Lyrec (38 page)

For an instant Lyrec thought he had died. Then he decided this had to be some trick of Miradomon’s, one last cruel jape. And then he heard the sinister voice booming out of the darkness. “What is
this
? Another trick of the Kobachs? Or have you involved some faction of eldritch power I haven’t encountered?
 
Who else have you set against me, Lyrec?”

Lyrec began to see again as Miradomon created a phosphorescence on the cavern walls nearest him. They began to glow much as the robe itself did. The throne remained in shadow.

He discovered that he’d fallen onto a solid black surface that sealed off the pit completely, a barrier between them and the star. He got to his feet. The robe floated over onto the barrier. His fingers discharged a blue blast of heat at it. Lyrec leapt away it; where it hit, a circle of dullness appeared—a grayish scorch that was the only sign the heat had any effect at all. “If you think this paltry shield can help you, you’re a greater fool than I imagined. What can you possibly gain? A few more moments of life? You don’t have the energy at your disposal to maintain
this.
”
 

Lyrec thought he might have heard the tiniest tremor of fear in the words. He moved far enough from the shield to avoid being scalded by any further attacks. “I’m not sure what it requires,” he replied, “since I have no part in it.”

Across the cavern a female voice said, “True. It’s
my
handiwork.”

The speaker climbed down from the throne, out of the shadows. Perplexed by her identity, Lyrec said, “Yadani?”

Miradomon knew better. Before he could stop himself, he uttered her name: “Elystroya.”
 
He realized now what he stood on, but not how she’d escaped, or with what power she had managed to transform her prison into the shield.

Lyrec stared fiercely at him. “You lied. And I accepted it. I believed you.”

“You’re so gullible, you believe
anything
people tell you,” remarked another voice.

“Borregad!” he shouted.

The cat, black once more, stood in the shadows, and only the gleam of his eyes pinpointed his position.
 
“I’m sorry you had to believe I was dead, but you needed help and I needed the
crex
to set her free.”

Elystroya held that silver sphere. Lyrec moved aside as the sphere ejected a dozen thin rods that impaled Miradomon where he stood on the shield, his arms raised to blast it again.

The robe wrestled against the hindrances. Growled like an animal. The only sign that the rods had injured him at all was the think yellow fluid dribbling out around them. One rod began to sizzle and in a moment was gone. The wound shrank and vanished.

Lyrec reached out and accepted the
crex
from Elystroya. He stared into her dark eyes and his joy was irrepressible. The cat came forward. “Not now,” he said. “That shield was her prison. It’s of his design, which means while we can’t do much to it, he can probably obliterate it.”

The second rod had vanished, and Miradomon concentrated on eliminating the last one holding his hand up. “This performance is moving,” he shouted at them, “but it plays badly here. All you’ve gained is the opportunity to wish one another good-bye.”

“The shield cuts off the star—that’s the source of his power,” Elystroya said. “He told me.”

Lyrec understood finally why the star lay below. Miradomon had said he was refashioning the universe for himself. The raw material for that creation pulsed in the bottom of that well. Unleashed, it would become a universe of chaos: his power would expand, become infinity itself.

He turned and charged at Miradomon. The
crex
whined impatiently.

But the brief reunion, as the robe had said, had taken up precious seconds. Eliminating the remaining rod that pinned his right hand and before Lyrec could even will another, Miradomon pointed at him, creating a flickering ring that girdled and paralyzed him at the edge of the shield. From the cries behind him, Lyrec concluded the other two had been snared the same way.

Miradomon quickly began destroying the remaining rods. “I warned you not to hesitate. Now you’ll spend the rest of eternity dying. When my new world blossoms, I’ll shred you into a billion particles, and every one of them alive and thinking and screaming in endless pain. Your deaths will spread like a cloud and taint every world before I even arrive.

“Even if you had attacked me, you could never have won. Your puny
crex
is nothing compared to me. Look at
her
—the best she could do is pin me for a moment.” His hands were free; the rods had all been eliminated. The remaining wounds began to recede. “You see? I’ve freed myself and I still have enough resources left without my source to blast this shield into powder and deal with all of you.” He roared in triumph.

