“Roger, Merlin. Go!” I pointed him out toward the obsidian city, and he took off, the cylinder spinning wildly, it spat out cable at a prodigious rate, leaving it to snake over the black sand surface. When Joniak had flown a sufficient distance away, the end of the cable stopped whipping around wildly. Hal ran over to the end, grabbed the cable and hauled it back toward Nero and his boxes.
Nero slipped the cable into place and locked the end down. “Secure. I have contact.”
Out by the edge of the city, the helicopter began its long, looping turn back toward us. It raced low over the terrain, darting forward and side to side like a dragonfly. The tail on the helicopter whipped around, pointed the craft’s nose at us, then it came up and the chopper raced back toward our position.
On its back-trail I began to see movement. The whole city seemed to have awakened with pale and almost corpselike creatures pouring out of the dark buildings. At that great a distance, I could not make out details, but I knew what I was looking at. Thousands and thousands of creatures like Mickey began to move inexorably toward us. I could see black patches on their bodies and knew that would be the carbon-fiber armor that Mickey had beneath his flesh. The automatons coming toward us were bald and, as nearly as I could make out, had a thumb, a forefinger and then no separation between or definition of the other fingers on their hands — meaning Pygmalion had decided that a thumb for grasping and a finger for using a trigger was more than sufficient for his warriors.
Worse than their appearance, which might have been considered elegant and economical in another setting, I sensed an intense desire in them to provide pleasure for their master. I knew Pygmalion had created them, and their desire to make him happy was backed by a miserable fear of failure. A low level of anxiety built within the mob heading toward us, and it increased in tandem with a sense of expectation.
Joniak’s Apache arrived back over us, and the drum spooled out another 40 feet of cable. The drum stopped spinning to the right, then rotated back and forth a couple of times before a cutting device severed the line. It dropped to the sand and the Apache brought itself up to an altitude of 100 feet before turning toward the city.
“Alpha, I have eight Hellfires. I can slow them down.”
“Negative, Merlin. Nail the cable and we’re all done for.”
Bat ran over with the other end of the cable and Nero Loring secured it. “Locked down.” He hit one button on the computer keyboard, then smiled. “On automatic.”
I smiled at him, then felt the mood of the creatures coming toward us change. I looked back and saw the vast majority of them had passed into the noose defined by the cable without molesting it. Their general level of anxiety dropped sharply for all of four seconds, then began a steep climb back up. I knew they were not smart enough to fear us, so that meant only one other possibility.
Pygmalion.
I had seen the diminutive Dark Lord in Japan, but he had not inspired fear in me at that time. In his own proto-dimension, however, the sight of him made my mouth go dry. Small and highly childlike, he walked through the air with a simple, almost casual gait that ate up tens of yards at a step. His approach brought with it an intensity of emotion that mixed incredulity and annoyance into an acid that ate away at my self-confidence and even my sense of self.
He stopped before us, hovering beneath the Apache, but its downdraft had no effect on him. He smiled, almost graciously, and bowed his head in my direction. “You seek to return to me Mickey and Jytte. How kind.” His head, which seemed too large for his body, wavered back and forth like that of a disappointed parent. “How incredibly stupid.”
The Dark Lord’s gaze swept over us, then he clucked to himself. “To think I was once like you, so puny and powerless. So imperfect.”
“And you are perfect?” I laughed.
“I am.” His head turned sharply toward Crowley. “And, no, that does not mean I am a perfect asshole. And, yes, I can read your mind, Crowley. I am a Dark Lord who was once human, so unraveling what you think is a complex cognitive network is but a moment’s idle diversion for me.”
Crowley’s shadow body folded its arms across its chest. “I take it then that ripping women and children apart, then rebuilding them, is something more taxing.”
Pygmalion laughed aloud, though it sounded forced to me. “I bestow perfection upon those who need it. Look at her, look at Jytte. When I found her she was nothing. She was more the battery running a plethora of machines than she was a human being.”
