Some of the languid Sarsans were beginning to move now, pulling knives and small axes from beneath cloaks and furs. Some raised their hands in a way that suggested familiarity with the wrestling style Raus used or one that was similar. That was better, Jav thought. More sporting, at least.
Though he could not make use of his corpse soldiers, Raus still had the physical power afforded him by the Resurrection Bolts. Those who approached him he slapped away with hands big even by Sarsan standards while he was Dark, and which easily shattered bone. Skulls crumpled between his splayed fingers, and the snow around him was soon melting under the wash of steaming blood, littered with red-black bits of wet gristle, glossy white chips of bone, and hunks of soft, gray tissue. The Bright Ones fared no better against him. The electricity delivered by their swords was completely ineffective on Raus, though the blades themselves, when they struck true, were not. Raus had several cuts, all of which had started out as deep gashes, but these healed as the minutes passed. He had taken one of the blades and shattered it with the flat of his hand, had flung another away with such force that it had lodged with a distant clang into steel, midway up the length of the Bright Sarsastra. One of the female Bright Ones had so vexed him that he had wrapped his arms about her head and snapped it from her shoulders.
Jav was some distance from Raus now, his fighting and the rhythm of the crowd taking him further and further away. He was acutely aware of their separation, but he didn’t care. Nor did he think it a strategy of the Sarsans. It didn’t matter, either. Jav knew that he would be exhausted before they could kill all the Sarsans, and wasn’t even sure that he and Raus could kill all of them under the current circumstances, but his rage was like a hunger that refused to allow him any action that didn’t lead directly to satiation, even if satiation led to self-destruction.
None of the wrestlers were a threat, but the blades were coming for him in profusion now, one after another and often two or three at a time. Jav’s jacket had offered meager protection from them at first, but now it was so cut up that it was falling away in still-smoking pieces. He gathered it up and ripped it from him, casting it away, oblivious in his fervor to the cold. He grabbed the wrist of a lunging knife wielder and raked the supporting shoulder with his other hand, fingers clawed, shredding it and removing the arm. But as he did that, another blade sliced across the small of his back. His body reacted, reflexes honed and anticipating. He pivoted, his fingers closing around the hand that held the knife and raising the point up through the man’s own neck, through the crook of chin and throat so that the blade was visible in the man’s wide-open mouth. Jav responded to another, diverting the course of a whistling axe head into that man’s chest, snapping the bones of his arm in the process. Jav front-kicked him away, turning with a vicious sweeping claw that cleared the face and hollowed the head of another standing near, awaiting his chance.
Jav caught sight once again of the machine Kohanic had used to seal away his and Raus’s armies. He would have little trouble fighting his way back to it and was unconcerned about any defense the Sarsans might mount, but it seemed too easy, too obvious a target. Jav couldn’t imagine that Kohanic would be so careless as to keep the machine in plain sight if there was any danger of canceling its effects. Still, it was a chance he couldn’t ignore. If he could free their armies to fight on their behalf, even in reduced numbers, the outcome of this conflict would be assured.
He made it, as expected, with little effort. Everyone in his path tried to kill him, but no one showed any particular interest in protecting what he sought. Jav stood below the pylon with its overlapping torso shapes. He took a deep breath and scissored his hands, raking his fingers across the machine in an effort to cut it in half, but his hands passed right through it. He pursed his lips and scrutinized the phantom contraption before him, realizing that it was out of synch with physical space. Using AI might enable him to reach it, but the concentration required would be impossible to accomplish without simply stopping and focusing on nothing else. The Sarsans would tear him apart if he stopped moving. He tried regardless, pushing as close to infinity as he dared, once then a second time, but it wasn’t enough and he suffered for it, so that he had no choice but to abandon his attempts on the machine.
The Sarsans came and came, leaving marks as they did: little cuts, long cuts, stabs that couldn’t quite penetrate Jav’s muscles conditioned for 25 standard gravities. None of them had the strength of the Bright Ones, but it didn’t matter. After fighting for nearly an hour and leaving himself open in his assault on the machine, he was almost exhausted from exertion and blood loss, and he was going numb with the cold. Eventually he would fall, but he would see that he left such a pile of bodies in his wake as to make men and gods tremble.
