by D. P. Prior
The disk slowed to a stop beneath a vertical tube and then rose. As it neared the surface, an iris valve began to open above.
The inner voice had returned mere days ago, like a cockroach creeping up from the bubbling abyss that lay beneath his rational mind. It was Blightey, he was sure of it. Just a ghost, a memory that refused to die. He’d told himself time and again not to worry; after all, hadn’t he defeated the Liche Lord after bringing him back from the Abyss? It wasn’t so much the threat Blightey presented that disturbed him; it was the lingering sense of mockery. As if he’d forgotten something—which was ridiculous—or as if he had somehow been led astray…
The disk wobbled as it passed through the valve; it wasn’t meant to do that. Gandaw stepped off, onto the bleached dust of the Dead Lands. Wind buffeted him and sent strands of his plastinated hair across his vision. He swept it out of his face with a surge of irritation. The hair wasn’t meant to do that, either. Even now, centuries after making the humiliating adverts that had launched Global Tech into the stratosphere, he could still hear the promise he made to his customers:
New from Global Tech: the plastination revolution! Hair you can style with just a thought. No more brushes, no more bad hair days. Permanently perfect hair, because you deserve it!
Only it wasn’t perfect, clearly. He ceased trying to pat it down and let the wind muss it up. He wondered when it had lost its hold. It had never occurred to him to monitor it, not in the unchanging environment of the Perfect Peak. The consumers would have all turned back into dust by now, in any case—dust surmounted by an imperishable wig. He wanted to tell himself it had been good enough, one of a string of products that had generated the capital to take Global Tech to world domination, but ‘good enough’ was one step down from perfection, and it was an infinite step, at that.
Three silver spheres shot toward him from the mountain. Tardy. Even the sentroids were no longer living up to his expectations. They stopped abruptly and then began to circle him, each in its own orbit.
Anything could have happened in the seconds he’d been left unguarded.
With a thought, he flexed the limbs of his exoskeleton. At least that was working correctly. Servos whined, and a shudder passed beneath his coat sleeves. Before his legs could extend, he stood down the system from defense mode.
It was hard to recall what the Dead Lands had looked like last time he’d been outside. He was fairly certain the sky had been some shade of blue—cobalt, most likely—and the suns had been golden, maybe even amber. Now, though, the sky was a like London’s smog all those centuries ago, and the bone-dust that formed an island around the Perfect Peak was shifting, morphing into jagged monoliths that crashed and reformed like waves. Even the vegetative border of the Sour Marsh was in upheaval, a writhing, undulating mass. The scarolite mountain itself was the only stationary point, an anchor amid the chaos, just as it should be. And, of course, it wasn’t really chaos if it was planned for, was it? These were expected side effects, the grumblings of nature as it prepared to be unwoven.
High above the Perfect Peak, the Null Sphere glistened blackly, gyring and pulsing as it aspired toward critical mass. Every every iota of matter stretching back to the point of origin billions of years ago, pared back to its constituent elements, codified and oriented to the meta-algorithm of Unweaving. The whole matrix of Creation uploaded bit by bit into a negative energy sphere powered by the Statue of Eingana. The epitome of perfection. Some fool had once said that man with his rational mind repeatedly tried to cram the universe into his head, but his head invariably split. Idiot! Had Gandaw not achieved this? Had he not contained the algorithms of everything that existed in his eons-old mind and worked out a way to unmake them? No stone had been left unturned. Nothing—not even the tiniest microbe—had escaped his processing.
Screen 55—That mocking thought again.
Gandaw sent a mental signal to the transporter disk. He’d seen enough. Everything was going to plan. He really didn’t need to waste his time and energy worrying about—
What about the Void? How do you account for that?
He started to descend, patting down his errant hair as the tube shielded him from the wind.
And the Abyss… You know it exists… You brought Blightey back from it, and yet you have studiously ignored it.
