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The Jekyll Legacy
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
The Jeckyll Legacy is a novel of a bit more than 260,000 words, including appendices.
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter One
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Alas! Too evident, my discoveries were incomplete. Enough, then, that I not only recognized my natural body for the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul.
— The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson
It could have been a scene from Father Knows Best, that iconic Fifties television sitcom starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt, except that the situation comedy was set in the Midwest somewhere, whereas this was upstate New York, just an hour or two — , or three, maybe four, if it wasn’t three o’clock in the morning and the State Police were still enforcing the speed limits — from New York City, so the residents fondly believed that they were much more sophisticated than a bunch of hicks from Iowa.
A distinguished-looking man was sitting at an old-fashioned rolltop desk in the study of a strikingly-Victorian cobblestone house built in 1832 by his great-great-great-grandfather. The room was large, a perfect match to the high ceilings, ornate wainscoting, carved chair rails, and decorative crown mouldings that wrapped the room in a cocoon of the century before last. To say that he felt comfortable in it would be gross understatement, because he’d been born here, quite literally — it had been his mother’s second pregnancy, and when it came time to deliver, there was no time left for leisurely drives into the hospital, as his father had insisted, despite his wife’s gentle suggestion, screamed at the top of her lungs, that it was time to leave. At the moment, the distinguished man was reading a magazine with no pictures and quite a few tables densely-packed with numbers taking up the two pages visible before him. Annals of Sub-Molecular Biology the banner at the top of the page read. The facing page had, ‘September-October, 2035 - Vol 3x, issue 5’. He was about half-way through the issue, deeply engrossed in an article about experimental genetic therapies which took into account quantum effects upon the expression of the human genome. He was nodding in pleased comprehension as he scanned down the tables.
A boy, or young man, really, walked in and said, “Hey, Dad. Can I borrow the lab?”
“What was that, son?” Dr. Herbert Lanyon the Third, MD, PhD, took a moment to glance up from his research journal to see his son, Herbert Lanyon the Fourth, or “Hastie” as his friends called him. He was not surprised to find Jack Utterson standing beside his son. The boys had been inseparable since birth, having being born minutes apart, in the same hospital, although to different parents, not to mention the fact that the Lanyon family and the Uttersons had been closely associated for more than a hundred years, since before their families had immigrated to America from England, well before the Civil War.
“I asked if I could borrow the lab.”
“What for?” Dr. Lanyon asked, straightening his impeccably red Harvard bow tie and adjusting his tasteful tweed smoking jacket with the leather patches at the elbows. Dr. Lanyon was a stickler for what he called ‘good manners’ in the presence of company, even when the company was as familiar as Jack.
“Nothin’ special.” Hastie spoke with a light, unconcerned tone, but his eyes never made it to his father’s and his foot kept scuffing at a spot on the plush carpet that only he seemed able to see. He was an awkward, gangly sort of boy, but very muscular and not entirely unhandsome, with regular features, a nice square jaw, curly brown hair, eyes that varied between hazel and green, depending on the light, and he looked like he was up to mischief, as usual.
Mr. Lanyon narrowed his gaze slightly and sighed. “You know the lab’s not a game room, son. Just remember our agreement. You have the right to experiment in the course of your studies, but you have to be careful, and replace whatever you blow up if you’re not.”
“Of course,” Hastie grumped while Jack turned away and laughed into the back of his hand, but Hastie made sure the rest of his words were mumbled quietly enough that only Jack overheard. “Pop, you’re such a stick-in-the-mud.”
“Very well then, son, but I’ll need it again later this evening, so remember to clean up after yourself. Oh, and don’t touch the TSP device.” Dr. Lanyon’s attention returned to his journal as the two teens left, jostling each other good-naturedly.
Hastie was always disappointed that the lab was not in the corner of some dark, dank, dungeon with crumbling, moss covered stone walls and assorted parts of strange devices. In actuality, it was a spare bedroom in the Lanyon’s ancestral home in the suburbs, and while there was a sturdy table in the center of the room with a Bunsen burner, some chemical compounds and some flasks of different sizes scattered across the surface, the walls were mostly tall bookcases and assorted family memorabilia covering the last century or so. It was the closet that held most of the lab equipment when not in use and it was a big closet, stocked to the brim with enough gadgets and doodads to make your average mad scientist at least as happy and content as a large injection of an antipsychotic medication.
“So what do you want to do?” Jack asked as he dropped heavily into one of the overstuffed chairs in the far corner of the lab and let his feet dangle over the armrest while Hastie prowled about the room, poking through the books. Jack had a bulkier frame than Hastie and was more of a bruiser, which explained his position on the school football team as a defensive tackle while Hastie played quarterback on offense. Jack would have made a good model for an old Hitler Youth recruiting poster, blond, blue-eyed, solid muscle, and ruggedly masculine.
“I want a really great costume for the Halloween dance, that’s what I want.” Hastie was poking around the room, shifting stacks of papers aside and looking carefully at the dusty books on the sagging shelves, some of which were stacked in front of other books, some of which were simply covered with so much dust that the titles were obscure. Hastie’s mother wasn’t all that fond of housework, and tended to let it slide, especially in the ‘lab.’
“So why aren’t we at the mall or something?” Jack was confused. “I don’t see anything like a costume out here. Have you looked in the closet?”
“What I’m lookin’ for isn’t in the closet.” He kept browsing. “How about some help. Move that chair over here so I can check the very top shelves.”
Jack sighed and started to unwind from his comfortable position when Hastie impatiently climbed onto the table and stood up. A moment later he was shouting.
“There! There is it.” Hastie shouted as he pointed to the other corner of the room. “Push the table over there.”
“I’m not moving you while you’re on the table, you dope. You’ll kill yourself. Get down and I’ll move it.”
“Alright already,” Hastie complained as he got down. “Sheesh. You’re so darn cautious. I don’t think you’ve ever taken a real risk, have you?”
“Sure I take risks,” Jack laughed as he helped to move the table, taking time to disconnect the bunsen burner from the supply hose, which drooped limply from an outlet in the ceiling high overhead. “I take risks every day. After all, I have you for a friend and that’s risk enough. Now when are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?”
“All in good time, Igor,” Hastie responded with an abominable accent that he obviously intended to be Transylvanian, but probably owed more to Young Frankenstein than to the Carpathian mountains of Romania. “All in good time.”
Hastie yanked on a large old leather-bound book until it finally came loose from its place on the top shelf. Only Jack’s hand on his back prevented a fall.
Ignoring his friend’s sarcastic, “You’re welcome,” Hastie jumped down, placed the book on the lab table and flipped through the last few pages until he found exactly what he was looking for.
“This is exactly what I was lookin’ for!” he said with manic glee. He danced jubilantly about the room grabbing his friend and leading him in an impromptu waltz.
“ ’This’ is what?” Jacked pushed away and straightened his clothes as he muttered to himself, then demanded again more loudly, “What is it, already?”
“It’s my great grandfather’s formula… well, actually it’s the formula my great grandfather got from his best friend. I forget the guy’s name, but it’s at the beginnin’ of the journal, and anyway that’s not what’s important now.”
“So what is?” Jack tried peering over his friend’s shoulder but was having trouble making words of the cramped handwriting in the journal.
“This is the formula, modified by my great grandfather, for changin’ people into someone else. As I remember the story, the first formula didn’t work very well, but great grandpa fixed it. We’ve had this sitting here for ages because no one in the family wanted to try it out.” Hastie finally paused for a breath.
“So this… this ‘formula’ has never been tested?” Jack was incredulous. “I’m outta here. Are you going to join me at the mall, or what?”
“Relax,” Hastie smirked. “Don’t be such a ‘worry wart.’ I’m not gonna make you take any risks. You can watch me… and after it works for me, you can try it, if you’re not too chicken, that is.”
“I’m not a chicken, darn you. I’ve got more tackles than anyone in the league. If it weren’t for me, think how many times you would have been chopped meat, Mr. All-State Quarterback. I just don’t think this stuff will work and we still need costumes. There’s only two days left before the dance.”
“Tell you what. You hit the mall. See what you can find in the way of decent costumes. I’ll pull this together. Pop usually has enough chemicals and lab apparatus in stock here for just about anythin’ I’ll need. Let’s meet back here tomorrow after practice, okay?” As usual, he didn’t wait for an answer, but began reading and muttering as he tried to decipher the handwriting. Jack watched him for a moment, then just shook his head and left. Sometimes he wondered why they stayed friends.
“Man! I hate wind sprints,” Hastie groused. The two friends were still breathing hard as they walked to Hastie’s car after practice. Jack was limping badly, but Hastie didn’t seem to notice. They were leaving school after most of the students and faculty had left for the afternoon, so there wasn’t much traffic around the campus, and it was a sunny Fall day, not cold yet, but the air was crisp and cool, and the leaves on the oaks that lined the street were just starting to change into their fall colors.
“Yeah. That was one hellacious session.” Jack agreed as he slumped into the passenger seat of Hastie’s hand-me-down Mom-mobile. “I’m beat.”
Hastie just groaned his agreement as he started the car and headed for home. Neither boy had the energy to reach out and turn on the radio and the silence quickly became uncomfortable.
“So what did you find at the mall?”
“Not a lot.” Jack gently rubbed at a newly-earned bruise on his upper thigh. “The department stores only had kid stuff left. The novelty stores had some stuff for adults left, but who wants to be Richard Nixon or a wolfman?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind being a wolfman, but who the heck is Richard Nixon? And we did agree to get something different — and something we could both do together. Besides, who ever heard of a blond wolf?” Hastie asked as he rubbed his friend’s military-cut hair. He always wore it so short that it looked a lot like peach fuzz.
“There was this one store….”
“Yeah? Give.”
“It was kind of strange — called ‘The Witch’s Familiar.’ ”
“So? What did they have?”
“Well, they had a lot of strange-looking stuff, almost like a dusty old botanica, candles, oils, crystal balls, mirrors, and an assortment of weird gimcracks. At first, I thought it was another variety store, like ‘Spooner Gifts,’ but choreographed by Mel Brooks. They had a couple of racks of costumes, but I never really got to see them.”
“Huh? You couldn’t walk to whatever corner of the store they were in?”
“No, O wise one. This whacky old crone all dressed up in black — but not like a Goth or anything, more like those people in Pennsylvania who live like it was a hundred years ago or something — came out of the back room before I was more than a few feet into the store and stopped me.”
“A big strong guy like you was stopped by an old woman?” Hastie smirked. “Extra! Extra! Read all about it. Big, hulkin’ center stopped in his tracks by an old fossil.”
“Cut it out,” Jack snarled in annoyance. “In the first place, she knew me by name for some reason, which weirded me out, because I'm sure I would have remembered seeing her. In the second place, what did you want me to do, arm wrestle her? Go two falls out of three? I stopped because I don't mess with girls, and she was so frail looking that I was afraid she might just topple over if I accidentally sneezed, much less touched her. Anyway, she told me that she didn’t have exactly what I was looking for anyway. You know, Hastie, sometimes you can be a real pain.”
“Sorry, guy. It just struck me as funny.” He stretched forward and turned on the radio and they rode in strained silence until arriving at Hastie’s house where they automatically sprawled out in comfortable positions in the den. Hastie grabbed the remote and started surfing channels on the television.
“So what did you come up with?”
“Huh?” Hastie had stopped changing channels. It was one of those barbarian from Hell action flicks, and he really liked the part where the big guy was blowing stuff up with a primitive hand-held grenade launcher.
“I said, what did you come up with?”
“I think it’s ‘Revenge of Selene.’ You know, the sword and sorcery flick with that blonde actress who married that other guy, Stallion or something.”
“I meant for costumes,” Jack didn’t quite snarl, but he made it clear he still wasn’t happy with Hastie’s comments about his unmacho behavior at that weird store. For once, Hastie, intellectual genius but emotional ignoramus that he was, caught on, and did his best to give a simple, straightforward, no-nonsense answer.
“Oh. Yeah, I made up a bunch of doses of the formula. It’s up in the lab. Come on.” He jumped from his chair and jogged up to the lab leaving Jack to decide whether to let the unending series of explosions bombard a soon-to-be-empty room.
Jack sighed and turned off the television, but not before one last wistful glance at the barbarian, who seemed to have found a beautiful buxom barbarian babe, now tastefully draped fainting across his left arm while he whacked away with his sword in his good right hand. He then ran and caught up to Hastie at the door to the lab.
“Whoa up, ‘Boy Blunder.’ You want to fill me in a bit about this formula before we use it?”
“Still don’t trust me, huh? Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck,” Hastie teased as he made flapping chicken movements with his arms.
“Excuse me? Last year? The moon rocket? I remember being hard-of-hearing for a week after it exploded instead of taking off.”
Hastie started to indignantly correct his memory-impaired friend’s misunderstanding of the situation, but Jack waved him off and continued in a louder voice so that Hastie’s words were lost in his friend’s tirade.
“Then there was two years ago when you were going to transmute lead into gold based on an old family recipe. I almost lost two fingers when your concoction exploded and splashed acid all over.” He rubbed the still visible scars on his left hand.
“But….”
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m on a roll. Every ‘experiment’ you’ve cooked up has resulted in something going wrong, all the way back to when we were seven years old and you made gunpowder but couldn’t find any charcoal so you cleverly made some charcoal from wood chips and dumped it into the mortar — before the embers had cooled. Once again, ‘BOOM!’
“Well, it….”
“ ‘BOOM!’ is the outcome of just about every project we’ve done together, so yeah, I want to preserve my hide and get a bit more information about this formula before using it.” Jack finally wound down and dropped back into the stuffed chair.
Hastie stood, hands on hips, scowling, waiting to see if Jack was really done before responding. “So why are you still here if you feel that way?”
“Because you’re my best friend,” Jack spoke with as much sincerity as he’d spoken with anger before, but then he broke into a good-natured grin as he continued. “And besides, who else would stick around to save you when things go wrong?”
“Well, nothin’ is going to go wrong this time, damn it. It’s not even my formula.”
“Sure,” Jack sat back down, but he certainly didn’t sound convinced.
Hastie kept speaking as he jumped back up onto the chair and grabbed a bunch of test-tubes from the same high shelf that the book with the formula had been found originally and stuffing as many as he could in various pockets, so he didn’t hear Jack mutter about the formula for gunpowder not being his originally either.
“I did some research.” His pockets were full, but there were still a couple of test-tubes in his hand. “The original formula was developed by a physician by the name of Jekyll, that’s pronounced ‘Jeekuhll,’ by the way, to rhyme with treacle. He was best friends with my great grandfather, Herbert Lanyon the First, and gramps got the book from Jekyll’s estate.”
“Let’s save the family history. Our families have been close for so long, I probably know it almost as well as you. Wasn’t Jekyll the guy who wanted to temporarily change his looks so he could live a life of crime?” He looked skeptical.
“Sorry.” Hastie dropped down into the other stuffed chair. “I gotta tell a bit more, so please bear with me. You’re right about the life of crime, but it probably wasn’t his original intention, and he’s not the center of the story anyway.
“So go on already. I’m waiting….”
“Anyway, Hastie Lanyon the First, was a doctor also. It bugged him that his very good friend had died so suddenly. I know Jekyll had planned to use it for evil, but science is just science, and the first Hastie Lanyon realized this. He knew the formula he’d found was somehow related to the formula mentioned in Jekyll’s journal, so he started studying it, looking for a way to make it work properly, without the mental and physical degradation that eventually drove Jeckyll mad. It became an obsession for him, especially alone in his big empty house after his wife died. His children had long since grown up and left for lives of their own and that was an age when servants did not spend more time than they had to with their betters.
“Anyway, Hastie the First eventually found out what was wrong with the original formula and fixed it. This is the modified formula he created, exactly as he described it. No modifications. No substitutions. None.”
“Well, that’s good to hear, I guess. What does it do?” It was clear from Jack’s tone of voice that he was still leery.
“Damn! Still don’t trust me huh?” Hastie’s confidence had returned as he spoke of things he understood. “Let’s see, how to describe it. Okay, let’s try this. Remember that old Chalker book, the one about the truck driver who turned into a barbarian and fought evil in another dimension?” Jack nodded pensively. They both loved Chalker’s books, and you could buy them for a song online, since no one had bothered to renew the copyright, books with only words in them having long since been relegated to the dusty antique stores that also sold Edison Cylinder Phonographs, the ones with the big horn things instead of amplifiers.
“In one of the later books in the series, the barbarian is bitten by a small dog that’s actually a ‘were,’ ” Jack said thoughtfully.
“A what?”
“A ‘were.’ ”
“Where what”?
“Werewolf.”
“I don’t know. I don’t see any wolf.” Jack made exaggerated searching movements as he laughed.
“Right, and who’s on first?”
“Second base.”
Now they were both laughing.
“Anyway,” Hastie tried to control his laughter enough to continue. “You darn well know it’s ‘were,’ as in werewolf — like Lon Chaney.”
“Of course. That’s where I heard the name.”
“On a movie marquee?”
“No. The name ‘Jekyll.’ It’s from that book by Robert Lewis Stevenson. That explains why they never talked about him much in our joint family histories. Wasn’t my great-great grandfather his lawyer or something? What kind of fantasies have you been spinning for me here?”
“No fantasy.” Hastie glared down at his seated friend. “I told you I needed to give you some history. Let me finish the story already.”
Jack nodded and waited, albeit not that patiently, if his rapidly twitching foot was any indication.
“My great grandfather wrote that book under a — whaddya call it — pseudonym. I have copies of the original galley proofs here somewhere if you don’t believe me. Anyway, I told you that he’d gotten obsessed. With no family around, he also became somethin’ of a recluse. Didn’t go anywhere. Didn’t see anyone. If you remember from your own family’s history, our two families almost split about then.”
Jack nodded his reluctant agreement.
“He did try his modified formula once — and then died.”
“Oh great, so now it’s poison you’re selling here?” Jack said, but he was smiling as he spoke.
“No.” Hastie scowled. “He had plenty of time to report that it worked and how it worked before he was run over by a hansom cab at seventy-six years of age.”
“Okay, so how does it work?”
“For that we go back to that Chalker story we were talkin’ about earlier. The barbarian became a ‘were,’ but not like Lon Chaney.”
“Yeah, I remember. He didn’t become a werewolf, he became a were-anything, whatever he was closest to when he changed.”
“Exactly, and that’s almost how this formula works.”
“Oh oh. Here we go again. What exactly do you mean by ‘almost?’ ”
“Relax, Jack. Your feathers are showing again. ‘Squawk! Cluck, cluck, cluck.’ The difference is that it’s not what you’re closest to, but what you’re thinking of when the change occurs.”
“Side effects? Do I turn purple? Does my nose fall off? Do I have an irresistible urge to walk in front of a hansom cab?”
“Nope. No side effects.”
“Okay, what aren’t you telling me. There’s got to be something. Give.”
“Nothin’ damn it. It changes you into whatever the heck you think of after takin’ the formula. It’s based on Jekyll’s formula, which changed the emotions and then let the emotions, or spirit as Jekyll called it, change the body. Great grandfather reversed it so that the form changed and then the emotions, or spirit, changed to reflect the form.”
“I knew there was a catch,” Jack snapped his fingers. “So if I think of becoming a horse, I become a horse. Then I become convinced that I am a horse. Then I don’t know to change back to me?”
“Wrong. You become a horse and you get the reflexes and instincts of a horse, but keep your intelligence. In effect you become like Mr. Ed.”
“A talking horse?”
“Well, maybe not, but a very smart horse. You might be able to speak a bit, but I’ll bet that the vocal cords of a horse would make speech very difficult, if not impossible.”
“But how do you know that I would know I could change back or, for that matter, that I would want to change back? Horses aren’t known for wanting to become humans as far as I know.”
“Because that’s what great grandfather turned himself into, a horse. The family had a hell of a time, removing the scuff marks from his hooves the wood flooring so they could sell the estate and move to America. They couldn’t figure out what great grandpa had been doing with a horse inside the house.”
“Okay. Another question. How do you turn back?”
“You take the formula and think about being yourself.”
“How did old Hastie the First find a way to drink the formula if he was a horse?”
“He knocked the bottle with the formula in it off the table and onto the floor. Then he lapped up what spilled and turned back.”
“That means we need to have an easy way to change back. How many bottles of that stuff did you make?”
“Dozens. More than enough for any eventuality. Does that mean that you believe me?”
“No, it means that I’m reserving judgment, although I’m still leaning towards the idea that this is a really elaborate practical joke.”
“When it’s not April Fools Day? Come on Jack, we have a tradition to uphold,” Hastie responded indignantly.
“Fine. It’s not a joke. It works, and we’re going to try it out tonight, two days before the party.”
“You still don’t believe me.”
“Nope. I already told you that. Just assume I do and humor me. What is this going to turn us into for the party? Ideas?”
“Well. I was thinking about something mythical. A satyr or a centaur.”
“Nope.”
“Why not? We both like centaurs.”
“Sure, but they’ll never let us in. Remember your great grandfather’s floors?”
“The precious gym floor or a fantastic costume.” Hastie lifted one hand and then the other as if weighing his options, and then said ruefully, “Okay. Gym floor wins, huh?” He grimaced in distaste. “Okay, how about Batman and Robin?”
“Nope. Too common. Care to guess how many cartoon super heroes will be there?”
“Good point. How about rock stars. Old one’s that have been around so that everyone knows them, but as themselves when they were young?”
“Sure. I’ll be George Michaels and you can be Boy George.”
“I was thinking of something just a bit more contemporary.”
“Okay, how about you be Whitney Houston and I’ll be Shania Twain.”
“You’re not takin’ this very seriously.”
“Of course I’m not. Why would I?”
“Because it works, darn it. Try it. Or are you chicken?”
“Don’t call me chicken.” Jack was out of his chair and trying to loom menacingly over his slightly taller friend. “Give it to me.”
“So you’re going to try it out? Are you sure you’re not afraid?”
“Sure I’m sure,” he growled as he grabbed two containers from his friend’s hands.
“What are you going to become?”
“Not a clue. I know. I’ll become… I’ll become… a barbarian, like from that movie you were watching.
“I wasn’t watching it, I was channel surfing and stopped there when you started talking to me again.”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” Before he found another reason not to, Jack uncorked the small test-tube and swallowed the amber fluid inside. “Ugh. It tastes like scotch.”
“Shut up and think barbarian. You want to screw this up?”
“I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” He looked down at his body. Why aren’t I changing?”
“It takes a few moments. Give it a chance.”
“Right. Absolutely.” But Jack still squeezed his eyes closed tight and concentrated as hard as he could.
“Hey! I feel a tingling. It must be working.” Jack’s eyes opened wide with shock, and then he collapsed to the floor groaning and writhing.
“Oh, god. It’s not supposed to hurt.” Hastie dropped to the ground beside his friend, trying to cradle Jack’s head in his lap as his face became pale with fear.
Jack suddenly became very still, hardly breathing. Before Hastie could start CPR one eye opened and Jack laughed. “Gotcha. This is one practical joke that’s going to be on you.”
“You bastard. You had me scared to death.” Hastie pushed Jack’s head off his lap and stood up. Still laughing, Jack pushed himself back so that he could lean against a stuffed chair.
“I told you this was a crock. Now what’s the real plan for the Halloween party? Does it have something to do with the TSP device your father mentioned yesterday?”
“Sorry, Jack. That was the real thing, and I suggest you keep thinking about big bad burly barbarians — unless you want to be that centaur, or maybe you want to be the barbarian babe?”
“Now that was one good looking babe. Did you know that her bio on Wikipedia says that Selene’s exactly as tall as me. She’s a red-head in that movie but she’s usually sporting blonde hair. I wonder if she’s a natural blonde? I’ll bet she is. She looks like a blonde.”
“Jack. Don’t do this. You really need to think of….”
Before Hastie could finish Jack groaned and slid over onto his side, hands clutched tightly to his chest. As Hastie watched, his best friend’s twitching body slowly seemed to turn to Jello and flow into a new and different shape. Hair flowed out of his head, reddish blonde hair that kept coming until it reached below the shoulders. His arms thinned and the skin lightened a bit. His upper torso didn’t get smaller, but it did change shape with the shoulders and waist becoming thinner. His shoes didn’t fall off, but they seemed to wiggle about more as he continued to twitch.
Suddenly Jack stopped twitching and lay still. His eyes shot open as he sucked in a prodigious quantity of the room’s air and screamed.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Two
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
By trying we can easily endure adversity.
Another man’s, I mean.— Following the Equator (1897)
— Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
“What was that? Did I hear someone scream?” Dr. Lanyon came running into the lab with a worried expression.
“Damn. I knew we needed better sound-proofing,” Hastie muttered to himself as his father’s eyes locked onto Jack, unsteadily getting to his feet.
“Is everything all right, Miss?” the older man smiled. Turning to Hastie his smile turned to a frown. “I thought we’d agreed that you would tell your parents when you have a friend visiting?”
“Right, Pop. I’m sorry. I guess I forgot.” Gesturing to Jack, he continued. “Dad, I’d like you to meet Selene. Selene, this is my Dad.”
Selene seemed more preoccupied with herself and failed to acknowledge the introduction. Before his father’s sensibilities could be aroused and Selene was asked to leave, Hastie rushed to continue an introduction.
“She’s new to our school and asked for some help with chemistry. I hope you don’t mind, but we were about to use the blackboard here in the lab for a study aid.”
“Oh. Okay, son, but next time we — your mother and I — want to know when you have friends over, and I want to know before you use the lab. I’m running the start up routine for the TSP right now and I would really prefer that no one use the lab right now.” Mrs. Lanyon appeared behind her husband just as he was finishing his instructions. She nodded in agreement and waited to be introduced.
“Hi, Mom. This is Selene. Selene, this is my Mom.” Selene nodded distractedly until Hastie kicked her to get her to focus on what was going on around her and not get them both into hot water. He was also worried that she might do something stupid like trying to check out her new anatomy in public.
“Selene, you have lovely hair, is strawberry blonde your natural color? It’s just perfect on you with your delicate skin tone; it makes you look like a young Maureen O’Hara.”
“Excuse me? Maureen who?” she said, still distracted.
“Your hair, is that the natural color? It’s quite becoming, almost like Hastie’s friend Jack’s hair. I’ve always thought he should let his hair grow a bit, at least more than the extreme buzz cut he usually wears.” Mrs. Lanyon stepped around her husband to approach Selene and fluffed out the younger woman’s hair so that it spread appealingly about her shoulders.
Hastie almost turned green with his mother’s reference to Jack, certain that in his obviously bewildered state his friend would give everything away.
“Oh, unh, yes.”
“Yes, what, dear?”
“Yes, I’m a natural redhead. I’m going to have to make an appointment to have it cut as soon as I can. It’s too long right now.” She glared at Hastie as he smirked and fought to stifle a snicker.
Hastie’s mother, on the other hand, was shocked. “Cut your beautiful hair? Oh, no, Selene, you mustn’t. It’s perfect on you, simply wonderful, just the way it is.”
“Ah, folks. Can we continue this discussion in the living room?” Dr. Lanyon moved protectively next to the closet door and tried to usher everyone out of the room. “I have an experiment under way and it would be safer if everyone moved this discussion to another room, like the living room.”
As if to emphasize the good doctor’s words, there was a rumbling from the closet. Everyone turned towards the door as the rumbling became louder.
“I think we should all leave now.” Dr. Lanyon suggested with more urgency.
The rumbling became a deep moan as it continued to grow in volume. Now, it was so loud that everyone covered their ears as Dr. Lanyon grabbed Selene in one hand and his wife with his other and started dragging them towards the exit.
As suddenly as it started, the noise stopped and everyone turned back to the closet door. There was a small red glow coming from the keyhole. The glow became brighter and before anyone could move the entire door was missing, replaced by a red swirling vortex. Incidental to the door’s disappearance, a whistling sound began that rapidly grew louder and louder until it was a roar. Papers, then small pieces of lab equipment, then books, furniture and people began flying into the vortex. Several minutes later there was a faint click and the vortex snapped off, leaving a completely empty room.
Waves of heat shimmered over a reddish sandy plain surrounded by layered cliffs, rounded and formed into strange multicolored rainbow shapes from ages of blowing wind. In the hazy azure sky, two suns were visible above one sculpted cliff. A single tree struggled to grow from a rocky ledge on a low hill, providing a limited amount of shade for the four bodies sprawled awkwardly beneath it. It was not until the twin suns settled behind the cliff for the night, that they slowly began to stir themselves to rise from their semiconscious stupor.
“Ow! I hurt.”
Assorted moans echoed the sentiment.
“Me too. What happened?” Selene asked as she angrily tugged her hair away from her face.
“I don’t know.” Hastie replied as he struggled to a sitting position. “I guess Pop’s experiment had a bug or two in it.”
“Is that true, dear?” Mrs. Lanyon groaned and asked her husband. Seeing Selene struggling with his hair she reached over to help. “Why don’t we put your hair in a ponytail, dear?”
“I’m afraid so, Emily dearest.” Dr. Lanyon interjected before Selene could snarl back the frustrated answer Hastie was expecting. Instead, Selene wisely bit her tongue and held back the first retort that came to mind, something about ‘like father, like son;’ instead saying, “Because despite what I look like, I’m really Jack and I haven’t the faintest idea how to do a ponytail or anything else with my hair.”
“Excuse me? I thought Hastie said your name was Selene.”
“He lied. I’m Jack. Jack Utterson. This body,” he gestured, “is another one of Hastie’s botched experiments.”
“Is that true, young man?” Mrs. Lanyon angrily turned to confront her son.
“No, Mom. Or at least not really.”
A loud snort of disgust came from Jack’s direction.
“I followed the instructions exactly. It was great grandfather’s formula.”
Mrs. Lanyon’s hand went to her mouth while Dr. Lanyon groaned, this time in disappointment.
“But Pop, you told me great grandpa had perfected it.”
“Yes, Hastie, he did develop a more benign version of Dr. Jekyll’s formula, but I also told you that the family has decided we would never use it. It was too dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Dangerous how? I knew you were holding out something from me, Hastie.” Jack was angry again; this time the anger was tinged with worry.
“It’s not dangerous, Jack. It worked, didn’t it?” Hastie responded quickly before turning back to his father. “Besides, I don’t see how it could be any more dangerous that your TSP.”
“That will be enough out of you, young man,” Dr. Lanyon glared at his son.
“I’m afraid he might be right, dear. Have you looked around?” Everyone looked beyond the piles of furniture, equipment and books that surrounded them.
“Oh….” Dr. Lanyon actually looked at the destruction, and realized that his experiment hadn’t gone quite as swimmingly as he’d imagined it would.
Jack muttered, “It looks like we’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.”
His attempt at a wry sort humor fell on deaf ears. There was no doubt that they weren’t in Kansas, since they’d never been there, but they obviously weren’t in New York either. In fact, it was doubtful whether they were even on the planet Earth, although the area looked something like the Monument Valley area so popular in ancient ‘cowboy’ films. Last he looked, there was only one Sun in the sky back on Earth, and it didn’t seem like the sort of thing one could forget.
“Unh, Pop. Something more than ‘Oh,’ seems called for here. Look!” He pointed down the hill toward the plain, where what looked like a distant herd of centaurs were galloping toward the hills.
“Never mind where we are. Give me one of those darned test-tubes so I can get back to being me again,” Jack demanded as she started crawling toward Hastie with a clear intent to do whatever was necessary to get what she wanted.
“Hastie, didn’t you tell Jack?”
“Not again,” Jack said irritably. “What else didn’t he tell me?” The slow crawl stopped. He’d made it as far as Mrs. Lanyon who gently put a comforting arm around the pretty blonde beside her.
“Hastie,” Dr. Lanyon “tsked.” “You know what we’ve told you about telling the truth, the whole truth.”
“Yes, Father.” Hastie seemed particularly chagrinned. “Unh, Jack, you can’t exactly turn back for a fortnight.”
“What? What the he… I mean heck, is a fortnight? Why can’t I change?”
“A fortnight is fourteen days, two weeks,” Hastie’s father interjected.
“Thank you, Dr. Lanyon. Now why do I have to wait so long? And for that matter,” Jack asked Hastie, “how the heck were we going to go back to school after Halloween if we were trapped inside your stupid science fiction/sword and sorcery bodies?”
“I… unh, I… forgot about that part.”
“You forgot? Isn’t it written in that stupid book you got the formula from?”
“No. Jack,” Dr. Lanyon explained, much to the relief of Hastie. “It was so noted in grandfather’s will, along with the warning that to try earlier would lock in the current form forever — if it didn’t kill you first.”
“Great. Just great.” Jack put her hands to her face and slumped to the ground while Mrs. Lanyon gently held her and rocked with her until a strange howling sound in the distance captured everyone’s attention.
“Dear, it seems as if we’re not alone, so I think we should think about what we need to do to make ourselves safe here, wherever here is, before wasting time in recriminations.”
“Very true. Let’s see what we have here that we can use to help us. Everyone take a corner and start sorting. Whatever seems irretrievably broken, toss away from the tree. Whatever seems intact, place beside the tree. Then we can make an inventory of what we have and see what we might be able to use to get back home. There was quite a bit of scientific apparatus in the closet, so surely enough survived to give us some hope of self-rescue.”
“Okay, Pop, but going home may be a bit difficult.”
“Why’s that?”
Hastie merely pointed upward. There in the sky was the bright full moon helping them see. Beside it was a much smaller, reddish colored moon.
“Oh,” Dr. Herbert Lanyon the Sixth, MD, PhD, said again. “So we’re not only not on Earth, we don’t even seem to be in the same solar system.” Then he smiled. “On the other hand, it proves conclusively that the TSP worked perfectly, so that’s some consolation.”
They all silently began sorting through the piles of scattered items about them.
The larger and brighter of the two moons had set by the time the sorting was completed. Four very tired people sat dejectedly about a small fire made of the combustible trash, which evidently included all the books, since they’d found little other than piles of scorched confetti and a few scraps of cardboard covers. The rest of the huge pile of junk had debris had been tossed in a rough circle around them and the pitifully small pile of useful items had been stacked next to the fire. The remains of the bookshelves and the shredded books themselves had provided a more than sufficient supply of flammable material for a fire, although the paper burned so quickly that they soon gave up on it, taking time to find bits of wood from the bookshelves instead. The refrigerator had been emptied to provide a small meal of melting candy bars and warm soda.
“Let’s review.” Sometimes Dr. Lanyon couldn’t help being pedantic, finding it difficult to abandon the academic habits of a lifetime. “The good news is that we’re alive, in good health, and that we have a nearly full box of wooden matches with an assortment of camping and survival supplies, including three remaining sodas, a few very soft candy bars, plus backpacks to carry it all. The bad news is that we have no other food, no water, only the clothes on our backs, and our weapons consist of one laser pointer, two mostly-decorative sabers which none of us know how to use effectively, quite a few small surgical knives, and enough chemicals to make a couple of pounds of nitrocellulose if we had some ice.” He pondered for a moment. “Have I missed anything? Oh yes, we don’t know where we are or how to get home.”
Everyone glumly agreed with his assessment.
“This sure ain’t Kansas, Toto,” Hastie muttered again.
By this time a despondent gloom that had settled over the entire group.
“Don’t say ‘ain’t,’ dear,” his mother corrected him as usual, but it lacked her usual fervor.
“Let’s get some sleep folks. We should probably take turns keeping watch, although I have no idea what we need to watch for. How about two-hour shifts? Who wants first shift?”
“I will. I’m not tired.” Jack picked up one of the sabers and idly examined it. Something about it seemed to fascinate him, although he had no idea what. While the others lay down on the sandy ground and tried to get comfortable, Jack began to slice the air with the blade.
Hastie wasn’t sleepy either, and he didn’t have a TV, nor any video games to fool with. As the only action around was Jack playing with the big knife, he watched his friend. With a twinge of guilt he realized that in her current form, she was very pleasing to look at.
“Hey, Selene. When did you get so good with a blade?”
“I don’t know. It just feels right. And don’t call me Selene. That’s what that stupid barbarian woman of yours was called in the movie.”
Hastie watched as Jack continued practicing his swordplay, moving faster and faster, making more and more difficult moves. She was good, very good. Better than she had any right to be, and there was something else, something different about her. Hastie concentrated, trying to figure out what had changed.
Her hair? Was her hair a different shade of red than he remembered? Maybe, but that wasn’t what was gnawing at the edges of his awareness. It had to be something else.
Her acceptance of the name Selene? Hastie had been teasing, but Jack usually became irate when teased. Maybe, but he didn’t think that was it either.
His clothes? Jack had been wearing a skin-tight reddish brown leather camisole when they’d come back from practice, hadn’t he?
“Unh, Mom, Pop, Jack. I think we have another problem.”
“What?”
“What’s that, dear?”
“Something’s happening to Sel… Jack. Her… his clothes are changing.”
“Nonsense, Hastie,” his mother chided him. “I remember complimenting her on her choice of leather when we met.”
“Mom, first off, that’s Jack, not a ‘her,’ and one problem is she… he’s not even correcting us. The second problem is, like I said before, her clothes are changing. We were both wearing sweats with the school logo on them, just like mine, when we left practice this afternoon. It’s a team rule.”
“Are you sure, dear? I definitely recall complimenting her on how nice she looked when we met.”
“I’m sure, Mom. I’m sure. Look. Now there’s a scabbard too.”
“Oh my, I certainly don’t remember that being there before.”
“Neither do I,” Dad chimed in.
“I don’t get it. What’s happening?”
Dr. Lanyon cleared his throat and everyone turned towards him. “I think I can explain, at least part of it.
“When she took the Jekyll formula her body changed. Now her mind is changing to match her body. That’s why she’s adjusting to the use of the name Selene. Watch.” He turned to address Jack.
“Jack, would you please tell us your name.”
“Sure.” Her face showed the strain as she concentrated on what should have been a simple request. “It’s Son…. It’s J… Jel… Selene. That’s it, Selene. My name is Selene.” Jack beamed at the others as he repeated the name over and over, her hair was now bright red, and she had freckles.
“Thank you, Selene,” Dad smiled politely at her. “You can stop now.”
