Titans of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  Unlike me, Vanity was a good actress.

  And unlike Victor, Vanity could not restrain herself from a mild gloat. She smiled archly at the prone women, and she made a little curtsy-pantomime. "Thank you for swearing, ladies. Now, Leader, can we get out of here?"

  She was not talking to me. It was Quentin who answered: "Victor, can you stun our ladies here with some paralysis beam? They cannot attack us again without breaking the law of oaths. I spare their lives."

  A glance from my higher sense showed me the strands of moral obligation running between Victor, Vanity, and Quentin. I saw group loyalty, and an obligation to abide by the outcome of elections. I had not appointed a proper chain of command, so no one had been in charge while Colin and I were missing. They had elected Quentin leader.

  Well, that was a bit of a relief, wasn't it?

  Quentin gave the order to Victor, who focused a narrow beam from his eye and touched one nymph after another with it. Something in their nerve-transmission changed when he touched them, and buried commands in their brain stems triggered their narcoleptic reflexes.

  Good thing they were already lying down.

  I shouted, "Something just happened! I saw the lines of moral order flicker and jump-"

  Quentin said, "What's it mean?"

  I said, 'There was something-a duty. When the nymphs broke that duty, it suddenly became useful to someone or something."

  Colin said, "Bugs. The nymphs were bugged."

  "Or booby-trapped. We were supposed to win. We tripped a trap by stunning them." I said,

  "Leader-what do we do... ?" (I really enjoyed being able to say that to someone else.) Quentin said, "Well... first, let's all get aboard the ship. Vanity can select a set of laws of nature that does not allow for..."

  Colin was not listening to the leader. He was staring at me.

  No, not at me. He was looking at the Amazon, who was still seated, glassy-eyed, on her steed about ten yards behind me.

  Colin shouted, "Bugs! Hey! Remember the- She's got the damn rifle bugged, too- Look out!"

  The rifle barrel was evidently mounted on gimbals, and evidently controlled via some sort of remote-camera arrangement. Even though the Amazon was not moving, and the stock was motionless in her hands, the barrel had lifted and rotated to cover us. When I say "us," I mean Colin and me. We two were standing, from the point of view of the gun, one behind the other, so that one bullet could pass through us both.

  There was no time to scream or blink or move. Victor exploded and fell over, as the rifle and the super-steed and the poor, unconscious Amazon were consumed in an explosion of blue fire.

  Far, far too rapidly for me to act...

  I saw the internal nature of the bullets loaded into the chamber. I could see it clearly, the inner workings of the rifle laid out as if spread on a diagram.

  All four bullet-types could not be loaded and shot at once-I could see the stresses in the space-time where the mutually contradictory paradigms cancelled each other out.

  But up to two could. The anti-psychic bullet for Colin and the space-collapsing shell for me, with a buckshot shell behind them both, to make sure we were peppered with pellets. The space-collapsing shell did not even need to strike me. It did not need to be in the same dimension I was in. All it had to do was ignite somewhere in the area.

  Victor must have been experimenting with neurotransmitters. I saw the internal nature of something very rapid happen in his brain stem, as if thoughts were being transmitted from one section of his brain to another by faster-than-light particles, not by the snail-pace electrochemical charges across nerve cell surfaces. Of course, it was not faster-than-light to him. It was merely particles moving in excess of three million kilometers per second. In his paradigm, there was no upper limit to velocity.

  The rifle, to be sure, operated on the same paradigm, and added extra charge to the rail gun to make the bullets come out faster. But the total energy in Victor's metal eye was evidently greater than that in the smaller metal eye hidden in the stock of the barrel.

  In effect, the gun-core poured as much power as possible into the rail gun as quickly as possible, and Victor poured as much power into a magnetic beam he was using to collapse the gun barrel...

  The bullets came out at 6 billion meters per second, roughly two hundred times the speed of light.

  The particle beam radiating from Victor traveled at roughly 7.5 billion meters per second. The kinetic energy released as heat by the motion of those particles created a flash of flame brighter than the surface of a blue-white star...

