torg 01 - Storm Knights Read online

  Atonal, bass vibrations trembled in the tips of her fingers where they pressed down upon the polished white plastic of the keys, and the attenuator pedal quivered under her foot as she floated back into the sensover scene. She was just getting to her solo when a voice came through the intercom panel near the door. The voice intruded on the music and spoke her name questioningly.

  "Dr. Hachi?" the voice of the security doorman forty-seven floors below asked.

  "Triple damn," she muttered to herself as she sat up in bed and pulled out the sensover chip of the symphony. She tossed it onto the counter that ran the length of the room, letting it mix with the jumble of electronic equipment, papers, books, program chips and data disks that littered the surface.

  "What?" she asked after she had slid off the bed and pushed the speak button on the intercom. Noting her absence, the bed retreated into its wall slot.

  "Your driver is here for you, Dr. Hachi."

  "Where?" she asked.

  "Garage level five, stall twenty-three."

  "Okay. Tell him I'll be down as soon as I can."

  "Sure thing ... uh, Dr. Hachi?"

  "Yes?"

  "Good luck, Mara."

  Mentally paralyzed for a moment with the thought of luck and how much of that elusive, randomly indeterminate substance it would take to save a world, she made no answer to the doorman's last remark. Then, thinking that even if she could not calculate nor mathematically define luck, only the probability of it, she was going to need all of it that she could get.

  "Thanks, Randin-Six. Randy."

  "Nothing of it, Mara. Carry your bags up when you get back?"

  Back. The word echoed in the shadowy, fear-filled corners of her mind. Back. Step off into the cosmverse and back again. Just like that. Nothing to it.

  "Yeah, sure. See you, Randy," she said, and took her finger off the speak button.

  29

  In sheer reptilian pleasure, Baruk Kaah hissed his approval. The new tribe members were making excellent progress. They used their hands to dig shallow holes throughout this field they once called Central Park. Into each six-paces-by-three-paces-by-one-arm-length-deep hole was laid a gospog seed. Then one of the dead of this world was placed in each hole, taken from the growing piles that lined the edge of the field.

  Off to the High Lord's left, another pile of bodies was carted in atop a dinosaur with a large, flat back. After it deposited its gruesome cargo, it trundled back to reload. Baruk Kaah looked to the field again, eager to watch his hand-picked master planters firmly tamp the loose earth back into the holes, sealing the seeds and bodies in place.

  Further along the rows of holes, a new member of Baruk Kaah's tribe dug enthusiastically. He wore dark blue slacks and a light blue shirt that had a New York City Transit Authority patch on the left sleeve, and he moved in a rolling, chimpanzeelike gait. His uniform, his mirror-finish sunglasses, and his clean-shaven face looked out of place as he hunched over to dig another hole.

  Baruk Kaah tilted his head upward and inhaled deeply. As he exhaled, he closed a flap in his nasal passages and diverted his exhalation through the hollow, elongated and u-shaped bony structure that ran from his nostrils, passing up the center of his face and arching at the top of his head. The trumpeting sound he made was a salute to the planters and diggers. The workers looked up from where they squatted and roared in response to the High Lord's praise.

  "What isss your crop?" Baruk Kaah asked hissingly of the edeinos planter nearest him.

  "These are gospogsss of the first-planting, Sssaar," the planter said. At the same time, he kept track of the carelessly swinging, sharply-ridged tail of the High Lord. It had been known to strike swiftly if the Saar was displeased. "In seven suns, you will have an army of gospogsss to march at your back."

  "How long before we sssee gospogsss of the fifth-planting?"

  The answer came, not from the planter, but from the ravagon that landed nearby. "When you win more land for the planting, Baruk Kaah. Then will the Gaunt Man's gift truly bear fruit."

  "Sssoon, ravagon, sssoon." Baruk Kaah turned away from the demon and looked back at the workers in the field. He addressed the planter, "Do you have enough workersss?"

  The master planter scanned the field. "Yes," he answered. "More of the nativesss are joining usss all the time."

  "The Gaunt Man planned well," said Baruk Kaah so that the ravagon could hear, giving grudging respect to the demon's master who looked like the soft-skinned, easily crushed natives of this cosm, but who truly thought and acted as an edeinos.

