SANITY LINE
Episode 08 - Answers
The extreme unfamiliarity with the informal process of a stern talking-to engendered more amusement than was appropriate for Vidcund, who felt, standing as he was more or less attentively opposite Stamatia and her desk, as though he had somehow been injected into a scene ripped from some police procedural drama or military flick.
“You mean to tell me that with the better part of a decade’s experience in the field, with a brain that’s all but screaming to be promoted well past where it is, your best guess on how to deal with the deviant was to drop a building on him?”
Vidcund blinked slowly and deliberately behind his glasses, portraying for the entire world the introverted, muted deliberation that countered Stamatia’s frustration. “With the limited resources available to me at the time, and the time constraints, the fact that I was even able to drop a building on him at all should speak to my operational creativity.”
“Shut up,” Stamatia responded with a sneer, looking to her computer. “… How the hell did you do that anyway?”
“A flicker of memory. I remembered somehow knowing that the building had been rigged for self-destruction, when it had been in active use. I merely got lucky that whoever purged the building didn’t neutralize the system.” Vidcund blinked slowly again, inclining his head slightly. “It’s possible the Amnesiac drugs from Project Moses are beginning to wear off.”
It certainly was possible. Human memory was a powerful thing, and an odd one – almost as odd as human perceptions of reality. Whole memories could be excised completely, obliterated by the best medication and hypnotherapy science could provide, but then they would slowly creep back, in déjà vu, flickers of intuition, and the hazy, mutedly-vivid scape of dreams.
This answer, at least, seemed to pacify the Woman in White, who leaned back in her chair somewhat, considering Vidcund coolly. “You are positive the creature in question is related to your Task Force’s mission?”
“I have tentatively identified him based on facial recognition scans as Grunnyar Crowe, a former associate of Gloria Creena.”
“Good. Organize your staff, Special Director.” Stamatia rose, the meeting at a formal end. “I expect significantly more subtle results in the future, if you wish to maintain your Grey Clearance and title.”
Vidcund smirked almost imperceptibly. “The webs we weave…”
---
“I thought, in the absence of any leads from Anfangsburg, I might present something new.”
Vidcund looked up from the real, ink-and-cellulose file he had been reading, glancing down the conference table to the speaker. This room – booked specially for the purpose of finally having a flesh-and-blood congregation of the Task Force – was a hive of information, projected on every wall, and for those with the benefit of augmented reality glasses (tinted or otherwise), even hanging in mid-air, obediently waiting to be gestured into and out of reality. “You have a lead, Erwin?”
Erwin Baha was among the eight agents, Vidcund included, who comprised the dedicated membership of the Task Force. Countless others, surely, comprised their support elements – resources acquired from the research or enforcement departments, mostly. After all, labour was expendable and unspecialized. The Group of Eight, however, were the specialists, each bringing something to the table the others lacked, which someone up above, possibly Stamatia herself, had considered relevant.
Vidcund, of course, brought consummate professionalism and organization, when he wasn’t busy breaking down buildings and throwing the rulebook into the wind. Baha, on the other hand, was one of those Agents Vidcund despised. He was late as a matter of course, inherently unprofessional, relying on charisma and specialty to make him indispensible.
Baha was an expert on cultic magics, particularly those that pertained to the Sleeping Eye and their derivatives. There was nobody more useful to this investigation, then, besides him.
That was why Vidcund was somewhat disappointed by Baha’s lead. “If you’ll recall, this investigation began not with a direct look at Creena, but at the release of proscribed literature – you will recall someone got their hands on a copy of the Pnakotic Manuscripts.”
“I also seem to recall the myth-cycle to which the Manuscripts belong were not part of your usual expertise,” Vidcund said flatly, “And apart from timing, I am no longer convinced they are related.”
“Ah, but I believe they are,” Baha said evenly, “And they are related through her.”
At Baha’s gesture, one of the wall-projections changed to a recent, rather high-quality surveillance photo. The live-animated image showed points being plotted on the young female subject’s face, followed by a webwork of lines, after which a matching file photo presented. Vidcund didn’t need to wait for the name to render to recognize the woman – Maria Frost.
He turned, giving Baha his undivided attention as the man continued. “Numerous people have reported, or, more accurately, been discovered, as having been subjected to the proscribed work King in Yellow. There’s a task force dedicated to the problem, and they forwarded me this photo. The copies were reported stolen from the W.A. Keeping Memorial Collection at the national library, by Ms. Frost.”
