I rushed him, knowing that if we didn't keep him down, we might not get another chance to ground him. I dropped my bow. I was too close to use it. The axes at my waist were too light to even bother a monster like Barbas. It was time for the hammer. I unslung it as I leaped in for the kill, swinging the weapon one around my head and bringing it down in a thunderous blow intended to shatter his spine.
Someone hit me from the side, with such force that my armor was pulverized and I felt at least one of my ribs break. I crashed to the ground, my hammer skidding from my fingers. Through the pain, I looked up to see Thukkar stomping past me with a flat, dead-eyed expression on his weathered face. No. The broken haft of a great hammer dropped from his grip, and as he moved toward the fallen Barbas, he snatched up a discarded spear and casually swung it with deceptively lazy motion into the side of Nissikul's head. Her helm burst, and she fell heavily, her armor shattering all around her and leaving her lying naked and bloody amidst the carnage. Her eyes stared sightlessly at me, and I prayed to any powers that could hear me that she was just unconscious. Satisfied that the demon wasn't about to die, the dead glare of Thukkar swiveled back to focus on me, and he marched woodenly over to me, brandishing his spear to thrust it into my throat.
Barbas stepped up behind the dead ranger, roaring, “I said that one was mine!” He plunged his hand straight through Thukkar’s back as easily as I might have torn through a rotten rag and he tore out the wriggling Eater Spawn from where it had been hiding. With a negligent motion, he crushed the spawn and threw it aside, letting Thukkar’s ruined body tumble, broken, to the ground.
Barbas crouched beside me, that insane grin stretching his lips once more. His expression was only made more horrifying by the fact that half of the flesh of his face had been burned away, leaving only the articulated metal skull beneath. “Hello, savage. I wonder what will happen if I tear your heart out? Do you think a god will come scurrying out?”
Chapter Seventy
Joanna
Bedlam
The Eater King lunged for me, trying to skewer me with two of his spiked segmented legs and pin me in place. I drew the sword I had taken from the temple beneath the ice and cleaved cleanly through them both in a single swing, sending twitching metal segments splashing into the gore that littered the ground all around us. The freakish shark smile on the Eater King’s face didn’t falter, not even for a moment. Even as I watched, the legs I had severed were growing back, emerging from the segmented metal body as the little tendrils all around them twisted and writhed.
I backed away, gathering a spear of witch-ice in my hand and hurling it with my enhanced strength at the horrible metal bug's exposed chest. Thin, razor-tipped legs thrashed, and the spear shattered into ice before it could even reach the creature's shining skin. "Shit." A mad, slack-faced ranger tried to rush me from out of the roiling crowd, and I backhanded him savagely, crushing his skull as easily as I might have cracked an egg. The Eater King skittered after me in a riot of spindly limbs, grinning like the cat that caught the canary. He was clearly enjoying this. "It's no use, ‘Storm Queen,' the monster said, in Perwik's voice. "You've been outplayed. You're outclassed. Just give up now, and I'll eat you before that thing from Beneath gets to you. I promise, girl, that’s mercy that I’m offering you.”
I showed the Eater King my teeth, continuing my slow progress backwards. A spear-wielding woman came screaming in from behind me, and I threw a spike of witch-ice into her brain without breaking eye contact with the monster. “How long were you there? Was there ever an Elder Perwik?”
The Eater King laughed, a cross between the Erin-Vulur coughing growl and the horrible shrieking sound I had heard him make before. “There was once a ranger Perwik, though he was dead long before I got him appointed Elder. He's quite famous among the Erinye. It's why they chose him to lead the other rangers. Why they chose me. After all, he did slay the Eater King." Another nails-on-slate laugh set my teeth on edge. "Though I was a little worried the first time I met that idiot Deepseeker. It seemed, however, that he couldn't sense my children or me, not even in his strapping new body. It's sad, isn't it? All that time fighting the shadows of things trapped far beneath miles of ice, and he had a bona fide man-eater right under his nose."
