Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (36 page)
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Oddly enou
gh, the lack of adornment suggested the stairs and the corridor below had not been crafted by
Pygmal
ion. I could not imagine him having created either without the addition of leering gargoyles or seductively simple and sensuous carvings to decorate them. As
bizarre and grotesque as Pygmalion's choice of medium for his work, he did have an artist's touch. Realizing that meant, then, that he had chosen to leave this area plain, and I determined that must have been to provide contrast for whatever work he had wrought in the heart of the mesa.
As much as I might have wished it would be otherwise, I found my assessment of him had not been wrong. At the base of the stairs, I entered a corridor which I found a bit small and tight, but for one of Pygmalion's statues it would have been quite roomy. Curving around to the left, the only illumination in the corridor came from the backlighting of the stairs and hint of silvery-white light from farther on around the bend.
I turned back to my two compatriots and saw Crowley lay his left hand on Jytte's right shoulder and give it a squeeze. Even making allowances for her light complexion and the brutal lighting, she had taken on a
ghostlike pallor. She leaned back against the wall with her eyes closed and, exposing her lovely long throat, tipped her face toward the ceiling.
"What it is, Jytte?" I whispered.
She shook her head slightly, then swallowed. "1 have been here before. The stairs. I know this place."
Crowley gently cupped the right side of her face in his left hand. "You left
a
victim, you return a saviour. You have survived and you
will
survive."
"Thank you." I saw a bead of sweat roll down over her Adam's apple, then her eyes opened and she nodded.
"After you, Coyote."
Though Crowley's words had been for Jytte, they emboldened me as well. Jytte and 1 were both constructs of a Dark Lord. We had both fled our former masters as victims, yet now rose to oppose them. We were the
slavemaster's nightmare in black fatigues and carrying automatic weapons. We had both resolved that our
masters would pay for what they had done to us and others, and right around the bend we could start
collecting.
I made my way down the corridor less cautiously than might have been prudent, but I felt armored with
the righteousness of what I had come to do. That makes it sound ridiculously like a religious convert
describing his visit to a den of iniquity, and it probably did approach that experience in the extreme. For the barest of moments 1 felt assured of the mythic quality of my quest to reach the lair of evil at the end of the corridor.
The difference between a myth and a horror tale, I discovered, is a matter of perspective.
The corridor opened on to a huge cavern that appeared quite natural in that stalactites and stalagmites
filled it like petrified teeth in fossil jaws. Darkness hid the arched depths of some vaults, while shadows hinted at yet further chambers and corridors elsewhere. The uneven floor had a molten smoothness to it,
as if it had frozen while yet fluid, or had been washed into gentle, undulating hills and valleys by eons of water seepage.
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The v
ista struck me as appropriate and right, except that I found it in the middle of a mesa in the d
esert
southwes
t. There the formation was utterly unnatural, which meant it had been planned and desi
gned and
created by other than random chance. Had the geographical and geological paradox not been enough to
point out the problem with the cavern, its overwhelming aspect would have clued me in quickly enough.
Ice. The stairs and corridor had been so cold because an inch of ice covered every square foot of the
cavern in a glittering, sparkling second skin. Icicles as long as I was tall, and sharpened to a needle's point, augmented the vast stalactite collection on the ceiling. Their frozen counterparts looked like
stalagmite seedlings about to
erupt out of the floor and blossom like their stony companions.
All around the room I saw standing, sitting and reclining shapes that looked vaguely humanoid. Muted
fleshtones reflected up through the ice-coats each of the figures wore. The different facets of the ice sliced up and reconstructed their images so the ice-folk appeared to be models for countless cubist artworks awaiting resurrection when that style came back into vogue.
I slid over to the nearest of the figures and crashed the MP-7's collapsed stock against the ice coating a figure's head. The ice shattered and, with a second blow, a big chunk came away. Aside from fragments clinging
tenaciously to a few black strands of hair, I managed to clear the ice away from the right side of the woman's face. Peeling off my right glove I touched her but found, as I expected and feared, her frostbitten flesh felt lifeless.
Jytte sank to her knees beside me and touched the woman. She looked up, horrified, then buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved with sobs. 1 reached out and hugged her, but 1 had the impression that she could not feel me, nor would she have heard me if 1 spoke.
Crowley crouched beside her, opposite me, and shook his head. "1 think this place was kept cold on purpose, by Pygmalion. It would lower the metabolic rate of his constructs so they would go into a hibernation, ft was his way of preserving their beauty." He pointed to the diamond-stud earing in the dead woman's ear. "I cannot think he would be so wasteful if he meant to kill them."
I looked around the ice cavern again. "If that is true, and it seems likely to me as well, how did the ice get in here?"
The occultist lowered his voice to a whisper. "This is the High Country, ft is winter and within the winter we get storms. There has to be a hole to the surface and enough snow and rain poured in here to produce this."