  "Grow well, planter," the High Lord said as he made his leave, not bothering to say anything to the ravagon.

  30

  On the island of Borneo, a new reality held sway. Gone were the laws of Earth, replaced by the axioms of Orrorsh. In the island's dark interior, a writhing bridge constructed of tortured bodies spanned an expanse from sky to ground. Beside the bridge, a small town had been constructed hastily, though to look at it one would believe that it had been in place for ages. The town lay clouded under a gray pall of burning coal and wood. Its cobbled streets were made odorous from the droppings of horses that pulled an incessant flow of carriages, delivery wagons, and hansom cabs. At the town's center, rising slightly over the other buildings, was a walled estate.

  To the general public of Orrorsh, this was Salisbury Manor. But to the lord of the estate, it was Illmound Keep.

  Within the walls of the estate was a four-storied manor house. Pointed, domed, and open-topped towers, which were round, square, oval and slanted, stabbed at the sky. Crenelated walkways arced and connected the towers or ended halfway to nothingness. Gable ends, held in the arms of massive, stone gargoyles who crouched upon the peaks of the slate roofs, jutted outward at every conceivable angle. Windows, dark and lighted, of thin-scraped horn and oiled vellum, of glass that was cut and stained and clear, looked out upon the rolling lawns and black, gnarled forests of the estate. Dormers wept from the eaves and down the sides of the manor house. And here and there, a buttress flew.

  In a room on the top floor of the manor house, a room paneled in heavy, dark wood and walled in shelves of leather-bound books, stood the hunter called Kurst. He stood with his back to the darkly green upholstered furniture and the massive, oak desk. The room was lit by the yellow, softly hissing flame of a brass and crystal gas lamp hanging from the tin-paneled ceiling. He stood looking out the leaded-glass, diamond-paned window down into the gardens below, tracing out with his eyes the intricate patterns of the hedge maze that dominated the west lawn of the estate. Carefully, as though he were actually walking on the crushed gravel, his eyes followed the angled and curved path. So as not to mar the challenge, he avoided looking at the center of the maze, the small open square that held the prize for any who could win their way there. Yesterday, when the gardeners had rerouted the maze, they had chained a young woman, one of the dark-skinned maidens native to the island, to the iron bench at the center of the open square.

  Kurst calmly drank some of the heavy burgundy from the crystal wine glass he held. He almost had the pattern solved, and soon he would go down to the west lawn, enter the maze, make his way through its winding, deceptive paths, and take the prize that the Gaunt Man had provided for him. He had never failed to take whatever prize was set out for him. He did not know if the Gaunt Man knew of this vantage point in the slanting west tower that allowed an overview of the maze below, nor did he care. He finished the wine and set the empty glass down on the tray, next to a half-filled decanter. He was turning away from the window when a hesitant knock came from the other side of the door.

  "Yes?" called Kurst. The high-buttoned, tweed suit that he wore, although of obviously rich cloth and careful tailoring, looked out of place and ill suited on

  the hunter. His slightly pointed ears and elongated eyes that angled perceptibly upward at their outside corners did little to take away from the wildness of his appearance.

  "Sir, it is I, Picard. The master wishes to see
you," said the voice from the other side of the door.

  "Very well," replied Kurst, letting fall to pieces the pattern he held in his mind. Through the glass of the window at Kurst's back, faintly came the sound of a wolf howling as he hunted somewhere in the black forests of the estate. The hair on the nape of Kurst's neck stood on end, and the fingers of his hands curled tautly. How he longed to join the wolf. But that would have to come later.

  He left the room, making his way past the manservant, and padded silently through the shadowy corridors of the manor house. Amazing, Kurst thought, that none of the sheep could see the manor for what it truly was. If they could, he was certain that none of them would ever step into its dark shadow, let alone cross its arched entryways.

  He made his way down to the underground levels where the Gaunt Man worked in his laboratory. As he passed the windowed gallery that looked out on the eastern grounds of the estate, he glanced at the maelstrom bridge that stretched into the sky. That bridge led back to his world, back to the cosm of Orrorsh. He pulled his gaze from the writhing bridge and continued on. Why dwell on the past, he decided, for if he read the Gaunt Man's plans correctly, none of them would ever see their homeworld again.

