Player upturned the cart, emptying it of rats. The pile didn’t last long; other street urchins were only too happy to scarf up the bounty to feed hungry mouths back at home who could no longer provide for the family for the simple reason that leaving the relatively safe confines of one’s home meant dodging werewolves and vampires, and not everyone was up for that, especially as they grew older. So the grandparents left it to the grandkids to put food on the table. The parents had often been picked off by the werewolves; the ancient ones didn’t smell right to them, so were left alone; the kids too small of a meal to bother with.
Player sat himself down in the cart and summoned his water magic. The street filled with water, the river rising and rising. It was soon carrying away the horse drawn carriages—horses and all, the pedestrians, the dogs being walked on leashes; they were all drowning in the torrent or trying out their mermaid magic they’d been saving for a particularly rainy day. Player wished the locals no particular malice; they were just casualties of war. Right now, he needed to get centered fast, and being surrounded by water calmed him, made it easier to ponder those missing elements on the periodic table that would further his cause. He was already seeing possible atomic configurations taking shape in the water as the flow of the river down Main Street carried coins from pockets along in the torrent, pushing some of them up together in manners that emulated atomic configurations. Chance, or his elemental magic working to assist him in ways he hadn’t considered before?
Truth be known, he was hoping the acting-out would summon Soren to give him a smack down. The negative attention-seeking behavior was something of a default setting when all else failed. He had progressed beyond that, but, with this latest feeling of abandonment—a core issue for him—he had regressed to the old ways. Soren paid him no visits; perhaps he was too far away to even pick up on Player’s bad boy stunts; or perhaps the beast wouldn’t allow Soren to be baited. Damn the beast. The owls were flying overhead though, the ones he lived with. And they were hooting disapprovingly at him. He couldn’t pretend they were there for the bounty of dead rats, for in those they barely seemed interested.
Finally, he relented and allowed the river to recede. The owls departed at the gesture, but not before hooting their approval in an entirely different octave than they’d used to voice their disapproval. He smiled. Surprising how well he reacted to judgement. One of these days he was going to surrender the need to have his every thought and action celebrated or condemned; he hated anything he did going unnoticed. Even the glaring eyes from the victims of the recent flood, their shaking fists, their curses borne on the wind—little did they know, they were just playing to his warped ego in his little drama.
Player arrived home to find the owls back on their roosts. Better yet, one of them was laying eggs. He had a new family to replace the ones who had abandoned him. He smiled hollowly; it wasn’t much of a consolation prize but it beat sitting and trembling in the hollow, empty exterior of his loft, which he’d yet to populate with furniture. He was desperate to, to cover up for the hollow he felt inside him, but he hardly had the time. Not with Soren keeping the pressure on to up his game, or risk abandonment by the most unlikely of means: his ad hoc family migrating to the stars to play at being celestial wizards. What were the odds the few people he could keep about him were the ones who alone could truly escape his powers of intimidation, which he’d used all his life to keep people from abandoning him as his father had done.
There was a disturbance behind him. Not a sound, because beyond the caterwauling of the owls, there was just the wind whistling beyond the cavity in the wall that remained for the owls to come and leave as they wished. It was a sensed presence in the silence.
Player turned; anyone who had seen the movie Carrie based on the Stephen King novel knew just how to read his face now.
The ones doing the reading turned out to be Aeros and Airy, the aerogel people from Victor’s team; two of his scientists. “What are you doing here?” Player said with all the warmth of a pit viper’s venom-depositing fangs.
For someone who hated to be alone, he really had to work on his people skills.
“Haven’t you heard,” Airy said with a smile, drifting above the floor beside her lover—they had both floated through the stained glass windows because their aerogel bodies made them more ghostlike than real. A human body maybe had billions of molecules in a cubic inch of flesh; they had less than one percent of that. “Triad magic is all the rage.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You need to procure the missing elements on the periodic table to find a way off this planet. We need your elemental magic if Aeros is to procure the next-generation nanites and I the altered chemistries that will serve us off-world.”
“How did—”
Airy pointed upwards with her finger. “They have balloons in Shelley’s London. Next time watch what the kids holding on to strings are holding on to overhead as they walk by.”
Player snorted, amused by the two of them passing themselves off as children’s toys to get up close to him. He did so relish being the center of anybody’s world.
More to the point…
Every cell in Aeros’s body was surrounded by a flexible chip crammed with artificial intelligence. He was the largest mobile factory for the most advanced nextgen nanites on the planet. Leave it to the transhumanist sector to spit out someone like this guy. Airy’s genetic alterations had turned her every cell into no less compact an artificial intelligence with the focus on creating new chemical and biological reactions formerly unheard of on planet earth. And it was Player’s guess she’d tweaked herself further to facilitate astrobiological experiments she was eager to undertake with Player’s help.
Player wasn’t that desperate for company as to consider teaming up with these two. But he was no fool either. If he wanted off world he was going to need to do more than open a door. He was going to have to be able to fight off whoever and whatever was on the other side. And his elemental magic was still primitive; who knew how long before he’d mastered the trials Soren had set for him on this world—far less whatever trials awaited out there. Like it or not, he needed these guys. And a collaboration would also fast-track his understanding of exactly what new elements he filled in on the periodic table could and couldn’t do in combination with one another. He’d have them to run most of the tests for him. His studies might well take him millennia without them, or possibly to the end of time.
