The Changeling Game, Chapter 92

92.
The Fall of the Black Fox

“Do not touch her!”

As one, the soldiers surrounding Kyra froze. Physically, anyway.

Their minds were still barraging her with thoughts of the vile things they wanted to do to her body, full of their excitement over how her warm, soft, living flesh would feel against them. She was trying to block those sick images from her head in preparation for the coming fight. She couldn’t isomorph away from them—in Elsewhere, she was surrounded by Crematoria’s intense dawn inferno—but she could isomorph them, or parts of them, as they came at her. Grab their weapons—

“Stand down.” The same male voice came again. “Go to your duty stations. I will deal with her.”

Smoldering resentment filled the room for a moment, but the soldiers obeyed and filed past the man who, she realized, she’d watched hoisting the Guv high into the air and then breaking her friend’s back across his armored knee.

The Necro commander’s hair was a dark red, almost black, and cut strangely, shaved on the sides and longer up top, with tight braids falling to midway down his back. His skin was pale and sickly-looking, his hazel eyes rimmed in red. He was about five inches taller than her and had at least eighty pounds on her.

One soldier stopped by him. “My Lord, I must protest. You are married. Surely you can give the men this breeder—”

“This is no breeder,” the “lord” said, his gaze never wavering from her. “You saw her fight. She will be a magnificent Knight of the Legion.”

For a moment the soldier was rendered speechless. His frown deepened. “Serving under you?”

“Have a care what tone you take,” For a moment, the “lord’s” gaze left her and he bent a frown upon his underling. “She will serve under my command if the Lord Marshal wills it. Try my patience again and I will give her a spear, and then we will see how she serves you.”

“On a platter,” Kyra opined. She hated it when people talked about her like she wasn’t even there. “A little one. Could probably even fit both of you on it.”

The “lord’s” mouth curled into an appreciative smile as he met her eyes. Then he turned another glare on his underling. “Leave us now. Tend to your duties. If you or the others wish to see the Underverse, you will put aside your unworthy fantasies. Now.”

“Yes, my Lord.” The other man stalked out of the room.

For a moment there was silence. Kyra continued to study her possible opponent, trying to spot any signs of weakness. He held himself like a trained warrior, balanced and powerful even at rest. She could take him down, but not easily.

But I can do it… Part of her wanted to just for what he’d done to the Guv.

“What is your name, girl?” he asked.

“Kyra.”

He paused, waiting for her to say more. When she didn’t, another small smile appeared on his face. “Where are you from, Kyra?”

“Earth, originally.”

His eyebrows went up. “There are very few in the ’verse who can make such a claim. Which sublight colony ship were you on?”

“The New Christy Pilgrim.”

He looked surprised, then thoughtful. Then, after a moment, she could swear she saw a lightbulb go on. “That makes you the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain, does it not?”

These Necros know about the New Christy Massacre? Crazy.

“It does.” No point in denying it. She’d admit what she needed to; he wouldn’t get any of her actual secrets from her.

“How did you come to be on Crematoria, Kyra Wittier-Collins? You and the other survivors of the massacre were exonerated some time ago.”

Well, that confirmed the conversation she’d overheard Toombs and Logan having, anyway. “I don’t think that exoneration covers the seventeen men I killed on New Queensland.”

Or the mercs she’d killed on Tangiers Prime. But she would never tell anyone about that.

“Do you like killing men, Kyra?”

Weird question. “You got no idea what they did.”

“That wasn’t what I asked,” he said, his expression calm and interested. “Do you like killing?”

It had been, she thought, one of the few things that had calmed her in Crematoria whenever everything became too much: setting her sights on one of the nastiest of the men in the place, someone cruel and brutal and vile of mind, and destroying him…

“Yes. I do. And I’m one of the best at it.”

He nodded, his small smile back. “Then I am glad you came aboard. As I said before, you will make a magnificent Knight of the Legion.”

“You want to make me a Necro?”

“We are Necromongers. The dealers of death. There is no army that can stand before us.”

Except, she thought, an army of Riddick…

But he had fallen, too.

