As fascinating as Pygmalion had found the glowing of his tower, so did Fiddleback look upon the destruction of his champion. He focused entirely on the battle between the scorpion-man and Mickey. The Dark Lord's emotions rollercoastered through the battle and finished somewhere close to begrudged respect for the minion who had rebelled and created his champion's undoing.
That distracted him enough for Bronislaw Joniak to bring the Apache around and unload the remaining Hellfire missiles. Had the Dark Lord not been in the city ruins, he might have been close enough to swat some or all of the missiles from the sky. As distant as he was, he could do nothing but watch impotently as the half-dozen missiles streaked in at their target and did to it what they had done to the statue, only more so.
I felt curiously detached as the missiles hit the glowing blue tower. Two exploded against the major support legs on the near side. The long crystalline supports shattered into a glittering hail and started the whole structure coming down. The rest of the missiles hit it at various points on up the structure, severing disks and blasting apart pillars.
I reflected for a second that those later missiles probably saved my life because, unlike the other people, I had not begun to run away from where we had been standing. Intellectually, I knew that the tower, with its legs shot out from it on our side, would likely fall right down on us. I should have been scared, but I could allow myself that luxury because I knew I would need it later. I knew as certainly as I knew respiration was necessary for life that the tower would not collapse on me, nor would it kill me.
That would have been too easy, too quick, too pleasant a way to die.
The crumbling tower released all its electrical and light energy into the sky. The golden cylinder vanished in an eyeblink, and the dome of the sky reappeared intact, though a curious bloody red stain shot through it. The freed electricity linked ground to sky with an argent lightning bolt, and the point where it touched the sky became an attractor for the blood.
Almost mechanically, I looked up at the Dark Lord that had created me. "You should have known better. I would never let you be in control of a live dimensional gate."
"I did, my pet." He raised himself up to his full height and St. Elmo's fire began to play over the horns, hooks and barbs on his exoskeleton. "I mizcalculated. You are too dangerouz to be allowed to live. I will kill you now."
"I'm the killer, remember, Fiddleback?" I laughed defiantly and ripped a hole into a nearby dimension. "I am the hunter, Fiddleback. Come kill me if you can because now, my master, we play my game and you will lose." I slipped through and closed the rift before his frustrated scream could reach me, then I began running for my life.
Someone less realistic than I would have put his running down to altruistic motives. He would have said he ran because he knew Fiddleback would pursue him to the exclusion of all others, thereby saving his friends back in Pygmalion's ruined domain. I knew that the first half of that idea was true, yet I could not guarantee he would not first destroy my comrades.
No, I ran because of sheer terror, at first. I knew it would take Fiddleback a microsecond to figure out what I had considered carefully since my return from the dead and my introduction to the Empress of Diamonds. The reason Fiddleback had required our aid to get him into Pygmalion's dimension was not because the other Dark Lord had hardened it against him, but because of the entropic barriers surrounding the pocket of proto-dimensions in which Pygmalion laired. By destroying the tower, I had managed to trap Fiddleback in an even smaller universe than the one in which he had previously roamed. Like a lobster blundering into a lobster pot, entry was easy for him, but escape would be impossible.
I knew that would fuel his rage and deepen his desire to tear me to bits. He could not allow me to live because I had successfully defied him on two occasions. On the first, in Phoenix, I had prevented him from entering the richest prize a Dark Lord could know: Earth. And here, now, I had brought him a step closer, then tricked and trapped him. I had done to a Dark Lord things that could only be rewarded with a lingering and painful existence.
I ripshifted into a dimension where I appeared in the sky above a molten sulfur surface. The noxious fumes choked and blinded me, but I fought off panic and allowed myself to fall, plunging faster and faster toward the fiery landscape. For a second, I toyed with the idea of suicide — knowing this death would be more merciful than any my former master would grant me — then I sliced through dimensional walls and dove on in to a new proto-dimension.
A rush of hot air boosted me into the new dimension. As the gap closed behind me, I heard an agonized roar as Fiddleback tore his way into the world of burning sulfur. I visualized his limbs bobbing in the choppy black ocean like French fries on the boil, but I knew that would be too quick and easy a release from my troubles. Fiddleback would never die by accident, only through a deliberate act of execution.
I fell a dozen feet and opened my eyes just as I skidded and bounced across waxen hills and through a rivulet of hot wax. It coated me, and I whipped my sodden hair out of my eyes. That action proved enough to cool the wax, leaving my hair frozen in a wind-lashed position. I laughed aloud at the absurdity of it, then reached up into the sky and pulled myself up into a new dimension.
I could feel Fiddleback out there, searching for me. His bath in the sulfur doubtlessly caused him to become more cautious. I felt him lay back, shifting on through to yet another dimension, then using his power as a Dark Lord to seek me out. Pursuit was not in his nature, for he preferred to sit back and, like a spider in a web, wait until prey came to him. He would analyze the dimensions in this entropic sphere, catalog them and start eliminating the ones that I would avoid. Gradually and carefully, he would isolate me and have me.
