Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (16 page)

Clea.

Donta pounded on the heavy wooden door.

He
focused
and struck the door with
his mind and his fist at the same time. The door shook in the doorway and the
temperature of the hallway dropped a few degrees. A few more “knocks” like that
and the door would not need to be opened. He heard a scrabbling from the other
side of the door and waited.

The door opened a crack, and he could see a
grey eye peeking out at him. He hit the door again and it sprung open. The
Feral slave who had been examining him was flung across the room to crash into
the middle of the floor. A door in the opposite wall opened and Mi Zabab
entered, tying a cord around his waist to secure the robe he had just put on.
The tented front of the robe indicated that Donta had interrupted him at a most
inopportune time.

As the Feral slave climbed to his feet,
Zabab broadcast his thoughts in the declarative mode.

Zabab:
Leave us.

The Feral bowed and circled Donta on his on
his way to the door. He closed the door behind him. Donta took the liberty of
warding the room, energizing the glyphs carved into the floor. They would not
be interrupted. Very few Guest could breach a ward energized by Donta.
Truthfully, many of the Host would not be able to breach it either —not unless
they had a Lens to enhance his or her abilities. Donta’s mental strength was
one of the reasons he had been made a Marshal.

“Tell me that it was not you. Please, it
couldn’t have been you, could it? You aren’t that completely bat shit insane,
are you?”

Zabab switched to the personal mode of
mindspeech, so that only Donta, or a snooping Adept of the twelfth order, could
hear him.

Zabab –> Donta:
My dear Donta, you
are lucky that I like you. Very lucky. I have gelded better men than you for
less. This interruption really is quite unacceptable.

“Answer me, Zabab. Did you go out with your
pet Nightfeeder and have her rip a fucking man’s arms off in the middle of the
fucking street in front of two hundred fucking witnesses?” Donta’s voice was
calm.

Zabab –> Donta:
You dare speak to me
that way?

The front of the robe was now flat. It
appeared that Donta now had Zabab’s undivided attention.

“Yes, I fucking dare. I knew it was a mistake
letting you keep her. You just couldn’t help yourself, could you?”

A guilty look flashed across Zabab’s face.
He casually walked away from the door through which he had entered the room,
too casually.

Donta looked at the door and then back to
Zabab.

“Really, Zabab.” He shook his head. “Did
seeing her rip a man apart get your juices flowing?”

Zabab –> Donta:
You have no right to
speak to me in this way. I admit it to a small lapse of judgment. But these
things happen. There have not been many other incidents in the year that I have
had her.

“Not many incidents. You mean there have
been other incidents?” Donta’s voice was no longer calm.

Zabab –> Donta:
Well, what’s the
point of having her if I can’t use her once in a while. Believe me, I have been
discreet.

“Discreet? She tore a man in two, in the
middle of a crowded street. Some of our students were witnesses.”

Zabab –> Donta:
It was more like
three pieces, not two.

Zabab nodded his head a few times, the Host
version of a chuckle.

Zabab –> Donta:
And it was a slave.

Zabab raised his eyebrows and showed his
open hands to Donta, as if to say that made it all okay.

“Listen to me. Listen to me carefully.”
Donta spoke slowly to control his anger. “We need to stay focused on our goal.
We cannot be distracted by pettiness and selfishness that our opponents
exhibit. If we stay disciplined we will prevail while they tear each other
apart. We just need to wait for the right time to strike, and the time will be
soon.

Zabab –> Donta:
Come now, it was only
a little fun, a jape. Answer me this, Donta, what will be the point of
prevailing if we create a world of tedium? And soon? Tell me, when is this
soon? It seems that you have been promising soon for quite a number of years.

“Don’t play games, Zabab, I am guessing that
you have been waiting an opportunity like this for millennia, you just hadn’t
been able to find someone with the cunning, drive and vision to make it a
reality, not before I came along. If we succeed we will usher in the new Golden
Age, an age of growth and advancement to replace this age of stagnation and
decay.”

Donta gathered himself and continued.

“We have twelve more years to mold him, to
make him ready. Twelve years from now the world will be a very different place.
The Exile’s return will be upon us and the New Temple will be complete.
Depending on what happens between now and then, the Emperor may decide to side
with the Orthodox and end the whole Guest experiment, or he may decide push
forward with our Progressive agenda. The New Temple will remove the need for
the annual Renewal and we will be able to shape my people more rapidly. We both
know that if the Orthodox wins both our bodies will be strapped to the altars.
If our candidate can do what I hope he can do, before the Orthodox achieve
preeminence, we will gain everything. In the meantime you need to restrain
yourself.”

Zabab –> Donta:
Fine, twelve years. I
will be discreet, but I will not be a eunuch. And I grant that you are most
useful to our cause. But a word of warning: make sure you continue to be useful
or you may find yourself spending time with our old friend, the Architect.

