Chapter Thirteen
This chapter's reposted. I'm really sorry about the html. Had to swop the doc. between computers cos mine's finally given up the ghost. Aaargh.
I've this creeping
Suspicion that things here are not as they seem.
Reassure me,
Why does it feel as if I'm in too deep?
Yes, I have done wrong…..
But what I did I thought needed be done,
I swear…….
Dave Matthews Band-The Stone(edit)
The words echoed around the room…trytrytrytrytrytry…
Seifer stared at his hand like a junkie on a bad trip.
Still looked the same. The difference was that he could move it himself.
He whirled, searching desperately for the thing among the shadows and pale flickering light.
It wasn't hard to find. It hung a few metres away, almost within touching distance, if he'd wanted to do such a stupid thing. Blowing gently in the draughts that rippled through the hall, it resembled an animated column of dry ice.
It didn't look so scary, but then Seifer knew that appearances could be deceptive, with Quistis the living proof.
Seifer scrabbled around, searching desperately for weapons. He still had his gun, but that was going to be about as much use as a toothpick against a T-Rexaur. In all the adventure vids he'd watched, the hero always had to fight the bad guy in a hall with lots of swords hanging over the fire, or at least lots of stuffed animal heads with big, pointy horns. This one was empty, although to be fair he supposed it was a hall. He'd hate to fight the thing in a tunnel.
Maybe he was the bad guy.
Hell, it had worked last time, and he didn't think heroes got dirty. However, Seifer was mostly sure that when you were fighting alone against something that could steal your soul and use your body like a sock puppet, you were probably on the Side Of Good. The whole "hopelessly and stupidly outnumbered" bit certainly seemed to fit, except, he thought sourly, when you were on the winning side.
The spirit ghosted around the edges of the room, watching him like a hawk, but so far, not trying to attack, which was okay with him. If he let it touch him again, it was all over. His foot clinked against something that felt heavy and out of place, and Seifer bent down and groped for the object, not taking his eyes off the thing. His fingers brushed metal. It was heavy and cold, so cold that he could feel it through his gloves. It rolled slightly.
The pipe. Seifer's free hand closed around it. He must have dropped it after he'd used it to open the door to go look for Quistis. Thank Hyne.
With the other hand he tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to manoeuvre the torch into a position where the three inches of charred wood left wouldn't scorch his wrist every time he bent down. The flames licked up, making him uncomfortably aware that the only thing standing between him and certain extreme pain was a few inches of cloth. He needed something that would burn. Books. People. Witches. Wood. But there wasn't any wood in the hall, or any of the other things either. The thing circled, slowly, like a shark. It didn't seem to like fire. Pity he didn't have any magic. He'd have burned its ass.
Seifer's eyes slid past it, scanning the apparently featureless wall.
There?
There was a slight mark on one of the stones nearest him, just to the right of the door they'd come in by. It seemed to flicker and crawl in the firelight as he stared at it with eyes unused to the dark. Not much to go on, but it was enough for the time being. There was a familiar feel to it, déjà vu with teeth.
And if he was wrong, he'd just have to be dead wrong. Seifer shivered. Or walking-dead wrong, depending on just how much he'd pissed it off.
There was hardly any sound in the room, just the slight crackling of the torch, his breathing steaming in the cold air and the scuff of his boots on stone as he turned to keep his eyes on the circling wraith.
The spirit made no sound at all.
He threw the torch, hard. It ducked easily out of the way and the brand exploded against the wall behind it, showering flaming dry wood and embers everywhere. A couple of the sparks passed right back through the misty outline of the spirit and landed on Seifer's coat. He brushed them of with a curse. And a few landed on one of the old tapestries, this one a particularly baroque version of a girl stroking a unicorn.
If you squinted a bit, the frayed face looked a bit like Quistis.
That was the best you could do?
It closed in. Seifer's grin was wolfish and held absolutely no humour.
The tapestry ignited with a sharp whoomph, flames rising high and dripping down to the floor on long strings of frayed yarn. The girl's face crumbled into ash.
Just a few minutes of cheaply bought time, but it might just be long enough.
There was a weird reptilian hiss as the spirit whipped round and recoiled from the blaze, shading its insubstantial face with equally wraithlike arms.
He grabbed the pipe with both hands and swung it wildly at the wall. The shock reverberated through his hands as it hit with a heavy metallic clunk, twisted the bar, feeling stone loosening, and yanked it out, swinging it like a baseball bat. There was a high wail and the wall crumbled, revealing some kind of object made of stone.
As Seifer got a closer look at it, he realised it was some kind of head and his first thought was bloody hell, before he realised that no way was anything organic going to survive that long. Instead it was a rough lump of some kind of sparkly grey stone, shaped into an oval woman's face, with the suggestion of long hair framing each side. The eyes were open, but without pupils, zombielike. It wasn't painted and there was no ornamentation apart from a deep spiral shaped groove that curled down from the corner of one eye. He guessed it was pretty, if you liked that kind of thing. Well done, at least. And he'd seen it before.
