Falling Angels, Chapter 7

7.
Soul Survivors

In retrospect, Kyra thought, the decision to return to Crematoria shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Consolidating her power, she found, was going more easily than expected. The lensers and quasi-dead were immediately on her side, although they understood that they were to pretend she was an ordinary acolyte whenever they saw her. Next up were the senior officials.

Those who hadn’t gone chasing after Riddick were generally too old or weak to participate in actual combat; they weren’t particularly ambitious, aside from a handful like Dame Vaako who would need to be handled with either finesse or, possibly, brute force. Taking over a delivery cart had been easy enough and within a handful of days, she had met with, and secured the fealty of, all but one or two. Arranging for them to transition to the Underverse gave her an opportunity to hone her skills at remote mind-control, as she gently nudged subjects into engineering “accidents” that took her foes out.

The entire time, she kept a close eye on Dame Vaako, who was playing at being the Empress of the Armada. The woman’s new obsession was investigating how, even though the electronics in the main control room had still been inoperable, the Purification of Helion Prime had suddenly occurred with no discernible warning.

“It makes no sense,” the Dame seethed, pacing. Kyra kept her head bowed and her expression one of simple concern. “It shouldn’t have happened like that!”

“How…” Kyra started, and then—on the advice of one of the voices in her head—changed the nature of her question. How should it have happened? might be read as facetious or insolent. But a variation on the question would help her learn more about how much of a potential threat the Dame actually was. “How does the Purification work, My Lady?”

There was a time when calling someone My Lady or Sir would have peeved her no end. Now, however, the knowledge that they were her subjects slid just enough hidden mockery into the words that she found she enjoyed saying them.

Dame Vaako stopped pacing and turned to look at her, her expression a little confused. “Honestly, I have never understood it completely. I know that it’s a much more powerful version of the purification we do on new recruits. So powerful, in fact, that it immediately sends everything in its path into the Underverse. But if that’s so, why we don’t just unleash it immediately instead of all of this… street fighting… is unfathomable.”

Because, Covu said inside her head, we need to replenish much more than just our ranks.

She shushed him, promising to ask him for more details later. The first of the Lords Martial loved to lecture for hours on the nature of Purification Energy and the Underverse, but now was definitely not the time.

If we just went around blowing up worlds without bringing in converts, Naphemil added, the rest of the ’verse would have rallied against us long ago.

Kyra hid a smirk. This was an argument that she’d heard several times now. Apparently he was the one who had decided that, if the Rykengolls could hide behind religion, so could they; officially, in the Galactic Register, the conflict was theological and the “greater” authorities’ hands were tied. If the Rykengolls could poison worlds to death in the name of religion, the Necromongers could also scour those same worlds clean. It made her wonder what her last defense lawyer would have said about it all. Something laced with profanity, no doubt.

“Do the controls work now?” she asked. Redirecting the Dame away from any harebrained schemes to launch Purification Towers at target worlds seemed like a good idea.

“Yes, finally, not that we need them at this point. But we still don’t know what he did to them!”

“Maybe it was something he did to the old Purifier,” she suggested, more to send the Dame in circles than anything else.

Dame Vaako turned and looked at her, frowning. “What, exactly, did you see happen on Crematoria? Think, girl.”

Honestly, it wasn’t that bad a command. She’d been watching the whole time, hadn’t she? Willing Riddick to get up…

“The Riddick…” She would have to ask her voices, later, why they always added that article before his name. “…was on the ground, on his knees… I think he was injured. Everybody was closing in on him. Your husband, his soldiers… and the Purifier was standing by the entryway to the hangar, just watching…”

“Like the coward he always was,” Dame Vaako muttered. Kyra had to suppress Zhylaw’s indignant response. His was still the loudest voice in her head, but the others had been growing in strength in the last few days.

