by Tim Waggoner
"I'm sorry," Varney said. "But I must do as my lord commands. Good luck to you both."
He assumed his whirlwind form and flew off to join the fight, and his curseweave hazmat suit, now empty, collapsed to floor next to us.
As tempting as it was to watch a battle between Bloodborn and Arcane, not to mention two Darklords, I tore my gaze away from the action above us. Shamika and I still had work to do.
I looked at Varvara. The Demon Queen's gaze remained glassy, her face expressionless. Galm had said she was fighting to throw off Gregor's mental control, but there was no outward sign of her efforts. I had no idea how long it would take, but I doubted we could count on Varvara to regain control of her body in time to help us.
I forgot about Varvara and turned to Shamika. "Where's Gregor at?" I asked her. "He has to be using some kind of machine to transport Nekropolis to Earth. Where is it?"
"I don't know!" she said. "I told you, I searched throughout the city for the missing Arcane, but I wasn't able to find a single trace of them, and I didn't find any dimension-shifting machinery during my search either."
"Maybe he's hidden the machine using magic," I said. "Or maybe he's located it underground somewhere." But neither of those possibilities felt right to me. A thought was nagging at the back of my mind, one that I couldn't quite catch hold of. I pictured the way Gregor had stood after he'd absorbed Talaith's magic strike. He'd pointed the lightning rod toward the sky and unleashed the bolt into the darkness. I remembered what he'd said just before doing it.
Now, if you'll all excuse me for a moment, I need to transfer this.
He'd sent Talaith's energy to the machine, wherever that was. And I was certain he had another body there to run the show from that end. How long would it take for him to put Talaith's power to work and begin transporting the city to Earth, this time permanently? Not long, I feared, and we had no idea where he was. If only I could think…
Once more I felt the sensation of my missing hand moving, only it felt different this time, kind of tingly. I looked down at the stump protruding from my right arm, and I was surprised to see my hand reappear right where it belonged, attached more or less firmly to my body. My fingers were clenched into a fist, and when I opened them I saw that I was clutching a small metal disk. I grinned. It was a reverser! Somehow Devona had gotten hold of my hand and used one of the magic disks to reverse Gregor's teleportation spell, sending my hand back to where it was taken from: my wrist. But why hadn't she used the reverser to send herself back too? Why just my hand?
And then I saw that my palm was marred by thin lines, and I remembered feeling a sensation of pressure on my hand a while ago, almost as if someone were cutting into it. I pulled away the reverser with my other hand and held up my palm so I could examine it more closely. There, cut into the flesh – with Devona's teeth, I guessed – was a single word.
Ulterion.
I grinned from ear to ear.
"I love that woman."
EIGHTEEN
"I've never flown this high before. It's fun!"
"Not exactly the first word that leaps to my mind," I said. "Terrifying, maybe. Hazardous, certainly. But fun? I don't think so."
Shamika had reshaped herself into something that resembled a large black moth, and I sat on her back, clutching two fleshy handles she'd created at the base of her head for me to grip. Her fan-like wings beat the air with forceful strokes as we soared through the darkness above Nekropolis, the city spread out below us like a child's toy. A dark, twisted child, that is. While the Sprawl, Gothtown, and the Boneyard are the most urban Dominions, only the first two had enough lights burning to cut through the darkness. The Boneyard is the realm of the Dead, and they have no need of streetlights to illuminate their way. Glamere and the Wyldwood are both pastoral for the most part, but even they had fires dotting the landscape here and there. The most light, of course, came from the mystic energies released in the continuing battle between the Bloodborn and Arcane in the air over Demon's Roost. I wondered how the fight would turn out. If Galm and his vampire soldiers could keep Talaith and her people busy long enough for Varvara to regain control of herself, then the Demon Queen could join in and repel Talaith. Otherwise, there was a chance that when – if – I returned home to the Sprawl, I might find it under new management. That is, assuming Gregor didn't succeed in relocating the whole damn city to Earth.
Umbriel the Shadowsun hung in the air off to our left, and we were almost even with it. Umbriel is an artificial construct, created by Dis and the Darklords to help maintain Nekropolis in this dimension, as well as provide the city's atmosphere and the power for Phlegethon. As such, it's not located off in space, as is the case with Earth's sun, and it's much smaller than Sol. But as for where Ulterion was located, I had no idea. There was a reason it was called the Hidden Moon, after all. We'd started out in the general direction in which we'd seen Gregor release the mystic power he'd gathered from Talaith, and Shamika had told me that if we got close enough, she should be able to sense her brother's presence. But so far we'd had no luck. I'd hoped that if we drew near Ulterion we might be able to spot it visually, but the sky above Nekropolis is totally and completely black, with no stars to provide illumination. Umbriel is a sort of grayish color that makes it easy enough to see against the darkness, and I'd hoped Ulterion might look similar, but if it did, I couldn't see it.
