A sudden series of screams from the main avenue pulled his mind away from frozen treats and he looked down to see Marka had already darted down the alley toward the street. He followed as quickly as he could and came to the street to find people fleeing in every direction, even into the alleys which they’d previously not dared to occupy.
He could only catch glimpses of Marka through the wave of bodies. They were the only two headed toward the spire, everyone else fled backward, the way they’d come. There was a small clearing. Lowell opened his mouth to call for Marka but before he could, she stumbled to the side and was clipped by a fleeing man.
Marka curled and went to the ground as a flock of people moved past her.
“Marka! Hey—”
The people were more frantic than they had been and pushing past was nearly impossible. The wave began to thin and he saw it. A tiny creature, deep red skin pulled taut over an awkward skeleton. It moved on two legs, glaring and snapping at the fleeing throngs, but not attacking. Was it too small? It was maybe the size of a young child, but horribly shaped with too long arms.
It spotted Marka on the ground and hunched, raking its claws against the bricks and emitting a high squeal. The creature was charging from Marka’s blind side and leapt, latching onto her back. Lowell was already on his way to her side when the creature landed. The razor fine claws dug into the thick hide of Marka’s cloak. She shifted, trying to throw the creature free.
Lowell tucked down and dove, shoulder first, into the imp. The creature skittered across the ground and stopped a few feet away. Lowell was on his feet first and the imp charged. It leapt and Lowell instinctively caught it. A single claw made it forward, catching his collar bone and running down the front of his chest. The beast screeched and hissed and managed to writhe its head over. Pointed teeth dug into his arm sending a stream of blood trickling down his arm.
Instinctively, he tried to whip the little bastard away, but it twisted against his throw and wrapped itself around his arm. The force put Lowell off balance and he fell to the ground. Now in a position of power, the imp crawled onto his chest. It hissed hot, horrible breath into his face. Lowell closed his eyes.
Where there should have been pain and a torn off face, there was the slap of skin on… whatever the imp had. He felt the prick of the claws slide off quickly and clatter on the street again.
Marka was over him at full speed. She moved on the nasty little vermin before it had time to regain composure and brought her heel down on it. There were a few wet cracks and the imp was done.
Lowell pulled himself up, the adrenaline making it nearly impossible to stay down. He tore away a chunk of shirt as he approached Marka and wrapped it tightly around his wounded arm, wincing.
“Whatever we’re doing, I think we’re running out of time.”
The bleeding had already slowed and the pain was starting to numb. He nodded toward the spire.
Marka moved first, the streets now clear as far as they could see. The run was short from there as they turned onto a wide road, much wider than any of the others had been. He could see there were two more like it splitting out from the large circular mall that sat at the base of the spire.
There was a flood of bodies in the area below the spire, stretching up the streets. Lowell screamed as they approached the back part of the line and people turned. To his surprise they noticed him this time around. The path cleared ahead as people darted away from the bleeding stranger.
Soon the pair stood in the circle at the base of the spire, looking up at it. The space between the white spirals glowed dimly with magical energy, continuing the patterns that had been dug into the pale stone. Around the base, the white stone was unbroken except for a few passages wide enough to let a few dozen people through at a time. The openings were clustered with guards in the black linen and the crowds kept their distance.
Marka broke through the crowd and walked out. The guards all turned their eyes to watch her. She pulled the book from under her cloak and held it up.
He could see it took everything she had, but the small girl forced as much sound as she could through a voice box that lacked any real practice with making sound. She spoke her language slowly and the air rippled with every word, her tattoos flaring. It was all she could do to force the words out, but they listened. When she was finished, she lowered the book and watched the guards with wary eyes.
Lowell came to her side and placed a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him and he smiled. She turned her attention back to the guards. There was a heated discussion among them. He was not close enough to hear clearly and it would have done him little good to be closer.
A few in the crowd shouted at the guards, but none dared to move past the line that had formed. A guard motioned at the crowd and another shook her head and shrugged dismissively. It was during their talk that Lowell noticed that the wind was still and the temperature was cool here. There was none of the hot humidity of the world just a few steps away, where the line of people stopped.
The guards turned to Marka again. They split ranks in an orderly fashion and formed up on either side of the door. From front to back, each of them took to a knee and faced their head toward the floor.
Marka stepped forward, grabbing Lowell by the hand.
“End,” she said, and pulled him toward the spire.
Chapter 14
A cold wind seemed to pull them toward the small, rounded opening in the black spire. It was entirely smooth and uniform, something sort of unnatural given the fact that it was made out of a giant black rock. Light fell into it and got stuck in such a way that it gleamed but never shifted. Lowell could swear he saw shifting just under the surface of the rock, but any time he thought he saw a movement the area became too dark to make out as the sinking light got pulled away into the spire.
He was hesitant to enter the place. As interesting as it had been from a distance, there was a deep sense of foreboding about the structure. Weird how getting your arm nearly chewed off by a tiny demon changes the way you look at places.