“I can’t explain why her clothes are changing, but I think I can explain what’s responsible for the changes.” He stopped and peered carefully at each of the others. “I’m pretty sure it’s only happening to her, so I think it’s a safe working hypothesis to assume that it’s somehow related to her ingestion of the Jekyll formula.”
“I don’t understand, Herbert. How could a formula, even one that somehow changes a person’s genetic makeup, change non-living matter?”
“I don’t know, Emily. Only with time and careful observation do we have a chance of determining that.” He started patting his pockets, looking for a notebook and pen so he could write down his observations.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Hastie? Please keep your voice down. Your mother is sleeping.”
“I haven’t figured out exactly how yet either, but the changes may help us.”
“How’s that, son?”
“The formula can change us into forms that are better suited to surviving here, like those centaurs we saw.”
“That’s true, son, but I don’t remember any reference to changes in non-living matter. That’s something new and, I must admit, worrisome to me.
“Gentlemen,” a woman’s voice called softly from the darkness
“Yes, Selene, I mean Jack?”
“I think you should be aware that we are not alone — and don’t call me Jack. That’s not my name and it’s just plain silly.”
The two men quickly scanned the darkness but saw nothing. “What’s up?”
“There are several large four legged creatures circling our campsite, I think six. Look away from the fire until your eyes adjust and you will be able to catch glimpses of the red glow of the fire in their eyes.”
It took two tense minutes for their eyes to adjust and even then it took luck to catch the occasional momentary glint of red from the fire reflected in the eyes of the creatures in the darkness.
“Should we wake Mom?”
“No, son, let her sleep. Your mother is many things, but not a fighter.”
The night was shattered by an unholy wail, like the one they had heard earlier, but much closer. “What was that?” Mrs. Lanyon was wide-awake, her eyes wide with fright as she jerked herself into an upright position.
“So much for not waking your mother,” Dr. Lanyon muttered, before responding in a louder voice to his wife. “It’s nothing, dear. Selene saw some animals nearby, but the fire is keeping them at bay.”
“Oh dear. Do we have enough wood to make it through the night?”
“More than enough, dear,” he answered aloud before muttering to himself, “I hope.” There was no assurance that this world rotated on a twenty-four hour schedule. He cursed himself for failing to keep track of the apparent motion of the stars.
“They’re getting closer.” Selene had taken a wide-footed fighting stance, with her transformed saber in hand as she concentrated on the things in the dark.
“Dearest, you stay by the fire and make sure it keeps burning as brightly as it is right now, but don’t make it any bigger. We don’t know how long the nights are here.”
Dr. Lanyon gestured to Hastie to move to another quadrant and find a weapon. As one, they ran to the lab table and yanked on its two remaining legs until they broke off in their hands. A club was better than bare hands and neither felt comfortable with the lone saber left.
Club in hand, each moved to a position at the barrier, about a third of the circumference of the circle of junk away from Selene. From the noises behind them, Mrs. Lanyon was digging through the piles of useful material, throwing out every flammable item she found, but neither of the men was willing to look back towards the fire where she was for fear of losing what little night vision they had.
There was another undulating wail and everyone but Selene jerked a bit. This one seemed louder and closer still. As the horrid caterwaul faded into the night, Selene spoke quietly but decisively. “They’re coming now.”
Seconds ticked by with only the crackling of the fire to confirm the passage of time. The tension was unbearable and Hastie glanced at the tense and unmoving figure of Selene to his right. “Where the hell are they?” he said, just as he heard a sound behind him.
Quickly turning back, he found a huge slathering mouth, full of teeth and snarling at him from the top of a pile of junk just inches away from his face. Before he could scream in fear and shock, it leapt from the pile straight at him, knocking him backwards to the sand within the circle, and then jumping onto his chest, knocking even more air from his lungs. Everything began to move in slow motion.
Gasping for breath he held the club in both hands as he tried to push the teeth, surrounded by ratty brownish fur, from his neck. As the jaws snapped at him he could hear sounds of battle around him, but couldn’t concentrate as he felt the thing’s neck sliding back off the club. The next time those jaws closed it would surely be around his neck.
Suddenly, the thing on his chest spasmed, giving him a chance to drop the club and grab at it’s neck on both sides, just behind the teeth. As he scrabbled for a grip, his hand brushed against something stiff and hard and it spasmed again before snapping at his neck, determined to bite him.
Hastie knew that his grip was slipping. Desperately grasping for a safer grip, he again brushed that stiff object and again the creature jerked as if in tremendous pain. Grasping at whatever it was, he absently noted that it was slick with some fluid, but that was secondary to his need to jab at the toothy monstrosity on top of him with the stick or whatever it was. He pushed it in firmly and twisted.
The creature howled and squirmed, clawing his chest painfully. He pushed harder as the creature made yet another lunge at his neck. The teeth were close enough that they had moved out of sight below his chin when the creature became rigid and… and stopped moving.
Hastie kept pushing and twisting the stick, or whatever it was for more than a minute, until he realized it was no longer moving. As he tiredly pushed it off, he realized that it had horrible breath — like sewer gas, fœtid and thick with decay — and that there was some type of fluid on his chest. A tired hand brushed absently at the sticky liquid and held it up for his inspection, twisting it into the amber light from the fire. It looked blackish red. It was blood. His last thought before passing out was to wonder if it was his.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Three
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost, (1667)
“He’s coming around, everybody. He’s coming around.”
Hastie wondered what his mother was doing in his bedroom so early in the morning. But wait a minute; the light through his closed eyes was too bright. It couldn’t be morning, maybe it was time to get up. Then he noticed the lump under his left shoulder.
Shifting position to get more comfortable, he wondered why he couldn’t hear the alarm clock, or had he forgotten to turn if on last night. He also wondered why the bed seemed so hard. Finally, Hastie had to wake up and opened his eyes to see his parents and a vision of loveliness looking down on him as he tried to sit up. The pain stopped him.
“Don’t try to move, Hastie, dear. The bunny rat sliced up your chest with its claws before you killed it.”
“Bunny rat?” Memories flooded to the fore. He remembered the formula, the problem with his father’s TSP device, the double moons, and… the bunny rats. “Oh.” It was more a groan than an acknowledgment, but the others smiled supportively.
“Is everyone else okay?”
“Yes, dear. Your father has a bad scratch on his arm, but Selene and I are fine.”
“What happened to the… unh, ‘bunny rats,’ and why call them that?” He tried to get up again and winced with the pain, but made it to a sitting position.
“Lie still, son, and we’ll explain.” Dr. Lanyon pushed an orange and violet colored object shaped like a small squash into his hand. “Drink! It tastes something like cherry cola, but not as sweet. It’s from the tree. I suspect the bunny rats were trying to get to them and we were in the way.
Hastie gagged it down, though it wasn’t all that unpleasant, but the muscles of his throat weren’t working right for some reason.
“Anyway, to answer your questions in reverse order, we’re calling them bunny rats because they have characteristics of both. There’s the long ears and fur like a rabbit and the tail and teeth of a rat. Of course, they are quite a bit bigger than either rats or rabbits.”
“About sixty-five pounds bigger, on average,” Selene interjected.
Dr. Lanyon glared as he would have at any of his students who were rash enough to interrupt one of his lectures, but when she just smiled and stood her ground, he shrugged and continued.
“As to what happened, we killed them. Selene got two, I got one, you got one and your mother got one.”
“One and a half,” Selene interrupted again. “The knife you used to kill yours was the one your mother threw and hit him, which weakened him enough that you were able to finish him off with the blade your mother had thoughtfully provided sticking out of his flank, right though his liver, as it turned out, so he would have died anyway. Plus one got away.”
“We are not sure of that, young lady.”
Selene just rolled her eyes and smiled knowingly at her friend’s father.
“Leave the girl alone, Herbert. She’s right.”
“What? Yes, dear, I mean, how do you know that?”
“I saw it, dear. It was right behind the one you killed. I threw a knife at that one too, but missed. Selene hurled a rock at it and hit it hard enough that it squealed and ran away.”
“So one of those monsters is still out there?” Hastie’s eyes darted everywhere at once as he tried to make sure there were no bunny rats nearby. His awareness of his need for self-preservation had been dramatically heightened by the fight he’d just been in.
“Relax, son. We’ll take turns standing guard, but I doubt it will come back. They seem to be pack animals and it has no pack to rely on any more.” Selene nodded her agreement and somehow that small gesture was more comforting to Hastie than his father’s assurances, but not enough that he was ready to take a chance on sleeping ever again.
“No way am I going to sleep. One of those monsters is still out there and I am not going to give it another chance at me.” Hastie tried to use the back of the tree to help him slide upward into a standing position, but immediately groaned in pain and slid back down.
“Herbert Lanyon the Seventh! I will not allow you to foolishly injure yourself because you do not trust your own father and mother. You will lie down and close your eyes this instant.” Mrs. Lanyon was like a force of nature when she was angry. Long experience had taught both Hastie and his father never to argue at such times.
“Yes, Mother.” Hastie bristled when he noticed Selene snicker, but his mother had laid down the law, so he slowly slid down into a more comfortable position and closed his eyes. He was asleep in seconds.
There must have been an earthquake. The whole world was shaking — and it hurt. Someone was calling him from a distance, “Hastie! Wake up, dear. Please wake up.”
“Wha?”
“Wake up, dear. Please wake up. Please.”
“Wazza matta?” The earthquake stopped and Hastie closed his eyes again, ready to go back to sleep.
“Herbert Lanyon, don’t you dare go back to sleep.”
“Yes, Mother.” His eyes were wide open again.
“Listen carefully, Hastie. We have a problem. The lacerations you got from that bunny rat have become infected. Both you and your father have become very ill. We’ve been discussing what to do and we’ve only come up with one answer. You — actually you and your father — must both take the Jekyll formula and change shape. Do you hear me? You’ve got to swallow the formula and then concentrate. Can you do that, dear?
“Sure, Mom. Right after I take a little nap….”
“Hastie! Don’t you dare go to sleep!”
“Just a nap, Mom. Not long. Just a few more minutes and I’ll get up for school.”
“He’s not paying attention. What are we going to do?”
“I’ll wake him up.” Selene gently pushed Mrs. Lanyon out of the way.
“Wake up, Hastie. Wake up, Hastie. Wake up, Hastie.” Each prompt was punctuated by a slap, each harder than the one before. On the fifth slap Hastie roused enough to slap away the hand and on the sixth he caught it just before it struck.
“Why are you hitting me? Would you like me to hit you like that?”
“It’s okay, dear,” Mrs. Lanyon quickly intervened. “You were sick and we couldn’t wake you up. We had to wake you up. We need you to do something. Can you hear me, dear?”
A nod, but one that threatened to continue on down toward his chest.
“You’re very sick, dear. You might die if you don’t do exactly what we say. You must take some of the formula and transform. It’s your only hope. Do you understand?” Selene grabbed him by the hair to keep him from nodding off again.
Another nod, but Hastie’s eyes were beginning to close again.
“Herbert Lanyon the Seventh! Don’t you dare go to sleep? Do you hear me?”
“Yesss, Mmmm,” he slurred. “Wonegoda sleep.”
Selene screamed into his ear, punctuating each emphatic order with another slap. “You must take the formula and you must transform, Hastie. You must become a centaur, just as your father advised, like the ones we saw down on the plain. Do you hear me, Hastie? A centaur! You must become a strong and powerful centaur!”
Selene placed a test-tube to the injured boy’s lips and tilted it up. When the liquid touched his lips he swallowed reflexively and then choked, nearly spitting it back out.
His mother said, “No, Hastie. Swallow. You must swallow, Hastie, dear.” She held her hand firmly over his mouth to keep the formula inside.
“Don’t worry about him swallowing.” I think he’s swallowed enough. “ Now we just need to keep him awake and focused long enough to start transforming.”
“That’s true, Selene. You keep him focused and I’ll take care of Dr. Lanyon.”
The two women separated and Selene turned back to Hastie. “Listen up, Hastie. I want you to think about centaurs. Do you hear me? Centaurs.”
“I hear you,” Hastie slurred. “Centaurs.” He further emphasized his understanding by nodded his agreement, but concurrently his eyes were glazing over.
“Hastie. Hastie!” Another slap.
“What? Whaddya want?”
“I want you to think of centaurs.
“Centaurs. Right.” His eyes unglazed for a moment and he looked up at Selene. “Say, did anyone ever tell you that you’re really, really pretty? What a babe….” With that he passed out. Even two hard slaps couldn’t rouse him.
“Mrs. Lanyon. We’ve got a problem here. Hastie’s unconscious and I can’t wake him.”
“Oh dear. Herbert, you’d better hold up on taking the formula. We may need both of our medical expertises with Hastie.” They all crowded around the injured boy.
“Do you think it will work, Herbert? Do you think the formula took?”
“I don’t know, dear. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Look!” Selene pointed. “He’s changing. Maybe he’ll be okay.”
“I just hope we were correct in our assumption that changing would heal his wounds.”
“I’m very hopeful,” Selene responded. “When I changed, a rather painful thigh injury I’d received at football practice earlier that day just disappeared, no bruising, no pain at all, like it never happened. And that old acid scar on my hand from Hastie’s rocket explosion?” She held up the hand in question for inspection. “Gone like yesterday’s newspaper. It should work for him just as well, maybe better, since I think we forced more into him than I drank to begin with. The stuff tastes nasty, you know.”
“We’ll see. We’ll see.”
“Oh, shoot.” Selene was watching the transformation.
“Don’t say that word, Selene, dear. It’s not ladylike.” Then Mrs. Lanyon glanced back down at her son. “Oh shoot,” she said.
The shape that was forming from what had been Hastie Lanyon didn’t seem to be developing hind legs and hooves, much less a tail.
“I don’t like being a centaur. It feels strange.” Emily Lanyon fought to suppress a grin at how whiny her husband’s voice sounded, or was that ‘whinny’ now? She seemed to have a lovely alto voice as well, well-suited to a beautiful centaur mare, which is exactly what she’d become, and wasn’t at all happy about it.
“Well, the breasts are a bit much, dear. Do you really think I should look like that?”
“Of course not, Emily. I guess my depth perception isn’t as good as I thought.” Her words didn’t stop her from blushing.
“It’s alright, dear,” Mrs. Lanyon laughed. “I’m actually somewhat flattered, but we had better get something around those things before you hurt yourself.” Fighting back a giggle, she continued, “I can’t wait to see you cantering.” With that Mrs. Lanyon began rummaging through the junk pile. Finding the flowered peach curtains that had been hanging in the lab she doubled them up and began wrapping them around Dr. Lanyon’s new breasts. Crossing them in the back, she brought them over his shoulders and then tied them between the cups.
“This seems awfully tight, dear.”
“I made it tight on purpose, dear. If those things of yours are bouncing uncomfortably now, when you’re just standing here talking to me, imagine what it’s going to be like when you’re galloping along.”
Dr. Lanyon’s face turned bright red and she staggered a bit, which only served to prove her wife’s point, since her breasts swayed rather alarmingly, even in their improvised confinement. If she could have figured out how to sit down, she would have done so gladly.
“Hastie’s coming around,” Selene said unhurriedly.
The two of them turned to see Selene pointing to a double of herself; except the one on the ground had very light ash-blonde hair and was a little shorter. The double was lying on her back, groaning and brushing her long blonde hair back from her face as if she’d been doing it all her life, using her forefingers to reach around behind her head and spread it becomingly over her shoulders, despite her obvious fatigue.
“Hastie, dear, how are you feeling?”
“Fine, Mom. I’ll get up for school in a few moments.” The blonde rolled over.
“No, Hastie. It’s time to wake up right now.” Mrs. Lanyon was quite insistent and Hastie finally rolled over again and looked up at her mother. Behind her and to the left was Selene — and on her right side was her mother again, but this time she had the lower extremities of a horse.
“Wha?” She was abruptly fully awake and sitting up, staring at the centaur.
“Don’t talk, Hastie,” his mother prompted. “Your father will explain everything presently.”
Hastie just stared from Selene, to her mother the centaur, who claimed to be her father, sort of, to the human woman who said she was her mother, and back to her transformed twin in total confusion. She was even more confused when the female centaur began speaking in her mother’s voice.
“You and I were very sick, probably dying from the infections we got when the bunny rats scratched us with their claws… and yes, I’m still your father, as well as a centaur that looks a lot like your mother. Just like you, I took the formula and changed. We needed a form of fast transportation and we needed to be able to communicate and handle things. Being a centaur, like those we saw that first day, seemed the simplest solution, and obviously wouldn’t stand out as being very odd. Unfortunately, since we’d agreed that the two of us would both change to become centaurs, when the change started I got started wondering what your mother would look like as a centaur. It’s the old ‘don’t think of elephants’ problem. Thus….” she gestured to display her new body.
“Well, I think it’s flattering, what your father has done,” Mrs. Lanyon cooed. “Don’t you? He’s taken my own body as his template and made some minor modifications to idealize it.” Mrs. Lanyon was referring to the slightly larger breasts and the more youthful, thinner and more glamorous face she now had, and declined to mention the handicap that large breasts would present her husband in a world that didn’t appear to contain support lingerie in wide profusion.
“Umm.”
“It’s okay, son. I’m still getting used to it too.” Dr. Lanyon carefully pranced back and forth to demonstrate how facile she’d become in her new chestnut mare’s body. “Your mother will need to do the same, so we’ll have two fast transports for the rest of our little family.”
Hastie once again gazed back up at his parents in confusion, unsure what her father meant. Then she remembered that he’d taken the formula too and quickly examined his body with growing shock and alarm.
“That’s right, Sis,” Selene chuckled. “Welcome to the buxom barbarian babes fun and social club. You’ll be pleased to know that we’re virtual twins.” As Hastie tentatively poked at the offending lumps on her chest, Selene gently slapped her hand away and continued. “Don’t be gross, Sis. You’ve simply got to get your mind out of the gutter, and nice girls don’t play with themselves while people are watching them.”
Mortified, Hastie blushed and pulled her hands away from her chest as quickly as if her boobs had been on fire. Then she started scrabbling around on the ground beside her with her hands, trying to find her clothes without looking down, lest she be tempted to stare at her own breasts again.
“Ahem,” her father cleared her throat. “So, to summarize,” Dr. Lanyon pontificated, in hopes of bringing the conversation back to something more useful to their situation, “Jack has become a fiery-red-haired woman with fair skin and an astonishing number of freckles who is now calling herself Selene. I’ve become a centaur mare with an upper body that’s a duplicate of your mother’s, and you’ve become an ash blonde version of someone who appears otherwise to be Jack’s shorter twin sister, but seems to have avoided the freckles.” He paused, thinking, then added, “which is good, because we can still tell you two apart fairly easily.”
“We’ve always been close friends, Hastie,” the new Selene laughed with great enthusiasm, and more than a touch of malice. “Now we can share cute outfits — maybe even boyfriends too,” she added, obviously satisfied to have reminded Hastie that most of their predicament was her fault. “Double dating will be such fun, dear.”
Hastie was at a loss for words, although she opened and then immediately closed her mouth several times as she tried to get some sort of sound besides a strangled gurgle to pass her lips. She wasn’t sure if she’d been more disturbed by the sinister laugh that had emanated from the redhead standing before him or by her final implication.
“Relax, Hastie, I was just joking,” she said, but not very convincingly, since she followed that reassuring disclaimer with, “We might want to spend a little time alone with our dates, after all.” Then she snickered again.
“That’s quite enough, Selene,” Mrs. Lanyon interrupted. “Hastie is still adjusting to this and I suspect it’s a bit of a shock. Now if all you ladies will excuse me,” she turned her back just in time to avoid having any of the others see her trying not to laugh, “I’m going to go off and become a centaur also, so we can travel more easily. It looks like endless wilderness around here, so we’ll have to travel some to find any local civilization, and two centaurs with two humans can cover a lot more ground than one centaur with three, and we don’t know how long it will take us to find either help or materials your father can use to build another TSP so we can get back to Earth.”
With that Emily Lanyon headed off to the other side of the tree with a reminder for the others to be quiet and refrain from disturbing her, so she could concentrate on doing a proper transformation.
Selene took the time to check for potential hostiles and then helped Hastie up so she could clamber into her torn jeans and shredded tee-shirt, both bloody from the attack, but all she had for now. Flipping the sword into the air, she deftly caught it by the hilt, flipped it again and caught it by the blade so that the handle faced Hastie, then handed it to her.
The blonde woman took it without thinking and began practicing some routines. Selene joined her with the other sword in hand and they began sparring — only to find that they were quite good and surprisingly evenly matched. No one had really noticed that Hastie’s jeans and ragged tee shirt had gradually become a black version of Selene’s skimpy leathers almost as soon as she’d shrugged back into them, nor that they were no longer torn.
“About a half an hour later, Mrs. Lanyon returned, or at least everyone assumed the centaur who came from around the tree was Mrs. Lanyon. The problem was that the upper portion appeared to be an idealized version of Dr. Lanyon the man, but much more muscular and movie star masculine, while the lower portion looked very much like a large chestnut stallion that could have been from the same dam and sire as Dr. Lanyon the centauress, except the stallion had blue eyes instead of green.
“I’m sorry, dear,” he apologized to his husband. “I just don’t understand. I’m quite sure I was thinking of becoming another centaur mare, just like you.”
“That’s all right, dear,” Dr. Lanyon said. “I was actually puzzling over these surprising gender changes myself. I’d originally thought that I’d been very careful to visualize myself as a male centaur, but when I came out as a mare I assumed I had slipped and thought of you at some crucial point, which is true, but I no longer think that it had any effect. With you telling me how careful you’d been, and considering the gender changes the boys went through, mostly unawares, I’m beginning to postulate that there may be more to the formula than great grandfather knew — or at least admitted.” She grimaced.
The others waited for her to continue, fairly patiently, although Selene was already starting to look grim. She did that a lot, though.
“As I think back on it now, I don’t remember grandfather, who was usually fastidious about details, being very specific about his time as a horse. I think everyone in the family assumed that he felt awkward talking about his thoughts and feelings as an equine, or had difficulty describing emotions and thought so foreign to his, but perhaps his uncharacteristic reticence was due to a radical gender change. That would have been a tremendous shock to his Victorian sensibilities, probably even more than his becoming part animal, or at perhaps human being in animal form.”
“That would be nice, dear, and I hope your theory is confirmed. I would really prefer to think that I’m capable of holding one thought for a reasonable period of time.”
“But that’s not the crux of my new theory, dear, just the explanation of why the exact nature of the change was concealed or suppressed,” she objected. “The original formula was designed to bring out opposite characteristics in the subject, presumably through the promotion or suppression of certain genetic sequences. In Jekyll’s case, the pairs selected were his phenotype along several axes of muscularity, bone structure, and refinement of features, but also his alignment along the axis of good and evil, although what that says about the heritability of moral nature I’d hesitate to guess, and whether there had to be a tradeoff along both physical and psychic lines I don’t know, but that seems to be what happened. In any case, the rather slight and handsome Jekyll was transformed into the ugly hulking brute of Hyde, and Jekyll’s rather timid nature — which had prevented him from embarking on the life of crime he desired, was replaced with reckless greed, unbridled lust, and implacable determination to have his way in all things.”
“But your ancestor claimed to have solved the problem, didn’t he? That’s what fooled poor Hastie here,” Mrs. Lanyon observed calmly.
Dr. Kenyon glared in her son’s direction, obviously still irritated by his precipitous and irresponsible use of the formula, but she was playing some sort of lethal juggling game with her twin that involved eight knives flashing through the narrow space between them faster than his eyes could follow, so his tacit disapproval passed her by. ‘Where are they getting all those knives,’ she thought idly, before she cleared her throat, a habit of her former life when speaking in public, but it had less of peremptory call to attention than diffidence and uncertainty to it, because it was now quite light and feminine, less intrusive than charmingly delightful. “Well, he wrote that he had, but never explained it, and I think that he never solved the binary nature of the serum at all, just shifted the effects to target different genetic sequences, or perhaps ‘states of being’ might be more correct. So he was able to vary the effect of the solution upon one axis of being, the overall genetic heritage a person embodies, but was tripped up by the necessary involvement of some sort of psychic change along another axis, so settled upon the binary — but morally neutral — nature of gender as a substitute for change along more problematic axes such as good and evil, or compassion and cruelty. It would thus appear that the changes in form are inevitably accompanied by a switch in gender. Our ancestors, of course, being proper Victorians, either never realized that the experimental record had been subtly distorted by judicious editing or deliberately suppressed this part of his journals, and simply issued a ban on using the formula as being ‘dangerous’ without specifying exactly what the dangers might be.”
Her wife gazed at her with renewed respect and love. His husband had always been an excellent theoretician and researcher, and so he didn’t doubt that she’d ‘hit the nail on the head.’ “Excellent reasoning, dear, and at least a good working hypothesis, if difficult to prove without further experiments that we’re currently unable to conduct.”
“I’d thought about that as well, actually, and had imagined using tiny amounts of just one vial, divided into many parts, to experiment on small animals, but wouldn’t want to risk it as long as we’re stuck here, because each vial represents a ‘miracle cure’ in extremis, as long as a fortnight has elapsed between medical emergencies, so I didn’t feel that we could risk even one vial until we’re all safely home.”
“I agree, dear. We don’t know yet how long….”
“Ahem,” the two barbarian women spoke in near unison, interrupting their discussion. “If you two are done theorizing, we think we should point out that there’s a cloud of dust approaching with fair speed, and that probably means company.”
“Oh great!” Dr. Lanyon was less than happy about this intrusion into her introspection regarding the situation. “Now what do we do?”
Both of the tall women spoke in unison again, like a Greek chorus of two, “I recommend we grab our backpacks, gather a bunch of these fruits and ‘hightail it for the other end of the canyon, pardner.’ ” If the previous instance of choral commentary had been strange, this instance, with exactly the same phony western drawl, was downright eerie, since it seemed to have been spontaneous, judging from the dumbfounded looks on their faces as they stared at one another.
“Girls, don’t do that. It’s spooky; almost like you’re actually one person in two bodies.” Mrs. Lanyon grabbed the other curtain and piled a dozen of the melon-like fruits into it. Tying it into a bundle and knotting it, he threw it over his shoulder and yelled for the girls to jump on. Two flying leaps and they were racing off towards the far wall of the canyon, the two women using the backpacks as bareback grips to hang onto, although they seemed as comfortable on horseback as they were with their knives and swords.
Dr. Lanyon was right at her wife’s heels, using her hands and arms in front of her ‘assets’ to supplement her improvised bra. ‘Damn!’ she thought. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a New Balance sportswear shop right now! Or even Victoria’s Secret!’
Selene took a brief glance backward. “They didn’t stop at the tree,” she yelled. The others just grunted and the two centaurs broke into a full gallop.
“Try to the left,” Hastie shouted. “I think I see a small arroyo. Hopefully, it’s a way out. If not, it’s a place we might be able to defend if we have to make a stand.”
The cloud of dust was growing closer. Neither Dr. Lanyon nor his wife were fully acclimated to their new bodies and had to concentrate for fear of stumbling. The extra weight of the two barbarian women was also disconcerting as they bounced about on the backs of the elder Lanyons as they galloped.
“I see about a dozen riders,” Selene called out. “They’re all armed with swords.”
“There’s the arroyo,” Hastie pointed. “Only about two hundred yards; I think we can make it.”
The two centaurs were breathing hard as Hastie shouted a plan of war above the rapid hoof beats. “Once we clear those rocks, Selene and I will drop off and prepare an ambush. You two gallop ahead a bit so the dust cloud continues into the pass and then circle back. Grab some rocks. You can throw them from a distance.”
“Get ready. We’ll drop the bags when we jump off.
“Now.” The two women jumped and scrambled behind several large boulders on each side of the small rock cut. The centaurs galloped on and they waited, but instead of continuing to close, the riders stopped just beyond arrow range.
They milled about until one rode forward a couple of yards. “Give yourselves up. You have nowhere to go.”
“We have ample food and water,” Selene called back arrogantly. “We’re simply waiting for the others in our group before attacking you.” Selene ignored the confused look that Hastie gave her. “They will arrive shortly.”
“Then they’ll become our captives as well.”
“They are more than your rabble. They will take you captive, if they do not slay you out of hand.”
“Before you make any additional idle threats,” the troop leader called back, “look behind you. It will be a long walk out of this wilderness without horses.”
“Look to your own rear,” Selene called back, brushing off Hastie’s frantic tugs at her arm. “Our friends will be here shortly.”
The tugging became even more insistent and Selene hissed at Hastie to stop.
“Shut up and look behind us,” Hastie hissed back. Cautiously Selene glanced behind and then sighed as she lowered her sword and let it slide to the ground. Several paces behind the two women the narrow entrance widened rapidly. In the opening were the centaurs. Riders were mounted on their backs holding sharp looking swords pointed at their necks. About a dozen additional horsemen surrounded the centaurs and stood, swords drawn, watching the two barbarian women intently.
As their swords fell and their hands rose into the air, one of the riders called to the others and they rode up to join the group by the rocks, surrounding them with several dozen riders, all with weapons drawn and huge smiles on their scarred faces.
The fallen swords quickly disappeared and thin strips of leather bound Selene’s and Hastie’s hands behind their backs. Additional strips of leather, tied in a noose, were draped around their necks with the other ends attached to saddle horns. Two horsemen examined the centaurs and babbled excitedly when they could not find reins. Leather was quickly placed around their necks too.
Without a word to the prisoners, they started off, only to stop briefly to stare at an explosion of bright light and a tornado of noise surrounding the now distant tree. Five minutes later, the noise and light disappeared as quickly as it had begun, but the tree was missing and no one seemed inclined to investigate its disappearance. The entire group began the trek down the now wide canyon with a distinctly more somber mien.
Selene and Hastie had to trot to keep up with the horde. Given the number of rocks and boulders strewn about the floor of the canyon their eyes were, of necessity, forced down to avoid tripping. Thus, they nearly bumped into the rears of the horses of their captors when they stopped short after rounding a corner.
Brushing hair from their faces with their hands still bound, the two women peered around the horses to see, carved into the side of the canyon, a huge set of doors. The doors were surrounded by a pair of engravings of centaurs, one male and one female. Light reflecting off the brightly burnished bronze covering their eyes, teeth and fingernails; beamed down on the crowd below them.
Even the horses seemed ill at ease and several had to be reined in while their riders murmured anxiously, but the only clear word was “Zampulus.”
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Four
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
It’s not the darkness that we truly fear,
but the bright light that lies hidden within our souls.
The deepest shadows lie concealed within our own cold hearts.
Only true compassion can kindle flames that set the world alight.— Kheiron of Pelion
The horde milled about restlessly in front of the temple. There was a clear undercurrent of fear as their captors examined the enormous structure carved out of the rock wall. Selene and Hastie seemed undisturbed, but both Dr. and Mrs. Lanyon shivered with some unspecified, but still palpable feeling of ill ease.
The temple itself had huge doors, easily three times as tall and twice as wide as the newly created centaurs. Fanning out on either side of the doors were six huge fluted columns, half again taller than the doors, and above the entrance was a capstone even taller than the doors below. The capstone stretched from one end of the row of columns to the other and was covered with hieroglyphics creating a single row of dancing giants across it.
Further examination was interrupted as the leader shouted, “Forward!”
Still gawking, the girls were yanked forward by the straps around their necks. They coughed and gasped for air while their captors laughed, but their expressions made it clear that it was much better for their captors that they could not speak.
As the group approached, the doors opened for them although there was no visible source that moved them. The leader, a strange looking man with bright white hair and a matching goatee easily a foot long, strode confidently up to the doors and made several gestures before turning back to the others.
“Set the wards have been, the torches lit. Put the horses in the stable, inside and to the left. Oh, and see they’re watered and fed. Bring the prisoners to me in the throne room.”
When no one moved, he snapped, “Now!” before stalking off into the temple.
“I don’t get it. Do you think they’re xenophobic?” Herbert Lanyon shrugged her shoulders and frowned as she poked at the dust covered, rotting, hay-strewn, stall. The stall was only a small portion of the room, which was also being used as a storage depot. An oil lamp flickered at the far end of the room where a number of jugs were carefully stacked. From the scents permeating the room, some were oil, some were wine, and some were other things, unidentifiable and strange, alien concoctions slithering just under the surface of their consciousness, like walking though an ethnic neighborhood in New York City, smelling the odors of mysterious spices and oils never encountered before, they finally realized that this was a truly alien planet, and that Earth was… somewhere else. There were also a number of what looked like burlap bags, some filled with various foodstuffs and others left strewn about after having been emptied. Nothing looked particularly useful.
The light barely made it to the side of the room where their makeshift stall had been set up. Dr. Lanyon could barely see her wife in the guttering light, although she could smell him and feel the heat radiating from his body.
“They’re treating us like common horses,” Emily whispered as she pointed in the direction of the now-sleeping stable hands. “Not a word to us. It was as if we didn’t exist.”
“Yes, dear, and they’re still doing it.”
“I mean, what is the world coming to when adult males don’t even look at naked breasts?” Herbert looked down and blushed as she realized what she’d just said. “Unh, what was that you said, dear?”
“I said they’re still treating us like horses.” Mrs. Lanyon pointed to the stall they were in. “No guards, no gate, just a rope from our neck to a tie ring in an open room, not even a real stall. We can walk away from here any time we want.”
“Then what are we waiting for? Let’s get the kids and get out of here. I think that flash of light and earthquake was the TSP. If it is, I know how to get us home.”
“Sounds good to me,” Mrs. Lanyon reached up and began working on the knotted leather tied to his neck. As she worked on the knot, she pondered aloud, “I wonder why?”
“Why what?” Dr. Lanyon was working with equal vigor on his own knot, inwardly cursing his lack of fingernails.
“I wonder why they act like we we’re horses. Do you think that’s what they think we are?”
“Humm. You know, I’ll bet they do. They must know about centaurs given the huge bas reliefs by the entrance, and they’re obviously afraid of them. With that much effort put into the artwork I would suspect centaurs are either quite rare and valuable, in which case they would be taking better care of us, or common, in which case they would know to speak to us.”
“But they ignored us. Even when we spoke to them they ignored us.”
“Exactly, Emily. We can hear each other speaking and the girls can hear us speaking, yet it seems they can’t… or won’t.”
“So which is it, ‘can’t’ or ‘won’t,’ Herbert? It makes a difference for how we should proceed.”
“There’s not enough information to determine that for sure yet, but I’m guessing ‘can’t.’ It’s like ‘Ghost,’ the children’s game where everyone pretends someone is not there even though he or she is actually present. Someone usually makes a mistake, talking to the ghost, walking around him or her, responding to something the ghost has said or done, even if it’s just a flush of embarrassment or a raised eyebrow. In effect someone blinks.”
Mrs. Lanyon waited impatiently for his husband to finish, but she seemed to have forgotten what she was saying as she concentrated on her knot. “What about ‘Ghost,’ dear?”
“Oh, sorry. No one blinked. Nothing. From our brief glimpse of those doors before we were led away, I suspect that centaurs are holy, and possibly taboo, so there may be some religious ordinance that prohibits noticing our presence, like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Our captors said and did absolutely nothing to give me the slightest hint that they thought we were anything more than horses, even when they were riding us. For whatever reason, I think we’ll be treated as horses rather than centaurs by everyone but Selene and her sister.”
“You mean our son, Hastie, don’t you, Herbert?”
“Yes, of course. For some reason I couldn’t remember his name. I think that’s a clue too, but I’m not sure of what.”
Herbert Lanyon gave a final yank and removed the knot around her neck. Looking up, she saw that her wife had already removed his knot and was using strips of the leather to tie burlap bags around each foot. He had already donned one of the backpacks full of useful tidbits they’d gathered back at the tree.
“Good idea, dear. It should muffle the sounds of our hooves nicely.” She quickly copied him, both with respect to the burlap and the other backpack, and they headed off in search of the youngsters.”
The chamber might have been opulent at one time, but it had been abandoned long enough that it had been necessary to actually shovel the dust into corners and there was still a strong smell of decay despite the aromas emanating from the food laden table in the center of the room. Hastie and Selene almost drooled as they examined the treasure of precious metals and jewels carelessly tossed into the corner along with the dust. There were only two people in the room, but neither one looked like your average next door neighbor. Both had scars of some sort and both wore swords, knives and a smattering of other weapons that she could see and wanted to have in her own hands, just for a second or two.
Several tapestries had also once adorned the throne room’s walls, but they too were rotted. When Selene tried to inspect one of them more closely, it disintegrated in a puff of cloying dust as she brushed her hand across the fabric. The two men turned as the billowing cloud of dust appeared and saw the girls. The big one had a sword in his hand although neither girl had seen him remove it from his scabbard. The smaller of the two, but not in girth, evidently the leader, merely smiled and beckoned them into the room.
“I welcome you to my table, strangers.” His accent sounded vaguely British, like the announcers on the BBC programs shown on cable. “ I am Akcuanrut, and this is the Lost Temple of Zampulus. Please….” he made a broad wave towards the table piled high with an assortment of fruits surrounding two large braised haunches of some kind of savory meat. Selene was fairly certain that they were the carcasses of the bunny rats they’d killed back by the tree.
Selene concluded that if it hadn’t happened yet, they were probably not going to be killed out of hand. That meant their captors either welcomed them, as the man had said, or that they had something worse in mind for them, but were delaying the surprise for reasons of their own. Thus, she felt confident that there was little to lose by fully entering the room, since their presence had already been announced by the crumbling tapestry. Similarly, given their less than powerful position, sans swords, there was also nothing to lose by being honest, and they’d left them their knives for some reason, either contemptuous of what they could actually do with them, or perhaps contemptuous of women in general. ‘We’ll just see about that,’ she thought to herself. Besides, she had no desire to be anyone’s ‘just a girl.’
“You first,” she said as she stepped toward the center of the room. It came out gruffly, but Selene didn’t care.
The white haired man just laughed and waved nonchalantly to his companion, a huge man with muscles on his muscles. Selene found herself staring, first at his biceps, then his chest and below, as he strode confidently to the table and grabbed an entire haunch with the ease of a scholar lifting a sheet of paper. Taking a prodigious bite he smiled with grease dripping from his mouth, and without bothering to wipe, tossed a portion of the haunch to Akcuanrut.
