Against the Unweaving

by D. P. Prior

  The gladius jerked sideways, twisting itself in Shader’s grip until it aimed like a spear at the sentroid holding Gandaw. With a sudden surge of movement, it shot forward with Shader clinging on, legs swinging crazily, and embedded itself in the silver sphere. The sentroid shook and sparked and burst into flame—and Gandaw fell, his filaments ripping free of the statue and flailing around him as they retracted into his armor. Grapnels snagged a railing and reeled him to the safety of a walkway. Down below, the chasm trembled and then snapped shut like the jaws of a monstrous beast.

  Almost immediately, Gandaw turned to a console and made a series of swipes and taps on its mirror. The Statue of Eingana was slowly lowered toward him, the crown atop its head still ablaze with sparks that stretched into strings of fire that fed into the base of the black sphere.

  The gladius matched Eingana’s descent, and Shader reached out to grab her. Pain jolted through his fingers and up his arm. He cried out and could only watch helplessly as Gandaw plucked the statue from the air.

  “Seconds to go!” he raved. “Seconds!”

  Amber light blasted from Eingana’s maw. The gladius came up to meet it with a wall of golden radiance. Where the two forces collided, a keening wail arose. At first, Shader thought it was coming from the gladius, but then he realized there were two cries. Brother and sister. Eingana and the Sword of the Archon, forced to fight, and both of them screaming.

  Above them, the black sphere ballooned and shuddered.

  The filaments reemerged from Gandaw’s armor and penetrated the statue. Instantly, it was awash with amber, and then it burst forth like a small sun. Shader was thrown back, but golden effulgence exploded from the gladius and met Eingana’s assault force for force. Where the two powers collided, flames erupted, burgeoning into a conflagration that consumed Shader and Gandaw but burned neither. The metal of the walkway, however, was white hot and smoldering, and Shader glimpsed Nameless and Rhiannon sheltering at the edge of the flames. There was nothing they could do. It was his fight alone now. His and Gandaw’s.

  “Deadlocked,” Gandaw said, face rapt with concentration. “Stay like this and you’ll perish in the Unweaving.” He glanced up at the black sphere shaking violently and growing denser by the second. “Let me raise the walls, shield us. Otherwise we’ll all die.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?” Shader said.

  “Not me,” Gandaw wailed. “Not me!”

  Shader willed the gladius to do more, willed it from defense to attack. It bucked in his grip, shrieked, and it was all he could do to hang on.

  “Please,” Gandaw cried. “Lay down the sword!”

  “Don’t do it, laddie!” Nameless yelled from beyond the conflagration. All Shader could see of him was a blur in the haze.

  “No, Deacon,” Rhiannon said, a wavering form beside the dwarf. “Don’t stop!”

  A low drone came from the black sphere, growing in volume. The sound reverberated through Shader’s bones, pressed on his skull, threatening to crush it.

  Seconds remaining… Seconds, and he wasn’t ready; wasn’t ready for oblivion.

  “You’re a man of faith,” Gandaw said, barely visible through the blaze coming off the statue in his grasp. “If you can’t trust me, place your faith in your god. Lower the sword.”

  Shader felt himself inching the blade down, felt the gladius slackening off its resistance to Eingana’s onslaught.

  “No!” Rhiannon cried.

  “Fight, laddie. Fight!”

  But it was fighting that had given the lie to what he was, wasn’t it? Fighting he’d always been too scared to give up, in case it put him at the mercy of others. In case he suffered the pain of humiliation. In case he lost control.

  “Do nothing and we all die,” Gandaw said.

  Was that so bad? What benefit was it for a few to survive when all the worlds were going to perish? He remembered the old man in the cell, and the calm he radiated as he went to his god. Felt the old man’s hope as he passed on what he most treasured.

  Shader’s fingers went to the pendant around his neck. What was it Thumil had said back at Arx Gravis? Surrender yourself to this Nous of yours… let him carry you.

  He shut his eyes and prayed for the strength to let go, the courage to abandon himself. But it wasn’t to Nous that he prayed, nor to Ain the Unknowable. It was to the lady on the pendant.

