by Conner, Jack
She chuckled. “He won’t see you. He has other concerns.”
Indeed, Uthua was directing the scientists and technicians, personally overseeing the firing of the Device. He barked orders, stared at read-outs, and even adjusted several machines himself, tweaking with a wrench, jerking a lever. This was clearly his operation. Lights snapped and arced, throwing surreal illumination on the tall, scarred fish-man with his all-black eyes, muscular frame and needle teeth. A burgundy cape swept from his broad shoulders.
Meanwhile the other guests mingled and socialized, eager yet apprehensive. If something went wrong, Uthua’s wrath would be terrible. They watched him with awe, but fear too. Even the other Collossum present looked at him in much the same way. Avery could identify them by the way the others treated them, bowing and fawning, but careful to give them space. There were three of them, and one, Avery saw without surprise, was Sartrand, draped in a silver robe and surrounded by priests.
The Muugist stared at the Device with a complicated scowl. Avery had no doubt he despaired of Uthua firing the Device on the behalf of the R’loth; he wanted to steal it, alter its functions and activate it on behalf of the Muug.
Good, Avery thought. This might just work.
The last of the invited guests trickled in and stood patiently, nervously, while Uthua worked and prepared the Device for activation. The machines storing the Atomic energy hummed louder, and louder, and Avery’s hair stood up even straighter.
A knot formed in his belly. It was almost time. He prayed Layanna and the others were hurrying, that they were doing what they needed to do. Planting bombs and breaking seals on extradimensional engines. If they weren’t, all was lost. Similarly, all would be lost if he failed to do what he needed to do.
Uthua spoke.
“It is ready,” he said, loudly and clearly, and instantly everyone in the room straightened and quieted, giving him their full attention. The near-Elder surveyed the crowd with black eyes. Around him sparks crackled from machine to machine, each one like a giant bee hive. “At last,” he said, “the time has come to ensure the victory of the hosts of Octung, not just in the continents of Consur and Urslin, but throughout the world. The utter triumph of the Lightning Crown is at hand.”
He paused while the Octunggen generals and heroes saluted, stomping their boots loudly.
He nodded. “Not only their triumph, but also the triumph of we Collossum.”
This time the soldiers, Sheridan and Avery included, made the sign of the trident over their hearts, three extended fingers, and bowed to the nearest Collossum. Sheridan had coached him in the niceties. That done, Avery began looking around, making sure he knew where Sartrand stood. Feigning a sudden spasm of nerves, he began to move away from Sheridan, but as it happened he didn’t have time.
“But first,” Uthua said, “the way must be cleared. Only the worthy shall witness this most glorious of events.”
What’s this? Avery thought, tasting fear on his tongue.
Soldiers materialized out of the shadows at the edges of the rooms, guns drawn and faces set. One group approached a two-star general and disarmed the suddenly terrified man. Another group arrested a woman to Avery’s left, another a man to his right. It all happened in a blur, so fast Avery could hardly believe it. What the hell was happening? The crowd murmured in apprehension.
Avery was completely unprepared when another group of soldiers seized Sheridan and dragged her backward while one of them removed her pistol. Snarling, she struggled against them, eyes blazing.
“What’s the meaning of this?” she demanded.
The soldiers did not answer.
Other guests muttered and backed away from the soldiers as if afraid they would be the next ones arrested, but when no more seizures were forthcoming they blinked and returned their attention to Uthua, hoping for explanation.
The Collossum’s eyes glittered. “These individuals meant to move against me and my fellow Revered as soon as the Device was activated. They belonged to a faction of the government—a very small faction, granted—known as the Red Hand. They meant to use their newly energized weapons to assault the Great Temple.” Shocked, indignant muttering greeted this. “As you can see, such secrets cannot be kept from gods, and now the traitors shall be given fitting punishment. Those in Lusterqal are likewise being rounded up as we speak.”
Avery met Sheridan’s eyes but could not detect her thoughts. Her face was like stone. The troopers handcuffed her and forced her and the other four traitors toward the doors.