And something just clicked. Seifer's train of thought, temporarily derailed, went something like this.
The spirit got power from the head. Destroy the head, destroy the ghost's power, destroy the ghost.
You didn't have to be Quistis to work that out.
Easy.
The wall had been packed with some kind of chalky core which drifted out and hade him cough, so he almost missed the thing as it swept past like a very angry jet plane. He dropped the pipe and rolled as the thing went over his head with the speed of a hare on double espresso and wrapped itself protectively round the stone.
Seifer though he could hear a faint keening, high up in the roof, and then he really didn't have time to think about anything else as it turned and flew at him, He was fighting purely on reflex now, months of training kicking in, but you couldn't fight something you couldn't touch. No time for all the brutally elegant strategies they'd taught at Garden or any of the careful gunblade moves he'd practised in the training centres.
It just had to be lucky once. He had to be lucky all the time, and he was tiring fast. Fast? Hell, he was screwed already.
His hand touched a piece of rock on the floor and he scooped it up, turning the movement into a dodge and then a dive as the thing swept overhead. It was a good job it seemed to be more bothered about the head than anything else, because it kept making little feinting circles away from it, seem to gain courage as he got further away, he'd duck or dodge, it'd turn and block him before he could get back. He threw the rock.
As Seifer had hoped it passed through the mistlike body of the wraith just like the embers had, without even slowing, and then arced to land against the head with a soft cluck. It didn't cause any significant damage, as the statue looked like it was made of granite or something, with all those little sparkly crystals, but it did knock it sideways, enough to send it tilting over the edge. The thing rushed to the head, keening, and Seifer used the brief moment's rest to pick up another rock from the floor, watching cautiously as it wrapped itself around the stone like a veil to hide its features. It screamed murder, and the scream seemed to radiate from every corner of the room
Killyoukillyoukillyoukillyoukillyoukillyou…
Get in line, he privately thought. The second rock bounced heavy in his hand and he raised his arm to throw it.
The thing moved so fast he couldn't even see it, sweeping towards him with another high thin scream. He dived, knees meeting the stone with a brief stab of pain, rolled and flung his arms over his head in a futile gesture, throwing the rock at it reflexively, well, it was either that or drop it on the floor, and that sure wasn't going to do a hell of a lot of good. Like the first one, it went straight through the spirit, but Seifer heard it glance off the wall to the right with a solid chock and thought, oh, shit. Missed.
And the thing was just..there.
There was a moment of startled surprise before he realised that it had sunk its arm, or the bit of smoke that passed for its arm, neatly through his layers of frayed clothes just below his ribs on his left side. There was a strange moment of freeze-frame as he stared straight at it, eyes widened in surprise.
It felt like a sharp cold pain, like taking a breath of freezing air in and holding it for so long your lungs started to burn, like drinking ice water on a really hot day. He couldn't breathe, running through long lines of vicious swearwords in his head as a pit of cold dread started to form in his stomach.
And then it stopped.
Well, he didn't feel possessed, not unless it was going for the really subtle approach. The spirit recoiled with, he would have sworn, a slight expression of surprise on its completely featureless face. It withdrew its hand, inspecting it curiously.
Seifer touched the spot where it had gone in, but his flesh felt warm and alive under his fingers. No pain, no welling wetness or the blood he'd half been expecting. He swore softly and gratefully.
He'd been asleep before. Maybe this meant it didn't work, couldn't work unless he was asleep. Or unconscious. An interesting thought he didn't much feel like testing at this time.
So if it couldn't stop him, fine. Mission accomplished in one easy hold-it-above-your-head and drop-it. The realisation was blinding and sweet as water in the desert. He could still get out of this. Sure, then he just had a hell of a lot of other problems to be getting on with, but this, this would finally be easy, like he'd thought.
Famous last words.
He levered himself up off the floor, looking around for the wraith.
At first there was no sign of it, and he wondered hazily if it had self-destructed, maybe out of disappointment. Seifer examined the rafters carefully, and although a couple of empty cobwebs gave him pause, he began to hope that it really could be gone. His gaze slid over the wall, floor, and then came to rest on the head. It stared blankly back at him. It looked like it could be worth a lot of money, back in the city, but he thought he'd pass.
It looked…kind of misty.
A moment later he realised that of course, the spirit was wrapped around the head. It gave him pause for all of three seconds before he reasoned that, since it couldn't really do anything until he went to sleep, it wasn't going to be much of an obstacle. Of course, if he planned to have a rest before stomping its home into a million little sparkly pieces, that could be some kind of big deal, but hell, by the time he slept again it'd be dead.
Heh. Taste the revenge of Seifer Almasy, evil spirit. Eat floor.
