by D. P. Prior
“I didn’t say I can’t. But I won’t, unless I have no choice. Like power, action has its costs, and for some of us they are equal and opposite. All that I do thaws the ice that holds the Demiurgos a little and cedes his will more reach into the worlds. I have found, given the disasters that have followed each new act of mine, and my brother’s counter, that it is better for me to do nothing directly.
“But I mentioned the dilemma of the Nameless Dwarf only as an example of how Aristodeus and I differ in our opinions of what should be done. What needs to be done. Ultimately, however, we are at war with the same foe.”
“Yeah, I figured that much. What I don’t get is, if you stopped the Demiurgos before”—assuming Elias had his facts right, which was by no means certain—“why can’t you do it again?”
The Archon waited a moment before he replied. He may have been surprised by the question, or maybe he was still vexed by his failure to defeat the Demiurgos for good.
“I prevented him from further ravaging my sister, but when I cast him into the Void, he endured. It should not have been possible. Supernals have, from time to time, traveled from our world to yours, but for the living, there is no return. Only the dead of your cosmos may travel the other way, though their passage has long-since been blocked by the emergence of the Abyss. He should have perished.”
“But instead,” Rhiannon said, “he threw up the Abyss about himself, is that right?”
“First the ice,” the Archon said. “It surrounded him like armor. I can only surmise it was his abject fear of the Void that gave it being.”
“That makes no sense,” Rhiannon said. “How can ice exist in the Void? How can anything?”
“I cannot answer—”
“And what would have happened to you? You cast him there. You acted directly, didn’t you, in order to kill him?”
“Yes, but…” Flames guttered within the Archon’s hood. He let out a sound like a gasp. “It was me! All these aeons, and it has taken a…” He waved a porcelain hand at Rhiannon, as if he didn’t know how to say “useless bitch”. Finally, he said, “woman. It has taken a woman to intuit what I should have seen from the first. I assumed the Demiurgos’s will is what kept him in existence: a will stronger even than the hunger of the Void. But now I see it: there can be no will in the Void. There can be nothing. It was my direct act against him that awarded him the justice our balance demands. But rather than my death in return, his dread of oblivion granted him the paradox of perdurance in the heart of nothing. It made for him a breathing space, one he has inflated with each new act of mine. And each soul, each tormented soul that seeks passage to the Supernal Realm, is caught within his web, adding its own substance to the reality of the Abyss. Every new death becomes a defiance of the Void.”
“Glad I could be of some help,” Rhiannon said. “But what the shog has that got to do with my daughter?”
The Archon reeled away from her, then recommenced his circuit of the room. “You have given me much to think on; much to ponder. Alas, you have also given me cause to rely more than I would like on the machinations of the philosopher. There is no other of this cosmos positioned to oppose my brother as he does, though I believe him to be overmatched. Perhaps the Liche Lord has the lore, but he lacks the will. I rather think my brother’s wiles suit Otto Blightey’s penchant for cruelty.”
Rhiannon pushed herself away from the table and stalked after the Archon. “So, you’re going to leave Saphra alone now?”
The Archon stopped abruptly. “It is more a matter of what you are going to do. I had hoped, given your indifference to the child, you might see the wisdom of nipping her life in the bud, before things are allowed to go too far.”
“You want me to kill her? Are you shogging crazy?”
“It is likely that you will. I see many possibilities, but in each of them, either your world is annexed to the Abyss, nothing more than dust and smoldering ashes, or one of you slays your daughter: you, or the girl’s father.”
No, Rhiannon cried silently. She stumbled into the wall of glass. Not me. I couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
“Fine,” she suddenly said, her old fury filling her veins like vindication. “Tell you what, I’ll stick it to the bald bastard instead. I’m never killing my daughter, do you hear? But he might, and I don’t plan on giving him the chance.”
She was halfway to the door with the black sword in hand, when the Archon’s voice froze her mid-stride.
“Do you know who he is? Do you even know who this father of your child is?”
Like she’d been concussed by a thunderclap, Rhiannon couldn’t speak; couldn’t articulate a single clear thought.
