A Gathering Evil

  "And the stopper?"

  "Singing a song. Her favorite Christmas hymn, 'Silent Night'!"

  A particularly strong and close bolt of lightning silhouetted Bat at the window. "Get her singing, Loring, or we'll all be doing a Requiem! Jesus, Caine, look at this!"

  The rainbows broke loose of their citadel moorings and began rotating above City Center like a helicopter blade. As they spun faster and faster they blurred together into a flat disc that slowly began to arc down into a bowl that covered the city. The light show continued to whirl at a frenetic pace and lighting strikes increased, skewering the luminescent dome for a second or two, then being sucked up into its maelstrom.

  Then the bowl's edge touched the maglev line. It continued to spin for a moment, then instantly stopped. Pressure built within the dome, and my ears popped. Below us, in the citadel, windows imploded. I heard my heart begin to pound inside me and I found breathing difficult. I tried to step back away from the window but the very air felt thick as wet cement.

  Suddenly the center of the bowl blew upward, and the whole funnel-shape began to spin again. I fell backward and lost sight of the sky for a second. When I came back up it had all changed, and I felt liked I'd dined on razor blades and ground glass for the last three days.

  The whole brilliant funnel had vanished, leaving in its wake a green and red neon latticework that might as well have been the funnel's bones. Around it and through it I could see the storm clouds, and though the center seemed to go up through the clouds, I saw nothing but a void in the heart of the funnel. Lightning strikes from outside it only hit the lattice, making it glow golden-yellow at that point for a second, then it returned to the red or green color it had been.

  I shouted over at Jytte and Loring. "You better do something. This is really weird."

  Jytte's fists knotted in frustration. "The Witch knew what she was doing. Most of these brain slices are from the left side of the brain. All math and logic, very little language."

  Loring knelt next to the machine. "Come on, Nerys, you have to do it. 'Silent night, holy night...'"

  The machine's membrane answered him with, "I can't, Daddy. I can't."

  "Think of something!" I stood and watched the first blue tendril hook itself over the edge of the funnel. "Bat, get the hell out of here, take Natch with you. I don't know how far you'll get but...."

  Bat shook his head as a second tendril appeared over the event horizon. "I don't run." He slapped a new clip into the carbine and worked the charging lever.

  The tendrils solidified as the creature hauled itself up through the hole dug in the sky. The creature's outline hardened into a carapace studded with hooks and bumps and claws. Whereas before it had been smoky gray and insubstantial, it was now a light brown that was his true color. Like the Plutonians he had doubtlessly fashioned in his own image, a leathery flesh covered his body. His head and face were pure arachnid, with compound eyes and sharp mandibles which could have taken the top off one of the Goddard Towers were he inclined to crane his neck toward it.

  The creature hung on the lattice with one hand while reaching out with the other. The arm telescoped out to extend from its shoulders, near the center of the city, to the base of the Lorica Citadel. With one of its triform fingers it nudged the burning body that had been the Witch, then brought the finger to its mouth and it tasted of the ashes.

  A buzzing, popping voice sounded in my head. "Thiz one never underztood. Inferior, with pretenzionz."

  "Jytte! Do something!"

  "There is nothing to do, Caine. The parts of the brain we have can't sing!"

  The creature's head rotated around to focus on me. "My pet, you oppoze me?"

  "I am not your pet!"

  "Defianze iz powerful. How to break your rezolve and leave your mind intact?"

  "Please baby, just sing it for me," Loring begged the black box.

  "I can't, Daddy."

  The creature reached out for me, but as it did, lightning struck the lattice in two places. The talons grasping at me flashed into their blue outline form and sparked from the metal window frames. They passed through them and left the stink of ozone in their wake as I jumped back, and Bat ducked beneath them.

  "He's still vulnerable! Sing the song!" I shouted.

  "I can't," the machine wailed.

  Not knowing if the machine had visual sensors or not, I pointed at the creature. "You have to. If you don't, Fiddleback will kill your father."

