Context (118 page)

And the satchel twitched once
more.

What the Chaos is it?

‘Elva!’ Tom made up his mind
instantly. ‘Throw it to me!’

Startled, Elva stared at him—grey
eyes wide with love—then tossed the satchel towards him.

Nine scarlet figures turned their
attention to Tom as he snatched it from the air.

Overhead, the massive presence of
the Blight stirred, but did not strike; that was more horrifying than if it had
killed everyone outright.

Two TauRiders moved to flank Tom,
guarding him, but
the air clenched
like a black fist and squeezed them
from existence, and they were gone.

Why didn‘t you kill me ?

Down on one knee, working quickly
as the nine scarlet-clad Absorbed drew closer, Tom opened the satchel, drew out
a spherical grey bag—spilling crystals: they were not the cause of the Blight’s
hesitation—and opened the bag.

He grabbed the wet, glistening
contents by its long thin locks of sparse, blood-soaked hair, and stood up
straight with the thing dangling from his hand.

The nine Absorbed stopped dead.

For in Tom’s hand was a flayed
human head, its blood-red muscles flensed and glistening, its sinews hanging
intact, with prominent lidless eyeballs: white spheres in startling contrast to
the bloody, stripped muscles. Its teeth looked long, for lips, like skin, had
been cut away. The head ended at the severed, dripping neck: not neatly, but
with a tangle of arteries and sinews, roughly hacked away from the long-dead
body.

And then, as it hung from Tom’s
hand,
the thing’s mouth moved,
forming silent words, and those dead
eyeballs swivelled to focus upon Tom.

He was too stunned even to drop
it.

‘It’s Eemur’s Head.’ Elva’s voice
echoed oddly in the stillness. ‘She was a Seer, killed long ago, and they guard
it like a treasure.’

A Seer?

And even as he watched, two
teardrops grew in that poor thing’s butchered face: one drop swelling slowly at
the corner of each eye.

But these were no ordinary tears,
for they sparked with electric blue fire, glowed like sapphires in startling
contrast to the black malevolence roiling overhead.

In
silence, the blackness waited. The air chilled, as if solidifying, while the
huge hive of Blight-absorbed humanity held its collective breath. Then the nine
Absorbed continued their advance towards him—as though Tom had missed
something, as though he could have struck back but failed—and he knew that mere
seconds remained before he and Elva and Thylara and the other TauRiders were
ripped from existence or, worse, invaded by the questing darkness with a
sickening intimacy which could not be denied, as it inserted itself into body
and soul, taking what it wanted, making human meat a part of its distributed
self.

He could have run; he could have
suicidally attacked.

Instead, in that moment of total
desperation, Tom performed an action he would never be able to explain to
himself or others, but which seemed simultaneously the strangest and most
natural thing to do at the time.

Slowly, gently, he raised up that
poor, bloody severed head...

‘No! Tom—’

... and
kissed
dead Eemur
on her bone-white teeth.

That flensed mouth parted, and
for a moment an icy purple swollen tongue touched Tom’s, cold and intimate, and
he shivered with fear and another emotion he could not name. And then he kissed
her twice more, gently, once at the corner of each eye where the fluorescent
sapphire tears were waiting.

Fate...

Fear and joy—bittersweet emotion
and a strange, acidic taste—accompanied the absorption of those electric,
glowing tears into Tom’s lips. He could feel their seeping numbness, then an
odd sensation, like an internal itch which could never be scratched, slithering
into his nerves, inserting and inveigling its way deep into his body ...

And was gone, inside him.

‘Tom? What’s happening to you?’

Then, accompanied by angelic
music only he could hear, white-hot fire began to sing inside his veins. The
scarlet figures were advancing—slowly, slowly as though underwater—but Tom was
no longer capable of fearing them.

For he understood his Destiny.

And a power was upon him.

Gently—as
though he had forever in which to act—he replaced Eemur’s Head in the grey bag,
and sticky-tagged it to his waist.

Then he waited.

Patiently.

There
were nine of them, advancing.

Rip.
A protest of sound.

Reality tore apart, and Tom
crouched before his single opponent, aware of the Tom Corcorigan to his left,
of the other to his right.

The blackness roiled overhead and
spun, reacting—
It knows—
and then there were eighty-one scarlet-clad men
coming towards him, before reality split asunder and once more each Tom
Corcorigan faced one opponent, and the arena was becoming crowded now as the
arachnasprites shuffled away, too close for comfort to the lowest tier of the
Blight’s other human components.

For I am become Legion.

Split again, and exponentially
again, and they overlapped, were a multitude—more than should fit inside the
arena, partially occupying the same space but without disaster—but Tom was
there too and this time he struck.

And they fell, each of the
Absorbed, as he—each Tom—struck once, hard, with killing concentration in the
blow.

‘Quickly, now!’ one of him called
to the others.

He closed his eyes ...

Opened them.

He was by himself, the only Tom
Corcorigan, standing at the centre of the arena, while scarlet figures winked
out of existence one by one.

Thylara was the first to react,
gunning her arachnasprite towards the exit tunnel. The people who had blocked
it were fallen: unconscious or dead. Elva jerked back with the inertia, unable
to look away from Tom, mouth open, her eyes sick with fear.

The other ‘sprites moved to
follow.

One of the riders paused, held
out an inviting hand, but Tom waved him on. Above, the massive blackness
gathered, yet he felt—he knew—it would not strike while he stood here,
protected by the power of Eemur’s tears.

The ‘sprites left one by one,
until only Tom was left, standing beneath the void.

But
the void was darkening. Its capabilities were massive, godlike, as though the
universe were gathering itself into one place above him, ready to wipe out Tom
Corcorigan with the rest of humanity upon this world. And its human components,
the mass of entwined bodies which lined the shaft overhead, sucked in a long
collective breath, as though readying itself for one massive strike which would
sunder reality and deal with this insect by flicking it into nonexistence.

Roiling, it waited.

There was a twitch of crimson
motion at the edge of Tom’s vision, then Thylara’s arachnasprite was hurtling
across the arena floor towards him.

‘Valnek’s got your friend.’ She
was panting as the ‘sprite halted. ‘Come on.’

With a glance upwards at the
darkness, Tom swung himself up behind her.

‘Can you do that trick again?’
Thylara hesitated. ‘Make copies of yourself?’

‘Not unless it attacks in the
same way.’

Tom did not understand how he had
tapped into the Blight’s own power; he knew only that he had subverted some
kind of flow, blending with its channelling as it replicated its human
manifestations.

I’m scared.

He had something of value to an
entity whose evil and capabilities made it equal to any god of myth or legend.
A power which had possibly subsumed entire worlds. And here he was, microscopic
before it, frail and defenceless.