FTA: The Right Question

VIII. The Right Question

War is months of boredom, punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

-Traditional Military Lore

Frankly, life at the Curwen Naval Yard in Galba Roy was proceeding at the same rate it always did. In spite of being the very real headquarters of the old Straits Navy and the nominal headquarters of the rapidly-amassing Blasted Bay Fleet, even the recent declaration of war by the Zaxtonian Union could not have changed things much. Granted, the guards at the gates were more numerous, and the quayside more crowded as more and more ships were assigned from costal operations to the new Blasted Bay Fleet in preparation for the defense of the most obvious avenue of Zaxtonian attack, but the day to day operations of many a sailor, officer, and Royal Marine were almost entirely the same as they seemed to ever have been.

Today, it was Athena Valkoinen's intention to change all of that. Dean press might be carrying the Executive Council's announcement as a declaration of war, and the media back home would be dutifully spinning it as little more than the acknowledgement of an existing condition, she knew it was something else. Something bigger. Somewhere in the ephemera, a decision had been made, and that decision was a two-pronged distraction. First, waste her time by sending her and the overwhelming majority of her specialist team to this relatively-harmless city state and throw them off balance. Then, waste the entire Union's time fighting a perfectly unnecessary war when something decidedly unusual was going on.

Vidcund's field reports from Figaro had made it abundantly clear to her that Galba Dea was the wrong enemy. Someone, somewhere, was being crafty.

She peered down at the Naval Yard from the window of her hotel room. Surely down there, someone's job was to keep an eye on all of these windows, for anyone watching the yard. Accordingly, she stayed a good foot back from the glass, and had kept the lights off, which in broad daylight was going to produce something of a false-mirror effect. Not perfect, but the best she could do on short notice.

The headset tucked into her left ear chirped. “Zulu,” came Zephyr's voice, giving the agreed-upon callsign. “My team is in position.”

Another chirp. “Alpha team standing by.”

Stepping away from the window, Athena moved the few short feet she had to move to stick her head into the bathroom, picking up a bottle of chocolate-flavoured whey-shake on the way. These were all but gone, on store shelves in the union. Rank had its advantages.

The bathroom itself had undergone something of a transformation, though care had been taken to ensure any changes to the room would be easily washed away. An infant basking shark had been slaughtered in the middle of the tile floor, over a plastic sheet, and the resultant blood carefully used for certain glyphic inscryptions around its body. There was a salt tang in the air – the bath had been filled at a great expense of time by carefully transporting buckets of water from the harbour up to the bathtub itself.

Dagonovich languished in this depressingly-clear water, back of his head exposed up to the ears, floating on its surface like a corpse. He raised his head at the sound of Valkoinen clearing his throat, nictitating membraines flashing across his eyes as they adjusted to the differences in refraction.

The sight would be jarring, if he was not her earliest success. “My men have recieved their instructions. They tell me the first half of their bargain is carried out. Those who would keep the other half are with Asmodeus and Zephyr.”

Valkoinen nodded. A deal with the Deep Ones had been difficult to secure, even with Dagonovich to be the go-between. He was a stranger to the relevant local body – however the monstrous and alien beings that lived beneath the waves organized themselves was not Valkoinen's concern, and wouldn't be until they showed interest enough in terrestrial affairs to be accounted for as a threat. The deal had come at some great cost, as well, though what that cost was, Dagonovich was hesitant to share. However she argued, cajolled, reasoned, or downright threatened, he would merely argue that he intended to fix it so that Agency would pay no cost at all.

She walked back into the hotel room proper, hearing the wet, sloshing noise of Dagonovich pulling himself out of the bath to follow her, his webbed feet slapping against the hardwood floor as he pulled a terry robe over his squamous, ill-fitting skin. He hid his inhuman heritage well enough, when dressed, but naked in the cold light of day, there was little to be done.

“We'll have to take that with us,” Valkoinen remarked.

