by Guy Haley
"Most efficacious, madam goddess," said Jagadith approvingly. "You guided us as surely as a pilot brings a ship safe to harbour." Apart from himself and Veronique, who shone with a faint moonglow, nothing at all was visible. "Now, where are we?"
"Shall I try some light?" said Veronique.
"Madam, let us not be overstretching ourselves. We are in no immediate danger. It is advisable not to tamper with our increasingly fragile universe if we do not absolutely have to."
"Let's try something a little more straightforward then." And then she shouted, as loudly as she could. "Professor!" The volume of her voice was shocking in the quiet – both she and Jag had been whispering before without realising.
"Professor!"
A light split the horizon, a distance of several miles, Jag guessed. It formed a hemisphere, a glowing halo creeping out from it, bringing feeble illumination to the dark.
"Veronique? Veronique, why are you shouting? I may be old, but I am not yet deaf." The voice was gentle and cracked, and carried the faintest shred of a Cantonese accent. It was also everywhere, in everything. The voice was everything.
It was the voice of Professor Zhang Qifang, fugitive teacher and new god.
"In the beginning… I see," said Jagadith, his lips tight. He shifted his grip on his sword. "Be wary, madam goddess," he said to Veronique, "your mentor is suffering from the largest of all divinity complexes."
They walked towards the source of the voice, the light in the distance guiding them across the featureless, entropic dark.
Halfway there, Jagadith reached out and grasped Veronique's hand. Though her teeth chattered, his hand still felt warm, and no plume of steam issued from his mouth. He squeezed slightly, reassuring and warming her.
"They are here, madam goddess," whispered the knight, "to either side of us. No! Do not look directly. Try not to draw their attention. They are changed, my fellow paladins, but I doubt their abilities are much dimmed."
Veronique looked rigidly ahead, but from the corner of her eyes she could see them. A long rank of silent giants glistened into view, the guardians of The RealWorld Reality Realms. Each of the RR's had them, simple security protocols given forms by bored nerds. Jokes, really, elevated to positions of monumental responsibility when the RR RealWorlds were closed, guarding the universes against the creatures that had created them.
They glowed with pale blue light, their forms vastly inflated. A knight upon a horse, armoured in the late gothic fashion, glared imperiously at them. A titanic moose stood by his side, its mouth slack, gaze unfocused, a wooden club of Herculean proportions hanging loosely from a primitive hand. Beside it, a pair of moustachioed brothers in what looked like plumber's garb, wrenches at the ready. By them, a phantom bear with an eye patch wearing a lion skin with intelligent eyes who, though closely resembling Tarquinius, had clearly once been flesh. They and a score more stood silently, tracking the pair with eyes suffused with the cold glimmer of hateful stars.
It was a long, frightful walk. Veronique wanted to break into a run, to get to the pool of radiance ahead.
"Be careful," said Jagadith, his voice almost inaudible, yet full of overwhelming calm. "They are his creatures now, but they still remember me as the greatest of them. Only my will holds them from assault." A single droplet of sweat worked its way down his temple from under his turban. "It troubles me that the other paladins are here, enslaved. The work of your mentor goes beyond this Realm and into the others. This is not like any expulsion I have ever performed before. He is a powerful man, this Qifang."
As they approached the pool, its light drowned out the feeble luminescence of the paladin ghosts, but she could still feel their hard gaze boring into her neck.
And then they reached the light. It took a moment for Veronique to look into it, and even when she did, she still could not see anything other than the brilliance of a sun.
Jag stepped straight into it, dragging her with him.
They were in a room. She blinked the afterimages away from the blinding hemisphere, her eyes struggling with the sudden change. The change was as disorienting as it had been sudden, and the shift in temperature made her giddy. It took her a few moments to recover.
She recognised it as Professor Zhang Qifang's office, rendered as she'd never seen it rendered before.
Books from several centuries lined one wall, ancient mechanisms another. Pieces of pre-electronic machines and newer tech littered the place, half-buried by drifts of living paper. Outside, the sun shone on students crossing a university square, garbed in mid-twenty-first-century fashions.
It was stiflingly warm after their walk through the dark.
"This is incredible," said Veronique. She inspected the ceiling, touched the wood, rubbed dust between her fingertips. "This is not real, is it? I mean this is… This is the most convincing simulation I have ever seen. They never feel entirely real." She trailed off, walking round the room. In the best virtualities, like the Realms, there were always signifiers to their unreality; those less than the best never came close. "The law won't let him have an office of his own. I think that always upset him. He is a very private man." She looked up and down a bookcase. "I never thought about it, but perhaps this is a reconstruction of one of his old offices. He probably had one, once. He's very old, older than the dippies, that's for sure."
"It is most probably a composite," said Jagadith. He looked sad. "I have seen such things many times before. Not all gods come with heavy hands. Some are lost, and seek a home."
