This twisted this way and that, confused, hesitating.
“We mean you no harm—” Gaunt began.
Two people burst into the room with weapons drawn. “Surrender!” called the guards from the bridge, pointing blades at This.
All reason was done. This lashed out with flourishes like jabbing elbows. Four humans reeled backward.
Gaunt snatched Eyetooth, closed her thumb on the sapphire, and twisted.
The world turned. This time everything spun faster. The light and sound and texture of sunset swirled like blood down a drain, and Gaunt and Bone fell again into the dark place lit by ghostly geometries. Gaunt tried to close the portal behind them, but This plunged into widderspace before she could do so. It was not fleeing this time.
As the gateway spiraled shut and left the stunned guards with a mystery, Gaunt noticed that a ghostly residue of sunlight and moonlight remained around herself and Bone. A form of protection granted by Sunspool and Moonwax?
This lashed out at them, but its substance recoiled at the glow.
“I’m not complaining,” Gaunt observed. “But you didn’t seal any agreement with the delven, Bone.”
“Maybe they disagree,” Bone said after a moment’s hesitation.
She gave him a hard look. “Well, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Be ready, Bone. To the cage of the First Prisoner!” she called out. “At the very moment we departed Loomsberg!”
There appeared a nearby portal. It led to a moonlit crystal field dominated by a titanic black coffin.
“And for my next feat...” Gaunt aimed Eyetooth behind her head, calling out, “The land of the plumed serpents!”
A fresh gateway opened, and she turned to behold a jungled realm twittering beneath four egg-shaped moons in a chartreuse sky. Vine-draped pillars proclaimed the flowing Vuuhrr tongue. In the distance rose stony domes, with colorful winged shapes twining beside them—
This! their foe whispered. It whipped away toward its paradise.
“‘Bye,” said Gaunt. She smiled at Bone. “I surmised that the survivors of the Motive War used Eyetooth to escape to another world, one where the Vuuhrr perception magic that triggered the war could not function. They knew Eyetooth must eventually return to our world, so they determined to keep it out of evil hands. Thus our friend This.”
“I am impressed,” Bone said.
“I think, by terms of the oath,” Gaunt said only, “you had best proceed from here.”
She handed him the key. He nodded.
They stepped through the other portal onto the crystal.
Gaunt and Bone shivered and gasped, for this moonlit summit seemed a trifle short on air; but the sun-and-moon glow about them brightened and their lungs rallied and a warm breeze revived them like a memory of summer twilight.
“Now to get our bearings,” Bone began, before they were assaulted by a cold yet more terrible, and a blazing heat as well.
For perhaps a hundred feet away stood three adversaries. One, a figure in grey furs—Snowheart, surely—merely watched behind her breathing mask, leaning against her bat-winged beast. But a second figure, shining within some manner of crystal armor as a seagull flew about its head, cast blasts of arctic wind accompanied by razor-sharp sigils of green ice. A third, no doubt Sarcopia Vorre, white-robed with a white raven on her shoulder, gestured like a storyteller who’d downed ten cups of tea and had one minute to relay an epic. From her fingers flowed waves of flame, and monstrous fangs sprouted from the swirling oranges and yellows and reds, each tooth a bonfire.
Gaunt and Bone’s solar-and-lunar glow absorbed the blasts. The frost unraveled, the fire dispersed. It was like wading into ocean surf. They were buffeted but unharmed.
The assault ebbed, and they could just overhear their opponents’ exclamations of surprise. But the sounds were drowned out by an immense moaning rising from the vault.
They stopped short, covered their ears, and instinctively looked away. But there was no escaping the wail. Under the influence of that sound they stared out over the moonlit roof of the world and imagined they could hear the Earthe’s every falling leaf and hailstone and moth-wing whisper. Their throats felt the thirst of cacti and their lungs the ache of a whale diving too deep. Their minds’ eyes knew starlight in the windows of a room where a newborn took her first taste of air and scented her first sweat and blood and felt her heart shake with the terror and rightness of freedom... as simultaneously they sensed five thousand miles away in a room full of sun-motes a feverish old man dying, lost in a boyhood memory of tide pools and the lacelight of reflected water dancing on shadowed rocks. And, to know all this, every river-kissed valley and ocean-embraced peninsula, every mountain peak and deep sea trench, every squawk and chitter and roar, and to be able to touch absolutely none of it...
