The man speaks and I obey his every word. He tells me to move and I move, he tells me to stop and I stop, he tells me to stop breathing and I stop breathing. What the purpose of the latter exercise is I have no idea. Perhaps simply to show me he can and will assert his dominance over me. There is nothing I can do about it. There is fear when such power has you in your grasp. His voice finds me when I begin to fall asleep, invigorating me. His mind oppresses and grips me when I don’t stay focused on the task of walking. And we walk. Oh hell how we walk. Days. Apparently, the structure and the hill in the distance are further away than my eyes would have me think.
On the fourth day, while I trudge behind him, the landscape slowly begins to rise before us. I know Ty and Calyx aren’t far behind, I can sense them while wearing the suit. Their body signatures shine like beacons in my mind. But the one who captured me doesn’t seem to care. I see him look back every once in a while, over his shoulder, yet I cannot be sure if he is looking at me or at them in the distance. Six of his men follow me, their heavy feet crushing stones and grinding what’s left of them beneath their boots. The sky is darkening as another evening grows, growling within a wretched storm that brews in the cloudcover. Why don’t they simply port me there like they had done before?
“I know you have thought this as the one freedoms no one will ever take from you,” the man says. “The freedom to think what you will. But the minds of mortals are fragile, easily controlled.”
“Bain,” a man behind me growls. “What should we do with the other two? They remain behind us.”
“Leave them be,” says the man over his shoulder. “It will be interesting to see what they attempt. What do you think? Loregar? What will your friends attempt?”
I have not heard that name in years. It has been so long, in fact, that the sound of it is utterly alien to me. I no longer share a connection with it… I feel nothing. And yet…
“Speak,” he says.
“I don’t know what they’ll attempt,” I admit, my own voice estranged to me as it echoes within the suit.
“Just as well,” says Bain. “Surprises are a delight.”
The other men laugh. A distinct sense like some private joke had just passed between them endows me. Their laughter is harsh, almost like growling.
In front of us, atop the steepening rise, the fortress looms closer, its dark walls glisten below the cloud-racked sky. The walls seem to touch the atmosphere and wound it with its presence. I see a road ahead, or what looks like the outline of one. It is carved from black, roughly-hewn stone. The sound of our footsteps changes as we reach it. A dull pattering plumes dust as feet scrape on uneven cobblestone. At first the road is only wide enough for us to walk on it single file, but it quickly expands until I can see nothing but the road ahead and the sides. The air becomes thick somehow, heavy in my lungs and, from the stones below, hundreds of limbs extend. I walk between them, the shadow hands grappling at my terror, feeding on it. They center around me and I slow my advance. The others don’t seem to mind as if they can’t even see them. I try to swat each away, but they cling. They grasp at my legs, my torso, then up to my neck and shoulders.
“Do not mind them,” says Bain. “They are only in your mind. They work wonders in keeping people at bay.”
His words don’t break through. All I can concentrate on, all I see, are the hands.
Terror is a strange thing. Once it has its grip on you, you tend to forget that there’s a rational road you can take. One that doesn’t involve you being scared shitless.
“Awir,” hisses Bain. A man behind me pushes me ahead. His heavy hand stays on my back and we continue our advance. I notice each shadow-limb bares an eye in its palm. An unblinking, staring eye, and I feel as though we are on a trail of some illusive witch that holds my sanity.
We make our way between the hands, our feet invisible below us, lost in shadow, when the first salvo of shots is fired from our right. Plasma swooshes by my face and hits the side of my armor. I feel a momentary pang of dissipating heat. Before me, Bain lights up like a small sun. Almost all fire seems to be concentrated on him, yet he only stands and I can’t tell what direction he is facing. We are brought to our knees by the shots, our systems overheating. Yet the heat is kept out enough not to burn. A monitor on my retinal-display flashes and fills up to near critical. About thirty men surround us, firing in silence. The sound of collective barrage is like a hundred rotors swishing. They have caught us by surprise, I’ll give them that much. Although how they accomplished the feat I do not know. They steady their fire on us, enough to keep us pinned down. A man steps closer than the rest. He approaches Bain and spits on him, I can hear the spit hissing away. “Fucking Templars. By the decree of Malkard, you will relinquish your prisoner to me, or die,” he demands behind a gas-mask.
Bain grunts something, and I can hear him on my internal speaker. His voice is raw, but measured, “You should have kept firing.”
