The Age of Scorpio (72 page)

‘It will be done as you say,’ she told him, and then immediately began organising people. The smell of the people was so overwhelming that it brought tears to Fachtna’s eyes as he pushed his way through them, but to their credit they did not panic as word spread of what was happening.

The wooden steps that led to the next level were gated and barred. His sword cut through the gates with ease. At each level he appointed gatekeepers and told them what they had to do, that they had to try and keep the calm or all would die. In as much as he could judge, he chose the strongest personalities. Examples were made. He didn’t want to do it – they’d suffered enough – but panic would kill them all.

Tangwen was exhausted when she reached the rope dangling down from the wicker man. She had grown up in a marsh and close to the Grey Father. If you wanted to survive then you had to be a good swimmer, but the currents in the channel between the two islands were vicious. She was not chosen of the gods like her companions, and it had taken every last bit of her strength to stop herself from being swept out to sea. As she looked up at the rope, tears in her eyes, she knew that she could not make the climb. She’d let Fachtna, Teardrop, Britha and all the people in the wicker man down.

Tangwen felt something bump against her from below. She looked into the water and saw a dark shape darting away. The large man plummeting into the water from above startled her. The surprising thing was he didn’t come back up, but nearby the water turned red.

‘Move now!’ Teardrop said in a voice that brooked no argument, and people backed out of the way for the swollen-headed creature with the bulging veins and crystalline eyes. He was followed moments later by a naked soot- and bloodstained woman with a spear slung over her back. Britha sat down on the soiled planks, her upper body a mass of pain. She didn’t think she could move her arms and she was so hungry. She looked at the wretches around her, collected herself and then stood up and painfully slipped the spear off her back and readied it. A woman was organising the captives’ escape on the ropes, savagely berating anyone who tried to push ahead while the strong took the frail and the smallest children down. The woman was doing this through fits of coughing. Britha could feel the smoke in her lungs but somehow still found herself able to breathe. She was not surprised to find that Teardrop was unaffected by the smoke as well.

Britha looked questioningly at Teardrop. The creature that used to be a man had taken his crystal-topped staff off his back. Teardrop turned and headed towards the steps.

With a thought Bress brought one of the black curraghs in as close as he dared to the wicker man. The craft might be able to fit between its legs but he didn’t want to risk the fire and he had a feeling that it would be raining captives soon. Ettin stood next to him as both of them stared into the smoke. They could see the ropes hanging down.

Ettin went first. He backed up and then ran along the deck and leaped into the smoke, his second head berating him as he did so. Then Bress did the same, his cloak trailing out behind him as he ran and then leaped, the smoke swallowing him.

Long, strong fingers grabbed the rope, cloak billowing as he started to pull himself up, following Ettin. There were captives climbing down the rope as they ascended. Ettin told them to jump. Most did, plummeting past them. For those that didn’t, Ettin grabbed one of the bronze torture blades from the front of his apron and slashed at them until they let go.

As he climbed, Bress woke the dragon with a thought.

Seven levels. Each level packed with captives taken from many different tribes. Fachtna rushed up, cutting through bars and metal gates. Spoke to the people, told them how to help themselves.

It was selfish, he knew. He should be down there helping keep the calm, helping people climb down. Or he should seek out Teardrop and watch over him, but he wanted a moment. He climbed onto the head, standing up on it, his bare feet gripping the metal framework. Just a moment above the stench. Just a moment free of the smoke. Just a moment with the clear blue sky. Looking out over the two islands, the third behind him. The long ridge of the hill on the mainland, much of it wooded except for the ugly clear scar where they had taken material to build this abomination and the fuel to fire it.

He did not want to look down to see the curraghs, to see the fate of the captives who had managed to climb down. He did look down, however, when he heard the sound of huge amounts of water pouring off something. He watched the dragon rise out of the water.

Britha was amazed by how orderly it was. While most were terrified, they were holding themselves together long enough to act in their own best interests and those of the people around them.

They had found a place on the fourth level clear enough for Teardrop to sit down cross-legged, his staff across his lap, and close his eyes.

