Come to think of it, Jon thought, Allie had been a little like that, too.
The memory brought another sharp pain to Jon’s chest, even as it forced another smile, an involuntary one that time, one that nearly hurt his face. He felt similar things going on with Revik, too, a kind of see-saw of emotions around remembering Allie as she was and getting hit with the lack of her within the image in front of him. Jon felt anger on the other man more than anything else, but also grief...and frustration...and disbelief...as he looked at the bad copy of his wife. Still, something in the fact that he could just hit her like that, and in the face, told Jon that Revik was doing this for himself, too.
He was showing himself that it wasn’t her, and from the look on his face, he catalogued the details of it not being her, even now, as he watched the apparition’s face.
Jon realized something else, too––even as it struck him that the same thing must have occurred to Revik already. This wasn’t just some prerecorded program created by Cass and Shadow and their minions. It wasn’t even solely an AI program, set to look and sound as close to Allie as possible, using Cass’s memories and whatever else.
Cass was operating the damned thing.
Cass was behind this thing even now, somehow.
“I agree, brother,” Wreg muttered from his other side.
Revik gave him a bare glance, and that time, Jon saw the understanding in his clear irises as well. Something about seeing that knowledge in Revik’s face made Jon relax a little, at least in terms of the Elaerian’s mental state...but the thing about Cass roiled in his head on a different track, somewhere between disbelief and disgust.
Cass was doing this.
She was directly behind this thing somehow, controlling it, speaking through it. Cass’s light was somehow mixed up in and projecting this fake version of Allie’s, which meant she’d gone out of her way to feel like Allie, too.
As soon as he thought it, Jon knew he was right.
The realization made him sick.
Like, really sick.
Feeling his jaw harden, Jon watched Revik’s face, wondering how he was really doing with this, regardless of what he knew. Jon couldn’t help wondering whether Revik was starting to lose his grip on the situation again, out of anger as much as grief at this point. The Elaerian was breathing harder, and Jon could tell by looking at him that he wasn’t out of breath, not from exertion anyway.
Revik made that motion with his fingers again, to the fake Allie.
“Come on, bitch,” he said.
The hatred in his words, particularly the last one, made Jon flinch.
Revik’s tone turned cajoling, mocking, without losing that harder edge.
“You want to be Allie, Cass?” Revik said softly. “...Is that what you want? Go ahead. Prove to me you can be my wife. Prove to all of us that you can be all of the things that she was...that you can have her heart and light and mind. Then you can tell us all how you deserve it more than she does. You can tell me how you’re really the better person...”
There was a silence.
In it, the apparition only stared at him, that predatory look back in its jade-green eyes.
Then, with a complete lack of fanfare...
It vanished.
21
THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING
REVIK BLINKED AS the lights rose.
His hand fell to the butt of his gun. His sight flared out, filling the cavernous room he found himself in, even as he kept it behind the shield Jon held along with Wreg, Jorag, Neela, Chinja...and whoever might still be helping them from the hotel, if anyone.
The apparition of Allie had disappeared.
He felt it go. It hurt, somewhere in his heart, even though he knew it wasn’t her.
The irrationality of his own reaction to seeing her disappear hurt him, too. He’d hit it in the face, whatever that thing was. It brought a sick feeling to his gut when he thought about that, but he couldn’t hold onto those feelings, either, not now. He needed to focus, to at least pretend his mind still worked in the same basic directions as before.
He could feel the clock ticking over him again.
Why hadn’t they tried to kill him yet?
He’d practically dared that Cass-Allie thing to kill him in the corridor just now.
When he first found himself in that stone hallway under the elevators, he’d thought that was it, that they’d played their last hand, by letting themselves into this fucked up hall of mirrors and losing their line out to Balidor and the others. The fact that Revik could no longer hear or see anyone from the hotel through that construct told him pretty much everything he needed to know.
He’d meant it when he told Balidor that they’d be dead if they couldn’t crack that lower-level construct.
As far as Revik could tell, they hadn’t cracked it.
In fact, he couldn’t help but feel like a mouse trapped in a maze, just waiting to be slaughtered, or perhaps experimented on by lazy and sociopathic scientists. The dying part might have bothered him if it wasn’t inevitable anyway, but even with the others, death struck him as more or less beside the point. They’d done nothing but go along with the trail set for them by Shadow and Cass and whoever else, so presumably, Shadow’s people wanted something from at least one of those in their party, if not all of them.
Revik had to guess likely him, meaning Revik himself.
Possibly Jon, too...or Wreg.
Maygar might be one of the targets of whatever this was, too.
The specifics almost didn’t matter...not anymore.
Well, other than in forcing Revik to decide at some point, whether or not to try and order the rest of them to leave, try and get out of this maze and leave him here to hunt for Menlim, Cass, Terian and the child on his own.
It felt too early to think about that, though.
