Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (32 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

More than one of my colleagues in the god business had, at some point or other, described me as a deceiver—a title I must admit had held some degree of legitimacy, at least in the old days. Now, however, I found good reason to question whether the one person I had best deceived in all my life was myself. For I had actually begun to allow myself to believe that things were looking up, that the whole sordid mess in which I had been embroiled since my return from exile might soon be resolved. More the fool, me, the ebon engines of destruction seemed to say as they reintroduced themselves to my already overly complicated life.

Crimson lightning flared about, filling the chamber with jagged, flickering shadows. The two Dark Men emerged from the portal and looked around, their bodies stiff and their motions jerky, robotic.

“Get down!” I shouted, pushing Evelyn back and reaching for Alaria. I felt that in this case she might actually appreciate my help. She had already moved to her right, away from us, though, so I made the snap decision to allow her to fend for herself and to concentrate on Evelyn and myself.

“Stay low,” I hissed at Evelyn. “Use the tables for cover. Head toward the exit.”

The Dark Men crackled with power, rivulets of blood-red energy coruscating down their arms and legs and sparkling in the air around them, giving them the appearance of voids at the center of crimson suns. First one, then the other became aware of our presence and our location and started toward us silently.

I considered every option at my disposal, from a quick offensive to the strongest defensive measures I could employ. None seemed likely to be effective. I had only escaped unscathed from the first one I had encountered because we had been out in the open, where I could outrun and outmaneuver him. And still I had been forced to employ every element of our surroundings to my advantage, use every trick in my book, just to make it to the gates of the City. Here, in a closed room, and against two of them at once, I did not fancy our chances at all. Our best bet was to get outside, quickly, and run for it.

As if reading my thoughts, one of the Dark Men moved around to position himself near the door. The other advanced on us smoothly.

Risking a quick look back over my shoulder, I saw another doorway further along the wall. I had no idea where it led, but at this point I was in no position to be picky. Grasping Evelyn by the wrist, I dashed for the other door, pulling her behind me.

The door looked to be made of a heavy, gray metal, and I found myself hoping it was heavy enough to withstand what was surely about to happen to it. It was surrounded by a broad frame and had a small, transparent window in the center. I searched around it but could find no way to open it. Anger and frustration grew inside me, along with other feelings I chose to ignore as best I could.

“He’s coming,” Evelyn said, her voice nearly cracking from anxiety.

I heard her rummaging in her bag and pulling out one of the guns.

“Would now be a good time?” she asked.

“Now would be an excellent time,” I replied, just before I spotted a small red square lower down on the left side of the door framing. I pressed it and the door slid open. Behind me, Evelyn pulled the trigger of her pistol twice.

“Nothing. They’re blocking it or something,” she said. “We need to get out of here!”

Unceremoniously I yanked her through the open doorway and into what turned out to be a much smaller storeroom of some sort. Crates and boxes and jumbled piles of of equipment lay everywhere. Whirling around, I realized the nearest Dark Man stood only a few steps away. His hands, wreathed in burning energy, reached out.

“Alaria! Where are you?”

No reply. She was nowhere in sight.

I shrugged, felt bad for her for only a second or two, and pressed the button, sealing the door closed. Keeping my finger on it, I surged the Power through the door’s circuitry, feeling the internal controls shorting out even as sparks sprayed out in my face.

“Where is she?” Evelyn asked, the gun still in her hand.

“I don’t know,” I replied, straightening up again and cautiously attempting to peer through the window in the door, looking for signs of either Alaria or our attackers, and seeing neither. “What happened when you shot them?”

“Nothing—except that the aura around them flared up both times I fired. Could they deflect it?”

“How should I know?” If my super-guns could not bring them down, what chance did we have at all?

A dark shape moved suddenly on the other side of the door, and I tried to see—and then jumped backward just as a black-gloved fist smashed into the window. The clear material cracked but did not shatter. A second blow, an instant later, impacted the door just below where the first had landed. The door shuddered and no longer appeared to fit properly; it now had a distinctive curve inward towards us.

“They will be through this thing any second now,” I breathed.

“Can you get us out of here?”

I had not tried yet, for a number of reasons: It takes a few seconds to complete the procedure, even when one is not facing cold, merciless death, mere feet away. Worse, I had never been here before, and Alaria had done the navigating on our journey, meaning I would be starting from scratch, with no clue as to our exact location or what planes lay close by. Moving too hastily, I could easily tear through the wrong barrier and drop us into a volcano or cause us to step out into an airless vacuum. And, on top of all this, Alaria might still be out there in the other room somewhere, injured and unable to escape. Dark lord I was, yes, but I could not simply run away and leave her at the mercy of these… things.

