Burning in the Banshee's Absence
by Matthew Chrulew
The dark-haired concubine still kneels before me, cold eyes caught in her task. In my ala comedown I can feel my own bodily weight pulling at my ego. I signal the closest assistant, who drags himself away from a whore’s embrace.
“More haze, boy,” I say. He nods and searches through the table litter for some ala. “No, pure stuff, my stuff. Get it.” He is gone into another room. Another takes the chance to rush over.
“Kane?” It is the ever-cautious Liu. I admit him the briefest of glances. “Avatar, I am worried. All this,” he says with a wave of his hand, screwing up his face, “all this is premature. We should push home our victory before —”
“Our victory is inevitable.”
He pauses, wary of pressing his argument. “But, Avatar, we are vulnerable while —”
“Liu,” I say, “we have the alpha taproot. There is nothing they can do. I have seen to it myself. Every Jinta avatar has been hounded to the outskirts of the etherspace. Their sentries have been flayed into submission. Even their precious Banshee is in hiding!” The disappointing bitch.
“Yes, Kane.” He smiles nervously, but does not withdraw. I skim from his fearful thoughts: images of camouflaged egos slowly proceeding through the traps and walls I arrayed around the alpha root.
“We still have sentries posted?” I ask.
“Of course.”
“Well, go and check on them if you wish. I will enter, as soon as…” I glance down at the girl still at work between my legs. Perhaps there is something to be said for the flesh. “As soon as I am ready.” Liu nods and hurries off.
I lay my head back against the cushions and try to remember how to experience this. Keep my mind to myself, to begin with, so as not to be put off by her disdain or boredom. But then there is a bundle of eager impressions nearby. “Avatar, your ala.” I nod and hold out my arm. A necessity for the other avatars, but a pleasure for me. He fumbles with my cannula until finally the stuff threads up my shoulder and through my body.
My sensations peak, and my ego is lifted, heightened.
There is movement before me as the concubine re-dresses me and leaves. My ego flickers, adrift between the mundane and ethereal. Should I enter the etherspace now? But I allow myself to float here and enjoy the unfocussed glide. There will be time enough for discipline soon.
There is a tremor and the strings of cloud convulse. My eyes jerk open. Liu is pushing revellers aside as he runs towards me. “M-melted,” he manages to stutter. “All the sentries, heads c-caved in. Focuses charred. Is it the B-b-b…?”
I stand up, take control of my body from within the ala high. The rest of the Rehi are staring at me.
“Kane?”
“Probably Regan, lashing out one last time. I’ll deal with it.”
I’d relish the chance to take down the precise Jinta strategist. But still I hope for more. Could it be the Banshee? At last?
I adjust my clothes and storm from the room, sweeping my cloak behind me. Rehi rush to open the doors as I stride to the alpha room. I pace the marble floor to the nonagram and sit. East-I focus. Direct entry. Pumped full to bursting of juice.
If it is the Banshee, it won’t be for much longer.
I arrange my legs and fold my hands, fingers positioned for maximum flow. A number of Rehi stand anxiously in the double doorway. From between their legs a little dog scampers into the room and skids up to me. I swipe at it with my gripped fists, lash out with a blast. “Fuck off!” But I’ve never been able to control the things, with words or mind.
My body tingles as the focus adjusts the differential from the blast.
Liu darts in and picks up the mutt with a comforting murmur, then pushes the onlookers out of the room. The doors thud closed.
I take a deep breath. Collapse my phenomenal field. Singularise.
There is a point, a red, burning point, suspended, breathing, concentrating all things.
And I extrapolate into the folds of ethereal geography.
The rhizome sprawls around me. A multitude of stems and barbs and nodes, tracks and meridians and holes. Immanent folds and trails. Empty roots long drained of power. Blackened sites of avatar skirmishes. Walls and traps and stakes where sentries have lodged. A great, interlinked mesh of ethereal structures.
Etherspace. My domain.
My home.
