Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (63 page)

A faint flicker of light drew his gaze to the
kitchen window in time for him to see Wils slip through the
opening. Aja was already out, no more than a shadow sliding along
the wall, closing in on him through the wind-driven snow.

Morgan smiled. The boy was a cat.

Robbi came next, followed by Jiang and
York.

Wils was literally a one-armed bandit, having
lost his left arm in an Old Dominion bar one night. Morgan had
taken the man on despite his handicap, partially because Wils was
faster with a lasgun with one arm than most people were with two,
and partially because the first time they’d met, Wils had nearly
conned him with a scam so skillfully contrived, Morgan had decided
he’d rather have the man working with him than against him. Robbi,
Wils’s younger brother and a fair thief in his own right, went
wherever his older brother chose to go.

The third member of the group, Jiang, was a
self-professed wastrel, sometimes in Morgan’s band and sometimes
not, depending on whose bed he was in or who was buying the drinks,
and invariably, how big a prize Morgan was going after. Too small,
and Jiang wasn’t interested. Too big, and he figured the risks were
too high. Their current job had been the exception. Easy in, easy
out, and easy money had been Jiang’s cheerful summation of the
undertaking. Despite the weather, so far he hadn’t been too far off
the mark.

The last man came through the window and
started down the wall. Huge and hulking, York was a brigand to the
core, hard faced and harder hearted. He was marked for death in
half the solar system with a bounty on his head posted by Van the
Wretched, a lunar warlord of vile reputation—enough reason for
Morgan to take York on. He’d had a few run-ins with Van’s
skraelpacks, troops of beastmen as brutish as they were fierce, and
he’d figured anybody who had dared to cross the wretched Van could
be nothing less than an asset in his own line of work.

Morgan looked over his assembled band. To a
man they were as loyal to him as they could be, which oft-times
wasn’t much, except for Aja. If Morgan had sired the boy himself,
he could be no more stalwart a companion. A shock of red hair,
usually standing somewhat on end, framed an impish face kept from
innocence by a wickedly mischievous grin and a pair of green eyes
that saw far more than they missed. There was little of a child
about Aja except for his damnable curiosity and mayhaps his
seventeen years. A refugee from the earth’s great deserts, he had
lived on the streets of the Old Dominion before attaching himself
to Morgan.

The boy materialized next to him from out of
the shadows, a slender form dressed in black, his face camouflaged
with broad, dark stripes of paint. “Bitchin’ weather, milord,” he
said, and blew on his hands.

“Aye,” Morgan agreed, watching his captain
size up the courtyard, the shrine, and the great wall, his eyes
flicking from one potential location to the next. Aja was the only
one who ever called him milord, a title the boy could only have
gotten out of him on a night when he’d been deep in his cups.

Some nights he awoke in a cold sweat, once
more falling through the weir, freezing to death with terror
clenching his gut—worm nights, he called them. ’Twas then he would
drink, looking for oblivion and a remnant of home. Aja could have
gotten anything out of him, if he’d asked on a worm night.

“Robbi over there on the wall with the
ropes,” the boy said, pointing to a crenellation south of the
dragons. “Wils by the temple door. Jiang standing guard with Wils.
York stays here to cover us.”

“Agreed,” Morgan said.

“What have they got inside the shrine?”

“Some ancient Lectron tripwires, field
security on a board—”

“Good,” the boy interrupted, a quick smile
curving his mouth. “And the alarm?”

“A series of color-synchronized lights on the
column holding the statue.”

A moment’s silence met that answer, then Aja
asked, “Like what we saw on Mercury Island?”

“Aye, much the same,” Morgan said, the tone
of his voice noncommittal. He thought he heard a soft curse, or
mayhaps it was only the wind.

They’d pulled off the Mercury Island job four
months ago, and despite Aja’s nimble fingers and quick mind, the
alarm had gone off and damn near gotten them caught. It was the
closest call they’d ever had, with him and Aja both sustaining
minor injuries.

“The seals in the hypocaust were Carillion
knockoffs. The alarm might be too,” the boy suggested, his tone
equally noncommittal.

