Best Laid Plans (45 page)

Still angry? Still struggling? Callixus should have quieted by now. Most of the raised dead were acquiescent within weeks, but the Grand Master had been under Cadman’s control for five hundred years. How could he still care? How could he remember anything else?

‘Perhaps,’
Callixus continued, the words tumbling out as if they’d been pent up for decades,
‘Ain is still trying to teach me. The Elect are exemplary in all things but their pride. My impotence before your evil may be the means of my salvation.’

Cadman shook his head, not quite believing what he was hearing. ‘Oh, Callixus, my old friend. You still cling to hope when all the evidence is against it. You really are remarkable—my absolute favourite. What would you have me do, release you?’

The glow of Callixus’ eyes softened for a moment.
‘You would do that? Then why did you bring me back from the Void?’

Cadman wanted to touch him then, hug him even, but the gesture would have felt hollow. ‘I need you, Callixus. Right now I need you more than ever. I know you think I’m evil,’
—and I’d be the first to agree with you—
‘but give me a few more days. See this through to the end, not because I force you, but because I’m asking you.’
Begging you.
‘Hell, Callixus, I’m as lost as you are. Even more so, because I chose this path.’ As much as anyone could choose anything. What was it the Ancient World priests used to say about seeds and stony ground, some getting smothered by weeds? If only Cadman hadn’t been so assiduous in his studies. If only he hadn’t looked down on those less capable than him. If only he hadn’t met Blightey…

Too late for regret, Cadman.
Way too late. He’d chosen his path and now he had to follow where it led. Oh, he could have hidden away in the shadows of Sarum for another century, more perhaps, but eventually he’d have had to face what he was. You could only put it off for so long, and Cadman had a nasty feeling his moment was coming.
Time to face the music, Ernst.

An odd feeling was gnawing away at what remained of his innards. He struggled to decipher it, shook his head, and then looked up into Callixus’ tormented eyes.

Compassion
?

Surely not. He could almost hear Blightey laughing at the idea all the way from Verusia.
Too late for compassion, my dear Ernst,
the Liche Lord would say.
You’ve stacked up too many tokens in the name of truth. Blightey’s truth—uncompromising, cruel, unforgiving. One act of compassion won’t make an iota’s difference. What would be the point?

No point,
Cadman realized. It would make no difference; there’d be no discernible gain.

Nevertheless…

‘I release you.’ He clapped a hand on Callixus’ ghostly shoulder. ‘But I ask you—I implore you—stay with me a few more days. Maybe Ain would want that.’
—Now that’s stretching it!—
‘Maybe you could help me…’

Cadman turned away, his heart thudding like a ricocheting bullet. Stop right there, Cadman, you cowardly, self-seeking, walking sack of rot! Fear, that’s all this is. Just put up or shut up. Take the consequences of your actions.

‘I will stay,’
Callixus said, his voice thick with emotion he should not have felt.
‘I know how hard—’

‘No,’ Cadman said, raising a hand for silence. ‘I don’t need to hear that. The Dweller is coming and there’s nothing I can do about it. It was my fault. I knew it was a risky gambit going after the statue, and now all the bad choices I’ve made are coming home to roost.’

Cadman stooped over Rhiannon and started to drag her to the centre of the roof. He paused for a moment, looked over his shoulder at the wraith, and felt he would have wept if he’d been capable. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and then tried to put the matter out of his mind with counting.

Rhiannon moaned and muttered something. For a moment she looked exactly what she was: a sacrificial victim dressed in virginal white.
Well, I’m not sure about the latter.
The effect was ruined by the filth staining her robe, but it was enough to make Cadman pause and reflect. She could have been a pre-Raphaelite heroine, perhaps even a saint. He bent closer to hear, but then realized she was probably just talking in her dreams. Whatever venom Ikrys had in his tail, it would undoubtedly give Morpheus a run for his money. Cadman shook his head and sighed. Not that anyone in this topsy-turvy post-Reckoning nightmare would even know who Morpheus was anymore. Mythology had fallen during the time of the Ancients, and religion along with it. There had been no place for anything that lacked utility in Global Tech’s world.

