CrossTown

by Loren W. Cooper

  I had one last errand. One last confrontation. And then I would be done with it. Then I could rest.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  I SEARCHED across all the myriad Ways until I found him. He waited where I had half expected him to wait. Once I located him, disdaining the Ways, I stepped through the shadows to the foot of the spire. I climbed the steps as any man would, placing one foot after the other, but that endless climb passed by in the time between breaths.

  He stood facing out over the valley. “Zethus.”

  I walked up behind him to stand at his back. “Anthony Vayne. I saved you for last.”

  He turned, his eyes lambent. “Did you think it would be easy for you?”

  “I figured out what you must be,” I continued without replying. “The last of the Nephilim. You didn’t disguise your lifespan well enough. You helped Titania. Your meddling left her and Fetch free to hound me through CrossTown and left me without the protection of the CrossTown authorities. You tried to ambush me with a machine in TechTown, then led the Whitesnakes to me on the Way. Did you let her know about Corvinus’s research? Did you set the Faerie onto me?”

  The corner of his mouth lifted. “I didn’t set the Faerie on you.” I started to shake my head, and he held up one hand. “Titania knew you worked with Corvinus. She found out about Corvinus’s research independently. I never dealt with her directly. Corvinus was careless. Titania and I both felt his meddling through the Ways, when he found and awakened the heart of stone. The day he died, I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to convince him that the course he was on would be the death of him. I went there to try to talk some sense into him. Maybe I would have killed him if he hadn’t abandoned the heart. I don’t know. But when I got there I found Corvinus dead, the defenses down. Fetch had already left and taken Titania’s vampire assassin with him. So I cleaned up. I confused the trail. I wanted to stop the madness from beginning again.”

  “Emory Drake did the deed,” I said. “He confessed, and Corvinus confirmed. One more sin to stoke the fires hotter for his cockroach soul.”

  Vayne nodded. “It was quick. Corvinus hardly knew what hit him. Drake was stupid. I don’t think Titania meant for Corvinus to die so quickly. I believe she planned to bury Corvinus’s research with him.”

  He sighed, looking past me into the darkness. Traces of emotion ran across his face, too quickly and faintly for me to read. “Who knew Corvinus would hide the heart so thoroughly?” A lightly wry tone touched his voice with color briefly. “Fetch tore the place apart. He searched, but he didn’t find what he was looking for. I didn’t either. I even searched the lower lab. I needed to find the heart and break the trail. I needed time. Confusion would give me time. I thought I could find the heart before you did. I didn’t want you on the Roads that lead to the Fane and the Rites.”

  I didn’t say anything. We stood for a moment in silence, looking out into the valley below. At last he raised his gaze to meet my own. “You have more drive than Corvinus had,” he told me. “I couldn’t let you get that scent. If Titania knew your master’s research had been destroyed, she would not have hounded you. But Corvinus hid the heart too well. I missed it. I didn’t know him well enough.”

  He paused. I waited, looking into his eyes. “Corvinus hid the heart well enough,” he said at last, “but he made his mistakes in other things. He was careless enough that Titania and I knew what he was digging into. Neither of us knew the extent of your involvement. We took independent steps. We both remembered what had been loosed in the past. Neither one of us would allow that to be loosed again.”

  “So she moved against me on her own. What of the ambushes?”

  He closed his eyes. “I did nothing to help or hinder you or your opposition. The Whitesnakes followed me looking for you. I let them. I knew nothing of the ambush in TechTown. The bounty was out on you by then. Titania had Fetch dogged your trail, and financed the Whitesnake bounty on you. She wanted you dead as insurance, in case you were involved in Corvinus’s research, but she wanted you pressed into revealing that research first if possible. I had hoped you would run out into the Ways, away from CrossTown. I think Titania would have been satisfied with that. But you didn’t.”

  Rage tightened in my chest, fueled by a river of power. “And so you are innocent,” I snarled sarcastically.