“I remember V—Lord Vaako saying something to the Riddick. I couldn’t hear what it was. And then his head tilted back and he began bending backwards. There was this blue-white light on his chest and then suddenly it blasted out. Almost everyone fell over. But the Purifier didn’t. He was still standing.” Kyra was amazed at just how much detail she could actually recall, but knew that part of it was that the guests in her head were observing her memories along with her. “That’s when the sunrise began to catch up with us. The air turned hot and our ship landed, calling everyone to it. The Riddick was lying on the ground. He wasn’t moving… we all thought he was dead. I ran for the ship, too. But… the Purifier… he didn’t. I looked back one last time at the ramp, and he was walking over to the Riddick’s body.”

A Furyan blast wouldn’t affect another Furyan, of course, Zhylaw interjected.

Wait, you know what happened? It took some work to keep her surprise off of her face.

Of course. I always chose Furyans as Purifiers. I hoped that maybe their energies would… bleed into ours. And they did, a little. Just not enough.

Okay, they needed to have a long discussion later about what that meant—

Wait, is Vaako Furyan?

Of course.

The Dame didn’t seem to care that she’d gone silent. The woman had resumed pacing, as swiftly as anyone could pace in a dress as tight as hers. “He might still be alive on Crematoria. Perhaps he used the Riddick as a way to try to escape our creed. He was always a little weasel…”

He was a good man, and I felt his death, Zhylaw fumed.

But he did hate being a Necromonger, didn’t he?

Yes, and no. He believed in our war against the Rykengolls. But Furyans were their own people, and their energies were and are unique. To him, the purification was an act of pollution, and he was always uncomfortable with the way the two energies had blended within him. In truth, I can’t blame him. Before his conversion, he might have single-handedly cleansed every body and soul in New Mecca without sending anyone to the Underverse in the process. Such a loss would rankle me, too. And she could tell that it did rankle.

We need to talk more about that later.

“Come, girl,” the Dame suddenly said. “We need to go find out whether or not he lives.”

Oh holy mother of fuck, she grumbled to her more religious companions. Is this something I need to stop? Personally, she had no desire to see that cinder of a world again.

Actually, no. We have been considering a return ourselves.

Why the fuck would—

In her mind’s eye, she suddenly saw one of the hellhounds, slinking towards her through the lava tubes, its silvery eyes fixed on her.

Not all Furyans have silver eyes, Kryll, who had once been Zhylaw’s master, told her. But the ones with access to their unbridled energies do. It’s a change that occurs around puberty. The story your Riddick told your Jack, about a shine job in prison, was a smoke screen. That’s why you couldn’t find a doctor to perform one on you. But your “hellhounds” are Furyan. I think we will need them.

Am I supposed to snap my fingers and call them to my side? Those beasts had been the only things she’d actually feared in the prison, although toward the end…

We will figure something out. Follow the Dame. The Armada is securely ours. This is a good chance to separate her from it and decide her fate, while we gather the Furyan wolves.

And within a few hours, they were on their way. The Dame was oblivious to the fact that she was surrounded by someone else’s servants; in her mind, she was already the First Lady of the Armada. Kyra, sitting next to her in the pilot’s seat and marveling at just how easy and fun flying a Necromonger ship was, was careful to keep that impression firmly in place. She pretended to sleep when the Dame used one of the quasi-dead to check in with Lord Vaako, listening into their schemes the whole time. Four nights passed that way until they had anything remotely interesting to overhear.

Vaako and the others had tracked Riddick to a space station and had nearly been shot to oblivion when they attempted to invade it. The station was on high alert and taking no chances, especially where Necromonger ships were concerned. But Riddick’s ship was no longer there, anyway, and one of Toal’s lensers had picked up its faint trail. Now Vaako was shadowing Toal, hoping to overtake him as soon as Riddick’s destination was determined.

The exchange left Dame Vaako in a peevish mood, which she took out on the crew… including Kyra. If she had actually been asleep when the Dame decided to wake her, she would have been annoyed, and the woman’s imperiousness was grating on her more and more. The temptation to space her came and went, as Zhylaw reminded her that the Dame was the best way to spy on Vaako and the other AWOL senior soldiers. Instead, she had fun pretending to hide annoyance from her “Mistress” and do whatever random fetching-and-carrying the Dame came up with until her sense of powerlessness waned.

