Heart of a Traitor Read online

  Heart of a Traitor

  By Aaron Lee Yeager

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  Acknowledgments

  My wonderful wife Ruth, my eternal companion, for everything she does, without her this book would never have been written; when the shells start falling there is no one better to have in the foxhole with you than her. Diana, for cheering me on when I didn’t believe in myself. Cari, for trying to teach me the difference between then and than. Ben, for his awesome beard. He’s not all that great, but his beard really is. Seriously, go check it out. My parents, for their example. Bill, for his friendship. Rob, for mowing my lawn when I couldn’t. Phil, for helping me with the website even though he was so busy with other things. Victor, for the chance to learn how to tell stories. Shane, for making me laugh, at him...WITH him, I meant with him...yeah. Michael, for reading and editing my stories. My daughter Shannon, for being my cheerleader. And to Michael A. Stackpole, who will never read this, but if he did, wow, wouldn’t he be surprised to see his name here. His books are what first inspired me to become a writer.

  Since I’ve got the room, here’s a list of people I’d love to hang out with someday:

  Bob Ross, Shaggy, Jackie Chan, Gambit, Wil Wheaton, Alf, Fred Rogers, Tobuscous, Jhonathan Frakes, Isamu Dyson, Gary Coleman, Doc Brown, John Stamos, Sokka, Bill Burr, Bill and Ted, Harrison Ford.

  (So, if you saw your name on that list, give me a call and we’ll make it happen.)

  Dedicated to Stephen

  Contents

  Chapter One: The Scorched Fields of Tridia

  Chapter Two: Jerricus Spaceport

  Chapter Three: The Gobin Bluffs

  Chapter Four: The Rite of Damnation

  Chapter Five: A Crusade for Redemption

  Chapter Six: The Belly of the Carrion

  Chapter Seven: The Burden of Candor

  Chapter Eight: Tyrant Sector Command

  Chapter Nine: The Pools of Despair

  Chapter Ten: The Throne Room of Bael’Eth

  Chapter Eleven: The Prison of the Past

  Chapter Twelve: The Bitter Skies of Jordanus

  Chapter Thirteen: To the Victor Goes the Spoils

  Chapter Fourteen: The Butchers of Marion Valley

  Chapter Fifteen: The Trade Winds of the Ether

  Chapter Sixteen: The Nest of the Kuldrizi

  Chapter Seventeen: The Lost Children of Correll

  Chapter Eighteen: The Swamps of Pirané

  Chapter Nineteen: Intersections

  Chapter Twenty: The Grey Cathedrals of Kall

  Chapter Twenty One: The Oathstone

  Chapter Twenty Two: The Art of Kesshouhin

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Festival of Shogatsu

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Healing Halls

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Masks and Mirrors

  Chapter Twenty-Six: In the Shadow of Kanochan

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The White Canals of Ardura

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Guilded Markets of Durnstein

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Dance of the Ariels

  Chapter Thirty: The Fountains of Diamant Plaza

  Chapter Thirty-One: The Silk Tapestries of the Glanz Hotel

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Autopsy in Steiermark

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Parlay and Parry

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Price of Exorcism

  Chapter Thirty-Five: The Ebony Spires of Achatberg Palace

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Metamorphosis

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Prisons of Body, Prisons of Mind, Prisons of Soul

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Onikano’s Interrogation Room

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Angelus Noctem

  Chapter Forty: The Iron Forests of Nori’s Forge

  Chapter Forty-One: Empty Cages

  Chapter Forty-Two: False Gatherings

  Chapter Forty-Three: Questions and Answers

  Chapter Forty Four: Devices and Threats

  Chapter Forty-Five: Descent into Darkness

  Chapter Forty-Six: To Loose the Beast

  Chapter Forty-Seven: The Promise of Yellow Flowers

  Chapter Forty-Eight: The Weaknesses That Make Us Strong

  Chapter Forty-Nine: The Limitless Fortress of Min’Draguard

  Chapter Fifty: The Human Heart

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The Scorched Fields of Tridia

  Honor and Glory to the Holy Luminarch, the Lightbringer, Man of Light, Man of Wisdom, the Great Emancipator, the Liberator. The One Pure Light that casts no shadow.

  -Morning Prayer from the Holy Book of Cerinţǎ, Chapter 405, verse 9

  I died again.

  Nariko moaned under the throbbing pain as life unnaturally returned to her body. The shattered bones of her skull fused back together while muscle and skin reknit themselves. Fresh hair sprouted from her head and grew long, falling into the blood-soaked mud around her. With a sharp pain her body gasped, hoarsely drawing in breath as her lungs rebuilt their proper shape. Instinctively she propped herself up on one elbow and retched, expelling the bullets and shrapnel that had been lodged in her torso only moments before.

  She took a moment to breathe and looked at her hands. To her alarm she realized that they were longer and slimmer than she remembered, the smooth nails coming to a point that gave them a slightly claw-like appearance. She caught her reflection in a piece of broken glass and saw a strange face looking back at her. Her skin had changed again. It was quite fair now and her hair had become lighter too, now a honey blonde.

