Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (33 page)

Evelyn had moved quickly from puzzled to bemused. “Did it strike you in the head?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

Raising both hands, I released the Power in the form of a broad, weak current that saturated the area in front of me. Ever so faintly, the shape of a sphere formed again, this time outlined in blue.

“Hey!” she said. “What’s that?”

“I’m very glad you see it too, now,” I noted, as I expended more energy, seeking to grasp hold of the shape. It was tricky; this was a construct made entirely from the Power, channeled by someone other than myself, along lines with which I was unfamiliar. After several instances of the shape slipping from my extended grasp, I finally managed to snag it. And I pulled. With a deep, resonating sound that vibrated the tables and equipment throughout the chamber, the sphere slid out of its pocket universe and into the one we currently occupied, there to hover in midair, glowing bright white.

Evelyn gasped.

After advising her to take cover, I sized up the artifact. Without question it was a vessel, containing something its owner wanted kept safe.

“Just what have you been hiding, Arendal?” I muttered as I prepared to assault the shell of energy before me. I had to be careful about this, just in case my hunch proved correct. Allowing my own energies to flow over every millimeter of its surface, I found the weakest spot in the weave and exerted as much strength as I dared on that one spot. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with an ear-splitting CRACK, the sphere split open and dissolved away to nothing. From its interior dropped two figures in blue, falling the short distance to the chamber floor and lying still.

Evelyn rushed past me as I sought to rein in my energies.

“It’s them!” she shouted, bending over what I could see were her two misplaced crewmen. “They’re alive.”

In a few moments, both of the humans had regained consciousness and were sitting up, coughing and trying to regain the feeling in their limbs. Both were terribly disoriented. Evelyn had the small medkit from her black flight suit out, just in case, but neither appeared to have suffered any serious wounds.

“I’m fine, fine,” Cassidy growled, pushing the diagnostic tool away. “Just feels like I’ve been asleep a long time,” he said.

“Yeah,” Kim agreed, attempting to stand up and failing. “How long were we out?”

“That would depend on a number of factors,” I replied. “We are not in the best position to judge at the moment.”

“You’ve been missing for several days, as far as we’re concerned,” Evelyn told them. “But, as I understand it, time may have moved differently where you were.” Then, blinking, she looked up at me. “Where were they?”

“A pocket universe Arendal had set up,” I said. “I couldn’t get a sense of exactly where it was, though— in the Above or the Below. He is very talented, and his constructions are always very complex.”

The two crewmen looked around, taking in their surroundings for the first time, squinting at the dark interior of Arendal’s sanctum.

“I think I liked the beach better,” Cassidy said.

“I think I dreamed,” Kim said, his voice distant.

“Of castles in the sky, or of taking out the trash?” I asked.

He looked at me curiously but did not reply.

Anxious to leave this place and get moving again, this time with a definite destination—the Golden City—in mind, I urged the humans to their feet. As they struggled to get their legs back under them again, Evelyn filled them in quickly on some of what had transpired in their absence.

“Let me get this straight, Captain,” Cassidy said, interrupting early on. “You’ve put up with this guy for
days
now?”

“Just the two of you?” Kim added, eyeing me suspiciously.

“He’s been a gentleman,” Evelyn told them firmly.

“This guy? Right,” Cassidy said with a snort. But he looked at me with something other than the usual contempt and distaste, for once.

Evelyn gave each of them one of the pistols she had carried in her duffle bag. After she had explained a bit about them, and what they could do, Cassidy and Kim seemed to perk up tremendously. Kim, cradling the gun in both hands, eyed me in such a way as to cause me to rethink the idea of giving him such a weapon.

Then she got to the part about the human worlds being under attack by a horde of demons.

“What are you talking about?” Cassidy demanded.

“Demons?” Kim looked from her captain to me to Cassidy. “You have to be kidding.”

Evelyn shook her head.

“We have no reason to doubt the information. And I’ve seen them—the demons. They’re real.”

Kim looked at her as if she had grown a second head.

“It must be some kind of alien invasion,” he finally said. “We need to get back.”

He turned to me, reddening.

“You hear that? Our worlds are under attack. No more stalling, no more delays. You have to get us back there
now
.”

“To do what?” I asked. “What can three more humans do in a war surely now covering a dozen worlds or more?”

I shook my head.

“No, the answer to it all, the key to both our problems, lies in the Golden City. I am sure of it.”

“But—“

I gestured at Evelyn.

“Your captain understands. Returning to Earth now would do you no good at all.”

I looked at all three of them, and spoke the most difficult words I had ever attempted to say.

“I need you here, with me.”

