Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (44 page)

His head and heart pounding together, Reece stomped and dragged his heel down Eldritch’s shin, at the same time throwing his weight to the right. Eldritch’s grip around his middle broke. In an instant of blind impulse, Reece grabbed the dagger of glass like a handle, its edges digging into his palms, and pulled.

After a second of resistance, the glass ripped from one side of Eldritch’s chest to the other in one quick, zipping movement. Eldritch and Reece fell apart from each other, Reece unintentionally dropping to his knees, Eldritch tipping over like a felled tree, landing with a smack on the marble floor.

There was a long moment of silence. Reece remained on his knees, staring blankly, cupping the tear on his side.
The Jester
groaned like a creature in pain and jumped, tipping over an orchestra chair that had been balanced precariously on the edge of the stage. The clap of wood on marble startled Reece fully awake, and he stood, putting up one tired knee at a time.

Eldritch was breathing.

Reece hesitated, then walked forward. “Get up,” he ordered the body at his feet, voice ragged. The slit he’d opened in Eldritch’s chest gaped up at him bloodlessly. “No more games, Eldritch. Get up.”

The Kreft remained flat on his back on the floor, almost like he’d been laid in an invisible coffin. Reece took another wary step in and leaned over him. As he did, Eldritch’s eyes sprang open, but there was something wrong with them...they stared without seeing, blank, deadpan… and a bright white sheen was coating them, like a film of opaque tears. Reece squinted. The same whiteness, only in mist form, was gathering behind Eldritch’s lips, swirling agitatedly. Despite himself, he began walking
backward, raising a hand against the swelling brilliance of the mist.

Charles Eldritch’s body suddenly arched onto its heels as if an invisible string was being pulled violently through its chest. The gracefully-swirling mist began climbing out of its mouth, its eyes, its nose and ears, moving not like a weather pattern, but like a creature, like a thing with a will. It squeezed itself out of the headmaster’s orifices and stretched limbs of shimmering mist, its insubstantial bulk growing in size till it loomed like a ghostly, faceless giant.

And then the featureless mass of white spoke in the deeper of the two voices that earlier had come from Eldritch’s one body. Rasping and cold, the voice prickled the little hairs on the back of Reece’s neck. Through the serum’s muffling touch on his senses, he felt a spike of panic.

“Reece, listen to me, The Kreft, they’re not human!”

“Oh, to touch again…to feel…to stretch…” the voice scratched as the white thing continued amassing itself over Eldritch’s limp body.

“What are you?” Reece mouthed.

The thing somehow heard his whisper, and though it had no detectable face, it moved in a way that suggested it had turned to look at him. The mist had a multihued sheen, like the colors sitting stagnant on an oil slick.

“I am Kreft,” the voice intoned, its white body undulating.

His heart thumping like a trapped bird against his ribcage, Reece said, “A parasite?”

He jumped as the creature cried out, “A parasite!” and then laughed. “We need not your weak human shells to live! We, who alone can survive The Voice of Space! We, the conquerors of the known galaxies!” The creature seemed to regard the discarded human body at its feet with disdain. “Long has it been since I’ve shed that human hide. Not since my last body was rendered unwearable. I had almost grown accustomed to human flesh. I had forgotten…yes, I had forgotten…”

The thing gave an impression of turning sharply, of looking into the distance, and Reece couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder. His heart missed a beat.

Nivy and Hayden had burst into the dark ballroom, and were standing at the edge of the marble with shocked faces that were washed out by the pulsing light of the thing.

The creature that was Eldritch began to laugh, a rumbling, throaty chuckle that turned into a mad roar. Then, with a flash as quick and startling as lightning, it vanished. Reece’s hair blew back from his face as something immense and invisible rushed by him.

Across the room, Nivy and Hayden started tentatively
towards the place where Reece stood alone.

“No! Stay back!” he shouted at them, spinning. He viewed them through a curtain of oily haze, a trail that had been left by The Kreft’s wraithlike body.

