by John Hook
Hard Reign
By John Hook
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2014 by John Hook
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form without the prior written consent of the author. Brief passages may be used for the purposes of a review.
I would welcome any communication at [email protected] I like very much to hear from readers, but I am not big on social media. Just one of my (many) quirks. ;-)
Fiction by John Hook:
Quentin Case Series:
Hard Case
Hard Corps
Hard Reign
For my late friend Bonnie W, who would have both enjoyed and understood this saga had she been around to read it. She left us too soon. I don’t think I ever thanked you enough for everything. With fond memories…
Note: This is the third volume of the adventures of Quentin Case. While I have made an effort to create a good story that stands on its own, it was a little harder here as this story is a transition from things as they used to be to things as they will be in the future. A lot happens that makes reference to the previous books. If you haven’t read the other books, you will still enjoy a good story of someone coming to terms with a hostile world and changes within himself. If you have read the previous books, you will understand even more of the undercurrents sweeping Quentin along.
1.
When the end came, it came swiftly, leaving nothing and no one on the scorched earth that had been Rockvale.
It began at sunrise. The sky lit up and blazed orange and blue. The orange was brighter than any sunrise of this hellish world and the blue was like the blue at the base of a gas stove flame. There was a sound, half thunder, half the pounding of hooves, except it came from the sky. Out of the sky came two legions of apparitions. There was no other word for them. If they were biological entities—either them or the nightmarish steeds they rode—they were like no biological life form I had ever seen except in shape.
The riders were pale white, almost translucent, with lights rather than bones showing through the translucent veils of their flesh. Red lights that pulsated. Their eyes were also red, while the beards of the men and the hair of both men and women, for they were mixed, were like fire.
The steeds they rode were vaguely in the form of wild stallions, but they were formed of what looked like black and gray angry clouds with arcs of electricity flashing through them. Their eyes were black like an empty void with a single gold light limned around them. More than galloping, they flowed down out of the sky in waves with deep rumbles of thunder.
There were two columns of riders, one cascading down on the predawn Rockvale from the right, the other on the left. There was no useful gain to be had here from trying to fight them. No one was going to be taken prisoner. The figures pointed and something akin to both fire and lightning arced through the air.
The first place hit was where I lived. The second was the training facilities for the Rockvale forces. Both went up in a plume of fire and lightning. The columns circled the town. The riders pointed. Buildings collapsed. Roads exploded, throwing rock and dirt everywhere. No mercy. No quarter. This was no warning. They had come to mete judgment on Rockvale, the center of the human resistance, although I had never completely thought of it that way.
My name is Quentin Case and, although I had been throwing myself at every magical being who stood in my way to try to stop the torture of humans, I had never thought of this on the scale of a war or a resistance. I just wanted them to stop doing the terrible things they did to us and was willing to risk everything to work towards that goal. They obviously thought of it as war and this was Armageddon.
The two columns of demonic fighters formed a circle around Rockvale and pointed. Arcs of the probably magical stuff that was neither quite fire nor lightning joined together, at first forming a ball over the town that grew in size. It changed in color from yellow to orange to angry blood red with highlights of blue at the edges. Lightning-like tongues licked outward from the hot ball, and then the ball began to elongate up and down. At the lower limits, nearer the ground, it narrowed and started to spin counterclockwise, going faster and faster until it was like the funnel of a powerful tornado. It touched down and began moving, blasting and leveling everything in its path. Fires broke out everywhere. Walls collapsed and stone actually melted. Wood and grass rope was almost instantly vaporized. The funnel of whatever that fiery energy was spun its way to the exact geographical center of Rockvale and then held its position, churning faster and faster. As the vortex spun, it began collapsing downward from a funnel to a circle and finally it disappeared into the ground, although arcs of the destructive energy from the fingers of the riders circling above still snaked out to strike at the center of where the circle had been. For a moment, it was as if everything of what was left of Rockvale held its breath. And then, in the next moment, there was a blinding red flash.
I would say that Rockvale was in flames, except there was nothing left of Rockvale, only the flames with tongues of lightning. The riders pulled their heads back and screamed at the sky. They reined up on their storm cloud steeds and, with a loud roll of thunder, fled high into the sky and disappeared over the horizon behind the mountains. They didn’t even stop to count the dead.
“Congratulations.” Izzy shook his head. “I think you’ve gotten their attention.”
“Would appear so.” I let my breath out, realizing I had been holding it during the entire attack. Luckily, we had been watching from a good distance away.
“Wow, Paul was right about you all this time,” Rox mocked.
“Yes, I’m never going to hear the end of this now.”
Only Saripha remained centered but serious. We were, as usual, using humor to distance ourselves from the fact that we had watched devastation on the scale of an atomic bomb blast. We had witnessed it swallow our home, such as it was in this place we called Hell.
“What do we do now?” It was a simple question, not a desperate cry for an answer. We all understood we had just witnessed a complete change to the world as we knew it and the answer to that simple question was going to take a long time to figure out.
