Chapter Fourteen
The hours spent struggling through the storm were difficult, and it wouldn't be right to call them uneventful; the mellow flakes fell denser and faster, the road became slipperier, and the once clear, flat horizon transformed into a frosted wall. Yet traveling developed a paradoxical monotony. The weather chipped away at the snowy postcard in gradual pixels, so though the winds grew in intensity and the sky grew darker, one moment seemed very much like the next. It was as though the blizzard swept away the passage of time itself. Pan only really believed they'd moved at all when the manor came into view.
Back on Mt. Paozu, there was a small rope bridge over a deep gorge. It creaked under the slightest pressure and swayed in the faintest current, and had single-handedly inspired more than one would-be mountain climber to turn back.
The bridge to Cold Manor was flatter and wider and made of stone, and Pan spent every step she took on it wishing she was crossing that rope bridge instead. Maybe it was the way the western winds blasted the snow across its surface and into the void beyond the edge. Maybe it was how Cold Manor looked like a collection of rust and tombstones laced together with zig-zags of stairs sagging from its cracked and asymmetric towers, and the pitch of the bridge tilted that already-morose picture disturbingly sideways. Maybe Pan was starting to get homesick.
Even a bridge like that had to end, and soon, Pan stood at the manor gate and its one last bit of strangeness: the bone doors were attached to a pair of four-sided mirrors. Frost bloomed over their surface, and one was cracked diagonally, but they were clear enough Pan could still see her own face behind it. A heartbeat thrummed in the depths of that house.
"Pop quiz," Pan said. She concentrated a small ball of energy in her hand. "Reach for this the way you'd reach for the Prismasphere, just like I showed you. Got it?"
Ember gave the ball a slight mental push, and then Gelata pushed it back, to confirm they both had.
"All right," Pan said. "Now, do the same thing, but further ahead of us, and a little below. What do you feel?"
"Some kind of web," Ember said. "I've found dense knots of energy at certain vital points of the house; two of the three towers and the back of the south wing."
Gelata approached the gate. "It's another barrier, like the one Frieza made to keep us trapped inside the hunting lodge. This one isn't enclosing the whole estate, though. It's just sectioning off certain rooms. The central gardens are open. The south wing, which if I'm remembering the floor plans right would open into the tunnels, is the most heavily shrouded."
"Not good," Ember said. "You and I need to get those tunnels open."
"If you get me to them, I think I can now. In fact, I'm certain of it. What do you suppose the weather researchers are making of the barrier?"
"I don't feel any weather researchers," Ember said.
"That could just be interference," Pan said. "I'm picking up a distinct signature to the southwest. Let's be careful in case it isn't Dr. February. Remember how to mask your presence? Make yourselves a ball, just like this one… good!... now squeeze it as small as you can. Feel what you're doing there? Extend it to all your energy. Right! See, I knew you guys could do it."
Ember dusted the snow from the door handle. "Next she'll be giving us stickers."
"Do you want stars or smiley faces?" Pan asked.
The jokes stopped. They slipped into the manor as quiet as shadows.
The foyer gave them plenty of other shadows for company. Cables ran in ceilings and corners, and the lamps they powered ran dim and sparse. They might have mistaken the decorative statues for people, were it not for one little issue: the stone figures had been decapitated to a man. That wasn't unusual. Dad had explained it to Pan. Smugglers who pilfered ruins for artifacts broke off heads because they could be removed and carried away more easily than whole statues, but still fetched a high price from collectors. That was probably what happened here. Even if the neck-stumps looked a little too eroded for the damage to be recent.
There was recent damage, and Ember found it. He motioned for Gelata and Pan to see the small black scuff on the hip of one of the figures.
"That's residue from cannon fire," He whispered.
It was all he needed to say. They all saw the clean equipment and floor with new eyes. There had been gunfire here, but every trace of the battle had been scrubbed.
By who? And why?
They were going to need a better way to keep hidden.
They found one quickly enough. The foyer opened into a great hall. It was empty of tables or furniture, and the staircase had crumbled into a magnificent pile of asbestos, but its balcony opened on each side to the east and west wings' second floors. That wasn't what interested them; it was still too visible. However, right above it, dark wooden support beams crossed the ceiling, and those would be thick enough to conceal them.
