Daemon

by Doug Dandridge

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said the man closest to Stark as the way cleared.

  Stark nodded his head, echoing the sentiments in his mind. Surely these people couldn’t be serious, sending a line of spearmen with leather jerkins and hard shell helmets to take on large men armed with modern weapons. But here they came, a couple of hundred natives with spears couched toward Stark and his men, who now numbered about forty as more came up. Behind them marched a hundred creatures with recurve bows grasped in their left hands, a quiver of arrows over left shoulders.

  “What do we do now, sir,” asked one of the sergeants who led one of the four squads of the harvesting unit.

  “We show them whose boss here,” said Stark, shifting his stun rod to his left hand, then drawing his automatic. He glanced up and down the skirmish line his men were forming, noting that most of the men had revolvers. The riflemen and shot gunners pulled their weapons off their shoulders and aimed them downrange, waiting for the command. There were only eight rifles, along with six shotguns, and only the rifles were really good for long range work.

  “Riflemen take aim and fire at will,” he yelled. “Shotguns and pistols hold until my command.”

  Within a second the first rifle fired. One of the Eldritch went down, a splash of red on his chest. Two more rifles fired while the first man jacked another round into his chamber. Within thirty seconds two dozen of the creatures were down on the hard surface of the square, while the eight riflemen serviced their targets with expert efficiency. Stark was beginning to believe that they would kill or chase away all of the Eldritch troops with no more than the eight rifles, when the men behind the spearman began to send their arrows arching into the sky to fall on the humans.

  Most of the arrows missed, clattering down onto the hard surface. A few didn’t. Two men sustained superficial wounds as arrows cut across arms. One got an arrow through his thigh. Another caught one in the chest that brought a bloody forth to the man’s lips as he sank to the ground.

  Stark had never been a combat soldier. But even he could see the stupidity of standing here and taking arrow fire. He glanced at the aliens pulling arrows from quivers and placing them to their bows, then at his men.

  “Charge them,” he yelled, then he took off for the enemy lines, waving his pistol in the air. “Fire at will as you get the range.”

  The men yelled and whooped as they took off, the riflemen stopping every couple of seconds to take a shot. The second flight of arrows looped overhead to fall where the men had been. The longer legged humans charged at the spearmen, who had stopped and couched their weapons to take the charge in the only way they knew how.

  Stark raised and aimed his pistol as he slowed a bit, estimating that he was within the fifty yard maximum effective range of his automatic. Some of the men with revolvers had already started firing, hitting with about two thirds of their shots. Stark aimed at the Eldritch spearman directly in front of him and squeezed off a shot. The spearman flinched as the round missed. Stark squeezed off another, aiming at the diminutive creature’s chest. Its face exploded in red and it fell backwards. Stark shrugged his shoulders as he continued forward. He had not hit the creature where he had aimed, but he had killed it, and that was good enough. Stark killed the little blue man next to the first, then switched back the other direction to send a shot into a creature that was hit in the center by a shotgun blast at the same time. Stark looked over and scowled at the man who had taken his target. The shot gunner was smiling too much to notice.

  Stark ejected his magazine, stuck it in a pocket, and pulled another from the pouches on his belt. The revolver carriers had to stop so they could reload their cylinders, and one fell to an arrow while not moving. As Stark leveled his pistol and shot, the line of spearman, a third of those who had originally stood there, broke and fled.

  Stark yelled at the top of his lungs and charged the archers, firing a shot every two seconds. He ejected his magazine and fed in another, taking some more shots before the surviving archers fled behind the spearmen. Stark looked around at the thirty-five men who were still with him. He knew two had been seriously wounded or killed, and maybe half dozen others had been lightly wounded. He looked at the now unprotected palace and shrugged his shoulders again. Why not, he thought, looking back at his men.

  “Let’s see what they’re protecting in there,” he said, and the men cheered and yelled words of encouragement.

  Stark ran toward the palace, pistol in his right hand, stun rod in his left. He zapped any of the Eldritch who came within range, knocking them to the ground so the followers could truss them up. He hurried straight toward the entrance to the palace, not straying from his path to chase outliers.

  The two spearmen who guarded the entrance looked like frightened children. Frightened children with long, sharp weapons who were determined to stick Stark if he came too close. Two rounds took them down, and he was through the entrance. Inside he grabbed an Eldritch man in ornate robes and pushed him against the wall, then looked for one of his men who had some skill with translation magic. Burt was the fifth man in after Stark, and the Officer waved him down with his pistol hand while the rest of the men moved down the hall to secure the building.

  “Ask this little turd what this place is,” said Stark to Burt. Burt mumbled the words of a spell, then looked the captive in the eyes and started talking in a sing song language that went completely over Stark’s head. The captive responded, tried to jerk away, and then talked some more.

  “He says his soul will be damned if he betrays his lord,” said Burt, looking back and forth between the captive and Stark.

  “Tell him I’ll send his soul to Hell if he doesn’t give me what I want,” growled Stark, jerking the captive up by his robes.

  Burt again launched into the sing song, then waited while the captive poured out over a minute of speech. Burt smiled, said something, then looked at Stark.

