The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (6 page)

Once they’d reached the castle, Jav sent the skeleton troops into any and all openings accessible from the ground, ordering them to kill on sight. Jav hopped down from Gran Mid and, together with Hilene, entered the castle through the main gate—there was little in the way of defensive fortifications.

The interior of the castle was a like a warren, with natural tunnels crisscrossing, opening into small chambers and vast halls. Jav and Hilene had taken their course alone, unaccompanied by any of Jav’s skeleton troops. The deeper they went, the smoother the walls were. Jav noticed, too, that the walls were reflective, and he wondered with grim foreboding if this might be all Gim Peshil needed in the way of defensive fortifications.

“You are not welcome here,” Peshil’s disembodied voice echoed through the corridor.

“No,” Jav shouted back, “but we are here nonetheless. You cannot undo what has been done, Gim Peshil. The Viscain Empire visits extinction on every native culture and civilization it encounters and has without fail for nearly eleven thousand years. It will be no different with yours.”

The corridor brightened then. Jav had enough time to raise his right forearm to guard his face, though this was perhaps unnecessary, as laser light bounced off the Kaiser Bones covering his arm.

Jav turned to Hilene, saw the smooth oval faceplate of her oversized, egg-shaped helmet light up with its Head Mounted Display, or HMD, attempting to identify targets. Whenever her HMD was active, the faceplate turned semi-transparent to reveal her pretty face. Behind his own skull helmet, he grinned at the look of intent determination plain on her features.

“It was weak,” Jav said in a low voice. “Either
he
is weak, or too far away for the light to remain intense enough to be a real threat. Well, a threat to me, anyway.

“Hold on. The number of skeletons has just been reduced by nearly twenty percent. Come on.”

Jav broke into a trot and Hilene floated after him. After two significant bends, the corridor opened into a great chamber, that Jav reckoned may have been at the very heart of the castle. The chamber was like the inside of a gargantuan gem, a hundred meters across, all faceted and brilliant. At the top of the chamber, another hundred meters up, was an aperture at the bottom of a faceted parabolic dish designed to collect the light of the sun and funnel it down. Tunnels, just like the one from which Jav and Hilene had emerged, opened at intervals all around the base of the chamber, while at the center was a crystalline mass that stood three meters tall, was a meter across at its widest point, and which spun lazily by inscrutable means upon a fulcrum. Tending this crystal was a creature that shone like the sun. The beast was similar in gross outline to what Suunts had become, was just as broad, but stood taller at forty meters, was wingless, and had the ephemeral appearance of being constructed of pure light.

“How dare you!” it thundered with Gim Peshil’s voice. It pointed its right taloned paw accusingly at Jav as it cried this and the arm stretched interminably to become a coherent beam of light.

Jav was gone in a vaguely man-shaped puff of smoke. Gone but not destroyed. Using the Ghost Kaiser, the displacement technique he’d practiced to perfection during his initial training with Kimbal Furst, Jav stared death in the face and avoided it, but only his five decades of experience with AI enabled him to perceive the approach of light before it struck. The beam of light continued harmlessly down the corridor from which Jav and Hilene had come.

Peshil only knew that Jav was gone after being run through by a laser of his creation. His snout curved up on one side in a terrible grin, revealing great palisade fangs of light, only slightly differentiated from the rest of him by shadowed outlines. He was wholly unprepared for the blow to his head that toppled him.

“The appearance of light, but not light,” Jav said, floating back and down from having delivered the Kaiser Kick, another technique he’d developed and practiced with Furst.

Peshil pushed himself up off the cavern floor with both arms. “You have the appearance of death, and may very well be death,” Peshil said rising. “But you’ll not kill me in my own nest.” Peshil stood and aimed both of his arms at the crystal in the center of the room. His arms instantly stretched to become light, his whole body transforming and following behind as if pulled. This light filled the crystal, split into thousands of rays to be dispersed through as many facets across the crystal’s surface, and then reflected back from the faceted walls. The interior of the chamber became an impassible lattice of laser light, with each of the branching tunnels receiving a beam exactly down its middle. Hilene was in no danger. Jav anticipated a number of incoming beams, dodged physically, used the Ghost Kaiser twice, but was finally struck in the back and knocked to the floor.

