Now back to my other work.
* * *
ROBERT
When you experience the destruction of your soul, you usually don’t expect to experience much of anything else after that. After that terrible pain in New York at the hands of those unwitting magicians, I feel a timeless moment of being at once healed and taken outside myself. I have the flickering experience of some European war zone and of rural China. Past lives, perhaps? Recollections of something in the memories of spirits I’ve healed over the years? Something of the sort, I expect, and in any event, the experience doesn’t last long enough for me to get many details.
The next thing I’m clearly aware of is standing on a brown swath of dead grass, almost entirely buried in sand. Ahead of me is something like the daydreams of a medieval castle, stone soaring up in delicate spires and massive walls, stretching out of sight in every direction. Behind me, I see as I turn around, is a massive sandstorm held at bay by forces I don’t yet recognize. The sky overhead is a pale blue, with a few very thin white clouds high above.
As I stand, I’m immediately aware of being significantly lighter than I should be. At first I wonder if I might be stronger than usual after that way-way-way-too-near-death experience, until I notice the dust I brushed off my pants settling much more slowly than usual. Reduced gravity, then, and presumably (since I’m breathing well, not freezing or baking, and otherwise enjoying the blessings of a habitable environment) the Umbral manifestation of one of the other planets. Sand. Dust. Likely Mars. This place could easily be the trapped remains of the great multi-Tradition chantry of Doissetep, which nobody’s been able to enter since a catastrophic surge in the sphere of Forces cut it off back in 1999. I hope I’m not trapped in here with it.
“Hello, anyone, ” I call out. “I am a stranger brought to your step by unknown means. I seek aid and information, for which I can trade honorable service. ”
* * *
MING XIAN
The terrible pain of death outside the Emperor’s palace gives way to a blurred sense of travel in someone else’s care (and fleeting glimpses of far, troubled lands) and then to a sudden stillness. I am seated on a worn stone bench just outside some immense palace I don’t recognize, looking at a frozen sandstorm just a few paces ahead. I get up and feel unexpectedly light. This must be some magician’s artificial realm, carved out of the vast spaces beyond the material world for some esoteric purpose or another, and I must proceed with extra care until I understand what’s going on.
I notice that my clothes are as they were before that last encounter, worn but clean, and I find no marks of injury on myself apart from the scars I’ve had for years. I have not changed in apparent age, nor in physical sex. I seem to have an altogether human anatomy and what feels like my own soul without other baggage in here. These are not things to take for granted: anyone powerful enough to take me more or less directly from the depths of the underworld to wherever this is, high above in middling reaches of the Umbra, is powerful enough to rewrite me inside and out, if he so chooses. He has apparently not chosen to do anything but restore me to my previous condition.
That concerns me. Great generosity is rare among the mighty. I worry that I will be expected to discharge an obligation in return for all this restoration, whether I would have chosen it for myself or not. The forced "gift” is a thing found in almost every human culture there ever was. I’ve been on my guard from the moment I woke up, but now I’m doubly so.
The gate next to me seems not to have been opened for quite some time, at least to judge by the drifts of sand I have to scoop away before the door will open. The buildings within are all in advanced stages of decay, much like the Emperor’s palace was. I hear an occasional soft whisper from somewhere close, and a distant shout that I can’t quite make out.
* * *
WILLIAM
It’s not so much that I feel my trip down into the deeper void reversed, precisely, as that it seems undone. Interrupted. I feel suddenly reintegrated somewhere else, someplace I don’t linger long enough to get any sense of. It might be one of those annoying space-time bridging points, to judge from the fleeting impressions I get of New York and some agricultural land in the midst of high mountains. All the damage done to me is instantly undone as well. Then, without any transition I’m aware of, I’m standing on what looks like someone’s B-movie version of Mars.
Standing. It takes a moment to sink in. I am standing, on two working legs. That was a very thorough patch-up job indeed. I mutter in what I know isn’t a very good Peter Sellers voice, “Mein Führer, I can fucking walk. ”
The gravity feels about right, good and springy. The sky isn’t too bad, either. At least whoever’s responsible for this set is aware of what scientists have known for forty years now about the Martian sky not being all red and weird. But this thing in front of me... well, conceivably someone’s making a movie of that Ray Bradbury story with a robotic version of the House of Usher on Mars. Except this would be Camelot on Mars, or something like that. It’s fucking huge, running off well beyond the shortened horizon. Pity it’s all in ruins; I’d like to at least study it some more.
Opposite the castle set is something very impressive: a full-bore sandstorm, held in place a few dozen paces outside the outer walls of the ruins. That takes a lot of power. Of course, so does maintaining a breathable atmosphere on a world with about a sixth of the gravity that usually takes. Suddenly I get an unpleasant suspicion. I know that there is a Union presence on Mars, but I don’t know anything much about it. I’ve always assumed it was just another research station. I also know that the Union’s beloved Inner Circle of highest leaders includes a fair number of really old guys (and maybe some really old gals), who have spent decades being surrounded by underlings willing to tell them that whatever they’re interested in must be really right and good for the world. If one of them decided, “Hey, the Union would greatly benefit by having a ruined castle on Mars, ” just who would tell him, “Sorry, sir, that’s an unwise use of our resources, ” really?
