The Demon City

by Evan Currie

  For the most part, the dreaming was more of a curiosity in his records than anything serious. While potentially potent by nearly all accounts, for the most part it was impossible to truly override someone else’s sense of self, and anything else was like trying to impose your will on the ocean: pointless and a waste of time.

  Not every record he had agreed, however.

  “Let us say this is correct,” Merlin allowed. “What do you propose?”

  “I don’t know,” Elan snapped, glaring at him. “First we should find it, shouldn’t we?”

  Merlin closed his eyes.

  Children.

  “Very well,” he said, opening his eyes and gesturing to the globe. It spun and grew until it came to show a spot familiar to him, one that made even him feel a well of emotions he would rather not. “If there is anything big coming, it would be centered here . . . in concept, if not in reality.”

  “What’s this?” Elan asked, focusing on the light.

  It was centered in a large island chain, with a large landmass to the north, but she didn’t see much to make it stand out from any other place.

  “That is Lemuria. It is the capital of the old world, your people’s world,” Merlin answered simply, “and it is now the capital of the demonic empire that has taken control. All orders for action stem, ultimately, from Lemuria.”

  Elan nodded slowly. “Then I’ll have to go there.”

  That was a step beyond what Merlin was willing to humor.

  “Are you out of what little you have to pass for a mind, child?” he spat. “The city was taken over before anything else. It has been in demon hands since the beginning. If there is anywhere on this world you should avoid, it is that place.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Elan shook her head. “I need to go there. The light shows that there is still a redoubt there. Is it . . . safe?”

  “The center there is secure, yes, but that isn’t the concern. The city above it is teeming with the dimensional intruders. You would not last an hour,” he grumbled. “Someone with infiltration training might have a chance at returning with useful information, but you, child, are altogether too . . . direct.”

  She gave him a gimlet eye, disliking his tone more than his words. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, child, that this isn’t a problem you can tackle head-on. It requires subtlety,” Merlin spat, now thoroughly irritated. “A word I doubt you even know the meaning of.”

  Elan was glaring at him but shifted her eyes as she looked reflexively up and to the right.

  Merlin laughed openly at her. “You don’t know what the word means, do you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “My life has become a comedy of errors,” Merlin groaned, then eyed her sternly. “Subtlety means not attracting attention. Being careful. Not forcing a certain someone to collapse an entire island chain in order to save your stupid backside!”

  “That was not my fault! You did that!” Elan protested. “You didn’t even tell me what you were doing!”

  “If you had another way to get yourself and all those refugees clear without bringing every demon for a thousand miles down on their heads, you could have offered up the suggestion at the time,” Merlin countered acerbically. “The only accessible transport station had been sunken by rising ocean levels, so I eliminated two problems with one solution.”

  “And you call that subtle,” Elan muttered.

  “I did no such thing,” Merlin snapped. “I call that effective.”

  “Fine, then I’ll go to this Lemuria place and be effective,” she riposted.

  Merlin started to reply but paused, thinking about what had just been said a couple of times over in his mind.

  Finally he slumped a little. “Somewhere, somehow, this conversation turned on me, and I’m not entirely sure how.”

  Elan, however, was now ignoring him, as she had already turned and marched out of the command center, leaving Merlin staring after her in a rather high degree of irritation.

  *****

  Making her way to the armory, Elan was silent and focused internally as she tried to figure out why she was so determined to do what even she considered to be more than a little crazy.

  Who . . . no, what¸ was that thing, and can I trust it? Them?

  Elan winced, rubbing her face as she walked.

  The dreaming was so . . . damned difficult to interpret sometimes. Even she was aware of that. If you slipped your focus, if you blinked just once, it could scoop you up and play with your brain until you believed anything and everything. Once you woke . . . well, reality would intercede again, but it made trusting anything you saw or heard in the dreaming problematic.

  All Elan really knew was that she had a rising sense of urgency that she couldn’t shake. What the . . . thing, being, entity . . . whatever it was, it had shown her a future she couldn’t allow to pass.

  Maybe Merlin was right. Maybe she was being reckless and foolish. But the alternative was to watch the whole world change, and that she would not do.

  I’ll make them kill me first, Elan thought grimly as she entered the armory just as Merlin appeared ahead of her.

  The projection of the old man looked tiredly at her. “This is insane.”

  “I don’t care,” Elan said firmly.

  “I could stop you,” Merlin told her. “I could lock down the transporter. By the circles, I could simply refuse to transport you. You’ve not learned enough to run the machinery yourself, and you know it.”

  “You could,” Elan confirmed, her head swiveling to look at him with a steady gaze, “but will you?”

  “I should,” he grumbled. “You’ve hardly convinced me that any of this is a good idea.”

  Elan looked away, her face a mask of thought and confusion that even he couldn’t read, for all his experience. Merlin knew, however, when to remain silent . . . however much many previous commanders of his facility might have disagreed with that statement.

  “I don’t know if it is,” Elan confessed after a long, drawn-out moment.