Donta stormed out of Zabab’s chambers, not
even bothering to slam the door.

When
he returned home following his “adventure” at the Festival, he had made himself
a panini with trembling hands. He tried not to think about how futile his death
at the hands of a couple of ignorant thugs would have been as he sliced some
old sharp cheddar. Usually he would leave the kitchen pristine after preparing
food, but today he left his plate on the table and the panini press open on the
counter, glistening with a sheen of melted butter, and slightly crusted with
brown cheese crisps that had oozed from the bread before solidifying.

He was eager to start work. More than
eager, he was driven.

He sat down and started to sketch his new
design, hands now steady and confident as he lost himself as he designed his
“crown of thorns.”

Eighteen hours, three more panini, four
Guinness and a two-hour nap later he had his prototype ready. It was ugly,
bulky and heavy, but he thought it would work. If it did he would work to
refine the design and make it beautiful. His finished products were always
beautiful. This, his crowning achievement, would be magnificent.

The torus of stainless steel had a diameter
of about a foot and was welded to pole attached to the back of a chair. The
smooth outer circle was marred by a heavy set of cabling that snaked across the
room to a cobbled-together control unit that looked like a laptop and a
generator had mated and produced an ugly hybrid offspring.

The inner ring of the torus was a few
inches wider than his head. Protruding from the inner surface was a series of
needles similar to acupuncture needles. The wire-thin spikes were not
distributed evenly but formed symmetrical bunches. If you could imagine someone
sitting in the chair with their head in the torus you would see that the
needles were mostly concentrated at the front and back of the skull. There were
a few needles on the support pole that would align with top of the spine of our
imaginary sitter.

He walked over to the control unit and
turned it on. The needles vibrated so quickly that they became hard to see and
then extended forward by a few inches, far enough to penetrate the skull of a
person had they been sitting in the chair.

He was desperate to see if it would work.
He wanted to try it himself, but he knew that would be foolhardy. He needed to
test it. He needed to calibrate it. Without calibration he would risk brain
damage.

Luckily, he had the perfect test subject, where
brain damage was not a concern.

Charlie surfaced from unconsciousness. She
was pleasantly surprised to find that she was not in the cage and was more or
less intact.

She was chained into a sitting position in
a chair with a thick metal hoop around her head. Her head was secured to a post
at the back of the chair by a separate steel band, ensuring she could not move
in her weakened state. “This is new,” she thought to herself.

She had arms and legs again; however, her
feet had been grafted to her wrists in place of her hands. Her remarkable
healing ability had linked up the nerves so that her feet felt like clumsy
hands. She scrunched her toes, which felt much longer than usual. She assumed
that her hands had taken the place of her feet. She knew that in time with a
bit of effort she would realign the structure of the feet on her wrists to look
like hands and the same with her hands on her ankles. Perhaps that was why her
captor had mutilated her this way. He always seemed to be testing the limits of
her ability to heal. Needless to say, even for an evil old monster such as
herself, it was very disturbing to be at the mercy of someone who was sick
enough to be making these types of alterations to her without her consent.

She snorted to herself. Consent, as if
anyone one would agree to what was being done to her. In the back of her mind,
she realized that she was losing her grip on her sanity if she could find
something close to humor in her situation.

Earlier in her imprisonment she wondered if
Leader was behind all the physical abuse. She soon discounted the possibility.
Leader had no need to resort to physical punishment. She could easily lock her
up in her mind and subject her to unspeakable horrors without touching her, as Charlie
knew from bitter experience.

It had to be someone testing the limit of
her ability to heal. There had to be a reason for her suffering, hadn’t there?

The other confusing part was that nothing
had attacked her on the mental plane —the psychological trauma she was
experiencing due to the vivisection notwithstanding. If an initiate, one of the
Quickened, had her there they would have been trying to breach her mental
shields. As far as she could tell her shields had not been breached, even while
she was unconscious. This was worrying, as their biggest taboo was to avoid
detection by the Herd, and all signs indicated that this was exactly what was
happening.

The device around her head started to hum
and she felt pinpricks against her scalp and spine. The smell of her burning
flesh hit her nostrils before she felt the excruciating pain.

She jerked her body and tried to move her
head from side to side. She could hear the strain on the metal band across her
forehead. One of the links in the chain across her chest popped and shot across
the room like a bullet.

She heard a sound behind her.

Her captor was in the room with her!

If she could just get free, she would
pummel him into a paste with her feet-hands and hand-feet.

She snarled and redoubled her efforts. She
was going to get free. The room went black as she sucked in every available
photon to power her struggle. Ambient heat dropped as she stole energy from the
air.

She could hear her captor struggle towards
the door. Light briefly flooded the room as he managed to slip out and slam the
door behind him. 

