He studied them as they listened to March, and he wondered about the internal workings of their minds. He knew that he was the eldest brother, but did that mean that the others could create beautiful and original things? Did March correct that error in their makeup? Or had he simply wanted strong, cunning foot soldiers?
“It’s time to go,” said March, but instead of taking each of them by the arm as he usually did with Neil, he made a Door and stood aside as each golem stepped through. Neil tried to be unobtrusive as he peered through before stepping through, while his brothers appeared to simply trust their creator and went through without hesitation.
Neil stepped into in parklike area in a city. It was evening and Neil knew by the cars that they were about fifteen years into the twenty-first century. The license plates indicated California. The air was cool and moist and had a tang to it which meant they were near the ocean.
“Portsmouth Square, San Francisco,” said one of his brothers, and Neil studied the place as they walked through behind March. They were in the center of Chinatown, and he longed to explore, but they had a serious job to do.
He paused at the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, studying the figure. She was dark and angular, blocky, but strong and graceful at the same time. She was sturdy. She held a torch aloft with both hands and her hair blew out sideways from her head, like a flame. He wondered at the person who made it, the many people who viewed it. The woman symbolized an important truth, something beyond the idea of the political system of self-governance. Something more important.
“It’s coming,” said March, touching his arm, and he turned to follow his brothers. They were a strange group, and if searched, they would produce seven Glocks in shoulder holsters, seven bowie knives and seven guns that shot tiny electronic tracking devices that March could use to track void wyrms or drakes through time. But even unarmed, the golems were one of the more deadly groups of beings on the planet.
An earthquake hit, and the golems crouched instinctively, bracing themselves. It was not a strong earthquake, and when it ended, the void wyrm appeared though its rip. Three of his brothers leapt forward to latch hold of it while the others circled around the sides.
As golems, they were immune to the pulling effect that the void wyrms used to draw their prey. The air blew around them, hunks of dirt and stray leaves flew into the rip, but they were not affected. Neil knew his job, but as the eldest, he had always been assigned to killing people instead of void wyrms. His brothers had more experience with the strange creatures, and he hung back to watch, preparing to help them if they required it.
The golems pulled out their bowie knives, and Neil watched as some of them held the void wyrm immobile and the others slit its throat. Or it must have been its throat since it was on the underside of the thing. One of his brothers hacked at the top half of the head. The thing shook and screamed and tried to pull back, but the golems were too strong, the ones on the ground bracing themselves to keep the creature from pulling back into its hole. Neil knew that each of them could fight off multiple men, and with six of them, the wyrm was simply outmatched.
The void wyrm’s blood flowed over the golems’ hands and knives, pooling in a pale bluish puddle that glowed faintly and wet the soles of their shoes and splashed on the legs of their pants. Neil wanted to turn away. The thrashing desperation of the creature touched him, and he steeled himself. He killed people, though he almost always did it with poison or a quick gunshot. He did not like suffering.
“This is what you must do,” said Mr. March from beside him.
“I know you said they are bad, that they rip holes, but why not simply close the holes?”
“I used to be able to. Me and the others who could help. But now, with things as they are, we cannot keep up. There are simply too many unstable places that attract them, and each void wyrm can make many rips. By exterminating them, we reduce their number, thereby reducing the number of rips they can create.”
“Why do they come? What do they want here?”
“They are attracted to instabilities. And they come because they are hungry.”
“Why not eat in the void?”
“It’s empty. Surely you know that.”
He did. But what sort of creature existed in a place where it could not feed?
“Will we kill them all?” he asked.
“I hope so.”
“That’s extinction, isn’t it? Genocide.”
“It’s survival. It’s necessary to keep the world safe.”
The void wyrm was now dead, and his brothers pulled back. March made a rip around the body and the pool of pale blood, letting the thing’s corpse fall back into the void. Perhaps its brothers and sisters would feed upon it.
The golems returned home with March, where he praised their swiftness, strength and decisive, quick action. They seemed pleased, in a reserved sort of way, and Neil wondered if that was how he appeared to others.
He thought of the void wyrm, bleeding and struggling and dying. It was only trying to eat. That was the most natural thing in the world. It was not a murderer or an inventor of terrible weapons, a rapist or child molester or one who indulged in evil and unnatural practices. The void wyrm was the very opposite, following the most natural urge in the world, to survive.
The brothers ate a meal prepared by March and then went upstairs to their rooms. Neil walked over to the sound system in the living room and played a piano concerto by some modern artist he had never heard of. He imagined her fingers, nimble and slender, dancing on the keys, her heart poured into the music.
“You are a more sensitive creature,” said March. “Your brothers are a little different. They are more quick to act and slow to ponder things.”
“I thought they might be like me.”
“No one is quite like you. And each of them is an individual. Do not forget that. I love each of them as I love you.”
