Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  His eye. Victor's eye.

  The crystal teeth acted as amplifiers.

  What came from his mouth was brighter than the sun. It seemed almost a solid thing, and the main axis of the discharge path was surrounded with concentric tubes of lightning sparks and positronic discharges. ,

  For a split second, all was utterly silent.

  In silence, the beam reached across the intervening space and touched Lamia and burned her instantly to ash. The ground behind her sagged, for it was now molten rock. The mountaintop exploded in each direction, sending out tons of ash and smoke. In silence, we saw a shock wave rush out from the point of impact, a wall of dust and rubble flickering outward at the speed of sound, concentric rings of shattered destruction.

  Then the sound hit us. It was as if a brick wall fell on us.

  Back on the island, he had not found the materials he needed to construct all parts of his body under the sea. That had been a prototype, a toy. This was the real thing. A battlewagon. The real Victor: an adult Telchine, fully grown and fully armed.

  A moment before the sound struck, I said nervously, "Leader, what do we do?" And Quentin answered softly, "Destroy them." But he was not talking to me. Quentin was in the path of a golden ray of light one of the lesser weapon-ports along the spine of the dragon-thing was shedding. Something large and dark and catlike flickered out from behind Quentin and slithered into, of all places, Colin's guitar. At the same moment, Phobetor (or, I should say, a grinning Colin inside Phobetor's body) was scuttling half-bent across the deck to snatch up the guitar.

  His hoof touched a spot where the Chaos muck was still bubbling. Now he straightened up again, standing at an odd angle to the deck, as if it were a flat surface to him.

  When the shock wave passed over him, it did not knock him flat. Instead, he grew larger, and the wind swirled around his mane and shaggy hair, and he spread his wings to catch it. And he laughed.

  At the same moment when the dragon sheered off the top of the mountain, the siren choir, to save themselves, rotated into hyperspace and unleashed a dire barrage of death music. An all-destroying energy filled the area.

  I could see them. This little pocket of dream-space in which we were stranded, this landscape of cherry blossom trees, was surrounded in all directions by a hollow four-dimensional bubble of chaos stuff. Imagine a firm island surrounded by a marshy lake, a solid planet surrounded by vacuum. The sirens jumped off the shore when their part of the island erupted, stepped into space when the planet was under attack.

  It was a mistake. The guitar, with no amplifiers and no speakers, woke at the laughter of the demon prince, and jarring electric noise, as loud as the shock wave that heralded its birth, thundered out in all directions.

  Colin started to play.

  He was not a good player, I admit, but he had energy. He was charged with a sexual tension; his music screamed and roared and reached up with arms of invincible passion, and smashed the barrage of solemn and ornate siren choirs into stunned and broken notes. He rocked.

  The death energy was absorbed and began to dance. It fell to our left and right and tore huge swaths out of the ground, toppling cherry trees and quenching the sunlight in those areas. But it did not touch us.

  And the chaos, the whirling, maddened chaos in which the sirens had so foolishly flung themselves, now opened many eyes, which shone and sparkled at the roaring electronic music; and reached out with many hands, all snapping their fingers to the driving backbeat, and came alive. Chaos came alive, throbbing with Colin's rhythms.

  The sirens attempted to rotate further into higher dimensions, but the passion and madness Colin wove around them with his music did not admit the possibility of higher dimensions. There was no place to run; there was no escape from chaos.

  Jerking angular bodies made of chaos substance, horned and clawed and spurred, rose up, roaring, and they danced to the pounding screams of Colin's smoking guitar. The devil-things tore the sirens to bits, drew them down into the muck, and smothered them.

  At once the tune changed from a ragged tumult to something wild and strange and sorrow-torn: Gold be the hue of my true lover's hair Rose red her lip, and bright her eyes I know my love and know despair

  She scorns my love, for she is wise. Wisdom tells her not to be Enamored of a boy like me Her thoughts are high; her heart is fine Too fine to belong to a heart like mine. I love my love and well she knows, I love the grass whereon she goes But I know the day will never come When she and I will be as one.

