“As cold and dead as ever,” Josef remarked.
“Aye, but for how long?” Jimmy responded, looking around. “The big boss and his local chiefs are free, and it’s only a matter of time until they fully satisfy themselves of the condition of things and unlock the others. They may be doing that right now with your turncoat providing the hand to break the seals they can’t touch. How many do you wager were in that transfer station, just moments from all those stations to God knows where? Hundreds? Thousands?”
They had completely forgotten Grysta, or whoever it was in Molly’s body pretending to be her. She’d followed them out, silently, but now she said, “Jimmy. …”
“Shut up, Grysta!” he snapped angrily, amazed even now that he’d ever uttered those words again. “You’ve done quiet enough damage for one day. Millions, perhaps billions, of creatures across all three empires will suffer horribly and maybe die or wish they could because you added the blue to their grisly red and gold combination.”
“Jimmy—I—I didn’t know. I still don’t know what all this is about. Besides, I wasn’t the one who did it—I was just there, that’s all.”
He turned and looked at her acidly. “Grysta, no matter what, they couldn’t have done it without you.”
She shook her head sadly. “I—I dunno. I thought everybody’d be glad I made it. It was what was supposed to happen. And none of you faced either doin’ that or spending eternity as a nothin’ in a whirling storm of nothin’ else. That Mycohl bitch—she walked in with you, and she did it free and clear. Looked real happy, too—even if her ugly face did get scratched up.”
Gun Roh Chin turned toward her. “You saw her? After? And maybe you saw that—that thing, too?”
“No, I never looked at him. I mean, I met him, sort of, in the nothin’ and I didn’t want to meet him for real, so when Jimmy yelled for everybody to close their eyes and not look, I got over to the wall and shut my eyes, too. But when I felt him leave—kind’a straight up, like goin’ out the point in that thing, real weird—I peeked. She was walkin’ out tall and whole, like she hadn’t been in a fight at all, between two of them demons. She looked, well, almost pretty, like all those scars were goin’ away, and strong, too. The only sign she’d been in a fight were three bright red scratches on her forehead.”
Jimmy McCray was suddenly more interested. “Scratches?”
“Uh-huh. Right in the middle of her forehead. Like somebody’d ripped nails straight down.”
Jimmy put three fingers at his hairline and moved them down to between his eyebrows. “Like that?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Just like that.”
“Is that important? Scratches?” the captain asked him.
“It could be, if they weren’t scratches at all,” Jimmy responded. “It’s Hebrew! Vav, vav, vav—six, six, six. In Hebrew the letters are also the numbers. It’s usually written as a simple straight line. Old Saint John of Patmos did see followers of the Quintara! For two thousand years folks have been trying to use numerology to figure out who he was talking about and proving almost everything, and it’s none of them. It has to be! Simple enough for anyone who had as much as charcoal or perhaps even mud to do, but arcane enough that nobody would take it for what it was!”
<Too simple,> Krisha put in, understanding that Grysta had Molly’s old emphatic skills but not the full panoply the others had, thanks to the limitations the makers put into that syn body. <Can you trust her? Or is this merely another stage in torment?>
<Even if that is truly Grysta in there and she’s been telling the absolute truth I couldn’t trust her,> Jimmy responded honestly. <She always has had her own agenda and it’s rarely tied to anyone else’s, and she doesn’t even have to live through me any more.>
<Even that is suspect,> Tobrush noted. <How do we know that she wasn’t led astray by them just to keep us occupied? Or feed us false information you would be certain to recognize just to raise our hopes before feeding us to the creatures of the other plane?>
“There’s only one way to prove the thesis and also bear out another needed fact,” the captain said, guessing the exchanges going on. “One of us has to put these lines on our forehead, walk back up that bridge to the garden, and see if the idols there let him pass. If they do, it’s for real, and he can also check to see if there is any sign our friends exited that way, in which case there is no station here. If not—then we have a way out.”
Instantly the others thought of the sight of Morok attempting to cross the barrier and being engulfed in energy.
“Are you volunteering to be the test subject?” Josef asked him, a little nervous. None of this mumbo-jumbo made any sense to him at all.
“No!” Krisha cried. “You can’t!”
