Exodus, page 33
“I’m sorry,” Derek said. “I wish we could assist you. But we can’t. We’ve got our orders.”
“Are you part of the military?”
“No.” Derek paused, looking away from the man and the other unfortunates. “It would be better if you leave now. Safer.”
“We can’t. You can’t ask us to do that. We’ve got old people and children among us.”
“I’m sorry.” Derek started forward then, aiming for the back of the museum. The schematic they had of the building showed the entrance to the basement there.
Trying not to think about the people barely living through the freezing cold around him and the fact that they were about to possibly endanger them all, Simon followed. He wondered what his father would have done, then wished that he’d have been able to ask him.
“Do you think this place is warded?” Wertham asked as they descended the steps leading to the basement.
“I don’t know,” Corrigan told him. “I’ve heard of such things, but I don’t know if that’s possible.”
Simon didn’t either, and he wondered if that was part of the protection hiding the Templar Underground from the demons.
“Warding doesn’t matter,” Mercer growled. “Demons have ways of getting past wards. None that have ever been put up have remained effective.”
Trying not to think about that, Simon kept watch. The basement was large, stuffed with boxes and crates that contained remnants of exhibits that had once filled the museum. A few more of the displaced Londoners squatted there as well, but they quickly gathered their belongings and headed up the steps when the Templar arrived.
They don’t trust us, either, Simon realized. That troubled him more than he thought it would.
Derek spent some time at the west wall. “There’s supposed to be a trigger. Ah, there it is.” He pressed on a section of the wall.
With slow, easy grace, a ten-foot section of the wall pivoted to a ninety-degree angle, basically becoming two doorways leading into the darkened room beyond. The Templar followed a spiral staircase around and down, reaching the other door in short order.
The new door was filled with symbols. Even with his meager magical ability, Simon sensed the power locked into the door.
It’s probably throughout that room, he told himself.
Derek tried the door but it was locked. He stepped back and called to Wertham. “These are supposed to be your specialty.”
“They can be,” Wertham agreed. He took his gloves off and placed his bare hands on the metal door, then started chanting. As he spoke, the symbols lit up. Less than a minute later, the bolts holding the door closed shot back with metallic snicks.
Wertham seized the door and opened it, then stepped back out of the way. Shelves of artifacts stood barely revealed. Simon made out weapons and works of art, models, vases, and other fragile things the museum owner had put together after so much work and dedication. The man had obviously cared about what he was doing.
Almost immediately, Simon saw the movement taking shape in the shadows. He shifted from the light-multiplier application to a true infrared, spotting the hole in the back of the room because it stood out in sharper relief, glowing a little from heat.
Demonic roars came through the opening. Magnifying and enhancing the images, Simon saw dozens of demons bearing down on a group of Cabalists, who were just then starting to run for their lives.
“Look out!” Mercer cried, drawing his sword. He stepped into the room after Derek, who had gone at once toward the Hammer in a special case on the wall.
Balekor’s Hammer gleamed a rich dark purple, like it had been roused from slumber.
The other Templar drew their weapons as well. They didn’t even have time to get set. Through the hole, Simon saw a young black man charging toward them. He was dressed all in black, but he didn’t wear the horns and tattoos of the other Cabalists he was with.
Before any of them could get set, the young black man threw out a hand. Simon saw a vague rippling take shape in the air before him, then an incredible force blasted the wall into pieces.
Forty-One
R ock and mortar pelted Simon as he was blown off his feet and driven backward. He flailed as he flew backward into another Templar. Both of them went down, buffeted by the waves of force that slammed through the vault.
“Get back!” Derek shouted. “Back up the stairs or we’re going to be trapped!”
Shoving himself to his feet, Simon took a firm grip on his sword and peered through the gaping hole in the wall. The vault had evidently butted up against the basement of the building across the alley, crossing under the alley. The wall on that side of the room had shattered and been strewn across the floor.
