by Zachary Adam
--Rituals. Formulae. Repetition. These were the great tripod of the old magic, and even the modern upstarts like the Coultiers and the Zaxtonians’ Agency had to obey that old rule. They were as fuel, oxidizer, and heat to a fire.
Sure, you had your priests, like Gloria, who could pull magic from seeming-nowhere with the invocation of their gods. And you had deal-making Kitabists, like Kline, whose powerful allies did the hard work for them. But for men like Viscount Isambard Louis Rainwright (Louis, to his few friends), these three were something you needed
– and as Grand Master of the Royal Society of the Wheel and Pinion, Rainwright had access to these in spades through his influence over the Society’s membership. He viewed the unfolding ritual below him, with its repetitious chanting of formulae, from a safe gallery above the Sanctum, located beneath the spacious Latham House in the royal city of Galba Roy. He watched from a throne-like seat, which was appropriate, as in spite of his comparatively low rank, he possessed power to rival the King himself.
“There’s a moment, after the die is cast, but before it hits the table, where if you breathe wrong you’ll change the way it lands.”
The other occupant of the gallery stirred, adjusting the blue-gleaming earpiece in his left ear as he did. “If I may be so bold as to interject, My Lord, we’re a tad late when it comes to saving Kraterburg. I happen to know that the Executive Council has at least attempted to evacuate.”
The servant – for that’s who he was – was a man visibly ten to twelve years the middle-aged Viscount’s senior, though his hair seemed to be less growing-in-grey than it was uniformly fading from its native black. He was an upright man, in spite of the cane in his hand, and moved around the gallery, as he did with most spaces, with a grace unexpected for a man wearing a silk blindfold. The brocaded piece matched the fabric used in his vest, the chest of which bore the Rainwright arms. “I wasn’t talking about saving Kraterburg, Walter. Your analysis is correct. The city is doomed. But, if we do what we’re doing just right… Miss Creena’s little incursion won’t last long. Her new key will be too robust. Plus, we’ll have that opening you and I have waited so long for.”
“Very good, sir. There is a message from Donnovan Kline. He would like to know your feelings on his invitation within the hour.”
“Tell him I am not so easily swayed to run and hide. Perhaps more politely than that.”
Rainwright rose from his thronelike seat, slipping into the robes his manservant now offered him, donning the pseudoacademic apparel that formed the ceremonial garb of the Order. As the Grand Master, he was the foremost worker of magic in one of the most powerful Order schools, and it showed, from his regal stride to the inherent necessity of his intervention in matters of all kinds.
Long ago, his master had told him to ignore Astrology – the stars, the man had said, were always aligned with something. Today, it would be a lesson hard learned by his former pupil, Creena. Today, he was going to give those stars a shove. In doing so, he might prevent the great Catastrophe. Buy mankind a few more millennia of borrowed time, and perhaps then he would have the time he himself needed to leave such concerns behind entirely.
He just needed to pick the right sacrificial lamb. “Tell me about Vidcund Därk again, Walter.”
--Vidcund’s head was spinning, throbbing, and refusing to move all at once. As the components of his brain responsible for encoding short-term memory began to connect back together, he nearly felt some grudging semblance of respect for Baha’s subterfuge. Managing to slip through the cracks of Agency’s counter-espionage network was one thing, but to actually strike a trained field agent dumb and senseless from a state of high alert was another matter entirely.
Assuming, of course, Erwin Baha was involved in the confusion at all. He remembered hearing the man, but not seeing him. As he lay supine on the ground, cues triggered all of his natural senses and turned up the intuition that Agency’s subliminal conditioning had honed to a razor’s edge. He could remember many things, now – the harrowing journey through the earth itself, the several seconds of panic in which he had emptied the magazines of both of his handguns into the creature dragging him in the hopes it would let him go.
Evidentially, he thought, from the fact he now awoke somewhere he had no memory of, he had been unsuccessful.
