Crusader (25 page)

Besides, Zenith could not get out of her mind the fact that Azhure had also encouraged the Niah-soul’s attempt to take over Zenith’s body.

StarDrifter? Could she go to StarDrifter? Zenith found herself standing before the door to the corridor. She trusted him more than any. She loved him. He would be understanding.

About WolfStar?

“Why am I feeling this way?” Zenith whispered.
“Why?”
She felt as though some mean-spirited giant had taken an enormous wooden spoon and stirred up her entrails. She was a mass of conflicting emotions, and yet she could not identify any of them.

And she did not know what to do, nor who to talk to. Was it just mention of WolfStar, or was it that combined with her feelings of disassociation and uselessness which had been growing for weeks now?

Zenith closed her eyes, gripped the door handle tightly, and made up her mind.

She
had
to talk to someone.

She turned the handle, opened the door, and walked into the corridor, vanishing into the gloom.

“
I
am not sure it was such a good idea to goad the StarSon,” Sheol said. “Nor tell him about the Sacred Groves. And most certainly it was
not
a good idea to let him know how vital the individual combats between us and his are!”

Sheol’s mouth pouted in a show of petulance that Barzula, Mot and Raspu privately thought would bring her to a very, very bad end.

But Qeteb surprised them. He had retained the congenial, handsome facade he’d shown DragonStar, and now walked about their glade, tossing an apple from one hand to the other.

Qeteb was in an extremely good mood. Infinite power coupled with infinite destruction lay in his immediate future, and that made him a trifle mellower than usual. He took a bite out of the apple.

“DragonStar would have guessed the fate of the Sacred Groves soon enough,” he said around the bits of creamy apple flesh that fell from his mouth. “And knowing precisely what rides on the individual combats will make him insecure, not more powerful. Sometimes knowledge undermines, not empowers.”

His eyes slid to Niah, still lying waiting soullessly for whatever his pleasure might be next.

Qeteb’s lips curled in a sly smile, and he spat out the remaining fragments of the apple, tossing the core away to
a rabid weasel nosing amid a dungheap behind one of the fruit trees.

Qeteb’s face flickered in distaste as the weasel snatched at the core. He thought that once he got the new order working nicely within this wasteland, he might do something about the more pungent aspects of his horde of maniacal admirers.

Then he bent down to Niah, and stroked her hair. Bitch. Her form did not appeal at all, but it was female and it was fertile, and that is all that Qeteb cared about. His hand slid down to her belly, and pressed down.

Her body nourished the foetal flesh that would eventually harbour Rox’s soul. A shame that the new flesh took so long to grow. There were magics and enchantments that could be used to speed up the process, but even so it would be many weeks before Niah’s body had fulfilled its purpose and Qeteb could dispose of it once and for all.

“Good little wife,” he muttered, and patted her cheek. “Dear girl.”

Weeks it might take, but in the meantime Niah was going to come in very, very useful.

Barzula appeared at his shoulder, and Qeteb looked up.

“What are you going to do?” Barzula asked. His voice was laden with suppressed excitement. His three companions and he had thought that Qeteb would act instantly to use Niah’s latent powers, and now they grew impatient.

Best not to show it too much, though.

Qeteb stood up and straightened out the fine grey wool tunic he wore.

“We go to the Sacred Groves, and we
eat
,” he said, and the other four Demons broke into howls of anticipation, holding hands and capering about in a circle.

“We need the power that we will obtain there,” Qeteb continued, and then paused, his eyes fixing on some distant, unseen point as he thought of all the power he and his could feed on in the Sacred Groves.

The silence lengthened.

Qeteb visibly shook himself, then spoke again. “We need that extra power to—”

“Destroy Sanctuary?” Sheol said, letting her eagerness get the better of her sense.

Qeteb roared, and flung out a stiff arm, hitting Sheol in the cheekbone.

There was a distinct crack, and Sheol fell over, but she scrambled to her feet, letting neither Qeteb’s anger nor her swelling face distract her from her hunger.

“What then?” she whispered. Her cheek quivered, and then rearranged itself back into a normal shape.

