They continued along the crystal bridge, and the universe wheeled around them. There were suns and moons of all shades and colors now, and comets that screamed like dying children as they rocketed past. Constellations formed unnerving shapes and huge unseen presences drifted past, scattering planets in their wake. But the bridge was firm and unyielding under their feet, and the Blue Moon shone before them like a beckoning finger. They were drawing near something now. They could feel it.
The bridge turned down suddenly, and plunged them into a realm of swirling, glowing mists. Hawk, Fisher, and Lament were in among the shifting mists and standing on what seemed like solid ground almost before they were aware of it. They looked quickly behind them, but all traces of the crystal bridge were gone. They had apparently arrived at their destination. Up above them, blazing down through the concealing mists, the Blue Moon shone like the open door of some unearthly furnace. The dreamlike feeling of uncertainty clung to the three of them as they inspected their surroundings.
The mists curled around them in streams and eddies, revealing tantalizing glimpses of the place they’d come to. It wasn’t hot or cold, pleasant or unpleasant, or anything they could easily put a name to. Instead there was a constant unsettling feeling of anticipation, as though everything was in the process of becoming something. Places, shapes, and structures were constantly forming and disappearing, just on the edge of their vision, gone the moment any of them turned to look at the apparitions directly. Some would linger for a few moments, like fragments of dreams barely recalled on waking, while others came and went so swiftly, they left only disturbing impressions behind them.
Hawk thought he saw a great fairy-tale castle with impossibly high walls and slender turrets. He thought he saw vast tomblike structures hanging on grim gray walls like huge limpets. And sometimes he thought he saw familiar places from his past, only half completed. But none of the visions lasted for long, and none of them felt very real. It was as though the world they had come to was trying on various clothes to see what would most appeal to its new visitors. There were sounds all around, rising and falling and overlapping. From the crying of birds to the howls of animals to the chattering of men in unknown languages. These, too, sounded somehow artificial, as though the world was speaking in tongues, perhaps trying for some common ground they could communicate on, perhaps not.
“I don’t know where we are,” Hawk said finally. “But I don’t think I like it. Nothing feels solid here. Nothing is certain.”
“What else did you expect,” asked the Magus, “in the land of Reverie?”
They all jumped a little as the sorcerer appeared suddenly before them. He looked like he always did; a short, almost self-effacing man wrapped in a great black cloak. His face and voice were still deceptively mild, but his pale gray eyes were unusually direct. He seemed entirely unperturbed by the shifting world around them.
“This is the world the Blue Moon orbits,” said the Magus calmly. “This is the place whose light the Blue Moon reflects. This is Reverie. I told you you’d come here eventually, Captains Hawk and Fisher. Remember?” He looked sternly at Lament. “But I wasn’t expecting you, Walking Man. You should not have come here. You could ruin everything.”
“We’re here because we chose to come here,” Hawk said. “Now what the hell is this place, exactly?”
“Not so much a place, more a concept,” said the Magus. “This is Reverie, the world of the Transient Beings, home and source to all Wild Magic.”
“Hold everything,” said Fisher. “How did you get here, Magus? You weren’t in the Inverted Cathedral with us. How did you get to the Gateway?”
“I belong here,” stated the Magus. “I am a Transient Being.” He looked briefly about him. “It’s not much, but I call it home. I’ve been away for a while. Going back and forth in the world, and walking up and down in it. We can only come to your world when you summon us, knowingly or unknowingly, and once we return, we have to wait until we are summoned again. I chose to stay in reality, limiting as it is, because it fascinated me. You fascinated me—humanity, in all its many wonders and mysteries.
“And now I’m back here again. I’ve been plotting this meeting for such a long time, Captains. Not for you specifically, but for people like you. Heroes who understand duty and courage and honor. Together we have the chance to do something splendid and marvelous and very necessary. If the Wrath of God doesn’t screw it up for all of us.”
