The Kingdoms of Evil (22 page)

The attempt at glamour failed. The four assassins chuckled. The sound was like the quiet growl of a stalking predator. It sent a shiver up Zathara's spine.
Damn!
She felt the esteem begin to flow from her to the approaching men.
Well played on their part, boys and girls.

"Zathara!" her father sensed her loss of control. "Don't let yourself admire them." He raised his voice, "Why are you offering them succor, wife?" Nashtang said. There was no quaver of fear in his voice. "I wouldn't take these men on if
they
paid
me
." His contemptuous comment was a hurled stone in the building Love-Magic battle. "They have let themselves become the tools of
Sapo.
By Love's sweating ass, we have destroyed the lives of men a hundred times better than you. You bullies. You gutter-trash!" he shouted. "Get out of here. Before I make you kill each other for my amusement!"

They were closer now. Their mouths were open now. Their growling chuckling was louder. Glamour-bent light gleamed off their teeth.

They are only playing a game, boys and girls.
Zathara focused on the internal dialogue.
We are, all of us, playing a game. A game of impressing the other force so much that they give up.
She concentrated. She dug into her training. She calmed herself.
They're winning right now, because our bids to gain their esteem aren't working. We respect them in their casting as killers, but they don't respect us. They've cast us as weak. Easy meat. I must therefore re-cast myself.
Zathara called forth a Love-Magic dance.

In his club in The RU, Freetrick had taught gara, Love-wielder dances. But to him, in The RU, the gara dances were only exotic and cultural.
In The RU, the dances don't
do
anything, boys and girls.
But here in The Nation of Love, in the heart of the capital city of Pranyapura…
here I can wield the love.

"Oh Daddy, you are
so
old fashioned. And you don't know what men want." Zathara took a step forward. Her shoulders were back. Her stare was challenging. Seductive.

"No, Zathara!" Neeshthura hissed. "You can't seduce these men!"

"I know," she said. Then in a carrying voice. "Don't tell me who I can and can't have, mother! Goddess of Love! I'm
nineteen years old
. I'm sick of those boys you throw at me. Not one of them could beat me in a fight."

Love-Magic made sure they could see her brilliant smile. "These men look like they might be a challenge."
These are hard men, boys and girls. If you'll allow me the use of Rationalist slang, these men are the sort who appreciate bad-assery.

Zathara pivoted on a foot, spun around to face her father, grabbed his sword handle, drew the blade, and whirled back around to brandish the weapon at their attackers. "So how about it?" she called to them. "Who wants to play?"

"We're gonna rape you," came the call. It was low. Evil. Calculated to terrify her. To rob her of her esteem. "First me, then all of my buddies. We'll bloody you up. We'll make your family watch. Then we'll rape your mother. Then we'll take your heads."

"Oh will you?"
But he does not scare me, boys and girls. I am deep in my new role. I am the femme fatal. I am sex and death and pain.
"I will sever your penis between my legs. I will chew off your balls. Then I'll make you thank me for it." Zathara expended a burst of charisma. And she did a step she was sure her mother did not know she knew.

Esteem peaked.
That was likely one or more of the assassins ejaculating, boys and girls.

"Now thank me." She purred.

"Oh, I am going to enjoy you," their leader said. His expression was indescribably terrifying.

Damn.
Zathara lost esteem to him. But not much. And if he was any judge of battles, he would know the time for banter was done. He would attack. And indeed, he was tensing. Zathara said a brief and fervent internal prayer to the Goddess of Love. And she attacked first.

The step would not have worked in The Rationalist Union. In Freetrick's gara club, she would never have been able to cover the distance between herself and her attackers. Then, once blocked, she would not have been able to bounce off the blade of the assassin and drop to the ground, ready to dart another jab at him. But this was The Nation of Love, and the esteem of the men flowed into her as she demonstrated her sword-work.

Unfortunately, boys and girls, these men have esteem, too, and more practice at actually killing people, and there are more of them.
Another burst of esteem shot Zathara back away from a thrust that would have skewered her kidney and her superhumanly strong defense thrust the assassin backward into a wall.
I must focus on my advantages.