With a similar smile, Akcuanrut ignored the two women as he began munching himself, although his table manners were better. Eventually, Hastie tentatively approached the table and tried a fruit. Selene sighed, and joined her, taking out her dagger and carving off a large section of the remaining haunch. For a while, the only sounds were those of ripping, chewing and swallowing, interspersed by the occasional masculine belch.
Finally, Akcuanrut threw down his bone, gave vent to a huge belch, leaned back on the stone throne upon which he’d been sitting and turned toward the women. “As I said earlier, I am Akcuanrut. Beside me, this hulking barbarian is D’lon-ra, my second in command. He will help us to recover the Heart of Virtue.”
“The what?” Selene asked.
“You said ‘us’,” Hastie interjected. “Do you mean Selene and my family?”
“Aye, Milady.”
“What makes you think we’ll work for you?” Selene asked with an edge of anger while Hastie overlaid her truculent question with “Fat chance, Charley!” in counterpoint.
“My, my, my wary very pretties. Whoa,” he laughed with a jiggling stomach. “Only one at a time, please. Perhaps your fellow travelers would like to join us before we enter council?” Every one turned to the entryway he gestured towards as Emily and Herbert sheepishly stepped around the corner of the wall from which they had been eavesdropping.
“Help yourselves to the food,” the silver haired man called out. “You must be hungry, but watch out for the meats. I’m afraid too much meat will make you rather ill, since your new bodies aren’t really designed to handle it.” He waited patiently as they paced up to the table and picked up a fruit each.
“Come, come, my weary friends. You must be hungrier than that. You’ve come a very long way, longer than even I can imagine without difficulty. Hungry centaurs become irritable, and we’ll all need to have clear heads to plan our strategy.” With that he turned back to the others.
“But you can see us as centaurs. How is that?” Dr. Lanyon was confused.
“Eat. Relax. I’ll explain in all due time, but there’s an etiquette to these things; others asked questions before you, so theirs take precedence.” He turned to Selene.
“Your question was first, I believe.” He held up one finger. “The Heart of Virtue is ‘Unique’ in all the world. Indeed, it’s not totally of this world at all. It was created by the Dark Gods to aid them in their eternal war against ‘The Light,’ but other than that we don’t know all that much about it, other than the fact that it somehow sucks the virtue from those about it. We don’t know if this is its prime function, to create additional slaves of Darkness, or whether this is a mere side effect of some evil working in other dimensions, like smoke from a chimney, the true purpose of which is to contain and carry away the noxious byproducts of fire, while the smoke itself is a mere accident caused by the nature of heat and wood. A perfect fire emits very little smoke, and so the more dense the smoke, the worse the skill of the one who created the fire.” He paused, evidently content to take the time to choose judiciously from among the many comestibles arrayed before him. Finally, he picked up what seemed to be some sort of tiny roasted bird, and popped it bones and all into his mouth, then chewed it with an expression of ineffable pleasure. “Voronian dawnsinger, a rare and delectable treat,” he explained.
After paying reverent attention to his morsel, he continued, “The second question was, I believe, although I paraphrase slightly, ‘Why should you aid us?’ ” He paused in thought for long enough for the others to wonder if he was going to respond at all, but then continued. “To explain, I’ll have to tell you a little bit of the history of this world. You four, after all, weren’t born here.”
Mrs. Lanyon gasped while her husband’s eyes grew wide, and her son’s eyes grew wider. Selene’s grave expression became even more severe, but Akcuanrut just smiled and nodded. “I know. Question number four, but I’ll answer it out of order.”
He took another portion from the food spread out before them and paused, considering. “It’s obvious that you’re not from this world because centaurs are routinely slaughtered for their magical properties by many wicked humans in this world, so most centaurs fear and avoid humans as much as possible. Even under mortal threat, no born centaur would permit himself to be captured, as you two have been, for the very reasonable fear of torture, mutilation, and death at human hands. I hasten to add that we are not numbered amongst the wicked, so you are perfectly safe here as our guests.” He paused to select a particularly delectable pale pink fruit, slice it into wedges, and pop several at once into his mouth before holding up one finger again.
He then continued, smiling, though whether it was out of general bonhomie or savoring the taste of the fruit was difficult to say. “Without false modesty, I have to say that were you really what you appear to be, centaurs of this world, and humans likewise, all four of you would recognize D’lon-ra as Emperor’s Champion and myself as Dean of the Emperor’s College of Wizards, either by name, by sight, or by description in countless stories.” He raised another finger.
“Not only that,” he said, adding a finger “but your spiritual and psychic auras are not from this world, despite your superficial appearance, although I admit that even I was fooled at first by your outward seeming.” Seeing his guest’s confusion he added, “But we’ll discuss this later, or we’ll never get to the rest of your questions.”
He sighed, then raised another finger. “Finally, you’re not from this world because, unlike all others of us, you speak with a terrible accent and nearly incomprehensible diction, as if you were talking with your mouths filled with pebbles.” He smiled at the mixed emotions which flashed across the faces of his guests as they debated which of his claims about them to accept and which merely not to reject.
“I’ve lost track of which number it was, so I’ll abandon tedious formal explication, but I believe your next question was ‘Why should you aid us?’ Not being of this world, the answer may not have as much meaning to the four of you as it does to us,” he made a broad gesture including D’lon-ra, “but to put things, as simply as possible, if we cannot get the Heart of Virtue back to the College within the next fortnight, this entire universe will cease to exist. The impact of the destruction of an entire universe on neighboring dimensions I don’t care to imagine, however disruptive our own demise might be to our neighbors.”
Dr. Lanyon gasped this time and then whispered to her wife. “Remember that glow and earthquake as we were running from this horde? I think it means that the gate home is still open. If this world really is destroyed, the energy blast into our world through that gate could destroy our world also.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Akcuanrut said gravely, then smiled at their confusion. “I told you that I was a wizard, so know all, see all, and so on.” He smiled again as he spoke, but it was quickly replaced by a frown of concern. “I feared that it was a portal, but had not the luxury of time to examine it in detail, occupied as I was with saving our own bacon, as it were. Portals work by creating weaknesses in the barriers that normally separate one Universe from the next, so any such portal would provide ready access to the wave of destructive energy caused by the explosion of this world. The influx of energy might merely damage your world, or perhaps even hurl it into your local Sun, and at it’s worst might lead to the explosion of your entire Universe, starting a progression of universal failures that could possibly extend through many other universes. I’m fairly certain that this intention may lie behind the hidden intentions of the Dark Gods, or perhaps it merely amuses them, as humans wager on the roll of dice. This may provide another reason to help us, I imagine, if the the end of this world and its innocent inhabitants bothers you not at all.”
Walking to the buffet, Akcuanrut retrieved a flagon of ale. Returning to his seat on the aging throne, he drank deeply. “Ahhh. Much talking without drink dries the mouth, I’m afraid.” He belched, evidently not a breach of social norms here, because he didn’t look embarrassed at all.
“So,” Mrs. Lanyon spoke around the orange and red speckled fruit in his mouth, “assuming that we believe you, and agree to assist you, how would we capture and transport this ‘Heart of Virtue’ if being near it turns you evil?”
“I will provide you with enchanted Medallions which will dampen its power to some extent, but will not protect you completely should you touch the Heart in any wise. The souls of heroes and the skills of thieves you’ll need, lest you succumb despite my protective devices and personal help. If you go with us on this quest, we all stand together, to live or die, succeed or fail.”
Hastie turned to Selene. She was tempted to whisper, but after her father’s failed attempt, decided not to bother and spoke aloud. “This guy can’t be serious, but I’d consider helping just for a piece of the reward if this stuff’s any indication.”
Selene rolled her eyes and a slight smile danced briefly on her lips in response, but she quickly stifled it and shushed Hastie, just as she would have in class when he started clowning around, worried that they might miss something important.
“Where is this Heart,” Selene asked, “assuming we agree to retrieve it for you, and if we’re in such a hurry, why are we wasting time eating?”
“Ahhh. I’d love to tell you that it’s but a pleasant stroll from here, but I cannot, alas.” Another swig, this time with a slight tremble to his hand, caused some beer to spill onto wizard’s flowing beard. A wave of his hand and it was dry again and Akcuanrut made little of it, but Selene thought she saw fear in his eyes. “Getting to the Heart may be more difficult than retrieving it, I think. The Dark Gods guard it, and we are only human. As for why we’re wasting time, considering that we hazard our lives without hope of survival, all this …,” he spread his hands to indicate the lavish meal before them, “…is a reminder of the pleasures and joys to be found in this world, perhaps our last experience of them, but good to keep in mind before we go willing into what my be the final darkness.”
“So we can’t touch it, or even be near it without turning into some kind of evil creatures, and you don’t even expect to survive,” Hastie sneered. “Way to go, fat boy. Is this supposed to convince us to help you?”
“Na-Noc,” D’lon-ra interrupted, “the previous Emperor’s Champion and the best warrior ever to live, tried this same quest last year. Neither he nor any of his picked band of warriors ever returned from the last attempt to recover the Heart.”
“So the Heart killed them?” Mrs. Lanyon was not happy with the way this conversation was going.
“No, Mrs. Lanyon, Na-Noc is undoubtedly waiting for us, but forever corrupted by the Heart of Virtue. As an agent of evil, his touch would be the same as if you touched the Heart itself.”
“Let me get this straight,” Hastie was clearly incredulous. “We can’t touch the Heart, whatever it is. We can’t be near it. We have to fight the best warrior this world has ever produced and we can’t let him touch us either. Is there any more good news?”
“Unfortunately, and making due allowance for your obvious sarcasm, yes. You must traverse the Cave of Despair to reach the Heart, a daunting task which has never been successfully performed before, insofar as we know, although all we have are legends, of course.”
“I was joking. I was joking. Let’s get out of here. These guys are insane.” Hastie turned to leave, but Selene grabbed her arm. Hastie tried to shrug her twin’s hand off, but it didn’t budge. An instant later a dagger was moving with tremendous speed towards Selene’s neck.
“Girls, please.” It was Dr. Lanyon, hands held to her mouth in shock, who spoke as her wife charged towards the two youngsters.
Selene saw the dagger approach and stepped back, releasing Hastie’s arm and at the same time drawing her dagger as quick as a rattlesnake, but with much less warning. “Is it playtime, sister?” she sneered evilly as both moved into identical fighting crouches.
“Oh dear. This is not acceptable at all.” The wizard’s hands flew out and everyone other than the wizard himself instantly froze in place, as if they’d been turned into marble statues, or as if time had simply stopped for them. A second wave and D’Lon-ra unfroze. “Reposition the centaur so that it doesn’t run into anyone or anything,” he said. With that he strolled over to the fighters, gently plucked the knives from their motionless hands, and then returned to his seat on the stone throne.
Another wave of his hand and there was a flurry of movement. Selene and Hastie blinked and suddenly turned to face the wizard gently tapping one dagger against the other, all thought of their duel forgotten in the face of their new enemy. Mrs. Lanyon scraped to a stop, marking the stone with his slipping hooves as he realized the room had moved somehow.
“Tsk. Tsk. How will you ever defeat the Heart of Virtue if you are unable to control your own evil tendencies?”
“Who says we’re going?” Hastie snarled. “I don’t like suicide missions.”
“Suicide? Not at all; rather suicide not to try. It is my hope that you will go, because it is the only reasonable and prudent course for you. We must undertake our journey, not in any certain hope of success, but for the safety this world, and for safety of your own world, both of which will be utterly destroyed without your help. We’ve tried this before, and those who went before us were all either killed or absorbed into the Heart’s evil, so we have no illusion of easy success to buoy our spirits, only the knowledge that cowardice will only affect the precise moment of our deaths, — not the inevitable fact of them — if we fail to capture the Heart and reset the wards around it.” The voice seemed suddenly tired and worn, as if exhaustion had set in and his huge warrior companion quickly moved solicitously at his side and helped him rise. “D’lon-ra and I will let you discuss your decision until sunrise tomorrow. Then we must proceed — whether with you or without you — to our fate, which must be death, since we’ve tried before with a more powerful wizard, and the best warrior in this world. Without your help, the one imponderable in this deadly equation, which is our only real hope, we are almost certain to fail, both our worlds will be destroyed, and quite possibly many more, but do what you will. What’s a universe or two, or even dozens, in the cosmic scheme of things?”
Without another word the wizard, aided by the warrior, left the room slowly and with dignity as the quartet watched in silence. When the door slammed everyone began to speak at once, but stopped as Selene raised her hand for silence. Several seconds passed as she listened intently before drawing a deep breath and sighing as she slowly sank to the floor and seated herself tailor fashion, a heavily-armed Buddha in calm contemplation. “I was afraid they’d try to block the doors and lock us in,” she explained.
“So what are we going to do?” Dr. Lanyon asked. She paced nervously; hooves echoing as each step struck the stone floor. “We’re not fighters. We’re a scientist, a housewife, and two high school football players. How do we pull off the theft of the century?”
“Let’s blow this joint,” Hastie chimed in. “This isn’t our fight. We need to get home and get our original bodies back — don’t we?” He was shocked into silence when no one, not even Dr. Lanyon, agreed.
“We have no choice,” Mrs. Lanyon said decisively. “Evil is evil. It must be stopped wherever it is found. If it’s not defeated here, it will follow us to our own world. We cannot permit that, and we cannot chance being able to seal the portal between our worlds before this world is destroyed, because your father may have weakened the barrier between the worlds with his experiment, so helping to ‘fix’ the hazard to our own world is a family obligation, but also because this world’s greatest wizard told us that he didn’t know how many adjoining worlds, how many billions of lives, might be destroyed if the Heart remains at large. If running away is our only option, we might as well stay here, put sacks over our heads to avoid unpleasant sights, and wait comfortably for our own spectacular demise.”
“Yes, dear, I agree,” replied Dr. Lanyon, “but as I pointed out earlier, we’re simply not equipped for the task at hand. We should allow those with more experience to….”
“I’ll fight,” Selene interrupted, crossing her arms defiantly. “Regardless of what the rest of you choose, I’ll stay and fight. This is what I was born to do, I think, so I will help to defeat this putz No-knock and his fancy talisman.”
“You’re crazy,” Hastie stormed off to the table and angrily munched on something that looked like a pear, but tasted like a cross between a cherry and an apple. She was careful to keep herself facing away from the others.
“We must help, but we can’t,” Dr. Lanyon’s voice cracked with emotion as she struggled with her competing emotions. “We’re just not properly trained and equipped for anything like this….”
“I’m not so sure about that, Herbert.” Mrs. Lanyon had been thinking furiously while the others spoke.
“What are you talking about, dear? How can we possibly consider doing something like this?”
“Perhaps Herbert Lanyon the Sixth, his wife Emily the grade school teacher, who gave up her medical career to become a housewife and mother, and then took up teaching so she could keep an eye on their only child while he was in school, their unruly teenaged son and his more stable friend who play football in high school and whose greatest ambition was to goof around and ogle the girls, can’t do anything….”
“That’s what I said, Emily.” Dr. Lanyon was thoroughly confused.
“Herbert,” the powerful male centaur smiled down on his now smaller husband as he continued. “Look around you. Look carefully. What do you see? I’m not a grade school teacher and your mild-mannered little ‘wife’ any longer, not really. I’m a rather large and formidable male centaur, at least twenty-six hundred pounds of muscle and heavy bone, what they’d call a warhorse if I wasn’t a centaur stallion. You, my dear husband, are slightly smaller than me, but still a rather imposing figure as a centaur mare weighing, what? Two thousand pounds or more? And that wizard said that centaurs have magic. We know we can cloud humans’ minds so they think we’re just horses. We haven’t figured it all out yet, but I’ll bet that we can do a lot more, and I’ll bet that wizard can help us to realize our full powers on this world.” She paused while that sank in. “Hastie and Selene — the former Jack — aren’t high school students out wandering the mall and playing video games any more either. They’re now incredibly-skilled barbarian warrior women. Have you watched them sparring, or listened to them plan strategy, especially Selene, who appears to be a military genius comparable to Sun Tzu? They’re natural swordswomen, experts with knives, swords, and probably every other weapon, because their transformations are working on them, even now, and giving them the exact skills that women with their backstory demand. In a contest between D’lon-ra and either one of them, I’d be hard pressed to guess who would win. Together, they’d easily vanquish D’Lon-ra, I’m sure of it. In fact, if the natives of this world hadn’t forced their surrender by capturing us, I believe they could have taken on the whole horde and won, since they seem to be modeled after the barbarians in that film Hastie liked, who could take on dragons and entire armies with equal aplomb. You said we had to help. I say we are able to help. Although our original selves might not have been up to the challenge, the way we are now, we must be able to do something, and I believe that we were bred for war, or come from a warrior class, so we must have skills to match, just like the girls.” She paused while her words sunk in, then added, “Besides, I couldn’t imagine living with myself knowing that I might have been able to save a world — two whole worlds — and did nothing, especially since one of them is ours.”
The others just stared, unsure what to make of the sermon that had just come from the rugged centaur stallion. The silence grew. Hastie coughed delicately. Dr. Lanyon shuffled her hooves nervously. Finally, Selene began to slowly and rhythmically clap, soon to be joined by Dr. Lanyon and finally even Hastie.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Five
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?— William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1603, 1604, 1623)
“Okay, what’s the drill? I want to get moving,” Hastie complained.
It had been touch and go for most of the night — Hastie as a barbarian woman being only a little less feckless than Hastie as a ‘jock,’ albeit much prettier — but now that the blonde barbarian had finally agreed to join the quest, she was impatient to get started and stood fidgeting with her sword hilt as they stood about in the throne room. She wasn’t alone, since no one except the wizard and the Emperor’s Champion seemed to be eating from the expansive breakfast table that had been set out before them, laden with every food imaginable in this world.
“I do not understand, young lady. This isn’t a marching contest, not at all.” Akcuanrut was confused.
“She means to say, please tell us what we need to do and what kind of problems should we expect along the way.” Over the course of the night Emily had emerged as the group’s spokescreature. It was a measure of the changes that had been occurring in their minds as they caught up to their bodies that bubbly Emily, the mother and housewife, had become serious, task-oriented Emily, the centaur stallion.
The others had changed too. Dr. Lanyon had changed from stuffy, pedantic scientist to nurturing centaur mare, segueing almost imperceptibly into their family’s new mother and hearthkeeper. Jack and Hastie had changed from fun-loving high school jocks to fiery-tempered barbarian warrior women who looked fierce enough to eat crowbars and spit out nails. Hastie was even now insisting that she be called Rhea, because she’d claimed that Rhea was a superheroine in some comic she’d read, so it was more fitting to have a heroic name. Dr. Lanyon had wisely refrained from explaining the rôle that Rhea had played in Ancient Greece, and that her namesake was a Goddess of fertility, motherhood, nurturing, and menstrual flow. Perhaps she might grow into her new name, after all.
The changes were not lost on Akcuanrut, but he didn’t offer his observations aloud.
“Oh…. Well…. Ah…. As I said earlier, we must recover the Heart of Virtue and place it safely under guard again. to do that, we must discover the location of the Portal of Death, and then pass through it without dying.” He paused to consider his words, then continued, “Then, we have to traverse the Cave of Despair, although I have no idea what horrors await us there, since none has ever passed through the cave and returned alive to report on the experience.” He paused again. “Finally, we’ll have to fight the Guardian of the Heart, probably Na-Noc, who I mentioned before, the former Emperor’s Champion.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Rhea interrupted. “Go on. What else? I want to get this over with.”
“That’s all there is, except that we must then return the Heart to the College of Wizards. It’s reasonable to assume that the Dark Gods will use all their available resources to stop us during the trip back.”
“Whoa up, there,” Rhea interrupted, tapping her foot in exasperation. “We agreed to help you get the darned thing. Surely once you have it, you can get it back to the College, can’t you?”
The wizard’s response was so quiet that it was almost missed by the others. “We must try, although we may perish in the doing of it, lest our little universes be doomed and all these creatures, the trees and fish, the grass, the blue sky above us, vanish into the dark ocean of oblivion. It would be a shame to have victory within our grasp, and then falter through either overconfidence or ennui.”
Rhea rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. So where’s the darned portal? When the going gets tough, the tough get going, you know.”
“Take care, woman. D’lon-ra placed a hand on Rhea’s shoulder but she brushed it off. “Your haste may be your undoing yet.”
“Hey. Funny,” Selene smirked as she changed to an atrocious French accent for no particular reason. Rhea’s haste eez likely to be her undoing,” she paraphrased the huge man beside her, smiling even more. “I like that. You know, Hastie used to be her nickname. Three guesses why, and you won’t need the last two.”
Rhea was outraged. “Shut up! you dumb broad,” she screamed at her twin, furious and embarrassed both at once.
“Who’s a dumb broad? You….” Selene was shouting louder.
“Children!” Emily Lanyon’s thundering bellow shook dust from the stone ceiling, followed immediately by an ominous grinding sound, a dry groan in the rocks and corbeled columns that supported the cliff above their heads, as if the Temple itself were in danger of falling down around their ears. All eyes turned to the stallion, who looked almost as shocked as the rest. In a normal speaking volume she continued, “I think we need to focus on the problem at hand. Rhea actually asked an excellent question.”
Rhea stuck her tongue out at Selene, but did little else for fear of another deafening rebuke from her mother.
“How do we locate the Portal?” he continued, looking pointedly at Akcuanrut.
“I do not know.”
Now their faces turned to the wizard, who actually squirmed a bit under their scrutiny.
Rhea burst into scornful laughter, rolling her eyes in crude mockery.
“You don’t know?” Emily spoke quietly after Rhea’s incredulous laughter had died down. He had an ominous frown on his countenance.
“Rhea, you stop interrupting your mother and Akcuanrut this instant,” Dr. Lanyon chimed in. “You may be bigger now, but you’re not big enough that he couldn’t turn you over and give you the spanking you so richly deserve! You’ve shamed us before our hosts with both your cowardice and open greed.”
“Ulp!” Rhea quickly stifled her laughter. Her father wasn’t easily led to anger, but when she got her dander up, she could be formidable on her own.
Akcuanrut waited patiently for the bickering to cease before answering. “The Portal of Death is said to be here in the Lost Temple of Zampulus, but its exact location is unknown, and I’ve been unable to magically detect it, as I should have been. This is very strange, since normally evil magic is as obvious as a skunk in a bedroom. I can only conclude that it somehow hides itself when it’s not currently in use. I’ve heard other, similar, stories about the magic of the Dark Gods, so subtle — or perhaps so far removed from our normal plane of existence — as to be undetectable when not in use.”
Herbert and Emily both glared at Rhea in a preëmptive attempt to avoid another snide comment. It seemed to work, since she said nothing and made no surly faces. “So how do we find it?” Emily asked for everyone.
“As I said, Dr. Lanyon, I do not know. I have my apprentices checking every room, thus far without result. Amazingly devious is evil. It could be anywhere.”
“Just how big is this place?” Mrs. Lanyon had a thoughtful look on his face.
“I do not know. It is said to be infinite, but of course that’s not possible. Thus far, we have checked over a hundred rooms very thoroughly without finding the portal.”
“Excuse me, sir, but that’s the third time you’ve called this place the Lost Temple of Whozits. Why do you keep callin’ it ‘lost’ when you evidently knew where it was to find it?” Selene’s question brought another smile to Rhea’s face, but she didn’t make the snide retort everyone expected. Herbert Lanyon, however, made shushing gestures anyway, pointing to her wife who was obviously deep in thought.
Emily noticed them all staring at him and holding their breath. “Don’t mind me, folks. I’m just trying to figure something out.” With that he wandered off toward a corner of the throne room muttering incomprehensibly. The others watched for a moment before the urgency of their situation brought them back to the task at hand.
“Ignore him. He’s concentrating on a problem. An atomic bomb could explode and he’d neither notice nor care,” Dr. Lanyon sighed at her wife’s poor timing.
“So why is it called the Lost Temple?” Rhea wasn’t giving up on her sister’s question.
“Oh, very well. We can do nothing until we find the Portal in any case.” Akcuanrut settled himself more comfortably on the throne. “Until about a month before this expedition, the Temple of Zampulus was nothing more than a legend, but even as a legend it has always been called ‘lost’. It was supposedly constructed long before recorded history and then abandoned for many thousands of years. The opinion of some of the historians at the College is that the term referred to the fact that this was a place of such intense evil that all who entered lost their souls. Others believed that it….
“That’s it,” Emily Lanyon shouted with gleeful enthusiasm from across the room, oblivious to the fact that Akcuanrut was still speaking.
None-the-less, everyone turned to her in anticipation, because Akcuanrut was taking a long time to say, ‘I don’t exactly know,’ when stripped of rhetoric.
“What’s ‘it,’ dear?” Herbert asked.
“ ‘It’ is the Portal. I know where the Portal has to be.”
“Well, tell us, man. Tell us, damn it! Have you known this all along?” D’lon-ra, who had been silent the whole time, was suddenly right in front of Emily, very nearly furious, his teeth grinding together as his fists clenched and unclenched, ready for action. Rhea absently noted that the Champion was nearly as tall as the male centaur, but took the precaution of surreptitiously drawing her dagger and hiding it in her palm just in case, as she saw her father charging protectively toward the two males, obviously worried about the possibility of confrontation.
“Friends, please. Let him speak,” Akcuanrut beseeched the group as he made an arcane gesture from where he sat upon the throne. Suddenly, D’lon-ra uttered a surprised yelp as his feet left the ground and he floated gently to the side of the throne.
“Be at ease, D’lon-ra. Let him speak before you get yourself worked up into a rage.”
“The answer,” Mrs. Lanyon couldn’t resist a little pontificating of his own, “was perfectly simple, once inductive reasoning was applied.” He paused and beamed down at his waiting audience.
Rhea had no patience for anticipation, so immediately whined, “So what’s the answer already, Mom?”
With an annoyed glance at Rhea, he continued. “What is evil? It’s the absence of all things good, like love, respect, trust….” Another pause.
“Enough with the classroom lecture. A little help here, please! Dad,” Rhea whined to his father, possibly because she looked like his mother, whom he’d always been able to wheedle more easily than his father. “How about making Mom give us the short answer? He’s got this whole Socratic method thing goin’ on….”
“Rhea, be polite to your fa… mo…. Anyway, be polite,” Herbert Lanyon snorted, embarrassed by her own confusion over her wife’s new gender and rôle in their family. “And don’t mumble the ends of your words. It’s a sloppy habit that encourages sloppy thinking.”
With a hurt look at Rhea, and a thank you glance at her husband, Emily Lanyon continued. “But that was the key; Trust with a capital ‘T’. Truly evil beings can never trust. They must directly control all events, plan for every contingency as if they were alone, with all others prepared to betray them at the drop of a hat, because they themselves are ready to do the same thing if it works to their own advantage. The truly evil being can never trust others to love, respect, or even fear them long enough to do their bidding, so they must constantly be on guard against plots by those who share its treacherous nature. In effect, the virtuous are unified, because they work for the common good, while evil is an inherently solitary vice. ‘There’s no honor amongst thieves,’ as the saying goes.”
“Some of us are still in high school,” Rhea snorted in annoyance. “Will you please tell us in simple terms what the heck you’re talking about.”
“But I just did.” He looked a bit irritated over Rhea’s continuing obtuse failure to comprehend. “Because evil cannot trust, it must place those things of value to it where it can be certain of its safety. The Portal must be here, in this room, in Evil’s throne room.”
“But this room was examined first,” Akcuanrut objected. “It simply cannot be here.”
“Why?” Mrs. Lanyon challenged. “Why can’t it be in this room? How do you know what you’re even looking for if you’ve never seen it?”
“Because I am a wizard of great power,” Akcuanrut spoke with all the hauteur of someone long used to being deferred to, “and the Portal of Death must be a thing of magic, a thing created by the Dark Gods of course, but magic none the less. I could not possibly fail to be aware of it if were here.”
“First, just consider the past few moments; we’ve seen bickering and childish confrontations between individuals who have every reason to feel confident and secure enough in themselves that being drawn into such time-wasting nonsense is almost incredible. Perhaps this ‘Heart of Virtue’s’ influence is more subtle than you know, and may not require the magical ‘signature’ you expect to find, because it works differently from other magic. Just because the ‘Dark Gods,’ as you call them, have the ability to perform magic does not mean that they have to use traditional magic. The best way for magical beings to do the unexpected would be to use something outside the realm of the magic you’re familiar with. Also, these Dark Gods of yours are supposed to be very clever, right? They were trying to hide their deepest secret, the one thing their most devious plans depended upon, sure to be the target of magical assaults of every kind. Why would clever Gods use the exact sort of trickery that they knew any powerful magic user would see right through? They might as well have pasted a sign on their collective butts with ‘Kick Me, Please!’ written on it.”
Akcuanrut’s mouth opened several times before any words came out and then he did a jig as he proclaimed, “Non-magical! Of course, a secretive magical being would have to use non-magical means! Such subtlety! Wheels within wheels! To think that so brilliant a mind as yours, dear Sir, has solved in an instant a puzzle that a thousand generations of the wise have failed to grasp,” he effused. Then he looked around him at the vastness of the hall they stood within and grew both puzzled and discouraged. “But where would it be in so large a room? How could we find it? There must be millions of places to hide a secret rock that can be moved, or tapped, or whatever, to open the secret door.”
“That I don’t know,” Emily responded as the level of excitement in the room plummeted, “but I’ll bet Jack does.”
“Jack?” Akcuanrut and D’lon-ra spoke in unison. When no one answered, D’lon-ra tried again. “What’s a Jack?”
Emily merely gazed calmly at Selene, joined by Dr. Lanyon and Rhea. The other two followed their gaze to Selene.
“I thought her name was Selene?” D’lon-ra missed the wizard’s question as he examined the barbarian woman carefully trying to discover what a ‘jack’ was.
“It is now,” Mrs. Lanyon said. “It was Jack when she was a male on our world.”
Selene crossed her arms and glared at Mrs. Lanyon in a perfect snit of fury over being ‘outed,’ especially after she noticed D’lon-ra staring at her in confusion.
Mrs. Lanyon carried on blithely, “She was an amateur magician on our world, where magic doesn’t really exist. That means she knows all sorts of illusions; tricks for making things seem magical when they really aren’t. She also knows a lot about how the attention can be misdirected, so that you notice what the magician wants you to notice instead of what’s really going on. I’ll bet that she can find a hidden mechanism of some sort with greater ease than any of us, and it must, I think, be concealed where it would easily come to hand, in other words, on or very near the very throne you’re seated on.”
To his credit, Akcuanrut leapt up from his seat with all the alacrity and grace of a young man, brushing at his robes as if he’d inadvertently sat in something nasty.
Selene used her most exaggerated theatrical strut as she walked to the throne. Passing Mrs. Lanyon, she hissed, “I’ll get you for that,” but she had trouble hiding a wry smile as she said it.
“We are of the Light, Selene,” she whispered to her as she stalked past; “our power lies in truth and personal integrity, not secrets and shame.”
Selene blushed, then she muttered incoherently as she roughly shooed Akcuanrut further away from the throne and examined it; feeling each crevice.
“Close to evil,” she mused aloud. “Probably the throne.” She kneeled down to look under it. “Somewhere it can be reached easily, yet it’s got to be unobtrusive so that others won’t find it. Hiding it in plain sight or misdirection seem the most likely options.”
Then she got up again and walked around the throne. Her hands moved lightly but slowly along one armrest, the high back, and then the other, feeling for lumps, bumps and anything moveable. At the gnarled hand rest on the left side of the elaborate seat her frown of concentration turned to a smile.
“I think I’ve found it. There’s a gem here that seems loose in its setting.”
“Devious, dear,” Dr. Lanyon worriedly called out to her daughter’s friend/sister. “You said they were devious. It might be a trap….”
“There,” Selene cried out in triumph and stood back waiting. Suddenly there was a wooshing sound. Rhea was instantly crouched back to back with D’lon-ra, shield held above her, sword out and presented. D’lon-ra had fluidly matched her actions. At the same time Dr. Lanyon screamed and cowered behind her wife who put her arms protectively about her as hundreds, thousands, of small darts whistled down upon the troupe from holes in the ceiling, covering every portion of the large room except a small area immediately around the throne.
Inches from Emily’s head they suddenly stopped, suspended in mid-air close enough to see a strangely colored stain on the otherwise shiny tip of each. As they watched in awe, the hovering darts slowly began to float in a quivering mass towards the corner farthest from everyone, bunching into a tight clump like a swirling swarm of bees. When they were no longer likely to strike anyone they fell with a dry rush of sound, like pouring a large bag of rice onto a floor.
Selene was the first to recover. “Sorry,” she said, blushing a bright red, particularly noticeable on her very fair skin. ‘Oh, great!’ she thought. ‘Not only have I been labeled as a freak, but a stupid freak to boot.’
“Next time, give us a little more warning,” Akcuanrut fumed, slowly lowering his hands and then slumping to the floor by the throne. “It’s not easy to control so many objects.”
“Sorry,” she called over her shoulder as she returned to examining the throne. I’ll be more careful next time.” Then she muttered almost imperceptibly under her breath, “Unlike Rhea here, which is why we’re in this stupid situation to begin with.”
Several more minutes passed as Selene carefully examined the throne and its pedestal. Fingers gently caressed the hard stone surfaces as the others watched warily. Finally, she stood and turned to the group. “I found two loose segments that might be latches or conceal levers. One is by the right armrest by this fluted hand rest,” she pointed, “and the other is on the left inside leg. If you folks are ready, I’ll try the one on the armrest, since that would be the handiest in an emergency.”
The barbarian woman waited as each of the others assumed a defensive or protective position as they had before under the duress of surprise, but this time more thoroughly. Mrs. Lanyon surveyed the others and then nodded. They all held their breaths and waited for they knew not what as Selene moved the hidden latch on the arm rest.
And moved it again, but in a different direction.
And moved it yet a third time, trying to twist it as she did so.
“So get on with it already,” Rhea grumped. “I’m getting tired of standing here, hunched over, waitin’ for the sky to fall.
“I did, Rhea. Three times now.”
“So what happened?” she complained. “Did we die and I missed it, or what?”
“Mind your tongue, Rhea,” Mrs. Lanyon quickly interjected before turning back to Selene. “You’re the expert here, dear. What does it mean?”
“I think it means that this was just a loose piece of wood, and not a hidden switch. If everyone’s ready, I’ll try the other one.”
Once again everyone braced themselves. Akcuanrut grumbled, “Do it already.”
Selene moved the other seeming latch, standing as far back as possible while she leaned down to work the lever. It clicked, but did nothing. Then she pushed at it again, but nothing happened at all.
“Damn it, work!” she said and kicked the throne with all her strength, grunting in frustration, and heard a faint click. Kicking it again, she was rewarded with a deep scraping sound as the throne and its pedestal began creeping backward, revealing a gaping pit opening into Stygian darkness.
“Yes!” Selene did a brief victory dance and Rhea joined in as Akcuanrut and D’lon-ra watched in confusion. “I guess it was a little bit sticky after so many thousands of years.”
“Is it the Portal of Death?” asked the ever practical Emily.
“Dark waves of evil magic are emanating from yonder pit, so I suspect it is,” was Akcuanrut’s response. “Well, then, let us go. I will lead of course. Just let me collect my apprentices.”
“Wrong.”
Rhea’s and Selene’s response was in unison again, but then Rhea elaborated. “D’lon-ra and I will lead as there may be non-magical traps and ambushes. The centaurs will flank you, wizard, and Selene will cover our backs. “There’s no time for apprentices, and too many people is too many people to stumble over any trap down there. We need to travel light and fast to surprise whatever might be waiting for us.”
“But… but….” Akcuanrut sputtered until D’lon-ra intervened.
“She’s right. The apprentices are very well-meaning, but men of action they’re not, and their powers won’t add that much to yours. On the other hand, their blundering about could be the death of us all; besides, time is precious. The only change I’d recommend is Selene at point with me and Rhea as rear guard. Selene has proven her ability to identify and deal with me-can-i-cal,” he spoke each syllable separately, as if the word was unfamiliar to him, “traps, and who knows what dreadful machineries else have been set in motion by that kick?”
“Oh, very well,” Akcuanrut grudgingly conceded. “Time is of the essence, so your words, O D’lon-ra, are wise counsel.”
“Fine,” Rhea interrupted. “Now that that’s resolved, shall we go?” She and Selene moved almost as one to the food table and stuffed several loaves of bread into their backpacks, followed by some fruits and other items that looked as though they might travel well.
“One question, before we depart,” Emily interjected. “How do Herbert and I get down there?”
“Why… float, of course,” Akcuanrut was surprised by the question. “Are you not familiar with the magic of centaurs? I thought that must be why you chose those forms.”
“We’ve only been centaurs a couple of days. Until then we weren’t even aware that centaurs really existed. We had no idea what centaurs can do, other than that it looked like they could travel with great rapidity, and carry heavy loads.”
“Oh, my! We must remedy that immediately. You can….”
D’lon-ra interrupted. “Save that for the trip, Master Wizard. We need to get moving now!”
“You have a hunch?” the wizard asked.
D’lon-ra nodded.
“Very well. D’lon-ra’s hunches are nearly as good as a seeing. We will speak of this more on the way.” With that he also took up several fruits and headed for the entrance to the pit.
“Uh-hum.” Emily clear his throat.
“Yes?” the wizard asked as he turned back to the centaurs.
“How do we float?”
“Oh, of course. All centaur magic is innate and only partially volitional. It will happen on its own, if you desire something, like a wish that one might make upon seeing a lucky omen.”
When both centaurs looked at him in confusion, he elaborated. “Try it here. Jump and wish that you could float like a cloud above the floor.”
“Okay,” they said in unison, but it was clear they weren’t really convinced. Still, they tried. Herbert and Emily separated a few feet as they moved to one side of the huge room. Turning back to the group, Emily jumped first — and found himself with his arms outstretched protecting his head from the ceiling, easily thirty feet in the air.
Landing as lightly as a feather at the other side of the room, she called enthusiastically back to Herbert, “Herbert! You must try this! It feels fantastic.”
Before Herbert could leap, he was in the air again, landing lightly beside his husband and slapping her on the rump. The centaur mare gave a yelp and a surprised leap, but then realized that she too could float.