It’s been quite a long time since I last walked, and that was under much less freaky circumstances than this. So I go slowly and carefully, making damn sure that I’m within easy reach of something to lean on in case I fall over. There's a gusting breeze that makes sounds too much like human voices for comfort. And off in the distance, it sounds like someone’s shouting. I debate whether to go toward or away from that.
* * *
Robert I’ve never been here before—shamans seldom spend much time in the artificial domains that other magicians construct for themselves out of the raw fabric of the spirit worlds—but I’ve heard stories about it. I awakened to my power not very long before Doissetep was destroyed, and many of the magicians I spoke with in my early wanderings had stories to tell about this or that conference there, the mentor who learned something valuable in the labs perched on the very brink of the realm where all fundamental forces originate, and so on. I’m still not entirely clear on what happened to it: something apparently made a surge within the, er, force of Forces so to speak, and erupted through all its connections to the material world. The technomagical Digital Web crashed like an overloaded power grid, which is exactly what it was, and there were explosions wherever sites had been consecrated to the flow and control of force. And all within Doissetep were trapped, cut off from the rest of the universe as their realm lost all its sustaining vitality.
Which makes me wonder just how I got here from that nasty death in New York. Someone’s intervening in my affairs, and that makes me nervous. I wish my totem were here. I don’t feel any barriers when I call out to him; it’s just that he’s very far away. “Hello! " I call out, without adding, “What the hell is going on here, anyway ?
Even in ruins, it’s an impressive place. Here were libraries. Not just collections of books, either, since magic comes in all kinds of peculiar forms. I see shelves to hold polished river stones of geomantic significance, and gardens of trees cultivated so
that the wind in their branches would make significant harmonics, and panes of glass each glazed to let a single color through, hung from beams overhead so as to make a sort of reverse prism effect. There’s more here than I can even guess at; I only know those galleries for what they are because I’d been told. The boundary with the Forces realm wasn’t any simple thing in three-dimensional space, of course. Here are wells and windows and lofts all arranged for studying one or a few selected forces in isolation, and two great amphitheaters, which I understand could hold the combined power of undifferentiated everything-force in sufficient quantity for close study.
Around all the tools of study, I see residences, dining facilities and everything needed to fix the meals several dozen magicians could eat, places for games and plays and other distractions from work, and many places too ruined or obscure for me to even guess sensibly at their purpose. The red sand covers almost everything that isn’t really well screened from the winds.
The real question is... okay, that’s silly. There are a lot of questions that matter a great deal to me right now. One of the most important ones is. Why am I here now? There can be no doubt that someone’s messing with my affairs. Since I prefer living to being dead, I can’t entirely complain, but I distrust anyone capable of and willing to take such drastic action without explanation. I feel like I’m being set up. I must proceed with caution here. Almost anything can be a trap.
On the other hand, I’m also willing to maintain my usual personality. If I’m being spared for a reason, I can at least hope that it’s because of what I am, rather than (or at least in addition to) what I can be made to do. I continue calling out as I walk. Sometimes I think I hear others moving in these ruins, though when I get close, I never see anything but the wind and the slightest traces of ghosts.
* * *
MING XIAN
Above all, I wonder just what it is I’m doing here. I ought (if that word means anything) to have perished deep in the underworld, the mindless shards of my soul enriching the storms. Someone with great power and widespread awareness intervened. I appreciate being alive, but in my experience, gifts like this come at a price, and I would very much like to know what it is.
A certain childlike part of me wishes to believe that Heaven and its ministers have reached down to show me special favor in this moment of need. Upon consideration, I find that unlikely, to put it mildly. But who, then? The Wu Keng wouldn’t do it; they’d help my would-be destroyer. My ancestors couldn’t, I think, rescue me from that attack, and if they could, they wouldn’t bring me here as opposed to some place like a personal or familial home. The list goes on, always foundering on power and usually on motive as well. I know that there are communities of the enlightened around the world, with territorial and other factions and complex struggles between them, but I’ve never bothered to learn the details.
Whatever this place is, it’s filled with ghosts. Some of them can make fairly coherent bodies for themselves out of the ambient power that lingers on after whatever destroyed it all. Others must grasp for fleeting concentrations of power borne on the winds and relics they stir up as the breezes pass. Still others can barely manage even that, and I can only sense their presence by the faintest of whispers. As far as I can tell, they’re all white, Europeans or Americans, and all from sometime in the recent past.
Then I turn a comer and see an apparently living man ahead of me. He’s young, at least a decade younger than me, and he has the same combination of physical perfection and deep weariness that I feel myself. “Hello, ” I say with much diffidence, in the best English I can muster.
* * *
Robert I emerge from the ruins of a small building, perhaps a warehouse of some kind, to see a middle-aged Chinese woman standing in the midst of an open courtyard. She radiates a peculiar combination of strength and exhaustion, her aura shining through the nondescript denim blouse and trousers she wears. It looks like she’s been traveling long and hard. I wonder what road might have brought her here, and then it occurs to me to wonder whether she may have been yanked here through some experience like my own mystery trip.
