Silence (33 page)

His concern was unfounded.

Khryzt didn’t make any perceptible
movement. But upon reaching Emili’s body, the jets of plasma
violently rebounded. They randomly flicked back through the air in
every direction, smashing into rock. Sheikoh barely managed to
dodge one headed for his leg. His plasmafire rained against the
rock walls of the cave, burning smoldering black craters. Hissing
steam and streams of dust trickled from shaking ceiling. Sheikoh
and Khryzt were blanketed in a dense, fog. The only noticeable
difference between them was the white flames burning over one pair
of eyes.

The harsh cry of plasmafire
reverberated throughout the tunnels. Sheikoh needed to distract the
Sycrarian until Indigo and Ghost made it. He could almost feel
Indigo’s and Ghost’s footsteps pounding his way. His hand twitched
to the amulet. The flaming, white eyes fizzled with amusement.
Sheikoh somehow knew Khryzt had caught the motion.

“
So how much of what you
told me was a lie?” Sheikoh demanded.

The dust settled around the two of
them. He watched Emili’s hand stretch out, pick up the codex.
Khryzt dog-eared the page it was on and then, with a cold glance at
Sheikoh, it climbed to Emili’s feet. Sheikoh spun his useless
pistol around a finger as he watched the creature. The bravado
belied his terror.

“
I told
you no lies,”
Khryzt
double-answered in that same, menacing voice.

“
Whoops.
Silly me,” Sheikoh laughed lightly. “Always forget to make it a
point to ask whether other people are planning to deliberately
destroy everything that I care about.” His steadily raised his
voice’s sarcasm, and, more importantly,
volume
, to cover any hints of
approaching footsteps. “
So
sorry
. Up until now it hasn’t really come
up, mate.”

“
If you had any idea of the
torment-

“
Try
me,
demon
,” Sheikoh interrupted Khryzt loudly. “What is it that
a
coward
like you
considers torment, I wonder?”

An explosion of glittering sparks
erupted around Emili’s face. Khryzt had twisted her mouth with fury
and lined Emili’s dimples with rage. Jagged bolts of white, plasma
flickered around Emili’s gentle hands that had taken the shape of
sharp talons. The shadowy cavern glowed with the power of the
Sycrarian’s fury; in the center of Emili’s palms were two orbs,
burning brilliant with repressed power. They grew to the size of
baseballs with electrical light that chased away nearby shadows.
Sheikoh fell back into a wary crouch, touching the amulet at his
throat for comfort. Magic couldn’t hurt him, he told himself over
and over.

It didn’t do a lot to dispel his
dread.

Sheikoh waited for the explosion,
tensed and ready. But for whatever reason Khryzt didn’t launch the
attack. After a long moment, the fury slid from the girl’s face and
the momentary infernos retreated from their leaping dances. The
crackling energy flickered out, and the spheres in Emili’s hands
faded, until all that was left was the afterglows in his eyes. The
corners of the cavern fell back into shadow.

“
Hundreds
of thousands of years wandering through the eternal white of the
Transcendental Plane have made it apparent that I deserve the title
coward,”
Khryzt’s echoing
double-voice admitted to Sheikoh.
“Through
all of the countless ages, I searched for purpose in the
endlessness. I dreamt that I might find some means of rejoining my
brethren Sycrarian.”

“
Each
century I was forced to endure chipped away at my hope. Every
moment, I lived the agony of complete loneliness. I bitterly
regretted my cowardice. If I had had the choice again, I would have
stayed; regardless that it meant a death at the hands of Zynia
Faet. I would have welcomed Zynia’s blade in my chest to breathe
the gentle darkness of my people one last time. To hear the call of
the Celestial Crescent,”
Khryzt
murmured in two echoing voices of deep thought.

Sheikoh watched the Sycrarian, not
sure where the creature was going with its monologue. His eyes kept
drifting over the skin of Emili’s elbow, or the tiny, red mole on
the bottom her jaw. Before he invariably shook himself and reminded
himself firmly that this was a demon and not Emili. As if to remind
him of the fact, a drizzle of sparks flickered out of Khryzt’s
eyes.