Raus was leaving his own pile of bodies and his stamina was untouched. The last of the Witch Kings had fallen to his brute strength with a punch through the chest. Anytime the crowd pressed too close, he filled the air with his electrokinesis, stopping his assailants in their tracks, bursting their eyes and organs, making them soil themselves as their last mortal act. The air reeked of blood and ozone, of charred flesh and excrement.
The two Shades had barely made any real impact on the numbers facing them, but of a sudden the northerners stopped, maintaining the characteristic silence they’d exhibited so far—excepting their screams of pain. Jav looked up. He would be loath to admit it, but he was thankful for the breather. He shared a questioning look with Raus, who only shook his head.
The ground beneath them began to shake and lights flicked on up the length of the Bright Sarsastra. It sounded as if the engines, buried deep within the valley floor, had come online and were revving up. The valley filled with the sound of the Bright Sarsastra—and something else, a kind of tinkling music from within the ground and from the surrounding mountain walls. Blue-white light shone from before-unseen cracks in the ground and from afar in exposed caverns dotting the surrounding ranges.
“The crystals,” Raus shouted above the din.
Jav nodded tiredly. But what good did the information do them?
“You,” a voice boomed, overwhelming all other sound, “will not outdo your father in wickedness!” From the ground rose a white shape, a ghost bigger and better defined than any other they had yet seen. Thars Kohanic hovered above the body he had occupied previously. He reached down with a motion that didn’t fully register on the senses to pick up the sword he’d used when physical. “The Kapler line ends here! No more shall be made to sacrifice themselves to you.
“Acston Mosario, Mills Fantisco, Emis Jesler, Shiia Elsara, Ilania Buskos: rise.”
At his command, the ghosts of the original surviving officers save his father rose from out of the ground, each as white and translucent as Kohanic. They too took up their former blades. Emis Jesler reached for the hilt of his shattered sword and the fragmented steel swirled back to reform the blade, still lined and fractured, but held together by the power of his bioelectric field. Mills Fantisco continued his rise, his speed increasing incredibly until he reached the place where his blade had sunk into the Bright Sarsastra. Retrieving it, he shot back down to join his fellows. All six of them advanced towards Raus, slowly at first then with a speed and motion that again failed to fully register on the senses. Raus took several steps backward, but was caught up in the mob of ghosts.
Emis Jesler and Mills Fantisco were on either side of Raus, wrapping their spectral arms about his and holding him firmly in place. He struggled against them, but could move only marginally within their grip, not at all enough to free himself. Kohanic situated himself before Raus, while Shiia Elsara, Actson Mosario, and Ilania Buskos circled behind him. “For justice,” Kohanic said, sinking his blade into Raus’s neck with a swift, sure swing just under the left Resurrection Bolt. Raus cried out, releasing his his electrokinetic field in reflex. The image of each ghost wavered, but otherwise they were wholly unaffected. Still Kohanic gasped in surprise and disgust. His blade was now trapped within f
lesh made whole again, healed in an instant by Raus’s natural power made monstrous by Jorston Kapler’s experiments and further by the alien Artifact that polluted his body. He wrenched the sword free, doing damage, but considerably less so than with his initial attack. With a glance, Kohanic signaled the others not holding Raus to commence or resume the execution and the three of them made their swords dance upon Raus’s body, eliciting little more than grunts from him with each biting strike.
Jav was already bounding through the crowd toward Raus and his attackers, a howl rising from his throat. He arrived in their midst, claw hands flashing, but his fingers found no solid targets, passing through the ghosts harmlessly.
Kohanic laughed and unexpectedly brought his sword around, catching Jav completely unaware. The blade forced him down to one knee, buried between neck and shoulder, neatly cleaving his left collar bone. Arms limp at his sides, blood running down his T-shirt in waves and pumping in competing streams from severed arteries pressed up against the flat of the blade, he stared up at Kohanic with a combination of exhausted disinterest and a desire to see things hurried along. His eyes went wide when the blade blurred, released current into his body, and Kohanic drove it further down to cut into his heart.
