Eréndira Marquez comes. She is a monster wrongly trusted by Paganini.
No time to try to understand, for the ferocious light ball, crackling and flashing, drew closer, the roaring even louder. Freddie saw various indistinct black objects churning like debris within a whirlpool of white and golden light, and as the ball grew larger, she noticed a human-like form at the core, half the size of the loud and blasting thing itself.
Prepare yourself. The demon is almost upon us.
Increasing in velocity at the last moment before entering the window, it crashed through with a thunderous racket, and in two blinks of moment, dissolved to a woman standing in a haze of swirling fire smoke.
Though not quite a woman.
Freddie's first impression was that of a uniquely beautiful human crossed with an insect, though upon closer inspection, other contrasting features became obvious: wicked mandibles thrust at least a full foot from her jaw like twin black sabers, and giant thorns the color of fire ant rose from her upper shoulders, while her eyes, big as fists, gleamed a somber, lifeless black like the eyes of a giant shark. But as the smoke cleared and the godlike hybrid strolled forward, the mandibles and thorns withdrew, retreating with soft pops into sockets of flesh. Her eyes shrunk to human eyes, becoming the color of umber, a burnt orange, an autumnal sizzle of things dying and seeking rebirth. And too, this Wizard Goddess stood tall, at least six foot four, curved and powerful as any woman Freddie had ever seen. She wore only a dark armor breastplate that bared her broad shoulders and contoured down to rest high on her hips, the surface patterned with three rows of magical Chinese-like symbols of varying sizes, all glowing soft purples and reds. Her flesh, of a Latin hue, dark as the Moorish ancestors of Spanish kings, and her hair black, flowing behind her and falling below her waist—the most lustrous black night of hair framing a face strong as a cliff, yet as lovely as the setting sunlight upon that cliff, accentuated with golden hoop earrings and a thin golden necklace with a gleaming emerald the size of a thumbnail. She wore no shoes, simply ankle bracelets of gold. To look upon this woman, if she could be called that, was to have one's breath taken away, no matter the observer be male or female.
Eréndira is smeared with blood. She has been on a killing spree.
Freddie saw what her other self made reference to: dabs and streaks of fresh blood on Eréndira's arms and above her bosom, a small trickle from the right side of her lip—as though the blood of her victims was still tasted by her mouth and body. The Wizard Goddess fixated on Paganini, who in turn watched her approach—his face calm, though not quite so apathetic as before. Her head turned ever so slightly as she strolled forward, and her autumnal burn of eye flashed at Freddie, and she knew at once that this Eréndira deeply loathed her. She saw her face in those umber Goddess eyes, and it reminded her of Temujin Gur, the way his eyes appeared to consume her at the banquet.
Yes, she hates you. She is a jealous half-blood who wants you dead.
"You have been fighting, my darling Empress of Byzantium," Paganini said with an emotionless tone.
Eréndira came to a halt before the table, and said, "I saved the stuffy Archduke Ferdinand twice, but Godfellow's forces moved in rapidly and the Serbs succeeded. It's his damn machine, his War Tracker daughter giving him that edge, as we both know. World War I therefore proceeds as usual, and even worse news, the battle for Mein Kampf has finally suffered an Extinction Event. I am sorry to report that Hitler has once again been rejected from art school," she said flatly, her voice possessing an exotic accent Freddie could not trace. Portugese? And the tone deep, nearly the voice of male command, unlike any other woman Freddie knew. But who was Hitler?
With resignation in his voice, Paganini said, "I am not surprised. The Mein Kampf point has seen conflict between our forces at least a dozen times. What are the losses?"
"Surya Command reports a squadron consisting of seven of our best spellcraft captains assigned to that era, along with two gods, Wotanna and Farzoon, and at least a dozen black armor pieces of various sizes including five new War Reapers, several platoons of Alakar, and reports of three to five Magogs, including a female with child."
Freddie still mulled over "Empress of Byzantium," much less the other terms. This Eréndira, an Empress of Byzantium? History recorded no such person. Freddie would have heard of her, history being one of her specialties.
