"Big place," Vetorix muttered.
The temple was indeed huge, and there were only five of us. How was this going to work, exactly? The main thing would be to keep people away from the portal; I didn't want viators racing off to Gaia. But how long would we have to do that?
Until Feslund's men had taken care of the soldiers, at least. They must have made it to the barracks by now. And the deaths would be starting.
Finally we found a narrow winding staircase made of some kind of polished wood. We went up one flight, opened a creaky iron door, and looked out at a large open area filled with clothing hung on racks. "Laundry?" Priscus murmured.
"Strange-looking," Sullinger said.
I saw denim jackets and corduroy pants and puffy shirts and odd-looking hooded garments and more. It wasn't laundry; it was clothing that viators would wear when they went to different worlds.
We didn't see anyone. We went back to the stairs and up another flight.
And that's when we heard the music start to play. I have heard big pipe organs a couple of times in my world, and this music was like that—deep and rich and full of bass, music you could feel as well as hear. The sound was one thing; the music itself was something else. As with other music I'd heard on Terra, the harmonies were slightly off, and the melody—if there was a melody—didn't go anywhere I expected it to go.
We stood by the door for a moment, just listening, and then Priscus quietly opened it a crack. After a moment he shut it.
"I saw Via," he murmured. If he was trying to sound like a hardened soldier he couldn't do it. His voice was filled with awe. "It is beautiful."
"What is happening?" Siglind demanded. "Why is music playing?"
It took him a moment to focus on her question. "It's a sunrise service, I presume."
"Are people out there?" I asked.
"I couldn't tell," Priscus replied. He seemed to be in a daze.
"Let's go upstairs," Siglind said.
We climbed another flight. I tried to remember what was upstairs in the temple—a long balcony, I thought. Anything else?
Priscus opened another door slightly, looked out again, and then silently closed it.
"What did you see?" Siglind demanded again.
"I never thought to see the real Via," he said, as if he hadn't heard her question.
"Yes, but what else? How many people?"
He didn't reply.
Siglind pushed him aside and opened the door. She took a quick look, and then closed it. "We are behind a narrow balcony," she reported. "Downstairs twenty or more people are prostrate on the floor, and a priest is standing on the altar next to Via."
We stood there silently. We need to do something. Someone needed to be in charge. I looked at Priscus; he said nothing.
"We must kill them all," Siglind said finally.
Sulliger and Vetorix looked to Priscus for confirmation. He didn't react at first, as if he hadn't heard what Siglind had said. Then he slowly shook his head. "It isn't right," he said. "Not in this place. Not in front of Via. The gods—"
"Enough of this," Siglind interrupted. "You will do as your princess commands."
He paused for a moment, and then shook his head once again. "I'm sorry, my lady. I can't. It's not right."
And so Siglind raised her gant and shot him. He disappeared before our eyes, along with a chunk of the wall behind him. Sulliger and Vetorix gasped. It took me a moment to understand what had happened. How could she do that? How could she kill Priscus?
"You two head back downstairs," she ordered them. "Larry and I will stay up here. Go out the door, and use your weapons on those people. Make sure none of them get away."
They hesitated, and then bowed and hurried back down the staircase.
"I'm sorry, Larry," Siglind said, "but there is no time for weakness in war. Let's go."
She opened the door and went out onto the balcony. I followed her, still in shock from what she had done. The organ music was even louder now.
I looked down and saw the portal. At last. And I saw the people prostrate in front of it—men and women, all wearing white robes. A couple of them were young; maybe they were from the schola. My age. A few were white-haired.
No one had spotted us; with the music so loud, no one had noticed the wall giving way from Siglind's shot.
Siglind raised her gant.
Did we really have to kill them all? What would that accomplish? I didn't want to do that. But I wasn't in charge; Siglind was. She fired her gant, and one of the worshippers disappeared. Then another. And then, finally, someone noticed what was happening, pointed, and screamed. The organ stopped. I saw Sulliger and Vetorix on the main floor; they too were firing now. People were scrambling to their feet and starting to run, but they disappeared before they got far.
The temple doors opened and guards rushed in, responding to the screams. I finally used my gant to kill one of them. Someone else—I didn't know who—destroyed the others.
And in moments the floor was empty.
The bitter odor was strong now; it was a stench in my nostrils. I felt like I couldn't breathe.
"Close the doors to the temple!" Siglind shouted to Sulliger and Vetorix.
They moved quickly to obey.
"Let's go down," she said to me.
We hurried back downstairs, out through the door and around the altar over which the portal hovered.
The screams had stopped. The priest, the guards, the prostrate figures, the people who had been running—everyone had disappeared.
Except, not quite. Perhaps it was the distance from which we were shooting, or the angle, or something. But here and there on the marble floor, now turned to rubble in spots, were bits of clothing and body parts—a finger; a foot still in its sandal; an ear.
I hadn't expected that.
I turned away from Siglind and threw up.
She patted me on the back. "Don't worry, Larry," she said. "We did what we had to do."