Gun Roh Chin smiled. “I must. They read minds, remember. We’re talking sentient beings of some sort there, able to exercise influence in this dimensional set through those idols. McCray must apply the marks on my forehead with whatever we can find, and I must go up there, alone, and see. I assure you I don’t relish climbing back up that far with as little rest as I’ve had, but I have a feeling that the master clock is ticking fast.”
“I won’t let you!” she exclaimed, sounding near hysteria. “You’re all I’ve got!”
He looked at her, suppressing the incredible pity he felt for her as always. “It’s better this way. If I remain here, my fate will most certainly be horrible. If worse comes to worst, jump into that mass out there. You will at least escape them, and you might find a way out on that plane, somehow. I cannot sense that plane at all, and I have no illusions about what sort of persuasions they can use to bend me to them, or, at best, eat me alive, a little at a time. I have no wish to do either. Either I get out before they return or I die quickly and cleanly.”
She could not refute the logic. “Then let me come with you!”
“They’d know the trick in an instant from your own mind,” he told her. “No, let’s do it, and quickly. I’ll go, and the rest of you search for something that might be a station and then meet back at this great common. If I succeed, I will join you. If I fail, try other means.”
The others nodded. “And how long do we wait?” Modra asked him. “There’s no day or night, and my clock is in my other suit.”
He gave a wry smile. “Wait until something happens. Then wait no more.”
Jimmy McCray went back in the temple and found more of the thick, oil-soaked black soot and used that to paint three even vertical lines on Chin’s forehead. After, the captain went over to Krisha and said, softly, “You must have courage no matter what. Until now, you have faced banal evil and clever evil but never before pure evil. You must cast out doubt and suppress fear. You cannot beat these creatures with guns or talents; you can beat them only with faith, and faith is more courage than anything else. I do not intend to die, but rather get out of here and fight them. If I do die, however, you must fight all the harder to make my death, and all the deaths that came before, of our friends and beloved comrades, have meaning. They are very good at what they do. Be better.”
“I—I don’t know if I’m the one for that,” she responded .honestly.
“You can be. If you have faith, in yourself and in higher powers, they can only kill you. The rest, the nightmare life, damnation, they can only do if you help, and take it upon yourself. One of the Mizlaplan must get back and report. One of the Mizlaplan must alert the Holy Angels before the horror truly begins. Only they hold the key to this.” He paused a moment, then gave her a confident-looking smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. The most I fear right now is that I shall be so tired I’ll fall off the bridge.” He took her hand, kissed it, then looked at her, winked, and walked off, so straight and noble, back into the city.
He didn’t slump and slow down until he was certain he was out of her sight.
OUT OF THE ABYSS
IT SEEMED LIKE DAYS BUT WAS CERTAINLY HOURS later, arid Gun Roh Chin had not returned, nor had they found any sign of a station, although, in this city of the damned, what would a station look like?
Krisha waited by the great, swirling pool of energy, not wanting to miss Chin if—when—he came back. At first it wasn’t so bad, but after a while the boredom and the settling began to get to her. She turned and walked over to the rail guarding the walk from the edge of the great pit and looked into it.
If this were-some romantic adventure, she thought, I’d look into here and suddenly gain powers equal or superior to the demons and return with sword in hand, the Blessed Warrior, to protect my people and vanquish the evil.
But it wasn’t some wild fiction or inspirational saga; it was real, and the more she looked at that strange bowl with its energy clouds that looked almost solid, the more nervous she got that something, perhaps that ultimate master of evil, would suddenly leap from it and grab her. Almost involuntarily, she recoiled, and she couldn’t help but watch her back more than the city where the others were, and from where, she prayed, Gun Roh Chin would emerge. It seemed
like every time she took her eyes off it, something seemed to move, just out of sight, in the corners of her eyes.
Nerves, she told herself. She hadn’t felt this scared, or this helpless, since the Inquisition had dragged her into the Holy One’s presence for her ordination. But even that was different. Many in history had resisted the Call to Minister, or had never desired it, but the Call had come and they had no choice but to obey the will of the gods. This—this was something else.
Even if Chin was right, and these Quintara were but an ancient race of flesh and blood, incredibly powerful but hardly godlike, it made no difference. It was that Other, their master, whom they served, that was at the heart of this horror. Even not seeing, even being blocked from seeing, she had still felt the creature and knew that it was of nothing in the universe she knew. The sheer power it radiated by its very presence in the same vast hall they were in dwarfed any such power she or any of the others had ever felt or sensed; the Holy Angels, even the demon princes, were as dust specks compared to it, and the utterly cold, totally alien intellect that resided within it was of a sort so strong, so overwhelming, that the only word she could think of for it was godlike, yet without any of the love or caring or compassion she’d always associated with that word.
