Part 32 (1/2)

The snap of wristbones was like an explosion in Alek's ears. He felt nothing. Nothing but helpless as he relented his hold on the sword.

Amadeus slapped him away, and again the ground met his back jarringly.

”Sssilly boy,” Amadeus said, smiling and reaching for the Hanzo blade on the ground beside him.

No you don't.

Alek reached for it with his one working hand. The blessing of the jonin, he thought, the sword that knew its master...

Amadeus growled as the sword skated away from him and into Alek's hands. His face looked as ancient as some gift off his golgotha. He crept backwards away from Alek and smiled again a little as if from courtesy.

Alek crept forward, the sword at the ready. He tasted blood, his mater's, his own. The warl.u.s.t was on him now like a fever. Kill you. By any means necessary. ”I will kill you,” he whispered through the false carnival of lights and music. ”Like you killed the others, demon. How many are there, how many wait for you...?”

Amadeus stopped crawling. He looked briefly toward the carousel. ”Fulfill the prophecy, my beautiful ssslayer,” Amadeus invited. ”Absssolve yourself.” The thing, creature, un-thing, smiled and looked at him, past his eyes and into his brain to the place where there was always sight for him...and showed him the numbers, the souls who had perished at his hand, and the number was no hundred, nor no thousand as Alek had suspected. He was wrong. Alek saw them all and there were a screaming, writhing million...

The plan had worked perfectly, of course. Alek felt their anger, their million-power rage, and screamed and slashed his katana too early and without half his strength.

Something happened, a spark, a scream of air--what? Alek knew only that his sword could not penetrate Amadeus and had returned to him, his shoulder, not a stab, a slash, deep, too deep, too much blood and pain. All of it drove him to the ground on his face. Icicles of laughter impaled his wounded mind and made him moan--Sean Stone's heckling, stolen and transparent.

Alek shook once, violently, and looked up.

As the animals undulated and turned, he saw Amadeus standing against them, against the false lights of carnival. The switchblade again: as long as a wakizas.h.i.+, it pointed down at the ground from his sleeve. Some awful enigma, thought Alek as he recovered, this ancient man and his modern weaponry.

”You broke my heart,” explained Amadeus as he charged forward and brought the weapon down in a glittering blue arc.

Alek, seeing this out of the tail of his eye, jerked sideways, and instead of penetrating his sternum, the slender perfect blade sank into his wounded shoulder, pinning him to the ground.

The Father bent low, his face white, a mask of envious hurt. He wept. He said, ”Does it hurt?”

Alek coughed blood, shook his head, felt only dark, deep pressure gathering within him. ”f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you killed Byron...made me kill Debra. Your spell...you did it to her. Always your game. Why did you hurt her?”

”You loved her,” said Amadeus. He twisted the blade, withdrew it slowly. He licked its greasy red single edge, smiled painfully in his tears and rouge of blood. ”You kissed her and touched her and put your filthy, unrepentant hands all over her. You would have run away with her. How do you think that made me feel?

Did I mean so little to you, Alek?”

Alek closed his eyes. His body was stone, immovable. Where was his sword, the sun? There. Maybe ten feet from his outstretched hand, the steel all blue light, the hilt a white bone. Too far, G.o.d help him, he had no f.u.c.king strength left! ”It wasn't any of your business,” he whispered. ”Why me? Why do you care? Why won't you let me go?”

”I love you,” Amadeus answered and stabbed him in the opposite shoulder.

Alek convulsed as if by the force of the impact alone and felt the katana slide into his hand, sleekly, like a serpent. The weapon more than anything else seemed to respond, seemed to animate him and power his dead right hand up in a las.h.i.+ng arc.

Amadeus fell away, seemed to dissolve into the black.

Alek sat up, rose up as if full of white fire, pain, purpose. He smiled, breathed through his teeth. He felt the Abyss yawn open in the center of his heart, felt it swallow the last whispers of pity or fear. They, the two of them, he and Debra, had been born for this, this work; they had been set in the Covenmaster's way. The knowledge sat within him in some dark, hidden place deeper than instinct or memory. Debra knew. Had always known.

Like Teresa had know.

And now, at last, so did he.

The katana jerked up backwards over his head and clashed with his Father's falling blade. Alek turned, a half pirouette, and met the Covenmaster's ground a.s.sault.

Amadeus grunted and broke away.

Alek followed, feinted right in an attempt to force his foe to circle around so the checkerboarding of car ousel lights was out of his eyes.

Amadeus ignored the feint and went in like a surgeon.

Alek beat it off and countered.

Amadeus simply faded back. Coward.

Alek stepped into the lead and again attacked in their dance of death, s.h.i.+fting his line in midmotion.

Amadeus followed the line of the blade, deflected it.

The swords clashed once more, shearing their edges and casting ruby-red sparks into the night. The two men came together corps a corps, then thrust each other away.

Dear G.o.d, the mirror! thought Alek as he caught his balance on a park bench. He battled himself.

”Yes, beloved. Yourself,” said Amadeus with an unwinding hiss, a narrow-eyed smile, a step forward. His hair writhed like a child's worse nightmare. ”Your blood is in me. Your mind is a book. So easy. You cannot win; do you see? You cannot defeat an enemy who can antic.i.p.ate your every move, who knows your heart better than you. You cannot fight yourself.”

”You're not me!” Alek spat bloodily.

Amadeus struck.

Alek did not recoil but blocked it. Sacrament in steel. He bared his teeth, rotated the sword, first one way and then the other, yet the swords would not divorce themselves. Die, Amadeus had to die. He thrust and was met only with unabsolved agony, the Father's hands, his weapon and mind, cold and diffused, light through an uncolored pane of gla.s.s, heatless light changing steel to bone and bone to dust.

Amadeus shoved him back and he crashed into a park bench.

Alek stood up and encountered suffocating pressure, unbelievable weight. Amadeus's psi slammed into his shoulders like a dropped sepulcher stone, drove him back down to his knees.

”Yesss.” Amadeus nodded. ”It is as it should be. Kneel, Alek. Kneel and receive your Communion.”

Alek stiffened, strained a moment, sought to support the invisible world on his shoulders, almost--but too great, too big. He lunged to his knees. He wept to the earth under his chin. He could not rise, could not fly.

Impossible. Debra. Where was she now? Where was his strength--?

Then came her indignant voice in the chamber of his mind, a thousand years away: Will you give up on yourself?

He put his hands upon the hilt of the sword, his live hand and his dead hand. He felt no pain, felt only the void of his own strength, taking, transforming. He tried and the sword came up where his body would not.

He looked down. Debra's ring on its chain had slid out of the b.l.o.o.d.y ruin of his s.h.i.+rt. The enormous holocaust of carousel lights was in it as the Abyss was in him now.

He turned a little to catch the light, then a little more to direct it.

Amadeus hissed when the laser of light struck his face, fell away in pain, his albinized eyes boiling with light.