Qeteb stared at her, then spoke. “We restore Rox’s soul to the scrap of flesh within that woman’s belly—”

“But that won’t do any good!” Mot said. He stepped forward, his skeletal arms wrapped about himself as if his overabundant hunger would make him consume himself at any moment. “He can’t be born yet, and—”

“Will no-one allow me to finish?” Qeteb bellowed, and the other Demons subsided, dropping their eyes and shuffling their feet.

It was a show of respect only. They were far too excited at the thought of the power that lay ahead to be too submissive.

“Have you learned
nothing
from all the worlds we have consumed? All the souls we have absorbed? Ah!”

Qeteb stalked away a few paces, then strode back, bent down and seized Niah by the hair, and hauled her to her feet.

Her face registered no pain, no offence.

Qeteb shook her so violently her arms and legs jiggled. “She is
soulless.
There is nothing there! If Rox inhabits the flesh within her flesh, then he can control her from her womb. He can control her
power!”

“Why not simply give Rox
her
body to inhabit?” Sheol asked. Why bother with all this waiting for the foetus Qeteb had planted to reach a viable state?

Qeteb stared at Sheol, allowing rage to suffuse his face. Initially, he’d wanted to give Rox a new body of flesh to
inhabit—Niah’s flesh had been somewhat overused, after all. But now there was a very, very good reason he didn’t want Rox to have permanent control of this woman’s body: if she was so infused with the Enemy’s power, then Qeteb wanted
none
of the other Demons to control it for very long. That Rox would do so for some few short weeks or months did not trouble Qeteb—after all, he was sure he could keep Rox under control for that length of time. But Qeteb would not,
could
not, tolerate a permanent situation where Rox controlled the vast power of the Enemy.

It might put Qeteb himself under threat.

No, better to dispose of the Niah person once and for all the instant her purpose was served.

There was one further reason why Qeteb did not give Niah’s soulless body to Rox, a reason that he did not even want to voice in his mind, let alone aloud to the other Demons:
there was something inside the Niah-woman that stopped him doing it.

Qeteb could not understand it. There was no logical reason why he shouldn’t have been able to suffuse the Niahwoman’s body with Rox’s soul, but
he could not do it.
All his exploratory probings had been repulsed. By what? By what?

He growled, and flexed his fists, and the four watching Demons took a simultaneous, co-ordinated step backwards.

“Her
body is foul and corrupted,” he said, “and I wish Rox to have flesh of this flesh,” he slapped his thigh, “to use. I am honouring him thus.”

The other four stared at him, then decided to accept his words.

“Once Rox is installed in the foetus and has control of the woman’s body,” Qeteb continued in a pleasant voice, as if none of the previous unpleasantness had occurred at all, “then we will destroy Sanctuary. We will
consume
everything within it—”

There were howls of laughter and hunger.

“—and then I will set you to hunting down each of DragonStar’s helpers, pitiful that they are, and to slaughtering them as they cringe begging for mercy.”

“And then DragonStar!” Mot cried, flinging his arms wide.

“Yes! Then DragonStar,” Qeteb said, and raised his arms heavenward. “And once His Prettiness is disposed of, we can turn our attention to this entire world!”

“And then?” Sheol asked, sidling close to Qeteb and laying an arm about his waist.

“Then we can rest awhile, my dear,” Qeteb said, and patted her cheek. “Before the next world.”

Beyond the apple grove, the wasteland ran with corruption. There were now hundreds of thousands of beasts—both human and their livestock, and formerly wild creatures—that ran the wastes. They had bred in past weeks and the young that they dropped only days after the frenzied copulations that had created them grew at a maniacal rate—and grew into maniacal shapes. The breeding itself had been utterly indiscriminate—men-things with cow-things, roosterthings with bitch-things, bull seal-things with woman-things—and the results of these copulations were worse than horrific, more imaginative than the darkest nightmare, and far more aggressive than the most ill-trained and starved guard dog.

The wasteland crawled with corruption that could have been barely imagined by the most drug-crazed mind.

There was an eating ahead. Their master, Qeteb, had issued an invitation.