  He released the gladius, and it clanged to the floor.

  Its light died instantly. Eingana’s attack petered out as Gandaw whirled around to the console and swiped across its mirror. With a rattling hum, the walls of the chamber began to rise, and when Gandaw made a few more passes across the mirror, they raced upward and closed the chamber tight against the Unweaving.

  The instant the ceiling snapped shut, obliterating sight of the black mass that was about to end all things, Gandaw turned back in triumph—and sent a wall of amber flame straight at Shader.

  The gladius shot up of its own accord, whirling, spinning, drawing the fire into itself, wrapping itself in the flames. A sound like a gasp came from the statue, and for a moment, Eingana’s attack faltered.

  “Finish him!” Gandaw yelled.

  The hum from beyond the apex rose to the roar of a thousand waterfalls. The walls of the chamber warped and buckled, and time seemed to stand still.

  Gandaw’s mouth opened and closed with macabre slowness.

  “Yeeeessss!” slewed from his lips in an endless stream.

  Wrong! Shader heard Aristodeus’s voice in his head, laced with the same criticism as during all those years of lessons. Never satisfied. Nothing was ever good enough. Wrong decision!

  But all he felt was disappointment pitting in his stomach, the disillusionment of misplaced faith.

  The sword stopped spinning and aligned itself, tip facing Gandaw.

  Faster than everything else in the room, as if it were immune to the new constraints on time, it shot forward.

  Gandaw cried out and ponderously raised his arms, but the sword wasn’t aiming for him.

  With a thunderous crack, it embedded itself in the heart of the statue.

  Eingana shuddered, and the glare of her eyes and fangs went out. Tendrils of golden light wrapped her in their embrace, and amber feelers of her own came out to intertwine with them. The serpent’s body began to swell. Stony scales cracked and sloughed off; long-fossilized jaws closed, and a forked tongue flicked between them.

  “No! What have you done?” Gandaw cried.

  Eingana grew and grew and grew until her monstrous head swayed high above Gandaw. She dashed the sparking crown against the ceiling, crushing the filaments linking her to the black sphere, and then, with a second blow, the crown shattered. The chamber stilled, and from outside came nothing but a deathly silence.

  The Archon’s sword jutting from Eingana’s body sank deeper, until black scales closed over it.

  Gandaw took a step back, but Eingana’s tail whipped around his legs and held him fast. Coil upon coil, she wrapped around his body, until all that was visible was his head, aghast beneath its crystal helm. His lips moved fast now, and a babbling stream of pleas left them, and then Eingana’s jaws opened and her head snapped down. Gandaw screamed, and greenish fluids sprayed as she crunched down on him and swallowed him whole.

  Shader watched in fascinated horror as a bulge passed down the serpent’s throat, deeper and deeper through her sinuous body. Amber eyes turned toward him, and he braced himself for a similar fate. The serpent’s head bobbed atop its neck, and it seemed to Shader that she nodded. Then, with a flick of her tail, she vanished, taking the Sword of the Archon with her.

  Shader sank slowly to his knees. Numbness spread from his mind to his limbs, and he hung his head in exhaustion. His hands were shaking, and the rims of his eyes burned with the need to shed tears.

  Rhiannon’s hand on his shoulder made him look up. She let out a long sigh and managed a tight smile.

  Nameless kept his distance, a morose figure encased in his black
helm, his squat bulk hanging languid.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Rhiannon said, her voice so soft Shader wasn’t certain he’d heard her right. Her fingers stiffened on his shoulder, and she let go. “Thought you’d given in. You should have bloody told us.”

  Mephesch’s head poked above the walkway, and then he rose into view atop a floating disk. He was beaming from ear to ear, but after catching Shader’s eye, his expression turned sober, and he stepped off the disk and set about swiping symbols on the console mirror Gandaw had so recently been using. With a clunk and a hum, the ceiling snapped open a crack, and then the walls began to sink once more toward the floor.

  Shader shielded his eyes against the brilliance from above, but then peeked through the gaps in his fingers. The black sphere was gone, and instead, a ray of sunlight lanced down through the opening, dust mites dancing along its length all the way to the floor of the chamber.

