DO NOT STOP ME, the angel was saying. I WILL BRING THE AGE OF SCIENCE. I WILL MAKE THE WORLD AS IT SHOULD BE.
“Are you a high god then?” Eshe was demanding, “that you make such choices for us?”
I AM BUT A DEMIURGE. IF THE CREATOR TRULY EXISTS, SHE IS FARTHER ABOVE ME THAN I AM ABOVE AN ANT.
“Let’s be gone, Bone,” Gaunt murmured. “We can discuss this... where we can breathe.” She twisted Eyetooth. She tried to avoid their being flung into the void; instead she shaped a dark portal.
“Demiurge,” Sarcopia said, heedless. “Despite your modesty, if we control you, do we control the universe?”
YOU EXAGGERATE—
“Are you mad?” said Jargo.
“You see a threat,” Sarcopia said. “I see a tool.” She raised her hands, and strange mists billowed forth to envelop the First Prisoner. It looked this way and that, muttering in its mighty voice, distracted as one in a dream.
“What are you doing?” Jargo demanded.
“I believe,” Eshe said, flexing her gauntlets, “Sarcopia is bewitching this demiurge. And if a demiurge shapes reality...”
Towers rose from the crystal plain, ivory filigrees all bearing a banner of a long-nailed hand clutching a full moon.
“Betrayer!” said Jargo. Crimson coruscations of light flowed out of nothingness to his left and his right, converging and spinning around his hands like the crowns of unseen torches. He splayed crystal fingertips, and the blood-light lashed against the First Prisoner. It staggered.
“Ha!” Jargo exulted. “The First Wizard weakened it! It will fall!”
“Why is Jargo not... attacking Sarcopia?” Bone asked Gaunt, hesitating beside the portal, unable to look away.
Gaunt gripped Eyetooth tightly. “I fear... Jargo has decided to kill the First Prisoner.”
“But why? Aside from it being huge and unnerving.”
“As I understand it, the First Prisoner stands for the diminishing of magic and the advancing of natural law. I think Jargo hopes that if the Prisoner is dead, magic will become yet more powerful.”
Sarcopia noticed Jargo’s efforts. She did not counteract him directly but reshaped her mist; the distracted angel muttered to itself.
A tower balcony shattered at a sudden earthquake, and its rubble flew toward Jargo. He countered with a sidestep and a fresh blast like purple fireflies. The rubble lost its solidity and hit the ground as a sort of bubbly foam.
“Should we not... be going?”
“Hold, Bone... Eshe approaches.”
“Are we agreed,” Eshe said to them “that neither sorcerer’s victory is desirable?”
Bone nodded, gratefully accepting a puff from the breathing apparatus.
“But what,” Gaunt whispered, “is desirable?”
“Entomb the angel,” said Eshe. “Status quo ante.”
“Help it escape,” said Bone. “End magic.”
“What?” said Gaunt, after she’d used the mask.
“Your own prolonged existence is the result of magic,” Eshe said.
“Indeed,” said Bone. “But it is unnatural and was originally the work of murderous sorcerers. I would be glad to see such people brought low.”
“There’s a compromise,” Gaunt realized. “What if we lure the demiurge far across the universe, away from our Earthe? It will take time to find its way back—millennia perhaps. Its influence might be subtle at first. Meanwhile we will almost have the status quo, though a more rational world will gradually arrive. And Eshe, if your land knows this change is coming, you will have an advantage.”
“Intriguing,” Eshe said, and Bone nodded.
Gaunt twirled Eyetooth and led them into darkness and ghostly geometries.
“One for my memoirs,” Eshe gasped.
Behind them a gap in the darkness revealed the magical duel atop the crystal plain.
“They seem un-lured,” Bone observed, grateful to be breathing deep (or perhaps occupying a place where breathing was unnecessary).
“Never fear,” Gaunt said, also rallying. “I am going to point Eyetooth between your heads.”
“What?” Bone said.
“Why?” Eshe said.
“You are foci. Bone, you’ve been touched by magic. I want you to envision a world that has more magic than ours. Bait the demiurge. But, Eshe, you are practical, rational. I want to you imagine that world as part of our own plane, so that the demiurge can one day return.”
