ElyriasEcstasy

Elyria’s Ecstasy

Amber Jayne
&
Eric Del Carlo

Elyria is a nightmare world,
besieged by the Black Ship and its inhuman Passengers. It is also a world of
uninhibited sexuality. Urna and Rune are an elite military unit working for the
Lux, the totalitarian dictators who control the planet’s last human stronghold.
They share a deep passion, too, bound together by a past neither can clearly
remember. When Urna can no longer abide the Lux’s repressive control of his
mind, he flees to join a band of rebels. Rune, heartbroken and furious, must
hunt him down.

Virge is a chemist who supplies the
drugs that keep the Lux military obedient. When she and her sometime lover
Bongo harbor the wayward Urna, she is caught up in a breathless carnal
adventure that will lead her into the deadly shadow of the Black Ship itself.

Elyria’s Ecstasy

Amber Jayne and Eric Del Carlo

Chapter One

There’s vermin in every city.

Rune, atop the crumbling tower, knew the full truth of this,
both the practical and philosophical reality, just as did the male on the dark,
decaying streets below. Rune, the Shadowflash, could whisper those very words—
There’s
vermin in every city
—and Urna, the Weapon, would hear. Only Urna’s and no
others’ ears. Only Rune’s complement. His second half.

Then again, he mused, halves were
equal
.

If he had made
that
thought a special, directed
whisper, Urna would have heard the bitterness in it. How would he react? With
pity, with jeering? Rune didn’t want to imagine it.

The men were dressed identically, both shrouded head to foot
in loose, black fabrics. This was the Unsafe, which meant they were beneath the
Black Ship. The ancient city was lit only by the Ship’s vague fungal glow, a
kind of radiating gloom so much less loving than sunlight or even firelight.
The two males were living extensions of that darkness.

On a corner of the rooftop, two sets of wings cooled. Rune
could still feel the cut of the harness across his shoulders. He flew because
they had to fly. It was the only realistic way into the Unsafe for anyone but a
salvage gang. Urna, however, seemed to relish the experience, banking about
unnecessarily, using too much fuel.

A gap remained among the cloth strips shrouding Rune’s head.
Urna, waiting far below on the cracked pavement, kept his eyes uncovered,
naturally. It was different for Rune. Much was different for him, and yet he
and Urna were so alike. In build they were similar, almost identical, really,
with lithe, muscled bodies and sharp features. There were even similarities in
their natures, which, on the surface, appeared so distinct. Urna, the
vivacious, the exuberant. Rune, the somber one, the caustic of the matched
pair.

Even so, Rune knew there was bitterness in Urna as well,
just as he felt sure of the joy buried somewhere inside himself.

With a snap of his lean shoulders, he discarded the circular
thoughts. They never went anywhere. He concentrated on pressing matters
instead, for this was the Unsafe, many miles from the sunlit lands of the Lux,
an uncomfortable distance even from the partially shadowed periphery towns
where the Guard watched the borders. He needed to be alert. Urna required him
for his special senses. Yes, he the Shadowflash was
necessary
to the
Weapon.

Having indulged this last mordant thought, Rune lifted the
final strip of black cloth and settled it snugly over his eyes. Blindness came,
and the ceaseless twilight beneath the ever-hovering, always writhing, faintly
glowing Black Ship surged into intense life all around him.

He heard. Smelled. Felt tiny stirrings of what couldn’t be
called wind. The air was chill, it always was under-Ship. His senses radiated
outward. He heard the slow murmurs of corrosion. He inhaled disturbed dust. He
listened to the drips of moisture. He felt the sagging, tired weight of the
abandoned city, a city like any other on Elyria, built by and for a people who
no longer occupied it. How many had died in the ancient chaos that had come
with the Black Ship’s arrival? There was no saying, and if there were, there
would be no point in saying it.

Rune let a cynical smile move beneath the swaddling black
cloth enclosing his face. He wasn’t a humorless man. Most people just didn’t
appreciate his brand of drollery.

He opened himself to the Unsafe, heard the vermin as they
gathered themselves. Passengers. Yes. The intelligence reports had been right,
though he half suspected these were mere guesswork, an excuse to send out the
best Shadowflash/Weapon team the Lux had. Urna and Rune were good, very good,
and they made their superiors look good. Very good.

Below came the sharp snap of glass breaking. From the
acoustics of the sound, Rune knew the size of the glass, its dimensions—a small
square pane, intact until now. Glass meant that this area had not been
completely stripped for materials yet. He made a mental note.

