Blackhand (37 page)

Ana looked at him, bewildered.

“There has not been such talk in Jura for decades,” she said. “The wars have ended. Sirian Ru is imprisoned and his stray creations slain.”

“But the god lives,” Blackhand said. “In defiance.”

“What difference does it make?”

“He is not done. As we speak another monster approaches and I sense it is his greatest.”

Ana swallowed hard. “That cannot be.”

“Yes,” Blackhand said. “It comes swiftly, flying through the air.”

He saw Ana’s fear rise. Her eyes widened. She believed. Grabbing a nearby guard, she spoke urgently.

“Summon the generals. Tell them the Thogstacker has returned with warning. Mobilize the troops. Send word to the Forestlands and Vaer,” she turned to Blackhand. “How much time do we have?”

Blackhand looked to the east and saw the approaching beast in the sky.

“It will be upon you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Ana staggered. She was not Aul. She was not a warrior. “What is it? Another Agara?”

Blackhand had seen the creature clearly. Its great wings spanned a mile and propelled it at fantastic speeds. Serpent-like, its body was covered in scales that could not be pierced. Two great eyes rested upon its long head, and he knew they could see an ant move from the top of the world. Inside its breast, a stone the size of a village infused life into its veins. Blackhand saw a rancid ocean of fluid splashing within its gullet.

“Much worse.”

Within an hour, the entire city convulsed in panic. A generation had risen since the Thog attack and these Abanshi knew nothing about war. The Abanshi spirit was still in them, but they were soft and not so willing to die for glory or other such ideals.

Blackhand ascended to a parapet at the top of the castle and looked east, watching the new threat as it closed the distance between them. The first city the creature destroyed was the one built around him at the base of the Living Wall. He watched as the creature flew in a circle above the settlement and vomited a river of acid upon the inhabitants. With a touch, the citizens dissolved to nothing. All those who had devoted themselves to him died in the blink of an eye. Thousands were killed in a matter of seconds without a defensive arrow flung. The deaths did not wound him as they would have before. He did not collapse in sorrow. Everything was one.

More towns and villages rested in the creature’s path but it ignored them, keeping course towards its goal, the city where he stood.

It was coming for him.

In the streets below, Abanshi citizens scattered in all directions, unsure how to respond to Blackhand’s warning. Most ran to the catacombs beneath the city. Soldiers wore their armor awkwardly, not used to its weight. Regiments lined up in disorganized rows, unpracticed, undisciplined.

Blackhand knew their inefficiency did not matter. Even at its peak, the Abanshi army could not defend against the threat approaching them. He saw no way to defeat the thing. It was designed to exploit every weakness he possessed. He was not even certain how to reach it.  Even if he could, any wound he produced would be tiny compared to its great size. A day would be needed to kill it.

He also knew the acid boiling in its belly was caustic enough to destroy him. A direct hit would melt him instantly before he could heal. The god had thought carefully about such a weapon.

Blackhand marveled at Ru’s genius.

Behind him, Ana approached, out of breath from climbing the hundreds of stairs to the parapet.

“How near is the monster?” she gasped.

“But hours,” he said, his spiritual eyes upon the creature in the distance.

“Everyone is in the tunnels,” Ana said. After Blackhand described what was coming, she had evacuated the city without hope. “If it’s half as hideous as you say, we have no defense except to hide.”

“As near as I can tell, the beast has no weakness,” he said. “I do not even know how to reach it to strike a blow.”

With those words, he heard a voice speak near him, a rumbling low whisper inciting a single word.

“Harpoon,” the voice growled. It came from the Agara blade.

Blackhand removed the sword and held it before him.

“What?” he asked.

The demon within the sword stirred and addressed him.

“My battles are countless, my victories absolute. I know war. I would have defeated even you were it not for the god’s poor design of a body,” the Agara said. “You should listen to my council.”

“Speak.”

“Men upon the sea hunt behemoths with harpoons,” the Demonthane said. “Lance the beast with a tether and meet it in the sky.”

Blackhand visualized the plan. It had merit.

Ana could hear only half the exchange. All she saw was Blackhand speaking to his black sword. He turned to her.

“Gather as much strong rope as you can find,” he ordered. “Bring it to the square at the center of town.”

“Your sword told you do this?” she asked.

“The Agara within offered a plan. I don’t know if it will work, but it gives us an action.”

He saw Ana was not comfortable with trusting a plan given to them by an Agara, but she did as he asked.

It took hours to gather and bind the rope. Soldiers tested each knot to ensure a tight hold. By the time they were done, a single length thousands of feet long coiled around the open center of the square.

Blackhand at first considered attaching the rope to a spear, but knew such a weapon would not be able to pierce even the softest portion of the creature flying towards them. Instead, he bound the tether to the hilt of the demon sword with only moments to spare.

“It’s here!” a watchman shouted from one of the towers as Blackhand tied the last knot.

From the square, a clear view of the eastern horizon could be seen. Above the sharp, azure mountains, Blackhand saw a dark slit gliding towards them from the sky. 

Even from such a great distance, it looked gigantic.

Blackhand knew the creature was attracted by his sword. He knew the others had a chance to get away before it vomited its deadly bile.

“Go to the tunnels,” he called to Ana and the warriors who remained. All fled, leaving him alone upon the wide expanse.

He knew he would only get one chance and he did not want the beast to regurgitate its cargo upon the length of rope, so he ran to the outer wall of the city. He hoped the creature would attack him there and give him a chance to get back to the coil while it reloaded another storm of acid.

As the creature closed, more details took shape. Its wings and body were covered in the same diamond-hard scales that had thwarted his attack on the Agara decades earlier. Its tail twisted and coiled in the wind as it changed direction. Upon its back, great wings sprouted like sails on a ship. Two huge yellow eyes perched above its fanged snout and already they had recognized him.

