“Indeed.” Stusson turned towards the basin. “Farewell, Garlin Braams.”
Braams watched, horror-struck, as a red cloud rose up in front of Olka Stusson. Every drop of blood was being extruded through Stusson’s pores to reform Stusson in that liquid medium. His body collapsed upon the floor, leaving the blood doppelgänger hovering over the basin. It looked over its shoulder to regard Braams and gave a final salute.
Braams was moved and appalled. “Sar Stusson!” he cried. But Stusson was already gone, pouring down in an endless stream onto and into the Blood Frame.
Stusson’s blood seemed to splash upon the ivory shapes, scattering wastefully, but in truth, not a single drop landed anywhere else. It did not mix with the rest of the blood filling the basin, but seemed to energize its singular target.
When it had finished drinking in all of Olka Stusson, the Blood Frame glowed with a kind of rich light Braams had never seen except within his meditations. Haloes manifested themselves variously, always textured and colored by the Entitled that raised them. What Braams saw was the pure light of the Divine, unmarred by ego or any influence of the physical world. It was pure, ideal, impossible, and yet real before him.
The Blood Frame stirred, rose up on its pedestal to stand straight as if worn by an invisible host. Braams knew that it was time. He stripped his clothes and jumped easily down to the bottom of the basin following almost exactly the arc that Stusson’s blood had made. He landed softly next to the floating ivory shapes, regarding them with awe. He circled them once, taking in their unreal light and then stepped into them. They adhered to him instantly. His head was now encased in a smooth helmet of shiny white bone with two slit eyeholes, from which he examined himself. Two plates covered his chest, two more his shoulders. His arms and legs were strapped with I-shaped struts. Bone links covered his finger joints; plates covered his palms and the backs of his hands; similar plates covered the tops of his feet. He felt a series of bone nodules down his back which formed a spine.
Once the Frame was completely in place, Braams noticed that the blood had risen up over the pedestal to cover his feet. He bent his knees slightly and snapped upwards, the blood at his feet rising with him, as if attached like an umbilical cord. At the peak of his leap, when he was level with the top of the basin and his momentum spent, he simply stopped. He floated there, taking deeper and deeper breaths, his breast heaving as the hub room grew hazy with heat shimmer. The sound of his heartbeat grew to fill the room, drowning out the roar of the rushing blood, and he began.
“For the Three Worlds,” he said softly.
Like stars filling the darkening sky, pinpoint atomic lights sparkled across his body, spreading, spreading until he was too dazzling to look at.
The air grew hotter, heavier, impossible to breathe, but the technicians were equipped with heat resistant suits and rebreathers. They worked the valves and funneled the blood which jetted into the basin, now half-full and like a small, tumultuous sea.
Braams had reached the point of no return. His body was no longer his own. With the next step, he would be consumed. He had faith in the prophecy, in Olka Stusson who’d just performed a miracle before his eyes, but he couldn’t banish a small sense of regret at having to abandon his sense of self. He knew that this must be done, but he’d never been good at being selfless. He could be compassionate, had an innate and unfailing understanding of right and wrong, but he was, at heart, selfish. Hadn’t that very trait played some very large part in his ability to excel, to become the thing that was needed now? He sighed and wished himself goodbye.
Braams’s form flashed brighter than any sun, but faster than his radiating light was the Blood Frame’s ability to absorb it. There was a muted, bass explosion from the middle of the Frame and Braams was gone. With sudden and immeasurable force, the roiling blood renewed its climb, jetting up the path of the umbilical tether into the Blood Frame which welcomed it with an unquenchable thirst. The hub room rocked as inordinate quantities of blood were drawn by the irresistible force. Blood thundered through the pipes, straining their capacity, pumping endlessly, and seeming to drain through a hole in space. But it wasn’t endless. Slowly, the blood pouring rapaciously up into the Blood Frame began to fill an invisible vessel, to be defined by an invisible outline, to remake Garlin Braams’s body into something like what Olka Stusson had become.
