He scarcely had time to react before I fired. The weapon barely made a sound, such that one might have questioned if it had fired at all; yet, at another level, it felt overwhelming, yanking all of my nerve endings tight and shaking me to the tips of my toes. Such is the nature of the weapons of the gods. My single shot, a blue lightning bolt trailing behind it, nailed him right between the eyes, shattering his little round glasses and sending pieces flying. He stood there for a second or two, swaying, a tiny dark circle having appeared just above the bridge of his nose. Then he fell face-first to the sand.
“And now I’m really pissed. Because I didn’t want to shoot anyone but Baranak.”
Evelyn walked up beside me and looked down at him, frowning. I glanced at her quickly, making sure she was okay.
“Nice work,” I said.
She simply nodded, then started back toward the others.
I waited there a moment, gun at the ready, in case Arendal moved again.
He did not.
I found myself somewhat surprised; one shot should have only staggered him, drained some of his energy temporarily away. I had expected more from him, given the formidable accounting he had given of himself to that point. Yet still he lay, like a mortal shot by a true firearm.
I was not about to complain, of course. Shrugging, I tucked the now-warm pistol back into my belt, silently and futilely wishing I had a few dozen more of them readily at hand. But while Arendal had been quite right in guessing that I had one last storehouse of weapons at my disposal, actually accessing it was going to be a pain. Even as the anger drained from me, though, a plan began to form itself within my mind.
“Lucian!”
I whirled. Evelyn stood a dozen feet away, her back to me, staring back up the sloping beach toward the trees.
“What—oh.”
I saw it then. The other two humans were gone.
“They just disappeared,” she said.
I frowned. Running to where they had been before, I asked, “Did you see any energy discharge around them?”
“No…” Panic crept into her voice. “Where did they go?”
I summoned the Power, though it was not easy, given my physical state at the moment, and searched for any telltale signs or traces of one of the others having opened a portal there. Finally, I shook my head.
“No one grabbed them, as far as I can tell.”
“So what does that mean?”
I sighed. At the moment, it hurt even to think.
“It appeared as if Arendal had placed all of you within some sort of bubble, suspending you just out of synch with this plane, probably. I have seen others do it before.”
I kicked at the sand under my feet, thinking.
“He pulled you out of it, but the other two were still there. Once I shot him, his connection to that plane must have snapped shut. Essentially, they were pulled back.”
She just looked at me.
“Back… to where?”
I shrugged.
“Who knows?”
Evelyn rubbed at her temples with her fists for a few seconds, then stalked over to where Arendal lay.
“He does. He knows. But I assume he’s dead now, right?”
“Quite to the contrary. Unfortunately.”
She stepped back quickly, as if she had stumbled over a snake—which was not far from the truth.
“He’s still alive?”
“The Fountain still flows. The Power surrounds us. He cannot die.”
She frowned down at him, back at me.
“Then what—?”
“The weapon—or, more precisely, the crystal within it—does not kill. It merely stuns its victim, and drains some of their energies into the crystal. I added a bit of my own energy to it, as well, just to be sure, and apparently it was more effective than I could have guessed. He will recover, but from what I sense of him now, not for a while. It should give us enough time to get away from here.” My mouth was a tight line. “And he will not be terribly comfortable for some time after he comes to. I see this as an added bonus.”
“But he’s incapacitated,” she said, ignoring my dry wit. “He can’t tell us where Cassidy and Kim are.”
She seated herself on the sand, clearly unhappy.
I shrugged.
“Not any time soon, no.” This seemed to me, in many ways, a good thing. Understandably, though, Evelyn did not see it that way.
Some length of time passed, during which the waves and the seabirds solemnly serenaded us—a god, a woman, and a near-corpse. I gazed out at the idyllic vista of my tropical paradise, yet found my thoughts arguing relentlessly, insistently in favor of a more dark and depressing attitude. I thought of freedom and of imprisonment, and of all the points in between. I considered the dubious wisdom of attempting murder, or at least inflicting grievous bodily harm, in the midst of seeking to clear my name of murder charges. Somehow, I doubted self-defense would serve to exonerate me—but then, what was one more body on an already distressingly, depressingly large pile, with all the survivors pointing at me, the accused? At least Arendal, unlike most of the others, had deserved what he had gotten. The pity was that he, alone among them, would not stay dead.
There apparently being nothing more for either of us to say, and a powerful weariness from all of our recent travails upon us both, Evelyn and I lay down in the shade, beneath the ring of trees atop the sandy hill, and we slept.
CHAPTER SIX
“That I could never dream,” Bronte wrote, “till Earth was lost to me.”
I never dreamed, in the time before my exile. Or if I did, I never recalled the dreams afterward.