As Jav regained his feet, his back smoking, the light congregated to reform Peshil. Peshil eyed Hilene, then Jav, then shot bodily as a beam of light once more, but this time through one of the tunnels.

Hilene approached the central crystal, her HMD lighting up to mark her target as she drove her spear hand into it, into the precise spot that would cause optimal fracture. The crystal shattered into a million tiny fragments.

“I think we’re done here,” Jav said. He ordered the remaining skeletons out of the castle and stood at the mouth of the tunnel from which they had originally come. He wasn’t worried about Hilene, but told her to join him anyway. He then proceeded to use AI to bring the roof of the cavern down to within a meter of the floor and exceeded infinity. With AI, space was relative, could be reduced as well as expanded. While Jav could bring the roof and the floor together, this had no actual affect on the stone structure supporting the roof. When he exceeded infinity, the roof was where he had put it but it was also still attached to its support. The immeasurable pressure required to actually bring the roof down was real for that instant when he exceeded infinity, though, and so great cracks raced around the room and the roof collapsed, an immense disk, several meters thick, that skidded down the chamber walls, crumbling only as irregularities caused sudden stops and upsets.

Gim Peshil streaked across the red sky, a fat wash of light, safe for the time being while in transit, but scared for his life nonetheless. His mind scrambled in a hundred different directions, but he knew where he was going. With his two greatest allies dead, only Sera Fontessa would give him sanctuary, and that was likely only temporary. She’d shown him favor once. He tried to forget that she showed everyone favor, at least for a time, and usually for a price. He had no choice, of course. She had connections to Kels Ansrath, whose powers would be necessary. First to Fontessa’s, but in the back of mind, he knew that, eventually, a much more terrible destination awaited him. Ansrath would be good for a start, and perhaps Fontessa herself would be of use, but in the end, with the fate of Thrax Palonis at stake, he would have to travel to the other side of the world and plead with Chan Fa, the Everliving, for help.

There were so many stories surrounding Chan Fa, the oldest and most horrible of the Shields, of how he’d killed and eaten every other Shield who’d opposed him. None of these tales could be confirmed, and few in recent years had even laid eyes on him, but all children grew up with the fear of Chan Fa seizing them in his jaws if they misbehaved. This was silly, and Peshil had never heard of any child actually suffering such a fate, but Chan Fa was real, or had been.

Fontessa’s territory was submerged in the cloud sea now. The moisture would slow Peshil’s progress substantially, but it couldn’t be helped. Almost as soon as he entered into the liquid storm front he was hailed from below.

“Gim Peshil, Light Smith! In the name of my mistress, Sera Fontessa, I command you to halt. You could pass me, but if you have designs upon my mistress’s abode, I have the means to warn her before your arrival and you would be met as an intruder. Halt and obey the laws of Sera Fontessa’s territory!”

Peshil gathered himself into his dragon form and descended grudgingly towards the mushroom wood watch tower until he was eye to eye with the man inside.

“I don’t have time to observe protocol. Who are you anyway, that can speak the way you have to a Shield?”

“Apologies, Gim Peshil. I too, am a Shield. I daresay some mutual respect is in order. It is in Sera Fontessa’s territory you now find yourself, and I, Ernis Rahm, am her appointed representative.”

“You? A Shield?” Peshil snorted. “What is your title then, Ernis Rahm?”

“I-I have no title.”

Through the wet gloom, Peshil eyed carefully the unremarkable man before him and then recalled that Fontessa employed a number of artificial Shields. These had been created by a Shield whose name and title he could not now remember. None of these creations had power beyond transformation, but an idea occurred to Peshil that turned his stomach even as it stirred the excitement of hope within his breast.

“Show me then. Let us meet as equals if I am to treat you as such,” Peshil said, backing away to give the man room.

The image shot forth from Rahm’s brow, giving birth to a dragon, twenty meters tall, covered in dull green scales. Its wings beat to keep it afloat before Peshil.

“Are all her outposts manned as this one is?” Peshil said.

“If you mean with Shields, yes.”