  It all happened at once.

  Colin stepped in front of me, using that same impossible speed he had used before. He had his hand on my wrist, and did... something... to me.

  The space-collapsing shell passed through me at faster-than-light speeds. In my paradigm, that meant it was outside of my frame of reference. It was traveling too quickly to affect or be affected by anything in my light-cone. Colin did something to the damn bullet so that it obeyed my paradigm. It turned into tachyons and vanished forever from our perceptual sets.

  Victor had deflected the anti-psychic shell, so that the grapeshot merely bounced off Colin's armor of arrogant self-confidence. Impatiently he brushed away red ink that, to anyone else, would have been deadly wounds.

  All at once...

  Quentin must have been warned by his friends that our hour of death had come. Before the rifle even fired, he waved the white wand in the air and whispered a command. A glowing circle of dancing firefly lights appeared around the glade, embracing all of us, and lesser lights of blue-green formed a star shape inside the circle. Latin words written in cursive trails of smoke wove themselves into existence around the group.

  Quentin really has the coolest special effects of any of the five of us. I mean, the fourth dimension is big and impressive, and being able to shoot blue light out of one's face to make deadly molecular machines is very useful. Also, being able to find a secret door in any blank wall had a definite utility, and it was darn convenient to be able to wipe any wounds or scars away.

  But little firefly sparks of gold and green and twilight blue, shining and dancing, inscribing cryptic Latin pentagrams on command? That was just too damn cool for words.

  The rush of terrible flame roared up to the edge of the circle, and the solar plasma touched the teeny tiny fireflies of Quentin's demonstration and...

  Something inside the expanding ball of atomic fire was screaming in fear. It called out in a horrid language made all of harshly aspirated consonants and cracking sibilants, and Quentin shouted back in the same language. Something inside the flame-or maybe it was the flame itself-whimpered. Imagine an elephant whimpering, or a Tyrannosaurus rex. Heck, for that matter, try to imagine something the size of the Queen Elizabeth II whimpering.

  The fireball spread to either side of us and did us no hurt. As for the radiant heat energy...

  We did not even feel any heat.

  This last was thanks to Vanity, I should mention. The laws of nature of Aristotle obtained inside the boundary made by Quentin's glowing ring, and Aristotle did not believe in radiant heat energy.

  If you dropped a cubic meter of the surface of the sun onto the Earth, instead of exploding, the supramudane substance, made of quintessence, would merely return by its natural motion to its divine place in the crystal spheres that govern heaven in cycles and epicycles. A rather friendly and human set of laws of nature, if you think about it."

  So the blast of intolerable energy released by the collision of two faster-than-light streams of superenergy, when it passed over the circle of Quentin's ward... turned into a soft, silvery light, the light of divine things, shot through with shivering glints of gold. The ancient Greek notion of the Sun was that it was a holy thing, the source of life, a great and benevolent daemon, perhaps even a god.

  The alchemical, life-creating rays of the sun passed over us and swept smoothly upward and vanished.

  We stood in a green circle
in the middle of a vast flat plain of smoldering stumps. The maenads, in what shape they had been, were dead. My pet Amazon had been instantly incinerated.

  The forest for half a mile in each direction was gone. Ash covered the smoking earth. There was no forest fire raging. Evidently all combustibles had been instantly reduced to their basic elements.

  Over a mile in each direction were scattered clouds of black and rolling red, embers and flashes of dying flame, dying perhaps because they had been blown out by the overpressure of the faster-than-light explosion.

  The line of tall hills, once hidden by towering green trees, was now clear to see. The forest still existed on the upper slopes, but not the lower. Instead, gathered at the foot of the hills, standing tall and ruined, the color and texture of burned matchsticks, glades of smoking and leafless trees leaned, tilting drunkenly away from us. The sheer violence of what had been done here, and by the discharge of a single sidearm, was staggering. I thought I saw clouds of steam nodding high over the river whose bed I had crossed earlier. I saw the melted wreckage of the high-tension power cables dripping in the distance, as all the trees between here and there had been turned to tall posts of leafless ash.

