by Stanzin
CHAPTER 22
Dialogue With The Devil
‘Hallo there,’ Gregory said, and laughed nervously. ‘You scared me.’
‘Forgive me,’ Remy said. He stood quite close, looking down curiously at Gregory.
Blood pounded in his ears… could Remy see his shock? Where had he come from? How had he reached here so quickly? How had he slipped by everyone’s defences.
‘It’s alright,’ Gregory said with forced lightness. ‘We’ve never actually met, have we? Gregory Grey.’ He stuck out his hand.
‘Remy Schuyler. A pleasure.’ The necromancer’s hand was hot, as if he were burning with fever.
He got to his feet. ‘It’s just… you popped up very suddenly. Where were you?’
‘Inside,’ Remy said, pointing at the Control Room. ‘There was a runeflow I wanted to test on the Tree.’
Remy must have been invisible… dread welled up in Gregory’s chest; he fought it down. ‘Oh, anything interesting?’
He had to get in somehow… get in and remove Remy’s rune-card, without Remy following him in.
‘Oh, yes… a project I’ve been working on for a long time now… and I think it’s going to turn out wonderfully… you’ll see. Any moment now,’ Remy said happily. Gregory stared at him. Remy didn’t look like a man who had had his legs broken only two nights ago, or like a man who’d spent two days under invasive interrogation.
Remy’s face was peaceful, his eyes bright, his hands delicately folded in front of him… he looked as if he were in a trance.
The edge of the landing was only a few feet away; if Gregory pushed quickly and hard, would he be able to shove Remy off? The memory of the near-corpses in the basement, and Remy fighting Vincent flashed vividly through his mind… no: the gypsy might have overpowered Remy… but the necromancer would rip Gregory apart in less time than it took to blink.
‘And you? This is an odd place and time for you to be,’ Remy said pleasantly.
‘Mr. Coffey and his daughter,’ Gregory said, suddenly remembering that Susannah hadn’t been at the funeral because her father needed her at the Tree. ‘They invited me to an early dinner… but I turned up a little too early. They’ve got some work, so I thought I’d stroll around.’
Then his heart sank.
Please let her not be here, he thought with dread, let her have left…
Where was Vincent? Where was Uncle Quincy and his army? Had Zach delivered Vincent’s message?
‘I see. Also, I suppose I should offer congratulations… Magus Gregory,’ Remy extended a thin hand.
‘What?… oh, right. Thanks.’ Remy’s hand was icy.
Come to think of it, he was actually closer to the door than Remy. He could just step in… he was still carrying his Aegis; if he could activate it on the door, Remy would be locked out.
‘Your boon was quite curious,’ Remy said.
‘Yeah…’ Gregory’s brain hiccoughed again. How had Remy heard about his boon? He’d been Vincent’s prisoner when Gregory had made it last night. ‘Yeah well, don’t tell anyone, but I only asked for it so they’d teach magic to all my friends at the orphanage.’
‘Admirable. Did you know I was raised in a foster home too? I more than appreciate your sentiment.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Officially the weirdest conversation-’ began Gregory’s brain and he yelled at it to shut up.
‘You’re welcome,’ Remy said. ‘Actually, you’re more than welcome to watch my project… I was just about to put the finishing touches.’
He’s gone mad, Gregory decided. No sane person would invite someone to witness what was presumably mass murder.
Then he remembered Remy was dying, so sanity might not figure highly in his mental states right now…
At any rate, he would be closer to the rune-card of death.
‘I’d love to,’ Gregory said.
He followed Remy into the dim room. Shining yellow runeflows streamed across the screens. Gregory’s eyes searched out the small stack of arrays in the corner of the room – they were all empty save one.
How do I get you out of the room? Gregory wondered. Aloud, he asked, ‘What are you trying to do?’
‘Did you know,’ said Remy quietly, ‘that at the moment of death, your Will…. it doesn’t disperse all at once? I think it’s because it’s gotten too used to the shape of your body.’
‘Huh?’
‘You’re unfamiliar with the concept? I suppose you would be. Usually only advanced healers speak of such things. Though I hear you’re very well read… what do you know of what happens to your spirit, your Will, after you die?’
‘…I don’t know.’
