Crossworld of Xai

by Steven Savage

  Jade blinked, “Oh, shit, the Voice?”

  “Yes,” Rake touched the crucifix around his neck, “the Voice.”

  “Rake …” Jade began, but the world shifted.

  Rake seemed to not so much glow, as stand out, and she knew what was happening …

  … it had come upon him Earths away, when he’d been recovering from wounds inflicted in a terrible war. It was something that had reached back through him when he had sought to make sense of it all. He called it the Voice, and Jade figured he usually tacked ‘of God’ onto the end, mentally. It was power, and it was forceful, and it was unpredictable.

  She’d only seen it in action twice, and the second time Rake had been so angry that the voice seemed to rip through him.

  “Reveal!” Rake yelled.

  Jade’s ears filled with sound. She snuck a look at HuanJen, who could have had the decency to look impressed.

  “Reveal …”

  Words trailing off in the distance.

  “reveal …”

  Then the words rushed back like wind and thunder.

  “This way …” Rake husked. Blood coated his lips. He took a handkerchief offered by HuanJen and spat into it, leaving ugly flecks of red on its gray surface.

  Jade almost said something compassionate and caring and stupid, but held back. She could see something in his eyes. She also noted he had drawn his pistols, and she just didn’t feel proper asking someone with two guns ‘hey, you OK?’

  Rake leapt out of the nearest exit, followed by HuanJen, followed by Jade. The Taoist mystic and his apprentice kept up with Rake’s stride as best they could, but his speed seemed unnatural …

  “Right!” Rake commanded in a hoarse voice.

  A turn down a corridor revealed small, closed caf��, one of the many restaurants serving the shard tower personnel. Rake focused on a door that apparently lead to an outdoor dining area …

  Two shots from his pistols shattered the lock.

  “Rake, what if it was open?” Huan-jen asked.

  “Well … screw it …”

  With determination, the minister kicked the door open, charging onto the balcony with his friends in tow.

  “Hello.” The voice echoed with several lifetimes of sarcasm.

  “Shit,” Jade muttered.

  A robed figure sat on the balcony’s edge, staring at the floor. Two simple symbols were drawn on the concrete in a red-brown substance - a simple cross and a yin-yang.

  “Sorry.” The Historian held up a bloody-fingered, raw-fleshed hand. “I didn’t have any paint.”

  Time seemed to slow and twist.

  “It’s simple, isn’t it?” the Historian asked. “There’s two sides to everything, really. Two bars on the cross, yin and yang, I never noticed until now. I should have. Two sides to everything.”

  The gathered clerics had fanned out. Jade to the left of the door, HuanJen to the right, Rake standing stock still in front of the only exit. The specter regarded them bemusedly.

  “Two sides to everything. Honestly, you think … no, you don’t, do you.”

  The Historian stood, dark cloak billowing. He was balanced on the ledge with perfect poise, as if he was part of the building.

  “But you aren’t all here, hmmmm … “

  There was a buzz at Rake’s waist.

  “Better get that.” Paldayne’s smile gleamed beneath his black hood.

  Rake holstered one pistol and reached for the walkie-talkie at his belt. He raised it to his ear, and held a hushed conversation. Moments later, he looked at the Historain strangely.

  “You fucking bastard.” Rake said clear as a bell. Jade felt her fur stand on end.

  “Two sides to every equation,” the Historian stated, “he is the other.

  “Rake?” HuanJen asked calmly.

  “Ahn and Brownmiller found … Derek Jacobi. The Scribe. His assistant.” Rake’s teeth were gritted. “I, ah, he was in the broadcast studio. He told them … where the Historian kept his secrets.”

  “Now, do you think I’d put them in my own head? Oh, no, no. In his. To easy to look for me. Too easy to talk to Galcir and find them. And if he’d been able to broadcast fine, but if not …”

  There was an unpleasantly unhumorous giggle. The Historian shook his head. “What are you going to do with a fourteen year old boy who’s got some of the nastiest secrets in Metris in his head, my clerical pursuiviants?”

