Ascent: Second Book of the Nameless Chronicle

by M. T. Miller

  “From whom?” said the Terror, still down. Even though he appeared weak, his hands did not seem to shake. “From the Russians? Or from Divine?”

  She remained silent.

  Eagle wished he could see her expression. The way she was frozen in place, it was bound to be hilarious.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “What happened down there?”

  His cigar in its ashtray, the sheriff stared into the Nameless’ eyes. They were seated in what was becoming their standard meeting room. Sitting in his spot, the Nameless hunched over the table, his elbows pressing against it.

  “Divine tried to kill me,” he said. “I got careless, and while I wrestled with the Russian, she stabbed through us both.”

  “Let me guess—you got better?”

  “Naturally,” the Nameless said.

  “Nothing remotely natural about you. And I don’t suppose you’re gonna let bygones be bygones?” the sheriff asked, taking another hit.

  “Would you?” the Nameless asked.

  “If I could get right back up like you, then maybe I would,” the sheriff said. “After all, she’s sure to be scared as shit right now. A bright girl, that one. Can take a hint.”

  “Correct me if I am wrong,” said the Nameless, “but this is more than a hint.”

  “And you are in a less-than-ideal position.”

  “I know that.” The Nameless averted his eyes. “It is the only reason I did not shoot. I could have taken her out the moment she came back.”

  “And that’s why we’re here, having a civil discussion,” the sheriff said. “As opposed to, y’know, you rotting in a cell somewhere.”

  “Of course. Civil,” the Nameless said. “She will get the same treatment, I suppose?”

  “No,” the sheriff said. “I’ve tossed her into the dungeons, to cool off for a while.”

  “That… is unexpected,” said the Nameless, looking back to the sheriff. “So, you believe me?”

  “Even if I don’t, she still fucked up badly, leaving you like that. Going by medical reports alone, you’ve barely got a flesh wound. That’s sloppy work on her part. I don’t reward sloppy work.”

  “And how long will she remain there?” the Nameless asked.

  “Who knows?” The sheriff showed a faint smile.

  “I see,” the Nameless said. “Is that all?”

  “Yeah.” The sheriff put his cigar back in the ashtray, and put his feet up right next to it. “Go home, Bones. Rest up. You’ll need it.”

  “I will,” the Nameless said on his way to the door.

  “Don’t worry about the Grin,” the sheriff said as the Nameless grabbed the knob.

  “I beg your pardon?” The Nameless said, stopping.

  “He won’t move a finger alone,” the sheriff said, looking sideways. “That, I can guarantee.”

  “Good to know,” the Nameless said. “Good day, Sheriff.”

  “Same.”

  ***

  Fully intent on taking the sheriff’s advice, the Nameless took the final detour toward his home. However, the strange figure that stood before his door put a big question mark over that plan.

  Who…?

  Tall, lean, and pale, the man had no hair on his head and wore a dark green suit. Barely showing any signs of breathing, he turned his head very slowly.

  The man in charge of the floor?

  “Mr. Bones,” he said as the rest of his body followed his head. “I would have a talk.”

  “What about?” the Nameless said, reaching for his gun.

  “There’ll be no need for that,” the bald man said. “I assure you, my intentions are entirely friendly.”

  “I have had a bad day,” the Nameless said, his hand hovering at his side. “It will take more than that to gain my trust.”

  “I know you’ve had a bad day, Mr. Bones. As a matter of fact, I counted on it.”

  “This is not helping your position,” the Nameless said.

  “Perhaps not,” the bald man said. “While I didn’t order anyone to attack you, the way everything has turned out is nothing short of perfect.” Now facing the Nameless, he raised his palms slightly. “You’ve just taken part in a test. Congratulations, you’ve passed!”

  “I do not understand a word you’re saying.”

  “You will.” The bald man started walking toward the Nameless. He did not seem to be in any kind of hurry. Once he got within an arm’s length, he stopped and raised his right hand. “I am Snake. Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bones.”

