A Red Sun Also Rises by Mark Hodder
The Yatsill Magician hissed venomously. “No matter. I can do without him!”
I laughed. “You poor demented fool. You’re delusional. Your machines are constructed from the imaginings of a child! The Zull have already incapacitated most of them. Your army is a barely controlled rabble! Do you really think Earth will fall to such a pathetic mob? Millions inhabit my world! Millions! We’ll design and construct superior machines. You won’t stand a chance!”
Yissil Froon gazed at me. His fingers moved slowly. “I can manipulate minds,” he said.
Three loud blasts rocked the aero-ship. The deck lurched and listed to the left. We all scrambled to regain balance, but my captor’s hold didn’t loosen.
“The Zull are attacking!” one of the Mi’aata crew reported.
“Retaliate! Kill them!”
The crewmember had spoken in Koluwaian and the reply was barked in the same language, but Yissil Froon switched back to English when he addressed me again, and I noticed that when he did so, one of the other Mi’aata, standing a little way behind him, gazed at the Yatsill’s back fixedly and moved its mouth as if silently repeating every word.
“Fleischer, you think you have the better of me, but you forget your own vulnerability. What I can do to you, I can do to all your kind.”
The pain of my fall suddenly blossomed, an abysmal flower, its razor-sharp petals slicing through me, its fiery stigma blazing up my spine. Horror, cowardice, and shame throbbed through my veins.
“No!” I moaned, and clamping my teeth shut, I summoned the will to resist. It rose up inside me, a dark and bestial thing, a sickening ferocity—a monster.
I faced it, accepted it, embraced it, and in an instant, there was nothing abominable about it at all.
Letting out the breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding, I said, “You cannot coerce fear out of me. I no longer doubt myself. There’s nothing for your vile mind to latch on to.”
The vehicle pitched and weaved as the Zull fired more energy bolts into its side.
My captor’s hold momentarily loosened.
I snatched the stock of my pistol, pulled the weapon out of its holster, curled my wrist, and fired backward into the creature. Its tentacles fell away from me.
“No!” Yissil Froon shouted. “Succumb!”
Two Mi’aata came flopping across the sloping deck, their limbs outstretched. I shot them. They sagged.
I heard an exclamation, “We’re losing altitude!” and glanced back. It had come from one of two Mi’aata hunched over consoles at the prow of the platform. I swung my arm around, aimed, and fired. The creature staggered back, its four eyes blinking, its mouth opening slackly.
Yissil Froon pounced forward and knocked the pistol from my hand. He grabbed me by the harness and flung me sternward. I hit the deck and went skidding through broken glass until I bumped against the Mi’aata who’d been watching the Yatsill.
“I say! Steady on!” it exclaimed.
“Hold him!” the Magician ordered.
“I don’t bloody well think so, old fruit!”
I looked up in wonderment. “Lord Brittleback?”
The Divergent returned my gaze. “That’s it! That’s what I was trying to remember! Lord Upright Brittleback! Of course!” It raised its tentacles and examined them. “By the Saviour! What in the name of Phenadoor has bloody well happened to me?”
Yissil Froon addressed the only Mi’aata remaining under his control. “Get the ship moving! Fly into the storm. Fast!”
Painfully, I pushed myself upright. “Lord Brittleback, would you stop that Mi’aata, please, while I take care of Yissil Froon?”
“Mi’aata?”
“The Blood God, Prime Minister.”
“Ah, quite so! Jolly good!”
I drew my sword and faced my enemy. The deck was listing about twenty-five degrees to port. It jerked beneath my feet as the aero-ship began to accelerate. Whatever advantage my blade offered was nullified by the Yatsill’s four legs, which gave Yissil Froon much more purchase on such an unstable surface, as was immediately demonstrated when, with my first step toward him, my foot landed on a shard of glass and slid out from beneath me. I fell sideways onto my thigh, and before I could recover myself, Froon swooped forward, snatched the sword from my hand, snapped the blade in half over one of his thighs, and cast it aside.
