while the black stars burn (19 page)

No, no, that wasn’t me, that wasn’t my memory. I reached to wipe silver trauma from my face with my shield hand, but I felt no liquid metal, just the dark water I was drowning in. Thrashing for air, I found the cold jagged edge of the ice above me. I swung my sword hand skyward, my weapon still clenched in my shivering fist, and hauled myself up into harsh air. Both my eyes almost immediately froze shut. Gasping from the cold, I started to crawl across the rough ice toward what I hoped was shore when I felt the surface begin to give way beneath me—

I could smell the little boy in the crib crammed next to mine. The wet nurse had given me a bottle of watered-down milk, but it soured in my stomach and I spit it all up. I felt so hungry and empty, but none of the exhausted orphanage staff paid any attention to our wails after the lights were out.

I didn’t know what I yearned for, except that I wanted to be near that little boy who was so warm and smelled so good. My infant bones were still rubbery, my muscles weak, but after a few tries I managed to stand, grasp the wooden crib rail, and pull myself up and over into his bed—

No. Not that. I didn’t want to feel what was coming next. I shook myself out of Miko’s memory and hauled myself back onto the ice.

It crazed and crackled beneath me as I scrambled toward the rocky dam, but I reached the glazed stones and managed to throw myself onto them before the pond-top shattered. I lay there, clinging to the rocks, gasping for breath, the frigid air like a thousand needles in my lungs. My water-stringy hair was freezing into icicle dreadlocks, and I could see frost crystals spreading across the sleeve of my jacket. To top it all off, my eyelids froze over my damn ocularis again.

It’s not really cold in here
, I told myself.
It’s not really
anything
in here. This is all the Goad’s illusion. See through it.

My pep talk wasn’t working, not even a little bit, and I could feel the knees of my leather pants freezing to the stones beneath me. I started crawling forward toward the bank, still gripping my shield and weapon. My gloves were turning hard as iron, but at least they were keeping the rocks from skinning my knuckles. The land surrounding the pond was a huge, beautifully landscaped garden that had suffered a fierce ice storm; tulips and roses were bent nearly double, their ice-sheathed heads touching the ground. The limbs of flowering bushes and small cherry trees were also burdened, dragging low, twigs and branches threatening to break at any moment.

I collapsed again as I reached solid ground. The pavestones below me felt as though they were sucking every last joule of heat from my core. I wasn’t sure what it would be like to freeze to death, whether it would hurt as tiny razors of ice seeded in my flesh and sliced open my cells, or if it would simply be a numb drifting-away, but I was pretty sure I was within just a few minutes of finding that out.

In my boyfriend’s hell, when I’d switched to a different ocularis view, my entire perception of the dimension had changed, not just my vision. Roughly the same things were happening, but the people were different, the scenery had changed, even the air was different. Could it work here, too? I prayed that it would.

My whole body was shivering and my flesh was so numb I could barely feel any of what I was doing. I cracked the ice sealing leather to leather and slipped my leaden arm out of the straps so I could set my shield down on the stones. With effort, I got to my knees and sat in the padded concave interior. I dared not let go of my sword, and I dared not let my shield get far from me. For all I knew, the Goad was lurking just out of sight, waiting to snatch away my protection.

I dearly wished I could summon my fire to my left hand. Seeing Miko bring her switchblade into my hellement made me wonder if it was possible, but sitting there with the freeze seeping into my brain I couldn’t figure the trick out. I pressed the chilly palm of my left hand to the eyelids frozen over my cold ocularis, hoping it would warm, willing it to warm.

Finally,
finally
, the frost melted and my torpid eye muscles started working again, and I was able to blink. Once. Nothing. Twice. Nothing. Thrice. Nothing.

Not a goddamned thing. I couldn’t see
anything
through my ocularis. Had the cold broken it?

Oh God, oh God, c’mon, I’m dying here.
I took a deep, lung-torturing breath and blinked again.

The garden around me changed, and I felt warmth flow back into my body. What had been trees and bushes and flowerbeds I now saw were people—tens of thousands of people—standing, crouching, lying on the ground. They were all immobilized in glassy chrysalises, their souls red and orange and purple lights burning within, tiny factories generating energy for the devil who’d trapped them. I could see the expressions of the dozen closest to me; they weren’t having pleasant dreams inside their prisons.