"He must have been working at this for ever! It's like I have stepped back in time."
Jag's lips quirked, his first smile since the death of this mount. "Perhaps you have. This is all illusion, but only so much as the rest of the Realms, and they are very real to me." He looked about the room. "The same as always, but different as I expected," he said half to himself. "Not like I remember your 'Real'."
"You have been into the Real?" She stopped herself and thought. "I suppose it is possible, actually, I don't see why not." She looked at him questioningly.
Jagadith started, shaken out of memory. "A very long time ago now by the running of our years, I am thinking." He breathed a deep breath. "Through here, I think," he said then, moving toward a curtained doorway on the other side of the room.
"Isn't that just a closet?" said Veronique.
"When the Realms are invaded by the gods, madam goddess, things are rarely what they seem. You must understand that this illusion is only so powerful because it is a refinement of the standard constructions you have come to call the Realms. There is artistry here, great skill. Our world grows in complexity day by day as it resonates within itself, pulling itself closer and closer to objective reality. But to make something like this outside of the natural progression of involuted complexity requires a master's eye."
A darkness came, the impression, if not the sight, of a giant bending down, pressing one huge gelid eye to the window to peer at them. A breeze ruffled the detritus on the room's desks. Fearful images ran across the living paper, and screams sounded outside, distant and desperate, then passed. Sunlight streamed in, motes of dust sparkling in the shafts. Veronique shuddered.
"What the hell was that?"
"Peel back the wallpaper and it might well not be a wall you confront, but the very stuff of nightmare. This is the flipside, as I believe you say," said Jagadith. He turned round, put his finger to his lips as he scrutinised the room. "But there is…" He trailed off. "Come!" he said suddenly. "The essence of the man we seek is on the other side of this partition. Be wary, something is not as it seems here, and, I am thinking, not in the usual way." And with that he swept the curtain aside and stepped through. Veronique followed after.
On the other side was another dark space as wide as a stadium. In the middle ran a column of coruscating energy, a figure of a silvered man rotating slowly within it. Next to that, sitting upon an incongruous milking stool, was Professor Zhang Qifang. He closed the book he was reading with a snap a
nd looked up. He gave them both a welcoming smile.
"You are persistent," he said. "I was hoping my new servants would have stopped you by now." Mild surprise wrote its lines across his liver-spotted face. At 127, Qifang looked not a day over eighty. A sigh caught in his throat, causing him to cough dryly. He stood and made his way painfully over to the pair. He looked the paladin up and down thoughtfully. "But I suppose I should have expected it of you, the greatest of all. I suppose I should regard your coming as an honour, only I'm not a fool. I did try and stop you. I have failed," he said.
"I am not a man for the stopping," said Jagadith calmly. "I am a man whose sole purpose it is to protect my charges from the likes of you and your interferences. A task, I add, I will take no small amount of pleasure in accomplishing, on account of the premature demise of my good friend Tarquinius."
"What?" coughed the old man "Heh, why? He will be reborn. The deaths of you avatars are… what? Inconvenient, that is all." He jabbed his finger at the knight. "You know nothing of true death, nothing at all."
"He will not be the same as he was. Nor will I."
"Really? Now that is very interesting." Jagadith opened his mouth, but the old man interrupted. "No, no. I do not dispute your claim, you are far better placed than I to know. I always intended to look into the transmigration of the soul in the reincarnation of Realm paladins. Never got round to it. Too little time." He slumped a little. "Too little time for everything. No matter. It is academic; you will fail, and then I will have all the time in the world."
"I beg to differ, sir," said Jagadith, and pulled at his sword. The metal of it came to life, a complex pattern of fractals playing up and down the steel, but the blade did not leave its scabbard fully, for Veronique had grasped the knight's arm.
"Jag, you'll kill him." She was matter-of-fact. There was no plea in what she said.
"A more deserving fate I have never had the pleasure of dealing."
"Let me talk to him. I am sure there must be another solution."
"No mistake, Dr Valdaire," said Qifang. "I am indeed here, as your friend no doubt has told you. Up to no good" – he grinned like a schoolboy – "would be a nice way of putting it." His brow dropped and he pulled a face at Veronique's shock. "You are disappointed. I am sorry. But it is not really so surprising. Nobody wants to die. You look death in the face, it changes you. When you have, Veronique Valdaire, you will see things my way."
"This goes against everything you ever taught me."
"On the contrary. I am doing this precisely so that I may continue what I have been teaching you. I am dying. I have lived as long as it is humanly possible, and although it is a far greater span of years than I could have hoped for as a young man, it is not enough. I must complete my work. Once I am gone, how can I continue to protect the thirty-six Realms? It is more than life to me, it is my vocation, and I will not allow death to stop me."
"By destroying a whole world?"
"No! By creating a new one! One with me at the centre, where I will be able to build a paradise, and protect for ever these places that you and I, and those idiots at the VIA and the UN, care so much about."
