I cackled again, weakly, like the last heave after a bout of vomiting. “Oh, this is perfect. Perfect. You know what? You think it doesn’t matter who sent us here? Well, it does for me, and it does for this fucking war that’s probably... staged, I don’t know.”
“What we saw—”
“Nope. Fuck you, and fuck you too, who must’ve spilled everything at the police station because you can’t keep your fucking mouth shut either, and fuck the Society, and fuck all of this bullshit, all of you are the fucking same. I quit. Everything, all of it, and you. I quit.” I gestured weakly at Johnny, seeing my hand clearly now, a sun or something like it rising now. “The biggest regret in my entire goddamn life is saving yours. I wish you were dead. Which is great! The best timing ever! Finally, everything lines up so a wish could actually come true! Because we’re all going to die here! And I don’t even know where here is!”
Gray light touched the stone behind us: blue, of course, pale blue and white, and others, surrounding us, the earth in the center blasted, even a little glassy. The moons faded into a dark, listlessly gray sky, boiling with clouds.
Some kind of survival instinct took over at last, the lizard brain telling us that we had made far too much noise for too long to continue going unnoticed by a predator, and we trudged out of the obvious magic circle, over the dead, crisped grass to softer stuff, an unpleasantly fleshy shade of pink and white, stark on the black soil. I sat again, and watched first Johnny, then Sofia, try various spells to get us out.
I could have told them it wouldn’t have worked. That was why, I wanted to say, we were sent here, by the trap rigged in the crystal cave. Here, and not some other place. There’s got to be a condition here that won’t let us, do magic; and that was the motivation of whoever did it; and that’s why we need to know who that was; and nobody knows.
The universe is a certain shape because it has to be to do its job; the universe is a certain shape so that it works. But every time we said the we should have been saying a. Every universe was different, every dimension. And we had been sent to one shaped like this. And that could not have been an accident. That was deliberate.
And because it was deliberate, whether Johnny knew it or not, someone did: that the Earth had just been, in effect, demilitarized.
Rutger sat next to me, cross-legged, and for a second I had the dizzying feeling that we were simply in front-row seats to a show, Shakespeare in the Park or something, the actors stark against the still-lightening sky, the ritual movements of their hands and lips telling an old story.
“If she asked me to kill you,” he said after a minute, “I would.”
“...Thank you for telling me that.”
Something brushed against my hand; I jerked it away reflexively, looking down just as a bright red-and-black bug the size of an egg jabbed its proboscis down into the dirt, kicking up a little spurt of dust. More sidled through the thin grass; I stood up quickly, brushing at my jeans and jacket, something stinging me on the hand, a faint disgusting motion of scrabbling legs trying to hang on as I tossed it away from me. Rutger did the same, and we headed back to Johnny and Sofia.
“Forget it,” I said, looking down at the angry bump of the sting. “It won’t work, nothing will work here, not for us. No one who sent us here would have let us get back. Also, there are huge bugs that want to shank us.”
We fled at an undignified walk, half-instinctively heading for higher ground again. The landscape was strange, unpleasant to the eye in ways I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Standing water in the wrong places, single ragged-topped mountains surrounded by flat plains, tapered pillars of black stone with nothing around them, and the trees all at strange angles, dangling with both vines and leaves. In the far distance, a forest of black and leafless trees was the wrong height, higher than the snow-capped mountains next to it. No birds sang, and the insects that followed us, stumbling patiently in and out of our footprints, were also silent. The only sound was a faraway whine, like something vibrating either above or below the human range of hearing.
At the top of the next hill, we looked down into a narrow valley, the top of something just visible—a church, I realized with a jolt. Something had happened to it, and I had seen it, somewhere... not on Earth. Somewhere else. It should not have had the intense and unmistakeable feel of familiarity, of a solid thing in my memory.
