Strangers and Lies

by P. S. Power

  "So, in the end it doesn't look like you showed them much at all, does it Katherine?" Gwen didn't even bother feeling petty about it. There was nothing but a repeated and simple pattern. Stab and move, find the next person that didn't get out of the way fast enough and repeat. She missed as often as she hit anything, but it was enough of a distraction that no one else managed to kill anyone on one of the slabs for a bit.

  When someone did finally manage it, the whole thing took her by surprise.

  Debussey had somehow gotten away from Beth and ran through the wall of monsters as if they weren't even there. That got Gwen to blink.

  "Illusion! The monsters are an illusion!" It might not help anything, but after a few seconds everyone rushed into the circle, eyes closed and panting.

  That didn't slow the Doctor down at all, as she made a mad dash for the blonde girl. Her own daughter, a knife in hand that she'd picked up from somewhere. That was on the far side of the circle. Illusion or not, the wall of monsters was still there as far as Gwen could tell. It defined the space. She had too big of a head start. No one could reach her in time to save the girl. There was a high pitched scream as she was stabbed in the heart, over and over again, Debussey screaming something in Latin.

  Gwen didn't know what it meant, but she could see the ugly green and purple glow in the air as space ripped, a sound coming from it that sounded like... death. There was no other way to explain it at all. Doom had come, and now nothing they did would stop it and nothing would ever be right again.

  It wasn't something as simple as dying that would happen either. It was worse than that. It was... eternity. Raw pain ripped from the tear in space, dropping most of them to their knees instantly. The Westmorlands didn't go down, and neither did Gwen. Not that they were springing around happily or anything. They moved though, as the others just fell to the floor and moaned.

  Gwen managed a few words.

  "What did you expect, you dumb-fucks." She didn't bother to explain. For some reason Debussey moved too, blade in hand, trying for Jeffery.

  There was no obvious reason for it, but she was going to kill the man anyway. The movement was choppy and slow. Focusing as hard as she could, Gwen tried to hit the woman with a tight beam of energy. Nothing happened though. It had taken place, that was clear, since the energy blast had warped the light as it passed, making it swirl and retreat a bit somehow. She nearly got lost in the pattern then, even as Doctor Debussey plunged the blade down.

  Gwen needed to do something, and she didn't have time to miss. Imagining the little game controller in her head, the mental device she used to control her abilities, the black textured plastic of it feeling cool under her imaginary fingers, she decided to turn the laser sight on. She hadn't known it existed before, but it made sense didn't it? Her Lance had a sight now, so her new power should too. She could only hope so. Otherwise this was going to get really messy, wasn't it?

  She hit the button hard, the tiny dot of red showing from across the room. For a while she still couldn't aim, nearly a second. That was due to the blood loss, she thought, but she forced her injured right shoulder to hold long enough for the red dot to line up, even as Debussey was about to finish whatever she was doing.

  There wasn't enough time...

  "Erin!" People responded to their own names after all. It got the woman to hesitate for just a moment, a barely perceptible thing. Gwen continued in that pause, finally getting the dot onto her forehead. "I have something to tell you, before you do that."

  She sounded wonderfully relaxed as the woman turned, her white robe covered in blood already, from her own daughter. Gwen couldn't even be bothered to feel rage yet over that. It would come though. Later.

  The older woman sneered at her.

  "What? Do you think you can stall long enough to make a difference? With this death I will enlarge the rent in space enough for things to come through, then we will sacrifice whole lands if needed until it is large enough-"

  Gwen hit the button in her mind, causing the center of the woman's face to collapse into itself.

  "No... I was just going to tell you that you've lost."

  There was still that feeling of horrible doom in the air, but the hole didn't get bigger and nothing was coming through. Not yet. On the good side, most of the people were on the floor writhing in horrible fear and pain. It meant that the lack of shackles wasn't a vast problem in the moment.

  Gwen realized that she was about to go out though, just losing consciousness, since the stab wounds had added up. It was a slow enough thing, having left her awake and able to act long enough, so she wasn't going to whine about it, but there was no way she could keep going.

  Except, of course, that she had to, at least long enough.

  Aiming, barely lifting her arm, she started blasting at the edge of the rent, the purple and sickly green glow drawing back ever so slightly as she did. "Close. Close. Close." She chanted, trying to put everything she had left into it. After nearly a minute of this she passed out, throwing up a bit as she sank into the blackness.

  When she came to the others had their armor on and were working to close the thing, everyone chanting in rhythm. The sheer terror having faded considerably, as the hole got smaller. It was still enough that the audience of a good horror movie would have felt they were getting their money's worth, but it wasn't enough to stop people from moving at all. Gwen got up and started killing people. After a few seconds, nodding as if it made some kind of actual sense, Billy started doing the same.

  "Close. Close. Close." Billy said the words with her as they worked, just in case it might make a difference.

  From one of the slabs, Ferdinand sitting up on his own, there was a low sound, followed by words.

  "Wait... we should... trial."

  Gwen crawled over to a young looking, slightly average woman, who whimpered plaintively, and stabbed her in the throat.

