Her words made him blink. A coldness settled on him. ‘No Tabitha,’ he began. ‘No, I told you the truth …’
‘Get away from me you maniac,’ she screamed beginning to struggle again. ‘You animal! You butcher! You want to cut me open and take my baby! Get away from me!’
Mark stumbled back from her, the words driving through him, punching at his core, taking the wind from him. He loved her – had always loved her and had dedicated his life to her. To hear these things hurt him deeply.
As soon as he let go, Tabitha twisted and grabbed a scalpel from the tray next to the bed. Awkwardly, she wrenched herself around, her stomach restricting her movements, and thrust the blade deep into Mark’s abdomen.
She attacked him furiously, stabbing him over and over again until blood flooded from his side and drenched her hand and arm and the bed she lay on. Dr. Reed stepped back, his eyes wide with shock at the murderous assault. Mark stood and took it, staring down at the twisted fury that overlaid the face of the woman he loved.
He wondered how she could think such things of him as each blow landed. How could she believe he would do anything to hurt her? After fifteen or sixteen stabs – Mark barely felt any of them – Tabitha suddenly convulsed. The scalpel fell from her hand and she cried out, her back arching. Mark watched helplessly as her jaw suddenly clenched, her tongue becoming trapped between her front teeth. He only began to react when she bit clean through it, and it fell onto her chest.
Time slowed to a crawl. Mark leant forwards to try and restrain her; her stomach stretched wide and burst like a lanced boil. An awful smell filled the room – the stink of blood and shit and bile – and Tabitha’s eyes went very wide. Mark stared into them as the light of life slowly disappeared.
Something roared. Tentacles flapped from Tabitha’s eviscerated corpse. Dr. Reed ran away. Mark watched numbly as the Barghest raised its blind head from the mess of guts and internal organs. He watched as it appeared to sniff the air, its writhing mass of pink limbs almost indistinguishable from Tabitha’s insides. He watched as it opened its huge, powerful mouth to roar again. It was only when it turned and bit a huge chunk of flesh from its mother’s ragged corpse that Mark finally regained his senses.
Snatching Camulus from where it was propped up against the wall for just such a contingency, he thrust the rainbow blade through the monster’s mouth. It shivered once, twice, and then went still.
Mark staggered away from the horrific sight, still gripping the sword. Tabitha’s stomach was splayed open like an obscene bird’s nest, her head was tilted backwards, her mouth was open and full of blood, her severed tongue lay below her chin. Her eyes were open and seemed to be staring right at him, accusing, hate-filled.
Rubbing his stomach, Mark could feel where the scalpel had entered his body. Now there was nothing but smooth skin and congealing blood. She was dead and he still lived. This was the price of immortality. He began to cry, and then he turned and walked slowly to his office. He collapsed into his chair. His eyes glazed, and he shut down, slipping into blissful catatonia.
The sprint down the stairs was too much for the human. Cam had held off the ORCs with occasional blasts of fire, buying brief seconds, but Rowan had become slower and slower, and more and more winded.
They had descended around two hundred feet before Rowan finally stumbled on the steep steps and collapsed. He was drenched in sweat, and his legs were trembling. ‘I can’t …’ he muttered. The howling was close.
Cam half carried, half dragged Rowan along beside him for a few more feet, but they were going too slowly. The noise of the approaching horde was so loud, Cam knew they were practically on top of them. Cam stopped next to a window. Rowan leant on the sill for a second, gulped some fresh air, and then slumped to the stairs. He sat with his back to the wall, the window above his head.
‘Leave me,’ Rowan gasped. ‘Go …’
‘If you say, “go on without me”, I will kick your tonsils out of your arse. Now get up!’
‘I can’t. You have to leave me.’
‘Oh, do fuck off,’ Cam snapped irritably. ‘I’ve got a plan.’
‘Not another one,’ Rowan panted. ‘How many more clusterfucks can we possibly expect to survive?’
