by Lee Bond
Samiel conjured up an image of Alistair Wood as a younger man and sketched as solemn a bow as he could with the ropes and pulleys impeding him. “I am discovering this too late in the game, my old friend Mister Wood, but I have to thank you anyways, already, for giving me answers as to who this Nickels is. Had I done something like this sooner, I would’ve spared myself considerable agony and irritation. But! As they say, it is never too late.
And in the time travel game, there isn’t really anything like ‘too late’, is there?” Samiel laughed loudly at his own joke. “I admire you, Mister Wood. Standing there, being able to take in all that is Nickels. How would you react, were you to learn that after all of this, all of my failures, all of my painstaking efforts in bringing him down, that he is nothing more than a creation of some much later version of me, and all designed to force me out of stagnation?
I can’t even deny it. The signs are everywhere I look. Things with Bishop progress ever forward, and while the skein of his life is more fragile than ever, it genuinely looks as though Lissande is going to be more successful than ever. Some … something about this version of Nickels, who’s always been chaos on the hoof, simply being in the same orbit as Bishop is causing things to twist, ever so gently, in my direction. This is … this excellent news.”
Samiel puffed his chest up with pride. It’d taken him too, too long to realize just what was going on, and for that, he should feel some shame or at the very least a kind of awkward embarrassment –especially in light of the fact that he apparently didn’t know his own mind well enough or the range of his powers- in failing to figure this fairly simple puzzle out much sooner, but he didn’t.
He was ebullient. Wood would watch, Chez would secure, he would win. If Bishop went off the rails as always, The Line would restart, and next time, he’d deal with Nickels in an entirely different way.
The joy and glory and power of being Overlord of The Line. It afforded you luxuries mortal man couldn’t understand.
“Let’s resume. Skip the gushing fanboy stuff. I want to hear Wood’s account of Chezzik’s arrival and that’s it. I’m eager to get back to it, now I know what’s really going on.”
***
“… not like this, not at all. General Habercome is here, with his private goon squad. They’ve assembled themselves squarely in the middle of where the media stands, and they are quite openly carrying their weapons. Habercome himself is doing nothing to prevent the media from recording them, either, which … is not good.
I’ve come across Habercome before, benefactor. You might say he is the Americanized version of myself, but where I am elegance and gentlemanly, he is your stereotypical thuggish Uncle Sam adherent, ready, willing and able to sling bullets wherever he wishes. And all in the name of the United States. He hasn’t seen me yet, which I suppose bodes well. I do not doubt he is still sore of our encounter in Milan.
Ah. Here comes our man now, walking out onto the stage, bold as brass tacks. Looks nothing like I’d imagined, to be quite sincere. Very tall, very muscular, the look of the devil in his eyes. Doesn’t at all seem to be the sort of man to house a brain the equal, nay, the sum of and greater than all the other assembled minds underneath this roof.
I shall take some pictures to include on whatever medium I eventually choose to store this on … well, this is odd. My cellular phone isn’t working properly. Hm. No signal, no funct… no one’s phones? No laptops, nor tablets. Nickels! He’s done this somehow. To what end I won…
Oh my God, someone’s …”
***
Sounds of confusion and screaming and, naturally, a single shot fired as well as broken glass and other frightful noises echoed loudly through the eternal stretch of the Ziggurat where Samiel made his home. The gunshot, of course, would be from poor Rommen deShure. The Overlord found the tiniest bit of regret in his heart for what’d become of the man. He’d failed, somehow. Missed some weird quirk in the boy from Kansas that’d turn him into the clumsy, half-mad idiot he was right then, in that convention center.
Just another one of those travesties that would be undone when everything was laid down just how he liked it. Samiel swore it.
The broken glass, of course, was Chezzik.
On the recording, more gunshots, followed by Wood’s breathless recording…
***
“Dear God. Dear … oh … dear God. I’ve … I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. The … smell … it’s ruinous. All this fear. The screams, the shouting. The … the chaos. I’ve … this man, this man in a white suit, he jumped through the roof above our heads! He … benefactor, he slaughtered the General and his men as if they were nothing and now he moves on to deal with Nickels himself.
