The Shattering: Omnibus

by Van Allen Plexico

  “You should have been one of us,” she growled at him then. “You have the traits. You would’ve fit right in.”

  “I have no interest in the gods or in godhood,” Iapetus replied, standing. “I simply wish to protect the precious and sacred Earth. And to do that, I will require your help.”

  Teluria stood there, facing him, for a long several seconds. She breathed in and out, her eyes burning like hot coals. At last she nodded once. “One favor. Granted by your Ecclesiarch.” She stuck out her lower lip. “Call it a reward for your loyal service to the Empire.”

  “Please,” he scoffed. “I know you care no more for this Empire than I do.” The pistol remained held easily in his left hand. “I have been nothing but honest with you; please afford me the same courtesy.”

  “Fine,” she spat. “What would you have me do?”

  He smiled, and this time the smile actually seemed warm. Warm for him, at any rate.

  “I would have you open a way for me and for my legion,” he said.

  “Oh? To where?”

  Now he laughed. “Why, to the one place you seem hell-bent that I shouldn’t go.”

  After Teluria had grudgingly allowed herself to be escorted back to the quarters prepared for her, Iapetus strode in the other direction, toward the bridge. Colonel Piryu hurried along at his side. As they neared the entrance to the command level, the junior officer couldn’t help but observe, “That went well, General.”

  Iapetus nodded. “Still, it was a narrow-run thing. If she had decided to test my jamming device only a couple of minutes earlier, she might have exposed everything.”

  Piryu looked puzzled. “Exposed? How is that? If you don’t mind my asking, sir?”

  Iapetus laughed. “She was quite right that blocking her power with any sort of man-made device is virtually impossible.”

  “What? But then—how were you able to—?”

  Iapetus held up the little black box with the red and green lights. “Simple,” he said, dropping it to the floor and crushing it with his boot. “I tricked her. It was fake.”

  “Fake?” Staring aghast down at the broken pieces of plastic on the floor, Piryu shook her head. “But she wasn’t able to open a portal!”

  Iapetus laughed harder. The doors to the command level opened before them and they walked out onto the bridge. On the main viewscreen directly ahead, the tan semicircle of a planet loomed large and near. The general pointed to it. “There’s your answer, Colonel.”

  The other officer stared at the mottled surface, studying its pattern. “That—that’s Candis, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Indeed it is,” Iapetus replied. “And we just dropped hyper and pulled into orbit a few moments ago. Just seconds before Teluria entered the strategium, in fact.”

  Piryu considered this. Slowly a smile spread across her face. “Candis,” she repeated. “The safeworld. The one place in the Empire where no dimensional portal can be opened, by god or man. The place where the walls of spacetime are too thick.”

  “Correct on all counts,” the general agreed. He nodded greeting to the ship’s captain and sat down in an auxiliary seat situated off to one side.

  Piryu shook her head in wonder. “Well played, General,” she said. “Very well played. Still...”

  “Yes?”

  Piryu met his eyes and then looked away, nervous. “I suppose we’d better hope she doesn’t figure it all out.”

  2

  “If you’re so sure they can’t detect us,” Tamerlane whispered, “why are we sneaking around like this? And whispering?”

  Inquisitor Delain sighed to herself. The two of them lurked in the shadows behind a massive stone column that towered up into the heights of the domed throne room. Just ahead of them lay the golden basin that still bubbled and spewed cosmic energies some fifteen meters into the air. Beyond that, the bodies of the Princess Marens and Colonel Belisarius lay unmoving, the hideous, ghostlike shape of the demonform slowly descending and merging ever so slowly into the body of the young woman. Only a fraction of the demon remained visible now; the process would not take much longer. The six ceremonial guardsmen had reemerged but the bulk of the Sand Kings forces were still absent.

  Delain had her right hand outstretched in front of her. “Because,” she answered, “while I am capable of obscuring us from the view of mortal man, I have no idea if the same can be said of a god. If the vizier there is truly one of Those Who Remain, the possibility exists that he could detect us at any time.”

