“So you found some ancient sacrificial structure?” Meg sounded skeptical. “How is this going to help us? We trick Aries' soldiers onto it and turn it on.” She paused. “That actually might work.”
“No, no, I was translating the runes in the corridor. I believe that the Coptic equivalent is far-walker.” Tethis turned to face them. “The legends of the War of the Caretaker said that those who followed the Caretaker could arrive unexpectedly – appearing in strongholds, behind enemy lines, within cities. That is how mjolnir was stolen, though, ah, the disastrous results of that foolishness are still visible.”
“Uh, what happened?” Liam asked, rubbing the back of his neck.
“The entire Caretaker city was turned into crystal,” Meg said, frowning. “They call the ruins the Forest of Lost Souls.”
“Eesh,” Liam said. “See, I'd have thought Thor would have just made it impossible to pick up or something.”
“Where's the fun in that?” Meg said, grinning at him. “So. This altar is a far-stepper. That's great. Right until we vanish to appear inside of a wall.” She frowned. “Or in the void. How do you target it?”
“I'm not sure,” Tethis said. “But I believe with some magic and some trial and error, I can figure it out. And since the cover is concealed and Aries' soldiers don't know this temple is here, we have the time!”
An ear piercing shriek rang out of the corridor that they had entered by and a blindingly white flash shone from around the corner, literally burning the shadow of a humanoid figure onto the corner wall. Liam grabbed his longsword, drawing it with a quick jerk. “What was that, Teth?”
“O-One of the traps that I guided us around,” Tethis said, her voice a soft whimper.
“Get to work!” Liam said, stepping up to crouch beside the doorway. “We'll guard the entrance. You get us to Faiyum without killing us. Don't worry.” He flashed her a grin. “We've got this.”
Tethis nodded, reaching up to adjust her linen wraps, then turned and ran towards the altar, her hair bouncing behind her. Once she was out of earshot, Meg leaned over and whispered to Liam.
“You do know I only have a limited amount of ammunition, right?”
“Yup,” Liam said. “But they don't, do they?”
Meg nodded and nestled one of her sling bullets – well, weighted rocks, really – into her sling. She started to twirl it casually in one arm as they waited. The footsteps of the hoplites rang louder and clearer and then the first two came around the corner. Their shields were raised, their helmets were on, and they held their spears. They advanced like bronze statues, ready to kill absolutely everything that got in their way.
For almost all of his life, Liam had wondered: how would Alexander the Great's dreaded Macedonians have stood up to gunfire? It had been this longstanding point of contention between him and Greg. His friend had sworn up, down, left, right and sideways that the Macedonians could have replaced Napoleon at Waterloo and only lost a half hour sooner than the Corsican. Personally, Liam had believed that it didn't matter how disciplined and well lead men were when they went up against muskets and cannons. They were still going up against muskets. And cannons.
Or, in this case, a super-humanly strong angelic woman who could hardly have missed. The first rock that Meg loosed slammed into the bridge of one of the hoplite's noses. The bronze flange that hung down from his horse-hair helmet barely slowed the stone down and a spray of blood misted the front of the shield and the wall behind him as the helmet went flying. He collapsed to the ground and the other hoplite paused.
Behind him, two more hoplites were emerging from around the corner. These two had darts in their hands and loosed them with quick, overhand tossing motions. Liam dragged Meg back a moment before the darts hit the ground she had been standing on – their nullstone tips cracked and sparked against the floor.
“Charge!”
That was the demigod who was leading the troops; her voice was quite recognizable, even over the sound of bronze armor rattling. Now it was time for Liam to shine. He stepped up and into the corridor, sword in his hands. The hoplite didn't even use her spear. She simply tried to bash Liam aside with her shield. Liam stepped to the side and hewed at her legs with his sword, stroking upwards. Steel cut through her legs and thighs with hideous ease and the corridor became drenched in blood. Liam felt wind rustle his ears and saw another hoplite flung backwards, a sling-stone denting his chest piece with the same force as a sledge hammer.
