Reign of the devourer, p.26
Reign of the Devourer, page 26
part #4 of Marvel Untold Series
“TREAD THE FOE INTO THE DIRT,” the hologram boomed. “DOOM COMMANDS IT.”
A ley line ran not far from Doomhelm. Zargo held it, as if he were trailing his fingers in a stream and feeling the play of the current. It was the line that had vibrated with the pain in Doomhelm. Zargo kept hold of the ley line, bracing himself. He looked up at the sides of the valley.
There was something that would have to be done.
He couldn’t though. Not yet. He had to be sure. To be wrong here would be terrible.
If he was right, all was already terrible.
He moved the hover platform forward again, gliding just a foot above the surface of the road. He eyed the dark windows on both sides, waiting.
“Krogh!” he called again. “I know your work is here. Are you trying to hide from me? I’m not Doom.”
Zargo stopped in front of the church. He thought about the people who would have come here for help and comfort, just as his parishioners had done on Walpurgis Night.
Had someone come to help them here? The Guard had. How long did they hold out?
He was making assumptions about the village. They didn’t feel wrong.
The hologram of Doom winked out. The sudden silence made Zargo’s ears pop.
“No, you aren’t Doom.” The harsh, sibilant voice sliced through the night from a dozen open, dark windows at once. “Is this your contentment, priest? Do you now live to be his errand boy?”
“I have come to fight you,” said Zargo. “I don’t need to be told that is the proper thing to do.”
“If you had been the priest of my village, I would have seen you burned,” said Krogh’s voices.
“If had I had been your priest, I would have deserved it,” said Zargo. “To be faithful to you would mean being faithful to nothing.” He took a breath. “If you are holding any villagers prisoner, will you let them go?” The question was a forlorn hope. He had to ask it, though. He had to try.
Krogh’s laughter ran up and down the main street and off down the smaller alleys. It echoed in the belfry of the church.
“Am I holding them?” said Krogh. “You could say that. You could say that I am holding them back.” The streetlights went out, starting from the outskirts of the village, rings of darkness moving toward the center. “Very well. You may have them.” The only light left was the one in front of the church. “I release them.”
The light went out. Zargo yanked hard on the controls of the hover platform. He rose quickly, just as a surge of urvullak came leaping and shrieking out of the windows and doorways. Zargo’s eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness. There were no stars, and all he could see was a squirming, slashing movement all around. He climbed diagonally, away from the church, and a snarling shadow dropped past him. It had leapt from the church tower, and it came so close that he felt the breeze of its claws as they whipped past his face.
Zargo took the hover platform higher, until he was sure he was out of reach. He felt less distant from this body than he had been. Adrenaline called him home. His heart beat steadily, though, calmed by his spirit’s home in the embrace of stone.
Krogh’s laughter rose, scratching at him, from across Doomhelm. “Coward!” the voices called. “Run, then. Fly away and hide.”
“No,” Zargo whispered, looking down into the darkness. “Running away is what I can’t do.” The Zargo of the recent past might have wanted to. The Zargo of the present did not.
“Can you fly when you sleep?” Krogh asked. “No? Then never sleep. For when you do, that is when I will come for you.”
“No,” said Zargo. “You won’t.”
He kept a tiny portion of his consciousness in his body. It was just enough to take the hover platform higher yet, more than a hundred feet up. Zargo’s physical eyes could no longer see the town at all now.
They didn’t have to. The rest of him perceived the valley and Doomhelm perfectly. He was in the earth. He was the earth. The valley became his cupped hands. The village sat at the bottom of the cup, writhing with undead.
There was no one to save here.
His mind grasped the ley line. He wielded it as if it were a power cable. It charged him with energy, energy that built and built until he could not contain it any longer.
Then he sent the power into the slopes of the valley, the valley that was his cupped hands, and he brought his hands together.
The mountains roared and shuddered. A crevasse split the village, and the stream disappeared into its depths. The sides of the mountains split, and fifty million tons of rock tumbled off. The double slide came down onto the village with the clamor of doomsday. The earth shook, an anvil struck by a giant’s hammer. Zargo witnessed the fall of every stone. He lived the Earth’s fury and its pain as it wrenched itself apart to kill the disease on its surface.
The echoes lasted a long time. The dust would linger even longer.
Erased and entombed, Doomhelm was silent. Now it slept forever.
•••
They were back in the lab. Orloff had removed her helmet, but with some reluctance, Doom noted. Her eyes kept going back to it on the table, and she still wore her armor, as if expecting to be back in the field in minutes. Doom frowned. He needed her full concentration.
“It is in this room that we will win the war, Doctor Orloff,” he said. “The war. Not individual battles.”
His tone and his words caught her attention. She was present once more, conscious that she should not risk his displeasure. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You have my attention.”
Doom nodded. He did understand her frustration. Here in the lab, isolated from the battlefronts, it was easy to believe they were not engaged in combat. Doom struggled with his own impatience. The temptation was to be out in the streets, exterminating the urvullak. The reality was that this was where he needed to be if that extermination was really going to occur. And if he was going to rip the Devourer from Krogh’s grasp.
