by Edward Aubry
A sword point emerged from Scott's chest. A quantity of blood shot out onto Harrison, who was predictably startled. With the hand not holding Harrison's neck, Ru'opihm reached around and grabbed his attacker. It was Hauptmann, who looked more frightened than anyone else in the room. Bess had turned him against his master.
Ru'opihm beat Hauptmann's head against the corner of the table until it was pulped.
Not bothering to remove the blade, It turned Its attention back to Harrison, "Your knife is calling me unkind names," It said. "I think I will enjoy filing it down to powder." It tightened Scott's grip on Harrison's throat.
Did I underestimate the likelihood that he'd actually murder me? He grabbed Scott's hand with his one good one, but the hand was cold and hard as iron. The blisters on his finger sent spikes of pain into his arm. He did not let go.
"How," asked Ru'opihm, "did you do that?"
Harrison coughed. Ru'opihm eased Scott's grip just enough to let him answer.
"I'll show you," he whispered. His hand tingled.
In the last, brief instant of consciousness available to him, Harrison was dimly aware that he was lying on a table in a windowless room, somehow looking up at open sky. The sound that accompanied this image was that of a thousand cannons being fired inside his skull, which was all he could hear.
Then he heard nothing at all.
Chapter Forty-Eight:
Last Chance
When Harrison was in seventh grade, he asked his science teacher a question about why things explode. The answer was dry enough, but the words stayed with him all his life. It was one of the clearest educational memories he had from that age.
"Usually," his teacher had explained, "things explode because they don't have enough room to burn."
He woke up with these words rolling around in his head. He also woke up with a great deal of pain. His throat hurt. His ears hurt (quick examination with a finger showed they were bleeding). His whole body ached. None of that compared to what his right hand felt like.
Harrison had never seen a third degree burn before. He managed to stay in denial about the one on his finger for almost thirty seconds. The flesh around the silver ring was dead white. It had partially melted, covering the edge of the metal. He resisted the terrifying urge to rip the ring off his finger, fearing what would come off with it.
The room was deathly silent. Sharply cold. Above him, a wispy cloud drifted across an otherwise clear sky. He exhaled and watched the water vapor crystallize. He did not hear his breath.
The air around him smelled like burnt bacon. He hoped it was not the smell of a burnt finger, but his hope had a strange detachment. He was deaf. He knew that. Deaf meant alive. Injured meant alive, too. If he smelled his wound, well, then, at least he could also smell. He forced himself to sit up.
It was not the smell of his finger.
Sitting on the table next to him was the shriveled, blackened, dried-out body of Scott. King Scott. Admiral Scott.
Dead Scott. Bess still protruded from his chest. She was black, too.
Harrison suddenly remembered what he was doing. He drew his uninjured hand to his mouth and took a deep breath through his nose. He held his breath, searching his feelings for any sign that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
He didn't feel evil.
He exhaled. It had been the most desperate gamble. Use the ring to steal the power from Scott. The power of Ru'opihm. The power of ultimate horror, malice, suffering, evil. He knew that Scott had not truly been that entity. He must have acquired whatever power he had. Whatever was given must be possible to take.
It had worked, more or less.
The power had not had room in Harrison to burn, so it had exploded. He had an oblique memory of what it had been like to be that powerful for a billionth of an instant. Well, I don't feel that way now. That's good. He felt proud. Ru'opihm's power was the power of pure evil, and it had not found purchase in Harrison's soul. This verified something he already knew, but the confirmation was welcome. He was, at his foundation, a good person.
The explosion had taken the top of the building with it. He was sitting on a table that was now on the roof of the structure. He wondered what it must look like from below. He wondered how long he would have to wait until someone down there came up to tell him.
"Glimmer!" he shouted. He couldn't hear his voice, but he could feel the vibrations in his throat. That was going to take some getting used to. "Glimmer!" He looked around, frantically, terrified that he might have killed her in the blast. If he had come all that way, endured that much, just to kill her by accident, it would break him in a way that nothing else had managed to do.
He saw her cage. It was toppled, but intact. He hopped down off the table. It hurt to move. He hurt everywhere. He yanked Bess out of Scott's corpse. She was silent in his hand. He sheathed her.
He surveyed the corner of the room. The ceiling and walls had all been sheared away, except for the part of the room that included Glimmer's cage. There was a zone around her, roughly spherical, with her at the center, that looked untouched and extended for about ten feet in every direction. Two quarter circles of wall met at the corner by her cage. Only one of Ru'opihm's victims was still hanging on the wall. He wasn't moving. The rest were gone. Harrison hoped they were all truly dead.
Also missing was Hadley's corpse. He looked. He had hoped to take it home, but it must have been carried out in the explosion. Hauptmann's body was gone, too. He found some stone rubble, some of it in the shapes of various body parts, which he took to be Ru'opihm's silent hench-thing.
"Glimmer!" he shouted again. That time, he thought he heard himself shouting, but it was a phantom sound, agonizingly disappointing.
He could see her waving feebly. Her mouth was moving. He had no idea what she was saying. Even her magic voice couldn't affect eardrums if they weren't there anymore.
