Chapter fourteen: Vengeance
Chapter fourteen
The gargoyle was of a fairly normal shape, all things considered. It was lizard-like in appearance, with a long dragging tail, horned ridges down its back, clawed hands and feet and a leering mouth full of sharp teeth. A pair of small, vestigial wings adorned its back. Aseena had seen a number of ones sculptured exactly like it.
None of them, however, had been fifteen meters tall. The ground shook with every step it took along the street.
"You can do that?" she shouted over the deafening rumble of the thing's movement - stone moving against stone, the ground moaning and crackling beneath its weight. "You can control that?"
"For a while," Dara said. She had a huge, mad grin plastered on her face. "It will fall apart under its own weight eventually, and I doubt I'll have the endurance to keep it running even for that long. But that's the beauty of it. I have a giant gargoyle. I don't need very long. I could flatten the entire Building Thirty-Seven by making the gargoyle jump up and down on it!"
"Yes, but Jalon is in there, so please don't do that," Aseena said. She wasn't sure she liked this. Dara had had an upsetting couple of days. She probably enjoyed the chance to stomp around and scare the crap out of people a little too much.
"Tsk," Dara said. "Ye weak of faith."
The gargoyle knelt down by Building Thirty-Seven and reached around it with its arms, each one as thick as a carriage. Then it slammed its fists against the opposite walls, once, twice, three times. Aseena heard the stone of the walls crack and crumble. The gargoyle's great fists broke apart too, but before her eyes, they reformed, cracks closing, broken-off pieces of Witch Stone flying to retake their place in the construction.
A motion caught Aseena's eye, and she looked around just in time to see a crossbow bolt strike the wall right next to Dara, bouncing off and striking up sparks.
"Get into cover, fool!" she gasped. She grabbed Dara and dragged her with her, into the safer shadows of a nearby alley. Several other crossbow bolts struck the spot where they had just been standing.
"Shoot at me, would they?" Dara growled.
"I think they might just be taking issue with you tearing holes in their secret installation!" Aseena said. She could hear a hint of hysteria in her own voice. "I know, I know, what a bunch of whiners, but you know how these government conspiracies can be!"
Dara shouted a long string of arcane words, and the gargoyle stuck its long arms in through the holes it had made and... lifted...
There was a deafening crack, followed by several more. Aseena glanced at Dara, and saw that her face was a mask of pain and exhertion. For a moment, she thought that the witch would pass out trying to do the impossible, but then the masonry of the building gave way, and the whole structure came loose.
The gargoyle lifted Building Thirty-Seven, half-turned and deposited it smack on the street, some ten meters away from where it had been standing. It slumped a little where it stood, but held. Aseena could see horrified faces turning up in the windows, looking out to see what the hell had just happened.
The gargoyle stood up straight again, positioning itself at the edge of the ragged foundation where the house had stood a moment ago.
"Come on," Dara said, and headed out of the alley at a brisk pace. Aseena followed her, looking around warily for more crossbows pointed in their direction. Dara seemed sure of herself, though, as she went to stand next to the gargoyle.
Where the house had stood, there was now a partly exposed cellar. In some places, the floor had remained, leaving rooms of the first level of the building exposed. Aseena could see a kitchen where a cook and a couple of skullions were cowering next to a great iron stove, looking at Dara with horror. In other places, the floor had been torn away, revealing a maze of stone corridors and dank cells with straw-clad floors. Some of them were occupied, by terrified humans or... other things.
"Is that a demon?" Aseena said, staring at the inhabitant of one cell. It was lying on the floor, drooling and staring into space, clearly lost for the world. "They keep demons here?"
"I'm sure they like a chance to experiment on them to find their weaknesses," Dara said. "Now shush and let me handle this."
She went to stand by the broken remnant of the wall, legs spread, arms folded. Behind her, the gargoyle arranged itself to mimic her pose with a rumble of moving Witch Stone.
"Now that I have everyone's undivided attention!" Dara bellowed. "I'm looking for a fellow named Jalon! Blonde hair, blue eyes, slender built, last seen wearing a towel. Nice boy, lovely singing voice, has the odd habit of seeing the future, but we're none of us perfect, right? You will want to hand him over. Now. I've had a bad time of late, and it's at least partly your fault, so I strongly suggest that you don't mess with me right now!"