He squinted. The slight ice-blue mist seemed to be thickening and the wraith wrapped itself tighter around the head, gaining strength from somewhere, and then slowly began to coalesce. The features of the head began to be obscured even more and then disappeared. The soft greenish light in the hall went out, giving the room even more of a funeral air, lit only by the flickering dregs of the tapestry that made shadows reel and dance in the corners. In the moonlight the stone looked dark, like spilled blood.
Seifer approached cautiously. The shadows in the niche seemed to be getting longer, and in the sudden flare of light as another hanging caught fire he could see a dark shape slowly rising.
This was not good. The room was changing around him, losing size and grandeur .Holes appeared in walls as the thing drew back its power and a dead bat dropped from the ceiling, making him jump.
Really, he supposed he should feel honoured as it was spending all of this power on him, but seeing as he'd been reduced from a cadet of one of the most feared mercenary fighting forces in the world to throwing rocks at something he knew he couldn't really hurt, give it ten more minutes and he'd have to stand there and poke it with a pointy stick.
Dammit. He'd always wanted to go out with a bang, or at least with more people watching, a wish that he was sure would be granted if the Galbadians got hold of him.
Seifer pulled his gun and loaded it fast, catching a stray bullet with his other hand as he fumbled the last one and slotting it neatly into place. The gun chambered with a click. For about the forty-seventh time since he'd left Marduk he wished he had Hyperion. Maybe he should have kept it, but at the time it had just been too much of a risk. Maybe.
The room had changed completely by the time he glanced up. It was still old, right, but it looked..older, in a way. Older, and with more holes. Trees jutted from the walls, bare and leafless, and the wind cut through the gaps howling like a lost soul and blowing in sharp windwhipped snowflakes. He shivered, teeth chattering. The gun was heavy and freezing in his hand.
The Revenge of Seifer Almasy was just going to take a little more time than he'd originally thought.
Seifer advanced, cautiously. The transformation of the room had created so many new shadows, he wasn't anything near sure where exactly it was.
The noise of his careful footsteps echoed round the hall, flagstones now worn and ridged with the wear of a thousand feet and Hyne knew how many years. It made them bloody hard to walk on.
There was a scuttling noise from the shadow behind him and Seifer swung round, spinning back again almost as fast as he sensed a movement in one of the very farthest shadows. The room seemed filled with tiny whispering voices, or maybe it was just the stress starting to get to him.
Whatever it was, it creeped him out. The shadows were beginning to take on spidery grasping hands. He circled in the centre of the room, wondering whether he should make his way over to one of the walls so at least he'd have something solid at his back, but then he didn't want to find one of those shadows reaching out. He couldn't see the stone any more.
There was a tapping noise from the arch of deeper darkness that formed the front door.
Seifer squinted, moved closer.
Everything appeared to be still.
A few steps forward, as he skirted a large and rotting hole that had appeared in the floor.
It took another few seconds of squinting to realise that there was something that shouldn't have been there lying along the frame of the door to the left. It looked like part of the ornate stone carving, or maybe a bundle of twigs, but what it really was beginning to look like was a hand.
You're going crazy, Almasy.
But then there was another tapping noise and a shadow, no, a figure, began to materialise up out of the darkness. It was abnormally thin, so thin that Seifer at first thought it was some kind of tree, silhouetted against the stone, an optical illusion, and its arms and legs seemed to be on wrong, all unfamiliar joints and angles. As he watched a blend of shapes flickered across its body, and he thought he saw the outline of a snarling wolf's head, with little chips of torchlight as eyes for a second before it solidified into a figure out of a tale or nightmare but unquestionably real.
It didn't look any more human than it had done as the column of blue light. The face was too long, almost horselike, the ears large, and the teeth, when it smiled, were sharp and pointed and too damn long. It wore tattered clothes of some sort, androgynous in style and made out of tufts of fur and cloth and what looked like branches. What skin showed between the tatterdemalion of rags and bones was brown as leather, and swirled with tattooes in blue paint that seemed to move in the torchlight.
It didn't look that threatening, but something made Seifer aware that this was Very Bad News.
"Don't come any closer." Was that fear in his voice?
The thing smiled and stretched out a hand.
Seifer pressed the trigger and the bullet made a small dark hole somewhere in the centre of its forehead.
The thing went over backwards with a soft thud and lay still.
It didn't move.
Seifer walked up to it carefully, ready to carry out the Seifer Almasy Method of 'Is it dead yet?' which was to shoot it in the head again. Worked with most things.
He leaned down just as the thing whipped up an inhumanly-fast hand and caught him round the ankle with a force to crush bones. Seifer fell, slamming one arm out along the stone to break his fall, and hammered with his free boot at the thing's face, smashing teeth and bone with the dogged persistence of a Duracell Bunny. The hand loosened, but didn't let go. He kept kicking until the crater of its face was a messy ruin that would have stopped any normal opponent but it was still moving and then until he was almost exhausted and breath rasped in his throat.
Silence.
