The giant backed off a step, but then he took his turn and swung with a tight but broad punch that barely grazed Istari. That was still enough to send him stumbling back. The two locked eyes again and charged.
I took advantage of the fact that neither was paying me the slightest bit of attention and I ran toward the equipment at the center of the room.
The segmented silver arms continued to move in rhythmic fashion, low above the table, blinding beams of hard light flashing from their tips—and now I could see what they were engaged in cutting.
It had once been human; of that much I was fairly certain. Given its current state, though, I couldn’t tell much beyond that. Not even race or gender.
I felt as though I were going to throw up. I looked away swiftly, even as the smell washed over me. What were they doing here, in this facility? I couldn’t begin to imagine, but my animosity toward the big gray alien had just magnified itself by a factor of a hundred at least. Probably more like a thousand.
Turning back the other way, I saw the giant had Istari in a sort of stranglehold, and appeared on the verge of ripping his head off. Frantically I looked around for a weapon; something that could possibly be effective against a creature of that size.
Nothing.
Except, perhaps...
I leapt onto the table, doing my best to ignore the grisly evidence that lay upon it, and grasped the nearest silver arm. It didn’t want to be redirected from its programmed course and I had to strain mightily but after a couple of seconds I managed to angle it upwards. The beam shot wildly across the inside of the dome and struck the far wall, scoring it black. The robotic appendage fought me like a wild fire hose but I wrapped both of my own arms tightly around it and directed the shimmering orange beam over and down, over and down...
The gray giant bellowed incoherent rage as the hard light sliced into his left shoulder. I ignored him and waved the beam into him again. He screamed and released Istari; I was relieved to see that my companion’s head was still attached, though he slumped forward and lay still.
The giant scrambled to his feet and came at me, murder in his eyes. I’d forgotten how quick the big monster was, because it never looked like he was moving very fast. But he ate up the distance between us in an instant, and the only thing that saved me was managing to get the robot arm pointed back at him. Its beam gouged him in the abdomen and he stumbled to a halt. As he looked down at it, the beam punched all the way through and erupted out his back. He looked back up at me then and bellowed again.
I had no sympathy for him—none before, and certainly not after having seen what lay on the table at my feet. Plus I feared he could still easily kill me.
He charged again.
I waved the beam in and sheared off his left arm just above the elbow.
This seemed to take him aback. He halted and stared at the smoking arm where it lay on the floor. Then he looked up at me, dumbfounded.
I waited to see what he would do next. I figured he’d come at me one more time. He seemed a pretty determined sort.
He didn’t disappoint me.
He charged one more time. I brought the beam up and sliced into his right leg. He stumbled, bellowing again, and dropped to the floor as the leg sheared off inches below the knee. There was little blood from any of his horrific wounds; the beam cauterized as it cut.
Surely that would do it. I released the arm—it continued to fire away— and hopped down from the table. The giant lay on his stomach, mumbling words in a language I couldn’t understand. As I neared him, gazing down at what was left of his massive form with a mixture of continued outrage and disgust, he contracted inwards, into a ball. I frowned at this. What was he doing?
He sprang. How he accomplished this, I could not tell you. He crossed the space between us like a snake striking and his remaining hand closed about my ankle before I could react. He yanked me down and then his bulk lay upon me, crushing me. I stared up into black eyes filled with cruel hate, and I cursed myself for my foolishness in approaching him before I’d finished him off—before I’d made him more closely resemble the thing on the table.
Holding me down with the weight of his body, his good arm came up, fist poised to smash down into my face. I grimaced as he screamed words in an alien tongue.
And then there came a bright orange flash and his head separated from his shoulders and tumbled away.
The big body slumped forward, lifeless and still and completely covering me.
I couldn’t breathe. I mean, I was unexpectedly still alive and that was all well and good, but I had no time to consider what had happened or how. I was being crushed to death and suffocated.
Managing to draw one of my knees toward my body, I kicked upward and kept pushing, and after a few seconds of this I’d managed to move the gray bulk just enough that I could draw a shallow breath. I gasped and drew up the other leg and shoved as hard as I could with both. Lord, but he was heavy—and now nothing but dead weight. Absurdly at that moment I wanted to laugh at the thought that he’d have been even heavier if I hadn’t just sliced a few pieces off of him. But I couldn’t draw in enough air to attempt such a thing. So I kept pushing.
Then help arrived. Someone was pulling at him from behind. Very quickly my upper half was uncovered as the giant’s bulk slid down, and then it was a matter of extracting my lower half. Seconds later I’d done it and lay on my back, staring up at the dome above me and breathing as if I’d just run three marathons, back-to-back.
A tall, slender form moved into my field of view and looked down at me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No,” Istari replied. “Thank you.” He held something aloft for me to see. The gray giant’s head. “You continue to surprise me, human.”
I stared at the gruesome item he was clutching like a prize and shook my head, laughing almost maniacally. “The feeling is mutual, I assure you,” I told him.
+ + +
He wasn’t seriously...
Yes. Yes, he was.