  "No. We don't leave anyone alive that knows how to make this work. We don't need a show on this one, people will understand why we had to do it." Or not. This was bigger than one kingdom. One of the surviving men, who looked like he was from the Middle East as far as Gwen could tell, nodded, speaking in rather broken English.

  "Yes, good. Stop them here. If pleasure." He was looking at her, not Ferdinand or the others, who were actually sealing the gate pretty well now.

  She just nodded and kept working. If the King wanted to complain about it later, well, he'd be alive to do that now, wouldn't he? They didn't have a lot of time before these people could act. The last five people had to be killed by Billy, who did it all with his right hand, the left clearly broken. It was still fast and efficient though. Better than they deserved, but torture would have been too risky.

  Half an hour later they were ready to move out of the space, the whole thing fixed.

  It felt almost like something else should happen then. An explosion, or maybe some kind of magical rebound, the gate flashing open and a giant tentacle reaching out to grab someone. From the way everyone else was acting they all seemed to be expecting the same thing. It was kind of nerve-wracking, but it didn't stop the man with the broken English from coming and using part of a dead person's robes to bind her wounds. Then he worked on everyone else, one after the other. It wasn't anything more than first aid, but it was a brilliant idea. Really, she should have thought of it.

  The man called Jeffery got up and walked over to her, his eyes tired looking. He didn't seem old, not in the main, about thirty or so. He knelt down beside her, and touched her side very lightly, it felt warm and tickled a bit, then he moved to the bad wound on her back, having her sit up. It wasn't instantly fixed, but she really did feel better already.

  "I'm sorry I involved you in this." The words weren't low at all, in fact he spoke out loud, so that everyone in the whole room could hear him. "My talents, I'm a healer, obviously, but I can also see the future. Sometimes too well. I... If I'd done anything else, the world would have ended. I know it isn't your world, Miss Far
ris, but..." There were no tears in his eyes, but he still looked bitterly sad.

  Then he moved to help Beth, who had taken some pretty bad wounds during her fight with Erin. Mainly scratches to her face. One of her eyes, the right one, was pretty messed up, but seemed to still be intact. She wasn't even blind.

  Gwen nearly just let the man go. She thought she got what he'd done then. It wasn't a great thing really, not for her. Then again, it could have been worse. He'd tried to save a world, and in the end it had worked. She was just going to keep her mouth shut and let the others think whatever they wanted, maybe blaming Debussey for her being there in the first place. It was still close enough, right?

  Ferdinand wasn't going to have that however. Not at all.

  "Explain." He didn't ask for more, just looking directly at the healer, who held his hands to Bethany's face, not responding for long enough that it seemed the King was about to demand again.

  Finally he sighed, nodding a little.

  "Well, no getting out of it now." Then, he stood up and turned to the ruler of the Western Kingdom, bowing a bit. "My name is Jeffery Rene Prentiss. I am, as you might guess from the name, originally from Europa. Two years ago I was hit with waves of precognitive dreams. They showed me a thing I didn't want to see." He looked away, wincing for some reason. "They showed me how the world ends."

  This was something that he didn't seem to want to talk much about, but the man did it, his voice sounding a little more Mongolian, since that was the language of his homeland. He kept going, sounding almost defeated then. As if he were sealing his own death warrant.

  "The visions showed horrors so great that, well, I fear I went mad. I tried to get help to stop it, but of course, no one would listen to me. The very powerful often end up going mad, so everyone simply thought that age and too much talent had worn my mind away. So I found Doctor Debussey, one of the leaders of the effort to end it all, a misguided and insane woman that simply wouldn't listen to reason, which I knew from what I had seen. So I infiltrated her group and... then I suggested she steal a version of her daughter from another world. I knew that it would kill you Gwen. Not some woman that I hadn't met before, not a faceless person that I could ignore, you. But nothing else would have worked. Any attempt to do anything else and the whole world ended, horribly."

  There was silence then, and Beth looked ready to hurt the man then and there, even if he had been helping to heal her moments before.

  "Why didn't you tell us... The Westmorlands, we would have believed you, with that information we could have stopped this all..."

  The man nodded, but after a few seconds got a slightly constipated look on his face.

  "When I tried that, in the visions, the world still ended. It became a wasteland, instead of the terror of the void it would have been otherwise, but it was still a horror, if a better option than the other. I considered it for a time, but..." He gestured to Gwen. "This possible future was the best one. All I had to do was sacrifice one innocent woman, from another world. One that no one would miss there at all. A brave and good person worth a thousand of me..."

  Heather still had her armor on, ready to fight just in case it came up. For that matter Gwen needed to get into her own, if she could manage it.

  "So you killed her, setting an insane woman on her and..."

  "Yes. It was all my fault. I stand ready to die for it. Please know, Miss Farris, it was honestly the only way. If I had another workable path at all, I would have taken it."

  There was a pleading tone to his voice, but Gwen just shrugged.

  "We can deal with that later. Right now we need to guard this spot and make sure everyone gets medical help. We also need to find the rest of the people that are involved in this. I doubt they all showed up here. They had bomb makers and that kind of thing."