He became aware, dimly at first, of movement around him – a darker darkness among the pitch, or the brain groping for movement against different angles of blackness. He fought for some semblance of motion from his limbs, but was unsuccessful. They weren’t numb, per se, but unresponsive, which was an unusual trait he’d yet to have experienced, and couldn’t chalk up the cause.
In the dark, where he used to be most comfortable, he was now the most alone. It was a perfect blackness that surrounded him, a grim darkness devoid of all those ‘stars’ of other hims. In the end, he resigned himself to this – even if there had been other places for his mind to leap, he had no choice, at the moment, but to follow this situation through, in the hopes that he might learn something about this threat they were now facing.
Too late, he came to grips with what his eyes were trying to show him – the offending organs having either come to new light or adjusted to the present gloom. The creature was offensively asymmetrical, a three-legged monstrosity with a tough, bony-looking carapace, five flailing tentacles that emerged from its top, and, from where Vidcund was laying, a single, curiously-apertured eye.
Before Vidcund could even register that such an outlandish creature could be real, and therefore a threat, the creature had him in its arms, and he was borne aloft and stiffly held, progressing through a long and dark passage.
With little other resource, he let the creature carry him, and it seemed as though each bump in the road or tripodal misstep helped Vidcund to regain a little more of his sense and his faculties. He was aware now, of a spike at the base of those tentacles, which was easily three feet high, poised just below his now-ventral naval, and cruelly tapered. The walls, through his limited vision, had covered over by some kind of moss or lichenous slimemould which, even as his vision began to clarify, gave the tunnel he was in a startlingly organic look. That wasn’t to say organic in the leafy-greens, nobody-put-anythingother-than-compost-on-my-soybeans way, but he was given the impression of travelling down a great vascular canal of some being far too large to exist in any sane world.
The light grew brighter and brighter until he emerged into the open air, the dazzling sunlight, and from one nightmare into another.
--Prince was right, Scion continually had to remind himself. Mourning could wait for later, and everyone present had work to do, even if that work was nothing less self-righteous than getting to a place of safety as quickly as possible.
At least, that was how Niles interpreted the other’s behaviour, as the man would occasionally stop, staring at some point in the ground, before selecting the next short leap-frog on the entire company’s path of travel. It was during one of these pauses when Niles learned that nothing could ever inure you to the shock of some new improbability becoming actual. The earth beneath their feet shuddered yet again, and instinctively, the former detective felt himself glancing toward the hotel they were now fleeing, as that unharmed structure now tore itself asunder.
There was an impression, later proven correct, of a great mass punching upward through the building, causing it to collapse in the perfect opposite of the orderly manner of a professional demolition, but spread outward, the force of new fragments on the old pushing the building away. Another of those Tentacles, those Great Arms as he had come to think of them, had burst through, but this one held relatively still, balancing a large object at its top.
Scion interrupted Prince’s astonishment with that most pre-human of emotions – fear. “We need to be running faster.”
--
“Welcome, Vidcund Därk.” That voice! It was the voice on the telephone, the voice of the Great Calamity, of ’98 and the foolhardy excesses of those who had
flourished before Agency had been allowed the free and quasi-omnipotent reign it had today. Vidcund recognized it even before his eyes adjusted to the glare and found the face it belonged to.
Fixing Gloria with the best look of impassive impudence a bound man could manage, he stated the facts of the matter as simply as a dinner order. “You’re alive.”
“As if you ever doubted,” she said with saccharine in her voice, brushing his short hair back from his brow. “I’m with law enforcement. You tend not to think you have a murder until you have a body,” Vidcund forced a smirk. “Next time around, you might want to take that into consideration.”
Gloria rose from his side, stepping away from the stone slab to which he was bound. The walls of the chamber had fallen away, leaving only this platform, this high place, where all in the city below could have seen what was to transpire. “There won’t be a next time, Agent Därk. Not for you, for me, or for anyone else. The Holocene, with its mankind and their arrogance, has come to an end, and not, as your historians would propose, with the rise of the Anthropocene. There is a God, Vidcund, and he doesn’t care for mankind’s arrogance.”
