Reviled

by Dean C. Moore

  Once the beast had access to Lar’s mind and Soren’s ability for writing algorithms and for programming languages for controlling his nanites, the beast could feed the fire, translating more and more of the alien language, faster and faster.

  Not much for speech, the beast fed the sounds to Soren and let him speak the words of power. The various Sorens that had been recalled, collapsed into the master copy, once again flew out of him, returning to battle the master wizards across the city.

  And as for the dragon morph, Kang, the second he caught on to what was going on he morphed again into a dragon—only this time one so small Soren could not track him with his naked eye. Soren tapped his nanite staff on the ground, and sent a tuft of nanites after the fleeing dragon. Through the nanites’ hive mind, Soren could see the tiny dragon, looking over its shoulder at its microscopic, monstrous stalkers, like an army of black alien spaceships, all firing laser weapons at him.

  The dragon morph continued morphing into smaller and smaller dragons that the nanites could not chase after, until he’d slipped through Einsteinian space-time via a quantum wormhole, to pop out on the other side of the planet, no doubt.

  Well, those guys hadn’t lasted thousands of years without a few tricks up their sleeves. No doubt Kang had a lot more magic at his disposal that he wasn’t ready to show Soren this day. He’d save those for when there was no escape.

  By the time the beast had surrendered his tunnel vision caused by the fury welling up in him at the dragon morph, Kang, both for what he’d done to the beast and for how he’d escaped, the other dragon morphs were gone, making use of the blind spot to mask their getaway, like any good stage magician. They’d probably learned to work in those moments of distraction even as apprentice wizards so many thousands of years ago.

  The beast was more furious than ever; he intuited that the dragon morphs had more to teach him when it came to mastering the cabbalistic nanites and the true source of their power. Maybe it was for that reason that the dragon morphs had fled, not wanting any part of that metamorphosis.

  The beast was so incensed that he was pushing Soren out again; they were losing the balance. The beast swirled about himself, wielding the cane as a laser weapon, slicing the buildings in half, and with his next rotation, telekinetically cleaving off the top halves and tossing them into that cherished lake the rich people had built.

  Soren could see, by way of the beast’s second sight, the residents living in the top halves of the buildings contemplating the house boats their homes had been turned into. The junior wizards patrolling the rooftops that had been taking in the show earlier, in hopes of picking up a few pointers, turned themselves to floating those houseboats and making sure the buildings would not sink to the bottom.

  This scaled down “Venice” with its boat canals between the buildings, already being marveled at by the yachters and boaters out with their small ships on the lake, was suddenly highly prized, and drawing in more tourists. Little did those tourists know, the werewolves and vamps inside Nouveau Venice were only too happy to prey on them. The junior wizards had already pooled their energies to throw a dome over the small city within a city that would also filter out the sun enough during the day like a polarizing lens so the creatures of the night could patrol twenty-four/seven to make up for the reduced food supply.

  Soren wanted to believe it was his quick thinking that had made something positive out of something so ugly as the beast’s rage, but he couldn’t be sure. By then, he was already receding into the background.

  When Soren’s mind had retreated from “Venice 2” it was not back into that strange, dreamlike space that had become a form of perpetual banishment. He found himself instead back in the moment where the beast was standing with the cane after the dragon morphs had eluded him. Why?

  Of course, the beast had reverted back to plan B, gaining wisdom from multiplying himself across the city of Syracuse so he could take on multiple wizards at once. And for that he needed Soren. They needed to continue to work together to figure out how to grow their power, moreover, so the day would come when he could engage an entire world full of wizards this way. Such power! Just thinking about it intoxicated the beast, pushing out the anger of the recent defeat.

  But something shattered the union of Soren and the beast yet again.

  The breakup was worse than ever. Soren shrieked with pain, his body transmitting and amplifying the ear-splitting sound coming from his lungs as if it were built to do little else. Every cell inside him was vibrating so violently that they were all on the verge of erupting.

  And then the pain and the threat were gone, because the link had been severed.

  An attack from Augustus. Soren recognized the wizard’s energy imprint even if the beast did not, because they’d tangled before.

  What new tricks are you up to, my old friend? Soren thought. What are you using to keep the brute and I apart?

  ***

  Augustus had been schooled by Bingwen, when last in Chinatown, in cabbalistic magic. Bingwen had never considered him much more than a remedial student in this area, and had ceased instructing him when he lost all patience.

  All the same…. Desperate times…. Nothing else was stopping Soren; nothing else even seemed to be slowing him down much.

  With both hands outstretched in front of him and creating a funnel of magic to carry the words directly to Soren’s ears, Augustus spoke, using the most ancient of tongues.

  Soren was shrieking in agony. Augustus could hear it from here, the notes propelled by the force of the beast’s lungs, not Soren’s.

  Augustus could do little more, as he’d never made it past this most basic of prayers. But he could do one last thing. He set the mantra to autoplay whenever and wherever Soren emerged and was one with the beast.

