Red reckoning, p.23
Red Reckoning, page 23
“I see it!” Ferraro called from below as we crested a slight rise. “We’re almost there.”
Dead ahead was a rectangular structure of ancient brick and stone standing among a thicket of trees. The place was completely windowless, with gray marble pillars marching across the front like soldiers standing in formation. If you didn’t know any better, you might think it was a family mausoleum, and you’d be partially right, since it had served that purpose a thousand years ago. The building, like most buildings in Moorchester, had been repurposed. Now the eerie crypt served as the Cubiculi ex Ostia. The Chamber of Doors. One of the Guild’s greatest secrets.
Buried deep inside, heavily guarded and in a fortified pocket dimension, was the Guild Vault—the repository for all the dangerous weapons the Guild had accumulated over the years. But that wasn’t its only purpose. Nope. If you knew how to navigate the Chamber, you could effectively find a Way—an interdimensional portal—to just about any-damn-where you could possibly need to go. Even inside the Guild, the Chamber’s existence, and its abilities, weren’t widely known. Hell, even those in the know avoided the Cubiculi ex Ostia unless great need dictated otherwise.
Navigating the Chamber was tricky. Dangerous.
True, you could use the Chamber to travel anywhere—Inworld or Out—but if you didn’t know your shit, you could just as easily end up wandering aimlessly in the void space between the worlds. Well, you’d wander aimlessly until one of the eldritch beings lurking in the ether turned you into meat paste and used your remains as floss. And, even if you avoided that unfortunate fate, you still might find yourself in some backwater stretch of Outworld:
An endless ocean filled with unseen horrors.
Or a realm bursting with toxic gas that’d choke the life from your body.
Or maybe one of the circles of Gehenna, where the air burned with sulfurous hellfire hot enough to boil the blood in your veins.
The Chamber was bad news bears, and it was also our only hope.
“The Gwyllgi are falling back!” Sullivan hollered, sounding both pleased and slightly mystified at the turn of events. Sure enough, the creatures had stopped pursuing us, even though they continued to watch our escape with electric blue eyes filled with absolute malice.
Just as I felt like celebrating, something smashed into the side of the MRAP and the world reeled and inverted. Air rushed past me as my feet went up and my head angled toward the ground. There was a screech of fiberglass ripping apart, the clang of metal, and the sound of screams. Using the Vis pumping through my body, I wove a complex construct of air and water, infused with the strength and suppleness of willow.
A shimmering dome of shifting green—emerald to pine to jade, and back again—encompassed me in a tight globe. Seconds later, I slammed into one of the pillars out front of the repurposed mausoleum. Thankfully, my shield was elastic, absorbing the force of the impact while exerting a steady pressure on me, pushing at me, saving me from a broken back or a smashed skull. I landed in a huff of exhaled air, the bubble finally dissipating. The construct had saved me from any serious damage, but it still felt like someone had worked me over with a tube sock filled with doorknobs.
I pushed myself up on my hands and shook my head, trying to get my bearings.
The MRAP was on one side and the other looked like it had been T-boned by a friggin’ freight train. Just what in the hell had hit us? I hadn’t sensed a lick of power, which meant it probably wasn’t the mage from the Humvee—best guess, all that damage had been done by raw physical force. But what in the hell could hit like that? Winona was as strong as a raging bull and not even she could pack a wallop to rival that.
Sullivan had also been knocked free from the turret, but he was already up and moving around, though looking dazed as hell. I gained my feet, stealing furtive glances all around, and made for the downed vehicle. Winona beat me to it, appearing in a cloud of purple smoke as she lightly leapt onto the vehicle and pried the door open.
“Winona, any idea what in the hell just happened?”
“That would be me,” came a voice from behind me.
I spun on my heels, hand darting to my pistol.
Standing not fifteen feet away with hands folded behind his back like he didn’t have a care in the world, was a Middle Eastern man with a swath of jet-black hair and a large scar running down his cheek and onto his neck. He was short, just a hair over five foot, but he had the presence of a giant. He wore an expensive looking suit, steel gray, and a silky black shirt that complemented his hair.
