Avery, whatever his other strengths or weakness might have been as a parent, also apparently thought that instilling a healthy fear of the dark was important for his child. To that end, he occasionally snuck downstairs and went into the room next to Jason’s, where the washer and dryer, the furnace, and the extra freezer were located. Avery proceeded to make “ghost noises” from the other side of the wall. He groaned, growled, and sighed like a lost spirit. Avery did this after Jason had already gone to bed, of course, not long after Jason made the perilous run from the light switch back to the protective blankets of his bed. He’d known the noises were coming from his father, not a ghost. He wasn’t stupid. But the ghostly groans had terrified him anyway. He’d been a kid.
Normally, such old memories – when he could pull them up at all – were faded like paper left in the sun. Colorless and drab, they lacked sting.
But not this time. This time, the memory of being afraid in his bed brain-slammed Jason. The sound of his father pretending to be the ghost was all he could hear. The darkness under the blankets – and their particular odor – was all he could see and smell. The sounds terrified him, pulling an answering cry of negation from him in a hoarse whisper.
“War?” came Merid’s voice, dragging Jason back to the moment. He was still astride his dlamma, its wings spread wide, using them to surf the dark energy boil. Next to the dlamma flew Merid, transformed into her real shape: a massive dragon, with brilliant feathered wings more than twice as far from tip to tip as the dlamma’s.
Jason was in the Strange. After what Carter had described on his first exposure – an endless, shuddering expanse deeper than any real sky, an infinite wheeling eternity where hunger stirred – Jason’d decided to never chance it himself. Yet here he was, smelling that same smell as the basement beneath his bed, remembering those same traumas he’d dismissed and forgotten as silly childhood fears…
“Are you leaving me already? What kind of failed Incarnation are you?” Merid said, drawing him back from his recollections a second time. “Whatever you’re seeing or feeling, it’s not real. It’s an effect of this realm on the mind. I told you to be ready.”
Jason concentrated on gathering his strength. The warmth of embarrassment flushed his face. It was a feeling he hadn’t endured in years.
“I’m fine.” He focused his eyes just ahead and above the dlamma’s head, where a void between two larger fractals created a zone free of mind-bending patterns. The dlamma seemed unfazed by what lay all around them, as did Merid.
“You were making sounds like a child. At least, I think it was a child,” said Merid, her draconic visage swiveled on her long neck to regard him quizzically.
“Maybe. But the fit has passed,” he said. “How is it that you and the dlamma aren’t affected? This place seems designed to tear minds asunder.”
The dragon’s scaled lips drew back into something probably meant to be a smile. “For my part, I’m still surprised one of those would agree to bear you, of all people.” Merid’s closer wing dipped, indicating the dlamma.
Was she avoiding his question? Maybe she was trying to direct his thoughts away from the precipice… So he decided to go with it. “What, you think all dlammas are champions of the weak and downtrodden in Ardeyn?”
The dlamma bearing Jason flew on without giving the least indication that it understood their conversation, though of course it could. Dlammas originally were the steeds of qephilim who fought against the human dragon riders serving Lotan during the Age of Myth. At least, according to the prehistory of the fake recursion Jason called home.
“Even the ones who no longer uphold the Seven Rules – the twisted ones – seem unlikely to serve a master, however powerful,” pressed Merid.
“So long as I allow it to hunt one of my homunculi every month or so, it agrees to bear me.”
“Interesting!” Merid said. “And now I understand. Did you know, usually when I meet a dlamma, it’s a fight.”
The dragon turned its gaze on the dlamma as they winged through the void, as if challenging it. It ignored her completely. Jason stilled his instinct to pat the dlamma on the neck, which he knew from personal experience would cause it to buck him off. Here in the Strange, would that be lethal?
“Maybe you can fight later,” Jason said. For the hundredth time, Jason mentally checked his connection to his Ring, and through it, the directional fix he had on the Ring of Silence. It still lay ahead. If Merid was leading him into a trap, at least it was baited with what he needed.