Okay, then. I quietly moved off my shield and slung it back on my arm, staring past the souls into the darkness between them, trying to see what might lie there. When Miko had tried to take my soul, she’d mistakenly absorbed the one surviving larval Goad that had still been lurking in my hellement. What did the little devil look like now? Its mother was a vast, flaccid creature in my boyfriend’s hell, a genuine monster that had grown fat on decades of angst, forcing her prey to relive their personal horrors over and over. But her child had only been in Miko’s hell for a couple of days. It hadn’t had much time to mature to an adult form, but it had over a thousand times more souls to feed from.

So was the young Goad still a small, quick spongelike larva? Or had it gotten huge and sedentary like its mother? I kept creeping along the path, watching the dark places for movement.

And then as I was scanning a small rocky hill…the whole thing shifted and undulated toward me. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. Crap. My stone eye focused more closely on the “hill”, and I saw it was pocked with hollows and burrows. In some holes, I saw fluttering tentacles I knew it used to taste and smell. In others, I saw circular grinding orifices like the toothy maws of hagfish. And in others shone glossy, deep-black eyes the size of basketballs.

A few days feeding off tens of thousands of souls’ agonies had sped its growth beyond anything I’d imagined. It wasn’t as huge as its momma, but it could still move around, and that made it more dangerous. At least it either wasn’t old enough or big enough to spawn yet. I watched its black eyes, and realized that (of course) they were starting to focus on me.

Great. Just great.

I sidestepped to the nearest trapped soul. She was curled like a fetus within her prison, naked. Her features were blurred, distorted further by her agonized expression. She looked to be maybe 18 or 19. Could she be awakened? I rapped on her chrysalis. The glassy surface was granite-solid, unyielding. I hit it again, harder, and she inside stirred and moaned, but did not open her eyes.

“Hey, wake up!” I called to her, sounding stupidly desperate even to myself. She was a stranger; if I knew anything about her, knew her name at the very least,
maybe
I could pull her out of the trauma she was re-living. But otherwise? I might as well have tried to awaken a marble statue.

The mountainous Goad made another ground-shaking lurch in my direction. Was it genuinely slow or just trying to trick me into thinking it was too heavy to fly? Its mother was only able to work the illusions of the hell to try to trap me, relying on her swarming children for protection. While most of the brood had been as bright as angry hornets, this particular offspring had already proved it was fairly clever.

I looked around at the trapped souls again, trying to think of a workable attack plan as I searched for anyone familiar. But none of the souls near me were recognizable through their chrysalis blurs. I’d only talked to a few of the townsfolk before they fell to Miko. How could I find any of them in here amongst these thousands? And what good could one or two of them do even if I somehow freed them before the Goad devoured me or did any of a thousand other horrible things that dangled from the gallows of my imagination?

The Goad made a low rumbling noise. “I sssseeee you, mongrellll.”

Well, it knew about as much English as its mother. I met its dark, hundred-eyed gaze, raising my sword and shield. “Great. You see me. What now?”

“Now you run!”

The Goad flattened itself, its spongy blob of a body rippling, and then it released, springing high into the air, sailing fast toward me, fifty tons of oily, ink-black flesh ready to squash me like a blueberry under a rancid side of beef.

Christ on a cracker. Yeah, I ran. Fast as I could, and I’d barely cleared its crush zone when I heard and felt it slamming down to the ground right behind me. I felt a moment of relief, slowed a little and chanced a glance backward.

Black tentacles were shooting out of the sides of the Goad like cannon-fired harpoons from a pirate ship. I tried to run faster, but a tentacle whipped into the back of my thigh, knocking me down. I tried to get some purchase on the damp grass to crawl away but the tentacle slithered tight around my leg and began to drag me back toward the monster.

I swore and managed to flip myself over as it hauled me across the damp ground, reeling me in like a sport fish. One of those horrible grinding mouths spasmed just above the pore the tentacle was retreating into. Snack time, and I was the chef’s special. I tucked my shield close to my body and held my sword ready.

