Deathstalker Legacy (46 page)

The Hellfire Club consisted of circles within circles, from dilettantes and wannabes at the edges, to the deadly philosophers at the very center. You could go in as deep as you wanted, or as deep as you could stand, but somehow there were always more circles inside those you’d thought were the innermost. This was partly to limit the number of people any member could betray if captured, but mostly because not everyone had the stomach for everything the Hellfire Club did. Or planned to do. Markham was in pretty deep, and hoped to go even deeper, but though he was pretty sure he lacked anything even remotely like a conscience, there were still some things he wouldn’t do. He was ambitious, not crazy.

At the core, it was whispered, the founding members’ extreme philosophies still survived: complete anarchy for the Empire and Humanity. A new Empire, without conscience or mercy or restraint. Divine chaos, a time of awful pleasures and splendid suffering: where the lesser orders, those outside the Club, would be slaves, objects, mere property, there to do all the necessary useful things, to be subject to their masters’ every whim, to live and die at their command; while the Hellfire Club made a glorious Hell on earth for everyone.

Markham didn’t believe in any of that, not least because he didn’t plan on sharing his power with anyone, but he had enough sense to keep his opinions on that matter to himself. To him, the Hellfire Club was just another useful tool, another means to get him what he wanted. He had a strong feeling a lot of members felt that way, in private.

“So,” said Frankie, in her deep sensual voice that was like being assaulted by a leather glove, “what are we to do about the Durandal? Such a dear boy. We all know his plans. And he’s come so far in such a short time. But I can’t help feeling that he threatens to steal our thunder. The Hellfire Club are the official villains and demons of the Golden Age, by choice and popular acclaim. If anyone’s going to bring the Throne down, it should be us.”

“He means well,” said a pretty young thing of indeterminate gender. “And I do so like to encourage new talent.”

“Kill him, for his presumption!” snapped a grossly fat man with so many body piercings he rattled when he breathed. “He should have come to us first. How dare he plan atrocities, and not include us?”

“But,” said Markham, his trained politician’s voice cutting easily across the other’s, “don’t you just love the idea of the greatest Paragon of all time becoming the Empire’s greatest villain? That a man who dedicated all his life to preserving the Empire and all it stood for, should be the one to bring it all crashing down in ruins? Irony is so good for the soul . . . Let him have his fun. Let him do all the hard work, gathering his followers and planning his plans, and when the Throne is finally in danger, we will step out from the shadows and take it all over. Make the Durandal one of us, whether he likes it or not. That’s the Hellfire Club way, after all.”

“Of course,” said Frankie, stretching her magnificent body with languorous ease. “Everyone can be seduced.”

“You should know,” Markham said generously. “Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I’ll leave you to sort out the details. I have another meeting to attend. The House will be in Session soon, and my attendance is required.”

“Ah yes,” said Frankie. “Have fun, my favorite Member . . .”

 

In his sumptuous office, surrounded by all the spoils of victory, Angelo Bellini, Patriarch of the one true Church, was entertaining his second important visitor of the day. The previous Patriarch’s remains had been carefully scraped up and removed, and very thoroughly disposed of, and everything in the office was now back to normal. Though the extractor fans were still working overtime. Angelo stood up behind his impressive desk, and nodded shortly to welcome the nearest thing the Ecstatics had to a leader or spokesperson. The Ecstatic was of average height, and a little thinner than most, probably because he kept forgetting to eat. Living in a constant state of orgasm will do that to you. He wore a simple gray shift, smelled strongly, and seemed to drift as much as walk across the deep pile carpeting towards Angelo and his desk.

Seen up close, the Ecstatic wasn’t very impressive. The constant unwavering smile was definitely disturbing, though, and there was something about the eyes . . . Angelo waved to the chair on the other side of his desk. He was damned if he was going to shake hands. The Ecstatic sank almost bonelessly into the hard-backed visitor’s chair, while Angelo made himself extremely comfortable in his rather more luxurious seat of power.