Landing, she quickly turned and jumped again, only to be met in mid-air by her wife who “high fived” her as he passed her. As each landed they turned and prepared to jump again, smiling like school children at play. Selene let them jump once more before interrupting them. “Enough fooling around, folks. Let’s go, people. We have two worlds to save.”
One more leap and they were at the pit and ready to leap in. Only Akcuanrut’s stiff warning prevented it. “Wait! I need to be sure there are no Magical traps set on the opening.”
He stood concentrating for several seconds and then made an abrupt up and down gesture.
“It’s free of magical traps, at least for the first hundred feet or so. Selene, would you please make a similar check for mech-ani-cal traps?”
Without a word, Selene knelt beside the entry and examined the edges. As if anticipating her thoughts, Rhea brought over a wall torch and dropped it into the pit.
They all watched the torch as it dropped, and dropped, and eventually faded into a faint spark in the darkness, then disappeared without ever landing.
“Folks, I think we’ve got a problem,” was Rhea’s understated comment.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Six
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,
— he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath —
“The horror! The horror!”The Heart of Darkness (1899)
— Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad)
“What’s wrong now?” Akcuanrut asked in irritation. Now that he’d agreed to move quickly, he was anxious to get moving.
“No bottom,” Selene cursed. “The darned pit’s effectively got no bottom.”
“I can fly us all to the ground easily,” said the wizard.
“I think not,” Dr. Lanyon rejoined the conversation. “Can you fly us and also respond to any magical threats?”
He seemed deflated slightly. “I can try, but you’re right. Overconfidence is the enemy of good luck.”
“You don’t sound very certain,” Emily said, “but that’s all right, because I don’t think you’ll need to do both.”
“Huh?” Rhea’s ears perked up. “Whaddya mean?”
“I mean your mother and I can float us to a soft landing, and are easily big enough to carry us all.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Selene stood and brushed off her hands. “I can’t find any more traps so let’s go.”
With a sly smile at Rhea, Selene jumped on Mrs. Lanyon’s back and called out, “I call dibs on riding with D’lon-ra.”
“What? No way.”
“Hey, you got to cuddle with the big guy when the darts were falling. It’s my turn now.”
“Children. Stop,” Mrs. Lanyon firmly pushed between the two before swords were drawn and spoke with his ‘it’s final and that’s it’ voice. “D’lono-ra and Selene will ride on my back while Akcuanrut and Rhea will ride on Herbert’s back. I’m both stronger and bigger in my present form, so I should be able to carry the extra weight more easily than Herbert.”
Grumbling, and with only one snort of laughter from Rhea about the weight comment, the girls took their places. All four humans carried a torch in one hand and a weapon in the other. Even Akcuanrut carried a short sword, while the centaurs held only a torch each, leaving one hand free to manipulate any obstacle they might encounter.
Mrs. Lanyon crossed his fingers. Dr. Lanyon silently mouthed, “I love you, Emily.” Taking each other’s hands, they walked to the edge and leapt into the void.
As soon as everyone realized they were still alive and floating everyone exhaled in unison. Slowly, like two gliding eagles, the two centaurs circled each other as they fell lower and lower down the dank stone well. They fell hundreds of feet. The bottom was still lost in darkness and the opening beneath the throne through which they had jumped was a pinpoint above them before they encountered anything of special note.
D’lon-ra was first to spy the tunnel, a roughly circular section of greater darkness. As Akcuanrut frantically braced himself to react instantaneously to any magical attack, Selene squinted intently as she examined the fast approaching entrance for any hidden traps, or rather places that might conceal them. Seeing none, she didn’t say anything as they sped toward the dark opening. One last circle and they were in the tunnel, the walls of it suddenly illuminated as they rushed through the opening, and then they were skidding to a stop on the floor of the tunnel as everyone cheered.
“Hush!D’lon-ra observed laconically. “The tunnel ahead is quite straight, and it too seems to go on forever.”
“The Cave of Despair,” Akcuanrut intoned solemnly. “Can you not feel in them the waves of pain and helplessness left behind by the hapless slaves coerced into creating them?” The others paused to examine their surroundings and themselves and slowly, unwillingly, nodded in agreement. They did have some sort of horrible aura about them, like the squalid slave quarters at luxurious Monticello, or the Old Slave Mart in Charleston. Looking at the hand-hewn rock walls, it was easy to imagine the oppressive dark filled with gaunt and scrabbling miners, the sound of whips, and the intermittent cries of anguish.
“No stinkin’ feeling is gonna get to me.” Rhea declared, and with that she turned and began to walk down the tunnel.
“Wait a minute, moron,” Selene shouted as she bolted after her and grabbed her smaller twin by the shoulder. “There are too many risks for you to be wondering off by yourself.”
“Like you’re gonna stop me?” Rhea sneered. Her dagger appeared in her hand.
“Rhea! Think! We’ve got to work together.” Selene pleaded, but that didn’t stop a dagger from appearing in her hand as well.
They danced about as each made exploratory feints, not realizing that the others had caught up to them until they suddenly found that they could not move. Akcuanrut had frozen them with his magic, again. Both struggled helplessly until their faces were bright red. Tears began to trickle from Rhea’s eyes.
“Agitated depression,” Mrs. Lanyon spoke with clinical detachment. “Sometimes when people are depressed, they fight against it, producing what appears to be a state of agitation, usually including aggression. Hold them while I look for something in my backpack.”
D’lon-ra moved behind Rhea while Emily Lanyon moved behind Selene. Each took a firm grip on the barbarian woman before him and held tight as Akcuanrut released his hold on them.
Suddenly able to move, each gave a tremendous shriek and began struggling as if possessed, but their captors merely waited stoically until they were spent. By that time, Mrs. Lanyon had finished digging in his backpack and was holding a whispered conversation with Akcuanrut. The wizard muttered something, waved a finger at something in the doctor’s hand and then they both turned back to the still struggling girls.
“Akcuanrut has enhanced the effect of an herb whose effects are very much like Saint John’s Wort. It should be more than strong enough to counteract any of the depressive effects of this benighted place.” The girls had stopped struggling as Mrs. Lanyon spoke, although they continued to glare maliciously at each other.
“I want each of us, in fact, to take one,” Hastie’s father offered small pieces of dried, whitish root to each girl. “You two first. If we release you, will you take it?”
It took a few moments, but eventually each agreed, and when released took the proffered root, swallowed quickly, and gagged at its bitter taste.
“Yuck. That stuff tastes terrible,” Rhea complained.
“True,” Mrs. Lanyon agreed, grimacing as she swallowed a piece herself, “but it will help us. Now, do you still feel angry?”
Rhea and Selene examined themselves. “No,” they spoke in unison again. “No. We feel fine now.”
“Then,” the good doctor used his best imitation of John Wayne, which was just as bad as the girl’s attempts at levity had been, and said, “Let’s roll them wagons, Pilgrims.”
“How long have we been marching?” Mrs. Lanyon grumped. “My hooves are getting sore.”
“It does seem like a long time, doesn’t it, Dear?” Dr. Lanyon agreed. “Maybe we should take a break.” The muted chorus of grunts made it clear everyone was in agreement, but didn’t have enough energy left for much enthusiasm.
“How long does this thing go on for, Akcuanrut?”
“Good question, Selene,” Rhea seconded her.
“I do not know,” Akcuanrut replied as he slid to the ground and groaned, “but we cannot go on for much longer, and I dread to think of sleeping when surrounded by so much evil.”
“So what do we do?” the ever-practical Dr. Lanyon asked.
“I will try something now. I should have thought of it earlier, of course, but hindsight is always all-encompassing.” Akcuanrut asked D’lon-ra for an arrow from his quiver. Next he took a small ball of twine from his own backpack and tied it to the back of the arrow, just in front of the feathers. Balancing the arrow chest-high on one finger, he muttered and the arrow began to vibrate. Akcuanrut dropped his finger and the arrow remained floating in the air. One last word and it shot forward to the limits of the attached line and then hung there like a dog straining at the end of its leash.
“We will follow this, and perhaps see more clearly if we are are being subtly misdirected.”
With more groans, everyone stood and slogged off behind the tireless arrow, which strained ahead of them like a young puppy on a leash.
“Break time.” Rhea didn’t wait for anyone to disagree as she slid to the ground.
“Who wants the last of the water?” Selene shook the water skin and everyone listened as it barely made any sound.
“We can’t go on like this,” Dr. Lanyon observed tiredly.
“The arrow still points straight ahead,” Akcuanrut observed.
“True, but why does it wobble every hundred feet or so?” Mrs. Lanyon wondered aloud as he watched it wobble again.
Akcuanrut“I have no idea. There may be currents of magic that alter the flow of space and time in here.”
“Maybe… maybe… may… mmmm….” Dr. Lanyon began digging frantically through her backpack. Shortly she had the laser pointer in her hand and assumed her lecturer’s stance.
“Aw geez, Dad,” Rhea groaned. “Can’t ya just tell us? I’m too tired for a lecture.”
“Hush, Rhea. Listen to your father,” Mrs. Lanyon’s deep voice boomed.
“Thank you, dear,” Dr. Lanyon smiled appreciatively at her muscular wife. “I am relatively unsure of the coherence of my speculative hypothesis, limited as I am by classical physics, rather than the magic which seems to rule this world, so I would prefer to explain my thoughts on this matter aloud, hoping that, even if I’m incorrect, my ramblings will jog the thought processes of someone else so that the correct solution presents itself. Akcuanrut’s comment about time and space sparked a feeling of ‘Eureka!’ in me, and made me immediately think of something I’d just been reading about quantum theory, specifically, about String Theory, which seemed particularly apropos since we’ve been following a string for the past weary miles.”
This time, there was a much more enthusiastic chorus of groans,
Undaunted, she gathered herself together for her presentation. “I wish I had a lectern,” she muttered, then said, “Does everyone know what a Möbius strip is? Anyone? Anyone?”
Emily Lanyon cleared his throat to remind his husband to keep to the point.
“Ah, yes. Never mind. Well, a Möbius strip is basically a one sided shape. You can make a representation of one by taking a strip of paper and curving it into a closed loop without twisting; then take one of the ends and rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees, then glue the two ends together. If you trace a pencil line along the surface of the loop, you’ll find that what you might naïvely think are two sides, an inside and an outside, are actually only one, so your penciled line will loop around the strip twice, once on what would have been the top, and then seamlessly around to what would have been the bottom, then around again to the top again, where it will finally meet itself.”
“Dear,” her wife said gently, “you’re dwelling upon inconsequentials, I think.”
“Sorry,” the smaller centaur cleared her throat. “In any case, some forms of String Theory require some portions of space and time to be folded in upon itself to form extra dimension which we can’t directly observe. I think that that’s what’s been happening here. If my premise is correct, my laser pointer should help to prove it.” With that she turned it on and aimed it at the wall. Slowly she moved the bright red dot further and further along the wall until it was just a pinpoint in the distance, and then it was gone.
“Look!” D’lon-ra pointed excitedly back along the tunnel toward a tiny red dot of light that had just appeared behind them.
Dr. Lanyon carefully held the pointer very still, keeping it aimed down the corridor in front of them, then turned the pointer off and on again several times, the last time carefully twisting around so she could see over her own shoulder, and could see what everyone else had seen, that the red dot behind them blinked off and on in synchrony with the movement of her finger on the laser button.
“I was afraid of that,” she said. “We’ve been walking in circles.”
“Come on, Dad,” Rhea whined. “We’ve been walking in a straight line. We never turned once.”
“That’s true, Rhea, but think of the Möbius strip. You can draw a straight line on it forever but it still loops around, even though you haven’t retraced your steps.” The laser pointer was replaced by the piece of paper and her finger traced its way around the strip several times without stopping. “Instead of a strip of paper, three-dimensional space itself has been twisted around and joined to itself in some manner, so that although we believe that we’ve been walking in a straight line, we’ve been subtly ‘tricked’ into walking the same short path many times.” Then he looked down at the floor of the corridor, smiled, and said, “In fact, I can prove it. Look above your heads. What do you see?”
They all looked but only Selene spoke out, “The roof of the corridor and traces of soot deposited when people have walked through carrying burning torches to give themselves light.”
“Exactly!” she said triumphantly. “Now look below your feet.” She pointed down for emphasis.
Selene looked down, then up, then down again. “I’ll be darned; the same sorts of soot on the ‘floor’ of the corridor as there are on the ceiling.” She looked up again. “Now that I know what it is, it’s fairly clear that someone has scuffed through the soot above us with their feet, just as we have the soot deposits below us.”
Dr. Lanyon beamed with pleasure, just as she did in the classroom when a student grasped an important point. “Excellent observation, Selene! You’ve got a good head on your shoulders!”
Selene blushed a little, but was none-the-less pleased with herself.
Mrs. Lanyon asked perceptively, “But how does this explain the wobble, dear?”
“I think the wobble is where we loop back, or turn over onto the other side of the three-dimensional loop though some sort of extradimensional portal. Before the wobble, the arrow correctly points forward and after the wobble it also correctly points forward, only we’re upside down from what we were before. Just at the wobble, though, where we loop back to the beginning again, the arrow is confused. It doesn’t know exactly where to point — up or down or right or left — so it enters a state of quantum uncertainty in which it wants to enter all possible states at once, hence the uncertainty in its exact orientation.”
“So it wobbles, Dad. So what?” Math theory was never Hastie’s strong suit, and changing sex didn’t seem to have done anything to improve her grasp of topology.
“Rhea. Think carefully. It’s the weak point. It’s where we get out.”
“But how?” she whined again.
She furrowed her brow, never having had a mother warn her of the dangers of permanent wrinkles from rash grimaces. “That’s the part I haven’t figured out yet.”
Rhea let out a heavy sigh, redolent of adolescent ennui. “Great, Dad. Build us up and drop us flat, why don’tcha?”
“Herbert Lanyon the Seventh, you apologize immediately,” Mrs. Lanyon roared.
“But….” Belatedly, Rhea glanced over at the angry expression on her mother’s face and revised her angsty attitude. “I’m sorry, Dad, but how do we get out?”
“I may have the answer to that,” Akcuanrut chimed in. “Now that you’ve brilliantly pointed out the weak point, I should be able to defeat the spell of concealment that must be there. Observe.”
“Great.” Rhea poked Selene in the ribs and muttered. “Now he’s done it. Just what we need, another lecture.”
Selene only glared at her and rolled her eyes, a subtle criticism that passed Rhea by completely.
However, instead of a lecture, Akcuanrut merely tugged gently at the arrow, pulling it back toward the group until it began to wobble again. Ever so slowly he continued to reel it in, feeling the line as carefully as an angler might strain to imagine the movements of a fish. The wobble grew more pronounced, Akcuanrut then twitched the line, and suddenly the arrow veered off to the left, flying rapidly towards the wall — and through it.
“Akcuanrut, you’ve done it,” Dr. Lanyon cheered, her voice rising an octave or so, until it was almost a squeal.
“Sinister. The way of evil, of course,” but the wizard smiled as he spoke.
“But there’s no door there, just more wall. Where did the arrow go?” Mrs. Lanyon was confused.
“No, dear, it just looks like a wall. Think of it as an optical illusion.”
“Okay folks, rest period is over. Let’s go kick some evil butt.” Rhea’s groan belied the enthusiasm in her voice as she slowly rose.
It was a matter of moments for Selene to check for traps and when she looked back, Akcuanrut nodded to indicate that he too had finished his examination of the unseen door.
One by one the group stepped through the illusory wall and into a cavernous room, bigger even than the throne room above. Every inch of the room’s circular wall appeared to be covered with sculpted images of cruel depravity, each worse than the one before, people — and other creatures — splayed on racks, their entrails being drawn, people thrown into pits of fire, others hacked by hooded figures with wicked-looking battle axes, others torn to pieces by wild animals, pierced through with spears, hung on low gibbets, the movements of their dying struggles captured in obsessive detail, flayed alive on wooden crosses, drowned in buckets while suspended upside down by flesh-hooks through their hamstrings. Every vicious cruelty possible was displayed upon those walls, the makers of which seemed to have focused their entire creative energy on destruction and pain. The center of the room was a sandpit about thirty feet wide and beyond that was a huge throne composed entirely of human bones. Sitting on the throne, and by no means dwarfed by it, was a leathery-winged, muscle-bound humanoid with ruddy skin and horns. Fangs grew from its lower jaw and the eyes shone with a yellow glow that seemed to pierce the soul.
The creature’s voice was incongruously deep, yet melodious, in a peculiarly discordant way, as effective in causing discomfort as nails on a blackboard. Somehow it also had a gravelly undertone that reached to the very marrow and made the bones shiver. “Greetings, D’lono-ra. It’s been a long time, old friend.”
“Na-Noc?” the Emperor’s Champion replied.
“How wonderful. You remember your old teacher,” the creature rumbled.
Rhea nudged Selene. “Teacher?”
Selene just shrugged in return.
“You, vile thing, are not my honored teacher and friend,” D’lon-ra spat out the words as if they had a sour taste.
“True,” the creature’s smile showed more teeth than should ever be seen. “I was your sad, tired old friend, resting on my laurels and the table scraps of an uncaring liege, but I’m feeling much better now.”
“Na-Noc was none of those things and you defile his memory, creature of evil.”
“Oh, D’lon-ra, D’lon-ra, old friend. You are so, so wrong, but worry not; soon you will join with me and understand.”
“Come to me, spawn of evil,” sword drawn, the huge hero moved warily out into the center of the sandy circle. “Allow me to end your torture. Allow me to kill the evil in you so that you may die honorably and be remembered for your good deeds and glorious accomplishments.”
“Jeez,” Rhea whispered to Selene, “he’s wordy all of a sudden.”
“Yeah,” Selene agreed, but she was staring intently at the tableau before them. “Something’s wrong!” she whispered.
Both women nodded imperceptibly to each, silently drew their swords and began circling in opposite directions around the edge of sand pit as Na-Noc flowed to his feet and languidly ambled out onto the sand.
The huge creature stopped about ten feet from D’lon-ra. The Emperor’s Champion was huge, but the creature dwarfed him, easily twice as large with muscles on its muscles.
“Come to me, little boy,” Na-Noc beckoned, his grin showing yet more teeth. “Come to me, if you dare.”
“D’lon-ra! No!” Akcuanrut shouted frantically. “It’s a trap!”
“Of course it’s a trap, incompetent one,” Na-Noc laughed. With that it lunged with superhuman speed, not directly at D’lon-ra, but right over his head in a flip using its wings to end up facing the hero’s back. One quick slice and D’lon-ra’s leathers were lying on the sand.
With a roar of anger D’lon-ra spun to face the creature, but was hampered by the shifting sand. A short sword appeared in his left hand and sliced a wide swath at stomach height while his long sword swung out in a higher arc toward the demon’s neck.
Na-Noc stood immobile as the gleaming blades approached and made contact with solid thwacking sounds, imbedding themselves a good half a foot in the creature’s body exactly where D’lon-ra had aimed. Yet rather than crumple to the ground, Na-Noc stood laughing. Then its flesh closed around the blades and began flowing rapidly toward the hilt.
Before a surprised D’lon-ra could react the fast-flowing flesh reached his hand and he froze. Within seconds the red flesh had encompassed the smaller man and then the two masses combined, leaving an even larger Na-Noc shaking the walls with his peals of hideous laughter.
“It’s not there, little ones.”
Selene had reached the throne and was examining it, looking for the Heart of Virtue while Rhea stood by as lookout. In the meantime, Akcuanrut had been gesturing and muttering frantically. Suddenly he refocused on the events about him and stared in disbelief at the altered Na-Noc. “Of course!” he shouted to the others. “By your own reasoning, Selene, it could it be nowhere else. The Heart must be lodged inside its body, the only place of ultimate safety for suspicious creature of evil. Within its own body lies the Heart of Virtue!”
“Oh great,” Rhea groaned. “Not only do we need to beat ‘Big Red,’ we’ve got to get that damned Heart from inside its molded jelly body.”
“You take the right side and I’ll take the left.” Selene cut off Rhea’s complaints and matched her words with actions. Still not sure how to help, but worried about the girls, Dr. and Mrs. Lanyon also stepped onto the sand and uncertainly moved toward the great beast.
The girls were graceful, yet blindingly fast as they parried and sliced in perfect unison like two sides of a mirror. Even the huge Na-Noc was hard pressed, but was managing to hold its own; the fact that its injuries healed over within seconds was helping it immensely, though, and it was clear to everyone there that the current stalemate would slowly turn to its favor as the girls were beginning to tire; yet Na-Noc seemed indefatigable.
Off on the sidelines, Akcuanrut was still chanting and gesturing frantically but to no avail. No spell he could throw seemed to affect the great red creature for more than a few seconds.
Meanwhile, Dr. Lanyon had been watching the struggle with that detached look on her face that she always used when concentrating on a problem. As her husband yelped in fear at a narrow escape for Rhea, he withdrew from his reverie and trotted off towards Akcuanrut to whisper for a moment.
When the wizard nodded she quickly trotted around the circle to her wife and whispered to him. He too nodded and Dr. Lanyon resumed her original position opposite her wife. Both centaurs unstrung the thick ropes hanging from their saddlebags and held large loops of rope as if preparing to lasso a steer.
As Na-Noc extended himself on both sides to thrust at the swordswomen harrying his flanks, Dr. Lanyon shouted, “Now!”
On cue, Akcuanrut threw a spell to freeze the air around Na-Noc to create a foot thick slab of ice around its corpulent body, leaving its limbs free to thrash around. At the same time, the two centaurs flipped their ropes over its extended arms, twisted them like garrottes around each arm, and reared back to pull them tight. Seeing their opening, Selene and Rhea immediately began hacking away at his huge limbs, even as the ice began to melt away as if dropped into a blast furnace.
The advantage was theirs however. On the third roundhouse chop both arms separated from its body, causing the centaurs to stumble as they struggled to regain their balance.
As the last of the ice began to melt, the barbarian women attacked Na-Noc’s legs and by the time a smaller set of replacement arms had formed, the legs too were gone. The centaurs quickly tossed their ropes around the falling legs and dragged them to yet another corner of the sand pit, far enough from the arms, that had in the instant become rippling puddles of red slowly sinking so rapidly into the sand that they could not easily or quickly reunite, trapped by the porous surface that the creature had designed to trap others.
As a much smaller Na-Noc reformed, Rhea and Selene started hacking away at the arms again. Now that a system had been developed, things moved quickly and shortly the once huge beast was little more than a quivering red blob about one foot in diameter while the others took up plates and cups to hurl sand on the separate blobs of Na-Noc jelly, which quickly sank into them, somehow weighing them down to the point that they could only quiver, knocked in random directions by fresh onslaughts of sand.
Akcuanrut’s magic was much easier to focus on the smaller blob and he carefully levitated the quivering mass while Mrs. Lanyon pulled a plastic picnic tablecloth from one of her backpacks.
The two girls kept hacking away until they could see a small lump of something shiny beneath the viscous red goo. At that point Dr. Lanyon tossed the plastic over the slimy lump, gathered the ends together and tied a bulky knot to seal whatever it was inside.
The group cautiously moved off the sand, carefully avoiding all the clumps of red. At the edge of the sand pit the three remaining humans collapsed to their knees on the floor of the hall, exhausted, while the centaurs remained poised for instant action. All five gave a heartfelt sigh of relief.
“Is it finally over?” Emily Lanyon asked Akcuanrut.
“Over at last, I think. The journey back is all that remains. After this, it should be relatively easy, although we must still be wary of the Dark God’s tricks.”
“So we can go home now?” Rhea asked, still panting from her exertions.
“Of course you can return home,” a sepulchral Voice boomed deafeningly, coming from everywhere and nowhere, from the walls, from the dank floor and hidden ceiling of the horrible hall. “And in fact, you should!”
The others jerked in surprise as Akcuanrut struggled back to his feet and resumed a defensive posture.
“Your presence here has served as an amusing diversion, but all diversions must eventually come to an end. You may even take the Heart of Virtue with you.” and then the Voice laughed horribly, just as it must have laughed when the moments of agony depicted on the walls of its throne room were first enacted.
There was a tremendous rushing sound and a blast of air, like the wind as a train rushes down a tunnel straight towards you. Just when they all thought it couldn’t get any louder, there was a gigantic flash, brighter than any locomotive headlamps, and….
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Seven
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
If you don’t change direction,
you may end up where you’re heading.— Lao Tse, (c. Sixth Century BCE)
—
“We’re home,” Mrs. Lanyon beamed as the five found themselves back in the family living room. “But how? Who was that?”
“A Dark God, of course,” Akcuanrut answered as he settled himself into Dr. Lanyon’s favorite lounge chair with a tired groan. “The Dark Gods have very strong magic, and they obviously saw this as the most effective way to prevent us from returning the Heart to the safekeeping of the College of Wizards.”
“I wonder why he returned us here,” Dr. Lanyon mused.
“Who cares? We’re home again and I’m sure ready to get my old body back. Which backpack was it in?” Rhea’s eyes danced from centaur to centaur as she waited for one of them to tell her where the Jekyll formula was.
“What happened to the saddlebags?” Selene asked. They were missing.
“Never mind,” Rhea responded cheerfully, “we’ve got more of the formula upstairs. I know I left some in — the lab. Oh heck, the Lab!” she screamed and ran upstairs.
“Turn off the TSP device while you’re up there, Rhea. It’s the yellow switch….” Dr. Lanyon trailed off as he realized the girl was already out of sight, and probably also out of hearing range. “I’ll ask her when she comes down,” the centaur muttered to herself, daunted by the notion of climbing the staircase, or even walking through the doorway, since it seemed awfully small, like Alice’s doorway into Wonderland. Fortunately, the bottle labelled “DRINK ME” was just upstairs.
“Hmmm, it’s nice to be home, isn’t it, dear?” Mrs. Lanyon sighed as he tiredly shifted hooves. “I can’t wait to get into a warm bath and get a good night’s sleep.”
“Me too,” Selene chimed in, dropping into a sprawl on the couch. “I wonder what I’m going to tell my parents when I get home.”
“Why the truth, dear. What else?” Mrs. Lanyon responded. “But please sit like a proper lady, Selene, dear.”
“But I’m not a lady, or at least I won’t be when Rhea gets back here in a few moments.”
“Actually, that’s not true, Selene, although I didn’t have the heart to disabuse Rhea of her ‘hasty’ jump to a false conclusion. We haven’t whiled away a fortnight on our quest, dear, and you know we have to wait out the full period to avoid all possibility of harm. So for now, please humor me, dear. It’s unseemly for a young lady to sit with her legs akimbo like that.”
Selene sighed and changed position after a wistful glance up the stairs. Where was Rhea already, she wondered.
Dr. Lanyon had other priorities. “I’m going to turn on the television set. I wonder how long we’ve been gone and what we’ve missed?”
Dr. Lanyon carefully maneuvered around the coffee table to reach it. Turning it on, he flipped to the cable news channel. Seconds later all conversation except the muted sounds of the television stopped as Rhea dejectedly dragged herself back into the living room.
“The lab — everything in it that wasn’t bolted down, great-grandfather’s journal, all my vials of the formula — gone. It’s like a tornado hit up there — a TSP tornado. It’s just an empty room.” Her shoulders slumped,, and it looked like she was trying to hold back tears. “Even the TSP device is gone,” she said despondently.
Mrs. Lanyon hissed in shock while Dr. Lanyon slid her hand into her wife’s but said nothing. It was unclear who was most comforted by the action.
Rhea slumped to the couch and Selene glided to her side and put an arm over her shoulder to comfort her. “It’s not that bad, Rhea.”
“Whaddya mean ‘not that bad’?”
“We’re all alive.” Suddenly Selene’s eyes closed as she realized what she’d just said. “All of us but D’lon-ra, that is.”
“D’lon-ra,” Rhea whispered. “What a horrible way to die.”
“His death was for a noble cause,” Akcuanrut offered. “The survival of a world, maybe many worlds. He will be remembered in song and story forever, when I get back.”
“But we’re stuck like this,” Rhea wailed, although it wasn’t clear whether the emotional display was for her body or the lost hero.
“Maybe I can change you back,” Akcuanrut opined, “although I’m not exactly sure how the spells might change between the worlds.”
Rhea glared up at the wizard. “You could have changed us back at any time and you didn’t? Why the heck not?”
“Herbert Lanyon the Seventh, you know I will not accept such language in my home.”
“Sorry, Mom, but why did he leave us like this if he could have changed us back?”
“For your safety,” Dr. Lanyon interrupted before Akcuanrut could respond.
“Hunh?”
“For your safety, Rhea. You were a fit and healthy young man, but how much did you know about swordplay?”
“Come on, Pop. You know my sport is football.”
“That’s exactly correct, Rhea. You are — er, were — a quarterback. What skills would you have brought to the quest we just completed had you still been a football player? Could you have thrown a touchdown pass to your wide receiver and taken down Na-Noc? Thrown the ‘Hail Mary’ pass to trick him into fumbling his defenses?”
“I…. Ah… Oh, heck,” Rhea glanced over to her mother for support, but she seemed to be assiduously watching the television. “That’s not the point. We shouldda been given a choice.”
“Rhea, Rhea, Rhea,” Dr. Lanyon tsked. “What choices were there? We barely survived. Look how often the skills that you and Selene brought to our group made the difference between life and death.”
Rhea puffed up a bit as she listened to her father. “Yeah, I guess so. But where did we get those skills anyway?”
“I can answer that,” Akcuanrut chimed in. “There are some rules of magic that remain constant across worlds, and the Law of Similarity is one of them.”
“Dad!” Rhea whined. “What the he… heck is he talking about?”
“Oh, Rhea,” Dr. Lanyon heaved a huge sigh. “Sometimes I despair for your continuing education. May I?” The female centaur deferred to the wizard who gestured his permission.
“Can you state the Laws of Thermodynamics, Rhea?”
“Of course. The First Law is….”
“That’s all right, Rhea. You don’t have to recite them, merely recognize that they exist.”
“Why?” Rhea pouted prettily. “Where are you going with this?”
“Well, science has rules. The Laws of Thermodynamics are just one example. Magic obviously has rules as well.” Dr. Lanyon glanced at the wizard for confirmation and Akcuanrut smiled back in agreement. “But the rules of magic are different from the rules of science. I think one of the rules of magic is that function follows form.”
“Correct, O Lady Centaur,” the wizard spoke formally, then nodded. “And a very neat manner of putting it. I love the way you people think.x”
Selene scratched her head, “Isn’t that backwards? I thought it was form follows function.”
“Normally it would be,” Dr. Lanyon paused. “No, I misspoke. Here, on this world, where science rules, the hypothesis would be ‘form follows function.’ Thus, a pair of scissors would be shaped with a sharp edge in order to be able to cut paper. Does that seem clear?”
Both women nodded.
“On Akcuanrut’s world, where magic rules, it’s the exact opposite so function follows form.”
“Fine, but if the lecture’s over, Dad, I still don’t understand what the heck you just said.”
Dr. Lanyon threw her hands up and her wife stepped between the two before his husband began to lecture again. “Let me try, dear.”
Without waiting for a response, Emily began. “It’s like right and left, yin and yang….”
“Yeah, I get it, Mom. They’re opposites.”
“Right, dear, but magic and science are true opposites.”
“So what’s with the function follows form?” Rhea whined.
“It means mean that because you had the form of a barbarian woman from your stupid movie, you started to think and act like the barbarian woman from your stupid movie, including her stupid outfit, Dumbo,” Selene had interrupted, then scowled and sprawled on the couch, taking Mrs. Lanyon’s regular place when watching the television.
Rhea scowled back at Selene, considering the beautiful intricacies of shape and form inherent in the image of her dagger sticking out of Selene’s back. Then, she complimented herself on her superhuman self-control as she grudgingly decided not to put her thoughts into action.
“What are we going to do with the Heart of Virtue?” Dr. Lanyon asked, trying to change the subject before there was actual bloodshed.
“That’s a good question.” Akcuanrut tapped his chin in thought. “I don’t know much about this dimension, but we’ll need someplace safe until I’m sure that you are free of continuing danger. Then, I will simply take it with me.”
“The safe in the lab should be perfect, Dear,” Mrs. Lanyon spoke up. “Assuming it’s still there of course.”
“Of course, Dear. That’s the ideal spot, although we might also think about putting in the safe deposit box at the bank, but how are we going to get it there?” Dr. Lanyon made a broad sweeping movement to display her equine half.
“Whoa up a moment,” Rhea smiled at the dour looks on her parents’ faces. “He’s a wizard. He said he could change us back. Let him change us back and then he can take the Heart wherever he wants.”
All eyes were on Akcuanrut.
“Unfortunately, I can’t do that here.”
“Why not? You are a wizard, aren’t you?”
“I am a great wizard, in my own world, but here a poor one. There’s little magic left in this world.”
“Of course. The magic. That’ why I felt out of sorts.” Mrs. Lanyon’s expression made it clear that he agreed with his husband. “In the other world, I felt a constant flow of energy that I could tap, but here it’s barely a trickle.”
“So we’re stuck?” Rhea’s hands went to her mouth in shock. “What are we going to do? What will Selene tell her parents?” She stopped a minute. Something was wrong, something she’d said. “And why are we still calling her Selene?”
“Slow down, Rhea,” his parents laughed. “We are what we are. Centaur or human, scientist or wizard, it doesn’t matter. We’re alive and a family; we will survive no matter what form we happen to have.”
“Great, I’m a babe. You’re both half horse. That’s it?”
“Does it matter all that much you’re female instead of male? I would think your father and I would have much more reason than you to be upset, we changed sex and we changed species — to one that doesn’t even exist on this world except as fantastical fable and myth. In this world we’re as unique as the Heart of Virtue. Just think what some people would do to us, were they to discover our existence.”
“Well spoken, Emily, and your point is well taken. As to Selene’s parents, we should probably call them over and explain to them personally. Our families have been close for so long, and we have a family history of contact with strange phenomena, so I’m sure that they will understand and help.”
While the Lanyon’s were talking, Akcuanrut dragged the plastic wrapped Heart of Virtue over to his seat and opened it. One glance inside and he quickly interrupted the others. “It is gone!”
“Huh? What’s gone? Don’t you dare tell us the Dark Gods have the Heart of Virtue after all this.”
“No. The Heart is safe,” he said, “if you can call such a dangerous object safe. Na-Noc, on the other hand, is missing, or what was left of him, which is troubling.”
“So the Dark Gods probably kept him back in the other world, right?”
“They could not possibly have kept him. He was too close to the Heart, and directly under its malignant influence. The Heart would have kept him in hopes of making further mischief.”
“What’s that mean?” Rhea asked.
“The Heart has very strong magic and intelligence of its own,” he said, “even stronger than the Dark Gods now, because they poured a lot of their own natural power into its creation in hopes of gaining an advantage over the forces of Light by concentrating the power of many Gods within a narrow compass. That is why we need to destroy it, if we can, or contain it if we cannot. By the physical actions of others it can be moved, but mere magic can have little or no effect on it. When the Dark God said that we could have it, he was only bluffing. He had no actual power to control the Heart, which would have subsumed him as easily as it corrupted Na-Noc if he’d tried. Keeping it was not his choice, unless he wished to fight both us and it at the same time, and he we have had the fight of his life if he’d won, both the Heart and he have a natural affinity, both being of the Dark, so his weaknesses are well-known to the Heart, and the temptations the Heart would use to wear down his resistance more alluring. Eventually, he would have succumbed.”
“You mean Na-Noc fell out and is now a slimy puddle on the rug somewhere?” Rhea snorted in a very unladylike manner.
Akcuanrut didn’t answer, but it was clear that he doubted the truth of Rhea’s assessment of Na-Noc’s absence.
“So, what you’re telling us is we’ve got a missing blob of evil creeping around somewhere?” She threw up her hands. “Let’s remember to bring along an empty mayonnaise jar the next time we go searching for him, Okay?”
The wizard nodded. “Exactly, although I’m not exactly sure what ‘mayonnaise’ might be, a jar of some sort would have been very handy, provided the top could be fastened very tightly.”
“Okay folks,” Rhea said nervously. “I think it’s officially time for a brief psychotic break. Who’s first?”
“Rhea, dear, let’s do try keeping focused on helpful thoughts,” Mrs. Lanyon chided his volatile son or daughter. It was difficult to say which side of the equation she was leaning towards, despite her loud and constant protestations. “I would think our first considerations would be to get the Heart of Virtue to a safe place and then figure out how we’re going to survive until we can return to our original forms.”
“I thought we agreed on locking the Heart in our safe?”
“Yes, dear, but you and I are not designed to go up or down stairs right now. Rhea will have to do it.”
“Sure. Okay. Give it to me.” In an instant she was gone. Moments later, she returned to find everyone laughing.
“What’s so funny? A gal could get paranoid here.”
Taking several gulps of air, Selene regained enough control to explain. “We were worried about being able to move about in this world, but that won’t be much of a problem, at least tonight.”
Selene pointed to the television set. The noon news was on, showing the date and a group of costumed kids.
It took a few moments for it to sink in, at least for Rhea; the kids were carrying decorated bags, and the date was obviously October Thirty-First — Halloween.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Eight
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
If you can remain calm and collected amidst all this confusion,
you simply don’t truly understand the problem.— Unknown
Vfrgoysl peeked out into the great opening. It was dark, but he could see clearly. Nothing moved. With an inaudible sigh, he scurried forward keeping to edge of the wall as he scanned the vast expanse before him seeking food. Hunger drove him. It always drove him, and it was not just his own hunger but the hunger of the many mouths of his children and his children’s children.
There! Food! A large blob of something pulsating slightly, but otherwise unmoving. It was enough to feed his entire family for several days. Vfrgoysl salivated in anticipation, but it was in the open. He would have to move away from the safety of the wall. He would have to move into the open where the giants lived, where blindingly bright light could appear without warning and where huge objects could drop down on you from nowhere to crush you.
There really was no choice and Vfrgoysl knew it. The hunger would consume him otherwise. His family would die; the thousands of them. Another quick scurry brought him to within mandible-reach of the blob.