I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my robe, which was still damp from the rain. I tried to answer, but I couldn't.
The massacre couldn't have lasted more than a couple of minutes.
Where is the glory in fighting with such a thing? Priscus had said of the gant. I looked down at my weapon; I was starting to hate gants.
I went over and stood staring up at the portal, surrounded by flowers and candles. Why was it visible here and not in my world, or Carmody's? Its blueness was like the ocean, not quite solid, always shifting. It felt so... familiar.
I broke my gaze away from it and went over to the place where the brown-robed man had sat when Valleia and I had come out of the portal; he had been writing in a large book that lay open on a polished table with intricately carved legs. The table was there; the book wasn't. But behind the table was a door with a key still in its lock. I opened the door, and I saw shelf after shelf of such books—recording, it seemed, the details of every trip of every viator, back through the centuries.
Somewhere in those books was my route home. I opened one of the books at random. The writing was incomprehensible.
I left the room. Vetorix and Sulliger had come up to the altar and were staring at the portal as if they were hypnotized. "I never thought to see it," Sulliger whispered. "So beautiful."
"And now it is ours," Vetorix replied.
Siglind approached us. The two soldiers looked at her nervously.
"Enough," she said. "Vetorix, stand by the front doors. Sulliger, you search the temple for—"
She didn't finish her sentence. Because at that instant Sulliger disappeared in a flash of white light, leaving behind nothing but ashes and a bitter odor in the air.
I didn't have a chance to think, because Siglind knocked me to the floor, and we rolled under the table. I couldn't breathe. Someone, somewhere in the temple, had a gant like ours, and now we were the hunted, now we were the ones who were helpless.
"Run," Siglind said to me. "Behind the altar."
And then the table dis
appeared, and a smattering of gray ash fell on me.
"Go!" Siglind shouted. "Go! Go!"
I got up and ran. But I looked back for a moment, and I saw Siglind standing with her gant out, and I realized that she was covering me, trying to spot the shooter in the gray dawn light.
And then she, too, disappeared—one moment a living, breathing woman, filled with courage and determination and loyalty, and the next just a spray of ash, a bitter smell, a memory.
Instead of running behind the altar, I leaped up the altar's stairs and dived into the portal.
After a moment I looked up. As usual, I had difficulty making the inside come into focus, but I could see the shimmering outlines of lights and dials. Or was I imagining them?
And now what? Was I safe from the shooter? Maybe, but I couldn't stay here forever.
But I could just walk—or crawl—out the other side. Into another universe. And perhaps it would be home. Even if it wasn't home, maybe it would be safer than where I was right now. Or maybe it would be a desolate world destroyed by disease or a comet or the curse of some awful invention like gants.
I knew so little.
If I went to a new universe, I would probably never get home. If I went out the other side of the portal, I could never say goodbye to Palta.
I sat inside the portal, unable to decide what to do.
And something happened as I sat there. I felt my mind shift, and the shimmering lights and dials rearranged themselves somehow. They weren't real, I thought. Or, no, they were real, but a different kind of real... Were they really made by gods? Or were they something else?
And my mind spun with the kind of speckness I had felt before. So many universes, so many versions of me and everyone.
And yet here I was, trying to save my life. This life. Now.
I waited. I caught my breath. The speckness faded. And then I crawled slowly out of the portal and back into the temple.
I saw Vetorix off to my left, next to the altar. He was crouching down, aiming his gant at something, at someone.
I saw him squeeze the handle. I heard a crash. And a scream. A woman's scream.
Vetorix raced forward, towards the crash, towards the scream. And then he disappeared.
I got to my feet, gant in hand, and raced around the portal and down from the altar. I opened a door, hoping it would take me to a staircase, but I found myself in the small room where Valleia had bathed and changed after bringing me here from my world. The room was dark. I smelled soap, or perfume. The floor was a little slippery.
I took a deep breath.
Priscus. Siglind. Sulliger. Vetorix. All gone.
I was the only one left.
And someone was out there with a gant.
A woman. Was she injured?
I opened the door a crack. I couldn't see anything. Had she seen me? Probably. But her attention had been focused on Vetorix.
Now it would be focused on me.
I couldn't stay where I was; I was too exposed. Whoever was out there knew far more about the temple than I did, presumably. The door to the staircase was to my right, perhaps thirty feet away. I could go downstairs and leave the temple the way we had entered it. Or I could go upstairs. To the balcony, where I had heard the scream. I could hunt the woman down.
I made my decision. I raced towards the door to the stairway, half-running, half-sliding across the marble floor. I opened the door, then slammed it shut behind me and ran up a couple of steps in case the woman was going to shoot at the door. That didn't happen, so I took a moment to catch my breath.
Then I went upstairs. Once again, I opened the door a crack. I saw nothing. I opened the door and walked out onto the balcony, holding the gant in front of me.
Sunlight spilled through the windows. I didn't see anyone on the balcony. On the right side of the balcony, halfway along, was a large hole; beyond that the balcony tilted down, ready to collapse.
