by Daniel Ruth
“Yeah, you can see the portal over the buildings now,” she replied wearily. “It’s sad how the park is the least damaged part of the city.”
“Except for the crater.”
“That wasn’t even caused by the damn demon,” Mei literally growled.
“All roads lead to... wherever we are,” I offered philosophically.
“Very deep,” she said dryly. “We’re descending now.”
A minute later we had touched down. This close to the portal the lights of the floater flickered slightly, despite the shielding. Stepping out, it seemed that not much had changed. The line of turrets remained, moved slightly but not significantly. The glowing shield partially obscured the lowest part of the dimensional tear. I wasn’t even sure why they kept it up since it only rose up to a hundred feet. A mere fraction of the portal.
“Please let Conrad know we’re here and need to get in.”
“Now that you have your wrist terminal back you could call him yourself,” Mei reminded me. I glanced down at my wrist. It was true, I could do that now. I really hadn’t used it much since I got it back. It was a great research tool, or it had been, when the global net hadn’t been torn to shreds. Now it was more useful for taking selfies.
“Fine, give me a minute to set up the calling functions again,” I muttered back and started to go through the menus.
“You haven’t even set it up,” Mei shook her head in exasperation.
“Who am I going to call? Besides everyone I want to talk to either lives in my house or across the street.”
“I haven’t seen you go over to chat with Faramond,” Mei teased.
“Very funny. I meant Stella. She’s helping with some research. I am not sure Faramond knows how to do anything except grunt.”
“He’s actually a fairly pleasant person,” Mei replied.
I stared at her. “Really?”
She looked away. “Okay, he’s creepy as hell. But Stella is sweet... in that scattered way she has. I am sure she’d appreciate if you two got along.”
“He’s an ass.”
“So are you.”
“Fair enough,” I acknowledged.
After a moment of silence, she looked over at my terminal. “Oh, for goodness sake, the initial setup is going to take at least ten minutes. I’ll just message him. You probably don’t even have his contact information set up. I’ll send it over when you’re done.”
“It would be faster if we could use implants. I was surprised when they didn’t explode giving everyone a free lobotomy when the ley lines erupted.”
“You never mentioned that possibility,” Mei said, giving me the evil eye even as she typed on her own terminal.
“Well, the end of the world was supposed to be a last resort sort of thing. I didn’t expect it to actually happen,” I shrugged. We made worst-case plans but I didn’t think we would need them. I really had thought we had it under control. Oh well. “I never thought Aviophobia would do us in.”
“What?”
“Fear of flying.”
“Are you saying Stella...”
“Yeah, our elf caused the end of the world,” I snickered. “Or maybe just kept us from being hit by the satellite weapon. Either way, it’s funny.”
“I don’t think anyone is going to share your humor,” Mei had a strained look on her face. Maybe she was tired. “Please don’t tell Stella. She would be very upset.”
“Sure, no big deal.” I suppose some people might hold it against her. All of my people lived, so it didn’t matter too much to me. After all, none of us had known that an hour delay would make a difference.
“So about that exploding head issue,” Mei prompted me again.
“I think it was the aura,” I replied thoughtfully. “As weak as a normal human’s aura is, it does make an impression on the firmament. Just as a magic effect has to overcome that aura to affect a person, so did the ley line flood.”
“But that’s certainly not a sure thing, spells have a pretty decent chance of working on a human,” Mei said thoughtfully.
I looked at her oddly. She stated defensively, “I am several hundred years old. While hunting down Jin I studied as much as I could about magic. It wasn’t that hard to find information lying about until the Moscow Event foul up drove everything underground.”
“I think you’ll find out that if they ever get the dead sorted out and recorded,” I paused as the shield in front of us disappeared. “That there are likely a lot of dead bodies that are missing portions of their brains. I don’t know what kind of medical scans they gave people before they put them on ice.”
