I blinked a few more times. It was a strange feeling, an odd, unfamiliar weight in a terribly intimate place, and a strange, half-familiar sensation whenever my eyelid slid over the smooth curve of the orb after so long with nothing at all to move against.
And then the crystal eye shifted into the perfect position, and a connection was made between it and whatever a natural eye connects to in the back of the socket, and I saw everything.
And was seen.
Lagna’s notebook was the god of knowledge’s actual eye, plucked from his severed head and put away as a trophy by the demon lord of Thraxys after the execution.
What happens when you put a portion of a god’s body into your own, you ask?
You are thrown into convulsions. And then you lose consciousness. Then you die.
And then the really awful part begins.
Amra: Interlude Three
The sky was gray.
A banal enough observation. For most people, most of the time. They look at the sky, the dome of light and air that looms above their every moment, seen and unseen, awake or asleep, living or dead, and if they notice it at all, they see it is gray, or blue, or the black of a moonless night, or a-bustle with scudding clouds pregnant with cold, penetrating rain, or pricked with icy stars. No one ever stops to consider whether there is a sky; only what sort of sky it might be at that moment, and whether it might change soon, making their lives more or less miserable.
This sky was gray.
When I went to sleep, there was no sky at all; but now there was a sky outside the door, and it was the color of well-used mop water. No sun or moon or star. Below, the rift still burned, golden yellow. Beyond, the absence of anything at all that I chose to think of as blackness.
I did not know what having a sky might mean.
I did not know why there was now a sky, or whether it would vanish as easily as it had arrived. I did not know whether having a sky was a good thing, or a bad sign, or neither.
I did know that I had grown very, very tired of not having a sky, so on the whole I was satisfied.
“Would you like to know why there is now a sky?” asked the little monster behind me.
“What I’d like to know is how to get my hands around your throat,” I replied.
“Contagion,” it said. “Contagion of thought and desire. The longer you stay here, the more your desires, and eventually even your idle thoughts, will paint themselves into reality around you. You have no experience controlling the power you now command. And so now there is a sky where once there was nothing. The desire for one bled through while you slept, and the rift reacted.”
“Well good. Maybe my desire to see you punished for all the vile things you’ve done will bleed through as well.” I turned away from my new sky and faced her—it.
“Sorry to disabuse you of the notion,” it said. “Divine magic trumps what you’ve got hold of out there.” She was sitting in a corner, winding her long, curly hair around a finger, over and over. She hadn’t moved from the corner in a long time. Not that she—it—was really there at all.
“Pity,” I said, and turned back to my new sky. It was better than nothing. But not much. An unrelieved expanse of gray. Kind of depressing, actually. The horizon was just a hazy line where gray turned to black.
“So, Chuckles, you can’t lie to me, correct?”
“Correct.”
“You said you made me, more or less. You started wars and had homeless children murdered, just so someone like me would come along. Right?”
“In broad strokes, yes.”
“What the hells for?”
Suddenly she was standing next to me. My flesh crawled, being so close to the image of the monster that had lodged itself in my soul. That she was a sickeningly-sweet little girl made it much worse. Long practice kept me from flinching. Never let the bastards see you flinch.
“You had a conversation with a bloodwitch in Loathewater, do you remember?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You told her that fate is a slaver, and that you refuse his chains. That piece of bravado sounded good, I grant you, but the truth is the chains of fate cannot be refused.”
“Fuck your truth.”
“They can’t be refused. Trust me on this. I cannot lie to you. They can, however, be broken. Or so I believe, and all my sisters with me.” She frowned. “We agree on little else, but we do agree on that.”
“Answer my damned question.”
“You are the pointy end of our argument with fate, Amra Thetys. I can’t say more. It isn’t my place.”
“Then whose place is it?”
“She Who Casts Eight Shadows.”
Pretty much all my life I’ve worked hard to avoid trouble. Not danger—that’s part and parcel of being a thief. When you set out to steal rare and valuable things, you’re sure to be stealing them from powerful, important people. That’s dangerous, and there’s no avoiding the fact. You do your best to minimize the risk.
Trouble is something different. There’s generally no profit in it, for one. And while danger’s something you usually need to go and seek out, trouble will come knocking on your door at any hour of the day or night, uninvited and usually unexpected. At least it did mine, far too often.
So I’d learned to make like I wasn’t home.
And still sometimes trouble just went ahead and bashed the door in.
“I truly and deeply hate you,” I said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Get away from me, why don’t you.”
Her image vanished, giving me the illusion of solitude. I stared out at my new sky, but my eyes kept sliding off it down to the horizon. Maybe having a sky wasn’t such a….
There was something out there, at the very limits of perception. I’d seen it. A brief flash, then gone. I stared for a long time, but did not see anything else. Then, just as I decided I’d imagined it, it came again, the barest spark of golden light.
“What the hells is that?” I said. It was meant to be a rhetorical question.
“That,” said Kalara, smugness practically coating her words, “is an end to our impasse.”