They stared at each other across this abyss of experience and gripped one another’s hands.
All these impressions flickered through their minds in the first second of the First Prisoner’s cry.
It lasted half a minute.
No battle occurred in that time. No speech was conceivable. In the wail’s aftermath every human on the summit stared long and silently at every other.
Bone recovered first. “I do what I must,” he croaked, wavering on his feet. He released Gaunt’s hand and, like a drunk with loosely grasped bottle and precariously grasped reality, advanced with a white-knuckled grip on Eyetooth. Gaunt followed, dazed.
“How can anyone bear the sound?” Snowheart murmured in the distance. Her voice seemed to boom with unearthly clarity.
“I am inured to all screams,” said the man in crystal armor with a cough. “Even these.”
“I’ve known the screams of lost souls,” Sarcopia said, her voice hitting a few high notes. “I am unshaken...”
Bone kept walking, his usually jocular scarred face an expressionless blank, until he reached the place he judged he could drop the key. “And now...” he began.
But Gaunt, who’d said nothing since the angel’s cry, was now seized by a rage surging from some molten place in the deep caverns of her mind.
And she snatched Eyetooth from Bone’s hand.
“Gaunt?” Bone began. But for once he was too dazed and too slow. She raised the key toward the Logos Lock.
Eyetooth’s hypergeometric extensions flashed out across the distance and connected with the vault. An earthquake-roar of tumblers shook the mountaintop.
It all ended with a click soft as a cricket’s chirp, or an acorn’s fall, or the first pebble of an avalanche hitting the second.
The prongs flashed back into the substance of Eyetooth.
“What?” Bone managed to say. “Why?”
“It was like...” Gaunt said, struggling to find words to explain her anger, “like hearing a poem being burned...”
The great vault opened; light streamed forth like a second sun. “Cover your eyes!” Gaunt cried out to all assembled, and Bone at least obeyed.
Words seared through their minds. Midnight becoming noon all in an instant: that was the quality of the voice. FEAR NOT, it said. MY VISAGE IS VEILED.
Gaunt spread the fingers covering her face. The giant figure stood cloaked in a fiery nimbus, blinking star-cluster eyes. It dimmed and its contours grew clearer, an octopus of moonlight with wings of thundercloud.
DOES THIS FORM SUIT?
“Ah,” said Gaunt.
“Um,” said Bone.
Mist swirled about it, and the colossal figure became a titanic tree, trunk recalling the galaxies of the sky, branches like dark nebulae, fruits as moons of many colors. NO, mused the Dawn Angel. The shape dwindled to something resembling a redwood bearing branches like an oak’s but laden with apples. BETTER. AND YET—The shape collapsed into a humanoid form, bat-winged, raven-headed, seagull-beaked.
Gaunt and Bone and their foes stumbled toward it like bluemoss addicts.
“You are most chimeric...” Gaunt murmured.
I AM A DEMIURGE.
&nbs
p; “You, uh, write stage plays?” Bone ventured with a squeak.
“Not a dramaturge,” Gaunt said. “A demiurge! A sort of secondary Creator.”
YES. BUT KNOW ALSO THAT IN A SENSE I AM ALL OF YOU, A COMPOSITE OF THE DREAMS OF UNTOLD QUINTILLIONS.
“Are you certain you don’t write plays?” Bone said. “I might find that slightly less terrifying.”
PERHAPS I HAVE. I HAVE BEEN SO MANY THINGS. A MANY-TENDRILED PHILOSOPHER FROM THE CONSTELLATION YOU CALL THE BEAR’S CUP. A MULTI-HORNED SLUG-BEAST TENDING THE SICK ON A WORLD OF SEVEN SUNS. AN ARMORED ICE CREEPER ON AN AIRLESS MOON, AND A SUNSPOT STRIDER ON THE FACE OF A STAR. I AM ALL OF THEM AND ALL OF YOU.
“And we,” Gaunt said, “felt all the world in your cry.”
YOU HAVE FREED ME, WHY?
“I felt, for a moment, that I was you, dying in there eternally.”
“That is all?” scoffed Sarcopia. “A feeling of sympathy? For this destroyer of magic?”
DESTROYER? said the angel. NO. IN THE END, GIVEN TIME, WHAT YOU CALL MAGIC WILL RESIDE PRIMARILY IN IMAGINATION. IN LOVE. IN TRUST. IN COMMUNITY. IN INDIVIDUALITY—
“Bah!” said the crystalline man. “Paltry things, all!”
