Outlanders 14 Hell Rising, page 29
The huge man didn't care for a forced retreat. He closed in on his opponent, body to body, blades crossed and locked. For a long second, they stood eye to-eye with each other. Quayle drove his head forward between the edges of the two swords, trying to butt Kane in the face. He sliced open his left cheek in the attempt.
Pushing off from Quayle, using his enormous body as a springboard, Kane slammed back against the plinth supporting the idol of Belial. Quayle pressed his advantage, hammering away with his cutlass as if to beat Kane to his knees. Kane blocked and parried. It was all he could do to hold on to the broadsword handle while the giant albino smashed and battered at him.
Kane's right arm began to lose all feeling, the strength seeping away. A fireball of agony burned in his shoulder socket. He placed both hands beneath the cross guard and tried to knock the cutlass aside long enough for him to get away from the statue.
He pressed himself to one of the huge legs and eased around it. Quayle's blade was a constant flicker of light. It lashed past Kane's guard, and its keen edge hissed along his collarbone before a beat of the broadsword knocked it clear. Kane felt the slow spread of blood beneath his shirt.
He slashed swiftly in return, a half cut, half thrust with the point, directed at Quayle's groin, ripping a straight slash in his trousers. Quayle's parry was frantic, barely in time. He sprang back, crimson oozing from a cut just above his pelvic bone.
"Always the point," Kane said breathlessly. "Remember that."
Quayle's lips drew back from his discolored teeth in a silent snarl, and he lunged, whipping the cutlass toward Kane's chest. He had no choice but to leap backward to avoid the razored blade. The back of his head bumped smartly against the curve of a curling tentacle, and he stumbled.
Quayle moved in to deliver a killing stroke. Anticipating the swing, Kane ducked aside at the last microsecond. The cutlass bit deeply into the tentacle, shearing through it, but the four-hundred-year-old blade broke on impact. The top half of the sword splintered and fell chiming to the floor, beside the sliced-off piece of statuary. The little sphere of orichalcum rolled away from the tentacle.
Quayle bleated his disbelief and grief. Eye bulging in its socket, he gaped at the jagged stump of his precious cutlass as if trying to convince himself that a trick of the light gave it only the illusion of being snapped in half.
Then, with a sobbing, bestial roar, he flung down the hilt and lumbered in an elephantine charge to retrieve the MP-5. Kane knew trying to tackle the behemoth would have the same effect as body-blocking a mountain. Quayle would just carry him piggyback to the dais. His toe nudged the orb of orichalcum and it rolled across the floor.
Glancing up, Kane focused on the open hole in the carved, demonic face above the dais. He dropped the sword, bent over, snatched up the little sphere and raced after Quayle. The big man had a three-yard head start, but Kane didn't have Quayle's extra two hundred-plus pounds of weight slowing him up. He could have easily caught or passed him, but Kane stayed at his heels.
Reaching the edge of the dais, Quayle half jumped, half crawled onto the crystal disk, grunting with the effort. He stooped, fumbling to pick up the subgun. As he bent over, Kane leaped up, slapped the orichalcum bead precisely into the mouth of the lasciviously grinning demon face and threw himself to the right.
Quayle whirled around, teeth bared in a grimace of homicidal fury. He worked the MP-5's trigger, spraying a wild storm of lead in Kane's general direction. Kane performed a frantic somersault, trying to roll ahead of the deadly, copper-jacketed stream. The slugs slashed long trenches in the chamber floor, showering him with rock chips. The walls threw back and magnified the rattling, stuttering roar.
The facets of the crystals above and below Quayle winked with the strobing muzzle-flash of the subgun.
They danced with inner sparks, seeming to gather the flickering light into themselves until they glowed with a throbbing flame. A nimbus of luminescence spilled from above and crept up from below, swiftly encasing Quayle's body in a shimmering skein of witch-fire.
At first the maddened man was oblivious to the phenomenon. Only when he was completely veiled by the wavering cocoon did he stop firing. He looked around wildly and made a convulsive lurch to leave the dais.
The convulsion turned into a spasm, one rippling shudder following the other until his entire body quaked, as if vibrating violently from within. He writhed, his eye wide and staring, saliva spilling from his slack lips. He dropped the MP-5.
His hairless scalp squirmed in half a dozen different places, as if tiny worms wriggled and burrowed just beneath the flesh. The white skin stretched and split amid little spurting geysers of blood. Rising to a crouch, Kane saw blunt-tipped horns sprouting from his skull, punching through the flesh.
Quayle screamed, a high-pitched ululating wail of agony ripped from pain centers Kane never knew existed in the human organism. The man clutched both sides of his head, his tongue protruding from his mouth. It was black and wet, then red as a gush of scarlet spewed from between his gaping jaws. The fabric of his sleeves over his elbows stretched out, then ripped as scarlet-coated spurs of bone erupted in a vermilion mist.
Quayle's body sagged as if bowed beneath his own ponderous weight. The right side of his face hung slackly from the bone, like wax exposed to great heat. With a wet, mucky pop, the flesh fell away and lay in a quivering lump of protoplasm on the disk.
