Inn Between Worlds Page 5

  “Vox is a murderer, Taimethis.”

  “Vox is a man driven insane by a gift our people gave him. I'm trying to fix that.”

  “Corinthus didn't give him a 'gift.' Corinthus used him like a puppet.”

  “After he went mad. Don't tell me you never picked up on it?” Taimethis chuckled.

  “I never met Vox before Corinthus and now that we've touched him, none of us can go back to stop that moment.”

  “At any rate, Catherine, I just wanted to help him understand. Surely you can sympathize. Where would, what's his name now? Umbras? Where would Umbras be without your guidance?”

  “There's a very human expression, Taimethis. Apples and Oranges.”

  “They're the same, Vox and Umbras. I don't care what you think about what Corinthus did, but I'm trying to undo that.”

  “By training him to use his power.”

  “He certainly can't be rid of it, so why shouldn't I?”

  “I'm going to stop you.”

  “From what? Training a single man?”

  The blue glow flared. “From turning him into a weapon!”

  The red glow enlarged and brightened, threatening to overpower the blue for a moment. “Look me in the eyes and tell me that Umbras is different! Tell me that, Catherine! Tell me your human is different! You fed him your power just like Astenath did with Vox!”

  The blue glow dimmed for a moment and Gideon's heart skipped. Adrenaline dumped into his veins and he readied himself to spring. One more breath and he would move. His hand tightened on the grip of his gun. One more breath.

  Catherine's blue aura flared, eclipsing Taimethis's red for a moment. “Umbras asked! Vox did not!”

  Taimethis roared and his voice echoed in Gideon's bones. “You're not going to stop me!”

  The red flared again and an earsplitting whine shot through the air. The pitch dropped as Catherine's aura brightened as well, then a pillar of red light wrapped in a swirl of blue shot away from the clearing and lanced through the sky.

  “I've seen less subtle signals before,” Gideon muttered, starting to creep closer. He turned so that the twin auras were in front of him as he moved sideways through the trees.

  Several more lances of red sped into the sky. He supposed Catherine was redirecting those beams of energy upwards and that, thanks to her gift, even she had no idea where he was at any given moment.

  That's just what I need, Gideon thought to himself, for her to deflect one of those beams right into my face.

  It took him five full minutes to get close enough to actually see what was going on. To one side, Catherine moved and flowed like a dancer in her steampunk clothing. Swirls of sapphire energy trailed her hands and feet as she moved. With her back to him, the next thing he noticed what that she lost the little hat that had been pinned to her hair—after the fight, she was going to be angry about that, he was sure.

  Then, Catherine turned and Gideon's jaw fell open. Her face with its dramatic makeup was lit up by twin torrents of blue flame that poured from her eyes.

  Across the little clearing Taimethis moved in straight lines and with sharp, hard movements. In his hands he held a staff with rings dangling from the head like a Shinto shakujo. He swung it in great arcs like a halberd, and it trailed sharp blades of red when it moved. Taimethis was dressed in what might have passed for relaxed wear on the earth of his childhood. White jodhpurs terminated into black boots. Above that, Taimethis wore a black shirt topped with a red waistcoat that was a near match for the twin crimson stars that had replaced his eyes.

  The two of them moved around each other, sending shocks through the air whenever they connected a blow. Catherine hit far more than she was hit, but her flowing style seemed incapable of delivering the sort of literally-earthshaking blows as Taimethis.

  Gideon watched for another minute, trying to figure out exactly how he, a mortal who most definitely could not stand up to that kind of power, was going to intervene.

  Taimethis fired off another beam from his hand. It struck Catherine directly, burning red against the blue swirling from her hands. The force of it pushed her back before she was able to redirect it into the sky again. When the mingling purple smoke cleared, part of Catherine's jacket and skirt had been burned away. Gideon felt a pang of guilt watching her move, knowing that dodging those attacks was likely an easy task if she did not have to keep him safe.

  Which, again, made Gideon wonder why.

