but, if so, you will have no money, no ship, no friends, no lover, and nowhere to go home to. You’ll follow your friend Lankur into suicide soon enough, and, if you survive the gauntlet, you will be right back here—as our slave. You probably won’t. You do not have a record of ever doing the best thing for you or anyone else. You had more chances at achieving the heights than most people would get in many lifetimes, and you have squandered them all. You always have been a loser, Modra, but, as always, the choice is yours—the last such choice you will ever be able to make to better yourself or others.”
She stared at him, unmoved until that last by his arguments and offers. The last comment fed everything she believed about herself; it rang with truth. Still, if one of her other talents was always making the wrong choice, then what would be upon her conscience if she freed a new horror on all of known civilization?
“What if no one breaks your damned seals?” she asked him curtly.
“Unless you commit suicide before reaching the city, there is no chance of that. All three groups are as good a mix as we could have hoped for. Someone will break the seal, either by design to claim our promise, or because of your own divisions. Even if, by some miracle, no one did, it wouldn’t matter. The gate that brought you here can swing open again, and there are many other gates. When it is time for something, it is time. We will not be denied.”
The scene faded, and Modra joined Krisha in a fitful, deep sleep.
Nor in fact were the two women alone in meeting the spectre of the Prince of the Powers of the Air on that sinister spiral to the Quintara city, as they discovered when each awoke, many, many hours later—how much later none had the means to say.
</ was offered command of a legion, > Josef told them.
<And I the key to all the knowledge of the Quintara,> Tobrush added. <The keys to the cosmos.>
<He said I would be a goddess,> Kalia told them. <That all men would be subject to me, and all women would worship me. >
Each of them received a holographic account of the visions of the other.
“I ignored its babblings by praying and reciting the ritual of exorcism,” Manya stated.
“Did it work?” GunRoh Chin asked, amused at the scene of it appearing in his imagination.
“No^but it drowned the Prince of Lies out,” she replied.
He chuckled. “Manya, I’m no theologian, but I believe that the rituals of exorcism send a creature back to Hell. If you’re right, and this is Hell, then he, and we, are already there!”
For the first time, he knew he’d gotten her, and it felt good. Her mouth opened a bit, then closed, with nothing coming out. Finally, she said, “Odd I never thought of that.”
Morok alone seemed really shaken by his own vision. “He offered me not one thing,” the Grand Inquisitor commented. “He merely promised me that whenever I died, and if I successfully ran his damnable gauntlet, he would see that I was tried by all those who have faced the Inquisition at my hands, and that they would decide my fate. He made no offers at all. None.”
“Because he knew that you would never do it, Holiness,” the captain put in, trying to soothe his nerves. “All he could do was intimidate you so that you might hesitate to prevent someone else from succumbing to weaknesses.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure that is it,” Morok said curtly, anxious to change the subject, but you didn’t have to be telepathic to know that he remained shaken, and that, at this point, even the Grand Inquisitor had doubts about right and wrong.
Krisha had her personal blocking on and was glad of it in this case, for she could not tell them the truth and she could not lie to the Faithful. Instead, she just said, “He offered me what I desired most.” She hated to keep the block on, since it limited her as well, but she dared not let it down.
She couldn’t help but notice that the Exchange telepath, McCray, was doing much the same thing. Although she was a stronger telepath than he, McCray had been obviously trained by masters, and his selective blocking was amazing.
She wished she could do that—block out only specific things, and at any level.
All he would tell Modra was, “We had an interesting discussion. He’s very good, as I expected he would be, but he couldn’t disguise the fact that he’s a bit nervous about me. Even though this is as new to me as to the others, it appears I know too much. There’s plenty left, I think, even in the Mizlaplan, who know the pentagram, but precious few souls left anywhere who’d recognize the Seal of Solomon.” He gave a wry smile, as if, somehow, he felt he had some sort of advantage from that arcane knowledge.
“Still and all,” he went on, “I’ve listened to and looked at the exchanges with the others, and something he said—I think it was to you, Modra—keeps goin’ round and round in my head. Something about there being two hundred million of them. I’ll connect it up at some point. The number’s important, somewhere, but archaic.”
“Molly dream ’bout big syn, too,” Molly put in cheerfully, aware of a dark mood but not much else.
They both turned in surprise. “What?”
“He just pat Molly on head, told her to be good girl, and say Molly in his big plans or something like that.”
Jimmy frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that at all. You couldn’t even go with us to the dark place, thank heavens, but you saw His Horniness himself and he just said, ‘Never mind for now.’ Hmph. You be very, very careful, Molly, and you listen only to us, right? You don’t want to do anything that would hurt me, do you?”
“No, course not, Jimmy. Molly be good girl. Even big syn say that.”
<She’s a real potential danger, > Modra warned him telepathically. <He told me that it might not be deliberate, and if anybody’s more prone to do something entirely innocently, it’s Molly.>
<I know, I know. But—what can I do? Leave her here? She’d try to make friends with the bloody statues!>
Over at the Mizlaplanian camp, Gun Roh Chin drank some water, wishing it were a bit stronger stuff, ate some fruit, again wishing for much better, and, most of all,
wishing as always for a cigar. Finally, he said, “I suppose I had a bit of an encounter with him, too.”
They all turned in surprise at that. “You?” Krisha explained, “How?”
