by D. P. Prior
“How does it work?” Cadman held up the piece of amber. It was a little shorter than his finger, and half as thick. One end tapered to a point. He was sure the thing was vibrating. Maybe just fanciful thinking.
“I promised not to use it.” Jarmin’s head dropped. He must have known that was the wrong answer by now.
“I gave no such promise.” Cadman tried to sound amiable. The fat face and big mustache had always made that easier, he found. People seemed to trust him.
Shadrak set down the bottle a little harder than necessary and twirled the knife on the tip of his finger. Jarmin’s eyes flitted from the blade to Cadman, the anticipation of what was to come clearly evident on his face.
“What if I close my eyes?” Cadman did so. “And focus my will through the … fang, would you call it?”
Nothing happened.
“Hmm. Disappointing. I don’t know about you, Jarmin, but I’m getting rather tired of this. How about you, Shadrak?”
“Bored as shog.” He took a step towards Jarmin. “Want me to cut an eye out?”
Jarmin squealed like a girl and yellow piss sprayed down his leg, pooling on the stone floor.
Cadman turned his nose up and let out an enormous sigh. “Shadrak here enjoyed a performance at Broken Bridge last night. All about the Statue of Eingana, it was.”
Shadrak pressed his face right up to Jarmin’s and slowly moved the tip of his knife towards an eye.
Jarmin began to shake and whimper. “Please. Please.”
“Shadrak tells me there are five pieces of the Statue of Eingana. Two eyes, two fangs, and the body.” Five blasted pieces. Or could you count the body as separate? Still led to four and one, in any case. “Nod if you agree.”
Jarmin nodded frantically.
“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Huntsman gave a fang to you, which you’ve done a good job of guarding, up until now.” Cadman flipped the amber into the air and caught it in a chubby hand. “Who has the other pieces?”
Jarmin squeezed his eyes shut, face all puckered up like a sphincter, knees knocking together.
“One name, then. That’s all it’ll take, and then you can go free.”
Jarmin looked up, blinking in disbelief. “I can go? You won’t kill me?”
“Why would I? We’re not animals, you know. Give me what I want and I will be more than happy. Your death would be of no benefit to me, and Shadrak here has probably had a surfeit of killing.” Actually, he’s probably working out how to do away with both of us once we’re finished. Cadman shot a glance at the shadows gathered in the alcove by the entrance and swallowed as he saw one move.
Jarmin took a deep breath, tongue moistening his lips.
“The Gray Abbot has an eye.”
“Really? Now who’d have thought it? The eye of a Dreamer goddess and one of her fangs entrusted to two of the Templum’s holiest Luminaries.”
“Can I go now?”
“Indeed.” Cadman held up the amber fang between thumb and forefinger. “Before you do, though, I wonder if you’d mind witnessing this. You see, I think I’ve worked out how to use it. Visualization. Am I right?”
Cadman closed his eyes and tightened his grip on the fang. He formed a picture of Jarmin’s flesh being ripped apart, felt the amber throb, and heard a sound like the pulping of ripe fruit. Something wet splashed his face and he opened his eyes.
A bloody mess hung from the ceiling. Shadrak was peering at it with more curiosity than disgust. The fang felt warm in Cadman’s hand. He uncurled his fingers and frowned. The amber had dulled considerably, and veins of green and brown had spread across the surface. Somewhere in the distance a bird cried out. Cadman suddenly felt uneasy, like he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He cocked his head to one side and listened but heard nothing else. Silly, Cadman, you paranoid old sod. He caught Shadrak watching him and gave a shrug.
“Might take a bit of practice, eh?” He thrust the fang into his jacket pocket. “So, the Gray Abbot. I don’t suppose you fancy a trip to Pardes?”
“Reckon I’ve paid my debt. There’s plenty o’ work back at the guild, and besides, I’ve got a score to settle with my previous employers.”
Cadman chewed the end of his mustache. He’d not been expecting that. “I take it you’re all right about me knowing who you are.” He felt a rush of trepidation. “You being Shadrak the Unseen and all that.”