  And the very last thing Augustus did was smile. The magic had worked like a charm.

  ***

  Soren wracked his brain for the meaning of the words Augustus had been uttering that had caused him to separate from the beast. But they had hardly been all that discernible over his own outcries. The beast, on the other hand, had captured every word; nothing was getting past his five senses. The utterances had felt all-too familiar to him. There was a clue in that, but what?

  Back at Victor’s lab….

  The scientists were decoding the scripts from the cypher room in one of the temples unearthed in Antarctica.

  Lar and Ramon had managed to create a series of oscillation waves that disturbed the hell out of the beast when they were in that cypher room. The instant they refined the signal by cleaning up the picture-writing, the vibrations had become so violent it had forced both Soren and the beast out of the pyramid.

  Of course.

  With the aid of the beast’s fine hearing, Soren had taken in every word Lar and Ramon had exchanged in that room, even if Soren couldn’t do much with the information at the time, not with the beast in control. The beast was learning far too slowly to trust Soren and to share power equally, and so that kept Soren from being as effective as he would like to be.

  But now, he could far better assess the import of what they’d dug up. The slave race that had just barely escaped their oppressors on another world had created warding magic at the time they built their temples to keep the predatory race that had dogged them across the heavens from ever finding them again. But even if they had, the refugees had made sure they couldn’t get close to the temples without being driven mad.

  But how would that have kept the alien race from destroying the temples from outer space, using technology that was available today, far less to a far superior civilization?

  Of course. Lar and Ramon didn’t have the necessary background to contextualize the intel they’d unearthed, to embed it properly within a larger body of understanding. But Soren did.

  Those pyramids had been sited on major power spots for the planet. That amplified whatever cabbalistic magic was in the temples. That lent them the power the oppressed alien race need
ed to drive off their oppressors. But damn, Soren…. Even as a chi master standing on such a power spot, doing as you did once before to help drive off the Tillerman…that had only been the final straw on the camel’s back. As a one-strike maneuver, you’d never have had the power you needed, not even with the fusion of Victor’s mandala magic with your chi magic.

  But somehow, the cabbalistic magic embossed in that pyramid…. He was missing something. There was no way a subjugated race could understand the language of the oppressor so well as to turn the magic inherent in the every word they uttered against them so completely.

  And then Soren remembered his Nietzsche, the old German philosopher: the slave must know the master better than the master the slave. Okay, understand their psychology better, sure, to understand how to kiss their ass and play them better than they could play one another, to avoid any misstep bringing death, torture, or something even worse upon them.

  Keep chiseling, Soren. You’re getting there. Just not all the way there yet.

  The alien language… It had been written, nay, it had been engineered to allow the master race to more readily think countless moves ahead, so they could out-manipulate any civilization they wanted to put under their thumb. Civilizations potentially far more advanced than any on earth back then, perhaps far more advanced than anything on Earth today.

  For the oppressed peoples to shake the yoke of the oppressor, that’s the tool they had to turn against them; it was what made their language so potent. They had to out-manipulate the manipulators. But, again, how? What missing element in addition to the fusion of chi magic and cabbalistic magic had granted such mental prowess?

  An adept, perhaps? A prodigy among their own kind? A freak of nature, or perhaps a hybrid resulting from an unsanctioned mating of someone in the master race with the slave race? Could such a person write the coding to hack the minds of the master manipulators?

  Not likely. Unless…. Yes, a less is more approach. Soren was rather expert at this, forced to design his nanite machines with less money than he would have liked, and more primitive equipment that he could afford access to. What then was the less is more approach used here?

  Yes, that’s it; the adept designed the coded virus to attack the intuitive minds of such an advanced species that had since become overly reliant on its analytical, scientific abilities—in human terms, its left-brained thinking—and that had learned over the eons to play down the importance of its own intuition, as indeed had been the case across history on earth. Very possibly this master race had lost touch with the magic inherent in the words they wielded, all but the one quality they valued most about it—its ability to allow them to manipulate lesser minds and lesser civilizations.

  A virus implanted in this underutilized, undervalued region of the brain, might well be able to run forever without detection. And what would it really have to do in the end to be truly effective, now that the virus had a place where it could remain hidden virtually forever? The obvious answer was that it needed to delete access to memories which triggered fear and foreboding, irrational anxieties, night sweats, terrors. The very things such a master race was all too happy to repress willingly, as it went against everything they stood for.

  And so, without putting a lot of deep, penetrating thought into it, this master race had been gently nudged over time to forget about anything having to do with the oppressed people. Perhaps the virus would have helped them to find perfectly rational reasons why keeping such a people around was more of a burden than it was worth. Perhaps it would have made it easy to argue for far superior answers to whatever problems the slave race solved for them.

  And the whole time this virus was running in the background, the master race would have no reason to suspect it was doing anything outside of its nature, because sure enough, the perfectly reasoned decisions would lead to better and better technologies, better and better substitutes for this meddlesome slave race.

  Yes, the less is more approach was definitely the way for a slave race to get around a master race that they couldn’t possibly outthink.