Garlin Braams was aware. He was somewhat relieved to find that he was indeed still Garlin Braams, but at the same time he was so much more. He had no heart, but he felt a pulse. He felt it through his being and with its coming he knew fear and hope and anguish and anger and countless other emotions, each through the individual experiencing it, both those of the Three Worlds and of the invading force. He felt the familiar and the unfamiliar and the intense clash on the other side of Shaala. He reached out, experimenting with this new sense, attempted to locate Kan Fosso, the closest to his equal he’d ever encountered, and found only an ebbing beat, faint and soon to be still. Another beat intertwined closely with Fosso’s—Lissa Kraaskau’s—and then another—Bask Sosa’s.
Braams frowned inwardly. Fosso was a great loss, but Sosa remained. He focused on Sosa’s beat, on his cool rage, and was gone from the hub room, debris raining down from the ruptured ceiling into the stark white bowl below where not a drop of blood remained, gone from Shaahal, from the continent, and across half the globe to arrive at Sosa’s side in time for the very next beat of his heart.
Sosa started at the red and white presence hovering just above his right shoulder, but recognition was nearly immediate.
“God, Braams. It’s you.”
Braams nodded. “But not in time for Fosso.”
“Look out,” Sosa said, more for informational purposes than from any sense of urgency. He drove his snake fist forward giving birth once again to that animate column of fanged smoke.
Kalkin, Vays at his back, accepted the rush of the smoke serpent, crushing it to his chest and exhausting it. There was something about the touch of that smoke that was like a lullaby, soothing him towards oblivion. The cells directly exposed to the smoke did not regenerate and instead poured away like a rancid discharge. If not for his mass and his ability to regenerate wholly from any of his cells, he might be in real danger, but the sensation was new and it disturbed him. “Be careful with the black one, Vays,” he said through his Artifact. “The Titan Star might be enough, or then again it might not.”
Kalkin leapt for Bask Sosa, surprising many upon the battlefield with his sudden and impressive agility, but Sosa would not be caught so easily. Kalkin’s giant, purple form landed where Sosa had been, would have crushed him to the ground had he been there, but Sosa, too, had leapt, high and clear, driving another smoke serpent into Kalkin’s head, back and shoulders. This nearly forced Kalkin to the ground, but after seconds of the onslaught, he gathered himself, turned savagely, his hand outstretched, and cried out, “Fuhai Hadou!”
Sosa was not prepared for what assaulted him. He raised his arms to block his chest and face as he was buffeted by waves of rot and decay. These had cleared the field of everything between them, befouling the very air, reducing living, breathing men and gene soldiers alike to pools of putrefaction. Liquid black poured off of Sosa, his serpent head melting away to reveal a face not unhandsome, but with inset eyes wide and terror-stricken.
“Kalkin, behind you,” Vays warned through his Artifact. “I’ll take care of the snake.”
Kalkin turned to face the recent arrival who stood immediately before him. The other was appraising him, and Kalkin was beginning to lose his patience. He lunged for the red and white man, swinging his open hand either to grab him or knock him sprawling, but Kalkin found this one, too, to be much more than what they’d come up against here so far. When the other moved, Kalkin was shocked to see his red body shake and jiggle like fluid contained within a thin membrane. But it wasn’t a membrane, he soon realized. He recognized that fluid, could smell it. Under those—bones?—he was animate blood. I
t occurred to him then, rather ridiculously, that this man before him, if man he were, reminded him of Jav in the Kaiser Bones, like some imperfect copy, or another interpretation of the same idea. He raised both fists high over his head and brought them down, finding the ground his only victim.
“You are dangerous,” the red and white figure said from behind. “I am Garlin Braams, Initiate of the Seventh Secret. Tell me your name before I am forced to eliminate you.”
“I’m Lor Kalkin. And you will have difficulty eliminating me.”
As if to punctuate this, as Braams’s flurry of Tiger Claws ripped easily through Kalkin’s prodigious midsection, the sickly purple flesh mended instantly after each pass.
“Some mild frustration, perhaps, but difficulty? No. It’s a shame. I sense in you, with the beating of your cancer pump, a nobility I would be drawn to under other circumstances.”
This gave Kalkin pause. His mind raced with anxiety and foreboding as he watched Garlin Braams claw at the air, much as Jav did when practicing the Eighteen Heavenly Claws alone, and the air grew hot. Currents of liquid fire began to follow the course of Braams’s hands. Strangely, Kalkin felt that this fire was something beyond normal; it seemed to be more than it was, pregnant in a way with infinite potential.