The entrance was narrow and ran deeper into the massive stone spire than Lowell had expected. All around him there was solid onyx, even the ground beneath him. The entryway must have run ten feet with a low ceiling overhead adding to a growing sense of claustrophobia. The light from the square behind them quickly fell away as it was devoured by the unrelenting darkness of the stone and was slowly replaced by a much stranger light. A white-purple like the burning of Marka’s magic seemed to come from everywhere around them. It followed them as they moved in, showing only the nearest two or three feet with any certain visibility before it was swallowed back up.
There was a dim wave of magic pulsing across Marka’s tattoos as they entered a much more spacious area. The light now pulsed out from them at regular intervals, ricocheting through black crystal and giving them brief ideas of how the room looked. Marka walked with confidence, and soon found them a stairway. It was an awkward thing, with too narrow steps that were also too high to comfortably walk up. It was also an unnecessarily long staircase for how much vertical space it should have covered. Marka walked in front and made her way up carefully, keeping the book in the hand nearest the wall. There was no guard rail to speak of, only a small raised lip at the edge. This was not so much a safety feature as it was the sort of thing that would trip you and then make you be dead.
High stepping was never a particular favorite as far as pastimes went and Lowell was now more annoyed at climbing stairs than he had been with all the frantic walking tours of the city he’d been on. The pain in his thighs reminded him to wonder whether the lack of pain in his arm was good or bad. He couldn’t really decide so he figured that if it fell off he would deal with it then.
The stairway finally came to a landing that spread out wide in front of them. From what the pulsing light showed, it was a massive disk that seemed to float in the middle of the spire. It could have been a huge column, but there was no real way to check that didn’t in
volve leaning over the edge and that seemed like an option better left unexplored.
The pulses of light died against a flat black surface in the middle of the disk. There was no detail on the rock and it looked to just be a dead end. He expected that Marka would pull him some direction. Instead, her leg began to glow. He half-instinctively took a step back, not wanting to get caught in whatever was about to happen.
He watched her closely. For the first time, in the dark of the vast black room, he could see the magic moving along the tattoos. It wasn’t the tattoos themselves that lit, it was the skin between. The color was different now, fluctuating and not nearly so bright. He looked to Marka. She was gritting her teeth against the pain in her leg. Lowell moved to touch her, but as he took the first step, the light began to stream off of her leg and toward the door.
Tiny trickles of the black-purple energy collected in the stone and the scrimshawed patterns began to reveal themselves as the magic moved along. The flow sped up and spiraled in toward the center in a geometric dance. The light hit the familiar scoop taken out of the middle of the rock and began to pool into a buzzing sphere.
Lowell waited for the door to slide open as all the others had done, but it didn’t happen. Instead the door began to glow. Dim at first, the light picked up little by little as it streamed from her leg until a wide rectangle formed on the face of the stone. Minutes passed. The door was slowly beginning to show what lay on the other side. Lowell turned his attention to Marka. She was biting her lip and had her fists balled against the pain. There was really nothing he could do. He wasn’t made of any sort of magic and this wasn’t the sort of place you came to with the intention of leaving something half finished. The best he could do was not let his concern show. To support her by watching and waiting until he could be of help.
The wall faded slowly, eventually becoming just a pale grey tint with the slightest streaks of purple coursing through. Another couple of minutes, and the wall was gone. Lowell took a skeptical step toward it. He’d gotten to the point where questioning things wasn’t really paying off, but this was still one of those things that didn’t seem like it ought to be happening. Marka, on the other hand, walked through the opening and into the room beyond.
He followed, still a bit hesitant that the door would reappear and that they’d be sealed in forever, but he didn’t have much choice. The inside was dimly lit. Not dark, exactly. Like a late evening sunset, only not the right color. He could see everything in the room. At the center there was a small mechanism, a series of onyx rings like he’d seen before. They circled around another ball of magical energy. The rings floated just above a small platform, revolving constantly at different rates.
At three posts around the center pedestal, there were tiny onyx prisms. Each of them was carved into the altar which sat under it. There were no markings in this room at all, only the glowing mechanism and the prisms. He could see a faint sphere around the center pedestal. Maybe the prisms were making a sort of laser alarm system kind of thing? It was hard to say and he wasn’t exactly jumping at the opportunity to give it a touch.
Marka flipped open the book they’d taken from the library and found the page she wanted. She looked carefully over the text and brought the book to Lowell. She handed him the tome and pointed to a particular pattern that was in the bottom corner of the page she’d selected. He traced his fingers along it until he heard a tearing sound from near one of the prisms. Marka’s teeth were latched onto her thumbnail and she was tearing it away from the skin. Tears started to roll down her cheeks.
“Jesus, Marka. What the fuck?”
Lowell ran to her, but before he could grab her and do whatever he thought would help, she yanked her head and the nail tore away. She spit it onto the ground, breathing heavy and clenching her teeth. Blood began to run down her hand. She dropped to her knees, ignoring Lowell who was standing with his mouth wide open.
She worked quickly, recreating the pattern she’d shown him on the floor in her blood. As sections of it came together, rivulets of purple flowed down from the altar into the valleys between the deep red lines. She finished one and jumped up to move to the other. Lowell followed, watching helplessly. The protective sphere around the center was beginning to flicker.
