“The army is descending in good order,” replied the First Protector, her ears flicking with annoyance. “I’m sure you can hear them, Your Majesty.” The qephilim gestured upward and back.
True, the clamor of a company banging and clanging its way above into the wide space was unmistakable. Voices issuing orders and boots on stone grew louder. She saw the yellow-orange glow of fresh lanterns shinning blearily through the translucent columns.
“Your Majesty…” began Navar. Damn it, Navar wasn’t going to wait until they were alone after all.
Elandine held up a hand. “Later.”
“Please,” she said, “I saw something… odd as I rushed to defend you–”
“I know, Navar. Believe me.”
“I trust you do understand the foolishness of your lone advance, you’re not an imbecile. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Elandine blinked, and cleared her throat. Navar was of course suggesting exactly the opposite. She ignored the jibe and said, “Then what?” she said
“When you commanded the spirits to leave, I’m certain I saw a flash – the same light I saw when we were beset by the Moon Door. You called on the Ring of Peace then to quell the kray, and the band flashed.”
Elandine well remembered that moment, when she’d asked the serene stillness of death, and froze descending kray seedlings before they touched her and her host. But… ”I don’t have the Ring anymore.” She raised her hand to demonstrate, and wiggled her bare fingers at the First Protector.
And yet… She looked more closely at her ring finger. She’d felt a phantom of the power the newly wakened Ring had contained a few times. Was it possible what she’d experienced was no mere memory?
She concentrated, attempting to recall exactly how the sensation had come to her. She imagined the cool band encircling her finger. A cold tingle – real or imagined she didn’t try to determine – answered. Faint, oh so faint. But maybe something real. Like an umber wolf sneaking up on an oblivious pilgrim, she carefully examined the feeling.
A ghostly voice floated across her, of someone speaking. A man, speaking. She didn’t recognize the voice, yet it was familiar, as if something inside her had been waiting to hear it since forever. It whispered, “Come to me, Rings of Incarnation. It is I, your Maker, who calls you. Return to me, in my hour of need. If worn, then I command you, the wearer, to find me. The ring will know the way. If I speak instead to a mute band – find me. Find a wearer, and lead her or him to me.”
The message didn’t repeat. But suddenly, certainty clutched Elandine with a crystal clarity she hadn’t felt about anything for far too long. She knew where the Maker was, and this time, she knew it wasn’t a sham. It was no seeming, or fraud. How she was able to discern it, she couldn’t say. She just knew that this time, the Maker really had returned to Ardeyn. And he was calling all the Rings of Incarnation to him. Including the Ring of Peace. Of… Death. The band that should be hers.
No doubt the Maker had the power to force the Betrayer to return the Ring to its rightful owner, if she proved unable. But would the Maker return Death to her, if she made a claim?
The only way to find out was to ask. She knew the way. For once circumstance smiled upon her. He wasn’t far.
27: Homecoming
Jason Cole
He lost sight of Merid hours earlier in the insane boil of unzipping fractal solids and multicolored hues. The kray still pursued him, though at a horrifyingly leisurely pace, as if they didn’t actually want to catch him. Which was fine by Jason. But his ability to move through the Strange was gradually deteriorating. The place scraped his mind like sandpaper.
Which is why when the dlamma appeared out of nowhere, having circled back to look for him, a weight of tension and fear loosened his body. He was pretty sure the kray hadn’t already caught him up because they were just toying with him, not because they couldn’t.
He grabbed the pommel and pulled himself into the saddle. The dlamma spread its wings, and they surged with a velocity Jason could hardly hoped to have matched. He was going to survive after all, it seemed. No thanks to that bitch Merid.
The massed horde quickly fell from sight, lost in the sickening swirl. He didn’t spend too long looking because it reminded him too much of staring into a suppurating wound.
And yet… He still sensed the massed horde of kray advancing. Even though they’d fallen completely out of sight, the feeling of their lingering presence remained. He hoped it was his imagination.
“Thank you,” he told the dlamma. “You have War’s gratitude.”
