About that time the unicorn appeared.
I could not later swear to that part. I was, obviously, rather preoccupied, and somewhat delirious. But if, as I feared, this blatantly violent display of the Power could serve as an attraction to beings capable of sensing it and finding their way to it, the possibility exists.
It was pale white, and it pranced about me in a tight circle, then tossed its head once and vanished.
So too, moments later, did the red griffon and the turquoise, three-headed serpent—though my head was spinning to such a degree by that point that all of it could have been a hallucination. Evelyn later claimed to have seen none of this; though, in my defense, she was not plugged into the flow of energy, as I was, and therefore was not operating at anything like the same level of perception.
My attempts to slow the rate of the flow had proven entirely ineffectual so far, and death—in one form or another—loomed now as a very real possibility. I resolved to try a different tack. Inhaling deeply, I pulled still more of the Power into me. Yes, more of it. More even than the insatiable silver shard was demanding. I channeled it down through my arms, actually encouraging the flow to increase even more. I sought to overload the link between the piece of metal and myself—though, if it failed, this would probably result in my incineration even sooner than before.
Out of the corner of my eye I thought I detected movement, but I could not be distracted at the moment. My hands were aflame, my arms searing hot, but somehow I had to ignore it all and work through the process in careful and deliberate fashion. Taking another breath, I bore down with all my might. The air around me crackled with blue bolts of lightning, playing over the silvery trees and across my flesh. The Power flowed into and through me like a gusher. My teeth chattered, and my arms shook uncontrollably. A single crack, like thunder, sounded. The metallic object in my hands exploded, hurling me backwards.
I slid to a stop on the smooth, gray surface, small silvery pieces raining down around me. I lay there and I watched them fall, and my brain worked.
Pieces. Fragments of a larger whole, dropping out of the sky, falling into place.
I must have started to understand it all then—to subconsciously arrange fragments and pieces of the bigger picture within my mind. Distracted as I was by innumerable other thoughts and events, however, it would be some time yet before I came to know what I knew.
The silver object had disintegrated. I looked down at myself somewhat nervously, fearful of what damage I might see, but was relieved to find nothing visibly wrong. My hands were numb, while my arms tingled as if they had been asleep. Add to this the fact that my head was spinning, and I found I had some difficulty in getting to my feet. All in all, however, I felt I’d made out as well as I could have hoped.
As I struggled to rise, Evelyn rushed towards me, then stopped dead and stared past me, mouth opening soundlessly.
I looked back.
Something similar to one of my portals had opened, perhaps sixty yards away. Rather than glowing with one of the colors of the gods, however, its entirety was black, like a pool of ink turned on its edge; and it rippled like oil on water. What emerged from it was even more disturbing.
One after the other, they crossed over into our plane. Figures out of nightmare. I scrambled to my feet and backed away, toward Evelyn, picking up a few of the larger silvery fragments from the ground as I went. The beings advanced, clearly aware of our presence and coming our way. Coming entirely too rapidly.
Shadows they were, yet three-dimensional and quite solid in places. My first thought was of the Dark Men, but those silent stalkers had been clad in fully solid and substantial featureless suits, and had moved with robotic precision. These creatures appeared nothing like that. They flowed from point to point, shimmering in and out of visibility. At times it seemed their clothing consisted of tattered ebon rags, yet at other moments they appeared smooth and naked. And the faces: nothing that could truthfully be called features, yet in place of eyes and mouth, slashes in the black revealed sparkling depths: pinprick stars and twisted nebulae and blazing suns, as if offering a view into deepest space. Sprung from the purest chaos, these creatures were. There could be no doubt. Demons, some called them. Mindlessly they had roamed the many planes since the very dawn of time. Out of that dark breed these interlopers had sprung, though they appeared to be of a variety I never had encountered before.
And one thing more, deeply troubling. Demons were limited to their home planes. None I had ever encountered could open portals through the dimensional barriers. For that reason, demons had never represented a serious threat to the gods—we could always simply walk away from them. Yet these beings clearly had the ability to penetrate the barriers, to move among the planes with ease. This was not good. Not good at all.
Somewhere in our navigation of shit creek, we had misplaced our paddle.
With my left hand I reached out, trying to get a feel for the fabric of spacetime around us. Nothing. My senses were beyond numb. I could scarcely feel my fingers, much less the delicate and sublime folds of the cosmos.
Reaching down, I clutched at my pistol where it still lay in the sand, grasping it in nearly dead fingers. Sliding open the chamber, I was greeted with the sight I had feared. The crystal had disintegrated. Only dull, red dust spilled out. The metallic pins that had held the gem in place and regulated its properties were melted away. It was useless. I hurled it away.
“Damn!”
Grasping Evelyn’s hand, I pressed two of the silvery fragments into it.
“Here. Doubtlessly they have been charged up far beyond what I had intended. They should provide some measure of defense.”
Her eyes widened. They did not waver from the dark horde advancing upon us.
“How much is ‘some?’”
I considered several comforting responses, discarded them all, and said, “Not enough.”
She merely nodded.
