Shimmer: A Novel (34 page)

Liana glanced up past Barrett’s body and saw his right arm extended, his fierce grip wrapped around the hilt of the sword. He’d wedged the side of the long blade deep into a narrow crevice in the dark rock. The sword served as a makeshift piton for two impromptu rock climbers in hell.

“Oh, God, Barrett,” she said tremulously, “I thought we were finished.”

“I noticed.”

“What?”

“You have an impressive set of lungs.”

Embarrassed, she cleared her throat and said, “My, um, battle cry.”

“Oh! Well, in the future, consider adding more unbridled rage and a little less stark fear.”

“Thanks, I’ll, uh, keep that in mi—”

“Oh, crap!”

She didn’t have to ask. As she stared up at him, dirt and pebbles trickled down in a fine spray from the crack in which his sword was pinned. Much like the rest of the barren landscape, the rock face around the embedded blade was crumbling.

“There’s a narrow lip of rock up here,” Barrett said. “I’ll lift you to it.”

“How narrow?”

“Too narrow to sit or stand.”

“Will I be able to teeter?”

“Nope.”

“No sitting, standing or teetering? What’s left?”

“Hanging.”

“Like from a noose?”

“Like from a trapeze, but without the swinging,” Barrett said. “When you were a little girl, you probably fantasized about joining the circus, right?”

“Not even once.”

“Too bad,” he said as he hauled her upward. “You’re slipping! Use your other hand!”

Liana reached up with her free hand and covered Barrett’s left with it, sandwiching his hand between hers to keep her fingers from slipping from his grasp. His forearm and bicep strained, muscles bunching, as he hoisted her higher with the strength of one arm. The tendons in his neck were prominent as sweat streamed off his face.

“See the handhold?”

She nodded.

“Grab it!”

He hadn’t been kidding. The lip of rock was a foot wide but no more than two inches deep. She transferred one hand, fingers already cramping on the hard narrow surface, and then she reached and grabbed hold with her other hand the instant he released it. A new wave of panic sluiced through her veins. The muscles in her arms quivered with strain. She had a minute—two at most—before sheer exhaustion overwhelmed her. “Can’t—hang on!”

“Yes you can.”

“I’m not as strong as you!”

“Use your feet.”

“Right,” she said. Her feet scrabbled for purchase beneath her, but her struggling increased the strain on her arms. If she couldn’t find—

Her left foot slipped into a wedge-shaped hole, taking some pressure off her arms while her right foot poked and prodded the rock face in search of a hold. In a few moments, she found a chunk of rock protruding from the mostly sheer wall and placed the sole of her right foot on it. She breathed deeply, calming herself. “Now what? Can’t hang here indefinitely.”

“Look up.”

She saw the faint glimmer of her light sphere hovering overhead. It was pulsing slowly, just about to wink out and cast them into darkness lit only by the roiling lava below. “Not exactly the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Not the light,” he said. “The surface.”

“What about it?”

“We’re only ten feet below the surface.”

“Ha!” she said in resignation. “Too bad the elevator is out of service. Might as well be ten stories.” When Barrett chuckled, she said, “What’s so funny?”

“The landscape is finally working to our advantage and you’re giving up?”

“What—?”

Instead of explaining, Barrett found a handhold for his left hand, secured his weight, then pried his sword from the disintegrating crevice. He reached up and jabbed the point against the cliff wall. Stone should have trumped forged metal, but the sword tip gouged into the rock and popped several chunks free. He was using the stone’s sudden and unnatural weakness to create new handholds above him. A few moments later, he worked his way closer to Liana, so that she could avail herself of the same divots in the rock wall. Abruptly, larger sections of the wall came loose, falling to the lava far below. He urged her upward, ahead of him. “It’s collapsing. Hurry!”

A massive slab of rock detached itself from beneath Barrett’s left foot, calving like an iceberg in warm waters. He swung crazily from a single handhold which then began to disintegrate under his pendulous weight. Liana made it over the lip to the surface, spun around, and offered her hand. “Here!”

The handhold crumbled away like wet sand through his fingers.