Kyra timed their Crematoria landing for shortly after nightfall, when the worst of the heat would have lifted but the bone-chilling cold wouldn’t have set in yet. She had been brought in, herself, in the daytime, and had no wish to try to replicate the harrowing descent she had witnessed. At the time, she had wondered if she would live long enough to reach the prison. A night landing, although still difficult, was much simpler.

Within minutes of landing, a lenser had found the artifacts that the Purifier had left behind, and another had found his skull. Kyra silently instructed them to hide their findings from the Dame; until they had found and recovered the wolves, she didn’t want to get into a power struggle with the woman over whether it was time to leave yet. Instead, she located the entry to the underground passage that Crematoria’s ill-fated jailors had used in their escape attempt.

“And why,” the Dame demanded, “are we not using the shuttle track?”

“It was damaged when the jailors and the mercs were fighting, My Lady,” she said, climbing onto the ladder.

Dame Vaako glared at her, standing her ground next to the shuttle track doorway. She had pressed the shuttle call button, but didn’t seem to notice that it hadn’t lit up. “Damaged how?”

“An explosion at the other end, My Lady. The other door buckled and collapsed partway onto the shuttle cart. There’s no way to call it to this end. This is the only safe way to the other side.”

“You might have mentioned this before we came here,” the Dame snapped, shouldering the crew aside and stepping up to the tunnel entry. She seemed content to have Kyra lead the way, however.

The walk took hours. They encountered a few bodies along it, some jailors and some inmates who hadn’t been inclined to join the surface run. While the jailors had been shot, both their remains and those of the inmates showed extensive evidence of having been…

…eaten.

The wolves were alive and well, then… and on the hunt. Kyra hoped she could actually get control of them without having to kill any of them, but she wasn’t sure how the hell she was supposed to do that. She wasn’t Furyan, after all. They had apparently liked Riddick, but she didn’t have that quasi-mystical connection to draw on.

We’ll figure something out, Zhylaw told her, his confidence unruffled.

Emerging into the prison control complex gave her a weird feeling of nostalgia. It had only been roughly two weeks since she’d escaped the place, she realized, but it felt like an ancient era.

“Someone’s here,” one of the scouts said as the crew fanned out.

“Show me!” the Dame demanded.

The scout had found a heavily barricaded inner office. Through the thick, assault-proof glass, Kyra could make out a figure huddled on a cot.

That will keep the Dame busy for a while, Zhylaw said, pleased. Where are the kennels?

Why would the wolves still be in them? All signs said that they had free run of the place now.

Beasts return to their dens when not on the hunt. And if they have the freedom to come and go now, it’s likely that they won’t think of those dens as prisons anymore.

That did make sense. Kyra slipped away from the crew, leaving behind instructions that they were to keep the Dame distracted from looking for her.

She knew exactly where the kennels were, of course. On more than one occasion, when she’d fought off an “amorous” guard or killed a rapacious inmate, she’d been locked in them herself. The wolves, although they had hunted her like everyone else at first, had begun to act more playful toward her in recent months, as if they looked forward to her company in the kennels and didn’t feel like ending it by eating her.

And that, Zhylaw commented, is something we can use.

The room was a shambles.

All of the cages had been broken open from within, but there were definite signs that the wolves were still using them. Where they had been spotlessly empty in the past, most of the cages now had odd collections of random items. Clothes and blankets twisted into bedding. Gnawed bones. Random items that she suspected they considered toys.

Alexander Toombs’ remains were scattered throughout the room, as well. Kyra couldn’t help feeling a certain cold satisfaction at that.

In the far corner of the room, curled up, was one of the wolves. Its breathing was shallow, labored.

Shit, I think it’s dying, Kyra thought, and hurried over to its side.