It nodded. Maybe the dlamma had realized Jason needed help, not only in escaping the kray, but also in finding the interface back to Ardeyn. The translucent membrane was difficult to see out in the Strange, because the Strange was a fucking mad house, and the interface was a mere blip in the maelstrom. He reminded himself, the Strange didn’t “contain” the Land of the Curse. Instead it hosted it like a computer network hosted a program. As real as Ardeyn sometimes seemed, this was the raw medium that gave it that semblance.
Ahead, the empty space they’d been rushing toward suddenly contained a curved pane of hard glass, one they were about to smash directly into. When the dlamma winged onward and into it, he forced himself not to flinch.
Firm pressure enveloped Jason, a giant fist squeezing every inch of him to fit into some more bounded, confined shape, one of rules, responsibilities, and hard consequences. The pressure eased and he blinked. Ardeyn stretched before him, familiar and normal. The corners of his mouth tugged up.
They soared over the Borderlands from Ardeyn’s southern foot, just miles from his fortress of Megeddon. Even from this distance, he could see the sprawling walls, the tall ebony towers, and the searing volcanic extrusions tapped to power the Foundries…
Odd he could see it all, actually. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Merid said that when we returned, it would be in same location we left – which was in the Borderlands west of her lair. Yet…” He gestured at the scene ahead.
The dlamma’s shoulders gave a subtle shrug, and it surprised him by speaking, “I have skills Merid lacks, when it comes to traveling back and forth between Ardeyn and the Strange. I can re-enter a recursion from the interface and come out almost anywhere I choose, if it lies along a specified boundary.”
Jason grinned. Allying with the dlamma continued to pay dividends. This creature aided him for inscrutable reasons of its own, not because it feared him. It had a spark of knowing that was lacking in others of its kind – it knew Ardeyn was a world bounded by a much wider, stranger reality. It possessed skills that even he, once an Incarnation of Ardeyn, was still learning. Making it a pet or taking its aid for obedience would probably piss it off, and that’d be the end of a beautiful friendship.
Indeed, with the dlamma’s help, perhaps he could finally deal with Merid… But only after he’d taken care of a few other things. For instance–
Blunt pain, like indigestion gone horribly wrong, stabbed through his bowels.
Jason grunted in surprise. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d felt physical discomfort, even during his mostly mortal existence over the preceding two centuries he’d been trapped in Ardeyn. He carefully rubbed his abdomen, checking for a stray spine or dart. Maybe a kray or the dragon had managed to stick him in all the chaos…
Nope. No visible wound or discoloration was visible.
But still he felt wrong, like he was going to be sick all over the dlamma’s back.
Jason tried to will the nausea away. He didn’t have time to diagnose the problem. The sensation was probably related to his anxiety about the kray armada, out there in the void. An armada that possessed the Ring of Silence, denied him.
Without at least four rings, he would not be entering the Maker’s Hall anytime soon. The pain inside him gouged at his liver, and he winced.
“You see it too, then,” said the dlamma, misreading his physical reaction.
Jason’
s eyes snapped to the towers over Megeddon. He realized that the pillar of dark smoke rising from the center of his fortress wasn’t normal. Not by half.
He scanned, both visually and with his enhanced senses, trying to discern the cause of the disturbance. No dragon was present, thankfully. Nor any kray he could detect – not even seedlings. But something bad had happened, somewhere within his Foundries. And… someone new had come into his realm.
His breath caught. That part of him that was War sensed a power that was familiar, from the days of old, from before the Betrayal.
“The Ring of Desire has returned to Megeddon,” he murmured, uncertain. But how could that be? The closer they came, however, the more certain War became. Desire was back, somehow.
Jason didn’t know what to think. He hadn’t made the Ring of Desire part of his plans moving forward after it served its purposes on Earth. Which had been shortsighted, given its evident return. But hell, he was willing to learn from his errors, as any good soldier did. In fact, the more he turned it over in his mind, the more Desire’s surprising return augured that his plans could proceed apace without the Ring of Silence. Let the kray have it! He wouldn’t be lured out past the Borderlands a second time.
