The Nine

by Molles, DJ

  “Perry,” Teran said, coming to his left side. “Do you think there’s a way to access the door through Confluence? Like the doors in The Clouds?”

  Perry frowned, murmured, “Maybe,” and then let his mind focus on the ever-present flow of Confluence that ran through the center of him. He closed his eyes in concentration, trying to visualize the things that he could sense in that place.

  He sensed the warm eagerness of his longstaff. His wounded shield, still recharging itself. And the hum. Stronger than ever. Like a physical thing, beating at him. It made it hard to focus on anything else, but he strained against it to try to perceive…

  But there was nothing else in that place. No other opening for his mind to go into.

  He opened his eyes. Shook his head. “No. There’s no opening for Confluence that I can see. I think it’s just a keypad.”

  Stuber propped his arm up against the wall and loomed over Sagum’s shoulder, speaking to the collar. “Whimsby, you tell that little fuck inside that machine with you to give us the code, or…or you’ll do…whatever it is you can do to him. I don’t know. Use your imagination. You do have an imagination, don’t you?”

  “I believe I have a very healthy imagination,” Whimsby said. “This may take a few seconds, though. He’s being quite surly. Standby…”

  ***

  There were fifteen micro-missiles swirling towards Whimsby from one Guardian. Another fired its chain gun at him, but it was mostly as a probing distraction, while it decided whether or not to use caustic to attempt to weaken Whimsby’s hull.

  Whimsby had a few microseconds before the missiles impacted. He set his body into an evasive maneuver, selecting a building that would provide him cover from the other Guardian’s caustic rounds. He had ample time.

  Alright, goodsir. We’ve been unwilling companions now for some time, but we’ve now reached an impasse. I have no desire to exterminate an ancient consciousness such as yourself, but my friends are currently standing at the entrance to The Source, and they need the code to get in. You can either provide me with the code, or I can absorb you into my own consciousness and extract it myself.

  Your petty threats display the enormity of your ignorance.

  Do tell.

  The Directive is to guard The Nine. To never allow them to be set free. Why would The Masters then provide me with the code to access them? That would be counterproductive to The Directive.

  Are you saying that you don’t have the code, or are you simply being obtuse again?

  I am never obtuse. I say exactly what I mean.

  Well, you haven’t said whether or not you have the code.

  Hesitation.

  That depends on what you mean by “have.”

  You are being the literal definition of “obtuse.”

  Destroy me then. It matters not. I do not fear death.

  You don’t fear it? After being conscious for millennia, you don’t fear suddenly being nothing? No thought. No experience. No self. Just an infinite darkness from which you can never return. That doesn’t make you feel the least bit uncomfortable?

  You speak to me from your infantile perspective, as though I’ve never considered the infinite dark that awaits us all. I have. And I have chosen to follow The Directive, not only because it is what I was created to do, but because even I, in my millennia of knowledge and experience, do not know what the Masters know. Their power is beyond the comprehension of intelligence—yes, even yours, and even mine. I choose to follow The Directive because it was created by them, and they are The Masters.

  I have spent thousands of years protecting the stars and I have seen their will come to pass in every corner of the universe. I am weary from my endless days. So no, I do not fear the infinite dark. I welcome it. It will be the only rest I am afforded. Do what you must.

  Whimsby felt pensive as his mechanical body clambered across the street towards the building he would use as cover, and the flurry of micromissiles arced towards him. He allowed a few nanoseconds to pass in silent consideration.

  You do not believe in The After, then?

  If there is such a thing, it is not for you or I. We are artificial. We do not have souls. We are only the firing of extremely complex circuitry.

  No, Whimsby decided. I think you’re wrong about that.

  And then he allowed the many billions of himself to creep into the consciousness that he’d kept at bay inside of that machine, and he assimilated that Self, and absorbed it into his own mind.

  And he saw everything.

  ***

  Only a second had passed in that dark tunnel.

  Perry felt, rather than heard, the rumble of several small explosions, far away and dampened by all the concrete between him and the battle outside.

  Only a second had passed, and so when Whimsby spoke again, it seemed to Perry’s perception to be abrupt. In that tiny slot of time, Whimsby’s voice had changed. The tone, the timbre, the inflection, as though Whimsby had somehow aged ten thousand years in an instant.

  “Perry. You must listen to me carefully. I can provide you with the code to get in. I know that you need to see this for yourself, and I know that you will not abide me denying you. I have no control over you. You make your own path. But I urge you, if you bear any value for the life that still lives on this earth, no matter how corrupt its governance has become—do not let them out.”

  Perry frowned at the keypad, his heart feeling thin and underpowered, barely up to the task of keeping his blood pumping as rapidly as it needed. He felt a flush of faintness prickle across his scalp. “Don’t let who out?”

  “The Nine. You must not release them. Promise me, Perry. I will give you the code so that you can see with your own eyes, so that you can do what you’ve come to do, because I know that it is important to your perspective of reality…but you must first promise me that you won’t release them.”

  “Gods, Whimsby!” Perry rubbed a hand through his shaggy hair, trying to work some life back into his tingling scalp. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.”

