Etherwalker (31 page)

To distract? Is that why I didn’t notice the machinery under the—

Váli lurched towards Rictus, sweeping a heavy arm around to crush the specter into the ground. Somehow, unbelievably, Rictus was prepared for the attack, and he ducked under the arm with a smooth swing of Enoch’s sword. Blood sprayed across the sand, and the monster gasped from its mouths. Apparently Rictus was right—it had been a long time since Váli’s blood had been spilled.

Spinning to place himself between the monster and his friends, Rictus hissed, “Stop trying to talk with the crazy radioactive man, Enoch.”

Váli whipped around with another arm—an arm that seemed to have grown yellow, bony claws. This was faster than Rictus had expected, and the specter’s rolling dodge only barely avoided a blow that ripped into the sand next to him. He came to his feet and charged the monster in a daring
flèche
that surprised even Enoch with its speed.

The muscles at Váli’s chest pulsed and then burst apart as a thick, muscled tentacle shot forward to wrap around Rictus’s sword arm and slam him down into the sand. Rictus struggled to his feet and tilted his wrist down to slice clean through the new tentacle—he had fought Váli unarmed before, and the veteran swordsman had been planning for this. Váli grunted and took a step back. The tentacle writhed on the ground, and Rictus kicked it at its owner with a laugh.

“Got any more of those, Beautiful? I can stand here all day, cutting ‘em off as fast as you squirt ‘em at me—can’t wrap me up so easy now, can ya?”

Váli pulled the severed limb into his largest mouth and took another step back, devouring his own flesh while another tongue licked at his bleeding stump. The monster settled back into the sand, and Enoch wondered if it had given up. A dozen smiles flashed across Váli’s chest. Rictus raised his other hand and beckoned the monster to attack.

The sand exploded at Rictus’s feet, and two more tentacles wound around his legs. Váli had sent them snaking through the sand underneath the specter’s feet and was now pulling him down. Rictus stabbed into the ground around him as he sank, filling the air around him with sand as he struggled in vain to cut his bonds. Again, Váli laughed the landslide laughter of a crowd.

Enoch cried out, shook free from his lethargy and drew his sword. He pushed Sera aside and ran towards his slowly sinking friend.

“Enoch!” she cried. “Stay back! We need to keep clear of his—”

Another wave of tentacles burst from the sand at Enoch’s feet, wrapping around the boy. He fell to the ground, sword tumbling. Mesha pounced on the tentacles in a hissing assault of claws and teeth that blooded them but was ultimately futile. One of the tentacles snapped at her, cracking like a whip, and she tumbled across the sand and was still. Enoch cried out and reached for the shadowcat, but he was pulled through the sand towards Váli.

Sera turned to run in a panic to get clear of those tentacles. The sand was already stirring at her feet, powerful undulations almost causing her to lose her balance. She spread her broken wings with a cry of pain, flapping them once, twice. For a second, she was free of the flailing tentacles, but then her right wing collapsed and she fell into the monster’s waiting embrace. Like Rictus and Enoch, she was pulled into the sand, her arms, legs, and wings pinned painfully tight inside the crushing grip of the muscular limbs.

Enoch watched Sera’s failed flight with impotent horror and lifted his head to see the captor. Váli had lost any similarity to a human form. A dozen limbs sprouted from his torso, limbs which bent with a writhing, serpentine strength as they pulled a struggling Rictus, Enoch, and Sera out of the sand and towards him. The limbs were absorbed back into Váli’s frame as they pulled, and Enoch could feel the flesh wrapped around his arms trembling with strange biological heat as the monster consumed itself. He could tell that the explosive transformation had cost the creature a significant amount of energy—the tentacle flesh had grown hotter still, and Váli dragged them all more slowly across the sand. Several of his mouths were panting.

“He’s weaker!” Enoch shouted. “Rictus, see if you can’t break free!”

Rictus turned his head to respond, but another tentacle slid around his neck and tightened like a noose. Váli smiled from his eating mouth, and a flotilla of tongues clicked at him disapprovingly.