“Never fancied myself much of a theif,” Dagonovich said, with his usual mix of reluctance and intregue. “But then, I did get some blood on the hem.”

Valkoinen tapped a few commands into her phone, and all at once, the quayside erupted, as a dozen ships succumbed to the radio-controlled limpets attached to their hulls. “Tell Asmodeus and Zephyr to have fun for an hour or so, then pull out without their teams. The ruse would be more effective if the Deans know who to blame.”

“Who they are meant to blame, you mean.”

---

Regardless of your aspirations in life, rare was the young man in Enotekka who did not eventually find themselves aboard a ship, or somehow otherwise involved in the shipping trade. Thus was the fate of Claude Cartier, aspiring ethnographer. He could have told you that the inevitability was a product of cultural forcings, saving the “nicer” jobs for women while men were left mostly to manual labour, combined with the economics of living in Razeland's only safe and developed anchorage. All of Razeland depended on Enotekka for its trade. Money was to be made with the ships, and money was the means by which a young man might one day hope to leave Razeland entirely, and travel to Kraterburg and enroll in the Universitat or to do the same at the Royal Academy of Ethnographic and Arechological Studies in Galba Roy, or any of a number of ports further beyond still.

This was, of course, the plan, and were it not for the Eruption, Claude would probably be in Kraterburg today, cash in hand and studies apace. Instead, he was still serving aboard M/V Neuvau Acumen, tramp general freighter that had, just yesterday, delivered much of the drummed petroleum products it was now hauling away from Figaro, under the new evacuation order.

With no sign of enemy shipping in the bay, he'd settled back into something like routine, and was taking his lunch in his usual place at the stern of the ship, sandwhich in hand as he looked at their wake and the great expanse of this new bay, which stretched as far as he, at least, could see.

His thoughts, like the ship, carried him to odd places. Today he was thinking about a curious overlap of the union's cultures as regarded a creature that the Lipan called Leviathan, having borrowed the word from Christian mythology and probably older fables still. The same creature, known by a name that to his knowledge translated to the same “massive monster of the sea”-type of meaning (and was typically unpronouncable to him in its proper, singsong Terrik), occupied a place of respect, admiration, and fear in Terik lore, being to the people of the Terrwald a totem, and therefore on a level somewhere between proper gods and mere spirits, if that concept made any sense to Claude's somewhat militant agnosticism. In the Fens, he was known as Shobog, a very old word that fell outside the usual language patterns, but it was clear that he was a very old force of nature (the Shobog, however, was usually treated with the same gender-neutral pronouns one uses to refer to furniture, or storms, for that matter). If the Deans had a similar legend it had been subsumed as the nation absorbed the cultures of the rest of the union in their typical, appropriative way.

There were differences, of course. Leviathan to the Lipan was a very, very old exemplar of a legendary (and, to sensible modern men, obviously non-existant) sea-folk, who had evolved from your smarter marine life into a sort of sapience. Being as they were very long lived, Leviathan's people could grow to massive sizes, and since they never died except by acts of violence (or, one supposed, by falling prey to disaster), Leviathan being the oldest was also the largest. Accounts differed, never placing him much larger than thirty or fourty feet tall, which you had to admit was impressive.

The Terrik's Leviathan was of course a slightly different beast all together, being in the essense of its form a very large whale, second cousin to the kraken, for it was large enough in some accounts to have swallowed whole ships (though, granted, Terrik ships were never all that big), and in one particularly famous legend it could be mistaken in daylight for an island for several millenia, since they believed that the former eastern isle of Coquitlam had obviously been Leviathan, and that's why it had vanished – he'd decided once again to swim. Traditional iconography placed him as a whale, anyway, and that was comforting, since, with the exception of the Orca, whales were pretty placid as sea life went.

Shobog, of course, was a different thing altogether. Sometimes a whale, sometimes a giant crayfish, or octopus, or anything else it seemed to want to be. Modern ethnography had some debate over whether or not there were one or many shobogs, or whether it truly was a shapeshifter, or simply a generalized word for sea-monster.