Vidcund was wholly unfamiliar with the work, as well he likely should have been, but he did recall the triskelion and its implications at the school - an attack for which he knew Gloria Creena (or at least her cult) to be responsible. “Does the play normally figure into the Eye mythology?”
“Not directly. However, there are parallels. If Maria is now a free agent – or even if she’s working with Creena directly, she’s probably trying to get people down the garden path. For one thing, we’re not even sure there’s anything useful in the King play. It’s a complete cognitohazard.”
Vidcund nodded slowly, a frown forming on his face. If the book was that dangerous, what had it been doing in a collection the public could get access to? “Who is in charge of the W.A. Keeping Collection?”
“Ahh...” Baha glanced at his notes, “A Professor. Donnovan Kline?”
The Special Director felt the corner of his mouth involuntarily curl into a smirk. “Not anymore.”
---
“It’s missing the second act, you know.”
Maria ignored the disembodied voice, just as everyone else in the library did. She was, naturally, the only person who could actually hear it, and there was no sense in speaking aloud, apparently to herself, when no such speech would have been allowed in the first place, never mind in a busier, nosier place where it might have gone unnoticed.
That she could hear the call of Il Fantoma even here, even in broad daylight, with all of Earth and the weight of its consensus-based reality blocking Aldebaran, was a sign of how far gone she herself was. In these lucid moments she wanted anything but to continue to act out her role... but such moments were increasingly fleeting.
“… Then again, I suppose it always is, isn’t it?”
She closed the book – an aging, yellow-paged edition of the King in Yellow (translation by Harrity from the original French, 1793) – and slid it back onto the shelf. They were, of course, nowhere near the plays, and such a public collection of the National Library as this had no business with such circumspectly-proscribed works.
“Yes,” she said gently, as she stepped into a stairwell she was confident was empty. “That’ll have to be a secret just for us.”
She adjusted the set of her yellow hood over her dark hair as she approached the base of the final flight of stairs, and reached out toward the un-alarmed fire escape door, finding it, quite disconcertingly, to open out into a blank, starless void.
She frowned slightly, and slowly let the door close between her and the roaring darkness. That hadn’t been part of anyone’s plan.
---
The Material Handling Annex was added to the National Library at the insistence of then-incoming Grand Librarian Donnovan Kline, though Agency had, as it did in most things, a fairly significant influence over the construction process. At their silent direction, most of the security network’s computing power had been moved into the new wing, and was subsequently slaved to the Agency analysis and override network, Echelon.
That meant, from a command room not unlike the Media Management Centre, Vidcund could have a complete overview of every bit of intelligence the library could offer him, before he’d even put boots on the ground. It seemed fitting to him that the subtle conflict that had began with the unauthorized divulgence of proscribed knowledge what felt like a small eternity ago, when he stood in a room scarcely distinguishable from this one, watching a now-dead professor speak what was functionally his last.
Not for the first time, he was conflicted between his sense of the sheer enormity of the power he, as a Special Director, helped Agency exercise, and the increasing fear that the poetry he couldn’t help but see in everything thus far was evidence that something greater than even his employer’s phenomenal power was personally orchestrating events.
It was a ridiculous fear, but it bit and grew all the same, and one day soon he would need to figure out a way to eradicate it.
On the main monitor, he watched a specifically-designated camera feed him images of the incoming convoy of vehicles – a sedan trailed by three armoured cars bearing the logo of the nationally-known CLIFF Deposit Service. Cliff, of course, was an Agency front operation, and while it had hundreds if not thousands of legitimate contracts, it was also used, as in this case, for moving around materiel, up to and including Enforcement troops.
A dozen agents, about half of whom, Vidcund reminded himself, were him. It nagged at the back of his mind, the idea that they were all him – if he was the particular Vidcund Därk he was at the moment, that was merely a temporary accident, the peculiar appearances bestowed upon reality in his transient state. While they unloaded and got ready to get to work, Vidcund cycled through the other cameras available, of which there were hundreds. When he got to the main lobby, he paused, highlighting an individual on the screen with a finger on a pad.
“Identify that man.”
“Heard.”
Vidcund continued to flick through the cameras while they obeyed his order, and was pleased to see a message flash on the main display just before someone read it outloud. “GOON reports Area Isolation in Effect.”
That, at least, was a relief. Under Area Isolation, the entire National Library had been effectively excised from reality, albeit temporarily. Nobody outside, even those with scheduled shifts, would feel the need to arrive there. Nobody on the inside now had the power to leave. It was an extreme measure to use in this case, but Därk wanted to make it perfectly clear – both to Kline and to whoever was distributing his proscribed material collection – that Agency was not taking the matter lightly.
