Uriel sat up straight, checking the time on his screen. He cursed, sliding his spreadsheets off the virtual table and into the chip in his wristwatch. Some made fun of him for it. So archaic. He liked it better than carrying around an embedded datacore.
“Seriously, Uriel,” Jarred said, shaking his head. “You’re in your own little world, aren’t you?”
Uriel hastened to grab his suit jacket and throw it on while jogging after Jarred.
CHAPTER
THREE
EVEN AS he was slaughtered, Raidriar planned.
Each moment of awareness helped him put together a plot, a method of escape.
Control. He would be in control.
So, even as he died, even as he flailed and struggled, he continued to plan.
It involved holding himself back and waiting for an opportunity. That opportunity was not now.
But it would come.
SIRIS KILLED. And he was killed.
Again and again, they made those same rounds. Sometimes he defeated the God King, and would keep him crippled and broken for weeks on end. But then he’d lose track of the passage of time. He wouldn’t notice that it had been far too long since he’d smashed the God King’s face against the ground.
Sometimes . . . he almost welcomed it. A change. Another voice, just for a few moments. He walked that line, letting Raidriar come just to the brink of recovery.
Because of that, sometimes he lost. When he did, he would swim that void, letting the Dark Self grow stronger and stronger until it broke him free again.
It was difficult to track the changing of days in this prison, particularly while wearing a body that did not age and did not need to eat. He felt hunger, yes—it was perpetual, a horrid scratching inside, as if something were trying to eat its way out. But he did not need food. He was immortal—truly immortal.
He won. He lost. They played this game over and over. Dozens of reversals. Hundreds of deaths and beyond.
Siris gave a brief notice to when he died his thousandth time in the prison. He had already killed Raidriar twelve hundred times at that point. Keeping track of those numbers . . . they were the only things for him to keep track of.
This became his world. His life.
Kill. Be killed.
With each death, the Dark Self grew stronger. Instincts he did not want, but which he seized and used anyway. A primal force that lived inside of him, like a monster bound in fragile, fraying ropes.
A nightmare.
YES . . . RAIDRIAR thought as he awoke from death. Hold something back.
He threw himself to his feet as awareness returned. He struggled, he fought, but he did not give everything.
A nugget of strength, buried within. He would need that. For now, he played the game. He fought back. This time he actually won, blinking his eyes as they restored themselves, looking down at the corpse of the man he’d battered against the wall until his neck broke.
Raidriar took a deep breath and settled down to think, plan, and plot.
SIRIS WAKENED from death and waited for the blow to fall.
He had recovered too slowly this time. Disoriented, he prepared to fight back, to reach up with hands gnarled and twisted. He had begun breaking Raidriar’s hands each time, and so his foe had begun doing the same thing.
No blow fell.
Go! the Dark Self said.
Siris roared to his feet, ready to punch with the backs of his wrists, fingers flopping uselessly. If he could get his arms around . . .
Around . . .
He searched about, blind, swinging this way and that. Where was his enemy? What game was this? Would Raidriar give him hope, then crush him? Raidriar was a fool! Any advantage would be seized, would be used. And—
“I never thought,” a weary voice said, “I would ever grow tired of killing you, Ausar.”
Siris’s eyes finally started picking out light. He backed away from the shadow near the voice and put his back to the wall of the prison.
Shadows became fuzzy images, which slowly became distinct. Raidriar sat on the floor, wearing only a loincloth and a ripped shirt stained with blood. He looked young—too young to be this ancient thing.
No armor, of course. Siris had stripped that from his enemy early on, and had broken it as best he could, pounding it flat with rocks. That was the Dark Self’s influence. Take away the enemy’s weapon. Disarm him. Expose his vulnerabilities before going for the kill.
Raidriar had done the same for Siris, of course. Often, one or the other would use bits of that armor as a weapon to murder his foe as he awoke. Most of the time, they just used their hands.
Raidriar leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes, sighing. “Turns out I was wrong,” he said, his voice echoing in this cavernous chamber, lit dimly by the glow of ancient machinery hidden in the floor and ceiling. “I can grow tired of killing you. It took merely sixteen hundred and fifty-two murders. Apparently, even the most pleasing of tasks can grow mundane by repetition.”
Siris rounded the chamber, keeping his distance. He picked out a chunk of metal, one of their shields, battered and broken, cracked down the middle. He tossed it aside.
“Nothing to say?” Raidriar asked.
“Fifty-one,” Siris said. His voice sounded ragged to his ears.
“What?”
“Sixteen hundred and fifty-one,” Siris said. “That’s how many times you’ve bested me. Not fifty-two, as you said earlier.”
“And of the two of us, you’d trust your own memory above mine?” Raidriar sounded amused. “I thought you knew me better than that.”
Siris grunted. He found his sword, but Raidriar had beaten it against the Worker’s throne over and over, rendering the weapon a mangled mess, broken halfway down. Siris sensed anger in those marks on the rock throne. They were mirrored by marks along the back, where Siris himself had pounded with his shield in a frenzied tempest, frustrated, powerless.
The Dark Self was powerful, but it was also wild, temperamental.
Siris picked up the broken sword.
“How long,” Raidriar asked, “do you suppose he was playing us?”
“I don’t know,” Siris said. “I doubt he originally wanted me to trap him in here.”
“Are you certain?”
Siris hesitated. “No.” He didn’t know anything, not any longer.
“Perhaps you are right, though,” the God King said idly. “What kind of creature could put himself in such a helpless state? Powerless, no control—uncertain if he’d ever be freed? It reviles the senses and the mind alike.”
Warily, Siris walked over near the God King. He passed a portion of the wall that was scraped and bloodied. At one point, the God King had apparently tried to claw his way through the rock—for all the good it did.
Still, in a way he envied his enemy. Siris had been bound here by his soul, same as the Worker had been. Raidriar, however, had simply been dropped in—he was a casualty of location. The prison would keep him as surely as it kept anyone, but if he could get through those rocks, he could find freedom.
Not Siris. He would never be able to escape, not unless he found a way to make someone else take his place.
Convenient, he thought, stepping toward Raidriar, that I have another Deathless here to force into that role.
But how? He’d have to be outside to set up the swap.
“We have to escape,” Siris said to the man he once knew as the God King. “Together.”
“If there were a chance for escape, do you not think that the Worker would have taken it during all those centuries? No. There is no escape.”
“Then what? Continue to kill one another?”
“A little boring, wouldn’t you say?”
Siris reached Raidriar. He hesitated.
And the Dark Self took over.
Siris attacked without planning to. He fell upon the God King, butchering him even as the other man reached up to try to strangle Siris.
When he was done, Siris stood ove
r the dead body, and let himself feel horror.
It’s starting to rule me, he realized.
Once, he worried that these thoughts would return him to being the man he had once been, the callous Deathless tyrant. This was worse, though. Far worse. He had all of that man’s rage, frustration, and skill—but none of that man’s control.
He sank down beside the corpse and sighed, resting his head back against the stone.
DEVIATION
THE THIRD
“IN CONCLUSION, we have a decision to make regarding the product,” Jarred said, standing at the head of the small room. “By far the largest of our potential markets are companies that do a lot of shipping. They can use Omega to cut their costs incredibly. Because of this, I suggest delaying the home user product to focus on an expensive, high-end commercial product.”