  He had little time to ponder that thought as the bones of a strategy coalesced in his mind. Withdrawing the portal controller from his pocket, Gideon dropped quietly into a crouch and set his gun on the ground. A few tweaks to the settings and he was able to open a portal on the far side of the clearing. Back in the darkness where no one could see, it would wait for seventy seconds before dissipating in a thunderclap and ruining his chances for a surprise attack.

  Another tweak to the device's settings and the next portal would open in front of him. He disabled the controller's safeties, allowing one-handed operation, and held it in his right hand. With his left, he picked up the revolver from the ground and took careful aim.

  With his thumb, Gideon toggled the selector for the larger of the gun's two barrels. He exhaled and gently squeezed the trigger. The gun hummed for half a heartbeat as impossible forces poured themselves into the focusing array and a dark purple lance skewered Taimethis in the shoulder.

  The gravity beam blew away Taimethis's shoulder joint and a good portion of his chest and neck. The wound poured crimson steam onto the ground. In an instant, Taimethis's eyes locked on Gideon's location and their glow brightened a thousandfold.

  His fingers moved too slowly toward the control and impossible heat and agony washed over him. In that moment, Gideon gained a new appreciation for the term “pain” as Taimethis's wrathful counterattack seemed to burn him to his very soul.

  That moment passed and he felt a sudden lightness in his chest. He burned on the inside, pain welling up in his mouth until he spat out blue fire. Alive and energized thanks to Catherine's power, Gideon pulled the trigger again. This second shot took Taimethis in the thigh, destroying it like the first had his shoulder.

  Rather than fall, he stood on one leg and a pillar of red smoke. From his destroyed shoulder, a tendril lashed out at Catherine so quickly that even she had trouble deflecting the attack.

  Taimethis's eyes flared again, and this time Gideon's fingers moved a little faster. The portal opened a scant few centimeters in front of his face. Linked to the other, Taimethis's eye beams poured into the hole in space only to reappear behind his back. Taimethis's own power ripped through his body, obliterating what remained and then scorching a path through the trees.

  When Catherine turned, Gideon saw part of her face had been burned away by Taimethis's earlier attacks. Instead of the blood and gore he expected, what smiled back at him was half the beautiful human face he expected and half a visage of brilliant blue, like crystal lit from within.

  They locked eyes, or Gideon locked his eyes on Catherine's human eye and a bright portion where her other eye should be, and he nodded. She swirled her hands around, dancing a network of lines into existence.

  On the other side of the clearing, the red smoke that was Taimethis was already reforming into a human shape. Another moment passed while red raced with blue and Gideon leveled his revolver at the red cloud. He fired again and what might have been an arm vanished from the core of the red. The other growth slowed as a new arm took its place in moments.

  “Gideon!” Catherine called in a voice of wind and rain. One hand held something that looked to Gideon's eyes like a horse's reins, only made of blue fire. The other beckoned him closer and he broke into a sprint, careful to keep his gun trained on Taimethis.

  He reached out to her beckoning hand, took it. Her other hand pulled on the cord of fire and the world vanished.

  ***

  Gideon fell forever. Beside him, Catherine's human form knitted itself back together, blue crys
tal concealed beneath human flesh once again. Something else lingered there, visible behind reality. Gideon did not know for how long he tried to focus on it, whatever “it” was, but eventually he started to see past Catherine's human form and to the luminous being beyond it.

  She was beautiful and terrible all at the same time, like the light of a star wrapped in a cup of tea and carried in the hand of the apocalypse.

  Before he could ask how long the drop would last, he stood on solid ground again. He did not impact it, nor was there any transition between falling and not-falling. One instant, Gideon and Catherine plunged through infinity, and the next he stood on a platform of stone that stretched as far as his eye could see.

  “Where are we?”

  Catherine, fully human-seeming again aside from the unnerving blue flames pouring from her eyes, regarded him silently. Distracted by her fiery eyes, Gideon did not notice for a moment that she finally shed the decorative, but ultimately poorly designed for combat, clothing she wore before. Now, Catherine dressed in a bodysuit of deep black, featureless save for a brilliant sapphire at her throat.

