She cocked her head, as if straining to hear. “He summons us! All the Incarnations. He needs us. We must go to him. And I am late! Too late? He called days ago, and I tarried, unknowing. Just as War failed to hear.”
Her eyes closed. The divine light that had shone down on her from some higher realm faded. Raul realized there were no flowers, no overpowering floral fragrance, or a god whose presence could madden those who saw her. There was only Kate, who looked confused.
“I wonder if it is wise to call up the power of that Incarnation ever again,” said Raul quietly.
“You might be right,” Kate replied, rubbing her temple. “It was hard to push her back this time. But I learned something. I know where Carter is, and where War has gone. Carter’s trying to get into the Maker’s Hall.”
“Carter? He’s here?”
“Him, or someone who thinks he’s the Maker, anyway.”
Raul frowned. He said, “This Maker’s Hall. It’s like Ardeyn’s version of Mount Olympus?” Earth mythology was something every agent of the Quiet Cabal learned. It came in handy in knowing what recursions to avoid.
“Presumably. It’s the same place Jason wants to break into to steal the keys to the kingdom. So to speak. And if Desire knows where Carter is, so must War. And Jason. He’s been trying to accumulate the Rings of Incarnation for the same purpose: use them to open the Maker’s Hall.”
“How do you know what Jason’s been up to?”
“Desire learned much gazing into Jason’s eyes. She could read his deepest desires. That’s one of her gifts.” Kate coughed.
“Right… So. If it is Carter, he must have called the Rings of Incarnation because he wants to get into the Hall, too. Meanwhile, Jason knows Carter is back in Ardeyn. The same way as you?”
“The same way as Desire just did, yes. If I concentrate, I can still almost feel what Jason is thinking.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” Raul cautioned.
“We need to stop Jason,” Kate said. “He’s planning on overpowering Carter, taking all the Rings for himself, and claiming the power of the Maker!”
Raul would’ve felt queasy if he had a stomach. “Jason is a psychopath.”
“He doesn’t think any of this is real,” Kate said. “Plus, bearing one of these Rings as long as he has can’t have been easy for him.”
“Regardless,” Raul said, “he’s got to be stopped. He’s at least partially quickened, if he was able to send the Ring of Desire to Earth in the first place, BITER or no. If he gained godlike power in Ardeyn, he wouldn’t be long satisfied in this realm. He’d turn his eyes to Earth. We need to get help.”
“From where?”
“From Ruk. From those who sent me to the world of normal matter in the first place: the Quiet Cabal.”
“But you might blink out of existence if you leave Ardeyn. Or if I leave, what happens to you? Besides, I don’t know the way.”
“I can tell you what you need to know to translate–”
“No. You’ll die.”
“I’m already dead, mi chula.”
“I’m not going to argue about it. We are here. Within the context of Ardeyn, we have the power to oppose Jason.”
“He’s the Betrayer; he’s War!”
“And I can call on Desire.”
Raul knew, as he’d known before, that it was futile to keep talking when Kate’s tone settled in that particular stubborn pitch. But he offered one last argument, “If the Betrayer doesn’t kill you, Desire might subsume you. That might be even worse. You’d lose your mind and personality. Your soul…”
“If Jason gains his heart’s desire, everyone on Earth will be wiped out, or overwritten with clones of Jason’s making. It’s me, or billions. Seems like an easy choice. Don’t you agree?”
Raul didn’t want to admit it, but Kate was right. He said, “And if Earth is devoured by Jason, it wouldn’t be long before all the recursions that Earth hosts would come to the same end, probably by a breach from the Strange itself. All the limited worlds would be wiped out. Including Ruk.”
“So help me, damn it! Is there some kind of translational ability that will get me to Carter?”
“You’d know it if you had something like that. But you’ve got that Ring. Can Incarnations fly? Like angels?”
Kate blinked. “I don’t know. I’d have to call her up again to find out.”
