SANITY LINE

Episode 09 - Gloria

 

                Vidcund spread his hands across the glass of the inner surface of his tank, stretching the semi-transparent “window” of CCTV footage until it was more clearly visible. He found this fluid he was suspended in, whatever it was, did not do much to impact his vision, or else the curvature of the tank’s surface counteracted it. The bubbles from his excited breathing, however, which had leaked around the edges of his face mask, had lead to him needing to clear up the view.

 

                What he was viewing was utter chaos. It had taken him the better part of ten minutes to find this particular CCTV channel, one of the few that was actively working anywhere in the College of Judges campus, to his extreme chagrin. Most showed either corrupted footage that showed rococo-baroque interpretations of what it should have showed, or showed the branded test-pattern of the Secure Technology Syndicate, the Slipher-Affiliated company that had designed and installed that particular bit of governmental security. All channels save this one – a single, bleary, depiction of a rain-soaked helicopter pad, with a helicopter idling its engines to go by the rotors as it waited for the arrival of the Executive Council, who were meant to evacuate the campus.

 

                For the first time in an Age, Vidcund was powerless to do much more than watch. The things he had seen between the physical still impressed upon his mind, sending a cold chill up his spine any time he contemplated so much as jumping from one body to the next, lest they should catch him. He had nothing to suggest they might have been malicious, but had no data on them either. The closest he had come in the twenty minutes he’d had so far was to come up with a lateral reference in another report to a Tillinghast Report, but no such report existed in the Agency network – or, as was more likely, it was so highly removed from his security clearance that the Agency did not even deign to acknowledge to him that it did, in fact, exist. He hoped this institutional ritual of blinding its brightest minds would change soon, and itself be forgotten. He was going to need all the information he could get his hands on.

 

                The video quaked, as it had done many times before. So far, Vidcund could not have been sure there was a supernatural explanation for the earthquakes – while the lowlands were far from any particularly active tectonic faults, the Old City was built in the caldera of an ancient volcano, and just because it had never shown any inclination to be active before, didn’t mean, to his untrained speculation, that it couldn’t become active in the future.

 

As he saw the lawns around the platform rupture, and the platform itself buckle, spilling the helicopter onto the lawns in what was about to become a blazing inferno of rending metal, that speculation died. Tendrils, unmistakably composed of animal tissues, and yet as wide across or wider as a stout tree, were now breaching that lawn, reaching out and groping for something.

 

                One fear overrode the last, and Vidcund could sit idle no longer. Closing his eyes, trusting his stars, he jumped.

 

---

 

                From overhead, the damage looked a lot worse than it doubtless looked on the ground. Prince could see most of the buildings of the restless slopes of Old Town collapsing, their outdated “heritage-mandated” engineering principles no match for the absolutely obscene movement of the ground on which they sat. While he was far from being a study in the subject of Geology, Prince had certainly never seen anything like it. The ground was moving, waving, like thickened water. Some force beneath it was imparting more energy into the rock than he would otherwise have thought possible.

 

                Via the headset, Archangel’s voice finally got around to interrupting everyone’s silent contemplation. “Explosion, 2 o’clock.”

                Reflexively, the former detective looked. The College of Judges complex was ablaze. Whiplike, tenebrous arms reached from all across its spacious lawns, as they burst from the cocoons of other buildings even nearer by. Some of those arms, he reasoned, could reach out and touch them, were they to stray to close.

 

                The sight left his mind in something of a static void. Voices and speculation around him fell on deaf ears, and he felt, rather than heard, the persistent sound of the helicopter’s engine. Whether his mind had been blasted, or had simply reconfigured itself, whatever was left of it and familiar was now concerned solely with finding the pattern. Today, giant tentacle-creatures poking out of the ground and laying waste to the oldest city in the Union was the New Normal. What, then, wasn’t normal? What was extraordinary about this? Nothing. The two things he cared most about – civilization and order – had gone out the window. Now he just had to catch them before they could hurt themselves.

 

                As his eyes mechanically scanned over the city, they came to focus on the old Crown Plaza Hotel building. It was unchanged, not so much as a window, from here, having seemed to be blown out, and none of the nearby, alien arms seemed the least bit interested in it, with one even actively avoiding it as it made a groping sweep of the surround.

 

                “Banker, take us to the Crown Plaza.”

 

                Archangel, who had been lost in thought, seemingly, suddenly turned to Prince, his face unreadable behind his stylized, skeletal mask. “Are you sure? What do you see?”

                “I see an island of safety in a sea of danger. I see the place where I would set up shop if I was going to orchestrate this.”

                Archangel gave an approving nod. “You’re going to be very good at this job, Prince.”

 

                Now, Niles thought bitterly, if only I could get someone to explain it to me.

 

---

 

                Vidcund found the Campus in exactly the sort of disarray one would expect. The College of Judges, mighty institutional ruler that had lead the union for over a century, was in ruins as physical as they were politically real. It had taken numerous jumps to find a home for his awareness which was actually suitable for his work, and each jump brought fears with it.

 

                He inherited some inertial awareness from each mind he displaced, and each had been gripped with, and in turn crippled by, uncertainty and fear. Many, he discovered, were in varying states of claustrophobic entrapment, some scarcely able to move at all, others trapped in corridors or even entire subterranean levels.

 

                Each jump, too, brought liberation from fears. He was greater than the pressing need of egress, for nobody could stop him from doing so. No feared-other, bilious and terrible as it flapped in tatters beyond the scope of the principle human, mechanical, chemical, or electromagnetic senses, could pose a threat to him, when he was no more bounded by the aforementioned laws than they themselves were.