From this close, it was clearly pulsating and Vfrgoysl twitched his antennas as he tried to sense whether it was truly edible. The faint cloying odor was all he needed to convince himself. He stretched a mandible to taste of the delicacy before him and found himself stuck. His mandible seemed to be rapidly sinking in, deeper and deeper. He jerked once, trying to back away from this new threat, but could not free himself.
Within seconds the blob had engulfed Vfrgoysl and less than a minute later he’d been completely absorbed. Vfrgoysl was no more, but a small portion of him, his knowledge and his emotions, lived on. Na-Noc grumbled at how slowly he was regaining his original mass. At this rate, one cockroach at a time, it would take forever.
Using the information he’d obtained from Vfrgoysl he reformed himself into a larger version of the cockroach and scurried off toward his nest. There were a couple of thousand morsels of food waiting for Na-Noc and the sooner he could regain his original size and reclaim the Heart of Virtue, the sooner he could petition the Dark Gods to return him to his homeland.
“Emily?” Herbert Lanyon whined as she plucked at her bra straps, irritated by their foreign feel and not any more comfortable with the smooth silky feeling of her blouse.
“Yes, dear?” Emily Lanyon asked as he stopped and looked up from the hay he was spreading about with his hooves in the makeshift stall they had created on one side of the family’s attached garage.
“Stop kicking the hay around and listen to me please. I’m worried about how the Uttersons will handle this.”
“Would you two like some privacy?” Akcuanrut glanced over from the workbench, as entranced as he was by the various tools, especially the power tools, and hoping he would be able to continue his examination. From time to time he’d pick up a cordless drill, or a power saw, and pull the trigger with a startled frisson and a delighted laugh.
“No, perhaps you can help,” Emily waved him over.
With a last wistful glance towards the workbench, he joined the two centaurs.
“We’ve done what we can. The kids will get another copy of the Jekyll formula from our safe deposit box on Monday. Selene even found an all-night feed and grain store that delivered half a ton of feed and that hay that Emily was just spreading around.” She made a wry moue. “Darn, I feel like I just did a commercial for the Yellow Pages.”
Emily smiled politely at his husband’s attempt at humor, but Akcuanrut stopped sneaking glances to the workbench long enough to give the female centaur a quizzical look.
“Sorry,” she blushed and explained about indexed business listings, although it was difficult to account for the fact that they were still called ‘yellow pages’ when in fact they were online now, and had no intrinsic color at all. That led into another long explication of electronic communication and the Internet, and by that time they were both confused. Before she could return to the original topic of discussion, the doorbell rang.
“Oh dear, I guess we’ll have to wing it.”
“Don’t worry, Herbert,” Emily assured her as he reached out and tucked an errant strand of hair behind his husband’s ear. “The Uttersons are our friends. They’ll understand.”
With that they all moved to a position behind the four foot high barrier that had been constructed earlier. The barrier was designed to block the centaur’s lower body from view until their new forms could be presented in a manner designed to avoid shocking their friends.
They could hear questioning voices approaching. “Is my tie straight?”
Herbert glanced critically at her wife and nodded, reaching out to grasp his hand and squeeze it nervously.
“Emily? Herbert? Are you really out there? Is this another one of your Halloween pranks? And where did you get these two darling girls to pretend to be barbarian swordswomen?….” the cultured “Vassar-trained voice” trailed off as Mrs. Lucille Utterson preceded her husband George into the garage. She stopped short when she saw Herbert Lanyon, his wife Emily, and a stranger with flowing white hair standing uncomfortably behind a plywood barrier. The Lanyons, oddly enough, appeared to be standing on a table or something, because they towered above everyone in the garage, almost brushing the ceiling, although the garage itself was designed to accommodate large vans, the better to lend itself to Dr Lanyon’s scientific experiments, some of which required heavy machinery and wouldn’t fit into the laboratory upstairs.
George had been paying too much attention to the two barbarian women to notice that his wife had stopped and bumped into her. “Sorry, dear. Must have tripped,” he smiled endearingly at her scowl.
“My Gawd, Emily, you’ve turned the garage into a stable,” Lucille clapped her hands in excitement as she turned back to the centaurs. “I can’t wait to see what’s next.”
As they had previously agreed, Dr. Lanyon responded as if she were her wife, or at least tried to, but Lucille had already turned to Akcuanrut. “And who might you be, sir? As you’re here I’m sure you must be a good friend of the Lanyon’s, but in that marvelous costume, I don’t recognize you.”
“Lucille!”
“Yes, Emily?” Lucille turned back to Dr. Lanyon with a perplexed look.
“Please sit down,” Dr. Lanyon gestured to the chairs that had been positioned just inside the garage, facing the barrier the Lanyons were standing behind. “We absolutely must talk.”
“Why of course, Emily,” she sounded hurt. “Why didn’t you say so? Come, dear,” Lucille gestured to her husband to follow, then marched haughtily to a chair and waited for her husband to seat her. Making a production of smoothing out her skirt, Lucille finally looked inquisitively up at the two centaurs standing behind the barricade. “What would you like to say, dear?”
Hiding her face behind her hand as she pretended to clear her throat, Dr. Lanyon muttered just loud enough for her wife to hear. “Sometimes I don’t know how you’ve put up with her all these years, Emily.
“We,” she continued aloud, facing the others, “Dr. Lanyon and I, need to tell you a story. At first blush, it will seem a rather outlandish tale, so I must ask you both to bear with us until the end.”
“Why, Emily, this sounds positively conspiratorial,” Lucille beamed, “like in college when we — George, stop poking me.”
“Lucille!”
“Yes, Emily? Oh, of course. Your story.”
With the skill of a career academician, Herbert Lanyon VI, MD, PhD, female centaur, described the events of the preceding few days in excruciating detail, successfully transforming the family’s incredible adventure into a rather dull report suitable for the driest technical journal. Mr. Utterson sat listening intently while his wife allowed the tale to progress to its eventual conclusion, albeit not without some foot-tapping and a stifled yawn or two.
At the conclusion, Mr. Utterson peered at one Lanyon and then the other before speaking. “That was a fascinating story, Emily, although presented in a manner more like what I would expect from your husband,” he nodded cheerily at the male centaur he assumed to be Herbert Lanyon. “Definitely not up to your usual standards of entertainment. But certainly you are not purporting to claim it as whole cloth, are you?”
“Of course it’s true, dear,” Lucille interrupted as she gave a broad wink at the person she thought was Emily. “After all, you know sorority sisters never lie to one another.”
“Rhea. Selene. Would you take your positions please?” As Emily’s deep voice boomed out, the twins quickly moved to stand at ease behind the Utterson’s chairs.
“Thank you. Now, Akcuanrut, would you please remove the barrier?” The wizard grumbled at being asked to perform manual labor, but rolled the barrier away to reveal the Lanyons in their full glory.
“Well, really! Emily Lanyon, I’m shocked. Cover yourself up this instant.” Sandra quickly scanned the garage seeking something to throw over her old friend, apparently standing naked from the waist down before her — and, more importantly, her husband, but failed to notice that both had implausibly shrunk down to normal size.
Spying an old blanket in a corner, covering the gas barbecue grill for the winter, she stood to rush over and grab it — or at least tried to stand — but two strong hands snaked out from behind her and held her immobile in her chair.
“I say, what’s the meaning of this?” George began to rise and also found himself held firmly in his seat as the woman behind him said, “Sorry, Dad,” and confused him even more. Then, everyone tried to speak at once. Finally, a plaster-cracking bellow from Emily Lanyon silenced the others and in the silence, Herbert called to Akcuanrut, “Why do they see us as humans? What’s wrong — er, or should I say right?”
“Magic, I suppose, your centaur magic. In a land of humans it would be safest to be perceived as human, so that is how you are perceived.” He thought deeply for a moment. “I suppose this means that not all the magic of this world has been consumed for some reason, just not the magical continuum drawn upon by creatures such as yourself.” He shrugged, a fluent student of human cultures and otherwise. “Who knew?”
“So how do we let them see us as we are?”
“Simply wish it so, just like flying. It’s your magic, so it answers only to you, and I have to confess that I’m a little jealous at the present moment.”
The two centaurs glanced at each other. Emily shrugged his shoulders and they both closed their eyes and concentrated. The Uttersons’ horrified gasps told them all that it had worked.
Selene was sprawled lazily on the living room couch watching the twenty-four hour news channel.
“Jeez. You’d think you’d never seen a TV before.” Rhea playfully ruffled Selene’s reddish blonde hair as she ambled past on the way to the lounge chair. On the news was a story about the theft of several lab rats being used to test a potential cancer cure. A spokesman for the laboratory was noting that the loss of the animals would delay testing for at least a year.
“Who the hell would want to steal a bunch of white rats?” Rhea wondered aloud.
“Got me,” Selene picked at a piece of loose fabric. “Maybe we should investigate, Frank.”
“Right, Joe,” Rhea snorted. “But your reference is messed up. The Hardy Boys were— well— boys — or haven’t you looked in a mirror lately?”
“True. Maybe Nancy Drew would be better — or how about the Bobbsey Twins?”
“Wasn’t one of them a boy? I vaguely recall my mother once lecturin’ me on them when I was a kid and didn’t want to learn to read. I had a theory worked out, see, that books were obsolete, because everything could be translated into speech electronically….”
Selene smirked. “Yeah, yeah, except that people can read — with training — from three to ten times as fast as even rapid speech can be understood. When scanning for information, the ratio goes up even higher. It was a dumb idea, Sherlock.”
Rhea grunted, unwilling to dignify a reasoned counter-argument to her childhood fantasy with a retort.
“I never read the Bobbsey Twins stories anyway. I thought they were boring.” Selene turned off the television and rolled onto her stomach to face Rhea. “But, speaking of boring, who really cares? Are you as restless as I am?”
“Yup, and unless you feel like some sword practice we’re probably gonna to stay bored. You know how damned long it takes our parents to develop a plan of action once they start talking. We could be old and gray before they decide anything.”
“So let’s go out and do something — something other than the same old sword practice, as exhilarating as that might be.” Selene sat up, getting excited by her idea. “We could visit the arcade at the mall, or check out how the team is doing without us. We could even go to the dance like we were planning before this all started.”
“Now wait just one minute Selene — and you are Selene now, not Jack. Do you want people to see you like you are now?”
“What’s wrong with what I look like?” Selene stood and posed seductively. “I think I look pretty darned good. Besides, who’s going to recognize us? We’ll just be two people in the crowd.”
“Right,” Rhea laughed. Standing, she gently took Selene by the hand and led her up the stairs to her old bedroom. “I’ve gotta get you to a mirror.”
“This is crazy, this is crazy, this is….”
“Oh shut up already, Rhea. It’s panic like that — panic unbecoming an ex-first string quarterback, I might add — that’s the reason why I’m driving, even if it is your car.”
“But the football game? No one will know us and they’ll try to….”
“Exactly, Rhea. No one will recognize you. That’s why we agreed that we would call you Nancy, although I still think Hattie would have been easier for you to remember — who would have known you had a thing for Nancy Drew? So what’s the problem?”
“What’s the problem? Darn it, Selene, we’re headin’ towards a high school football game. Teenaged boys; hormone factories, and they’ll be even more difficult to deal with once they get their adrenaline flowin’ from the game. You must remember what that’s like, Jack,” she intentionally used his birth name, “you used to be one.”
“So? I’m not looking for sex, Nancy,” Selene used the incognito Rhea had selected for effect, “just a good time. Teenage girls have been dealing with teenage boys for ages. Exactly how many girls did you ravish after each game you played, for example?”
“None, but….”
“But what? We’re going to watch our team play. If you still feel uncomfortable, we can leave right after the game ends. Nobody’s going to hit on you, well not much anyway. Besides, if someone did, you could slice them into tiny bits at least seventeen different ways — but please don’t. I’d suggest just using some of the same techniques your girlfriend Connie has been using to keep you both virgins. It would be hard to explain away the misunderstanding if either of us had to kill anyone, and it’s awfully difficult to get blood out of leather. Right now, these are our only outfits, remember, and I’m not sure whether anything we purchased in a modern style would stay that way for any length of time, considering what happened to the clothes we were wearing when we changed. I mean, look at us, still fresh as savage daisies, our outfits clean and neatly pressed after weeks of wandering around in the wilderness without a dry cleaner in sight.”
Rhea wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention. “Connie never looked like we do. I mean she was pretty — real pretty when it comes to that — but just look at us. I mean, we’re out and out gorgeous, like supermodels or rock stars. Worse than that, look what we’re wearin’. We’re gonna freeze our cute little behinds off wearing teeny-weeny leather bikinis like this.”
“No problemo, buddy mine. The bikinis are fine — they’re just a Halloween costume like almost everyone else at the game will be wearing. As for being cold, look on the back seat.” With that, Selene pulled into the high school parking lot. “Come on,” she called out as she grabbed her old letter jacket, slammed her door and strutted proudly towards the gate.
Rhea sat watching as Selene strode through the gate and disappeared into the crowd. She could hear the cheers from the assembled students, from the sound of them all boys, and shivered, now that the car heater was off. With a deep sigh, she reached back and grabbed her letter jacket. Throwing it over her shoulders and holding it closed in front of herself, Rhea slowly left the car and trudged towards the gate, easily following the path of outraged girls, most of whom were berating their boyfriends about staring at ‘that slut,’ or words to that effect — and who knew what else.
Akcuanrut was bored. He had quickly realized that he didn’t have enough knowledge of this world to be of any help, especially as the direction of the discussions were leaning towards how to cope until the changes could be reversed rather than how to get Akcuanrut back to his world. With the TSP device gone, it had not taken him long to come to the conclusion that he would have to arrange for his own return. The others didn’t even notice when he excused himself and left the garage.
Wandering through the kitchen was fun for a while, the gas stove was amazing and he played with it for several minutes before moving on to the refrigerator. He played with the refrigerator door, watching the light go on and off, then with the in-the-door ice dispenser until there was a small pile of cubes and crushed ice on the floor. The sink was most fascinating of all to Akcuanrut, with its hot and cold water and the drain to take it all away.
He was tempted to use a bit of his magical reserve to determine how they worked, but grudgingly decided against it. He didn’t have enough magic to return as it was and this world didn’t have much to spare. Instead, he decided to see if he could find and gather what he would need. Not one to delay, once he’d finally made a decision, Akcuanrut stalked out to the garage. The door was still open to air it out after one of the centaurs had inadvertently relieved himself or herself. The debate still raged in the other room and no one even noticed as he grabbed the blanket off the grill and stalked purposefully off into the dusk.
Na-Noc was hungry again — and weak. He had no idea where he was, but assumed it was some hell the Dark Gods had sent him to for failing to protect the Heart of Virtue. It took so long to surround and absorb his food in this place where magic was so scant, and he’d shed a lot of the mass he’d gathered with so much effort when one of the rats he’d ambushed had turned out to have ingested a copious dose of poison. It had been a race to slough off the poisoned tissue before it killed him as it worked its way rapidly toward what passed for a brain in his protean body. He had to find a wizard, or at least a powerful source of magic, if he was ever to escape this prison. It was faint, but he could sense a wizard nearby. Food was closer — and he was so hungry… so very hungry.
The crowd roared. It was first and ten on the thirty-yard line and the Orbs had the ball. Selene was yelling and cheering them on with the rest, but Rhea was a bit more critical as she analyzed her replacement’s moves. Phil Cohn was doing remarkably well as a second string quarterback coming out from behind Rhea’s shadow, but he seemed to be afraid to go with a pass play.
“Selene. Selene!” Rhea shouted and tugged at her leathers to get the excited girl’s attention, since Selene had discarded her jacket within moments of finding a seat, finding it too warm once she’d started jumping up and down and cheering on her team. “We’ve gotta get Phil to pass the ball. No one’s coverin’ any of the receivers. They’re wide open and he’s almost outta time.”
“What?” Selene shouted over the crowd. “I can’t hear you.”
“I said, he needs to pass the ball. He’s only called one pass play the entire game and if he doesn’t start soon, he’ll be massacred. We don’t have enough ground plays to keep their defense off guard,”
“So tell him.”
“No way. I’m stayin’ low key. Besides, the way I look, why would he believe I have the slightest idea how to play a man’s game like football?”
“So you’d let our team and our school down?”
“No. That’s why I told you. You don’t seem to mind paradin’ around for everyone to see. You go tell him.”
“No. It’s your suggestion. You go,” Selene smiled archly.
“I can’t. I just can’t.” Rhea was near tears in her frustration. “Come on. It’s your team too.”
“Well, all right. You’re right there. I don’t want them to lose either.” Selene hesitated for a moment, as if in thought, and then gave a big grin. “But you’re going to owe me — big time. Right, ‘Nancy’?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll owe you. I’ll owe you. Anythin’ you say. Now get down there and convince him to do a pass play. It’s already second down.”
“Okay, but take off your coat,” she said.
“What!? Why on Earth should I take off my coat?”
“Do you want the team to win? I’m not going down there unless you take off your coat, and that’s final.”
“Okay,” she groused, as she shrugged out of her jacket, “but I don’t see why I have to do anything so silly.”
Without a word, but smiling back at Rhea as she turned toward the home team’s place by the side of the field, Selene gave a flip of her hair and flounced off to the bench where the coach was giving the team a last minute pep talk. Smiling, she wondered if it was the usual one involving calling the players ladies and threatening to enroll them in the cheerleading squad if they didn’t win.
The time out was ending as Selene made it to the bench and called Tim aside. The whistle blew and they were still talking. Rhea couldn’t tell what Selene said, but Phil shook his head and started to head back out onto the field. Selene stopped him and pointed in Rhea’s direction just as the coach got to them and started yelling. Suddenly the coach was on the ground holding his arm and Phil’s eyes were bugging out. Ignoring the quarterback’s shocked expression; Selene said something again and pointed towards Rhea again.
Before she’d finished her instructions to Phil, a whistle blew and everyone groaned as the refs moved the ball back ten yards for delay of game. Rhea fought the urge to scream in frustration. Phil shook his head, as if he’d been slugged, and jogged out onto the field, but kept sneaking glances back at Selene, who was helping the coach slowly to his feet and smiling.
At first, he was shouting at her, but then she said something that seemed to quiet him down, and he managed to focus his attention on the game again.
The huddle broke and both teams lined up with the Orbs needing twenty-seven yards with just seventeen seconds to the end of the game. A running play would use up most, if not all, of the clock and the Orbs would end up losing nineteen to fourteen.
Phil knew that the barbarian babe was right, but he was worried. He hadn’t connected on a single pass in the last practice and the one pass he had thrown during this game had resulted in an interception and the touchdown that currently put the Wolverines in the lead.
The coach had called for a lateral to Tim Walsh the halfback on the last play, but when the ball was hiked Phil quickly tossed the ball, only to see Tim buried in red Wolverine uniforms after gaining only two yards.
Now the pressure was really on. Another quick huddle, then the ball snapped for the last down of the game — and he dropped it. Cursing, he lunged for the bouncing ball, scooped it up and began running towards the bleachers only to see a wall of red charging towards him. Doubling back, a silver Orbs uniform streaked past him and a Wolverine went down. Three more were still closing on him.
Desperate, seeing Tim Walsh standing alone in the end zone, hands in the air waving frantically, he chucked the ball in a wobbly arc just as a wall of red crashed down on him.
When Phil awoke, he found himself lying on a cot at the sidelines with Selene, the coach, and the team’s trainer staring down at him. In the background he could hear cheering, but couldn’t tell which team the cheers were for.
“Unh,” he lifted his head, or rather tried to, until everything started spinning. Setting it gently back on the pillow and holding it he mumbled, “Who won?”
“We did, Phil,” the coach beamed down at him. “Tim caught your pass in the end zone. No one was even near enough to touch him. It was brilliant, even if a little wobbly, but you were under a lot of pressure, and managed to keep your head. Good job, son.” The others nodded, also smiling.
Cautiously, Phil turned to Selene. “And it’s a date?”
Selene smiled and nodded. Then the cot lifted and they followed him out to the ambulance.
The crowd of food had drawn Na-Noc like a magnet and he huddled beneath a wood and metal structure trying to decide which morsels of garbage to consume first when he recognized a magic source with the taste of his original world. How could that be? he wondered and stretched an eye up on a thin pseudopod. Wiggling between the wooden slats he saw one of the barbarian women and quickly withdrew. If one was there, the other was probably nearby. He worriedly searched for another magical signature, fearful that the other one was already sneaking up on him.
With a sign of relief, Na-Noc finally located the other one near the open field that people had been running about on. Hunger was now secondary to survival in Na-Noc’s mind and he crawled off looking for easier prey.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Chapter Nine
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Gather my children and you shall hear,
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863)
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Looking like a demented child’s image of a half-pint werewolf, Na-Noc trotted down the wide paths of his personal hell. The creatures here were different than the humans he was used to seeing, or even the Dark Gods and their minions. In fact they were even different from each other, with few looking even vaguely similar. As dusk approached, even more creatures could be seen, each more fearsome and demonic than the next.
Hunger was once again Na-Noc’s primary concern, because the battle with Akcuanrut, D’lon-ra and their minions had taken so much out of him. He was, even now, still smaller than a bunny rat cub and no match for these hellish creatures. This was especially true because they all seemed to be traveling in groups — another sign of the fearsome nature of this place when even the demons needed to travel in packs.
There were smaller creatures about, but Na-Noc needed mass and he needed it fast if he was going to be able to survive here. Additionally, if he absorbed some of the intelligence and knowledge of these demons he might learn how to survive in this world.
Hugging the sides of the castles where there was more shrubbery to hide him, Na-Noc searched for his next meal. It was just past dusk when he finally found a target, a small orange furred demon about his size. Absorbing it would almost double his mass and the next creature he ate could be large enough to bring him back to his original size at last.
It ambled down the street, apparently unaware of Na-Noc’s presence, stopping to receive tribute at castle after castle. Each stop brought it closer to Na-Noc and he licked his chops and salivated in anticipation. A half dozen castles away, three castles away, two castles away.
Na-Noc adjusted his crouch infinitesimally in order to be better able to lunge out from behind his shrub, grab the small creature and carry it back to his hiding place to be absorbed at his leisure. That’s when the benighted fur ball glanced at something on its wrist and trotted off to the corner instead of down the path to Na-Noc’s waiting pseudoclaws.
With a cry of anguish he considered charging out into the open to grab the creature. That was, until he recognized the white haired man the boy had approached, Akcuanrut.
“You did what?!” The volume of Rhea’s voice was sufficient to rattle the car windows.
“Well, you said you’d do anything to make sure our team won.
“But… but… but….” Rhea was in shock at what Selene had done to her. Finally, she took a ragged gulp of air and screeched, “But a date? You know how I feel about bein’ seen in this body. I’ll be a laughingstock. You’ll be a laughingstock. We’ll never….”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ve been through this so many times I can’t count. You made a promise, and I expect you to keep it. If you make me, I’ll tell everyone you broke your word.”
“So? No one knows who I am. We’ll get the Jekyll formula on Monday and I’ll be me again instead of — this….” She gestured to her body’s new curves.
“But I’ll know. I’ll know that you wouldn’t keep your promise when the chips were down.”
“So?”
“So, I’ll tell everyone.”
“And get yourself locked up in the nearest funny farm?”
“And provide proof.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I’ve already appealed to your sense of adventure, to see what it’s like on a date from the girl’s point of view — but you must have lost that back on that other world. I’ve appealed to your sense of honor, hoping you would keep your word once you made the promise — but you’re telling me you have no problems reneging on your word. I’ve pleaded with you, as my best friend, to come and back me up — but our friendship doesn’t seem to mean much right now, despite all those years I went along with all those hare-brained invention schemes of yours — at great personal risk I might remind you. Remember, I’ll be there too, and while I really do want to do this, I really don’t want to do it alone — so sure, sure I’d tell everyone, and sure, I’d provide proof.” Selene folded her arms and glared back at Rhea.
Incongruously, Rhea’s first reaction was amazement that Selene had actually managed to present that soliloquy in one breath, especially since this was, by far, the most she’d said since the transformation. Unfortunately, the meaning of Selene’s words then sunk in and Rhea uncomfortably realized that Selene was right. She had promised, albeit foolishly, and without a full understanding of the implications of her promise. Even worse, Rhea realized that her best friend had every reason to expect Rhea to join her. They had been friends all their lives and Selene had always been there for Rhea. Despite her angry words, Rhea still doubted that Selene would actually follow through on her threat to tell the world about the Jekyll formula. She was living proof of the pandemonium it could cause, a teenage boy who was genetically a female barbarian princess with near superhuman strength and warrior skills. However, it did make Rhea realize that Selene really did want to do this dating thing and that regardless of Rhea’s opinion on the matter, Rhea owed her.
Slowly, Rhea deflated back into the car seat, tears streaming down her eyes. “Okay. I’ll go,” she whispered.
Akcuanrut was amazed. The outside world was even more fantastic than the kitchen and the workshop. The castles were so plentiful; there was no place for the serfs to till the soil, other than decorative grasslands kept too short to provide nourishment for a rabbit. The roads were made of some hard substance that would undoubtedly split the hooves of draft horses, and they used lights without flame.
The people seemed familiar, although most were smaller than the people of his land. At least they had arms and legs with few exceptions. Also, eyes and ears were the norm. Clothing was another thing though. The colors, the designs; it was like a rainbow of different outfits, again with few duplications.
Akcuanrut had followed the other beings of the area, walking along the white strip beside the road until he reached a corner. He was standing there trying to decide which way to go when he felt a gentle tugging at his robe.
Looking down, he saw one of the small creatures looking up at him. The creature was wearing a white robe similar to his, but had strange reptilian hands and a short, squat head with big, pointed ears and a furrowed brow. The color of its skin was a deep green with faint traces of gray white, as if it were quite old. The overall impression was of an aged, but extremely knowledgeable creature.
“ ’Cuse me, Mister,” the little creature said, it’s voice childlike, but with a strange hollow echo. “Would you help me cross the street?”
“What do you wish, strange being?”
“I wanna cross the street,” it pointed to the black surface that the “cars” preferred. “I can do it myself, but Mommy said I hadda get help.”
“Certainly, small being,” Akcuanrut responded with more assurance than he felt. “Which way do you wish to go?”
“That way,” it pointed. “I’m goin’ home now.” It sounded so happy to be going home, Akcuanrut felt a momentary twinge of jealousy, wishing that he too could return home.
The small being took his hand and tugged him towards the street. Akcuanrut followed, a bit uncertain of what to do about the “cars,” but there was nothing to worry about. They stayed between some white lines painted on the “street” and the only “car” that approached, slowed and stopped as it came near them.
“Thanks, Mister,” the small being spoke again as they stepped onto the curb again. “I’m Yoda. Who are you?”
“I am Akcuanrut, Dean of the Emperor’s College of Wizards and Advisor to Emperor Elvi of Myriad.”
“Oh wow. That sounds cool, but I don’t know him. What movie is he from?”
“Movie? Like on the TV?” Akcuanrut had learned a bit from listening to the twins. “None. I am from another dimension.”
“Oh, like Doctor Weird, the comic book guy. I like movie characters best of all.” Yoda sounded disappointed and didn’t speak for a while, just holding Akcuanrut’s hand and walking along.
They crossed two more streets like that before coming to one that was much larger. Akcuanrut confidently stepped out onto the blacktop despite the many cars rushing by when Yoda tugged his arm.
“The light, Mister. It’s gotta turn green.” The small creature looked at him as if he were a crêtin.
“Huh?” Akcuanrut searched about looking for something that would turn green before he realized Yoda was pointing at a box hanging above the middle of the street with three globes. Facing them only the red one was lit, but there were two others of indeterminate color and on the side facing the moving cars the bottom light was lit, and it was green.
“But it is green,” Akcuanrut pointed.
“That’s for the cars. The red one is for us,’ the small being stood patiently.
As Akcuanrut watched the mysterious lights, the green light facing the cars went out and the light above, a yellow one, went on. Akcuanrut watched in amazement as the cars began to slow and stop. Moments later, the yellow light had gone off and a red light went on. At the same time, the red light facing them went off and the green light below it went on. Akcuanrut stood, fascinated by the changes and trying to figure out what had happened to stop the cars when he realized that Yoda was tugging at his sleeve again.
“Let’s go before it changes again.” With that the small furry creature led Akcuanrut across the street while the cars waited patiently for them to complete their crossing.
Four castles down from the light Yoda suddenly let go of Akcuanrut’s hand and bolted towards the front portico. At the castle entrance, Yoda turned and waved, “Bye, Ack… bye, Acky.” Then he was gone.
Akcuanrut stood wondering what to do next. Doing a search for magic sources, he found one — and it was close, very close. Smiling at his good luck, the wizard headed down the white way toward the building with the large steeple on top.
“So we’re all agreed here?” The others nodded and Herbert Lanyon smiled prettily. “Then to summarize, George will prepare a power of attorney for Herbert and I to sign, have it notarized at his office and then go to the bank for the backup copy of the formula. That will be much easier than having either of us go, and less embarrassing than asking Aunt Agatha Lanyon to fax us her copy, since the family had agreed never to use the formula at all, and I’d have to explain what Rhea, Hastie, actually did with it, not that she’d have any trouble believing it. Akcuanrut is worried that he may have great difficulty being able to find sufficient magical energies on this world to return the Heart of Virtue to his world so, as a matter of courtesy, Emily and I have agreed not to use even that small amount of possibly-unrelated centaur magic needed to appear human. With the formula, we can return to our original shapes and then I can get to work on the TSP device so Akcuanrut can get home — even if he can’t find enough magic to do it on his own.”
“Come to think of it,” George asked, “where is Ack… what did you say his name was? I’d like to talk to him about wherever he came from.”
“I think I saw him heading towards the kitchen an hour or so ago,” Emily answered. “Rather than have one of us wreck the new tile floor with our hooves, would you please ask him to come out here, George?” With a nod, George sauntered off.
“I have a more basic question, dearest,” Lucille spoke up. “What is this TSP thingee you’ve been talking about?”
“You weren’t listening, were you, Lucille?” Herbert was a bit hurt that her wife’s best friend had not paid better attention to her narrative, although as she thought about it, she realized she should have been used to it by now. With a tired shake of her head, she explained again.
“The TSP ‘thingee’ is a Trans-Spacial Portal. To use layman’s terms, it was supposed to function something like the transporters in StarTrek, a method of moving objects from one place to another by dismantling their individual atoms and then recreating them in another….”
“Dear?”
“Yes, Emily?” Herbert turned towards her wife. “I was just trying to explain the TSP to Lucille.”
“And I’m listening quite intently, Herb — I mean Emily.”
“No, you’re not, Lucille,” Emily laughed. “I’ve known you much too long for you to fool me. I can see that slightly glazed look and you’re playing with that one curl of your hair again. What were you really doing, planning tomorrow’s wardrobe?”
“No!” Lucille was indignant, “of course not. I was… I was….” and then she started laughing. “My Gawd. It really is you in that body, isn’t it, Emily. I didn’t really believe it until just now.”
“I apologize, Herbert,” she turned to the female centaur. “Emily is correct. I really wasn’t paying full attention to your explanation, but the transporter explanation was sufficient for my needs.”
Turning back to the male centaur, she good-naturedly slapped his arm. “But you, Emily. How could you give away our feminine secrets like that?”
Emily gave a deep gravelly chuckle. “Have you noticed that I seem to have a rather unique perspective on that at the moment, Lucille? I imagine that the Men’s Union will be filing a grievance as well.”
Just then, the door burst open and George came barreling back into the garage, a little winded, either by worry or the rush back to the garage. “I can’t find him!” he said.
“What’s that, George?”
“I can’t find that Akcuanrut friend of yours.”
“Did you check upstairs?”
“I checked every room, including the bathrooms and the closets. I also checked the basement and I even checked the back yard. I’m afraid he’s gone.”
“Oh my,” Emily gasped, holding his hand to his mouth. “He’s not familiar with this world, and he’s fearless. I hope he’ll be all right.”
“We’d better find him. Emily and I will check the neighborhood on foot. George, you and Lucille take your car. Everyone take their cell phones and call if you spot him.”
“Right. Come on, Lucille. You drive while I check to see if he’s been picked up by the police.”
“What about the girls?” Emily asked. “What about Rhea and Selene — I mean Hastie and Jack?”
“I’ll call them right after checking with the police,” George called back from the car as it pulled out of the driveway.
“Tim and Phil will meet us at the entrance to the school in a few minutes. Are you ready, ‘Nancy?’ ”
“Well, let’s see, Selene. Are my pants clean? Oh, sorry. I’m not wearin’ any damned pants. Is my skirt too long? Humm. No skirt either. Well, is my leather bikini coverin’ everything it needs to cover? Just barely. No prob, Selene. Ready as I can possibly be.”
“Lighten up, ‘Nancy’,” Selene laughed. “We’re here for the Halloween dance. Let’s have fun and win the award for best costume, just like we’d been planning to do all week, and it was your scheme, if you’ll recall, to do just that. It seems a shame to go to all that trouble and then just give up because you’re ‘chicken.’ ” She made a few ‘clucks’ to remind Rhea of her former attitude. “What’s the matter, Rhea, can’t handle the heat once you’ve landed us back in the soup again?”
“Uhhummm.”
“Yes, ‘Nancy’?”
“Wouldn’t it help to have a damned costume in the first place? We look like refugees from an X-rated movie. There’s no way they’re gonna let us into the dance dressed like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if they call the cops and have us arrested for tryin’ to corrupt the morals of minors.”
“Oh, come on. As cute as we look, they’d let us into the Vatican, just to say hello, and we’d both get waved to the front of the line if they had any fancy nightclubs here in town like they have down in the ‘Big Apple.’ You know, deep down, you’re dying to go to this dance. Like I said, calm down. The guys will be here any minute.”
The cell phone in the leather shoulder pack Selene carried started chiming.
“Saved by the bell,” Rhea cheered before smiling beatifically upward and clasping his hands together in prayer. “Thank you, lord. Thank you.”
“Relax, Saint Joan. It’s probably a wrong number,” but Selene took the sack off her shoulder and rummaged through it for the cell phone.
“Hello?”
“Oh, hi, Dad. What’s up?”
“He is?” Selene asked worriedly.
“You did?”
“We’ve got Rhea’s car and we’ll start looking for him immediately.” Selene silently replaced the phone in the pack and shouldered it before turning back to Rhea.
“Are you enjoying keepin’ me in suspense? Give already,” Rhea demanded.
“It’s Akcuanrut.”
“Yeah?” Rhea gestured for Selene to elaborate.
“He’s missing.”
The rubbish-filled alley was deserted except for the two teens wearing rubber Halloween maks and cursing as they attacked a metal door with a crowbar. Na-Noc stood at the alley’s entrance and checked for other ways out, but there were none. If he could get to at least one of them before they broke through that door, he could be near full mass; two and he’d be complete again.
It always seemed to take so much longer to absorb the minds of his victims and the voices of the incompletely absorbed warred in Na-Noc’s head. He had never tried to absorb this many diverse creatures in such as short time. The mind most harmonious to his current need won and he assumed the shape of Vfrgoysl.
“Hey, Blackie.”
“Shut up an’ push, dumbass.”
“Blackie,” the voice was more urgent.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Ralph?”
“I heard something.”
“It’s probably just your mother with a John.”
“Screw you, Blackie. I told you never to talk about my mother that way. Anyway, I heard something. Really I did.”
“Aw right. Let’s check it out. Whaddja hear?” The door was forgotten as they stared at each other.
“I dunno. Like a —like sump’n’ strange. From back by da street,” Ralph pointed.
“So, like I said. Check it out.”
“I ain’t gonna check out nothin’. You check it out.”
“Oh, crap,” Blackie spat. “You are one freaking chicken. Ya know dat, don’t ya? Come on.” With that Blackie grabbed Ralph’s jacket collar and dragged him along towards the alley entrance. They got four steps before Ralph screamed and pulled away.
Looking up, Blackie screamed too.
They were still screaming when the three-foot-long cockroach that had skittered up the wall to their left chittered happily from about six feet over their heads, and then jumped down on them and the screaming stopped abruptly.
“Hey! Where are you ladies going? I thought we had a date.”
The shout was from Phil Cohn, dressed as a Scottish highlander, who had just finished parking his car. Tim Walsh exited the passenger side door a moment later, smoothing out his colonial gentleman’s frock coat and knee-length breeches outfit.
Selene and Rhea stopped trotting through the school parking lot towards their car to wait for the two football players to catch up to them.
“We do — I mean we did,” Selene stumbled over her reply.
“Well, unless I’m mistaken, the dance is the other way.” Tim pointed back at the school and smiled disarmingly. “And why did ‘we do’ change to ‘we did’?”
“Yeah! We had a date,” Phil chimed in, looking disappointed. “Just like a girl to back out at the last minute,” he said. “You just found out that I’m Jewish, right?”
“What? Are you crazy?” Selene said. “Look, we’re sorry, but we’ve got a very real emergency back home. Ack….”
Rhea had covertly elbowed Selene in the ribs.
“Ah… an old friend of our parents has gone missing and… unh… we’ve got to help find him. He’s a little… dotty… so we really need to help find him before he gets into trouble.”
“Yeah,” Rhea added her agreement, trying to look more disappointed than she felt.
“Tim?” Phil Cohn turned to his teammate questioningly.
“I’m in, Phil. No way I’m missing out on a date with a couple of hot chicks like these two just because of some female emergency,” was his immediate response.
Phil cringed and rolled his eyes for the sake of the ‘hot chicks’ in question. Then he shrugged slightly, moving slightly away from Tim to put a little symbolic distance between them. “Shut up, Tim.”
“Do you know what they’re talking about, Rhea… I mean Nancy? Do we know any ‘hot chicks?’ ” Her tone was glacial.
“Not a clue, Selene. They obviously have us confused with someone else, possibly one of those bimbos you see in those trashy movies they sometimes play at the drive-in, if you care for such things.”
Selene turned back to the two boys. “So who exactly are you guys talking about?”
Phil tried to be apologetic. “Look, I apologize for Tim here. You know how some football players sometimes get when they’ve been hit on the head too many times. Please don’t think he’s an complete idiot just because he talks like one sometimes.” He glared at Tim. “When he takes his medication, he sometimes seems almost human.” He glared at him again.
