Silence (24 page)

“
Bring
the roof down!”
screamed a high
double-voice of the red-eyed Celestial women.

The order echoed over the resounding
murmur of ominous incantation. Sheikoh turned around in a
blindingly fast movement. But it wasn’t fast enough. Eyes wide, he
raced forward, streaking towards the three Celestial women. He
leapt, but he was too late.

The spellwork that colored their hands
was unleashed in a tumultuous instant. Multicolored energy swirled
around the inside of Sanatous’s room, blasting against one another
with discordant shrieks. The chaos quickly formed a hurricane of
whirling destruction. Instead of rain and hail, rocks and rubble
slammed around him.

Sheikoh dodged backwards, evading a
massive hunk of masonry. He danced around splintered beams and
jagged boards. Left and right through the endless obstacles, always
making for the door. The ground bulged and shook, and the ceiling
quaked above him. He wasn’t going to make it.

He was too
slow
.

The roof shook dangerously, roaring
like a thunder clap. And then it happened. Exactly like Sheikoh had
known it would, a second before it did. A sheet of broken house
came down overhead, and he pushed his body into
overdrive.

To the Celestial, it was like he
disappeared.

Sheikoh streaked forward, dodging
through the wall of debris. He bounded on a falling lamp. Then he
twisted, ducking through the insurmountable field of rubble and
brickwork bearing down on him. A giant piece of white masonry
forced Sheikoh to flip and then he pushed off of the ground with a
desperate robot arm and danced through the collapse. He was
lightning’s child. The wind’s blood and heir.

He blurred through a tsunami of broken
mansion. Stepped on a silversteel pillar. Bounded off of a desktop.
Slid through a drawer’s hole. Lunged beneath a falling
chandelier.

He was almost at the door.
So
close
.

The final instant of the roof’s
complete collapse seemed to go on without limit. Sheikoh dodged
falling boards and boulders faster than blinking, faster than
thought. But the last two feet were already impassible. They were a
wall of broken house.

Sheikoh was trapped.

He hesitated for a microsecond, and a
rock slammed into his shoulder. He was knocked into a half-stumble.
Rubble pummeled his back and his head until he couldn’t see
straight. There was no hope. But he wasn’t going to give up and
wait for death. He was going to try the impossible.

For Dorothi.

His last thought. He liked
it.

Bounding from airborne wooden pillar
to the cracked chest of a statue, Sheikoh covered his face and eyes
with his forearms and launched at the door. He was mercilessly
pounded with a barrage of falling items. But somehow, he kept
moving forward through them. Somehow, bricks shattered against his
body and the wind’s scream was more deafening than even the
avalanche’s insurmountable roar.

Somehow, Sheikoh made it.
 

Riding a rippling shockwave of dust,
he splintered through what was left of Sanatous’s door. His
battered body blasted towards a green-eyed Celestial. Sheikoh
compressed his velocity into a fist and swung for all he was
worth.

His right hand blew a hole
straight through her body, splashing the wall behind her crimson.
Her expression was arranged in mild surprise as her eyes slowly
flickered out.
His right hand trapped,
Sheikoh flicked out his ML5 and snapped two quick plasma
bursts.

Another Celestial went down, a hole
burned between her eyes. The third deflected Sheikoh’s plasma bolt
with a crimson barrier, like Sanatous had, sending it straight back
at him. Sheikoh threw himself to the floor, pulling the dead
Celestial down with him. His arm, the right one, shivered inside
the dead Celestial’s body, vibrating in backlash of his massive
overdrive.

He looked up at the last Celestial,
the one with red eyes. She was backing away lowering the hand she’d
raised to created that red barrier than blocked his shots. Sheikoh
caught a glimpse of the archaic, black rune that was tattooed onto
her palm. If he had to guess, it looked like Celestial could skip
an incantation with a blood rune. He filed the information away
just in case he ever met another. He had to survive this one
first.

Sheikoh’s overdrive was taking its
toll. His limbs shook dangerously beneath him, he could feel them
vibrate his bones. His right arm was still trapped inside of the
dead Celestial’s body, and he was stuck on the ground until he
managed to get it out. He laid on the ground, trying to tug his
heavy, uncooperating arm out of the dead women.