But how had the ring he’d repurposed to deliver quantum code on Earth returned to Ardeyn? Was Desire’s reappearance related to the pillar of smoke rising from his fortress? His gut said it was connected.
Unless the kray had got ahead of him, suggested the part of him that liked to dash his most cherished dreams.
“Faster, damn you! I mean, please go quickly as you can, my friend,” he told the dlamma.
The dlamma sped toward the brooding walls of his home – hopefully, his home for only a little while longer, until he quit it and returned to Earth on his own terms. As they flew, Jason idly massaged at the lingering pain in his side.
Something both better and far worse than he’d imagined had played out in the heart of Megeddon in his absence. Among the press of reds stumbling mindlessly through the thick smoke around the edge of the Pit Reactor, no kray hunted, which was a relief. But the heaped rubble and even thicker smoke spilling out of the Contact Foundry made Jason’s heart jump into his throat.
He bounded forward and passed through the smoke.
“What the hell is going on in here?” he roared as he took in the disaster.
Debris, mixed with the corpses of his red homunculi were everywhere. Worse, BITER was a wreck of shattered crystals steaming noxious black vapor as they continued to disintegrate. A century of work, obliterated…
And the translation gate focus that had shimmered in the center of the chamber, the gate he’d managed to connect to Earth, was gone. The connection was severed.
He got his breathing under control by rationalizing. It wasn’t a complete disaster; he’d already accomplished his initial goal of bringing Earth back into sync with Ardeyn. With that in place, moving between the locations should prove far easier, especially for someone like him. He’d just proved he could move between worlds hosted by the dark energy network. Could the world or normal matter be that much more difficult to breach, now that it was synched?
Not once he had taken the Maker’s attributes for his own, he decided.
Jason finally spied the intruders: a man and a woman, standing still as statues over the dead body of one of Jason’s lieutenants. He knew who they were. For fuck’s sake, he’d actually puppeted the man around on Earth, which he’d temporarily entangled with the Ring of Desire using the entropic seed he’d gotten from the kray.
Raul, the man pretended his name was, though that was a fucking lie; it was actually something like Url-shoon or some similar mouthful. When he’d possessed Raul, Jason had seen into the man’s mind. There, he’d glimpsed an alien world called “Ruk” the likes of which he could never even have imagined. Insane biotech science fiction craziness run amok…
Raul had warned him that Ardeyn “wasn’t alone,” and that War’s plans wouldn’t be allowed to succeed. And here Raul was. The man’s threats hadn’t been idle. He was obviously responsible for the destruction visited on Jason’s fortress. Which implied that maybe there was such a place as Ruk, twin to Ardeyn in the dark energy network. He decided not to worry about that complication just yet.
Jason knew the woman, too. She’d been on Earth with Raul.
Aloud, Jason said “Katherine Manners.” She glanced at him and – holy shit, she was wearing the Ring of Desire. Shit. Shit!
Did she know its full potential? Did she have any inkling of what she could do with it on her finger? Like all the other Rings, it hadn’t returned to full power, but he imagined a reasonable portion of its old strength had returned. He reached out to see if any of the entanglement created by the entropic seed remained, but that link was gone.
“Jason Cole,” Kate said, looking at him with wide eyes. Scared eyes. Which suggested she didn’t know what the Ring of Desire could do, after all. Relief made him smile.
“Call me War,” he told her. “Why’d you destroy my Contact Foundry?”
Anger replaced the fear in her eyes and face. She sputtered, “Why? To save the world. Because you tried to leave Earth vulnerable against the Strange! And… the things that live there!”
As she spoke, “Raul from Ruk” nodded along casually. But to War’s trained eyes, the man was actually poised to go for Jason’s throat. Raul was dangerous, maybe even to an Incarnation. Jason glanced round and saw a couple of reds he could call to his defense, if it came to it. Or he could summon the mantle to War and create a small unit of duplicates about as quickly. But either way, Jason, his homunculi, and his duplicates would be vulnerable to Desire’s will, should she show forth that particular Ring’s mind-bending power. Desire’s demands had always been War’s biggest weakness, if half-remembered fragments of ancient memory could be believed.
