by Mark Jeffrey
AFTER A bit more walking through the labyrinth beneath Snake Island, Ulrich led the company into a room filled with artifacts immediately recognizable as Niburian in origin. In fact, it looked very much like the lab Siren had in his Sky Chamber during the time of the Pocket. Several scientist types milled around, seemingly trying to derive the secrets from each as to how it worked, what it was.
“Here,” Ulrich said, pointing at two giant ornate iron chairs. Each was beset with dazzling jewels of all kinds. Great sharp pikes rose from their backs like cathedral spires.
One of the chairs was sleek silver. An octagon of red was set into the top of its backrest. The other chair was midnight black, and looked as if thousands of metallic strands had been intricately layered and thatched together, giving it the appearance of being composed of dark steel leaves.
“What are these?”
“Battle Thrones,” said a new voice. “Or Thunderchairs. They have a couple of names.” A very old, very short man with a large bulbous bald head appeared. “Hello. I am Doctor Horace Hardin.”
Max nodded a hello back. “They’re Niburian, I assume.”
“That is correct,” Hardin replied. “Niburan Kings of old would face each other in one-on-one combat in Battle Thrones, according to the texts we’ve been able to steal. We know they fly. We know they’re outfitted with all kinds of exotic weapons and defenses, but not much more than that. Oh, there is one more thing: they’re not made of atoms.”
Not?
“We’ve put an electron microscope on them, and all we see is a smooth surface, no matter how tiny we go. It’s not really matter at all as we understand it. Rather, it’s like the chair is a Platonic ideal form made manifest. But that seems to be true of most Niburian artifacts.”
There is another world beneath this one.
“Let me guess: only a pureblood Niburian can operate it.”
Ulrich grinned. His teeth sat like crooked gravestones in his battle-rapped mouth. “Not that I haven’t tried. We all have. Even Sparkle here. And trust me, I’ve love to fly one of these babies right up the gut of the City State of the World Emperor. But it looks like that’s going to be your job.”
Max’s watery eyes betrayed him; they filled with flash of panic.
“If you can. Let’s see if you can even make it do anything. Go on. Have a seat.” Ulrich indicated the silver chair. “I’ve always like this one, myself. It’s like the Niburian sports car model.”
Sparkle looked suddenly uneasy. And everyone else was staring expectantly at Max.
The Battle Throne certainly didn't look very comfortable, Max thought to himself. It was made of hard, cold metal. There were no curves to it at all. Everything was all straight edges and right angles and spikes.
“Oh, hell,” Max muttered. They expected him to do it. If he was going to get any more information out of these Resistance guys he was going to have to play along.
Max sat down.
Immediately, the chair awoke. It began a low thrumming, like a giant hive of bees shivering as one. Max sat bolt upright in alarm. It felt like the chair might electrocute him.
The red hexagon started pulsing unevenly, like it was transmitting a code.
It levitated a foot off the ground.
Max gasped.
It hung there motionless for a moment, as if taking a deep breath, a pause before speaking.
And then, purpose gripped it. The chair rotated like a head snapping quickly to one side. It zipped down the long hallway at an astonishing speed.
Max screamed in alarm. This thing was going to kill him! Tall doorway after tall doorway whipped by. People dove out of the way in a panic.
He couldn’t control it. He couldn’t control it! Frantically, he tried to drive his will into it, operate it like an appendage. It had no effect.
No! Nononononononono!
Somewhere behind him, Marvin Sparkle barked orders.
The chair seemed to have a mind of its own. A mind of its own? That was how Ian described the bloodmetal — he struggled with his armor whenever he used it, it was a contest of wills. Was he supposed to fight the thing? Mentally? Was that it?
Without warning, the chair zipped towards the ceiling.
Max’s arms flew up over his head in a protective posture. At the same moment, a warm blue fire enveloped the chair.
It crashed through the rock ceiling like it was all cardboard and burst out into the starry summer night, leaving a mist of rock and wood and debris in its wake.
It climbed into the sky.