  Jade blinked, then her heart was doused in icewater. The Lakkom whined in her hands, writhing like a snake made of black metal. She found herself without words, with only something red and fiery screaming behind her eyes.

  “The Scribe. You motherfucking …” Jade began.

  A teenage boy with gods knew what rumors and innuendoes and tales and hidden things in his mind. A timebomb made flesh, and dropped into the hands of Guild Esoteric, who supposedly kept things calm and civil.

  “Temper, temper,” The Historian wagged a finger, walking around the ledge calmly. “I wasn’t sure he’d get to broadcast anything, but, I figured I’d see what I could do. You didn’t get it, did … ah, yes, the camera crews. Something I learned from you, my techno-mystics.”

  Two people charged out of the stairwell, both with cameras; a taller man and a more rotund gentleman, both wearing simple coveralls and patches that identified them as members of the Communicants.. They seemed startled at the presence of the clerics and the Historian, but kept filming, two shoulder-held cameras swinging around like gun turrets.

  The Historian held up a cell phone. “I noticed you used them a lot or that irritating little Clericall. Welcome, my friends, to the show that … will not ever, ever end. Welcome to History.”

  Jade took a deep breath. She felt something happening. The city, all around her, filled with people. The wind, the sirens, the darkness …

  The Historian slowly took off his mask. Underneath it, he didn’t look particuarly frightening or menacing. He looked tired; his long face was pale, eyes red, light hair stringy and unwashed.

  Paldayne, former Dean of Historians, member of the Guild of Academics and the University.

  “Never saw it coming, did you? Did anyone?” Paldayne asked.

  Silence. Rake’s mouth twitched. HuanJen was as still as midnight. The cameramen kept filming. Jade felt spellbound, like she was both in a play and in the audience, as if she was watching something play out.

  Paldayne looked up at the top of Shard Tower.

  … Shard Tower, where everything happened, and where the Guild Council met …

  “I’m not writing it down anymore,” the man known as The Historian said simply.

  The black mask fell from his long fingers, and fluttered away, becoming part of the darkness below the balcony. Paldayne watched it fall, but his eyes occasionally flickered to the gathered clerics.

  Jade wanted to do something, but it was as if there was another self inside of her trying to break out and take action. This was The Historian, this was whom they’d hunted for weeks and weeks. This was the man who stole secrets and killed people to placate the bizarre being he drew his power from.

  Only … she wasn’t sure what to do. HuanJen and Rake didn’t appear to be doing anything but watching, and as much as she prided herself on her independence, she didn’t want to independently do anything stupid. This was out of her league.

  “So, it’s over, isn’t it?” Paldayne asked, then shook his head in response to an unheard answer. “No, no it’s not. No.”

  Paldayne’s eyes lit up with an internal fire, a burning fusion of anger and hatred and frustration.

  “It’s not over,” the Dean of Historian’s voice became a roar, “It’s not going to be over! You all know how this ends!”

  Paldyane threw his head back, pointing at the top of Shard Tower. “Fuck you! Fuck all of you! This isn’t over!”

  Jade caught HuanJen moving slowly toward Paldayne. He didn’t seem to be walking, really - just getting closer on his own without effort. He was onto somet
hing, Jade was sure - and judging by Rake’s glances at the Magician-Priest, he knew what was going on as well.

  Unfortunately, Jade realized, they couldn’t share it with her. She felt like she knew what was going on, but she couldn’t reflect it in words. If only she could put it in words, it wouldn’t be so terrifying.

  Paldayne, The Historian, turned his attention back to the odd collection of mystics, and pointed at Rake, finger stabbing like a spear.

  “This may hold some meaning for you, Holy Man,” Paldayne sneered at the minister. “‘Better to reign in hell.’”

  HuanJen began moving …

  … and Jade realized it was a play after all. Paldayne for his ambitions to wake people up, had just created a new delusion, a new nightmare. Ziggurat Jack had been formed by the old murderer-in-the-dark fears, and all Paldayne had done is give embodiment to new terrors. She and her friends had been trying to step out of the play he’d created, and he’d tried to draw people in, draw them in.

  The Historian stepped back, into empty air, and fell towards the street below, face locked in an alloy of smile and snarl.

