The heat that had been building inside Elandine, sharpening like a spear thrust aimed at Carter suddenly shifted and found a new target. She screamed, “War! The Betrayer, you mean. That sodden, earthwanking, pissguzzling thief!”
The raggedy man flinched. His pirate companion, who seemed to be having a hard time with their conversation in the first place, took a step back. Elandine felt Navar’s calming hand on her shoulder. She closed her eyes and counted to five.
“So you do know Jason,” Carter said into the silence.
“War – the Betrayer – stole the Ring from me. He helped me in a desperate hour claiming that he was the Maker. In my need, I lent the Ring to him.” Her face felt warm.
“Holy crap,” murmured Carter, looking crestfallen. “How did Jason pull off that con?”
“Con?” Elandine frowned.
“Con – short for confidence trick. A swindle. How did he fool you?”
She chewed her lip, debating whether to tell him or walk away. Explaining what she’d been up to, she realized, might not sound completely sane. On the other hand, this man was claiming he’d once been the Maker. In the balance, who was he to judge her? Finally she said, “When the Ring’s power swelled recently, I decided to use it to storm the Court of Sleep, and ask for release of my sister Flora, recently slain, from those who judge the dead. When the false Maker appeared, I was betrayed by my hope and desperation. I’m not going to make that mistake a second time.”
So saying, Elandine drew her sword – it made a shhhhh sound as it came free – and in one continuous motion, placed the point at Carter’s neck.
“So, convince me you’re who you say you are, and not just another thief sniffing after power,” she said.
The qephilim pirate finally spoke, raising her hands placatingly. “Excuse me? We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. And unless I’ve forgotten everything I know about heraldry, you appear to be Queen of Hazurrium, out for a stroll on the Glass Desert with a small army. That’s downright peculiar, given that you’re hundreds of miles from your land. Is the queen who you really are?”
Elandine didn’t let the sword tip waver, but gave a tight nod. When the pirate put it that way, it did sound faintly ludicrous.
Siraja continued, “Excellent. Which means I shall address you properly from now on, Your Majesty. Easy enough. This leads me to my next point: I also only just learned Carter’s claim to be the fallen creator of Ardeyn. And like you, Your Majesty, I found his claim suspect.”
“So you don’t believe him,” Elandine said. “Why do you travel with him?”
“That’s a long and complicated story, but leave that for a moment. I said I found his claim suspect. But in the time since he’s suggested his mad provenance until now, I’ve been considering the possibility. I’ve compared the claim with everything I know about him and seen him accomplish since we’ve been together. I’ve reviewed all his peculiar abilities.”
“I’m right here, you know,” said Carter, his eyes flicking between Elandine, down to the queen’s sword, and over to the qephilim.
“I’m talking to the pirate,” said the queen. Then, “Go on, pirate.”
“My name is Siraja, Your Majesty.”
“Go on, Siraja, and make it quick, if you please. What peculiar abilities?”
“Abilities like how he knows the name of anything, anything at all, just by looking at it,” Siraja said. “Or how, once he knows a thing’s name, he can command it, or change it. Or even give it life. That’s how he freed us from the soul sorcerers we just escaped. By animating a hollow statue to create a distraction. And I realized, just now when you showed up here calling him Maker, that those would be exactly the sort of abilities I’d expect the creator of Ardeyn to wield. He might be telling the truth.” The pirate ceased talking, and fixed Carter with a nonplussed look, as if surprised at her own words.
Elandine stepped on the hope that flickered behind her heart. She said, “Fascinating. Assuming you’re not simply in on his elaborate sham.”
“It’s all true, I swear it,” Carter said.
“Then show me,” commanded Elandine. “Show forth your power. Name my sword.” Her weapon, a sword of power wielded during the Age of Myth, had a secret name that only she–
“Your sword has a secret name, which makes it harder for me to know it, but–”
“Stop,” she yelled, suddenly realizing that the man might actually succeed, and worse, blurt out her weapon’s name. The blade was powered, to some degree, by the mystery inherent in its origin and name. “Whisper it to me.”
