As she headed off toward it, I walked over to where the others stood and sat in the shade provided by Bronislaw's Apache. Jytte and Rajani sat with Mickey, speaking to him in hushed tones, while Sinclair stood behind them and rested a hand gently on Rajani's shoulder. Bat sat off a bit, speaking in Polish with the dwarf, leaving Crowley, Hal and Nero Loring in a tight knot toward the middle of the aircraft's shadow.
I forced myself to concentrate on the joyful smiles they gave me instead of the piquant misery of those automatons dying by degrees within the crushed city and on the sand outside it. Though trained as an assassin, I had no love for the ultimate benefactor of my work and did not want to be infected by it. I turned my back on them and returned the smiles of my friends with a genuine warmth.
"I'm very glad Fiddleback did not kill you before he came after me." I smiled at Mickey. "Thank you for saving my life."
He nodded somewhat mechanically. "I don't like playing rough."
"I know, but if you had not, many more people would have been hurt." I sensed distress from Rajani, and I frowned. "It's not your fault, Rajani."
"It is, Coyote. When that thing came through, Mickey immediately oriented on it."
I smiled as my recollection of the scorpion-man brought with it identification of the face on the tail and the eyes on the body. "Of course, that was a combination of Arrigo El-Leichter and Colonel Nagashita. Mickey had been told to kill the both of them. He had imprinted on them."
"Yes, but just after I sensed the danger and warned you, I plucked a new template, the one that fit the new thing they had become, from Fiddleback's brain." She caressed Mickey's head. "I swapped it out for the templates he had imprinted on. I triggered him and now..." She shrugged helplessly.
"He will understand, Rajani, and someday, in the future, he will thank you." I nodded to both her and Mickey, hoping that my prediction would, in fact, come true.
"If there is a future," Sinclair grunted.
"There will be: Fiddleback is dead." I undid the buckles holding my combat harness on and began to shrug out of it. "I lured him to the dimension where I regenerated from my wounds. The vultures went after him there."
Sinclair frowned. "He left here in an awful hurry. Why didn't he just haul himself out of there."
I unfastened the web belt and tossed it on the ground, not caring any more if sand got into the holstered Krait's action. "A Dark Lord in a dimension with a similar aspect can block entry or exit, exactly as Pygmalion did here." Plucking the other Krait from its place at the small of my back, I lofted it over to where it dropped on top of its mate. "I had help."
Crowley nodded slowly at my words, then looked over at where Natch searched among the tower's fragments for something, then picked up a fist-sized diamond. "And she was it? Which one?"
I raised an eyebrow. "I would have thought it obvious to you, Damon. The Empress of Diamonds."
"Of course." He sketched a brief salute, then accepted the Wildey Wolf and shoulder holster from me. "How long have you known about her?"
I knew he really meant to ask why I had not told him about her, but I answered the question he had asked. "She and my predecessor had an alliance. That's how he, a man as blind in these proto-dimensions as Nero here, was able to know of and anticipate Fiddleback's foray into Phoenix. Her aspect is that of a salvager, so Coyote assumed she was less of a threat than Fiddleback."
The occultist's shadowed head nodded. "And now that Fiddleback is gone, she has much to salvage."
"Correct, Crowley." The Empress returned to my side with her prize. "I have much to salvage, much to do, but I am not ungrateful to you — all of you — for the part you played in my victory. In the new cosmology I create around myself, you will all be praised for your efforts on my behalf."
Hal frowned. "What's she talking about?"
I grinned wryly. "She is rather proud of her efforts, and well she should be because she played so many sides against the middle that the chances of her success were, at best, minimal. As Fiddleback said, 'Well played.'"
The Empress painted a falsely modest grin on Natch's face. "You are too kind, Coyote."
"Am I? Using Natch as an agent to make contact with and keep tabs on Coyote was brilliant. Through her you were able to direct Coyote toward frustrating the efforts of your rivals to dabble in Earthly things. You even established the Reapers as your power base, but never let them get powerful enough to attract the attention of your rival Dark Lords. If one of them got ambitious, you let Coyote know about his operation and these good people neatly trimmed your organization back for you."
I folded my arms across my chest. "Yes, now it all begins to come together for me. Mr. Leich was the Reaper who picked me up from the ambulance, which would have meant he was a creature in your direct service. I wondered what his connection was with Nery s Loring, and now I know you were it. The first night I saw her, she wore a large diamond ring. You had managed to turn her, which is how you learned enough of Fiddleback's plan to alert Coyote."
"Bravo, Coyote, you are very good." She gently rubbed Natch's right hand across the surface of the diamond and in its wake left a finished, faceted gemstone. "Your predecessor chose well."
"But not well enough, you're thinking, I bet." I looked beyond her back at the scintillating mound of diamonds. "Let me think. Ah, because Pygmalion did not have a clue about how to create a dimensional gate — neither did Fiddleback or he would have long since made the dead one he had work again — you talked him into an alliance.