Then she heard the panic start, the screams, the sounds of struggling, cries of pain mingling with fear. Britha ran to the edge and looked down. As the dragon rose up level with her, water still pouring off it, she nearly soiled herself.

Behind her, Teardrop had started to beg and gibber, talking nonsense rapidly and pathetically. He was weeping openly. Britha forced herself to turn away from the monstrous form of the rising dragon and back to Teardrop. She watched in horror as blood leaked out of his clothes and wounds appeared all over his face, his skin blackening and blistering as if it was being burned. Some of the cuts on his face and head, the lower ones, leaked blood. Ghostly tendrils of what looked like crystal emerged from the cuts higher up. His features were racked with agony of the like Britha had never seen before. It was with mounting horror that she realised what Teardrop had come here to do. All the pain and suffering that Bress and his master were trying to use to drive a goddess insane, Teardrop was going to take unto himself.

Tears sprang into her eyes.

It was easy to mistake it for a dragon. The Naga craft had its membranous wings extended for atmospheric operations. It had a main body, which housed the craft’s biotech drive and the other organs that provided life support, and a long neck, which led to the craft’s brain and the Naga who ostensibly melded with it to act as overseers as much as pilots for the brute organism.

Fachtna watched it rise from the water, almost oblivious to the screams of panic from below. It was overkill. After all, what could one warrior do against such power. He felt gratified that Bress or his master felt that he warranted such a grand death.

Then he smiled and reached for the case on his back as his internal targeting systems locked on to the dragon, plotting targeting solutions and preparing to transmit them. He took the case and opened it. It was heavily shielded and constantly transmitting narcotic, soporific programs to the spear inside.

Fachtna lifted the drowsy spear out of its case. A demonic face formed in the smart matter of the lower part of the weapon’s long bladed head. The haft of the weapon extended to over six feet. He felt the psychotic AI in the weapon start to wake. The Lloigor had always felt that function followed form. If you were to make a weapon, then the weapon, to fully fulfil its purpose, should hate because its purpose was carnage. Even allowing for that, the AI in the spear, which some called Lug, had far exceeded its initial programmed hate and gone into the realms of near-uncontrollable madness on battlefields eternities ago. If some of the stories were true, then the weapon – like its makers – could have been older than this universe. Fachtna himself was nearly overwhelmed by the weapon’s hunger for slaughter. He almost lost himself in its myriad rage-filled psychoses.

The dragon breathed and engulfed the top of the wicker man’s head in fire. Superheated plasma turned the smart-matter-seeded metal into a melted and fused mess.

Fachtna’s leap took him high above the wicker man just as where he had been standing moments before was turned to slag. Fachtna was aiming for the wicker man’s shoulder. He almost overshot. His bare feet failed to grip as he slipped painfully onto his arse and started to slide off. He grabbed the framework of the wicker man with his left hand and used it to swing around until he was facing the dragon again. The Naga ship tilted to one side as it circled the wicker man, looking for another shot.

Fachtna pulled his right arm back and threw the spear at the dragon. He transmitted his targeting ware’s firing solutions to the insane AI at the same time. The spear’s AG drive kicked in, accelerating it to hypersonic speeds, the resultant boom deafening the screaming captives below. The thermal head superheated to white hot as it hit the Naga craft in an explosion of burning biotechnological armoured skin and flesh.

Through conduits and corridors that had more in common with veins and arteries, the spear sought out the Naga symbiotically fused with the craft and the other semi-autonomous organisms/weapons that lived within it and killed them all.

Fachtna drew his sword again, cut through the framework and dived into the now-empty seventh level of the wicker man. He rolled forward onto his feet and ran. The dragon breathed once more. Fachtna felt the heat on his back; his hair caught fire as the shoulder of the wicker man was turned to slag.

Through the layers of psychoses, the spear recognised the craft as a manifestation of its ancient enemy. It sought out the craft/organism’s beating heart and slew the dragon.

