Tithe to Tartarus: The Dark Avenger's Sidekick Book Three (Moth & Cobweb 6)

by John C. Wright

  For here he was, dead, a small speck of darkness screaming in the vast and scarred palm of a spirit older and darker that loomed in the black world. But her arrows could abolish ghosts and curse them never to return to Earth. Dead was Lord Tuesday, but she could harm him yet.

  Prudence told her to flee; love of vengeance told her to slay. Hatred drove out fear. She drew her bow and dove like a falcon.

  The peak of the hood of the fallen angel was larger than a mountain. Past it she fell, deep and deeper. The hand holding Lord Tuesday was like a black lake fed by five rivers. The fallen angel, without a word, and not even smiling, cast back his hood when she came close and revealed his face.

  She recalled the horror of the shock, and the blood gushing from her eyes and ears, and the constricting, white-hot, branching pains shooting through her chest as her heart burst. She recalled desperately trying to mouth the words Tom had told her to say, but there was no air in her lungs. The words! What were they?

  She found herself in a blinding light that did not blind her. It was a dozen times brighter than sunlight, but restful to her eyes, filling her with golden warmth… A bright lady was coming closer to her in the midst of this light, reaching out…

  5. The Runes of Deceit

  She wound her legs around his midriff and locked her ankles. His breath was driven from his body; he gasped like a sleeper in a nightmare, but he did not change expressions. Her elbow was behind his head, driving it forward, and her arms were locked around his elbows. Despite his greater strength, he had no leverage to rise.

  The horned rider glared down at the young man and woman rolling and writhing on the glassy ground at his steed’s hoofs. In a dry voice, he said, “These antics detract from the dignity of the day. If we are tardy by one tenth part of one second beyond the time agreed for tender of payment, our kingdoms and our children suffer. Make haste.”

  Yumiko, while pinning the arms of the man she held, saw a playing card tucked into the fold of his fancy cuff. She pulled it out with her teeth and crossed her eyes to stare at it. It was the joker. Angular letters had been written all about the margin of the card.

  The last time she had seen such a card, it had carried runes of finding, meant to expose someone in hiding. Could not the same magic be used to hide someone?

  Yumiko tossed her head and spat the card away. It fell to the glassy surface. The man she held shrank, losing weight and age, and his face melted and reformed. He no longer looked like Wilcolac. Instead, here was a freckle-cheeked young man with startling blue eyes and a mop of uncombed red hair atop.

  The sight was like the blast of many trumpets heralding a victory parade in Yumiko’s heart. Heat and cold pulsed through her veins. Her world spun. This face was at the center of it. She knew each freckle. She knew him.

  His eyes were blank and dull: he was as if asleep.

  With a cry of anger, Wilcolac drew a long dagger with a curving, snakelike blade. He knelt, clawing frantically, picked up the playing card, rose, and came toward her.

  Yumiko caught sight of the gem glittering on the necklace, the one she gave Tom in the desperate hour when they parted. The light again flared into her, parting an inner darkness. She remembered giving the pendant to Tom. And she remembered more.

  6. The Glass Maze

  The floor, ceiling, and walls of the labyrinth were as clear as air. Only the splatters of blood, torn corpses, and shattered weapons showed where the halls and stairs were. To their left were the mighty doors of silver, set with many runes and charms. Tom’s laser-howitzer had burned away the hinges on one side, just enough for Yumiko to use her wirepoon grapnel to snag and drag the ring to them. But the hinges were alive and groaning and growing back together, and the doors were pulling themselves back in place after having maliciously fallen onto the laser-howitzer and shattering its delicate lenses.

  The hordes of attackers, men in dark suits, werewolves, vampires, men possessed by ghosts, and statues large and small seemed nearby but were kept from them by the glass walls.

