Blake's 7 Zombie Fic!
OK, here's the other long (for me) Blake's 7 story that's recently been released from multi-year zine limbo. This is, uh... Actually, I'm not sure quite what to say about this one, except that it was written in response to a request for a story with a "supernatural" theme. And that it was written way before zombies were "cool." (Well, OK, zombies have always been cool. But I've seen a whole bunch of zombie-themed fanfic in the last couple of years, and had never encountered any at the time I wrote this. I was being all original! I was! See, this is another reason why the long delays that are sometimes associated with zines kind of suck.)
This is ~11,000 words, set PGP, and contains spoilers through the end (and especially for the end). And it's very much a "read at your own risk" kind of thing. It contains decaying bodies and assorted other ickiness, as well as much extremely dark humor, and one scene that, while it doesn't contain anything explicit, features some disturbing sexual content. At least, I hope it's disturbing. If anybody finds it sexy I really, really don't want to know. Also, I very much recommend not reading this back-to-back with "Bargaining Stage." I mean it.
Again, this is in two parts, 'cause LJ says it's too long.
The Zombie Master
or
PGP of the Living Dead
Pt. 1
GAUDA PRIME, THE DAY AFTER
"...Raising the dead..."
Avon's head snapped up. The old hag had been talking non-stop for hours: about the contents of the herbal tea he'd been drinking (after which he'd immediately stopped drinking it), about the tediously extensive local folklore of Gauda Prime, and, for quite some time now, about her own purported supernatural powers. She was worse than Vila. It had got to the point where he was almost considering abandoning her smelly tent and taking his chances with the Federation, just to get away from her prattling. So it wasn't really surprising that he'd completely stopped listening. Until now.
"What?"
"Raising the dead," she said, apparently delighted at having evoked a response from him at last. "Zombies, my lad! One of my specialties. Why, I remember, once, when old Farmer Zotkins..."
"You can raise the dead?" His voice was scornful and disbelieving. No ridiculous traces of hopefulness in at all. Definitely not.
She gave him a toothless grin. "Skeptic, eh? Watch this, sonny!"
With a surprisingly spry twist of her gnarled body, she reached up to a peg on the wall of the tent and plucked down the carcass of a small mammal, which had presumably been hanging there for later use in the stewpot. Unless it was for some other purpose he didn't particularly want to know about.
Avon opened his mouth to say something, but she shot him a withering glare. "No talking! Just sit there and don't interrupt. I got to concentrate for this."
So he sat there and watched in bemusement as she muttered and chanted over the creature's body, pulled out a filthy knife with which she deftly sliced a shallow cut into her own finger, sprinkled tiny drops of blood around the furry corpse, muttered and chanted some more, and finally leaned back with a groan as her eyes rolled upwards into their sockets.
Then she smiled at him again, wiped her bleeding finger on a dress-hem even filthier than the knife had been and, with a palpable air of satisfaction said, "There! Whattdaya think of that, then, Mr. Skeptic?"
He stared pointedly at the still-dead animal.
Which twitched.
She grinned. He gaped. The creature twitched again, shook its furry head, rose unsteadily to its feet and lurched for the tent door.
He set down his long-neglected teacup, deliberately ignoring the slight trembling in his hand. "Can you do that with a human being?"
"'Course I can. Much harder with people, though. Takes a terrible price, it does. Not one I'd be willing to pay, neither."
"Could you teach me?"
She regarded him calmly. "Oh, I think you're the type as could learn. Assuming you're willing to pay the price."
"Which is?"
"Well, to begin with, it requires a human sacrifice."
If she expected him to so much as blink at that, she was disappointed. "And?"
"And it'll cost you half your soul."
He smiled darkly. "I'm not sure there is that much of it left."
Keen eyes bored into him. "Oh, I'd say you've got just about that much left." She sucked absently at her injured finger without taking her gaze from him. "That should probably make it easier for you, truth be told."
"Well, then," he said, smiling in exactly the way you'd expect a man with half a soul to smile. "Show me."
"Wait just a minute, sonny. There's still the matter of my fee, ya know."
"What do you want?"
"What have you got?"
He spread his arms slightly, displaying for her everything he had left in the universe.
"That'll do," she said. "It's been a long time since I had a comely lad like you in me bed. Particularly without having to go to the trouble o' layin' a spell on him." Staring into her leering, wrinkled face, it was easy enough to see why.
He shrugged and began unfastening his tunic. Why not? He'd been intimate with far viler things than her.
And it wasn't like he had anything better to do.
FIVE DAYS AFTER
There was only one trooper guarding the room where the bodies were kept. For Avon's purposes, this was ideal. Using the rather... unusual stealth techniques the old woman had taught him (and trying hard not to think about the details of the payment she had extracted for that instruction), he crept up behind the unsuspecting trooper and efficiently clubbed the man into unconsciousness.
Avon dragged the body into the storage room and quietly shut the door behind him, confident that the occupants of Blake's former base remained unaware of his presence.
Carefully, he surveyed the room. Five beds. Five bodies. Five familiar bodies.
Five rather ripe familiar bodies, in fact. You'd think the Federation could have set up some refrigeration equipment in here. He hoped that wouldn't be a problem.
One of the bodies was staring at him.
"Damn it, Blake, don't look at me like that. I'm fixing it, aren't I?" He realized he was talking to dead man, and stopped, feeling embarrassed. Then again, with any luck, he'd have to get used to it, wouldn't he?
He pulled the knife from his boot, and with a snarl, hauled the unconscious trooper to his feet. He took a deep breath... and slit the man's throat.
Hoarsely, he began chanting as he grabbed the dying trooper by his feet and started dragging him in a slow circuit about the room, tracing a circle around the clustered beds with spurts of bright arterial blood.
When it was finished he rolled the trooper's body to the side, well out of the circle, and, still chanting, allowed his eyes to roll upwards into his head. He wasn't entirely sure just how serious the old witch had been about this particular part of the ceremony, but no matter how incongruously silly it made him feel, he was not about to risk omitting it. And at least he'd had a lot of practice at rolling his eyes upward, after all those times he'd been hit on the head.
When he looked again, the bodies were moving. One by one, they lurched to their feet and began to look around them with empty animal eyes.
"Brainsss..." hissed Tarrant.
The others immediately took up the chorus. "Brainsss... Brainsss... Brainssss..."
"Yes," said Avon. There was no fear in him. These corpses would not hurt him. They would obey him. He was their Master.
"Yes," he said again, throwing open the door. "Kill!"
They hardly needed the encouragement, practically knocking pieces off each other in their haste to get through the door.
In moments, he could hear screams. And gunfire. And more screams. And some rather disturbing slurping noises.
So, this was what one got in exchange for half a soul. Not a bad trade, he decided. Certainly much better than what he'd got for the first half.