I moved forward into the crater containing the towering portal. Sure enough, the anchor rock was lying where I had dropped it. It was actually a rough half sphere. The dragon that had bound me in runes and created this anchor to trap me in this dimension, had apparently just inscribed it on a random piece of duracrete in an equally random alley. When I had reversed the anchor point for an instant, taking advantage of the energy flux as I initially crossed the portal’s threshold, it had torn itself from the ground and created the largest indestructible kinetic kill device in the history of this world. That I knew of.
So here I was, next to my prison. The parameters had expanded a bit, yet this chunk of rock still defined my boundary. As I slowly walked around the anchor I paused as I felt a slight tingle of familiar magics. Looking down at my feet I saw a fragment of bone embedded in the hard, fused ground. I reached down with a happy smile and pried a tooth the size of my forearm from the stone. On the sides were engraved the runes for truth and the hunt. The golden links I had attached to the tooth had melted along the surface and made it look halfway like a candle. I especially appreciated how it had filled in the runic etching. It looked more like art than a tool that Stella’s priests had cobbled together from the tooth that Faramond had torn out of my mouth.
I was in human form at the time and it had returned to its natural form when it had been broken loose. I may never completely forgive the brutish servant, despite having gotten a very nice artifact from it. From the feeling it was giving off, it had absorbed a significant amount of energy from the event and perhaps from the anchor stone’s impact.
Slapping the incisor into my palm, I glanced back and forth from the rock to the portal. I needed the ability to travel, yet I couldn’t leave the anchor. I also couldn’t very well carry a chunk of rock larger than I was around the world. On the other hand, runes were one of the strongest magics, closest to the firmament. That made anything it was bonded to was almost the embodiment of the concept itself. Could trying to enforce this concept to its limit benefit me?
I moved closer to the anchor rock and brought the point of the rune bound incisor into contact with the surface. I concentrated on the rune of truth and pushed my interpretation of the concept onto the boundary. I could feel the energies bound in place resist, unable to change. I had altered this before, from ‘bound’ to ‘anchor’ and back. I could feel I had the right tool to enforce my truth on reality. What was I missing?
The catalyst. I looked back at the portal. Passing through that monstrous rip in reality had caused the energies to be flexible enough for me to make some changes. I awkwardly reached down and picked up the anchor stone. It was heavy but honestly, it was bulkier than anything else.
“Are you going to try to take that back to the house,” Mei called out, puzzled. “Because there is no way it’s going to fit in the floater and it will take you hours to walk home with that.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said as I walked over to the portal. “While it would look cool in the back yard, it has more use here.”
I carefully placed it halfway through the portal, one side in our dimension, the other in the next dimension over. I was rewarded with the feeling of the energies of the anchor stone resonating. I moved to the middle point so I was also halfway through and felt my own rune become part of the fluctuating circuit. Placing the tooth onto the surface once more, I was rewarded
with a rush of energy as if a circuit had been completed.
Pushing the concept of Truth through the tooth, I once again tried to enforce my perspective on reality. The purest form of magic. Without extenuating circumstances, only the gods performed this type of magic. My tool moved as if with a will of its own and I found the point etching a familiar rune on the side of the stone, smaller, merely the size of my palm. ‘Anchor’. As it was inscribed, I felt feedback. Almost a double vision, as if reality was on the verge of rejecting my version of it. I firmed my will and the probabilities merged, becoming the one reality we live in.
A cracking sound resounded through the crater as a shard fractured off the large stone and fell to the ground. On its surface, freshly inscribed, was the rune for ‘anchor’. It vibrated with the same energy and concept as the larger stone. And the symbol on my chest.
“Didn’t you say that thing was indestructible,” Mei asked.
I bent down to pick up the shard and almost collapsed as exhaustion, mental and physical engulfed me. “It is.”
“It doesn’t look it,” she said skeptically.
“Despite what your eyes are telling you, this shard is the same thing as this rock,” I said as I tiredly patted the rock.