“Motherfuck—” This was Urna, whose boot heel had stepped on
the glass. Rune, blindfolded, could hear the rustle of his clothing, the
flexing of his trim, hard muscles, even the steady tempo of his heart.

The two males, both wrapped in black, had winged their way
here to fight Passengers. Rune, focusing his tremendous talents of detection,
picked out individual targets as they started converging on the place at the
foot of the tower, that patch of rough, buckled, weedy asphalt presently
occupied by his second self, the Weapon Urna.

* * * * *

Urna snatched up what he’d found beneath the splinters of
glass, that little square he had unexpectedly stepped on, and tucked the sheet
of stiff paper-like material away inside his clothing.

A Passenger was coming around on Urna’s right, pressed up
close to the same building on top of which stood Rune. Shadowflash Rune.
Guardian Rune. His sightless-sight. Ever watchful, tuned to Urna in a manner
beyond normal human understanding, a connectivity that even that whole fucking
array of Lux doctors with their goddamn drugs could never fully figure out.
You
two have an…affinity,
they’d said. Well, no shit. And certainly they’d had
no luck in recreating a duo such as theirs, though not from lack of effort.

Urna grinned. Unlike Rune, he wore a black hood, though the
rest of his outfit was the same. He liked the loose fit. It was good for
combat.

“On your right,” said a voice softly, as if speaking just
behind his ear. Then it added a bit archly, “I know you already see it.”

Urna had indeed seen the Passenger but he still appreciated
Rune’s warning. Rune could spot the creatures well before they got near him,
which still didn’t make this a safe operation, not by any stretch. This was the
Unsafe, and unsafe it damn well was.

The Passenger was inhuman. Tall and thin. Long limbs. Long
fingers. Made of a darkness even less substantial-seeming than the fungal glow
of the Black Ship. Yet this Passenger coming toward him was quite capable of
tangible, frightening noises. Its claws scrambled across the concrete, hoarse
breath heaving from its gaping mouth. Those claws were wicked instruments.

Urna moved on the thing.

He made it a quick, neat kill, unsheathing the medium-length
curve of his sword and leaping in a single fluid motion. The blade bit. The
Passenger’s black clammy hide parted. A clawed limb swung but Urna was already
under the blow, diving away, pivoting.

No need for a second slice. The creature dropped. Urna’s
teeth remained bared.

“Grin about it later,” said Rune at his ear. Urna, after all
this time together, was used to the idea that his colleague could literally
hear him grin, detecting the pull of facial muscles, discerning even from the
soaring top of this building the barely audible squeak of enamel coming
together. But the Shadowflash was quite right, despite the fact that he could
be an insufferable prig. One dead Passenger was nothing to celebrate. Not when
these ruins were no doubt full of them. Like cockroaches, there were at least
ten for every one immediately noticed.

They were seriously converging now. Urna could see and hear
their numbers, but Rune, naturally, knew their positions better than he did. In
a way this was the Shadowflash’s fight, despite the fact that Urna had the
title of Weapon. Without his counterpart, he would still be a being of vastly
superior reflexes and combative skills, a kind of mega-warrior. But that wasn’t
enough, not against these Passengers. Not against the vile living freight from
the Black Ship.

He spared that Ship a quick glance now, above, always above,
wreathing this world, making the vast part of Elyria a place of permanent dusk.
Only the lands of the Lux, the Safe, knew sunlight. It was for the Lux that
Urna fought.

As Rune swiftly rattled off the locations of closing
targets, Urna at last drew his firearm from its holster. It was polished and
oiled, with a long barrel and a good weight. A beautiful weapon…just as he too
was a beautiful Weapon, he thought, grinning anew in spite of Rune’s fussy
admonition of a moment ago. There was no good reason not to enjoy this, he told
himself as he squeezed the trigger. A nearby figure clattered to the gritty, broken
pavement. He shot again, and again, and again, each bullet precisely placed,
his aim unwavering. He turned one way, pivoted back around, lifted his sword
when one of the seemingly mindless attackers got through. It was ballet. He was
lethal grace. Rune continued to advise him even as the Passengers kept on
coming.

What the hell were they, these dark monsters? He didn’t
know, even after so much close-quarters experience with the creatures. They
came from the Ship. They scavenged in the old cities for purposes people
theorized endlessly about. They were hostile, even going so far as to raid the
border towns surrounding the Safe now and then, to be fought off by the guns of
the Guard.