‘You just told me to leave you behind! Now be quiet, I’m trying to concentrate.’ The mob of ORCs came streaming down the stairway behind them. The horde was a breaking wave of living death. The Twisted at the front stumbled and fell and were crushed beneath the pounding feet of those that came behind.
Cam pushed Rowan behind him and unleashed the dragon on his arm. Beams of bright white fire, so hot they were almost liquid, lanced into the zombies, cutting vast swathes through the crowd.
Cam immediately turned towards the wall opposite the window and unleashed another stream of searing flame. It cut a wide hole through the wall. Liquid rock dripped red and orange to the floor. Cam gave the horde another beam of fire, incinerating forty or fifty in the front few rows. Then he gripped Rowan by the collar and threw him through the opening. The marine managed a forlorn wail as he went. Cam followed right after him, ignoring the incredible heat of the molten rock.
‘You crazy bastard,’ Rowan moaned. ‘I think I’ve burned my everything.’
They were in a spacious room. It looked like it had once been some sort of study. The floor was polished stone with a huge blue and green woven rug at its centre. A large wooden desk, piled with brittle papers, sat atop it. There were bookcases against every wall, crammed with dry tomes of every size, shape, and colour. The ones around the hole he had burned through the wall were starting to blaze quite merrily. Opposite the desk, there was a huge stone halo. It was laid flat, like a table. Three thick iron legs held it up, and its surface was covered in thousands of tiny counters. There was one door into the room, and it was wide open. Six fluted stone columns supported a high ceiling, and everything was covered in dust.
Screeching ORCs started to pour through the hole. Cam blasted them from existence. ‘Come on,’ Cam said. He pulled Rowan to his feet and together they stumbled out of the study. More Twisted clawed their way into the study and threw themselves after the human and the Elf.
As soon as they were clear of the room, Cam turned and let loose a bar of dragon fire. The closest ORC was practically touching him, its crooked fingers held out in front of it at the end of scabrous arms, its decomposing face snarling insanely. The white fire turned it into specks of incandescent light. Cam stepped back into the doorway and aimed towards the hole he had made, killing everything in the study. He cut the six columns away, then turned his attention to the ceiling, melting it until the whole thing groaned once and collapsed, filling the study with molten rock and thunderous noise.
Dust spumed into his face, and Cam ducked away, coughing. Rowan was lying on the floor in the next room. Cam lay down next to him and crossed his arms.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked the marine.
‘Better. I just need a few minutes to catch my breath.’
‘Any burns?’
‘Nothing worth writing home about. It was just the shock of being thrown through a … I don’t even know what to call it.’
‘Well, that’s good then.’
‘Yep.’ They lay in companionable silence for a few minutes. ‘What next?’
‘Well,’ Cam replied, ‘I’m hoping that the Twisted will carry on down the stairs. A stampede like that … I can’t see how the ones at the front could stop even if they wanted to. The rest will keep pushing until they’re all the way down in Kilmanoi’s Hall. And then they’ll kill everything.’
‘Right. That’s good. And how are we going to get through all of that?’
‘Erm. Well … I’m sure I’ll think of something.’
‘Of course you will. So, where the hell are we?’
‘We should be near the top of one of the buildings that surround the Hall. When you’re feeling up to it, we’ll start making our way down.’
It turned out that
they were dizzyingly high up in a suite of apartments not far from the roof. They were above the clouds, and from that height, the Hall seemed tiny. Beyond the room they had rested in was a balcony, and on it there were six telescopes of various sizes.
‘It must have been used as some sort of observatory,’ Rowan said, putting his eye to one of the telescopes. Cam followed his lead. Without the aid of the telescope, he could see nothing except the glare of the giant hole in the centre of the Hall. With it, he could make out the dots of lights of the Ifrit campfires, and the entrance to the stairwell they had climbed to get above Kilmanoi’s hall. By the looks of things, they had moved about a mile around the circumference of the Tower.
‘Come on, it’s a long way back,’ Cam said after another five minutes playing with the telescopes. They went quickly, but Rowan was recovering slowly from the journey up, so it still took them another two hours to get near to the bottom. They were about fifteen storeys up when the Twisted burst from the interior stairwell Cam and Rowan had entered so many hours earlier.
