New Title 1

by Dru Pagliassotti

  “I adjure you, ancient serpent,” Jack said, blood leaking past his lips as each word sent pain tearing through his burned mouth and throat. He straightened his shoulders and composed himself. “Give place, abominable creature, give way, thou monster; give way to Christ, in whom thou found none of thine works—for He has already stripped thee of thy powers and laid waste thy kingdom, bound thee prisoner and plundered thy weapons. He has cast thee forth into the outer darkness, where everlasting ruin awaits thee and thine abettors.”

  The serpent plunged toward him, and Andy spread his arms, shouting a wordless oath that sent light leaping before Jack’s half-transformed gaze. The serpent’s mouth crashed into the barrier and hung there a moment, hovering before them, its teeth soiled but sharp.

  Jack bit down on his tongue once more, then stepped forward and spat blood into the serpent’s straining mouth.

  “Begone, serpent; God casts thee out, to whose might all things are subject.”

  The serpent’s jaws snapped shut and it threw itself backward, head smashing against the ceiling. Then it leaped forward, propelling itself across the room and back into the last flickering flames of the chamber beyond, where Jack saw several still, blackened hulks coiled in frozen postures.

  He grabbed Andy’s arm, his head swimming, then looked at the place where the dragons’ circle had been broken.

  The two entities were completely focused on him: eyes and feathery antennae, cilia and vein-laden membranes.

  XLIII

  Auctor watched, a hyperverse away, as Viator thrashed back and forth with impatient anger. But both of them had been given conservative natures: hers as a pathfinder, his as an analyzer, and so they each waited to see what would happen next.

  The hypospatial entity that had trapped their companions was not one of the burning guardian sigils that so actively attempted to bar them from this endoverse, but it and two of its companions were imbued with similar powers. Moreover, Auctor could sense the true sigils hovering just to one side of the dimension, watchful and waiting, just as he watched and waited.

  If we interfere, we will face war, he informed Viator, checking the multitude of possible endoverses that fanned out from his indecision over whether to enter the fray or remain aloof. In virtually all of them, he saw Viator and himself moving in to aid Domitor and Carnifex, only to be promptly besieged by the endoverse guardians who lurked above and below, waiting to repel the void. And in this place, at this time, we face a high likelihood of loss.

  Would we destroy enough to allow others access? Viator asked, as any good servant of Verminaarch should. But Auctor, who had seen enough and calculated enough to develop a heretical sense of self-preservation, mulled over the odds with more concern for his own survival than the successful incursion of the void.

  It isn’t clear. I would not waste our resources on an uncertain battle.

  She hissed, dissatisfied but trusting his analysis, as she had been genetically programmed to do.

  His check of the hypospatial entities’ patterns of mass and energy had revealed a few anomalies that Auctor thought he might exploit, but he was limited by lack of data. Just as the other entity, the tiny sigil-being that crouched in the room they were observing now, had seemed anomalously unfit to survive, so did the three others. They differed, in greater or lesser ways, from the other native entities whose data he had harvested.

  The question was, were their differences adaptive or malignant?

  He could absorb and adjust their energy fields, but he couldn’t decide with assurance whether the adjustment would end up strengthening or weakening the entities.

  His inclination was to assume that their differences were adaptive, and that was why they had the power to bind his matepair. After all, the others of their species had been easy to destroy.

  But acting without sufficient data ran counter to his nature.

  Do something, Viator urged him, flickering back and forth across the limis. Do something, or I will enter without you and leave those creatures strewn across the multiverse.

  If you destroy them, the guardians will swarm us and drive us back to the void.

  I will not wait any longer!

  Bide, then. I will act. Auctor reluctantly set himself to scanning the boundaries of their hyperverse and stretched a questing tentacle forward across the threshold. Perhaps if he erased the physical anomalies within the invoking entity, he would destroy the entity’s unusual power.

  Author Bio

  Dru Pagliassotti is the author of the award-winning steampunk novel Clockwork Heart and her short stories have been published in a variety of zines and anthologies. She is currently co-editing Day Terrors, a horror anthology from The Harrow Press. A professor of communication at California Lutheran University, Dru also recently co-edited the scholarly volume Boy’s Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre.

  Artist Bio

  Katja Faith is a twenty-two-year-old married artist from Belgorod, Russia. Her art tends to be surrealistic and dark. She happily describes herself as “a kind fairy, just in a bad mood.”

  See more of Katja’s art at katjafaith.deviantart.com.

  Table of Contents

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  Twenty-One

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  Twenty-Nine

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  Thirty-One

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  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

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  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Bios