John Wright - Titans of Chaos

Quentin mumbled something, but his voice, once again, came strangely clear and pristine to the ear: "My part is played. I turn command over to my second."

Vanity shrieked, "Oh no!"

A voice came from Quentin's walking stick. "Milady, my master bade me speak this word once death has silenced him..."

Vanity snapped, "He's not dead yet! Shut up!"

"... He says that, if he perishes still trapped within this false world of matter, the Lord of the Dead will claim his soul and prevent his resurrection; nonetheless, he bids you keep his memory in you, and he promises your memory in him will soften the torments of hell to which he will be taken."

"Shut up!" screamed Vanity. "He's not dead!" She whirled to face Victor. "You fixed me. Fix him!"

Victor said, "He is suffering a software degradation. The electromagnetic envelope where he stores his memory is disintegrating."

I said, "Victor, what can you do?"

Victor turned to me. "For now, nothing. The mission takes priority. Vanity, see if you can get this platform we are riding to dodge; try to lose our pursuer. Amelia, keep an eye on Trismegistus; inform me of his movements. Colin, prevent Trismegistus from approaching through the fourth dimension. You can stop him from using Amelia's paradigm; if he has to come through physical space, Vanity can keep slamming doors in his face. I will sweep for bugs."

I said, "Leader, we can't win without Quentin. Not against the god of magic. We need a magician."

Victor said, "All we need to do is open our lead. Trismegistus had to introduce a chaos storm into the environment to prevent Vanity from using her powers to escape; if he does that again, I can quell it, or turn the storm against him. Logically, he would not have risked doing that if he had some other way to overtake a Phaeacian. Therefore we should be able to outdistance him. If we can hold him off long enough! We'll see about Quentin as soon as we have time."

Vanity stood for a moment, her lip trembling, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Then she nodded at Victor, turned, and knelt on the platform. A hatch hidden beneath the boards opened beneath her fingers. Beneath was a control panel, black with dozens of buttons.

She pushed one. A shunt opened in the shaft, and we were kicked to one side. Our fall was now at an angle. A steel door slid into place behind us. The stone around her neck flared green; we passed another threshold, and another door fell to. Again her stone flared.

She was leaving an alternating pattern of different laws of nature behind us. In one stretch of corridor, kinetic energy was directly proportional to speed; in another, it was inverse; in a third, it was inverse cubed. Another section of the corridor behind us turned black as she lowered the speed of light in that segment to five kilometers per hour; if Trismegistus tried to pass through that area at any faster a speed, he would be outside of our frame of reference, unable to affect us.

It was certainly the cleverest thing I ever saw Vanity do.

Clever, but in vain. It was not working.

I said to Colin, "He's skipping out of the plenum. He's just going around the barriers Vanity is setting up. Can you get him?"

Colin looked behind us and saw nothing but dwindling concentric squares as we fell past deck after deck. He said, "I don't see him."

I said, "Look with your heart. Follow my finger. Can you see the direction I'm pointing? There."

Because I could see the slender spindle-shape of the fourth-dimensional being, sliding from dream to dream, parallel to the ship, but in a space skew to our space.

"I see him now. Tiny little thing, isn't he?" Colin made a grabbing gesture with his hand, like a man slapping a fly. "Got 'em. Ow! It stung me."

Colin's eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell to the deck. Mist began trickling out of his mouth and nose.

"Colin!" I knelt and put my arms around him. "Oh, dear God, Colin!"

Blue light stabbed out of Victor's eye and bathed Colin. "An electromagnetic field is disintegrating him. I've stopped the field, but I cannot stop the effect," said Victor. "Put the ring of Gyges back on him."

I said, "The ring's broken. Maybe I can try to fix it. Who had it last?"

Colin groaned muddily. "It's all going away."

"What?" I said.

"The dream of the world. All going away..."

Victor said, "It's on his finger."

Foolish of me. There it was. It had a controlling monad, just like a living being. The monad had been forced out of alignment by an Amazonian azure ray, and the internal nature of the ring had turned into something materialistic, dull, and inert.

I twisted the monad back into shape, but the internal nature of the ring did not change. Mending the break in a glass after the water had run out.

"Nothing's happening," I said.

Victor said, "Can you reproduce the effect Miss Daw used to propel you out of the fourth dimension? I've neutralized all energy flows in this area; he should not be able to track us, either by magic or by electronics-"

"Wait! I see something!"

"Report."

"It's the corpse. The giant whatever-it-is inside the hollow horse coffin. The genie in the ring, do you know who I mean?"

Victor said, "The icon representing the ring of Gyges."

"He says there is an object in our future. No one can defeat the God of Speed in a race; no one can outrun him. It's fate."

Vanity said, "Don't listen to him! He's lying! Don't believe it."

I looked at Vanity. She was kneeling, cradling Quentin in her arms. Quentin stirred and moaned feebly. He was not dead.

She said, "Dead people work for the bad guy, remember? The guy with the keys to the underworld?"

Victor said, "Amelia, what were the four steps needed for us to undo an Olympian decree of fate?"

I said, "It is complex, but I can sum it up: Each of us has a part to play. First, I am supposed to give the destiny enough free will to allow it to be changed.

"Second, a destiny is a curse. It uses sympathy and contagion to organize the spirits of the universe to want a certain outcome. To annul that requires magic: Quentin's paradigm.

"Third, a destiny is fixed and inescapable, as dispassionate as a law of nature. That's you. I think you take away the free will I give the destiny-force, so that it acts according to a mechanistic cause and effect.

"I was told that finally, a psychic event of a type and kind unknown must take place at the final step to make it permanent. Unknown to my people! My sister Circe has a blind spot, because of her paradigm: She didn't know what Colin's role was supposed to be." I swallowed. "I volun-teered, you know. It was to get that message through that I came into this world, and suffered all this, and met you."

Vanity cut in impatiently, "Do we need that last part? Do we care if it is permanent or not, at this point? If we just temporarily made it possible to outrun Trismegistus, then we could outrun him, right?"

I said to Victor, "There was one thing more: Time-space must be arranged to permit the laws of nature under which these four events may take place. That sounds like a Vanity thing to me."