Supernatural. That word had tripped off her tongue since she was very small, and she’d always believed in it in an abstract way. The supernatural was something from outside of normal laws, from outside the universe itself. Something whose power was beyond belief, spawned by no conceivable evolutionary process under the laws of physics she knew. . . .
Something they had allowed back in. Something which was not evil, but rather defined evil. Something that toyed with countless races even from wherever it had been imprisoned, and something which now was imprisoned and limited no more.
But if that was the Great Evil, the Dark Source—Satan, Jimmy McCray had called it, although it probably .had a million names—then that plaintive question asked within
the pyramid took on new meaning. He was here; where were the gods?
The Holy Angels were a match for the demons, she was certain of that. For the demons … but not for that.
She started, then turned quickly, but there was nothing there. Not now.
I have to stop thinking about it, she told herself. Not only for the sake of her nerves, but—what if, by dwelling on that One, she somehow summoned it?
She felt terribly alone, and the one thing no natural telepath ever could handle was being alone. Worse, being so close to the center, the t-band was muddied, intermittent, blanking or scrambling the signals of the few others within the city. Even the newer level of powers she’d gained on the long and bloody journey were pretty well out as well. That was to be expected—it was .long known that the so-called broadcast and reception talents were grouped together in a narrow band of frequencies. Interference on one would be expected to scramble them all. Still, any time in the past when she’d been either blocked out or had interference, there had been other living people, allies of her own sort, nearby.
Her depression wasn’t aided by this trial she’d undergone, either; from those first pictures of the Quintara back at the scientific base camp through the sight of the dead and rotting corpses of their initial victims, she’d known that these creatures were on a level higher than herself for all their evil. Modra had told them that the cymol recordings showed that the full blast of energy pistols hadn’t even slowed them down; that all the death and carnage had been done by two of them with nothing but their bare hands and bodies.
Now they were free, and freeing more. Millions more. Hundreds of millions, perhaps. All hungry after such a very long imprisonment. . . .
She saw movement along one of the streets leading into the common and her mind jumped both ways, at once expecting to see some of the Quintara come to reclaim their city, come for her to curse her, and also hope that it might be the captain.
It was Jimmy McCray and Modra Stryke, with that odd possessed creature trailing behind.
Now both relieved and disappointed, she waited for them to get close enough to communicate.
“Well, there’s good news and bad news,” McCray told her. “First, there’s a station here, all right, and it doesn’t have any Quintara in it at the moment. It’s down in the basement, as it were—the lowest level of the city—and it’s huge. The bad news is that it’s in a state of complete activity, almost as if it were a living thing in and of itself, and it’s humming along and doing something. Possibly reestablishing contact all along the line. It’s also got more ways to go than you can count and no way to tell what goes where.”
Modra gestured with her head toward the swirling energy lake. “At least it’s a better exit than that. If, of course, we don’t run into any Quintara along the way.” She paused. “No sign of Captain Chin yet?”
“No, none. But—all this does something to you. I have no time sense any more. There are no cues, no clocks, no sun, nothing changing regularly. I don’t even know if he’s been gone minutes, or hours.”
“That’s true of all of us,” Modra agreed. “But we were poking around all over the place for a pretty long time before we found the station. It’s been a while at, least. My feet are killing me, anyway.”
“Where are the Mycohl?” Krisha asked them.
Jimmy shrugged. “Haven’t seen them. I hope they rendezvous back here with us and don’t just try for it if they find the station. For one thing, we don’t know if the Number of the Beast really works in there. If not, then we’re going to wind up either right back here or emerge in a world that will kill us or, worse even than that, in the midst of a bunch of starving devils.”
“It’s better than staying here,” Krisha responded.
Modra stiffened. “Did you both just feel something?”
The other two nodded. “Very strange,” McCray said softly. “Almost like …”
“There are Quintara here again,” Krisha added, articulating their fears.
Modra looked around. “Let’s move away from here and get a little cover,” she suggested. “Not towards that damned temple, either.”