  “Listen,” said Tom. “No time to explain. Give me your pendant. Lord Saturday means to send me alive to Hell. These creatures will have to take me alive and keep me alive. Come find me. I won’t look the same, and I won’t be the same, but anything wearing this pendant is me. Your passage through the mist will make you forget, but if my calculations are right, you cannot forget this pendant. You can use the ring instantly to find me again at any time, merely by concentrating on the sight of the pendant. They will not dare take it. When you find me, just grab me and hold on. As long as you hold me, I am safe. No matter what, do not let go. No matter what they turn me into, do not let go. Say my real name to me to wake me up. Now, can you do that?”

  “I swear,” she said softly.

  “And if they threaten to kill or hurt you, say these words…”

  7. Quills

  Wilcolac reached down, and took Yumiko by the hair, and drew back her head at a painful angle, exposing her throat.

  But she called out the words Tom had told her. “In Christ’s name I dedicate the blood I shed to mingle with his. My death I give to the glory of the Holy Ghost. To the Father, I commend my spirit!”

  It was the same thing she had said to the demon in the midst of the dark world before she died. She wondered what it meant.

  A great wail came out of the gathered dukes and counts of Hell.

  The horned rider said, “Stop! Touch her not!”

  Wilcolac hesitated.

  The horned rider said, “The spot where a martyr dies is holy, and her bones would blast us. The anger of our hosts who summon us here would be without limit. She must release him of her own volition.”

  Wilcolac stepped back. He said, “My lord, I can change his face and name. This august company can do more. Lady Malen, if you would?”

  The voice of Malen came from behind the mask of the hayagriva. “Thrall! Be thou a porcupine! When she releases you, cross the threshold and be damned!”

  Immediately, Tom’s body, cloak, garb, and all darkened, shrank, and changed, and a new form swelled into being in Yumiko’s tightly straining arms and legs. The porcupine was twice or thrice normal size and writhed and turned and snapped at her. Barbed quills, sharp as needles, entered her tender flesh in a hundred places. Her every instinct told her to open her arms and to fling the monster from her.

  But he did not claw and drag himself over the threshold. Those were not his instructions. Yumiko tightened her grip, driving the terrible barbs into herself. She was slick with blood.

  She cried, “Tom! Tom Moth! Tomorrow Rocket Moth! Wake! Wake! Hear your name and wake!”

  The creature thrashed. Barbs struck her in the face and pierced her cheek. With immense pain, she continued to cry out his name. He did not wake.

  The pendant had not changed. The fine chain was still around the neck of the porcupine, glittering. The elf magic left it untouched. The piercing light from the teardrop smote her again.

  8. Ballroom

  Yumiko on her featherless batwings dropped silently down from the shadowy ceiling of the ballroom. Seven men in formal suits and ties lay toppled among the broken tables and overturned chairs near the punch bowl. Arrows had pierced gunhands, necks, lungs, and hearts.

  She turned one of them over. It was her target. With a cleaver she cut off the hand, wrapping it in plastic and stowing it in her pouch. Winged Vengeance could check the fingerprints later to confirm the kill.

  The sound of the elevator chiming interrupted her thought. She moved quickly, overturned a table, knelt behind it, and nocked a red arrow. She had a second arrow in hand with a different head in case what came through the door was man, not elf.

  It was neither elf nor man, precisely. It was a youth with an unruly head of bright red hair, whistling a merry tune and skipping. He wore a lab coat over his clothes and a pair of goggles over his eyes. He had a yo-yo in his hand, which he spun to the left and then to the right and then back again. The yo-yo was beeping, and littl
e lights at the hub winked.

  He hopped over one of the dead bodies, paused, looked down, and clucked his tongue.

  Yumiko drew back. In his dim light, no one would spy her. The red-haired youth looked up, smiled at her, and waved. “Yoo-hoo! Ollie, ollie, oxenfree!”

  She stood and drew her bowstring to her cheek.

  “No shooting,” he said, “My doctor says puncture wounds are bad for me. Is that arrowhead made of a ferromagnetic alloy by any chance? If so, fire away. I’ll be invulnerable.”

  Yumiko gritted her teeth. “What is that?”

  “Ferromagnetic. The kind of magnetism displayed by iron and associated with parallel magnetic alignment of neighboring atoms.”

  “And if my arrowhead is not? Not ferro—what you said.”