The ship squirmed, slightly, beneath Claude's feet, and in losing his sandwhich overboard he came back to more present matters. The weather was shifting – stars winking out overhead as cloud cover closed in. The air was still, even by the standards of the New Bay. Where, then, had that unusual wave come from? The water was less calm than it should have been, especially aft-port, as though some kind of force had disturbed it.

There was a great rending noise, and he felt all at once the momentum ripped out from underfoot, throwing him a few stumbling paces in the direction the ship had been travelling. They were being bourne upward, too, but this disturbed him less than the sudden arrest. They must have run aground on something in the uncharted depths of the New Bay. Hopefully, this wave would let them carry free. No doubt the captain would be around shortly to ask him to go below-decks and look for damage from the impact.

No forward motion presented itself. They simply went up, and up. Claude regained his railing, looking down over the sides. Some great formation of rock had appeared all around them, lifting higher and higher up out of the water, the ragged, craggy edges of the apparant crater or reef darkly suggestive in what was left of the moonlight of a fanged maw.

Then, like a trapdoor opening beneath his feet, the ship listed sharply to starboard, and he tumbled with it into blackness.

---

Vidcund would have thought sleeping on a ship to be an improvement over sleeping on land, after his long reliance on isolation tanks to minimize his sleep and provide what little of that he had taken. It was bad enough his body often rebelled against itself and woke him up for no damn reason, leaving him tired throughout the balance of the day; this ship, in particular, with all the bumps and groans thereby associated, only made the problem worse.

After the umpteenth attempt at salvaging some portion of the night for rest was interrupted by what he was fairly certain was the vessel itself being flatulent, Vidcund screwed up the energy to shift his weight strongly left, slip back into his shoes, and spend all of two minutes resuming his professional appearance before stepping into the corridor. Just because he was tired and grumpy, didn't mean his suit had to look as roadworn as he himself was.

He paused a nook to pour piped-in hot water into a cup of instant, mint-flavoured hot chocolate, and continued upward to the bridge of the Co-Ordination Vessel. The ship, Acumen's Charter by name, was a unique feature of Lipan shipping. The fractuous history of the Lipan people was not forgotten post-union, and what had once been a sort of trabilism now presented itself in the workings of the larger merchantile concerns, all of which were owned by the various Trade Dynasties that had once made up a large part of the Razeland's sociopolitical history. This one was owned by Acumen and Crucible Co., out of Enotekka, which was the largest, and owned by Frau Deborah LeCruset, mother to Locke LeCruset, who was apparently a sponsor of Edward's athletic career. One day, Vidcund would have to learn how to barter favours like everyone else seemed to. He was resourceful, yes, but he doubt he could have bent the merchant fleet to his will with one phone call.

He'd have had to call Research and Control to get blackmail material, first.

The ship itself screamed of opulance. Vidcund hardly saw the point – it was a sort of roving tender ship and corporate retreat, like an office and a dock with an inboard motor attached. Granted, it came in handy for moments like this – any time a Merchant Fleet needed to work en-masse – but most of the time it was surely an example of the Lipan often having more money than sense.

The bridge was ablaze with activity, mostly around a central, digital chart-table, where the positions of other ships in the convoy were plotted. Eventually Vidcund was able to get a good look – the long line of Merchant Fleet ships burning south for the now-open waters of the Grand Strait, where the current would hasten their travel to Zvanesburg to complete their comission; followed by a loose (and, Vidcund noted with some satisfaction, deliberately-imprecise) plot of the positions of the Maritime Self-Defense Force vessels that had left some hours after them, both to cover their retreat and as a consequence of the delay caused by re-embarking their men.

Vidcund had yet to get a good action report regarding the retreat. The Acumen's Charter had good security people running her networks, and they were exactly good enough to have his proprietary agency protocols rejected. Vidcund wasn't entirely sure that was legal, but now hardly seemed the time to press the issue.

