As I waited to return to my body, I noticed movement on the mountain wall above me. Even through the chaos I recognized the insectile scuttling of Mr. Wonderful and the stoic gait of Bowg.
Then came a truly unprecedented experience for me: the burning desire to stop being dead and get back into my body as soon as possible. I could see the red-tinted forms of the two assassins as they stood over my form, and Mr. Wonderful, hands on hips, kicked at my body with a shoe knife.
It seemed like my resurrection was maliciously taking its time for once. I could feel myself starting to be pulled back, but Mr. Wonderful was already rolling my body towards the edge. I tried to yell but I was unheard by the living world, and the usual cluster of supervising Deleters were no help at all.
Just as one of my body’s legs swung out into thin air, something bright and fast streaked past me like a comet, trailing white sparks. Bowg and Wonderful looked up—as did I—just in time for a glowing ball of light to explode into sparks directly under their feet. They both leapt out of the way, badly misjudged the width of their platform and dropped straight off the mountain.
Then my soul surged back into my body. I opened my eyes to find myself on my back, half-on and half-off the ledge. I swiftly dragged myself into a firmer position.
Thaddeus scuttled into view. He was attached to the wall with the crampons, and the force of the blast had pushed him down onto his back. “See how the Dark Ones flee from the light,” he announced. “They are like the cockroaches in the festering outside toilet of the Damned.”
“Was it you casting those spells?” I asked.
“The light of the LORD fills my rotten soul and unwashed hands,” he said, which I took to mean “yes.”
“You haven’t got any hands.” This raised another question. “How did you wiggle your fingers to cast the spell?”
“The light comes from within, not the machinations of my digits,” he said, although I did notice that he’d taken his shoes and socks off. It must have been difficult to put the crampons back on afterwards, especially with no arms. “Idle no longer. We must proceed.”
I attempted to, but stopped half-way. The entire left side of my body rattled around like a limp bag of firewood. I couldn’t move my hand or bend my elbow; the fall had shattered most of the bones in my arm like the dry sticks they were. “My arm’s paralyzed,” I muttered. “I lost my wooden leg, too. There’ll be no fixing this without Meryl.”
“Cease your whining. Behold.” He kicked a crampon off one of his bare feet. “Only one foot is required to ascend to Heaven.”
I attached it to my one remaining foot and tucked my useless arm into my belt. Between the two I could pretty much write off the entire left side of my body, appendage-wise. I touched the crampon gingerly to the wall and instantly shifted from sitting on a ledge with my foot in the air to awkwardly half-crouching on the vast horizontal plain of Mount Murdercruel.
We resumed the climb. With only one crampon each we had to continue on all fours. I was having to do a quick little bunny-hop with each step, attempting to get the crampon back onto the wall before gravity could have a chance to react. Thaddeus didn’t seem to be having any trouble, though.
“Hey!” I said as he tore off ahead. “I’ve only got one arm in commission, remember!”
I felt stupid about it immediately. He didn’t say anything, but he gave me a piercing look that said I had absolutely no right to complain. Without arms he was having to flop forward like a newborn baby seal with brain damage, banging his face against the rock with each step.
And he was making rather alarming pace, too. I was having to hop flat out just to keep up. “Hey,” I called, to change the subject. “What exactly was that spell?”
“The Level 47 Cunning Argument,” he said proudly. “For rapid conversion of heathens.”
“Have you always been able to do that?”
“’Tis a standard teaching in my Order.”
“Never seen you do anything like that before.”
“Before, I had no inspiration. Now, my purpose is clear.”
I watched him slither and flail his way up the wall with quiet dignity. It occurred to me that I’d never bothered to find anything out about Thaddeus’s order; they could have been anything from gentle vicars to unstoppable warrior monks, although I suddenly had good reason to doubt the first one. It also occurred to me that I didn’t know precisely how advanced a priest he had been. Considering that merely being undead had upped my battle mage level by several increments, he was probably quite formidable now. All in all it made me grateful once again that his energies were being focused away from me at last. Rip both his arms off; why hadn’t I thought of that?