Ember pointed to them. He thought so, too.
Pan flew to the support. It was as dusty as she'd have expected up here, with some old boxes rotted through. She breathed through her shirt to avoid coughing. Ember arrived a second later, carrying Gelata.
All three felt the approach at once, a power not monstrous but not insignificant, either. Such was the speed at which it travelled that, as soon as they'd managed to squeeze themselves against the roof, the first-floor door to the east wing opened.
Pan had to resist leaning forward to see what came through.
A Sutova guardsman stepped through the door. He also tried to remain hidden and probably would have succeeded, had they not picked such high ground. He was wiry with scars and sinew and wasn't anyone Pan recognized. He tapped his scouter, swept the room.
Eventually, he shook his head in disgust. "False reading," he said. "It must have been a rat. Over. Over? Hello?"
He retreated into the east wing, tapping the communicator on his gauntlet.
Pan almost hopped down to the balcony, but Ember held her back by the shoulder.
She waited until the guardsman was out of earshot to ask why.
"Isn't that one of your men from the palace?" Pan asked. "Why didn't you want to talk to him? He might know what's going on here. At least, you should take him into the tunnels with you."
Ember peered over the edge. "Missing civilians, signs of a gunfight, a guard on premises… I don't like any of this, and it's because that's one of my men. I know what we do and how we do it. Let's follow him from here before we get our hopes up."
Following the guard wasn't difficult. They kept pace with him on the second floor, monitoring his signature. He wasn't so fast they couldn't keep up without making noise or releasing enough of their own energy to show up on the scouter. The researchers must not have come this way, because the utility lamps vanished. Here, the only light came from the ceiling-to-floor windows punctuating every interval in the wall, and that was indigo light, a dark light that made everything it touched too fluorescent.
Pan wanted to see what was outside, but she didn't have time. The guard turned into a room below, and they had to follow him.
This led them into an apartment with an odd twist: the bed had been stripped and heaped with broken instruments. Smashed cameras. Torn papers. Unstrung tape. On top of it all, a fire had been lit, and while it had burned out and taken the potential evidence with it, the ashes were still warm. This hadn't happened long ago.
"Son of a bitch," Ember whispered.
Gelata brushed away some of the ash. She waved them over.
At the very bottom of the pile, one singed laptop remained. Pan thought it was a laptop, anyway. It looked like an oyster. Gelata opened it on the edge of the mattress, and it did have a screen inside.
"They wiped it before they burned it," She whispered. "However, the other equipment protected it from the flame, so it's still functional."
"What does that matter if the data's been erased?" Ember whispered.
"Erasing something doesn't get rid of it," Gelata replied. "It's more like it tells the operating system the space those files take up is blank and can be used for other things."
"Can you find a program that can get them back?"
"I wouldn't risk connecting in case network activity is being monitored, but there's no need to go that far. I can use an old restore point to roll the system back to before the files were deleted."
"Nice," Pan whispered. "If you ever move to Earth, you should apply for a job at Capsule Corp. My friend Trunks is the president, and you wouldn't believe what he pays his staff."
"You jest, but if we find what I think we will, hiding in the North Quadrant's boondocks might not be off the table."
Pan didn't like the sound of that.
Still, there wasn't much she could do for Gelata as she worked the computer. Instead, Pan quietly returned to the window and watched the snow pile itself onto the brown shrubs. Plants had overtaken the space, knotting into and ripping up the walkways and supports. In this weather they were dry, but they'd spring to life in warmer weather, and then the court would go from tangled to impassable. With the high tops of the trees towering over the roof of the west wing, it looked like a little strip of house between foliage.
'Broken down little manor in the middle of a forest;' that's what Frieza had called it. Had he meant it? Had he lived here for years and walked away with no attachment to the place at all? He couldn't possibly hate the manor that much. Then again, maybe if Frieza were on Mt. Paozu, he'd be thinking she couldn't possibly love it that much.
