They put out their right hands and pointed at the ground, and the ground blazed with brilliant white light, illuminating them all. The white-hot beam of energy, as smooth and perfect as if a computer hologram, fanned out, encircled the three, and when the circle, was complete moved inward, tracing a complex geometric pattern. The Quintara saw the pattern and stepped back in fear and revulsion at what it represented to them.
The three then spoke mentally with one voice, stronger and more powerful than theirs, both, ancient and very young, both male and female, a chorus of confident pronouncements, in a tongue strange and ancient to the speakers, but not to those who heard it.
<Let the Quintara be placed once more in endless not-sleep, sealed between the universes, to suffer for their rebellion! Your holes lead only to your prisons from which you have been untimely loosed. Who dares stand against us, to risk imprisonment not in amber but in fire or deepest pit? The people must bear you within themselves; they need not bear you as well. We are the people, and as the people we cast you out!>
The ground shook as if a mighty earthquake had suddenly struck; the idol beyond, the great stone altar itself, trembled and moved off its foundations, and beyond the city was in panic as buildings shimmered and all that was loose fell into the darkened streets.
A great darkness beyond the darkness of the night came upon them; around the three and their blazing seal formed a region of that which could not be conceived; a blackness that was truly nothing, given shape only by that of the world which it touched. That world vanished for the three, and they were suddenly falling, falling free into the nothingness, falling down a great, deep hole supported only by the ancient seal which itself could not illuminate the great abyss. Down, down, they sunk, into the void that had no end.
Now something did reach out from below: concentric rings of color, blacks and browns and grays, swirling, capturing them like a maelstrom, spinning around in counterclockwise fashion, spinning them, spinning toward a central point below.
They passed through the bottom and through lawyers of color, brilliant, without imperfection, perfect squares forming a progressive spectrum of colors as they sank down, down. . . .
They held fast and firm to their platform, and Gun Roh Chin, in the center, reached out his hands and took one of theirs in each of his own.
Falling forever in the nothingness, they suddenly realized that a new element was forming, a something beyond shape, beyond the ability of even the Higher Races behind them to truly comprehend.
He comes, the thought said, and it was all.
Spirals of silver, green, and violet, like spider’s webs, shot from him who still could be only glimpsed, a darkness beyond darkness, a creature spawned in a cosmos whose rules they were unable to comprehend. Strange, overpowering foul odors hit them all although they were sealed in their suits; great menacing balls of incredible smoothness struck all around them, bouncing here and there, coming very close.
Some of its rules …
RED for the rage at what they would do to those if left free. YELLOW for the faith that sustained those who would oppose them. BLUE for the knowledge needed to fight them.
But …
The colors sprang from the three; red, blue, and yellow gold, swirled around them, energized them, transfigured them in all ways.
They grew and spread mighty wings of force, controlling their position and descent. Off the Seal now, under it, behind it, using it as both shield and weapon, pressing forward, making the Seal their one mighty thought forcing out all others, creating before them a solid, impenetrable juggernaut and pressing forward, not falling now but in motion, in controlled, confident flight. Homo in excelsis, united, powerful, balanced, supreme!
The black coldness of pure Will, tempered not by pity, or sympathy, nor tainted by morality, love or hate, beauty or ugliness, pushed against them, a solid wall of smooth, shiny blackness, in which all colors were combined as one having equal value and thus canceled themselves out. A terrible, machine-like blackness, Reason without Feeling, immense, monolithic, alone.
Anticipating that this was the attack he had to fight off but had not thought it necessary to fight this time, the Engineer’s tactic was to attempt to absorb their radiations. The shield of the Seal, however, glowed a perfect white, reflecting back all of the blackness and enveloping within its contrails the three who pushed it on.
Black pentagrams spit from the receding wall of darkness, some bouncing harmlessly off the shield, others swooping and swerving in and out and about attempting to snare just one of them, to unbalance the shield and turn it so that blackness could overwhelm it. To those attacks they returned the circle and the star; centered on the pentagrams they set them spinning dizzily out of control, containing the blackness of the pentagram within and rendering it harmless.