Of course, his search plan was predicated on his assumption that I desired surviving our encounter. Doubtlessly, it had begun to occur to him that I might not care about my life. I had, after all, already won in a way. I had gotten him to eliminate Pygmalion as a threat to Earth. More importantly, I had trapped him in an isolated niche. Once other Dark Lords learned of its existence and location, it would become a Pandora's Box that no one would open for fear of releasing Fiddleback.
Pulling myself up into Turquoise through a hole in the ground that closed after I left it, I realized his assumption concerning me was both right and wrong. I did want to live in the same way that each and every living thing desired life. It was the key to maintaining the competitive edge. Without it, literally, I would have let myself swan dive into the sulfur sea and have been done with it.
On the other hand, I found death a comfortable companion. All my life I had been trained to kill, and I had accomplished my appointed tasks in Fiddleback's name with skill and daring. The only enemy who had ever even detected my existence had been able to stop me, but only after the fact of his own death. He gave as good as he got, killing my old identity and rebirthing me in his image. Then I died again, at the hands of the Aryans, but I survived that to become good enough to defy a Dark Lord.
I got the impression that the third time, death would not be so kind to me.
I didn't care, as long as I took Fiddleback with me.
Had Fiddleback been hot on my trail, I would have detoured through a very cold proto-dimension ahead and down a bit. With the leisure given me by his shift in tactics, I cut a straight course through the dimensions to the one he had to have guessed I would run to. For someone desiring life, this would be a blessed sanctuary. He would know I had to go for it, and even as I approached it, I could feel him coming in after me.
I phase shifted into Tityus' dimension, appearing on top of a stony hillock overlooking the valley where the Titan lay bound to his rock. The vultures, a bronze flock, covered his chest like a scale mail shirt. Their metal beaks flashed in the noontime sun and came away bloody while he screamed with the voices of men beyond reason because of pain.
"That iz the leazt I will do with you, my pet." Fiddleback matched the elegance of my phase shift with on
e of his own. His upper left arm still hung broken and useless from the shattered shoulder socket, and the lower arm on that side had been burned to a blackened stump past the first joint. Despite that damage, or perhaps because of it, he looked as horrifying as ever.
"The game is over, Fiddleback. You lose."
"Do I? How arrogant you are!"
"A chip off the old block." I leaped down off my perch and moved toward my right and out of the range of his working forelimbs. "I am the seed you planted and the fruit you nurtured. Now comes to you the bitter harvest you deserve."
He stared down at me for a second, then I saw his head come up. He raised his forelimbs defensively and swept them through the air as if waving away a cloud of gnats. I sensed his frustration and annoyance spiking, but he had not even an inkling of his true danger.
The bronze vultures, programmed simply to pick out and feed upon the largest creature in the dimension, abandoned their daily fare and sailed in at Fiddleback. His flailing arms batted some out of the air, crushing their delicate mechanisms and scattering them across the landscape. Still others ducked beneath his arms or attacked his back and eyes. Over a dozen went immediately for the hole the statue had opened in his upper left shoulder.
A wave of anger rolled off Fiddleback, and I felt reality begin to warp around him as he started to phase shift. The warping stopped instantly, and reality snapped back into place. More vultures hit him as Fiddleback's right fore-limbs raked at the air to open a rip-cut to another dimension. His triple fingers scraped along something that might as well have been slicker than oily ice and harder than diamond, because he could get no grip and could not pierce the proto-dimension's flesh.
"Now The Dark Lord looked down at me, his pulsar eyes locking the green pupils on me. "You do not want to be trapped with me, Coyote. Free me, and I give you your life."
I laughed aloud and watched the birds tear at him. They tore bloody black hunks from his flesh and flung them away from his body. They did not bother to feed, just greedily dug at him. They burrowed into his exoskeleton, and for each one he plucked from his body and crushed between fingers, a half-dozen more assaulted him.
On the ground, I saw gears rolling along with a directed purposefulness. It felt as if I were watching a stop-animation film, because the broken bits and pieces of birds gathered themselves up into piles that slowly resolved themselves into bigger and stronger vultures. Those metal raptors, some large enough to carry passengers or cargo back on Earth, slashed at Fiddleback with renewed vigor.
The sky above the Dark Lord glowed with the bronze colors of a sunset, yet the sun remained at its zenith. The birds descended in a great cloud and looked like an angry swarm of bees. Their mechanical shrieks filled the world with an industrial cry of victory.
As I watched Fiddleback falter and go down, I saw something else happening to him. The gobbets of flesh unceremoniously stripped from him did not lie still on the ground. I saw them twitch, and all the sharply torn edges folded down into themselves until each of the pieces of skin became pouchlike. Each of these cocoons dried quickly and, as they did so, took on one of a rainbow of colors, from ivory to onyx.