“Pathetic creature!” he snarled. His fingers caught my neck in a vice-like grip and he hauled me into the air. “Without machines! Without an army! Even then, I can take your world!”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Lord Brittleback struggling with the Mi’aata at the controls.
“So the rupture still opens onto Koluwai, does it? Very well, the islanders will be the first to fall under my spell.” The Yatsill slammed me down and crouched over me, his sharp fingers constricting my throat. “And from that island I shall spread my influence until it infiltrates your so-called civilisation.” He leaned close until I could feel his breath upon my face. “I have seen inside Clarissa Stark’s mind, Aiden Fleischer. I understand the nature of your Earth. I know your species is divided—that most are less developed than the Yatsill, while the rest are in the grip of powers every bit as stultifying as the Quintessence. What resentments and fears must seethe in the masses! What longings and frustrations! What angers and hatreds! Those shall be my weapons!”
I thought of overcrowded Whitechapel and its inhumane poverty, of the teeming masses of discarded, disenfranchised, and wretched poor, and of the monster born out of that Inferno, of Jack the Ripper. By God, if Yissil Froon loosed his mesmeric powers upon such misery, could he not produce from it a vast army of demonic murderers? How easy for him to take those whose path to goodness was already fraught with such terrible obstacles—deprivation, disease, corruption, drudgery, violence, humiliation—and cause them to turn away from it, to face in the direction of lessening good, to become evil!
“Ah, yes!” he hissed. “I see that you understand!”
I clutched at his wrists, tried to pull his hands away, but couldn’t match his strength. With agonising slowness, he was throttling me to death.
The aero-ship began to shudder. Its propellers howled. At the periphery of my fast-clouding vision, I saw Lord Brittleback dragging the other Mi’aata away from the console.
“We’re descending too fast!” it screamed. “We’ll hit the trees!”
The port side of the vessel suddenly dipped. Yissil Froon and I, the stunned Mi’aata, and Lord Brittleback and his opponent all careened across the deck. The Magician let go of me as he fought for balance. He toppled over and collided with a bulkhead. I skidded into him, kicked at his face, and felt it squelch beneath the heels of my sandals. He knocked my legs away. The foot-long tip of my broken sword came skating by. I slapped my hand onto it and swung the metal up, around, and down, ramming it point-first into Yissil Froon’s upper right arm, careless of the fact that in doing so I cut my fingers to the bone. The blade cracked through the carapace and into the soft flesh beneath. Blood spurted. The Magician screeched. One of his knees came up and impacted against the side of my jaw. I rolled away, my senses reeling, saw the shattered glass roof spinning past my eyes, caught a glimpse of Zull flying close, trees looming, and the zeniths of twin suns flaring over the horizon. I bounced off a metal wall and was thrown against the remains of the roof. The aero-ship corkscrewed downward.
“Brace yourself, Mr. Fleischer!” Lord Brittleback yelled. “We’re going to hit the bloody ground!”
Yissil Froon seized my left ankle as I fell past him and pulled me into a crushing embrace. We were tossed around the cabin, rebounding from one side to the other. Lord Brittleback bumped against us, went whirling away, struck glass, smashed through it, and was sent flying out into the open air.
With a deafening roar, the machine ploughed into the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings.
“Aiden! Aiden! Answer me!”
Clarissa’s voice penetrated my jumbled senses, cutting through the discor
There was a girder across my body, pinning me down, excruciatingly heavy against my chest, but as far as I could ascertain, I hadn’t sustained any grievous injury—miraculously!—though I was so battered that even raising my wrist to my mouth sent spikes of pain through me.
“Aiden! Please! Please!”
“Clarissa,” I gasped.
It made no sense. Why wasn’t the vessel slowing? Its propellers couldn’t be rotating—the impact would have torn them apart—yet the aero-ship was grinding through the treetops, the boles so massive and densely packed that it couldn’t fall through them.