“Hello, ” she says in a clear though accented Chinese.
“Hello, ” I say back. “My name is Robert Blanclege. I’m a stranger here. I come from New York, in the United States. To the best of my knowledge, this is the chantry of Doissetep, in the spirit realm of the planet Mars. ”
She looks confused for a moment, then smiles. “I didn’t actually suspect that in particular, but I suspected something that strange. I am Ming Xian, an employee of the Office of Family Planning and a practitioner of the ancestral rites. I was somewhere else and then found myself here, rather suddenly. "
“Me too. " I think about playing it coy, but decide not. “Ms. Ming, ” I add, "I don’t begin to have a clue what’s going on here. I’m a shaman, a spirit dancer. This was a place for hermetics and the practitioners of highly organized approaches to willworking. I don’t feel I belong here, and I don’t know why I’m here now. The last thing I remember is a terrible attack from unwitting willworkers who were making their own torment and fought me when I tried to show them the truth. I thought they’d killed me, and then suddenly I was here. ” She thinks about that. “The same for me, Mr.... " She wrestles with my name for a moment, fails, and moves on. “I was fighting a hungry ghost, what you would call a vampire, and it destroyed me, or would have. Then I was here. ”
“Did you deal much with hermetics? ” I’m not sure if she’ll know the term, and think how I might explain it.
“No, ” she says. “We have them in China, of course, but their schools never mingled with the ones I studied in, and since my... graduation... I have been solitary. ” She pauses again. “Not in the company of other magicians, I mean. ”
“Forgive me if I offend with an ignorant question, ” I say with some trepidation, “but if you have no ties here personally, perhaps one of your ancestors did? A mentor? Someone with authority over you, as you define authority? ”
She shakes her head. “No. My teachers and I became estranged, and if they were to take me, it would be to a prison. Few of my ancestors had any talent for the supernatural, and those few were all shamans. Your rural cousins, " she adds with a quick smile.
“Well, then. ” I gesture. “I’ve been looking around in hopes of finding something useful. Would you like to join me? Perhaps together we can understand more quickly. ”
“Thank you, that would be very nice. " Together we look around at the routes we haven’t taken yet.
* * *
WILLIAM
The first rule of parapsychology is that it all sucks. The ability to sterilize an era of all lingering psionic traces, neurologically sensitive quantum distortions, and all the rest of that is one of the basic features of the good life, right up there with indoor plumbing and steak sauce. I really, really hate wandering around in the midst of crap that the superstitious would interpret as ghosts.
Wandering itself is pretty nice. I could get used to having legs again. I try not to, because I’m sure that whoever’s responsible is going to show up with the bill in hand, and when I refuse to pay it (as of course I will), they’ll take their nice legs back. I don't even have a full set of prosthetics with me, just the emergency braces that would let me hobble a few steps and then crawl reasonably productively. I make the most of the occasion while it lasts, enjoying the ability to stretch up on tiptoes, to jump and kick.
The man shouting off in the distance quiets down and falls into conversation with someone else, whose voice is soft enough that I can’t make out details. Dammit, what I could do with even one surveillance drone. Even a handful of directional mikes and the most basic processing gear. I feel so helpless without my tools, and compensate as best I can with what I hope is a confident demeanor. I just wish I knew a lot more about this all.
I turn a comer, and nearly run into a man waiting for me. He’s Middle Eastern, to judge from the darkness of his skin and the shape of his fe
atures. Handsome as hell, too, and he stands with immense confidence, wearing what looks like old-fashioned Eskimo or other arctic gear. I’m very, very bothered that I didn’t even hear him. “Are you the management T’ I demand in my best manner. “I wish to register a complaint. ”
He smiles, revealing teeth that apparently didn’t get as much dentists’ love as they might have benefited from. He speaks a single sentence that I can’t make out.
“Ignorance of basic English is no excuse, " I snap. “Take me to the manager. ”
“William, ” he says, in the midst of more unfamiliar sounds. It’s not Arabic, I don’t think; I’ve heard that spoken by our consultants in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Persian, perhaps? Or just gibberish, I suppose.
“That’s Mr. Albacastle to you. There must be someone in charge, and you are clearly not it. Hop to it, boy. ” That last is a calculated crack. He looks at least my age and a lot more physically experienced: his hands and sandaled feet are thickly callused and he’s got the countless small scars you see on someone who deals with thorns and other such obstacles on a regular basis. But there’s nothing like bad attitude either to get results or to make me feel a little less intimidated by the whole thing.
For the briefest of moments he flickers. Some martial arts trick? Is he just an ectoplasmic manifestation? No, he's leaving solid prints on the ground and displacing air when he speaks—I can see eddies in the dust swirls that pass us by. But now he looks a lot more awake, and is his necklace pendant different? Dammit, I didn’t make a thorough enough survey at first to be sure. “Hello, William, ” he says in fluent English. “You’re early. ”
World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 03] - Judgment Day Page 15