Zhe #02 - Chains of Tartarus

by Drew Dale Daniel Bryenton

  The slug hit Exalted Reine right between its non-existent eyes, a tiny entry wound which trickled yellow pus for a second before it puckered closed. The saprophytic creature shook its head like a dazed fighting dog, its pointed teeth grinding. Then it unrolled its tongue, the bullet balanced on its glistening tip.

  "Didn't quite see that one coming, did you?" asked the Ashishi, dropping his hand back down to his side. He'd held the slug cupped in his palm for a second, spinning slow and hot in a ball of temporal stasis. That should have been impossible without the most potent 'chrome, but it had seemed so utterly effortless...

  Something had changed within him. Some tiny, critical part had snapped, and now his anger fed on itself, an orouboros serpent spinning like a turbine in his brain.

  In the instant when the bullet struck, his skin had prickled with the caress of power...

  "Very nice, clone-meat!" spat the Exalted, plucking the deformed lump of lead from the fork of its tongue. "But playtime is definitely over. Now we test the limits of your pain. Now we find the breaking point of your flesh..."

  A grin tore open his face, a jagged white gash against the black.

  See it from above. A lonely little figure at the bottom of a twenty-foot pit, walled in by rubble. And surrounding that smoldering crater: a sea of the living dead, a heaving black morass of them.

  Their leader points both of his ornate machine-pistols down at his prey and grips the triggers, unleashing the horde amid a spray of bullets...

  Zoom tight on that doomed little stick-man in his ragged greatcoat and dreadlocks. He's smiling.

  The Saprophytes came down on him in a wave, chittering and howling and hissing, down into the crater in a reeking flood.

  It was time to see what his newfound rage could do. Time to slip into the never- ending now, and forget the bloody price of it...

  He crossed his arms, fists clenched as the first rank of foes charged in at him, a glistening wall of pincers and claws and lashing tentacular whips. Dust began to rise around him in a spiral, lifted in a shimmering shroud of energy which cocooned his body. This was the death-meditation of the Dervashi, the Rune of the Invisible, and with his newfound power behind it...

  Reine's bullets hissed and melted.

  Those first eager Saprophytes hit the barrier screaming, and combusted as they touched it. Power flared and raved, tiny stones whirling up around Abdulafia's body, then twists of wire, chunks of burnt plasticrete.

  Burning gobbets of Worm-flesh flew wide, a noisome rain.

  And Abdulafia fed on their pain, completing the circuit, using the sliver of black despite the Worm had left in his head to kill its children. His hands flew out as if he were breaking free of manacle chains, and the gyre of dust and debris around him blew apart. It was as if he stood at the heart of a mortar explosion, untouched, while the Saprophytes were flayed to ribbons by unseen shrapnel.

  How their suffering suffused him! Sweet agony pulsed in his veins, potent as the purest adrenochrome!

  And then the killing began in earnest.

  He pushed the field out from his body, using it as armor and weapon at once, a flickering aura of force sizzling in the air inches from his skin. When he drove his fist into the face of a slavering Saprophyte it caved in around that energistic shell, blasting the thing's head to ribbons. When he angled his hand into a chopping blade the field narrowed down, razor-sharp, splitting another foe like rotten wood... Wherever he touched them they began to smolder and smoke and burn, keening in agony even as the will of their master pushed them forward.

  The black sliver of the Worm deep in 'Afia's skull seemed to throb and swell as he fed on the pain of his enemies, drowning out reason, narrowing his vision down to a seething tunnel of red. Anything which stood before him died, battered and sliced and butchered and burnt by the incandescent blaze surrounding him. He dropped into the stance of the snake, and his roundhouse kick burst a Saprophyte's chest wide open, ribs cracking like glass. Combat forms he'd been patterned with since childhood flowed through him, breaking necks and shattering skulls...

  The power was almost too much - techniques which had racked him with pain now snapped off tight and neat, time bending around him as if he were a monolith in the temporal stream. Twenty Saprophytes had burned and died before Reine pulled the triggers of his machineguns again, his eyeless face snarling in slow-motion behind the muzzle flash. Tongues of fire strobed as the bullets flew, glacial, hanging in the air like jewels.

