The Gathering Dark (47 page)

High above the dry bed of the Guadalevin River, Peter Octavian held his arms wide, his head thrown back, and his breath catching in his throat. Magick flowed out of him and through him, a circuit that lit his eyes with a cobalt blue glow and caused his hair to stand on end. Blue electric sparks danced across his body, and tendrils of that magick leaped from his fingertips to touch the interior of the sphere of energy in which he held himself and Keomany Shaw aloft over the Cleft of Ronda.

The rocks and trees were far below, with only magick suspending the two of them. Peter felt it coursing through him, yet instead of draining him, this immersion in the sorcerous power that surged within him only seemed to invigorate him. For all the spells and enchantments he had learned, that was only ritual, the knowledge necessary to tap the dark energies that churned in the world around him, in the many parallel universes whose science was yet undiscovered. In addition to that knowledge, however, there must be the will, the innate power, to become a mage.

So it was that he felt stronger than ever. The sphere sizzled, burning the air at his extremities, and he willed it to descend into the gorge.

“It’s amazing,” Keomany whispered.

Inside that sphere, he could hear her perfectly. Peter glanced at her and saw that golden light gleaming in her eyes. A shaft of Spanish morning light fifteen feet wide enveloped them so that the blue sphere of magickal energy was bathed in sunshine. Inside that sphere, Peter could smell fresh air, the breath of his own world, spring in Europe.

It was a gift and he was grateful to Keomany for it.

“When this is done,” he said as the sphere dropped more quickly past stone walls and outcroppings, past hidden battlements built centuries past to guard the city from attack. “If we survive, I want to spend more time outside . . . less time alone, in my apartment, with a paintbrush. I’ve spent far too much time trying to recreate the things I relished in my youth instead of appreciating the world as it is now. The scents on the air. The sound of the wind. I owe you that.”

Keomany smiled at him and took a deep breath. Her eyes closed a moment. “Wind chimes. I want to hear the sound of wind chimes again.”

But when her eyes opened, there was no wistfulness there, only dark purpose. She nodded at Peter and he in return. He glanced down at the sight that awaited him, the horror they had both been avoiding as they descended. The walls of the Cleft were steep until they reached a plateau on either side where trees and bushes grew. Below that, rock that had calved off the cliffsides over the ages was arranged in strange architecture on the banks of the dry river.

One hundred feet above the rocks.

Eighty.

Fifty.

Peter reached out to hold Keomany’s hand. The sphere’s integrity wavered only the tiniest bit. He felt it lurch beneath them, an airplane passing through momentary turbulence, an air pocket. The filthy, oily rain and the Tatterdemalion’s storm could not be heard from within that protective shield.

“Now,” Peter whispered.

Keomany stared downward again, at the enormous brood mother, the colossal insectoid demon that lay curled on its side in the dry riverbed as newborn Whispers slipped from a pouch in its belly. The demon spawn climbed to their feet, shaky as colts at first, and then quickly grew more stable and began to caper across the rocks toward the wall of the gorge, and to climb upward . . . to prey upon the people who still hid away in their homes in Ronda.

The Whispers had not been here long enough to slaughter the whole town. Ronda’s tribulations had only just begun. Much of its population might still survive if they could stop this now.

The earthwitch shuddered with revulsion and Peter
felt
that emotion from her, shared it through the connection that was now theirs. Just as he felt the touch of Gaea, felt the pure spirit of the earth, the soul of nature, passing through him. He feared that he might taint it, that somehow the dark magicks he practiced and the horrid deeds he had once performed might stain the radiance of the power now sluicing through him, washing over him from Keomany’s spirit into his own.

Then he realized how arrogant a thought that was, the idea that he could have such an impact on something so much greater than he was.

Peter was a conduit only. Like the eternal balance of chaos and order, like his fingers meeting Keomany’s, his sorcery twined with the natural magicks that she had tapped. As one they reached downward, the light of the Spanish morning that burned down upon them through that tear between dimensions shone upon the riverbed.