He didn't even feel any different.
Much.
Smiling, Avon went forth to witness the carnage.
SEVEN DAYS AFTER
Avon and his army of zombies were gathered around the breakfast table. Avon sat eating his own meal in silence and trying not to look too closely at the contents of the others' plates. The others, for their part, were generally attempting the same thing, albeit with rather less success.
And then, of course, there was Vila.
"I can't eat this!"
Avon calmly lifted a forkful of his own breakfast to his mouth and chewed. "Why not?"
"Why not? Why not? Because it's a human brain, Avon, that's why not!"
"It's not like it's the first one you've eaten," Avon pointed out, quite reasonably. "I personally watched you rip the heads off of at least four troopers immediately after your reanimation."
Vila's corpse-green skin became even greener. "That was... That was different! I wasn't in my right mind then!"
"Well, if you want to stay in your right mind -- such as it is -- you will have to learn to adjust your diet. We have been over this, Vila. Without regular consumption of human cerebral material, you will begin to decay -- well, more than you already have -- and your mental functioning will be severely impaired, a form of deterioration which you, of all people, can ill afford to suffer."
"Unfortunately, Vila," said Tarrant, lifting a forkful of brain and regarding it with a grimace, "he does seem to be right about that."
"Shut up, Tarrant," they both said at once.
Tarrant's mouth spasmed shut with an audible click, and he gave Avon a murderous glare. Dayna and Soolin exchanged a glance. Blake, still under a "don't talk to me" order from the day before, silently got up and left the table.
Avon just smiled. "Of course, if you want to turn back into the mindless, ravening beast you were when I first raised you, by all means, continue to fast. The results might be amusing."
Vila stared down at the raw mass of gray-red goop that constituted his "breakfast" and swallowed. "Can't I at least have something alcoholic to wash it down with?"
"At this hour of the morning? Besides, you couldn't metabolize it."
Vila gave him an anguished look.
"If it makes you feel any better, you might consider the possibility that, for all you know, that particular organ might well have belonged to the man who killed you." He grinned soullessly. "Think of it as poetic justice."
Vila picked up his fork, looked at the plate, looked at Avon, looked at the plate again. He put the fork down.
"Avon!" he wailed. "I can't! Don't make me! I can't!"
"Vila." Avon's tone was perfectly reasonable, and Vila looked up at him with hopeful eyes. "Shut up and eat your brains."
Vila's hand lurched out, grabbed the fork, scooped up a huge, gooey chunk, and popped it neatly into his helplessly struggling mouth.
Avon smiled.
"May I be excused, please?" said Dayna. "I think I've had enough."
TWO WEEKS AFTER
"On your knees, Blake."
Blake fought it, of course. He'd never accepted the Federation's power over him, and he'd be damned if he would accept Avon's.
He knelt anyway.
"Avon, don't you think..."
"Shut up!"
His mouth closed itself at Avon's command, but his glare continued, effortlessly conveying the proverbial thousand words.
Avon merely grinned past him. "Well, now, this makes quite a change, doesn't it? You taking my orders. Perhaps there is some justice in the universe, after all."
The muscles of Blake's jaws clenched.
Avon looked down at him, his smile turning cold. "It is justice, Blake. After all you've put me through, after all I've done for you, you owe me. And I do intend to collect."
Blake hardly needed the use of his voice to convey what he thought of this assertion.
Avon laughed, sounding disturbingly like a kid with a new toy. A streak of panic flashed through Blake. He'd be willing to bet that Avon was the kind of child who'd taken his toys apart to see how they worked.
"I am your master now. I created you. You will do what I command."
Blake rolled his eyes to show how bored he was with all this oratory. Really, the man sounded like a villain in a melodramatic holovid.
Avon's hand shot out, tangling in Blake's limp hair, forcing his head down. "Don't struggle," he said, just as Blake's nervous system had finished sending out its first "struggle" command. The two impulses waged a brief, convulsive war, before Blake's nervous system remembered that it was dead and gave up. No trusting anything these days.
Avon removed his hand from Blake's hair and placed in on his own hip. Which he then thrust forward suggestively.
"Anything I command."
Blake gave him a you've-got-to-be-kidding look.
"Oh, yes." Avon was clearly getting off on this. He was purring like a cat with a facefull of cream.
Oooh, bad image.
"I can make you do it. I will make you do it."
Blake wondered if Avon appreciated the staggering opportunities for deadly comeback lines that damned "shut up" command was forcing him to miss. It was almost more annoying than this whole sexual humiliation thing Avon apparently was intent on. To have a deadly comeback line and not to be able to use it on Avon... now that was unfair.
"First," he said in a voice that was entirely too pleased with itself, "kiss my boot."
So Blake did it. As if that proved anything. Then he raised he face to gaze into Avon's with all the defiance and insolence he could muster.
And saw Avon staring at his boot with a queasy look on his face.
They both stared for a moment at the slimy chunk of flesh stuck to the toe. Blake tentatively touched his face, found himself unable to repress a slightly hysterical thought about "giving Avon lip," and decided maybe it was just as well he couldn't speak, after all.
Avon gave a pale, shaky chuckle and said "On second thought, perhaps I don't care to add necrophilia to my list of vices after all."
Blake smiled. Avon shuddered.
"Go away, Blake."
Well, that was one order that Blake didn't mind obeying. He gladly turned around and went, leaving Avon alone to shake the gunk off his shoe and contemplate the thought that perhaps the old gypsy woman wasn't looking so bad, after all...
FIFTEEN DAYS AFTER
"This simply can not be allowed to continue!" Tarrant's death-pale face was tinged with the pink of indignation.
"Tarrant's right." Soolin's voice cut across the noises of assent made by the others. "Avon was always difficult to deal with, but this time he's gone several light-years too far."
"He's had me working on that captured ship of his day and night for the last week," Tarrant went on. "The only reason he let me stop long enough to come here tonight is that I finally convinced him that if he didn't let me have a brain break once in a while, I'd start leaking into the engines!"
"At least he hasn't turned you into his personal slave!" countered Vila. "Cleaning up after him, waiting on him hand and foot... 'Vila, fetch this,' and 'Vila do that!' 'Bring me my breakfast, Vila!' 'Wash the stains out of my leather, Vila!' 'Go saw open some troopers' skulls, Vila!' Do you know how ripe those dead troopers are getting?"
"All right, Vila," Dayna cut in. "We get the idea!"
"Absolute power," said Blake, who was at least being allowed to talk today. "And Avon's been corrupted absolutely."
"Not that Avon took much corrupting," added Tarrant.
"I don't like being a zombie, Blake!" Vila wailed. "Brain-eating makes me nauseous, and I'm afraid Avon's going to order me to jump off a cliff one day just for a laugh, and all the best bits of me are falling off! And I can't even have a little drink to forget my troubles!"
