Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (49 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
1 phase shifted intoTityus' dimension, appearing on top of a stony hillock overlooking the valley where
the Titan lay bound to his rock. The vultures, a bronze flock, covered his chest like a scale mail shirt.
Their metal beaks flashed in the noontime sun and came away bloody while he screamed with the voices
of men beyond reason because of pain.
"That iz the leazt I will do with you, my pet." Fiddleback matched the elegance of my phase shift with one of his own. His upper left arm still hung broken and useless from the shattered shoulder socket, and
the lower arm on that side had been burned to a blackened stump past the first joint. Despite that damage, or perhaps because of it, he looked as horrifying as ever.
"The game is over, Fiddleback. You lose."
"Do I? How arrogant you are!"
"A chip off the old block." I leaped down off my perch and moved toward my right and out of the range of his working forelimbs. "I am the seed you planted and the fruit you nurtured. Mow comes to you the bitter harvest you deserve."
He stared down at me for a second, then I saw his head come up. He raised his forelimbs defensively and
swept them through the air as if waving away a cloud of gnats. I sensed his frustration and annoyance
spiking, but he had not even an inkling of his true danger.
The bronze vultures, programmed simply to pick out and feed upon the largest creature in the dimension,
abandoned their daily fare and sailed in at Fiddleback. His flailing arms batted some out of the air,
crushing their
delicate mechanisms and scattering them across the landscape. Still others ducked beneath his arms or
attacked his back and eyes. Over a dozen went immediately for the hole the statue had opened in his upper left shoulder.
A wave of anger rolled off Fiddleback, and I felt reality begin to warp around him as he started to phase shift.
The warping stopped instantly, and reality snapped back into place. More vultures hit him as Fiddleback's right fore-limbs raked at the air to open a rip-cut to another dimension. His triple fingers scraped along something that might as well have been slicker than oily ice and harder than diamond, because he could get no grip and could not pierce the proto-dimension's flesh.
"NOr
The Dark Lord looked down at me, his pulsar eyes locking the green pupils on me. "You do not want to be trapped with me, Coyote. Free me, and I give you your life."
I laughed aloud and watched the birds tear at him. They tore bloody black hunks from his flesh and flung
them away from his body. They did not bother to feed, just greedily dug at him. They burrowed into his
exoskeleton, and for each one he plucked from his body and crushed between fingers, a half-dozen more
assaulted him.
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On the gro
und, I saw gears rolling along with a directed purposefulness. It felt as if 1 were watching a s
top-
anima
tion film, because the broken bits and pieces of birds gathered themselves up into piles that slowly resolved themselves into bigger and stronger vultures. Those metal raptors, some large enough to carry
passengers or cargo back on Earth, slashed at Fiddleback with renewed vigor.
The sky above the Dark Lord glowed with the bronze colors of a sunset, yet the sun remained at its zenith.
The birds descended in a great cloud and looked like an angry
swarm of bees. Their mechanical shrieks filled the world with an industrial cry of victory.
As 1 watched Fiddleback falter and go down, I saw something else happening to him. The gobbets of
flesh unceremoniously stripped from him did not lie still on the ground. I saw them twitch, and all the
sharply torn edges folded down into themselves until each of the pieces of skin became pouchlike. Each
of these cocoons dried quickly and, as they did so, took on one of a rainbow of colors, from ivory to
onyx.
Something struggled within the fleshy pods, then the pods themselves split along a dark seam. A
frighteningly familiar head tiyust it self through the opening, then an eight-legged creature dragged itself to freedom. As it crawled out of the opening, 1 noticed the far end of the cocoon was sucked on inside
itself. Ultimately, it rolled on down and, insideout, sealed itself toformthe
MyrangeikkCs
abdomen.
More and more of these cocoons transmogrified themselves into
Myrangeikkl
individuals. I looked back at Fiddleback's body and saw, through a swirling cyclone of vultures, where other Myrangeifcfcf were
popping free of the Dark Lord's flesh from a million boils, in a process akin to that which had birthed
Vetha.
"It is as you expected it would be, isn't it?"
I turned to my right and nodded to the Empress of Diamonds. "Different mechanism, similar result." I pointed out at the herd of
Myrangeikkincw
working together to pull pods away from the carcass, quickly sorting them by color and other factors that escaped my notice. "1 suppose 1 could have guessed, after having seen how Vetha had been reconstituted from Fiddleback, that the rebirth of his race might be
possible."