A figure emerged into a part of underground corridor that had gotten exposed - tall, thin, with grey hair that was now covered with stone dust.
"Mystic Dara," she said.
Dara smiled mirthlessly.
"Lord Minister Kroll. I might have known. Oh, wait. I did."
"You can't honestly expect to get away with this," Kroll said. "You vastly overestimate your importance to the Demesne if you do. I will have you jailed for malicious use of witchcraft, destruction of property, obstruction of government activity, wanting disregard for the public safety..."
"Save it," Dara said. "It's over. I'm going to expose your little pet project here. No one is going to care that I didn't do it nicely and tidily, not right now when everything is chaos anyway. Me, hero. You, villain. That's what everyone will see. Oh, and just wait until they all find out that I did it to rescue a pretty young man." She clasped her hands over her heart, and high above her, the gargoyle did the same. "It will look so romantic."
"It's your word against all of ours," Kroll said. "You can't prove a thing."
"No, it's my word, and the word of everyone who will start coming forward to testify once the cat is out of the bag, and all the evidence that will be lying around in this place, against your desperate denials," Dara said. "That's the problem with conspiracies. I've seen enough of them in my time to know. They rely on their own inertia - on no one wanting to be the first to talk, no one wanting to be the first to take a good hard look. Once someone has blown the lid off of things..." She glanced at the rest of the house, lying on the street a short distance away. "... as it were... good old entropy sets in pretty quickly."
Kroll scowled.
"You self-congratulatory little sociopath, you have no idea what this will..."
"Yes, yes, yes," Dara said. "I know how much of a splash this will make. I've figured it out, all right? It's what I do. This was your idea from the start - Building Thirty-Seven, secret interrogations, experiments on demons, whatever the hell else you have been up to in here. It's very much a Ministry of Mystery operation - all very 'insane Mystic,' all of it. Only you made sure to get the Ministry of Safety so entangled in it that they'd get hurt worse than you if it ever got out." She smirked. "It was really not nice of you to outsmart the Soldier boys like that. They can't help it that they're not very bright. But then, I suppose that you just couldn't help yourself. You turning into some kind of twisted villain was destined to happen - it's what happens to every Unhallowed Sixty-Six person who is even remotely competent, isn't it?"
"I am nothing like them!" The words tore themselves out of Kroll's throat, seemingly before she had time to think about them.
Dara shrugged.
"You've tried not to be, I'll give you that," she said. "I figured that out too - it took me a while, but I did. Not every Unhallowed Sixty-Six scion is crazy about being crazy, isn't that so? You made it your life's work to fight against it all, didn't you? The ones that have kept the faith have their endgame going on. All this..." She gestured to the ruins of Building Thirty-Seven. "This is yours. You've been trying to root them out for ages, by whatever means necessary. Except you have that one weakness, don't you..."
Kroll didn't answer.
"Mansuur is your son," Dara said. "You brought him up to believe that he had a terrible destiny and that he had to fight it, just like you. But he liked the destiny part a good deal more than the fighting part, didn't he?" She chuckled mirthlessly. "We never do turn out quite like our parents want us to. But you couldn't very well expose him, could you? If he was discovered to be plotting the destruction of the Demesne, he'd probably be executed. What mother could do that to her little boy?"
Kroll said nothing.
"Hence your half-assed measures during this investigation," Dara said, "whereby you have been trying to put a stop to Mansuur's plans and put a stop to me digging into his plans at the same time. Well, enough already. Get out of my way. I don't know if I can save the Demesne or not, but I know that you can't - your loyalties are far too divided. Let me take Jalon with me, and leave me alone to try to solve this on my own."
"Or else?" Kroll said.
"Or else my gargoyle will dig him out from there," Dara said, "and never mind how much damage I have to do along the way. Just give it a rest, Kroll. Let my friend here go in and fetch her boyfriend, and we'll leave... for now, at least."
There was a pause.
"Very well," Kroll said.
Dara took Aseena's hand and gave it a quick squeeze. Aseena felt something hard and sharp in her hand, and reflexively closed her fist around it. She took a leap down into the half-exposed basement. Kroll gave her a hateful look as she headed up to her, but pointed her to a cell some distance down the corridor. Aseena headed into it.
