The Nine Read online

  Had this been the longstaff that Selos had used to murder Perry’s mother and father? The thought caused him to abhor the weapon, but at the same time, he badly wished he could learn to use it properly. The more he failed at it, the more he abhorred it, and the more desperate he became to master it.

  Mastery would prove to himself that he deserved the faith of his father, that he was capable of accomplishing this mission. But every failure to master it seemed to whisper to him, You’re not enough, you’ll never be capable, you’ll never deserve that faith.

  He looked over his shoulders at the cliffs again. What was on the other side of them? The fabled East Ruins? The message from his father had told him to go to the East Ruins and find The Source—something that could grant the power of the godtech to anyone.

  But they’d been warned. Threatened, actually, by the strange mechanical man that had tried to stop them.

  Machines of terror and wrath will rip the life from your body, and that of your friends.

  Perry still didn’t know what those might be, and when he would encounter them. But he wondered, if he couldn’t use the longstaff effectively, would he survive? Would he be able to protect his friends? The thought of failing them was like a heavy stone that he carried, strapped to his chest, every minute of every day.

  He couldn’t fail them. He had to keep them alive. He needed to be master of his weapon.

  He sighed, gripping his longstaff again. “I’ll take first watch.”

  No one replied.

  Perry glanced over at his friends again. Teran and Sagum opened a satchel, counting up their dwindling provisions. Figuring out how many mouthfuls, and of what, they would have for dinner that night.

  But Stuber eyed him suspiciously.

  “What?” The way he said it—maybe a little too innocent.

  “You’re not planning to sneak out there towards the cliffs when we’re all asleep, are you?”

  “Pff,” Perry shook his head. “Please. I’m not that dumb.”

  But that was a lie.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE STRANGER

  Okay, so maybe Perry wasn’t dumb. Because he’d had his reasons for sneaking out into the darkness while his companions had slept.

  When you’re gifted a clasp that integrates with your brain and envelopes you in an impenetrable energy shield, then that eventually makes its way into your psyche. Maybe you start to feel a little more protected than you actually are.

  Maybe you start to think that you should be the one doing the dangerous things, because no one else in your group has an energy shield.

  So maybe you decide that you might be doing everyone a favor if you creep out while they’re sleeping—and can’t argue with you about it—and scout out what exactly might be lurking in and around those cliffs in the distance, and if there was a passage through them.

  He wasn’t going to go that far. Not even all the way to the cliffs. In fact, he had stopped, deciding that he’d gone far enough, and that was when he looked back towards the fire to confirm that all was well with his sleeping friends…

  And that was when something hit him in the back and paralyzed him.

  No flowing red. No access to The Calm.

  Which meant no energy shield, and no longstaff.

  Laying in the dust, sucking dirt, his back felt like it was on fire, and that fire raged through him, turning every muscle and ligament into millet porridge. He tried to cry out, but all that issued from him was a low, quiet groan, as he stared at the campfire where his friends sat, warm and safe and completely unaware that he was in danger.

  A scuttling noise from behind him.

  He tried to turn his head, but of course, couldn’t. The paralysis had taken total control now. He did seem to be able to move his eyes. And his heart and lungs still worked. So he had that going for him.

  The scuttling drew closer. Very close. Right on top of him.

  An exhale of breath on the back of his neck. “Ooh. Oh my,” a thin voice rasped. “Look at this one. Look at this one right here.”

  A sharp inhale of breath—Perry felt the air move across his ear. It was smelling him.

  “Oh-ho, what’s this?” A hand crept into Perry’s vision, touching his longstaff where it lay in the sand, so very close to him, and yet absolutely useless. “Are you one of them, Hombre? Ha. Imagine that. Little old me, getting one of them.”

  More shifting and snuffling.

  “You’re small though, ain’t you, Hombre? Bit small for a paladin. That makes me sad. Hey. Are you breathing? I didn’t kill you, did I? But you can’t talk, can you? Haha. No, of course you can’t.”