I trigger my hidden channel and ride it directly to the alpha taproot, bypassing all the bluffs and obstacles. The root pulses gently beneath my wrap. I suck a fix through and shudder at the delicate spike. Around me, everything is intact, locked to my signature. Unbreached. I trigger back to East-I and sweep the surrounds. The sentry stakes are empty; the space around shimmers from recent clashes.
There! An ego, approaching from an extremity. Red tendrils twist their way closer. So it is her. That mobile sonic terror.
My only worthy rival.
She’s killed my sentries, but failed against my defences.
Is she baiting me?
But I have the alpha root. Could she be that stupid?
Do I care? Finally, I can have my victory.
I send a preliminary flicker in her direction, and it travels true and strikes her flailing coils.
And she’s gone.
What? I knew it was inevitable. But it couldn’t be that easy. Never in our countless clashes. I approach the shimmer that remains.
What an anticlimax.
I recoil as all around me the rhizome is torn like web. I am wrenched back to my body. Without control I jerk forward and suck in air. My ego strains against heavy, suffocating matter. Sensations flood back.
Jinta crouch over Rehi bodies, flicking knives through entrails. The dog yaps at their feet. One kicks it out the door. Someone scrabbles with my arm.
Fuck. I blast him, send a brutal ring through the room, again through the whole compound. Bodies drop like hail. Their softened heads collapse from the impact. I brace at the jolt from the nonagram.
The hail melts as egos perish, Jinta and Rehi alike.
Silence. I look down at my arm. An empty syringe hangs limply from my cannula.
I rip it out and try to rise, but fall back onto the cold floor. Already the ala high is disintegrating into puffs of mist. A watery thickness pulls at my ego. I pull myself onto hands and knees.
“Where are you, you bitch?” I struggle an arms-length forward. Only the dog comes in, sniffs at the bodies. “Regan? Javin? Come out, you cowards! Face me!”
But I drop again, face against the marble. The mutt’s tongue laps at my neck.
My ego drowns.
•
There is a breathing point of suspended concentration.
But then the juncture collapses and the fire resolves into pain. My eyes flutter open to see him withdraw the cigarette. I strive against the ropes but my bonds are too tight. The reek of smoke and burnt flesh strikes me and I choke back the vomit in my throat.
Agony radiates from the brand directly above my third eye.
The bastard takes a drag and pulls the smoke transmuted from my skin deep into his lungs. He leans forward and blows it onto the wound, smiling that maniacal smile.
I remain silent.
Does he think this will break me? Even novices know how to withdraw from the physical. The first thing avatars learn, before they taste their first drop of ala, before they can even try to extrapolate, is to collapse all bodily senses and train the ego as a disconnected entity.
These skills also have other uses, like when you’re being tortured by a vindictive Jinta with a fucked-up idea of sharing a smoke.
Just because he never made it as an avatar.
And now as he stares into my eyes, his eyebrows slightly raised, not even verbalising his question, I summon enough fire to meet his gaze, and still, still I say nothing.
He’s not after the locations of the mundane foci or any less important secrets of the etherspace. Only the one thing that has finally given me the power to destroy the Banshee, the power that sent her fleeing with just one blast along the flows. The alpha taproot.
But although I’m weak and cut off from etherspace, the root is still mine.
He turns away, takes another drag. The room’s bricks are greying as if stained by the smoke of thousands of tortures. “Did you know,” he says in his insufferable accent, “that traditional Chinese medicine, along with acupuncture and acupressure and the like, has a method called moxibustion?” He turns and looks at me, his dark, hollow face quickened by glee. “They all work on similar principles: you stimulate a point connected to other areas of the body by meridians. It can have all sorts of curative effects.” His arm hangs in midair, the cigarette perched between his bony fingers.
“Except, instead of pressure, or needles, this method works by heat.” He pushes his face right up to mine, and I want to break cracks in his perfect teeth. “Did you know that?”
“A few seconds before you said it,” I say, staring back. “I skimmed it just as your little ego pulled it up from memory, rabid with self-congratulation.”