PART IV: NOWHERE
Thirty-Four
Imagine, if you will, that you were able to know every detail of every piece of existence, from the smallest mote of dust settling on a blade of grass to the dance of stars, all ten billion trillion of them—and absolutely everything in between. Now imagine, if you can, knowing all of it, all at once, moment by moment, change by infinitesimal change.
That was what omniscience was.
It was vastly overrated, because it was utterly useless. Worse than useless. A human, mortal mind was wholly inadequate, entirely too fragile, simply too limited in every conceivable way to deal with the unending volume of knowledge that was omniscience.
It killed me.
Lagna’s eye killed me, and that’s all that saved me. If I’d somehow been able to survive it, I would have been driven permanently mad. Perhaps my head would have exploded, and I’d have lived on like that, somehow. I don’t know. It isn’t something I like to contemplate.
I don’t know how long I was dead. It’s not as if time really had much meaning in my situation. At first there was nothing, as you might expect when you die. Then I became aware of the fact that there was still an I, and that it was aware. It doesn’t sound like much, but without that, you’ve literally got nothing.
That’s what happens when you die, I discovered, if you happen to be already physically present in an afterlife—even one in as miserable a condition as Thraxys happened to be. You don’t go anywhere. Your life is gone and your soul loses its connection to its anchor, your flesh—but your spirit does not part from your flesh.
There’s nowhere for it to go because, according to the rules it plays by, it’s already arrived. And so your spirit, in a panic, claws its way back into the very atoms of its earthly container. Or at least mine did. It is not a process I can endorse. In some sense, I feel
as if I am still dead, and haunting my own flesh, forcing it to maintain all the various bodily functions. It’s an unpleasant, distracting feeling, and it does nothing to bolster my sanity.
I came back to life screaming, that much I remember. Instinctively my hands went up to my eye—Lagna’s eye. I clapped a palm over it, blocking out all light—and just like that, the torrent of knowledge cut off.
I squeezed my eyelid tight. Took my hands away and scrabbled in my pocket for the patch, and put it back on. My violent trembling made it a challenge, but I succeeded in time. I made damned sure the patch was on properly.
Then I took a rest. I call it a rest because admitting to curling up into a ball and moaning is rather embarrassing.
Gradually, I became aware of my surroundings once more. I was lying on the floor, next to the table. The rest of the room was gone, which was less fine, and the floor was just spinning slowly in a dim emptiness, a sky without end. That wasn’t fine at all. Bits of the shattered moon gave off a wan, uneven light, and the wreckage of Thraxys was everywhere. The only thing that I caught a glimpse of that seemed unaffected by the destruction was the Spike, which looked more like an endless wire from my remove. It stretched out of sight in both directions. I could not see any of the other hells. I don’t know if that meant they were also destroyed, or if it simply wasn’t possible to see one from another one.
I enjoyed watching you die again, Halfmoon informed me.
“Not tired of that trick yet, then?” I wouldn’t say I enjoyed my exchanges with the creature, but I did find its blatant, bloodthirsty honesty amusing. And they served to reinforce my decision to never, ever reunite its head with its body.
No, not tired. I think I will not get tired of it soon. Do it more and we can both find out.
“You just tell me when you sense the rift.”
The rift is not here.
“I didn’t think it was. Now be quiet. I have to master this thing, somehow.”
I collected my thoughts, and my courage. Recalled Amra, and put her memory squarely at the forefront of my mind. Lifted the patch by the barest measure and opened my eyelids the most minute fraction.
Was overwhelmed once more.
I came back to consciousness after a time, feeling as if my mind had had blazing hot pokers rammed through it. The patch acted as a dead man’s switch, at least, covering the eye when my hand fell away and cutting off the torrent.
You did not die that time, so it does not count. But I liked you being in pain.
“Keep it up and I’ll gouge your eye out and put this thing in you.”
Silence.
“This isn’t going to work,” I muttered. I needed a filter of some sort. Some way to pick through all that knowledge, and exclude the irrelevant. And I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t even know if it was possible. In short, I needed a key. Just as the Queen of Souls had mentioned.
I considered and set aside the idea of using magic to try and tame the thing. Mortal magic was nothing, really, when set against demonic magic, and even less when matched against divine power. I would try if I could think of nothing else, but I didn’t hold much hope for success.
The real issue was that I knew less than I’d thought about Lagna’s notebook. Legends, I had learned from bitter experience and now more than once, masked as much of the truth as they revealed.
Thagoth had indeed held the secret to immortality, or at least a secret. Lagna’s notebook did indeed contain all the knowledge in existence. And yet, having attained both now in my lifetime, I was neither immortal nor all-knowing.
What did I know? About Lagna’s notebook, that is, beyond the obvious? What—
I smiled a grim sort of smile. The Guardian wasn’t a pleasant creature, but she’d given me a clue, hadn’t she? Mockingly, laughing at me in unkind fashion, but she’d given me the truth. She’d told me I’d see. What else had she said?
That some books were the reader as well as the read. And that some books were very angry.
Both of those implied there was some sort of intelligence lingering in Lagna’s eye. Some sense of self. I would never have suspected a body part could contain, or retain, anything like a personality, but then I was not a god.