“It was a dream, and, like all dreams, it had this very unreal quality about it,” he told them. “Until you all told yours, I would have dismissed it as a product of the surroundings. It certainly wasn’t vivid, like your experiences were, and was less a conversation than a monologue—all on his part, I might add. The gist was more or less what you’ve told me the others were offered, with the usual compliments. Knowledge, love, power, all that. Most of all, he offered me youth and eternal life in the flesh. He said … the reason nulls were nulls is that they had no immortal souls.”
THE CITY OF THE DEAD
“I AM DETERMINED TO DO THIS, SO PLEASE DO not keep trying to talk me out of it,” Morok told them. “I am sick and tired of being pushed and shoved around by these forces, entirely at their mercy, while they mock us! It is time for us to take some initiative!”
“The demon prophesied to Modra that one of us would die before reaching the city,” Krisha reminded him. “I do not wish that to be you, Holy Father.”
He dismissed the threat. “For one thing, they lie. They are the source of lies. If they could actually foresee the future, this demon prince would have known in advance that one of us would free him, and who, and all of this mind-play would have been unnecessary. You must not listen to them. That is the first step to becoming theirs. They can make things happen, but only if you believe them first. I will not die wandering forever in this maze, or until the other two parties have already entered the city.”
Krisha understood, and was forced to accept his logic, knowing, too, that Morok already considered it divine intervention that he was still alive at all at this point. She also understood that, if it were just the Mizlaplan in this place, without the others, Morok would have sacrificed them all so that none might enter the city and free the demons, even by accident. It was not, however, that simple. The others might reach it first, for one thing, or, even if some way could be found for everyone to die, it would mean only a short-term victory. On that the demon prince had been correct. There must be a virtual naval force around that world with the first station by now, and the best minds of the Exchange had to be poking and probing for a way in. A down-the-line order to ensnare more people within the station would not be difficult for the demon prince; sooner or later, the right one would come along. The only hope was to get down there and discover just what they were dealing with, and see if there was any sort of action possible for them to stave off what the demon prince considered inevitable.
“Child,” Morok said to Krisha gently, “what can they do? Throw stones at me? I’ll not go near the city; I merely want to get the lay of the land.” He turned to the others. “The one problem is going to be that, whatever I see and learn, the others will learn as well,” he reminded them. “If we get a route, you must move quickly.”
The Stargin stretched his great wings, and, oddly, the action made him look less bird-like and more, well, classically angelic.
He looked around. “The air isn’t still, but it is quiet,” he told them. “The thermals are pretty well static. Still, I have flown under far worse conditions than this.”
The body seemed somehow to sink into the ground as the legs contracted and muscles tensed like coiled springs. Then he let the tension go, wings at the ready, and launched himself into the air.
There was barely enough room to flap the wings, and for a moment they feared he wouldn’t clear the top of the hedge, but then he was up, and, with effort, climbing. Morok always looked ungainly on the ground, but, in the air, he was a picture of grace and form.
Looking down, Morok was startled to see just how close the three groups were to one another, and to the city gates beyond, and, unable to block, he could see them all galvanizing into action as they received the images he was seeing. He tried to concentrate on just a routing for his own people; then, when he was certain Krisha, at least, had the picture in her mind, he turned his attention to the city.
It is almost like the vision, he thought, amazed. The maze had several possible ways to get to the gates, but they all ended up in one exit, flanked by two enormous, bestial idols. Beyond, the grass ended, and there was instead a road made of the same material as was used in the interior of the stations, going downward in a broad spiral for about two kilometers, passing eventually behind the city before emerging again on the other side to what appeared to be a broad avenue, the main thoroughfare, of the city itself.
Unlike the vision, the spiral had a milky coloration, and meter-high side walls, and would not be the dizzying approach they’d feared it might be.
The city itself appeared even greater than he’d expected. It continued the spiral structure, but was built so that the buildings intersected multiple levels of the great spiral organization. The architecture had some of that melted look of the station interiors, but the buildings, the streets, everything glowed with soft colors—reds, blues, greens, yellows, purples-and came together to create a soft, three-dimensional pastel. It was difficult to believe that so vile a race could create something this beautiful.
The spiral, however, was not circular, but rather had a distinct oval shape. On one side of the central region rose the pyramid of earlier visions, a soft golden color, looking perfect and seamless, as it arose from what had to be the base of the city far below to tower over even the tallest other structure, dominating everything. The rest of the spiral center was hard to see at an angle, but appeared a black nothingness.
The entire city seemed suspended in space, built atop some glassy disk-like foundation that itself appeared to rest on nothing at all. He could see, too, that the sky did indeed seem to be some sort of transparent barrier, or, possibly, a projection, which grew lower as it passed over the city and ended somewhere beyond.
Chaos Keep, the demon had called the place. At the center and the edge of the universe.
He had flown before only in the mist and pouring rain of what they all thought of as the wet world; this was the first time when he had some time and good visibility, and he made the most of it.
This place was vast, but with the sky barrier clear he could see that it did not have an infinite horizon. The hills preceding the maze went on for some distance, then just seemed to abruptly stop, as if they, too, were hitting some sort of wall or barrier, and he had the distinct impression that the “sky” curved slightly and angled down to the left and right of the city.
The captain had been correct; these were not worlds. Rather, they were enormous rooms, or compartments, hundreds of kilometers across, designed and maintained to look like worlds. That was why there had been no variations, no day or night. The waterfall on the wet world probably recirculated all that water, in a constant cycle.