Was that the cause of the crash?
I walked slowly forward, towards the hole. I passed enormous windows, their lower halves covered by thick purple draperies. I checked behind the draperies as I went, ready to shoot. After each step I stopped and listened and looked around.
I knew how careful I had to be. But I was tired. I had been up all night, marching through the rain, searching, worrying, killing. My reflexes were a split second slower than they needed to be when I pulled the final drapery back next to the hole, and I saw the witch.
It wasn't a witch. It was an ancient woman with a craggy face and long white hair. I had glimpsed her before, tending the flowers on the altar as I walked out of the temple that first time with Valleia. I had barely noticed her then. And now...
Now there was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been. The arm was tied off above the stump with a piece of cloth.
And before I could react she had launched herself upon me, trying to wrest the gant from my grasp. Her hand shook. Her eyes were black and watery. "Diabolus!" she hissed. Devil!
I was terrified that I would squeeze the gant too hard trying to hold onto it and it would go off and I would be the one who disappeared. I got my left hand around her throat and squeezed. The old woman's fingers only seemed to get stronger, though, and the gant fell out of my hand. She broke away from me and lunged for it. I pushed her back and tried to grab it myself.
But it clattered through the hole in the balcony floor and down to the floor below. The woman gave a despairing cry. We were both at the edge of the hole.
She tried to push at me, but she had no leverage.
I scrambled back away from her, and I realized I had a second gant in my pocket. She stood up and started to come for me again.
And, then, somehow, I realized that I didn't need the gant. The confusion and dizziness I had felt in the portal had turned to power. I could transmit that dizziness, that speckness. I could make her feel the staggering immensity of the multiverse and her pitiful role in it. She didn't matter; nothing she did mattered, against the backdrop of all that was or could be.
I could transmit all this, and so I did.
Her eyes widened as she felt the power of my mind. She staggered, the way the pawnbroker had staggered before Affron. She took a step back before my onslaught, and she lost her balance and went through the hole. Her hand grasped desperately at the edge but couldn't hold on. And then she was gone. I saw her—I felt her—land with a horrifying thud on the marble floor below.
I took a deep breath. I was shaking. What had happened? What had I done? And then I got up and ran—back to the stairway, back downstairs, past the portal to where the old woman was lying face down and motionless on the floor, near the wreckage that had fallen from the balcony above.
First I picked up my gant.
And then I turned her over.
But she wasn't dead. She was holding another gant—her gant—in her left hand. Before I could grab it from her, before I could use the power I had discovered inside my mind, she squeezed the handle.
And nothing happened.
I took it away from her and stepped back. Her hand fell to the floor, her eyes clouded over, and her broken body lay motionless at my feet.
To be safe I shot her then, and she disappeared like all the others into the immensity of the multiverse.
And then I sat down on the temple floor and tried to understand what had just happened.
Chapter 29
First, I remembered a thunderstorm.
It was one of my earliest memories. I was asleep in my room, and a big thunderclap woke me up. I saw lightning crackling outside the window, I heard rain drumming on the roof, and I was terrified. I must have cried out, because my mom came into my room right away. I don't know where Cassie or Matthew were—maybe she had already comforted them. Maybe I was so little that Matthew hadn't even been born yet.
"It's just a little storm, Larry," she said to me. "It'll go away."
I must have kept crying, because she got in bed next to me. And that was always the best thi
ng. She stroked my hair and held me close. "It won't be long," she murmured. "The storm always goes away."
And she was right. The thunderstorm raged outside for a while, and then it started to fade. And what did it matter, anyway? It couldn't hurt me, because my mom was holding me, and that meant everything was going to be all right.
I don't remember what happened next. I must have fallen asleep, because I always did.
And now I remembered what I had also remembered back in the colonnade with Palta: my mother was terrified of thunderstorms. While she had been comforting me, she was also frightened herself.
I missed my mother.
Here on Terra, she was far away; my world was far away. There was only me. And who was I? After what had just happened, I didn't really know. I could barely think.
Was I safe, or in terrible danger? If a hundred soldiers suddenly stormed the temple, could I defend myself with my pair of gants? Or, perhaps, with my mind?
I tried to understand what I had done to the old woman.
Presumably she had been the temple's caretaker—someone who spent her life in the place. And maybe the priests had trusted her with a gant to make sure that bad people could not desecrate the most sacred place on Terra.
But her gant was no match for the power I had found inside me.
Where did that power come from? Affron would know. Affron had seen something in me. A kindred spirit, perhaps.
But why me?
It made no sense.
But it felt like it made sense. In enough universes, someone could do almost anything.
I shook my head and tried to focus on this moment. Should I stay here in the temple, or leave and try to find the others? Were they still alive? How many other people in Urbis besides the old woman had gants—viators and soldiers and random people?
Finally I got to my feet and went over to the massive front doors. I didn't see any way to lock them or bar them. If people wanted to come in, the only way I could stop them was by killing them.
TERRA (The Portal Series, Book 2) Page 23
