by David Finn
Santos placed the book back on the shelf. There were several thick red volumes beside it. ‘You just don’t realise how rare you are, Demorn. I’ve read deep into the books. You almost never remember anything. You’re a wandering sword without a goal, a hostage to the blade and the goddess—’
Demorn slapped him across the face. The golden helm rolled across the floor. His lip bled. Lightning blazed across the dreary sky outside. The power surged inside her. ‘I’m nobody’s hostage. Not yours, not the sword. Not any god.’
She pointed out the window to the ruined cityscape.
‘You’re losing the War, Santos. Don’t lose me. Or it’s all gone.’
Santos sat up on the throne with a slight smile that seemed smug for somebody who had just been hit across the face.
‘Temper, temper.’
Demorn was losing patience. ‘Forget about the legends, forget about the books. I’m here now, man. Use me!’
He wiped the blood off his lip. ‘Point taken.’
She stalked back to the window. ‘Jesus, tell me where I have to be and who I have to kill. Can you do that? Or should I just leave now, Santos? Because I don’t feel like hanging around if this is all going to play out like drowning rats on the Titanic.’
Santos chuckled. ‘You’re so dramatic.’
He held a blood-stained key. ‘On the last push to Ulihurin, one of my kill squads recovered this from a Death Dealer.’
Demorn stared at him. The Key was shuddering in his fingers. She could feel the dark power from across the room. ‘I’m surprised your kill squad was strong enough to kill a Dealer and take a Banker’s Key.’
Santos smiled. The rot was starting at the edges of his skin. ‘Well, it was a courier with a spare copy, but he still had some kick. I’ve upped the kill squads’ capacity. They’re more lethal than ever now.’
Yeah, it’s doing so much good, Santos, Demorn thought. We’ve got bombs falling in the streets outside but we’re getting better at killing people.
‘Where’s the Fort?’
‘Near Anchorage. A coastal town down south on the Bay City Run. It’s a mansion. They use it as a packing station.’
He tossed the Banker key. It sizzled in her palm and she put it inside her jacket. Demorn nodded.
‘I vaguely know the area. What do you need?’
His look was empty. His skin was really starting to rot.
‘I need my soul back. We’re doomed otherwise.’
She sighed, looking out the window. ‘Ok. Do you really think we can win this war?’
Santos coughed, a sick hacking sound. The Baron put the Helm back on, relaxing back on the throne. His throat cleared and his breathing improved. ‘We’re hitting them just as hard, Demorn. When I pulled our legions back, I kept my squads up there. It’s a war of attrition now.’
She almost laughed. All she could think of was his rotten beauty. And how she wasn’t there, leading them, as she should be.
‘What happened to the courier?’
‘On ice. We got lucky. I kept his cloak. As far as we know, they don’t know we have him. He was still enroute.’
She laughed then, genuinely amused. ‘It’s a disguise gig then? Pretend I’m him, cloak ’n’ dagger? That’s the plan?’
‘Infiltration. I need you to get on the Death Dealer’s ship. You’ve done it before.’
Demorn shook her head. ‘I’ve done hits and extractions. But I’m not a spy, Baron.’
She popped a mint in her mouth. ‘I’m too sincere.’
Santos seemed exhausted, slumped in his throne. ‘So you won’t go?’
She laughed her scary laugh. ‘Oh please, you know I’ll go, hon. I miss that pretty face of yours.’
Santos visibly relaxed. They were in a worse place than she’d guessed if he was betting everything on his Hail Mary of a suicide run.
‘Give me your best death squad. If shit goes south, we take it the hard way. We go all in.’
He started to get up, but Demorn waved him away as she went to leave the throne room.
‘Demorn!’ he called. ‘There’s one thing.’
She turned at the door. ‘Of course there is.’
‘We had the courier on the rack for a few hours. No regular courier should have that much power. We think it was an off-the-books job. We think the Dealer wasn’t clean. Probably hustling with the organisers down in Bay City. It’s a den of thieves.’
‘Is this a hunch or a fact? Where’s the courier now?’
