Undone Deeds

by Del Franco, Mark

  “Focus.”

  The word cut across the black like the thrum of the deep. A curiosity surged through me at the break of the monotony, but only for a moment. The black returned, black and silent. Even as I considered I had imagined it, I lost the sense of it and faded away into the black.

  “Grey.”

  The word cut across the black like the thrum of the deep. I had heard a sound that formed a word that formed a meaning. I was the sound that was the word that was the meaning. I was Grey. I knew this and remembered this and held on to this as the idea faded away into the black.

  I remembered then the other word. I had a memory of another word. My name was not the first word, the first sound. It had been another word with a sound and a meaning, and I knew that, too.

  “Focus, Grey.”

  I heard the words, pausing as I heard them, wondering whether I heard the words in my memory or heard them again in the black. It mattered not in the black. It felt the same. I heard the words and the memory and held them in my mind and remembered who I was.

  A pinpoint of light stirred in the black. I saw it, then black, then black. I was tumbling again. I saw it, then saw it, then black. I saw it. The pinpoint of light stayed in my vision. It stayed, no longer shifting to black. I was still. The pinpoint of light in the dark moved, and I saw it and knew it for what it was: essence in the black.

  There was light.

  Light floated in the distance, essence light that soared toward me. Bursts of color flared, fireworks against the black, fading to darkness. I wondered if the colors were essence or simply a physiological reaction to the enveloping darkness. I wondered if they were the afterimages of essence I had seen, memory images of the colors of essence or levels of essence I couldn’t normally sense with light. The colors flashed and flared, then faded, and always the darkness returned, except the pinpoint of light remained, growing in the black

  The pinpoint changed, became shape, first a circle, then an oval, then a line. The light became what it was: essence in the black, essence moving toward me, essence I recognized, the shape of a body signature, shifting from white to blue to evergreen. The body signature arrived at last or in an instant. I wasn’t sure which. I was sure of the body signature, though, and of the face that belonged to that signature and floated in front of me.

  “Am I dead?” I asked Bergin Vize.

  I had spent years as a Guild agent chasing Vize, elf terrorist and chronic adversary. I remembered that now. I had lost my abilities because of him—and he had lost his. He returned to Boston again and again, and each time I faced him and lost, until the last time. The last time he showed his face, he died in the destruction of a building. I watched him fall. I did not see him rise. No one found him. He was buried under tons of concrete and stone, the building he helped destroy, his tomb.

  The face before me—Bergin Vize’s face—did not smile. “Not quite. Not yet.”

  “I watched you die,” I said.

  “It’s not important,” he said.

  My mind cleared, a lifting of fog and confusion. I was floating in darkness with Bergin Vize. “I think it is. If you are dead, I’m hallucinating. If you’re alive, I need to kill you.”

  He did smile then. “After all this time, you still see only two alternatives? This has always been about us but never between you and me.”

  “Here we go again, Vize. Tell me how you want to save the world by destroying it,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not me. Maeve.”

  Maeve. Of course, Maeve. She wanted to destroy the world. Vize did, too. Everybody wanted to destroy the world to make it something else. “I think she killed me. I think I’m dead. TirNaNog is gone, and I’m left with looking at you in the dark for eternity,” I said.

  Vize stared, serene and patient. In the black, his body shimmering, essence forming the shape of him except his right side. Where his arm should have been was nothingness, the stain of the same darkness in my head manifesting itself on his arm. Something glittered in the darkness, though, down where his hand should have been. Something familiar. “Maeve has made a fatal error, Grey. She does not know I am here. She doesn’t know about this place. Even better, she does not believe it exists. There lies my final chance.”

  “All right. I’ll play, Vize. Where am I then?” I asked.

  His face shifted, the essence of him flickering and re-forming. “You know where we are. It’s a place and a thing and an idea. It is the same thing that’s been consuming us for the last three years. We are in the Gap. We are in the darkness that is nothing. We are here and not here.”