Jalon was lying on the floor. He was naked and filthy, writhing and gasping like he had no control over his muscles. The sound that was coming out of his throat might have been laughter.
Aseena wanted to scream. She wanted to take a sword and kill every single person who had ever set foot in Building Thirty-Seven. She wanted to cradle Jalon like a child and rock him and soothe him. She wanted to tear down the sky and bring an end to a world where this was allowed to happen.
"Jalon?" she said. "Oh God, Jalon..." She knelt down on the floor, putting her hands helplessly on his ill-used skin. Her muscles flexed and twitched spasmically beneath her fingers. She would, at that moment, have given anything for a healer's gift, for the power to cleanse Jalon's body of whatever they had inflicted on it.
"Th-th-th-the cold," Jalon gasped. "The blood freezes solid, and the dark ones walk the streets! The vengeance of the Philistine, gah, gah, gah, her hatred makes her small, gah, gah, too small and too human to defeat the undefeatable..."
"Oh honey, oh honey." Aseena felt tears on her cheeks. "It'll be all right, honey, it'll all be all right, I'll take care of you, you'll be all right again..."
She picked him up in her arms. Jalon was not a large man, and she was strong - she could carry him a short distance. Carrying him in her arms like a child, she stepped out of the cell.
She found Kroll pointing a crossbow at her.
"Mystic Dara!" the Lord Minister shouted. "I have both of your friends down here right now - their lives are in my hands! If you make a single false move, I will kill them both! Are you ready to renegotiate?"
The piece of rock Dara had pressed into Aseena's hand tore out of her grip, cutting a bloody gash in her hand as it did. With unerring, frightening speed, it flew through the air. It impacted with Kroll's forehead with a sickening, wet crunch.
Kroll remained standing for a moment, a look of astonishment on her gaunt face. Then her legs folded under her, and she dropped to the floor. Her eyes stared at the wall, glassy and blind.
"No more negotiations!" Dara shouted from somewhere up there.
Jalon gave off a grotesque giggle.
"The mother falls," he chortled. "The dark grows cold."
Aseena couldn't argue with that. She felt cold already.
The gargoyle was of a fairly normal shape, all things considered. It was lizard-like in appearance, with a long dragging tail, horned ridges down its back, clawed hands and feet and a leering mouth full of sharp teeth. A pair of small, vestigial wings adorned its back. Aseena had seen a number of ones sculptured exactly like it.
None of them, however, had been fifteen meters tall. The ground shook with every step it took along the street.
"You can do that?" she shouted over the deafening rumble of the thing's movement - stone moving against stone, the ground moaning and crackling beneath its weight. "You can control that?"
"For a while," Dara said. She had a huge, mad grin plastered on her face. "It will fall apart under its own weight eventually, and I doubt I'll have the endurance to keep it running even for that long. But that's the beauty of it. I have a giant gargoyle. I don't need very long. I could flatten the entire Building Thirty-Seven by making the gargoyle jump up and down on it!"
"Yes, but Jalon is in there, so please don't do that," Aseena said. She wasn't sure she liked this. Dara had had an upsetting couple of days. She probably enjoyed the chance to stomp around and scare the crap out of people a little too much.
"Tsk," Dara said. "Ye weak of faith."
The gargoyle knelt down by Building Thirty-Seven and reached around it with its arms, each one as thick as a carriage. Then it slammed its fists against the opposite walls, once, twice, three times. Aseena heard the stone of the walls crack and crumble. The gargoyle's great fists broke apart too, but before her eyes, they reformed, cracks closing, broken-off pieces of Witch Stone flying to retake their place in the construction.
A motion caught Aseena's eye, and she looked around just in time to see a crossbow bolt strike the wall right next to Dara, bouncing off and striking up sparks.
"Get into cover, fool!" she gasped. She grabbed Dara and dragged her with her, into the safer shadows of a nearby alley. Several other crossbow bolts struck the spot where they had just been standing.
"Shoot at me, would they?" Dara growled.
"I think they might just be taking issue with you tearing holes in their secret installation!" Aseena said. She could hear a hint of hysteria in her own voice. "I know, I know, what a bunch of whiners, but you know how these government conspiracies can be!"