Only seconds left before the tentacle would yank me into the Goad’s maw. I would have only one chance at this. My shield was maybe a little bigger than the circumference of the mouth, maybe—

—a sudden jerk and I was there, the tentacle whipping me up at that looming garbage disposal orifice. I rammed the shield against the undulating teeth. As the mouth twitched, scraping the metal, seeming unsure of what to do with this unexpected resistance, I drove the point of my sword deep into the oily, gritty flesh. Dark ichor that stank of diesel spurted from the wound. It was like cutting into oilfield mud. I carved my blade down hard in an arc around the outer lip of the mouth, trying to sever the muscles controlling the grinding jaws.

It was working. I felt part of the mouth go slack, but tentacles grabbed both my booted feet, pulling them in opposite directions like I was a wishbone the monster wanted to snap. I jerked my blade free from the sucking flesh and slashed the tentacles constricting my feet. They were tough as tire rubber, but I hacked them away.

The Goad was shuddering, shifting, corpulent muscles bunching beneath its foul skin. It was going to try for another jump. Or maybe it was just going to flop over. Either way, it would crush me. I had to find its heart, had to kill it as quickly as possible before it could do the same to me.

I slipped my arm out of the shield still jamming its mouth, took a rib-straining breath, shut my eyes, then plunged into the cut I’d made, slicing deeper with my sword while I tore at the greasy flesh with my left hand and the toes of my boots. The monster’s inner tissues had a loose, pulpy feel, like the inside of a huge citrus fruit, as if it had been growing so quickly that its meat hadn’t had a chance to fill in and harden. But that lax texture made my task easier. I burrowed into its body, ignoring the stinging ichor, relying on touch and my instincts to tell me how far to go.

The beast roared and writhed. The flesh around me contracted as if it were trying to push me out. But after everything the Goad had done to me, after it had turned me into a cannibal, infected me, tried to kill me, I wasn’t about to stop. Oh hell no. And I was close. I could feel the pulse and heat of its heart, see the red glow of it even through my closed eyelids.

I plunged my left hand through the last membrane into the burning magma auricle, connecting myself to the source of its diabolic power, and the current ran through me, a dark electricity that lit up my every synapse and nerve ending with sparks and shadows of the trapped multitudes’ personal torments. My hand was in flaming agony, but I knew I could bear it. I had been through worse. The Goad’s roar turned to a terrified shriek as I pulled its vile life energy into the reservoir in my hellement.

The beast shuddered in seizures, and its flesh began to fall apart from the inside out, a rotting house of loose meat. The current disconnected as the devil died, and I fell back amongst the oily charnel rubble, gasping for air, spitting out the Goad’s foul fluids, wiping my eyes clear on my sleeves. My left hand was a barbecued mess, but I was too high on adrenaline to feel much pain.

It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever done, but I was overjoyed: I’d won. And now Miko had to hold up her end of our bargain. Grinning, I began kicking through the stink to find my shield.

Fable Fusion

A tale of the 7th Doctor and his companion Ace; originally appeared
in
Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague

Cowritten with Gary A. Braunbeck

The little girl knelt at the edge of the pit in the great stone floor, her unwashed hair obscuring her face. The dress she wore was old and tattered, but Ace could see that the garment had been cared for with the greatest affection and tenderness. The girl remained quite still, as if waiting for something important, something glorious, something that was, at the very least, well…
fun
.

She did not have to wait long.

From the depths of the pit came the sound of a violin; softly at first, but with a great, determined pulse in the lower register. Its slowness imbued it with tremendous purpose, like a dance-hall comic telling a complex shaggy-dog story as he worked his way toward the corker of a punchline. The sound immediately relaxed the little girl’s body as she whispered: “Oh, Papa, this is going to be a good’un, isn’t it?”

The note rose in pitch and intensity, releasing a single, sustained note that hung in the air, unwavering, until finally it pierced through her, creating a feeling of such sweetness, such delight, such unbound giddiness, that her body trembled from the pure, unapologetic
hilarity
of the note; it wrapped itself around her like a fine, delicate thread, over and over, cocooning her in its eloquent and sharp wit, and the girl—as if being tickled by dozen of fingers—fell on her side giggling and waving her hands.