8.6

Zyrdicia was in a bitter mood by the time she left the underworld. Destroying spirits of the dead was never fun. Finding the correct one was a chore. It was like looking for a particular cockroach in a sewer infested with them. She hated the teeming, anguished chaos of the space the dead inhabited. Everything about it was loathsome to her. An unexpected encounter with some of Azriok's Howler demons in the underworld rounded out an altogether unpleasant experience.

She sat down on the floor next to an open vault deep in the catacombs under Castle Greystone and leaned against a vaulted archway. Her fingers stroked the perfect, octagonal bricks in the stonework. Dark elves had built this space too, sometime in the distant past.

She lingered alone in the dark, next to Philonius' tomb. His severed skull rested in her lap. She had used it to locate his spirit in the underworld. After a brief conversation with his shade, she had destroyed his soul. Like so many things, it was a skill she owed to Azriok. There had been few occasions when she had needed to hunt the dead, but when she did, she was grateful to her mentor for having shared the secret, so many years ago. Not that he seemed to care today.

Hell's gate opens into the Astral Plane very near the point in which that plane intersects with the underworld. A thin barrier separates the place of demons and dark magic from the place of the dead. Zyrdicia had been near enough to the gate that Azriok had sensed her presence and sent a horde of his minions to force her through it. As long as she was awake, however, she was able to deal with his games effectively enough, repugnant as they were. She had slain every one of the Howlers.

As she sat in the Greystone family catacomb now, the slithering and crawling inhabitants of the dank, subterranean space did not bother Zyrdicia. Tonight she felt more at home among them than she did among either species with which she shared genetic material. She sighed. Entanglement with a mortal was as abhorrent as involvement with a Sephiroth lord. For different reasons, both were unwelcome and undesirable. Her unique, liminal existence between both species prevented her from ever belonging to either. Not that she would want to. She despised both at this moment.

She kept the loneliness that dwelt at the core of her being shackled with mirth and laughter. As long as she could keep herself amused, she never had to acknowledge how empty her psyche felt without Azriok's presence in it. She hated Azriok for that almost as much as she missed what once was. After the trip to the underworld, the humor had forsaken her, and in its absence, melancholy filled the void.

She considered transporting herself to a little world nestled in a wrinkle between the Astral Plane and the Elemental Plane of Water. It was a dimension that was all her own, uncharted and, since she killed its only resident, uninhabited. Not a soul knew about it, not even Portia. Her secret world was a wonderful hiding place. She remembered the beautiful, shimmering lilac ocean there fondly. Of course, if she stayed there long, she would probably go mad from sheer boredom and loneliness. Ultimately, such self-imposed exile would be more like prison than escape.

Better to be in a world with people, who could act as dancing bears for her entertainment. Their presence took the bite out of the isolation that was the corollary to her uniqueness in the universe.

Zyrdicia sniffed the air suddenly. She wasn't alone in the catacombs after all. She sensed dark magic nearby - very powerful dark magic. Her eyes scanned the burial chamber slowly, unable to locate a trace of the intruder's source. She called her sword with a thought, her nerves suddenly on edge. "Show yourself, Sephiroth!" she commanded in Tenaebran.

The angel appeared in the archway next to her, his arms crossed. He looked down upon her, his eyes glittering in the darkness. She recognized his short, curly locks and stout form immediately.

"Baphim. You must be tired of the material world to risk banishment by coming to see me."

"You are too smart to not listen to what I have to say."

"If you are here as a messenger, I would rather kill you now. I'm in no mood for Sephiroth games."

"Such an attempt would be imprudent. I don't share Azriok's aversion to harming you," Baphim advised pleasantly.

"But you know damned well he would destroy you if you did. What do you want?"

"Actually, I have what you want."

"What?"

"Information."

"About?"

"Azriok's war against Zyr. Your role in it. And how you can use it against both of them."

Zyrdicia's eyes narrowed. "In return for?"

"Nothing at all."

Zyrdicia laughed mockingly, "Liar."

His huge green eyes widened innocently. "Truly. If you act on the information I give you, that will be reward enough for me."

Baphim was a lesser Sephiroth. He lacked the power of Zyr or Azriok, but he was cunning and hazardous in his own right. "Tell me your information."

"Azriok and Zyr have each pinned their entire existence upon you. Whoever wins the war for possession of you will destroy the other. Many believe Azriok soon will replace Zyr as ruler of Hell. Time-honored alliances are shifting among the Sephiroth."

"And why should I care?"

"Because you will determine whether Azriok succeeds. You could change the outcome as no one else could."

"And now we get to why you are here..."

"You could destroy Azriok. You have access to Zyr's power. Aside from Zyr himself, you are the only one who could slay the Fairest Sephiroth in Tenaebra."