A second glance at the map table told him exactly what the fuss was, and he asked nobody in particular for clarification. “How long has New Acumen been missing?”

“Couple minutes,” the First Officer responded. She had an unusually curt expression on her face that Vidcund liked to see. She was taking the matter very seriously, for such a fresh problem. “Normally I'd be inclined to blame a transponder malfunction, but we don't have them on our own radar, either.”

“I suppose they aren't answering your calls, either,” Vidcund said, in the sort of flat, disinterested tone you use when you know the hope you're offering is worthless. “Did you notify the escort?”

“I did. They requested we proceed with all speed. They intend to do the same and overtake us.”

Vidcund shrugged at that, excusing himself by simply remaining silent – the First Officer had enough work of her own to do that she would not long tolerate his presence beyond simply exiling him from the bridge, and almost to the instant, he guessed exactly when she'd turn away and focus on what really mattered. Obligingly, Vidcund moved out of the way, picking up a handset to call down to Edward's stateroom.

The advanced number of rings, coupled with the weight in Edward's voice, suggested the younger man was sleeping much better than his Agency handler. “Get up, Eddy. It's time for Plan B.”

---

If the Deans had one thing right, frankly, it was their culture of pseudo-accepted, pseudo-encouraged borderline alchoholism that lead to such fantastic improbabilities as not having the pub to yourself at 10 AM. This had been a rule of Scion's, implemented in the aftermath of the betrayal at Redhall. Always be in public, especially if you couldn't be with your unmasked partner.

Niles had come straight to this particular pub from his motel room, a choice he had made the night before, partly because the bartender was the unassuming old man type, and partly because this particlar bar was exactly slow enough that someone taking up a whole booth to himself for most of the day, taking all his meals there and keeping the draft lines bled wasn't an annoyance, without being so slow as the dining room was ever entirely empty. Besides, the expenses simply went to Banker, and Banker would simply absorb them.

As it happened, at the moment he was killing time, nervously spinning and flipping a thumb-drive between his fingers as he digested his fried haddock and lager, absorbing the latest in local news from a newspaper he'd bought on the way in. You could still smoke here, but the pungency of his favourite blend (and the increasing cost of tobacco overall) meant the cigarillos were still tucked safely away.

The paper predictably lead with the story of the previous day's fire at Redhall – how the media chose to allude to the triggering of a dual fire-and-intruder alarm at Redhall Palace. Evidentially a small fire had broken out in the area near the Tower of Curiosities. No major property damage had resulted, and the Fire Service had declared the cause to be an electrical fault.

It was interesting to Niles that the Deans seemed disinterested in pursuing them – all the moreso because of the contents of this flash drive, and how hard he'd had to work to get it. Evidentially sent his way by the Queen in Waiting, it had gone through Locuna, to Prodigal, to Prince, and now here Niles was, waiting for something to have a good look at it and see whatever was so goddamn important.

The door opened. It was raining outside – the kind of good sturdy spring rain that belonged a few months in the past or a half-year in the future. It was as though the heavens had opened, intent on sweeping clean streets and fields that humanity itself couldn't – or won't. The rain had got the better of James, who hurried to join Niles in his booth, slinging an equally soggy-looking laptop bag into the space between the two of them, and charitibly offering his own back in the direction of the door.

At least, Niles supposed, James was probably harder to sneak up on than he looked. It was hard to mesh the man's twin identities together in the detective's head. On the one hand, you had the deeply-psionic Scion, cold tactician and natural leader who Eli Sharona considered that magic blend of compitent and dangerous enough to be his successor, first-among-equals of the Four Horsemen. On the other hand, you had Professor James Derrida, Head of Biochemistry at National University's Terrerra campus, who was absent-minded enough to forget his umbrella in a part of the world where it only ever rained.

James, Niles decided, he liked. Scion, well... for so long, the two had danced around each other, playing shadow-games, even before Scion had kidnapped him, brought him before Eli, and simultaneously saved the detective's life while condemning him to death and an afterlife of questions.

