Nightlord: Shadows (133 page)

Then things got
worse
.

I stumbled backward into my headspace, dragged in and thrown across the room by the scruff of the neck, tumbling to the floor, skidding up against my desk. I shook my head and climbed to my feet.

I was standing there, looking at me.

My first words were questions, couched in language usually reserved for sailors.

“I’m you,” he replied, smiling. He only had regular fangs, not a whole mouthful of sharp teeth. “I’m the you that should have been.”

“Time travel?” I hazarded, cracking my knuckles.

“No, nothing like that. I’m the you without all those moral and ethical dilemmas. I’m the strong version. Or, you could say that I’m your son, Father. You contributed the best parts of you, and the Devourer was my mother; it helped me grow and become myself, rather than dissipate into formlessness.”

Memory flashed before me. I hung in an empty nothing, devoid of everything, a perfect void, while something dark and terrible fought over me with a blazing wall of fire. There was a tearing, ripping sensation as the darkness called to darkness within me, pulling out all that was hateful and evil. The blackness in my soul, the terrible things that lurk in the deep recesses of the heart, all drawn out, opened up,
copied
.

And, apparently, invested with power and form, given a kind of life.

“You’re my dark side,” I said, slowly. “A copy of all the evil I have in me.”

“Indeed. And now, I’ll finally have a body that can stand to hold me.” He laughed, a short, brittle sound. “Human forms tend to break down quickly when they house a spirit of my power!”

“I can imagine. Demons don’t do well in flesh.”

“Oh, I’m not a demon,” he replied, still grinning. I wondered if his fangs ever retracted. “I’m much closer to a human soul than that. A half-breed, perhaps—a child of you and the Devourer. Mortal flesh still isn’t durable enough for me, though.”

“And that’s why you’re here.”

“Exactly. I need your body if I expect to be incarnate.”

“You could have just used Keria’s,” I pointed out.

“Would you have settled for that?” he asked, scornfully.

“Maybe you have a point,” I agreed. “I wouldn’t have felt comfortable in someone else’s skin.”

Without warning, I grabbed the desk and spun, sliding it across the floor like a runaway freight train. He jumped straight up, avoiding it as it crashed into the wall, but I was right behind the desk and slammed into him anyway. He bounced off the wall with me and I was on top of him, on top of the desk, beating him with my fists. His head rocked back and forth as I bloodied my knuckles.

He got a foot braced on the wall and shoved, propelling us both off the slick surface of the desk. We landed sideways on the floor and he got one leg up between us, shoving us apart. I tried to roll with it and come to my feet, but he was just as fast, maybe a trifle faster than I. I barely made it to my feet before he sprang.

We wrestled and fought, punching and gouging, clawing and biting, two monsters locked in a life-or-death struggle. He managed to get me in a chokehold; I broke two of his fingers as I peeled his hand away. He gouged me in one eye as a reply and we separated, circling, bleeding from a dozen clawed wounds.

“You’re stronger than I expected, Dad.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What’s the matter, Dad? Not proud of your firstborn son?”

I came in, then, low and fast, and slammed him into the wall. He brought both hands down on my back to claw, but I brought my fist up between his legs to distract him. Monster or not, I know that still hurts. He clawed up my back pretty well anyway, then I rammed my own claws into his abdomen, under the ribs, and lifted him.

He kneed me in the face, then kicked when the recoil gave him room to do so; he came off my claws and rolled backward while I staggered the other way. We circled each other again, watching, wary. We seemed pretty evenly matched.

“Give you this, Dad,” he said, still circling with me, “I never had trouble like this from the princes of Byrne.”

“Which one gave you the most trouble?” I asked.

He looked thoughtful for an instant, and I was ready for it: that fraction of a second when his attention was divided. I rushed him again, shouldering him into the wall one more time, but this time I seized his right arm. His left came around, slashing and tearing from one shoulder to the other along my back, but I twisted his arm and brought it down, brought my knee up. It cracked like a green branch and he howled.

I jerked away from him, yanking on the broken arm as I did so. He staggered as I pulled and I kicked his nearest knee. He fell, or would have. Instead, I turned his fall into a swing, still holding him by the broken arm. Around once, twice, three times, accelerating the whole way, before I slammed him bodily into the edge of my desk. Things cracked inside him.

The rebound made it easy to swing him the other way, so I did. Into a wall. Then I threw him into a corner and he landed in a heap.