“If you can keep your mouth shut, you’ve nothing to fear from me.”
“Quite. Quite. And thank you. What are you doing?”
Shadrak pried open the grill on the cellar floor and lowered himself into the opening.
“You’re not going down there?”
“Best way to see the city.”
“What about the wine?”
“You finish it.”
Shadrak slid the grill back into place and dropped from sight.
A shadow detached itself from the wall and drifted to Cadman’s side.
“Thank you, Callixus, but it seems you weren’t needed after all.”
The wraith hovered over him, adding its chillness to the cold he already felt.
Cadman scrabbled about in his pocket for a cigarette. “Can you make the journey to Pardes?”
“You want me to kill the Gray Abbot?”
“Only if you must. Bring me his piece of the Statue of Eingana. Who knows, with two segments I may have double the power.” Then again he might just be getting deeper into something than he ought to. What on earth was he doing? He thought about the tentacled nightmare that had invaded his bedroom and shattered the illusion of safety.
The cat’s out of the bag, Cadman. Either you see this through or get as far away from here as possible. But anywhere that wasn’t Sahul was that much closer to Verusia, and the last thing he needed was to come to the attention of his old master, Otto Blightey.
THE SCENT OF POWER
Sektis Gandaw’s breath was a solar wind, streaming particles into empty space. Arterial fluids chilled, hardening flesh, slowing thoughts. The sloshing beats of his prosthetic heart grew further apart—he counted the seconds between them like a child anticipating the next peal of thunder. Red pulsed in his peripheral vision, no more than a hazy acknowledgement pushed to the extremities of awareness by the burgeoning silence.
He waited for the patterns of the Unweaving.
Perfectly on cue, light swirled from the metal vambrace on his forearm, settling into streams and arcs, circles and squares, all present and correct, as he knew they would be. Next came the polygons, dancing with numbers. Once they would have triggered a migraine; now they were a symphony rising to rapture. But even in ecstasy, the niggling continued. Without adequate power, all this was just a light show, an exercise in algebra, a set of calculations so vast it was like cramming the cosmos into his skull and trusting his head not to explode.
If only he’d not made the dwarves… The whirling display flickered, and daggers jabbed Gandaw’s brain. If only he still had the energy of the so-called goddess, Eingana… Red light flashed; the hissing crackle of white noise. If only—
“Breakout … Breakout…” The grating voice of a sentroid, distorting through his aural implants.
The shapes and numbers swirled into a maelstrom and then zipped back into the vambrace. A ripple ran through Gandaw’s tunic as the exoskeleton beneath reactivated and a thousand pinpricks pierced his skin. His regenerated flesh suffused with warmth, arteries thawed, and the mechanical heart resumed its bracing tattoo.
With a tap of a button on the vambrace, he stimulated the phosphorescence of the green veins that fractured the black scarolite walls. He stood and switched on the vambrace’s com-screen, his plastic stool melting away into the floor.
“Mephesch, I’m trying to work.”
The homunculus’s face was pressed too close to the camera, just those inscrutable eyes set in sockets like calderas.
“Apologies, Technocrat. It’s Skeyr Magnus,” Mephesch said. “He’s found a way out
. Taken the rest of them with him.”
“Show me.”
The image changed: a sentroid’s aerial shot of the mountain’s perfectly symmetrical peak. There was a rupture near the summit through which scores of lizard-men were pouring. The display cut to another sentroid’s camera, further back: the scarolite mountain stark against the bleached dust of the Dead Lands.
“There,” Gandaw said. “That’s him.”
The sentroid moved in for the kill, Skeyr Magnus scampering away on reptilian legs that were never designed for speed. Gandaw should have aborted the lizard-men long ago. They had shown themselves good for nothing. Another failed experiment—just like the dwarves.
“Wait,” he spoke into the vambrace. “What’s that on his hand?”
The sentroid zoomed in.
“Is that one of my gauntlets?”
