Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (47 page)
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Authors: Evil Triumphant
produced by the giant turbines into the Mercury grid. I had a mental image of light bulbs blowing
throughout the area, and a part of me even regretted the panic and terror among those left in the darkness.
By the same token, I knew that what they felt now would seem like paradise if we failed.
The crystalline tower crackled with energy as the surge hit it. My flesh and scalp tingled as we used the structure of the gate tower to send power through from Earth to Pygmalion's private little domain. Even
the diminutive Dark Lord turned to face the tower, his look of pridef ul awe etched in shades of blue on
his face.
The gemstones turned a deep sapphire color and hummed. Gold and silver lightning shot through them,
going around and around, bouncing from facet to flaw and on again, gamboling otterlike in the stones.
The tower glowed so intensely that blue shadows fell over the land, and Pygmalion's mindless troops
slowed their approach.
I could see from Pygmalion's face that the immense towering beauty enchanted him. He stared at it like a
man watching the woman of his dreams come naked for him
and him alone. The tower was his link to Earth, the key to his conquest of his old home, and we had
supplied it with power enough to enable him to move any and all the troops across it he wanted. We had
completed his grand design for him.
He studied it lovingly, from top to bottom, then he noticed the twin golden threads running from the base to the knot of us. He watched the line as if it were a fuse slowly burning down on a keg of dynamite. His rapture changed to horror and, for the first time ever, I saw fear in the eyes of a Dark Lord.
"What have you done?!" he screamed, already too late to stop it.
A golden wall of energy shot straight up into the heavens from the circle of cable the Apache had laid
down. As it reached the bowl of the sky, it spread out until its very edges melted seamlessly into the
golden atmosphere. The sky within the cylinder twitched, as if a membrane upon which a rock had been
dropped. It rebounded and held, then twitched again more violently.
It held a second time, but as it snapped back into a golden shell above us, I felt a hissed groan shake the proto-dimension. 1 looked at Pygmalion and saw his body tense as if his pain and concentration could
reinforce his dimension's sanctity. A grin grew on his face, and I felt a sense of triumph from him, but
neither lived very long.
The third assault did not test the elasticity of the dimension's boundaries, but shattered it instead. The sky in the center of the cylinder cracked like an eggshell, and pieces of it fell inward. As they did so, they clung to the walls of the cylinder, and 1 saw its golden light grow brighter as the dimensional gate sucked in the energy Pygmalion had used to fortify his domain. Another piece fell inward, then two more
disappeared into the dark void beyond the opening.
«/VO/» Pygmalion's mental scream of terror reached down into my soul and almost invoked pity for the
little man hovering above me. For a second—a naked, raw, painful second—Pygmalion remembered
what it was to be a human in the presence of one of the most powerful Dark Lords in infinity. His
remembrance broke his concentration, and in that moment the top of the world popped off like a skull cap
beneath a bone-saw in an autopsy.
Fiddleback hauled himself through into Pygmalion's dimension, all spiderlike and full of fury. He landed
amid the dimensional gate's circle like an earthquake. The ground heaved hard enough to topple everyone
from their feet, including those of Pygmalion's warriors who had not been crushed beneath Fiddleback's
flat feet. The shock wave of his entry even buffeted Pygmalion and moved him back through the air.
As Pygmalion's warriors stood back up, they attacked Fiddleback and started scaling his legs as they
might mount the outside of a skyscraper. The Dark Lord, barely mindful of their assaults, shook his lower limbs as a cat mightawetpaw. Pygmalion's warriors, flung off Fiddleback with incredible ease, sailed
through the air and died dashed and smashed against the buildings that had once been their homes.
The warriors had stood out like aphids on a rose stem, all pale against the yellow-green of his
exoskeleton. Though I had seen him before, both when he tried to enter Phoenix through the dimensional
gate built there and in the dimensions where he gave us Vetha, 1 had never had a clear frame of reference to help size him. ft was true that he had batted a Scorpion Security copter out of the air in Phoenix, but he had never actually made it all the way in, so I discovered I had denied the external evidence of his true size. Each of his feet could have crushed a four by four
square of residential homes, and were he to lie down, he could have bridged the two mile gap between
City Center and the Lorica Citadel with ease.
Each footfall sending tremors through the world, Fid-dleback advanced to the edge of the dimensional
gate and beyond it. "My pet, you have zukzeeded. I have come."
I picked myself up and craned my neck back to see all of him. "Your turn."
The huge Dark Lord reached out with a forelimb, telescoping it out and spreading his three fingers like a net. Pygmalion appeared to be nothing more than a gnat to him, and proved just as elusive as he shot up
and away. Fiddleback's fingers closed with a thunderclap, but his tiny foe eluded his grasp.