We climbed in silence for I don’t know how long. Once I had settled into a routine of crawling and hopping, and when I was satisfied that Mr. Wonderful wasn’t going to show up again anytime soon, it was easy to fall into a reverie. With the regular movements of my untiring limbs it was like being rocked to sleep by a huge stone nanny.
Then, the wind stopped.
It hadn’t simply died down; as we passed some unmarked line it simply popped abruptly out of existence. Once you’ve gotten used to constant discomfort, its sudden cessation is like suddenly getting all your skin torn off. Surprised, I stopped. I could still hear its whistling roar coming from below us, but it was like it was on the other side of a wall.
I looked around. Then I noticed the sky, and jolted with surprise a second time. “What happened to the stars?” I said.
Thaddeus also stopped and stared. The sky was featureless black—not the mundane blackness that comes from the absence of light, but the same inky, infinite blackness I’d witnessed under the ocean.
Light there was plenty of. It emanated from below and was casting our shadows up the unyielding rock of Mount Murdercruel, whose forbidding blackness now seemed quite mediocre by comparison. With the latest in a long line of sinking feelings, I looked down.
The world was a glittering sphere far below us, an ocean of clouds broken up by the occasional island of land or sea. And stretching out over it, below us now, was a layer of stars. A thousand two-dimensional circles of bright light surrounded the planet like spotted gift wrap.
“They’re just . . . lights,” I said. “They’re just a bunch of lights in the sky.”
“What did you think they were?”
“I thought they were stars!” I waved my working arm, grasping for words. “You know. Other balls of gas like our sun, going out into space forever. Other worlds. Other life!”
He gave me a rather condescending look, and continued the climb. “Our planet is the center of the universe,” he said. “That is what the LORD has always taught us.”
“But there isn’t any universe.” I jerked my head upwards. “Not anymore. It’s just . . . black.”
Ahead of us, the sky was still empty and silent. Behind us, the world was getting on with the complicated business of existing, a patchwork quilt of cloud, ocean and land. I took one last look over the continents, and fancied that if I squinted I could just make out one of Barry’s armies sweeping across another unwitting nation.
Then I heard a new noise. A rapid series of regular “chink”s, like spikes sticking in and out of rock. I looked down between my legs, and saw two figures, one skinny, one stout, scrambling their way up towards us.
“Oh, give me a BREAK!” I spat, before redoubling my efforts. I crawled and hopped as fast as I could manage, flinging myself at the wall again and again.
“What’s the hurry?! What’s the hurry?!” yelled Mr. Wonderful like a demented mantra.
I didn’t know how much longer my body could keep up this pace. Scraps of flesh flew off my arms each time they slapped against the wall, and some foul liquid was dripping from my nose hole. And I still didn’t seem to be going fast enough. The rattling of his knives was getting louder and louder, and now that there was no other sound, it was like the rattling of a stick inside a gnoll’s feed bucket. The sound s
eemed to be coming from all around me. I was expecting at any moment a butterfly knife to appear between my legs and smoothly slice me in half lengthways.
Then I ran out of mountain.
I’d been going fast enough that I kept going for a few feet, but then the crampon came away from the rock, my hand groped for something solid, and I fell forward onto a horizontal surface. A genuine one, this time.
“What happened?” was what I intended to say, but it came out more as “Whuhackaguh?”
“Our exodus is truly blessed,” said Thaddeus, already on his feet and bouncing excitedly. “We have reached the summit of the world!”
We stood on the edge of a glass-smooth plain. It was like some staggeringly powerful device had cleanly sheared off the mountain from this point upwards, creating a tree stump a mile wide. Originally, the peak had probably been much, much higher, as terrifying a thought as that was.
As I looked around, I realized the plain wasn’t as empty as I’d initially thought. There was something in the middle . . .
