Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  Multidimensional continuum control is a fine superpower-there is none better-but no girl wants a paradigm she cannot use without looking icky.

  Vanity's voice came over the phone speaker: "Amelia! Amelia! Oh, God, please answer!"

  "I'm here."

  "Something just saw you. Something powerful and terrible. Then another group of somethings joined in. There is a crowd looking at you."

  I looked left and right. Bare walls. Loading dock with empty trucks. Behind me was a space filled with a diesel engine, calmly purring. I ran the few yards, down a set of metal stairs, and eased open a rear door leading to the loading bay. Outside was a short alley leading to a nighttime street, neon-lit. There were people on it, couples walking, perhaps headed to the club just down the way. No one stopping to turn and look toward the store.

  I opened up eyes in the fourth dimension. There was a blaze of utility from the music section of the store overhead, but now I saw it was not useful to me or Colin; the supply of instruments was very useful to someone else.

  That same light sent out a streamer of moral obligation like a spiderweb. I traced the strands.

  One bundle went toward Deimos, who was sitting in a glassed-in office high above a dancing floor of many dazzling lights. He had his harpoon in his hand, facing the direction of the store, as if the intervening walls and buildings were no barrier to his dread weapon. The threads there ran from him to Archer, who was on the street between the store and the club. Deimos was acting as a sniper, a friendly one, ready to strike down anyone who threatened his brother. Had he been watching the whole exchange between me and Archer? Probably not, or Vanity would have sensed his eyesight. No-something had startled him into a warlike stance, a warning that his oath to protect his brother was about to be challenged.

  I saw a second bundle leaving him and leading back to me. He had made a promise to me to show my card to Archer. It was a dim connection, but enough that Deimos could sense a threat to me as well. If I were killed, he could not keep his promise.

  I am lucky Deimos had made that promise, because I could see through his tangle of moral connections something I could not see radiating from myself.

  A final bundle had reached down from a point immensely remote in space, right to my position, glowing, shivering, and crawling with motes and flickers of communication-purpose. It was as if the line was shouting to someone, HERE! SHE IS HERE!

  "Damn!" I breathed.

  Wives of the Psychopomp

  "Do you see anyone?" asked Vanity over the phone.

  "The money. I spent the money..."

  I could dimly hear, in the background, Quentin's voice saying, "It's ap Cymru. Amelia's in debt to him now. That's why they gave her such an absurd amount of money. The obligation was not actual before, because she herself never spent it. Tell her to throw away whatever it is she just bought..."

  Vanity: "Did you hear Quentin?"

  "Yes." I tossed the sleek black guitar into a Dumpster filled with packing material. And immediately: "Didn't work," I said. The obligation lines continued to lead to me, not to it. Oh well.

  I picked up the guitar again. No reason to throw away a perfectly good guitar.

  I said to Vanity: "Which floor are you on?"

  Vanity said: "I am not in the store anymore. I led the boys into a secret elevator behind the jewelry department when I felt someone find you. I am hoping it will lead down to a sewer or-Listen! Get to the docks, get to the shore. Or to the nearest body of water. I am ordering my ship to go find you."

  Vanity shouted over the tiny phone speaker: "Do not dare tell me you are going to lead them away! What if we get attacked by Dr. Fell and you are not there? What if Mrs. Wren attacks you, and it is something Quentin could save you from by saying the name of a fish? We are all in danger if you are in danger! Don't you dare run off on us or be brave, or so help me God, I will never forgive you, Amelia Armstrong Windrose!"

  Quentin, in the background, softly: "Colin can find her. She still owes him a favor."

  I should have run back into the store, but the fact that streamers of obligation-energy were reaching from Deimos to this area frightened me irrationally. This store was part of a trap. Vanity was not in it, anyway.

  I ran from the alley to the street. It was bright and crowded for a nighttime street, and the night air was warm.

  People were staring at me, so I slowed down to a brisk trot. Just a lady in a leather jacket and cap, out for a walk with her space-age guitar! Everything is normal!