"I have to agree with Vila," said Dayna. "Much though I hate to admit it. Although..." A wicked smile crept onto her face. "I must say, there is a certain attraction to the idea of vengeance from beyond the grave. If Avon ever lets me, I would take great delight in eating Servalan's brain personally."
"Yes, well, one thing at a time," said Blake. "The question is, what are we going to do about Avon?"
"I think what you're really asking, Blake, is 'How do we kill him?'"
"Soolin!" Dayna sounded shocked.
"I don't like it, either, Dayna, but be practical..."
"No," Blake interrupted her. "No. There's been enough killing. Even if it were possible."
"Haven't you ever heard the phrase 'turnabout is fair play,' Blake?" Tarrant said nastily.
Blake glared at Tarrant grimly, and he lapsed back into silence.
"No," Blake said again. "We're not going to kill him. But Tarrant is right: this can't be permitted to continue. Even the Federation never had this kind of control over people."
"If you still consider us people," Soolin said.
Blake ignored her. "We have to find out the source of this power of his, if we're going to manage to defeat it."
"Oh, that's easy!" said Vila. "He learned it all from some old woman, he said. Out in the hills, somewhere."
"Wait," said Soolin, looking surprised. "An old witch woman? In a tent?"
"You know her?" asked Blake eagerly.
"I know of her," said Soolin. "Everyone on GP does. People used to tell stories about her, to frighten children into behaving. I even saw her once, from a distance. I ran the other way. I was six." She frowned. "It can't be the same woman, though. She must've been close to a hundred then."
"If she can teach people how to raise the dead," Dayna pointed out rationally, "then who's to say she can't still be alive herself?"
"Soolin," said Blake. "Do you know where to find this woman?"
Soolin shrugged. "I'd know where to start looking."
"Good." Blake smiled. "We know what we need to do next, then. One way or another, we are going to break Avon's control."
"What are you giggling about?" Tarrant asked, staring at Vila, who was, indeed, giggling.
"Well, it's quite a pun, really, isn't it?" There was a horribly smug look on his face. "The zombies are..."
"Don't say it!" Dayna groaned, anticipating him.
"...Revolting!" He ducked quickly as Tarrant threw a spanner at him.
SIXTEEN DAYS AFTER
The old woman came out of her tent just as Soolin, Blake and Vila crested the top of the hill.
"Left you late enough, he did," she said as they approached. "Still I suppose that couldn't be avoided."
"You know who we are?" said Blake.
"I know whose you are," she said, scanning him up and down with an appraising look. "Hmm. Nice, strong aura, though. Good work, there."
Appearing to dismiss Blake entirely, she turned to Vila, gently tilting up his chin and examining the flesh of his face. He gave her a nervous smile.
"Good animation, too. Not much lurching, fine muscle control." She released Vila's chin and grinned at him, a look that was, if possible, even more disturbing than her stare. "He did do the eye rolling!"
"The reason we've come to find you..." said Blake.
"The reason you've come to find me," she interrupted brusquely, "is that you don't like being undead. Right?"
"Right!" said Vila enthusiastically.
"Actually..." Blake began.
She cut him off again. "Right. That's people for ya. Never satisfied. No, undead ain't good enough. They wanna be alive. Never mind that undead beats dead, which is what ya were. No, they want it all. No gratitude, just greed. Gimme, gimme, gimme!"
"How much?" asked Soolin dryly.
The old woman cackled. "I like your style, young woman! Very direct." She squinted at Soolin for a moment. "Wait. I know you, don't I? Yes... Little girl who ran away crying!"
Soolin seemed to have difficulty deciding whether to look embarrassed or surprised, and finally managed to settle on her usual cool aloofness. "How much?" she repeated.
"'T'ain't a question of money, dearie. 'Tis a question of what your fancy-educated master would call 'entropy.' A corpse is a corpse. You can make it get up and walk around, but you can't turn it back into a live body. Not with any kind of magic I ever knew of, anyway."
"So we're stuck like this?" moaned Vila. "Forever?"
"There, there." She patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. "I'm sure you'll get used to it, my boy." She peered at his face again, frowning. "Maybe we can get you cleaned up a bit. Preservation spell, take some of that green from yer eyeballs..."
"Actually," said Blake, his very best I-am-in-control-of-the-situation voice completely drowning out Vila's eagerly positive response, "What we really want to know is how to break Avon's control over us."
"Ah. So it's not yer physical state that's botherin' ya, is it? It's the geas." She almost sounded approving.
"The what?" Vila's brow wrinkled up in confusion.
"The geas, my lad!" she cried, clapping him on the shoulder with rather surprising force. "The compulsion to obey your master."
"Avon is not our master," growled Blake.
"Ah, but he is. That grates on you somethin' fierce, doesn't it? But he's the one what raised you, and the power over you is his. It's a fundamental part o' necromancy. There ain't no gettin' around it."
"So there's nothing we can do?" said Soolin, fingering her gun as though suddenly itching to use it on Avon, geas or no geas.
The old woman's eyes unfocused for a moment, and she went utterly still.
"Er, lady?" said Vila at last, passing a hand in front of her eyes. "Lady? Are you all right?"
Her eyes snapped back into focus and locked in on Vila with a glacier-melting gaze. "O' course I'm all right! I'm just thinkin', is all!"
She turned back to Blake. "All right," she said brusquely. "Here's the thing you got to know about necromancy. If you want to undo somethin' like this, you got to give back whatever thing it was that the necromancer gave up to do the spell in the first place. Right?"
"I'll take your word for it," said Blake with a hint of amusement.
"Smart lad. All right. Thing is, the half a soul your Avon gave up..."
"What!?"
She glared at Blake for the interruption. "Half his soul," she snapped. "Half his soul. Completely standard in this sort of thing. Anyway, the thing is, he gave it up to animate you, and if you give it back you'll all be ordinary non-walking corpses again. And undead, as I said before, bein' preferable to dead, I can only assume you're not wantin' that. Besides which, he's not likely to want it back after it's been used to animate you lot. Half a soul tainted with that kind o' dark magic is far worse than no soul at all."
"But?" said Vila hopefully.
She smiled and pinched his cheek. "But, zombie-me-lad, one half o' a man's soul is just as good as the other half, and your Avon's left bits and pieces of his all over the place. Get those back to him, and, well..." She winked.
"And you can do this for us?" asked Soolin dubiously.
"I can give you the means to do it yourself," said the witch. "I'm too old to go gallivantin' around the galaxy collectin' bits o' soul. Besides, who'd feed my lizards?"
"Thank you," said Blake, relief and gratitude in his voice.