  Gideon began to sense a theme and unconsciously touched the sapphire blue cravat that encircled his own neck. Coincidences, he reminded himself, did not happen.

  When Catherine spoke, her voice still carried undercurrents that sounded like a distant thunderstorm. “We’re between realities where only thought and power exist.”

  Gideon raised an eyebrow. “Impossible. Even the Inn exists.”

  “Have you ever played early twenty-first century video games, Gideon?”

  Surprised by the apparent non-sequitur, Gideon cocked his head to one side. “Some, why?”

  “A lot of them had glitches that would turn reality inside out. Colors would be reversed, or the controls wouldn't work right. Sometimes the world would shift, appear and disappear, at random. You know what I'm talking about, right?”

  Gideon slowly nodded. “Negative levels, yes.”

  Catherine indicated the blank landscape with a wave of her hand. “This is the realm of thought, where reality is only limited by what you can imagine.”

  “And Taimethis?”

  “He's here somewhere.”

  Gideon shook his head. “No, I mean what does this place do for him?”

  “It's more about what it can do for you, Gideon. Here, you're no less powerful than I am.”

  With a little more emphasis, Gideon repeated himself. “And Taimethis?”

  Catherine closed her eyes for a moment. The effect was strange as what appeared to be human eyelids, made of nothing more than flesh and blood, perfectly concealed the streams of blue fire for a few seconds. When she opened them, Catherine said, “Taimethis can imagine quite a lot.”

  As though summoned, Taimethis now stood a few meters off to Gideon's left. He had regenerated his clothes and staff. He stood with his staff resting between arms folded across his chest. Like Catherine, the only thing to mark him as inhuman in that moment were his eyes. They glowed a deep crimson red, twin smokeless hearts of fire.

  “Why?” he asked in his voice of honey.

  Catherine wheeled on him, hands coming up in guard. Blue symbols, illegible to Gideon's eyes, swarmed around them in rings. He drew and leveled his revolver, aiming at Taimethis's face.

  Calmly, Taimethis unfolded his arms and set the butt of his staff on the stone ground. “I'm going to ask you again, Catherine, and I at least would like an answer before you try to uncarnate me. Need I remind you that you came after me. I didn't seek out this confrontation, nor did I throw the first blow. You've dogged me for a dozen cycles now and I demand to know why.”

  With the sound of a storm, Catherine replied, “you're dangerous, Taimethis.”

  “I?” he demanded, then repeated himself. “I? Corinthus is dangerous. Astenath is dangerous! I'm trying to fix the damage they've caused, or I would be except you continue to follow me. You are a blight!”

  The sound of rain became the crash of a tsunami. “You've destroyed universes!”

  Gideon's blood ran cold. He might be immortal, but experience taught him over and over that he was most definitely not invincible. He supposed he was somewhat more durable than the average man, but even that was nothing compared to the kinds of power facing him now.

  Yet options remained. Gideon forced himself to remember the fact that he had a weapon powerful enough to damage Taimethis's human form—human shell? Gideon asked himself. Just what were these people?—even in the real universe. Catherine's cryptic instructions rang in his ears and Gideon relaxed through nothing less than force of will.

  He focused on something simple: a fissure. For a moment, nothing happened. Gideon grit his teeth and imagined it again, envisioning even the smallest detail. He saw the pattern in the ground as it opened, heard the roaring of rock tearing itself apart, felt the rush of air as the land heaved upward and snapped shut on Taimethis's body.

  Then, exactly as he saw it in his mind, it happened. Distracted by his argument with Catherine, Taimethis did not react fast enough to the sudden attack and any retort he had planned was drowned by the thundercrack of stone slamming back together.

  “He's not done yet,” Catherine warned.

  “I wouldn't expect him to be.” With a smile, Gideon said, “what fun would this be if he went down that easily?”

