FTA: In the Hands of the Living God

XII. In the Hands of the Living God

With so much about Tererra’s governmental infrastructure having been improvised, finding a suitable place to once again dive into transproprioception had been, to Vidcund’s great surprise, the hardest part about regaining his powers. With such a short time on the medication, Valkoinen told him, it wouldn’t be long after the drug was withdrawn from his diet that he would regain that latent sense.

The hard part, as it turned out, was providing him with the sort of sensory deprivation that he needed. No Agency facility had existed in Tererra until Kraterburg – the nearest facilities had been Abject and Peir 17 at Zvanesburg Port. Peir 17 hadn’t been part of Project Moses, as Abject had been, and wasn’t equipped with the requisite isolation tank.

And so, here Vidcund was, arriving at some dime-a-dozen retreat spa in the downtown, team of Enforcement and Medicosecurity staff trailing behind him into the recently-foreclosed-upon building. They found the immersion tanks at the back of the building still in good working order, though Vidcund was somewhat annoyed he had to start them himself. It did wonders for his belief in the usefulness of his medical staff, that the didn’t even know how to properly operate the equipment they were meant to keep him safe in.

He chased this thought out of his mind as he stripped down, donned his earplugs, and swung himself into the pod. He had bigger fish to fry – the twin worries of whether or not he could find the transproprioceptive “lever” in his mind, and what would happen when he did. He still retained a perfect memory of his horror at the National Library. He had, on the slower days, thought about requesting feedback from Research on the matter. He never got around to it, but on one occasion, he’d brought the matter up with Dagonovic, whose answer was some comfort, anyway.

“The subdimensional gulf is home to a great many plankton, as it were,” the Deep One had said, with his usual hedging, “none of which are usually worthy of note. I think we have something in house on the subject. What was that author’s name... Tellinghouse? Tellerplatz?”

Lingering in the lukewarm dark, it would have been easy to fixate on these concerns, but fixation wasn’t Vidcund’s strongest suit. Granted, he could fixate on a goal, or an idea, but the nature of Agency’s mental conditioning was such that he could choose the most productive fixation. It wasn’t long before he felt his muscles disjoint all at once, and the throbbing of his heartbeat in his ears subsided, and the darkness over his head became the canopy of stars.

As he had done once before, in the library, he thrust himself outward to many of these stars all at once, and found himself standing among them, as though he were on a high place looking down. Once again, the shapeless-undulating denizens of this world between lives flowed around him. He was an attache to a motor rifles company, being instructed on the difference between textbook and tactical correctness in weapons carriage, a technical advisor to a team of UAV operators working the Agency equipment, an entire squad of Enforcers awaiting their own tactical deployment – he had taken his many-armed form.

He took one calm, measured breath, and turned his gaze away from the status monitor at Headquarters, so that he could speak directly to Valkoinen, who stood over his shoulder. “... We are ready to begin.”

---

Rainwright hated convoys. It was the preferred mode of travel for certain members of the Peerage in Wartime, and even as the head of Special Branch, the Viscount somehow couldn’t order Special Branch to let him travel home in peace. Instead, he had to be hamstrung by having his driver direct his towncar through the city, wedged between a pair of SUVs along a pair of very particular routes that were, this time of day, closed to civilian traffic – a necessity in the cramped Old City. As compensation, he supposed, the car was at least secure. It was his car, after all, which meant that he could attend to his work.

Walter was in the passenger-side rear seat, reading through his briefing notes. “Master Cartwright would like a word. It’s supposedly quite important.”

Rainwright frowned, his attention having caught at the last street-corner, as he idly viewed them in passing through the front windshield. He twisted his cane idly in his hands. “Which Master Cartwright?”

“Ah, Admiral Cartwright. He does something or other for the Navy Meteorological Service.”

Rainwright nodded, finding his attention again snagged at a corner. A familiar face, maybe. “Arrange for him to speak with us in person.”

“As I recall he’s rather fond of billiards.”

“Arrange it. At the country house, if it can wait.”

Rainwright’s attention snagged again, once again picking out a familiar face on the sidewalk. A middle-aged gentleman had stepped out of a store-front with his purchase tucked under his arm, eyes obscured by tinted glasses in spite of the relative mild glare the overcast day had provided them. Rainwright knew that man, knew him by the violet glint under his glasses, by the subtle undertone of the man’s hair.