  He smiled sadly. “Well, I will be less than invulnerable. Say cheese!”

  “Why should I say–” but then she was blinking in blindness, for a silent eruption of white light had emerged from his belt buckle. She heard a whistling snap of noise pass just before her nose, but when she tried to backflip out of the way, her hand tugged her bow. The bow was snagged on something and did not move.

  She blinked the floating spots free and focused her eyes away from where she was looking, so she could see the scene with her side vision.

  The youth was now seated atop the table next to her. His legs were crossed at the knee, and his foot was pointed at her. Out from his boot, a length of thin white metal had extended. It was about as big around as a walking stick. It reached from his leg to her bowstaff, passed between her bowstaff and bowstring, and then had embedded its tip in the floor. She could still move the bow and draw it, and she could point an arrow at any target anywhere in the room, except for the spot where he sat.

  “You are annoying!” she cried.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And very annoying!”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And, and, uh–!”

  “Fun. Unpredictable. Persistent. Smart. I always get the desired result in the end.”

  Beneath her mask, she scowled. The last of the blue dots floated out of her vision. She spoke in a quieter voice. “How did you follow me?”

  “The first time we met, I decided I simply had to see you again. So I whipped up a harmless radioactive isotope my Geiger yo-yo here could detect and tagged you with it the second time we met. Varying the antennae length helps me triangulate.” He did an around-the-world and a walk-the-dog, and then pulled the yo-yo back to his hand, and tucked it away in a pouch at his belt.

  “How did you follow me just now? I disabled the elevator,” she said.

  “I re-enabled it. And improved it a bit. Now it can shoot through the ceiling. I can take you for a ride. Kind of a short ride, sort of a parabola, but it will be fun. Want to come?” He looked down at the floor. “You have to stop killing people by the way. Someone from the heavenly city of Sarras should have better manners.”

  She said, “How do you know who I am?”

  He said, “Your ninja outfit is not airtight, and you leave clues and traces where you go, especially if you get wounded. A drop of blood contains your whole genetic code. You are my first cousin, four times removed, counting through my father Vidric, but counting through my mother, Dr. Rocket, you are my second cousin once removed. I am…”

  “Tomorrow Moth. The boy who flew to the moon. Everyone knows your name.”

  “Boy, then. I’ve grown. I don’t know yours. Name, I mean.”

  “My father is Danger son of Bold. My mother is Dandrenor daughter of Pellinore. I am Yumiko Ume-no-Mikoto Moth.”

  “Take off your mask,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I can see through it anyway with my X-ray goggles.”

  He must have been fibbing about his goggles having X-rays because he stammered and stared when she removed the Noh-play fox mask she wore, shook her hair free, and looked up at him.

  “Wow,” he mused. “You really are yummy cute!”

  “Yumiko.”

  “How about that elevator ride? I want to see if the disintegration bomb timer will work properly and blow the roof before we hit.” He twitched his foot, and the length of metal hindering her bowstring now retracted and slid into a sheath hidden in his boot. He hopped to his feet. “Shall we?”

  She said, “How can you hide a twenty-foot pole in your boot?”

  “You mean my gyro-stilts? If you have lived your life in the clouds, you probably do not know about mermaid pouches. There is a lot you can do with space compression that the mermaids never dreamed of. Including storing compression energy more efficiently than any spring. Speaking of which, your outfit is really pretty clumsy and unclassy.”

  “W– what?”

  “You could do better. What say we go to my flying lab and kick around a few designs?” He stepped closer and grinned an alarming grin.

  It was too close. She threw a knife at his leg, but an invisible force made it wobble and spin away harmlessly. But the smoke pellets she flung in his face were not deflected. Evidently, they were not ferromagnetic.

  She left him coughing in a cloud, and leaped out the window, and so escaped. That ended their first date.

  9. Venom

  Yumiko did not release the porcupine. The twelve figures now departed from their positions surrounding the mouth in the black ice and began walking slowly forward toward the black dolmen.

