But suddenly the pistol was hers. She closed her fingers on the grip. She took a step backward from the desk, tripped on a heel, found herself sitting on the blood-stained carpet with the pistol in both shaking hands, holding it in front of her like a dime-store crucifix.
Matthew Crane — the thing that had once been Matthew Crane — reared up before her. The desk lamp fell sideways, raking harsh light across his blistered face. His eyes were cherry red, the pupils narrow black slits. “Little Flea!” he cried. “Good work!”
She fired the pistol. Her aim was low. The bullet clipped a rib, spraying a gout of bloody substance against the far wall. Crane reeled backward, supporting himself on a rack of congressional reports. He looked down at his wound, then back at Lily.
She stood up cautiously.
He smiled — if that was meant to be a smile — past the stumps of his teeth.
“Don’t stop now, Little Flea,” he whispered. “For god’s sake don’t stop now.”
She didn’t. She didn’t stop until the pistol was empty, not until what remained of Matthew Crane was motionless on the floor.
Chapter Forty
A spasm of mortar fire collapsed what remained of the Dome of the Well. Vast intact slabs of shaped rock fell and shattered, lofting pillars of dust into the autumn air. Guilford advanced through the rubble, rifle in hand. His wounds were grave and his breathing was ragged and painful. But all his limbs worked and his mind was as clear as could be expected under the circumstances.
A reef of cloud had drifted in from the mountains, turning the day cold and wet. Drizzle chilled the City and painted the ruins a drab, slick black. Guilford darkened his face with a handful of mud and imagined himself blending into these tortured angles of broken stone. The enemy had abandoned order and were stalking the human intruders almost at random — an effective strategy, since there was no guessing which corner might conceal a demon. Only their stench betrayed them.
Guilford put his head around an intact foundation stone and saw one of the monsters less than a dozen yards away.
This one had left its human origins far behind. The transformation was nearly complete: it stood over seven feet tall, its rounded skull and razor jaws similar to the specimen Sullivan had shown him in the Museum of Monstrosities. It was systematically dismembering a man who had stumbled into its clutches — no one Guilford knew personally, small consolation though that was. It razored the body apart, inspecting and discarding the pieces methodically while Guilford choked back nausea and took careful aim. When the monster reared back with some fresh nugget of human flesh, he fired.
A clean shot to the pale and vulnerable belly. The monster staggered and fell — wounded, not dead, but it didn’t seem able to do more than lie on its back and flex its claws in the air. Guilford sprinted across a field of granite dust toward the collapsed Dome, anxious to find fresh cover before the sound attracted more of the creatures.
He discovered Tom Compton crouched behind a half wall, hand clutched to his throat.
“Bastards almost took my head off,” the frontiersman said. He spat a red globule into the dust.
So we can still bleed, Guilford thought. Bleed the way we did at Belleau Wood. Bleed the way we did when we were human.
He took Tom’s arm. “Can you walk?”
“I hope so. Too fuckin’ soon to give up the ghost.”
Guilford helped him up. The throat wound was vicious, and the frontiersman’s other injuries were just as grave. Faint light flickered from his ruined body. Fragile magic.
“Quiet now,” Tom warned.
They topped a hill of rubble, all that remained of the Dome that had stood for ten thousand years in the silence of this empty continent. Rifle fire popped frantically to the north and west.
“Head down,” Tom cautioned. They inched forward, breathing dust until their mouths were sandpaper and their throats rusted pipes.
I remember you, Guilford thought: Tom Compton, the First Sergeant who had dragged him through the wheat field toward Château-Thierry, pointlessly, because he was dying… Over these knives of granite until they saw the Well itself, brighter than Guilford remembered it, radiant with light, its crumbling perimeter guarded by a pair of vigilant monsters, their eyes swiveling with a fierce intelligence.