“What do Necromongers do, exactly?” she asked.

“Humanity should never have spread as it did. It does not belong in this ’verse. We are cleansing the ’verse of the human infection so that all can be reborn in the Underverse. You can help us bring salvation to billions.”

Religious fuckery. She could hear it in his words, in his sudden pious tone. She hated religious fuckery.

Not like I can ask him to stop the ride and let me out… shit.

“By killing people?” she asked.

“Are you not one of the best at that?” he countered, a tiny, challenging smile appearing on his lips.

“I might be interested.” Might not, though.

His tiny smile grew by a fraction. “Come. Let’s get you cleaned up and fed. This ship is not equipped for conversions with no Purifier, and given your association with the Riddick, the Lord Marshal may wish to speak with you before you receive your marks. But I imagine you are tired and hungry after how hard you fought.”

“And you’re not?” He’d briefly seemed staggered by whatever had happened on the runway, but now he seemed cool as a…

…corpse…?

“You will find that, after you become one of us, the exertions that could deplete you as an ordinary human—”

—A breeder, his mind added, but she had the sense that the word carried a connotation of slavery—

“—will be trivial to you.”

She wouldn’t drop her guard, not completely. But this man was making an offer that had no small amount of appeal to it. She wondered if one day she might be able to break men over her knee, too. That thought did have its allure. “Okay. What’s your name?”

“Lord Vaako. Come, Kyra. It’s time for you to begin your new life.”

It took them only a little over two days to reach Helion Prime, something that surprised her but that Vaako had been happy to explain. There was a Star Jump corridor between Helion and Igneon that took only half of that time; the rest was spent in sublight transit. It was a heavily used route; while the general population of the Helion system had been led to believe that the energy it supplied other worlds came from their own sun, the truth was that the rare plasmas they traded in came from the powerful emissions of that young neighboring star still in its infancy, harvested as those emissions passed strategically positioned collectors. Energy, Vaako added, that had enabled humanity to spread entirely too far through the stars, polluting too many worlds.

In the interim, she was able to shower, to dress in garb that Vaako said was “fitting for an acolyte,” and even join him and the other soldiers at meals. The Necromongers had a preference for intense flavors in their food; curiously, they seemed to perceive the food as almost bland. She found herself wondering if their senses of taste had been compromised by their conversions.

Not that she cared much; Tizzy had been the foodie. Kyra mostly just ate to refuel.

The men spoke of prior campaigns and kill counts, and slowly thawed to the idea that she was meant to be one of their comrades in arms, and not a spoil of war, as she shared some of her kill stories, including the things she had done in the past to men who tried to get too familiar. True to Vaako’s word, none of them touched her. Not even him. He was, as she had heard, already married… and known for his scrupulous fidelity.

Which was a relief. She found that she was warming to him, in spite of how they had met, and was glad that there wouldn’t be any amorous intentions on his end that she’d have to deal with.

Helion Prime looked nothing like she remembered.

She had only spent one morning on its surface as she and Tizzy fled Aceso for the spaceport, and they hadn’t traveled through the best parts of town as they did so. Still, the sky had been blue. The air had been fresh. The buildings hadn’t been piles of rubble…

It was almost as if someone had tried to turn that world into another Crematoria. The sky was a foul yellow-orange that stank of fires and death, and the graceful, signature architecture had been reduced to tumbled wreckage. Hundreds of years of painstaking creation destroyed in a day—

This was what Necromongers did to worlds. They were killing on a scale she could barely even comprehend. A scale that far exceeded what she and Tizzy had feared might be done to the people of Tangiers Prime if the Quintessa Corporation ever real­ized—

Oh fuck, what if they decide to go there next?

This wasn’t something she wanted to be party to. But she wasn’t sure she had any kind of say in the matter. Beneath the veneer of “honored guest” that Vaako had layered onto her situation, she was still a prisoner.

Vaako’s scout ship had landed near a massive craft that he called the Basilica. He led her up its steps and inside.

“I must take you to the Lord Marshal first,” he told her as they walked. “He will need the news of the Riddick’s fate.”