‘It dissipates. Some say it returns to the primordial spirit from whence it came… the mother Will, from whom all other Wills are derived: the Wills of all animals, and all peoples, and yours, and mine. They say it is a most powerful thing…’
The necromancer looked almost melancholy.
‘We do know for sure that our bodies are containers within which our Wills grow… body and Will mold and enrich each other as we age... they become more potent… powerful…’
Gregory was a little irritated with himself – Remy was distracting him from what he needed to do. Not that Gregory had any chance of removing the rune-card – Remy was practically standing on top of it.
‘I can’t imagine people taking all that seriously,’ Gregory said, casting his eyes around for a distraction… any distraction.
‘No,’ Remy sighed. ‘That’s both a blessing and curse, I suppose. They don’t take it seriously, so they can’t live in the manner most beneficial to them. But if they did take it seriously, they’d scramble over themselves to possess that power… like piglets fighting for a turn at a sow’s teat.’
‘What’s all this got to do with your project anyway?’
‘In a sense, when you’re alive, it’s as if your Will dreams and grows, and when you finally die, your Will wakes… existing, briefly, as a separate entity from the world, caught between the physical and the spiritual… in a waking limbo.
‘In that brief moment of waking, before your Will dissipates… it could actually go anywhere… one could, if they wanted, point their will to a different direction, a different purpose.
‘But where do you send a powerful, life-enriched and unbound spirit? What other vessel could receive it?’
Vincent’s words from less than an hour ago echoed in Gregory’s head:
‘… magics in this world… old powers… that can be harnessed only by sacrifice… as if he were hoarding strength… thaumic potential… siphoned off to some unknown vessel…’
‘I don’t know,’ Gregory said.
‘No, you wouldn’t. Tell me, have you ever chosen to lose a fight, Magus Gregory?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you know… that a fight deliberately, strategically lost, is victory disguised. A battle sacrificed so that the war is won, yes?’ Remy said.
Gregory nodded.
‘What if that choice was taken away from you? What if your Will was so imprisoned, that winning or losing didn’t matter… because you were only ever a pawn fighting someone else’s war.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Did you know that the world is at war?’
‘What war?’ Why was Remy telling him this?
‘It’s the most important war that very few even know is being fought,’ Remy said. ‘An invasion no one can see, yet it’s fought every day, at every moment… and we are losing every battle… wouldn’t it be just – moral even – to set people free of their pretensions to choice… to harness their Wills for the greater good?’
Gregory said nothing. His ears strained… but there was no sound from outside the room.
‘To tell of it all would take too much time, and I don’t have much left. But I can tell you this – we needed a weapon… and that was my task… to build something more powerful than the world had ever seen.’
Remy caressed the co
ntrol panel. ‘So I built the Tree.’
And that’s when Gregory knew Remy intended to kill him – it was the only circumstance under which he would admit to the Tree’s true purpose.
Gregory forced a snort of derision, despite the terror suddenly coursing through his nerves - ‘The Tree’s a weapon?’
‘Human Will – thaumic energy – can be an exponential force – it’s powerful enough when confined to a single body… can you imagine how powerful it could be if many such Wills were wielded at once?’ Remy said, a wild light coming into his eyes. ‘What if you could wield fifteen thousand such powers?’
He looked expectantly at Gregory.
‘You mean the refugees in Helika… those rune-linked to the tree,’ Gregory said.
‘Yes,’ Remy beamed. His hands were trembling… an effect of the poison?
‘But for you to… wield their Wills, they’d need to…’
‘To die, yes.’
Gregory dashed for the console: some forced picked him up and threw him into the wall across the room: the impact knocked the air out of his lungs: and when he could breathe again, he realised he was still pinned to the wall, a foot off the ground.
‘I’m sorry, Magus Gregory,’ Remy said.
Gregory summoned the power he had thrown at the spectre only two nights before: his thauma exploded against Remy’s; nothing happened…he was helpless against Remy’s necromantically enhanced strength.
‘Why?’ Gregory choked out in rage. ‘Why am I here? Why not just tell me leave? What’s the point of telling me all this?’
‘I apologise, but this will be my life’s only truly great work. I shall die today… and I may die with no one ever knowing my role in the war. I wanted an audience… and I don’t want to die alone.’