She knew this beast. It had inhabited the cage beside hers, on those occasions when she had been locked in the kennels. It had play-hunted her a few times, but had always let her escape. She wondered suddenly if it had considered her a friend.

Toombs’ knife was buried in its abdomen. The wound had turned septic. Looking at the beast with her other sight rather than with her eyes, she could see that it had spent the last two weeks slowly inching toward death, but now had only hours left.

Damn it, she thought, reaching out and stroking its neck. She was surprised at just how much it hurt to think about this wolf, in particular, dying.

It opened its eyes. Familiar silver, so like Riddick’s eyes, focused on her and the wolf made an exhausted chuffing sound.

“I’m so sorry,” she heard herself telling it. That bastard Toombs had stolen from her again.

She’d almost managed to evade prison time, after all. Menefee had talked the prosecution into a plea deal that would have allowed her to be charged as a minor and serve a gentle slap-on-the-wrist sentence in a juvenile facility. She would have been back with Jack, her beloved Audie, the moment she turned eighteen. Until Alexander motherfucking Toombs had arrived.

And suddenly she wasn’t the one in danger. Toombs was there to serve extradition papers for the murderer of Antonia Chillingsworth: Jack B. Badd. Audie.

Audie would never have survived this place. She wouldn’t have even made it a month. She was strong, but she didn’t have the necessary killer instincts. She was far too kind for a place like this. She’d killed Chillingsworth to defend Riddick, after all, not herself.

There had been no question in her mind. Before Toombs could even see the girl he had come to arrest, she had filed her confession, claiming that it was her on board the Kublai Khan. Audie had told her everything about those terrifying days on the ship, enough that she’d been able to produce a spectacular false confession that neither Toombs—nor a horrified Menefee—could refute. She and Audie had only seen each other once after that, when she had received her soulmate’s tearful promise that somehow, some way, she would get Riddick to come to Crematoria and rescue her.

And she had, too. It had taken years, but he had finally come.

Glancing at Toombs’s remains again, she hoped he’d gone straight to some variety of Hell. He didn’t deserve the Underverse. The poor creature beside her, however, did.

It’s not one of mine. Is there anything I can do to help it? she asked the arrayed Lords Martial in her head.

We can only grant passage to converts. If there was a way to purify it before its due time, we could ensure its passage, but… She could feel their regret.

I’m so sorry, she thought again, leaning forward to rest her head against its.

Only… she didn’t lean forward. Not with her body. It was her spectral head that touched its, passed into it—

Kyra, what are you—

She was somewhere else.

Running, hot wind against her scales, rough stone against her paws. Free of her cage, free to roam, free to hunt, free to feed. Fragile creatures fleeing before her. None of them worthy of her interest except as possible meals. None but one, perhaps? The packmate that wasn’t a packmate? She could look for that one. Play a little. She wouldn’t hurt the creature. It had strength to it, ferocity… she would teach it how to be even stronger. That would be fun.

Up a long trail, onto a metal landing… oh, there you are, small one, fragile but strong, little cub…

Kyra tried to understand just what she was seeing. Her vision was strange, skewed, colors that she didn’t recognize dominating. The creature before her was tall and spindly, stuck on two legs. It was a female, she knew that, and it was slightly polluted by something that she knew she could eradicate if only the cub would let her touch it. It was young. It was strong. It was ferocious. A worthy cub to adopt and clean up. One day perhaps it would let her.

What were these thoughts? They filled her head, taking up the place that had been occupied by the Lords Martial. What was this creature before her? She looked more closely.

Me, she suddenly realized. My god, that’s me!

Kyra-that-had-been was standing before her, facing the Furyan wolf that she was now… staring it down and then leaping from the bridge to catch a dangling rope and swing away. She chuffed, laughing with delight at the cub’s daring move. She had chosen well indeed—

What is happening to me?

If this was that day, though, she realized, then Riddick was here. She didn’t understand how or why, but he was here. The moment she thought of him, she felt the wolf-she-was paying attention. Kin was in this place? She needed to find this creature!

