by Zachary Adam
He was rewarded with a muffled thump from behind the now-sealed door to the gate room, and Drache’s exhilarated-yet-confused expression. “Just what the hell do you suppose that was? Archangel up to his old tricks?” “Archangel knows better than to bite the hand that feeds him.” Vidcund frowned deeply. “We’re being played, and I think I know by whom.”
Drache, for his part, took disproportionate care in reloading his firearm. Vidcund thought to stop him, for the moment. Bullets clearly didn’t faze their latest enemy.
What followed was silence, punctuated only by Vidcund’s operation of the gate terminal. He marvelled at the technology, at its crusty, analogue interface, which he struggled to comprehend, given the peculiar symbolic lexicon in which the various dials, switches, and gauges were identified.
Eventually, though, he did get it right, and a shimmering wave-front formed in the iris of the complex geometric web-work on the wall. It was some kind of printed circuit board, Vidcund told himself, struck by how alike to some of the old cult documents he found, and the symbology within. Nothing at work here but pure, proper Technology. Vidcund found he could not look through the gate. It was too bright, even with his glasses, and seemed to flicker in and out of colours, rapidly, shifting with prismatic effects into and out of colours he could not name.
“Alright, so where does that go?”
Vidcund looked to Drache. “I honestly haven’t the foggiest. Give me your sidearm.”
Calmly, he stepped into the light, bringing himself to what he hoped would be safety, and trusting Drache to follow behind.
--Time was the universal salve, so it was said. It healed all wounds, after all. That, at least, was the theory – if time had been healing the wounds Niles Clayton had accumulated in his unparalleled journeys, it was doing it in subtle, convoluted ways that seemed difficult to discern. He had lapsed from outright panic to nervous catatonia, becoming all but unresponsive. Only Scion, among his tenders, thought he showed any signs of an eventual recovery. Archangel, who had hauled him back from beyond shores of death, across the empty gulfs wherein, among others, ruled Daemon-Sultan Azathoth, had given up hope, condemning Niles to a slow, living death, in which his every material need was attended, and yet he would live until he died again without ever leaving the tomb-infirmary where he was housed.
Scion contemplated the oddness of this place from a minaret. The Grey Angels had chosen this ruined cemetery, abandoned one or two cultural shifts ago in the vast regrown forests of the northern Terrwald. They were in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, where the secrets of the island grew slumberous. No civilization ever lasted long in these parts, and that seemed true as well for whoever had created this.
It was Archangel’s purview. His family was from here, some ancient line that was among the few that could be traced unbroken through the centuries, down to the betrayal of the White Keepers by Gloria Creena. He was a Tererran through and through. The woods beat in his heart, and his blood flowed through these rivers.
Scion was not given to believing in magic, whatever platitudes he offered, however strongly he believed Clark was right with his Law. He had, as all the Angels had, his own personal experiences with the supernatural, and it was the memory of this that had finally distracted him from the strangeness of the return of the dead detective to their happy little family. He found he could explain nearly everything, from the gates to the ghosts, but the actual reversal of death?
He contemplated it all from that minaret, while he sipped stale, twice-or-thrice-warmed tea through the narrow opening of a paper cup, the report from Archangel’s contacts in the Mortuary business still on the third page of photographs on his desk.
The photograph had depicted a singular oddity. That Vidcund Därk should be among the dead in a gunfight involving himself and another skilled operator was not entirely unusual. Pyrrhic firefights happened more often than anyone who engaged in such things professionally cared to admit. What was unusual, however, was a pattern of three small squares as a tattoo at what was, supposedly, the base of Vidcund’s spine.
He’d had other tattoos, of course, including a valid UPC that returned a perfectly valid number. But those three tattoos were familiar, because Scion had a set of them himself. Such markings were commonly used by technicians operating a particular item of Slipher Medical equipment used for spinal fluid sampling. The only reason to get them tattooed was for frequent sampling, and the only reason for that…
“James.” Scion shifted his attention away from his recollections and paperwork, turning his attention over his shoulder, to where Archangel had entered the room, unmasked. “Eli. Did you actually read this?”
“Yeah. I’m starting to question its validity. Vidcund Därk’s been seen since. It’s difficult to believe there are two of him.”
“Strange,” James said. His voice was full of doubt, but he hoped the strangeness masked it. “I certainly thought so.” Eli set his hand on James’ shoulder. “But, if I can raise the dead, then there’s no reason to believe nobody else can. It’s a problem to discuss when you get back from the infirmary.” James frowned slightly. “I know you’re a doctor and all, but I hardly think a case of the seasonal sniffles is cause for alarm.”
“Obviously. You need to get down there because our guest asked for you.” James arched an eyebrow, and picked up his tea as he settled his mask back in place. “I wasn’t expecting him to be coherent this soon.”
“If at all,” Archangel countered, replacing his own mask.
06 – Carcosa
Sometimes, you could stare at something for hours, and still be unable to accept its reality. Such was the situation for Vidcund Därk.
