“Wait, Mentalist, before you transfer yourself to safety!” the Senior urged. “We have a chance to capture him here.”
“We only have a chance if we are alive! This place is rife with Chaos. He is too close!”
“And so he has extended himself too far,” replied the Senior. “He cannot summon much of his power here. Let him meet our full Gyre.”
“We are only four! We are too few!” cried the Mentalist. “The others aren’t coming!”
As if to prove him wrong, two figures appeared above the ruins, the Lorewarden and the Spiritist. They began to fall then slowed and glided aside as they took command of the forces acting upon them, but even that minor use of essence disturbed the wildfire on the ground, and it rose in restless ridges, preparing to strike at the source of magic.
“Transference! Use the Transference, you idiots!” shouted the Cosmologer. The wildfire arced upward from many different points, hungry tendrils searching for prey. The Lorewarden and the Spiritist vanished. Two bright flashes of silver marked where they had been. The two wizards reappeared on the ground between the others.
Something tightened through the brooding sky. The billowing smoke was wrenched upright into a single plume which shot up to the concaved base of the cloud, sucked into a dark and hungry maw. Zarost guessed what Ametheus would do—a great strike of wildfire through the concealing column of smoke would explode within the waiting reservoir of fatal tainted ash in their centre and would cause a wave of Chaos which could overwhelm the six wizards. However if he was close enough to trigger Chaos in that way, he was close enough for the Gyre to reach him with their own spells. He was there and, for the first time in years, the Gyre could face him directly.
A subtle charge rushed under Zarost’s feet, away from the ruins. It puzzled him—the surge usually led toward the trigger point. Maybe Ametheus wasn’t going to use the ruins after all, maybe ...
“Outward!” he shouted. “Face outward! We are within it. Chaos comes upon us!”
The air was perfectly still. The clouds sank and drew the dark night down upon the world. Then lightning broke in painful brilliance; fractured lines fell everywhere. Zarost linked his attention with the others to form the union of the Gyre. They augmented the Cosmologer’s skills to redirect the strikes and the air was shattered around them upon their protective sphere. Roll after roll of thunder hammered at their bones. Where the lightning found purchase, it lived, connecting earth and sky without fading. Some of the deflected strikes were so close Zarost could smell the meaty cinnamon scent of wildfire in the shivering air.
Within the pooled attention of the Gyre, they shared a moment of doubt. They should escape to the crossing point of infinity, while there was still a chance, but the defiance which held them there was stronger—they could weather the storm, they would turn the Sorcerer’s game upon himself.
They would end him.
The ground lurched. The strands of lightning forked horizontally all at once, raking the air with a thousand claws. Zarost regained his balance and strove with the others to deny the advance of the wildfire. Ametheus would not be able to sustain the multiple flows. Chaos never endured. Change was a rapid force, it corrupted what it touched, but the power itself always faded—only Order lasted. The Gyre would have a chance to retaliate, if they could just hold on for long enough.
The whirling lattice of lightning ignited in one horrendous incandescent flare. A great cracking sound assaulted them, riding the crest of a shockwave that blew them toward the ruins at their back. They almost lost the Spiritist in that moment. She tumbled to the edge of the contaminated ash before the others grounded her and parted the elemental forces to allow her a moment to rejoin the collective. Then they stood firm. The flow of Chaos was poorly directed and the rushing force passed them by.
It became darker and darker, until the only light came from the failing threads of charge which lingered around the perimeter of the Gyre’s defended area, and from the wastes behind them that gave off a sickly smoky glow. Zarost tried to sense where the Sorcerer was hiding. His presence would be revealed for an instant as the assault waned. Zarost spread his awareness, outward across the dark sands. He met a strange wall beyond which his mind could not go. It was impossible—he should be able to extend his consciousness through everything in the universe, all the way to infinity. He tried again, searching upward then behind, hoping to find a gap.