Neil wasn’t jealous of March’s affections. In fact, he felt nothing at all at the idea of having beloved brothers. It made them a family, did it not? But it didn’t feel like a family. But how would he know? He could only see other families and imagine the experience.
March left him to his music, and Neil stretched out on the sofa, not bothering to turn on the light as the sun set and the room grew darker.
He thought of the other people he had killed, and the evidence March had shown him. He had trusted that the evidence of their guilt was true, but how could he know for certain? They may very well have been innocent. Something about the void wyrm stirred up discontent in his heart and disturbed the peace of his thoughts. The thing, monstrous as it was, seemed innocent.
He thought of its ugliness, and how the idea of ugliness was only in his mind. To its parent or mate, the creature might be quite beautiful. There were beautiful people with ugly interiors. He knew that. Perhaps this creature was beautiful inside. That was possible. What if killing it was the killing of an innocent? The thought ate at him.
But this was all futile. He was a golem, and a golem obeyed its master. He had read books, and he knew the stories. Golems were made to do a prescribed deed, and then things went wrong and they’d kill someone or do something terrible. Then they would have to be destroyed. They were unnatural things. and the moral lesson to the tale was that mortals should not attempt to imitate nature and natural forces. A man should not take on the power of the gods to create life or to mete out death. But March was no human man.
Besides, those were only stories. He and his brothers were made for good, not evil. They weren’t mindless animated hunks of earth, but people. They had minds and hearts, though if they turned on March, they might just be destroyed.
In the end, he supposed he was like all people, trying to do good according to his view of right and wrong. And that made him no different than March or any human being, although Marc
h claimed there was no objective right and wrong.
Except for one thing, a thing he saw embodied in the statue of the Goddess of Democracy. Freedom was good.
He and March were in agreement upon that point.
Chapter 26
“All Hallow’s Eve is tomorrow night,” sighed the drake.
“I know,” said Astrid. “I always loved trick-or-treating as a kid, and when I had an apartment, I liked handing out candy.”
“The night wasn’t always celebrated in that way. I was born in what is now Turkey. It wasn’t until much later when I moved north that I learned how the spots where the worlds touch become thinner on that day. Many years passed before the advent of the modern practice of sending children to threaten people and demand candy.”
“It’s more fun than it sounds.”
“Oh, I doubt it. It sounds terribly fun already.”
The sun was setting and they left the balcony that faced the western ocean and ate a meal of falafel, hummus, flat bread and goat cheese.
An old man, one Astrid had seen many times before, served them. He had always seemed so shy, and she had never asked his name. Sevilen knew. He knew the names and life histories of everyone on the island. Only a few humans remained, and all of them of their own free will. She knew Sevilen’s desire to hoard and collect and his occasional attempts to overcome that hunger. But he still hadn’t freed her from her obligation, so she couldn’t truly pity him. He might be lonely, but unless she was allowed out of their agreement, he was still using force and obligation to hold her.
“I have another drawing,” she said. “I did this one in colored pencil.”
She pulled the folder from her bag, but the moment she did so, she wished she hadn’t brought the drawing. This one was too personal, too intimate. But maybe this was the drawing he’d accept as fulfillment of that portion of their bargain. Maybe it was true enough. She never minded creating art for him, but she wished he’d accept a piece already. The endless rejections, as interesting, educational and kindly as they might be, wore on her. He took the folder and opened it. He did not disguise his surprise.
“What is this?” he asked, though the subject was obvious.
“A dragon. You told me before that you were Turkish, and I looked up dragons from that region and tried to guess what you might look like.”
“You think I’m red and gold?”
“I don’t know. I just thought they were beautiful colors together.”
“Do you think I’m beautiful?”
He looked up at her, and she saw that his question was neither playful or taunting, nor was he flirting. He was genuinely curious.
“I don’t know. I just wanted to draw a beautiful dragon.”
“You should ask for what you want. You don’t do that often enough.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Obviously you’re curious about what I look like. You spent at least a few hours imagining this drawing, yet you’ve never asked me to show myself to you.”
“I didn’t think you would. You didn’t grant my request for freedom.”
His expression changed, and she saw that she had hurt him.
“You ask me to free you as if you don’t like coming here. You visit longer than required, you bring me gifts, you say we are friends. And we are more than that as well.”
“Friends don’t keep each other under any obligation. Friends come to each other because they like each other.”
“I am out of practice. I haven’t had very many friends.”
He didn’t have any, is what he meant, but she knew he was too proud to say it.
“Can you show me? Can I see you as a dragon?” she asked.
He hesitated, then said, “Outside, on the beach. I’m rather large.”
Sevilen walked behind her, and no sooner had they taken a few steps out on the sand than the men attacked. They poured through a Door, each of them armed with drawn guns and knives in sheaths on their belts. She felt Sevilen rise up behind her in his dragon form, and the men looked up over her head without fear.