The next hoplite that rushed Liam had a short sword in his hands. Liam blocked, then smashed the crossguard of his sword into the man's throat. The man – a red-skinned humanoid with a long, spade-tipped tail – staggered backwards, clutching at his throat with one hand, choking.
“Fall back! They are mine!”
The demigod's voice was stern and stolid and she emerged from around the corner. She was still nearly naked, and still held in her hand the blade that glittered and flared with what Liam now recognized as magic.
She smirked as Meg made a quiet shrugging gesture and tossed her sling aside. She was out of ammo. Great.
“I am Livana,” the demigod said. “Daughter of Aries. Victor over the forces of the Aesir in the Odinson Ocean. Champion of New Athens. I have slain dozens of men in personal combat and I hold in my hand a sword blessed and crafted by Hephaestus himself!” She lifted her sword over her head, then swung it down, aiming it at Liam. “Hear this, human: no edged weapon can cut my skin, for I am sired by the Lord of War himself. Lay down your weapon and I will show mercy.”
Liam tensed, his jaw tightening as he stood up taller and straighter. Once again, he became aware of how much taller he was than everyone in this bizarre place – he easily found himself looking down his nose at the elf.
He paused, considering what he might say.
Then he grinned and rested his blade against his shoulder, spreading his hand in a casual gesture.
“Come and take them,” he said.
That had exactly the effect he wanted. Trust an Athenian, even an elven Athenian twenty centuries after the fact, to hate Sparta.
Liv charged. Her feet slapped the ground and she swung her blade in a curving arc. Liam didn't even try to parry. He simply stepped backwards and let Meg grab the woman from behind. But Liv was ready for that. She moved blindingly quick, dropping out of Meg's grip and slamming a nullstone tipped dart into the valk's thigh. Meg swore loudly and staggered backwards against the wall, clutching at the dart with both hands. Liam then focused entirely on evading Liv. But Liv fought like someone who knew they were invincible – cutting at her with the tip of his blade didn't cause her to hesitate. She threw herself against his defenses and slashed at him with her sword.
And shitty bronze was still considerably harder and sharper than a HEMA T-shirt and human skin. Soon, Liam bled from three narrow, thin cuts. Adrenaline buzzed through his body as he heard cheers from the hoplites – they were smashing their spears into their shields and hollering.
Delenn once more glanced off Liv's belly and she laughed – actually took the time to stop and laugh at him.
And Liam saw his opening.
He tossed his blade up, caught it by the flat and the front edge, holding it in a half-swording style.
There were few moments in the universe where one could use what one had learned from a textbook at exactly the right time to change everything. When these seconds came, everything stopped and Liam found himself reflecting on the curious history that had brought him here. A confluence of smiths and weaponry and training – all of it bringing to this one moment, where good, honest steel would outmatch a god.
Or, at the very least, a demigod.
And so Liam stepped forward and slammed his pommel into Livana's gut with a single, perfect murder stroke. The crossguard – weighted and given the extra torque by being at the end of the blade rather than the base – smashed home like a baseball bat. Liv's mouth opened wide in shock as she staggered backwards from the impact, spittle flying from her li
ps. She looked as if the whole world had gone upside down. Then Liam swung his sword around in his hands, ignoring the deep slashes he was opening in his own palms, ignoring the agony filling him, to bring the cross-guard and pommel back down onto the base of Liv's skull.
The crunch was audible and she hit the ground face first, her head turned to the side.
Liam grabbed his pommel and gasped, his mind locking onto a single, hazy thought: Next time. Next. Time. Get. Gauntlets. Jesus!
He held his sword in agonized fingers, blood dripping to the ground as he stepped backwards.
Then Meg was beside him. She still had the nulldart in her thigh, but she could still hold Liv up against her chest and press a bronze dagger to her throat. “Get back!” she shouted. “Get back, or do you want to explain to Aries that you got his daughter stuck like a pig?”