Soon a new destination appeared beyond a fresh portal, hanging in a familiar-seeming starfield. It was a flat Earthe-like world... no, Gaunt realized, it was two such worlds, which had somehow survived a collision in which one had sliced through the other until the blue-green discs stuck together at a forty-five degree angle.
Out beyond the original portal the angel noticed. It stumbled closer. YES, YES...
“Gaunt,” Bone said, “can we get out of the way?”
Gaunt concentrated, waving the key a tiny fraction. The silvery discs containing the three of them drifted to one side.
The angel entered widderspace, spells still lashing at it through the portal to Earthe. YES! THE WIZARDS OF THAT PLACE CAST MANY A SPELL TO STABILIZE THEIR COLLIDING WORLDS, PROTECTING MILLIONS. SO MUCH MAGIC TO QUELL!
Bone said, “Millions?”
Gaunt could not answer.
“They are not our millions,” Eshe said.
Bone shook his head. “I steal wonders, not lives.”
“We’ve already killed,” Eshe said, “all of us. Grow up, thief. This is so often what it means to protect what you love.”
“No...” Bone stared at Gaunt, his usual insouciance melting into the plea of a lost child.
“Bone, I’m sorry—there’s no time—”
He closed his eyes and concentrated. As he did so, his light disc drifted away from theirs and took its place in the void between the angel and the conjoined world.
“Bone, no!”
“It will overrun me,” he called out. “There is only one way to save me, if that’s what you want. Use Eyetooth to lure the angel to another world—”
“Shut up, shut up, you great fool.”
She raised the key.
Eshe flashed a bright smile beneath a hard gaze. “I haven’t seen such self-sacrificing stupidity since my first year in the Whispering Hunt.”
“Not in later years?” Gaunt said through gritted teeth.
“The idealistic ones don’t last the first year,” Eshe said. “But I still miss them sometimes. Do as you will. Jargo and Sarcopia approach. I will delay them.”
Two bolts of deranged energies lashed past the demiurge and against Imago Bone, who had been chanting a nursery rhyme:
In a palace of seashells,
Finer than all he’ens or hells,
He dwells—or doesn’t—in the sea,
Maybe watching you and me.
The Walrus God! He is my friend!
When I my disbelief suspend!
We created him in jest
Such a god is surely best
For agnostic fishermen
Who say a prayer now and then.
Gaunt feared those were his last words, words fittingly strange for Bone; but she did as he’d asked. She twisted the key, and an opening to a new disc-shaped world appeared. This world seemed composed entirely of water with a few islands resembling giant shells (as perhaps they were). It gleamed blue beneath a blazing sand dollar of a sun.
The demiurge’s five faces grinned. Gaunt wished her disc toward Bone. At last she reached him and maneuvered them both behind the portal leading to the abode (as it might be) of the Walrus God, giving them temporary shelter from both the angel and the sorcerers.
Bone looked weak, shivering and covered in green frost. She embraced and warmed him, not knowing what else to do. Have I never held a man in this way, she wondered, just to bring him back from the brink? Her body, sharing warmth, seemed to tell her racing brain: we’re beyond courtship now. He has not conquered you. You
have not conquered him. Those are games for children.
The demiurge neared the portal. I WOULD MEET THIS GOD AND NOT-GOD OF THE AGNOSTICS...
“No!” came Sarcopia’s voice. “You’re mine to command!”
“Mine to destroy!” said Jargo.
“Out of our way, Eshe!”
But it was too late. The angel shrank to the proportions necessary to enter the portal and vanished from widderspace. Gaunt closed the gateway.
Eshe drifted back toward Gaunt and Bone.
“You,” Sarcopia said to the three gathered beside Eyetooth. “You have thwarted me. At least I’ll have the key. Over your dead bodies, naturally.”
“That key is mine, by right of conquest,” said Jargo.
“There’s no such thing as right of conquest,” Gaunt murmured, sheltering Bone. “There is conquest, and there are rights. They do not go together, as you’ll understand as soon as someone conquers you.”
But they did not listen. Jargo’s claim roused Sarcopia’s fury. Crimson adders lashed out at Jargo, who parried with a spider’s web of flickering green.
