Beneath Ceaseless Skies #48 Read online

  And the room exploded in silver light. Something slammed into his back, electrick and ice-cold.

  “Cwrsallog! Face me.”

  Lightning flashed. Bands of thaumic force wrapped around Sully’s chest like the fingers of a giant hand and pulled him away from her.

  Doctor Mallory stood before the library doors. An aura of cold argent fire coursed around him, banishing every shadow. He locked his eyes onto Sully’s and with his right hand traced the glyph of the Fourfold Causality. Silver light trailed behind his fingertips like diamonds in a winter night’s sky.

  “Warlords of Matter and Energy, Sovereigns of Space and Time. Granteth unto me thy righteous protection as I open my Mind to thee....”

  “Rowan...,” Sabrina whispered.

  The bands around Sully’s chest tightened.

  “Sabrina!” Mallory said. “What in the Goddess’s Name happened?”

  “Nothing! Nothing, I swear!” Locks of sweaty hair hung in her eyes. “Christ Jesus, don’t look at me like that! It’s not my fault your boy’s a bloody lunatic!”

  “Queen of Phantoms save us. Back away, girl, now.”

  Doctor Mallory narrowed his eyes. Sully railed as two serrated throwing blades rocketed off their wall mounts and flew past him as if shot from a cannon. The blades sank into power conduits bracketed on either side of the library doors.

  Electricks from the great machines that powered the City flashed from the severed cables. Mallory caught the bolts and bridged them across the doors in a writhing stream of chained lightning.

  “That arc will cut you in half, demon. You’re not leaving this room.”

  Sully heard the words but they were meaningless. The demon’s rage became his own. It broke through Doctor Mallory’s psychic bonds and leapt at the figure bathed in silver fire.

  The Enemy met him head-on. They slammed into each other, grappling before the doorway, but the Enemy, the Dark Apostle, would not yield. Sully fought all the more, compelled by unspeakable pain, his every move mirroring the struggle within him, human and nonhuman alike wrestling for control of the body that housed them both. Sabrina flew in and grabbed the straps of Sully’s bracers, but he slapped her back without thought or remorse.

  About the Enemy’s person, his rings, buckles, circlets, and bands shone like great electrick arc lamps. The Shadowmancers had finished their armour with psycho-reactive liquid crystal glazes. Caught in the fevered grip of battle frenzy, the ancient Armies of Starlight were blinding.

  Doctor Mallory blazed like the lamp of the sun.

  Space folded along either side of his hands and solidified into a line of material force—a staff, the mental manifestation of a horned stang bound in leather straps, its tines sheathed in illusory steel.

  Doctor Mallory spun away and cracked Sully across the jaw with the staff. Sully whirled aside, pain and blood exploding red-hot, and crashed to the stone-and-timber floor.

  “Hit him again!” Sabrina yelled. “Zap him! Turn him into a bug!”

  Sully recoiled and faced Doctor Mallory, felt the muscles in his face twist upward into the malevolent travesty of a smile. Thunder crashed again, above them now, the sound of Heaven’s Engines splitting apart. He wiped black blood from his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Rowan Mallory,” the wurm said. Its voice hissed and burbled. “We meet again.”

  “You remember me, Cwrsallog. I’m impressed.” Energies coruscated up and down the length of the illusory stang in Doctor Mallory’s hands.

  “Don’t be. You call down the forces of the Invisible Reach as if the power was yours to command. You’re no more than a pawn, a game piece for the Iron Confessors and She Who Strikes Fear. You are beneath our concern.”

  “You didn’t think so the last time I beat you.”

  “Your resources caught us unawares. That will not happen again.”

  Sully’s arms lunged forward. A mass of black corruption surged from his mouth like blood jetting from a slashed artery.

  “Bloody Hell!” Doctor Mallory’s staff vanished and Space again reshaped before him, bolstered by the elements of Energy and Time. The surge hit his shield and splattered, a serpentine miasma falling over the furnishings in cold bubbling pools.

  Sabrina dove and rolled behind an apothecary’s bureau. “A wurm?!” she cried. Ebony globs hit the floor and spat at her in thick ropey spurts. “He’s carrying a wurm!”