Santos shook his head. ‘It was a rough few hours. He was dead before he got here.’
‘Great interrogation work,’ Demorn said dryly. ‘Very thorough. This helps me how?’
‘I thought it could be an in.’
Demorn smiled. ‘It just makes everything more dirty. Well, at least your boys got a cloak. I like a good wardrobe change. Peace and love, man.’
Demorn left the room before Santos could reply, resisting the temptation to slam the door behind her.
The Baron shuffled from his throne, every step sure pain. He’d covered the mirrors. He was ashamed of how he looked. Ashamed of what had become of the War. The shameful, long retreat from the Prussian Front. The crippling impact of Ulihurin. What had become of him. The city outside his window was a reminder he couldn’t ignore. In a couple of hours the bombing would start again. Data was streaming in via his Helm about the War, feeding direct into his implant and across his vision—defeats and victories, a constant catalogue of lives taken and lives lost. Scenarios. Options. Scorched earth projections. If the wrong things happened in the right order, Ceron City would be a plagued hellhole only weeks from now.
His hand was shaking. The stream of data was too much. He tried to keep his eye on the big game, the major play. But he felt small and drowning in details. Did he really believe his kill squads could do the job his legions couldn’t? What if the Prussian bombing hit the factories churning out the squads?
‘Turn it off.’
The Helm shut down the feed. Santos stood in silence, blind to everything but the stench of his corrupted face, his eyes too damaged to cry the tears he felt. Demorn was everything. He was the Baron of nothing but a ruined city waiting for a nuke. Demorn was everything. Demorn was the hope. Suddenly he laughed, despite everything, despite these mad visions of apocalypse, remembering how crazy and loose Demorn was, how light-hearted she had always been, since the start, with those flashing eyes and that scary, innocent smile.
A survivor just as much as a killer. His last and most deadly weapon.
2
* * *
Demorn’s boots crunched on the beach gravel. She looked up at the luxurious villa on the cliffs above the stormy ocean. The black cloak was wrapped around her, making her at times invisible, a slight shadow over the stones. Her face showed no emotion but hunger burnt in her eyes.
A warm wind blew from the sea. Around her, the robotic kill squad moved. She could hear them communicating, lightning speed computations in a satellite buzz as they set up for the attack. They rarely spoke aloud. Demorn had spent time with many kill squads on the Front but they normally had human commanders to run the bots in short hit assignments. This was long range and she acted as consultant more than a leader.
Watching the grey and white robotic figures shuffle and move in patterns, reminding her of nothing so much as blank mannequins, so devoid were they of personality, it occurred to her that Santos was definitely becoming stretched thin on human commanders. At times during the arduous two week journey from Ceron City, Demorn forgot they were real and that she wasn’t alone. They acted like shadows and that’s how she related to them. Left to her own devices for the first time since she first worked for the Baron, Demorn had spent most of her spare time catching up on Spider-Man and Batman comics on her tablet, and trying not to think too much about a life without Santos.
On the journey to the ocean the pastures and the country landscapes rolling by outside the carriage window, untouched by conflict, reminded Demorn o
f just how localised and personal the War was. A battle for control between Ceron City and New Prussia didn’t matter in the wastelands of Glass. Indeed, it seemed like a different universe the farther south they travelled toward the sea. Demorn felt like she could take a breath. She hadn’t even worn her jacket for the last few days. She’d switched from black combat pants to her single pair of blue jeans yesterday. She’d been listening to country music for the first time in months and occasionally wondering about whether she should just hit the road and leave. How much did she owe anybody here?
There was a mercenary side of her that couldn’t help but wonder if she had bought Santos’ advertisements too well when he took her off the street. And there was another side who remembered she’d only had a couple of bucks in her pocket and a single skull soul around her neck. Demorn couldn’t remember if it had even been her own. Her hands unconsciously played with her throat as she looked out to the sea.
‘We’re ready, ma’am. The Soul Ship took harbour last night. There’s an estimated sixteen in the house. A lot of weapons.’