He steps back, and the expression on his face alters slightly, but immediately his guard returns. “Of course.” He can’t have thought the Banshee’s blocking would prevent me from skimming when he’s at this range? “Of course you did,” he says. “But there’s more.” Condescension further curves his thin-lipped smile.
“What they do, you know — yes, you probably do, but I’m going to tell you anyway — is use sticks of rolled herbs, light them up at the end, and hold them close to a point on the body, building up heat. They use it for headaches, pain relief, invigoration, relaxation, depending on the point chosen. Even to change the position of a pregnant woman’s foetus!
“It sounds like fun, wouldn’t you say? I mean, I’m sure the ingredients also had some aromatic effect, but a cigarette could work almost as well, don’t you think?”
He steps lightly to the side. “I thought you, of all people, would be excited by all this talk of meridians and connections and nodes. Just because this has something to do with the real world, O great Kane, doesn’t mean you should ignore it. Surely you wouldn’t make the typical Rehi mistake of maligning the power of the body? Of pain, my dear avatar?”
I spit on the floor. The gall! Fucking moxibustion. But he’s right — in a sense the city’s foci, mostly discoverable only through trial and error, are like potent points on the body’s meridians; except that accessing and manipulating these nodes achieves much more than balancing your fucking ch’i.
And the ever-elusive alpha root? Tapped correctly, that juice can turn neophyte avatars into the zen monks of psychistry.
“Don’t tell me your thoughts are too precious to escape that wonderful mind of yours. Surely you don’t doubt they’ll come scurrying out through your mouth as soon as I choose?”
What is it they say about knowledge and power? Bullshit.
I’m knowledge, he’s power. Nothing could be more opposed.
“Well,” I say, no longer able to hold back, “since you can’t get them any other way, I suppose animals like you have no qualms resorting to such crude methods.”
“Of course not.” He smiles. “If it works…”
And it did work for the Jinta dogs. On the verge of annihilation, they somehow came to realise what we’d all ignored — forgotten — for most of this war.
Just mount a physical attack. In normal space.
It should never have been possible; we always had armed musclers and other protection for our sentries and miners, all our avatars. For years we fought all our battles in the ether. But somehow, hellbent on monopolising the roots, we let it lapse. It should have been over. I’d tapped the source, and I was strong enough to wipe out the Banshee. The briefest skirmish had sent her scurrying from the filaments.
But somehow they got through. We weren’t careful enough guarding the physical locations. Driven to desperation, they drew me into the ether, took our godforsaken quarter, and stormed the house. There I was, seated on the nonagram in an ala fix as if there was nothing outside myself. Nothing beyond the etherspace.
I woke in this claustrophobic room, cleansed of ala — to ensure my impotence, I guess. Now, their infirm Banshee blocks the mindscape. Her sinewy constructions prevent any contact with whoever wasn’t captured, and keep me from flaying their agents.
Happy with their crude strategy, they’ve extended it to interrogation and torture as well.
If you’re onto a good thing…
“It must sting, hmm, Kane? To be taken by surprise like that? By such ordinary methods? All your Rehi gone, your muscle and avatars, even your dirty concubines. I mean, you can’t know how easy it was in the end. A simple distraction, a physical assault, and suddenly we hold not only the no-man’s land but most of yours as well! We have the great Kane in our hands, and the filthy Rehi presence in the etherfields is gone. Easy pickings.
“Now there’s only one thing we need.”
He lights another cigarette and holds it near my arm. “I’m sure this is one of those pressure points,” he says, staring at my shoulder. He brings the cigarette close to my skin. I can feel the building heat. “I think this is about where they’d hold it.” He smirks. “But I’m not one to do things in halves.”
And this time with malice he crushes it into the soft spot on my shoulder so the cigarette falls apart against my arm. The pain hits again, a searing burn I can’t flinch from, can’t bring my other hand to. I can only gag and strain against the ropes that hold me to the chair.
