The Nex

by Tim Pratt

  Such magics were not unheard of, but they were never associated with someone like this. He appeared human, about six-feet tall, bare-chested and obese, pale skin smeared with blood. He was bald, and his features were brutish, almost like a child’s clay figure of a man.

  He held an absurd sword in his right hand, the blade as long as he was tall, but curved like a scimitar in a theatrical production about air-pirates, and it appeared to be made of gold, an impractical metal for weaponry. When he smiled, his lips peeled back to show an amazing array of yellow stump-teeth. He reared back his right arm and swung the sword, striking a merrow-woman swaddled all over in wet towels, nearly severing her arm. The square plunged into chaos, with vendors, customers, and passers-by screaming and fleeing in all directions, while the fat man kept swinging his sword, moving no more than a step or two in any direction, chopping people down as they ran.

  “The reports were accurate after all,” Howlaa said. “I’ll go sort this.” The messenger stood behind us, whimpering, tugging at Howlaa’s arm, trying to get zim to leave.

  “No,” I said. “We were ordered to report to the Regent, and that’s what we’ll do.”

  Howlaa spoke with exaggerated patience. “The Regent will only tell me to find and kill this man. Why not spare myself the walk, and kill him now? Or do you think the Regent would prefer that I let him kill more of the city’s residents?”

  We both knew the Regent was uninterested in the well-being of individual citizens – more residents were just a snatch-and-grab away, after all – but I could tell Howlaa would not be swayed. I considered invoking my sole real power over Howlaa, but I was under orders to take that extreme step only in the event that Howlaa tried to escape the Ax or harm one of the royal orphans. “I do not condone this,” I said.

  “I don’t care.” Howlaa strode into the still-flurrying mass of people. In a few moments zie was within range of the fat man’s swinging sword. Howlaa ducked under the man’s wild swings, and reached up with a long arm to grab the man’s wrist. By now most of the people able to escape the square had done so, and I had a clear view of the action.

  The fat man looked down at Howlaa as if zie were a minor annoyance, then shook his arm as if to displace a biting fly.

  Howlaa flew through the air and struck a red-and-white striped crypt headfirst, landing in a heap.

  The fat man caught sight of the messenger – who was now rather pointlessly trying to cower behind me – and sauntered over. The fat man was extraordinarily bow-legged, his chest hair was gray, and his genitals were entirely hidden under the generous flop of his belly-rolls.

  As always in these situations, I wondered what it would be like to fear for my physical existence, and regretted that I would never know.

  Behind the fat man, Howlaa rose, rippled, and transformed, taking on zir most fearsome shape, a creature I had never otherwise encountered, that Howlaa called a Rendigo. It was reptilian, armored in sharpened bony plates, with a long snout reminiscent of the were-crocodiles that lived in the sewer labyrinths below the Regent’s palace. The Rendigo’s four arms were useless for anything but killing, paws gauntleted in razor scales, with claws that dripped blinding toxins, and its four legs were capable of great speed and leaps. Howlaa seldom resorted to this form, because it came with a heavy freight of biochemical killing rage that could be hard to shake off afterward. Howlaa leapt at the fat man, landing on his back with unimaginable force, poison-wet claws flashing.

  The fat man swiveled at the waist and flung Howlaa off his back, not even breaking stride, raising his sword over the messenger. The fat man was uninjured; all the blood and nastiness that streaked his body came from his victims. His sword passed through me and cleaved the messenger nearly in two.

  The fat man smiled, looking at his work, then frowned, and blinked. His body flickered, becoming transparent in places, and he moaned before disappearing.

  Howlaa, back in Nagalinda form, crouched and vomited out a sizzling stream of Rendigo venom and biochemical rage-agents.

  Howlaa wiped zir mouth, then stood up, glancing at the dead messenger. “Let’s try it your way, Wisp. On to the Regent’s palace. Perhaps he has an idea for... another approach to the problem.”

  I thought about saying “I told you so.” I couldn’t think of any reason to refrain. “I told you so,” I said.

  “Shushit,” Howlaa said, preoccupied, thinking, doing what zie did best, assessing complex problems and trying to figure out the easiest way to kill the source of those problems, so I let zim be, and didn’t taunt further.

