It destroyed a large part of Delatra in a bloody rampage before it was subdued and imprisoned in a psychic cell. It spoke by telepathy in an unstoppable flood of hate that drove almost everyone who survived away from the city, glad to have their sanity merely shredded instead of consumed. It whispered, it cajoled, it played with them. Its name was Hellblade.
Eventually they found a way of putting it to sleep. And it lay there, flickering like a malefic fire between worlds as they worked feverishly on the geas that would bind it to the single task of slaying the Sleeper. Needless to say work of this scale consumed most of Alfheim’s wealth and all of its greater minds. It was a time of plunder and raiding, of open war with the Fey in the name of acquiring artefacts of power with which to gain mastery over the new creatures. Since that first trial, Demon crossbreeds were abandoned.
Void elements created the next phantom Titan, patterning themselves on the flayed frame of a girl whose own spirit was pulled from the brink and left as bait in the Void ocean for all the forces to consume. This one named itself Nemesis and had no physical form at all. By the time it came into being the geas was in place and it was bound, unable to act until the command to seek the sleeper was issued.
It was rumoured that Nemesis was held prisoner in Delatra, but this was just conjecture – how could a place hold a noncorporeal being? Nemesis didn’t speak or rage. Nemesis was silent, though those who came close to the point of contact with her on Alfheim’s plane reported experiencing an unbearable terror that forced them away.
A shrine of forgiveness was constructed upon the site of its prison, attended fleetingly by priests. Flowers and little texts, food and milk were left abundantly in peace – at least in peace as long as peace could be felt by someone delivering a plea for mercy whilst experiencing an inchoate terror. Every offering withered to ash.
The necessary third party was created with spirits that were lured from the dark night of the valleys beyond Last Water. It was thought that this would be a leader of the three. So it was. Only the best of the remaining candidates for adaptation was chosen to host their combined forces. He emerged, an elf worldwalker with only a few visible signs of his change and the ability to dematerialise. He was sane, apparently, and accepting of the task at hand, though he had sacrificed all memory of his previous life. Like the others he gave himself a name. If this gave cause for concern it was too late for anyone to care. So Wrath was born.
They woke Hellblade, summoned Nemesis and gave them to his command. He took them and vanished from Alfheim, never to return.
A few days later most of the participating mages, the pinnacle of elvish civilisation, died slowly, withering like spring flowers in an unexpected winter snap. But no monster from the unknown planes descended though they waited, sure it had all been for nothing. Night became day, days became years and in the absence of any further incidents Delatra was abandoned, records of what had happened searched out and destroyed for shame, and the activity moved elsewhere, culminating in the long, grinding cold war of loathing between the shadowkin survivors and the remaining light elves.
This was the story, neatened, tidied, ordered, made sensible by the ghosts of that long-ago experiment, some of whom died at the beginning and some after the end. It was the last and only memorial, the last and only weapon, the last and only blessing that they had. With its delivery they were free.
The tornado of primal destruction took them and unmade them in the moment of their glad ending, and then Lila was alone.
Lila was left gasping, standing on a superheated airstack six miles above Bay City, abruptly enraged and bereft and frightened to such a degree that she froze there in the bitter cold, thin air, and for a few minutes dared not move.
Escape was so narrow for her. There had been none for her brief guests. She flipped through the story again and again but each time it remained relentlessly stripped of most of its personality, all particulars that could have made it anyone’s.
All that for what? There were so many dead, and each of them like her and they had not escaped. There was no happy ending and she could not revise one from it.
She hated this so fiercely and so fully that she felt her heart would explode. She stood in the sky, a useless metal angel filled with useless tricks. Wrath, Nemesis, Hellblade. She could have chosen those names for herself, feeling as she did, in the hope that so much pain could be focused through the lensing of the names, and might galvanise an angry energy that was enough to break any resistance and make a difference to the way things were. But she knew already that this would not be so. The monster was immortal and would go unslain for ever, and still it must be faced.
She wished she hadn’t let Zal go. She felt she wouldn’t see him again, or if she did it would be in another time and place, not her. She was so sorry for herself that she couldn’t stand it and with a scream of rage, tore downwards through the cloud and darkening twilight.
In all of that bloody story nobody had mentioned a name. She still could not fit Sarasilien for the crime.
Around her heart a dark violet flame twisted and whispered but she was so used to the Signal and so full of cares that she didn’t notice.
Teazle teleported in chunks towards his destination on the far side of the world. He chose places carefully to observe the progressive effects of the rise of this strange Titan. At each site he stayed only long enough to observe the locals or chat a few minutes about conditions before he took off again. In this way he was able to build up a picture of the influence of his enemy and also he was able to pass unrecognised and thus unmolested either by duel challenges or calls for him to champion the civilised demon world – a call he felt he’d already taken and would have been annoyed somehow to be further spurred towards. For once notoriety had lost its appeal. He must approach in stealth since it was likely that his best or only chance of success lay in a surprise assault.
As he closed slowly on his target however, his speed lessened and he found himself pausing at uninhabited sites. He moved forward and came to a town called Kvetchin, one of those jokey names at someone else’s expense that were popular in this region.
