We Aimless Few

by Robert J. Crane

  Carefully, I rose so I was almost at full height. Heidi grabbed onto one leg from behind, anchoring me. Sort of—she was small, light. I felt less like I’d been cemented into place than held down by a scarf draped about an ankle. But still, better than nothing.

  “Can I help?” asked Borrick.

  “Get her other leg.”

  “I’d really rather you didn’t,” I said—but too late; he’d leaned around Heidi and gripped onto the other.

  To his credit: he was much weightier than Heidi, his hands larger, wrapped about my left shin. If a wave buffeted me off, he had at least a chance of keeping me in place.

  Still, it was very difficult not to rip myself out of his grip by sheer instinct.

  “If your fingers wander so much as an inch...” I warned.

  He grimaced. “Wouldn’t think of it, believe me.”

  “Come on, Mira,” said Heidi. “Get the key!”

  “Right. Key.” I focused ahead, to the pyramid zipping away.

  The log boat was keeping a good pace with it. Now I was standing, the pyramid was at about my head height—easy to grab. But when I extended my arm, my fingers—it was just out of reach.

  “Lean!” Heidi said.

  I did—

  The boat gave a particularly violent shudder. I yelped, instinctively jerking back so I didn’t flop forward and get a good dunking—Heidi and Borrick tightened their grips, although only Borrick kept me planted; Heidi was strong, but my right foot still moved; she seemed more to be cutting off my blood supply than helping me remain stationary.

  When I steadied myself again, the pyramid had zipped ahead a good few feet.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. “How am I supposed to get it now?”

  “Use the spear?” said Borrick.

  “No!” said Heidi, glaring at him. “She’ll just ping it into the river!”

  “So? She can dive in and get it!”

  “She is not your slave,” I ground out, hand extended once again. “And I have a name! It’s Mira Brand—you should know that by now, Borrick, seeing as I’ve whooped your butt in every competition we’ve had.”

  I could picture his sour expression without turning to confirm it. He loosened his hold, just a fraction.

  “I forbid you from using the spear,” Heidi growled at me. “Do not lose that key! I need it to find my mother!”

  “Once again—not your slave.” I clenched my teeth. “But fine—I’ll get your stupid pyramid.”

  The river sprayed. Our log boat was churning up a constant shower of it. It rebounded away from the boat, two arcs that curved and rained down behind us. Some of the spatters had an inward trajectory though, and they fell upon us steadily. Burrs came with them, stinking worse for the water—why was it everything smelled worse when it was wet?

  The river forked. The pyramid jerked to follow it—and then so did the log boat, following along with me at the front and reaching forward, like a carving on the front of a Viking ship.

  The banks were narrowing now. The sand was being replaced with mud, swapping in stretches that looked like one had been daubed over the other. Trees could reach closer to the river’s edge now.

  Like the waters powered them, they too were moving faster, not just flexing and shifting but thrashing—

  An exu tree slammed its full height into the water just ahead of us. An explosive wave of river water was slung over us—as were hundreds of seeds, their barbed ends jabbing at my skin. I barely slammed my eyes shut in time to keep myself from being blinded by the damned things.

  “Wow!” Borrick cried.

  “This is not a ride! Stop treating it like it's fun!” I roared back—but my shout was lost to the noise of dozens of the trees doing the same, the entire way along the river, throwing themselves against the water like a deranged psycho against a mirror in some slasher movie. The waves they kicked up began to slosh the log boat’s forward end from side to side—

  The pyramid drew farther away.

  “No!” Heidi cried. Her voice was anguished, in a way I had never heard it, a panicked, shrieked note that was raw and very, very real. “Mira!”

  I gritted my teeth. “Sorry,” I said—and I ripped Decidian’s Spear off from my jeans—ping! There went another one of those damned metal loops—and swung it to full length.

  “No—!” She groped for my arm to stop me—

  No longer held by her, I stepped forward, up onto the front end of the boat. It canted, front end tilting toward the river bed—

  I leapt.

  Heidi’s fingers caught on my jeans. I felt her nails run down the back of my boots, desperately trying for purchase, anywhere that she could find it—

  Then I was clear, arcing through the air, as exu trees slapped into the water and barbs flew on waves of spray—

  The pyramid was fixed in my sights, dead center. Every second it drew farther away, farther—

  I took careful aim with Decidian’s Spear—and swung.

  It rose up, from beneath, a perfect straight line—up, so it was horizontal, and then higher—

  At a slight angle, it hit the pyramid on the underside—right on the last few inches of the haft, below the bladed tip.

  The pyramid followed the spear, held aloft by it in slow-motion as it continued to rise—

  And then it bounced off, up, over our heads—I tilted up to see it, mouth open, as the river came up to meet me—

  I slapped face first into the water myself—

  And the pyramid landed in Borrick’s outstretched hands.

  14

  Our challenge complete, we sat upon the shore, upon a log from a downed exu tree that had probably been the source of its own downfall in some spasmodic thrashing a decade or so prior.

  The trees had returned to their usual soft swaying. Sitting here now, body positioned so as to absorb the little sunlight there was and hopefully dry off a bit before returning to London, it was almost as if the whole mad, flailing, river race had never happened.

