War of the World Makers

by Reilly Michaels

  Once the floor of the Great Hall was polished, the huge task ending about four in the afternoon, Zolo and three more servants were summoned by a furious Gleb to the castle kitchen where he demanded to know who had broken the expensive china vase outside Prince Christian's bed chamber a few hours earlier. One of them must have done it since, according to Gleb, "You woggers are the worst of the bunch around here!"

  After Gleb finished yelling with such force that spit from his mouth showered them all, Zolo asked him how it was possible given they were all polishing "the ass kissing floor?" Before the evil bastard butler could answer, Margaret of Anjou, alerted by the sound of Gleb's blather via Zolo's ears, speared the toady of Princess Johanna with such a horrible ache between the eyes that he gripped his head and moaned like a child. Gleb could only dismiss the "woggers" by waving them away, unable to talk with his pain.

  Zolo then heard his Mother Yarrow softly say to him:

  O espía espera por ti, nunha árbore, ao lado da Princesa von Anhalt (The spy awaits you, in a tree beside the Princess von Anhalt).

  ‘The spy awaits’—Saravastra code talk for the NMNI of Master Paganini. So Freddie must have been successful at transferring them to Gur, but at what cost? Zolo felt anxious to see her. Though where exactly, and why in a tree? Had the Mongolian perched like a bird when the NMNI oozed from his skin as a tiny bead of sweat? Or had he actually turned into a bird and crapped the NMNI on a nearby leaf? And why was Freddie there? Had he whisked her outside the castle for ...? Too many questions. He hungered to know the answers, and he must learn the truth immediately!

  But I cannot use magic for it would be too strong and alert Gur. Damn it all! Nai Yarrow?

  She did not answer.

  Nai Yarrow Margaret?

  Still no answer.

  Margaret was strong on rules. Master Paganini chose her for this reason, among many others. Zolo knew Mother Yarrows underwent careful screenings. All must be disciplined, loyal, needful and grateful. Warrior women in their waning years served well, all of them living south of the Nicholas Line. They were the best. Ordinary women of the noble or peasant classes usually failed in the long run—too selfish or fearful, or overcome with superstition.

  Zolo muttered a curse to himself, and just as he prepared to leave the kitchen, a big commotion began outside in the Great Hall. The sounds of many voices and cries of alarm! Before he could think, the kitchen door burst open and a crowd of servants poured through, three or four valets and butlers in the lead. They vigorously waved their arms and shouted, their faces red and strained, their white wigs knocked askew on their heads; and followed by more servants, a mix of lower rank butlers and "wogger boys" carrying the body of a woman in maidservant clothing, her face to the floor.

  Clearing a big cutting table with sweeping arms, the men laid her atop it, face down. That is when Zolo noticed the woman's uniform ripped open in the back, torn way to bare her upper shoulders. On her flesh, several inches below her neck, Zolo saw symbols, Chinese symbols big as hands and etched blackly, as though burned into her with a brand:

  母 狗 學 習

  Zolo noticed the symbols move ... no wait, it was the woman, and she breathed! "Turn her over," Zolo said. "She's alive!" Though the butlers glared at Zolo for daring to bark a command, they clutched the woman's body and flipped her. That's when Zolo saw her face for the first time:

  "Babette!" he shouted with a shocked voice.

  One of the maidservants, a much younger woman born of serf parents, screamed: "She is cursed by that Mongolian wizard of Empress Elizabeth! We will be cursed in turn!"

  "Shut up!" one of the oldest valets named Faust said to her.

  But too late. The younger maids and scullery took up the howl of the first, and one of the older valets began looking hysterical, crossing himself repeatedly. In a few moments, the entire kitchen resounded with cursing and cries of doom. The chef, an old bull named Kaufman, began shouting for silence and whacking his meat hammer against an iron pan, but they would not stop. "Throw her from the castle!" one of the butlers yelled. "Yes, out with the cursed sow!" another maid exclaimed.

  An enraged and disgusted Zolo picked a woozy Babette up from the table. He slung her big body over his left shoulder, and without hesitation, strutted out of the room, shouting behind him as he went, "I will take care of this matter and this curse!" and before anyone could react he was out of the kitchen and across the Great Hall in a few bounds, vanishing within moments like a ghost.