  A couple more deaths and I won’t be able to pass as human anymore, she realized.

  Human...

  Her mind settled on that word as she looked at her eyes. They were red, a bright, unnatural red, which contrasted sharply with her flawless skin.

  Was I ever human?

  She’d been having that dream again, the one where she was human. It felt so long ago. Looking into this strange reflection and seeing a face that didn’t feel like hers, she couldn’t help but question everything. Was it even her dream to begin with? Was it someone else’s dream?

  Has it really been three centuries?

  She could feel the sorcery flowing through her veins and pulsating in her skin. She could feel the different types of magic within her that darkened her soul with every passing day. She could feel the growing darkness within her. Normally she tried to ignore it, but now that she looked she could feel it at the back of her mind, a slumbering darkness. Like a cancerous tumor it spread inside of her. She could tell it had grown stronger this time. It grew stronger each time she died, and yet it did nothing. It only seemed to wait patiently. That was the part that really frightened her. It was so patient. It made it seem indomitable.

  She wondered how much of the real her was still left. Certainly, she decided, there was very little remaining now. Every time she died she lost more and more.

  What was my name back then? She would have to search through the archives and look it up. There was really very little point in it, though. It would be like looking up someone else’s name. It would not spark fond memories or bring back the past. They were gone, erased from her.

  Half-closing her eyes, she searched through her remaining memories. It was frustrating. At this point she could remember almost nothing about her early life, but clear and vibrant in her memories were the faces. Crisp and vivid, she could clearly see the faces of everyone she had ever killed in battle. That was to be expected. It was always the best parts that were lost first. She could find brief images of her father’s distant eyes and her mo
ther’s tears, but little else about her family and her brother.

  Wait, did I have a brother? She could feel him, but she couldn’t remember anything about him. Nariko winced as she tried to remember his face, or his name, but there was nothing.

  It still bothered her quite a bit, but it didn’t bother her as much as it used to. It is hard to mourn the loss of something you cannot recall ever having. It was like reaching out to grasp a shadow. Sometimes she wondered if it was just images of past lives. Reincarnation was an older doctrine, but certainly not heretical, after all. But then there was that image in her mind of the person she used to be. The curse would never fully rob her of that. It left it there intentionally, to cruelly remind her day by day of how much she had changed and how much she had lost. The shame of it churned in her mind, like shards of glass.

  Nariko became embarrassed and shoved her shame aside.

  Members of the warrior class do not feel shame. I may have lost a lot of things, but there is one thing a Senshi always keeps. Her pride.

  Forcing herself to stand up, she wobbled a bit as she adjusted to her new center of gravity. She had definitely grown taller again, probably topping six feet at this point. From the way her ruined armor clung to her, she could tell she had more of an hourglass figure than she did the day before.

  Around her was a barren landscape of corpses and trenches. The dead from both sides intermingled in gathering red pools of water, their dead eyes gazing skyward, hands still clutching their weapons, or bloodstained letters to home that would never arrive.

  It had been a complete disaster. The traitor commander H’Kar’Jun had decimated his own forces in a series of thirteen doomed assaults at the confederate lines, which had held like a stonewall despite overwhelming numbers. Now the battle had moved on, miles away, leaving only waste behind.

  I am so sick of working for traitors like him. As a Senshi, Nariko could see the reason for his failure clearly. His objective was not victory, it was glory. Personal glory. When he ordered the assault, he could see only the favor he would win from his demon lord if they were to break through the confederate lines in such a spectacular fashion. If his goal had been victory, he never would have attempted it. Ultimately that was the greatest weakness of the traitors. Despite all of their advantages, their demonic powers and gifts, their seemingly limitless manpower, and the promise of immortality offered them by their demon lords. Despite all those things, they had no loyalty toward each other. Each one was in a race to curry favor at the expense of everyone else, and that is why they failed.

  “Action without possibility of result is wasted action,” she chanted to herself.

  Nariko checked her chronometer and clenched her teeth. In less than two days confederate reinforcements would be arriving from off-world and then the battle for this planet would be lost. She always resented giving her aid to these traitors, but if she didn’t help them win this world, then her people would never be free of the curse.

  The Luminarch tests our faith, she chanted in her mind. To some of us is given the most difficult test of all. To fight alongside his enemies but remain loyal to Him. That is my test. She forced herself to believe it was true.

  Nariko began removing the few chunks of her armor that still clung to her body and bowed her head solemnly, intoning a prayer of parting to the spirit of the machine that had perished. There would be no time for a proper eulogy.

  After a quick search, she found her pistol and sword nearby, underneath the charred remains of a confederate who had made the mistake of trying to pick them up as a battlefield trophy. Nariko scoffed at the desecration. Her katana had been ruined, burnt down nearly to the hilt. She scratched at the black stub with her thumbnail, revealing some silver sheen beneath. With any luck, there would still be enough living cells left in the hilt for her to cultivate. She ran her fingers along the vine-shaped filigree of her pistol. No matter how carefully she studied and replicated the traditional patterns of her homeworld, it still felt like nothing more than an imitation to her.