Istari had been rummaging around inside the banks of electronic equipment that half-surrounded the surgical table for several minutes, while I kept the giant’s headless corpse company. Now, as I looked on, he pulled a sheaf of wiring loose from one of the cabinets and spooled it out until he reached the severed head, which he’d set upright on the floor nearby. Carefully he separated the bundle of wires and then, after studying them very briefly, he began plugging them into the flesh of the head in various spots.
“Can I ask what you think you’re doing?” I managed, feeling queasy all over again. He of course ignored me.
Once he’d inserted about a half-dozen of the stripped ends of the wires into the head, he moved around to stand directly in front of it. He stood there, stock still, for several seconds before lowering himself to the floor and sitting lotus style, staring back at it. Slowly he closed his eyes and he began to mumble strange words in an alien tongue.
“You don’t seriously expect to be able to communicate with—” I began.
“Silence,” he barked, not opening his eyes or otherwise moving.
Anger filled me but I restrained myself. Idly I wished I possessed a sword; likely I would have employed it at that moment to render him in a similar state to the giant. So perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t have one.
Several seconds passed and my annoyance grew. Finally I opened my mouth to speak—but, even as I did, sparks erupted from the back of the big gray head where the leads penetrated the gray flesh.
Istari’s eyes snapped open.
A second later, so did the giant’s.
I might have jumped a good half-meter off the ground. It was extremely unsettling.
Istari spoke up louder now and, though he continued to speak in a language I couldn’t understand, it rapidly became clear that he was directing a stream of questions at his former associate. The head merely stared back at him silently, sullenly at first, and so the questioning became louder, more intense.
&nb
sp; I realized then that up until that moment he hadn’t actually been speaking out loud to the head. He’d been using his silent mental speech, and apparently its intensity was so great as to enable me to hear it as well, as a sort of bleed-over. But now he was actually talking, his mouth working furiously as he enunciated the alien speech.
My head throbbing, I moved back a step or two.
Istari’s eyes were wide and angry now and he practically barked at the head. As he spoke, I noticed an electricity in the air and the hair on my arms stood up. The temperature in the room dropped and frost formed on the floor around us, spider-webbing its way toward me. My breath was a white cloud that shrouded my face.
The giant’s features twisted with what looked like scarcely-contained rage. But—what could he do against such indignity? He was merely a head.
The gray lips parted and he spoke. No actual words came forth, but I could hear him nonetheless in my mind. His voice as I perceived it was deep, rumbling and though I understood not a syllable of it, I could tell that it was shot through with hate.
I will spare you some of the grisly details, but you must know the gist of how this transpired. The interrogation went on for several minutes more. Each time the giant spoke, sparks shot out from the points of contact with the wires Istari had implanted in the back of the gray cranium. Flames leapt to life and began to spread over the head’s surface. The eyes melted from the inside and little orange tongues of flame danced in the empty sockets. When the mouth opened, it was a glimpse into hell. By the end, Istari was demanding answers from a blazing, blackened, misshapen mass. It was all quite horrific.
I stood between them, my eyes flicking back and forth from the flaming skull to the seated alien. I couldn’t decide which of them disturbed me more.
Istari blinked and looked up at me, as though coming out of a trance. Slowly he rose and I helped him fully to his feet.
“Did you learn anything useful?” I asked. There were other things I wanted to ask of my strange companion but I held them back for now.
He allowed that very faint smile of his to reappear briefly on his lips, and he chuckled softly. “Oh yes,” he said, his voice very soft, very faint, to the point that I had to lean in to make out what he was saying. “Most of it was useless. Things I already knew. And of course the babbling, the pain—as was to be expected.”
A sour look crossed my face at this.
“But, toward the end,” Istari went on, “he could not hold back the singular item I most sought.”
“That being...?”
“The destination of Udasi the Judge, after he left this place. Udasi, my erstwhile associate among the Immortals.” He chuckled again, louder. “Udasi, who carries with him the sword.”
SIX
“Not again,” I insisted. “No. We need help before we go blindly charging off across the galaxy again.”
We were mounting our horses on the narrow cliff outside the dome. Istari had walked up to each, spoken a few alien words and snapped his fingers, and they’d come back to full wakefulness as though nothing had happened. I’d briefly examined Comet and he’d seemed none the worse for the experience. So I climbed aboard and we started off behind Istari yet again.
“Are you listening to me?” I called, when it became apparent that my pale, slender companion was not.
“I am not certain you have understood what has transpired thus far,” Istari offered by way of reply. “As before, time is of the essence. Everything that transpired here, everything we endured and all that we accomplished means nothing if we do not take advantage of this actionable intelligence.”
“This ‘actionable intelligence’ seems to me to be giving us a good place to go to get killed,” I replied. “We were extremely fortunate to survive against our big gray friend back there. Now you want to push our luck?” I shook my head. “We can’t do this alone.”
“We can and we will,” Istari said. “The entire purpose of fighting him was to interrogate him and gain the information I now possess.” He looked back at me, his voice rising for the first time since I’d first encountered him. “Would you simply walk away from our mission now?”
