006

Must I plead my case,” Thune hissed. “Or dost thou recognize how foolish it would be to hand me to that brute?”

Frank surveyed the scene before him. His senses were acutely sharp now, his eyesight in particular. It was the kind of focus he usually only experienced from chemical enhancement, but it seemed to come naturally now. Every subtle detail stood revealed to him, the aggressive posture of the raiders, the drop of black poison on the tip of the scorpion’s sting, the glint of rage and madness in the mounted brute’s wide eyes. He had a deep appreciation for the power of a visual, and these particular images told a singular story, one of violence, quick and final.

With his newfound strength, he felt the equal to any of these threats. Individually. But together, they were a problem. And although something deep in his chest ached for confrontation, yearned to have his sword bite into flesh – the flesh of the unjust – the odds seemed too long.

“How do these guys know you, Thune?”

“It seems my legend has preceded me.”

“You said they’re tomb raiders. Were they looking for you?”

“What difference would it make?”

“Answer me, outlander,” the mounted raider called. “Carnithrax will leave here today with one head or with two. The choice is yours.”

“What do you want with this man?” Frank shouted, his voice unrecognizable to his own ears.

“The bounty on that head is worth a kingdom of gold.”

“What are his crimes?”

“You don’t know?” Carnithrax laughed. “You carry the head of the most wanted sorcerer in all of Argos. He’s the man who killed the sun.”

“Lies!” Thune shouted.

“Forfeit that head, outlander, or forfeit your life.” Carnithrax dug his sandaled heels into the sides of his mount and the beast advanced, its hand-feet clawing nimbly across the sand.

“What is he talking about, Thune?”

“We have no time for discussion. Our survival depends on one another. Thou canst hope to navigate Argos without me. The choice is clear.”

The four surviving raiders fell in line behind Carnithrax, the entire band picking up speed as they raced toward Frank.

“When this is over,” Frank said, “you and me are gonna talk.”

“If we still have our tongues.”

Moving quickly, he slung his shield across his back, looping his arms through its leather straps like sliding on a book bag. He took a fresh grip on his sword, felt the skull in his belt writhing.

“Be a problem, Frank,” he whispered and then charged screaming at the raiders.

Carnithrax watched his approach, gauging his speed. He drew back one massive arm, a black spear cradled in his palm, and just as Frank came within throwing distance, he loosed it.

The throw was perfectly timed and the spear flew straight for its target. But Frank was already airborne. He leaped clear into the sky, higher even than he’d leaped back in the temple, his already prodigious muscles now bolstered by the consumed fear of his foes. He sailed over the thrown spear and over the scorpion’s futilely lashing tail before landing on a distant rock wall.

The impact knocked the wind out of him. He clamped his free hand onto a protrusion of jagged stone, but his hand slipped and he just barely caught himself with the tips of his fingers. He hung swinging out over open air, his ebon nails cracking as they dug into the unforgiving rock. Looking down, he saw he was thirty feet off the ground. It was another fifty feet to the top of the cliff.

Climb or die, marine. Choice is yours.

He kicked wildly, using momentum to swing back to the wall. He settled one foot onto a sloped ledge and landed a single toe of the other foot on a shallow hold. Before he could steady himself, something struck the shield on his back with a metallic clang. He felt it again, like a hard slap between his shoulder blades. Seconds later, a volley of spears clattered against the rock face, their bronze tips striking sparks from the stone.

He scrambled up the wall, making good speed despite climbing one-handed, still holding his sword. He was ten feet from the top of the cliff when an arrow exploded next to his head, showering his left ear with splinters. The impact was strong enough to leave a hole in the cliff as wide as his fist.

He spared a glance over his shoulder and saw Carnithrax standing in his saddle, wielding a bow made of black bone that was so massive, no one with less than four arms could have drawn it. Next to him was his flag bearer, a tall broadly-built Copper Man armored in a blue insect carapace. He wore a bronze helm plumed in blue horse hair, and the battle flag strapped to his back bore a rendering of Carnithrax’s nightmarish mount.

As Frank watched, the flag bearer reached into a giant quiver, retrieved an arrow that was half as long as a boat oar, and handed it up to Carnithrax.

“Shit.”

He was exposed up here. No cover, no chance to dodge. His shield wouldn’t stop that arrow, and he wasn’t moving fast enough to make it up the cliff before –

The bowstring twanged.

The shot arrow was a blur. He had no time to judge its speed. Even thought was too slow.

