by D. P. Prior
Nameless brought his axe down with all his weight behind it, ripping through a shoulder and sending a metal arm skimming across the floor. He rammed the butt of the haft into the creature’s nose, reversed his grip, and powered the blade right through its jaw.
Shader struck to his right, but a bloodless fist caught him on the left temple. He stumbled, reversed his sword, and stabbed back into pliant flesh. Spinning, he ripped the blade up through the creature’s torso and split it in two all the way to the head.
Nameless went down beneath a barrage of blows, his axe clattering to the floor. He grabbed two of the creatures round the ankles and surged upright, flipping them into the throng. Retrieving his axe, he staggered backward, flailing about wildly.
“Run,” Shader yelled.
“You run,” Nameless said, swaying on his feet. “I’ll hold them.”
“For all of two seconds.”
Together, they fought a determined but ailing rearguard all the way to the wall. A narrow channel had opened up along that side of the hall, and they edged along it, battling for every step.
A glimmer of movement drew Nameless’s eyes to the ceiling. Fifty or so yards ahead, a disk was coming down, a lone homunculus standing on it and watching them intently. He wore a gray tunic and britches. His hair was oily black and far too perfect to be natural.
As the disk touched down, the homunculus jumped off and tapped at a vambrace on his wrist. The mass of creatures fell back from Shader and Nameless, leaving a corridor that led to the disk.
Shader saw the opportunity first and practically flung Nameless ahead of him into he opening.
“Go!”
This time, Nameless obeyed.
Already, the channel was closing up, and he had to duck and dodge grasping fingers and clubbing blows. Shader came with him, cutting and thrusting with deft precision.
The homunculus stepped away from the disk and weaved his way into the mass of bodies until he was lost from sight.
Nameless’s feet were starting to drag, but he was seconds from the disk, when a huge creature stepped from an alcove and raised a metal arm with a barbed spear tip in place of a hand. With a sound like the crack of a whip, the spear flew at him, trailing a length of chain. Nameless twisted at the last possible instant, but the tip tore through his side in a spray of blood and the clatter of broken links from his armor. Pain flared beneath his ribs, and then the creature yanked on the chain and reeled him in like a fish.
Nameless stumbled onto his knees and slid toward it, one hand clasping the base of the spear jutting from his side. His vision started to fade, but then fire ignited his blood. Just as the creature reached out to grab him, he swung his axe with the other hand, hitting it in the guts with more force than he’d have believed possible. The creature bent double, and bones punctured its skin in half a dozen places. The chain slackened, and with a sickening roar, Nameless tried to pull the spear tip out. The barb caught, and his roar turned into a scream as he slumped to the floor.
He dimly saw Shader arrive ahead of the lumbering crowd. The knight swung for the creature, and its head bounced away.
Nameless felt rather than saw Shader kneel beside him.
“Grit your teeth,” Shader said.
Nameless grunted, and Shader pushed the spike out through his back. When the barb emerged, the knight swept down the gladius and sheared it away. Sheathing the sword, he placed one hand on Nameless’s shoulder, and with the other pulled the chain out through the front. Nameless bucked and shuddered, and when the chain came clear and snaked to the floor, he bellowed, “Shog, shog, shog!” The bellows turned to coughs, and then he managed to croak, “That hurt.”
“I can heal you,” Shader said, starting to draw the gladius again, but Nameless put a hand over his.
“No, laddie. No magic. Not from that thing. I saw how it sliced through those shoggers like they weren’t even solid. It has the feel of the black axe about it.”
Shader hooked an arm under Nameless’s shoulder and helped him to stand. “But you’ll bleed to death.”
“Come on, laddie,” Nameless said, scooping up his axe and limping toward the disk. “Help me get my boot off, and I’ll plug the wound with a sock.”
Shader supported him on one side, casting wary looks at the creatures, who were lumbering in from all sides and closing up the gap the homunculus had made.
The instant they made the disk, the horde grew frantic. Those in the front ranks parted to admit three more of the huge creatures. They each raised metal arms and launched spears trailing chains.
Shader threw Nameless to the platform and dropped on top of him. There was a succession of dull thuds as the spears struck some invisible barrier, and the chains clunked heavily to the ground.