"Don't thank me yet," she said, casting an amused glance in Soolin's direction. "We still ain't discussed my fee." She looked Blake carefully up and down, then shook her head. "If you were a little less decomposed, I'd be tempted to ask ya for what yer master paid. As it is..." She grinned toothlessly. "I'll take cash."
Blake smiled and began digging into his pockets.
SEVENTEEN DAYS AFTER
Vila, despite his protestations, had managed to wrangle more freedom out of Avon than any of the rest of them and was pretty much allowed to wander the base as he pleased. It was Vila, therefore, who'd been elected to go and explain things to the other two.
The other two, currently, were staring at Vila as if he'd lost his mind.
"So we have to go and find these pieces of Avon's soul?" Dayna was obviously struggling to take this seriously.
"Personally, I was a little surprised to find out he ever had one," replied Vila. "But that's the idea, anyway."
"And she expects us to believe that, this strange old woman of yours?"
"You didn't see her, Tarrant! She was... spooky. If she says she can put half of Avon's soul back, I believe her!"
"Well," said Dayna slowly. "It's certainly clear that she has some kind of power. We've had first-hand evidence of that." She held out her own hands before her, examining the loose, gray-tinged flesh with a grimace. "And there were witch doctors on Sarran who could do some pretty amazing things, whether you call it magic or not."
"Well, that's as may be," said Tarrant. "But I still find it hard to believe that we're supposed to work this magic -- or whatever it is -- with... with that!"
The three of them stared for a moment at the objects Vila was carrying. Even he had to admit they didn't look like much. He held up the forked twig, cleared his throat, and began in what he thought of as his Lecture Mode (as distinguished, of course, from Avon's far less congenial Lecture Mode, which tended to make audiences rapidly wish they were elsewhere, preferably somewhere where people didn't think they were too stupid to live).
"This is an, um, soul-piece-locator. It's like a dowser... a downsing... a..."
"A dowsing rod?" Dayna cut in impatiently.
"Er, yeah, one of them. Only for souls, y'see. You take hold of it by the forky bits, and you say the magic words, and it points you to where the, er, bit of Avon's soul is. Works with star charts, too, she said. Just hold it over the map and write down the coordinates where it points!"
"And I suppose the jar is to hold these soul pieces once we've caught them?" Tarrant smiled. His white teeth gleamed disturbingly against slimy black gums.
"That's right!" Vila peered closely at the object in question. It appeared to be an entirely ordinary glass jar, complete with screw-on top, except for the (mercifully unidentified) small bone tied just below the mouth on a piece of grubby string. "The string's to keep the bits you've already got from getting out again until you're ready, I think. Somehow. I don't know what the bone's for, but she said not to mess with it."
"All right, Vila." said Tarrant with exaggerated tolerance. "I'll go get the star charts. Why don't you show us how it works?"
**
A few minutes later, Tarrant's worktable was cleared of various half-assembled stardrive parts and the massive hardcopy star charts salvaged from Scorpio lay unrolled across it.
"Well, go on, Vila." The teeth gleamed again. "Work your magic!"
"Right. Here goes." Vila cleared his throat, grasped the prongs of the stick firmly in either hand, held it poised above the chart, and began chanting nonsense syllables in a slow, careful voice. He was rather proud of himself, actually. He'd been muttering the words under his breath all morning, and was pretty sure he had them completely perfect.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Dayna spoke up gently. "Vila, are you..."
And then Vila gave a yelp as the soul-dowser nearly yanked his arms from their sockets... and came to a quivering stop pointing, not at the star chart, but directly at the far wall.
Dayna snorted. "It doesn't work!"
"Yes, it does," Tarrant's voice was a near-whisper. "You know what's off in that direction, Dayna?"
Vila let go of the implement. It hovered there in mid-air for a moment, shivering, before clattering to the floor. "The tracking gallery," he said in a horrified whimper.
**
All the blood had been cleaned up. Vila knew this, because he'd been the one who'd had to do it. He had hoped never to set foot in the room again, and Tarrant and Dayna practically had to drag him over the threshold this time.
"All right, Vila. Try it now." Tarrant took a deep breath, trying not to shiver. He'd always thought that the old saying about someone walking over your grave was mere superstition.
Vila held the slender twig in both shaking hands and began reciting the words in a rapid, breathless fashion. It jerked in his grasp and aimed itself promptly at a spot in the middle of the room.
He gulped. "This is it, all right."
"I suppose it really shouldn't be surprising," said Tarrant.
"It all worked out nice for Avon, didn't it?" Vila's voice was suddenly bitter.
Dayna looked affronted. "What do you mean?"
"He got the satisfaction of shooting Blake... without any of the guilt. 'Cause he 'fixed' it, didn’t he? A little black magic, make it all better! And now he's got just what he always wanted: a bunch of 'friends' who'll hang on his every word and always do what he says and can't possibly ever betray him."
"Is that what we're doing now?" She sounded disturbed. "Betraying him?"
"No! We're helping him. Giving him back what he's lost." Tarrant paused. "Well, at least some of it. Assuming this works, that is." He chuckled sadly. "I never thought I'd be looking to get the Avon of Xenon Base back, but he'd certainly be an improvement on the current version."
He turned to Vila, visibly dragging his mind back to the business at hand. "All right. What do we do now?"
"I dunno. Open the jar, I suppose."
Dayna, who was holding the jar, looked at it and shrugged. "All right. Here goes!" She unscrewed the top.
There was a scream. Or at least, something like a scream. And something like a rush of air, and something like... Well, something like something that was hard to describe, really. A wave of emotion crashing over them, painful and sweet and over too fast to be experienced properly.
Dayna held up the jar, a look of shock and wonder on her face. There was something in it.
EIGHTEEN DAYS AFTER
"So this is part of Avon's soul," said Blake, peering into the jar. Within it something blackly luminous writhed like liquid smoke, beating uselessly against the glass walls of the container.
"Pretty much what I would have expected it to look like," said Vila. "Dark and shifty and hard on the eyes."
"It looks like it's trying to get out," commented Dayna. "I don't think it likes being trapped in there."
"I'm not surprised," Blake said with a faint, sad smile. He reached out and trailed his fingers along the glass. The trapped soul-fragment stilled for a moment under his touch. He stroked it gently through the jar for a moment, then withdrew his hand. It writhed more violently than before.
Blake fixed the others with his stare. "Next piece," he said grimly.
The star chart was unrolled once again, and this time when Vila completed his incantation the rod merely quivered slightly in his hands, tugging him gently across the starry map until it came to rest above a spot on the map indicated only by the symbol for a star system and a set of coordinates.
"That seems vaguely familiar," said Tarrant. Blake peered eagerly over his shoulder as he looked up the planet's identity.
"Where's... Malodaar?" he asked innocently.
Vila groaned and buried his head in his hands.