The Dark Lord ran his hand through the air, and a dust-devil sprang up. It sucked dirt in, coloring the funnel black, then it condensed into a small cloud hovering in front of him. Like a magician attempting to show no invisible wires or hidden supports, the Dark Lord waved his hands above and below the cloud. He packed it tightly without touching it, creating a glob of blackness that glistened like molten glass.
The black blob remained in the air and began to undergo changes without Pygmalion’s mimed input. It slowly resolved itself into the form of an infant female with no legs and no arms, just feet and hands at her hips and shoulders, respectively. The left side of her face started out of proportion with the right, and that difference became exaggerated as the statuette aged. The homunculus’ lopsided head tilted toward its right shoulder and features sharpened somewhat as its breasts grew full and its hair lengthened.
“This was you, Jytte. This is what you were when I found you, rescued you from your prison. You lived in a world of plastic and chrome, encased in a bubble in which you lived and slept. Your only human contact came from the praises your parents had digitized to be played back when you did something good. They were more proud of the new equipment that they could buy than they were of you, and their willingness to spare no expense for you marked them as saints among their friends.”
He pressed a hand to his own chest. “I took you away from all that. I gave you the arms and legs you had never known. I reshaped your face. I fixed all that was wrong inside. I made you the creature of your dreams. You know this is true.”
I looked over at Jytte and saw her tremble. I sensed in her utter panic and shame, but somehow she remained where she was. She wanted to run, she wanted to deny all he was saying, but she knew she could not. He was telling the truth, but not to help her.
He wanted her to have the truth to destroy her so he could feed off her tortured soul.
Jytte’s tear-streaked face jerked up a second before the barrel of her M-16. She snapped off a quick shot that exploded the glass parody of humanity. “That is not what I am now.”
Pygmalion looked at her with new respect. “No, no it is not.” His grin became hideous. “But it could be again, my dear, oh so easily.”
“I think not, Pygmalion.” I covered him with my MP-7. “We like Jytte just the way she is.”
The Dark Lord looked disappointed at me. “What? You’re not going to tell me that it will be ‘over your dead body’ that I work on her again? Ah, you’re the one Fiddleback trained, so I know better than to expect clichés from you. Mickey, destroy this one.”
I shot a glance at Mickey, but he made no move toward me. “No.”
Pygmalion’s head rocked back. “What have you done to him? Alien witch, this was your doing, wasn’t it?”
“My pleasure, Nicholas.” Rajani reached out and took Mickey’s left hand.
The Dark Lord’s scowl grew rather heavy, and I could sense anger and outrage rising in him. “You are fools all, but brave fools. Imagine thinking that you and that ancient helicopter could somehow destroy me. I may once have been human, but no more. I am a Dark Lord.”
“But still mortal, eh, Pygmalion?” I formed the picture of a cockroach being stamped into paste in my mind.
“If you could find a big enough shoe, yes,” he laughed, “but none of you can kill me.”
I saw Hal tap his stopwatch, and I smiled. “That’s not why we’re here, Pygmalion.” I let my gun point toward the ground. “We just wanted ringside seats when the
exterminator came to do the job.”
Chapter 30
Somewhere in the depths of the Hoover Dam, Paul Warner hit a switch that sent every last watt of power produced by the giant turbines into the Mercury grid. I had a mental image of light bulbs blowing throughout the area, and a part of me even regretted the panic and terror among those left in the darkness. By the same token, I knew that what they felt now would seem like paradise if we failed.
The crystalline tower crackled with energy as the surge hit it. My flesh and scalp tingled as we used the structure of the gate tower to send power through from Earth to Pygmalion’s private little domain. Even the diminutive Dark Lord turned to face the tower, his look of prideful awe etched in shades of blue on his face.
The gemstones turned a deep sapphire color and hummed. Gold and silver lightning shot through them, going around and around, bouncing from facet to flaw and on again, gamboling otterlike in the stones. The tower glowed so intensely that blue shadows fell over the land, and Pygmalion’s mindless troops slowed their approach.
I could see from Pygmalion’s face that the immense towering beauty enchanted him. He stared at it like a man watching the woman of his dreams come naked for him and him alone. The tower was his link to Earth, the key to his conquest of his old home, and we had supplied it with power enough to enable him to move any and all the troops across it he wanted. We had completed his grand design for him.
