Onslaught

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: PALLAS AND JOVE

Absolute darkness could not exist without absolute light. Anyone who stared on the deathwurms in their convoluted mass would have known that a pure light was coming: the angel Akroma.

Wide wings spread above the tangled wurms. Perfect pinions flashed the sunlight as they bore her above the swarm. The wings sprouted from feline shoulders, and a spotted tail lashed the air as she came. In one muscular arm, Akroma bore a staff like a jag of lightning. The other arm pointed down into the mess of monsters. Within a mane of flesh, the woman's serene face stared at the darkness, her white eyes intense.

"I see what you are. Deaths. Terrible deaths. One of you is the death of Nivea, the birth of me. One of you."

Akroma pivoted into a dive. She tucked her wings and held the lightning lance foremost. From blue skies, she shrieked down upon the wurms. In a riven second, she reached them.

Her lance stabbed one beast in the back, just above a lump where living creatures struggled. Muscle burst open. The lightning staff pierced the bolus and burned away flesh. Snarling like a jaguar, Akroma yanked the lance upward. The wurm's flesh peeled open. Terrified creatures boiled up and out.

Covered in digestive slime, elves and goblins clawed their way out of the belly of death. They slid down the thing's flanks and fetched up against adjacent wurms. Gasping, they turned to see their deliverer but winced away in terror.

Above Akroma loomed the gargantuan head of the deathwurm she had pierced. It reared up to block the sun. She was just lifting her face to see it when the horrid jaws roared down to snap her up. Translucent teeth gleamed around a black gullet.

With a single stroke of her wings, Akroma shot upward. She was not fast enough to fully evade the darting head of the wurm, but she hadn't meant to escape. She lifted the lightning lance high and rammed it down through the snout of the worm. It pierced the palate, jagged through the mouth, and pinned its lower jaw.

The wurm shrieked, pitching its head back and forth.

Akroma rode that convulsing head, all the while twisting her lance, stirring it through wider rings of flesh. In time, she would reach brain, burn through it, and kill the beast. This particular wurm was not the death of Nivea: Akroma would have sensed it. Still, it was an abomination, and soon it would be dead.

A shadow loomed above the impaled head. Akroma did not even look up. She hurled herself into the air, dragging the lightning lance out of the hole it had burned. Eagle wings caught the air, and feline claws leaped free of the wurm. Akroma soared away just as the second deathwurm clamped its head on the first With a swift crunch, it bit through skin, sinew, and bone. Even as it swallowed, the headless body shivered miserably.

Akroma rose above the horrid battle. From here, the mass of worms seemed a huge, dark brain. It spread across an imagined world and disbelieved all. It left nothingness in its wake. Akroma hefted her lightning lance. She would move like a brainstorm across that evil mind.

Two surges of her wings sent her strafing above the wurms.

Without slowing, she jabbed the lance in, stabbing one monster after another. She impaled a creature's head, another's back, and a third's belly, stitching agony across the mound of death.

She sought a particular death. If she could find the death of Nivea, could slay it and gut it from gullet to anus, perhaps she would find Nivea yet alive within. Her lightning lance came down twice more, and again, tasting the deathwurms but finding no trace of Nivea.

One wurm did not remain with the others. It was driven by a strange instinct. The souls of the dead naturally gravitate toward their homes, to linger and haunt, to greet loved ones and terrify hated ones. This wurm homed in.

It plunged through the jungle, snapping up the occasional great cat along the way. The scent of clear waters and limestone came from up ahead. Mixed with those odors was the taste of the soul who had made this place. The wurm drove toward that soul to which it was bound.

Here was the incarnate death of Nivea, and it would be the death of Ixidor too.

The wurm moved rapidly, toppling trees and leaving a mucus trail behind. Birds pecked at its flesh as it went, ripping off hunks of black and gobbling them down-only to gasp and die. Land-bound creatures recoiled from the seeking beast. It drove a small stampede of them right out of the forest and onto the shore of a blue lake. Next moment, the wurm itself arrived.

