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The girl has no hold over me, but the gone-to-Coventry trap-prison laid for the prisoner in the past is cool.
phargle said:
Effy's a cutie for sure XD Can't wait to see her on the next series . Sci Fi cube is going to play a lot into the future as well .
Just a status report . I'm now on Thanksgiving vacation , huzzah ! Working on an update as we speak . Will be working on the AARlander this week as well . Lots of stuff to do so little time !
General_BT said:
ColossusCrusher said:
Haha , a character from the terrible debauched UK show Skins of which the image of Trey is also from (from Tony Stonem . Ironically they're brother and sister in the show) . Don't go looking out for too many pictures though ! I'd like to use more of them in the coming updates XD
English Patriot said:Oh I honestly hope you use nice pictures
Haha we'll definitely try !
Chapter CXXII: Blood
8 July 1642
The first sign Sir Covington received that something had gone wrong was when all of the lights in the hotel where the insurrectionists were holed up in suddenly flickered into silent darkness. There was no commotion or panic, just a sudden and immovable hush that expanded like a stifling ebony blanket over the dark streets of Antwerp. Covington was perched atop a tall building a block away from the hotel and maneuvered himself onto a niche on the roof where the slopes of two buildings met. It was from this station that he watched over the operation going on in front of him.
It hadn't meant to be a major coup or anything particularly special. Covington was mindful that the Room did not want to cause a large stir. Nonetheless, he was hoping to plant someone or two in the hotel who could be his eyes and ears. Gaining information about the enemy would be a major step in foiling the inevitable overflow of Dutch patriotism. When all the lights in the building went out, he was immediately suspicious. When the gunshots finally began to ring out from the hotel, he immediately made his way down.
He had sent in only a group of two men plus Vermeer to infiltrate the compound. Vermeer was supposed to be a new guard on rotation for the Prince of Orange while the two operatives Covington had specifically called in from out of town during the course of the week were to impersonate delegates from Breda complete with credentials. They were supposed to slip in, Vermeer was to supervise, and then leave the two behind to do the work as he rotated out. Having all of the lights off at once, Covington thought, could only mean that there was something going on-- and the revolutionaries had planned something.
He made it down to the street with some difficulty. Gunshots were still being heard from the building and already, neighboring homes and businesses began to turn their lights on. As Covington approached the building, he noticed a stream of men rushing out from the main entrance. This was strange, he thought to himself. If it had been some kind of trap for his operatives, why was there a sudden panic? His three men could not have taken on the entire guard force in the hotel and caused this much confusion and pandemonium. He approached the building more cautiously as he was only a block away.
Earlier in the week, he had already found out the various emergency exits of the insurrectionists. That was the reasoning behind shutting down the harbour for the evening-- to flush out the secret exits to and from the building and see where they would go. He knew that not closing the city gates would be enough to assure the revolutionaries that they were not in any immediate danger, but he also knew that with the fastest route out of the city being blocked, they would need to redouble their security and test their tunnels. With deadly efficiency, he managed to pinpoint the exits of the secret passageways. What bothered Giles from knowing this, however, is that these were people exiting through the main entrance. Something was stopping them from taking the time to exit through the tunnels.
Closer he approached using the cover of the shadows from the surrounding buildings and avoided where the lamps of the woken tenants had begun to illuminate the ground. There are no guards at the door he thought to himself. What was going on?
He was close enough that the people running out from the building were unwittingly passing him. Gunshots were still being discharged and he could easily tell that there now was the tumult of a melee going on inside. In the confusion, he decided that now was his chance. Giles raced into the doorway and tried to find his way in the darkened interior of the hotel. Running up one flight of stairs where the noise of fighting was the highest pitch, he entered a massive chamber-- probably where they had meetings-- and immediately saw that there were dead bodies on the floor: there was one body he recognized.
“Gijsbert!” Giles rushed to the man on the floor and crouched down next to him. The gentleman on the floor still had his fake credentials strewn about his badly hewn tunic. The blood was being soaked up by his clothes with abandon.