He found himself standing as stoically as could be managed on the edge of a vast precipice. What had struck him immediately about the situation were the practical things, the sorts of things professionals like he and Drache looked for. He realized immediately that they must have been rather high up in terms of altitude, for the valley at the base of the cliff – which had a gentle, flowing terrain – seemed filled with fog. A roiling, unnatural fog which seemed, lapping at the edges of the ground – which must also have dropped off sharply at its edge – like waves on a lake.
Then, he had looked up, to get a sense of his cardinal directions… and god only knew how long he and Drache stood there in awestruck silence, considering the state of the sky. Someone had drawn a crude smear of sun-lit nebula in garish colour across the night sky, a bright backdrop, as starlight went, for hundreds of black dots. They were stars, they must have been, but dead stars, else stars so vibrant that they radiated in colours unseen by human eyes.
When their brains resolved the image of the two moons arcing ever lower toward the horizon, a wind stirred up that knocked them from their reverie. Dust was evoked from the ground – a strange, snowy ash, the passing of which brought with it a hint of the nose of brandy. The scent – suggestive and pregnant with memory, shook Drache, at least, out of it, and he looked suddenly to Vidcund, shifting his grip on his weapon uncomfortably.
“Where the hell are we?”
Vidcund looked back, and finally got around to closing his jaw, though one eyebrow refused to snap into place. “You’re asking me?”
--
Actors retain a measure of their control only when they retain the memory that they are not really their character. That thought – albeit malformed and in language much simpler – raced as an unending mantra through Maria Frost’s mind as she let her attendants dress her. Here, in the City by the Lake, nobody called her by that name. Nobody here cared who Maria Frost was.
But her name here – the name she reminded herself was nothing more than a mask – was power, a power as great as her anonymity, for none here, under the tattered yellow banners that lined the high street, had known who she was until she had compelled her Phantom by his Master’s Sign to eliminate Gloria Creena.
A mission at which he had failed. “… Tell me again what happened, Phantom.”
Maria turned, the high, brass-rebatoed lace collar of her gown shading her somewhat from the pallid light of the rising suns. “I have no doubt you speak only the Truth, Phantom. I doubt merely that I recall everything I wish to know.”
The creature – Maria could never think of him as anything else, since he had spoken those words so fatal to her restful nature – bowed again. Scrapingly. The yellow sign featured prominently on the breast of his dusterjacket, betraying his new alliances and the means by which his will was subverted. A will no more free than her own, Maria thought, though the price paid would be worth the goal if only her Phantom would complete his mission. “It grieves me to inform Your Majesty that my previous mission to kill Gloria Creena turned out to be unsuccessful. Yesterday, she and the balance of her god’s cult attacked a bastion of your people’s Agency Division in force. There were, as far as I am aware, no survivors.”
Maria bowed her head slightly so that her attendant could settle her brow with a circlet set with a large topaz at the centre of the brow. “Are you quite certain of that?” “As certain as is reasonable.”
“Then who is stirring up this trail on the Ashen Shore?”
--Vidcund had just about made peace with the sudden change of scenery by the time he got his first good look at the city. The sun had risen – two suns, though the unusual sky had already worn out its shock value – and his suit had changed considerably, now becoming a sort of a long jacket he seemed to wear over a gorget or curiass of silvery metal. The coat itself was marked out into a tight grid by lines of perpendicular black-on-black pinstriping. He found it dashing, though obviously entirely unsuitable for day to day wear, uniform code violations aside.
Drache, for his part, was fairing somewhat worse, now having donned some sort of hybrid banded-mail and scale armour, making him look like a fish’s dream of what a roman centurion would have looked like. These changes were all the more baffling for the fact that none of the rest of their equipment had changed in any way – Vidcund still held two presumably-functional pistols, which he had been careful to reload in case he had neglected to after the firefight with the large man in the night.
“The city looked a hell of a lot closer, didn’t it?” Vidcund looked up from the lake of clouds – he had no other way of describing the phenomenon, and the term itself seemed sufficient. That was a lake of clouds. The Lake of Clouds, as far as he was concerned. The city they had seen, to which they were hiking across what he could only describe as a beach with ash for sand, had been the closer of two on the edge of the lake – and though it had looked somewhat more stricken (assuming he understood the unearthly architecture enough to recognize the scars of combat), the distance to the other had seemed sufficiently insurmountable that the pair had elected, on Vidcund’s unspoken determination, to pursue this one. Though it loomed ever larger, it seemed to be
determined to defy good and proper understandings of physics by not actually drawing any closer. It was a peculiar, dreaming effect, and Vidcund had had many such dreams in the past, though never so vivid. Fleeing something or advancing on something, without making any headway at all.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “It did.” They trudged on. The going was like a walk in molasses in late fall. The ash was so light on the ground that you could sink ankle-deep into it, but then it seemed to billow and fly loose in their passing, in spite of all the weight it seemed to impart to each footfall.
Drache knew they both knew it, and so found something else to complain about. “There should have been a gate there for us, right? That’d make sense, right?”
Vidcund came to a dead stop. No, there had been no return gate, but the return gate had just been an assumption the both of them had made – mostly because they tended to think of the Gate as just a special kind of advanced doorway, and nobody ever worried about whether there would be a return doorway. “Sergeant, has anything else today made any kind of sense whatsoever?”
