Roshaun opened one cupped hand, the gesture he usually used to bring up the little matrix of light that was his implementation of the manual. But nothing happened. He shook his head at Kit.
“Fil?”
Filif rustled all his branches, No.
Nita swallowed. She reached for her otherspace pocket … and couldn’t find it. She pulled the rowan wand out of the belt of her jeans, and found it nothing but a peeled white stick. She lifted her charm bracelet, shook it—
But now it was just a bracelet, and the charms jingled harmlessly. A lightning bolt, a circle with the number 26, a little fish, a few other symbols.
Dairine had been tapping at Spot’s keyboard. Now she was scowling harder than ever. “No manual,” she said. “He’s still in there, he can communicate through the software, but that’s all. No access to the manual functions. And he can’t hear his homeworld, or any of his people.” She let out an unhappy breath, closed Spot up again, and went back to hugging him. “We’re cut off.”
Kit had also been feeling in the air for his pocket; he couldn’t find his, either. “Okay,” he said, “we’re supposed to become useless, now, because we think we’re marooned, completely isolated, and totally powerless. Forgive me if I don’t feel like cooperating. What can we do?” He looked around at them. No one volunteered any thoughts.
The warrior who had been blocking the door before them now moved away from it, and another figure came through.
It was the Arch-votary in its patterned shell. Slowly, it approached, those massive claws raised. Nita held her ground, and saw that the others were doing the same, though Ponch, sticking close to Kit’s side, growled softly, and the fur over his shoulders and down his back was bristling.
The Arch-votary stopped, looming up before them. “Evil ones,” it said, “enemies of the Great One, come and be judged.”
Roshaun lifted his head and gave the Arch-votary an inexpressibly haughty look. “Killed, perhaps,” he said. “But your dark Master has neither authority nor right to judge us. Therefore stand away, lackey, and keep silent in the presence of your betters.”
And Roshaun swept straight past the Arch-votary, right on through that doorway into the central cavern, leaving the angry and befuddled Yaldiv staring after him. Dairine went straight past it, too, throwing it a dirty and dismissive look, and followed Roshaun. Carmela and Ronan and Filif went after her. After a moment’s hesitation, Memeki followed Filif through the doorway, and Ponch, with a glance back at Kit, trotted after her, growling.
Kit and Nita threw each other a glance and headed after Ponch. “Roshaun really comes into his own in situations like this,” Kit said under his breath, glancing over his shoulder as the Arch-votary and the warriors followed them in.
“You’ve got a point,” Nita muttered back, “but if it’s all the same to you, I don’t want to be in any more situations like this.”
“If we don’t get real lucky in the next few minutes,” Kit said, “you can relax, because we won’t be.”
They passed through the door, their guards following.
The lower bowl of that huge elliptical cavern was empty except for the warriors who blocked the many other entrances. It was a long walk for the group across that strangely soft, papery surface, and after the first look at the huge swollen shape of the King, Nita started to feel her confidence ebbing away, feeling more like ill-founded bravado every moment. The massive, bloated bag of body that lay there on the dais at one focus of the elliptical bowl, with handmaidens constantly bringing food to its little chewing jaws and going away again, felt to Nita as if it was absolutely heaving with millions of those sparks of angry fire, endlessly being spun off like stars of a dark galaxy from that core of evil at their center, the Lone One’s presence in the King. And it was strong, stronger than she’d thought. She could feel it sucking at her will as they got closer, as if it was trying to empty all the thoughts out of her brain, every sense that she was herself, that she was anything but a slave, to do what she was told, to obey orders.
She shook her head. There was something she was supposed to be doing, but she couldn’t think what.
Something jabbed her in the side. “Neets!”
Her eyes went wide. Nita realized that she’d been walking toward the dais without even being aware of it. She glanced sideways, and saw Kit looking at her in concern, but ready to elbow her again if necessary. “You there?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Count inside your head, or sing yourself a song or something.”