“Is this a Zen thing,” she asked me in a confused tone. “Because I spent a few years at a couple monasteries and the only thing I got out of them was frustration and some decent martial arts.”
I opened my mouth to explain in more detail and then stopped. “Yeah, let’s go with that. You could say this is my key to the universe.”
I couldn’t leave the large anchor stone in the portal. The fluctuations it caused, while useful, also made it uncertain that the smaller shard would have the effect I wanted. Also, if by some miracle the Primary portal somehow closed on an indestructible object that was mostly a concept, the local reality just might cease to exist. Since I had my house and friends in this area, I would definitely try to avoid that.
I sluggishly stood up. I was so drained. It had been a very long time since I had used pretty much all my mystic energies to power anything. I didn’t want to move, just curl up and go to sleep. Then I thought about my newest nightmare and did my best to divert my psychic energies into my body. Slowly a trickle of vigor filled me.
I half rolled and half dragged the anchor rock back to its previous position. It seemed a lot heavier suddenly. I had briefly considered creating more shards, but even in my mentally exhausted state, I realized it would be moronic to try. It was almost impossible to kill yourself through using too much power. Almost being the watchword. I would have to come back later after I had recovered.
Mei looked on silently, a frown on her face. Doubtless, she was worried, I don’t think she had ever seen me so bedraggled, except perhaps after Sebastian blew my finger off during his first assassination attempt. She moved to offer me an arm to lean on, but I waved her away with a faint grin. I felt lousy but I would be fine after a few hours of meditation.
“Are you sure exhausting yourself is wise when you are going to beard the dragon soon?” Okay, maybe not so silently.
“Trust me, there would be no bearding without this,” I said as I held up the shard. Hmm, a tooth in one hand and a stone shard in the other. I hesitantly tried to shove them into my belt. I took them back out after I felt my belt give way and my pants start to tear. Well, this was awkward.
“You have a purse or something?”
“Why would I have a purse?”
“Women always have purses, every movie I watch has demonstrated this,” I replied confidently.
“That’s very sexist,” she retorted.
“It’s your culture. If you don’t like it, change it,” I snarked back. “It certainly isn’t universal, I am going to meet a woman twice my size, an order magnitude stronger and a hundred times angrier than I am. I am betting she doesn’t have a purse. So do you have one?”
She pouted as she held out her hand. I handed her the shard and the tooth and tucked them away in a pouch under her jacket. “Fine. I’ll hold the for you until we get back.” She started forward and then kind of folded around the purse with a surprised ‘oof’. I looked on in surprise before I realized that the anchor shard couldn’t move when it wasn’t in contact with me.
“Change of plans. Hold onto the tooth. I’ll hold on to the shard.”
“You think? So the dragon is a female?”
“Yep.”
“Any chance of romance?”
“We nuked her home. I’ll be lucky if I can stop her from declaring war on us.”
By this time we had made it inside the floater and I was resting my eyes and trying not to fall asleep. “So assuming you got what you needed, when are we going?”
“Might as well go now, I can sleep on the way over. It’s a few hours flying, right?” I pursed my lips in thought. I knew there was something I was forgetting. Odd, I never forgot something unless I didn’t care or actually tried.
“I still can’t get used to seeing lights when flying over the Blight,” Mei mused as she looked out the window over the city.
I slapped myself on the forehead. “Never mind, we’ll have to go over to Paris tomorrow. I keep forgetting to go to Purgatory and find out what went wrong.”
“Purgatory? Oh, Sulayman. Why can’t I remember him for more than ten minutes,” she asked puzzled.
“Something went wrong. The wards Sulayman had were enough to keep the authorities from questioning the changes and to keep the peace between the shifters and the vampires. Now no one can remember them.”
“Beth did,” Mei pointed out.
