Spires of Infinity (31 page)

What’s going on? Why are people fleeing?”

The dog-eared man licked his lips anxiously, looking from Sam, to Gabriel, and back to Sam again. “The Apostle of Cain.”

“What the hell’s an Apostle,” Sam asked in confusion.

“He rose to power in the Quarantine Zone about a month back, and got all the

mutants organized. His face is so grotesque that he can’t bear to gaze upon it himself, and always wears a mask and a big heavy cloak to hide his mutations. The Emperor sent an entire division of troops to help defend the walls. We just received word that a battle has been fought, a section of the wall is down, and the Imperial Army is retreating in defeat. New Hope is right in the Apostle’s path!”

“Right in the Apostle’s path to
where
,” Gabriel asked.

“Don’t be daft,” the man looked as though he’d never heard a question so stupid.

“Where else? He’s headed for the Spires of Infinity! You two better head back the way you came until things settle down.”

With that, the two of them took off running southward with their litter bouncing between them.

Watching them go, Gabriel wondered how long it would take an army to reach the town from the walls to the east.

“A month ago,” Sam said thoughtfully. “That’s when I first saw you, looking like a little lost puppy. Remember all those soldiers on their way to the Quarantine Zone?

They said there was someone organizing the mutants and causing trouble.”

“Oh crap,” Gabriel cried in sudden realization.

“What,” Sam reached for the pistol on her left hip. “What is it?”

“I think I just figured out what I’m supposed to do at the Spires of Infinity,”

Gabriel moaned.

“You don’t mean . . .?”

“God, I hope not. I have no idea how to stop an entire army.”

Chapter 27: The Apostle Comes

Shocked by the sudden change in temperature, Kari gasped aloud. Cold beat at

her like a brick to the face, as her tails involuntarily tried to curl between her legs. With her Demon blood always hot in her veins, she was rarely affected by cold, but there was something different about the cold in this world. It was deeper, and sharper, seeping into her.

“No way,” Michael said with wonder in his eyes.

What Kari saw around them was completely unexpected. They stood in a wide,

busy street, with wooden buildings all around. Urgency charged the air as hundreds of townspeople fled in disarray, many carrying armfuls of belongings. It was the people themselves that made Kari stare.

“They’re
all
Heretics,” she thought her eyes might drop right out of her head.

“
All
of them!”

“No,” Jonathan muttered, his brow furrowing. “They
look
like us, but they don’t
feel
like us. I can’t sense them like I can other Heretics.”

Kari’s senses in that regard were rather lacking, but those of her brothers were top notch. Still, they were far from perfect.

“What do you mean,” she asked. “
Look
at them.”

“They smell like humans,” Michael shrugged, “not Heretics. What’s going on

here?”

They were drawing stares and it took Kari a few seconds to figure out why. With her illusions disguising them, they looked like three ordinary humans in a place where there were no ordinary humans. She never would have thought to find a world where
not
having a tail or two was strange. Immediately, she unraveled the illusions around them, and they stood as their normal, undisguised selves.

“Awoo,” Jonathan made a rather bland attempt at a wolf’s howl, saying the word rather than actually howling it.

“Awoo indeed, fellow wolf,” Michael grinned. “Great to be ourselves for once.”

Kari rolled her eyes. “I though you said you were dogs.”

“You wound us deeply, sister dear.”

“How could you be so cruel as to call two noble wolves, lowly dogs.”

“Wolves are beautiful, noble, and loyal creatures.”

“A dog just can’t compare to the majesty and power of a wolf.”

“You said dogs were loyal not three days ago,” Kari pointed out.

“Nowhere
near
as loyal as wolves,” Michael said, turning to Jonathan. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

“Think of the women we’ll find here,” Jonathan replied giddily.

“At last, beautiful girls with tails of their own. Let’s see them make excuses now.”

“Exactly! There can’t possibly be prejudices against men with furry protrusions when everyone has one.”

“At last, a world where women can see past their prejudices to the idiocy

beneath,” Kari said sarcastically, rolling her eyes skyward. Her jaw nearly hit the ground at the sight.

