The Loss Queen (Approaching Infinity Book 5) Read online

  No. It was all a lie. It ended here. If he killed this woman—The Loss Queen, he had no doubt—the spell would be broken. He’d suffer no more. She was manipulating his mind, his emotions, his memories, but he was a Shade of the Viscain Empire, First General of the Twenty-first Generation. He would not succumb to these or any other tricks.

  “Do you remember me?” Staring distractedly at something upon his face, she moved closer to him and raised a hand, from which he recoiled clumsily.

  “I’ve never seen you before now,” he said, unconsciously touching faceplate of the Kaiser Bones, which he realized was bloody when he pulled his fingers away.

  “You fought Duras,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You heard his song.”

  “Yes.”

  Her face darkened, her lips quivered.

  Jav was confused by her reaction since, by now, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Duras was dead.

  She composed herself and asked again, “Do you remember me?”

  “I’ve told you—”

  “But you didn’t answer my question.” She stared at him for a moment. “You know me but you don’t remember me, do you?” It wasn’t a question. She bowed her head and shook it, attempted to sniff away what she could no longer hold back.

  Were those tears? He was so confused by the timing of her reactions.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said.

  “I think we both know that I do.”

  She looked up and shook her head again, looking very much like a little girl. “No, you don’t. I can help you. All you need to do is remember.”

  “No, you’re not welcome in my head. If you have the means to protect yourself, I suggest you employ them.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, her nervous smile disappearing as quickly as it came.

  Jav flashed forward, leading with the True Kaiser Kick, and encountered an upraised hand that turned every ounce of potential force he created back at him. He reversed violently, spiraling into the wall.

  He got to his hands and knees to cough and spat blood from his helmet’s mouthpiece. He stood, wobbled for a moment. More blood came up and out through his mouthpiece, painting his front red. Cold numbness began to spread from his right side like a stain, like death creeping over him, through him. He ignored it. He was more concerned about his resolve and how her very presence eroded it.

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t make me do this. Fighting me like this only expedites the inevitable.”

  Jav took an unsteady step forward, found his balance, and kicked off the ground, leading with a claw-hand. Once more, she raised her hand, repelling him without effort.

  She pleaded with him as he struggled to his feet. “You’re already broken inside. No one survives the Cricket’s song.”

  “And. . . yet. . . here I am,” Jav said through labored breaths. Strange, reminiscent pressure clutched at his lungs, strangling them, suffocating him even though he didn’t need the oxygen they pumped through him.

  She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

  Jav gathered himself and attempted the True Kaiser Kick one more time. He calculated to the limits of his capacity to think, delivered what he thought would kill or destroy anything, and felt it all come back to him. Since he’d survived it, he’d obviously overestimated his own ability. This made him chuckle, which in turn dislodged him from the wall into which he’d impacted. He dropped like a sack to the floor along with a rain of crushed bits of hardened resin. He made an effort to rise, succeeded.

  “Please, stop. Join me, and together we can set things right. There’s still hope.”

  “Hope is a trap,” Jav said, standing on legs that at first could barely hold him. “A precipice overlooking ruin. An empty inducement to fantasy. A lie.”

  “No. You don’t believe that,” she said, but she broke eye contact as the words came out.

  “Don’t I? I can feel your influence. I can feel what you’re trying to do to me, to persuade me with more than just your words. I don’t understand why, but I won’t give in. Not this time. Not ever again.” The vision of the redheaded girl bursting to pieces flashed upon his mind’s eye. He took a step closer to the Loss Queen. She remained in place, distraught but otherwise unfazed, unconcerned.

  “But you must. I’ve waited so long for you. Why is critical, but to understand you must remember. And before that you must forgive yourself.”

  “There is no forgiveness for me.” He took another step closer on legs that were beginning to lose feeling. She didn’t budge.

  “I will forgive you.” Then in a very small voice she said, “I will always forgive you.”

  “How can you? After killing three of your Loss Commanders? After killing countless thousands of your soldiers? After condemning your planet to extinction? Beyond those horrible things, you know nothing about me.”

  “I know exactly everything about you.” Her eyes, blazing now, seized upon his once more. “A very long time ago, we were in love. But frustrated to the point of madness because we could not be together, you started trolling the dark places for fights to combat the emptiness you felt. For good or for ill, you never stopped.

  “Everything else is detail, what you have done, what has been done to you.”

  She radiated palpable sadness, and Jav thought that there was nothing she did not know.

  “And here we are, come full, bittersweet circle.” She looked away, her pale cheeks flushing.

  “It is a travesty,” she said. “All the women I have been had their own lives ahead of them. All of them stolen, snuffed out and excised from my being, carving out a growing abyss of sorrow that is reflected here in this Tower. But that is a small thing in comparison to all the other lives taken along the Viscain’s path and the affliction Samhain has wrought upon the universe.

  “I, too, however, must admit to some guilt, to some complicity. There was no other way. You had to come here. Only Strauss had the means, and only you can reach Strauss. Samhain created a double edged sword, one that countless billions would have to suffer before the other edge could be turned upon its wielder. Only you, only here, only with my guiding hand.”