The hoplites looked at one another – but they didn't lower their spears.
Meg and Liam stepped backwards as Liam tightened his grip on his sword. Maybe, he thought, The pressure will slow the bleeding. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.
They came to the stairs leading up to the far-step alter. Behind them, Liam could hear a crack of displaced air and Tethis swearing in Coptic that his translation spell didn't pick up. “Almost ready,” she said.
The hoplites were starting to spread around them. Meg looked back, then forward, then at Tethis.
“Hurry, Tethis!” she said, her voice edged with pain.
“I don't want to rush this. We might end up dead if this thing is targeted wrong,” Tethis said, her voice distracted. Liam risked tearing his gaze from the hoplites that surrounded them to look down at the gobliness. The top of the altar didn't look a thing like an altar or even like a magical artifact. It instead looked a bit like the kind of obtuse minimalist interfaces that Apple might design if they had only stone to work with. Tethis' fingers traced patterns along barely visible buttons, causing magical lights to glow and flare. She had placed a small clump of dust onto the center of the altar, though Liam noticed the dust was surrounded by a faint patina of white lines, similar to the healing spell that Tethis had cast on his arm.
“Is that a tracker?” he asked.
“Yes!”
Meg's wing flapped out, almost bowling Tethis and Liam over. A spear – a spear that would have gone straight through Liam's head – went into the wing and Meg screamed in pain, red coating her white feathers.
“Fuck testing!” She flung herself backwards onto the alter. Liam hopped back onto it, his rump pressing to the white. He grabbed Tethis with one bloody hand, smearing his gore on her rump as he dragged her up.
“Push the fucking button!” Liam shouted.
Tethis slammed her palms down on the alter.
And everything turned white.
Liam felt as if his body was being torn apart. It felt like his skin was being peeled backwards away from his flesh. It felt as if his bones were being ripped out and shredded. It felt like eternity.
Liam appeared and he felt as if he was falling. The sky overhead was a beautiful blue – but it was the blue of oceans and water and waves, not of home.
Then he hit the ground.
Five
White light.
Warm sheets.
A sound of singing in the streets.
The rattle of bells wrapped around a dancer's ankle.
A child's laughter.
And the sounds of what had to be a million cats, mewling and purring and screeching in delight and terror.
One such cat leaped onto Liam's bed and started to lick his face. He laughed quietly, thinking it was his mother's cat, Mixie. But there was two things that brought him up short. The first was the realization that there was no weight on his chest, no paws pressing to his nipples and no comforting, purring belly rubbing against his pecks. Instead, the weight was to either side of his shoulders in the bed, dimpling the sheets against him.
The second was that Mixie never had a pair of amazing double D breasts.
He opened his eyes and the woman who had been licking him drew backwards, enough for him to see that she was a perfect fusion of woman and cat. Her fur was dainty and elegantly black, pure and spotless save for a single white star around her left eye. Her slitted eyes, too, were an excellent combination of human intellect and the playful sociopathy of a good kitten. Her ears were perked up and her short, elegant whiskers twitched in a smile. She was also dressed in nothing but a white shift that contrasted sweetly with her black fur. Liam looked at her, then at the room – a place with pale limestone walls and a large slitted window.
Then Liam looked at his hands. His palms didn't even have scars.
“Normally,” the cat-girl said, her voice amused. “People go straight for these suckers. I suppose, though, you need some incentives...”
She shrugged, then took a hold of her linen shift. A single tug sent it sailing off her shoulders, her breasts slumping slightly in the open air. Hard red nipples peeked out from the black fur, accentuating the tips of her full breasts. Liam's hands closed around them in an instant. There was something about almost being killed that took the needs of a male and drove it up to eleven. His cock was hard enough to tent the blankets and he realized he was wearing nothing underneath them.
Well.
That was convenient.
He rolled the cat-girl onto her back, panting heavily as he loomed over her, spreading her thighs with his hands. Her pussy lips were surrounded by a slight muff – but her could see they were essentially human, save for their coloration.