  Before Mallory could answer, the heavy stones beneath them lurched upward with a deep echoing thud. Again the room heaved. Display cases of weaponry toppled around them. Timbers snapped, gaslamps sputtered. A third crash, and a massive section of the floor swung upward on great clockwork hinges, propelled by a hulking red slab of muscle and black bone.

  The Enemy’s Servant.

  “Villain!” roared Broonandag the Blunt. “I say thee nay.”

  “Broon—” said Doctor Mallory, but was silenced as black viscera slapped over his mouth and eyes. The puddles of ooze congealed and sprang, whipping around the two Mallorys’ arms and legs. Tightening, anchoring them to the library’s heavy fixtures, pulling them down to their knees.

  “Ah, the hired help,” the wurm said. “Do see that the bed sheets are freshly laundered and tucked in—it’s going to be a busy night.”

  Broon smiled. Locked in his grip was a gigantic cleaver that still bore traces of the evening meal. “Cwrsallog, thou slimiest of rascals. We would have words with thee.” He slammed the trapdoor shut; neither Sully nor the parasite within was strong enough to lift it.

  Broon was a monster of a gruhl even to other gruhls, and he towered over Sully by more than a metre. Red and mottled black, four dark eyes set in line above a heavy jaw, thick ogre-sized cords of muscle covering most of his torso and shoulders. He tossed the cleaver from one scarred hand to the other.

  “Apologies, friend Sully. This will ache most painfully.”

  The wurm retreated slowly, eyeing the heavy blade. “Addle-pated carbuncle. You cannot harm us without ravaging Sullivan’s flesh and bones. Do you expect to stop us with that?”

  “Nay.” Broon threw the cleaver straight up. Suspended on thick lengths of rope from the conduits above hung an enormous battle hh’l, a siege hammer of epic proportions. The cleaver bit through the ropes. The hh’l fell. Broon caught it easily.

  “I expect to stop thee with this.”

  Broon swung the great hammer. Sully leapt as it smashed into the floor. Broon swung again, and again hit the crumbling stones and joists with a force that could shatter continents. Sully slipped away every time, the wurm controlling his movement with inhuman speed and fluidity. The gruhl roared.

  “Hold thee still, honour-less praQ!”

  Doctor Mallory continued to fight the demon’s foul discharge, scraping the coils from his mouth long enough to secure welcome gasps of breath. He was all but engulfed in them now, squeezing, forcing the air from his lungs. Sabrina’s state was no better as she struggled in futile desperation.

  “Broon, that’s not Sully!” she yelled. “Stop pissing about and do something!”

  “Bedevil not thine uumlads into a twist, my lady. I have me a plan.”

  Broon dropped the hh’l with a thunderous crash, leapt, and slammed his colossal fists onto the broken stones. The concussion snapped the remaining joists along the arc of Broon’s hammer blows; the floor collapsed, pavers and scattered weapons dropping into the mechanical workings of the Downbelow before the parasite could force Sully to react. The drop was far enough to break his back, and into the darkness he fell.

  “Sully!” Sabrina screamed.

  Broon was at the edge of the breach faster than his great bulk would suggest. He caught the boy by the wrist and pulled him back. But the demon in Sully’s gut heaved again and another black surge erupted from his mouth, hitting Broon square in the eyes. He howled.

  “Villain! Thou shalt pay for thy cowardly blow!”

  Sully dropped into a coiled stance, ready to launch himself again.

  Br
oon blindly clawed at the mess in his eyes and tripped over the hh’l. Gruhls were hopelessly top-heavy; off balance, his massive upper body pulled him backward and slammed his head into a corner already compromised by the blows to the floor. Structural supports collapsed, and the Enemy’s Servant was buried in cascading debris.

  “Broon!” Silver light flared from Doctor Mallory’s eyes. “Skull and Dagger! Boiling and Exultant Wave!”

  Psychic energies, the forces of Mind, coursed through him as he called upon the ancient Shadowmancers by avatar and name. The library came alive. Toppled bookcases and timbers slid across the room to barricade the gaping hole in the floor.

  Mallory focused on a dozen vials of herbal solvents and altered the equation that defined their position in Space. The vials flew from their shelves, circling the room faster than thought, propelled by a second equation that accelerated Time.

  He seized a third equation and the glass vessels exploded, raining solvents over the wurm’s vomited agents. The ejecta boiled away, black steam curling from his bonds as he and Sabrina were set free. With a shout she ran to Broon’s aid and, piece by piece, dug him from the heavy rubble.

