Heaven's Gate (35 page)

*

Outside, the discovery of the door has not gone unnoticed, at least by the lich, Rugan mentally reviews his rapidly diminishing force and comes to the conclusion that there is no way it can prevail against the Strigoi construct. Barely twenty snipers are still firing from the hill and the sandy floor of the ruins is littered with the twitching limbs of his followers. Through out all this the Tinker’s machine has shown no sign of slowing, or even taking any damage from the constant barrage of gunfire. Until now Rugan would have sworn that there was nothing so single minded and unstoppable as one of his own creations, it had never occurred to him that the Strigoi could make such a thing. Grinding brittle teeth in frustration the ex-confessor orders the last of his minions to abandon their positions and attack the construct on mass. Even the severed limbs respond to this command, dragging and wriggling towards the place where the silver giant still stalks looking for prey hidden in the rubble and rocks of the long ruined town. Rugan has no illusions about the chances of stopping his adversary but his task is clear now. If he cannot defeat the construct then perhaps he can find the Pardoner, who no doubt has some means of controlling the thing. A wicked gleam lights his pale eyes at the thought of a final revenge against the Pardoner. One way or another Rugan knows that he must prevent the Strigoi servant from finding the doors. Since their very inception the Necromancers had been charged with protecting the Gate. What that actually meant had eroded with time but the lich was not given to speculation, all it knew was that if it could find and kill Nathaniel Tenichi, possibly even gain control of his machine then it would be all the more easy to destroy those who had dared enter the forbidden ruins. At the moment that seems a tall order but even if he could not claim Tenechi or his machine only one or two of the fugitives have to die in order for him to even the odds.

Nathaniel pears into the darkness and the dust stirred up by his master’s creation. He is more than a little nervous by this time that the thing might have hurt the girl in its mindless frenzy, but he fears to call it off lest Rugan’s zombies have not yet been dealt with. It is fine balance though, because he would rather face fifty of the undead troopers than his master’s wrath at having been denied the Gate. There was every chance he would end up as parts of another construct such as the one that raged through the ruins. There was no chance of seeing the girl if she were in trouble, so he kept the scroll held in front of him, listening for a feminine scream that would mean it was time for him to bark out the command word that would force the construct to retreat.

The Pilgrim and the mutant would no doubt try to protect the girl, so in theory at least, he should have time to call it back. At least that is what he hoped as he waited, barely breathing, for that call. He could always claim that the machine had been ordered to stop and failed to do so, Nathaniel doesn’t know whether that excuse would do him any good, though he might be doing himself more harm to tell his master that he had lost the girl and the Gate and that it was all his creation’s fault. No the only thing he could do was listen for the first sign of trouble and try to call the thing back before it could do any irreparable damage. He could not even use the vial of his master’s blood tucked into his saddle bags to revive the girl, Kalip had been very specific about not contaminating her blood.

So intent is the Pardoner on the darkness and the dust, that he does not notice his attacker approach, until a lifeless hand encircles his wrist and tears him from his mount. Nathaniel shouts rolling with the fall in an attempt to protect the brittle parchment in his hands. Sure enough his shoulder takes most of the impact and he rolls over coughing and partially winded, to look up into the lifeless eyes of Father Rugan. The face of the lich is at once familiar and terribly alien, somewhere a long way behind those flaccid orbs there lay a spark of the hatred that Rugan had borne him whenever their paths had crossed, but it is only an echo of living emotion, meshed in the soft corruption of rotting flesh. Fresh icor runs slowly past the lich’s eye from the hole in its forehead, more than half its brain had leaked out of that ragged portal and the larger exit wound in the back of his head. There is nothing organic left in the old priest’s hatred, only what is left when we strip all thought or feeling from emotion. Nathaniel knows that Rugan has every intention of making his death as painful and full of terror as he can but Nathaniel also knows that the tortured creature in front of him has only the vaguest idea why it will do this.

Grunting with the effort and pain, he regains his feet and draws his pistol.

“Stay back, Rugan!”

“You think that is any threat to me?”

Nathaniel lets the lich take two steps towards him before hammering him back with a succession of shots.

“Only two more bullets left in that gun and then what will you do?” The lich mocks. Nathanial’s eyes desperately scan the yellowed scroll in his other hand.

“Why couldn’t you just have died the first time?” Nathaniel asks, firing his last rounds in a desperate attempt to force the lich further back and at the same time murmuring the command to call his master’s construct back to him.
 
The lich’s body rocks with the impact but the predatory expression on its ruined face never changes, not even when nearly eight foot of steel and undead flesh rears behind it and brings its whirring blades down into the lich’s nerveless flesh.

Rugan feels almost nothing as his shoulder and the leftside of his rib cage are sheered off to fall into the sand, there is hardly even any blood, the days in the desert have left him dry and all but cured. There is a strange sensation of his awareness bridging the gap between his arm and the rest of him and then the whip like limbs strike again, sending his head flying into the air. Rugan has little time to dwell on this new development, however, because he is already using his severed arm to claw at the Pardoner’s leg. Nathaniel’s triumph turns to disgust as he feels the hand on his ankle, a simple kick frees him from the assault but to his horror, the hand is but the first of many, from all corners of the dust ruins the dissected bodies of the fallen have responded to the lich’s call. Too late the Pardoner looks for his horse but it has already bolted and fallen victim to the maddened machine that can do nothing to hold back the wave of undead flesh bearing down its controller through shear irresistible weight. The hands and arms of more than a hundred men drag on Nathaniel’s fine clothes, using the strong fabrics to pull him down where each and every part of the fallen men of Silversnow capable of moving under their own power, scrabble to hold him down. Nathaniel dies with his mouth full of sandy fingers, unable even to scream, no coroner could have told you if it was his lungs or heart that ruptured first; though a tracker would have told you that, after he died, the Pardoner rose on stiff legs and picked up two things from the dust. Something the size of a man’s head and an old piece of parchment, a few small fragments of which tumbled through the dead man’s nerveless fingers; with these two items in either hand Nathaniel Teneichi crosses towards the doors in the side of the mountain, the silver construct in tow.