  The scuttling sound again.

  The campfire in the distance was blotted out, as though putting the final point on the fact that Perry had made his last mistake. Something crouched in front of him, pressed in so close that he couldn’t quite focus on it at first.

  It was a face. But…

  Nothing about it was correct. It was hard to see by starlight alone, but Perry got the impression that the shape of it was triangular, the chin coming to a sharp point, the cheekbones abnormally high and protruding. The eyes were large and dark.

  The head pivoted rapidly, twisting as though to take Perry in from various angles.

  A thin split that must have been a mouth stretched wide, revealing small nubs of teeth that shown stark white in the starlight. They clacked together a few times, as though biting the air.

  “Oh, good. Good, good, good. You’re not dead. Not dead is good. You need to be alive. Alive is best. Wouldn’t have it any other way. Wouldn’t do that to m’lady, no I wouldn’t.”

  The stranger bent over Perry’s body, and he felt hard hands scrabble across his back, then prod and probe, right at the spot where he’d been hit. When they touched it, agony coursed through him, from the top of his head down to his toes, but he couldn’t move or twitch or cry out.

  “Oh-ho. Good shot. Good, good, good.”

  The stranger pulled back and stood up.

  Perry’s eyes followed him.

  The vast majority of useful details went unnoticed by Perry, because his eyes fixated on the most obvious thing: A massive protuberance between the stranger’s legs.

  Oh gods, what the hell is that?

  The stranger turned then, looking back at the fire in the distance, and Perry saw that the protuberance wasn’t coming from between his legs, but seemed to sprout from his lower back. It curled into a crescent shape, and then straightened out again, like a fat, pulsing tail that drew to a wicked point.

  “You brought others,” the stranger mused. “That’s good. But not yet. Later. I will come back for them later. For now, I’ll take you. Small. But good enough. Yes, good enough for now.”

  The stranger stooped down, and Perry felt a sudden, iron grip on his wrist. And then he was dragged across the Glass Flats, away from the fire, away from his friends.

  Without any muscle control, Perry’s head flopped backwards. He looked at the world upside down. The sky below him, vast and open and scattered with stars. The cliffs, now just a massive black obstruction.

  We’re heading for the cliffs.

  He could feel everything around him. Whatever the stranger had hit him with, it had paralyzed him, but not numbed his nerves. He felt his skin of his wrist stretched taut as he was dragged along. He felt his boot heels sliding across the ground. He felt his dry throat. And he definitely felt fear.

  Oddly enough, his heart rate and respiration didn’t seem to respond to his adrenal glands kicking into high gear. His breathing kept on at a steady rate, and his pulse thumped along, only slightly elevated.

  In his mind, though, Perry went haywire with questions.

  The big, burning one seemed to be, What the hell is this guy going to do to me?

  His imagination had no shortage of horrific possibilities, but they were all dark and obscure, because the entire situation was so out of bounds from what Perry considered as real, that everything still felt impo
ssible.

  The stranger stopped dragging him. Released his wrist.

  Perry slumped to the ground, now on his side, his cheek pressed against his shoulder. He wasn’t certain whether they’d traveled a greater distance than he’d thought, or if his vantage point was too low to the ground, but he could no longer see the fire.

  The stranger seemed to be pacing around. Muttering to himself.

  After a few moments of this, the stranger seemed to find something he was looking for. “Ah. There you are. Haha. I knew I’d find you. Good, good. Alright…” Perry felt his wrist taken up again. That impossibly strong grip from such a wiry…Person? Beast? Thing?

  “Up we go,” the stranger said, cheerily.

  Up?

  Perry had just enough time to consider the ramifications of that direction in a place that was completely flat, and then he felt his body lifted into the air, dangling by his wrist.