“For once I agree with you, Jargo,” said Sarcopia.
FABLE WILL PASS ITS TORCH TO HISTORY. MAGIC WILL BE HARDER TO FIND. BUT JUSTICE WILL BE EASIER TO COME BY.
“Have we heard enough, Sarcopia?” said the crystal figure called Jargo.
“Indeed,” Sarcopia answered. “And you, Eshe?”
“Yes,” said the woman Gaunt and Bone had until now known as Snowheart. “Kpalamaa prefers the status quo.”
“Give us Eyetooth,” Jargo said to Gaunt, holding out a gleaming armored hand.
“Indeed,” said Eshe, making an identical gesture. “We will make good use of the key.”
“Give it to me,” Sarcopia said, “or I blind your friend.” For her raven had settled onto Bone’s head with a hungry look.
Sarcopia smiled. “Thief, do not test your reflexes against Regret. She has eaten many a sorcerer’s eyes.”
“Bone,” Gaunt said slowly, “don’t get brave here.”
Bone began laughing.
“Bone?”
“No, not precisely,” said Bone’s voice, and yet not Bone’s voice. “He found me in a deep place of Archaeopolis long ago. He thought he‘d left me behind.”
Bone snorted, and pale dust poured out his nose, gleaming in angelic light, before he snorted it back in.
“Bone dust?” Eshe said.
“I was a skull when Bone found me. But a most ancient one. If not for my mighty will, it would have collapsed into dust long ago. It was a simple matter to ensorcel Bone and flow into his head, bonding my skull to his.”
Gaunt stared in horror. She managed to say, “You’ve been with him all this time?”
Again the laugh. “Ah, my dear, you wondered why he was so thick-headed.”
“I’m informed you are a Class One threat,” Sarcopia said, “and yet you’ve slipped in under our noses.”
“Under the thief’s nose too,” Jargo said. “What are you?”
“I am the First Wizard, fools. I grabbed power by the chakras and never let it go. Even after losing life and skin. Unlike this First Prisoner, I chewed my way to the top. I understand power in a way even angels cannot. And I say unto you, power makes us all monsters. The only way to redeem power is to disperse it. But magic always concentrates power. So I contrived to set the First Prisoner free. I prophesied that Imago Bone here—” here the First Wizard caused Bone to wave “—would one day partner with someone of wit, will, and empathy, and that she would free the angel. Indeed, it would be impossible for her not to do so and still be Persimmon Gaunt.”
“You... you’re the founder of all we hold dear,” Sarcopia said.
“How can you oppose magic?” Jargo demanded.
“Because I’ve lived millennia, dolt. I’ve seen what magic does to people. Your illustrious ancestor Jargo I once used me as a paperweight, right where you‘ve got a bust of Klarga now. And Sarcopia Vorre, did you know your family name descends from the Vuuhrr, whose knowledge I bear? That‘s because I taught your line‘s founder too, before he decapitated me. And Eshe—the Namer of Dust, whom you met, to your long sorrow? She was my pupil, whole stole much of my memory. Yet I do remember breeding the first Olitiau too. And familiars! My potions accidentally produced the first of your kind. You have unearthly appetites, do you not?”
“Well,” squawked the seagull, “idealists are tasty, what can I say?”
“Eyeballs!” croaked the raven from Bone’s shoulder, though not acting on the threat.
“Sure,” said the seagull. “If we find an idealist, you can keep that part.”
The First Wizard chuckled. “And Gaunt, those kleptomancers you‘ve tangled with started with a book stolen from me. And your tattoo—”
“Say no more,” she snapped.
“As you wish.”
SO, the First Prisoner said, I HAVE YOU TO THANK FOR FREEDOM. BUT WHY?
“To gloat—and for this.”
Bone spewed dust into the angel’s face.
It shuddered and transformed, swelling into a black-robed, hooded giant of unknown age and gender. Its hands were buried within sleeves of inky star-flecked shadow. Within its hood drifted galaxies. NOW, came a raspy counterfeit of its original voice, THE FIRST PRISONER AND THE FIRST WIZARD ARE AS ONE.
It reached toward the Olitiau. The beast sensed its doom and took wing, but a hand like an inky nebula slapped it against the crystal plain. When the hand flowed back into the robes, there remained neither flesh nor bones but a book marked with a portrait of an Olitiau.