She stuck close to him as they entered an enormous cham­ber… a throne room… and walked toward the throne. Other groups of people were hurrying into the room, and several men were descending staircases from higher levels as well.

“Who is this?” she heard someone ask.

A stunningly beautiful woman, her skin maybe a shade or two darker than Riddick’s and her black hair drawn back into a tight and elaborate bun, had walked up to Vaako and had taken his arm. His wife, Kyra assumed.

“This,” Vaako said, nodding in Kyra’s direction, “is Kyra Wittier-Collins, the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain. An associate of Riddick’s, and a proficient warrior who I am presenting to the Lord Marshal for conversion. Kyra, this is my wife, the Dame Vaako.”

Said Dame was regarding her as if she were something that had clung to the bottom of a shoe. Lovely. She kept her face bland, slipping back into the manners she’d been taught in the Enclave and giving the other woman a respectful nod and the curtsy due an Elder. “Ma’am.”

Dame Vaako’s eyebrow arched. “Interesting girl. Why is she not on her way to one of the Stews?”

“She killed twenty-four of my men. I think she planned to kill even more if any of them tried to touch her in an unseemly way. Conversion seems the better choice, wouldn’t you agree?”

His wife looked impressed, albeit unwillingly. “By all means. I shudder to think what she might do in the Stews if you had sent her there.”

Actually, Kyra reflected, Dame Vaako seemed to be contemplating that scenario with barely-concealed glee. Whatever “Stews” were, the woman hated them.

“What news of the Riddick, Vaako?” A man’s voice called out. Kyra faced forward again. The speaker was sitting on the throne, his shrewd gaze giving the lie to his indolent posture.

“The Riddick is dead, Lord Marshal,” Vaako intoned, bowing. When Dame Vaako bowed also, Kyra copied their move.

“And who is this?”

Vaako repeated much of what he had told his wife, adding more details about her for his commander’s benefit. He touched briefly on the New Christy Standoff and Massacre, noting that Kyra had been one of the children who escaped in the wake, and the one credited for killing five Colonial Marshals during the massacre and three more in the aftermath, including their leader, “Red Roger” Fiennes. Some of what he was saying confused her. She thought things had played out differently, somehow. Maybe the accounts he had seen were wrong—

“She was twelve at the time, my Lord. She was later sent to Crematoria for seventeen murders on New Queensland, and personally killed twenty-four of our soldiers while she and the Riddick were attempting to escape Crematoria.”

“An extraordinary résumé,” the Lord Marshal observed. “What now?”

“Once she is converted,” Vaako continued, “I recommend training her to be a Knight of the Legion, unless you wish otherwise. I volunteer to train her and have her serve under my command.”

Kyra could feel how much that displeased his wife. Didn’t she know her husband had no interest in anyone but her?

“I will consider it. We do need a few more women in our Amazon regiment,” the Lord Marshal said with a smirk. “Is it true that the Riddick is dead, Kyra?”

It hurt to think about even now. She swallowed and nodded. “I didn’t see him die, but I saw him dead on the ground. He wasn’t…”

She couldn’t finish. He wasn’t breath­ing… I couldn’t feel him any­more…

“Were you two close, girl?” His voice was gentle, but she could feel the intensity of his regard. This wasn’t some idle question.

“Yeah. He, um… rescued me when I was younger, and came to Crematoria to rescue me again.”

“I should like to see this.” The Lord Marshal rose from his throne. “Take her before the Quasi-Dead. I wish to know everything about her time with the Riddick. And his death. Where is the Purifier who accompanied you?”

“Dead as well, Lord Marshal.” Vaako glanced at Kyra, his expression uneasy and regretful.

“Come this way, child,” his wife said, releasing Vaako’s arm to slink around him and take hers. “This shouldn’t take long. And then you will begin your conversion.”

There was nowhere to run, even if Kyra knew what she was suddenly feeling a need to run from. Helion Prime was an airless rock in Elsewhere; she couldn’t slip across to escape. And even if she fled, what then? What was left of the world was dying.

She walked with Dame Vaako instead, waiting and watching, trying to figure out her next move.

