Chapter 12

twelve

. . .

Thaumas

The battle was over almost before it began.

Oh, Zarath's killers fought with the desperate fury of cornered predators, all fang and claw and animal cunning. They died hard, choking on their own blood, cursing us to the Void and back.

But in the end, they died all the same. Outmatched and over matched, no matter their cruelty, their twisted gifts.

Because in the end, they were only monsters. Only flesh, even wrapped in silk and cybernetics and the screams of the damned.

And flesh was so damn fragile. So eager to yield beneath the keen edges of our fury, to spill its vital essence in steaming torrents across the deck plates.

And yield they did, the devil's tithe claimed in full measure. Until only one remained, panting and snarling, still spitting defiance even brought to bay at last.

Zarath. Once a legend, a bogeyman made manifest to haunt a thousand shattered worlds. Now just a man, battered and bleeding, his fine clothes shredded to crimson rags.

But the madness, the cruelty that still burned in his eyes, cold and eternal as the void beyond the hull. The void he had sought to embody, to become, in his relentless pursuit of dark apotheosis.

They beat him, broke him, and finally toppled his empire of agonies. But even now, even brought so low he would not go gently. Would not embrace this, his final unmaking, without one last attempt to twist the knife.

To spit in the eyes of his vanquishers, laughing all the while.

"Well, darlings," he purred, voice wet and cloying. "Haven't we had fun?"

He straightened painfully. The motion accompanied by the wet crack of shattered bones. But his smile never faltered, never dimmed, even as fresh blood leaked from the corner of his mouth.

"But the game grows stale now, don't you think? You've bruised your little knuckles on my face, spilled your share of blood in the doing." A wheezing chuckle, flecks of crimson misting the air. "Shall we call it a draw, hmmm? Decline the rematch, before one of us says something we'll regret?"

Beside me, Kat snarled, a predator's fury in the sound. I felt her tremble against me, every atom of her screaming to rip, to tear, to scatter this smirking butcher to the stellar winds.

And Void help me, I shared the sentiment. Wanted nothing more than to wrap my talons around his lying throat, silence that silver tongue permanently.

But no. No, we needed him talking, loathsome as the prospect might be. Needed to dig the truth out of his twisted brain, sift the silt for bitter pearls of intel.

Because as vile as Zarath was, as ruinous, I had a sick, sinking feeling that he was not the cancer entirely. That there was more at work here than one man's dreams of godhood, of grinding the cosmos ‘neath his boot.

Call it a soldier's instinct. The hindbrain hackle-prickle of danger on the wind, the ozone stink heralding a rad-storm.

We had cut out the Syndicate's heart, left it broken and bleeding but I feared the rest of the beast yet drew breath.

And if that was so, if that impossible, teeth-chattering wrongness lurked still beyond the firelight.

Then I needed to know. Needed to scent out its shape, map the labyrinth of its malice. So that I might know how best to cut its throat when Void and viciousness kicked down the door.

So I set my teeth on edge, forced my gorge down. Stomped hard on the impulse to rip and rend, break the mocking monster before me into his squalling, whimpering components.

Later. There would be time later to balance the books, to weigh Zarath's life against his crimes and find it so, so wanting.

I stepped forward, smooth and implacable, Kat a half-step to my left. We moved in unison, extensions of one lethal will, no words needed in the grim accord of this moment.

"Up," I commanded, my voice clipped and colder than the void beyond the hull. "Slowly, no sudden moves."

My plasma-casters hummed, the apertures whining as I primed the magnetic coils. Kat's pulse rifle buzzed like an aggravated wasp, cradled rock-steady against her shoulder.

"One twitch, one flicker of hostile intent." I smiled, a slash of white in the crimson gloom. "And you breathe through a brand new blowhole. Am I fucking clear?"

Zarath wheezed a laugh, wincing as he dragged himself upright. "Crystal, darling. I'm rather attached to my current orif…"

KA-THUD.

His snide retort cut off in a grunt, my armored knee cracking into his gut like a torpedo impact. He folded like a ruptured pressure suit, all the air smashed from his lungs.