The three of them gawked at me, silently, for what seemed like an eternity.

At last, Evelyn broke the silence. “You need us?”

“Someone in the City is behind all of this,” I said. “Maybe Baranak, attempting to extend his domain. Maybe Vorthan. Enough circumstantial evidence points his way, but you can imagine that I am not fond of accusations based on weak evidence, at the moment. Perhaps both of them together are responsible. I don’t know. But I am firmly convinced that all of this—all of it—will not end until we discover the source of it all, and stop it
there
.”

Cassidy and Kim glanced at one another, then back at me. “And you want us to come along,” Cassidy said.

“You are now armed. You have had some experience in dealing with my kind. You have a personal stake in it, now, as well. Also, to some degree, you are in my debt. And…”

I looked down, extremely uncomfortable, and thought of the words Evelyn had spoken to me, in the dungeon, just after we had first met.

“You are all I have.”

All three of the humans visibly reacted to that. I turned and strode across the chamber, hands clasped behind my back, long coat flaring behind me, waiting.

The two men looked at their captain, waiting for her to speak. After a second, she nodded.

“There’s no question we can do more good with him, out here, than we can do on our own, back home,” she said.

Somewhat reluctantly, Cassidy nodded.

Kim frowned but, outnumbered and outranked and unable to defeat our reasoning, he agreed as well.

As the two crewmen turned back to the task of familiarizing themselves with the pistols, Evelyn walked over to where I stood.

“We’re with you,” she said. “Don’t let me down.”

I looked at her, my first, instinctual reaction quickly squashed by all I had learned in the time since I had first met her and her crew. Soberly, I nodded.

“You could have just ordered them to obey, though, right?”

She frowned at me.

“Lucian, I didn’t hike halfway across the universe and risk death in a dozen different extremely bizarre ways in order to rescue my crew, just to treat them like tools, like robots, afterward. I value their knowledge, their opinions.”

She shrugged.

“Of course, if they had disagreed, then I would have ordered them to obey my decision.”

She grinned, and I could not help but do likewise.

The crewmen’s conversation caught my attention then, and I walked back across the room to listen.

“Demons,” Kim was muttering. “Crazy.”

“It’s not the first time, though,” Cassidy said, scratching his chin. “The Second Empire was overrun by them. That’s what brought it down—or at least, my grandma used to say so.”

“Oh, please. The Second Empire collapsed because of economic failure and internal revolt,” Kim asserted loudly, as if reciting a line learned in grade school.

Cassidy shrugged. “My granddad always said it was because the imperial government got too big, too involved in everyone’s business.”

“Whatever.” Kim waved a dismissive hand. “The point is, it wasn’t some supernatural plague of demons that brought it down. All those thousand year old myths about devils coming out of the earth and swallowing up whole planets—ridiculous.”

“They did not swallow whole planets,” I said, stepping between them, “but they certainly laid waste to cities, and they slew humans by the millions.”

I shook my head.

“Amazing how, in only a few dozen generations, humans can forget even something like that.”

“There’s never been any evidence found of it,” Evelyn pointed out. “You would think we would find the remains of bodies, artifacts of some sort, scattered all over the worlds of the old Empire.”

“They brought little with them and took everything when they retreated,” I said.

“What do you know of it?” Kim said, facing me, frowning. “Some psycho from the Outer Worlds. You expect us to believe you know anything about the fall of the Empire?”

“I was there,” I said. “I fought them.”

They stared at me. Evelyn started to smile and turned away; she understood enough now, had seen enough, to know the truth. The other two probably never would believe it. I shrugged.

“Where?” Kim demanded.

“Mysentia. Argos. Chronos. I led the resistance there, and in other places. The invasion was not confined just to the Seven Worlds, the future Alliance worlds, you know.”

“Markos the Liberator,” Evelyn said, nodding. “Yes.”

Kim stared at her, then back at me.

I smiled.

“Did you think I earned that title just by leading a revolt against the Terran Alliance?”

My mouth drew into a tight line as I thought back across the centuries.

“I helped liberate half a dozen worlds from the demons, a thousand years ago.”

“Why?” Kim shook his head. “What did you care?”

“It was my home,” I replied. “My exile had just begun. I fully intended to dwell on Mysentia for centuries, or longer. And, as it turned out, I did.”

Cassidy and Kim both appeared to be taking all of this in. Finally Kim waved a hand in the air.

“It doesn’t really matter now,” he said. “We’re all in agreement to follow you, to see this matter through to the end.”

“Whatever end that might be,” Evelyn said, zipping up the duffle bag she had stuffed with pieces of the Dark Man armor we had found—our evidence.