Everything stopped then. The blade, his breath, his heart, the blood jetting from his shoulder, the snow in the air—nothing moved. But something was moving, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Something stirred deep within Jav’s head, tickling his sinuses, something physical and familiar, something that had been a source of dread to him and which he thought he’d escaped. But its presence now would be welcome, would enable him to vent his boundless rage, which otherwise would circle uselessly and impotently within his broken body until death came. It required but one word from Jav.
Kohanic looked down with colorless eyes, confused by Jav’s manner.
Jav was still looking up, but he didn’t see Kohanic. A strange smile haunted his face, and he uttered the word that led to salvation. “Yes,” he said.
For an instant golden light etched a framework cube about Jav’s head and shattered audibly, so audibly in fact that it rang out, piercing the curtain of noise draped over the valley by the Bright Sarsastra and emanating from the countless, unseen crystal batteries. Outliving its creator, Mont Cranden’s second seal was broken. Jav’s face paled as pearls seemed to rise from his pores. Though he possessed millennia of experience, Kohanic curled his insubstantial lip in disgust, uncertainty, and finally, fear.
Motion spread through the myriad Sarsans like a ripple in a pool. All bowed physically to the power of the sound and the palpable miasmic dread that spilled out from its source. Those close enough to see the emergence of the Mask gawked, appalled by the obscenity occurring before them.
A fresh jolt of current from Kohanic’s sword turned Jav’s T-shirt to ash, but Kohanic could force the blade down no further, not even against the opposite and irresistible force of Jav’s act of rising to stand straight. Kohanic looked into the face the Ritual Mask presented, trying to fathom what lay behind the crease suggestions of eyes set within the immaculate ivory plate. Forgotten was Raus and the others as they strove to cut him apart, though Raus’s own current came at intervals, reigned in to within a few centimeters of his person, healing him each time as much as the time before.
Jav closed the fingers of his left hand around Kohanic’s blade and lifted it from his shoulder. The cleft was already beginning to mend.
“You’ve left me. . . empty,” Jav said. “The Mikai Curse will be the end of you all.”
Kohanic reeled back from Jav as the shadow eyes upon the Ritual Mask opened, fixing him with a malevolent stare, unnatural but at the same time possessed of a primitive animism that reached down into Kohanic’s core, into unconscious race memories shared by all human stock regardless of culture or the boundaries of the black empty space separating planets, that seized upon a basic fear of the dark and what lies hidden within. In his moment of terror, Kohanic relaxed his hold on the sword and Jav tore it free of his grip. He held it suspended between them for a moment in his left hand, bathing Kohanic in the malicious gaze of the Mask’s shadow eyes, and then he shattered it by closing his fingers into a fist. Though incorporeal, Kohanic turned away unconsciously from the scattering bits and shards of steel.
A bass thump rolled out through the valley.
“I feel sorry for you, Thars Kohanic,” Jav said. “I don’t know what you did with the Kaiser Bones, and it would be childish to raise questions of fairness, but by all rights I should be dead and Raus dying.”
A second boom sounded. Kohanic’s fellows had stopped their attempt at execution and were watching Jav and their leader now, not sure exactly what to do.
“But I’m not and he isn’t. In time you may have been able to cut him so he couldn’t put himself back together, but you’re not going to get that chance.”
A light red fog had risen, filling the killing plain imperceptibly, and commingling with the falling snow. Another boom crashed ominously, and in that instant, the fog grew substantially thicker. As if waking from a shared stupor, hundreds of Sarsans looked around uneasily. For the first time, murmurs of misgivings, curses, and complaints rose up among them.
“Thars,” Emis Fantisco said hoarsely. “Something is wrong.”
Kohanic ignored him. His fear had run its course. He had known life and death for several thousand years. What did he have to fear from the physical? He reached out his right hand and his fallen sword hilt leapt to it, the blade reassembling itself in an instant. His face contorted with rage and he swung the blade at Jav savagely. Jav leaned back with the strange stuttered motion that characterized his actions while Dark with the Ritual Mask, easily avoiding Kohanic’s every slash and thrust.