The Dame led her into a chamber behind the throne and over to a dais in its center. “Stand here, child. Don’t resist. The only one resistance will hurt is you.”

Another new one… you have brought us…

There were voices in Kyra’s head, voices that shouldn’t be there. Her legs buckled and she collapsed on the dais, struggling against the feeling of strange minds rifling through her mind and her memories.

“Show me her memories of the Riddick,” she heard the Lord Marshal commanding them.

We see a great many memories of the Riddick in her mind. A day’s worth of true memories. The others are either not her own, or are lies. She has believed in them for years.

No! That wasn’t true. It wasn’t possible!

The girl, Jack, that the Riddick thought of… she knew her. They traveled together. Jack shared her memories of the Riddick, in an attempt to impart strength…

Her mind was unraveling. Locked in the grip of brains far more powerful than her own, Kyra found herself reeled back, seeing how the New Christy Massacre had really played out all over again, watching the destruction of everything she had loved or hated as a child… witnessing her mother’s mur­der… reliving the retribution she eventually was able to wreak upon the men who had violated her and her mother…

…and Riddick had never been there. He had never rescued her, never watched over her, never taught her any of the skills she’d acquired. She had been alone on Canaan Mountain.

She had had no one.

Her life spooled out again before her. More than three years of agony, exploitation, and lost time before Jack appeared in Aceso and the feedback effect of two espers in close proximity began to build between them, forging a bond—

An esper. She is an esper. Powerful even before our purifications. She will be an extraordinary Quasi-Dead…

The escape, and the run to Tangiers Prime—

She has crossed a threshold. She knows the way to another ’verse… not the Underverse but one she calls Else­where…

“Where is the Elemental?” she heard the Lord Marshal call out from a distance. Someone replied, but she didn’t catch their words. “Good. Make sure she stays there until this is completed. She is to know nothing of what we learn from this girl.”

Kyra, meanwhile, was plunged back into the chaos of defending the Scarlet Matador passengers from the Quintessa Corporation, the Spaceport Explosion, the arrival of Duke Pritchard and the stab wound he gave her… recovering in bed while Jack, now calling herself Tislilel, told her stories about Riddick… the stories becoming infinitely more real when Tizzy—her sister, Tizzy!—realized she could share sense memo­ries…

Tizzy? She shied away from the minds constraining her and called out to her sister. If she was anywhere near, anywhere still in the ’verse, maybe she would hear.

The Quasi-Dead kept plundering at her mind, revealing all the secrets she had tried to keep, all the things that could get millions mur­dered… but now she was in the thrall of a marauding force that intended to murder billions upon bil­lions…

Tizzy! she called out again, trying to feel her sister somewhere out there.

Her life continued unspooling before her, before them, every secret and bit of suffering exposed. She saw, as if from the outside, her growing conviction that Jack’s memories were her own…

You are not Jack, the Quasi-Dead whispered in her head. You never were. That name belonged to someone else, along with all the memories you treasure so much…

She wanted to deny it, to rail against them and cling to the dream of a world with three suns. She couldn’t; they wouldn’t let her. Trying to hold on anyway filled her head with agony that brought her to the edge of screaming.

She screamed inside instead, pouring every bit of her torment into a final call, grasping for the bond they had once shared. Jack! Help me!

You will not speak to outsiders again, the Quasi-Dead told her, and she felt something muffling her awareness of the minds around her. Cutting her off. Suddenly she could only feel them.

And something else. Something hideous, malicious, waiting close by…

They took everything. They ransacked her mind and found everything she had ever tried to hide.

You will be a fine addition to the ranks of the Quasi-Dead, Kyra Wittier-Collins, once you have been purified and trained.

She was lying on the dais, in a puddle of tears, when two men came and lifted her to her feet. They were dressed like the man who had stayed behind on the runway of Crematoria, when everyone else was racing for the scout ship. When she couldn’t manage to walk, they dragged her between them to another room, suspending her in a harness, restraining her, and then—

Pain, agonizing pain, on either side of her neck. Her body shuddered as she tried to break free, but she had no strength left to fight with.