  “Least you did it,” Rhiannon said. It sounded begrudging at first, but then she said, “Deacon, you did it.” She wouldn’t meet his gaze, though, and instead craned her neck to look upward, where the receding walls gave way to skies of brilliant cobalt dotted with gossamer wisps of cloud. High above the Perfect Peak, the twin suns blazed with newfound health and vitality.

  As the walls retracted fully, exposing the stark expanse of the Dead Lands, Mephesch hopped back on his disk and descended all the way through the ground floor and down into the roots of the mountain.

  Shader forced himself to his feet as greenish light flared out on the open plain. A portal swirled into existence, and a figure stepped out of it. Shader blinked against the glare, seeing little more than a silhouette, but Rhiannon tutted and went to lean out over a railing to watch the figure approaching. Even without seeing him clearly, Shader knew who it was. It was starting to seem that nothing—not even the gaping maw of the Abyss—could stop Aristodeus from returning like a fly to a pile of dung.

  Way back past Aristodeus, at the edge of the Sour Marsh, a line of lizard-men spread out, staring up at the pristine sky. One at the front raised an arm toward the mountain, in what Shader took to be a salute. From this distance, the hand looked overly large, and once or twice it sparked. Skeyr Magnus, then, still standing after everything.

  Shader waved in acknowledgment. What had brought the lizard-men to the fight, and at such a critical moment? He fingered the old man’s pendant, and then wondered if he’d received his answer as a circle opened in the bleached dust of the Dead Lands and Mephesch emerged on his disk. Aristodeus opened his arms and quickened his pace, and the homunculus ran to him. As the two of them walked back to the disk, Rhiannon shouldered her sword and strode past Shader, heading to the steps and climbing down.

  Shader was about to follow, when he caught sight of Nameless still standing there. He hadn’t moved an inch, and looked every bit like a statue, a memorial to gloom and despair.

  “Nameless?” Shader said, walking over to him. He’d taken the full force of one of Gandaw’s fireballs to the head. Maybe he was—

  Nameless jerked and then shook himself. “Laddie? By the Lords of Arnoch, laddie, you did it!”

  Shader hesitated for a moment, and then gripped the dwarf by the wrist and clapped him on the shoulder. “I did nothing.” It was the truth. Nameless and Rhiannon had fought tooth and nail and had both nearly been killed in the process; Skeyr Magnus and his lizard-men, too. But when it had come down to it, in the heat of the moment, Shader had frozen. If it hadn’t been for the sword…

  “I was watching, laddie. I saw just what you did. Shog me for a shogging shogger, but if you’d listened to this stupid old dwarf, we’d have lost everything.”

  “Listened to you?” Shader said. He had no idea what Nameless was talking about.

  “I told you to fight, remember. It’s what I’d have done, what I always do. But if you’d gone on fighting, there’d have been no one to break the deadlock, and the worlds would have ended. I see it now, but at the time, I thought you’d failed us. Failed everyone.”

  Shader had thought the same himself, thought he’d played into Gandaw’s hands.

  “How did you know?” Nameless said.

  Why didn’t you tell us? Rhiannon had asked.

  Shader looked away, down into the open chamber, where she stood leaning on Callixus’s black sword as Aristodeus and Mephesch came up through the floor on the floating disk.

  Truth was, he hadn’t known. If anything, he’d despaired, or been close to it.

  Do nothing, and we all die.

  Fight on, same conclusion.

  What other choice had there been? It had been purely pragmatic, hadn’t it? Selfish, even. At least by complying, by putting the sword down, there had been a slim chance of survival—for himself, Rhiannon, and Nameless, but not for anyone else. Or was it more than that? Had it been Thumil’s words that had swayed him? The old man’s faith, the image of the lady? It was all such a blur. There was no clarity to what he’d done.

  “Thumil told me something before we left Arx Gravis,” he said. Maybe he couldn’t be sure why he’d acted as he had, but one possibility stemmed from despair and blind luck, whereas the other held the promise of hope; hope that there were other forces at play, that he wasn’t the one holding all the cards.