"You can't do that! You're condemning millions of sentient beings to death, beings you have fought for years to protect!"
Qifang pursed his weathered lips. "A regrettable occurrence, yes. But Veronique, you know that Thirty-six is the most violent of all the lands. Its loss is regrettable, but I will recreate it anew, and better, and then it will safeguard all the rest. One dies to save thirty-five, a good transaction."
"And what of self-determination? Does that mean nothing to you any longer?" Veronique said angrily. "What about the law?"
Qifang laughed an uproarious laugh that trailed into dry coughs. He dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief. "Look not at me, Veronique, but at that." He pointed to the silver giant behind him. "I will be above all earthly law! The self-determination of the inhabitants of the remaining thirty-five Realms will be guaranteed for all time, and I will deal most harshly with those who would have it any other way. Veronique, please. You do not understand, I can see that. Thirty-six's loss is a noble sacrifice."
"This world, it has a name," said Jagadith calmly. He shook off Veronique's arm and concluded drawing his sword.
Qifang looked at the weapon and sniffed dismissively. "You expect to harm me with that? I am afraid you are too late. That is my body now," he said, gesturing at the figure in the stream of lightning, "not this. Shortly my reconfiguration will be complete. I will create a new world." He turned to Veronique, his eyes fevered. "And it will be a new world, Veronique. I can create a heaven away from Earth."
"What if you are wrong? What if these actions turn people against the Realms and they are deactivated? Consider it, please, for a moment. Such massive alteration of Thirty-six will endanger all the others."
A flurry of expressions flickered across Qifang's face, as if he were searching for the right one amidst a poorly archived filing system.
Jagadith frowned. "Something," he muttered, "is not right here."
Qifang shook his head. "Veronique, I would never dare take such a risk without being absolutely sure, and I am. Put away your sword, paladin, I would not wish to destroy the child of one of history's great minds." The silver man and the doorway to the office disappeared. They were at the centre of the dark again. Beyond the meagre circle of light the three of them stood within, jostled by the ghosts of Jagadith's fellows. "See? They are mine now, but they will all have a place in my new world, as could you, as could you both."
Jag stood back; his sword dropped to his side. "Madam goddess, he is right, I cannot fight him. He is too powerful."
"Ha! You see sense, prince. Listen to him, Veronique. You respect him, and well you should. Listen to what he says! You are one of the finest research graduates I have ever had. Think of what we could achieve together here!"
"Silence!" bellowed Jagadith, and held his sword at full stretch, its point directed unwaveringly toward the professor. "Madam goddess," he said to Veronique, his expression full of regret, "it is I who am sorry. I was wrong. I am thinking you may be right about your professor."
"What do you mean?"
"I cannot fight him because this is not Professor Zhang Qifang. This is not some interloper from outside, but something much worse, this is something from within the Realms. He is trying to trick you, and me. You need to be gone from here, now. I am sorry I do not have time to properly enact the protocols of banishment. I only pray that this will work in their stead."
"But if that is not Qifang, wha…" began Veronique, and stopped. The pain was sudden and all consuming, quickly followed by a numbness that coiled about her heart. Jagadith leaned in and pushed his sword hard, once, twice. She felt the metal scrape on her ribs as it forced them apart slightly. The sword emerged from her back, its fire charring her flesh, the burnt-pork stink of it filling her nostrils.
"What are you doing?" said Qifang – whether from fear or some residual concern for his colleague, Veronique's dying mind could not discern.
"Go now in peace, and with my protection. This is not your mentor, you must believe that. Above all, remember you are not really here, after all," said Jag. "Please, madam goddess, do not come back."
Veronique looked, her eyes questioning, mouth open in shock. She could not talk. The cold enveloped her, her vision dimmed to a point of light, Jag at its centre as grim-faced as Shiva.
The light went out.
Veronique's body slid off the knight's sword. He turned to confront the shades of the paladins as they moved towards him.
Valdaire's blood evaporated from his sparking blade as he raised it against his fellows.
Veronique awoke with little drama. Her eyes flicked open, her first short breath hissed out from between dry lips, perhaps a little more eagerly than if she had been sleeping. A second followed, deeper and longer, then coughing, awkward and painful around the feeding tube. She tugged free in a state close to panic, spit and muc
us running dripping on the floor.
She was back.
Her breathing rasped in her ears. Her vision would not focus. Her eyes were dry and scratchy. Her eyelids caught painfully when she blinked, and then her eyes filled with tears in response, blurring her sight further. It was dark. Her rank odour was an affront to her nose. She sat up and rubbed between her breasts, the place where Jagadith's sword had pierced her in that other place. It throbbed, but there was no sign of the wound. The rush of relief she felt was mingled with fear. Many had died from similar injuries inflicted in the RR RealWorlds; the mental buffers to prevent dream-induced death had been removed when the UN declared the Realms free.