He wanted to retort that the Abyss was an absurdity, someone else’s fantasy. Wanted to say that the Void was just absence, not a thing in itself, and so no part of his equations. Blightey had been trapped; no one was denying that, and Gandaw had brought him back by converting the largest particle accelerator in the Great West, but there was never any question of the Liche Lord being trapped in the infernal realm. An alternate plane of existence, maybe. That made much more sense; and if it were such, then it also lay outside the scope of the Unweaving. No, the Abyss was just the same old superstitious nonsense that he’d finally put paid to before the Reckoning, when the ignorant hoped for an eternity of bliss, and feared one of never-ending torment; back in the days when the masses were controlled by a persistent delusion about God.
But—the seditious thought started.
Gandaw severed it at its source with a thought of his own, sharp as a scalpel. Intracranial lasers followed his direction, excised the responsible memory nodes from the preserved organic core of his consciousness.
Ah, you can run, but you can’t hide!
He started. Surely it couldn’t have survived… And then he realized: this thought was his own.
You can’t unlearn something and pretend that it doesn’t exist.
There were things in his calculations he’d not accounted for. The horror of the realization would have undone him, were it not for a massive influx of chemicals from his exoskeleton.
He’d known it all along. Known he was afraid of the Void and all it implied; known he couldn’t accept the reality of the Abyss. And now it was too late. Even if he could stop the Unweaving at this late stage, how could he study emptiness itself? How could he research the abode of a being reputedly formed from the very stuff of lies?
As the drugs took effect, Gandaw’s rational mind reasserted itself. It was nerves, that was all; another indictment of a flawed creation. He was succumbing to phantasms, to irrational fears. It was only natural—much as he despised that term—but there was no excuse to indulge such primitive nonsense.
Without even noticing the intervening journey, Gandaw found himself back in the control room at the heart of the mountain.
Mephesch greeted him with glittery eyes and flicked a look at the chronometer on his vambrace.
“One hour, thirty-five minutes and twenty-two seconds to go, Technocrat.”
Gandaw wanted to say, “Good”, or “Excellent,” but all he could manage was a nod.
He strode past the homunculus and craned his neck to look up at screen 55 and the inky image of the Void. Gaseous strands crisscrossed its face like a taunt. He was about to turn away, when a flicker of flame limned the entire web. He glanced at Mephesch, who merely shrugged blankly, and when he looked once more at the screen, the flames had gone.
“Problem, Technocrat?” Mephesch said.
No, Gandaw silently told himself. No. No. No. He fixed Mephesch with what he hoped was a confident stare. “No. Nothing. No problem.”
Mephesch stuck out his bottom lip and nodded, then he turned his attention to the tiers of screens.
The kryeh remained hunched over their terminals, each one poised to cry out the instant their respective screen went blank; when there was nothing left in that region of space for the satellites to convey. When the satellites themselves had ceased to exist.
All going to plan. All going perfectly to plan.
If he repeated the mantra enough, he’d believe it to be true. Had it really come to this? Endless eons of rigorous planning only to rely at the last on self-deception. Maybe it would work in spite of the omissions. Probably it would. How much difference could it make, leaving out two things that couldn’t poss
ibly fit with the pattern of the rest of creation? But there it was again, that gulf between ‘good enough’ and perfection. Only, he was starting to get the inkling this was about more than being blind-sided by irrational fear; more than a simple case of negligence. He was starting to feel like he’d been duped.
WHERE TIME HAS NO MEANING
“Keep your guard up!” Aristodeus yelled.
Rhiannon couldn’t. Her arms were leaden, the black sword a ponderous weight. “Can’t you at least open the shogging door? It’s bloody stifling in here.”
The white-washed walls of the philosopher’s tower seemed to be closing in on her, and the ceiling threatened to crush her to the ground. There was no room for maneuver, and that meant the swordplay was relentless; no retreat, just stand your ground, parry, thrust, block, slice; either that, or receive a sharp slap with the flat of a blade.
“We’ve been going at it for hours,” she said. “Shouldn’t the world have ended by now? What’s the point of all this, if we don’t even take a pop at Gandaw?”