  And then I felt Colin's music gathering itself out of the air and then enter into me.

  I did not understand what this music-creature was. Unknown energies thrilled along my nervous system. Something in Colin's driving passion woke something deep in me, and, all at once, I was aware of a wide area of time and space, dream and reality, multiple levels of the complex web of unknowns we called the universe.

  Admiration. It was not his thanks that opened up my powers; it was his admiration. Hero-worship (heroine-worship?) burned like a fire in him; he touched me with it; I was ignited. He thought I was wise; I became wise. My eyes opened in many dimensions, seeing many things, imaginable and unimaginable.

  I saw the final cause, or the for-the-sake-of-which, of the radar beams the Amazons had bounced from us. It was child's play to rotate them into self-awareness and self-being, and send them merrily on their way. False messages were sent to the ranging circuits in the Amazon guns. Shells fell among the maenads, rather than among us.

  The army, acting as a unit, had formed an artificial unity-of-purpose. It was like a monad, but larger. I twisted the monad. I sent it to attack the nymphs.

  The conceptual unity of the Amazon army was broken at that moment. All those calm, automaton-like fembot women in their black armor now were no longer programmed to act as one. They woke to independent thought: Some fired at the nymphs, some at the maenads, some at us. It was chaos on a mental level.

  Too many fired at us. The shells fell. I could deactivate one or two dozen, but many dozens more were still coming.

  I reached out with limbs made of energy, took up my friends, sent a line of force into Vanity's ship, found another deck resting deep in another pocket in time-space, and rotated us all through overspace into the pocket.

  I do not know what the others saw, what I looked like to them, or what they looked like to themselves. Vanity screamed and screamed. Maybe she could see all of her bones and organs clearly. She folded in half, like a paper doll lifted too suddenly from the flat surface, and her feet were occupying the same space as her skull, brain, eyes.

  Something that lived inside Quentin's chest, something bright and pure, seemed to wake up and look around curiously.

  I could hot move Colin. He seemed solid. I could not lift him out of the hyperplane.

  Boom. An explosion went off where we had been standing. The shock wave raced out in three dimensions, but did not reach us. Ripples on a pond cannot touch a bird hovering above it.

  I stepped belowdeck into a small cabin. It was paneled with pale wood and lit with a silver lantern. There were barrels lashed to the cabin wall to our left, a small stack of square crates lashed down to the right.

  Then I pulled my companions carefully-ever so carefully-down into the plane with me. I made sure all wrinkles were smoothed out, and that they were flipped the right way, not lefthand-righthand reversed.

  The echoes of the explosion were ringing overhead. Vanity stopped screaming once her body was twisted from Escher-shape back to normal, but she looked greenish.

  Quentin was...

  I caught my breath. Quentin was made of clay. His face and hair were now composed of pale and dark layers of fired ceramic___

  His real body was like the doll he made of Vanity. He had no real body. He was an exiled spirit trapped in matter.

  Then he stirred, breathed, and a flush of color came back into his skin. The clay vessel looked like human flesh again.

  He said, "Where is Colin?"


  I said, "I can't move him. He's back up with the explosion."

  He said to me, "Why didn't you bring Victor?"

  Vanity said, "Victor melted. He's dead."

  Quentin said harshly to her, "Victor is the dragon. He shed his human shape." To me, "Go get him! We are vulnerable only when we are apart!"

  I said, "I think it hurts him when I pull him through four-space. He's not built for it."

  Vanity said, "Oh! Look! My turn! Mine! Watch this! I can reach him, Leader! There is a path to Victor. Things are calm around him, or something." And she pulled open a switch hidden behind one of the crates.

  The deck overhead opened.

  Colin, still playing his angry guitar, sparks shooting from his hand, was standing on the head of the dragon-thing.

  A hundred guns and emission antennae peeped out from firing turrets that opened along the dragon's armored sides. Tracer fire and directed energy lanced from the huge dragon-shape in every direction. Like some steel instrument of medical torture, the mandibles opened again, the mouth gaped wide, showing a concentric funnel of crystal shark-teeth, the blue orb surrounded by its banks of amplifiers and augmentation-circuits glowed brightly, and the main beam of azure plasma licked out, so bright as to make all the laser fire seem dim by contrast, so loud as to make the other incendiaries seem silent.

