Heaven's Gate

by Toby Bennett

  Impossibly, Blake manages to twist his body through the grasping ribbons of flesh and leaves behind several trophies, quivering on the floor, for his efforts. The white haired Pilgrim is fast and strong but it is clear to Lillian from the start that he is on the defensive. Again and again he is forced to duck and weave through the grasping limbs of his two attackers. Lillian stands at the exit to the chamber unable to decide what to do. It is only a matter of time before her self-appointed saviour is brought down, already the seemingly innumerable white limbs are harrying him into an ever tighter mesh and Dale seems impervious to any damage done to him. Lillian edges closer to the door trying to work up the courage to run into the ill lit passages but her common sense tells her she does not know the way out, nor has she forgotten the mad, fiery eyes watching her from the darkness. The fact that Pellan’s twisted offspring have not seen fit to aid him in the struggle, leads her to wonder whether whatever freaks are still waiting in the darkness will obey his injunction against harming her. There is simply no denying that the Pilgrim is her only hope and it is the acknowledgement of this thought, rather than any personal bravery, which makes her turn and go back into the chamber.

  There is nowhere for the fool to go now, Dale thrills in that part of his brain that is still working. It will take a while for him to work out the knots and pulped ganglia in his bullet-shattered nervous system, but for now, he has all that he needs to function in his killer instinct, which drives his malleable body to ever greater extremes. Had he been in full position of his faculties, he would have admitted that his assessment of the Pilgrim as ‘merely human’ had proved terribly flawed, he had never seen anyone move so fast and his strength, though, obviously beginning to flag, was prodigious. At the moment, however, all he can see is his victim at bay, brought to heel by his master’s strong limbs. He gathers himself for the pounce, the final charge that will end this fight. Without his right ear or eye, he gets no warning of the sudden impact as Lillian throws herself against him, pushing him off line. The dark hunter gives a howl of frustration and whirls on his new attacker, through the red haze that clouds his mind he sees the girl as nothing but an annoyance, an insect, which has ruined his moment. Heedless of dimly remembered instructions not to harm her Dale raises both sets of talons with every intention of leaving the girl disemboweled and screaming but instead pain explodes through his chest.

  A white limb punches through Dale’s amoured skin, its claw extruding from the front of his chest and lifts the howling vampire, high above Lillian’s head.

  “You were told not to harm her, under any circumstances.” Pellan growls but there is no response, the claw has pierced Dale’s heart. With a frown that distorts his jowls even further, Pellan lets the corpse drop.

  “Enough of this!” He says, addressing Blake where he stands warding off the poised claws with his dancing blade. “You cannot win and I cannot let you have the girl, perhaps we can come to another arrangement.”

  “Like what?” Blake asks, warily.

  “Let me make my deal and then bother whoever buys her. I will have what I want and you can bother the other fools who seek the Gate to your heart’s content.”

  “How do I know that I can trust you?” Blake asks, stepping gingerly from the circle of severed claws and clear gore.

  “What choice do you have? I grow new limbs every day, as part of my condition. I can already see you flagging, there is simply no way for you to stop me. However, I dislike pain and I see another way for us all to get what we want.”

  “What makes you think that I can’t kill you?”

  “Lop limbs off all day if you like, I’m still all around you. I have grown for centuries, I have countless limbs, many hearts.” The Elder slaps the wound already sealing on his flabby distorted chest. “What you see here is only a small part of me, there is simply no way for you to really harm me.”

  “There is one thing you’ve forgotten,” the Pilgrim says making as if to sheathe his sword.

  “What’s that?” Pellan asks, with the air of one indulging a child.

  “As far as I can see you only have one head.”

  All the white limbs react at once, grasping as fast as they can trying to fend off the streak of motion that shoots towards the bulk in the middle of the room but they are none of them fast enough to stop Blake’s sword from lashing out in a heavy blow that sends the large head flying away from its obese body. Deprived of sight and much of its personality, Pellan flails out at its tormentor, fine tendrils as thin as hair wait patiently for any vibration. Nearly a dozen clawed limbs tear into the ground near the spot where Blake had so recently stood but the Pilgrim is gone now moving as quickly as he can, while taking care not to step too heavily on the ground. A few feet away Pellan’s head watches him with an expression of sheer hatred, its mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water. With an abrupt heave of its toothless jaw, the head manages to drag itself forward, leaving a snail’s trail of fluid. Already the gelatinous neck is sprouting thin cables which it uses to stabilize itself and help propel it forward.

  At the sight of this abomination moving towards him, Blake instantly stands still and brings his finger up to his lips silently urging Lillian not to make a sound or movement. It takes a few seconds before the head registers the significance of the warning and by then it is too late. Three clawed tentacles slam into the only thing they can still sense moving in the room and tear the gaping head into splinters of bone and torn flesh. Without a central brain it takes a moment for the main body to process the fact that the size and weight of its victim can only mean one thing. A shower of viscous fluid erupts from the remains of Pellan’s neck and the swollen torso quivers with a scream that wracks the whole body but finds little expression in the ruined vocal chords at the stump of the neck. ‘NOW!’ Blake mouths, gathering his legs beneath him.