From the waters ahead rose a glorious palace, white marble above and white reflection below. The wurm was home, gazing upon the outward manifestation of the beloved mind.

The great black beast scuttled down the sands and waded out upon the waves. From its skin, darkness spread in the water. As more of its vast bulk ventured out, inky waves spread from either side. It slithered back and forth, its movements churning the once-placid lake. Soon, a hundred tons of wurm traveled weightlessly across the waves.

Ahead stood a shimmering man on a broad raft. He seemed like Ixidor. He poled away in terror.

The wurm merely opened its mouth and swallowed a few thousand gallons and the man and the raft. It wasn't him, but it tasted like him.

It reached the foundations, pylons sinking into the waters and holding aloft the palace. Even these massive drums of stone smelled of Ixidor. With wet sucker feet, the wurm gripped the smooth stone and climbed. Its weight made the massive walls grind and creak. As it went, the wurm cracked stone, and grit dropped away, pattering into the lake.

The wurm climbed up a long column, across the pediment, over a flying buttress, and atop a roof that buckled and fell. Through a hanging garden, over an aerial bridge, across a broad dome, and up another tower the wurm smelled its quarry. Ixidor was within.

Its black head craned up over the balustrade of a broad balcony. It oozed over the rail, bashing aside the chairs and table that waited there. Beyond the arched doorway opened a grand bedchamber, and in the center of that space stood Ixidor.

He trembled. There was something defective in his eyes, as if he were mad or wounded or both. The man sucked a breath, drawing in the dark spores that wafted from the wurm's flesh. He smelled it, too, for he said sadly, "Nivea."

That name energized the great wurm. It hunched forward. Its head jabbed beneath the balcony's arch, and its tail dragged slime along the tower wall. Caterpillar feet slapped the floor and drove the beast toward Ixidor. The wurm's mouth gaped for its long-awaited meal.

Ixidor wasn't alone. Around him stood six shadows, his own shadows, but living. He turned to one of them and dived into it, slipping away, as though it were a hole in the air. In rapid succession, the other shadows followed. Two, three, four, they were gone, then the fifth.

The wurm lunged.

The sixth dissolved to nothing.

Translucent teeth snapped down on emptiness. Ixidor was gone. He had escaped.

The wurm thrashed, crushing the grand canopied bed and tearing down the curtains. Its head was a mallet in that place of glass and silk. Its teeth tore the guts out of Ixidor's bedchamber. The space smelled fragrant of Ixidor, and destroying it was the second best thing to destroying him.

Only when the chamber was entirely gutted did the furious creature slide back out. Its flanged head slipped beneath the archway, and it reared out on the wind. The scent was faint here, but it remained. Ixidor was still in his palace. It would find him and destroy him, as it had destroyed Nivea.

At last, they would be together.

Akroma flew low above the tangled wurms and stabbed down with her lightning staff. She ripped open the back of another beast. Even as half-living creatures spilled from its wound, the deathwurm reared angrily. Its head rose just beneath Akroma. Her wings surged, flinging her beyond the reach of that ravenous mouth and out to soar over empty ground.

The wurm lunged after her, missed, ripped open a sucking hole in the nightmare lands, and flung itself onward, relentless. It gnashed again and tore open the world. Three pits and four opened beneath the monster. It rushed on after Akroma.

Her wings beat with almost frantic speed, flinging her along. A succession of pits opened behind her. The wind ripped feathers from her wings, and she was losing her hold on the air. Just behind her claws, the mouth of the wurm crashed closed. One more bite, and she would be destroyed.

The wurm pounced. Akroma hurled herself skyward. Glassy teeth snapped closed, scraping her hind paws. Trailing blood, Akroma climbed into the heavens.

The sucking wind was suddenly gone.

Reaching the apex of her flight, Akroma glanced down.