The thing moved again with a spastic twitch but the grip still held and he watched as blood congealed and scabbed and bone reknitted. With a kind of eerie calm he placed the barrel of the gun against its wrist, and pulled the trigger, jerking his leg from the grip of the thing and limping the few yards to lean against the nearest wall. It was a few seconds before he looked down and realised the hand was still locked around his leg.
Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed thickly, reached down and began to force the fingers apart. Two of them broke with a noise like snapping twigs before he managed to lever the thing off and threw it across the room, where it rolled over and started to crawl back to its owner like a pale brown leather crab. As it reached the bare, high-arched feet the thing bent down and picked it up, stared at Seifer and aligned the hand with the stump of its wrist as nonchalantly as putting on a glove. There was a cracking noise as tendon and bone and blood vessels seemed to grow down from the wrist, writhing blindly before joining the stump.
It was really, really disgusting, but like a train wreck, he couldn't take his eyes off it.
The thing flexed its fingers with a crack and ran a finger around the line where hand and arm joined. The flesh sealed up behind it, flowing like water.
Are you beginning to understand?
The voice was mocking.
It would have made Seifer vomit, but as he hadn't actually eaten anything for the last forty eight hours, he contented himself with retching quietly in a corner.
Seifer liked people, if only as audiences, or targets, at least when he was winning, as the only thing that was worse to him than failing was failing with an audience. He'd managed to get round this at Garden by the simple tactic of not losing, but he had a gut feeling that that wouldn't work this time. Why, he didn't know, but there must have been a reason why the spirit had changed its form.
And right now he was guessing that the ability to regenerate new body parts was a major factor, and unfortunately, not one that he shared.
Seifer didn't lie to himself, or at least not much, because self-delusion was weakness, and weakness meant you'd lose. And right now, he was going to die. Of course, giving up usually meant you were going to lose, too. If you could convince your opponent you were going to win before you'd even fought the battle, it was yours already.
Logic was not his friend.
Come to think of it, he didn't have many friends right now.
But maybe it was better that way. Seifer had learned long ago that the only person you could really depend on was yourself. That didn't stop him from wishing Quistis of Raijin or Fuujin or hell, even that wet-behind-the-ears Galbadian cadet -what was his name now? were there to back him up. He tried to tell himself he didn't need anyone else, Hyne dammit, but it was cold, dark and okay, maybe even a little spooky. Although Seifer usually ate spooky for breakfast, the situation was making him as jumpy as a ferret on crack.
Adrenaline sang through his veins as he eyed the thing, nerves on a knife-edge. It didn't seem to be making any sudden moves. In fact it was just standing there, relaxed, looselimbed and as graceless as a reanimated scarecrow. It seemed to be smiling, and its pointed teeth made the smile something less than charming, like a shark's right before it opened its mouth and took a big bite out of your legs. Normally it wouldn't have stood a chance, he must have been a good hundred pounds heavier than it, if about a foot shorter, and well armed.
But then there was that smile..
Seifer fought to keep his voice level, even managing a touch of the old familiar arrogance. "Come on, then. Show me what you got."
If anything, the smile became a little bit wider.
You will lose. And you know it. Otherwise you would have attacked me by now. Are you afraid, boy?
"I'm not afraid. It's not over yet."
He thought how Quistis always said it was overconfidence that made him careless. Overconfidence, and, oh yeah, underestimating the enemy. Been there, done that. It would have been nice if he'd at least known that he'd learned from his mistakes.
He thought how being a sorceress's knight and one of the most wanted men in the country gave him the right not to be called 'boy' ever again. He'd earned it. Boy, had he earned it.
I could have made you famous
"Don't you mean 'infamous'? That's why I'm in this fucking mess in the first place."
"But this time" another smile "you would have been on the winning side."
"Yeah, right. Like you're going to conquer the world from this shithole"
But I would have let you live. Anyway, the time for bargains is over.
"I've got one. How about I don't kill you, and you let me and her walk out of here. You can have the others." he added, feeling generous. Way to get rid of two problems at once. Damn, he should have been a politician. Now that was a scary thought.
The time for bargains is over. You are dead.
It was the way it said it that sent chills up Seifer's spine. He'd been threatened many times, in many different ways, but there was a calm certainty about the statement that said, yes, this is going to happen. Not as good as, just, you are.
His finger itched on the trigger.
He just had to get past it. That was what he kept telling himself, and Hyne, he almost convinced himself it would be easy.
It wasn't.
Seifer had his plan marked out in his head even before he moved. He just had to disable it for long enough to get to the head and drop it on the floor, maybe stamp on it a few times. Problem solved.
The first part went just as planned. Often, the first person to get efficiently vicious was the last person left standing. The one thing Leonhart hadn't got, how to fight dirty
He opened his mouth to reply, "You think….." and as it cocked its head at him, listening in a vaguely birdlike manner, he feinted to the left, went round to the fight, and as it raised its arm to swipe at him-the thing had a helluva long reach, like some kind of monkey, and it almost got him- he raised his knife and grabbed the opposite shoulder. The knife sank up to the hilt under its left armpit and he twisted it a couple of times for good measure.