He studied it lovingly, from top to bottom, then he noticed the twin golden threads running from the base to the knot of us. He watched the line as if it were a fuse slowly burning down on a keg of dynamite. His rapture changed to horror and, for the first time ever, I saw fear in the eyes of a Dark Lord.
“What have you done?!” he screamed, already too late to stop it.
A golden wall of energy shot straight up into the heavens from the circle of cable the Apache had laid down. As it reached the bowl of the sky, it spread out until its very edges melted seamlessly into the golden atmosphere. The sky within the cylinder twitched, as if a membrane upon which a rock had been dropped. It rebounded and held, then twitched again more violently.
It held a second time, but as it snapped back into a golden shell above us, I felt a hissed groan shake the proto-dimension. I looked at Pygmalion and saw his body tense as if his pain and concentration could reinforce his dimension’s sanctity. A grin grew on his face, and I felt a sense of triumph from him, but neither lived very long.
The third assault did not test the elasticity of the dimension’s boundaries, but shattered it instead. The sky in the center of the cylinder cracked like an eggshell, and pieces of it fell inward. As they did so, they clung to the walls of the cylinder, and I saw its golden light grow brighter as the dimensional gate sucked in the energy Pygmalion had used to fortify his domain. Another piece fell inward, then two more disappeared into the dark void beyond the opening.
“NO!” Pygmalion’s mental scream of terror reached down into my soul and almost invoked pity for the little man hovering above me. For a second — a naked, raw, painful second — Pygmalion remembered what it was to be a human in the presence of one of the most powerful Dark Lords in infinity. His remembrance broke his concentration, and in that moment the top of the world popped off like a skull cap beneath a bone-saw in an autopsy.
Fiddleback hauled himself through into Pygmalion’s dimension, all spiderlike and full of fury. He landed amid the dimensional gate’s circle like an earthquake. The ground heaved hard enough to topple everyone from their feet, including those of Pygmalion’s warriors who had not been crushed beneath Fiddleback’s flat feet. The shock wave of his entry even buffeted Pygmalion and moved him back through the air.
As Pygmalion’s warriors stood back up, they attacked Fiddleback and started scaling his legs as they might mount the outside of a skyscraper. The Dark Lord, barely mindful of their assaults, shook his lower limbs as a cat might a wet paw. Pygmalion’s warriors, flung off Fiddleback with incredible ease, sailed through the air and died dashed and smashed against the buildings that had once been their homes.
The warriors had stood out like aphids on a rose stem, all pale against the yellow-green of his exoskeleton. Though I had seen him before, both when he tried to enter Phoenix through the dimensional gate built there and in the dimensions where he gave us Vetha, I had never had a clear frame of reference to help size him. it was true that he had batted a Scorpion Security copter out of the air in Phoenix, but he had never actually made it all the way in, so I discovered I had denied the external evidence of his true size. Each of his feet could have crushed a four by four square of residential homes, and were he to lie down, he could have bridged the two mile gap between City Center and the Lorica Citadel with ease.
Each footfall sending tremors through the world, Fiddleback advanced to the edge of the dimensional gate and beyond it. “My pet, you have zukzeeded. I have come.”
I picked myself up and craned my neck back to see all of him. “Your turn.”
The huge Dark Lord reached out with a forelimb, telescoping it out and spreading his three fingers like a net. Pygmalion appeared to be nothing more than a gnat to him, and proved just as elusive as he shot up and away. Fiddleback’s fingers closed with a thunderclap, but his tiny foe eluded his grasp.
Fiddleback’s mandibles spread apart and clicked back together as his head swiveled, and he followed Pygmalion’s course back into the black city. Fiddleback turned quickly and incredibly gracefully for a creature of such mass, then reared up on his hind two motile legs and stamped down hard with the front pair.
The tremor shook the buildings of the city and started toppling them like the card houses they were. Slab after slab crashed into a companion, and roofs collapsed down on the whole lot. Dust swirled up into the air as the seismic tide washed the city away. Hovels disintegrated like domino patterns, then covered themselves with a thick black plume of dust.
