Demorn: Blade of Exile (The Asanti Series Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Part 1

  1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8

  Interlude 1: Somebody, Somewhere

  • 9 •

  Part 2

  • 1 •

  Interlude 2: Pop Songs

  2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 •

  Part 3

  1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14

  A Reader’s Guide to the Asanti Series

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Demorn

  Blade of Exile

  The Asanti Series: Book One

  David Finn

  A Reader’s Guide to the Asanti Series

  Copyright © 2015, David Finn.

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Design by QA Productions

  Cover design by Deranged Doctor Design

  For Michelle, my love, we are making the dream come real.

  Part 1

  1

  * * *

  Demorn’s boots crunched across the ice roof, the pain locket burning on her chest. Her pistol glinted in her right hand. She was careful on the slippery surface, seeking the entrance to the lair. A Medusi sprang at her, turquoise eye-beams bouncing off the ice, pale skin marked with sun tats. Demorn flicked an energy star from her gloved wrist, slicing through the Medusi throat. Her gun hand followed as it gurgled into death, the body ashing out over the ice.

  She tugged her leather jacket tight around her, blocking out the cold. The sun was a pale disc glittering off purple sunglasses.

  Demorn’s fingers found the grate and she overrode the primitive sensor alarms. She could feel the monsters beneath her, flickering at the periphery of her awareness. They hissed to each other through the ice, garbled translations through her implant. She heard a human scream inside the lair. The voice died out fast as the creatures ripped into flesh. Her fingers tightened on her pistol but it was far too late now. The invisible watch blinked on her wrist, a yellow grin on a blue face that only her eyes could see. Smile had been reliable. She had found the nest at last.

  Demorn heard one of the creatures giggle, an edge of madness in the tone. An old, slow sad song started playing in the cavern, tenderly haunting as it came from nowhere. Staring into the whiteness of this frozen world, Demorn thought randomly of past loves, past lovers. Soft lips she’d kissed, a lilac perfume that had lingered in Demorn’s sheets, clothes and heart, memories blazing suddenly inside the neon maze.

  Demorn slid through the grate, tumbling down onto the ice, firing at the fast moving shadows as they howled with hatred and fear. Her pistol found the first one, disintegrating the Medusi body with a vivid purple fire.

  It was as if she was back in some Sanctum Club, dancing with beautiful people, as the dark shapes fell and she spun through the air, in rhythm with the feelings of another life, before the hunting became everything. The Medusi screamed as they lit up in holy purple flames, beautiful turquoise streams of light haphazardly bouncing off the frigid cavern walls, snake hair thrashing as they died.

  Nothing touched her as she cleared the room. All that remained was an exhausted peace of corpses and ash. The music had stopped. Another tune began playing sad and big, a dirge to the ice that clawed through her heart. She shot the stereo.

  Demorn prowled through the room. Surviving Medusi hissed and cursed at her from shadows, wounded and scared. She threw down three sapphire blue jewels, lighting up the lair. Crystalline statues were scattered haphazardly through the room. She approached the statue of a young man. So life-like, frozen forever. Her gloved hand felt the glassy surface, the terror on his anonymous face which could never find peace. So many races and creeds, from so many cities, so many worlds. The Medusi had been down here for years. The trail to them had been long and hard.

  The floor was slippery, coins strewn across it. Alien insignias mixed with more familiar human coinage. She left them on the ice floor. Her bounty was far more precious than a few coins. Her watch flashed, the yellow smile fainter. Her mark was still down there, deeper in the cavern. She heard the moan of a young girl, dying out. Without conscious thought, Demorn ran into the dark, away from the sapphire light that kept the monsters at bay, hearing that young voice as if it were her own, calling out from the dark.