"Why would I do that?" Zyrdicia asked. Despite her hatred for Azriok tonight, she shuddered involuntarily at the thought of permanently destroying the only being in the cosmos who truly understood her.

"Because you could absorb his power, Zyrdicia. You would have his power plus Zyr's at your disposal. Imagine it! You could then destroy Zyr himself. You would be free of their manipulative games, child."

"Who sent you?"

"I came on my own," he responded defensively.

Zyrdicia stared at him, thinking. It was not unheard of for the lesser Sephiroth to try to maneuver their way up through the ranks of angels to increase their power. If he was suggesting such a course of action, she knew he must already have a plan in mind to destroy her eventually in order to steal her own magic, plus through her, that of Zyr and Azriok.

She had what she needed from him. She lunged at his heart with the sword before he realized the danger. He lashed out angrily with his long, pointed nails before disappearing back into the ether. He was now exiled from the material plane for six-hundred-sixty six years.

8.7

A light still burned in the window of Dr. Boris Krankstoff's laboratory in Lyr. Zyrdicia did not bother to knock when she entered. The spindly old scientist stared into his microscope, oblivious to her arrival.

"Hello, Boris," Zyrdicia greeted softly.

Krankstoff jumped, startled by the unexpected presence. "Your Grace. I had no idea you were here..." he muttered in a raspy, deeply accented voice. He peered at her through thick spectacles over a crooked nose. His face was long and angular, topped by a thinning shock of snow-white hair. He stood up from his stool, his white lab coat flopping about. He bowed politely, "My apologies."

He did not move to kiss her cheek. He kept a discrete personal space around him at all times in his life, avoiding unnecessary touch with other living things at all costs. Some interpreted his behavior as eccentric and snobbish. Zyrdicia understood that he was obsessed with infection.

The old man stared at Zyrdicia for a moment. He noted dark circles just beginning to appear under her otherwise flawless eyes. "You look ill," he observed. The tone of the statement was not an expression of concern; it was merely a scientific fact.

"I'm tired. It's been a long night."

Krankstoff pursed his lips and nodded, still regarding her suspiciously. He knew that Zyrdicia allegedly possessed an inhuman immunity to disease. She would make a most fascinating experimental subject. As a matter of scientific inquiry, he wondered whether her body's resistance had any limits. If she were to die unexpectedly, her cadaver would be an interesting specimen. The fact that the unusual woman was quite dear to him was all that prevented him from devising a scheme to make her a subject of a vivisection experiment.

Zyrdicia met Dr. Krankstoff when she had visited the City of Angels. At the time, he had been a visiting member of the biology faculty at a renowned technological university in a suburb of the city. A prominent bacteriologist and specialist in biological warfare in his native Russia, he had taken the temporary university appointment in America when his government could no longer afford to pay him a salary. A pure researcher at heart, he found American academia and pedagogy stifling.

The university had sponsored a series of lectures and panel discussion about the future of biological warfare, and its implicit moral danger. The lectures were well advertised, and open to the public. Concerned scientists predictably called for stricter government oversight and better training of authorities to combat terrorism. When the discussion moderator asked whether research with destructive applications should be curtailed, Dr. Krankstoff shocked the room by declaring that as a scientist, he had no responsibility for such matters. He was concerned only with the "intrinsic beauty of the organisms" he researched. He considered it an affront to be bothered with Western problems of social conscience.

Zyrdicia had been in the audience, listening attentively. She had stopped the professor in the parking structure outside the auditorium, complementing him on the wisdom of his words. Krankstoff at first thought the beautiful young woman must be an intelligence operative. The science students he encountered at the university were almost exclusively male. Women were few in number in the field, and he had certainly never seen one who looked like this. He almost hoped she was an intelligence operative. It would be better to sell his vast knowledge to a rogue government or terrorist organization than continue to squander it upon pimple-faced undergraduates.

He was a lonely, bitter man already deep in middle age, facing the decline of an otherwise stellar career. When this beguiling, young woman expressed admiration for his professional brilliance, he immediately invited her to join him for dinner. An opportunity for pleasant conversation and such attractive company was rare at his age.

Krankstoff's discussion with Zyrdicia changed his life and resurrected his career. His choice of words at the lecture mesmerized her. She not only understood exactly what he meant by a disease's "intrinsic beauty" but she found such deadly beauty inspiring, even electrifying. At first Krankstoff had thought she was a lovely nutcase. Rational scientist that he was, when she talked animatedly about various plagues she had observed "in different worlds," he immediately dismissed her as a schizophrenic. But when she mentioned specific research in one of those worlds, she gained his undivided attention.

