John Wright - Titans of Chaos

Victor said to me, "How close is he to overtaking us?"

I looked back. I saw the fourth-dimensional shape of Trismegistus, but he was not behind us, not anymore. He was ahead of us.

I saw an explosion in the fourth dimension, another clash caused by the violent intersection of two mutually contradictory laws of nature. Trismegistus had seized the segment of dream-space through which our elevator shaft was running, and shoved it into the middle of downtown Los Angeles, back on the material plane, Earth. All our running: We had run in a circle, like some wounded game creature.

A flux of crooked morality strands, charged and infused with magic, was issuing contradictory orders to the matter and energy in the area. Nothing knew what the laws of nature were any longer; it was another dream-storm, exploding like a bomb beneath our feet.

At the same time, the line of energy I was using to probe him stiffened with a force of some unknown purport. One of his serpents reared up from his wand, opened its fanged mouth. Musical tension, similar to a siren song, flickered from the snake-mouth, flashed backwards along the strand, and struck me in the face. Musical snake venom in my eyes.

There was a sensation of fire in my eyes, pain. My eyes were filled with tears, but I could still see.

Dimly.

It was getting dimmer. I was going blind.

I screamed, "Vanity, get us out of here! He's ahead of us!"

Victor said, "Belay that, Vanity. Create the laws of nature needed to dispel a destiny. There is no point in running."

I was thrown to the ground as the platform came to an abrupt halt. Things to me were half-lit, monochromatic. We were in a green house. The deck to either side of us was spread with wide lawns and jeweled statues, and ornamental gardens in terraces climbed up the sloping wooden hull. The portholes here were like the windows of a cathedral: a massive rose-window at one end, hazed in rainbows, stained-glass arches marching like sentries away from it.

The green stone around Vanity's neck flickered and went dim. Vanity said, "We are surrounded by chaos, Leader! I cannot back us out of here."

Victor issued a weft of magnetic force that carried him over to the nearest stained-glass window.

Without flinching, he shoved his arm through the window, cutting himself badly on the shards. A black fluid squirted from his veins, falling into whatever cloudscape or seascape was beyond the window. I could not see the scene clearly. It was something that billowed.

A beam swept from his eye and ignited the black substance. A bluish flame started up and began to get brighter through the window.

Victor said, "I can try to stabilize the immediate area. Do you have the laws of nature we want?"

Vanity said, "I wished for what you told me to wish for. Is Quentin going to be okay?"

A voice came out of my cell phone. It came out of Vanity's pocket and Quentin's and Colin's coat as well, where they kept their cell phones. I assume Victor could simply hear it.

"Checkmate," came the light, quick, playful voice of Trismegistus.

He continued: "The laws of nature that allow one to unweave a destiny are the same ones, the exact same ones, that allow destinies to be sewn up in the first place. The air of Olympos, so to speak. Our home field advantage. The laws least favorable to Chaos and your powers. A dead zone. Apt expression, eh? Very apt?

"For all this, all this, foolish children, has been ordained by fate. Once fate is set, it must come to pass, soon or late. I had hoped merely to decree your death while I lay at leisure, eating grapes, but your exertions against my incompetent wives and clumsy paramours- in escaping them, your deaths were not escaped, and were in nowise less inevitable, but it was taking long, so very long! I am not the god of patience, but of speed! So now I must run you down myself. It is ended: Now I speak. I decree your deaths, and war, horrific war, to overwhelm the world!

"So I proclaim, Tachys Hermes Trismegistus Chrysor-rapis, Diactoros, and Klepsiphron, Polytropos, and Argeiphontes! Swift messenger thrice-greatest of the golden wand I am, messenger of death, guide of souls to hell, thief-prince and many-turning: at whose behest even the wisest, all-seeing, perish! To bring the message of inescapable fate is in my jurisdiction: For I am Mechaniotes the contriver; this I contrive. I am the soul-thief Psychopompos: These steal I."

Even though Trismegistus was outside the ship, what he did next involved a huge section of time-space, and I saw it. Even with my eyesight growing dim, I saw it.

It was the same thing I had seen Mavors do on Mars. Forces flowed into the future and established something there, a cold shape like ice, freezing the energies of time into one rigidity.

It was the destiny of our deaths.

He said, "A life for a life, I demand, by the death of Laverna, of Lamia, of Eurymedusa: your blood to wash her blood from your hand."

A web of moral obligations, many-stranded, complex, dazzling, now wound around the iceberg of energy.

"To deviate from my decree, I do not allow: Time has no will, for Saturn is in Tartarus."

I saw the azure dazzle of cryptognostic particles stream from his eyepatch-but into time, not into space-and negate the free will he had just created. The iceberg of time-energy became as cold and implacable as inanimate matter: a law of nature, from which there was no appeal, no mercy.

Then he threw back his head (I saw it through the walls of the ship) and chanted: Muse, sing of Hermes, the son of Zeus and Maia,

Lord of Cyllene and Arcadia rich in flocks,

The luck-bringing messenger of the immortals whom Maia bare,

The rich-tressed nymph, when she was joined in love with Zeus!

Born with the dawning, at midday he played on the lyre,

And in the evening he stole the cattle of far-darting Apollo....

As swiftly are all his many-turning contrivances accomplished!

My sight was failing. Perhaps this was due to blindness; perhaps it was the side effect of Colin's paradigm. Whatever Trismegistus did to set the destiny in place, I could not look at it.

Victor paid not the least attention to the voice. He said to me, "Amelia, can you look through time with some new sense of yours and find this destiny waiting in our future? Can you locate the destiny-influencing thing?"

I tried to describe what I had just seen. My words meant nothing to him. In his paradigm, time is not a continuum, but an absolute.

He said, "Perhaps I can negate the electromagnetic entities from Quentin's paradigm. You said you saw what you call morality involved? Which direction is it?"

I said, "It is in the time direction."

"Time is not a dimension," he said, puzzled.

"Victor! I'm going blind. I am losing my sight on all levels. I can't see anything."

The azure light from his eye swept over my face once or twice, with no effect.

Victor turned the beam on Quentin. Quentin shivered, made a gasping noise, like a child might make who cries out during a nightmare.