“I meant anyone that has actually been exposed to his wards. Beth was never there. I think there still might be a faint city-wide effect, but I think the amnesia thing is for people that have actually been there.” I muttered to myself as I set up a reminder on my wrist terminal for later this evening. “I thought I was more resistant, but even I am forgetting about it if I don’t have someone bring it up.”
“Bring what up?” Mei asked, sounding muddled.
“Nothing,” I sighed. “I am going back to the house to rest, and then I am going for a nice walk later tonight. Don’t wait up.”
“Where are you going?”
“Apparently, nowhere you know.”
Chapter 8
My terminal rang that evening. I absently tapped it to silence it. I had just gotten several solid hours of research in. It may not sound like much, but when you are constantly being interrupted to deal with nuisances... Suffice to say, it was most satisfying. Still, I had set that for a reason.
A moment later I smacked my forehead, as I realized Sulayman’s ward had nailed me again. I put my etching tools away and stacked the ceramic plates back in their corner. I grabbed a few spare bowls with the nullification ward on it, a few small ceramic plates and stuffed them in a pouch. It worked fairly well against the demon lord’s self-destruction magic, so hopefully it would work on Sulayman’s enchantments.
You may wonder why I didn’t immediately place the bowl on my head and charge into Purgatory. While I admit I am not quite as vain as most humans, well, it’s a bowl. On your head. There was a reason Ryder wore a helmet over it.
I left the anchor shard on the table and hung the fang on its newly attached chain on my waist. It was barely noticeable under my jacket but it should help fortify me against lies and illusions. It was also a sharp pointy thing that I could stab things with. A useful all around tool.
As I walked down the hallway, I did a double take as I saw Stella, Mei, and Beth on the couch. I nervously glanced around to make sure I wasn’t caught in another dream. Beth was doing something of dubious legality on her projected workspace while the Stella and Mei were pointing to the map and talking animatedly. Okay, that seemed completely mundane. I gave them a brief wave and turned to go.
“Are you going somewhere?” Mei asked.
“Yes. Bye,” I called back over my shoulder.
“Wait a minute, the las
t time you disappeared Conrad was harassing me for hours.”
I barely slowed down. There was no way I was going to waste time explaining something she’d forget a minute later. “Good thing I have a terminal now. Call me if you need something.”
I hopped on the bike and was riding away before she could properly respond that that. I took a moment to place the terminal in ‘Do not disturb’ mode. Matt had actually mentioned that with the city in disarray there was actually looting and other crimes. He had expressed some concern about my bike’s safety. I wasn’t too worried because the gear ratio was so high that even a shifter or a vampire would likely only be able to go at a slow walking pace. I had also taken a few minutes to etch a ward on the frame. It did the opposite of negation ward. Where the one dispelled mystic energy, the one on the bike concentrated them. Humans are pretty uncomfortable around such things. I understand it feels like they are being watched. By Freddy Kreuger.
I was whistling quietly to myself as I peddled. The world was different. Without the massive advertisement holograms lit above the city, the streets were almost dark except for the military ships flying overhead. Even the little traffic of the daytime was gone and the most activity I saw was a pack of jaguars chasing after a stray dinosaur. Likely a pack of shifters. That would be odd otherwise.
I was finally approaching Purgatory. It was ironic. The location was originally the Blight. A lawless place where gangs, homeless, anarchists and the mentally ill roamed. Sulayman had bought up the land and within weeks transformed it into a resort. Mostly for the supernatural. Now the area around it was dark, no electricity, no traffic. Completely dead.
“Finally, you arrive,” hissed a voice from the alley ahead. The modest clairvoyance I possessed chose this moment to warn me of danger. Thank you, useless psionic power.
Out of the alley sauntered a haggard, pale man in rags. For a moment I thought I was dealing with Baron Samedi and his zombies. Then I realized it was a vampire. Rather than the well-dressed almost effeminate vampires that had been remade into the image of gentlemen, this man looked almost diseased. Fangs jutted from his mouth and bloodshot eyes stared at me hungrily.