City of Light & Shadow (31 page)

  "A bit of a let-down, if this is it," Kat said.

  No it wasn't, not for Tom. He couldn't focus on that wall, couldn't decide quite what he was looking at. It was as if he were staring at two different walls, both existing in the same place at the same time, one overlaying the other, flip-flopping in and out of focus constantly. The first was a featureless blank, just another unremarkable wall, but the second was something else entirely. Tom was instantly reminded of a memory absorbed while he was in the immersion tank. He saw again in vivid detail the enormous column of core material being lowered into Thaiburley's heart. This was it.
This
was what he remembered from those newly acquired memories. Phasing in and out of focus, of existence, as if jostling for attention with the mundane wall it shared space with, was a section of that vibrant, swirling, impossibly bright energy. This time though, it was different. This wasn't someone else's memories – images in which he had no emotional investment – this was physically in front of
him
, in person. It had instant impact in a way that the planted memories could never convey. The core pulsed with vigour, seeming almost alive.

  It reached out to him and Tom felt his body respond.

  The core's energy touched every part of him simultaneously, seeming to stimulate every cell, evoking a sense of euphoria such as he'd never experienced before. Tom felt a shiver run up the back of his neck and his hair tingled, as if every strand was stretching upward to attention. He wanted to laugh, to sing, to share this exulted state with the world.

  He grabbed Kat's hand, perhaps to dance with her, though afterwards he couldn't be certain. She instantly pulled away, snatching it out of his grip.

  "Tom, what the breck are you doing?"

  "Can't you see, can't you
feel
it?"
How could she not?

  "No, so you're going to have to tell us poor blind folk what's got into you. What are you seeing that we can't?"

  "The light… the colours… the
core
!" and he was laughing now.

  Suddenly he stopped as a sense of dread washed over him. "Oh no."

  "What?"

  He felt them coming – when he was this alive, this connected, how could he fail to? Streaks of individual sentient core energy zeroing in on his location, racing towards him like arrows loosed by a company of expert archers converging on the same bullseye.

  The Demons. Tom might have anticipated their arrival but to Kat and Jayce it must have seemed as if Thaiburley's most elusive citizens materialised out of nowhere. One instant they were on the threshold of a vacant space, the next a host of winged, serenely smiling, achingly beautiful Adonises filled the room. No women among the lot of them, Tom noted in passing. How could anyone ever have believed in Demons' eggs when the Demons themselves were all male?

  "Thaiss!" Kat exclaimed. "We had trouble enough dealing with just one of these breckers, what are we supposed to do about this lot?"

  Good question, and there would be no kayjele to help them this time.

  The assault began almost immediately. There was no attempt at violence, no physical threat from the assembled host at all; the demons were far too subtle for that. They played to their strengths.

  It was impossible not to be impressed by such physical perfection, the aura of health, of vitality, of
goodness
that surrounded them. It was only natural to feel a sense of awe at these visions of angelic perfection; and love and devotion were little more than a few quick steps away from awe.

  
Why was he trying to destroy them, these wondrous, perfect be
ings, what was he thinking of? They had a right to live just as
much as he did.

  
Tom, don't listen to them.
The goddess, nagging him again, as she always seemed to be. Why wouldn't she leave him alone?
Fight it Tom.

  "Be gone, old woman," said the Demons. "You no longer hold dominion here."

  
Tom…
But the image of the elderly woman distorted, flickered, and dissolved, like some victim of the Rust Warriors.
The Rust Warriors!
That memory stirred anger, hatred, and resistance. Tom wriggled free, just a little bit, free of the Demons' insidious influence; enough to remember, enough to question, enough for a seed of free will to take hold. From that seed, clear thinking spread, causing the Demon's hold on him to falter.

  People had died. A lot of people. Directly or indirectly the Demons were responsible; they were in league with the Rust Warriors and the blood of Thaiburley stained their hands. Tom kept telling himself this, running through it again and again as if it were his litany for hiding. He was determined to fight them, to remain free of their will.