“Identity match. 84% confidence.”
That earned the operator responsible a frown. “Why so low?”
“Subject is being unusually good at not looking toward any of the security cameras. And the system at the National Library isn’t all that great to begin with. Still, the computer’s 84% certain that’s Eli Sharona, known S-Class subject. Need the file?”
“No.”
Archangel needed no introduction.
Reaching out across the great gulfs of the mental dimensions, Vidcund decided it was time to bring a more personal touch to these proceedings.
---
Donnovan Kline could not recall a time he had been more angry, and he had had ample opportunity to get angry, over a very long and illustrious (for his profession) career. As a chef without her knives or claims adjustor without his actuarial tables, neither wizard nor librarian could perform their role without their books, and the loss of the W.A. Keeping collection was a vital blow to both roles. Kline doubted very much that Agency had yet to discover him for what he was – else he would never have risen to this position in the first place – and yet that small, vestigial bit of illogical humanity yet ticking away in his heart of hearts could not help but to feel that the decision to permanently sequester the collection was not so much happening to him as directed at him.
Kline’s personal collections were considerable, with a depth and breadth of knowledge perhaps unrivalled in the world, at least in his particular area of expertise. To his personal system of classification, there were about three different varieties of arcanist – that was to say, those few occultists who managed to grapple on to useful knowledge instead of the usual occult trivia. The Kitabists, of which he was perhaps the archetypical example, who derived their knowledge from that discovered in the past, dredging up from times older than memory That Which Could Not Be Denied. Then you had Order Mages – few, in these days, at least, few who truly held any real power. Shaping the universe to their will. Kline had long suspected that a few of this group worked within, or perhaps above, Agency Division. The third category... well, the least said about those who delve into the time before time perhaps the better.
Still and all, there were works in the W.A. Keeping collection that were likely to be irreplaceable. It was the sort of thing that bold men would take large risks to safeguard, and today was a day for such risks.
When Kline had been young, there was a practice in effect known as the commonplace book. It was a sort of mental junk-drawer, a place to jot such things as had no better place, or perhaps as would be needed in something of a hurry.
He still maintained such a thing, and reaching into the drawer of his richly-appointed office desk, he sought out the solution to his problem, and prepared to issue a clarion call that would bridge even Vidcund Därk’s little ‘reality gap’.
It was time for Socrates and Plato to show off a little.
---
A knife crafted from living bone of a creature long past man’s memory sounded like two things: a literary cliché and impossibility. It was, at the very least, the latter. Maria had gone through great tribulations to obtain Gloria’s signature weapon, and had long since come to terms with it having been fake. Still and all, it was a good knife – sturdy and sharp, which to her mind was the only thing a knife should ever be. The look, and its history, however exaggerated, were a credit to the drama of the weapon – a facet admired by both Cassilda and Maria-Cassilda’s etheric master.
It was for that reason, more than laziness or paranoia that she had chosen to keep the thing on her person. She couldn’t have brought herself to discard it with all the willpower in the world. Now, of course, she was thankful she had not. It was one more of the ways in which the Unnamable’s script shaped her life, whether she wished it to or not, and one more way in which she could be assured of His benevolence.
A benevolence which, at the balance of the day, would not be felt by many. It was with a deft stroke of her fake knife that very real blood was spilled, and not her own. Gloria had taught her well, in this regard. Sure, the Old Sow might have invested considerably more care in the selection of her sacrificial lambs, consulting astrology and arcane math, but Maria had the solvent lucidity of the modern. Blood was blood, and the young man studying in the psychology section made as good a volume of it as any.
Of course, this wasn’t a play. There was a goodly amount of panic – Mr. Pscyhology had plenty of friends to panic and run and bolt, and in this post-98 society, there were plenty of security guards to rush onto the scene.
What happened next was difficult to explain, even for Maria, whose ancient bonding with Cassilda gave her insight into such moments. Speaking in that proper tongue of the Original Play, she performed the usual rote gestures and delivered the prescribed line. What was hard to explain, though, was the effect. The guards continued to run, as did, one supposes, everyone else. The blood, on the other hand, was changed.
Once, when she was a young girl, she’d seen a match applied to a pool of spilled gasoline. It was a slow-motion shot, some sort of stock photography or footage from one of those shows where they find a dim, vaguely-educational reason to blow something up in front of very expensive camera equipment. As the flame spread across the pool, so too did something best described only as aurora borealis flash across the bloodied floor, transforming it in its passing and leaving Maria changed.