The homunculus appeared off to the right. He gave a single nod and tapped at his vambrace.
With a whir and a shudder, the disk lifted into the air. As it passed through a hole in the ceiling, it gathered pace, shooting up through level after level.
Nameless moaned as he was rocked from side to side. He had one hand vainly trying to staunch the flow of blood, the other draped over the haft of his axe. After what seemed an age, the disk entered a metal shaft, shook violently, and came to a halt.
The disk had come to rest in some kind of silver-walled cubicle, where it fit seamlessly into the floor. One of the walls had a hairline crack down its center, and there was a panel adjacent to it. Nameless could hear someone running about outside. There was a clang of metal, a searing hiss, and beneath it all, a sound like the roar of flames.
Shader placed a hand on the wall.
“Heat,” he said.
Stepping away, he bent to examine the panel. “It looks unlocked, if I understand the symbols correctly.”
“Boot, laddie,” Nameless rasped. He held out his leg. The warm seep of blood flooded the disk beneath where he lay. His hand staunching the flow from his side wound was red as a butcher’s. He gave a grim smile at the irony.
Shader took hold of the boot, but before he could pull, Nameless heard a man say something from beyond the cubicle, not loud enough for him to make out the words, but the timbre of the voice was somehow familiar.
“That ol’ Baldilocks?”
Shader stiffened, straining to hear.
Another man spoke, the sound clipped and toneless. “Think we’ve arrived,” Shader said. “That’s Sektis Gan—”
There was a cry and a clash, then a boom rocked the cubicle.
Shader ducked instinctively.
Nameless tried to roll onto his side, let out a gasp, and lay back. His chest fluttered as it rose and fell, and his breaths rattled around the great helm.
“Think I’ll take the magic, after all,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”
Moving aside Nameless’s blood-soaked hand, Shader touched the gladius to his wound. Golden light flowed down the blade.
Nameless cried out, and his back arched. Searing heat cauterized the flesh. He winced at the sensation of muscle and sinew knitting back together. He hummed a tune to take his mind off the pain, but stopped abruptly when Shader withdrew the sword.
“Thank you, laddie.” Nameless yawned, suddenly overcome with fatigue. “Just thirty winks and I’ll be right as—”
A woman screamed.
Shader whirled toward the crack in the wall, shot a glance at the panel.
Another scream, and this time, Shader cried, “Rhiannon!”
Nameless struggled to rise but slumped back down. “Go, laddie. I’ll follow… when… I…”
His words trailed off as blackness claimed him.
THE UNWEAVING
Nameless had no idea how much time had passed. He rolled his head from side to side; heard the scrape and grate of the helm on the floor. His eyes snapped open.
He was lying on his back, staring at a silver ceiling. With a start, he sat. Ahead of him was the open doorway Shader had headed for. A flickering orange glow came from the other side, and with it a blast
of warm air.
He tried to stand, but swooned and had to lay back down. The healing had worked, but he felt like he’d fought ten bouts in the circles.
He heard Shader’s voice. Aristodeus’s, too. And there was a third man speaking, in a tone that was cold and rasping.
He rolled to his front and crawled toward the doorway, dragging his axe with him. It was hard going, and the blood he’d spilled smeared as he passed through it.
He crossed the threshold into a chamber like the inside of an enormous cone. Blood pounded in his ears from the effort of moving. He rested for a moment, angling the great helm so he could take in the sight ahead.
Tiers of walkways, each with banks of flickering mirrors, wound all the way up to the apex of the cone. Naked women with wings like a bat’s were hunched in front of the mirrors, as if watching their own reflections, or monitoring the moving pictures playing across the glass.
Crimson footsteps led across the floor—Shader’s, from where he’d stood in Nameless’s pooling blood.
A flame-filled chasm rent the chamber in two, and from within its maw, the top of a slender tower poked, its ivory walls blackened with soot.
Aristodeus was staring wide-eyed from an open sash window just below the tower’s turreted roof, and Nameless followed his gaze to where Rhiannon was suspended in midair.