The second pattern was complete and the sphere began to sputter and crackle. Not from the outside, but from within. Whatever was held back by the prisms was trying to break free. Marka paid the noise no mind and moved to the third altar. As she got to work at the base, Lowell heard yelling from below. Just as he moved to the door Degoed crested the stairs, walking toward him with a dagger in his bony hand.
“YOU!”
He pointed to Lowell and shouted. The next words were in the old man’s own language, but there was blame in his voice. Blame and hate and fear. The sound of a crack from inside stopped the man dead where he stood as though he realized where they were for the first time. His eyes narrowed and he charged Lowell, the dagger over his head.
The dagger came down shallow as Lowell stepped back, but the old man had committed everything to the blow. Pointy shoulders jabbed at his chest and the pair went to the ground. He could hear the dagger slide away toward the sphere. It slid into the protective magic and hissed as the energy sent it shooting off into a far wall.
Degoed struggled to push himself up. He looked frantically around the room for his lost dagger. He wasn’t much of a threat without the blade so Lowell wrestled with him as best he could manage with his wounded arm. Any time he could buy Marka was well spent. Old as he was, the Elder was wiry and put up more fight than Lowell could handle with the damage he’d taken. Degoed freed himself and began to clamber across the room on unsteady hands and knees.
He had not covered half the distance to the knife when a loud, sharp pop send a shock of energy through the room. He froze, eyes turning in terror toward the center pedestal. A sphere of white-hot magic lit the room like a tiny sun. The Elder turned himself over and pressed his back against the wall. He began to scream and curse in his own tongue. Old, horrified eyes locked with Lowell's.
“She makes our end. We will all die.”
Lowell looked across to Marka. She was wearing it, the ring. When had she put it on? The dense magical energy was lashing wildly out from the slow growing sphere. A tail of it caught Lowell on the arm, sending him sprawling in terrible pain. It felt like acid was creeping slowly across his arm, burning everything it touched.
Marka.
He gritted his teeth and forced his eyes open, clouded with painful tears. He could see the blurred outline of the girl against the hot white light. She reached out her hand.
“NO!”
The light consumed her as the orb jumped in size.
“NO! MARKA, NO!”
He got to his knees, the pain falling off behind something worse. He stared into the burning torrent of unbound energy, hoping for anything. There was only a violent wind and a deafening hum. No. No, no, no. He balled his fists and forced himself to stand. He took a strained step toward the light. He pulled his leg forward to take another step when a pointed gust caught him in the chest. He stumbled back and caught himself, if just. Again he pushed himself toward the sphere that had taken Marka and again it pushed him away. It was different from the whipping air that filled the room. Almost gentle now. But it would not let him move forward.
He swatted at the air, helplessly, trying to force himself into the ball. The tiny wall of air refused to bend or relent. Lowell fell to his knees. He shut his eyes, wanting nothing more than to scream.
A warm, small hand touched his shoulder and his eyes shot open. It was Marka. The pressure bearing down on Lowell was immense as the ball sputtered in fits and bursts behind her. He noticed it, then. He could see the ball through her. She was fading like the door had. The feeling of warmth began to slowly fade from his shoulder.
“Marka, don’t. I can’t.”
He looked up at her, staring at her face, pleading for anything. Marka smiled. It was b
eautiful and awkward and not quite right, but it was true. She was happy.
The wind in the room died suddenly and the magic smoothed and quieted.
She pointed to herself. “Go.” And then to him. “Stay.”
She turned and moved back toward the sphere. Marka turned around just in front of the brightly lit ball and smiled again.
“End.”
She stepped into the light and the ball began to shrink and fade. It turned fast and bright. The entirety of the black spire began to shake and shudder underneath him and all Lowell could manage was choking sobs. The ball was a tiny dot when the air began to rush toward it. Taking a breath became harder and harder as the rushing air grew faster and more violent. Lowell slumped and laid himself down on the cool floor, thinking how nice it felt. He looked up to see what had become of Degoed. The hilt of a knife stood out of his chest as hollow eyes stared off at nothing.
All Lowell wanted was to sleep. The pain in his arm was gone, he noticed and he couldn’t really breathe quite right. He closed his eyes.
Chapter 15
A small prick in the back of his hand woke him up. There was the garbled sound of people talking but he couldn’t so much make it out. There was an unsubtle pain over basically every inch of his body. He could feel the pressure of wraps on his arms and legs.
“…used to be so cheerful before the accident.” It was his mom. Oversharing, as was her custom. “His sister—”
He tried to move and must’ve let out some kind of sound.
“Lowell?!”
God, she was shrill. His eyes cracked and light flooded in for the first time in what felt like forever. There was a blurry shadow looking down at him which was quickly joined by another. His eyes adjusted and he blinked. A nurse and his mother.
“Lowell?! Are you okay? Oh god, my baby.”
She leaned in to touch him and he let out an involuntary sort of “ack” sound when she grabbed him. She shot away at the sound, realizing he was injured.
My Black Beast Page 9