"But what...?" My question died on my lips as other voices echoed through the cavern. I slide Jytte back out of sight, and Crowley hunkered down beside me. At his signal, I worked my way back toward the left, past Jytte, to a low wall of congealed stalagmites and looked to the center of the room.
I saw two nearly human creatures similar to a couple I had met and killed elsewhere in Arizona. They stood as tall as a normal man and, aside from a slightly grayish cast to their skin and their pointed ears, they looked utterly unremarkable. The clothes they wore made them look like refugees from some low-budget pirate
movie and could only have been improved upon if one of them wore an eyepatch and had a parrot perched on
his shoulder.
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They did
not disturb me because I knew they were Draolings. Dwellers in a nearby dimension, an intrepi
d few
ventured
through an interconnecting proto-dimension to play little homicidal tricks on humanity. Cro
wley had
suggested Draolings were behind the Donner party massacre and might have been the Zodiac killer in
California. With what I'd learned, I was willing to peg a Draoling as the Green River Killer in the Pacific Northwest and even suggest they played Svengali to the likes of Charles Manson, David Berkowitz and
Jeffrey Dahmer.
Even with that sort of nasty pedigree, they did not concern me, because I knew how easy it would be to kill them. And how good it would feel to have done so.
What
did
concern me was the creature standing between them. Actually, standing is correct, but conveys the wrong image, because the massive beast appeared to be more at home in a four-point stance. Its stooped
shoulders and crested spine just avoided brushing stalactites as it shuffled forward on little, bandy legs.
Mottled flesh with a granitelike color pattern covered it from its toes on up beyond where the massive chest narrowed slightly past
the shoulders to form a neck roughly the circumference of a manhole. The lantern-jawed head featured
pointed ears, a flattened skull and wide but hardly innocent eyes. Two triangular slits flat in its face served as its nose. It held its mouth open, revealing a phalanx of sharklike teeth.
The creature raised one huge fist and crashed it down on an ice-clad corpse with enough force to send a
tremble through the cavern. The blow pulped the corpse's mid-section, tearing it in half. The two Draolings immediately scrambled after the upper body like hyenas fighting over carrion, while the larger creature
grabbed the lower body with one ankle in each paw. With a yank that rippled muscles in its chest and thick arms, the monster tore the corpse's pelvis apart like a wishbone and commenced gnawing on a frozen thigh.
One of the Draolings pulled an arm free of torso, spilling his compatriot back in a tangle with the rest of the body, then nibbled on the torn deltoid muscle. "As a snack, frozen is fine, but 1 much prefer my meat fresher."
His companion broke the corpse's arm off at the elbow and peeled the frozen flesh back as if it were a glove.
"Agreed. Snack now, then we can harvest something to be thawed and prepared correctly."
The behemoth just belched and spit a femur out.
The surreality of the whole situation hit me like a runaway train. Hidden in shadow within an artificial cavern coated in ice, I was listening to extra-dimensional creatures discussing human beings as if they were range-fed cattle. What Pygmalion had sculpted into examples of physical perfection like Jytte, these creatures saw only as Purina Draoling-chow. While the credo that suggested presentation was part of the enjoyment of a meal had often seemed silly to me—especially when a meal seemed priced more as art than foodstuff—the Draolings
were doing the moral equivalent of killing and eating Best of
Breed at the Westminster Dog Show.
That momentary perspective of extra-dimensional morality put creatures like Fiddleback and the Empress
of Diamonds in their place, hot only were they Dark Lords, but they were from elsewhere and could not
view us in the way we viewed ourselves. They were predators, and we were prey, with no rights to be
imagined, much less respected. That whole round of thought also made Pygmalion yet more horrible for
his willful abandonment of his humanity in exchange for the power of a Dark Lord.
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While
my whirlwind of thought precluded action, Jytte did not find herself so preoccupied. I saw her
out
of the c
omer of my eye as she stepped up into the open lane between our hiding places and the feaste
rs.
The rage pouring off her seemed hot enough to melt the ice and the stone beneath it, but she remained
rock steady. She held the M-177 at her right hip and flipped the safety off with an snap that echoed
through the cavern like a gunshot.
The Draolings looked up with smiles on their faces. "What have we here?" asked one around a mouthful of food.
Jytte hit the carbine's trigger with a mechanical precision that made the rifle seem part of her. The initial three-shot burst sent a trio of cartridges arcing through the air to clink and clatter off a stalagmite's icy sheath. The bullets caught the speaker in the chest, compressing it violently in a lethal Heimlich
maneuver that spewed most of his meat-cud out over the floor. Blowing out his back, the bullets sent a
spray of bright, arterial blood out to drench the large monster.
As Jytte shifted her aimpoint slightly to the right and let another burst go, my early training clicked in and my mind analyzed her attack with clinical clarity. Because she stood only 25 meters from her target, the