  The demon’s pain burned Sully as if it were his own. He grabbed the first weapon in reach—a gruagach backsword of unrefined detail—and swung it at the Enemy with mad agility.

  Doctor Mallory whipped the bal’geTh from his waist and caught the fell blade, his hands protected by impenetrable gruhl mesh. Thaumaturgical might slapped Sully across the face and ripped the sword from his hands. It raised him off the floor and there suspended him, his feet dangling in a sustained burst of reversed gravity.

  Doctor Mallory pulled a leather belt from the bal’geTh and buckled it around Sully’s wrists, binding him mid-air, then cast a wide psychic net around the boy’s mind.

  “Sullivan Finn, the Powers be thy anchorage and avengement, the true Wisdom of godly and Celestial Law. Lo, they shall calleth down their righteousness as the Starlight, and their judgment as the noonday—”

  The wurm convulsed, Sully’s gut heaving. “Ha! We do not fear your pathetic light! You have no concept of the Glory that reigned when Shadowmancers walked the mighty isles of Morgana. But all fires die, pretender. Flames gutter out, light fades to black. In the end only the Great Deep is eternal. We shall reclaim this World, and through these mortal vessels the Gods shall reign once more.”

  Mallory laughed bitterly. “You dare call me a pretender? You’re no more a God than am I. You’re a scavenger sniffing at the ruins the true Masters left behind.”

  “The High Forces will fall, and the Armies of the Abyss shall rise in their place. Your damnable interference will be eliminated.”

  “Presaging the future is not what I was called to do, you vile abomination. Safeguarding it is.”

  Sully’s clothes ripped open. More vessels upended and bathed him in streams of botanical oils—aneurin and medrawt, maelgwn, taliesin and llyr—allergens lethal to the wurm, whose body chemistry permeated Sully’s own.

  His fleshed burned.

  The creature existed as pure instinct now—beyond pain, beneath the façade of rationality. It caught the iron-rich tang of blood from the woman tending to the dazed brute in the corner, the heady intoxication of perspiration and blossoming maturity from the children.

  The children—

  He could smell them, creeping through the dark. There! On the stone staircase, just beyond the fire’s light. The Enemy had not yet seen them. Tender pieces of flesh, so easily taken, so easily tainted and stained. Each one a cradle to warm cold black seed....

  No, you can’t! YOU CAN’T! Sully thought. Terror ripped into his heart like jagged claws of ice.

  Of course we can, laughed the wurm. And yours is the tool. Think of it, Sullivan. The very innocents you pledged to save. Your destiny revealed, the Folding Circle complete. Oh, the irony is delicious.

  A scream, high and shrill, in the hall beyond the double doors. Emlyn. She stood frozen at the foot of the stairs, the other children piling up behind her—Graham, Fiona and Henry, Lilybet and Clare—clamouring to get through.

  “Bugger, what’s all this then?”

  “Holy praQ, it’s Sully and Doctor M!”

  “Broon! What’s wrong with Broon?”

  Mallory saw them, too late.

  “Oh, dear Goddess. Sabrina!” His concentration faltered, hesitated the barest fraction of an instant.

  A boy broke through. Henry, the eldest, fine red hair dusting the tip of his chin. He ran to the very edge of the deadly electrick stream. “Doctor M!”

  Sabrina shouted. “Henry! No, poppet, stay back! Rowan!”

  “Sabrina! Keep them away from the door!”

  The wurm felt the belt around Sully’s wrists loosen....

  Lightning flashed again, multicoloured behind tinted glass. The rain pounded harder, louder, in frantic deliberate blows, drawn to the metaphysical fury inside the manse.

  “Sabrina, move!”

  Doctor Mallory’s concentration broke, and the wurm slammed Sully’s head into the bridge of his nose. The Enemy staggered back, hot blood flowing down his face.

  Sabrina bolted from the corner.

  The demon pulled, muscles straining shoulder to wrist. The belt snapped, and the energies that suspended him vaporized in icy white light. Doctor Mallory was unprepared. The mental backlash shot through him like Heaven’s own thunderbolt, frying every nerve.

  And without a focused Mind to sustain its equation, the electrick barrier collapsed in a flurry of hot blue sparks.