The world’s most costly quick-change act aside, it did have one other, small effect, and it was the one which Maria had desired – she was no longer alone.
“Your wish, your Majesty?”
“Defend your Queen, Il Fantoma.”
---
The Saffron Academy, in spite of a name and conservatism of uniform that suggested otherwise, was among the newer of the occult traditions. Unlike, however, almost all other newcomers, they made no secret of their freshness. New approaches were needed, they’d say. The old ways died out because they no longer functioned, and clearly that meant they were in error. Honesty was not their only eschewal of tradition, either – their founder would often boast to those knowledgably in such matters that they belonged to none of the established schools – neither Order nor Kitabist nor Throwback. They formed on their own a fourth school, he said, a synthesis of the willful constructs of the Order mages and the erudition of the Kitabist.
It was this founder, one self-named Professor Malvolio Coultier, who had discovered and improved upon the original Excise Edict. The ritual, a bit of old lore hinted at in Kitabist myth as some power purported by Order Mages, had originally been intended to remove humans, rather than places, from reality, and irreversibly at that. Malvolio decided that wasn’t worth monetizing – the costs in terms of karma would just be too great. So, he had developed this altered version, this metaphysical cordon.
That, itself, had been a major revenue driver. Not as good as the scores of Academy members who learned nothing of value but none-the-less paid dues into what was, essentially, the first of the co-ed fraternal orders – but, none the less, a major revenue driver. Mostly government – Coultier didn’t like giving corporations or even private individuals the kind of at-will immunity that came with a pocket dimension.
Still and all, he’d never tried to ward off a whole building before, and certainly never anything the size of the national library. Even with a small host of his best apprentices, and the combined manna provided by the laymen, he’d been surprised that it had worked.
Therefore, when everyone came out of the trance of sustaining the effect at once, he shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet, his practiced mind knew the loss of sufficient capital when it felt it. This had felt less like an empty bank account, and more like a breach.
As the flurry of discussion started up around him, he calmly fished his phone from a pocket, and dialed.
---
Okay... that one didn’t feel that great.
There was some quality of the transit between bodies that left an impression on the mind, Vidcund was coming to learn. It was a fatigue, and he supposed there was no reason for it not to be. Surely, projecting your consciousness from wherever it sat to effectively hijack another body was going to require some energy. But the transit itself had a texture, if you wished to think of it as a road. Sometimes the road was rockier than others.
It wasn’t accurate language, which maddened him, but of course English had no accurate language to discuss it.
He glanced around the W.A. Keeping Room, trying to remember what he was doing here. The bumpier transitions could be disorienting, as though something pressing had shoved his previous concern out of his mind. He thought back to a second before – he had been at the Operations Control Centre. Their private-sector contractor had been telling him the Excision Order had broken down, right after...
Right after he’d lost contact with the Enforcement team in the Material Handling Annex.
He broke into a run, palming one of the collapsible batons under his jacket as he made for that direction with as much speed as he could manage. Judging by the panicked state of the civilians he was passing, there was no need to pretend everything was under control.
He touched his ear to wake up his Bluetooth headset, which formed an automatic connection to dispatch. “Group Creena, Team 3 to National Library.”
Whatever was happening, this was going to have to be worth the paperwork.
---
When you wanted to be unable to believe your luck, you brought along Prodigal. That, at least, was the active philosophy Archangel brought to the operations of the Grey Angels. He wasn’t sure he believed in luck – he was raised on predestination and had lived through an adolescence and early adulthood further steeped in confirmation bias – but you couldn’t argue that Prodigal wasn’t a good luck charm. He’d never been injured, and seemed to ward off bad luck.
That, he supposed, must have been how Agency Division had managed to miss the Juanita Coultier Memorial Collection. He was quite certain there was a more complex reason, somewhere, but the fact that they were emptying out the Keeping collection, but leaving behind the Memorial, was suspect. The Memorial was just as full of eldritch gems – admittedly, however, in the form of lateral references buried at the bottom of less than interesting pages.
Still, as prodigal had a knack for luck, Archangel had a knack for grand leaps of logic with such lateral references.
The rising chorus of screams and gunshots came while he was scanning through a passage Prince had keyed upon, from his stack of assigned reading, and he calmly turned to face the general direction of the commotion, even while his companions did so, albeit looking much more consumed.
