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Chapter Thirty-Four

Beyond the Gate

Illarion Glazkov


The snow had quit falling, so Illarion shifted his feet so that Object 12 slid to a stop. He’d been crashing toward the gate home, but was so blind that he was in danger of leading them astray. “I need somebody to clean this visor now.” He bent 12 at the waist and hoped for the best.

Bodies rushed up and huddled around the Object for safety. Others took cover behind the tree trunks. Illarion could barely see them, but he feared this was only half of what the expedition had started with. Maybe less.

Hands appeared on the thick glass. The blood smeared across the view port, but much of it was scraped away. He’d grown used to not being blind. It had spoiled him. Illarion wasn’t even sure who had done that. He didn’t even know who on the crew was still alive. “Thank you.”

It turned out to be Chankov. “Can you see?”

It was red-tinged and blurred, but it would do. “Yeah.”

“Good.” Chankov violently thumped 12’s helmet and pointed the direction they’d come from. “Then look toward the village and tell me what in the hell those are.”

Illarion rose and turned. At first, he thought it was a flock of vultures circling, but the things landing atop the buildings could only be described as birds in the loosest sense. The creatures grasped the roofs with enormous claws. Their wings were monstrous, with long, nearly skeletal corpse arms, and ragged tufts of feathers sprouting from them. Each wing ended in nearly human hands.

“I have no idea,” Illarion said.

The flying creatures didn’t seem to mind—or notice, really—the cat-things, nor the tall, spindly observers. The cats leapt from the roofs and skulked into the alleys. Not gone but staying out of the way of the birds.

There was a flapping noise and then a heavy thump as one of the bird-things landed on a branch, thirty feet above them.

“Hold your fire,” Chankov snapped.

Closer, the things were even more horrific to look at. Nearly as big as a man, its body was missing patches of feathers and skin, and the flesh beneath seemed rotted and pitted. At first he thought it was withering with maggots, but something was clearly moving around inside the bird.

“Dead Sister, it’s like a bag full of worms,” whispered a nearby trencher.

The bird seemed to yawn, its beak splitting open in three directions, and slimy tendrils snaked from its mouth, questing. Not worms, but it had been consumed by some other type of parasite, like nothing Illarion had ever seen before.

One of the cat monsters was still in the open, slinking across the field. This one was smaller, probably younger than the others. One of the more massive bird-things swooped down and landed on it. Claws pinned the cat to the snow. The tendrils inside shot out, faster than Illarion would have believed, and wrapped around the thrashing cat, quickly covering it in pulsing black cords. They tightened, and the monster howled in pain. Bones snapped, and the cat was slowly crushed, collapsed into a fleshy ball to be dragged inside its gullet.

If those tendrils got ahold of him, even the armor wouldn’t protect him.

“Let’s move slowly,” Chankov urged. “Don’t give them a reason to chase us just yet.”

Illarion pointed 12’s halberd the direction they needed to go. “That way a few hundred yards. I can bring up the rear.”

“I think I can sense where it is from here,” Natalya said. And when he heard her voice, relief flooded through Illarion. Thankfully she was still alive. He’d do everything in his power to keep it that way.

Chankov tapped the back hatch. “Glazkov, count to a hundred, then follow.”

He began counting. One hundred seemed a long way off.

The soldiers moved cautiously, trying not to slip on the blood slush. He kept the cannon pointed toward the village, but Illarion risked quick glances side to side to make sure they weren’t being flanked. He saw no new threats other than the bird-things. He risked turning enough to see the retreating platoon, but they were all so filth crusted that he couldn’t even tell who was who. Was that bastard Kristoph still alive? It would only matter if Kristoph had been telling the truth about him having some secret knowledge about how to make the gate work.

Illarion had counted to seventy when every monster, ground-bound and flyer, looked his way simultaneously.

The Dead Sister had appeared directly in front of Object 12.

“I am torn, Illarion Alexandrovich.”

This time she hadn’t whisked him away to some white-frosted land of memory to toy with him. He was still encased in magical steel, not that it would protect him from a being who could change reality with her will. The cannon was aimed right at her, but it seemed foolhardy to shoot at a goddess. “Why is that, Sister?”

“Your people show such heart, such fire, such courage, that the old me would have been compelled to reward them. Except I also recognize that they unwittingly serve the heinous crone who cast me down, and thus they deserve to suffer and die.”