Sparkling with golden filaments, his hands opened to finish the job of shattering the shield. Twin streams of plasma cut into the surface. A hairline crack appeared and began to spread out toward the center of the shield.

Then suddenly the plasma streams withered and stopped.

Miradomon cried out as if in pain and alarm. He clamped the cowl in both hands as though he would tear off his own head; in desperation he was trying to keep the robe from receding. “Damn the child,” he screamed, “damn the
child!”
The Kobachs had tapped into him through Tynec and begun to drain his reserves. Instead of a direct assault, they drew his energy away, trying to drag him down. In any other circumstance, their assault would have provided a brief inconvenience—he would have let loose more energy in a burst to slay them all; but here and now he couldn’t afford it.
 
The black shield prevented him from replenishing.
 

As his power melted away, the wounds reappeared and spread wide. The viscous material of the robe started to slide from him, taking with it the impenetrable shadow that had concealed his features. His hands, clutching at his head, turned pale green and decayed. The gold threads dissolved.

The ring that entrapped Lyrec sputtered and faded. Elystroya and the cat came up beside him. The robe bubbled and congealed, rivulets collecting into a glowing mass around Miradomon’s feet.

Upon his arrival in Secamelan, Miradomon had extracted all the knowledge from a priest of Chagri whose misfortune it was to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Once the vessel lay empty, Miradomon had bled into him, a body to inhabit and discard whenever he was finished here. Now, without the energy to maintain it, the effects of his corrosive pneuma were at last revealed.

The whole of his head was gangrenous, the skin swollen and covered with dark seeping sores. The nose had caved in and the faintly glowing eyes seemed impossibly contained in almost lidless sockets.

Borregad looked away in revulsion as the whole chamber around them trembled as though from an earthquake.

The cracked and rubbery lips split into a perverted grin. Miradomon was letting his form go, releasing the energy of binding to strike a single molecular junction in the shield. If he could shatter one more point along the already formed crack, he could burst it open. He repurposed more energy. The robe drained off further, revealing a sunken, skeletal chest and torso.

A shard from the shield shattered and fell up into the air. A narrow beam of from the well-star fell across Miradomon.

“Lyrec!” shouted Elystroya.

He’d seen it and jumped onto the shield, arms raised above his head, his hands bonded now into a single silver sphere.

The robe spun back up Miradomon with amazing speed. Just a few more seconds and he could be whole again. He cried out, “Wait, Lyrec. I could give you worlds! Elystroya for your own! I could—”

The
crex
shot forth a beam of disruption, cutting through the air like a blade of heat. It sliced into Miradomon as if he were a mirage—through the all-too-mortal and unprotected rotting skull, through teeth and tongue, ending his final plea. Through throat and breastbone. Lyrec stared into the enormous terrified eyes. “Wait?” he said. “You told me
never
to hesitate.” He brought his arms down with all his might and the beam drove through the body and bit into the black shield. The lump of half-formed robe caught fire. The shield began to crack. Along the central fissure it tilted, caving in.

Independent of one another, Miradomon’s two eyes rolled in his head. Fluid spilt from the incision, pouring onto the shield, running through the opening. The two halves of his body came apart with a moist sucking sound and toppled back on either side of the widening fissure. Organs disgorged in a dark, wet mass. The greenish flesh melted. It flowed from the bones.

The two halves of the shield collapsed and the body along with Lyrec vanished into the pit.

Elystroya and Borregad ran to the edge. The floor trembled beneath them.

Coated silver once more, Lyrec floated up out of the pit. He landed beside Elystroya. They looked at one another for a moment, and then hesitantly, awkwardly, he hugged her. She didn’t move. The floor shook again.

The cat ran toward the rear of the cavern. “Hug later,” he yelled at them. “This place is coming apart. We brought Lewyn—the princess. In the throne.” He vanished among the shadows, his voice echoing after: “Wait for me!”