 

                By the time he finally found a working clone that was in a practical position, he found himself climbing out of a rather nice sedan which had been pulled up rather badly onto the lawns, not terribly far from the rather inaccessible helipad. There was no good way to drive there from here, and even if there were, the forest of tentacles that had sprouted up in the meantime would have made the act either impossible at worst, or, if they were acting with malice, downright suicidal.

 

                That which had thrown around earth and cement with impunity would think little of a car.

 

                Relying solely on the fact that he was smaller and more maneuverable than a vehicle, Vidcund set off at a run, clearing yardage as though the fate of the world was at stake. He was comforted, at least, to know that these interlopers, these other-minds who controlled his bodies when he was away like well-meaning neighbours set the task of sitting house, were as dedicated as he was to physical fitness.

 

                Grudgingly, he had to accept that this particular body was in better shape than his old one.

 

                “Vidcund, hold on a second!” The familiar voice had called Vidcund out of his reverie, causing him to bite the heels of his formalized shoes into the quake-softened earth and turned to face the speaker, keeping the corner of his eye on the nearest of the writhing things which had softened the ground so. “… Baha? Is that-”

 

                As his eyes searched hard for the source of the voice, that tentacle behind him snatched him up off the ground, and before he could figure out the best way to escape it, it was drawing him into the hole through which it had emerged.

 

---

 

                Prince could recall a similar sensation only once in his life. Reality had burned in and out of existence in a slowly-strobing pattern once before, as he lay dying on the floor of his apartment, driven by his flagging heartbeat. However, this time, he was determined the result would remain different, and through the rapidly-diminishing haze in his mind, he’d already fought his pen-knife out of a pocket to saw away his jammed safety harness.

 

                So much, he bitterly thought, for that island of safety.

 

                They couldn’t have been more than a block away from the building he’d picked out as a decent spot for investigation when a sudden impact had sent the helicopter spinning. When he looked behind him, he wasn’t surprised to see the whole ass end of the craft missing – something having sheared off not just the tail rotor, but the entire tail. The fact that the damn thing landed upright was a testament to either the luck or skill of the pilot.

 

                As his sense restored, he became aware of gunshots just outside the aircraft, and looked to find that very same pilot on a knee beside the standing Prodigal, each of whom were unloading firearms into some unseen threat that was hidden by the lip of the roof.

 

                Finally awake, he slid down the angled deck and onto the glass-and-fuel strewn pavement outside, drawing his Detective Special as he did so, and reaching out to put his hand on Banker’s shoulder – the pilot had clearly stricken him as the cooler head in the past, and the unclear hierarchy of the Angels still placed the man somewhat highly.

 

                “10-13!” he shouted, in the gap between gunshots.

Banker glanced behind him to the investigator while he reloaded a rifle that Prince’s brain belatedly registered as illegal. “… Come again?”

“What the hell is going on?”

 

Banker lowered the rifle, using his left hand to point, instantly drawing Niles’ attention down to the end of the block. “Leapfrogging. Three-of-twos. You and I are going to push up there, yeah?”

 

Niles looked. Archangel and Scion were where Banker had pointed, though to be honest, Archangel couldn’t have been providing much to that partnership. They were under assault by strange beasts, unlike anything Niles had seen before, in person or photographically, but those beasts seemed to shy away from them, probably terrified by the fact that from time to time Scion would glance at one of their number, which would then proceed to launch itself three stories into the air and splatter back to earth with a satisfying, arthropod crunch.

 

Still, having an objective helped when it came to maintaining composure, and he nodded to Banker. “Your party.”

“Reloading,” the other muttered, and once he’d slid what seemed to be his final clip home, the man nodded. “Okay. Motion up!”

 

The two ran, neither firing a shot, relying on Prodigal to clear out anything that came entirely too near to them as they slid into the relative home plate that was Archangel and Scion’s position. In Prince’s case, the metaphor was actually an accurate description, as he went down hard on his back and probably (it was a poor time to check) tore the hell out of his jacket while he let his momentum carry him the last two or three feet – an action he’d undertaken to dodge a beast which had overcome its trepidation to lunge at him.

 

As he watched, an invisible force slammed it into the ground so hard that it stopped trying to move, and for the first time, Niles got a good look at the creature, and began to understand why the sight of it was making his brain itch so devilishly.  The whole thing seemed to suffer from some strange condition of trinary radial symmetry. It had three legs, clad in the same seemingly-thick carapace as the rest of the body, and between each leg seemed to peek out an eye with a peculiar pupil-shape. From the top emerged a short spike, surrounding which were five whip-like, and evidentially once-prehensile arms.

“They’re called crawlers,” Archangel spoke, snapping the man out of his shocked revelation. “And while they are certainly nothing of the world you know, they are as mortal as any other living thing. If you must use a firearm, concentrate your fire near the joints in the armour around the eyes. They have very little by way of internal structure, and the gaps in their armour make promising targets.”

 

“What are they?”

 

Archangel glanced ahead, no doubt choosing his and Scion’s next path. “I just told you.”

Scion gestured broadly, sweeping a few of the braver ones clear so that he didn’t have to focus anymore. “That tentacle’s going to be trouble.”

