Tales of the Unquiet Gods (9 page)

"I was simply going to kill you," one voice - the same voice - issued from three mouths, "but you brought that into my presence. And though you interest me, creature, I will not forgive your transgression." Pallid lips drew back from shiny, black teeth in something closer to rictus than a smile. "I believe I shall make you scream to death before I claim your sibling, and make it like these."

"Chelle?" Anne didn't know why she asked. The creatures' voice spread terror through Her mind was wrapped about in a freezing fog, her muscles turned to ice. Thoughts were hard, like wringing out cloth she couldn't quite get her hands around.

"Chelle." Irony dripped from the word. "Such a creation, and such a dancer. An artist who is also a work of art. The frenzy of creation has claimed your sibling in all possible ways but one, and that one forever out of reach. I felt when you entered my place, thing, that your blood would make an excellent toy of mine."

"Chelle is nobody's toy." Anne forced the words from tongue and lips grown thick and wooden.

"Oh, but it is!" The mind behind the voice sounded proud, as a child presenting a new drawing. "See how it moves, your blood! Full of grace, full of beauty, all that is best of human kine in evidence! And to think it was once as boring as you are, full of nothing but fear and hatred of self. Did you know it still occasionally thinks of itself as Ryan?"

Anne's eyes stung at the cruelty, and she hoped Chelle couldn't hear the words. Chelle had worked so very hard to overcome the pain, to get through the fear. Anne was so proud of her sister, and to hear her beautiful, shining spirit stripped to an "it" hurt, worse even than when their father walked out of their lives forever.

"Your 'Chelle' will dance, will make beauty, until near death, dear, pathetic thing," the voice gloated, "and then these things will bend your precious sibling backward over my altar, pluck out its eyes, and replace them with the silvered orbs of my service. Then Chelle," the voice dripped with revulsion, "will be like these, and I shall find others of your kine kind to consume. Other artists, dancers, singers, wordsmiths and designers, other creators of beauty. Their magnificence and suffering will be delicious!"

The words grated on her mind, and Anne's heart quailed within her. The voice was nearly a physical force, and the music and the crowd mirrored it. When it expressed its hideous joy, the music grew wild and triumphant and the dancers cried out. How could she even fight such a thing?

"But you, thing, aren't even the creation your sibling is." Anne drooped at the disgust flavoring the voice. "You devoted all your time to study, to practice and to protecting your fragile Ryan. You never did anything worthwhile. Not even breed more kine." The voice carried with it the understanding that Anne's very existence was a crime.

Waves of despair swept through Anne. The voice - whoever, whatever it was - spoke the truth. She'd worked hard in school to get the grades to make it into college. She'd done her damnedest to provide once it became clear her parents couldn't, forgoing dance, music and art: anything extra, anything that spent and didn't pay. She'd struggled to graduate with honors, and then worked to afford Chelle's treatments. She'd taken up martial arts, and shooting - though she'd been denied a permit over and over - to have the means to keep Chelle safe. She'd never made anything, done anything that wasn't for the express purpose of helping Chelle. Not for years.

And it hurt. God, it hurt. All Anne's things were really Chelle's things, and she'd never even noticed. She took pride in her skills and in her ability to help her sister achieve her goals. But she hadn't had anything to really call her own for years.

The hard, bright glow from Anne's hand softened into scintillation. The vaporous cloaks swirled up to cover the voice's creatures once again, and the crowd dimmed and faded into the background. But through the sorrow of a life ill-spent, Anne could still see Chelle. Her sister spun into a sequence of kicks, using momentum to switch feet on the fly and turn flips as she went. It was a stunning display, and Anne felt her heart unknot inside her chest at the sheer beauty of it.

"True, I may have put Michelle's needs ahead of my own desires. True, I may have suppressed my own creative drive for my sister. I may not sing, play, or write," Anne said, closing her fingers into fists and shifting her weight, "but I bet I can show you a dance you won't forget."