They came to a very sudden stop. Inexplicably, they seemed to find themselves transported. There had been no sensation – it was simply the fact of the matter that Därk became alarmed to find himself among the city’s spires. Drache, it seemed, was equally alarmed, because that submachine gun snapped up as rapidly as Därk would have liked to see it do were they under fire. He had to admit, the temptation to reach for the hypermasculine security blanket of his own firearms was a sore temptation. “Okay. We might be in more trouble than I thought.”
“Yes.” Came an unwelcome third voice, “You are.”
--It was easy to identify the intoxicating quality of her life here, of why this reality had proven so attractive. That addictive quality was why she had agreed to the worship of her new King. His promises, coming later, had cemented the deal, but it was originally this:
Here, in this city, on this world, she was a Queen. She had come from nothing; the poor daughter of a broken home, the mind-sundered victim of cultists of a god that promised glory and brought only decadence and decay. She held in her hands the ability to flatten Gloria and all her allies, to herald in a proper age of revival upon the Earth.
But that power came with responsibility, as she, indirectly, through her mastery of the Phantom, was responsible for bringing about the conditions whereby the King’s vibe – his influence - could be introduced to the world, and whereby those who would disrupt it would meet swift demises.
She had gathered a small army of followers as she walked with the phantom, and now met these latest examples of the latter group where they stood at a crossroads, the throng pressing in before her, a wall of polite, noble swordsman with their masks. Masks were big here. The Phantom, beside her, was masked in his way, and she herself wore an ornate piece of gilt work that gave her a hawkish façade.
“Yes,” she said, interrupting them. “You are.”
--Vidcund squared his jaw somewhat, looking rather cooly to his left, toward the crowd and those who had gathered. Instinct filled him, rushing through him in a way that could only truly be explained by having been born for this very role.
Before he so much as had time crush the mint he had been nursing under his molars, he had taken in the fullness of the situation; the subtle shift in Drache’s posture that marked the centre of the woman’s chest as the present target of his weapon, the terrain down each of the three roads he still had access to, the precise number of the mob. The way the figure beside the apparently leader had rested his hand on the hilt of a sword as Vidcund turned, the way that same masked figure seemed to stare right through Vidcund, in spite of any real sight of his eyes behind his pallid mask.
For once, as a leader, he felt no need to speak. He had complete confidence not only in his own abilities, but in the power of Drache’s intuition, such that he knew Drache would follow his intent as faithfully as his explicit orders.
“Well,” he said slowly, swallowing the remnants of his confection. “I’d certainly hate for this little misadventure to turn violent.”
As if on cue, Drache shifted his aim slightly, and even as Vidcund lifted his left foot to begin what was sure to be quite the sprint, he watched a considerable portion of the lieutenant’s head be blown away by a well-placed round, even as the figure drew the blade he had been clutching and surged forward. Vidcund’s head throbbed at the impossibility, at the complete lack of blood as a considerable volume of white, pussy matter had gouged off of the side of the figure’s head.
He cleared leather himself as he was passing the corner of a building. He chose a turn, because, while he and Drache were merely two, and could keep formation, the mob would have to wheel about. Turns would cost them speed disproportionate to the speed it cost the Agents, and that might give our heroes the edge they needed to escape.
Escape where, he hadn’t the foggiest. But with no other options, he decided to trust his instincts. Blindly, though keenly aware of Drache’s position, he poured out the contents of his right-hand pistol’s magazine to disc
ourage pursuit.
As he glanced again rounding the next corner – a left turn this time, he was pleased to see the mob trampling a few of his victims, who, unlike the Masked Man, seemed much more vulnerable. Drache must have noted it, too, for he no longer fired on that seeming-lieutenant, but instead sprayed high-velocity, leaden demise into the crowd.
Neither felt the need to waste breath on banter, but Vidcund could tell the jokes in his head. “I thought we weren’t going to cause any trouble,” Drache would have said. “This isn’t exactly a by the book approach.” “Books were written for worlds with rules,” Vidcund would have replied.
They ran. Vidcund discarded his handgun – it was a pound or two less he’d have to carry, a pound or two less to tax his mortal lungs and slow him down. Drache, of course, was somewhat used to moving under load, but even so, he seemed to take the suggestion. He dropped the submachine gun when he had expended his final clip, and spent some time running backward at a fair rate while emptying his sidearm into the crowd as well, throwing the empty weapon at them in a final act of defiance.
Vidcund put out his hand to stop Drache just as the man turned around, and they found themselves staring out over a precipice – and with the realization that the cityscape in which they had been running had been just one rooftop in a much larger city than they had a concept of.
There was no time to be awestruck, though Drache was clearly captivated by the sight. Vidcund turned around, staring down this Queen in her yellow gown, as she dragged the mob to a halt seemingly by her will alone.
He had but a few seconds to come up with a plan.
--Maria reached out to touch the Phantom’s shoulder, and as he stopped, the rest of the mob seemed to lose their will to fight. In fairness, their numbers were certainly diminished. These strangers were brighter than some, she realized. Previous adventurers in her world had focused their wrath almost exclusively on the Phantom when they realized the extent of his vitality.
