Terrance considered that for a moment. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
Beauregard smiled. “If I claimed one or the other, you wouldn’t believe me.”
Terrance thought of those who’d been captured. Of Randolph burnt to nothing. Of Talia being cut down. Of Shannon orchestrating it all with a smile on her face. “I want out of this. I want normal again. No sword. No evil to fight. No Shannon.”
“Then let’s go toss the sword,” Beauregard said. “When it’s gone for good, the choice is made and no more worrying about it.”
Terrance stared at the sheathed sword. “Last time I was about to do that, I found kids being threatened and I stopped to help. Of course, I didn’t get my head ripped off only because Talia came to help me. That’s not going to happen again.”
“It’s a noble thing to want to help,” Beauregard said. “But you’re…you. You’re just going to get killed, for little purpose.”
Terrance stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Right behind you,” Beauregard said, following Terrance out of the apartment.
This time, no conflict stopped Terrance as he walked through the apartment complex and went through the fence. After hiking a little longer, he saw the ground before him drop off in the direction of the setting sun. Soon he reached the edge of the canyon that lay beyond the apartments. It was about a hundred yards wide and stretched beyond sight in either direction. He crept to the edge and peered over. The bottom of the canyon was so far down, he saw nothing but blackness. Or maybe not just blackness—he thought he saw stars twinkling down there.
“Is this a bottomless pit?” Terrance asked.
Beauregard puffed at his pipe. “Just another weird thing that you no longer want to deal with.”
Terrance detached the sheathed sword from his belt and held it out in front of himself. “I just wanted to help.”
“Good intentions. Road-paving. Hell. That sort of thing,” Beauregard said. “The question is: do you want to die?”
“No one does.” He remembered the faerie’s offer to Shannon, to kill her. Who would accept that? “But what if I am an infinite being? Then I can’t die.”
Beauregard chuckled. “Then you especially don’t need the sword. But do you really believe that?”
Terrance felt weak and useless. That was the truth of it. He dangled his sword over the edge. “I feel like a coward, just leaving it all behind—especially my friends who were captured.”
“There are plenty of fools in the Infinite who are used to that sort of thing,” Beauregard said. “I’m sure they’ll launch some sort of rescue mission, but would you be of any help in that?”
Terrance played the failure over and over in his head. Especially the spray of blood as Shannon cut into Talia, and Talia’s body falling limply into nothingness. He’d spoken up that first time he’d seen her in peril, but ultimately it was all for naught. “I can’t help anyone.” With that, he let the sword slip from his fingers, and it tumbled down into the canyon until it disappeared into the blackness below. An odd thought leapt into his mind, to jump in after it, but he was through with foolish notions. “So I guess that’s it.”
There was no answer. Terrance turned around and saw that Beauregard was gone. His world was becoming more normal already. There was no happiness there, though, only the hope that the pain he was feeling would soon fade.
Chapter 31
Terrance had turned off his phone. He turned it back on the next morning and found that Shannon had called a few more times throughout the night. He was hoping that by now she might just assume he was dead, making the whole breakup easier. He felt like a coward for not handling it more directly, but he already felt that his cowardice had been well-established by letting Beauregard handle giving the bad news. And by tossing his sword. Terrance’s hand reflexively went to his hip but found nothing. Cowardice, in the face of odds he couldn’t hope to take on, felt justified at least.
He was set for his drive to work, hoping to achieve that more-normal day that he longed for, but he started noticing things along the way. He kept seeing those eyeless cavefish in groups of about a half-dozen, out in the open, moving between buildings, such as one group descending on a Burger King as he drove by. He saw chimeras flying overhead, and occasionally he saw the Hollow Ones with the cavefish, moving toward some purpose, though he couldn’t tell what as he watched at red stoplights.
He saw more of the forces of the Darkness as he got nearer downtown. The regular people on the sidewalks seemed to be making an effort to avoid them, rather than just ignoring them as if their presence were normal. Something was going on, but Terrance determined it wasn’t his concern, because what exactly could he do about it anyhow?
In the parking garage, some of the dark things with the shining eyes were crawling around on the ceiling, watching him. He did his best to ignore them as he headed into his office building.
He had been gone a day and a half, so there was a lot of email to catch up on when he sat down in his cubicle. It was mainly a number of error notices on the system and an email from Pendergrass wondering where he was with the main algorithm code. He quickly checked his personal email, which included one from Shannon with the subject line Are you okay? He didn’t click on it; he felt he still had to give himself some time to figure out what he was going to do. And coffee. He needed coffee.
He headed for the break room. When he got back to his desk, Lance was waiting there. Terrance rarely ran into him on his way out of their apartments, as Lance always got in a little later. “Hey, what’s going on?” Lance asked. “Last I saw, you were running off with Shannon, and then I didn’t see you for a day.”
Terrance sighed and sat back down at his desk. “I don’t really want to talk about it. We got a text from Lacey threatening to hurt you—but she didn’t do anything to you, right?”
Lance chuckled. “I wouldn’t mind her doing stuff to me. So, um…you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” At least that’s what he wanted to be. “I don’t think it’s working out with me and Shannon, though.”
