The Master of War reached out with a giant gauntlet and tore a blade from the helicopter. The helicopter crashed to one side, the engine sucked in dirt and died.
Then he hammered the blade in his giant fist, until he held a sword. Blunt and heavy, dirty and stained and ugly. A sword for war.
“Be mine,” said Janus, his terrible face far above the wizard, who remained on his knees in the dirt.
“I am…yours,” said Solomon, and wondered what it was that he did.
Then, there in the field of wheat and blood and shattered machinery, the God told the wizard the future.
Uninvited to the conversation, the dog laid its head down and fell asleep, happy enough.
Together Janus and Solomon spoke long, long into the night, until the sun came up and finally, Janus sent Solomon to find that which had been lost, and that which had been saved.
Death in a book.
III. THE GAME OF BLOOD AND BONE
A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?
—SHODAN/System Shock (1994)
Developed by Looking Glass Technologies. Published by Origin Systems.
47
Holland pulled the car up to his and Ank’s home in the same place he always parked, beside the kitchen door. It was to the right of the cottage, rather than the left, where the garage and the dead cat were.
Holland was tired. It was nearly six in the morning when he got home, spending most of the night waiting on a surly homeless man, the rest driving. He noted the missing pane of glass in the kitchen door before he even stepped from the car and figured he wasn’t going to be sleeping, no matter how badly he needed to get his head down.
Getting from the car was a bit of a show for a man Holland’s size and girth. He performed an encore by taking his damn time, then staring out to sea like he had all day and nothing doing. He didn’t look toward the house at all. He didn’t try to look in the windows. He could smell food. Good food. Big fat food…like Ank’d make. Bacon, eggs, sausages…the good stuff. He wondered if she’d split the sausages, fried them inside and out, like pig-butterflies, just the way he liked them.
For a split second, he wondered if he had it all wrong. But no longer than that. Holland knew he had the right of it and doubt, right now, was a grand way to get himself killed.
His daughter was in the book, in his pocket. And she had a key. She had no need to smash windows to get into her own house.
Holland drew a fresh packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, his hand brushing the gun there. While he held the flickering match against the tip of the cigarette, he worked through a few scenarios in his head, but mostly just the ones that didn’t end in him getting killed. There was one that was sure to buy him a little time, but that involved getting in the car and leaving.
Wasn’t an option.
The other choice, the only choice that made any kind of sense to Holland, was to be a fucking man about it.
He smoked his cigarette while staring at the sea. Make them wait. Maybe they’d come out, he’d shoot, the end. Holland liked the sound of that. He liked short stories. Violence lent itself to short tales.
But then, he needed answers. Whoever was in his house probably had a few answers he didn’t. Might be able to get a couple of steps closer to understanding what Jane was about. Understanding Jane better wouldn’t hurt, in the long run.
Plus, all that aside, it was his fucking house.
He ground out the cigarette in the sand and headed for his front door. He never used the front door. Today, he would.
He put his key in the door and pushed it wide. No one waiting, no shot, no war cry, no screaming, wailing banshee. Good start.
The smell of honest food was stronger as soon as he entered. His stomach, long neglected, growled.
Hush, he thought.
He stalked on quiet feet through the house and didn’t use his stick, which he held like a club, or a sword, one-handed…Holland could be awfully quiet when he wanted.
He left the kitchen until he’d cleared all the other rooms.
Breakfast was on the table, steaming.
A chair was already out. The table was laid, and his breakfast partner was a thickset man with a wicked widow’s peak, a thick, full, black beard and shoulders like a bull.
Holland nodded, like he was just passing a silent morning greeting, sat and looked at his breakfast, then, at the man opposite him. The heavyset man was like an island of calm. He wore a broad smile right there in the middle of his thick beard, and waved a hand at the food.
“You realize you’re entirely, irrevocably insane, right?” said Holland. He began to eat with gusto, despite the psychopath in the kitchen, because he was hungry and because he wasn’t sure when, or if, he’d be eating again.
“You know what’s mentally ill? Life. Life is,” said Carter.
“You’re the changeling?” asked Holland, keeping it easy, safe. It wasn’t a great leap of deduction. He’d heard of the man, though he’d never met him. Now the state of the council house guy made more sense. Holland could smell beast on the man, and the man was Jane’s beast for sure. She couldn’t touch Holland. Didn’t mean she couldn’t push him around some with another’s hands.
“Carter,” said the beast-man. “You’re Holland. I know you.”
“I’m sorry,” said Holland around a mouthful of bacon. “I don’t know you personally. Just by reputation. You’ll have to forgive me. You work for Jane now?”
Carter nodded, shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.” He pointed to the food. “Last meal.”
Holland nodded back, still eating. “It’s good. Cheers.”
“Tough guy, huh?”
This time, Holland’s head shook. “Just hungry.”
Carter’s calm, Holland felt, was cracking. Like the ice he walked on. He was a big man with a gammy leg, and right now he felt like he was walking right over thin ice.
When it cracked, he just hoped he fell right on top of this bastard.