Backing away, the red-eyed Celestial
blasted jets of light at Sheikoh. They shot right through him and
burned black marks into the cream-colored carpet. One red jet went
right through his cheek. Light sparked against one of the dark,
spidery runes on the wall. There was a glittering explosion, and
the light streaked back. It left a smoldering black crater in the
ceiling.

Sheikoh finally ripped his
overdriven arm out of the first Celestial. Warm blood poured onto
the carpet, staining it with a growing circle of red. The synthskin
around his arm was tattered and gaping with holes, shaking in
ominous warning. Spindly, insectoid limb, surrounded with the wormy
muscle showed through.
Sheikoh forced his
vibrating body to stand, letting the dead Celestial’s ruined body
splash into a puddle of her own blood. He barely noticed. His
attention was focused on his gruesome, right arm.

The last Celestial ran to the body of
the other Celestial, one of the dead ones. The one that Sheikoh had
shot. She ripped a jeweled dagger out of the dead woman’s belt;
magic wasn’t any use against someone wearing the Transcendent
Amulet. She pointed its shaking tip at Sheikoh and began to
advance.

Sheikoh noticed droplets of sweat
running down the lines of the black tattoos on her neck. He tried
to retreated, but his cyborg limbs were next to useless. He fell
against the wall, bracing himself with his natural left hand. The
Celestial charged towards him, swinging the dagger. Her eyes glowed
red as the devil. There was nothing Sheikoh could do. Desperate, he
flung his shivering, metal arm at her as hard as he
could.

The vibrating, blacksteel crowbar of
an arm pistol-whipped her right in the face. There was shattering
snap. The Celestial’s neck twisted all the way back backwards, and
she was flung through the air. Her glowing red eyes met Sheikoh’s,
as they flickered out. About eight feet away the Celestial women
bounced against the floor and then collapsed into a limp heap like
a lifeless manikin. A line of blood trickled from her
lips.

Sheikoh stared at her for a
moment.
Then his overworked limbs gave out
beneath him. His metal legs dropped onto his knees, painfully
jolting his hip. He tried to move his right arm. The fingers didn’t
even twitch, but there wasn’t much surprise in that; he’d
overdriven his parts harder than he ever had. He had no idea how
long he was going to have to wait for the motors to recharge and
the adjustments to finish.

Of course, if any of wires had
degraded or broken than he would be immobile until whatever got
some repair work. He told himself that there was no way that
happened, that that didn’t make any sense. The worse overdrive lash
back he had ever had was two of useless fingers and a burnt-out
knee, and fingers, knees, and elbows all burnt out without any
overdrive. The only real thing that he had to worry about was
someone discovering him in his vulnerable state.

Still, even though he
logically knew all of that, he couldn’t help worrying that he’d
never move again.

The haze of adrenaline gave way before
a million aches and bruises. He felt like a giant mess of broken
weakness. Eyes slightly crossed, Sheikoh nodded back and forth, in
and out of consciousness. Every time he tried to surrender himself
to black oblivion however, a throb of aching pain would force him
back to reality.

He suddenly felt like he was laying on
Alimiat’s operating table, so long ago. He could almost see the
man’s yellow-scarred eyes, Emili’s crystal-blue irises. Cold steel
burned the skin of his back.

He lay there, watching paralyzed as
the two silhouettes cut him up and attach bits and pieces of metal
to the terrifying skeleton that they’d already built into him. He
tried to move his hands, tell them that he was conscious, that he
could feel the pain of that saw that was cutting through his bones
but he was frozen. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t.

He suddenly realized that their skin
had gone soft and scaly, like they were two human-lizards. He
wanted to cry, to rage against the bonds holding him there. He
needed help. They needed to understand that he was feeling all of
this. Help. Dorothi… Where was Dorothi when he needed
her?

“
Hey
Emili, we’ll cut him at the waist and fry the legs for dinner. Not
like the kid can use them for anything, am I right?”
Alimiat laughed evilly.