Quayle turned his head, one entire side of it nothing but reddened bone. Gurgling around the blood bubbling from his mouth, he said, "You were right. I should've done more research."
His body fell flat on the crystal, and after a few twitches of feet and fingers, he moved no more.
Head spinning, Kane climbed to his feet, not able to tear his eyes away from the transformation Quayle's body was still undergoing. He didn't understand any of it except he had instinctively known that the dais was somehow involved in the creation of the mixtures.
Fand made her slow, stiff way over to him, face crimson streaked, the braid in her hair loosened. He put an arm around her, and she leaned into him, wincing. "You all right?" he asked.
"Aside from a desperate headache, I think I may have a cracked clavicle. But our skins are whole, more or less."
Kane indicated Quayle's light-sheathed body. "Which is more than can be said for him."
She kissed him on the cheek. "I knew only you would be able to best Balor, Ka'in."
"Kane," he corrected automatically.
"How did you know how to activate the machine with the orichalcum if you are only Kane?" she challenged.
He swept his gaze over the statue of Belial, about to tell her how he, Kane, not Ka'in, reasoned out the process due to his own experiences over the past year. Then he saw Belial's tentacles exuding a gibbous glow, like captured moonbeams. All of the beads embedded in the swirl of arms gleamed.
Fand saw it, too, and a gasp of fright tore from her throat. "You did more than activate the machine—you triggered a chain reaction!"
"How?" Kane snarled out the word. "The beads weren't exposed to solar radiation!"
"How do I know?" Fand shot back, voice high and trembling. "These devices haven't been used in thousands and thousands of years. They're probably as unstable as the energy that powers them."
"Shit!" Even as Kane hissed the word, he pivoted on a heel and dragged Fand in a sprint across the chamber. She shook loose and, long legs pumping, outdistanced him within seconds.
When they pushed through the opening, Fand grasped the carved image of the kraken. "Give me a hand. If we seal up the chamber, it might contain the—"
Kane didn't need to hear the rest. Clutching the tentacles, he hurled his entire weight into a muscle- cracking shove, the toes of his boots digging into the floor. For a long, heart-stopping second, nothing happened. It was like trying to uproot the temple itself. Then their combined strength prevailed, and with a prolonged screech of ancient gears and pulleys, the curved section of the wall slowly shifted. It joined seamlessly with the stone blocks, thudding solidly into place.
Body quivering with exertion, Kane followed the loping Fand up the dark staircase and then in a crazed, gasping dash down the long corridor and out of the building.
Fand still maintained the lead when they reached the stone steps leading to the sea. She leaped down them four at a time. Kane followed her closely, not daring to look behind him. A single misstep could pitch him headlong into a neck-breaking fall.
They piled aboard the skiff, casting off the line. It started immediately and Kane piloted it in a reckless swerve, the hull scraping on half-submerged rocks. The boat roared across the water, bouncing as violently as a stone skimming the surface of a pond.
When they had covered a little more than half the distance to where the Cromwell lay at anchor, Kane dared to cast a glance over his shoulder. The craggy atoll looked exactly the same as when they'd first seen it.
Shouting in order to be heard over the rush of the wind and the steady growl of the engine, Kane demanded, "If something was going to happen, shouldn't it have by now?"
The world staggered. An intolerable white glare filled his eyes. The sea heaved and the boat catapulted forward, riding mountainous ridges of flying foam. The skiff rose high on a rolling torrent, turning sideways, then flipping upside down.
Kane tried to cling to something, sought to reach Fand, but he plunged into a maelstrom of such force that he felt his bones compress. Even as the sea buffeted him, tossed him like a cork, he was aware of the thundering vibration of destruction. The orichalcum's detonating energy, pent-up in the vault below sea level, had burst forth in an apocalyptic torrent.
He rolled helplessly, seeing nothing, not knowing in which direction lay the surface or the bottom. There was nothing for him to do but somehow stay alive.
His lungs ached and blood roared in his head as he was swept and tumbled along by wave after wave of concussive force. He felt a pounding as of immense hammers upon his brain, then a vast numbness. Water seeped into his mouth, and he struggled to keep from inhaling it, clamping his lips tight.
Then a hand took one of his. His eyes, squeezed shut against the unholy glare, opened and he saw cool, greenish light, not the incandescent ball of hellfire that had scorched across the sky. Fand floated above him, her long unbound hair flowing around her head like a luminous veil.
Her golden eyes were blank, lost in shock. Dark red clouds puffed from around her ears. Slowly, Kane kicked his leaden legs and moved them both toward the surface. Her own legs began to stir, sluggishly at first, then with more determination.
Their heads broke the surface together. They dog- paddled in the shallow troughs between the rough waves, gasping and retching, vomiting out the water they had swallowed. When she was able to speak, Fand said in a strangulated voice, "I'm deaf."
"Your eardrums have ruptured," Kane told her. "You'll recover."
She gave him an angry glare. "I can't hear you!"
Kane turned in the direction of the atoll and saw only a great, bubbling froth from which shifting rays of smoky pink light shone, like the aurora borealis as seen through several layers of cloud cover.