“Oh, thank Heaven! Get out of there, Aiden! Quickly!”
I reached down, took hold of the girder, and pushed. It shifted, but not enough.
“I’m trapped!”
My ears were assaulted by cacophonous thunder and the crashes and squeals of the disintegrating flying machine. The deck bucked and shrieked. It banged against the back of my head. A gust of wind whistled through the ripped metal, bringing with it the scent of lemons.
“I can’t get to you in time, Aiden! You’re being pulled into the rupture.”
“Don’t try!” I responded. I heaved at the girder and managed to push myself a little way out from under it. “Report!”
“What?”
“Report! What has happened?”
I shoved the beam again, my lacerated fingers sending a spike of pain through me, and gained a few more inches of freedom. Then the deck suddenly angled upward, the girder came loose, and I heaved myself out from beneath it. I grabbed a fold of twisted metal to secure myself. The frenzied whistle of escaping steam sounded from the rear of the machine, drowning Clarissa’s reply. I pressed my wrist to the side of my head and shouted, “Repeat! I can barely hear you!”
“The war machines are disabled! Colonel Spearjab and Artellokas are drawing the defeated Divergent to the forest below me. They’re taking to the trees and pupating. The rest are being hunted. We’ve won, Aiden! But you have to get off that ship! It’s almost at the mouth!”
To my left, a jumble of debris flew into the air and clattered upward out of the cabin. The storm was raging outside and everything was being drawn into it as if magnetised.
A buckled panel clanged aside and Yissil Froon burst into view. His body was dented and bloody, the shell ruined, his limbs broken. Still, he had strength enough to throw himself onto me with an inarticulate cry of rage, slicing his left hand down, its serrated digits gashing my chest. Then he was suddenly twirling into the air as the aero-ship jolted upward, and I saw him catapulted out of it and yanked into the sky.
I felt myself grabbed by a powerful force, as if gravity itself had reversed direction. The twisted deck plate was wrenched from my grasp and I was sucked out of the wreck.
The world pirouetted around me—trees, a band of purple, the moons, a streak of orange, Yissil Froon, the sea, the ship, lightning.
“Aiden! No!”
Clarissa’s scream followed me into a vertical tube of iridescent energy. I was enveloped by numbing cold and felt a sensation of immeasurable speed.
The last thing I saw, as my senses fled, was the aero-ship, below me, flowering into a ball of flame as some part of its engine—probably the boiler—detonated.
°
My eyes were brimming with pale blue sky—a memory returned but oddly detached, as if belonging to someone else—and a syrupy scent clogged my nostrils. I felt dewy grass between my fingers. A bee flew lazily past my face.
Earth.
And I knew exactly where on Earth, too. The intoxicating perfume was unmistakable. It belonged to a small blossom-filled glade on one of Koluwai’s hills, a clearing strewn with the corpses of Zull.
Dawn had just broken, the quality of the light told me that much, and the trees should’ve been alive with squawking birds and chattering monkeys. They weren’t.
I slowly turned my head, cautious of pain. The foliage around me was littered with fragments of metal and ragged strips of material—pieces of the aero-ship and its two dirigibles. The destroyed machine had been coughed through the rupture.
A shadow slid over me. I tried to push myself upright but a heavy weight thudded down onto my chest, knocking me back, pinning me to the ground.
Yissil Froon glared down at me, his head trembling from side to side as if in the grip of a seizure. Drool oozed from his mouth and sprayed my face as he gave a clacking laugh and exclaimed, “It’s better than I ever hoped! This world of yours is filled with so many minds! So many! And all consumed by panic and antipathy! It’s positively . . . delicious!”
He looked up to the heavens and flung his arms out.
“I will have it!”
The fringed outer lips of his mouth stretched so wide they tore at the corners. His face receded into the shell of his head. The front seam of his ruined body split open and red tentacles writhed out of it.