  “Erm, likewise,” the Nameless said as he moved his hand away from his gun. They shook, and he noted how cold the man’s skin was.

  “There is a lot I have to go over,” Snake said once they let go. He pointed to the general direction of the elevators. “Would you mind if we talked in my office?”

  “Would my home not be proper?” the Nameless asked.

  “It would,” Snake said. “But I prefer privacy. This concerns you, and who you were lifetimes ago.”

  Who I was? The Nameless stepped back, his hand over the revolver again.

  “Please,” Snake said. “Do you see any guards? I’ve ordered them away. To show you my trust. Surely you see that.”

  The Nameless took a quick look around. The man was right. Besides the two of them, there was no one in sight. He relaxed his posture, but not his mind.

  “Who was I, Snake?”

  “We’ll get to that,” Snake said. “In my office.”

  The Nameless contemplated what he was to do. If this man truly had the power to move the guards around, then he could do much better than lure him somewhere.

  “Let me guess,” the Nameless said as he slowly turned the way Snake was pointing. “You are with the Management.”

  “One of its four members, yes,” Snake said as he led the way. The Nameless followed step by step.

  “And what was your test about?” the Nameless asked.

  “Humanity,” Snake said. “Or whatever passes for it, when one is not human.”

  “What am I, if not human?”

  “I could say it,” Snake said, “but I’d prefer to show you instead.”

  “No,” the Nameless said, stopping abruptly and causing Snake to do so as well. “I have waited enough. I want to know now.”

  Snake sighed. Facing the Nameless, he lifted a hand in front of his face, and extended his index finger. Within seconds, it wiggled and contorted, developing eyes and a large mouth at the end. A hissing sound followed, and a two-foot long snake stuck out from where it was definitely not expected.

  “That… that is a new trick,” the Nameless said.

  “As a matter of fact, it’s quite old,” Snake said. “As old as the world, give or take a few millennia.”

  “Sorcery of some kind?” asked the Nameless.

  “Not at all,” Snake said as his finger slowly returned to normal. “Sorcery is a mortal form of magic. Where I, like you, am divine.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Please.” Snake pointed toward the elevators again. “We’ll talk along the way.”

  Grudgingly, the Nameless started walking.

  “We are gods, Mr. Bones,” Snake said, leading the way again. “Pagan gods, as some would choose to clump us together.”

  The Nameless did not say a word. Deep inside him, some buried part agreed with it.

  “Deities forgotten by the modern world,” Snake continued. “Until relatively recently, forced to feed on scraps in order to survive. But times change, and so have we. This is our chance.”

  “You are talking about the world’s end?”

  “Please,” Snake said as he led them to an intersection. “I look left, I still see the planet. I look right, and it’s the same. The world is still there. A few billion people poorer, but nothing is perfect.”

  “Did you cause this?” the Nameless asked. “The mass disappearances?”

  “Of course not,” Snake said. “Oh, if only we were capable of something like that… But no, wh
atever it was, it happened without our intervention. Who knows what it was, really? As far as we know, it might have even been the Rapture.”

  “The Rapture?”

  “The end times, as proclaimed by some of the more insane Christian denominations,” Snake said. “Supposedly, the pious would be beamed up into Heaven so they could sit out the final battle.”

  “So…” The Nameless paused. “The Christian God exists?”

  “I have no idea,” Snake said. “Neither does anyone else I’ve asked. And I have asked. That faith came from the Old World, a place I don’t remember setting foot in.”

  “And was there a final battle?” the Nameless asked.

  “Again, the world’s still standing, so I wouldn’t call it final,” Snake said as he greeted the guards around the elevators. He pointed toward a door, and the Nameless followed. It was numbered as 1. “But there certainly was a battle. Or battles, however you like.”

  “For dominance over the States?” asked the Nameless . “Or the rest of the world?”

