Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  Colin said, "I thought hunting was illegal now. No more toffs trampling through other people's gardens, you know, killing innocent foxes."

  I checked the date. "This was years ago, back when Englishmen still had rights. He was in the estuary below Middlesbrough, hunting small game birds, which were every one as guilty as sin, I'm sure. Anyway, the diagnosis here is of a trauma to the diencephalic-mesencephalic core-anyone know what that means?"

  "It's part of an auto," Colin offered.

  "It's part of his head," Quentin said. "Cephalic is from the Latin for 'head.'"

  "The chart mentions severe cognitive impairment. And something happened to his Ommaya and Gennarelli. No, wait, that's the name of the scale he was tested against." I breathed a sigh.

  "Leader, I'm sorry. I've studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, as well as astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geometry, but I cannot read a medical chart. This is written in another language only remotely related to the Queen's English. At a guess? Mortimer here went into the marsh and came out stupid. They think he fell and hit his head."

  We had discussed the plans for this exhaustively during the boat fide. Vanity stepped down toward the road, found a manhole cover, which, at Victor's gesture, flew open silently. She descended a ladder to where, not by coincidence, she "found" a large underground river. She called her boat.

  Then she scampered back up the ladder.

  She said, "We have our escape route, and our getaway boat coming. Amelia, is it obvious?"

  I had to say, "Sort of. To me it looks like this big tube filled with river water just dipped out of the parallel plane where the dreamlands are and intersected the Earth continuum. I dunno. There are other fourth-dimensional topography features here, stuff from the cathedral and old Roman ruins, other old roads through hyperspace, hidden groves of trees at right angles to normal space. Druid stuff, I guess. Someone like you was really active here, years ago. Your river might pass unnoticed if a siren walks by, but it's not exactly hidden, either."

  Vanity frowned. "In that case, let me keep the secret-passage-making to a minimum. We go in the front way. Victor, your turn."

  He walked across the snowy road and we followed him.

  I noticed invisible forces leaving his body and reaching up to nearby lampposts. "Victor!" I whispered. "Are you knocking out the cameras? I think those are just for traffic, not part of the hospital. You know, to catch jaywalkers and stuff. They're innocent."

  Victor said darkly, "Cameras like that are always put up by men like Boggin. I am sure whoever put them up told his students they were for their own good, too, using the same jolly tones our Boggin uses."

  At the front door, Victor manipulated the lock mechanism and the wires I described to him. The door clicked open. Quentin brought out from beneath his cloak a severed human hand dipped in wax, and he carefully lit each of the fingers on fire. Holding it before him, he strode down the corridors. He stood with his eerie candle between us and the main desk where the guard was sleeping, and the smoke from the candles reached like tentacles toward the guard's face. We all made noise as we crept past him, but somehow, the guard did not wake.

  The elevators were locked down at night. Rather than asking us to trace wires and locks and fiddle with the unfamiliar controls, Vanity gave Colin the high sign. Colin grinned a wicked grin, stepping forward. He grew at least two inches, and his muscles swelled and thickened on his frame, until his coat buttons and seams were straining. Then, like some abominable snowman, he just plunged his bare hands into the steel doors and tore them from their tracks.

  Victor had him tear one metal door in half, which made such a noise that it should have set the entire ward screaming, but Quentin's candle protected us, or something did. Colin thrust the broken door into the empty elevator shaft, and we all stepped on it, and Victor levitated us up to the third floor.

  This time, before Colin could show off, I reached into the locking mechanism and removed the little iron pins through the untouched surface of the door, and the doors could be slid aside without further ado.

  The corridor was a drab olive hue, thick-shadowed in the light of a single night-bulb held in a cage of wires on the ceiling. Vanity started looking at the room numbers painted on the wall, but I just took her elbow and pointed.

  And here was our next locked door in an evening of locked doors.

  I whispered, "There are five of us, and five ways to open this door. Who does the honor, Leader?"

  Vanity whispered back, "How do you figure five?"