Past the church lay a city, or something that was trying to look like a city, perhaps copied imperfectly from another imperfect copy with a broken pantograph. Smoke rose from steep rooftops, and here and there glowed lights, dim and bluish or greenish, like the bioluminescence of abyssal things. Around the valley were dark-purple trees, brittle looking and dangling with thin listless snakes, the branches broken in strange patterns. The soil shaded from black to a dark red, like dried blood. Voices sounded, distant but clear in the silence with nothing to compete with them.
A city might mean people, knowledge. A way home, maybe. Or at least a place to forget about going home, start a new life here. Get away from these three, find a hovel, get a job.
Or maybe I’d just be murdered, mutilated, tortured, and eaten. Not necessarily in that order.
“Pretty sure one of you knows where we are,” I said.
“Dzannin,” Johnny said. “I think.”
“Which is what.”
“I don’t know. One of their dimensions, okay? The books just say it has two moons, and there are cities there. It’s not like we do… anthropological studies on every monster that comes to Earth.”
I kept watching the city, glancing back at the others, back at the city. There was magic here: I could see the soft, amber fuzz around Johnny’s head, the sign showing that not only was her ill-gotten gift still working, but she could still use it.
If. If there was a chance we could get home. We couldn’t stop the invasion from this side; if anything, I suspected that was why the trap had been set in the first place. Coming here was just adding insult to injury, a slap for a slap, a place where she could use as much of her gift as she liked, and still be stuck, and still be powerless, and still know that somewhere, her home was being consumed and corrupted.
Of course not. Jesus. We’ve got nothing and she’ll never come up with a plan. Not even her. She needs all her gadgets and people to come up with something, and she hasn’t even got her bag. She hasn’t even got a pen.
Still.
Only a diamond, they used to say, can cut diamond. But that’s not true any more. That hasn’t been true for a long time. Humanity came up with something else that you could use. And They came up with her... and then They took Their eyes off her for two seconds.
It’s not nothing. It doesn’t mean nothing. That we’re here and we can’t do spells, but the condition of her very existence still exists. She hasn’t got any of her stuff, but she’s got us. Maybe something can still be done, even if we all hate each other. Maybe you can just… hate each other and still do good somehow. It’s not for us. It’s for the world. And somewhere down there, maybe there is a way.
But what I finally said was, “We can’t stay up here forever.”
Rutger grunted, not exactly an affirmative, but a small noise of despair and confusion, and we moved slowly down the far side of the hill.
THE CITY WAS even worse than it had appeared from above, like something long-submerged in one of those oily-looking lakes and then dredged back out and turned on its side, everything broken under its own weight and hung with ropes and rags of rotting weed. Squirming maggots chewed audibly on the dangling foliage as we passed, dropping slimy clots of purple and black onto the rutted and muddy streets.
One day this will be Earth, I thought. One day soon...
Maybe it already happened. And everywhere will be like this. Like Outworld in the Mortal Kombat movie.
The church we had seen was nearly at the city limits, if you could call them that—just ahead of the first crumbling and uninhabited huts, surrounded by green-gray bones of every shape and size,
protruding out of the dirt so that for a second it seemed like an ordinary lawn, only somewhat anemic, and teeth still startlingly white or the clear green glassiness of Coke bottles.
The shattered... the shattered cathedral of black stone. I flinched back from it, and dug my heels into the dirt near the first of the bones, my heart beating unevenly with recalled fear. Johnny stopped, and looked at me with a kind of tired curiosity.
“I’ve seen it before,” I said. “When we were... before the Anomaly.”
“A dream?”
A vision. In which They had demanded I kill her, after They had found or made a back door into my brain and let Themselves in, and programmed the keypad so that They could come back whenever They wanted... no. There had been enough confession for now. She didn’t need to know everything; and didn’t deserve to know everything. I shook my head, hard. “A bad dream.”
“We will be recognized,” Rutger muttered, gazing down into the streets past the cathedral. “We need to remain unseen. As far as possible.”
