“That would have been stupid even without the Beast’s presence.”
“I’m aware of that now. Wrong place, wrong time. But—ah, it’s all kind of a mess.” He raised his right hand to his head. His incorporeal visage swirled when he pierced his own essence.
“Just start with what you remember,” Kendra said. “Work from there. Your name, if you would.”
“You already know my name.”
Kendra’s voice became taut. “Humor me, then.”
The spirit put his hands on his hips and thought for a half-minute before he next spoke. “Qimber. Name is—was—Qimber. My parents live right around here, just south of the hills past the forest’s edge. Dad bought Burth for me—a dozen baskets of fresh vegetables, still dirty, they agreed on—after I finished my schooling. Said I’d need somethin to remember the country by.” He smirked. “Dad used to say, ‘Damn serrens should be glad I’m not exterminatin ‘em.’ Course, he’d never do that. Got a soft spot for them. I think most farmers do.”
Russ watched, guarded against saying anything.
“Burth and I come out every year. But it’s been gettin—darker, I guess. Burth’s family told me it had to do with the trees pullin in together. Dunno anything about that, though. I work over on the east cost of Yarnle in shipping.”
“Where specifically?” Kendra asked. An edge cut into her voice.
“Is that important?” Qimber said, mirroring Russ’s thought.
“Maybe.” Kendra’s eyes bored into the vision. She emphasized her next words: “Answer the question.”
Qimber’s face slackened. “An island off the northeast coast. Kivrenkin. Not many know about it. Don’t suppose that matters now that I’m dead. It’s an all right life, apart from the old hermit who lives out there. Swear to gods you can hear her wailing at night when the tide gets real low.”
Exasperation spread across Kendra’s face, and she huffed. “No point asking what you did on Kivrenkin, then. Anyone who knows prefers you this way.”
“Kendra,” Willa said.
“I’m not proud of what I did,” said Qimber, “of what they do out there. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not smart”—
“Doesn’t cost you anything now,” Kendra said.
—“and I got too deep with the wrong people before I could get out. But guess what. Even Arnin bought our stuff. We were busy preparin a huge shipment for ‘em right before I went on leave.”
Contained rage eroded the plain visage Kendra had cultivated over so many years, and she surged power into the phylactery.
Qimber yelped and fell to one knee. “What are you doing?” When he raised his hands to his head this time, they cradled his face as they would have when he lived.
“Just testing a hypothesis.” Kendra looked to the young Priest, who watched, worried. Her gaze returned to Qimber, and she let off the energy she channeled. “You’re fine. Just get on with it. We don’t need a subplot of thunder bugs and lightning.”
“You’re the one who asked,” Qimber said. Desperation exhausted his voice.
Kendra almost shouted: “No, I didn’t. You talked your way into that one. Now what did this to you?”
“Oh gods.” He held his head between his hands. A shadow skulked toward him, as though another party joined him in a holo-projected message. The Beast swiped at him, and Qimber fell onto his back. When he got up, a copy of himself remained on the ground, and he tripped over himself trying to skitter away from it. Cuts marked the other’s face, a particularly deep one across his nose. “No. No, it’s all coming back.” In tandem, a red line shined across his body and the stone that floated over Kendra’s hand.
Kendra said something in her Ley tongue, then spoke to Qimber in Plainari. “You’re all right.” Her face turned placid. “It can’t get you again.”
Qimber exhaled a puff of red dust, and at the same time, a rain of red fell from the phylactery. “That’s it,” he said, and he knelt next to himself. “It was a woman. I heard a scream and followed it, against my better instincts. How good could they have been, though, if I followed a random scream in a forest? I’d set up camp, and I was about to lie for a nap when it came. Burth and his family had gone underground, thank the gods.
“But this bitch, she wasn’t fucking normal—a shapeshifter for one. After I’d found her, calmed her a bit, she grabbed me while I went to piss and brought me here. Paralyzed me. I couldn’t do a thing to stop her.” Again, a vision of the dirty woman dragged a copy of Qimber into the cave by his ankles and dropped him at the cave’s center, where it joined the copy of himself he’d left on the ground. Qimber watched it happen, and his breathing sharpened. A muted drum filled the quiet around them, a heartbeat, quick with fear.
