Against the Unweaving

by D. P. Prior

  —on your head be it.

  The image of a baby, head dashed against the hard stone of Arx Gravis, sprang to life behind his eyes. Thumil groaned and tried to nestle further into Cordy’s bosom.

  After all, it is your head to lose.

  THE END OF WORLDS

  The Homestead, Earth

  Year of the Reckoning: 908

  Hands gripped Shader’s arm and helped him to his feet. His vision swirled red and blue, slashed into ribbons by streaks of argent and gold. He blinked until his eyes regained their focus on the ruddy plateau of the Homestead beneath his feet, and above, the sapphire skies of Sahul. Silver glinted from the heads of pikes and spears, and the aureate sun glared down with a heat that seared its displeasure deep into his flesh.

  “Barek,” he said, shuddering as he faced the youth. “You made it.”

  Rhiannon was approaching, leading Sammy like the last walk of the damned and trailing Callixus’s black sword.

  A sea of troops looked toward him as if he might have some answer, might be able to tell them all was not lost. The Emperor Hagalle pushed to the front, glaring his unspoken accusations. General Starn was at his side, all stiff and proper, bleeding from a score of wounds and looking like he’d collapse if honor would let him. Behind them came the Ipsissimus, stooped and broken, like a man who no longer believed in salvation.

  “So, it’s over, then,” Barek stated matter-of-factly. “This is the end of all things.”

  Dave the Slave hobbled into view, his hunchback a swollen malignancy full to the bursting with poison. He pointed at Shader and cried, “He has doomed us.”

  Shader’s head was spinning from the concussion, his thoughts rising and breaking like waves on a reef. If only he’d struck Gandaw when he’d had the chance. If only he hadn’t hesitated—

  “Deacon?” Rhiannon said, releasing Sammy’s hand and taking hold of Shader’s face. “Deacon?”

  Shader’s eyes tracked Sammy’s progress as the boy wandered away from his sister and went into the embrace of the huge snake man. At least one of the Hybrids had survived.

  “I’m sorry, Rhiannon.” —For everything. For all you’ve suffered.

  “Is it true?” She pressed her face close to his, and all he could think of was the sweetness of her breath. “Have we lost?”

  Shader pulled away, gestured to the sky where the throne had been. He was tired. Too tired to care about the end of Creation. But all eyes were on him, like he was the world’s last hope. He had to say something, even if it was to confirm their greatest fears.

  “Gandaw’s beyond our reach now.”

  “You did this!” Dave inveighed. “You were given a chance—”

  The hunchback dropped to his knees with a thud, and Shadrak the Unseen emerged from behind him.

  “Kidney punch,” the assassin said. “Which is mild, considering what I thought of doing.”

  Still alive, then, after he’d been flung across the ridge by some unseen force. Like a cockroach, Shader thought. Even if they were too late, and Creation fell, Shadrak would no doubt still be there, hunkered down in some nook or cranny in Gandaw’s brave new world.

  “Reckon I can find him,” Shadrak said. “Sektis shogging Gandaw. But I don’t know how much time we have.”

  And then Aristodeus was there, rubbing his beard like he always did when considering an interesting conundrum. He smiled at Shader, but there was no warmth in his eyes. If anything, he looked like a man tormented, a man who had staked his entire existence on one last throw of the die.

  “You clearly don’t understand the nature of the beast,” he said. “Gandaw has planned this for millennia, and he’s not about to mess it up by rushing. He has instruments that have mapped Creation one strand at a time, all so he can plug the data into his algorithms for the Unweaving. The only thing missing was an energy source big enough for the task.”

  “So it’s over,” Rhiannon said.

  “If we do nothing.” Aristodeus’s words may have been meant for the Ipsissimus, but if they were, they were wasted. The Ipsissimus seemed lost in a world of his own, as absent as the Nous he was supposed to represent. “If you do nothing.” Aristodeus spoke the words directly to Shader, and something was communicated between them: no more than a chill in Shader’s spine, a knotting of his stomach, and the vague feeling that something like this had happened before.

  Every frayed nerve in Shader’s body screamed recognition, but his concussed mind just threw up blurs and rumors.

