“This is awful,” whispered Ulpo, deciding that he could talk safely amid the roar of the generator.
“We’ve got to get him—we’ve got to get the rod!” cried Remtall. He’d lost his patience, half from determination for the Rod, half from his growing claustrophobia.
“Wait!” urged Behlas. It was too late—Remtall drew his diamond dagger from his sheath. Without delay, he charged full speed at the Gear, who stood idle, closer to them now than Parasink. In a reckless maneuver, Remtall flung himself through the air at his target: his pounce lined directly at the Gear’s neck, a slice to cut the machine’s circuitry of life. An incredible clangor interrupted the glow-motor’s whine; Remtall collapsed on top of the surprised Gear. They tumbled into a pile of detritus: pipes, bolts, and wiring debris tore into Remtall’s muscles. The green light softened again; the body on the center table stopped undulating. Parasink’s Rod had returned to a dull grain of oak. The commotion had distracted him; he turned to see what mischief Sevelcore had manifested. To his shock, a gnome had appeared from thin air, grappling desperately with his minion.
“Remtall, behind you!” cried Ulpo, running fast to intervene. It was too late: Parasink quickly recognized the danger, and from his Rod leapt a golden arc, encapsulating Remtall, paralyzing him, lifting him into the air. Frozen still in midair, Remtall tried to use his limbs. They were ineffective, dead weight—he could only gaze inertly at his captor, surveying a pair of white-slit eyes set into dry, scaly skin, nearly hidden by the shadow of a hood.
“Vile usurper,” scolded Parasink. Remtall’s body whirled in small circles, slow then fast, his dizziness increasing.
“Enough!” Behlas wailed, running toward the fray. Ulpo tugged at Parasink, unable to knock the weak-looking man from his feet—no matter how hard he pushed, tugged, or bit, the sorcerer did not budge.
Behlas ran before Parasink: white slits widened into ovals of incredulity as Parasink watched Behlas launch a blast of emerald-scarlet electricity, snaking fatally toward the necromancer’s head. Dropping Remtall instantly, Parasink turned to face the streaming blast. He raised the Rod in the direction of the attack just in time: the energy pouring forcefully from Behlas’s fingers disappeared into the Rod, as if hitting a vacuum. Ulpo assaulted Parasink’s legs, barreling into them over and over again, his body his weapon, but it was no use—the sorcerer was grounded by some impenetrable strength, anchored deep into the rock by unseen roots.
Remtall slammed to the ground, released from his floating position halfway to the ceiling; he hit hard against one of the stone slabs, rolled off the table entangled to the mechanical body lying on it. Quickly regaining his feet, fighting to free himself from a mess of hot wires, Remtall looked up at the plight of his friends: Behlas relentlessly tried to bore into Parasink’s defense, yielding nothing—the energy flaying Parasink was tamed, absorbed by the Rod he held aloft.
“Enough!” roared Parasink, his snake-lisp transposed into a deep, angry timbre. Angered at Behlas’s surprising endurance, Parasink rose off the ground, nearly to the ceiling, kicking Ulpo from his legs. From his airborne position he thrust his arms straight out, hands gripped firmly to the center of the Rod of the Gorge—a tremor shook the room, Behlas’s stream of emerald-scarlet light transforming: it lightened to pink and lime, then to white, and finally a painful gold, as the direction of energy reversed from the Rod back toward its attacker. The Rod snapped loudly, issuing drawn-out cracks of high-pitched thunder. Behlas writhed in pain as the gold seared him, covering his body; piercing howls of agony joined the snarling voice of the Rod.
“Parasite of your mother’s womb!” Remtall exclaimed, breaking free from the bloodied mess of wires entangling him. Ulpo, floored from Parasink’s blow, watched his gnomen friend in astonishment: Remtall leapt, body sprawled wide, flying to a remarkable height to reach Parasink’s lower waist; there he clung, dangling from the levitating sorcerer. Stab after stab, Remtall drove his dagger deep into Parasink’s thighs. Unhindered, if in pain at all, the wounds seemed to strengthen the sorcerer’s gold arrest of Behlas’s shuddering body.