Kalkin composed himself and lashed out again with the Fuhai Hadou. More bystanders, collapsed into wet, stinking pools, but Braams was too fast, too agile. As he let the flow of his psychic rot cease, he saw Braams stop, perform a series of gestures, as if pulling fuel from the heavens, and strike the air between them with both claw hands, palms aimed directly at him.
A raging column of fire, orange-white and faceted like a colossal, ever-expanding gem exploded from Braams’s hands, striking Kalkin, filling the space between his arms and legs, so that he was caught bodily and sent, much as Jav had been by Bask Sosa, through the air.
“This is cruel mercy,” Braams cried after Kalkin’s retreating form and out over the roar of liquid fire spouting from his palms. “You repair yourself, but my fire will not burn out until you are consumed. Contemplate justice, Lor Kalkin.”
Kalkin clung feebly to the fire, a streaking comet with him at the head that threatened to eat him away like his own cancer. It burned into him unceasingly and drove him further and further from the battlefield, past the Root Palace where he tried desperately to think only of Tia Winn, through the stratosphere, where he could endure in silence no longer, letting out a monstrous wail though he had no mouth through which to do so, and out into black space, where consciousness abandoned him.
• • •
Tia Winn blanched. She had been watching the fighting from a protected balcony, had witnessed Abanastar’s redirected sunbeam and not been concerned, had seen the thick lance of fire come their way and pass them by, not concerned this time either, except that it had been Kalkin on the receiving end of that fire and it had shot off into space.
“Lor,” she probed with her Artifact. “Lor!”
Silence fed her panic and panic was her only recourse.
• • •
Jav heard the cries in his head through his Artifact, but he couldn’t make sense of them. That couldn’t be Kalkin streaking like a meteor out of the atmosphere and into space. It had to be something else. The cold needles still littered his guts, numbing him and making everything fuzzy. Focus seemed maddeningly close, but just beyond his reach.
• • •
Forbis Vays stalked the formerly serpent-headed Entitled, chasing him through the still-crowded battlefield. He had learned patience to some degree through his respect for Kalkin, but he was angry at what he saw here on this planet, angry with what had been done to him, angry at how their various shows of force had been blunted, defeated, or turned back on them. He forced the change, pushing himself to one hundred and twenty percent. Plates upon his armor shifted to reveal red and green lights and the excess vents that regulated his power, preventing him from simply exploding. Empowered now as he was, Vays had little trouble catching up with Sosa, getting Sosa’s attention by jabbing the Titan Saber through the back of his right shoulder.
Sosa turned, enraged not so much by the wound, but by what he considered to be a breach of fair play.
Vays sensed his indignation and would have none of it. “Only those running away need fear being stabbed in the back by me. Cowardly? Thorough? Which of us is which?” Vays shook his head. “Defend yourself.”
“I shall. I am Bask Sosa, Initiate of the Fifth Secret.”
Now that he’d stopped, Sosa took a moment to rebuild his Halo, recalling his serpent’s head. Tendrils of black rose up his chest, covering it, and continuing to rise up, wrapping around his head and binding it in that form. He hissed, holding his right hand up and bent at the wrist so that the fingers pointed towards Vays, the overall image that of a snake ready to strike. His left hand was at his right elbow and the way he moved, Vays could almost see the body of an actual snake: the head Sosa’s, right hand; the body continuing to the right elbow, bending at the junction with his left hand and continuing again down the length of the left arm.
Vays was entranced by Sosa’s movement, but only momentarily. His own indignation had grown too severe. He swept at Sosa with the Titan Saber, but Sosa was lithe and moved with supple grace, just like the snake he emulated, to avoid the deadly blade. They wove in and out and despite his expert application of the Single Element Ghost Sword, Bask Sosa proved to be an elusive target.
A howling stream of fire rocketed overhead. Vays noted with horror that Kalkin was on the receiving end, being driven away, black smoke bleeding off of him as the fire burned. “Kalkin!” The sight gave Vays a sick sense of dread that was like a punch in the stomach—and stole his attention long enough to leave him open to Sosa’s strikes.