Too late, he realized that Scion had followed the convoy with his gaze, and when the SUV in front of the towncar suddenly bucked backward as though something had exploded under the front end of it, there was little Rainwright could do, save to swing his arm out and catch Walter by the chest, so that the butler was not thrown too firmly forward by the sudden impact and arrest.

The broken glass had not yet fallen still before Rainwright opened the door, dragging Walter by the upper arm behind him. When the tip of Rainwright’s cane impacted the ground it empowered him, and he emerged from the vehicle with the same rapidness and physical sense-of-purpose as the Special Branch enforcers who were clambering out of the rear SUV. He continued to run, dragging Walter along beside him, traversing the pavement with ease and a glare spared for where Scion had been a moment ago. The air behind them grew raucous with gunfire, and Rainwright rounded a corner in the crooked street, mere feet from the gate to Fate Mill Road.

Even for a man as formidable as the Viscount, the scene that unfolded before him was a jarring one. The pale man in the long coat was threatening enough, emerging from his ensconced position with a combat saber in relaxed and familiar grip in his right hand – all the more threatening for his immediately-recognizable face. Edward Coultier, eventual heir to the family name, could be a threatening factor in the Order of the Wheel and Pinion’s Zaxtonian operations.

But then, advancing from the opposite path was the shambling figure in the decaying overcoat, unarmed save for the clawlike, threatening, artificial hand that emerged from his left sleeve. Rainwright could hope against hope all he wanted, but this was Archangel indeed. The mask marked him as such, all reports and rumours of the man’s death aside.

To his credit, though, the Viscount stepped forward, striking his cane against the cobblestones with deliberate force. Sparks showered where the brass point struck stone in dramatic flourish, and he held his open arms to his sides, imparting the faintest shove that suggested to Walter that the man continue on in that direction, quickly.

“Gentlemen,” Rainwright said with his typical flat and dry tone. “You would appear to be headed the wrong way.”

Edward saluted with his blade in response, as Walter cleared the corner of the gate, only to find himself slammed against the wall, in short order, by an otherwise unfelt hand. The hands did not come until a moment later, as a pair of gloves took him by the front of the jacket, and lifted him back to his feet. The figure’s aura was oppressive, redolent in notes of tobacco and whiskey, and something else which Walter knew, by long experience, to be death.

“Hold up there a moment, Walter,” came Prince’s familiar voice, and the butler’s expression hardened as he recovered from his momentary shock.

When Walter’s cane touched the ground, the blast was deafening.

---

The less-travelled sections of the central Terrwald suited Holly Bell. Less shadowed here than in the North, the Terrwald here was none the less a thick, cold, and lush boreal rain-forest that was shockingly noisome in its silence. She, and a small band of Carcosan irregulars which Duke Adron had placed under her control upon her presentation to him, had come here on the mission of a Ducal Command. This small, unnamed valley, miles from the nearest dirt roadway, was the homestead of the Sharona Clan.

The Clan, to her limited understanding of the local lore, were descendants of some shamanic tribe headed by a figure named Shar. Opposed, or at the very least shunned, by the White Keepers and the greater Terrik culture, the Sharona had fallen into utter disregard. Insular, and geographically isolated, the tribe had dwindled to the modern era, now extant only in a single family, whose patriarch had caused sensational headlines throughout the union with his actions in the wake of ‘98, only to reappear in 2006, brutally murdered a hundred miles away in Kraterburg. What had happened to his wife (and, some argued, sister) remained a mystery. The family had last been known to be in the hands of the elder of two sons, one Eli Sharona, who had died in 2009 when, attempting to flee from the National Police Force, he was struck by a train, though rumours persisted he had survived, as his own murderous pattern continued to crop up in unusual cases throughout the union and even in Galba Dea. Of his twin sister, little was known, save that she alone among the three (or four) surviving Sharonas had a valid drivers license, listing her place of residence somewhere in what had once been Kraterburg. Of the younger siblings there was no sign, and they were rumoured to either continue to scratch out some meager existence here, or else have disappeared into the foster care system.