He dropped—

Liana screamed—

Barrett’s fingers pressed against the rock, sliding across the cracked surface, creating friction, though not nearly enough to slow his descent. That wasn’t his intent. He fell less than a yard before his fingers wedged into a crack and supported him. Tucking his sword through the back of his belt, Barrett used both hands and feet to seek and find even the smallest crevices and the most insignificant hand- and toeholds. Before his weight settled on any one point, he shifted to the next, a continual rock climbing motion depending more on faith and speed than on the quality of the cliff face. Cracks and fault lines followed his progress but never caught him. He scrambled sideways at first, but gradually worked his way upward, reaching the surface about twenty feet away from Liana.

She scrambled to her feet, ran to him, and hugged him so fiercely on his unsteady legs she almost knocked them both into the fiery chasm. “Thank you! Thank you, Barrett! I owe you my life. I gave up, but you never did. Not for one single moment.”

“It’s not over,” Barrett said. “We need to keep moving.”

“Right,” she said, swiping grateful tears from her eyes. “Of course.”

Barrett took her hand and they scampered across the treacherous ground. He seemed to sense an impending misstep an instant before it happened. When he was in dangerous situations, a dash of precognition augmented his meta-human reflexes, possibly induced by the sudden rise in adrenaline. An innate early warning system, if he could move fast enough to take advantage of it. Liana lost count of the number of times he yanked her back from footing that was sound one moment, treacherous the next. Crevices and sinkholes appeared randomly and with unnerving frequency. Barrett ran in a zigzag stutter step, faster than a jog but slower than a sprint. Because Liana couldn’t predict each change in direction, she collided against him more often than not. Presently, she began to trust his instincts more than her own senses, keeping her eyes on his movements rather than on the dark ground in front of her.

A rhythmic booming rose above the tortured cacophony of hissing steam, and crackling, crumbling rock. At first they ignored the sound, assuming it was caused by the disintegrating landscape or the rush of surging lava. Then Liana chanced a look behind them and gasped. “Company. Gaining fast.”

“How is that possible?”

At the risk of sending him face first into a sinkhole, she grabbed his jaw and swung his head around. “Sweet Jesus! That must be—”

“Carnifex,” Liana said grimly.

There could be no doubt. His heedless stride and singular method of locomotion marked him as literal master of this hellish domain. Though he was almost two hundred feet away and cloaked in the shadows of his world, Liana realized he was massive, perhaps ten feet tall with arms and legs as thick as a man’s torso. He was clad in patchwork leather, with metal plating banded to his shoulders, elbows and knees, and heavy black boots which created the thunderous sound of his progress. Held in his left hand was a crude, double-headed battle-axe as long as Barrett was tall. His prodigious weight should have sent him through the treacherous ground to the lava below like a cannonball dropped in a vat of cottage cheese. Yet incredibly the crumbling ground regained solidity just ahead of him, rising up to meet each gargantuan footfall, holding its shape and retaining its strength until he stepped away, then crumbling once more. No matter his pace or direction, the ground recognized, welcomed, and supported him—even when he spotted Liana and Barrett and veered toward them, breaking into a loping run.

“Run!” she cried, tugging Barrett’s arm.

“Can’t outrun that,” Barrett said. “We make our stand here.”

“But—”

“I won’t be cut down from behind,” Barrett said with grim conviction. “Take shelter if you can find it. Any tricks up your sleeve, now would be a good time.”

Carnifex was less than a hundred feet from them, close enough that the gruesome details of his garb came into focus.

“Oh, my God, his leather, it’s…”

“People,” Barrett said, nodding.

The flesh of numerous faces, some but not all of them human, were stretched across his torso and limbs, tanned skin crudely sewn together in an approximation of clothing. An assortment of bones, many identifiably human, a few of them human skulls, rattled against his chest, a breastplate fashioned in an abattoir.

When he was within fifty feet of them, Liana made out details of his wide, flattened head, bracketed by two corkscrewed horns pointing forward at asymmetric angles. A half dozen eyes of various sizes spotted his forehead, a few of them milky white and apparently blind; three vertical but uneven nostril slits flared with his exertion; and his long, ragged mouth was a hideous display of mismatched teeth and fangs pointing in every direction. The sound of his excited breathing reached them: heavy, wet, and throaty, accompanied by a steady spray of thick saliva.

“Look,” Barrett said. “His abdomen.”

Liana had a hard time pulling her gaze away from the frightening visage rushing toward them long enough to see— “Proto-flesh,” she said incredulously. “His abdomen is unformed.”

