Fulcrum

by Doug Rickaway

Alastor raised his hands again and willed the people to be still, forcing their attention back on his face. Cowed, they returned to their spots as if magnetized.

  “Please. I do apologize for the horror you have just witnessed. Rest assured that those who choose to join me will not suffer such a cruel fate. I give you my word.” Alastor offered the spectators a wide-handed, magnanimous gesture that did not match his cool, predatory gaze.

  A roiling wail of terror went up from women and children in the crowd. A teenage boy with blond hair and a handsome face pissed himself.

  “Now it is time to decide. If you wish to serve, you must simply come and stand with us.”

  Just then, the tense scene was interrupted by the tinkle of exploding glass, the crunching boom of doors flying open, and the scuffling roar of boots on stone.

  “FREEZE!”

  A Eursan voice rang out across the Envirodome, its echo mingling with the ebbing peals of Alastor’s tirade. Alastor turned, his hand going to his blade. Men in riot gear, numbering in the low hundreds, began to pour from doorways and windows like ants from a disturbed mound.

  “Ah, the local militia has arrived. And you brought slave bears. How charming,” Alastor hissed.

  Alastor searched the invading party, assessing threat levels with a mind that had been honed for battle on a thousand blood-soaked fields. He was surprised to see the Tarsi among the station inspectors; it was something he had not expected, and this brought him joy. The presence of a wrinkle, a problem to solve, invigorated his mind, pushing back the malaise that had come with the extension of his lifespan. The Tarsi group was large, both in number and sheer girth. Alastor wondered for a moment what the Tarsi on this station had been eating to grow to such hulking size. Or perhaps it was their presence alone on the battlefield, the scent of their musk in his nostrils, that made them appear larger than usual.

  “Mendraga! Leave this place, or you will die!” snarled a booming voice. Alastor turned to face the source of this bold challenge. It was a huge Tarsi, some kind of leader apparently, given the way the others looked to him. He stood shoulder to shoulder with a bear with a scarred face—one eye gone, the other afire with hatred and violence.

  “Ah, the old names, eh, slave bear?” shouted Alastor. “Tell me, where is your Elder? Was he too frail to accompany you?”

  “I am here, blood drinker,” an old slave bear said, stepping from behind the bold one and the scarred one.

  Alastor then felt a greater consciousness envelop his own. It looked through his eyes, heard through his ears. The Elder! He is the one! Take him now! hissed the consciousness, in a voice that only Alastor could hear.

  “At long last, great old one! Do you have any idea how long we have been searching for you, little bear?” Alastor said, his eyes never leaving the Elder’s.

  “I care not, Mendraga. The desires of your kind mean nothing to me,” the Elder replied.

  “IS THAT ANY WAY TO SPEAK TO AN OLD FRIEND?” said Alastor, but it was not Alastor’s voice that emanated from his lips. Alastor’s eyes rolled back as he spoke, exposing blood shot sclera. This new voice thrummed in the floor, and crawled up the backs of the Tarsi and under their skin.

  “AT LAST I HAVE FOUND YOU, OLD ONE.”

  “You will not touch him!” shouted the scarred bear, dropping to a fighting stance. The other Tarsi followed suit.

  “THE ELDER IS MINE. GIVE HIM TO ME AND LIVE, OR DIE PROTECTING HIM. IT MEANS NOTHING TO ME.”

  “Foul demon, speak no further. Your words are poison,” said the Elder, raising his staff.

  A bolt of crackling blue energy sprang forth from the crystal at its head. It struck Alastor mid-chest, and he tumbled back onto his ass in a tangle of limbs and cape.

  Alastor rose from the floor with uncanny, feral grace.

  “You are all going to die,“ said Alastor, in his own voice, but no less menacingly.

  “Maybe. But we will take some of your friends with us,” growled the bold one.

  “We’ll see,” said Alastor, with a savage grin.

  “Round up as many Eursans as you can and bring them back to the ship!” Alastor shouted to his crew of mercenaries.

  The others who had come with Alastor sprang into action. They weren’t as fast as him, but they could move with considerable speed and agility. They began to encircle the herd of terrified people, goading them toward the gaping maw of blackness that led to the enemy ship.