The Cabalists rushed into the vault, adding confusion to the threat of sudden death. Several of the Templar aimed their hand weapons at the new arrivals and backed them off, not certain if they were attacking with the demons or merely under attack themselves. The answer came quickly enough when the demons fired and two of the security people with the Cabalists went down. The security guards took cover at the edge of the wall and returned fire, but the effort didn’t slow the rampaging demons.
Simon had his Spike Bolter up, aiming it at the black-clad man that had blown the wall apart. The man was younger than Simon had at first believed. Then Simon saw the scaled fist that thrust through the man’s coat sleeve. It looked like his skin had been removed and lizard’s hide transplanted there.
“Help us,” a tall Cabalist cried out as he took cover. “We were ambushed by the demons.”
“Let them through,” Derek commanded.
Grumbling and cursing, the Templar pushed the Cabalists behind them and took up arms against the demons. They stood with the security people. And the demons continued their assault.
“Mercer,” Derek yelled, “get these people out of here. All of you fall back. We can’t fight them here.”
Mercer fled up the stairs.
Derek had Balekor’s Hammer in both hands as he sprinted back toward the exit. He pushed into his men, urging them onward as the demon hordes pressed in from behind.
Weapons fire from the demons struck within the vault. Sparks erupted from Simon’s helmet as some kind of beam splashed against him. The force rocked him on his heels but he stood his ground.
“Derek!” Mercer yelled from the top of the stairs. “The door has closed! It’s jammed and I can’t get it open! We can’t get out!”
Simon wondered if the door had been blocked by the people they’d told to leave the premises. He wouldn’t have blamed them.
“Get the door open!” Derek shouted back.
“Wertham’s trying!”
Simon pushed himself forward through the advancing wave of Cabalists. The man in black who had caused the wall to explode brushed past him, obviously looking for the fastest way out.
“Derek,” Simon said as he watched the demons approach. He stood in front of the Cabalists, drawing weapons fire and providing the protective wall of his armor. “We can’t run. There’s no time. If the demons bottle us in here, they’re going to pick us off. We can’t get trapped in here.”
Derek stood beside Simon.
“It’s time we fought back,” Simon said. He held his sword and the Spike Bolter. “Live or die, we can’t run from this fight.”
“Here!” Derek shouted. “Form a skirmish line! We’re going to take the fight to them!”
Scared and pumped up on adrenaline, Simon reached for the anger that fired through him. Maybe these weren’t the demons who had slain his father, but it had been demons like them. He stood ready.
Derek flashed him on a private band through the HUD. “We can’t let the hammer slip out of our hands. No matter what happens.”
Simon nodded grimly, rocked by another salvo of beams that sliced through the blown-out wall. “We can’t stay here, either.”
“I know.” Derek slung the Hammer over his shoulder and freed his sword. “Charge!”
As one man, the Templar boiled out of the vault, racing over the bodies of the dead and injured Cabalists bleeding on the ground. War cries, amplified by the HUD’s audio enhancers, pealed from the walls of the rooms. They met the demon horde less than ten feet from the opening in the wall.
A solid wave of Templar met the ragged line of demons. For a moment, the demons held their ground, then they were knocked aside and down as the powered suits got the upper hand.
Simon thrust the Spike Bolter into a demon’s face and squeezed the trigger. The demon’s head blew into pieces, scattering gore all over Simon. Setting himself, Simon swung his sword and cut deeply into another demon’s body.
There are too many, his mind screamed at him. But there are already two less than there were, he told that scared part of himself. They were also packed so solidly in front of him that he couldn’t miss. All he had to do was keep fighting.
Metal ground against metal as the Templar blades and armor met the armor the demons were wearing and the weapons they carried. Already several of the demons were down, some of them dead and others mortally wounded and crying out in fear. The Templar killed them without mercy, just as the demons did to the fallen Templar. The din was horrendous, like a scene cut from the deepest pits of Hell.