At different times in my life, I have believed different things about dreams. For instance, for the longest time I was sure they were simply the mind’s way of taking out the garbage, so to speak; that, in sleep, we gather up all the negativity and hurt and fear we have temporarily filed away during the day, and we congeal those feelings and images into a not-terribly-coherent whole that has meaning only to the sleeping mind; and then we parade that odd concoction past our mind’s eye, confronting and overcoming as we go. Thus in sleep we pull phantoms and devils, those things we cannot or will not confront during the day, out of the dark corners and into the light, where they may be discarded. Because I did not often dream in the Golden City, I believed I feared little, was seldom if ever hurt, and therefore possessed little metaphysical garbage that required disposal. Time and bitter experience eventually would serve to obliterate this myth. Few who have ever lived, I now know, have needed more the services of a mental janitorial service. For the lives of the gods are long, and the bad always comes with the good, and the experiences pile upwards, ever upwards, shaping and tearing down and reshaping again, leaving considerable detritus in their wakes.
Another view, one I have more recently entertained, suggests we see in dreams what we desire but might never know in waking life. As a god, little could be denied me, and my dreams, if dreams there were, always afterward seemed to be flimsy, insignificant things. The true stuff of dreams I lived every day, there in my Golden City. To what might one aspire, when one dwells forever in paradise? Conquest, yes—but that I always calculated as a real, definite goal with a specific path toward its achievement. Never did I think of it as merely a dream. With my rebellion and my defeat, however, my plans were shattered and my ambitions undone. In an instant, that which always had seemed so entirely real and possible became mere fantasy. Upon my exile, and especially after the Power vanished, I came to know fear and loss and longing beyond anything I had previously imagined. And I knew dreams, vivid and powerful and lingering dreams.
Sleeping in the sand and the shade beneath my circle of trees on my little island, I dreamed once more. Visions of hope and glory and defeat and death haunted me, and demons out of blackest darkness hunted me. Gods living and gods surely dead taunted me with assertions and accusations. I cursed them all and then begged each of them in turn for forgiveness, though for what transgressions
I cannot say.
Awaking, I found myself lying on my side, wrought up and tense. The sleep had not been restful; in fact, I felt in many ways worse than when I had lain down.
Evelyn sat leaning against a tree trunk nearby, watching the sea birds where they walked in the sand, leaving small triangular tracks that circled and meandered. She glanced my way as I sat up, but said nothing. I stood and brushed the sand from my clothes, but she ignored me. For some time afterward, we only watched the birds and felt the breeze, and we kept our thoughts, such as they were, entirely to ourselves.
An interminable time later, I gave way and asked after her condition. She kept her reply to a bare minimum, and I understood that. Despite all her evident strength, she was afraid and confused and had lost the only other people to whom she felt she could turn. My treatment of her and the others up to that point, I knew then, while much of the time warranted by the attitudes of her cohorts, had contributed little to any sense of trust she might have developed towards me. Perhaps at this point I first felt some measure of shame. Such a thing I will no longer dismiss out of hand, though it still galls me to admit it.
And so I met her at least halfway, and we walked along the sands, and we talked, haltingly at first, but with increasing confidence on both our parts.
Toward dreams our conversation eventually turned, there on my beach beneath my eternally perfect sky. She listened politely but kept most of her thoughts on the matter to herself. I believed at the time she hardly listened and cared even less. I would, of course, discover otherwise later. Truth be told, I cared little for her contributions to this portion of our conversation. After all, what possible perspective could a mere mortal offer with regard to contemplations of infinite years and infinite dreams? In retrospect I see my pride and my blindness clearly and I weep now for both, though little good comes from such ruminations at this late date. Enough. Those days are done and gone and can never return. A fool is yet a fool even if he be a god, with the difference that all his foolishness is magnified a thousand fold and more.
“So, what is our next move?”
Her asking of the question broke the spell, and effectively ended the long, idyllic afternoon of our respite. On some level I understood that I had been delaying the inevitable, for a reason opaque to me then. On the surface, though, I was all business.
“My plan was to shake the trees, beat the bushes—whatever botanical expression you prefer—and try to find evidence of the true guilty party, or parties.” Then I gritted my teeth, blood starting to boil again. “But Turmborne and Arendal both intimated that the others have little interest in my guilt or innocence. They don’t care who is guilty—only that someone gets blamed, and the killings stop.”
She nodded. “It’s not terribly encouraging.”
“No.”
I turned away, angry, and paced a few steps in either direction, then looked back up at her again.
“I think it is time for a new plan. Or rather,” I said, a glint in my eye, “an old plan.”
She eyed me warily.
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“I have no choice,” I said. “Not any longer.”
Her expression was ambivalent.
“So long as it doesn’t make you look even more guilty.”
“I scarcely imagine that is possible now,” I said. “Or relevant.”
Brows furrowing, she nodded once.
“So what will we do?”
“We?” My eyes met hers momentarily, and I looked away. “No. These are things I must do alone.”
“What things?” she asked, though she surely had a pretty good idea before she asked.
“Raise an army,” I replied. “And before that, secure arms for them.”
Evelyn appeared deeply troubled. I knew the fate of her crewmen weighed upon her, and I allowed myself a moment’s consideration that perhaps something else colored her thoughts, as well.
“And you’re doing this alone,” she said. “You’re going to take me home, then?” She frowned at that. “What about the others?”
I gazed out to sea.