He was probably right. Nothing moved except some sort of small vermin, not quite a rat, not quite a crow, with small membranous wings and a long scaly tail ending in a spiked club. These scampered back and forth attacking each other, swarming the dozen or so corpses that lay in the street (at least, I hoped they were corpses).
Despite being sickened by the smell, and the bodies we had to skirt, we crossed to the shelter of the crumbling buildings. They all looked ready to collapse (again), particularly the roofs, which were angled in a way that seemed actually useless. Too sharp to have a turret or attic. Just blades, jabbing up into the sky. The vermin scattered as we approached, hissing at us.
I tried to imagine how we looked: four people, living human people, in high-tech hiking gear and nanoceramic-soled boots, reflective dots on our jackets for night-time safety, moving through this colossal crumbling city of rot and filth.
“I’ve seen this movie,” I whispered. “It’s one of those like. Ralph Bakshi ones.”
“Wizards,” Johnny whispered. “You called me halfway through, freaking out, remember? You had pneumonia and were watching it while you were out of your head on cough syrup.”
I was about to reply when something shifted heavily across the street, big living—or, well, moving—creatures. Some roughly humanoid, but naked and covered in gray fur or white scales; some like centipedes, squid, tangles of barbed wire, dripping heaps of slime. Some coruscated in colours hidden under translucent patches of membranous skin. Overhead something soared low, making clacking mechanical noises, wet, like the book lungs and mouthparts of a horseshoe crab.
Sofia tugged on my sleeve, startling me. I turned and we crept away, Rutger in the lead, into the unoccupied darknesses between the buildings, seeking another street where we could speak and not be seen. At last, he ducked into a low, wide building, lichen-crusted black stone with two uneven arches, so that we could see that it was empty, and keep an eye on the openings. Things skittered and fled as we huddled next to the wall.
I looked up to see something slimy and white with two waving antennae advancing across the dark stone towards my face, and took one large step away. “This is crazy,” I whispered. “We can’t keep sneaking around like this. We’re going to get… I don’t even know. Caught and killed. Or turned in like they tried to do in that dragon place.”
“Back to the hills,” Johnny said. “Tactical retreat.”
The cathedral made a good landmark, luckily, and was easily the highest thing in the city—towering far over everything else, broken as it was. This time, I peered into it, and nearly jumped: at the normality, not at the strangeness. Nothing could have been stranger here than the pews, the altar, the discarded and torn tapestries, too obscured with filth and the dripping vines and their worms to see what they had once depicted. At the far end something hung: not a cross. Something else.
“Nick,” Sofia whispered urgently. “Stay out of there!”
It was an iron cage suspended from the ceiling by an uneven chain, the links as thick as my wrist. And inside it, slumped against the bars, still in his robe, was someone I knew. Or something I knew. Had known once. Had, by failing to resist me, in his way, helped to save the world.
And he was dead, or as dead as you could be if you had been hanging in the place between life and death for untold eons, possessing no time except what people brought with them and spun off like an electromagnetic field. Dead, with a sign on something that looked like dirty leather pinned to the base of the cage, stiff and tilted.
“It says TRAITOR,” Johnny said; I glanced down, annoyed that she had followed me in. Rutger and Sofia were standing guard at the doorway, shifting uneasily in and out of the light.
It was dim in here, the stained-glass windows dull and filthy, as if stained with soot. But enough light came through them and the broken doors to see the face, and know what I was seeing.
Well. If we were going to die anyway.
“His name was Namru,” I said quietly, trying to avoid an echo. “Remember at Akhmetov’s when we... when we found Celestial Observations? And you said you were calling for me, and I was ignoring you? Well, I really couldn’t hear you where I was. I passed through... something. A broken spot in the books. And walked into a desert and found him there. Guarding the book. Forever. He had been tricked, cheated...”
I swallowed, surprised to find a lump in my throat. It was far worse now, knowing what I knew, and anger flared in my chest below the exhaustion and this... whatever it was. Could you call it pity? Maybe just guilt for what I had done, thinking my motives were so noble, even though I was only helping her become the hero of the hour.