 

He was referring to one which had emerged from the intersection of the street they were on and the one which ran in front of the hotel, and was presently picking up anything with any mass at all useful and flinging it down the street in their direction, though by now it was out of objects within its reach to use. It was long, however, and had good reach, and Niles realized immediately that just such a creature must have brought down the helicopter itself.

 

“What is that?!”

Archangel glanced back to the now-crouching ex-cop. “Perhaps answers are best suited for later. Scion, we’ve got to take that thing out.”

If the prospect intimidated Scion at all, he was putting on a brave front – though Niles, intuitively, realized it was just that. “All right. Usual giant-slaying plan?”
“The very last thing I want you to do is try and touch whatever rudimentary excuse for a brain that thing has.” Archangel was extracting something from under his coat. “You with Prince. Banker, on me.”

“Heard,” Banker echoed, with the tone of a man who had said the word until it had lost meaning.

“Security out!”

 

Prince watched with great nervousness. The beasts that had surrounded them were diminishing – there was, after all, a finite number of them, and faced with the great losses Scion could apparently inflict upon them, they now tried for the softer target of prodigal, who was trying to join them. Those few beasts he couldn’t sweep out of his way with his handguns were summarily dispatched by telekinetic bursts from Scion, dramatically thrown aside or smeared against building walls.

 

Prince had eyes for none of this, focused on Archangel and Banker. The pilot was clearing ground like he had wings on his heels, angling for a position just barely distant of the tentacle’s apparent reach, no doubt meaning to take a knee and, therefore, a firing position. Niles saw a flicker of motion as Archangel gestured with the large object he was holding, and saw the whole thing unfold as though it were spring-loaded, providing him with a long-hafted scythe.

 

He had almost forgotten that Archangel was the same person as Eli Sharona, and in this moment felt a half-decade of hatred and rivalry shift into respect and admiration. Sharona, no doubt leveraging the same magic that had given rise to his criminal necromancy, was a fearsome fighter at close range, with a reputation with that particular weapon. It came as no surprise, then, when in a single, fluid motion, he span the final few feet toward the tentacle, and severed it completely, in spite of its significant girth. The falling, flailing thing tore a massive gouge in the façade of the hotel, crashing down through the main doors.

 

Before anyone had time to feel relief, however, the ground beneath their leader buckled, and suddenly he was being borne up in the air on another, identical tentacle, which shook him like a rag-doll. Still, Prince felt as though Archangel was composed, determinedly swiping at the damn thing with his weapon, trying to angle a strike that could take off the limb without severing the man’s own foot.

 

The creature cracked itself like a whip, and Archangel soared through the air, hitting the ground hard and sliding the width of one, maybe two buildings further down from where he landed.

 

Niles barely remembered moving. At once, they were all at his side, Scion kneeling down to test for the man’s flagging pulse. Archangel’s mask lay a few feet away, having knocked itself clear on the impact. Eli’s eyes, clouding no doubt faster than the powerful man would have liked, sought out Scion’s. “… It’s happening. It’s all… it’s happening. You know what to do?”

“It’s a foregone conclusion,” Scion said, stuggling to keep the emotion clear from his voice. “And you’re coming with us.”

“No. You need speed, not an extra couple hundred pounds.” Eli coughed, bloodying the ground beside his head. “… Go.”

“I’m not going to leave you…”

Without realizing he had, Niles set his hand on James’s shoulder. “That was an order. And he’s right.”

Eli grinned a pink grin up at him. “… I was right. You’re going to be good at this.”

 

The smile slowly faded from his face, as the necromancer slowly faded from his life.

 

---

 

“Your honour, I need you to focus.”

 

Great Justice Michael James Scamwell recalled similar hazes, from years long since past, when habits of heavy drinking and blood of Irish providence had made for a miracle he’d ever graduated law school at all. Still, at quarter-one in the afternoon, there was no reason to be black-out-drunk, and less reason still for this paradoxical young man to be standing over him, gripping him by the shirt front and dragging him across… what? Michael’s fingers said grass. Wet grass.

 

He looked up at the young man. Well, his face at least was young, but his hair was a very pale grey, possibly even white (though it was hard for the man to tell with his vision still less than perfect and the sky above so deeply over-cast). He was pale, too, but that might have been because of the garish red vest he was wearing over his white shirt and black pants. The vest, itself, was peculiar, extending into something akin to a stiff mao-collar, and fastening along the young man’s right shoulder with three polished brass buttons. It was thick, and padded, and reminded Michael of a fencer’s garment.

 

Suddenly, it clicked. “… Edward? What the hell are you doing?”

“My Father’s job, as usual.”

 

There were footfalls on the lawn. A deluge had begun, but even in the rain, Michael could recognize the distinctive black-and-grey uniforms of the Justice Guard – his personal military retinue, forced upon him by his foolish decision to accept election to the highest seat in the land. “Captain Coultier. How’s his condition?”

“Not a field medic but I’ve seen worse injuries come from training accidents. Take him.”

                After a brief, and rough, examination, Michael felt himself being lifted up into that most undignified of aid positions, the fireman’s carry, and could still hear Edward’s voice over the roar of the rushing fluid in his ears, and what he realized was also the blaze of an inferno and the blare of klaxons. Little wonder – as the son of the Lord Field Marshall of the Ground Self Defense Forces, Edward Coultier came by his aura of authority honestly. “There are still two others in the helicopter. Assistant Justice McKim and Agent-Liaison Becket.”

“What about the Commissioner-Marshal and your father?”