  Except, of course, for the broken boughs and branches now littering the river’s shore. There were plenty of those. And plenty of the damned seeds all over the place too. My jeans were coated with a layer of the things almost up to the knee—I was definitely going to need to be careful. London did not need parks full of these bipolar things.

  “Excellent, Mira!” said Borrick, clapping me on the back. “You did it!”

  I fixed him with a dark glare. “Please do not touch me.”

  He retracted his hand, a flash of annoyance on his face for a moment. But it smoothed over. “We couldn’t have done that without you.”

  “No,” I agreed, “you couldn’t.”

  Heidi had the pyramid now. It rested in her hand. She sat at the other end of the log, in a moving blanket of shade, and stared at it with an intense hunger I’d wager had shone in my own eyes more than a few times so far this year.

  I had to keep myself from telling her, “You know this means absolutely nothing, don’t you? It’s just a carrot on a stick.”

  Good thing I held back. I doubted it would go down well.

  Besides—this wasn’t just a carrot on a stick. Yes, the trinket itself might be, this key and the coin and the Instrumentum Aeternitatis and every other damn thing the Antecessors had left for we Seekers to find. But there was a human goal in this quest. Heidi was searching for her mother. That was not ‘nothing’.

  I felt strangely alien, beside the two of them. Heidi and Borrick—I’d been as excited as them, many times. I knew the thrill of a new achievement, of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat—even if, in this particular case, this hadn’t been an exactly threatening situation to have been in. (Although, those trees … and the blinding threat of the seeds...)

  Likewise, I knew the quiet intensity that Heidi had slipped into. She was a step closer to finding her mother.

  And she knew it.

  “What do we do now?” Borrick asked, peering at the pyramid in Heidi’s hand.

  �
��I don’t know,” she sighed, after a long pause—so long that I thought she hadn’t heard. She closed her fingers around the bronze object, weighing it—and then, with a shielded yet begrudging look, she handed it over to me.

  It was the first time I’d held it; the first time I’d felt its weight, like it were a solid block of steel; the first time I’d run my fingers across the patterning on the outer faces, etched lines that were so thickly laid down in places they looked like the cross-hatching in some of Camille’s Edward Gorey books; and the first time I’d felt first-hand just how cold it was, as if it could suck the heat straight out of the universe and dispose of it in another.

  It reacted almost immediately.

  The top of the pyramid, the pointed apex, broke apart, following the contours of etched lines a half-centimeter from the top. The four triangular faces flexed outward, like they were each affixed by a hinge.

  A projection lit up above it, drawn in white lines that were perfectly visible despite the daylight.

  It was a world, slowly rotating, with many small, disparate continents separated by vast basins. Upon one of those, an exaggerated aberration marred it, something blocky and square. An arrow, itself a projected pyramid, spun above it.

  “Guess that’s where we’re going,” said Heidi.

  “How do we find it though?” asked Borrick.

  “I know how,” I said.

  “Of course you do,” said Heidi quietly. “You’re the one who’s meant to help us with this.”

  Borrick nodded, appraising me with gleaming eyes. “It’s fate.”

  Fate? No, this wasn’t fate—this was the Antecessors, forcing me back into this world when I wanted nothing more to do with it, pushing me back into playing their stupid games with yet more manipulation—first the coin, and now this. I was a slave, a puppet with no choice but to bend to their every whim.

  And bend I would.

  “Come on,” I said gruffly, taking out my compass and beginning back along the river the way we’d come.

  “Where are we going?” asked Borrick, scrabbling to follow.

  Heidi answered for me.

  “Back to London.”

  15

  “Clock,” I said after stepping back through to my old hideout, “got a job for you.”

  The projected crystal face that took up the entire span of the library’s ceiling, still set to the world Carson had entered before walking out of here—and out of my life—reconfigured itself. LISTENING blinked on and off where a world breakdown was usually present—atmospheric content, day length, average temperature, that sort of thing.

  “Find this.” I held up the pyramid, its projection returning, pathetically small and indistinct in comparison to the million-world clock’s vast display.

  SCANNING.

  A moment later: SEARCHING RECORDS.

  “This’ll take a bit,” I said over my shoulder, to Borrick more than Heidi—she’d seen it in action more than a few times. “I’d make yourself comfortable.” And I headed off, down the aisle, to a seat at one of the tables heaped with books. I dropped heavily onto it, laying the pyramid down beside me.

  Heidi joined me. She was chewing her lip. Perching herself down at the table’s short end, she pushed the chair around so her back was to the fireplace, and the mantel on which the Chalice Gloria shone. Anxious, she watched as the million-world clock’s holographic display blurred, like a whole flipbook of planets being whizzed through at near-incomprehensible speed.

  Borrick watched it too, so distracted that he almost tripped over a pile of the books I’d thrown onto the floor in my anguish. He frowned down at them, long enough to check his footing as he stepped past, and then he was back to watching it as he ambled over and took a seat at the table with us.