  She shook her head, her cheeks reddening further.

  Jav took another step towards her.

  “Worse, I cannot deny my own pleasure at your return. Along with all the pain and all the horror, I embraced a vain and selfish hope that we might someday be together again. I have waited so very long for you, seen you through so many different eyes, touched you with fingers that weren’t truly mine. It is a terrible thing, but I am glad you’re here.”

  He cocked his head, clearly nonplussed by this. “Who are you?”

  You know who I am. I am Champagne, the Loss Queen. I am Jennifer Gordon. I am Mai Pardine. I am Anis Lausden and a hundred others whose names you’ve never heard, whose faces you’ve never seen. Our connection must be reopened, but there is only one way. It must be pried. We all do what we must. Forgive me. . .”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jav said. “One of us dies today.” Another step.

  Fresh tears streamed down her cheeks as she frowned. She spoke at him but not to him, her voice firm with resolve and familiar command. “There is no other way. You understand what this means? Once I free you, you mustn’t abandon him, not now. Not until he is finished.”

  She nodded as if to confirm any possible onlooker’s thought that she might be crazy.

  Jav gave a quick shake of his head before shooting forward with explosive speed, his gripping hands poised one above the other in the attitude of the Kaiser Claw.

  5

  THE VOICE OF A HUNDRED HEROES

  From white to black. He may have been falling, but the sensation faded as he grew accustomed to it. He could see his hands, his arms, his torso, his legs. Instead of the Kaiser Bones, he wore a wet skin of blood. Probably his blood, but maybe not. He’d shed enough of it himself to fill drums.

  The black gave way to the greens
ward of Planet 1607. A shining, black Godsort approached him, pressing the grass down into meter-deep footprints with each step, until it loomed directly above him. The sleek lines melted into the scaled hide of a dinosaur—they were dinosaurs, not dyna sores! The beast stared at him with glassy, accusing eyes, its head poised arrogantly atop its long neck before promptly whip-snapping down, jaws wide to take a bite.

  Jav could only attempt to cover his face as the maw enveloped him, sinking him into the midst of a sea alive and teeming with the dead, all of them reminding him, accusing him, damning him. Atrocities he’d committed occurred all around to form an inescapable prison of memories: vivid, horrible and all of his own making. One of the dinosaurs had made him see this. Subsequent events had rewired his mind, effectively blocking these visions, but now he was subject to them once again. Guilt shot through him like a thousand tiny arrows, followed by another thousand, and another, overwhelming him, drowning him. So many had died by his hand, or as a result of his actions.

  The world was amoebic chaos, with the dead erupting from ruptured pustules, like spills of maggots, overflowing from where Jav had hidden them away in justification, far, far away from conscience. Now that membrane, thin and tenuous and already straining, threatened to burst, to add to the chaos and sink Jav back into insanity, formless and irreparable. The maggot-flow increased, further taxing the skin of justification, until it burst like a popped balloon. The effect was sudden and intense, as if Jav’s own skin had been ripped whole from his body.

  That sensation was not altogether unknown to him. Not too long ago. . . a physical analog for what he now experienced.

  He pulled himself along through the grinding press of bodies (of jagged metal?) that confined him, a muscle flexing to cast him out, to purge him like an infection, with jutting teeth and bone raking away more and more and leaving less and less. Squeezing through one final aperture, too small to accommodate what was left of his body, he slipped into a vast open space, backed by a white light, that flickered occasionally—it was dying. Here he had nothing, was nothing. Here he could hide behind nothing. An oval shape that leered with the impression of human features, drew away from his vision, cracked and came apart, the pieces fluttering away like flower petals in the wind. All that remained of him was his psyche, laid bare and sensitive to the slightest breath.

  The dead had not abandoned him. Every face of everyone he had killed or caused to die formed a facet of whatever reality this was. The staring eyes never blinked, never hinted of mercy, of forgiveness. And this was right. Bones began to gather, to glom onto one another, to take shape, to rise and form pillars that supported the universe, for that is what this place was: the universe distilled, the crumbling halls of Jav Holson’s mind.

  The pillars, there were a hundred of them he somehow knew, formed a semi-circle with the beautiful white flicker light behind them, and their shadows fell on him like the weight he knew the pillars themselves must possess.

  “If I am to be judged,” he said, “restraints are unnecessary. There is nothing left of me. I have no means and no will to fight.

  “I have killed indiscriminately for no other reason than that I could. The Viscain Empire would go on with or without me. The blame is mine and I accept it.”

  The universe shook in response.

  “Yes, Jav Holson,” a voice, boomed and thundered through all. “You have no choice, but to accept it.”

  “Who are you?” Jav said.

  “Do you not recognize our voice, Jav Holson? On Sarsa, we were able to assert our will, if only briefly. We succeeded in making you hear and came close to making you understand us.