“You should order something.”

James waved off Niles' concern, “I don't want to eat in front of you.”

Niles gestured to his plate, at the edge of the table, which had not been cleared, and leaned over to retrieve the scientist's laptop from the laptop bag. He ignored the larger, black standard-format one, selecting instead a smaller navy blue netbook, as had been their habit of late. Something to do with some contact of James' or Banker's having specially prepared these smaller machines, of which the Angels, in their paranoia, had few.

In this respect, Niles felt less limited than his lack of a legal identity otherwise would have made him. None of the other Angels carried cell phones more advanced than the early-2000s' best flip-phones, at least not that he'd seen. Nobody used laptops, or tablets. Cameras, when necessary, were as a rule digitals so cheap as to be disposable. It was down to paranoia, but it also went a good way to explain how it was possible that neither the NPF nor Agency had apparently ever cracked the organization. They were good at the subterfuges nobody used anymore.

Still, sometimes you needed a box of pixels, and so, here was an expensive photo album.

The machine was slow to boot, such that the men had time to place an order (Bubble and Squeek with a Farm-Fresh Egg and a cup of coffee for James; another pint for Niles and a coffee to take the edge off it) and the drinks themselves had time to arrive before they got the computer unlocked fully. Five more minutes passed before the flash drive could be mounted and decrypted, and James' meal had time to arrive before Niles had had time to go through the images in full and digest their greater meaning.

There was a full video of the engagement with Bell, but that was pointless, since Niles had been there. What was of more use were the high quality stills taken from the video itself, and a nagging sense of significance that he could hardly pin down. Of course, there was another folder full of files supposedly from the original investigation of the Curio Room itself, but for the moment, he was less interested in those.

Why would she include these?

James quietly ate his breakfast and sipped his coffee. “Is there something there we all missed that she caught?”

Niles's hand fell from his chin to the table significantly more forcefully than he meant to, and he tried half-heartedly to wither the professor's disarming smile with a glare of his own. It was irritating enough when Scion was poking Prince's brain. That James seemed comfortable doing it whenever – and that there was no way to know when he was doing it or stop his mental evesdropping – was flatly maddening. The detective turned the laptop around abruptly and let James flick through the photos himself, excusing himself for a visit to the mens and to tell the nice young woman who had their table he'd changed his mind and actually would like to try the bread pudding.

By the time he'd come back, James was deeply into whatever computing task he'd stumbled into. When he turned the computer back around, Niles saw he'd copied one of the images and cropped it, zooming in strongly on an object in Holly's left hand. “Look familiar?”

The discontinuity of Niles' life took jarring centre-stage. “Yeah... that's his.”

“Maybe she's one too.”

Niles frowned slightly at the image, tilting his head just slightly to the left. He doubted, very much, that Holly Bell and Eli Sharona had anything in common. “I should double check some notes, but we need to figure out whether or not to finish the contract.”

James nodded slowly. In that respect, anyway, he had not been being so absent minded. “That's my next meeting, but for your part, consider the matter on hold. Want me to get your lunch?”
Niles shrugged. “My turn to get yours, I think. What next?”

“I'll swing by your place after work,” James said, slipping a banknote adjacent to his plate anyway. “Maybe you can finish telling me that story.”

---

Someone's always got to throw the biggest wrench they can find into my plans.

As it turned out, the hard part about working down-tier with the lower-ranking Grey Angels was not getting in touch with them – any of the Four Horsemen could get a hold of fully one-quarter of the membership of the organization with little notice, and since the Four Horsemen could get a hold of each other on demand, that made communication relatively effortless. The hard part was figuring out where to meet face to face. You couldn't go anywhere too seedy, because you'd either risk triggering a gang war, or simply attract too much attention. However, once the masks went on, you couldn't just go to the corner pub, either.

