Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (70 page)

And now maybe he was gone too.

She watched the arc of light edging through the park—well into the Sheep Meadow now, almost to the rim of the hole. Did that mean they were winning, or was this just a false hope?

Sylvia closed her eyes and hugged Jeffy tighter.

If you’re still alive down there, Glaeken, please know that you’re in our thoughts. If there’s anything you can do, do it. Get him, Glaeken. Don’t let him get away with what he’s done to us.
GET HIM!

Yes, light was seeping down the tunnel. Glaeken was sure of it now. Growing steadily. And Rasalom … Rasalom was thrashing about in his amniotic sac.

What was happening up on the surface? The weapon was here, useless, encased in hardened fluid from the sack. What in the name of anything could exert such a disturbing effect on Rasalom?

Suddenly a thunderous rumble from the tunnel behind him. The support shuddered beneath Glaeken’s feet. He twisted and saw the growing glow disappear as the roof of the tunnel collapsed, choking the passage with rubble. As the tunnel mouth belched a cloud of dust, Rasalom’s voice returned.

“Once again you’ve chosen a vexing group of friends, Glaeken.”

A warm glow of pride lit within him, along with a glimmer of—did he dare?—hope.

“They’re a tough bunch. What have they done?”

“Nothing that will matter in the long run, but for the present they’ve created an annoyance, an inconvenience.”

“What?”

“They’ve enlarged the pinhole in the night-cover made by your puny little weapon.”

Glaeken steadied himself, choked down the shout of triumph that surged against his vocal cords. He maintained a calm exterior.

“How?”

“How is irrelevant. Their success is irrelevant. The entire world is in darkness. A single cone of sunlight, no matter how bright, is laughably insignificant.”

Glaeken sensed the weight of all that Rasalom had left unsaid.

“Sunlight, Rasalom? Since when have you been afraid of sunlight?”

“I fear nothing, Glaeken. I am master of this sphere. It fears me.”

“It’s not sunlight, is it, Rasalom. It’s another kind of light. Light from your enemy. And it comes at a time and place that’s more than ‘inconvenient.’ It’s shining directly above your little nest, and it has arrived at a time when you’re vulnerable, before your new form has matured.”

“Nonsense, Glaeken. Pure wishful thinking on your part. When my gestation is through, and that is only a matter of hours now, I shall personally plug that hole in my perfect night. Then you will see how ‘vulnerable’ I am.”

Glaeken noticed a growing warmth at his back. He twisted again toward the rubble-strewn tunnel. Something happening there.

And then he saw it. A gleaming pinpoint, a tiny bead no larger than a grain of sand, glowing near the top of the debris, growing bigger, growing brighter. The light seemed to be worming its way through the rubble, as if it had a mind of its own. But how was that possible?

“Don’t allow yourself to hope, Glaeken. It cannot harm me.”

Yet Glaeken did allow himself to hope, could not help but hope when he saw the bead brighten suddenly and shoot out toward the pit in a narrow beam of brilliance, like a needle-thin blue-white laser streaming toward Rasalom. But it came up short against the support under Glaeken’s feet, spraying and splashing like water against a stone wall.

The beam persisted, though. Like a living thing with a will of its own, it split, one half sliding upward, the other down around the support. The light crept to the top just inches ahead of Glaeken’s trapped feet. As soon as it crested the support it raced downward to rejoin its other half. They fused and once again shot out toward Rasalom’s amniotic sac.

But the beam did not strike the sac. Instead it flashed toward the weapon, igniting the exposed butt of the hilt. The pommel blazed with blinding fire, and dimly, through the encrustations, Glaeken could see bolts of light flashing along the length of the blade.

Rasalom howled in Glaeken’s mind as he writhed and thrashed within his sac. Glaeken had a feeling that this time was no act.

The weapon began to vibrate, the encrustations cracked and fell away like old skin, and suddenly the hilt was free, blazing with white light.

Another beam of radiance broke through the rubble and flashed across the cavern. It too found the weapon and added its power to it.

But how … how could the light pass through the rubble?

And then he heard a stone tumble off the debris pile. Something—some
one
—was disturbing the rubble, clearing a passage along its top.

Glaeken knew of only one person with the indomitable will necessary to reach this spot.

As Rasalom’s howl rose to a shriek, Glaeken felt the tendrils wrapped around his legs begin to soften, their hold weaken. He bent and tore at them, straining to pull free. No time to lose. Rasalom’s thrashings were shaking the weapon within the wound it had made. The beam of light stayed with it, moving whenever it did, but if the weapon slipped loose it would fall into the pit. And then Rasalom’s victory would be assured.

With a final surge, Glaeken yanked his legs free and leapt to the central disk where the four arched supports fused. He dropped to his belly, hung precariously over the edge, and reached for the weapon.

Cold-fire eternity beckoned below.

He fought a surge of vertigo and stretched his right arm to its limits, violently thrusting it down to force the ligaments to give him the tiny extra increment of length he needed to reach the jittering hilt. His fingertips brushed the pommel twice, and then with a final, agonizing thrust, he hooked two fingers around it. At his touch the weapon seemed to move on its own, slamming the grip of the hilt against his palm. Power surged up his arm and throughout his body and once more the weapon was his.

As he was the weapon’s.

He stood and looked about. The original beams of light and new ones from the rubble stayed with the blade, fueling it, following wherever he moved it. He couldn’t reach Rasalom or his sac, so he decided to try the next best thing.