  Alastor began to laugh as he watched the Eursan cattle scatter, their eyes rolling in terror, their mouths turned downward in bloodcurdling, involuntary grimaces of sheer panic.

  After what seemed like an eternity, but was in truth the span of but two heartbeats, Alastor turned to the hulking Jolly Roger and said:

  “KILL THEM! DO NOT HARM THE ELDER TARSI!”

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Blood drinker!

  The words reverberated in Letho’s mind. Though he had seen and heard things that had rocked his perception of reality, he could not reconcile this. His own burgeoning abilities, the Tarsi legends. He could understand them, in a way, for they were part of him now. But not this.

  He looked at the broken body of Baran Gall crumpled at the feet of the intruder in black, and grief filled his body. The notion that he was somehow responsible for his former supervisor’s death filled his mind, irrational though it was.

  Creatures that consumed Eursan blood and could move as he did. Powered armor suits with no one inside them. Even across the middling distance Letho could see that the Jolly Roger’s faceplate was twisted from an explosive impact, the glass shattered in a web pattern in the top corner. There was a great sheaf of dried brown (blood! his mind shouted) across its chest area, distorting his view of who or what was inside. A green smoke—no, a mist—curled in unnatural tendrils out of the opening. And beneath the faceplate, where he should have seen the grim face of a space marine, there was only mist and pestilent green light. The tendrils curled down the sides of the great machine, caressing it.

  It didn’t matter whether or not Letho could reconcile this new facet of reality. Creatures of legend moved before him in real time, and they were going to kill him and his friends. He looked at the man in black, and they locked eyes for a moment. The man in black grinned at him, flashing pit-viper fangs, and he felt fear clutch his lower body in a cold vise grip.

  The possessed armor suit let out a lurching, gut-scrambling roar. It began its inexorable charge toward them, its twin mini-guns cycling up, preparing to chew targets to bits of flesh.

  The thudding footfalls of the Jolly Roger made Letho’s clenched teeth clack together.

  The Jolly Roger opened fire, and the earsplitting, rumbling purr somehow reminded Letho of the world’s largest zipper being pulled down. People moved all around Letho in slow motion, eyes wide, jaws slack in abject terror. They tripped and fell, moving without logic, propelled by instincts that had saved their progenitors from the dagger-toothed jaws of ancient predators.

  Alastor’s cadre appeared like black blurs that fell from the sky. As he ran, Letho watched the shirtless, tattooed one grab a young man and woman. The tattooed one planted his feet and leaped high into the air, disappearing into the gaping black hole at the top of the Envirodome.

  Only the station inspectors moved with purpose and order. They fell back on their training and began to move toward nearby buildings. Letho and the Tarsi followed.

  Zedock Wartimer was barking orders that Letho couldn’t quite hear over the din. The sharpened gaze that was Letho’s gift fell over his eyes again, and he saw the battle unfolding before him. His mind quickened, and he felt a strange notion that he could see the path of things that would be. He saw the place where the so-called Jolly Roger’s hail of bullets would soon come crashing. He saw the path of Alastor’s charge stretching out before them like some kind of blurring, forward-reaching shadow.

  One of the Tarsi had lingered behind, and somehow made it past the Jolly Roger’s lead curtain. It moved to engage Alastor, who
cursed in a tongue that was foreign to Letho’s ears, and lunged at him with a mighty paw. Alastor recoiled, three vertical slashes laid across his cheek. He slapped his hand to his cheek like a man who has just remembered something important. The Tarsi’s tiny, vestigial nails had made their mark.

  “You’re a brave one, aren’t you?” Alastor hissed. “But you won’t strike me again.”