As we flew, I thought of what Ichorus had told me in the Fever House, how he'd been searching for Ulterion and been blasted with some kind of energy ray. I wished I'd questioned him then, for it was obvious now that he'd come close to stumbling across Gregor's operation and triggered some kind of defense system. Ichorus had been lucky to survive with only a few scorched feathers. If Shamika was unable to sense Gregor, and we couldn't spot Ulterion visually, my last hope was that we might repeat Ichorus' mistake and–
Light flared in the darkness ahead, and a beam of energy lanced toward us. I tried to warn Shamika to brace herself, but I wasn't able to get the words out in time. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as energy crackled around us and then dissipated harmlessly. I opened my eyes, only mildly surprised that Shamika and I hadn't been burned to a crisp. It seemed the Coat of Every Color had once again done its job and shielded us from Gregor's energy blast.
"I see it now!" Shamika said, and she banked right, her wings beating faster, and we surged forward at increased speed.
I didn't see anything, but then my zombie eyes aren't any better than the ones I had when I was alive. Shamika was an alien creature, and I had no idea exactly how her senses worked, but if she said she saw Ulterion, I believed her. A moment later I was finally able to make out a dark shape of an orb, black against the black sky behind it. I couldn't tell how large it was, for there was nothing nearby to lend perspective, but I guessed that while it was a far smaller version of the satellite that orbited Earth, it was at least big enough for Gregor's dimension-shifting machine.
Gregor didn't bother firing his energy ray at us again. He learned fast – information was his stock in trade, after all – and he probably needed all the power he could get to make his machine work. Why waste it on us if the Coat of Every Color would just repel his attacks? So Shamika and I were able to approach Ulterion without any more trouble, and she descended to the surface of the Hidden Moon and landed with surprising gentleness for someone who'd just completed her first flight.
I climbed off and stood on wobbly legs. My physical condition had little to do with how nervous I'd been during our flight and everything to do with how difficult it was for me to keep my various body parts together. The cohesion spell that Papa Chatha had cast on me was close to wearing off, and when it finally failed, I'd collapse into a pile of useless pieces. If we were going to stop Gregor, we had to do it fast.
I looked around, but it was like standing in the middle of a deep cave without any light source. I could sense the solid weight of Ulterion beneath my feet and feel its rocky surface under my shoes, but I couldn't see
a damn thing.
"It's OK," Shamika said. "I'll lead you."
Ulterion, like Umbriel, lay within the atmospheric bubble that encloses Nekropolis, so even though we were technically standing on the surface of a moon, there was air to transmit our voices, even if neither of us needed it to breathe.
Shamika took my hand with human-seeming fingers, and I knew she'd once more taken the form of a teenage girl. She started walking, and I went with her, moving with the spastic jerky motions that were all I was capable of. Shamika surely noticed my awkward movements, but she said nothing about them.
"There's a dome a few hundred feet in front of us," Shamika said. "It looks like Gregor created it from Ulterion's substance."
I imagined hundreds of insects scuttling over the moon's dark surface, tearing chunks out of the ground and refashioning them bit by bit into a dome to hide Gregor's machinery. "Can you see anything that looks like an entrance?"
"I doubt there is one," she said. "Gregor used teleportation magic to bring the magic-users here, remember? It's probably how he moved his equipment in as well. But don't worry. I'll be able to get us inside."
With every step we took, I anticipated an attack by a horde of insects, but none came. I still wore the Coat of Every Color and carried the Dreamthrower, and I had the Herald Bells and the osame-fuda gun tucked into my pockets. Maybe Gregor knew his insects couldn't stand against the holy weapons. Or maybe he had another reason for not attacking us. Whatever it was, I knew I wouldn't like it. Gregor always stacked the deck in his favor.
I sensed the dome ahead of us rather than seeing it, but I still would've bumped into it if Shamika hadn't stopped me. Before either of us could say or do anything, a tiny pinprick of light appeared in the surface of the dome before us. It quickly widened as a semicircular door formed, spilling greenish light onto the moon's dark surface.
I could see Shamika's face now, and she was frowning.
"I was wrong," she said. "Gregor didn't make the dome out of Ulterion's substance. He made it out of his own."
I looked at Shamika. "Welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly."
She gave me a confused look, and I said, "Means we're expected. Shall we?"
We stepped inside, and I didn't bother to check if the entrance sealed shut behind us. I knew it would.
Greenfire torches were set in sconces around the inside of the dome, providing illumination. The mystic flames were set to burn at a low level, and I remembered how Gregor had once told me that since the Watchers were native to this dark dimension, intense light could hurt them. Too bad I hadn't asked Maggie to loan me one of the Hidden Light's illuminaries.
The inside of the dome was fashioned from the same dark substance as the outside, and it creeped me out to think that in a sense I was standing inside Gregor. In the middle of the dome stood a circle of men and women, all of them mired in black goo that stretched from the floor and covered them up to their waists. Their hands and arms had been left free, but since each of them stared blankly into space, their facial features slack, I knew they were under Gregor's control. They were the missing magic-users, and I was relieved to see Papa Chatha among them, though I hated seeing my old friend held in this trance-like state. The magic-users faced inward, gazing sightlessly at each other, connected by black wires attached to metal bands around their heads.