“She told me what she was gonna do, that it should honor me. Spoke at me while she—she ate me.” He choked up, and for several seconds, the vision stuttered. He swallowed heavily before he went on.
“Kept me alive as long as she could. Started with my hands and feet.” The unmoving version lost the mentioned appendages, and the heartbeat pulsed. “I couldn’t think much through it, couldn’t scream or get away. Wasn’t even bound.” A few seconds of quiet passed. “But she asked a question, over and again.” Though a bad one, he gave his best impression of her; the dirty woman mouthed in time with him. “‘Do you have a pretty friend? Do you have a pretty friend?’” The shade held a finger against his lips. Even in effigy, her eyes glowed with their sinful light, and her red lips split her face into a ghastly smile. “I shuddered even though I couldn’t move. It didn’t occur to me what she was really asking anyway. Figured she was just talkin about Burth.”
Qimber shook his head. “But no, she meant to do this, or something worse, to someone else. I can still see her—this thing doesn’t get it right, how terrifying she is—those gray eyes peering at me from pure darkness, the way they shined through her hair. Always smilin, always watching. Kept praying at first that I’d wake up, but then she pulled off my right arm up to my elbow”—as though they couldn’t have envisioned it, Qimber-on-the-floor’s right forearm fell away—“then the other, then to my shoulders—just—dismantling me. She got up to my left knee before she stopped, spooked, like she’d heard something.”
In time with his words, the dirty woman stilled and stared toward the cave’s entrance. Russ checked his display. Nothing. She looked there in time-past anyway, but still, it daunted him.
“I feared Burth had come tryin to find me.” Qimber ran his left hand across Burth’s back. The serren wrung his paws in painted distress. “He hadn’t. But she laughed and started saying, ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ again and again, like she’d gotten a new catchphrase instead of pretty little friend.”
A gouged-out hollow replaced the other’s eye. His face gained a static fuzz even in the blue light of Kendra’s magic. Qimber quieted for a quarter-minute, and Russ became worried the entire image had somehow frozen. The heartbeat came in stuttering trembles.
But Qimber continued. “I had to watch her after I dissociated. My spirit—just—couldn’t take it anymore. She made fun of me for not being able to talk back at her, how I was unable to scream or get up and leave. ‘Get up and run, it’ll be fun,’ she said. And I watched as my body became another set of bones in her collection.
“The last I felt, the last thing I remember from being alive”—he closed his eyes and shook his head—“was her running her hand into my stomach when I wasn’t much more than a torso anyway, cuttin me open to dip her fingers in blood. My blood.” The drum reached a tympanic apex, then stopped. Qimber gestured to the wall behind Kendra. “She wrote on the wall over there.”
Kendra turned her gaze to the rock behind her.
“Couldn’t read it,” said Qimber. “Weird script. Might be nonsense.” He looked toward his serren. “Burth”—
Russ turned his attention to the glyphs on the wall. Scratches and gashes marred the cave’s interior, but where Kendra had stopped, the dirty woman had attributed more sen
se to the markings. Now that he paid them a modicum of attention, his mind made sense of them.
“Russ,” Kendra said.
“What is it?” The entrance remained clear, but Russ misgave that nothingness. The message’s syntax didn’t translate well into Plainari when he deciphered it. “It’s Demonic. But old, clunky—older than I’m used to dealing with. From before even the War of the Bridges, yeah?” He pointed to a specific rune he didn’t recognize. “Do ya know what that one says?”
“Can’t your suit translate it?”
“Newer models, maybe, but this is War-time armor. All the processing power goes to combat and survival.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure they called it that back then anyway.” Kendra pressed close to him, lowered her voice. “Russ, we need to leave. Say the word, and it’s done.”
“Why? What does it say?”
“Knew you’d come,” Kendra said and pointed to the rune Russ couldn’t read, “Grand Master.”