The wurm was stuck tight atop the series of pits it had chewed in the world. Its rubbery body had been sucked down into them in five places. The creature struggled to pull itself free, but the sound of ripping sinews told what would come next. With five greasy pops, the deathwurm tore into sections and disappeared down through the holes.

It was Akroma's fifth kill. Still perhaps a thousand monsters remained. They had uncoiled, no longer lying in a great mound atop each other but spreading out across the land. Most feasted on those who lay wounded on the battlefield-easy kills and readily available. Others pursued the fleeing armies across the nightmare lands, toward the desert.

The creator had mandated that Akroma kill all the wurms. So far she had destroyed only a handful.

Even as she hung above them, a new tactic came to her. Gathering her wings, Akroma stooped down from the sky. She dived toward the head of a wurm, though she held her lightning staff behind her, not before. Swooping in front of the huge thing's eyes, she rose to land lightly on the head of a nearby creature. It did not know she was there, but the first wurm did.

It rose, mouth gaping, and waggled back and forth, expecting her to leap away. Akroma only stood, returning its soulless stare. The rearing wurm struck. Its jaws spread wide so that its teeth seemed a giant bear trap. They clamped down but caught only a few of Akroma's darting feathers. Still, the fangs cut a huge chunk out of the other wurm's head.

Recoiling, the beast swallowed the gobbet. It gasped and choked, death eating death, and thrashed its life away. It rolled in agony atop the split skull of its victim. Together, the killers perished.

Those were the sixth and seventh kills for Akroma. Flapping conspicuously past the eyes of her next victim, she lighted on the neck of a nearby beast. It was not the way she was designed to fight-bait to make one wurm food for another. Still, with each attack, she could slay two of the monsters. At this rate, she would have them defeated in a few weeks.

By then, they might have spread through all of Otaria.

Akroma shrugged away the thought, hurling herself into the air.

Teeth clamped down on the flesh where she had been, and a pair of wurms began to die.

Perhaps Akroma could not slay them all. Perhaps she would be killed herself the next time she tried. Until she discovered a more lethal technique, though, she would flit from head to head and destroy.

Ixidor landed on his side in a broad courtyard of Locus. Gritting his teeth, he glanced up through the glimmering air.

His unmen followed, vaulting one after another overhead. Five of them escaped through the sixth, who closed forever, keeping the wurm away.

Not for long.

Shifting his focus, Ixidor saw the monstrous beast. Twisted, titanic, evil, it clung to the highest tower of his palace. Its black bulk dripped ooze down the white walls. Its head rooted through the chamber above-Ixidor's bedchamber.

Staring up at the grotesque creature, Ixidor awakened from his stupor. Since the beetles had first poured in their ravenous swarm from Phage, he had reeled like a man suffering a stroke. Part of his mind had been eaten away. All the thoughts that had dwelt therein had vanished. At first, Ixidor had been unable to move or think. Now, he could do both. Anger awakened him.

Locus was his tribute to Nivea: beauty defying ugliness, life defying death. Now death's ugly parasite clung to it.

Ixidor rose. His five remaining unmen did so as well, standing in the center of a beautiful garden. Beneath their feet, four paths diverged, each leading outward to one of the white walls. At the terminus of each path stood a huge frieze of Nivea's face. Four Niveas peered inward.

"My north, south, east, and west."

The flowers of each season were planted around her faces so that as the fickle year turned, she would never be without adornment. This was Locus at its finest-beautifully defiant. It was the perfect place for Ixidor to battle the wurm.

On the tower above, it finished its depredations and withdrew from the ravaged bedchamber. Its head waggled in the air, seeming to sniff, then, with slow magnificence, that sinewy thing turned toward Ixidor. Recognition glinted in its ink-ball eyes. Shifting feet on the stony side of the tower, the wurm wound its slimy way down the tower.