Two of the ivory
Myrangeikki
came to me bearing a cocoon the size of a football and placed it in my hands. I
felt life stirring inside it. The outer surface went from a soft supple leather to the dry crispness of an autumn leaf. The seam drew itself along the dorsal surface like mercury in a thermometer climbing
upward on a scorching day. The creature inside it stirred, then the pod split open and it began to emerge.
It grabbed on to my forearm with its mandibles to pull itself free of the cocoon. The grip did not feel that hard, yet I knew its lack of ferocity came not from a lack of intent to injure, but from a physical inability to generate that much power. Stunted forelimbs likewise struggled to free the
Myrangeikkihom
the cocoon, so I helped pulled the pod down and smoothed it as it closed to cover a misshapen abdomen.
Shifting my grip, I dumped the dwarf
Myrangeikki
onto its back with its soft thorax held firmly in my left hand. It opened its jaws, freeing my right arm, then I supported its abdomen and held it like a baby.
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"You we
re my pet, Coyote," it buzzed, "and now they give me to you zo 1 can be yourz."
Fiddleback's head swiveled toward my companion as she slipped her diamond pendant from around her
neck and fastened it around his. "Emprezz, I zenzed your hand in thiz when I could not depart. Well
played. Will you zalvage me, now?"
The Empress of Diamonds kissed the deformed
Myrangeikkion
the forehead and took him from my arms.
"You are beyond even the salvation 1 offer." She laid him on the ground, then gestured at him. His limbs plucked ineffectually for a second at the diamond pendant, then he lay quiescent.
"Thuz it endz," he buzzed.
As 1 watched, the diamond began to flow out along the sliver strand in both directions. It hardened on the chain as if crystalizing from super-saturated solution, instantly
wreathing his throat in blue-white splendor. Then, as if the two diamond waves had hit and passed
through each other at the clasp, the gems thickened as their momentum took them around again to race
toward the pendant itself. There they shot through each other yet again, turning the necklace into a
diamond collar.
As the opening around Fiddleback's neck began saw-toothed contractions, 1 searched his emotions for
fear or anger. I found neither, but instead uncovered a mildly nostalgic sense of disappointment and a
smugness that cut at me like a cold wind. He looked up at me when the growing diamond torus bit into
his neck, and his mandibles parted ever so slightly.
»Thuz it beginz, my pet»
The doughnut became a disk and Fiddleback's head slid free of his body.
The Empress of Diamonds stood on Match's tiptoes and gave me a peck on the cheek. "I know, he
seemed so benign, but he was that way when he started his climb."
I looked out at the other
Myrangeikki.
"There is no chance they will unite again?"
"Not without another synthesizer."
Synthesizer.
I knew that was what 1 could become as a Dark Lord, yet I could not bring myself to even dream of pulling Fiddleback's people together and again subjecting them to the tortures they had endured
while part of him. No, while 1 lived, while 1 breathed, they would be left alone here or in another
dimension. They had endured enough.
The Empress took my right hand in her left, then swirled her right hand through the air. I saw reality
begin to warp with her motion, as if she were stirring a liquid and distorting its reflection. "Come with me, Coyote. We must return to your friends and let them know of my victory."
"Your victory?"
She smiled in a most un-Natchlike way and, tugging me through to the dimension where Pygmalion died,
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amend
ed her statement with, "Our victory, my sweet, of course, our victory."
Dark Conspiracy 3-36.jpg
Whatever it had been before, Pygmalion's dimension had weathered his demise not at all well. As the
Empress of Diamonds brought me through, I sensed the life ebbing from the countless warriors
Pygmalion had created and from the world that had hatched them. With his death came the warriors'
death, and their despair washed over me like an icy rain. Bereft of its Dark Lord, yet still deceptively
bright and warm, this proto-dimension had become nothing more than a place of death.
The strongest pocket of life surrounded my friends. They appeared surprised as the person they saw as
Natch led me through a dimensional rift like a young girl dragging a reluctant suitor along on an idyllic spring walk. She let my hand drop from her grasp as she giggled and pirouetted. She smiled at Bat, then
skipped and spun on toward where the tower had fallen.
As she headed off toward it, I walked over to where the others stood and sat in the shade provided by
Bronislaw's Apache. Jytte and Rajani sat with Mickey, speaking to him in hushed tones, while Sinclair
stood behind them and rested
a
hand gently on Rajani's shoulder. Bat sat off a bit, speaking in Polish with the dwarf, leaving Crowley, Hal and Nero Loring in a tight knot toward the middle of the
aircraft's shadow.
I forced myself to concentrate on the joyful smiles they gave me instead of the piquant misery of those