For several seconds, I simply stood there, breathing hard and wondering why I needed to. For that matter, why wasn’t I regenerating? My guess was that I was a mental presence, not a physical one, and this was all mental exertion. Maybe I wasn’t regenerating because the damage was psychic, not physical. It sure hurt like real wounds.

My doppelganger laughed softly. He lay in a heap on the floor, hardly moving.

“Enjoy it,” he gasped. “That feeling of victory. It won’t be for long.”

“This, coming from the broken heap,” I observed, massaging my shoulder. I straightened with effort; my back felt as though it was on fire. “What’s going to happen to you when I toss you out, I wonder?”

“Nothing,” he replied, lifting his bloodied face to look at me. “You can’t get rid of me anymore. I’m in you. I
am
you.”

“You never were,” I spat. “You were never anything more than a copy—and a flawed copy, at that.”

“If you say so, Dad. A copy can’t compare.”

“Exactly. Time to go.” I stepped forward.

“A copy, yes,” he said, grinning, “and now added to the originals!”

His one good hand slapped the floor—almost; he seized the bolt of the basement door, yanked it back. I surged forward, but was too late. The door flew open and a boiling, flapping, seething darkness came up from the depths like an eruption from my own private hell.

Which, considering what lives down there, it most certainly was.

A wave of dark and terrible things swarmed up, swamped my mental study, filled it to overflowing, and sucked me down into the darkness.

Above me, I heard a terrible, sickening laughter.

It sounded just like me.

Halar picked himself up from the floor, slowly, as though every movement was an effort. He looked around and nodded in satisfaction. The dead prince on the other side of the grating seemed to grin at him, face twisted in a rictus of agony and death. Halar chuckled and stretched.

Boss?
Firebrand asked.
Are you all right?

“I’m fine. Let’s find the rest of the royal family and their magician.”

I don’t hear anyone nearby.

“Then we’ll look.”

Okay. What happened?

“I ate a Prince. He disagreed with me. Now shut up. I’m concentrating.”

Sorry, Boss
.

Halar sheathed both swords and moved through a perfunctory search the rest of the floor. No one seemed to be present. Quickly, then, he ascended to the next floor and skimmed through it, as well. He found three guards and dismembered them with his hands, bit chunks from their flesh to swallow blood. He laughed in delight as the blood from the bodies flowed and rippled to him, soaked into his skin.

He entered the room they guarded. The young man inside brought up his sword and assumed a guard stance.

Halar ripped him limb from limb and laughed again as he watched the blood crawl into his skin.

“I think that does it for the family,” he observed, tossing most of a desiccated arm aside. “Let’s go look in the basement for the magician.”

Rakal.

“Yes.”

Rather than go down through a tower full of flaming stairs, Halar simply stepped out a window and dropped to the courtyard. The courtyard was almost well-illuminated. Several mirrored lanterns added to the light shed by the burning towers.

He stood amid a small hail of missiles; they veered subtly to either side, missing him. The men on the walls continued to shoot at him anyway. He ignored them and went to kick in the nearest door.

Moments before he reached it, the door exploded outward. A smoking-hot statue of solid bronze emerged from the inferno beyond. The flames had spread from the towers to other areas of the palace.

“Oh, well,” he said, shrugging. “Any sign of Rakal?”

Bronze stood still for a moment and regarded him. Her ears perked forward sharply and her nostrils stretched wide. She sniffed at Halar, advanced a step, sniffed at him again. Halar stood still, waiting.

Bronze stopped and laid her ears back, down and flat. Her eyes widened. Her lips rippled back from her teeth.

“Bronze!” Halar said, sharply. She snorted fire and backed away from him.

“Now, that’s just unacceptable,” Halar snapped. “Get over here right now!”

Bronze blew fire at him and wheeled, running. Halar watched her go, perplexed.

“Well, what’s gotten into her?” he wondered aloud.

Got me, Boss. She didn’t recognize you.

“Hmm. Maybe she ran into some sort of confusion spell while we were separated.”

Could be. Would a spell like that work on her?

“Depends on a lot of things. Well, it’s not important. I can deal with her later,” he said, darkly.

He continued around the palace until he found a door without flames behind it. Hurrying in, he moved quickly through the palace to one of the stairways below. Once under ground level, he negotiated the sublevel to the magician’s chamber. He paused to knock on the door.