  Merlin thought to make a statement then, but another glance at her expression silenced him once more. There was something in her eyes, a deep conflict that he couldn’t read specifically but could hardly miss. It was like looking into the eye of a storm. Depth and furious purpose lay there, being marshaled to power given form.

  “I just . . .” Elan again hesitated, thinking her way through her words. “I don’t think we have time, Merlin. I think we’re running out of that very quickly.”

  Merlin considered his response. “Time, young lady, is ephemeral and fleeting in ways a human can hardly understand, yet it is one of the bulwarks of consciousness. Below the wispy surface you experience, I can assure you, time never runs out.”

  “It does for us,” Elan said softly. “If we do nothing, it does for us.”

  Merlin was silent for a moment, never looking away from her as he considered the statement.

  “For a long time,” he said stonily, “I have avoided looking into the future, child, because I am all too aware of that. We lost this war. There is no point in throwing yourself into the grinder for a lost cause. Stay on Atlantis, Elanthielle. With some luck you may live out your life and die before the demons come for you.”

  She shook her head. “We haven’t lost. The . . . being, thing . . . whatever it was, it showed me that. It said something had changed, and now the future is uncertain.”

  “I assure you,” Merlin said firmly, “no one knows the flow of time as I do. There is no future here for children of men, no future you want to contemplate, at least.”

  Elan squared off with him, looking evenly into his visage. “If you believe that, then why save me? Why save us all?”

  The projection shrugged with a certain apathy that Elan had never associated with him before.

  “Why take a breath when death is inevitable eventually anyway?” he asked. “It is done because instincts demand it. I saved you because my instincts told me to,
just as you fight because your instincts tell you to. Instincts are fundamentally stupid. They continue to act even when there is no hope, no chance. They even act in total defiance of reality, and when our reality changes, instincts are unable to change to match, and then we die at the very feet of the things that we evolved to keep ourselves alive. Reality has changed, and our instincts are no longer enough . . . but we cling to them anyway, because when our consciousness can offer no more hope, why shouldn’t we?”

  Elan’s expression slowly shifted from slight confusion to a dark glower as he spoke, and she finally stamped her feet loudly enough to startle the projection.

  “I told you,” she said, “something changed. There is hope. There is a path. We just have to find it.”

  “Child,” Merlin said firmly, “I am an elemental intelligence, and time is my element. I have looked and seen the end of humanity and all other nondemonic forms in this universe. There are no paths. There is no hope.”

  “When?”

  Merlin was taken aback by the stubborn and belligerent tone as she glared at him, chin thrust out as she openly challenged his expertise.

  “Excuse me?”

  “When did you look?” Elan said again, no less challenging.

  Merlin returned her glare and redoubled it. “I’ve existed beyond your ken, child, and looked into the paths of time since before your maternal line came into existence. Don’t think you can challenge—”

  “When did you look last?” she cut him off, leaving him sputtering in apoplectic disbelief.

  “Child, I stared into that black morass for generations,” he snarled. “I tried to find a path through, any path through. Even if we sacrificed ourselves, it made no difference. There is no path. We cannot do the impossible. No one can.”

  “Look again,” Elan told him in a cold, steady tone.

  “Child . . .”

  “Look again.”

  Merlin fell silent, glaring at her as she matched his glare and sent it right back. The silence stretched out for a long time between them before Merlin found himself in the unusual position of looking away first.

  “I will look again, child, but when I find nothing,” he told her, “you must give up on this path. All you’ll do is sacrifice what little time you have left. Just . . . live your life like there is no tomorrow, child, because I’m telling you: there isn’t.”

  Elan’s lips curled up crookedly. “Live like there’s no tomorrow? I can agree to that. Now look, if you really can.”

  He shot her an annoyed glare but didn’t respond to the taunt as he began to refocus his capacities in a way he hadn’t done in so very long. Time was a finicky element. It didn’t flow, as most people believed; it wasn’t a river. It was an ocean, with tides that waxed and waned. The idea of future, past, and present was truly more of a human concept than anything else, but the very simplicity of the concept was useful, even if it wasn’t particularly accurate.

  He sank himself into the vast ocean of elemental time, something the ancient entity hadn’t done in so long that he had begun to lose his conceptual understanding of time and had even started to think of it like a human might. That was obliterated in a moment as the great ocean of time swallowed him whole, and Merlin opened the equivalent of his eyes to look into the inky blackness he knew would be spreading from the future to the past.

  In an instant, he noted that something was wrong.

  No, not wrong . . . just not expected.

  Merlin swept his focus, looking first into the past as humans understood it in order to establish his bearings. He could see the greatness of the human culture as it was birthed in the stars and spread from sun to sun, bringing the light of consciousness to the darkness. The invasion was there, that sickly black ink that started as a single splotch buried deep in the universe but spread quickly until, in the human present, it had swallowed the earth, the home of humanity, the beacon of the universe.

  Steeling himself, Merlin swept his focus about, looking into the human conception of the future to where the blackness would swallow the stars . . . only it hadn’t. Or rather, if it had, he couldn’t see it.