Not sure if she was leading or following, she thought of the waterfalls. That was where Riddick had been when she’d last seen him as Kyra-that-was. Maybe that was where he still was now. She hurried unerringly for them, knowing the exact way even though it was a way that she’d never taken as a spindly human cub.

Stepping through one of the waterfalls that concealed a tunnel, she was confronted by something…

…godlike.

He shone. Light so pure that it made her think of the Underverse, cascading out from him but visible only to her silver eyes. How could no other creatures in this place feel his glory? His eyes were on her, locked with hers, and he held out a hand.

Welcoming her home.

She stalked forward, basking in the light, in the scent of home that emanated from him, until his hand touched her side—

Gasping, she sat back. She was in the kennels, the Furyan wolf before her once more. It was changed. She could still feel the light of Furya within it, but now…

What did you do? Zhylaw asked. How did you purify it?

Instead of answering, she reached forward again, this time with a spectral hand, and slid it into the abdominal wound. Necrotizing tissue melted away, replaced by whole, healthy flesh. She felt the beast’s breathing and heartbeat stabilize even as her physical hand pulled Toombs’ knife out and her spiritual hand wiped away all signs of its passage. The wolf raised her head, silver eyes focusing on her again.

Cub?

Mother, she answered her. The pure love that flowed between them left her breathless and her mental passengers dumbfounded.

The wolf rose, understanding her completely, and set off to gather her pack. They would come with her to the Basilica. They would join the war and help her clean the ’verse. They would follow their chosen cub, grown so very powerful, and help her find The Ones again…

The wolf passed the Necromonger soldier entering the chamber without paying him any attention, off on her quest to bring the other wolves home. Kyra glanced up at the soldier, who looked agitated. “What’s wrong?”

“My Liege,” he said quietly, “we have gained access to the woman barricaded in that room. Dame Vaako attempted to interrogate her, but she’s delirious. Now she’s demanding we kill her and—what is your command?”

Kyra reached out. Dame Vaako was raging at the soldiers, demanding to know why they were no longer obeying her. That wouldn’t do. Sleep, she thought, sending out as powerful a mental command as she could. When the Dame promptly dropped to the ground, she almost laughed.

“I will deal with this,” she told the soldier.

Almost no women were in Crematoria. The few who were sent here generally didn’t survive long, and most of those who did managed it by trading sexual favors to the most powerful of the convicts. She wondered who among them had survived, but whoever it was, it would make a good test over whether this thing that had happened with the wolf was a fluke or an actual power she possessed. In the back of her mind, she could hear the other Lords Martial arguing over what had happened, more surprised than her. If it was a power, it was one they had never known about before.

The Dame still lay crumpled on the floor of the chamber. On the cot, however, was a woman that Kyra recognized, not as one of her fellow convicts but as one of the mercs who had brought Riddick to Crematoria. She was the one who had been felled by the doors to the shuttle track, her injuries too grim for anyone to worry about caging her. Somehow she had managed to survive this long, and had even managed to barricade herself inside the Warden’s private office. Her food and medicine must have finally run out, though, and her injuries were overtaking her.

But you lived long enough for me to get here, and that might just be your salvation. I hope you’re worth it and not something rotten like Toombs… She knelt down before the cot and leaned forward again, repeating what she had done with the wolf—

—and woke up, gasping, on a small spacecraft.

The rank stench of the craft almost made her gag. The men surrounding her were the worst crew she’d ever been part of, dangerous to fall asleep around, and she only hoped the money would make it all worth it—

It had worked. She was in this woman’s past. But where and when?

Riddick was chained up in front of her, across from her.

Well, if this isn’t someone’s greatest hits track, I don’t know what it is.

She climbed to her feet and made her way over to him. No light cascaded out of him, not this time, not through these human eyes. For all his contained power, there was no sense of godlike puissance now. She wondered if any of the scent she had caught, while a wolf, would still linger on him, the scent of inhuman purity.