  Tamerlane nodded, agitated. He was staring straight at the princess and the demon, and his face was contorted with anger. “How dare they do this?” he muttered to himself. “It’s inhuman.”

  “Zahir is not a human,” Delain pointed out. “And, based on his words, Rameses must now believe the same can be said of himself.”

  “We’ll see about that,” the general snapped.

  “We must hurry,” Delain said. “I’m sorry it took so long to get us down from the balcony.” There had been a large group of Sand Kings standing at attention directly in front of the doorway that led from the balcony’s stairway down into the throne room. Delain had insisted she could find another way, but it had taken a seeming eternity of repeated backtracking—and then another forever when they had run into yet another patrol and had had to take cover and wait. Tamerlane had felt he could have taken down either group—particularly with Delain’s able assistance—but he wasn’t ready to reveal his or the rest of his team’s presence just yet.

  “Colonel Arani and the others on the balcony are well-concealed from casual view,” Delain said, “but without my powers to blanket them entirely, they could be discovered at any moment.”

  Tamerlane nodded again. “So—let me make sure I understand. All we need to do is get to this bowl thing, and you can use the power from it to sort of boost the signal so that I can contact Iapetus via the Aether?”

  “Essentially, yes,” Delain agreed. “I anticipate that it will be more difficult given the interference clogging the Aether. But I will do my best.”

  “I know you will.” Tamerlane gave her a wink. “Alright. Let’s do it.”

  Right hand held out before her, the Inquisitor led the way, keeping the two of them as invisible as she could. So far, no one was looking their way, which certainly helped.

  They crouched down behind the golden basin and Delain offered the general her left hand. He gave her a look but shrugged and took it in his right. Then, closing her eyes, she touched the basin with her own right hand.

  “Open the Aether link in your mind,” the woman told him quietly.

  Tamerlane braced himself for the onslaught of painful static he’d experienced earlier. He closed his eyes and concentrated.

  There was no pain. The interference was gone. The Aether opened itself to him without protest. Then Delain began to draw cosmic energy from the fountain, allowing it to flow into Tamerlane. In reaction, the general gasped. The resonance, the depth of his senses increased a hundredfold—a thousandfold. He found he could reach with his mind through the infinitely branching pipeline that was the Aether net, to find—to touch—almost anyone who was connected to it.

  “Is it working?” Delain asked.

  “Nnnggh,” Tamerlane responded, unable to form words in the physical world as his mind expanded throughout the AetherSphere. All the recent talk of godhood had meant little to him, but suddenly he felt he understood, ever so slightly, what that might be like. His mortal frame still sat hunched down, hidden behind the golden cauldron, but his consciousness traveled throughout the cosmos in the blink of an eye. To inhabit all of even one narrow sliver of the Above—to have one’s consciousness filling the entire network, all at once—was to become in some ways a living god.

  “General,” came the voice of Delain as if from far away. “General!”

  He felt something then—felt something with his nearly-forgotten physical body. He blinked his eyes open and saw her, hunched over, leaning towards him. She was
kicking him in the shins.

  “General!” she hissed again. “You have to control it—don’t let it carry you away. If you go too far down that path, you might not come back.”

  Tamerlane’s eyes focused on her. He understood—understood all too well, now. Steeling himself, he closed his eyes again. This time, though, he did it with purpose, with focus. This time, as the Aether enveloped him, he knew exactly what he was doing, where he was going, for whom he was searching.

  Iapetus. Iapetus!

  Where are you, O commander of the Sons of Terra? Where are—

  There.

  The link opened and the mental “voice” of Ioan Iapetus echoed in Tamerlane’s head. “Who is this? What is happening?”

  “General,” Tamerlane said, his voice a carefully-contained thunderbolt striking across the cosmos. “I need you. You and your legion. Now.”

  To his credit, Iapetus seemed to grasp what was happening—and to whom he was speaking—remarkably quickly.

  “So. Tamerlane. Again you request my assistance.”

  “This is no request, General. You will bring your legion here, now, if you wish to see the Empire—and the galaxy itself—survive.”

