“If you want to bring more people in here, you can count me out.” Hal Garrett, his right arm in a sling, limped over toward us. Rotfoam splatter streaked his pants and left sleeve. Some had even been smeared across his forehead. He looked at Crowley. “Have you told him yet?”
“Told me what?”
The man of shadows shook his head. “Seeing as how you were not around at the moment, I headed out to try to kill Pygmalion. I know assassination is your bailiwick, but I’ve been known to shoot straight. I tried to enter Pygmalion’s dimension, but I could not. I’ve not surveyed the whole thing, but as nearly as I can tell he’s managed to armor his dimension so I can’t get in.”
I nodded. “I am given to understand that Dark Lords can manage that trick in dimensions with sympathetic resonances to their aspect.”
Crowley looked me over from toes to head and back again. “That’s an interesting piece of information.”
He waited for me to volunteer the source of my comment, but I shook my head. “There’s something wrong here.”
Hal burst out with a disgusted laugh. “Clearly nothing wrong with your reasoning capabilities.”
“That’s enough, gentlemen!” I looked from Crowley to Hal and back again. “What I’m catching from both of you is that somehow what happened here is my fault. You’re both exhausted — I can see it and you know it. That’s the only reason I’m trying to ignore your comments.”
I paused for a second and let the pain and death in the proto-dimension fill me. Despair, frustration and just plain anger wove through the atmosphere. I could sense the lost friends and the sharp sense of terror that had been the last thing most of the dying thought about. From Hal, I got the strong impression that everything had been a waste and that some other option should have been made to work.
“I wasn’t here, that’s true. Do you think, had I been able, I wouldn’t have been here? Do you think I don’t mourn for these people? No, I didn’t know them, I didn’t interview them and didn’t have them place their confidence in me. By the same token, given a choice between that and kissing a hand grenade, what do you think I’d choose?”
Hal nodded. “I’m sorry, Coyote, I just...one of the guys who died shouldn’t have been here at all. I let him talk me into it.”
Crowley nodded. “Will Raven. Damned good thing he was here. If he hadn’t been, we never would have gotten Ryuhito.”
“He’s still dead, Crowley.” The tall African-American looked down at the ground. “Will had a son. His grandfather is caring for the boy.”
“Hal, you made the best decision you could. You shouldn’t have been here, either.” I glanced at the shadow man. “What did you mean by ‘gotten’ in reference to Ryuhito?”
“Will cracked Ryuhito’s skull while the Yidam kept him busy and I...I should have killed Ryuhito, but I wanted a nonlethal solution. Will found it, then got killed. Before he died, though, he made it impossible for Pygmalion to track me when I took Ryuhito away.”
“The emperor’s grandson is still alive? Where?”
Crowley hesitated for a moment. “He’s in a very safe place, a little dimension I know about. I think he has a fractured skull, but he’s not dead.”
“Good. That should deny him to Pygmalion.” I let Crowley’s evasion of my question pass. Being told the name he had for the dimension where he stashed Ryuhito would do me absolutely no good. I had no skill at telepathy, so getting the information out his brain would have been impossible for me. Given that I never got any emotion from Crowley either, I knew that even a gifted telepath would be blocked from his mind.
More importantly, I realized, Crowley had very effectively relieved me of some responsibility and prevented the possibility of my betraying our cause. I was a creature of a Dark Lord. Trusting me had to be difficult for him, and I accepted that fact. Not telling him that I had spoken with the Empress of Diamonds likewise meant he could not be forced to give that information over. I trusted Crowley to look out for himself and, as a consequence, the whole of Earth.
“Was evading Pygmalion difficult?”
Crowley shook his head. “As nearly as I could tell, there was no pursuit.”
“Hal, did you see any of Pygmalion’s constructs here? Anyone who looked like Mickey?”
The big man shook his head. “I didn’t see anything like that. Having seen Mickey go at Bat, I can’t imagine my still being alive if Pygmalion had sent troops to avenge Ryuhito’s defeat.”