Clayton glanced to him questioningly; no doubt keen to see how his once-nemesis would react. Eli would not disappoint. “Suit up. Prince... call Banker. Tell him we’re going to need a speedier exit. Prodigal, give Driver a call and tell him to go collect Scion.”
Eli closed the door to the collection room, before turning to return to his duffle bag.
---
The Materials Handling Annex and the National Library Proper were separated by each other from an architectural firewall, with the only breach between the two being a large, triple-doored corridor whose doors were kept closed at all times – in fact, it was impossible to get down the corridor with all three doors open, unless you were willing to wedge each open in turn. If you were moving from the library into the much richer annex, the doors opened away from you, which lead to the incredibly therapeutic action of being able to slam through the doors at high speed, taking each at a shoulder in turn, in what could only be described as a display of tenacity.
Vidcund cleared the last door with quite a bit of velocity behind him, the sensitivity he brought to perception amplified by training and adrenaline.
Turning to his right, and then his left, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. In the end, he went left, heading toward the parked convoy of removal vehicles, where the enforcement team should have been. He rounded the corner behind the rearmost truck at a run, discarding one of the ill-chosen batons in order to draw a handgun.
He heard a curious sound over the pounding of his heartbeat and his entirely indiscrete footfalls. There, behind the last armoured vehicle in the line. It was a wet snapping, a curious rending that seemed familiar and alien all at once, and it was this sound that had inspired his heightened caution.
However, the caution had stolen from him the opportunity to earn an expedient answer, as, upon his rounding of the final corner, he had time only to spy a dark and hungry something, bounding away from him through a corner formed by the join between the garage door and the wall, which opened as though blown outward, into a starry void.
Through his growing sense of dread and the haze of a developing migraine, he became aware of the call holding tone in his earpiece, and touched it.
“Därk.”
“Team three in position. Disturbance is in the 10 o’clock wing relative public entrance.”
Vidcund wanted to correct them, and then realized all of that panic he had rushed passed had to be for something. “En route. Don’t engage until I get there.”
At least, he thought, he could rely on this particular team – they were all MOSES clones, after all. He started in that direction, relying on residual memory and inertia to carry that body back to where it needed to be, as he jumped back into his body at the control room. It was a rough transit – and to him, an unacceptable delay.
By the end of the day, he thought, he was going to have to try to control two bodies at once. Couldn’t be that hard, really. It’s not like any of the perspective-points he had today were his from a purely biological standpoint, and surely it was just a matter of practice.
“... Is this a joke? What’s wrong with the display?”
He frowned at the master display, removing his glasses as he watched the scene in the “ten o’clock wing” unfold. Nothing looked right – the books were too old, the shelves too baroque, the clothing of the few present too regal and festive. It was like watching a movie or drama unfold. Men with clubs – he took to be some sort of perceptive analogue to the guards – fighting men with swords.
Sighing, he realized, entirely too late, that this had to be some form of mimetic contamination – and he wasn’t about to expose more people to it. Reaching down to his workstation, he sealed the doors, and reached under his coat. It was just as well, really. None of those present seemed fit to answer him, and the monitor wasn’t supposed to be set in gilded, hand-graven trim.
---
The earliest vaccinations were crude techniques, inoculating the treated with very real pathogens in order to promote a healthy immune response against even worse illnesses. So to was it with Archangel. He had been steeped in horror since birth, immersed in the perverse morality of those wars that are waged out of the public view.
But for the accidents of that birth, he could have been an Agent, or indeed any form of wet-worker. He was immune to most of your standard horrors, and there was little that terrified him.
That, in and of itself, tended to inspire as much fear as it did respect from his followers in the Grey Angels, for when wisdom suggested standing back and letting authority handle it, or at least coming up with a plan, Archangel often only acted. His more loyal followers, Scion among them, had learned that he was never truly acting without a plan – he carried in his head so many general contingencies that the telepath often wondered how there could be room in that skull for anything else.
The library guards had all but fallen to the present threat by the time the active trio had arrived, and Archangel seemed unwilling to waste an opportunity, pausing only to turn to them and issue the minimum they would need.
“Hold this entrance. Scion will find us well enough but he needs a door to come in through. Prodigal – mind your targets. At some point this’ll raise Agency eyebrows and getting out of here will be a lot easier if they consider us less of a threat.”
With that, he rounded the final archway, reaching beneath his jacket, and Prince was somewhat surprised to see that he didn’t draw a firearm, or even some more common melee weapon, but a mechanism which unfolded in a swift motion, providing him with a cruel-seeming (but impractical, to Prince’s thinking) scythe.