“Oh, well, sorry to hear that. Um…so, do you have any idea what’s going on today?”
Terrance raised an eyebrow. “With what?”
Lance looked a bit uncomfortable. “There’s…you know…people like Shannon and her coworkers out and about everywhere doing…something.”
“I don’t know anything about it. I’m trying to stay out of that sort of thing, now. It’s been a big mess anytime I’ve tried to get involved.”
“You don’t think it concerns us?”
Terrance slumped in his chair. “Just ignore it, and we’ll be fine. I think that’s how it works.”
Lance looked down the row of cubes, toward the window. “Okay. So you’re not running out there with your faerie sword?”
Terrance thought of how the crystal palace had shattered as it collided with the ground. “No. I got rid of it.”
Lance nodded. “Oh, okay. Well, sorry about Shannon.” He walked off.
Terrance was just beginning to contemplate getting to work on the algorithm code when Karen appeared. “We need to talk,” she said, and motioned for him to follow.
Terrance sighed. “Okay.” He followed her to the stairwell, which gave them a little more privacy. “I kinda lost your sweatpants,” Terrance told her. “I left them in a room on a Zeppelin somewhere past the edge of the world.” He doubted there was an appropriate lost and found he could call.
“I don’t care about that.” Karen had her usual sour expression that Terrance was never quite sure was directed at him or at life in general. “Shannon called me and said she can’t get in contact with you and she’s worried something has happened to you. Why haven’t you called her back?”
Terrance shrugged. “I was…getting to it.”
“Are you breaking up with her? What happened with you two? I thought you were helping her quit her job or something?”
“That didn’t work out. Instead, she”—Terrance thoug
ht again of Randolph’s being burnt to nothing in the dragon fire, and of the spray of blood when Shannon sliced through Talia—“she had second thoughts, and…uhh…”
“And what?”
“I don’t know.” He took his glasses off and rubbed the lenses with the edge of his shirt. “She’s evil. You know that?”
“What do you mean?”
He put his glasses back on. Karen was looking at him like he was cat vomit that she had to clean up, and something snapped in Terrance. “Maybe you’re too much of an empty-headed bimbo to notice, but there are dark, evil forces out there. Shannon sided with them. And that’s kind of an issue.”
The disgusted look faded into something much more unreadable, but then it returned. “You’re a real prick, you know that? Waving around your little faerie sword doesn’t make you some special warrior, fighting evil.”
“I am well aware of that,” he said, not hiding his exasperation. “I am no warrior. I am just a computer programmer. Nothing more.”
Karen studied Terrance’s face, her expression neutral. “You should probably tell Shannon this and end it.”
Terrance nodded.
Karen stood there for a few more seconds, looking like she was about to say something else, but finally turned quietly and left.
Terrance took out his phone and stared at it for a while. He really didn’t think he was up to talking to Shannon, so instead he typed out a text. A breakup by text was pretty low, but so was murder, so Terrance didn’t think he should feel too bad about it. He typed out, You win. I tossed the sword. Now leave me alone. After a little hesitation, he hit the Send button.
He headed back to his cubicle, though he was feeling too drained to work. Still, getting lost in his work seemed like the only possible escape from the pain he was feeling. He found Pendergrass standing by his desk.
“I was looking for you,” he said. “It’s stopped working completely.”
“What?”
Pendergrass looked panicked. “The main algorithm is busted. I’m pretty sure it’s now just returning negative one to everything. Did you deploy any changes to it recently?”
“No…I’ve been gone the last day or so.”
“Well, look into it now. I was about to try to figure it out myself.”
Terrance sighed and sat down at his desk. “We really need to replace that garbage. That code is nearly indecipherable. Who wrote it?”
Pendergrass shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is it was written a long time ago, probably before many coding standards were settled. We’re talking back when C code was a novelty. The stuff is ancient.”
“‘Ancient’ is the word for it.” He brought up the file. “I’ll see what I can see.”
“Okay, tell me as soon as you figure it out.” Pendergrass headed off.
Terrance dove once more into the mishmash of oddly named variables and unhelpful comments. Once again, it was extremely difficult to follow the flow of the logic, but he ran the algorithm in his test setup and soon found the problem. For some reason, there was a branch the code would go down based only on some odd math against the date. After exploring it for a while, he realized it had only started going down this particular path that day. And it was easy to see why it was breaking, because the code down that path was garbage.
One part of the code jumped out at him. There was a comment reading, “as you wait, it consumes,” followed by the line:
td = dest < home;
He had no idea what any of those variables were supposed to mean or what they did for the program. The thought jumped into his head that “td” were his initials, and he stared at the line a while longer. He remembered how the Infinite said things were hidden in ancient texts, and Pendergrass had declared this code to be ancient. Could this be a message for him? If so, who put it there?
He shook the thought from his head; he had determined that he was done with this sort of thing, and there was no reason to stumble down the path to more tragedy. Instead, he did what seemed the sensible thing: began to fix the code so that the program never went into the section of nonsense logic.
After Terrance had worked for a while on getting the fix into production, he suddenly felt a chill. “I have an announcement,” boomed Darlor’s voice. The demon was standing at the end of the room, looking out over the cubicles. “There will be a new empowerment ceremony tomorrow.”