  The spell that controlled the wild maenads had not dissolved when Lamia died; I saw the strands and wires jerk when that intolerably bright blue flame reached out, and all the maenads screamed and jumped. Zap. All magic gone.

  Colin was shouting the harsh words of his song, music loud enough to hear above the din of gunfire, beams, bolts, and bombs:

  What genius picked this battlefield?

  Here, in the Dreaming, where I am Lord?

  You picked unwisely. Your fate was sealed.

  Today you die, ladies: You have my word.

  For the Father of Lies, you made yourselves whores,

  Thought you could cheat Hell? One final lie,

  To sucker you into the hell of his wars

  But I tell it straight, ladies: Today you die.

  For war is chaos, and Chaos is ours!

  And, as he sang, the mountainside danced. Break-dancing, I guess you could call it. Slam dancing.

  Avalanche dancing. And once the rocks and boulders started doing pirouettes and tumbling tricks, the fires started from the incendiaries and explosions of the Victor-dragon wanted to join in.

  Rolling balls of flame many yards wide, surrounded by billowing black smoke, now hopped and leaped and rocked and rolled all up and down the slope, tossing battalions in the air, quaking with laughter made of yellow flame.

  Quentin floated or was drawn upward by a smoke shape that issued from his cloak. Surrounded by wraithlike shapes of mists and motes, Quentin raised his hands and found a white staff in them.

  He stepped out onto the deck and stood in the shadow of the giant worm-thing. Pointing his bright wand, he spoke. "Spirits with whom I have a pact: I unleash you from my wrist as a falcon upon my prey. Seize my foes and hold them helpless."

  He threw the wand to the deck behind him; it blazed too brightly for any eye to look upon, brighter than a lightning flash, but silent. His shadow was cast upward.

  His flesh turned into fine clay, pale and immobile.

  The sky from one horizon to the zenith turned black as ink and fell down on the enemy army. This was the real Quentin, too large to fit in any mortal body.

  I said to Vanity, "Open a trapdoor beneath them."

  Vanity said, "Can I do that? My powers are not working here. Besides, I can't get a door that big."

  Victor, speaking over the cell phone in her pocket, said in a small, tinny voice: "I have been stabilizing the matter in the area. Try it again."

  The dragon breathed out an azure hurricane. The black sky-stuff rolling over the screaming army turned to a slick black glass. The screams stopped. Movement stopped. I could see dim figures of women trapped inside it, flies in amber.

  Vanity opened a trapdoor no bigger than my fist. It was enough for me. I rotated the whole mass of the trapped army into four-space, folded it into two and then one dimension, made it into a point, and sent it through the opening.

  When the army reached the chaos, I released the pressure of the dimensional fold.

  Colin played a few notes, soft and low. His ragged demon-things now towed the now-fully-three-dimensional black glass mass off into the chaos storm, deeper and deeper. I lost sight of them.

  Gone.

  No wonder they were afraid of us.

  The winged shape of fire seeped back down into Quentin, who turned from fine porcelain back into flesh and blood, and opened his eyes.

  The Swift God Thrice-Greatest

  Quentin said to Victor, "You should not have killed Lamia. It makes us vulnerable to enemy magic."

  An external speaker built into the armor of the dragon-worm crackled to life. "I will attempt to negate any incoming magic, Leader."

  "It also might call the Psychopomp. He might come to gather her spirit, to save her from hell..."

  Framed in the square of trapdoor leading up to the deck, I could see, against the burned sails and high blue sky beyond, the long metal head of the Victor-dragon, which still had the Phobetor-shaped Colin, steaming guitar in hand, hooves planted wide, atop it. Quentin stood on the deck below them both, and had his hand out. He snapped his fingers, and his wand flew up toward his grasp. The wand was in midair, moving toward him.

  Then it happened, too swift to see.

