Mobius

by Garon Whited

  I also had two gates. One for the cannon, one for us. I used the big one for going back and forth to Zombie World—it’s just a ring of iridium wire, hung on a wall—but it would also serve as a grab gate for the Orb. Once opened, I would have to reach through with the tongs and drag it back.

  There’s the key point to the plan. Finding the Orb in the seething sea of the void.

  Turns out, it’s not so hard, which was a pleasant surprise.

  I got a lock on it using my Ring of Spying. With a mirror to operate the point-of-view scrying spell, it was obvious: A big, black ball, hostile and angry, but not adrift in a sea of chaos. Instead, it sat in a sack of some sort, covered in goo. Turning the scrying sensor, I took a good look around. The space it occupied was a sacklike area, possibly leather, but there were no seams. The space was covered in a layer of foul-looking goo.

  I finally figured it out. Some Thing in the deep void ate it.

  With anything else, this might count as a way to dispose of it. I’m leery about the Orb working its will on some Thing big enough to casually gulp it down, though. If it can control the Thing, it can go places. Can the Orb see through its eyes? Can it use the Thing’s ability to navigate—if any? Can it go back to Rethven, or will it be happy with any world with people? Can it force a Thing to go through a firmament? Or can the Thing upchuck an Orb like spitting out a cannonball and let it simply fall through on its own?

  Come to think of it, did the Thing assume a form because the Orb drifted by? The Orb’s structure is a thing of order, not chaos, and could have a stabilizing effect on the chaos around it, much like a firmament. It’s almost a pocket universe of its own, in some ways. Or did the Orb drift close enough to a world for the Things nearby to be solid and hungry?

  I sent the scrying sensor elsewhere, outside the Thing. The resolution dropped off rapidly, but I did confirm the Thing was… swimming? Flying? Moving through the void, not stomping along some other world’s landscape or sitting in some conjurer’s containment circle.

  Close enough for government work. And, as a once and future king, I am a government. But—surprise, surprise!—things didn’t go as planned.

  Someone pounded on the barn door.

  Firebrand?

  I don’t know. I didn’t hear them come up. I can’t hear them now.

  One? Ten?

  One, I think.

  Bronze snorted and planted hooves, prepared to move instantly in any direction. I closed down my magical paraphernalia and put my helm on. My gauntlets clip to my belt, but the helmet is awkward to carry around.

  The knocking came again, this time as pounding hard enough to rattle the door.

  “Who is it?” I called.

  “Let this portal be opened,” came the response. I didn’t like the response. It’s not how the locals talk.

  “What for?” I shot back.

  This was not an acceptable answer. The door blew out of the frame and pelted the far wall with fragments.

  A young lady, early twenties, possibly all of five-foot-four and as skinny as I am, stepped through the smoking hole where the door had been.

  I wasn’t fooled. The blaze of light shining from inside her form of flesh was a complete giveaway. Mortals might not see it, might not even sense it, but my eyes see the spirit behind the flesh better than they see the flesh. The entity inside her body—or what was her body; she might not be in it anymore—was an energy-state being. For lack of a better word, an angel.

  My first thought wasn’t blasphemous, but it was certainly profane. This is not the sort of interruption I needed.

  “What happens here?” she asked.

  “Nothing, at the moment. I just shut down a scrying mirror, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  She looked at me keenly for a moment. My stealth and concealment spells took a beating from her gaze and I reinforced them with the power on hand in the crystals. I looked back, trying to evaluate her. She brightened even as I watched. An effect of fresh occupancy? Or was some sort of damping effect wearing off now that she was using her powers?

  “The stench of chaos lingers in this place,” she told me. “It clings to you like the night clings in shadows come the dawn.”

  “Ah. Perhaps your chief concern would be the gate,” I suggested, indicating the magical loop of wire. I only wanted to divert her from me. She turned her gaze to the iridium wire on the wall. She approached it, looked at it intently, and laid a finger on it. Her spirit brightened markedly, revealing itself fully as it put forth its power.