In their performances at Eldritch college, the step had only been a dramatic flourish in a dance. Here, when Zathara tossed the weighted end of her wrap at one of the men, it flew as if winged. Caught in the grip of her Love-Magic, the cloth flowed like water around his body. The cloth sash tightened. Zathara yanked.

As the man rocked forward, spinning like a top, she pulled herself through the air to meet him.

Her thighs closed around the man's head as it emerged from the fabric of her robe. She squeezed, twisted, and used all the esteem she had left.
Goddess, lend me strength. Goddess, make this
work!

The assassin's neck snapped between her legs as she rode him to the ground.

Zathara stood, wrap dangling half off her, legs apart, feet straddling the head of the assassin she had killed. His comrades looked at her. Their eyes were wide.
Now the hardest part, boys and girls.
She had less than half a second before they attacked.
Half a second to deliver my line.
Most professional killers had catch-phrases memorized, but Zathara had scarcely expected to have to use one. What could she say? Ah, yes.

"Tell me, lover" she asked the broken-necked corpse. Her voice was husky and sensuous, like burned honey. "Was it good for you?" She looked at the other assassins with a gaze that she knew could give a hard-on to a eunuch.

"Wow," said one of the men. And the esteem swept over her.

Zathara's wrap slithered over her body. It pulled tight, stretched, tugged, shaped her into a warrior's wet dream. She crouched, left leg sliding out and back, her father's sword flicking up into her hands. She looked up at the toughs from under heavy eyelids and steeply slanting brows. "Who wants a turn?"

She imbued that word with as much power as she dared. Sure enough, only one stepped forward.

The hero feint. It was the classic trick to make a numerically superior enemy give up its advantage of numbers.
The problem is, boys and girls,
Zathara thought as her sword flashed in front of her in the patterns she had learned at Eldritch College,
that even individually, these men are all better at fighting than I am.
Her advantages of surprise sex and esteem weren't going to be enough to overcome her opponent's skill and strength. So
my best option would be to take the esteem I have stolen from them and…

"For the fallen guardsmen!" Zathara used esteem to give her the strength to batter back her huge attacker's blade. "For my family's honor!" Another flash of glamour to dazzle the man while she drew the weapon back. "And for myself!" In a single, ecstatic release, all of Zathara's remaining esteem again rushed out from her heart through her hands to her sword. The sword that swung through the torso of her attacker as if his muscles and bones had turned to water.

That impressed them. In the wash of esteem the move generated, Zathara could throw her sword at the next closest man. It spun threw the air, separating his head from his shoulders before spinning back to her grip. "So your evil will always come back to destroy you." Zathara said. And cursed herself. What the hell kind of one-liner was that?

And there were
still
three enormous assassins readying themselves to kill her. They looked much less impressed by her most recent move. They were no longer smiling. But they advanced together.

Well,
thought Zathara,
I suppose I couldn't hope for all six of them to allow me to kill them, boys and girls.

"Goodbye," said Zathara. And used her remaining esteem yank her body backward.

"Run now," she advised her family as she shot past them through the air. Then esteem began to flow out of her and she had just enough left to twist herself around before she was falling, stumbling on the cobbles, running to stay ahead of the three assassins.

Fear began to seep back into Zathara. It was like cold water dripping down her spine. Esteem was hemorrhaging out of her now. Magical potential trailed behind her like the tail of a comet. It lent strength to her pursuers, who howled like wolves.

"Don't stop!" Nashtang's voice bellowed from behind her. "Zathara! The door to Warehouse Bright Golden 34b!" The last of the fading sunlight illuminated the large numbers of a warehouse as she passed it: Bright Golden 32a. "Knock three times on the door!" He gasped. "Then once! Don't stop! Now you!" From the echoes, Zathara knew her father had spun around. Nashtang was facing the assassins. "You've seen what the daughter of Nashtang seSuyamuan can do. Now see the man himself if you dare!"