Nita made a face. “You wouldn’t want to hear me sing,” she said. “Dair’s the school-choir department.” But she started reciting a series of primes, and tried not to walk in rhythm.
She managed to keep herself from vaguing out again, but as they got closer and closer to the dais, a straightforward horror of the King itself started to set in. The idea of giant bugs had been a problem for her when she was little, a fear mostly exorcised now, but not entirely. Nita had pretty much come to terms with the claws and shells and fangs of the Yaldiv, but this was different. The flabby, pallid, distended bag of the King’s body, swollen, gross, heaving, beating with little veins, made her shudder at the very sight of it—and the closer she got to it, the farther away Nita desperately wanted to be. I don’t want to scream, she thought, but if anybody makes me go up to it, makes me touch it—I really don’t want to scream; it’ll just set Dairine off.
“What a gigantic ugly sack of crap,” Dairine said, in a tone of completely clinical interest. “Truly disgusting. And would you look at the ugly wiggly bits! But it’s so deluded, it still thinks everybody ought to be bowing and scraping to it. Isn’t it beyond pathetic? Don’t freeze up, Memeki, it’s not worth your time.”
Nita gulped again, but at the same time felt strangely reassured; she was certain the remark hadn’t been entirely directed at Memeki. She gave Kit a glance and saw him roll his eyes in amusement, even here, even now. A shadow on her left made her look that way: Filif was there, rustling against her, saying nothing, but all those little berry-eyes looked surprisingly serene.
As they got close to the dais, the warriors behind reached out claws to stop them. The King’s flesh-buried little eyes peered down at them, black, unreflecting, empty… though not nearly empty enough: Nita could feel the darkness behind them, looking out at them all with cruel recognition.
Roshaun held his head up. “Bright star that was,” he said, “dark star that falls, in your downward arc with defiance we greet you. Do your poor worst!”
A few moments’ silence passed, and then the King spoke. The voice that came out of it was a shock to Nita, a perfectly human sound, though she had no idea how Filif or Ponch or Memeki might be hearing it. “That will not take much doing,” said the Lone Power through Its tool, “for the evil power which the Enemy gave you is now yours no more.” Nita wasn’t sure how that inhuman face could smile, but somehow it seemed to be managing it.
The King tried to hitch itself forward a little; Nita winced at the long water-bed ripple that this sent up its body. Then the Lone One looked at Memeki through the King. “Here, then, is our little heretic, doomed to die so soon, doing my will as she must, no matter how she desires to do otherwise.” It paused. “Though she might still die in my good graces, and so achieve as much salvation as she ever will.”
It bent Its gaze on her. “Handmaiden, Favored of the Great One,” It said softly, “give up this vain dream of oneness, of being one’s own self! Don’t you realize this is all an evil plot by the One’s enemies? They would drive you away from your own kind, from the right way to think, the right way to be. Come back within the mind that bore you; come back and be one again with those who will always honor what you have done as a mother of your people, a daughter of the Great One, honored by the King.”
Nita could feel the power the King was bringing to bear on Memeki. Even she began slowly to feel that it was wrong of any being to resist such honor, that Memeki should forget all about them, s
ave herself, bow down before the King.
Beware! said the peridexis’s voice in her head. Don’t let Its shadowy little truth overwhelm the greater one.
Nita blinked, shook her head slightly as if to clear it. Thanks, she said, and the King’s influence receded. But this is just Its usual game, isn’t it? The Lone One would really love it if It could not only stop Memeki from being the Hesper, but also break her will before she died.
Memeki now stood swaying on her many legs, her eyes reflecting nothing but the King as she leaned more and more toward him. “For am I not the One who set your people free from the tyranny of the mighty and evil Force from Outside?” the King was saying. “Do you not owe all your loyalty to the One who stole the tyrant’s power despite everything it could do, and so made your world free?”
Memeki swayed, swayed, slowly grew still … then looked up. “Free?” she said. “Yes. You made us free.” She was shivering again, and she crouched down as if once again feeling the pangs of the eggs beginning to move inside her. “Free to kill. And free to die.”