Paganini's calm broke, and he said with irritation in his voice, "Magogs with child are not supposed to engage and—"
"It was not my choice," Eréndira said, her voice clam, and turning to face Freddie, her umber eyes burning brighter, she shouted with a thunderclap voice that shook the very molecules of the room wherein they stood:
"AND AS FOR YOU, CZARINA CATHERINE, YOU SHOULD TEACH YOUR BRATTY YOUNGER SELF TO HIDE HER THOUGHTS SO THEY DO NOT FOUL US ALL LIKE CURDLED MILK!" The sheer force of the bellow rocked Freddie back on her heels. "I WAS AN EMPRESS OF BZYANTIUM, AND MY NAME WAS THEODORA!"
Courage. The vile creature is baiting you.
"Do not try my patience now, Eréndira, this is a time for mourning, not petty rancor," said Paganini. "These beings were heroes."
Eréndira turned her face back to him and resumed her flat delivery as though nothing had happened: "You always feel sad for your heroes, especially following an Extinction Event, but why? You know it will occur if a pivotal point in history is contested too often. You know that anyone hurled back in time due to the Event will cross the Nicholas Line going south and our chrono-defense satellites will sterilize them, and whatever burning and bloody scraps are left once they hit the Cenozoic ocean at over a thousand miles an hour will be breakfast for megalodons. You and Godfellow set up your game that way. Your rules, your World Maker craft. You should learn to accept the inevitability and not mope about it like a sissy girl."
"I will not argue my emotions with you, Eréndira. And this is far more than just a game. Edison, as deluded as he is, isn't insane. He knows that without rules like the Nicholas Line that all of us would cease to exist."
Freddie decided to speak. It felt ridiculous for her to stand there, mute and afraid of this Eréndira apparition. "But you said to me, Master Paganini, that I am a chess queen in this game, did you not?" Freddie asked him.
Before he could answer, Eréndira turned a glare on Freddie and said, "Look, it's trying to think!" The glare intensified, the umber eyes burning with streaks of fire, like scraps of heroes falling into the Cenozoic ocean. Freddie's fingers began to painfully prick for the first time since Eréndira appeared. "Who said you could speak in my presence, babooshka? Isn't that what your castle nanny calls you?"
"My nanny is none of your business, Empress of Byzantium."
The claws are out. Careful!
"So, your fingers are pricking?" Eréndira asked. "Well, one day you will do enough evil to make your own fingers prick, and you will say to yourself ..." And Eréndira cleared her voice and spoke a perfect imitation of Freddie:
"By the pricking of my fingers, my own black soul nearby lingers."
"I will not do evil, so that will never happen," Freddie said with a tone of defiance.
"Gods of Time! The perfect Czarina!" Eréndira Marquez said and laughed in a bitter tone, like someone who had seen too much misery and death. "You will do evil in war, babooshska, more than you can dream! So much that your castle nanny Babette would not recognize you. So much that you will make Princess Johanna look like an innocent wood nymph in comparison."
"Enough of you!" Freddie shouted at Eréndira. The comparison to Princess Johanna had proved too much. She felt anger beginning to overtake her, and she welcomed it, for it was far easier to endure than fear.
In consequence of Freddie's defiance, Eréndira's entire body began to fume. The air above her head and upper shoulders turned mirage-like hot, her umber eyes brightening and streaking with meteor. Her face darkened to a sinister death smile while dark blades of shadow whipped like a turning fan across her upper chest, arms and thighs, as though horrid
inner demons raced within her, their black forms reflected on her flesh.
"We love, and we fight, like no human can," Eréndira said with a savage tone in her voice.
Freddie saw Eréndira staring murderously at her and watched as her own face bloated larger and larger in Eréndira's eyes, and with that growth came the feeling of painful nails scratching inside her head. She winced and groaned. It felt to her as if Eréndira would claw her brain to shreds.
"Enough, Eréndira!" Paganini shouted, "There is work to be done!"
Eréndira ignored Paganini because Freddie was now her chosen victim. "Conflict that does not kill you, makes you stronger, Czarina whore, so let us make you a little stronger now. Do you want me to tell you about THE EVIL THINGS YOU WILL DO BEGINNING WITH ALLOWING YOUR OWN FATHER'S DEATH?"
Damn her lying bitch soul!