The battle raged, each side in near constant thrust and parry, but as it raged they tired as well, and as it raged the Engineer kept falling back. Soon it became obvious that the three would tire while the Engineer had no such limitations, and it was a matter of not tiring too greatly or too soon before the Engineer fell to the Hatch.
The Engineer, too, understood this. From the expanse of his transdimensional realm he fashioned weapon after weapon, hurling them again and again as if in hope that numbers would make up for lack of direction, forcing them to counter, counter, counter again and again, tiring them beyond their ability to sustain the push of the attack.
They passed beyond what they thought was their limit, pain and nausea racking them, their colors fading and with that their maneuverability and their ability to fend off the constant attacks and keep the shield fully energized as the pure white the logic of this place required.
How long had it been? How long must they go on? How long could they go on? Only the faces, the dead faces, kept them going now, the faces that floated past. . . .
Manya, and Savin, and Morok the Holy Ladue . . .
Robokuk, and Desereth, and Josef, too, and Tris and the Durquist and Jimmy McCray. . . .
And beyond them the other faces, the pleading faces, the faces looking into the pit of horrors. Terran faces, and Rithian, too, and Gnolls, Mesoks, Julkis, Thions, and hundreds more. Ninety trillion, but not strong; ninety trillion and uncountable futures for their children and grandchildren until the very universe was dead, and darkness enveloped all those shining lights around them, all those tiny galaxies and supergalaxies and megagalaxies and beyond. …
Even now Quintara-led fleets bore down on them, on the Holy Worlds of the Mizlaplan, upon the very capital of the Exchange, upon the great ringed mother world of the Mycohl.
There would be no second chance. If the Engineer escaped from this he would join those fleets, energize them, envelop all before them in his darkness and engulf them in the Nothing. Even if they fought off the attacks, others would come, again and again, as numerous and infinite as the pentagrams thrown at them, until at least one bastion fell.
The grid appeared suddenly: green lines of force representing they knew not what, yet it was familiar to them. The harder blackness, the creatures of the spaces of the grid, reached out for them and then retreated as if receiving horrible shocks.
They turned leftward and into the spiral sinister that led down, down, to the city below.
Now the narrowing that had so blocked their path became their ally; there was less space for pentagrams to get past the Seal, and diminishing all the time. Now the shield was virtually touching the walls, burning, scouring the foulness that dwelt within those places. The sight of it and the break it gave them infused them with renewed energy reserves from places they hadn’t suspected were there.
Suddenly they burst out and the great city was below them; now the Engineer reached out, called his minions to his aid, and the city was suddenly ablaze with activity. It did not matter; the fall was now too short. The Engineer plunged into the whirling eye of energy at the edge of the city and sank beneath it, and they followed.
Beyond was an outer darkness, a place that had no rules or reason, a place into which the bright energy drained. The Engineer plunged through to that place, but the three were stopped by the Seal, which struck the opening and stuck there, setting the whole great pool of energy ablaze with a bright white glow.
They rested a moment, bathing in the glow, exulting in the victory, but the job was not yet finished. Connectors, conductors of pure force dipped into the pool, leading upward to a great, throbbing, living dynamo, and beyond that the pyramid.
One tiny tendril was not like the rest; it stood out black, a great hairline against the pulsing glow, extending from the dynamo and master logic systems down to a point away from the Seal. Down and into the wall that separated the All from the Nothing.
How long had it taken the Engineer to create that tiny hole? How long to push his fashioned cable upward until somehow it hit just right and connected into the master logic systems center? How long was long to a being like the Engineer?
They broke the cable and sealed the nearly microscopic hole with another Seal of Solomon, this fashioned from the very energy in which they bathed. Then they rose to the point where the master control center contacted the pool of energy. This time he would have to think of another way. This time the ancient mistake would not be repeated. This time, after reprogramming the system, the access points below would themselves be shielded.
But not completely.