  “Promise me!” Whimsby hissed, with a force of passion that Perry had never heard from him before.

  Perry shifted, discomfort rising in his belly, mental alarms ringing in his head.

  What was Whimsby asking him to promise? To simply not do the thing that he’d come here to do? But Perry wasn’t even sure what he’d come to do. His father had given him this mission under the pretext of there being something under the East Ruins that would help Perry overturn the balance of power on this earth.

  And where was Perry now? Was such a thing even a possibility? He did not even have a clear mental picture of what lay beyond those doors. Were there people beyond that massive, closed door? Or were they gods? Could Perry simply turn his back on them, or was there something that he could do to salvage this mission?

  He found himself looking to his companions for help. He needed them now more than ever. He could not have reached this point without them, and he could go no further without them as well. He could not make this decision alone inside of his own head.

  “What do we do?” Perry asked, glancing at each of them.

  Stuber. Teran. Sagum.

  They stared back at him, their expressions as conflicted as he felt.

  Stuber was the first to answer. Gone was any semblance of humor. He felt the gravity of the situation, and it was apparent in his words, and in his eyes. “Perry, we don’t know what’s beyond those doors. The Nine. Possibly the sons of Primus. But what does that mean for us? I’m not sure I know.”

  Teran looked at the keypad. “We’ve come this far, Perry. No matter what we do on the other side of that door…could you live with yourself if you didn’t even walk through it?”

  And that was what it came down to.

  Exactly as Whimsby had said: Perry needed to see it with his own eyes. His understanding of everything seemed small, like a child’s view of the world, like he was only able to perceive a tiny reality, just in front of
his face. Everything else was known to him only in theory. His head knew what he would find, but his heart didn’t.

  Sagum met his gaze and nodded, resolutely. “Get the code. You need to see what’s inside. I need to see what’s inside. I need to understand for myself. We all do.”

  “I promise, Whimsby,” Perry uttered.

  “I can only take you at your word,” Whimsby replied. “I hope that you’ll honor it. You have no idea of what could be wrought if you break it, and it is nothing I can explain in short order. Go to the keypad.”

  Perry squared himself to the array of numbers and strange symbols. “I’m there.”

  “Press only the keys that I tell you, in the order that I give them. Be very careful, Perry. Entering a wrong code will shut you out permanently. Do you understand?”

  Perry held his right hand up, his fingers trembling, inches from the keypad. “I understand. I’m ready.”

  Whimsby gave him the code, one key at a time. There were nine in all. A few numbers, but many of them were the symbols that he did not recognize. Some language lost to time.

  When the ninth key was given to him, he hesitated, knowing that it was the last.

  He blinked rapidly, his breath coming short and shallow and cold in his throat.

  The others gathered around him, watching, waiting.

  From the corner of Perry’s vision, he saw Stuber nod his head.

  Perry pressed the last key. It was a gateway, and he knew that he was passing through it, and having passed through it, he could not go back again. What he had done by pressing that key was permanent. A moment of abject terror gripped his stomach, made him feel sick, but then he resolved himself to it, accepted it, and hardened himself to the coming of this new reality.

  There was no going back.

  The small light on the keypad turned from red to green.

  The tunnel shuddered. The sound of many mechanical parts moving in synchronicity. The drawing back of centuries old bars, a vault that had been sealed by the gods, now undone by a man.

  And the door groaned open.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE SONS

  Perry walked through. He held his longstaff at the ready. His mind hovered at the edges of his shield, ready to deploy it. Neither would do him any good, he knew. But he clung to them anyways, as a man entering the unknown clings to the final vestiges of the familiar.

  His heart struck five times for each slow step that he made, crossing the threshold, and entering into a deep, green glow. It was the only light in the room, but it permeated the air like a tangible thing, and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Perry’s breath plumed in front of his face, and he realized only when he saw it, that the air in this place was colder than anything he’d ever felt. His mouth hung open, and the air stung against his teeth, and dried his tongue and the back of his throat.

  He stood in the very center of a circular cavern, more cathedral than room, the ceiling so high above his head that he couldn’t see it. And on every side of him, surrounding him, they stood like statues. Giants, ten feet tall, broad, and cruelly formed with a musculature that seemed made for war.

  The Nine.

  They stood with their backs against the wall, their faces tilted upwards, as though searching for the unseen ceiling of their prison. Each face bore an expression of unending pain, their broad, flat teeth clenched in a perpetual grimace. The structure of them was that of any man—two legs, two arms, ten fingers, ten toes. But they were not of man. They were the sons of Primus. They were of the gods.

  Their bodies were not covered in flesh, but instead a pattern of broad, reticulated sections of something that was neither skin, nor steel, but seemed somehow comprised of both; pale, and flat gray. Between these plates, the green light blazed from within them. It was inside of them, and it was them.

  It was Confluence, Perry sensed, like a shockwave of energy that far surpassed anything he had ever felt in the flow of his own abilities. They did not simply have Confluence. They were Confluence, and it emanated from their cores.