Emili began laughing as well. Their
laugh became the double-cackle of a Celestial. Sheikoh suddenly
felt like he was looking at them from one end of an ever widening
tunnel and he still couldn’t move. They grew bigger and bigger,
more and more monstrous until they towered over Sheikoh like scaly,
skyscraper-sized dragons.

Where was
Dorothi?!

Sheikoh started awake to a hazy world of smoke, dust and
tears. In that moment, the word ‘sore’ attained a new meaning for
him. The pain across his body roared in his ears, like the
complaining of a million angry inhabitants of his body. He was
drowning, pummeled under thousands of thousands of
bruises.

Sheikoh tried to raise his arms. Then
he rubbed the harsh atmosphere of blood and ruined house from his
aching eyes. He suddenly registered the cold touch of his right
hand. He flexed his leg motors experimentally and looked down at
his beaten up, torn up body.

“
I’m back baby…” Sheikoh
celebrated wearily.

He flicked up to his feet, and his
back exploded with intense pain. It was enough to make him gasp out
his breath. His autonomic legs had moved way too fast. As bruised
pain rippled down his frame, his head swam with white sparkles. The
world slowly began to settle into place.

Once everything was back in focus,
Sheikoh looked around. The floor to late Sanatous’s room had
collapsed under debris. Rubble spilled down onto the floor beneath
it. The edge of the room, sagging down, was all that was left of
the original floor. Battered pieces of furniture and broken glass
lay strewn over burned, dirty-looking carpet. Sheikoh gazed around
the destroyed room. He started when something caught his
attention.

Beneath a crushed half of Sanatous’s
bedside table, next to the splinters of the Celestial’s bedframe,
there was a leather book lying on the ground. Sheikoh looked at it.
It was an untitled book with an amulet sized indentation in its
middle.

‘
That must be it! The book
that Dream… or… Camillio… Tyche..?’ Sheikoh figured with a jolt
through his pain-numbed thoughts. He remembered that his Celestial
employer had said something about putting the Transcendent Amulet
into the book’s cover…  

Sheikoh shook in black hair, and his
head rippled with headache. A cloud of dust puffed around his head.
He half walked half stumbled over the jagged pieces of remaining
floor. His steady, blacksteel legs were at odds with his unfocused
eyes. Sheikoh bent down over the book, his back protesting. His
eyes watered at the pain. He let his knees fall to the ground. It
seemed to be the easier way to go about picking this thing up, but
once down, he numbly realized that he wasn’t getting back
up.

Probably a bad thing. Honestly though,
Sheikoh couldn’t find it in himself to care. At least he’d done
everything. He hoped that when he died Camillio Tyche, or Dream, or
whoever the dude was, made sure to give his payout to Dorothi. If
anyone knew how to treat you when you died for them, it’d be a
Celestial… right?

Sheikoh’s vision split into two fuzzy
books. He stared at them for a moment, seized by doubt. He needed
to be sure that Dorothi was going to be okay if he didn’t make it.
He remembered… Dream had said something about putting the amulet
into the book’s cover.

Sheikoh pulled the amulet over his
head and clumsily pressed about half of it into the indentation of
the book’s leather cover. His blurred vision wasn’t helping very
much right now. He closed his eyes, fighting against the exhaustion
nodding his head, and used felt the leather circle. His fingers
guided the medallion into the cover slot with a satisfying
click.

Wind shrieking in his ears, Sheikoh’s
body was ripped from the ground and hurled into a spin. Around and
around and around, he spun within an omnipotent tornado. His body
was racing forward fast that he couldn’t see, even when he forced
his eyes open.  The vortex waved his limbs around like a rag
doll’s.

There was a flash and his spinning
felt more focused, like he was falling towards the earth. Something
had changed. Sheikoh could feel himself going faster and faster and
faster. His eyes were slammed with sudden blurred neon hues. He
couldn’t wonder what they were or what was happening though, he was
going too fast to think at all. He felt his throat burning, and
suddenly realized that he was screaming. Next to the wind’s
all-encompassing howl, his shout was soundless.