Philip Farmer: The Gates of Creation

Vala and Theotormon then advanced towards each other, taking a step forward slowly and in unison. It was as if they were partners in a formal dance, they moved so stately and in such matching rhythm.

Wolff crouched and waited. He had taken his suit off so that it would not hinder his movements. The sweat of tension covered his body. Neither he nor Luvah were armed. They had lost all their own weapons before they reached the secret room. And the room, to his dismay, had contained no arms. Apparently, Urizen had not thought it necessary. Or, much more likely, there were weapons hidden behind the walls, accessible only to one who knew how to find them. Urizen had not had time to give that information—if he had ever intended to do so.

The plan was to wait until Vala had passed Luvah, hidden on the other side of the hall. When he rushed out behind her, Theotormon would jump her. Wolff would hurl himself from his hiding place and help the other two.

Vala stopped several feet away from the diamond chandelier. Theotormon also stopped. She said, “Well, my ugly brother, it seems that you have kept your side of the bargain.”

He nodded and said, “So where is the spaceship?”

He went forward one step in the hope that she, too, would take one and so place herself nearer. Vala stood still, however. Mockingly, she said, “The entrance to it is just on the other side of that rose-shaped mirror. You could have gone to it and left me to die—if you had known about it! You witless filth!”

Theotormon snarled and leaped at her. Luvah came out from behind the statue but bumped into Chryseis. Wolff rose and sped straight at Vala.

She screamed and held up her right hand, the palm at right angles to her arm, fingers stiffly pointing toward the ceiling. Out of the palm shot an intensely white beam no thicker than a needle. She moved her hand to her left in a horizontal arc. The beam slashed across Theotormon’s neck, and his head fell off. For a moment, the body stood upright, blood fountaining upward from his neck. Then he fell forward.

Wolff whirled like a broken-field runner. He threw himself down on the floor behind Theotormon’s feet. Vala, hearing Luvah curse as he recovered from his bump into Chryseis, spun around. Evidently she thought that this was the nearest danger and that she had enough time to deal with Wolff.

Chryseis had reacted quickly. On seeing the head of the seal-man fall off and roll back behind Theotormon, she had dived for the protection of a statue. Vala’s ray took off a chunk of the base of the statue but missed Chryseis. Then Luvah was coming in, head down. Vala leaped adroitly aside and chopped down with the edge of the palm of her left hand. Luvah fell forward on his face, unconscious.

Why she had not killed him with the tiny beamer implanted in the flesh of her palm was a mystery. Perhaps she wanted someone to save as a torture victim, in keeping with the psychology of the Lords.

Wolff was helpless, or so Vala thought. She advanced towards him.

“You I shall kill now,” she said. “You’re too dangerous to leave alive for a second longer than necessary.”

“I’m not dead yet,” Wolff said. His fingers closed on Theotormon’s head, and he hurled it at her. He was up on his feet at once and running towards her, knowing that he did not have a chance but hoping that something would happen to deflect her aim long enough.

She raised her hand to ward off the grisly projectile. The beam split the head in half, but one section continued to fly towards her.

The ray, directed towards the ceiling momentarily, cut the gold alloy chain. And the half-ton diamond chandelier came down upon her.

Wolff was still charging while all this occurred. He dived onto the floor to be below her line of fire in case she was still living and could use the hand. She glared up at him, the light not yet gone from her eyes. Her arms and her body were pinned beneath the diamond, from beneath which blood ran.

“You… did it, brother,” she gasped.

Chryseis came out from behind the statue to throw herself into his arms. She clung to him and sobbed. He could not blame her for this, but there were still things to do.

He kissed her a few times, hugged her, and pushed her away from him.

“We have to get out while we can,” he said. “Push in on the third gargoyle to the left on the upper decoration on that mirror.”

She did so; the mirror swung hi. Wolff put his unconscious brother on his shoulders and started towards the entrance. Chryseis said, “Robert! What about her?”

He stopped. “What about her?”

“Are you going to let her suffer like this? It may take a long time before she dies.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Besides, she has it coming.”

“Robert!”

Wolff sighed. For a moment, he had been a complete Lord again, had become the old Jadawin.

He put Luvah on the floor and walked over to Vala. She twisted, and her hand came loose, a section of the shorn diamond falling over onto the floor. Wolff leaped at her and caught her hand just as the ray shot forth from the palm. He twisted her hand so violently that the bones cracked. She cried out once with pain before she died.

Directed by Wolff, the laser beam had half-guillotined her.

Wolff, Chryseis, and Luvah entered the spaceship. It rose straight up the launching shaft to the very top of the palace. Wolff headed the ship for the exit-gate, hidden in the mountains of the tempusfudger planet. Only then did he have tune to find out how Vala had managed to get Chryseis from her bed and out of their world.

“The hexaculum awoke me,” she said, “while you were still sleeping. It—Vala’s voice—warned me that if I tried to wake you, you would be killed in a horrible way. Vala told me that only by following her instructions would I prevent your death.”

“You should have known better,” he said. “If she had been able to hurt me, she would have done it. But then, I suppose that you were too concerned for me. You did not dare to take the chance that she might be bluffing.”

“Yes. I wanted to cry out, but I was afraid that she might be able to carry out her threats. I was so terrified for you that I was not thinking straight. So I went through the gate she designated, one of those gates that take you to a lower level of our planet. I deactivated the alarms before entering it, as she ordered. Vala was waiting in the cave where our gate took me. She had already set up a gate to take us to this universe. The rest you know.”

Wolff turned the controls over to Luvah so that he could embrace and kiss her. She began to weep, and soon he was weeping, too. His tears were not only from relief for having gotten her back unharmed and relief from the unrelenting strain of the experiences in this world. He wept for his dead brothers and sister. He did not mourn those who had just died, the adults. He mourned for his brothers and sister as the children they had once been and for the love they had had for each other as children. He grieved for the loss of what they might have been.