Demorn: Soul Fighter (The Asanti Series Book 3)

by David Finn

  ‘Not the locket, not the pain god,’ he choked, colour coming back to his gaunt face.

  Demorn sat back against the white wall of the room. She couldn’t work out why she had tried to save him. She wasn’t even sure it would have worked. And so he knew about the locket. The locket of Mictecaciuatl’s hair.

  ‘The amulet helped save you, Iverson. You would be dead down there. Should I throw you back in? Would you rather that?’

  His eyes sharpened as he came back to himself. He looked at the crystal water in the plunge pool with distrust, then he took in the room. He patted Demorn on the shoulder as he got up.

  ‘Sorry. Thanks. I worry the trinkets of the gods will eat my soul.’

  ‘Well, maybe they will, but we’re alive, which is better than being dead, Investigator.’

  He laughed in agreement. He hit his chest hard, coughing up more water as he stood. His jumpsuit was already dry while she felt soaked to the bone. The ruby was on fire in her heart, providing the only warmth she knew. She already regretted leaving her jacket behind.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked.

  Demorn shook her head. ‘I’m going off half remembered system designs I saw a couple of times back in Babelzon. If my brother were here he’d be a lot more helpful. He has all these schematics on the Spire.’

  ‘I was just following you. Where’s the flaming sword? Are you having technical difficulties?’

  She shrugged and tapped her chest. ‘My ruby just took one for the team to keep me alive and we lost a Ruby Room to Kingdom and his goddamn cronies. Xalos isn’t spawning this exact second. But guess what, I’ve got a gun too.’

  Demorn took the Athena gun off her ankle holster. ‘Holy bullets too.’

  Iverson was bent, examining the terminal by the closed door. He seemed unruffled despite a couple of close brushes with death and an invaded Ruby Room. Demorn had only seen the Investigators on the Front at a distance. They were respected and feared but not loved. She could feel his implant buzzing as he synched with the technology. Then he pressed a couple of digits and it slid open to a darkened corridor filled with husks. Demorn slammed a fresh clip into the Athena gun.

  He gave her a friendly smile. ‘Holy bullets, hey?’

  ‘Yeah, an Athena gun. I’ve had it a long time.’

  Iverson was contemplative, he seemed to be catching his breath. He looked tired. ‘I bet there’s a story behind that.’

  She smiled. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘It must be hard to keep track of whatever god you’re fighting for.’

  Demorn laughed. ‘I’m fighting for me mostly. Me and the people I love. I was an atheist until I met my first Goddess.’

  She kicked at the ground with bare feet. The crystal pool was a mysterious mirror behind them.

  ‘Maybe I can pray up a new jacket. I liked that jacket.’

  Iverson strode into the dark corridor. Demorn felt a distant rumble through the ground. A shadow of the Goddess perhaps, reaching this distant place. Or the temple room sliding into the Void. She thought of her brother back in Babelzon. She had been gone from him too long. She couldn’t help but think of Winter, her masseuse and girlfriend back in Bay City. There was something new and fresh about that relationship, filled with hope and without damage. With a final glance at the plated windows high above Demorn followed the Investigator into the shadows.

  12

  * * *

  Her foot crushed the insectoid against the lab door. Enough with these fucking insects. A Triton logo was emblazoned on the door. With a twist of her legs Demorn snapped off the shrunken and malformed head.

  Iverson was firing his way through a clip. Two black-suited minders with crown-of-thorns for heads thrashed against the far wall, dying the hard way. They wore Triton uniforms.

  ‘This place is crawling with Thorn-heads,’ Iverson muttered.

  She smiled at the term. There was an air of chaos around them in the labs. Papers tossed around randomly, a few screens still on, some shot out or cracked. All of her feelings were bad. They dodged ominous black sigils that burnt in the air as Demorn accessed the network, muscling her way into the system.

  Iverson said, ‘I’ve seen witchcraft on the Front, but never so much, so close together.’

  ‘That’s not witchcraft,’ Demorn said as she typed in code. Her eyes glittered. ‘It’s demonic. The blackest kind of sorcery. It means the demon gods are coming to this reality.’