  ***

  Before we entered the Palace, Howlaa took on one of zir common working shapes, that of a human woman with a trim assassin-athlete’s body, short dark hair, and deceptively innocent-looking brown eyes. The Regent – who had begun his life as human, though long contact with the royal orphans had wrought certain changes in him physiologically and otherwise – found this form attractive, as I had often sensed from fluctuations in his body heat. I’d made the mistake of sharing that information with Howlaa once, and now Howlaa wore this shape every time we met with the Regent, in hopes of discomforting him. I thought it was a wasted effort, as the Regent simply looked, and enjoyed, and was untroubled by Howlaa’s unavailability.

  We went up the cloudy white stone steps of the palace, which had been a great king’s residence in some world far away, and was unlike any other architecture in Nexington-on-Axis. Some said the palace was alive, a growing thing, which seemed borne out by the ever-shifting arrangement of minarets and spires, the way the hallways meandered organically, and walls that appeared and disappeared. Others said it was not alive but simply magical. I had been reliably informed that the palace, unable to grow out because of the press of other government buildings on all sides, was growing down, adding a new sub-basement every five years or so. No one knew where the excavated dirt went, or where the building materials came from – no one, that is, except possibly the royal orphans, who were not likely to share the knowledge with anyone.

  Two armored Nagalinda guards escorted us into the palace. That was a better reason for Howlaa to change shape – Nagalinda didn’t like seeing skinshifters wearing their forms, because it meant that at some point the skinshifter had ingested some portion of a Nagalinda’s body, and while their species enjoyed eating their enemies, they didn’t tolerate being eaten by others.

  We were escorted, not to the audience room, but into one of the sub-basements. We were working members of the government, and received no pomp or ceremony. As we walked, the Nagalinda guards muttered to one another, complaining of bad dreams that had kept them up all night. I hadn’t even realized that Nagalinda could dream.

  We reached the underground heart of the palace, where the Regent stood at a railing looking down into the great pit that held the royal snatch-engines. He was tall, dressed in simple linen, white-haired, old but not elderly. We joined him, waiting to be spoken to, and as always I was staggered at the scale of the machinery that brought new buildings and land and large flora and fauna to the Ax.

  The snatch-engines were towering coils of copper and silver and gleaming adamant, baroque machines that wheezed and rumbled and squealed, with huge gears turning, stacks venting steam, and catwalks criss-crossing down to the unseen bottom of the engine-shaft. The royal orphans scuttled along the catwalks and on the machinery itself, their bodies feathered and insect-like, scaled and horned, multi-legged, some winged, all of them chittering and squeaking to one another, making subtle and gross refinements to the engines their long-dead parents, the Queen and Kings of Nexington-on-Axis, had built so many centuries ago. The orphans all had the inherent ability to steal things from passing worlds, but the engines augmented their powers by many orders of magnitude. The Queen and Kings had been able to communicate with other species, it was said, though they’d seldom bothered to do so; their orphans, each unlike its siblings except for the bizarre chimera-like make-up of their bodies, communicated with no one except the Regent.


  “I understand you attempted to stop the killer on your way here,” the Regent said, turning to face us. While his eyes were alert, his bearing was less upright than usual. He looked tired. “That was profoundly stupid.”

  “I’ve never encountered anything my Rendigo form couldn’t kill,” Howlaa said.

  “I don’t think that’s a true statement anymore. You should have come to me first. I have something that might help you.” The Regent stifled a yawn, then snapped his fingers. One of the royal orphans – a trundling thing with translucent skin through which deep blue organs could be seen – scrambled up to the railing, carrying a smoked-glass vial in one tiny hand. The Regent bowed formally, took the vial, and shooed the orphan away. “This is the blood of a questing beast. You may drink it.”

  “A questing beast!” I said. “How did you ever capture one?”

  “We have our secrets,” the Regent said.

  Howlaa snorted. “Even questing beasts die sometime, Wisp. The snatch-engines probably grabbed the corpse of one.” Howlaa was pretending to be unimpressed, but I saw zir hands shake as they took the vial.