You salvaged part of a dimensional gate and worked it into a prototype model from which he built this tower. He accepted your alliance as one that would guarantee domination over the Earth and quite probably co-dominion over the dimensions. He even went so far to adorn the people he worked over with diamonds in your honor."
"Pygmalion's earlier experience with alien life forms made him especially susceptible to my blandishments, especially when he was first on the run from Fiddleback." The Empress shrugged effortlessly. "He proved very willing to help when I explained that I could not build beautiful things like he could."
Crowley shook his head. "He never realized that a salvager can only salvage that which has been created and destroyed."
"Which," I took over from him, "is why you needed not only a builder, but also someone capable of destroying Pygmalion and his toy. And that means, of course, your victory involves that pile of diamond dust."
The Empress of Diamonds nodded as she finished her reshaping of the diamond and held it up in the fingers of Natch's left hand. "Very, very good. I might actually have underestimated you. You saw it — you all saw it — the gold and silver pattern in the stones when the tower was energized. The easiest way for you to understand what happened is this: That pattern, and what the energy did to fix it in the gems, is roughly equivalent to a computer program and its being burned into a silicon-based chip. In this case, the program has been holographically locked into the diamonds in that mound and, when one of those gems is set into a piece of jewelry, I will have a direct link into the people wearing it."
She slowly rotated the gem, letting the sunlight spark and flash from the facets. "I got the idea from the faint feed I occasionally got from the Hope Diamond. It is an exquisite stone, and the incredible pain associated with it is sweeter than any wine you can imagine. It occurred to me that humans everywhere revere and covet these diamonds. They keep them with them during times of happiness, and surrender them most reluctantly."
The Empress laughed aloud, then looked at Hal Garrett. "Think of it, Hal, think of the diamond you gave your wife when you asked her to marry you. Think of the worry she poured into it when you were injured in games. Think of the loneliness for which it became a symbol when you were away on road trips. Think of how it became a focus for pain and doubt and even her death agony when she knew that because of her marriage to you, she would die."
Hal held himself back, but his pain became a volcano in the emotional landscape of the dimension. I st
epped between her and him. "You've made your point."
"I have, but you still do not grasp the depth of what this truly means. Imagine, just for a second, the volume of angst I will get just from decaying marriages. All the guilt and shame of cheating spouses will become mine. I will possess the heartache of the betrayed, and the grief of those who mourn a spouse's death."
She spun away from me, dancing like a little girl in love for the first time. "And if the gem is stolen, so much the better. A thief s fear, as the Hope Diamond will attest, is a nourishing nectar. If the gem is recovered and returned to the owner, so much the better. The paranoia and insecurity of someone who has lost keepsakes and gets them back surpasses even greed in its delicious intensity."
The Empress of Diamonds stopped and waved an idle hand toward the mountain of diamonds to her right. "Please, partake of them. Be my first worshippers. I will exalt you all. You will not want for pleasures and slaves. You will be first among the multitudes and my vanguard when jealous Dark Lords foolishly try to oppose me."
Bat stood up, his fists balled. "Why is it every Dark Lord thinks we would want to toady up to him or her?"
I snapped my fingers, and the Empress looked away from Bat and toward me. "If we refuse?"
"Then the honors I plan for you will have to be awarded posthumously because, collectively, you are a threat. In alliance with Fiddleback, you destroyed Pygmalion." She shined the diamond against the breast of her fatigues like an apple. "You helped me destroy Fiddleback and could, were I to let you live, link up with Baron Someday, Midas Longclaws or even Nimrod Nyet and cause me all manner of difficulty."
"That's it!" Bat started stalking across the sand at her with his fists raised and ready. "I promise this won't hurt."
"Bat, no!" I barked at him. it came as a warning, not a plea, and he knew I was not warning him about any danger she might pose. "She's mine."
The Empress shook her head when she looked at me. "Fiddleback trained you well. You are good, very good, at what you do, but, in this case, you are not good enough."
"I wasn't before, but I am now." I reached out and sucked in the misery of Pygmalion's dying warriors like a sponge soaking up water. I took their fear of death and blended it with their hopelessness and mewing appeals for a quick surcease of their pain. I savored the mixture and drank it in. It exploded like 200-proof alcohol in my stomach and spread a supernova warmth throughout my body.
I saw the expression on Natch's face shift as the Empress realized what I had done. "A bold move, Coyote. A desperate gamble, but one I respect This is a draw — I will take my booty and leave now"
I sensed her desire to flee and felt her starting to shift, but I shook my head. I did not want her to leave, so I imposed my will on the dimension. I knew a synthesizer had to be close enough to a builder to let me armor this dimension, so I imagined it closing up in an armored ball, trapping her inside.
A new sun, a black sun, appeared in the sky eclipsing the original sun. Darkness leaked from the new sun in a jet corona and flooded the sky vault with blackness like ink spreading through water. The temperature dropped 60 degrees in a heartbeat, but my internal fire kept me more than warm. A cold wind sprang up at my back and frost appeared on the diamond Natch held.
"You cannot!" she protested.