  His eyes opened and he took a step toward me. I felt the hot breath of ancient power swirl around me. “I am not innocent. I have taken countless lives. I have killed gods and monsters. I have destroyed entire civilizations. You know nothing of what I am.”

  The power of the darkness stretched around me endlessly. I stood at the eye of a storm yet unborn. “You are damned.”

  He turned away again, unwilling to face me. “I am that. What you have done is nothing compared to what I have been. I am the only survivor of the Wars of the Brethren. I was the first, and I will be the last. God will not let me die.”

  I could taste his death in the heart of the night. While he hadn’t killed Corvinus, and he hadn’t set any of the killers on my trail, he could have trusted me in the beginning. He’d failed Corvinus. He’d been willing to kill to protect his secrets. He’d been willing to stand by and let me die. He’d hidden Titania and Fetch from CrossTerPol. He’d made it easy for them to hound me through the Ways. Fury built within me until I could not think. It had become so easy to act through the power. It begged to be used. He would not turn to face me, but waited in silence for the blow to fall.

  I couldn’t kill him. I didn’t have that much mercy in me. It took all I had to fold the power inwards and hold all the fury in check.

  I didn’t notice when he left. By that time, I had become captive to my own thoughts.

  I stayed there for a long time, dwelling in the valley of shadows, listening to the echoes of forgotten music. The beauty of the singer’s voice still held me, though only ghosts of memory remained to haunt that place. I thought about all I had seen, and all I had done. I didn’t have much cause for pride. Mine had been a selfish life, clinging so tightly to existence as to never enjoy it. At least I had freed those spirits I had held in captivity. Later, I had released all of my captives from the darkness where I had bound them. Of all my living works, I felt satisfaction with those acts alone.

  It can be a miserable thing to write your own epitaph.

  My awareness ran out through the shadows and into all of the realms of possibility. If darkness dwelt in a place, then there too did I dwell. If shadow stretched into a time, then that time was home to me. I stayed there, watching over the valley of shadow, watching through the hungry night and into all the worlds touched by darkness. Through all those instants, and in all those places over which I held sway, I would catch sight from time to time of familiar places, and familiar faces: the White Wolf, hunting through the frozen pillars of great trees in a vast taiga; Bright Angel, laughing as she spread her wings and danced with brilliant strokes of lightning; the White Rose at the edge of a still pool of water, softly singing; the Wraith in his workshop, stooping over flickering light burning deep in a great orb, suddenly pausing to straighten and swing his head quizzically, as if he felt the pressure of my regard upon him. All these and more passed by, unknowing; I watched them pass, uncaring. Memory itself faded before the eternal regression of the folded moment, and all that I had ever known came to be nothing more than a distant progression parading behind a wall of glass. Soundless, tiny figures divorced of context or meaning, none of which could touch me. There in the darkness, nothing could touch me.

  I had left my humanity behind, and I could not lay my hand back upon it as easily as I had lost it.

  I had no conception of time while I remained in that place. Time no longer held any significance for me. So I do not know how long it took her to find me.

  I felt her enter the valley, and I paced her as she wound her way up the steps of the spire, though my body did not move from the place where I had left it. The darkness hid nothing from me.

  Chimereon’
s voice spoke from the shadows. “I thought I might find you here.”

  I didn’t move. Settling back into my body sufficiently to converse took grim effort. An endless sea of pain wrapped me in the rough swaddling of flesh. I spoke slowly. “In the end, I let him go.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I know.”

  “I feel …” My voice trailed off as I struggled for the words.

  “You feel.” Her voice was firm. “That is enough.”

  I dropped my gaze back down to the darkness below. “I feel bereft.”

  Chimereon moved closer. “You knew what it was to be a man. Now you understand what it is to be a Power.”

  “Other than the power, everything feels the same, so long as I allow myself to feel,” I replied slowly. “I still feel all of those things that make me human. I still feel pain. I still hate. I can still fail. I am alone.”

  She nodded. “Isolation is the nature of power. You have been through the process of becoming the definition of a thing. And that process strips you of all mortal connections. I know that as well as any, and better than most.”