Aristodeus sighed and lowered his sword. “As I’ve said a thousand times, it would not be wise to leave the tower, nor open the door—even a crack.”
“Why? What’s out there? Where the shog—?”
He held up a hand to cut her off. “And as for the Unweaving, consider it on hold. It’s more complex than that, but let’s just say time has no meaning here. We could train for days, years even, and still emerge before the end of all things. Call it a gift. Call it a blessing, if you like. Call it a responsibility.”
He lunged at her and she batted his blade away with ease.
“Good. It’s paying off. Still a poor substitute for Shader, though. If you’re to have any chance, we’ll need to go in together. You must be fast, very fast, and you’ll need the element of surprise. Without Shader’s sword, our chances are virtually nil, but I refuse to sit back and do nothing. If Gandaw doesn’t see us coming, and if that evil-looking sword of yours can penetrate his exoskeleton, who knows, maybe we won’t need to deal with Eingana.”
“So, what, you just magic us in and hope he’s looking the other way?”
Aristodeus shook his head and adopted a defensive stance. “I can’t get us through the scarolite. The mountain’s shielded against anything I can muster.”
“What, then?”
Aristodeus looked up at the ceiling and sucked in his top lip. “I fought Gandaw once before, and he used Eingana’s power to send me here. I have a theory—a desperate one, nonetheless—I might be able make the return trip, follow the fault-line of his own making. This tower is, shall we say, a construct of my will. It’s all that wards us from what’s outside. It is not, however, altogether stationary. It can be relocated, moved, propelled, even. You’ve already seen what I can accomplish with my will, else how else would I have brought you here? No, just wait and see. I think I can get us to Sektis Gandaw. Now, fight!”
He launched a blistering series of attacks. Rhiannon parried frantically until he backed her up against the door. He pressed in close, the whiskers of his beard scratching her face. His breath stank of garlic and wine, same as before, when he’d… when she’d drunk too much champagne. She tried to knee him in the groin, but he saw it coming, blocked her with the hilt of his sword.
“My first choice would be for Shader to get back on track,” he said, and then his tongue darted out and poked at her tightly closed lips. “Maybe that dwarf will knock some sense into him, but I can’t count on it. Which is where you come in. And don’t think the game stops with the Unweaving. What’s happening is far bigger than Sektis Gandaw. Yes, it’s all over if Gandaw wins, but if not, there’s a much bigger problem lurking in the shadows.”
He pushed himself away from her.
“You lack strength, speed, and stamina. We’ll work on all three. But first, if you’ve had enough for today—and don’t forget, we’ll be doing this day in, day out, until you’re ready, no matter how long it takes—there’s something we must do, sober, this time.”
Rhiannon screamed and swung the black sword with all her might. Aristodeus was quicker, though, and he grabbed her wrist and stayed the blow.
“We must plan for the endgame, should we ever reach that stage. Now, look at me. Look at my eyes. Are you telling me it was just the champagne last time, or do you see something there, something familiar?”
She saw something right enough. She saw the same leering hunger Gaston shogging Rayn had when he raped her. Never again, she had sworn, and yet she’d already let it happen, let him ply her with booze.
“Yeah, I see something familiar right enough,” she said, but before she could tell him exactly what it was, she was riveted to the ice-blue of his eyes, the way they darkened at the edges like a gathering storm. How could she have not noticed before? Had it been the drink? “Shader,” she said. “You have Shader’s eyes.”
“What else?” he demanded. “Imagine there’s no beard.”
He was right. The angles of his face, the jawline…
“You’re related? But how—?”
“More than that. Much more. I’m a planner, my dear. Always have been, always will be. If we can stop Gandaw, and it’s a big ‘if’ right now, there’s something I’m going to need from you. Something very important. Hear me out. I’ll explain everything, and when I’ve finished, I have no doubt you’ll give it to me.”