He swung his sword in a blind panic, shielding as much of his body as possible with the flat of the blade. But his swing came just a beat too slow, the arrow barreling in on him like a four-seam heater to the chest. The air in front of him rippled. He shut his eyes to brace for impact.

One heartbeat, two heartbeats, three.

No pain. No blood.

He opened his eyes to see the arrow hanging suspended in mid-air, its fearsome bronze tip an inch from his chest. It trembled, vibrating in place, fighting against whatever force now held it.

“Loathe as I am to admit this,” Thune said, his voice strained, “I am somewhat out of practice. I do not know how much longer I can keep this up.”

“You stopped that arrow?”

“And saved thy life. Do not make me do it twice.”

Frank swung back to the wall, the raiders below shrieking and stamping in frustration. With a grunt, he pulled himself up over the final ledge and onto the clifftop.

He ran, trying to put as much distance between himself and the Copper Men as possible. That scorpion beast didn’t look like it could climb sheer cliffs, but he wasn’t going to wait around and find out.

The clifftop was a shelf of yellow rock scrubbed raw by wind and time, juttin up over a sun-scorched wasteland of arid brush and broken mesas and, in the distance, a cracked salt basin. Ahead of him, a narrow trail wormed skyward through a steep shoulder of rock. It was an old path, carved by centuries of footsteps and overgrown with purple shrubs and spiny white trees. It looked treacherous in places, with a series of steep switchbacks threading spires of yellow sandstone, with only the occasional cairn of stacked stones to mark the way.

The view up here reminded him of the Southwest. He’d shot an episode of a television show in Colorado a year and a half ago, Blood on the Mesa. It was a prestige Western and he’d been cast to play the heavy, a shitheel Pinkerton named Doc Howard. It was supposed to be a recurring role, but he’d been too drunk to remember his lines, too smart to want to say them the way they were written.

Hoping to bring an air of supernatural menace to his performance, he’d talked with the scriptwriter about Blood Meridian and with the director about High Plains Drifter, but couldn’t find common ground with either of them. When the writer cited a character from The Hunger Games as the main inspiration for his character, Frank’s response – a loud, overlong Yuuuuucccckkkk, drawn out for maximal effect – didn’t seem to win him any friends. They killed the Doc off after one episode.

He might have been back on that set now, judging by the landscape, but the colors here were different. And more than different, they seemed to be playing tricks with his eyes.

The earth was yellow, but unlike any yellow he’d seen before, somehow more vibrant, more pure. It wasn’t fidelity he was experiencing, not exactly. This wasn’t like switching from a CRT television to a high-definition screen. Instead, the colors seemed … elevated.

The earth wasn’t just yellow, it was supremely yellow, a poet’s description of yellow, a yellow you could feel. And the same was true of the violet shrubs, and the olive-hued sky. He might have been walking through a painting, or a dream. But when he glanced back to the horizon and caught sight of the rising sun, he knew this was no dream. This was a nightmare.

The sun was a small black orb, dark as pitch, with a surface that seemed to swallow light instead of radiating it. Around this void – this bullet hole through the sky – burned a massive corona of seething, boiling red light.

Terrifying is not the first word you’d use to describe a sunrise. But it was the first word that came to mind now.

Only moments ago, his head had been a jumble of thoughts and preoccupations. Where was he? How did he get here? How would he get home? But suddenly all that shit disappeared, and only one thought remained, a thought so loaded it went off like a gunshot inside his skull.

You don’t belong here.

***

“You said you could get me home, Thune.”

The trek up the rock shoulder and out of the valley wasn’t easy, even with Frank’s new body. The trail was steep, and several parts were blocked by landslides, forcing him to climb rough cliffs and narrow canyons. The puncture wound in his shoulder had stopped bleeding, but with every overhand movement, it sent a pulse of pain all the way down to his fingertips, an insistent reminder that it was, in fact, still there.

The land itself seemed determined to stop his progress. The purple shrubs lining the path shed painful stickers, and hordes of buzzing insects, strange double-headed mosquitoes mostly, stung his exposed flesh. He prayed nothing was laying eggs in his open wound.

Several times they came across the bones of dead beasts lying half-buried in the yellow earth, some even larger than Frank. For the entire trip, the looming after-effects of Fear Eater hung over his head like impending doom. The power he’d absorbed from those scared raiders was only a temporary boon, something borrowed, not taken. It would leave him soon (he didn’t know how long exactly), and when it did, he’d be weakened for a time. If he didn’t put a good distance between himself and the raiders before then … well, the shoulder would be the least of his worries.

