Deathstalker Legacy (51 page)

“You will see what the ELFs can do! We will show you atrocities and nightmares, never to be forgotten! We will do such things to the Paragons that when we finally let them die and go to Hell, the fires of the Pit will be a comfort to them!”

“That’s what I want,” said Finn.

“And when we’re done with them, and they’re all dead; we’ll come for you, Finn Durandal. The last Paragon.”

“No,” said Finn, smiling for the first time. “Then, I’ll come for you.”

“You have no idea who we are and where we are,” said the ELF, through the thrall. “And you never will; because we never leave loose ends.”

He held his hand up beside his face. It held a long knife with a serrated edge. The ELF made the thrall cut out his eyes, cut off his nose, and lick the blood off the blade, laughing breathily all the while. And then he cut his throat. Blood gushed out, spattering the vidphone camera lens. Finn watched, unmoved, as the ELF withdrew from the thrall’s mind, leaving an innocent man to die a horrified, senseless death. He fell back out of camera range, and Finn shut down the link from his end. About what he’d expected from the ELFs. They’d always had a taste for the grand gesture. Finn left the booth, stepped onto his waiting sled, and soared quickly up into the sky. He looked sharply about him for some sign of an ambush, but all seemed calm and quiet. Finn flew on over the city, frowning thoughtfully.

Dealing with ELFs, even at arm’s length, was always going to be dangerous; but so far his plan seemed to be working out perfectly. And thanks to Brett and Rose, he at least knew where two of the ELFs were. (Even though Brett was still in shock from his encounter with the Spider Harps.) Finn smiled happily. No; he was still ahead of the game, while everyone else only thought they were. He would have his revenge on his enemies and put himself one step closer to his eventual goal. And if things were progressing only slowly, well; what’s the point of revenge if you don’t take the time to savor it?

 

Lewis Deathstalker and Jesamine Flowers arrived (carefully separately) at the House to find the whole place in an uproar. The narrow corridors and offices backstage were a complete bedlam, with people running back and forth, plunging in and out of rooms with white faces and wild staring eyes, shouting incoherently at each other. In overcrowded offices, people sat and stood over computer terminals, trying desperately to get information out of them. And some just stood in doorways, or sat on the floor in the corridors, sobbing helplessly into hands pressed to their faces.

Lewis hurried through the corridors, a growing premonition chilling his heart till he could hardly breathe. What had happened while he was away, out of the loop; selfishly enjoying himself? What could have happened to cause such panic and despair? He started grabbing people and shouting questions at them, but they just tore themselves away. No one had the time to talk to him, and not even his Champion’s authority or Deathstalker face was enough to slow them down.

Lewis saw Jesamine slipping through the great door onto the floor of the House, and decided he’d better give her a few minutes’ start. Even now, in the midst of . . . all this, he had to be careful. Had to protect his reputation. And Douglas’s. Besides; there was still one place he could go where he would be sure to get answers and information. One person who always knew what was going on. In fact, he should have gone there first. He headed for Anne Barclay’s office, and when he got there the door opened before he could even knock.

Inside, he found Anne sitting slumped in her chair, not even looking at her monitor screens. She’d turned the sound off, so her screens were full of tiny people shouting dumbly at each other. She looked stunned, as though someone had hit her. She was trying to drink coffee from her favorite mug, but her hand was shaking too much. She tried using both hands, but it didn’t help much. She looked dully at Lewis as he moved over to her, and didn’t smile or even nod.

“What is it?” said Lewis desperately. “Anne; what the hell has happened? Is Douglas all right? Has there been another suicide bomber?”

Anne looked at him with cold, bitter eyes, her mouth a flat line. “You should have been here, Lewis. You should have been here.”

“Tell Douglas that. He’s the one who told me to stay away. Now talk to me, Anne.
What’s happened?
”

“You think I don’t know where you’ve been?” said Anne. “What you’ve been doing? I know. I can smell her on you.”

Lewis stopped short, as though she’d hit him. “Anne . . .”