  She ran down through a long narrow tunnel, the sunglasses becoming her night eyes. A brutal wind blasted her, more bitter with each step she took. She saw three Medusi racing up toward her. She fired on instinct, killing two outright. The third ran up the wall, avoiding the shots, then flew past her, terrified. Demorn slowed down, every sense alert. She saw a young, teenage girl dressed in an oversized jumper and short skirt, huddled crying in a freezing corner of the tunnel. Her face was a blend of smudged pink lipstick, thick makeup across a pretty face. What Demorn always remembered were her hoop earrings, and a terrible sick whiteness that all the fake tan in the galaxy could never hide. The girl’s eyes were black tunnels and her hands shook, expensive jewellery rattling on thin wrists. Demorn glanced at her watch but it was not flashing. This was not her target, this was not her payday.

  She bent down, talking softly. ‘How many were left alive?’

  The girl murmured, ‘Almost none of us, not now. They liked to play.’

  Demorn felt Xalos stirring in her chest, the ancient flames of the vengeance blade. The old disgust rose up inside her, the familiar need to bring justice and make amends. For wrongs that were not of her making or design, but still her place to fix.

  Demorn held her freezing body tight. ‘Not anymore they don’t.’

  The girl’s makeup ran with black tears. ‘I don’t think I’m alive, they killed me, they killed me too.’

  Demorn could see through her, into the dark, cold tunnel. The girl was just a ghost, shimmering for a little while. She vanished in the wind, still crying, going to wherever the dead go.

  The tunnel opened into a chamber laid with glass coffins. All the coffins were dark except for one, which shone with soft pink light at the far end. A large archway was lit up, opening to a mysterious darkness beyond. Demorn knew what lay in the coffins. But she still looked inside, she could not turn away. In each dark coffin a crystal statue clawed at the glass lid. Each haunted face wore a variation of private terror, eyes wide open to their awful fate.

  Demorn reached the last pink coffin. A teenage girl lay sleeping in a foetal position, dressed in a black t-shirt, torn blue jeans, messy long, blonde hair streaked with green. She looked about sixteen with change. Demorn’s watch sparkled with a big flashing green smile, rotating across the screen with the confirmation.

  Rachel Kobayashi. She’d found her mark, Demorn thought with a sigh of grim satisfaction. She depressed the coffin lid, pink light bathing the girl, and lifted her light body out. Rachel slightly smiled, curling into Demorn’s arms, her face tranquil in this dirty, frozen place. Demorn felt her dead heart stir a little. How had she survived?

  Demorn pushed the girl’s jumper up. Ahhh. The blue tattoo was there upon her wrist: Alodin Mars, the Goddess of the Innocents, resting on a glowing spear. Club Protection.

  Rachel’s eyes opened, ocean blue, framing a young face. ‘You came.’

  Demorn smiled, her watch sparkling a final time as the voice matched up with the logs. ‘Yeah, Rachel. That’s my job.’

  ‘Who are you? How do you know who I am?’

  Demorn took her glasses off. Her eyes were a blazing green. She raised her right hand, took off her glove. On her wrist shone the same tattoo, Alodin Mars glowing upon her pale skin.

  ‘My name’s Demorn. I’m an
Innocent working out of Babelzon. Your father contacted us to find you.’

  Rachel’s face broke out in happiness. She tightly clutched onto Demorn’s jacket. Her eyes were tender and full of something that Demorn used to have, now only recognised in others. It was the most naked trust, the trust you have when all else has been taken away.

  ‘I’m in the Innocents fan club! Does this rescue mean I can be full-time now?’

  Demorn set her down on the cold ground, smiling. She quickly took off her watch and pressed it onto Rachel’s slender wrist.

  ‘We’ll see. It’s set for the Clubhouse. Inner Sanctum, Babelzon.’

  Rachel looked confused. ‘What about you?’

  ‘We’re connected. I’m on a time delay. I’ve got something else to do here.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Rachel’s eyes were big and filled with tears. Demorn impulsively kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be okay. Grab a coffee and go chill in the Music Room.’

  The girl snorted.

  ‘You actually have a room that you call a Music Room?’

  Demorn smirked. ‘Oh yeah. Sometimes I go in there all alone and listen to country albums and get all sensitive.’

  Rachel looked a little uncertain. ‘My Dad hasn’t talked to me in weeks, y’know. I hope he’s not mad.’

