Crossworld of Xai

by Steven Savage

  “Guildie,” said the taller man, “we were in town, heard about the League. People say you’re helping them, wondered what you know.”

  “Curious,” the shorter man broke in, “we had family in the League last generation. Guild said you may know if things are about.”

  “I don’t,” HuanJen answered curtly, “now I’m eating my lunch, if you want to join me …”

  “What is up, Guildie?” asked the taller.

  HuanJen considered the best response. The two obviously didn’t think much of being in a crowded restaurant with many Temple Street regulars, meaning they either intended him no harm, or they were very stupid. Stupidity wasn’t an appreciated trait on Xai, so he was hoping for the former.

  “I am doing my job. There is nothing up as far as I know. Now, gentleman …”

  The two men moved forward. HuanJen appeared to sit back, but to a casual observer, it would appear his hands had moved slightly. Both men stopped, and appeared to be staring down.

  “Now, please, let’s not have any incidents,” the Magician-Priest said softly, “or all I have to do is make two simple moves to render both of you quite impotent and in great pain.”

  There was a moment of painfully aware, silent communication between the two outskirt-dwellers. As if of one mind, they both turned and quickly headed for the exit of the restraunt.

  “Sir?” One of the white-smocked waiters hurred up to HuanJen, holding a pitcher of water. It was general regarded in waterdom that a good pitcher of water would solve many problems.

  “Nothing,” HuanJen answered with a pleasant smile, “just some gentlemen following a rumors and innuendo.”

  “Oh.” The waiter nodded. “I …”

  “Yes, yes I would like some more water while you are here …”

  The water happily refilled the sage’s glass, enjoying a small bit of order in the universe.

  January 15, 2001 AD, Xaian Standard Calendar

  There was another meeting of the Court of Mirrors.

  It wasn’t an official meeting, though the Court didn’t really have those anymore. Two of their members had already moved on to other jobs, courtesy of Rake and his associates.

  All of those meeting in the small hotel room weren’t members of the Court of Mirrors. The Courts parts didn’t speak to each other very much. There wasn’t much reason.

  The League grew smaller by the day, and not just in numbers.

  “I suspect the apprentice.” The voice was deep, rough, the voice an avalanche would have.

  “No, people like her.” The second voice was bitter, female.

  “Exactly,” the first speaker answered.

  “Things changed, you know.” A third voice person joined the conversation. “Suddenly, she’s not interfering with divinations. As if something was released.”

  “Yes.” The first speaker rumbled.

  Silence.

  “Trynce got the death scroll in the final act,” the second person spoke hesitatingly, “she … had an idea …”

  “We’re listening …”

  “What if … something happened to her to make people investigate …”

  January 17, 2001 AD, Xaian Standard Calendar

  Jade Shalesdaughter walked into one of the less community-oriented areas of Metris.

  The city itself was, in general, a huge patchwork of communities. People knew each other. People connected. Xaian society was, above all, social. It had to be otherwise it wouldn’t be a society.

  However, there were places where there was temporary housing for merchants, visitors, refugees, and more. Hotels, temporary apartments, storage areas. Usually, they bordered on other communities, at least to be close enough to shops and markets. Places for temporary residents.

  Jade didn’t like them herself. Sure the buildings were clean, and usually they had a security staff (technically Gendarmes, but “freelance” ones who had their own quasi-guild), but they felt cold. Empty. Like the safehouses Colony relied on back on her earth.

  Still, she had a job to do.

  Someone had caught her as she left the Nax last night. Garnet and she had stayed late, catching up, talking, listening to Garnet’s tales of her new neighbors. Of course, the Panoramic League had to intrude, and HuanJen had gone off to bed.

  A few people had moved out of the League and wanted to talk to her separately. They were thinking of going Esoteric, and wanted some advice. She could understand that, though she was annoyed they didn’t want Rake’s help. Rake was always reliable but there was occasional friction among native religion and the larger denominations, even the disorganized mass of Xaian Christianity.