Sosa’s fingertips pressed suddenly and with unexpected force against the middle of Vays’s armored chest. Vays felt thousands upon thousands of needles push through not just the impact point but his entire body. Numbness threatened to creep in and cripple his chances for survival. Another fingertip strike upon his brow sent him reeling. He nearly tripped over a corpse, but steadied himself through superb reflex action before going down. He was dazed, but at a hundred and twenty percent, the effects were short-lived. He regained his senses and nearly lost them again as his indignation overflowed, evolved into a higher order of rage. He shot forward, crying out, “Star Factory!” his blade jabbing with impossible speed one hundred and eight times. Not all the jabs found their marks, but Sosa was bleeding from several wounds spread out all over his body.
To endure Kalkin’s attack, Sosa had had to scour the depths of his near perfect knowledge of the Fifth Secret. He had not come out unscathed and now he faced a madman with a sword. He needed time to recuperate, if only for minutes, if he was going to be of any more use to the Three Worlds. He turned to flee.
Vays saw Sosa attempt to run yet again and became even more incensed. The Titan Saber flashed and Sosa’s left arm came away, cleaved cleanly at the shoulder. Blood started to pump out. Sosa, still in flight turned to look, appalled. Black strands rose up from around the wound, wrapping it even as his right hand clamped over the sheared surface. Sosa did not stop, did not stumble. Thick black smoke billowed out from his hips to engulf his lower body and he rose up into the air upon a lengthening trunk, over the crowd upon the battlefield and away from Vays.
Vays paused a moment, watching Sosa’s retreating form, then he moved with explosive speed and accuracy, tracing a pattern in the air with the Titan Saber. A hundred meters away Sosa stopped in the air as if snared by an invisible force, the column of smoke about his lower body scattering in an instant, but the neon red lines of the Grudge Star appeared about him, his head and limbs—except for his missing left arm—each confined to one of the five points of the star that was framed in a perfect circle.
“It was your choice to run!” Vays cried. He pulled the handle of the Titan Saber apart along the hidden rolling track within. The hammer and
trigger popped out, and Vays clicked the handle closed again. “I’m ashamed for you”, Vays said through gritted teeth, quivering with barely controlled rage. “It’s unfortunate that you meet your fate with your back turned.” He aimed the crooked hilt of his sword at Sosa, the blade at an angle, pointing towards the ground. He cocked the hammer with his thumb and fired.
Sosa screamed as his right arm exploded.
Vays was surprised by his reaction to the sound of Sosa’s screams. He felt angry and guilty at the same time, a sensation he hadn’t experienced since his childhood. It scared him and he reacted. He fanned the hammer and pulled the trigger, causing each of the points of the Star to explode, attempting to hurry the process to shut Sosa up, to prevent Sosa from making him feel this way. He kept fanning the hammer and pulling the trigger, but the explosions had stopped. Vays didn’t understand at first why the screaming hadn’t ceased. Then he knew. The scream he heard was his own. He stopped with a start at the realization, panting and not knowing how to feel.
• • •
Stafros Lowe was bleeding from several ragged wounds, two of which had pierced his body, Dark armor and all, all the way through. But the Entitled who’d identified himself as Pendell Faiz was dead. Lowe now took a moment to recover and marveled slightly at the black smoke serpent that shot through the sky with Jav caught in its jaws. Employing his Lead Cloud Steps, Lowe leapt into the air where he stayed and attempted to assess the situation. His first thought was to go to Jav’s aid, but Jav was moving well out of the conflict zone and out of danger—assuming he wasn’t already dead. If he were dead, or even dying, Lowe could do nothing for him, so he turned his attention to the source of Jav’s sudden departure and made his way towards the serpent-headed Entitled.
He drew nearer, and though he never took his eyes off of his target, a strange red and white figure had joined the black one. Lowe saw Kalkin and Vays arrive just then, the serpent-headed Entitled engaging Kalkin, then being chased off by Vays. He was tired and his wounds hurt, but he pushed himself, trying to increase his speed. Whatever his intentions had been, they were instantly overwhelmed by fear of an order as yet unexperienced. On landing, Lowe watched as Kalkin was now removed from the battlefield, not following a gentle arc to land somewhere terrestrial, but unerringly straight, right off the edge of the horizon. Lowe stood, facing this unknown opponent who possessed unimaginable power, and swallowed hard.
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 32
