I turned, letting the machine spirits spiral out into the cold and bring forth the ice to do my bidding. It wasn’t even witch-ice that answered me. The glacier itself was full of old nanite spirit clouds. It was one thing that the Erinye religion had gotten right about their world. The land belonged to Ravanur, and the ice was her shroud. It was practically a living thing. And it was mine. I drove my fist forward as if I meant to punch the Eater King out of the air, even though I was nowhere near close enough to strike him. The glacier beneath me shifted, and a great sculpted arm emerged from the ground in a chorus of shattering ice, curving through the air with deceptive slowness. It caught the Eater King full in his chest and bore him down to the ice with crushing finality, smashing him like a toy. But I wasn't done. I twisted that gigantic, frozen hand and plucked the battered metal body from where it lay. The shark-mouthed face shrieked in rage at me, and all of the Erinye playing host to the Eater's Spawn turned towards me as one, locking on to me with single-minded focus. Fair enough. This King's reign was over. I crushed him in my gigantic sculpted hand, working my fingers until I was sure that the monster had been ground down into fine enough pieces. Then I gave what remained a contemptuous toss and scattered shards of metal across a mile of glacier behind me.
The Spawn all charged at me. There were at least thirty of them still standing. But that was fine; I was literally in my element now. A storm gathered above me in a whirling vortex, answering my call with customary speed. The Great North Wind's laughter boomed out across the heavens, and spears of seething green lightning began stabbing down out of the sky, turning charging Eater-Span and their hosts into steaming meat. Those who made it through the deadly barrage of lightning found only the cold, emotionless jaws of the ice waiting for them, as I opened a great maw in the ice beneath them and swallowed them whole, I crushed them into paste far beneath my feet. That thing from Beneath, the Eater King had said. Barbas was here. This was his doing; not that there had been any doubt in my mind. But where-
“JOANNA!”
I turned and saw Barbas stepping towards me with casual grace, making his way over the twitching piles of ruined bodies and writhing wounded around him. He was dragging something, almost carelessly, though I couldn’t make out what it was. A shout of “Akkandaka” drew my attention over the demon’s shoulder, and I winced. A knot of surviving warriors hadn’t fled, and they gathered at the back of the cave, trying to muster their nerve for a charge that they knew it would accomplish nothing. I raised a hand, palm out to them, telling them not to bother. This had already been a massacre on my account. There was no sense in adding two-score more to the butcher’s bill.
Barbas emerged from the mess of dead, walking towards me over the ice, and I reached down into it for the power to crush him where he stood. I needed him alive for Volistad’s ritual. That didn’t mean I needed him unhurt. And I really, really wanted to hurt him just then. I realized then what he was dragging. He had Volistad by the ankle and was dragging him along the way as a child might have dragged a doll. The ranger’s breastplate had been shattered, and his side seemed distorted. He probably had a broken rib. He thrashed, trying to reach Barbas’ arm, but to no avail. Every time he got anything resembling a grip on the metal hand holding him, Barbas would just twist his arm and slam the battered warrior back down onto the ice.
"Wow," commented Barbas, his tone acidic. "You've done a great job since you took over here, Jo." He gestured dramatically behind himself with his free hand, a genuine smile on his face. The effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that about half of his skin had been burned off, along with whatever clothes he might have been wearing. This wasn't the person I had loved. This wasn't the architect of my dreams. This was a demon, a dark entity from below, and he had brought about the deaths of so many of my people. Barbas continued his mockery, coming to a halt just five meters away from me, Volistad dangling in his grip. "I mean, I've got to hand it to you, Joanna. I love what you’ve done with the place!”
“Joanna!” Volistad struggled, managing to lock eyes with me for a second. “Kill him! You have the power! Don’t-”
Barbas rolled his eyes and whipped Volistad down hard against the ice, silencing him. I heard the sharp snap of severed bone. I wasn’t sure what level of injury Volistad could come back from, but if this kept up, there wasn’t going to be enough of the Deepseeker to put back together. “So rude,” Barbas commented, grinning like a skull. “Interrupting like that.”
“What do you want?” I asked, my voice flat with weariness. I was tired of this. I was tired of being beaten, tired of being out-classed, tired of being out-fought. I had gone and gathered godlike powers and put together an army. Barbas shouldn’t have had the upper hand, but here we were. My army was scattered, my people were broken and dying.
“Oh, surely you know. I want your heart, love. The literal heart beating in your chest.” He laughed, and despite it all, the sound stirred a warmth deep in my gut. That laugh was infectious, even coming out of burned metal face, even when its owner was dragging my lover by the heel as if he were a child. “You see, your pitiful fabricator stopped working. I think that the little morsel I took this voice from might have tampered with it, but it doesn’t matter. The thing with the burug was an inspired choice on the part of that old bitch, Ravanur. Biomechanical nanite-control facilities and factories, all in one, grown fully-formed and ready-made. All they need to work is that most elusive of qualities- the Maker's Mark. The touch of Ravanur. The echo of her power." Barbas aimed a finger at my chest. "The Stormcallers got by with shards of that strength for so long, making do with what they could cobble together without their Mother's touch. But you, you have the genuine article." He beckoned with one hand to me. "So give it."