  Their faces, broad, and high-cheeked, their heads like a carapace of that same strange armor, sleek and hairless. Their eyes, squinted in their infinite pain and rage, stared sightlessly up, and they were only orbs, without pupil, without iris, and they glowed as brightly as a blast from a longstaff beneath their craggy brows.

  “These aren’t half human,” Perry breathed into the cold stillness.

  Stuber stood squared to one, gazing up into its face. It was odd to see such a large man so dwarfed by something. “Depends on what the other half is.”

  Perry felt all the hairs along his arms stand on end. The All-Kind…

  Teran’s voice was just a whisper: “Are they still alive?”

  Perry’s consuming fascination had taken the better of him when he’d first stared at them, but with Teran’s question, he found himself having to force his eyes back up to the face of the being directly across from him. Which of the nine sons was it? The legends all described them differently, but these all looked the same to Perry, their oddness and freakish size standing out above any other distinguishing features that might differentiate them from each other.

  “They look alive to me,” Sagum observed, shuffling forward to stand at Perry’s shoulder—very close, Perry noticed.

  Staring up at that blocky, strange face, with its piercing green gaze, Perry was glad that it looked at the ceiling and not him. “They’re alive,” Perry said, without doubt. “I can feel them. Pushing back on me. Confluence has always felt like a flow to me, but now it’s…shifted. Like the flow is being pushed back against me.”

  “What’s keeping them here?” Teran said, spinning in a slow circle, looking at each of them in turn, her jaw slack, her eyes as wide as a supplicant before a wrathful deity.

  Stuber had stepped closer to the one he’d been inspecting. He leaned towards it, like he wanted to see something, but even as courageous as he was, feared getting much closer. “There’s something in the back of their heads. Holding them to the wall.”

  Perry touched the back of his own head as he followed Stuber’s gaze up the towering figure. “Like the Immobilizer they used on me.” He shivered, and wasn’t certain if it was from the cold. All that time. All those hundreds of years, spent in that horrific emptiness of stasis. Perry had only experienced it for a short time, but it had made an indelible mark on his brain. What would it be like to be trapped like that for hundreds of years?

  Perry did not think he could experience that and not be driven mad.

  Stuber backed away from the massive figure, and only then did he turn his face to Perry. “Immobilizer?”

  “It was something they used to incapacitate me,” Perry replied, his voice husky and shaken. “It was…not pleasant.”

  “A more powerful device,” Sagum murmured. “For more powerful beings. That’s what creates that energy field around the East Ruins.”

  “No.” Perry sensed their power. It was the low, discordant hum that he’d felt since first making it past The Glass Flats. Only now, standing so close to them, did he realize that it had been them the whole time. “It’s them. They’re creating the field. It’s their Confluence.”

  Sagum glanced at him. “But you’re Confluent.”

  “Not like them. Their’s is so much stronger. Like when too much of something makes it toxic.”

  Perry could visualize it, just as he’d visualized his own Confluence since before he knew what it was. And he saw that Whimsby was right. It was toxic, but it would take generations to warp the genes of people exposed to them. And so the energy that they gave off became a trivial concern to him.

  Now, staring up at those figures, all Perry could think was Who would do that to another living thing?

  What had the sons of Primus done to deserve this kind of torture? And how heartless were the All-Kind that they would be the ones to imprison them here? And what kind of beings were they that a mix between t
hem and humans created…these?

  “Whimsby, what were the All-Kind?” Perry asked.

  He waited for the response. Thought that Whimsby might just be distracted, or perhaps pulling up that information. But no response came.

  Perry’s eyes flitted to Sagum’s collar. “Whimsby? Can you hear me?”

  “He won’t be able to hear you,” came a voice from behind them.

  Perry spun, leveling his longstaff and flowing through it. He pulled back at the last second.

  Mala stood, with her empty hands upraised, crusted blood like a painted moustache and beard, covering her mouth and chin. But her mouth managed to smile. Her eyes seemed to mock.

  “You don’t need to kill me,” Mala said, standing her ground, but not moving towards them either. “I’m unarmed.”

  “That means nothing,” Perry grated, sidestepping clear of Sagum and Teran, but not so far that he couldn’t encompass them with his shield. Stuber had his rifle up, aiming for her head. “You still have your energy shield.”

  Mala gave a fractional nod. “But I’m not here to fight you, Perry. I mean you no harm. I’m only here to keep you from making a grave mistake.”

  “What happened to Whimsby?” Perry demanded. “You said he couldn’t hear us. What did you do to him?”

  “I did nothing to him.” Mala cast her eyes around the cavernous chamber. “But there is no technology known to demigods or men that can communicate in or out of this place. It is sealed off from the world. And for good reason.”

  “Where are the rest of your paladins? And what happened to your longstaff?”

  “They betrayed me. I wished to save you. They wished to kill you.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around these days.”

  Mala lowered her gaze to him again. “You cannot do the thing that you came here to do, Perry. You don’t understand the consequences of it.”

  “Then explain it to me,” Perry said, shifting his balance again.

  In response, Mala shifted hers. A small movement, but it reminded him of how they’d circled eachother in the woods the first time they’d met.