Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4)

by James A. Hunter

  Still, I could sure as hell get used to travelling like this.

  I was expecting a greeting of some sort from Lady Fate, but none met my ears.

  I turned, taking in the yawning cave, before finally surveying the rustic space, which passed as Lady Fate’s living room. The walls of her personal quarters were rock, but the stone was smooth and polished, and a few pieces of needlework hung in yellowing frames. There was a quaint wooden table with a trio of stools, a well-worn rocking chair in one corner, a closed cupboard, and a great stone fireplace with a tremendous kettle resting over a cold fire. Place looked like the Twilight Zone version of Little House on the Prairie.

  But the woman—or women, depending on your definition—we’d come to see was MIA.

  “Bother,” Fortuna said with a sniff. “The Tapestry’s been giving us more and more problems lately. As more Seals are introduced into play, the less distinct the future becomes, and the harder the Tapestry is to accurately discern.” She frowned, tapping a foot restlessly. “She must be in the Archive. She’ll hate having you in there, but we don’t have time to waste. This way,” she said, striding away from the cozy living room area and deeper into the huge cave.

  There was nothing for me to do but follow along like a lost puppy, sticking to Fortuna’s heels as she moved.

  My boss beelined toward the far wall, and I was surprised to see a connecting tunnelway—a cleft in the wall, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding rock—leading deeper into the cave. At first, the hallway was dark as pitch, but as Fortuna led me deeper in, an uneasy glow, soft and cerulean, seeped from the stonework, cast by veins of blue deep within the earthen walls. In some ways, those branching lines of blue almost looked like actual veins, lying just under the surface of stone skin.

  It wasn’t long before I spotted the first connecting hallway, just another passage of dark rock, cutting wildly into the heart of this place. A few more nondescript hallways followed—more of the same—but then came the rooms.

  Holy shit, those rooms:

  The first was a cavernous space shrouded in thick silver fog with some strange half-seen city looming in the distance. I couldn’t place the city, but it was some modern place with sleek skyscrapers of metal and glass. Except the city, wherever it was, had the look of desolation about it. The glass broken. Buildings charred. Cars, empty and abandoned, littered the streets. I had a sneaking suspicion it was some future reality under observation.

  Another room let out into a lush meadow basking in the yellow glow of a massive crystal overhead. The meadow, an idyllic place for an afternoon picnic, was surrounded by towering trees with a fairy ring of wildflowers in the center. I wanted nothing more than to go lie in the center of that ring, to drop into the lush green grass and take a nap. At least I wanted that until I noticed the ground burble and roil beneath the fairy ring, as though some gargantuan worm waited just below the surface. Hungry and patient.

  There were also rooms of a more mundane nature: modern-day offices, manned by a small platoon of lumpy, malformed, ashen-skinned men and women—none of them over four feet—with huge spidery hands and luminescent green eyes. Goblins, I’d reckon, but these were all dressed in business casual attire. Mostly, they ignored our presence, methodically going about their tasks, though a few did stop to offer Fortuna bows or curtseys of deep respect.

  There were also storage rooms or maybe, more accurately, armories:

  We strolled by a blocky cavern on the left filled with weapons from every conceivable century.

  Gleaming blades in every shape and variety neatly lined a wall—Japanese katanas, curved Moorish scimitars, European bastard swords, Roman gladiuses, nimble rapiers with elaborate basket hilts, inward curving falcatas. Next to them sat battle-axes, maces, various polearms, and war hammers. But there was also a huge array of modern armaments. Shelves and shelves full of ’em. Civil war era muzzle-loaded muskets propped up against M4s and AKs. A table full of frag grenades and flashbangs hanging out with German stalk grenades from WWI. And handguns galore. Enough to arm a battalion of troops.

  Not to mention bigger caliber bad boys that I would literally kill to get my hands on. Browning .50 caliber heavy machine guns. Beefy chain guns. A Milkor MGL lightweight automatic grenade launcher. And sitting in the back of the room, like the bad boy in the class, was a M777 Howitzer. A friggin’ Howitzer.