  As I continued to walk, I noticed that everything did look normal. Whatever alarm I had just set off, it might be weeks or years before ap Cymru answered. Maybe I was safe for now.

  I pulled the phone from my pocket and held it up to my ear. "Vanity! I'm in the main street in front of the shop. There are people all around me, humans. If we're right about the gods, they will not show themselves in front of a crowd. I am making my way West on..."

  That was when I noticed the phone was dead. There was no click of disconnection, no hum of the power shutting off, just... silence.

  "Vanity? Hello...?"

  All the bright, noisy cars moving from light to light along the street now slowed and halted. Radio music banging from the nearer cars squawked and stopped.

  The pedestrians, wherever they were, beneath the neon signs at the bus stops, in the middle of the crosswalk, on the sidewalks, fell, or slumped, or keeled over.

  Blackness rushed across the cityscape as lights from the building across the way went out. The streetlamps turned dark. A thousand teeny tiny machine noises, radios, the hissing of the portable popcorn popper of a late-night street vendor, the whirr of distant automatic doors opening and closing, the hum from refrigerators, elevators, other motors... all muttered and fell into a deep, tomblike hush.

  The clock on the bell tower of the bank across the street from my position emitted one last peal, and then stopped, its second hand frozen. The electronic sign turned all white as all the bulbs lit up, and then went black.

  I felt a pressure in the sleep centers of my brain, activity in my pons attempting to trigger narcolepsy, changes in my medulla oblongata trying to switch my brain-wave pattern from alpha-beta consciousness to delta-wave dream state.

  If my brain continued to obey the laws of nature, I would have to sleep, and immediately.

  I jumped into another dimension.

  I was through and "past" the stone surface of the building in front of me in a moment. I saw the cubicles and interior spaces of the building, the pipes beneath the street, the interstices between the walls, all laid out like a flat blueprint. I saw the various textures of internal natures: greedy billboards, generous water pipes, frowning walls, ambitious electrical generators, patient power lines.

  At this point I was some nine hundred feet above the street, and about forty feet or so in the

  "blue" direction of overspace, not so far away from the plane of Earth's home continuum that I could not see it, albeit everything was now made soft and mysterious by a haze of blue, a Doppler shift created by the curving metric.

  Through the blue haze, I could see other planes of other continua around me, to my left and right, up and down, before me, behind me, and blue and red of me. Only then did I notice what was odd about this four-space. Unlike the street level, it was lit. It was much brighter here than the analogous four-space "above" England. I was seeing farther than I ever had before.

  I looked "above" and "behind" me for the source of the light.

  The light (actually, volumes of an energy for which we have no name) was coming from (issuing in concentric hyperspheres) a curving bubble or blister in a nearby continuum. This continuum was in a plane parallel to Earth's continuum. It lay about a hundred yards in the "blue" direction, and had formed this reddish blister on its hypersurface, which was swelling and shimmering. The sight reminded me of a steel door being melted, as if the metal were expanding and about to explode outward---

  The sight made me feel, desp
ite that I was in the freedom of hyperspace, claustrophobic.

  In that gushing light, I could see that the hyperspace was swarming with traffic. In seventeen different time-space pockets, with the watery corridors before and behind them pinched shut, were great fleets of floating mountains of black metal, deck upon deck and turret upon turret bris-ding with deck-guns, bombards, and cannons. We had seen these lumbering battle barges on the horizon when Mavors had allowed us to escape. Their flags showed the circle-and-spear emblem of Mars. Laestragonians.

  Not far from these barges, patrolling the time-space corridors, were slim black ships, pentaconters and triremes, skipping across the curving interdimensional waters like bolts shot from crossbows. These black ships flew banners displaying a trident. Atlanteans.