Crowley started to pace. “I think I see what you’re driving at, Coyote. I assumed Pygmalion didn’t come after Ryuhito because the trail was too difficult to follow. I also assumed that Pygmalion armored his proto-dimension because, without Ryuhito, he could not oppose Fiddleback.”
“Exactly. Because we saw Pygmalion and Fiddleback in conflict over Ryuhito, we have overlooked some obvious things. We assumed that Fiddleback was correct in stating Pygmalion wants to destroy him. That’s certainly the truth from Fiddleback’s point of view, but his is not the only point of view, is it?”
As we talked, the three of us began to drift deeper into the compound. The campsite returned, more or less, to normal the farther north we went. Like the Mary Celeste, the compound looked utterly proper except for the lack of people in it. If the stink of decaying plants hadn’t been so prevalent, I could have forgotten that anything was amiss.
The African-American scratched at the stubble on his chin. “We need to rethink everything. Pygmalion had been Fiddleback’s disciple, but he rebelled. In rebelling, he gained the status of a Dark Lord.”
I nodded. “Right, he became Fiddleback’s equal, more or less, right then and there. The major difference between them is that, because of Pygmalion’s much smaller power base, he can move into some dimensions where Fiddleback cannot. Pygmalion’s headquarters is one of those. I assume Earth is, as well.”
Crowley confirmed my speculation. “Earth is tricky, but there are a number of Dark Lords who have limited access and who meddle in the affairs of humanity. Fiddleback, for example, can project a considerable amount of psychic energy into Earth, but he cannot journey there physically because he cannot break through the entropy barrier around Earth. The only way to do that is with a dimensional gateway.”
I looked over at Crowley. “What about that tunnel thing that Pygmalion used?”
He shrugged. “That operated already inside the entropy barrier around the Earth.” He stopped dead. “That means Pygmalion staged his raid on Galbro from a proto-dimension very close to Earth, within the entropy barrier...”
“Or from one point on the Earth to another.” Hal nodded. “Pygmalion can come to the Earth whenever he wants, which makes sense, since he was born there.”
At the other end of the camp, we plunged into the rain forest. With the sun nearly at its zenith, the dappled blues and violets almost made me imagine that I was walking through some undersea wonderland. “If Earth is such a big plum and Pygmalion has access to it at will, why would he use another proto-dimension as his workshop?”
Crowley laughed harshly. “You saw what he did with Mickey. That boy aged physically at a very quick rate. The other warriors Pygmalion has that are based on the Mickey prototype were fully developed when I met some in diverting the tunnel device. By keeping another dimension under his control, he can incubate an army that will make conquering yet other dimensions easy.”
I stepped over a sky-blue birch trunk. “How many soldiers would it take to conquer the Earth?”
The shadow man shrugged. “A billion?”
Hal half-closed his brown eyes. “But bringing a billion warriors in would be blocked by the entropy barriers, right?”
“If he tried it all in one lump, yes.” I slowly smiled. “If he has a dimensional gate, he can bring them in regardless.”
“But warriors like Mickey are not likely to go without notice, which means he would have to bring them in to a place where their isolation is guaranteed until he has a sufficient force to prevent disruption.” Crowle
y nodded his head. “That means he’d have to have a secure site that is in very good supply.”
“Right.” I winked at Crowley, knowing we were on the same wavelength.
Hal shook his head. “You two obviously know the game plan, but I’m missing something.”
“Hal, it’s easy.” We broke through the brush and looked up at the terraced hillside dotted with dolmen. Over half of them had windmill propellers affixed at the top. In the proto-dimension’s light breeze, the props spun away lazily. “There’s your key.”
The African-American squinted for a second, then nodded sheepishly. “Energy.”
“Exactly. This casts a new light on the battle over Ryuhito, doesn’t it?”
“Ryuhito’s sun-god displays were enough to power his army here. With training...” Hal slapped his forehead with his left hand. “And Fiddleback wanted Ryuhito because he could provide more power than the whole of the Frozen Shade, which means he could have powered the dimensional gate that’s built into the Phoenix maglev train circuit.”
I slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s right. Pygmalion needed to prevent Fiddleback from coming through to Earth. He did it by removing the battery that Fiddleback wanted to use. Presumably he didn’t just blow the maglev line because he knew it would be valuable some day for moving troops. He arrived, took Ryuhito away and made some vague threat about returning with Ryuhito to enslave the world.
“That meant that all of us took his threat as being dependent upon Ryuhito in some way. We focused on Ryuhito and devoted a certain amount of our planning to ways to eliminate or neutralize the prince.” I grinned wryly. “And if Pygmalion is even half as intelligent as we’ve given him credit for, he’s already worked the same sort of failsafe into Ryuhito’s brain that Fiddleback has with me, preventing either one of us from assuming the powers of a Dark Lord in opposition to our mentor’s wishes.”
“Well, we’ve got Ryuhito now, so he’s out of the equation.” Crowley toyed with the tip of his goatee. “This puts us back to square one, but with a caveat: We know Pygmalion intends to conquer the Earth with an army of soldiers built on the Mickey prototype. What we don’t know is where his staging area is. If what he needs is a place deserted enough to let him bring his armies in, he could be almost anywhere.”
“I don’t think so, Damon. I think he made a mistake there.” I smiled openly. “Pygmalion took Mickey from Flagstaff. Jytte Ravel was found somewhere in Arizona.”
“Kingman, I think,” Hal offered. “She never said anything about it, but I recall Coyote or Marit mentioning one time or another.”
The shadow man canted his head slightly. “So, you think he’s operating out of the northern area of Arizona?”
“That, or the California badlands, or the Nevada desert, or southern Utah. There’s a lot of open space out there.”
Hal dropped to one knee and plucked an azure strand of grass. “It’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“No it won’t,” I assured them both. “We have Jytte, and she once lived in the eye of that needle. To find Pygmalion’s base, all we need is to convince her that she wants to lead us back to the place from which she escaped.”
Chapter 21
Crowley and I took an indirect route on our return to Earth. We walked through the dimensions within the same entropy sphere as Turquoise. Crowley carried on a vague travelogue that let me know why the Yidam and Will Raven had selected the proto-dimension they had used for their staging area. As always, I found the reasoning decidedly logical and nodded in agreement that the correct choice had been made.
Crowley held out a silhouette hand to slow me as we approached Pygmalion’s factory dimension. A grayish-purple fog filled the area surrounding it and appeared to be without surfaces or movement. By the same token, I could feel something solid beneath my feet, and I found the sensation of a gentle breeze in my face a constant.
We pushed on forward and I found the breeze stiffening. By the time my kilt started flapping in the wind, the fog came to an abrupt end. Standing on the edge of a brilliantly lit void, I felt as if I had worked my way through the surface of some giant tennis ball and now stood looking at a miniature sun burning at its core.
Crowley spit at the burning ball of a dimension suspended like a star in front of us. His spittle made it barely two feet from his mouth before crackling loudly and exploding into a wisp of steam. “No welcome mat here.”
I shielded my eyes against the light streaming out from the proto-dimensional sphere. “For someone who needs energy, isn’t this a wasteful display?”
The shadow man shrugged. “The heat layer is very narrow, but quite sufficient to hurt most things trying to crawl through it — present company included.”
“The sphere doesn’t look very big.”
“It’s bigger on the inside than the outside. I think he means it as a statement about himself, really.” Crowley rested his hands on his hips. “Arrogance seems to be an attribute that all Dark Lords share.”
“As long as they continue to underestimate us, I don’t mind.” I pointed toward the dimensional ball. “Making it in there would require either a lot of energy to overwhelm the defense or a dimensional gate, right?”
“As I understand it, yes.” Crowley nodded slowly. “Pygmalion has to be devoting a certain amount of his concentration on keeping this dimension inviolate. While we can’t strike at him, it does pin him into place.”
“So we know where we will meet him, but he’s choosing the battlefield.”