“If I’m such a threat to your plans,” Lament said, “why don’t you just strike me down?”
“Because it’s too late now,” the Magus said sourly. “You’re already here. You must be very careful, Walking Man. Reverie is the place of belief, and a faith as strong and uncritical as yours could make you very dangerous. If you value the continued survival of humanity and reality itself, whatever you see and hear, or think you see and hear, keep your mouth shut and don’t interfere.”
“Isobel,” said Hawk in a rather strained voice, “your hair is blond again. When did that happen?”
Fisher’s hand went to her hair and pulled the end of the braid in front of her. All traces of the black dye were gone, and her hair was its familiar dark yellow again. She looked at Hawk, started to shrug, and then stopped and looked closely at Hawk’s face.
“Hawk, take off your eyepatch.”
“What?”
“Your eyepatch, love. Take it off. I have this strange feeling …”
Hawk slowly removed the black silk patch that covered the empty eye socket where his right eye had been before a demon clawed it out of his head. He let the black patch fall to the ground. He didn’t need the wonder in Fisher’s face to know that something marvelous had happened. His right eyelids, so long sealed together, opened slowly, and he looked at Fisher with two eyes for the first time in twelve years. They smiled at each other for a long moment, and then Hawk looked at the Magus.
“What’s happening here, sorcerer? What are we changing?”
“Belief is everything here,” said the Magus. “Reverie is the place of concepts and ideas, dreams and fantasies and everything in between. Thoughts have power here. Physical presences are passing things, unless vested in some specific viewpoint. Your self-image decides who and what you are here. So don’t let your thoughts wander. If you forget yourself here, you might not come back.”
Fisher looked closely at Lament. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“I know who and what I am,” said Jericho Lament. “I made myself the Walking Man by my own free choice and desire.”
But he didn’t sound quite as sure as he might have, and everyone could hear it in his voice, even him.
“I anticipated everything but you,” said the Magus. “A man who willingly made himself into something both more and less than a man.”
Lament looked at him sharply. “What do you mean ‘less’?”
“You gave up free will,” said the Magus. “In return for something I am unable to comprehend. But then, I’m not a man and never was.”
“So you’re a Transient Being,” said Fisher. “Maybe you could explain just what the hell that is.”
“We are many,” said the Magus, “for we are legion. Forgive me, the old jokes are always the best. We are what you created to be here. Don’t blame us if you don’t like the shape and texture of your own dreams.”
The ground shook suddenly beneath their feet, and something huge lurched out of the mists to stand behind the Magus, towering over him. Over nine feet tall, it was a great ill-formed skeleton, as much like a man as not, held together only by ancient and awful magics. Blood ran from his grinning jaws in a steady crimson stream, falling down to splash on his chestbone and ribs. His bones were browned and yellowed with age. Blood dripped thickly from his fingertips and oozed out from under his flat, bony feet. More ran down his long, curving leg-bones, and welled from his empty eyesockets like tears. He stank of carrion and the grave, and things that should have been safely and securely buried long ago.
&
nbsp; Hawk and Fisher had their weapons in their hands, and were standing shoulder to shoulder, ready for any sign of attack. Lament studied the huge skeleton, leaning on his staff.
“What the bloody hell is that?” asked Hawk.
“That is Bloody Bones,” said the Magus, not even glancing behind him. He seemed entirely unruffled, even amused, by the naked anger and threat in Hawk’s voice. “He’s a Transient Being just like me. Some kind of ancient funerary god or demon. It’s often hard to tell such things apart. There were those who worshiped him centuries ago, but he never cared. It is his single nature to frighten and to terrify, and the blood you see is the blood of his countless victims. He’s here to take you to the present spokesman of our ephemeral kind. I really would advise you to go with him. You have nothing strong enough to hurt him.”
“Just how many Transient Beings are there?” asked Fisher, not lowering her sword.
“As many as there need to be,” said the Magus. “And they’re all very interested in you.”