“You think I would expend myself like this unless it guaranteed a checkmate, little Pensanden? I had this encounter calculated and won before you even drew your sword.”

That was when Enoch understood. This monster, it thought like he did; it knew his mental abilities well enough to trap him and drain his flagging energies with a meaningless, infinite pattern. Váli had been trained—built? bred?—to think like a Pensanden. It was a monster, all right.
A monster like me.

Enoch shouted, trying to find some meaning in this chaos.

“You . . . you are an etherwalker? You are what I will become?”

The smile on Váli’s mouth grew wide and then literally cracked through the sides of Váli’s face—around to where his ears would have been, had he been human—and transformed the monster’s head into a gaping maw. New teeth pushed through the freshly bloodied gums—teeth more edged and carnivorous than those at the front. Váli meant to feed.

Rictus was closest, and the tentacles around the specter bulged and then lifted him into the air above the maw. The monster turned its eyes on Enoch.

“You think your Mesoamerican godfathers were the only ones playing with organic computers and human wetware? They were just the lucky first out of the gate, boy. The first ones to grab hold of the net and shake off those behind them.”

He released the uppermost length of the tentacle holding Rictus, and the specter’s sword arm was free. Rictus tried to double over and slash at the tentacles binding his legs, but Váli was too quick—with a hiss, he lunged and bit into his victim’s shoulder. The specter’s sword dropped to the sand as bones crunched under spade-like teeth. Rictus flailed against the monster, digging his fingers into the venous flesh of Váli’s lips and pulling away bloody handfuls of flesh. It was a painful, if fruitless, gesture—the monster moaned from his mouths and then took another bite, severing Rictus’s pelvis and legs from his torso. The specter now hung, spine and withered entrails dangling above the chewing maw, silently clawing at the bleeding flesh around the creature’s mouth. This actually turned Váli’s moan into a scream, and like that Rictus was stuffed into his mouth. Trembling tentacles moved to put oddly delicate pressure on the bleeding, wounded lips, and the rhythmic sound of crunching, snapping bones filled the dry air. Váli’s voice, now smoldering with pain and rage, echoed from the unengaged mouths.

“I’ll credit your specter friend—I’ve not been bloodied in a century. His reward will be to slowly digest in a stomach I’ve grown just for specters—a stomach filled with a thick bile that suspends his nanites in mucus so the acid can do its work. I’ve made sure to swallow his skull intact so he can witness his own dissolution.”

Váli now began to pull Enoch towards him. Even though he knew it was useless, the boy continued to struggle against the tentacles. He could hear Sera struggling as well as she was dragged beside him. He turned his head, tried to see if he couldn’t help . . .
somehow.

“
Sera! I can’t—”

She was staring at him, face steady, mouthing two words over and over. Enoch couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. He shook his head, confused.

Sera whispered, not wanting Váli to hear. It was a barely audible hiss over the rasping of the sand.

“Suspend. Nanites.”

Suspend nanites? Isn’t that what Váli is doing to Rictus?

“Sera,” Enoch whispered back. “What do you mean? You want me to
help
—?”

But Váli was now lifting him into the air, drawing Enoch to a mouth still spotted with Rictus’s remains.

“Don’t worry, I will only bite off your limbs—nothing vital. Like your specter friend, I can help you suffer for ages—nearly as long as him, in fact. I’ll have to connect you to my circulatory system so that you don’t bleed to death every time I peel the skin from your body.”

Sera spoke from the sand underneath him now, her voice strained. “You . . . you’re just a
troll
. A freak tumor of uncontrolled cancer cells. You were made to match the Pensanden. But you’ll never be more than an ugly shadow. A shadow smart enough to understand what he can never be!”

Enoch knew what she was trying to do—stall Váli to give him time. Time to figure out what she had meant by
suspend nanites.
Enoch’s head still ached from
pushing
the specters. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t . . .