She felt the warmth of the Archon’s approach. “What has he told you, Rhiannon?”
Everything. He said he’d told me everything.
She felt the air pressure behind her alter. It grew dense with the threat of an explosion, and the warmth turned to heat.
“How he failed to prevent the Unweaving that first time?”
She whimpered that she knew.
“How he fell into the Abyss?”
She dipped her head.
“How he can come and go as he pleases?”
He’d said as much while they watched Saphra with the homunculi, but he said there were limits, that he got snapped back.
“Did he tell you the Abyss is timeless, by virtue of its proximity to the Void?”
“Yes,” Rhiannon managed. “In his tower. He trained me for months, but when we left, only hours had passed.”
“Did he tell you he can visit the past? Never the future; always the past.”
The champagne! Oh, Nous, he said something about the champagne, about where he’d got it from—
—Mine comes, you could say, fresh from the wreck.
The champagne that had allowed him to—
“He wanted a second chance, Rhiannon. I call it hubris. He calls it necessity. He really believed he was the only one capable of stopping Sektis Gandaw. When he fell, he saw deeper into the true nature of the evil he confronted; caught a glimpse of the puppet master. But still, Gandaw had to be stopped, else all the worlds would fall—all this side of the Void, that is. I agreed with him. I agreed, and we planned together, but then he went too far. In his arrogance, he claimed he’d been close to victory, and that it was only the Technocrat’s harnessing of my sister that thwarted him: he could not withstand the power of a Supernal. He begged for my sword, wanted so urgently to wield it in a second attempt to stay Gandaw. When I relented, it burned his hand. It rejected him. Which tells me his morality is deeply suspect.”
“I thought you’d be just fine with that, seeing as you want my daughter dead.”
Rhiannon hoped he’d react. She even turned to face the eruption, but instead he calmly explained, “It’s a matter of proportion, Rhiannon. The needs of the many—”
“Don’t you dare!” she said. “Don’t you dare feed me that crap from the Liber!”
“Forgive me,” the Archon said, withdrawing a little. “And forgive me for what I must now tell you. Aristodeus isn’t just trapped in the Abyss yet able to appear here, in two places at the same time. He is also two people.”
Rhiannon’s head swam with the idea. That didn’t make any sense. Two people? Like Nous and Ain were supposed to be one and the same, though father and son? She opened her mouth to ask, “What do you mean?” but her jaw locked, and all she could do was stare blankly.
“Aristodeus is also Shader. They are one and the same.”
The eyes! The chill blue, swirling to gray.
Oh, Nous—
The set of the jaw, if you took away the beard. Shader’s widow’s peak that would one day thin into baldness.
Ain—
Even their height, their skill with a blade. Only the accent was different.
“Physically, they are the same,” the Archon said. “And they are the same soul.”
Oh no. Please, no.
Rhiannon’s head was a hive of stinging insects. She tr
ied to grasp a thought, a word, some tangible chunk of reality. Storm winds skirled about her skull.
“From the same womb,” the Archon said. “With the same father. Conceived at the same time.”
But Aristodeus was Graecian. Shader had been raised in Britannia. Hence the accent. But how? How could they be the same? They couldn’t even be twins: the philosopher was old enough to be Shader’s grandfather.
The glare from the Archon’s cowl dimmed to a benign glow. “He visited his own birth, snatched the babe, and gave it over to the care of foster parents in Britannia.”
Jarl and Gralia. Shader’s mother and father. The warrior and the luminary.
“But,” she stammered. “But if he took the baby,”—if he took himself; had himself raised as Shader—“he shouldn’t exist, should he?” The life he’d led would never have happened. But then, how would he take the infant, if there was no Aristodeus to take it?
The Archon shook his head. “It is the kind of paradox the Demiurgos loves. I warned Aristodeus at the time, but he would not heed me.”
“So, it’s a trap. Shader’s a trap. An illusion. Another deception.” Like Dave the Slave.