  Iridium melts at about 2,500 degrees Centigrade. Call it 4,500 Fahrenheit. When it melts into a pool of liquid metal, it also sets fire to anything remotely flammable it touches, like barn walls, fresh logs, and some rocks.

  I made a note to not shake hands and wished I’d thought to bring a fire extinguisher. Come to that, an angel extinguisher was sounding pretty good right now.

  She turned her attention to me again, this time without the laser glare. She was actually rather pretty, in a curly-headed blonde sort of way. Pity the thing inside her was the only thing I could really see clearly.

  “What do you here?”

  “I was trying to dispose of a creature of terrible evil, but an angel interrupted me.”

  “I see no remains of any such being.”

  “Did I mention an angel interrupted my good work?”

  She—it—regarded me with a strangely impassive expression.

  “The forces of chaos move within you,” it observed, and took a step toward me, hand outstretched. I disappeared from in front of her, moved under the air cannon at the speed of dark, and reappeared on the far side. I saw what it did to an iridium gateway. I didn’t want her touching me in the first place, much less after such a comment. The air cannon wasn’t much of a barrier, but it helped enforce some personal space.

  “I’m aware of it,” I told her. “The forces are fine just as they are.”

  “They cannot be permitted to spread.”

  “And they won’t. They’re contained, are they not?”

  It frowned.

  “This is irregular.”

  “It’s a hazard of life. Irregular things happen.”

  “They should not.”

  “Maybe so, but they’re an observed fact.”

  “This displeases me,” it observed. It cocked her head and blinked at me, still trying to penetrate my privacy spells. “How do you exist? What are you?”

  As it asked, I realized it was a tough question. What am I? From the angelic point of view…

  “I’m a living human with a chaos infestation. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

  “I will purge it from you.” It moved toward me again.

  “Not without killing me,” I replied, and it stopped.

  “What relevance does this observation possess?” it asked, as though genuinely puzzled.

  “Aren’t you forbidden from killing humans?”

  “Yes. I am not certain you qualify.”

  “Don’t like the sound of that,” I admitted, and reminded myself the angelic community might not have developed such high ethical standards at this point in time. Come to that, Valan gave me the impression of different camps of angel-class beings. Not all of them might share the stricture on human life, or even human extermination. With this in mind, I moved to my left along the pipe, causing her to move a bit with me, but also changing the direction of her attention. I make one hell of a distraction.

  “Too much chaos enters as the world-vines grow. There are too many strands of the world, and too many end in oblivion. The chaos within you must not be permitted to disrupt the threads of fate.”

  “Funnily enough, I’m kind of bound up in a predestination paradox, myself,” I admitted, still edging along.

  “Impossible. You are mortal.”

  “Yeah, well, only by a technicality.”

  “Your words are meaningless. Cease your movement and the process of dissolution will be minimally destructive,” it order
ed, extending one hand.

  Bronze kicked like a ten-ton metal mule, shattering bones, rupturing organs, and sending the remains down the length of the pipe and into the barn wall. The wall didn’t appreciate this, but the pieces didn’t actually go through. Whatever the angel’s restrictions, it reacted the same as Valan to the destruction of a corporeal form. White light erupted. It filled the barn with a blinding radiance, gathered itself into a point of infinite brightness, and shot directly away until it vanished, all without ever leaving the barn.

  Pan-dimensional beings of light annoy me.

  When Valan did it, though, it was still daylight out. When Miss Curly Top did it, it was night. Naturally, I turned away and shielded my eyes the instant it started to explode with light, but, as with opening a pipe-gate into a sunny day, it didn’t do my face or hands any good. I was blinded as my eyes scorched in their sockets, along with most of my face. My armor protected me from the rest of it, but I now have a definitive answer on whether or not uncontained angelic light acts like sunlight on a chaos-blooded vampire.