A tiny, hard kernel in Anne's breast shrieked at her as she spoke. Her fear - a black, screaming terror - gibbered at the thought of confronting the force behind the nightmare voice. This was a thing out of darkest dreams: something that could control dozens of minds. Something that existed apart from humanity, yet seemed to dwell in it and warp people to its whims. How could she fight that: something that had no body?

Yet as those thoughts ran in a terrified little circle at the center of Anne's being, she found herself calming. It didn't matter - couldn't matter - what the outcome was here. It only mattered that this thing wouldn't claim Chelle. The mind behind the voice might not have a body, but there was at least a face in front of Anne now.

And she'd spent several years of her life pounding on people on her sister's behalf.

Anne whipped a feint at the man-shaped thing on the left. It drifted away, and a fistful of skeletal fingers from the center monster wrapped around her wrist. Anne snapped her free hand down, holding the thing in contact. The honeyed luminescence clothing her hands hardened, trapping the insectile digits in photonic amber. Anne lifted her feet from the cold stone floor and let her weight pendulum from its arm.

She drove her foot down and into the outside of its knee. A flash of auric glory etched lines deep on her opponent's face, and Anne felt drawn-wire tight ligaments stretch past their limits and tear. Pallid lips skinned back from its ebony snarl. A series of detonations as it ground its teeth to breaking announced to their tiny world that these abominations could feel pain.

Her feet met the floor, one on stone and one on a shattered mass of bone and tissue. As soon as she landed, Anne grounded her heel and drove her elbow toward the creature's exposed jaw. On contact, another flash of light accompanied the snap of breaking bone and the dull pop as the joint separated mixed nauseatingly and rolled back up through her shoulder. Before, her stomach had turned at dealing that kind of damage, but hurting these things just fanned the flames of her spirit.

Anne's world abruptly slowed, and she knew without seeing that a stiffened knife hand tipped with cruel, black claws drove toward her unguarded back. Simultaneously, the thing to her front was throwing the same blow at the ribs under her arm. If both strikes landed, Anne would be out two functioning lungs. More importantly, Chelle would be left at the tender mercies of whatever was behind this hideous display. It was fortunate then, that Anne had no intention of letting either creature gets its claws inside her tender skin.

It was far easier to move in the direction one already faced. Anne leaned to her right and slid her left foot back, driving her weight through her other foot and into the ruined knee of the center creature. As the monster to her front drifted around its falling companion, Anne arched her back to dodge its strike. Her hands curled around that slowly floating arm and snapped shut.

Anne cranked herself around, using the man-thing's arm as a lever. She drove her shoulder into its chest and threw it into the path of its fellow. She heard a meaty thud and felt pricking against her deltoid where it contacted the thing's chest. Anne sprang away and saw the thing she'd released slowly slump forward. It slid off the clawed hand of the one behind it with a sickening sucking noise.

The thing looked down at its fingers, covered in the fluids of its sibling. The shifting pearlescent light washed out whatever color the ichor might have, turning it black in Anne's sight.

"Tell me, wicked child, do you know how rare it is to find three of one kind?" Its unnatural eyes snapped up, its gaze lancing out to spear Anne's with a burning hatred made all the more virulent for the creature's motionlessness. "Three beautiful male children, all intelligent and sensitive. They came to me. They chose to serve, to gain greater beauty by my will." Anne's mind reeled at the thought of willingly subjecting oneself to such a malevolent psyche.

"And between you and that one, in mere moments, you have destroyed the work of centuries!"

"Perhaps you shouldn't have fed off those who hadn't asked for it," Anne panted. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Chelle still dancing. It didn't appear she'd paused at all. Her sister's chest heaved, and a sheen of sweat showed on her exposed skin. Chelle's eyes were no longer shut, but stared wide open at nothing. The flickering light of Under Hill danced over them in a way that set Anne's heart aching.

The unman left standing shrieked, a piercing scream full of the rage of dying stars.

