by Alex Irvine
“What about the people you killed?” Strange shot back, thinking of Daniel Drumm lying dead at the bottom of the stairs.
Kaecilius couldn’t shrug, but Strange had the feeling he would have. “Tiny, momentary specks within an indifferent universe,” he said.
Wait, Strange thought. He remembered using exactly those words to The Ancient One, right after his arrival in Kamar-Taj. How had Kaecilius known that? Did he have ears inside Kamar-Taj? Spies? Or was it just a coincidence? Or… some kind of message from a different power?
Kaecilius didn’t say one way or the other. “Yes. You see, you see what we’re doing? The world is not what it ought to be. Humanity longs for the eternal, for a world beyond time, because time is what enslaves us. Time is an insult. Death is an insult. Doctor… we don’t seek to rule this world. We seek to save it, to hand it over to Dormammu, who is the intent of all evolution, the Why of all existence.”
Now Kaecilius was revealing himself to be a fanatic. “The Sorcerer Supreme defends existence,” Strange said.
Ignoring him, Kaecilius asked, “What was it that brought you to Kamar-Taj, Doctor? Was it enlightenment? Power? You came to be healed, as did we all. Kamar-Taj is a place that collects broken things. We all come with the promise of being healed, but instead The Ancient One gives us parlor tricks. The real magic she keeps for herself. Have you ever wondered how she managed to live this long?”
“I… I saw the rituals in The Book of Cagliostro.”
“So, you know.” Kaecilius sounded satisfied. “The ritual gives me the power to overthrow The Ancient One and tear her Sanctums down, to let the Dark Dimension in. Because what The Ancient One hoards, Dormammu gives freely. Life, everlasting. He is not the destroyer of worlds, Doctor; he is the savior of worlds.”
“No. I mean, come on. Look at your face,” Strange said, hoping the obvious damage would be enough to at least give the fanatic some pause. “Dormammu made you a murderer. Just how good can his kingdom be?” Kaecilius smiled. Puzzled, Strange asked, “You think that’s funny?”
Kaecilius’s smile grew broader. “No, Doctor. What’s funny is that you’ve lost your sling ring.”
Strange looked down. It was true. His sling ring was gone.
Then he heard something from the bottom of the stairs. He turned and saw, too late, a Zealot coming out of a portal. In the next moment he felt the Zealot’s Space Shard bury itself deep in his chest. All the strength went out of Strange’s legs. Staggering, he tumbled down the stairs. Strange knew he was hurt badly. He could feel pressure building in his chest as blood pooled around his heart from the wound. He needed a doctor—now. There was no way he could fight the Zealot.
But still, the Zealot came after him, bringing another Space Shard into existence.
The red cloak came to his rescue, ripping itself away from Strange’s body and wrapping around the Zealot’s head. It dragged him off balance and flung him to the ground, doing its best to incapacitate the tough fanatic. For a piece of cloth, magical or no, the cloak was doing an astounding job and, from what Stephen could make out, seemed to be winning.
From one of its folds, Strange’s sling ring bounced across the floor toward him. He snatched it up and tried to focus his fading energy on creating a portal. He knew where he had to go. The portal materialized. On the other side, he could see a broom closet. Yes. He staggered through.
Behind him, the Zealot still struggled against the cloak.
CHAPTER 9
A startled nurse saw Doctor Stephen Strange reel out of the broom closet into the hospital hall. He reeled even farther into the wall, leaving a bloody handprint. “Sir, can I help you?” the nurse said.
“Doctor Palmer,” Strange panted. “Where is she?”
“Sir, we need to—”
“Where is she?” Strange shouted.
“At the nurses’ station.”
Strange pushed past her. He was in bad shape, and each second wasted could cost him. “Christine!”
She ran around the counter at the nurses’ station. “Stephen? Oh my god. What—”
“We need to get me on an operating table now,” he said. It was getting harder to draw breath. “Just you. Now! I haven’t any time!”