He needed a better idea of what Shadow and Cassandra had in mind, and he didn’t have that yet, either. He knew his inability to wrap his head around why they would have brought him here was a delusional kind of avoidance too, and one he’d been actively indulging for hours now, pretty much since he’d listed off the names of those seers he wanted along with him on this venture. He’d been signing their death warrants. Some part of him knew that, but he hadn’t really admitted it to himself fully until now.
Whatever Menlim wanted––his blood, his son, his friends, his light––Revik couldn’t help but think they could have gotten it by now. Which meant that either they couldn’t take those things for some reason, or they wanted something else. Something Revik hadn’t yet discerned from the shifting strands of the construct around him.
He wondered if Allie would ever forgive him for putting Jon on that list.
He couldn’t think about that now, either, though.
Revik hadn’t voiced any of those specific thoughts aloud to the others, but he knew Wreg, at least, had to be thinking along roughly similar lines. Wreg, especially, would be fully aware of how dim their chances got, once they found themselves in this maze of bullshit without a compass, and no way to communicate with their allies outside. Moreover, Wreg knew Menlim. He knew what kind of mind they were dealing with, even if he didn’t know Cass.
Revik thought all of this, watching the lights in that larger auditorium grow brighter.
Of course, he had no idea if he’d been in this larger room all along, or if, conversely, they still stood in that eight-foot-wide corridor with the fake stone walls...or, more likely still, in a differently-shaped room entirely.
Revik didn’t bother to try and discern the truth.
He knew the vast majority of what he saw now had to be pure illusion, too. He gazed up at the high rock walls, still done up in that medieval castle-like decor. His eyes shifted across the oak beam ceilings and then down again, to the larger, branch-like torches standing in rows of iron brackets above long and old-looking wooden tables.
The whole ambiance of the massive hall, despite the height of the ceiling and the columns o
f cut stone that dotted the larger, more open space, evoked feelings and associations in Revik’s mind markedly similar to that hunting lodge-slash-château in Argentina. Detailed, embroidered tapestries hung from the walls, most of them depicting images from the caves in the Pamir, only in significantly bloodier and darker translations. The images held none of the fragments of light and presence that Revik remembered from the ancestral caves of the original Sark settlers, either, but instead seemed to flicker like shadows, holding a disorienting and more violent presence, like the construct itself. Those paintings mixed with the strange, altar-like stage in front, and the blood red rug before the fireplace, giving the room the quality of a nightmare.
Menlim had always liked the medieval aesthetics.
When Revik had been a boy, he bought into that vision of castles as something opulent and impressive, too. Maybe he’d been too close to his uncle’s mind back then, or maybe he thought of it as something that could protect him from the outside world, even as it evoked the image of a king, someone who didn’t have to fear anyone.
Now all Revik could see was the blood soaked into the stone.
Blood...and ego.
Those two thing often seemed to be paired, in his experience.
Revik stood perfectly still as he looked around, drinking in the dimensions of the room, trying only cautiously to see behind the images to the physicality beyond. Being Elaerian, he could catch glimpses of the physical structure itself, but he could already feel that the construct had been built to mess with his own sense of physical dimension and geography, too. Most of the fragments he caught had a distorted feel to them, and didn’t match up with other element of the room that swirled around his light. The stone columns would feel real, but in the wrong place, out of synch with the wall he could feel cutting the room in half, and a lower ceiling made of organic metal instead of stone.
Revik could tell that the pieces he felt were more or less ‘real’ but the dimensions and distances were off, which rendered most of those glimpses as only marginally helpful, at least when it came to mapping out a workable schematic.
Even so, he shared what he saw with his own people, watching them frown and look at the same walls in confusion as they followed his Elaerian glimpses into the physical structure of the walls, floors and ceilings.
Revik was still looking around when a half-circle of forms appeared in the middle of the room, facing them directly.
Revik blinked, staring back at them.
They’d appeared so silently and immediately that he doubted his senses...then doubted whether he’d somehow missed seeing them before. But no, they were new. They’d only just arrived, despite the utter lack of change in the room’s vibration.
The shape of that half-moon they formed struck him as deliberately menacing. Something about it struck him as trial-like in nature...or maybe more like a firing squad.
He supposed that had to be deliberate, too.
He felt his own people react, sparks of fear coming off them as they took in the reality of the group of newcomers standing in front of them. Neela stepped back, raising her rifle. Jon held his gun in his good hand, too, as did Wreg. Revik didn’t take his eyes off the people facing them, but he could feel Jorag on his other side raise his gun and unlock the harness on his rifle. He felt Chinja swivel her rifle down to aim forward, too, as did Jax.
Only when Revik had finished taking stock of his own people did he focus specifically on the faces of those in front of them.
He knew the reason he’d avoided doing that, too, even before he met the gaze of the yellow-eyed man in the center.
He could feel her here, somewhere.
Not his daughter...Allie.
He knew it wasn’t real, but the whisper of her presence hit him harder somehow...even harder than it had in that walking and talking ghost they’d already thrown at him. He knew the man in front of him had to be responsible. He knew it wasn’t real, but it took him a few more seconds to recover, to control his heart rate, his breathing, his light.