  Which turned out not to be a big problem at all. They were, Jeffery assured her, all accounted for. Oh, one or two might have managed to miss the whole thing that day, but most of them were soundly dead already. His eyes lingered on the corpse of the little girl on the far end, and for the first time they watered. No one seemed to notice that part, except her.

  It took a while for everyone to get to where they needed, since they were in Marduk, the land run by the man with the broken English. He bowed to them all, and looked at the dead on the floor, his face going harsh then.

  "Peoples from all lands tried to kill us all this day. A debt owed." Then he bowed toward them all, including Jeffery, either not getting his confession or realizing that it was a heroic act, after a fashion. The man had saved the entire world after all. It was hard to ignore things like that.

  Some soldiers came, ones that dressed a bit like Saracen mercenaries. Gwen had fought some of those before, but these men were a little tidier in their dress and while the outfits were loose and flowing, the nice, very deep, red color marked them as special somehow and not common forces at all. No one sane would dress like that for battle after all.

  They cleared the living from the room and even let the others get back home, after a while, since the Teletransport spheres had to be recharged. The King went first, and, for some reason, Gwen was the last one to leave. Jeffery left in the group just before that, apparently having given himself up. To his mind he'd done something nearly as horrible as destroying the world would have been it seemed.

  It was Darrick that came back, holding three spheres, two of them having full charges. He bowed to the soldiers there, a clipped thing. Gwen just waved, too tired and injured for more. She had her armor on, since she wasn't going to carry it otherwise, not as injured as she was.

  No one pulled their focus swords or started trying to fight with them, so they seemed to get that it wasn't a threat. In fact one of the men actually nodded at her somberly. Then she pushed the button with her gloved left hand, the metal making a slight clanging sound against the sphere as she did.

  It wasn't perfect, perhaps, but she'd had worse days. Gwen felt really horrible about the people that had died, except Debussey, and most of her friends. She didn't count them as human though, so they didn't matter. If they wanted to try and haunt her, they were welcome to. She didn't think they really would, except for Erin. The others didn't know her well enough to bother.

  Of course she'd probably go after Bethany, which was a thing she mentioned to her friend as soon as they both managed to get out or their armor and had a shower. Somehow in all of this, a real shower head had been placed in her bathroom. It was heavenly.

  Someone brought her new clothing, which was a clean base garment for the armor, just in case she had to fight again. It was a good plan as far as she was concerned. She kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it didn't come.

  Bethany hugged her then, a lingering thing that she didn't let go of for a long time, nearly half an hour. When she finally spoke it was a little dark sounding, but the words were clearly a joke.

  "Doctor Debussey did seem to think that I was her nemesis, didn't she? No doubt I'll be seeing her again then." There was a sigh and a shake of the head. "Well, it will give me a chance to finish our dispute, won't it?"

  Gwen smiled, not really feeling it at all.

  "Yup. Let me know when she shows up, I have a few things to work out with her myself."

  Chapter eighteen

  The entire world was put on hold for days after that. Or very nearly. To everyone's surprise Gwen insisted that the kids still get their summer camp, even if everyone was preoccupied. The only person that backed her, at first, was Countess Goebbels.

  "Gwen is correct. We promised these children training and an adventure. Are we people of our words or not?" There was a clipped correctness to her voice, which had almost everyone else falling into line pretty fast after that. When Ferdinand showed up about an hour later at Park Street and crashed their meeting, he didn't even blink at the idea.

  "Make it happen. While this current crisis has passed, we only gain from the students of our kingdom feeling they can trust that we mean wha
t we say." Without waiting he pointed at Gwen with his right hand, fingers closed, and then included Heather, Beth and the Vernors, all of whom had been working on the various projects at hand. "Come with me please? We have matters to discuss."

  It sounded horribly dark, as if someone was going to die or something, even though Gwen hadn't heard of any new attacks. It had to be possible that some of the group involved had escaped, but if so, they'd be best served by hiding and disavowing all knowledge of the events. It's what she would have done.

  The general consensus of magicians and academics on the matter was that no one would be replicating the work anytime soon. Everyone that knew the techniques used specifically had died, and anyone else that might have done it had good information from the telesar that was telling them about how close they'd all come to dying. That didn't mean some nutjob might not just go ahead and try anyway, but, for a while at least, no one with the skills to actually make it work should be attempting it. It was one of the problems with magic. A single person or small group could create vast damage, under the right conditions. It was probably true anywhere, but far more so here.

  When they got to the front sitting room, Ferdinand leading them, he let them all sit before talking. He stared at Gwen the whole time, his face a mask of stone, unmoving.

  "Mr. Prentiss has confessed to killing you, with full foreknowledge of what he was doing. He has requested that I pass another apology to you personally."

  The man sank to his knees, and bowed his head, not looking at her.

  "I believe him to be a man of good will, having spoken to him many times in the last days. One driven to extremes by his power and the desire to save his world. If it is within you to forgive such a thing, I think it would make his last days just a bit brighter." Then he waited, his face looking tired, but still young. He was only in his late twenties after all.