  “He said something about a God King, the religious and temporal leader of their people,” said Burt. “Kind of like a cross between a king and a Bishop, from what I could gather, but with more power than either.”

  “Ask him if this God King has any kind of powers we need to look out for,” said Stark, glancing up the corridor where his men were gathered outside a heavy ornate door, setting explosives to blow down the locked portal. After a moment Burt looked up at Stark with a smile.

  “The God King has powers to heal illness and injury,” said Burt. “Nothing offensive, or even defensive.”

  “Thanks,” said Stark, releasing the creature’s robe and pushing his stun rod into the Eldritch’s chest. The creature twitched and went down, while Stark pivoted and headed up the hall.

  “Fire in the hole,” yelled one of the men up the hall. Stark ducked into an alcove, looking up at the ceiling, which was studded with small glowing gems in the golden wood, sending out a constant light. Stark thought the architecture was beautiful, even if his head was almost scraping the ceiling. Too bad it had to be built by people whose only use was to provide energy to their superiors. The explosion startled him out of those thoughts, and he moved back further into the alcove as splinters of wood flew down the hall. A yell told of at least one his men who didn’t take cover well enough, and who had met up with a splinter.

  Stark ran out of the alcove and toward the room beyond the door, jumping over part of the wooden portal that lay across the threshold. A trio of the little people, armed with the spears of the soldiers, lay dead on the tile floor, victims of the explosives. Many other of the little people stood or knelt in the large room beyond the door, many with hands over their ears. A golden carpet led up the center of the room to a raised dais where sat a throne. On that throne lounged a creature much like the others Stark had seen, with the exception of the richly embroidered robes on its body. It looked curiously at the invading humans, but made no move to escape.

  Stark walked up the carpeted path toward the ruler, while his men fanned out and shocked everyone that came w
ithin reach. Stark was thinking that he would need to make several trips back today to bring all the captives. He wondered if there would be enough cell space for them, then thought that they could always sacrifice the prisoners and the homeless to make room for these more efficient storage batteries.

  Stark stalked up the steps to the throne as if he owned the throne room. Which, with the weapons his men carried, he did. Burt tagged along behind him, ready to talk and translate a conversation with the potentate on the throne. Stark stopped and looked down at the unassuming creature that was the religious and secular figurehead for the Eldritch. The creature met his gaze without fear, which caused Stark to feel very angry. He resisted the impulse to stun the creature where he sat.

  “Tell him he is my prisoner, and I will take him back to my world,” said Stark to Burt. “Tell him if he cooperates he may be able to save his own life.”

  Burt started chatting away in the native language, his magical ability allowing him to connect. The potentate chatted back, looking as if he were relaxing for the evening, and not facing the possible death and destruction of himself and his city.

  “He says it would be a bad idea to take him to our planet,” said Burt, smiling at Stark.

  “A bad idea, huh,” said Stark, with a bark of a laugh. “Bad for him, or for us?”

  “I think he means for both of us,” said Burt, with a scowl back at the God King. “He also said he is the heart of the people, and is immortal. He cautions about using him in our bloody magic.”

  Stark smiled down at the God King, his mind already working. If this little guy had more energy than the rest of his kind, he could be quite a find. Energy was what they were here for. He grabbed the ruler by his arm and jerked him from his throne. The ruler came along without struggle, a slight mocking smile on his face.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Yvette Daemon hated late night meetings of the Council of Mages. She would rather do anything than sit around a table with her peers, knowing that most of them hated her and her husband, but acting like they were the best of friends, while haggling out the political future of the city and the country. At least it’s over for another week, she thought, climbing out of the gondola of her private airship and stepping onto the landing platform. Unless another idiot calls an emergency meeting.

  The mansion sat under its brilliant lights. The bodyguards that every Council member rated fanned out on the lawn beneath the platform. Twice the normal number, there were eight bodyguards in her entourage, along with her personal secretary and prime assistant. I’ll be glad when this silliness is over as well, she thought, walking down the steps and watching her guards meet and confer with the house security before leading her into the mansion. House security had been augmented as well, because her husband thought that whatever had killed Macodemus and the employees would come after one of them next.

  She thought that idea was stupid. Much as she loved her husband, in the comfortable kind of love that older couples enjoyed, she thought he was too paranoid. She was one of the eight most powerful mages on the planet, an order of magnitude more powerful than poor Macodemus. She looked at the manor security, dressed in the eye numbing camouflage of soldiers, which they in fact were. Retired soldiers turned mercenary, looking for an easy job to support them to retirement. But also heavily armed and well trained. Something that her poor son did not have around his house.

  “I will sleep in tomorrow,” she told Helen, her personal assistant, as they walked toward the house. Behind her the airship buzzed away under its steam engines, heading for its hanger.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Helen, nodding and looking at her pocket watch. She looked with a nervous glance at her mistress. “It’s just about to strike twelve. The witching hour.”

  Yvette nodded her head, feeling a bit of unease at that statement. The unease turned to a shiver of alarm, and at that moment she realized that she should have been just as paranoid as her husband.

  The red cloud of energy appeared out of nowhere. It was shaped like a tornado, something that Yvette had read about but never seen. That section of the continent had been dead for almost three score years. But she had seen pictures, and it was swirling at high speed like she had heard they did.

