Majestrum

by Matthew Hughes

  "What are you pointing at?" I said. "The dust?"

  "Not the dust. Nor the barrier that the dust covers. But that which lies beyond both."

  Now I saw the image he created on the inner screen of our mind. The interplanar mechanism had been restarted from the other side.

  "By whom?" I said.

  "By the one whose name we do not speak."

  "Started, yes, but is it under control? Or is he intending for the device to blow up?"

  I felt him mulling. "No," he said after a moment, "he has not waited all this time to create a cataclysm that will destroy a large part of the other continuum as well as ours."

  "How much of ours will be destroyed if this mechanism keeps running without control?" I said.

  "The planet, at least," he said, "though who knows what it's destructive range might be?"

  Throughout this discussion, various horrors and afreets kept swimming into view from the corners of my eyes. I turned toward a clownish figure that opened its mouth to reveal needle teeth and it became semi-transparent. I said, "Let us move away from the device. These monstrosities are annoying."

  I skated north a few paces, turned and found that the apparitions were gone. "That seems to be enough distance," I said. "Let us reconsider the case."

  From its place in the hood, my assistant said, "Your analysis of last night was flawed."

  "Thank you for pointing that out," I said.

  "I did so," it said, "so that we could begin a new analysis by identifying the flaw."

  "I can do so readily," I said. "I am losing my abilities. As my other self waxes in strength, I must inevitably wane. Proximity to this device is probably speeding up the process of decline."

  "I do not think so," said my assistant and my inner companion with remarkable synchronicity. The integrator added, "Now would not be a good time for you to sink into one of your puddles of self-sorrow."

  "I believe my sorrows run deeper than most puddles," I said. "I am, after all, facing an end to all that I have known."

  "Cheer up," said my other self. "I believe things are going to work out quite well."

  "How pleasant for you," I said. "A golden future beckons, and all you have to do before basking in its aura is figure out how to save the world from imminent destruction."

  "I do not believe our adversary intends to blow up the world," he said. "I believe he intends, as he always did, to rule it. Now, why don't you focus your undiminished faculties on that fundamental fact and see where we can go from there?"

  He was right, of course, much as I might resent it. "Very well," I said. "Integrator, what was the flaw in my previous analysis?"

  It answered immediately. "The matter of the key."

  "Exactly. We assumed --"

  "You assumed," it interrupted.

  "It was assumed," I said, "that Filidor had been lured here because he possessed the false key that could be modified into a true version, giving the Authority command of the device."

  "That assumption has proved unfounded," said my assistant.

  "Indeed," I said, "which means the act of drawing our attention to the false key was a blind."

  "Yes."

  "Which means that the object we took--"

  "You took," said both the voice in my head and that of my assistant.

  "Are you two communicating at some intuitive level?" I asked.

  "No," they said in unison, my sharer adding, "We both have a flair for the obvious."

  I continued. "Therefore, the object that I took to be a blind must not be. Thus we have been led here to bring--"

  "The book," they both said.

  "Please stop doing that," I said. "It is disconcerting."

  I was already moving at an angle toward the corner of the device around which I had lately crept. As I neared it, the imaginary fiends and hellhounds reasserted themselves, crowding more thickly around me. I ignored them, swept through them, and a moment later I was side-sliding around the corner that led to the mechanism's south face.

  I could not see the book where I had left it, so dense were the illusions this close to the device. But I skated toward it, blowing through semi-transparent blood suckers and breath-stealers and suddenly I was able to see it through the skirts of a warty nosed crone who flourished two blood-smeared sickles at me. I moved closer, willing myself not to be distracted by the phantoms.

  "And there," said the voice from my hood, "is the other flaw in your analysis."

  Right again, I thought, for not only had I taken the blind for the truth and the truth for a blind, but I had dismissed from consideration the other factor that now looked up at me from guileless young eyes. Then the boy from Drusibal Square stooped and picked up Bristal Baxandall's book, turned on his heels and skated smoothly away, turning the far corner of the device.

  "He is heading for the control panel," said my other self.

  "I do not need intuition to tell me that," I said, turning and going back the way I had come. I slid hurriedly around the corner I had just rounded, heading north. As I reached the device's northeast corner I did not bother to exercise caution as I had minutes before. I drew my weapon and prepared to open fire on a child that was no child, but an avatar of Majestrum, or Osk Rievor, or whatever guise in which he projected himself into our continuum.

  I put the question to my other self, "Is it possible that Osk Rievor was the Authority's name before he assumed the title by which we know him? If so, knowing his name could give us an avenue of attack."

  "No," was the answer. "My sense is that there is no connection."

  "I am sure you are wrong."

  "You were sure that boy was me."

  "Then who is Osk Rievor?"

  "First things first," said my inner companion.

  I had rounded the corner. The imaginaries were thicker, the device humming more loudly and with a note that sounded like vicious smugness. I wondered that my deeper levels could contain so many images of horror and threat: bogeymen and specters, belly-rippers and nose-stealers, and a gleefully savage caricature of a boyhood tutor whom I remembered for his delight in skewering by sarcasm.