The light of another world, of Gaea herself, touched the soil of this hellish dimension yet again, far more powerful than before. Peter allowed the sphere to sink even closer toward the ground, perhaps twenty feet above the rocks.

The tear between worlds widened. Above them the churning storm was driven back, the black-orange thunderheads ripped asunder, and the area of clear blue sky and golden sunlight widened.

The brood mother began to scream. Where it struck the exposed flesh of her belly, the skin began to blister. The enormous creature curled more tightly in upon itself to hide away from the sunshine, and unlike its offspring, its outer shell protected it.

But as the circle of light widened, the Whispers began to burn. They ran blindly, hissing, tendril-tongues darting about. Some tried to slip back into their mother’s dark embrace but the brood queen had closed herself off to them in order to survive. As they ran, a high keening wail beginning to issue from them like the whistle of a teapot, the Whispers burst into flame one by one.

Their carapaces charred, glowed like burning embers, and then began to disintegrate as the fire ate them. In seconds, those who had been unfortunate enough to be touched by the sun were nothing more than dust. Yet the brood mother remained.

The ground beneath the hideous, massive demon trembled and a fissure opened in the dry riverbed. Though the power flowed through Peter as well, though he tried to expand upon it, tried to paint the walls of the gorge with the light and vibrant life of another world, he had no idea what to expect. More pear trees, he thought.

But there were no trees, this time.

From that fissure in the floor of the river came a sudden torrent of water, a spray that fountained from the dry bed and began to flow over the rocks. The touch of the water made the massive brood mother twitch, but nothing more. It began to splash the demon, to flow around it, and Peter realized what he and Keomany had done with Gaea’s power and his own magick.

They had brought the river back. Or at least a part of it.

The gap in the storm above, the calm blue sky, continued to expand slowly. The sunlight shone down and the river water glistened as it flowed. But there were still dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Whispers climbing the walls of the gorge and no telling how many more already up in the city. The slaughter would go on.

For now.

But the Whispers were not their target.

“Now what?” Keomany asked.

Peter frowned. “I’d hoped the sun would take out the mother as well. Looks like a more direct approach is necessary.” He glanced at her. “You’ll be all right?”

Keomany smiled beatifically. “More than all right.”

He wondered what it would have been like to be so infused with the natural spirit, the soul of an entire planet. Likely Gaea had barely touched her, for no single being could contain all of that. He himself had only tasted the essence of that magick and he wanted to languish in it, to invite it in. But it was not to be. A taste was all Peter was ever destined to have.

He broke contact with Keomany. In that instant it was as though every brush with darkness he had ever experienced came rushing back into him. The first time he had slain an enemy in service to his father the emperor, and watched the Turk die on his sword. The night he had laid his throat bare to Karl Von Reinman and let his life drain out into the old vampire’s mouth, given himself over to the hunger. All of the death he had wrought upon enemies, and upon those who were only prey, until he had realized that he had always been a warrior and never wanted to be a predator.

His time in Hell. Seemingly endless years of agony. The learning of sorcery, the mastering of magick . . . opening himself up again to the ominous powers that ebbed and flowed like the tides across the universe.

When he let go of Keomany’s fingers, Peter was reminded of all of that. Reminded of what he was. A bitterness surged up within him, yet it was a sort of melancholy that felt familiar to him. Those touches of darkness, despite his benevolent intentions . . . they were what reminded him what it was to be human. They made him a better man.

Peter Octavian, born Nicephorus Dragases, bastard son of an emperor. Monster. Warrior. Mage. But in the end, still just a man. For a long time he had feared that frailty, that simplicity, and now he remembered that once upon a time it had been all he ever wanted. To be simply a man.

Eyes narrowed, he gritted his teeth and felt the magick flowing through him again. He glanced at Keomany and nodded once, and the sphere fell. It hurtled the last twenty feet and dissipated the moment it touched the rocks. Peter landed as though he had leaped from that height. Behind him, Keomany grunted as her feet struck ground, and she rolled, scrambling to get up again. The tear in the fabric of dimensions narrowed slightly above them, the Hellstorm pushing at its edges, but Keomany’s earth magick was enough.