Christine helped him through a swinging door into an emergency-room operating theater. She laid him on a table. “What happened?”
“Stabbed,” he said. “Cardiac tamponade.”
She started working, peeling back his robe to get a view of the wound. “What are you wearing?” That was a long story Strange didn’t have time to tell. Christine tapped on his chest at various points. “The chest cavity is clear.”
Now he really couldn’t breathe. That fact on top of his pain made it nearly impossible for him to gasp out, “The blood… is in the pericardial sac.” Then he felt himself slipping away, felt his overexerted hands relaxing and going limp. Dimly, he heard Christine saying, “No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no! Stephen! Stephen!”
As she yelled at her former friend, she was getting a syringe ready to draw the blood out of the pericardial sac around his heart. If it didn’t happen fast, the blood would squeeze his heart and Strange would die. And it had to happen just right. Stephen felt himself losing touch with his body. In his last moment of consciousness, that gave him an idea, a last hope…
He heaved himself up and out of his body. Astral projection. His astral form hovered just above the table. He turned and saw his body on the table, with the ragged wound in his chest from the Zealot’s Space Shard. Christine brought the needle to his chest, pausing. If she put it in the wrong place, it would draw blood out of the heart instead of from around it. That would be fatal.
Strange couldn’t help himself. Even after all he’d learned at Kamar-Taj, he couldn’t just let someone operate without giving his advice. “Just a little higher,” he said.
Christine screamed and jumped away, covering her mouth with one gloved hand. Strange had forgotten that he was back in the normal world, where people didn’t expect things like astral projection. “Please be careful with the needle.”
“Stephen?” she squeaked. “Oh lord, oh lord. What am I seeing?”
“My astral body.”
“Are you dead?”
“No, Christine, but I am dying.” He tried to say it gently, but he was in a bit of a hurry.
“Right. Right.” She gathered herself and rested the point of the needle against his skin. Strange showed her the exact spot, sinking his astral fingers into his body’s chest.
“I’ve… I’ve never seen a wound like this before,” she said. The skin around the wound was cracked and gray. Just like the skin around Kaecilius’s eyes. The Space Shards were weapons of the Dark Dimension. “What were you stabbed with?”
“I don’t know,” Strange said. He watched her work, slowly drawing blood into the syringe. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the astral form of one of the Zealots ghosting into the room. “I’m going to have to vanish now.”
“No, I—”
“Keep me alive, will you?” Strange vanished from her sight and turned to face the Zealot. He was the one who had stabbed him. He must have astrally projected himself to escape the cloak… and to finish what he’d started back in the New York Sanctum.
The Zealot charged and crashed into Strange. They wrestled across the operating room, floating through delicate instruments, and battering each other as Christine kept slowly drawing blood from around Strange’s heart. The Zealot was strong, and Strange hadn’t learned enough martial arts to keep up with him. He was losing the fight. They tumbled over the operating table, jostling Christine a little. Astral bodies, despite their ghostlike appearances, could have small effects in the real world. Then they phased through the wall out into the hallway, through a vending machine where Doctor Nic West was just getting some potato chips. Several other candies fell to the bottom of the machine when Strange and the Zealot passed through it. Doctor West scooped them all up—What a lucky day for Nic, Strange noted bitter
ly.
The Zealot was still getting the better of Strange, landing blow after blow. After one stunning punch, Strange felt his astral link to his body slipping.
In the operating room, a monitor alarm went off. Strange’s body was flatlining. His heart had stopped. Christine ran to get defibrillator paddles. She charged them up and shocked his heart, trying to start it again.
In the astral realm, the extra energy from the charge went off like a bomb through Stephen’s projection. It blasted the lunging Zealot across the room. In the real world, equipment clanged and fell onto the floor. “Stephen, come on,” Christine said. His heart started to beat… but slowly. He was still in danger.
Strange appeared to Christine. “Hit me again!”
She gave a little shriek and said, “Stop doing that!”
“Up the voltage and hit me again.”