Zathara ran.
My father will win.
She thought.
He will win, because he is the better man.
Desperately she tried to send esteem to him. 33c. 34a. She was slowing. Her wrap was tangled in her legs. Her lungs screamed for air. Behind her, her father's voice bellowed in pain.

"
Yes!
"

No. In triumph.

Without thinking, Zathara stopped. She turned in time to see something dark, irregular, and
huge
sweep out from the shadows and knock one of the assassins sprawling. Then it turned, and Zathara made out the silhouette of something like a man before a massive hand closed around the head of another assassin.

The man's scream rose to a pig-like squeal before the monster's fingers crushed his skull.

The third assassin turned to run, but the black thing moved with inhuman speed. Misshapen hands reached out, grabbed, then
threw
the man. He died in a splash of blood. Eight feet up the brick wall of a warehouse.

A hand settled on her shoulder.

Zathara screamed, grabbed the hand at the wrist, and twisted it around behind its owner. She let go, though, when she saw the man's face.

"
Freetrick?
"

But no. The man blinking at her was older than her friend. His shoulders were wider, his chest bulkier, and his hair cropped short. But his long, beak-like nose and wedge-shaped face were so close to her friend's features that in the half-darkness he could have passed for Freetrick's family.

"Oh for the sake of Love," she swore.

"Ah." Her father's voice sounded from behind her. "I see you have met Bleeryarr."

The Skrean smiled and made a leg. "It is unspeakably ghastly to meet you, Dark Lady Zathara." He spoke Rationalist with the same sharp accent as the girl who had kidnapped Freetrick.

Freetrick had to admit that Castle Clouds-Gather had atmosphere.

Capering goblins and grinning skulls encrusted the stonework of massive buttresses that protruded from floor and walls like the ribs of a giant snake, narrowing to the mist-shrouded ceiling, giving the impression of oppressive heights above. Occasional red-glowing crystals cast more shadows than light, turning the decorative stonework and statuary from mere bad taste into flickering half-seen nightmare. And just when Freetrick thought he had gotten used to the interior design, a leering gargoyle face would blink and disappear in a flutter of skittering limbs. Some servants preferred the walls and ceilings to the floor, apparently.

"I trust you appreciate the architecture of evil, my lord?" Asked DeMacabre after the third time Freetrick flinched back from a buttress.

"Oh! Yes! Sure!" said Freetrick. "It's quite…" he groped for adjectives, "eerie."

"Mmm-We do our best, my lord" said DeMacabre, humbly.

Freetrick was sure he did. "So, uh." He shook himself, "DeMacabre, is it necromancy that keeps the lights on and the mist in the air?"

"Sagacious, my lord," said DeMacabre, "sagacious."

Which apparently meant yes. "And the same for the Maelstrom?"

The duke's grin suddenly appeared less insane than artificial. Was that suspicious narrowing of those yellow eyes? "My lord, if I may ask, why...that is to say, what prompts my lord's interest in this, pardon me my lord, extremely dull subject?"

"Well, DeMacabre, the Maelstrom stops any food at all from growing in Skrea. And if it's using magical energy just to stay up there...I mean, isn't that a horrible waste?"

"Hmm." DeMacabre tapped a fingernail on his teeth in a way that was indescribably horrible. "I confess I had never thought of it in this way, but yes, indeed."

Aha! Freetrick's spirits rose. Maybe, if the other aristocrats were as reasonable as DeMacabre...

"Yes! A great and spectacular waste! Just to think of it...all of those dying souls going to feed a machine that, by causing mass starvation, kills yet more! Truly, it makes one tremble before the dark genius of Skreon Kakistos, the first Ultimate Fiend, does it not? Ah, to be descended from such a visionary!" DeMacabre wiped an imaginary tear from the corner of one eye. "Mm…but forgive me, my lord." DeMacabre turned to look back at Freetrick, plucked eyebrows bunched together. "Why would my lord wish to know…such things?"

"I need to know about this place if I am going to be in charge of it," Freetrick said, "like, for example, what's the population of Skrea?"