Chapter 28
Not Opportunistic
Just before sunrise the snow intensified, the flakes growing fluffy again as predawn warming touched the clouds.
Despite that, Erik was as dry as could be expected, especially since they were inside Grove City limits.
The suburb wasn’t big enough to have a temple, and Erik wondered why they weren’t swinging north and a little east to hit the larger metropolis.
Some cities, big as they were, didn’t have active temples with Flame access, just minor ones to relieve the pressure from the zones where the shadowbeasts hunted almost at will.
Lirai were almost lottery-winner rare, but they were also long-lived after the Flame, well-protected once the Sons found them, and he’d thought the clear zone extended further.
Still, if Ignatius thought the best bet of finding an active temple was in this direction, then that’s where it was—especially given the trouble getting hold of Control.
After all, he was the one in contact with liaison officers and controls, all most likely other Fathers, their age and experience providing steady anchor.
It was the Fathers who selected new candidates and chose the territories, who had survived longest with the god’s whispering in their heads, who kept the Youngers stable and taught the Elders how to endure.
Erik’s nerves were raw and danger was a piece of cold metal in his mouth, the taste coating his palate. The SUV was slowing, coming off the freeway—maybe their lirai needed a bathroom break.
Jake wouldn’t take over the running until true dawn, which would put Erik in the car with her.
She had the oneiros, even if she couldn’t use it to laser-focus invisible force or spark the Flame in a new well yet.
The created gem would call if she was upset or attacked, and he’d know.
It wasn’t what he’d been thinking of while making the setting, his concentration a white-hot glare as he forced power and metal to his will, but even if she hated him for giving her to the Flame she’d wear the necklace and he could be content.
Even if another Son made a replacement for her, maybe she wouldn’t put the first one in a box.
Erik could think of her with star-metal resting against her breastbone, the chain touching her nape, the stone—retrieved and shaped the old way, a gift only a Son of Ymre could give—singing its soft, almost inaudible lullaby as colors shifted in its pale heart.
Erik pitched forward, falling through space, boots kissing the rooftop several stories below with a jolt he was moving too quickly to really feel.
The SUV swayed into a long curve; he reached a good vantage point just as it came to a stop at the end of the exit, left turn signal blinking, and remained there just a touch too long.
What the hell?
He skidded to a stop, losing momentum, and scanned.
Nothing but the usual seashell buzz of people thinking, dreaming, sleeping, eating, shitting—maybe a few lucky ones were having sex, bright spikes of pleasure in a dark fogbound landscape.
The snow whirled, a curtain drawn before him, and he took off at a tangent, sorcery-fueled intuition prickling under his skin.
When they stopped, his job was to hold the perimeter, then—
WHAM.
The impact was so sudden two of his ribs snapped.
Erik tumbled sideways, knowing he was going to hit hard, rage rising red under his skin like a leng-urchin’s spikes.
The vast hidden dream-plateau where the half-real servants of the Mad God’s elder liches eked out their miserable hungry banishment was riven with deep gullies, cracks, and balkas; sometimes the leng creatures slipped through the bottom, finding themselves in low, evil earthly places.
He realized that was another thing that bothered him—the jana-spiders and the nightmare beast at his lirai’s window were from different parts of the nightmare lands. Neither were generally opportunistic, even the juvenile shoggoth.
They were sent.
Erik landed, a roar of pain from broken bones spiraling through him.
The fury tore him out of the thing’s soft, strangling grip, its pale misshapen hands squirming for his throat, its eyes full of diseased blue pinpricks dancing on shoals of black mud.
The constellation-gaze was an igsoth’s greatest weapon—that, and the fact that they were practically invisible until they attacked.
Unless you had an oneiros. The dreamstones pierced their veils and could often hold many of the loathsome hatchlings at bay with its glow alone.
He had a brief moment of feeling glad he’d finished making his lirai’s before the agony wedded to fury poured through him again and he struck, knives biting deep in the thing’s guts to loose a flood of foul brackish fluid full of wriggling gutsnakes—the thing was infected, just to add to the fun—and he sensed more than heard the crumple of metal, the tinkle of falling safety glass, and a rush of gasoline-fed flame.