“An abomination, yes,” the Archon said. “A desecration, even. But he is quite real. They both are, at least for now. What you see of Aristodeus is real, too, as far as the flesh goes. But the ground of his soul is tormented, running in circles, yet he does not even know it. I suspect, were his true essence—that which is mired in the Abyss—ever to converge with Shader, the paradox would be unbound, and only one would remain.”
“So…” Rhiannon’s mind was a racing maelstrom. “Does that make Shader Saphra’s father?” She was half-joking; but it was the joke of a woman who’d lost her grip on sanity.
“Genetically,” the Archon said. When she frowned she didn’t know what that meant, he added, “Same parents, same person, same flesh. So, yes: that which impregnated you was Shader in all but memory and experience.”
Shog.
Shader… A father. And yet he’d never… at least not to her knowledge, and not with her. Almost, on one or two occasions, but not quite.
But how could she tell him? Should she? And what about Aristodeus? She knew with absolute clarity that if she could have brought them together, Shader and the philosopher’s core or essence, she’d have done it. Done it and hoped the one still breathing was the one who deserved it most. She had no doubt that was Shader.
Then she had another thought: “What if I kill him? What if I cut the bald bastard into pieces? What then? Would Shader die, too?”
“I do not think so,” the Archon said. “But we stray from my purpose in telling you all this. Sometimes it takes an avalanche of knowledge to restore clear sight. It is my hope that you can see now why you must get Saphra away from Aristodeus. At least then you may in some small way mitigate her doom.”
Her doom? “What do you mean, ‘her doom’?”
“Every action, every use of power comes at a cost. Did I not say this before? Saphra’s conception is a tangle of violations, and the laws that govern the worlds cry out for restoration. Order has been perverted. Time has been turned in on itself. Ancient balances have been disturbed, and all this draws the gaze of the Demiurgos. He sees in her his likeness. He would have her for his own.”
“Between a rock and a hard place,” Rhiannon said. “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, is that what you’re saying?” When the Archon didn’t answer, she pressed on. “If I leave her with Aristodeus, he’ll use her for Ain-knows what end; but if I get her away from him, the Demiurgos will come to claim her? So, what’s he been waiting for? I’ve raised her for four years and there’s been no stink of sulfur.”
The fire in the Archon’s hood was now no more than a pearly haze. “My brother is a master of the insidious.”
Even as he said it, Rhiannon felt the weight of the black sword at her side. Her drinking, her cutting, her nights away. Her endless excuses and rejections. They would all take their toll, sooner or later. Saphra was a sponge, soaking it all up, owning it, personalizing it, feeling that she was to blame.
“Saphra,” she croaked. Then louder, “Saphra!”
She hefted the sword in two hands and ran at the glass wall. The homunculus inside looked up, shock written all over his gnomic face.
But before she could strike, the Archon drifted between her and the glass. Porcelain fingers grasped her wrists, and slowly, little by little, she lowered the sword.
“Won’t that cost you?” she muttered. “Wasn’t that a direct action?”
“Sometimes it is necessary to cede a little ground,” the Archon said, though he swiftly released her. “The girl is too well guarded here. The homunculi are small, but their lore is vast. And the philosopher will be expecting you to try to take your daughter.”
“Good. Least he’ll know why I’m going to cut his shogging head off.”
“He is too skilled,” the Archon said, like Rhiannon needed reminding. “You will require the aid of others to get Saphra back.”
“Who? Shader? Nameless?”
“Shader, perhaps, but there is one other who could help: Adeptus Ludo.”
The priest with the big ears? What could he do? “You’re joking, aren’t you? No disrespect, but Aristodeus would run him through in the blink of an eye.”
“You misunderstand me,” the Archon said. “Ludo is precious to me. Perhaps the most gifted of all the Nousians. Certainly, he is the closest to the truth. Should he find it, a new spring will revive the Templum, restore it to what it ought to be: a bulwark against the Demiurgos. A mind like that might sway even Aristodeus, were he granted a chance to debate. And if he should fail, then by all means, turn to Shader for aid, if he will give it.”