Staring at the sky, she was completely speechless. Ignoring her brothers’ attempts to get her attention, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the huge red sun partially eclipsed by a gigantic blue and purple swirled planet. It was the most breathtaking sight she’d ever laid eyes on.

“Oh wow,” the twins said when they followed her gaze.

Unable to look away, Kari wondered if she was dreaming. Surely something like that could only exist in a dream. How could it possibly be so cold with the sun so huge in the sky? Their last world, where they had rested and recovered, had a large yellow sun, and it had been unbearably hot even at night. Maybe it had something to do with the color. She’d never seen a red sun before.

It had been nice to rest after their ordeals. She’d slept for almost a week straight, and the three of them together had eaten enough to feed an army for a month. She’d thought the sky
there
was spectacular, with seven moons and stars so thick in the night sky that they made solid waves and ribbons of twinkling light. That sky had nothing on this one.

“I wonder where all these people are going,” Kari finally managed to pry her eyes from the eclipsing sun.

“Maybe they’re afraid of the eclipse,” Michael suggested.

“I don’t think so. There’s something strange about this place,” Jonathan

muttered. “Can you feel it?”

Searching with her admittedly lacking senses, Kari felt what he was talking about immediately. Something felt horribly wrong and out of place in this world. She couldn’t quite identify it. It was almost like she could feel the world straining for life, but falling closer and closer to death. Something was twisting the world around them, making it cry out in agony.

“Look at this,” Michael said, holding up his shard of the Gate. It blazed brightly with inner purple fire.

Pulling her own out, Kari found that it was also glowing, as was Jonathan’s.

“What’s going on,” Michael asked.

“I’m not sure,” Kari said. The crystal seemed to hum in her hand. “It’s like they’re resonating with something.”

Dropping the crystal to hang on its cord, Kari was surprised to find that it strained against gravity to hang a bit to her left. Looking in that direction, she saw several towers far away on the horizon. The central tower was pointed directly at the sun above and a barely perceptible beam of light seemed to connect them.

“I think it’s coming from those towers,” Kari nodded to the crystal around her neck, which seemed caught in some sort of magnetic pull toward them.

“That’s certainly worth investigating,” Jonathan stuffed his crystal back down his shirt.

“First I think we should figure out why these people are running for their lives like the world is ending,” Kari said, grabbing a passerby, another foxgirl who eyed her second tail as though she wished she’d thought of it first. “Excuse me. Can you tell me what’s going on here? Why is everyone running?”

Blinking as if she’d been asked if water was wet, she eyed them, her tail twitching nervously. She was obviously wary of the twins, especially Jonathan with his overgrown meat cleaver that he called a sword.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Obviously not,” Michael said impatiently.

“No,” Kari kicked him in the shin on general principle. “We just arrived. What’s going on?”

“It’s the Apostle,” the foxgirl said fearfully. “He’s a mutant, they say. Face so grotesque that he has to wear a mask to hide it from even himself. He organized the other mutants in the Quarantine Zone and came over the walls.”

“Quarantine Zone,” Jonathan asked.

The foxgirl pointed in the opposite direction of the towers. Turing her head, Kari saw a massive cement wall rising out of the ground in the distance. It snaked off for god only knew how long in both directions. Who would bother building a wall so big, and why?

“The Imperial Army, and some Imperial Guardsmen came to defend the walls, but

the Apostle and his army of mutants came over them like a flood. The Imperials fled north and the Apostle is marching for the Spires of Infinity,” the foxgirl nodded toward the towers. “And we’re right in his path.”

“The Apostle again,” Michael muttered. “Doesn’t that bitch know when to quit?”

“I guess that means she survived,” Kari sighed. That could cause problems, as she was reasonably sure Jonathan had fallen for her. She didn’t like not knowing whether or not she could trust him to do the right thing if the time came that the Apostle had to die.

“They say the Apostle was even
born
with his tail,” the foxgirl leaned in conspiratorially, lowering her voice.