“You can’t escape the wheels of justice, my little jaywalkers,” came Mr. Wonderful’s voice. His grin appeared over the edge, followed by the rest of him. “Now then, let’s . . .” he flinched hugely. “Crack my knackers, what the hell is that?”
“I think it’s the Nexus,” I said.
This seemed like a pretty safe bet. Even if a human had previously been able to get a team of workmen all the way up here, they’d probably have built something with slightly more traditional architecture than a featureless cube sitting in the dead center of the cross-sectioned mountain.
A normal construction team would additionally have been hard pressed to build it out of a single piece of milky-white stone that glowed brightly from within, and wouldn’t have been able to set up the glowing pillar of light that stretched eternally upwards from the top of the cube.
“Huh,” said Mr. Wonderful, already bored. He took two smart steps forward and grabbed both Thaddeus and me around our throats. “Well, for the top of the world, it’s not much to look at, is it? This really what you climbed all this way to see?” He giggled mockingly. “Want to take some pictures before I throw you off?”
“Unhand us, black devil,” spat Thaddeus. “Only the LORD may leave His fingermarks on the sullied flesh of His design.”
“It’s the Nexus!” I yelled. “Don’t you understand?!”
“No, I don’t understand!” said Mr. Wonderful cheerfully, dragging us inexorably back towards the edge. “I prefer to keep it that way. Understanding gets in the way of the violence.”
“It’s what we’re looking for! It’s the center of the whole Infusion! Where the Deleters come from!”
“Oh really?” droned Mr. Wonderful disinterestedly. Then some kind of thought penetrated the mad bastard’s head and he said it a second time, less dismissively.
“Mr. Wonderful,” said Bowg. “Your motion towards the mountain edge appears to have stalled. The execution of our assignment cannot be concluded without prompt re-assumption of movement on your part.”
Bowg’s voice snapped Mr. Wonderful out of his contemplation and he resumed dragging us along. “Not like it matters,” he said agreeably. “You wouldn’t know what to do with a Nexus even if you had one.”
He reached the edge and swung around, dangling me over the abyss. My foot groped desperately for the edge, and I clung as hard as I could to his arm as he attempted to shake me off like a piece of snot on his finger. “But we do know what to do! We’re on a mission from God!”
“Oh, that’s a new one.” He jiggled Thaddeus like an armful of puppy. “How much have you been talking to this chap?”
“I mean the real one! He told us how to end the Infusion! How do you think we got teleported here?! We can’t do that kind of magic!” I was babbling now.
“Your punishment will be afforded greater dignity if you undergo it in silence,” said Bowg. “Your attempts to reason with Mr. Wonderful are futile, as he is a psychopath, and consequently utterly irrational.”
“My little friend’s right, y’know,” said Mr. Wonderful conspiratorially to Thaddeus. “You can’t rely on psychopaths
—they’re totally unpredictable.”
Everyone present saw it coming just a little too late to react. Mr. Wonderful suddenly spun around, flailing my and Thaddeus’s legs like a fairground ride. My foot collided soundly with the side of Bowg’s head.
The dwarf’s expression didn’t change. He tottered dizzily for a second as gravity debated what to do with him, then Mr. Wonderful helped it make up its mind by hurling two knives, which lodged themselves either side of Bowg’s nose.
“Oh,” Bowg said. “Shit.” Then he fell.
“Been on that little twat’s leash for years,” said Mr. Wonderful, watching him disappear from sight. “The obedient pit bull becomes the escaped tiger! And it’s got a knife!” He twirled another blade and made a vaguely predatory roaring noise, then smartly reached out and grabbed me by the lapel.
“Uh,” I said, wondering if we hadn’t made a gigantic mistake.
“Swear to me,” he said, nose to nose hole with me. “Do you honestly know how to end the Infusion?”
I didn’t have the slightest idea, but the piercing, almost pleading look in his eye warned me against honesty. “Yes,” I said.