“No, your heart is beating!” On the monitor, the signal was getting stronger.
Strange knew it was against all medical protocol to shock a patient again when the first shock had worked… but in the astral realm he was still in real trouble. “Just do it!”
He vanished, just in time to avoid the Zealot, who was after him again. But this time, instead of trying to fight his way free, Strange grappled with him and held on. He heard the building whine of the defibrillator… and then Christine shocked him again.
The charge burned through Strange’s astral form and into the Zealot’s, overwhelming the aggressive projection. There was a violent flash, and in the real world lightbulbs popped and the operating room went dark. In the astral realm, the Zealot’s body disappeared, leaving behind nothing but burned marks on the walls.
On the operating table, Strange’s body spasmed and he opened his eyes. Christine jumped back, still clutching the defibrillator paddles. “Oh god! Are you okay?”
He tried to lift his head. “Hey there,” he said. He was alive.
A little later, as she stitched his wound, Christine had gotten herself together enough to start getting mad. Really mad. “After all this time, you just show up here, flying out of your body?” she said, pulling a stitch tight.
“Yeah, I know,” Strange said. He wished he could explain everything, but how would she take it? “I missed you, too, by the way. I wrote two e-mails, but you never responded.”
She didn’t look at him, keeping her attention on the sutures she was putting in his chest. She might be mad, but she was still a phenomenal doctor. “Why would I?”
“Christine, I am so, so sorry. For all of it.” It felt good to say that. Whatever else happened with Kamar-Taj and Kaecilius, Strange knew he had changed as a person. “And you were right, I was a complete ass. I treated you so horribly, and you deserved so much more.”
“Stop,” she said. “You… you’re clearly in shock.” But now she did look at him, and he saw the concern—and maybe something more—in her face. “I mean, what is happening? Where have you been?”
“Well, after Western medicine failed me, I headed East, and I ended up in Kathmandu.”
“Kathmandu?” Christine rolled her eyes.
“And then I went to a place called Kamar-Taj and I talked to someone called The Ancient One and…”
“Oh,” she said. “So you joined a cult.”
“No, I didn’t. Not exactly. I mean, they did teach me to tap into powers that I never even knew existed.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a cult.”
He had known it would be hard to explain, but he wasn’t sure what he expected from Christine. “It’s not a cult,” he said again, thankful she wasn’t outright saying he was crazy.
“Well, that’s what a cultist would say.” She was right. Strange chuckled and started to sit up. “Wait, Stephen… what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m late for a cult meeting,” he said, and swung his legs off the table. He could walk with some help, and Christine guided him out into the hall.
“This is insane,” she said. There it was, he noted. He needed to be in the hospital.
“Yeah,” Strange agreed. There was no point in arguing it.
“Where are you going?”
“Um…” He wasn’t sure how to say it.
Christine, as usual, cut to the chase. “Just tell me the truth.”
Okay, Strange thought. You asked for it. “Well, a powerful sorcerer, who gave himself over to an ancient entity who can bend the very laws of physics, tried very hard to kill me, but I left him chained up in Greenwich Village, and the quickest way back there is through a dimensional gateway that I opened up in the mop closet.”
She let him go and took a step back. “Okay. Don’t tell me. Fine.”
Strange opened the closet door. The portal still hung sparking in midair, with the interior of the Greenwich Village Sanctum visible inside it. Christine walked up close enough to see that it was real, eyes wide with astonishment. Strange kept going. From the other side of the portal, he turned back to her.
“I really do have to go,” he said. The portal closed as he walked away into the Sanctum.
CHAPTER 10
The body of the Zealot lay in the hall, with the cloak hovering nearby. Strange bent and laid two fingers on the Zealot’s neck, feeling for a pulse.
There was none. He was dead. And Strange had killed him.
It was a terrible thing to realize, but Strange couldn’t take time to process it right then. He swept the cloak around his shoulders and went upstairs looking for Kaecilius. Instead, he found the empty framework lying on the floor in the artifact gallery, under the window that displayed the Sanctum’s sigil.