The compound was of some interest to the Duke, certainly, and Holly, from her perch in a pine high above it, tended to feel the same way. Maligned families so often had rumoured powers or possessions that went beyond what was physical and ordinary. While the denizens of the dreaming possessed their fair share of magic, even in their heyday, the Arts had limited use in the material world. Now, with the White Keepers’ Seals and the Agency that had followed in their footsteps, fae magic worked even less.

Even with the Banner of Carcossa and the Yellow Sign flying at their back, the Duke’s armies were going to need an upper hand before the Zaxtonians found theirs.

Below, the compound was in ruins. If anyone lived here, they would have had to be feral. The roofs had fallen in, else been burst through by the trees that had grown up under the traditional raised-floor buildings below. At the northern end, a huge section of the outer wall had collapsed, as had the buildings around it, around some depression or other in the ground. From here, the collapse looked quite ancient. Grass, having flourished in the clearing the compound presented, carpeted it. A gnarled old birch stood at one end, alien for its whiteness and still-present leaves in a sea of conifers and frost-sheared trees.

When your senses are as sensitive as a slaugh's, a sense of stillness in the wilderness was cause for notice. Not alarm, not even necessarily concern, but it was an unusual condition and worth thinking upon. When it had happened in the clearing, it was cause enough to bring her unit of scouts to a halt. Her and her fellow slaugh waited in the underbrush for an hour for something. The return of the cicadas and crickets. Birdsong. A snake rolling over in the grass.

When no further sign of life than a stiff breeze had showed itself, she picked herself up, repeating her handsign for the party's stillness. She was a shadow in broad daylight, moving quickly to the large pine that stood crooked just off the centre. She scaled it at a leap, and from its gently-swaying top, she found what had seemed so unusual.

The earth in the middle of the clearing had slid inward, collapsing, like sand in the pit of the antlion. And whatever had caused this, she was certain, was the cause of her unusual stillness.

“Weh-heh-hell now...” she said to herself, loud enough for her team to hear. “... Looks like we have some digging to do.”

---

As often transpired, in Rainwright’s experience, the would-be duel began with a period of mounting tension which likely felt longer than it actually was. His would-be assassins stared him down with calculating indifference, and he himself, in the first moments, dare not move so much as a lip lest he trigger their encounter prematurely. Instead, he delved mentally into his contingencies, relying upon and triggering a number of latent enchantments laid upon the ring on his left hand. The ring was a personal token, a bullet-shaped shard of carnelian embraced simplistically in gold.

In the distance, gunfire rose from stray, inquisitive firings to a full-blown firefight. The figurative tension of the moment began to decay. Rainwright felt an electric charge spread across his body as the enchantments he’d prepared toughened his clothing to something akin to steel. A few metres distant, Archangel’s shoulders rolled, his body dropping forward in preparation of a dash. The Viscount, Grandmaster of his Order, raised his cane to his chest before striking it forward upon the ground. A shade later, the rumble of an explosion echoed from Fate Mill Road.

Chains of cold iron, that peculiar Dean treatment of meteoric iron, erupted from the ground, sprouting tight and coiling tighter so that the famed Ghost Fencer was immediately snared in their grip, which elicted a forceful-but-powerless curse from the young man. Archangel, on the other hand, was not so easy to catch. He was already in motion, and, as the chains punched through sections of his jacket where his torso or pelvis might otherwise have been, Rainwright realized he must have been something... exotic.

Temptations to study would have to wait. Archangel closed the distance between the three of them in three lofty paces, swinging his armoured left arm with complete disregard for the Viscount’s practiced, fencer-like stance. The blow caught the man amid-ribs, lifting him and throwing him bodily toward the pavement. Though freshly-healed and out of martial practice, the Viscount was equal the challenge, touching the ground with the point of his cane as though it were an extension of his body. The magic of his authority cemented it as firmly as a pole, allowing him to arrest his throw and land more stably on his feet.

Archangel was on him in an instant, even as glyphs wrought of light radiated from Rainwright’s ring like a shield, and the Lich’s relentless, untiring assault wore on the Viscount, backing him further and further up the alley, toward Fate Mill Road’s gate. Rainwright by now had gathered that some other force of allies to the Grey Angels waited there for them, and knew he had to prevent his arrival at all costs.