The Princess of Anhalt and Czarina Catherine were now in agreement. Freddie glared at Eréndira, her body trembling with rage, and her enemy glared back, and as they did so, magical yarrow symbols appeared in mid-air, flanking both of them. Large as each woman by half, they glowed a blood red and swirled angrily as they underwent ongoing mutation to new symbols.
YARROW WAR SYMBOLS.
Glyphs of sorcery such as these had the power to devastate entire cities, but Freddie was
ignorant of their meaning. She did not care, though her older self understood, and welcomed the chance to inflict as much pain as possible on Eréndira.
Paganini shouted at them, "Suppress the yarrow! You will take out half of Saravastra!"
Eréndira's yarrow symbols, hot and snapping, faded from view as their master never let her eyes stray from Freddie. And as they faded, so did Freddie's defensive yarrow symbols.
"I have no need of yarrow," Freddie said with an edge of knife in her voice. "I will strangle you dead for speaking of my father with your foul lips."
"You wish to lay a hand on me, hypocrite Czarina? I will snap your head off and throw it over the Himalayas!"
So be it, half-blood monster!
Freddie's open right hand blurred forth and struck Eréndira's face with a lightning bolt slap that whipped the creature's body around for three spins and slammed her to the floor. Without a moment of hesitation, Freddie cried out like a wild lioness and launched herself onto Eréndira with inhuman speed. She grappled the muscular and taller body of the Wizard Goddess, head-locked her and drove a knee into her chest with the force of a wall-shattering ram. Eréndira grunted in pain and Freddie drove in the knee again. The furious Wizard Goddess reacted with a fist driven upward into Freddie's abdomen, and then, with legs strong enough to pummel a tyrannosaurus to pulp, she sprang forward and up, causing the two of them to fly like cannon shot across the room and smack the wall beyond Paganini's desk. The force of the impact quaked the entire building, and they crashed to the floor, Eréndira's legs locked like pythons around Freddie's straining body.
The women screamed in rage, hurling insults in Galician like Czarina esterco! and Can bruxa! (Czarina dung! and Witch dog!) as they punched each other in the face, each blow with enough force to crater a city street.
Realizing that shouting was pointless, Paganini reached for Skanda, his magical violin, for he understood that only its power might stop the fight before the tower collapsed. He hoped too that the quaking and shrieking would bring the Saravastra spellcraft captains racing up to the room.
Meanwhile, the death grapple between the World Maker and Wizard Goddess continued without surrender or respite. Freddie and Eréndira careened over the floor, wrestling and punching, stopping once or twice to bang each other's head by the hair into the stone tiles before rolling on towards the opposite wall. Eréndira's legs continued to squeeze gasps from Freddie, crushing her with enough force to reduce a boulder to rubble. Once they hit the wall though, Freddie raised herself and yanked Eréndira up by the hair to face her, whereupon Eréndira's mandibles burst suddenly out from her jaw and drove their dark points with a kerchunk deep into Freddie's cheeks.
"Saravastra's gods!" Paganini yelled.
He began to play Skanda, his bow striking with anger, his fingers curving over the strings and beating like mad white spiders, but it would take time and ingenuity to break apart this fight between these two powerful and furious magical beings.
Freddie screamed and her face blood streamed down her chest. She let go of Eréndira's hair with her left hand and snapped off a mandible from the jaw of the Wizard Goddess, yanking it from her own cheek at the same time. Eréndira screamed in agony. With a cry of rage, Freddie drove the black saber into the wizard woman's mouth with such force that the point of it pierced through the back of her neck. Freddie then spat the blood from her own mouth into her enemy's shocked face, and as Eréndira desperately yanked the mandible free, followed by a spewing gush of dark blood that soaked Freddie's chemise, a World Maker aria voice echoed in the room, pure and bright as sun from the voice of the older Freddie:
Fóraaa monstro, a cabeza cara a pedraaaa! (Away monster, your head to the stone!)
The shrieking Wizard Goddess unwrapped from Freddie and flew backwards in an instant. The aria spell levitated her to the ceiling before driving her to the floor face first, there to begin ramming her head into the stone tiles. Freddie then leapt high towards her foe, her right arm outstretched as a symbol of moon-blue steel formed in mid-air and congealed to four feet of shimmering yarrow sword, clutched at the hilt by her right hand.