Fiddleback's mandibles spread apart and clicked back together as his head swiveled, and he followed
Pygmalion's course back into the black city. Fiddlebacktumed quickly and incredibly gracefully for a
creature of such mass, then reared up on his hind two motile legs and stamped down hard with the front
pair.
The tremor shook the buildings of the city and started toppling them like the card houses they were. Slab after slab crashed into a companion, and roofs collapsed down on the whole lot. Dust swirled up into the
air as the seismic tide washed the city away. Hovels disintegrated like domino patterns, then covered
themselves with a thick black plume of dust.
Fiddleback lunged in toward the city, then I saw something move within the dust. It shot up and out, a
glassy black limb striking Fiddleback high and hard enough in the thorax to rock him backward.
Fiddleback stumbled, and his hind two legs buckled like the legs of a stunned prizefighter. He stumbled,
his abdomen touching the ground, and for a heartbeat he was vulnerable.
While powerful, Fiddleback was by no means invin-
cible, and especially not so in another Dark Lord's hideaway. Pygmalion's knowledge of the place and his
familiarity with its quirks and special rules could have supplied him the edge to rid himself of Fiddleback. A quick, sharp, decisive blow with the weapon he had formed could have won Pygmalion the day and spelled
doom for humanity.
Ultimately, though, Pygmalion's humanity proved his vulnerability. Had Pygmalion not succumbed to his
vanity, he would have destroyed his former master. He could not resist the theatrics of having his weapon rise up out of the dark dustcioud enshrouding his capital. Likewise, he could not forsake the chance to batter, torture and punish his former master.
The weapon he built
was
magnificent and splendidly suited to what he wanted it to do. As he had done before with the dust of the earth, Pygmalion had used the broken obsidian of his city to create another homunculus.
Cast in the form of Mickey and scaled to Fiddleback as Mickey would have been to a horse, the liquid stone warrior dropped into a martial arts fighting stance. Its mouth open for a scream, the statue danced forward with featherlight steps that mocked the fallen creature before it.
I keyed my radio. "Fire two, Mr. Joniak, at the stone man."
The Mickey statue landed a solid kick to Fiddleback's upper left shoulder. The stone foot crushed the exoskel-
A B B YY.c
eton, d
riving carapace shards back into the Dark Lord's flesh. A cicada buzz of pain filled the proto-
dime
nsion, starting the tower to tremble like a tuning fork. Steaming black blood spurted from the wound, covering the statue, but neither stained it nor burned it.
Two Hellfire missiles streaked out from the Apache and rode flametongues all the way to the target. They
impacted less than a two meters apart and within two
seconds of each other. Designed originally to make the Apache a deadly antitank war machine, their
effect on a living-stone creature was nothing short of spectacular. Their high-explosive heads blew deep
craters in the statue's broad chest, spitting sharp obsidian shards in all directions.
More importantly, the first rocket created one set of vibrations in the volcanic glass and the other sent a contrasting shock wave through its crystalline lattice. Where new and old vibrations met, cracks began to form. The statue wavered and looked as if it would fall, then it recovered and raised a fist to crush
Fiddleback's skull.
Fiddleback struck hard, thrusting his upper right fore-limb out to stab into the statue's chest. His fingers closed into a knotty fist, but it seemed as if the blow did less damage than the sensation of indignation Fiddleback focused on the statue and pulsed out through his fist. The blow landed with a sharp crack, the fist withdrew, then shot out again to pulverize the statue.
The colossus exploded like hammerstruck glass. As fragments big and small rained down over the
landscape, Fiddleback climbed up onto his feet and darted forward. The trio of whole forelimbs dug
through the rubble like a dog pawing a trash midden, then 1 heard an exultant buzz of triumph punctuated
by a desperate and terrible scream.
Fiddlebacktumed toward us, having plucked Pygmalion from the ruins of his giant warrior. I heard sound
coming from between the fingers of Fiddleback's upraised hand. "He implorez you to help him, my pet.
He zayz you are both human and must fight me."
Bat laughed aloud. "It's a bitch being puny and powerless."
I nodded. "And human, that's rough. Never know who you can trust."
"True wordz, my pet, humanz cannot be truzted."
Fiddleback's fingers closed with wet scrunching sounds, then he smeared them clean on a piece of the statue's broken thigh. "Not truzted at all."
"Coyote, look out!"
I spun at the sound of Rajani's voice and pulled back, allowing myself to flop down on my back. Something man-sized and swathed in black faded into existence behind me. Because of its unusual shape, I almost
thought Fiddleback had managed to resurrect Vetha to use her against me, but the little bit of flesh visible around the eyes was beige, not ivory, and the dark brown eyes were human.
What was not human rose above the creature like a snake and darted forward in a blur. Had I not been warned, the meter-long swordblade mounted at the end of the tail would have run me through spine to breastbone and