“Neither are on campus. My father and the Commissioner-Marshal are in Anfangsburg on business.” Edward gestured, adding a questioning tone to his voice. “The Assistant Justice?”

 

Several men departed after them, and Nicholas Tobin, Sergeant Major of the Justice Guard, nodded somewhat. “… You’d have been good at this job.”

“I already have a job,” Edward said, with a touch of pride, and lowered a hand to the sabre at his hip. “Do you have secondary evac?”

“Try tertiary,” Tobin countered. “Roads are entirely too damaged for the backup transit plan.”

“Give me ten minutes and some quiet and I can get you out of here. From indoors, preferably.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

 

---

 

                It was rather impossible to clean house without getting your hands dirty. That was a very real statement, and one that figured heavily in Gloria’s thought processes and her ministrations to those among her followers who couldn’t help but get cold feet once they realized just how visceral the cult’s magic could be.

 

                In this case, she actually had to remind herself, as she tried to reduce the degree to which her dress clung to her due to the slime in which she was covered. Travelling here was always an ordeal, for the Labyrinth did not make it easy for her. Deep in the bowels of Kraterburg, the ancient God in the Cave was less God than Cave, than it had been when she had delivered the first of its larval kind to these depths, hundreds of years ago.

 

                Now, she had to be borne here in the belly of the slug-like C’bthnk-creatures which occasionally bore it fresh victims, now that Agency had cut off its food source. This suited her well, for the C’bthnk were hers by design, and what was more, the Labyrinth’s reliance on her for its food meant that the creature now had almost preternatural  loyalty to her, which was useful. Her regular visits, to conduct the rites called for by her sleeping god, had extended her life and her ministry, to the point that now, four and a half centuries later, she herself could see the fruition of plans mere mortals could only have hoped would one day succeed.

 

                The ground beneath her shook as she made her way into the throne room, where a seat of basalt sat among the three irregularly-spaced torches and the spirals of crude pseudoglyphs. As she knelt before it, she felt herself suffused with a great understanding of the sheer power of the Labyrinth as their wills became one.

With a great surge, she forced it to bring this chamber – contained like a memory inside an extensible organ – up to the surface of the world.

 

                Soon, the sleeper would awaken, and take to his seat once more.

 

---

 

                Rituals. Formulae. Repetition. These were the great tripod of the old magic, and even the modern upstarts like the Coultiers and the Zaxtonian’s Agency had to obey that old rule. They were as fuel, oxidizer, and heat to a fire.

 

                Sure, you had your priests, like Gloria, who could pull magic from seeming-nowhere with the invocation of their gods. And you had deal-making Kitabists, like Kline, whose powerful allies did the hard work for them. But for men like Viscount Isambard Louis Rainwright (Louis, to his few friends), these three were something you needed – and as Grand Master of the Royal Society of the Wheel and Pinion, Rainwright had access to these in spades.

 

                He viewed the unfolding ritual below him, with its repetitious chanting of formulae, from a safe gallery above the Sanctum, located beneath the spacious Latham House in the royal city of Galba Roy. He watched from a thronelike seat, which was appropriate, as in spite of his comparatively low rank, he possessed power to rival the King himself.

 

                “There’s a moment, after the die is cast, but before it hits the table, where if you breathe wrong you’ll change the way it lands.”

 

                The other occupant of the gallery stirred, adjusting the blue-gleaming earpiece in his left ear as he did. “If I may be so bold as to interject, My Lord, we’re a tad late when it comes to saving Kraterburg. I happen to know that the Executive Council has at least attempted to evacuate.”

 

                The servant – for that’s who he was – was a man visibly ten to twelve years the middle-aged Viscount’s senior, though his hair seemed to be less growing-in-grey than it was uniformly being faded from its native black. He was an upright man, in spite of the cane in his hand, and moved around the gallery, as he did with most spaces, with a grace unexpected for a man wearing a silk blindfold. The brocaded piece matched the fabric used in his vest, the chest of which bore the Rainwright arms. “I wasn’t talking about saving Kraterburg, Walter. Your analysis is correct. The city is doomed. But, if we do what we’re doing just right… Miss Creena’s little incursion won’t last long. Plus, we’ll have that opening you and I have waited so long for.”

 

                “Very good, sir. There is a message from Donnovan Kline. He would like to know your feelings on his invitation within the hour.”
                “Tell him I am not so easily swayed to run and hide. Perhaps more politely than that.”

 

---

 

                Vidcund’s head was spinning, throbbing, and refusing to move all at once. As the components of his brain responsible for encoding short-term memory began to connect back together, he nearly fely some grudging semblance of respect for Baha’s subterfuge. Managing to slip through the cracks of Agency’s counter-espionage network was one thing, but to actually strike a trained field agent dumb and senseless from a state of high alert was another matter entirely.

 

                Assuming, of course, Erwin Baha was involved in the confusion at all. He remembered hearing the man, but not seeing him. As he lay supine on the ground, cues triggered all of his natural senses and turned up the intuition that Agency’s subliminal conditioning had honed to a razor’s edge. He could remember many things, now – the harrowing journey through the earth itself, the several seconds of panic in which he had emptied the magazines of both of his handguns into the creature dragging him in the hopes it would let him go.

 

                Evidentially, he thought, from the fact he now awoke somewhere he had no memory of, he had been unsuccessful.

 

                He became aware, dimly at first, of movement around him – a darker darkness among the pitch, or the brain groping for movement against different angles of blackness. He fought for some semblance of motion from his limbs, but was unsuccessful. They weren’t numb, per-se, but unresponsive, which was an unusual trait he’d yet to have experienced, and couldn’t chalk up the cause.