  * Оверман *

  BABETTE'S EYES WERE THOSE OF A LIFELESS ANIMAL. Zolo had carried her to a secret room of rest and solitude created months earlier with the help of Mother Yarrow. The room, like a suite in a Paris city hotel, contained running water, a sink, a bed, and more. He laid Babette down and lit a few candles on the end table, his hands still trembling with anger. He could not believe the disloyalty! The vicious dog attack on Babette by servants she had worked with for years. He hated them. Perfect swine, except for very few. If he'd not acted quickly, they might have thrown her off the castle wall like a side of rotten beef.

  Zolo could not stop to ponder further though. With Mother Yarrow's help, he placed a rejuvenation spell on Babette. She would be unconscious until the next morning as she healed from Gur's branding—more than enough time for him to rendezvous with Freddie. His concern mounted by the moment. If such a horrible thing had been done to an innocent Babette by the wicked Gur, what ungodly assault had the Princess von Anhalt suffered? Nai Yarrow Margaret?

  I am here, Zolo, and with you.

  Zolo felt relieved she was present once more. He pulled a dark woolen cloak from a big cedar armoire in the room and fastened it with a clasp around his shoulders. He kissed a sleeping Babette on the forehead and exited the castle. Unseen to all, and with magical yarrow as his shield against human eyes, he ran across the fields of toiling serfs and up into the dark forested hills of Anhalt faster than a horse could gallop. Knowing where Freddie could be found, because Margaret of Anjou pointed the way in such gentle whispers as Sobre o monte (Over the hill), he pursued his course, gaining speed, leaping small lakes and even gliding from slope to meadow like a soaring hawk. On the way, Zolo asked Mother Yarrow to define the Chinese symbols on Babette's back, and she replied A cadela aprende (the bitch learns). The knowledge of this caused even further rage, but he put it to sleep, for only the fate of the Princess von Anhalt mattered to him now.

  Many miles later, near sundown, he closed in on her location. A great streak of red and purple cloud filled the sky above him, the dying light soaking sadly into the last autumn leaves; and from the north, the first of a light snowfall blew in from a heavy black cloud drifting south. The snow fell in gleaming, dusk-light flecks, and as Zolo ran up one final hill, a long sloping one of straw-colored grasses, he spotted something very odd at the crest: a white pillar, perhaps a column of pure marble, and upon the top of the pillar, a small dark ball.

  So what the devil is this? A monument of some kind?

  He drew closer, panting and puffing out his frosty breath, and soon realized the white pillar to be a solid block of ice, one at least eight feet tall and three feet wide, and the dark ball atop it, the Princess von Anhalt's head.

  "By the gods of Saravastra!" Zolo yelled. "What has—"

  "You were thinking of Dante a while ago. I heard you," the head said quite calmly with Freddie's voice. Its eyes were glassy, darkly simmering with pale autumn light, staring straight ahead. The long, dark chestnut hair fell behind and down the back of the ice. But Freddie's skin had not turned blue and she seemed quite at ease. "Am I not like Lucifer in The Inferno by Dante, entrapped in a block of ice?"

  "You are ... I—" Zolo stumbled with his words, unable to understand. "Why are you not chewing Judas then?" he asked, attempting to bolster his own courage with humor.

  "I have been thinking of things, Mister Bold. You know, there is a birthing oven of stars, in the uncountable miles of night above me, known as the Orion Nebula, and it i
s so large that not even the best human minds in Europe can ever hope to understand it ... and in this Orion Nebula, a place exists called the Well of Souls, and the smoke of this well, the nebula vapor, is hot enough to burn Earth to a black ash in moments. It forms great towers and faces of all colors, the likes of which no one can possibly imagine. I have seen all of this today, sir," she said and closed her eyes as Zolo stared at her in disbelief, still regaining his breath.

  In a moment she opened her eyes again and the big pillar of ice, now glowing pink in the sunset, dissolved at once into tiny flecks of snow. The flecks formed a whirlpool that rose above her naked body and vanished in an early evening breeze, carried away to fall on the pines and firs further down the southern slope of the hill. Her body, steaming with foggy vapor and gleaming like fiery white porcelain in the dying sun, drifted to the ground, landing softly before him.