Dara shouted a long string of arcane words, and the gargoyle stuck its long arms in through the holes it had made and... lifted...
There was a deafening crack, followed by several more. Aseena glanced at Dara, and saw that her face was a mask of pain and exhertion. For a moment, she thought that the witch would pass out trying to do the impossible, but then the masonry of the building gave way, and the whole structure came loose.
The gargoyle lifted Building Thirty-Seven, half-turned and deposited it smack on the street, some ten meters away from where it had been standing. It slumped a little where it stood, but held. Aseena could see horrified faces turning up in the windows, looking out to see what the hell had just happened.
The gargoyle stood up straight again, positioning itself at the edge of the ragged foundation where the house had stood a moment ago.
"Come on," Dara said, and headed out of the alley at a brisk pace. Aseena followed her, looking around warily for more crossbows pointed in their direction. Dara seemed sure of herself, though, as she went to stand next to the gargoyle.
Where the house had stood, there was now a partly exposed cellar. In some places, the floor had remained, leaving rooms of the first level of the building exposed. Aseena could see a kitchen where a cook and a couple of skullions were cowering next to a great iron stove, looking at Dara with horror. In other places, the floor had been torn away, revealing a maze of stone corridors and dank cells with straw-clad floors. Some of them were occupied, by terrified humans or... other things.
"Is that a demon?" Aseena said, staring at the inhabitant of one cell. It was lying on the floor, drooling and staring into space, clearly lost for the world. "They keep demons here?"
"I'm sure they like a chance to experiment on them to find their weaknesses," Dara said. "Now shush and let me handle this."
She went to stand by the broken remnant of the wall, legs spread, arms folded. Behind her, the gargoyle arranged itself to mimic her pose with a rumble of moving Witch Stone.
"Now that I have everyone's undivided attention!" Dara bellowed. "I'm looking for a fellow named Jalon! Blonde hair, blue eyes, slender built, last seen wearing a towel. Nice boy, lovely singing voice, has the odd habit of seeing the future, but we're none of us perfect, right? You will want to hand him over. Now. I've had a bad time of late, and it's at least partly your fault, so I strongly suggest that you don't mess with me right now!"
A figure emerged into a part of underground corridor that had gotten exposed - tall, thin, with grey hair that was now covered with stone dust.
"Mystic Dara," she said.
Dara smiled mirthlessly.
"Lord Minister Kroll. I might have known. Oh, wait. I did."
"You can't honestly expect to get away with this," Kroll said. "You vastly overestimate your importance to the Demesne if you do. I will have you jailed for malicious use of witchcraft, destruction of property, obstruction of government activity, wanting disregard for the public safety..."
"Save it," Dara said. "It's over. I'm going to expose your little pet project here. No one is going to care that I didn't do it nicely and tidily, not right now when everything is chaos anyway. Me, hero. You, villain. That's what everyone will see. Oh, and just wait until they all find out that I did it to rescue a pretty young man." She clasped her hands over her heart, and high above her, the gargoyle did the same. "It will look so romantic."
"It's your word against all of ours," Kroll said. "You can't prove a thing."
"No, it's my word, and the word of everyone who will start coming forward to testify once the cat is out of the bag, and all the evidence that will be lying around in this place, against your desperate denials," Dara said. "That's the problem with conspiracies. I've seen enough of them in my time to know. They rely on their own inertia - on no one wanting to be the first to talk, no one wanting to be the first to take a good hard look. Once someone has blown the lid off of things..." She glanced at the rest of the house, lying on the street a short distance away. "... as it were... good old entropy sets in pretty quickly."
Kroll scowled.
"You self-congratulatory little sociopath, you have no idea what this will..."
"Yes, yes, yes," Dara said. "I know how much of a splash this will make. I've figured it out, all right? It's what I do. This was your idea from the start - Building Thirty-Seven, secret interrogations, experiments on demons, whatever the hell else you have been up to in here. It's very much a Ministry of Mystery operation - all very 'insane Mystic,' all of it. Only you made sure to get the Ministry of Safety so entangled in it that they'd get hurt worse than you if it ever got out." She smirked. "It was really not nice of you to outsmart the Soldier boys like that. They can't help it that they're not very bright. But then, I suppose that you just couldn't help yourself. You turning into some kind of twisted villain was destined to happen - it's what happens to every Unhallowed Sixty-Six person who is even remotely competent, isn't it?"