  From his quiet place at the heart of the slaughter Abdulafia pointed one finger at a single slug, leaning back as a Saprophyte's blade of bone stabbed past his shoulder. His other hand ripped through its spine, cutting it in half. The crawling bullet followed his fingertip as he straightened up again, turning, bending its path through the air. Now the next one, and the next - all of them plucked from their trajectories and re-assigned in a single heartbeat. He unclenched his mind for a second, allowing the bullets to fly, spiraling wide to shatter the skulls of ten more Saprophytes.

  Abdulafia heard Reine scream, a high-pitched screech of rage. The Exalted jammed its ornate silver guns into the bubbling black flesh of his chest and threw back its head, loops of acidic drool whipping out from the corners of its mouth. Even in slow-motion the change came down terrifyingly fast, threshing worms of shadow bursting from every inch of Reine's skin, weaving themselves together into knotted muscles and wicked spikes.

  Transformed, the Ashishim's sorcery had no effect on the Exalted at all - it leaped from the top of the crater even as it shifted, as swift and deadly as 'Afia himself. All around it Saprophytes fought and died, moving like jerky stroboscopic images, and the Exalted tossed them aside, hooking them with its claws, throwing oily black bodies left and right as it landed. Its eyeless face was drawn out into a bullet-shaped snout, rows of glistening teeth hinged open beneath. There was nothing left of the man named Reine who had welcomed the embrace of the Worm - this was an engine of war, scattering lesser abominations before it as it charged at its prey.

  Abdulafia had barely enough time to brace himself before the Exalted hammered into him, forcing itself through his energy field in a cloud of vile black smoke. One of Reine's immense hands clamped around his shoulder, hissing with the touch of acid, plucking him up into the air like a rag doll.

  If those slavering jaws had bitten down across his body then it would have been the end. But rage gripped the Exalted One, and it threw its struggling prey overhand, playing with the Ashishim like a cat with a mouse. The Saprophytes parted as 'Afia was hurled into their ranks, shrinking back like insects from a flame. He fetched up against the wall of rubble with a bone-jarring impact, knocking the breath from his lungs and the flickering aura from around his body. Time squeezed back into focus.

  Abdulafia's vision doubled, swimming with light and shadow as he looked down at his hands, those terrible weapons which had torn apart a hundred Saprophytes in as many seconds.

  They were webbed and crusted with dripping black oil up the wrists, but it didn't burn him.

  That was when the red maelstrom blew away, and he heard the sound of demonic laughter echoing inside him, bubbling up from the sliver of darkness in his brain. "Do you like the power, clone-meat?" asked the Worm. "Does it make you forget your failure?"

  Time slowed down again, but not at his bidding. A terrible pressure throbbed inside Abdulafia's skull, threatening to burst his eyes from their sockets, and through a haze of tears he could see the Exalted coming for him, tearing through its own soldiers in its bloodthirsty haste.

  "Now you see what you can do if you just give in, Ashishi. After all, aren't all the ones you cared about dead? Don't they deserve a pyre the size of a whole world to burn on?"

  The slick intimacy of it made him choke, but nothing could stop the voice from whispering its blasphemies.

  "The Illuminatus has betrayed you, Abdulafia 330. How do you think I took Magus Verlaine? Do you think he wouldn't offer you up as a living sacrifice if he could buy himself m
ore power? You, and CeeAn 187 as well..."

  Doubt and fear spiked through him then, as he watched Reine's wicked jaws creak open, slick ropes of saliva pulled tight between its rows of teeth. Was that all he was to his Illuminatus, the allfather of the Ashishim? A killing machine to be tactically sacrificed when it became obsolete?

  "Join us or fight us, clone. Either way, I own you. If it's any consolation, your precious Illuminatus will suffer for his betrayal..."

