Titans of Chaos Read online

  It did not seem gross to me, when I saw the utility light up through Quentin's damaged lung.

  I reached out with my hand and massaged his heart to make it start again. I felt the unbeating heart jump to life. No, it was not gross at all.

  When his heart moved, I saw, outside, that the walking stick Quentin had been carrying now jumped up from where it lay on the deck and struck Quentin.

  The internal nature of the stuff Quentin was made of had been disenchanted, turned unmagical, and neutralized, when the azure beam from the eye of Trismegistus swept over him. But his wand had not been in his hand at that moment The wand was still magical. It was still wreathed around and knotted with lines and webs of spells, set there carefully by Quentin.

  The wand struck Quentin's motionless body.

  Then it all turned into clay. Quentin's spirit, a shape of dark fire, winged with night and crowned with black stars, fell out from the bottom of his flesh and slid through the deck. It closed upon the black cat-shadow clawing Vanity.

  The wand, flying off on a mission of its own, smote Phobetor, who turned immediately back into Colin, a nice, human-looking boy.

  A boy without a demon-heart to quench. I saw the web of magic slide away, clawing and strangling, but slipping. Colin swayed unsteadily to his feet, screamed a weak sort of yell, and flopped somewhat unconvincingly at Trismegistus.

  Trismegistus, meanwhile, saw Quentin's body turn to fine porcelain, and the beam darted from his metal eye, sweeping down. Both Quentin and the catlike shadow-thing were struck, but the beam must have hit a more vital part of the shadow-cat; it yowled and vanished, whereas Quentin merely staggered.

  Trismegistus shrank to half his size and lifted his revolver into the fourth dimension, and shot me.

  I rotated my girl-body into place to parry and ducked behind it. The bullet bounced off the skintight Amazonian bodysuit I wore. Tee hee.

  A probe (made of some sort of music energy) unfolded from a time distortion in the fourth dimension, and fired a bullet of another kind. This one was an Amazonian space-flattener bullet.

  I unfolded out from behind my 3-D cross-section, trying to maximize my volume, so that I would have the largest mass possible to absorb and disperse the damage. Three, four, and five dimensional I became, and, since the restraining weight of the neutronium medium seemed weaker and more flexible here, where the chaos was bubbling to every side, I pushed an inch or two into the sixth.

  Odd. What were those tetrahedrons doing here? Each face of the tetrahedrons was made of a five-dimensional plane of time-stuff. Beyond, I saw gravity-lights, refracting the time-shining into four rainbows, which formed, in turn, into many-branching shapes like towers of coral, each angle of which held an interlocking group of hypercube-crystalsfor an edge, reaching long arms into whirlpools of neutrino-heavy ideograms made of paper-thin five-dimensional thought-energy.

  Shock, pain. The shell passed over and into the space I occupied, bypassing the three-dimensional armor, smashing me flat again.

  Instead of jumping away from Trismegistus, I jumped at him. The shell went off when I was only two meters from him, and a hot poker of pain went through my shoulder, down my lungs, hip, tail, and out the other side of me.

  The music cut into my wings and tail. I smelled my own blood burning, and I fell, three-dimensional again, to the deck. I did not feel the pain just yet. But I could not feel my right arm either.

  Trismegistus had to pull all his mass back into the shape he wore, the small shape, because the music burning me was going off so close to him. Colin grappled him for a moment, biting into his neck veins with an unenthusiastic sort of chomp.

  During that moment, Victor, our human-size Victor, dressed in a skintight cloth of metal foil, popped out of a coffin-shaped slot or hangar in the tail of the dead dragon body. He was faceless and eyeless, his visage merely a blank mask of bony substance. He reached back inside with a ray of magnetism and manipulated some control. The guns lining the back and sides of the dragon swiveled to cover Trismegistus, and opened fire.

  Colin rolled away from Trismegistus and put his hand somehow through and inside me without touching me, plucked out the deadly music with his hand. That saved my life, though it did not stop the pain or internal bleeding.

  The music-thing looked like a scorpion made of fire in Colin's hand. He threw it at Trismegistus.

  The barrage of various heavy weapons lining the dragon armor, now that Trismegistus could not step sideways into the fourth dimension, could hurt him.

  Or, they would have hurt him, had he not been able to outrun the bullets shot at him. Trismegistus turned into a blur of motion, but it was a blur localized at about a hundred yards off the port side of our damaged ship, and, with no space-bending techniques at hand, he could not outrun some of Victor's energy weapons, many of which were firing at faster-than-light speeds Newton would allow, but not Einstein.

  Colin waved his hand at the chaos muck boiling and seething off the port side. His teeth were red and clenched with pain; his fist was shaking with weakness. His voice was breathy and lacked timbre: "Dream-stuff! Your Prince calls! Dance and play! Rip and rend and slay!"

  Evidently, despite his weakness, he was inspired with pain and anger, because the whole environment caught fire, and the liquid earth, which had merely been bubbling and splashing, now erupted as if a million land mines, buried beneath the fluid gunk, had all gone off at once. The whole section of ground in that quarter jumped into the sky; the sky there fell.