THUS WILL YOU ALL END.
“All?” Gaunt said, putting her arm around the retching but liberated Bone.
YOU’VE ALL BEEN TOUCHED BY MAGIC. I WON’T HAVE YOU RUNNING LOOSE. I THINK BONE WILL BECOME AN OVERWROUGHT SAGA UPON INFERIOR PAPER BENEATH A LURID COVER. AND YOU WILL BECOME AN ERUDITE VOLUME THAT WEARY STUDENTS MIGHT BE FORCED TO READ.
“You are cruel,” Bone coughed.
HOW CAN IT EVER BE CRUEL TO DESTROY AN ELITE?
“Will you destroy yourself as well?” Gaunt demanded.
IN TIME I WILL BECOME A CAMPFIRE STORY ABOUT POETIC JUSTICE.
The white raven returned to Sarcopia, who was saying to someone unseen, “Lady Cynthia and Lord Raz, you will find its weakness or I will have your souls!”
Jargo waved shining hands, and the razor-symboled ice blasts recommenced. All shattered harmlessly against the giant presence.
Eshe wordlessly leapt and sank metallic claws into the figure’s back. It shrugged and backhanded her. She skidded across the crystal. YOU, MY DEAR, WILL BE AN INTELLIGENCE REPORT WITH MOST OF ITS WORDS REDACTED.
Gaunt and Bone ran to her side. “I...” Eshe sputtered as they helped her up. “I thank you,” she finished in surprise. “I seem to be mostly intact.”
“As do I,” Bone said, noting Sarcopia unleashing a blast that resembled a bloodthirsty phoenix. “Surprisingly. But I think... our minutes are numbered like pages. The protection Gaunt and I arrived with... appears to have faded. I’m short of breath...”
Eshe shared her strange breathing mask, first with Bone, then with Gaunt. They inhaled gratefully as Eshe said, “I do not think the Wizard-Prisoner will stop with us.”
“Indeed,” Gaunt said, before taking her turn with the mask. “How many innocent people... will be deemed ‘touched by magic’?”
“That is often the problem with revolutionaries,” Eshe said. “Killing becomes a habit. Doctrines twist to support it.” She reclaimed the mask.
“We need a plan,” Bone said. “Preferably one... that doesn’t, heh, involve... exertion...”
Gaunt raised Eyetooth.
Once again a flourish of prongs crossed the air, this time striking the Wizard-Prisoner. But her target only laughed as the metal passed through him, as though he or it or both were illusions.
“It was,” Bone said, “at least a plan.”
“I have one more... but you won’t like it.”
“I like my lack of plans... even less.”
“What do you propose?” Eshe said.
“This.”
Gaunt twisted the key—
An emerald expanse of jungle opened beside them, and before them twisted a dark spiraling shape.
Gaunt spoke in sibilant syllables, pointing from the living symbol to the possessed angel. “Gaunt,” said the black squiggle, and launched itself through the portal toward the foe.
“What... did you tell it?” Bone asked.
“I informed it... who was ultimately responsible... for the theft of Eyetooth. I think it carries a trace... of the magic of the Motive War... and can see my own motives. And I think it likes me.”
This flowed up the Wizard-Prisoner’s robes and engulfed its head like a crown. Gaunt closed the portal.
WHAT! WHAT IS...
“This.”
YOU WILL NOT STOP ME!
Lightning flickered around the head of the angel, and the dark shape convulsed.
“T – h – i – s...”
The dark crown became bone white.
NO, NO, I AM POWER, YOU ARE NOTHING, YOU ARE...
“i – s...”
NO...
“i...”
This toppled and shattered into black dust.
“This... This was a hero,” Gaunt said.
The Dawn Angel gasped, holding its starry hands to its head. I AM FREE. THE GUARDIAN OF THE KEY DESTROYED THE WIZARD...
Its form twisted. Now the vast angel possessed five slack-jawed faces, resembling all the humans on the summit, and two quivering sets of white wings.
“It’s weakened!” Sarcopia concluded.
“We might seal it up again!” shouted Jargo.
Eshe stepped forward wordlessly, leaving behind Gaunt and Bone.
“But should we?” Bone whispered. “I understand the First Wizard’s... argument. Minus the murder...”
Gaunt said, “I can see it either way... With or without magic... an empty belly is still an empty belly...”
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