  Everything that had been inside Quentin's ward was saved. Even the dry leaves resting on the grassy stones were untouched.

  Almost everything. There was one dark spot in the green circle of grass and trees around us.

  Victor.

  I stared in horror at the prone body of Victor. I looked inside Victor to see if he was alive or not.

  Life? I am not sure. I saw motions on an atomic level, sensed a burst of radio-energy...

  All our cell phones rang.

  Vanity yanked hers to her ear. "Yes?"

  I was staring at where Victor's motionless body lay headlong in a crater, steaming and smoking.

  The chain mail he wore was drooling little molten metal droplets across his skin. He must have done some modification to his skin, because it was not charring, not melting, not burned. There were no holes in him. His hair was intact.

  His hair was like gold wire. It was not burned.

  I said, my voice all hollow with surprise, "It's Victor. The phone is useful to him..."

  The voice over Vanity's cell phone said, "This is Victor. I've lost power to my hull..."

  Colin blenched. "His... 'hull'? Did he say-?"

  "... certain of my nerves and muscles will take time to repair. Prop me up so that my eye is facing East The signal controlling the gun came from-"

  Vanity interrupted, "Leader! We're being watched!"

  I said, "Leader! A hole is opening in space-time. It's the enemy Phaeacian."

  I was looking at Quentin, and saw, about two miles behind him, a tower set with stained-glass windows, rising suddenly out of the ground like a piston. It was near the edge of the burned area.

  Trees and soil were carried upward on the roof of the tower as it rose, and nodded over the tower sides like the crown of a colossus.

  A smaller tower, this one made of brown stone, with narrow archer slits instead of windows, rose up to one side of the first tower, throwing soil and rocks each way. Dirt, like black water, dribbled and trickled down its eaves.

  A third tower, this one in the burned zone, reared aloft out of the earth, carrying a cluster of stumps and ash on its head. A fourth tower a hundred yards beyond reared up, but was caught in a tangle of shattered and smoldering tree trunks, and could only get half its windows above the ground.

  Quentin's eyes were focused behind me: Awe and astonishment had robbed him of expression.

  I turned. There were more towers behind me. At least two dozen, rearing up, taller than the burned trees around them.

  And trapdoors were opening, some slowly, some quickly. Not one, not ten, but hundreds. I saw doors an acre wide, rising up, carrying huge segments of the landscape with them, lifting rocks and tree stumps. Deep in these vast doors could be seen the heads of staircases fit for giants, inset with ivory ramparts, five hundred yards wide. There were battlements and windows like gems being pulled up to the surface, carried by the posts that lifted up these titanic roofs.

  And beyond these hundred doors, one vast door that ran from horizon to horizon made itself known.

  The hills opened.

  Imagine that all the mountains and hills that embraced a quarter of the horizon, as far to the north and south as could be seen without turning, were not hills at all, but the rooftops and turrets and tower-tops of a buried city: and not merely a city, but also its suburbs, and a goodly section of the surrounding farms and villages.

  Now imagine that all the million columns supporting the roofs and towers, halls, palaces, esplanades, and wintergar-dens of that underground countryside moved upward with one ponderous, silent, earthquake-potent thrust Those roofs and tower-tops with all the countless tons of rock atop them, and all the wide acres of burned forest-tops crowning them, were all moved upward with untroubled, infinite strength.

  That was what we saw.

  Vast pillars of ivory and marble pushed the miles of hillside, rock and trees and stream and woods, birds' nests and salt lick and brush, earth and stone and steaming wreckage of forest stump, acre upon acre, upward. A hundred yards aloft, two hundred, more.

  Upward and upward. The underside of the hollow hills gleamed with the reflections of that ceiling, like a firmament, of a world that shone up from underfoot.

  We saw the tops of pillars the size of skyscrapers holding up a sky of stone. Light from beneath, bright as the sun, but colored like moonlight seen through rippling water, played back and forth across the underside of this pillar-upheld firmament.