  Zolo was speechless. The fact that the Princess von Anhalt stood naked before him, her body exquisite, stronger and more shapely and stunning of limb than he could have guessed, did nothing to prod his words. After a long pause of inhaling her like a strange and wondrous scent, like a white starflower of Samarkand, he unwrapped his woolen cloak and covered her body with it, feeling a bit ashamed he'd not done so sooner. To his surprise, she responded by encircling his neck with her bare arms, pulling him close, and kissing him on the mouth with great passion.

  Zolo returned her love and felt overwhelmed with the urge to fully take her, beneath the darkening sky, but she gently bit his lips and withdrew with a big smile to stare at his love-silly face, and said, "In that tree over there, on a leaf about half way up, are the thoughts of Gur. Your NMNI data, as Master Paganini says." She pointed to an old oak on her left, about twenty yards away. "The demon Gur brought my body here, nothing but a blackened mummy. He encased me in a pillar of ice then flew into that tree, sat on a branch and began mocking me and laughing like a jolly Buddha before falling as black dust to the grass."

  "What has he done to you, and Babette—"

  "Babette, yes, my darling Babette. I know she is cared for now, by you. She bravely tried to help me and Gur branded her. The beast's cruelty knows no limit. I understood that he was filled with hatred and contempt, but never realized he wishes the entire world as we know it to meet a violent end."

  "Master Paganini believes this also," Zolo said, still recovering from Freddie's passion.

  "And my father? I know you are watching over him."

  "He is perfectly well."

  Wait now," she said, and opened her hand before Zolo. Atop her palm was an oak leaf. "Here it is."

  Zolo took the oak leaf from Freddie and pressed it between both his hands. The invisible NMNI speck of Gur's thoughts, smaller than the eye of an ant, entered his flesh and fed Mother Yarrow. She in turn forwarded it with her open chronocom link to Saravastra, there to be analyzed by Paganini's Bodhisattvas trained in "black magic operations." Unknown to Zolo, she smelled a whiff of Gur's thoughts in passing, as one might smell rotting garbage on a passing cart, and it frightened her. She knew evil existed, once a party to it herself, though this evil of Gur surpassed what she believed possible. Only the dark thing lurking on the fringe of her thoughts could compare, yet it was more mysterious. Gur's evil, in contrast, was a poison arrow to the eye.

  No disguise. No retreat.

  Zolo knew nothing of Margaret’s fear, or her experience with the odor of Gur. He simply hoped the NMNI information would provide a way to end the sorcerer’s hellish existence forever. Whether he worked for Master Godfellow, or himself alone, it did not matter. The evil thing needed to perish.

  Freddie interrupted his thoughts of Gur with a toneless voice:

  "And now, Mister Bold, your Mother Yarrow cannot hear me. I must tell a secret and you must vow there will be no betrayal to anyone in the universe, past or present."

  Even if Zolo wished to, he could not deny her request. He nodded his head and his eyes gave consent.

  "All three of us have decided to take action," she stated matter-of-factly.

  "All three?"

  Freddie did not answer, only stared at Zolo with that glazed eye he first saw upon arrival before the ice pillar. What was she thinking? Is she once again entering the Well of Souls? He did not know.

  She gripped him by the arm and gently pulled him to the ground to sit close beside her, the two of them settling to face the final rays of sunset. Only half the sun remained on the dark horizon and Venus shimmered in the china-blue mist of sky. Zolo wished to kiss Freddie during these final moments of light, until she said to him with a voice calm and natural as a stream of water over stones:

  "We are going to kill Edison Godfellow tonight."

  "What?"

  "My other self, Czarina Catherine, and the Mother Yarrow we share, Maria of Pozzuoli, came to the decision as I cooled and healed in that block of ice."

  Zolo struggled to make sense of it. Could this be a manipulation of Temujin Gur? Naturally, he might benefit from Master Godfellow's death, especially if he plans to cross the Nicholas. She continued. "Their voices came to me as I suffered, gave me courage, and we talked of war ...”

  “You talked—“

  “What Master Paganini wishes, the end of War Tracker, is important, yes, though War Tracker is useless to anyone but Godfellow. Without him, the militarists lose, and the vision of Saravastra and peace is realized for Earth."

  "But Master Paganini has his plans, and we do not know—"

  "The World Maker wants what we all want," Freddie said, her voice gaining an edge as she stared at him, her dark blue eyes glimmering with a twilight sun.