"I have." I stared at Natch's body, and in an instant I was beyond her being. My vision took me on in through her eyes and along her optic nerve. When I reached her brain, I pushed on farther still, narrowing my focus and running deeper than just the cellular level. I entered her cells and compressed myself until mitochondria passed through the protoplasm like dirigibles, and then farther until her DMA went from a tangled skein to a system of all the world's roads all woven together.
I duplicated myself a million billion times and spread through her like an infection. I moved through her faster than a shower of neutrinos and did even less damage than they might, always hunting. I was doing what Fiddleback had always demanded of me, searching out my elusive quarry in the most unexpected of places.
I found her, the Empress, huddled deep in cells scattered throughout Natch's body. I concentrated and gathered my forces to surround the Empress' fragments, then I drove them before me. I could taste her fear as well, but I did not drink it in. I wanted nothing to taint me or distract me from my duty at hand.
The Empress, like Fiddleback, felt more comfortable with indirect manipulation than direct confrontation. While she might have had the power to destroy me, she fled from me, hoping to elude me through subterfuge, not realizing that she left a trail I could follow no matter how she tried to disguise it. She stank of death and, in that, I knew I had to pursue her because she was truly mine.
In her last-ditch attempt to escape me, she dove into the diamond Natch held. I shot past her and returned to my own body, reading her intention to form a warrior from diamonds akin to the obsidian one Pygmalion had created. Her plan formulated, she hesitated for just a second as she considered how she would salvage such a creature from her diamond mountain, and in that second I had her.
I snatched the diamond from Natch's hand and held it up, locking my left hand around it tightly. I glanced at the gem to see if she took on any image in there, but I saw nothing. Without regret or a second thought, I snapped my fist closed and consigned her to oblivion.
Opening my fist, I let the diamond gravel spill to the ground. I searched it for any sign of her, but all I felt was her death. I pulled that into me and let it warm me for a moment. I had succeeded. I had destroyed her. I had become a Dark Lord, accepting a Dark Lord's power, but I had avoided its corruption. I had killed the Empress of Diamonds, and I knew I had ended the most grave threat to Earth that had ever existed.
I could hear my friends cheering around me, but something drew my attention back to Natch. Once again, I injected myself into her and shrank down until the double-helix of her DNA hung above me like the Milky Way in a clear, dark sky. I marveled at its stunning simplicity and how, with only four base pairs strung together in long chains, it was a blueprint for anything and everything Natch had been or would ever become.
I moved my consciousness along, swirling my way along the chromosome. Molecules of adenine linked with thymine and guanine with cytosine, unending, eternal, yet in patterns that actually meant something. I realized as I sailed along, I was racing down the length of Chromosome 11, and I knew that it contained genes so vital for life function that without them, no creature could survive. At that point, I found myself slowing, almost unconsciously, and extending above and below me I saw the 1720 base pairs that made up the gene that produced beta-globulin — one of the four proteins that makes up hemoglobin and allows red blood cells to carry oxygen from the lungs to the body's cells.
As I studied it, I knew how important it was. I knew that adjustments to it, breaks in its code, if spread throughout the body, would prove fatal. I realized that, if I reached in and changed a thymine-adenine pair for the cytosine-guanine pair right there, I would have this cell halfway toward producing hemoglobin-M. And if I did it in the same spot on Natch's other copy of Chromosome 11, the cell would produce that defective form of beta-globulin, as would all its descendants.
And if I did it in all the cells of her body, instantly she would suffer from black mouth and she would die. Or if I only did it in her ova, then did the same to Bat or any other suitor she took, the child would be born with black mouth and would die. She would mourn the child and try to create another to take its place, and death would claim it as well.
I realized that I wanted to make that substitution.
I realized much more.
Thus it begins, Fiddleback had told me as he died. He had not regretted his passing and had met it with a smug satisfaction that chilled me. He had long vowed that he would not repeat his mistake with Pygmalion in me, and he had blocked me from ever being able to accept the powers of a Dark Lord unless he approved. At the end, with that statement, he had.
I knew then why he had a
cquiesced and why I had been able to prevent the Empress of Diamonds from fleeing this proto-dimension. I was not a synthesizer nor builder. The proto-dimension had lost the Dark Lord that had defined it and shaped it. He had died here, killing the proto-dimension and giving it the same aspect that Fiddleback had given me.
Death.
Fiddleback had decided never to be tricked and betrayed again. He had fashioned me as an assassin to actively pursue his enemies, but he had also fused into me something more sinister. He gave me an aspect that hungered for the death of others. I drew my strength from it; I was drawn to it and to causing it. Because death was inescapable and came to all things, there was nothing in reality that did not make me stronger.
Once I accepted my powers and started to draw my sustenance from death, my course of action was preordained. It would be my place to cause death and luxuriate in it. I would destroy Fiddleback's enemies because their deaths would be strong and make me much more powerful. One after another, I would visit dimensions and leave them drained husks, devoid of life.
I would continue to do that until there was nothing left for me to kill, then I would cannibalize myself. Fiddleback, my creator and master, would have his final triumph — even over me, the person who had caused his death.
Fiddleback Trilogy 3 - Evil Triumphant Page 29