“I told thee only that I knew the answer to getting thee home,” Thune said. “Not that I myself could do so. And I do know the answer. Or at least I know where to look.”

“Where?”

“My order, the Sons of the Shattered Mirror. They are the greatest minds in Argos. Only bring me to the Mirror Manor, on the island of Altricen, and my brother sages will be at thy disposal.”

“You want me to take you to your order?”

“It is the only way.”

“So to get me home, I have to first get you home? Is that what you’re saying? Why does this feel like a bait and switch?”

“Thou have assumed the worst of me, Frank Farrell.”

“I don’t know what to think of you, Thune. I don’t even know what the fuck you are.”

“I am as thou seest.”

“‘I am as thou seest’? You say that like it means something. What am I seest-ing? A living skull? A talking skeleton?”

“I find your words insulting. Speak plainly, what doest thou want of me?”

“I want answers. About you, about me, about this place.”

“And why doest thou think I can supply them?”

Frank stopped and lifted Thune’s head from his belt, holding it by its tough, dry hair. He didn’t like handling the head overmuch, but he preferred to look someone in the eye when they were talking, if only to judge whether they were lying. It had served him well over the years – he lived and worked in Hollywood, after all, bullshit capital of the world – and only got him in trouble once, that time in Dublin after the Sgt. Skulltaker 2 premiere when a drunk guy at Kehoe’s Pub headbutted him into unconsciousness.

“You’re from here,” Frank said. “And you know this place a hell of a lot better than me.”

“I have been imprisoned for centuries, locked away in that lightless dungeon. The world around us is not the one I remember.”

“Well, start with what you do remember. We’ll work backward from there.”

“As I said earlier, thou art in Argos, a violent land, ancient beyond measure, and cursed to its core.”

“Cursed how?”

“A thousand years ago a dead star fell from the sky and shattered this world. It poisoned the seas, flooded the world and toppled the great empires of man. It brought with it horrors from out of space, mutants and demons that have plagued humanity ever since.”

“Were you around then?”

“No, I was born five hundred years after the Red Doom.”

“And you’re still … with us?” Alive didn’t seem the right word.

“Yes, although I do not understand this curse I bear. I am conscious, but I do not need to eat or drink. I do not breathe. I do not sleep, although I do still dream.”

“Are you a sorcerer like that raider said?”

Thune made a spitting noise. “Sorcerers commune with demons and monstrosities. They bring death and suffering to all. I am no sorcerer, Frank Farrell. And thou wouldst do well not to refer to me as one in the future.”

“Then what are you?”

“I am a mentalist, a psion. My thoughts are actions, as I have just demonstrated.”

“So what you did back there with the arrow … that wasn’t sorcery?”

“Sorcerers deal in profane magic. Psions are practitioners of the mental arts. Thou wouldst not mistake a physician for a torturer. Likewise thou must never compare these two pursuits.”

“Then why’d Four-Arms say you were the man who killed the sun?”

“Lies and superstition, I would guess. Beyond that, I can not answer for the brute.”

He couldn’t shake the feeling that Thune was holding back.

The raiders had been excavating that dungeon, not simply robbing it. He’d found the proof of that himself – the pair of boots at the edge of the bottomless pit, the rucksack on the vertebral bridge, the rope bridge itself. If loot was their only goal, they could have escaped with a few treasures and managed to keep their lives. But instead they’d kept going, deeper and deeper into that bloody, slimy hell. And they went because they were looking for something specific, something they hadn’t yet found, not until he walked out the front door with it tied to his belt.

It was paranoid thinking, sure. But then, he’d found himself lost on an alien world that was determined to kill him. A healthy dose of mistrust seemed like a good survival mechanism.

“If it’s been hundreds of years since you saw the light of day, maybe your order doesn’t even exist anymore. Did you ever consider that?”

“If the Sons of the Shattered Mirror have fallen, then Argos itself is lost. And there is no hope of thee ever returning home.”

Frank stared deeply into Thune’s eyes, the only part of him that still seemed alive, searching for any small tic, any little tell, that might reveal a lie. The eyes themselves looked like dull mirrors, flat and gray and unnaturally reflective. But the life in them was undeniable, as was the hint of fear they tried to conceal.

“All right,” he said, at last. “We’ll pay the Sons a visit. I owe you that much. But then you’re getting me home. Toot suite.”

“My thanks, Frank Farrell.”

“So how do we get to this place, this … ”

“Mirror Manor.”

“Sure.”

