Istari nodded back, then turned to Orondi. He smiled. “It would appear your usefulness has reached its ending.”
“Wait,” I interjected. I faced the Oracle and asked, “What was that all about? What made you react that way to me?”
“I…what?” The Oracle had still been contemplating the floor. Now he looked up at me, and again it seemed as if he were noticing me for the first time. This time, though, he exhibited no sudden reactions. He merely peered back at me dully.
Istari gave me an odd look; he’d missed it all and had no idea what I was talking about or what was happening.
Orondi blinked, shook his head, and replied, “...Nothing. It was nothing.”
I gave him another second or two to acknowledge and explain, but he merely frowned and looked off to the side, as if utterly confused by it all.
Istari gave me a quick look. I shrugged, not certain what was happening or what to say. Istari took this, however, as an indication from me that I didn’t care what became of the old guy. He nodded back.
Then he ran the elderly Immortal through with a lightning strike of the blade.
I recoiled, surprised.
Before I could say anything, Istari had kicked Orondi off the impaling weapon and allowed the Oracle’s dying body to stumble backwards. Gasping, he staggered back until his lower legs met the rim of the Well. He tripped, head over heels, and tumbled into it. There was no splash, no impact of any sort. He merely fell, and fell, and fell, and eventually he was lost to view.
Istari leaned down and gazed into the Well. “He claimed Eternity,” the alien said. “Now he belongs to it.”
I looked up from the dark depths of the void to the darker depths of my companion’s eyes. They were now cold and hard.
“Why did you—?”
“I told you I would hurl him into the abyss,” he said, his voice flat. “And I did.”
I started to respond but couldn’t decide what to say. I exhaled slowly and nodded, and together we walked around the Well of Eternity and helped our wounded troopers to their feet. Then we made ready for the next phase of the operation.
How had it come to this? I had never considered myself a proper soldier, a warrior of any sort. Unlike my uncles—and perhaps even my father himself—I had never dreamed of the glory of battle.
No. What I was doing was not out of love of combat and desire for victory over my foes. It was something much less glamorous, less exciting, less thrilling.
It was simply duty.
That was it. That was what I clung to, for the longest time. I was merely doing my duty. Duty to my father, to my family and to my homeworld. Nothing beyond that.
At the time I refused to even entertain the idea that some part of me, deep inside, had been awakened by it; that I might actually be enjoying it.
Later I would want to blame Istari for that change within myself. But I know now that he was not at fault—at least not in that way. No, there had been in me since birth, I believe, a potential for violence, for battle, that had lain dormant, like dry kindling awaiting a fateful spark. Istari, Prometheus-like in so many ways, provided that spark. But he was not the fire. The fire was within me all that time, awaiting its opportunity to blossom.
As for Istari?
“Four down,” he stated flatly, wiping the blade of the golden sword on the outfit of one of the Oracle’s fallen savages. “Four to go.”
I didn’t like Istari. I found him entirely too enigmatic and not at all trustworthy. I certainly didn’t condone all of his actions.
But I couldn’t argue with his math.
TEN
We rode along the Paths between the worlds and the surviving dozen of my soldiers, shocked and staggering but resolute, followed along.
Istari had told me that the remaining four of the Cabal were likely to be all gathered in one place now—the so-called Great Nexus—and that we should strike them immediately and hard, before they had further time to prepare for our coming.
“What did you see in the Well?” I asked him as Comet and Sneak carried us at a trot.
“Nothing of any importance,” he replied offhandedly.
“So Orondi lied, then? His Well didn’t show you your fate?”
“No,” he said. “It did.”
I looked at him, taken aback. “And?”
“He could show me nothing I did not already know,” the alien answered. “My fate is sealed; I have known this from the beginning. Nothing he or I or anyone else could do can change that. I am the closed loop, the Alpha and the Omega. My destiny is my own—it does not answer to one such as him.”
I tried to comprehend what he had said but most of it eluded me. The gist of it, though, seemed to me to be, He didn’t show me anything that surprised me.
And hearing that, I looked back at my companion of these last couple of days and I realized with a start that I could tell he was lying. I’d gotten to know him well enough as we’d charged from crisis to crisis that I could see the signs of his deception. I wanted to press him on it, but decided not to. Not yet. We still had major work to do—and very powerful beings to fight—and I wanted nothing to interfere with that mission.
Even so, I was convinced that he had seen something in the Oracle’s little pool that had taken him unawares.
We traveled on for a short while with each of us lost in our own thoughts. The tunnel of mists that comprised the usual transitional phases between the worlds had given way now, and we found ourselves on actual, non-metaphysical dry land. A slanted, rugged, rock-strewn piece of landscape, to be specific. The sunlight was a pale violet and the breeze was warmer than I would have liked and the air was filled with strange, birdlike creatures that circled far overhead and screeched and cawed. The horses had to pick their way carefully down the invisible path that Istari directed them along, and the soldiers behind us were slowed by the terrain as well.