  Questing beasts were near-legendary apex predators, the only creatures able to hunt extra-dimensional creatures. They could pursue prey across dimensions, grasping their victims with tendrils of math and magic, and chasing them forever, even across branching worlds.

  “Wherever the killer disappears to, you’ll be able to follow him, once you shift into the skin of a questing beast,” the Regent said.

  “Yes, I’ve grasped the implications,” Howlaa said.

  “Then you’ve also grasped the possible avenues of escape this skin will provide you,” the Regent said. “But if you think of leaving this world for frivolous reasons, or of not returning when your mission is complete, there will be... consequences.”

  “I know,” Howlaa said, squeezing the vial. “That’s what my little Wisp is for.”

  “I will be vigilant, Regent,” I said.

  “Oh, indeed, I’m sure,” the Regent said. “Away, then. Go into the city. The killer seems to favor marketplaces and restaurants, places with a high concentration of victims – he has appeared in five such locations since yesterday. Take this.” He passed Howlaa a misshapen sapphire, cloudy and cracked, dangling on a thin metal chain. “If any civil servant sees the killer, they will notify you through this, and, once you drink the blood of the questing beast, you will be able to ‘port yourself to the location instantly.”

  Howlaa nodded. I would go wherever Howlaa did, for my particulate substance was inextricably entangled with zir gross anatomy. Howlaa uncapped the vial and drank the blood. Zir body, through the arcane processes of the skinshifter race, sequenced the genetic information of the questing beast, the macro-in-the-micro implicit in the blood, and incorporated the properties of the beast. Howlaa shivered, closed zir eyes, swallowed, and whined deep in zir throat. Then, with a little sigh of pleasure, Howlaa opened zir eyes and said, voice only slightly trembling, “Let’s go, Wisp. On with the hunt.”

  ***

  The killer did not reappear that day. Howlaa and I went to the Western Outskirts, one of the few safe open spaces in the Ax, so zie could practice being the questing beast. It’s dangerous to loiter in empty lots in the city proper, because the royal snatch-engines are configured to look for buildings that can fill available gaps. Thus, a space that is at one moment a weed-filled lot can in another instant be occupied by an apartment building full of bewildered humans, or a plaster-hive of angrily jostled buzz-men, or stranger things – and anyone who happened to be standing in the empty lot when the building appeared would be flattened. But the Western Outskirts are set aside for outdoor recreations, acre upon acre of playing fields, ramshackle wooden sky-diving platforms, lakes of various liquids for swimming or bathing or dueling, obstacle courses, consensual-cannibalism hunting grounds, and similar public spaces. Howlaa chose an empty field marked off with white lines for some unknown game, and transformed into the questing beast.

  As one of the bodiless, dedicated to observation, it shames me to admit I could make little sense of Howlaa’s new form; too much of zir body occupied non-visible dimensions. I saw limbs, golden fur, the impression of claws, something flickering that might have been a tail pendulum-swinging in and out of phase, but nothing my vision could settle on or hold. Looking at Howlaa in this form agitated me. If I had a stomach, I might have found it nauseating.

  Howlaa flickered back to female human form and spent some minutes curled on the ground, moaning. “Coming back to this body is a bit of a shock,” zie said after a while. “But I think I get the general idea. I can go anywhere just by finding the right trail of scent.”

  “But you won’t go anywhere. You won’t try to escape.”

  Howlaa threw a clod of dirt at me. “Correct, Wisp, I won’t. But not because you’d try to stop me – “

  “I would stop you.”

  “– only because I don’t like being tossed aside in a fight. I’m going to follow this fat bastard, and I’m going to chew on him. You can’t lose a questing beast once it gets its claws in you.”

  “So... now we wait.”

  “Now you wait. I’m going to drink. One of the advantages of wearing a human skin is that something as cheap and plentiful as alcohol provides such a fine buzz.”

  “Is this the best time to become intoxicated?” We bodiless have a reputation for being prudish and judgmental, which is not unwarranted. I can never get drunk, can never pleasantly impair my own faculties, and I am resentful of (and confused by) those bodied creatures that can.

  “Which time? This time, when I might be killed by a fat man with a golden sword tomorrow? Yes, I’d say that’s the best time for intoxication.”