“Sir Covington...” the man spat up blood as he spoke rasply. Giles tried to place his hand on the man's chest to stop the bleeding, but he could feel that the skin underneath was lacerated as if some tiger had had its way with him the poor man.
“What happened?” he asked as he tried to follow the man's failing eyes as they lost focus. The moonlight barely flickered against those man's irises as he struggled to utter something.
“They attacked us-- Vermeer... he's over... there... trying...” he had to pause to cough some blood out of his windpipe. “Vermeer tried to get... me to get you... to tell you...to tell you...”
The man's head drooped slightly and a groan escaped him like a gurgle. Covington pulled the man's head towards him and supported him firmly while shooting an intense look into the dying agent's eyes as if his soul would lend some energy in between those pairs of windows. “Who attacked you?” Covington asked solidly as he struggled to keep his blood-greased hands firmly against the back of Gijsbert's head. He knew as well that it was not just the agents that were assaulted, but that everyone seemed to be targeted. His eyes dove into Gijsbert's wavering gaze trying to fish the answer out of him before he expired.
“Vermeer said...” the man struggled gasping for air while feeling the blood return to his lungs and depriving him of oxygen. He gasped and locked eyes with Covington opening them as wide as he can as if holding back a terrible cough. “Zey...” the man tried to speak. “Zey... ahhh.... thools...”
Covington could recognize that it was some kind of tortured English-- something obviously meant for Covington himself. “What?” he asked for clarification. It did not help that Gijsbert could only speak English tortuously. “Xe-a-thouls?” he tried to repeat the words.
“Zey--” the man tried to say again but choked on his own blood. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and he promptly laid limp in Covington's arms.
Giles laid Gijsbert down carefully and shut those horrified lids closed before starting at a sound heard from the next room. The earflash of foot against wood alerted him although the rest of the area seemed to tense up in an anxious silence. He got to his feet and rubbed the blood of the poor dead man against his sleeves before moving forward. He reached into his jacket pocket ready to unleash his pistol at an enemy at any time.
Treading the umbrage of the unlit room, he found himself next to the portal where the sound had come from. He could not make out anything on the other side of the open doorway, so he had no choice but to slide into the next chamber. Immediately, something caught his eye. A figure of white, as radiant as a full moon filled the chamber in some strange incandescence. A figure in a white dress: a vision that arrested Giles. It pinned him against the far wall of the chamber and choked his breath. It was that girl...
And she turned around, her pale face now shining a beacon of radiance in his direction that startled Giles enough for his heart to stop beating for an instant. He clutched his chest-- a kind of gesture that caught the attention of those eyes. Softly, that white colour faded and the radiance subsided. Shadow returned to the room and the young lady-- Katarina-- looked at Giles with some maddening serenity. “Kill him,” she whispered.
Giles' eyes adjusted. The shadows of the room started to form outlines now-- they started to form lines of barely discernable moonlight curving against objects in the room. Behind the young lady, three looming figures now began to take form. Tall and flowing, the three that were emerging from the shadow were the spread of the entire room as if the young Katarina was standing in front of the sails of a ship.
A strange set of apparitions behind the girl greeted Giles
It was the visors that had caught Giles' attention first. Built into the cloth, the strange slits permitted no viewer to see the eyes of the men but the metal outline gleamed like silver in the small light coming from beyond the windows. Giles did not understand what they were or who they were, but he could easily see the warm blood dripping from their hands-- gauntleted hands that resembled more the claws of some bird of prey than gauntlets. “They... are tools...” Giles finally understood the strange words before the three lunged towards him.
---
The drab, brown covered wagon matched well with the muddied path. From an eagle, the small transport might have seemed like a ripple in the road... a rodent merely pushing up a brown carpet as it sped along underneath. The rain outside made it harder to see and only the weak glow of the orange lamp gave any colour past the gray and the brown.