“Wait on that. I might have something.” Raul pointed at his own corpse, which Kate must have dragged into the antechamber with her. It lay battered, torn, and pale in a dark bloom of blood. He’d avoided looking until then, just in case the experience didn’t sit well. He’d been right to do so; seeing himself splayed out like meat on a butcher’s block was awful. Luckily, he had no time for drama.
Kate followed his gesture, moving to the blood’s edge.
Raul directed, “Check in my stuff. I carried a couple of cyphers with me from Earth. Grab them both.”
Kate bent and removed the pouch from the corpse’s belt with quick fingers. Raul half expected to feel something when she did, through some kind of sympathetic relationship. But apparently the connection between what he’d been before and the ghost he was now was severed.
“Are these it?” Kate dumped a handful of gold coins, a rolled bundle of lock picking tools, a small dagger, an amulet, and a vial of elixir into her palm.
Raul said, “Grab the vial and the amulet. The rest is just leftover residue from my translation. They’re meaningless.”
Kate dumped the coins, keeping the amulet, the vial, and Raul noticed, the lock picking tools. She shoved those into her satchel, then examined the remaining items. Her eyes grew wider. “You know, I can feel that there’s something different about these.”
“Anyone who’s quickened has the same ability,” Raul explained. “The ability to sense objects birthed in the Strange – like cyphers. Stow the vial. It’s the amulet we want.”
“Should I put it on?”
Without thinking, he reached for it to show her how to activate the function. His hand passed through her and amulet.
“Better just tell me how it works,” she said.
“It’s an instant shield,” Raul said. “It has a special traveling property. I’ve been itching to try it out, truth to tell. Put on the amulet, then press the circular image on the front, with the wing design.”
Kate lifted the chain over her neck. “What’s going to happen?”
“You’ll gain the means to rapidly travel,” he said. “I don’t know the specifics. That’s how cyphers work.”
“Then you better tuck in. I don’t want to leave you behind.” Kate raised the Ring of Incarnation. “It’s your new focus, until we figure out how to translate you back to life.”
Raul glanced one last time at his corpse. He hoped Kate’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. Then he allowed himself to disincorporate. The void claimed him once more, except now that he knew his situation, he found that he wasn’t actually in a place of emptiness.
Concentrating, Raul recognized that he remained “with” Kate, except he was bodiless and without form. It was like he was… haunting her. Everything was a bit fuzzy, but he could still sense what was going on around her.
Kate examined the amulet a few more moments, glanced at the corpse, then away. She mumbled, “Time to fly the fuck out of here.”
She unbarred the door to the antechamber and activated the cypher. A full-sized iron shield popped into existence as the amulet melted away in a mist of fractal designs. Blazoned on the shield’s front were feathered dragon wings. Kate flinched away, but the shield remained before her, hovering protectively.
She shrugged, then inserted her arm into the straps and said, “Take me to Carter Morrison, where he waits upon the Glass Desert.”
The shield warped and grew, reaching to wrap her in a protective envelope of thin iron. In a second, it transformed into a craft that resembled, so far as Raul could determine, a carved metal dragon. Twin portholes for eyes allowed
Kate to look out. She was already cursing in surprise as the enchanted conveyance swept its wings back and rocketed forward on a jet of dragon-heated air. The wing edges struck sparks and terrific echoes from the walls of Megeddon as the craft careened along corridors and up every set of stairs it found, moving higher and higher within the fortress. More than once, homunculi had to throw themselves flat to avoid being splattered across its front.
Then they burst free from the structure like an arrow fired from a giant’s bow. They sped high above the Betrayer’s lava-lit citadel of doom, gaining even more velocity. Raul barely had a moment to take it in; already the craft was rolling into a new trajectory.
A mirror bright line of radiance blazed on the horizon. With obscenities spewing in their wake from a thoroughly rattled Katherine Manners, the craft winged west, toward the eye-watering glow.
32: Short Cut
Jason Cole
The moment Desire’s attention lifted, Jason fled from Megeddon’s Foundries like a cockroach let out from beneath a glass. He didn’t race along the corridors of his fortress out of fear. He wasn’t afraid of Desire. Exactly the opposite. But events of the prior minutes had convinced him that no matter whether he addressed Desire while wearing the aura of War, or as merely Jason the Betrayer, he was vulnerable. Whatever affair the two Incarnations had enjoyed in their fictional relationship before he’d stepped into the office of War was a chink in his armor he couldn’t repair. At least, not without due preparation. Preparation he’d just discovered he had no time for.