But first, Qeteb and his Demons must needs attend the Sacred Groves. Eating aplenty lay there, too, but the Demons were not about to share this meal with anyone. The power of the Mother, and of the Horned Ones, and of whatever other enchantment the Groves harboured was far too potent and
far too glorious to share with the misconceived darkness that slavered in the dirt.

Qeteb stood in the centre of the apple grove and raised his hand above his head.

He twisted it in an abrupt motion, and the wooden bowl spun down out of the sky.

It wailed a little as it fell through the air, as if grieving.

Qeteb caught it in firm fingers, and squeezed the wooden flesh of the bowl until tiny cracks appeared.

“Careful!” Sheol muttered, shuffling from foot to foot.

Qeteb raised the bowl as if to strike her with it, then relaxed. “I have never been careful, my dear, only successful.”

Sheol grinned. “May I be the one to—”

“We all must shed our blood for this,” Qeteb said, “if we all want to go to the Groves.”

He put the bowl on the ground and the five Demons grouped about it. Qeteb waved his hand, and the bowl brimmed with water; it was the colour of a murky day.

“Mother, you cow-bitch,” Qeteb said in a voice that bordered on the pleasant, “we’re coming to
eat
you!”

He lifted his hand to his mouth and bit down savagely on his thumb.

Blood spurted out, and Qeteb let it spatter into the bowl of water.

He looked up.

The other four lifted their own hands to their mouths, bit down, and then let their blood spatter into the bowl.

Large amounts of blood also dribbled down their clothes, and stained their chins.

One of them had bit too hard, and the severed tip of a thumb fell into the bowl with a splash.

The water in the bowl turned to blood.

Qeteb laughed—then he began to howl with mirth. He abruptly stopped, his chest heaving, his eyes bright. “It’s time!” he cried, and he grabbed the hands of the two Demons next to him.

They all joined hands…and as they did their forms changed. They blurred and ran like candle wax placed too close to a fire, and each of them lifted a foot—now too metamorphosed into free-flowing form to be distinguishable as a foot—and placed it on the rim of the bowl.

A great wind howled through the apple grove, shaking the trees and knocking over several of the stumps the Demons used as seats.

It was laughter, the laughter of a world gone completely mad.

The Demons’ forms flowed completely into a black-green liquid, and then they flowed completely into the bowl of water.

The laughter quieted, and a new grove, a sacred place, was invaded.

S
he did not know exactly why she had come here, but she thought it was because she needed to put an end to it. If she could do that, then perhaps she could move on with the rest of her life.

And maybe she could come to terms with StarDrifter.

“First things first,” Zenith muttered as she lifted a hand, clenched and unclenched it to try and control its unwelcome trembling, then grasped the door handle before her.

It did not budge, and Zenith took that as a sign from the stars that she should not be here. She heaved a sigh of relief, let the handle go, and turned away.

“My Lady Zenith?” a polite voice inquired behind her.

Zenith’s throat went suddenly, horribly dry, and she turned her head back to the door.

It was open now, and a birdman, one of the Lake Guard, stood there.

“My Lady?” he repeated, ever polite and deferential.

“I, ah, I wondered if I might, ah, see…”

“Yes?”

“I wondered if I might spend a few minutes with Wolf Star.”

There. The words were out. The action had been stated, even if the motives remained horrifyingly unclear.

“You want to see WolfStar? My Lord Axis has left very clear instructions that—”

“Surely they do not pertain to me?” Zenith said. “His daughter? Besides, I have heard that WolfStar is seriously ill, and I thought—” What could she say? Everyone knew she was no Healer! “—that I might sit with him for a while, perhaps while he sleeps, and give the Healers some respite.”

The guardsman hesitated, and glanced at someone over his shoulder.

Then he looked back at Zenith, nodded, and opened the door wide. “Please enter, my Lady.”

Zenith clenched her hands amid her skirts, and walked in, carefully folding her wings so that they touched neither door frame nor guard.

She entered a small chamber. There were several chairs and stools scattered about, a chest, a table, and a wooden crate packed with bottles of unguents and herbal potions.