Plane of the Godless

by Peter Hartz

  “Second, you don’t set direction and policy for this company. Michelle and I do. If you don’t like what we are doing, you are free, within the limits of the non-compete and non-disclosure agreements you signed when you started here, to go away and do something else. I really wish you had just gone away instead of pulling this shit, because now I have to clean up the mess that you made.

  “What in the hell made you think that you have any right whatsoever to decide this company, that Michelle built from the ground up by herself, should do anything? Your job was to manage the finances. Nothing more!” David’s self-control was nearly gone as his hands gripped the arms of the chair so tightly his knuckles were white, and he half rose out of the seat while leaning forward part-way across the table. Then he forced himself to take a deep breath and sit back down, his face flushed with emotion.

  Steven cringed in the expensive chair as David bellowed out the last two words so loudly that his ears rang, all the while wondering what had caused him to just spill his guts like this. He was about to speak up, when David beat him to it.

  “I am really glad you came to me today, Stevie.” The sarcasm was so thick, one could almost walk across it. “You are now going to tell everything you know about whom you are working with, and what you know about their plans. Speak up loud and clear so the mic on the web cam can hear you and get everything recorded, and so that the people on the other end can understand exactly what is going on. But before you do, Phil is going to come in and take over the questioning.” The door to the office opened, and Steven’s eyes darted to the left at the sudden intrusion. But any hope of escaping out the suddenly open door was dashed as he saw several members of David’s team standing there, with angry expressions on their faces. He shrunk down even further as he realized he had no way out of the situation he was in.

  Phil stepped into the office, and stared down at the pathetic little man looking up at him with fear plainly on his face. He knew intellectually that Gil’s skillset was formidable, but the Compel Truth spell amazed him. If only he’d had that at his disposal back in his role as an Army criminal investigator, his life, and his work load, would have been so much simpler.

  The entire team had been watching and listening to the feed from the webcam on David’s desk from the outer office, where it was also being streamed to several other PCs for recording, both here and at the London data center. From there, it was being encrypted and stored at other locations around Europe, in case it was needed later. David was right, Phil knew, when he postulated that the Federal government was involved. That was the only organization with the reach and the capability to pull off what had had been done so far, and Steven’s statement that a U.S. Senator was involved clearly finished all dissent on the topic.

  While everyone liked and respected David, everyone loved Michelle. This was not going to be fun for Steven.

  For the next hour or more, David and the entire team watched and listened to the main TV screen pulled from the nearby conference room to the main part of the administrative area outside David’s office as Steven spilled his guts on everything he knew about the conspiracy.

  Towards the end of the interrogation, Phil’s trained investigative skills and instincts narrowed in on what Steven might have known about who might be behind the attack, and who was providing obviously very private information about Michelle’s habits and when she would be at the cottage that no one outside David and Michelle and the contractors who built it for David should have known about. Unfortunately, Steven was such a credible fool that he never even thought to ask questions of his powerful benefactor that might have clued him in on what was really going on. The worst part of it for Steven was that the entire conversation was recorded, encrypted, and shipped offsite to parts unknown across the Internet.

  Giltreas had been astonished by that capability, and what it meant in terms of proof later on of misdeeds, which led to his introduction to YouTube.com a week ago when the plans had been made for when they discovered whoever had been involved in the plot. David just chuckled and turned Gil loose on a computer the tech department set up just for Gil on the company network, and Gil had spent hours out of the day looking at all manner of videos from all over the world, his headphones on and his face glued to the screen in front of him. Everything from gardening to music to movies to combat footage was right there for him to view, and he soaked it up every chance he could.

  Now he sat quietly in the back of David’s office, having made himself unseen before David opened the door to let Steven in. And as the questioning went on, he grew more and more impressed with Phil as the human elegantly and delicately extracted every last thing that Steven knew, and pieced together things that Steven only slightly guessed at.

  Chapter 28

  Michelle was waiting impatiently in the throne room when Allison came in in a hurry. She had been sitting in the main room of the suite she was sharing with Michelle and the dogs when a guard had come up and told her that Michelle wanted her in the main room in the building as soon as possible. Now she hurried over to Michelle, speaking as soon as she saw her sister-in-law.

  Michelle was dressed in a loose shirt and soft leather pants that she had borrowed from Delara, along with some sandals that had been found that would fit her. Personally, Allie thought that the queen had found someone to make them for Michelle, since they looked perfectly brand new, but Michelle just smiled and nodded when Allie suggested it to her.

  Now, Michelle’s face, which had been so serene in the last few days, was frowning. Clearly she was troubled about something, and Allie thought she also detected some anger, as well. The experiences she had had had had a profound effect on her, Allison decided, and not just physically.