He could feel her, and gods, it hurt.
He forced his eyes to focus on Menlim, instead.
“Hello, nephew,” the ancient seer said.
Revik didn’t bother to answer.
He didn’t believe the seer to be physically ‘there’ in any real sense, any more than he believed in the walk-in stone fireplace at one end of the room, or the wine glasses that stood like small sentinels filled with blood along the length of the nearest wooden table. He knew Menlim and the other bodies who faced him were likely just fabrications of the construct imbued with presence, just like that not-Allie thing had been.
Just like everything in here.
Even so, he hadn’t faced his uncle in over one hundred years.
Revik could feel reactions in his light and his body regardless of what he knew. They worsened the longer he looked at the image of the aged seer. With Allie’s light still coiling and sparking in his in the background, the emotions that rose as he looked at Menlim only intensified, grew harder to catalogue, much less to control in any real way.
Menlim stared back at him, his face as expressionless and emaciated as Revik remembered it from when he was a child.
The face was aged––not quite to the extent of a Tarsi or Vash, but definitely on the high end of middle age, at least a hundred years older than Balidor, if not a hundred and fifty or two hundred, possibly even more––but, that face had not aged more from when Revik had last seen it, at least, not as far as he could tell. Menlim’s appearance didn’t seem to have changed at all in those intervening years, not in the color of his hair or skin, not in his weight or the appearance of those yellow eyes, or the set of his sculpted mouth.
Once he found his eyes resting there, Revik couldn’t help but look at the man’s form in detail, almost as if reminding himself of its basic shape, the feel of the male seer behind it. He tried to sort fact from fantasy, from the nightmares of his childhood, which had likely blown the seer into almost mythic portions in the more traumatized areas of his mind.
He found it almost impossible to do that, too.
He started with clothes, with the presentation of the man, which also hadn’t changed significantly from what Revik remembered. Menlim wore dark, wood-colored pants that looked almost to be suede. He’d tucked a light-colored, collared shirt behind a plain, black leather belt, and a dark-green jacket fell to about calf-length down his sides and back, also of some soft leather, possibly calfskin. Menlim wore his iron-gray hair exactly the way Revik remembered from Bavaria, too, in a plain metal clip at the base of his neck, and pulled severely out of his skull-like face. The goatee was new, but it fit what Revik remembered of the man’s personal appearance, as well. It also fit with how Menlim liked to present himself, almost as a retired professor type, outdoorsy but highly educated and well-read.
Revik shifted his weight between his feet, feeling irrationally younger as he stared at that face. Clenching his jaw didn’t help. Remembering Allie...remembering his daughter, or Cass, or the seers standing protectively around him...none of that really helped him either.
His heart pounded in his chest, hard enough he found himself thinking the others must hear it––that Menlim must hear it, too.
Maybe to distract himself, or maybe to keep from changing expression, Revik looked at the others in that half-circle facing them, scanning past faces without fully letting himself see them. He paused on Terian’s familiar features for less than a breath, then spent even less time on Cass’s face, noting only the lack of the Nazi-like scar before he moved on to the next. He barely looked at Salinse at all...or the face of the old woman he scarcely remembered from some feed broadcast or another about the White House under Wellington.
The next four faces Revik didn’t know at all.
The last face Revik’s eyes settled on made him start faintly in surprise.
The familiarity jarred him, but more because of its seeming incongruence here, in this underground dungeon, not so m
uch due to any negative associations or emotions with the actual person. Seeing him here struck Revik as one of the more unreal aspects of this bizarre meeting, given his last run-in with the man in London.
Eddard.
Revik blinked, but the face didn’t change.
Revik really looked at him then, unlike the others, studying the face of his ex-manservant, who he’d always believed to be human. Revik looked him over from head to foot––from the wire-frame glasses and the thinning, nondescript, brown hair, down the expensive-looking, tailored blue suit above black, Italian loafers.
Raven told him once, that Eddard was a part of this.
Revik hadn’t really believed her.
Hell, he’d barely given the idea much thought at all.
Of course, Raven told Revik about Eddard in the same conversation that she told Revik Maygar was his biological son, so the detail got lost somewhat, given her more dramatic confessions. Truthfully, Revik had forgotten all about it. He’d barely acknowledged it at the time, other than to mention it in passing to Balidor, along with a physical description so the Adhipan leader could verify Raven’s story. He’d never even thought to ask Balidor about it after. It had been purely a standard debriefing kind of thing, like describing a car driven by one of Shadow’s minions...or a courier a target had once used.
The whole idea of Eddard being in Shadow’s inner circle still struck Revik as ludicrous on a certain level.
He remembered Eddard...well, in fact, given how much time he’d spent with him, and how much access the human had to some of the more intimate details of Revik’s life, and for over a decade. Revik had been forced to accept the ‘gift’ of Eddard from his British employers, knowing full well he was there to spy on him.
Allie's War Season Four Page 45