Pan scowled at her reflection. Why was she thinking about that when her mind should be on the darkening sky and the fight it would bring her? In an hour and a half, tops, she'd be battling for her life. In fact, maybe she should tell Gelata to start for those tunnels now and take the computer with her, just to be on the safe side.
She'd almost persuaded herself to do that, perhaps to take her mind off her own thoughts, when Gelata flashed them a thumbs up. She'd managed to restore the deleted files.
They found, as she played through the video with the sound muted, most of the video was mundane. Researchers set up lamps and close-caption cameras under the leadership of a stern-looking second-tier Reizomorph in spectacles Pan guessed must be Dr. February. Some of the shots documented those rooms blocked off by barriers, which might help them find those rooms but gave them no hint as to what could have happened.
Until Gelata skipped straight to the last one.
It started as dull as the others: Dr. February holding a clipboard, saying something to the camera as she pointed to splotches and arrows over an area map. It ended as quietly as it began… but violently.
A team of four Sutova guardsmen stormed the room. They said nothing, not even when Dr. February approached them yelling; they merely pulled their cannons and fired. February fell on the spot, clutching her chest. Two more researchers ran to her aid and fell next to her.
The guardsmen didn't speak as they filed through the room. Two of them placed a round device that looked to Pan like a motorcycle engine next to the door; the other two took the equipment so smoothly it would have looked like they were running a fire drill, if it weren't for the dead scientists on the floor. Then one of them grabbed the computer and snapped it shut, and that was all.
"I thought it would be something like that," Ember whispered. "Officer, what is that machine they're placing?"
"You mean it's not a bomb?" Pan asked.
"Do you remember what I said when I analyzed the barrier at the hunting lodge?" Gelata asked. "It was woven like a Highwayman's Hitch. That's a kind of knot that's painful to tease apart, but if you pull one right thread, it'll come undone instantly. This barrier is composed of threads of the Vile Wave, drawn thin like a Razor Rain. It kills anything that touches it, and if you destroy part of it, it'll grow back… as long as the 'right thread,' the core of the barrier, remains in place. Pull that and the whole barrier comes down. That device is supposed to find the core." She shook her head. "It won't. It's in the wrong place."
"Then you know where it is?" Ember whispered.
Gelata flipped back a few videos, to February working beside some stairs in the south wing. It was strange to see the scientist alive and moving after watching her being gunned down. Strange and eerie. She pointed.
A laser flew through the floor and into the ceiling.
"Say something! I know you're there! You have to be there!"
He'd heard them! Had they gotten too loud? Pan had thought if they whispered, their voices wouldn't carry through the floor; how had he heard them? A moment later, she realized he hadn't. He wasn't talking to them at all; he was shouting into his communicator, and from the sound of it, getting no response from any of the three men Pan had seen on the video with him.
"Blaize! Steyme! Roil! It's Char; anybody copy!"
Nobody did, and he fired another shot through the roof, inches away from Pan's foot.
"I think," Ember said, "It's time for me to introduce myself to my subordinate."
"We can't go down there now! It's getting too late," Pan said.
"You can't go down there now, and you're not going to. You're going to take Gelata to the room in that video. You've got your fight; you can't afford to get tangled up in one of mine." Ember cracked his knuckles. "I'll handle this. I'll meet the two of you in that room. Officer, I want that barrier down by the time I get there. Now get into the hallway."
Pan soon saw why. Ember didn't bother climbing down the stairs. Since Char was already destroying it, he punched straight through the floor.
She wished she could stay, but Gelata grabbed her and pulled her to the balcony. "Captain's orders," She said. "We're leaving."
With one last look over her shoulder, Pan followed.
ooo
"We'll make the best time if we cut through the gardens," Pan said.
Gelata glanced to the open door and the darkness beyond. "Can we risk it?"