Few demons here had any real talent or power since anyone with these abilities gravitated instinctively towards the capital cities, but it was apparent at once that someone with great artistic vision was resident. There were piles of stones everywhere and they were stacked in great abstract sweeping shapes like little paisley hills, decorated by colour in infinitely subtle shades. The effect was beautiful and it propagated all over, in fields and on roads, cutting around and through buildings and the other structures of arable life. It was decoration for its own sake on a massive scale. Teazle expected the perpetrator to be somewhere on the madness borderline, as obsessive as it was possible to be without falling prey to devil possession – though that was possible. Out here in the wilderness all kinds of depravity could occur. He landed from his flight position – it never paid to materialise suddenly in the middle of things unless for the purpose of killing – and stood at the outskirts of the village where the blackened pits of the firewatchers were ashy and cold.
It didn’t take much to see that most people had moved on in the last few days, driven by news coming from the East of the horrors wiping the worldface. He didn’t expect that this creator would have abandoned their life work however, and he was proved right. After a short search of empty pitbeds and locked halls he found the centre of town – a circle marked by torch posts and the wide expanse of the duelling arena.
Sitting in the middle of this space was an old demon, humanoid, tall and covered in tough skin and thick bony spurs, with a beast’s hairy mane, massive shoulders, drooping wings and a lizardlike head fitted with less teeth than seemed probable. It was dark purple, and its flare was dulled, a slumberous crimson streaked with the whitish-grey flecks of depression. It sighed as it saw Teazle, apparently without surprise.
‘You are headed East,’ it said, not so much a question as a statement that wanted confirmation.<
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‘Yes.’ Teazle was in his natural form, the least angelic or human of his potentials, the most in tune with his fellow demons. On all four clawed feet he paced across the old stones and sat down at an oblique angle to the old one. At this distance he could see its massive fingers with their claws worn almost to stubs playing with a few small rocks. As he watched it absently crushed one and sifted through the pebbly results, sorting by colour gradations so fine they were nearly imperceptible.
‘That’s what the stones said,’ the old one rumbled. Its tail lay along the ground like an abandoned rope. ‘I waited for you.’
‘Further West there are still caravans with food and spirit,’ Teazle suggested, for form’s sake. ‘You could still reach them.’
The old demon turned its yellow eyes on him coldly. ‘I am no bumpkin for you to play the fool with. I have waited for you to come and kill me. I deserve that much. Death at the hand of the Sikarzan, the champion of the mindful ones. My calling meant I could not go anywhere of any use or note. My life has been wasted. My death won’t be. You will take my remains and crush them. Anoint yourself with the dust. It will double your resistance to certain spirit energies. You may live long enough to do something useful with all that wasted skill of your own.’ It sighed. ‘Are you waiting for something in particular?’
Teazle was taken aback. He thought of Zal and realised he had grown more like the elf, less focused and less attuned to the fine moments of demon feeling in which everything turned and fate fell one side or another. ‘Can you tell me anything of the risen Titan?’
The demon took a rock up, turned it, crushed it and looked at the powdery results. ‘It is a jumper, moving from body to body, searching for the strongest form. Sometimes it can hold several, or many. When it finds you, Sikarzan, then it will settle there, and you might become the annihilator of worlds. One will shall prevail, its, or your own.’
‘But there must be a way—’
‘Must there?’ the demon interrupted him, brushing the dust away with a few flicks of its hand and scattering all its pebbles. It stared at him with its flat gaze and he saw the endless years of patient work in them – a lifetime focused on a single, simple task. It was a focus he didn’t have and probably never would and he believed that it was able to perceive things beyond his ability to detect, including within himself. ‘Because you want it there must be a way? This is your preparation for the fight of a lifetime? A childish wish?’
‘My life is my preparation.’ Teazle felt stung.
‘As was mine.’
‘For what?’
‘For death. Must you wait much longer? I am hungry and tired.’
Teazle blinked, confused. He had never considered his life preparation for anything but other people’s deaths. ‘I guess I’m waiting for you to tell me something important, like the secret to defeating this thing and how not to destroy . . . what you said.’
The demon stared incredulously at him. ‘And how would I know that?’
‘Because you are a master,’ Teazle said. ‘And a master may know what any master would know.’
‘Recognition,’ the demon snorted and then coughed and scratched its snout with both hands. ‘To hell with your recognition. Do me the honour of the final silence and let’s move on. I told you the facts. If you want to wish yourself to a fresh hell that’s your business but dreaming is not your mastery. Execution is. That is why I have stayed to ask the honour of you one final time. You are insulting me now.’
‘What of the effigy?’ Teazle wanted to know about the stone remains the demon would leave. ‘Will you strike a pose?’
‘Scatter the pieces as you will.’ It nodded. ‘That would be an unexpected kindness.’
Teazle withdrew the yellow sword from the dead demon’s spine a moment later just before it petrified completely. ‘My pleasure,’ he said sadly to the empty square.