“Given thy superhuman pace, and assuming we have no further distractions, I estimate we shall reach the valley head by sundown. We will have to make a rough camp. From there, it is a three-day trek to the port city of Uqmai. Mayhaps we can hire on a ship to take us off-island.”

“Well then, let’s get –” A wave of muscle pain washed over Frank, his back and chest and arms aching like the flu. His legs nearly buckled, and he eased himself down onto his knees.

“Art thou injured?” Thune said.

Exhaustion

Status Condition

Reduce Might to 3.

Reduce Speed by half.

“No,” Frank groaned, heaviness settling over him like a weighted blanket. Too tired to remain upright, he lay down on the hot sand, the shield on his back turtling him. Every small action – breathing, speaking, even holding Thune – had become a monumental task now, a labor of the gods, and it seemed he was not worthy.

“What is happening to thee?”

“Side effect of my powers.” Frank closed his eyes as shaking chills racked him. Every joint in his body whined, like someone had sprinkled ground glass into them.

It was called the Hangover, and it was a fundamental part of Sgt. Skulltaker lore, as important to him as kryptonite to Superman. It had gotten Sarge into many a pickle over the years, particularly the early run of the comics, where it was sure to pop up at least once an issue, and sometimes more than once, if the writer was low on ideas that month.

Its use was limited in the movies though. Market research showed audiences didn’t like to see the hero appear weak. And for the kind of slop Maverick Studios made, the market was the only thing that mattered. They’d managed to pull off a dramatic use of the Hangover in the first film, during Sarge’s climactic battle with Comodore Komoto atop the submarine Razor Eel, but they’d skipped it in parts two and three.

“What shall I do to help?” Thune said.

“We need to hide. I can’t be out in the open if the raiders show up.”

“Mayhaps I can find a suitable refuge. Lift me so that I may survey the area.”

Frank untied Thune’s hair from his war belt and then hoisted the head into the air. They were in a clearing of hard-packed dirt ringed by steep cliffs, like an earthenware bowl placed here by primordial giants and long since forgotten. Beds of vibrant, desert wildflowers bloomed all around, yellow and blue and silver. A rocky overhang bisected the sky, arcing from one end of the clearing to the other, its craggy face covered by a dense mat of strange brown vines.

The trail they had followed out of the valley basin ended up ahead, and at its terminus was a narrow canyon that sloped upward out of the clearing. This canyon looked like the result of a rockslide, like a wedge-shaped sliver of the cliff wall had been shattered and its debris left to wash down into the clearing. Several large boulders were scattered about, massive rocks that must have weighed several hundred pounds apiece, but none of them stood higher than two feet or so, not nearly big enough to hide Frank’s massive frame.

The canyon itself seemed to be the only way out of the clearing. It would have been difficult to climb in Frank’s old body, easy to climb in his new body, and now would prove impossible.

“Any prospects?” Frank said.

It was quiet here, unnaturally so. His senses had not been affected by fatigue, and with his sharp eyes and keen ears, he could detect a stillness in the clearing that he had not appreciated on the hike up. He’d seen animal spoor all over the trail, odd paw prints and hoof marks and colorful droppings, left by creatures he could only dream of. But he saw no tracks in this hard-packed earth, no signs of passing animals at all. It was as though the trail out of the valley lead to this clearing and then … stopped.

“I do not see any sufficient hiding places. Perhaps we can seek cover by –”

The dagger struck Thune in his left eye with the force of a heavyweight punch, spinning him around. He screamed, the howl echoing loudly off the cliffs. But louder than the sound itself was the involuntary psionic pulse that followed, a wave of agonizing psychic feedback that shot through Frank’s body like lightning, seizing his muscles, curling his toes.

He heard a thump on the hard earth and raised his head, eyes swimming. Up ahead, a small man dressed in mottled reptile skins lay groaning on the ground. Directly above him, the strange brown vines on the rocky overhang had parted to reveal a cavity carved into the raw stone, like a deer stand sized for a child.

It was a ten-foot drop from the rock face to the ground (ten feet, at least, maybe closer to fifteen) but judging by the small man’s groaning, the fall had only hurt him, not killed him. It was a lucky fall, all things considered. If he’d landed two feet to the left, he’d have broken his back on a sharp-edged boulder that was as big around as a coffee table.

As Frank watched, the small man rolled over and climbed haltingly to his feet.

“Think they’re so smart, don’t they?” he said, muttering to himself. “Think Nanesh is a fool, don’t they? We’ll see who the fool really is.”

Turning toward Frank, the small man pulled a stone dagger from the folds of his wrap and then moved in for the kill.