Goraddon halted in mid-step and stood there, staring in astonishment. Then he rushed forward and sought a way to open the panel. His frustration only increased with each passing second, because absolutely no signs could be found of the doorway he had just watched open and close.
At last he whirled and confronted the frozen soldiers of the three legions. And that description was very nearly accurate, because the temperature in the room had dropped precipitously in the past few moments, as the side effects of Goraddon’s psychic lockdown increased. Ice now covered all the floors and ran part of the way up the nearest walls.
Goraddon gazed out at the dozens of individuals arrayed before him, most of them clad in the heavy armor of Agrippa’s Kings of Oblivion or the deep red and gold of Tamerlane’s Lords of Fire. His overwhelming arrogance and confidence had melted away, leaving him exposed to the ridicule of the mortals who stared back at him. Only his absolute control over their motor functions likely kept them all from laughing at him now; laughing at him—at a god! It was utterly intolerable.
He strode over to Tamerlane and Agrippa, then looked past them to where Teluria still stood. “Iapetus might have escaped me—for now—but you three remain,” he said, “and you are the most important components of my plan.” He smiled and gestured to Teluria. “Come here now, my dear.”
Being a goddess, she was able to resist somewhat at first. Goraddon frowned at this and redoubled his psychic efforts, as a side effect causing frost to form all across her red robes. In response she began to walk stiffly in his direction, shivering.
Blue lightning flared suddenly from behind Teluria.
Goraddon blinked and raised a hand, stopping the goddess from approaching. As she halted and stood still as a statue again, he moved around her. Now he saw the dark-skinned youth in the loincloth standing there, one hand barely up past waist level, electricity dancing across his fingertips.
“Ah, Solonis,” he said. “I had nearly forgotten about you.” He laughed. “Perhaps you would serve as a bargaining chip with the Dark Powers, too.” He moved closer, pursing his lips. “Then again,” he said, reconsidering, “you are but a ghost of a ghost, and entirely too pathetic to bother with.”
Solonis managed to gasp out a few words, despite Goraddon’s psychic lockdown: “You—are merely—a—carrion god,” he said. “A corpse—animated—only—by your—hate.”
Goraddon seemed about to object to that description, but then paused and shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said. “But I find existence in any form on this plane vastly superior to being trapped in the Below.” He made an idle gesture toward Solonis, freeing his jaw muscles. “If I must hear your ravings, seer-god,” he said with a sigh, “by all means let them at least be clear and understandable.”
Solonis wasted neither time nor words. “You have managed to pull your corporeal form back together with the help of your demon friends in the Below, Goraddon, but it won’t last long. It never does. Already the Below calls to you; it pulls at you, drawing you back down. Only the sacrifice of one of equal power and stature into the Below could grant you a prolonged presence on this plane of existence. And since nobody here is willing to make that sacrifice on your behalf...”
Goraddon laughed at this. “You believed I would be asking for volunteers?” he said with a snort. He raised a hand and behind him the circle of fire blazed to life again and expanded to the size it had been before. Its black depths beckoned.
“You are monstrous,” Solonis spat. “I had no idea you had become so—”
“Enough,” Goraddon said. He gestured again and Solonis froze. Then he nodded toward the still-immobile Teluria. “You,” he said, and the mental hooks flew out; the hooks of his awful persuasion, effective against gods as well as mortals. “You, dear lady. You wish to make that sacrifice for me, do you not? You wish to take my place in the Below, that I might remain within this dimension and the Above. I know that you do. Come to me. Come and leap into the Below in my place, and close this breach, that I might press forward with my grand plans for all of existence!”
Teluria stared back at Goraddon, her eyes wide. She slowly shook her head back and forth, then opened and closed her mouth, attempting to speak. Perhaps she meant to object, though no one would ever know. Then her eyes glazed over, all white, and she started forward, gliding toward Goraddon, and toward the awful, spinning maw of the Below.
“No!” cried Solonis, managing by the hardest to break free of the other god’s control. He looked about almost frantically, then lunged for and grabbed Teluria by the upper arm. For a couple of long seconds a sort of tug-of-war took place between Solonis and Goraddon, with the goddess Teluria playing the role of the rope. And then, as she began to pull away from him, her arm sliding through his fingers, Solonis cried out. A split-second later, his body slumped to the floor, limp, lifeless.
It was Goraddon who held Teluria by the upper arm now, grinning in triumph. He leered down at Solonis’s crumpled body. “And so it ends,” he said. “And so my reign begins.”
27
The Sons of Terra blasted their way through the main airlock of the Ascanius and ran headlong into a murderous crossfire.
The first dozen Sons in their black and gold surged inside, following the detonation of explosives that wrecked the locks on the doorway. As the smoke cleared, Captain Dequoi’s position opened up with set pieces and handguns, driving the invaders to their right. No sooner had the Sons been pushed that way than Commander Ehrens, her anxiety now under a sort of control, ordered her own squad to open fire. The first wave of boarders never made it more than five steps inside the I Legion flagship.
The second wave pushed in hard on the heels of the first, and they managed to force their way a bit further inside. These, too, however, Dequoi repelled or cut down.