  The Athena gun flashed in the shadows as she unloaded a volley of bullets from where she sat. The last thorn-head died.

  ‘Demon gods?’ Iverson asked.

  ‘Yep,’ she said, working with fast fingers while Iverson covered the door. ‘Much worse than my gods. I’ve seen them before in a Sinatra time-line I did missions in.’

  Iverson pulled a face of surprise. ‘A Sinatra time-line? The Frank Sinatra? Cranky Frankie? “Night and Day”, “I Got You under My Skin”?’

  She shot him a smile. ‘Yeah, the Frank Sinatra. And he wasn’t so cranky with me, hun. We had a working relationship.’

  ‘Impressive.’

  ‘Sure, until the thorn-heads turned up and shit went south. And the demon gods don’t want to give anybody a magic sword or a gun. They want to eat our souls, pollute the reality with their death machines, and move on.’

  She pointed at the Triton logos. ‘That’s what I find almost hilarious about these corporate stooges that sit here and work on this stuff. They must know what they are calling, who they are reaching out to. The Fracture Event changed the game, Iverson. It didn’t just destroy my home-world, it weakened the walls of reality. It put a time bomb under every mortal world across a whole chain of universes. And these idiots know that, Investigator, and still they sit here and wear their lab coats and work their shifts and play with their algorithms and buy up worlds like the fire won’t burn them, too.’

  Iverson glanced at the screen in between scanning the lab for more thorn-heads. ‘Yeah, well life’s a bitch and so are the gods from the sound of it. Maybe they offer a good dental plan.’

  Demorn gave a droll laugh. The system unlocked and she began accessing layers of data beneath the firewalls. Iverson saw multiple pictures of Demorn in different costumes and time periods scrolling across the screen, waves of data, screen shots of a future city, vast city towers rising into a stormy sky where lightning arced through thick red clouds.

  The ruby heart burnt from underneath her shirt. She seemed to almost merge with the images on the screen, another legend in a screen filled with them. His vision blurred, and Iverson had to shake his head, the implant bringing clarity.

  Demorn looked up, palming a tiny thumb drive which she plugged into her watch. The screen shut down to black. Demorn gave him a soft pat on the face.

  She said, ‘Don’t look too deep, babe. I’m bad news. You know how back there in the War they call me a legend and act like there’s something I’m supposed to be saving them from?’

  Iverson nodded. ‘Sure, Wandering Princess of the Swords. Comes in a time of need. That’s the legend.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘The chain around my neck more like. I usually forget most of what I’ve seen and done and just sell my sword to a likely cause. Seems to work.’

  Her face was very pale and her eyes shone. ‘But when the thorn-heads turn up and the sigils are burning in the air, the prophecies go live. Even I can’t run away from that. It’s impossible. That’s my Fate. I’ve seen the future, Investigator. It’s just the Void. That’s what awaits us. That’s what I can’t forget or run from, no matter how much I want to.’

  She looked from the blank screen into the sigil, the dead energy spiralling inside itself, a pathway to the abyss. Demorn could feel memories and data flooding her brain, a bank of knowledge normally blocked to her. She cracked a smile.

  She said, ‘But I’m strong. This is why I’m here and this is what I’m supposed to save them from.’

  ‘Are you strong enough?’

  She gave him a l
ook. ‘I never die easy and I can run deep, Iverson. I can slaughter a thousand thorn-heads and their insect slaves. But to beat a phalanx of demon gods beaming in direct from the Void, with idiots like Kingdom and his cronies running interference? There isn’t a hero in all the universes who can stop all that. You’re fighting against Fate then, in a war without end.’

  Iverson let her talk. He could feel the tension drain off her in these bizarre monologues.

  She drew the burning sword from her chest, the ruby burning under her shirt. Iverson’s vision blurred. He saw something strange above her head, a tall, shimmering glass and steel crown. The Order implant adjusted, narrowing the focus, fighting the reality bleed. Standing in front of him was a kickass woman with crazy, blazing eyes carrying a curved burning sword.

  His implant eyes focused on the purple flames licking the katana. Xalos. The blade of exile. The Order records had it archived and valued at enormous price. There would be Investigators on the payroll who would attack Demorn even now, at this critical juncture, just to capture the artefact, to dissect it and her.