Tarrant and Dayna gave him sympathetic looks, but Soolin flashed a macabre smile and said "Oh, I don't know, Vila. I should think you'd be flattered."
Vila made a rude gesture at her without ever lifting his hands from his eyes.
[Link to Pt. 2]
This is ~11,000 words, set PGP, and contains spoilers through the end (and especially for the end). And it's very much a "read at your own risk" kind of thing. It contains decaying bodies and assorted other ickiness, as well as much extremely dark humor, and one scene that, while it doesn't contain anything explicit, features some disturbing sexual content. At least, I hope it's disturbing. If anybody finds it sexy I really, really don't want to know. Also, I very much recommend not reading this back-to-back with "Bargaining Stage." I mean it.
Again, this is in two parts, 'cause LJ says it's too long.
The Zombie Master
or
PGP of the Living Dead
Pt. 1
GAUDA PRIME, THE DAY AFTER
"...Raising the dead..."
Avon's head snapped up. The old hag had been talking non-stop for hours: about the contents of the herbal tea he'd been drinking (after which he'd immediately stopped drinking it), about the tediously extensive local folklore of Gauda Prime, and, for quite some time now, about her own purported supernatural powers. She was worse than Vila. It had got to the point where he was almost considering abandoning her smelly tent and taking his chances with the Federation, just to get away from her prattling. So it wasn't really surprising that he'd completely stopped listening. Until now.
"What?"
"Raising the dead," she said, apparently delighted at having evoked a response from him at last. "Zombies, my lad! One of my specialties. Why, I remember, once, when old Farmer Zotkins..."
"You can raise the dead?" His voice was scornful and disbelieving. No ridiculous traces of hopefulness in at all. Definitely not.
She gave him a toothless grin. "Skeptic, eh? Watch this, sonny!"
With a surprisingly spry twist of her gnarled body, she reached up to a peg on the wall of the tent and plucked down the carcass of a small mammal, which had presumably been hanging there for later use in the stewpot. Unless it was for some other purpose he didn't particularly want to know about.
Avon opened his mouth to say something, but she shot him a withering glare. "No talking! Just sit there and don't interrupt. I got to concentrate for this."
So he sat there and watched in bemusement as she muttered and chanted over the creature's body, pulled out a filthy knife with which she deftly sliced a shallow cut into her own finger, sprinkled tiny drops of blood around the furry corpse, muttered and chanted some more, and finally leaned back with a groan as her eyes rolled upwards into their sockets.
Then she smiled at him again, wiped her bleeding finger on a dress-hem even filthier than the knife had been and, with a palpable air of satisfaction said, "There! Whattdaya think of that, then, Mr. Skeptic?"
He stared pointedly at the still-dead animal.
Which twitched.
She grinned. He gaped. The creature twitched again, shook its furry head, rose unsteadily to its feet and lurched for the tent door.
He set down his long-neglected teacup, deliberately ignoring the slight trembling in his hand. "Can you do that with a human being?"
"'Course I can. Much harder with people, though. Takes a terrible price, it does. Not one I'd be willing to pay, neither."
"Could you teach me?"
She regarded him calmly. "Oh, I think you're the type as could learn. Assuming you're willing to pay the price."
"Which is?"
"Well, to begin with, it requires a human sacrifice."
If she expected him to so much as blink at that, she was disappointed. "And?"
"And it'll cost you half your soul."
He smiled darkly. "I'm not sure there is that much of it left."
Keen eyes bored into him. "Oh, I'd say you've got just about that much left." She sucked absently at her injured finger without taking her gaze from him. "That should probably make it easier for you, truth be told."
"Well, then," he said, smiling in exactly the way you'd expect a man with half a soul to smile. "Show me."
"Wait just a minute, sonny. There's still the matter of my fee, ya know."
"What do you want?"
"What have you got?"
He spread his arms slightly, displaying for her everything he had left in the universe.
"That'll do," she said. "It's been a long time since I had a comely lad like you in me bed. Particularly without having to go to the trouble o' layin' a spell on him." Staring into her leering, wrinkled face, it was easy enough to see why.
He shrugged and began unfastening his tunic. Why not? He'd been intimate with far viler things than her.
And it wasn't like he had anything better to do.
FIVE DAYS AFTER
There was only one trooper guarding the room where the bodies were kept. For Avon's purposes, this was ideal. Using the rather... unusual stealth techniques the old woman had taught him (and trying hard not to think about the details of the payment she had extracted for that instruction), he crept up behind the unsuspecting trooper and efficiently clubbed the man into unconsciousness.
Avon dragged the body into the storage room and quietly shut the door behind him, confident that the occupants of Blake's former base remained unaware of his presence.
Carefully, he surveyed the room. Five beds. Five bodies. Five familiar bodies.
Five rather ripe familiar bodies, in fact. You'd think the Federation could have set up some refrigeration equipment in here. He hoped that wouldn't be a problem.
One of the bodies was staring at him.
"Damn it, Blake, don't look at me like that. I'm fixing it, aren't I?" He realized he was talking to dead man, and stopped, feeling embarrassed. Then again, with any luck, he'd have to get used to it, wouldn't he?
He pulled the knife from his boot, and with a snarl, hauled the unconscious trooper to his feet. He took a deep breath... and slit the man's throat.
Hoarsely, he began chanting as he grabbed the dying trooper by his feet and started dragging him in a slow circuit about the room, tracing a circle around the clustered beds with spurts of bright arterial blood.
When it was finished he rolled the trooper's body to the side, well out of the circle, and, still chanting, allowed his eyes to roll upwards into his head. He wasn't entirely sure just how serious the old witch had been about this particular part of the ceremony, but no matter how incongruously silly it made him feel, he was not about to risk omitting it. And at least he'd had a lot of practice at rolling his eyes upward, after all those times he'd been hit on the head.
When he looked again, the bodies were moving. One by one, they lurched to their feet and began to look around them with empty animal eyes.
"Brainsss..." hissed Tarrant.
The others immediately took up the chorus. "Brainsss... Brainsss... Brainssss..."
"Yes," said Avon. There was no fear in him. These corpses would not hurt him. They would obey him. He was their Master.
"Yes," he said again, throwing open the door. "Kill!"
They hardly needed the encouragement, practically knocking pieces off each other in their haste to get through the door.
In moments, he could hear screams. And gunfire. And more screams. And some rather disturbing slurping noises.
So, this was what one got in exchange for half a soul. Not a bad trade, he decided. Certainly much better than what he'd got for the first half.
He didn't even feel any different.
Much.
Smiling, Avon went forth to witness the carnage.
SEVEN DAYS AFTER
Avon and his army of zombies were gathered around the breakfast table. Avon sat eating his own meal in silence and trying not to look too closely at the contents of the others' plates. The others, for their part, were generally attempting the same thing, albeit with rather less success.
