Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [110]
Dorris couldn’t move as the three things approached. Her heart was trip-hammering; she could only pray that it would stop beating before they got to her.
But it didn’t.
A wide shadow cast by the tinseled moonlight crossed Dorris’s face. She stared and drooled. The things seemed to be staring, too, at her, but not with eyes for they had none, but with gashes where their eyes should be.
They looked at her a while, then turned, then moved hulkingly away to eventually stand up near the bait house. They stood perfectly still, in a perfectly straight line, almost as if . . . they were waiting for something.
SomeTHING? Dorris’s faltering brain managed. Or someONE?
Perhaps the horror had ravaged her consciousness so intricately that she’d been tainted with some psychic inclination, because when she looked dazedly back at the blood-filled and blight-infested lake, she did indeed see someone else coming out—but not another of these looming clay monstrosities.
It was a man.
(III)
Oh, wow, I don’t like this, Krilid thought after he’d debarked from the Nectoport and sent it back to Ezoriel’s headquarters. Suddenly his fear of heights returned, with no more Nectoport to shelter him. It’s just me and the Great Outdoors . . .
When he dared look down, his belly flip-flopped. Six hundred and sixty-six feet was a long way down . . .
It was on the left shoulder of the Demonculus that Krilid now sat, in a convenient little observation cupola.
When he’d slammed Gerold’s raw heart into the monster’s cardiac cavity, the Hell-Flux had audibly groaned down below, and its pallid luminescence had momentarily trebled. Meanwhile, the Anti-Light at the end of the cavity had sparked, signaling that the Animation Spells were properly engaged and conduction had been achieved. All the while, the Electrocity Generators down below kicked up into high rev from an occult detection sensor, to drain off all available Deathforce power . . .
These things meant that everything was working right. All systems go, Krilid had thought, a bit incredulous that nothing yet had gone wrong.
On the field at the Demonculus’s massive feet, throngs of Conscripts rallied, firing up curse-tipped arrows and sulphur guns, but the creature’s sheer size reduced their efforts to futility. Krilid chuckled. Like throwing pebbles . . . But Krilid’s chuckle ground down when he spotted several more Balloon Skiffs beginning to rise from their launch platforms. Not good, the Troll realized. We need to be far away by the time those balloons can reach this altitude. Archlocks and Bio-Wizards would undoubtedly be on the Skiffs, and would try all guises of Hexes and Cabalistic Viruses in hopes of disabling the Demonculus before it became ambulatory.
But . . . when would that be?
“Hey, Gerold!” Krilid yelled up from the cupola’s little side window. He was shouting toward the crude hole where the Demonculus’s ear should be. “Can you hear me yet?”
The giant muck-made head remained motionless.
Krilid began to feel sick.
Why wasn’t it working? He’d done everything as instructed. Had Lucifer’s Sorcerers planted countermeasure devices within the Demonculus? So much for Ezoriel’s fortune tellers, the Troll lamented.
A mile up ahead, an attack formation of Gryphons were beginning to swoop down . . .
Krilid got out of the cupola and ran to the base of the Demonculus’s neck. “Gerold! Come on! Make this thing work!”
No response. The Demonculus didn’t budge, nor could any sign of unlife be detected about the creature’s appalling face.
“Damn it!” Krilid kicked at a muscle strand in the Demonculus’s neck. “The friggin’ thing