Fuck it, figured Holland, trying to make his way through his breakfast. Guy was a good cook. Not Ank. No, not as good as Ank. But he was pretty hungry.
He noticed the small camera set on the kitchen work surface, behind Carter and over his massive shoulder. Watching Holland.
“Home movies?”
Carter smiled, but tight, like he didn’t like the camera himself. A sore spot. Holland tucked the knowledge away out of habit, not because he thought the knowledge was going to prove useful down the line…this wasn’t a down-the-line chat. This wasn’t he and Jane, shooting the shit, dancing around each other.
It was a good breakfast, and the chat was appreciated, but Holland got the sense there wasn’t much of a future in it.
“I forget things. The camera remembers for me.”
“Murder? You forget murder?”
Carter nodded.
“Shame,” said Holland, pausing in his feed. “The change? Must be tough, being a changeling…but then, you like it, right?”
Carter ignored Holland. “Give me the book.”
“What’s Jane got on you, Carter? Used to be I was her first team…now, you? A man who can’t even remember what he is?”
“Give me the book,” said Carter again, but his calm was going. His hand fluttered at his face, like a fly had landed there. It hadn’t.
“Ain’t going to happen, Carter. You’re a fucking abomination. You know that? An Eater of Souls…you’re low on the chain, Carter. What I don’t get is, what the fuck would Jane want with you?”
Holland was pushing him. Carter wasn’t an idiot. He knew…but Holland saw now that Carter wanted Holland to push him. Wanted the change to come over him. Holland saw how it was going to go, right then. Wasn’t any way around it. Wasn’t ever going to be.
“I can feel it coming on, Holland. Trust me. I don’t care. You’re right…I like it. Give me the book…”
A shot rang out and sm
oke poured through a hole in Holland’s jacket. The sound, in the kitchen, was immense. A hand-loaded silver slug, heavy, barreled through the still, hot air.
And stopped dead right above the plate of bacon, toast, eggs, beans. The smoke, too, which should have drifted, hung in the air. A forkful of food paused between Holland’s plate and his open mouth. His mouth didn’t move. He neither breathed, nor blinked. The moisture in his eyes was drying in the summer heat already.
Carter, too, was immobile, across the table from Holland.
The only thing, in fact, that moved in the kitchen was a mage, a man who had once been called Solomon. He strode forward and stood beside the kitchen table, looking at the one Janus called Holland, and the other known as Carter.
Such a simple thing to end them. He could carve them into any shape he wanted right now. Their blood would be still. He could skin the men, cut out their eyes, make them into eunuchs, sew their tongues together.
But why? To what end? Kill, leave to rot…did it matter?
This moment in time he’d created wouldn’t last forever…they would rot. Rot, alive. Solomon nodded to himself. It was good enough. Imperfect, perhaps, but a fitting end to such men as these.
What were they? A fat man, a fat build of muscle? All men rot. These two? Six months, a year from now…they would be nothing but stinking flesh puppets with bones and sinews holding them in their seats. Two years? Even their flesh would begin to flake away…their eyes would atrophy, maybe fall from their heads…
“Good,” said Solomon, pleased enough with his work. Kill now, or leave to die…it mattered not to him.
But he did wonder if Janus was blind. Even he, insane through years of imprisonment, could see the man Holland was the more dangerous of the two. They’d rot, yes. And he had what he wished, yes…
But the fat man Holland had a stench already. Something bitter that prickled Solomon’s nostrils…like he’d been marked by death already. Called home?
Solomon shook his head. He couldn’t place it, but Janus was his master for now, and Janus refused to let Solomon kill the fat one…
It was a sweet picture.
Almost domestic bliss. Two killers, watching each other over a fat breakfast.
The mage shrugged. He came for death, yes, but not these two. Solomon reached into Holland’s still jacket pocket and took the book back into his hands.
It felt…heavy. Heavier than he remembered it. But then, the last time he’d held it was over two thousand years ago…and it had been empty then.
Now? Now it wasn’t. It was a prison once again, and within it…Death. A little death, maybe…but a trinket, once more, of value.
And Janus liked things of value, didn’t he?
Solomon left the two men to star forevermore in their morbid play, until they fell to dust.
He stepped out of the kitchen and into a vast complex of underground caves, where Janus kept the memories of a thousand moments in history, the relics of heroes and saints and Gods that had passed.
A great vault door stood before Solomon. He was not permitted to enter, but a gaunt child with a single eye in the center of her broad forehead took the book from him. The book, Janus promised, that now held the future and the key to death itself.
And the girl called Ank, trapped within, was that key.
48
Ank Holland woke from a long sleep, stretching out and feeling her spine and shoulders crack, like she’d rested on the floor…
Why am I…
Then, remembrance flooded back in, and with it, fear.
Her eyes flicked open, expecting to see some new horror. But nothing loomed, or leered. She felt no immediate threat. The light was less dim, more natural…like there was daylight within the book at last.
I turned the page!
She did not know how long, only that she was rested, and healed. Her blood was gone. She bore no scabs or scars…like it never happened. Like she’d never slit her wrist with a beast’s tooth.