They waited, rooted to the ground, looking around in the dark. A wall of wind blasted by Reece again, howling. He tried following it with his serum-improved eyes, but there was only darkness, darkness and that strange, oily sheen…

He paused to look again at the sheen hanging in the air, so familiar. Suddenly, he knew what it was and where he’d seen it before. In school…in books…in a painting in Emathia’s library tower…

His eyes raced across the ballroom, picking out the mysterious floating trail. He found its origin point, its head, and determined that that was where—or what—Eldritch was.

It was coming straight at him, like a locomotive with its breaks out.

“Look out!” Hayden cried.

The Kreft reappeared out of the trail like a blinding, hurtling comet and pummeled into Reece, lifting him from his feet. Its white substance streamed around him as the marble ballroom floor dropped away and he soared twenty, thirty, sixty feet up into the air, splayed over the strangely solid surface of the glowing mass, the wind crushing his back.

It deposited him on the observation deck astern of the ship, where several mechanics had been moderating the flow of coal gas rising through the massive pipes at the corners of
The Jester
. Reece landed on his back, coughing. The three pipes joined together beneath the open belly of the heliocraft’s balloon, and even this far beneath them, he could smell their fumes, feel their heat. An anchor to the real world. This night was beginning to feel like one long, bad dream.

The mechanics screamed and scrambled as the white being reappeared, bobbing in midair beneath where the pipes twisted together into one enormous gasline. They fled down a hatch and left Reece dragging himself backward till his hands touched the wooden safety rail hedging the observation deck. Only a few dainty shafts of wood divided him from a deadly drop into the ballroom below, and despite the much more pressing matter of the alien set on murdering him, his stomach hardened queasily when he glanced down and saw Hayden and Nivy looking small enough to fit into a matchbox together.

He looked up just as The Kreft shot at him like a flaming cannonball, and rolled, flinching as the rail to his left exploded into splinters. His eyes unwillingly locked onto the telltale oil slick trickling through the broken gap in the safety rail. Little crumbs of refuse—bits of wood, some shattered glass—were sliding across the floor within the slick, as if resisting some distant magnet. He’d eat a hob if he hadn’t just discovered how the Streams out in space were made.

Reece shook himself. No time for lollygagging. He could study the Streams later, provided he didn’t die a slow, painful, and by all means very premature death.

Hissing laughter gave him a split second’s warning; he dove, barely dodging The Kreft as it zoomed past him, a white bolt of power, energy, and heat. If he hadn’t moved, he would have been catapulted out into the night. It was kill or be killed, now.

Which begged the question…
could
Eldritch be killed?

Hayden panted, his heart squeezed in his chest. Up above, on an observation balcony jutting out over the ballroom, Reece was fighting a losing battle. His only strength was in his ability to dart in and out of The Kreft’s reckless line of fire; attacking was completely out of the question. He had no weapons, no clue of how to fight back. He was dying.

“What do we do, Nivy? What do we do?” Hayden moaned.

She spared him a glance before jogging
towards where the weird undulating haze left behind by The Kreft dipped down and grazed the marble floor. Hayden bemusedly started after her, then stopped to uncertainly adjust his bifocals. There was rubble floating in the haze. Drifting along on an invisible current, spinning lazily up after Eldritch.

Nivy’s earlier words snapped together in Hayden’s head; he felt like the
click
should have been audible. He could suddenly see it all clearly in his head: The Kreft exploring the Epimetheus, setting up their occupation, their vaporous bodies leaving great streaks in the black Voice of Space. A captain would have accidentally happened into one of the streaks and found his ship caught up in a current that sped it across the great gaps of nothingness between planets in weeks and days that should have been months or even years.

“How would you destroy a Stream?”

Hayden hurried to Nivy, and before common sense could catch up to him, thrust his arm into the Stream up to his armpit. He felt a tug on his hand, and a second later, began sliding. Upward. With a gasp, he kicked, but his toes were already the only part of his foot touching the marble, and even though he could feel his arm, he could hardly wriggle it. It was as though he had gotten the arm shut in a translocator door and was being hauled up after it.

