What if the choice was between doing that and becoming the destroyer of an entire species? Of an entire world?
The Vaimnamne banked again. Seth's arms were getting sore from hanging on, and a renewed fear of falling flared up in him.
“How much longer?” he asked. Their destination was looming large ahead of them, but not quickly enough for his liking.
“You are safe with me,” the Vaimnamne reassured him.
“Thanks. I guess if you'd wanted me dead, you could have dropped me ages ago.”
“That is true, Seth.”
“Do you have a name?”
“I do.”
Seth waited, but it wasn't offered. He took the hint and rode the rest of the way in silence.
“A world without gods is not a world without wonder. Strangeness walks our land as it always has.
It simply takes new shapes and wears new faces.”
THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 10:12
Hadrian and Ellis quenched their thirst in an uninhabited tropical fish shop. The tanks were full of dead fish, undrinkable and foul smelling, but there was a large bottle of water in the rear office and a cupboard full of slightly stale muesli snacks. Hadrian ate voraciously, not realising until then just how hungry he was. With something in his stomach, his headache eased, and they were soon on their way again.
They kept to side streets, winding circuitously through the sprawling cityscape, their only rough guide the reflected glow of the fires behind them. Rain fell twice, once in a gentle but steady stream that soaked them to the bone. The second came in a flash storm, accompanied by lightning and booming thunder. They waited out the heavy rain in the back of a toppled truck, afraid of what might accompany the storm, but nothing came out of the darkness. Wet and cold, they crept out of cover when the storm had passed and continued putting a substantial distance between them and Lascowicz's lair.
Twice, something swept overhead, a giant invisible shape that stirred the clouds and left flashes of ball lightning in its wake. Hadrian couldn't tell if it was flying under or over the clouds. Occasional glimpses of the stars showed them to be warping, as though seen through waves of intense heat. Subsonic roars shook the city and brought showers of mortar down upon them. He didn't know what caused the disturbances, but he thought of the collapsing Transamerica Pyramid and of the creature Lascowicz had summoned that night: another dei, perhaps the one called Mot. If so, the skies above the city had become playgrounds for gods along with the streets.
“Wait.” He brought Ellis to a halt just as they were about to dash across an empty intersection.
“What is it?”
“I don't know. A gut feeling.” Danger—leave quickly. Dread soaked into him the longer he stood staring at the intersection. “I think we should go back. Find another way.”
“Why?”
He couldn't explain how he knew. “There's something bad here. Something that might hurt us.”
“You've got to give me more than that.”
“That's all I have.”
She shrugged. “How do I know you're not imagining things?”
He wasn't sure himself. He was simply responding to an intuitive reading of the intersection. It was as though something had shifted in his head and in the world around him: a new geometry was making itself felt. There was a resonance between the shape of the road and the world around it.
He backed away from the intersection and took Ellis with him. “Watch,” he said, picking up a half brick and hefting it one hand. “Let's see if I'm right.”
With a grunt, he threw the brick into the centre of the intersection. What he expected to happen, he didn't know. But he knew, somehow, that it wasn't going to be good.
The brick came down—and disappeared as though it had never existed. Without so much as a sound or a ripple, it was swallowed by the road surface and vanished without a trace.
They waited a second. Nothing stirred. Hadrian was about to suggest that they had seen enough when, with a loud cracking noise, a stream of brick-coloured gravel sprayed out of the road. It shot with surprising force into the air, smashing a window on the building opposite them and rattling onto rooftops. They instinctively ducked, although none came in their direction.
“Okay,” Ellis said, taking his hand and hurrying back the way they'd come, “you've convinced me. Any other gut feelings you'd like to share?”
“None at the moment,” he said, “but I'll let you know.”
“Do.”
Her hand was cool against his. The night deepened around them as the fires gradually receded into the distance. He didn't know when dawn was due, but he longed for it. It seemed an eternity since he had last seen sunlight.
The next intersection was “safe.” From what, exactly, Hadrian wasn't certain, but he suspected it wasn't just from brick-eating monsters or obvious physical threats. The city was a dense tangle of connections and potential connections, as though a horde of giant, invisible spiders had moved in, leaving swathes of overlapping webs in their wake. The webs weren't visible, but he could feel them connecting buildings, lampposts, fire hydrants, parking meters—even manhole covers and drains. Nothing was exempt. If it was part of the city, it was caught up in the web.
He was becoming aware of an entirely new world around him—and that was both disorienting and strangely liberating. He knew that he had been granted this new consciousness by virtue of his connection with Seth, not through any effort of his own. It was, in its way, exhilarating: he might not understand everything about the new world yet, but at least he wasn't excluded. Not completely. There was a chance that he could find a way back to Kybele, or even survive on his own.
None of the first ten intersections they came across offered any such easy solutions, but hope remained.
They walked in silence until, finally, a hint of daylight crept across the sky. The light was so thin and wan it was barely there, but it did a lot to improve their spirits. Although they were both weary, their pace increased and they began to talk again. The enormity of their situation was reduced slightly, now they could see it more clearly.
“You've got blood on your top,” he said, pointing. The fabric over her upper abdomen was deeply stained, despite the rain. “Are you okay?”