For Archangel, however, the situation seemed to turn on its head in an instant. An icy shock rolled through his body, and for an instant he felt as though a glacial hand had seized his navel. He turned, looking with practiced aptitudes along the lines of sight to which only the dead or damned were party. Hundreds of miles away, he could see the Terrwald, and the small, pale, moth-like figure who had extracted his phylactery from the ground. Too late, he realized both his critical blunder in leaving the object unattended, and in giving it overly high priority in this present moment.

Rainwright had shouted something, and plunged his pointed cane deep into the middle of Archangel’s coat. The resultant blast was almost blinding to Edward, at a distance, as only the mask and arm of Archangel fell to the cobbled alley ground beneath, together with a fine residue of bluish dust. For Rainwright, the moment must have been truly victorious – there was the great Archangel slain, and the at-least-considerable threat of Edward Coultier left to the Viscount’s mercy.

Except the Crimson Knight wasn’t particularly inclined to rely upon the mercy of his enemies. Several minutes of struggle had allowed him to work the knife in his pocket free, and he drove it through the links of the cold iron, which fell away like gravity would have intended, the magic that animated them having been corrupted, punctured, and ultimately destroyed by the counter-magic which Edward had developed and perfected over a rather active career. Even as the chains were falling the Knight dodged sideways and hurled the knife toward the Viscount, where it lodged in his arcane shield and that, too, eventually disintegrated.

Rainwright rushed the Knight in a fury, ignoring the young man’s flourish, as his free hand filled with fire to match the heavy bronze blade that served as Coultier’s main-gauche. He was surprised to find the young man resolved under pressure – rage written in every line of the fencer’s flaming countenance, and yet so calculating in his gaze that Rainwright could only stalemate the duel. When Edward’s main gauche and Rainwright’s spell finally made contact the explosion was deafening, leaving either man’s coat singed, ash streaking on the younger man’s red, and surely just as present on Rainwright’s black.

They would likely have continued like this for some time, had the air between the two of them not suddenly sizzled alive with gunfire. Instinctively, both men jerked backward, and as the incoming fire continued to track Edward, the fencer snarled, turning his left hand to a backhanded grip and gesturing with his own ad-hoc arcanistry. The air around him fuzzed, buying him half a second.

Before Rainwright could counterspell it, Edward was good as gone. A fluttering scarlet banner, moving once from where Edward had stood, to Archangel’s latent mask, which likewise vanished as the banner arched up over the nearest building, vanishing.

As the Special Branch operatives closed in on Rainwright, they found him frowning at the abandoned arm. “... See to it that is secured. Where is Mr. Smith-Jameson?”

---

To say that the operation to break the siege was going poorly was an overstatement of facts, but it certainly seemed that way to Vidcund. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but he felt each body he was occupying as though it were his own, and, inevitably, the necessity to split his attention forty or fifty different ways at any given moment was leading to casualties. His artillery-officer puppets were the first to be dropped from the proverbial roster, as he withdrew from them in order to save some mental processing time.

This began a trend that continued – when his avatars among the rifle infantry had pushed their unit sufficiently far ahead of the rest of the line to become encircled, he abandoned them to whatever fate their collective awarenesses could eke out for themselves, and then his own grandilloquent forms among each and every other unit until he was in less than a dozen bodies – his airmobile Enforcement squad ensconced in their Avrotek Musta and rapidly headed into the heaviest part of the Carcosan formation: the body that was most-arguably “his”, resting in its immersion tank; and, the Vidcund which was liaising directly with Valkoinen and the rest of Kether, who were issuing orders from well behind the line, manipulating events in ways the GSDF officer core only wished they could.

It was from this later body that he expressed the worst of his nerves, fidgeting with his paper cup while staring unfocused at the computer monitor before him. In reality, he no longer quite identified with any of these bodies. He was the one walking in the midst of them all, ephemeral and vital. The spectral and gargantuan undulating plankton that plied this same world-between-minds gave him a wide berth as he worked his scores of limbs, focused his dozens of eyes, and directed the most vital assault of the campaign.