  Aristodeus’s eyes narrowed. They were bluer than the sky and glimmered like ice in the arctic sun. The philosopher’s bald head was wrinkled with concern, but Shader had the sense it was not for his welfare. There was some secret, something Aristodeus wasn’t saying, and Shader’s whole being held the answer. But still his mind stalled, like a horse balking at a jump. Whatever it was, it was there, but on the far side of an unfathomable abyss.

  The philosopher stepped away, and Shader’s nerves quieted. His head was pounding from where he’d struck it when he tumbled down the ridge. The sun’s scorching heat wasn’t helping any. Ain, he was dry. When had he last had something to drink?

  I think I can find him—Was it Shadrak who’d said that?

  The albino was watching Aristodeus with a coolness that went deeper than mere curiosity at the philosopher’s appearance out of nowhere, or the knowledge he claimed of the end of all things. Shadrak must have sensed Shader’s gaze, for his pink eyes narrowed, demanding some kind of action. Shader looked at the others, as if their presence, their tangibility, might rub off on his thoughts.

  Rhiannon had lost something—something as vague and indefinable as Shader’s memories. She looked older somehow, face honed by conflict, eyes darker, tainted by what they’d seen. The color had drained from her lips, and her complexion had sallowed beyond its wan mystique, now appearing sickly, pallid like the dead of Sahul who first Cadman and then Gandaw had commanded against them. Walking corpses, necrotic ghouls. Maybe their undeath was contagious.

  Barek looked numb from exhaustion and lucky to be alive. There was hardly any white left on his tabard, so drenched was it with his own blood and the putrid gore of the undead. His young eyes held the same dullness that had deadened the Ipsissimus’s since the loss of his Monas and his failure to lift a finger to prevent it.

  Shader’s face tightened, and he sucked in air through clenched teeth. His anger hadn’t passed, but he no longer knew if it was directed at the Ipsissimus, or at the deity who demanded pacifism at the point of a sword. Did he have the right to be angry at Nous, the son of Ain the Concealed, the one true Lord who was no-thing? But Nous was something. The more Shader trod the path of the Templum, the more he realized Nous was utterly human in his contradictions and paradoxes, in his broken promises and his ability to disappoint.

  So, it’s over, Rhiannon had said—for the worlds, Earth and Aethir. Ain’s teeth, how many other worlds were threatened by Gandaw’s Unweaving? And did it just involve the whole span of space, or would time be unpicked, too? All so that Sektis Gandaw could be his own origin, the still point of a perfect creation, a creation with no room for any of those left standing atop the Homestead, those who had given their lives defending the bedrock of existence. Those who expected something of Shader, something he didn’t know how to give.

  Worlds were going to fall. Creation itself was poised for oblivion.

  If you do nothing, Aristodeus had said. But what could Shader do? Hadn’t he already had his chance and failed just as completely as the Ipsissimus?

  Dave the Slave remained on his knees. His mouth was still, but accusation burned in his eyes. Out of them all, the crazy prophet had expected the most from Shader. Ain only knew what he would do now that Shader had stayed his hand, refused to obey the ‘Voice of Nous.’ Shader couldn’t hold onto Dave’s eyes. They were the myopic eyes of a lunatic, a man whose faith was a dangerous obsession.

  Looking away from Dave, Shader’s gaze swept the battlefield, the tablet
op summit of the Homestead, most sacred site of Sahul’s Dreamers. The dead lay in piles that could have been spread out to cover a large field. Some were now twice dead, the remains of the disinterred automatons commanded by Sektis Gandaw. The others, mingled in bloody heaps, were sworn enemies driven together by desperation: the armies of Nousia and Sahul. Thousands dead, a fraction of that remaining, all waiting for Shader to act, to tell them there was still hope.

  Finally, the giant snake-headed Hybrid spoke, all the while hugging the boy, Sammy, against his massive chest. Little Sammy Kwane, Rhiannon’s brother, now weather-beaten and half-naked in the manner of the Dreamers.

  “You have the Archon’sss sssword. Perhapsss there isss yet sssome hope.”

  Shader looked down at the gladius still snug in his grip, like it wanted to be there. The Sword of the Archon, won in the tournament in Aeterna. Isn’t that what Aristodeus had prepared him for as a child?

  Shader saw the philosopher watching him, nodding at Mamba’s refusal of despair. Dave’s glare seemed to say, “The sword you should have slain Gandaw with.” —You were given a chance.

