Colin looked up when he said that. "You are kidding about that last part, right? The stars don't really bet, do they?"
Quentin said, "Not the stars per se, but the mesoaetherians do—the princes of the middle air. They also cheat on their bets, and send omens and signs to people to change the odds of one fate winning out over another. That's why most omens are so vague—if the mesoaetherians are caught, they can always claim they were not really trying to tell the humans things humans are not supposed to know. What's the word from your spy novels, Colin?"
"Plausible deniability."
"Anyway, among the many other illegal things my friends do, they gamble on human suffering and the outcomes of wars and natural disasters. I told you they were like Mafia people."
I raised my hand.
Quentin pointed at me. "Yes? A question?"
"No," I said, feeling tired. "I was only indicating that it was me. I was the one you said that to."
"Oh. I told Amelia. Mafia people."
Victor said to Vanity, "Vanity, call your boat. How long will it take to get here from Antarctica?"
Vanity looked surprised, as if she had been caught unprepared for a pop quiz. "I—I don't—how would I know that? She might be on the far side of the Antarctic. I don't know her top speed. You do know Corus warned Amelia that they can tell when I call my boat?"
Victor nodded. "But the people watching the boat, Mestor and Boggin and his crew, want to keep us alive at all costs, and the people coming for us now want us dead."
Quentin looked down at his diagrams. "They want everybody dead."
Victor said, "What's that?"
Quentin passed him a sheet of paper covered with zodiacal symbols and crabbed mathematical calculations. "Not just us. Everyone. They want everyone dead."
Colin said, "Everyone on the ship?"
I spoke up. "I think he means everyone everyone. The whole enchilada. All living things that breathe.
Lamia told Quentin her master wants to start the last war, the Armageddon, between Cosmos and Chaos, remember? They want the stars torn down and the dome of the sky to collapse." And, before Victor could object that the sky was not literally a dome, I added, "They want to crack the planet like an egg and make an omelet, trigger a nova in Sol. That sort of thing."
Quentin sighed again.
Vanity leaped to her feet. "Oh my goodness!"
Colin said, "What is it?"
Victor said, "Is someone watching us?"
Vanity said, "I didn't get a chance to finish checking all our stuff! There might be a bug, just a physical bug somewhere, planted on us. I never finished looking!"
Victor had a stiff look to his face. I would not have recognized that look even a little while ago, but in my heart I knew what it was. Leaders who make bad decisions get that look. Leaders who think they may have endangered the lives entrusted to them. But what could he have done differently? We had needed Vanity in here to help with Quentin's experiment, which, had it worked, might have told us the nature of, or how to escape from, the coming danger.
Victor said, "Go look through our possessions. Prioritize your investigation. Check the things we got from Paris last. Anything that the enemy touched or handled is suspect. Anything we took from their hands, or…"
Colin said, "Passports. Money. The things Amelia got from ap Cymru."
Vanity said, "I checked mine…"
We all passed our papers over to Vanity, and I included the envelope of money. Vanity closed her eyes and began shuffling through the passports slowly.
I jumped up. It was obvious. So obvious. I said, "It can't be the passports. Those came from ap Cymru.
He is with the Olympians! It's not the Olympians attacking—Quentin just found that out! It's the dress!
My wedding dress!"
Colin said, "What wedding dress? Did you guys hear some story no one bothered to tell me?"
I was running toward my room. Over my shoulder, I shouted back to them, "It's not Lamia attacking. It's not Lamia! It's—"
At that moment, even over the mindless roar of the storm, we heard the hideous, tormented, long-drawn-out shriek and rumble of metal plates, vast and heavy metal plates, grinding and twisting, being torn, buckling under unimaginable, titanic pressure.
The deck heeled over at a forty-five degree angle. I slipped and fell to the carpet. The divan was bolted to the deck, but the pile of clothes boxes atop it was not; fabric and cardboard and scented crepe paper fell over my face. I heard crashes behind me as the bottles slid out of the wet bar and clattered to the floor. Our television, our luxurious television, toppled from its stand and fell with a noise of shattering glass.
"I'm not paying for that," said Colin, who was facedown on the deck.
An alarm hooted through the ship. I heard tumbling crashes, shouts, and screams of alarm and panic ringing from the other cabins and staterooms.
"That felt like we hit an iceberg," said Quentin, from somewhere behind me.
The lights in the cabin flickered and went dark. It was black as pitch. There were no lights anywhere.
"No," I said, raising my voice to be overheard above the rising wail of mixed people's voices crying out from the cabins around us, the hoots and klaxons or various alarms. "It's Echidna. Grendel's mom. She's pulled the ship off course."
5.
Yellow emergency lights spluttered and came on. As soon as the ship was done with her sharp-angled turn, the deck went flat again. The captain's voice, immensely amplified, rang from loudspeakers, telling the passengers that the ship was still afloat, urging them to be calm. "We may have caught up against an obstruction. We are investigating the cause…"
I was looking through, or, rather, "past" the decks and bulkheads and hull of the ship.
Victor said, "Do you see what's happening?"