And to think, at one time Cadman had trodden the path of science, a natural enough progression from his medical career. Odd that he didn’t end up like the Technocrat himself, especially as they’d both shared the same mentor in Blightey. But Blightey had moved on since his tutoring of Sektis Gandaw. He’d told Cadman they’d fallen out, but if what Cadman had gleaned from history were true, that was an unmitigated understatement. There’d been a conflict of terrifying proportions and Gandaw had emerged triumphant. Blightey had slithered away into obscurity, but he’d not been idle, and his threat certainly hadn’t gone away. If the Liche Lord’s millennia of existence had taught him anything, it was how to be patient. New protégés had come and gone—most of them had ended up on spikes outside Blightey’s castle in Verusia—and by the time Cadman had come to the Liche Lord’s attention, Blightey had immersed himself in practices far darker than science, far more primal and insidious.

‘Doctor!’
Callixus hissed.

Cadman’s head snapped back and his pince-nez flew from the bridge of his nose. Rhiannon’s teeth were bared in a rictus grin, her fist drawn back for another blow. Before Cadman could react, Callixus smothered her like a vaporous pall, re-forming behind her with her wrists held in his spectral hands. She squirmed and cursed as Cadman fumbled around for his pince-nez. It was an automatic reaction, one he still cherished. He’d had no physical need of the eyeglasses for centuries, but that didn’t mean he didn’t
need
them. They were as necessary to him as Cognac and cigarettes. He twisted the frames back into shape and settled them back on his nose. Rhiannon flinched as if she expected him to hit her back.

‘Be still, my dear, be still,’ Cadman said, raising his palms. ‘Whatever I may be, I’m no brute.’

She said nothing, but eyed him with undisguised malice.

Cadman couldn’t really blame her. ‘If I could spare you, I would,’ he said with a gentleness that surprised himself. ‘Odd as it might strike you, I don’t actually want anyone else to get hurt. Too much has happened already.’
Too much that I didn’t intend.
Or did he? Was he to blame for all the actions that had arisen from his initial action, his decision to seek out the statue? Was he culpable for accepting the path suggested by the Dweller, or was the demon to blame for tempting him?

‘I am…’ Cadman shut his eyes and tried to find the right words.
Why the hell am I explaining myself? What does any of this matter?
‘I’m afraid.’ More than that: he was terrified. The longer you, lived the greater the fear of oblivion. He’d spent centuries running from death, outwitting mortality, sidestepping the big questions of his existence; but the Dweller made that impossible. Not only had it coaxed him from the shadows and back into the world of risks, but now it was on its way to exact payment for its services.

‘Tell someone who cares,’ Rhiannon said, looking at him as if he were something she’d ordinarily scrape off her shoe. ‘You expect sympathy, after all the people you’ve killed? Shog, you’re pathetic.’

Cadman swallowed. He hadn’t expected that. Didn’t she know he had the power to kill her? Hell, he even had the power to raise her again and grant her an eternity of torment.

She continued to stare at him with fire in her eyes. Life.

‘I didn’t want to become like this.’ Cadman couldn’t stop himself; he needed her to understand. ‘I just want to be left alone.’

‘Then crawl back under whatever stone you came from.’

Callixus’ eyes smouldered down at Rhiannon, but she paid no heed. She wore her anger, or her despair, like armour.

‘Too late for that,’ Cadman said. ‘Far too late. Newton’s First Law and all that.’ She’d have no idea what he was talking about, but Cadman wasn’t really addressing her. He was speaking to himself. It’s what he needed, what he should have done an age ago. ‘I know what the right thing to do would be.’ Just the acknowledgment sent icy fissures through his bones. ‘I know I’m being selfish.’ Self-preserving; self-absorbed. ‘But I can’t do anything else. It’s my fault—everything that’s happened—but I’m too weak to make it right.’