  Now, Soren, how to hack the mantra that once uttered severs your link with the beast? That’s the last piece of the puzzle. You do that, you now have, at your disposal, at least one way for a David to slay a Goliath, a tool you may well get to employ more than once in the days ahead.

  Soren used the fact that much of his identity was still located in the mindchip to his advantage. The chip would have no trouble writing algorithms to get around the cabbalistic language. Its task wasn’t even that daunting. It just had to figure out what made a subset of symbols within that language—a very small subset at that—work as a weapon, an acoustic weapon, essentially.

  Soren was surprised when the answer came within seconds of the algorithms being setup by the mindchip. And then he remembered that the beast had been hard at work forging connections between this particular region of the mindchip; even if he was keeping the rest of Soren’s consciousness out of the loop, so the magic of the cabbala would only be accessible from Soren’s intuitive side, the side the beast felt more comfortable with.

  And now that the hack was in place, he could re-forge the union with the beast. A split second later they were as one again. And this time the beast must have trusted him enough to share the stage with him, no longer forcing Soren to be a passive spectator when they were fused as one. The beast might be cunning, power-crazed, untempered by reason or any sense of inhibitions, but he shared Soren’s pragmatic sense. Whatever worked to get him to his goals was just fine with him.

  Soren would have to be careful not to violate that trust, as much as he would certainly be tempted to in the days ahead.

  Soren smiled at Augustus, who had maintained a link with him, even though he and his entourage of blind huntresses were halfway across the city now. The link was a sound tunnel that the wizard had created to affect Soren with his words of magic. He’d neglected to shut down the connection between them because he wasn’t sure if his magic would take or not, or for how long.

  Soren set Augustus’s mind to rest. “Augustus, sorry to disappoint you, but the beast and I are one again, and we’re coming for you. Your huntresses will not be able to stop us.”

  Soren had conceded to the terrorizing of his friends and of the most powerful wizards on the planet. Because the truth was, being tested like they were forced them to take their game to the next level. For wizards and hunters alike, that was always a good thing. Especially with the likes of Victor Truman about.

  Victor’s own project of becoming master of the multiverse involved encouraging celestial wizards to unleash their fury on the planet just to keep him in check. And his workaround for that was to throw these very same master wizards Soren was going after now against the celestial wizards as sacrificial pawns. Their failures would nonetheless hopefully expose weaknesses in the celestial wizards Victor could then capitalize upon to trounce them.

  What Soren was doing with the beast’s assistance could very well fortify the remaining Syracuse wizards to come up against the latest celestial wizard, the Dark Matter Man.

  Even with this new era of trust between Soren and the brute, the beast would not reveal his hidden purpose beyond what Soren already understood. That the Frankenstein’s monster was manipulating his friends and the other master wizards of this world for a specific purpose was beyond doubt.

  Was that purpose to help with the overthrow of the Dark Matter Man? Or was the Beast—and now Soren—merely the puppet being wielded by the Dark Matter Man? Until both Soren and the beast understood the cabbalistic magic better that the brute was only now learning to use, there was the distinct possibility that both of them were being played. And the beast didn’t like that anymore than Soren did. The thought alone elicited a powerful outcry from the beast, like a tormented soul railing against his chains.

  Their next step had become clear since throwing off Augustus’s magic. They needed to wend their way toward Bingwen—the one who had taught Augustus
everything he knew about cabbalistic magic.

  Soren would not be visiting Bingwen in the manner he had before. This time he and the beast would be one—and so a far more formidable opponent.

  Something else.

  The mindchip had used what it had learned about the design and engineering of acoustic weapons married to cabbalistic magic to decode much more of the cabbalistic symbols—particularly the ones relating to the design and engineering of spirit-science weapons of all kinds. And married to the beast as Soren was now, that meant that together they could invent spirit-science magic on the fly to counter any protests Bingwen had to the brute’s less than subtle interrogation methods.

  Soren felt sorry for Bingwen already. But the fate of the planet was at stake here. Soren had to counter both what Victor and the Dark Matter Man were up to. It wasn’t a game he could afford to lose. And for once, Soren didn’t mind rationalizing in the beast’s favor.

  The only question now was, would he continue to rationalize in the beast’s favor as part of their new union? And in the beast’s claiming Soren’s intuition for himself, had he cut Soren off sufficiently from his own good sense, his gut instincts, which might well warn him now from following along such a dark path?

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Soren materialized inside Bingwen’s flat.

  Bingwen jumped back a couple paces, instinctively reached for a talisman about his wrist, the way fighters reach for a weapon; of course, from a wizard’s perspective, it was a weapon.

  “You look startled.” Soren sounded as if he were simply stating a fact.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Bingwen released the talisman.

  “I thought it might be because you didn’t expect me to get past your cabbalistic warding magic.” Soren ran his hands over one of the cabbalistic figures Bingwen had been whittling, drawn from his scan of Soren earlier, lying on his work table.