“Maybe,” Morgan conceded.

“Well, I don’t want another friggin’ Mercury
Island catastrophe,” York said, shoving himself forward from the
rear and giving them each a tech-jaw to bite down on. Morgan put
the marble-size piece of soft plastic on his back teeth and closed
his mouth for a count of four.

“Friggin’ catastrophes are your stock in
trade, York,” Aja countered before biting down on his own tech-jaw.
With his teeth closed, he flashed York one of his trademark grins,
thoroughly unperturbed by the older man’s complaint. York always
expected the worse, and Aja never did. Morgan figured the two made
a good pair.

“Are we going to do this thing or not?” Jiang
asked, and Morgan heard him half through the storm and half through
the tech-jaw.

He looked again to the deserted courtyard.
They were going to do it, aright. The monastery was getting to him.
Too much praying was part of the problem. He’d long since given up
prayer. As to what else about the place discomfited him, he wasn’t
sure, but something did, niggling at him, stirring up things best
left forgotten, and he would as soon be away. With hand signals and
a succinct set of commands, he deployed his men, directing York to
stay behind.

One by one, the bandits disappeared down the
ladder, melting into the night and the storm. As the five split up,
the tech-jaws kept them in communication. Like so much of the
hardware they used, the tech-jaws didn’t come cheap, but Morgan had
gotten past the point where he and Aja had to spend their downtime
trying to cobble together bulkier and less reliable
alternatives.

The snowstorm was working in their favor,
keeping any stray monks inside. The temperature had finally sunk
below zero and with the windchill was well into negative double
digits.

The future, Morgan had discovered, afforded a
few luxuries, especially in footwear. His boots were supple and
warm with three-centimeter-thick soles that cushioned his every
step while giving him better traction than he’d ever gotten in a
leather shoe. But it was a friggin’ long way to have come for a
good pair of boots—a friggin’ long way.

He and Aja made one last check of the other
men’s positions before lifting the curtain on the temple door and
slipping inside. They both came to an immediate stop. The room was
cast in pitch darkness, except for the blue sheen of the power
field around the statue and the low bar of lights illuminating the
alarm.

Aja slipped a night visor on over his
eyes—and froze into perfect stillness.

“By the bones...” he breathed through the
tech-jaw, his hand absently moving to touch the small yellow wallet
on his belt.

Morgan put on his own night visor, and large
gilded statues of demons loomed up on either side of the temple,
revealed in the gloom by the visor’s green light. Great beasts of
all types lined the walls, reaching fifteen feet from ceiling to
floor: tiger-devils and lions silently roaring, bull-headed men and
leopard-ghouls. He’d first seen the sentinels in daylight, their
long fangs glinting with the rays of the sun, their chatoyant gilt
eyes shining, looking alive. The cover of darkness did naught to
dispel the demons’ frightful countenances nor their eerie
watchfulness. The altar was between two great dragons, the whole of
it fronted with a metal, latticework grille.

He looked to Aja, signalling him to continue,
and after the briefest of hesitations his captain bent to his
task.

“Don’t move left,” the boy said, crouching
down to disable the first tripwire. “Okay, go.”

Aja disabled two more tripwires before they
reached the field security board. It was set into the floor, part
of the circle incised around the column holding the dragon statue.
The field itself projected from the innumerable ports drilled into
the circle, creating a translucent blue cylinder of protection. The
boy stood close to the board and pulled a pliant metallic glove
from his belt. Even from a distance, Morgan could feel the power
pulsing through the blue light. When Aja was ready, he reached out
with his gloved hand and touched the field. The light streaked up
his arm, limning half his body. Sparks skittered from his
fingertips. Wind gusted through the door, lifting the boy’s hair to
snap and flutter with the force of the moving air, and for a moment
he was held there, captain of the elements.

’Twas as close to magic as Morgan ever hoped
to get again, what Aja could do with binary code and a
wavelength-sensitized glove. The boy knelt to the board, being
careful not to break his charged contact with the power field, his
fingers trailing lines of blue fire down the length of the
cylinder. Digits came up on the board, lines of zeros and ones
reflecting red on the green lens of the boy’s night visor. He
worked the keys with his free hand, reading the code through the
fingertips of his right.