This was the bit where the plan began to seriously differ from reality.
In real life, the victim would have been killed instantly, Seifer's knife slashing through the left lung to the heart, hopefully cutting several major blood vessels on the way in. It was a technique he'd used several times during his brief and unspectacular career of an assassin, no scream, as the guy was dead before he knew it, and very little blood. Just a man sagging over quietly in a dark alleyway, another holding him up, smiling, explaining, too much drink, keeping to the shadows. Nothing suspicious about that, and it had worked any number of times.
Okay, he hadn't been quite as stupid as to imagine it would kill the thing, but surely having most of your arteries severed would slow you down a bit.
It didn't even flinch.
Another thing Quistis had once told him. Never Assume Anything.
Seifer had assumed the thing would stagger, fall, be thrown off balance long enough for him to get round it. Instead it grabbed him by the shoulder of his jacket and threw him into the opposite wall without even breaking a sweat. Thankfully its overlong, bony fingers skidded off the worn leather so it couldn't get a proper grip, otherwise he realised later the fall would probably have broken his neck, but as Seifer body-slammed the wall he really wasn't thinking about how damn lucky he was.
As he fell over, he saw the spirit moving up out of the corner of his eyes, pushed off the floor and was up, muscles working automatically past exhaustion or pain, before he actually thought about what he was doing.
It tried to grab him again, arms flailing like a particularly deadly windmill, slicing the air. Seifer tried hard not to look at the slash under its left arm. Body fluids dripped out sluggishly to stain the strange clothing down its side, and then stopped. The blood wasn't red, and it didn't smell metallic and heavy and hot like human blood, but rather of wetness, dank corners in forests the sun never saw, the floor layered head-high in fermenting leaflitter, populated by strange pale bugs with no eyes and glowing radioactive bodies.
Okay, time to try another tactic. This time he waited until it came closer and then tried a variation on his favourite Garden technique. Ducking beneath its guard, he slashed at it with his knife, spinning and cutting again and again until its stomach was a ragged patchwork of holes, all the delicate pipework of the human body torn to shreds as he ducked under its arms finally, slipping on bits of bloody tubing and feeling its clawing fingers grasping for his coat collar and hair.
It was possible that this method was even more stunningly unsuccessful than the first, One, because after Seifer ducked under its arm to go get the head he had no idea where the hell in the room he was, two, it seemed to slow it down about as much as his first attempt, (i.e, not at all) and three, because afterwards the thing just caught hold of his other arm, the one without a knife, by the little finger and used his own momentum to throw him across the room into another wall.
The finger broke.
It hurt a lot.
After that Seifer just tried to stay the hell out of its way, and the fight was reduced to a near-silent game of dodgeball, feints and retreats and no sound at all except his breathing and the odd groan and curseword as it threw him into, over or onto various items of architecture.
Quistis dozed in a corner. She'd finally managed to drift into a heavy half-doze some hours after Seifer had left, dreams slow and peopled by strange abstract figures that slipped through her fingers as soon as she tried to focus on them. Socks and mountains and pumpkins driving buses took on sudden vital importance for a few seconds before they faded away, merging into different though equally weird dreams or sudden freezing wakefulness.
She'd always heard (mostly from non SeeDs) that the hard thing about battle was the waiting, but from her own experience she, personally, thought the worst part was when something or someone came running screaming at you and trying to bite your knees off or sink a bullet in your chest.
That wasn't making the waiting any easier.
There was a feeling of unease so strong she could almost taste it. The Galbadians were handling it in their own way. Stren had a lighter, flicking it repetitively and irritatingly open and closed with an echoing click. The flame seemed to pass through his hands, dancing in Quistis' sleepy mind like an independent spirit. It was a waste of fuel, of course, but she had a feeling that he knew this as well as her and it wasn't like they could light any kind of fire in a cell anyway.
Rahel had a dogeared and greasy pack of Triple Triad cards in her hands, playing Patience over and over with a kind of dogged intense determination. Quistis would have offered to join in, but there was something in the older woman's posture that indicated she'd very much like to be left alone, and she respected that.
Dom was cleaning his pistol with an oily rag. He had all the parts laid out in front of him, carefully set on the back of a plastic mapcase like some kind of street trader and was meticulously twisting the rag into a tiny point to reach every corner, eyes intent on his work.
Quistis just sat and tried to sleep.
Her watch indicated it was now six thirty am. Back in Garden the day would just be starting, students lining up in the cafeteria for rolls and cereal and hot coffee.
Coffee.