  “We are the Voice of a Hundred Heroes. Perhaps you’ve never wondered at the source of your Artifact. It is true that the Kaiser Bones were ultimately produced by the Viscain Emperor, but not before he used bones collected from a hundred different heroes from a hundred different worlds as raw materials to create a profane instrument to continue his rape of life and the living. You, too, are such an instrument, Jav Holson, but where we were made silent and our will taken from us, your chief excuse has been self-imposed ignorance.

  “We have been freed, Jav Holson. No longer will we be ignored. We hold your fate in our hands. We will see you accountable for your crimes.”

  “I do not hide from what I’ve done,” Jav said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “If you’re here with me, then you know that I cannot. Each and every life I’ve taken is a stabbing reminder, a collective weight of crushing guilt of which I can never be free.”

  “There is more, Jav Holson. You have but to remember. And you are right, you are slipping from the world of the living, but even in death, you will not be free of this burden, this debt to life that can never be repaid.”

  “More?” Jav said.

  “More!” the Voice thundered.

  “How can that be?”

  “For more than two hundred years, you have kept the secret even from yourself, though you could not hide it from us. From the moment the Kaiser Bones were yours, we’ve known what you are, what you’ve done, what you’re capable of. You can hide nothing from us.”

  “Nor do I attempt to.”

  There was silence for a moment before the Voice continued.

  “You, too, have been a victim in your way, tricked into committing acts that have fundamentally changed you, acts you are still unable to accept. What you have done can never be undone, but you must remember for there to be a full accounting, and a full accounting will be had.”

  “Nearly every culture we’ve encountered has had a version of hell,” Jav said. “I accept and welcome whatever punishment awaits me.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As a challenge to retribution?”

  “I. . .”

  “Say it!”

  “You said yourself you know my mind better than I do.”

  “Say it!”

  Jav shrunk under the power of the Voice. “I accept and welcome punishment, not in defiance, but in the interest of balance. There can never be a true balance, I’ve killed too many, but the universe speaks, as I have waited so long for it to. There is no forgiveness for what I’ve done. I accept that, but if death is not oblivion, then it is only right that I spend it atoning for the wrongs I’ve committed.”

  “Even if that atonement should last an eternity?”

  “What does it matter? Where it counts, it’s my one life for the countless I’ve taken.”

  “Just so.”

  10,923.023.1530

  Planet 1612 (Loss)

  Sanga Mountains • Loss Tower

  Jav opened his eyes to the Loss Queen staring down at him, her own eyes wet. One of her tears had struck his cheek, warming it pleasantly. His head was in her lap. He wasn’t wearing the Kaiser Bones, but he could feel them, strong and ready and willful.

  She smiled a smile that was filled with an eternity of want and sadness, of maybes and could-bes. “It’s not a trap and it’s not a lie. Look into my eyes, drink in the truth, and remember.”

  He had no interest in fighting her anymore. She was too pretty, too familiar, too genuine. He reached up and touched her cheek. She reacted sharply, but not negatively. Her cheeks reddened and she pressed against his fingers like a nuzzling kitten. They made eye contact then and lost themselves in each other. Finally she bent lower to kiss him, a light brushing touch upon the lips.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why aren’t I dead?”

  “Because,” she said, “there’s time enough for everyone to atone after their dead, but you can still aid us while living.

  “Do you remember?”

  He felt like he’d known her his entire life, that they fit each other like two halves of a whole, that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her, but he didn’t remember anything beyond what he’d carried with him to Loss. “Part of me remembers you. Vividly. But. . .” He shook his head.

  She pursed her lips, nodded
. She glanced across the room and stared at something that Jav couldn’t see.

  He didn’t believe it, but if this were all some elaborate trap, he didn’t care. Despite the guilt bearing down on him, he felt better, more complete, more human than he had in longer than he could remember. That alone was enough to justify what was being done to him—if anything were.

  “I have a favor to ask you,” she said softly.

  “Anything,” he blurted, unable to suppress his enthusiasm.

  “I want you to destroy Samhain.”

  6

  THE OTHER SKELETON GENERAL

  (THE POSEUR)

  10,922.045.1000

  Planet 1251

  Cov Merasec’s Residence

  “You need to be more careful,” Cov Merasec said. “Remember that no one else knows.” He stood at the edge of his retirement home roof, looking out at the former Root Palace, which caught very little of the narrow beam of light from the artificial sun.

  “I know. Soon it won’t matter.” Vansen Biggs spun the shaft of a scythe—the shaft and blade both looking as thought they’d been carved from giant teeth—in the palm of his right hand.

  “Soon, yes,” Merasec said, turning to face his student. “But not yet. So tell me. How did he compare on the block?”

  Biggs shrugged. “Same as always. He’s good, but more than once I could have flipped things.”

  “And that’s not ego talking?”

  “Nope. Dark he’d stand no chance. I’d overwhelm him with the Copy Army—if it were necessary.”

  “What if he dropped into the shadows?”

  “I’d follow him. With the Ivory Scythe, there’s nothing I can’t do.”

  Merasec snorted, tugging at his chin with synthetic fingers. “Well, it’s not him you need to worry about.”