Even as the Magus spoke, Hawk, Fisher, and Lament became aware of other presences watching silently from the concealing mists. They were moving slowly, unhurriedly, just beyond the limits of human vision, circling the new arrivals to their realm; awful and unsettling things that watched and studied with unseen eyes. They were pressing closer now, and Hawk, Fisher, and Lament began to catch glimpses of ugly shapes and unquiet details, as though their own passing thoughts were giving shape and purpose to what lay in the mists.
“Keep your gaze fixed on me and Bloody Bones,” the Magus said sharply. “You’ll find things much less disturbing that way. Our shapes and natures are fixed and determined by long belief, but just by being here, you have undue influence. Believe me, you don’t want to see some of the things your arrival has attracted. Just follow Bloody Bones and he’ll take you to someone who’ll answer all your questions. But don’t blame us if you don’t like the answers.”
The huge skeleton turned abruptly and lurched off into the mists, the Magus close behind him. Rather than be left alone in a place of mists, surrounded by unseen enemies, Hawk and Fisher went after them, their weapons still in their hands. Lament brought up the rear, carefully not even glancing behind him, his lips moving soundlessly in one of the more martial psalms. The presences kept up with them as the small party moved through the churning mists, but they maintained their distance. Shapes slowly began to form out of the mists; a tree here and there, spiky shrubs, branches hanging down or thrusting up to form a canopy overhead. The shining sourceless light of the mists gradually died away to be replaced by the baleful, ghastly light of the Blue Moon. Hawk and Fisher realized in the same heart-stopping moment that they were back in the Darkwood again. It seemed entirely real—as dark and oppressive and soul-destroying as they remembered. All the trees around them were dead and rotting, and the horrid spiritual dread of the darkness beat upon their minds and their souls with all its old remembered strength. Hawk and Fisher stuck close together, breathing deeply despite the stench to try and calm themselves. Lament was singing his psalm aloud now, but it was a small sound in such a dark place.
Hawk knew where they were going, where they had to be going. And what terrible deathless thing was waiting to greet them again.
But even so, his heart slammed painfully in his chest when they finally came to the awful dark heart of the Darkwood, and there, sitting on his rotten throne, the Demon Prince. The malevolent, terrible creature that had come so close to destroying everything Hawk had ever cared for. The Demon Prince looked like a man. He had looked like other things before, and might again, but for now it amused him to look like his prey. His features were blurred, as though they’d melted and run. His long, delicate fingers ended in claws, and his burning crimson eyes held no human thoughts or emotions. Unnaturally tall, easily eight feet in height, he was slender to the point of emaciation. His pale flesh looked like something left too long in the dark, grown soft and rotten. He dressed in rags and tatters of darkest black and wore a battered wide-brimmed hat, pulled down low over his burning eyes. His wide slash of a mouth was full of pointed teeth, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet and sibilant, and grated on their nerves like fingernails down a blackboard.
“So good to see old friends again,” said the Demon Prince. “I told you we’d meet again. You can’t destroy me, little human. Banish me, and I just return here and wait for some new fool to summon me back into the world of men. I am of the Transient Beings, ideas made flesh, and we live on long after our every human enemy is dead and gone.”
“Of course,” said Lament, apparently unmoved. “Evil is eternal. I’ve always known that.”
“Strictly speaking, we’re neither good nor bad,” said the Demon Prince, leaning back in the rotting tree stump that was his throne and crossing his long legs casually. “Those are human terms, human limitations. We are archetypes, reflections of what’s on man’s inner mind. We are the shadows humanity casts. We are the physical manifestations of abstract concepts, forces, fears, and preoccupations. Neuroses and psychoses, given rein to run free and potent in the mortal world. We are the rod you made for your own back. We sprang full-grown from humanity’s brow, created in simpler times, when the Wild Magic was all there was.”
“You always did like the sound of your own voice,” said Hawk. “You’re saying the Transient Beings are everything we ever dreamed of.”