I don’t give him the respect of withdrawing.
This sort of pain, the pain of the body that I knew only in hunger or withdrawal from the drug: it comes screaming back as if eager to make up for lost time.
But despite the agony, the assault isn’t just physical. At least he’s putting that manipulative intellect of his to use. He asks no questions, makes no demands. Just idle talk and cigarettes.
He knows I know exactly what he wants.
He should know I won’t give it to him.
“They say there are also some points that help with memory,” he says, spitting. “You could do with some help with your memory, couldn’t you, Kane?” He lights up another, for himself. “Or maybe memory isn’t your problem at all.”
I look around at the room’s bricks and single door, trying to distract myself from the pain, but my own agony is only joined by that of others. Echoes of the previous interrogations remain trapped within these walls. The psychic resonances of my underling Rehi avatars imprint themselves on my mind.
One sentry after the next brought here and flayed into madness by the Banshee. Heads hung in defeat as she paced around the chair and screamed in that impossible pitch, her deep red hair flying around her, her nails scratching the air as she battered their minds.
None survived her onslaughts. Few could.
Except myself. Especially now. Try as she might, my thoughts are secure. So she sits back in some room and braces the pulses in here, protecting Javin while he interrogates me in the old method.
With a handle on the pain, I focus back on Javin, resolved to try a new angle. “Why doesn’t she take me on herself. Does she have no sense of climax? It would make such a fitting end, the two masters duelling. I mean, we both know she’d never get it, not for all her annoying screaming. But the coward could at least try.”
“It’s pragmatism. There’s an easier method!”
“What makes you think you can get it?”
He smiles. “Heh. The months you spent in the etherspace have messed with your brain, as well as further swelling your ego. If such a thing is conceivable. Look at yourself, Kane. Look at all you filthy Rehi! Ignoring your bodies has made you weak.”
I glance at his spindly arms, his hollow face, but it doesn’t matter. I’m the one tied to a chair in the middle of the enemy’s compound.
“You cannot withdraw forever,” he says, mid-drag. “And the body has limits.”
I should have crippled him when I had the opportunity, before he realised he had no talent as an avatar. Before he became this resentful, chain-smoking carcass. Early on, he’d experimented with his abilities like everyone else, and bumped into me lurking in a dark corner of the ether.
I should have flayed the dog when I had the chance.
But back then — it seems a lifetime ago, but could only be a handful of years — we were still fighting a humane war. Anyone with psychic capability was taking sides — few were more than second generation psychics, and on hearing about the ether manifestation in our quarter they were appearing out of the city’s cracks to try themselves as avatars. Packs were chosen, and they scrapped for both physical and ethereal territory until only the Rehi and Jinta remained. Hell, back then there was even government interest. A few short attempts to gain control of the land and disrupt the packs, infiltrating and sabotaging each crew. But that was before the prompt return of their mush-brained agents convinced them to quarantine this urban hell-hole, leaving us to kill each other with impunity.
I’ve heard of more etherzones, isolated around the world. Whether controlled or contested by packs like us, or successfully institutionalised by whichever local regime, I don’t know. I have no doubt the government’s lack of interest in us was due to less costly prospects elsewhere. But it all matters little to me — our portion of the ether is still insulated, its once-virgin plenitudes marked only by the scars of our battles, the marks of our habitation, the wounds of our mines. I’ve only ever felt an outside presence in the etherspace when I connected with the alpha taproot. We’ve only ever fought within our zone.
We thought it would only take a few weeks to establish the territory.
But that was back before the Banshee arose. Back when there were rules.
“Or perhaps you’re right,” he’s saying. “Perhaps I’m making a terrible mistake.” His voice almost squeals as he speaks. “Maybe my special form of moxibustion will animate your third eye meridian and awaken your oh-so-powerful ego, and you’ll blast me into another dimension!” He laughs cruelly, his frame shuddering with the act. “Oh, that’s right. You can’t do that.” He looks around as if paranoid. “You’re surrounded!”