Ixidor strode to gather his weapons. He would not wield killing things, for the wurm embodied every killing thing. Ixidor would fight only with life, with beauty-the essence of Nivea.

He started small, gathering a broad bouquet of fresh blooms. His arm was its vase, and his life energy was its water. It was a work of art, his greatest weapon.

The wurm slithered over the courtyard wall. It was quick. Extending its rubbery form down to the river-stone walk, the wurm wound toward Ixidor.

The man only stood and waited, his unmen surrounding him. He held his bouquet ready as if the wurm were a coming bride. The flowers were no longer mere flowers, though. They had transcended their material forms. Ixidor had infused each stem, leaf, and petal with his life essence. The bouquet solidified in this precise form, this exact orientation. He completed his creation by extending the flowers toward the wurm. He said, "These are for you, Nivea-my love. For you alone."

Wet and lunging, the wurm flopped up the trail and opened its black mouth.

Ixidor leaned forward like a man flinging flowers into a grave. He opened his arm, hurling the bouquet into the jaws of death.

The wurm snapped closed on the flowers. When its mouth opened again, the blooms were gone. It leaped on Ixidor.

He flung himself sideways through one of his unmen. The other four followed. Ixidor left the bright garden and the black wurm and landed in a long art gallery. The remaining unmen tumbled down around him, while their comrade vanished in the face of the wurm.

Ixidor stood, feeling the thick woolen rug beneath his feet. He wished he could have remained to watch what his bouquet did. It would tumble intact through the monster's gut and seek out whatever essence of Nivea remained there. It would find her, and he would find it.

Or perhaps the bouquet was a foolish fancy, and Ixidor was simply mad.

He peered around at the gallery, and his misgivings deepened. Perhaps he was mad. He'd only half imagined this space. The long rug beneath his feet was extraordinarily detailed, but the paintings on the wall were indistinct, the sculptures shapeless, the ceiling irregularly bossed and in places receding into misty uncertainty. Ixidor had known he wanted an art gallery in his palace, but had been so busy creating living art that he had neglected dead art.

It was just as well. He could finish the gallery now and finish off the wurm.

Even as he stood there among his unmen, the rose window at the end of the gallery shattered. Where once bright panes welcomed the sun, now jagged fangs of glass ringed the frame. The wurm broke through. Glass cut long furrows in its sinewy flesh as it squeezed in.

Ixidor turned away from the coming beast. He lifted his hand toward the empty frames on the walls and sent out mental images of himself. Each painting became a precise portrait of him-so precise that it lived and moved. Ixidors stepped from their frames and mingled upon the floor. Death would have to eat them all before it could find him.

Lowering his hand, Ixidor flung it out toward the sculptures. They too took shape, life-sized images of him. They jumped down from their bases and stood staring at the monster that flopped toward them.

"All for you, Nivea. I give these folk only to you."

Just like the immutable flowers, these works of art would not dissolve in the tract of the beast. They would climb through it, giving Nivea company and killing the monster from within.

Or Ixidor was mad.

The wurm would not be stopped. It smelled the true Ixidor among all these false ones and bashed the creatures aside. They scrambled up along its muzzle, and when the beast gnashed at them, the Ixidors leaped into its mouth. An army of semblances invaded the monster and ripped out fistfuls of flesh as they went.

Ixidor laughed. He had reached the farthest vestibule in his gallery, and the wurm thundered angrily toward him. It swallowed its killers obliviously-deadly portraits, beauty against ugliness. Ixidor laughed.

The great beast lunged.

Ixidor hurled himself through another unman. The final three followed. They and their master tumbled to the ground elsewhere in the palace, and the one who had been their portal snapped shut.

Air hissed into Ixidor's inner ears. He clutched his head while the pressure equalized and then looked around at the deep chamber, stony and dark. Though he had created this windowless space, he had never been here before. There was no way into this deep sanctum except through a single stair that wound down within one of the foundation pylons. They were fifty feet beneath the bottom of the lake. Even if the wurm could smell him under stone and silt and water, it could not hope to squeeze down the pylon to reach him. Here he would be safe.