I said: "The water is dark, but, when she grabbed the keel of the ship, there was a flash like emerald-green lightning igniting the water in the sea for a moment. She has transparent flukes like an eel and a sting in her tail like a scorpion sting. I can see the shape of her arms and hands, and the cloud of her long hair as it streams back. She had just ripped away the rudders and propeller of the ship; they were tumbling in the water around her. Her face is very beautiful, but pale and terrible.
"There is something else: ahead of us, at right angles to this normal continuum, is another time-space, intersecting. The intersection takes place along a tubelike zone of discontinuity. Where the tube meets the water, there is a circle of ocean whose inner nature is slightly different than that of our world. Directly below this circle of water is an undersea mountain with a flat top; there is a courtyard and a temple atop this flat area, and lights shining in the windows of the temple. In the courtyard is a sailor, tied upside down to a post, with his eyes torn out. The remains of a sailor. It is about fifty fathoms down. That is where she is taking us. We are going to be passing over that position."
There was a moment of silence while Victor absorbed this information. Everyone looked blanched and strange in the harsh glare of the emergency lights.
Colin said, "Orders, Leader? And let me just take this moment to say, I hope the words 'run away'
appeal' somewhere in the commands you are about to baric: out. And I think I speak for all the parts of my presently unkilled body when I say this."
Victor said slowly, 'There may be complicating factors. This isn't Lamia. Grendel's mother may be here simply to kill the human beings aboard. If we are obligated to risk or sacrifice our lives to save the mortals, we cannot run away."
Colin quirked his mouth to one side. "Hmph. Sacrifice lives. I did notice the words 'run away' did appear in the orders, but not exactly in the word order I would have wanted…"
"Enough chatter. The question may be moot," Victor said, frowning. He looked at Vanity.
She said, "I can't tell how far away my boat is! She heard me when I called; I can tell she can tell where I am and she is coming, but I don't know any more than that"
I said softly, "I know what it is. The inspiration. She is coming to build another pile of skulls in her garden behind her house."
Quentin said, "Let me see what I can do. Incanto sanctum circumque" He tapped his wand on the ground and a soft, pearly light issued from one tip. He held it out at arm's length and waved it around his head. The pearly light drew a clearly visible line of light into a perfect circle around him. A ring of pure light hung, floating, in the air at about the level of his shoulders, serene, luminous, wonderful. It was one of the coolest things I had ever seen.
Quentin took out a hand mirror and placed it on the carpet between his feet. He lowered his head and stared down at it, muttering: " Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas…"
Victor turned to Vanity. "Either to fight, or to flee, or to find your vessel, we will have to get up on deck.
All the normal passageways and hatches were locked after the storm reached hurricane proportions.
Look for another way out."
Vanity said doubtfully, "I don't think people build secret passageways on boats."
"Look for one nonetheless."
There was noise from the corridor. I could hear voices, calm, loud, authoritative. It sounded as if a gang of the ship's staff were going from door to door, reassuring people and asking if anyone needed help.
Victor said, "Amelia, keep an eye on Echidna."
Vanity yelped. "She can hear it. When you say her name!"
Victor said calmly to the rest of us, "No one say her name again. Say 'fishmonger.'"
Victor stepped over to the door. When the officers knocked, he called out that everything was fine in here. I did not see whatever energy or particle-beam left his body and flashed through the door at them, but I sensed its utility to Victor, and its internal nature. Glassy-eyed, the men turned and continued on down the corridor.
Victor looked over his shoulder. "Progress?"
Colin said, "I am doing a whole fat lot of nothing here."
Vanity said, "Found it. The air duct. For some reason, they built it large enough to crawl through. You would think they'd only make it wide enough to let air pass, wouldn't you? But here it is."
Vanity had her head halfway into a square hole which had opened in the wall above the wet bar. With a click, electric lights came on in the hole, and shone around her body. "There is a switch," she said.
I said, "Something is distorting space-time. That undersea mountain is no longer far away. Now it is almost directly underfoot. We are about to pass into the intersection zone."
Colin looked at the porthole, as if to see outside.
Blackness pressed up against the glass. The roaring waves of rain beat a tattoo on the glass.
A whisper came from the light-encircled Quentin. It sounded like his voice, as if he were doing ventriloquism. His voice seemed to be coming from the mirror at his feet. I could sense it was useful to someone other than Quentin, that voice, and its internal nature was alien to this time-space.
"Death, painful death, is all fate holds in store; some will die for want of air, some for terror, hunger and despair. Death if you approach her, one or many, of your four. And yet among your number there are five. Let her return what she has stolen, and she may yet return a…"
Colin cried out and put his hands up as if to ward off a blow. The mirror at Quentin's feet cracked. The mirror above the wet bar turned into a spiderweb of shatter lines with a noise like a gunshot. From the bathroom, I also heard tinkling glass and the clatter of falling shards.
The stone on Vanity's necklace gave off a lancing green dazzle, like a flash of summer lightning. And she shouted. Her shout was a shout of joy, however.
I turned to look at the bathroom, expecting to see the mirror broken there. But instead, walls and surfaces blocked my view. For a moment, I was confused. How could a merely three-dimensional surface prevent me from seeing "over" it? Then I squinted, letting out a low moan of fear and annoyance.