I took the opportunity to raise a question that had puzzled me.
“Immortals,” I said, and Istari glanced my way. “Why that name? The impression I’ve gotten so far is that none of you are particularly immortal.”
He shrugged. “We have all lived a very long time,” he said, “but your point is a fair one. We have found ways to prolong our lifetimes by drawing upon the cosmic energies of the Above that we have been able to access for many centuries. But each of us yet faces a finite span followed by inevitable decline and death.” He smiled that evil smile at me. “Our plan, however, included overcoming that limitation.”
“Overcoming?” I repeated, raising one eyebrow, the skepticism evident in my voice. “Overcoming death? Entirely?”
“Indeed,” he said. “We had a plan—the other four still do, I’m sure—for attaining true immortality.”
I couldn’t quite believe this but I went along for argument’s sake. “If that’s so,” I said, “then why would you turn against them—and against your chance for immortality?”
He chuckled. “You haven’t been paying attention,” he intoned. “I told you—my fate is sealed. Nothing those four wretched creatures do can alter it in any way.”
I nodded slowly. I had no intention of debating that topic. My thoughts turned instead to the more practical question: “So how do they think they can achieve immortality?” I wasn’t really expecting him to answer. To my surprise, he did. Or, at least, he attempted to.
“That is actually something you need to know now, before we arrive,” he said. “For it bears directly on what will happen once we begin—”
I never got to hear the rest of that sentence, because that was when the bomb detonated in our midst.
+ + +
The brass band was winding down its medley of greatest hits inside my brain as I came back to wakefulness and looked around. Instantly my mind rebelled at what it was seeing, for it simply couldn’t be.
I sat in a hard metal seat centered at one end of a chamber twice as long as it was wide. The ceiling curved far overhead, descending on either side to straight,
fluted walls of stone and metal, all gray and white. Enormous columns of stone spiraled with silver and gold braced those walls in rows along both sides. Seated stadium-style on each side were hundreds of gray giants; giants of the same race as the two I had encountered—and helped to kill—earlier. They were all dressed in long, loose robes of black with gold metal trim, and they eyed me with what appeared to be unmitigated hostility.
This, you might understand, concerned me greatly.
At the far end of the room, a bright ball of shimmering light hovered in midair above a gray circular pedestal. The ball oscillated from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to violet to red again. I had the strangest sensation—I know not why—that it was a great eye, scrutinizing me in the finest detail. It gave me chills.
Directly ahead of me, at the center point of the room, stood another of the giants—but this one wore a skintight suit of metallic red and blue that covered all but his face and hands. Traces of gold wound here and there along his torso and arms and legs in a manner similar to the detail on the columns.
As I took all of this in and began to formulate the most obvious questions within my mind, the figure in red and blue took two steps toward me, frowned, then turned back to the assembly and to the hovering ball of light and cried out—in a language I could actually understand—the words, “He is awake!”
A general murmuring from the audience. A flaring of bright orange from the light.
The figure in red and blue strode toward me in a deliberative manner, his head down and his hands clasped behind his back.
“What is this?” I demanded, rising to my feet. “Where am I?”
The giant halted in mid step, now three-quarters of the way toward me, and raised his head up high, eyes wide, as if thoroughly shocked by my question. Then he slowly turned, meeting the gaze of most of the others assembled on either side, before completing his turn by facing me once more.
“He wants to know where he is,” the deep voice intoned, a hint of laughter about the edges. He paused for effect, then, “Better that he ask who he is!”
General laughter from the galleries. It died out quickly.
“I know who I am,” I called back. I leaned out against the waist-high railing that circled in front of my chair, placing my hands against it for support. At that moment I noticed two things. One was that I no longer wore the golden armor I’d donned earlier; they had been replaced by a simple shirt and pants of some rough, gray, natural fabric. The other thing I realized was that my hands were shackled by heavy metal cuffs and chains. How I hadn’t noticed that until this moment baffled me.
“He thinks he knows who he is,” the figure before me called out, ridicule in his tone. “But I seriously doubt that he actually does.” He faced me again and met my eyes. His burned with an almost manic intensity. “Who are you, then? Tell the court who you believe yourself to be—that we may disabuse you of that notion.”
“I am Gaius Baranak, son of Constantine and lord of—”
“No,” the giant boomed out, cutting me off. “You are none of those things. Not any longer, if ever.” He strode closer. “You forfeited the right to be any of those things when you transgressed the law. Now you are one thing and one thing only,” he declared. “You are the accused. The defendant in this trial.”
“Trial?” I realized then what I had found myself in the middle of. A trial, indeed—with this giant who stood before me as the prosecutor, obviously. I looked around with a newfound understanding and decided that the audience must be the jury. That begged the question, though—who or what was the judge?
“Trial,” the prosecutor repeated. “That is correct. You are the defendant here. You are accused of heinous crimes against the galaxy. And you will be tried and found guilty.”