I should do something. Say something. Use my means to convince this slender killer in the white suit to leave off, but I am petrified. The look of cool dispassion on his face as he did for those men … I doubt it will ever leave me. He stalks Nickels, but there is an awful chance, benefactor, that he is dead, shot lethally by some blonde-headed fool.
Ah. Conversation. Thank God. Our man Nickels isn’t dead. Merely wounded. He and this man are …”
***
There followed a shrieking scream unlike anything Samiel had ever heard before, a powerful, full-on, full ranged harmonic howl that ripped and tore it’s way through the Ziggurat with visible intensity, blowing back the ever-present, gently colored incongruous tentacles of smoke-like energy and actually, physically, rattling the incongruity far above his head.
Samiel fared no better under the strange onslaught; the sound, made by no man or beast but by The Line itself as it was assailed, was a barrage, an inescapable assault of sound that had him thrashing painfully in his leather and rope pulley system until the Overlord thought he might break loose.
The sound continued on and on and on, buffeting Samiel, slinging him about in his harness, until the time-traveler found in himself fear that this might be the awful, unkind end. That Nickels had deployed some form of deadly weapon there on the field, something awful, something desper…
The sound faded, diminishing into a faint trickling whisper that soon disappeared underneath the background noises of the Ziggurat itself, gone so abruptly that Samiel found himself wondering if it’d even come in the first place.
“What the hell was all that?” Samiel –worn out from the exertion of keeping himself right where he was- breathlessly examined The Lines before him, exhaling a nervously held breath when it was revealed that everyone he was tracking was still as fine as the day they’d intruded on his peaceful life.
Wood’s drive, still playing, clicked once, very loudly, and resumed playing.
***
“I do not like this, benefactor. Not at all. There is a distinct military presence here, of the sort that would generally make your typical American quite uncomfortable. I see across the floor that noxious boilerplate soldier, General Habercome. I can only imagine he’s here to deal with Garth Nickels in the ham-handed fashion that his particular sub rosa organization chooses to deal with all threats. Our last encounter, in Milan, did not go as well as he’d planned, and my usual sources claim he’s still quite cross over losing out.
Ah well. Such is life…”
***
Samiel stared into the middle distance, so incredulous that he knew he must look the fool.
That wasn’t right. Those words coming from Wood’s mouth weren’t the ones he’d said. Samiel should know. After hundreds of thousands of years of manipulating The Line, one of his many talents was perfect recall, and those words were different.
Same, but different. Which was impossible.
Unless…
“No.” Samiel reached out and pulled a pulley, which was in turn connected to a computer that was kept out of the way lest he bump it accidentally. “No. Nonononono. No. It can’t be. Nickels is anything but that stupid. He was already playing with deadly fire, using it across such a small gulf of time. To use it the same day? Suicide. Shee
r and … no. Nononono. I can’t believe it. No.”
Samiel’s fat, flattened fingers danced nimbly across the customized keyboard, pausing every few seconds as the present him brought to mind codes and commands that none of him had used in a terribly long time; the machine beneath his grimy fingers was an old one, designed in a much, much older iteration of History, one who’s sole function in life was to track the resounding tears ripped into the fabric of the Overall Line.
Little more than a parlor trick these days as he was able to hold more than a dozen Lines in his focal point at any one time, Samiel needed to rely on the diagnostic computer now because … because there was no proof of Wood’s words anywhere except inside his own head.
The antiquated, rusty and mildewed machine beeped and blooped nonsensically, it’s grimy, partially blackened screen populating itself with a graph laden down with a surprising number of dots across a plane.
Samiel recognized his own handiwork immediately. His incursions into The Line –both backward and forward- were big and bold as brass tacks. No need to hide when you were the only one in the game. Naturally, there were a greater number of cross-instances than normal in the 20th and 21st centuries, button-bright indicators of his efforts to kill Garth through rough and dirty manipulation of the entire Federal task force and both the more delicate and ingenious efforts at transforming deShure and Wood into reliable, full-time agents.