Blue tongues of flame licked across the black glove on the lizard-man’s right hand. Gandaw squinted in order to focus his optics. The projection gauntlet? Skeyr Magnus, nothing but an engineered brute, had a projection gauntlet?
“It’s how they got out, Technocrat,” Mephesch said through the aural implants. “Punched a hole in the top of the mountain. Nothing else could do that to scarolite.”
“But the shields—”
“Only work—”
“—from the outside,” Gandaw finished. “Then seal the breach and exterminate them in the Dead Lands.”
A throng of lizard-men formed around Skeyr Magnus, moving in unison like a single organism. Gandaw rubbed his chin, admiring his handiwork. Perhaps they hadn’t been an unmitigated disaster after all. They were maximizing their chances of survival by protecting the individual with the most power.
Blue fire streaked towards the sentroid’s camera and the screen went dark.
“Switching to another sentroid,” Mephesch said.
Gandaw shook his head. What would be the point? The lizard-men were too close to the edge of the Dead Lands, the limits of the sentroids’ range.
“Let them go. They’ll never make it out of the Sour Marsh.”
“Point taken,” Mephesch said. “I’ll mobilize a team to repair the breach, and I’ll see to it that the gauntlet is replicated. Sorry for the interruption, Technocrat. I’ll try not to disturb you again.”
“Too late for that. I’m coming down.”
***
Sektis Gandaw stepped from the elevator into the cathedral cavern at the heart of the mountain. The intolerable escape of the lizard-men had already been rendered tolerable by chemicals. Just how he liked it: everything back to normal. Perfect homeostasis.
His gaze flicked across the screens that studded the walls. Images assailed him from every angle: long-shots, close ups, heat residues and fractals, all beamed from a network of satellites so ancient as to be unsuspected by the people of Earth—ungrateful insects. Each screen had a seat of molded plastic before it and its own dedicated kryeh, eyes wired into the receivers, bat wings folded behind shriveled female bodies.
He made an efficient sweep of the monitoring stations that spiraled up from the ground in concentric tiers to terminate in the single round eye of screen 55 on the ceiling, trained perpetually on the Void. He’d stared out at the worlds for centuries, and the worlds always glared back at him, insolent in their elliptical orbits. Utterly predictable, but imperfect nevertheless.
Same routine, same place, same time. Upon the hour, every hour, every tardy Aethirean day. He cocked an eyebrow, only slightly, and more as an extension of his will than an unconscious expression. In spite of the irritating excitement generated by the breakout, he was succumbing to the tedium again. He acknowledged the boredom before shutting it off behind a curtain of steel. That would be an admission of complicity with someone else’s universe, someone else’s creation. He would have scoffed if he hadn’t possessed such flawless self-control. He elected, instead, to stab the buttons on his vambrace with the tip of a bloodless finger.
Someone else’s universe. To think there were still people who believed in a divine architect responsible for the mess out there. More of a petulant child, strewing its playthings chaotically about the crib before falling asleep and forgetting all about them. Not even that. Simply chance, blind and unaware. Chaos begotten from nothing with no need for supernatural explanations. It was all in the math, just as he’d demonstrated back on Earth. The problem was, no one had wanted to know.
Gandaw’s optics whirred into focus on the digits racing across the vambrace’s screen. He read them off with the partition of his mind assigned to such things.
The homunculus, Mephesch, was running his checks, scurrying from station to station, testing the connections with the kryeh, all of whom remained taut with anticipation, staring blankly at the images in front of them. They might as well have been carved out of the rock of the mountain, dead things crafted from the same scarolite ore Gandaw had created the dwarves to mine following his flight from Earth a millennium ago.
Gandaw spared a few moments observing Mephesch, making sure he did exactly as he’d been instructed. He was certain the creature meant to betray him, it was in his nature. After all, the homunculi claimed to be the spawn of the Demiurgos, the supposed god reputedly trapped at the center of the Void. Utter nonsense, of course, but the thing that really annoyed him was that, no matter how diligently he sifted through the life forms of Aethir and Earth, no matter how much he scrutinized and distilled the basic energies and elements of the cosmos, he could not account for the existence of the homunculi.