  Iapetus did not reply for a moment. Then, “What is this grave danger you need my help in confronting?” He laughed. “Have Rameses and his Sand Kings proven too much for your own soldiers to handle?”

  “It’s not just Rameses. It’s the people—if people they truly are—that he serves.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “The gods,” Tamerlane said. “Three of them, we believe.” He paused. “They have the princess. She’s in the process now of being possessed by a demon lord.”

  “By a what?” Iapetus’s voice betrayed his skepticism.

  “There is no more time,” Tamerlane barked across the link. “If you don’t want to see the galaxy laid waste, with a creature of the Below reigning over the ruins, you must act. And you must act now!”

  Iapetus laughed again.

  “Why do you laugh?” Tamerlane demanded. “Do you discount the degree of danger we face?”

  “Oh no, not at all,” Iapetus replied. “I believe you. It’s just that your timing could not have been more fortuitous.”

  “Why is that?” Tamerlane asked, barely holding his anger at the man in check.

  “Because I will be there in mere moments,” he replied.

  “You—what?” Tamerlane couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “You’re already on the way?”

  “You are in the throne room now—is that correct?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Rumor has it Rameses possesses a weapon of awesome might within the throne room,” Iapetus went on, ignoring Tamerlane’s objections. “If it can be disabled, the force I have here with me should be sufficient.”

  “The force you have with you?” Tamerlane was taken aback. “We may require the better part of your entire legion.”

  “I doubt that.” He continued on before Tamerlane could object. “Can you disable the weapon in the next few moments?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  “Good. Do it.”

  The link was severed on the far end. Tamerlane opened his eyes.

  “Success?” Delain asked.

  “It...sounded like it,” Tamerlane said, “but then again, it was Iapetus, so—” Tamerlane started to say more, but a cry from the gangly vizier, Zahir, caught his attention.

  “The demon lord will soon arise! The process is nearly complete!”

  At Zahir’s shout, Rameses turned from where he had been standing over the body of Nakamura. He had been gazing down at the broken Taiko, mixed feelings nearly overwhelming what little remained of his own personality—the parts Goraddon hadn’t violently and permanently suppressed. Part of him was thrilled to see the presumptive, arrogant Nakamura brought low—and even more thrilled at the possibilities for himself that now lay open. But another part of him, buried deep inside, was extremely disappointed. “I—I didn’t get to do anything,” he whined softly, so that no one else could hear. “I only got to stand there, in hiding, and—”

  “Lord Rameses,” Zahir called, his kohl-rimmed eyes meeting the governor’s, seeming to appraise him carefully. “Did you hear? The process is nearly finished.”

  “What’s that?” Rameses asked, blinking as he roused himself from his musings.

  “It is almost irreversible now. Come and see,” Zahir said, beckoning with skeletal fingers.

  The crimson armor moving smoothly, as though it were but a suit of silken clothing, Rameses crossed the short distance between them and stared at the body of the little princess on her palanquin. The demonform was no longer visible above her, save as a vivid, glowing red halo about her. Somewhere inside Rameses a voice screamed objections, but that part of him was locked away forever. Instead he merely nodded. “Very good,” he said. “What next?”

  Zahir had turned and was stepping over the bodies of the Lords of Fire soldiers that lay dead on the cold marble floor. “First we must have the Sand Kings remove this... debris,” he clucked, kicking at one of the bodies disdainfully. He turned. “And then—”

  Nakamura was sitting halfway up. His eyes burned with hatred.

  Zahir gasped and stumbled back, tripping over a body, going down in a heap. His Egyptian headdress toppled off and skittered across the floor.

  “Monster!” Nakamura shouted. “Loathsome creature!” He brought his hands up, directing both of them at Zahir. “How dare you harm the princess?”

  Zahir scrambled to get back—to get away. He was entirely too slow.

  Flames lashed out from Nakamura’s hands; cosmic flames that were not of our realm but of the Above. The fires set into Zahir with all the fury of their master who had conjured them.