  There was a flare of blue-white light. Maybe it was Cherenkov radiation. The head of the Victor-dragon now had a dented furrow bisecting it, and a splash of crumpled armor flying in each direction.

  Atop the dragon-skull, at the crumpled end of the furrow, was the figure of a lean man with overly muscular legs. One leg was straight, the other half-bent beneath him. He was balanced for that split-instant on one heel, leaning so far back that his spine was almost parallel to the deck, looking for all the world like a runner sliding into a baseball plate. He was the very picture of speed incarnate, trying desperately to halt his motion. In his hand was a long wand or pole whose edge he had dug into the crumpled surface of the broken armor plate.

  There were thin streamers of white smoke and white flame around his heels, and his pale white cloak tails were flying up around his shoulders in a frozen moment like outspread wings.

  No, they were outspread wings. Wings like white flame. And the white flares of lightning I saw gathered around his heels were wings also.

  The pole in his hand was not just dug into the armor. Two long thin snake-heads had shot out from two long thin snake-necks, and had driven long thin fangs into the dragon's surface, like living guide wires or tail-hooks. It would have looked comical if it had not looked so utterly satanic and grotesque. I flinched, seeing those poor snakes, stretched by that tremendous pressure of such abrupt deceleration___

  The man had a hat shaped like a flying saucer. It spun off his head when he stopped, striking our mast and rebounding in a spray of splinters. The man's hair was black and loose and flowing, whipped by the wind of his own passage.

  All this, I should mention, took place in a split instant of total silence. Then, there was a sonic boom that threw me from my feet.

  The skidding figure atop the dragon-head now straight-ened up, swirling and furling his vast white wings around him. He was a narrow-faced man, with one eye that glittered glee. A patch covered his other eye. His mouth quirked in a crooked half smile.

  He hefted the snaky wand in his hand and made a casual gesture.

  I saw a blur of burning motion in the fourth dimension.

  Without the least struggle or fuss, the Victor-snake fell prone, a puppet with its strings cut.

  Clashing and clattering across the tilted deck, yards upon yards of snaky folds collapsed to either side of the ship, and spilled in wide arcs across the grass and rock. Victor's fall made an odd ringin
g noise, as if a giant had shuffled a deck of playing cards made of metal.

  At that same time, the eyepatch the man wore caught fire and burned away. The eye socket beneath was filled with a glittering blue metallic orb, the eye of a cyclopes, and surrounded by scar tissue. The man had shot through the eyepatch, like a man with a gun firing through a coat pocket, not taking the time to draw it.

  The azure beam flickered out and touched Quentin. Quentin cried out and fell down, choking. The wand that had been flying toward his hand now bounded away at an odd angle and fell clattering to the deck beyond my range of vision. Wraithlike smoke, some sort of choking gas, had replaced the oxygen in Quentin's lungs.

  As Victor's huge body fell, the wings blurred into motion on the man's feet, and he stood in midair, motionless while his support fell away beneath him.

  The hat, which also had wings of its own, now flapped and flew, light as a hummingbird, lifting itself from the severed wreck of the broken mast, and dropping down on the young god's flowing locks. The shining of the rim of his headgear gave him a halo of steel where the sunlight caught it.

  The man looked pleased.

  The first person to react was Colin. In his Phobetor shape, Colin leaped through the air, talons raised, horns lowered, breathing fire, his vast bat wings a hurricane of speed.

  Roaring, he fell upon the slim godlike figure.

  The slim godlike figure had slipped away and was hanging in the air a dozen yards to the left. The motion was too quick to follow; just pop, and he was yards away.

  He gestured with his wand: A Greek temple made of swirls of mist, air made opaque, ripples of shivering twilight, all faded into view, hovering above the deck, with the sudden absurdity of a dream. The temple was complete with Doric columns, a portico and architrave, a solemn altar surrounded by tripods filled with starlight rather than flame.

  A system of pentacles and pentagrams were inscribed in firefly light on every flagstone of that hall, diagram within diagram, all scribbled over with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew characters. The Sephiroth were smoldering on the wall behind; images from the tarot cards sparkled in little panels set within the frieze; the zodiac flamed along the roof.