  The snake-man turned to face Shadrak. “I will go with you, though my woundsss are many.” He inclined his head, eyes widening in a manner that suggested familiarity, affection even. There was a deep gouge in his shoulder, and scores of gashes across his chest and legs. It looked as if he could hardly move his left arm. Sammy clung to him, as if he couldn’t bare to let him go.

  Shadrak held his gaze for a long while, as if he were appraising, or perhaps remembering. Finally he shook his head and looked away. “No. I have my instructions. Just me and Shader. No one else.”

  “Instructions?” Aristodeus said. “Who gave you instructions?”

  “Not at liberty to say. Why, does that rain on your parade?”

  Shadrak was following orders? Whose? Surely not the Sicarii: this was much bigger than them. Shader took some slight satisfaction from the fact that Aristodeus hadn’t been expecting this. The philosopher bit down on his top lip, narrowed his eyes to slits. Green light swirled around him, and then he was gone, as if he’d never been there.

  The Emperor Hagalle drew himself up to his considerable height, dwarfing the stocky General Starn even more than he normally did.

  “And who goes for Sahul? This is far too important to entrust to a Nousian and whatever the hell you are.” He shot a derisive look at Shadrak.

  “I’m Sicarii, Emperor,” Shadrak said, his tone genial, while the words implied threat, especially to one as paranoid as Hagalle.

  Hagalle clenched his fists and glowered. If he’d proven anything to Shader in the last few hours, it was that he was a man who confronted his fears. The tension hung thickly between him and the tiny assassin, and then Rhiannon stepped forward.

  “I’m from Oakendale,” she said. “Place is a shithole, but I reckon it qualifies as Sahulian. I’ll go.”

  She looked at Sammy, but he paid her no heed. His head was buried in the snake-man’s chest. Something about the slump of Rhiannon’s shoulders, the forced stoicism of her face, told Shader she already knew she’d lost her brother.

  “No,” Shader said, but his voice sounded thin and weak. He didn’t want her clinging to him just because there was nothing for her here. Oh, she still had the Templum, but that couldn’t be enough. Not for Rhiannon. Not the woman he knew. And besides, it had never been enough for Shader.

  “He stabbed you, Deacon,” Rhiannon said, jabbing a finger at Shadrak. “Or have you already forgotten that? No, don’t tell me. You’ve forgiven him.” She snorted her contempt.

  The pain was still there, a dull ache in his lower back, in spite of the Archon’s healing. It wasn’t an idea Shader was comfortable with—traveling to an uncharted world with the man who’d killed him—quite literally—but what choice did he have? Without even asking him what he wanted, it seemed everyone had decided Shader was going on this madcap mission; after all, he was the Keeper of the Archon’s Sword, wasn’t he? But what could Rhiannon do? If Shadrak intended more harm, how could she prevent it?

  “Yes,” Rhiannon said. “I’m coming, and that’s bloody final. I’ll keep that little shit in his place.” She glared at Shadrak. “And you know I can, don’t you?”

  Shadrak’s hand went to his face, but he held her gaze with his unnerving eyes and snorted his contempt.

  “Anyone else have anything to add?” Shadrak said, pulling up his hood, either to shield his head from the sun or to emphasize his profession. “Coz I’m keeping a list.”

  Hagalle looked at the Ipsissimus, but there was no response.

  “I will accompany you, for that is the will of Nous,” Dave said, lurching to Shader’s side.

  “Over my rotting corpse,” Shadrak said.

  “But Nous—”

  “Can go shog himself.” The assassin pushed roughly past him and strode for the edge of the mesa. Clusters of soldiers got out of his way and merely watched as he turned back and hollered, “You coming, or are we gonna sit on our asses and watch the shogging fireworks? Coz the end of the world’s coming, Shader, and now’s the only chance we have.”

  Rhiannon turned to her brother. “I… Sammy, I love…”

  The boy’s blank gaze seemed to freeze the words in her mouth. He took hold of the snake-man’s hand and tugged it. The two turned away and walked back toward the massed troops and the bodies of the dead.

  Shader took hold of Rhiannon by the shoulders. “You sure about this? Sammy—”

  “Yeah, like he needs me,” Rhiannon said, breaking free of him and storming after Shadrak.