Peshil nodded. “Still not equal, I’m afraid.” Peshil’s head lanced forward, narrowing into a beam and driving a channel between Rahm’s eyes and out through the back of his head. His head returned, and he gripped Rahm, already dead, in both arms, easing them both to the wet ground where he proceeded to devour the artificial Shield.

Inside Ernis Rahm’s watchtower was a crude map of Sera Fontessa’s territory. Peshil was already familiar with her borders, but the map showed the locations of five other watchtowers, which he sought out and proceeded to plunder. After consuming the fourth artificial Shield, he’d begun to feel heavy and lethargic, but not nearly as much as he should have, considering the volume of meat he’d put into his belly. He wondered if this was because the Shields were artificial or if it was because he’d really only consumed a volume equal to five men instead of five twenty-meter-tall dragons. He thought that his mass had increased, and not just around his middle. His vantage point, when standing erect, seemed further from the ground.

It wasn’t difficult to dupe the final Shield out of his life. When Peshil was finished, a mere three hours had passed since he’d arrived at the first watchtower. He made the circuit back to this, his point of entry into Fontessa’s territory, and continued on towards Fontessa’s castle, ready to lie about the whereabouts of her sentries. He’d left no evidence, and few were qualified to accuse him, especially during cloud sea, of roaming Fontessa’s border and having his way.

Preoccupation with his feasting and the strange, active lack of moral outrage—and perhaps mild intoxication?—had managed to dull his initial sense of urgency regarding the invaders. He prepared himself mentally to present as frantic a case as possible to Fontessa. Fontessa would expect this. If the issue of her sentries came up, he could claim that the invaders were responsible, and this could only help to increase the anxiety he wished to inspire.

He
did
feel a little drunk and certainly more confident than before that they would be able to turn back the invaders. Still, making the case—convincing Shields to work together, that there could be threats other than other Shields—would require drama.

The outline of Fontessa’s castle became faintly visible in the standing murk of the cloud sea. It looked much like his own castle, like those of every other Shield, he imagined, though it was, he knew, unique. He hovered before the main gate on great beating wings of solid light and called for the mistress.

“Sera Fontessa, Mist Dancer! I, Gim Peshil, the Light Smith, request an audience!”

After a few minutes, gears within the castle walls began to clink and the main gates swung open. A man Peshil recognized—a Shield and this one not artificial—stood at the head of a group of armed soldiers. Though Peshil had had his own contingent of men, he realized now, after his had been so easily co-opted, how superfluous they were. They meant nothing to a Shield. And oppositely, a lone Shield could defend this or any other castle indefinitely from any invading force not consisting of other Shields. A show of rank, of opulence, was all the men really amounted to.

“What brings you here, Gim Peshil, Light Smith?”

As the Shield below hailed him, Peshil’s stomach growled. Peshil ignored this even as he acknowledged, without the slightest trace of distaste, the implications. He resumed his human form and bowed before Karsten Rolst, the Red Lance, as was proper for a Shield from a visiting territory, even if he was of higher rank.

“I bring terrible news, Karsten Rolst,” Peshil said. “We are all in danger,
Thrax Palonis
is in danger of falling to invaders from out of the sky.”

“Calm yourself, Gim Peshil. I will conduct you to the mistress.”

Peshil nodded, affecting nervousness, and followed Rolst into the castle’s interior.

Peshil had been in Fontessa’s receiving hall before, but he was always surprised anew by the lavish mushroom wood furnishings, the tapestries of thick silk that lined the walls, and the endless coupling that took place upon the soft couches spread throughout the chamber. Truly, one of her many talents was her ability to display opulence. Electric lights lit the chamber so brightly that it was easy to forget that they were in the heart of a giant volcanic rock formation in the middle of the night during cloud sea.

Sera Fontessa sat in a great, cushioned lounge at the head of the chamber where she could watch all that transpired here. Peshil felt adolescent clumsiness descend upon him like a physical weight as it always did when he was in her presence. Her skin was dark, given more to ebony than bronze, and her breasts were some of the most magnificent Peshil had ever seen, always peaking through her hair, which fell in lank waves of glossy obsidian. Her attention seemed a prisoner of the various carnal acts before her. She showed no shame. She simply stared with her full, moist lips slightly parted and her cheeks flushed, so that she shone with a raw, wanton glow.