A silver sphere hovered above her, bathing her in blue light. Even more shocking, though, was how different she looked. She was armored in dark leather, with black boots all the way up to her knees. Her hair was pulled back in a braided tail, and where her arms were exposed, they looked harder, more defined. Her eyes glared defiance, and not a little frenzy. The black sword was directly beneath her feet, lodged in the fizzing and sparking shell of a metal crab the size of a pony. More of the crab-things were heaped around the room in smoking piles.
Shader stood off to one side, staring up into the heights. He didn’t look like a man who’d come to fight. He seemed bewildered. Out of his depth.
Nameless rolled to his back so he could look up more easily. At first, all he saw was an inky cloud belching waves of blackness near the cone’s truncated ceiling. It looked and felt alive, and each time it breathed, a tinge of nausea crept beneath his skin.
Then, within the miasma, he could make out the form of a serpent with glowing amber eyes and fangs like jags of lightning. It had to be the Statue of Eingana. Atop its head, a crown of pulsing filaments sent a constant ring of sparks up through the ceiling. At the center of the circle they formed, a single mirror glared down, showing nothing but a black hole that seemed to beckon and tug.
A disk drifted out from behind the statue and made an arcing descent, until it hovered twenty feet above Shader.
A man stepped to its edge and inclined his head to look down with eyes of incandescent blue. His face appeared gray, mask-like, beneath pitch black hair as slick and unnatural as the homunculus’s had been. He wore a long brown coat, beneath which Nameless glimpsed dark metal greaves and cuisses. One hand was gloved in black; the other looked desiccated. Ribbed tubing ran from the knuckles up under the coat sleeve.
Nameless had seen this man before, in a vision. It was the figure upon the throne. Shader had been beneath it, atop a sprawling mesa, and Aristodeus’s words had bubbled up from the earth:
Not good. Not good at all.
The lost battle Aristodeus had told him about. Shader’s missed opportunity, his failure to nip the Unweaving in the bud.
There was no doubt in Nameless’s mind who it was.
Shader threw a look at Aristodeus, who shrugged and turned his palms up. A ripple passed through the philosopher’s body, and for an instant he flickered. If Aristodeus noticed, he didn’t show it.
Sektis Gandaw, however, seemed impressed. “Bilocation? I thought only I’d mastered that. It’s been quite a day of discoveries. First,”—he gestured toward the smoking chasm—“tangible evidence that the Abyss may well constitute an empirical fact, after all, and now a philosopher who can be in two places at the same time.”
“What are you talking about, Sektis?” Aristodeus said. “Has one of your memory nodes ruptured and corrupted what’s left of your brain?”
Gandaw surveyed him for a long moment before he replied. “Simply an observation. Where there is a certain density of shielding—in the case of this mountain, scarolite—bilocated simulacra have been known to flicker, whereas the originals, generally, do not.”
Aristodeus glanced at his hands. “What flicker? Maybe you need your optics tested.” His voice rose in pitch, and a tic started up on his cheek.
“Stolen technology, no doubt,” Gandaw said, as if he didn’t really care. “Leftovers from Global Tech, or did it come from here?” He let his disconcerting eyes rove the chamber, and when he didn’t find what he was looking for, visibly stiffened. A fine tremor ran through his coat, his shoulders dropped, and he drew in a long, shuddering breath. He lifted his arm and spoke into his vambrace. “Mephesch?” The next words came out slow and deliberate: “Where are you?”
“On my way, Technocrat,” a crackling voice answered.
Nameless rolled to his side until he could see Rhiannon hanging beneath the sphere. She hadn’t moved since he’d entered the chamber. Was she even breathing?
“I didn’t use technology to bring us here,” Aristodeus said, tapping himself on the temple. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Sektis—”
“Oh, please,” Gandaw said. “I’ve dissected and analyzed every last strand of human DNA, scrutinized every possible permutation of the genome, and rigorously tested the whole pathetic organism ad nauseam. There is no hidden power of the mind that allows you to teleport, let alone move an entire tower. I don’t care how old you are and how inflated your ego is, you are either lying or deluded. No, wait, I hadn’t factored in the new data to hand. What can we extrapolate from the empirical evidence for the reality of the Abyss? Must we not now hypothesize the existence of its reputed creator?