He steps closer. “And you’re all out of your precious drug.”
He pushes the cigarette into my cheek this time, and it’s too much. I try to withdraw, to fall away from the perceptions, but I’m weak, my concentration is broken, and anger overcomes my control. I pull my head back and swing it at his hand, knocking the brand from his fingers. My mind opens up with the action, sweeping a circle around my position; it glances filaments of resonating pain, but then rebounds against what I’m sure are illusory walls.
Red coils mark the walls, but at the head of the blockages, it isn’t the Banshee’s presence at all. Just a composite of shifting bluffs.
Javin steps back, smiling. “The cracks are beginning to show.” But his self-satisfaction quickly turns to concern when he sees my own smile slowly open.
She’s not even fucking there!
This whole time I’ve been insulating, assuming that it was the Banshee doing the blocking, but it couldn’t be. I had sensed her signature when I awoke in the room, but I hadn’t even thought of illusion. The walls are strong, for sure — probably Regan’s, the sly, prim bastard — but they aren’t the Banshee’s.
I take in Javin’s worried look. He’s been keeping up the torture, the pain, to make sure I withdrew inside, to keep my focus away from the exterior. And stupidly, I misread his nervousness as excitement. But now, even without any ala, I can see through their façade.
He glances at the door behind him and shuffles. I give a quick discharge beyond the room, and the etherwalls buckle. It’s certainly not the monster; I can feel Regan’s frantic manipulations. I turn to Javin, inside the room, as he stands by the brick wall, grabbing at the cigarettes in his pocket.
I growl at him. “You fucking tricked me, you shrewd dog. I can’t believe you tricked me. But now I know.”
Maybe they’re right about knowledge and power after all.
He quavers by the wall. “You know nothing. You have no idea.”
“What have I missed, Javin? You better not think about it — you wouldn’t want me to find out.” I hurl another, more powerful blast outwards, which sends their shields flying. Regan is not even responding, the fucking shadow! Fine. I concentrate on the coward before me.
“Don’t think about it,” I tell him. His face distorts as he struggles with the effort. “Don’t. I’ll get it, and then you’ll be screwed. Oh, the paradox!”
His body language, frenzied thoughts, verbal spurts, all say the same thing: Fuck you, Kane!
Javin jumps forward, scattering the cigarettes, and his dead-straight Jinta knife trembles at my throat. “You think you can trick me with your little games? You think your paradox will get me! My thoughts are mine alone.”
I laugh at his lie, and sample his effluvia. His thoughts turn away, desperately self-determining as he tries not to think of whatever he’s hiding. There is something he doesn’t want me to know.
But I can’t be bothered playing any more. “I don’t need to skim to figure out what you dogs are trying.”
I can interrogate as well.
He pushes the knife, jerks back my head. “I should have them blast you right now. They’d enjoy that very much. No, fuck them, I’ll kill you myself. It’s not as if you’re our only chance of getting what we want.”
There it is. His pathetic bluff. This whole time all his words have been simple lies. Except now, circumstances no longer support them.
He should have stuck with torture.
I am their last chance; they won’t kill me just yet. But why the hell do they want to access the alpha root so badly? They don’t need to go there right now. They have the upper hand; their assault has destroyed us and left the etherspace open for exploration, all the roots ripe for tapping. They’ll get there in time.
Why do they think they don’t have time?
But then he pushes away and the ether shudders as a hideous vision glides through the door. She’s in the room, her robes draping her figure and flowing behind her, tendrils of hair flying around her face in pulses of tainted flame.
Her exquisite, unspeakable face.
Javin is gone, was never in the room. I search beyond, behind her throbbing energies, but there is no other force, no etherwalls, broken or standing. Just her, floating in front of me right now, hissing.
“You stupid fuck.” Those pain-crazy eyes, those lips that quiver now in unison with the swarm of burning locks. Why does the bitch have to be so fucking beautiful! For years we’ve duelled in strategy and etherspace, taking land and lives, demarcating and sucking at the ether. I defined myself with the goal of destroying her; and now, deceived and defeated, I sit here as she finally confronts me.