“You can have both. Half of us have already died. Reward the other half by letting them go free. Please, consider our toll paid.”

“A cunning appeal, satisfying justice and mercy.” She smiled, and the image of ghoul teeth in a face of such perfection would haunt Illarion for the rest of his days. “I approve.”

“Thank you, Sister.” He engaged the leg controls and slowly began walking away.

“I will spare them, but you are not like them, Illarion. You are nothing like them. If you want to return to your home, to serve as your Witch’s dog, you must earn it.”

The birds threw themselves into the air on nightmare wings.

The monster above plummeted toward him, but he smashed it from the sky with the halberd. Black ooze sprayed the trees. The body rolled across the ground, trembled, then burst open in a flurry of writhing tendrils. Whatever the thing living inside of the body was, it began dragging itself his way, the corpse of the bird being pulled in its wake.

Dead Sister’s eyes. He fired the cannon, turning the slithering mess into a steaming ruin, then turned 12 and ran.

They came at him from every direction. Illarion began killing. 12 became an extension of his body, moving as smoothly as he willed it, tons of steel moving and swinging. He cleaved the wings off monsters. Stomped them flat. Blasted them from the sky. But they just kept coming.

The monsters swarmed. As many as he killed, more got through. The Object’s shield stopped fast-moving projectiles, but it did nothing against a falling body, and the beasts began latching on. Illarion threw the armor side to side, smashing into the surrounding trees, crushing creatures between bark and steel.

He could barely see anything, but he could feel the bodies colliding with the armor, scratching to get in. One of the things was draped over the Object’s head, claws trying to pry open the view port. He used 12’s gun hand to drag that creature off. Even as he crushed its head, the tendrils wrapped around 12’s steel fist and tried to bind the gears.

The platoon was just ahead of him. The cairn was in sight. The pile of stones was similar to the one he’d grown up near. The boundary he’d been warned never to go near. Now it was his only hope.

Despite pushing the controls as hard as he could, 12 was slowing down. It didn’t matter how many of the flying bodies he destroyed, the real danger was the creatures living in those husks. They were like rapidly moving brambles, wrapping themselves around the Object’s limbs. Their blood and ichor dripped down his view port. Just seeing it that close to his face made him crave a bath.

He could see his friends, desperate to help. They even tried shooting at the creatures tearing at him, but 12’s shield stopped their bullets.

The alien cords were tightening around 12’s legs, linking together, entwining. Illarion forced the Object onward, tearing through the material. But each step he took got a little weaker, a littler shorter, and destroyed less of the monstrous material. He was being slowly buried. The hatch was shaking at his back. The view port was grinding in front of his eyes. And he knew as soon as a seal gave those tendrils would burrow directly into his flesh.

12 fell.


Beyond the Gate

Kristoph Vals


Kristoph watched, horrified and fascinated, as a pulsing mass of evil took down the mighty Object. The ooze that lived inside the many bird-things had leaked out and had seemingly formed into one single gigantic entity. It was vile blackness come to life, vines cracking like whips, trying to rip Glazkov out to consume him. New eyes sprouted in the mass of fleshy tendrils. Mouths with serrated teeth. Their image burned into Kristoph’s mind, and he knew sleeping would never be easy again. The creature pulsed and slithered against the back of the Object. Soon, the gifted lad would be pried out of his shell and killed. Hopefully. Death seemed a mercy compared to his imagination at what the monster could do.

He sighed. So much for getting his own wizard out of this mess. And he really had come to like Glazkov.

“Oh well.” Kristoph turned back toward the pile of stones.

“What’re you waiting for?” one of the trenchers shouted. “Open the path!”

Except his ability to do so had been a lie. Insurance to keep the soldier’s growing rebellion in check. Eliv’s report to the Chancellor had included nothing special about crossing over.

“I want to go home!” That soldier had tears running from his eyes. Even men who had survived the front weren’t prepared for the undead horror that was right behind them. Most couldn’t even look in the direction of their comrade who had kept them alive all this time. Their hero.

That is the unfortunate truth about heroes, he thought. They die while lesser men live.