We continued to back away, and the demons kept pace, seemingly enjoying the cat and mouse aspect of our new relationship.
“This might be a good time to open us a way out of here,” Evelyn said after a few more steps.
“You may rest assured that I have tried,” I told her with some annoyance. “It’s not happening. I nearly burnt myself out. At the moment, I am not able to focus the Power into anything remotely as cohesive or complicated as a portal.”
I laughed humorlessly.
“Not that it would do much good, probably. I’d be willing to wager these demons are perfectly capable of tracking us, now that they have our metaphysical scent.”
“Great. So, what will they do—eat us?”
I shrugged.
“Your guess is as good as mine. Demons come in many varieties, and their habits vary just as widely. But if we are on the menu, I intend to provoke the most extreme case of acid reflux in history upon whichever one tries to digest me.”
The dark figures started circling around us on both sides as we spoke, obviously seeking to surround us. We retreated in the direction of the building, though I doubted it would offer much in the way of cover or defense.
“I thought you couldn’t die!”
“All the worse for me, then,” I shot back. “I get to enjoy eternal, near-death suffering.” I allowed myself a bitter smile. “But how nice of you to think of my well-being at a time like this, rather than your own.”
The small, low building lay close behind us now, and I glanced back, making certain the demons had not overrun it.
“No one knows the exact fate of victims of demons, possibly because no one who was stupid enough to be captured by them has ever escaped to tell the tale. But the rumors have always included dark, hellish dimensions… endless torment… living death… that sort of thing. Experiences best avoided, I would say.”
I sensed the building behind us and reached back, never taking my eyes off the nearest of the horde. Feeling the rough, splintering door, I shoved and it swung open easily. I pulled Evelyn with me
through and inside.
“What is this place?”
I looked around quickly, simultaneously checking out the condition of the edifice and looking for any, oh, heavy artillery that might have been left lying around. Disappointment greeted me on both counts: the building had seriously deteriorated from the last time I had visited it, and the inside had been cleaned out, save for a few random planks lying about. It was little more than an empty, crumbling shack.
“This used to be one of my safe houses—a hideout,” I told her, as I bent over and picked up the most solid-looking plank I could see. “Had to bring in all the lumber myself, from elsewhere.”
I shoved the plank into position to brace the door.
“I suppose Alaria wasn’t lying when she said they all had been found.”
Light from the swirling aurora in the sky filtered down through cracks in the ceiling, casting eerie, ever-shifting shadows. Sounds began to reach us from outside. Scuttling, shuffling, and extremely disconcerting sounds.
Trying once more to open a portal, I managed only a smattering of blue sparks. My system was still too traumatized.
Crackling, popping sounds came from all around us, as dark hands worked their way through cracks in the walls and pushed inside. Ghastly fingers probed and grasped.
“Are they deliberately playing with us?” Evelyn asked, her voice growing strident.
“Somehow, I think they like the theatricality of it all,” I replied.
“Fabulous. Murderous demons with a flair for the dramatic.”
Quickly I spared a glance at Evelyn. She retained her flippant attitude even in the face of such horror, and I found this impressive. But I could tell from the tone of her voice, from her face, that she was reeling inside. I could not blame her. None of this was terribly new to me, in general, and yet it had pushed me to the limits of my physical and mental resources. I could scarcely imagine how a mortal could hold up at all.
Seconds ticked by. The weakened, crumbling walls gave way slowly but surely to the demons’ insistent pressures. We waited. Evelyn made no sound, but I could feel her body tensing beside mine.
They would be upon us in an instant.
“Squeeze the silver pieces and focus on the thought of a bubble around yourself,” I said, my voice hoarse.
The wall to our right gave way. Demons surged forward. A blue hemisphere blossomed around the two of us as Evelyn used the charged silver fragment to summon a shield. The demons recoiled from it at first, then approached it more confidently. They pawed at it, clawed at it. Talons raked over its surface. All too quickly, it began to rend. Again the dark fingers reached toward us. Evelyn’s free hand had grasped my upper arm, and she squeezed it very hard.
And then the earth moved, the heavens opened, and crimson fire rained down, down upon our enemies, down from somewhere...
CHAPTER SEVEN
These crimson flames that cascaded down from heavy skies and smote our enemies and drove them back relentlessly—these flames I knew, and knew all too well. Most recently, a thousand years ago, they had interposed themselves between my forces and the great citadel in the square of the Golden City. They had resisted my every effort to circumvent them, and scorched coldly at my dark soul as I sought to bull my way through them. Their eldritch energies frustrated my forces and disrupted my plans, and they succeeded in holding me off until Baranak arrived with his throng to utterly crush my uprising.
Yes, these flames I knew. Their master, the great engineer of the gods, however… That was a different story.
What little time I had ever spent in the company our god of toil, in the long years prior to my rebellion, had involved exceptionally large quantities of alcohol and obscene amounts of tasty but doubtlessly unhealthy food.
The two of us had conversed at length on only three occasions that I could recall. In my memories, each carried with it a different flavor, a different mood pervasive over it. While none of the three could rightly be called grand or momentous, each remained vivid in my mind and would contribute a piece to the puzzle that emerged later.
