torg 01 - Storm Knights (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into the machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riding ten inches off the concrete garage floor, with a roaring of drive fans ducted down and back, the

vehicle jetted through the floor-to-ceiling opening of the unwalled garage. The sled's speed was sufficient to pierce the weak force barrier that kept weather and flying debris out of the garage. Mara's rump lifted from the seat, her stomach seemed to climb up to her throat, and she trapped a yell of excitement behind clenched teeth as the air sled fell thirty feet before its anti-crash units slowed its fall. The sled hit the ground below with a soft thump and bounced up to its standard ten inches of lift, fluttering like a leaf in the breeze before it steadied.

Laughing, the driver cut back the speed rheo and began to steer the sled through the streets of Cape City, toward the Transference Facility.

"Thanks, Mara. I don't get to do that very often, since I normally do chauffeur duty for Council members," said the driver.

"My pleasure," said Mara, still laughing and chuckling inside the sixteen-year-old body that housed the intellect of a genius.

Five feet and four inches tall, light-skinned with a mane of silver hair that fell softly about ears that were a bit too jutting, Mara was a walking contradiction. Force-educated with RNA injections at an early age because of her remarkably high level of intelligence and indentured to the World Council in exchange for her cybernetic enhancements, she was a child with the weight of the world on her shoulders. No, make that the weight of worlds.

If she clicked her molars together in a beat-beat-pause-beat pattern, her diagnostic implants would perform a system's check on her circuitry. Aside from the security implant and microfilament in her right elbow and arm, the storage pouch in her right, upper thigh, Mara had added to nature's design: diagnostic displays in her right optic nerves and retina; a high-resolution scanner enhancement attachment for her left eye; molybdenum fibers sewn into her incisors for straight cutting power; two standard enhancement-input sockets behind her right ear and with tracer filaments leading to the analytical portions of her brain; slightly reinforced tendons in her neck after a minor skiing accident; two-year, weaponry power pack in her right shoulder; and, channeling power lines, a slim cable leading to the weapons socket in her right hand.

But it was the enhancements added to her left arm and hand that had cost her ten years of her life to come. That left forearm and, now, clawlike hand was shot through with wires and printed circuitry, allowing her to run tests on and provide feedback for the microchips she designed. The small, square groove on the tip of her thumb held the chip. Electric micro-probes in the index finger sought for broken paths in the chips. The gossamer-thin extrusions from the middle finger, being most opposable to the work platform on the thumb, were used for the delicate work of burning new paths in the magnetic bubbles of the chips. With her eye-enhancer attached and with her analytical enhancements at full blast (and, therefore, only for short periods of time) she could manipulate that middle finger in the micromillimeter movements necessary. Her ring finger provided the power to unseal and seal the chips and to erect a static charge that kept chip-destroying dust from her hand. The little finger, least controllable, extended a power lead for running full-up tests.