The attempt to impale the Wizard Goddess, however, was hampered by Paganini's Skanda beginning to take effect. The arc of Freddie's flying body, sword in hand, began to slow, and slow even more. Only one chance remained. The older Freddie within her invoked her Mother Yarrow:
Nai Yarrow Maria, concesión forzaaaa me! (Mother Yarrow Maria, grant me strength!)
In defiance of Skanda's magic gaining in power by the second, Freddie completed her arc just in time, dropping down to drive the yarrow sword through the back of her enemy with a force of no less than twenty tons per square inch. The flesh of the Wizard Goddess sizzled hot at the point of entry wound and the blade stabbed deep into the tower floor, trapping her there like a thrashing dragonfly pinned by a dart.
Eréndira howled in such unrelenting agony that the sound of it was like several large cannons firing salvos one after the other, and it was said later, by those who lived in Saravastra, that the howls beat against the Himalayas like storm waves and caused dozens of avalanches, some of which buried whole villages of mountain tribesmen and wrecked more than a dozen Buddhist shrines.
* Оверман *
COVERED IN BLOOD AND SMILING, SHE SAT BEFORE PAGANINI, her chemise in tatters and torn from her legs. Recovering from the fight with the Wizard Goddess, she breathed deeply, unable yet to believe herself wrong for relishing the extra pain she caused the half-blood by twisting the yarrow sword in her body as she thrashed. Nothing but hatred, pure and glorious, had filled Freddie's soul. Both her souls. How satisfactory to have watched Paganini's Bodhisattvas of spellcraft pouring into the room in their tall crescent caps and flowing orange robes to remove a screeching Eréndira Marquez still impaled by the yarrow sword. Their spells, spoken in unison, formed an imprisoning sphere of force around the Wizard Goddess and she looked like a squirming rodent trapped in a glass egg.
"We have known you for years now, and you are hot of head, full of passions," Paganini said, his face dour and exhausted, "That is a strength, and a weakness at the same time. It is amazing you were able to slow my music spell reaching full zenith. Skanda has rarely been defied."
"Skanda?"
"The Hindu god of war. But my Skanda, my violin, is an instrument for creation also, almost as varied and strong as your aria power. But that is a matter for another time. I have more I must tell you. My apologies for the interruption of—"
“What is the source of Ahriman’s power?” Freddie asked.
“You cut right to it, yes?” Paganini said, grinning sadly.
“To know the sour
ce is to know a being’s deepest secret,” she said.
Following a long sigh, a weary Paganini said he had no answer for Ahriman’s power. And how did he influence the aria, create the aria? Why was it bestowed on Freddie and not another? No answer for that either. The future Czarina's power derived from the same source as the yarrow magic refined by he and Edison Godfellow many centuries before in Spain after the fall of the Roman Empire—the source being the "Tao," the flow and substance of existence into which Ahriman was embedded, like a tree growing from a great stone.
The concepts of magical aria, Tao, and yarrow mesmerized Freddie.
"However, there is a theory we World Makers have …," Paganini said, looking distant and somber.
“Yes?”
“That the Tao, at least in part, is a balance of visible matter like stars with dark matter we cannot see. The dark matter state will be discovered by Earth scientists about a hundred years from now. The Tao is a fanciful term, one belonging to the ancient Chinese. The notion of Ahriman growing into it, also fanciful."
While Freddie still tasted Eréndira's blood in her mouth, Paganini reached over to one of the contraptions on his desk. It appeared like a small, transparent sphere of glass with an elongated neck, a very thin loop of wire inside. It stood upright upon a wooden base, screwed into the top of it. Paganini's index finger touched something on the base and she heard a click sound. The sphere filled with white light. Paganini withdrew his hand and said, "Electricity … the power to change life on an enormous scale, with the help of science and a manifestation of Tao, but the non-magical side of Tao. Few human beings comprehend electricity, just know that it works and has many uses. The same circumstance applies to the magical side of Tao. We call upon it and control it, use it for a number of purposes, though we do not fully understand its nature."
War of the World Makers Page 11
