Prisoner 52 (32 page)

T
he energies flowed round to what parts of him were left uncovered and the skin upon his legs peeled back from the bone, flayed away so that it draped as skirts might where the flesh was yet attached. A swarm of spiders skittered outward from the destroyed characters thereupon and over the bodies of the dead that they nearly outsized and from beneath the glacial depths rose a beast of four arms and molten skin that raged away into its enemies, which were any among the living. The Maerazian waved its taloned hand across the wounds and the glyphs scrawled upon his stomach spun astray to conjure over them the hide of some scaled daemon.

T
he broken figure of Tobias Simms gestured once more while he ministrated upon himself and the ice fell out from beneath the Maerazian and he with it into the opened jaws brought into being there. The thing to whose mouth they were rose blind from the fissure in the glacier upon chitinous scythes that then drew its bulbous, worming bulk forth to its master.

The broken man, the burned man, spun about in his place in the air as though one thought at once gave way to another and so recommenced his journey upward into the thickening arms of the ship's inner glow. Spikes then erupted from within the beast that he had created and it made a deep bleating noise and as sudden as it had been given life fell over dead. The
fat of its great stomach commenced to bubble and to steam and the Maerazian, shrouded roundabout within his molten sphere, appeared from within.

He hurled himself by his will through the air toward Tobias Simms and dispensed with his shield
as he did so and crashed into him so that upon impact the worms that were the tongues of the maw within his breast coiled about his foe. They careered then down to the ice entwined together and black wings of shadow unfurled from the shoulders of the warlord so that he glided down to land upon his feet, the frail and obliterated form held out before him by the tongues – ready to be devoured.

"I cannot be destroyed." Tobias said through his jaw broken sidelong with the rest of him, through his cooked flesh that had been scourged by flame of all but its most intrinsic parts. "I am destruction itself – until all are
none."

He began to shake violently in the Maerazian's grip and his scorched body began to
misshape and devolve into some discord in the creation of the multiverse. Pale tissues slick with the oozes they extricated overtook the burns and sears that had become his skin and his neck spasmed and elongated until at length it was twice again above the Maerazian and the head atop it an eyeless, toothless thing that sucked at the air. His stomach bulged with the rest of him so that it appeared the warlord held now a gluttonous parody of such worms that dwell beneath lightless seas and which burst open then at the behest of what seemed to those who watched bundles of fleshy ropes that began to bind the Maerazian up. He cut at them with his long claws and kept them at bay, but they were many. The arms of the thing that had been Tobias Simms began to split and change so that they joined as greater cousins the tentacles that writhed now upon his back, which became more and more the proverbial spine of an invertebrate wriggling mass.

"You can follow me or stay here and die." Sejanus said and charged forth from the melted wreckage of the HEV they crouched behind.

"Where in the Hells is he going?" Leargam shouted at Tezac.

"Some place with an idea better than this." He said and followed after him, the old man after him.

They advanced together across the field and amidst the corpses and destruction that littered it. A chariot crashed down before them and its crew were at once descended upon and taken away by the creatures that had driven it aground and they dashed round it, went on at Sejanus's lead. He stopped ahead on the other side of the wreck and took from within its debris one of the propellant spears of the raiders that had piloted it and turned to Tezac.

"How far can you throw me?" He said.

"Throw you?" He said and looked him over. "Straight up and without an exo-suit, no more than six or seven feet. Why?"

"Just do it when I tell you." Sejanus said and Tezac grabbed hold of him by the back of
his suit and waited for what was to them an inexplicable happening. "Now."

The big man lifted him from his feet and, bearing
his weight with the awkward length of the spear he carried, threw Sejanus into the air with as much strength as his limbs and the exo-suit he wore afforded him. They watched as he ascended and appeared at several meters up would begin to drop down again. Then he triggered the airjets of the spear he bore. Sejanus launched with it and it carried him up through the skirmish that went on above until it bored into the hull of a passing chariot.

He
held fast to the spear through the inertia and then undulated himself by his grip upon the haft to swing up into the galley of the chariot. He landed in a low crouch and faced down the two that were left of its crew and his rifle that he brought round upon its sling was knocked away by the flash of a sword. The lone Maerazian left to give fight drove his dark blade down at him and he leapt backward from it and its point sparked against the steel of the floor. He got to his feet and its edge swept at his throat and he leaned out of its reach, threw back his arms. The driver of the winged beasts that drew it along looked back at them over his shoulder.

He shouted some word or phrase that went unheard by one and not understood by the other, to Sejanus a name or a warning. The sword came on and the grim death mask
of the raider beyond it came on and silently, as if death itself confronted him. Something inside of him wished it were so. Then draping tendrils and stretched, grey limbs flitted before him and death himself screamed and proved he was not so. Sejanus glanced at the thing as it spun about with the Maerazian fighting and shouting within its grip and then looked at the driver, the driver at him.

He left the reins and made for the rifle that lay nearest him in the corner of the galley before the helmsman's cockpit and Sejanus dove for the sword which lay between them, knocked clear of its swordsman. His hands wrapped round its hilt and the pilot had gotten his own round the body of the gun and so he at once came up from the floor of the chariot and
stabbed him through the throat, in that place where the breastplate of his armor ended and the helmet had not yet begun. The Maerazian fell sputtering and bleeding and clutching at the blade stuck fast in his neck and Sejanus rushed forward to catch hold of the reins.