His ribs healed messily, sorcery sparking under his jacket and shredded T-shirt, snow crusting his hair because he was rolling, knives unerringly finding the igsoth’s throat and ignoring the thing’s tiny, diamond-sharp claws swiping his coatsleeve.
A single one wasn’t going to keep him down for long, but the damage was already done.
Don’t let anything happen to her. There was nobody to pray to; the jeering cackle of a mad god inside his skull reached a feedback squeal as he tore the life from the igsoth, rising caked with more snow, flicking ichor and wriggling parasites off his blades with quick habitual movements.
If the igsoth hadn’t bled out by dawn the sunshine, however weak, would take care of it—they were creatures of deepest night.
There was a stinging rosette of red and gold in the near distance, flickering on the other side of a gas station’s bulk. They’d barely gotten off the freeway; his lirai was probably hysterical with fear.
Keep her safe for a few seconds longer, guys.
He barely noticed the pain, going straight up the side of a brick building, bolting across the roof, and now he could see the fire more clearly.
There was another low crumpling sound, oddly distorted by the snow, and he flung himself into empty space, landing with a jolt across the street from a deserted—though still beacon-bright—Shell station.
Now he heard gunfire, too, dull terrible popping through veils of falling snow, a treacherous breeze rising from nowhere and driving frozen-wet stinging into his face.
That’s not an igsoth. They can’t work windveils.
More gunfire. A battle-cry—Jake’s, but weirdly distorted, the snow swirling. Erik was soaked, water drift-streaming from his skin and clothes as he tore through shell after shell of illusion, an arrow flying for its target—
The thing in the snow chuckled and squealed. Dawn was so, so close; if they could just hold out, the longest night of the year would soon be over.
Should’ve moved her before now. But Control—
For a moment Erik wasn’t sure why he’d stopped. Then he looked down.
Thunk. The sound reached him late, cotton-fog shock filling his ears, and he stared at the dirty ivory spear-claw embedded in his chest. Its edge smoked with poison, and its golden chasing, not to mention the gems along its handle, would buy you anything in the waking world you desired.
It would also pay for passage to the dreaming lands, but unless you were careful you’d end up sold for a handful of clotted-blood rubies and taken to the nightmare country, carried in the stinking hold of a black ship with banks of oars like serried teeth along each side, its prow a frozen scream under a pair of staring crimson lamps.
Oh, shit, Erik thought, and the thing in the snow laughed.
It loomed before him, its fingers stained by the filthy spear-claw wrenched from an almost unimaginable beast in the lands bordering the fair far shimmering of deepest dreams. Those rolling green hills and bright shining city were a place the Mad God hated almost as much as this tiny inconsequential planet whose inhabitants, through whatever freak of genetics, magic, or just plain chance, could bleed away his force, betray him, and bar his passage, not to mention impede his plans.
It didn’t matter. Even the claw in his chest, digging relentlessly for his heart, didn’t matter.
Erik closed one bloody, dripping, grimy hand around the spear, spat a mouthful of liquid glittering red in the faint orange glare of citylight off snow, and yanked it free, not caring if he sliced his fingers down to bone or even lost one or two.
They’ll grow back eventually. Kill that thing, Erik. Kill it now.
The creature who could wield that claw came from deep in nightmare, though it might look human enough—save for the extra joints on its long, strong fingers and the wasted, terrible almost-beauty of its pale, lipless face.
Sarnaki. One of the Great Liars creeping through the fringes of normal human dreaming, voracious but banished from the waking world—unless, that was, they were summoned and sent to be the god’s fleshly hands.
Fast, unpredictable, deadly toxic to lirai, utterly committed to its task, they were also very, very difficult to destroy.
For one thing, they regenerated almost as quickly as a Son.
Erik’s knees turned to melting snow, and he staggered.
The thing laughed again, using the falling flakes as a shield, and if the sarnaki wasn’t splitting its attention between an Elder and those he was protecting, it could only mean more than one of the Mad God’s centurions was lurking in the blizzard.
“Lirai,” Erik whispered, and the thing halted, snarling. For a single cold, heartstopping moment it was clearly visible; Erik shoved himself forward, the wrenched-free spear in his hand keening and the hole in his chest giving a splattering gout of bright crimson.