  I reached up and grabbed him by the neck, felt his pulse beneath my grip. “How about this? Does this feel here? Want to rethink that nothing and not-here crap?”

  He smiled, his face fading in and out of darkness. “Like to like, Grey. You are essence here, as am I. It matters not whether we are physical or ethereal. How many times have you tried to kill me, Grey? How many times have I tried to kill you?”

  I shoved him. He drifted a few feet away. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Vize lifted his dark hand, the hand that wore the gold ring that had ended our fight and caused us to lose our abilities. His hand and arm had been consumed with the dark mass like my mind had been. The ring burned in the darkness that was his hand, a mote that glowed bright with life in the black. “Do you remember?” he asked.

  “I remember enough. I lost my abilities because of that ring,” I said.

  “Focus, Grey. Remember,” he said.

  I had been trying to remember for three years what had happened the night I fought Vize. I had tracked him down to a nuclear power plant he was planning to blow up. We fought. He lost control of his ring, and we lost our abilities. “Stop saying that.”

  “Do you know what a soul stone is?” he asked.

  People made soul stones as safety measures. Split a piece of your body essence—or even a significant amount—bond it to a static object to create an essence ward, and, well, don’t die. Without the destruction of someone’s life force— what some called the soul—and its container—a body or a ward—a person could receive a fatal wound and live. All that needed to be done to save them was the uniting of the soul stone with the body. “Of course I do.”

  “We made a soul stone, Grey. We made a soul stone together. We saved the world,” he said.

  I frowned. “You and me? We made a soul stone? Not likely.”

  Vize held his hand out, a glitter of essence in the darkness. “The ring, Grey. We remade the ring with a piece of our souls. It was the only way to stop her from killing us because we are the only ones who can stop her from killing everyone.”

  I closed my eyes, but it didn’t matter. Vize registered in my sensing ability, his body signature adrift in the dark. If I was dead and the Christian hell existed, this would be it. I was going to pay for everything I had done by being taunted by Vize forever. That was what I got for destroying TirNaNog.

  “TirNaNog is not gone. It is here, and it is not here,” he said.

  I opened my eyes. “You can read minds. Great.”

  “Focus, Grey. You can do the same with me,” he said.

  I sighed, or at least thought I did, alone there in the dark with my nemesis gnawing at my mind. I didn’t want to focus. I didn’t want to think or remember. I wanted to be left alone. Drifting was a decent option for a change, especially if I was dead.

  “You won’t die. You can’t yet,” Vize said.

  “Well, you certainly won’t,” I said.

  “Listen to me” he said.

  “You’re not here,” I said.

  “She will condemn you as Donor condemned me. You will drift here with me on the edge of death in an ever-present now because our soul stone lies buried beneath the Guildhouse. We will drift here because we are tainted with the darkness. The two people Maeve cannot destroy, lost in the one place she cannot reach,” he said.

  “I knew this was hell,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Hell is a state of mind here, brother.”

  We drifted, not speaking. It might have been a moment or an eternity. We drifted.

  “She has the sword and the spear, Grey. She is reaching for the stone. Her hand burns down through your mind as we speak. She will hunt down the bowl. She will destroy whoever touches it,” he said.

  “Why would she destroy everything?” I asked.

  “Because she reaches beyond her reach. She thinks she can control what cannot be controlled. She thinks she can turn the Wheel of the World, but the Wheel of the World turns as It will,” he said.

  I didn’t answer him. I didn’t care anymore. I closed my eyes and let my body tumble through the darkness.

  “Meryl will die,” he said.

  I opened my eyes and grabbed him, my hands burying themselves not in clothes, but his body signature. “What did you say?”

  No satisfaction showed on his face, no mocking. “She will die, and you will never get to tell her you’re sorry.”

  I shoved him. He didn’t drift away. “She knows,” I said.

  “And I know you. I see it in your mind. You need to say good-bye. You need to face her. Call the bowl,” he said.