Reversing his grip, he lifted the weapon high and drove the point down into the center of the nearest of the supporting arches. A blinding flash lit the cavern as the blade cut deep into the flinty substance. The material of the support began to bubble and smoke as the blade melted its way through it like a hot knife cutting frozen butter. Foul, greasy smoke, reeking of seared flesh, engulfed him. More flashes followed as Glaeken worked the blade back and forth, widening the gash as he deepened it, strobing the cavern with bursts of light and stretching weird shadows against its walls.

Rasalom howled.

“No, Glaeken! I command you to stop! Stop now or you’ll pay dearly. And so will your friends!”

Without pausing an instant in his labors, Glaeken glanced down at the huge eye pressed furiously against the membrane.

“You’ve already promised that, Rasalom. What have I got to lose?”

“I
won’t
kill you, Glaeken! I’ll let you live on, just barely. I’ll make you witness, see,
feel
everything that happens in my new world.”

Glaeken said nothing. He had almost cut through the first arch. With a final thrust, the blade angled through the underside and came free.

The central portion suddenly sagged a half a foot under him. Glaeken hurried to his left, toward the next support.

“Glaeken, NO! That island I promised you—you and the woman and your friends—”

Glaeken shut his mind to Rasalom’s rantings and drove the blade into the second arch. More flashes and oily smoke. He worked the blade ferociously, gasping with the stench and the exertion, and eventually it worked its way through.

The center sagged again, its free edge lurching downward almost two feet this time. The supports he had cut wept dark fluid from their truncated ends as they remained suspended above the void like severed arms reaching for something they would never again possess.

Supported now by only two arches, the center tilted at an angle. Glaeken’s feet slipped on the smooth surface as he hurried toward the nearer of the remaining arches.

And again he drove the blade deep into the substance. But as he worked it through, he felt an impact on his right leg. Searing pain flashed up to his hip. He caught a blur of movement and rolled away.

A huge hand had reared up from the underside of the center, but it resembled a hand in only the vaguest sense—black as the night above, with three fingers as thick around as Glaeken’s waist, each terminating in a sharp yellow talon. Crimson fluid stained one of those—his blood.

Rasalom—in his new form. Glaeken could not see the rest of him, most of which was no doubt still in the sac below. Had his new form finally matured, or was he breaking free before the process was completed in order to stop Glaeken?

It made another swipe, blindly, in his direction. Glaeken ducked under the talons. The sudden move sent a fresh surge of agony through his wounded leg. As it came for him again, he slashed with the weapon and felt the blade dig deep into the inky flesh.

Light exploded around him, a flash of brilliance that dwarfed all those before it. In his mind he heard Rasalom cry out in shock and pain. When his vision cleared he saw the taloned hand waving above him, one of its thick fingers swinging madly back and forth as it dangled from a smoking stump by a few remaining intact tendons.

Glaeken straightened and limped to the other support. He had been able to cut only partway through the third and was unlikely to get a chance to finish the job within Rasalom’s reach. He’d attack the fourth—but not near the center.

His move must have surprised Rasalom because Glaeken was halfway along the arch before the voice sounded in his brain.

“Don’t run off, Glaeken. We’ve only begun to play.”

Glaeken didn’t look back. He continued his torturous trek toward the far end of the arch. Within a dozen feet of its origin he stopped and turned.

Rasalom’s amniotic sac still hung from its lopsided platform like a gargantuan punching bag, but now a sinewed arm with a wounded hand protruded from the rent made by the weapon. It raked the air above it with its two remaining talons. And the eye … that malevolent eye still pressed against the membrane, glaring at him.

“I’m not running far.”

With another burst of light and bloom of oily smoke, he drove the weapon deep into the arch beneath him and began to work it back and forth. The support was thicker here near its base, but he could afford the extra time it would take because he was out of Rasalom’s reach.

“Glaeken,”
Rasalom said to his mind,
“you’ll never learn. You are forcing me to…”

Ahead, over the center of the pit, another arm clawed free of the membrane, then ripped a talon down the surface of the sac, opening it like a zipper. Tons of ebony fluid poured from the rent, spilling into the bottomless glow of the depths below. The rent parted, widened, and then …

Something emerged from the membrane.

Glaeken knew who it was, but could not be certain
what
it was. It had arms, that he knew. And a huge eye at its upper end. But in the dim glow leaking up from the pit below he could be sure of little else as it crawled from the sac and hoisted itself onto the sagging central platform. Legs … now he could see legs, four bristling, segmented stalks like a tarantula’s, but the rest was encased in an oozing gelatinous mass that dripped off the platform in amorphous globs and tumbled into infinity. A larger shape lurked within the mass, something with a head and a torso, but Glaeken could make out no details. And now a pair of thick, sucker-studded tentacles wriggled free of the gelatin below the arms to twist and coil in the air.

Glaeken flashed back to the q’qrs with their extra, tentacle-like upper limbs, but he had a feeling this shape, this avatar possessed far more appendages.

It began moving his way, crawling toward him along the slope of the fourth arch.

Glaeken redoubled his efforts with the weapon, widening, deepening the cut in the upper surface, thrusting the blade through to the underside. Rasalom’s incomplete new form was cumbersome, his progress slow, but he was sliding steadily closer. He soon would have Glaeken within reach of those talons.

Suddenly an explosive crack echoed through the cavern as the fourth arch shook beneath Glaeken’s feet and broke partway through like a green sapling. Its distal segment sagged. Glaeken paused and watched Rasalom claw frantically for purchase as he slipped back along the decline toward the central disk. He gave the monstrous form no time to recover, however; immediately he renewed his hacking assault at the remaining splinters holding the arch together.

“Give it up, Glaeken! This is an exercise in futility! You cannot win!”

Rasalom’s words were no longer in his mind. His new form was speaking in a startlingly powerful voice. Even muffled by the gelatinous coating, it shook the walls of the cavern.