  Demorn was smooth. ‘He wants you back real bad.’

  White lines burst through the floor, forming tiny cracks in the ice.

  ‘You’re just saying that ’cause he’s rich.’

  Demorn slid her purple sunglasses back on.

  ‘He pays well, that’s true.’

  Pure light blazed through the archway like a small sun. The ice coffins cracked and shattered. Rachel screamed in terror. Demorn held the girl close to her. From inside the white light, it called out their names with a shocking, cruel intensity, over and over. Demorn knew something cold and evil lay there, in the centre of the light. A bitter gust of wind blew through the archway into the room, horribly intense, laced with plague and death. She felt weak, and the pain locket on her breast throbbed with power, clearing her mind with a burning focus. The Club portal opened and Rachel flickered away into nothingness, pulled back to Babelzon.

  2

  * * *

  The scream repeated, filled with agony and hate. Sometimes it sounded like one man, then it was a multitude, a chorus of hate. The voices didn’t ask for Rachel anymore, just Demorn. She walked through the archway toward the light, her glasses phasing to handle the intense brightness.

  A strange thin man in a tight white suit stood in a cavern, a glowing cracked egg in his hands. The giant beam of white light spilt out from the egg. He smiled at her, displaying short black teeth that glistened in the light as she came through the archway.

  A Pale Sun! Demorn whispered her surprise. His eyes blinked slowly, yellow, reptilian and lidded, as he examined the cracked egg. The light radiating outward ceased, sucked backward, absorbed into either the egg or himself, she didn’t know. His figure blurred and Demorn saw a spectral after-image of a massive five-headed reptilian figure, echoing through the cavern, shuddering outside reality, vibrating through space, triumphant and all-consuming.

  Her eyes snapped back to this world. Bodies of Medusi were littered around him, charred and burnt. The Pale Sun tossed away the ruined egg, now dark and charred. She realised larger eggs surrounded him, some cracked and open, many still unhatched.

  ‘What is a monster like you doing here?’ she said, raising the pistol at his head.

  He chuckled. His voice was a dry rasp.

  ‘So says the bounty hunter with a gun to my head. It’s a funny life.’

  She shot bullet after holy bullet into him. The Pale hissed as the bullets struck, tearing into his suit, spilling dark blood. She watched the wounds close, bullets pushing through pallid skin, dropping to the cavern floor. He caught one in his fingers, examining it.

  ‘Holy bullets, how they sting.’

  A forked tongue flickered across his black teeth. ‘But that’s all they do.’

  He moved his white fingers. A venomous cloud took a crackling shape between his hands. Her instincts flared. The glasses knew. Poison, goddammit!

  Demorn grasped the pain locket around her neck, murmuring the trigger word. An instant aching coursed through her heart and her hand clasped tight around the locket. She could feel the extra strength flooding into her limbs, as the fire of a death god burnt through her heart and into her soul. Demorn flew into the upper reaches of the cavern, the poison cloud spewing toward her. She caught some of the vapour trail, dry-retching, soaring upward. Of course I never bring my nose plugs, she thought with a dry disgust.

  Demorn reached the upper limits of the cavern. Her magic eyes scanned the icy room, pain searing through her body every moment she floated in the air. She couldn’t see anything but the frozen ceiling. This was a dead end. The only way through him was through him. Demorn pulled a red and green mask from her jacket, down over her face, the synthetic folds meshing into her glasses and skin, synching and enhancing her senses. Her sight became crystal sharp. Demorn could see the deep lines in his corrupt face.

  The Pale Sun laughed below, voice rippling with contempt.

  ‘A blessed gun and some accessories. That won’t be enough! I’m a Pale Sun! I’m an Emperor of the Lost Sun!’

  Whatever that means, Demorn thought.

  He can be beaten.

  The intense voice echoed through her mind, passionate and clear.

  By Alodin! A telepath.

  The voice echoed back through her mind.

  He has not yet taken full form, we have no time! Attack with me now!