She breaks into a bitter smile, and laughs.
“You stupid, arrogant fuck. After all this time still so full of yourself that you can’t even recognise an illusion. And now it’s too late.”
My mind races back. The location. I could swear I hadn’t directly thought of the root; and there’s no way she could have been probing deeper than the surface. Whatever they’ve pumped me with, I still would have known.
But fuck, here she is. This whole thing, the torture I thought I could feel, the burns on my skin that made me withdraw further inside, and then my playing games with Javin, as if I were tricking him somehow… It was all her illusion, and now she stands right in front of me. I should have known there was no reason for her not to be here.
The air shimmers and burns with her presence.
Oh, shit… I picture the taproot, her projecting there as soon as she’s dealt with me. Once she accesses it, it’s all over for everyone.
I wait for her to approach, for her hair to envelop my head and suck me to a husk like all the previous avatars. I build up one last blast, ready to confront her. We can go down together. She laughs, a revolting noise that I thought was Javin’s laugh.
That is the real Javin’s laugh.
The illusion disappears, melts away, as her face transforms into the skeletal grin of my torturer, posed in front of me, dragging on a cigarette. The door opens behind him and a clean-cut figure steps through.
Regan. “Thank you, sir.” He smiles and then steps out again, his emergence a grievous slur.
He got me, the bastard. His illusory walls were weak to make his Banshee illusion seem strong. And now he has the location.
I am left here with Javin as he gloats a centimetre in front of my face.
Potential energies wait among my thoughts.
And I send the blast I’d prepared for the Banshee into his pathetic little mind, tearing its fabric and melting the substrate. His eyes widen before fluttering closed as his forehead caves in, the concave indent burning grey as his frontal lobe disintegrates into mush.
The resurgence blasts me from the surrounding foci.
I brace as his body falls into mine. His grisly face bounces onto my shoulder, and I twist in pain as his still-lit cigarette pushes into my arm. The bastard, even in death… But I turn, slowly, pushing through the agony, trying to move the cigarette, onto clothes, anything flammable. It burns into my arm until I can feel no more; I strain my head around his melted skull to see, but his weight is too great. And again I am confronted by the reek of my own burning flesh.
Fuck! I struggle against his frame, rocking the chair forward until we both collapse on the floor. His body lies limp under me, but I can see it, now, where his arm was pressed up against mine.
His robe smoulders.
I strain to manipulate my uncoordinated body, the weight of the chair on my back. The flames start to spread across his robe. Awkwardly, I hold my arms into the fire, cringe, push through the pain, scream curses at the fucking Jinta beast, until the rope weakens and eventually breaks.
My flesh still smoking, I swing the chair away and stagger to the ground, panting.
I scan the compound for presences. Regan is nearby, locked into the ether at one of their foci. The rest of the building seems empty. No, there’s a faint presence a short distance away.
It’s her. Weak and powerless.
I must have underestimated how much I hurt her in the battle. She must need healing badly; they must need to tap the root now because she’s close to death.
The agony will not subside; glancing at my scorched arms, I sit up and try to concentrate, to withdraw from the pain, and extrapolate into the etherspace. I don’t need ala; I’ve been weaning myself off the contamination ever since the supply began to falter, training myself to enter while dry. I converge my senses, fall away.
There is a point, burning, breathing.
Slowly, I reveal myself to the pathways. Without a focus, my field of transition is vague. Regan would have formal access, West-IV or some such. He has the advantage, but I have the skill. I struggle against the nebulous folds, bringing them gradually to definition — though my physical state is weakening me — and search the desolate rhizome.
I’m caught in a stifling corner, but his trail is still evident. I scan the complex trajectory to the alpha root. The bastard’s making the right connections, coursing from shoot to stem. He must be astute to have gleaned the location from one quick visualisation in my mind. I tear through a sprig and push my speed.