  "Fourth dimension, magnetic powers, magic, brute strength. And you can open a locked door, too. I mean, you don't know for sure the lock is engaged, do you? No one knows what is inside a wall."

  She shook her head. "I can only find a secret passage if there might be one. Here there is nothing I can work with: Too much attention has already been paid to these walls."

  But Quentin said, "Leader! We cannot open this door."

  "Why not?" she said. "Are you worried about the rules here? We're already breaking and entering."

  He shook his head. "I don't know why, but I see the signs. This door is forbidden."

  Vanity looked at me and I looked at the threads of moral energy in the place. "He's right," I said.

  "But I don't see anything like that on the other doors. Why is this door different? I wonder if we should abort."

  Vanity said, "We can go in without touching the door."

  Victor said, 'To get in without touching the door requires we break in through an adjoining wall, the outside window, the ceiling, or the floor."

  Vanity said, "Amelia, if you would... ?"

  "Gladly, Leader."

  I have no idea what it looked like to them. I asked them to close their eyes anyway. I stood with one foot in the corridor and one foot in the room, with my leg going "over" the wall in the red direction, without touching it. I picked up Vanity first, and ballet-lifted her from right to left, and I made sure there were no wrinkles or rotations when I flattened their paper-doll bodies back into the flat square that formed the room.

  When it came Victor's turn, I balked. "Leader, I think it might be bad for him. He is kind of thinner than you people are in the fourth dimension. I don't want to hurt him."

  Quentin said, "He can go through the door. It won't see him."

  Blue light dazzled from Victor's head, and the lock clicked of its own accord, and he walked through. The azure light fell into the small, grim room and snuffed out Quentin's candle.

  The man, Mortimer, stirred on the white metal-framed bed, opened his eyes, and sat up.

  "Who're you?" His eyes were as blue and empty as a summer sky. Innocent. A child's eyes.

  A dart of light left Victor's metallic third eye and flicked into the man's face. His eyelids drooped, and he lay back down, snoring before he hit the thin yellow pillow.

  Vanity said, "What was that?"

  Victor closed the door behind him. "Narcolepsy. I stimulated the pons area of the brain and activated his sleep cycle."

  Vanity looked a little miffed that Victor had acted without waiting for orders, but she didn't say anything aside from, "Can you fix him?"

  "Let me look." And the azure beam played over the young man's face for many minutes. "Leader, I have been instructed, programmed, in a science called cryptognosis, which involves the manipulation of the nervous system on a fine structural level. There is nothing physically wrong with his brain. If it is a spell, anything from Quentin's paradigm, I should have been unable to undo it."

  Vanity said, "Should have been?"

  Victor said, 'The proper stimulation sequences are occurring, but the synapses in certain brain areas will not fire. I can detect the microvoltage changes on the dendrites, which should trigger corresponding actions in the axons, but nothing happens. There are no proteins that would attenuate the signals in operation."

  "Amelia, report."

  I said, "Something is lowering the utility, the usefulness of his brain cells to him. I see mor
al connections running into the past and future. There is a confusion of time-energy. There is something, some awareness, which is in the future, that reacts to changes in Mr. Finklestein here.

  Its interior nature is watchful and stern, but it has no free will. Its moral stance, um, changed, when Victor negated all the magic in the patient. I don't know what I am looking at. It could be natural. It could be artificial."

  "Can you do your monad thing?"

  I reached into the man's nervous system and straightened what I could. "Leader, I don't see a change. It is like it is something he's doing to himself, maybe? If he's not really hurt, could it be hypnosis? He has free will; he is just not using it."

  Quentin said, 'This sounds like it is up my alley, Leader. An enchantment, something that bound his will. Maybe he ran into a bad elf in the swamp? I suggest we retire to the graveyard across the street and let me try something. I know the formulae to summon and command the Great King and President called Zagam. He will appear at first in the form of a bull with gryphon's wings. He has the power to make fools witty. I need but a drop of blood from the patient."

  I reached into a cabinet one floor down and several yards up the corridor. Quentin looked startled when my hand turned red and vanished and reappeared. "Sterile lancet?" I offered. "This is a hospital, you know."

