Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes (13 page)

25 The Screaming Hole

It was evening now. I was looking out from the second story of a derelict tower. Like most of the buildings in Enoch, the one opposite was veneered with weathered limestone carved in intricate designs. It had an inhabited look.

A hunch-backed man of phylite stock—one of Jairus’ misfits—was walking slowly up and down the empty street, wading through the aureate glow and shafts of gold reflected from the towers’ heads high above. A vagrant’s two feet stuck out from the shadows that curtained the square entryway. No other sign could I see of the Misfit’s trap.

For a while I paced up and down the dusty hallway that led to the window, hoping for some sign. No sign came. The armor beckoned to me from the bag, but I was afraid to put it on. I was afraid of what it would do to me. And I hesitated at the choice that lay before me. I could entrust my body and soul to an unknown force to rescue a woman who wanted nothing to do with me, or I could leave Enoch forever, return whence I had come, and try to forget the things I had seen and the people I had known.

Put in those terms, there was of course only one thing I could do. I had to see Seila again if nothing else. There was something between us, something more than the overpowering sensual desire I pretended I didn’t feel.

So, reluctantly, I began to don the armor one piece at a time—cuirass, arm guards, greaves, helmet. The old metal embraced my weary limbs as though made for me. The feeling of immense, unconquerable vitality surged through my heart once again. Green and blue coursed along my arms and legs. I balanced the anlace in my hand, hesitated, then slid its blade into the empty scabbard at my side. I would avoid killing if I could.

I stepped to the sill and leaped out, landing on my feet behind the sentry. He whirled and drew his blade. The vagrant emerged from the shadows at the same instant, shedding his rags and brandishing a sword. I parried a blow from the sentry and grabbed his blade with one hand. Yanking him forward by it, I struck him a blow that felled him. The other guard brought his sword down but missed. The tip of it struck sparks from the pavement. I stepped on the steel, snapping it, and laid him alongside his mate.

The great doors groaned deeply on their hinges as I thrust my way through them. I was in a short, wide foyer with tiled floors and walls of white marble and a flowing fountain at each end. A man at a reception desk rose halfway from his chair. I strode past him into the atrium of the building. It was filled with subaqueous light filtering through a dome of stained glass in the center of the high ceiling. Below the skylight was a tinkling fountain with a statue of colored porcelain. Lines of columns ran along the walls.

Four guards in scrap-iron armor emerged from the shadows. I rushed the first, picked him up, and tossed him bodily into the fountain, shattering the statue. The second I struck down with a single blow. The other two seized hold of my arms. I drove their heads together and let them tumble senselessly to the floor.

The guard in the fountain was drowning under the weight of his armor. I laid hold of him and dragged him out. “Where is she?” I roared.

The guard trembled. “Who?” he stammered.

“The princess.”

“All the way at the top.”

“How do I get there?”

“By the stairs through that door.” He nodded in the direction of a door at the back. There was a wrought-iron gate before it.

“Locked?”

“Yes.”

“Give me the key.”

“It’s a combination lock. I know the combination.” He smiled. He was recovering his self-possession. “But you’ll never get it out of me. I don’t know who you are, but whatever you do to me will be better than having my intestines unraveled and wrapped around a tree by the Misfit for talking.”

I dropped him and went to the gate and began battering at the bars with both fists. At the first blow they rattled. At the second they bent. At the third blow the latch broke and they swung open. A stairwell of white marble lit dimly by small square windows lay beyond. I dashed up the steps, taking three at a time.

They wound up the building with a door at each inner landing. The topmost one was secured by another gate. I crashed through it as I had the first and went from room to room, searching for Seila. The floor was laid out in a square, and I went all the way around it, battering down every locked door and felling three more guards. She was nowhere to be found. Nonplused, I began a more careful search, and came across a black iron door in the outer wall at the head of a short flight of steps. I went up and pulled it open.

Beyond lay the terrace I had seen from the procession. It was an urban moss-garden, a maze of stone planters and cool alcoves touched with the golden glow of the setting sun. I went to the parapet and looked out. Enoch was a forest of towers. The cruciform rift below was already shrouded in shadow. The crowds had dispersed long before. The ziggurat was empty.

The veranda ran the length of the tower and turned. I drew my anlace and crept that way as though stalking quarry in the desert. I reached the corner and peered past it. At the end of the next reach, a man and a woman reclined on a stone dais, eating from a golden platter.