In a final fit of energy, Behlas summoned his remaining strength: His Vapoury rallied against the demonic gold that wrapped his body. The stream pouring from the Rod turned white again, then flickered green-red; but it was no use, the gold flickered back instantly, and Behals keeled over, utterly defeated.
“Know you that I do not bleed, or feel pain? Blood is the vestige of primal construction, first Darkin, the flawed iteration of Gaigas, that only I have been able to reprove!” came Parasink’s hiss. He released his hold on Behlas’s body, ready to deal with the gnomen pest stabbing diamond into his legs. Remtall hadn’t fatigued in his assault, though he could scarcely believe what he saw—his dagger pierced the thin man’s skin with each strike, cutting past the robe, into the meat of his thighs, but no blood came forth, instead creating a lattice of ineffectual gouges.
“Down,” commanded Parasink. With a flip of his wrist, Remtall slammed to the cave floor. This time the tiny gnome did not stir, nor move any muscle, but lay still atop a tangle of wires and tubes.
“Those who dare enter my chamber—who dare upset my work—dare insult my intelligence! Appalling creations!” cried Parasink. He reformed his golden energy, thrust it toward Remtall’s downed body.
“Appalling maker!” came a robotic voice. Ulpo watched in awe as Parasink froze in midair; the Rod dropped from his hands, gold light disappeared. The room dimmed to the soft-green glow of only the mechanical bulbs lining the Gear Chamber’s walls. A horrific sight became visible in the jade ambience: the Gear servant, Sevelcore, had clamped two thick cables, running down from the ceiling generator, directly onto Parasink’s feet; jolt after jolt of the generator’s power rent the sorcerer’s body into a pulsating limb. The cables brightened while the ceiling motor whined terribly, as if ready to seize up from too amplified a throughput. As the sorcerer’s body writhed, Sevelcore climbed the nearest table and grabbed a large cord close to the ceiling, affixing it to Parasink’s neck: Parasink’s eye-slits widened, became ovals again; his dark robe sizzled, releasing curls of smoke that flashed into sight with each throbbing of light. He looked down, stared at his Rod which lay far from reach. Sevelcore jumped down and turned off the generator. Parasink swayed back and forth from the ceiling, lifeless, limply hanging from the cord on his neck.
Slowly, Ulpo managed to regain his feet. Standing erect, he braced himself, wondering if the Gear would seek to destroy them all.
“Don’t be afraid, dwarf friend—I may look ugly, but I intend no harm to you, or your friends; you see, a consciousness has somehow returned to me, and I was on your side before you knew it,” came the sweetest robotic droning Ulpo had ever heard.
* * *
A rattle broke the silence in the room. A cord was thrown and a bolt twisted through the air; Remtall shook off the debris covering him and stood up, unsure if he was dreaming. The entire incident with Parasink had been too bizarre, too unsettling to have been real. Scouring for clues amid the emerald ambience, he realized it had truly occurred, he wasn’t mad—a frayed silver-black robe swung softly beneath the generator in the center of the laboratory: Parasink was dead.
“Finally up I see,” Ulpo shot from across the room. Remtall turned away from the hanging corpse and looked upon his dwarven friend, and Behlas next to him; they were still in danger, Remtall realized with a fright—behind them moved the black silhouette of a Gear. Remtall forgot his confusion, picked his dagger up from the rubble at his feet and charged in a blind fury, hoping to reach the Gear before it seized them from behind.
“Woah!” Behlas commanded, barring Remtall’s way, taking a slice from the gnome’s dagger.
“Fool—behind you!” Remtall screamed, furiously struggling to break out of Behlas’s grasp.
“It’s alright, calm down—he’s with us.”
“With us? Pah! He’s enchanted your mind with worm-fever! Let—me—go!”
“He
is, Remtall—Behlas isn’t lying,” Ulpo chimed in. The Gear stepped forward. Remtall beheld the strange organic machine: he wore grey leggings and dust-brown boots; a wide belt of nicked steel crossed his waist, within which wires ran in and out of tight-grooved etchings; a soot-covered vest cloaked his chest, a hole dominant at its center—from the hole jutted a series of thin copper pipes, each glowing lush emerald. Dust concealed the human tone of his face, patched with the bronze reflection of metal in spots; atop his head dirt blond hair ran through small circlets of lit brass; gnome-sized eyes pulsed bright red—obvious machine parts.
