“You seem nervous,” he said.
“I am.”
“Why?”
“So far as I know, you’ve never had anyone killed unless it pretty god damned necessary.”
“That’s why you’re nervous?”
“No, I’m nervous because there’s always a first time.”
“This won’t be it.”
“I’m glad to hear you say so.”
“And I hope it won’t be necessary.”
“Me too.”
“Although death isn’t as scary for you as it is for the rest of us.”
“Death is pretty scary for us. Figure there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll be the one who comes back out of stub. That means there’s a fifty-fifty chance you won’t.”
“Better than a hundred percent chance.”
“Yes,” I said.
“In your case, it has to be better than fifty-fifty, or we’ll need to rewrite the laws of probability. That would be how many coin-flips in a row?”
“I like talking to someone who knows why it’s called a coin-flip.”
“Yeah, me too,” he said.
“Remember what you told me about the universe being a little less screwed up because of us?”
“Yeah.”
“You too.”
“What’s your point?”
“We’re sort of alike, Frank. When the opportunity comes up, we use the resources we have to fix things a little, here and there, don’t we? And sometimes it means we have to throw our weight around, just a bit.”
“I’m still waiting for your point.”
“And we hate it when someone does that to us. You use money, I use oxytocin, but we still push when we need to, and we hate being pushed.”
“How about if you just say what’s on your mind?”
“Why did you bring me here, Frank?”
“I told you. I want to recreate the Earth of three thousand years ago.”
“Yeah, only I don’t believe you.”
“I haven’t lied to you, Phil.”
“I don’t think you’re lying. I think you believe what you told me.”
“I think I’d know.”
“That’s sort of the issue. What made you want to rebuild the Earth?”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“When we meddle with someone, if we do it right, the Focus never knows he’s been meddled with. We just change his actions—subtly—and push him a bit. He feels like a free agent. And he is a free agent—it’s just that he’s a free agent who’s a little more inclined to do the right thing.”
“Keep talking.”
“So, when did you get the idea to do this?”
“Are you saying one of you did this to me? Meddled with me?”
“No, not one of us. When did you get the idea?”
He stood there and looked at me for what seemed like a long time, and I was scared. “You said you wouldn’t—”
“I meant it. I’m not. I won’t.” Now I was well and truly into the scared zone. I said, “Now, when did you get the idea to recreate the Earth?”
He nodded slowly, with the look of a man ready to accept an unpleasant truth—or maybe of someone who’d had to accept unpleasant truths before. “All right,” he said. “Let me think.”
The sun was going down, splashing red on the rocks behind him, making the sky orange in the west; the scent of pine-needles came with a breeze that should have been chilly but wasn’t.
“It was a few years ago,” he said at last. “I was looking at pictures from old Earth, and I thought about how we’d screwed the place up before we managed to get off it, and how I’d love to see what it would have been like if we hadn’t.”
“And it suddenly came to you to try it out, to learn more.”
“Yes.”
“And to enlist me to help.”
“Yes.”
“So you already knew about me, about us.”
He frowned. “I guess I. . . I don’t. . . I must have.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t understand—”
“We aren’t the only ones who can meddle, Frank.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” although the look on his face suggested that, maybe, he was starting to figure it out, and that he didn’t like it any more than I did.
“Not sure, or don’t want to believe it?”
“Both.”
“We’re standing at a power pull, Frank. You know what you can do here.”
“What is this about, Phil?”
“Ask the god, he set the whole thing up.”
“He can’t do that. He can’t do anything unless I—”
It’s just like making a scary play in poker: once you’re committed, you’re too busy to be scared. I ploughed on. “Remember Mike Shandon and Belion, Frank?”
“I’m not likely to forget.”
“The god jumped from the Pei’an to the man, and did it without the Pei’an even being consulted.”
“Special circumstances.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you imagine Shimbo wants?”
“Immortality. The Garden. Me.”
“I don’t believe—”
“You don’t want to believe, Frank. You’ve never been sure how much is you and how much is the god. He’s made you angry, proud, frightened; but you’ve always wondered if he was real. Well, he’s real, Frank, and he has his own agenda. He wants to leave you, Frank. He wants me, for my access to the Garden, for my lifetimes of past and future.”
He was quiet for a long time after that. Then he said, “You know, Phil, even if you’re right, I’m not sure I’d mind so much.”
“Maybe, but I can’t let that happen.”
“That’s why you picked the flowers?”
“Yeah, to tell him that.”
“You think he’ll listen to you? I haven’t had much luck getting him to listen to me.”
“No, I don’t figure he’s going to listen. But I’m not just going to wait around. One day you’ll ask me to take a walk, and we’ll pass near a power-pull, and Shimbo will manifest, and then he’ll be gone from you and he’ll be with me. I’m not going to wait for that to happen.”
He shook his head, standing next to me. We both watched the sunset. “Did it occur to you to just tell me you wanted to go?”