I blinked. “You want me to give you my heart?”
“Yes. Take it out and give it to me.” He squeezed Volistad’s ankle in his grip and broken bones ground together beneath the skin. “Give it now.”
“I can’t take my own heart out of my chest, you lunatic. If you want it, you’re going to have to put him down and come take it from me.” I knew exactly what the demon would do the moment the words crossed my lips, but it was too late.
Barbas released Volistad's leg with a little flick of his wrist, sending him skidding across the ice towards me. He stepped forward and placed one foot on the Deepseeker's chest, looking me right in the eyes. "Put him down, Joanna? Well, if you insi-" He stopped in place, mid-word, the same smug smile frozen on his face.
“What the-” I managed, but nothing else came out. Without any fanfare, the demon wearing Barbas’ face went completely limp, crashing to the ground in a tangle of blood-smeared metal limbs.
Volistad let out a feeble cheer and subsided into cackling like a madman. “Hahahah, you smug bastard. I figured it out.”
“What?” I repeated. Clever.
Volistad groaned, apparently feeling the pain of all of his wounds at once. "I'm the Deepseeker, Joanna. As you control the sky and the ice, so I control the machines themselves. That thing is was just a complicated machine. It took me far too long to think of it, and even longer to teach myself how to do it, but I turned off his power source." I rushed over to him, wanting to snatch him up off the ground but unsure of how broken his body was. He waved me off weakly. "No, no, I've got it. Now that I've gotten the hang of the damn machine spirits, it goes a lot faster." As I watched, his leg straightened with a series of gut-clenching pops, and the distorted lump in his side subsided. "Still hurts like hell, though." I held out a hand, and he took it, letting me pull him to his feet.
“You did it,” I said lamely, finally regaining control of my vocal cords.
"Yes," Volistad groaned. "And you slew the Eater King. I saw it." His face twisted, and he showed all of his teeth in a snarl. "Now, let's get that fucking thing down to my ship so we can finish this. Would you mind carrying him? I need to find out if my sister is still alive." Without another word, he started off towards the charnel pit that was all that rem
ained of our glorious army.
I bent and seized the inert metal form, hoisting it up onto my shoulder. The demon was heavy, even for me, but I wasn’t about to complain. The surviving Erinye warriors that hadn’t fled were fanning out from the mouth of the cave already, searching for survivors amidst the carnage.
“Yes,” I said bitterly, echoing Volistad. “Let’s finish this.”
...
Chapter Twenty-One: Genesis
Volistad
We stood in the great cryogenic room aboard Heaven’s Hawk. The inert form of the demon machine lay crumpled beside one of the tanks, missing its head and a great deal of its chest cavity. Though I had switched off the power, we were talking about an ancient god here. I had beaten him because he had stopped thinking about me, fully focused as he was on humiliating Joanna. I didn't fool myself into thinking that I could use the same trick twice and survive. So the moment we got the metal body down into my ship, I had removed the processor in the head as well as the extra data storage device I had found in its chest. There was a lot in there, but I had been able to isolate the part of the vast quantity of data contained within that I was sure represented the real Barbas. The rest of it I erased with a certain savage satisfaction. I knew now that I couldn't do the same to the gods in their cells. There was some loophole the oldest of them could exploit involving quantum computing- but since the Dark One in this body had uploaded himself into hardware, he was vulnerable. And now he was gone. It was a shame that he had killed so many of my people before I had figured out how to stop him.
Nissikul, it turned out, had survived, mainly because she was stubborn as the mountain we all lived on, and she simply refused to bleed to death. All of her wounds had been frozen in fragments of witch-ice, even in as she lay unconscious. Many of the other Stormcallers were dead- they had apparently been among those most heavily targeted by the Eater Spawn- but those that remained seemed to have decided that Nissi was some kind of warrior prophet. And so the endless cycle of religion and myth keeps turning, remarked a cynical, ancient part of me, but even Palamun couldn’t fully condemn the whole thing. Who knew if there really wasn’t a real God out there? Just because one group of power-mad mortals had dared to encroach into the realm of the divine, did that make them gods? After all, as I now knew, even the race of people from which Ravanur and Palamun had sprung, were but a blip in time when compared to the age of the stars, the age of the universe. Let the remaining Stormcallers venerate my sister. Perhaps I could get Joanna to change the word from god to Saint. That would have a nice ring to it. Saint Nissikul. We could canonize them all: Saint Thukkar the Stalwart, Saint Joanna the Fierce, Saint Volistad… what would they call me, five-hundred years from now?
Joanna finished stripping out of her bloodied sealskin clothes, and I looked up for a moment with interest. Even in the aftermath of the worst day of my life, a part of me perked up, but I clubbed it back down. This was not the time. She climbed into one of the two pods standing at the center of the room, where Palamun had made the switch between his various hosts. I met her eyes as I finished connecting the robot head to the cables that had once led to the second tank. “Do you understand what we’re about to do here?”