Carter stepped close, and said into her cupped ear, “Rendswandir. It was forged during the War of the Fall for its first wielder Garsan. Garsan slew the Dragon of Shades on its deadly edge.” He stepped back.
Elandine gasped. “How? No one but I know the sword’s secret name…”
“Apparently, no longer strictly true,” Siraja said.
Carter looked vaguely rueful and said, “It’s a knack, but I don’t know how it works. And sometimes I remember things that didn’t happen to me.”
“Then to who?”
“To the Maker. Part of him is in me. Which is why I think I can wake him again, or at least his tools.”
“What sorts of things do you remember?” asked Elandine, fascinated despite herself.
“Flashes of stuff I don’t understand very well. Fields of combat thick with monsters and angels, of vast spaces underground, of souls being judged… And certainty. Certainty of a sort I’ve never felt before, as if–”
“Souls being judged?” Elandine interrupted again. “Was it the Court of Sleep you saw?”
“Maybe,” allowed Carter. “But it’s all–”
“If I help you get into the Maker’s Hall, do you promise to release my sister Flora from whatever fate she was handed by the Umber Judges, they who judge the souls of the dead? On your name as the Maker?”
Carter looked confused. “I shouldn’t make such a promise. I don’t know how to return the dead to life.”
“You may not,” said Elandine, hope tugging the corners of her mouth upward, “but if you really can wake the Maker, he will know. Do you promise?”
Carter looked at Siraja. The pirate said, “Like Her Highness says, if you’re really the Maker, then what’s beyond you? Or, him, I mean.”
Carter nodded, returning his gaze to Elandine. “If we get into the Hall, and I can claim the Maker’s power as my own – and after I resolve the issue of saving the world – then yes, I will do all I can to help your sister.”
“Glorious!” whispered the queen. She glanced around to see the army of Peacemakers arrayed at her back, and Navar. The First Protector’s ears flicked worriedly, but for once, she held her tongue.
“So,” said Carter. “I can point you back the way down to the spaces beneath the glass, where a coven of soul sorcerers is ensconced. They’re tough, but I doubt they could stand up to your army.”
“Why would we go down there?” Elandine wondered, her mind reviewing happy memories of Flora, and anticipating the look on her face when she was pulled from Death by the Maker’s decree.
“Um,” mumbled Carter, becoming unsure.
“Because all we need do,” continued Elandine happily, “is wait for the others to arrive.”
“The others being?”
“If your call reached me, it reached everyone who still has or recently carried a Ring of Incarnation. Once they are assembled, you’ll have your key. With them, you can summon the door to the Hall, without need of cleaning out the vermin ensconced below.”
Carter looked doubtful. “You think it’ll be that easy?”
Elandine shrugged. “Well, of course when the Betrayer arrives, we’ll have to kill him and take his Ring and the one he stole from me. I suppose other arrivals could prove similarly annoying.”
The First Protector finally broke her silence, “Your Majesty can’t be suggesting we attack the Betrayer!”
“Why not? We’ve go
t the Maker-in-Waiting right here! Plus me and my army. And as the Maker here reminds me–”
“Please call me Carter,” he interrupted.
“As Carter Strange here reminds me, I’ve still got my blade. Its edge remains sharp enough to cut the throat of a fallen Incarnation.”
31: Haunting
Raul of Ruk
I’m dead, Raul thought.
Not that he cared especially; concerns seemed far from him. Probably it was the nonchalance the dead were famous for, he mused. All around him, it was black. Well, not so much black as void, if nothingness could be said to have a color. People, even people in Ruk, imagined the void of space as black. And in the universe of normal matter, where things like photons and optical nerves were real, perhaps darkness really was black in outer space, from a certain perspective.
From Raul’s current point of view, optic nerves and photons were distant concepts. He was, he reminded himself a second time, dead.