“Well, at least he and I have one point of agreement,” the agent quipped. He was bound with simple ropes, and if he could catch her mid-monologue, he might just manage to free himself.
“I have you to thank, really, for delivering yourself so readily into my grasp. I never would have thought that you yourself would be the ideal sacrifice – the correct key for the gate. Not when I began to set things in motion most recently, nor when I birthed the Labyrinth whose destruction of your precious capital had brought you so speedily to hand. Such convenience. And yet, you, undeniably, are the key to the gate that has imprisoned the sleeper these long years.”
She produced a knife, and Vidcund sighed. His escape was to be that more painful variety, he realized, as had been his escape from the apartment where he and Clayton had staged their final duel. It was in that exhalation, that acceptance, as his latent teleproprioceptive “vision” flickered, and he had only the dullest impression of the nearest “stars” around him.
A dull impression, because, in that moment, her knife had stood out so brightly that it had looked as though the sun had fallen into her hand. He marvelled at it, so astonished that he found himself staring down at the hilt, buried deep into his chest.
All at once, he was scattered, as he had been in the library when he had attempted to multiplex his presence across two of the bodies that formed his constellation of awareness. He found himself once again standing in a great, glaring abyss of light, in the space between bodies where thoughts leaped and those presences that lived beyond flickered and passed. Standing before the body he had just left and Gloria was another, who seized the fleeing mote of Vidcund’s consciousness in a squamous pseodopod.
“I am become everything you have been, mortal. You are to thank for my Awakening and My Freedom.” The mote the drowsy god had captured burst like a nova, scattering itself among the many stars Vidcund Därk could lay claim to, and Vidcund’s last coherent thought before the burst was a firm, calm “No.”
Slowly, like aggregating dust forming a planet, the mote collected again around one of the nearer clones, and then, all at once, Vidcund Därk was back in the world.
--“What about us?”
“You simply aren’t allowed to join me,” Kline repeated, tired of fielding the same question for the fourteenth or fifteenth time.
Plato, the younger of the brothers who served him, frowned at this, even going so far as to give a low growl in the back of his throat. It was not unusual for he and his brother to fall into the service of a mage – particularly those who tampered with time, as Kline frequently did – but such mages usually went to great lengths to stay in the Hounds’ good graces and avoid falling victim to their predatory nature.
Kline had kept them well fed, for now, supplying them with prey to hunt who usually, by some human judgment or another, deserved it. But now, Kline had nothing to offer, and the Hounds were always hungry.
The ritual beneath the museum had gone smoothly, in spite of the seal having been broken in the tremors that even now shook the earth and threatened to drop the museum straight through the chamber’s roof. A shimmering portal to other possibilities had opened, and the participants had largely scattered in fear when the two Coleopterous beings from the other side had emerged. The Beetle-Folk of the Great Race, whom the hounds recognized, were beyond the point of having to fear their Depredations, and their respectful speech with Kline had shown the Hounds quite clearly they would not tolerate an attack on the magus in their presence.
“I guess we’ll be seeing each other, then.” Socrates, the elder, rejoined. “I suppose we might,” Kline countered, testily. “Run to whatever many-angled corner of time as you may, Hounds of Tindalos. It will be some time, indeed, before the world is again fit for man.”
As he left, the Hounds watched, and Socrates took a bite from an apple he’d held close to hand. “… He’s overreacting again.”
“He’s going to overreact every time.”
At length, Socrates frowned, and paused in his chewing, as he regarded the broken capstone in the middle of the room, which the White Keepers had laid down at his insistence all those years ago.
“That’s never happened before.”
--The air was wrong. Granted, humanity tended to do a decent job of screwing the world up every chance they could, but today, the air was especially wrong. It seemed somehow lessened, as if it was somehow less vital.