And then he understood.
Suspend nanites! She wanted me to realize what those words meant when the monster said them. Váli wouldn’t have to create this special bile of his, he wouldn’t have to take any of these crude measures with the specters if he could do what I do. He has my ability to see and create patterns—but cannot see with the
afila nubla!
That is where he is helpless!

Enoch knew what he had to do now. He just needed Sera to keep stalling Váli. Just a little longer . . .

Luckily, Sera had hit a nerve. Váli tightened his grip around her, and she let out a gasp. His voices were burning hotter.

“Ah, the trained bird finally speaks! Even in death, you sing the praises of your false god. You, my dear, are the saddest of this lot. An entire race of beings bred as decorative messengers in a world where communication is fast as light. A people made dependent on silly metal wings—in an age when man could fly around the world in hours aboard vessels that matched the speed of sound.”

Váli focused his attention on Sera now. Enoch fought to keep his focus, pushed away his fear for Sera by holding to his
afila nubla
with ferocious determination.
This is why Master Gershom trained me
, he thought.
So that I could keep my mind in focus when it mattered most.

The monster lifted Sera into the air and used another tentacle to pull her broken wing free, extended to its quivering limit.

Sera screamed. “Can’t you
feel
the insult done to your kind just by the Pensanden? To be born a decoration. A useless, archaic decoration.”

He lifted her high and opened his monstrous jaws, this time meaning to bite her in half. Váli did not care to keep the angel alive.

Enoch’s will crumbled, and he screamed the last air from his lungs.

“Sera!”

There was a roar, and something large flew through the air, landing on Váli’s twisted face with a heavy
thump
and knocking Sera to the ground
.
Gasping for breath, Enoch blinked the tears from his eyes.

G’Nor crouched on Váli’s face, thick claws deep in the tentacled monster’s flesh. With another roar, the beast tore into Váli with a flurry of powerful swipes that sent torn flesh and blood into the air.

Váli was screaming and roaring back, cursing in fear and rage at this unexpected intruder. The monster rolled to shake G’Nor from his face, but couldn’t loose the beast’s predatory grip. The tentacle around Enoch shivered loose and whipped around to beat at his attacker. With deadly feline reflexes, G’Nor twisted his head back to snap the tentacle between long dagger fangs and then shook the prize with feral violence. The bucking tentacle was torn to shreds between the beast’s razor teeth, and G’Nor turned back to sink his fangs into Váli’s jaw. G’Nor ripped the monster’s jawbone from its mouth in a shower of blood, and Enoch couldn’t help but process the contrast between the two beasts—the blunt clumsiness of twisted human creativity against millions of years of predatory evolution.

Váli was screaming now. More tentacles erupted from his torso, wrapping around G’Nor’s powerful body—and being flayed to ribbons by the beast’s ebony claws. But they were growing heavily tangled around G’Nor, and Enoch saw Váli’s strategy: the tentacles were a distraction to the beast, much like the pattern had been to him. As the wildly flailing limbs kept G’Nor preoccupied, Váli was detaching his vital organs from the bloody mess. A slug-like portion of the monster extended from behind the bleeding torso—a featureless lozenge of pulsing flesh half the size of the original creature. It sprouted thin, finlike limbs and started to burrow into the sand beyond the reach of G’Nor.             

*  *  *  *

Sera saw and stumbled to her feet, casting around for Enoch’s sword. “G’Nor! He’s escaping! If he gets away, he’ll heal and come back again!”

G’Nor heard her, but he was so wrapped in dying, constricting tentacles that he could not break free. Váli detached completely, slid into the blood-soaked sand and disappeared.

Sera turned to Enoch, desperate. He was standing, one hand at his temple, the other extended forward in the direction Váli had gone. Again, blood was running from his ears.

“Enoch! We’ve lost Váli. We need to leave here. Now. If he can heal even half as quickly as the trolls, then we . . .” Her voice drifted off.

Enoch was trembling.

“Enoch?”

G’Nor had freed himself from the tentacles and left the convulsing mess to check on Sera. He signed to her with blood-soaked paws. Sera waved him away and stumbled towards Mesha, who stirred at her touch.