“I understand that every time you try to leave the world, the world doesn’t want to let you. I have an idea that, mysteriously, it wouldn’t want to let me, either.”
“You may be right. But if what you say is true, you’re an idiot to piss him off.”
“Maybe.”
“You have a plan,” he stated.
“Maybe.”
He shook his head. “You aren’t the type to just let things happen to you. Any more than I am.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Any more than you are.”
I turned away from the sunset, and faced him fully. “It isn’t going to work, Shimbo. I don’t want you.”
Sandow looked different, though at that moment, I don’t think I could have explained how. More focused, maybe? Something deeper behind his eyes?
“I know what you want, Shrugger of Thunders: you want the Garden; you want forty thousand years of accumulated knowledge and to know that if your host dies you’ll go on. But you can’t have it; I’m sorry.
“If you inhabit me against my will, I swear by all the good I’ve ever done, I’ll never go near a power pull. You will never manifest, and when this body dies, the others will keep me in stub for a hundred years if they have to, to make sure I’m gone. To make sure you’re gone. I promise this, Shimbo. We don’t want you.”
I was concentrating so fully on Sandow’s face, I barely noticed the storm-clouds gathering over our heads.
Sandow tried to speak—tried, but then he was gone, and there was another in his place. Whatever my opinion of psychic ability, one thing I know for sure is that I don’t have any. So what I saw in Sandow I saw with my eyes. He fill
ed his body more; he took in more air, and spread out, from his feet, into the ground below us. I’m sure that if I’d been able to measure him just then, he’d have been the same height he was five minutes before; but he was taller; man-sized and yet somehow bigger. His arm was raised, and I knew—knew that when it came down, I would be dead. I hoped I’d only be stubbed, back in the Garden, waiting to start over; but the man before me was a god, whatever that might mean, so who knew what he could do?
The rain came down, the thunder roared, the ground shook; it was hard to stay upright. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Was Sandow in there at all, any more? Was there enough of him left to give me the ten or fifteen seconds I needed?
There was a crack of thunder, and the rain came down in torrents. Sandow’s—or, rather, Shimbo’s—eyes fell upon me, and I understood that I was about as significant as a gnat that was annoying him.
If I managed to live through this, it was going to produce one of the most interesting seeds in the Garden.
And he hesitated; and that was Sandow, inside the god. Was it force, or pleading? Control, or reason? I had no way of knowing. But now I had my few seconds. Just me and Shimbo.
I pulled the infocard from my pocket, flicked it to life, and held it out, letting it show him what in my head I still called a slide show—3D pictures of world after world, hanging in space. World after world that he would know.
“You aren’t simply a beast, you know,” I told him. And flicked the infopod again; the soft, low rumble of chanting in Pe’ian occurred, just barely audible.
I made myself hold his eyes—ancient, powerful, terrifying eyes. I wanted to sink into the ground. Of course, with the way everything around me was shaking, that was a possibility in a more literal sense than I cared for.
“You create as well as destroy. I know of your wrath, and I know the worlds you have helped to build. You can be either. The man who holds you is human, and he, too, creates as well as destroys. So do I. Is it so much to ask that he, and I, be permitted to live out our lives? Shimbo of Darktree Tower, do you need to control so much that you spread unhappiness? Is that who you wish to be, how you wish to be remembered by all who come after? I am asking you to consider, to think about it.”
And still, he hesitated. He hadn’t yet destroyed me, and that was something. But his hand was still raised; all he needed to do was lower it, and I’d be no more. So I looked up at the most powerful being I had ever heard of, much less encountered, and said, “One other thing, before you toast me.” And, just like a hippie from a millennium ago, I stuck a handful of flowers in his face.
Take that, I thought.
“You are more than a servant,” I said. “Can you be less than a master?”
He stood there, arm upraised, inhaling the scent of a flower sacred to him, seeing his worlds, hearing his chant; and I waited.
And something changed, and it was Francis Sandow who stood before me once again. The rain slowed, slowed, and stopped; and above me the clouds broke up. Sandow looked at me. Before he could speak, I said, “I promised not to meddle with you; I didn’t say anything about him.”
“You’d have made a good lawyer,” he told me.
“Ouch,” I explained.
We stood in the darkening dark, there, in the hand-crafted world, and I breathed sweet air, glad that I was still able to, and that it was still me doing it. He was quiet, either because he sensed that I needed some time, or else because he needed some, too.
Night came to Sandow’s World.
“Let’s go back to the house,” he said at last. “Want to walk? I can send for a craft.”
“Walking is fine.”
“I’ll have the David Bowie come for you tomorrow.”
“All right. You saved me, you know.”
“After putting you in a position to be killed. Or worse.”
I shrugged. “Are you still going to build that world?”
“Yeah, I am. At this point, I kind of need to.”
I chuckled. “Redemption?”
He shook his head. “Not funny.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Phil, I’m sorry—”
“Forget it.”
“Maybe I will. But you won’t. Ever. I don’t envy you that.”
