Galefire III : Tether War

by Kenny Soward

  Cute.

  Elsa sneered and kicked the thing over the side.

  And then there were more coming over the lip of rock at their feet, growing in number until it was a wave of them, like a reverse waterfall.

  Lonnie looked down at a spot of shade-covered ground. “They must be trying to get out of the worst of the heat.”

  “Yes, they prefer shadowy places, when they aren’t feeding on the soft scree below. Makes sense. But—”

  A thudding sounded on the ridge above. A slow, heavy plodding and grinding that set Lonnie’s teeth on edge.

  The footfalls of something very large.

  Lonnie looked up just in time to see a huge hammer with a head like a rune-covered meat tenderizer whip over the rim and slam down into the stone ahead of them. The only problem was that Tall Thomas had been standing between it and the stone.

  The hammer crushed him into human puree. What was left of him spun, rifle up, a burst of rounds whizzing by, at least two biting Lonnie in the shoulder and side. He fell against the wall, Elsa with him, both trying to protect one another.

  A giant of a hand drew the hammer back, and a horned head peaked over the rim. It had shiny black eyes, expressive, almost human. Two tiny slits made its nose. Its jaw was slung low and wide, filled with square, blunt teeth, perfect for crushing hard objects. A hard, stony mantle spread up and forward from the top of its head, forming the horns, its skin a leathery reddish black.

  “Stone demon,” he and Elsa said almost simultaneously.

  “Look alive,” Lonnie shouted at the team, heart thudding as the memories came back to him. Stone mites were almost always part of a bigger ecosystem. They fed on the stone while other things, bigger things, fed on them. If it wasn’t Elsa’s kind crushing and killing the stone mites, then it had to be something else.

  In this case, stone demons.

  The genius of Azarah’s plan to guard her tether dawned on him. What better way to protect a secret than setting up a natural, and quite dangerous, ecosystem all around it? The idea that a bunch of stone demons had taken up residence to feed on the surrounding mites would draw no attention from any of the Lords of Hell.

  They’d never know she was still alive on Earth, still feeding off of Hell’s power.

  This tribe of demons had probably been living on the stone mites for thousands of years and had perfected the tools to crush the stone mites, waiting each day to smash the little creatures as they ran the gauntlet to the cooler areas of rock. The stone demons had probably been lying in wait inside their lairs until now.

  But stone demon teeth were also meant for crushing bone, and there was tastier fare to pulp. Namely Bess and her team.

  Lonnie growled, kicking the stone mites from his feet and hurrying along the wall, leaning out to get a better look at the monster above him. The demon adjusted to get a better angle on him as well, then swung its mighty weapon down.

  Lonnie stepped easily aside, pushing Elsa back, wincing as the rock was pulverized where he’d been standing. Shouts rang all up and down the ECC line, telling him there was more than one of the beasts, and they were wreaking havoc.

  “Move ahead people.” Bess’s words were tight through the earpiece.

  Gun fire erupted up and down the line in controlled bursts. The soldier ahead of him moved around the corner and disappeared. Lonnie and Elsa followed, keeping their eyes up and their guns ready to unload should they see that horned head again. The hammer whipped over the ledge so fast he almost missed it, just stepping out of the way before rocks shattered in a spray next to him. He saw the thing’s head for just a second before it drew the hammer back.

  “Fucker,” Lonnie mumbled, steeling himself against the next blow that was sure to come.

  He got ten more feet before the hammer fell. Stepping left, he fired at the arm wielding the huge weapon and filled it full of seven or eight rounds of anti-ripper ammo.

  Elsa joined in, getting some shots off herself.

  The demon’s hand tried to clench the hammer and draw it up, but its bone and flesh had been torn apart at the forearm, and the claw and hammer tumbled off the rim with a tremendous howl from the beast.

  “You like that, asshole?” Lonnie shouted. “You want some more? I didn’t think so.”

  They kept moving, following the commandos as they made their way painstakingly to the top. He passed two more places where ECC soldiers had been smashed. The body of one, impossible to tell who it was, had crumpled against the wall there.