His regard dipped to the band on her hand against his will, then flinched away. Jason decided to play along a while longer, and continue to assess the situation. He needed that ring off Kate’s finger.
“Endanger the Earth?” asked Jason. “Did Carter tell you that? He’s brain-damaged by everything that’s happened to him. He has it all wrong. If you’re getting your intel from Carter Morrison, think again.”
“You’re lying,” said Kate.
“Am I? Says who?”
Raul cleared his throat. “Says me. You’re risking this recursion, and Earth, and Ruk, plus every other limited world connected to Earth with your insane machinations. You do know that, right? Or are you actually ignorant of how excessive quantum computing attracts the attention of alien entities in the dark energy network?” Raul curled his lip in contempt.
Fuck it. Jason smashed his elbow into the man’s throat with bone crushing force. Or he would’ve, if Raul hadn’t been ready for him, probably trying to elicit exactly such a response. Instead of crushing the man’s larynx and so resigning him to death by suffocation, Jason’s elbow was slapped aside and down, pinned briefly across Jason’s own chest.
With the hand he wasn’t using to restrict War’s arm, Raul stabbed at Jason with a scarlet-hilted short sword. Jason’s own reflexes took over, and he shifted back and away, breaking the pin and evading the sword in one move.
Surprisingly, Raul didn’t follow up. Instead he speared Jason with amazingly clear eyes and said, “Wouldn’t you rather just have a nice, comfortable rest? All this fighting, all this striving. It’s so tiring! Come on, let’s call it quits and sit for a bit. What do you say?”
For a half moment, the man’s mental twist actually had the ghost of an effect. Luckily the influence Raul exerted fell far short of what’d be needed to compromise War… but Jason pretended to go along with it anyway. He allowed his mouth to go slack, and his arms drop to his sides. He said, “You know, I am tired. Trying to take over the world isn’t easy.”
Raul nodded. “I can only imagine. Why don’t you go over there and have a seat? Perfect place for a nap.” He motioned toward the ne
arest wall.
Jason made a show of yawning, and took a few steps that way.
Kate whispered to Raul, “What’re you doing?”
The moment the man’s attention shifted to his friend, War’s mantle surged up in Jason like rising magma. He multiplied from a single figure into a company a dozen strong, each clad in ebony armor and wielding weapons that kindled to roaring flame.
The intruders would pay for their insolence. In one voice, he and his company demanded, “Give up your Ring, or die.” Their fingers pointed at Kate like ebony knives.
“Oh, holy Jesus,” Kate said, reflexively hiding her Ring with her opposite hand. Raul stepped in front of her, drawing a second short sword from his sheath. He held the blades with reasonable skill. Not that it was going to do him any good against War.
Jason laughed. Or maybe it was War. Did it matter? The power of his Incarnation was cresting again, and while basking in that mastery, failure was unimaginable. The Ring of War glowed scarlet, brighter than he’d seen it since before the Maker’s death, bathing his duplicates, the floor, Raul and his swords, and even Kate who cowered from the light’s intensity.
The band on Kate’s finger flickered into a glowing life of its own, as if taking light from the fervor of his own mantle. Not red like blood splashed across the battlefield. Her light was violet. War remembered that color. The Ring of Desire emitted the hue of purity, lucidity, ambition, delight… and devotion.
War frowned, understanding his tactical error. By invoking his own aura, he’d catalyzed the somnolent power in the mortal’s Ring. A power now rising into awareness. War had to deal with things immediately before Desire realized he’d just given her a human host.
With as little effort as closing his fist, War launched his company into a charge. His soldiers fell on Raul and Kate, burning weapons slashing, crushing, and stabbing.
28: Desire
Katherine Manners
Kate was so terrified she thought she might pee. Maybe she did. It didn’t matter. She and Raul were about to die.
The Myth of the Maker Page 25