  Like jagged teeth in the wide gap between the lower brink and the upper hill-covered roof now held aloft, we saw the many fortresses and walls, overlooking wide passes between them. These passes were the heads of roads and highways leading down into that underground universe. Only the tops of the roads were visible to us, but the shape of the mighty slope down which they rolled could be detected from the contour of the pillars, minarets, and hanging gardens that overtopped them. The upper battlements of the chain of fortress walls fell lower the farther they were from the lip of the pit-or should I call it the boundary of the landscape- and the roadways were no doubt parallel to them.

  There were pennants and battle flags hanging from every window and archer slit. Siege guns peered from over the fortress walls, and sixteen-inch guns, something that would grace the heaviest dreadnought afloat, looked down from pillboxes and fortified positions beyond.

  And from this chasm, roaring and murmuring, came a noise of many voices calling out.

  My ear heard only a roar of ocean noise. A higher sense detected an inner meaning: "Death! To the Orphans of Chaos! Death!"

  It was the battle cry of Lamia.

  Like a river breaking from a dam, endless lines of cavalry poured forth from the passes between the forts. Amazons on their swift steeds streamed with quiet haste down the slope.

  All the central, metal eyes of all the steeds were lit, a thousand little winks and flashes of azure light, a constellation of blue stars approaching through the green trees and brown stumps, the columns of ash.

  With them, less orderly, were maenads. What I had seen before had not been an army, or even a horde. Compared to this, the hundreds from which I had been running had been merely a flying squad, a detachment.

  Song rose up from the battlements. Thousand-voices strong, the choir of music and magic rose like a rising sun from out of that inner, underground universe. Siren song.

  A river of eerie green-gold sparks poured out from one of the taller towers in the landscape and reached across three miles of green forest, brown ash-land, and green forest again, to wrap a distant tower in an aura of supernatural fire. Arms of gold and emerald fire streamed from that tower in answer, and rushed like a wall of burning flame across miles of landscape to a third tower. The third tower ignited and threw a river of gold-green power to a fourth; a fourth to
a fifth, this one made all from a single huge slab of quartz; and this fifth back to the fourth again.

  A pentacle. With walls of gold-green flaming energy reaching across four miles of space, the towers drew a star-shape around us. No doubt hidden nymphs, not merely four or five, but countless scores and hundreds, were practicing their craft and beginning their demonstrations.

  And the siege guns opened fire.

  I saw the muzzle flashes of the gigantic siege cannons and sixteen-inch guns firing before we heard any noise. I should not call them muzzle flashes. Energy discharges. These were not gunpowder cannons; they were rail guns. Heavy artillery based roughly on the same weapon design that the Amazons used as rifles. There was not going to be any noise, except the rush of one-ton shells breaking the sound barrier.

  In that moment of eerie silence, as the shells were falling, but before they hit, Quentin shouted,

  "Aboard! Now!"

  The first note of siren-music had robbed me of my extra dimensions, powers, and senses. Colin was going crosseyed with shock and pain as the miles-wide pentagram was being drawn around us, but, before the fifth tower finished drawing arms of fire from across the forest to its sister towers, Colin had caught me up in his arms, and heaved Victor's immobile body upright, and fell, dragging us, into the open trapdoor that Vanity was, even now, jumping down through.

  Quentin's powers were not yet turned off, as the Amazons and their metal-eyed horses were still far away. A shadow came around him as his feet silently left the soil, and the cloak seemed to reach out with ever-widening wings, and that shadow reached out and touched all of us, lifted, pushed, and we were all standing on the deck of the Argent Nautilus. Except for Victor, who fell over.

  Quentin said, "Vanity! If you would please-"

  The trapdoor overhead exploded with blue light as the first of the hundred shells landed. The roof of the tunnel above us was turned instantly to plasma. The vacuum created by the firestorm sucked the river water up in a white spray, where the heat was breaking the water molecules into their constituent oxygen and hydrogen."