“Not the woman,” shouted one of the men and they opened fire on Sevilen.
She hit the sand, scrambled away and then turned back. Sevilen was on all fours, a creature more magnificent and more frightening than she had imagined in her drawing.
He was black, but not an ordinary dull black or even a shining, lacquered black. More like hematite, metallic, and his scales shone blue here and there as he turned to attack the men. Their bullets had to have hit him, but she knew that dragon scales were notoriously impervious to damage.
He was as beautiful as he was terrifying. His neck was long and muscular, his head triangular and his silver eyes bright and sharp. His tail was long and mobile and his body was thinner than she would have guessed, more serpentine. When he opened his mouth, his teeth gleamed white and she felt a thrill go through her to be at the side of such a creature.
These attackers had to be men from the Seelie. The Seelie had been the ones who wanted the drake dead, and now they were here to accomplish what Astrid had refused to do.
But now, looking at each one in turn, she recognized one of them. It was he who had commanded the others not to kill the woman.
“Neil!” she yelled. “Stop it. He’s my friend!”
Neil glanced at her, clearly confused, and then turned back to Sevilen. The drake inhaled deeply and Astrid scrambled farther back in anticipation of the certain inferno.
“Neil!” she screamed.
She watched as Sevilen paused and studied Neil, knowing what he was and that he and Astrid were friends. And then she understood. Neil didn’t know her. They had never met.
Two of the men leapt onto Sevilen’s back, long knives drawn. The drake bucked and turned his long neck to grab one and tear him free. The other stabbed him, and finding himself unsuccessful, used the knife to try to pry up a large scale. Sevilen ripped him off as well.
A moment later, Neil and the other men, who must be golems judging from their strength and tenacity, dropped down into the sand, vanishing, but Astrid got a look at the place they went. It was icy and empty. Sevilen had made a Door.
“Golems,” said Sevilen. “I can tell that they’re just matter with no soul inside.”
“Why are golems trying to kill you?”
“Why are they being ordered to, you mean?”
An instant later, another Door appeared and the golems returned. Astrid was not going to sit idly by this time. If the golems were stronger together, then splitting them up would be her goal. She made a Door beneath the feet of the nearest golem and sent him to the Sahara desert. Another she sent to the Rocky Mountains. Sevilen sent the others to places she didn’t see. She took special care with Neil, sending him to Los Angeles, to a park near the Time Corps safe house.
“They aren’t the ones making the Doors,” she said to Sevilen. “It’s March. It has to be. He was the one who used to control Neil.”
“Then he’ll fetch them all and send them back to us again.”
The golems reappeared, none the worse for wear. On their personal time lines, it might be a week later. March could take his time in collecting them and letting them rest, traveling through time and space as he pleased.
The old serving man was hurrying down the path from the house, a gun in his hand and a look of pure fury on his face.
“Don’t!” cried Sevilen, but the man began firing on the golems. One of them turned and returned fire and the old man fell where he stood.
Sevilen roared in fury and anguish and he opened a Door to the void. All seven golems would have fallen through, but Astrid made another, smaller Door and wrapped it around Neil, sending him back to the Los Angeles park. Maybe, like Elliot and Sister, he might remember a few bits of things that had happene
d in their shared past if he saw a familiar place.
“Come,” Sevilen said. “We’ll go to the void. It’ll be safer for us. But first I want to bury Ihsan.”
Astrid didn’t know if they had much time before the next golem attack, but she supposed if they had to, the two of them could simply step through their own Doors to safety. Even golems could not survive in the void, though she and Sevilen could remain there indefinitely.
As Sevilen turned, she noticed a wound on his leg where one of the golems had managed to cut the flesh beneath the scales. His blood was a pale, glowing blue. She knew where she had seen such a substance before.
“Your blood,” she said. “Seamus uses it in the time machines.”
He turned toward her, fixing one gleaming eye on her. “Does he now?”
“He doesn’t harvest it himself,” she said. “He never even knew what it was. He got the original vials of it from his former partner, Oren McCullen. And McCullen got it from March.”
“Then March either got it from a drake or from one of our children.”
“Your children?”
“You call them void wyrms. They are our young. A stage between egg and full grown. As I told you, we are void creatures.”
“But the void wyrms are—they’re terrifying. And they try to eat people.”
“It’s natural for young to be hungry. All babies are.”
“Why are they in the void at all? You live here.”
“Because most of my kind were banished long ago. There was fighting. There was a war. We lost. A few of us, the more peaceful ones, were allowed to stay. I am among them. But the rest of our kind were sent to another world, a world that could not sustain us all. But as things that can live in the void, we survived. Our children seek out food, like a newborn piglet seeking its mother’s teat. Only the teat is a tear between worlds.”
The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series) Page 130