Right now if someone had handed her an empty mug, Quistis would have tried to lick the bottom. Her mouth felt dirty, dry, and she was cold. Too much blood in her caffeine system, Selphie had always teased in the mornings when she turned up like some kind of zombie, in sharp contrast to the Trabian girl whose hyperactivity, she had reluctantly come to assume, was all-natural. She knew she should be thankful for small mercies. If Selphie had been here she would have been climbing the walls and driving Quistis crazy.
The walls.
Quistis'gaze played idly over the wall above Dom's head. He was oblivious, immersed in his work, head bent. The wall looked somehow different. For a minute she would have sworn that it flexed and distorted like a piece of rubber. She rubbed her eyes, feeling the reassuring rough warmth of her fur gloves against her face
It was official.
Quistis Trepe was going crazy without coffee.
The second wave, when it came, caught her by surprise. The wall, in fact the whole cell, flexed and contracted like a stress ball as Dom dived for cover under a rucksack as pebbles and then large stones, blocklike squares it would have taken at least two of them to lift, crashed down to crack the floor slabs into pieces but miraculously faling to hit anybody.
"Shit!"
That was Dom, from under the rucksack. The straps trailed round his head like oversized bunny ears, and Quistis had to fight an absurd urge to laugh as she covered her head with her arms.
Rahel and Stren were both flattened against the wall.
There was a grating noise from the structure. The four SeeDs stared at each other, all thinking the same thing
It's going to go.
In unison they looked at the ceiling. It creaked but held.
There was a noise that sounded like someone inhaling and the whole cell changed. It didn't happen all at once, but more like a wave that crashed through the building, leaving the faint scent of leaflitter and mould. A wave of darkness. All the lights went out, leaving only sharp freezing blackness.
Someone swore, softly but clearly, and they all tensed, expected more rockfalls, some kind of strange attack, something.
There was a hushed silence.
Finally there was the click Quistis had been hearing for the last half-hour as Stren opened his lighter. The SeeDs huddled round it, trying not to stare at the tiny flame as their eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness.
"Just what the fuck is going on?"
There was sudden thump from above their heads and dust and small pebbles rained down.
"Whatever. Let's get out of here."
"I don't like this. It could be a trap"
"Well everyone move unless you want to not bloody like it from under a big pile of rocks." She recognised Rahel's voice, last, but the others were male, indistinguishable, and she couldn't tell who had spoken.
Quistis fumbled for the door. She could see a darker shape where it had been, hissed at Stren to cover the light, and drew her whip as she made her careful way towards it, stumbling over rocks until she reached the reached the opposite wall of the cell and traced her fingers along it, feeling dampness and what she swore was vegetation.
She waved a hand carefully. It found no resistance except air.
"Is it open?" A hissed whisper from one of the other three, still grouped around the lighter like moths to a flame
"It's not even here"
"You're joking"
"Do I look like I'm joking?" she snapped. Bad enough they were going to make her official pathfinder, now they had to question her too.
"Dunno. Can't see. It's too dark."
Quistis stepped out over the threshold. Her boots touched hard stone and then after two steps, sweeping her feet carefully in front of her and trying very very hard not to think about horror movies, she bumped into the door. It was twisted as if crushed by some giant hand. As she pulled off her gloves to touch it, Quistis realised that it was as rusted and overgrown as if it had been lying in the same place for years.
More voices from the cell behind her.
"Where's she gone?"
"Quistis?"
"Trepe?"
"I'm here. It's all right. It's open. We're out" Saying the last words filled her with relief.
The other SeeDs filed out into the corridor behind her, faces pale blurs in the darkness.
Rahel groaned. "What the hell happened?"
Looking around, Quistis could have asked the same question. The corridor was smaller than she remembered (and she'd sent a lot of time staring at it) and pockmarked with holes. The floor was strewn with vegetation that couldn't have grown in less than a few years, a tangled mat of green. It was muddy underfoot though the soil was hard and frozen, trickling in from holes gaping in the stone walls where the stones had fallen out.
"Whatever way, it doesn't look too safe. Which way, Quistis?"
Quistis didn't know how the hell they expected her to know, but it gave her at least some kind of authority. She pointed along the way Seifer had left and then lowered her arm as she realised they had no way of seeing her.
"This way. To the left." Her voice rang oddly along the corridors, throwing her own words back to her.
There was a lot of echoey swearing as people stubbed toes on rocks and turned round facing the wrong way, until they moved out, Quistis in point, Stren on rearguard and the other two in between.
Quistis unhooked her whip from her belt, holding it loosely in her hand as she stepped over stone blocks, murmuring warnings to the men behind her. The floor seemed to slope, very gently, upwards.
They had travelled only a couple of hundred metres before she started to hear the sounds. Small noises, at first, sounding like panicked breathing, and slow scrapes along the ground, that gradually built up to an insane crescendo of noise, echoing oddly from the stone walls. It was impossible to tell where they were coming from, what they were or even how far away, the tunnels functioning as a kind of amplifier with the sounds ricocheting off corners further ahead in the blackness.