With a snap of sheer panic, Max lit his hands with his power. White stars streaked his skin. He drove this into the chair, tried to make it obey.
But the chair simply absorbed his power like a void, trebled it and threw it back at him in an ever-increasing feedback loop. His own skin was sizzling, his muscles spasmed, electrocuted. It was too much: Max was quickly forced to drop his fire.
The chair made beeline for the top of Mount Griswold and then hovered several hundred feet above the peak, motionless.
What was it doing?
At least it’s dark, Max thought. Nobody down there could see him — save the brief flash of his power, but even the light from that had been mostly sucked away by the eldritch Battle Throne.
The chair rotated slowly. The night sky spun above him like a planetarium. Rich, milky starlight shone down like a benediction.
Okay, Max thought. Think! Vertigo panicked him. There was no safety belt on this thing, he realized. All it had to do was tilt forward, tip him over —
The chair accelerated from being perfectly at rest to horrific speed in the blink of an eye.
“Stooooop!” Max shouted.
And the chair did so. Again, he was perfectly at rest. And somehow he had not been tossed from the chair; inertia had been cancelled.
Max’s heart thundered while he caught his breath. “Stay — stay here, chair. Just … float here for a second. Don’t do anything else!”
What had he done differently that had worked? Max wondered. Speaking aloud? Did he have to talk to it?
But instinct told him that was wrong. It was more like … he had formed a command.
Yes, that was it. He wasn’t supposed to control it like an arm or a leg. That had been his mistake. He was interacting with another … he hesitated to think of it as a will, because it didn’t seem alive in any way. But that was what it acted like. It was more that he needed to simply express what he wanted and the chair would execute it for him.
That made sense. It was a Battle Throne. In battle, you wanted assistance.
Ah. It was like a really powerful horse. That was the metaphor. He wasn’t the horse. But he guided the horse, and the horse did the work.
“Take me back to where I started,” he said aloud. As the chair began moving he added, “Slowly! Not too fast. Sort of … float back there.”
And the chair did.
ULRICH HAD been positively ecstatic when Max had arrived back in the chamber. He didn’t seem to care at all about the hole Max had left in the ceiling. “Oh we’ll repair that easily enough before dawn. The important point is you can make those chairs work! We have a new weapon against the Bondsman we’ve never had before!”
Max sagged. He was now even more powerful than before. And he knew all too keenly how that power could be turned against him by the cleverness of the Archons — and no doubt their servant, the Bondsman.
“But now, we rest. It’s late. Tomorrow morning, we’ll have a war council and decide what our next move is.”
Ulrich left them at that point and instructed some of his underlings to show Max and Marvin Sparkle to their quarters.
To his relief, they were each given their own rooms. Max retreated into his with relief when the door finally shut. Be he noticed ruefully as it did so, a guard was posted outside his door. He’d expected that: Ulrich still didn’t trust him, despite his jubilation at his success with the Battle Throne. Tomorrow was as likely to be an inquisition into his
motives and history as much as it was a ‘war council’.
There was a bed against one wall and not much else. He inspected the bathroom: there was a shower and towels, which he quickly took advantage of. The water was heavy and refreshing; mountain water, water from a deep underground well. The pipes or whatever delivered it here creaked and shivered whenever he adjusted the rudimentary knobs: they had not been part of the original Niburian design of this place, people had clearly added them at some point relatively recently. When he’d finished, he washed his clothes as best he could and hung them out to dry.
Then he sank into the bed, which was surprisingly comfortable except for a prickly wool blanket that sent tiny blue shocks of static electricity snapping into the dark of the room whenever he turned over.
MORNING CAME in what seemed like minutes. But he’d slept deeply, and felt refreshed — despite the Bondsman’s Dream soaking his sleep.
A guard had woken him and placed plate of fruit and some meats out for him with a jug of cold, heavy mountain water which he greedily devoured after the guard left. Afterward, Max felt good, on his toes. Good. He’d need his wits today.
After another quick shower, he inspected his clothes: dry, as he’d hoped. He didn’t relish the idea of asking Ulrich for a change. He didn’t want to have to owe him anything when he faced him.
