plague vial. The effect came within seconds, the livid pinkness of the slime flowing into something more skin-coloured, spreading, thinning, the feeling of insects crawling … and finally, a patch of new skin little wider than a fingerprint.
‘If you help me you can walk away with many such treasures. Wonders of the old world. I could explain them to you. A man with that kind of magic on his side could rule—’
‘I already have a kingdom, ghost.’ I sealed the cylinder and set it over my shoulder again.
‘Is it enough?’ she asked, Hakon immobile, her voice rising from his chest. The sweet smell of rot hung about him. A fly buzzed about his head, settling by the corner of an eye.
‘Nothing is ever enough.’ Habit led my fingers to the old burns across the left side of my face, still rough and puckered. ‘You didn’t want me pretty? Or doesn’t your gloop heal burns?’
‘It was made for burns. Burns are its speciality. But that injury is curiously resistant. There’s an exotic energy signature … If our physics laboratory were operational then …’
I backed toward the mouth of the cave and the green riot of hook-briar. The drone of bees reached me now, the call of birds. High summer outside, the seasons had turned whilst I slept.
‘There’s no escape that way, Jorg.’ Kalla followed. ‘Hook-briar was one of our works.’
‘Yours?’
‘Well, not mine. But from this facility. This was a big place once. Three hundred people worked here. Chamber upon chamber, waiting now for a man with enough vision to excavate them. Hook-briar – a cheaper, self-renewing razor wire. Highly effective engineering. For warmer climes than this of course if you want all-year protection. They never did get a strain that wouldn’t die back in the winter.’
‘And your … “projector” is out there?’ I tilted my head toward the midst of the thorns. ‘You’re not worried I might call on you in person?’ I gave her my dangerous smile. I hadn’t felt like smiling since I woke but now the edge of an idea sliced through the fading fog of Kalla’s drugs.
Hakon nodded. ‘It’s safe enough from you even if you wore armour and carried shears. Naked and without weapons you pose no threat. I tell you this to show you how hopeless your situation is. Work with me and power beyond your dreams could be—’
‘I’ve dreamed enough, ghost,’ I said. ‘Time to die. Goodbye, Brother Hakon.’
His lips twitched, a snarl of effort, and words stuttered out. ‘B-b-beauty. S-s-sacrifice.’ His own voice, free of Kalla’s control. The mutterings of a broken mind. Or perhaps his memory of our joking in Vyene about the price we’d pay to see our enemies burn.
I set my strength to untwisting the top of the vial.
‘No!’ Hakon started forward, Kalla shouting from his chest unit.
The lid came free and I flung the container over his head, back along the corridor. Kalla had said it held death, a plague that might scour mankind from the world. I’d called it Pandora’s Box. I turned and ran, shrugging Hakon’s reaching fingers from my shoulder. I built up speed, barefoot across the stony cavern floor.
I’d released Pandora’s ills and back along the corridor a klaxon sounded, wailing like a thousand banshees. Angling toward the extreme left of the cave mouth, I reached the impenetrable wall of thorns, and leapt, high as I might, diving forward.
‘Purging. Repeat – level 0 viral breach. Repeat. Full Purge!’
Pandora’s Box held all the world’s troubles … but at the bottom of it, last to emerge, trapped among nightmares, lay Hope.
The hook-briar gave before my weight, thorns snagging at my skin, slipping in, tearing, slicing deeper, holding, until at last they arrested my advance and I hung among them. Trapped as I’d been trapped years before, pierced by the same sharp and sudden pain, but this time by my own volition.
I heard rather than saw the hot white tongue of fire that roared from the cave mouth, a spear of incendiary rage surrounded by billowing flame that spilled to either side, spreading, engulfing.
The klaxon felt silent, leaving only the roar of flames, the crackle of burning, and my screaming as the margins of the inferno reached me, naked amongst the thorns.
Unconsciousness is a blessing in such times, but horrifically late in coming. I felt my skin crisp, saw my hair shrivel and burn as the hot breath of the fire blew around me. I saw the skin melting from my hands before the heat took my sight.
Unconsciousness is a blessing, but only a temporary one.
I found myself amid a forest of blackened coils, thorn-toothed, stark against the blueness of the sky.
Rolling my bald and weeping head, I saw with blurred eyes a corridor cut through the midst of the hook-briar where only fine white ash remained. The silver-steel of the cylinder lay beneath me, scorched but unharmed. I jabbed at the buttons with sticky fingers, some welded together with molten skin, clumsy in a pain that admits no description.
Three times I tried the numbers. I would have wept but I’d gone past tears. At last, infinitely slow, the lid rotated off and I dipped my hands into the nu-skin. I daubed the slime across each finger. As the stuff writhed across them I held each digit wide, despite the pain. I smeared slime across my face, into my mouth, into each eye, down across my body as far as the remaining thorns would let me.
Whatever science or enchantment the nu-skin held it proved to be powerful. The unguent worked different wonders depending on where it found itself, repairing my sight, flowing down my windpipe and healing my lungs to the point where I could scream once more, building new skin across my arms while the dead stuff sloughed away.
I tore free of the thorns, only to snare myself on new ones, but allowing the application of my dwindling stock of slime to new areas, groin, legs, back. The skin’s work drew on my own strength, an exhaustion rising through me that dragged me into a torpor despite the crawling agony of it all.
At last a light rain woke me. I stood, caught amid the skeletal remains of the briar, impaled on black thorns, smeared with ash, but unburned, clad in a new hide.
Even burned and brittle the hook-briar took its toll on me as I struggled through. By the time I reached the corridor of ash I ran with blood from a hundred wounds, the last of the nu-skin exhausted early in the escape. The rain came heavy now, but warm, sluicing down across my body in a crimson wash. I stood in the mud and ash and let it clean me.
I returned to the cave, finding it still hot, the stone ticking as it cooled, no trace of Hakon save a stain around the blackened drug stand. Wincing at the heat beneath my bare and bleeding feet I made my way along the dark corridor and found my sword. And thus dressed I left the bunker.
At last, before my strength failed once more, I picked my way around ancient remnants of razor wire and came to where the top of a sunken pillar of Builder-stone emerged from the mud. The stone had been cracked by the fire’s heat and a little less than a foot of it lay exposed. Despite the weathering and corrosion it took more effort than I thought remained in me to slide the top to one side. The hollow interior stretched down beyond sight, the inner surface crowded with myriad crystalline growths, all interconnected with a forest of silver wires, some thick, some finer than spider silk. Many of the crystals lay dark, but here and there one glowed with a faint light, visible only in the shadow.
‘Found you.’
‘Don’t.’ Kalla’s voice, weak and pulsing from the interior.
I pried a rock from the muck about me. A heavy chunk of what might once have been poured stone. Grunting with effort I lifted it to the lip of the column. It would fit down the inside with an inch or two to spare.
‘I can’t end. Not like—’
‘A thousand years is too long to live.’ And I let the rock fall. It dropped with a prolonged and continuous sound of shattering, ricocheting from one wall to the other, tearing