Elias Vale was still able to hold and fire an automatic rifle, though his fingers had grown clumsy and strange. He was changing in ways he preferred not to think about, changing like the men around him, some of whom were no longer even remotely human. But that was all right. He was close to the Well of the Ascension, doing sacred and urgent work. He felt the close proximity of the gods.
His eyesight had been subtly altered. He found he could detect faint motion in dim light. His other senses, too. He could smell the salt-pork smell of the attackers. The rain falling on his pebbled skin was both cold and pleasing. The sound of rifle fire was acutely loud, even the rattle of pebbles a symphony of discrete tones.
More acute, too, was the sense that had attracted the gods to him in the first place, his ability to peer at least a small distance into a human soul. The beings attacking the Sacred City were only partly human — partly something much older and larger — but he felt the shape of their lives, every poignancy and tension and secret vulnerability. That skill might still be useful.
His rifle was not his only weapon.
He huddled behind a granite block while two of the more thoroughly transformed men patrolled the rim of the Well. He felt — but it was indescribable! — the immense living energy of this place, the gods imprisoned in the nonspace deep in the earth, straining at physical incarnation.
An army of them.
And he felt the presence of two half-mortal men approaching from the north.
He picked their names from the glowing air: Tom Compton. Guilford Law.
Ancient souls.
Vale clutched his rifle to his pustulant chest and smiled emptily.
Tom said, “I’ll circle left, draw them off with a couple of shots. You do what you can.”
Guilford nodded, watching his wounded friend scrabble away.
The Well was a pocket of algorithms embedded in the ontosphere, a pinprick opening in to the deeper architecture of the Archive. The god-Guilford’s only way in was through physical incarnation: he had needed Guilford to carry him here, but the battle inside the Well, the Binding, that was gods’ work. But I’m tired, Guilford thought. I hurt. And with the pain and the fatigue came a crippling nostalgia; he found himself thinking of Caroline, her long black hair and wounded eyes; of Lily, five years old, spellbound under the influence of Dorothy Gale and Tik-Tok; of Abby’s patience and strength; of Nicholas gazing at him with a trust he hadn’t earned or deserved, a trust soon breached… he wanted to bring it back, bring it all back, and he wondered if that was why the gods had built their Archive in the first place: this mortal unwillingness to surrender the past, lose love to crumbling atoms.
He closed his eyes and rested his cheek on a jut of wet stone. The light inside him flickered. Blood welled up from his wounds.
The sound of Tom’s rifle roused him.
At the eroded rim of the Well the two monsters swiveled their heads toward the sound of the gun. Tom fired again and one of the beasts screamed, a shriek nearly human in its pain and rage. Bile-green fluid spurted from the monster’s ruptured gut.
Guilford took advantage of the distraction to move another several yards closer to the Well, dodging between man-high columns of granite.
Now both creatures were moving, approaching the source of the gunshots at an oblique angle, offering their dorsal armor against the rifle fire. They were extraordinarily large, maybe specially-appointed guardians. Their walk — bipedal, fluidly balanced — was slow, but Guilford had learned to respect their speed. Claws and forearm mandibles were exposed, bone-white, glistening with rain. Their smaller lower arms, less arms than auxiliary knives, clattered restlessly.
The rain deepened from drizzle to downpour, sheets of i
t streaming off ancient stone, raising plumes of vapor from the Well.
The monsters weren’t affected by the rain. They paused and rocked their heads, a querulous birdlike gesture. The water gave their skins or shells a polished gleam, raising hidden colors, a rainbow iridescence that made Guilford think of his childhood, of washing pebbles in a brook to see their luster emerge from the dross of dust and air.
Closer now. He felt the heat of the Well, the burned-insulation reek of it.
Tom stepped into the open and fired another shot, maybe the last of his hoarded ammunition. Guilford used the opportunity the frontiersman created and ran for the rim of the Well, glancing backward. Get away while you can, he wanted to shout, but he saw Tom’s left leg buckle under him. The frontiersman dropped to one knee, managed to raise his rifle, but the nearest creature, the one he had wounded, was suddenly on him.
