"It is but an echo the long dead past, merely images reconstructed from scant records."
"No," I said, "it is a foretaste of the future."
He said nothing in reply. I realized, though, that his silence came not from any consideration of what I had said, but from his fascination with the new images that had appeared on Old Confustible's screen. I was reminded of a child sitting rapt before a wondershow.
This time the point of view was general, as the screen showed a series of brief shots and slow pans. The cumulative effect was to establish an enormous excavation pit seen obliquely from above, almost entirely filled by an immense mechanism fashioned from several different metals as well as some substances that I could not readily identify. It was difficult to focus the eye on the huge device, which towered well above the rim of the great pit, partly because some of its surfaces were obscured by scaffolding, partly because some of the materials from which it was made resisted the eye's attempts to secure a clear view.
"There are transdimensional aspects to that thing," I said to the Archon's integrator.
"There are. It is an interplanar device."
The point of view now swooped in for a closer look. On some levels of the scaffolding, men and women in highly structured clothing performed operations I could not make out. Some were adjusting controls or attaching components to the main mass of the apparatus, while others appeared to be merely standing in deep thought and conversing with themselves, while still more were gesticulating or performing what looked like interpretative dance. When I heard my other self make a wordless sound of appreciation I understood what I was seeing.
"Those are, in a universe governed by magic, the equivalent of apparaticists and technicians," I said.
"Indeed," said Old Confustible, "a large number of magicians and arcanists were employed to construct the device. We see them now as the final adjustments are made before the first test."
"The device's purpose?" I said.
"The question can be answered in two ways. It is intended to draw from an adjacent plane an energy that occurs naturally and plentifully there, and which normally leaks into this realm steadily and pervasively, though in small quantities. The device will store the energy so that it can be applied in concentrated form and directed at specific targets."
"The name of this energy?"
"Colloquially, it is called 'evil.'"
"I see," I said. "And the second purpose?"
"To serve the ends of the chief person of power in this world."
"The Archon?"
"The title was not then used. Indeed, the title was never spoken. Circumlocutions were employed, such as 'He Who Commands' or 'The Authority.'"
I did not need my intuitive sharer to make the connection. "Assistant," I said to the creature on my shoulder, "communicate to the Archon's integrator the sequence of letters that, if spoken, cause my inner self to collapse."
To Old Confustible, I said, "Is that the name that was not to be spoken?"
I would not have expected to hear even the slight tinge of surprise that colored the voice of the Archon's integrator as it said, "It was. Where did you come across it?"
"It would premature to say," I said. "I would like to see this figure of dread."
"I was just coming to it. Behold."
The images on the screen shifted as the point of view again swooped away from the capering, muttering spellcasters. It panned across a cityscape and I recognized some of the startlingly strange architecture that I had seen through the eyes of Phaladrine.
"What city is this?" I said.
"It was called Ambit."
The viewpoint settled on one quarter of the horizon, focused on a remarkable building that dominated the skyline: it was pyramidal in shape, of colossal dimensions and constructed of massive blocks of black stone that seemed to be cemented together by a mortar made of congealed fire. It did not rest on the ground, but was supported on two gargantuan legs clad in green reptilian scales, knees bent like a weightlifter's, the feet ending in hooked talons. The claws dug not into open ground but into ruined masonry, as if the entire building had but recently arrived on the scene, its mode of transport crushing houses and walls as if they were blades of grass.
The pyramid's apex was a single clear crystal, easily the size of the greatest manse in Olkney, set with windows shuttered by sheets of opal and two tall doors of brilliant ruby. As the viewpoint carried me toward them, the portals opened ponderously and I passed within. What followed was a dizzying passage through high, wide corridors and great halls, lined and ornamented with marvels too many and too bizarre for me to encompass. I saw improbable beasts, men and women whose bodies were formed of swirling motes, translucent servants busily going about incomprehensible duties, floors of flame and walls of ice, rooms that seemed to go on into infinity, corners that turned in eye-staggering, impossible directions.
"Astonishing," said my inner companion. "The inventiveness. The sheer artistry."
"The vanity," I said. "The sheer excess."
The viewpoint raced on, rushing up a spiral staircase to arrive at the very pinnacle of the great crystal. Here was a pyramidal chamber of human proportions, its walls translucent, its floor of milk white stone veined in reds and greens. At the center of the room the floor became a raised dais on which stood a throne of black iron. At first I thought the metal was oiled, then I realized that the constant shimmer across its surface was of some powerful energy, barely constrained.
Upon the throne sat the shape of a man, forearms resting on the chair's armrests, feet flat on the white stone of the dais, in such perfect stillness that I would have taken the image for a static rendering, if the viewpoint had not swept me around the room to see him from all angles.
"Is this he?" I asked Old Confustible.
"It is what he had become," it said.
"Freeze the display," I said. "I wish to study him."
The integrator obliged and, at my further bidding, enlarged the image. The figure did not appear to be that of a man, but of a statue. Yet as I had the magnification increased still more, I saw that this was a work beyond the skill of the most adept sculpture. Even to the pores of his skin, the lashes of his eyes, the fine hairs on the backs of his hands, the detail was exquisitely accurate. Yet this was not flesh, but a dull black substance I would have called stone, if stone could have come alive.
