Karl Schroeder - Lady of Mazes

Aaron turned and gave Filament a hoist into the eschatus machine. Kale had backed up against it, shock and fear on his face. "I shut down inscape for a mile around!" shouted Maren recklessly. "Your precious dream world has been snuffed out like a candle!"

Aaron growled in fury and once again swung his gun up. "Bring it back or I'll kill you," he said.

"Put down that toy, little boy," she said. Aaron pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. He cursed and threw the gun down. Maren laughed at him; then Aaron reached down and snapped up the sword Doran Morss had dropped. He stepped forward and, with a single slash, cut Maren Ellis's throat.

Maren's face showed pure surprise as the impact knocked her into the hurricane of rioting people. She vanished in a whirl of flailing limbs and screaming faces.

Aaron stood staring after her. His hands were shaking; but all the anger had drained out of him. He seemed to be trying to say something.

Deafening thunder rolled out of the sky. The anecliptic and Book forces had been fighting a delicate battle overhead, neither side willing to risk killing the helpless people below. Now the black and red nightmares of Raven's people were diving out of the air, sending bolts of fire toward the edge of the park. In seconds the tech lock generators would be destroyed.

"This way!" Peaseblossom slapped Livia on the back. He was carrying Cicada across his shoulders like a sack of grain. He jerked his chin to the left, where Livia saw Doran Morss and Qiingi standing back to back, swords drawn. They were guarding a crumpled catwalk that lay across the ground — just why, she couldn't tell for a few moments.

Then she raised her eyes and saw that the catwalk was affixed to a cable that had not completely touched down. It rose slowly across a hundred meters until it was above the heads of the crowd, and its far end draped over the top of a building outside the park.

"Come on!" Qiingi pushed into the hysterical mob and the others followed. Livia found herself flanked by Pease-blossom on one side and Emblaze on the other. Both struck out fiercely to protect her as they edged their way along the catwalk.

She looked back at the eschatus machine. Aaron stood next to it, oblivious to the crowd, watching her. She met his eyes for a second, then turned away.

Staggering and pulling, they made it up the cable and above the heads of the crowd. Livia ran along the catwalk, and as she ran she found she was singing — no one song, just nonsense scraps, anything she could think of to drown out the screaming of the crowd below her.

Silence fell as if a switch had been thrown and for a few seconds all Livia could hear was her own ragged voice wailing the chorus to some old ditty. Then she staggered to a stop and looked down.

The sleepwalkers had frozen in place, like bots with their power cut off. In midscream, midblow, they had stopped as inscape came back on. All across the park those who had fallen were standing and those standing lowered their arms to their sides and closed their mouths.

"Hell," said Doran. "She's gonna set it off. Hurry!" He ran up the steepening slope of the catwalk without looking back.

They made it to the edge of the park without any apocalyptic blast, though Livia's shoulders itched in anticipation. They were able to hop down off the catwalk to the roof and clamber into the building through a shattered upstairs window. And they made it down to the street without incident.

The echoes of the battle were fading. Chunks of smoldering black and crimson monster lay everywhere as Livia stepped into the road and looked back at the crowd. The flying creatures from the anecliptic fleet were circling directly above the eschatus machine now, firing their lasers down into the black fog that had coalesced densely around it. But everywhere else, the battle seemed to be winding down.

Doran glanced over at Livia, and seemed to see her for the first time. "Haver!"

"Not Haver," she snapped. "Kodaly."

"Kodaly ... " His eyes widened with apparent recognition. "So that's what ... "

In the next street, they found the bodies of Wester-haven's peers among the blackened remains of tech lock machinery. It seemed too late for shock or sorrow, even when livia spotted the face of Rene Caiser on one of the bodies.

As they stood gazing at the carnage, a shadow flickered across the road. Livia instinctively ducked; she heard laughter from above, and then Choronzon the god was touching down lightly not three meters away.

He looked untroubled by the death and destruction, his hair perhaps in a bit more boyish disarray than usual. He bowed to the silent group and said, "At your service, madam, sirs. I heard you needed a bit of liberating, so I thought I'd drop in."

His callousness made Livia want to throw up.

Emblaze had also recovered her poise. "We're grateful for your help," she said to Choronzon.

"Are we?" snapped Livia. "That remains to be seen." She stepped in front of Emblaze. "Choronzon, I don't want to appear ungrateful, but I'd like to know what you're going to do now that Teven's been retaken."

"Do?" He looked innocently surprised at the question.

"Who rules here now?" she asked bluntly. "Will you leave us in peace to restore the manifolds? Or did you make some other arrangement with the annies while you were on your way here?"

"Livia Kodaly." He shook his head sadly. "You don't know when's the wrong time to pick a fight, do you? I've just taken this world, Liv. Leave it to those of us who accomplished that — those of us who made this world in the first place! — to decide what will happen next"

"In other words," she said, "you're not going to leave us alone. Are you?"

He crossed his arms. "Things will have to change, certainly."

"No more manifolds?"

"No more manifolds. I didn't like the results of that experiment. Maren went too far."

"Maybe. But it wasn't all bad. The tech locks ... "

"Are officially banned. I'll be wiping every last repository that might hold their plans before I leave. And the annies have agreed that Teven Coronal should join the rest of the Archipelago. Of course, there's the little problem of what to do about that," he crooked a thumb at the distant eschatus machine, "and about the Good Book in general. We'll have a fight on our hands, no doubt about it. But I'm sure we'll win. And then we'll build better firebreaks. Ones that will hold for a million years."

Livia looked at Qiingi. He gazed back despairingly and in his eyes she saw the death of Ometeotl. Choronzon was talking about the end of any human person's right to decide the shape of their own world. By the time he was done, an invincible tyranny would have settled over the human race, for all time. What was that term the versos used to describe it? Wallpaper: an endless repeating pattern of identical lives. If men and women could no longer select the technologies that would frame their lives, the Archipelago might remain a wondrous, dazzling place to live but it would never change. No man like Qiingi would ever exist again because no place like Raven's country could exist. Neither would there be drummers, nor the slow measured beat of lives lived in the dream-time of Oceanus.

"I think it's about to go off," Emblaze said, pointing.

They turned to look; the black cloud was beginning to glow an electric blue. A faint hissing sound reached livia's ears in the eerie post-battle silence.

"You'd better be going," said Choronzon. "I'll deal with whatever comes out of that explosion."

Livia was no longer listening. She looked around at the others: Emblaze and her lads, Qiingi, Doran Morss, and the haggard, shattered Sophia. She turned to gaze across the skyline of Barrastea, and thought of the strange twist of fate that had made her the Ariadne to Westerhaven's lost people. It was a fate she would never have chosen for herself, but it was a fate she could no longer avoid or deny.