John Wright - Titans of Chaos

Vanity was clever this time. The floor on which we lay now acted like a platform that shot downward. Deck after deck swooped away from us as we rode the high-speed elevator downward, into ever-vaster holds the Argent Nautilus now somehow held within her tiny hull.

None of the wounded even had to move.

The square of storm-stuff overhead dwindled to a point, and the falling blue eye of Victor had trouble coming down fast enough, meteorlike, to return to its master's hand.

Slam. A door of steel slid shut behind us. Bang. Another. Boom. A third. Apparently Vanity knew how to run her powers in reverse, and create barriers where none had been before.

Quentin remembered me. He said, "Colin, wish Amelia back to health again. Victor, you concentrate on Vanity."

Colin pulled himself by his bloodstained hands over to where I was. He put an arm around my shoulders to prop me up. I felt a warm sensation enter my body, clarity of mind. Colin said softly,

"Okay, Amelia. That is just red ink. Let go of your fear and the pain will let go. Snap out of it."

With my head up, I could see Victor bent over Vanity like a one-eyed ghoul over a corpse. An antiseptic smell and a sense of heat issued from his body, as if he had projected some kind of weird force field to sterilize everything in an envelope around him. He had pried open her chest cavity with several metal tentacles and clamps formed from his suit, and a dozen more tentacles were reaching into the heap of organs, performing a dozen operations with a score of instruments, tiny waldo-hands, molecular engines made of red blood or clear fluid.

Victor had no face. His one forehead-socket was empty. I saw he had perched his one eye on her breastbone, to get a better look at the situation, and it had grown dozens of strands of fiber-optic cable, and these glassy strands had sent little camera-eyes snaking into all her major veins and organs.

I heard the hissing noise of a bone saw.

It was a disgusting sight, much worse than my earlier imaginings.

Quentin was muttering: "Oh, dear sweet Jesus, save her life. Gods of Heaven, of wood, of Hell, save my Vanity, I pray you, if you have ever loved or known love, or if you ever knew horror and pain and fear you wished to flee."

The shadowy cat thing must not have been entirely dead or dissolved, because the black stain on the planks under Quentin's feet now spoke up: "Son of the Gray Sisters, I will restore your dying whore. Merely say the words, my soul is thine."

Quentin gritted his teeth. A look of madness grew in his eyes, brighter and brighter. He said,

"Spirit, my's-"

Victor said in a voice of infinite calm: "Leader, please do not be precipitous. Vanity's body is just a broken machine. Fix the machine; she's fixed. There is nothing to it. Give me another three minutes at the outside."

Quentin struck the stain with his wand, "Damned spirit, I suck dry thy last bit of life and grant it to my friend and comrade; let the blood of my lady, shed by you, torture you in darkness forever if you say other than 'I will.' Do you agree?"

Something too dark to see, but reddish around the edges, snakelike, trembled down the wandshaft and embedded itself into the stain.

Screams, screams, screams of pain filled the air. Mingled with the screams must have been the words I will because a shower of energy points flowed along the moral lines connecting Colin with Quentin.

Quentin said, "Here is life! Colin, take some as well. Use it on yourself and Amelia."

Colin tightened his grip around me. Suddenly, impossibly, my extra wings and limbs and tendrils were no longer here, and hence no longer in pain. He stroked my face and hair, and brushed the blood away. He stroked my arms and legs, belly, breasts, and thighs, and wherever his hand passed, the blood passed away, too, and the pain was gone. I had had a hole in my lungs with a hypervolume larger than the volume of my whole 3-D body, but that was gone, too, wished away by Colin.

As swift as waking from a dream, and with as little sense or reason to it, the pain was gone. I was hale and whole again.

Victor closed up Vanity. A black fluid, like a swift amoeba, wriggled over her flesh, knitting cell to cell. The wounds closed with no suture and no scar.

Victor picked up his eye in his hand. A blue spark flashed from the iris and struck Vanity's skull.

Victor said, "I return bodily controls to you. Wake."

Vanity sat up, stretched, yawned, looked around with her huge green eyes. "What's going on? I've had a bad dream___Quentin... ?"

Quentin said, "I am afraid it was real."

I had been lying here for several seconds, while Colin continued to caress my naked breasts and run his hands along my inner thigh.

"Hey!" I shouted, slapping him hard across the cheek.

"Ow!" He shouted back, "Wounded man here!"

"Get your filthy hands-"

"Part of the medical procedure. I am summoning inspiration."

"I'll inspire you, you sick jerk-"

"Madam, I am a trained professional. Now then, for the next part of the process, you are required to start pulling down my zipper with your teeth."

The impending murder of Colin Iblis mac FirBolg was interrupted by a loud noise.

Crash. The first steel door, high above us, had just given way.

Crunch. The second one, too.

Something very fast was coming down the shaft after us.

The Shield of Lady Wisdom

Deck after deck whizzed past us as the platform fell. Some of the decks were crowded with boxes and crates, warehouses. Others held corridors lined with small oval doors and hatches.

Then we started passing decks filled with museum displays, library shelves, rows of obsidian coffins. One deck was a greenhouse, set with water fountains, stretching back as far as the eye could see. Another that flashed past was an observatory, with scores of complex telescopes pointed out a score of portholes and crystal domes, each window opening on a different twilight seascape. We were entering strange territory.

"What is this ship?" I said aloud, my voice hushed with wonder.

"Phaeacia," said Colin.

I gave him a startled look. "What's that?"

"It is all one ship. All of their ships are part of the same ship, folded into different parts of the dream. This is their empire. The ship is larger than the worlds through which she sails."

"How do you know?"

He shrugged. "It is in my heart. I just know. I'm inspired."

Quentin made a choking noise. For a moment, I thought he was laughing at what Colin had said.

But no. Quentin's face was pale; his eyes had no life in them.

Quentin was wounded. His body showed no scar, no scratch, but I saw the web of moral obligations radiating from him turning black and curling up. His soul had been wounded by the cat-thing.

I said, "Victor! Do your golden-ray thing to Quentin! Or do something! He's hurt!"

Quentin swayed on his feet and knelt, and put his head to the floor. Then he fell over sideways.