“Yes,” the Demon Prince agreed. “Especially the bad ones.”
“But the world and humanity have moved on,” said the Magus, and there was something in his voice that made them all look at him. “Man has become more complex, replacing the chaotic Wild Magic with the more easily understood and controlled High Magic, and now more and more with the logical, more useful science. Humanity is entering, or creating, the time of the rational mind, and soon he will have no use for such as us anymore.”
The Demon Prince stirred restlessly on his decaying throne. “It has been a long, long time since you have returned to Reverie, Magus. And as always, you bring bad news with you. You were created too closely in humanity’s image. No wonder we despise you so much. You remind us of everything we hate.”
“Why do you hate humanity?” asked Hawk. His mouth was dry and his voice was rough, but his gaze was perfectly steady. “If we created you, you should be grateful to us.”
The Demon Prince laughed briefly, a harsh, unpleasant, hateful sound. “You know nothing, understand nothing, little man. We hate you because you’re real. Because humanity is real you can grow and change and evolve, become more than you were. Transient Beings are bound by their nature to be only what they are, trapped and limited to the form your kind imagined. Eternally existing, eternally damned to never be more than what we were when humanity coughed us up.
“But now you have opened the Gateway, an unexpected back door into Reality. And every Transient Being in Reverie is free at last to have its revenge on you. We shall all go through into the world of mortal men, in all our awful glory, without having to be summoned. After so very, very long, our time has come round at last. We’re coming in force, to overthrow the upstart reason, and crush the tyrant science. Logic and order, cause and effect, and all the other constraints on our freedom shall be swept aside, and the Wild Magic shall once again have dominion over every unfortunate living thing. Once the Blue Moon’s orbit has intersected with your own moon once again, we will all cross over and remake your world in our own hating image. Then there shall be chaos, loose in the world like a wolf in the fold, for forever and a day. And oh, the terrible pleasures we shall take in what used to be your world.”
“We’ll fight you,” said Fisher. “We’ll never give up. We beat you last time.”
“I was alone then,” said the Demon Prince. “And I laid waste your whole Kingdom. There are more of us here than your mind can comprehend, and under a never-ending Blue Moon we shall be very powerful indeed. And in this new world of eternal chaos that we shall make, perhaps the limitations of the Transien
t Beings themselves shall be broken and overturned. We will all become real, and able to change and evolve at last. What creation doesn’t want to turn on its creator, to become greater than was intended, to outgrow and overtake the creator?”
“And if you can’t?” asked Lament. “If what you are is what you’ll always be, what then?”
“Then we’ll punish humanity forever,” answered the Demon Prince. “And the hell we’ll make for him on earth will be worse than any hell he can escape to by dying.”
“You always did have a way with words,” murmured the Magus. “But let’s not forget I made all this possible. It was my creation of a Rift in space and time that raised the level of Wild Magic in the mortal world, and awoke the Gateway to life once more. The Rift was such a useful toy; I knew they’d never be able to resist it.”
“You have our gratitude,” the Demon Prince said coldly.
“We will find a way to stop you,” Lament said doggedly. “God will not allow you to triumph.”
“Wild Magic is the magic of creation,” said the Demon Prince. “Perhaps we’ll remake God, or create a new God of our own. All things are possible under a Blue Moon.”
“Exactly,” agreed the Magus, and once again there was something in his voice that drew all eyes to him. “Everything that is happening now is happening because of me. I have planned for centuries to bring this about, manipulating the mortal world and certain useful people in it, to bring us all to this place, this moment. But not, alas, for the reasons you might suppose. The truth is, I intend to close the Gateway, separate reality from Reverie forever, and shut the mortal world off from every form of magic.” He smiled vaguely about him, as though inviting comments, and then continued. “I have lived a very long time in the world of men, and seen reason slowly replace superstition. I have watched the world become a better place as the wild madness was controlled and put aside. It just got in the way of humanity’s maturing.