While he’d stood bedazzled by Desire’s divine smile, War heard Carter Strange call for the Rings of Incarnation.
Jason’s metallic, oversize boots clanged on the stone stairs as he sprinted up to the aerie. He was delighted to find the dlamma hadn’t left for wherever it called home. The creature had landed Jason there less than an hour before. Two red homunculi were wiping it down. Evidence of a repast was spread out on the stone, red and rare like the dlamma preferred.
“Are you rested?” Jason asked. “I need your help again. Something has happened. Desire is here! Can you believe it? She’s incarnate! Though that’s not what I need your help with. Still, I can’t help wondering–”
The dlamma said, “You are babbling.”
Jason counted to five. He congratulated himself on his self-discipline for not smashing the flying thing into paste for its impertinence. He concentrated on all the fond thoughts he’d recently entertained regarding the winged beast. He said, “Allow me to rephrase,” he said. “Please fly me to the center of the Glass Desert. Immediately. Will you?”
The dlamma regarded Jason for several long seconds with its expression unreadable behind its mask. It finally replied, “I need a restorative more vital than this meal.” Its eyes flicked to the red mess. “But yes. I sense you would not ask were the need not urgent.”
“Urgent?” He coughed, catching himself yet again. “Yes, that’s exactly right.” Jason removed from his belt an elixir, one of the special class of potions and similar trinkets that turned up unexpectedly now and again. “I’ll spare you the details, if you’re not interested,” he continued, handing over the vial. The dlamma grasped it in surprisingly dexterous feathers and sucked the vial dry. A shimmer of vibrancy flowed across its wings and tail feathers, and its eyes sparkled. After that it bowed, allowing Jason to mount.
As he secured himself with leather straps into the saddle, Jason explained, “Suffice it to say that a sad pretender to the Maker’s power is back in play, and we need to work swiftly to stay in the game.”
The dlamma leaped, wings fanning out. They were back in the air. Instead of flying west, the creature winged straight south.
As Jason opened his mouth to make the obvious comment, the dlamma said, “We can cut hours off the trip by skimming along the exterior of Ardeyn in the Strange, then re-entering at a point closest to our destination.”
“We can?”
The dlamma continued, “Of course. Remember our homecoming? We talked about this very thing.”
“Of course,” Jason admitted. He was embarrassed to have forgotten. But to be fair to himself, before his trip with Merid, he’d avoided thinking about the dark energy network as policy.
“But now that I do remember, why not go up?” he inquired. “Ardeyn isn’t spherical.”
“The air is mostly confined to within ten miles of the surface, true,” the dlamma replied. “But the boundary where the Strange begins is much farther above and beneath the land mass than where the air gives out, presumably to leave room for the sun, moons, and all the stars to exist within.”
“Right,” Jason said. He’d occasionally wondered if those celestial objects lay out in the Strange. Apparently not. But it didn’t matter. The dlamma was flying. He trusted it to take him where he wanted to go.
The creature flapped on, eating up the miles. Sitting on the dlamma’s saddle, he could do nothing except think. The Borderlands rolled beneath him as they approached the Edge. He had some time to consider his situation. He’d been far more reactive of late than he preferred. Events had been pushing him, rather than the other way around, and he didn’t like it.
Jason pulled out the chain on which he kept the two other Rings he’d collected besides his own: Death and Commerce. Both were weighty, thick with significance that shone from them almost like illumination. He contemplated the bands, thinking that if he had known better, maybe he would not have sent the Ring of Desire off to Earth. Back then, he’d had two Rings – War and Desire – and he’d known where to find Commerce. Maybe he could’ve tracked down Death on his own, giving him the four needed to open the way. He could’ve used them as the key…
No, probably not. Before Ardeyn had been pulled from the Schrödinger-like null space where it’d nestled in the Strange out of synch from Earth, his own Ring of War, not to mention the Ring of Commerce, and the Ring of Desire had possessed only a ghost of their previous power. Too little to have opened the Hall, his research had proven. Besides, he hadn’t known for sure where to look for the Ring of Death. Stealing it had been a happy accident.