We had expected that there were going to be consequences after Guido killed the other Manitor. The Manitor, with a jackal’s head, had stood by while his Shade put Saripha in a position to sacrifice herself. Saripha had actually been alive in this world, unlike the rest of us. She was a witch who had crossed over when the veils between our world and the world of the living had been thin. Our bodies are biological, but they are also like illusions. We call them glamours. When we become too damaged, we simply regenerate a new body. It is a violent process that reboots you and you lose all memory and personality. We refer to the reborn bodies as “protos.”
When they first emerged, they had unbounded energy and rage. The Shade had wanted me to turn over a power I have absorbed into my body. Saripha was afraid I would do so to save her. So she sacrificed her mortality and simply died. She needn’t have worried. I didn’t know how to do it even if I had chosen to. The power in me destroyed the Shade. Guido tore open the throat of the Manitor. Was it rage? I don’t know if Guido ever loses control, but he is alien and hard to read. Was it justice? Whatever it was, I had suspected we were going to learn more about the hierarchy in Hell. We had finally pushed them too far.
Saripha, indeed, died but found her way back to us. Now she was one of us, a former living human with a body that was part biological and part glamour. She looked pretty much as she had in life, which said something about how accurate an image she
always had of herself since these glamour bodies reflect how we think of ourselves. She had a wise face you immediately trusted, eyes that shone, silvery white hair pulled back in a long pony tail. It was impossible to tell her age. She looked young and her features were soft, but there was a look in her eyes of one who had seen much of the world.
She found her way back to us by way of a very odd guide, a cat named Rooni. Saripha explained that there are other afterlife worlds besides this one and they coexisted, although she couldn’t explain exactly what that meant. Rooni moves between them and guided Saripha back to this one. We didn’t see much of Rooni after that, but apparently she had chosen to stick around. She sometimes communicated with Saripha.
That is how we found out about the attack on Rockvale.
Saripha still lived in the odd abandoned city with Guido. It is hard to describe their relationship exactly. She is—or was, I forget sometimes—human and he is a very ancient being with a very large man’s body and a dog’s head, which may or may not be an illusion. I think they love each other very deeply and he was also her protector. There is a very special bond there, but I don’t have a lot of insight into it. Saripha doesn’t talk about it much, not because she is secretive but because it probably doesn’t translate well to anyone not in such a relationship.
Saripha had risen from her nightly rest. We don’t really need sleep in these glamour bodies, but there are a lot of things we do because of the comfort they bring us, reminders of when we were living. Since Saripha had been living until just a short time ago, she especially needed it. However, Guido failed to show up as he always did when she had breakfast. She was alarmed to realize she also couldn’t sense a connection to him.
That’s when Rooni appeared. Rooni apparently has very odd ways of communicating. She rubbed her head against Saripha’s leg and then, without warning, sunk her fangs into her calf. I probably would have kicked the cat, but Saripha didn’t react as she picked up messages in her head. I get the impression it isn’t so much like someone talking to you, telepathy, as impressions and images that you have to interpret. It would probably be a challenge for me, but Saripha seems to be comfortable with that sort of thing.
What she came away with was that Guido had been compelled to leave. We assumed that had to do with appearing before the Council. We didn’t know anything about the Council. Guido had alluded to it a number of times. He also made it sound like there was a division within the council of those who were loyal to the hierarchy in Hell and those who weren’t. Guido was among the latter, but he never was clear about this. We assumed he had been called to account for what he chose to do to the other Manitor.
The other, more immediate concern was that retribution was going to be visited upon Rockvale. We didn’t know what that would consist of, however, we assumed it would be coming from somewhere higher than the Manitors and we had never seen those entities. I decided that since we didn’t know what we would be up against, it was probably a bad idea to stand and fight. Instead, we evacuated Rockvale.
Kyo was in charge. Since we didn’t know the scale of this retribution, we thought it would be a mistake to seek shelter in the few other places we knew, like Zaccora or Haven. It was possible the powers that be would look for us in those places too. She sent armed messengers to both destinations to warn them. We also decided that amassing everyone in one place was a bad idea, so Kyo divided up the troops and had them take smaller groups of citizens from Rockvale into the mountains. Thus each small group had its own protection and they could seek shelter until it passed. The idea was to go as far and fan out as widely as possible. Demons would be the main thing to watch out for, but each small unit of Kyo’s warriors could handle them. We, of course, were imagining there would be a Rockvale to return to. We were wrong. We were a diaspora now.
Paul, Sidney, Zeon had taken Taka and returned to the stone tower they had hidden out in for years. Kyo and Blaise had taken a small unit of the most accomplished warriors that she had trained and headed out to try to find and join up with Roland and the Zaccoran forces to figure out strategy depending on where things ended up.