And then, of course, there was Vila.
"I can't eat this!"
Avon calmly lifted a forkful of his own breakfast to his mouth and chewed. "Why not?"
"Why not? Why not? Because it's a human brain, Avon, that's why not!"
"It's not like it's the first one you've eaten," Avon pointed out, quite reasonably. "I personally watched you rip the heads off of at least four troopers immediately after your reanimation."
Vila's corpse-green skin became even greener. "That was... That was different! I wasn't in my right mind then!"
"Well, if you want to stay in your right mind -- such as it is -- you will have to learn to adjust your diet. We have been over this, Vila. Without regular consumption of human cerebral material, you will begin to decay -- well, more than you already have -- and your mental functioning will be severely impaired, a form of deterioration which you, of all people, can ill afford to suffer."
"Unfortunately, Vila," said Tarrant, lifting a forkful of brain and regarding it with a grimace, "he does seem to be right about that."
"Shut up, Tarrant," they both said at once.
Tarrant's mouth spasmed shut with an audible click, and he gave Avon a murderous glare. Dayna and Soolin exchanged a glance. Blake, still under a "don't talk to me" order from the day before, silently got up and left the table.
Avon just smiled. "Of course, if you want to turn back into the mindless, ravening beast you were when I first raised you, by all means, continue to fast. The results might be amusing."
Vila stared down at the raw mass of gray-red goop that constituted his "breakfast" and swallowed. "Can't I at least have something alcoholic to wash it down with?"
"At this hour of the morning? Besides, you couldn't metabolize it."
Vila gave him an anguished look.
"If it makes you feel any better, you might consider the possibility that, for all you know, that particular organ might well have belonged to the man who killed you." He grinned soullessly. "Think of it as poetic justice."
Vila picked up his fork, looked at the plate, looked at Avon, looked at the plate again. He put the fork down.
"Avon!" he wailed. "I can't! Don't make me! I can't!"
"Vila." Avon's tone was perfectly reasonable, and Vila looked up at him with hopeful eyes. "Shut up and eat your brains."
Vila's hand lurched out, grabbed the fork, scooped up a huge, gooey chunk, and popped it neatly into his helplessly struggling mouth.
Avon smiled.
"May I be excused, please?" said Dayna. "I think I've had enough."
TWO WEEKS AFTER
"On your knees, Blake."
Blake fought it, of course. He'd never accepted the Federation's power over him, and he'd be damned if he would accept Avon's.
He knelt anyway.
"Avon, don't you think..."
"Shut up!"
His mouth closed itself at Avon's command, but his glare continued, effortlessly conveying the proverbial thousand words.
Avon merely grinned past him. "Well, now, this makes quite a change, doesn't it? You taking my orders. Perhaps there is some justice in the universe, after all."
The muscles of Blake's jaws clenched.
Avon looked down at him, his smile turning cold. "It is justice, Blake. After all you've put me through, after all I've done for you, you owe me. And I do intend to collect."
Blake hardly needed the use of his voice to convey what he thought of this assertion.
Avon laughed, sounding disturbingly like a kid with a new toy. A streak of panic flashed through Blake. He'd be willing to bet that Avon was the kind of child who'd taken his toys apart to see how they worked.
"I am your master now. I created you. You will do what I command."
Blake rolled his eyes to show how bored he was with all this oratory. Really, the man sounded like a villain in a melodramatic holovid.
Avon's hand shot out, tangling in Blake's limp hair, forcing his head down. "Don't struggle," he said, just as Blake's nervous system had finished sending out its first "struggle" command. The two impulses waged a brief, convulsive war, before Blake's nervous system remembered that it was dead and gave up. No trusting anything these days.
Avon removed his hand from Blake's hair and placed in on his own hip. Which he then thrust forward suggestively.
"Anything I command."
Blake gave him a you've-got-to-be-kidding look.
"Oh, yes." Avon was clearly getting off on this. He was purring like a cat with a facefull of cream.
Oooh, bad image.
"I can make you do it. I will make you do it."
Blake wondered if Avon appreciated the staggering opportunities for deadly comeback lines that damned "shut up" command was forcing him to miss. It was almost more annoying than this whole sexual humiliation thing Avon apparently was intent on. To have a deadly comeback line and not to be able to use it on Avon... now that was unfair.
"First," he said in a voice that was entirely too pleased with itself, "kiss my boot."
So Blake did it. As if that proved anything. Then he raised he face to gaze into Avon's with all the defiance and insolence he could muster.
And saw Avon staring at his boot with a queasy look on his face.
They both stared for a moment at the slimy chunk of flesh stuck to the toe. Blake tentatively touched his face, found himself unable to repress a slightly hysterical thought about "giving Avon lip," and decided maybe it was just as well he couldn't speak, after all.
Avon gave a pale, shaky chuckle and said "On second thought, perhaps I don't care to add necrophilia to my list of vices after all."
Blake smiled. Avon shuddered.
"Go away, Blake."
Well, that was one order that Blake didn't mind obeying. He gladly turned around and went, leaving Avon alone to shake the gunk off his shoe and contemplate the thought that perhaps the old gypsy woman wasn't looking so bad, after all...
FIFTEEN DAYS AFTER
"This simply can not be allowed to continue!" Tarrant's death-pale face was tinged with the pink of indignation.
"Tarrant's right." Soolin's voice cut across the noises of assent made by the others. "Avon was always difficult to deal with, but this time he's gone several light-years too far."
"He's had me working on that captured ship of his day and night for the last week," Tarrant went on. "The only reason he let me stop long enough to come here tonight is that I finally convinced him that if he didn't let me have a brain break once in a while, I'd start leaking into the engines!"
"At least he hasn't turned you into his personal slave!" countered Vila. "Cleaning up after him, waiting on him hand and foot... 'Vila, fetch this,' and 'Vila do that!' 'Bring me my breakfast, Vila!' 'Wash the stains out of my leather, Vila!' 'Go saw open some troopers' skulls, Vila!' Do you know how ripe those dead troopers are getting?"
"All right, Vila," Dayna cut in. "We get the idea!"
"Absolute power," said Blake, who was at least being allowed to talk today. "And Avon's been corrupted absolutely."
"Not that Avon took much corrupting," added Tarrant.
"I don't like being a zombie, Blake!" Vila wailed. "Brain-eating makes me nauseous, and I'm afraid Avon's going to order me to jump off a cliff one day just for a laugh, and all the best bits of me are falling off! And I can't even have a little drink to forget my troubles!"
"I have to agree with Vila," said Dayna. "Much though I hate to admit it. Although..." A wicked smile crept onto her face. "I must say, there is a certain attraction to the idea of vengeance from beyond the grave. If Avon ever lets me, I would take great delight in eating Servalan's brain personally."