I followed him down, one knee in his chest, my talon locked around his throat. "Shall we try that again, worm?" I enquired mildly, my tone at odds with the fury flexing my fingers. "Or would you prefer conversing in the traditional Raptor tongue?"

I squeezed, ever so slightly. Just enough for him to feel the pinch of keratin against his windpipe, to imagine the obscene ease with which I could crush it.

His eyes bugged satisfyingly, thin lips working like a suffocating fish. But his gaze never left mine, a cold flicker of amusement dancing in those mad, mad depths.

"So rough, my dear!" He rasped, vocal cords fluttering against my palm. "At least buy a lady dinner first!"

I leaned in, my beak a scant inch from his leer. "Let's get one thing straight, meat. You are no one's lady. No blushing innocent to be coddled and courted."

My smile was a rictus, a death's-head grin. "You are the butcher of Kalados. The skin-stitcher, the screaming king. You have left worlds dead and charred in your wake, ground galaxies beneath your boot heels."

I tightened my grip, a fresh web of burst capillaries painting his sclera scarlet. "So believe me when I tell you, Hell has a very special throne carved out just for you. And I will spend eternity shoveling brimstone up your ass if you don't start talking."

He gurgled, a high, manic edge to the sound. As if my fury delighted him, struck some sick chord within that shriveled little walnut he called a heart.

Kat stepped forward, her rifle a hard jut against his temple. "Answer the man," she said, her voice diamond and arsenic. "Or my next stop is an art supply store to find a brand new canvas."

And for the first time, just the barest flicker, Zarath flinched. A micro expression, there and gone in a fractured instant, but I caught it all the same.

The slightest cringe, the reflexive dip of his gaze. A chink in the armor, a tell of weakness from the terrible Zarath himself.

Because looking into Kat's eyes in that moment, even I had to suppress a shiver. Had to fight down the atavistic dread trickling through my veins, icy certainty of the horrors she could inflict given half a reason.

This was no mere threat, no posturing puff to be dismissed. It was a promise, cold as the void and twice as certain. If Zarath did not comply, did not peel back the layers of his labyrinthine schemes.

Then the Morrigan herself would descend on raven wings to claim his shriveled soul. And her handmaiden would wear my mate's face, as she flensed the truth from his screaming flesh in strips.

Perhaps something of that dark divinity communicated itself to Zarath at that moment. Perhaps, staring into the fathomless wells of Kat's eyes, he glimpsed at last the reaping of his black deeds had sown the implacable promise of ruin to follow.

Whatever the cause, he seemed to diminish, to dwindle somehow before us. That diamantine arrogance, the lazy cruelty leeched away, leaving him small and pathetic in his sudden frailty.

"All right," he croaked, the words bitter ashes on his tongue. "All right, curse you. I'll tell you what you want to know."

I exchanged a swift glance with Kat, a flutter of silent communication. A quick, querying quirk of my brow ridge.

Believe him?

The slightest incline of her chin, eyes never leaving our captive.

For now.

I turned back to Zarath, my talons flexing against his throat. "Talk then, butcher. Unburden yourself of your sins, confess your atrocities to the cosmic scales."

"And pray your black account does not weigh too heavy, when the reckoning is through."

He closed his eyes, a shudder rippling through his broken frame. As if steeling himself to lance some hidden, festering abscess, to deliver him of the poison churning in his guts.

"It's bigger than me," he said at last, each word ripped from him like rotted teeth. "Bigger than the Syndicate, the slaving, the screams of our infinite meat."

He laughed, high and sobbing, madness leaking through the cracks. "Cogs, you see? Only cogs, in a great machine. The furnace must be fed, must consume entire systems to stoke its ravening maw."

"What machine?" I demanded, dreading a sinking leaden weight in my crop. Somewhere, in the twisted coils of my neuro forming, a pattern was pressing. An outline, vague yet chilling, like glimpsing some behemoth shape gliding beneath a blackwater sea. "What furnace? Explain!"

Zarath's eyes slitted open, naked despair and resignation writ clear in those lunar pits. "The Elder Gods," he whispered, the breath rattling in his punctured lungs. "The great old thighs beyond the Dark, dreaming in their necropolis, and the mad fools who would resurrect them."