OUTCLASSED
Shadrak’s ears popped as the mine cart raced along an unending tunnel. Green blurs streaked past the windows, but other than that, the walls outside were black as pitch, broken only by evenly-spaced gray struts. He craned his neck to look behind, same as he’d been doing since they’d left. Nothing but darkness. He turned back with a sigh. Shog, when had he gotten so jittery? The answer to that was never far from his mind: Ever since that scutting thing had come at him in the city. He’d never felt so slow, so clumsy, so… outclassed.
First off, he’d thought it had just been bad luck, that he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then he’d thought it’d been after him specifically—though what the shog for, he had no idea; it weren’t like he’d had time to make enemies on Aethir. But then Shader said it’d been watching Nameless from a rooftop, which told a different story. Chances are, it was after all of them, in which case, why hadn’t it killed them already? It had the ability, of that he had no doubt. But then, couldn’t he say the same of himself? No matter how easy the job, no matter how good he knew he was, didn’t he always stalk his prey first, observe its ways, test out its strengths and weaknesses? Instinctively, he pulled the concealer cloak tight about his body and let its cavernous hood swallow his face.
Albert was beside Shader on the seat in front. Shadrak could tell he was nervous by the way he kept reaching into his breast pocket for his absent handkerchief.
Shader was rigid, looking straight ahead, hat tugged low over his eyes. He’d not been right since they broke him out. A pall of defeat hung over him—same as with Kadee in the last stages of her wasting. If Aristodeus had put all his eggs in that partic’lar basket, things was well and truly shogged. And if whisking Rhiannon away was his fallback plan, then things was doubly shogged. Weren’t nothing that bitch could do that Shadrak couldn’t achieve with a sharp knife or a gun.
Nameless sat next to Rugbeard up front. The old dwarf was harping on about the good ol’ days or some shite, but Nameless might as well have been asleep, for all the reaction he gave.
Without warning, the tunnel walls bulged and contracted.
“Ain’t right,” Rugbeard yelled over his shoulder.
The tunnel began to twist and turn, like they was passing through the insides of a writhing serpent.
Rugbeard raised his hands. “Ain’t right, I tell you. These here tracks run straight as the crow flies.”
The undulations stopped as quickly as they’d started, and the cart picked up speed, hurtling through the darkness like a bullet. Shadrak’s head was slammed back by the pressure, the skin of his ch
eeks pulled taut. Albert and Shader were bent like bows, but the two dwarves sat as solid as stone. Shadrak’s skull felt like it was gonna cave in, but then they began to slow.
“Hold on!” Rugbeard called out. “Some shogger’s left a cart on the track!”
The undercarriage screeched, and the cart juddered. Shadrak was flung head-first into Albert’s back. There was a girlish scream and the smell of garlic mingled with stale sweat. Albert pitched forward, but Shader caught hold of his jacket and steadied him. A few more jolts, and the cart came to a halt. Rugbeard hit a switch, and the sides slid back, revealing a stone platform lit from above by flickering strips of crystal.
Shadrak wasted no time exiting onto a stone platform. In front of them was an identical cart. They’d missed it by a hair’s breadth.
Rugbeard was next out, gesturing at the other cart and complaining. “Driver would’ve been fired back in the day! Ain’t nothing short of dangerous, is what it is.”
“You telling me this tunnel’s still in use?” Shadrak said.
Nameless lumbered out beside him. “No, laddie. My folk haven’t come to the Perfect Peak in a very long time.”
“So,” Albert said, gingerly stepping onto the platform, as if it might sprout teeth and bite his legs off, “some irresponsible dwarf miner abandoned the thing years ago, did he? If you ask me, you should take a belt to his hairy little behind.”
“No, sonny,” Rugbeard said. “That ain’t what I’m saying. See—” He stroked the iron of the undercarriage. “Still warm.”
Shader walked straight past them and stood before a huge circular portal that must have been thirty-feet in diameter. Its center was a swirl of steel petals surrounding a central aperture no bigger than a coin.
“Iris valve, sonny,” Rugbeard said. “Only, we don’t have the code.” He wandered over to it and slapped a panel on the wall.