  Another room on the right was identical to the armory, but instead filled with body armor ranging from segmented metal Roman lorica to modern tactical Kevlar.

  “What in the holy mother of God is this place?” I asked, my hurts and aches momentarily forgotten as my inner mercenary rubbed his hands together in greedy glee. “I thought Lady Fate was some cloistered old broad living by herself in this dingy cave. But this? Friggin’ hell, what is all this?”

  Fortuna looked at me over one shoulder as she walked, the ghost of a smile tracing her lips, one eyebrow cocked. “The Lady Wyrd has a strange sense of propriety. Whenever she entertains guests of the mortal variety, she likes to put on the dog and pony show with the rickety furniture and the black kettle—it reinforces a certain image she wishes to maintain. But behind the scene things are quite different. Though Lady Fate may seem a humble woman, a great trust has been bestowed upon her. She is not only protector of the Tapestry of Fate, she is its enforcer, which is no small thing.”

  “Okay, I get that,” I replied. “But what’s with all the weapons and armor? Can’t exactly see Lady Fate leading a raid, and, no offense, but I have an equally hard time seeing you handling a fully automatic shotgun.”

  “You might be surprised,” she said, a glint in her eye. “But you are right in that those weapons aren’t for us. We have a surprisingly large workforce, and we like to make sure our freelancers have whatever they require. Lady Fate oversees not only the spinning of the Tapestry but ensuring its integrity, and that means monitoring the time stream in both directions. Can’t have hostile agents mucking around in time, making unplanned changes. You’ve already met our senior officer, Sir Galahad—the fellow you and Ferraro saved in future Seattle. He patrols the Mists of Fate and guards the Repository on top of the Holy Grail.”

  “Wait, that goody-two-shoes knight works directly for you?”

  She shook her head left and right. “Technically he works for the White King, but Lady Fate is his immediate supervisor.”

  “And he needs all those weapons?” I asked, suddenly revising my opinion of the douchey Sir Gal, who still definitely had a girl’s name. Anyone who got to fire off a friggin’ Howitzer had to be alright.

  “No, not Sir Gal—he has Varunastra with him, after all, direct from the Lady of the Waters. But we have other freelancers who regularly take commissions, and if they take on an assignment in ancient Rome or Colonial America, they need to be properly armed.”

  I had no words. I mean, what could you even say about something like that?

  We walked on for a beat in silence, until, at last, we came to the end of the hallway and a drawn gate—dark wood, ancient brass fixtures, and runic symbols gleaming like radiant moonlight—preventing us from going further.

  “This,” she said, wheeling about to give me a long, weighing look, “is the Archive. The resting place of the Tapestry. Few immortals and fewer mortals have ever gazed on it, so count yourself among the lucky.” She snorted and slapped at her thigh. “Lucky. I kill myself. Anyway, before we proceed, a word of caution. Lady Fate is most definitely inside”—she closed her eyes and canted her head, listening to some unheard thing—“so she’ll be in her true form, which can be …” Her lips curled into a fine, tight line. “Shocking if you aren’t prepared. Please don’t overreact. She can be a bit sensitive about her appearance.”

  She turned and, without giving me further warning or instruction, grabbed my hand and pulled me through the gate.

  TWENTY-NINE:

  The Archive

  The hulking gate didn’t open, didn’t budge, we just walked right through the damn thing�
��a sizzle like the static from a high energy line washed over me—and then we were standing on a rough stone platform hanging over a massive chasm like nothing I’d ever seen before. The unending abyss stretched out in every direction—a void unfathomably deep and incomprehensibly high that vanished into the horizon.

  Huge boulders of craggy stone—small mountains in some cases—hung suspended in the air, completely unsupported, defying gravity by their nature. Running between the boulders, up and down for as far as I could see, was what had to be the Tapestry. Except it wasn’t even remotely like what I’d expected. It was a ginormous spider web, spun from radiant, golden silk, running from everywhere to everywhere. A manic tangle of strands without rhyme or reason, at least not to my eye.

  Some of those strands were wispy and thin, only tenuously connected, while other cables of webbing were as thick as bridges.