"I can't hear you," he said. He felt it in his throat. It buzzed in his ears. This time it was not a phantom sound. He was not imagining it. He had heard a friend once talk about what it sounded like when a ruptured eardrum healed. This felt like what his friend had described, but on an absurdly accelerated scale. "I can't hear you," he repeated. He heard it that time, faintly, as if from far away, through a filter.
"Twas brillig," he said, "and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe." By the time he reached the end of the line, his ears were buzzing like a kazoo. The words were distinct and identifiable. He was regrowing his eardrums by talking to himself.
It was Claudia's power, he realized. The power to be heard. It was incredible. He couldn't help but wonder if he had stumbled upon a cure for all kinds of deafness. Then he couldn't help but recognize the unlikelihood of ever finding out.
"I can hear you now," he said. It buzzed, but only a little.
"What?" the pixie asked.
"I said I can hear you now," he said. She stared at him, with big pixie eyes. "That was you making fun of me, wasn't it?" She nodded.
He laughed. He laughed so hard that he started coughing, and almost threw up. "Ow-ow-ow," he said. He picked up the stand and set it back upright. "We have to get you out of here," he said. "There's some kind of spell on the lock, isn't there?"
She nodded. "Pain curse, I think."
"No shit," he said. He remembered what it had felt like. "What about the lock itself?"
She shrugged. "Normal lock, I think." He was watching her, looking for signs of injury. She didn't have any obvious marks on her, but he wouldn't know what to look for, anyway. She was looking back at him with an expression he couldn't quite read.
"You came back for me," she said.
"Of course," he said. He studied the lock. "So it's just pain? I should still be able to unlock it if I can just bear it for a second or two, right?"
"Um," she said.
"Well?" he asked when she did not elaborate.
"It's just that it's really going to
hurt."
Harrison almost laughed again. He was already in so much pain from having his finger burned, his shoulder shattered, and the power of an evil god wash through him and out of him, that he hardly thought this would count for much. He was a little concerned about how the ring had reacted before, but he put that aside. He did not want to dwell on the pain in his hand right now. "It'll only be for a second," he said. He reached up and grabbed the lock.
The agony was searing. It shot through his entire body. He refused to let go.
Over his own screams, he could hear Glimmer pleading with him to stop. Finally he heard her say, "Open," and he dropped to the floor.
Panting, he looked up. Glimmer's head was poking through the open door. He looked at his right hand. His middle finger was gone.
Well, not gone exactly. He found what was left of it, lying on the floor next to the silver ring. The finger was scorched almost beyond identification. The gap in his hand was similarly cauterized. Ruefully, he picked up the ring and put it in his pocket. He planned to return it, somehow.
He stood up. Standing in her cage, Glimmer was at eye level with him. She was staring at him with wide, tiny eyes, little glittery tears streaking down her face. For a second, he thought he saw pity in her eyes, but then he remembered what pity looked like and realized this was something else. It was adoration. "You came back for me," she said again.
"Of course I came back for you. Didn't you expect me to?"
"Yes," she said. She was fanning her face with both hands. "I just didn't expect it to feel like this. Let me see your hand."
He held his ruined hand up to the cage, trying not to look at it too closely himself. She leaned over and kissed it right on the burn. For an instant, he felt that electric shock she always gave him, which hurt like hell. Then his hand went warm and numb.
"Thank you," he whispered.
"You're my hero," she said. He offered her his wounded hand again, and she climbed out of the cage onto it.
"It's not dead, is it?" he asked.
She shook her head. "It can't die. It's not like that."
He nodded. "Then it's only a matter of time before It shows up here again, takes our bomb, and destroys the world. We have to find it and set it off while it's still on the island."
"You lost Gizmo," she said.
He nodded again. "We may be able to set it off manually," he said. "We need to try, at least. Can you track it down for me?"
She looked at him, puzzled. "Sure. Won't we … well, won't Apryl have to be the one who does it? She's not here, is she?"
"No," he said. "But the part of her we need is. That ring Titania gave me. It lets me steal powers. That's how I stopped Scott just now. I took Claudia's power, and I took Apryl's, right before I left." Her jaw dropped. For an instant, he thought he saw a flicker of purple over her shoulders. "Glimmer? Are your wings growing back?"
"Of course they are," she said. "You came back for me."
Harrison closed his eyes. He had saved her. His courage had gotten her out of her cage, and his love for her had given her a means of escape from the island. A tear tried to spill out of his eye. He wiped it away. They were going to be all right. He could still save the world. His people would be safe.
"Listen," he said. "We won't have much time. You've got to help me find the bomb, then you've got to get out of here as fast as you can. Tell the others what happened. Tell … tell my kids … tell Sarah I'm really sorry. I promised her I'd come back." The tears were flowing faster now than he could stop them. "Tell Claudia how proud I am of her. Tell Alec … hell, tell them all. We did it. They did it. They're heroes, every one of them."
He paused. He couldn't say it. He had to.
"Tell Apryl I love her."