The rocks were a small broken pile, the lowest part around it looking like a short fence, like a peasant farmer would use to keep in sheep, not as a boundary between worlds. Unlike nearly everything else they’d seen here, this place seemed to be cloaked in an odd red fog. Kristoph thought about just stepping over the boundary, but he wasn’t sure what that would do to him. If it would cause some terrible trauma, better it do it to someone else. So instead he gestured at the crying man. “I have already done what needed doing. It should be fine. You may proceed.”

The soldier looked at the rocks, then back at the thing trying to devour Glazkov, then hurried and leapt over the stones. Given how awful this realm had been, Kristoph half expected him to be sliced to pieces, or burst into flames, but instead the soldier simply vanished into the fog. Hopefully, he would have landed at their target in Transellia, but it was doubtful there would be a blood storm raging there, so it wasn’t like he could return and tell them it was safe. This would have to do.

But before Kristoph could even give the order or caution them to be alert on the other side, because they would theoretically be arriving in Almacian territory and they still had a mission to complete, many of the poor terrified trenchers rushed the cairn. Those also disappeared into the swirling red mist.

“Where’s Darus?” Sotnik Chankov bellowed.

“Here!” Natalya answered. Their infantry Sotnik was being helped along by her, obviously in a great deal of pain. “He’s hurt.”

“I’ll live,” Darus said as Natalya handed him off to a soldier.

“Get your men through. Destroy the gas. Finish the mission,” Chankov said. “The Wall’s with me.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Our job.” Chankov looked toward the Wall. “Alright, boys, it’s time to free our Object.”

“From that?” Kavelerov shrieked.

Chankov hoisted a steel pry bar as if it were a spear. “I know it’s not mud or wire, but it’s our duty to keep our armor moving.”

“How?” Zoltov asked.

“I haven’t figured that out yet! Now help me or go join the infantry.” Chankov started running toward where Glazkov had fallen. Shockingly enough, all of the surviving crew took up their tools and followed.

Kristoph marveled at the display of courage. The Wall were fools, but brave fools. He was surprised to see Natalya reload her rifle and then go after them. He had expected the Rolmani to be more pragmatic than that.

Alas, Vasily was still nearby, looking back toward the evil mass. It was odd, but Vasily seemed to be seething. There was real actual anger on his face, not just the blank passiveness the Cursed usually displayed. It was the most emotion Kristoph had seen from his partner since back when he’d been alive. It was as if this realm had reawakened a bit of the man he’d once been. Unfortunately, with Glazkov about to perish, there went his plan for preemptively removing the Chancellor’s assassin.

“You should go try to save that Object with them,” Kristoph suggested. “That’s a valuable asset.”

Vasily turned toward him. His blindfold had been ripped off during the battle. Embedded in his flesh above and between the black holes where his eyes had been was the broken clay fragment that had been stripped from a fallen golem. For the first time since he had been Cursed, Vasily spoke.

“We shouldn’t have killed Her disciples.” Vasily lifted one hand and pointed at something behind Kristoph.

Kristoph spun around and found himself face-to-face with a beautiful woman, dressed all in white. She was a vision of perfection, except her eyes were as empty as Vasily’s sockets. Kristoph couldn’t move as she placed one freezing palm alongside his cheek. He tried to speak, to make excuses, to beg for mercy, anything, but he’d been robbed of his words as well.

“At least not inside the walls of my church,” the Goddess said as she slowly pressed her thumbnail into Kristoph’s right eye.

Oh, now he could scream.

Vasily watched and did nothing.


Beyond the Gate

Illarion Glazkov


Illarion was hanging by the straps of the harness, facedown. He threw all his weight against the controls. The Object’s joints made a terrible grinding noise, but 12 was too entangled in the evil vines to break free. “Come on!” He slammed his hands forward, visualizing 12 doing a push-up. His body was just there to tell the golem magic what to do. There. 12 was beginning to rise. Just a bit.

More of the evil slithered across the exterior to attack the arms. He gritted his teeth and pushed harder. Sweat rolled down his face and into his eyes. There was a metallic screech as something tore. 12 flopped back down.

Most of the view port was covered by the black tendrils. They were twitching, barbed, in various sizes, from shoestrings to thick ropes, and the only thing keeping them off his face was a few inches of steel and armored glass. The thickest of them suddenly sprouted an eye that snapped open and focused on him. He reached back and slammed the vent closed, just in case one of the tendrils was narrow enough to make it through. The hatch at his back was clanking. Just as the latch turned easier for him than it did for others, simply because the suit liked him better, it must have been doing everything it could to keep the evil out.