  Yes. It does. Not quite as harsh as sunlight, I think, but still unpleasant. Not a welding flame, just a campfire. It’s still painful and damaging. Use caution when evicting them from their containers, whether they be flesh suits or magic bottles. At least it was a flash burn, not an ongoing fire.

  Is Bronze going to have to save you from every encounter with these things? Firebrand asked.

  “Yes.” My face hurt, but it wasn’t too badly damaged to speak clearly.

  She is?

  “Not really. You’re forgetting the time I summoned up Valan and bottled him.”

  Ah. Fair enough. But whenever you get into a fight with a powerful entity, she has to bail you out.

  “We’re a team. You helped on more than one occasion, yourself.”

  I guess that’s true.

  “Are you feeling left out?”

  No! …not exactly.

  “I’m sure we can find some giant zombies for you to explode.”

  Maybe later, Firebrand decided. Can you see, yet?

  “No. I’m feeling my way around with tendrils.”

  Can you operate a gate?

  “I doubt it. Besides, Curly Top melted the big one.”

  So, what do we do?

  “First off, we put out the fire.”

  Aww.

  “I may need the barn, so don’t eat it.”

  You keep wanting me to put them out, Firebrand reminded me. I should practice.

  “Fine, but we’ll work on it together.”

  Feeling around with tendrils is not a good substitute for sight. It’s better than using my burned hands, though. I used the big can of water I kept for drinking. This cooled the iridium puddle and put out most of the flames. I used a tarp to beat the rest into submission before using the last of the water.

  Good work by the blind fireman.

  “Shut up.”

  After I ask what we do next.

  “Next?” I thought about it. “All right, next, we move out into the woods. There will be animals out there. I can grab anything small with my tendrils and get blood in my eyes. Bronze can do a run around us, herding anything larger toward me. A deer, a hog, a coyote—I don’t know what they have around here, but just about anything will do if I can rip it open and stick my face in its guts.”

  We did so. Turns out, the local population of wild hogs is fairly large. I drained the vitality out of three of them when Bronze herded a—what’s a group of hogs called, anyway? She herded several of them near me. The rest was simple enough. This restored my eyes well enough to see. My vision wasn’t as sharp as I’ve come to expect, but forty percent and slowly rising is better than zero percent and holding. The blood treatments also killed the pain from the burns, finally.

  As a note, small animals are not as useful to me as I hoped. Sure, they have a little bit of blood, but there’s so little of it, it all soaks into my hands. It helps, sure, but not nearly as much as direct application to the eyes. Did my hands a world of good, though.

  With my face no longer a warning poster for why sunscreen is important, I took stock. My power crystals were no longer at full charge, but my parameters changed. I no longer had a gate large enough to step through. I could use the barn door as a locus, but it’s not a gate. Was there enough to get us out of this world? No. Me, possibly, but a gate big enough for all of us would be open only a fraction of a second if it worked at all.

  I knew I should have taken the time to construct a shift-booth. The potential waste of effort didn’t seem to outweigh the energy savings. I didn’t think I’d need a high-efficiency transfer, just a few small holes to move crystals back and forth a few times.

  As for my gates, well, the cannon gate was intact. I might fit through it, with a little struggle, but it would have to be open longer. The solidified blob of metal was still iridium, but it wasn’t a gate. If I had the power for it, I could carve a gate design on any handy wall, but power was still the issue.

  My head came up, my eyes went wide, and I moved instantly to grab the crystals, my gate, the iridium—still hot, but what are gauntlets for?—and swing into the saddle.

  Boss?

  “We’re out of here.”

  Why? What’s—

  I didn’t have to kick Bronze’s sides. She grasped the urgency and didn’t bother to ask for anything as silly as an explanation. She put her head down and accelerated, ignoring anything she didn’t regard as an obstacle, which included the barn. It would have included fences, single-course brick walls, and police roadblocks if any had been in the way.