With this second wave down, the II Legion assault team paused, as if reassessing their plans. The boarding action had turned out to be harder than they had anticipated.
The third push was overwhelming. More of the black-clad soldiers of II Legion came through the entryway this time than in both of the first two assaults combined. Commander Ehrens’s position was pushed back first, followed a few seconds later by Dequoi’s. As he barked retreat orders, another wave of II Legion fighters pushed in, and the captain began to lose hope of holding them at the airlock area.
“What’s the status on the special ops team?” he asked over the Aether link as he organized the withdrawal to the secondary holding position. “Ehrens—do you hear me?”
“Yes, Captain,” the second in command replied after a moment. “Sorry—we are in the process of pulling back, and—”
“So are we,” the captain barked. “What about the special ops team?”
Another pause, then, “They’re on schedule, Captain. At least, that’s what I’m told.”
Dequoi nodded, suppressing a smile. “Good,” he replied. “I’d hate to think we did all this for nothing.”
28
Agrippa and Tamerlane barely noticed Solonis’s plight. They were otherwise occupied. As the tug-of-war took place between the two gods, Goraddon’s lock on all the others faltered. Straining against their mental bonds the entire time, waiting for any opportunity to move, the two human commanders surged forward, attempting to attack the man in black while he was distracted.
Goraddon saw them moving before they’d gotten close to him. He gestured and both generals froze, becoming statues. Only the tiniest sounds of protest squeaked from their paralyzed throats.
Teluria continued forward in robotic fashion, crossing the space between the generals and Goraddon. She reached him, her mouth still hanging open, her eyes utterly blank. She stood next to him, facing into the mouth of the Below. The fire-rimmed circle continued to rotate counter-clockwise, flames licking upward around the pitch-black circle at the center; the circular opening that marked the start of the tunnel down into the underverse.
Agrippa could still think, could still feel, but couldn’t move or speak.
He glared at the man in black, then shifted his gaze to the gateway. He could sense the cold darkness radiating up from its depths. The black opening seemed to call to him. He could almost hear voices crying from down in the depths, alternately pleading for help and pleading for him to come and join them down there, wherever they were. He tried to fight it, to close his eyes, but he could do neither. He suspected—he feared—that if the man in black had not paralyzed him thusly, he might well have already leapt into the pit of his own volition. The compulsion—the awful, horrible compulsion—was that strong.
“Now,” Goraddon said, as he reached out and caressed Teluria’s cheek. “Now, my dear, you will give your all to ensure my plans finally come to fruition.” He turned slightly to glare at Tamerlane and Agrippa where they stood rooted in place, a few paces away. “You two have caused me inconceivable aggravation and delay,” he growled. “Twice you have disrupted my carefully-laid plans. I wished your Empire to remain in place a bit longer, with my own demonic allies in control of it—either by possessing the late Emperor or his daughter. But I have discarded those schemes now. I no longer intend to rule your Empire and, by extension, your galaxy. Now I mean to see it all laid utterly in ruin. My new allies—I believe you are growing familiar with them, yes?—the Phaedrons and the Skrazzi. They will overrun your Empire and the worlds of all the others in this galaxy, slaughtering in the trillions—and beyond.” His eyes burned with a luminous fire now, as his voice rose in tenor. “This galaxy will be naught but a charnel house when I am finished with it. Death! Glorious death and destruction. A funeral pyre a million light-years across. And as the flames reach up from countless worlds, the power of all that death, all that destruction, will serve to reignite the spirit of my lord Vorthan. And then He will return to us at last, and rule over the charred wasteland that was your galaxy.”
Goraddon raised his right hand and turned it slightly. In response, the window-sized circle of fire that hovered near the center of the chamber expanded, growing to more than doorway-size in only a second. With his left hand, he violently shoved Teluria towards it.
The goddess in red stumbled forwards—and then she halted, stopping her forward progress. She turned about and, to Goraddon’s astonishment, began to stalk back towards him, her mouth curled into a snarl.
“How are you doing this?” the man in black demanded, his voice filled with anger but also with a hint of fear. He raised both hands and redoubled his efforts at locking the goddess in place. She in turn grimaced but pushed on, now almost arms-length away from him.
“Are you afraid, monster?” Teluria growled—but the voice that came from her mouth was deeper than normal; it belonged to someone else entirely.
“It’s you,” the man in black snapped. “You didn’t die after all.”
“I died long ago,” said the voice of Solonis, speaking from Teluria’s mouth. “My ghost is simply too stubborn to know when to quit.”
“Get out of my body,” the goddess said in her own voice at that junction.
“Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?” said the Solonis voice in response—thus causing Teluria to appear for all the world as if she were having an argument with herself. Which, in a way, she was—and in a way she was not.
The red-robed feminine body, currently the object of a mental contest among three separate intellects, each pushing or pulling it a different way, stopped in mid-step. As Teluria’s body hesitated, the panicking goddess’s own persona frantically and instinctually wrestling for control, Goraddon took advantage of the opening and rushed forward, his hand coming around to deliver a powerful blow.
It never made contact.