I had been girlified again. Three-dimensionalized. Ameliorated, so to speak.
Victor said, "Report."
Everyone started to talk at once.
Victor said, "Oldest first."
I said, "Powers shut off." Keep it brief.
Vanity said, "I sensed what she did. We just passed over a boundary. It is so obvious! I should have figured it out before! This necklace has a boundary stone in it, just like the green table, just like Boggin's ring on his toe. All you are doing is attracting or deflecting the attention of whatever enforces the laws of nature. That is why I can sense when people are paying attention to me, you see? It is so I can do what I do. That is the principle the ships are built on; that is why they can read minds! I know how to do it now!
The trick I did with Bran's Head to turn people's powers off and on! I know how to do it!"
Victor said, "Do so. Do it now."
Vanity said, "Well, I can't do it now. My power is off. But if my power got turned back on, I could turn it off. Other people's, too. You have to be near a boundary for this to work. Something decides where boundaries are…"
Victor said, "Later, please. Colin?"
Colin said, "I had a dream while the voice was talking. Knowledge just came into my head out of nowhere. Were you guys wondering what I am supposed to be able to do, like Amelia seeing through walls and Victor seeing molecules and magnetic fields? I saw something with my heart. I saw the future.
Fishmonger is going to capsize the ship and trap an amount of air in it. She is going to push it to the bottom. She is going to eat the people a few at a time. She is going to keep them alive, keep the air fresh, for a long, long time. Like a crab tank in the restaurant. I saw an old couple, lying in bed in an upside-down room. I thought they were hugging each other. At first, I thought they were kissing. You know, saying good-bye because they both knew they were both about to die. The old gal was already dead. The guy must have been very hungry because he was eating her face…"
Vanity said, "Ugh! Stop! No descriptions of cannibal face-eating! No! Ugh!"
Colin said, "A lot more will kill themselves, or each other. It's going to be pretty bad. You know that scene I never translated right in the Odyssey? The one where Odysseus and his men are trapped in a cave by a man-eating Cyclopes? Okay. The fishmonger here is from that same background story, see? It will be pretty bad for the people."
Quentin said, "The fishmonger must have pushed us over a ward, in addition to pushing the ship into another sphere of reality, because my friends all fled The one who was talking was one of the Dukes of Hell, a fairly influential fellow, and the largest spirit I had yet called up. I was going to use him to drive away the influences controlling the fishmonger's powers. I waited too long. We could have won, and been free. I wasn't expecting this. I didn't think our powers could just be shut down like that. The undersea shelf we are passing over must be an area like the school grounds back home. Kind of clever of her, actually."
Colin bent, picked up one of the shards of the broken mirror, and, before anyone could stop him, he drew the sharp point along one arm, making a scratch and drawing blood.
"Gross!" said Vanity.
Colin then dropped the shard, passed his hand over the cut, and wiped the blood away. The scratch was wiped away as well, and his arm was whole.
Colin looked up. "Leader, I can report my powers are still on."
Victor sat down in a chair, and bowed and put his face in his hands.
We were all silent, staring at him.
I had never seen Victor hesitate before. I had never seen him afraid.
The noises in the background, the stir of the wind, the shouts of alarm from other cabins, grew dim.
Perhaps the storm was dying down, now that we
were overtop the undersea mountain.
Victor raised his head, and his face was pale and stern. He spoke in an even-toned and level voice:
"Either we have an obligation to save the human beings, or not. If not, we should run away. If we have an obligation, then we cannot risk ourselves fighting a monster, because good evidence suggests our death would immediately trigger an attack on Cosmos by Chaos, and entail the destruction of the Earth. There are more people aboard Earth than are on this ship. The people here aboard ship, if they viewed the matter objectively, would agree that their sacrifice, in order to preserve the Earth, is a reasonable exchange. Logically, of course, these people aboard ship will perish in any case if Chaos destroys Cosmos. In either situation, whether we are obligated to defend the humans or not, logic suggests that we should run and leave them to their fate."
I could feel the blood draining out of my face. The others had strange, strained looks on their faces, too.
Colin was looking particularly annoyed.
Victor continued, "A second factor, though, is the fact that they rescued us. They did not know we were not in any real, danger, but, nonetheless, the crew of this ship rescued, to the best of their ability, a group of us stranded in a motorboat. As a general principle, in order to encourage the rescues of ships at sea, there must be an incentive rather than a disincentive attached. One incentive is that the rescued party should operate according to a reciprocal standard, and perform such rescues as may be needed when called upon to do so."
His voice trailed off.
Colin said, "What does all that goobledygook mean, Mein Fuhrer?"
Victor said, "We must see if there is anything we can do without getting ourselves killed, since getting killed, so it seems, might entail the destruction of the Earth by Chaos. We have Colin turn into something large enough to hold us all, something that swims or flies. If we cross back over the boundary we just crossed, our powers may simply turn back on again; Quentin may be able to vanquish the fishmonger in short order."
Fugitives of Chaos Page 32