Those were indicated in a bright purple, because the Royal color was reserved only for those who would eventually be Gods. Samiel spent a few minutes reveling in the mastery of his insertion points, reflecting how, at the beginning of things, he’d been a rude beast, literally clawing his way into a point in The Line.
“Now I dance my way through and no one sees a thing. Pity. I’d like some admirers.” Samiel rapped the side of the box as it slowly chugged it’s way through detecting Nickels’ intrusions. “Ah well. When this is all over and done with, and I am the man I want to be, and the world is the way the world deserves. Then.”
Nickels’ crude invasions of The Line began popping into place, one at a time, presumably in the order in which he’d decided to risk his own life. Sparingly, at first, hints of a man unsure of himself, of a man growing accustomed to foreign technology far beyond his ken, then rapidfire quick. One after the other, bang bang bang, on-point trips into his own personal past, expertly nailing down some specific fact of History and then neatly excising what wasn’t wanted or needed in favor of a better path.
Around those moments, the Overall Line buckled and shifted under the onslaught but never once showed signs of fraying on the edges.
And then … and then came the day of the convention center.
Samiel felt his eyes bulge so hard in his sockets that were he not wearing heavy goggles put there precisely for this sort of thing, the Overlord of The Line might have worried those important orbs were poised to pop right out. If they were to fall from this height, they’d be forever lost in the ziggurat-maze down below.
One. Two. Three. Forty. Fifty.
A hundred.
A hundred fifty.
“He’s mad.” Samiel flung The Line Diagnostic Machine away from him with such strength that it tore itself loose from the mechanical arm holding into place along with the rest of his equipment and flew off into the upper reaches of the cavern. Eventually the strange temporal tide emanating from the temporal incongruity reached out and grabbed hold of the broken computer and pulled it in, where it vanished. “Mad. This is … this is madness. Corrupt, unhinged, unbreakable madness. And he’s still going. Was. Is. Makes no difference! He’s going to kill himself.”
Early on in his career as temporal agent working behind the scenes to transform the pointless history of the world into something more palatable, Samiel had made the same mistake as Garth was that very moment, and it was a mistake that he carried with him every moment of every day.
The pain. Oh, the pain from short-skipping down The Line to a focal point less than three days from the moment of the reach was a force to be reckoned with, oh yes it was. Had he been the sort of person to go to a hospital the first time he’d been that foolish, they would’ve undoubtedly tried to pronounce him dead on the scene; The Line was amenable to manipulation, given enough leeway along itself, but when you reached out through to yourself in a portion of The Line where History was not yet … fully formed, you were smacked, and smacked down hard.
Samiel didn’t much understand the whys and wherefores of such nasty repercussions, but he had understood, and fairly immediately, that it was something he wouldn’t do unless the situation was dire.
“Four times? No. Five. No more than that. In hundreds of thousands of years.” Samiel shivered inside his loose skin. Five times. And he bore the memory of the pain as if it was still happening. Even though those moments had been excised from The Line for near eternity, it took no effort to recollect the soul-searing, skin-flaying torture of bending The Line between two soft points in History.
Caught between Rommen deShure and Chezzik Elteren, Garth Nickels was trying to undo … everything, and in so doing, was effortlessly achieving what Samiel had long sought to do this whole time; the temporal interloper was killing himself, and far more viciously than was necessary.
“No.” Samiel’s voice was full of determination. “Not today.”
The irony wasn’t lost on the man. Not a day ago, he’d been resolute in his desire to rid The Line –and himself, of course- of the man calling himself Garth Nickels. Would’ve done anything in his power to accomplish it, in fact. Certainly bringing an unallied maniac in the form of Chezzik Elteren aboard was all the signs that Samiel needed to highlight his nearly rabid intent to remove Nickels from The Line.
But that’d been before.