  The Demons inevitably sensed his struggles and must have realised that he was slipping away from them, because they switched tactics. Tom felt the change but it took him a while to work out precisely
what
had changed, because it wasn't directed at him. The Demons were focusing their efforts on his friends.

  "Tom…!" His name emerged from Kat's lips as a strangled gasp.

  He looked to see her drawing one of her short swords and turning towards him, her movements jerked and stuttering in marked contrast to their usual fluid grace. It was as if she were a marionette being operated by some inex pert puppet master. Tom realised immediately what was happening.

  "Fight them, Kat, fight them!"

  "What… the breck… do you think I'm doing?"

  Yet still the sword drew free of its scabbard. Nor was Kat the only tool the Demons were attempting to wield. Jayce, drilled for much of his life in discipline and the honour of duty, reacted to their manipulations somewhat differently. As Tom watched, he stood rigidly for a moment and then convulsed, collapsing to the floor to writhe and twitch. The internal conflict between what he knew he should do and what the Demons were compelling him to do evidently triggering a seizure of some kind.

  Kat's sword was now clenched in both her white-knuckled hands, as she took a stiff-legged step towards him.

  "For Thaiss's sake, Tom, kill me!" she urged.

  "No!"

  "If you don't… I'll kill… myself."

  "No, Kat!" He watched horrified as the sword lifted in her shaking hands to point upwards and then, with agonising slowness, began to turn inwards towards its wielder. He saw this with only part of his awareness, however. The rest of him was elsewhere, skirting around the Demons, not joining with them, not plunging into that vast mass of their combined consciousness, just feeling around its edges, searching for a weakness. He sensed something surprising about them, a nebulous emotion that was wholly unexpected and which he was frantically trying to understand.

  The Demons were afraid, which meant they must be vulnerable. If he could only work out what of, he might yet find a way of saving himself and Kat, of saving everybody.

  "Trust me, Kat," he said. "Don't harm yourself, just concentrate on not harming me."

  "Easy… for you… to say."

  Sweat trickled down her face. The trembling blade continued to reverse, lowering by ponderous degree towards her shoulder.

  It wasn't him. The Demons weren't afraid of his much vaunted talent… so what was it?

  As if sensing his quest, a calm, almost musical voice spoke soothingly, "You can't beat us, Tom. Not this close to the core, the source of our strength. Nothing can touch us here, at the seat of our very being."

  Was it just imagination that dressed his next thoughts in the voice of the goddess, or did some vestige of Thaiss still reside within him?
Listen to their words
, the voice seemed to whisper.
The clue to defeating them is in their own words.

  Tom thought frantically, analysing the Demons' gloating pronouncement, taking individual words and considering their implications, discarding the irrelevancies and unspecifics, concentrating on the truly important ones. They quickly boiled down to just three: Demons, source, core. They were the essence of what was going on here. In the blink of an eye he expanded his thoughts in a manner that would have been impossible before his stay with Thaiss, to consider the relationship between those concepts, and as quickly as that he had it: what the Demons were trying so hard to distract him from; what they were afraid of.

  In order to stop him, the Demons had congregated at the one place where they were at their most powerful, but it was also where they were most vulnerable: yes the core was the source of their strength, but that same core had been calling to them for more than a century, attempting to reclaim them. They were programmed to heed that call, their nature demanded they merge with the core when summoned, yet they had resisted that imperative throughout and continued to resist it even now. Every day since must have been a constant struggle for them, a fight not to succumb; and never would that call be stronger than it was here and now, at its very source.

  Despite their apparent confidence, their air of assumed infallibility, coming here was an act of desperation, a gamble they were driven to take; one in which the odds were stacked in their favour only for as long as he failed to recognise their peril.

  The gamble had just backfired.

  "Hang on, Kat, he yelled. "For Thaiss's sake, hang on!"