“This isn’t over, demon!” the two-star general shouted at Uthua. A soldier struck him across the face, and he spat out blood and what looked like a tooth. The general opened his mouth to speak again, and this time the soldier simply shot him, right through the head. The people in the room jumped at the noise and sudden violence. Without emotion, the soldiers hefted the dead man up. One threw the corpse over his shoulder, heedless of the gore.
Edging around the spilled blood and brain matter, the troopers forced the captives out, and Avery tried to catch Sheridan’s eyes one last time but couldn’t. For some reason, grief filled him. He had told her weeks ago that she was mad to plot against the Collossum, that they would surely catch her, but she had not listened, and now she was being led away to slaughter if she was lucky—but more likely a torture cell, perhaps even a room in this very building to become the subject of scientists. Hardly believing it, Avery felt a hitch in his throat.
Don’t be stupid. She’s Sheridan! She deserves whatever’s coming to her.
Doesn’t she?
Then it hit him: if she died, so too would Ani.
Reeling, he turned back to Uthua, who had assumed a sober posture. His black gaze pondered the retreating back of the last captive, then returned to the quicksilver of the Device.
“It’s time,” he said, and even though it was almost a whisper everyone in the whole room took a breath.
The air rippled around Uthua, and he began moving his hands across the surface of the Device, not quite touching it, but affecting it on some other-planal level. Avery got the sense that he was coaxing it, getting it ready to open up to him like a lover.
This was Avery’s chance. He forced thoughts of Ani and Sheridan away. Sucking up his courage, he cut through the gathering of generals, celebrities and politicians, at last nearing Sartrand. The Collossum’s attention was on the Device, and he wore the same bitter expression he had before. He seemed completely unmoved by the arrests of Sheridan and the other conspirators.
“Excuse me,” Avery whispered, touching the god’s sleeve.
Two men who must be Sartrand’s personal priests stepped forward, forcing him back. “Leave off,” one said. “Now isn’t the time for a blessing.”
“Sartrand,” Avery called.
The priests, bodyguards as much as anything else, clapped their hands on him.
In irritation, Sartrand looked over as if to shoo away a fly, but as soon as he saw Avery his expression changed. The priests were preparing to physically haul Avery away when Sartrand said, “Release him.”
He didn’t have to ask twice.
“Give us privacy,” Sartrand instructed, and the priests bowed and moved off several feet. With all the hissing and spitting of machines in the room, he and Avery needn’t fear being overheard.
“Is that you?” Sartrand said. He sounded as though he couldn’t believe it. In a whisper, he added, “The paramour of the Black Bitch?” Delight twinkled in his eyes, and he almost looked on the verge of laughter.
“It’s me,” Avery said. “And I need your help.”
Sartrand almost clapped his hands. “I can’t imagine how you got in here. The Red Hand, I suppose. It doesn’t matter.” He sighed, and the amusement drained from him. “I’m going to have to have you arrested. Please don’t take it personally.” He lifted his hand to signal someone.
“Don’t. It would be a mistake.”
“Oh? Why is that?” He lowered the hand.
&nbs
p; Good, Avery thought. There was a reason Sartrand had sent the priests away. He was hoping.
“Because if you do you’ll never get your hands on the Device,” Avery said.
“Pardon me?”
“That’s right. I can help you get it.”
Dismissal crossed Sartrand’s features. “You’re mad. It’s almost over now. We’ve lost.” He nodded vaguely to Uthua.
“But not yet.” Avery heard the desperation in his voice and forced himself to rein his fear in. “If you help us, we will help you.”
Sartrand clearly wanted to end this conversation, but he couldn’t quite let himself. “Tell me quickly. What do you intend?”
“My friends are going to cause a distraction at any moment. When they do, this room will empty. Many will rush off. That will leave us and a few others alone with the Device.”
Sartrand frowned. He’s considering it.
“And Uthua,” Sartrand said, as if Avery had missed something.
“That’s where you come in. I happen to know where some extradimensional weapons are hidden in this room, as the Red Hand was planning to use them. While you engage Uthua, I’ll locate them and destroy him for you. After that the Device is yours.”