  "No, not my daddy!"

  I was staring at the machine, but the voice that answered me came from my left. As I glanced over in that direction a little girl in a Plutonian silktunic ran across the room and hugged Nero Loring. "Daddy, I won't let him hurt you. I won't."

  "Nerys!" Loring held her out at arm's length, then hugged her to him. "'Silent Night,' you have to sing 'Silent Night.'"

  "Silent night, Holy night," the girl began obediently.

  I looked out at the funnel. It looked as bright as ever. As I watched a helicopter lifted off from one of the landing pads on City Center and climbed toward Fiddleback.

  "That's Scorpion," Bat assured me.

  "Jytte, this isn't working."

  Fiddleback reached down and contemptuously swatted the chopper from the sky. It exploded when his talons moved through it. Flaming debris fluttered down through the air and another Frozen Shade panel died with a flash.

  Bat looked over at the computer. "Jytte, this really isn't working!"

  Natch pointed at the black box. "Nerys isn't hitched into the machine."

  Jytte reached out and took hold of the two cables attached to the bottom of the brain-fan. She tugged once, and they didn't come lose. Her perfect lips peeled back away from even white teeth, transforming her babydoll face into a mask of fury. She pulled again and one came free, then a third yank ripped the other one loose.

  A little line of yellow lightning arced between the two receptor pads. "This will sting, Nerys, but it won't hurt you. Sing, child sing!"

  Two little puffs of smoke went up as Jytte pressed the electrodes to the girl's temples. Nerys stiffened, her head jerking backward, then she craned her head down and stared straight out at Fiddleback. "Silent night, Holy night," she sang in a trembling voice.

  Every note she sang started the funnel's lines quivering as if they were guitar strings or piano wires. The light dimmed behind the ripples running along lines and burned white-gold at the peaks. Sparks ignited at the juncture points and teased lightning strikes from the thunderheads.

  "All is calm, all is bright."

  Fiddleback's outline flickered and wavered. Blue light pulsed along his outline. The lines on the funnel to which he clung began to melt like ice beneath a blowtorch.

  "Round yon virgin, mother and child. Holy infant so tender and mild."

  Fiddleback's image began to stretch and fade. The funnel lost its rigid shape, and the rainbow lights began to make their return. They started swirling through the sky and twisted Fiddleback around and around until it he looked more like a piece of rotelli than he did a Plutonian. His arms, which had become little more than blue lines, twisted about him like razorwire coils.

  "Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace." Fiddleback's grip on the vortex failed, and the rainbow whirlpool sucked him up and out of the world like a cockroach being flushed down a toilet.

  Awakening at the heart of a lightning storm, with thunder shaking the very earth with its violence, is not a pleasant experience. Glass crunched beneath my feet as I stared out through the penthouse's broken wall. I let my left hand rest on one of the metal supports, and I dared the storm to strike it and consume me, gambling that it would not.

  The thunderstorm we had witnessed so far was but an overture to the elemental fury that lashed the city. Mother Nature reshaped and released all the energies that had been stored up in the funnel. Repeated and nearly constant lighting strikes lit the building in stark, skeletal colors. It almost seemed to me that the Earth, having been left so open to a
ssault from another dimension, wished to scour the wound clean and ensure that no vestige of the infection remained.

  Captain Brad Williams had been on duty that night and arrived with a contingent of security people shortly after the funnel dissipated. Williams recognized Nero Loring and accepted Nero's story of an electrical short that caused all the damage. I could see in his eyes and sense in his being that he didn't truly believe what he was told, but he desperately wanted a rational explanation to let him deal with what he had seen. He took Nero and Nerys off and Coyote's three aides with them, leaving me alone with the storm and my thoughts.

  So much had happened in such a short time that I really did not know how to assess all of it. Ten days ago I was a null. I did not know who or what I was. Over the next week and a half I discovered, apparently, that I was an assassin who had been hired to kill Nero Loring. In a 180-degree turnabout, I worked with him to destroy the creature that had supplanted his daughter and ordered me to kill him. Along the way I had killed a pair of traitors in Coyote's organization and helped defeat an extradimensional creature bent on the domination of humanity.