  Down in the lowest level of the manor house, where bedrock was the floor and the water of the land wept through the fitted stone blocks of the manor's deep foundations, Kurst pushed open the iron studded door to the chamber that was the workshop of the Gaunt Man. Kurst slid sideways into the room and stood silently, unmoving in the shadows. At the far end of the room, hunched, deformed creatures shoveled coal into a gigantic furnace that filled a significant portion of the chamber. Steam whistled and turbines whined. Generators turned and the harsh, yellow light of incandescent bulbs washed over strange machinery. And over three figures.

  Kurst moved further into the shadow of a stone pillar that supported the high ceiling of the chamber. He watched two of the figures as they moved about the third where it lay strapped to an altarlike stone table. From where they cruelly pierced the chest of the man on the table, two short shafts pointed upward at awkward angles. The shafts were about two feet long and one inch in diameter. All the colors that Kurst had ever seen shifted and flowed along the surfaces of the shafts. Words in an ancient, arcane script and bathed in the glowing, flowing colors spiraled around each shaft.

  The man was the stormer that Kurst had hunted in the jungle, the sheep that, in the final moment, had found its claws. Kurst knew the ends of the shafts in the stormer's chest were pointed and barbed. The outer ends were knobbed and sheathed in brass. At intervals that grew farther and farther apart, bursts of energy coruscated from the brass knobs and dissipated in the damp air of the chamber.

  Into the machine.

  Beyond the stone table was an assemblage of spinning flywheels, turning cams, arcing electrical sparks, and gauges with bouncing indicator needles. It spanned a quarter of the room and reached halfway to the shadows near the ceiling. Kurst heard the Gaunt Man speaking to the large man standing with him at the side of the stone table.

  "This is the last and the bravest of them, Scythak. And the strongest. Look at him now. Shuddering in his flesh and cringing in his spirit."

  "Stormers," rumbled Scythak scornfully as he grabbed one of the rods and twisted. The stormer arched his back and screamed.

  "Careful, Scythak," chuckled the Gaunt Man. "You might lose part of yourself."

  "I do not fear these runes," said Scythak, indicating the rods protruding from the stormer's chest. "Nor do I fear that machine which makes them work."

  "You should. Look what they have done to this stormer," the Gaunt Man said as he pointed to the suffering man, "and to Kurst."

  "That weakling! Why do you keep him around? Kill him or send him back to the Moors where he belongs." "He serves me well. Now, let's see what more we can get from this one." The Gaunt Man moved to the machine, adjusted some rheostats and turned some dials.

  The raw smell of burnt flesh and ozone reached Kurst where he stood, and his fear of the rods and the machine started his shapeshifting. The fingers of his left hand lengthened. The nails grew into claws, and dense, dark brown fur stiffened on the back of his hand and up his wrist. Kurst feared the rods and the machine, because of what the Gaunt Man had done to him with them, and because of what he might do again. Kurst did not know what that machine had stripped from him, but he promised himself that he would not lose any more to it or to the Gaunt Man. He controlled his fear, willed his left hand back to its human shape, and walked out of the shadows toward the Gaunt Man.

  On the world of Orrorsh, the world on which Kurst had been born and recruited into his service, he was known as Lord Bryon Salisbury, Earl of Waterford. But to those in his service, to those who understood the mysteries of the cosms, he was the Gaunt Man. Kurst suspected that Lord Salisbury had not been born on Orrorsh, if the word born could apply to him.

  The Gaunt Man was six and a half feet tall, only an inch or so shorter than the massive Scythak standing next to him. His narrow head held his hollow-cheeked face on a long, slender neck that merged into narrow shoulders. His thin, long-armed body in the white laboratory coat that he wore when working in the chamber reminded Kurst of an animated stalk of dried winter hay. His dragon-topped cane rested against a nearby wall.

  Kurst silently slipped into place at the stone table beside the Gaunt Man, bowing to his master while pointedly ignoring Scythak.