  “What is going… ahhh. A gate. Someone is coming to visit?” Allie shifted mental gears quickly as she saw the strange magical construct standing in the room, so similar to the first one she and the others had passed through to arrive in Delara’s home.

  “Not exactly.” The response was grim, and Allison caught the undertone then. Michelle was more than a little angry, but she was a past master of concealing her emotions from most people. Allie knew her better, though.

  “They found someone, then.” The look on Allison’s face suddenly matched that of the incredibly beautiful, amazingly young-looking woman standing next to her. A stray thought flashed through her mind as she recalled the miraculous transformation that Michelle had undergone at Giltreas’ hand when he had brought her back to life.

  The ‘incident’, as Michelle insisted on calling it, had changed everything for them all. David and Allison had been healed of everything wrong with them, including the need for glasses and contact lenses. Allison had been unable to conceive a child, something that Giltreas accredited to the minute traces of what he had called poisons he had found in her body, most of which was localized in what he referred to as her ‘center of womanhood’. She felt and looked younger now, just like how she looked after she made it through Marine boot camp – in peak physical condition and full of energy and life. David had mentioned that he felt much the same way, since he had also been hit with the same spells that had fixed everything that was wrong with Allison.

  But Michelle’s transformation was complete. She was unrecognizable to anyone who hadn’t known her in high school, before Fate had decided that she made a good target and crash test dummy. Nearly sixty extra pounds had been erased from her frame as if it had never existed, along with every scar, old wound, mole, every bit of flab and skin imperfection; you name it, Giltreas had made it all disappear with magic. But there were other changes, as well.

  Michelle didn’t seem to need sleep anymore. She also barely ate anything at all. And she didn’t seem to miss either the sleep or the food. Allison had kept some small hope that the same would happen to her, but she was contented to not have to contemplate changes to herself of that magnitude. She worried about Michelle, though, and what impact those changes were having on her.

  Allison
had been studying magic when she wasn’t working out with the guardsmen. The dwarven mage Yintarin had agreed to teach her, after warning her that she was much too old to start developing the concentration and focus necessary to advance very far. But he and she were both surprised at what she was capable of.

  Yintarin also had been surprised at her physical abilities, but after a long discussion of martial arts, and how long she had been studying them, he was as surprised no more at either her physical abilities nor her single-minded pursuit of the mage arts and the progress she made. She had learned to focus all her attention on a task or goal many years before – she was just bringing that single-minded focus to bear on a new set of goals and aspirations.

  Now both Michelle and Allison turned as Delara appeared dressed in her royal attire, with her small, understated crown of office in place on her head. She ascended to her throne on the dais, seated herself sedately and gracefully, then looked at the human women.

  “Are you ready?” The short question came out gently, as she knew that Michelle was not at all pleased at who she was about to meet.

  Michelle steeled herself and nodded. Four days before, David and Giltreas had come through a portal to explain they had been unable to rule out Steven. With the mention of just his first name, everything clicked in Michelle’s mind. It had to be. His attitude had always been borderline arrogant, but he had covered it well with his exceptional work in his role as Chief Financial Officer. Now, though, word had come just an hour earlier that, with the help of a convenient spell from Giltreas, Steven had spilled the beans, telling everything he knew, or thought he knew, about the attack on Michelle.

  She was not at all surprised that Steven had thought the plan was a little different than what had actually happened. He was quite blind to some things, she had learned over the years of their professional relationship, especially things that contradicted what he ‘knew’ was true. The old adage came to mind: it is when you are convinced that something is true when it is actually wrong that you suffer the most.

  The queen’s guards finished taking their places around the room, and between the dais and where Giltreas had placed the gate. They had been assured that the man they were about to take into custody was no threat, but they were taking no chances. Experience was the best teacher. Michelle didn’t mind the show of force. It would certainly cow Steven into acquiescence, a most desirable state.

  Now a guard walked to the gate, and signaled that all was ready.

  ◆◆◆

  Steven stared blankly the strange apparition in front of him. The grey man had told him it was a gate to his home plane, whatever that meant. The shimmering, watery surface stood vertically in front of him, making a weird sound that he couldn’t compare to anything he had ever heard before.

  Giltreas had ‘called’ the gate as simply as anyone else made a phone call, waving his hand in a forward and upward motion that seemed to be connected to the manifestation of the thing now making a mockery of the physics that he had studied in college as an elective. Over to the side, David had been talking quietly to some of his team members. It appeared that half of them would be staying behind, while the other half went through to ensure that Steven was taken into custody without any issues. The one complication to their plans was Cora.

  Steven’s wife had shown up, intent on surprising her husband with a pleasant lunch at The Local, a nearby restaurant they both liked to frequent. Instead, she had been told that she would be accompanying her husband on a trip for a while. No one had had the courage to tell her what he had done, so he had been forced to tell her himself that he had caused a lot of problems, and was in a lot of trouble.