“That is the man who attacked us back at the safe house,” Winona said, her voice tight, a hint of panic lingering under the words.
Akiya of Assyria. One of the five. An Overlord.
Overlord
“WINONA,” I SAID, NEVER taking my eyes off the newcomer. “Get everyone into the Chamber. I’ll deal with this clown.”
“Bold words, coming from—” the Overlord started to say.
I didn’t let him finish.
I called up a geyser of flame to rival Ol’ Faithful from beneath his feet. I wasn’t in the mood for bad villain monologuing. Especially not from the assbag that had sliced Greg up and left him for dead. The fire was hot enough to melt steel given a little time, but a second later a form emerged from the flames, suit gone—burned to ash. The dude stepped forward, butt ass naked, and not fazed in the least. A smirk played across his lips, his red eyes glinting. He was confident, I could give him that much.
“As I was saying—”
Nope. Still not falling for the monologue.
I hit him again, this time conjuring a web of golden light, equal parts fire, air, and spirit. The construct wrapped around him like a net and burned with the power of a falling star, and the golden lines of energy flared as I pumped more and more power into the construct. The Strigoi howled in agony as the lines of raw Vis bit into skin and chewed through the muscle beneath. Good. I had no patience for people who hurt my friends, and this guy was about as bad as they came. I threw all of my will into the working, but some equal and opposite force hit back like a sledgehammer.
Suddenly, it felt like I was trying to push an enormous boulder up the side of Mount Everest. An indomitable will strained against me, prying my construct apart at the seams, and it was all I could do to hold my magic together. I reached for more power, drawing deeply on the Nox flowing through my soul, but sweat ran down my face and into my eyes and my limbs struggled under the effort. Holy crap, but this guy was strong. Still, I had the power of two demons at my disposal, not to mention the mantle of an angelic being and the raw determination of an angry Marine.
In an instant the battle shifted.
My golden net of inferno power imploded in a cloud of white smoke and a railroad spike of pain stabbed me in the guts.
I dropped to my knees, fingers clutching at my stomach, my power momentarily forgotten. Something stepped out of the bank of white smoke—something that wasn’t even remotely human. A creature with faded gray skin, riddled with black veins. Stunted wings, with spikes protruding from the end, jutted from its shoulder blades. Deep-set crimson eyes regarded me from above something that was less mouth and more army of curling tentacles, like some kind of Cthulhu reject. Large bat ears, curling horns, and raven-black talons completed the look.
This thing was a Vampire Lord in all its infernal glory.
It stalked toward me—a lion leisurely closing in to kill wounded prey—and I felt a mental weight bear down on me like a foot on the windpipe. Psychic fingers pried into my mind and soul, and it was everything I could do to keep this thing from cracking open my brain like an egg.
“Your power is nothing to me, mortal,” the creature sneered, the psychic force of his presence increasing until it was nearly unbearable. “Even with the power of angels at your back, you are a pale imitation of true power.”
I wanted to shoot back a snappy retort, but I couldn’t move a muscle, and staying conscious at this point was a chore.
He took another step, less than ten feet now, when an orb of blue-white lightning sideswiped the Overlord from the left. Sullivan. The construct rocked the vampire to one side, though somehow he managed to keep his feet. Before he could respond, a bolt of green goop smashed into the staggered Overlord from the opposite side, quickly congealing and morphing into a soupy mush which further hardened into a blob of lime-colored Jell-O. Darlene. She might not have been one of the best field agents the Guild had at its disposal, but when push came to shove, she was willing to fight.
Sullivan appeared on my left, stepping out from behind a glamour, and Darlene appeared on my right, her palms outthrust, her jaw clenched. The arch-mage was the last to arrive, banishing the impressive glamour with a wave of her hand. She looked a little worse for the wear, a deep cut running across her forehead, blood coating one cheek like war paint. Had to say, she looked far less like the stuffy bureaucrat I’d always imagined her to be and more like some mystical war goddess come to life.
She positioned herself directly in front of me, shoulders square, feet planted wide.