Carnifex’s skin was exposed there, a gray viscous surface that roiled and rippled with shapes half protruding before slipping beneath the surface again. Proto-flesh was not vital and explained how Carnifex could send tentacles of himself through rifts without fear of suffering damage to his formed physical being. Losing those tentacles was no more harmful to Carnifex than a human having hair cut or fingernails clipped. At no personal risk, Carnifex had nonetheless used those proto-tentacles to probe their world and murder dozens of people. As Barrett had guessed earlier, the so-called Reaper of Flesh had been committing blind, cowardly acts of murder. Liana began to wonder if the apparent random killing spree had a purpose far more sinister than wanton destruction. But she only had moments to entertain such thoughts before Carnifex was upon them.

Barrett was crouched in a battle stance, brandishing his sword. If he was afraid—
How can he not be terrified?
—he wasn’t showing it in his body language. Nevertheless, he looked like a child before an onrushing bull.

Liana took partial shelter behind an oblong boulder, desperately trying to come up with a spell to even the astronomical odds stacked against them. Light, cold, heat, sound, movement? She shook her head to clear the panicked litany of useless ideas. Nothing in her magical arsenal seemed up to the task.

Carnifex roared and swung his battle-axe in a two-handed grip.

Anticipating the whistling arc of the curved axe head, which was at decapitation height, Barrett ducked out of range. Darting forward, he drove the tip of his sword into Carnifex’s heavily muscled right thigh, eliciting a howl of pain and outrage from the demon. Barrett dropped and rolled to the left to avoid the backswing of the battle-axe, springing to his feet an instant later.

“First blood, Carnifex, old buddy,” Barrett said. “And I know
that
one hurt.”

Liana couldn’t believe the gleam of excitement in Barrett’s eyes.
God, he’s enjoying this!

He sidestepped an overhead log-splitting blow from the axe that cleaved the ground where he’d stood a moment ago. Leaping forward, he tried to cut into Carnifex’s hamstring with a backhand sweep of his sword, but in his haste, he misjudged the placement of the blow. The edge of the blade clanged off the metal plating strapped around the demon’s knee.

Without turning, Carnifex swung his massive elbow around, aiming for Barrett’s head.

Barrett saw the attack too late to completely avoid it. Lightning-fast reflexes saved his life, but even a glancing blow from that demonic arm was powerful enough to send him sprawling in a daze. Carnifex raised a boot to crush Barrett like an overturned beetle.

Liana had been waiting with a simple spell to provide a momentary distraction for Barrett at a critical moment in the battle. Having traced a few patterns on her forearms, she shouted,
“Luminos — FULGOS!”

Usually, the harsh realm of the hell world was oppressive in its suffocating darkness. But in that instant, blinding light created a temporary whiteout, as if a thousand flashbulbs had fired simultaneously. Lying on the ground, Barrett’s back was to Liana as she cast the light spell. Carnifex was not so fortunate. When she’d shouted the spell command, he’d turned to face her, as she knew he would, and his numerous eyes were wide with surprise as the light erupted across the stark plane. Never had the effect of that particular spell been so powerful for her. Maybe her desperation gave the command extra magical oomph, but her brief experience in the hell world taught her that magic was much more responsive here, apparently even when wielded against its master.

Surrendering to the darkness, the light faded almost instantly, but it had served its purpose.

Carnifex staggered blindly backward as Barrett scrambled to his feet and out of harm’s way—but only for a moment. He wasted no time pressing his attack, slashing and jabbing with his sword as Carnifex held his battle-axe in both hands and struggled to block strikes he could not see.

Liana began to entertain hope that Barrett’s temporary advantage, combined with his superior speed and meta-human reflexes, could turn the tide of the battle in his favor long enough to land a killing blow. She should have known better. They had come to a hell world after all. And hope could not long survive in hell.

Barrett must have known Carnifex’s blindness was temporary and that the blows he’d landed thus far had produced nothing more than a series of superficial wounds. To inflict a mortal wound he would have to aim high. The breastplate of bones shielded the demon’s chest, and his broad head was almost out of reach, so Barrett chose the next best target—Carnifex’s thick neck. If his sword cut deep enough, he might even sever the demon’s spinal column. Leaping with his right arm extended, he drove the sword tip toward the slight hollow in the center of Carnifex’s throat.