“That’s already been determined, has it?” I asked, still trying to gain my mental footing.
“It is a verdict that I am quite certain the judge will reach,” he replied.
The judge. So. There was a judge—somewhere—and he or she would decide my verdict rather than any jury.
“Where is this judge?” I asked.
The prosecutor looked back at me, seemingly dumbfounded, for more than a couple of seconds. Then he laughed. “You mean you do not recognize the presence of the Machine?”
“The what?”
I looked around, trying to figure out what he meant and what or to whom he might have been referring. I saw no one else present save the gathering of gray giants.
“The Machine! The great bringer of law and order to this galaxy. He whom we all serve.”
I shrugged and shook my head, perplexed.
“I don’t serve any machine,” I tried to point out. But no one there was listening.
The prosecutor turned so that his left side was to me and his right faced back down the chamber. He raised his right arm and directed it, palm open, toward the hovering ball of shimmering light.
“The Machine!”
I frowned. The light? The thing I’d taken as their mood lighting for the room? That was this Machine he was speaking of? That was my judge—the decider of my fate?
Then something Istari had said earlier came back to me. He’d said a great artificial intelligence—a Machine—had once ruled over the galaxy, but it had been overthrown. In part, I seemed to recall him saying, by the actions of his Cabal of Immortals. And what was more, I remembered with a start, the agents of that Machine were the same species of gray giants I saw before me now.
So—had I gone back in time? Or had the Machine been restored somehow, along with its servants? Was it now “alive” and well and doing its thing again—and deciding to begin its new campaign of galactic domination by removing me from the board?
Why me? What was I to it? What threat to it or to anyone else could I possibly represent?
The prosecutor was addressing me again and with effort I managed to direct my attention away from my churning thoughts and back to him. He was saying something about the charges that I faced.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I was... too overwhelmed with the grandeur of this court to hear the charges. Would you mind repeating them?”
He appeared annoyed but he straightened and read them off again: “You, the accused, are hereby charged before this gathering of the Hands and before the Machine himself with the following crimes. One, that you did trespass within the bounds of the Above. Two, that you did aid and abet your accomplices, the so-called Immortals, in their efforts to aggrandize themselves while destroying the galaxy. Three—”
“Destroying the galaxy?” I interrupted. This had taken me aback. “Who is destroying the galaxy?”
The prosecutor regarded me with a dubious expression for a moment, then spread his hands. “It is entirely plausible that you, a mere human and doubtlessly a thrall to their sinister will, do not know the full extent of their schemes,” he said. “Perhaps you are not aware that this Cabal has detected an oncoming wave of ultra-destructive energy traveling toward our galaxy from some point in the distant future. Perhaps you do not realize that their intentions are not to deflect it away but to encourage its arrival in the mortal realm of spacetime, where they plan to harness much of it to their own ambitions—while allowing the rest of it to crash into the stars and planets themselves. They would wreck the galaxy in order to magnify their own petty powers.” He shook his great gray head. “It is all utterly shameful.”
I was reeling at this information. If true, it meant that my mission with Istari was even more critical—far, far more critical—than I had known.
“This is all news to me,” I said. “But—wait—you said I have been aiding and abetting the Cabal?” I laughed at this. “You have that exactly backwards.”
“Oh do we now?” the prosecutor snapped, putting on an exaggerated performance of recoiling in shock at my words. “So you deny assisting that member of the Cabal of Immortals called Istari?”
I blinked. “Well of course I’ve helped Istari,” I began.
“But Istari and I have been working against—”
“Silence! By your own words are you incriminated.” He turned back to the light. “The prosecution moves for immediate judgment and sentencing.”
“Wait,” I shouted. “Don’t I get to make my case? Doesn’t the defense get a turn? What sort of unfair, illegitimate court are you running here?”
The prosecutor stalked the remaining length of the hall and stopped only inches away from me. He towered over me and bent down such that his blunt gray face was directly before mine. It was unnerving; in the previous instances in which I had been anything like that close to one of his kind, they had been trying with all their considerable might to kill me.
“Disrespectful words directed toward this court will only make your punishment come more swiftly and in a more painful fashion,” he barked.
“This is no court,” I replied, anger filling my voice. “A court is a place where both sides in a dispute are allowed to make their case and then an impartial judge and jury decide based on the facts presented. This is merely a performance, based on some imagined slight I’ve caused that has no basis in reality.”
The prosecutor made to interrupt me again but I continued, overriding him.
“Is the Machine nothing but a petty tyrant, condemning all who dare speak the truth?”
“Certainly not,” the prosecutor snapped.
“Does he fear to hear the truth from a lowly creature such as myself?”
“Never!” he barked, his expression defiant. But then he frowned suddenly and turned back toward the light, not quite as certain that he accurately spoke for his master as he had been seconds earlier.
Baranak_Storming the Gates Page 17