  —the problem? Firebrand finished.

  “Angels.”

  O-kay. Not arguing, but I’m wondering why we’re suddenly running…?

  “An angel showed up without warning. I don’t know what got their attention, but we just sent one back to base with a hell of a headache.”

  Can’t you go any faster? Firebrand asked Bronze. She leaned into it harder, but also wanted to know where we were going. Were we running from or running to? Or were we starting with running from and we’d get to the running to later?

  “From. Just from. At least while I think.”

  Bronze devoted herself to making distance while I devoted myself to figuring out our next move.

  Given: Something attracted their attention. I have some evidence that I, personally, don’t set off their alarms with the chaos in my blood. If I did, they would be on me constantly. Maybe it’s my privacy spells, maybe it’s the fact I’m a physical container for the chaos energy. Either way, they can see it in me, but it doesn’t look like they innately sense it at a distance.

  Likewise, gates don’t necessarily make their alarms go ping! If they did, once again, I would have angelic trouble from On High all the time. This leaves—to my way of thinking—only a few possibilities.

  The first one, I can’t do anything about. There might have been an angel wandering around nearby who happened to notice. I don’t like the idea, but it’s possible. I especially do not like the idea because there’s no way to tell. I can cast cloaking spells on the barn, for example, but the gate connection is a line through multiple dimensions. It’s like shielding your house and then shining a searchlight on something. They can see the beam even if they can’t see the light bulb.

  Angels annoy me.

  If they have to be close by to see the effect of an active gate, that’s to my advantage. But if they don’t intrinsically sense gates—Valan, for example, didn’t recognize the effect of a gate when my altar ego helped Bronze’s energy-form through to the junkyard—what made my most recent gate activity stand out? The destination? It’s possible a gate into the infinite void of chaos is like a beacon to the glowing things. I’m told there’s a mandate to keep the chaos outside… well, outside. A hole into the belly of a chaos beast may be like setting off a fire alarm.

  As for other possibilities, I don’t have much. Long-term gates? Nope, we did it a lot in Apocalyptica. N
o angels. Multiple gate spells in quick succession? Ditto. I think it has to be either a chance encounter with a free-roaming angel, or a chaos-connected gate setting off alarms. Either way, I have at least one angel upset with me.

  Which left us with the present problem. We drop-kicked an angel out of its human suit and into the afterlife. Unless Curly Top was the Angel of Forgiveness, she might take exception to this. Given her behavior prior to departure, I’m leaning more toward the idea she’s a fighting sort, possibly an avenging angel. If she picks up a sword, I’m betting it blazes with holy fire.

  I checked my various spells of hiding. I don’t normally wear all of them when I’m not in Rethven, mostly because I don’t worry so much about shadowy conspiracies to assassinate the King, the Lord of Shadow, the Nightlord, or the Demon King. Now, though, I have a good reason to worry about direct assaults from glowing figures of light wanting to put down a chaos beast in human form.

  Damn it all, now I need specialized anti-angelic detection spells in the amulet, too, and I need to have them running by default. I barely have a set of anti-dying spells—and I need to add to that set, too!

  Still, no matter how you slice it, I don’t want to be fried. I manually raised all my radar-stopping spells off my amulet and depleted the last of my power crystals. The key to avoiding divine wrath is not being a target. The easiest way to not be a divine target is to never incur the wrath of Heaven. Since that ship sailed, caught fire, and promptly sank, I was stuck with being hard to find.

  I wonder if there’s an angelic department in charge of finding lost things? I hope not.

  In the meantime, it would help to get as far away as possible from what might turn into ground zero. Bronze was handling it excellently on the physical level. What I wanted to do was get away on the multiversal level. This involved getting power, drawing a gate, and making good our escape.

  I didn’t like my idea, but it was the only reasonable idea I had. We could run into the wilderness and replicate my usual converter setup, which would take quite a while… or go back to the house and charge more quickly there.