“Right, which means he has a hell of a home field advantage. By the same token, it probably means he has not begun to ferry troops into Earth. He will be vulnerable when he does that, because the amount of energy required to establish a link will be more with his dimension armored like this. Sustaining that over the time required to move a billion troops, or even the number needed to secure a staging area, is going to be draining.”
I nodded. “So he will drop his defenses here at that time, you assume, which leaves him open to a strike.”
“Yes, but you know as well as I do that hitting this place at that time would be suicidal.”
“Because he’ll have all his troops ready to go and just waiting to eat up opposition.” I turned away from the burning sphere and headed back into the fog. “We have to pre-empt his strike at Earth, and we have to do it in his dimension, because we’ll need Fiddleback with us, and giving him access to Earth isn’t part of the game plan.” Crowley slapped me on the back. “That’s how I read it. Let’s get back to Phoenix and see if we can find a spot where we won’t mind letting two Dark Lords have a war.”
We arrived in Phoenix late in the evening. Appearing the suite of rooms I maintained at the top of the Lorica Industries corporate citadel, I left Crowley to call Jytte while I took a shower and dressed in jeans, an aquamarine shirt and a pair of docksider loafers. I took my time dressing because I needed time to think a bit.
Oddly enough, feeling the starchy stiffness of the shirt’s collar and cuffs helped focus me. The shirt felt uncomfortable, but I wore it because it helped define who and what I was. The kilt, while functional, was not me. I was not a Greek hero coming back from a time in the underworld; I was a Dark Lord’s minion, and I sincerely doubted that made me a hero in anyone’s book.
I realized that, in creating me, Fiddleback had forged a formidable weapon indeed. My predecessor had seen that and had chosen me to replace him. I had no doubt that his choice had been motivated by his belief in my ability to oppose my former master. I also had to imagine he did not discount my ability to face off with another Dark Lord. If his causing me to destroy a Reaper base was an indication, he expected me to destroy the Empress of Diamonds when push came to shove.
Things had changed from what he had envisioned. Pygmalion supplanted Fiddleback as the primary threat to humanity. Eliminating that threat called for an alliance with my former master. I could imagine Coyote approving the alliance and even my striking a bargain with the Empress of
Diamonds to ambush Fiddleback, if necessary.
What I couldn’t tell is how he would take what I needed to force Jytte to do to eliminate Pygmalion. For as long as I had known Jytte, which was not, granted, that long a time, she had been a gorgeous doll, a living automaton. She did everything she could to downplay her beauty. She dressed down, she acted in only the most subdued ways and seemed to do everything she could to distance herself from all other human beings.
It occurred to me that the only emotion I had seen her display came after I had spoken with the ghost of my predecessor. In the back of my mind, I had wondered if Coyote and Jytte had been lovers or otherwise emotionally entangled. Certainly if Coyote had helped to rescue her from Pygmalion, she would have been greatly in his debt. I knew that he was the only member of his group she trusted with the secret of his plan concerning me, which means he had also confided in her the reason he needed to be replaced.
Given the likelihood of some ties there, I had to wonder what he would have thought of my need to have Jytte lead us back to the place where Pygmalion kept her before her escape. She would resist — she had to resist if she wished to maintain the minimal control she had over her life. She used her amnesia as a foundation, but I had to get her to dig deeper. I had to sacrifice the welfare of one for the good of the many, or so I meant to be doing, but I really did not know if my plan would work.
It also occurred to me that in doing what I would be doing to Jytte, I would be no better than a Dark Lord using someone. My only hope, my only difference with those we opposed, was that I would try to get Jytte to listen to reason first. I would try to get her to work with me. I had to at least try that, or there was no reason in trying anything at all.
I left my dressing chamber and threaded my way through the corridor to the central sitting room. The white upholstery of the couch and chairs matched the white marble covering the floor. A teak coffee table with a glass top pinned a small piece of carpet in place in front of the couch. The room’s northern wall looked out toward Squaw Peak and Camelback Mountain, with both of them rising above the black, Frozen Shade ocean like distant islands. The white drapes had been pulled back to allow full view of the peaceful vista.
Evil Triumphant Page 17