 

                In the dark, where he used to be most comfortable, he was now the most alone. It was a perfect blackness that surrounded him, a grim darkness devoid of all those ‘stars’ of other hims. In the end, he resigned himself to this – even if there had been other places for his mind to leap, he had no choice, at the moment, but to follow this situation through, in the hopes that he might learn something about this threat they were now facing.

 

                Too late, he came to grips with what his eyes were trying to show him – the offending organs having either come to new light or adjusted to the present gloom. The creature was offensively asymmetrical, a three-legged monstrosity with a tough, bony-looking carapace, five flailing tentacles that emerged from its top, and, from where Vidcund was laying, a single, curiously-apertured eye.

 

                Before Vidcund could even register that such an outlandish creature could be real, and therefore a threat, the creature had him in its arms, and he was borne aloft and stiffly held, progressing through a long and dark passage.

 

                With little other resource, he let the creature carry him, and it seemed as though each bump in the road or tripodal misstep helped Vidcund to regain a little more of his sense and his faculties. He was aware now, of a spike at the base of those tentacles, which was easily three feet high, poised just below his now-ventral naval, and cruelly tapered. The walls, through his limited vision, had covered over by some kind of moss or lichenous slime-mold which, even as his vision began to clarify, gave the tunnel he was in a startlingly organic look. That wasn’t to say organic in the leafy-greens, nobody-put-anything-other-than-compost-on-my-soybeans way, but he was given the impression of travelling down a great vascular canal of some being far too large to exist in any sane world.

 

                The light grew brighter and brighter until he emerged into the open air, the dazzling sunlight, and from one nightmare into another.

 

---

 

                Prince was right, Scion continually had to remind himself. Mourning could wait for later, and everyone present had work to do, even if that work was nothing less self-righteous than getting to a place of safety as quickly as possible.

 

                At least, that was how Niles interpreted the other’s behavior, as the man would occasionally stop, staring at some point in the ground, before selecting the next short leap-frog on the entire company’s path of travel. It was during one of these pauses when Niles learned that nothing could ever inure you to the shock of some new improbability becoming actual. The earth beneath their feet shuddered yet again, and instinctively, the former detective felt himself glancing toward the hotel they were now fleeing, as that unharmed structure now tore itself asunder.

 

                There was an impression, later proven correct, of a great mass punching upward through the building, causing it to collapse in the perfect opposite of the orderly manner of a professional demolition, but spread outward, the force of new fragments on the old pushing the building away. Another of those Tentacles, those Great Arms as he had come to think of them, had burst through, but this one held relatively still, balancing a large object at its top.

 

                Scion interrupted Prince’s astonishment with that most pre-human of emotions – fear. “We need to be running faster.”

 

---

 

                “Welcome, Vidcund Därk.”

 

                That voice! It was the voice on the telephone, the voice of the Great Calamity, of ’98 and the foolhardy excesses of those who had flourished before Agency had been allowed the free and quasiomnipotent reign it had today. Vidcund recognized it even before his eyes adjusted to the glare and found the face it belonged to.

 

                Fixing Gloria with the best of impassive impudence a bound man could manage, he stated the facts of the matter as simply as a dinner order. “You’re alive.”

                “As if you ever doubted,” she said with saccharine in her voice, brushing his short hair back from his face.

                “I’m with law enforcement. You tend not to think you have a murder until you have a body,” Vidcund forced a smirk. “Next time around, you might want to take that into consideration.”

 

                Gloria rose from his side, stepping away from the stone slab to which he was bound. The walls of the chamber had fallen away, leaving only this platform, this high place, where all in the city below could have seen what was to transpire. “There won’t be a next time, Agent Därk. Not for you, for me, or for anyone else. The Holocene, with its mankind and their arrogance, has come to an end, and not, as your historians would propose, with the rise of the Anthropocene. There is a God, Vidcund, and he doesn’t care for mankind’s arrogance.”

                “Well, at least he and I have one point of agreement,” the agent quipped. He was bound with simple ropes, and if he could catch her mid-monologue, he might just manage to free himself.

 

                “I have you to thank, really, for delivering yourself so readily into my grasp. I never would have thought that you yourself would be the ideal sacrifice – the correct key for the gate. Not when I began to set things in motion most recently, nor when I birthed the Labyrinth whose destruction of your precious capital had brought you so speedily to hand. Such convenience. And yet, you, undeniably, are the key to the gate that has imprisoned the sleeper these long years.”

 

                She produced a knife, and Vidcund sighed. His escape was to be that more painful variety, he realized, as had been his escape from the hotel where he and Clayton had staged their final duel. It was in that exhalation, that acceptance, as his latent teleproprioceptive “vision” flickered, and he had only the dullest impression of the nearest “stars” around him.

 

                A dull impression, because, in that moment, her knife had stood out so brightly that it had looked as though the sun had fallen into her hand. He marveled at it, so astonished that he found himself staring down at the hilt, buried deep into his chest.

 

All at once, he was scattered, as he had been in the library when he had attempted to multiplex his presence across two of the bodies that formed his constellation of awareness. He found himself once again standing in a great, glaring abyss of light, in the space between bodies where thoughts leaped and those presences that lived beyond flickered and passed. Standing before the body he had just left and Gloria was another, who seized the fleeing mote of Vidcund’s consciousness in a squamous pseodopod.