Fand coughed, splashed and said, "Look."
Kane turned around and saw the Cromwell still at anchor, bobbing up and down in the last of the giant ripples. She was less than twenty yards away. With a bit of surprise, Kane realized they had been pushed for nearly half a mile by the shock wave.
Cutting a white wake off the Cromwell's port side chugged Hornblower's Wraith. He was able to see
Grant and Phin standing on the deck in front of the wheelhouse. Fand began to stroke toward the black ship. "Dodd can still fire on them."
Even as Kane swam after her, gritting his teeth at the acidic burn of brine on his cuts, the door to the Cromwell's bridge opened. Dodd appeared, frantically waving a square of white cloth at the Wraith.
Fand released her breath in a deep sigh. She turned her beautiful, bruised face to Kane, her eyes alight with exuberance. She clutched at him, grabbing handfuls of his sodden shirt.
"It's all over now," she said, her voice scratchy and raw but holding a thrill of happiness. "The Imperium is defeated, and hell rose and sank again!"
Kane managed to muster a weak smile. Flow that it was done, he was too exhausted to care. All he could think about was Brigid Baptiste, and what she might be thinking—or dreaming.
Epilogue
After turning Trillium over to the stable, hand, Brigid started to return to the house, but on impulse turned up the path to the formal gardens. Still in glorious bloom this fall, the garden with its huge rhododendron hedges and winding paths had always drawn her like a magnet from the time she was a small child. The winding path she now walked had aromatic herbs growing in its crevices. The mint in particular released a fragrance that always lifted her spirits. But today, not even the garden could calm all the disturbing thoughts that swirled through her mind. She had a sense of great events building in the distance, and she knew somehow Captain Kane was involved with them.
When she entered the house through the solarium doors, she was surprised and not at all happy to find Paul Delmas waiting for her. He was wearing a beautifully tailored riding habit and he swished the crop through the air in annoyance. In a voice ragged with asperity, he demanded, "Where have you been? I thought we were to ride together."
Brigid let him wait for a reply. Something of a dandy, Paul was amazingly handsome and tailored to a fault. Brigid could picture him spending hours before a glass, his patient valet in attendance, turning first this way, then that, posing first with one outfit, then an- other, searching the flaxen-haired reflection for that elusive perfect look.
With his charm, dandified good looks and money, he'd seemed at first to be the perfect match for Brigid. Temperamentally, they were extremely unsuited for each other.
"I'm waiting, Brigid." Paul's eyebrows drew down over the bridge of his aquiline nose.
"Oh, do be quiet, Paul. It simply slipped my mind." Brigid's quick retort surprised him with its note of defiance.
Paul gazed at her for one second with an emotion that bordered on shock, but quickly transmuted into patronizing amusement. "Why, Brigid, we're unusually wasp-tongued today. Is something the matter? May I be of assistance?"
He stepped close to her and, firmly grasping her elbows, drew her close to him. His gaze traveled from her head to her toes. She tried to withdraw from his grasp without seeming repulsed, which she most definitely was.
"Brigid!" he said sharply. "You must tell me what this is all about! Tell me everything at once, you silly goose."
She didn't know what to tell him about anything, much less everything. She felt herself withdrawing, not just from him but from her entire life as if it were unreal, taking on the quality of a dream.
Bernard, the butler, cleared his throat peremptorily from the foyer. Paul swiftly released Brigid, stepping away. The old white-haired servant proffered a silver salver to Brigid upon which lay a small white calling card, facedown.
Lips pursed in a moue of distaste, Bernard said,
"You have a visitor, Mam'selle. A gentleman." He spoke the word as if he found the taste and texture of it extremely repugnant. "He awaits you in the garden."
Brigid glanced through the glass-paneled door and saw the figure of a man pacing impatiently back and forth between the rose bed and grape arbor. She couldn't understand why she hadn't seen him when she walked past them just moments before. His face was in shadow, but the sun glinted from the silver knob and ferrule of his cane.
Cane...
Brigid picked up the card and read the handwritten inscription on the obverse side. In flowing cursive script she read, "I'm waiting for you. Come back to me, anam-chara."
Turning away from Paul, Brigid hurried toward the door. He called after her, a strident, angry question. "Who is this so-called gentleman? I demand you tell me his name immediately!"
She paid him no heed, turning the brass door handles and stepping out into a white antiseptic world.
Instead of the perfume of flowers, she smelled the scent of sterilizing fluids, of starched and laundered sheets. Instead of the sun, she saw neon strips shedding an artificial glow. She felt a light, warm pressure on her right hand. Everything was fuzzy, blurred around the edges so she blinked them into focus.
Kane sat beside her in a chair, head bowed, eyes closed as if he were sleeping. He looked exhausted to the point of being ill, his face pale and drawn tight over the facial bones, his hair in disarray. Her hand was nestled in his palm.
Brigid stirred, clearing a throat dry as dust, trying to move her tongue, which felt like a shriveled strip of shoe leather. Kane's head snapped up, eyes widening. They were weary eyes, worried eyes, red-netted and wet. He leaned over her urgently, tightening his grip on her hand. "Brigid?"