"What is he made of?" I asked the Archon's integrator.
"The substance was never named to us," it said. "He traveled into another realm, underwent fearsome ordeals, remade himself, and returned as you see him. His powers had increased multifold."
I noticed that my thumb and forefinger were rubbing against each other and I realized that it was not I but my other self who was unconsciously performing the action. "You know what that stuff is," he said to me.
"Yes," I said, "I do." Though I had only ever seen it as grains of black grit.
"Bid the integrator to pull back to give us a full view of him," he asked me, "and unfreeze the image. I wish to try something."
"Very well." I did as he asked and watched the dark figure sitting immobile upon the throne, the face deeply lined, the nose proud as a raised sword blade, the eyes sunk in darkness. Yet not immobile, I now saw, because the lines about those eyes now deepened, as if the man of stone had turned his mind to some question and was focusing his thoughts thereon.
Then from within my own head I heard my other self whisper a name: "Majestrum."
Instantly, I felt his presence go from me, as it had when Filidor had spoken the word. But that was not what caught my attention. Instead I kept my gaze on the screen, where that dark and stony countenance from an impossibly ancient age had reacted to the sound of its unspeakable name. I recalled how, not long before, I had seen a change in Chalivire Afre's face and likened it to a predator focusing on the sudden appearance of prey. Compared to the starkness I saw in the visage of Majestrum, Chalivire had shown me no more than the face of a kitten spying a bal
l of thread.
"I must contemplate," I told Old Confustible. "I will walk outside for a few moments, then return."
"As you wish."
I went out onto the Archon's private terrace and stood as if in meditation over the view of Olkney slipping into evening. But my regard was turned inward. I called to my inner companion, seeking to rouse him, and after several such attempts, I felt his return.
"Are you all right?" I said.
"I believe so," he said.
"What was the purpose of that exercise?"
"Tell me first, what happened when I spoke the name?"
I was candid with him. "I do not like to say it, but I cannot help acknowledging that he reacted."
There was a silence from within me. "What does it mean?" I said.
"I cannot say for certain," he said, "but this is much is clear: he is not dead. Nor is he without power."
"It is four aeons since the impressions were taken on which those images were based."
"Four aeons, here," he said, "but you said yourself that in another realm that may be no more than a moderately busy afternoon."
"You think he is alive?"
"The word may not precisely apply. But, in some way, he is assuredly extant."
"And if his power still reaches from wherever he is to wherever his name is spoken?" I said. The old sun was sliding into the dark sea of Mornedy Sound. I felt the first chill of the night wind so high up above the city. My assistant shivered on my shoulder. I showed my other self the images of my thoughts about beasts of prey. "We are but kittens," I said.
"We must learn more," my sharer said. I sensed fear in him, but also the same thrill of excitement. Had he been in control of our body, it would have been trembling.
Instead I shivered from a chill that had nothing to do with the cold upper air, but I said, "Yes. Let us go back in."
#
"He had become," Old Confustible said, "a grim tyrant." The image of the dark man on the iron throne hung in the air of the Archon's study. "The Authority had formerly been but the first among nine peers, but his nature combined overweening ambition with an unparalleled aptitude for attracting, binding and applying the most powerful energies of his realm. He grew, in strength and in appetite, and soon stretched his rule across the world."
The scene shifted and another figure appeared: a tall man, lean and ascetic of face, clad in a robe of brilliant blue, his long, white hair wind-whipped like a flag. He stood atop a black crag, a great chasm at his feet and an unearthly sky rippling and streaming above his head.
"One of his eight colleagues opposed him, challenged him to a contest of powers. They met at the appointed place, in a realm jointly created for the purpose. There is no actual record of the conflict. Only one of the duelists returned and he gave no formal report. His return and his opponent's absence should have conveyed all that needed to be said, but in the years following, the victor often dwelled on the details of his triumph. The scene here is a reconstruction based on that crowing."
Majestrum had positioned himself opposite the blue-robed wizard, the dark stuff of his legs and feet seemingly rooted in a rocky outcrop that stood out from the cliff that was the far side of the chasm. He waited calmly, his stony eyes cast down at the empty air.
A bell pealed somewhere above the two combatants. The man in blue raised his hands in a precise configuration. The sleeves of his robe fell back to his elbows, revealing forearms that were densely figured in arcane symbols. Some of them glowed a deeper blue than his clothing, others were like fire set into his pale flesh.
The bell tolled once again and the lean man's hands swept forward to point across the empty space at Majestrum. A concentrated beam of invisible force roiled the air between them, smashing across the distance in moments, only to break harmlessly against the barrier of the Authority's outstretched palm.
I saw that this had been no opening feint. The blue wizard had sought to damage, if not destroy, his opponent by summoning the entirety of his strength to launch a devastating initial blow. But all his power had not moved Majestrum back by a minim. Now he recognized, too late, the degree to which he was overmatched. His jaw made a sideways motion and his bright piercing eyes blinked once.