  “I can’t call it. It’s not like the spear,” I said.

  “But it is. Look inside yourself, see what the Wheel of the World has granted you to see. The bowl is the physical representation of bounty. It exists in the Wheel of the World beyond its physical form. We are beyond ourselves here. Call the bowl, Grey, and I will show you truth.”

  A suspicion had been growing within me the more he talked. Maeve had abilities I could only guess at. I wasn’t drifting in the darkness with Vize. Maeve wanted me to believe that. If Vize said anything true, it was that Maeve had everything but the bowl. Calling it—and I did understand now that I could—would be handing her the thing she sought most. She had failed, though, by giving me more information than she intended. If I could call the bowl like I could call the spear, then I could call anything the Wheel of the World allowed me.

  If I called the spear, Maeve would take it away from me. I could call something she hadn’t possessed, something she could not touch because it had never claimed her. In the depths of my mind, an essence signature registered. It had always been there. I had never thought to look because I didn’t understand I could. I summoned the essence to me, there in the dark, not the bowl and not the spear. In a flash of brilliant white, the sword appeared in my hand. I pointed it at Vize’s chest. “You told me too much, Maeve. Game over.”

  Unfazed, Vize held out his hand. “Give me the sword.”

  I lifted the point from his chest and smiled. “Thought I was stupid, Maeve? Didn’t think I would suspect a mind trick?”

  “The sword, Grey.”

  The blade shimmered white in the dark, dark shadows swirling around it without touching it. “Take it from me,” I said.

  “It will be easier if you give it to me of your own free will,” he said.

  “Of course, it would. You never held the sword, Maeve. You only touched it as the dagger. You can’t take it from me because you can’t take it.”

  “This is your choice, Grey,” he said.

  I presented the hilt, feeling pretty smug. “Take it, Maeve. Go on. I dare you.”

  Vize grasped the sword and pulled it from my hand, pain stabbing my mind as my connection to the sword snapped. I gaped, fear creeping up my spine. I was wrong. I had given her yet another weapon. “I don’t understand. You never held the sword.”

  “I am not Maeve,” Vize said. “I held the sword in TirNaNog. It called to me then, and I call to it now.”

  “It’s really you, Vize?” I asked.

  “I was and am. Now take my hand,” he said.

  On his left hand, the ring smoldered with golden essence. It washed across my face with unsettling familiarity. It was me. It burned with my own living essence. Curious, I took his hand. The ring began to slip off his finger.

  “I knew you wouldn’t call the bowl, Grey. You aren’t stupid. Your suspicious nature might save everything yet,” he said.

  The ring was sliding into my palm. “What do you mean?”

  “Tell Eorla thank you for everything. Tell her I died with hope.”

  Still puzzled, I looked from my hand to his face. Smiling, Vize drove the point of the sword into my forehead. I convulsed in a shower of pain and essence. The darkness constricted like an iris and a burning cold swept over me as

  41

  White.

  Whiteness filled my vision with nothing to break the relentlessness of it. Above me, the white simply was, as if the air itself was color. Or no color. As if nothing else existed except the white. I hung limp in the air, as if there were no air, no gravity. My head burned, like a cold fire in my mind, blazing against a blanket of night.

  Everything is white. I have been here before. This is where it started. Or ended. I don’t remember which. Everything around me is white. I stared into a nothingness of white. I am here again. Around me, I see shadows of light flickering in the depths of the white. They spin and whirl, roll and stop, taunting me with patterns that disintegrate as they take shape.

  Bursts of color flare in my vision, fireworks against the white, fading to darkness. More, then more, the darkness is closing on me, like the slow closing of my eyes. My mind, like my eyes, is closing, like my eyes are blinking. Like my mind is blinking.

  My mind blinks.

  The air begins to haze with white ambient essence, like a fog. Vize has taken out the security and is making his way toward the area where the spent fuel rods are stored. Emergency lights flash bright yellow as I follow him down a long corridor. People in hazmat suits stand frozen along the walls, like statues randomly arranged. They’re not dead, but suspended, caught in an elven binding spell.