Another blow of a black fist and I started to reassess that last thought. Just then, though, something caught my attention—something about the Dark Man who stood mere inches and a single metal door away. As he drew back his fist to strike again, I noticed that the energies flowing all about his arm, while crimson in color, appeared to congeal into fiery globules where they came closest to touching his form. The pattern of the globules, the way they flowed about him and down his body, like thick liquid more than energy—this seemed extremely familiar to me. I had seen it before, somewhere… and the memory made me think, perversely, of beautiful women and laughter and…

The fist struck again and I stumbled back, away from the door, but not before I noticed a flash of white through the glass, moving quickly. I leaned as close as I dared—the glass could shatter in my face at any moment—and saw Alaria leaping onto one of the tables, fending off the other Dark Man with Arendal’s cane. The Dark Man leapt onto the table in front of her, a blinding white flash lit both that room and our own—

—and Alaria was gone.

It took me a couple more seconds to realize that both of the Dark Men were missing, as well.

I waited.

Nothing.

I glanced back at Evelyn; she looked from me to the window to me again.

“What—?”

“I have no idea.”

We waited some more.

Nothing continued to happen.

“Do you think they’re really gone?”

I shrugged. “Alaria certainly is.”

“Did they… kill her?”

“I wish I knew.”

Bending down to inspect the lock mechanism, I saw that my efforts had hopelessly ruined it. It scarcely mattered, though—the Dark Man had done the work for us. Grasping the twisted door by its now-exposed edges, I easily pushed it aside. It came off its track and fell to the floor with a clang. Ah, well. If we were attacked again, we would have to look elsewhere for sanctuary.

I moved out first, the Power at the ready for attack or defense as needed. Evelyn followed me, shining her flashlight back and forth across the big room.

Nothing.

I allowed myself to exhale; it felt as if I had been holding my breath for five minutes, though the conflict had not lasted nearly that long.

“Alaria!”

My shouted call brought forth no reply. Evelyn joined in, but a few seconds of this gave us reason to believe she was no longer in the vicinity, if even on this plane.

Raising my hand to generate a sphere of light again, I moved carefully toward the exit. Evelyn met me there, coming around from the direction where we had last seen Alaria. We stood just inside the main doorway, looking back inside, lightning flashing at our backs and rain pounding down to splatter around our feet.

“What do we do now?” Evelyn asked, still dazed from the shock and the adrenalin.

And then the thoughts that had been dancing just beyond the reach of my consciousness for several minutes solidified, snapping into focus. And I remembered.

It had been more than two thousand years earlier—no wonder it took me so long to recall the incident. We were spending time on a plane in the Below, Jarren and I, carousing in bars and romancing the women and generally behaving like boorish idiots who still had a few centuries of growing up to do. And at one bar, as Jarren and I were speaking to two particularly comely young things, Jarren had summoned the Power and allowed some of it to manifest about himself. Showing off, essentially. No one else had seen it but the women and myself, and I quickly passed it off with them as some kind of novelty device he was using to impress people. Embarrassed with himself and angry with me, he had stormed out of the bar and I had never seen him again. Things had worked out well, though, at least from my perspective—I had ended up with both of the girls. A singularly pleasant memory, at the time, though I had not dwelt upon it in years.

What brought it back to me now, however, was something other than the outcome of the evening’s socializing.

When Jarren had summoned his energies about him, bringing forth his own particular manifestation of the Power, as each of us could do, those energies had flowed about his arms in rivulets, and congealed in the spots closest to his body in tiny, spherical clumps, running downward.

How had this creature, this Dark Man, come to steal the power of a god?

I breathed in and out a couple more times, clearing my head.

“Lucian?”

I blinked and came back to the present. Looking at Evelyn, I forced something of a smile. “We have good evidence now,” I replied. “Much better than I first thought. We need to get it to the City.”

“The City?” She stared at me in amazement. “You think anyone will listen to you there?”

I shook my head tiredly. “I don’t know. But I am not running from them any longer. These Dark Men are too powerful. Others have seen them now. The others can scarcely blame me for every trouble that besets them now.”

The ground and walls around us shook as thunder from the most recent lightning strike rumbled past, followed almost immediately by another bolt that hit just outside the doorway. As Evelyn and I stumbled back into the chamber, stunned, the electricity raced along a thick metal pipe bolted to the wall ahead of us and thereby gained entry to a bank of computer equipment, which in turn exploded in a shower of sparks and flame. As the electricity dissipated, some small portion of it continued on beyond the ruined equipment and traced out the sparkling contours of a sphere, about ten feet in diameter, apparently hovering in midair. The entire effect lasted barely a second, and then was gone again. Quickly I ran to where the sphere had appeared, waving my hands through the space.

“What are you doing?” Evelyn said, coming up behind me.

“Did you see it?”

“See what? All I saw was the lightning, and now I’m mainly seeing spots.”

Nothing. There was nothing there. But I had seen it. Walking in an arc around the area, I continued to wave my hands about, through thin air.