“I'm fine,” she said and squeezed his hand. “It's not my blood.”
“Someone got in your way?”
“Kind of,” she said, grimacing. The cut on her cheek had healed into a brown scab. “It's a long story.”
He wanted to know exactly what had happened after Seth had died, how she had escaped Locyta and the others. She was reluctant to talk about it, avoiding with a wince any attempt to elicit details. But she did her best, and he tried not to press her too hard.
The train had screeched to a halt, she said, as though its engine had been ripped out. He assumed that was when the electricity had failed, on the moment of Seth's death, although whether it had failed locally first and spread later to cover the entire world she didn't know. In the chaotic darkness, she had escaped from those holding her captive. Her first thought had been to save Hadrian, but she hadn't been able to find him. Locyta and the others had taken him and his brother's body away.
Ellis had managed, with a number of the more agile commuters, to get out of the train and walk along the tunnels to the next station. From there she had climbed stalled escalators and followed echoing, pitch-black tunnels to the surface. No one knew what was going on. The power was off; cars, electronic watches, radios, mobile phones, and PDAs had all stopped working. It was as though the modern world had died with one stroke, rendering anything more complex than a screwdriver absolutely useless.
The new laws are fading, Kybele had said, and the old laws are returning. Because of you.
The streets filled with people. Confused, frightened, anxious crowds converged on police stations, town halls, and government buildings. Night was coming, and people were afraid. Surrounded by Swedes who, in the heat of the moment, cared more about themselv
es than the well-being of a tourist and her friends—even if one of them had been murdered—Ellis had felt utterly cut off from everyone and everything she had ever known.
She wouldn't talk much about what had happened when night fell. It was too awful, she said, and he could imagine. It was then, he assumed, that the first great work of Yod's servants had begun. The creature called Mot, according to Lascowicz, had scoured the streets clean of human life, covering larger and larger areas as formerly isolated city centres had joined and overlapped into one vast territory. The metaphor of giant spiders he had considered earlier took on a whole new meaning, especially when he remembered the pile of bodies that Pukje had shown him, hidden away in an abandoned building.
Few living things had survived. At the time, Hadrian had been unconscious in hospital: presumably Lascowicz's protection had spared him the fate of those sacrificed to fuel Yod's push into the First Realm. Ellis had had similar mixed fortunes, he gathered, surviving first by hiding and then, that night, by being captured.
Lascowicz's goons—more energumen—had locked her in a holding cell until the man himself came to inspect her. The detective had seemed angry, she said. Hadrian assumed that this had taken place not long after his escape from the hospital. He had interrogated her for hours, occasionally using force. A sexual assault was never threatened—much to her obvious relief—but knives were produced, and flames. They punched her, threatened to break her fingers.
“Minor stuff, really,” she said, “compared to what they could have done. Hell, I've got an imagination. I know what people do to people. I guess they played on that. They let me know that they were serious, and once I understood that I told them everything.”
“About what?”
“You and Seth. That was the stupid thing—on their part, I mean. They didn't ask me anything important, at least it didn't seem important at the time. It wasn't like you were secret agents and they thought I was an agent, too. They just wanted to know about you and your lives. I didn't see what harm it would be to tell them, and as I said, my imagination was good.”
“It's okay,” he reassured her, certain there was nothing she could have told Lascowicz and his allies that they could have used against him. They'd already had the most important thing: her.
“You'd do the same in my shoes.” Her voice was tough, but she didn't meet his eye.
“I know,” he said. “Go on.”
There wasn't much more to her story. Once Lascowicz was certain she had nothing else to tell, she'd been moved to the lair for safekeeping. She'd been fed twice and permitted to wash once. She hadn't been allowed a change of clothes. As time dragged, she had come to the conclusion that she was going to be killed whether Hadrian came for her or not. She was just a temporary asset. The moment it became inconvenient to keep her alive, she would be disposed of.
“That's about it,” she said. “You came and everything went crazy. And here we are now, taking the air on a beautiful spring day. Does it feel like spring to you? It does to me—and that's weird, since it was winter in Sweden when we last saw it. How did that happen?”
He didn't know how best to explain. The weather was out of whack, as was everything else in the world. The license plates on the cars around them were currently Spanish. A block earlier they had been Chinese; half an hour before that they had been Australian.
He had yet to see a single person from outside the city. That bothered him. Perhaps they couldn't get past the gods who had moved in, or they had problems of their own…
“What about you?” she asked. “You've been holding out on your side of the story all day. It's your turn now.”
He nodded reluctantly, although he was unsure where to begin. He described his awakening in hospital, with Bechard and Lascowicz before they had been taken over and after. In retrospect it seemed obvious that Lascowicz's interrogation had been used to tease out a means of manipulating Hadrian, if such was required. It certainly hadn't taken the Wolf and his cohorts long to track down Ellis and use her against him.
That was as far as he got, however, before his experiences jarred with Ellis's.
“You think Lascowicz is working for Yod?” she asked him. “It didn't look that way to me.”
“How so?”