Saripha, Izzy, Rox and I decided to stay and watch what happened. We were up in the hills near where Izzy’s house had been before it was destroyed. It was high enough that you could see everything, but far enough that we thought we would be safe. We were right, but after witnessing the power brought to bear on Rockvale, that might have been a bit of hubris.
Below us, Rockvale no longer existed. In fact, it was as if it had never existed. There were no ruins, no crumbling walls, and no potholes in the streets. There was nothing but flat dry earth, smoothed as if sanded down, polished like stone. Nothing remained of Rockvale. Not a single brick of adobe or splinter of wood or leaf of roof thatching or flat stone from the road or square. I have no doubt, had we been caught unaware, that we would all be nothing more than a herd of screaming protos. Or maybe not even that, depending on what the juju that did this to Rockvale was. Maybe it was meant to leave nothing behind. Maybe that was their solution to me. Leave nothing.
“What do we do now, indeed.”
Saripha turned to Rox. “Do you have any idea what we are up against? Do you know of this happening before? Are they done?”
It was the kind of question we usually asked Kyo as she was more traveled than any of us, but Rox had actually been in Hell the longest as far as we could tell.
“I’ve never seen anything like this—or whatever those beings were. Keep in mind, there is a lot that I no longer remember.”
“We could just give up and go back to laying low in the tower with the others.” Izzy shrugged.
“That doesn’t work for me,” I said.
“I figured. However, you have to admit, when you see the fire power that we are up against now…”
“The thing is, we’ve always been up against that fire power but they haven’t brought it out until now. It doesn’t change anything.”
“Well, it does mean we probably have to camp out for a while.” Rox winked.
“That could be fun.”
“No doubt it will.” Rox smiled widely, her eyes making promises.
Rox was the most truly beautiful woman I had ever known. It wasn’t any of those fashion model notions of surface beauty. Physically, she was exotic, with dark hair and darker eyes. She was small and muscular and graceful, but it was more the way she opened a space when she walked into it or the way her smile would create light that wasn’t there before and make my breathing a little faster. It was the way she seemed so fully in the world and the moment and just drew you in with her gravity. Well, it was that way for me, but then, I was in love in this most unlikely of places for love to flourish.
The thing was, Rox was also complicated. She had a side that walked a line between connection and cruelty. A dark side that wasn’t evil so much as exploratory, navigating dark corners of human experience like pain and controlled, consensual cruelty. In the past, that side had been ratcheted up by the magical powers here. They had intended her to work her cruelty on me, and for a while she did. Saripha had worked with her to help her learn to own and control her dark side so that others couldn’t do that to her again.
As I stood there, studying her face, thinking these thoughts, she was suddenly gone. I heard a scream, but I realized it was Saripha who had been standing next to Rox and was startled by sudden movement. One moment Saripha was standing next to her. In the next moment, there was a blur and Rox was gone. My eyes followed the direction of the blur and I could feel the color wash out of my face. A strange mixture of fear and anger flooded in, but it mostly left me immobile.
Above us, in the sky over the trees, floated the being we called “the Angel.” A couple of times I had gotten a glimpse of her where I sensed she was not as she appeared, but most of the time she was like some fantasy illustrator’s idea of an angel, like Disney’s blue fairy. She was this perfectly proportioned young woman with light skin and golden hair, wearing a flowing dress th
at hardly hid her body beneath its almost translucent veils. The body seemed to glow with a pure golden light, just what you would expect in a heavenly vision. Except this was Hell, and sharp claws had extended from her fingers and had sunk into Rox’s midsection, suspending her above the trees. The Angel’s glowing wings spread out, flapping slowly, appearing to allow her to hover. Rox was stunned. Her face showed a mixture of pain and shock.
“What do you want?!” My anger was beginning to win out. Izzy strung an arrow, having already slung his bow from off his back, but I stopped him. It was clear there was no clean shot and I doubted the arrow would do more than annoy the Angel.
The Angel sneered down and drew up Rox even tighter against her body.
“From you, nothing! I have what I want here. You few humans will be hunted down, but you are no longer a threat.”
And with that, the Angel was gone, arcing through the sky with Rox. I tried to give chase but all I got for my trouble was to fail to notice where the hill took a sudden drop, and I ended up in the dirt with a pain in my side. Izzy climbed down and helped me up.
Personal loss is a funny thing. I had watched Rockvale be completely flattened and I mostly had an intellectual awe at the power that had been unleashed. However, having Rox snatched from me brought pain and sorrow and anger. Saripha put her hand on my shoulder. She must have been feeling this with Guido’s mysterious absence. Saripha hides—or maybe processes—her feelings better than I do.
I was unsteady on my feet but Izzy caught me. I pushed him away, not so much out of rudeness but because I was about to explode and I didn’t want to accidentally lash out at anyone.
“If they want war they’ve got war. I’m going to find Rox and then…”
“And then what?” Saripha’s voice was low and calm and yet it had strength enough to cut through the useless tantrum I was about to have.