“Are you suffering from Krogh’s psychic campaign?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I know it’s happening, but it’s deep in the background. I don’t understand why that should be.”
“That is interesting,” said Doom. “Perhaps useful, as well. What we need to accomplish will be based on the neural frequencies of the living and the dead. We will begin by taking new readings from you.”
Orloff nodded and climbed onto a slab next to the obelisk. Doom ran the tests quickly. He nodded to himself when he saw the results.
“Look,” he said to Orloff when she joined him at the screen. “Your brainwaves have changed since our last tests. The difference is not great, but it is significant.”
Orloff pointed to a pattern of signals. “That’s close to what we found when I was in the liminal state.”
“Quite. And now we find them when you are not wearing the helmet. Your use of it seems to have resulted in a neural restructuring.”
“Permanent, do you think?”
“That remains to be seen. Would it trouble you if it was?”
“No,” Orloff said without hesitation.
Good. The unknown presented even fewer terrors for her than he had suspected.
“We have discovered the means of disrupting the urvullak’s connections to the Devourer,” said Doom. “That is our starting point. Rifles and suits of armor are not sufficient. Not against what Krogh has become.”
“So now we need a weapon of mass destruction,” said Orloff.
“No,” said Doom. “Not mass. Total.”
“Total,” Orloff repeated, looking uneasy.
“It is simplicity itself for me to broadcast a signal to all of Latveria,” said Doom.
Orloff turned pale. “But if we did that…” she began.
“We would kill the entire population,” said Doom. He paused. “You do not think I am willing to make that sacrifice,” he said. She must know that I am not. I am Doom. I walk this Earth to save it, not to destroy it.
“No,” said Orloff, color returning to her cheeks. “No, of course not.”
“We seek a means of interference that will affect only the urvullak,” said Doom. “We must find what has eluded us thus far.”
He plunged into the work, and Orloff did as well. Within minutes, Doom was consumed by the search. He was on the battlefield. Every step he took was as much a part of the war as a physical march against the urvullak. He was aware of the pressures of time. He felt the seconds slipping away, never to be recaptured, and knew that with them, more of Latveria fell to Krogh. Those same seconds would be lost outside the castle, and lost in vain. This was the true front line.
He went back and forth between the results of the tests on the dead, on the urvullak, and on Orloff. He had new tests run on Orloff’s assistants, as he could no longer look at hers as representing the typical human’s wavelengths. What she could withstand without effort now might kill anyone else.
Krogh’s omnipresence felt like another key. Turn her strength into a weakness. If she could be everywhere, then there had to be a way of striking her everywhere.
“The urvullak signatures are different than before,” said Orloff.
“Yes,” said Doom. The change was subtle, but consistent. “There we see the signature of Krogh’s wavelength. She is present as she was not before. That is what must be isolated and blocked.”
“But anything we use to shut down those neural frequencies shuts down all frequencies.”
And Doom saw what needed to happen. “Then we do not shut anything down. We mask one frequency with another instead.”
Orloff’s eyes widened in understanding. “We make the urvullak perceive each other as living people.”
“Precisely. We need a baseline human wavelength, one common to all, so its transmission will be harmless to the living.”
“I know what that would look like,” said Orloff. Her fingers flew over her workstation’s keyboard, and a new wavelength model appeared on the screen before her. “Will this be enough, though?” she asked. “I don’t see how this would affect Krogh or the Devourer directly.”
Nor did he wish it to. His goal there was different. He would not destroy the Devourer. It would yet be his. “I will deal with that threat,” said Doom. The means to do so were coming together in his mind. “That will be my task alone. You may return to the fray, Doctor Orloff. Hold the urvullak back until I can deploy this new weapon.”
He sent the other assistants away as well. He wanted the laboratory to himself. When he was alone, he turned to the urvullak specimens. Except for when he and Orloff had needed to run tests on them, they had been kept completely isolated from each other and from the lab, lead screen surrounding each specimen so Krogh could not see the work being done. Now Doom raised one screen, unveiling a single specimen. Its snarling stilled as he contemplated it, and it stared back at him. This was the first time tonight that Doom had allowed himself to be seen in the lab by an urvullak. Krogh would not have known he was here until now.
“Well,” said Doom. “Here we are. Is there anything you wish to say, Krogh?”
“You have lost, Doom. Your efforts are futile.”
Doom tapped controls. Mechanical arms seized the urvullak and brought it forward into the lab. They held its limbs and its head. It could only look forward. Behind it and to one side, on one of the work tables, was one of the sensory deprivation helmets that Orloff had had placed over the specimen’s skulls before the tests began.
“My efforts are futile,” said Doom. “That is bravado, and in a not very convincing form.” He stepped out of the line of sight and picked up the helmet. “For you to judge them futile, you would have to know what they are.”
The urvullak squirmed, trying to see what Doom was doing. “I don’t have to know,” Krogh spat with its voice. “Nothing you do can stop me.”