‘You don’t have to die – you could just forget everything and leave!’ yelled Gregory. ‘And your plan’s stupid! You can’t kill fifteen thousand people without people noticing! Once they figure out how you used the Tree, they’ll destroy this precious weapon of yours!’
Remy looked amused. ‘The Tree is only an idea given form. The true weapon was always the idea itself – to harness thaumic potential through rune-linking. The construct only looks like a tree because I like trees… I could have easily made it look like a big box, or a library.’
‘They won’t let anyone ever use… or build something like this again!’
‘True… but only if they find out. And they will never find out, because I’m going to destroy the Blood Tree as soon as its task is done… which shall be tonight.’
‘The Blood Tree falls and then a whole bunch of refugees die? They’ll figure out the connection at once. They’ll know the Tree caused it,’ Gregory spat, and then he remembered Director Coffey and Susannah – if they were still here when the Tree fell, they wouldn’t survive either.
Remy smiled. ‘That depends on which they think is the cause… and which they think is the effect.’
Gregory’s jaw fell… and his fists clenched.
‘You’re going to make it look like… like something killed the refugees off... and without their magic to sustain it… the Tree collapsed,’ he whispered, at once horrified and admiring of the simple genius. ‘No one will suspect the Tree.’
‘Clever, isn’t it?’ Remy said, looking absurdly pleased with himself. ‘My idea. And if, for some reason, the Blood Tree itself can’t kill the refugees… there’s more than one way to skin a cat… speaking of which, I need to see how things are going on that end… they must be worried I haven’t been in touch. I must inform them the timetable will have to be sped up.’
The Scrying portal lit up at Remy’s approach. The necromancer placed something into the circle – a small white twig… no, a bone from someone’s finger. Was Remy calling his master? The man Vincent had hunted all these years… was that his finger-bone?
There was a shout from outside the room – Remy’s finger paused an inch away from the button that would link his mind to one hundreds of miles away.
‘Someone called for you, Magus Gregory… your friends?’ Remy said. ‘Excuse me, I’ll just be back. Hang around.’
The necromancer chuckled at his own little joke, and shimmered out of sight.
The voice really had shouted Gregory’s name. Who was it? Vincent or Uncle Quincy? Vincent’s tracer, the one he’d put on Gregory at their first meeting… surely it would lead them to him? Susannah and her father didn’t even know he was here.
Gregory blasted whatever force held him with his own thauma again, with the same results. Still he tried, with bellows of rage… and tried again, and again, with tears pouring down his face, till his magic ached unpleasantly… and still the bonds held him.
His exhaustion took him to despair – Susannah would die, and her father would die… Vincent would never get to know his son… Gregory would die without a single memory of his mother… beyond the mountains, Lesley Greene and everybody in her camp would die, unless he could warn them…
The Scrying portal! Gregory realised… Lesley’s blood frond was still in his pocket… if only he could get free…
‘Let… me… GO!’ he roared, casting out with everything he had. His thauma strained so hard Gregory thought his magic would break… and it still wasn’t enough… when he felt something he’d felt only once before, less than a day before…
An immense power flooded him: it was like drowning, if drowning could feel good, like falling into something vast and ancient and calm… Domremy, a country’s spirit…
Whatever Remy had cast to hold Gregory, it broke – no human spell could stand such an onslaught. Gregory fell to the ground, scrambled to his feet, dashed to the door, pulled out the Aegis from his pocket, and fixed it to the open archway: the translucent golden barrier materialised: an instant later an immensely powerful spell crashed harmlessly into it… the barrier held.
Remy stood on the other side of the barrier, his ring channelling torrential spellfire… to no effect. The Tree drew power from the magic of fifteen thousand refugees – Remy couldn’t break it even if he absorbed the strength of a thousand men.
The torrent cut off abruptly.
That trancelike peace had left Remy’s face - it was twisted with rage and panic now.
‘How’d you break free?’ Remy demanded.
‘When I figure it out, I’ll let you know,’ Gregory said, his ears still roaring with Domremy’s power.
‘Open the door,’ Remy snarled.
Instead, Gregory turned and pulled out the solitary rune-card from the array tower. Remy’s eyes widened in shock. Turning back, Gregory broke the thin runewood over his knee.
‘No.’