She nodded, shuddering as the crystal front panel sealed in front of her and cryo-amniotic fluid began to fill the space, crawling slowly up her body. I noted with a clinical sort of detachment that any wounds she had taken in the battle, just twelve hours before, were already gone. She didn’t even have bruises. I, on the other hand, looked like a horrible fright mask of myself. I wasn’t sure there was a part of me that wasn’t composed mostly of bruises. The leg by which the demon had dragged me had healed when I told it to, but apparently, there were limits to my control. Blame it on my inexperience or my distraction, I wasn't going to be running any foot-races anytime soon, and the trip down the ladder to this ship had been its own special form of hell. But it didn’t matter. What was done was done.
I reached out with my mind, sending signals through my nanite clouds to the cryogenic tank and coupling its internal network with the cybernetic lattice I found in Joanna’s brain. It was a very cunning piece of work, and I wondered if I would ever get to meet the sort of people who had designed it. Perhaps it was the ancient machine god in my head, but I was finding myself liking this whole “advanced technology” thing. Maybe I would keep doing it after the ice was gone.
I felt Joanna's mind connect to the network as the cryo-amniotic fluid rose to her chin. She closed her eyes as the liquid crested over her head and breathed deep. She was completely encased in it now, and her lungs were taking air directly from the tank. I checked the connections on the head one last time, grimaced, and activated it. The dream began coming together between Joanna and the spirit trapped inside the head almost immediately. I thought about watching but then thought better of it. It was best to allow a woman her privacy, especially in her last moment with her friend. Her former lover, a primal part of me corrected, growling with poorly suppressed jealousy. I snorted. She was with me, now. So what did it matter? I activated the monitor and waved a negligent hand at the floor behind me. A stool rose up smoothly beneath me, and I sat down to wait for my moment.
…
Joanna
I woke in downy comfort, in a cabin built on the shore of a peaceful lake. Everything was as I remembered it. I had built the place, after all, even if my memories of doing so were false. Of course, I could put it back. I sat up on the bed, breathing deeply from the eternally autumn air, and I smiled sadly. This was going to be the last time I ever saw this place. But that was alright. All good things did have to come to an end, after all.
I rose from the bed and tiptoed quietly to the door into the hall. I was still wearing the clothes I had fought in, bloodstains and all. At my waist there hung a sword. The sanctity of this place had long since been broken. I wouldn't travel unarmed again, not even in my own mind. The hall was dark and bare. The pictures that had once decorated the walls were gone. I shivered and walked out into the cold living room, the wooden floorboards creaking beneath my feet. The furniture lay strewn randomly around. The couch was where it was supposed to be, but the chairs from the breakfast nook had all been smashed to kindling and strewn across the floor. I walked out through the wreckage to the French doors, which stood forlornly open. Barbas was standing at the end of the dock, staring out at the lake as the light faded in the sky above us.
Autumn splendor turned to rot and winter as I walked out to meet him, and as I drew level with the djinni, the forest around us stood barren and dead. Bare branches scraped at the heavens like a thousand hands rose in supplication. “The dream is dying,” I said, not turning to look at Barbas’ face.
“I know,” he replied, his voice ragged and empty. “Why did you bring me back here?”
I turned and met his gaze. The intact one was the same green as it had ever been, though the silver orb that had replaced the missing eye was gone, leaving sunken eyelids over an empty socket. He was bloodied and beaten, and a litany of wounds still oozed blood as he just stood there before me. Despite all that, he was still the handsome spirit I had come to love. Even after all that had happened, he was still my Qarin. “I came here to ask you a question, Barbas.”
“Ask it then.” The dead, despairing look in his eyes told me that he thought he already knew what I was going to say.
“That thing. The one that got a hold of you, the Dark One-”
“Emmeloch,” Barbas interrupted. “His name was Emmeloch.”
“Right. Emmeloch. Were you able to learn why he and his kind were imprisoned here?”
Barbas frowned. That had not been the question he expected. A little light came back into his eyes. “Yes. He crushed me into a corner, wore my face…” His face crumpled with grief for a moment, but he regained control. “But he couldn’t stop me from learning. I knew everything that he did, but I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“But you did,” I said, reaching out and putting a
hand on his shoulder, trying to reassure him. “You broke the fabricator. You ruined his chances at building another tower to thaw the planet.”
Barbas' laugh was hollow. "That only made him come after you. The Eater King wasn't one of the Dark Ones; he just saw you as a threat after you killed one of his spawn and upended the power structure of the Erin-Vulur. When he sent a messenger to Emmeloch to tell him about you- I was sure that the Dark One would kill you. I thought I had doomed you with my little petty rebellion. He told me as much when we set up the trap for you and the Erinye."
"He would have come for me, anyway," I sighed. "But do you know why he and the others were imprisoned?"
“Yes,” Barbas answered simply. “They were imprisoned for hubris.”
“Well, that and the horrible things that they did to feed that hubris,” I said quickly.
“What is the point of this? Why did you bring me here? I know it wasn’t to bring me back into your head. You don’t trust me anymore.” He turned away from me and stared out at the lake. “You’ll never trust me again. You’ll never love me again.”
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 69