Widderspace filled with red-and-green swirls and spears and circles and cirrus wisps, and the battle as much resembled children’s finger-painting as a duel to the death.
“Your deeds are pointless—” Gaunt began.
But she could not finish, for Eshe had jabbed her with a potion-dabbed claw and snatched the key away.
In oblivion rose a new dream. Gaunt stood upon the highest balcony of a great hall dominated by a fireplace ten times the scale of her prior dream’s. Chandeliers hung on grand chains like fire-reflecting constellations. A flag billowed beyond a moonlit window, but Gaunt could not determine its nature.
A baby basket lay precariously on a high balustrade. Gaunt seemed to awaken from a daze, realizing the baby was hers and that she’d placed it there to claim for herself a precious moment of rest. She’d thought everything would be all right, but now she understood she’d been stupid and selfish.
She reached out too late. The baby woke, wailed, wobbled. The basket tipped into the void.
Gaunt screamed, hands raking empty air. She saw the tiny girl slip from the plunging basket, spinning wide-eyed toward her doom. But a peculiar thing happened, even though in the dream it seemed old knowledge: this is how it happens sometimes, when you fall.
The girl aged as she dropped.
Water burst into the mansion’s ground floor, and, even more unaccountably, narwhals swum amongst the bobbing furniture. The girl, now an armored young woman with long braids of red hair, landed upon one beast. She waved to Gaunt.
What are you? Gaunt called.
You have summoned us, the girl said. By traveling with a temporally complicated artifact, you have made yourselves temporally complicated.
What are you?
Think on this: what if you, as you are right now, are the best possible you there could ever be, even accounting for a vast metacosm brimming with yous. Nowhere in creation is there a better you than the one you are now. Would you find this knowledge crushing or liberating? Now, what if it could be proven that you are the very worst example of any you in existence, anywhere. No version of you is more foolish, addled, disappointing, or depraved. Would you find this knowledge deflating or exhilarating? Either way, the question is, if you could be your best self, what would you be?
The waters rose and swept over the balcony. The girl had vanished into the waves. Gaunt dove into them.
#
Gaunt awoke in Bone’s arms, still surrounded by the cold of widderspace. He said, “If you’re lying and she dies, Eshe, there’s no place in the cosmos where you can hide from me.”
“It is merely a stunning solution.” Eshe was holding the key. Gaunt saw her twist it. Though Eshe had not employed Eyetooth before, her observations seemed to have taught her much.
The portal to Earthe vanished.
The flourishes of power faded. The sorcerous duel ebbed.
“What have you done?” demanded Sarcopia.
“Don’t you see?” a tiny Jargo spat, his crystalline form flaking away into a sparkling cloud. “We are tied to the magic of our Earthe. Now we haven’t the power to return.”
“You kept nothing in reserve?” his seagull squawked. “It all went into the duel?”
The little Jargo shook his fist. Sarcopia’s white raven squawked in dismay.
“By trapping you here I’ve removed two more threats from the world,” Eshe said, “at the paltry cost of we few souls marooned.”
Bone stared at her, green frost still chilling his eyebrows. “You seem so... warm and kind... and yet you...”
“Your lady-love was about to see millions killed to preserve our own world. I’ve doomed a few souls to remove threats to my homeland—and yours, if you care. I call that enlightened and efficient.”
Gaunt stirred, gripped Bone’s hand. “Don’t be a child, Eshe,” she said. “We’ll not be marooned. Return that key.”
“No,” said Eshe.
Although the two sorcerers shivered aghast there in the cold of widderspace, the seagull flung itself toward Eshe, who raised and twisted Eyetooth. A portal opened near the bird, an opening into someplace green and bright and full of voices. He evaded it.
Eshe mocked, “Do you still believe, Johann Sebastian, that all things we experience are things we secretly desire?”
The bird squawked something foul and performed the act it had referenced. Then it battered her spattered head.
At that moment of distraction Gaunt kicked Eshe in the gut, and Bone, dropping a pretense, went from looking at death’s door to merely at death’s stoop. He grabbed the key.
“You are despicable,” Eshe said.
“I am a thief,” Bone said.