  At the sense of her touch the pistol hummed to life underneath its coating of mud and readjusted itself to fit her grip more precisely. Nariko reached down instinctively to grab a new ammo clip before realizing that they were all gone, probably shredded by a mortar shell at some point. Only the few rounds still in the clip remained.

  From among the confederate bodies around her she located a pair of minimally damaged trousers and gloves from one soldier, a shirt and coat from another and a flak jacket that looked like it would fit from a third.

  Ugh. Why do these clothes all smell like cabbage?

  She began stripping out of her destroyed null-suit and changing when her attention was drawn to something moving on the edge of the trench a few feet from her. Sticking up defiantly from the red mud was a small yellow flower. A single yellow petal clung weakly to the stem as it shivered in the cold morning breeze. Nariko found herself transfixed and was filled with an unsettling feeling of loss that she could not explain.

  A noise caught her attention and her head snapped around toward it. A confederate soldier was standing at the edge of the trench, looking down at her. From his face she could tell he couldn’t be older than his mid-teens. Coming across a voluptuous woman changing her clothes in a trench had caught him quite off guard and he stood there in shock, unable to move.

  Quick as thought, Nariko raised her pistol and aimed it at the young man.

  “For the Luminarch,” she whispered steadily as she fired. A blue lance of energy fired out of the top barrel and hit the young man in the throat. His weapon fell down into the trench as his hands came up, grasping around his ruined and charred neck. Their gaze met as he gasped for breath. His eyes pleaded for aid and for a moment she felt something welling up within her, but she quickly clamped it down and kept her eyes cold. His face bulging in agony, he fell down into the trench.

  Nariko censured herself for her lapse in judgment. She had already seen evidence of confederate teams stripping the fallen of their boots and weapons, so she should have realized that they were probably still in the process of doing so in this area. She assigned herself three days of fasting and focus drills when the campaign was over, as she finished dressing herself, taking the boots and helmet from the young man even as his dying body twitched next to her. The pants fit okay, but the shirt sleeves were too short and the flak jacket pinched her chest. She figured it was good enough as she tucked her pistol and sword hilt into the belt.

  Taking up a predatory stance, Nariko grabbed the man’s rifle and quietly crept up to the top of the trench. Her weapon’s discharge had not gone unnoticed. Several nearby confederates had already organized themselves into two groups and were working their way smoothly toward her position. The youth of this world were trained to fight before they learned how to read, if they learned that at all. True to their training, one group approached her straight on, jinking from cover to cover, while the second flanked her left side. Once they were within optimal weapons range, one group would lay down a blanket of fire at her while the other moved closer to her. They would alternate this pattern, forcing her to keep her head down until she was properly flanked and then it would be too late.

  Nariko would not give them that chance. She leapt over a chunk of concrete and began sprinting along the ridge of the trench toward the group on her left. Surprised, the young men halted their advance and took up position behind the bloated corpse of a horse and opened fire. A volley of lead sped out toward Nariko, but she had already slid down on one leg, skidding to a stop behind a pile of sandbags. The soldiers altered their fire and the bullets tore at the tops of the sandbags. Keeping her head down, Nariko removed a power cell from her pistol and lobbed it toward the soldiers. She patiently waited for two and a third seconds and then came up over the sandbags, rifle drawn. She felt a stinging jab of pain as a bullet passed through her left shoulder. Her black blood oozed out and instantly hardened, sealing the wound. A second shot ricocheted off her helmet.

/>   Her throw had been true; the ammo clip was falling down directly over the soldiers. With fluid precision she fired her rifle ahead of the falling clip and her shot struck home. The power cell exploded above the confederates and they were sprayed with the thickly charged battery acid. The men and women dropped their weapons, clutching their charred faces with burnt and ruined hands. Their screams were muffled by the screeching of electrical discharge that sent waves of blue fire over their bodies.

  Nariko felt something hit her back, as if someone had tapped her roughly on the shoulder. She looked to one side and saw a pair of grenades spinning at her knees. The other group had closed with her faster than she would have guessed. Without thinking, Nariko pulled off her helmet and thrust it down over the two grenades. She then threw herself to one side, falling down into the trench beside her. The grenades exploded above her, shattering the helmet and sending dirt and shrapnel in all directions.

  Nariko pulled herself to her feet and shifted her vision into the infrared. She could barely make out the dull red silhouettes of the remaining soldiers through the wall of dirt between them as they leapt down into the next trench over. One of the silhouettes produced something that, with the pull of a cord, began to glow brighter and brighter.

  Crap, a demolition charge.

  The trench Nariko had thrown herself into had been further deepened by an artillery blast. It would take several moments for her to climb out again and by then she’d be dead. Nariko tapped the controls on her pistol and a delicate gold filament extended out of the stock and inserted itself into her wrist. There was a the briefest moment of probing discomfort, then the pistol chirped affirmative and Nariko’s vision was superimposed with an image from the micro-camera mounted in the tip of the bullet, looking out from the lower barrel of her pistol.

  Nariko raised the pistol and fired it upwards. Her view streaked out of the chamber and up into the sky, where she guided it in an arc that streaked back down to the earth, small corrections centering its flight back directly into the demolition charge.