  …Jade could see it all in her mind now; Paldayne would die from the fall, and it would be like a classic movie closing: THE END? And that question mark would be where everyone poured their fears, and whatever Paldayne had become would live off of that terror. There would just be The Historian.

  HuanJen blurred forward, and leapt after Paldayne, stepping off the balcony as if he was stepping out of a doorway.

  Jade finally managed to let out a short, strangled scream.

  Two figured fell towards the streets of Metris.

  HuanJen was calculating, mind weaving a tapestry of math and time.

  He ignored the ground, ignored the Historian’s laughter. He called upon one of the earliest disciplines he’d learned in the Order, when he’d understood an old quote about how water could go anywhere.

  A knife with no edge could cut through anything, even space.

  He vanished within himself, and appeared some ways below The Historian.

  … calculating. He could send himself to another spot without really crossing space, but each time it left him more disoriented. Each time he was lost between different states of himself …

  … become like water, all penetrating, no substance, a perfect edge …

  The mystic vanished again, nearly two hundred feet below the plunging Historian.

  One more time …

  “Christ, he, ah, did it!” Rake exclaimed.

  Jade blinked. “He … sent himself lower …the zappy-thing.”

  He wasn’t going to die.

  He was going to live.

  Jade felt tears well up in the corner of her eyes.

  She’d probably kill him for his.

  HuanJen landed on the parking lot, and ended up rolling across the pavement. His legs ached, his mind was wrapped in cotton and white noise, but he was on the ground.

  That only left …

  There was hideous, soul-darkening laughter echoing throughout the city as the Historian plunged toward the parking lot. It was something deep, something powerful, something out of time. It was the laughter you heard when you were a child all alone and knew the darkness had teeth.

  With a sickening sound, half crunch, half splat, The Historian’s body slammed into the parking lot with the force of a three-hundred foot fall. Even in the darkness, HuanJen could tell the fall, not surprisingly, had been fatal.

  Physically fatal.

  HuanJen let himself go, let his mind fall away, words plunging into the Void-they-came-from. He was a gateway to the all-come-from, where all things were leveled and all edges blunted and all knots untangled.

  Something insubstantial eminated from Paldayne’s corpse and hovered in the air, something one saw with the mind and not the eyes. Ill defined, like a painting whose paints had run due to water, it was a vaguely human shape, and it looked like everything you were sure was watching you behind your back.

  It spoke without words. It spoke of secrets and things unknown, of knife-edge ideas and horrors created by the horrified. It was everything you were afraid of people knowing, and you couldn’t fight it because it was knowledge. It reached for form …

  It found none. If found itself beyond form, all spiraling around a circle with its edge everywhere and its center nowhere.

  The half-ghost poured into HuanJen’s body, into the all-emanate, and the all-resolve, the Center of things. In moments, the mystic was alone, with only a mangled corpse for company.

  “That was . .. draining.” HuanJen said properly, before falling flat on his face.

  Moments later, Brian Talbot walked over to the prostate mystic. He looked at HuanJen, at the Historian’s body, and then back to the Magician-Priest.

  “Damn, that was cool …”

  “Thank you,” was the muffled reply before HuanJen indulged in unavoidable unconsciousness.

  “That was brave of him.” Deep voice, volcano-rumble words. Brownmiller.

  “It was stupid. Ok, brave, yes, but stupid.” Jade’s voice. “He’s good at that.”

  “Jade?” HuanJen asked. A furred hand gripped his right hand passionately.

  “Yes, love. Oh, Huan …”

  “I am fine.” HuanJen opened his eyes. Several concerned faces were looking down at him, lit by the flashlights of several concerned security guards. Jade’s was the most visible and the most welcome.

  “That was, ah, quite a stunt,” Rake commented. “Good job.”

  “I … figured it out.” HuanJen whispered.

  “I will not enjoy explaining this to the Gendarmes,” Ahn sighed. “I hope Byrd is helpful.”

  “Hey, how is he?” Brian Talbot’s face swam into view. “Hey, Huan, you OK? That was bizarre.”

  “Oh, fine, Rake?”