“I am Sevelcore—or, I was. You may call me Binn, it was my name once, I think,” came the mechanical voice. His halting inflection hinted of a real person behind the ruby stars.
“Never mind your name—you were in league with that one!” Remtall spat, restrained by Behlas; he pointed to the slain form of Parasink, hanging motionless below the generator.
“It was I who opened the door for you earlier, after the alarm—I knew you were there. I didn’t want Parasink aware of it—” replied Binn.
“He’s right Remtall, I felt it too, but I couldn’t explain it then,” Behlas said.
“But, agh…” Remtall strained but could find no reason to find Binn an enemy. He peered curiously again at the face of the Gear. “You—you were a gnome once, weren’t you?”
“I was. But my memory—it’s not very clear,” Binn replied.
“How could this be?” Remtall asked. Seeing his friend rise to the truth, Behlas released his hold.
“You missed the story, sleeping all this time—you were knocked out cold from that fall,” Ulpo explained.
“Fall?”
“Don’t you remember stabbing his legs?” asked Ulpo.
“Ah—I remember it didn’t do one damned bit of good, that vile cheat of nature,” Remtall glowered. Suddenly, he was distracted, looking all around the chamber, searching for something.
“What is it?” Ulpo asked.
“His liquor, he’s lost it,” scoffed Behlas.
“No I haven’t,” Remtall came back, hopping deftly over several piles of rubble to reach the bronzed bottle that had been lost during the fray.
“Then, without giving me the long version, what happ…” Remtall began, paused midsentence, even before he had a chance to drink the last of the liquor: “The Rod!”
“Yes, we have it, right here,” said Behlas. His left arm held aloft the thin oak staff.
“Ahah!—We’ve done it!” the gnome cried, lifting his bottle high, gulping deeply in celebration.
“Hey!” scolded Ulpo, leaping over debris to seize the bottle before Remtall finished it.
“Sorry,” muttered Remtall, wiping his chin with his left hand, relinquishing the bottle with the other.
“Thanks for saving us some,” said Ulpo sarcastically.
“Well then, let’s have the short of it,” Remtall said. “I want to get out of these forsaken mines.” Binn looked patiently at Behlas, waiting for him to start, but Behlas did not, and rather looked at Binn with approval to speak.
“It seems that the Sleeping Enox has stirred the pool of energy within the world, Gaigas’s way of bleeding an excess of harmful energy inside—” Binn started, but Remtall rudely interrupted:
“I don’t care a damn about the Sleeping Enox, I don’t even know what the hell it is you’re talking about—I want to know how you killed him,” Remtall yelled, warmth of liquor returning to his blood, spoiling his patience.
“Oh—I see. I injected the terminal current—created from his own power and the Rod’s, into his nervous system. I chained the primary channel motor directly to his spine, through his neck,” told Binn.
“He saved us all, Remtall,” Ulpo chimed in.
“Salt sea leech-mother—was you that killed him?” Remtall replied in shock.
“I did.”
“Well that’s one I’ll have to pay back! Who’d have thought a Gear—one of the bastard’s own—would have…” He paused, working out the scenario in his head. He looked at Behlas, then at Binn. “You’re telling me that you broke from his spell too?”
“As I said, it was the Sleeping Enox, I am nearly certain,” replied Binn.
“But how could a tube spiked into his back kill him? He had the rod!” Remtall said, deep in thought, ignoring the Sleeping Enox.
“The Rod—you came for it, and yet you know so little about it,” Behlas said, laughing hard. His hand went to his chest where a pain had manifested, his laugh becoming a cough.
“Remtall, your name is, correct?—the Rod has great power to destruct, but not to preserve vitality—it is a purely offensive artifact,” explained Binn.
“But he used it to build all this—this motor, these experiments, even you I take it!”
“Yes—Parasink used the Rod for those purposes, but the Rod was the agent through which he smashed the elements of rock into energy form; he did not create a heartier corporeal form for himself—even with all that power, Parasink was a terribly frail, fragile being. Had he understood what the coming of the Enox meant, perhaps he could have devised some method to protect himself—it is to our great benefit he did not,” Binn said.