Peter stood bathed in the sunlight, ten feet from the brood mother. From here it looked even more massive than it had from above, like some whale that had been dragged into the gorge. Its thin outer shell pulsed with life and that skin steamed with the touch of the sun, but did not burn. The stench of the thing, this close, was terrible. Half of the demon was in sunlight, washed in several inches of water where the river spurted up from a fissure in the ground. The other half still lay within the hellish orange light of this dimension, buffeted by the driving rain, dripping with liquid that ran like thickening blood down its side.

This was their only solution. He knew that. If this did not work, he was out of ideas. The Tatterdemalion was far more powerful than anything he had ever imagined. Even the demon lords that had tortured him in Hell were only physical creatures, terrible and cruel, but nothing like this thing, like this . . . Hellgod.

Peter purposefully walked out of the sunlight, into the awful darkness and the roiling storm. The wind bent him over with its strength, the greasy rain slicked his hair and soaked his clothing anew. He ran the back of his hand across the stubble on his chin and then he raised both hands above his hand.

“You think we’re insignificant!” he screamed. “But you made a mistake. You never should have shown yourself to me. You never should have let me know we’d gotten your attention. The only reason you’d have done that—whatever the hell you are—is if we could hurt you.”

Jaw clenched, Peter lowered his gaze, staring at the brood mother. “And now the time’s come,” he whispered, the storm stealing the words as they issued from his lips. “Time to hurt you.”

The energy around his hands blazed more brightly. Once more he began to lift off the ground, barely even realizing it. The magick was in his control, but only just. Sorcerous power filled him, raised him, thrumming through his body. There in the hideous orange-black storm—only a few feet from the splash of sunlight from his home-world—Peter Octavian raised his hands above his head and let the power wash through him. His teeth bled, and the backs of his eyes hurt, and his bones ached down deep.

The light that glowed around his upraised hands shifted from blue to a deep, bruise-dark purple. Slowly, the mage brought his palms together, whispering words in a language only the darkness knew. Sparks of gleaming ebony began to circle round one another in the midst of that energy contained between his palms—a galaxy at his fingertips.

Peter brought his hands together, grabbed hold of the magick that burned there as though he were Zeus snatching bolts of lightning from the air. The purple light solidified in his hands and sliced his skin, a hiltless sword whose blade was sharp as glass.

In silence he moved, leaping up through the rain, the sorcerous blade above his head, a beacon of magick whose light flickered up through the Cleft and off the bridge and the buildings far above.

The brood mother still lay half in, half out of the splash of sunlight Keomany had brought through, Gaea’s light. But the gigantic demon must have sensed Peter, or understood his words. As he fell down upon her with that magickal blade, the monstrosity unfurled its body, moving far faster than could be expected of such a massive creature. It opened up, and muscles undulating beneath that hideous shell, it rolled onto its belly, onto the dozens of legs there. In a sliver of a moment he saw the wide wet slit of its pouch from which thousands of Whispers had been born. Even now Peter saw the limbs of one of the mother’s children poking from that birth canal, hiding from the sunlight that might destroy it.

The brood mother whipped its head around toward him and he saw countless amber eyes glowing there. Its maw opened as if it might attack or spew some unknown effluent upon him, but despite its incredible speed, it was too late.

The mage brought down the keen edge of the blade formed from the most ancient of magicks and it split the brood mother’s face in two, slashing eyes and flesh and black, twisted bone beneath. The sorcerous power of that sword burned the flesh like acid, eating away at its victim, spreading like fire as the brood mother screamed.

Its body thrashed but the damage was done. Its tail end whipped around, hauling itself out of the earthlight, but Peter had already retreated. The brood mother howled, a sound like a thousand bats squealing out their radar cries.

Peter stumbled back toward Keomany, who stared in abject horror at the result of his magick. Under the light of her golden gaze and as he reentered the earthlight that spilled through the dimensional tear above her, he felt filthy and vulgar, his own sorcery a thing to be despised.