Archangel paraded into the line of sight of the conflict without the least care for his own safety, and indeed made every effort to draw attention to his rather recognizable appearance. That mask, that death-gaze visage, was known everywhere in the Union, and depending on how deeply steeped in the occult you were, you either feared or revered him.
For those masked invaders who were milling about the library, protecting the centre of this particular reading space, the answer seemed to be fear. They were cowed by his presence, and Prince, from his position of cover, could see that some balefire-effect, a corona of suggestive St Elmo’s Fire, radiated from the necromancer’s very person.
Then, very quickly, they recovered from their initial fear, and rushed toward him. Prince found the moments that followed very difficult to follow, as suddenly, they seemed to come from all sides, and he had his own door to defend – such had been the fear Archangel had initially commanded, that he had actually passed through a great number of them before he even needed his weapon.
“Yeah,” Prodigal said calmly, as he began to fire into the onrushing swarm. “He does that sometimes.”
“I know,” Niles said. “I think I’ve been on the receiving end once or twice.”
---
“Were those Grey Angels?”
Vidcund glanced again in the direction of the door, leading his team at something of a run down a service corridor off of the main atrium. “Sure looked like it. Prodigal and... I’m not sure of the other one’s name. Seen him before, though.”
“We aren’t engaging?”
“They aren’t the enemy. And even if they were, they wouldn’t leave themselves that badly exposed unless they wanted us to attack from that side.”
A stairwell in the service corridor spanned the gap to the next level up, admitting them onto a balcony that fed the second tier of this particular collection room. For a single terrifying moment, Vidcund thought that he had sprung a trap by moving through that door, and dove to the edge of the balcony for what little cover it would offer.
He was still in mid-air when he realized the great rending he had heard was the glass ceiling caving in, raining down fragments of small, cubed glass. At least, he thought, the glaziers who had installed the ceiling had been smart enough to use proper safety glass. Looking up, he frowned. From the eclipsed sky, there descended a coterie of strange, winged things, with heads like emaciated equines, membranous wings, and digitigrades legs which none-the-less ended in webbed feet. They dove quickly through the window, landing at the centre of the room, where they flopped along on their four feet toward a pair of figures who seemed the only calm, at-ease persons in the room.
“Oh,” he said, bile rising in the back of his throat, “Like Hell.”
He rose, his fellows taking his lead, and drew just one of his handguns. He was going to need both hands for stability, which he would need for range, but he was damned if he was going to let the apparent perpetrators escape.
One of the figures looked, and time slowed to a crawl. Vidcund could not recall having seen another figure like him – a tall, noble-postured man, whose brocaded vest of gold on black bore that three-armed triskellion which Research had warned the Special Director about. What was most shocking, however, was that Vidcund couldn’t make up his mind about the man’s face. It seemed absent, as though protected by a mask, but a mask quite so grotesque he could not recall having ever seen outside of Hollywood. It pulsed with veins that shone through pallid skin, and yet those veins were of such ornate arrangement and implausible design that Vidcund could be excused for doubting they had a natural cause.
He became aware, even as his mental conditioning kicked in and prevented him from caring over-much about that particular detail – a question resolved as easily from a dead body as a living one, that he and his team had been translated down to the centre of the battle, where they stood on a level field with the nobleman and the gowned-and-masked lady he seemed to be defending.
The man, from his position of having his hand on his hip, now drew his sword. “It is not polite to stare, Vidcund Därk. I knew we would cross paths again.”
Behind him, Vidcund was intuitively aware of his fellows piecemeal discarding their drawn firearms to draw out their batons – clearly, an enemy who could alter the arrangement of space was going to be hard to shoot. For his own part, he did the same. “Under my authority as a duly-appointed agent of the College of Judges, I order you to remove your mask and submit to lawful detention.”
The woman laughed derisively, which inspired a chuckle in her swordsman. “I wear no mask.”
Vidcund, intending to press his advantage so far as was possible, withdrew, mentally. He did not leap far, however, for the first time ever, aiming for a point between all of the bodies he had in the room, intending to control them all at once. He could then fight with impunity, live or die, and what was more, fight with an uncommon and impossible level of co-ordination.