  In fact, he couldn’t see anything.

  There was a deep gray mist obscuring the future, something he had never before encountered.

  Merlin was not infallible; he knew that all too well. He was, however, a master of quantum interactions beyond the imagination of humanity. He could see the ultimate future of the universe, just as he could see the ultimate past, with ease . . . simply by calculating the results of quantum interactions. Smaller details were more difficult to distinguish, but it was possible if he could find the appropriate variables . . . but he could easily miss those details.

  He could be blindsided as well, particularly if a threat came from outside the universal frame of reference, as the demons had. They hadn’t existed until they suddenly did, and their changes were wrought on the universe in total defiance of his calculations until he had found and assimilated the new variables.

  However, he had never been blinded before.

  Merlin didn’t even know what that could possibly mean.

  One thing he did know was that the child was right. Something had changed, and while he wasn’t convinced that there was any true hope, Merlin had to admit that it seemed that it was no longer entirely impossible that some might exist.

  He snapped back to the macroscopic reality of the universe, rising from the ocean of time to once more walk the surface as a human might, and looked at the girl who was still staring at him.

  “You saw it, didn’t you?” she asked, a gleam in her eyes. “The mist?”

  Merlin was shocked to his core by her question, by the insight it implied.

  He’d never known a human to see time the way he could, but for her to describe the mist with confidence told him that she wasn’t making anything up.

  “Yes,” he said firmly, already shifting gears as he tried to determine what their options were now. “I saw the mist. What I don’t understand is what it means. I’ve never seen anything like it. Something has thrown the entire universe into question. I do not think you understand just how impossible that is.”

  “Does it really matter?” Elan asked him. “We have a chance now. That’s enough.”

  “Does it really . . .?” Merlin sputtered. “Child, the only way for the ocean of time to change this drastically is via some sort of external influence. The closest thing I’ve ever encountered to this is the invasion of the demons themselves, and even their impact was nothing compared to this. Destiny no longer appears to exist, child. That speaks of power the likes of which no one should ever witness, let alone hold.”

  “I don’t care,” Elan said simply. “All that matters is that we have a chance. I don’t care who gave it to us. I don’t care if it’s somehow another enemy. If it is, we’ll deal with them when we’re done with the demons.”

  Merlin was taken aback by the simple confidence in her voice, a confidence he wanted to ascribe to youth and foolishness, but found himself starting to believe despite himself as she spoke.

  “I’m going to Lemuria, Merlin,” she told him. “You can help, or you can try to stop me. Either way, I’m going, even if I have to start from Atlantis and swim. Make your decision.”

  Merlin would have choked were he human. The idea of the child trying to swim to Lemuria from the island she’d named Atlantis was utterly ludicrous. The two were almost on opposite sides of the world or, rather, about one-third of the way around the circumference of the planet from one another. Forgetting even the thousands of miles of open ocean between them and the issue of whether she could even find the right direction to swim, there was an entire continent between them as well.

  Even so, looking at her, he had the feeling that she would indeed try it.

  He shook his head slowly, surrendering.

  “I suppose if this is how you choose to spend your life, I may as well see to it that you get the best deal for the exchange possible,” he said
finally, not quite willing to entertain the possibility that she might actually find a true path to a future that didn’t include the demons. Merlin nodded to the armory as it unlocked at a thought from him. “Your father must have been insane, because you certainly did not get this from your maternal line.”

  Elan shot him a scowl but said nothing as she marched into the armory to retrieve what she could in the hopes of not merely avoiding death but somehow finding a path to the impossible future.

  *****

  I need to check with Simone. I’ve never heard of some of the techniques here, Caleb thought as he pored over the text of the book, somehow more engrossed in what he was reading than anything he had ever had the chance to read in the past.

  He now understood Elan’s fascination with the book. It was almost impossible to close once you got started, and it felt like it was somehow connecting directly to his brain and just dumping information in. Words flowed as he read them and somehow managed to stick. Simone would have laughed at him if she were there to see him so deeply pulled into something that was trying to teach him.

  It was filled with instructions on swordplay, tricks that he’d seen Simone and others use but hadn’t been able to entirely understand himself. When he’d asked, Simone had said that some tricks just came with experience.

  Maybe he hadn’t been ready then, but now it all seemed to make sense as he read the book, and it just seemed to perfectly explain all the things that he’d struggled with in the past.

  He turned the page and read the next header, mind still swirling with the information he’d just absorbed.

  On Combat and Leading Men.

  Caleb sat back, surprised by the abrupt switch in subjects, but then leaned over the book again to read more.

  In leading those who fight, a commander will reveal more of himself to his enemy than any normal man ever will to his loved ones. Understand that this is inevitable and use it against your enemy. Know yourself, so that you may know how your enemy will see you.

  Caleb thought about those words and suddenly understood something Simone had told him what felt like a lifetime ago. She’d been trying to explain how to read his opponent in a fight, but it hadn’t made sense to him. He could read what someone was thinking in the moment, but she had spoken about more than that. Now he understood.