He leaps up and grabs the man by the neck, his heated armor burning skin and flesh. There’s a snap and the body drops. He leaves a trail behind him, an after-image, but I don’t see him move. He’s in their midst before I can blink. One second he stands before me, the next, bodies fly in all directions. Dead limbs flail about in the air, as though no longer attached to a man but a broken toy. Guns drop from dead grips, other still fire away. Men die screaming. Skulls crack with each blow Bain dishes out, his movements a series of blurs and grunts in the dark. I only see the after effects of it, the gun-flashes giving only a small sense to the carnage. I notice men on the ground, their blood lost in the dark, men in the air, thumping the soil as they fall, men running, intercepted, and snapped over a knee like twigs. The cracks of a spine shattering make my throat pulse with pressure. Some men fire from the hip as they run, painting the huge shape of Bain golden. He stands backlit and terrible, like some demigod angered beyond reproach.
There is a kind of beauty in slaughter. It makes you realize what power men hold in their hands every day. Few ever truly think about it, but it is we who hold ourselves at bay. In the end, there is nothing but ourselves stopping us. We make a decision not to kill, most of us an unconscious one. We make a decision when nothing would be easier than to stick a very sharp object through someone’s very soft eye. The object doesn’t even have to be sharp. But Bain is different, and not just because he doesn’t have a sharp object, none that I can see, at least. His hand wouldn’t fit in any eye socket either. He is different for the simple fact that I had never seen anything like him. His killings are methodical. There is no joy in his actions. His every movement tells a story of necessity. Kill or be killed. He is different because he can murder thirty men by himself without missing a beat. There is even one that runs. He makes it far. Bain simply crouches as though he were to pick something up and disappears into the darkness above us. I hear a deep strike in the distance, a crunch of bone. Of every bone.
Given my life so far, I’m rather surprised I have never heard the sound of a skull being punched through by a fist. It’s a distinct crack, a strangely elegant sound. But such a chance is something I am hoping to avoid.
I see Bain on my retinal display, encroaching from the darkness. It had ended almost as soon as it began, there are none left.
Blood and viscera drip from the contours of his armor as he walks back to us. The smell reaches me before he even comes close. His armor is hot, the blood steaming and cooking. His breathing is quickened, laboring behind his mouth-grille. The other around me stand silent but for their own breaths like clockwork. His shoulderguards, each shaped like a yawning drake, exhaust out vile smoke. There is no humor in his voice. “March.” And we continue walking.
The second salvo of shots surprises us more than the first. It’s not the suddenness of it, however, but rather the apparent wish of our attackers to meet the dead on their way to whatever place the dead visit. There are at least fifty of them this time, unleashing a horizontal firestorm into our backs and sides as they spread around us. I can h
ear a murmur, a voice upon the air. For a moment it feels as though the wind is speaking to me. The words of it are painful to bear, charged with hidden meaning and secrets the world doesn’t wish to hear. I can feel the soil resisting, the pebbles and the dust moving, rising. It takes me a moment longer to realize the voice is Bain, talking, chanting.
“Observe, Loregar,” says Awir, standing behind me, his voice a whisper, calm even in the face of all the plasma hitting us. Sparks bounce off his armor as though he were an anvil upon which a blacksmith is hammering his steel. “Words are power. True words have strength. They carry the world.”
“What do you mean?”
“We are conduits, Loregar. Reality flows through us. Yet there are some men within whom the veil between reality and MU is at its thinnest.”
Projectiles begin to spin and circle until the circle turns into a thin line – a disk where everything becomes one. The yellow-hot plasma, the dust, the particles of air and the pebbles, the darkness of night, all an expression of white light, a jagged reality in the midst of which we stand. Sound becomes still, frozen in a monotone, unchanging buzz, heavy enough to make my stomach shake.
“MU?” I ask. My voice carries over the comm.
“Nothingness,” says Awir, his answer a crackle.
“Do you wish to see the sun, Loregar?” Bain’s voice. I think he’s laughing. “Have a taste.”
Light spins my consciousness and sends it adrift.
Our minds are wondrous things. They jump between places and sometimes leave us grasping for thoughts, or the will to be rid of them.
I observe the movement of luminosity as though it were in slow motion. The world breathes, its breath too loud to bear. I hear the voice of Calyx between each exhale. I smell her on the wind, I see her in the sky. The night becomes bright.
Light expands outward in all directions, encompassing the men and their guns still blaring. Some had started to run, but a man can’t outrun light, now can he? The spread is near instantaneous and the men stand caught in it. It makes shadows of their bones, ash within the surrounding brightness, their skulls gaping wide in silent screams. There’s nothing left of them, and what is left, the night hides and the wasteland buries.
CHAPTER 17