THE WAR COUNCIL took place in a wide oval shaped room. This was clearly part of the original Niburian design. Several times during his stay he’d seen tunnels or rooms quarried from rude-hewn rock as if it were blasted away. But not this room. This room was sheer and luminescent creamy-white, a soothing, heavenly-type feeling to it.
A wide, immense mosaiced table sat in the middle of it. Little chips of deep blue and red and yellow were set into the surface, which was not made bumpy by this, but was rather was sheer and frictionless. It was so smooth and perfect, in fact, that some of the paper piled on top of it had to be held down by stones to keep them from sliding away.
Max tried to count how many people were in the room: it seemed perhaps thirty or so: a mix of men and women and all races. Ulrich and Hardin were both here. Marvin Sparkle was here as well, but he did not say hello, Max noted. Ah. So Marvin was also one of the interrogators.
Max was on his own, as he’d suspected.
Ulrich called for everyone to take their seats, and then the doors were shut. Max was led to the far end of the table: no one else was seated near him: they all clustered around the far side of the table.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the Resistance. Please say hello to Max Quick.”
Again with the stares. The whispers. Max couldn’t tell whether they were stares of amazement or disgust. After all, everyone here had heard that ridiculous ‘Tale of Max Quick’.
“Hello,” Max said and tried to muster a wan smile.
“Most of you know that Max successfully flew a Battle Throne last evening,” Ulrich continued. “And most of you also know that our comrade Marvin Sparkle has spoken of a power that Max possesses — a power based on his unique genetic makeup. So first I would ask you, Max, about this power: is it true?”
Max nodded. “Yes. It is.”
“How would you describe this power?”
Max opened his mouth and then realized he didn’t know how to describe it, exactly. He wasn’t even sure what it really was. But the expectant eyes around the table bored into him and the hush was intolerable. He suddenly recalled Ulrich’s words from the previous night, that ‘…and no one has killed you, yet.’ You want to put me on the spot? You want to put me on trial? Fine. Let’s make you all a little nervous.
Concentrating, he summoned the power.
It came easily. It fact, he noted with a little bit of trepidation, it was coming to him easier all the time now. His arms became filled with stars, and then burst into white flame.
A collective gasp arose.
Max let a little jangling ball of argent jump across the table. It hit a pitcher of mountain water which promptly melted into slag on the table. A sharp hiss filled the air. A gout of steam sprang upward like a punctured heating pipe as all the water evaporated immediately.
Most everyone jumped back in their chairs, startled. But Ulrich remained, a mountain of calm. His eyes narrowed as if he’d just spied a scorpion.
“It’s a power I was born with,” Max explained. “I was … I was sort of bred to have it. Like you said. Genetics or something. But I don’t understand what it is for, exactly.”
“Bred you say? Who bred it into you?” an Indian woman wearing a sari asked him.
Ah. So here it comes.
Marvin Sparkle had warned him not to tell the Resistance about The Machine. But he decided to dare a little bit of the truth.
“The Archons,” he said. Thump, the words went. Silence.
But it was a silence of confusion. “The … who?” Hardin said.
“Archons. Beings of pure sentient fear. They sometimes look like crows, other times like people. They’re the ones behind the Bondsman. Don’t you know that?” Max swung his gaze at Marvin Sparkle. “Didn’t you tell them?”
Sparkle adjusted his hulking form in his too-small chair. Elephant in a teacup, Max thought. “No,” Sparkle replied. “It is … not a military matter.”
Ulrich raised an eyebrow at Sparkle. “But why would you withhold any information?”
Marvin waved it away as if this were trivial. “It’s not information. It’s superstition.” Max’s eyes flamed at the bald-faced lie. “It’s a Niburian myth; your anger with me is silly. It’s like not telling you about Odin if we were fighting a horde of Vikings. What matters is practical, military information.”
Sparkle’s eyes shot Max a warning. Don’t go there.