Before he’d realized the truth of it.
Samiel shook his head. However impossible it was, or even how implausible, Garth Nickels was a part of the tapestry he was trying to weave throughout History. All the signs were there. Bishop was closer now than he’d ever been before, willing allegiance to a cause greater than the orgiastic idolatry of his own life hovering just out of view, and the only thing different between this moment in The Line and any of the others was Nickels himself.
It was easy enough to see, from here, in the 25th century, that nothing Nickels was doing in the 21st was going to have any impact on the world. Because the present world had no knowledge of the man. Showed no signs of his tech, anywhere. So from The Line’s point of view, Nickels was unimportant, save one:
Bishop.
Bishop’s Line remained full of potential.
“And that is why you are here, Nickels.” Samiel started working on pulling Chezzik backwards up The Line. There was no point to the assassin being there. No need to corral Nickels in. Better, now, as was evinced by Woods’ POV monologue, to stand aside, let Nickels live his life the way he wanted. And so long as that life continued to influence Drake Bishop, so long as the billionaire’s very existence continued the inevitable slide towards compassion to a cause greater than his own –even if that empathy remained under the surface, only to rise four hundred years later, in his children-, so be it.
Garth Nickels needed to live.
Samiel grabbed hold of Chezzik Elteren’s Line and hauled him forward…
***
Chezzik Elteren straightened lapels that needed no straightening and took a long, thoughtful look at bloated Baron Samiel. The bastard looked more harried than usual, and the entire expanse stank of unadulterated emotion. One of his ‘pieces sampled the pheromonal stench wafting past his delicate senses and was not surprised to see that there was rage, fear, disappointment and victory all rolled into one fat, disgusting perfume that was in no way enticing.
“Ouch.” The assassin replied drolly. “That hurt.”
“Apologies.” Samiel replied curtly. “I have changed my mind. No need for you to travel to the past. Nickels is no longer a threat to my operation. You may go. I will provide you with a
considerable amount of money once you reach the threshold to the outside world. In the parlance of the 20th century, make sure the door doesn’t hit your ass on the way out.”
Chezzik watched on as Samiel turned back to his computers, fat fingers click-clacking on huge keyboards. “One hundred eighty-six times. And one half.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Samiel turned away from his keyboards, mountainous forehead beetling in confusion. “Say that again.”
“One hundred,” Chezzik fiddled with his sleeves. Really, there was something wrong with them. It was like traveling through time had done some irrevocable harm to the creases. It were driving him faintly bonkers. “Eighty-six times. And one half. Though in all fairness, that remaining half is on you, squire.”
“Not possible.” Samiel shook his head adamantly. “I am a master at this. I pulled you out of The Line before you even entered the 20th century. You have had no experiences there.”
“Now how could I forget traveling through time?” Chezzik demanded idly, keeping his eyes on bloated Samiel. “And more importantly, how could I forget one hundred and eighty-six and one half times, though that last one is on you, of being bounced back to the same point in that time? Over and over again.”
Samiel regretted the destruction of The Line Diagnostic Machine more now than ever. It wouldn’t be able to plot Nickels’ personal temporal incursions any longer because they didn’t exist, but it might’ve been able to do a scan of Chezzik’s Line.
Fussily, "There is no indication that you should have any recollections of anything you may or may not have gotten up to in the past, Chezzik." Samiel leveled a gaze at the assassin, one that'd cowed some of the most powerful beings the world had ever seen. "Attempting to fool with me will only result in your embarrassment."
Yeah, there were definitely something wrong with the old EverKleen. Even the pockets -in which there were all sorts of things, picked up here and there, as old habits did indeed die quite hard- were off kilter. Like they were smaller or summink.
He ignored Samiel's impressive glower in favor of tapping the center of his forehead. The searing fire burning through the skin there remained still, while the rest of his organic systems popped and fizzled with the strange power inherent in Nickels' blood. "Upgrades, squire. Upgrades. It seems our man Nickels is a mite bit odder than we ever imagined."