The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) Read online

  Stoakes turned his eyes to the four. Two were prone, with eyes glazed, and clearly in shock. One sat amongst them, his feet kicking out, slipping on the blood-slick floor as if he were absently trying to stand. The last was breathing heavily and staring murder at Stoakes.

  Stoakes shrugged. “You heard her. You’re all going to die anyway. You can draw your sword if you like.”

  The man glanced at Yosen then looked to Stoakes. Stoakes shrugged again. He shot the Secret Sword forward again with a loud crack, punching a hole in the man’s chest from a distance. He sighed. “Sorry,” he said, meaning it.

  “Have I compromised you and your position within this community?” Stoakes said to the restaurant woman.

  She looked over her shoulder as she locked the last of the shutters and smiled enigmatically at him. Stoakes heard her humph the same humph that Yosen couldn’t identify. He smiled back at her.

  • • •

  Stoakes had two bodies stacked on each shoulder. This was his second trip down to the basement, having brought Yosen—and the arm collection—down first when Kira Suska had started to drag him down herself. Leaving Stoakes to it, she had started to clean up the blood, but seeing how strong he was and how much more quickly this would go, she wiped her hands, and followed him down the stairs.

  As he reached the bottom, she emerged from behind him and moved ahead to a post that rose one and a half meters from the floor. It was dark down here in spite of the electric light, but Stoakes saw her work a number of small levers jutting from the top of the post and then shifted his eyes to the floor, which started to rumble. Two plates of heavy steel began to slide apart, revealing a red glow from three meters below. He walked to the edge of the nearest plate once it had stopped, and looked down into bubbling lava.

  “This is your sewer?” he said somewhat incredulously.

  She nodded. “Most every block has access. You’re lucky that I run a business. Stuffing them down toilets would have been more difficult.”

  “Is there any ceremony you’d like to observe?”

  “For them? Not hardly.” She gestured, with a nod, for him to toss the bodies down, and he did. “No one will miss Yosen and his crew except for Bek Ialo.”

  Stoakes went over to Yosen’s prone form, wrapped his fingers around the deadman’s neck, and carried him one-handed to the edge of the fiery sewer pit. “What about him? What was that that came out of him?”

  Kira cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, but she was intrigued, not suspicious. “That was his Shield. It would have ruined the whole place if he’d managed to bring it out. I owe you for that.”

  “Is it recoverable? Might you be able to make use of it?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s inside him and I don’t want what he’s got. Little good it did him. No, the lava will burn him, leaving the Shield. The Shield will ride the flow and find its way back to Chan Fa.” She paused for a moment, staring at Stoakes, trying to understand the impossibility he represented.

  “You really are a visitor here, and by here I don’t just mean Ialo’s territory,” she said.

  Stoakes tossed Yosen down and watched him sink slowly through the viscous surface, burning on contact with a fire no more visibly intense than that of several candle-flames.

  “You are correct,” he said meeting her gaze, the red flickering glow lighting them both from below.

  She shook her head. “Where did you come from?”

  “From the lights in the night sky.”

  She took his hands, which were remarkably clean of blood, in hers and drew him along with her towards the stairs. She reached out casually and without looking to flip the levers on the post to close the sewer doors. “Help me clean up and when we are done I will show you true hospitality.”

  • • •

  Stoakes lay in Kira’s bed with Kira tracing her finger over the hard angles and countless scars of his body. “Tell me about the Shields,” he said. “You said that if Yosen’s had come out it would have ruined your restaurant.”

  “They’re big. Some can alter their size, but in general they’re as big or bigger than a city block.”

  From what Stoakes had seen, that meant thirty to forty meters for a start.

  “Those with strong ones hold territories; those with weaker ones serve the stronger and hope to someday steal the territory for themselves. Bek Ialo did that.”

  “Did he become so strong?”

  “Not particularly. He’s called the Shadow Thief and for good reason. His Shield lets him take anything he wants. He was shrewd, at least, to succeed with his coup, but we’ve seen no benefit under him.”

  “How many are there in total?”

  “A hundred maybe? I don’t know.”

  “How many more like Yosen does Ialo have?”

  “None.”

  “What will Ialo do when he realizes Yosen is missing?”

  She shrugged. “Come here. Ask questions. Make threats. Take some things he decides he likes.”

  Stoakes nodded and rolled over on top of her. “Kind of like me.”

  She grinned. “Kind of like you.”

  10,735.211

  Kira stood at the window. Her small suite of rooms on the top floor of the building afforded a good view. She stared at the storm-front mass in the sky heading towards the city. It was hypnotic in its way, Stoakes thought as he came up behind her.

  “Should we be worried about that?” he said, placing his hands upon her shoulders and nuzzling her neck.

  “No,” she replied, smiling at his sudden closeness. “It’s just the cloud sea. It’ll shut down some businesses and make everything disgustingly warm and wet, but it’ll bring water. It’s good timing, actually. The weather will be bad enough to dissuade Ialo from coming to investigate Yosen’s disappearance. In fact, it may even postpone his finding out.”