The limit was complete. A skin had formed around them; impenetrable, absolute. Where the lightning had raged it had burnt emptiness. It was as if something was missing from reality, as if an invisible trench had been cut across it. Like a gap of nothingness, Zarost realised, that paradox they had used against the Writhe. The Gyre had used the dimensional anomaly in desperation to end the previous spell the Sorcerer had unleashed upon Oldenworld. Now he was using it against them, but in a way that defied belief. A sphere of nothing, with their little world contained within.
As Zarost knew, so they all knew. The other members of the Gyre groaned.
They really were trapped. By breaking a piece of reality out of the pattern, Ametheus had ensured that there was no escape. Even with all the cleverness beneath his hat, Zarost could not understand what had happened. The Sorcerer had enclosed them in a new dimension, a converse less than a quarter-league wide.
The Mentalist was the first to panic and let go of the Gyre, to try to transfer out of their prison. He went nowhere; he didn’t even begin to fade. Without his awareness touching infinity, his body would not dissolve. As he knew, so they all knew. The Cosmologer had discovered the reason for the darkness. It was as if the sun had ceased to be part of their reality. In the tiny world they were in, there was no sun: only the fire, the sand and the ruins of their tradition. The Gyre turned to Zarost. He was the Riddler, best suited to solve such a quandary. As the Gyre members directed their intent to Zarost, his concentration sharpened, and his mind staggered with the combined intelligence.
Ametheus had unleashed a spell of unprecedented magnitude. He had contained his Chaos, which in itself was strange. The vital seeds of wildfire were locked in this small place. Whatever happened in this sealed world would remain here. Zarost had never seen a spell cast by the Sorcerer which sealed Chaos off—that was typical of an Order spell, not Chaos. Was the Sorcerer learning to use their own power against them? No, Zarost remembered, he had been advised. The Warlock had planned this, down to the panicked beating of their hearts. He had done more than point out the Gyre’s weaknesses. He had strategised their responses and wielded the wildfire against them all. He had learnt how to use Chaos.
Zarost could almost understand the Warlock, a man who saw life as a power struggle, defecting to join the greater power. In many ways it was an old story—a man of frustrated ambition turning to treachery to reach his goal. He was simply a traitor, and so, human. To endear himself to his new master, he would employ his knowledge to bring about the ruin of his old house. Why had Ametheus listened to him? It meant that Ametheus was in league with an Order wizard. It was contrary to his nature. It was unexpected, and so Zarost solved the riddle. The Gyre’s mistake had been to expect Ametheus to behave as he had in the past.
“Chaos is never predictable,” he stated simply.
They had lost the age-old war in a most bizarre way. They had been taken out. They weren’t part of the right universe any more. They couldn’t fight the Chaos in Oldenworld, because they couldn’t get into it. They were in a world that was no world at all—a dead end. To escape from the separated sphere, they would have to create a bridge of substance through the void of nothingness. When the Gyre had used the nothingness before, they had each held a corner of a rectangle. They had been able to stretch the gap wide then close it again because they could each anchor a corner point and direct the transition along straight divides. But with a sphere of nothingness, there were no corners. There was no place for them to get a hold on the transition point. It was a horrendous spell. Zarost did not understand how Ametheus ha
d been able to create it. He should not have been capable of disrupting reality so perfectly. There was always a flaw in his manipulations, it was the fundamental truth of Chaos—perfection of any kind was impossible.
None of them had the power to fill Nothing—not even together. They could manipulate what was there, but not what wasn’t. None of them could create a reality. Even the Cosmologer was an assembler, not a maker. She needed the raw materials of essence to begin with. In a space without essence, they were powerless, just as the Sorcerer was. He could break and separate but he could not heal such a rift in space.
Zarost realised what they had really lost. He knew of one maker. Oh how that stabbed him in his heart, through and through. The Lifesinger was the only one who could bridge a gap of life, who could heal a broken circle. Tabitha could have created. She had been destroyed first, somewhere in the dead ash, in the ruins of Order.
He considered his many mistakes. He had laid the right pieces of the puzzle of prophecy, but his adversary had reordered them and created something so strange it could not possibly lead to the moment of truth.