My preliminary flickers flash against a hidden sentry. I burrow and whip him from beneath, flaying until he dissipates. An unbalance ahead suggests movement; I take a side-path, racing, and rejoin the trail behind Regan. I prepare for more guards, but there’s no-one, just the string of traps he leaves in his wake, bursts and caltrops and prongs, even a partly constructed wall that disintegrates as I pass through. Weaving, melding and separating in turn, I dodge them all. The taproot is close. I push forward and am stung by a still-wavering caltrop. Barely harmed, I move on, throbbing ever closer to his globular ego, and reach him just as he opens around a bluff.
With a muffled flare I dissolve him.
Motherfucker. Die.
Below the next rise, concealed by a multitude of folds, is the taproot. Did he really expect to reach it? I manoeuvre around the traps, navigate my walls, and there it lies, gently pulsing. Its petals stretch towards me and disappear behind in an expanding coil. Exhausted, I connect, basking in the undiluted energy. I suck up the juices, refill my depleted reserves.
Mend, gloriously heal.
It is all mine.
After a moment, vengeful desire peels me away from that lull, and I return to the dead, ugly world.
The room impresses itself upon me. Javin’s burnt and crushed body lies crumpled on the floor; pain resonances still fill the room. Shaking, horribly aware of my burnt forearms and scarred limbs and face, but feeling the tingle that precedes their accelerated healing, I rise and exit the haunted room.
The corridor is grey and dismal, like all Jinta buildings. Like all Jinta. I follow my senses’ guide to the closest focus, appalled by the constriction of the compound.
Turning a corner, I balk at a charred body fallen in the passageway. The silence around me feels like the still after a battle. Where is everyone?
I turn another corner and stop at a junction. Regan is spreadeagled in a nonagram, his irritating suit now soiled. As it should be. But beyond him lies another body, burnt like the previous, as if it has been drained through incineration. What the fuck has been going on?
But then I look again and realise. The position of Regan’s body, even the deportment of his ego in the etherspace as he approached the taproot, suggest that he wasn’t trying to take in juice for healing.
He wanted firepower.
They don’t want to heal the bitch — they want to kill her.
She has to be here somewhere. I range the locality, feeling for her presence, moving slowly from corridor to room. There’s something there…
They could have just asked me.
How pathetic; having taken us with their last-ditch ploy they find themselves collapsing from within. I must have wounded her more than I thought, critically, mortally, and now, diminished, the selfish bitch is sucking at her own men to hang onto life, devouring them with fire to feed her appetite.
A force as ugly, as base as that isn’t hard to find.
Just look for the trail of blackened corpses.
It didn’t have to go down like this. Three times I offered, three times allowing her the chance to shimmer at my side. It could have been over by now; we could have finished this thing and properly colonised the etherspace. With the territory demarcated and mined, we could finally have turned our attention to our borders. To those controlling the ala supply and waiting for us to massacre each other. I would have allowed her an important position; she could even have attended my bedchamber. But no. She was too power hungry, too wrathful, too much a Jinta to accept. And so now she wallows just beyond the next corridor, having consumed all her former allies, spent and exhausted and dying.
Which is where I come in.
Cautious now, I approach her door, feeling for threats in both realms. She can’t be strong enough to ambush me, but I’m not risking anything with her.
The only sense I get is of a pathetic, gasping maw, searching for sustenance.
I push open the door and step through, take in the sight of the Banshee stricken on the floor. The room is trashed, furniture broken, paint peeled. Her tendrils lie feebly about her, her aura diminished to a whisper. She stares up at me as I enter, her hate-filled eyes struggling to take in my presence.
“You,” she manages to voice.
“Me.”
And now, witnessing her pathetic figure, the charred Jinta bodies still in my mind, I can’t help but laugh at her plight, at the ruin she has brought on all of them.