The first time was in a dark and smoky bar in Drezas, the capital city of Tolkar. I entered with a pair of attractive young mortal women in tow, midway through an exceptionally pleasant evening of celebrating the success of one of my innumerable minor schemes. He sat alone at a small table in the back, smoke from a long, slender cigar wreathing his bald head. I had sensed his presence instantly, even before laying eyes on him, and approached him to offer greetings and to make polite inquiry as to his presence. He had feigned ignorance of the place as a known favorite of mine, and had let on just enough in the way of his darker thoughts that I had been drawn in and felt compelled to sit down and continue the conversation. The two young women were forgotten; I have no idea what became of them. But he and I spent the remainder of the evening deep in conversation, drinking the establishment dry and talking the moons out of the heavens. His mood had been black—darker even than mine on a good day—yet the words we spoke to one another that night carried a strange power. Afterward I could remember few of the particulars, which I found odd, other than a sense that he was searching for something, and having little success. For a long while I attributed this gap in my memory to the alcohol, or to my lack of attention and patience for the rambling discourses of my fellow gods. Later I would have cause to question this.
My second encounter with him came several decades later, and again took place in a bar on the mortal plane. In all the time since our first meeting, I had scarcely thought of that earlier night or dwelt on its larger implications, until by chance I passed him on a sidewalk in a city on Majondra. His mood was lighter, and he greeted me heartily and talked me into joining him for dinner at a nearby restaurant that was one of his favorites. About the time of the third course, his demeanor turned dark again, his eyes in their deeply recessed craters burned bright, and the conversation moved inexorably back to where we had left it before—his quest for knowledge in areas long beyond the ken of even the most learned of the gods. I managed to depart our dinner later with at least that much intact in my mind, though again the rest flew away with the coming of the Majondra dawn.
From these two early conversations I had decided that, far from a mediocre, mid-level god useful mainly for his technical virtuosity, he was someone to watch in the future, on many levels. I also believe we developed something of a grudging respect for one another. Perhaps, had events allowed it, we might have developed a true friendship—or as close an approximation of one as seems possible among we of the Golden City.
The third time I ran into him, our meeting lasted only minutes. I had set myself up for a period of months on a snowy world several planes removed from both the City and the human plane, living with a small retinue of servants and hangers-on in a vast, alpine lodge I had ordered constructed some years earlier. Generally I prefer warmer weather, but occasionally—as such spans are measured in the lifetimes of immortals—the desire for skiing and related activities takes hold, and must be satisfied. This encounter began with an unexpected knock at the front door. Tearing myself away from my glass of wine, bearskin rug, and lovely female companion, I opened the door and, with some degree of surprise, welcomed him into my lodge and invited him to share drinks by the fire. He would have none of it. He stood in the doorway, his goateed face twisted in a mask of anger and frustration beneath that gleaming bald scalp, and he sought to question me roughly about matters of arcane art and science for which I had little knowledge and fewer answers. Apparently dissatisfied with my responses to his little inquisition, he first intimated that I was holding out on him, attempting to deliberately mislead him. Then he grew frustrated and whirled about, stomping down the steps and flashing away in a splashing circlet of red flame. I shrugged and closed the door behind me, returning to the soft rugs and the warm fire and the warmer embrace.
Those varying incidents encapsulate our three one-on-one encounters. My fourth encounter with him was, as I have said, in the courtyard
of the Golden City, during my insurrection, where he had stood with Baranak and the others against me. He had not been present afterward, at my sentencing, when Baranak’s clique exiled me to the mortal plane. Our most recent meeting was in the dungeon, when he and Baranak and Alaria had visited me and listed the charges of murder against me.
From these few, brief episodes, one might well conclude that he was many things—brilliant engineer, brooding seeker of knowledge, moody loner—but neither guardian angel nor cavalryman riding to the rescue probably would make that list. Thus my great and profound surprise to discover that it was indeed Vorthan, the great engineer, the god of toil, who had arrived to rescue Evelyn and me from the demon horde.
# # #
The crimson flames flashed down from that madly shifting sky, high above my gray, bowl-shaped world, and smote the demons where they stood.
It began with a blinding flash of light from outside, from behind the massed body of demons. A split-second later, a rolling boom sounded, shaking the floor at our feet. The demons inside the shack with us whirled around, flowing like quicksilver, to see what was happening.
Again the flash and the thunder. The demons all but forgot us in their rush to investigate this new phenomenon. In mere seconds, the building was empty but for Evelyn and me.
Lowering the fist that contained the silver fragment, Evelyn frowned and looked wordlessly from the open wall to me to the opening again.
I shrugged.
Wails reached our ears then. The wailing of demons. Again the flames, again the sound and the fury. What did this signify?
We moved cautiously to the opening and peered out.
Standing on bare, muscular legs some short distance away, a bald figure clad in leather and wielding a massive hammer smashed at the ranks of demons. Red energies spilled from the weapon, lashing at the dark horde and driving them back.
Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (The Above Book 1) Page 12