He was not prepared, though, for the alien landscape – or perhaps a mind-scape – of that peculiar position between brains. He had anticipated difficulty in the early seconds, in dealing with multiple and contradictory sets of sensory inputs. It was a known problem, and one he had thought was hinted at in the limited passages of his dossier that he was able to obtain. Nothing had hinted at this land-between the lands, or the strange, undulating, and silently malevolent creatures that pulsed and swam at will through the mindscape.
Having realized his mistake, it was now terrifyingly late to correct it.
---
The breakdown of an appropriate level of fear was expected by Archangel, and his scythe was not for show. It was a peculiar weapon, one you did not expect to see in a fight and, frankly, a tool that was not particularly suited to the acts of war. Still, he used it briefly, and reaped his way through the throng of Invaders, whose soft grave-worm bodies offered little resistance to the surgically-sharp blade.
In fact, thus far the battle was so easy for Archangel that he felt no need to further tax his arcane reserves, and bore his might in the body rather than the soul, as he cut his way to the centre of the room. He had, in the moment of safety his fearful aura had given him, spied two figures at the centre of the room who had stood apart.
Rituals had components. In Archangel’s experience, he could save a lot of sweat by taking out a ritual’s leaders, sparing him from having to hunt down each reveller in turn, at least in the short term. Nits bring lice, after all...
Therefore, the two had become his targets, and he was coming, inexorable and indefatigable as Death itself. The grave yawned when his anger was kindled, and centuries of heritage simmered in his boiling blood.
You need to be careful, came a voice in the back of his mind. I showed the man to Prince, and I have seen the video myself. That is his Masked Man, from the morgue. And his is no mind fit for reading.
I’ll be careful, Eli thought, knowing Scion would keep reading his mind for a moment or two, listening for a response.
Though no answer came, he was willing to lay significant money on the fact that Scion would have muttered something about Eli always saying that and never doing it.
Archangel simply had a different definition of careful – a somewhat self-destructive one. After all, carefully-delivered bombs still exploded when they were in place.
The last row of puss-fleshed interlopers fell beneath his sword, as did one of the curious winged demons that had recently arrived, before, with a final burst of speed, Archangel surged forward, blocking a swing of the Masked Man’s sword on the back of his artificial arm.
“For behold, I have come in fire, and my strike is like the whirlwind, and my anger and fury rebuke you with fire. For I shall execute my judgement with the sword on all flesh, and those slain by me will be many.” Archangel intoned, in a deep and resonant tone that was as much play-acting as it was the statement itself.
The creature stood back, somewhat, and in his peripheral vision, Archangel saw Scion doing something over the fallen men who had been about to be put to the sword. The swordsman seemed no more uncomfortable than he had been a moment ago.
“... You are no God,” he said at last. “You are not even the Archangel you claim to be.”
“Truth,” said Archangel, “Is relative. You will kneel, before the end.”
---
For her own part, Cassilda did not understand what was happening. None of it was going according to her script, and she was increasingly concerned that somehow some greater power than even the King was at play here – though the tenacity of humanity was, to humans, well known, it was rarely an excuse for her own failures.
Maria, on the other hand, wanted nothing more to do with this situation, and almost found herself rooting for the masked assailant who had come, ghost-like, from the sea of her loyal and obedient jailors. She trembled, behind her mask of regal self-importance, at the might she had at her fingertips, and at the grand implications of what she had done here.
A Byakhee approached her quite suddenly, and powerful hands from one of the nameless Carcosans lifted her up onto its back. She thought, too late, to jump back down. All she could do, then, was scream, as the great beast beat its wings and hauled her skyward, into the false night of the eclipse, bound for that red star so near the horizon, across the yawning, empty gulf of the aether.
---
Archangel realized that he had been spending the last several minutes allowing his partner in this particular swords-dance to lead, but could do very little to turn that particular tide. An educated swordsman, with god-knows-how-much experience, was going to control the footwork of a battle, and there was nothing that a mage could do with it, even if he was armed with a particularly pointy stick. Nevertheless, the necromancer’s natural arm was more than up to the task of the battle all on its own, performing flatly impressive feats with his polearm that left his left hand free, even as he remained all but entirely aloof of the other’s testing strikes.
“If you are aiming to wear me out, faceless, you are off your mark.”
More importantly, however, he was now prepared to put his magic to work. The touch of his left hand – false or not – could be a death grip. It was the cold embrace of the grave, the temporal rot of death which eventually would consume all things, and when next the Phantom struck at him, he simply closed his hand around the creature’s weapon, causing it to rust and decay away before their very eyes.