Simon kept moving, using the HUD to keep track of the other Templar. They tried to stay in a group, but it was impossible with all the close-in fighting that was going on. Reaching across his body, his sword raised to block an axe blow, he pushed the Spike Bolter against the back of a demon’s head that was attacking a fallen Templar and pulled the trigger.
The demon’s head went to pieces, but as the creature slumped, Simon saw that he’d acted too late. The demon had already succeeded in shoving a spear through the fallen Templar’s chest. Electricity and arcane forces fired at the breach in the armor, but blood was there, too. The falling demon draped the Templar.
Lifting his foot, Simon drove his other attacker backward with a kick. Simon reached down for the fallen Templar, just enough to make suit contact so he could read the other man’s vital statistics.
All his suit received was a series of flat lines that confirmed what he’d feared. There was no pulse. No respiration. The man was dead.
“Simon! Look out!” Derek chopped with his sword, turning aside a spear that had been aimed at Simon’s heart. The demon behind the spear thrust was a brutish beast almost twice as large as Simon.
The demon swept a massive fist back, striking Derek full in the face. If he hadn’t been in armor, the blow would have killed him. As it was, Derek crumpled against a wall nearly twenty feet away, his senses wavered, and for a moment he thought he was going to drop. He took a deep breath and shook off the effects of the blow.
Simon waded into the fray again. With all the limbs and weapons waved around, with beams tracking scorch marks on the floors, walls, and ceiling, it was impossible to know which way the battle was turning.
Swinging his sword, Simon buried the blade in the thick corded muscle of a Darkspawn’s neck and chest. The sword lodged, trapped there as the demon fought with its last breath to stick him with the sword it carried. Simon kicked at it, trying to free the dying creature from his sword.
Before he succeeded, another Darkspawn shouldered its wounded comrade aside and aimed a pistol at Simon’s face. Simon attempted to duck but couldn’t get out of the way in time. Bilious green liquid splashed against his helm, followed immediately by a cloud of white smoke that partially obscured his vision.
Abandoning his hold on the sword for the moment, Simon fisted his right hand, twisted his hips to get everything he could into the effort, and punched the Darkspawn in the throat. Bone snapped and gave way before the blow.
The demon hu-urked twice, stepping back as it struggled to breathe. Simon hit his opponent twice more, tearing the leathery hide and flesh from its face and crumpling the skull bones.
Spotting the demon that still had his sword in it, Simon stepped over to it, placed a foot on its chest, and yanked. The sword tore free. In that moment, he spotted the pitting left by the liquid the demon had shot him with.
“Armor integrity,” Simon said, moving toward the closest demon.
“Armor integrity is at 83 percent,” the HUD computer answered.
“Identify substance coating armor.” Simon thrust his sword into a demon’s back, hoping the heart was close by. Demon physiology was different and they weren’t necessarily all the same.
“Substance: unknown. Never before encountered.”
New weapons or old ones we haven’t seen before? Simon wondered. The demon he attacked tried to whip around. Using his left arm to block the creature’s attempt to point a pistol at him, Simon yanked hard on the sword with his right. The spinal cord separated with a loud crunch. Lower body paralyzed, the demon sank to the ground. Simon blasted it in the face, killing it.
“More of them are coming!” someone shouted.
Simon threw himself at a pair of Gremlins that had pinned a Templar against the shattered wall. One of them had hold of the Templar’s sword, trapping it in a sword-breaker. The other fired fiery bolts from a pistol that left ghostly images on Simon’s HUD.
Wrapping his arms around the head of one Gremlin, Simon managed to get a shoulder into the next and knock all of them to the ground. One of the Gremlins recovered almost at once and was on top of Simon in a heartbeat. It slammed a razor-sharp blade into his faceplate twice before Simon shoved the Spike Bolter up under the Gremlin’s chin and pulled the trigger. The palladium spikes chased the last fleeting thoughts from the demon’s head.