“
You were
supposed to be my
salvation
,”
the Sycrarian cried, startling Sheikoh.
“You were
everything
I had been searching for all of those the untold
centuries. When you promised to release me from the agony of my
exile, I was beside myself with hope. I hadn’t felt hope for
millennia
.”

“
Yeah, I
don’t know how you do it on your little Black Moon, but over here
in the real world, when someone does you a favor you say
‘
thank you,
’” Sheikoh responded sharply. “You demon’s must show
gratitude by blowing a grandma up or something, huh?”

Khryzt fixed him with a cold
glance.

“
Your favor consisted of a few short words after everything
I’d done to aide you.”
Khryzt retorted,
before continuing.
”When an Outworlder
such as you offered to forgive my transgression of the Celestial
Crescent’s will, I felt an exhilaration that no mortal could ever
hope to understand. Upon extending my consciousness, however, I
realized that something was horribly wrong. The Celestial Crescent
wasn’t singing its song through the Transcendent Plane. It was
gone.”

“
Then I
felt it, the moment that you opened a portal to
this
place. The crescent
pulled me here. I followed you through the portal in the body of
your Emili. The call of the Celestial Crescent led me to
him
,”
Khryzt spat in his twin alien voices, flinging a
disgusted finger at the unconscious Centaurai.

“
This
monster
has stolen the Celestial Crescent. As a result,
the Black Moon, has been eradicated. Without the Celestial Crescent
at its core, the Black Moon can’t form from the chaos drawn around
it. It’s is bound to this contemptible human, and I know of no way
to disentangle its sacred silver from his life-force.

“
The
Celestial Crescent belongs in the Transcendent Plane. Without it,
everything that I have longed for all of these centuries has proven
to be nothing more than ashes and half-forgotten
dreams,”
Khryzt finished in
double-tones of bitter despair.

So Khryzt
was
trying to retrieve
the Celestial Crescent. And it was somehow bound to Cylium
Vest.

Sheikoh bit his lip and thought things
through. Ghost was after the Arch Centaurai position, Camillio
Tyche wanted the codex (hopefully he didn’t want the Sycrarian
overly), and all Sheikoh wanted was for the demon to vacate Emili’s
body. Khryzt would probably go back to the Transcendent Plane with
his magical crescent thing… If Tyche figured out some way to rip
the crescent out of Cylium Vest…  

Sheikoh opened his mouth to suggest a
compromise.

Ghost and Indigo burst into the
cavern. Sheikoh cursed and dodged behind a boulder. They couldn’t
have chosen a worse moment to pummel the distracted Khryzt with a
barrage of red and green plasmafire. And it wasn’t doing much to
the demon. From the slams and sizzling of his cover, Sheikoh could
tell Khryzt’s shield hadn’t faltered.

It looked like negotiation was off of
the table. There was nothing else to do but proceed with their
original plan.   

The plasmafire cut off suddenly. They
had apparently discovered the invisible barrier around the
Sycrarian. Sheikoh flipped over the eight-foot boulder in a single,
bounding leap. He landed in a roll, morphing it into a charge for
Khryzt. Air howled in his ears and the ground heaved. Around him,
rebounding plasmafire pelted smoking craters into its rock walls.
The cave shook.

Through the tumult, Sheikoh furiously
raced for the two white flames.

- Emili’s -

- Khyrzt’s -

Its
eyes

Just below them, all the power of a
hurricane swirled itself into a dense, white ball. It floated
outside of Emili’s mouth, which was arranged in silent roar. By the
vortex’s whistling light, Sheikoh could see Emili’s face. Her neck
stretched out, taunt and strained. Her white teeth sparked with the
ball’s blinding light. Even blanketed in thick clouds of dust and
wearing a demon’s expression, she was unbelievably
beautiful.

Sheikoh shook himself. He guessed that
the blast was more than enough to kill Ghost and Indigo. As well as
about half of the mountain above. Sheikoh desperately hurled his
body the last ten feet. He rocketed towards the Sycrarian, faster
than blinking. His arms instinctively covered his face. A cloud of
surprised sparks flared over his forearms.