  Vanity unbuttoned her sea-coat and pulled her necklace out from her sweater. She was sweating.

  It had been cool outside, but the air in this small dim room was hot and close. "Let me see if I can get a more magical set of laws of nature working here, to help you out."

  "You know," I said doubtfully, "if we mess up something here, it could be bad. I mean, we're trying to do neurosurgery on this guy without anyone's permission, and..."

  No one was listening. They were all staring at Vanity's bosom. I mean, it is large and round and nicely shaped, but...

  Oh. There was a face in the middle of the green stone around her neck. That was what the boys were staring at.

  Vanity said, "Who are you?"

  A fair soft voice seemed to have spoken, although it did not speak. It was like we were remembering words, not hearing words. A queenly face in the dim depth of the green stone had answered wordlessly: "Andromeda am I, the queen of Ethiopia's daughter, prideful Cassiopeia. In all the devastated lands from Philistia to Lebanon, none save the fairest could be found to sate the monster, and so to pay my mother's guilt, with modest piety, uncomplaining, with daughterish obedience, I chained myself to the sacrificial sea-rock, to save the human lands from horrid Typhon's brood." Her eyes turned toward Victor as she spoke this. "Great Perseus me succored, who slew Medusa, cousin of the Graeae." Now she looked at Quentin. "And after life and death, Olympian Lord Terminus, All-highest, he who guards the boundary stone, opened the boundaries of starry night for me, had my figure placed within the heavens, a guide to mariners. The Phaeacians befriended my folk in times past, the mariners of Phoenicia and Tyre. I watch your silver ships even as Bran watches Cassiterides, the island of Tin. Ask of me, Daughter of Arete."

  "Can you make the room here hold the laws of nature that will let Quentin cast his magic?"

  The woman's voice hung in our memories, as if she had spoken: "There is no magic, only mysteries explained, and mysteries unexplained."

  Quentin muttered, "See? As I've always said."

  Vanity seemed at a loss. "Well-can you help us some other way?"

  "I will bestow what grace is mine to give, for any demoiselle who suffers chains is mine, and any savior who breaks those chains, and you are both at once, Phaeacian. The young man is chained, but he is not one of mine: On your oath to harm him not, I will perform."

  We all agreed.

  In our memories, we heard her words: "Phobetor, Nightmare-prince, this room is yours: I gift it you."

  The room did not change shape, nor did the moonlight falling in through the grille of the window darken, but something like that should have happened, because a strange dreamlike sensation crept over me, a sense that I could not move, or that the objects around me were alive, silently chuckling, merely holding into the familiar shapes of floor and bed out of a watchful malice.

  Colin said, "Hey. I can see his dreams. He is dreaming right now."

  Vanity said, "Colin, Amelia is freaking out. I think your dreamworld is bad for her. Can you do something?"

  He pulled his eyes away from the figure on the bed. "Um. Like what, Red Leader?"

  The man on the bed opened his eyes. It was horrible, like looking at a zombie. His mouth was open, and his voice came out, but I did not see any tongue or teeth. The lips did not move. It was like the real Mortimer was crouched below the bed, speaking up through a tube shoved through the back of a corpse. Nothing looked wrong, but it was horrible for the same reason dreams are horrible, when you dream about an empty white room with an empty wooden chair in it, and cannot remember why that terrifies you.

  Colin was holding me by the shoulders, and Victor was standing behind me with his arm around my waist. Funny. I didn't remember them reaching for me.

  "Amelia," said Colin. "Calm down. You have nothing to be afraid of. By the authority vested in me as a Prince of Chaos, son of Morpheus, I invite you into my realm, um, this whole room, the land on which it stands and the sky above, and all the rights, rents, and privileges appertaining thereto. There. Did anything happen?"

  I said in a calm, slow voice: "His eyes are open. He's talking. Can't you hear him?"

  "Amelia, stop screaming. Um." Colin shrugged. "Leader, what's going on?"

  Vanity spoke up, "Ask her what the voice said."