  Erupting like an oil-soaked torch, Zahir screamed.

  Still ensorcelled, the guardsmen only stared straight ahead, lacking any coherent commands from Zahir.

  All eyes moved to the blazing man as he staggered back, shrieking, his features obscured by flames. All eyes, that is, except for one pair.

  Rameses was staring directly at the Sword of Baranak where it lay on the marble floor. He moved toward it, reaching out.

  Tamerlane saw what was happening—it was all only a short distance away from him—but he couldn’t quite believe it.

  “He’s alive,” he said to Delain, voice strained with emotion. “He’s still alive!”

  Delain knew what the general was going to do but, before she could attempt anything to stop him, he raised up from cover, taking one step in Nakamura’s direction, clearly intending to come to his assistance. “Taiko!” he called. “Are you—?”

  Rameses, encased in the cosmic crimson armor, came forward and into view. He held something in his right hand, raised high. Something gleaming and golden. Too late, Tamerlane realized it was the Sword of Baranak. He raised a hand to unleash his own cosmic flame.

  The sword came around, not slowed in the least by its passage through Nakamura’s neck. The head separated from the body and dropped to the marble floor, followed a second later by the body itself. Both parts burst into flame.

  Tamerlane screamed.

  From her post on the balcony of the throne room, Colonel Niobe Arani saw it all unfold with mounting horror.

  General Tamerlane and the Inquisition woman, Delain, were crouched behind the golden basin, busy in their attempt to contact General Iapetus. The pale, lanky vizier, meanwhile, was standing over the little princess, supervising—and reveling in—the near-completion of the process that would bind a demonform to her forever. Then, unexpectedly, Nakamura the Taiko had risen up, his wounds apparently not fatal, and had unleashed a blast of fire at the vizier. The vile man had stumbled back, falling over the bodies of former soldiers of I Legion, his every visible surface area bursting into flame. He’d shrieked, and he’d burned.

  And then the most horrifying development of all: Governor Rameses, encased in the strange, red arm
or and wielding the Sword of Baranak that Nakamura himself had brought with him to Ahknaton, had swung the cosmic blade and decapitated the Taiko. The man’s head and his body had each burst into an uncontrollable blaze. Within seconds, only ashes remained.

  In reaction, General Tamerlane had stood and screamed in horror. Arani couldn’t blame him. If someone who had meant as much to her as she knew Nakamura meant to Tamerlane had just been killed—and killed in that manner, and right in front of her—she, too, likely would have thrown caution to the wind. Unfortunately, doing so revealed his presence to the bad guys—and it would surely make them look for others.

  In short, Arani understood in an instant that the jig was up. Coming to terms with that fact and all of its ramifications very quickly, she took Titus Elaro’s rifle from him before he could object. She hefted it, sighted down it, and fired.

  Rameses was just advancing on Tamerlane, the sword held high and ready to strike again, when Arani’s shot caught him in the lower ribcage on the left side. It didn’t penetrate the crimson armor at all, but the force of the blast spun him around and sent him backwards a step.

  Tamerlane stood now like some vengeful god, his hands blazing with cosmic fire. Still standing on the other side of the golden bowl, he directed his arms in the direction of Rameses and let loose a column of flames that crossed the short distance between them in less than the blink of an eye. The fires washed quickly over him.

  “That is the best you can do, Tamerlane?” Rameses barked. The flames were settling down and it appeared now that the armor was entirely undamaged.

  The last of the flames vanished and Rameses stalked forward again. As he moved, however, he cast a quick glance toward Zahir, intending to ask the vizier how he was; to ask him if Nakamura’s attack had caused him any harm. What he saw took him aback and stopped him in his tracks.

  Zahir lay on the floor, his body a burned, molten mess. There was no way the poor wretch could have lived long in that state. As Rameses looked on, however, the vizier-god’s eyes turned upward and stared directly at him; it was enough to give anyone who saw it nightmares for years to come. And then the blackened body rose from the marble floor, the mouth opening and closing, no intelligible sounds emerging but only an animal-like hiss.