Pan pulled her through in spite of her protests. "The Vile Wave hasn't crested yet, and if we don't open up those tunnels before it does, you and Ember… you can't go outside, and if you're anywhere Frieza can see you, or if I start shaking the ground again…"
Pan knew there must be some piece of equipment about, since now that she and Gelata ran underneath the gnarled old trees that had blocked her view, she saw tangles of wire poking through the rapidly-piling snow, around the dry fountain, all leading to the south wing. She just thought it would be some kind of weather balloon or barometer or some other thing that wouldn't help her. She was wrong; she opened the door, ushered Gelata through, and found the wires hooked up to a series of close-caption monitors. Most of the screens showed empty rooms. One, however, showed her Ember, and the room he'd fallen into. Perhaps it had been a library at one point, but now the shelves were empty, and there was little else but a table made of marble.
"Look," Pan said, brushing snow out of her hair.
Gelata knelt beside the arch to the undercroft. The barrier flowed like squid ink before it, but it was just translucent enough Pan could make out stairs behind it. "There's nothing I can do for Ember except trust him and follow his orders. It looks like I'll need all my concentration for that. The thread vibrates. I have to catch it at exactly the right time."
Pan didn't want to be in the way, either, so she kept silent and watched the monitor.
Ember landed on one knee amidst a cloud of dust. Chunks of plaster dropped as he stood. Char tapped his scouter. He clenched the trigger of his arm-cannon and the barrel glowed, burst.
The laser crashed into a green barrier and trickled down in rivulets; and Ember didn't give Char another shot, either. He drew a handful of indigo light and pulled. The straps holding the rig to his back and arms fell apart, and the weapon flew into Ember's hands. He turned it to one side, slid it open and checked it.
"You spent a lot of charges on a ceiling that, from the look of it, was coming down anyway. That's a criminal waste of resources. You should have learned better than that."
"My apologies, Captain," Char said. "It's only that I've lost contact with the rest of my team. I can't pick them up on the scouter. I couldn't even pick up yours, and apparently you were right on top of me. Interference from the storm, perhaps? Or some kind of sabotage?"
"What?" Ember said. "Not open to the possibility I'm a ghost?"
Ember faced Pan on the monitor, which meant she saw Char's back, and moreover, the knife strapped there; the one Char reached for, his fingers inching around it as Ember was occupied with the cannon.
"No."
The knife was out of its sheath in a flash and carving an arc into the air beside Ember's face.
"At least not yet!"
The blade didn't hit its mark. Metal clashed and sparks flew; Ember had pulled one of his own concealed knives, locked it onto Char's. The younger guardsman slid the blade free with a scrape and lunged, aiming the point at Ember's chest. Blood flew; had he hit? Not what he was aiming for, Pan saw, when the static cleared; blood soaked Ember's leathers, but it was pouring from a gash across his shoulder.
Char couldn't stop. He stopped himself on the table, doubled over, and that was when Ember snagged the whiskers on his head and cracked his skull against the marble.
A blow like that could kill, but Char was made of stronger stuff than Pan had thought; though dazed, he was not seriously hurt, and when Ember pulled him back for a second slam, the guardsman struggled under his arm and hurled him back-first into the table. The stone snapped in half as Ember fell through it. The knife was back out now, and Ember rolled just in time to keep it from piercing straight through his windpipe. Char brought it down again and again, and more sparks flew as it missed flesh and hit stone.
Ember snapped his own knife's cross-guard to the blade. It was a desperate move, Pan knew, and just as she feared the blade sliced his fingers. Now his hand was as slick with blood as his shoulder. The knife held, though; the blades were locked, neither moving.
"My men are dead, aren't they?" Char asked through gritted teeth.
"Haven't seen a one of them," Ember responded. The veins in their arms bulged as each tried to overpower the other. "The way things are going, probably."
Char put both hands and his back into twisting the knife, and Ember's glanced to the side and hit the broken table, still in his hand. He was wide open now, and Char grinned a joyless kind of grin as he brought the knife home. He hadn't watched what Ember's free hand was doing, though; and the Captain had snagged a jagged chunk of marble, about the size of his forearm, and heaved it into the side of Char's head. He staggered again, and Ember didn't try to dislodge him gracefully; he shoved him in the chest, into the wall.
"Funny thing about that, too," Ember said. "Just before I left…"
"Before you defected, you mean," Char spat.