Some of the fierceness left Rhiannon’s eyes. She studied Cadman just like his mother had done whenever he’d disappointed her.

‘Then let me help you,’ she said.

She sounded sincere.
Impossible. She’s just acting. She just wants to save her skin.

Her eye-contact never wavered and Cadman felt himself grimacing.

‘But…’ he wrung his hands. There was a tightness behind his eyes that extended through his cheekbones. It was as if the remains of his body remembered how to cry, but lacked the tear ducts to do so. ‘How…? I mean, what…?’

Wind whipped through Rhiannon’s hair, fanning it out behind her like a black halo. Callixus turned his head to scan the rooftop as the gust raced around them faster and faster, sucking dust and detritus into a funnel of air until Dead Man’s Torch was the epicentre of a cyclone. Cadman staggered back, holding onto a merlon for support.

‘Too late,’ said the voice of a child.

The wind dropped, leaving an ebon figure perched atop the crenulations. Its face was devoid of features, its body curved like a woman’s, with jutting breasts and tapered hips; yet between its legs hung an appendage as huge as a horse’s. A hazy miasma surrounded the androgyne, radiating a palpable malignancy as poignant as the plague that had ravaged Sarum. The head split down the centre, revealing a man’s face beneath, still black, as if carved from coal, yet unmistakeable in its dour leanness.

‘Deacon?’ Rhiannon said, struggling, but still held firm by Callixus.

‘Shader?’ Cadman took a step back.

‘Appropriate, don’t you think?’ the Dweller said. ‘After all, it was his soul you promised me.’

Rhiannon turned her ire on Cadman. ‘You did what?’ She looked from him to the black figure. ‘The thing from the templum? Is this…?’

Cadman nodded, his hand slipping inside his jacket pocket, fingers caressing the warm fragments within. ‘Lies and deception,’ he said. ‘That’s all it is.’

The Dweller laughed and hopped off the parapet, a leer spreading across Shader’s face. ‘What would you expect? Like father, like son, don’t they say? But I didn’t force you into any bargain, Cadman. You did that of your own free will. I did as you asked: I killed the knight. You might at least have had the courtesy to tell me he carried the Sword of the Archon as well as the petrified body of Eingana. No, no, no,’ the Dweller wagged a finger to forestall Cadman’s protests. ‘His soul, you said; either that or a suitable substitute. Isn’t that what we agreed? And if no substitute was forthcoming, then I could have you.’

Cadman took another step back as a ripple ran through the Dweller’s phallus, which began to stiffen.

The demon winked out of existence and appeared directly over Rhiannon, stroking itself to rigid attention. ‘So, lady,’ its voice was husky, urgent. ‘I assume you are here for me?’ The Dweller looked to Cadman, who nodded. ‘I need to know,’ it ran its hand up and down the length of its member, ‘what are your feelings for Deacon Shader?’

‘Shog him,’ Rhiannon said without hesitation.

The Dweller’s hand stopped moving. ‘What, no love? No affection.’

Cadman studied her face, searching for any sign she was lying. She was expressionless, utterly pokerfaced. She may have been a hustler; she may have been bluffing. How would he know? How would the Dweller—?’

‘Fuck him,’ Rhiannon said. Her eyes dropped to the Dweller’s appendage and she sneered.

As if she’d uttered a word of power, the Dweller lost all cohesion, splashing to the floor in a liquefied pool. Cadman sighed with relief and was about to release the fragments when a bubble popped on the surface of the puddle. A rill of blackness oozed from the edge, twisting and coiling. The liquid began to simmer, tendrils sprouting, the central mass growing, roiling, churning. One after the other, heads burst forth from the rapidly solidifying bulk, drool trickling from their mouths, eyes rolling. Callixus dragged Rhiannon back and released her so that he could draw his sword, but all the Dweller’s eyes were on Cadman.

‘Not good enough,’ one of the heads said.