To totally seal it off would mean cutting it off from its power source, shutting down the system. To shut down the system would mean endless reincarnation for the Quintara, for the stations were natural things that depended not at all on the system itself, having been connected to it but not dependent upon it. To contain the Quintara, power must be maintained. Otherwise they would be merely inconvenienced in having to manually reprogram each one. To maintain the power was to leave a gap, albeit small and as far away from the bottom of the pool as possible, through
which contact might be re-established. It was a risk that had to be taken, a price that had to be paid yet again.
But this time the open spaces filled, not covering the rest but linking and binding all three against a new color, a soft glowing green, the binding color of hope and rebirth; a pure color, untainted by blackness.
Now for the station and upward, to affix the broken seals, to secure the system, to spin out of phase those stations that intersected points in the known universe. Through fire and through rain, through bitter cold and terrible heat, through soft breezes and howling gales, through billeting and maintenance depots left over from the perfecting of the universe they walked, until once more they stepped out into fresh warm air under a starry sky.
They stood there on a hilltop, great wings folded, looking out across a sea of stars.
<We are on our own,> Gun Roh Chin noted.
Modra looked at the other two, great beings of soft green cores inside softly glowing white as grand as the images of angels of old, and knew that she must look that way, too.
She knew, as the others did, that she had but to spread her wings and visualize a pattern and fly into it to move to any other point. The amount of knowledge and sheer power that she possessed was awesome, beyond anything they had imagined.
<Poor Kalia,> Krisha thought, shaking her beautiful head. <Had she chosen wisely she would have had power beyond anything they could have given her. >
<She would never have accepted it, > Chin noted. <No matter what the cause, the environment in which she was raised, the abuses she suffered, there was far too much darkness in her soul to attain this. She would have attracted his bolts like a magnet, and the whiteness would have eaten her alive. >
The mere thought of Kalia brought a flood of images to their minds: of Rithian, drol, and even Quintara digging frantically through the rubble to free their tapped mates from the ruins of the castle, and finding their great one’s body crushed and atop it the body of a small Terran, his hand locked upon an object thrust up under the demon prince’s breastplate
with such force that it was almost all the way in. And Jimmy, crushed, frozen in death, with an incredible smile on his face. . . .
And yet, miraculously, well away from the pair, in a space made by the falling of several beams and pillars, they found Kalia, unconscious but alive, and brought her out.
<That infection she sought for Josef is within her now,> Krisha noted. <I wonder if there is an antidote for it at this stage ?>
Almost instantly, although she didn’t know how, she knew that there was such a thing, if administered within the first three days.
<But there is no one there to give it to her,> Modra-noted. <And she is no longer of much value to them. It will work on her, yet her body is self-renewing. That was part of the price paid for her treachery by the demon prince. She will become what she made others become, but, unlike them, she will not age.>
<It is not an unfitting judgment, > Gun Roh Chin noted. <Perhaps, in a few decades or so, one of us might remember her and have enough mercy to seek her out and kill her.>
<If we think of it, > Krisha said without much conviction that she, at least, would get around to it.
It was one thing to feel pity, even an impulse to mercy; they all felt that. But true justice could not be evil.
<There are still a couple of things about this matter that trouble me,> Gun Roh Chin commented. <I am having problems reconciling them.>
<Only a couple?> Modra responded. <Even with all this new-found knowledge and power I have to honestly admit that I don’t understand a thing that we did.>
Krisha wasn’t at all bothered. <We won. This time. What else is there to know?>
<Well,> Gun Roh Chin replied, <for openers, how did those two Quintara back at Rainbow Bridge and the others we saw have clothes on? We know the system.>
The answer was amazingly simple. Cornered, trapped in that last ancient conflict, some of the Quintara had indeed surrendered rather than face the possibility of the volcanic fires or the Bottomless Pit. Those were placed within the closest stations by the Mycohl and sealed there, blocking the reincarnation in those areas of the more fanatical ones who had gone to the end. That might even have to be an option again, they knew.
<All right, that one had bothered me, > he admitted. </ will admit that this method of dieting information is far superior to mere deduction. So, how did we affix the Mycohl seal when we had no Mycohl among us?>