As he’d planned in sending the Ring of Desire across, laden with spells-cum-malware, Earth and Ardeyn had reconnected. He’d been thrilled to learn that two hundred years hadn’t passed on Earth as it had here, but only three.
The reconnection brought Carter back, which Jason hadn’t expected. Carter’s renewed existence, in turn, rejuvenated the Rings to their current potential, which while not yet full, were surely at least half their original strength. Strength enough to open the Hall.
Starting with getting his revenge on the man who’d trapped him here for two hundred years. But this time he wouldn’t kill Carter. No. He’d learned his lesson. He needed Carter alive to keep the Rings revitalized. Carter obviously didn’t have all the Maker’s power himself yet, or he’d have gone into the Hall. Which was why he’d called the Rings.
Jason wasn’t exactly sure how it would all go down. It was all a tangled mess. But Jason was committed to surfing that chaos and coming out on top. Of course, if he managed to enter the Hall and claim the Maker’s mantle, Carter would be superfluous. Worse, a threat. As the dlamma flew, Jason imagined different ways he might end Carter’s existence permanently, or at least painfully.
Ardeyn’s edges were ragged, half-dead, and partly crumbled into drifting earth motes called skerries. As the dlamma winged out into the void toward the superficies, the discomfort in his stomach that’d plagued him as they’d left the Strange sharpened. Jason remembered the kray who’d pursued him out of their domain. “What if the kray are waiting?”
“I am fast,” the dlamma replied.
“You better be.”
They passed into the Strange. As before, the roiling infinities stretched Jason’s mind to breaking point. Closing his eyes offered scant comfort. Somehow the medium was able to press through his eyelids and impart their immensities directly into his consciousness.
The dlamma swerved sharply, a
lmost throwing him; only the leather restraints kept him in the saddle. Jason’s eyes snapped open instinctively.
The kray armada was all around them, a carapaced swarm of thousands falling through the Strange with pincers extended like fighter-plane guns. The dlamma swerved again to avoid a flight of five kray no bigger than dogs, then dove like a stone to get beneath a kray as large as a house.
The monsters had obviously not ceased their advance after he’d escaped their pursuit by entering Ardeyn. Had they known he’d emerge again? “Get us out of here!” he screamed to the dlamma. The winged beast was already juking and corkscrewing like a rebel alliance ship dodging tie-fighters. His command was only more noise amid a rising scream of hunting kray.
The pain in his belly was worse than ever. He pushed it away. The leather straps keeping him in the saddle jerked savagely each time the dlamma made a course correction, adding to his discomfort. How had the kray known to wait for him, when he himself hadn’t known he’d return to the Strange more than a few hours ago?
A kray pincer clipped the dlamma. He and the dlamma tumbled, though neither uttered a shriek. Jason prepared to call for the mantle of War, but his mount pulled out of the fall, which perhaps not coincidentally put them at least a hundred meters from the closest kray. They flashed through a region of thin blue fractals stretching away like curling puppet strings. Beyond the kray outriders that’d ambushed them, a far larger kray mass boiled and surged like a flying ant hill above them. A nebula of darkness swirled at its core, and from that darkness, Jason sensed an all-consuming malevolence.
Even if Ardeyn wasn’t really “real,” the planetovore that commanded the kray in that advancing apocalypse was every bit as authentic and palpable as Jason himself. Not for the first time, he regretted he’d ever had dealings with the damned things. Those bargains had literally lessened him.
The dlamma took advantage of the clear space around it and looped back in a wide curve toward the interface with Ardeyn. A flight of kray tried to get in between them and the superficies. Jason batted them away with his staff using War’s strength, spattering both himself and his mount with gore, and the dlamma zipped through the opening.
The Myth of the Maker Page 29