  The other looked like Steve Jacobs.

  Avoided death below, Lonnie thought, only to find it up here.

  And then, glaring up, Lonnie got an angle on another stone demon that had already been wounded by someone else. It seemed to be staggering near the edge, clutching at its bleeding face and neck.

  Lonnie unloaded on it. Three, four, five bursts.

  The big bastard stumbled back, then forward again, toppling off the ledge to sail right over his head and down, down, to smash on the rocks below.

  “Got another one,” Lonnie said into the mic of his hanging mask, his blood pumping like fire through his veins. “Light `emup.”

  Bess was shouting commands into the mic too fast for Lonnie to follow.

  “Form up on me. I need some suppressing fire.”

  The stone wall grew shallower as the path rose to bring them even with the ledge above, to bring them even with the demons. There was a moment where he thought one of them might reach right down to snatch him up, but then he spotted a handful of soldiers who’d secured a spot ahead and were firing sparingly back behind him, keeping the demons at bay.

  Lonnie broke into a jog, keeping to the edge of the ledge so he wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire. He glanced back to see a craggy demon head peek around the corner, only to be clipped by another ECC round. He sidled past the commandos—Rachel Dillard and Dion, Tuck and Betty, and Alex. Jeff was behind them, working on Nina Yu’s arm, which looked twisted at an extremely awkward angle. Just ten of the original sixteen left.

  “Hold positions,” Bess said, and took Lonnie by the arm, leading him further up a small, sandy rise, up to the side of the stone building that was their goal. Lonnie gazed at it. The structure was at least a hundred feet tall. Twice as long as that, the back half almost completely buried in sand that had blown up in a thousand years of storms. But they didn’t need to climb it. They just needed to get inside. Still, it was an amazing structure, the polished black stone covered with sigils similar to what he’d seen back in Gruff’s room in the Under River. He ran his fingers along the smooth surface, felt the tremor of power flow from it through his fingers.

  “Lonnie?”

  He shook himself out of his reverie.

  “We made it,” he told her. “The tether is inside. I can feel it.”

  Chapter 26

  Torri felt what was happening outside. All the pent up wrath that reverberated through the hills, up through her feet, and into her very bones. She sensed Azarah’s creatures crossing the valley floor, over the creeks and open ground and into her woods. She heard gunshots as the ECC commandos opened fire. Saw Kristanna slam one earpiece on the table and pick up another one. Forgetting Bess and her team, she had to now direct the fight on the hill.

  Glancing at her assault rifle where it leaned against one of the workstations, Kristanna turned her attention away from the big monitor following Bess’s group and focused on two smaller ones feeding her the scene on this hill.

  “I’ve got fifteen operatives up here, plus Crash and Ingrid. Think that will be enough?”

  “No.”

  The ground spoke to Torri through the soles of her bare feet. She felt every footfall, knew the position of every single person out there. She sensed every single thing.

  She communicated to her woods.

  Root and branch…

  Crawling things…

  Defend yourself…

  Make death sing…

  The ground rumbled as the incantati
on left her softly moving lips and traveled down through her bare feet and into the ground.

  The sudden baying of her wolf pack sent a chill up Torri’s spine. She wanted to leap up, run to them, and fight. But Kristanna shot her a look. She couldn’t just leave, not with the M2 mission coming steadily to a head. They needed to keep the lines of communication open.

  Torri cried out, clutching her chest at the bloody scene that popped into her head, the woods showing her wolves going after some of Azarah’s gunmen on the hill.

  “What is it, Torri?”

  “Somethin’ got one of my wolves. Abigail! I had her since she was a pup.”

  She balled her hands into fists and struck her knees, sobbing. Her wrathful will told the woods what to do.

  The trees around the gunmen stooped, branches reaching down to tear and rend those who’d killed her pup.

  Keep fighting my little ones, she thought. Send `emrunnin’.