  Wilcolac was trembling, but so very slightly that it could only been seen in how the reflections of the firefly lights above this head shifted and shook in the curving blade surface. He said, “King Brian, if you would?”

  The Irish brogue issued from the mask of the destrier. “Who am I to discomfort a fair maiden, poor wee thing but half an elf? Lady Nimue is crueler than me. Let her do the deed.”

  “With pleasure, Your Majesty,” came a smooth voice from behind the mask of Embarr, a steed famed for running on water as well as on land. She threw back her cloak, whose leaves were those of the water reed. She called, “Thrall! Be thou a serpent to constrict and bite, and let thy tooth be deadlier than an asp! When she unhands you, cross the threshold and be damned!”

  Immediately, the porcupine became a great serpent of no type seen on Earth, larger than a boa constrictor, but hooded like a cobra. Yumiko seized it by the throat before it could sink fangs into her neck, and she forced the great head back, but powerful coils now wound around her punctured, bleeding body and began to crush her bones. Fangs sank into her wrist. The pain was like a scalding burn traveling up her arm. Dizzy black spots crowded her vision. Her finger grew swollen. Her forearm was turning blue. The coils of the snake clamped her tighter than a vice. She could drawn no breath. Her eyes grew dim.

  She could only whisper and croak his name, again and again. He did not wake.

  But she could still see the pendant glancing and gleaming around the serpent’s throat. And she did not let go.

  10. Theater

  Yumiko swung from rooftop to rooftop using her kusarigama. Whenever the hook did not catch properly, she fell and snapped out her batwings. She glided to the top of a lower building.

  A rushing gush of noise thundered from the dark sky. Down from the low-hanging clouds, riding three narrow columns of exhaust that issued from his winged backpack, dropped Tom Moth, grinning. His roaring backpack grew muted, whined, and fell silent. He dropped lightly to the roof. He was wearing goggles and a heavy leather flight jacket, with the wool collar turned up.

  “Let’s go around again,” he said. “Race you to the top of the Flatiron Building!”

  She did not answer but threw a handful of pellets at him. The wings of his backpack tilted, and a blast issued from the vents at the tip of either wing. The jet exhaust dispersed her smoky attack handily.

  “Stop following me!” she cried.

  She swung and soared again. He rocketed past her underneath, his face turned upward, and his arms and legs imitated a slow backstroke. He was wait
ing on the rooftop where she landed. He was lounging in a Morris chair.

  “Where did you get a chair?” she asked.

  He stood up. “Aw. I was sure could you figure this one out.” He stood, and folded the chair into a segment as small as a handkerchief, and stowed it among the many pouches and holsters of his belt. “It is smart metal. An alloy made with the folding space folded directly into it. I could do this to any of your gear. Here!”

  And he tossed her what seemed a small pistol. She thought about shooting him, but instead pointed it at a chimney pot, and pulled the trigger. It was a wire-harpoon gun.

  After a moment or two of playing with it, she said, “How did you make the retraction spindle so small, so powerful, so silent?”

  He said, “Same as my stilts. I use the force of the compressed space when it unfolds to drive it. In this case, the space fold is torsion-wise. Wound rather than compressed. You can have it along with the parachute harness that goes with it. On one condition!”

  Her longing for so useful a device warred with her suspicions. “What condition?”

  “Go out on a date with me.”

  She said, “I am not going into your lab! You would strap me to a slab and do terrible things!”

  “Don’t give me any ideas. We will go some place public, with a crowd. To see a motion picture.”

  She frowned. She would have to return to the sanctum and find something nicer to wear. “What kind of motion picture?”

  “It’s science fiction. All the best films are science fiction!”

  Later, seated in a darkened theater with a soda in one hand and a bag of popcorn in the other, Yumiko decided she did not really like science-fiction films. There were too many explosions, for one thing, and the space princess ended up doing all the work and saving the spaceman. Why bother keeping him around? The swordfighter’s stance was wrong. And why did the magic swirling space vortex bring only one character back from the dead? It dishonored his self sacrifice. Yumiko did not like stories where the heroine had to do the rescuing or where characters did not stay properly dead.