"Yes, well, one thing at a time," said Blake. "The question is, what are we going to do about Avon?"
"I think what you're really asking, Blake, is 'How do we kill him?'"
"Soolin!" Dayna sounded shocked.
"I don't like it, either, Dayna, but be practical..."
"No," Blake interrupted her. "No. There's been enough killing. Even if it were possible."
"Haven't you ever heard the phrase 'turnabout is fair play,' Blake?" Tarrant said nastily.
Blake glared at Tarrant grimly, and he lapsed back into silence.
"No," Blake said again. "We're not going to kill him. But Tarrant is right: this can't be permitted to continue. Even the Federation never had this kind of control over people."
"If you still consider us people," Soolin said.
Blake ignored her. "We have to find out the source of this power of his, if we're going to manage to defeat it."
"Oh, that's easy!" said Vila. "He learned it all from some old woman, he said. Out in the hills, somewhere."
"Wait," said Soolin, looking surprised. "An old witch woman? In a tent?"
"You know her?" asked Blake eagerly.
"I know of her," said Soolin. "Everyone on GP does. People used to tell stories about her, to frighten children into behaving. I even saw her once, from a distance. I ran the other way. I was six." She frowned. "It can't be the same woman, though. She must've been close to a hundred then."
"If she can teach people how to raise the dead," Dayna pointed out rationally, "then who's to say she can't still be alive herself?"
"Soolin," said Blake. "Do you know where to find this woman?"
Soolin shrugged. "I'd know where to start looking."
"Good." Blake smiled. "We know what we need to do next, then. One way or another, we are going to break Avon's control."
"What are you giggling about?" Tarrant asked, staring at Vila, who was, indeed, giggling.
"Well, it's quite a pun, really, isn't it?" There was a horribly smug look on his face. "The zombies are..."
"Don't say it!" Dayna groaned, anticipating him.
"...Revolting!" He ducked quickly as Tarrant threw a spanner at him.
SIXTEEN DAYS AFTER
The old woman came out of her tent just as Soolin, Blake and Vila crested the top of the hill.
"Left you late enough, he did," she said as they approached. "Still I suppose that couldn't be avoided."
"You know who we are?" said Blake.
"I know whose you are," she said, scanning him up and down with an appraising look. "Hmm. Nice, strong aura, though. Good work, there."
Appearing to dismiss Blake entirely, she turned to Vila, gently tilting up his chin and examining the flesh of his face. He gave her a nervous smile.
"Good animation, too. Not much lurching, fine muscle control." She released Vila's chin and grinned at him, a look that was, if possible, even more disturbing than her stare. "He did do the eye rolling!"
"The reason we've come to find you..." said Blake.
"The reason you've come to find me," she interrupted brusquely, "is that you don't like being undead. Right?"
"Right!" said Vila enthusiastically.
"Actually..." Blake began.
She cut him off again. "Right. That's people for ya. Never satisfied. No, undead ain't good enough. They wanna be alive. Never mind that undead beats dead, which is what ya were. No, they want it all. No gratitude, just greed. Gimme, gimme, gimme!"
"How much?" asked Soolin dryly.
The old woman cackled. "I like your style, young woman! Very direct." She squinted at Soolin for a moment. "Wait. I know you, don't I? Yes... Little girl who ran away crying!"
Soolin seemed to have difficulty deciding whether to look embarrassed or surprised, and finally managed to settle on her usual cool aloofness. "How much?" she repeated.
"'T'ain't a question of money, dearie. 'Tis a question of what your fancy-educated master would call 'entropy.' A corpse is a corpse. You can make it get up and walk around, but you can't turn it back into a live body. Not with any kind of magic I ever knew of, anyway."
"So we're stuck like this?" moaned Vila. "Forever?"
"There, there." She patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. "I'm sure you'll get used to it, my boy." She peered at his face again, frowning. "Maybe we can get you cleaned up a bit. Preservation spell, take some of that green from yer eyeballs..."
"Actually," said Blake, his very best I-am-in-control-of-the-situation voice completely drowning out Vila's eagerly positive response, "What we really want to know is how to break Avon's control over us."
"Ah. So it's not yer physical state that's botherin' ya, is it? It's the geas." She almost sounded approving.
"The what?" Vila's brow wrinkled up in confusion.
"The geas, my lad!" she cried, clapping him on the shoulder with rather surprising force. "The compulsion to obey your master."
"Avon is not our master," growled Blake.
"Ah, but he is. That grates on you somethin' fierce, doesn't it? But he's the one what raised you, and the power over you is his. It's a fundamental part o' necromancy. There ain't no gettin' around it."
"So there's nothing we can do?" said Soolin, fingering her gun as though suddenly itching to use it on Avon, geas or no geas.
The old woman's eyes unfocused for a moment, and she went utterly still.
"Er, lady?" said Vila at last, passing a hand in front of her eyes. "Lady? Are you all right?"
Her eyes snapped back into focus and locked in on Vila with a glacier-melting gaze. "O' course I'm all right! I'm just thinkin', is all!"
She turned back to Blake. "All right," she said brusquely. "Here's the thing you got to know about necromancy. If you want to undo somethin' like this, you got to give back whatever thing it was that the necromancer gave up to do the spell in the first place. Right?"
"I'll take your word for it," said Blake with a hint of amusement.
"Smart lad. All right. Thing is, the half a soul your Avon gave up..."
"What!?"
She glared at Blake for the interruption. "Half his soul," she snapped. "Half his soul. Completely standard in this sort of thing. Anyway, the thing is, he gave it up to animate you, and if you give it back you'll all be ordinary non-walking corpses again. And undead, as I said before, bein' preferable to dead, I can only assume you're not wantin' that. Besides which, he's not likely to want it back after it's been used to animate you lot. Half a soul tainted with that kind o' dark magic is far worse than no soul at all."
"But?" said Vila hopefully.
She smiled and pinched his cheek. "But, zombie-me-lad, one half o' a man's soul is just as good as the other half, and your Avon's left bits and pieces of his all over the place. Get those back to him, and, well..." She winked.
"And you can do this for us?" asked Soolin dubiously.
"I can give you the means to do it yourself," said the witch. "I'm too old to go gallivantin' around the galaxy collectin' bits o' soul. Besides, who'd feed my lizards?"
"Thank you," said Blake, relief and gratitude in his voice.
"Don't thank me yet," she said, casting an amused glance in Soolin's direction. "We still ain't discussed my fee." She looked Blake carefully up and down, then shook her head. "If you were a little less decomposed, I'd be tempted to ask ya for what yer master paid. As it is..." She grinned toothlessly. "I'll take cash."
Blake smiled and began digging into his pockets.
