The City Annihilator

By Stuart Hopen

Beneath our feet, beneath this very spot, lies beauty beyond all comprehension. This beauty lies in the form of seven cities. These seven cities are linked in mysterious and secretive ways to one another, and the destiny of all mankind. But the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss are preparing to destroy the seven cities. The aftermath of destroying their consummate beauty will yield ultimate power to the ultimate enemy, and throw the world into darkness. And the seven cities that have lain for countless eons, safe from the corruptions of man, will be no more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bold Venture Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463768457

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#5 The City Annihilator

Stuart Hopen

Published by Bold Venture Press

www.boldventurepress.com

Copyright

The City Annihilator © Copyright 2018 by Stuart Hopen. All rights reserved.

October 2018 | eBook and Paperback edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities between actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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Contents

Copyright Notice

Dedication

What Has Gone Before

The City Annihilator by Stuart Hopen

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

About the Author

Connect with Bold Venture Press

Dedication

For Gina

What Has Gone Before

Captain Hollister is a scrappy orphan who became one of the Great War’s most feared aces, a patriot ever alert for trouble. But trouble has found Congrieve, in spades, in the form of Cassiopeia Peyotrovna Lampreyv, the deposed queen of a hidden Carpathian kingdom. She is gifted with a preternatural skill for handling planes and men — but a rare form of hemophilia (turning her eye whites to a blood red) mandates constant transfusions. The queen has beguiled Congrieve to join her fight against the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss, a society of sorcerers conjuring true magic by destroying beautiful things.

Congrieve and the queen are accompanied by: Captain Orville Wootin. Congrieve’s closest friend, Wootin is a mad genius, brilliant airman, spymaster, poet and philosopher, who always delivers the goods — except when he’s out of his mind. They are joined by Peyotr Lampreyv — Cassiopeia’s 14-year-old son, afflicted by the same genetic disorder, and Chaim Ben-Zimra — The queen’s private physician, a rabbi, a cabalist and mystic with an uncanny understanding of the dark forces threatening our mortal realm.

Previously, the Mysteriarchs unleashed incredible weapons — hordes of flesh-eating flies, and a gargantuan dragon. Now the Twilight Patrol is stalked by a malevolent and supremely powerful high archon of the Abyss — Count Alexander Bulousov, Cassiopeia’s husband, who will stop at nothing to reclaim his wife and son.

The City Annihilator

The Twilight Patrol flies to a mystic realm that spans all of eternity, from the moment before the beginning of time to the end of all and everything. Their only map is an ancient book of spells that simultaneously authors itself, page by dreaded page, through the act of being read.

Torn by the contradictory forces between chaos and splendor, freedom and fate, matter and idea, the Patrol must face their deadliest opponents— the Circus Sans Foi ni Loi— the pilots who fear neither God nor man. The Circus without faith or law.

In a world that deifies imagination, Hollister Congrieve confronts a woman from his past, someone he had trusted completely. But now her once perfect beauty is marred by hideous scars, and her once perfect rectitude has been subsumed by the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss. She leads a plot to seize control of universe at the moment of its creation, and to reshape it to her own insidious ends using the most powerful explosive fusion ever conceived— the blend of being and nothingness!

Chapter one

A Stone’s Throw from the Dead Sea

April 1, 1918

Orville Wootin piloted his Spad over the Judean Desert, wondering why they call this the holy land, when it had been created with so little generosity. Even though the hour was approaching midnight and the sun had long departed, the sands were still impossibly hot, suffering from the long day’s merciless brutality. Winds loped and hissed as they passed like vipers in mass migration over the dunes.

Wootin had been brought here by yet another summons from Cassiopeia, the Queen of Cassiopeia. He was getting used to this business. It was getting to be a routine, almost mundane, though her perennial protestations of urgency and impending doom never proved to be unfounded. And yet there was something different in the way she spoke to him this time. For once, she phrased her requirements as a request, rather than a command, and she prefaced her entreaty with concern that he might have competing priorities. There was a subdued undercurrent of feminine hysteria in her voice, a hint of weakness he’d never heard before, and an uncharacteristic acknowledgement that obedience on his part was not taken for granted. Maybe she really believed she was dying, as Congrieve had reported, dying, along with the rest of her old world order. Perhaps her new affectation was part of the way she was coming to terms with these developments.