In the middle of the circle lay Darius. He was covered by a cocoon of black goo up to his neck, and he was clearly in a trance as well. Like the magic-users, his arms were free, and they lay folded over his chest. Clutched in his hands was another metal lightning rod, a twin to the one Gregor's General Klamm body had used to transmit Talaith's captured power. The rod pulsed with yellowish light, and there was a feeling of barely restrained energy in the air, like a storm that might erupt any moment. Darius also had a metal band around his head with wires protruding from it, but instead of being connected to the circle of magic-users, his wires stretched across the floor, out of the circle and over to a bank of computer consoles set up near one section of the wall. The equipment was extremely high-tech and reminded me of the holographic display table in Varvara's war room. This was a different configuration of machinery, but there was no mistaking how advanced it was.
Gregor stood outside the circle. The real Gregor, or at least the giant insect guise familiar to me from years of going to him for information: a human-sized roach standing upright on a quartet of segmented legs, obsidian gems in place of eyes, antennae in constant motion as they greedily drank in all sensory data in his vicinity. And standing next to Gregor, mired in the same black gunk that imprisoned the abducted magic-users, was Devona.
"It's about time you got here," she said, smiling.
The relief I felt upon seeing my love alive was so strong it nearly knocked me to my knees.
"Sorry it took so long," I said. "We ran into a few problems along the way."
"Don't you always?" Devona said.
I held up my right hand with the word Ulterion scratched into the palm. "Thanks for the message. But one thing puzzles me: how did you hide my hand from Gregor?"
"It hid itself," she said. "As soon as we arrived, it scuttled off behind the computer banks and stayed there until Gregor was busy, then it crawled back over to me. I had the idea to scratch a message into it with my teeth, and then I put a reverser in it and watched it teleport back to you." Devona turned to Gregor. "You really should've kept me in a trance, you know. Or at least searched me and taken the reverser away before I could use it."
Gregor shrugged, the motion looking awkward on his insectile body. "Once I brought you here, I knew there was nothing you could do to stop me, so I didn't bother keeping you entranced or searching you. I admit the latter was a mistake." He paused. "But I found it oddly… gratifying to have someone conscious to bear witness as my plan unfolded."
Shamika's tone held a note of triumph. "Are you telling us you found it pleasing to have someone to talk with? That you actually took satisfaction in contact with an Other?"
Gregor whirled around to face his sister and let out an angry hiss. "Do not insult me! I have not been infected with the madness that plagues you!"
Shamika's satisfied smile said that she thought otherwise, but she didn't say anything.
"I'm confused," I said. "I thought you abducted Devona because you wanted to use the magic our children possess. But she's not hooked up to anything."
"That's because your surmise is incorrect," Gregor said. "It may well be true that your progeny possess significant potential to wield magic, but I have no use for it. I have all the magic power I need right here." Gregor pointed toward the ground with one of his insect arms. "Earth's dimension is rich in magical energy, but there's little in this realm, so Dis and the Darklords needed to create a source of mystic power for their people to draw upon once they moved to Nekropolis. Ulterion is the source of that power, and all of Nekropolis' magic-using Darkfolk use it – including Dis and the Darklords – even if most Darkfolk are unaware of precisely where the power comes from. The Darklords prefer that no one knows where this power comes from, which is why the moon is hidden and its existence kept secret. They'd rather someone not attempt to use Ulterion's magic for his or her own purposes – such as transporting the city to Earth." Gregor's roach-like face didn't possess the physiognomy to smile, but I could hear the grin in his voice as he said this last part.
I looked down at the ground beneath my feet. "Ulterion is a gigantic magic generator?" I said. I understood then why no one in Nekropolis, including the Darklords, had been able to magically track the missing magic-users. Ulterion's energy field had hidden them from everyone's mystic perceptions. I looked at the circle of entranced witches and warlocks. "If the moon is your power source, what do you need them for?"
Devona answered. "To safely channel Talaith's power into Darius, which will allow him to draw on Ulterion's energy without being destroyed. Darius will then become capable of opening an immense dimensional portal and shifting a
ll of Nekropolis to Earth."
"And the computer equipment?" I asked.
Gregor answered that one. "Is for dimensional targeting. Like the magic-users, I need to keep Darius in a trance in order to control him. One of my insects burrowed into his brain is sufficient for that task. Unfortunately, Darius isn't fully capable of precise targeting in his current state, and while the insect inside him is me, I do not have his instinct for interdimensional travel. So I need technology to help me guide Nekropolis' transference to Earth."
"So if the equipment was destroyed…" I began.
"It would make no difference ultimately," Gregor said. "I might not be able to shift Nekropolis to Earth, but I would still be able to send it out of this dimension, which is all that truly matters to me. I have no idea where the city would end up in that case, but I don't care, just as long as the hated Others are gone."
"So Darius is the key to your entire plan," I said. "Without him, you cannot use Ulterion to open a large enough portal to send Nekropolis away."
"Indeed," Gregor confirmed.
"And if you don't need the twins' magic, Devona is here for… what?" I asked.
"Insurance," Gregor said.
More of the black substance that formed the dome – Gregor's substance – flowed up Devona's body until she was covered all the way to the neck. The ebon gunk hardened around her throat and took on the shape of a mouth filled with sharp black teeth.