Tears were streaming down Glimmer's face in such quantity that she radiated sparkle. Her wings unfurled. They were gorgeous. Larger, deeper purple than before, more ornate. They had curly tails extending off their lower edge and frills over her shoulders. She wrapped them around her naked body. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She took to the air and hovered in front of his face.
Then she kissed him. It was not unlike the first time he had kissed Apryl, when she had been in the throes of her power. He felt a warmth spread from the pixie's lips into his own, and it surged through his body. The aches faded. Even his pulped shoulder stopped hurting. His lingering fears and sadness subsided. She pulled away. He felt perfect.
"Glimmer?" he said. "We have to go now."
She nodded.
And punched him in the face.
The force of the blow threw him back, and he toppled over. He shook the surprise out of his face just in time to see a trail of purple sparks leading out the door, shimmer, and then rain out to nothingness.
"What the hell?" he said.
Then everything went white.
Chapter Forty-Nine:
Little Lights
Though it seemed to linger for a long time, the white flash lasted only for a fraction of a second. During that instant, Harrison heard nothing, felt nothing, had no sense at all of what was happening.
Then he fell down.
It must have been twenty stories to the ground from where he had been in the giant Gryphon. His sense of motion was subtle. He felt weightless. The tiniest breeze was blowing beneath him. He could see nothing but a cloud of dust in every direction.
Glimmer had set off the bomb. That much was obvious. How, he couldn't be sure. Why, he knew. Unlike everything else around him, he was totally unaffected by the blast. She must have done something to him in that last moment before she sped out of the room. Sped out of his life.
Sped out of her life.
He remembered learning how she had blown up the middle of the Worm. She had released the energy in her little finger. He wondered if he had just seen how much energy was stored in an entire pixie.
He touched down with the same approximate force as hopping out of bed. He couldn't see, he couldn't hear, but he knew that nothing was left now on the entire island. He was safe. For whatever that was worth. He sat down on the ground, waiting for the dust to subside. He had no trouble breathing for the same reason that he felt no heat, and no concussion. He rode out his immunity patiently.
It took a really, really long time.
He had no sense of how long he waited. He was not wearing a watch, and the dust was so thick he couldn't even tell if the sun was still up. Eventually, more from boredom than anything else, he fell asleep.
* * *
He woke up once during the night. The air was biting cold, and he was ill-equipped for it. Whatever Glimmer had done to him was starting to wear off. He could feel some of the pain returning and was not looking forward to feeling his left shoulder again. He hoped that his protection would last at least until sunup, so he would not die of exposure. Beyond that, he had no plan. Night would come again. He had nowhere to go.
The dust was gone, as far as he could tell. So was everything else. He was sitting on a flat stretch of ground with no apparent contours and no apparent objects. Nothing anywhere. It was too dark for him to see properly, but he imagined that he was somewhere near the center of a crater, much like the one that they had found on Manhattan. He could not tell how far away the horizon was, and he could not see or hear the ocean.
He drew Bess from her scabbard. The first time he had held her, he had noticed how warm she felt. Now she was cold to the touch. He could not see what she looked like, but he knew she had taken some punishment when he stole Scott's power. She had been imbedded in Scott at the time, and Scott had been burnt to a pungent crisp.
"Bess?" he said hopefully. He knew that he did not have to speak aloud to communicate with her. He did so anyway. It kept him focused.
Bess said nothing.
He swished her through the air a few times, listening to her sing against the breeze. It was a poor attempt to wake her up. He expected it to fail. It did.
Clutching the little sword against his chest, he crie
d himself back to sleep.
* * *
Morning came. Harrison woke with the dawn and watched the sun rise over a perfectly straight horizon. The crater was indeed identical to the one he had seen before, with one exception. From New York City, he could still make out some detail beyond the island of Manhattan. He could see tree-covered hills in New Jersey. Here, there was nothing else. He couldn't even see the water from where he stood, as the lip of the crater was just above sea level.
The air was cool, but not as bad as it should have been. It was early winter where he was, the equivalent of December in New York. Today, he was lucking into some kind of Indian summer. It wouldn't last, he knew. Eventually, it would get colder, and then colder still, until he could no longer survive. It did not faze him. He would be dead from so many other causes by then that the cold would be a perfect finish.
He went for a walk.
There was absolutely nothing to see. For a while, he could not tell that he had moved from his original position. He had been hoping that the ground was not as smooth as it appeared at first. He had been hoping that it held at least one pixie-sized hiding place, somewhere. It turned out to be featureless.
Eventually, he became convinced that the horizon in front of him was marginally closer than the one behind him. He kept going, hoping to reach it before he collapsed from exhaustion. Or tedium. When the incline became noticeable, he got excited and started sprinting. He reached the edge of the crater out of breath, but inexplicably satisfied.
He had been hoping for some kind of view. He got one. The Indian Ocean spread out before him, as featureless as the ground on the island had been. He looked for sails. It was a pointless exercise. Even if he saw a boat, no one on it would ever see him. He did not see anything. He could not even be sure he was looking in the right direction.