The man was like chaos incarnate. A phantasmagoria of obscene expressions played continually on his face. He was unkempt and his clothes were mismatched. He moved his arms and chewed his food stiffly, mechanically, like a puppet. His body was gigantic and muscular, but his head was tiny in comparison, and the back of his skull was flat.

The woman was Seila. She shrank from contact with her companion and spoke only when spoken to. I don’t know how long I watched her, trying to read the situation. She saw me before the man did. Her eyes opened wide and her muscles tensed.

The man sensed it. He looked up and saw me. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, rising. His voice was strangely stilted.

“I’m here for Seila,” I said, stepping into the open. Seila started at the sound of my voice.

“But she is our concubine,” the man said, “bought and paid for.” He sounded as though reading from a script, a script that I had already somehow deviated from, to his consternation.

“She wasn’t for sale,” I replied.

The chaotic man’s body convulsed wildly. “We know you!” he shrieked. “What have you to do with us? Have you come here to drive us out? This world is ours now!”

Suddenly I understood. I drew myself up. “Be silent,” I commanded, as I had often seen the theurges of the Wabe do. “Come out of him.”

In answer the man took up the platter, dumped its contents to the pavement, and sent it spinning. It would have taken my head off had I not thrown up my forearm at the last instant. As it was the missile shivered into fragments and knocked me off balance. I tripped and fell back against a stone planter.

The man bounded at me, shrieking, rolling his eyes and gnashing his slavering jaws. He wrapped his fingers around my neck and began to squeeze. His hands were like vises, and he seemed insensible to blows. I drew my dagger and tried to stab him. He caught my wrist, twisted the weapon out of my hand, and tossed it over the parapet.

Now my vision swam with red. In my agony I saw that Seila had fled. I was glad of that, glad she wouldn’t be there to see my end. A low, insistent gong dinned in my ears. I lost consciousness for a second.

Seila’s voice crossed the void. “Keftu!” she seemed to shout. “Keftu! Take it!”

With my last strength I stretched out my arm. It seemed to drop into empty space. When it rejoined my body my fingers were wrapped around the hilt of a sword. I swung the blade into sight. A white-hot bar dropped into the space before my face. I set it against the man’s visage and ran it across. Instantly I was released. I collapsed to the pavement and crawled away, coughing, the sword still in my hand.

I struggled to my feet. I could still feel iron fingers around my neck. The monster, half-blinded, was flailing his arms wildly, seeking me with outstretched fingers. I crooked my sword-arm and swung. The blade caught him just below the chin, cleaving sinew and bone, shearing clean through his short neck.

The headless body dropped to the pavement but didn’t die. It beat its fists and heels on the stone tiles, screaming horribly through the voice box at the end of its severed neck. It was like the dance of a decapitated insect.

“Kill it!” cried Seila. “Kill it quickly, before it gets up!” She pushed at my elbow. “Through the heart! It’s the only way!”

I staggered up to the bubbling monstrosity, raised my sword, and drove it point-downward into its ribcage. A fountain of blood spurted up and ebbed slowly. The body collapsed. Silence mantled the garden.

I was still coughing and choking. Black blood sizzled down my blade. I held it up before my eyes. It was Deinothax, and it was glad to see me. I wiped it on the body and slipped it into the empty scabbard at my side.

26 Shadows of the Adept

Seila came up beside me and looked at the body. “A ghul,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

“I thought ghulim couldn’t speak,” I said.

“They can’t. But they can be infested by the princes of the air and controlled like puppets. I should have known it from how awkward he was. There must have been quite a few in him.” She was silent a moment. Then she looked at me. “We meet again.” There was tenderness in her voice, and sorrow, and a hint of reproach. “So that
was
you in the procession.”

I drew off my helmet. “It was,” I said.

“What predicaments you get yourself into!”

“It was an accident. I couldn’t help but go along. And how could I have imagined…!”

She shrugged. “Once a cycle a lottery is held. The winner lives a year in luxury at the expense of the Cheiropt. Then he pays the price. Most phylites actually see it as a kind of immortality, and envy the chosen ones. Their flayed skins, stripped and treated by the machine, sit there in those cells for a long time. Sometimes a princeps has second thoughts, though. Whoever it was got off easy today. He’s probably living it up right now. Tomorrow he’ll realize he’s a misfit.”