  Hanging in little time-space pockets of their own were huge machines shaped like suits of armor, half a mile or more from crown to spurs. The hulls of the machines were blazing with silver and gold, brightly enameled and decorated with delicate bas-relief. Spears or war-hammers the size of aircraft carriers rested at the sides of the metal warlords. I gazed "past" their armored hulls at their interior clockworks, engines, amplifiers, linkages; I saw alchemical hearts of white fire burning in glass vessels. I saw pistons the size of the Empire State Building. Tubes charged with atomic energy, like veins from the heart of the sun, ran down the core of each suit, from shoulder to heel.

  The massive visors of the machines were being cranked open. Their lantern-eyes were being lit by attendants, who stood on ladders clamped to the cheek-plates, and reached carefully upward with long poles tipped with fire. Their symbol was a crane in flight. Mulciber's people.

  I was used to hyperspace being empty, my own private playground. Here it was seething with a hornet's nest of ships and men and armaments, the crossroads of hundreds of pathways through time-space. A port city for the traffic of the gods. And it was under guard. Archer's place had been in one of the few dark corners of this multidimensional edifice.

  And we had been skipping along in the middle of it. Shopping.

  I had let one of the members of my squad leave me alone, to go off and play smooch-face with another member...

  Where, in all this mess and splendor and commotion of hyperspace, was Vanity?

  I followed a group of morality strands, my obligations to the group, with my eye---

  There! I saw the Argent Nautilus, with Vanity at the prow, sailing down one sharply curving tube (although, to her, I assume, the space looked flat and open) about twenty-five feet below the surface of the street beneath the streets of Los Angeles, and about twenty meters in the dream-plane. Looking for me... ?

  I tilted my wings and swam through the thick medium of hyperspace, moving toward Vanity and the Argent Nautilus. She was about a quarter mile away from me, no farther, but the hyperspatial distances here were longer because of the positive curve of the plane: It would take me twice as long to cover the distance here that I could have covered on foot, had I dipped back into Earth's home dimension. I was still afraid of the sleep effect rippling through the city, and wanted to stay above (or should I say a-blue) of it.

  I drew closer slowly. Victor and Quentin were standing on deck next to her, and Vanity (who, no doubt, felt my gaze on her) was trying to point in my direction. It was not a direction she could turn. Victor and Quentin turned their eyes left and right, but I was not left or right of them. They looked up and down, but I was not above or below them.

  I shouted, but they did not seem to hear me. Where was Colin?

  I redoubled my speed. With wings and tail and hands and feet, I clawed and waded, sloshed and swam and flew toward my friends.

  There came a flash. A group of morality strands looping widely from the near distance running to me now lit up and glittered.

  That blister bulging out from the dream-plane, I now saw, was the source of the sleep-spell sweeping over Los Angeles. Morality radiated in concentric waves from it, somehow obligating the men and machines, clocks and electric circuits of Earth to slumber.

  The internal nature of the obligation I could see: It affected everyone who used telephones, telegraphs, cars, other means of transport. Anyone who hired a lawyer, who made money, who trafficked with merchants. Anyone who told a lie. They all owed something to... whom?

  Whoever was behind this spell. An Olympian calling in a debt.

  Into the middle of the effect, the strands that drew my gaze led. In the epicenter of that blister, deep in the dreamworld, was a small bubble of stable reality where the laws of Earth were mimicked.

  There, I saw a black mountainside surrounded by clouds of twilight red. Here on a shelf of rock, a score of columns stood in a circle, a temple with no roof.

  On the altar-stone, kneeling, back straight, head down, buttocks on her heels, was a feminine figure wearing a red kimono. Her hair was black and straight, shining like India ink. The red silk fabric was decorated with images of butterflies and bats, blank-faced cherubs presenting lilies to tiny skeletons. In a semicircle before her on the stone there gleamed a strand of crystal marbles, arranged in pairs. In one hand she held a knife, in the other an ivory drinking horn.

  To her left stood the girl-form of ap Cymru: dark-haired and dark-eyed Laverna, goddess of fraud. She was wearing a skintight black sheath of fabric and carrying a snake in; either hand.

  One was lashing its tail in the air; the other was twining her wrist, a living bracelet.