Consider the nature of our foes, she said. Consider what has happened before. This is so much the worse than the horrors we’ve already seen.

Wootin wondered what could shake the unshakable Queen. His curiosity had been piqued. He marveled at her masterful self-negating offer of a choice, and yet it gave him pause. He had the nagging sense that he’d been somehow tricked, and pressed into the service of some folkloric pattern. He questioned what enchantment or post hypnotic suggestion had so unmanned his free-will and condemned him to the role of a mere character, ruled by the laws of fairytales. He felt that way more often than he cared to admit, as if he were an unreal person in an unreal setting. There were other occasions, albeit far more rare, when he felt the opposite way, wholly alive and authentic. These rare occasions might happen during moments of intense concentration—in the midst of composing poetry or mortal aerial combat—and he would lose his individuality altogether, merging himself into a vast design of being that manifested itself through himself, somehow miraculously producing results that were far superior to that which he’d otherwise be capable. Wootin wondered whether these phenomena, though seemingly distinct and contrary in nature, might be inseparable aspects of one another. There was little doubt in his mind that his friend Hollister Congrieve played a role in these patterns and conventions. He knew Congrieve had already been conscripted into this new mission.

Wootin approached the strange and remote meeting place Cassiopeia had appointed during their brief conversation. Shrugging off altitude from under his wings, he spied his destination. It was an area designated by rows of wooden posts that extended out for miles, forming a pentagram upon the barrenness below. Two bone-white arches rose over the wooden posts and their shadows in the moonlight lay over the pentagram. At the point at which the shadows crossed lay a bald patch of sand, forming a pentagram within the pentagram.

When he drew closer, he saw that living men had been hung upon the wooden posts; countless figures assuming the posture of the hanged man from the Tarot Deck. They were hanging upside down; all still alive, their faces impassive and inscrutable, as if waiting for some imminent insight. Wootin tried to make sense of it, but that was an impossible task. He shook himself, attempting to escape from what must surely be a nightmare, or a hallucination. But the rows and rows of hanged men remained before him. They seemed not to be suffering, or even uncomfortable.

Wootin brought his Spad to a landing on a rocky plateau rising over the outer perimeters of the posts, where two other planes had preceded him. There was another Spad, much like his own, and a tri-plane marked by the emblem of the Queen’s namesake constellation.

Wootin found the Queen just below, pacing among the posts, accompanied by her physician, the dark giant, Rabbi Chaim Ben-Zimra, and, of course, Hollister Congrieve. The full moon continued its ascent over the night sky.

What’s this all about, then? Who set up this inhuman display, and what the devil is it supposed to mean? demanded Wootin.

The Queen elevated her pale chin, and caught Wootin with her disdainful red regard. I will let Ben-Zimra explain, she said with a sigh, as if the task of explaining the situation was something exhausting and beneath her. So fully had she regained her former haughty composure, Wootin suspected that her earlier display of humanity had been entirely tactical. Her tall frame inclined imperiously at ninety decrees from the ground, firmly rooted despite high heeled boots in the sand, with impressive facial and pelvic angularity, gentle curving of neck and spine, all assembled with a bias for the erect. The desert wind agitated her sanguine hued tresses into serpentine banners, intermingling the desperate coils with sable strands on the collar of her leather flight jacket.

Ben-Zimra spoke. The hanged men have hung in this spot for centuries. The time for which they have hung is beyond our measurement. Their time is something akin to the eternal, but our time is exceedingly short.

Wootin looked at the posts and the men hanging head down, and their many eyes staring into the vast empty spaces. The smell of the men seemed to be a permanent part of the desert, ancient, musky, inseparably stinking as if it were a fixture.