Blinking, Kari didn’t follow. Of
course
the Apostle was born with a tail, she was a Heretic. Realization dawned, and suddenly a town full of Heretics that weren’t Heretics made a lot more sense. Had these people been born human and later altered their bodies to imitate Heretics? What human would ever
want
to look like a Heretic? It was a ludicrous thought.

“I need to go,” the foxgirl said. “They’re waiting for me. If I don’t get to the wagon in time they’ll leave without me.”

With that she scampered away, carrying her basket awkwardly.

“Whatever those Spires of Infinity are,” Michael fingered his shard of the Gate through his shirt, “there’s something strange about them. Maybe there’s some sort of weapon that the Apostle wants. Whatever it is, we can’t let her have it.”

“Agreed,” Jonathan nodded.

Kari nodded her agreement as well.

“We need to get there before she does and find out what’s making our crystals act like this,” Michael said.

“Let’s go,” Kari started toward the Spires of Infinity, but came to a stop when someone caught her eye. First it was the curious beasts that looked a cross between a horse and a wildcat that gave her pause, but then the man riding one of them. He was the only person in town that appeared to be human.

He was ruggedly handsome, with disheveled, wavy dark hair that was mostly

hidden under a wide-brimmed hat, and pale blue eyes. The several days of stubble on his face reminded her of her father. She’d rarely seen her father clean-shaven, and she supposed she’d grown up thinking that real men always had stubble on their faces. There was something about the man that drew Kari to him. She had the strangest feeling that they’d met somewhere long ago, and she’d been trying to find him again ever since.

Nodding a greeting to her, the man navigated his animal through the crowd. He had an air about him of someone that did not belong, of course that could just be his lack of a tail. Still, the way he held himself, and the way he looked warily at everything around him, screamed that he was a stranger here.

Drawn by an odd desire to learn more about him, Kari took a step after him, but stopped, shaking her head. This was no time to be pretending at fairytale love at first sight. There were far more important things to be thinking of.

Taking one last look at him before he rode out of sight, Kari realized that his companion was glaring at her, her bushy wolf tail bristling. Her long silver hair was done up in twin braids and she had what looked like a stuffed cat of all things resting on her shoulders. Glaring daggers at Kari, her golden eyes glinted metallically in the dimming sunlight. Showing a ridiculous amount of cleavage, Kari thought it was a miracle that she didn’t pop right out of her skimpy top with the movement of the animal she rode.

With a body like that she couldn’t possibly be as young as her face would lead one to believe.

“He’s mine,” the girl mouthed. “Find your own.”

Kari shrugged an apology and waved her away, pointedly not looking at her

rugged companion again until they were out of sight in the traffic. He was handsome, but if someone already had a claim on him, she didn’t want any trouble.

“And she says
we
communicate without talking,” Jonathan said close at her right side.

“She thinks we read each other’s minds,” Michael replied, close on her left.

“Women,” they said together. “I swear the two of you just had an entire

conversation without opening your mouths.”

Looking from one brother to the other, Kari shook her head. Men were so blind sometimes. They never paid attention to the mood of a situation, people’s facial expressions, or their body language. She sometimes wondered how they managed to communicate with each other at all. They never understood that sometimes words just weren’t necessary, and others, not enough.

Kari gave each of them a glare in turn and they both flinched back from her.

“See,” Jonathan said. “Like that. That look has an entire chewing out in it and you didn’t even have to say a single word.”

“Message received, loud and clear,” Michael gave her a mock salute. “We annoy you, stop acting like idiots. Yes ma’am!”

Well, maybe they weren’t
completely
blind, only selectively so.

“Let’s go already,” Jonathan said, trying to shoo Kari forward. “Time’s wasting.”

“Yeah,” Michael agreed. “Why were you glaring that kid down anyway?”

Shrugging, Kari could hardly say that she’d been admiring the girl’s man. They’d never let her hear the end of it. Besides, they were right, there were far more important things to be thinking about now, like what power lay in the Spires of Infinity and how they were going to stop the Apostle from taking it.