  Iverson was not one of them. He had never been attracted to the massive museums and mausoleums that lay deep inside the Order satellites. There were Order scientists drilling down into the core. There were two types of Investigators. There was research and there was fieldwork. He was almost all fieldwork. He had been since they recruited him from the battlefield. Research was only as good as what he could use to an Investigator like Iverson.

  He said, ‘Are you really all alone?’

  She popped some gum. ‘Well you’re here, which is nice. But Firethorn has fallen and my Innocents are all back home in Babelzon. I’m the only pawn of prophecy I know. But hope lives eternal, hey.’

  She held up her watch, with the tiny drive attached. ‘Anyway, good news, I know where we are. There’s a portal point out of this crap. I can guide us to an old Innocents’ hideout. And from there, make the jump we need.’

  She gave him a cheesy grin. ‘Maybe. Hopefully. Sorry my brother isn’t available to calculate the odds. The reception here is the worst.’

  Iverson nodded. It would have to do.

  ‘Cool. Let’s get moving, soldier.’

  He moved fast to the main exit door, her laughter cold behind him, dosed with unreality and danger. Personally, he wondered what he had gotten himself into. The alarm started buzzing. Demorn pushed past Iverson and ripped the door open with her steel hand, her face manic, almost desperate for battle, as she ran into the darkened corridor.

  Under the sound of the unceasing alarm, the labs were still as a tomb. They saw nobody for several minutes as they toured the facility. The alarms finally stopped ringing and they were left to their thoughts and their imaginings, which could be worse. Iverson had been mostly silent since they’d killed the last thorn-head. Demorn hummed snippets of Sinatra and Dean Martin songs to herself.

  Iverson said, ‘This whole setup confuses me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You keep talking about a Ruby Room, somehow connected to the Goddess and I assume what’s in your chest. But what’s all this?’ Iverson rapped gently on the corridor wall. ‘Are we still in the Ruby Room? Did you build these labs?’

  Demorn said, ‘Hmm. Kind of but not really. My old leader, Red Morning, who led the Innocents before me for about twenty years and studied the old texts, knew a lot about it. She said that all the Rooms were linked, once parts of vast temples built at the dawn of time, worshipping something vaster and more powerful than the creatures that now call themselves gods. The Big Bad Gods. The real MOFOs.’

  Demorn grinned. ‘Anyway, these temples were partly in our mortal reality, partly elsewhere. Like you might have a temple on Earth, in Detroit or Memphis for instance, and that was connected to a much huger dimensional fortress in a kind of Limbo, close to the Void. Some heavy shit lies outside the walls and windows of these places. And this fortress was owned and the province of the God/Goddess and their chosen followers.’

  Demorn was actually enjoying this rare chance to talk abut this with somebody. Most of it was secondhand knowledge from Red Morning or her brother, but it was a unique position for her to be giving a history lesson. Iverson seemed intrigued.

  ‘Anyway, cut to “some time passes”, alright? At some point reality gets splintered badly in the God Wars, when all these Big Bad Gods had a big ol’ fight over spilt milk, or how many angels can dance on a pin, or same sex marriage, or whatever the hell Gods fight about, and the Fortresses began to split apart during the War, becoming fragments. We call them Ruby Rooms. These Rooms fell to the hands of the true believers, such as the Innocents and the Cavern back in Babelzon.’

  She rapped her chest. ‘And yes, I’m connected, as are the Innocents, my sisters and my brothers back in Babelzon. I’m low on power this exact moment, but the Sword of Xalos is in my chest. If I die and I pass beneath, and we can all truly die, then the Sword will be passed on. Think of these Rooms like cells in a collective, except the collective has gone, and now you have all these random cells scattered throughout all the different worlds, each tethered to a physical entity.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘That’s the fifty cent tour. And I’m not an expert. Any questions?’

  Iverson said, ‘What about these labs?’

  She shrugged. ‘I figure they’re like built-ons. Kingdom and his Triton cronies obviously infiltrated this Room and took over this particular cell over time. That can happen.’