“Then you should not be worried about what is happening behind your creature,” said Doom. “But I think you are, Maleva Krogh. I think you are afraid of me. I think you fear what is about to happen. You should be afraid. You have defied me, and you have injured my country. Your fall will be a painful one. And it is about to begin.”
The urvullak strained against the arms. It shrieked, its instinctual rage fused with Krogh’s frustration. Doom placed the helmet over the urvullak’s head, cutting off all of Krogh’s perceptions of the lab.
“And now to work,” said Doom.
•••
What was he doing?
Krogh felt the wounds Doom had already inflicted on her. She saw his image in every village, town and city that she attacked. In some instances, she laughed at the holographic projections. Doom’s propaganda was empty when all had fallen. But in other places, those images stiffened resistance, and the living fought back with renewed vigor. And that faithless priest, Zargo, had taken her triumph at Doomhelm away from her.
Then there were the Doombots. She saw them everywhere too. She knew they were not Doom, because they had no souls. There was nothing in them for the urvullak to feast upon. The Devourer recoiled from the unliving weapons, its instincts raging against the things that could not feed its hunger. For the citizens of Latveria, though, they arrived as Doom’s promise fulfilled. He said he would fight with them, and he did. They could not tell a Doombot from their real sovereign.
They did not matter. They could not alter the outcome of the war. She kept repeating these truths to herself. The setbacks were temporary. All Doom had managed to do was slow her down. He was still losing.
He had also vanished after routing the attack on Heroic Andrew Boulevard.
Where is he? Where is he?
She could see almost everywhere, but she could not see him.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.
But what if it did?
And then he let her see him in the laboratory. He mocked her. He toyed with her, and then took away all sight and sound again. A few moments later, that urvullak disappeared completely from her perception. He must have destroyed it.
If that was all he had done, why did he taunt her? Why have the urvullak in a laboratory?
What was he doing? What was he doing?
The question became urgent. It tormented her. It seeded the beginnings of fear.
Hurry. Finish the war. Do what you told him you would do. Take all of Latveria. Leave him with nothing. If she did it fast enough, it really would not matter what Doom was doing now. He could not win when the battles were all over. In a Latveria that was only urvullak, what could he do?
Except that wasn’t the Latveria she wanted either. She wanted a living population too. She wanted subjects who would understand who ruled over them, and what their suffering meant.
She wanted Latveria to be the model for the gift she would bring to the world.
It wasn’t enough to take everything from Doom. That was just the first part of the usurper’s punishment. He also had to be destroyed.
The Devourer hungered for the taste of his soul. The Devourer was not a being of conscious thoughts. It did not care what she did with Latveria, as long as it continued to feed. It had sensed the strength of Doom’s being, though. It perceived in him a feast unlike any other. It drove Krogh toward that goal. She could not have resisted even if she wanted to.
She was pleased by the thought of the Devourer taking Doom. That would be the fitting end.
Hurry, then. Destroy his nation, and then him.
She turned all of her strength against Doomstadt. She pulled the urvullak away from all the other population centers of Latveria. One great surge, now. One great push to topple the capital. When Doomstadt fell, everything else would too.
The urvullak sprinted over the land. They gathered in a huge swarm around Doomstadt. They joined all their kin already in the city. Krogh sent the flood directly through the homes within. The urvullak crashed through doors and windows. They rampaged up staircases and down corridors. They burst through every makeshift barricade and into the residences where the people of the city hid and waited. Krogh watched the people try to fight. She listened to them cry out for Doom. Her thousands of voices laughed at them.
“There is no hope for Doom,” she said. “There is no salvation for you.”
The urvullak fell on their prey. They left no one alive. In every building they assaulted, they came out with their numbers increased. A tide of fear swept the city. As it flowed on, it became a tide of hunger. The Doombots and the guards stopped the wave in isolated patches. Doom’s propaganda kept the people fighting. It wasn’t enough. Krogh made her legions flow away from the stronger resistance, water foaming around a stubborn boulder. There was always another alley down which to send her urvullak, another building to take instead.
Krogh grew in number. She turned Doom’s defiant words into lies. She closed in on the castle.
•••
“None of the lines are holding,” Verlak radioed to Doom. “The urvullak are pushing forward on all fronts.” She was on the outer ramparts of the castle, directing long-range fire into the streets. To the south, the roads were filling with fleeing, screaming people. Behind them, the urvullak came, an encroaching sea of clawing shapes.
“Fall back,” said Doom. “Call the people to the castle and make your stand. Krogh’s defeat is close at hand.”
Verlak relayed Doom’s order to the command center, and a new siren began to wail. It rose and fell, rose and fell without pause. It was the call of sanctuary, going out to all who could hear it and answer.
Elsa joined her, helmet under her arm. “Doom says we just need to hold them back a little while longer,” Verlak said to her.
“Yes,” said Elsa. “He’s almost ready.” She put the helmet on. “We’re going to win, Kari.” She pointed into the night. From blocks away came shrieks from the urvullak.