So I can hurt here, she thought. But I can heal, too.
Can I die?
She shook the thought away and pushed herself from her rest—on sandy floor, again, to look around. This time, though, she was faced not with endless walls, but she rested inside the halls of some great and magnificent temple. No seats, like a church might have. No adornments upon the wall, just simple and stunning architecture that led her eye way up high to a distant ceiling, and then down, across the sand, to a simple altar of white stone with a lone candle burning.
Between her and the altar were snakes.
Hundreds and hundreds of snakes, silent, sleeping, like she’d been…then…awake.
49
The snakes hissed and spat and rattled, writhed, roiled, around on the sand, over each other. But Ank’s fear soon settled to healthy caution when after a few minutes they came no closer. The closest they seemed to come was a few feet, but then they shifted and slid away again, as though there was some kind of invisible barrier between her and the snakes.
Time to find out how far I can push…it?
Yes, it was. That was undeniably true. The book was the mind, the master of the snakes and the basilisk and the manticore. Those other things…they were manifestations of the book’s dark purpose. But they were not the book.
Can a book have a soul? Be a thing, an entity…have thoughts and feelings, pride and anger, compassion…invention?
Was all that she saw a creation of the mind of the wizard…or something else?
Did the book have a voice, or was it just words, an idiot accident, a mere ghost in the machine…like a virus, maybe, in a computer, or a bug…or…
Ank felt no pain, and when she looked more closely for the wounds in her wrists, she found no mark of her self-mutilation.
“If you wanted me dead, I’d be dead,” she said. She spoke not to the altar or the snakes, but to the book.
Nothing came back. No booming voice, no marks in the sand.
“But then there would be nobody to…play with?”
Silence returned from the world, her gaol.
She shook her head. The book didn’t know what playing was, maybe. Didn’t, maybe, know that what it did was real, dangerous, here within its pages?
Am I really talking to a book…or myself?
“Read you?” she said, and this time, she did get a response.
The snakes upon the floor began to move. Snakes she didn’t recognize tumbling among a few she did. She was fairly sure she saw a desert cobra in there, silky and dark, and a horned viper.
At first, she didn’t understand…until she saw the method in their flowing, hypnotic dance. They moved to form letters.
I AM MORE THAN A BOOK A GAME A SOUL A SOUL A SOUL
The snakes slithered, the words moved away.
Great. Good going, Ank. Made it angry. Made a book full of snakes angry.
But the snakes still moved no closer to her.
What does a book want? What the fuck could a book need, or care about?
It’s just a book.
Got to stop thinking like that, Ank, she told herself. Because it wasn’t just a book, was it?
It was angry.
Anger is an emotion.
Shitfire, she thought. I hurt the fucking book’s feelings.
If I piss it off enough…would those snakes crawl close enough to spit in my eyes, sink their poison in my skin?
Don’t make it angry. Just…don’t.
“What do you want?”
Nonsense words that weren’t words. Just the snakes squirming across the sand beneath her feet. A whispering sound came from their scales, like insanity might sound could you hear it think.
What could it want? What could I offer a book with a soul? A crazed book.
“I’ll tell you my name,” said Ank. “If you let me out…”
Nothing. Nothing at all. The snakes did nothing that made any kind of sense. But they slowed.
It’s thinking. This is what it looks like when it’s t
hinking. It…slows…
Then the snakes swirled in a sudden frenzy and she realized the book was excited…there was something it wanted, after all.
She tried not to smile. She was glad she didn’t, because when she read the words in the snakes, she knew it could never, ever be.
“LET YOU FREE,” wrote the book in snake-words. “BUT I KNOW YOUR NAME”
Ank was cold, watching the book’s thoughts and hopes written there before her in words made of shifting snakes.
“LET YOU FREE YES FREE FREE”
Ank kept her face still. So still. Just as she read the book, she knew the book read her, too. Read her face, her actions, maybe her thoughts. Her blood was ink, here in this place. Her synapses little more than the spaces between words.
“IF YOU TAKE ME WITH YOU”
Ank stood still, thinking hard.
Got to get this right, and right now, she thought, but carefully, oh so carefully.
Fuck this up and you’re dead.
“TRUE” wrote the book with snakes slithering upon the warm sand in a magnificent temple, all held within an impossible mind.
50
Ank’s own thoughts were like snakes. She tried to calm them, to settle her mind. Firing inside, flipping switches, making insane associations so fast she barely managed to think at all. Thoughts so fast, so abundant, her mind couldn’t reach out and steady even one of them.
Slow.
She heard that, though. She didn’t see it, written in snakes. She didn’t have to corral it within her mind to hold the thought in.
Slow.
She heard it. In her ears. It was a sound and it was real, solid, honest. A voice forever in her memory.
Holland.
51
Ank was seven years old. Her hair was a dark blonde, not yet the purple mess that it would be. A small child with a quick grin. Thin arms, but strong enough.
Holland held a gun and Ank did not. Ank watched the gun, then Holland. Her eyes flipping between the two.
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