Diana and Locuna had been supposed to report to Scion at an ill-used pier, but the chaos of the early morning had stirred up a harbourside hornet's nest as the seafront was combed for any stragglers among those responsible for the distruction of half the Royal Dean Navy at port. Locuna, for his part, found the situation terribly funny. Diana, as Scion was now long used, mostly tried to figure out how it was achieved.

Eventually, a suitably quiet warehouse district was found, a suitable alleyway selected, messages retransmitted and a meeting achieved.

Diana, contrary to her usual professional stifness, was actually the most distracted. “Do they know who did it yet?”

Scion shrugged, showing his ultimate disinterest. The rain had turned his grey jacket nearly black, and seated cross-legged on a crate at the end of a blind alleyway, he could have passed for an abandoned movie prop. With the starry mask, it gave him an air of the enlightened he simply didn't deserve. “The Zaxtonians, of course. Somehow. Without a combat fleet anywhere near Galba Roy, or any support network for the company of infantry taken as prisoners or, more often, casualties.”

“Agency, then.” Locuna said flatly.

“Most probably,” Diana agreed.

Scion cleared his throat inaudibly, drawing in their attention with his empathic link to the two of them. He was an able leader, because he did not need to bark, or bite, or shout. He had an effective aura of command, more subtle and useful than his predecessor's aura of abject terror. “There has been a change of plan. We were attacked at Redhall, as you know. There were no injuries, but I am extremely disturbed that three of us, three of the four, no less – could be blindsided.”

“Good thing Prince showed up to save the day,” Locuna responded, bitterly.
Scion shrugged dismissively. “Better your brother arrived than that he didn't. I am not concerned with such recrimination. This event has happened, and regardless of our response to it, that event had a cause.”

“Rainwright,” the two said in unison. Scion sighed – these two were dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous operating cell in the whole group, if you considered Diana (the woman who could kill anything) and Locuna (the man who could go anywhere) partners. Granted, Diana worked with the Angels only infrequently... but her operations with them never failed to make a very clear statement. Still... there were things clever thieves and military officers couldn't be expected to understand.

“A more immediate cause. Our investigation is on hold. For the moment, you two have a new assignment. Holly Bell.”

Locuna nodded, and turned to head to the end of the Alley – he'd heard enough and there was no discussing such a thing after the order was given. Diana, for the moment, lingered. An axe to grind, maybe, or an ego to massage with a large trophy, bent her from her usually silent nature.

“... Then Rainwright?”

Scion could not help but smile behind his mask just slightly – a smile he graciously allowed Diana to feel. “My child, there is a time and a place for everything.”

---

Vidcund had made something of a study over the years of the human tendancies of fear – partly due to the rigorous requirements of Agency Conditioning, where he had learned many a mantra, koan, and other mental bypass for his own frightful instincts, and also partly because fear turned out to be a surprisingly common reaction among civilians to his appearance, sudden or otherwise, in their lives. One thing he had known for some time was that the unfamiliarity of a situation engendered undue levels of fear.

Knowing that, however, helped less than he would like it too, and as an unseasonably cold wind buffeted them from behind for the third or fourth time, leaving as suddenly as it had arrived, it was getting hard to resist the instinctual sense of something being deeply, deeply wrong.

The call came only a moment or two after he had guessed it might. The operator at the radar station had noticed yet another vessel from the convoy had winked off of his monitor, vanishing without a trace and kicking off yet another flurry of attempts to contact the latest-missing vessel. That brought the total to three, and now, the co-ordination vessel was at the rear of the convoy.

Vidcund, at this point, turned to the Captain, who had returned to replace her first officer. “Is it possible to advise you, Captain, without necessarily placing your vessel under Agency Comandeership?”

The Captain's brow only furrowed further as she turned to look at Vidcund. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

“Cease all further communication. Shut off all external running lights and accellerate to the maximum speed possible.” Vidcund shrugged, almost dismissively. “Navigate by instruments.”

“What, exactly, are we meant to be running from?”