“Call me Joy,” the Ecstatic said suddenly, his happy voice full of real if unfocused enthusiasm. “It’s a use name, of course. I don’t have the patience for formal names anymore. And who I might have been in the past is of no interest to you or to me. It’s good to be here. It’s good to be anywhere. We met briefly at Douglas’s Coronation, you and I. Exchanged a few words. Or perhaps we didn’t. It’s so hard to be sure about things that don’t really matter. I love chocolate.”

“Well done,” said Angelo. “You were almost coherent there, for a while. If not particularly valuable. Are you comfortable?”

“Oh, I’m always comfortable. Really. You have no idea.”

“Could you please stop smiling like that? It’s not natural.”

“Not for you, perhaps. For me, the world is good. So large and wondrous and full of pleasure. Call me Joy. You called, and here I am. You’ve done a lot with this place. I don’t like it. Someone died here recently.”

Angelo looked sharply at the Ecstatic. He’d never had much time for the extravagant claims made for the Ecstatics’ supposed powers of insight, but that last remark, so casually made, was certainly unsettling. Angelo made himself relax. The Ecstatic could say any damned thing he liked. It didn’t matter.

“The Church’s previous Patriarch, the very venerable Roland Wentworth, has resigned,” Angelo said flatly. “Reasons of ill health. He is gone, and he won’t be coming back. I have therefore replaced him as Patriarch. I lead the Church of Christ Transcendent, the glorious Church Militant; and there is no room in the new Church for such as you. For such . . . ostentatious self-indulgence. The new Church is all about service and loyalty and rigid self-discipline. You do nothing to advance the Cause, you are incapable of serving in the holy war to come; and your very nature brings the Church into disrepute. You disgust me. I have therefore taken the decision to excommunicate all Ecstatics, and ban the surgeries that produce you. You will all be expelled, denied the comforts and protections of mother Church. You don’t fit in with our new image.”

Angelo realized he was saying more than he’d meant to, more than he needed, but there was something about the calm unwavering smile and gaze of the Ecstatic before him that goaded him, trying to find something that would crack that serene self-control. He wanted to hurt the Ecstatic, frighten him, make him squeal and cry and beg for mercy. Not that it would make any difference, of course.

“You don’t want us around because you can’t afford to tolerate the existence of any other power base in the Church that might oppose your will,” said Joy, in a surprisingly rational voice. “I knew this was coming. We all did. It’s why I’m here.”

“You knew?” said Angelo, honestly shocked. “How could you know? Who talked? None of my people would have talked . . .”

“No one had to tell us,” said Joy. “You never understood who and what we are, Angelo Bellini. What we see and what we know. With our bodies freed from the demands of the now, our minds are freed to roam through past, present, and future. Our thoughts are unlocked, unshackled from the rigid restraints of rationality. I see through and beyond you, Angelo, as clearly as I see the functions of your desk. Behind you is the Durandal, and ahead of you is terror. We see so much, all of us. It’s just that mostly we can’t be bothered to tell anyone. There are Light People who walk among you, unnoticed and unobserved, intent on their own unknown missions. There are angels in the skies and demons in the earth. We hear voices that aren’t there, and see things that may never happen. I have seen the future plummeting back into the past, and the dead rising to walk again. I see your aura, and it’s really very ugly.”

“Shut up!” said Angelo. “Shut up, damn you!” All the hairs were standing up on his arms and on the back of his neck. He was sweating and his hands were icy cold, as though someone had just walked over his grave. He was scared, horribly scared, and he didn’t know why. “You’re here because I ordered you here, to listen when I speak! You don’t have to die. You could go back to the surgeons, go under the knife again. Let us put controls in your heads. Live on in service to the new Church . . .”

“No,” said Joy pleasantly. “I don’t think so. We won’t go back to being human. To being only human. We’d rather die.”

“Then die,” said Angelo Bellini viciously.

But even as his hand moved towards the control on his desk that would detonate the new transmutation bomb under the Ecstatic’s chair, Joy leaned over suddenly, reached under his seat, ripped out the bomb and held it up before him. He looked at it curiously for a moment, and then tossed it across the desk, aimed nicely to land right on the control that would activate it. Angelo screamed and shrieked with horror, and erupted up out of his chair to grab the bomb with both hands. He moved quickly away from the desk, put the bomb down on the floor very carefully, and then backed away from it; his mind full of the awful death of the previous Patriarch. He spun around, breathing hard, suddenly sure Joy would be leaning over his desk with his hand poised over the activation pad; but there was no sign of the Ecstatic anywhere. He’d left as silently as he’d come, while Angelo was preoccupied.