  The corridor ends at a locked door, a sign flashes the evacuation order and warns of radiation. A keypad beside the door has lights that glow steady red. I don’t have a code. I backtrack to the nearest person in a hazmat suit. The binding spell is not as sophisticated as I assumed. It will degrade within an hour if Vize doesn’t kill us all. I hesitate, expecting a trap, but see none. I hold my breath and call up some essence, hoping it will not trigger something and kill us. I hit the binding spell with a counterspell. The man sways, startled to be aware and alert again.

  I steady him and point to the door. “I need to get through. I need you to open that door.”

  His glasses behind the mask are crooked on his face. He looks like a family man, maybe fifty years old, not someone who expected to find himself in the middle of a terrorist attack. He straightens his shoulders. “No.”

  I wish his family could see him at that moment. The world is crashing down around him, he’s got powerful fey throwing spells around, and he says “no” to me. The defiant glint in his eye is admirable but not convenient. “Look, I’m one of the good guys. Honest. I need to get in there and stop the guy who’s doing this.”

  “You don’t have a suit,” he said.

  “I’m a druid. I have a body shield that should work the same way,” I said. I’m not sure how long my body shield will work on the other side of the door. It doesn’t matter. Vize matters. Killing him matters more.

  He shakes his head, the large hood moving from side to side. “I’m not worried about you. I’m worried that a guy with no suit is on a suicide mission.”

  I grin. I like this guy. I wish we were meeting under different circumstances, and I want to hit him for slowing me down. But I like him. “Sir, I can destroy that door with my abilities. If I wanted to hurt anyone but myself, we wouldn’t be talking. You would be waking up to find a gaping hole in the wall. I’m trying to reduce risk, but if I have to sacrifice myself and everyone in this hall to try and stop Vize, I will. Please open the door.”

  I can’t see his face as he looks down the hall at the other people bound in the spell. “Can you wake them up?”

  I raise my arm and shoot a stream of esse
nce down the center of the hall, tuning its resonance so that it disrupts the binding spells. One by one, people shift and sway on their feet. A few fall. “Satisfied?”

  He walks to the door and punches in an access code. The system cycles. “You’re gonna die in the there, you know that, right?”

  I pat him on the shoulder. “Not if I can help it. Make sure the door closes behind me and get everyone out.”

  The door opens, and I don’t wait for a response from the guy. I’m in the containment area. The air is thick with essence, a cloud I can’t see through. An elven signature runs through, so it’s Vize, but there’s also a high-level resonance I’ve never seen. Vize is tapping into the reactor at a pure essence level. That’s bad.

  Uncertain in the fog, my body shield shudders around me like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s a response to the radiation, a bombardment of neutrinos or some such I had no clear conception of. The air is humid, and beneath the sound of the emergency sirens and the hum of machinery, I hear a low rumble, like water boiling. My sensing ability registers multiple essence signatures and a fierce white light in front of me. It’s the spent–fuel rod pool.

  I reach a metal railing and watch rising essence warp and twist around it. It’s water, a fine mist rising in the air. The surface of the containment is low—too low according to warning signs painted on the inner surface of the pool. I jog along the edge, sifting through the signatures for Vize. My senses are all screwed up, and I slam into a wall of solid air. Beyond it, powerful essence shimmers evergreen. It moves closer, resolving into the shape of a man. Vize appears in the mist.

  “We need to talk,” he says.

  “You can do all your talking in a jail cell,” I say.

  He shifts his attention to the pool. “We don’t have much time. You need to speak to Nigel Martin. Maeve is going to try to kill us. We have to stop her.”

  Ignoring him, I test the barrier with essence-infused hands, searching for weak points. There are always weak spots, no matter how good you are. “Looks like you’re the one that’s going to kill us if you expose those fuel rods,” I say.