  Cora was deeply in love and utterly devoted to her husband, and no matter how upset she was with him and what he had done, she couldn’t be without him. Whatever happened to him, she vowed, she would be there at his side. The simple statement had humbled him and torn him apart mentally, shaming him to his very soul, and he had wept on her shoulder as she tried to rectify the two seemingly different people that inhabited the body of the man she married. It would take a lot of time for her to put the two together, and while she didn’t forgive him for what he had done, she would be there beside him no matter what.

  She had recognized that her husband’s life was in David’s hands, and she had taken him aside to quietly ask him to not kill Steven.

  David had been shocked at the request, and it caused him to mentally take a step back and reevaluate his own state of mind towards Steven. He decided that he would defer the decision about what to do with Steven until later, but a small part of him knew that he couldn’t take the other man’s life, regardless of what Steven had done to Michelle or anyone else; he didn’t want that on his own conscience.

  David had simply said that she would have to accompany her husband, for her own safety. He didn’t explain his reasons why, but she had guessed that Steven had been conspiring with someone who had convinced him to do something stupid. He meant well, but he was quite naive when it really came down to it. She had no interest in being the pawn of anyone who had been manipulating her husband, so she readily agreed.

  Now, they waited, watching the strange thing for any sign. And it came.

  A hand appeared and waved them forward in a ‘come here’ gesture that everyone recognized, extending out from the gate that hung in the outer administrative office area, and everyone who hadn’t seen it before gasped involuntarily as the action drove home what Giltreas had said before: he used gates to travel to other planes of existence.

  A short while after the hand disappeared, the first few team members went forward and followed David through the gate, wondering where they would appear on the other side.

  Allison watched as David came through the gate, and he immediately stepped forward to clear the area where the others came through. He nodded at Allison, Michelle, then Delara, and stepped aside as Phil and Nate came through, followed by Christine. The three humans looked around in awe at the strange place and people they were seeing for the first time, then stepped aside.

  Delara looked on with interest from her throne as the humans who were devoted to David and Michelle came through the gate. One man was of the same human group as David, but the second man had skin as dark as those from the land below the great desert, and the woman had the look of the far eastern tribes – almond skin and exotic eyes. All three moved with the grace of well-trained warriors, though, and she approved, even if her seneschal had not been happy, predictably, about allowing so many humans into her throne room. A patient smile had calmed him somewhat, though, and he had subsided. He had, though insisted on doubling the guards, something she thanked him for pleasantly. It was a wise decision, after all.

  Michelle watched as Steven stepped through, then her hand went to her mouth as Cora followed, looking elegant and graceful as always, even in a situation as unfamiliar and fantastic as what she was currently caught up in. The understated dress suit she wore, suitable for the business world that she brushed up against from time to time in her role in the various charities she was involved in, was beautiful, a black and white floral print that was tailored to her figure without being inappropriate in any way.

  Giltreas rounded out the group, closing the gate when he came through.

  Cora looked around in astonishment as she emerged from the gate, and stepped forward as she had been told to by the strange grey-skinned and grey-haired man. The guards, dressed in what looked like costumes better found at the Renaissance Festival, all looked at her gravely, the seriousness of the situation etched into their green-skinned faces. She held gently to Steven’s arm as she realized that her husband had truly made some monumentally foolish mistakes, and hoped that they would both get through it as unscathed as possible. Then she saw Allison standing next to a young human woman she didn’t recognize, but who could be sought after for the cover of any fashion magazine in the world. Her flawless skin and almost ethereal beauty made Cora’s breath catch in her throat, and Steve
n turned to look at what had caused his wife to be so startled. Shock made him freeze in place.

  Whomever was standing next to Allison was, in a word, perfect. He had never seen someone of such unreal beauty. She seemed to glow from the inside. She had the same hair and eye color as Michelle, he thought blankly, but he simply could not identify who she was. Until she moved forward.

  “Cora. It is so good to see you again. How are your parents? Still doing well, I hope?” Even the voice was unfamiliar to both Cora and Steven, but Phil was looking at her with his mouth open and his eyes so incredibly wide as she approached the slightly younger woman with her hands out.

  “They are doing well. I apologize, you have the better of me. Have we met before?” The gracious tone was exactly perfect, a cultured, well-mannered example of class and breeding.

  “I realize that I look a little different now. Trust me when I tell you I am more shocked than you are to be this way. It’s me, Michelle,” she stated, then waited to see if they recognized her or not.

  Cora didn’t. She simply hadn’t spent enough time around her to pick up on the mannerisms that help provide non-verbal identification. Steven did. As did Phil.

  The blood drained from Steven’s face as he saw the results of Giltreas’ handiwork for the first time, and up close.