  ***

  The next morning, we went to a den of vile iniquity near the palace. While Howlaa drank, I observed, and listened. I learned that a plague of nightmares was troubling the city center, and many of the bar’s patrons had gone to stay with relatives in more far-flung districts in order to get some sleep. At least Howlaa and I wouldn’t be called upon to deal with that crisis – bad dreams were rather too metaphysical a problem for Howlaa’s methods to solve.

  After a morning of Howlaa’s hard drinking, the sing-charm the Regent had given us began to sound. Howlaa was underneath a table, talking to zimself, and seemed oblivious to the gem’s keening, though everyone else in the bar heard, and went silent.

  “Howlaa,” I said, rumbling my voice in zir bones. Howlaa scowled, then skinshifted into a Nagalinda form, becoming instantly sober. Nagalinda process alcohol as easily as humans process water.

  “Off we go,” Howlaa said, and rushed into the street, transforming into the questing beast once zie was far enough away to avoid inadvertently snagging any of the bar patrons with extra-dimensional tendrils.

  We traveled, the city folding and flickering around us, buildings bleeding light, darkness pressing in from odd angles until I was hopelessly disoriented. Seconds later we were in the middle of the Landlock Sea, on a floating wooden platform so large it barely seemed to move. The sea-market nearby was in chaos, fishermen and hunters of various species – Manipogos, Hydrans, Mhorags, others – running wildly for boats and bridges or diving into the water to get away from the fat man, who was now armed with a golden trident. He speared people, laughing, and Howlaa went for him and grappled, flashing tendrils wrapping around the fat man’s bulk, barely-seen limbs knocking aside his weapon. The fat man stumbled, staggered, and fell to his knees. Howlaa’s ferocious lashings didn’t penetrate the man’s impossibly durable flesh, but at least he’d been prevented from further acts of murder.

  Then the man vanished, and Howlaa with him, and I was pulled along in their wake, on my way to wherever the fat man went when he wasn’t killing residents of the Ax for sport.

  ***

  For a moment, I looked down on the Ax, which spun as sedately as a gear in a great machine, and other universes flashed past, their edges blue- and red-shifting as they
went by at tremendous speeds, briefly touching the Ax, sparks flying at the contact, the royal snatch-engines making their cross-dimensional depredations. Then we plummeted into an oncoming blur of blue-green-white, and after a period of blackness, I found myself in another world.

  ***

  “Wisp,” Howlaa hissed as I came back into focus. I had never been unconscious before – even my “sleep” is just a blessed respite from sensory input, not a loss of consciousness – and I did not like the sensation. Our passage from the Ax to this other plane had agitated my particles so severely that I’d lost cohesion, and, thus, awareness.

  Now that my faculties were in control of me again, I saw a star-flecked night sky above, and Howlaa in human-female form, crouching by bushes beside a brick wall. I did not see the fat man anywhere.

  “What – “ I began.

  “Quiet,” Howlaa whispered, looking around nervously. I looked, but saw nothing to worry about. Grass, flowerbeds, and beside us a single-story brick house of a sort sometimes seen in the blander sections of the Middling Residential District. “The fat man got away,” Howlaa said. “Only he actually melted away, or misted away, or... My tentacles didn’t slip. He didn’t slip through them. He just disappeared. Nothing can escape a questing beast.”

  “Perhaps the legends exaggerate the beast’s powers,” I said.

  “Perhaps you’d best shushit and listen, Wisp. There’s an open window just over there, and I can almost hear...”

  I did not have to settle for almost. I floated above the bushes a few feet to the window, which opened onto a bedroom occupied by two humans, neither of them the fat man. The man and woman were both in bed, illuminated by a single bedside lamp. The man, who was pigeon-chested and had thinning hair, gestured excitedly, and the woman, an exhausted-looking blonde, lay propped on one elbow, looking at him through half-closed eyelids.

  I listened, and because Howlaa is (I grudgingly admit) better at data analysis than I am, I let zir listen, too, by extending a portion of my attenuated substance down toward zim, a probing presence that Howlaa sensed and accepted. My vision blurred, and sounds took on strange echoes, but then I found my focus and stopped picking up residuals of Howlaa’s sensory input – but zie would see and hear everything as clearly as I did.