  At first, he thought that the stranger intended to hoist him up onto his shoulders and carry him that way—dragging bodies was cumbersome, surely he’d tired himself out by now. But then Perry’s limp neck sagged, and his head lolled, and his eyes looked straight down.

  His hanging body.

  His dangling feet.

  White sand…and dark rock, that could have only been the face of a cliff.

  Gods in the skies! This can’t be happening!

  But it was happening.

  The stranger hauled him up, and Perry rose, still hanging by only his wrist, and the distance between his feet and the ground grew and grew.

  The stranger was carrying him up the cliffs.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE CLIFFS

  Teran was the first to wake up.

  She did so slowly, the campfire glimmering under half-lidded eyes. She considered rolling over and going back to sleep. The grind of walking…and walking…and walking some more, in the heat, with very little water and food, had ground her down. She felt like her body had aged ten years. It creaked and groaned like it never had before.

  And I thought I lived a rough life before this.

  She wanted to roll over, but that was just the fatigue talking. She was a conscientious person, and when she woke up, as she was prone to doing several times a night, she had a habit of counting heads before relaxing again.

  With a low, tired sigh, she stretched her groggy eyelids open, first taking in the stars over their heads. She judged the time by the passage of certain stars—a skill she’d learned early in her life as an Outsider.

  She hadn’t slept that long. It’d only been an hour by her reckoning.

  Which meant that Perry would still be on watch.

  She leaned up, propping herself on her elbow and squinting dry eyes across the smoldering fire. Stuber’s large shape lay in his usual posture. He was not one to toss and turn through the night. He always slept on his back, with his boots crossed, and his hands clasped on his chest. A peaceful repose, like he was practicing for laying in a casket.

  Sagum lay between her and Stuber. He slept like a child—curled up into a ball, usually with his pack clutched to his chest, as though it brought him comfort.

  She sat up fully, looking into the empty space where she expected Perry to be, perhaps ten yards from the fire. Even with the fire burning low as it was, the glow should have still been enough for her to see his back.

  Frowning, she craned her neck to see farther. She wanted to call out to him, because that would mean she didn’t have to get up. If she got up, the sleepiness would flee her and she would struggle to get back to sleep. And she was next on watch, in just a few hours.

  “Godsdammit,” she whispered to herself.

  She got up as quietly as possible, trying not to wake the others. Standing gave her a better vantage point. Besides the glow from the fire, the air was crystal clear above the Glass Flats and the sky held enough stars that it illuminated the expanse around them in cold hues.

  The white sands, cast blue by the starlight, stretched forever in all directions except for dead ahead of her. Ahead, they terminated in the monolithic black wall of the cliffs. Just looking at them out there in the night made her heart sink again.

  But where was Perry? She should’ve been able to see him. Even if he’d wandered out beyond the firelight, she should have been able to spy his dark figure standing out against the moonscape of the flats.

  She spun in a slow circle. Worry hadn’t yet begun to make itself known. At first, it was just irritation. She liked Perry a lot. Sure, he had a chip on his shoulder. But knowing his history—his time at the Academy called Hell’s Hollow, his abuse at the hands of his classmates and instructors, how they all wanted him to quit because he was too small to be a legionnaire—she understood where that chip came from. Despite all that, he was a genuine person, and he tried hard to look out for everyone.

  He wanted to protect them, and he felt he was the most capable one to do it.

  And maybe he had a point, seeing as how he was half-demigod, and could use godtech. But it seemed to Teran that in the midst of all of this, Perry had forgotten that they were a team.

  They all had things to bring to the table.

  But Perry tended to want to do it all himself.

  Was it that he didn’t trust them to be capable?

  She rubbed sand out of the back of her hair. She had completed an entire circle, looking in every direction, and was now back to staring at those black cliffs in the distance.

  Finally, worry knocked in the door of her consciousness.

  “Stuber,” she said.

  The big man took a sudden breath, but didn’t rise. She saw his eyes by the firelight, now open. “What?”