  “We need to get you under cover, ma’am,” said Cedric, the Chief of her bodyguard detail, running up to her with a sawed off shotgun in his hand.

  Yvette nodded her head as she followed the man toward the manor. Shots rang out behind her. The security force starting to engage the thing coming onto her property. A man ran by to the side, a sub-machinegun chattering in his hands, his camouflaged uniform blurring into the background.

  Yvette turned for a moment, her breath catching in her throat as she saw how large the thing had grown as it had gotten closer. A Mage on the security force threw a ball of force at the thing, the air rippling from its passage. It hit the entity, and Yvette expected it would at least disrupt the whirlwind a bit. The side of the entity facing the Mage rippled with the force. The whirlwind absorbed the energy, growing larger and spinning faster. The Mage threw another energy ball, with the same result, while the projectile weapons of the security force did nothing at all to the oncoming thing. They simply hit the vortex and disappeared inside it. One of the security men pulled the pin on a potato masher grenade and threw the device in the path of the vortex. The weapon exploded with a dull boom. The vortex was pushed slightly to the side, then reoriented itself and continued on toward its target, Yvette.

  The battlemage among the security force threw a ball of antimagic, sparking with all the colors of the rainbow as it struck the vortex. That seemed to have a little more effect than the last attempts. The vortex bucked and shrank just a bit, enough to raise the morale of the defending troops as they could finally see an effect to their attacks.

  What happened next sent a chill of horror up Yvette Daemon’s spine. The vortex spit a stream of objects at the offending Mage. Splatters of blood flew into the air and the Mage yelled out, a short sharp scream that ended as mists of blood appeared above his head. The bullets, thought Yvette, remembering all of the rounds the security force had fired into the entity. It had absorbed them and swirled them around its wall of wind, then released them at a threat it couldn’t reach directly.

  “Come on, ma’am,” yelled the Chief Bodyguard, grabbing Yvette by the arm. “We need to get you under the cover of the manor defensive system.”

  Yvette wondered why, as she allowed the bodyguard to drag her along. House security systems had not stopped this thing, nor even slowed it down as far as anyone could tell. The manor had a more powerful security system, to be sure, but it was based on the same principle as all of those house and apartment systems that had already failed.

  Now that the Mage was down the vortex forged ahead, oblivious to the attacks of the security force. The vortex swerved and picked up one of the guards, tossing him within and swirling him around it perimeter for a moment. It then tore the man apart, his body shredded into thousands of pieces, spewed from the entity in a cloud of red. The other security guards screamed or cowered as they were splattered with the remains of their comrade. Two more of the security force went down to spewed pellets, and the three remaining looked ready to break and run.

  “Ma’am,” said the bodyguard in a cracking voice, looking to her, to his gun, and to the entity that was advancing on them. Yvette knew that he had to be thinking that his weapon would do him no good. And she was the only one here now who could manipulate magic beyond the normal household task spells that most people knew. If anyone was going to stop this thing before it killed her, it would be her.

  “I’m going to stop it,” she said to the bodyguard, shrugging off his hand while channeling power into her body. First she reached out to the dead Mage, using her powers over necromancy to push some life force into the body of the man. It was a temporary fix, at most capable of animating the man a couple of hours, and probably burning him out as a potential undead vessel in the future. But she
needed that firepower now, not in some unknown future. Establishing control over him, she ordered the shambling creature to continue using one spell over and over again, all its newly dead mind was capable of. The Mage shuffled to his feet and began launching bolts of electricity at the entity. The bolts really did nothing to the thing but distract it. That was all that Yvette required.

  The powerful Mage, while the zombie was attracting the entity’s attention, probed her mind for the best spell she could find to attack the creature. She finally settled on an antimagic disruption spell much like the other Mage had cast when he was still alive. Something that would disrupt the very fabric that held the entity’s energy together. She went over the spell in her mind, settling herself around the words and the resonances of the words. She opened her eyes and looked at the entity, just as it was firing another string of pellets at the zombie and blasting out large areas of dead flesh.

  Yvette threw the first ball of antimagic at the thing, watching it into the target. The entity staggered, then lurched forward to pick up the Zombie Mage and puree him in the whirlwind. Yvette threw another ball of energy, then another, recycling the same spell over and over, processing the energy coming to her from the circuit on the property.

  The entity swayed and staggered. She was sure that the vortex itself was shrinking, becoming weaker. I’m going to beat this thing, she thought with elation. It may have beaten lesser mages, even poor Macodemus. But it’s not going to beat me. That last thought of her son raised the anger in her, and she reached deep inside her to pull a final ball of energy into her grasp, then hurled it with hate at the thing that had killed her son.

  The shimmering ball of antimagic hit the entity, sending out bolts of colors in all directions as it impacted the swirling winds. The creature let out a keening sound, a noise that hurt the ears of all who could hear. Yvette put her hands over her ears even as she shouted in triumph, watching the winds break from their tornado pattern. The entity staggered, shuddered, and fell apart, tendrils of red flowing into the surrounding air, then dissipating and disappearing.