  It was, of course, Jade to the rescue. People did see her more often than HuanJen, so it was time to be all sensitive and caring. Well, she did feel more relaxed after her recent experiences …

  Jade located the long-term hotel in question, and promptly found herself in a small courtyard. It was really more a bunch of tiny houses than hotel rooms or apartments. Everything was clean, and pretty, and fresh, and boringly sterile.

  Jade never thought she’d miss the occasional grime and disorganization of Metris proper. However you knew where you stood with grime and disorganization - cleanliness gave you nothing to go on.

  The Vulpine navigated her way to the room in question, and knocked on the door.

  After a few moments, she noticed an envelope on the doormat with her name on it. She picked it up, and found a key, and a simple note.

  HAD TO GET GROCERIES. LET YOURSELF IN.

  Jade shrugged. Well, she’d take care of things in time …

  The inside of the apartment smelled odd. Jade sniffed the air. Something wasn’t quite right - something sweet and vaguely chemical reached her nose. Not quite incense-the odor held an unpleasant complexity …

  “First, we make sure her mind is open. That’s relatively easy to do with a few substances, and her mind is probably more open than usual. A good block of classic ritual incense will do the trick … enhanced.”

  “I worry it can be …”

  “Please, you pay, no one cares. No, no one will know. But she, let us see what they do when one of their own is victimized.”

  “Yes. And we can explain it many ways. And if she is hurt … well, she’s Guild. There’s always more.”

  The Vulpine shook her head. The scent was odd, but not nauseating.

  Though, some of it smelled familiar. HuanJen didn’t use many mind-altering substances, and fairly looked down on many of them, and that was what was so familiar …

  Jade sat at the table. There was a tape player there. A hand-scrawled note on it simply read “DO NOT PLAY.”

  Jade tapped her fingers on the table.

  It was probably a sign for someone else …

  She was bored …

  This of course was Jade. Jade had enough curiosity to kill a litter of cats.

  She pushed the button.

  “You sure she will?”

  “Trynce knows people. And she think’s she’s looking for something, she’ll have to.”

  The tape started.

  “Dancing midnight menagerie.”

  “Collisions within the star’s heart.”

  “We call upon the chains of rubies.”

  “Through the mirror’s medicine.”

  “Poison and rinds of the past …”

  Jade heard the words, but the sense they made came in through other portals than her ears.

  “Finally, we have one of Tempest’s poems read by the three of us on that tape machine - and yes, I’ll return it. Anyone, it’s one of those we only read in emergencies. She’s literate enough to be easy prey in her state. Then, we wait.”

  “For …”

  ” … she is a mystic, she is under the influence of the mix … I think things will happen …”

  Jade felt scared of a poem.

  Spectres, spirits, haunts, psychopaths, she understood that. You could get used to those things pretty easily, and even get to enjoy them. Ther
e was a point where something not weird enough was actually terrifying.

  Like a lone tape player, playing nonsense poetry.

  “Ok, what …”

  The world stumbled as the tape player kicked off. Jade looked down at a small insense burner, and took a sniff. Who would leave incense burning, and the block of it was huge …

  “Shamanic mix …” she muttered.

  She felt afraid again. Fear was an odd thing, it divided and united, and it spread cracks in your mind.

  Jade had a very active mind. It had been honed by education, bathed in HuanJen’s teachings, and nurtured by meditation and supernatural insight. She could do a lot with such a mind …

  … including turn it against itself.

  YES.

  The voice hadn’t gone into her ears. Jade found this very disconcerting since she’d quite clearly heard it …

  … and she felt the cold-sting needles of adrenaline in her blood. Part of her was sure that wasn’t good. Adrenaline enhanced things at times, and she didn’t need what she was thinking enhanced at all.

  Something black moved in the corner of her eye. The Vulpine whirled about, the Lakkom flying out of its holster and into her hands.

  Nothing.