She described in great detail a brutal, primitive scientific study of delivery methods for plague in biological warfare. Krankstoff knew about that study. Only three or four scientists in the world would have recognized it. It was conducted by the Nazis in the early forties. The research had been secretly taken out of Germany by the Russians after World War II, and eventually formed the basis for the Russian bio warfare program during the Cold War. She described details of the experiments that only someone intimately familiar with the documents could know.

Krankstoff had studied those experiments in great detail as a young man. He had written about them in his post-doctoral studies, which were still highly classified. Comrade Stalin had eventually given him the resources to continue where the experiments had left off. In Siberia, Krankstoff and his colleagues at one time had the most sophisticated experimental laboratory of disease in the world. He toiled away in happy solitude for decades, cataloging pathogens and manipulating them into new forms of potential terror.

When Zyrdicia referred to the obscure Nazi doctors responsible for the study as "Fritz" and "Heinrich", Krankstoff almost dropped his fork. No published documents contained the name "Fritz". He recognized it only because he had once interviewed Dr. Ludwig Mueller's widow in Leipzig, under the aegis of the KGB. Frau Mueller had used that nickname to refer to her late husband, the executed war criminal.

Krankstoff at that moment acknowledged to himself that he had left the confines of rational inquiry in the conversation. As the discussion progressed, he felt like Faust speaking to Mephistopheles in Goethe's drama. But he lacked Faust's moral hesitation. The moment she offered to give him a place to "play with plague" without rules, without interference of social conscience, he immediately accepted. His career was already over. The world had passed him by, supplanted his era with a new one of compassion. He had nothing to lose.

Zyrdicia viewed Krankstoff as an artist in need of a patron. Funding his work was no different in her eyes than supporting morbid painters or poets. In Lyr he had access to exotic diseases from all over the cosmos, not to mention new humanoid lifeforms to experiment upon. It was paradise to him. There was no tyrannical Soviet bureaucracy to contend with, no university administration, no international human rights treaties. He was free to pursue whatever organisms struck his fancy, combining them, changing them, exercising omnipotence.

The city's healers viewed him with suspicion, for good reason. From time to time, when strange illnesses struck the city, he always had a ready cure - for a price. Some gossips suggested that he created the outbreaks in order to extort vast sums from the healers. Money was an unlikely motive, given that Zyrdicia provided generously for his financial security. Sheer misanthropic spite, however, could never be discounted as a possible purpose with him.

"Come, look!" Krankstoff said, gesturing to the microscope.

Zyrdicia peered at the thread-like organism on the slide. "It's lovely. What is it?"

"My magnum opus!"

"But what does it do?"

"It kills, of course. It is a plague cocktail. I have combined the most lethal aspect of the Death Spores with a more conventional recombinant virus and anthrax, plus fourteen other pathogens for good measure."

Zyrdicia's eyes twinkled in excitement. "You've made the Death Spores more powerful?"

"Yes. It kills with the efficiency of the Death Spores, but it will not extinguish itself. That original one's limit is its inability to remain outside a human body for more than forty-eight hours. It is self-limiting in that it kills off the population it needs to survive. This new one could remain hibernating in soil, or water for decades. And once awakened, it will transform itself slightly with each new occurrence, preventing any natural immune response from developing in the species. My tests suggest it is ninety-seven percent lethal to every humanoid lifeform. A considerable improvement over the Death Spores!" Krankstoff cackled, "It is the ultimate plague!"

"So it would make an area uninhabitable, for years?"

"Yes."

"Amazing that such a minuscule lifeform could have such power. Not even I could do that. I can't wait to see it at work. Could it wipe out the species, in a given world?"

"In the right circumstances, yes."

"We'll have to find somewhere fitting to unleash it."

"It is not ready yet. But when the time comes, I think that I should like to go back to Los Angeles for a visit..."

Zyrdicia laughed. Krankstoff hated that city. She had already unleashed an earthquake and a serial killer upon it. A plague certainly would not be out of character. "Perfect. Let me know when you're ready, then. In the mean time, do you have the elixir for me?"

The professor nodded, pointing to a carefully packed box of vials. "Two dozen doses, as you asked."

"Prepare more."

"How much?"

"Enough for a small army."

His angular eyebrows shot up. "Which state is your client now?" He knew that on rare occasions she had arranged to sell his deadly creations to certain governments and organizations in various dimensions. He enjoyed seeing his work released, and the data obtained was always helpful.

"No client. Personal...involvement."

"Then the army must be very small indeed."

"No, I'm thinking in the range of a thousand doses or so. I may not need it. In fact, I hope not. But just in case..."

"It will take a little time. But I will have my staff begin stockpiling it for such a contingency. Remember: only in the first day does it help for certain!"