  I said, "I can hear you, Vanity. Mortimer is talking. He says he saw her bathing. The girl was naked. It was freezing winter, and the snow was on the sedge and swamp-grass, but she laughed and sported in the pool like it was a bath. Her dogs were blind, no eyes in the sockets, and white and pale as death. She set her dogs on him."

  Colin said, "She's right. That is what I am seeing inside his head. There is a girl, maybe fourteen, fifteen. Athletic build, sort of Jewish-looking, olive-skinned, with her hair all pinned up. Huh.

  That's funny. She just turned and looked at me."

  Vanity said, "Someone is watching us."

  Colin said, "She's whistling for her dogs. How can she be doing that? This is something in his dream."

  I spoke. My words sounded odd to me. "He is dreaming a real thing."

  "Actaeon," said Quentin. "I told you about him before. His own hounds turn on him. I guess in the modern version, his brain cells turn on him. Leader, we had best start the retreat!"

  Colin reached forward and touched the figure on the bed. Suddenly, the dream sensations left me.

  The man's eyes were closed again; his mouth was relaxed. Colin spoke in a voice of solemn command: "I release you from your nightmare. Be whole! I release you from the curse of the goddess! Wake! OH, BAT CRAP! She's coming! Don't any of you see her! She's coming with her dogs! Leader, whaddya wanna do?"

  Vanity said in a voice that squeaked with panic, "Can any of you see anything?"

  Victor said, "I think only Colin's laws of nature are working now."

  Vanity clutched at her stone. "Okay. I can-"

  I shouted, "Leader, no! Wait! I can see her, too. She is approaching through the dream-realm, a plane parallel to the plane of earth. But the world-paths curve away from this room. I don't think she can get into the room, not while you are maintaining a boundary with your green stone."

  The moon shining in through the window changed suddenly, and an olive-skinned girl stood outside, looking in. She was dressed in a brief white tunic, leather leggings, and a forearm-guard on her right arm. In that hand, she held a bow that was as silver and lustrous as the moon. Atop her tightly bunned and netted hair, she wore a coronet shaped like a crescent. With her other hand, she was fishing an arrow from her ivory quiver. Her eyes were the color of moonlight, and eerie, and cold. Her internal nature was fierce and clean and young, untouched by any man.
r />   "Chaotic creatures, dressed like humans, and standing in a house!" she said, and her voice was like a crystal goblet chiming. It was more regal than pretty, but it was the kind of voice that could say things like off with their heads or throw them to the snakes without any hint of pity or doubt.

  From the shape of her legs and her general trim, I could tell she'd be good at the hundred-meter dash. Her shoulders were broad and sinewy for a girl, the muscles sculpted from endlessly pulling a bowstring.

  Victor raised his hand. "Miss, don't shoot! We're the hostages from Chaos. If we die, the war between Cosmos and Chaos starts again."

  She rolled her silvery blind-seeming eyes in mirth. "You give commands to me, little boar piglet, little wolf cub? Your kind is my prey: I hunt you for sport. Cunning it is of you vile creatures to pretend to be the babies Father gave to Boreas. But the wise North Wind would never let the real hostages of Chaos escape his sight, would he? My Big Brother would know, for he sees everything, and Mavors would know, too. I will cut out your tongue for that lie, unhearted dragon-boy, and cook it for soup. You others I will stuff. Release your hostage!"

  Vanity was standing there, her mouth open, her face blank with fear. I knew that look. I had seen it on her when she was called on in class, on days when we hadn't studied the lesson. Out of ideas.

  I saw the morality webs fletch and twitch. "She means you, Leader. She thinks we've captured you."

  I could see the dogs through the walls. They were coming out of the moonlit clouds, silvery white, as if made of cloud-stuff, solidifying as they ran through the air. Blind things with red ears. Their internal nature was deadly and cold: These were things from Hell. Everyone heard them baying.

  The queenly teenager said to me, "You have spoken out of turn, Unknown One. For that affront, I demand the sacrifice of life and limb and everything. Do you deny me?"