  A scuttle of movement near one of the boulders nearest me caught my attention; a heartbeat later Lady Wyrd scuttled into view. I wanted to vomit in my mouth.

  The Three-Faced-Hag had never been much of a looker—spoiler alert, the name totally gives it away—but compared to the thing descending toward me, the Wyrd in human form was like a recently bloomed rose, sparkling in the early morning light, fresh with dew droplets dotting its petals. The first time I’d met Lady Fate, she’d appeared as a hunched, matronly woman sporting a homespun gown of drab brown. Pretty average, aside from the fact that she had three faces, one forward facing, the other two protruding like cancerous growths from either side of her head.

  Gross to the max, am I right? Wrong-o.

  The creature dropping toward me on a fat strand of silk beat that in spades.

  A spider, big as an M1A1 tank, spooled toward us, its legs gold and red, oddly delicate, and studded with black hairs. Its monstrously oversized thorax was neon green, spotted with brilliant crimson, and bristled with gleaming spikes like golden K-Bars. And the head … Shiiiit. It had a giant maw with fangs the size of short curved swords, but instead of the customary arachnid eyes, the creature had three human faces bulging out.

  The same three faces I’d seen the first time I’d met the Wyrd:

  A young woman with creamy skin, high cheekbones, and flawless lips.

  A middle-aged woman, cheeks too thin and hollow, worry wrinkles sprouting across her forehead, around her eyes, and at the corners of her mouth.

  The last a wrinkled hag, a crone, with a horribly disfigured mouth, lopsided by stroke on one side.

  None of the faces had eyes, just empty sockets, dark as the grave and murky as the future. Unfortunately, those eyeless faces reminded me too much of my own marred visage and I had to turn away, disrespect or no.

  “Handmaiden,” the withered grandmother faced crooned, looking at Fortuna. “This is most unexpected. You were to deliver the brief to the young man away from our realm. Why is he here?”

  Fortuna offered a curt apology and then launched into an immediate and concise explanation of the circumstances.

  “We should’ve seen it, of course,” the grandmotherly face said, then offered a long sigh. “It’s this damn Tapestry,” she said, facing me. “The Seals are throwing everything off. Everything. And the longer this whole mess goes on, the more unclear things become. Soon we will be blind in truth, at least where you are concerned, young man.” She descended the rest of the way, her fat body lowering onto her crab-like legs, squat abdomen resting on the ground.

  “Well, what’s done is done,” the Wyrd said, “but Fortuna, dear, ring ahead next time, won’t you?” The lovely young face frowned. “We’ve had designs on our Champion since first we laid eyes on him,” the maiden face said. “We’d so hoped to seduce him into a night of passionate lovemaking, but he’ll never be amicable to the idea. Not now. Not after seeing us in our true form.” She looked crestfallen.

  I was crestfallen too, crestfallen because I still had one eye and had to watch this gigantic spider freak try and put the moves on me.

  “No point wasting time,” the middle-aged face said directly to the younger. “We’ve got work to do, yet—much and much work to do—so let’s see to our Champion’s needs, then send him on his way, shall we? Have you given him the original brief, Fortuna?”

  Lady Luck shook her head.

  “Might as well do it ourselves,” the grandmother face replied with a nod. “We formally welcome you to our realm, Yancy Lazarus, and we hope you enjoyed the tour. Sadly, we are terribly busy, so let’s be about our business. We dispatched our handmaiden”—the spider-woman dipped her enormous head toward Lady Luck—“because there are several crucial developments you really ought to know. First, there is him.”

  One spidery leg, slim and knobby, lashed out, and in its wake was a brilliant light like shifting quicksilver, which resolved into the image of a man: young, bushy beard, ice-chip eyes. The Savage Prophet. “You have already met him,” Lady Fate said, “and the fact that you stand before us is good news—the monk did his duty, and in so doing prevented an absolutely disastrous outcome. Just disastrous. But, it is an ephemeral victory. One pitfall avoided, with a thousand more before us. Moreover, that insufferable Prophet is a big part of the headache we’re dealing with here. He’s preventing us from properly discerning your fate.”