“Right, well, do me a favor and give it a few hours so I can get myself resurrected. I have to get back to the Guild before he does, the little tell-tale gobshite.” He produced another butterfly knife from his seemingly limitless reserves, twirled it smartly three times, then buried it in his own eye socket. His skinny body folded up like a collapsing clothes rack.
“In the end,” said Thaddeus, to fill the confused silence that followed, “even he had the goodness of the LORD in his heart.”
“What are you talking about? He’s a murdering psychotic bastard.”
“In another time, such qualities could have sanctified him.”
FIVE
The closer we moved to the cube in the center of the plain, the more certain I was that we’d found what we were looking for. It had none of the decorations or filigree you might expect of an artifact of the gods, which probably meant that it was indeed genuinely important.
Up close, the cube was smaller than it had seemed from the edge, just a few feet taller than me. If the Deleters and their cosmic creators were inside, they wouldn’t have a lot of elbow room. Its top face was emitting a broad column of light that stretched off into the black sky. I could hear a familiar high-pitched gibbering coming from within.
We were probably the first sentient beings to gaze upon the Nexus. The occasion called for a memorable quote that would go down in history. “Well,” I said, after some thought. “Here we are.”
“The LORD has guided us, and our pilgrimage is nearing an end.”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” I said, turning to him. “You do know we only have Dub’s word for it that Si-Mon is the false god, right? We could just be swapping one all-powerful cosmic dipshit for another.”
“If you do not believe that the true LORD sanctions our quest, then why do you pursue it?”
“Me, I’m just here for a nice clean death, and Dub said he can give me one. I don’t care who ends up running the world. I just want it to stop being my problem.”
“Those are the words of your tainted mouth. But are they truly the words of your soul?”
“Tell me, when you become religious, do you have to be taught how to use that smug annoying know-it-all voice, or does it come naturally? Because you should know it really doesn’t give any authority to the drivel you spout.”
“Worry not,” he said, my words sailing gaily over his head. “If Si-Mon is the true LORD, He would never allow Himself to be defeated by the actions of two unclean blasphemers such as us.”
I stared into the depths of the cube. “You know, you’re really not being much of a comfort.” I took a step towards the piercing whiteness, a
nd hesitated.
Thaddeus took the opportunity to reactivate that same smug tone of voice I hate. “Perhaps now you ponder your true purpose?”
“No, I’m just looking for the bloody door.” I did a complete circle around the cube. “Seriously, how do you get in this thing?”
I attempted to run my good hand across the surface. It passed straight through and was swallowed by the white mass.
It was an extraordinary feeling, like waving a hand over a volcanic vent that has somehow found a way to pump hot and cold air simultaneously. I could feel my arm being pushed upwards by a strong but gentle blast. I looked again at the great column of light that plunged infinitely into the void.
This wasn’t the Nexus itself. This was just the way in.
The whiteness didn’t seem to be damaging my hand, so I pushed my arm in to the shoulder. As soon as it had hold of that much, the wind started sucking the rest of me in like spaghetti. I couldn’t have pulled back even if I’d wanted to. I took a deep breath out of ingrained habit and let it take me.
For a moment, I saw nothing but the blinding whiteness. The incessant gibbering was deafeningly loud and coming from all around me. Meaningless images flickered past my vision. I felt an ethereal fist grab me by the waist and pull me upwards at incredible speed. The white disappeared with a wet pop, and the planet rocketed away from me, just as it had done during my first death, but this felt very different. There was no warmth or sensation of love. The world below me was still and silent, as if sulking off in despair.
Then the whiteness returned, and everything went silent.
—
The silence was soon replaced by a continuous rattling, like the chirrupping of mechanical crickets. When my vision cleared, I found myself standing in . . .
. . . I didn’t have anything to compare it to. I had been expecting some heavenly plain of existence, maybe with classical gold pillars and naked seraphim, but it was just a big room, totally unfamiliar except for its soul-crushing mundanity.
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