Daemons Are Forever

The strangeness accelerated, until I couldn’t look anymore. I turned away, and suddenly fell sick and shaking to the cold stone floor. Behind me, there were terrible sounds. I yelled for the Glass to stop, my eyes squeezed shut, tears leaking past screwed-up lids. And immediately a blessed silence filled the chapel. When I finally dared to look again, there was nothing in the mirror hovering before me but my own reflection, looking back at me. I looked like hell. I looked like I’d already been through a war, and lost.

I rose slowly to my feet, a cold determination forcing the weakness out of me. I wasn’t going to lose. I couldn’t afford to. I was going to get my help from the future, whatever the cost. Because the alternative was so much worse.

I instructed the Merlin Glass to go as far into the potential futures as necessary, to find me the one descendant best suited to helping me win the war against the Invaders. A warrior, to lead the family into battle. A leader of men, to inspire them. A man who would be everything…I was not.

The Glass showed me a new scene, strange enough to take my breath away. A battlefield on an alien planet. Three suns blazed in a garish pink sky, looking down on a great snowy waste, littered with hundreds of broken bodies and splashed with blood. Huge broken war machines lay half buried in the snow, so alien in design I couldn’t even guess what they were supposed to do. But the bodies in the snow were quite definitely men and women, though their strange jade green armour was unfamiliar. It boasted crusted accumulations of jagged technology, punctuated with jewels that glowed like radioactive eyes. All the bodies bore the marks of sudden and brutal death, some actually torn apart and dismembered. War had come and gone here, and these people had lost.

And then one man came ru

More armed men came spilling over the snowy horizon. They ploughed through the snow after the ru

The pursuing men closed in on the warrior, and he stood patiently, waiting for them to come to him. To my surprise, they put away their guns and went for him with swords the moment they were in reach. The fight that followed was swift and savage, like nothing I’d ever seen before; every move cold and clinical and utterly without mercy. The warrior fought well and fiercely, handling the long steel blade as though it were weightless. Blood and guts and hacked-off limbs decorated the bloody snow around him, and none of his enemies even came close to touching him. He stamped back and forth in the crimson snow, slicing and cutting and avoiding the blows coming at him from every direction with almost feline grace.

There must have been twenty men and more against one lone warrior, and he killed them all in just a few minutes.

As the last man fell into the snow in a flurry of spurting arterial blood, the warrior looked calmly about him, not even breathing hard. He nodded once, as though satisfied with his performance, and then lowered his sword. He was just starting to relax when another man rose up from under the snow behind him. He’d been hiding under another body, completely hidden, waiting for his chance. He raised his unfamiliar gun to shoot the warrior in the back, and I drew my Colt Repeater and shot the man in the head, through the doorway. A bullet from the past, to kill a man in the future.

The sound of the Colt was loud and coarse, after the brief hum of the energy weapons, and the warrior spun around incredibly fast, his sword at the ready. Just in time to see the man who would have killed him collapsing into the snow with half his head blown away. The warrior saw me, watching him through a hole in the air, and his gaze was dark and cold and thoughtful. He strode unhurriedly through the blood-spattered snow to stand before the gateway, and then considered me thoughtfully for a long moment. He still hadn’t put away his sword. Blood dripping from the blade steamed in the chill air I could feel blowing through the opening. He said something, his breath clouding on the air, but I couldn’t understand him. It didn’t sound like any human language I’d ever heard. I quickly ordered my torc to translate, and just like that his words began to make sense.

“Thanks for the help,” said the warrior. “Didn’t expect to find a friend in this God-deserted place. I owe you a debt of honour, stranger.”

“Where are the rest of your people?” I said.

He shrugged. “Dead. Every last one of them. We knew it was a suicide mission when the emperor sent us here; but it wasn’t like we had a choice. Man proposes, and the emperor disposes. Especially when you’re…no longer in favour at court.” He stopped and looked sharply around him, listening for something I couldn’t hear. “My enemies are coming again. Can you get me out of this mess, stranger? I am the only survivor of my command, and the size of the opposing force is … far greater than I was given to understand.”

“You’re taking my appearance very calmly,” I said. “Or are such things as this common in your time?”

He shrugged again. “I’ve seen stranger shit than this, out on the Rim. Get me out of here, stranger, and I vow to serve you as I would my emperor. Not forever; my vow to the imperial throne must take preference. But a time away from court might help the blood to cool a little…on both sides. Shall we say, service to you in return for my rescue, for a year and a day?”

“Sounds fair to me,” I said. But when I tried to reach through the opening, the Glass wouldn’t let me. I’d been afraid of that. “Look, I’m not really a stranger. I’m speaking to you from far in your past. I don’t know exactly how far. Centuries, certainly; maybe more. You are a descendant of my family. And my family needs a warrior’s guidance. But I can’t just…bring you through. You’re too far off from me. But I have another way of reaching you.”

“Better be quick,” he said dispassionately. “My enemies will be here soon. What’s your name?”

“Edwin Drood,” I said. “And yours?”

The warrior smiled. “Deathstalker. Giles Deathstalker.”