  Pet had turned against master and, just this once, the pet got away with it. I labored under no illusion that Fiddleback had been destroyed. A creature capable of crafting the sort of intricate and long-term plot that would culminate in creating a city-sized dimensional gateway would not venture everything on attempting to break through. I had been instrumental in his failure, and I knew his retribution would be both direct and cruel.

  Lost in thought, I wandered through the Witch's shattered domain. As things in the Lorica Tower began to return to normal, power flooded back into the penthouse and I found a wall-projection television playing in the back. On it I caught a news special concerning the happenings in the Lorica Citadel and above the city. The newscaster reported things straight—though Fiddleback did not image well on video—then showed a clip with the head of the Phoenix Skeptics commenting on what had taken place. Their executive director dismissed it all as a combination of St. Elmo's fire, an unusually bright and southern display of the aurora borealis and mass hysteria.

  He was very convincing—wrong, but convincing. I could imagine a whole host of people—people like Brad Williams—denying the evidence of their own eyes in favor of his description. In an odd way I knew I had functioned like that throughout my life. I had seen all the signs of what was going on with Leich, but I denied the evidence of my own eyes because the explanation—that he was regenerating after crippling and fatal wounds— stood incredibly far outside the possibilities I'd been taught to accept.

  I had seen Leich. I had seen the Witch in her true form. I'd been to dimensions outside the one in which our world existed. I had experienced things that forced a redefinition of the term "normal." And yet, were I to tell the Skeptics what I had seen and done, I would have no corroborative evidence of my claims, and they would dismiss me as being deluded or delusional.

  Suddenly I understood part of what had to drive Crowley and Coyote. They were men who realized that things existed outside the normal realm of human experience. Crowley had said Coyote would be blind to the dimensions, so he limited his work to Earth, while Crowley himself worked elsewhere. Instead of trying to explain the nature of the universe to a populace unable to accept or understand it, they took on the responsibility of responding to and resolving problems that most people refused to acknowledge as existing.

  "I think you understand things very well, Tycho."

  I turned around as a young man about my height, with dark hair, moustache and goatee casually strolled through the devastated penthouse. He smiled as I held my hand out to him. "Tycho Caine. You must be Coyote."

  The man laughed, and I caught familiar notes in his voice, but I could not place where I'd heard it before. "This is the second time you have made that assumption." He pulled off a gray glove and offered me his right hand. A gold ring flashed on it.

  "Crowley? But you're so young. You can't be..."

  "Perhaps not in the logic of this world, but it is possible." His grip was firm and he pumped my arm with strength. "It was a decidedly distasteful experience."

  I narrowed my eyes. "You took Nerys's body to the dimension of Tartarus where Tityus regenerates everything the vultures have eaten in a day."

  He nodded. "Because of the way the storage areas worked, Nerys was not really dead. I took her there directly, which was not an easy journey. Because enough of her brainstem had been left behind, she regenerated her brain. It took six months, but I am pleased to see the effort was worth it."

  I stared at him. "Time, I take it, moves a lot faster there than here?"

  "In reality it does, but when there it hardly seems so. She regenerated her brain, and I regenerated the damage of my infirmity—old age. If it were not for what it did for Nerys, I would think it a hideous place. Nothing to do but shoot vultures and listen to a barely literate Titan bellow curses against Apollo all day and night."

  "You brought Nerys here? I didn't see you."

  "You were a bit occupied. I left quickly because I needed to cover my tracks. I also made contact with Coyote." The man's green eyes narrowed. "If you are willing, I will take you to him."

  "Please."

  Crowley grabbed a hold of my combat harness. "Blank your mind. Concentrate on perceiving nothing and yet everything. Control your breathing. You want to open a portal between you and the dimensions outside this one."

