Simon Green - Daemons Are Forever

I’d never heard Strange sound so tired, so beaten down…almost defeated. He’d always seemed so powerful, so far above humanity, it had never even occurred to me that there might be other forces, other Beings, as far above him… I looked at Harry, standing proud and tall in his golden armour.

“Put that away,” I said. “We don’t have time for this shit. We have important business to discuss. Family business.”

“No,” he said immediately. “There’s nothing more important than this. Nothing can happen, nothing can be decided, until we decide who’s in charge. I noticed you haven’t put on your armour, Eddie. What’s the matter? Haven’t you got the balls for a fair fight?”

“A duel?” I said. “In the middle of all this, you want to fight a duel?”

“It is the traditional way,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms, smiling just a little bit.

“Just another reason why I never got along with the traditional ways,” I said. “But if it’ll make you happy, Harry…”

I subvocalised the activating Words, and the armour poured out of my torc to encase me. I immediately felt stronger, sharper, more confident. A quick glance down showed me my armour was now as golden as his. I flexed my golden fists slowly, and then started towards Harry. He came to me, and we circled each other cautiously. Everyone else fell back, to give us plenty of room. I saw Molly holding Giles by the arm and murmuring urgently in his ear, making it clear he mustn’t interfere. He nodded. He looked like he understood all about duels.

The Sarjeant-at-Arms took a step forward, perhaps to say something in support of Harry, or perhaps just to try to distract me, and Giles swept forward impossibly quickly, crossing the width of the hall in a moment. His long sword leapt into his hand as he slammed the Sarjeant up against the wall, and then he set the edge of the long blade against the Sarjeant’s throat. It all happened so quickly the Sarjeant didn’t have a chance to call up his armour. He looked into Giles’s cold eyes, so close to his own, and stood very still ,saying nothing. A slow trickle of blood ran down his throat from where the razor edge of the sword just parted the skin over his Adam’s apple.

“Don’t,” said Giles.

Harry seized the moment while my attention was elsewhere, and threw himself at me. We went head to head, both of us too angry to think of subtlety. We traded blows that would have killed ordinary men, but neither of us felt them. We grappled with each other, swaying back and forth as we wrestled, but we both knew all the tricks. We slammed together again and again, our superhuman strength and speed equally matched. I pushed him away from me and extruded long golden blades from my hands. Harry grew blades from his hands too, and we cut viciously at each other, thrusting and hacking and swirling around each other too quickly for the human eye to follow. We were in the grip of the armour now, our passion and hate transformed into superhuman action.

I slammed his left blade aside through brute force and cut at his chest. The supernaturally sharp edge cut through his armour to reach him, the only thing that could. I heard him grunt, in pain and surprise, and then I had to duck quickly as his backhand response almost took my head off. We spun and danced, stamping our golden feet so hard we cracked the wooden floor. We fought on, golden blurs in the crimson light. But even in this we were too evenly matched, trading superficial cuts and wounds that never even came close to ending the duel.

But I’d been through a lot more than he had, and I was tired. My arms ached, and I could feel blood trickling warmly down my skin inside my armour. I had to end this, while I still could. So I used an old trick, the one I used to beat his father. I parried both his blades with mine, forced them up and out of the way, and went for his throat with both hands. My blades withdrew into the golden gloves so I could get a good grip on his golden neck. The impact sent us both crashing to the floor and I ended up on top, both my hands bearing down on his throat. His hands discarded their blades as he instinctively grabbed at my wrists, trying to force my hands away. The armour around his neck should have been a match for my armoured hands, but at such close proximity, under the force of my will, his armour and mine melded together so that my bare hands were suddenly at his bare throat, inside the armour.

He made some sound of shock and surprise, and then my hands closed, and I cut it off. He bucked and struggled under me, but he couldn’t shift my hands. He choked and convulsed, and I wouldn’t let him breathe.

Until finally he stopped fighting me and slapped the ground at his side. The old signal of a fighter who yields. I let go, and he started breathing again. I stayed crouched over him, ready to go again if he was faking. For a while we stayed there, him on the floor, me over him, both of us breathing hard. I would have killed him if he hadn’t yielded, and he knew it.

“Was that how you killed my father?” he said finally.

“Typical of you, Harry,” I said. “Always fixated on the past. A leader has to look to the future. I could have killed you, but I didn’t want to. First, because it would probably have caused more problems than it solved, and secondly, the family needs experienced field agents like you. Now more than ever. So forget this Patriarch crap. Go back to being part of my Inner Circle. Give me your word that you’ll follow me, obey my orders, for the good of the family…and this is over.”

“And if I say no?”

“You know the answer to that. It’s all or nothing, Harry. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said quietly, bitterly. “For the good of the family.”

We both armoured down. I gave him my hand and helped him to his feet.

“No!” Roger said suddenly, stepping forward. “You don’t have to give in to him, Harry! You don’t have to take any crap from anyone, not while I’m here!”

And just like that, he took on his Infernal aspect, wrapping it around him like a cloak, and he didn’t seem in any way human anymore. Shadows gathered around him, a living darkness that seemed to eat up the crimson light. There was a thick stench of blood and sulphur on the air, and a rush of almost unbearable heat sent all of us stumbling back, even Harry. Roger smiled, and his mouth was full of pointed teeth. His eyes were black pits in his face. His presence was heavy in the Sanctity, like an unbearable weight pressing down on the world. He looked like what he really was; something from the Pit. Even Harry couldn’t bear to look at him directly. Roger laughed softly, an evil, hateful sound that had no human humour in it, and we all winced. Roger rose up into the air, defying the natural laws of the world as though they were nothing, and hung on the air with his arms mockingly outstretched as though nailed to an invisible cross.

“Jesus doesn’t want me for a sunbeam,” he said in a voice like an animal grunting. “You think you’re so much, Eddie Drood…Let me show you true power.”

Before I could even say anything, Molly rose up into the air to face him, levitating effortlessly. Her face was set and cold as she put herself between me and the hellspawn. I wanted to call out to her, but I had no voice. Unnatural energies coalesced around both of them, felt as much as seen, spitting and crackling like beads of water on a hot surface. Something was gathering between them, something awful…Just being this close to the two of them felt like razor blades slicing into my soul. Mortals weren’t supposed to see things like this, feel things like this. Forbidden magics and inhuman practices…

Roger waved a hand, and a hole opened up in the floor of the Sanctity. The wooden floorboards seemed to just rot away into nothing, and the hole grew steadily, like a cancer in the body of the world. Barbed brass tentacles, already slick with spilled blood, shot up out of the hall and snapped around Molly, pinning her arms to her sides. She cried out, as though fouled by their touch, and struggled fiercely, blood spurting on the air as the metal barbs dug into her flesh. And then the tentacles snapped back into the hole, taking her with them, and the hole disappeared. The floor was solid again, untouched, as though nothing had happened. Roger turned slowly, still hanging unsupported on the air, and smiled his awful smile at me.