Mike Shevdon - The Road to Bedlam

"This way."

As I followed there was the sharp double crack of pistol shots. The opaque glass door to the right shattered in a shower of glass. Alarmed, I leapt aside and pressed myself against the wall, out of the line of the ambush. Raffmir pushed through, there was a dull thud and then a man in a security uniform was hurled backwards through the other door, shattering that too. He bounced once on the floor and rolled across the carpet, groaned and lay still.

I stepped gingerly across the glass-covered carpet to where Raffmir was sweeping fragments of glass from his sleeve. The acrid smell of gunfire hung around him. There was a black pistol on the floor, and I reached for the gun.

"Leave it," he said. "Its sound will only betray our location. Your sword is cleaner and more certain."

"Were you hit?" I asked.

He shook his head, but the smile had gone. "The time has come," he said, "to show them what they are dealing with."

He shifted form back to the long coat and ruffled shirt. As he did so the air chilled suddenly and the lights flickered and dimmed.

"Do likewise," he instructed. "Take as much power as you can. Together we can absorb all they have. Without power or light they will be unable to respond."

The well of darkness within me dilated and I drew in power. The room temperature plummeted and the lights winked out. There was a crackling, splitting sound as the water in the cooler froze and split the container. My hands and fingers were outlined in a white nimbus. The sirens faltered and then subsided into a muted beeping. Emergency lights flickered on then faded to blue and died.

"Keep drawing power. They are not creatures of the dark like us. We will have the advantage as long as we can hold it. Together we can deny them light, while we can still see."

He gestured around him and I found I could indeed see, even beyond the faint outlines illuminated by our flickering nimbus. The real world was in darkness, but the shadow world overlaid upon it was like glowing smoke.

He walked on into that spectral dark, and I followed.

I followed him into the shadows, seeing beyond the walls into offices and corridors. Shadows shifted in those spaces and I realised there were people, moving shadows of smoke within a misty framework of walls and doors.

Amidst the misty world were things that stood out, stark and grey. We approached a vertical rectangular grid. It resolved in the faint light of Raffmir's nimbus into a barrier of iron bars.

"The door is reinforced iron, designed to be proof against our power. The lock is iron too, so our kind cannot affect it."

"Can we get past it?"

He grinned and in answer his glow intensified for a moment and then he vanished. There was a moment of deeper darkness and then his glow reappeared on the other side of the door and he began drawing power once more.

"It seems," he said from the far side of the bars, "that there is a chink in their armour."

I followed his example and gathered power into me. I could see the iron bars of the door, the impervious nature of it, standing stark where all else was smoke. Between the bars, though, was space, and space was ours. I didn't go through the door, but simply stepped around it, moving from one side to the other without passing through the distance in between. Where we could see, we could go.

Beyond that door was a short corridor and then another door, identical to the first.

As we approached the second door there was the loud crack of another pistol shot. This time Raffmir jerked at the impact. Behind him, I dodged sideways, avoiding the line of fire as bullets sprayed into the space, showering us with chips of plaster and paint. The ringing of the pistol shots, the muzzle flash from the gun, the smell of cordite and gunpowder catching in my throat, made the confined space suddenly claustrophobic. Raffmir flattened himself against the wall.

"Are you hurt?" I asked.

He smiled grimly, then pressed his hand against his shoulder and opened it, showing me the blood.

In the darkness beyond the door, a man crossed the corridor, trying to gain a clear shot where I was pinned against the wall. I watched in slow motion as he raised the pistol and aimed at my head.

Instinct saved me as I slid behind the curtain of reality, emerging in the corridor behind them. The shot was still ringing in the corridor as I emerged.

"Shit!" The man said. "He vanished."

As I drew my sword, they realised at once that the danger was among them. There were three men. The first, the security guard who had aimed at me, turned to point his weapon. My sword arced down, blade flashing in the dark, severing the arm at the wrist. The weapon fell and bounced off the carpet, the hand still grasping it. The second guard raised his gun and my sword swept under his chin. He stopped and shuddered, and his head snapped back as a fountain of blood erupted from his neck. The third stepped back clear of his comrades, trying for a shot. I closed the distance in a single long thrust. The sword thudded under his breastbone. He jerked, the hand with the gun flailing, colliding with the wall. The gun clattered heavily to the floor. He gave a wet cough and slid backwards off the blade on to the floor, red blooming across the front of his white coat. He looked down at the spreading blood, his chin unshaven, his eyes wide with surprise. Then his head fell back and his eyes glazed.

Looking down at him while he died, I could see that he looked like a medic. I had just killed a doctor. What kind of doctor carried a pistol?

The fight was over so quickly. All those months of training, long hours of step and parry, turn and slice, and the real fight was over in seconds. It was unreal.

I was standing over him, trying to stop my hand from shaking, when Raffmir appeared beside me. I still held the sword in my hand, watching the blood drip from the end of the blade on to the medic's coat. I could feel my heart thumping now that the adrenalin had nowhere to go.

"That was nicely done," he said. It was the first compliment he had ever paid me.

He shrugged out of his coat and let it fall on the ground. Underneath, the blood was soaking into the shirt around the gory hole in his arm. He glanced down.

"Careless," he said, shaking his head gently. "More haste, less speed."

He went back to where the guard whose hand I'd severed was sitting, leaning against the wall, cradling the stump in his lap and rocking back and forth. Even in the faint light of the glow around Raffmir I could see the sweat beaded on the man's skin, the way his eyes were wide and staring at nothing.

Raffmir picked him up by the front of his uniform and held him one-handed against the wall.

"Does it hurt?"

The man's eyes were staring but seeing nothing. Raffmir smiled. "Not for long."

Dappled moonlight spilled out into the corridor.

"Raffmir, don't…" But it was already too late.

Black tendrils of power extended from Raffmir's outstretched hand into the guard's skin. His flesh sank against his bones and his eyes bulged as Raffmir consumed his life essence in front of me. For once I understood what Blackbird had meant when she said that such a thing was obscene. What was left of the guard fell through Raffmir's hand.

He glanced sideways at me. "Squeamish, cousin?"

"Was that necessary?"

In answer, he drew back the shirt from his arm where the blood caked the cloth, revealing a newly puckered scar where the gunshot wound had been.

He prodded it gently, checking for tenderness. "I do believe it was," he said.

He reached down and retrieved his coat, putting a finger through the hole that the bullet had made. He shrugged back into it, covering the blood-soaked shirt. His glamour shifted slightly and the hole in his coat also vanished.