The metallic voice jerked her back to the now. The kill-bot looked the same as the rest, white and grey paint over a narrow frame, gun muzzles on both hands, an inhuman robotic head swivelling, examining the wide beach.
‘Of course, thank you.’
She might have been chilled but she had the Athena pistol strapped to her leg. Demorn checked it out of habit. The chamber was full. The kill-bot seemed to be watching expectantly. His comrades were frozen, eerily between programs, barely visible on the beach even to her magic eyes. She glanced at her watch.
‘We attack in half an hour. Full frontal assault.’
The metallic voice was flat. ‘Do you want us to run on slave mode?’
‘No, I don’t want that,’ Demorn said, her voice a touch sharper than intended. ‘It’s a hostile extraction. Put the bots on maximum offence the second a shot is fired, code them not to shoot me. We’re gonna have to kill everyone. I’m going for whatever he’s got on the ship.’
She shot him a smile. ‘Maybe we can get away clean and be back on the bus to Ceron by nightfall.’
‘Hey, Leader 1.’
The bot’s head swung around. These things were smart. They picked up on made up nicknames. It was why she hated talking to them. She flicked the face of an attractive blonde girl from her watch screen into the bot’s readout.
‘Do you know who she is?’
The bot grated, ‘Kate Montangue. Your former lover.’
It was almost funny the flat way the bot spoke her name. Almost. Demorn watched Kate’s blonde hair ruffle in the wind until it was too real and she shut the picture off.
‘Yeah, that’s her.’ Demorn pointed up to the villa mansion in the distance. ‘If you see Kate up there, don’t shoot her in the bloodbath. That’s a standing order for you all.’
Demorn walked back to the cab to change for the battle. The best thing about the kill-bots was that they didn’t ask anything about feelings. They just followed orders. They killed everybody they were told to. Her watch was flashing with red shadows. Something big was up there. Demorn had left a country song playing in the cab. She smiled, putting the death mask on. She let the coldness come over her as she listened to Johnny Cash sing about God. It was moments like this she was glad that she remembered who she was. It made the battles worth something. She was more than just a wandering sword, more than somebody else’s prophecy. Demorn slid her purple glasses on. She left the jacket behind, going with the black cloak, wrapping it around her t-shirt and jeans, feeling younger somehow, younger than she had felt in a long time.
3
* * *
The guard outside the back door looked like a fat Prussian cop. Muscle gone to love handles. He was half asleep in a deck chair, with a huge gun laid across his legs. The cloak had got her close, right to the back entrance, a thin twilight outline as she’d circled the villa. The bots were similarly hidden. At about the three metre mark, he seemed to blink her way. Demorn flicked the energy star hard from the back of her hand, catching him in the neck. His body arced up as metal cut brutally through skin, and Demorn closed the gap fast, catching him, snapping his neck. He smelt of expensive aftershave.
She relaxed his body back onto the chair, palming the key card, and disappeared into the shadows. The doorway glowed with pulsing electronic charges. Demorn knew she had seconds, if that. She inserted the card into the slot in the alcove. The door clicked open.
She saw a young soldier guy making out on a kitchen top with what looked like a fucking goat girl. He squealed when he saw Demorn. Her pistol put two in soldier boy’s head while he was still fumbling madly for the rifle.
Goat-girl and she had a moment. The chick’s breasts were heaving, her eyes wild, drugged up. Demorn’s magic eyes could spot white powder on the kitchen top. Naughty, naughty. The face was either extremely expensive cosmetic surgery or genetics. Demorn put her money on the former. Her shots hadn’t been loud compared to the godawful rock music blaring from a stereo.
Demorn put her fingers to her lips. Goat-girl started to scream, running at her with a knife she had by the counter, wailing like crazy for Bobby. Demorn blew her away with a single shot. Goat-girl went down for the count, her body jerking back, slumped just past lover boy. It was just a mask after all. Must be kinky cosplay night.
Sixteen minus three made thirteen. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Even as the thought went through her head an alarm started ringing through the house. The kitchenette lights went up to fluorescent white. Her skin slightly burnt and she pulled the cloak tighter around her. The material hissed but didn’t catch alight. This was some mystic magic bullshit.
