“If you can keep your mouth shut, you’ve nothing to fear from me.”
“Quite. Quite. And thank you. What are you doing?”
Shadrak pried open the grill on the cellar floor and lowered himself into the opening.
“You’re not going down there?”
“Best way to see the city.”
“What about the wine?”
“You finish it.”
Shadrak slid the grill back into place and dropped from sight.
A shadow detached itself from the wall and drifted to Cadman’s side.
“Thank you, Callixus, but it seems you weren’t needed after all.”
The wraith hovered over him, adding its chillness to the cold he already felt.
Cadman scrabbled about in his pocket for a cigarette. “Can you make the journey to Pardes?”
“You want me to kill the Gray Abbot?”
“Only if you must. Bring me his piece of the Statue of Eingana. Who knows, with two segments I may have double the power.” Then again he might just be getting deeper into something than he ought to. What on earth was he doing? He thought about the tentacled nightmare that had invaded his bedroom and shattered the illusion of safety.
The cat’s out of the bag, Cadman. Either you see this through or get as far away from here as possible. But anywhere that wasn’t Sahul was that much closer to Verusia, and the last thing he needed was to come to the attention of his old master, Otto Blightey.
THE SCENT OF POWER
Sektis Gandaw’s breath was a solar wind, streaming particles into empty space. Arterial fluids chilled, hardening flesh, slowing thoughts. The sloshing beats of his prosthetic heart grew further apart—he counted the seconds between them like a child anticipating the next peal of thunder. Red pulsed in his peripheral vision, no more than a hazy acknowledgement pushed to the extremities of awareness by the burgeoning silence.
He waited for the patterns of the Unweaving.
Perfectly on cue, light swirled from the metal vambrace on his forearm, settling into streams and arcs, circles and squares, all present and correct, as he knew they would be. Next came the polygons, dancing with numbers. Once they would have triggered a migraine; now they were a symphony rising to rapture. But even in ecstasy, the niggling continued. Without adequate power, all this was just a light show, an exercise in algebra, a set of calculations so vast it was like cramming the cosmos into his skull and trusting his head not to explode.
If only he’d not made the dwarves… The whirling display flickered, and daggers jabbed Gandaw’s brain. If only he still had the energy of the so-called goddess, Eingana… Red light flashed; the hissing crackle of white noise. If only—
“Breakout … Breakout…” The grating voice of a sentroid, distorting through his aural implants.
The shapes and numbers swirled into a maelstrom and then zipped back into the vambrace. A ripple ran through Gandaw’s tunic as the exoskeleton beneath reactivated and a thousand pinpricks pierced his skin. His regenerated flesh suffused with warmth, arteries thawed, and the mechanical heart resumed its bracing tattoo.
With a tap of a button on the vambrace, he stimulated the phosphorescence of the green veins that fractured the black scarolite walls. He stood and switched on the vambrace’s com-screen, his plastic stool melting away into the floor.
“Mephesch, I’m trying to work.”
The homunculus’s face was pressed too close to the camera, just those inscrutable eyes set in sockets like calderas.
“Apologies, Technocrat. It’s Skeyr Magnus,” Mephesch said. “He’s found a way out. Taken the rest of them with him.”
“Show me.”
The image changed: a sentroid’s aerial shot of the mountain’s perfectly symmetrical peak. There was a rupture near the summit through which scores of lizard-men were pouring. The display cut to another sentroid’s camera, further back: the scarolite mountain stark against the bleached dust of the Dead Lands.
“There,” Gandaw said. “That’s him.”
The sentroid moved in for the kill, Skeyr Magnus scampering away on reptilian legs that were never designed for speed. Gandaw should have aborted the lizard-men long ago. They had shown themselves good for nothing. Another failed experiment—just like the dwarves.
“Wait,” he spoke into the vambrace. “What’s that on his hand?”
The sentroid zoomed in.
“Is that one of my gauntlets?”
Blue tongues of flame licked across the black glove on the lizard-man’s right hand. Gandaw squinted in order to focus his optics. The projection gauntlet? Skeyr Magnus, nothing but an engineered brute, had a projection gauntlet?