Another thought occurred to him: thoughts don’t normally occur to the dead. Maybe he wasn’t actually–
Nope, he was dead, as they said on Earth, as a doornail. Jason Cole – War – had done it for him. He’d perished before he could use a curative cypher or the one that might have removed him from harm’s way by flying him straight out of Megeddon. He was no longer alive, it was true.
But he was also in Ardeyn. Which made all the difference.
The rules worked differently in the Land of the Curse than on Earth or in Ruk, or any other recursion Raul had personally visited. As policy, Ruk’s Quiet Cabal rarely traveled to fictionally or mythologically seeded recursions around Earth, out of fear of igniting the spark of cognizance in the inhabitants. And that went double for recursions created by fictions that included spirits that survived bodily death; those were the sorts of stories likely to contain beings of “magical” power, including all manner of demons, demigods, and probably even deities. No one wanted to risk one of those creatures gaining the spark and worse, becoming quickened.
But here he was, in this surprise recursion of Ardeyn, which should never have been, where the soul survived bodily death. He was proof.
Raul was glad that ghosts didn’t have emotions, otherwise he’d be freaking the hell out, to use another Earthly phrase. When he’d first translated to Earth, he’d acquired Spanish automatically, becoming as fluid as a native speaker. He’d had to learn English by dint of concentrated study. Since then, he’d become something of a connoisseur of both languages during his decades long stay on Earth. He particularly enjoyed the colorful sayings. Not that any of that mattered now.
On balance, he was beginning to wonder about his no-emotions assumption. For instance, he obviously retained a sense of curiosity, because he wanted to know very badly where he was. And if he was going to be completely truthful about it, he was becoming attached to even the limited existence he still apparently retained. Though that paled before the cold worry that soaked through him when he wondered what had become of Katherine Manners.
“Mi chula!” he whispered. And just like that, the void suddenly spat him out, and he was with Kate.
Last time he’d seen her, she’d been in the Foundries facing off against War. He’d tried to save her. As a senior agent of Ruk’s Quiet Cabal, Raul figured he stood a chance against Jason. But in the context of Ardeyn, Jason was also War, a demigod of combat. And before an Incarnation, Raul had failed to prevail.
“Raul,” said Kate, as her eyes focused on him. They were red as if she’d been crying. “I’m so sorry.”
He reached to comfort her but his hand passed right through her shoulder. The sensation was like waving through cool fog. He drew back and studied his hand. It seemed normal enough – and solid – to him. He wondered how he looked to Kate. Ghostly and pale? The fiction-made-real meant that yes, that was probably how he looked.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“In a storeroom just off the Contact Foundry.” Burlap-wrapped parcels cluttered the small room. The single exit was barred with a thin metallic rod.
“Kate, staying in the enemy’s stronghold is foolhardy!”
“Tell me about it. But I don’t know where to go! But we’re safe for now. I’m safe, anyhow. What about you? You’re the one who… died.”
“Remarkably good, considering.” His voice sounded almost exactly the same to his own ears, other than having acquired a slight resonance. Some might even call it a ghostly resonance.
She glanced into his eyes. “Fuck, Raul, I didn’t know what to do! I saw you bleeding out, and before I could really even think about it, the part of me that believes she’s part of this world, that shepherds the dead, reached out to you. Offered you a place with me. If that was wrong of me, I–”
“Seriously?” he interrupted. She’d provided him a place to anchor. If he concentrated, he could feel a cool current, as if he was standing ankle deep in icy water. Here with Kate, he knew, he could ignore it. But without her, he’d have been swept away into the Night Vault on a colorless wave of nonexistence…
He continued, “If I’d been stabbed that many times in Ruk or on Earth, that would have been the end, forever. So thank you for thinking on your feet, and offering a hand. I feel overwhelmingly odd, but that’s hardly surprising. And when you think about the alternative…” He shrugged.
Kate scrunched her eyes in sudden thought. She said. “Hey. Is a ghost-you enough like the real you to translate back to Earth and arrive as the living version of you?”