Leaning close, she inhaled his scent. Masculine, definitely. And he needed a shower. He smelled of smoke, blood, and death. Nothing of the otherworldly fragrance that she had smelled as a wolf. She reached out, drawing his goggles up to his forehead—

His eyes opened, shining silver, and his legs clamped, viselike, around her knee.

“Did you know that you grind your teeth when you sleep?” he asked her, his voice amused—

—and she was back in the warden’s office.

“Goddamn,” she muttered, and felt the Lords Martial echoing her sentiments as they examined her sudden new memories. She could feel her connection to the woman on the cot even now, the woman who was now one of hers. Reaching forward with her spectral hand, she explored and corrected the injuries that had festered for the last two weeks. This part, at least, was something that Zhylaw and the others recognized and understood. She could feel them debating whether or not she had simply been riding along in the memories of both wolf and merc, or had actually somehow traveled through time and changed their actions.

I’ll probably have to try it a few more times before we can be sure, she told them as she sat back. “Okay. Some of you carry the Dame back to the ship… some of you get to carry this lady. I’m bringing up the rear with some new acquisitions.”

Her soldiers obeyed without a word, completely hers. She had to admit that the feeling of power was something she enjoyed.

Dame Vaako remained unconscious until after they had taken off from Crematoria once more, a full complement of Furyan wolves on board the ship along with one recovering mercenary. When Kyra finally let her wake up, she was groggy and confused. “Where am I?”

“Back on board the ship, My Lady,” Kyra told her, having worked out all of the details of her planned lies. “We never did reach the prison. The tunnel had filled with volcanic gases. You lost consciousness and we carried you back out.”

“I could have sworn…” Eavesdropping in her mind, Kyra snatched away the Dame’s memories of the prison even as she reached for them. “The Purifier…?”

“We found this,” Kyra said, producing a burned and blackened skull. She followed it up with some of the man’s adornments. “With these.”

“So he is dead, then,” Dame Vaako sighed. “This trip was a waste of time.”

Not even a little, Kyra thought as she nodded in grave agreement. This trip was incredibly valuable.

Kyra had timed the Dame’s revival so that most of the soldiers would be retiring to rest when she woke. She pretended to do so herself, curling up in the pilot’s chair and settling her breathing into the deep, slow rhythm of sleep even as she kept the Dame’s attention away from the wolves in the shuttle bay and the mercenary in one of the back rooms. It was time to decide the woman’s fate, after all, once she’d been given one more opportunity to contact Lord Vaako and learn of his progress.

I can control her easily enough, she suggested to the Lords Martial. I can make her my creature.

Her husband might notice the change in her, Zhylaw pointed out.

He’ll definitely notice if she dies, Oltuvm, who rarely spoke, argued.

Dame Vaako, meanwhile, had “sneaked” over to one of the quasi-dead and was talking to her husband through its telepathic connection to its kin on his ship.

I would rather be done with her scheming forever, given all of the—we have a problem, Zhylaw said, uncharacteristically interrupting himself mid-thought.

What? Kyra asked, struggling to keep her breathing even.

Pynchon.

What about it? That was where she wanted to go next, of course, but first she needed to drag her errant generals back to their stations—

Riddick is going to Pynchon. Lord Vaako and the others are following him there.

Pynchon. Audie.

Motherfuckers, Kyra seethed. Any chance I can make their heads explode from here?

If only, Baylock replied, suppressing phantom laughter.

We need to get there ahead of them, she thought, pretending to wake up and stretch. I guess the Dame gets to live a little bit longer…

When Dame Vaako walked up to her a moment later and ordered her to set course for Pynchon, Kyra was no longer amused by the pretense that the order hadn’t really come from her in the first place. Things had gotten deadly serious. The new Lord Martial was playing no more games.

Not when Audie’s life might be on the line.

You couldn’t just go back to your hideout, Riddick? Damn it all.

But part of her hoped she might see that heavenly light once more when they met again. The wolves, resting in the shuttle bay, raised their heads and howled in agreement.

Beside her, Dame Vaako, now fully under her control, heard nothing.