Fachtna glanced behind him. The Naga craft was listing badly to one side. Then the disruption in the air at its tail, caused by the craft’s Real Space drive, simply stopped, and it plummeted towards the sea.

Fachtna stopped running and headed back to the edge of the fused area of the wicker man’s seventh level, patting out the flames in his hair as he went. He ignored the burning sensation from his feet and the smell of flesh cooking as he looked out and watched the dragon crash through one of the curraghs below. Even frightened, even deafened, the captives still managed to cheer.

Now comes the hard part
, Fachtna thought. The program had taken up an enormous part of the memory within his internal nanite headware. The program was complex, intelligent, ancient and had its own personality. It was designed to do just one thing: soothe the spear enough for it to return and be replaced in its case. To the spear this would feel like the betrayal of a lover played out in moments that for the AI stretched out for lifetimes.

Possession by the spear was a definite threat. Fachtna activated protective programs, mystic sigils that would look after his internal systems; he dropped calming narcotics into his augmented systems to try to suppress the psychotic rage spillover into his consciousness. He ran through calming mental and physical exercises taught at warrior camp and later by the technomantic
dryw
.

The spear returned to Fachtna’s hand, its haft receding. Fachtna tried not to hurry as he sent the various codes designed to make the AI sleep. He placed it in the case and with a pronounced sigh of relief closed it.

The foot caught him dead centre in the back with a force that would have snapped a non-augmented spine. Instead it sent him sprawling across the soiled boards.

Bress let go of the framework he’d used to swing in and dropped down onto the floor behind the prostrate Fachtna. Behind him the framework that had opened for him with a thought was growing shut.

‘You’re a long way from your Eggshell, little man,’ he said evenly. Fachtna rolled over to face him. He felt a little thrill of fear. He wished he hadn’t used the
riasterthae
frenzy to kill the giant. He couldn’t withstand another frenzy today. He wished his arms and shoulders weren’t still in agony despite the best efforts of his augmentations to repair them.

‘I thought we were a myth to the likes of you?’ he asked for the sake of something to say.

‘Long gone perhaps, but Crom has a long memory.’

Besides fear, Fachtna also felt excitement. He really wanted to kill this man. He was less happy when Bress leaned down and picked up the case with the spear in it.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

Fachtna skipped up onto his feet, sword in hand.

It was warm in here. Her internal breath felt like the dry desert wind from a hundred lives ago. Except in her breath was moisture. He stood in a cave of bone and flesh, his hands and the side of his head sunk into the wall. He shared the thoughts and feelings of a creator. He was perverting them. He had fed her pain and fear and hatred, and she had given that form. From her womb they had grown like blisters through her skin. Skin that was strong enough to survive the deepest abysses the oceans had to offer. Slowly she was waking. Unlike her sisters, her creator had not driven her irrevocably insane, but the pain of the sacrifices would be enough to harm her mind. That would allow him to influence her to open the way.

The pain and the fear lessened significantly. She could still feel it, even asleep, but it was not being fed directly to her via the transmissions of crystal parasites. He had felt the interference but thought nothing of it. Small people with small minds. They could not be allowed to stop the sending, however.

Smoke poured up through the planks in the floor of the fourth level, obscuring most of their view and the people waiting by the steps. They were just coughing, sobbing shadows now, cursing those who moved so slowly beneath them.

Teardrop was a bleeding mess, still sitting cross-legged, his arms held out, no part of him unwounded. If his skin was not cut then it was burned. His gibbering had long ago ceased to be language, and blood came from his mouth as crystal oozed from his eyes. He was now just making a rasping rattling noise.

The first thing she noticed was that the cursing, sobbing and coughing had stopped. The captives came through the smoke towards them, arms outstretched, enslaved by the magic of the crystal seeds in their heads again. Britha moved in front of Teardrop. She heard him coughing and spitting out blood behind her. Crom apparently wanted Teardrop and Britha dead more than he needed the captives’ fear.

Fachtna and Bress stared at each other. Fachtna held his sword two-handed in a mid-guard; Bress, his bastard sword in one hand, the spear’s case in the other, was much more relaxed.