In a swift motion, taking advantage of this surprise, he swept around, pushing his weight into the dolorous blow of his scythe, which pierced through the creature’s spine, if it truly had one, and out the front of his chest. The weight of the blow forced the Phantom forward, fittingly, onto his knees.
By the time Scion had fought his way back over to the pair of them, all that was left of the creature – and those that had come with it, were piles of ash, and the lingering stink of brandy.
“You figured out how to kill it already?”
“Hardly,” Archangel stooped, sifting through the ash. “... If you don’t have the body, you don’t have the kill. Is Banker here?”
Scion nodded. “I’ll get our guys up to the roof. Those men... they were with Agency Division. And their peculiarities are something we should discuss.”
“Later. They might have had friends.”
---
The old superstition that eclipses brought bad luck had a foundation. While the collapse of Grand Magic had meant that the modern world saw only those eclipses of the sun which were caused legitimately by the moon, those schooled in the Old Ways knew better. There were Ways, Means by which the sun could be silenced, and so they paid very careful attention to the latest astronomical tables, for those eclipses such as were uncalled for were dire omens indeed, as they formed augurs of the actions of potential enemies.
For her own part, Gloria was unhappy with any eclipse that was not her doing, and this one had called her up onto the roof of the abandoned hotel which she and Baha still used for their base of operations, from its earliest moments. There, she watched, keenly, and had seen both the arriving Byakhee and the departing, and knew now what it meant.
“That was Maria Frost.”
Baha gave one of his curious little smiles, inclining his head slightly. “You can be so certain?”
“Our Master has given me many gifts, of which this is one of the least. That is Maria Frost. She has allied with the Hasturites. And is doing well for herself, by the look of things.”
The two descended back into the unlit shadows of the stairwell that had brought them here, preparing to delve deeply. Baha was not convinced. “She is nothing. A convenient key. Not even necessary.”
“A convenience that has fallen into the hands of a rival power. We may be fated to be the victors, Baha, but we cannot sit idly. Our Master demands action – Glory favours the Valorous.”
“What, then, do you propose?”
Gloria pushed open the heavy, rusting doors into the storage room that they had set up as a ritual hall in the basement. Some of her followers had been along already to prepare the space for her, and she discarded her robe, stealing into the shadows cast about the room by the greenish, sickly fire that burned from irregularly-placed braziers around the room. A stone, quite seemingly natural, unworked rock, had burst through the cement more or less in the centre of the floor.
“... Our hand is forced, Erwin. Make your preparations in Terrera. It is time we awake that which sleeps beneath this city. When you have broken the seal... I will then enact that which will return our master to us.”
A young woman was being lead in, scarcely conscious to judge by the glazed look in her eyes. One of Gloria’s drug-fuelled sacrificial lambs, no doubt. Erwin gave a small smile. “... I can only hope, my dear, that your faith is not misplaced in me.”
He turned his back on the ritual that was to commence, and fled, wishing to quit Kraterburg as quickly as possible.
---
Prince always marvelled at the resources the Grey Angels had at their disposal. Someone in their organization had known their way with paper – Banker, Niles suspected, if only because of the name. He had known something of their organizational boundries through his work with the National Police Force, but now, having seen it with his own eyes, he found himself surprised.
Whether rented or owned, the ability to bring in a helicopter at what was, functionally, a moment’s notice, and without breaking a single law in the process except perhaps during the landing on the entirely unapproved roof of the National Library, was an impressive stunt. Banker himself was at the controls, when the Angels had arrived on the roof, piling into the vehicle.
As usual, he had hundreds of questions. But once he reached the aircraft and it leaped back into the quickly-lightening sky, he found them dead in his throat. He no longer wanted answers as badly as he once had, because answers were usually questions, these days, and he was growing more and more anxious about it all. He looked around the passenger cabin. Archangel, his mask in his lap so that he could towel sweat off of his face, was is in busy cheek-to-cheek conversation with Scion, the two of them looking uncommonly serious. Prodigal, for his part, was patched into the intercom system, talking to Banker.
Unwilling to interrupt, Niles contented himself with this rare, low-altitude view of the city, and found himself increasingly frowning in the direction of the Old City in the Caldera. It became more and more difficult to write what he was seeing off as an illusion of atmospheric interference. It was as though the Old City was now afloat on the surface of a sea of water, so badly was it shaking and waving.
Then, as buildings in the centre began to tumble, and something was continuing to move in the dust that followed, he rose his voice so loud he had no need for his headset.
“STOP.”
Everyone was staring at him. Then, slowly, everyone was staring with him.