“Seila,” I said, scarcely attending to her words, “I was in the temple district because I was looking for you. I’ve come to save you because I—I love you.”

She kissed me. “Baby, baby,” she said, “what makes you think I wanted saving?”

“If nothing else,” I said, and touched the pommel of my sword.

She glanced at it and smiled. “I made quite a scene to get that. I didn’t know why at the time. I suppose I just saw how much you wanted it, and thought it a shame for some ridiculous phylite to get it.”

“Seila,” I said, “do you know why you’re here?”

“They never told me,” she said guardedly. “Do you know? You must know something, or you would never have found me.”

“I do know something. I know a great deal. Most of it makes no sense. But this I can tell you. I know why you weren’t able to find the one you came to Enoch to find.”

She colored. “Why?”

“You would have had to look in the Hanging Gardens.”

“You mean—”

“Have you heard of the Adept?”

She looked off into the distance. “It’s true, then!” she whispered. “He’s alive, and in Narva. This means he’s doing something. But what? What am I to do?” She looked at me. “How do you know this?”

“An overheard conversation. The Misfit and a tool of his, a ghularch of the Cheiropt.”

“You met the Misfit?”

“I did. He tried to have Granny put out of the way. The ghularch was the one sent to do it. I went to see
him
afterward.”

“He
is
a fool,” said Seila. “You can’t own the tools of the Cheiropt without the Cheiropt owning you.”

“He’ll have little cause to love me now. I destroyed a carload of chimeras he’d had transported from the Deserits.”

“Why interfere?”

I shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I? I didn’t ask to be thrown into this. But I had my own reasons. Slaying chimeras is in the blood of my sires. I told you of the daemon-wife buried beneath the mountain. From time to time a monster comes forth. The Phylarch of Arras destroys it.”

She was looking at me, but her mind was elsewhere. “So you learned all this from the Misfit?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t know that the Adept was in Narva when you came to Enoch?”

“How could I? I didn’t know of the existence of either.”

“But when you told me you were trying to find a way there—” She broke off and shook her head.

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing. Never mind. I spoke without thought.”

“This is how I see it,” I said. “When I got to Enoch I made it no secret that I was trying to find the way to Narva. That, together with the fact that I look like a Druin to Enochite eyes, made the Misfit suspect some connection with the Adept. He or one of his underlings saw my first fight. They must have known about you at that point as well. They assumed I had gotten myself thrown into the pit just to make contact with you. I know for a fact that we were paired under someone’s orders. Granny let that slip before she died. They probably listened in on us. Then, when they found out I didn’t know anything, and my failure to slay the cyclops made it easy to get rid of me, they moved you up here to try to lure the Adept down from Narva.”

“So that was their plan,” muttered Seila. “They’d have been better off trying some other bait.”

“I don’t think so. He’s been searching for you, Seila. Jairus said that.”

Seila closed her eyes. Pain etched lines on her face. “Go on,” she said.

“That’s all. Granny was supposed to have had me destroyed, I think, but her avarice got the better of her. That’s why Jairus put her out of the way.”

“But what is the Misfit’s interest in the Adept?”

“He mentioned someone else. Someone in the Deserits. The Sun Mage.”

Seila paled but smiled bitterly. “He has no idea, then.”

I hardly heard her. My head swam all of a sudden, and I staggered.

“What is it?” she cried. “Here I am talking to you and not tending to your wounds!”

“I’m not wounded. But suddenly I feel—I don’t know how to describe it.”

We both realized then that the sunlight had vanished from the terrace. The opalescent sky looked down on us, but shadow was mantling even the upper reaches of the city. Seila clasped her hands. “What are we doing? We need to escape. They’re coming. They probably have our retreat blocked off. We’re caught in their trap. Oh, what were we thinking?”

A sense of foreboding came over me. I had the feeling of eyes on my back. I turned. The ghul’s head was lying on the pavement. Its one good eye focused on me, and it smiled.

Seila gasped. “It’s heard all we’ve said! The nephelim will tell them everything!”

I strode over to the head, stooped, and seized it by the hair. With one arm stretched out as a counterweight I spun and launched it in a lazy arc. It rode high into the evening sky, then dropped out of sight into the rift.

At that moment a body of fighting men appeared around the corner of the veranda. Several more stepped through a side door that I hadn’t noticed. Jairus was with them.