Ixidor smiled. He snapped his fingers. Lights flickered into being along the stony walls. They showed an opulent chamber with thick red carpets. Before him, a long and elegant dining table stood in the midst of tall seats. To one side, a canopy bed waited, and next to it stood a giant wardrobe. With a huge and well-stocked pantry, a deep cesspit, and burgeoning bookshelves, Ixidor could remain in this room forever.

He had forgotten about this place. He should have come here first. Let Topos take care of itself. Let mortals ravage his world, and when they were done, he would rise to live again.

Ixidor strode toward the canopy bed, and his three remaining unmen followed. Heaving an exhausted sigh, Ixidor climbed onto the silken sheets and laid himself out flat. He would wait out the war here with his unmen.

He must have slept. He had right and reason to.

Ixidor awoke to see an unman grasping at him. It tried to shake him, but its empty hands laid hold of nothing. Its silent shouts had not awakened Ixidor either. He rose because of the steady trickle of water off the canopy onto the carpet.

"What is it?" Ixidor asked.

In reply, a deep whuffling noise came from the stone ceiling.

Ixidor stood and stared at the great slab. It had cracked. Water traced out the jag and dripped down to strike the peak of the canopy. Even as Ixidor watched, the drops grew larger, and the crack began to spray.

"What's happening?" Ixidor wondered again. It sounded like something massive was burrowing into the silty bottom of the lake____________________

A chunk of stone bounded free of the crack. Water poured down in a white shaft and spread across the floor. The shaft widened, and the ceiling cracked out in the precise diameter of the deathwurm's head.

Ixidor turned and took a step, trying to spot the stairway out.

The wurm broke through.

Massive blocks shattered and fell. In their midst came a true horror. Where once a slender column of water rushed down, now a fat and meaty wurm crashed through the ceiling. Water poured in a roaring cascade all around it. Its jaws snapped up the canopy bed, crunching it to splinters and feathers. Down stuck to its translucent teeth as it turned its head. Stupid little eyes fixed on Ixidor.

"I should have known. There is no safe place, not even in my mind. Especially not in my mind."

With one last, longing look at the deep sanctum, Ixidor hurled himself through the unman who had awakened him.

He landed on his side in another corner of Locus-a private theater that had never held a play. Ixidor lay there panting. That had been a close one. Would he be running forever?

Water poured out around him, sluicing through the legs of the unman. Ixidor blinked, seeing twin floods gush across the ground. The unman hadn't closed. He yet stood there, a portal between the deep sanctum and the theater. Why hadn't he closed? And where were the other unmen?

Ixidor hadn't seen them since he fell asleep. They should have been incapable of leaving him, for he had never granted them free will.

Two of his unmen had abandoned him. The third remained open, waiting for its companions to jump through. The open gate would allow any creature to pass Ixidor lurched backward Through the unman burst the head of the wurm. Its mouth gaped, teeth spread, and jaws snapped.

Ixidor could not get out of the way.

The thing's mouth closed around him, and its cold gullet swallowed. All was darkness and agony.

The wurm withdrew its head through the unman.

Deprived of its master, the unman only stood and trembled, water pouring through shuddering legs.

He was gone.

Above the ravenous wurms and the sucking pits, Akroma somehow sensed it. The creator was gone. "Ixidor."

She could do no more. Battered and weary, Akroma had killed fifty deathwurms. More than a thousand remained. She had fought because she knew Ixidor wished it. Now he was gone.

Akroma labored into the uncaring sky.

Beneath her feline feet, wurms bounded across the nightmare lands and entered the sandy desert. They continued on, gobbling up folk as they went. They could not bite through the world anymore, but they would scour it of all life.

Akroma hung in the sky and watched the end of Otaria.