“Unfortunately, we cannot attempt the road to your plane now. Alaria all but admitted that Baranak’s lackeys are camped out along that road, lying in wait for me. Nor can I embark on any extended search for your missing comrades, given the current political climate.”
She followed after me, her voice growing strident.
“Then what—?”
“I will place you in a secure location, until I can resolve matters.”
She started to object, but I turned and began to move back towards the spot where Arendal’s body lay facedown in the sand.
“Before we do that, though, there is one other matter to attend to.”
Evelyn watched as I bent over Arendal’s inexplicably still-limp body and rolled him over onto his back. She gasped in horror at what was revealed, and I found myself agreeing in spirit with her reaction.
A hole, approximately a half-inch in diameter, had been burned cleanly into his forehead. Dried blood surrounded it. The wound lay precisely where I had shot him.
After a few moments, during which neither of us moved or spoke, Evelyn whispered, “He’ll survive that?”
I bent closer, studying the wound, shaking my head slowly.
“This—it—” I absently ran my left hand back through my hair, trying to suppress the odd sense of panic that grew within my breast. “It was not supposed to do this.”
“It wasn’t?”
Shaking my head again, I examined the pistol, then opened it and removed the jewel. I held it up to the sun and studied it carefully. A tiny spark danced within it.
“No,” I said then. “It most assuredly was not.”
Another pause, and then Evelyn asked, “So… might he actually be… dead?”
Instead of answering, I quickly began to pat him down.
“What are you doing?”
I was not seeking anything in particular, but with Arendal, it was a good bet he would have something of importance on his person. Sure enough, I felt a small, hard object inside his coat. Reaching into his inside breast pocket, I pulled forth a small, red crystal, very similar to the one from my pistol. I held it up, letting the light shine through it. It sparkled like a tiny star, flawless and empty.
“Looks like some kind of data storage crystal,” Evelyn observed. “Your people use them, too?”
“No.”
Out of curiosity, I tried to fit the crystal I had taken from Arendal into my gun. It slid smoothly, perfectly into place. I frowned—that could not possibly mean anything good. I resolved to test this new gem at the next opportunity, and left it in place. Stashing the old crystal in my pocket, I put my gun away and finished patting him down. Then I lifted under his arms and dragged him up the slope.
During the process of moving him, my panic evaporated and I welcomed the returning anger and resentment towards Arendal that took its place. By the time I reached the top, his fate scarcely concerned me at all. I pulled him over to the open trap door into my storage room and unceremoniously rolled him over the edge. He fell limply and hit the bottom with a satisfying smack.
Evelyn shouted up from the beach, “What if he isn’t dead?”
I shrugged. “Then he wakes up. Eventually.” I looked down at his unpleasantly twisted form where it lay.
“Whatever might have just broken should heal long before he recovers from that hole through his head,” I replied as I slid the door closed. “But at least I got to enjoy doing it to him.”
She just shook her head and turned away.
I trudged back down the hill and, when I reached her, she silently fell in step alongside me. We made our way along the beach, to the spot where we had first emerged there.
Evelyn pointed to the silver cane lying nearby.
“Aren’t you going to get rid of his walking stick?”
I looked at it, took a deep breath, and shook my head.
“Screw
it,” I said. “I’m not touching that thing again.”
She nodded.
“But isn’t there some way to get rid of it?”
“There’s no point,” I said. “It would probably just return to him when he recovers.”
She looked puzzled by that but let it pass.
I brought both hands up then, as if feeling the surface of an invisible wall in front of me. I was in fact feeling the construction of space-time around me, getting a sense of its warp and woof and detecting the areas of least resistance to penetration. Satisfied, I pushed. The air around me rippled as if I had pushed my fingers into a pond, and reality shuddered. Twisting my right hand, I exerted more of the Power, and an oval, rimmed in blue flame, irised open before us, to a height of about ten feet and a width of roughly five feet.
Taking Evelyn’s hand, I led her through the portal and away from my tiny tropical paradise, idly wondering if I would ever have the opportunity or inclination to return there. A profound sadness descended on me then, though why I cannot say.
Once the portal snapped shut behind us, thick mists surrounded us on all sides. The ground underfoot was hard, red clay. I recognized our location instantly.
Evelyn looked around, eyes wide.
“We are still in the Above,” I told her. “Slow time, high power.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me.
“I’m still not sure I follow all of that,” she said.
“It is actually quite simple,” I said. “Think of your plane, containing Earth and your Terran Alliance, as well as my old Mysentia and the Outer Worlds, as a sort of middle ground. Below that, so to speak, power decreases as you go ‘down’ the levels. And time speeds up. Creatures in the lower levels of the Below are almost like insects—very weak, buzzing about, and living lives that, even to you, would seem quite brief. A year in parts of the Below would seem only a few hours in your plane, and only an instant in my City.”
She nodded.
“And that’s where subspace is located, right?”
I nodded.
“The portion of the Below that humans have accessed for centuries, for rapid space travel. Yes. Your ships move through subspace—through a level of the Below—while very little time passes back in your own plane. You still have to put your crews into stasis for very long journeys but, once back in your realm, they scarcely seem to have been gone any time at all.”
Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (The Above Book 1) Page 10