Through the gaps left by the vines, he saw movement. The rest of the Wall were coming to help him. There was no way they could fight this stuff. They would surely die.

“No! Leave me!” but his voice must have been muffled beneath the plague, and it didn’t boom as it should have. “Chankov, get out of here! Go!”

They either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care. Outside he could hear Chankov shouting orders, but the sounds were muffled. The Wall rushed forward and attacked the Sister’s evil. He heard the metallic echoes through the hull as tools were slammed through the vines to ring against steel.

Illarion tried desperately to work the controls. Even if he was stuck, the harder the evil had to work to keep 12’s limbs pinned, the less it could concentrate on hurting his friends. One of the Wall was swept from his feet as his legs were ensnared, and Illarion watched, horrified, as he was dragged from view.

Then there was an unholy screeching noise, and a flash of orange flame passed by the view port. Somebody had lit a torch and tried attacking the thing with fire. The writhing mass surged away from the fire, because whatever the torch touched went up in a bright orange flash. It was vulnerable to fire.

The shock of the fire caused the monster’s relentless strangulation to stop for just a moment. The instant the tendrils loosened, Illarion shoved off from the ground. Vines burst and tore as 12 got to its knees. One of the Wall he’d not seen got tossed aside by the sudden movement. His halberd arm was still too immobilized, but he was able to reach up with his gun arm and scrape a handful of evil from 12’s view port.

Fire was spreading up 12’s legs, rapidly consuming the screaming blob creature, but it was like the monster was fighting the fire by beating the flames out beneath its own bulk. Illarion took the wiggling handful of monster and shoved it into the fire on his leg until it caught too. As that chunk screamed and thrashed, he jammed it against the monster on 12’s other arm, until it caught as well. The thing didn’t just burn like oil, it stuck like oil as well.

The more the creature burned, the more its hold on 12 loosened. Quickly, the Object was entirely wreathed in flames. The internal temperature—which had been consistent the entire time they’d been in this realm—began to rise like the inside of a stove. The creature went up like a bonfire, and 12 was in the center.

Illarion forced the burning Object to stand up.

“Everybody out. Now! Move!” Chankov ordered, and the Wall ran for the cairn.

Illarion pushed the flaming Object after them, stumbling and limping with chunks of burning evil sloughing off in his wake. None of the normal protocols to fight an Object fire would work right now. It was get home or die here. He’d try to figure out how to survive on the other side.

The others leapt across the stones and disappeared into the fog. Natalya and Chankov stopped at the boundary, to urge him onward, both of them pointing as if something were chasing him. A great dark shadow was blotting out the red sky, but Illarion didn’t dare look back to see what was causing it. Natalya looked as if she were prepared to wait until the last second, but Chankov shoved her across the stones toward home.

As far as Illarion could tell, the two of them were the last.

The Sister of Vengeance appeared. Thankfully she was off to the side, because he wouldn’t have been able to stop from running her down if she’d been in his path, an offense which would probably cause her to crush him like a bug.

Only this time she wasn’t looking at Illarion, but rather Chankov. “Such selfless nobility. Perhaps the rest of your species is not as irredeemable as I thought.”

Chankov turned toward her, mouth falling open in shock, as he saw the women of his dreams in the flesh for the first time.

But then Object 12 plowed into the cairn, taking the last of the Wall back to the other side.

Object 12 returned to the real world, ten feet tall and on fire, moving at full speed, thundering across the grass. He slammed both feet against the controls, causing tons of steel to slide to a violent, lurching stop. Chankov went rolling away, a long bloody gash cut across his chest. For a second Illarion panicked, thinking that he’d been the cause of that injury, but then Chankov sat up and pulled off one of the barbed tendrils, dead now, and tossed it aside. He must have been the one who had been struck by the monster while trying to free the Object.

Illarion looked around. It was just before sunrise, with an actual sun, and 12 was standing in a field of tall grass.

They’d made it home.

Illarion had never been happier than in that instant, and he began to laugh. He looked down and saw his other friends, all of them painted red from the blood snow of the Sister’s hellish plain. They were hiding in the grass . . . which he had just set on fire.