“Then have your chef cook me something I won’t want to forget.”
“I’ll do that,” he said.
And he did.
Keeper of the Keys
by Kelly McCullough
I felt the dragon coming before I saw him, a whirling and curling in the clouds at the very limits of my perceptions. Moonbird, greatest of Rondoval’s dragons, and astride his scaly neck, the castle’s long absent master. My master, Pol Detson.
He had his guitar in his hands and a song to speed the journey on his lips, though his voice sounded cracked and tired rather than sweet as it usually did. It had been nearly three years since I’d seen him last—my much missed accursed master. Far longer than he’d expected to take unlocking the secrets of the Keys.
I would have sought him out before now, but he had commanded me to remain behind, and defend Rondoval castle against a possible assault by the greatest of the madwands, Henry Spier. He had also charged me to do what I could to continue the renovations he’d begun after his return from the technological mirror world where he’d grown up.
I disapproved of that—the banishment, not his return. The place for the master of Rondoval was here, where the castle’s curse could keep a proper eye on him. But the family politics of my accursed master’s line were. . .complex, full of strife. It was Pol’s grandfather, Mor, who had sent him into exile as a baby, only to bring him back again as a young man. The banishment had followed a sorcerous duel in which Mor killed Det, who was Pol’s father and Mor’s own son.
Then, it had been too dangerous to allow the young Pol to live in the world of Rondoval. Later, it had been too dangerous to have him anywhere else. At least, that’s how I understand things to have happened. I was physically present at the duel, but not yet in any shape to pay attention to the thing, having only just been summoned into the world myself. Summoned? Perhaps it were better to say created, or even cast, for I am as much a spell as anything, the—
“Belphanior, come to me. I need you.”
The words were little more than a whisper, but coming from Pol’s lips I would have heard them half a world away, for I was the curse of Rondoval and I had been created expressly to serve or avenge her masters as they needed me. I spun myself up into a tower of crystalline light and raced to meet him, finally freed from my long confinement at the castle.
“What is your wish, oh accursed master?” I asked as I manifested myself in the air before him.
“You’ve been consorting with demons again, haven’t you?” asked Pol.
I had cause then to be glad that I couldn’t blush, for he was right. I liked demons, being one myself, though very new to the game.
“I can always tell when you’ve been chatting with the one you met at the gathering at Belken by the way your diction goes all grandiose,” he continued. “But that’s neither here nor there. I need you to take Mouseglove ahead to the castle for me, and see that you hold the enchantments in place, he’s badly hurt and I haven’t the strength to keep them there much longer.”
It was only as he mentioned the little thief that I registered Mouseglove’s presence, so focused had I been on the return of Rondoval’s master. Pol’s eyes glowed for a moment and a thick rope of amber light detached itself from the dragon-shaped birthmark on his forearm, drifting over to attach itself to me. The other end was connected to a network of multicolored strands that wrapped cocoon-like around Mouseglove, and I felt a heavy drain on my resources as I took over the maintenance of the spell and lifted the thief from Moonbird’s back.
“I’ll be along as soon as I’ve seen to things in the caves, but only briefly,” Pol continued. “I need to act on what I’ve learned and, quickly. If it weren’t for M
ouseglove I’d have gone straight on to Avinconet, but I can’t trust him to Merson’s care, or my brother’s. So I have to attempt things out of order.”
As I carried Mouseglove down to the castle, I studied the spell that bound him. It was a beautifully crafted bit of magic, worthy of Det himself, or maybe even old Mor—far beyond what Pol could have managed the last time I’d seen him. That was shortly after the confrontation with Henry Spier at Avinconet. It pleased me that Pol was continuing to grow so rapidly in his spellcrafting, though it did not surprise me.
He was a madwand, from a long line of madwands, natural sorcerers all, save only his older brother. Laric had been ruined by Ryle Merson, Det’s onetime partner and later nemesis. And now an uneasy ally of my master—more of those complex family politics. The formal training Merson had inflicted on Laric had cut him off from the dragon blood that Mor’s great great grandfather had brought into the line along with the dragon-form birthmark that graced the right arm of every child of the house.
Though Det had made me, I couldn’t conscience what he had done to his older son by giving him to Merson as a hostage. Laric’s loss of his madwand’s soul was a goodly part of why I chose to recognize Pol as the true heir to Rondoval and my master over his older brother’s claim.
*
Pol sagged in the saddle as he watched Belphanior bear the wounded thief away, only too glad of the battle straps that held him in place.
Moonbird canted his head to one side, looking back at Pol worriedly. Are you all right back there?
I’m fine, old friend, just very tired. Pol cased his guitar and slid it into the pocket dimension where he kept his most precious possessions. Very, very tired.
Pol wanted nothing more than to land at Rondoval and fall into his chambers for a week’s sleep. But as he had backtracked his father’s steps across the eastern continent, he had felt the presence of Spier more than once as both sought to discover the secrets of the Keys. It was a deadly race with knowledge and power as the prize.
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 4