  “I am … well.” Rake tried to smile, but the blood crusted at the corners of his mouth was unsettling. “You caught it. I , ah, thought of blasting him with the Voice, but, ah he’d made sure he was in a position where, ah, it was unwise.”

  “If his body was gone, his … The Historian would have survived.” HuanJen shifted around, only to find Jade suddenly pillowing his head in her lap. Her smell was welcome, fur and spring and musk.

  “Er, what?” Biran asked. “Look, the reverend here kind of filled me in. You fought someone …”

  ” … thing.” Jade finished the man’s sentence. “He … was almost a man, but then he wasn’t.”

  “He had to die in a way that would stab him into in our minds, that fit his Pattern, fit people’s expectations, a great showdown,” HuanJen’s tired voice switched into the mode of teaching and lecturing effortlessly, “The fear of him haunting, the fear of the secrets held by The Scribe, the old power of Ziggurat Jack … he’d have become something that would stay with us in the darkness if he’d ended it right.”

  “Fortunately, he didn’t expect someone would jump off of a frigging balcony to make sure he got exorcised during his suicide attempt.” Jade grinned. “You scared me shitless love.”

  “You know me.”

  “I do.” Jade shifted around for a kiss.

  “I feel, I shouldn’t be seeing this,” Brian commented to Rake as the Vulpine’s lips met those of her lover. HuanJen’s hands moved over Jade shamelessly.

  “You, ah, get used to it. I’ve, ah, seen them worse.” Rake shrugged.

  Brian blinked. “Does he normally get that … physical after jumping off of a skyscraper.”

  Rake put his arm around Brian’s shoulders. “My, ah, friend, the Lord moves in mysterious, ah, ways. These are, ah, some of them.”

  June 10, 2000 AD, Xaian Standard Calendar.

  “Afternoon … Slate?” Richard Nax asked.

  The huge gray-furred Vulpine had come into the Nax, but not at the normal time. Richard’s precise mind had to spin for a few moments before he placed a name to the regular’s face. He so often associated people with times and places that an unexpected visit
was cause for confusion.

  “That’s me,” the huge man said happily, sitting at the bar, “I’ll have … give me one of your Brazier Rums and Colas.”

  “Gladly, ” Richard selected the proper implements and began mixing happily.

  “You seem happier,” Slate remarked after a moment’s thought.

  “Really, Mr … Shaleson?” Richard placed the drink before his customer. “I can’t … well … it has been crazy. Last night, that helped?”

  “The Blackout?”

  “Well … everyone pitched in, we got the candles out. It was .. . fun.” Mr. Nax stuck his hands in his pockets. “Not that there was much else to do.”

  Slate sipped his drink. “What, did you have a sing-along, and …”

  “Well, yes, actually.” Richard grinned.

  “Yeah. It seems to have made an impression,” Salte acknowledged, “My fiancee and I spent a very nice night together.”

  Richard raised an eyebrow. He was feeling in a remrkable mood, and figured he’d play along. Besides, the bar was nearly empty at this hour.

  “Should I ask?” Richard queried.

  “Nah, nothing like that,” Slate smiled. “Thing were … well, you know how things are.”

  “I thought I did, yes,” Richard nodded, “You won’t believe what I see here.”

  “Oh, I believe it, I do!” Slate said comfortingly. “I work security for Corona. The things people worry about are quite upsetting. And my fiancee, my girlfriend, she was taking care of the apartment of a friend in the Gendarmes who’s roomate was a Nurse. If I didn’t see it, I heard it, and I heard more than I needed.”

  “Oh, yes. Where the Gendarmes didn’t get to. That problem with those warehouses. Oh, and you heard about last night, at the Tower?”

  Slate gave Richard a pained look. “Two of my friends and my sister were there.”

  Richard blinked. “Wait … HuanJen, Jade … Rake? I saw only a little …”

  “My sister has a tenancy for trouble. She’s quite adept at locating it and inserting herself into said trouble.”

  Richard noticed Slate’s drink was getting low, and began brewing another one. He didn’t run bar as much as he’d like, but he found that most bartenders didn’t take the whole listening thing far enough.