Even from a mile away, they had a bird’s eye view of the carnage. The Ifrit must have noticed that the fire had gone out because they had built it back up into a shimmering inferno. They also must have heard the shrieking ORCs as they came down the immense length of the stairwell, because there was a small army of around four-thousand fire giants waiting for them.
From where Cam watched, it was almost as if everything paused. As if the world held its breath. Then ORCs began to stream out of the stairwell ablaze, running wildly in all directions. They were quickly put out of their misery. As more and more came through the flames, more and more fell and were trampled by their brethren. The fire began to diminish as it was smothered with the mindless bodies of the dead. Within fifteen minutes, the sheer numbers of Twisted stumbling over the bonfire had put it out. The howling rose to a crescendo, and a tide of raging death poured into Kilmanoi’s Hall. Hundreds and then thousands of the Twisted charged into the Ifrit. For a few minutes, the Ifrit line held.
Cam watched in silence as the heaving mass so far below him fell into chaos. Even up here, the stench of charred ORCs was strong in the air. Fire spat everywhere. Howling, grunting, and screaming echoed around the Hall. Cam watched the fighting monsters. They surged back and forth beyond the two buildings that flanked the stairwell like a stormy ocean. Cam felt bewildered. He had caused this. He had engineered this battle. Ifrit were dying because of something he had done, and he felt a strange sense of deep remorse.
The Ifrit died, burning in their own flames. The ORCs broke through their lines and entered Kilmanoi’s Hall in their tens of thousands. Cam watched new battle lines being formed as more and more Ifrit dashed to shore up the breach in their defences. Soon, there were five or six different battles spinning wildly through the shanty town. The Twisted coming from the stairwell changed from a river to a stream to a trickle. The fighting moved off around the halo of solid stone that formed the floor of Kilmanoi’s Hall.
Cam pointed to where he thought the Blind Room was. It looked undefended; the vagaries of battle had taken the Ifrit and the Twisted from their path. ‘It’s time to go.’
Rowan nodded. Together they made their way down the last few floors.
‘It was all supposed to be so perfect,’ Creachmhaoil said. ‘I would be the one to save the Seelie Court from destruction. I was going to find the answer, rejuvenate the races, give them a future. It seemed so simple. We knew Cú Roí and his Therians derived power from the humans, and such power, too! You have no idea how much potential the humans have. They evolve, they grow, they change. Eventually, they will be gods.
‘But us? The Elves? The Ifrit? The Jötnar? Even the Svartálfar are a stagnant race. We don’t change. We are immortal, and as such we stay the same in perpetuity. It is a paradox, I know, but a race of immortals is doomed to die out, whereas these mortal things have the chance to last for an eternity.
‘I want eternity. I fear the other option. I have lived long enough to know that nothing comes afterwards. But the magic is dying, and without it we must wither and disappear. The Tower will collapse and fall to whatever mysteries it hangs above. The races will be forgotten, and the damned humans will keep on going, spreading through the stars no doubt, like some intergalactic plague.
‘So much power. Cú Roí could tap it, but you two chose to banish him. You tried to kill him! Morons! Could you not see what you held in your hands?’
‘Of course we did,’ the Maiden said gently. ‘That was why we had to destroy him.’ They were still in the Blind Room. Grímnir watched Creachmhaoil closely. The Elf seemed somehow deflated: a dull copy of himself. When he came into the Blind Room he had stared at the two of them for hours. Then he began to speak. To confess, really. Grímnir had no sympathy for him.
‘Cú Roí was the key. He was the answer. If we could learn to modify ourselves with that ability to live off the humans, then we could potentially live forever.’
‘Parasitically?’
‘Symbiotically! Do you not think the humans would have benefited from this? For years, we have treated them as nothing but curiosities to be toyed with – entertainment for the Courts. If we had recognised their value, we could have mentored them: we could have made them great. Our races could have lived together forever. If a few had to be sacrificed – well, it’s not something they haven’t done before.