  The black filth of the Saprophytes was on his hands like blood, but it hadn't come from the pitiful things he'd destroyed. It was part of him now, the price of his newfound strength. It bled out of his pores from that core of anger throbbing in his head.

  Exalted Reine was reaching out for him, its claws crooked to smash him bloody against the jagged wall of the pit. But if he fought back, then the creeping infection would only spread faster...

  "Make your choice, Abdulafia. The more you agonize, the sweeter you'll taste..." Time dropped in again, and the Exalted leaped at him in a blur.

  Decades of training wouldn't let him die - he ducked under its blow, coming up hard, driving a savage uppercut right into the pulpy black ooze of its chest. If the infection hadn't already taken his hands they would have surely been burned down to the bone by that corrosive muck. Reine's charnel breath was almost suffocating, and Abdulafia gagged as he groped under the beast's skin for.... there! The slippery handle of a machine pistol, drowned in saprophytic slime.

  If the Exalted hadn't struck so hard and fast it might have had time to react, but the creature's serrated claws were stuck fast in the mess of plasticrete and steel behind Abdulafia. In the second it took to pull itself loose 'Afia ripped the pistol out from its ribcage and jammed the muzzle up under its grossly distended jaw.

  The lesser Saprophytes flinched back as muzzle-flash burst from Reine's forehead, the Exalted One's whole skull blasted to dripping chunks by a storm of lead. Delicious pain flared from the craterous exit wound, and 'Afia ached with hunger for it. Denying that black thirst was the hardest thing the Ashishi had ever done, more agonizing than the pain of Reclamation Day - worse than the brutal comedown sickness of the 'chrome.

  But his eyes were on the vile infection in his hands, the darkness ramifying through his veins. Surrender or fight, the Worm would own him. His Illuminatus had betrayed him. And CeeAn would still be gone.

  Reine's body slumped to the ground, malformed and ruined, its hideous wounds already beginning to stitch themselves back together. All around the Saprophytes cowered back, hissing, a circle of them waiting for Abdulafia's choice. He was their brother, wasn't he? A machine built for death, with all the humanity of a bullet or a bomb...

  There was another way, though.

  Abdulafia stepped over the twitching body of the Exalted, out into the middle of the crater where every one of the Saprophytes could see him. He didn't want their master to miss this - his final act of defiance.

  The Worm caught his intention just a second too late, and its seductive whisper racked up to a scream inside his head.

  Then Abdulafia brought Reine's damascened automatic up to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  The gun clicked, empty.

  Again, his eyes screwed shut, his teeth gritted...

  Click. Nothing.

  Abdulafia heard an obscene sucking, gurgling sound over the manic laughter in his head.

  He turned, the pistol still pressed to his skull, and found Reine stuffed back into his semblance of human form, a mad grin painted across his eyeless face. That battered grey panama hat was perched back atop his head, and his other pistol was in his hand.

  "Bravo, 330! What an exit that would have been! But it's not your day for dramatic gestures, clone. You don't get to take the easy way out." The ring of Saprophytes closed in as their lord stalked forward, keeping his gun trained on Abdulafia's head. "I'll be more than happy to provide you with a bullet, of course. But only when you beg me to end your suffering..."

  The Ashishi let his gun fall away as he bowed his head, all hope lost. He wouldn't fight them. He wouldn't die as the mindless killer he had always feared becoming.

  It hit the ground with the tiny sound of metal on metal.

  'Afia opened his eyes, staring down at a burnt ruin of rubble and glass and steel. He felt Reine's pistol barrel grinding into his skin, oily and cold. And he picked out words stamped into an exposed bulge of stainless steel, right at his feet.

  Eversio Mark-One Nanomechanical Scourge Weapon.

  Providence.

  It was nothing less than a miracle, a sign that he was still needed alive in this twisted world. Behind his curtain of bloodied dreadlocks, Abdulafia's face split in a grin to rival that of his Exalted foe. He'd only become one of them if he used their power to kill. But the Eversio was just a tool, wasn't it?