“Fine, I’m in,” he said, finally. Though possibly losing the “Carrie” face said enough. The two Aerogel people smiled.
“You two seem very happy, considering I’ve yet to figure out what these missing elements are on the periodic table that we will need to open a portal in order to find our first celestial wizard.”
“Victor is going to be the last one left standing,” Airy said. “He’ll come home to find out that the one person who most wanted to be the first to take on the celestial wizards in their domain is the one person who can’t leave Earth. Not so long as the savant remains his best weapon against the alien queen. You know how he is; he won’t leave her side until he’s milked her every secret that he can use for his empowerment, so that once he does step off-world to join us, he’s once again the most powerful of us all.”
Player parted his lips, joining in the chorus of smiles. First Soren, and then Victor. They had both stolen his thunder at one point or another. And Airy and Aeros were handing Player just what he wanted: a chance again to be the center of everyone else’s universe; to be the most powerful wizard of them all. It was what they all wanted; and it all came down to who had the best strategy and tactics to such an end—and the best allies. And Player was confident he’d found the two perfect allies to compliment his particular gifts. Now, at last, he would be unstoppable.
TWENTY-THREE
“Come on, you overgrown insect. What have you got for me? I’ll be damned if I’m beaten at my own game to meet the celestial wizards on the cosmic st
age as an equal.” Victor was goading the savant as if she were one of his underlings. For all he knew, she could blast him back to the Stone Age where his only sidekicks would be a flock of pterodactyls. But it didn’t change how he felt about things.
The lab felt empty without the others, and eerily quiet and still. The usual frenzy of activity gone. Just when he needed more progress rather than less. And the alien, once again, was ignoring him, lost in saying her goodbyes to her family over in a corner of the lab—or so it seemed. The sounds she was making—were those alien sobs?
Victor groaned with frustration and turned to the consoles she had been working at earlier to see if he could make out for himself what progress she’d made in preparing them for the alien queen’s return. Soren had appeared to Victor only briefly—awakening him in a nightmare—to assure him that any sense of victory was misguided. Soon, the bitch would be back, more powerful than ever. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say. He had no reason to doubt Soren. With that cabbalistic magic he was wielding, his ability to see into the darkness out there in the cosmos was second to none. He could see into regions that even Victor was blind to.
Victor stared at the pyramids dotting the Antarctic, buried miles beneath the ice that had been discovered recently. He and his troupe had made use of them for insights into the alien queen, learning of a time when her people had visited Earth long, long ago. This much had come out when Victor and his team and Soren and his posse were busy putting the last celestial wizard back in a genie jar. But something was different about the display on the console this time. What?
He expanded the grid search to show the entire globe. Fuck me! Every pyramid on the planet was lit up, including ones he didn’t know existed—that no one knew existed. Some still buried in jungle, some submerged beneath the earth’s surface, some discoverers from prior ages had unearthed. The speculation that these temples had been built on Ley lines for the purpose of interacting with the planet’s chi energy in some way…. Well, such notions were easy to dismiss when the pyramids discovered didn’t cover all of the planet’s meridians—the places where most of these energy lines converged. But with the work the savant had done, there was no denying they had been placed to interact with the earth’s energy body now. Either to amplify the amount of energy running through it, or to dampen it down, depending on how you read the “help” Earth had received from ancient aliens. Few believed that people from the past had the savvy to concoct such a “rosary” of such epic scale for the sole purpose of praying to the gods, however many thousands of years ago. But there were psychics, trance channels, and Teslas of their times back then, so Victor refused to embrace the Ancient Alien hypothesis; he saw no reason to see zebras when horses would suffice to explain the footprints from prior eras.
Still….
“What are you looking at, Victor?” He ran his hands over the glowing lights of the computer monitor and desktop in one, ignoring the holographic projection that the others preferred to work with. He let his fingers pull in information that his eyes refused to relay to his brain. “The savant…. She was behind the pyramidal array. She’d endured for thousands of years until all the pyramids were in place. She had elicited the help of Bingwen, the first of the dragon morphs, whose abilities she’d gifted him in order to solicit his cooperation. He had gladly completed the “rosary” for her, completing the work on the last few pyramids when she was forced to abandon the project, entering cryogenic freeze for all time, because her mind, grown too powerful, couldn’t help but summon the alien queen despite all her precautions to the contrary; it was the only way to ensure she didn’t do that, but it was also the only way to continue to augment the power of her mind and of the planet’s defenses—away from the alien queen’s prying eyes.
Bingwen had become quite the loyalist to the project because his own self-serving interests were entirely in alignment with the savant’s; he wanted to survive, and she’d given him the best route to such an end.
The pyramid configuration, once all lit up like this, was an all-seeing eye all its own. It allowed the Earth’s magicians and scientists to detect dangers—no matter where those dangers were in the multiverse—that were headed their way. The lens formed by the transmitting antennas at each node could be attuned further once the threat was detected to focus more specifically on the nature of that threat, revealing still more about the alien civilization, to give the people of earth the lead time they needed to arrange a defense.