“You caught me unprepared at the safe house, Akiya,” she said. She spoke his name with familiarity—these two had some history. “But not this time.” She began to chant, hands moving through a series of complex movements, fingers flashing and curling as she called on massive streams of earth and air and fire, weaving them together in a tapestry of power a thousand times more complex than anything I could manage, even with the help of Azazel. The arch-mage wasn’t even near my raw power level, but her finesse and control was out of this world.
The Overlord hissed and struggled to free himself from Darlene’s quick-drying goo. “I’ll find you again, Lacey,” he growled, beady red eyes boring into the arch-mage. “You couldn’t stop me then and you won’t stop me now.”
“Perhaps,” she replied coolly, hands still flowing through their practiced motions, “but then I don’t need to stop you—just stall you.” She offered him a feral smile and slammed her palms together. A peal of thunder rang out like a church bell, and spectral silver chains of power exploded from the ground, wrapping themselves around his arms and legs. Entwining his body. Gripping at his throat. She sagged visibly from the effort and Sullivan was suddenly by her side. He slipped beneath her arm and helped steady her.
“I’ll be fine,” she grunted, shaking her head. “But we should hurry. That”—she nodded toward the silvery chains—“will buy us a minute at most. Hopefully long enough to get through the doors. Winona, please get Mage Lazarus into the vault.”
The bigfoot appeared beside me, Ferraro already slung over one shoulder. My throat constricted and for a beat I saw Greg, sprawled out on the floor with his guts hanging out. A thousand worst-case scenarios sprinted through my head. What if she was dead? Or permanently injured? This was exactly what I’d been worried about. Ferraro was a capable woman and a badass without equal, but she was also human, trading blows with things that were so far outside her weight class that she didn’t even move the needle on the scale. She was a mouse fighting a tiger, and for a second, I was sure that things had finally caught up with her.
But then she stirred. Out cold, but alive. I let out a ragged breath I hadn’t even been aware I was holding.
“She is fine,” Winona assured me as she scooped me up in her other arm and slung me over her other shoulder like a misbehaving toddler. It was humiliating, of course, but I also deeply appreciated the help. The Overlord’s psychic pressure wasn’t currently grinding me into the dirt under a metaphysical bootheel, but the knife-spike of pain in my stomach still hadn’t vanished. “Her vitals are strong,” Winona continued, reassuringly. “She suffered a minor head injury when the vehicle rolled.”
I felt a flash of relief and nodded in reply, unable to speak.
While the Overlord howled and fought against his conjured bindings, Sullivan and Darlene helped the arch-mage hobble toward the entrance into the Cubiculi ex Ostia. The heavy wooden doors barring our way slammed open, the sound echoing in the unnatural stillness. The Chamber hadn’t been used as a crypt in a thousand years or more, but it still held the feel of a tomb. Cold. Dank. Dark. Dead. There was a power in the air, an unseen force that rejected our intrusion into this place, as though our presence was somehow profane. Sacrilegious.
The room itself was sixty feet long, all weathered granite and ancient marble, filled with an unnatural gloom. A living murk that pressed at us, fighting to submerge us into darkness. Marble columns, like those positioned out front, lined the room on either side. The columns offered a feeble illumination to ward off the gloom—each pillar was inscribed with a single, long, looping line of text, running from the top of the column to its bottom, circling down in a tight spiral. Thirteen doors lined the left wall and thirteen more lined the right. Hulking sentinels of black obsidian with no markings, no hinges, no handles. More like polished stone than actual doorways.
Sullivan wheeled and slammed the entryway doors shut, but that only muted the blood-curdling howl that chased us.
“He’s almost broken through the ward,” the arch-mage said, voice trembling from strain, “and I won’t be able to pull that trick off again. Quickly now. Third door on the right.”
“Will he be able to track us into the doors?” I asked as Winona gently set me down onto my feet.
The arch-mage paused, a thoughtful look flashing across her face. “Let us hope not,” she finally replied. “Stay close and do as I do, the tether be damned.” Without any further explanation, she ushered us toward the correct door.