  The blue metal eye shot out of the mouth of the dragon and floated over to the blind and eyeless Victor. A valve or aperture opened in Victor's brow, and he placed the metal eye half within.

  It glowed and rotated. Now Victor could see again.

  The metal foil covering his body puffed up with magnetic charge. He moved. He was here, gently picking up both Colin and me.

  Then he was down belowdeck. Vanity had been clawed and cut by the beast, and I saw red arterial blood spurting. Quentin's spirit was dissolving and flickering, but it was bent over Vanity, trying to apply pressure to her horrible wounds. His hands were insubstantial, though, and the precious blood simply flooded through them. Tears of fire were burning on Quentin's cheeks. He was too dazed to realize that his hands were only made of phantom-stuff, and could not help her.

  Victor's voice came from his chest plate, amplified tremendously to outshout the thunder of the guns and thunderbolts going off overhead: "You'll die without your body, Quentin."

  Quentin moaned something, but his wand, up on deck, tapped impatiently.

  Quentin's spirit flashed upward through the deck boards and returned with his clay body. The spirit seemed to have great difficulty getting back into it, however. The dark and fiery silhouette was trying to wriggle into it through the mouth like a man putting on a wetsuit, but the spirit was losing fire and color, as if it were fainting, bleeding, dying.

  The wand jumped up in the air, and a light came from it.

  It poked the Quentin-body in the mouth, and seemed to act as a shoehorn. The spirit was slurped inside, a reverse-genie returning to a tiny lamp.

  Colin could not stand. He dragged himself on his belly over to Vanity, he bit back a cry of horror and alarm, and he lifted up his hands to apply pressure to her spurting wounds. 'Tourniquet!" His voice was desperation. "Tourniquet here, or it is death!"

  Victor was having blood drip out of one hand. No, not blood, but his molecular blood-creatures, the ones programmed to heal.

  With his other hand, Victor was tearing up long strips from the deck boards he knelt on, which were bubbling and turning into bandages when the beam from his one eye struck them.

  Victor's metal cloth suit ripped itself into shreds or tentacles. One strand formed a noose around Vanity's gushing arm, tightening. The spurting stopped. The others, like a hundred-armed hydra of medicine, took bandages, applied them, probed other wounds.

  I am ashamed to admit I was too much in pain to move. That does not sound s
hameful, does it?

  But the truth was, I was too much in pain to try to move, and I could not think straight. The only thing I was thinking at the time was, Why are they all looking at Vanity? Why isn't Victor helping me?

  Sometimes the best in people comes out during emergencies. Sometimes not.

  Quentin staggered over to Vanity.

  I heard Colin say, "Don't look. This is pretty bloody bad."

  Quentin made a noise like a whipped dog, a painful whimpering. He whispered, "Darling, don't die. Don't die."

  Vanity mumbled something, and made a noise something between a groan and a shriek. I heard gargling. It sounded like blood was obstructing her throat.

  My eyes could not focus. I stared at the ceiling. I heard the conversation, but I did not look at Vanity. My imagination was filled with pictures of her soft flesh cut and lacerated, blood and other fluid seeping and spurting from open wounds, white bone fragments sticking from flesh.

  Maybe the reality was not so bad as what I imagined. Or maybe it was worse.

  Quentin said, "What is going on? What are you doing to her?"

  Victor said in a cold voice, "Leader, we must wake Vanity back up, so that she can get us out of here before Trismegistus returns. Her body is trying to put her into shock, to release her from pain. Do I have your permission to apply a stimulant?"

  "Wh-what? Is it going to hurt her?"

  "The pain-signals reaching her brain from her nervous system will increase."

  "If, if we don't-"

  "Leader, we cannot possibly withstand another attack from Trismegistus. All of you are wounded, and I lost ninety percent of my body mass. Will you give the order?"

  I did not hear Quentin's reply; he must have nodded.

  Colin said, "Steady on. Steady." I do not know if he was telling Victor to be careful in applying medication to Vanity, or telling Quentin to retain his self-control.

  Vanity let out a gasping scream. It sounded horrible.

  Quentin: "Darling, I'm here. Don't worry. It will be over in a moment. We need to-"

  Vanity: (Something inaudible.)

  Quentin: "What?"

  Colin: "She said the chaos was in the way. She needs solid reality, something with walls, boundaries, definitions."

  Quentin: "Victor, can you stabilize the area?"

  Victor: "Yes. But Trismegistus will find us the moment the storm drops."

  Quentin: "Do it."

  Victor pried his blue orb eye out of his head and threw it upward. I saw it fly up overhead. At the top of its arc, it passed through the trapdoor and shot blue light in a fan toward the starboard side, the side away from where Trismegistus still (I hoped) was struggling with the storm and dodging cannon fire from the dragon-corpse.

  Chaotic matter was evidently even easier to command than solid matter. The storm on that side fell quiet with an eerie swiftness.

  Vanity mumbled something. A command. I saw the reflection of a green dazzle coming from her position where she lay.

  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 pr
ocess, 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.

  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."