*

The tunnel snakes down, plunging into the ancient complex. As the small party follows the pulsing lights emanating from strips on either side of the passage floor, the rough grit and sand that spilled in when they entered is replaced by the fine powder of dust laid down over long years. At regular intervals there are side turns and strange rooms, some sealed by doors, others gaping dark and empty, thick with dust and the smell of stale air. As they reach deeper into the complex, only the main corridor provides any light and there is no temptation to deviate from it. In the shadows of one of the open doorways, Lillian is sure that she can see the ivory white of old bone. The thought that people might have lived here, even become trapped here in these strange smooth corridors, was quickly followed for her by the thought that here might yet be
survivours
or worse ghosts, still
 
prowling the black passages that twisted, who knows how far away from the dim light. She cannot help but think back to her time beneath the earth in Pellan’s Tunnels and they seemed fresh by comparison to this dusty airless place, where footsteps echo and nothing moves but the light flowing like blood down the last living vein, in a long fallen body. They follow that vein in silence until they come to the pulsing heart of that forgotten place.

Kalip might have made something of the lights winking all around them, but to Leedon in his weakened state, slumped on the dusty floor at the back of the group, this did indeed seem like a sky full of stars winking high above him. Could it be that the Heavens were laid out here? He narrows his swollen eyes and tries to focus on finding a pattern in the flashing luminescence. Beneath the dust of years, metal still gleams silver and with a groan a panel at the other end of the room, slides back to reveal the indent of a human hand in the silver metal of the wall. Yorick gives Lillian a nod and the girl advances towards the wall with her hand outstretched. Leedon gasps at the thought of such presumption, if the Gate to Heaven lay somewhere beyond the wall were any of them worthy to meddle with it? He begins to struggle to his feet, his cracked lips parting in a strangled protest, but before he can make himself heard or Lillian reaches her goal the General is thrown forward by a sudden impact.

A thousand pounds of steel and undead flesh descend upon the General and the mutant standing next to him, only the limpness of his body prevents Angus from being snapped in half, like
Aden
, by the impact of the charging automation, which ploughs through the men waiting behind Lillian, as if they were insects. Warm blood spatters over the General’s face, brining a strange unholy clarity. Blinking through the red haze Leedon looks up at the slack jawed face of his Chief Pardoner, dangling from Nathaniel’s left hand is the severed head of his old mentor. Rugan spares him a grin before barking an order that the lack of lungs or vocal chords turns into the sharp clicking of enamel on enamel. The corpse holding him relays its master’s orders, though and the silver monster lunges for the screaming baron’s daughter at the other end of the room.

Chapter 18:

“Salvation”

In the flashing light of the dust filled room the silver monster moves like a dancer in a strobe, so fast that no normal eye could follow its movements. It throws aside the men in its path as if they weigh nothing at all and bears down on the target its new master has chosen. Lillian looks about desperately for even a momentary escape but apart from a few upended trolleys and bits of metal littering the floor, the room is empty. There seems no way that she can slow her attacker’s charge, or avoid the whip-like limbs. She gets a brief glimpse of the whirring appendages, still dark with drying blood as they whip towards her then she closes her eyes resigning herself to what must follow.

Something knocks her back, driving her to the ground but instead of the pain she was expecting there is a shriek of protesting metal as Samuel Blake, his eyes blazing with a light of their own, pushes Lillian aside and thrusts one of the discarded metal trolleys into the path of the descending metal tendrils. The automation repeats its frenzied attack, raising sparks from the old metal, which never having been meant to withstand such impacts, begins to buckle.

“Move!” Blake yells, but Lillian finds her limbs unable to function, she is shaking so hard that it is a struggle to get her legs underneath her, let alone move under her own power.

Just a few hundred meters away Aden is trying to do the same thing, but his legs will not respond either, it is not pain or panic that robs him of the ability to rise but a numbness that spreads beyond a single point of pain in his injured back. He chokes spitting out a mouthful of blood, unable to lift himself from the floor, he has no choice but to slump against the wall behind him and try to position his body so that the weight doesn’t force his broken rib any deeper into his lung. Resigned to his impotence,
Aden
looks back to the doorway where a man in a torn and bloodied Pardoner’s robe stands pale and bloodless as death, relaying the words of a smirking severed head.

“You may try to thwart me all you want, Captain,” Rugan mouths, his words taken up by the corpse holding him, “but you only waste your time.”
 

Blake, his mouth set in a snarl of inhuman rage and determination does not answer but twists the tortured metal frame in a blur of motion, so that he just manages to intercept another lightning blow.

“The girl must die! You have come so close to your precious Gate that I think you can see that there is no other option. I would be the first to admit that it did not have to be like this, but as you can see, I have paid my own price for my miscalculation. I know how you fear death, Captain but take some comfort in the fact that you will be getting the better part of this deal.”

At an unspoken command the corpse of Nathaniel Tenichi raises the old scroll in his other hand so that his master can review the various instructions that the Tinker had so thoughtfully provided him with, then almost as soon as he hears the gun shots, Geoffrey Rugan’s world goes black. Across the room
Aden
slumps back against the cold wall, allowing his smoking pistols to fall from his hands. The third eye slowly closing in the middle of his forehead marks with grim satisfaction, that both bullets had found their mark, dead centre of the litch’s eyes.