“Yeah, Nancy, or Rhea, whatever you say goes,” Tim said. He held his hand in front of his heart and addressed Rhea directly, “I swear I didn’t mean anything mean or degrading to women. My brain was just knocked for a loop when I saw how beautiful you were, so my mouth just ran away with itself. You know how guys are sometimes. Forgive me, please?”
Rhea looked at him suspiciously. “You try anything funny, Mister, and I’ll break your arm, but I guess you deserve a second chance, just one, because you upheld the honor of the team.”
Phil said, “Look, Selene. I know you’re in a bind, but you’re our dates, and guys don’t run out on their dates when they’re in trouble. I know you said that Rhea, or Nancy, whatever she’s called, would go out with me if I threw a pass instead of trying to run out the play, but — no offense, Rhea, because you’re really beautiful, just like your sister here — I wanted to go out with you, Selene, because you’re wicked smart and… you’re beautiful, and something just clicked when I saw you, so I gave my date with Rhea to Tim here, because he’s the guy who actually caught the ball. We don’t care whether we go to the dance or somewhere else, but we aren’t just dropping you like hot potatoes because you have a little problem. We want to help you, and I think we could. We came in Tim’s car, so if you’d like, we could split into two groups and cover twice the territory. Plus, it would be safer if you could concentrate on looking for your friend while we guys drive.”
“Exactly, babes,” Tim chimed in. “So who do we need to find?”
“Give us a minute, guys.” Rhea pulled Selene a dozen or so feet away the boys and whispered. “We’ve got a problem here. How do we tell them we’re searching for a white-haired wizard from another dimension?”
“We don’t.”
“So you’ll politely tell them ‘thanks, but no thanks’?” Rhea looked relieved.
“Nope. I’ll tell them what I already implied; he’s an eccentric and slightly slow uncle who doesn’t know the area and could get into trouble if we don’t find him. We do owe them the date, you know, because they made your play for you, and we promised.”
“Oh, shit. And I suppose you want to split up too so we can cover more area?”
“I hadn’t actually thought of that,” Selene responded cattily, “but it’s an excellent idea. We’d be able to cover twice as much ground, and with both of us able to focus on finding the wizard instead of worrying about running into trick or treaters, it would be safer for all of us. Plus, we’d have the best chance of finding Acky before he gets into trouble. Do you want Tim or Phil?” After only a millisecond of polite hesitation, she said, “Never mind. I’ll take Phil. You can have Tim.”
Without waiting for a response from the sputtering girl, Selene strode purposefully back to the guys as Rhea muttered something about her enjoying this entirely too much.
“ ’Girl talk’ over?” Tim’s wink, designed to show that this was meant to be humorous, turned into an “oof” and he found himself on the ground looking up at an angry Selene.
“That was just to save time and make sure you believed Rhea… Nancy, when she said she’d break your arm, because if she doesn’t, and she can, I will. Don’t even think of trying any macho games with either of us. Now, if you’re still interested in helping, we’d really appreciate your help.” Selene waited for their responses, tapping her foot impatiently.
“Selene, I’m at your service,” Phil said, “and Tim has not only apologized, but will receive a severe thrashing from me once Rhea-Nancy’s done with him.”
“Great. I’m going with you, Phil. You can drive. Nancy here will go with Tim — who’s going to be a perfect gentleman,” she glowered briefly at Tim, who was still getting back up and brushing himself off. “We’ll tell you what’s happening on the way.”
On the way to the cars Phil smugly poked Tim in the ribs and stage-whispered just loud enough that the two girls heard too, “I told you that macho bull of yours wouldn’t work with these girls.”
Finally feeling sated from his double meal, Na-Noc moved on to his second objective, to find sufficient magic to help him overcome that benighted Akcuanrut and regain the Heart of Virtue. The magic nearby was strong — he could feel it, the strongest he’d felt since being dumped on this hell-hole planet — and close, very close. Assuming the shape of one of the creatures that had captured his interest, and then been caught by his appetite — a human with stooped shoulders, wavy black hair, bushy eyebrows, receding forehead, pointed nose, and black stubble on his protruding chin, he hurried towards his goal.
Rounding the corner he could see it, a huge building, bigger than any of the castles about it. This one even looked a bit like a castle, made of stone, with a tower, crenels and clerestory windows. Power rolled out from it in waves, crashing against Na-Noc and making him feel giddy. This was enough power to defeat Akcuanrut and still have enough left over to return home without the aid of the Dark Gods.
Still, Na-Noc held back. Something was wrong. It was too easy. With the patience of a skilled predator, he examined the situation, patiently waiting to discover where the trap was; the trap that had to be there.
That was it! The creatures of this world walked past it, but didn’t enter. He would have to wait until someone dared enter so he could learn from them how to survive the ordeal. Modifying his shape to that of a bench beside the white path, Na-Noc prepared to wait patiently for what he needed — and maybe snatch another snack or two as he did.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Ten
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world .— William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1603, 1604, 1623)
“Nice costume, lady.”
The shout came from a passing car and this time, Herbert simply ignored it as she and her wife Emily trotted up one block and down and other searching for the missing wizard. To save time, they’d split up, taking every other block, close enough that they could hear if the other raised a shout, and not terribly worried about anyone accosting them, because, despite the innocuous appearance they presented to the world, they had the weight ond power of a squad of beefy Marines. Of course, she hadn’t realized that as a woman alone at night she’d be the target of many offers to ‘help,’ or ‘go out’ some time, whether those offering had actual help or social engagement in mind or something more earthy. She’d been routinely ignoring the date requests, but for the previous baker’s dozen of critiques of her costume, her breasts, and her face, she’d been vacillating between polite ‘No, thank you’s’ irritated ‘Buzz off’s.’ Initially, she’d tried “Thank you, but no” only to find that the most persistent suitors had been the ones she’d been polite to initially.
Then, she’d tried to brush them off with an immediate “Don’t bother. I’m not interested.” Unfortunately, there seemed to be some folks who took her attempts to brush them off as a personal challenge, showing remarkable persistence until finally convinced she meant it, all of which took time away fromm her search.
Next, she’d tried getting ugly and rude from the start. This helped a bit, as most potential suitors backed off, but few of the men took her antipathy as a personal challenge, and followed her down the street with escalating insistence, usually culminating in snarled insults, and in one case a vulgar threat, which was doing little to soothe her fraying temper.
On several occasions, Emily tried to offer suggestions by cellphone, but Herbert would listen intently as usual, then insist that there was little he expected from this world, but that politeness was one of them. Once, Emily even found it necessary run over to Herbert’s block to step between his husband and the rudest and most persistent suitor. In the end they just cantered away without having to resort to violence, and left the angry young man cursing from the stoop of his brownstone while his friends ribbed him unmercifully for his lack of prowess with the opposite sex.
After enduring by proxy quite a bit of this more-or-less continuous hassling, Emily could see that Herbert was becoming exhausted on principle, so diplomatically suggested, “I’m getting a bit tired, dear. Let’s find a quiet place to rest.”
“Good idea, Emily. This pavement is killing my hooves,” Dr. Lanyon sighed as they slowed to a walk and stopped on the grass in a park across from a church.
“Ah, much better,” Emily rumbled contentedly. “Cool, soft, comfortable grass. Almost makes you want to nibble a bit and see what it tastes like.”
“Emily! You’re not going feral on me, are you?”
“Of course not, dear.” He bent at the waist to pluck a long flat blade with his fingers and hold it up to the glow of the streetlight. “But it does look so green, so moist, so….”
“Emily!” Herbert was shocked.
“Oh relax, Herbert, I’m joking.”
With that, Emily placed the flat of the blade between his thumbs, pushed his thumbs against his lips and played “Yankee Doodle” on his homegrown kazoo. Herbert shook her head, sighed and pulled out her cell phone to check on how the others were doing.
“So, Nancy, tell me about this uncle of yours.” Tim was trying to be a gentleman and make small talk.
“Not much to tell,” Rhea squirmed uncomfortably, unsure what she could safely say. “He’s got flowing white hair, a white beard and he’s only been with us for a day.”
“So? What is he, some kind a foreigner or something?”
She thought for a moment before speaking, for some inchoate reason reluctant to stretch the truth any further than she absolutely had to. “You could say that. He’s certainly not from around here, anyway.”
Two blocks later, Tim’s arm had moved onto the car’s bench seat behind Rhea, not touching her, but getting closer. Ignoring the arm, Rhea touched Tim gently on the thigh, letting her hand linger there for a moment, like her girlfriend Connie would do when she wanted to distract her.
“Turn here and we can check out Broadhurst — and use two hands on the wheel so you don’t kill us both.” Rhea smiled to herself as the encroaching hand disappeared. She was getting better at this “girl stuff.” Connie had been a better teacher than she’d thought.
“Yes, ma’am,” Tim laughed and made the turn. After the turn, his arm returned to the back of the bench seat and Rhea sighed to herself ruefully, recognizing that she would have done the same thing with Connie.
“So, tell me about yourself. You obviously know the town. Why haven’t I seen a beautiful, babe… I mean girl, like you in our school before?”
“I’ve been around,” Rhea didn’t want to tell him that until a couple of days ago Tim had been catching the footballs she’d thrown to him. “It’s probably just the fancy costume that suddenly caught your eye. Let’s loop up to Hechlinger next.”
“Whoa up there, girl! You don’t really expect me to believe that I would have missed a beautiful babe like you at our school, do you?”
“Well,” Rhea frantically searched for a delicate shade of truthiness that would allow her to answer without actually lying. For some reason, despite her insistence to Selene that she wanted nothing to do with boys or dating, she felt that it was important to be truthful with Tim. Deciding, not too confidently, that it was just her normal desire to be honest, Rhea continued.
“I’ve been at Orbit High for the last four years. I guess you could say I had a sort of growth spurt recently.”
“That’s one ‘humongous’ growth spurt, Nancy,” he took his eyes off the road yet again to ogle her breasts appreciatively. “I can tell you from first-hand experience that you are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m a twin, remember?” That should be safer, get him talking about Selene instead of me, Rhea thought.
“True. But you’ve got blonde hair and Selene is a redhead.”
“So the only reason you want to be with me is my hair color? Or is it because I’m a twin, or because I have an uncle — with white hair?” Rhea wasn’t sure, but for some reason, it annoyed her that his reason for liking her was as inconsequential as her hair color.
“What can I say? I’m a blonde man, and your hair just happens to be my favorite shade of blonde.”
“I sure hope you’ve got a better reason than that for liking me, mister,” Rhea growled as her left hand moved to the dagger in her waist belt and began slowly sliding it in and out of the hilt.
“No, babe. Stop being such a feminist. It’s you. I think you’re beautiful, so naturally my favorite shade of hair is eactly your shade now. I want to know everything I can about you. I want to hold you….”
The dagger against his Adam’s Apple felt sharper than Tim cared to admit as he slowly moved the hand that he’d been edging toward Rhea’s right boob back onto the steering wheel.
“I suggest that you slowly pull to the side of the road and park, and don’t get any ideas about what ‘park’ means,” Rhea growled through gritted teeth. The dagger remained at Tim’s neck as he complied.
“Now, I’ve known you for almost four years and I’ve always thought you were a bit slow, but trainable, so I’m going to give you one last chance. You will do all of the following to the letter, or you will step out of the car and this ‘date’ is over. Got that?”
He nodded, very carefully.
“First, when you’re not keeping your eyes on the road — your primary responsibility when I’m depending on you for my personal safety — you will speak to me directly, looking at my face rather than my chest. She waited for his almost imperceptible nod. As a reward she moved the dagger a fraction of an inch away from his throat.
“Second, you will not even think about making another crude pass at me. My boobs are not ‘hot buttons’ that instantly turn me into some sort of raving nymphomaniac if you manage to lay a finger on them.”
Another nod.
“Third, you will not call me ‘babe’ or any other degrading or ‘cutesy’ name. My name is Rhea, and I’m proud of it.”
Rhea wondered why Tim’s eyes grew wide, but he nodded yet again and so Rhea shrugged and continued.
“Fourth, and finally, you will act as if I’m a friend rather than just some dumb broad to be talked into the sack. I may be blonde, but I’m a lot smarter than you. Is that clear?”
Tim remained unmoving, staring straight ahead, but said nothing.
“I said, ‘Is that clear?’ ”
Slowly, very slowly, Tim lifted his left hand off the steering wheel and pointed to the knife near his throat.
“Oh.” The knife was suddenly nowhere to be seen.
“Yes, Rhea.”
“Wha?… Why did you call me Rhea?”
“Th… that’s what you asked me to call you, but I can call you Nancy if you like. It’s entirely up to you”
“Oh shit.” Rhea dropped her head to her hands and began to cry. Afraid to touch her, Tim squirmed uncomfortably as he waited for her to take the handkerchief he offered.
In the other car, Phil and Selene had a much friendlier, but equally bizarre, conversation. “So you’re trying to tell me that you’re Jack Utterson? That you played football on the same team as me for the last four years, that you were center for Rhea Lanyon’s quarterback, who used to be Hastie Lanyon and is apparently now Selene, your blonde twin? That your parents are now centaurs and the guy we’re looking for is really a wizard from another dimension?” Skepticism dripped from Phil’s voice.
“Right,” the red-headed barbarian woman responded as she turned towards her passenger. She was nodding her head and smiling, as if he’d just won the All-State Spelling Bee.
“Why don’t you let me out here, please?” Phil shook his head in disbelief. “I think I’ll walk home.”
“If that’s what you really want.” She looked disappointed.
Selene pulled the car to the side of the street and turned off the engine. No words were spoken, but her sad eyes bore deeper and deeper into Phil’s soul. He stared defensively at the floor mat, but refusing to look back into her eyes did nothing to relieve the growing tension.
“Damn it, Selene, how the hell do you expect me to believe that line of bull?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you tell me that obviously ridiculous tale?”
“First, because it’s true. Second, because you asked. I believe in honesty; it’s so much simpler than lies, however well-intended.”
Phil gaped, open mouthed, at the beautiful redheaded woman sitting beside him, unsure what to do. True, there was something about her, an air of familiarity that made him feel like he’d known her for years. Then there was that tone of absolute certainty in her voice, not like other people he’d met who seemed to try too hard when they were lying. Besides, she was the foxiest chick he’d ever met, and if she was mad, it was a beautiful madness. Taking his hand off the car door, Phil turned and forced himself to look into her eyes, stopping briefly to examine her glorious breasts on the way up.
“Explain please. How can an obviously impossible tale be true?”
“I should make you use Aristotelian logic, like Mr. Brekinridge did in tenth grade math.” She smiled as his brow furrowed, no doubt trying to guess how she could possibly had known about that, especially since he’d been the butt of Brekinridge’s “guidance” enough times to have reconsidered his plans for a scientific career until Jack had convinced him to go with his dreams by helping him through the final exam with a grade in the low nineties. “But I won’t. The answer is obvious. I’m telling the truth, regardless of how bizarre it sounds, because it’s the only thing that makes sense. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”
“But….”
“Stop talking,” Selene gently touched her finger to his lips. “I only told you because you asked. I don’t care if you believe me or not. In fact, it might be easier if you didn’t.” Selene stopped and thought for a moment. Her eyes gazed unseeing into the distance and her words seem disconnected, as if she were quietly debating with herself rather than answering Phil.
“No, that’s not true,” she said, “I hadn’t realized it until just now, but I guess I wanted to be honest with you on the off chance that there could be something more than just raw sexual attraction between us, and I didn’t want a series of lies to get in the way of that. I guess that I was looking, however tentatively, for a — a relationship,” she stumbled over the words. A moment later she shook herself and turned back to Phil.
“Wow. That was strange. I was already planning a family there for a moment.” She smiled as Phil squirmed at her words. “Relax, bud. Self-examination can be fascinating, but not necessarily the whole story. While those thoughts were there in the back of my mind, I guarantee you that they’re well in the background. I’m much more interested in finding Akcuanrut followed by some joint, mutually consenting, heterosexual experimentation sans commitments. So how about a quick kiss and we get on with our search?”
The kiss took much longer than either of them expected. It finally stopped when Selene felt an intense desire to ask Phil whether it was true, what they said about Scotsmen, and then got a little scared, just thinking about where that might lead, and so backed off a little, for a while.
“George?”
“Yes, dear?” he interrupted his driving and scanning for the old wizard long enough to glance over at his wife. She was chewing absently on a fingernail and George silently groaned to himself. It was time for another “deep discussion.”
“Do you really believe the story Emily and Herbert just told us?”
“Yes, dear.”
“You don’t think it’s another of their elaborate Halloween pranks? Remember last year when they built a UFO in the backyard?”
“I remember.” He turned down Oxford Drive and slowed so they could examine a crowd gathered around “Werther’s Olde Fashioned Soda Shoppe.”
“Why don’t you think it’s a joke, George?”
“Mostly an analysis of the musculature of their hind legs, Lucille.”
“Now, George,” Lucille wagged a finger at him, “don’t you go giving me some boring scientific explanation.”
“Of course not, dear. What I saw was a real horse’s hind quarter. Too thin at the hoof for a human leg to fit into any sort of costume or prothestic, and each joint moved independently. Also, you could see the ripple of muscles on their backs. Then too, there was the way each had information that only the other should have had….”
“Enough, dear. I get the idea. So are we really going to help them go back to that other dimension?”
“I’m afraid we don’t really have any choice. I don’t think our world is ready for a pair of living, breathing, talking centaurs. Worse, there’s the magic,” George scowled for a moment as they drove past a couple of teenage trick-or-treaters throwing toilet paper over a tree on someone’s front lawn.
“What do you mean? The magic is in that other dimension, assuming it exists. How can that affect us, George?”
“It’s like Pandora’s box, my dear. Once people on this world know it’s there, they won’t forget. It will niggle at them until they find out how to use it here. Look at Nobel and nitroglycerine. He was so appalled by what he’d invented, he tried to take back the knowledge. After realizing he couldn’t uninvent it, he created a trust to honor those who worked towards peace and creation instead of the war and destruction made more horrible by his invention. It was the closest he could come to putting the genie back into the bottle, but as you know from history, his ‘noble’ effort, no pun intended, has done little to prevent wholesale death and destruction that he himself made possible.”
“I guess so, dear, but when you put it that way, it sounds so hopeless. Isn’t there something we can do?”
“I don’t think so, Lucille. Although I suppose a couple of well-placed prayers wouldn’t hurt.”
“You’re scaring me, George. Please stop.”
“Yes, dear,” George sighed and changed the subject. “Why don’t you call Herbert and Emily and see how they’re doing?”
“Yeah!” Selene slapped the dashboard in joy as she put down her smartphone. “They found him! They found him!”
“Who? Who found him? Where is he?”
“Rhea’s parents, the centaurs, they found Akcuanrut,” Selene lunged across the seat before Phil could even flinch and gave him a huge hug and kiss. “They were by that old gothic church on Winthrup Avenue, across from the park. He just walked up to them. Would you believe the old coot had gone trick or treating?”
“Great, Selene,” Phil’s enthusiasm was much more reserved than hers as he sat unmoving, waiting for Selene to untangle herself from him. Hopeful that this might mean they could continue their date, but afraid to push the issue as Tim had, Phil asked, “What now?”
“Oh….” Selene realized Phil’s meaning and sobered up. “Oh.” They were silent; each thinking furiously about what should be next. Finally, Selene broke the silence asking coyly, “What would you like to do, Phil?”
“Now you’re going to dump the decision on me?” Phil grumped and was silent again. He had tried to make it sound like he was teasing her, but he wasn’t certain he’d pulled it off.
Selene nodded timidly and held her breath as she waited, hoping he’d give her the answer she wanted. Her hands went behind her back, she crossed her fingers and her lips moved almost imperceptibly as she silently mouthed “Please, please, please, please.”
“How about we finish helping get your ‘uncle’ safe and then finish this date?”
Like a shot, Selene was back on the other side of the car, sitting on his lap, hugging and kissing Phil again. They almost decided that the car seat was the perfect place to finish their date when the cell phone rang again.
“Murfph.” Selene groaned in annoyance, but her face never left his face and her lips never left his lips.
Phil actually pulled away just enough to ask, “Maybe we should answer it?” Despite his suggestion, Phil sighed in disappointment when Selene slowly slid off his lap. “Drat. I was hoping you’d ignore me.”
“I almost did. Being responsible can be a real pain sometimes,” Selene whined as she answered the phone and listened with growing intensity.
Turning off the cell phone, a somber Selene turned to her date. “I’d better drop you off. Would you like me to leave you at the dance or at home,” she asked wistfully. “Where would you prefer?”
“Wha? What happened to our date this time? A guy could get a complex here.”
“Something’s come up. I need to get to that church as quickly as I can. There’s going to be trouble.”
“So? Why do you keep thinking I’m only here to get into your pants? I’m going with you.”
“Are you sure, Phil? You don’t know what you’re walking into. I’m talking dangerous with a capital ‘D’ and it rhymes with ‘T’ and that spells ‘trouble’.”
“So?”
“Phil. Please think carefully here. We’re up against an enemy here that almost beat us last time and can apparently come back from the dead.”
“More of that magic you were talking about?”
Selene just nodded.
“And you think that’s going to keep me away?”
“Phil. I like you very much. I don’t want to be the cause of your death.”
“I’m here now with the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, who’s either crazy as a loon and dangerous to boot, or who may be the ex-first-string center for my football team and a visitor from another world where there’s magic. Either way, I think I’m in love with you and I’m not leaving you if I can help it. You could probably stop me if you tried, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m going.” He crossed his arms and sat staring straight ahead, daring her to kick him out of the car.
Na-Noc was getting hungry again. Many people had passed and a few had even sat on nearby benches, but none had approached him. Worse yet, no one had attempted to enter the castle yet. He was considering changing his position to get closer to the hard white path, when a lone adult in a black costume and a small white collar approached.
“I see our neighborhood hooligans have been out rearranging the lawn furniture again,” the man muttered, but with a smile on his face. Reaching Na-Noc, he grasped the ersatz bench and began to lift it, completing his turn back to the street before realizing that some sort of soft gooey material had flowed over his hands.
Befuddled, the man watched as whatever it was flowed rapidly up his arms, reaching the elbow before he could react sufficiently to attempt to drop the bench. Unfortunately, by then it was far too late. The ooze continued to flow over him, making its way to his shoulders and the pain began. He managed the beginnings of a loud scream before it was aborted as his mouth was covered.
Standing beside a row of tall hedges in the park across from the church, Herbert glanced up in time to see Na-Noc tilt a pair of legs into the air and use gravity to finish his feast. Without taking her eyes off the blob, rapidly reforming into a bench again, she tapped Emily on his rump and pointed. Emily glanced over his shoulder just in time to see the ooze reform into a nondescript park bench.
“Wha?….” Emily’s voice was a low whisper, despite being more than fifty yards away from the creature.
“I guess we know what happened to Na-Noc now.” Herbert’s voice too was hushed. “Better tell the others.”
Emily nodded without taking his eyes off the bench and Herbert reached into her purse for the cell phone as they quickly cantered to a more protected location from which to observe the creature.
“So what’s the story?” Selene asked as she dropped to the grass next to the others. She and Phil were the last to arrive. As they approached the others, Phil lagged behind. Instead of dropping to the ground beside Selene, or even standing beside her, he slowly spiraled closer and closer to the two centaurs with his eyes bugging out more and more the closer he came. He was just about to reach out a hand and touch Dr. Lanyon’s hind quarter when Selene interrupted him and he jerked his hand back to his side.
“What’s the problem, Phil? Grab a seat,” Selene called over to him. “Where’s Tim?”
“He’s at the dance,” was Rhea’s emotionless response. Selene couldn’t decide whether the response was happy or sad, but was immediately concerned for her new twin sister — especially since the date had been her idea, albeit the only non-violent way she’d thought of at the time to get the coach and players to listen to Rhea’s advice about how to win the game.
“Oh, too bad. Are you all right?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Rhea turned away and flinched when Selene placed a hand on her shoulder to comfort her.
With a whispered, “We need to talk later,” Selene forced herself to smile and return her attention to the rest of the group.
“Phil’s decided to help us,” Selene beamed as she explained to the others why he was here before she could be asked.
“Ouch.” Herbert flicked her tail at the offending spot on her rump and turned to see what had bit her, only to discover that Phil had pinched her.
“Oh my god.” Phil staggered back. Tripping in his hurry, he fell into a nearby hedge and slid down onto his backside still staring at the two centaurs.
“What’s the problem, Phil? I know you’ve seen Rhea’s parents before.”
“They… they’re centaurs,” he pointed.
“Yeah, so? I told you they were, didn’t I?”
“Just a moment, Selene,” Herbert interrupted. “There seems to be a problem here. “You did just pinch me on my rump, didn’t you, young man?”
“Unh, yes, ma’am.”
“On my horse’s rump?”
“Yes, ma’am, ” he said, “and I’m terribly sorry, Ma’am. I’m not usually that rude at all. I was just a little confused.” Phil’s voice still quavered and he made a loud gulping sound as he swallowed hard, but he seemed a bit more certain of himself as he glanced sheepishly at Selene. “I guess I can rule out crazy for the moment,” he smiled, but then suddenly looked worried again, “unless it’s me in the booby hatch dreaming this whole thing up.”
“Akcuanrut?” Herbert kept her eyes on the young man still sitting on the grass. “Isn’t our magic working? I know we agreed to use it to seem human again and less inconspicuous once you confirmed that there was enough power to do so and still meet your needs.”
A quick gesture and a squint of the left eye and Akcuanrut answered. “Yes, it’s working. The strongest I’ve seen it since we arrived on this world.”
“Then why can he see us as centaurs?” Herbert asked as she folded her arms under her breasts and stared suspiciously at Phil. She took care to move her rump away from him in order to avoid the chance of another pinch.
Another gesture, another squint and Akcuanrut responded again. “Because this young man has the makings of a first-rate wizard’s apprentice.” The others turned as one to stare at Phil, almost missing Akcuanrut’s next words. “you’re not dreaming, young man. Unfortunately, you’ll never have the opportunity to develop your considerable skills in this strange world.”
“Folks?” Herbert Lanyon raised her hand. “Maybe we should figure out what we’re going to do about Na-Noc?”
“Whatever do you mean, Emily?” Mrs. Utterson asked the female centaur.
“Emily is over there, Lucille.” Herbert pointed to the male centaur beside her. “I’m Herbert, remember? And what I mean is, about a hundred yards away, with only this line of shrubs between it and us, we have a known agent of the Dark Gods pretending to be a park bench; a shape changing creature that eats human beings and just ate some clergyman. We tried to kill the blasted thing once and failed. He, or rather it, will not rest until it has recovered the Heart of Virtue and destroyed the people who took it from him — that is to say, us.”
“An excellent recap, dear,” Emily patted his husband’s rump supportively. “Any ideas?”
The silence was deafening. Finally, Akcuanrut spoke. “I think I can explain his reason for being here. There is a source of magical power, albeit low-grade, and of a kind foreign to me. He must be trying to learn how to use it.”
“I think we’d better come up with a plan of action then,” Herbert suggested.
“I don’t think there’s much choice,” George Utterson observed. “That ‘thing,’ cannot be permitted to remain in this world.” He then reiterated his discussions with Lucille regarding the impact of the discovery that there was real magic in the world and concluded with, “… so while no one could put strife, famine, hatred, et cetera, back into Pandora’s box, we have to at least try.”
The others agreed and Herbert again repeated her recommendation for the development of a plan when Phil interrupted.
“Unh, folks?”
“You have an idea?”
“No, I need to point out another problem.” Phil pointed towards the hedge and everyone turned. Na-Noc was changing again. As they watched, the bench morphed into a gelatinous blob. The blob quivered and began to assume a vaguely human form, but with the head of a cockroach. It quivered again, and the insect head disappeared, only to be replaced by the head of D’lon-ra, the Emperor’s Champion who had fought and died in the battle to recover the Heart of Virtue. D’lon-ra’s head was quickly replaced by several others, before the head, and then the entire body settled into the form of the clergyman Na-Noc had recently consumed. As the group watched, the seeming minister brushed himself off and walked into the church as if he owned the place.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Eleven
|
Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (circa 4 BCE — 65 CE)
While the others were still clearly uncomfortable with the plan the group had quickly cobbled together, Rhea could see that Selene was at peace with herself. Surprising herself, Rhea realized that she was too. It was not that she was looking forward to the upcoming battle; Rhea knew she wasn’t. Nor was it a death wish, either because she was still stuck in her current gender, or because that rat Tim had dumped her. The rules might be different for males and females, but there were still rules and Rhea knew that she was a quick study. Similarly, Tim’s actions were of surprisingly little import, as every glance at her gorgeous, redheaded twin only reinforced her opinion that he was a fool, and she hadn’t made it to starting quarterback by letting other people rattle her. It was… acceptance. Rhea had finally admitted to herself that she was comfortable with who she now was; Rhea Lanyon, best friend to Selene Utterson, only child of Herbert and Emily Lanyon, competent and capable young adult woman. Tearing herself away from her ruminations, she quickly grasped the essentials of the plan that was unfolding.
It was a simple plan. Emily, Herbert and Akcuanrut slowly walked through the huge carved oak doors of the main entrance and down the center aisle, but not before everyone else had spread out and surreptitiously positioned themselves by the other entrances. Phil crawled down the left aisle while George, silently berating himself for not being in better shape, crawled down the right aisle while trying not to let his ragged breathing become loud enough to echo in the otherwise empty chapel. Selene and Rhea were wraiths, sneaking in the side fire exits — which they'd somehow managed to open without a sound — and hovering at either edge of the pulpit, hidden by the richly brocaded curtains that framed it. Only Lucille was not present. She had another task to complete, securing the Heart so that Akcuanrut could take it back when Na-Noc had been defeated.
Na-Noc was a glowing, pulsating blob partially hidden behind the altar. The sing-song sound of chanting drifted out to the main area of the chapel. He didn’t respond as Akcuanrut and the two centaurs noisily strode down the aisle, the sound of echoing hooves hopefully masking any sounds the others might make.
“Na-Noc,” Akcuanrut called out as the trio stopped by the first row of seats.
A second mouth — or more accurately a caricature of a mouth — formed while the first continued to chant. “Ah, Akcuanrut — and I see you’ve brought the others — how convenient. Will you approach more closely, so that I may consume you? Or may I again look forward to the sport of battle?” A serpentine tongue slithered from the depths of its mouth to lick its misshapen lips in anticipation. A chitinous arm formed briefly, only to be sucked back in and replaced by a tail reminiscent of a huge rat’s, before it too was sucked back into the blob.
Akcuanrut had been shocked by the raw power within the building. From the outside, he’d recognized the building as a site of magical power — through the faint emanations seeping out — but some quirk of the structure’s design had retained the vast majority of its power within its walls. Squaring his shoulders, he stopped several feet from the pulpit. “You seem to be having control problems, Na-Noc. Let me help you, why don’t you?”
“I think not, little man. Soon I will have all the power I need. I will consume you all and recover the Heart. Then, I will return home in triumph.”
“And to what will you return? To the fighting pit where the Gods imprisoned you? You were once a friend. Is there no chance of rekindling that friendship?”
“Fool! Do you think I would permit that? With this power, I can be safe from their manipulations and yours, old man. Now approach and be eaten.”
“I think not, ‘gelatine-for-brains’.” Selene stepped out from behind the drapery that had hidden her. Sword drawn, Rhea also stepped into view.
“I wondered how long you two would cower in the shadows. Why don’t the other two of you show yourselves and we can end this game?” Phil and George hesitantly rose from behind the pews that had hidden them. Each held a long dagger — albeit inexpertly — borrowed from the barbarian women's seemingly endless supply.
Akcuanrut began to chant. At the first words, a ripple passed over Na-Noc, as if he were chilled, but the only clear response was the formation of a third mouth that began chanting a counterpoint to the wizard’s words, somehow different enough to negate the affects of Akcuanrut’s words. From each side, the barbarian women stalked toward Na-Noc, swords at the ready and grim smiles on their faces.
“Yes. Come to me, my pretty ones. Let us finish this at last,” the tongue from the first mouth seemed to be making an obscene gesture as the lips curled into an ugly sneer.
“Mouthy little blob, isn’t he, Selene?” Rhea laughed.
“All talk and no action, I’ll bet,” Selene quipped back.
With a roar, Na-Noc shot pseudopods directly towards the two swordswomen, each with a sharply pointed and barbed tip. Phil gasped at the incredible speed of the projectiles while George wailed out “No!” in fear for his ex-son’s life. Yet, with equal speed swords flashed and a truncated piece of Na-Noc dropped to the floor.
Before they could slither back to the main body, twin swords skewered them and flung them into the corner near Phil. As soon as they touched each other, they combined into a single blob and again began slithering back towards Na-Noc.
Phil cleared his throat and hesitantly began the chant Akcuanrut had taught him. Even seeing two centaurs and the weird talking blob on the pulpit had not fully convinced Phil of the existence of real magic. Yet, at the first words of the chant, the small blob shuddered and stopped its movement toward Na-Noc, as Phil felt a rush of spiritual power through his body. It was as if there was suddenly an invisible wall corralling the little blob that it couldn’t pass beyond. Over. Under. Around. The small blob tried them all — and failed. Instead of rejoining with Na-Noc, it slowly retreated as the unseen wall pushed it back towards the corner of the church by Phil and lay there quivering.
Surprised, Phil stopped, only to see the blob rapidly scurry back towards Na-Noc again. Fearful that it would return to the main body, Phil quickly began chanting again; this time louder than before. It was as if the blob had hit a brick wall again. With more confidence now, Phil began to chant even louder and watched the blob slowly move back until it was pressed against the wall near him.
Howling in rage, Na-Noc threw out more chitinous pseudopods, this time at Akcuanrut and the two centaurs. Herbert screamed in fear and Emily screamed in rage. They both grabbed hands and reared up on their hind legs as instructed by Akcuanrut, lashing out furiously with their forelegs with incredible speed and accuracy. Akcuanrut merely chanted louder, apparently unconcerned, but both centaurs were sure they were about to be absorbed.
Hooves struck chitin and there was a blinding flash of light. Two more lumps of Na-Noc went flying into the other corner of the church near George. As with the first segments, they merged on landing, but cowered against the wall.
“Way to go, Mom! Do it again, Dad!” Rhea glanced away from her furious sword work just long enough to insure that they were safe and to praise her parents.
“Good work, Emily, Herbert!” George Utterson called out from the other side of chapel. “It looks like centaur hooves really are almost as powerful magically as unicorn horns.” Turning back to the blob in the corner, he looked at his dagger and wondered how he could possibly keep the lump before him from scurrying back to Na-Noc. Seeking frantically for something better to use, he grabbed a hymnal and threw it at the small blob — and was surprised when it shied away from it.
Throwing another hymnal, the blob shied away again. George thought he heard a faint scream of fear. Quickly, George ran down the aisle, grabbing as many hymnals as he could from the racks on the backs of the pews and threw them at the blob. Each time, it backed away and sought another route back to Na-Noc, one that avoided touching the book or even the space above it.
One book struck it and there was a puff of foul-smelling steam and smoke, and a loud hiss, followed by a high-pitched screech of pain from both the surrounded blob and from Na-Noc, whose chanting faltered for a moment before it resumed. Where the hymnal had struck, there was a burn mark, and the blob seemed smaller, as if the book had burned some of it away. George yelled out his discovery to the others and began tossing more books, this time directly at the blob he was guarding.
From this point on things settled into a pattern. Rhea and Selene sparred with Na-Noc. Every now and then they managed to chop off pieces of blob and toss them into the corners, where Phil chanted half of them into submission and George used the hymnals to both contain the other half of them, and burn a good portion away to boot, with a nasty stench of burning flesh.
Akcuanrut chanted away, beads of sweat forming from his efforts, while Herbert and Emily protected him with flashing hooves. With sufficient time, they would win, but time was against them. Everyone could feel the concentration of magical power as a palpable and growing weight in the air. Na-Noc had to be nearing the conclusion of the incantation he was chanting.
“Yoo-hoo! Hello, everyone. I found it. I’ve brought the stone.” Lucille Utterson blew into the church with the same fanfare and panache that she used when entering her Garden Club. “Emily? When’s the last time you cleaned that closet, dear. I had to wade through….”
Before she was half way down the center aisle to hand the stone to Emily, a long thin pseudopod shot up towards the ceiling. It passed over the heads and reaches of the two barbarian women. Still on the rise, it even passed beyond the reach of the centaurs, despite their rearing up to protect Akcuanrut. After it cleared the centaurs, it dived down, directly at Lucille, from whom it plucked the Heart of Virtue from a shocked, and for once speechless, Lucille. Maintaining the same high arc over everyone’s heads, it quickly pulled back into the main blob and disappeared into the center of the writhing mass.
Even before the stone reached the pulpit, and without missing a beat in its chant, Na-Noc began to gloat with another mouth. “I told you I was invincible. I told you that you could not defeat me. Drop your weapons and bow before me now and I may let you live to serve me, else die like the fleas you are.”
“Big talk, blob boy,” Selene spit out and batted a chitinous pseudopod far enough aside to lop it off with her next stroke. Na-Noc bellowed in pain, and angrily concentrated two pseudopods on Selene, to the exception of the others.
Free of the blob’s attention for a moment, Rhea charged onto the pulpit and overturned the lectern onto Na-Noc. There was a tremendous cloud of horrible smoke, and a seething hiss that almost drowned out the sound of Na-Noc bellowing from all three mouths.
Na-Noc’s chant had finally been interrupted, but before anyone could cheer, the chanting began again. A gentle breeze started and quickly grew in strength. Within seconds it was gusting about, blowing the hymnals into the air — and still gaining strength.
“Oh, hell,” Rhea got out before the roar of the wind drowned out all conversation. “I have a bad feeling about this.” She grabbed for a pew and hoped everyone else had done the same, but the flying debris was so thick she couldn’t see anyone else.
A thin tinkling sound could be heard momentarily above the wind as the stained glass clerestory windows imploded inward. A second later Rhea had a dozen small scratches over her body, but Na-Noc screamed in anguish and fury.