Gun shots started outside, and somewhere below her a machine gun opened up. Demorn slammed the door behind her and ran through the kitchenette, her mind for some reason unable to place the tune as the singer hit the chorus loud like a ton of bricks.
The outside corridor was quieter for a moment. The machine gun rattled to a stop. Hustling for cover, Demorn peered out, the Athena pistol tight in her grasp. The back entrance had taken her high up in the base, an upper level. Probably through the private guards’ section. Goat-girl had party hooker written all over her.
The place was a real gangsters paradise. Money dripped off the walls. A massive window looked out to the ocean from the cliff top, taking up one whole side of the house. The sun dropped orange tango red into sky.
A sweeping staircase took the action down to a big party floor. She could see four guys shouting at each other, guns out for display. Coarse Prussian mixed with something more exotic. They weren’t looking up her way. Demorn glanced at her watch. It didn’t make sense. Across the blue screen she was getting shadowy red flashes. She had no precise read.
Where was the machine gun? She was still looking when the bay window exploded. She threw herself against the wall as glass shattered everywhere. She saw what looked like the Beast himself, encircled by the grey and white kill-bots. The remaining windows exploded too, shards of glass, the cloak protecting Demorn’s body, sharp pieces bouncing off the glasses, cutting her face.
The machine gun went again. She opened her eyes, rolling off the wall. Slick blood was on her arm.
Below lay chaos. It truly seemed the Beast had risen from some pit. Howling with fear the mobsters pumped scattered gunshots into the creature. The dark skin rippled with waves of heat. A lone man with a machine gun thudded into the kill-bots as they pumped shots into the great creature, their moves slicker than any human could be, encircling the demon. The mobsters perished in the blaze of violence, the monster screaming in a foul language, loose of human chains, the wild, barely tamed sorcery pushing direct into Demorn’s face.
It hated its captors as much as these intruders.
Demorn had to draw upon old inner reserves as she staggered up. Demorn placed her hand on her chest to draw Xalos, murmuring an Asanti chant. An icy hand gripped her throat, almost crushing her windpipe. She
smashed up with her elbow on instinct, striking a tender spot.
She span around. There was nothing there. She leapt through the air with a vicious roundhouse kick. Nothing. Her throat burnt, layered with thin fingermarks. She drew the blade, holy Xalos. Pride and anger surged through Demorn as she gripped it tight. An icy hand gripped her wrist with cruel pressure. Paralysis flooded her arm. The blade slipped through dead fingers. Mocking laughter. She was smashed against the stairwell with a closed fist. The Beast was howling below. Demorn ducked a blow on pure instinct. She couldn’t see anything.
Another fist smashed hard into her face, sending her reeling. She rolled off the bannister, avoiding another mighty punch, smashing into the wood, snapping the rail. That was more than a fist.
The Beast howled as it destroyed the mobsters and the kill-bots fought. She went for the locket around her neck. It was gone. Lifted.
That mocking laugh. Half familiar. She couldn’t see a thing. Her glasses were cracked. This whole thing had gone south fast.
A sudden explosion hit the house, shaking them. Total offence. Well, she had asked for it. The dazzling white light flickered and went out. Another hail of gunfire rattled below, small arms fire.
Demorn turned and ran, thin laughter echoing in her ears.
She tore down the corridor, smashing through a door with her good hand, flinging it backward, hearing a satisfying thud, slowing this invisible creep. She still had her speed. This house had levels. Down was out, down was a nightmare zone where the Beast fought. She needed UP. She skidded past an expensive looking bathroom, hurtling down a hallway. She hit a burly security guy flush in the chest as she rounded the alcove corner. She bounced off him as he collided back up the narrow staircase he had come down. He was all prison face tats and fumbling with a gun. Demorn kicked him hard in the face. He took it like a champ, so she gave him another one which he blocked with a thick arm, cursing about invisible bitches in Prussian. His arm twisted and he managed to get a shot off, hitting the wall.