Agrippa, his Deising-Arry heavy-duty armor whining, blocked the god’s punch with his left arm. An instant later, he drove his white-gauntleted fist into Goraddon’s face, driving him backwards.
Goraddon barely kept on his feet. Halting his momentum backwards, he snarled and rushed forward—only to be knocked aside again by an unseen and unheard blow from his left. Rolling with the impact, he leapt to his feet again and saw Tamerlane standing there, the god-slayer pistol Iapetus had dropped in hand. He fired again, and this time Goraddon went down hard. For all his bluster earlier, the gun did hurt him; he could feel entire reserves of his strength—of the Power—being sucked out of him each time he was struck by a shot from it. Tamerlane now filling his vision, he charged forward—
—directly into the swinging golden blur that he recognized only a split-second too late was the Sword of Baranak, now wielded by Agrippa and about to come into very solid contact with him and—
—and down went Goraddon, the blade failing to slice into his animated flesh but delivering a powerful blow nonetheless.
As he rolled over onto his back, the man in black looked up and saw the blond general looming over him, golden sword in his right hand.
“You are too dangerous for me to grant any quarter,” Agrippa said, and he drove the golden blade down into Goraddon’s torso.
The black-clad god screamed in agony, and again when the human general drew the blade back out—likely to prepare to strike again. Goraddon didn’t allow him the chance. He scrambled away, pushing with his hands and his feet across the dull gray floor. A huge wound gaped open in his chest but, instead of blood, raw energy—the Power of the Fountain of the Golden City—gurgled out, shimmering like liquid fire.
As Agrippa and Tamerlane advanced, cold murder in their eyes, Goraddon realized he had lost control of the entire assembly. Now all the soldiers—a couple dozen in white and green, and more in red and gold—were advancing on him. His concentration was shot—there was no way he would be able to reestablish the psychic lockdown on so many individuals in his current condition. For the first time in eons, Goraddon the Adversary, the fabled man in black, was afraid.
He had good reason to be.
As Agrippa and Tamerlane and Teluria/Solonis and segments of the I and III Legions all closed in on him, and as his very life-force spilled out of the wound Agrippa had dealt him with the ancient sword of the gods, Goraddon backed himself all the way up to the small, still-spinning dimensional portal. Sensing it was behind him, he turned, as if thinking it might represent a means of escape for him.
In a way, it did.
The portal flared to life and expanded to its previous size, resembling a huge round doorway or the entrance to a cave, wreathed in flame and filled with utter blackness. Goraddon pulled himself to his feet and faced the portal fully, hesitating, seemingly contemplating what might await him there and weighing the consequences of leaping through versus remaining here, in this condition.
The decision, as it turned out, had already been made for him.
Before Goraddon could leap through—and before anything else could emerge—Solonis said from Teluria’s mouth, to the generals and to the goddess herself, “This body must disappear for a time. There must be no alternatives for…” He/she trailed off.
The others understood. There was full agreement. “Go,” barked Tamerlane. “Go now—while you have the chance.” Agrippa nodded his agreement.
Teluria’s left hand came up from her side and gestured. In response, another portal opened, some distance away from the fiery one. She moved quickly toward it.
“We shall meet again, gentlemen,” the goddess said—though later none could say whether it had been Teluria’s voice or that of Solonis that had spoken the words.
With a crackle of blue lightning, Teluria disappeared, taking Solonis’s spirit-ghost with her.
Goraddon would have struggled mightily to prevent her escape, of course, but something else had his full attention at that moment. The portal wreathed in fire was opening. It was opening, and something entirely repulsive and other-worldly was coming out of it.
The massive body of the Demon Lord emerged from the stygian depths of the portal with a suddenness that shocked everyone present. One moment he was not there; the next, he was erupting out of the circle of fire like some vengeful spirit. The horned m
onstrosity gazed with disinterest at the humans present for a few seconds, its nostrils flaring and fire boiling from its nose. Then it looked down at the much-reduced figure in black who stood there, cringing.
“So, Goraddon, my slave,” the demon said, nodding its head. “Your time is up.”
“Yes, my lord, and I—”
“And you have not fulfilled your part of the bargain,” the demon replied. “The two human generals yet live. No replacement god has come to me, and I see none present. I therefore invoke the penalty clause of our agreement.”
“What?” Goraddon stumbled back, his panic evident now. “No—no, that’s not fair. All is in readiness. Teluria will be a perfectly—” He stopped in mid-sentence as he turned about and realized that the goddess in red was nowhere to be seen. “Wha—where did she go?” He stumbled away from the portal and the Demon Lord, now scarcely maintaining his balance. His voice was so panicked as to be shrill. “Where is she?” he cried.
And then the Demon Lord’s talons closed on him.
The man in black realized what was happening too late to change it. He struggled to get away, his arms flailing madly, hands grasping for any purchase. He caught Tamerlane by the sleeve of his red smartcloth uniform and tried to hold on.
Tamerlane unleashed the cosmic flame upon him.
Releasing the general’s uniform as the fire bit into him, he managed to shriek once, twice. Then the demon’s claws fully locked onto him and dragged him kicking and screaming back through the portal and into the gaping maw of Hell.
The Shattering: Omnibus Page 83