I snarled and hurled another useless spear at him. He shredded it, as expected, mocking me with his terrible laughter. Just a few more steps and we would see who was laughing. I just needed room to move, where I wouldn’t be tripping over bodies. I needed the ice under my feet, needed the good, old, comforting weight of the glacier backing me. Just a couple more steps. The Eater King seemed to realize what I was about, because he suddenly pounced, springing for me with all of his spindly spear-tipped legs flashing forward to take me. The heel of my boot came down on the ice, and the fight changed.
I turned, letting the machine spirits spiral out into the cold and bring forth the ice to do my bidding. It wasn’t even witch-ice that answered me. The glacier itself was full of old nanite spirit clouds. It was one thing that the Erinye religion had gotten right about their world. The land belonged to Ravanur, and the ice was her shroud. It was practically a living thing. And it was mine. I drove my fist forward as if I meant to punch the Eater King out of the air, even though I was nowhere near close enough to strike him. The glacier beneath me shifted, and a great sculpted arm emerged from the ground in a chorus of shattering ice, curving through the air with deceptive slowness. It caught the Eater King full in his chest and bore him down to the ice with crushing finality, smashing him like a toy. But I wasn't done. I twisted that gigantic, frozen hand and plucked the battered metal body from where it lay. The shark-mouthed face shrieked in rage at me, and all of the Erinye playing host to the Eater's Spawn turned towards me as one, locking on to me with single-minded focus. Fair enough. This King's reign was over. I crushed him in my gigantic sculpted hand, working my fingers until I was sure that the monster had been ground down into fine enough pieces. Then I gave what remained a contemptuous toss and scattered shards of metal across a mile of glacier behind me.
The Spawn all charged at me. There were at least thirty of them still standing. But that was fine; I was literally in my element now. A storm gathered above me in a whirling vortex, answering my call with customary speed. The Great North Wind's laughter boomed out across the heavens, and spears of seething green lightning began stabbing down out of the sky, turning charging Eater-Span and their hosts into steaming meat. Those who made it through the deadly barrage of lightning found only the cold, emotionless jaws of the ice waiting for them, as I opened a great maw in the ice beneath them and swallowed them whole, I crushed them into paste far beneath my feet. That thing from Beneath, the Eater King had said. Barbas was here. This was his doing; not that there had been any doubt in my mind. But where-
“JOANNA!”
I turned and saw Barbas stepping towards me with casual grace, making his way over the twitching piles of ruined bodies and writhing wounded around him. He was dragging something, almost carelessly, though I couldn’t make out what it was. A shout of “Akkandaka” drew my attention over the demon’s shoulder, and I winced. A knot of surviving warriors hadn’t fled, and they gathered at the back of the cave, trying to muster their nerve for a charge that they knew it would accomplish nothing. I raised a hand, palm out to them, telling them not to bother. This had already been a massacre on my account. There was no sense in adding two-score more to the butcher’s bill.
Barbas emerged from the mess of dead, walking towards me over the ice, and I reached down into it for the power to crush him where he stood. I needed him alive for Volistad’s ritual. That didn’t mean I needed him unhurt. And I really, really wanted to hurt him just then. I realized then what he was dragging. He had Volistad by the ankle and was dragging him along the way as a child might have dragged a doll. The ranger’s breastplate had been shattered, and his side seemed distorted. He probably had a broken rib. He thrashed, trying to reach Barbas’ arm, but to no avail. Every time
he got anything resembling a grip on the metal hand holding him, Barbas would just twist his arm and slam the battered warrior back down onto the ice.
"Wow," commented Barbas, his tone acidic. "You've done a great job since you took over here, Jo." He gestured dramatically behind himself with his free hand, a genuine smile on his face. The effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that about half of his skin had been burned off, along with whatever clothes he might have been wearing. This wasn't the person I had loved. This wasn't the architect of my dreams. This was a demon, a dark entity from below, and he had brought about the deaths of so many of my people. Barbas continued his mockery, coming to a halt just five meters away from me, Volistad dangling in his grip. "I mean, I've got to hand it to you, Joanna. I love what you’ve done with the place!”