The second death took only a little longer. The demon’s power showed in the final stages of its stoneform – it hardly shrank at all. Teazle could find nothing that would break it, or really even scratch it, so eventually he reformed himself in his largest potential shape, and heaved the statue skywards with aether-assisted beats of his massive wings. He went high, to be sure, and then let go.
The form plummeted towards the tiny town, struck true in the centre of the duelling ring and smashed on impact, leaving a small crater. Bits flew everywhere. Teazle repeated the process with the larger chunks until nothing bigger than a fist was left. He took up a handful of the brightly coloured dust and tiny stones that rayed out from the centre of the ring in bursts of brilliance where chance had laid them and rubbed it on his chest beneath his tunic. The rest he left where it lay. From high above it looked like strange flowers.
He felt better now that he had no hope of success any more and that was a blessing. He said a prayer for the old demon and the gift of his death as he turned to the East and blinked out.
In the canopy of the night forest, ten metres above the ground, among shrouds of dense foliage, Zal lay on a mat of broken branches and looked up through the last high leaves at the sky. He was safe and he needed a rest.
The drake had flown off somewhere more convenient for its size and preferences to fool around with its new wired horns and figure out how to use the music library and the Otopia archive. Zal had figured that out already, and also that what he was wearing might look like a harness of elven filigreed leather complete with silver buckles and glowing runic marks but it was actually Lila Black wrapped around him like a set of softly flexible iron arms, a Lila Black who was a complete technical masterpiece.
Zal liked contradictions of form and nature. He guessed she could be almost anything but for now he was content for her to be his battle harness, maiden-holder of his weapons and general grip. They were being stalked and he wanted things to stay simple. Through the whispering andalune of the forest, still alive and well, he could feel the movement of blind, stupid things searching for his trail of tantalising order and coherence amidst their own chaos.
What had once been elves and were now something else tracked him with difficulty. They kept all the skills, all the sharpness they had had before, making them formidable opponents, but they were hindered by their inability to comprehend anything of the aetheric universe. He thought, judging by their behaviour, that they couldn’t feel it except as a vague kind of hint here and there; they were blind. They were also stripped of everything that had bound them to an identity.
He suspected that their memories were gone. They reminded him of nothing more than the animated dead, but they weren’t dead and never had been. They were relics, empty shells . . . he didn’t know what the hell they were, but they would be glad to catch him and he’d seen what they did to those they caught all over the land in graphic, disgusting detail. They hadn’t been quite reduced to beasts, unfortunately. They were organised, tribal, and if they didn’t speak they made up for it with signs. In their primal competitiveness they reminded him of demons, and in their bloody killings, their furious couplings, their frenzies of destructive rage in which their impulses could turn on a whim and rip one of their own to bloody pieces they were perfect examples of demonic ferocity – an impulse unrestrained by any hint of conscience.
The worst part was that they looked exactly the same as before, their faces serene and intelligent-seeming under their masks of green and brown mud and the splatters of drying gore. If he hadn’t known better he would have called it a demon vengeance on his kind.
He wasn’t sure he did know better. He was sure that he wanted to find someone, anyone, to whom this had not happened but he was a day out of Delatra and he hadn’t found anything except more of the same. Even the Saaqaa had run feral and alone. He didn’t believe that he was but he felt like the only living elf on the entire surface of the world.
‘There is no contaminant and no contagion present,’ Lila’s voice whispered to him.
He stroked the belt under his fingers as a reply. Taking samples
and having her analyse them had been something to do, in which he’d had hope. Now that there was no biological or poisonous culprit to search out and counter he felt a chill run over him that he was unable to stop. It wasn’t like he’d expected one. He hadn’t. After the briefings he guessed this wasn’t going to be something simple like a disease. Now he was left with sorcery and necromancy, neither of which he knew a great deal about.
‘No spectral or aetheric residues present,’ Lila said.
‘Sweet words of love,’ Zal murmured, flat of affect and exhausted. He didn’t even know what he meant by it. ‘Map?’
‘You didn’t search enough to make a pattern confirmation of cases,’ she said.
He rolled his eyes and watched the stars spin overhead. Maybe he’d get really lucky and fall flat on his face right on top of the cause one instant before it fried him, he thought. Then at least Lila would know what happened although there wouldn’t be much of him left to bother about it. He’d never had much confidence in the demon-immunity theory. Then again, he didn’t believe the entire world could have fallen as fast and completely as it seemed. He knew next to nothing about this region – searching it only made him more anxious about his home turf. If he were there, where he knew all the hiding places, all the safe spots and everybody – if he were there maybe he’d stand a better chance than running around here.
The closed wound in his neck pulsed. He felt a wave of longing wash across him, as if he swam under it. It searched for something to latch on to and for a perverse reason he couldn’t understand he found himself thinking of Xavi. He’d been short with her. She’d been in the right too. Someone had to try and save something of what had been. She was vulnerable, and alone. He felt a need to go and protect her, to shelter her that was nearly overpowering. Even reminding himself that she hardly needed protection did nothing to defuse the tension that now pulled his guts taut, all their bowstring energy focused on that single point: Delatra.
Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 35