She started purring as he rubbed at her sex. The purring got louder as Liam leaned forward, sucking desperately first on one nipple, then the other. The girl crooned and arched her back, pressing her chest against his mouth. But then Liam's common sense grabbed him by the balls and slammed his head into the wall. He jerked his head back from her and panted.
“Meg?”
“Fit as a fiddle,” she said, chuckling. “Now, come on, back to my tits.”
“Tethis?”
“Still writing her report. Now, come on,” she said, twitching her thighs and arching her back. “I figure you owe me this fucking considering how hard I worked healing you. And you don't even worship my goddess.”
Liam blinked. “You're my doctor?”
The woman smirked at him, her whiskers twitching. “I don't know what a doctor is but my name is Star-Eye, Priestess of Bastet. And spent a day and a half bathing your body and listening to Meg talk about your skill and I want my shot!”
Liam blinked again. “Meg told you?”
“She literally said that if I never rode you, I'd regret it for my whole life,” Star-Eye said, sounding annoyed. “Now. Come on. My pussy is waiting.” She reached down to spread her lips with one paw-like hand, her furred fingers tilted so that the soft pads pressed to her sex lips. But Liam could still see that her claw tips were remarkably sharp looking.
He hoped she was that dainty with everything she did in bed.
Liam ducked his head forward. He felt his cheeks brush against her thigh fur and heard the confused murr that came from her mouth, moments before his tongue slid up to caress the hooded cleft of her clit. Her juices were considerably sweeter than Meg's, lacking almost all her tang. And, fortunately, her fur cushioned the sudden pressure of her thighs closing around his head tightly, her pawed feet hooking behind his head. Liam closed his eyes and pressed against her sex, her lips sucking on her pussy, his tongue darting forward. He swirled it around then found the place that made her back arch.
“Oh goddess!” She howled, her hands grabbing his hair. He felt her claws tease along his scalp – but he tried to put it out of his mind as he reached up to slide his arms under her arms, rub his palms along her belly, then squeeze her large breasts. He found her nipples and tweaked them gently as he ate her out hungrily. Star-Eye curled to the side, rolling and lifting one leg above her head, spreading herself with her hand and her posture. This let Liam slide three fingers into her sex, crooking them up an
d rubbing at her G-spot.
“Bastet, oh Bastet, hear my prayers and come steal this guy!” Star-Eye moaned, then vanished into incoherence. She buried her face against the pillow and bit down on it. Feathers filled the air as she thrashed and her juices spurted against Liam's face. He drank her down and took a moment reflecting on the fact that eating out a humanoid cat who had just healed whatever had gone wrong with his body after transporting from a long forgotten temple was not that weirdest thing that happened to him this week.
Star-Eye panted and rolled onto her back again. “So, now you fuck me?” she panted.
“That's the plan,” Liam said, drawing himself up onto his knees. He gripped his dick and started to slip it up and down, grinding the broad head of his shaft against the priestess' pussy. He half closed his eyes and savored the intense tactility of life here in Purgatory. And it was here, with his cock teasing the sex of a catgirl that he barely knew, after surviving a harrowing adventure, that Liam realized that even if someone arrived and offered him a ticket right home…
He wouldn't take it.
His mind, in that instant, painted for him a picture of a life that was utterly mundane. He would enjoy it, yeah. He'd have his friends. He might even meet a girl that drove him as wild as Meg and Star-Eye and Tethis. He would be in love, and raise kids, and see the future that humanity was blindly hacking out of their world. But would he ever step into ancient temples that had survived millennium and held wonders and dangers beyond irritating local curators? Would he cross blades with villains and save damsels? Would he make a difference?
He didn't know for sure…
But he doubted it.
“Stop teasing meeeee!” Star-Eye whined.
“I'm not interrupting anything, am I?”
The Murder Stroke (Purgatory Wars Book 1) Page 8