“Hope it was worth your expedition, Remtall, and that you hadn’t planned on bringing it home to make your friends indestructible,” Behlas said, calmed from his fit of laughter.
“It’ll do just fine. Hand it here,” he demanded.
“Have a try…” smiled Behlas. He held the Rod out. Remtall seized his prized possession with both fists, eager to embrace what he’d set to sea for.
“Aagh!” cried Remtall. The Rod lit with gold light, stinging Remtall; he dropped the staff, the gold vanishing as the oak bounced off the stone floor. Behlas bent to pick it up as Remtall rubbed his hands against his weathered pants. “You’d better hold it for me.”
“Good thing we found our ghost-friend, eh Rem? Doesn’t look like we’d have been able to get it across the sea—even if we had been able to kill Parasink ourselves,” Ulpo said, mollifying Remtall’s anger at being unable to wield the staff himself.
“I too, would have been unable to assist you—it takes a great power of Vapoury to but hold the staff,” Binn said.
“Well then, let’s be out of this Gaigas forsaken place,” Remtall riled, his head turned to thoughts of warm beds, women and ale.
“But what of the rest here?” Binn protested.
“Ulpo and I mustn’t tarry. You two may do whatever you please. Know that you won’t be forgotten, and that we will one day repay the heroism you’ve rendered here,” Remtall said. Content with his goodbye, he moved toward the door, ready to return to the Endless Forest.
“I am coming—if there’s anything to be done for the slaves and spirits of this place, we’ve done it—if the Enox has risen, then any who haven’t been here too long will realize they’ve a soul again, and they will find it in themselves to leave—as for the rest, there is nothing we can do for them, not now,” Behlas said.
“Then I’ll follow,” Binn said after a moment of silence.
“A Gear! To come back to the East Continent? Ho!” Remtall said, thoroughly amused.
“I may be part machine, but the evil in me died with Parasink, who instilled it; and my consciousness has somehow been restored—I will go, on whatever errand you are tasked with, for I have been sick of these dank mines for too long, and long to see free lands again,” Binn cried.
“Fine with me—our ship is more than well-equipped for four—but no more of this dallying, we march to the shores!” Remtall ordained. He walked to the far side of the room. Behlas and Ulpo followed their gnomen friend, and after a long pause, Binn chased up.
“So where are we going then?” Binn asked.
“As second-in-command on this expedition, Ulpo will fill in such details,” Remtall explained. The three marched fast through the tunnels, past the empty miners’ quarters, and out onto the high rock-packed forest trail. They hiked swiftly do
wn; all the while Ulpo filled Binn in with details about their situation: he told how the evil wizard Aulterion had attacked Enoa; how Vesleathren had used magic to corrupt a generation of trolls, creating the Feral Brood Army; how evil had been defeated in Enoa, but reformed in Hemlin; how Krem, Slowin, Flaer, and Adacon had all been heroes, ensuring that the world was not destroyed.
“I have been a native of Aaurlind since before I was—made like this by him—and I’d heard lore of Vesleathren and Aulterion, but I thought both to be dead—legends of a war before my time,” Binn said.
“Young then, are you?” Remtall asked, realizing it was impossible to tell the age of the once-gnome, given all the mechanical parts sprouting from him. “I was in the Five Country War, boy,” Remtall told.
“Really?” asked the eager Binn; for the rest of the journey to the shore, Remtall became the focus of attention, recounting tales of his time spent as captain aboard the Granfernace, in command of the Gnomen Fleet, about which Binn had heard legends in his youth. Binn remembered tales of valor, and he was greatly enthused to not only hear the stories once more, but from a direct source, a legend himself.
“What a strange life you have led, Captain Olter’Fane,” Behlas smiled as dawn opened its pink eye through a last row of trees that separated the brush line from the long beach.
“Ah—she’s a sight for sore eyes,” Remtall exclaimed, first to step through the trees, seeing clearly his anchored ship, half a mile away, thirty yards out to sea, beyond the gentle lap of the Kalm, ebbing away from the flat yellow-white sand.
The party of four crowded into the small boat that Remtall had tied to a black-rock jetty. Remtall and Ulpo grabbed oars and began to bat furiously into waves, making good speed toward their ship.
Darkin: The Prophecy of the Key (The Darkin Saga Book 2) Page 19
