Flesh Gambit (6 page)

The clap of thunder detonated outside the room, and the concussive force rippled through the chamber like a tsunami. Khat was picked up and flung across the room like a rag doll. He struck the wall hard and the breath was driven from him. He fell heavily to the ground, still clutching the Chaos Sphere.

Through the open balcony Khat heard the slave girl scream and the sound of the hovering sunship bouncing against the tower wall. He thrust one hand against the ground and pushed himself up. His hand slipped in the gore, and he struck the floor again.

He snarled his frustration and forced himself up to his knees, painted scarlet with the splashed blood. From out on the horizon, Khat heard Cahlii scream. It simmered up like a gale and then flashed across the turbulent ocean like sheet lightning. It hammered into the tower and spilled in through the open window until he was deafened by the din. Khat dropped his tools and clamped his hands over his ears against the agony.

Abraxsis sat up. Part of his skull fell away and struck the floor. Like a marionette, the Herald lumbered to its feet. Khat pushed himself away from the rising creature until his back was against the wall.

Cahlii is displeased
, the Herald said.

With a start Khat realized the daemon had not spoken but that the words were echoing inside his head. Desperate, he scrambled to scoop up his prizes from where he had dropped them. Behind the disfigured Herald, Sheára forced her own mutilated corpse upward. On either side of the two fantastic creatures, murdered guardsmen rose in shambling horrors.

Khat felt sharp nails rake his flesh. He snapped his head back and forth. The Caliph and the
Infantana
clawed at him, eyes rolled back in their heads, mouths slack and hungry. Khat clutched the Sphere tightly in his fist so that the black metal spikes protruded through his fingers.

Fear and terror surged through his body in wild pulses, and he frantically began to flail his way free. He screamed in surprise and pain when he felt Alyssa’s broken teeth sink into his leg. He looked down and saw her ashen face latched onto his thigh. He buried the spikes of the Chaos Sphere into her skull and pried her from him.

The Caliph looped arms around his waist and tried to bury his gnashing teeth in Khat’s crotch. Khat threw his hip around to block the corpse’s lunge. Undead guardsmen launched themselves at him like gamesmen on a field of play, trying to drag him to the floor.

As fists and limbs rained in, driving him down, Khat looked up through the tangled knot and saw the twin shapes of Sheára and Abraxsis rushing forward. His mind spun like a wheel through panicked options, each more desperate than the last, but he knew what he had to do even as blunt teeth ripped at the veins in his neck. He must give himself into the Sphere.

He said The Word that he had lied and stolen and murdered to obtain, and sealed his soul to the black device. He felt the metal vibrate in his frantic grip like a tuning fork. A flash of heat and light snapped out around him, and his attackers were thrown clear. The Sphere leapt from his hand, screaming with banshee intensity, and it felt as if his guts were attached to it by metal hooks.

Khat screamed at the intensity of the pain, of the agony. Even as he screamed, helpless in the face of torture, the Sphere spun under the power of its weird. Its spinning violence lashed through flesh and ripped it apart with a living ferocity. A tornado of flesh and blood, gut and bone flew through the air, splashing bodies and walls.

Through it all Khat screamed.

He saw the heads of guardsmen detached with ragged, haphazard indifference. Sheára, stumbling on her ruined legs, was sliced through her breasts until her torso slid off her body at a sharp angle. The spinning, screaming Sphere tore through Abraxsis’ back and straight out the front of the Herald. It severed so many bones in the Caliph that the walking corpse drooped like a jellyfish washed up on the shore.

Khat felt each puncture, each rend and tear that his mystic weapon inflicted. It was an unending torture, but even as the agony of the death-dealing mutilation racked his body, Khat bathed in an oily feeling of
fullness
that engorged him. He felt arcane energies feeding him, making him stronger as he cannibalized the living energy being ripped from the animated corpses. It went on until he was fairly drunk and he knew without questions that if he were to unleash the Sphere on the truly living that he would feed on them like the vampire or the succubus.

His pain was unbearable. He flopped on the ground, helpless in the face of the power that fed him and the price it demanded. He felt each rip and slice, each stabbing wound, each cut and stab, until he thought his flesh would simply fly off his body, ripped apart like sailors in the teeth of hungry sharks.

Then it was over.

He gasped and felt his heart lurch painfully in his chest. He sat up, body slick with sweat under the paint of gore. The Sphere now inexplicitly clutched tightly in his massive fist was icy cold despite the fever pitch of his own grip.

Like a man in an opium fugue, Khat staggered up to his feet. The pain had simply stopped and now he fairly
thrummed
with the power he had leeched. He kicked his way clear of the bodies and parts of bodies like a man breaking trail through a swamp. He was coated with bits of flesh like soggy parchment and crimson from head to toe, his hair clotted with blood and bits of bone.

Giddy with the intoxication of his murders, Khat made his way to the window. He stopped and picked up Abraxsis’ glaive. He leaned against it, one hand still clutching the Sphere. He knew he had found the answer. Found the key to the pathway of revenge he had blazed out for himself so long ago in Primus.

Khat went over the balcony and landed on the deck of his ship. He looked over at the slave girl. She stood naked at the tiller and held the sunship with a steady hand. She stood with feet spread wide in confidence at her new command. The wind off the sea played her hair behind her like a tattered banner. She met his gaze without flinching, unmoved by the blood that dripped with his every step and breath.

“What is your name, woman,” Khat demanded.

“Annja,” she answered.

“Take me over the sea and away from the place, navigator.”

“Aye.”

Smoothly the sunship rotated under her sure hand and slid out away from the highest tower in Gomorrah. Annja’s eyes were a fierce blaze as she exercised her power. Khat turned his face into the breeze and he couldn’t wipe the smile from his face.

I’m coming,
he warned.
Let the mighty tremble
, he felt himself laughing,
the son of Primus rises and the works of man done in Her name will fall.

Gomorrah, Tiered City, shrank behind him as he sped for the sun hanging low over the ocean. Beneath him the shadow of his sunship slid across the waves as he ran.

Mark Adam is the working pseudonym for a prolifically published traditional author. Flesh Gambit is a conscious effort to mix traditional Sword & Sorcery with the new brand of fantasy erotica currently popular.