  Crash’s heavy steps resounded in her head as he and Ingrid descended the eastern slope to clash with creatures there. Guns went off. Growls and pitched battles raged all around the hill.

  Shotguns and rifles rumbled from where some of the hillfolk were gathered on the south side. Azarah’s creatures, ghoulkine and hoarbeasts like an inkblot oozing up the hill, absorbing all the lead anyone could throw at them, killing a lot of the men and woman defending that side and coming on up. Coming closer.

  Torri sent a swarm of insects that way. A tremendous buzzing of flying beetles and crickets and locusts come out of the ground early from their hibernation to do Torri’s bidding, filled with her magic and will.

  They swarmed the intruders, halting their progress, but it wouldn’t be enough.

  As if sensing the same thing, Kristanna snatched up her MP5, resting it in the crook of her arm and turning to Torri. “I’m going. You have to keep the connection to Bess’s team open. We have to keep broadcasting to the satellite. If we don’t make it out of here alive, my ECC people need to know what happened.”

  Torri shook her head, hadn’t realized how deeply she’d immersed herself in the hill and the creatures all around her. She was lightheaded with the effort. “Kris…where?”

  “I’m going out there. I’ve already lost half our people.” She shook her head. “God bless you, Torri. Stay as long as you can and then…” Kristanna just shrugged then called out some final orders to the rest of the commandos in the tent. They grabbed their own weapons, abandoning their computer terminals, and followed the tall blonde through the wavering tent flap. The ECC leader let out a high-pitched whoop, calling out in a high, clear voice, “Gird yourselves, yet be shattered…gird yourselves, yet be shattered. In the name of God my father…”

  There was a terrible eruption of gunfire as they charged toward something coming from the west.

  And then Torri was completely alone.

  Her head fell forward, tears dripping down her face and falling into her lap. If she was the witch she used to be, she’d stand up and cast down all these bastards from her hill. But she’d grown weak over the years, caught up in gardening and the trifling drama of the hill folk. She’d done a lot of good, sure, but hadn’t prepared herself for anything like this.

  She’d been lazy and thoughtless, wallowing in her own seclusion for the most part.

  And now they would all pay for it.

  Withdrawing into herself, Torri ignored all other sounds. She allowed her mind to follow the hard fiber lines that went from the tent all the way the gate at Pondcliff. She sent her mind through the gate, into the dark nothingness of the Fade, and into Hell itself.

  She sought out her next best friends.

  “Y’all there?”

  Lonnie, Elsa, Alex, Bess, and Jeff stood inside a receiving room of sorts. Two onyx pillars stretched to the roof on each side, and the walls were adorned with hellish visions of Azarah’s wrath spun in gilded tapestries and murals. As unsettling as those images were, they were going in anyway, at least until Torri’s voice burst through the Fade into their earpieces.

  “Y’all there?”

  Bess stopped and held up her hand. “We hear you, Torri. Go ahead.”

  “Good, wasn’t sure if this would work or not.”

  Bess cocked her head as if it would help her hear a little better. “What’s going on? Where’s Kristanna?”

  “She’s gone out to fight them. I’m here all alone now just sitting in the chair.”

  “Fuck the chair, Torri,” Lonnie said, his pulse quickening with the thought of Torri losing that precious hill. He’d seen Gruff’s Under River get swept away and his gut churned at the thought of the same thing happening to Torri. “Fuck the connection. Do whatever you have to do to defend your hill.”

  “I just…I dunno.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Gunfire pierced the Fade. Distant, but still…

  Lonnie clenched his fist, turning as if he could somehow get back to her. “Torri?”

  “I’m fine. How y’all doin’? Any better?”

  Lonnie clenched his fist. “Look, Torri. Don’t worry about us. Whatever happens here, we’ll deal with it. But the Hill. You can’t let them take it. Not like they took the Under River.”

  “I know.”

  “Then go.”

  “Lonnie, I know what’s got to be done, it’s just hard gettin’ on with it. Been up at this hill a long time, stuck in a rut, I guess.”