‘No, what I did was a good thing: A wise thing.’ He was cut off by a sound outside. It was a strange noise but Grímnir recognised it. Creachmhaoil obviously didn’t, because he tilted his head to one side and frowned.
‘It is the Twisted, Creachmhaoil. I think you had better shut the door.’
‘That’s impossible,’ the Elf scoffed. The noise of sudden, violent conflict drifted into the Blind Room. Ifrit yelled battle cries and screams of fear. The howling got louder.
‘Either close the door or cut me free,’ Grímnir insisted. ‘It is the Twisted.’
‘No!’ Creachmhaoil shrieked as he ran forwards and slammed the door shut against the sound of the massacre outside.
They ran and hid, hid and ran. Cam and Rowan didn’t find it too difficult to avoid the legions of Ifrit running to do battle. They slipped between their lines and followed the building line around towards the Blind Room. Soon they were away from the slaughter. There were small groups of ORCs that had also found their way around the Ifrit battlefront, but Cam dispatched them easily.
Forty minutes after re-entering Kilmanoi’s Hall, they reached the Blind Room. It was unguarded. Outside, there was a swathe of ORC corpses. The ash on the floor was ankle deep. They went inside. Cam surveyed the room. His eyes narrowed when his gaze fell on Creachmhaoil.
‘What happened, Creachmhaoil?’ Cam asked.
Grímnir turned his head and smiled when he saw him. ‘Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha,’ he said. ‘I am glad you are well.’
‘Where’s Dow?’
‘Unfortunately, Dow Sė Mochaomhog became a liability, and I had to dispose of him.’ Creachmhaoil laughed, but the sound was bitter and sad.
‘You killed him,’ Cam stated quietly.
‘He would never have understood. It wasn’t my fault. The spells were worked out properly … There was no way I could have foreseen what would happen.’
‘Tell me,’ Cam demanded.
‘I studied it, you see. I went through everything I could – every last scrap of research that had been done on Cú Roí. It seemed simple to alter the construct of an Elf: to make one like the Therians. I … I …’
‘You caused The Transmogrification, didn’t you?’ Cam asked.
‘It was a justified risk. The Firstcomer explained it to me. I was trying to save a race!’
‘Instead you nearly destroyed it.’
‘It shouldn’t have happened,’ Creachmhaoil insisted. ‘My calculations were perfect. I can still make it right.’
‘Where did it happen?’
Creachmhaoil’s head sank to his breast, his eyes closi
ng. ‘Here. Just outside this accursed room. I thought that if anything did go wrong, then we could retreat here quickly, and any magical fallout could be contained.’
‘You used an Elf? Who?’
‘One of my students volunteered. She was called Peyre. Peyre Mac Uaithne. A most promising young woman. The magic was designed to alter her spirit. Open it to the human magic. She would have become a hybrid. A creature of both worlds. Just like the Therians. Just like Cú Roí. She would have been our new miracle. Our salvation.’
‘But Peyre ripped everybody’s throat out instead,’ Cam said. ‘She didn’t need magic to do it, did she? She used her hands. And her teeth. The Blind Room was no protection at all.’ He harrumphed. ‘A single point of origin, just like I said.’ There was no triumph, just sadness in his voice.
Creachmhaoil looked up and his eyes flashed with sudden anger. ‘And you are so clever, Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha? Sitting amongst the humans, drinking yourself into oblivion, forsaking your race.’
‘I might have gone and hidden away. Turned my back. But I never did any harm. You’re guilty of genocide.’
‘It was an accident,’ Creachmhaoil hissed.
‘It was negligent, immoral, and stupid,’ Cam hissed back.
‘And soon it will be made right.’
‘What do you mean?’
Creachmhaoil smiled slyly. ‘Damballah came to me. He located Cú Roí in the ether, floating through time. We brought him back … but that awful creature Morgan Leach found him before we did, hence this small trouble in the human world.’
Immortals' Requiem Page 39