“How far?” Jason asked.
Merid shrugged, which was a sort of full body movement for her. She said, “It’s not so much distance as time. Locations are relative out here. Everything is constantly changing. Finding a way between them requires that you mentally memorize beacons and signposts, and concentrate on reaching them.”
Jason craned his head around and looked behind him. He’d expected to see Ardeyn growing smaller in the distance. Instead, he saw only more of the Strange, stretching away to infinity behind them. As he considered whether or not to comment on the feeling of being utterly lost, he spied a hazy, translucent bubble in the far distance. Ardeyn was hundreds of miles across, but the sphere was hardly a fraction of that, and growing smaller every minute as the dlamma and dragon flew on. He focused his gaze upon the sphere, committing it to memory.
Merid’s head twisted round, and her lips drew back into another smile, though he was beginning to have his doubts about the expression. “That sphere,” Jason said. “It’s Ardeyn’s beacon, yeah?”
“It’ll serve that purpose,” she said, and her smile fled. It reappeared on Jason’s face, his first one in the Strange. At least that was one thing she couldn’t hold over him.
“Not to be pedantic, then, but how long until we reach this hidden enclave of yours?”
“It’s variable. Several more hours at least. Perhaps we can pass the time by you telling me more of this Earth I’ve heard you speak of, and what’s kept you so busy at your Foundries.”
Jason rubbed his chin. “I don’t recall telling you anything about Earth.”
“Yet, I seem to know about it. Maybe I learned about it from my spies.” She laughed.
Jason seriously doubted Merid had anyone on the inside of his operation. Everyone was him, for fuck’s sake. He wouldn’t betray himself… Then again, he was kind of a dick.
And sometimes the clones created using the body vats were unreliable. He looked forward to the day all his power returned, and he could scrap those homunculi completely. His lieutenants in particular had it coming.
“Well, you got me there,” Jason said. “So fair’s fair. Explain what else you’ve learned about this insane place we’re flying through. If you’ve got a lair out here, you must’ve been out here before. Most critters of Ardeyn remain stuck in the narrative of the Land of the Curse.”
“‘Stuck in the narrative’? Fascinating way of putting it, I’ll have to remember that. But I woke up. Maybe partly because of your own actions, upsetting everything when you slew the Maker. I discovered the land I lived in was only one of many limited worlds, all adrift in the Strange.”
Something about the dragon’s explanation bothered Jason. He was certain she was leaving something out. But he nodded along.
She continued, “One world isn’t so limited, is it? The world you come from. Earth.”
“Just how did you learn about that?”
“You’re not the first version of yourself who I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with. You’ve cast so many of yourselves away over the years. Luckily for me, most versions of you are fairly compliant, when enough pain is applied.”
Jason reined the dlamma to a stop, so that they hung drifting in the void. Merid flew past, then dipped one wing to curve her flight so that she entered a wide orbit around them.
“What’s wrong?” she called. That damned “smile” was back on her muzzle.
“How many of my homunculi have you interrogated?” he asked with a s
inking feeling. It was a stalling tactic. She probably knew his entire plan. And she’d lured him out here for a reason; probably not the one he thought.
“I’ve lost count. The odd thing is that, despite all of them being copies of you, they were all a little different. They all died differently. Some defiantly, some pleading, others in stoic silence. Isn’t that fascinating?”
“Yeah.” Jason craned his head back along their route, looking for the sphere he’d earlier spied. It was gone, too far behind him. But he’d marked it as a beacon, as the dragon had described. He hoped that would be enough.
Merid continued. “So I wonder how you will die, now that your time has come.”
“You can’t hope to beat me in a fight, Merid, for all your strength. I am War, and a measure of my Incarnation has returned to me.”