Majestrum withdrew the hand that had repelled the other's assault, then raised it in a languid gesture, the dark stone fingers curled inwards. Then he flicked the digits outward with a snap of the wrist, and a thick jet of brown filth spewed across the chasm.
The man in blue snapped his arms together in a cross and I saw his lips speak a syllable, but whatever the intended effect of his countermove might have been, it achieved nothing. The feculent stream struck squarely where his arms met, battered them aside and drenched the man in corruption, the force of the purulent surge driving him back. The wizard's feet flew out from beneath him and he sat down heavily.
The flow of ordure and rot continued from Majestrum's outstretched palm while his other hand executed a circular motion --once, twice, three times -- while he spoke several words that my mind could not retain: they slid from my mental grasp even as I heard them. The effect of this new incantation was to invert the crag on which his opponent had stood -- and now struggled to stand against the torrent of foulness -- turning it into a narrow depression, deeper than the blue wizard was tall.
Majestrum's intent was clear, I thought. He meant to drown in ordure the former colleague who had dared to challenge his assumption of supreme authority. But I was wrong; the victor in this contest relished cruelty far beyond what I was seeing. While the vanquished wizard floundered in a pool of filth, caked and dripping from head to fingertips in unspeakable substances, the author of these indignities came to hover in the air above his victim. From that vantage, he unleashed a succession of hurts and humiliations that I soon found unbearable to watch.
"Enough," I said to the Archon's integrator. "Let us move on."
From within, I heard a protest. "I must see how these things are done," said my other self.
"They are not fit to be witnessed," I said, inwardly. "Come back some day when I am gone and indulge your appetites to a satiety. But leave me out of it."
"I do not act from idle curiosity. That. . . entity is what we may have to contend with."
"From what we have just seen, you would need more than the scraps of spells in Baxandall's books to handle him."
"All the more reason to study the record."
I ignored the assertion and said, "Besides, it is Osk Rievor we must deal with, here in our aeon, and he is a far smaller fish."
"I am not sure of that," he said. "I am still not able to form a clear pattern."
"Then let us get on with acquiring information from Old Confustible, obtaining a broad scope, rather than obsessing over details of cantrips and hand-waving."
The Archon's integrator was speaking again. It had blanked the screen. "Are you ready to continue?" it said. "Your attention sometimes seems to wander."
"It is how I process information," I said.
"How curious." The screen lit anew with the image of the great device in its pit. "Despite what had happened to the Authority's challenger, whose name was subsequently expunged completely, his former peers still chafed under his increasingly arbitrary rule. When he ordered them to serve him in the construction of the interplanar capacitor in which he would store and wield a vast concentration of evil, they saw an opportunity to undo him."
"He was enlisting them to harness an energy that was more powerful than he was," I said.
"Indeed," said Old Confustible, "and so a plot was hatched, predicated on the arrival of a moment when the Authority would be vulnerable: the moment when the device was first activated. The focus of the plot was on the key to the device, the implement that would control its operation.
"Not even the Authority had the power to construct such an instrument. He required the assistance of the seven most powerful thaumaturges of the age, those who had been his peers until he had subjugated them."
; "And were their names," I said, "Phaladrine Baudrel, Omris Shevannagar, App Imrici, Hilarion Falan-Falan, Terris Botch, Chav Hemister and Oblon Hammis?"
"You surprise me," said Old Confustible. "I don't think I have been surprised by anyone save an Archon -- and not too many of them -- in a very long time. Where did you come across those names?"
"It would be --"
"I am familiar with your signature phrase," the integrator said. "Very well, let us continue."
I saw images of Phaladrine Baudrel and six others, each working in private. "The Authority divided the project into separate segments and gave one to each of the seven. None was to know what any of the other six were working on."
"Yet they did, didn't they?" I said.
"He Who Commanded was growing more and more consumed by the building of his device. It would have allowed him to extend his rule beyond Earth to all the worlds of The Spray and into several other universes. He began to dream the dreams that always seduce a tyrant: powers beyond powers, worlds at his feet, whole realms bowing to his whims."
"And the dreams occluded his faculties," I said. "It was ever thus, we may be thankful, else tyrants would never fall."
The screen showed members of the cabal crossing each other's paths while on seemingly innocuous errands. Sleeves touched, bodies brushed by each other, glances met, lips moved. "He unknowingly created space, only a little space, in which the plotters could operate. They took the chance, and together they instilled into the key a deliberate flaw that they hoped would slip by his notice."
"So that when he inserted into the mechanism and caused it to come to life. . ." I said.
"It would destroy him."
"And did it work?"
"See for yourself."
Now the screen showed the great mechanism at a later time, when all the scaffolding had been removed. Its surface was now clear, all components hidden beneath a uniform gray skin across which flickered rainbows of energy. Around the pit in which it stood a great crowd was assembled, waving colorful flags and bunting, though when the viewpoint swept across the upturned faces I saw behind the expressions of gay excitement a common strain of barely disguised terror.
Majestrum Page 20