Sartrand studied Avery intently. There was nothing distracted or impatient about his manner now. Avery had his full attention. “And why would you do this? What’s in it for you?”
“Layanna,” Avery said. “She has long had Muugist sympathies.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Avery remembered Sartrand offering Layanna the chance to join him. “When she saw you and the others so bravely fighting on behalf of the Muug, she meditated for a long time about it. For days. At last she emerged and said she had reached out her mind to the Muug and they had touched her. Changed her. Now she dedicates herself to them. My friends and I are bound to her, and we’ll do whatever she says. Joined with you, we can change the world. The cosmos.” He attempted to make his eyes blaze with passion.
A similar passion kindled in Sartrand’s face, slowly at first, but then all at once. “Yes! I have prayed for this. How I have prayed.” A sudden consternation gave him pause. “But it must be fast. It must be now. If your friends don’t come through—”
Uthua’s other-self erupted out of him, filling the center of the chamber with his dark, globular form. Phantasmagorical flesh heaved and bunched, and strange lights flickered through the murk sickeningly. His tentacles plunged into the Device, disappearing from view. The stench of ammonia clogged Avery’s nose and mouth, and he fought for breath. He tried not to look at the roiling, shapeless bulwarks that radiated from the center of the chamber, enfolding the Device between malignant pseudopods. The tendrils that disappeared into the silver sphere squirmed and flexed vigorously, as if Uthua was working on some other plane, going about one last major effort before the final push.
And so he must have been, for with a last flex and twist, a riot of tentacles emerged from the quicksilver, and to Avery’s surprise they brought something out of the Device. It was long, much too long to have fit in the sphere, but of course it hadn’t, really, it had existed on some other plane, just waiting to be extracted. Uthua extracted it now, pulling a long, gleaming silver lance from the depths of the machine. He held it up, and light shone from it, glittering and strange. It’s a lightning rod, Avery realized, but it was like none he’d ever seen.
The key, he thought. Yaslen had said that the Device was a lock, and that the key was contained inside of it until the proper time—that it was in fact the key that needed to be infused with the energies of the Atomic Sea.
“Whatever your friends are going to do, they’d better do it now,” Sartrand hissed.
Avery didn’t reply, but he could feel himself sweating. Hurry, Layanna.
“Now,” Uthua intoned, staring up at the silver lance, “the final blow will be struck. All hail the Outer Lords!”
“All hail the Outer Lords!” the group chanted.
One of the writhing tendrils triggered a switch. All of a sudden a great blast of energy leapt from the pedestal and into the lightning rod. As the energy funneled into it, the rod glowed and crackled with life, turning a dazzling blue-white, and Avery knew that if he or any other mortal had been holding it, the thing would have burnt his hands off—and possibly the rest of him.
Uthua’s tentacles raised the crackling lance high in the air, letting it become suffused with energy. It crackled louder, and louder, and the air blurred around it. The static charge in the chamber grew so intense it burned Avery’s lungs and seared his eyes.
At last the rod had filled with the necessary energy, and Uthua shut the machines down. They died with a winding roar, and with no further ado Uthua raised the silver spear high overhead, preparing to drive it down into the Device in one final, victorious blow—
The floor pitched from side to side. People screamed. Another blast, and the floor pitched the other way. Avery tottered, barely kept his footing. The guests gasped and glanced around. Uthua paused. Screams came from outside, from all directions.
Explosions rocked the Over-City, audible even over the hiss and spit and boom of the fading machines, even over the cries of the damned in the halls beyond.
“We’re under attack!” someone gasped.
“What shall we do?”
The floor pitched again, this time flinging Sartrand against Avery. Both righted themselves quickly. Others were on the floor.
“That one was close,” someone said.
Uthua indicated one of the other two Collossum besides Sartrand, a tall woman with black hair and green eyes. “See to it,” he ordered.
“Yes, my lord.”