“Joanna!” Volistad struggled, managing to lock eyes with me for a second. “Kill him! You have the power! Don’t-”
Barbas rolled his eyes and whipped Volistad down hard against the ice, silencing him. I heard the sharp snap of severed bone. I wasn’t sure what level of injury Volistad could come back from, but if this kept up, there wasn’t going to be enough of the Deepseeker to put back together. “So rude,” Barbas commented, grinning like a skull. “Interrupting like that.”
“What do you want?” I asked, my voice flat with weariness. I was tired of this. I was tired of being beaten, tired of being out-classed, tired of being out-fought. I had gone and gathered godlike powers and put together an army. Barbas shouldn’t have had the upper hand, but here we were. My army was scattered, my people were broken and dying.
“Oh, surely you know. I want your heart, love. The literal heart beating in your chest.” He laughed, and despite it all, the sound stirred a warmth deep in my gut. That laugh was infectious, even coming out of burned metal face, even when its owner was dragging my lover by the heel as if he were a child. “You see, your pitiful fabricator stopped working. I think that the little morsel I took this voice from might have tampered with it, but it doesn’t matter. The thing with the burug was an inspired choice on the part of that old bitch, Ravanur. Biomechanical nanite-control facilities and factories, all in one, grown fully-formed and ready-made. All they need to work is that most elusive of qualities- the Maker's Mark. The touch of Ravanur. The echo of her power." Barbas aimed a finger at my chest. "The Stormcallers got by with shards of that strength for so long, making do with what they could cobble together without their Mother's touch. But you, you have the genuine article." He beckoned with one hand to me. "So give it."
I blinked. “You want me to give you my heart?”
“Yes. Take it out and give it to me.” He squeezed Volistad’s ankle in his grip and broken bones ground together beneath the skin. “Give it now.”
“I can’t take my own heart out of my chest, you lunatic. If you want it, you’re going to have to put him down and come take it from me.” I knew exactly what the demon would do the moment the words crossed my lips, but it was too late.
Barbas released Volistad's leg with a little flick of his wrist, sending him skidding across the ice towards me. He stepped forward and placed one foot on the Deepseeker's chest, looking me right in the eyes. "Put him down, Joanna? Well, if you insi-" He stopped in place, mid-word, the same smug smile frozen on his face.
“What the-” I managed, but nothing else came out. Without any fanfare, the demon wearing Barbas’ face went completely limp, crashing to the ground in a tangle of blood-smeared metal limbs.
Volistad let out a feeble cheer and subsided into cackling like a madman. “Hahahah, you smug bastard. I figured it out.”
“What?” I repeated. Clever.
Volistad groaned, apparently feeling the pain of all of his wounds at once. "I'm the Deepseeker, Joanna. As you control the sky and the ice, so I control the machines themselves. That thing is was just a complicated machine. It took me far too long to think of it, and even longer to teach myself how to do it, but I turned off his power source." I rushed over to him, wanting to snatch him up off the ground but unsure of how broken his body was. He waved me off weakly. "No, no, I've got it. Now that I've gotten the hang of the damn machine spirits, it goes a lot faster." As I watched, his leg straightened with a series of gut-clenching pops, and the distorted lump in his side subsided. "Still hurts like hell, though." I held out a hand, and he took it, letting me pull him to his feet.
“You did it,” I said lamely, finally regaining control of my vocal cords.
"Yes," Volistad groaned. "And you slew the Eater King. I saw it." His face twisted, and he showed all of his teeth in a snarl. "Now, let's get that fucking thing down to my ship so we can finish this. Would you mind carrying him? I need to find out if my sister is still alive." Without another word, he started off towards the charnel pit that was all that remained of our glorious army.
I bent and seized the inert metal form, hoisting it up onto my shoulder. The demon was heavy, even for me, but I wasn’t about to complain. The surviving Erinye warriors that hadn’t fled were fanning out from the mouth of the cave already, searching for survivors amidst the carnage.
“Yes,” I said bitterly, echoing Volistad. “Let’s finish this.”