And there was another detail that intrigued Blackhand. Within the monster’s head, the lightning of reason flashed. Not merely the crude awareness of the later Thogs, but something far more complex. Images and reason, plans and strategies. Self-awareness. The creature possessed real thought. It was truly alive.

Great wings dug into the air and closed the distance between them.

The beast roared and gathered a mouthful of vomit. Diving, its jaws parted and a yellow river spilled forth. Blackhand jumped backwards to miss the tide, hurtling Jura’s concentric walls in a step.

The acid struck the ground. So caustic was the substance that it melted the stone walls in an instant, disassembling the smallest particles of their form. A sizzling lake bubbled like lava over a third of the city. Buildings slid into the lake and disappeared.

Another leap and Blackhand was on the green beside the makeshift harpoon. The monster passed overhead and climbed, gathering more corrosive for a second strike. Its wings whipped a gale through the streets.

He retrieved the bound Agara blade and calculated the force required to hit his mark.

“The eyes,” the Agara offered. “They are soft.”

Raring back, Blackhand took aim as the creature turned wide to make a second pass. He hurled the sword.

The weapon flew straight and true, taking with it the tons of rope tied to its hilt. The coil spun madly into the sky, reminding Blackhand of the Lanya’s living chains in its movement. Several seconds passed before the sword met its target.

The blade struck the creature in the left eye, burying itself into the socket. The monster jerked from the unexpected wound, shrieking in pain, flinging a rain of misfired acid in all directions. Blackhand grabbed the whipping rope which was nearing its end. The creature’s momentum jerked him into the sky and he began to climb.

He scurried up the hemp cable like a spider. The monster twisted and flailed, trying to shake the splinter from its eye, shrieking in pain.

Blackhand’s grip held fast.  In a few moments he had scaled the rope and clung onto the creature’s face. He tore at the soft pulp of the yellow eye and the monster shrieked again. Ripping an opening wide enough, he crawled inside the gooey socket. The space could have held twenty wagons.

Moving through the pulp to the back of eye, he found the Agara blade sunk to the hilt in bone. He twisted the weapon from its purchase. A thousand swings in a second cleared the rest of the ooze from the eye socket and gave him room to work. The creature cried out with a sound that resembled speech.

Even if he could have, he did not intend to kill the monster outright. Another plan had taken shape within his mind, one that would conquer all of his problems in a single stroke.

The beast possessed thought, it desired life. Wounded, it would return to its maker for help.

A quick assessment of the creature’s internal anatomy told him what he needed to know. At the base of the throat, a system of ducts and bladders formed the organs that projected the acid. Behind that was the huge power stone that gave it life.

Careful to avoid the active brain, he punctured the bone at the back of the eye socket and sawed an opening large enough to enter. More screams came from the beast. Inside its dark sinus, he sawed another hole to get to its throat. Droplets of acid burned his arms.

Blackhand entered the thorax and the flesh of his feet began to melt. Moving quickly, his clothing burning from his body, bits of his flesh falling off in globs, he passed the organs that produced the corrosive substance and found the stone.

The object was so large he could not see the top. It was a spherical mountain. How had Ru crafted such a thing? Intricate patterns of nerves webbed its black surface and traveled away in a thousand different directions, sending energy to diverse regions of the mammoth body.

Examining the network, Blackhand saw where to make the necessary cut. Surgically, he nicked a portion of the nerve fiber with his sword.

A great howl roared through the cavernous bowels of the giant. It climbed and dived in the air, feeling the wound and sensing its severity. Blackhand felt the creature realize it was dying.

The monster turned and began its journey back home. Back to Ru’s castle.

Chapter 43

The Lanya queen had wounded him. Never before had she attacked Ru directly. The witch had always stayed in the background, manipulating the players from afar. She must have been very protective of the little Abanshi.

No. Ru couldn’t call him that any more. He was no longer the anonymous little Abanshi. Now he was Blackhand. And what that meant, the god didn’t know.

Sirian Ru walked out upon the enormous landing shelf he had constructed for his new creation.  Made from solid marble, the open platform stretched more than a mile in all directions, crowning his castle with a flat, gleaming, white slab. A strong wind whipped across the polished surface of the shelf, but Ru did not notice.

Blackhand had learned to hide, a skill passed on by his protective ally. In the process of completing this feat, he had blended with the broken chunk of god and both man and god had died. Or rather, both had joined to become something else. Blackhand was nothing less than a new category of life. Ru had gotten to know the new being quite well. They had conversed for thirty years. Although the ideas they shared were simple, their telling took time through so many dimensions.

Ru had been busy during the conversation. He had never stopped working. The Last Soulstone had taken twenty years for him to produce. It was agony pulling the ethereal material through his body continuously for decades, but he had done it.

The result was a masterpiece, a triumph over his previous work. A great culmination of all he had learned. Ru had constructed a body with features making it invincible to Blackhand. The god had just been waiting for the right time to set it free.

At last, the waiting had ended. Ru had released his triumph. His final gambit against his new enemy had been put into play. Did Blackhand still mourn death as he had before? Ru hoped so. His new creation would serve the being a feast of sorrow. Then it would kill him.

Ru knew the acid would eventually find its mark. He had thought long on that feature. He wanted a weapon that would be impossible to deflect, something difficult to avoid when launched. At some point, Blackhand would fail to dodge quickly enough, or underestimate the creature’s ability to adapt. He would err and become emotionally involved in the world again. Or he would foolishly sacrifice himself to save others. Somehow, at some moment, Blackhand would make a mistake and the acid would take him.