Guilford moaned involuntarily as the monster deftly nipped Tom’s head from his body.
The sheeting rain concealed all else. The air smelled of ozone and lightning.
He shouldn’t have stopped. The second monster had spotted him and was moving now at terrifying speed toward the Well, long legs pumping as efficiently as a leopard’s. Running, it made no sound audible over the hiss of the rain; but when it stopped it released a cloud of stinging solvent vapors, waste products of some unimaginable body chemistry. Its eyes, expressionless and strange, focused tightly on him.
He lifted his rifle and fired two rapid shots at the creature.
The bullets chipped its gleaming armor, perhaps cracked an exposed rib, caused it to stumble back a step. Guilford fired again, fired until his clip was empty and the monster lay motionless on the ground.
Tom, he thought.
But the frontiersman was beyond repair.
Guilford turned back to the Well.
The rim was close. The spiral of stone steps was intact, though perilously littered with fresh debris. That didn’t matter. He wasn’t planning to take the stairs. Jump and let gravity carry him. There was no bottom to this rabbit hole, only the end of the world. He began to run.
He stopped when a human figure stood up not ten paces in front of him.
No, he realized, not human, only some poor soul less advanced in its destruction. The face in particular looked as if it had been broken long ago, bones shifting along the fault lines like volcanic plates.
This creature struggled to raise its own rifle, its arms shaking with the palsy of transformation.
Guilford took another clip of ammunition from his belt.
“You don’t want to shoot me,” the monster said.
The words cut through the rush of the rain and the distant crack of artillery.
Ignore him, the god-Guilford said.
“There’s someone with me, Guilford. Someone you know.”
He ejected the spent clip. “Who would that be?” Watching the monster struggle with its own rifle. Bad case of the shakes. Keep him talking.
No, the picket insisted.
The monster closed its eyes and said, “Dad?”
Guilford froze.
No.
“Is that you? I can’t see—”
Guilford froze, though he felt the picket’s urgent pleading.
“Dad, it’s me! It’s Nick!”
No, it isn’t Nick, because Nick—
“Nick?”
“Dad, don’t shoot! I’m inside here! I don’t want to die, not again!”
The monster still struggling against its own convulsions to raise the rifle. He saw it but couldn’t make sense of it. He remembered the bright, awful roses of his son’s blood.
The picket was suddenly beside him, faint as mist.
Time slowed to a crawl. He felt his hammering heart beat at half speed, slow timpani notes.
The monster flailed its gun with a glacial imprecision.
The picket said, “Listen to me. Quickly, now. That isn’t Nick.”
“What happens to the dead? Do the demons get them?”
“Not always. And that isn’t Nick.”
“How do I know?”
“Guilford. Do you think I would let them take him?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No. I didn’t. Nick is with me, Guilford. He’s with us.”
The picket held out his hands in a cradling motion, and for a moment — a sweet and terrible moment — Nick was there, eyes closed, asleep, twelve years old and at peace.
“That’s what this is all about,” the picket said. “These lives.”
Guilford said, “I’m so tired… Nick?”
But Nick had vanished again.
“Fire your gun,” the picket said sternly.
He did.
So did the monster.
Guilford felt the bullets pierce him. The pain, this time, was brutal. But that didn’t matter. Close now. He fired and fired again, until the man with the broken face lay shattered on the ground.
Guilford dragged his own broken body to the rim of the Well.
He closed his eyes and fell. Pain ebbed into mist. Free as a raindrop now. Hey, Nick, look at me. And he felt Nick’s somnolent presence. The picket had been telling the truth. Nick was wrapped in timelessness, sleeping until the end of the ontosphere, falling into the luminous waters of the Archive, numbers deeper than any ocean, warm as summer air.