  Bess slapped her hand against Lonnie’s chest. “Man, we can end this here and now. Let’s go.”

  Lonnie nodded, hefting his rifle. “Torri, we’re going in now. Just do what you have to do. Do it.”

  “Okay, Lonnie. Okay.”

  And then Lonnie felt the force of the connection diminish. Torri’d removed herself from the line completely. Cut off, withdrawn back inside her own head in that little tent atop a hill somewhere in the woods of Eastern Kentucky. Seemed as far away from Hell as you could get right now, and Lonnie silently wished her the best of luck.

  “Okay, let’s do this. Tuck? Betty? How’s it looking in there?”

  “The left hallway. Follow it all the way down. You’re not going to believe what’s in here.”

  Rachel, Dion, and Nina stayed behind to guard their backs against any overly curious stone demons, and the rest moved in single file, with Bess and Alex in the lead, Jeff next, and then Elsa and Lonnie.

  The dragon lighter in his pocket pressed reassuringly against his leg. One of the last of Selix’s tokens, aside from some clothes of hers back in the van. He didn’t know if it still worked after everything they’d been through, but he bet it did.

  Lonnie ground his teeth, eyes watering with the specter of her memory. He’d finish this for her or die trying.

  The passage on the left was short, then turned sharply right. Bess led them down another long hall that ran half the length of the entire structure. The thrum of power was palpable now, although Lonnie found it had taken on a different tenor. It was mechanical now, monstrously churning away inside the structure.

  Power thrummed through the black stone, shielding any resonant energies from escaping. No one would ever suspect Azarah’s tether existed. Not unless they stumbled upon the structure by accident, and even then it would have just been another set of ruins in a world of countless ruins unless they looked very closely. It had only been through the ECC’s advanced technology that both gates, the one in the Indian Ocean and this one, had been found.

  Bess lifted the barrel of her gun and moved ahead as the sounds of the machine grew louder. Another aroma joined that of the sulfuric reek. The viscous scent of bloodoil jarred his olfactory senses, reminding him of the lower levels of Xester when he’d lived there. That concoction of fatty tissue and crude oil drawn up from the ground to lubricate the city’s machines, which ran ceaselessly until their parts corroded into dust and were replaced with new ones.

  He shuddered and pushed the thought away. No time for it now.

  At the end of the passage, Bess leaned forwa
rd to peer through an archway their right. The rest of them piled in behind, unwisely perhaps, trying to get their own peek.

  It was a single, long chamber stretching the length of the building, the size of a damn football field. A twisted column rose into the shadowy heights on both sides, anchored by squat machines set into blocks of stone.

  Lonnie moved moved a step to the left, and there it was. The tether, stretched across the floor between the twin machines. A twisted coil of energies, it was as thick as the trunk of a giant oak, ten times thicker than the one his sister had used to cross into the Under River. And it surged with steady power.

  Everything was cast in its pale, reddish glow, that same dark pink color of his sister’s eyes.

  “This is definitely it. That’s my grandmother’s tether.”

  “She’s hung,” Jeff said, marveling.

  “Got me beat,” Alex added, “almost.”

  “One more, guys,” Bess said, “and I’m sending you to your room. No more playtime in the big room with the big power cable.”

  “And there’s the gate Azarah is channeling her energy through.” Lonnie pointed to the east end where a huge stone gate appeared, its shimmery silver surface pierced by the tether through which the the machine threaded it.

  “That’s going through to the gate in the Indian Ocean,” Bess said, “and Azarah is channeling from it. How can she do that?”

  Lonnie shrugged. “It can’t be seen on Earth. At least not in plain view. It’s more ore less invisible until it shorts out. Like when Selix bit through my sister’s tether. We could see it flashing and sputtering.”

  “So, we cut this and Azarah’s power dies over there?”

  “Yeah. Like turning off a light. She’ll be as helpless as a lamb.”

  Tuck and Betty trotted up. The shorter woman shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing much to see out there, aside from, well, that.” She jerked her head at the machines where they harnessed the pulsing power.