Rakal opened the door and did a double-take. He recovered and stood silent, watching for something.

That’s him, Boss!
Firebrand declared. Halar did not reply, but addressed Rakal, instead.

“Are you going to just stand there?” Halar demanded. “Or do you plan to let me in?”

Rakal stepped aside. Halar pushed the door open and marched into the magician’s laboratory.

“Did it…?” Rakal asked, hesitantly.

“Of course it did,” Halar answered. He drew the second sword and held it by the forte, gesturing with the hilt. “If it hadn’t worked, where do you think this would be?”

“Probably in my guts,” Rakal admitted, relaxing. “I’m glad we’ve finally—” he began, and Halar moved, faster than the eye could follow. The swordpoint took Rakal up under the chin and out the top of his head. Halar twisted the blade in the wound and flicked it forward, out through the middle of Rakal’s face, cutting it free of the brain and skull.

Rakal’s body collapsed to the floor, twitching and burbling.

“I regret that you can be of no service to me,” Halar said, smiling. He gestured with the blade and what was left of Rakal’s head came off at the neck. Blood swirled on the floor, slithering to Halar’s feet.

Still smiling, he watched the blood on the blade slide down, over the guard, and find its way into his skin. Then he flicked the weapon to remove everything else from the blade. He sheathed it and drew Firebrand.

“Let’s burn the place down,” Halar said, “and then go to the mountain. I have ever so much to do.”

It’s never cold, at least. Hell doesn’t freeze over all that often. This is a good thing for a naked animal on the run in a world of terror and death.

The landscape in which I live is a twisted ruin, a festering mockery of a world descended into the pit of decay. Skeletal steel beams mark the corpses of buildings; crumbled piles of masonry lie like rotting flesh around the bones. Unwinking eyes, glassless, stare mournfully from other structures, overgrown with carnivorous ivy. Streams of I-know-not-what flow down the middle of ruined, rubbled streets, twisting and turning among the burning trash heaps of forgotten dreams and rotting middens of the mind.

The dark thing that invaded my mind empowered everything that ever hurt me. Every memory that makes me cringe, every forgotten slight, injustice, or cruelty done to me—or done by me—rose up and dragged me down with them. All the fears, hatreds, insecurities, and jealousies I have ever known pursue me constantly. Bitterness and pain stalk me in the dark and twisting alleys of my dreams. These things lurk in the shadowed, twilit landscape of my undermind, the basement beneath my mental study. Occasionally, one or more of them will cross my path and flay me with the whips and lashes of guilt and fear.

Sometimes, I think I catch glimpses of Bronze in the distance. I don’t know if she is really in here with me, part of me, somewhere, or if what I think I see is merely another torment. I know the flock of harpies that sometimes dive at me, screeching and snatching, are real enough; they are the embodiment of terror wearing the faces of the women I love.

I am almost always on the move. If I stop for longer than a few moments, they find me. They are always following me, for my feet hurt from the rough ground and sharp debris, and leave bloody footprints with every step. Little things emerge from the wasteland as I pass; they lap up the blood as I run.

Once, I looked back to see what they were. I don’t look back anymore.

Where are the stairs? If I could find them, I could go up, try to force the door, perhaps even finish what I started. I do not dare to climb a building, nor venture into any dead end or cul-de-sac. I have to keep routes of escape open to evade the things that hunt me.

The sky is an unrelenting black. There is no sun, no moon, not even stars.

I do not sleep. I’ve tried being tricky, splashing through rivulets to wash away the blood, swinging up into hidden alcoves and shadowed holes, there to try and rest. I can rest, yes, but sleep will not come to me. So I try to remember to look up whenever I can, to keep one eye on the sky. When that door opens, it will be a pillar of light in a world gone to gloom, and I will ascend through it.

Will the memories that pain me come with me? Will they seize me and drag me down with them again into this quagmire of agony and heartache? Or can I rise above my darker nature—not that of the vampire, but that darkness that lurks in the depths of every heart?

I must believe I can be better than that. I must! But it is so hard to believe in anything, here, where the darkness itself tastes of despair and guttering fires give off the smoke of desolation. This is not a place for hope, or faith, or belief in anything.

Immortality implies the potential of forever. In an infinite length of time, I will have an opportunity. I must.

Somewhere in the length of eternity, I will rise again.