  Laverna's lips moved. My sense that detected inner meanings of things told me what their words meant to convey, even though I did not hear them: Try again. If she is not asleep, then she is fleeing. We must come at them one at a time....

  There was a third woman, standing to the other side. She was dressed in a folded garb of many pockets and pleated layers of cloth, intricate, with sea motifs of green and blue. Her hair was red as new blood. She wore a long veil of aquamarine. I saw only her eyes, which were emeralds sparkling with light.

  The words from the woman in white were: No need. She looks at me now. I feel the pressure of her gaze. She is outside of the plane of Earth, and alone. Another of my kind is also watching her-the Princess Nausicaa. The two are apart.

  When the woman in the red kimono raised her head and her loose hair parted, I saw it was Lamia.

  I saw the raw and empty red sockets where her eyes had been. I knew now what the marbles in the semicircle before her were: disembodied eyes.

  The marbles twinkled and turned toward me.

  Lamia-I see her. I see them both.

  Laverna said-Begin!

  Lamia upended the drinking horn. A splash of blood struck the stone before her. She threw back her head, mouth wide. I heard no scream, yet still I sensed the meaning of what was said: Wives of the Psychopomp, I release thee: All ye fair captives who sold white bodies and dark souls to the lust of Trismegistus for promises of escape from Hell, I put aside your chains: Let slip thy leash, and run thee down my prey!

  The red-haired woman raised her hand, saying, Guardian of Dreams! I call upon our ancient covenant. I open the gate, I break the boundaries, I let pass my Lord's many wives into the daylight world: I let pass the laws of dreams as well.

  A green stone, a twin to the one I had seen on Boggin's toe, glimmered in her palm like a star made of poison.

  (I noticed then, too late... far too late... that the glinting strands whose flash, had attracted my attention were running from Laverna to me to the guitar I still held. My debt to ap Cymru.) The blister from the dream-plane expanded, grew brighter, and intersected the plane of Earth.

  The blister erupted. There was an explosion, then darkness.

  The heavy medium of hyperspace shook with the concussion. A force violent beyond all description sent me tumbling end over end.

  An automatic reflex had made me turn headfirst into the wave, and to "yank in" the various red and blue limbs and wings of my hyperbody. I folded myself into a three-dimensional shape (to narrow my 4-D cross-section to nothing) and let the conc
ussion flow over me. It helped-I was not broken in half-but I still was thrown.

  I did not lose consciousness, but my senses spun. I remember dazed images of useful tubes through hyperspace, used by the Atlantean ships, being blown and twisted by the explosion, and darkening to uselessness.

  I remember seeing the hidden half-mile-tall giants of Mulciber's army being scattered hither and yon throughout four-space. The blister itself, the source of the light, erupted into Earth's plane, depositing armies of dream-women into the sleeping metropolis and blowing aside the normal laws of nature of Earth in the Los Angeles area-I saw the internal nature of all objects flutter violently with the new impositions-become dreamlike, charged with magic.

  The echoes of the fading light failed, and it was suddenly as dark here as it had ever been in hyperspace above England. Remember England, where I had gotten lost less than an inch or two away from the plane of Earth? Here, I was at least fifty yards away, and had been blown farther still, and tumbled. I did not know at what angle my present three-body might be relative to Earth's space-time.

  So I floundered for another long minute or so in the gloom and gluey thickness of hyperspace.

  Then I gathered my wits, glad no one was around to see me panicking.

  I looked for morality strands. There were two pairs, of different internal natures. One set was glittering with how useful it was to Lamia. I selected the other set and chased it.

  I saw disconnected clouds of bluish light, like nebulae in a sky without stars. When I passed through one such cloud, I saw an image of Earth's home dimension, with the expanding blister of the dreamworld still touching it and intersecting. Was this a current image, and the cloud a medium to carry the image to me? Or perhaps I was passing through patches of slowly traveling light that were tumbling like shards of a broken mirror through the vast gloom of hyperspace, debris from the explosion.