Terrance shuddered, thinking of the creature below the building, and of what this ceremony might entail. But this was the challenge, wasn’t it? Terrance knew he would see awful things on occasion and there was nothing he could do about it. Because what could he do other than get himself killed trying to fight powers far stronger than himself?
“I hope we can avoid an incident like last time,” Darlor added.
He thought of Talia’s being delivered to the horrible creature while everyone just stood there and watched. He wondered if that was part of how the Adversary fed off of them. But was it Talia that it would have been feeding off of, or those who stood by and did nothing?
It was a pointless thought, because nothing was the only real option. Maybe he helped a little with Talia that one time, but she was dead now—because that was all that fighting such forces was likely to achieve. There was no winning against immortal soldiers or powers that controlled reality.
Terrance decided the simple solution was to not come in tomorrow. He had already missed a lot of work, but he wasn’t yet up for the challenge of being like the others and ignoring the evil. But eventually he would be—he’d have to be. He couldn’t stop it, so there was nothing he could do other than learn to tolerate. To deaden his outrage to such things. To be empty of such emotion. To be hollow inside.
“No,” Terrance heard himself utter.
“What?” Darlor demanded.
Terrance found himself stepping up from his desk and standing in the cubicle hall to face Darlor. What am I doing? I threw away my sword; there is no pretending that I can do anything to stop these people. Rationally, this was pointless, but the memory of Talia crying for help kept echoing in his mind, and he could not repeat the scenario in which he would just stand by and watch. As futile as he knew fighting the Darkness was—as suicidal as it seemed—he knew that he couldn’t accept any other option.
Terrance looked at the terrible Darlor and shuddered in fear. But more than that, he was angry. He somehow managed to say in a calm voice, “If I see the unnamed creature from below again, I will kill it.” It seemed like a pointless boast when he didn’t even have a sword, but it didn’t feel like a lie either. Somewhere deep down, he felt that he would destroy that evil thing.
Darlor said nothing immediately; he just glared at Terrance with fierce eyes. Around him, Terrance could see heads popping up from behind cubicle walls to watch the scene unfold. Now a bit of embarrassment was thrown into the mix, but the anger was still what ruled him.
“Let’s talk in my office,” Darlor finally said.
“Okay.” He followed the demon, doing his best to ignore all the eyes watching him. Inside Darlor’s cave, he closed the door behind him.
Darlor walked to his throne. “Sit.”
“I’m good.” Terrance tried to keep his voice firm, but he could feel his heart pounding inside him. He was so defenseless and exposed right now, and he had no idea where this was going.
Darlor stood too, his dark, scaly form much taller and larger than Terrance. “Do you understand the choice you are making?”
You have to back down or you will be killed, yelled a voice inside Terrance. The logic was sound, but he also felt that it was wrong. “I understand enough,” he answered Darlor.
Darlor was still now, like a statue—a gargoyle. “You are a good programmer, Mr. Denby.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you not enjoy that job?”
“I do. I like programming very much.”
“Then you should program. If you pursue these other things beyond your concern, then you put it all at risk. You could
lose your job and your salary.”
Terrance considered that and shuddered a bit. You are going to lose everything. “If that happens, it happens.”
“You could lose your health insurance.”
That made Terrance stop. He hadn’t thought about running around fighting evil without health insurance; that seemed like a really bad idea. But he looked at the demon standing there, and knew this was all just to scare him. That’s what all this was about: to get him to yield out of fear. And the fear was screaming at him. Are you suicidal? Do you want to die? He did not want to die. But the whole idea of submitting to the evil out there felt a lot like dying—and that was the death he was truly scared of. “I’m going to fight whatever evil I see. I’m doing what I must; you do what you must.”
Darlor finally moved, a slight nod. “So be it.”
The demon leapt at Terrance, plowing into him and smashing them both through the drywall, landing out in the open-air cubicle area. Terrance was dizzy from the impact, but saw Darlor standing over him with enormous leathery wings spread out behind him, making him look five times his normal size. Terrance tried to look around for something to grab as a weapon, but Darlor seized him with one claw and tossed him across the room, where he smashed into a cubicle divider that surprisingly had less give than the office wall.
Terrance could hear a great commotion of people shouting around him. He looked up and saw everyone watching, but no one helping.
Terrance reached for a nearby chair, but Darlor seized him by the arm. “We try to let you serve us without having to constantly remind you how small and pathetic you are,” Darlor said.
“Oh, shut up!” Terrance managed to retort as he tried to pull away Darlor’s claw while hitting him in the face. The demon’s skin was like rock.
Darlor’s other hand went to Terrance’s neck and lifted him into the air. “We offer you everything,” Darlor said as he walked forward. Terrance realized he was heading toward a window. “Most are smart enough to accept, because the alternative is to die pathetically and alone.”
“You offer nothing I want,” Terrance said as he feebly tried to pull Darlor’s claw off his neck. Darlor slammed him against the window. It held, but he could feel it cracking against his back.
Sidequest: In Realms Ungoogled Page 25