Vidcund didn't answer. He was already moving, into the companionway that lead down to the level of the vessel's open decks, which he would have to traverse in order to reach the specific part of the vessel where Edward was preparing for their unconventional method of escape.

He paused about halfway across the deck, a chill running up his spine. A deep and pervasive sense of the wrong seized him by the cocyx, sending a hand to his hip in spite of any sort of threat to identify, or even suggestion of a target to fire upon. He stood there for several second, poised in supernal immovability on the deck of the remarkably stable vessel, soaking in every input of his senses to try and pin down what had tickled him.

As was almost always the case, it was the sudden correction of the faulty condition which allowed it to rise above the noise of the rest of reality. The waters had begun to froth somewhat, returning to a more normal pattern of movement after a period of remarkable stillness. Vidcund frowned at this, stepping closer to the railing, to peer down at the water. He could think of all manner of causes for waves, but bubbling... bubbling was something new.

The running lights of the ship cut out – no doubt belatedly upon his suggestion – and Vidcund was shocked to see it was not that difficult to adjust. What light had once come from the lights themselves seemed to come from the stars, the moon, and most shockingly, the water itself. The frothing had continued to increase, in such overwhelming degree that the suggestions of linearity or pattern in the sickly green glow had to be merely Vidcund's mind playing tricks on him. The surface had begun to break, in places, with a great many somethings (or, the reptile part of his brain suggested in malign panic, some singular thing of impossible scale) beginning to emerge, surrounding the vessel.

Hopelessness flickered, and Vidcund turned on a heel. Hemmed in by these creatures, the water level seemed to have begun to drop – the great, ivory suggestions of figures now seemed to resolve more clearly to his mind's eye as teeth larger than anything such a creature could possibly pray on. The ship listed, hard – the decking kicking out from beneath his feet just as he slipped past a hatch, flinging him hard and fast down another companionway until he collided with the bulkhead some deck or another below where he had started. Vidcund seized the nearest object to hand – a protruding bit of plumbing – and held on for dear life.

The vessel seemed to tumble for an eternity that his glasses marked as less than a full minute, before one final, and sturdy, crash. They had come to rest entirely on their side – there was a great rending of steel, internal lights quenched instantaneously, and the sulfur-aerosol reek of flammable gas began to become apparant.

Straightening – impressed with his own resilience, he picked his way down the companionway carefully. He didn't have a flashlight – the light-amplification filter on his glasses would have to suffice – but he didn't have all that far to go, either. The ship had canted onto its side – fortunately now rather level, so that he could at least walk on the wall instead of the intersection between surfaces.

He counted down the correct number of doors, knocked twice, and swung the heavy waterproof hatch open. “You down here, Edward?”

There was a long pause. Something shifted. “... Fuck me. How are we alive?”

Vidcund looked down into the room – a conference room of sufficiently small size that he felt he could safely leap through the door, if he lowered himself by his arms as far as they would go, and landed appropriately to spread the impact through as many joints and muscles as possible. While he prepared to do this, Edward shoved a few astray chairs aside, so that he could get at the far wall, where he had carefully copied the arcane mathmatics and geometry his brother had advised him to use.

“I've been thinking about this,” Edward said in the meanwhile. “I mean, I know exactly enough Enochian to understand where we're going.”

“Anywhere,” Vidcund said, landing harder than he meant to when he'd glanced against the edge of the table, which was bolted to the floor and therefore floating unexpectedly free in space, “is better than here.”

---

There was a saying in idiomatic Terrik that strongly mirrored an old Zen koan: “Without recourse to good or evil, show me your original face, before your mother and father were born.” It was a difficult problem best left to philosophers and those who made a lifetime study of such esoteric matters, and certainly no attempt will be made here to resolve this koan or the Terrik challenge in any meaningful way.

Allow us to instead consider the interconnectedness of things, the unary nature of existance, with no death and no end to death, nor life nor end to life. To “gaze beyond” as the necromancer once put it was a gesture at making such studies, but nothing more. To truly live on the far side of the veil, to truly die undying or live unliving, required a distinction of mind such as cannot be put into words. The way that can be spoken of is not the true way.