"I am nothing like them!" The words tore themselves out of Kroll's throat, seemingly before she had time to think about them.
Dara shrugged.
"You've tried not to be, I'll give you that," she said. "I figured that out too - it took me a while, but I did. Not every Unhallowed Sixty-Six scion is crazy about being crazy, isn't that so? You made it your life's work to fight against it all, didn't you? The ones that have kept the faith have their endgame going on. All this..." She gestured to the ruins of Building Thirty-Seven. "This is yours. You've been trying to root them out for ages, by whatever means necessary. Except you have that one weakness, don't you..."
Kroll didn't answer.
"Mansuur is your son," Dara said. "You brought him up to believe that he had a terrible destiny and that he had to fight it, just like you. But he liked the destiny part a good deal more than the fighting part, didn't he?" She chuckled mirthlessly. "We never do turn out quite like our parents want us to. But you couldn't very well expose him, could you? If he was discovered to be plotting the destruction of the Demesne, he'd probably be executed. What mother could do that to her little boy?"
Kroll said nothing.
"Hence your half-assed measures during this investigation," Dara said, "whereby you have been trying to put a stop to Mansuur's plans and put a stop to me digging into his plans at the same time. Well, enough already. Get out of my way. I don't know if I can save the Demesne or not, but I know that you can't - your loyalties are far too divided. Let me take Jalon with me, and leave me alone to try to solve this on my own."
"Or else?" Kroll said.
"Or else my gargoyle will dig him out from there," Dara said, "and never mind how much damage I have to do along the way. Just give it a rest, Kroll. Let my friend here go in and fetch her boyfriend, and we'll leave... for now, at least."
There was a pause.
"Very well," Kroll said.
Dara took Aseena's hand and gave it a quick squeeze. Aseena felt something hard and sharp in her hand, and reflexively closed her fist around it. She took a leap down into the half-exposed basement. Kroll gave her a hateful look as she headed up to her, but pointed her to a cell some distance down the corridor. Aseena headed into it.
Jalon was lying on the floor. He was naked and filthy, writhing and gasping like he had no control over his muscles. The sound that was coming out of his throat might have been laughter.
Aseena wanted to scream. She wanted to take a sword and kill every single person who had ever set foot in Building Thirty-Seven. She wanted to cradle Jalon like a child and rock him and soothe him. She wanted to tear down the sky and bring an end to a world where this was allowed to happen.
"Jalon?" she said. "Oh God, Jalon..." She knelt down on the floor, putting her hands helplessly on his ill-used skin. Her muscles flexed and twitched spasmically beneath her fingers. She would, at that moment, have given anything for a healer's gift, for the power to cleanse Jalon's body of whatever they had inflicted on it.
"Th-th-th-the cold," Jalon gasped. "The blood freezes solid, and the dark ones walk the streets! The vengeance of the Philistine, gah, gah, gah, her hatred makes her small, gah, gah, too small and too human to defeat the undefeatable..."
"Oh honey, oh honey." Aseena felt tears on her cheeks. "It'll be all right, honey, it'll all be all right, I'll take care of you, you'll be all right again..."
She picked him up in her arms. Jalon was not a large man, and she was strong - she could carry him a short distance. Carrying him in her arms like a child, she stepped out of the cell.
She found Kroll pointing a crossbow at her.
"Mystic Dara!" the Lord Minister shouted. "I have both of your friends down here right now - their lives are in my hands! If you make a single false move, I will kill them both! Are you ready to renegotiate?"
The piece of rock Dara had pressed into Aseena's hand tore out of her grip, cutting a bloody gash in her hand as it did. With unerring, frightening speed, it flew through the air. It impacted with Kroll's forehead with a sickening, wet crunch.
Kroll remained standing for a moment, a look of astonishment on her gaunt face. Then her legs folded under her, and she dropped to the floor. Her eyes stared at the wall, glassy and blind.
"No more negotiations!" Dara shouted from somewhere up there.
Jalon gave off a grotesque giggle.
"The mother falls," he chortled. "The dark grows cold."
Aseena couldn't argue with that. She felt cold already.