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Not a clue. I went to a party where Misty is playing a corporate cult gig and suddenly it turns into Kingdom and his band of a thousand brothers.’

  ‘Did she know? Your friend? She seemed very at home on stage.’

  Demorn was caught looking into the remnants of another huge row of computers. Spiral charts. A few scattered corpses of lab assistants who maybe hadn’t stuck close enough to the Triton program. Kingdom didn’t mess around when he was running an op. He acted fast and without remorse. It was eerie how dead this place was.

  ‘In a vague way she probably knew who was writing the cheques. Triton’s a listed entity. Misty’s not political, other than she plays both sides of the room. She was almost born on stage, her father was in the business. Sell, sell, sell. That’s Misty. She’s all about building her brand and her channel. I kind of like that about her.’

  Iverson was smooth. ‘We could have died, of course.’

  Demorn grinned. ‘We could die in the next five minutes, Iverson, and we could have died in the last five. Does it matter? Misty is who she is. It’s just another gig to her. She’ll be back in Bay City right now, kicking back in her condo, tweeting her thoughts to the masses, bless her bejewelled booty. In a week she’ll wonder where I am and start to miss me. Cue a text and catch up.’

  Iverson chuckled. ‘Well, she’s your friend, Demorn. I still don’t understand how all this was built.’

  ‘Some of the Rooms are a lot bigger than others, more like mini castles. It all depends on how much of the Fortress split off. Bay City got a big chunk, obviously. Triton probably got some people into the cult years ago and started to go off script.’

  Iverson agreed. ‘They are a long way from the War. I spoke to my friend Lydia, who runs security down there. Attention was diverted, their government is weak, a minor league Duke and a drug addicted Duchess. Not even the Order has been monitoring them.’

  Demorn shrugged. ‘Perfect candidates for a Triton incursion. Kingdom plays for keeps once he signs in blood. Who knows how long he’s been building these labs, constructing the machines to bring the demon gods to us? I’ve personally got no fucking idea. This all operates outside of the standard time-line, Iverson.’

  Iverson looked at her with his dark eyes. ‘Meaning?’

  Demorn gripped his arm, squeezing his lean muscles. ‘Meaning that Kingdom and Triton have made structural change.’

  She punched the wall with her hand. ‘If we could go back one hundred years in the past, this wo
uld be here, all this would have happened. I could jump forward one thousand years into the future and perhaps nothing would have changed. This Ruby Room would still be lost to Triton, imploding as Kingdom damned it to oblivion.’

  As she spoke the walls shook. ‘It’s pretty deep, hey.’

  Iverson laughed, thoughtful. ‘I’m reminded of the Master Rooms. They’re what the Order uses to try to control and monitor the endless multiple realities that spiralled out of the Fracture Event.’

  Demorn longed for a mint. ‘How’d they do?’

  Iverson liked her, she could tell from the amusement in his dark eyes. ‘The Order keeps me at a distance, Demorn. They send me out in the field and tell me to get things and kill people and they wipe me when I’m done. I’ve never heard of the Ruby Rooms and I’ve been an Investigator on the frontline for ten years. That’s odd.’

  Now it was her turn to play dumb. ‘Why?’

  Iverson said, ‘Because I’m good at what I do and I think I’ve probably stumbled on this before. It’s too big a secret and I know so many already.’

  Demorn felt a chill run down her back. ‘That’s full on.’

  Iverson tapped his brow. ‘That’s being an Investigator. The Order takes parts of our lives, Demorn. The implant gives, the implant takes.’

  She sighed. ‘That’s heavy. This whole phase is heavy. I’m looking forward to having a break when all is said and done. Idiots like Kingdom never understand what they are summoning.’

  She rapped on her chest, laughing. ‘And meanwhile, I carry a shard of the God Fortress in my chest which lights up like a torch. Which is just great. And unlike my old leader Red Morning, who was obsessed by all this behind-the-scenes mystic bullshit, I haven’t had a lot of time to catch up on my reading of the “ancient texts” and “hidden secrets” and what it all means. I’m too busy putting out fires and working on the next paying gig. Most times I’d rather read a fucking comic book or go on a real date, especially if we’re all going to die tomorrow. Jesus.’