Something large and vaguely humanoid flew by her head and without thinking she released one hand from its death grip on the now rocking and shuddering pew. Her free hand lunged out to grab the shape — a shape that looked very much like Lucille Utterson — and caught the hem of her skirt. The shape flew past, leaving nothing but a small piece of fabric in Rhea’s hand. Then something very large crashed into Rhea’s head and everything went black.
“She’s coming around.” A warm body lunged on top of her and before Rhea could reach for her best dagger — the dagger she’d foolishly given to Phil — the shape began hugging and kissing her.
“Ouch. Stop that. My head hurts, my body hurts. Heck, even my lips hurt. What the heck happened?” she asked as she struggled to push the still-slightly-blurred shape of her redheaded twin away and sit up.
“Rhea, you watch your language, young man — er, young woman.” It was a deep voice from behind her and turning she realized it was her mother standing there with his arms crossed and a frown on his face. Next to him was Rhea’s father pacing nervously back and forth. Beside him was Akcuanrut, muttering and making strange gestures by a nearby tree and Phil, still handsomely clad in Highland kilt and tartan, shifting nervously from foot to foot beside the wizard.
“Sorry, Mom; still learning this girl stuff. I seems that old habits die hard. What happened?”
“Na-Noc created a portal.”
“Na-Noc. Where the he…. Unh, where is he? And when did he learn to do magic?”
“Gone, dear, at least most of what was left of him. And he has the Heart of Virtue. As to his mastery of magic, Akcuanrut believes he must have learned something from the Dark Gods, but been prevented from using it by them until he got to our world and out from under their control.”
“Yes, Rhea,” a female voice intruded. “We’re back on Akcuanrut’s world. Perhaps I’d better recap a bit.”
Herbert Lanyon took Rhea’s immediate groan as enthusiastic assent. “Yes, Rhea,” she said in a tone as plonking as she had often been before her recent changes, “we’re back on Akcuanrut’s world. Maybe I’d better recap a bit.”
Herbert Lanyon took Rhea’s next and louder groan as further and more enthusiastic assent. “Na-Noc managed to create a portal back to his world. He went through it along with you, Selene, Phil, Akcuanrut, your mother, and me.”
“What about Mr. and Mrs. Utterson? I don’t see them, and they must have been sucked in too. I remember trying to grab her as she flew by me.” Rhea saw the pained look on Selene’s face and was immediately sorry she’d asked.
“They were. We think Na-Noc absorbed my Mom and Dad,” was her grim reply.
Rhea felt tears stinging at her eyes and said, “I'm so sorry, honey,” then quickly changed the subject. “Did I hear you say that Na-Noc was gone ‘mostly’? ”
Herbert pointed. Under the tree, now only partially obscured by Phil and Akcuanrut and surrounded by hymnals and a shattered pile of stained glass, was a pulsating blob. As she watched, it transformed into a midget D’lon-Ra, not more then a foot in height, looking a bit like an assemblage of marshmallows, in that his features seemed somehow blurred, softened around the edges, he had not a single hair on his body, and his joints were no longer angular, but rather rounded, just what one might expect for a creature molded out of gelatine.
“What’s with mini-Na-Noc?”
“It claims to be D’lon-Ra,” Selene replied, dagger in hand, eyes never leaving the miniature “Emperor’s Hero.”
“I am D’lon-Ra!” It tried for a bellow, but it sounded more like the shrill scream of an angry Blue Jay.
“Supposedly, the hymnals and stained glass burned out the evil portions of the various souls Na-Noc had absorbed,” the female centaur said with more than a hint of her former classroom manner, “and little ‘D’lon-Ra’ here was the strongest of the ‘good’ personalities left. The interesting feature of this transformation is that it, or he, claims there is still a small link between Na-Noc and himself. He claims he can tell us where the vile creature currently resides — and thus the Heart of Virtue — which is more than Akcuanrut can do at the moment.”
“What’s the Wiz’s problem?”
“Something akin to a magical sprain,” she said. “Apparently, he over-extended himself fighting Na-Noc and needs time to recover.”
“So, in other words, he can’t send us home and he can’t fight Na-Noc, let alone the Dark Gods. We’re stuck here on a world about to be overrun by evil.”
“Yes, dear. That’s a rather succinct, if grim, summary,” Herbert acknowledged.
With a final groan, Rhea forced herself to stand and recovered her weapons. Sheathing her sword, she stalked over to the tree and kicked the hymnals aside to let the midget D’lon-Ra out before anyone could object. “Okay, Lassie. Show us the way.”
“Who is this ‘Lassie?’ I am D’lon-Ra,” it grumbled but pointed. “The Evil One is that way.”
“Rhea, what’s the meaning of this? Where are you going?”
“Well, hopefully we’re all going,” she glanced from face to face, judging their willingness to join her quest. “As to where we’re going, that should be obvious. We’re going to find and destroy old blob-boy, recover the Heart of Virtue, bring it to the capital, whatever Acky over there calls it, and save the world from the powers of Darkness. Then, as the reward for our good deeds, the folks at the Wizard’s College are da… unh, very sure to show their undying gratitude by sending us back home, preferably in our own bodies.”
Herbert Lanyon’s only response was, “Oh.”
Rhea watched the reincarnated D’lon-Ra trot off down a dirt path amongst the trees. Akcuanrut followed immediately behind, still muttering, and Phil trailed after the old wizard, listening intently. Emily and Herbert looked from spouse to kids and back. Herbert held out a hand to her wife and hand-in-hand they slowly paced off after the others.
“Let’s go. We’ve got a job to do.” Rhea waited for Selene, a bit surprised that she would be the last.
A lopsided smile spread over the redheaded barbarian woman’s face. Striding over to Rhea, she put an arm over her blonde twin’s shoulder and dragged her after the others. Within five paces, they were skipping along, arm in arm, singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” from The Wizard of Oz.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twelve
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.— William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1603, 1604, 1623)
“Where are the bricks?”
“Huh?” Selene snarled and stopped rubbing her stomach. She’d been alternating between rubbing and scanning the environment for most of the morning. Phil was certain she was angry with him given how few words had been exchanged and how brusque those few had been. He was at the point of giving up when he decided on one last stab at humor.
“I said ‘where are the bricks?’ You know; the yellow bricks this road is supposed to be made of?”
Selene stopped and turned to Phil, who was walking just behind her on the tree-lined road. They were at point, so the others hadn’t heard his question. “This isn’t Oz and there isn’t any yellow brick road. Phil, I hope you don’t think this is going to be some pleasant field trip to the zoo or something. There really is death out there waiting for you and I’d hate to think I brought you here just to die.”
“I think I can take care of myself,” Phil huffed.
There was great sadness in Selene’s eyes as she responded. “Please don’t make me show you how wrong you are. Didn’t the situation at the church show you exactly how dangerous this world can be?”
“What it showed me was that there is more to life than the magic of car sales, which is what I was going to be doing in my father’s dealership as soon as high school ended, unless I got my scholarship.”
“Phil,” she said sadly, “I think you’d better go back with the others now. I don’t think I can be responsible for your safety.”
“Huh?
“I said, please go back and join the others. I don’t want to see you harmed as a result of your severe case of overconfidence.”
To say that Phil was taken aback by Selene’s words was an understatement. He stopped and gaped at her with hurt puppy dog eyes as the others trudged toward them and soon caught up to them.
Rhea was the first to notice that something was wrong. “Hey, what is this? Trouble in paradise?”
“Apprentice? Is something wrong between the two of you?” Akcuanrut asked.
Selene stared from Phil to Rhea to Akcuanrut and back again. Without warning, she bolted off the path and ran into the woods.
“Oh, drat. What did I say now?” Rhea asked as she hurried after her red-haired friend.
“What happened here?” Akcuanrut asked.
Phil sighed heavily. “I — I don’t know. She’s been mad about something all morning. Trying to cheer her up a moment ago, I asked where the yellow brick road was as a sort of joke, because on our world there’s a famous story in which a yellow brick road plays a prominent part. I just wanted to see her smile or laugh. Instead, she turned on me, and then told me to join the group, because she couldn’t be responsible for my safety.
“I think I know what might be wrong,” Emily said. “I don’t think it was really anything you said or did, Phil, but I’ll let you know after we’ve spoken.” With that the male centaur galloped purposefully off into the woods in search of the two girls.
“Do you know what’s going on, Master?”
“I know that this is a chance to practice your skills, Apprentice. How might you answer your own question?”
“I could follow Mrs. Lanyon?”
“You are not the Apprentice Skulker. You must think Magically.”
“I could make myself invisible and eavesdrop,” Phil mused, “but you already told me to think of other ways of discovering the information. Besides, I’m not sure I’ve learned sufficient control to avoid all the pitfalls of trying to not exist in terms of the visual, auditory and olfactory senses of several people.”
Akcuanrut said nothing, only raised one eyebrow.
Phil tried to think, and then said, “I know! I could become a copy of her so I’d know exactly how she thinks —” Then his face fell. “But I don’t know if I’d be able to retain sufficient magic to return to my own body afterwards, and twin barbarian princesses is more than enough. Triplets might be more than this world could survive. Besides, if I did become a duplicate of her, I probably wouldn’t have sufficient knowledge of how it feels to be female to recognize and interpret the problem.” Then he thought again. “Either that, or I’d know so much about how she feels that I’d be furious with me as well, so probably wouldn’t help me out of spite.”
Akcuanrut said nothing again, but this time rolled his eyes.
Then he had a brilliant idea. “I could place a geis on her that would require her to tell me, but that would require me to have more willpower than she does, and quite honestly, I’m not certain I do.”
Akcuanrut pursed his lips in silent disapproval.
“No, you’re right, of course. Coercion is the first step on the Dark Path, and would inevitably turn her against me.” He sighed in defeat. “I could… I… I don’t know what I could do, Master. I’m sorry.” He hung his head.
Akcuanrut sighed deeply. “So close, but then you give up. You could wait patiently until she returns. She obviously has thinking of her own to do. Time answers all questions, assuming we have time to spare, so the magical lesson here is: ‘Observe carefully. Think carefully. Take care not to rush to precipitous action.’ ”
Phil stared after the wizard as Akcuanrut stolled over to a nearby tree and sat leaning against it. He was instantly snoring quietly.
“This is magic?” Phil wondered to himself as he turned to peer toward the wooded area where Selene, Rhea and Mrs. Lanyon had disappeared.
“It’s the magic of Patience, hasty Apprentice. All true magic lies at the heart of life, life in its essence, which forever unfolds. Before you can conjure a rose, you must understand why flowers grow.” The words echoed in Phil’s mind and he twirled back to see Akcuanrut, still by the tree, still apparently sound asleep, in mid-snore.
Gentle, reproving laughter echoed in Phil’s mind and he thought, ‘I guess the old guy’s getting some of his magical powers back.’ Phil turned back to the woods and stared intently, hoping against hope that no one would realize he was blushing.
Emily Lanyon found his daughter’s wayward friend sitting forlorn in a small clearing about a thousand yards from the road. In the midst of a pastoral scene that would have inspired any artist, complete with small babbling brook and a riot of color from exotic wildflowers that crowded every inch of the sunlit area, Selene sat on a small boulder with her head bowed, and she was crying while nervously cleaning her sword with a handful of leaves and flowers. Rhea was trying futilely to calm her down or soothe her somehow, but having little luck. Emily changed magically into his purely human form to appear slightly less imposing and walked loudly towards the pair, scuffing his feet against the dirt to insure that his approach was heard.
“Go away. We want to be alone,” Rhea growled before turning back to Selene.
“Do you know why she’s upset?”
“No. Now go away and leave us alone. This is girl… guy… private stuff.”
Selene sniffed in apparent agreement with her friend’s uncompromising, if slightly incoherent position.
“Yes, it is. Now do you, an apparent girl, know why Selene’s upset?”
“Because Phil was a pig, just like that other pig, his friend Tim.” she said sullenly.
“I don’t think so,” Emily replied. “Have you asked her?”
“I’ll ask her as soon as she’s stopped crying. Now just leave us the heck alone.”
“Rhea Lanyon, you watch your tone of voice.” he scolded. “I’ll make allowance for your concern for your friend, but I am still your mother — in mind and spirit, if not in body, and have been a girl much longer than you’ve been alive.” Turning to Selene even before Rhea could mutter an apology, he asked, “Selene, dear. It’s okay. If you can’t talk right now, that’s okay too, but you can nod your head or shake it, and I do need to ask you some questions.”
Selene stuck out her lower lip in a pout, but said nothing.
Emily nodded, as if she’d just said something eloquent. “You’re angry with Phil, then, but why? Has he said or done something to hurt you?”
A nod followed immediately by a negative head shake and another sigh.
“So you’re mad at him, but not for something he’s said or done. Do you know why you’re mad at him?”
Another negative head shake, but less certain.
“Does your tummy hurt or feel funny, like something’s wrong, but you can’t quite place what it might be?”
A nod. The tears slowly stopped as Selene considered Emily Lanyon’s words.
“Do you also feel like you need to do something, but you don’t know quite what it is you need to do? I always felt that way just before.”
“Unh-huh.” It was accompanied by a nod as if Selene wasn’t certain her whispered words had been heard.
“Selene, dear, my beloved foster-daughter. I think you’re suffering from two things. The first, and probably the most important right now, is that you’re beginning to fall in love with Phil, who seems to be a wonderful young man, astonishingly brave, not entirely foolhardy, and willing to risk his life for you. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s falling in love with you as well.” She paused for a long moment while Selene considered her words. “Your other problem is smaller, although it can be overwhelming at times, in that you’re suffering not only from the pangs of young love, but from PMS, premenstrual syndrome. You’re about to have your first period, dear, and I wish more than ever that I still shared that with you. It’s something that mothers and daughters have helped each other through for a million years or more, and you’ve been robbed of that through circumstance, as have I, but yours is the most bitter loss, I think, because we don’t know what’s happened to your real mother, and I make an awkward surrogate at best.”
Selene looked up at him, and then ran sobbing into his arms, where Mrs. Lanyon hugged her close and stroked her hair.
“There now, sweet baby,” he crooned, as tender and loving as any mother could be. “You’ll feel better after a good cry. It always helped for me, when I was still a woman, and you’re truly a woman now.”
Rhea stared at the male centaur in disbelief. Finally, she blurted out, “Omigod! That’s not possible. We’re…. We’re…. Oh. Oh!”
Mrs. Lanyon looked up at his new daughter. “Yes, dear, only females menstruate, but you two haven’t been young women for long, so you haven’t had much practice. Having been one for the first forty years of my life, I recognize the signs, although I must admit I can’t work up too much sorrow over their absence right now. There’s something to be said for being able to remain on an even emotional plane, although of course I’ve lost the highs as well as the lows. Remember that, both of you, if you start to feel down.” He turned to include Rhea. “As women, you’re more susceptible to depression and blue funks, but you’ll also experience joys, deep and lasting joys, that far surpass what you were capable of before. It has to do with the basic wiring of your new female brains, and how we’re…. Pardon…, how you’re put together now.“
Then he turned again to Selene, who was still weeping, and said, “I suggest you take Akcuanrut aside and privately ask him to help provide whatever is used on this world to control the bleeding. Soft cotton rags work, although you’d have to wash them carefully to avoid bacterial or other infection, and we don’t have much cotton cloth to spare, so an organic local substitute would be better in the long run. You might also ask him if he has anything to help with the irritability and other symptoms.”
Selene said nothing in reply, although her panicked blush was probably as eloquent as any words.
“Just consider him your personal physician, dear. For all our supposed ‘natural modesty,’ we’re expected to show our private parts to a large number of men over the years, since female GYN specialists aren’t thick on the ground, even in these relatively enlightened times. By the way, Rhea, you might want to join Selene when she has that conversation. If you’re not about to receive your monthly visitor, you’ll probably be experiencing it soon, since you were changed on the very same day. In fact,” Mrs. Lanyon mused aloud, “I’d better have this conversation with your father too — or do centaurs just go into heat? I wonder.”
Now it was Rhea’s turn to blush. Whether it was at the thought of her father going into heat, or the impending likelihood of menstruation, she didn’t say.
“Now come on, both of you. Get up and let’s join the rest of our party. They’re waiting for us and we still have an evil amorphous blob to catch and destroy.”
“But I can’t.” Selene was crying again. “I’ve been horrible to Phil. He must hate me. And the others — how can they trust me if I can’t keep my head?”
“By being brave and doing what you have to do. That’s what women have done for eons and will continue to do for eons to come. You’ll also find, my dear, that men are quite willing to forgive you almost anything, as long as they’re confident of your love for them, and I’m quite sure that Phil loves you, possibly as much as you love him. All you’ll have to do is tell him so and he’ll be happy as a clam. Now come on, girls,” he gestured with both hands to encourage them to rise, “ we’ve got work to do.”
With that, Emily reached out a hand and took Selene’s hand as she allowed her true self to reappear. The centaur gently pulled the barbarian woman to her feet and led her back towards the others.
Rhea followed; a bemused expression on her face as she grumbled to no one in particular, “What the heck kind of quest is this? People don’t menstruate during quests. Ask anyone who’s done rôle play gaming. There’s never a bathroom or even a need for a bathroom. If we’re going to have to deal with things like PMS, we’re going to have to deal with all the rest of the things women deal with, like getting… Oh, my God!” Too late, she realized that her voice had risen to a shout.
The others turned back to see what the problem was. Selene was comforted to know that, PMS or not, her sword was out of its scabbard and in her hand before she completed her turn. Behind her, she could hear the others approaching at a dead run.
“I think the word you’re searching for, dear, is ‘pregnant,” Emily calmly offered.
“What? Who’s pregnant? What’s going on here?” Herbert Lanyon screamed, drowning out similar questions from the others. Turning towards an equally shocked Phil, the centaur filly glared and asked ominously, “Do you know anything about this, Phillip?”
“Yeah, Phil, I thought we meant something to each other,” Selene chimed in mischievously.
“Selene, don’t make things worse than they are. Everyone, no one is pregnant, at least not at the moment.” Emily gazed at his daughter’s friend in mild reproof and warning.
“I think a bit more of an explanation is in order here, Emily,” Dr. Lanyon blustered rather fetchingly, suddenly unsure of herself. “One of the girls definitely screamed and that usually means something’s wrong.”
“We can talk later, dear. For now, thank you for caring enough to come running, but it was a false alarm. I think Selene’s ready to resume our trek so, if everyone’s had sufficient opportunity to rest….” He completed the statement with a gesture to usher everyone back to the path.
“Not quite, Mrs. Lanyon,” Selene interjected. “Rhea and I need to speak to Akcuanrut.” When no one moved, she made ‘shooing movements’ and added, “Privately, please.”
With that the others reluctantly moved off towards the road. Before pulling the elder sorcerer aside, Selene called out as sweetly as she could, “Phil, dear, would you please join me at point in a few moments? I owe you an apology, and could really use your help.”
The night was clear and comfortable, brightly lit by the two moons, which seemed farther apart. The sounds of the small brook bubbling away just beneath the trees at the edge of the clearing would have been appealing under different circumstances, but it was a quiet and introspective group that pitched camp that night. Rhea was still coming to grips with the realities of her new gender. Selene was off in the shadows at the edge of the campsite, doing her best, despite her discomfort, to convince Phil that she wasn’t really mad at him without telling him exactly what was wrong. D’lon-Ra was off hunting his dinner and spending the night away from the group in recognition of the fact that he still wasn’t fully accepted and trusted. Akcuanrut was off concocting potions for Rhea and Selene to ease their premenstrual symptoms, still only potential for Rhea, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared. The wizard had also showed them the fluffy leaves of a certain low-lying plant and then explained their use, when wrapped in a length of cloth, so the two barbarians were out in the midst of a largish patch of them, taking some grim satisfaction in slashing at the stems with their knives as they gathered the amount that their mother had advised might be necessary.
“Dear?” Dr. Lanyon asked her wife as they grazed on some delicious wild wheat a short distance from the camp.
“Yes?”
“Do you think Rhea and Selene have changed?”
“You mean more than what would be expected from someone still acclimating to something as basic as a change in gender?”
“Oh, yummy. Try this,” Dr. Lanyon pointed to a clump of what looked like rye grass, “and yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”
Emily pondered for a while before answering. “I don’t know. There have definitely been changes; this afternoon’s discoveries are just the most recent, but I also see Rhea as being more polite — not cursing as much. And Selene seems to have picked up a boyfriend, which makes me wonder a bit. But I can’t tell exactly what’s due to the change in gender and what might be due to the rather unusual situation we all seem to be in. Why do you ask, Herbert?”
“Because I wonder if there might not be yet another explanation for these changes.” Dr. Lanyon hesitated.
“Don’t stop now, dear. You’ve got my full attention.”
“Well. It’s based on something Akcuanrut said. We were talking about magic and he was trying to explain how it worked.”
“You mean other than centaur magic, I presume. We don’t seem to need to do anything special when we change shapes and so forth.”
“True, but I’m not certain that we’re completely unaffected either.”
“This doesn’t sound good. Herbert Lanyon, you tell me what you’re talking about right now. No more beating around the bush.”
“Of course, Emily, dear. It seems that the measure of how good a wizard is is how little he’s affected by the magic he causes. It’s common, for example, to find that someone who creates evil magic, even for the best of motives, will become at least a bit more evil.
“He used the example of Na-Noc, an Emperor’s Champion and Hero who is now clearly evil, due to his prolonged contact with evil magic. Unlike D’lon-Ra, he ignored his magical training and thus couldn’t protect himself.”
“We’ll come back to how that affects us in a moment, but does that mean that Na-Noc could be saved if he was surrounded by good magic for a long period of time?” Emily asked.
“Exactly. Akcuanrut says that the long term goal is to bring Na-Noc back to the College of Wizards and surround him in a bubble of good magic.”
“So why didn’t he do that back in the Dungeon of Despair or whatever he called it, where we first meet him?”
“I asked Akcuanrut that same question. Apparently, it takes a minimum of five wizards to create something like that and more, many more, to sustain it for any length of time, since it has to be maintained at full strength both day and night for many days. Despite his rather prodigious abilities, Akcuanrut just didn’t have the ability to do it himself, and still doesn’t, unless we run across quite a few more wizards during our quest.”
“Let’s get some water from that stream, dear” Emily suggested and they cantered across the field toward the brook, swinging wide of the campsite in order to continue their conversation in private.
“So, to continue your logical arguments,” he said, “if Na-Noc can be changed from good to evil, or vice versa, by contact with magic, you’re wondering if Rhea and Selene could be changed by magic.”
“Or us.”
“Or…Oh! Do you think we’ve changed?” Emily stopped short.
“I don’t know. Most of what’s happened so far has been driven by factors beyond our control. We’ve been reacting rather than acting. My guess is yes, but I don’t know exactly how. In the West, we tend to think of the Self as somehow separate from the body, a philosophic analogy to the concept of a soul, but what if the body is the Self? If true, our changes imply far more than just a change of gender or shape.”
The remainder of the night was spent in silence as each considered the implications, taking time to eat a few mouthfuls of the choicest grasses every once in a while. Although they dozed for a few moments from time to time, they quickly fell into a rhythm of sleeping and waking that ensured that one of them was always awake and on guard while the other slumbered upright, their stay mechanisms locked and hooves firmly planted in a wide stance to remain upright. Neither noticed that this wasn’t at all their usual habit.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Thirteen
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.— Ali ibn-Abi-Talib
Emerging from out of the deep shade of the forest proper, the path became wider as the trees grew sparse and then vanished into low rolling hills which overlooked the green valley of Ede with its areas of cultivated land covering much of the far side of a broad river, and grazing land on the near side, through which they were traveling now. The pastoral scene was marred, though, by a battle raging in the center of the valley where a score or two of centaurs were encircled by at least twice that many humans on horseback and an equal number on foot. Although the centaurs were unarmed, their flashing hooves struck their opponents like lightning, and few of those who went down went on to rise again. They also had a trick of leaning down and grabbing an opponent in a sort of wrestling move, except instead of taking them down, as a human wrestler might, they’d take them up in the air and then hurl them back down to the rocky ground below from high above their heads. Few rose from this injury either, and the humans found it difficult to defend themselves against an assault from the centaur’s human half, because the innate centaur glamour made the actual attack invisible until the man was suddenly snatched into the air by unseen hands, and then thrown down again.
Akcuanrut was flabbergasted. He had just finished describing how Ede had a long tradition of peaceful coexistence between man and centaur, being one of the few places outside the capital where the centaurs were not hunted down for their magic.
Dr. Lanyon, ever the teacher, began to relate it to the human equivalent of hunting the tiger to near extinction for the perceived power of its various body parts, but Selene never heard the end of the lecture. Sword drawn, she went charging down the hill, screaming a battle cry, with Rhea less than a single step behind her.
After Emily and Herbert shared that classic parental perplexed look of “what are we going to do with them,” they called for Akcuanrut and Phil to jump on their backs and follow. The tiny D’lon-Ra turned into a ball and began rolling down the hill, building speed as he went, and catching up to the still screaming barbarian women at the bottom of the slope.
The rabble on foot scattered to allow the three sword-wielders through to the skirmish within, presumably thinking they were coming to help the other humans, but they closed ranks again before the two centaurs could reach the battle lines. Swords, staffs and rocks were raised menacingly, until the horde realized that there were humans riding, and apparently directing, the centaurs.
By the time the centaurs reached the circle of humans surrounding the battle, Selene, Rhea and D’lon-Ra were in the center of the conflict, laughing and joking back and forth as they stood back to back, their swords flashing in a deadly pattern which cowed their many opponents, or in the case of D’lon-Ra, a single dagger. They were being careful to incapacitate rather than maim or kill anyone amongst the warring parties as they indiscriminately traded blows with centaur and human alike, turning what was formerly a pitched battle into a morass of confusion in which the participant’s former enthusiasm was gradually waning.
Stopping a couple of yards from the line of spears, Akcuanrut stood on the male centaur’s shoulders, balancing himself with the aid of a hand from Emily. From his higher vantage point he could see that, while D’lon-Ra and the barbarian women were making a significant and growing dent in the number of participants, there were still enough participants to keep the battle going for a while longer.
“Apprentice. Do the spell for Levitation.”
“But, Master Akcuanrut, I’ve never done that spell for more than one or two small objects.” Phil stared worriedly at the battlefield.
“Then you need practice, and this is an ideal opportunity.”
“The whole battlefield, Master?” Phil seemed nervous.
Akcuanrut nodded and waited, patiently standing atop Mrs. Lanyon. Phil closed his eyes and pursed his lips as he muttered and gestured in a seemingly random fashion. Suddenly his eyes opened long enough for a single blink and then slammed shut. The strain became even more evident from the tightened muscles in his neck and the reddish cast of his face.
Slowly, so slowly that some failed to even notice it as they hacked and slashed away, the entire group edged upward into the air. When they were high enough that the centaurs could walk beneath the combatants, they did so at an easy stroll.
Roughly at the center of the melée, Akcuanrut tapped Emily gently with his foot and he stopped. By then, all the combatants had realized something was up and had ceased hostilities, uncertain of who and what their enemies were. While they still glanced warily at each other, their main focus was now on the wizard below, whom at least some of the gathered humans obviously recognized, since several paled and dropped their arms immediately, whispering quietly to anyone near enough to whisper to, and trying very earnestly to be invisible otherwise.
Rhea gave a huge smile and waved down at them, calling out “Hi, Mom. Hi, Pop. Hi, Phil. Hey, Acky, why’d you stop our fun?”
Mr. Lanyon gave her daughter a tentative wave in return, but Emily Lanyon merely frowned and waited for Akcuanrut to proceed.
“Who, exactly, is responsible for all this nonsense?” The wizard’s voice was calm and friendly, but with an air of authority that would accept nothing less than a complete and honest answer. He spoke in a normal conversational voice, yet everyone heard him as if they were right beside him, or as if he were inside their head.
“They broke the truce,” one man said. “They butchered Medgrid and hid his body somewhere.” It was a huge human close to the center of the conflict who spoke with venom.
“ ’Tis a lie,” an even larger male centaur — the only one there, Emily noticed, although he was much smaller than Emily, or even herself, who outweighed him by at least five hundred pounds, retorted with equal fervor. “ ’Tis Red Paint t’was killed and her body hidden by these wicked heathen humans.”
Before anything more could be said, given the potential that whatever was said would exacerbate the situation rather than serve to calm the waters, Akcuanrut raised his hand for silence. Thinking for a moment, he turned to the leader of the humans and asked, “How is it that you discovered Medgrid’s death, if there was no body?”
“Why from Red Paint. She came to us to gloat about her actions, saying she did it for the pure pleasure of the act.”
Turning to the male centaur, Akcuanrut asked, “And Red Paint’s death, you discovered it exactly how?”
“Why from Medgrid. He stood upon the hill by our favorite grazing field and called out in gory detail how he’d murdered Red Paint, cut her into small pieces and ate her raw.”
“I fear that you’ve been manipulated, both of you, by an accomplished liar. Doesn’t it seem even slightly incongruous that your friends appeared to you all after they’d been killed by the other? Further, if your friends wanted either to take advantage of their lies, or avenge their own pseudo-deaths, wouldn’t they be here now? Do you think they collaborated to sow dissension and hatred amongst you all, and are even now snickering together in some hidden corner?” Seeing no response other than the beginnings of confusion amongst the gathered fighters, he continued, “I must tell you a story about an evil monster named Na-Noc.”
“Unh, Master Akcuanrut?” Phil’s forehead was beaded with sweat and he was under visible strain.
“Yes, Apprentice?” Akcuanrut turned to Phil, irritated at the interruption.
“May I let them down now, please?”
“Unh, oh, sorry. One moment longer, please.” Turning to the two leaders, he asked, “Can you both promise to refrain from further hostilities while I explain this to you?”
They both nodded and each called out instructions to stand down to their followers, although most had already done so on their own, having recognized the wizard as an official of the Imperial Court. Akcuanrut gave Phil a brief nod. Immediately, everyone was lowered to the ground, albeit a bit shakily, as Phil struggled to encompass everyone safely within his fading sphere of magical power. The two leaders stalked over to Akcuanrut, stopping about ten feet from each other and the wizard.
“What is this story and why is it important that we hear it?” they both asked simultaneously and then glared at each other for having the temerity to speak at the same time as the other.
After the wizard had finished, he made a gesture toward the centaur stallion, who spoke first. “I’m Windflyer, stallion of this herd. So, you believe this Na-Noc ate them both and then set us up to fight for the sole purpose of slowing you and your troop down? Yet you have provided no evidence of the truth of this.”
“True, I have no proof, other than my office from the Imperial Crown, but I would ask each of you to consider one thing. What were Medgrid and Red Paint like as people? Were they evil? Did they like to hurt others? Was it common for them to gloat over any evil done to others?”
The silence was becoming oppressive when the centaur male looked back to the others and quietly said, “No, Red Paint was caring and compassionate. She would go out of her way to help others. Her special skill was healing and she took it very seriously. With all deference to what you saw, Iccles,” he addressed the other leader, “it just doesn’t sound like her.”
“Likewise Medgrid,” Iccles offered grudgingly. “He was a teacher, known for helping others, guiding them toward the ‘Light’. I can honestly say that I never once heard him, or had another report of hearing him, make a disparaging comment about another, whether human or centaur.”
“While proof positive it isn’t, this is all very suggestive,” Akcuanrut noted. “Neither seems at all likely to have acted as they might appear to have acted, and neither is with us now, even when their presence would be helpful, or even necessary, so it seems certain that both of your friends are dead, so they can’t have killed each other, as they both claimed, and then come back to life to assert that the other was dead, and then run away. Add to that the fact that these two beings are perhaps the most likely amongst you to fall victim to an evil monster who could take on a false seeming of someone innocuous, perhaps a child, and then falsely appeal to their kindly natures and treacherously plead for succor with implacable calculation and murderous intent. For such innocents, the evil Na-Noc would have no pity, and I can attest that Na-Noc has indeed passed this way, because I, as Dean of the Emperor’s College of Wizards, can smell his foul essence in the very air.”
Both Windflyer and Iccles were ashamed by then, and made no further comment.
As Iccles and Windflyer wandered off separately to explain the situation to their people, Herbert, Emily and the others all sighed in relief. Emily, however, was agitated for some reason, and continued prancing from foot to foot as if in pain. Finally, he trotted off toward a small group of humans, several of whom were lying on the ground with what appeared to be serious injuries.
“Emily,” Herbert called out worriedly, seeing the humans eyeing her wife in a less than friendly manner, “Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure, dear,” he called back over his shoulder. “I feel this urge… no, a compulsion, to go help those wounded people.”
“But those people don’t look like they want your help, dear,” Herbert noted as she trotted off after her wife. There was no way she was going to let him be hurt just because he had a yen to be helpful. Although he had a medical degree back on Earth, he hadn’t practiced in many years, and he couldn’t know anything about the local infections and what medical supplies might be available, after all.
“I know. I… I… something is drawing me to them, making me. I can’t help myself.”
Herbert caught up to Emily about twenty feet from the cluster of humans, about the same time that they turned and formed a wall, swords drawn, between the centaurs and the wounded humans.
“Leave us to our wounded, centaurs, your kind are not wanted here.”
“I’m sorry. Those people, they hurt, they need help. Please. I need to help them.”
“We’ve lost enough friends to your kind. No more. Leave us.”
“You harmed each other through your own stupidity and anger, human. I don’t want to hurt them. I….”
“Those people are dying, aren’t they?” Herbert interrupted. “They’ll likely be dead by nightfall without care. Emily wants to help them. If you truly want no more deaths, what do you have to lose?”
It took a bit more persuasion, but eventually, the humans moved aside and Emily rushed to the closest wounded man. Without thinking, he carefully positioned himself on his front knees and placed his hands gently on the man’s chest. At first, nothing seemed to happen, but then the man’s wound, a deep cut to the waist, probably piercing his liver, began to bubble and ooze. Strange fluids bubbled out and jumped through the air to a matching spot on Emily’s side. Groaning in pain, but with a look of sheer bliss, Emily continued until the bubbling stopped and the wound healed itself into fresh new skin with only a trace of a scar.
This was repeated for each of the other men as the humans, and soon several of the centaurs watched. As the last man was healed, still kneeling, Emily tiredly sought out Herbert. “Help me up please, dear. I don’t think I can stand on my own at the moment.” Then, he fell over on his side unconscious.
“…can’t do that, can he?”
“Yes,” Akcuanrut replied, “he can….” He was about to continue when Herbert turned away.
“Emily’s awake,” she said as she immediately trotted over to her wife, who was in an upright position with a cloth sling underneath him, holding him suspended in the air, so that his hooves just barely touched the ground.
“Emily? Dear? How do you feel?” she asked as she gently rubbed his hair and back.
“I…I’m okaaaayyyy,” he slurred and struggled to stand on his own, struggling to find a purchase for his hooves.
“Don’t struggle, dear, you’re in a support sling to help keep you upright.”
“Whaa…?” he said blearily. “Why am I… tied up?”
“Because we’re so large, dear. If you’d remained lying down on your side for too long, your lungs and internal organs would have been crushed by your own weight and you might have died. Windflyer explained it to me. Evidently, we only need about ten minutes of really deep sleep, dreaming sleep, once or twice a night, but to do that we have to lie down for a short period. Large centaurs like us have to be even more careful, and we can go without REM sleep for longer, but we do need to dream or we’ll get groggy after a few days.”
“The people?”
“You saved them, all five of them. You’ve found your special magic; you’re a healer, my dear, and might think about taking up the practice of medicine again, assuming we get back home eventually.”
“Good. I’m glad. Can I get out of this contraption now? It’s not very comfortable.”
“Do you think you can stand on your own?”
“I think so. Let’s find out, why don’t we?”
As Herbert slowly released the tension on the sling, Emily braced his feet, rising up in several stages. Shortly, he had his full weight on his feet and was taking a few tentative steps.
“Is he ready to travel?” Akcuanrut asked nervously. He had just been instructing the others to prepare to move out as soon as possible.
“I guess so,” Emily answered, albeit without any confidence in his voice. “What’s the rush?”
“Unh, how about we get moving and I’ll explain as we walk,” Phil said.
Na-Noc was furious. He didn’t expect to be lucky enough to have Akcuanrut and all his hangers-on die in the little war he’d managed to engineer, but at the least it could have slowed them down for a while. Instead, it had taken longer to start things than it had taken for them to end it, so they were actually almost snapping at his heels now, closer than they’d been before, so he’d wasted his head start on them. He needed time, time to get where he needed to go, and more time once he got there. Well, the Ice Tower was the next obvious stop along the way. He’d have to stop them there.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Fourteen
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.
— Kǒngzǐ (Confucius) (551—479 BCE)
“So Windflyer was ready to fight you, but he really didn’t want to because if he won he would have to drive you away and if he lost he’d have to leave.”
“Just because I’m a male centaur?”
“That, and because you’re a healer. Na-Noc killed Red Paint. She was their healer and Windflyer knew that for the benefit of the herd they really needed one. He even offered to take your place in our quest, giving you the herd. I suspect it nearly killed him to make that offer, a stallion voluntarily giving up his herd, so you can see how important it was to him.”
“Wow! I could have had my own herd?”
“Is that what you want, Emily?” Herbert suddenly stopped trotting beside Emily, who took several more steps before realizing that she wasn’t beside him anymore.
Turning, he asked, “What? Did I say something wrong? Please talk to me, Herbert, dear.”
“Do you want to be the herd stallion?” she asked.
“I never really thought about it. I suppose it could be fun, but I think I’d rather finish this quest, go home and put my feet up for a couple of weeks before we start teaching classes next semester.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, Herbert, I’m sure, but what’s the matter? Something is clearly bothering you.”
“It’s these bodies.”
“Yes, Herbert, what about them?”
“They, unh, they….”
“Oh, Herbert, just say it already. It’s clearly important to you.”
“Yes, dear!” the words came out in a rush. “These bodies are changing us, how we act, how we think, how we feel. I’m becoming… docile, easily led, submissive, like an ordinary mare, especially when I’m around a powerful stallion like Windflyer, who has a large herd of females, and you’re not near me. I almost gave myself to Windflyer and joined his herd, because the need to submit to him was so compelling, so instinctive, and you were unconscious, essentially defeated — even though I knew in my mind that you’d sacrificed yourself to heal those people — but there was another part of me that wanted to be with a strong stallion. All he would have had to do was ask, or simply take me, and I would have done it; I couldn’t have helped myself. I wouldn’t have wanted to help myself. You have to help me.” She paused.