Or maybe it was the sunlight that kept them out of the Safe.
Although that didn’t explain why the Passengers didn’t just attack during the
Safe’s night. Something else must be holding them back. What?

Who knew? Not his problem.

Urna fired and swiftly reloaded. He swung his curved sword
until the blade dripped with ichor. Another cluster of Passengers emerged from
out of nowhere, as they tended to do. He turned to deal with the beasts. They
were trying to flank him, evidently unaware of the tactical advantage he had.
Maybe, though, the clawed creatures weren’t quite so mindless as they seemed.
Urna still couldn’t make up his mind about that. But again, it wasn’t his
problem.

His eyes had had plenty of time to adjust to the
fungus-phosphorescence of the Shiplight and he could see well enough the
outlines of things, crags made of shattered slabs of concrete. Mountains of
detritus here. He used the fractured cityscape to his advantage as he moved out
from the tower’s base. He knew how to hide and could go motionless if he needed
to. But most importantly, with Rune’s aid, he could
see
the enemy
coming. He could beat them at their own game.

His hood fell back when he moved, his hair a flash of pale
silver. The spare, fey lines of his face were revealed as off into the
decomposing maze of streets he went, taking the fight to the Passengers, those
repugnant raiders of poor, beleaguered Elyria. The face of his world so
sorrowful beneath the dark veil of the Black Ship.

Yet even as he fought, some tiny sliver of his mind remained
aware of the thing he’d found underneath the glass he had stepped on, that
image he’d glimpsed before tucking the picture swiftly into a pocket. That
brief glimpse still resonated within him, awakening things from his unclear
past he hadn’t fully realized were sleeping.

* * * * *

They paid no mind to Rune. He was still and silent and blind
as statuary, blending into the city around him. Besides, he was too high up and
the Passengers might even know he was near the wings, though no one could say
definitively what kind of reasoning powers the beasts had. Rune had his own ideas,
accumulated over many missions into the Unsafe, though he wasn’t eager to share
his speculations.

He was, however, indeed relatively safe up here. The human
on the ground was interesting enough to the inhuman occupiers of the ruined
city. Urna had been out there in the dark for less than an hour and already
he’d killed dozens of them. What good that ultimately did, Rune couldn’t say.
There seemed to be an endless supply of Passengers. On operations where he and
the Weapon provided cover for the official salvage crews, their purpose was
much clearer.

Still, by mission standards this was another successful
operation. And it was also nearing its close. Rune’s senses worked at a radius
of roughly one mile, and within that sphere he could accurately pick out
movements, could keep absolute track of Urna. Beyond that range things got
fuzzy.

And he wasn’t about to let Urna stray.

“That’s it,” Rune said, shaping and sending the softly
uttered words in such a way that they traveled exclusively to Urna’s ears, many
of the ancient crumbling blocks away.

He heard Urna’s breathing, heavier than a few moments ago.
The Weapon was getting tired. “I want to kill one more.” There was a note of
petulance in his voice.

“Too bad,” Rune said sharply, annoyed. He couldn’t deny
Urna’s talents, but the man could also be a child sometimes. “Get back here.
Now.”

Urna didn’t answer, but he did turn and start back toward
the tower. Rune listened all the way. No more Passengers came after him. Scared
off? Living to fight another day? Again, he couldn’t say. Again,
nobody
could say. The Black Ship and the creatures it had brought to this world
remained a vast mystery, even after these hundreds of years. No one even knew
how the Passengers disembarked from their Ship. Did they leap, parachute? Were
there places deeper into the Unsafe where the Ship actually touched the ground?
Maybe they had some kind of materialization transfer system, which would put
their technology far beyond that of the Lux.

Still blindfolded, he drew a glowstick from within the folds
of his clothes, stepped to the jagged edge of the roof, and dropped it over. He
heard its whistling descent before it landed with a delicate tink on a flat
slab of sidewalk.

“Yeah, I fucking see it,” Urna muttered as he approached the
base of the building. The Weapon had quite a vocabulary of vulgarities, some of
them garnered from his studies of ancient texts.

Rune at last permitted himself a small, sly smile as he
heard Urna ascending the stairs. Like the Weapon, he too was armed. He paused
now to check his firearm, a less grandiose one than Urna’s but just as
potentially lethal. Still sightless, he made sure of the instrument’s
functionality, smelling the cool, oily metal, feeling the weight of the
undischarged bullets. Throughout the course of their many missions into the
Unsafe he had only fired this implement twice—and the first time had probably
not even been necessary, just a case of beginner’s nerves. The second time had
been something else entirely.