But this was a wedge issue, Max quickly saw. And Ulrich clearly did not like this non-answer: his silver jewelry jangled in annoyance. Max went on the offensive to exploit it.
“I have a question now,” Max snapped. “What do you know about the Bondsman?”
There was a silence, and then a tall Latino looking man spoke up. “We have tried to kill him, if that’s what you mean. All assassination attempts always fail, as if he knows exactly how to avoid them. Or sometimes, we’re certain we succeeded — only to have the Bondsman appear on television again the next day. He has an uncanny knack for survival. And our operatives have an uncanny knack for just the opposite. Anyone sent out is certain to die. After decades of losing good men and women, we’ve learned that our victory will not come in this way.”
“And nobody’s ever seen him without that mask on,” Max pressed.
“No.”
“C’mon. Somebody has to have. What about a girlfriend? Everybody has some inner circle, everybody slips up — it’s 1977, right? Since 1948, you’ve had this guy on your neck. That’s what, twenty-nine, thirty years? In all this time, no one has ever come forward? No theories?”
“He’s probably Niburian,” Hardin offered. “That’s the most common theory. Almost everyone thinks that. He came out of nowhere and defeated Jadeth: probably he’s a Niburian warlord who exploited an opportunity. The Niburian hardware at his command certainly suggests this: as with the Battle Thrones, only pureblood Niburians can operate some of it. And he’s probably male, but there’s no reason why he couldn’t be female. There is a reason for the mask, of course, and that could be it. Or some people think he’s a robot: his voice is icy, like a synthesizer or vocoder, and does not suggest either gender. The mask could be to hide his electronic interior — or perhaps he is Niburian robot or more properly said, golem. Something that operates using technology we don’t understand — and we still don’t really understand why Sky Chambers fly, just that they do, so we’re operating in realms of physics nobody truly understands.
“But nobody really knows. His —hers, or its — identity is a complete mystery.”
A name is power, Max breathed. To know the name of a thing is to have mastery over it.
“And now our turn,” Ulrich said. “You are c
uriously ill-informed, Mr. Quick. You genuinely don’t seem to know any of this. But how can that be?”
“I just got here,” Max non-explained.
“Just —? Where were you? Nibiru?” a fat man at the edge of the table shouted.
“Somewhere else. Somewhere the Bondsman wasn’t,” Max replied.
“Mr. Quick. We need to understand you. If you’re to —“
“I’ll get to it later,” Max popped back. “That is, if I like your answers to my questions. You don’t trust me? Fine. I don’t trust you either. And if you think I can’t leave this place whenever I damn well please, you’re sadly mistaken!” Several eyes went to the still-hot pile hardening of glass slag on the table. At that, Max softened his tone. “I want to trust you. I want to defeat the Bondsman, I truly do. But this has to go both ways. I’m interviewing you as much as you’re interviewing me.” I’ve already been more truthful with you than Sparkle!
Ulrich nodded slowly. “I see. Well perhaps you can answer this then. What of the Tale of Max Quick? Most tales — even false ones — have their root in the truth. Did you, in fact, recover the Pendant? You seemed to know much about it when we spoke earlier.”
Uh-oh, Max thought. He considered lying: after all, they didn’t know about Archons, maybe they didn’t know Niburians lived impossibly long lives. He could claim that he was as he appeared: a young man of seventeen or eighteen, and therefore he couldn’t have been alive in 1948. But he’d come this far with the truth; he gambled with it again.
“Yes,” Max gritted.
An intake of breaths around the table made a hiss.
“And after recovering the Pendant, did you, in fact, give it to Jadeth?”
Now that was a bomb of a question. But again, Max gambled on truth:
“Yes.” The reaction was immediate: several people stood, while still others unholstered weapons. “But,” Max snapped quickly, stabbing a finger in the air, “It didn’t happen the way the way you’ve been told. I did not — I repeat, did NOT — give Jadeth a weapon to enslave humanity with.” At the time, it was the only course of action: the only alternative was to use it on Jadeth, which was in itself an act as evil as what Jadeth proposed to do herself. He chose not to fight evil with evil.