  "I understand." I took in a deep breath and let it play out slowly. I forced my mind to forget the aches and pains I felt, and I took myself deep inside. I imagined the wall of reality to be like a theater curtain, and I gently probed it for the slit that would let me pass through it.

  "Good."

  I felt a tug on my belt as Crowley and I moved forward. Tantalizing flashes of color strobed past, each a window into a different dimension. Some, perhaps those closest to and most like what Earth had once been, felt warm and buoyed my spirits. Others we brushed by kindled bloodlust or visions of depravity I never would have imagined unaided. As we moved on things became darker and yet more warped, but the only way I can describe them is to note I felt colder and colder as we progressed.

  Finally we came to a bare, arid landscape that looked at once to me to be the red planet where I had seen Nero Loring. As my eyes adjusted to it, however, I realized that it was red only in a circle that centered itself on Crowley's shadowform. Outside that sharp line the world was rendered in white, black and a varied array of gray shades. Though a sun burned in the black sky, I still felt cold.

  Outside the circle I saw a man. He seemed small, but I knew that was more than a function of his appearing as if projected on a screen, instead of actually standing there. He looked fortyish, with a full head of hair and strongly chiseled features. His dark eyes had a depth to them that I could see in spite of the flat image. A nervous tic tugged at the corner of his right eye, but I would have expected a man who had done what all he had to show some effect of the stress.

  He smiled openly, erasing some of the worry from his face. "You've had a busy evening, Mr. Caine. You have my sympathies concerning Ms. Fisk, and my awe that you had prepared yourself in case Pell was not the only traitor. I had not considered that possibility. So the code word for Marit was Salome. I assume the others had similar biblical mnemonics."

  "Yes." Even though it had had gone dead, I checked to make sure I had switched my radio off. "Bat was Sampson, Natch was Delilah and Jytte was Lilith. Loring was Adam."

  A meteorite died in the sky behind him. "And Crowley? Was he rigged to explode, or did you trust him?"

  I glanced over at the shadow man and shrugged. "Lucifer."

  Coyote paused for a moment, then nodded. "You are very much the man I thought you were. You deserve answers, and you shall have them, finally."

  "I would like that very much. Who am I?"

  The small man folded his arms across his chest. "I must apologize to you for having manipulated you as grossl
y as I did. As Crowley has told you, I am unable to go freely through the dimensions to deal with problems. I knew I would need someone like you who could do that, but to get you to work for me I needed to have something you wanted. In your case, it was your identity. I apologize because I have known who you are since before you awakened, and I have known this because I stole your memory in the first place."

  My jaw dropped open. "You what? All of this has been a sham?"

  "Yes, but a necessary one, I think." Coyote's face hardened. "I'll give you the thumbnail sketch, then Jytte can provide you with a file that will confirm all I am telling you. You are, as you have surmised, an assassin. You are one of the best in the world, probably in the top seven, definitely the top ten. This I know because, well, I know it. You have an impressive record, especially against targets that must be hunted down. You are one of Fiddleback's favorites, and this is the reason you were brought to Phoenix to kill Nero Loring. You have never missed a target, to my knowledge, and your record still holds. You are an impressive and terrifying man.

  "In researching you, however, I did discover two flaws in you. You have very expensive taste in rental cars, which allowed us to get a line on the identity you used here. You chose the name Tycho Caine, which I find interestingly symbolic: Tycho—derived from the Greek tychon, 'hitting the mark.' And Caine, of course, was his brother's slayer. Everything else you know about Tycho Caine is a fabrication that I have created because, as you have been known to do, after your hit you engaged in a bout of gambling. I suspect this is because, after you murder someone, you want to give the universe a chance to get even with you. My agents found you, drugged you and after we built up the Tycho Caine we wanted you to search out, they released you."

  "Wait, wait, wait." I turned to Crowley. "How much of this did you know?"

  He gave me an enigmatic shrug. "Enough. Coyote confided in me he would be turning one of Fiddleback's tools against him, and he asked for my help. I gave it to him and to you."