Laklødder skran ðzak deħr nihil bloşnihil.
Nothing but madness, when the end is played against the end.
There was only one consolation. If Ametheus wished to finish them off, he would have to enter the separated world. In so doing, he would breach the gap between worlds himself, and come he would. He would not be able to resist the temptation of six wizards all in one pot. When he came, they would leave. There was no question of facing him down anymore. He had demonstrated his ability, he was surely at the apex of his cycle of madness. The flames that licked through the ruins of the Sanctuary rose higher, throwing a baleful light upon the sand.
They had to prepare a strategy.
“Analyse this, Lorewarden!” he said.
“F equals m a,” the Lorewarden replied.
“And easy emsy squared?” ventured Zarost
“Exactly my point. So energy is proportional to force over acceleration. If this truly is a separate system, the energy we can draw on is small and constant, due to the limited amount of matter, and the more we try to accelerate ourselves, to escape, the greater the force against us will be. We have to be calm, as calm as possible.”
“But that assumes energy is constant in the universe.”
“But energy is ultimately finite, Riddler. There is only so much matter available to convert.”
“Ametheus isn’t bound by that assumption.”
“It doesn’t matter how much you tip the second axis, you get to the same end of the rod. Convert all the matter to energy and you still have a finite total.”
“Ah, but what if you increase the force and cause the acceleration to decrease?”
“Don’t be a fool!” squawked the Cosmologer. “How would you would you do such a thing?”
“Apply the force from all directions at once. Compress this space until there is nothing to compress anymore. Isn’t that what he will do? Crush us into oblivion. He would harvest so much energy he could use it to create anything.”
“But the matter would resist such compression!” objected the Cosmologer. “You would require an immense amount of energy!”
The Lorewarden concurred. “You can’t compress your hands together because your left hand fights with your right hand for the space. Matter resists.” He clapped his hands to make his point.
“But if you take enough of the spaces out, doesn’t gravity do the job all on its own?”
The Lorewarden was silent. The Cosmologer’s lips worked like a fish out of water as the awful idea assaulted her mind. “Oh,” she said.
The Gyre turned slowly on the dangerous thought.
“This is true, yes,” said the Lorewarden. “If you removed enough space, the matter would collapse upon itself.”
“You’ll get some horrible time compressions too,” said the Senior.
“Blast it, Riddler, will Chaos be the end of us?” demanded the Mentalist. He looked at Zarost with haunted eyes. “What do you propose?”
There was no time.
“The ground!” the Mystery cried out. “Out there! The air as well!”
Zarost spun around. A crumbling, breaking, crushing sensation came at him from within the gloom. A jagged crack whipped past him on his right side, skewing the sand beyond at a horrible angle as if what he saw was a scene in a tilted mirror. Another crack passed between Zarost and the wizards to his left, as space folded. The Lorewarden shouted something, but Zarost couldn’t hear him.
His link to the Gyre was suddenly severed, and in that moment he knew the true terror of his isolation. He had only his own skills to draw upon. He was alone in his sliver of reality, and he could not escape. Silver raindrops began to fall, dangerous wildfire, each droplet burning with Chaos. It would change his flesh if it struck him, altering him with random mutations until he lost command of his body altogether. He mustered all his concentration and danced beneath the assault, throwing small hooks of Dark essence at each droplet to freeze them before they struck. If he used a more sophisticated spell to defend himself, the wildfire would be drawn to him too quickly.
The rain fell faster and faster. Pit-pat pittat pittit-pittat.
Despite his caution, his Freeze spell attracted more and more droplets, finally so many that he missed some of them. Poisonous liquid stung his face and shoulders. He abandoned his frantic attempt to alter the rain and concentrated on resisting his own alteration instead. Change rippled over his skin. His hand turned black and dripped like sponge. He resisted. Fifteen eyes burst through at his wrist. He denied them. He held his own image firmly in mind—Twardy Zarost, with a bristly beard, a wiry mop of hair and his favourite striped hat upon his head and his indigo pants. He refused each deviation of form as it came upon him: his leg swollen with elephant skin; red scales that ran up his arm; and barbed whiskers upon his face. Resisted, refused, repelled. Gradually, the cancerous growths and painful crusts washed away in the steady flow of Zarost’s revisualisation.