“It’s how they got out, Technocrat,” Mephesch said through the aural implants. “Punched a hole in the top of the mountain. Nothing else could do that to scarolite.”
“But the shields—”
“Only work—”
“—from the outside,” Gandaw finished. “Then seal the breach and exterminate them in the Dead Lands.”
A throng of lizard-men formed around Skeyr Magnus, moving in unison like a single organism. Gandaw rubbed his chin, admiring his handiwork. Perhaps they hadn’t been an unmitigated disaster after all. They were maximizing their chances of survival by protecting the individual with the most power.
Blue fire streaked towards the sentroid’s camera and the screen went dark.
“Switching to another sentroid,” Mephesch said.
Gandaw shook his head. What would be the point? The lizard-men were too close to the edge of the Dead Lands, the limits of the sentroids’ range.
“Let them go. They’ll never make it out of the Sour Marsh.”
“Point taken,” Mephesch said. “I’ll mobilize a team to repair the breach, and I’ll see to it that the gauntlet is replicated. Sorry for the interruption, Technocrat. I’ll try not to disturb you again.”
“Too late for that. I’m coming down.”
* * *
Sektis Gandaw stepped from the elevator into the cathedral cavern at the heart of the mountain. The intolerable escape of the lizard-men had already been rendered tolerable by chemicals. Just how he liked it: everything back to normal. Perfect homeostasis.
His gaze flicked across the screens that studded the walls. Images assailed him from every angle: long-shots, close ups, heat residues and fractals, all beamed from a network of satellites so ancient as to be unsuspected by the people of Earth—ungrateful insects. Each screen had a seat of molded plastic before it and its own dedicated kryeh, eyes wired into the receivers, bat wings folded behind shriveled female bodies.
He made an efficient sweep of the monitoring stations that spiraled up from the ground in concentric tiers to terminate in the single round eye of screen 55 on the ceiling, trained perpetually on the Void. He’d stared out at the worlds for centuries, and the worlds always glared back at him, insolent in their elliptical orbits. Utterly predictable, but imperfect nevertheless.
Same routine, same place, same time. Upon the hour, every hour, every tardy Aethirean day. He cocked an eyebrow, only slightly, and more as an extension of his will than an unconscious expression. In spite of the irritating excitement generated by the breakout, he was succumbing to the tedium again. He acknowledged the boredom before shutting it off behind a curtain of steel. That would be an admission of complicity with someone else’s universe, someone else’s creation. He would have scoffed if he hadn’t possessed such flawless self-control. He elected, instead, to stab the buttons on his vambrace with the tip of a bloodless finger.
Someone else’s universe. To think there were still people who believed in a divine architect responsible for the mess out there. More of a petulant child, strewing its playthings chaotically about the crib before falling asleep and forgetting all about them. Not even that. Simply chance, blind and unaware. Chaos begotten from nothing with no need for supernatural explanations. It was all in the math, just as he’d demonstrated back on Earth. The problem was, no one had wanted t
o know.
Gandaw’s optics whirred into focus on the digits racing across the vambrace’s screen. He read them off with the partition of his mind assigned to such things.
The homunculus, Mephesch, was running his checks, scurrying from station to station, testing the connections with the kryeh, all of whom remained taut with anticipation, staring blankly at the images in front of them. They might as well have been carved out of the rock of the mountain, dead things crafted from the same scarolite ore Gandaw had created the dwarves to mine following his flight from Earth a millennium ago.
Gandaw spared a few moments observing Mephesch, making sure he did exactly as he’d been instructed. He was certain the creature meant to betray him, it was in his nature. After all, the homunculi claimed to be the spawn of the Demiurgos, the supposed god reputedly trapped at the center of the Void. Utter nonsense, of course, but the thing that really annoyed him was that, no matter how diligently he sifted through the life forms of Aethir and Earth, no matter how much he scrutinized and distilled the basic energies and elements of the cosmos, he could not account for the existence of the homunculi.