"You all ask for it! Every moment of every day do you yearn to be made better! With every lapsed plan, every failed calling, every dream sublimated to unlovely reality, you and all your kine beg me to take your grubby little souls in my fist!" The mind ruling the thing twisted its face into a parody of a person, the petty hatred molding the noble features with the inchoate frustration of a thwarted child. "You want someone else to make you dance, to make you sing. Every one of you desires to abrogate your agency to another, to someone better. I am better, and yet you resist!"

The desperate frustration set Anne aback. So many people she knew, practically everyone she met: every one of them asking why someone else didn't fix things. Why won't the president make it better? Or if not the president, the mayor, the governor or someone else in power. The implication was that if someone else takes care of the problems, then I don't have to, and can get on to more important issues.

For a moment, Anne's guard slipped.

And in that moment, the will moving the unman struck.

Smokey shadow wreathed the thing, and it blurred in Anne's vision. There was a flash of golden light in the midst of a suddenly Stygian darkness. Anne felt a thud, and somehow found herself flying through the air. She had a confused image of Chelle floating over the top of her, starshine limning her short, spiky hair and a rictus grin fixed on her unseeing face, and Anne felt the impact of her shoulders on the obsidian.

She slid across the ice-slick stone, coming to a rest hanging just over the ledge. For one endless instant, the moonstone shimmer of what passed for a ceiling spun over her head. Anne's lizard brain jabbed her in the metaphorical backside, and her spasming diaphragm contracted, dragging an implosion of air into her lungs.

A darkening shadow overhead sent Anne rolling back across the volcanic glass. A smoky figure dropped out of the gloom, an echoing crack resounding from the hard surface where Anne's head had just lay.

Anne rolled to her feet, and it was only instinct that had her sway to her right. The unman flew past her, clawed hands outstretched to rend and tear. The breeze from the last thing's passage ruffled her hair. Streaming shadowy vapor, it rolled and came to its feet.

"The hide from your flesh," the unman shrieked. "The flesh from your bones!"

The thing charged, its horrific visage drawing closer with unnaturally smooth grace. Wicked claws reached out of the inky mist it wore as a cloak, grasping for not just her flesh, but her soul as well.

Anne should have been terrified. Indeed, her fear sent galvanizing threads weaving through her chest, but they twined together with furious, incandescent anger, driving Anne forward to meet her hellish adversary.

Anne was glad she'd chosen to wear her flat-soled boots to this vile pit of a club: though she loved the inches heels gave her, she'd never have been able to fight in them, let alone run on the slick stone.

Chelle spun between them as the howling anathema bore down on her, and Anne's heart skipped a beat. Her sister leapt into the air, spinning to leave a bare hair's breadth as the the creature roared past, and Anne had time only to move.

At the last instant, Anne threw herself to her knees in front of the monstrous thing howling for her blood. The insensate rage on its perverted face betrayed a surprising lack of control. She must have irritated the will that drove it.

Anne leaned back nearly prone as she slid across the mirror-polished stone. She took a sketchy kick on one hip, but she could tell she'd surprised her enemy, as the wild blow had no force. She snaked out her trailing hand and caught the thing by one bony ankle. Anne used the thing's momentum against it, pulling hard on its leg, simultaneously spinning her around and whipping the unman face first into the obsidian with all the strength of its wild charge. Anne quashed any sympathy she felt at the hollow crack as skull bounced off stone.

Anne sprang to her feet, and Chelle leapt over the prone unman, inverted, unsupported, her body turning in the air. Her sister's shining form hung suspended over the collapsed monster, and a flash of insight nearly blinded Anne. Her sister still danced, the crowd still gyrated, the musicians still played at the same fever pitch.

Whatever the will was, it didn't control anything but her opponents. It inspired, it drove them, but it was only as powerful as they allowed. Anne hadn't given it an opening. Her mind was too disciplined; her character too honed toward protection. Sudden confidence burned like an ember at Anne's core. Chelle might still danced, but she'd always danced. The thing that ruled Under Hill didn't own her. Not yet, at least.