A trap, Russ thought. Whispers came to him and snaked through the tech in his helmet. He raised his hands to either side of his face to try to cover his ears, to try to free his mind from their understanding, but the voice laughed a haughty howl and left as quickly as it had come.
“They’re watching us,” he said, intuiting the truth, then he reached for his hammer, pulled it to him, and shouldered it.
“Goddess,” Willa said next to them. “Grand Master. That has to mean you, right? But why? I’ve never heard of a demon acting like this. Even during the War, in—in any of the writings I’ve read, there’s nothing like what Qimber describes.”
Qimber spoke quietly with Burth, who leaned into his master’s touch, even with nothing to press against. “You have to show ‘em, buddy. Just imagine, she might do this to someone else.” He lowered his voice. “We can’t let her do that, can we?”
Burth sighed, and a few seconds later, he nodded. “Okay.”
“It’s more than odd,” Russ said. “Demons don’t take prisoners, and”—something snatched at his right hand. His helm showed movement at the mouth of the den. He whipped his hammer to a balanced pose off to his left side. The Light had answered his call and hung over his right hand.
Burth looked back him.
“Sneaky little fucker,” said Russ. The serren had pilfered the bag of jerky.
Kendra called for her motes and held them near her mouth. A part broke away and zoomed out of the cave.
“Come,” said Burth, who popped a piece of meat into his mouth.
“Reassess,” said Kendra. She stood next to Russ. “If this wasn’t the trap, we’re sure as hell walking into one.”
“I know we’re walking into one,” Russ said, his mind on a single track.
“Then why shouldn’t we leave?” asked Willa. “If we can get word to the Undertaker”—
“No.” Russ thought of the reasons he wanted to go, fear chief among them. But the opportunity they’d gotten here—if D’niqa had meant for him to see this message, would she expect him to walk into an ambush? How many lives could they save if they stayed? And Lillie—it all just needed to fall into place. “We’re so close. If we find her, we can end this.”
“Come,” Burth said again. “Show nice man the darkness.”
“Goddess, Sieku would kill me if he knew I was putting my trust in a serren.”
“I’m not far from it, either,” said Kendra.
Regardless, for now, they marshaled forward.
Burth’s fur glowed in their light. By the time they reached the air outside, the serren had already walked a few dozen feet off to the left. He checked over his shoulder periodically to make sure his charges kept up with him. Kendra whispered under her breath, and another part of her Ley bundle darted away. The air warmed, thickened, and Uniquity’s Light pierced less and less into the gloom.
Russ stepped toward a tree upon which flecks of the night stuck. He touched the rough bark, gathered the Fel on his gauntlet. The tar stretched between his fingers and the bough when he pulled them apart. “We’re close. Can’t be more than a hundred yards.”
“What?” Kendra said.
Burth passed behind a tree and didn’t reappear on its other side.
Willa stopped. “Where’d he go?” Kendra bumped into her.
Russ’s brow furrowed. He couldn’t keep track of where the serren had disappeared as he moved around the trees.
“See that,” said Kendra, “how do you know he’s not just a demon luring us into the trap?”
“Because demons aren’t this clever,” Russ said, turning in place. “Not the lesser ones.”
“Leh—lesser demons also can’t speak,” Willa added.
“That’s also a pretty elaborate ruse with Qimber if Burth is one of ‘em.” The shadows pushed against them. Shade moved at the edges of Russ’s vision, yet no sound reached him, save for a rustle of branch and what sounded like the tightening of a string past its note. “Just got pulled somewhere”—his speech slowed as he focused on a patter underground, a scurrying beast under his right boot. “All we’ve got to do”—
He picked up his foot and smashed it into the dirt. The ground gave way to the rodents’ tunnels.
Wails filled the air, and Russ’s Light shined against dozens of eyes, all of which looked up at him in abject terror.
“What I tell you?” Burth said. He extricated himself from the bunch and climbed out of the hole. “No dee-mund. Just friends.”
“Burth,” another of them said, though he pronounced the serren’s name more like ‘Booth.’ “You can’t go. Dangers in the Above.”