  He could feel it immediately once he knew what to look for; that summons: a relentless insistence that tugged at them. Now Tom knew exactly what to do, how to beat them. He didn't attack, he didn't fling his talent impotently against the unyielding might of the Demons' combined magnificence; he simply grasped the bond that tied each individual Demon to Thaiburley's core, the tether that even now sought to reel them in, and held fast while he summoned his talent. Feeling it burn, feeling it swell within every last corner of his being until he could contain it no more. Only then did he let go, pouring everything he had into that link, strengthening it, boosting it, until the summons ripped through the Demon's fragile indifference, battering at their carefully constructed resistance.

  And they did resist. At first. For desperate seconds they clung on. Futilely. First one and then another succumbed, their defences shredding as they were sucked into the vortex of the core. Two more followed immediately and the trickle became a rush. Tom felt them go, each parting scream a testament of despair and frustrated ambition, every single one of them indistinguishable from the last.

  Finally it was over. He came back to himself and discovered he was on his knees, without any recollection of how he came to be there. Kat stood beside him, her sword lying on the ground, both hands held stiffly open at her sides. She looked petrified, her face as white as a freshly starched shirt.

  He climbed shakily to his feet and drew her into his arms, hugging her close, an instinctive act which he would have suppressed if he'd stopped to think about it. She didn't resist but instead hugged him back, clinging to him until the trembling stopped. "It's okay," he said. "They're gone." He said this as much to reassure himself as her.

  After a few ragged breaths exhaled against his shoulder and neck – their warmth a tickle on his throat – she pulled away. There was a little more colour to her cheeks now. "Thaiss, that'll be something to tell folks on a cold dark night!"

  Tom grinned. "Should be worth a drink or two."

  "You're not kidding." She stooped to reclaim her sword.

  Jayce was in the process of pushing himself up from the floor, one hand spread on the ground for support, the other clutching his head, finger and thumb either side of his eyes as if to hold them in place. Flecks of drying spittle marked his cheek and chin. He lowered the hand, blew out his cheeks and gave Tom a shallow nod to indicate he was all right. Tom realised that, bizarrely, he was probably in the best shape of any of them.

  "They've really gone?" Kat asked from beside him.

  He nodded. "Sucked back into the core, where they belong."

  "Remind me never to get on the wrong side of you."

  "Oh I will, don't worry."

  "Now what?"

  "Now we do what we came here for. We replenish the core." Interesting how Kat was deferring to him all of a sudden. He reckoned he could get used to that.

  Despite his confident words, Tom wasn't entirely clear
how
he was supposed to replenish the core, but there was no point in admitting as much just yet.

  The room was unchanged, which struck Tom as wrong; there should have been some disorder, scorch marks on the floor, a hole, or at least some slight difference to mark the fierce, brief struggle that had just taken place here. But the impassive walls and logic-defying platform remained the same. As did the dual-nature of the core wall, alternating rapidly between functional neutrality and the writhing energy of the city's heart. Even the core looked no different. It had just swallowed an entire generation of Demons without even belching.

  Tom walked slowly forward, mesmerised. He felt that he was being offered a choice of two different realities. Inevitably, he chose the core, concentrating on those shifting energies, until they stabilised and became permanent, the mundane blandness of solid masonry no longer interfering.

  "Wow," Kat said. "Did you do that?"

  "No, not really," he replied. "It was there all the time."

  Tom knew what to do now. It was obvious. He clambered up onto the platform. Kat and Jayce followed, though he was barely paying them any attention now.

  Calmly, almost reverently, he took the rucksack from his back and eased it onto the floor. He lifted the canister free of the bag, his hands tingling at the touch, a sense of pins and needles running in ripples up his arm. He placed the cylinder on the ground and flipped open both catches. Holding it with one hand, he tilted the tube towards the core, as if aiming a stunted canon. With his other hand, he lifted open the lid.