A group of Sarsans had taken some initiative, commandeering the windram and turning it in Jav’s direction. They waited only until he paused long enough to make a shot count, and then fired the Lightning Gun. But Jav was an experienced fighter, his senses made preternatural by the Ritual Mask, and he was—unlike almost every other time in the past when Dark with its power—completely lucid. Somewhere deep within him, the rage threatened to break through the surface of his calm and overwhelm him, but not yet. Maybe not at all. Maybe he could maintain control this time. He avoided the streak that flashed from the prow of the windram just as easily as he had every one of Kohanic’s attempted strikes. It passed between the two, lighting the blood-heavy air to a beautiful shade of rose and raising a white bloom upon the hull of the Bright Sarsastra.
Jav leapt, making a forty meter arc, and pounced down on upon the fore end of the windram, driving it into the ground, shattering the control column, and reducing the man at the column to blood and meat with adamantine claw hands. Another boom punctuated his action upon the windram, momentarily distorting every droplet hanging in the air and setting them all to moving so that the fog was like a stormy sky in miniature, drawn into the Ritual Mask, lazily at first then with increased speed and force. Jav’s wounds were healed now, his collar bone and the bare skin that covered it unmarked save for a faint, white scar—one line among hundreds, lost in a map of brutality.
Kohanic was upon Jav quickly, engaging him again, but Jav was moving faster now, his movements even more visually jarring, broken, but ultimately precise and dangerous—or would be, if Kohanic were alive. Funnel streams coalesced from the fog, sinking without end into the surface of the Ritual Mask, passing straight through Kohanic, who simply could not make his sword connect.
While the mass of the Sarsan people had grown loud with varied shouts of despair or of encouraging cheers for their leader or of plain expressions of fear or of a desire to avoid death, no more of them sought to test Jav, no matter how frail his diminutive size made him seem.
Kohanic was no longer a real threat to him, but Jav felt the Curse coming. He couldn’t stop it and wouldn’t even if he could. There were too many Sarsans, and Jav didn’t think he could stomach killing the number required with hi
s bare hands. The Curse was terrible; he might even call it evil, but it was necessary, and though using it changed nothing except the means, he felt his conscience falsely eased for the time being. Raus. Raus might not survive. There was no way to get him far enough away in time.
Struggling to hold back the Curse to consider what to do with Raus cost Jav an instant of concentration. A corner of the square tip of Kohanic’s blade sliced through Jav’s right shoulder, delivering as much current as Kohanic had to offer. This served only to bring Jav back to focus and annoy him, though. He lurched forward artlessly, heedless of any danger Kohanic might present, and took the blade from him a second time. Kohanic wouldn’t be retrieving it though. In one unbroken motion, Jav had wrested it from Kohanic’s grip and cast it way so hard that it left a clear wake through the blood fog. He pointed after the blade, adding immeasurable velocity through AI, and drove it into the eastern range kilometers away with such potency that atoms were forced together on impact, creating a nuclear reaction. Daylight shone in the valley, and the ground shook. Everyone stared, mouths agape, faces ruddy with the glow.
The music from the crystals had grown softer, and The Bright Ones flickered intermittently.
“Raus,” Jav called, weary from the effort of suppressing the Curse. “You may or may not survive this. I’m sorry.”
Still in the grip of Emis Jesler and Mills Fantisco, and having no idea what to expect, Raus simply bowed his head, resolved to whatever might come.
Though not as loud as the explosion on the mountain, the next boom from the Ritual Mask cleared the frigid air and falling snow of every hint of red, but more than that it seized the blood from every Sarsan within a hundred meters of Jav, wrenching the vital substance from eyes, ears, mouths and pores, leaving all affected dead, dried, and shriveled. Most didn’t feel the sudden, fatal pull. Everyone was too busy awed by what Jav had done to the mountain. Among those unaffected, some hadn’t noticed what had happened to their fellows, but others realized that a danger far more pressing was closer at hand than the possibility of being burned by far off nuclear fire.
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 14