Quistis held out a hand veiled in spiderwebs, thumping into Rahel's chest as the older woman took another step forwards. Someone else bumped into her back.
She hissed "Stop." quietly, almost inaudibly, but the tunnels took it up and twisted it, giving it teeth, stopstopstopstopstopstop rattling along into infinity and then fading suddenly into a drift of cold and empty silence.
The noises from in front had finished, too. She could feel movements in the air from behind her as the Galbadians shifted silently, checking for enemies.
"Is anybody there?" This time it sounded normal, and she cursed whatever fluke of architecture had built the corridors.
There was a long pause.
"Lupe?" Someone's voice from up above, young, nervous, tentative
"Quistis Trepe, Balamb." She tried to put as much calming authority in her voice as she could.
A dark shape rounded the corner, carrying a twisted, improvised torch of paper that shed some light, through not much, on the proceedings. The effect was slightly spoiled when it burned down to the figure's hand and went out abruptly as he sucked his fingers, swearing.
"Damn."
damndamndamndamn. The noise rumbled through the corridors, ending with another indistinct thump from the ceiling. More pebbles showered down, hard rain.
Rahel raised her voice, shouting through the noise.
"Who is it.?"
"Isak!" The figure got close. "Don't shoot!"
"You're okay?" She could see the outline of untidy black hair now, if she looked hard.
"Quistis?" He sounded unreasonably relieved to have found her.
Rahel coughed. "Do you know what the hell just went down?"
Isak swung his head to her, looking startled.
"It's okay. It's Rahel, Stren, Dom. Got any ideas? We were just sitting there and it went all tits-up."
Dom and Stren chimed in with muted 'hey' s from behind her.
Isak waved to them, the movement almost invisible in the dark, and turned his head back towards Quistis. She could see the glitter of his glasses.
"Uh, well, I saw Seifer a while back, and he said he was going to go fight it. That was a while back." He shrugged. "Haven't seen him since. Maybe that's got something to do with it."
"Almasy's brainwashed. Joined the Dark side." Rahel cut in, her speech military-crisp and sharp as a knife.
Isak's gaze flicked between them, umpire in this game of verbal tennis.
Quistis reluctantly nodded. Oh yes, he's just so damn evil he managed to collapse the castle around us just by concentrating really hard..
He looked supremely puzzled, and his next question made her freeze.
"Didn't you see Seifer? He said he was coming to find you."
Quistis thought better of mentioning their earlier encounter. "Haven't seen him. Why?"
Isak shrugged again. "Dunno. He didn't sound brainwashed." But this time his voice sounded doubtful.
Quistis privately thought that, as Seifer was an arrogant violent annoying jerk whether brainwashed or not, it was sometimes hard to tell. She could just see herself trying to explain it to the Galbadians.
So how did you know he wasn't being controlled and just faking it?
Well, he swore more…..
A third shower of pebbles cascaded from the ceiling.
"Look, we better get out of here." She turned to Isak. "Seen any stairs?"
She could hear the rustle of his clothing as he moved. "Just back here. I was going to go up, and then I heard you, so I thought I'd go investigate."
Quistis shot him an assessing look. "Why does everyone run in the direction of the menacing sound?"
"Curiosity." He started off. "And night vision goggles."
Of course. He'd been on night watch. She was beginning to think that there was more to Isak than a messy haircut and the survival instincts of a sardine.
The stairs, when they found them, were almost suicidally narrow, with deep U shaped steps. Quistis went first, arranging Stren at the back as before. She shivered in the blast of cold air that drifted down from the rooms above, fighting with drifts of watery damp scent from below. Steps rocked under her feet, crumbling mortar and chips of stone as she walked.
This place was crazy. Like some kind of fairground funhouse, though of course without the fun and with special extra servings of piping hot death.
Oh well. She was a SeeD, peril was her job, and she enjoyed it, laughing in the face of danger and all that, but Quistis couldn't help thinking that maybe she should have taken that desk job after all.
There was a strange scraping noise from the floors above. She froze for a second and then continued up the staircase, all five of them ascending in a quick careful silence. Wind whipped at her hair and pushed the hood of her parka down. Water dripped on her face, freezing and icy. They climbed more steps in a tight spiral and after passing a couple more empty floors she heard voices again, calling out of the darkness.
"Anybody there?"
This time it was only more SeeDs, about fifteen in number and not much older, ragged and bedraggled. All of them seemed rather touchingly grateful to have found someone who could tell them what to do, and Quistis wondered just what the Galbadians were thinking, allowing kids out on such an important mission. But then, they hadn't been any older in the Sorceresses Wars.
How time flew. She was, what, all of twenty now?
Quistis felt a lot older.
She kept climbing, calves beginning to burn after so many hours inactivity. Noises drifted down from the rooms above her, scufflings and some kind of muffled thuds. She hissed down the staircase for quiet. Thank Hyne for faked authority.