  The anguished monster feels the change in weight but it does not react in time to prevent, its attacker from grabbing Lillian by her left arm and plunging into the partially lit corridor. Turn follows turn and Lillian finds herself all but dragged down the slimy passages which seem to explode with raking claws and hungry tentacles. All around her she can hear the screams of Pellan’s twisted children dying in their burrows and damp graves, killed by their parent’s madness. Somehow the Pilgrim guides them through the chaos, taking little more than scratches despite the frenzied attacks launched from the very walls themselves. More than once Lillian feels something wet close on a wrist or an ankle but the Pilgrim’s sabre lashes out so quickly that they never even seem to stop moving. At last they turn a corner and the darkness ahead is twinkling with stars. Lillian slumps against the damp wall, her body going limp with sudden relief.

  “No!” the Pilgrims cry comes just in time to allow her to throw her body to the side and avoid the writhing tentacle and its hooked claw as it bursts from the wall just above her head. Once more the sabre blurs and the offending limb drops, still pumping watery icor into the mud.

  “We can’t afford to rest yet,” the white haired man admonishes her, “we will not be safe until we are out of this damned marsh.” He confides in an urgent whisper, as he drags her up roughly by her armpit.

  “Let go…” Lillian snaps, trying to drag herself free but the grip on her arm is every bit as strong and unforgiving as Kurt’s undead grasp had been. Without saying anything else the Pilgrim lifts her painfully and throws them both towards the tunnel’s end.

  Cold water and more mud, rise up to meet their falling bodies. Lillian shrieks in shock and outrage as the miasma of the swamp engulfs her and sticks to the course woolen robe, which immediately becomes sodden and heavy and seems to drag her down further into the mud. With what little strength she has left the baron’s daughter heaves herself up onto her knees to glare hatred at the Pilgrim, who seems somehow, to have avoided the worst of the muck. She opens her mouth to vent anger that has built for nearly thirty hours but at moment the ground behind her explodes with a huge sucking noise. Whether it was
the ferocity of Pellan’s attacks which collapsed the tunnels or he had always been the one holding them up and had simply allowed them to collapse through carelessness or in the hope of trapping the fugitives there is no way to tell but it takes all of Blake’s strength to pull a spluttering Lillian from under the wave of chill mud, caused by the sudden implosion of his ancient lair. The depression in the earth stretches for nearly a mile behind them, a ruined stretch of vegetation, quickly filling with the churned and dirty waters of the marsh. Lillian is too exhausted and dazed to even look back, she simply allows the Pilgrim to guide her on the long trek through the marshes until at last they emerge, the last two weary survivours to walk out of Eden.

  *

  The great train that the people of the Bowl know only as Tyre is coming to a stop at Brigton station. Steam and smoke hiss and coil upwards, ghostly fingers catching the pink glow of the setting sun, a light that the Tinker, hidden in the foremost compartment of the train behind thick shutters will never see again. There is some regret in the loss of that light even now; since his all but forgotten boyhood Kalip had admired the trains, he had delighted in the power and majesty of the juggernauts as they settled at the platforms, like dragons choking smoke and smelling of fire. He had pursued his craft long enough now to know that the steam and all the rest were mere show, though he could not even begin to guess at the true complexity of the energies that powered the great locomotives. Not even three centuries of study had given him that much insight, he knew that the great machines had little more than appearance in common with the rare locomotives that the noble families sometimes ran on the disused lines.

  A shudder from the small object curled in his cold hand brings him back from boyhood fancies. He looks down at the little messenger, a construct, all brass and glossy steel, yet so cleverly made that it was light as a bird in his hand. Indeed the creature under the metal skin had once been a bird but that was before he had shared some of his essence with it and grafted it into the metal skin it now wore. Now its tiny eyes were his eyes, its every flutter his to command, should he so choose. With such instruments at his disposal it was surprising that he had not learned of the girl’s disappearance almost as soon as it happened; the only explanation was that there had been an outside agency involved, someone who knew enough to keep her out of sight or how to make sure that they kept away from his small spies. A task that was not all that easy since, unless it was stripped down as it was now, the messenger would be almost indistinguishable from any one of the thousand birds that flew over the royal palace every day, he’d only taken the outer skin off now to ensure that someone had not found a way to tamper with it.

  After all the effort he had taken to maneouver the girl into Leedon’s clutches, it was galling to think that she had simply escaped. Impossible to countenance that she had slipped both Leedon’s guards and his own spies without help, Zacurius must be involved, there was just no other explanation. Kalip curses himself for a fool, there had been no rumour of the silver obsessed beaurocrat and he had made the mistake of reckoning without him or indeed Pellan, who, it seemed, had now got hold of the girl. It had seemed so perfect, marry the girl, who was the key to the whole equation to the General and then let him do all the legwork. Just as he had allowed the General to dispose of his fellow Elders, with the added bonus that, due to his agents’ unstinting efforts, many of the forbidden artifacts that had once been kept from him in the Citadel, were now in his position. He was already working on a creature that blended his own handiwork and this ancient power when the girl had disappeared.