  "Ah, Kurst, how nice of you to join us," the Gaunt Man said with a sneer on his long face. Scythak snickered evilly.

  "You sent for me, master," Kurst said. "How might I serve you?"

  "I wanted you to witness the final stage of this stormer's existence. This is one of your catches, is it not."

  Kurst studied the young man, and his hand unconsciously stroked the rapidly-vanishing scar beneath his shirt.

  "Ah, yes, Kurst," laughed the larger Scythak, "for all your vaunted speed this stormer actually wounded you. Perhaps you should be put out to the kennels so you might spend your old age in comfort."

  "That's enough," said the Gaunt Man abruptly. Then he turned his attention back to the man on the stone slab and said to Kurst, "I am almost finished here. This stormer is hardly worth permanently connecting to the machine, but I can still make use of his possibilities. Watch."

  The Gaunt Man made some minor adjustments to the instruments on the machine, and the flashes of energy bursting from the knobbed ends of the rods in the stormer's chest became more intense in their eruptions.

  "Now, I shall strip him clean," said the Gaunt Man, and he threw a gnarled lever.

  With that, the stormer screamed and thrashed wildly. The pain, while unbearable, only lasted a moment. Then a crackling cloud of light burst from the tops of the imbedded staves and hovered briefly over the stone slab. Kurst thought he saw the stormer's form within the cloud, but then the energy was sucked into the giant gridwork of brass and glass that made up much of the machine, joining with the rest of the lightning that constantly played across the lattice.

  "Now," the Gaunt Man sighed as he readjusted the dials, "his possibilities are mine."

  Kurst looked to the stone slab, but all that remained of the stormer, once his possibilities were yanked out, was a dried, lifeless husk.

  31

  Already dressed and waiting for this moment, Mara walked out of the living cubicle, across the cluttered, chrome and pastel-plastic lab area, and toward the doorway leading to the access hall. Even though her fear of failure, death, maybe never being able to come home again, filled her mind, she willed her feet to take steps. Even though the fluttery feeling deep in her empty belly said, "Don't go!" she opened the door. There was nothing to pack. The cybertechs would check out her circuits, enhancements, and power pack when she got to the Transference Facility. But she stopped just short of leaving her apartment, slid her right hand into the right hip pocket of her black jumpsuit, reached through the slit on the inside of that pocket, and pushed open the concealed cover of
the storage pouch in her right thigh.

  Inside the storage pouch, her hand briefly fondled the data plate that held her recordings of the world she was about to leave. The recordings were incomplete, as yet. But the plate would be there for her to work on when she needed to think about something besides cosmverse physics and war. It would be there when she needed to plug it in and see Kadandra, if only as images imposed upon her brain.

  Reassured that the plate was there, she left the apartment. In the hall, after the door had shut silently behind her, she inserted her right index finger into the round security socket on the door. A small, electric tingling rippled from her elbow, through her arm and finger and into the door that then locked with an audible click.

  "It's kinda sexual," she had once mentioned to Ken-dal Alec-Four when trying to describe this enhancement. He had looked at her with either disgust or amusement. With Alec, she knew, it was often hard to tell the difference between the two. At the grav-shaft at the end of the access hall, she pushed the down button and, when the capsule arrived, stepped in and said, "Garage level five."

  "Of course, Dr. Hachi Mara-Two," said the rich, male, synthesized voice of the capsule as its circuits analyzed her voice and gave her clearance to use the grav-shaft.

  The driver was leaning against the gleaming, stainless steel side of the air sled when she found stall twenty-three. Quizzically, he raised one eyebrow at her.

  "Front seat," she said, moving to the passenger side of the air sled. She opened the door and slid into the soft, leatherlike upholstery of the seat.

  The driver closed her door, entered the vehicle on the driver's side, took the control yoke in his hands, and asked, "Vehicle shaft or fast drop?"

  "Fast drop," answered Mara as she fastened the safety webbing and grabbed onto the handholds attached to the dashboard.

  "You got it," said the driver as he grinned at her and fastened his own webbing. Keypunching in the starter code, he spun the speed rheo to maximum and released fan baffles.