Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

As the final words were spoken, Ayradyss flung herself from the train cab, metamorphosis already upon her. The white robes of the caoineag billowed upward, silvered, became the mylar dragon wings of the Angel of the Forsaken Hope. Naked legs, glimpsed momentarily, melded into the slender curving tail of the Mermaid Beneath the Seven Dancing Moons. Her hair remained dark, but her gaze became wild and inhuman; her sweet mouth lost its softness, curling with fierceness as her wings beat and carried her to the moire barrier.

To the appreciative war cries of the Scottish ghosts who leaned from the passenger cars of the Brass Babboon to watch the battle, she used the Sword of Wind and Obsidian to reduce the barrier to code and sickly mist that paled, dissipated, vanished, and was gone.

“Mother…” Jay whispered, hoarse with awe. “I never…”

But the Nymph of the Logic Tree had no attention to spare for the young man who was stepping down from the train’s cab to approach her. She twisted in the air, turning, spiraling outward as if seeking to orient on a summons that none of the rest could hear.

“Mother?” Jay called. “Ayradyss?”

The fierce eyes looked at him uncomprehendingly. Wings of mylar beat against the air, fish tail swam against currents those below could not see. She rose higher in the air.

“Mom! Ayradyss? Mom!” Jay’s voice broke, for clearly the creature in the air above them all was flying (or perhaps swimming) away from them. “Come back! Mom!”

Once again the dark eyes glanced down at him. This time, they might have held a touch of reproach—or perhaps what he saw was pity—or perhaps there was naught but indifference. With a final powerful effort of wings and tail the Child of the First Word soared into the highest reaches of the sky, so high that the jet stream became a river.

She dove into those sea green waters and was gone.

Jay stared after her as if the power of his attention would draw her down again, that he would find beside him the dark-haired young woman in the shrouding garments of the caoineag he was just barely comfortable accepting as what remained of his idealized mother. No such thing happened and what he found beside him was the crusader ghost.

“Ghost, what happened?”

“You called upon what she once was and she became it. Then her maker summoned her and she had no choice but to go.”

“What she once was?”

“All that was in the chant, laddie. Come back to the train. We mus’ be movin’ on or another such beastie as the last will be sent. I dinna doubt that its maker felt its goin’.”

Jay stumbled after, beginning to comprehend.

“My mother was like Alice’s father, a thing created by one of the gods of Virtu?”

“Aye, I wouldna call her a ‘thing,’ but from what I heard her tell the caoineag long ago that was the way of it.”

“The caoineag ? But she was the caoineag .”

“She took over from the one before, laddie.”

“Who was my mother’s maker, then? This Skyga?”

“Nae, i’ ‘twere the one called Seaga.”

Without waiting for instructions, the Brass Babboon stoked up its engines and brought them up to speed. Realities rippled by: Hindu ghosts awaited reissuance according to their deeds in life; coffins gaped beneath a sickle moon and the skeletons parodied the Maypole romp; fires burned with heat but without destroying the writhing bodies on which they fed.

Alice touched Jay lightly on one arm.

“She isn’t dead, Jay. Seaga must want her for the same reasons that Skyga wanted Ambry.”

“She never mentioned…” Jay trailed off, lifted his wrist and addressed the bracelet. “Did you know about this? Why didn’t you stop me?”

“I did not know,” the bracelet said. “As you recall, your father did not include full knowledge of Ayradyss in my programming.”

The crusader ghost rapped his chain to get Jay’s attention.

“I dinna think that the old laird ever knew Ayradyss’s origin.”

“How couldn’t he? They were married!”

“Aye, but he was from a far later part of her life. To him, she was the Nymph he met in romantic places in Virtu, not one whose past he tried to learn.”

The bracelet spoke, “That, at least, I can confirm. My files do record his shock at learning that the woman he had loved without consideration for time was merely a virtual creation, destined for the touch of moire.”

“How could he know so little?” Jay said. “He loved her!”

“He did,” Desmond Drum said, speaking for the first time, “but love does not guarantee accurate information. In fact, it almost always includes a certain degree of willful blindness.”

Jay could have wept for disillusionment and guilt, but the cab of the Brass Babboon and the passenger cars behind were crowded with those he had brought to help him fight for the Lord of Entropy. Nor was he the only one who had taken a loss in this battle—and his was far smaller than that of Virginia or even of Alice, who must suffer for her mother’s loss along with her own.

Alice was right. Ayradyss was beyond his helping—at least for now. If he had placed her in danger, then more than ever he needed to effect the rescue of the Lord of Deep Fields. Death had indicated that the trespass of the Ones on Meru into his realms would give him a certain reciprocal power over them. Certainly, Death’s actions would distract the gods from their various pawns.

Jay pressed other, less comforting, thoughts from his mind. He did not want to consider that the destruction or reduction of the Ones on High might also mean the ending of their creations. He did not want to consider that the games that Death would play with the gods might not suit his own needs. Such thoughts would do him no good now, no matter how true they might be.

Reaching up, he dragged on the whistle cord and bared his teeth in delight at its wild, angry shriek. His companions sensed his mood and let him be, though Alice squeezed his hand before going to sit beside Drum.

Dubhe, hanging by his tail, turned to face Jay.

“We’re almost there. I recognize the acid river. You ready to give orders?”

Jay nodded. “As ready as I’ll ever be. Pass the word to look for signs of battle. We may learn something from what has gone before. B.B., take us to the palace.”

“Right!”

“Crusader, tell the ghosts to sharpen their claymores. We’re almost there.”

“Aye!”

Humming rails, steel against stone, light songs for courage.

“Not much longer now,” Death said, looking down from the window of his palace. “We cannot hold out much longer. It is as I feared. Earthma’s child can draw on strengths beyond mine or hers alone.”

“‘Child’ seems a most inappropriate appellation for such a creature,” Tranto said, “for it is not at all childlike.”

“Except, perhaps, in its talent for destruction,” Death countered wryly.

“Still, I propose that we dub it ‘Antaeus’—the name of another warlike child of Earth.”

“Fitting.”

A howl, spare and lonely, seemed to echo the despair the Lord of the Lost would not permit himself to voice. Snake and phant barely heard it, so appropriate did it seem to this moment. Mizar raised his head, tongue drooping between spiked fangs, listened to hear if it would come again.

“Perhaps the bastard is a fitting replacement for me,” the Lord of the Lost continued on. “In some ways, it is my offspring. In the ways and customs of many lands and many times patricide is an honored and accepted way of claiming a kingdom.”