Something struggled within the fleshy pods, then the pods themselves split along a dark seam. A frighteningly familiar head thrust it self through the opening, then an eight-legged creature dragged itself to freedom. As it crawled out of the opening, I noticed the far end of the cocoon was sucked on inside itself. Ultimately, it rolled on down and, insideout, sealed itself to form the Myrangeikki's abdomen.
More and more of these cocoons transmogrified themselves into Myrangeikki individuals. I looked back at Fiddleback's body and saw, through a swirling cyclone of vultures, where other Myrangeikki were popping free of the Dark Lord's flesh from a million boils, in a process akin to that which had birthed Vetha.
"It is as you expected it would be, isn't it?"
I turned to my right and nodded to the Empress of Diamonds. "Different mechanism, similar result." I pointed out at the herd of Myrangeikki now working together to pull pods away from the carcass, quickly sorting them by color and other factors that escaped my notice. "I suppose I could have guessed, after having seen how Vetha had been reconstituted from Fiddleback, that the rebirth of his race might be possible."
Two of the ivory Myrangeikki came to me bearing a cocoon the size of a football and placed it in my hands. I felt life stirring inside it. The outer surface went from a soft supple leather to the dry crispness of an autumn leaf. The seam drew itself along the dorsal surface like mercury in a thermometer climbing upward on a scorching day. The creature inside it stirred, then the pod split open and it began to emerge.
It grabbed on to my forearm with its mandibles to pull itself free of the cocoon. The grip did not feel that hard, yet I knew its lack of ferocity came not from a lack of intent to injure, but from a physical inability to generate that much power. Stunted forelimbs likewise struggled to free the Myrangeikki from the cocoon, so I helped pulled the pod down and smoothed it as it closed to cover a misshapen abdomen.
Shifting my grip, I dumped the dwarf Myrangeikki onto its back with its soft thorax held firmly in my left hand. It opened its jaws, freeing my right arm, then I supported its abdomen and held it like a baby.
"You were my pet, Coyote," it buzzed, "and now they give me to you zo I can be yourz."
Fiddleback's head swiveled toward my companion as she slipped her diamond pendant from around her neck and fastened it around his. "Emprezz, I zenzed your hand in thiz when I could not depart. Well played. Will you zalvage me, now?"
The Empress of Diamonds kissed the deformed Myrangeikki on the forehead and took him from my arms. "You are beyond even the salvation I offer." She laid him on the ground, then gestured at him. His limbs plucked ineffectually for a second at the diamond pendant, then he lay quiescent.
"Thuz it endz," he buzzed.
As I watched, the diamond began to flow out along the sliver strand in both directions. It hardened on the chain as if crystalizing from super-saturated solution, instantly wreathing his throat in blue-white splendor. Then, as if the two diamond waves had hit and passed through each other at the clasp, the gems thickened as their momentum took them around again to race toward the pendant itself. There they shot through each other yet again, turning the necklace into a diamond collar.
As the opening around Fiddleback's neck began saw-toothed contractions, I searched his emotions for fear or anger. I found neither, but instead uncovered a mildly nostalgic sense of disappointment and a smugness that cut at me like a cold wind. He looked up at me when the growing diamond torus bit into his neck, and his mandibles parted ever so slightly.
"Thuz it beginz, my pet"
The doughnut became a disk and Fiddleback's head slid free of his body.
The Empress of Diamonds stood on Natch's tiptoes and gave me a peck on the cheek. "I know, he seemed so benign, but he was that way when he started his climb."
I looked out at the other Myrangeikki. "There is no chance they will unite again?"
"Not without another synthesizer."
Synthesizer. I knew that was what I could become as a Dark Lord, yet I could not bring myself to even dream of pulling Fiddleback's people together and again subjecting them to the tortures they had endured while part of him. No, while I lived, while I breathed, they would be left alone here or in another dimension. They had endured enough.
The Empress took my right hand in her left, then swirled her right hand through the air. I saw reality begin to warp with her motion, as if she were stirring a liquid and distorting its reflection. "Come with me, Coyote. We must return to your friends and let them know of my victory."
"Your victory?"
She smiled in a most un-Natchlike way and, tugging me through to the dimension where Pygmalion died, amended her statement with, "Our victory, my sweet, of course, our victory."
Whatever it had been before, Pygmalion's dimension had weathered his demise not at all well. As the Em
press of Diamonds brought me through, I sensed the life ebbing from the countless warriors Pygmalion had created and from the world that had hatched them. With his death came the warriors' death, and their despair washed over me like an icy rain. Bereft of its Dark Lord, yet still deceptively bright and warm, this proto-dimension had become nothing more than a place of death.
The strongest pocket of life surrounded my friends. They appeared surprised as the person they saw as Natch led me through a dimensional rift like a young girl dragging a reluctant suitor along on an idyllic spring walk. She let my hand drop from her grasp as she giggled and pirouetted. She smiled at Bat, then skipped and spun on toward where the tower had fallen.