  “How in the hell is that possible?” I asked, genuinely confused. I mean, who could pull one over on Lady-friggin’-Fate? That’s like trying to beat a guy named “Huge-Arm” Mike at arm wrestling. Crazy.

  “It’s the nature of the Tapestry,” Fortuna said, next to me. “Though my mistress is responsible for spinning, enforcing, and protecting the Tapestry, the information contained within is of divine origin. Now, many choices are left to chance, left to the whims of mortal free will, but the White King also has a will of His own. Though He does not often act directly, when He does elect to act, it is the absolute final word on the matter. And, since the White King exists outside of space and time, His direct actions are recorded beforehand in the Tapestry of Fate—the divine decrees upon which reality is built.”

  She swept one hand toward the expansive cavern filled with golden silk.

  “Since the Tapestry is of divine origin, only divine power may influence and distort it.”

  “What’s that got to do with the Prophet?”

  “It has everything to do with the Prophet, because he has acquired a Seal of his own—the Fifth Seal to be precise, and it’s making matters nearly unbearable for us on this end.”

  “That’s not exactly a revelation, ladies,” I replied, rubbing at my chin. “The whole demon-thing, I mean. I saw him slinging around a little Nox during his battle with the abbot, so I kinda assumed there was something more going on than strictly meets the eye, but why would that affect the Tapestry? Shit, seems like everybody and their friggin’ brothers has one of these Seals, so what’s so special about this clown?”

  “Not everyone and their brother has a Seal,” Fortuna replied sternly, “and it’s such a big deal because of which Seal he happens to have.” She popped her briefcase and pulled out a manila dossier, rifling through its contents before pulling out a glossy photo of a sigil—a goofy looking set of wings, encompassed by a circle. “Each demon has their own specialty. Azazel is a lord of war and dark magicks, for example. The Fifth Seal, however, contains the essence of Orobas the Chrysós, Great Prince of Hell, and Deceiver of Humanity. He’s an oracle spirit.” She paused, mouth lingering open. “He’s a prophet of sorts, which is a title he’s gone by for ages.

  “Orobas is not nearly so vicious or powerful as Azazel, but he is crafty and loyal to his Bearer, almost to a fault. Not to mention, as an oracle spirit, he has the utterly unfortunate ability to glimpse portions of the Tapestry. He can’t see everything, but he can see enough to be a real thorn in our side. He’s using that power to predict our moves and stack the deck in his favor. And, perhaps even worse, he is a fulcrum, like you. I’d wager he’s your counterpart, the Champion of the enemy.”

  Well, shit on a stick.<
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  So not only did that toolbag have access to a friggin’ demon and the power of Old Man Winter at his disposal, he also had the ability to predict the future. Perfect. In what universe was that fair? What a complete load of shit.

  “Wait a minute,” I finally said, frowning, thinking back to my few limited encounters with the guy. Something wasn’t adding up right in my head. “If he already knows the future, why did he need to get answers from the monk or from Beauvoir in the first place? Shouldn’t he have been able to read the future in advance and know where the Fourth Seal Bearer would be long before I ever found out?”

  “You have a sharp mind, boy,” said the grandmotherly face of Lady Fate, her weathered mug breaking into an uneven grin. “But the Tapestry, and indeed Fate itself, is not so simple as you think. Aside from the direct decrees of the White King, the future isn’t set in stone. It’s fluid, flexible, and often changing. Some possibilities are more solid than others, more likely, but they are not written in stone until they are written in stone—and even then, minute alterations are still possible. And reading those endless deviations with any degree of accuracy is a tricky business.”

  “Moreover, he can’t control this ability of his,” Fortuna said, “not the way you’re thinking. The Tapestry is in many ways like your interweb. All the information you could ever want is readily available, but the quantity of information is far too great for any mortal, or even demon, to handle—so you must know precisely what you want to see. And even if you do find what you’re looking for, there’s no guarantee what you find will be useful. At most, he can direct the Sight only enough to catch snippets of the most probable futures. But those snippets, those images, are little more than pictures, and pictures without context at that.”