  “OK, whoever …”

  Something moved again, just out of her view. She looked around frantically, and each time, she couldn’t find it. Something black. Something with a red glow wihin it.

  Then she realized, she was seeing something inside her own head, and everything exploded in terror, all summarized in one word.

  Obsidian.

  “… did you feel that?”

  “Yes. She was very open-minded. Those kinds fall under the effects so easily.”

  “She’s got an Obsidian summoned, not even a minor terror or false visions! That’s …”

  “Yes, ten percent chance. I’d hoped for her to get flashforwards or something similar. She knew the risks, Yevva. Now, let us see what Guild Esoteric thinks now. Let us see if this makes them pay attention.”

  Jade stumbled out of the apartment, and down the hallway. Something was following her, which was quite easy because it was behind her own eyes.

  Obsidian.

  The Otherworld’s other-side. The things that came because you worked hard not to call them. The side of reality that came because you really noted how hard you didn’t call it. They where when the universe balanced out because you had avoided that balance.

  One was in her head. She’d gotten so scared and she was open, and it had come …

  It of course had to have been deliberate. It was all so casually non-casual, so simple …

  … unless the thing in her head was making her paranoid.

  Her mind became a very complex maze.

  Jade took the cell phone out of its pouch and dialed it very deliberately.

  “Damn answering machine.”

  She leaned against a wall and dialed again.

  “Damn it, Huan, you forgot to turn it on …”

  A little fumbling produced a Clericall unit. No one used them as much as they did, but the Guild had held onto them. The Communicants had figured, back before the crisis over their status, that it’d be helpful if Esotericists could reach each other in a crisis.

  This felt like a …

  “No.”

  Jade shoved the device into the recesses of her satchel. You didn’t know if you’d get anyone, and she’d probably get a panic. No panics. Not now.

  Something red glared at her inside her own soul. Jade smiled grimly.

  “Stick around, asshole.”

  As calm as she could, Jade left the apartment and headed for Temple Street.

  The Obsidian had come in a moment of weakness. It wasn’t going to get another one.

  Jade caught a taxi and endured the streets of Metris at high-speed - or at least as fast as the electric cars common to the city went. The driver ignored her, and for that she was glad.

  Why would someone do this? It was deliberate, it had to be. Of course it had Panoramic League all over it, but … did it? Maybe someone was trying to make them look bad, so set the supernatural ambush for them . .

  Her mind whirled. It made it worse. Obsidians came into the divisions in your mind - benevolently they were startling reminders of things you were divided from. Too often they appeared as terrifying, confrontational embodiments of your worst concerns. Guardian Angels through a funhouse mirror.

  Jade felt it in her mind. It was trying to get something to hold onto, it had come through her basic fear and concern and disgust with the League.

  It was pissing her off.

  Damn it she was Guild Esoteric. She was a future cleric. She knew who M was. She shouldn’t have to deal with some minor spirit entity saying “hello, may I bugger your brain?”

  It fueled her, the fury turning into a kind of calm understanding. Divine anger.

  “Come and find me?” Jade half-asked, half taunted in her mind. “You can’t, can you?”

  The Obsidian shifted around in Jade’s head, like black quicksilver behind her eyes.

  Jade remembered M. M, embodiment of the Guild, M who wasn’t anything but just was. Just like anything. Just like her …

  “You need something to hang on too! But, what’s there? Huh, what’s me?”

  Red-eyes glared within Jade’s mind. She glared back in arctic-cold emerald green.

  “What’s me? Am I this fear, that like? Guess what? I’m on to you! You can only hang around if I’m stuck thinking something’s me, some one thing or things are me? But … I’m not any one thing am I?”

  Black liquid mud shot with silver raged across Jade’s vision.

  “I’m like wind, where does it come from? Can you stop, it, catch it? I know I’m a non-localized phenomena baby, and you can’t catch me!”

  The Obsidian’s voice echoed in her head, an incoherent statement of rebellion.

  “That’s right! I know it, I’m … there’s no place you can find me, I’m just here. I’m here and I’m everywhere.”