Lyrec called after him but got no reply. Stumbling on the uneven floor, he ran to the throne and found a naked girl sitting there, staring blankly ahead. He picked her up, and turned back to Elystroya. “Take my hand.” She came to him. Where they had been standing a moment before, a section of ceiling crashed down through the floor. Elystroya touched him. Silver spun up her arm and over her body. Lewyn, too, gleamed under the polished surface of his
crex.

One wall shook and began to collapse.

Elystroya asked, “Why is this happening?”

“His force, his will, whatever it was, was all that kept this locus together. He’d dispensed with his
crex
, turned it into a vast container. He used it as the boundary of this parasitic world of his. It probably started to shrink before he was dead. Without him, it’s collapsing. That star down there—we have to—”

The floor opened up beneath them and they tumbled out of sight. A thin string of plasma shot up through the ceiling, then splashed down, melting through more of the floor.

Borregad reappeared out of the fluctuating rear wall. He ran clumsily on his hind legs. “All right, let’s … He saw that the floor was gone and scrambled wildly onto the throne. “Lyrec? You better not have fallen in! The least you could have done was wait for me!” Above him, half the ceiling broke loose. “Lyrec!” he shrieked.

A silver hand materialized in the darkness behind him. It reached out, grabbed his tail, and he was pulled, howling, into nothingness.

The throne shattered and the last of the floor gave way. The walls rippled and exploded. In the pit the white star collapsed in an instant into a ball no bigger than Lyrec’s
crex.

Then it blossomed.

*****

Talenyecis, half out of her wits and standing at the ready, almost killed the nearest of the two silver figures when they popped into the room.

Lyrec eyed her and blinked at the blade that vibrated a hand’s width from his head. Beyond her, a single torch burned in a wall bracket, and the fine edge of the sword gleamed with its light. “Would you mind?” asked Lyrec. Talenyecis lowered the sword and replaced it in her scabbard. “Hold her,” he said and handed Lewyn to her. A coating of silver spread from the princess to cover Talenyecis.

“What are you doing to me?” she asked irately.

“In a minute.” He tilted his head, eyes closed as if listening to something. Talenyecis heard nothing. He reached out, and his hand vanished into nothingness. After a second, he tugged sharply back and his hand re-emerged, holding a howling mad silver beast by the tail. Upside down, the cat bleated, “I could have died! You left me there, I could have died!”

“Why did you run off?”

Borregad showed him the black globe. “
This
is why.”

“What is it?”

Elystroya said, “One of his prisons.”

“Specifically Lewyn. All you’ve got is her body,” added the cat. “And let go of my tail.”

The castle shuddered. Talenyecis’s eyes widened. “What?” was all she could ask.

Lyrec took Borregad in his arms, said, “Stand close,” and then closed his eyes.

The last thing Talenyecis saw was a huge crack forming down the outside wall. The room tilted, fluttered, and shrank from view.

Chapter 27.

The tavern looked as if a great battle had been fought in it. The same bodies as before now lay flung across various parts of the room. Chairs and tables lay overturned or shattered. The Kobachs had siphoned off what they could of Miradomon’s power through Tynec, but they couldn’t absorb such adverse energy, and it had spun off them like a whirling storm front. Confined, rebounding through the building, it had wreaked demonic vengeance on everything beyond the Kobach circle.

Now, though the Kobachs still defensively maintained their circle, Grohd sat beside his hearth, where he had started a fire after crawling away from them. His pants were soaked with
grynne
that had poured across the floor when his stored kegs ruptured in the tumult. Bozadon Reket remained seated beside the others. Both he and Grohd had been persuaded by Ronnæm to volunteer. They had linked up with the Kobachs most reluctantly, but were now giving thanks to the gods that they had done so, as it had surely saved their lives.

Reket was utterly drained after the experience, but he tingled with a strange light-headed vigor that no previous experience in his life had ever generated. It reminded him a little of the pinnacle moment in sex except that, now it had passed, he didn’t feel like going to sleep. Being a Kobach might offer some advantages, but he was going to reserve judgment until he had the opportunity to try this again; and he had no intention of ever doing that.

Thunder shook the floor beneath them. A cold wind swirled and danced in the middle of the room, buffeting everyone. Grohd whined, “Oh, no, it’s come for us!” and crawled into hiding behind the bar again.