SEVENTEEN DAYS AFTER
Vila, despite his protestations, had managed to wrangle more freedom out of Avon than any of the rest of them and was pretty much allowed to wander the base as he pleased. It was Vila, therefore, who'd been elected to go and explain things to the other two.
The other two, currently, were staring at Vila as if he'd lost his mind.
"So we have to go and find these pieces of Avon's soul?" Dayna was obviously struggling to take this seriously.
"Personally, I was a little surprised to find out he ever had one," replied Vila. "But that's the idea, anyway."
"And she expects us to believe that, this strange old woman of yours?"
"You didn't see her, Tarrant! She was... spooky. If she says she can put half of Avon's soul back, I believe her!"
"Well," said Dayna slowly. "It's certainly clear that she has some kind of power. We've had first-hand evidence of that." She held out her own hands before her, examining the loose, gray-tinged flesh with a grimace. "And there were witch doctors on Sarran who could do some pretty amazing things, whether you call it magic or not."
"Well, that's as may be," said Tarrant. "But I still find it hard to believe that we're supposed to work this magic -- or whatever it is -- with... with that!"
The three of them stared for a moment at the objects Vila was carrying. Even he had to admit they didn't look like much. He held up the forked twig, cleared his throat, and began in what he thought of as his Lecture Mode (as distinguished, of course, from Avon's far less congenial Lecture Mode, which tended to make audiences rapidly wish they were elsewhere, preferably somewhere where people didn't think they were too stupid to live).
"This is an, um, soul-piece-locator. It's like a dowser... a downsing... a..."
"A dowsing rod?" Dayna cut in impatiently.
"Er, yeah, one of them. Only for souls, y'see. You take hold of it by the forky bits, and you say the magic words, and it points you to where the, er, bit of Avon's soul is. Works with star charts, too, she said. Just hold it over the map and write down the coordinates where it points!"
"And I suppose the jar is to hold these soul pieces once we've caught them?" Tarrant smiled. His white teeth gleamed disturbingly against slimy black gums.
"That's right!" Vila peered closely at the object in question. It appeared to be an entirely ordinary glass jar, complete with screw-on top, except for the (mercifully unidentified) small bone tied just below the mouth on a piece of grubby string. "The string's to keep the bits you've already got from getting out again until you're ready, I think. Somehow. I don't know what the bone's for, but she said not to mess with it."
"All right, Vila." said Tarrant with exaggerated tolerance. "I'll go get the star charts. Why don't you show us how it works?"
**
A few minutes later, Tarrant's worktable was cleared of various half-assembled stardrive parts and the massive hardcopy star charts salvaged from Scorpio lay unrolled across it.
"Well, go on, Vila." The teeth gleamed again. "Work your magic!"
"Right. Here goes." Vila cleared his throat, grasped the prongs of the stick firmly in either hand, held it poised above the chart, and began chanting nonsense syllables in a slow, careful voice. He was rather proud of himself, actually. He'd been muttering the words under his breath all morning, and was pretty sure he had them completely perfect.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Dayna spoke up gently. "Vila, are you..."
And then Vila gave a yelp as the soul-dowser nearly yanked his arms from their sockets... and came to a quivering stop pointing, not at the star chart, but directly at the far wall.
Dayna snorted. "It doesn't work!"
"Yes, it does," Tarrant's voice was a near-whisper. "You know what's off in that direction, Dayna?"
Vila let go of the implement. It hovered there in mid-air for a moment, shivering, before clattering to the floor. "The tracking gallery," he said in a horrified whimper.
**
All the blood had been cleaned up. Vila knew this, because he'd been the one who'd had to do it. He had hoped never to set foot in the room again, and Tarrant and Dayna practically had to drag him over the threshold this time.
"All right, Vila. Try it now." Tarrant took a deep breath, trying not to shiver. He'd always thought that the old saying about someone walking over your grave was mere superstition.
Vila held the slender twig in both shaking hands and began reciting the words in a rapid, breathless fashion. It jerked in his grasp and aimed itself promptly at a spot in the middle of the room.
He gulped. "This is it, all right."
"I suppose it really shouldn't be surprising," said Tarrant.
"It all worked out nice for Avon, didn't it?" Vila's voice was suddenly bitter.
Dayna looked affronted. "What do you mean?"
"He got the satisfaction of shooting Blake... without any of the guilt. 'Cause he 'fixed' it, didn’t he? A little black magic, make it all better! And now he's got just what he always wanted: a bunch of 'friends' who'll hang on his every word and always do what he says and can't possibly ever betray him."
"Is that what we're doing now?" She sounded disturbed. "Betraying him?"
"No! We're helping him. Giving him back what he's lost." Tarrant paused. "Well, at least some of it. Assuming this works, that is." He chuckled sadly. "I never thought I'd be looking to get the Avon of Xenon Base back, but he'd certainly be an improvement on the current version."
He turned to Vila, visibly dragging his mind back to the business at hand. "All right. What do we do now?"
"I dunno. Open the jar, I suppose."
Dayna, who was holding the jar, looked at it and shrugged. "All right. Here goes!" She unscrewed the top.
There was a scream. Or at least, something like a scream. And something like a rush of air, and something like... Well, something like something that was hard to describe, really. A wave of emotion crashing over them, painful and sweet and over too fast to be experienced properly.
Dayna held up the jar, a look of shock and wonder on her face. There was something in it.
EIGHTEEN DAYS AFTER
"So this is part of Avon's soul," said Blake, peering into the jar. Within it something blackly luminous writhed like liquid smoke, beating uselessly against the glass walls of the container.
"Pretty much what I would have expected it to look like," said Vila. "Dark and shifty and hard on the eyes."
"It looks like it's trying to get out," commented Dayna. "I don't think it likes being trapped in there."
"I'm not surprised," Blake said with a faint, sad smile. He reached out and trailed his fingers along the glass. The trapped soul-fragment stilled for a moment under his touch. He stroked it gently through the jar for a moment, then withdrew his hand. It writhed more violently than before.
Blake fixed the others with his stare. "Next piece," he said grimly.
The star chart was unrolled once again, and this time when Vila completed his incantation the rod merely quivered slightly in his hands, tugging him gently across the starry map until it came to rest above a spot on the map indicated only by the symbol for a star system and a set of coordinates.
"That seems vaguely familiar," said Tarrant. Blake peered eagerly over his shoulder as he looked up the planet's identity.
"Where's... Malodaar?" he asked innocently.
Vila groaned and buried his head in his hands.
Tarrant and Dayna gave him sympathetic looks, but Soolin flashed a macabre smile and said "Oh, I don't know, Vila. I should think you'd be flattered."
Vila made a rude gesture at her without ever lifting his hands from his eyes.
[Link to Pt. 2]