  "Mother Yarrow Maria knows better than this," Zolo replied, "She has sworn her loyalty to Saravastra and our cause."

  "She wants nothing more than to help our cause. She is risking much also."

  "But you cannot kill Master Godfellow, even with your aria powers. He is protected in all his past lives down to the Nicholas by complex and immensely powerful spells. Even if you somehow killed him in the past, his spell sends an alarm that summons both he and a contingent of Dio Soldati from a time before the point of death. We know, it's been tried by another World Maker, a long time ago. Master Paganini believes that even if you blocked that spell, Master Godfellow has others that would awaken and undo all you have done."

  "Another World Maker? Who was this other World Maker?"

  "She is dead. And I was not supposed to tell you that."

  "Because she was the one with aria powers? The one Master Paganini spoke of?"

  "Yes, yes ... He did not wish to speak of it, not until—"

  "Even my older self and Maria said nothing. What was her name?"

  "No one wishes to speak of it unless forced."

  "I am forcing you, Mister Bold," she said with a flat tone.

  "Her name was Dao Changkratok, and she was born in Thailand over two hundred years ago, to a poor family of rice farmers."

  "How did she die?" she asked him, now with a determined voice. "Since facing death at the hands of Temujin Gur and burning to a crisp of bacon, I am less afraid of death, and more afraid of Gur."

  "Gur wants you afraid of him despite your growing powers. That is his game."

  "Never mind him. How did she die?"

  Zolo wished to hide the truth, though the reveal of it might stop or slow her recklessness. Perhaps, or no? ... No. She will of course go forward regardless. It is a matter of honor now between she and her new companions. Still, he did not wish to tell her, though little choice remained.

  Perhaps he might soften it?

  "She was on a mission to end Master Godfellow's life at the point of Nicholas in 1529. He ended hers instead."

  "How? I must know. I must be prepared," Freddie said, her breath coming faster.

  "I can tell you nothing that will prepare you for Godfellow except to say you cannot prepare for him. He is a supreme World Maker, a genius, a commander of deadly black-armor forces, and he covers all possibilities to the fi
nest detail and—"

  "I will not accept this as true," she said, her eyes flaring at him.

  "Then you will DIE!" he shouted like a madman, jumping to his feet and looking down at her. "Listen to me! Dao appeared one second after the Nicholas Line was drawn, one second, and Dio Soldati swarmed her, seven of them, all powerful enough to smash a mountain to dust. Master Godfellow had anticipated such a move. Guardian spells filled his space, globes of them everywhere, invisible, watching everything, every hair on every arm, especially during those first moments following establishment of the line. They picked her out despite a disguise. One of them smelled a difference in the heat of her brain ... I do not completely understand it."

  "We do not have to worry about brain smells, and—"

  "You must listen! They beat her to death with their yarrow and black armor and war swords while Godfellow rained giant meteors on her like Odin. It took hours, and she destroyed many of them, but they did it, and burned her down to salt. Do you hear? A few spoonfuls of salt. They seasoned fish with her, just for a laugh, and joined with Godfellow to create a spell that obliterated her for all time, from birth onward. We only knew of her because Saravastra's magic saved knowledge of her existence outside the new time stream."

  Gazing up at him, in a calm but firm voice, Freddie said, "I do appreciate your concern, but my older self and Maria know of the Dio Soldati, and they have conceived a bold new plan."

  "To what? Destroy them?"

  "No, to avoid them entirely. We will pull Godfellow from the future and send him to another world, as it was over two billion years ago, and kill him there."

  "What world?"

  "Mars."

  "Mars? Kill him on Mars?"

  "What more fitting grave for Godfellow than the God of War planet?"

  "Why not just materialize him in the core of the sun?"

  "Because we must be sure. We must see him dead."

  "Does your Mother Yarrow now have a screen around this place?"

  "Yes, and I do also. I sang a shield atop her own. Nothing can see us or hear us. Mother Yarrow Maria has also created decoys a few miles away, and right now they are making love beneath the light of Venus." Zolo paused to consider and blushed. Freddie saw and reached up to hold his hand. She held it tight and stood up to face him. "And I desire that we do the same, if I come out of this alive. I want you too, Zolo Bold."