“Oh yeah?” Burth held up the treat bag between his front paws. “I got jooky.”
Collectively, their eyes widened. A small one’s mouth hung open. “Oh gods,” one in back said. It looked to Russ. “You have more?”
“Russ,” Kendra said, “we don’t have time for this.”
Russ raised his hand in a wordless gesture and knelt. “Your friend—your brave friend—is helpin us with something.” He rustled in his pocket for another pack of salted meat. “Think you can be quiet while he does?”
In chorus, like a practiced show, they all nodded and intoned, “Mm hmm.”
“He family,” said the one in front. “Burth do good.”
Russ tossed the bag toward them. One in the middle caught it and gnawed it open. All those around her grabbed for a piece and chewed their treat. Loudly.
“Nice man,” one said.
“Good man,” said another, nodding.
Russ stood and turned toward Burth. “All right. Show us where.”
Burth looked around and shook a flake of Fel off his back. “We here.” He paced forward and stepped onto blackened rock, against which his claws echoed.
“Go,” a serren said, and the others retreated to the Underground. “Back to mama. Go, go.”
Russ’s vision resolved, and the vale lifted. He raised his hammer. His Light couldn’t touch the top of the monolithic maw that stood open before them—fifty feet high, at least—as Russ beheld what the presence had tried to show him over the last few days. The haze shimmered, and a lackluster glow reached them from the cave’s throat.
“Yeah, that’s more like it,” said Kendra. “Warm, too.”
Burth followed Russ’s gaze to the top of the entrance. His ears draped to the ground behind him. “Itchy.”
“This is it, Kendra,” said Russ.
“Ya think? Cripes, this is fucked. Especially now that I’m here in person.”
“In person is right,” Willa said. Her ears flicked against unseen touches, laid flatter against her head.
Most everything in Russ told him to stay away, and again he tamped down the impulse to run. If they found D’niqa, which they likely would at the back of this cave, they could finish this War before most anyone even believed it began.
“Stay out here,” Russ said to Willa. “We need you outside.”
“Yeah,” she answered, then she looked at him. “I’m fine ei
ther way, ya know.”
“Need someone to make sure we don’t get ambushed heading in.” Russ looked around the cave’s entrance. He couldn’t see the hole he’d kicked into the serrens’ tunnels just a few meters back. “Don’t know what all’s roamin out here. Be careful.”
“Very reassuring, Russ,” said Kendra.
“Don’t worry,” Willa said. “Ah—I’ll be fine.”
“Anything,” Russ said, “and you go. Don’t play hero for us.”
Willa’s face remained placid. She nodded. Russ took one step forward, then another, his boots kerlinking against the rock underfoot. The world outside drowned away, and the world of the demons pulled him forward.
“Stay if you want, you sniveling beast.” Kendra sounded a dozen meters behind, yet Russ turned and saw his party only three steps back.
Burth padded a few steps further inside, then stopped, his face ablaze with alarm. “I wait here with catgirl.” His mousy brown fur rustled as the air moved, and he squinted his eyes each time against the exhalations. “New friends. Good.” He stuffed another piece of jerky into his mouth.
Kendra looked at Russ, a confused scowl across her face.
“Just you and me,” he said. Kendra joined him, and they walked into a maw of hell.
3
A basso evil from depths unimaginable came to Russ. It started light as fume, yet it rose to a thunderous range and impressed upon him images of entire cities laid waste, scorched land left in its stead, and victims whipped and tortured under demonic ministrations of flogs, claws and teeth, and Fel magic.
Russ traced a finger over a rune on his armor. “We are the Light in the darkness,” he whispered to himself. The voice wavered away from him. “The Light where it cannot go.”
Kendra peered over her shoulder. “It’s not getting closer.” She sounded calm. “What if this is the trap? A chronal paradox?”
The cave’s walls pinched and pulled from themselves with vapid periodicity. At the narrowest, Russ and Kendra couldn’t even walk abreast, but when it widened, the blackness pulled away from them until it seemed like they walked on nothing, surrounded by the same, and the point at the end got no closer for their effort.
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