"I'm not mincing words with you. Before I left, I requested an expedition much like the one you've managed to lose, and King Sulfuri refused me. Said it was suicide. Now, there are only two people with the authority to order a strike like this, so did King Sulfuri lie to me, or was it Princess Incendria who sent you?"
"I see no reason to share intel with a dead man."
"Not even what the royal brat thought those researchers might find in this wreck that justified making them disappear?"
"I'll tell you what a wise man once told me," Char said. "We've got one job here, to keep Asphodel City peaceful at any cost. If the price is you, too damn bad for you, right? As part of my mission is disposing of all unauthorized witnesses, it looks like the price is you, Captain."
"Let's be blunt, kid," Ember said. "That's more than you can collect, and you know it."
"I also know why you're holding back. Midnight's coming. The Vile Wave is alive and hunting. No summoner could stop it. Those weak little barriers and magnetics are the best even you can risk this late. I'd say that evens the odds nicely."
"And you'd be talking shit."
Char may have thought he was ready for Ember's attack, but he wasn't ready enough. Ember drove the knife home and he was simply so much stronger that, with all the power of his barreling run behind him, it broke straight through Char's defenses. He only barely managed to block with his knife, and that came with a price; the blade flew from Char's hand, spun across the room, and stuck with a glint from the edge of an old bookshelf.
It bought Ember maybe a second. Instead of trying to fight the force of the blow, Char whirled into it. The roundhouse kick he delivered Ember's bleeding hand knocked his knife away, too, and while he groped for another one Char hammered his knuckles into Ember's gut.
It was sloppy and thuggish, but there was power enough behind it that it did its job. Ember was thrown off-balance, and Char was one strong blow from putting him back on the floor. He tried for it; there was no choice, Ember had to block…
Ember stumbled. Char seized his cannon from the floor, pressed it against Ember's head and fired.
Pan gasped.
The barrel glowed. The glow faded. The gun was out of ammunition. That didn't make it useless, though; Char drew it back and slammed it into Ember's jaw. At that bad angle, it tore his face open. Blood erupted from the cut. Char brought it down again, this time on Ember's injured arm; and not only did more blood flow, Pan heard a sickening snap and Ember's arm went limp. Char raised the bludgeon again, higher.
He's open, Ember! Pan thought.
Ember did see. He may have lost full use of one arm, but the other was fine, and he raised it. "Firedrake bite!"
The ki scored a direct hit on Char's unprotected side and threw him into the wall, this time hard enough to crumble the stone.
He dusted off the ash and stood. "You can't use your arm anymore, Captain, and you can't use the Prismasphere. It doesn't matter how much you flail. You have no chance of walking away from this fight alive. Out of respect for your service and your position, I'll grant you a quick death, but only if you give up now."
"You're a more generous man than I am," Ember said. "But you're still wrong."
"You can't think you can still fight."
"Not about that. You've sized that situation up nicely." Ember raised his functional hand. "You're wrong that I can't use the Prismasphere. Blue Wave Razor Rain!"
The light was so bright, when it faded, it was like a blackout. Or maybe that was the Vile energy that ballooned through the room, obscuring the fighters and sending the CCTV monitor into static. When it finally cleared, Ember wasn't the only one bleeding. Char was covered with hairline cuts.
Could it have possibly been worth it? Ember was breathing harder than Pan had ever seen, and the sweat that poured down his face mixed with the blood. He hadn't hurt Char that much.
"Are you mad?" Char said.
"You tell me," Ember said, and fired again.
With teach blow, the pain etched on Ember's face grew stronger, his skin damper. After the fourth razor rain, he sagged, no longer having the energy to even hold a proper defensive stance. If Char got through the Prismatic razor-wire to attack him now, it would be over, he would be dead. Char wasn't able to, though, and the longer he struggled to, the more the Vile Wave curled from the floor like smoke. Blocking Ember's attacks chipped away at him, and the Vile Wave knew which of them was the weaker.
"Green Wave Deflection…" Char coughed.
The backlash came swift, and it came powerful. Char threw his head back and screamed as the energy found its outlet.