It hurts… it hurts…

Let it happen. Let it in. The pain will set you free.

She knew that voice. She’d heard it in night­mares…

I will show you a world without pain. A world where the Demons of the Darkness are no more, and life is ever-renewing…

It’s you… oh my God, it’s you…

You are mine, little creature. Do not fight this.

She could almost see it in front of her, a perfect world, a place of peace and harmony and glory—

Another lie. No more true than Tizzy’s narratives of Riddick rescuing her on Canaan Mountain.

Their Underverse is a lie…

For an instant, she caught a glimpse of what lay behind the lie. Image fragments assaulted her—

…fire crisscrossing the sky over New Marra­kesh…

…men and women brandishing flaming swords above their heads, their eyes glowing silver like Riddick’s, leaping onto the backs of creatures that looked like Mommy Ree…

…a dying god pinned in place by a spear of rock…

…gnarled, wrinkled hands clasping hers as an old, old woman, with eyes that made her think of Tizzy, murmured It’s almost finished now…

…a stone box crumbling to dust in her hands, its dissolution reverberating through all of creation…

…her long-lost stuffed rabbit, El-Ahrairah, lying on a pillow, but not the pillow she’d left him on when she was six…

…Tafrara Meziane, tears running down her face, arm outstretched, hand splayed against the chestplate of a man in Necromonger armor…

…an impossible, terrifying creature, both tiny and enormous at the same time, its obsidian skin containing the shine of galaxies, sitting on Tizzy’s chest and reaching out to touch her face with its claw—

No no no no NO NO NO—

Darkness. Silence. Her life force, her will, was draining away, her skin turning cold and stiff.

You are his now, Kyra. Obedience is all. Fealty is all. The Underverse waits.

But…

It is the only truth you will need. It is the only truth you will have.

Silence. Darkness. Something new, something eldritch and powerful, was seeping into her where her life and will had once been.

A second was a year. An hour was an eternity. She did not dream of a world with three suns. Her dreams were dead.

“Lift her down. The Lord Marshal has commanded her attendance upon him.”

“Right now? Aren’t we preparing to leave atmosphere? She’d be better off—”

“Right now. Do it.”

She’d forgotten all about the things piercing her neck until they were withdrawn.

The two Purifiers who had taken her out of the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead… eons ago… helped her don the robes of an acolyte. She followed one of them back to the throne room, where the Lord Marshal was beckoning her forward. Head down and covered properly like an acolyte’s always should be, she walked up to the throne’s steps.

“What is your will, Lord Marshal?”

“I understand that your conversion is complete, Kyra. And that you are destined to become one of the Quasi-Dead. Is it well with you?”

No! a tiny voice within her screamed. “Yes, My Lord. I look forward to serving.”

“Today, however, I have need of a different service from you.”

Fuck you, you bastard! the tiny voice raged, buried deep. “My Lord has only to ask.”

“Someone you once knew will be coming. Stay close. Perhaps you can convince him to convert to the Way.”

You goddamn fucking son of a bitch, I’ll never ever— “It would be my honor.”

“It won’t be long now.”

It wasn’t.

The attack was sudden and swift, a dark figure in Necromonger armor flying through the air, a knife raised in one hand, aiming for the Lord Marshal. He seemed already aware; before she could even gasp, he had turned the attacker’s momentum against him and flung the would-be assassin across the main hall’s floor.

And for a moment, Kyra thought she had seen the impossible.

Riddick is dead. That couldn’t have been him—

“Stay your weapons!” the Lord Marshal ordered the crowd in the hall. “He came for me.”

The soldiers that had begun massing around the man, weapons drawn, moved back.

“Kyra,” the Lord Marshal murmured. “To me, now.”

She obeyed, walking to his side and letting him turn her to face the crowd and draw her hood back.

Oh fuck. Oh shit…

It was Riddick. Riddick sprawled on the floor of the main hall, staring at her in horror. He rose to a crouch, his eyes never leaving hers.

Riddick! Oh my God, Riddick, please help me—

He cannot hear you, the Quasi-Dead murmured in her head. You are ours, not his.