 

“I am become everything you have been, mortal. You are to thank for my Awakening and My Freedom.”
 

The mote the drowsy god had captured burst like a nova, scattering itself among the many stars Vidcund Därk could lay claim to, and Vidcund’s last coherent thought before the burst was a firm, calm “No.”

 

Slowly, like aggregating dust forming a planet, the mote collected again around one of the nearer clones, and then, all at once, Vidcund Därk was back in the world.

 

---

 

“What about us?”

“You simply aren’t allowed to join me,” Kline repeated, tired of fielding the same question for the fourteenth or fifteenth time.

 

Plato, the younger of the brothers who served him, frowned at this, even going so far as to give a low growl in the back of his throat. It was not unusual for he and his brother to fall into the service of a mage – particularly those who tampered with time, as Kline frequently did – but such mages usually went to great lengths to stay in the Hounds’ good graces and avoid falling victim to their predatory nature.

 

Kline had kept them well fed, for now, supplying them with prey to hunt who usually, by some human judgment or another, deserved it. But now, Kline had nothing to offer, and the Hounds were always hungry.

 

The ritual beneath the museum had gone smoothly, in spite of the seal having been broken in the tremours that even now shook the earth and threatened to drop the museum straight through the chamber’s roof. A shimmering portal to other possibilities had opened, and the participants had largely scattered in fear when the two Coleopterous beings from the other side had emerged. The Beetle-Folk of the Great Race, whom the hounds recognized, were beyond the point of having to fear their Depredations, and their respectful speech with Kline had shown the Hounds quite clearly they would not tolerate an attack on the magus in their presence.

 

“I guess we’ll be seeing each other, then.” Socrates, the elder, rejoined.

“I suppose we might,” Kline countered, testily. “Run to whatever many-angled corner of time as you may, Hounds of Tindalos. It will be some time, indeed, before the world is again fit for man.”

 

As he left, the Hounds watched, and Socrates took a bite from an apple he’d held close to hand. “… He’s overreacting again.”
“He’s going to overreact every time.”

 

---

 

The air was wrong. Granted, humanity tended to do a decent job of screwing the world up every chance they good, but today, the air was especially wrong. It seemed somehow lessened, as if it was somehow less vital.

 

Glory took a few steps forward, examining the city of his advent, the city where he would begin the painfully brief process of clearing off the earth of all those unworthy of him. His disciple, the human who had taken his name for her own, fawned over him, sighing over his passing like a girl of schooling age focusing her attention on a dreamy upperclassman.

 

A frown furrowed his brow, beneath his golden hair. “Something is wrong. I am still bound.”

 

Gloria was nothing if not thoroughly obedient. “Perhaps another sacrifice is required?”

“No,” the drowsy god replied, looking out over the city. “We must merely complete the first.”

 

Somehow, impossibly, the human she had fed to him had escaped death, though his thoroughly dehydrated remains were quite clearly still present. Glory could feel that human’s presence all throughout the city, perhaps even further away, as though the man could occupy multiple places at once. Holding out his hand, he willed the body to decompose further, forming a blade of carbonized calcium he could take to hand – it was as good a weapon as any.

 

“… I’ll wait for you.”

Glory smiled to the young woman, lifting her chin slightly with the point of his weapon. “I know you will, my pet.”

 

Reaching the edge of the stage, he jumped.

 

---

 

“You’re all late! Hustle up, boys, this is how people die!”

 

Granted the very real and very fresh nature of the wound left for the surviving Grey Angels with the death of their leader, their would-be rescuer’s comment was ill received, and it was only some grace of professionalism or fatigue that prevented that anger from rising above the level of mere frustration. Scion, it seemed, was the only one at all composed. He shook the young man’s hand gently, tapping the temple of his face in vague semblance of the removal of his mask, as a cowboy might do to his hat. “We appreciate the help all the same, Professor Coultier. I understand you had to give up a very important engagement to make the time.”

“I doubt very much I’m the only person with cancelled plans today, Scion.” The white-haired Malvolio responded. Unlike his older brother, he at least had a healthy tan on him. “… Is this all of us?”

“Yes,” Scion answered, slowly. “Archangel couldn’t join us today.”

 

Malvolio nodded, his expression softening. Scion was rather fond of Malvolio, through a professional familiarity between their alter egos, and it was precisely because Malvolio was sufficiently sensitive to read between the lines. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

 

So far, the bank on East Thirty-Second was still standing, and largely unharmed by the frequent quakes. It was designed against such things, having been built only ten years ago, as a Branch and District Office of the Zaxtonian Bundesbank, an institution predating Federalization. The earthquake-resistant architecture had been a laughable measure in the geographically stable fenlands of south-suburban Kraterburg, but nobody was laughing today.

 

Malvolio lead the Grey Angels back, past bank officials and customers who were wisely too afraid to go outside, into a secure room ordinarily used for special customers – like Coultier – to view their safety deposit boxes. The “new order” mage had been busy, it seemed, with the wall woven over in charcoal etchings – great circles and glyphs with peripheral calculations of math that Niles didn’t even recognize the operands for.

 

“Regrettably I have no time to explain things to first-time travelers. The Infernal City are even worse for punctuality than the Deans, if you would believe it.”

“Oh,” Scion said, almost conversationally. “I’d believe it.”