He screamed, “I am Yissil Froon! I am Yissil Froon.”
A network of cracks snaked across his exoskeleton. Wet flesh bulged through them.
“And I . . .”
I felt something solid on the ground beside my hand and curled my blood-wet fingers around it.
“Am . . .”
Yissil Froon’s carapace fractured and fell away as a horribly malformed Mi’aata burst from within it.
“God!”
Instead of four eyes, it had seven, varying in size but all burning with madness; its limbs were of differing thicknesses, the suckers and spines distributed irregularly along their twisted length; its torso was contorted and stretched over with patchy, discoloured skin; it was monstrous; it was pathetic; it was still Yissil Froon.
The devil looked down at me and whispered, “Worship me.”
“In all honesty,” I replied, “I’d rather not.”
I swept the object in my hand up and into the side of its head. The crunching impact sent the creature reeling sideways. I pushed myself away from it, jumped to my feet, and put my full weight behind a second blow. Tentacles wrapped around me but their grip was loose, the strength already draining from them.
I clubbed Yissil Froon again and again—and there was no wrath, no lust for vengeance, and no red mist before my eyes. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I did it without hesitation or regret. I smashed his head to a pulp, destroyed his sick brain, and wiped him from existence. Then I teetered, fell to my knees, and looked at the thing I was holding.
It was crusted with dried mud and smeared with gore, but it was recognisably the Webley-Pryse revolver given to me by the London Missionary Society so long ago.
They’d told me the life of a missionary is sometimes perilous.
°
12. War
Even now, it seems absurd to me that a structure which spans the vast distances between planets is yet so sensitive that one end of it will follow a crystal no bigger in size than a cigar. Inevitably, my incredulity draws my consideration from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and I think of that which my own species has achieved, and stand aghast at the unprecedented destruction wrought two years ago by the splitting of an atom.
If something so inconceivably small can destroy Hiroshima, why not a crystal shift the end of a fold in space?
My account is almost done.
Five years have passed since my return to Earth.
With my bare hands, I buried the corpse of Yissil Froon in the Koluwaian jungle. His Mi’aata body had been as horribly distorted as his mind, due, no doubt, to his excessive drinking of Dar’sayn. In effect, he’d been consuming his own kind, so I suppose it only fitting that his remains are now rotting on an island where cannibalism was practised.
When I descended the hill and emerged from the undergrowth, I found Koluwai transformed. The tree
After two days, during which I subsisted on fruit, nuts, and berries, I learned from an elderly man that a vicious war between Australia and Japan was raging throughout Melanesia. Koluwai had been, for the space of one catastrophic week, a battleground.
It took a further three days before I was able to persuade a fisherman to sail me to Futuna. From there I made my way with painstaking slowness northwestward past Vanuatu, through the Solomon Islands, and on to Papua New Guinea. The scars of conflict were obvious throughout the region—the smoking hulks of battleships, burning towns, ravaged farms, and, everywhere, the dead.
While approaching Port Moresby, I encountered actual combat for the first time. By now, I knew the war was global, and understood what Yissil Froon had meant when he said the world was filled with panic and antipathy. I also realised that my Germanic surname might cause me trouble, so when I chanced upon a corpse—among the many fallen—that bore some physical resemblance to me, I rather shamefacedly appropriated the young man’s uniform and identity papers and became Private Peter Edwards of the Australian Army.
If there’s such a thing as divine retribution—or karma—I felt the full force of it later that day when I found myself in the middle of an artillery strike. A Japanese shell burst beside me and I knew no more until I regained consciousness two days later in a mobile hospital. My first act was to check that the crystal was still hanging around my neck—which is when I discovered that my left hand was missing. Strangely, I was thankful. Had it been the right, I might have lost the little spirally tattoo on my inner wrist. The thing doesn’t function, of course, but it gives me comfort to speak into it each night before I sleep.
As soon as the rupture opens, I’ll come back. I’ll return to you. I promise.
The crystal was safe.