His optics zoomed in on Mephesch, dressed like Gandaw himself in a dull gray tunic, gray trousers, and black shoes that never needed polishing. The homunculus was barely three feet tall, craggy faced, with plastinated dark hair—again like Gandaw’s, which never required cutting. Mephesch’s eyes were like black pebbles peering mockingly from beneath ledge-like brows. Not Gandaw’s design at all. The homunculi were more like fairy tale gnomes than the evolutionary dead-end he’d first suspected. That had always been the problem with Aethir, he mused, ruing the day of the Reckoning when he’d been forced to return to the world of his previous exile in a planeship: it was so chaotic. Creatures sprang up from Qlippoth, Aethir’s dark side, like phantoms from nightmare, and his early attempts to subjugate the region had ended in disaster. The best he could do was to station sentroids along the borders of the Dead Lands surrounding his mountain base, and continue with his experiments in Malkuth, the so-called Light Side of Aethir.
Qlippoth, along with the crevasses leading to the pit of Gehenna, and the homunculi themselves, were intolerable exceptions to Gandaw’s meticulously charted map of creation. They stood outside his paradigm and either had to be eradicated or ignored. He was incapable of the latter, but could only achieve the former if he could recommence the Unweaving. He’d come close once before, but then he’d been betrayed by his own creation, the dwarves. Ever since, he’d kept his eyes fixed on the worlds, watching for the barest glimmer of energy from that which he’d lost, the power source that would fuel his un-creation: the Statue of Eingana.
His optics were drawn inexorably to screen 55. A familiar knotting started in his stomach as he stared into the swirling black of the Void, feeling it tugging at the core of his being. Nothing but a singularity, he told himself as the biostat kicked in to relax him. Needles delivered their sedatives, and equilibrium was resumed as quickly as it had been lost.
Definitely a black hole, but that didn’t account for the gaseous tendrils crisscrossing the Void like the webbing of a cosmic spider, the slenderest threads here and there touching Aethir’s underground realm of Gehenna. The superstitious called it the Abyss. His former master, Otto Blightey, had been trapped there once and had reached across the stars with his prodigious will to request Gandaw’s aid. All that so-called magic, but in the end it had been science that had brought Blightey home, science that had found a foothold in the nebulous reality covering the mouth of the Void. It had also been science that had stood up to Blightey’s subsequent machinations and driven him into hiding. Unfortunately, the same science had yet to offer a viable hypothesis for the Abyss, and that was something that Gandaw simply couldn’t abide.
No matter, he thought, even the imponderables of the universe would be unwoven with the rest of creation, leaving him free to start from first principles with his own elements and his own precise imprint of perfection.
He almost sighed with boredom as he once more scanned the stationary kryeh monitoring the screens.
One of you make a sound. Anything to end the interminable silence. Anything to—
“Caw.”
Gandaw stopped mid-thought, ears buzzing as the aural implants filtered out the humming of machinery and homed in on the frequencies of the sound just emitted … by one of the kryeh.
Mephesch was watching him, head to one side, black eyes glinting with either excitement or mischief. In response to Gandaw’s unasked question, Mephesch indicated the kryeh stationed at screen 37 on the second tier. The circle of flooring beneath Gandaw’s shiny shoes detached itself and bore him upwards until he levitated just behind the creature. Mephesch seemed to merge with the wall and then reappeared beside the offending kryeh. Gandaw shook his head. How did he do that?
The satellite was aimed at the northwest coast of Sahul, the troublesome last refuge of opposition to his Global Technocracy on Earth in the days before the Reckoning. The image was unfocused, showing only a blurry, indistinguishable landmass. A node pushed through Gandaw’s scalp, microfilaments whipping out like the tentacles of a fluorescent jellyfish and inserting into receptors on the edge of the screen. He zoomed in upon a city tucked away within the northern jungle, attenuated his trackers and expanded a section of the road leading south along the coast. There was a momentary flare of amber light.
“Caw,” screeched the kryeh, a little louder this time. It opened its razor-lined jaw to squawk again and then clamped it shut. The light had vanished.
Mephesch shrugged.