He was the Riddler. He was the Riddler.
He was still the Riddler, despite the Chaos working upon him.
Zarost recognised the assault for what it was. The rain was only a trickle of power, it was not devastating. The raindrops had made him panic and prevented him from focusing his attention on the real threat. Ametheus had done it to all of them. The neighbouring scene tilted toward Zarost, as if a piece of the mirrored world was falling inward along the line it had cracked upon. Within the warped window of reality, Twardy saw the Lorewarden changing earth to laval fire to burn the frenzied silver ants that crawled toward him. Farther away, in his own separated space, the Mentalist was on his knees, his arms spread wide, shouting like a madman. Whatever he was being subjected to was overloading his attention. Zarost couldn’t see the Spiritist anywhere, but a glimpse of an oblique scene told him that the Senior was surrounded by clouds of swirling ash. All the while, the real threat was disguised—every one of their little worlds was collapsing, crumbling, fraying at the edges. Zarost guessed that each wizard would end up in a tiny shard, isolated and trapped, dodging and weaving until there was no more space to hide. A crack would eventually find every one of them, pass through their bodies and divide their attention. They would be divided and divided, until they died.
He had to find a way out.
The Chaos-formed rain continued to beat down on him, but he denied it. He refused to be erased.
It made no sense—reality would not break apart on its own, but how could Ametheus manipulate this collapsing world, if it was fully separated from the realm which he inhabited? A link to the Sorcerer had to exist, there had to be a cord of attention along which Zarost could escape.
“W-what if there is no c-c-cord, b-because I am h-h-here?”
Twardy Zarost jumped, the voice was that close. He spun to face the flames. Only a portion of the ruins remained. The rest had broken off into the scenes in which the other wizards battled, canted off at o
dd illogical angles. There was no sign of the Sorcerer, though Zarost was sure Ametheus had spoken. The voice was full of the stuttered words that characterised the inner turmoil Ametheus endured.
“You-you d-d-don’t see me because you d-d-don’t want to believe I can do w-what you are seeing.” The Sorcerer’s deep voice surrounded Zarost.
“If you showed yourself in a way I could understand, would you and I ever come to the same understanding?”
“C-clever riddle, Riddler. B-b-but before I reveal myself, I-I and I wish to e-explain something to you all. I h-hold the vital access to each of your worlds. If any of you t-try to harm me now, I sh-shall abandon you to this c-c-current fate. If by some m-miracle of m-magic you injure me, y-you will still be trapped in your shard of reality. You will n-never escape it, for your w-way back will be gone. Your salvation is through me.”
Things were worse than Zarost had thought. Not only was Ametheus in the height of his cycle of Chaos, but he was in control of his magic as well—for the moment. He had separated the six wizards, but from the way he spoke Zarost had to assume Ametheus was heard by all of them, which meant he existed in all of their separated worlds. He was the one common element, the centre-point, the crux. Their lives relied on the concentration of a man who was at best unstable; at worst, utterly insane.
Zarost tried to get his lens to reveal the Sorcerer’s position, but there was so many warnings coming at him he could not find Ametheus amid all the stroke-marks. The silvered rain continued to fall in the strange little world. The sand was pitted and strangely coloured by the impacts. The flames continued to blacken the few remaining columns of jagged stone. Zarost clung to a single hope—the Sorcerer wanted something from the Gyre or he would have ended them already. If they talked, they might have a chance to delay him long enough for his concentration to slip. Then again, maybe Ametheus was simply toying with them. Zarost watched the flames. He was sure the Sorcerer was concealing himself somewhere in the fire. It was the only common point of all the wizards’ shards.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 59