I sense her skim my thoughts; and she smiles at me, halting my laughter. “You think,” she says, “that I’m pathetic? I may be finished, Kane, but you, O great avatar… What more is it that you think you have? Your buildings, your foci, we destroyed it all. All of your Rehi men, your musclers and novice avatars, even your harlot entourage — they are dead, O great one, they are all dead. There is only you, and you have nothing.”
I stare back at her. “They mean nothing. I have control now — the ether, the alpha root, they are mine.”
But she laughs, spit flying from her lips. Her hair sparks for a second before languishing again. “You pathetic fool. It’s raze and be razed. You know that. You think you can transcend it? The territory is gone! They’re here now, the outside has come in — your only future with the ether is as a castrated conduit!” She laughs again as I step back. “What did you think had happened? Ha, you think you did this?” She gestures to her broken body, shaking her head. “You think you even scratched me in that little scuffle? Such arrogance.” She sniffs. “It was Regan. He convinced me to challenge you, draw you in so they could make their surprise attack. But he had Javin lead them, and the bastard stayed right here and attacked me, physically, while I was under!” She laughs in self-deprecation, holding aside her robe to reveal the gashes on her torso.
“This,” she says and spreads her arms, as if to indicate the bodies that litter the halls, “my pack, this was self-defence. He forced me to drain them to stay alive, and only so he could steal my signature for his illusions! So that you wouldn’t sense my absence! Regan betrayed us from the start, he was from outside, corporate or government, who knows which — it makes no difference. He infiltrated and was only waiting for somebody to locate the root.”
“Regan’s dead now,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter.” She smiles. “They’re already here.”
“You lie!” They wouldn’t dare try again. Every marine assault since we’d first learned to mine had been repelled. “They are powerless. They will die like you. Unless…” I sneer at her. “Unless you’ll reconsider joining my harem?”
She screws up her face. “The dogs can have you.” I step forward, focus, harness the reserves I filled, and flay her addled mind, wipe away her lies with strike after strike, just to hear again her scream.
And it comes, finally, that ghastly shriek, that source of so much pain. This time, filled with her own.
The selfish bitch can’t tear at me any longer.
I reach over and pull at her robe until she is naked. Her stomach is still bloody from Regan’s wounds. Above them, her breasts lie to the sides as if resting. Below them, her bent legs halfway expose her vulva.
Points on her body, connected by meridians. Points to be burnt, prodded, pierced.
But the conquest is done.
I rip out a curl of her barely shimmering hair and exit the room. I stalk through corridors before finally finding a door to the outside. Breaking the lock, I open it and step out of the confinement, through into the night, to heal and retaliate, and regain what is mine.
A streetscape opens before me, and at last some fresh air blows across my face. I fill my lungs, and the ache in my limbs returns. I turn down the street and cross over to the building that rises on the other side, trying to get my bearings.
I scan the stars, the streets. Test the foci. Energy comes to me from all over the city. My city.
I am the alpha.
A rhythmic hum rises around me. I look up to see a helidrone emerge over the Jinta compound, and then another. They infrascan the concrete proliferation below them. I pin to the wall, but it is too late; cords whip from beneath the helis and marines buzz down. Lights to either side reveal more closing in along the street.
I step forward and take the attention of the dozen armored bodies approaching from the roof and pavement. As a drone passes overhead, I blast the closest soldiers, one by one, quick bursts melting their brains and dropping them in succession. The rest leap over them and push faster, but flaying with impunity, I watch them fall. Energy returns to me from the city like lightning strikes. The last marine stands in the darkness to my right, crouching, muttering, and I hear a strange scratching on the ground. I fell him with a thrashing burst, just as he emits a yell: “Attack!”
Growling, two huge dogs bound from the shadows, their canines dripping as they carve the air. I attempt to flay them, but they don’t even flinch, my blasts impotent against their unfathomable minds. Their slavering jaws close in on my neck, and I react just in time. I dive to the side, roll and turn as they skid to a stop and spin around, barking viciously. Fucking dogs… I back up against the wall as they advance.
Their animal eyes know only bloodthirst.
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© 2008 Matthew Chrulew, all rights reserved
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