“Consider this,” the Lord Marshal was saying as he and Riddick walked toward each other. “If you fall here… now…”

Both men went still, facing off across the hall.

“…you’ll never rise,” her master said.

Riddick tried to say something, but the Lord Marshal went on speaking.

“But if you choose another way… the Necromonger Way…” He gestured back at Kyra.

Fuck, he’s using me as a lure… She wanted to fight, to scream, to kill someone, but she couldn’t move.

“You’ll die in due time,” the Lord Marshal continued, “and rise again in the Underverse.”

There’s no such thing! It’s not real! It’s a lie! It’s the Mor—

Your relationship with Riddick was the lie, the Quasi-Dead countered. The Underverse is truth. The Underverse is all.

Riddick was focused on her, his expression intent. Was he trying to speak to her? Why couldn’t she hear him? She tried to will her way through the barrier that the Quasi-Dead had erected between them—

You will not speak to him or any other, they said. They were blocking her!

The Lord Marshal’s left arm came back, gesturing her way and beckoning her to him. She didn’t want to obey, but she stepped forward and moved to his side. He put his hand on her shoulder and she expected to flinch the way she always did when a strange man touched her—

But instead, she felt rewarded. The greatest of them all had deigned to touch her, an honor beyond com­pare—

Fuck you all! she screamed deep within. The expression on the man’s face infuriated her. Paternal, kindly, the lying façade of a man who had absolute power and could imagine that anything he did, no matter how brutal, was his right and somehow innately good just because he was the one doing it. You ripped apart my mind, you motherfucking son of a side of—

“Go to him,” He murmured, and she found herself obeying.

It was ten steps to stand before Riddick. Just ten. She spent the whole time wrestling for control of her body… and losing.

“It hurts,” she heard herself telling him, “at first.”

Don’t listen to me! It’s not me! This isn’t what I need to tell you! Pain, she suddenly thought, was all she’d ever known. Except for one brief time—

“But after a while,” her mouth continued, out of her control, “the pain goes away, just as they promise.”

Everything they promise is a lie! Don’t let them in! Help me! She had called for Jack’s help, too, but she had gone away, had been taken from her years ago, and now the last bits of Jack that Kyra had been left with were gone, shattered by the Quasi-Dead…

Riddick’s expression was dubious, distrustful, hints of both horror and longing on his features. “Are you with me, Kyra?” he murmured.

Yes! Yes, please help me! Riddick, please— “There’s a moment when you can almost see the Underverse through his eyes,” she heard herself saying. His eyes? No. Not the Lord Marshal’s eyes. What she had caught a glimpse of had come from the Mori­bund— “He makes it sound perfect. A place where anyone can start over.”

She had started over so many times. What was one more? She never should have let General Toal separate her from Tizzy, never should have tried to link them staying together to him—

Tell him Jack’s dead, her Tizzy had said in their final moment together. She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world.

Kyra never should have made them staying together about him. She should have just asked her sister not to leave her. What if, one day, her orders were to kill Tizzy? She couldn’t even make Riddick hear her thoughts; how would she pos­sibly—

“Are you with me, Kyra?” he repeated.

Yes, Riddick, please help me. Please take me away from here. She tried to move to his side, tried to say yes with her body if not with her voice—

He is not yours, the Quasi-Dead told her, forcing her to move on instead. He never was.

She walked past him and into the crowd, surrounded by the Moribund’s puppets. The Moribund’s meat… She was his puppet now too, his meat.

“Convert now,” the Lord Marshal was saying behind her, “or fall forever.”

She wished she’d burned up on Crematoria.

And, somehow, she heard Riddick’s whisper. “You killed everything I know…”

Riddick’s survival instincts had switched off. He was planning to fight to the death. His death.

Kyra gathered all the strength she had left into a single, desperate cry. There were beings she’d hidden from for years, whose power and strangeness had terrified her, but now she wondered why she’d feared them at all when so much worse existed in the ’verses. She prayed that they might hear her now. She had nothing else left to try.

SOMEBODY HELP ME!