  I pushed through them all, my feet sliding on the almost frictionless surface beneath the dust. And now, through the intervening layers of phantasms, I saw the child exactly where I expected him, standing before the control panel, the book spread open in his arms. But, curiously, he was not reading it. He held it outwards, as if for the gaze of another, and slowly turned the pages.

  I slowed my approach, resisting a futile impulse to sweep aside the intangible menaces that swarmed about me. "Shall I shoot?" I said.

  "No," said my other self. "You might hit the device or the book, and I feel that either would be bad."

  "How bad?"

  "Remember the explosion that created this devastation," he said.

  "That bad?" I said.

  "Worse. Approach with caution. There is something else here we have not taken into account."

  "I will get very close and shoot him in the head," I said, adjusting the weapon to its narrowest beam. Between the boy and me now stood the image of a naked man with the head and hooves of a horse, though the teeth must have come from a reptile, a pale woman in a gown of flowing gossamer who carried a man's severed head by its hair, a thick-bodied snake that scurried along on a score of tiny feet, and a manlike thing that looked to have been randomly assembled from pieces of several corpses.

  I slowed so that I glided with decreasing speed through the horse-man, the head-bearer and the footed snake, and was almost upon the boy. The child gazed unconcernedly ahead of him. As before, I focused all of my intent on what I was about to do. I leveled the pistol, so that as soon as it passed through the slumping thing that was a body-parts collection I could place it against the child's temple and fire.

  But the arm that should have swept through the last of the intervening phantoms instead encountered solid, cold, clammy flesh. The dead thing's face turned toward me on a creaking neck and its fourteen conge
aled eyes regarded me without emotion.

  "Back away," said the voice in my head. "Quickly."

  I was still set to do what I had come to do. "I will kill it," I said inwardly, raising the weapon toward this new target.

  "No! You mustn't!"

  I felt my other self struggling to take control of our body, our feet slipping. He had not had any practice at the peculiar method of locomotion and I felt a flash of fear at the prospect of his tumbling us into the device. But my fear was nothing to the excitement that I felt emanating from his side of our shared mental space.

  "I'll get us away," I said. "Let me do it."

  He gave me back the helm and I steered us away from the boy and the multi-optic composite corpse, back pedaling away from the device until I was far enough away that its energies ceased to conjure frights from my lower mind. Now I saw only the boy holding the book, its pages spread to be read by the lifeless eyes of that shambles of a dead man.

  My other self was vibrating beside me in our shared space. But when I examined his emotional state I found that he was not shivering with fear but trembling with excitement.

  "Are you not frightened?" I said.

  "At some level, I suppose I must be," he said. "But my fear is swept away by a presentiment that I am about to experience astonishments."

  For a moment I felt a fleeting sense of what it must be like to be him, to be catching tantalizing glimpses of the world he and his kind would inherit, a world full of amazements and possibilities. But his excitement seemed to me a childlike response, when what was needed was a practical plan. I needed to bring him back to the issue at hand.

  "What is that animated corpse?" I said.

  "It can read the book," he said.

  "Why can it do so, when no one else can?"

  "Because," he said, "it has been assembled from pieces -- and especially the eyes -- of the descendants of the seven spellsters who originally created the book. That was what all those murders over the ages were about. The adversary was creating a golem -- I believe that's the technical term -- that could perform the task."

  He showed me pictures, his imaginings of what had happened. I saw Majestrum disappear into the other continuum just before the destruction of Ambit and the seven plotters. I saw the white ring of power smash its way across that city of wonders to Phaladrine Baudrel's slim tower, watched as it toppled and shattered, one small object flying clear: a book bound in leather that bounced and tumbled across the devastation and came to rest in the rubble. It lay there, untouched by the fire that came, because it could not burn, and unaffected by the passage of the ages, because it was shielded by the magic of seven great spellsters and of Majestrum himself.

  I saw what he was showing me. "It is the combined spells that created the true key," I said. "From it a new key can be made."

  But now came new pictures. I saw each of the seven thaumaturges creating a segment of the book while above them Majestrum loomed like a dark monolith. He used his superordinate power to decree that no one of them could read any other's portion of the great incantation. There could be no cabal against him.

  And so, Phaladrine had contrived to adulterate her part of the whole. I saw the future she and the other plotters had envisioned: Majestrum destroyed, the seven sharing power, though each would have regarded any of the others as a potential threat.

  "It would not have worked well," I said.

  Instead, there had been no great powers in the land. The age of magic had come to its expected close and the age of rationalism had produced the Archonate. But Majestrum -- or at least the essence of him -- had lurked in the other realm, like one of Lord Afre's ancestors in the essentiary exerting influence over the one substance in our cosmos to which he was still connected: the shattered crumbs of his stony corpse. Over unfathomable time, though it may have been much less where he was, he contrived to induce descendants of the plotters to come within range of his fragments. Each time the effort succeeded, he would use his carefully husbanded power to open a portal and suck through it a piece of his victim.