  The Ashishi hooked the toe of his boot under the barrel of the gun as Reine's claw tightened around the dome of his skull, its razor tips pricking blood from his scalp. Just one little distraction, and then...

  He groaned as if in pain, staggering back from his tormentor as he scrabbled at that implacable claw.

  "Oh, not so brave now, hmm?" gloated the Exalted, tightening its grip for a second and then letting go. Abdulafia stumbled, almost falling, peering out from between his swinging dreadlocks at the eyeless mask of his foe. A bare quarter of a second would do it....

  "What should we do with him first, my pets? The flaying? The scarring? Perhaps the branding, or the harvesting of the eyes...." Reine turned to his captive audience of Saprophytes, his arms spread wide, welcoming their sniveling adulation.

  And 'Afia brought his foot up from the rubble and dust, breaking the silver bulk of the Eversio loose in a spray of chipped plasticrete. It spun in midair along its axis, reflected fire shimmering across its stainless-steel skin. The Ashishi warrior reached out and grabbed it, tucking the stock up to his shoulder, the grips tight in his hands. One of his plug-tipped dreads snaked into the interface port atop the cannon, sending a shatterburst of schematics whirling through his mind.

  Without the fission micropile Tsien had carried on his back the thing could only be used six more times. A microsecond's scan of the weapon's schematics revealed that this would be more than enough.

  Exalted Reine spun around as he heard the click and whirr of the Eversio powering up, twining polyps of darkness already bursting from his face and shoulders. But he was far too late. Even as he shifted, his monstrous jaws stretching and drooling, he was already dead.

  "No! This can't be! You were supposed to be miiiiiiiine!"

  'Afia flicked his grimy 'locks out of his eyes, squinting down the barrel of the cannon. Deep in the seething heart of the Eversio thousands of tentacles twined, each one only a molecule thick, each one under the direct control of the Ashishi's mind. Oh, he'd never be as elegant and brutal with it as Tsien had been. But there were forty Saprophytes and one smug little Exalted shit in his killing field, and he was going to enjoy what happened next immensely.

  He pulled the trigger, feeling the hum and crackle as that deadly silver cloud condensed, watching it slither across the smoky air in slow motion. The tip of each strand was an eye, unfurling a serpent of wire behind it. They ran down their prey, relentless, mummifying each slick black body in steel cotton-candy, twitching against their bubbling skin. The final thread plunged down between Reine's nightmare jaws, ramifying through its organs, wrapping tight around its bones. Forty Saprophytes in a single chilling silver breath, all of them hopelessly doomed.

  Then the second trigger locked down, and every one of those filaments pulled tight at once. Well - all but one.

  The lesser slaves of the Worm screamed as they were dissected, their surface tension breaking as the damned inside them spilled out. Human bones burned clean of flesh clattered and rolled amid a deluge of acidic filth, staining the rubble black.

  Those which had avoided the Eversio's kiss cowered cravenly, melting back up the crat
er walls.

  'Afia was alone with his prey.

  The final thread was the one which bound up Exalted Reine, and as it quivered in the air like a harpstring Abdulafia could finally see a little of the creature's humanity. It was afraid to die.

  "You worthless bastards!" it hissed, cursing its cowardly slaves. "Take him! Take him NOW!"

  But not one of them would dare its alien flesh against the Eversio. They could see that their leader was doomed, and there was safer prey to be had out amid the ruins...

  "Listen good, Exalted." said Abdulafia, coiling the wire tight as he pulled the twitching creature close. "I want your master to hear me loud and clear. I want all of you to know what's coming."

  Now he knew what it felt like to be Edward Tsien - his humanity bleeding away, his only possible joy a hideous revenge. And like the Super-Cyben, all he wanted to do was go home.

  "I have a piece of you inside my head, but I'm not going to use it. I'm going to take it down to the R.T. with me, to the 'techs and Magi of my people. I'll gladly go under the knife if that's what it takes to kill you, Worm. They can cut you from my living brain unanesthetized, I don't care. Hells - you made me stop caring. And if the Illuminatus is on your side, I'll deal with him myself. You've just seen how."