To demonstrate, and to see if he could draw on the power of War while in this crazy realm, he threw off a handful of armored duplicates. None of them had mounts to support them, so they hung in the emptiness around him like paratroopers in free fall. He swallowed a sigh of relief. Their heads began swiveling in unison, tracking the dragon.
Merid fluidly widened her orbit, then said, “You’re confident because you don’t fully understand what it is to be a dragon. On the other wing, a dragon does not like to leave things to chance when she doesn’t have to. It’s not how I gained my current position, by being sloppy. And it’s why I brought you out here, where I have friends who are especially interested in you. What is it you call them? The kray?”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, I did. They promised to give me anything I wanted, if they could have you. And look, here they come now!” The dragon pointed with a claw.
A stain was growing in the void in the direction they had been traveling. He’d noticed earlier, but had assumed it was yet another oddity of the network best not studied too closely. He focused his senses. The stain leaped into clarity: it was composed of thousands of swarming kray, swirling in their direction through the void like a school of starving razorfish. And he didn’t doubt that behind the vanguard, their matriarch followed. Somewhere in all that alien flesh, he sensed the Ring of Silence.
“You bitch,” he said to Merid, not quite able to keep his voice even, but not from fear. It was rage. She’d ruined everything.
Jason reined his dlamma around and whispered, “To Ardeyn, as if your life depended on it.” The dlamma, tucking its wings, banked sharply enough that Jason nearly fell off, then surged back the way they’d come.
Merid easily paced them, leaving the handful of homunculi he’d summoned behind. He mentally commanded that they blunt the kray advance, for all the good it would do.
“Fleeing won’t save you,” Merid said, from his left. Her wings had no trouble sculling through the void of the Strange as she paced his dlamma.
He knew it was probably pointless, but decided to try. He yelled, “Why do you think the kray want me? If they kill me out here, where none of the Seven Rules apply, they render the agreements I’ve made with them null and void. Those agreements are… complicated. If I’m killed out here, it’ll probably breach Ardeyn’s Seven Rules. Nothing will prevent the kray from pouring into the Land of the Curse. They won’t stop until they’ve consumed everything! Including you.”
“As if I would trust anything you tell me,” she replied. “The title ‘Betrayer’ did not come to you for nothing.” Then she breathed a sheet of fire hot as the sun at him.
His dlamma veered. The fire only singed them. Still, the skin along his back, beneath his armor, blistered. The dlamma’s wingtips smeared trails of smoke.
War’s aura kindled like a bonfire from the pain of his blistering skin, overcoming and magnifying him like the director of a thousand-piece symphony orchestra. Well, two hundred-piece, he had time to marvel as the exultation of the drums built. Then he was no longer Jason. He was the Incarnation of War.
He jumped away from his saddle, aiming at the dragon. The dlamma kept winging onward without so much as a look backward.
War drew his staff. It burst into flame at least as bright as Merid’s breath. The dragon, banked upward to avoid his leap. His trajectory carried him through the void as if he had wings of his own. Merid wasn’t fast enough to completely evade his surprise attack. She roared as his fiery weapon crashed down on one wing and went tumbling away as the momentum of his own attack carried him onward.
War realized it wasn’t the wings of either the dlamma or the dragon that allowed them to travel through the Strange. After all, the approaching kray armada had none. It was will. And of that, War had plenty. More than any dragon, however ancient and powerful. Before there were dragons, he had strode Ardeyn as the manifestation of battle.
War’s trajectory abruptly curved. He came around, exhilaration burning through him like a forge fire, then accelerated like a bolt from a ballista toward Merid.
The dragon, one wing hurt, still managed to react almost instantly. She extended her head and loosed another stream of fire. War didn’t flinch; he accreted dozens of lesser selves around him with a thought, creating a barrier of flesh.