Sheikoh slammed into the
Sycrarian, and knocked it off of Emili’s feet.
The inferno of force exploded outwards. Sheikoh’s vision was
swallowed in blinding waves of untamed chaos. It was surreal to see
reality warp and stones fly under pressure he was immune to.
Sheikoh ran straight through the storm of power, untouched, while
the cavern quaked beneath him. He thanked the amulet bouncing
against his chest. The destruction should have charred him black in
an instant.

Sheikoh burst out of the misfire.
Dodged a stalactite threatening to spear him. Charged the nearby
Sycrarian. He slashed with his hissing electroblade. The stroke
threatened to cripple an arm.

Emili’s arm.

Sheikoh’s strike stuttered for the
merest instant. He didn’t have time to follow through. Khryzt
dodged.

And he was suddenly wide
open.

Shit!

A leg whipped across Sheikoh’s chest.
The air was smashed from his lungs. He was flung backwards like a
crumpled, paper ball.

Midair, he wrested his ML5 out of its
holster and covered the demon in instinctive plasmafire. It looked
like it surprised Khryzt. All three of his shots went
wide.

The next instant, he smashed into hard
rock. A breath gasped out of his chest and the pistol was knocked
out of his hand. He bounced off the rock and collapsed into a heap
of numb surprise. A haze slowed his thoughts and froze his battered
body. He lay there dazed. Consciousness flickered in and out. Ghost
and Indigo saved him. They quadrupled Sheikoh’s desperate
plasmafire with their own.

Khryzt didn’t deflect their shots with
its invisible wall though. Emili’s arms bent into a circle and, in
the air between them, a swirling vortex opened up. It plucked
Indigo’s and Ghost’s plasmafire out of thin air, focusing them into
a ball of tornado-fast wind. The power spun with the light of their
shots.

This didn’t look good. Sheikoh pushed
himself up, climbing to his feet heavily.

Khryzt twisted the energy into a rough
harpoon and held it above Emili’s head like a conqueror. Sheikoh
didn’t like where this was going. He stepped towards Khryzt as the
demon threw the cackling energy at Indigo and Ghost like it was a
spear made of lightning. The lethal bolt zigzagged towards Indigo
and Ghost, faster than the eye could follow.

Ghost flung himself at Indigo and
tackled him out of the path of the bolt. The snarling energy ripped
a new tunnel through the wall behind where they’d been moments
before. The members of Legacy slammed into a wall. The cave floor
heaved violently, moaning a deep, ominous rumble. Sheikoh struggled
to regain balance as the chamber shook. Cracks climbed up the
walls.  

Something shattered by Sheikoh’s foot.
He looked over and then up at the ceiling. Stalactites were raining
down, there tips sharp as daggers. He dodged left and right,
avoiding the falling blades, and slowly moving towards Khryzt in a
desperate frenzy of blurred movement. One lanced straight towards
his chest. His balance was off. He couldn’t dodge it. It was going
to stab him in the heart.

At the very last instant, Sheikoh
desperately swung his right arm at the stalactite. It shattered it
like glass.

Khryzt had forsaken him for two easier
targets. The Sycrarian pointed two flickering, purple fingers at
Ghost, who kept Indigo safe beneath him. The android had covered
Indigo from the hail of falling stalactites with his own body.
Sheikoh could just make out the needles of rocks impaled in Ghost’s
back.

The stalactites finally stopped
raining. Sheikoh bunched up his metal legs and charged the
Sycrarian. But it made no difference. It was too little, too late.
He was too far away.

Khryzt smashed Ghost’s shoulder with a
purple beam. It blasted him into the air, spinning like a gear.
Ghost came down rolling and didn’t stop until he lay against the
far side of the cave.

 
The android only
lived because the demon hadn’t noticed the dull gleam of blacksteel
peeking out of his Synthskin. But there was no way Khryzt didn’t
see it now.