As the rest of the platoon had appeared, they must have had the sense to stay low and quiet to avoid being spotted by the Almacians. Illarion didn’t have that luxury, and as he looked down he realized there was an extensive series of earthworks and an artillery battery less than a hundred yards away, and the artillery pieces were surrounded by dozens of men in gray coats and bug-eyed gas masks. They turned as one to see the burning giant appear seemingly from out of nowhere.

In fact, a pair of Almacians were closer, as if they had been walking toward the stones. They must have seen or heard something and gone to check it out. Natalya had said that the Almacian test range had been right next to the cairn in Transellia. She had not been exaggerating. His abrupt arrival had caused them to stop, stunned.

Without even thinking about it, Illarion leapt 12 forward, swinging the halberd in a wide sweeping arc. He hit them so hard he felt the impact feed back into the controls. It was only after he’d acted that he realized that he had just moved the Object in a way that no one had ever managed before, and the magic had responded like they were still on the other side.

The Kolakolvians rose from their hiding places and opened fire.

The Almacians at the artillery battery never had a chance. Most of them didn’t even have rifles. The handful of guards were quickly cut down by Darus’ men. The few who tried to run got shot in the back or chased down and bayoneted to death.

As much as he wanted to help, Illarion knew he had to get the fire put out before 12 was too damaged to fight. So he dropped the armor to the ground, and rolled, throwing up plumes of dirt. Ordinarily that would have been a stupid maneuver sure to get an Object stuck, but instinct told him that he’d have no problem getting back up. And once the burning monster chunks had been buried in dust and extinguished, that proved to be true.

Once 12 was upright, he took better stock of the situation. Several hundred yards downrange were a bunch of cows. The Almacians must have been getting ready to do another test, probably of some new, even more lethal mixture. Illarion realized that he could see the lights of the Almacian gas factory in the opposite direction. Surely by now the gunfire at their test range would have been heard, and an alarm would sound. They had no idea how many troops were still stationed here after the slaughter at the front, but they were sure to be drastically outnumbered. Their only hope was to strike hard and do as much damage as possible.

He began marching back toward the stones, hoping to find someone who still had a clip for the cannon. “I need a reload.”

Lourens ran up, big brass clip carried in both hands. Illarion was glad to see his friend had made it in one piece, but that reminded him of the bargain he’d struck with Kristoph to keep it that way.

“Where’s the Oprichnik?”

Lourens pointed toward the stones. “He got injured.”

“Good. Give me a moment.” Illarion walked 12 that way until he spotted Kristoph, sitting on the ground, with a bloody bandage pressed against his face.

The Cursed, Vasily, was standing a few feet away.

“Policeman.” Illarion waited for Kristoph to look up at him. With one eye covered, Kristoph appeared pale and ragged, shaken to his core. What did it take to unnerve a man like this? “About our agreement . . . ”

Kristoph nodded. “Do it.”

Illarion would give Vasily no chance, because he had seen how unnaturally strong and fast the Cursed could be. The halberd rose, but even moving as suddenly as he could, Illarion realized that Vasily still could have gotten out of the way if he had wanted to.

Except the Cursed just looked right through him with those black, soulless holes, and spread his arms slightly, as if accepting his destruction.

Illarion swung straight down and cleaved Vasily in two. He struck so hard that the bones didn’t even slow the steel, and the blade was buried deep into the soil.

Kristoph watched the two halves of the dead Cursed for a moment, as if making sure the deed was done, before saying, “Farewell, old friend.” Then he turned toward the stunned soldier who had been tending his head wound. “Tell Darus it appears these Almac dogs were preparing for another gas test. Let us finish it for them.”

Illarion noted that there were flags everywhere. Even the grass was a sort of flag, which made sense why the Almacians had built their test range here. The wind was gusting straight toward their vile factory and there was a wagon full of artillery shells waiting nearby. The Almacians must have been waiting for the wind to shift in a safe direction.

“You heard me, Strelet. Have Darus turn one of those guns around and let’s give them a taste of their own medicine. Unless you’d rather fight fairly?”

“No, sir!” The soldier leapt up and ran off to find his commander.

Kristoph turned back toward Object 12. “Well done, Glazkov. I will remember this.”

Disgusted, Illarion turned and walked away.


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