Any hack could read code, make code, and even
break code given enough time, but no hack could do it through an
active field. More than a few had been fried trying. Aja’s touch
was immeasurably light, nearly psychic. That he could skim the
surface of a field while reading a board made him rare even among
those with similar talents.

Aye, Morgan thought, the boy was a rare one,
beholden mayhaps even of a bit of sight. More than his captain’s
softwork skills made Morgan think so. The boy showed other signs.
Morgan had oft wondered about Aja’s parents and what could have
happened that they’d abandoned their son, or lost him.

A cracking bolt of energy streaked the length
of the cylinder, signalling Aja’s breaking of his connection.

The boy took a step back, his glove smoking.
A slow smile spread across his face as the power field faltered,
the blue light flickering and then failing altogether, leaving
nothing between them and the twenty-four-karat dragon except the
alarm system. Aja moved in close and knelt in front of the
color-synchronized lights on the column.

Morgan watched him run his hands along the
alarm’s frame, searching for the tell-tale signs of Carillion
manufacturing. They were always there, joints that didn’t meld,
burrs that hadn’t been filed off, keys that stuck, fluids that
leaked.

A snick of sound broke the silence, and Aja
turned with a wide grin on his face, holding up a small lever that
had all but fallen off the alarm.

“Carillion,” he said.

Morgan nodded, pleased.

Aja took a few extra minutes with the alarm,
double-checking himself twice before cutting it off. When nothing
happened, Morgan sounded the okay to the other men, letting them
know he and Aja would be coming out. Stepping forward, he pulled a
padded velvet pouch from his belt and reached for the dragon, only
to come to a stop, suddenly immobilized by a strange scent drifting
up out of the darkness.

His nose knew what it was before his mind
could acknowledge the truth, and his blood ran instantly cold. Aja
was sniffing the air, his brow furrowed.

“What in the h—” the boy started, but got no
further. A soft keening followed the scent out of the darkness,
echoing around the temple, sounding as if from a great distance,
and with it came an intensifying of the smell, warm and rich, and
redolent of the deep earth.

Morgan stared into the dark, washed through
with dread, unable to move. Demons, dragons... and
worms
.
The memory of them coiled around his heart and lungs, sinuous and
winding, reclaiming their place—the very breath and pulse of him.
Sweet God.

“Milord?” Aja questioned when he didn’t
finish picking up the dragon, but only stood there, sweat breaking
out on his brow, his fingers outstretched, his whole arm trembling.
“Morgan?” the boy said uncertainly.

Morgan cursed under his breath. He should
have known. They were time worms. No passing of years would ever
see their demise. Now they had a cult of monks worshipping them. He
wondered if the buggers knew what they were messing with, and in
the next second knew that of course they did.

Friggin’ worms. They’d not get him a second
time.

Gritting his teeth, he grabbed the gold
statue and turned to run. Another curse lodged in his throat. He
and Aja were no longer alone. A dozen monks had emerged from the
gaping belly of a tiger-devil, arisen from God knew what wormish
rites, and were staring at him and his captain in horror. Behind
them were more monks, some carrying torches.

“Rush them,” Morgan commanded, pushing his
hood off his head and dragging his longsword up out of its
scabbard.

“Rush who?” Jiang asked through the tech-jaw
from outside by the door.

“Move!” Wils roared, making Morgan’s ears
ring. In the next instant, the one-armed bandit came running into
the temple, his lasgun drawn. A monk came out of the shadows and
caught him from behind, knocking him out cold with an iron key he
swung from a strap. Wils fell splayed on the floor, his lasgun
sliding over the stone into darkness.

Jiang got off a shot, and the monks went
wild. More of them poured out of the tiger-devil’s belly, filling
the temple and creating chaos.

“On my way,” Morgan heard York say, the older
man’s voice crackling up through the tech-jaw.

Two monks pulled metal staffs off the
latticework grille of the altar and came at Morgan, looking as if
they planned on knocking his head off.