Ben-Zimra continued, "There are things you must understand—and the most important is this. Beneath our feet, beneath this very spot, lies beauty beyond all comprehension. This beauty lies in the form of seven cities. These are the cities beautiful; the cities known throughout the ages, and in the legends of mankind they are known as the seven cities of D’say-Wardsany. These seven cities are linked in mysterious and secretive ways to one another, and the destiny of all mankind. These cities possess astonishing beauty, each one in its own unique way.

But the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss are preparing to destroy the seven cities. The aftermath of destroying their consummate beauty will yield ultimate power to the ultimate enemy, and throw the world into darkness. And the seven cities that have lain for countless eons, safe from the corruptions of man, will be no more.

His officious white robe rippling around him, Ben-Zimra spoke in deep tones that were somehow soothing despite the dreaded import of his message. The hard lines on his umber face conveyed a sense of hard earned wisdom, but the corners of the mouth creased upward at the edges— age creating a smile that never left him. The eyes were dark and hypnotic, often frightening in their intensity, but not without dreamy mischief.

The Mysteriarchs of the Abyss are plotting to destroy this beauty, these eternal treasures. Or so it has been reported to us. By now you know the ways of the Mysteriarchs. And you know that they gain power by destroying beautiful things. And well you know, and well you have seen the powers they have been able to gain. And if they succeed in destroying the cities, in destroying the unimaginable beauty that lies beneath our feet—if they succeed, they will gain power in proportion to that which they have destroyed. They will gain power in the size and complexity and breadth of the beauty they have destroyed. And with such power, no one will be able to stop them. Not now, not ever.

Wootin began to shake his head. Seven Cities? Buried under the sand? Are you mad?

Improbable as it sounds, it is the truth.

Sir, we are within a stone’s throw of the Dead Sea. We are standing upon the lowest ground on Earth. There is no way… it is just impossible.

You have seen impossible things, before. In the days before, when we have been together. And we have been witness to the impossible. And so it is. But the time for argument is running out. And you must act immediately. For the moment you must act is nearly upon us. And that moment will happen at midnight, when the shadows of the ancient arches perfectly bisect the pentagram within the pentagram.

Wootin let out a long, exasperated exhalation that was something like a cross between a sigh of hopeless despair and a half-repressed chortle. So what are we supposed to do? Just start digging?

We could dig for eons and never reach the cities. That is not the path we must take.

Pray tell, exactly where does this path begin?

It begins with the moon.

That’s well beyond the Spad’s altitude ceiling.

At midnight, the moon will reach its zenith, and the shadows of the arches shall perfectly bisect the pentagram within the pentagram. And between those points, between the moon and interlocked shadows, therein lies the path. And at that time, and between those points, those who would seek D’say-Wardsany must fall from sky.

Wait…

Congrieve interjected, Orville, what he means to say is that the three of us… you, me, and the Queen… will have to power dive straight to the ground from a height of ten thousand feet.

Wootin rolled his eyes and smacked his forehead. Hollister, if this makes sense to you—or anyone else present—then I’m proud to be a lunatic.

Look, Orville, I don’t claim to know how this hocus-pocus works. But I’ve seen enough of it to know that it does. And for that matter, so have you. And you know what ends up happening when we ignore the warnings these two give us, crazy as they always sound.

Even with her colorless skin and her blood flooded eyes, the Queen was still very beautiful. It had to do with the triumph of geometry over limitations of her health. When he considered the unnerving effect of that beauty upon his friend, Wootin wondered whether the Mysteriarchs had the right idea after all.

I can’t argue with you. It wouldn’t do any good if I tried. But for the heck of it, I’m not going along this time. I’m not, just not. I get despondent sometimes, and my disposition might even tend toward the suicidal. But tonight, I’m not in the mood. Wootin folded his arms across his chest as a show of stubborn opposition, and he tried to anchor himself in the sand, but the soft ground made him all the more unsteady. He had the uncomfortable feeling that his refusal was not a real manifestation of his will—not a decision he could guide by mulishness or maneuvering or zeal or adherence to principles, but rather another part of