Something pummeled into him from behind; arms wrapped around his waist, pulling so hard a seam on his shirt gave a woeful crack. The force of the tackle yanked him out of the Stream’s grip, and he fell, skidding on a jacket that had been dropped amongst the litter on the ballroom floor.

Giving Nivy a grateful nod—he couldn’t have formed two coherent words just then, not with his breath caught in his throat as it was—Hayden looked down at his feet and the abandoned dress jacket twisted beneath them. Something glinted on one of the splayed sleeves—a pair of flight wings. Reece’s. He scooped it up. The fabric was wet, bloody.

Clutching the jacket in fisted fingers, Hayden looked around at Nivy. She was taking aim with the Veritas’s weapon—or trying to. The gun was held steady in her hands, but she kept shifting it fluidly, as if trying to aim at a fly. Up above, Eldritch was zipping back and forth across Reece’s defenses like a horse repeatedly trampling an animal on the ground, never more than a blurry smudge of white light. Hayden might not know one end of a gun from the other, but he had to believe getting a clean shot off on Eldritch would be next to impossible while he was moving that fast. Nivy’s face, furious and desperate at the same time, confirmed as much. There had to be another way.

How would you destroy a Stream?

“Nivy, the bullet! Of course!” Hayden exclaimed. “You were right! We can use the Streams against Eldritch—they all lead to him, right? Don’t they?”

Nivy nodded and gave up on the silver gun, tossing it down. She reached a hand into her dress and plumbed out Gideon’s proffered bullet, showing it to Hayden on the flat of her sweating hand.

“Crack it open. We need the burstpowder that’s inside.” Hayden winced as wild laughter and a shout of pain echoed down to them, one after the other.
Hold on, Reece!
“I saw fire in the oil lamps of the servants’ corridors—I’ll grab one!”

He left Nivy trying to pry open the bullet with her fingernails and dashed away, bringing the jacket without meaning to. His hands simply wouldn’t unclench.

He wheeled around a corner, heading for the distant orange glow he had noticed in passing on his and Nivy’s mad run to reach Reece. If he could get that fire and set it to the bullet’s burstpowder within the Stream, the resulting explosion should carry to Eldritch, and at the very least…

Wringing the jacket in his fists, Hayden grit his teeth and bore down on the solitary lantern hanging from a hook on the wall with his heart drumrolling in his chest. He reached the lantern out of breath, fumbled trying to lower it from the wall. The hot glass nudged his arm as it swung, smarting, and he jumped and gasped. Reece and Gideon never looked as clumsy as Hayden felt when they were doing something this important.

Footsteps. Behind him.

Spinning, holding up his only defense—the lantern creaking on its iron handle—Hayden shouted, “Who’s there?” He cleared his throat as his voice cracked and raised the lantern a little higher, throwing back the creeping shadows.

Someone was there…he could feel them. There was no reason it shouldn’t be one of the duke’s guests, though most of them had been herded into windowless safety corridors by sentries trying to restore order. But he sensed…no, that was silly. It wasn’t possible to tell someone meant you harm without even seeing their face.

Gulping down his terror, Hayden stepped forward, then immediately spasmed to a stop. He was looking at a dead man.

Liem stood blocking the hallway before him, a golden mask propped on the back of his brown hair, his upper lip crusted with dry blood. He looked furious. Calm, unarmed, but furious.

“Liem!” Hayden choked. “What are you—
how
are you—”

Liem’s lip curled. He spoke quietly, in a whisper like the rustling of fire. “I sacrifice everything. And then this.”

“I—I’m afraid I don’t—”

“Why couldn’t Reece leave it alone? Eldritch wanted him involved…wanted to use him…but I knew he’d find a way to use us using him!
I knew it
!”

Backing away from Liem, who looked disconcertingly like a wilder version of his brother in the dark, Hayden stammered, “Liem, it’s not too late…we can save Reece…we can stop this….”