“Shut up. Go into the House. Be with your King. He needs you. Jes . . . doesn’t matter now. Nothing else matters now.”

“Anne, what—”

“The Terror, Lewis. The Terror has finally arrived.”

Lewis gasped at her, horror flooding through him as he finally understood. He backed away from her, and then turned and ran from the room, heading for the House, and his King.

It was all quiet when he finally got there, almost deathly quiet. The place was packed, everyone there in person or in holo, watching the great viewscreen floating above the open floor of the House. All of them utterly transfixed by the terrible images on the screen. Lewis moved over to stand beside Douglas, sitting forward on the edge of his Throne. The King seemed somehow smaller, shrunken by the magnitude of the events unfolding before him. He didn’t even look around to acknowledge Lewis’s arrival. Everyone was silent, stunned; MPs, clones, espers, aliens, Shub. The unthinkable had finally happened. Two centuries after the blessed Owen had given them his dire warning through Captain Silence, and commanded the Empire to prepare; the Terror had finally come for them all.

Lewis used his comm implant to access the House’s official records and brought himself up to date on what had happened while he was away, all the time watching the awful scenes on the viewscreen along with everyone else. Watching while planets burned on the edge of the Empire.

It started, as so many bad things did, out on the Rim. Out on the far boundary of the Empire, where civilization ends and the endless night begins, lay a small group of unimportant planets that two centuries before had been a part of the legendary and infamous Darkvoid. Swallowed up by the dreadful Darkvoid Device, the populations of those worlds had become monsters; the Recreated. They were rescued and restored to their humanity by the blessed Owen, given life and sanity and peace of heart again. For two hundred years. Until the Terror came.
Poor bastards,
Lewis thought helplessly.
You just couldn’t get a break, could you?

The Terror came out of the dark unknown spaces beyond the Rim of Empire, from the vast and unknowable outer reaches. There was no warning, no premonition; just the Terror coming out of nowhere to fall on the undefended planets like a wolf upon the fold. Out of the billions of innocent souls who once lived on those seven worlds, only one man now survived: Donal Corcoran, heading for the safety of the inner systems as fast as his small ship,
The Jeremiah,
could carry him. What he saw drove him out of his mind, so that he screamed and weeped and shuddered uncontrollably as he contacted the authorities, to try and tell them what he’d seen, and what had happened, on the day the Terror finally reached the Empire.

He’d just happened to be leaving orbit after a fairly successful trading run to the planet Iona, when the Terror arrived. He ran, accelerating with everything his ship’s engines could give him, until he was fast enough and far enough away from the planet’s gravity well to drop into the safety of hyperspace. No one blamed him. Running was the only sane thing to do. While his ship was still building up speed, Corcoran dropped all his sensor drones behind him, to record what was happening. Some of the drones were still transmitting now, through
The Jeremiah
’s computers, showing what the Terror had done to seven helpless planets and their populations. The drones were dying, one by one, their information streams cutting in and out. Apparently just their continued proximity to the Terror was enough to distort and mutate their systems. Those that weren’t dying were becoming something else, and no one knew what.

The Jeremiah
hadn’t escaped unscathed, either. Systems were breaking down all over the ship, scarred by the gaze of the Medusa. And Donal Corcoran, once a simple trader, was now a wild-eyed crazy man, prophesying doom. He kept breaking into the drones’ transmissions, to scream and shout and weep over what he’d seen. Just one look at the Terror had been enough to unhinge his thoughts, and fracture his reason. Tragically, he was still just sane enough to know how much he’d lost. You couldn’t look into the devil’s eyes and hope to come away unmarked. The nearest Fleet starcruiser had been sent to intercept his path and pick him up, but the Rim was a long way off, even for the new H-class stardrives. No one patrolled the Rim anymore. There was no need. Nothing ever happened out there, so far from the heart of civilization. And there hadn’t been a threat from beyond the Rim since the blessed Owen’s day.

No one ever really thought the Terror would come in their lifetime . . .