“I don’t want to walk away from it, but I’d like to feel that we have a chance against whomever or whatever we have to face next.”
“We will have a chance,” he said after a moment’s pause. His tone softened back to the way it had been up until now. “I have learned where Udasi the Judge has gone with the sword. I know what he is doing there. And I know how to ambush him. The risk to each of us is miniscule.”
I didn’t reply to that but I may have snorted derisively under my breath. I didn’t trust this guy in the slightest. And “our mission” as he called it was really only his mission. My only interest in it was doing my part in our alliance—no, that sounded too friendly; call it a mutual assistance pact, at best—and in helping him acquire an item he had repeatedly assured me would be of tremendous value in completing my mission afterward.
That was, of course, if I still lived at the completion of his mission.
The fog and the lights returned as our horses carried us along across the barren landscape. We moved at first along the cliff, parallel to the wall of steeply-sloped mountain on our right and the drop to the sea on our left. Soon, though, both cliff face and drop vanished into the mists. Despite all rational thoughts to the contrary, I somehow suspected—knew—that neither was there any longer. We were, in every sense of the word, elsewhere.
The fog billowed before us now and swirled madly in our wake. Horizontal forks of lighting flared along on either side as the tunnel effect closed around us. Visibility dropped to only a few meters ahead. A rainbow swirl cascaded over, through and past us, to the point that I was sure I could not just see and feel but smell and taste the colors. This was the third journey I’d made through this strange between-space in the past couple of hours and it was the worst of the lot. I began to question my very sanity.
I also wondered, for at least the third time, how he was able to do this.
Something happened then that I hadn’t expected: the ground beneath us rose slowly into a gentle incline. We were moving uphill. The horses slowed a bit as the slope increased. Istari vanished ahead in the mist. A fear of becoming lost forever here in this realm of oblivion gripped my insides. I started to encourage Comet to pick up the pace—though I could scarcely complain, given how well and how quickly he had adapted to such bizarre surroundings and taken them all in stride—when Istari reappeared directly before us. He had come to a stop. I reined Comet in and called out, “What is it?”
“We have arrived,” my pale companion announced.
I turned in the saddle, regarding the fog. The air was strangely dry, not humid as one might have expected. This was not water vapor, I surmised. It represented something else entirely. “Arrived where?” I asked.
“Where we need to be,” he said. He leapt from the saddle and took his black horse’s reins in hand. I climbed down and did the same with Comet. Together we led the horses very slowly a short distance more in the direction we’d been traveling, and within seconds the clouds parted and revealed a small, shallow, bowl-shaped valley or arroyo. The barren rock surface of the cliff had been replaced by short, rough grass the color of harvested wheat. At the center of the nearly circular open area stood a single tree; it looked to be an ancient oak, currently bereft of leaves. Its spindly, skeletal limbs reached out in every direction. The air around us was cool and smelled of autumn.
Istari regarded the old tree and nodded. “This is the marker,” he said. “This is the place.”
“What place?”
The pale alien looked at me, impatience clear on his face. “The place where our target should emerge. He has in all likelihood traveled into a pocket universe and is using the sword to siphon cosmic energies from a still-higher plane. When he emerges, he will be somewhat disoriented and vulnerable.”
“Oh?”
“Or he should be, at least.”
“So—what do we do now?” I asked, leading Comet off to the side and holding the reins firmly so he wouldn’t wander into the fog. “We just wait for him?”
“We wait,” Istari said.
Reluctantly I nodded. I gazed out at the little circle we occupied, surrounded by walls of opaque mist, and I sighed.
Istari performed the hypnosis trick on our horses again and then moved to stand with his back against the trunk of the tree, facing outward. He gestured. “Take the other side,” he told me, an unusual sense of urgency in his tone. “Stand as I am standing. Keep your eyes open.”
“For what?”
“For a doorway,” he said. “It will be obvious. You will have no doubt if you see it.”
I thought—I was absolutely certain—that he was speaking metaphorically.
Of course, he wasn’t.
We hadn’t been standing there more than four or five minutes, on either side of the tree and with me about to ask why we had been in such of a hurry to get here if we were just going to stand against a tree and contemplate the bleak vista, when something shimmered into view directly before me. Istari had been right—there was absolutely no mistaking what it was.
It was a door. An actual, honest-to-goodness, free-standing door, wooden and ancient-looking and standing right there in the grove, halfway between the tree and the fog, where before there had been nothing but dead grass.
I stared at it incredulously for probably the space of two heartbeats. Then I shouted, “Door!”
Istari was around the tree and at my side in an instant. A second later he’d moved to where the door stood, positioning himself just to one side of it. “Do not move,” he told me.
I was starting to ask him exactly what he had in mind, when the door opened.
It was surreal. Not that all the other things I’d experienced since leaving the palace on Victoria hadn’t been, but this was perhaps the most surreal thing of all. The door swung on invisible hinges and revealed a rectangular opening—an opening in space, in reality. For a couple of seconds I was looking through the passage into another world, or another universe. My mouth opened and closed but words failed me. I gaped.
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