  The beast opened its mouth wide and roared a chorus of anger as it charged, fists clenched. Alastor sidestepped—no, side-slipped—like a man unstuck from time. His sword whispered as it cut through the air and the Tarsi’s neck, neither providing any resistance. Letho cried out, tears clouding his vision for a moment. Alastor’s head whipped around, his eyes settling on the building that Letho had taken cover in. Alastor smiled, curdling Letho’s blood.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Alastor remained on the steps of the Civil Services Building. He could have been halfway across the battlefield in a blink, the Elder in the clutch of his mighty hand, but this was what he enjoyed over all things. He didn’t want it to end too soon; he savored the pungent reek of fear and desperation in the air, the smell of burning and spent gunpowder.

  He felt the bullets smash against his armor, impacting with concentrated speed and force like asteroids. He felt one penetrate a chink between his armor plates. He felt no pain as it blossomed and tumbled through his body, tearing through dead flesh and organs that he no longer needed. The bullet came to rest in the small of his back, just above his left buttock, the ragged canal it had carved through him already knitting itself back together. The bullet slid out of the exit wound even as it blossomed in reverse, leaving pure, unmarred skin.

  Alastor had seen a young Eursan with the Tarsi, and he had felt something strange; a vivid pulse seemed to emanate from the boy, and Alastor sought it out. To his surprise he found that the boy’s mind was both transmitting and receiving through the ether.

  Like a Mendraga, Alastor thought.

  He wrapped the tendrils of his own consciousness around the boy’s and began to speak.

  The Elder is mine! I am going to kill you and your friends, little one. Maybe when I am done with the Elder I will have to open you up and…

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  ...See what makes you tick!

  Letho collapsed onto the floor, eyes rolling back in his head, body convulsing.

  He felt a presence in his mind, violating him, wrapping sick, black intelligence around his cerebellum, divesting him of secrets long hidden, uncovering things that were hidden even from Letho himself. He felt the dark man rifling through the folds of his mind.

  In doing so Alastor exposed some of himself.

  He has spilled blood on so many battlefields I can’t even count them all, Letho thought.

  He saw a glimpse of the man standing in a clearing just on the edge of a verdant, uncut forest. He was covered head to foot in animal skins, and his countenance was smeared with blood, dirt, and cracked blue face paint. The arteries in his neck pumped hot, savage blood through his body, and the cords of his neck became taut strands as he bellowed in a forgotten language. Then the link was severed.

  Large-caliber bullets began to chew up the first floor of the building where Letho was ensconced. Fist-sized holes began to appear, cut through with beams of light choked with dust, and Letho threw himself to the ground, chunks of brick and plaster lacerating his cheeks and then his forearms as he threw them up to protect his face.

  He knows the Elder is in here with me, and now the gun-monster knows it too. He saw it in my brain.

  “NO! He is MINE!” Letho heard Alastor roar from everywhere. The Jolly Roger sank down a few centimeters, his smoking arm cannons shrinking to his sides in an almost Eursan gesture. Then it turned its focus elsewhere, renewing its assault on the beleaguered station inspectors.

  Letho clasped his temples in his hands, attempting to expel the black pus of Alastor’s presence from his mind. Then Bayorn was at his side, his paws checking him for injury.

  “I’m all right, buddy,” he panted, nodding in the direction of Alastor Wyrre, who now stood at the base of the great temple.

  “Old one!” shouted Alastor from outside. “The longer your delay your fate, the more innocent souls will burden your conscience. Let us end this!”

  “What do we do, Bayorn?” Letho asked, his voice sounding small and childlike in his own ears.

  “We attack! He cannot stop us all,” inserted Maka.

  Letho scanned the room; several Tarsi returned his gaze, and they all looked as scared as he felt. Yet there was a tinge of resolve under the Tarsi’s clamped, panicked expressions. They stood around the Elder, watching him, waiting for guidance. The look in their eyes and their expressions told Letho what the near future might hold for him and his Tarsi brothers. Letho’s guts filled with glacial cold.

  “From the basement of this building we can access maintenance tunnels that run underneath the streets. Perhaps we can flank the metal beast and bring him down. Maka, you will take the Elder back to the underneath, where we will regroup to protect him once the monstrosity has been destroyed,” Bayorn said.

  The Elder shook his head and placed a hand on Bayorn’s shoulder. “The Dragon’s paw has come for me at last, and I shall go to him.”

  “No!” Bayorn shouted.