  “Just be alert, Gideon.”

  Watching the landscape whose gray stone now gradually tuned a sandy red, he asked, “how many times have you fought him, exactly?”

  “Like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the first.”

  “He said you'd been following him?”

  “In the real universe, where he can't kill me.”

  “And now?”

  “Just like you're as powerful as we are, we're as mortal as you.”

  Gideon grimaced. “That's reassuring. I wasn't expecting to have to kill a god before dinner. Is he really as dangerous as you say?”

  Catherine nodded. “I wasn't lying. Taimethis destabilized time by meddling too much. In an instant, a trillion trillion lives,” she snapped her fingers, and Gideon flinched, “gone.”

  A knot formed in Gideon's stomach. “How?”

  “He changed too many things, reset events too many times trying to get the outcome he wanted.”

  “How is that different from what I, or any of us living in the Inn, do?”

  “You move time around. There's still a universe where the crew of the Staraveth arrive at a dead, frozen world. In that universe, their planet plays an important role in a thousand events through history.

  “So why me?”

  “Why you specifically, or why not someone like Umbras?”

  “Both.”

  “For the former, it's because Umbras recommended you. I meant it when I said that earlier. As for the latter, let's say that Umbras and I respect one another but we are perhaps the multiverse's worst partners for something like this.”

  “Remind me to...” Gideon trailed off as the ground beneath his feet rumbled and spoke.

  “Your human learns quick, Dart-Thrower.”

  Through gritted teeth, the storm that was Catherine replied, “do not call me that.” To Gideon, she added, “be ready.”

  “For?”

  She pointed. “That.”

  Gideon pivoted to face the direction she indicated, gun at the ready. He instinctively fired off a shot from the gravity lens at what he thought was a nearby, man-sized target. The beam sped across space for some distance before the figure uncurled an impossibly long arm and swatted it away.

  “Remember my video game metaphor?”

  Gideon nodded, resisting the automatic urge to fire another shot.

  “Let's just say, Taimethis hacks.”

  “Can we beat him?”

  “He's been beaten before.”

  “By you?”

  “I was there.”

  “Comforting.”

  Within the space of a heartbe
at, reality changed. Up became sideways as a massive wall of stone appeared in front of Gideon's face, moving toward him at impossible speeds. The stone struck him, sending Gideon flying through the air like a discarded baseball. Somewhere beneath the sound of the avalanche, he heard Catherine yelling his name.

  Sailing through the air, Gideon again reminded himself of Catherine's instructions. He pictured flight, controlling his movement in the air with nothing more than the desire to move in any direction.

  Abruptly, he came to a midair stop, hovering what seemed to be a dozen meters above the ground.

  What he assumed to be Taimethis loomed in the distance, impossibly far and yet still uncomfortably close. A torso that might have been human-shaped sat in the middle of too many limbs. Four arms swept the sky in every direction and instead of legs, he now possessed serpentine coils that merged with the red stone. Instead of a head, the red glow of Taimethis's eyes floated in empty space above his shoulders.

  Gideon realized he dropped his gun when Taimethis's snake coil sent him flying. Instead of looking for it, he simply imagined it being back in his hand, and it was.

  One of Taimethis's impossibly long arms swept toward him, parting the air with a sonic boom. Gideon concentrated on the idea of flight, of dodging, and veered out of the hand's path. In the same moment, he squeezed his gun's trigger, piercing the index finger of Taimethis's hand.

  Recoil, normally manageable on the ground, pushed Gideon backward and broke his momentary concentration. His mind immediately remembered that humans did not fly and he plummeted to the stony ground next to Catherine.

  She gestured and a blue glow formed under Gideon's feet, lifting and pushing him away as the ground where he fell formed into another snake coil. Another appeared under her feet and she rose into the air after him.

  Standing on Catherine's platform, Gideon imagined great pillars of stone rising from the ground like spring-loaded bolts. They would snap out, strike Taimethis, possibly even pierce him, over and over again until the stone monstrosity crumbled.