 

Prince craned his neck to see what Malvolio was doing. He recognized the young man – mostly in passing, so that the detective could not quite remember where. Regardless, he saw little, and understood less. The man muttered, and made a few glyphic additions to his vandalism, before the wall seemed to collapse inward within the bounds of one of the many concentric circles, opening a portal just large enough to be crawled for. To where, none could tell – they saw only a yawning, black abyss.

 

“Let’s hope they don’t mind a two-minute delay. After you, Scion.”

 

One by one, the various Grey Angels slipped through this portal, following the intrepid lead of Scion. A few needed encouragement – Banker hesitated the longest, before taking a deep breath and, with the air of jumping off a sinking ship, plunged through the hole. At last, it was Prince’s turn, and he braced himself on the edge of the remaining wall, staring into the black, feeling the air rush past him into the void.

 

“Any port in a storm, Detective Clayton.”

Prince double-took, glancing at Malvolio for a long pause, before the man encouraged him with a hand on his shoulder to step through. Seamlessly, with only a slight disorientation at the change in gravity, Niles hauled himself out of a hole in the ground, stepping out onto a dim plateau. The light – a cold blue-green – seemed mostly to be the glow of a great city on the far side of a river. Among the familiar faces was someone new  - a man with an unusually young face for one whose bearing, dress, and size would have placed him in his mid-twenties, and with whom Scion seemed to be holding a close conversation.

 

Niles’ arrival snatched the newcomer’s attention away immediately, to the point that Scion had no choice but to introduce them. “Ah, Prince, good. I’d like you to meet one of our… sponsors, Aaron Cluny.”

The young man’s grip was firm, but somehow cold, in spite of the fact that both men were gloved – Niles in the usual leather, the other man in what seemed to be driving gloves. “How do you do, Mister Cluny?”

“Mister Cluny is my father, Mister ‘Prince’,” clearly, Aaron had no taste for Aliases. “… Welcome to Hell.”

Niles looked, sharply and questioningly, to Scion, who merely shrugged. “Any port in a storm, Prince. Aaron, we need to arrange a return ticket.”
                “Impossible, currently, for Kraterburg. I might be able to arrange for a Special Egress Permit to Anfangsburg, but it will take some time.”

“At present, time is something we have a surplus of.”

“Excellent. I have arranged for a Chartered Charon to take you across the River into the Freeman District. Would you like a few recommendations?”

“No,” Banker said, interjecting as he tucked his phone back beneath his coat. “We’ve already made arrangements.”

Scion stared at the other for a moment, and Prince guessed correctly that some form of mental exchange occurred, for a moment later, Scion was nodding his understanding. “I agree. We need some time to collect ourselves.”

“I understand. I would mourn his passing as well, if I was prone to mourning.”

 

---

 

Death had a price. In a very real sense, each one suffered was costing Vidcund a piece of himself, and while knowing what to expect in the final moment of an individual body had lessened the blow that had been so strong the first time around, the fact remained that they were blows, inflicting pain every bit as visceral as the actual wounds themselves.

 

He was tired, lost, and confused. It seemed he barely had time to occupy a new body before the latest assailant would appear, dropping from the sky or bursting from the ground to run him through with a strike so swift Vidcund registered no part of the event until after he had been slain. It was growing taxing, frustrating, to the point that he was unsure, spare bodies or no, he could bear many more defeats.

 

One thing was clear, however – this new figure, with his impossible agility, strength, and speed, was after Vidcund with a vengeance, a determination matched, if at all, only by Vidcund’s own professionalism and vision. In spite of not having the first clue how, or even anyone to advise him, Vidcund was certain that the Union could be saved and this new threat defeated, even if Kraterburg itself was a lost cause.

 

Scenes of his own repeated deaths blurred past, as he left bodies almost as soon as he arrived, lingering only long enough for his intuition to suggest something was wrong before he leaped to another body clear across the country, and another, and another. It was in one of these leaps that he realized the truth.

 

Kraterburg was a lost cause, and the lack of a need to save it liberated the most powerful weapon Vidcund could think of. He paused, long enough for the inexoerable attacker to run him through from behind, and forced a smirk onto his latest face before again attempting to split his attention, to linger longer than was otherwise necessary in the space between minds. He could brave the attention of beasts for the time being. There was nothing he wouldn’t give for his country – not his life, nor limb, and so why should sanity or soul be any different.

 

He could see the god, of whom his assailant was but a finger, pause in his Squamous horribleness. Some rule of this Tweenland world prevented the great, impossibly-scaled being from striking out at him directly, and the minute hesitation of deciding which of the many new Vidcund Därks to attack bought Vidcund time, as it would continue to do. He held in his mind some dozen selves, each with their full suite of senses and awarenesses, each armed as they were when they were independent minds free from the power of his influence.

 

His only comfort was the understanding that he was doing all that he could, else these men would likely have died regardless, and what further harm could befall them than that? If he was defeated, it would not be for lack of trying.

 

One such self, however, had his priority, held the greatest amount of an entire mind. It was a supervisor at the largely-overrun Agency base beneath the College of Judges complex… and now, it was bestowed with Vidcund’s plan.

 

Moses had parted the Red Sea, they said. Could Vidcund, like his apparent namesake, be a man who made the impossible possible?

 

---

 

Stamatia Dowd could not recall the last time she had used an Agency Control Room herself, but it was the one place she could have thought of which could afford her some semblance of sufficient information. As a White Agent, she had a reasonable claim to the leadership of the entire Division with the loss of contact with the current Agent-Liaison to the Executive Council, and was using it to her advantage, trying to consolidate her influence by bringing an end to the current crisis.