He blinked and saw the god burst out of him. This luminous thing had once been Guilford Law, dead on a battlefield in France, nurtured by Sentience, equipotent with the gods and one of them, inseparable from them, a being Guilford could not begin to comprehend, all fierce light and color and vengeful as an angry angel, binding the demons who howled their frustration across the far and fading borders of the world.
Interlude
They stood a while on the high ground above the ruined City of Demons. The day was uniformly bright, but the sky was full of stars.
“What now?” Guilford asked.
“We wait,” the picket said, infinitely patient.
Guilford saw more men climbing the hillside. The City was silent now, empty once more. Guilford recognized the Old Men, Tom and Erasmus among them, whole and smiling. He was surprised he could see their faces so clearly across this distance.
“Wait for what?”
“The end of all battles,” the picket said.
Guilford shook his head sternly. “No.”
“No?”
“No. That’s not what I want. I want what I wasn’t allowed to have.” He looked hard at the picket. “I want a life.”
“All the life you want — eventually.”
“I mean a human life. I want to walk like a whole man, grow old before I die. Just… human life.”
The picket was silent for a long stretch.
I surprised a god, Guilford thought.
Finally the picket said, “It may be within my power. Are you certain this is what you want?”
“It’s all I ever wanted.”
The ancient Guilford nodded. He understood — the oldest part of him, at least, understood. He said, “But the pain—”
“Yes,” Guilford said flatly. “The pain. That, too.”
Epilogue
The End of Summer, 1999
Karen, back from her morning walk, told Guilford a huge sea wheel had washed up on the beach. After lunch (sandwiches on the veranda, though he couldn’t eat more than a bite) he went to have a look at this nautical prodigy.
He took his time, hoarding his energy. He followed a path from the house through dense ferns, through bell trees dripping August nectar. His legs ached almost at once, and he was breathless by the time he saw the ocean. The Oro Delta coast possessed as benign a climate as Darwinia could boast, but summer was often crippling humid and always hot. Clouds stacked over the windless Mediterranean like great marbled palaces, like the cathedrals of vanished Europe.
Last night’s storm had stranded the sea wheel high on the pebbled margin of the beach. Guilford approached the object tentatively. It was immense,
at least six feet in diameter, not a perfect circle but a broken ellipse, mottled white; otherwise it looked remarkably like a wagon wheel, the flotsam of some undersea caravan.
In fact it was a sort of vegetable, a deep-water plant, typically Darwinian in its hollow symmetry.
Odd that it had washed up here, to grace the beach behind his house. He wondered what force, what tide or motion of the water, had detached the sea wheel from its bed. Or perhaps it was more evidence of the ongoing struggle between Darwinian and terrestrial ecologies, even in the benthic privacy of the ocean.
On land, in Guilford’s lifetime, the flowering plants had begun to conquer their slower Darwinian analogues. At the verge of the road from Tilson he had lately discovered a wild stand of morning glories, blue as summer. But some of the Darwinian species were returning the favor; skeleton lace and false anemones were said to be increasingly common south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The sea wheel, a fragile thing, would be black and rotted by tomorrow noon. Guilford turned to walk home, but the pain beneath his ribs took him and he chose to rest a moment. He wetted a handkerchief in a tide pool and mopped his face, tasting the salt tang on his lips. His breath came hard, but that was to be expected. Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat.
Forced to sit a while, he admired the strangeness of the sea wheel, its heady incongruity. A strange thing washed up on a strange shore: well, I know how that feels.
Last night’s storm had cleared the air. He watched the glossy sea give back the sky its blue. He whistled tunes between his teeth until he felt fit enough to start the journey back.
Karen would be waiting. He hadn’t told her what the doctor had said, at least not the full story, though she obviously suspected something. She would be all right about it, but he dreaded the phone calls from friends, perhaps especially the inevitable call from Lily and all the attendant consequences: a last visit, old sins and old grief hovering in the air like voiceless birds. Not that he wouldn’t like to see her again, but Lily herself was frail these days. At least he wouldn’t outlive her. Small mercies, Guilford thought.
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