  I considered the complexity of the process, the difficulty in nudging the few travelers who ever came to Barran to pick up an odd shaped lump of rock and carry it home, so that it could be passed around for who knew how long before it came within range of the right person. "It seems a remarkably roundabout way to accomplish his aims," I said. "Why did he not just bring himself over here and stalk his victims directly?"

  "There is not enough of him. His flesh was bound to the false key. It stayed here and was destroyed. Only his essentials were carried over to the other side."

  "How do you know this?"

  "I just do," he said. "Indeed, the more I remain close to the interplanar device, the deeper my understanding."

  I tried not to let him see how this answer worried me. "Go on," I said.

  "He could not project too much of himself, for fear the part that remained behind in the other continuum might become dissociated. Unanchored, his projected self would dwindle, becoming insubstantial in our realm. So he would send only the smallest fragment of himself, so stripped down that it did not know who it was or where it came from."

  "The boy."

  "The boy. He was sent to see where the book was, and who had it. Perhaps, too, he had to keep in touch with it."

  A worrisome thought bubbled up and broke like a foul vapor in my mind. "The book has some of his old power in it. He exerts influence through it."

  "Yes, almost certainly."

  "He used that power to induce an obsession in you, to make you bring the book here."

  "Yes," he said, "and no. I had what you called an obsession about the book from the beginning because I knew it was crucial. But the compulsion to bring it to this place is separate and not connected."

  "How would you know that?"

  "How would you know if salt had lately been added to a drink that before tasted sweet?"

  "We're back to my having to trust your judgment."

  "It has not failed us so far."

  His confidence felt so boyish. "You are so young," I said. As I spoke, I looked back toward where the boy stood holding the book for the golem. A small hand turned a page, and I saw that it was the last. Solemnly, the child closed the leather cover and let the tome fall. It dissolved as it tumbled in the air, so that it reached the ground as a shower of dust. The boy put out his hands, palms upturned. An object appeared in them, small and gray.

  "Quick," I said. I raised the weapon, then felt my other self grapple within me for control, pulling my aim askew. He was stronger than me in this place, the power of the other realm leaking into ours; he knew it, and I knew it.

  I struggled futilely and then the time for action passed. Now it was too late. The child winked out of sight, taking the key with him, taking it back to the person of power who had waited aeons for this moment.

  The creature assembled from parts of seven corpses stood inert, then its head leaned toward one shoulder and fell off, striking the dust with a dull thud. Its knees bent and its legs went out from beneath it. It became a pile of meat and bones and split skin, the several eyes rolling off in different directions. A skirl of wind brought its odor to me, a rank smell of putrefaction.

  "You should have let me shoot," I said.

  "It would have done no good."

  "Then he has won."

  "He has done what he meant to do," my other self said. "Now we must see what we can do about it."

  "What can we do?" I said. "My friend the demon has deserted us. Besides, I doubt he was more than a spratling, whose elders have since sent him packing. And now our adversary's dire mechanism is at last under his control. What can we do that the seven greatest thaumaturges of the Seventeenth Aeon could not accomplish?"

  My mood was bleak. But from the other side of our shared space, my inner companion radiated a cheerful anticipation, like a schoolboy about to set off on an stimulating excursion. I felt him take control of one of our arms. He raised it above his hea
d.

  "Let us just see," he said.

  I heard a squawk and felt a flurry of movement from just behind my head. My hood was suddenly lighter.

  My upraised hand performed a quick series of motions involving fist and fingers, and the world around us ceased to exist.

  #

  "This is frightening," I said.

  "Really? I find it exhilarating."

  It had been worrisome enough to transit the nonspace of the adjacent realm under the guidance of the juvenile demon who had rescued me from an oubliette not long before. Plunging into the nonplace unguided except by my alter ego's enthusiasm was terrifying.

  "Where are we? Where are we going?"

  "Over there."

  But there was no "there." There was no anywhere. We swam/floated/flew through nothing, for here there were no "things," no forms, nothing to touch or hold to or stand on or kick in frustration. Colors and shapes swirled around us, coalescing then separating, blending into and through each other in a constant flux and churn.

  "We are moving, aren't we?" I said. "I sense motion."

  "You could say we are changing our orientation," he said. "That implies motion if you think of it in relation to our previous orientation, but it is not wise to draw any hard and fast inference from that implication."

  "I don't understand."

  "Yes, I know."

  "Where are we going?"

  "I'm not sure. I'll know when we get there."

  "What will happen when we do?"

  "I have a plan."

  "What kind of plan?"

  "A daring and bold one," he said.

  "Is that wise?"

  "It has to be that kind of plan. It's that kind of cosmos."

  "What is this plan?"

  "It's actually more of an inclination, call it a feeling."

  Again, his vagueness failed to inspire confidence. "I think we should discuss this further," I said.

  "No time," he said. "We're here."

  One moment we were in the formlessness of the other realm, the next we were standing on black rock under a sky that streamed and rippled with the colors of mud and dried blood. A few steps away the rock became a cliff face, plunging down to immeasurable depths. Far across the chasm, I saw a tumble of crags that looked familiar.