  “Both,” Snake said, unlocking the door. “Whoever did this left us in a world full of armed psychopaths. Was it any surprise they broke it so quickly?”

  The door opened and Snake went first. The lights went up, and he gestured for his guest to enter. As the Nameless complied he noticed that instead of a room, inside was another hallway. A spiral staircase went up beyond a flexible iron fence, while a door to the left led elsewhere.

  “My office,” Snake said as he led them through the door.

  “Relics?” the Nameless said. The room was full of them. Artifacts of all shapes and sizes hung from the walls, mostly Native American in origin. Clothing, weapons, and things he could not even name, all several centuries old.

  “I get sentimental from time to time,” Snake said as he sat behind the table. He pointed toward another chair. “Please.”

  The Nameless complied, although he kept staring.

  “If…” The sight of a spear reminded him of what he wanted to know most. “If I am as divine as you say, why must I keep killing?”

  “That’s the easiest question you could possibly ask,” Snake said. “Human sacrifice. As a deity, you require sustenance, and you seem to respond well to that particular method. You always did.”

  “I did?” the Nameless repeated. “Who am…who was I, then?”

  “We never knew you by name,” Snake said. “But in all likelihood, you were some sort of war god. A particularly aggressive one. What I’m certain about is that you came from the Old World.

  “When you did,” Snake went on, “you brought with you an amount of destruction this continent had never witnessed before. We had no idea what you had planned or why you were even here; from our perspective, you were nothing but a bloodthirsty invader.”

  “And then I assume we went to war?”

  “Of course we did,” Snake said, “and my side lost horribly. One by one, my… colleagues fell before you, and you always executed the defeated. All but one. And he grew to hate you for it.”

  “Who?”

  “We now call him the Sun God,” Snake said. “The two of you fought nearly to a standstill. You said you were impressed with his prowess and let him live, although it took him decades to fully recover. Reeling over his defeat, my people surrendered.

  “Centuries passed, and the land renamed as America changed. Whenever it did, you were there. So it was of no surprise that you took part in the Civil War. That’s the last we heard of you. You disappeared, destroyed in some manner.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Tarantula,” Snake said. “Of the four of us that comprise the Management, only she has the ability to see the strands of fate. Fate is…” He fumbled around his papers. “Difficult to describe. She sees what will happen, but not unmistakably. Certain factors work outside of fate, and their intervention can rip the threads apart. Tarantula becomes effectively blind to them until they reweave.”

  “The black-haired woman with the twin braids,” the Nameless said.

  “That’s her,” said Snake.

  “Is that how you knew how to find me?” the Nameless asked, his forehead tensing up. “Where to send the Skulls to hunt me?”

  “Yes and no,” Snake said. “We did learn something, but the decision wasn’t ours to make. I’ll get to that.”

  “Please.”

  “Before the chaos ensued, the Pyramid was supposed to be something else entirely,” Snake said. “The Sun God, who had become a successful businessman, built it with the intention of making a self-sustained city-casino to rival the likes of Vegas. After the catastrophe, however, he saw its potential for something much, much greater.”

  “A false Promised Land?” the Nameless asked.

  “There is no promised land,” Snake said. To prove his point, he pulled some credit chips out of his drawer and let them drop on the table. “What are these?”

  “Credit chips,” the Nameless said.

  “What do they provide?” Snake asked.

  “Given one has enough, everything,” the Nameless said.

  “Exactly,” Snake said. “So in a word, it is all-powerful. A thing to worship. See where I’m going with this?”

  “Not exactly,” the Nameless said.

  “We couldn’t establish a cult up here,” Snake said. “Between the Movement in the east, the Skulls in the west, and the True Church everywhere, if we dared to proclaim ourselves gods again… well, there would be war. And with the number of people in here, we’d lose it even with our advantage in firearms.