An electric current flowed through the
chair and the smell of burning flesh intensified. She fought the urge to lose
consciousness and redirected some of the energy into expanding her frame. Her
form started to swell as she converted the electricity, heat and light into
mass. She was in danger of incinerating herself by pulling in the energy so
quickly, but she was past caring. She needed to get out of this hell.

The needles hummed louder and then the
humming stopped.

Abruptly, she lost the battle to stay awake
and found herself back in her refuge.

She was on the beach, on her beach. Her
rage was an inferno inside her, manifesting as an erupting volcano, looming over
the tree-lined edge of her beach.

She thought of how she would pay him back.
Perhaps she could convince Leader to Turn him so she could make him pay with
centuries of agony. She smiled as she reveled in fantasies of revenge.

He slammed the door and hit the panic
button that electrified the chair. Thank goodness he had taken precautions.

He placed his hand on the clunky lever
located beside the door that would initiate the sterilization sequence. Below
the lever was a large red button. Above the door was a blank maroon screen that
would light up with red digital numerals if he pulled the lever. The full
sterilization sequence took thirty seconds; however, if it looked like she was
going to get through the door before the sequence was complete, he could hit
the big red button to trigger a partial sterilization. There was no guarantee
that a partial sterilization would work, but it should at least slow her down
and give him an opportunity to escape into the tunnels under the city, into the
buried streets of past generations.

Looking at the monitor on the other side of
the door, he saw that she resisted the compulsion to go to sleep for a few more
seconds.

“Scrotal sack,” he muttered.

She blacked out.

He sighed and slowly removed his hand from
the lever.

He went back into the room and checked the
control apparatus. He fist pumped the air.

His calculations had been perfect. Iin
spite of her struggles, he had successfully implanted the sensors on her
cerebral cortex and on the medulla oblongata the top of her spine, without
damaging the brain matter itself.

His investigations into how she healed so
quickly would accelerate now that he could monitor her brain activity as she
healed. He would also be able to switch her off without resorting to using the
rather crude electrocution method he was relying on.

Worst case scenario: he would be able to
switch her off for good if he needed to.

He was exhausted but too excited to sleep.

He needed to take a short walk. He checked
the weather on his phone; it was raining, beautiful. He would go out, but only
after he fixed his Taser.

Oh, well, no rest for the righteous.

The rain was steady and light. He would not
stay out long. He was a little nervous about being out after the Festival
fiasco, but he would not be made a prisoner in his own house any more than he
would be a prisoner of his broken body.

As he passed the building housing the
Camera Obscura he got a chill and looked around furtively. It felt like someone
was watching him. The feeling stayed with him as he approached the courtyard in
front of the castle. He was so engaged in concentrating on the feeling of being
observed that he did not pay enough attention to where he was putting his feet.
He ended up tripping on a misaligned cobble. He did not get his arm up quickly
enough and fell painfully on his nose, bringing tears to his eyes. He rolled
onto his back and brought his hand to his throbbing nose. His hand came away
bloody.

“Testicular tumor,” he muttered as he
struggled to his feet.

He looked around to see if anyone had seen
his fall. He knew it was silly but he was more concerned about someone seeing
his fall than he was about being hurt. His arm and face were throbbing, but he
did not seem to be seriously damaged.

He hurried back to his home.

***

Baby’s eyes popped open.

It couldn’t be.

She and Little Eve had not found anything
in two weeks of searching, other than the tingle that Little Eve had discounted
and the feeling she had after broadcasting in the pub. Her mental shout in the
pub did not appear to have attracted too much undue attention. She had detected
a few rivals in their territory, individuals though, no full packs or covens.
It was usual for competitors to be in town for Festival time. The Festival not only
attracted large amounts of the Herd, but also hunters, bogeymen and the other
types of Quickened who fed on the Herd.

Just prior to slamming her consciousness
back to her body, she had noticed a figure outside the castle wall. He appeared
to be injured or damaged in some way. His bright aura had attracted her
attention — he must have been a very strong latent or one of the Quickened. She
was just about to move on with her search when he had fallen on his face. If
she had been in her body she would have laughed; in her astral form she had
settled for radiating amusement. As he sat up and rubbed at his bloodied face,
he said something.

All amusement had dropped away from her and
she had become deadly serious.

As she rocketed back along the silver
umbilicus that linked her to her body, she replayed what she had seen and heard
in her mind to make sure she had not made a mistake. She was sure.

She jumped up and pushed past Eve.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said.

“Huh? Did you find her?”

“No, just need to check on something. I’ll
be right back.”

“Attendre, wait, you can’t just leave, what
if Leader checks in?” 

“Make something up, you’ll be fine.”

As she closed the door behind her, Baby
said to herself, “Finn Alexander, how are you not dead?”

She ran down the hallway to the stairs.