  I need you, Shader wanted to say, but a strange paralysis overcame his jaw, and the words remained unspoken. He set off after Rhiannon, lowering his eyes so he didn’t have to look at the troops he passed. When he got to the edge of the tabletop, Rhiannon was already clambering down to a broad ledge that wound around the summit of the Homestead. He groaned, and already felt dizzy. He’d never liked heights. Not even as a child.

  Shadrak looked up at him from the ledge. “Left my long-gun on the ridge. Shogged if I’m going back for it now. Ain’t like it was gonna work, anyway, piece of crap. Not after I slung it down.”

  Rhiannon dropped the last couple of feet to stand beside the assassin. “Come on,” she said to Shader. “What’s the hold up.”

  Swallowing bile, Shader grimaced and lowered his feet over the edge. “No hold up,” he said, twisting to face the rock wall. “Just wondering how falling and breaking our necks is going to help, that’s all.”

  He looked back at the troops spread out across the mesa. They were moving among their fallen comrades, or collecting in groups, staring at him. He saw the Ipsissimus walking off by himself, a sorry-looking trio of Elect knights struggling to keep up, horses in tow. General Starn caught Shader’s eye and saluted, then jumped as Hagalle barked something at him. What would they do now that the battle was over? What could they do, save wait and hope? He shook his head, and the weight of responsibility felt like the sky had dropped on him. Why him? Why did it all depend on him? Couldn’t Aristodeus have found someone more worthy? Someone capable of at least taking the chances he was given?

  He drew in a deep breath and held it, prodding the rock face with his boot until he found a good-sized niche. Then slowly, ever so carefully, he started to climb down.

  The instant Shader reached the ledge, Shadrak turned and tapped the air with his fingers. Light flared in a horizontal beam before his feet and then swiftly grew upward to form a rectangular doorway.

  “Well, don’t just stand there gawping,” Shadrak said, and stepped inside.

  Shader could feel Dave’s eyes on him, glaring down at the ledge. He pointedly averted his gaze. There was no need to look: the tingling running up and down his spine was evidence enough. But maybe the hunchback had been right. Maybe he should have finished the job. Why had he hesitated? Why had he not struck Gandaw in that fleeting moment of opportunity? It was a question that threw up a dozen more:
Why had he left Aeterna for Sahul? Why had he left Pardes? Why had he almost given up all he was for Rhiannon? Why hadn’t it been enough?

  He clenched his fists, and acid ran through his veins. She was standing so close to him, he could smell her sweat. No doubt, she could smell his, too. It wasn’t as if any of them had had time to wash these past few days.

  Turning back to the doorway, he gestured for Rhiannon to go first. She screwed her face up and pressed it into the light.

  “Oh my shogging—” She pulled back out again. “You have got to see this!”

  She grabbed Shader’s hand and dragged him through the doorway’s effulgence behind her.

  Shader’s heart bounced up into his throat. It was enough to jolt him back to his senses. He tensed and flicked his eyes around, searching for any hint of a threat. The gladius throbbed in his hand and eased the pain in his head, cleared his mind. It must have responded to the arousal caused by the transition, for where there had been rock and open sky, they were now standing at one end of a metallic corridor, burnished as smooth as glass and lit by an eerie blue luminescence from some invisible source.

  Shadrak was striding ahead of them, completely at home.

  It wasn’t magic—at least not like any Shader had encountered. This had more the feel of Ancient tech about it, like the weapons he’d seen on Podesta’s ship, or the sketches in the history books Aristodeus had made him read as a child. The closest thing that sprang to mind was the dome he and Barek had discovered in Fenrir. A wave of emotion rolled up his spine and made him shudder. With a quick prayer for the soul of Osric, who had endured centuries of torment only to give up his remaining half-life to protect those he owed nothing to, Shader touched his forehead and dragged his attention back to the task in hand.

  The corridor went on so long it must have passed beyond the edge of the Homestead. Shadrak waited for them at a junction, above which were lintels inscribed with numerals. They followed him down the left-hand passageway, which was identical in every way to the entrance corridor, and paused before a slit partway along the wall. Shadrak pried open a silver panel and pressed a sequence of buttons. The wall slid open, revealing a rectangular cubicle, into which they stepped. The wall sealed behind them, and Shadrak tapped more buttons on the inside. The cubicle shuddered, and a low droning started up. Shader watched Rhiannon out of the corner of his eye, but she seemed more fascinated than scared.