 

Instead, however, she seemed to spend most of her time focusing on swatting flies. The computer and its operators were busy trying to parse the latest development – a supernatural entity thus-far unrecorded in the database was rapidly transporting itself all across the union, trying and succeeding to kill a large collection of seemingly unrelated agency staff members as quickly as possible.

 

Like a lightning bolt, the penny dropped, and she stood up quite suddenly. “Cross reference the list of known victims to the most recent Project Moses II subject listing.”

 

It was such a bizarre request that there was a lengthy pause before the search could be completed, and in the end, she had to input the command herself, being the only person in the room the computer system decided would have sufficient clearance to actually know that project existed.

 

One by one, she saw the background of the list of victim’s names change to green as they matched, and she was entirely unsurprised to find, without exception, that every single victim had been a Moses II test subject – a clone of Vidcund Därk.

 

She moistened her lips, considering her next move carefully. “I want a status update on the current whereabouts of the surviving subjects. Start with those nearest us.”

 

She was entirely unsurprised to find she had one in this very facility, and gave a tired sigh. Vidcund, what the hell are you doing?

 

---

 

Vidcund’s primary focus hustled himself down the corridor as quickly as his legs would carry him, a misappropriated P90 sub-machine gun tucked under his arm, as yet unused. He knew, as the previous occupant of this mind had, that parts of lower section of the facility (in which he found himself) were overrun by those three-legged five-armed creatures he had seen earlier, and he had no desire to waste time trying to fight one with small arms.

 

He had to split his attention enough to keep grabbing new bodies as the Waking God culled the old ones, in order to keep the other busy long enough to complete his work. This facility, which had been intended to be the ultimate bastion of the continuity of Government and Agency both, had a unique power source, and that beating heart could be the key to ending all of this.

 

As he reached the room he wanted, he was irritated to hear a familiar voice in his ear. Why now, of all times, did his supervisor choose to distract him.

 

“Agent Därk, just what in the hell are you doing?”

“Your favourite colloquialism is ‘saving the world’, Ms Dowd.” Fingers flew over keys, disabling safety interlocks in a way only this body knew how, perhaps only this body was authorized to do. The modularity of his knowledge and abilities was startling. He didn’t know what he knew anymore, until he did it, as though his mind could passively index the brain it was currently using.

 

He was out of time. He could do nothing, now, but spring the trap, and all at once, he let his focus crash back into this body. He barely had time to realize there was a rather distant body he could jump to from here, before he felt the presence behind him.

 

This time, perhaps impending victory bought him a few seconds. The God which Slept favoured him with a charismatic smile from the far side of the console. “I have not had a hunt as spirited in some time, Vidcund Därk. Were you not the Gate, I would keep you alive to learn of your true nature.”

“I am the Gate,” Vidcund affirmed, looking not behind him, but up and forward, into the Antimatter Containment Chamber. “… But you aren’t the Key.”

 

This death was the most painless so far, so quickly had it come.

 

---

 

Einstein stumbled upon a consequence of the nature of the universe when he was doing the early work on Special Relativity, and this was a deadly consequence, as the Kraterburg Incident would prove. Agency, through their nearly omnipresent front companies, had diverted truly enormous amounts of energy from the national grid for decades, in order to power the production of antimatter at the Kraterburg Facility. The reason, on paper, was to provide a suitable storage for energy all but indefinitely. Kraterburg facility’s containment held some sixty-five kilograms of the stuff – enough to power the entire country for five years. Since it was intended only to power the facility itself, it had might as well be an indefinite supply of clean, emissionsless energy.

 

What Vidcund had seized upon was the only downside of the project – antimatter, unlike ordinary fuel, didn’t give a good goddamn what it reacted with or the rate at which it did so. It found matter, annihilated at the most fundamental levels of physics, and released massive amounts of energy thus stored into the immediate area. Didn’t matter what the matter was – it didn’t even really matter how it was distributed, when the relevant order of magnitude is considered.

 

The resultant explosion was unquestionably the largest such event in human history, quite possibly in the history of the world. In terms of energy released, it was a drop in the bucket of such mundane events as the sun’s daily output absorbed by the earth. In this case, it was the rate of release.

 

By some miracle of chance, Vidcund had escaped, his telepresent ego gravely wounded, by fleeing the body he’d occupied in the last half-instant before the event had begun. He had no idea if the god, too, was so lucky, but privately doubted it. He had an ideal vantage point, far above the tenebrous upper ceiling of the sky as defined by hidebound scientists who needed such things as boundries to feel comfortable.

 

His consciousness lingered, each and every sense fuzzy around its edges. The stars on the ground winked out, consumed in a blast the computer feeding him images told him was sixteen kilometres across. As with most of these things, the true damage would be felt far wider – it was the equivalent to some 280 of the largest nuclear detonation ever recorded – the Tsar Bomba of the Russians – occurring simultaneously. There would be no radioactive fallout, apart from whatever was blown asunder in hospitals and laboratories in the affected area. A winter of sorts was almost assured – weeks or not months of perpetually overcast weather, unseasonable cold, and perhaps years of economic downturn not just in the Union but worldwide.

 

Vidcund’s fading consciousness couldn’t have cared for any of that. The Union had been spared – at least some remnant of it. The menace had failed to chase him, and was therefore no doubt defeated.

 

He faded into the blackness that was encroaching on the edge of his vision, and could not have cared if he was to return.