  “Only good advice I had from Thumil was to steer clear of Ironbelly’s ale,” Nameless said.

  “He spoke about surrender.”

  “What?” Nameless spat the word, as if it were an affront.

  “Not in battle.”

  “Ah, well, that’s all right, then, laddie. Least I think it is.”

  “He meant not always needing to be in control. Surrender to Nous, or whoever it is he prayed to. Giving yourself over to a higher power.”

  Nameless snorted and shook the great helm. “Sounds like a bad idea to me. That’s the kind of thing that led to my…” His voice choked off, and he crossed his arms over his chest. After a moment’s silence, he said, “The black axe was like that. Don’t see myself surrendering to any higher power after what it made me do.”

  “This is different,” Shader said. “A willing surrender, not a…” He didn’t know how to say it. Possession? Nameless made it unnecessary, though.

  “Old baldilocks was right.” He cocked a thumb down below, where Aristodeus was looking up at them expectantly. “This was beyond me. Have to say, laddie, I don’t get what you’re talking about. The whole thing stinks of madness and deception, but proof’s in the pudding, I guess.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Shader asked.

  “You were right. I just have a hard time seeing how. Guess that’s why you’re the savior of the worlds, and I’m just a butcher with too much blood on his hands.”

  Shader took hold of Nameless’ shoulders and looked straight into the eye-slit of the great helm. He intended to show confidence, to offer words of consolation, but the dark eyes that stared back at him were so full of sorrow, so haunted, he wavered and looked away.

  “No, my friend,” he managed. “If it hadn’t been for you”—and Rhiannon—“I’d have never gotten close enough.” If it hadn’t been for so many others—Shadrak, Albert… And then the full magnitude of it hit him: all the people who’d given so much, first to stop Dr. Cadman, and then the Unweaving: Barek, Huntsman, General Starn, Captain Podesta, Maldark the Fallen… There were too many to name. Even poor, flawed Gaston had ultimately given all he had. Shader only hoped it had been enough.

  For a moment, it was clear to him. It wasn’t all on his shoulders. Never had been. But more than that, he was filled with the pervading sense that all was well; everything was as it should be; that there was a guiding hand steering the course of the worlds, whether or not he could discern it.

  If only it could have stayed like that. If only these revelations didn’t flicker away to nothing like an oxygen-starved flame. He clung to the feeling while he could, but even as Nameless clapped him on the back and led the way down the steps toward Aristodeus, Rhiann
on, and Mephesch, Shader knew his insight wasn’t complete.

  THE PARTING OF WAYS

  The wagon pulled up just shy of a crater-pocked plain that stretched away from the road.

  “This it?” Shadrak said. “This where you left it?” He scratched inside the sling holding his injured arm tight to his chest. Shogging thing was infested with lice, he was sure of it. Either that, or Albert had cut it from Fargin’s shite-encrusted loin cloth. Amounted to about the same thing, though, he reckoned.

  Buck looked over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. “It’s where I found him.”

  Albert didn’t look so sure, sat in the back with Shadrak, a half-eaten pastry clutched in his pudgy hand. He stood and turned a slow circle, using his spare hand as a visor. “They all look the same to me,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Buck said. “Once you’ve seen one boreworm hole, you’ve seen ’em all.”

  Shadrak grunted as he rolled forward from the crate he’d been using as a chair and found his feet. Pain lanced down his arm, all the way to the fingers. He bit his lip and grimaced. Shog, he hated being injured. Once he’d stubbed his toe kicking in some shogger’s door. Blasted thing had swollen the size of a sausage and made him hobble for weeks. Hadn’t done the target no good, though. He’d still got a bullet through the back of the skull; waste of a bullet, but there weren’t no way he was gonna hop after him. Injury like that to his dignity weren’t the kind that would ever heal.

  “Find it,” he said to Albert.

  “You find it,” Albert said, taking a bite of pastry and making more noise than a cow chewing the cud.

  Shadrak knew it was the pain, knew it was the annoyance of being hurt and all, but he was right out of patience. A couple of day’s practice, and he was as good with the left hand as the right. He drew his pistol, twirled it once on his finger, and took aim.