It was the third time they had to cross territory like this. Making their way southward, the travelers, under the advice of Señora Amatallah, took a variety of different transports in a meandering fashion that took them criss-crossing along the French countryside, coast, and mountains. Soon they would cross into the Iberian peninsula itself and begin the last leg of their journey.
Iñigo watched the grey atmosphere outside and accepted the pensive desolation of the highway. The bumps along the road constantly shifted the horizon up and down, but he always managed to stay even with the hill-line and his steady eye never shifted from the even crests of the hills beyond even while the grey skies seemed to meld with the dull trees. He had not said much during the whole journey. His routine was one of contemplation and this was not only from what he had seen in Amsterdam, but also about the strange musings of his identity. Who he was exactly was bothering him the most. The face he saw in Amsterdam on one of the assassins-- that familiar face-- was the thing that bothered him the most after that.
“Are you alright, Iñigo?” Lope, who was sitting to his left in the wagon, asked gruffly. It was the four of them under the cover of the canvas. Amatallah and her daughter Alia were on the right seats, Iñigo and Lope on the left while Diego drove the horses in front. Their baggage was kept in between them right below where the dull lamp was hanging from the frame of the carriage.
“I'm just a little cold,” Iñigo admitted as he brought one of his bags from the floor onto his lap to lean on. Lope watched the young boy press his head against the sack as if it was a pillow and gave out a little comforting laugh. He stretched an arm over the young man's back and planted his own jacket on the boy's arched frame.
“It's hard,” Amatallah suddenly began to say from the other end of the wagon. Alia was asleep with her head on her mother's lap and the older woman was stroking the young one's hair while speaking softly to the men on the other side. “Most people go through life in the same way the trees and the rocks go through their days: the motion upward to the sun, or the rolling down of stones to some deep point. For most people, this is how they live. It's hard when you're faced with something extraordinary. It forces you to live differently.”
“Knowing your experience, I'll take that advice well enough,” Lope sighed and leaned back on his seat.
“That's not all that I mean,” Amatallah corrected gently. “The hardest part is that something extraordinary has revealed itself to everyone in one way or another-- and it's usually in the people we've come across. The saddest tragedy of this world is that they either don't recognise the spectacle they've witnessed or, realising it, they refuse to change how they've lived. It would be as if someone offered you a means to pay all of your debts yet you treated that person the same way the day after without even so much as a thank you and continue to gamble away your life.”
“True,” Lope grunted. He wasn't one for philosophising, but he had learned to humour Amatallah if he ever wanted to get any information out of her. “Though in this case, it's hardly anything good. All we know is that someone is trying to take Iñigo away. That's not exactly a boon.”
“Only if you stop at the negative side of this extraordinary circumstance,” Amatallah shook her head with a smile. “There's a reason for everything, Señor Lope. The extraordinary thing is not those men after your adopted son. That is only a consequence of the 'extraordinary'. What's truly remarkable is right in front of you.” Here, she began to stare at the tired Iñigo.
Lope turned his head as well and looked at the young man who looked back timidly at both of them. Iñigo turned to Lope as if searching for what would be appropriate to say. Lope took a moment to look at Iñigo before turning towards Amatallah. “Can't you tell us what it is that's so special?” he asked gently.
“It's why we're going to Madrid,” Amatallah sighed. She looked straight at Lope and exhaled again. “I used to think I knew. It was not until recently that I understood that my training in the Sublime Porte was only a fragment of a deeper truth. What I learned from the deep recesses of Constantinople was only the half burnt legacy of the Byzantine Greeks. Even those things that I was told was passed down by our forefathers from Mecca about this whole affair are incomplete.
“It used to be enough, though,” she admitted ruefully. “With the Sultan ruling from his throne, what we understood of the others seemed sufficient to keep us safe. There was no need to dig deeper-- to reach back and admit that what we knew only came from the Infidels.” She began to shake her head and looked away distantly outside of the rear of the wagon. Lope knew that she was finished speaking. Amatallah was always a strange mixture of terse rigidity and nostalgic, philosophic intensity that bordered on madness.