Ember did not so much take cover as direct his fall behind the broken table. Pan didn't know if he'd come back up again. He did, though, once Char had fallen to the floor. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he moved his mouth but no words came out; had Pan looked like that after the backlash hit her? Though Ember didn't look much better. As he raised his hand one final time, it shook with the effort.
"Turns out I'm more merciful than I thought. I'm not going to let that energy eat you alive from the inside out after all. Firedrake bite!"
The blast contacted Char again, and this time it tore straight through him. He slumped on the floor, dead. Tendrils of flame mingled with the Vile Energy.
Ember paused, looked down at the dead guardsman. Pan couldn't read his face. Was it regret?
Whatever it was, he turned away and pushed himself through the door, leaning on the wall for support.
ooo
"Ember won, but he's hurt." Pan turned from the screen. Gelata still knelt by the barrier, and it still rippled between them and the stairs, a deceptively placid wall of instant death.
Gelata stopped. "How badly?"
"He'll be okay if he can get to a safe place to ride out the Vile Wave. How soon can that happen?"
"Unfortunately, it's easier said than done," Gelata said. "I know how to remove it. As I said before, the core thread expands and contracts. I have to dislodge it when it's at its thinnest; that's the only time it's vulnerable. It's difficult to get the timing right, thanks to the syncopation. I'm not strong enough to move it, even if I could get hold of it. Once the Captain gets here, perhaps he can…"
"I don't think he's that okay," Pan said. "If you're not strong enough on your own, I'll have to help you."
"But it's almost midnight!"
"That means there's no time to argue," Pan said, the image of Char's twitching corpse still fresh behind her eyes. "Tell me what to do."
Gelata glared at the gate, or maybe through the gate, at the stairs that were so close, yet so far. "I don't think… never mind. You're right. Reach for the green wave, like you're deflecting an attack."
Pan knelt and spread her hands over the barrier. It tickled her fingers with its sickly attraction. "I have it."
"Since we can't touch the Vile Wave, we're going to push it out of the way with the green wave. Do you feel that pulse? That's the thread. Do you feel what I mean about its difficult rhythm? We're going to have to push in perfect unison, as if it wasn't difficult enough already."
Pan felt two short thrums, one long crash, a pause, and then it repeated itself. She tried to count it out, but got frustrated, and a lot more quickly than Gelata had. What kind of strange beat was this? Thrum, thrum, crash, thrum, thrum…
The rhythm tugged at Pan's memory, and when she figured out why, she laughed.
Gelata cast her a sidelong glance. "You aren't experiencing a backlash, are you?"
"No," Pan said. "I know how we can get the timing right. My grandpa was bad at telling time, so when we were training together and had to keep a tempo, he made me recite an old tongue twister instead of counting out the seconds. Pickle pot, pepper pot, purple pot." Pan drew it out. "Pick-le pot. Pep-per pot. Pur-ple pot. Do you hear it now?"
"I don't believe it," Gelata said. "That matches the barrier's rhythm perfectly."
"Say it with me. As soon as the sequence starts over. Right about… now. Pickle pot."
"Pepper pot," Gelata said.
"Purple pot!"
Gelata and Pan both spun the green wave into globes and fired at the barrier.
Had it worked? Pan didn't know. Their little green will-o-wisps had been so feeble, and the poisonous fog over the doorway so overpowering; it rippled when they hit and swallowed them whole.
The darkness cracked. Green light shone through. The glow grew stronger, more verdant, and as it did, the cracks widened.
It happened all at once, like a dam breaking. The Vile barrier shattered. The explosion knocked them both to their knees, arms over their faces. It wasn't just this one room, either; sense extended, Pan could feel the oppression lifting from the entire manor. The barrier crumbled, opening every door it had blocked.
Including the one before them.
"Help Ember when he gets here," Pan said. "I'm going to run to the other side of the manor. I'll lead Frieza away and give you guys time to get into the tunnels beneath the forest."
She turned on one heel and made to do just that. There was no time to congratulate herself. There might not even be any reason.
Under her breath, without even thinking, Pan whispered, "Thanks again, Grandpa."