She waved to a certain general, who stomped his heel and beckoned for his troops, and they followed him and the woman out in one long rush. The other Collossum, the last one besides Sartrand and Uthua, met them and helped lead the way. The guests looked around at each other uneasily. The floor rocked.
“It’s a diversion, nothing more,” Uthua said. “Pay no mind. It’s being looked after. Don’t let it delay our final victory.”
“Now,” Avery told Sartrand.
Uthua raised the rod overhead once more, coiling his tentacles to plunge it down swiftly into the waiting Device—
Sartrand’s other-self exploded outward. In a roiling, heaving mass of wine-red bulwarks and pseudopods, he barreled straight at Uthua. Several of the guests occupied the space between the two gods, and he tore them to pieces as he went, eating what was left. Most of the others ran for the door.
Uthua saw him coming and braced himself. The two god-things met with a clap of thunder that rocked the floor even more violently than the outside blasts had done. Strange colors filled the air, hissing and crackling like radio static.
In the halls outside, the patients that had been driven mad by torture screamed, pierced perhaps on some psychic level by the violence.
Pseudopods smashed against pseudopods, and wine-dark tentacles tore at rearing mounds of ebon, phantasmagorical flesh. Organelles flamed and swelled, pulsing with whatever passed for adrenaline among the god-things, or perhaps preparing defenses. Uthua plunged his tendrils deep into Sartrand, penetrating the outer amoebic wall and thrusting inside, questing, questing for Sartrand’s mortal form. Sartrand’s tendrils did the same, but Uthua was too large; his mortal form too far back for Sartrand to reach, and the acids that filled his sac were stronger; they ate at Sartrand’s limbs viciously.
Avery watched in awe and horror, as did the few people who had stayed. Some, shaken, fled in panic, and Avery didn’t blame them. These were their gods. It was unthinkable that they should war like this. Blasphemy to even behold it.
Avery tore his eyes away from the battle and rushed toward the lab benches and trays, scanning frantically for what he needed. There! It was the backpack the Device was carried in. It wasn’t the backpack, of course, not the one he’d grown used to over the past few weeks, as Sheridan had used its very familiarity—with
its chips and stains and defects—to trick him in Ayu. That trunk was gone. The Octunggen had found or fashioned a new one, however, and it was open on one of the benches.
Somewhere there must be tools for moving the Device. The scientists wouldn’t always have a Collossum handy to do it for them. They must have special tongs, machines, some apparatus …
Avery’s gaze landed on a pair of gleaming silver gloves. They were long, almost elbow length, and seemed composed of chain mail like some medieval gauntlets, though surely they were far more sophisticated than that, and the links were so fine he could see no crack between them.
Without a second thought, he slipped them on. They were surprisingly cool against his hands. And heavy.
He squared his shoulders and moved toward the center of the room. There Sartrand and Uthua engaged each other in a titanic struggle. The echoes of their blows battered his eardrums. The blows themselves reverberated through his feet. His eyes could not process all he was seeing, and he tried not to watch.
Of course he had lied to Sartrand. He had no extradimensional weapons stashed around the room. There would be no salvation for the Muugist. He was Avery’s last sacrifice to the Device. Already Uthua was winning, wrapping his great bulk around Sartrand, enfolding him. Devouring him.
Summoning his courage, Avery slipped between the thrusting walls of dark flesh that divided around the Device, wincing with every spasm and ripple of the otherworldly substances. He only hesitated a moment when his gloved hands neared the dappled, silvery surface of the Device itself, which emitted the sort of hum a tuning fork might make. What if the gloves didn’t work? Would he simply be fried to a crisp?
Sucking in a breath, he grabbed it.
The gloves touched it just as if it were a normal object—a bowling ball, even—though it was hot and alive beneath his fingers. He could feel it moving. It was almost like gripping water, if one could grip water, and it rippled and flowed under his hands.
He yanked at it, but it was held firmly by the down-sweeping arms. He pulled harder, putting his back to it. With a suck and a pop, he wrenched it free, staggering him backward. He almost stumbled straight into Uthua.