  Kalip looks across his cabin to the silver shape reflecting the ruddy half light of the room in its smoothed contours and whip thin appendages that looked so much like the limbs of the fresh water squid that inhabited the waters around IslandCity. The repairs were so close to completion, the functions listed on the old parchment were almost perfectly integrated with its new functions and the mind of the unfortunate he had sealed inside the metal skin. The servant was almost certainly mad by now but that was hardly the point, a combination of machinery and sorcery ensured that its twisted mind had little or nothing to do with its behaviour, at least until the controller allowed it to express that pent up rage. He had allowed himself to get too carried away in the details and forgotten that he was not alone. Now, if he were to keep things as he wanted them, he would have to come to terms with Pellan. The bloated freak would no doubt ask for more than either he or Zacurius could afford but he would have to meet those demands no matter what it took. Besides, once the Gate was his, this world would mean very little. Kalip gives a sigh that is more a reflexive memory than anything to do with breathing.

  The construct could have massacred a whole army if it had to but it would be no good against his fellow Elders, no real use until he could get Leedon in position to use the girl. He would have to rely on smaller tools for now, his new toy was an instrument designed for broad strokes. As if in answer to his thoughts, a light rap on the cabin’s hidden door announces the arrival of his most senior human agent.

  With a snap of his fingers Kalip activates the door’s mechanism and allows the man to enter. The white of a Pardoner’s robe, only slightly stained by the station’s soot, makes the Tinker smile. Who would suspect that such a senior member of the Inquisition could be one of the Strigoi’s servants and would soon be in the presence of the General himself? Kalip only regretted that the nature of the game they now played prevented him from having his man simply reveal Zacurius to Leedon, but whatever else he might think, the leader of the Crusade must not suspect the truth of his failure until the last.

  “My Lord.” The man in the robes simpers. His true and helpless adoration for his master cannot prevent the Pardoner from slapping at his clothing in the hope of getting some of the soot from it. The man had always been fastidious and too obsessed with his appearance but it was something that Kalip tolerated, after all he reminds himself, a bad workman blames his tools. Sensing something of Kalip’s displeasure, the man makes as if to speak.

  “Spare me any explanations,” the Tinker forestalls his servant, “the girl is gone and that is an end to it.”

  The man blinks, obviously surprised that his lord has taken the disruption to their schemes so well.

  “Don’t be surprised, I can hardly be angry with you when I failed to get wind of her escape. I have, however, at least some passably good news.”

  “What is that, my Lord?” His minion dares to ask.

  “My little friend here has brought me some valuable information,” Kalip holds up the intricate little construct in his hand. As it had been preprogrammed to do when in the open, the little spy hops from foot to foot imitating the quick darting movements of a small bird on a branch. The almost perfect mime is made strangely disturbing by its skeletal metal limbs. Unaware or indifferent to his servant’s discomfort at this simple display of his handiwork Kalip continues, “Zacurius’s plan to have the girl has been disrupted by Pellan, one of his children snatched her while she was still on the road.”

  “With respect, sir, how is that good news? Those marshes would be impossible to thoroughly search, if Pellan wanted to, he could keep the girl and there would be little we could do about it except to launch a full invasion against an apparently empty swamp, which if ever we could persuade General Leedon to countenance, would be almost impossible to explain without confirming old Rugan’s constant insistence that vampires are still a threat.”

  “Have no fear of that, the old freak definitely has no interest in the girl for his own sake. He’s carved out a niche for himself, which he’s not left in generations, why would he develop an interest in the Gate now?”

  “You think he will trade her?”

  “Just so. We will probably be able to come to an arrangement and we have the advantage of being able to make an offer before Zacurius even knows his plans are thwarted. Besides the girl is no good without the book, with luck we shall be able to reclaim the girl and proceed with the original plan…
. Nothing more than a case of wedding jitters eh?” The Pardoner seems partially comforted by his lord’s reassurance but he still shifts uncomfortably.

  “Is there more I should know?” Kalip prompts.

  “No it’s just, well… can we trust the plan now? It will be hard to keep General Leedon to the idea, he was hardly keen on her to begin with.”

  “If politics isn’t enough to convince him then the Gate will be, how can so pious a man refuse a chance at Heaven itself?”

  “Not easily but there is always Rugan. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were he rather than Zacurius behind the girl’s disappearance.”

  “And what would the priest have to gain? You’ve all but usurped him, haven’t you?”

  “Just that, sir, I think he seeks to destroy the alliance I forged in order to undermine me in the General’s eyes.”

  Kalip is about to reply when a small slit, set in one of the compartment’s walls, admits another winged spy, at the same time one of the crystal panels set in the wall opposite flares into life, revealing the image of a bedraggled pair, pulling themselves from the mud. Kalip’s servant draws in a breath of recognition at the sight of the grimy Lady Carter but Kalip’s attention is all for the tall white haired figure next to her.

  “It would seem that I have underestimated the odds once again! Pellan is no longer someone to worry about.”

  “How could Zacurius have achieved this so quickly?” The Pardoner wonders aloud staring at the devastation of Pellan’s collapsed home.