It was his team that were to assassinate Maria Frost and any other commanders they came across, after all. And as they deployed on long ropes through the sundered ceiling of a cathedral-turned-headquarters, he realized it was unlikely he would ever withdraw them.

---

It was the drawn-out nature of the firefight and the ultimately anticlimactic nature of the final shots that left Walter assured his assailants had escaped, though it would have to be time and reporting that told him whether they had gotten off scott free, or had, at least, paid in some measure of flesh for their brazen attempt on his life.

Attacks against his master, Walter had become accustomed to. It was natural, given the Viscount’s sundry occupations, that he would acquire enemies who would seek this sort of extralegal restitution. It was unheard of, in all the blind butler’s long years of service, for Rainwright’s enemies to turn their ire against him, personally. Walter made a point of not making enemies of his own.

He dusted himself off, confident in the ongoing protection of the Special Branch operatives he had summoned from thin air into the crowded alley that Fate Mill Road actually was. The autumnal chill, however unseasonal, stung through his shirt-sleeves and vest, and not for the first time, he wished he had not been in his recent habit of travelling by car without his coat. That habit would need to be evaluated, but not before he re-evaluated his involvement with the Grey Angels. Betraying them had been a calculated risk on the Viscount’s part, but now, from his Butler’s perspective, it appeared to be mis-calculated.

“D’you want my coat, Mr. Smith-Jameson,” one of the agents asked, into the Bulter’s foul mood.

Walter could only respond in mutual politeness, with a convincing, albeit plastic smile. “No, but thank you all the same, Agent. I take it the other two are pursuing our foe?”

“No, sir, they’ve gone into the alley to support the Viscount.” The Agent took him by the arm. “This way please, sir. We’ve got to get you into the chase car.”

Walter nodded. He and the Viscount each had a chase car, which followed the convoy from a discreet distance. The cars were unmarked, with civilian plates and factory-standard paint jobs, and intended for exactly this eventuality, whereupon it would pick them up and deliver them back to the Townhouse securely.

“A change of plans, then, Agent,” Walter protested. “Have the driver take me to the estate.”

At least out in the country, he reasoned, he could have a few hours to get his head straight, before the Viscount caught up with him. After all these years, he at least owed the man considerable thought before he tendered his resignation.

---

A great concussion rend the air within the throne-room, disturbing the static posture of the Masked Duke. Plaster, board, and other detritus rained down from above, smashing the small models on the table with which he was keeping appraised of the situation in the field. As the Queen’s general (in the absence of her Ambassador, the Phantom of Truth), it was his hand that guided both the Carcosan and Unseelie hosts in their ensuing defeat of the Zaxtonian forces’ attempt to break the current siege.

The Duke took one strident backward step, putting out a hand behind him to inform the queen she was to stay at his shoulder, even as he drew his sword with the other. The ceiling of the vast chamber was sundered, falling inward, and among the falling plaster were figures descending on ropes. Gunfire erupted – at first, toward no particular figure, but as the figures descended and the Duke deposited Cassilda behind the cover of the Throne, that fire was increasingly directed toward him. His sword-arm moved of its own accord, the blackened armour and the vaguely-purple blade becoming more of a shimmering field in front of him as the magic blade wielded itself to protect him from the harm.

As the figures – some sort of black-clad Zaxtonian special forces, no doubt – moved and fired, covering each other, sealing the room by casting explosives into the hall to create a field of rubble, reloading in turns, the Duke was struck most by the silence of the moment. He had no troops left to give orders, but surely, at least, these aggressors should have been communicating, telling each other when they would need cover, when they needed to reload.

He continued to withstand their attack for only a moment before the first mistake was made, creating an opening in which he moved as a violet blur, only solidifying to the point where the eye could resolve him as he arrived within arm’s reach of the nearest fighter, shortly decapitated, as he drew his long dagger, running it through the next in line. The fire began to track toward him again, sparking off the edge of both blades as he pirouetted to a position behind a pillar, from which he could be more assured of some safety, and lower his weapons to rest at his sides temporarily.

Not at all to his surprise, the enemy reacted in silence. They fell in like fashion, dispatched in relatively short order by the fleet-of-foot Masked Duke.

---

The problem with wallflowers was that they saw all, and the problem with henchmen was potential disloyalty.