  “I don’t see Perry.”

  Stuber sat up, straight as a board. His scowled into the distance, then got to his feet, swiveling his head in a slow, steady circle. His mouth clamped shut amid the beard that had grown shaggy over the last week. His jaw muscles worked.

  He stooped and took up his Roq-11. He looked at Teran, his expression inscrutable. Then he frowned down at Sagum, who still snored.

  Stuber kicked a bit of dust at him.

  Sagum snorted and started awake. “What?” he spat grit out of his mouth then stared up at the obvious culprit—the big ex-legionnaire glaring at him. “What the fuck?”

  “On your feet, Smegma.”

  Sagum didn’t seem inclined to obey, until he looked over and saw that Teran was standing as well. Peer pressure being what it is, Sagum grumbled something foul under his breath and staggered to his feet. “What’s the problem? Where’s Perry?”

  “That’s the problem,” Stuber stated, turning his gaze outwards again.

  Teran looked back towards the cliffs and then started. A dark figure stood about fifteen yards out of the edge of the firelight, nothing but a silhouette against the pale sands. She almost called out to Perry, but then noted that the figure was too tall, and dressed strangely.

  “Stuber,” she said, pointing.

  Stuber had already zeroed in. He snapped his rifle to his shoulder.

  A voice lilted to them over the cold, clear air: “No need for violence, legionnaire. I believe you’re missing one of your party. Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  “Yeah, fuck you,” Stuber barked into the darkness. “I’ll decide when there’s a need for violence. You got about two seconds to convince me not to blow holes in you.”

  The figure took a few, languid steps forward, so that he was at the edge of the firelight, but not in it—still obscured by darkness. He stooped low, placed something on the ground, and then kicked it into the light of the fire.

  It was Perry’s longstaff.

  “Something took your friend. He dropped this.” The man’s voice was airy and relaxed. “And some rather ghastly things are about to happen to him if we don’t show up to help him. Is that convincing enough?”

  ***

  Dangling a hundred feet off the ground, Perry swore in his head, because his mouth wouldn’t work. Was he pe
rmanently paralyzed? And where was the stranger taking him? And how in the hell was the stranger able to carry him up the cliffs like this? No human should have been able to hold to him with one hand, and climb a vertical rock face with his remaining three limbs.

  Why couldn’t he use his energy shield?

  His mind was still there, he was still able to think, but somehow, whatever had paralyzed him had scrambled that flowing red river inside of him that allowed him to use the godtech. He could feel the ability down deep inside of him still, and yet he couldn’t sink into it, couldn’t access it, couldn’t even feel the presence of the clasp like he’d become so used to.

  He felt his body rise suddenly, being tossed upwards. His heart lodged in his throat. The grip on his wrist let go. He hung there in the night air, so far above the hardened glass ground, where, if he should fall, his noggin would break open like an overripe gourd.

  He started to fall.

  The grip snatched his wrist again.

  His body tumbled bonelessly, then struck the cliff and bounced off like sand-filled sack doll.

  “Ha! Gotcha,” the voice wheezed from above him. “Did you think I had let you go? Well I did. Tricky stretch here. Had to jump for my handhold. But I gotcha. Hahaha. I always do.”

  Perry felt himself hefted up, continuing to bounce against the face of the cliff a few more times, though luckily it was mostly his legs.

  “Almost there, Hombre,” the stranger told him. The grip on his wrist changed. Perry’s body twisted as the stranger yanked his arm, hand over hand, like pulling up a rope. The stranger came into view again.

  Perry’s eyes widened. If he’d had control of his mouth, he would have gaped in horror, but all he could do was stare dumbly.

  The stranger clung to handholds that Perry couldn’t even see. The starlight glinted off of his skin, and the disturbing tail that protruded from his lower back.

  But it wasn’t a tail. This was somehow worse. It was a long, segmented growth, much darker than the rest of the stranger’s flesh.