He blinked. “I don’t know. I suspect not, but I suppose we could try and see what–”
Kate said, “No! At least, not before we look into it further. Do some experiments first, so we don’t kill you.” She waved her hands as if at some imaginary space where experiments on ghosts and dimensional travel could be conducted. “What if we try and you turn up on Earth as a corpse?”
Raul nodded. What he understood of context-keeping during translations between recursions hinted that if a dead person translated into a world where standard physics held sway… well, he hoped he’d make a pretty corpse. He kept his doubts to himself. Instead he said, “What do you propose?”
She pointed at her Ring. “This is even more important than we first thought. Jason originally sent it to Earth, in contravention of everything you’ve told me about translating. To survive that trip, it had to be something exceptional here in Ardeyn. It can move between realms, which is why Jason used it in the first place, and why I found it in that server room on Earth.”
“Agreed. Usually, only cyphers can–”
“I figured out what it really is. One of the Rings of Incarnation. It’s Desire.”
Raul had acquired enough frame of reference upon translation into Ardeyn to know exactly what that meant. If a ghost could gasp, he would have.
Kate continued, “And War accidentally woke it. For a little while, it was as if I was the Incarnation of Desire.”
“I don’t remember…”
“You were dying.”
“Ah.” He wanted to clear his throat, but found he lacked the means. Instead he said, “So, you’re suggesting this Incarnation has the means to return to life those recently dead?”
“I… don’t know. But I’m going to try.”
“Wait!” urged Raul, suddenly nervous for a reason he couldn’t name. “Where’s War? Won’t he be back?”
“I don’t know. Desire bested him somehow, made him stand down. Then you died, and I was distracted. After that, he was gone. Not much time’s passed since you reappeared. Five minutes, maybe.”
“We need to find out where he is, and go somewhere else, so he doesn’t turn you into a ghost too.’
She shook her head. “If he shows up again, Desire can handle him.”
“Desire? You talk like it’s a separate entity. You’re wearing the Ring. Doesn’t that mean you control the power of the Incarnation?”
“Sort of. I can’t quite explain it.” She waved away his question, and continued, “It do
esn’t matter. Let’s see if we can do anything for you.”
He recognized that intractable tone. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m keeping watch. Jason might have left for reasons of his own, but he or one of his duplicates could turn up again at any moment. These Foundries are presumably central to his operation.”
Kate wasn’t listening. She’d raised her hand, the one wearing the Ring. The Ring of Desire. Raul eyed it with newfound wariness. She closed her eyes in concentration.
About ten seconds passed before he realized sapphire and silver flowers, just coming into bloom, sprouted from the storeroom floor. Funny that he hadn’t noticed them before. The delicate scent of lily-of-the-valley mixed with the nostalgic odor of lilac relaxed him, though he idly wondered how it was he could smell. The blooms were thickest at Kate’s feet, where the petals flowed into a blue gown, sewn with silver thread.
Had Kate been wearing that all along? If so, he hadn’t appreciated how magnificent it was. He’d always known she was wonderful, but now her beauty outshone the sun. Her red hair was a bundle of braids wound about with silver wire, and on her finger sat a wide band that burned with divine grace.
His earlier suspicion that spirits in Ardeyn could feel emotion was confirmed. At least in the presence of this woman, the emotion of desire transfixed, and perhaps would have frozen his heart, had he had one.
“¡Híjole!,” Raul muttered. Spanish was better for expressing surprise than English or Rukian.
Ruk… Which was his home recursion. Right. What the–
Raul startled from his spell. He managed to croak, “Kate? You in there? That Ring of Desire, it’s not fooling around.”
Desire slowly blinked, and looked down at her Ring, ignoring Raul completely. She said, her voice both like Katherine’s and something far more, “I hear the Maker speaking. His voice is so faint. Oh, praise be to Him; He is not slain! War tried, but failed.”
“That’s good,” mumbled Raul. “But–”
The Myth of the Maker Page 28