However, as in all satori, eventual that essential unity becomes a binary, and from there, the multitudes spring. And this is where we join things – as one small corner of the multiversal warp and weft became aware of itself again and began to construct the necessary binaries of self and other.

There was, for Archangel, a brief, glorious moment in which he saw this weave for what it was. As a chess-player saw the lines of force on his board, the thing that was Eli Sharona could see at least the near horizon of the universal equivalent. True, the unique contours of this tapestry ensured he could not gaze too far beyond, into those truly maddening depths behind him where the knots gathered and that blind bastard of a diety, too dangerous to allude to let alone name, danced madly to the tune of the familiar and cliche chaos of the cosmos – nor to the far edge, where hounds lingered over their prey and hid from things yet stranger still.

That thought amused him – that there could be something in the world the Hounds of Tindalos themselves feared.

The Necromancer's mind contorted, half pulled and half pulling, around those local lines of force – around the sudden influx of saffron cords, the strange illusory fibres that seemed half-there and half-dreamed, and the familiar brassy chains of Rainwright.

Rainwright, old rival, lord of the Order school of magic, the most powerful and most profane, who had, it seemed, stumbled into the path that would forever lead to his and Archangel's collision. There were many futures the dead could see – none of them wholly good – and none of them, this ghost decided, lead to a situation where the Viscount could live and his consciousness, such as it was, could continue to linger here.

At once, at that thought, the universe consolidated itself into the many-faceted illusion of reality we all consider so useful, with distinct things and places and objects each distinguished by such fanciful concepts of direction and the passage of time.

Archangel was once again locked in his box.

---

Sometimes, the most surreal part of an experience were the matters which seemed normal. The portal opened, the cosmos folded, Edward and Vidcund had fallen between, and arrived, unceremoniously, in what could only have been the international flights terminal of a large metropolitan airport.

It was still night time, to judge by the sheer blackness of the sky outside what little there were for windows, though the ground outside had an unnatural quality of flatness to it. Vidcund's eye could discern no true horizon in the distance, though it was very dark, the lights aside. He could spy no runway from here – indeed, the only thing behind them was a large stone wall, glyphs much like those Edward had hastily drawn permenently inscribed on its surface – others seeming ready to shift at a moment's notice by way of what seemed to be movable plates and panels.

There was no time to examine it in great detail. At Edward's lead, Vidcund stepped forward, into a queue of other recent arrivals, all of whom seemed like business travellers. Edward's vest (the cape forgotten) was the only colour visible in a sea of monocrhomatic purple-black.

“Had to say anywhere, didn't you?”

The familiarity of the scene, already buzzing in the back of Vidcund's mind, burst through the barrier of amnesia that had been fading since the drugs keeping it maintained had been withdrawn from him. While the great abyss of the past remained, one small detail had surfaced. “I didn't necessarily mean Hell.”

Hell, the Infernal City. Of all the places to wind up.

As the queue approached a checkpoint, Edward turned to Vidcund. “We don't have valid passports.”

“Our return gate doesn't exist. They'd have to send us somewhere else.” Vidcund considered the matter for some time – the guards ahead, heavily armed, taking their time considering the papers of each traveller. “Tererra, maybe.”

“You two. Come with me.”

A silence had fallen over the line. The guards had looked up from their work and were staring at an individual, freshly arrived through a door that must have been reserved for employees or officials, since it was the first Vidcund had seen anyone come or go through it. He was a young man, barely out of his teens (if he was at all), in an impeccable and bespoke suit of slate-blues, a blood-red pin set in his lapel with a familiar logo.

Vidcund and Edward exchanged a look, and stepped out of the queue, to follow this stranger. They had, for the moment, no other choice.

“That's Aaron Cluny,” Edward muttered to Vidcund, before they had gotten too close.

Vidcund frowned behind his glasses. Cluny – there was a name that rung a bell.