Lope relaxed in his seat despite what he'd heard. Being closer to Madrid, perhaps, was giving him some method of keeping himself hopeful, but all he hoped for was that until they were safe in the capital, those assassins would be unsuccessful in following their trail.
Interlude
Trey had stepped out into the front yard of the house and was attempting to retrace his movements. It was near the strange tree that he passed by earlier that he noticed the trail of blood that started with the half buried pool under the tree and proceeded away from the house. He could tell where his foot had marked onto the spot-- it was the area where some of the grass was depressed.
He remarked at how he had not noticed it the first time he had approached the house. He had parked on the uphill side of the road when he had made his way back to the house. It was only because the police cars were taking up most of the space in front of the home and cordoned the rest of the area off that he had to put his car further up the road and thus cut across the lawn to get back. Perhaps it was because he was so anxious to tell the police about what had happened the night before-- or at least that he saw the kidnapper too (they would have called him crazy if he told them the part about meeting himself)-- that he had not bothered to check where he was walking.
It was morbid curiosity now that drove him forward. The trail led away from the house and onto the next home on the street-- closer to where he parked his car. It was an old home-- probably dating from the Franciscan Era and the trail of blood led up to a side door of the building. The building itself chilled Trey easily. No car at the front, nor was there any sign of life within. The colour was this beige hude that somehow reminded him of human skin. He shuddered just looking at it.
He meant to turn around. He meant to go back to the party house and tell the police. But there was something strange about the trail-- the blood-- that door on the side. Somehow he knew that it was unlocked. There was something very familiar about all of it. Not only that, but there was something in there calling him. He could almost hear it in the flustering of the wind... Trey...
He moved forward and clasped his hand on the brass doorknob and rushed it open. He stepped inside almost without thinking and without looking. It was a blur of muted colours by the time he walked in. It was like a surge of magnetism but he did it... he walked into the center of the room. And that was when he saw him there. He was laying in a pool of blood. The boy that was missing-- he forgot his name but the police had shown him a picture just a few minutes earlier.
He stared at the body. There was no smell of decay-- just a sterile stifling atmosphere that choked up his nostrils. It smelt like iron. His body was frozen in place and it did not even make him flinch that the door behind him slammed shut from a sudden gust of wind. His vision focused on the young man on the floor-- dead. His vision all around him began to warp and it was as if his eyes were being drawn out towards the corpse.
The voice from the other room startled him enough to break the spell of the dead body: “Welcome home.”
Chapter CXXIII: Homecoming (coming soon)
well just great...now i get to have bad dreams again tonight. Thanks for sharing that last image...it's seered into my mind. (great update...creepy!)
“Zey... ahhh.... thools...”
..For some reason, this (Zeratul, rather than "they are tools"), in combination with parts of the description, makes me think that the "enemy" is the Protoss, specifically dark templar
..For some reason, this (Zeratul, rather than "they are tools"), in combination with parts of the description, makes me think that the "enemy" is the Protoss, specifically dark templar
Youch. That is probably the most appropriate chapter title we've had so far. No lack of blood indeed.
Ha, ha, ha!*laughs extremely evilly* Covington, getting attacked by some robot-people!
Anyway, his associates! i liked them!
Anyway, his associates!
i liked them!
robw963 said:
Haha I'm glad the point got across XD
ForzaA: Haha we're just geeky like that ! Oh noez , the Xel-Naga are coming too ! XD
Judas Maccabeus: XD Thank you sir ! Yeah , a dark chapter ! I was also hoping you would have picked up on some of the Christian imagery in the second half of the main chapter before the interlude though XD Sloppy ! har har har XD
balkanite: robot-people XD that's an interesting theory !
ColossusCrusher: haha , i'm afraid we won't have Protoss around =(