Victor nearly came in his pants. The savant had given him not just a way to sense the alien queen’s return, but to get the drop on every celestial wizard—or its equivalent in the universe—any force sentient enough and powerful enough to be a threat to him.
Suddenly he didn’t much care one way or another about the alien queen’s return and whether or not she had her way with this world. With a tool like this at his disposal, he could continue to further his cosmic domination scheme. Surely the savant hadn’t been so accommodating just to make him happy? She was more of a “everything for the greater good” type; another Soren-like bleeding heart, in her own way. So why had she shown him this?
The sync with the savant’s mind was shattered. He turned to her in time to see her seedpod of a cranium split open.
Lar had been right. It was both a brainpan and a womb. The savant’s grey matter exited the womb, flitting on wings. The child hovered above the console Victor was standing at before taking one very big step back to get out of that thing’s way; its fluttering wings looking like it could scissor off his head with no effort.
The baby had a cranium nearly as big as the mother’s; its wings, much like any queen ant that sported them only so long as to establish a new colony before the wings fell away.
Victor turned to the family the savant had left behind; suddenly he understood the reason for her wails, her goodbyes, her grief. She would never see them again, and she couldn’t even raise them from the dead out of fear that firing up her mind to that degree would summon the alien queen. “You put her between that rock and a hard place, Victor. That’s on you. You better find a way to use your powers to reunite that family, or Soren will have you for breakfast. Besides, there are limits to how far you’ll go to play the heavy, now that you’ve grown as a person.” For now, Victor clenched his jaw and let the muscles bulging behind his rear teeth contain the emotions that threatened to get the best of him.
He regarded the savant’s dead body a moment longer on the floor, refusing to whisk it away down some portal he could easily open up, flushing it out into the vacuum of space. He owed her more than that. And if he didn’t feel so, everyone he had come to depend on would find out soon enough what went down here and hold him accountable. He wasn’t prepared to risk the wrath of the very people he depended on to see his mission through to the end.
She could damn well lie there and play to his guilty conscious until it was fertilized enough to take action—and to find a way of reuniting her with her family.
He returned his eyes to the baby. He knew what she represented—a new approach, perhaps a constellation of new approaches that would go beyond any way the savant mother had of generating warding magic with the cabbalistic magic of the master race. She had done all she could do to buy them time. Linked with Soren’s mind and the various other group minds he’d arrayed around him, she’d helped to flush the alien queen from this world. But she couldn’t go another round in that heavyweight boxing match. So she had birthed the child that could. Or, that was the hope.
Victor was feeling elated once again, ashamed for feeling that way, considering the dead mother on the floor, but damn it, not one superweapon for detecting and checking the powers of celestial wizards but two—the pyramid array and now the savant’s baby. This was shaping up to be one hell of a day. And for now, at least, worth being left behind while lesser wizards ventured out into the cosmos ahead of him. Even that could be viewed as a triumph; after all, wasn’t it his way to learn from others mistakes? Let them die out there i
n the cosmos, taking the hits for him; Victor would learn from their mistakes so that by the time he stepped on the cosmic stage, he’d have what it took to weather the punches heading his way.
TWENTY-FOUR
Stealy was running her hand over the Egyptian statue of Anubis, the jackal-headed man, when Ramon grabbed her chin and turned it toward Vima.
Vima was flying through the portal behind them on butterfly wings. “That would look angelic on anyone else,” Stealy said. “I’m prompted to ask who she stole the angel getup off of.”
“You and me both. I’m the king of conniving, well, the prince, so long as Victor keeps beating me at my game. And I tell you that girl is up to something.” His mumbling, he could only hope, was being drowned out by the droning of Vima’s butterfly wings.
“That mystery can wait. So long as she plays her part in our current drama, I don’t care what other intrigue she has in store for us.” Stealy went back to examining Anubis. From what he could tell, she found him quite sexy, and was getting aroused.
Ramon grumbled at her flirtatious hand movements over Anubis’s surface. “Fickle minx.”
He closed the portal behind them. “What’s up with dog breath over here?” Ramon directed the question to Vima. She lost the butterfly wings, letting them dissolve as if he was imagining the whole thing.
“He’s our ticket off this world.” Vima’s eyes were on the statue, not him.
“He’s a lump of stone.” Ramon didn’t take kindly to both women being more fixated on Anubis than on him. Admittedly, Anubis was closely associated with mummification and known as the protector of the dead. It was Anubis who conducted the deceased to the hall of judgment. There was a clue in that, but for right now, Ramon was too distracted to make much of it.
“The alien queen’s race was not the only one to visit Earth once upon a time,” Vima explained. “Anubis points us to one off-world civilization that might still be around and willing to accommodate us with a portal onto the celestial stage.” She turned her gaze on Ramon—like laser cannons swiveling into place on the surface of Mars as the space army decided to give unwelcomed Earth visitors a piece of their mind. “Search your memories. You must fill in the rest.” That intimidating voice was an acoustic weapon every bit the match for the eyes.
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