“But what other freedom is there,” the King said, more softly still, “in this concentration camp of a universe, where all things must happen according to the evil Other’s inflexible rules, on threat of some awful eternal punishment? Far better to tell it, ‘Not your will, but mine!’—and turn your back on the Other’s unkept promise that groveling to It will bring you joy. Death comes no matter what the Other does, and so only Death’s servants, my servants, are truly free! Free to take what they want, to kill what they want, no consequences, no punishment, no limits!”
“Except when the freedom is one you don’t choose to grant,” Memeki said, more loudly this time. She was shaking herself all over, struggling to stand straight again. “You hold out hope with one claw and take it away with the other! I may be weak and doomed soon to die, but I will die as an I, not just one more nameless scrap of shell to be thrown out into the sucking mud! No matter how little a time it lasts, I will be what all these are—” And she looked around at Kit and Ponch and Nita and the others. “— selves unto themselves, and beings that matter to each other! Such a life, even a breath’s worth of it, is better than anything you’ve ever given me!”
Memeki was trembling again, but with passion, with determination, desperate and doomed. She took a step toward the dais, and another, her claws lifted not in that old gesture of submission, but in one more like a warrior’s threat. “I will be what the Voice said I was, the Hesper, I will be the Aeon of Light, the Power that made a different choice from yours. I will be the Star that did not fall, no matter how little a time the light lasts!”
The possessed King tapped a fretful foreclaw on the dais, almost like someone drumming his fingers. It looked past Memeki at Kit and Nita and the others. “Well, they have spoiled you beyond tempting,” It said, sounding aggrieved. “What a shame. But this is no great loss, for in a very little while I will nonetheless get a couple of hundred more avatars out of you. Oh, yes,” It said, as once again Memeki’s legs started to give way under her. Dairine and Roshaun reached out to support her on one side, and Kit and Ronan on the other. Ponch shouldered in between them and started licking Memeki’s face. “I have hastened your time considerably; you can feel them preparing to come forth. This should be educational for these ‘friends’ you’re so enamored of.”
The King waved away the handmaidens servicing him; they scuttled away into the shadows behind the dais. “And after that, you will have an honor guard to accompany you on your road into the dark from which there is no return. But, no, of course, I forget.” It looked around at Nita and Kit and the others. “Obedient to the Other’s brainwashing, you have all deluded yourselves into thinking that the darkness is actually light. ‘Timeheart.’” It chuckled. “Little consolation that place will be to you, even if you manage to reach it; for there you’ll sit outside of time, waiting for the sufferings of everyone you’ve ever known to end. And I need not do anything further to bring that fate about, for the Pullulus has already doomed all your worlds.”
It turned Its head just enough to look over at Carmela, who was standing there with her hands on her hips, looking scornful. “And to your ignorance you’ve now added folly,” the King said, “for you’ve gone so far as to bring with you someone who doesn’t even have any of the Other’s vile power. Whatever possessed you to do something so foolishly arrogant, so sheerly useless?” Then It laughed. “Well, I suppose that in the long run, probably I did. You, alien thing, come over here.”
To Nita’s absolute horror, Carmela’s arms suddenly flopped away from her body, jerking like the arms of a puppet on strings. Carmela wobbled, her balance lost, and her face went slack with shock as she took a step toward those nastily working jaws. Then she scowled, dug in her heels, and stopped again.
“Oh, resistance,” the King said. “How amusing. But you have no more power against me than that. Now come here.”
Carmela struggled, but it was no use. Nita watched with horror as she put one foot in front of the other, clumsy, stiff—and with each step she was able to resist less, and her face went still and empty. “No!” Kit yelled, and started forward, but the warriors who had been lingering nearby now grabbed him roughly from behind. They did the same with Nita and Roshaun and Ronan when they tried to move.