  How strange. Me, Heidi, and Alain Borrick—a former friend turned enemy, and a long-time enemy, all of us here in my hideout.

  My old hideout, I reminded myself. This place was no more mine than the table by the window I used to frequent at Tortilla, at the top of the stairs. I’d been a guest here—a very misguided guest—and now I was visiting one last time before getting on with my life, away from all this madness.

  “Where are the records it’s searching?” Borrick asked me. “Does it have a memory bank somewhere?”

  I shrugged. “Didn’t install it; wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh! Was it here when you first found this place?”

  “Nope; picked it up, out of my share of the payout for finding the lost treasure of Ostiagard. I didn’t really discuss the specifics with the man who put it in though.” That man had been Benson, who assured me that our transaction – and my location – would remain ‘strictly confidential’. Seeing as how a great many Seekers had come to learn I was in London, including Borrick, my estranged grandmother, and Tyran Burnton, I very much doubted the meaning of ‘confidential’ in the Seeker world quite meshed up with how I understood it. Yet another reason I’d be glad to see the back of all of this.

  “Not many people have million-world clocks,” said Borrick admiringly, watching the projection flitting by planet after planet after planet. “Even my father—” his expression soured here for a few seconds, before he once again smoothed it over “—has never splurged on one.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re expensive.”

  “Not half,” said Borrick. He appraised me now, with a skeptical squint not entirely dissimilar to my mother’s scrutinizing gaze. “Just how much did you get paid for the City of Lies’ treasure?”

  “More than you can imagine in your wildest dreams,” I said.

  Again, funny how things had changed. Once upon a time, that would’ve been a major bragging point. But now, I had no desire to do any such thing. Who cared how much I got paid? Yes, I was rich in coup, and could be very rich once I transferred the money between the Seeker currency and my regal-sounding Great British pounds—enough that, realistically, I never needed to worry about the job my mother was trying to foist on me, whether it be reception work or shelf-stacker or even gutter-cleaner—anything to get me out of the damned house. I had no interest in making Borrick feel like a failure now though—which was a very unnatural feeling indeed.

  I watched the clock continue its search. Idly, I wondered—just where did its memory banks live, anyway? Carson might know; he’d been a lot more interested in it, actually asking questions rather than making polite conversation, the way my parents did when the gas man came to check their meter.

  Carson was gone though, very far away from here—and as useful as the million-world clock had proven itself to be, it couldn’t tell me where to find Carson now.

  Not, I supposed, that he would be particularly welcoming of me, should I turn up in his life again.

  I tamped down a sigh. He’d been so close to breaking when I last saw him. How black was my heart that I’d been able to just turn on my heel and walk out on him?

  The million-world clock emitted a soft tone, breaking me out of the drudgery of my thoughts.

  A planet turned gently on the hologram. Much larger than the projection from the pyramid, it bore significantly more detail—but that was it, all right; the continents all matched, the basins and bays between them.

  “Laknuria,” said Heidi, rising. Her voice lifted with excitement—another step forward. “Mira—thank you,” she breathed, turning to me. “Thank you so much.”

  “Whatever,” I said, shrugging.

  “You’re the only person who could have done this,” she said. “You’re the only person who could have helped me.”

  Very doubtful. Million-world clocks were rare, as Borrick said, but they weren’t a technological unicorn. There were others out there, beyond mine. In fact, if I had to hazard a guess as to who else might own one, there was one mutual ‘friend’ Heidi and I both shared who likely had the funds.

  Of course, if what Heidi said was true, she was too ashamed to deal with Lady Angelica any longer.

  Regardless, the Antecessors’ intent was clear
. I was the only person who Heidi knew directly who could help make forward progress with this quest. They’d designed the challenges specifically to draw me back in, with the coin, and now to keep me here, by inviting my use of the million-world clock in finding the next destination. Probably they’d have something else up their sleeves—and how overjoyed I was at the thought of discovering what it might be. Might they want a sample of my DNA next? A bit of bone marrow, to pass through to the next challenge? A recitation of my diary, from where I was seven, all four entries I’d ever completed before getting bored with it?

  I should just tell them—both of them. Borrick was operating under the illusion that I was greatly honored, that the Antecessors were so impressed by me that they’d had no choice but to create a relic with my face on it.

  I could shatter that for him in thirty seconds—that, and every single dream he’d ever had, of this world, and his success in it, meaning anything.

  Yet I couldn’t.

  Why?

  I wasn’t sure. Once again, I came back to that time just five weeks ago—how I’d have relished in having this moment at my fingertips. But I couldn’t, now.

  Somehow, something in me had changed.

  I didn’t linger on it. It was too uncomfortable. Instead, I rose. “Laknuria—looks industrialized.”

  It did, at least the continent that the pyramid’s hologram indicated we should visit. The whole land mass appeared to have been converted to machine and factory. A faint haze of smog, rendered in a thin, projected mist, clung to it.

  “I wonder,” said Borrick, rising too to stare. “Why didn’t the people there spread to the other land masses?” He glanced to me. “Maybe the other nations are not quite so advanced?”

  I neither knew, nor cared. Nor did I like just how much Borrick echoed of Carson right now.