Greta mulled these points over quietly while she sat, a patient ornament, in the section of the war-court reserved for Lady Frostburn and her contingent of retainers. The court had been gathered as soon as possible. The Zaxtonian and Carcosan forces had stalemated themselves some miles distant, and barring another sortie of special forces, the throne room was considered, once again, safe and secure.

It was the Duke that was holding forth his court. Cassilda, from her high throne, merely observed, first while the Duke relayed the deadlocked nature of the battle, and then as, one by one, the Duke’s commanders reported to him, promising their aid and that their forces would arrive within the day to come in order to break that same deadlock. For Greta, it was an absolute bore of a show, like much of court business.

It became more interesting when a face she had never seen before separated itself from the crowd. She was a middling-height, slight young woman, with a cape patterned like moth’s wings, pallid skin, and a shock of vibrant hair in a nondescript haircut. She naturally attracted Greta’s attention, a stark contrast to the richly-costumed fae nobility that made up most of the Duke’s commanders.

“Your Grace, my party of scouts has returned from the north after investigating the Sharona Compound, as you ordered.”

A doe-headed functionary stepped forward with her, handing off a metal box. There was a palpable shock that rippled through the room – the Fae no doubt able to see some facet of the box’s reality that she herself could not without magical aid. Even the Duke tilted his head slightly, evidencing interest his newly-fashionable mask would not have betrayed.

“In doing so, we discovered this.”
The duke held out an armoured hand toward Greta’s general direction. “Lady Frostburn.”

The Lynx-Witch sprang up from her seat at once, padding across the throne to the Duke’s side, and then toward the functionary, where she could bend forward and examine the box in great detail. “... I believe this might be a phylactery, your grace.”

For the first time in the whole meeting, Cassilda stirred. To Greta, this new queen of fae had seemed distracted for the duration of the meeting, but now, this exchange had her complete attention. “What did you say?”

Frostburn bristled, before courtesying. “I said it may well be a phylactery, your grace. They are a powerful tool used by Tererran Mages. By the markings, and the smell... I would say this one is necromantic in nature.”

The Duke’s masked eyes narrowed – an effect Greta always found chilling. “What does it do?”

“That’s a question deserving of further study, your grace,” Frostburn said carefully, her tail swishing. “I propose we place the object under my care until I have more completely identified it.”

Greta eyed the box carefully. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been meant for the Fae. This was enough for her to be interested in it. Cassilda’s obvious, unabashed interest, on the other hand, was enough to convince the young witch that she had ought to prevent Frostburn from identifying it at all costs.

Perhaps it would be the key to her freedom.

---

Vidcund had felt each and every one. Every death, every blow. Every last breath had rattled in his chest, the pain of the wounds inflicted anchoring him sharply to the body in question, the speed of the fight such that Vidcund had no choice but to stand in each body and fight them, or sacrifice the body to the confusion of the basic mind when he prematurely withdrew.

When the final body had perished, he withdrew, from everything, as the fainting man involuntarily collapses. In Tererra, people were no doubt scrambling to pull him from his immersion tank, or stop him from injuring himself too badly as he suffered seizure and fell from his desk. Here, in the great in between, he could only convulse.

The Tillinghast Plankton began to swarm around him, keeping a timid distance of which he was only tangentially aware, while growing in number and inching ever closer. As they drew near, Agency’s conditioning and an older, deeper-set indominability took hold. He stood, as it were, on this undulating plane, and the Plankton stopped closing in on him.

As he anchored himself in this disembodied consciousness, too weary to leap into a body of its own, he could watch the Plankton slowly back away from him, dispersing. The urgency of his mind calmed, the fear of the animals or spirits, or some other thing, lessened by their own timidity toward his...

What was he, now? A mind? An essence? He was certainly himself, but no version of himself he had ever known. He had no real sense apart from an awareness of his not-landscape and the vague, tingling numbness of the bodies from which he was cut off. A body he wasn’t continued to ache with the pain of each and every injury inflicted upon him, as a phantom limb troubled an amputee. And though he would withdraw from this pain, it was his only truly physical sense.

Instead, he anchored himself in it, as a drowning man clings to his flotsam, and resolved to wait out this storm, for better or for worse.