“This has all been just a game for you, hasn’t it?” the King said. “But you see now how wrong you were. Maybe it would be amusing to do to you what we do to the handmaidens. Wall you up in an incubatorium, without food or water, and see how long it takes before you beg to be fed what the grubs are fed. Or perhaps even feed you to the grubs. There are always some whose first meal isn’t big enough.”
There was no sign of struggle left in Carmela, none at all; Nita got just a glimpse of the blank look of her eyes as she stepped closer and closer to the King, as if sleepwalking, helpless. Kit threw himself again in the King’s direction, but the warriors held him fast. “No!” he shouted. “Do it to me if you want, not her!”
The King’s regard slid in Kit’s direction. “We will do it to you soon enough, I think,” It said. “But first we will let her bleed a little. Just a nip here… a nip there.” It lazily stretched out Its claws. “She will feel every moment of it, but not be able to move a muscle. It should be a learning experience for one so spirited.”
Carmela stepped closer, and closer. Another step or two would bring her within range of those cruel claws; they were stretching toward her, one of them would be close enough with the next step to brush her cheek—”NO!” Nita screamed, struggling in the grip of the claws that held her.
“But wait. What might this be that I perceive there?” said the King’s soft, oily voice. “A weapon of some kind? And how cunningly hidden under that body-covering. But though you might have been clever about hiding it, it makes no difference if the mind that hid it is helpless to hide its own thoughts. Bring it out.”
Carmela stopped, and slowly reached inside the light vest she was wearing, bringing out the curling iron. Very softly the King said, “Perhaps blood would be the wrong approach after all. What delicious irony if one who lives by such a weapon should die by it, and be unable even to—”
The terrible blast of fire in that dim place blinded everybody and knocked them staggering. The force of the explosion shoved Nita into the warrior that was holding her; she found her footing again just before it let go of her and went down, crashing to the floor with a horrible, thin, shrilling scream. An awful singed-hair stink of burning bug came billowing out from the dais through waves of greasy black smoke, and it was some seconds before this cleared enough for Nita to see that the King’s entire front half had been blown away. Its rear half was now a smoking, bubbling, sagging bag of grossness, the sight of which made Nita simply bend over double and retch, mutely grateful that the soda she’d drunk was now too far along in her system to come back up. When she straightened up again, she saw through the smoke that Carmela was standing in front of the King’s sm
oking remains with the curling iron in her hand.
“Oops,” Carmela said… and, very slowly, smiled.
Nita stared around them in utter astonishment. Around them, all the other warriors and even the Arch-votary were making that same terrible shrill cry, wavering, desperate, as they fell to the ground and went silent. From the depths of the City to its heights, faintly at first and then more loudly, Nita started to hear that shrilling spreading all through the vast place. Ronan instantly whirled and snatched the Spear of Light out of the claws of the collapsed warrior who’d held it.
Kit ran over to Carmela. When he got to her, he threw his arms around her and buried his face against her. “You dummy,” he said, “you incredible idiot, you stupid—”
“Hey, I love you, too,” Carmela said, hugging him back as Nita hurried over.
“‘Mela,” she said, “it was controlling you! How did you—”
“It wasn’t,” Carmela said. “It made me jerk a little that first time, but after that I was just playing along. Maybe it’s no good with our kind of brain or something?”
Nita didn’t think that was likely, but she looked about halfway back at the King, making a face. It was very dead, and the smell seemed to be getting worse rather than better. “Okay,” she said. “But what about Memeki?”
They turned toward her. Memeki was hunched on the floor, and her limbs, which had before been flailing as if in distress, were now unnervingly still. Nita went over to her, knelt down by her. “Memeki?”
No answer.
“It’s starting to happen to her, isn’t it,” Kit said.
Nita felt sure it was. She reached sideways, feeling around for her otherspace pocket, and still couldn’t feel it.
Huh? she thought. What’s the matter? she said to the peridexis. The King’s dead, the Lone One should be—
“Uh,” Dairine said, very quietly. “Neets—”
Nita looked up, looked around, unable to see what Dairine’s problem was. Then she looked back at the dais.