“Well, that thing he was raising—Mot, or whatever it's called—is intended to distract Yod. I overheard them talking about it. If Yod breaks through into this realm, there'll be nothing to stop it. The person or thing they'd normally rely on isn't being much help.”
“Baal.”
She nodded. “That's the one. So Lascowicz has taken things into his own hands.”
Hadrian mulled that over. If it was true, it cast events in a completely different light. His immediate thought was to protest that Kybele had confirmed Lascowicz's alliance with the dei of the Second Realm, but looking back on it he realised that she hadn't so much done that as let him assume it.
“I don't get it,” he said, struggling to penetrate the tangle of lies and misconceptions. If Lascowicz and Kybele were old rivals for power in the First Realm, which seemed likely, then he could understand why she might encourage him to believe that Lascowicz was the enemy he sought. But why, in the process, obstruct someone making concrete efforts to stop Yod? If indeed that was what Lascowicz was doing. It didn't make sense at all—unless she had her own contingency plans that he didn't know about, plans that Mot would interfere with. Perhaps she hoped to wake Baal herself, rather than rely on a new, possibly dangerous player to do it for her.
“It doesn't matter,” he decided, ignoring the worm of disquiet burrowing steadily into his version of events. “Nothing changes the fact that Lascowicz kidnapped and threatened both of us. Whichever side he's on, it's not ours.”
She nodded. “He's on his own side, like all of us.”
Team Castillo wasn't doing so good, he thought, as he went on to describe his escape from the hospital and his experiences on the streets of the city. His description of Pukje provoked a blank response; likewise the many other creatures he had encountered along the way. Lascowicz had kept her safely away from some of the more bizarre fauna creeping into the world; for that at least he was grateful.
He came to the point where Pukje had led him to Kybele and her entourage.
“Kybele?” she said, shivering. “That must have been terrifying. I don't know what she looks like, but I can imagine. She's a monster.”
“A monster?” They were parroting each other, never a good sign. “You've met her. She told you where you could take me, back at the lair. She helped us.”
“That was Kybele?” Ellis shook her head. “No. She can't be.”
“Why not?”
“Kybele's not your friend. Don't think for a second that she is. The Swede—the person who killed Seth—was working for her.”
“Locyta? No. That can't be right.”
“I beg to differ.”
“But she helped me. You said so yourself.”
“She was keeping you alive.”
“Exactly.” Even as he said the word, he realised that it implied something he had, until that moment, never considered.
Kybele was keeping him alive so that the link between the realms would remain intact.
And that was what Yod wanted.
He stopped to lean against a wall, feeling dizzy. Utu's weight was heavy in his hand. The worm in his mind was voracious. “Oh, fuck.”
Gurzil's head had fallen at Kybele's feet, as Locyta's had only days ago. You set them up and I keep knocking them down, Lascowicz had said. How many more of your minions are you going to throw away like this?
Then there was the coming of Mot, Baal's enemy. The old god of death is still hungry, despite its recent snack. Did you think it would obediently go away when it was no longer needed?
Kybele was the mistress of the city. If anything so voracious as Mot was to roam freely like that, it could only have done so with her permission.
Hadrian felt like a complete fool. Kybele had told
him that Lascowicz had killed Locyta, but it had never occurred to him to wonder why. She had said that Locyta was doing Yod's will, not Lascowicz. She had made a speech about the danger of having only one top predator, and he had assumed from that that she was working against Yod. Mimir had indicated a dislike of Kybele, and so had the raven, Kutkinnaku. Lascowicz had called her a traitor to the realm.
Kybele was working for Yod.
Hadrian felt like weeping. He was utterly out of his depth.
“I'm sorry, Hadrian.” Ellis put an arm around him. Her skin was cool but her touch comforting. “I had no idea. You trusted her because she helped you find me. She probably wanted me for the same reason Lascowicz did: to control you. It feels awful to have been used. I should know.”
“How did you know?” he asked, his voice a hollow croak. “About Kybele.”
“Again, I heard Lascowicz talking about it. I guess I could be wrong—”
“No. You're not wrong. What else did you hear about her?”
“She wants to become the new dei of the First Realm. Baal is old and tired. Mot is old, too, but stronger now; angry. Its reappearance under Lascowicz's control obviously took her by surprise—and if anything is going to wake Baal, its old enemy will be the one. She probably thought she could walk in and out of Lascowicz's lair without too much trouble. She got more than she bargained for.”
So did I, Hadrian thought. He had been lied to at every turn.
Let me keep some secrets a little longer, she had said.
“I'm so sorry,” Ellis repeated. “I don't blame you for feeling down on yourself, but it's not your fault.”
He shook his head. That wasn't how he felt at all. He had been out of his depth, not out of his mind. Now he just felt unbearably weary, as though all the energy had been sucked out of him.
“We've got each other now,” she said. “That's the main thing. We came through okay.”
“So far.” He forced himself to move. Wallowing in self-pity wasn't going to solve anything. The puddles covering the streets were slowly receding, revealing miniature sandbars thick with the detritus of a dead city. He didn't want to be like that rubbish, trapped and lifeless, doomed to burial with the rest as it all came tumbling down around him.
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