He fixed me with a glare, bright and feverish, a crusader's zeal igniting in those bloodshot depths. "They called to me, don't you see? Sang to me, sweet sibilant whispers behind my eyes, coiled in the rotting meat of my mind."

His voice rose, spiraling towards hysteria, tongues of lunatic flame. "They showed me the truth, the great crouching obscenity at the heart of all flesh! Peel back the skin, crack wide the bone, and the squirming chaos writhes through, the jabbering mad god void!"

I recoiled, disgust and horror, a choking tide in my throat. At my side, Kat made a low, animal sound of revulsion, her battle-mask slipping to reveal the fear beneath.

"You're insane," I rasped, shaking my head as if to dislodge the sickening images suddenly gibbering behind my eyes. "Space-sick and crazy, rotted through with too much dark and death."

"Am I?" Zarath barked a laugh, spittle and blood spraying the ruined silk of his tunic. "Gaze into the abyss long enough, my dear, and you will see how paper-thin the veil of civilization stretches! See the mad, piping truth, capering and chirruping in the spaces behind stars!"

He sobered, the fire dimming to ember and ash in his eyes. "The Resurrection is coming, Thaumas. The Elder Gods stir in their sleep, straining towards cruel nativity. And their priests, their puppets, even now converge on the Shrouded Reach, to midwife their aborning."

A cold, sinking dread wormed through my crop, icy talons sinking into the meat of my hearts. The Shrouded Reach, that benighted realm of blood and shadow.

My ancestral home. The birthplace of my kind, before the Raptorian diaspora. Before the call to the stars, to slip the surly bonds of gravity and pierce the obsidian gulfs between worlds.

And now, if this lunatic spoke true, the staging ground for an atrocity beyond measure. The first pebble in an avalanche, a cataclysm to shake the cosmos and rend the very fabric of reality.

All beginning on Raptoria. In the shadowed enclaves and obsidian spires of my forebears, my blood.

Duty warred with despair within me, a paralyzing clash of polarized imperatives. I had sworn to defend the innocent, to stand as a bulwark against the dark. How could I now turn my back on such a threat, abandon the worlds to their grim fate?

But Kat was my first loyalty, my brightest lodestar. For so long, I had dreamed of building a life with her, a future far from the death and darkness that had defined us for so long.

How could I drag her into this new crucible, this war unlike any we had faced before? How could I ask her to once more take up the sword, stain her hands with blood and horror for a conflict not her own?

And worse, far worse, how could I risk losing her, my bold falcon, my valiant Valkyrie, to the squirming obscenities even now churning towards cruel quickening?

The answer rose in my throat, bitter as wormwood on my tongue. I couldn't. I wouldn't. Not for anything, not even the fate of worlds hanging in the balance.

Because a universe without Kat, was no universe I wanted to inhabit. No cold, sterile eternity I could endure, bereft of her bright laughter, her diamond courage, the fire of her soul.

So I would do the unthinkable. The impossible, antithetical to every fiber of my being. I would leave her behind, sail into the squamous dark alone, and shoulder the weight of galaxies like a lodestone around my neck.

Rend and crush the growing shadows, cauterize this cancer alone, or fall to my ruin in the attempt.

All to keep my northern star safe. To spare her the barest chance of being swallowed by the abominations even now slouching towards wakefulness.

I took a shuddering breath, resolve crystallizing in my marrow. Gently, so gently, I reached out to cup Kat's face, memorizing every beloved plane and angle.

"Kat," I whispered, my voice cracking and thick with every aching pulse of my heart. "My valiant one, my bright mate."

Her eyes widened, questions dancing in those verdant depths. But I forged ahead, the words tearing themselves from my throat like squalling, blood-slick things.

"I have to go," I said hoarsely, each word a shard of glass. "Return to Raptoria, stand against the rising dark. Rip out this evil by the roots, before it can plunge the cosmos into a screaming new hell."

I swallowed hard, steeling myself for the killing blow. The rending strike, the sundering sweep to break both our hearts for the greater good.

"And I have to go alone."