One by one the sensor drones were shutting down, overwhelmed by the awful energies radiating from the seven burning worlds out on the Rim. It didn’t matter. There was no point in going there, no one left to rescue. And the Terror wasn’t there anymore. It had moved on, heading on a slow straight line right for the densely populated planets at the heart of the Empire.

Lewis called up the House’s records of the events leading up to the Terror. Recorded images filled his eyes, channeled down his optic nerves; a combination of the planets’ news channels, security systems, and individual recordings. A short history of the coming of the end. Lewis felt angry and sick and helpless, and his lips pressed so tightly together they were entirely white.

It started simply enough. Something came out of the darkness beyond the Rim, out of the empty spaces, traveling at just under light speed. It caught everyone by surprise, because no one was looking for it. Why should they? It shot past the seven populated worlds without slowing, before they even knew it was there, and plunged into their sun. And that should have been the end of it. It should have been destroyed, annihilated in a moment in the hottest fires of all. Instead, it made itself at home in the heart of the sun, basking in the unimaginable heat, and incubated there. Growing,
becoming
. It absorbed the sun’s energies, eating it up, gathering fuel for its mission, and when it was ready it hatched, and a swarm of hateful black creatures that might have been alive or might have been machines or something entirely other, came flying out of the sun’s flames and descended on the seven populated planets like so many horrid angels. Or devils.

There were millions of them, each of them subtly different, intricate malevolent shapes like Hell’s snowflakes, with hundreds of eyes and even more sharp cutting edges. They formed thick living rings around the targeted planets, endless numbers of them, fighting and jostling for position at barely sublight speed. On the surface of the planets below, machines malfunctioned, computers were thrown off line, and AIs spoke gibberish. Planetary defenses failed to operate. The swarm descended, screaming in anticipation as they plunged into the planets’ atmosphere, and everyone who heard that scream went insane. There was no recording of the sound; it was too big, too alien, too terribly other for technology to capture. But people could hear it, and the endless uninterrupted scream drove everyone instantly, violently insane . . .

Men and women and children howled with unbearable mental agony and destroyed everything around them. They tore down their homes and set fire to their cities. And then they turned on each other, killing friends and strangers and family with equal ferocity, not because they wanted to, but because they were driven to it. By the never-ending scream of the swarm that flew above them, circling and circling the planet like vultures waiting for something to die. On seven worlds, seven entire populations went insane and slaughtered each other in the ruins of their burning cities. There was no defense against the maddening howl of the swarm. Blood flowed. Millions, and then billions, lay dead and dying.

And then, finally, the Terror appeared. Space opened, torn apart by unnatural forces, and from a place where nothing comes from, came something the size of a world. It was alive and aware and utterly hideous, but once again mere human technology was incapable of capturing and recording all that it was. It existed in more than three spatial dimensions, its details fading in and out, as though reality itself wasn’t strong enough to encompass all of it, to hold all of the Terror at once. There was something that might have been eyes, dark and awful, vaster than oceans and more deep. And a great mouth, that opened and opened, till it seemed the Terror might swallow the burning planets whole.

Instead the Terror fed, on the madness and the suffering and the destruction. On the Hell its children had made for it. The people fell and lay still, all that they were and might have been, consumed in a moment. The Terror. In the end, there was nothing left but seven burning worlds, orbiting a shrunken sun. The swarm died then, dropping from the skies into the flames like angels whose wings had been torn from their backs, like devils going home because their work had been done. The Terror didn’t need them anymore. Its eyes and mouth were gone, if they had ever really been there. Space ripped apart again, with a sound like something dying or giving birth, and the Terror returned to wherever it had come from. Only one dark shape remained, the single ugly progenitor that had come from beyond the Rim, from the dark spaces, to dive into the sun and begin it all. The Terror’s unstoppable herald, heading relentlessly on into the Empire, towards the next set of populated worlds, and eventually, on a line that would bring it right to the heart of Humanity. To the homeworld itself: Logres. At sublight speed it would take centuries to get there, but it was coming.