Angelo leaned over his desk, and hit the comm panel with unnecessary force. “Security! There’s an Ecstatic loose in this building! Kill it! Shoot it on sight! And when you’re sure the unnatural thing is dead, bring the body here to my office, so I can see it for myself!”

Security sped through the Cathedral at a run, driven on by Angelo’s increasingly hysterical orders, but the Ecstatic was nowhere to be found. No one saw him leave, and he didn’t show up on any of the security monitors. Which should have been impossible. So Angelo got on the comm again, to some of his more fanatical Neumen supporters, and personally gave the death order for all the Ecstatics. In any city, on any world. Let them see what excommunication from the new Church really meant . . . Let the law bleat what it liked; by the time they got their act together it would all be over. And if any of his Neumen assassins should be caught, well; fanatics were always so eager to become martyrs for their Cause . . .

The Ecstatics as a movement were finished. They were already as good as extinct. They were history.

But somehow that didn’t comfort Angelo Bellini at all.
Ahead of you is terror . . .

 

Within the hour, the Parade of the Endless was swarming with Neumen fanatics, proud in their new Church armor, hunting down Ecstatics with gun and steel and missionary zeal, killing them openly in the streets. The peacekeepers mobilized in force to stop them, calling in reinforcements from all the surrounding cities, but still they were too widely spread, and greatly outnumbered. Excommunicated, condemned, and damned by the Church as heretics, the Ecstatics were thrown out of their seminaries, retreats, and churches, and the doors slammed and locked behind them. No one in the Church would hide or succor them. No one dared. The Neumen ran through city streets howling like wolves, blood dripping thickly from their blades. Most of the Ecstatics were easy targets. They didn’t run. They walked calmly through the streets, unwilling or unable to defend themselves. They smiled kindly on their murderers, making no attempt to escape, and they died easily, still smiling their disturbing smiles. The bodies piled up, and blood ran in the gutters of the perfect city. When individual peacekeepers got in the way, the Neumen cut them down too.

The Paragon Emma Steel heard shooting, and came swooping down on her gravity sled, to see half a dozen Neumen assassins in Church Militant trappings pursuing a lone Ecstatic down a main street. They were openly firing disrupters, but somehow their target was never where they aimed. He ran down the middle of the road, luckily free of traffic for the moment, while people lined both sides of the street and jeered and yelled crude insults at the running man. They scattered like sheep as Emma’s sled came shrieking down at full speed, and she slammed it to an abrupt halt between the running Neumen and their prey. The six men stumbled to a halt as she jumped lithely down from her sled, her gun and sword already in her hands. They were fanatics, but they knew who she was.

They looked at each other, and then at the Ecstatic, standing quietly just beyond Emma’s hovering sled, looking back at them, smiling. The Neumen looked at Emma Steel, slowly advancing on them, and anywhen else they would probably have done the sensible thing and turned and run. But their senses were maddened by the chase, blood from their previous kills still dripping from their weapons, and after all, there were six of them against just one Paragon. And they knew from the riot that sometimes Paragons die just as easily as anyone else. One man raised his energy gun, and fired it point blank. The force shield on Emma’s arm intercepted the blast, and the energy beam ricocheted harmlessly away. Committed now, the Neumen howled wordlessly and threw themselves at her.

Emma cut down the first two to reach her with ruthless efficiency, her sword a blur as it cut through throat and gut. She surged forward while her first two victims were still crumpling to the blood-spattered ground, and then she was in and among the other four before they knew what was happening. They cried out as steel ripped through their flesh, while all their swords found was air. They were fanatics, but Emma Steel was a warrior. She killed them all in a matter of moments, and then looked unhurriedly about her. Six dead men lay in bloody heaps in the street, and she wasn’t even breathing hard. The crowds lining both sides of the street were silent, their faces sullen, angry, cheated out of the death they wanted. One of them stepped forward, her face drawn in cold, ugly lines. She glared at Emma Steel.