Which immediately began burning away like ablative armor, individual components screaming in searing agony. War felt the unbearable pain of his duplicate selves dying, but he didn’t let his dive toward Merid falter. On one level, he didn’t care. On the field of battle, soldiers died. But on another level, it shocked him. For an instant, his sense of self – as Jason – sparked back into existence. Like fire taking light, Jason’s mind bloomed back to full control. Jason wavered even as he brought his staff around, connecting with Merid’s head. But not lethally, as the blow would’ve otherwise been. He’d allowed himself to think, damn it all, and War’s aura faded away into the background once more. With the power of the Ring only partially renewed, he didn’t know when he’d be able to call on it again.
But Merid didn’t know that. She backed off, wings suddenly frantic, head unsteady from his blow. Then she fled without another word or thought of trying to distract him.
The kray’s advance now blotted out a quarter of the emptiness, and the scent that had nearly undone him was replaced with a sort of termite reek. They were too close. If he lingered any longer, the advancing wave would envelop him. His dlamma, understanding the better part of valor, was already far ahead of Jason, following the fleeing dragon.
Words whispered out of the void behind him, from the massed throats – if they had throats – of the kray. Or maybe it was in his head? He heard, War of Ardeyn, all your promises are due. We call them in now, as is our right. As we agreed. Give yourselves up to us!
“No!” screamed Jason, terror pouring like ice water down his spine. “That wasn’t our agreement!” He’d never needed to be War so desperately as then, but the Incarnation seemed farther away than ever. Could dread give you a heart attack?
Our agreement was open to change, as you agreed when we gave you the last gift. The one you used to touch your home in the universe of the real…
“Just give me more time. Let me return to Ardeyn. Finish what I’ve started.” Sweat beaded on his lip, trickled down his back within his suddenly too-warm armor.
Why should we?
That was a good question. “The universe of ‘the real’ you called it. If you let me go now, I will open the way for you.” Of course, he wouldn’t actually do that, not really. Would he?
The kray didn’t answer. Their advance didn’t stop. But it slowed. As if to give him time…
Time to betray not only everyone in Ardeyn, but everyone on Earth…
No. Jason frowned. The kray were easily manipulated, as he’d just proven, again. They wouldn’t get Earth – his home planet didn’t deserve to be destroyed by inhuman monsters. If anyone were going to take over the planet, it was going to be him.
At that thought, a flicker of War’s mantle pulsed once, bequeathing a gift before falling nascent once more. Jason recalled the secret of moving in the Strange that War had divined:
the will to make a change.
Jason shot away from the advancing kray front. His fiery staff left a smear of sooty ash across the void.
24. Exploration
Carter Morrison
A massive crater pocked the Glass Desert. Shards of silvery glass larger than houses surrounded the cavity. They were still sharp. Siraja had explained that it’d once been a blister that’d shattered. The resulting hole was called the Singing Crater because of the strange music that emerged from the cavity. The pirates sometimes heard it from miles away at night, high and fluting.
“Who makes the music?” I asked her as Nightstar wove between stands of broken glass. The ship was close to the crater’s edge. We stood along the railing, watching the shards slip past. The sun was already well up, but a low cover of clouds kept things tolerably cool. Even though we were near our destination, I couldn’t hear any harmonies.
“No one knows. Maybe we’ll find the performer,” she said, without much conviction.
“No one’s gone to check before now? I find that hard to believe.”
“Many have tried,” she said. “What became of them…?”
“Let me guess: they never returned.”
She smiled. “Not always. Sometimes only parts returned. One of the princes in Mandariel sent a party of explorers into the crater five years ago. A few days after they were sent, the explorers’ right hands were found piled in a heap on the floor of the prince’s bedroom.”
“That can’t possibly be true. It’s just a pirate’s tale. Right?”
She shrugged. She did that a lot, but I didn’t take it as a slight. It was a kind of casual gesture normally shared only between friends. Early on, she may have regretted stepping in to help me. But since then, I liked to believe we’d become friends, or at least friendly acquaintances.
The Myth of the Maker Page 20