  Sabrina raced for the children. The Enemy’s sister, his one true weakness.

  Sully fell to his feet and sprang, grabbed Sabrina by the waist of her skirts, and threw her into the fury of the midnight gales.

  She hit a window, cracked her head on the frame. Thick bevelled glass showered her back, shards and wind and icy driving hail. And something else.

  A consciousness, an elemental desire to wrest her body through the jagged glass. Sabrina grabbed the window frame but was no match for the draw of the wind. It closed around her shoulders, tore at the combs in her hair....

  “Choose, Rowan Mallory!” the wurm said. Foul threads of steam coiled from Sully’s burnt flesh.

  “Choose! Help Sullivan, save your three-penny whore of a sister, or protect the children. Choose one, and sacrifice the rest to Caustic Epiphany and the Brethren of Pestilent Torment.”

  Doctor Mallory staggered forward, struggling against the backlash of his own misdirected assault. “Fight it, Sully!” he said. “Fight it!”

  He ran to his sister. Grabbed her, pulled her back inside with his left hand and whirled a great sweeping arc through the air with his right—the Projective Hand, the hand that rallied focus for the World Mind. Shattered glass leapt off the floor and flew back into place, fusing whole again in a blinding quicksilver flash of reversed Time.

  Doctor Mallory stumbled, weakened beyond the strength and limit of what the mortal frame could bear. “Get the children into the strongroom,” he said to Sabrina, cradling her bloody head. “The defense incantations will protect you—” But as she fell limp into his arms he collapsed as well, utterly spent.

  The carnal scent of the children pulled the wurm back to its feet. Sully’s pulse raced. His blood sang, a thousand sensations centred on the throbbing hammer that threatened to burst rock-hard through the needlework of his black canvas trousers. The parasite laughed.

  Now doesn’t this look familiar, it said. But then, sweet boy, you were on the receiving end.

  Sully screamed.

  The wurm lurched forward, turned on the children frozen there in the dark beneath the stairs—

  —and illumination flared in the depths of Sully’s being. One final course still remained. His final sacrifice—for the children and Doctor Mallory, for his victims in the past and the innocents forever doomed to suffer because of the passions he could no longer control.

  He cast himself into the Garden. The maze of st
one walls buckled inward under the pressure of the irresistible black tide. Only the strength of Sully’s own Will kept them from crumbling altogether.

  It’s finished, Cwrsallog. I’m done.

  And Sully surrendered to the tide. The walls collapsed, psychic fortifications flying apart like snapping bands of Bessemer steel. The wurm’s essence surged in unchecked, and in the centre of the maze, on the ruins of the battlefield, the cold stone tower that held Sully Finn’s soul burst open in transcendent light.

  Come and get me, you twisted son of a bitch.

  What are you doing? the demon roared. Darkness poured through the shattered walls and vaporized, caught in the wake of golden radiant glory. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  I’m giving you my Mind, sirrah. It’s what you’ve always wanted. Have at it then.

  What—?

  The light burned through the last of the walls, consuming every vestige of the battlefield. And still the darkness rushed in, an unstoppable flood pulling him into the firestorm.

  But there’s a catch, old monster. I’m betting the Body cannot live without the Will. I’m betting I cease to exist. I’m betting I die, you bastard. And I’m taking you with me.

  His spirit blazed like the morningstar Gloriana, brilliance far beyond Morgana’s dark skies, golden and incandescent in the tenebrous depths of the Aether. His spark of divinity, the Light of the World. The wurm screamed and clawed as the parasitic union that bound them together burned in holy fire.

  Greater love hath no Man than this—

  Sully collapsed in unspeakable pain.

  Let there be light.

  Everything vanished in blinding Night—the sounds of the rain and the wind, the stink of his own burnt flesh, the silent screaming pain, and Sully too was swept into starlight. He feared death more than he’d ever feared the demon, and terror welled up inside him as the clockwork gates Beyond the Ninth Wave spun open to swallow him whole.

  But then a man’s voice called to him. Hands coalesced out of the night, cradled him, pulled him back, the voice chanting thaumic formulae and equations as his Mind channelled the great battle-surgeons of Morgana’s past: Ice Blade and Thay’lun Sciencemaster, Blood-Raker and Wuhr’g the Atrocious.