If an eye could be a book, then the remaining portion of the god’s personality might be a key.
So. So and so. Perhaps I could come to an accommodation with the remains of the god of knowledge. Win its cooperation. Win, or purchase. Or failing that, somehow compel.
I attempted to make contact.
Thirty-Five
I did what I had not done since I’d put the damned thing in. While keeping my eyes firmly shut and the orb covered with my patch, I opened up my magesight. And there he was. Or as much of him as was left, I suppose.
He sat on a rock. The rock sat on a featureless, dust-colored plane, and a sky that looked more or less the same stood above. The light was sourceless and everywhere.
His skin was a dark, dark brown. The hair on his head was close cropped, tightly curled, and graying. The hair on his chin was braided. He was more muscled than I’d imagined him to be. He wore a faded old robe, similar to those Elamners wear, and his feet were sandaled, callused, and dusty. His face… his face was bleak, and his shallow-set, starry-pupiled eyes, when he turned to face me, were hot.
“Lagna, I presume.” I sketched a brief bow.
“Where is my body?” he asked, and his voice was leashed thunder. “Where is the rest of me?”
“I do not know,” I replied. “The legends do not say what Xom Dei did with your corpse. Does the god of knowledge not know?”
“I have knowledge of nothing, from the time this eye was placed inside the cursed box until the moment you opened it.”
I took a few steps toward him. “Lagna, I have come a long and perilous way to recover this portion of you. I ask for your assistance—”
“I care nothing for your needs or your toils, mortal. I find myself in need of a body. Yours will have to do. Give it to me.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are you serious?”
“Do you mistake me for the god of humor?”
“I am not giving you my body. It’s the only one I happen to have. Sorry.”
The sky darkened and the dust at our feet turned rust red. His face suffused with anger. In an instant he was off his rock and his nose was mashed against mine as he screamed in my face.
“GIVE ME YOUR BODY!”
For an answer, I brought my hands up from my sides and shoved him away from me. He stumbled backwards and fell on his posterior. His shock was plain.
“You’re not a god,” I told him. “You’re a piece of petrified meat from a god that once was. He died a thousand years and more ago. Accustom yourself to the reality of your situation.”
He came up from the ground swinging, so I assumed he wasn’t willing to accustom himself.
I suppose you could say that, in some sense, our fight wasn’t real. He had no body, and I never moved a muscle of mine. You might be forgiven for believing it was all symbolic. And maybe that’s all it was. But I’ve been in life or death struggles before. This was as real as any, and the stakes just as high. It was two wills intent on annihilating each other, and it was brutal and vicious.
Lagna’s punch connected with my stomach and drove the breath from me and doubled me over. I stumbled back and he followed, bringing down two clasped hands like a double hammer on the base of my neck. I fell to the dust at his feet, gasping it in. I wondered, through the pain, if he’d broken my neck. But the pain told me he had not.
He brought his foot back to kick my teeth down my throat. I took advantage of his imbalance. I grabbed his ankle and yanked with all the strength I could muster. He fell on his back. I suffered a couple of kicks climbing on top of him. I managed a punch to the side of his head, and then we were trading grapples and blows, knees and bites and grunts. We were both sweating and desperate, and murder was on both our minds.
Somehow he got hold of the middle fi
nger of my right hand, and bent it back until it snapped.
I screamed, and he let out a sort of feral growl and shifted, getting most of his weight atop me, our legs tangled. He got one hand on my throat and began to squeeze. His own face was swollen with rage.
It was a special sort of agony, forcing the hand with the broken finger into a fist, but he had the uninjured hand pinned. So make a fist I did, as the need for air and the lack of it began to dim my vision. And then I punched with that fist straight into his throat, putting behind it every ounce of frustration and pain and rage I’d experienced over the last weeks.
His larynx snapped and folded inwards.
I screamed again, my hand in agony.
He did not scream, his voice box being crushed. He just gagged and choked until he died.
And that’s how I killed the last remaining shred of the god of knowledge.
#
I staggered to my feet, grinding my teeth to choke back the scream that wanted to escape my mouth. I cradled my mangled hand against my chest. I almost left that place within the eye, to escape the pain, but stopped myself before I made that mistake. Somewhere here was the key to everything, to controlling what I had taken at such a great cost, and getting back what I desperately missed.
Amra.
I went inward, blocking out the agony of my hand. Blocking out all the various injuries I’d sustained in reaching this place, this moment. Blocking out everything, so that I could think. And then I opened all my senses to my surroundings, looking for the slightest clue to gaining control of the eye.
Nothing.
So I changed tack, and pretended I was the arrogant bastard I’d just killed.
“Show me the planes, one by one. All of them.”
And it did, too fast for me to take in anything. Then suddenly I was back in Lagna’s desolate realm.
“Halfmoon, can you hear me?”
Sadly, yes.
“If you have contact with me, then you have contact with the eye through me. Attend, and tell me when you sense the rift.”
The Thief Who Wasn't There Page 23