  “Good,” Stoakes said. “When do you plan on opening up again?”

  She shrugged. “I was thinking this afternoon. The restaurant makes a nice temporary refuge from the direct spray of the cloud sea for those who can’t just drop everything when it comes. The sooner we open back up, the less likely there’ll be any chance for speculation on what might of happened to Yosen and his crew. We open up with spotless floors and no corpses to be found and it’s like it never happened.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “That’s what impresses you?” she said, turning to face him and pushing him back towards the bed. “I haven’t been trying hard enough then.”

  “By all means, continue your endeavors.”

  • • •

  The cloud sea arrived late morning and by afternoon had submerged the city in swirling humidity so thick that it was hard to believe that breathing was still possible. Stoakes had never seen anything quite like it. There was the handful of planets that had spawned water-breathing humans, and there were the countless planets that harbored no civilization or sentient life where atmospheric conditions ran the gamut of strange, but this was akin to lowering an ocean from the sky onto a city. One more reason for clotheslessness, he thought.

  Stoakes had no real issue with his own nakedness, but living nearly a thousand years does a fair job of instilling set routines. Besides, he had nothing to gain by abandoning his clothes. His pale skin would have been just as much an indicator of his alienness, and he wasn’t interested in blending in with a population that was about to die out. He was adept at hiding in plain sight. When stealth was required, no one would be able to detect him.

  So he dressed and accompanied Kira downstairs to help her open the restaurant for the day. After they opened all the shutters, she promptly called a foot messenger passing by and sent him after each of her employees. The chairs were still stacked on top of the tables, and no one seemed interested in taking a meal just yet, so Stoakes wrapped his arms around Kira and took her behind the bar, the dark end not clearly visible from the street.

  “I’m going out for a while,” he said, pressing himself into her so t
hat she felt something stir beneath the fabric of this clothes.

  “Why? Where? I don’t want you to go,” she said frowning.

  In her eyes, he could see the depth of her illogical attachment. Clearly she’d been attracted to him from the start and further excited by his easy handling of Yosen, further still by her true belief that he was an alien. He was her secret, one that she didn’t want to share or lose.

  “I plan to kill Bek Ialo. Maybe not today, but I want to take a look at his fortifications.”

  “I don’t doubt that you can kill him. Is that why you came here?”

  “Not exactly. I plan to kill him as an exercise. I haven’t lied to you Kira and I won’t. Your world is doomed. Nothing can change that. I can’t save you from what’s coming, but I can do just about anything else you want me to up until the end.”

  She looked at him blankly for a moment, then began to nod. He wasn’t sure if she really understood, and he supposed it didn’t matter. She accepted everything he said as truth, and while he hadn’t uttered a single lie, it was perhaps less than prudent to accept everything he said without a healthy dose of skepticism. She was drunk on him, though, and he liked her.

  “I’ll be back. You have to work, anyway. You said that it would take five days for the cloud sea to pass. Close up tomorrow. Say that business is too slow because of the weather if you need a reason or an excuse.”

  “You’ll come back? Really?”

  “Yes.”

  She lurched forward and kissed him. He gripped her buttocks, one in each hand, and ground his loins against hers, kissing her back with equal passion.

  He took her face in his hands and gently disengaged them, a thin trail of saliva linking them momentarily before she wiped at her lower lip with the back of her hand.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and then went Dark before her eyes for the first time, bleeding out like a cloud of ink in the moist air.

  She watched him gather slightly and flash blackly for the street. She fought to steady her breathing and to consciously purge the heat that suffused her.

  • • •

  The dense moisture slowed Stoakes down somewhat but allowed him a much longer float time. He moved through the streets—mostly empty of pedestrians, but not entirely—towards the part of the city that backed into the mountainous outcropping of rock, which farther beyond held Ialo’s castle. The city came to an abrupt end as the rock rose up, black and porous and everywhere sharp-edged, but it was no real obstacle for him. His pace was unbroken as he right-angled up the rock wall and over-shot its fifty meter height by another ten meters to drift down upon the uneven plateau some ways in where he kicked off and continued on towards Ialo’s.

  Up on the plateau, perhaps because of the influence of the cloud sea, countless varieties of lizards cavorted. None were bigger than a meter or two in length, and many had pouches under their chins that expanded as they drank from the air. Stoakes had seen no sign of any animal life on the plain during his approach to the city, but he supposed that every species had its habitat. Maybe the plain was full of strange life now, too.

  At the foot of Ialo’s castle was a forest of mushrooms. None of the stalks rose higher than three meters—making these dwarves compared to some of the others he’d seen—and some glowed with pale, sickly light, green or purple or pink. Littering the ground, too, were small globular fungi that visibly swelled as they absorbed the moisture from the air. Stoakes thought that these here, and wherever they were found, were likely harvested as storable water sources.