Chapter Seventy-One
Volistad
Genesis
We stood in the great cryogenic room aboard Heaven’s Hawk. The inert form of the demon machine lay crumpled beside one of the tanks, missing its head and a great deal of its chest cavity. Though I had switched off the power, we were talking about an ancient god here. I had beaten him because he had stopped thinking about me, fully focused as he was on humiliating Joanna. I didn't fool myself into thinking that I could use the same trick twice and survive. So the moment we got the metal body down into my ship, I had removed the processor in the head as well as the extra data storage device I had found in its chest. There was a lot in there, but I had been able to isolate the part of the vast quantity of data contained within that I was sure represented the real Barbas. The rest of it I erased with a certain savage satisfaction. I knew now that I couldn't do the same to the gods in their cells. There was some loophole the oldest of them could exploit involving quantum computing- but since the Dark One in this body had uploaded himself into hardware, he was vulnerable. And now he was gone. It was a shame that he had killed so many of my people before I had figured out how to stop him.
Nissikul, it turned out, had survived, mainly because she was stubborn as the mountain we all lived on, and she simply refused to bleed to death. All of her wounds had been frozen in fragments of witch-ice, even in as she lay unconscious. Many of the other Stormcallers were dead- they had apparently been among those most heavily targeted by the Eater Spawn- but those that remained seemed to have decided that Nissi was some kind of warrior prophet. And so the endless cycle of religion and myth keeps turning, remarked a cynical, ancient part of me, but even Palamun couldn’t fully condemn the whole thing. Who knew if there really wasn’t a real God out there? Just because one group of power-mad mortals had dared to encroach into the realm of the divine, did that make them gods? After all, as I now knew, even the race of people from which Ravanur and Palamun had sprung, were but a blip in time when compared to the age of the stars, the age of the universe. Let the remaining Stormcallers venerate my sister. Perhaps I could get Joanna to change the word from god to Saint. That would have a nice ring to it. Saint Nissikul. We could canonize them all: Saint Thukkar the Stalwart, Saint Joanna the Fierce, Saint Volistad… what would they call me, five-hundred years from now?
Joanna finished stripping out of her bloodied sealskin clothes, and I looked up for a moment with interest. Even in the aftermath of the worst day of my life, a part of me perked up, but I clubbed it back down. This was not the time. She climbed into one of the two pods standing at the center of the room, where Palamun had made the switch between his various hosts. I met her eyes as I finished connecting the robot head to the cables that had once led to the second tank. “Do you understand what we’re about to do her
e?”
She nodded, shuddering as the crystal front panel sealed in front of her and cryo-amniotic fluid began to fill the space, crawling slowly up her body. I noted with a clinical sort of detachment that any wounds she had taken in the battle, just twelve hours before, were already gone. She didn’t even have bruises. I, on the other hand, looked like a horrible fright mask of myself. I wasn’t sure there was a part of me that wasn’t composed mostly of bruises. The leg by which the demon had dragged me had healed when I told it to, but apparently, there were limits to my control. Blame it on my inexperience or my distraction, I wasn't going to be running any foot-races anytime soon, and the trip down the ladder to this ship had been its own special form of hell. But it didn’t matter. What was done was done.
I reached out with my mind, sending signals through my nanite clouds to the cryogenic tank and coupling its internal network with the cybernetic lattice I found in Joanna’s brain. It was a very cunning piece of work, and I wondered if I would ever get to meet the sort of people who had designed it. Perhaps it was the ancient machine god in my head, but I was finding myself liking this whole “advanced technology” thing. Maybe I would keep doing it after the ice was gone.
I felt Joanna's mind connect to the network as the cryo-amniotic fluid rose to her chin. She closed her eyes as the liquid crested over her head and breathed deep. She was completely encased in it now, and her lungs were taking air directly from the tank. I checked the connections on the head one last time, grimaced, and activated it. The dream began coming together between Joanna and the spirit trapped inside the head almost immediately. I thought about watching but then thought better of it. It was best to allow a woman her privacy, especially in her last moment with her friend. Her former lover, a primal part of me corrected, growling with poorly suppressed jealousy. I snorted. She was with me, now. So what did it matter? I activated the monitor and waved a negligent hand at the floor behind me. A stool rose up smoothly beneath me, and I sat down to wait for my moment.
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 40