  Snouts and eyes snapped up, training on the only objector to the Elder’s will.

  “To do so would be suicide! You mustn’t!” Bayorn said.

  “His fate and mine have been intertwined. Even now I can feel myself being pulled toward him. I have foreseen this coming for some time, though I knew not when it would arrive. It is time, Bayorn. Now, before any more blood is shed.”

  The Elder stood on legs that wobbled, in contrast to the regality of his movement. He strode to Bayorn, placing his hand on the younger Tarsi’s shoulder. Bayorn averted his eyes, but he did not turn his back on the Elder. They began to converse in Tarsi, but it was a dialect that Letho could not understand. The confused looks that the other Tarsi exchanged indicated that it was foreign to them as well.

  Bayorn’s eyes began to water, and he shook his head, his eyes beseeching. The Elder placed his hands on Bayorn’s wide cheeks, and he became still. The Elder said something in the unknown dialect, and placed a single kiss upon Bayorn’s forehead.

  “Have faith, my son,” the Elder said at last in common Tarsi, and Bayorn lowered his head.

  Finally, the Elder turned, and spoke to the gathered Tarsi. “Do not shed tears for me, my sons. I have at last been called to my true purpose. I have lived long in your company, and we have shared much in our Kinsha. It is enough. We shall meet again in the halls of our forefathers.”

  With that, the Elder trudged toward the open door in the slow but persistent gait of the old, his face transfixed with joy, or maybe divine purpose, Letho could not tell which. Perhaps both were the same.

  As he passed Maka, he placed a hand on the stalwart bear’s forearm.

  “Maka, you must always guard your brother. He will need you now more than ever.”

  Letho felt a solid lump rise up in his throat as the Elder passed under the doorway.

  “Elder one!” Letho cried out before he could stop himself.

  The Elder paused, and turned, infinite patience in his eyes. Letho would remember the moment for the rest of his days.

  “Yes, Letho? What is it?” the Elder asked, as if they were reposing in his dormitory, speaking of trivialities.

  Letho’s mind flooded with an infinite sea of questions. They tumbled over one another, a white blur of jumbled neural activity.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he finally asked, his tears coming unabated now, hacking their way through the grime on his face.

  “Letho, you must do what is right.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  They were silent for some time. Letho watched the Elder from a shattered window as he made his way toward his fate. It was Zedock’s voice that broke the silence.

 
; “What in the hell is the Elder doing?” he shouted.

  Zedock and a squad of station inspectors had just come down from the second floor, guns still smoldering. They looked a little worse for the wear, uniforms torn in places, faces spattered with dust, grime and blood. Many of them had taken grazing bullet wounds or had cuts from flying debris.

  “He goes to his fate,” Bayorn answered.

  Zedock dropped his head.

  “All righty. So what’s the plan, then?” Zedock said.

  “We must stop the metal beast,” Bayorn replied in a low voice.

  “Are you nuts?” Letho shouted from the window. “That thing will tear us apart!”

  “It is as the Elder has foretold. We must bring it down,” Bayorn answered.

  “Bayorn, with these?” Maka grinned. He pulled a handful of breaching charges from a rucksack on the floor.

  “Where did you get those, Maka?”

  “One of the Eursans dropped them. He is dead now.”

  “Hey!” one of the station inspectors shouted.

  Maka’s smile drooped, and he glared at the station inspector for a moment, who promptly dropped his eyes and began checking his rifle.

  Bayorn looked at the breach charges, then back at Letho.

  “What are you thinking, Bayorn?” Zedock asked.

  “We will take the access tunnels and attempt to flank the metal beast. It appears to be powered by some sort of foul magic, but it is made of metal. Even metal that is moved by magic can be broken,” he said.

  The low thrum of Bayorn’s voice caught Letho’s attention. He looked at Bayorn, and noticed that he was standing a little taller, and there was a deep, assertive boom in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

  Zedock nodded. “I’ll send some men with you to draw the bastard’s fire.”

  “Good. Once he’s down, send the rest of your men to start rounding up any citizens they can find. Maka will lead you back to the underneath.”