“He opened a door into one of the other places and showed me... myself. Another me. There were, um, aspen trees...” I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “And he said... he would take the other Nick from his world, and send him to ours. Earth, I mean. To take my place in a… in a world that he said was fixed, one that wasn’t ending. If I stayed in the desert instead, and guarded the book. But I thought he was lying. That he couldn’t hold up his end. And I thought: You wouldn’t have told me the book was the only key to saving the world if it wasn’t. I believed you. So I took it from him, and went back. That’s how I ‘found’ it in the library.”
We fell silent, staring up at the ruined thing in the cage. Strange bones showed through the ripped flesh. His fingers were bent at strange angles, curled atop the folds of his robe. The cage was so heavy it didn’t sway at all in the wind blowing through the cathedral.
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” I asked her softly. “If I had taken his offer, and taken over his job, would he have saved the world?”
“I—”
“Ksssst!”
I turned, alarmed, to see Sofia and Rutger gesturing frantically from the other door, and glanced back just in time to see shadows moving behind the altar. No time to run, too far. Johnny and I ducked automatically behind a pew and froze, so that the remnants of hymnal and leaf under our feet would not make any noise.
The newcomers were making a lot of noise though, shuffling rather than walking, a hurried creaking as they mounted the podium over which the cage’s chain ran. We were, I estimated, about twenty paces away. Horrifyingly close. Leave, I urged them, as if it was a word of power. Leave, leave, leave, leave... Dust floated up under our chins, Johnny’s face twisting with the effort not to cough.
And then a voice, a human voice. I nearly toppled over backwards, and grabbed the hymnal holder by my face to stay upright.
“Of course, Master.”
Something guttural, just at the edge of speech. A weak, rotten response. Johnny and I stared at each other in silent alarm. No. Couldn’t be.
I had to look. Johnny shook her head desperately, tiny movements, trying not to to make a sound as her chin rubbed against her coat collar, but I couldn’t resist one more second. I raised one eye above the top of the pew, as slowly as I could manage, and then back down, heart pounding.
Had they seen that? The single, staring eye?
The pair had been gloating—or no. The larger figure had been jabbing at the contents of the cage with something like a cactus spine protruding from the end of a loose, boneless limb. It was a sickening patchwork of a thing, raw flesh with blackened green blood, maggots working away, corkscrewing into the loose joins of thread or sinew, a milky slime over what should have been the face but was just a clutter of chitinous tubes and struts. And what had looked like a black cape draped over one shoulder was a wing, composed of a hundred smaller, scaly things without faces, clutching one another to stay together.
Behind it, cringing, nodding, simpering, a human. A real, living human, or something that looked like one, wearing only a dirty gray blanket slung around its shoulders, barefoot and crusted in mud up to the shins.
We stayed there unmoving until they left, and the cathedral was silent again. Just the wind, and the creak of the chain. Traitor, the sign said. Traitor.
“It was...”
“It can’t be,” she whispered.
“Okay, well if you recognized the voice and you didn’t even look, then you know fucking well who it was.” I rose at last, my knees creaking, and hung onto the back of the pew. “Your oldest buddy. Your oldest friend. Some title.”
“Fuck you.”
“Guess I can’t really blame you too much,” I said as we walked back towards the exit, away from the dangling cage. “I mean you were three. Two? Three. You didn’t know any better.”
I had to stop a second later, feeling sick; I had made the mistake of looking down at her face. “What. What is it?”
“Well, it’s…”
“You lied about that too.”
“It… gave me the ability first. And then came back to see if I wanted to keep it. I knew what I was doing. I said yes.”
“Of course you did.”
Rutger and Sofia hovered in the doorway, too far away to see their faces. I had never felt so far from them, or anyone, it seemed. Like we were all, the four of us, different species rather than different people. I barely felt anger any more, only resignation at hearing this latest truth, if she hadn’t lied yet again.
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