Navigating through the doors was dangerous work and getting to the Vault was the next best thing to impossible—at least it would’ve been without her help. The arch-mage went first, since she’d have to lead the way. Darlene, Winona, and Ferraro followed, while Sullivan and I went last—holding down the fort just in case that ass clown vampire Overlord came calling.
When it was finally my turn, I pressed one hand against the featureless chunk of obsidian, spreading my fingers and conjuring a thin stream of Vis, which I fed into the night-dark slab of rock. The door quivered under my palm, began to hum and vibrate, the steady thrum of a generator kicking to life. I’d done this a handful of times before, but that didn’t banish the butterflies flailing around in the pit of my stomach like a bunch of drunken college kids. Going through the doors was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
The hum increased, cycling faster and faster until the noise was a high-pitched whine that vibrated in my teeth. Aside from the terrible, bone-shaking buzz, however, the door itself looked completely unchanged. Towering, black, unmarred. You couldn’t see through it, couldn’t tell what lay on the other side, but the Way was open. I wasn’t exactly sure of the why or how, but I knew each plane of existence vibrated on a certain pitch—each reality existing at a different wavelength, often overlapping. When opened, the doors vibrated at the pitch of whatever world lay beyond, and they allowed you to vibrate at the same frequency. For a time.
A second later my hand slipped through the door, everything from the wrist down, gone. An awfully freaky sight. But even though I couldn’t see my hand, I could feel it. A cool numbness filled my fingertips with pinpricks.
I shuddered, my stomach roiling, vertigo overtaking me as I passed through the door and into a world that was as hot as the inside of an oven. I wobbled for a second, pressing my eyes shut tight, waiting for the effects of the resonance shift to pass. Traveling like this definitely wasn’t as pleasant as skipping through an angelic portal.
I took a deep breath, steeling my nerves, and opened my eyes. We were inside a volcano, rough mountainous walls rising up around us in a jagged ring. A hundred feet or more below us was a pool of red and yellow magma, churning and burbling, ribbons of steam wafting up. We were on a four-foot-wide spit of earthen bridge that arched gracefully across the pit below. An ethereal golden cord, no thicker than a pencil and invisible to any but a mage, snaked its way across the bridge, connecting to a door, identical to the one we’d just come through, set into the rocky surface of the wall.
The tether bound one door to the next, linked by a strand of Vis like two tin cans connected by a length of twine. The golden rule of traveling the doors was that you never left the path and never lost the tether. No matter what. Step away for even a second and that thin trail would dissipate, poof gone, never to be seen again. If you lost the tether, you lost the next door, and your ass would be indefinitely stranded. You also had to move quick, because the link fizzled and died within minutes. The arch-mage was already halfway across the bridge, but she’d stopped, her toes right on the edge of the stone walkway.
She was peering down into the lava far below.
“This is the first departure point,” she said, waving toward a burbling pit below. I glanced down and noticed there was a small rune etched into the rocky floor—looked a little like a tiny pair of wings, so faint you would never see it if you didn’t know to look. “The way forward is a leap of faith.” She nodded, face stony and serious, then stepped from the edge of the cliff, plummeting over the side.
Slack-jawed, I watched her disappear into the lava, gone in a flash of light and a wave of heat.
“What the hell?” I asked mechanically, staring down into the lava flow. You never left the path, never abandoned the tether. It was like rule number one. Oh yeah, and also not jumping into a friggin’ volcano was up there too.
“Not as bad as it looks,” Sullivan said, bracing himself then taking the plunge.
I tiptoed right up to the edge and licked my lips, anxious sweat beading on my face and rolling down my chest. I wasn’t afraid of heights, but neither was I wholly comfortable jumping a hundred feet into magma. This was insane. Darlene stood nearby, whimpering, her eyes as wide as teacups, her frame shaking like a leaf in a strong gale. Winona looked uncertain, eyes squinted, staring down at the slowly churning magma. She still had Ferraro slung over a shoulder and I was glad for the FBI agent that she was down for the count. This was one decision I didn’t want to make.