Gandaw became aware that he was gritting his teeth and he once more felt the calming fluids entering his body. He glared at the screen.
“Where does that road lead?” His voice sounded cold and indifferent, just the way he liked it.
Mephesch punched keys on a console and threw a look over his shoulder. “The city of Sarum.”
Gandaw retracted his microfilaments and threw up a map on his vambrace, the terrain etched in sharp green lines, the data overlaid in red.
Sarum was the largest city in the Midwest, and virtually on top of the last place to register a reading: the village of Oakendale. He’d sent mawgs to investigate that one, but before they’d located the source, they’d been driven back by some religious maniac wielding a sword. After that, he’d lost all trace of the emission.
“This is a different piece,” Mephesch said, running some calculations on the keypad.
Two pieces in such close proximity? Someone was being careless. Either that, or the savage, Huntsman, was growing weaker. In any case, this was too good an opportunity to miss. With two pieces of the Statue of Eingana, Gandaw might be able to use them to locate the others. He glanced at Mephesch, but the homunculus was oblivious, still tapping out numbers. An indicator winked on Gandaw’s vambrace. His heart rate was ever-so-slightly elevated, but not for long.
“Get me Krylyrd,” he said in a voice of utmost calm.
Mephesch hit some more keys and the images on all the screens merged into one enormous picture of a rough amphitheater hewn from dried mud.
The mawg stepped into view, hunched and tuberous, part wolf, part reptile, a string of skulls adorning its sinewy neck. Krylryd’s image loomed from the walls, yellow eyes feverous, black lips curling away from the rows upon rows of needle-sharp teeth lining its jutting maw and extending all the way to its gullet. If Gandaw recollected correctly, that was the result of throwing in the genes of some carnivorous plant or other. The mawgs had also been imbued with a semblance of the collective intelligence he’d observed in ants. He’d never have created such a mixed bag these days, but back then he was still learning, and besides, the mawgs had proven a valuable tool. With the disappearance of the last planeship, they were his sole presence on Earth—his hands and feet, you might say, complementing the eyes and ears he had orbiting the planet.
“Krylyrd.” He loathed addressing the gibbering creature.
The mawg threw i
tself on the ground and started contorting and foaming at the mouth, obviously convinced it was entering some mystical state from which to commune with a god. Either that or it was just putting on a show for the rest of the hive, ensuring they were awestruck enough to accept its leadership rather than devouring its flesh and then, as was their custom, disgorging it.
“Someone has used the power of Eingana. Send scouts to the city of Sarum in Sahul. Tell them, if they find the statue they will be infinitely rewarded.”
Actually, he’d un-create them along with the rest of the imperfect universe, but Krylyrd didn’t need to know that.
The mawg’s jaws parted in an exultant roar, and in the background, Gandaw could hear the howls of the hive growing to a frenzy in the anticipation of blood.
THE ORPHAN
One of the knights heard something and held back. The others pressed on, a staggered line sweeping through the trees with the subtlety of stampeding cattle. Huntsman scuttled along the branch and lowered himself by a silken thread. He hung above the knight’s sandy hair, watched him turn in response to a sniffle from the undergrowth. Huntsman swung back and forth then sprang as the knight set off towards the sound. He landed lightly on the back of a white tunic that covered silver mail. The knight ducked under branches, crashed through ferns with no recognition that he had a passenger.
The boy, Sammy, scampered out of a thicket, mud-stained and miserable, squealing like a spitted pig. The knight lunged at him, caught hold of his shirt and ripped it away, sending Sammy sprawling on his face.
“Stay away, stay away!” the boy cried, crawling on hands and knees.
“Sammy, it’s me, Barek.” The knight held up his hands and inched forward.
Huntsman dropped to the forest floor, spindly legs retracting, flesh boiling, twisting, growing until he stood as a man behind the knight. Barek’s hand went to his sword and he turned, gaping like a pituri chewer. Huntsman curled his lips back to show the stubs of his teeth, rolled his eyes up into their lids, and hooked his fingers like the fangs of a death adder.
Magic, Myth & Majesty: 7 Fantasy Novels Page 141