“Strange!” He turned and saw Mordo on the other side of the gallery, a sword strapped to his back. “You’re okay.”
“A relative term,” Strange said. “But yeah, I’m okay.”
“The Cloak of Levitation,” Mordo said as he got a better look at what Strange was wearing. “It came to you.”
The Ancient One stepped out of the shadows near Mordo. “No minor feat,” she said, almost complimenting him. “It’s a fickle thing.”
Strange wasn’t interested in compliments from her right then, but he also knew the time wasn’t right to confront her with what he had learned about Dormammu and the source of her long life. “He’s escaped,” he said.
“Kaecilius?” The Ancient One asked.
“Yeah. He can fold space and matter at will.”
“He folds matter outside the Mirror Dimension? In the real world?” She looked deeply concerned at this. Having experienced Kaecilius’s power, Strange could understand why.
“Yeah,” he said.
“How many more?”
“Two. I stranded one in the desert.”
“And the other?”
“His body is in the hall,” Strange said. “Master Drumm was in the foyer.”
“He’s been taken back to Kamar-Taj,” Mordo said.
Her tone grave, The Ancient One brought Strange up to date. “The London Sanctum has fallen. Only New York and Hong Kong remain now to shield us from the Dark Dimension. You defended the New York Sanctum from attack. With its Master gone, it needs another.… Master Strange.”
Master? That wasn’t possible. He wasn’t ready; compared to Mordo or Wong, Strange had just begun his study. And even if he was ready… “No,” he said, turning to her. “It is Doctor Strange. Not Master Strange, not Mister Strange—Doctor Strange.” He struggled to control his emotions as he went on. “When I became a doctor, I swore an oath to do no harm. And I have just killed a man! I’m not doing that again. I became a doctor to save lives, not take them.”
The Ancient One heard him out. From the look on her face, he even thought she believed he was sincere. But still she cut through what he said. She was her own kind of surgeon, slicing away the diseased parts of her students’ minds and emotions. “You became a doctor to save one life above all others,” she said. “Your own.”
Strange was getting a little sick of her guru act. “Still seeing through me, are y
ou?”
“I see what I’ve always seen,” she said. “Your overinflated ego. You want to go back to the delusion that you can control anything, even death, which no one can control. Not even the great Doctor Stephen Strange.”
“Not even Dormammu?” If she was going to come after him, Strange thought, he wasn’t going to back down. Not now. “He offers immortality.”
Mordo watched both of them, looking concerned that the tension between them might escalate. “It’s our fear of death that gives Dormammu life,” The Ancient One said. “He feeds off it.”
“Like you feed on him?” Strange saw from her expression that it was true. “You talk to me about controlling death. Well, I know how you do it. I’ve seen the missing rituals from The Book of Cagliostro.”
“Measure your next words very carefully, Doctor,” she said, her voice quiet, hard, and distinctly threatening.
Strange didn’t care. “Because you might not like them?”
“Because you may not know of what you speak.”
“What is he talking about?” Mordo demanded.
He was looking at The Ancient One, but Strange answered instead. “I’m talking about her long life. The source of her immortality. She draws power from the Dark Dimension to stay alive.”
Mordo refused to believe this. “That’s not true.”
“I’ve seen the rituals and worked them out,” Strange said, eyes still focused on The Ancient One. “I know how you do it.”
She paused, and for a moment Strange thought he might have gone too far. Where were the warnings about how far you could push the Sorcerer Supreme before she lashed out? But she stayed calm and changed the subject. “Once they regroup, the Zealots will be back. You’ll need reinforcements.” She turned away and was gone.
There was a long, tense silence. Then Strange broke it. “She is not who you think she is,” he said to Mordo.
Mordo was loyal, and Strange’s accusations against The Ancient One angered him. “You don’t have the right to say that. You have no idea of the responsibility that rests upon her shoulders.”