  As he entered into the forest, he was immediately impressed by the surreal environment in which he found himself. The mushroom caps effectively blocked the sky, and the pale light they emitted gave them the appearance of giant sticks of candy. A moss-like fungus, surprisingly thick and soft, covered the ground here. He wasn’t sure what its natural color was, but it seemed to pick up the light from the mushrooms and alter it to further reinforce the sense of being in a candy wonderland.

  He stopped and returned to normal to admire his surroundings. This was one of the great benefits of his otherwise grim assignment: being able to experience the infinite variety of nature’s imagination. He suddenly felt very light-headed and a little lethargic. His mind was starting drift. All the colors were becoming more vivid and patterns began to swirl within them. He became dimly aware of a sweet, cloying scent. He staggered two steps forward, having to support himself upon the stalk of the nearest mushroom. The abrupt stop provided by the support of the mushroom made his brain feel like it was bouncing painfully off the walls of his skull. He realized with a start that there were no lizards within the forest. He gasped for breath, which turned out to be counterproductive to clearing his head. He dropped to one knee and clung to a single thought until he could make his will a reality.

  He went Dark. He didn’t move, but his muzzy thoughts solidified. Not having lungs to breathe now, he was no longer in any danger. He looked around the forest with a new respect. If not for his Artifact, he might be dead. Not a bad defensive perimeter, really. Especially if one didn’t know better.

  He paused there long enough to recover and then resumed his course through the deadly forest for another kilometer until he emerged onto a rugged belt of rock that was intermittently course and glassy smooth. This wrapped immediately around the castle which resembled a volcanic cone in some places, a riot of bursting, liquid stone frozen solid in others, these latter riots forming turrets and whole, elevated wings.

  The castle was pocked with crenellations, many of which were, Stoakes knew, nothing more than shallow depressions, but as he climbed the walls, he found he had his pick of entry points. He alighted upon the lip of one of the many holes and stopped. Though he had confidence in his stealth, he really didn’t know what he might be able to expect from Ialo. The Yellow Diamond Spectacles were very useful in situations like these. He put them on and saw the serpentine light he’d first seen on his way to the city. He studied the light, noting that despite the area it covered, it was diffuse. He narrowed his focus and located its source: a man, deep within the heart of the castle. He wondered if Yosen would have shown a similar light in size had he seen him through the Spectacles. Somehow he doubted it. Stoakes removed the Spectacles and put them away. Based on Ialo’s present location, he felt he had little to fear roaming the castle and so continued on in.

  The deeper into the castle he went, the drier the air was, which was a bit of a relief. He imagined there were moisture traps funneling the condensed water down to natural tanks to stock the castle. It was noticeably drafty, too. The corridor he traveled was one of many, all interconnected and open to the outside. With each change in the air currents came a different, strangely musical tone. He guessed that all the channels through the rock worked together like a set of pipes, playing a melody dictated by the wind. He wondered briefly if his presence in the corridors altered the sound the castle made and if it were possible for Ialo to sense his presence through this disruption. He decided that it was possible, but not probable.

  He made his way lower and lower into the castle. There had been no sources of light, natural or electric, in the upper corridors, but here wires were strung along the ceilings, powering bulbs at intervals. There were fewer openings to the outside down here and it was quite comfortable—one would never know that the air just outside was like a standing swamp. He came across an echoing chamber that housed a large volume of water, the walls alive with trickling runnels. He marveled at and was thankful for the conditions that separated the moisture from the air. There were people down here, too, servants or custodians. He passed several elderly males and some younger females. It wasn’t difficult to remain unseen. He stuck close to the ceiling, occupying the spaces just out of reach of the bulbs.

  A cut in the rock and what lay beyond it caught his attention and brought him to a halt. He passed through two jagged outcroppings, which made an uneven aperture, into a vast cavern that rose up at least fifty meters and ranged another fi
fty meters to his left, his right, and ahead of him. Carved into the walls were shelves that reached the ceiling and were packed full of things that glittered. Spread out upon the floor of the chamber were stacks and stacks of… the only word that occurred to Stoakes which seemed appropriate was booty.

  He approached the nearest pile, which consisted of countless pieces of jewelry, jewels and gemstones without settings, a stone statue, skillfully wrought, of a beautiful woman, another of a giant winged lizard, a dragon, really. There were small, inscrutable machines, carved effigies, and other artworks. A glance at the shelves revealed innumerable books with a variety of other articles interspersed between long runs of volumes.

  Stoakes was impressed. Kira had said that Ialo’s Shield gave him the power to take what he wanted and here was evidence of that. He was not the least bit interested in anything here. He was simply shocked that anyone would want to amass such a collection of what were essentially useless trinkets, especially if Ialo was of the ruling class and could physically back his claim to his title and position. Then again, Stoakes supposed that if Ialo were known as the Shadow Thief, he really ought to have some proof of his ability.

  “It’s impressive, isn’t it?”

  Stoakes, a black humanoid cloud, started and turned to face the man questioning him. “That’s the word exactly,” Stoakes said, “but perhaps not for the reasons you’d expect. What’s impressive is your discovering me.”