He drove the chariot onward and until he could circuit back round to the combat that took place. The ram plate of the craft broke the skulls of inmate and Maerazian and traveller alike as he bore down upon the plain, levelled out above it to speed toward the warlord and the half-abominated form of Tobias Simms
who struggled still in each other's clutches. He drew near and hefted from the rack beside him an airjet spear and with the strength of his exo-suit both held it aloft and kept hold of the reins.

The sinuous ropes of the bowels of Tobias Simms had
enveloped the Maerazian about his shoulders and kept his arms at his sides so that his claws were of no more use to him. The beak of the maw within his own breast snapped at them and cut them away from the knotted innards of the man who spawned them, but for every one there grew more to replace it. The worms that were its tongues sought some hold of their own, that they might wrestle Tobias away. But his form in no way yielded and instead the mouthing eel that his neck had become squirmed up through the air and snapped down as a serpent upon the Maerazian.

The eyeless, sucking orifice fastened itself onto his head and began to engulf it. Its inner pincers sank into the flesh there until they met with the bone of his skull and there strove deeper so that he felt their tips scratching across his cranium. He struggled against it with his great strength and with the
tendrils of the mouth housed amidst his ribcage and when these failed tried to make use of the words writ upon his skin as proofs of compacts old as time.

But thought of these brought into his mind an endless darkness populated as endlessly with endless things, abject and abominable things that had a place in no mortal mind. Things that drifted through a dead space absent of any ponderable purpose or reason; things that had sat since the beginning in cold deeps inimical to the stuff that had created them and to subsist
must subvert. He stared into that void shown to him, the void of an endless hunger and the void of a way of life that tended towards destruction, and in its black depths he could but stare as the thing ate into his skull as it ate then into his mind.

Sejanus looked on and tightened his grip round the reins
of the chariot to depress the trigger that electrified them. The winged beasts at their barbed ends yowled into the storm as hounds from the deepest hells and hastened onward to the entwined forms ahead. He raised the spear above his head and resettled his grip and in his passing the conjoined horrors he cast the spear. It sailed its natural course through the winds, straight and true, and as it came nigh the airjets along its haft activated. Its cruel and jagged point, the force of the pressurized gas behind it and that of his arm and the exo-suit, gored through what remained in mutation of Tobias Simm's spinal column. In a shower of bone and pale ichorous flesh the being he had become burst apart and there erupted in its place a great green light.

All who looked upon it saw nothing else and in its glow that was like the sun's there arose a cacophony, a dirge from beyond the most distant and alien stars and men wailed themsel
ves only to drown it out. Then the brilliance dimmed to less than that of the night and as sudden as it had come into being. Sejanus and his chariot coursed through its emerald twilight and as though caught in that small instant for eternity. From afar all could see now the crystalline heart from which it still poured but small now and glowering at the end of the spear that pierced it. Then it exploded.

The light that had
shined forth returned a hundredfold and within it rampaged a swirling horde of fiends and brute beasts, as if the detonation had breached some seal beneath the earth against the hells and brought up its fire and deranged attendants. Tezac saw from his far place the figures framed within the brightness, the Maerazian and the chariot and all others caught inside of it, vaporize. Then the abyssal legion that had been conjured was sucked away down into some form which remained still in the light of the blast and that raged about where it stood, flailing and its shape changing all the time. But this too in moments was gone, as with everything else, and the radiance petered out to nothing more than staccato shimmering across the melting glacial plain.

A groan sounded as from the gutter of the earth and the home of things not meant to be found and it shook the skies and the ice beneath their feet. Tezac looked up at the ship
and the clouds that were swallowing it back again amidst its mournful cries. The beings that had issued from its inner regions returned to them and the Maerazians harried them as they fled, taking of them a great number.

He began to walk then and the old man with him, to tread over the dead that lay everywhere and to no certain place. He went until they turned to ashes and then he began to run. The crater that had been struck into the ground by the force of the crystal's explosion came no closer ahead and so he began to sprint. The piles and little strands of grey ash and the black pulverized steel of HEVs and crashed chariots wheeled beneath him and he fell to his knees at the edge of the pit and peered down into it. But within he saw only crumbling rock and darkness and rising from it a foul smell
that he knew without being able to know reeked like no other stench. He sank back onto his legs and looked about at the confines of the hole punched into the planet‘s surface, at the incinerated remains scattered around it as if more could be found in them that had not been there before.

"Sejanus!" He cried
and he did not know why, his voice carried far into the emptiness by gelid and desolate winds, with such suddenness that the old man stopped short of his approach behind him. "Sejanus."

"I can't see his biosigns." Leargam said and came up beside him, panting and casting about as he had done. "Not anywhere."

"The Maerazian's neither, I suppose. Or Tobias."

"None of them." He said. "It's like they weren't even here."

"Well." Tezac said and got to his feet.

"You know, it's funny."

"What?"

"He was so tore up inside." Leargam said. "Everything he did, those things on his service record and the things that got him in here. Then he does this. No one will ever know his name, but I guess that's how these things go. I'm sorry, Tezac."

"Everyone keeps saying that." He said and got to his feet and looked up at the chariots that circled overhead and landed elsewhere, the eyes of their crews all turned on them now. "I must be a real sorry guy."

"What else is anybody supposed to say?" The
old man said. "Things happen and you ought to know by now not everyone makes it."

"I know it." Tezac said and wiped
away the blood that ran from his nose with the back of his hand. "But maybe if he did, well, maybe that’d mean I could too."

"You could what?" Leargam said. "You know, they filled your head with so much crap it's a wonder you don't have shit for brains."