  “So we had this plan, you see. Well, the Sun God had it. We helped. We would offer anyone relative security, on the grounds that they accept our rules. And our rules, incidentally, force a man into a life of constant struggle, striving for this—” he took up a chip “—but always lacking in it. The more people want it, the more power it has. Faith is simply flowing through Babylon, Mr. Bones, and we feast on it.”

  “I… I do not know what to say.”

  “This is too much to take in at once, I know,” Snake said. “But you said you wanted answers. No one said it was going to be simple.”

  “And I still want them,” the Nameless said. “Please, proceed.”

  “As you’ve witnessed firsthand,” Snake said, “this place functions. To a degree. Rumors circulate outside, and people keep coming. But we want, and need, to further improve the quality of life here. Unfortunately, we can’t do that without sacrificing productivity. If we sacrifice productivity, we’ll lose all that we’ve built within months, or maybe a year. See our problem? We need to expand, but we can’t.

  “For that, we needed a warrior. We needed you.”

  “So it was you who returned me to life?”

  “If we could do that, you’d be the last one we’d call back,” Snake said. “No. Somehow, you were going to rise on your own. Tarantula saw it, and let us know. The Sun God had his own idea. Instead of a welcome wagon, he paid a small fortune to the Skulls’ leader in exchange for your head.”

  “She did not foresee that?” the Nameless asked. “And if they were told where I would be, why did the Skulls not come in larger numbers?”

  “She only saw the time and a vague location,” Snake said. “The Boneslinger had to spread his forces around. Lucky you. As for her predicting the Sun God’s actions… it doesn’t work like that. She sees the future, but as soon as she changes it—by telling it to someone, for instance—she tears the threads herself, becoming blind again.”

  “That sounds difficult to plan around,” said the Nameless.

  “You get used to it after hundreds of years,” Snake said. “So, there I was, with an angry Sun God, a half-blind Tarantula, and a disillusioned Coyote. You’d killed the Skulls’ leader, and we’d lost your trace completely. Then, all of a sudden, you spring up in the middle of our city, and Tarantula says she helped you in. You can imagine how on edge we all were, and if you can’t, the answer is very.

  “The Sun God wante
d to destroy you immediately. But the rest of us wouldn’t let him. He had acted alone before, and things went to shit. This time, we made him let us do our thing.”

  “So you sent me down to kill outlaws?” the Nameless asked.

  “Not exactly,” Snake said. “All we did was disable the Sun God’s trigger. The rest was all you. We needed to know if you were volatile and dangerous, whether we could trust you.” He smiled. “Among other factors, your last mission proved to us that we can.”

  “If sticking a knife down a Russian’s eye socket while bleeding to death is what you need, I am going to do it admirably,” the Nameless said.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” Snake said. “You controlled your temper. Instead of taking that backstabbing woman’s life, you instead chose mercy. The old you would have flown into a frenzy and murdered the whole Crew—or died trying. But you are not him. You are someone new; someone we can actually work with. Someone who can become one of us.”

  “And you would offer me this, despite the disapproval of this Sun God?”

  “Three against one in your favor,” Snake said. “Me and Tarantula have both seen you work, and Coyote is a hair’s breath away from rebelling in some way anyway. He aches for change, and your presence will calm him down. At least for a while.”

  “Assuming you do that,” the Nameless said, “and I accepted—what would be expected of me?”

  “For starters, you’d be in charge of defending the city and training its army,” Snake said. “If anyone should move against us, then you’d become our spearhead, leading us to victory.”

  “Having me on board would cost you significant manpower,” the Nameless said.

  “Not if we let you siphon some of that scrumptious faith we’ve got flowing around,” Snake said with a dry smile. “You’re not living off sacrifices because you’re like that, Bones. It is your lack of cult that forces you to. But we can fix it.” He let his gaze fall on the table. “Once we’re in charge of the States, we’ll be able to fix everything.”

  “I must admit,” the Nameless said, “that your offer is certainly enticing.”

  “You speak as if you won’t take it,” Snake said.