Fiddleback lunged in toward the city, then I saw something move within the dust. It shot up and out, a glassy black limb striking Fiddleback high and hard enough in the thorax to rock him backward. Fiddleback stumbled, and his hind two legs buckled like the legs of a stunned prizefighter. He stumbled, his abdomen touching the ground, and for a heartbeat he was vulnerable.
While powerful, Fiddleback was by no means invincible, and especially not so in another Dark Lord’s hideaway. Pygmalion’s knowledge of the place and his familiarity with its quirks and special rules could have supplied him the edge to rid himself of Fiddleback. A quick, sharp, decisive blow with the weapon he had formed could have won Pygmalion the day and spelled doom for humanity.
Ultimately, though, Pygmalion’s humanity proved his vulnerability. Had Pygmalion not succumbed to his vanity, he would have destroyed his former master. He could not resist the theatrics of having his weapon rise up out of the dark dustcloud enshrouding his capital. Likewise, he could not forsake the chance to batter, torture and punish his former master.
The weapon he built was magnificent and splendidly suited to what he wanted it to do. As he had done before with the dust of the earth, Pygmalion had used the broken obsidian of his city to create another homunculus. Cast in the form of Mickey and scaled to Fiddleback as Mickey would have been to a horse, the liquid stone warrior dropped into a martial arts fighting stance. Its mouth open for a scream, the statue danced forward with featherlight steps that mocked the fallen creature before it.
I keyed my radio. “Fire two, Mr. Joniak, at the stone man.”
The Mickey statue landed a solid kick to Fiddleback’s upper left shoulder. The stone foot crushed the exoskeleton, driving carapace shards back into the Dark Lord’s flesh. A cicada buzz of pain filled the proto-dimension, starting the tower to tremble like a tuning fork. Steaming black blood spurted from the wound, covering the statue, but neither stained it nor burned it.
Two Hellfire missiles streaked out from the Apache and rode flametongues all the way to the target. They impacted less than a two meters apart
and within two seconds of each other. Designed originally to make the Apache a deadly antitank war machine, their effect on a living-stone creature was nothing short of spectacular. Their high-explosive heads blew deep craters in the statue’s broad chest, spitting sharp obsidian shards in all directions.
More importantly, the first rocket created one set of vibrations in the volcanic glass and the other sent a contrasting shock wave through its crystalline lattice. Where new and old vibrations met, cracks began to form. The statue wavered and looked as if it would fall, then it recovered and raised a fist to crush Fiddleback’s skull.
Fiddleback struck hard, thrusting his upper right fore-limb out to stab into the statue’s chest. His fingers closed into a knotty fist, but it seemed as if the blow did less damage than the sensation of indignation Fiddleback focused on the statue and pulsed out through his fist. The blow landed with a sharp crack, the fist withdrew, then shot out again to pulverize the statue.
The colossus exploded like hammerstruck glass. As fragments big and small rained down over the landscape, Fiddleback climbed up onto his feet and darted forward. The trio of whole forelimbs dug through the rubble like a dog pawing a trash midden, then I heard an exultant buzz of triumph punctuated by a desperate and terrible scream.
Fiddleback turned toward us, having plucked Pygmalion from the ruins of his giant warrior. I heard sound coming from between the fingers of Fiddleback’s upraised hand. “He implorez you to help him, my pet. He zayz you are both human and must fight me.”
Bat laughed aloud. “It’s a bitch being puny and powerless.”
I nodded. “And human, that’s rough. Never know who you can trust.”
“True wordz, my pet, humanz cannot be truzted.”
Fiddleback’s fingers closed with wet scrunching sounds, then he smeared them clean on a piece of the statue’s broken thigh. “Not truzted at all.”
“Coyote, look out!”
I spun at the sound of Rajani’s voice and pulled back, allowing myself to flop down on my back. Something man-sized and swathed in black faded into existence behind me. Because of its unusual shape, I almost thought Fiddleback had managed to resurrect Vetha to use her against me, but the little bit of flesh visible around the eyes was beige, not ivory, and the dark brown eyes were human.