  She knew she was baiting it. Probably that made things worse - or perhaps better. She didn’t want it getting out of her head. The things could grow and expand …

  … and she recalled Ziggurat Jack and the Historian and other things that had grown from tiny seeds of malice. Sure, this was probably nothing, but she couldn’t take that chance. It simply wasn’t something she would do.

  “Here we are …” The cabby’s voice cut through Jade’s mind. She absently tossed him what was probably twice the fare in Guilders, and climbed out of the cab.

  The Obsidian wailed behind her eyes.

  “No, no, it’s gonna be over.” Jade felt exhausted. “Look, I’m just going to exorcise you and we can get this over with.”

  The specter charged at the walls of her mind, trying to find a latch …

  … Jade’s sexuality. Fur against warm skin, green lingerie, thongs, lace. HuanJen’s hands roaming over her body like quicksilver fire.

  “Not there, sorry… “

  … her brother. Walls of gray and dark eyes that were angry. Jade’s mind held, though barely. Fingers of anger seeped into the wrong places.

  “Uh-uh, love my brother, just can’t always stand him …”

  Jade walked into a building marked “Church of the Works of Christ.”

  Reverend Rake, once Richard Larkeens, was engaged in a discussion of the utmost importance in the small chapel of his Church.

  “Mhadi, I’m really not, ah, sure about another bake sale,” he said, looking up at Mhadi, his visitor and one of the representatives of Xai’s Muslim community.

  You had to look up at Mhadi, he was tall, and he had the peculiar kind of thinness that made him look taller. Add his white clerical robes and one got a distorted appearance, as if some very clever director with a few too many special lenses was having fun.

  “Well, it does bring in the Guilders, and that one did …”

  Rake cut off his fellow holy man with a gesture.
“Bad, ah, weather for it. I’m ah, sure, this warm snap won’t last. What we really, ah, need …”

  Mahdi pretended to cover his ears with his nut-brown hands. “Please, no more about the food court.”

  ” … oh, well. We could improve it, ah, again …”

  “I like the bake sales and the cook-outs. It gets people together - without sweating or hammering nails.”

  Before Rake could respond, the sanctuary was blessed with the simple plea “help me the fuck out.”

  Even if he hadn’t heard the voice, Rake would have known it was Jade. She was able to swear in holy places in a very sincere manner.

  Jade looked terrible. There was something odd, jerky about her movements, as she staggered towards Rake and Mahdi. Rake’s occult senses were not the keenest, but he felt a terrible hideous wrongness to her.

  “Jade …”

  “Obsidian,” the apprentice cleric snarled, “bastards summoned one right in my head. I need you to get it out.”

  Rake blinked. Behind him, Mhadi’s breath caught in his throat. Mhadi wasn’t exactly Mr. Exorcism in Rake’s book, despite his rather intense training by Sufi mystics. He seemed unduly surprised by even the commonest supernatural occurance.

  “Jade, I …” Rake swallowed. “If I …”

  “Blast it the fuck out of me.” Jade’s eyes were vertiginous fire. “I’m trying not to let it out and trying not to let it get into me.”

  “Demon?” Mhadi asked.

  “I wouldn’t classify it at that stage.” Rake’s voice rang clear as tempered glass. The air around him seemed thicker. “Let it out, Jade. That’ll be easier, and you won’t be hurt. Let it out.”

  Jade almost shook her head, but something about Rake’s voice held her. The Voice.

  “Let it out and I’ll stop it.”

  Jade nodded, and …

  … fell into herself. You breathed and looked to your breathing, and when your realized mind and breath came from one source, you faded away …

  … and as she faded away, the Obsidian found nothing to cling to or nothing to confine it. The entity tore out of her, a swirl of not-light with ruby-red flashes for eyes. It twisted in the air, orienting itself.

  Then it focused on Rake. Despite what many though, Obsidians could exist in Holy Places. Everything had a place in creation - though they didn’t have to like the people they met.