At least the weird echoing effects had stopped. Their voices seemed to be muffled in velvet, swallowed up by the great curtain of noiselessness that had descended on the rooms like very expensive soundproofing.
There it was again.
Quistis motioned to the soldiers behind her to stay still and crept up the last three steps herself, whip at the ready. If whatever was there was in the stairwell, it probably wouldn't do any good, but it made her feel better. One of the major limitations of a whip, sure, they were versatile, and people didn't take them seriously, but you really, really, needed room to use them in.
She mentally ran through the words of magic in her head, but felt nothing except the answering keyed-up rush of adrenaline, sparking for one single second, and then fizzling out like a firework in the rain.
Still no magic, then. Its loss felt like a black hole in her mind.
Figured. She was in a black mood. And she had a headache, no magic, yadda yadda. In fact, most of the items on her equipment list seemed to be preceded by 'no' No magic, no backup she could trust, no information, no- well, almost no- light.
No luck.
What did the SeeD manual advise in situations like this?
She continued up the stairwell, one hand scuffing along the centre wall. Easy. Don't get into this kind of fight. But she couldn't not get into it. Quistis Trepe never turned her back on a fight. That would be failing and failing was one of the few things she did not tolerate. As well as cold coffee, Seifer and small pink fluffy toys. She was a winner.
Didn't feel particularly winner-like at the moment though. Success? Please. Life sucked.
The noises grew louder and her steps slower as the light got slightly brighter. It flickered, oddly, throwing the steps into uncertain sharp relief. Quistis stumbled, threw an arm out to catch herself and then stopped where she was, awkwardly balanced on the stairs, one foot up and one down, with her head resting on the elbow of her outflung arm. The noises continued. She craned her neck, seeing moving blurs.
It was Seifer. He was fighting, which didn't really surprise her, but with none of his usually effectively vicious grace, more like a dogged determination.
What he was fighting did surprise her. It looked nothing like the blue light, or him, or like the soldier. Rather it resembled nothing more than an animated bundle of twigs, some inhumanly elongated figure that was hardly visible in the flickering light.
Quistis cautiously stepped out into the room, sliding her feet carefully along the flat stones until she heard footsteps from behind her and turned, lightly and silently, hoping that it was just some Galbadians that had decided to catch her up. She could deal with people questioning her authority. She'd had enough practice.
There was a pointed hiss from the shadows of the stairwell.
"What in Hyne's name is going on?"
The thing Seifer was fighting's head's snapped round, like a hunting hawk as it focused. Seifer managed to get in a sweeping slash to its chest before it delivered a blow to his face that sent him reeling.
Quistis jumped back as he hit the wall beside the door, dislodging several pieces of masonry, and fell over with a crash. She poked him cautiously with the toe of her army boot. Seifer mumbled something that sounded very much like "stand up straight when I'm trying to…hit you" and then his eyes opened. People pushed past from behind as she moved into the room.
"Are you all right?"
Spot the Sandman reference..(I drove a bus)
Everyone will have worked out by now that the picture thing has kind of dried up. This is due to my sister, who's the artist ( in case you haven't figured that by now due to her talent for shameless self-promotion) having lots of work to. Basically it was a choice between waiting for the art or going ahead and posting, and the writing won. There will, however, be a pic to celebrate 100 reviews (if I get that far) but looks like that'll be it, apart from maybe title art for anything else I do. There is also a possibility of a couple of collaborations (me writing, her drawing), check for info.
Have sucky holiday job, but on the plus side more time to write as in only 8 to 5 with no homework. Am hoping to finish GB by the time I go on holiday in September and have a short break before I start posting my next project. Next time you use a piece of ribbon, of for that matter anything you didn't make yourself, think of the poor schmo who had to cut/paint/pack/weigh that for you. Yes, even the keyboard. Someone had to put that together, you know. And I bet they got paid minimum wage. And no, they didn't enjoy it.
And to (in alphabetical order)
Breaker-one (yeah, all ff8 charas are kind of a blank page as far as resolutions is concerned, although there's lots of fanon conventions, which makes it fun. Some stuff, it ends so ..completely, fanfics are made kind of unnecessary, ie Spirited Away, which I did think about.) CelesteSpring(*sings Billy Joels' angry Young Man at her*Haven't got ff7, but Reno looks..interesting. Mmm. Maybe, ebay permitting.) Dalpal (hehe, your comment gave me the idea for this chapter song) Dust Traveller (the swearing's sins of the fathers. I have to do something about it, otherwise in RL later I'll be all 'Your dog's totally fucked. Shit, shouldn't have said that.' And then they'll sue me.) KRP, (thanks) Quistis88, (also thanks, loffable d00d), seventh (Rinoa is not a strong, confident woman, Quistis, on the other hand….) and superviolinist (so is he)
Wow, I'm amazed how many good writers took the time to r & r. :o
kate (I'm going down to Hollywood, they're going to make a movie 'bout the things they find crawling round my brain)