  I didn’t raise my eyes from the shadows. “You knew all along, didn’t you? You opened the Way to this place. Why? To end your solitude?”

  She looked away, out into the darkness. “The seeds of what you could become had already begun to sprout. If I had not shown you the way, you would have found another, or destroyed yourself on the journey. None of this is easy. But there is solace.”

  I looked up and met her eyes. They burned with white light. “You still owe me a favor, remember?”

  I thought about turning away, back into my solitude. She could not compel me. I had become a thing that could not be compelled. I no longer had the ties of obligation that had bound me through the days of my life. But was obligation merely a matter of compulsion? Or was there something more?

  I believed that there was more. I always had. Character meant paying your debts. I considered my power, my independence, and the isolation those things had brought me. I wanted to be able to feel again. I didn’t want to remain a thing, and not a man, no matter what that might cost.

  In spite of that, I had to go to the limits of my will to bend my neck to accept my debt. It was almost too far for me to reach.

  I rose. The darkness thickened around me, taking on a new aspect. Incomprehensibilities opened within it—things I could perceive, but not yet understand. Chimereon stepped out into that darkness. I saw the makings of a Way opening out behind her.

  I saw the ghostly image of a coiled snake, feathered wings beating slowly, superimposed over her human form. “Follow me,” she said.

  The static power I held close fought my first step, an inertia beyond the physical. I rolled that stone back from the mouth of my living grave by the indescribable effort of releasing my clenched hold on the power running through the darkness. That heavy shadow fell away, spread out, and joined with the living darkness of the Road Chimereon had opened.

  I followed her, shuffling off the spire and into the looming night. My feet left bare rock and fell on a pathway of deeper darkness stretching through the shadows. As I moved, something stirred in me. I saw Chimereon receding away from me, falling away down the endless length of the Road, and as she diminished away from me her shape twisted, and turned, until great wings beat slowly at the air, long, snowy, and crimson feathers rippling in the air, until her sinuous body became the coiling, emerald length of a great serpent, shining like a beacon at the far end of the shadows.

  A second step followed the first. An old, familiar hunger took hold of me. Too long had I charted my course between narrow boundaries. Too long had I cut straight to the bone. The Road lengthened before me, quickened under my foot, and the shadows stretched out, reaching for eternity. I lost sight of Chimereon then, but it didn’t matter. The Road had a hold on me, the endless possibility of the journey.

  Paths branched before me and branched again. My mind spun down distant channels, and my body followed. Power ran like a current under my feet, buoying my step, but my memory turned toward other Roads, and my next step fell on stone. A high roof of stone arched far above my head. I breathed in dry, cool air, as if I stood in empty lungs, rather than deep in a cave. In the distance I heard the poink! of a single drop of water, falling, destroying, building, reshaping. The rocky floor of the cave sloped down. Through the darkness I could see, as if I stood there again in the daylight, that the cave would open to a pool of clear water, surrounded by climbing vines covered in white and purple flowers. The flowers perfumed the air. The spirit of that place, revered locally as a healer and gentle oracle, carried that light, sweet scent with her even after I took her into my Legion.

  I didn’t want to disturb the White Rose if she had returned, so I took another step on the Road of darkness, and the stone shifted to a thin, thin veneer of slick mud over river rock. A chill, clean breath of fresh rain caressed my face and moistened my lips. Bare trees jutted up into the night. Dead, rotting leaves warring with red mud covered the riverbank in a layer of slime. The place felt empty. Bane would haunt it no more. He had made his last choice. He had fallen to his own betrayal.

  Shivering, drawing my coat around me, I stepped again. Gravel crunched underfoot, sharp stones turning together under the soles of my boots, an ordered chaos breathing warm dust with every step. The roadside shrine hadn’t changed, it seemed. Monks from the abbey on the hill still groomed the river-rock surface of the Road, tending the stone like a garden. A patchwork of shadows picked out the coiling pattern of the low, shaped trees that lined the Road and framed upright posts. Angular characters slashed down the broad faces of the rectangular posts, catching the prayers of that alien land and binding them to service. It had been a special place, but the genius loci dwelt there no longer. I had taken the guardian spirit that drew pilgrims from distant lands in search of a warrior’s blessing. He had fallen at the last as I chased my empty vengeance to Titania’s door. I hoped Blade had found peace, but I feared I had brought him only destruction.