If he will?
“But not Nameless? Why not Nameless?” He was her best bet, any way you looked at it. Shader might best Aristodeus in a duel, but Nameless would positively crush him.
The Archon seemed reluctant to answer. Finally, he said, “If the opportunity presents itself. But let’s hope it does not come down to that. Ludo is your best hope, and yet he has been placed in peril by Aristodeus’s madcap quest. I cannot lose him to the evil lurking in Verusia. You must go after the others. Ward him, with your life if necessary.”
“You want me to babysit your favorite? So, that’s what this is all about? You don’t give a damn about me or Saphra. You’re desperate, aren’t you? Afraid to act yourself, and afraid to lose one of your pawns. What is it you want him for? The next Ipsissimus?”
The Archon’s fire went out for an instant, then it blazed back white and hot. “He must purify the Templum, excise the errors sown by Blightey. It can be a rock again. A last bastion against deception.”
“Then maybe you should ask Shader. According to Baldy, he’s already on his way there.” She scabbarded her sword and folded her arms across her chest. “Because he might just give a shog.”
“Shader’s purpose in Verusia is unknown to me, and in any case, I fear he may be too late. Go, Rhiannon. I can send you there in an instant.”
“And how’s that not acting directly? You sending me there? You get to play with magic, what does your brother get in return?”
“I have fathomed the consequences and found them favorable. Such a minor act will strengthen the Demiurgos only slightly. And think, when you return, you will have Ludo’s mind to pit against the philosopher’s. That, and the might of grateful companions. But if you do not go, I fear Ludo will do something foolish. He has the intellect of a genius, but the wisdom of a child. He is an idealist, who sees no limit to what might be accomplished by love. I fear he does not know the full extent of Otto Blightey’s evil, of his uncompromising cruelty. More than that, he could not guess that it is utterly willed; that Blightey is as familiar with the ways of love as any luminary, yet it is the familiarity that breeds contempt. Perhaps more troubling, is the Liche Lord’s belief that he is beyond redemption, that there is no going back, whatever Ludo believes a
bout the limitless mercy of Ain. Though I do not share his reasoning, the Liche Lord is a far more accomplished theologian than any the Templum can boast. Greater even than Ludo.”
The pure fire of the Archon’s cowl blazed to engulf him. He gave way to a ball of radiant whiteness that swirled bigger and bigger, until its center seemed to merge with snow. Mist hung thickly between the trunks of pines, and high above, the sun wavered with the pallor of sickness from ashen skies.
Tingles of dread clawed their way up Rhiannon’s spine, yet she was drawn, in spite of herself, toward the vista.
“Go, Rhiannon,” the Archon’s voice sounded from far off. “Keep him safe, and your daughter will be restored to you. Have faith.”
Reflexively shutting her eyes, she stepped over the threshold. Cold bit into her shins, soaked through her britches. Her eyes snapped open. She’d plunged into snow up to her knees. Almost instantly, she panicked and tried to turn back, but the Archon’s fire had gone. Where it should have been, a dense pine forest rolled away into the distance. The sun leered down at her, and the cloying mist whispered her name. She started to draw Callixus’s sword, but stopped as the Archon reappeared before her.
He gestured that she should look behind. When she turned, she saw a scatter of people dressed in furs trudging toward her on snow shoes. In the distance beyond them, against the slate-gray clouds, she could just make out a castle on a hill.
She spun back to the Archon. “What is that place? Who are those people?”
The cold in her shins seeped into her thighs, her belly, her arms. Save for the crunching approach of the snow shoes, all she could hear was the thump, thump, thump of her own heart. There was no other sound. Nothing. Like the life of the forest had been smothered.
“Remember,” the Archon said. “Faith is ofttimes dark.”
“Shog faith! Get me out of here! I’ve changed my mind.”
The Archon sighed and pulled back his hood.
Rhiannon threw up her hands, but too late.
The force of the conflagration flung her to the ground. Everything turned white. At first, she thought she was face down in the snow, but she couldn’t have been: the cold was greatest at her back.