His optics zoomed in on Mephesch, dressed like Gandaw himself in a dull gray tunic, gray trousers, and black shoes that never needed polishing. The homunculus was barely three feet tall, craggy faced, with plastinated dark hair—again like Gandaw’s, which never required cutting. Mephesch’s eyes were like black pebbles peering mockingly from beneath ledge-like brows. Not Gandaw’s design at all. The homunculi were more like fairy tale gnomes than the evolutionary dead-end he’d first suspected. That had always been the problem with Aethir, he mused, ruing the day of the Reckoning when he’d been forced to return to the world of his previous exile in a planeship: it was so chaotic. Creatures sprang up from Qlippoth, Aethir’s dark side, like phantoms from nightmare, and his early attempts to subjugate the region had ended in disaster. The best he could do was to station sentroids along the borders of the Dead Lands surrounding his mountain base, and continue with his experiments in Malkuth, the so-called Light Side of Aethir.
Qlippoth, along with the crevasses leading to the pit of Gehenna, and the homunculi themselves, were intolerable exceptions to Gandaw’s meticulously charted map of creation. They stood outside his paradigm and either had to be eradicated or ignored. He was incapable of the latter, but could only achieve the former if he could recommence the Unweaving. He’d come close once before, but then he’d been betrayed by his own creation, the dwarves. Ever since, he’d kept his eyes fixed on the worlds, watching for the barest glimmer of energy from that which he’d lost, the power source that would fuel his un-creation: the Statue of Eingana.
His optics were drawn inexorably to screen 55. A familiar knotting started in his stomach as he stared into the swirling black of the Void, feeling it tugging at the core of his being. Nothing but a singularity, he told himself as the biostat kicked in to relax him. Needles delivered their sedatives, and equilibrium was resumed as quickly as it had been lost.
Definitely a black hole, but that didn’t account for the gaseous tendrils crisscrossing the Void like the webbing of a cosmic spider, the slenderest threads here and there touching Aethir’s underground realm of Gehenna. The superstitious called it the Abyss. His former master, Otto Blightey, had been trapped there once and had reached across the stars with his prodigious will to request Gandaw’s aid. All that so-called magic, but in the end it had been science that had brought Blightey home, science that had found a foothold in the nebulous reality covering the mouth of the Void. It had also been science that had stood up to Blightey’s sub
sequent machinations and driven him into hiding. Unfortunately, the same science had yet to offer a viable hypothesis for the Abyss, and that was something that Gandaw simply couldn’t abide.
No matter, he thought, even the imponderables of the universe would be unwoven with the rest of creation, leaving him free to start from first principles with his own elements and his own precise imprint of perfection.
He almost sighed with boredom as he once more scanned the stationary kryeh monitoring the screens.
One of you make a sound. Anything to end the interminable silence. Anything to—
“Caw.”
Gandaw stopped mid-thought, ears buzzing as the aural implants filtered out the humming of machinery and homed in on the frequencies of the sound just emitted … by one of the kryeh.
Mephesch was watching him, head to one side, black eyes glinting with either excitement or mischief. In response to Gandaw’s unasked question, Mephesch indicated the kryeh stationed at screen 37 on the second tier. The circle of flooring beneath Gandaw’s shiny shoes detached itself and bore him upwards until he levitated just behind the creature. Mephesch seemed to merge with the wall and then reappeared beside the offending kryeh. Gandaw shook his head. How did he do that?
The satellite was aimed at the northwest coast of Sahul, the troublesome last refuge of opposition to his Global Technocracy on Earth in the days before the Reckoning. The image was unfocused, showing only a blurry, indistinguishable landmass. A node pushed through Gandaw’s scalp, microfilaments whipping out like the tentacles of a fluorescent jellyfish and inserting into receptors on the edge of the screen. He zoomed in upon a city tucked away within the northern jungle, attenuated his trackers and expanded a section of the road leading south along the coast. There was a momentary flare of amber light.