“You see, Aristodeus, last time you tried to thwart the Unweaving all those hundreds of years ago, that very same chasm opened up and swallowed you. All I did was unleash the power of Eingana. What happened next was as unexpected to me as I’m sure it was to you. I confess, I should have investigated the phenomenon, and it’s been niggling away at the back of my mind ever since. But I recently had something of an epiphany. It doesn’t matter that there are two imponderables in this miserable universe that I’ve not set my scalpel to. I thought it mattered, thought I knew all there was to know, but then I realized I’d been deceiving myself. The Abyss, and that.” He jabbed a finger toward the lone mirror at the top of the chamber.
Its hungry emptiness hit Nameless with sudden clarity. Somehow, Sektis Gandaw had a mirror showing that which shouldn’t be seen—couldn’t. He realized with a primal dread that he was gazing directly into the Void.
“They didn’t fit into my grand hypothesis,” Gandaw said, “and so I left them out. I deceived myself. Maybe you’ve done the same; or maybe someone’s deceiving you. Could it be that you are bilocating without even realizing it? That your essence is elsewhere, kept by a master who allows you a long leash?” He looked at Shader. “You holy types invented the myths. What do you think? Is it possible that the impeccable mind of Aristodeus has fallen prey to the deceptions of the Demiurgos?”
A haunted look passed across Aristodeus’s eyes, and for a moment, his mouth hung open. Then he clamped it shut, and his face grew as stoic and mask-like as Gandaw’s.
“You don’t believe that, Sektis. All this speculation is hardly your style. What are you up to? Stalling?”
A homunculus stepped out of a wall and pattered across the floor. It was the same one that had given up his disk for them, and rescued them from the creatures below.
“Ah, Mephesch,” Gandaw said. “Re-route enough of Eingana’s power to close that rift, would you?”
When the homunculus looked at him blankly, Gandaw said, “She opened the exact same ch
asm when this upstart philosopher plunged to what should have been his death.”
“One thousand one hundred and eighty-four years ago, Technocrat,” Mephesch said. “Two hundred and seventy-six years before the event known as—”
“Yes, yes, the so-called Reckoning. Your point?”
Mephesch glanced at Aristodeus and grinned. “He doesn’t look a day above seventy.”
Aristodeus frowned at that, but he was as rapt as everyone else.
“My point, Gandaw said, is that if Aristodeus has found a way to re-open the rift Eingana created and subsequently closed, it stands to reason, does it not, that she can seal it again?”
“But the Null Sphere, Technocrat…” The homunculus glanced up at the ceiling.
“A minute’s delay, at most,” Gandaw said. “Just do it; it’ll save worrying about the clean-up later.”
Aristodeus started to protest as the homunculus leaned over the shoulder of a bat-winged woman and tapped at its mirror, all the while flicking glances between Gandaw and Aristodeus’s tower poking up above the chasm.
A brilliant burst of amber lanced down from Eingana’s eyes.
Nameless rolled back to his front, got onto his elbows, and tried to drag himself forward. He grunted with the effort and slumped back down. He’d not even moved an inch.
“No!” Aristodeus cried. “Shader!”
The philosopher was flung back from the window. With a shake and a rumble, the white tower sank beneath the flames, and the chasm closed over it. When the tremors subsided, the floor looked as good as new, as if the tower had never been there.
“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” Gandaw said to Shader. “Somewhat predictable, but what do you expect from such a pedestrian creation? Sorry to see him go? Indifferent? Glad to fill his place in the pecking order?”
“He’s dead?” Shader said.
Nameless tried again to move. His heart thudded around his ribcage, and his lungs were clogged with the stale air inside the helm. He clawed vainly at the floor.
Gandaw’s disk hovered closer to Shader. “I met Aristodeus only once—well, twice, if you count his ill-fated attempt to stop the Unweaving last time round. He was sent to see me on Urddynoor, at the behest of some obnoxious bioethics commission or other. I forget what they were called—one of the curses of longevity for an imperfect organism. They had grown concerned at my success with melding.”