Glory took a few steps forward, examining the city of his advent, the city where he would begin the painfully brief process of clearing off the earth of all those unworthy of him. His disciple, the human who had taken his name for her own, fawned over him, sighing over his passing like a girl of schooling age focusing her attention on a dreamy upperclassman.
A frown furrowed his brow, beneath his golden hair. “Something is wrong. I am still bound.” Gloria was nothing if not thoroughly obedient. “Perhaps another sacrifice is required?”
“No,” the drowsy god replied, looking out over the city. “We must merely complete the first.”
Somehow, impossibly, the human she had fed to him had escaped death, though his thoroughly dehydrated remains were quite clearly still present. Glory could feel that human’s presence all throughout the city, perhaps even further away, as though the man could occupy multiple places at once. Holding out his hand, he willed the body to decompose further, forming a blade of carbonized calcium he could take to hand – it was as good a weapon as any.
“… I’ll wait for you.”
Glory smiled to the young woman, lifting her chin slightly with the point of his weapon. “I know you will, my pet.”
Reaching the edge of the platform the sundered storey had formed, he jumped.
--
“You’re all late! Hustle up, boys, this is how people die!” Granted the very real and very fresh nature of the wound left for the surviving Grey Angels with the death of their leader, their would-be rescuer’s comment was ill received, and it was only some grace of professionalism or fatigue that prevented that anger from rising above the level of mere frustration. Scion, it seemed, was the only one at all composed. He shook the young man’s hand gently, tapping the temple of his face in vague semblance of the removal of his mask, as a cowboy might do to his hat. “We appreciate the help all the same, Professor Coultier. I understand you had to give up a very important engagement to make the time.”
“I doubt very much I’m the only person with cancelled plans today, Scion.” The white-haired Malvolio responded. Unlike his older brother, he at least had a healthy tan on him. “… Is this all of us?”
“Yes,” Scion answered, slowly. “Archangel couldn’t join us today.” Malvolio nodded, his expression softening. Scion was rather fond of Malvolio, through a professional familiarity between their alter egos, and it was precisely because Malvolio was sufficiently sensitive to re
ad between the lines. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
So far, the bank on East Thirty-Second was still standing, and largely unharmed by the frequent quakes. It was designed against such things, having been built only ten years ago, as a Branch and District Office of the Zaxtonian Bundesbank, an institution predating Federalization. The earthquake-resistant architecture had been a laughable measure in the geographically stable fenlands of south-suburban Kraterburg, but nobody was laughing today.
Malvolio lead the Grey Angels back, past bank officials and customers who were wisely too afraid to go outside, into a secure room ordinarily used for special customers
– like Coultier – to view their safety deposit boxes. The “new order” mage had been busy, it seemed, with the wall woven over in charcoal etchings – great circles and glyphs with peripheral calculations of math that Niles didn’t even recognize the operands for.
“Regrettably I have no time to explain things to first-time travellers. The Infernal City are even worse for punctuality than the Deans, if you would believe it.” “Oh,” Scion said, almost conversationally. “I’d believe it.”
Prince craned his neck to see what Malvolio was doing. He recognized the young man – mostly in passing, so that the detective could not quite remember where. Regardless, he saw little, and understood less. The man muttered, and made a few glyphic additions to his vandalism, before the wall seemed to collapse inward within the bounds of one of the many concentric circles, opening a portal just large enough to be crawled for. To where, none could tell – they saw only a yawning, black abyss.
“Let’s hope they don’t mind a two-minute delay. After you, Scion.” One by one, the various Grey Angels slipped through this portal, following the intrepid lead of Scion. A few needed encouragement – Banker hesitated the longest, before taking a deep breath and, with the air of jumping off a sinking ship, plunged through the hole. At last, it was Prince’s turn, and he braced himself on the edge of the remaining wall, staring into the black, feeling the air rush past him into the void.