  A deep, enquiring hoot followed me as I stepped again down a Road of memories, still traveling through the reaches of shadow. An uneven surface tripped me, and I stumbled. Even without starlight I saw the straight lines of long grasses thrusting up through the cracked, tilted slabs of gray concrete that surfaced the Road. Towering oaks lined and roofed the lane. The concrete buckled under the slow, inexorable grip of the roots of the trees. Shadow had taken that place for his own, a feral echo of an older time. He had held that place as his own until I came along and bound him and took him away. Moonlight fell on the grass past the leafy roof of the oaks. Light would prosper in that place more easily in Shadow’s absence, while the roots continued their slow, destructive work on the Road. I could hear small movements in the grass as the animals crept back to make that place their home.

  Another step and a pale sun tried unsuccessfully to pull itself over the sharp line of the horizon. I stood on a bare outcropping of stone surrounded by blowing streams of white, powdery snow hustling along beds of ice. I thought I heard the distant call of a wolf on the wind as I paused to listen, shivering, but it fell away, until I heard only the voice of the wind, endlessly calling through the vast, empty desert of ice and rock and snow. If anyone made his way home, it would be the White Wolf.

  Chilled by the absence of life, I stepped to another cold place, a high place. I stood on a stone peak. The sun lay low in the sky, his light burnished orange by thin clouds. Under a blue-velvet firmament, lush green jungle sprawled out around the peak like a verdant sea. White feathers of mist rose from the long stream of a high mountain waterfall dropping from the cliff across from me. In the borders between the clouds and the mists flashed the brilliant broken arches of rainbows. I searched the morning light for the bright sweep of wings, for a familiar shout of laughter, but if Bright Angel had returned to her home, she was hiding from me.

  I couldn’t blame her.

  In the end, I fled that place, t
hose memories, turning even deeper into the past until I came to the beginning of the journey that would bring me to CrossTown. My hands still rough from laying the stone foundation of the walls of the city that would become Thebes, sweating in the hot Mediterranean sun, I’d watched my brother sing and shape the final stones into place, and I’d sworn to Amphion then that I’d find my own magic, instead of breaking my back while he made his music. I had found magic, too, but not in the captive spirits I’d enslaved, nor in the fires of the Nephilim. I’d found it first in the mystery of the Road, in the wonder of discovering what lay over the next hill, and around the next bend. I’d lost that mystery some time during my sojourn in CrossTown, when in my desire to extend my life I had forgotten how to live.

  I ran past Thebes before I arrived. I came at last to another high place. I stood at a crossroad, marked by a lightning-shattered oak overgrown with ivy, and looked down over the City below. CrossTown lay below me, pulsing and breathing and growing like a great sprawling beast. TechTown and Night-Town, DeepTown and OldTown, the beating heart of the Folded Quarter, all these and more danced and shuddered and lived down there. Roads ran through the City like the threads of a vast tapestry. Even the darkest Road sparkled with possibility, and even the tamest harbored in its secret heart the wild desire for freedom.

  More than the lifeblood of CrossTown, the Road was the lifeblood of all us traveling fools, all those looking for what lay over the next hill, around the next bend, or over the horizon. My brother chose the City, but I, I chose the freedom of the Road, the freedom of the hunt, the freedom of life without walls, until I had built walls around myself, narrowed my course, limited my choices, and ultimately severed all connections but the empty ties of power and coercion. I had built myself a prison I could carry with me, and so could never escape. And once I’d settled my last debt, I’d let all that stolen power and all those endless days drop down around me until I could no longer find the promise of the Road. I’d nearly lost myself in the barren comfort of empty power.