“Master,” the seagull, Johann Sebastian, said in wonder, for now he had gotten a good look through Eshe’s new portal. “There it is. The kind of place I always dreamed of...”
It was a world of tiny people chased by birds. The three-eyed birds had shining rainbow plumage and the four-armed people had green skin. Nevertheless the seagull sighed. “So long, Jargo. I’m going to a better place.”
The seagull dove through. The portal closed.
“My magic!” the tiny Jargo seethed. “My kingdom, my slaves, my servants, my worshippers. My familiar. Gone. Because of you!”
Jargo’s will drove him toward the three, and Bone reacted almost instinctively. Almost. For he’d already considered an interesting use of Eyetooth.
“Starfang’s summit,” Bone called out as he spun the key, “ at local noontime.”
Jargo, his caution gone, fell into a new, blazing, portal. His scream was short.
Bone closed the gateway, and all went quite dark.
Sarcopia and Eshe just stared.
“Any ideas, Gaunt?” Bone said, passing her Eyetooth. “I trust your judgment.”
“I could say the same of you. Sarcopia, I offer you the same boon we’ve granted Jargo’s familiar. Happiness in some other realm.”
Sarcopia shook her head. “I offer another option. Take me to my home in Ebontide. There I may grant you astonishing boons. Eshe here can verify that we Vorres abide by our oaths.”
Eshe nodded. “I do not approve, but she isn’t lying.”
Gaunt frowned. “If I was fresh, I might consider it. But I’m too weary for legalistic oath-wrangling.”
“Then we return to Loomsberg,” Bone said. “We can secure Eyetooth there. The environment will blunt Sarcopia’s powers.”
“You did it,” Gaunt realized, recalling the scene in the room at the Tilted Windmill. “Didn’t you? Bargained with the delven somehow.”
“Yes,” Bone said, turning the key. “Half of me, for all of you.”
He opened the way to a world—
Beyond the portal bobbed boats on a waterfront, and there were seemingly a million of them, canoes and caravels, rafts and triremes, coracles and cruisers of steel. Many intelligent creatures swarmed aboard t
he madcap armada, bespectacled green monkeys and armored red frogs, purple dwarves with endless beards in which whole bee colonies swirled...
“I do not understand... I pictured Loomsberg...”
“Some part of your mind may be resisting your plan,” Eshe said.
“A part concerned with self-preservation,” Gaunt said.
“Then you do it, Gaunt,” Bone said, closing the portal. “Honor my wish.”
“It would be like killing you,” Gaunt said.
“More like maiming,” Bone said lightly. At her silent stare, he added, “That was perhaps in poor taste. I might still have as many as thirty years left after my bargain, Persimmon. And I’ve already lived ninety. It’s not like dying.”
Gaunt shook her head. They could flee to another world. But they would be forever defending Eyetooth. Death would hound them both. “Yes it is, Bone. Yes it is. But I will do it.”
Hating herself, she turned the key—
Beyond the new gateway three-headed green ducks glided down a blue river under an arching wooden bridge filled with blue giraffes clutching flowered mouth-parasols of white and red and pink and yellow...
“I too pictured Loomsberg... what is happening?”
Sarcopia laughed. “To see my enemies so thwarted is almost worth death.”
“Gaunt and Bone,” Eshe said. “You are not the marrying kind, I think. But I think you hesitate on the brink of a similarly great commitment to each other.”
“Survival?” Bone said.
“Killing?” Gaunt said.
“Debt,” Eshe said. “To return home in this way, Gaunt, will make you feel indebted to Bone. And, Bone, to dedicate yourself to Gaunt in this way is a kind of genuflection, a sealing of your life to hers. You will feel debt to her as a result.”
“Ridiculous,” Bone said. “I am giving, not stealing. Why would I feel indebted to her?”
Eshe smiled. “Nevertheless. I have been married, once.”
“Your words are bewildering,” Gaunt said. “What are you proposing?”
“Give me the key—”
“Ha!” put in Sarcopia.
“Give me the key and I will aim Eyetooth between your heads and open the way to Loomsberg. I have never been, but I think you together can open the way. I swear on the blood of the Swan Goddess I will attempt no mischief.”
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