  Demorn saw a red form flicker wildly through the cavern. The Pale Sun disappeared for a moment in the billowing black cloud which surged up into the cold air. Demorn could see him within the poison cloud, trapped in some lightning speed clash with the fast-moving figure. She focused her mind, tumbling down toward the fight, the mask and locket protecting her from the worst of the stinking poison.

  As Demorn landed, she felt a surge of power flow from the Sun. A rumble of transcendental thunder echoed with lost wailing and oceans of tears from all the cities on all the worlds that would fall before the Pale Suns, preparing the universe for some horrible, unnamed entity that would come in their wake, the alien thing that clawed at the edge of her own dreams . . . now, before, after, forever.

  Gasping, Demorn rejected those false visions. He was just another trickster, a mad killer driven underground with all the other sick creatures. The Pale Sun towered over a lithe figure in a dark red cloak striking him again and again, lightning fast, with a staff that burnt with insane fire.

  Demorn moved into the fight. Demorn fired at the Pale Sun. The red cloaked figure turned. It was a young woman, she had a face of pure fire, a hunter demon carrying revenge from some deep hell, charred orange eyes that cut deep through the dark. The image reverberated into Demorn’s mind, seared onto her soul forever. Seeing those bright eyes burn against the unspeakable void, Demorn felt her own doubts subside, replaced by rage against the Pale Sun. She felt a hunger for revenge which blocked out everything else, cleansing her heart utterly.

  Demorn watched the bullets burn and sting as they struck the monster, shots refracting through reality, multiple faces echoing in the void. He howled in anger and frustration. The huntress struck home with her staff, the holy bullets by some miracle not touching her cloaked form as she flipped wildly in the cavern air.

  Now!

  Demorn sneered her scary smile, the mask curled around her features. Yes. It felt right. The demon-huntress swept upward onto the man’s face, cracking the wood hard across his face, flying high into the air with an athletic jump, releasing a sharp metal blade, driving it down into the monster’s neck.

  The Pale howled, and for a single moment, Demorn saw the Sun as he truly was, stripped of artifice and cloaking spells. Both wonderful and revolting, a pure and compl
ete evil, no real trace of humanity left in it anywhere. Inside was something far more ancient and far more terrible than humanity, a stain across blank white that flashed across Demorn’s magic eyes and soul. She would never forget the inner workings of the Pale Suns.

  Demorn blinked, refocusing. The creature had shed the human skin. But it lived. Solid ivory horns protruded from the monster’s bleeding mouth, ripping through the flesh. Black scale was forming upon his skin. A long shimmering spear lay in his hands. Ignoring the spike embedded in his neck, the creature drove upward and caught the hunter as she leapt away. The monster cruelly twisted the spear, then slowly drew it from the chest of the huntress.

  ‘I AM BORN AGAIN!’

  ‘Get ready for the grave,’ Demorn said, firing the pistol, but the bullets deflected from the shiny hide.

  The creature snarled down at Demorn, and for all the blood split, she knew he would not be killed that way. She holstered the pistol on her leg, signalling with her left hand, smiling her cruel smile. Her heart beat true and clean.

  ‘Come get me, behemoth.’

  It charged at her, brandishing the bloody spear. There was a ripping and tearing in the air itself, and a huge pain in her chest. Demorn looked down, gasping at the hurt. Her t-shirt was soaked a vivid crimson, and a blazing katana burst through her chest. She moaned in pain. Xalos was spawned. Demorn grasped the katana handle. The pain disappeared, replaced with an exhilaration and light-headed rage as she swung the blade in a blazing arc. Xalos sliced past his black spear, and Demorn screamed an Asanti oath wrenched from the gutters of her heart.

  She felt the jarring impact as the blade tore into the creature, hefting through the scale-black armour, thudding into flesh. Memories and information flooded into her, wrongs done by this evil entity, crimes committed, innocents hurt, victims sent to miserable, forgotten deaths. The deeper the blade sank into the creature, the more she ate into the evil, the more she knew of his crimes, stoking Demorn’s desperate, wild need for vengeance, a measure of justice for haunted souls.