Simon pushed himself from beneath the dead weight just in time to get slammed with a huge hammer that caught him in the center of the chest. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs. For one brief moment he panicked that the blow had smashed in the breastplate to the point it was going to suffocate him. Then he managed a breath, realized that the breastplate had only transferred the hydrostatic shock it hadn’t been able to transfer throughout the suit, and caught another blow on the shoulder that spun him over.
Dazed, Simon pushed himself away and scrambled across the bodies of Cabalist security men, demons, and a fallen Templar. The brief contact with the Templar let him know that the man was dead.
He shoved himself around, swinging his legs to take out the legs of the Gremlin that had hit him. When the creature fell, Simon rolled to straddle it, then slammed his sword through its chest and twisted. The Gremlin bucked through its death throes.
On his feet again, Simon swept the battlefield. More demons were coming through the chimney at the other end of the basement.
This was a trap, Simon realized. They knew we were coming. Then he remembered the Cabalists and amended that. The demons had known that someone was coming.
There were too many to fight through. Nearly a third of the Templar had fallen, most of them dead. It wouldn’t be long before they all fell because the demons didn’t seem to worry about dying.
Forty-Two
S imon thought desperately, looking for a way out. He parried the blade of another Gremlin, then rolled behind an attacking Darkspawn that lunged at him. He thought about the tunnels that ran under London. The city was honeycombed with them. Tunnels allowed pedestrians to cross under the Thames. They carried waste in huge sewers. And they were used to transport cargo.
“Bring up building schematic,” Simon told the computer. “Visual overlay. Mark my position.”
“Complying,” the computer responded.
Simon shot the Darkspawn in the back of the head before it could turn to face him. As the demon fell, Simon put a shoulder into its back and propelled the dead weight into the Gremlin. Both demons went down in a tangle of arms and legs. Crossing to them, Simon pierced the Gremlin’s chest with his sword before it could get up, then kicked it in the face hard enough to snap its neck.
“Schematic processing,” the computer said.
Almost instantly, a fine gold three-dimensional blueprint overlaid the HUD. A gold dot marked Simon’s position.
“Are there any tunnels beneath this room?” Simon asked. He stumbled back as a beam hit him and chipped his armor. Turning, he moved in behind a Darkspawn for cover and watched as the next beam hit the demon instead of him.
“Affirmative,” the computer responded.
Immediately, a wide tunnel showed up in silver on the HUD.
“What is it?” Simon asked.
“A private cargo tunnel from the docks. It was used by Holdstock Glassworks until the business closed.”
“Is it still viable?”
“Unknown.”
“Mark it on the blueprint,” Simon ordered. He slashed with his sword as the demon turned to face him. One side was a smoking, charred ruin from the flames shot by another demon. Simon’s sword blow opened the demon’s abdomen and he dodged away as it fell apart. “Derek.”
“What?” Desperation tightened Derek’s response.
“There’s a tunnel under the floor.” Simon spotted the demon with the pistol, pulled up the Spike Bolter, and opened fire.
The palladium needles drove the demon backward in stumbling steps.
“If we can use a shaped charge and blow through the floor, we might be able to escape.”
Blood and other matter covered the concrete floor. Footing was treacherous. Still, the Templar had managed to press out from the vault where they’d been trapped. There wasn’t much in the way of cover, a few support pillars and discarded equipment the size of cars all the way down to small crates.
“I’ve got a map,” Simon said.
“Send it,” Derek replied.
Simon did, continuing to fight for his life. He couldn’t tell if the demons were still coming through the chimney, but there were more than enough on hand already to do the job.
“Higgins,” Derek called.
“Yes,” the man replied.
“I need a shaped charge. Place it where the map is marked.”
Even as Simon fired his Spike Bolter, he took note of Derek’s choice. The spot was behind their present position, midway to the vault room they’d vacated.