Then she looked at him directly. “You have to control me, Emily, and make me yours before it’s too late, and you need other mares too, as many as possible, because… because… it excites me to see a stallion with another mare… the more mares, the more exciting it is to imagine being a part of a… a herd of other mares… to have my sisters around me while our stallion guards us to keep us safe from harm, or from lesser stallions. I… While you were still unconscious, I saw Windflyer mount one of his mares… I watched as he captured her and held her still, controlling her. I watched as she stood for him, not moving, her hooves spread for him as she hunched herself down slightly, rooted to the ground and steady, preparing herself for his weight and power, but then she held her tail aside and winked her vulva at him, exposing her clitoris, showing him how ready she was for him, inviting him to come inside her so he could fill her womb with his sperm, so he could make her pregnant with his foal. He was so beautiful, Emily, so strong, so powerful, that I had to hold my breath, anticipating what I knew was going to happen to her. And then he reared up with a great shout and… covered her, draping his forelegs over her flanks, holding her upper body captive with his hands and arms as he entered her with a sudden movement of his… his… hardness, and he was… thrusting so… with such incredible strength… and power… so deeply… and then she sighed aloud when she felt him… inside her… and I… I wanted it, Emily… I wanted it to be me….” Herbert finally broke down, still not moving, her head drooping down in shame; tears silently trickling down her cheeks, as she wept without a sound.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Fifteen
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
— Bereshit (Genesis) 3:16
Without a word, Emily sidled close to her — which made her suddenly conscious of the difference in their relative size and strength — then leaned down and bit her back, right at the curve where her human top melded into her animal lower parts, not hard enough to break the skin, but firmly enough to hurt, which strangely excited her, made her yearn for him. “Emily….”
“Be quiet, Herbert. I’ve given you space because I thought you were ashamed and frightened of our sexual changes, and wanted to make light of them, not because I didn’t want you. We’re married, Herbert, for better and for worse, and of course I want our sexual lives to continue, just as it did before our changes. You should have told me sooner, and I suspect that you were ashamed or you wouldn’t have been so hesitant, or so fearful.” He leaned over and bit her again, further back, right at her withers, but more gently, and she shivered, strangely soothed, but struck dumb in a new and almost overpowering excitement and anticipation. “Now, Herbert, turn and look at me again. Look at my size in comparison to Windflyer. Do you think that I could possibly feel threatened by him? I probably outweigh him by eight hundred pounds or more. Look honestly at yourself, in comparison to the other mares, you’re beautiful and strong, Herbert; strong enough that you could probably defeat Windflyer on your own, if you had a mind to do so. We’re something like Percherons on this world, Herbert, with an admixture of something like a quarter Arabian for speed and agility, great warhorses of both breeding and lineage, not common wild mustangs, so keep that in mind. Windflyer is far beneath you, Herbert. I’ll take you when you come fully into heat, and not before. You’ll hold yourself ready for me, not some mongrel upstart.”
Herbert was astonished to feel that this new arrogance in Emily both excited and calmed her, together with his casual dominance of her body. “Thank you, Emily. I was all flustered for a moment, but you’ve set me straight again. Whenever you want me, I’m yours, and no one else’s. I belong to you, Emily.” She sidled up to rub herself against his withers, and then her hand sought his.
He took it. “Of course you do, Herbert,” he said brusquely. “I was remiss not to make that plain, and it won’t happen again. I’ll make very sure that Windflyer knows it too, although I’ll also make it plain that I don’t want any of his mares, since it would be troublesome to carry along so many when we find our way home, and I’m not at all sure I’d want to cover his mares in any case.” He briefly let a look of scorn cross his face before saying, “Give me his herd indeed! As if I couldn’t simply take them, but it would be unfair to burden the herd with my genes, because we’re creatures of high civilization, you and I, where they’re much smaller, and perfectly suited for living in the wilderness. I’ll explain that to him, but we’ll speak no more of it.”
“Yes, Emily,” Herbert said meekly.
“Emily! We’ve been looking for you,” Akcuanrut seemed genuinely glad to see him when they met upon a small hill overlooking the town. “How are you feeling? Quite recovered? Since we know that Na-Noc is still somewhat less than a day ahead of us, it would be an excellent plan, I think, to follow his trail as quickly as possible. If he reaches the Lost Temple of Zampulus before us, he may well be able to draw upon magical resources hidden there, which will make our task more difficult.”
“Quite well, thank you, and I agree. I’m afraid that there will be complications if we stay any longer in any case.”
“Really? What sort? I thought you’d solved their problems quite nicely, and at no little cost to you.”
He snorted. “Except that now Windflyer is trying to talk Herbert into persuading me to stay. Since their only Healer, the mare Red Paint, was killed by Na-Noc, he’s worried about his herd.”
“I see. I can understand why. Healers are very rare among the centaur people, and offer a significant advantage, although it must have galled him to say so.”
“Indeed. Herbert told me about his plan to give me his herd and go on in my stead, but that makes no sense. With my genes, the herd would never survive in the wild, no matter what advantage Healing give them.”
Akcuanrut looked thoughtful. “Actually, you may be wrong, Emily. As we see here in this isolated area, humans and centaurs find it possible to live together, to the advantage of both peoples, but the average centaur is Windflyer’s size or smaller, so they’re at a relative disadvantage in human lands, and the powers inherent in human-style magic — like your own healing powers — are very rare among them, although their innate centaur magic is partial compensation. Were they your size, with the gifts you bring with you….”
“Just a darned minute, Sir!” He was very angry. “I don’t know what sort of man you take me for, but if you expect me to take my ease back here while my husband and only child go waltzing off into dreadful danger…”
“Patience, hasty centaur,” he admonished Emily gently. “I made no improper suggestion, but perhaps there’s a way in which we can help the centaur people as a whole, and perhaps gain their assistance in defeating Na-Noc, thus preventing the destruction of our two worlds.”
He stopped his incipient tirade, then said, “Oh. Well….”
“Exactly. We must try to keep our eyes on the larger prize, rather than becoming bogged down in less relevant details.”
“Okay,” he grudgingly admitted. “What’s your idea.”
“First, you said that your husband presented this notion for your approval; is that true?”
“Well, yes, but….”
“Would you characterize her behavior as normal? Has she ever suggested that you take on multiple sexual partners before?”
“Of course not! We….”
Akcuanrut gave him no time to object, but pressed on. “And how did you react? Were you shocked? Horrified? Disappointed? Anything that would remind you of your previous attitude toward your husband?”
“Well, no, but….”
“Remember the first rule of magic here, Emily, function follows form, and you are now a centaur stallion, your husband is a centaur mare, and you both think and act approximately as your new form dictates, although there’s obviously some hysteresis. You are neither of you ‘mere ghosts’ in the abstract machinery of your bodies, floating around pulling levers to make the machinery do this or that. Your minds are created by your respective bodies, so both your situations and biological imperatives have inevitably changed, just as your former son is becoming more your daughter every day. You must have noticed that all of your individual attitudes have… ‘adjusted’ themselves to suit your individual new realities. Your lives are going forward, a perfectly healthy response to a major life change, and in time you will consider this a blessing.”
This all sounded very reasonable, especially when the wizard said it with such confidence, but Emily couldn’t quite share his confidence, nor did he fully believe Akcuanrut’s glib assurances, even as the wizard sauntered off down the hill, smiling placidly in benevolent beatitude.
After a long few minutes pondering his situation, he suddenly realized that the wizard hadn’t actually said anything, other than vague platitudes that might have been copied from one of those workplace ‘motivational’ posters, and that he’d been left in exactly the same position he’d been in before.
For the very first time in her life, Emily Lanyon said, “WTF!” aloud.
Emily was still standing on the same low hillside, thinking about his problem, when she saw Akcuanrut, Phil, his new apprentice, his son Rhea and her friend Selene, plus the entirety of Windflyer’s herd, Windflyer himself, and Herbert, come streaming out the town gate and troop up the hill to where he stood. Surprise was the least of his feelings.
“Akcuanrut,” Emily said. “Back so soon?”
“Of course,” he said. “I thought we’d agreed that our prompt departure was of great importance, lest the world be destroyed while we dither.”
“Well, yes, but….”
“Well? Here we are, ready to go,” the wizard said.
“But… but… but….” he stuttered. “All of you?”
The wizard looked at him with something like pity. “We talked about this, didn’t we? Seeing how well you and Herbert were able to handle Na-Noc with your flashing hooves, it must have struck you that having all the local centaurs working as a whole to trap and contain Na-Noc would even the odds a little, even if he managed to get back into his lair beneath the Temple proper.”
Oddly enough, it hadn’t, but he agreed anyway. “Yes, I suppose it would.” He did, however, see where this was going. He and Herbert had been instrumental in their first victory over Na-Noc. It would require both of them to corral him again, especially now that he’d seen how he was defeated before. It wouldn’t be easy to pull off the same trick twice. Having the herd behind him would be a huge advantage, and one which Na-Noc probably wouldn’t expect, especially if they managed to conceal their involvement. To do that, he’d have to be in charge of them, and everything flowed from that central fact. However much he resented being railroaded into taking the first step on a path that would lead him away from his comfortable life as a wife and mother, he was enough of a scientist to see that it was inevitable and necessary, given the present emergency, so by the time Herbert came cantering toward him, he was quite prepared for the first words out of her mouth.
“Oh, Emily! I’m so proud that you’ve decided to lead the herd after all! I’ve talked with all the other mares, and they’re excited too. Did you know that they have a prophecy about this moment, when a giant stallion they call Thundercloud comes out of nowhere in a blinding flash of lightning? The centaurs we saw that first day reported our arrival, in exactly the manner described by prophesy, so of course everyone was on edge, waiting for the promised Stallion who would lead the centaurs to a stunning victory over all our enemies, and to think that it’s you, my own dear Emily. Imagine it!” Her eyes were shining with pride and love, and Emily didn’t have the heart to disabuse her of her fantasy. ‘Prophesy, indeed!’ he thought to himself, somehow resigned to be a creature of legend, if only Herbert were pleased with him….
“Prophecy?” he said aloud.
“Oh, yes! The prophesy describes you to a ‘T,’ Emily! Your color, which is very rare here, in fact I’m not at all sure that there are any chestnut centaurs. We certainly haven’t seen any. Most are pintos, grey, or black, but we seem to be the only chestnut centaurs in the world. Of course I’m not mentioned in the legends, not by name in any case, or even by description, but your blue eyes are an integral part of the story — or legend, rather, because they’re the color of the sky from whence you’re supposed to have descended in that astounding lightning stroke. And, Emily, the legends say that you’re a powerful Healer, the Chosen One who will bring Human magic to the Centaur race, and end their long oppression by the two-legged men.” She paused as pleased as if she’d just completed a difficult proof in predicate logic, as precise and neatly bundled up as a formal Chomsky grammar.
Emily was nonplused, to say the least. Since her marriage to the moderately famous Dr. Herbert Lanyon, MD, PhD, she’d put her own career on hold, so to speak, and had given up medicine entirely, knowing full well the sort of schedules she would have had to maintain if she’d kept up any sort of practice. Luckily, his income had been sufficient to pay off both their student loans, although his had been smaller to begin with, since he came from old money, at least by American standards. “I had no idea,” she said, then looked toward Akcuanrut, whether in supplication or irritation he couldn’t say, just at this particular moment in time.
That worthy shrugged, then said, “There is surprisingly little knowledge of the centaur people, even amongst the wise, my dear Sir, so I’m just as taken aback as you are, although it augurs well for the success of our enterprise, I would think, if the prophesies are true, and I have no reason to doubt them. Stranger things have happened; witness the fact that I myself have traveled between the worlds and survived, that I’ve seen ‘cordless power tools,’ and ‘traffic lights,’ and magic lamps that give no heat and require neither flint nor steel to light them.”
“True,” he said, by now resigned to what was increasingly seeming like his duty, since even his husband had been swept up in a general enthusiasm for his leadership in this enterprise. “The ancient formula that had spawned only horror tales, long kept a closely-guarded secret by my husband’s family for fear that it would be misused by ruthless agencies intent on domination of the world, just as the original Jekyll had tried to dominate London in his prideful madness, seems now that it might be the precursor to something entirely unforeseen, something wonderful, the salvation of both our worlds and the liberation of an entire people from terror, assuming the prophesies are true, and that we succeed.” He looked to the wizard for guidance, since he seemed to be the only one entirely sure of himself just now. “So, what now?”
“Now this formality:” The wizard turned to address the current leader of the herd, “Windflyer, are you now prepared to yield up your leadership of your people to Thundercloud?”
“I am, Wizard. My people need his gift to survive, and we all need his leadership to defeat this Na-Noc and save this world from destruction by the Dark Gods.” He bowed his proud head, submitting himself to the wizard, and to Emily.
The Wizard raised his arms, bright sparks and clouds of light coruscating from his open, empty hands, and spoke, “Then bright blessings to you, O Windflyer, who shall be in future generations be renowned as first amongst your people to embody the full promise of increasing life and power for all the generations of centaurs to come.” With that, he released the light into the surrounding air, where it expanded and intensified to suffuse the entire herd, including especially Windflyer, Emily, and Herbert, dazzling adamantine islands of pellucid clarity within a general brilliance, a light so preternaturally illuminating that one could see their very bones and internal organs, if one had the strength of will to avoid covering one’s eyes or turning away.
The Wizard spoke a series of words, “Kabayong Babae! Kabayo! Ale!” and the swirling vortex of brilliance that was Windflyer blazed brighter. “Palitan!” he cried out, and the maelstrom of light changed color, spinning into gold. “Mayari!” he intoned, and all the roiling nimbus of light froze instantly in place, like the snapshot of a violent explosion, and then rushed backwards, pouring into the bodies of every centaur there present on the field, themselves seemingly frozen by the implosion of color and brilliant light, and then everything went suddenly dark, except it wasn’t truly darkness, but only the contrast between the bright power of magic now fading into the normal light of the sun above them in the sky.
Emily blinked away the fading spots before her eyes and saw that Windflyer — or what had once been Windflyer — was now a chestnut mare who appeared to be the very twin of Herbert, both in coloring and size, right down to her pretty green eyes.
As if she’d recognized a long-lost sister from across the space between them, Herbert trotted up to the reborn Windflyer and hugged her close to her ample bosom, both of them somehow gracefully aware of exactly how to lean into each other without discomfort. “Windflyer,” she exclaimed, laughing in unfeigned delight, “I’d be much more comfortable complimenting you on your beauty if we didn’t seem to be identical twins, but seeing you finally makes me realize exactly how beautiful I must be.” She smoothed her luxurious new tresses back from her face with tender care and smiled. “Welcome home, dear sister, and all my love be with you.” Then she looked her up and down, this time judiciously. “We’ll have to see about getting you some sort of brassiere. Unfortunately, when we left home, I didn’t have time to pack.”
Windflyer’s eyes went wide. “Brassiere?” she said, extremely puzzled.
“What I don’t understand,” Emily said irritably, “is why you changed the entire herd to look exactly like my husband.”
“Parsimony,” Akcuanrut said simply.
When the wizard failed to expand upon this rather oracular ambiguity, Emily asked again, “What on Earth… wherever this is, anyway… does that mean.”
“It means that we’d agreed that a larger and heavier type of centaur would be more successful both in fighting Na-Noc and in holding their own against those wicked humans who prey upon the centaurs to make use of their dismembered bodies as magical talismans.”
“We did?” Emily asked. “I have no memory of it.”
“Well, I did, and my Apprentice agreed with me, although you first brought up the issue, albeit on the conservative end of the spectrum of possible concerns, but you had little or no local knowledge to inform your opinion, so I discounted it more than slightly. Since I had only two models of this new breed of centaur available — that is, yourself and Herbert — those two were what I used, much more frugal than attempting to compute and juggle many different types, none of which I had ever encountered before, especially when my magical powers were at a relatively low ebb. We didn’t have any opportunity in your world to encounter any other centaurs, so I used what I had to hand.”
“But didn’t you stop to think that they might not want to be changed?” he complained.
“Of course I did, and I did consult with Windflyer, whose herd this was, and who saw the advantages right away, seconded by the older mares. There are over a hundred centaur mares in this herd alone, which should give the new species a good head start on turning from prey to predators.” He smiled benignly once again. “In the real world, being a predator is much more satisfactory, taking all in all, than the other rôle, and you and Herbert bring much more than mere size to the table, but rather an increased talent for both centaur and human magics in addition to your other powers. When combined with speed, imposing size, and strength, your many offspring will be formidable. In fact, though, if we’re eventually able to establish a controlled gateway too your world, it would wonderful if some of your people were able to visit our world, either to establish residence or for extended visits. Our world is very sparsely populated, so I’m sure land grants with ample savannah, pastures, and farmland could be made available for permanent settlement, if we can work out the details regarding long-term residency.”
“And Windflyer agreed?” Emily was startled, even amazed, despite Herbert’s admiring assessment of her former character as a stallion.
“Of course she did. I told you that she saw the clear benefit to his herd, and so did the mares, which is much more important.”
“But… but….s”
“What? Would you like to take her place? Perhaps Herbert would prefer to be the stallion of the herd. She, at least, seems to be properly concerned for the welfare of the herd as a whole, and is not nearly so truculent and obstreperous, so her contribution might be even more effective than yours, I think. Here, let me fix this for you,” he said as he hiked up his sleeves a bit, raised his hands, began to chant, “Kabayong simarrón!” as the light began to build.
“Wait!” Emily shouted desperately, suddenly panicked, although he didn’t know exactly why.
The wizard raised one supercilious brow. “Well?” he said.
“Don’t bother,” he said sullenly.
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” he said, “now I’ve gotten warmed up. Just stand there quietly and in two shakes of your tail you’ll be a happy young mare, so you won’t have to trouble yourself about any responsibilities for anyone but yourself… and your foals, of course. I’m quite sure Herbert will be able to see her way clear to perform her duties without shilly-shallying or procrastination.”
“No!” he said forcefully. He thought about the issue of justice in what the wizard proposed, ‘Wasn’t this taking them one step further toward our presumptive goal? After all, doesn’t Herbert deserve to be a real husband again? Even if they remained centaurs for some time to come… No! Herbert was too much like Hastie had been, too wrapped up in her own private dream worlds to be effective in the very real world they inhabited now! If I’d been in charge of that darned formula, I certainly wouldn’t have left it lying on a shelf for the irresponsible Hastie to find, and it wasn’t as if Hastie hadn’t amply demonstrated her lack of foresight before, many times over, one near disaster after another, often rescued by Jack, who’d always had a good head on her shoulders, and seemed only to have been improved by her recent transformation, just as their own family has been improved by all these changes.’ “No,” he said again. “Whatever has to be done, Wizard, I’ll take the responsibility. Herbert was rarely able to take things all that seriously, for all her strengths as a scientist and researcher.”
Akcuanrut smiled benignly. “I wondered exactly how long it would take you to admit that, Emily.”
He pursed his lips in irritation, but then nodded. “Well, you made your point. I think I should call myself Thundercloud now. It can’t hurt to embrace the prophesy, and may make it possible to enlist the help of other centaurs. I noticed that you left the yearling males alone, in the midst of your spellcasting, and had wondered about it.”
He smiled again. “Very perceptive of you, Emily, or Thundercloud, as I should say. As messengers, the colts are unsurpassed, fleet and tireless. We may be able to lure other centaur herds to our aid, if the stakes become known widely.”
“But I don’t understand how any prophesy of this world could have predicted our arrival on it.”
“Do you think the Dark Gods are the only powers in the world, ‘O Thundercloud of Legend?’ Long has the Dark warred against the Light; ancient are our Enemies. Doesn’t it strike you as… interesting… that humans are identical, as far as I can tell, on both our worlds. I don’t doubt that centaurs are as well. Certainly you seem so to me, although obviously greatly improved upon the mostly-feral centaur population here, just as we are better-fed and generally larger compared to the scattered hill tribes far to the South and East. Whether this is because our worlds are close to each other, I don’t know, since our records pertain only to this world, as far as I know. We’ve had travelers come through Portals before, but nothing wildly exotic, other than this thing that Na-Noc became, and I’m not sure that he’s not simply self-created, as you yourself may have explained back in his throne room, where our adventure really began. He’s driven by hate now, but the human body is a harmonious whole, each part working in coöperation with all the others. What would a human body look like if all the parts of it were at war with themselves, the bones refusing to be just bones, the lungs filled with envy for the heart full of blood? I think it might look like Na-Noc, a protean being who can only hold a particular form through force of will, forcing the submission of the rest of his body for whatever time seems necessary, but inevitably relapsing into formlessness when the impetus of external threats grows less pressing.”
“But on our world, centaurs don’t exist! We changed ourselves into these forms with the aid of science.”
Akcuanrut blinked in surprise. “You may think of it as merely ‘science,’ Thundercloud. but you knew what centaurs were, didn’t you? If the centaurs of your world possessed inherent magical powers, as they do on our world, perhaps they were hunted to extinction, or perhaps they’re in hiding somewhere; I don’t know. But the fact that you recognized them — and were able to change your forms into perfectly-functional centaurs without close examination of our local centaurs — suggests that there was an underlying reality to draw upon, and it certainly wasn’t from this world, because centaurs of your size and strength are unknown here. Even your coloring is exotic. From where, exactly, could you have magically imagined a centaur of this particular shade of reddish brown, with a physical conformation more robust and powerful than any centaur that exists upon this world, if not from some dimly-remembered model inherited from your own world’s past? Magic doesn’t come from nothing, but rather from an underlying ur-reality that gives it shape, the form the magician calls into being with his working. The fact that your minds already contained the memory of the ur-centaurs of your own world made your bodies possible, so the fact of your presence on this world in these forms is an existence proof of ur-centaurs in your own world, whether past or present, open or concealed.”
Emily — he still thought of himself as Emily, he’d used the name for many years, so ‘Thundercloud’ still seemed a little odd, perhaps even pretentious — thought about that for a long moment. “That actually makes sense,” he said. “The family history of the formula doesn’t actually make sense in terms of modern genetic and developmental science, so I’d simply accepted it as an entertaining fable, until the efficacy of it was demonstrated in the persons of my former son and husband, plus Selene, of course. But why does the change always involve a gender switch?”
Akcuanrut considered this question with some care, then the light dawned. “Of course! The ‘formula,’ as you call it, is what we would term a ‘magical trigger,’ possessing no inherent power of its own, only the power to unleash a parasitic wish. To perform so radical a transformation, though, requires real power. The amount of magical potential that exists between basic alignments, like male and female, is enormous, so the changes are powered by the shift in alignments, the transformation fed by the wisher’s own gender.”
“Would good and evil be such an alignment as well?” he asked. “The original creator of the formula changed back and forth between a basically good man to a depraved and evil monster.”
“It would, I think, although I’d question whether a truly ‘good’ man would willingly transform himself into a villain. It would be a strain upon the wisher’s sanity, one would suppose, for a good man to wish to be evil, or for an evil man to wish to be good. The male/female dichotomy isn’t be nearly as wrenching, since most sane men and women like — sometimes quite admire — each other, and of course there’s quite a bit of natural overlap.”
He thought about this for a few minutes, during which Akcuanrut showed no sign of impatience. “I think that’s true. The first Jekyll was evidently evil in both forms, but moderately so in his original form, and wanted only more power to do evil and get away with it, so his transformation must have been at the expense of his good looks. I suppose physical beauty might be a lesser ‘alignment,’ or perhaps there was some other essential difference between the two to function as the opposite poles of a sort of psychic ‘battery.’ His further transformations were motivated by the desire to conceal his crimes by disguising himself, so he became trapped in a cycle of transformations in which he became steadily more grotesque, and moved along a progression in which both forms became ever more wicked and depraved, then finally insane in both forms. I love my husband very much, but it doesn’t seem to matter which sex we are, as long as we’re together.” He thought for a moment longer. “Actually, I think it’s better. I seem to have more of a talent in balancing family life with external obligations, where Herbert tended to let one or another slide at times, sometimes both at once. Then too, I somehow feel more ‘natural’ as I am now, more… powerful… liberated… more like me!”
“Well then,” the Wizard said, “now that we’re all reading from the same grimoire, as it were, should we start organizing the pursuit of Na-Noc?”
“Excellent idea!” he cried, rearing up suddenly in eagerness and fury, looking about from a new height, more than twelve feet above the ground. “Where’s what’s left of D’lon-Ra? I’ve a bone to pick with that Na-Noc, and D’lon-Ra seems to be the key.”
It was early the next day before they were able to organise everything, mostly supplies for the humans in their party, but also an assortment of swords for the most athletic of the centaur women, strong bows and fitted quivers of arrows for Selene and Rhea, who seemed most likely to be able use them effectively, as well as Windflyer, Herbert, and… Thundercloud, just in case. Emily knew that he couldn’t put off taking on a new name forever, so decided to bite the bullet and just do it. Most of the herd was already calling him Thundercloud in any case, so it simplified things to have everyone reading from the same script, so to speak. He’d encouraged Herbert to choose a new name for herself as well, since the one she had was outside the norm for centaurs, and it drew attention, since the typical centaur response to hearing it was ‘What’s that mean?’ and neither ‘Bright army’ nor ‘Shining host’ really made the grade.
She’d said that she’d think about it.
The two barbarian women, on a lighter note, had taken to their new toys as if they were familiar relics of childhood, nostalgically fondling them for a second or two, then testing their draw weight, running their eyes down the limbs of their bows with the eyes of the true connoisseuse, judging their trueness and workmanship with a finely-tuned discernment, then putting a rapid flight of six arrows each into the air so quickly that they were all still in fight before the first struck the distant tree they’d both aimed at. Then they’d turned to each other and grinned, very pleased to possess yet another beautiful means of dealing death, and the fact that these lovely things worked from a distance was just the perfect cherry on top.
Thundercloud shivered. The two women were a little scary at times, like kung fu warriors from a Hong Kong action film, only lacking the ability to fly though the air by means of their mystic chi power — or at least he didn’t think they could fly. He was suddenly glad that this was a low-tech world, since he’d had a horrid vision of the two of them with automatic weapons and shoulder-launched missiles, leaping laughing through a wall of flames to a soundtrack of machine gun fire with a backbeat of exploding hand grenades and land mines.
Then, when all was ready, the great host moved toward the north, toward the entrance of the Lost Temple of Zampulus, and hot on Na-Noc’s trail.
There was plenty of time for observation as they made their stately progress northward, the leagues passing by each an individual experience, quite unlike the travel by automobile or passenger jet he was most familiar with. Although there were more than a thousand centaurs — and their numbers were growing day by day, as the colts and unattached stallions spread the news, that Thundercloud had manifested in their age, and would lead the herds toward victory and freedom — at any given time he could see only a few dozen, because they’d spread out to make the most of the limited pasture available along their way. Akcuanrut was keeping track of everyone by mystic means that he’d declined to elaborate upon, but the extent of their army was primarily visible by the sudden appearance of yet another small group of centaur mares over the crest of a low hill in the near distance before descending out of his sight again, hidden by another rise of ground.
Phil had surprised him, although he supposed that both girls were old enough to be interested in boys, but it was difficult to say which one or both found Phil more fascinating, and why. They both went out of their way to talk to him now that they were on the move, although it was clear that Phil’s own heart was set on Selene. He’d been a fullback, as he recalled, or something else, since he wasn’t exactly au courant with the various positions on a football team. He’d tried to be — or at least seem — interested for Hastie’s sake, but had never really cared for team sports in general, much less football in particular, a game which — in his own mind at least — made cricket look exciting. Phil seemed much more intellectual than either Hastie or Jack had been, before they became Rhea and Selene, not the stereotypical ‘football jock’ at all. He came to an instant decision, since he was fortuitously ambling through an area of meadows and sparse woodland with Phil at one side of him and no one particularly nearby. “Phil, pardon my curiosity, but I was wondering why on Earth you took up football. You seem more interested in the sciences and liberal arts than physical fitness.”
He looked up at the imposing centaur stallion with no hesitation at all, saying, “It’s simple, really. My parents don’t have much money to spare, and a football scholarship seemed like a good idea at the time, but then I met Selene and I couldn’t abandon her when she was in trouble.” His eyes were shining brightly, and he grinned to let him know that this wasn’t any sort of hardship, nor were his services to Selene, to all of them, begrudged.
Emily found himself liking this very earnest young man. “So football was a means to an end, rather than an end in itself?”
“Yep,” he nodded. “I was taking a heavy scholastic load as well, much more intensive than was usual amongst my fellow ‘jocks.’ But believe me, I was being ribbed by the guys in my advanced chem class for the football a lot more than I was by my teammates for taking the ‘nerd’ courses. There were quite a few guys on the team with very realistic expectations — not everyone is picked straight out of high school, and injuries can shut down a football career at the drop of a ref’s time-out flag. There were a lot of my teammates with some sort of ‘Plan B’ beyond going to work at their Dad’s gas station held firmly in mind. For me, though, my Plan B was football, and I’d never wanted to go beyond college ball.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Of course, if a scout had walked up offering three million dollars for my first year, I might have put rocket science on hold for a bit,” he grinned as an aside, “but I wasn’t holding my breath. I think Jack… Selene… was the only one on the team with a serious shot at the Pro leagues, and she wasn’t really interested. Like me, she would have preferred a career with more likelihood of a Nobel Prize than a Heisman Trophy.” He gestured around them. “I reckon the question is moot just now, and magic is this world’s science, so here I am, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” He grinned again, then laughed. “I hope he doesn’t set me to filling up a vat with buckets of water.”
“Do you want to go back?”
Again, Phil surprised him. “It depends…,” he said judiciously.
“Depends?”
“I’d like to see my mom and dad again,” he mused as he strode along, “and I worry about them not knowing what’s become of me, but if going back means that Selene has to go back to being Jack,” his face fell into a frown, “I’d rather stay here forever. Maybe I can write to my mother somehow, or arrange a spiritualist vision or something.”
“Well,” Emily said smiling, “if it’s any consolation at all, I’m pretty sure that Selene feels much the same about you.”
“I’m pretty sure she does too, Sir, but Selene has a very well-developed sense of duty.” He looked up at him again, but this time his face was bleak. “I’m pretty sure she’d go back to being Jack if she felt that she ought to do so, and of course there’s her parents gone missing, with no way of knowing if we can get them back, or if they’d wind up like D’lon-Ra if we do.”
“You know, there’s nothing to prevent you from going back with Selene if she does go back, whether to help in her parent’s recovery or to wind up their affairs.”
“But what if she decides that she has to be Jack in order to do something, say if they have to go into a hospital, and she has to prove that she’s their legal next of kin?”
“Phil, you can’t cover every contingency. Herbert and I — mostly Herbert — made elaborate plans with insurance, trust funds, living wills, advance directives, preselected guardians for Hastie, with backups if anything went wrong in our own lives, but not one of our myriad plans covered evil beings intent upon destroying the entire world, nor ourselves changing into centaurs, much less changing sex.” He threw up his hands in an elaborate shrug. “In a long life, one must be prepared to abandon one’s luggage once in a while, and be willing to improvise. Ordinarily I’d say, ‘Give it time, you’re young, after all,’ but that’s not really true any longer. You’re both of you, in your way, warriors, risking your lives for people you don’t even know back home, doing adult jobs, and you both deserve the right to make adult decisions, because it’s all your lives at stake, and both your possible futures. You both deserve whatever happiness you can give each other, Phil, so don’t second-guess yourself trying to make any decisions for Selene. Sit down together and talk. Ask her what she wants, tell her what you want, and make sure that neither of you work yourselves into the sort of corner where neither of you gets anything even near what you both really want, because the other party is trying to make it easier for the other to say ‘No’ without an embarrassing scene.”
Phil looked up at him in sudden realisation. “That’s what I was doing, wasn’t it?”
“It was. If I were in your shoes — and this is just a suggestion, mind you, — I’d find a moment alone with her and tell her how much you love her, and that you want to make some sort of future with her before it’s too late for anything. I know that if the end of the world comes along, I’d bitterly regret not marrying my own true love first, rather than waiting until everything is safe and boring again.”
“Do you think we might die?”
“Of course,” he said. “Our straits wouldn’t be nearly so desperate were it not for the fact that our enemies — the Dark Gods, as I understand it — are intent upon the destruction of all life. Although I’m not sure how, the so-called Heart of Virtue is meant to accomplish this. We can even see how this might come to pass, in that the Heart is greedy, and attempts to incorporate all of life into itself, the volitional equivalent of a cosmic Black Hole.”
A bitter expression came upon Phil’s countenance then, and he said, “How can you stand it? Knowing that everyone you love might die? That this… thing might take everything from all of us?”
Emily stopped then, and reached down to clasp Phil’s shoulder. “Son, I’m a lot older than you — although I know that this might seem like the clichés that many old people drone on about — but all of human existence is defined by birth and death, the two endpoints of every merely human life, and as you grow older you’ll come to recognize the sweetness in that. It’s bearable, even a joy, because it gives us the opportunity to give ourselves to something that will outlive us — in the simplest biological sense our children, but also our human societies, or even all existence. As a man intent upon a career in science, you’ve surely noticed that you learn from the selfless examples and lifeworks of countless other scientists, who’ve generously passed on the accumulated works of their hands and minds to whomever wants to take it up, the gift that truly keeps on giving, as it were. Scientia, knowledge, is an immortal human construct whose only real purpose is to be passed into the future when our own hands and minds grow too weak to grasp even the smallest part of it. Our children are much the same, our gift to humanity, carrying our genetic heritage, whatever that might be, but also our family values, whatever they were, forward into a future of which we’ll inevitably fail to see the full extent.” He shrugged, then grinned. “As the song says, ‘That’s life.’ ”
Phil grinned back at him. “Isn’t that a magazine?”
“It’s whatever you make of it, Phil, whatever you want. I think Selene’s just over there, by the way, not that it’s any sort of hint….” he pointed off towards the left, ahead of their path as led by Akcuanrut and D’lon-Ra, following Na-Noc, who was evidently headed towards Zampulus, but with curious side jaunts at long intervals, which the two evidently felt obliged to investigate, not trusting that these excursions by Na-Noc from the direct path to his Temple and Throne didn’t constitute a threat of some sort.
With a cheery wave, Phil ran off in that direction and Thundercloud carried on at an amble, feeling awfully pleased with himself as a matchmaker and lonely hearts advisor. Emily couldn’t help but smile, though, at the portentous name he’d taken on, ‘Or should that be pretentious?’ he thought.
When next the centaur stallion saw Phil, he and Selene were walking hand-in-hand back toward the main group, Selene as impeccably outfitted for the buxom barbarian babe trade as ever, but Phil was looking a little… disheveled, so Thundercloud was very pleased indeed. If there’s one thing more satisfying to a parent than dispensing sage advice, it’s having that advice acted upon with such alacrity. He waved at them and called out, “Selene! Phil!” feeling an expansive bonhomie. “What news from the front lines?”
Both of them blushed very prettily, and Thundercloud smiled. As they approached, he said more quietly, “I take it, then, that your… conversation went well?”
Selene answered for both of them. “It did. We’re going to get married officially,” she said and grinned. “I never thought I’d say that with such happiness, and from the extremely interesting perspective on marriage I now possess, but here I am.”
“That’s wonderful news, Selene. I’m very happy for you both. I suppose Akcuanrut would be the nearest civil and religious authority, and I’m sure that he’d be glad to perform whatever ceremony is appropriate to this world.”
“Actually, we’d like you to officiate at the ceremony, Thundercloud,” she said. “My Phil is Jewish, and the Ketubah is a contract between the woman and the man as individuals, as well as members of the larger community, so anyone can lead the service, more or less, as long as the proper formalities are adhered to.”
“I’d be honored, of course, Selene. What would I have to do?”
“Well, first we’ll have to draw up the Ketubah, the formal marriage contract, which spells out our obligations to each other.” She smiled and said, almost whispering, “Did you know that in Jewish law the husband is required to give sexual pleasure to his wife? The wife can bring a legal claim against him if he doesn’t live up to his legal obligations! Think of how many marriages might have been saved if that were part of every marriage.” She rolled her eyes expressively, then raised her voice again. “Anyway, we’re going to use an egalitarian format, because we both know who’s going to be doing the lionesses’ share of the ‘protecting,’ at least from physical dangers. Once we get back, we can have it copied over in fine calligraphy, but for now the plain text will do. Phil will tell you what we agreed on. We’ve already taken care of many of the details, since Phil was able to conjure up two very nice rings already.” She held up their hands, still entwined, to show off their wedding bands, rather elaborate by modern standards, but she was a barbarian, after all.
It wasn’t at all lost on Emily that they were already wearing their rings, so he imagined that Phil’s rumpled appearance was probably the result of their practical embarcation on their intimate married life, a bold initiative which he heartily approved of, given their circumstances. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while you may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying,’ he thought to himself. Since a touch of melancholy added a certain poignancy to every happy occasion, he felt somewhat pleased to feel bittersweet tears well up and begin flowing down his cheeks.
That very evening, when the centaurs had to rest and eat in any case, they held the ceremony. Somehow, Akcuanrut had managed to scare up enough white fabric to create a makeshift canopy, or chuppah, held aloft on sapling poles held in turn by four young centaur fillies from the herd. Thundercloud had set down in his most careful script two copies of the marriage contract — as dictated by Phil — on the finest linen paper they had — a part of Akcuanrut’s magical kit. Wine and ale they had in plenty, since neither of the two native humans — assuming that D’lon-Ra was still fully human, despite his odd appearance and size — thought that ordinary water was fit to drink.
At first he’d been confused by the contract, because it talked about the coming ceremony as if it had already occurred, but then Phil explained that they’d already agreed upon the wording and had exchanged their betrothal vows and gifts privately, so the ceremony was primarily to obtain the required witnesses to the document itself, which belonged, in some sense, to Selene, because it also spelled out her bridal gifts and the payments she was due if Phil died or divorced her. At this point, Selene had interrupted, explaining that the last phrase was actually redundant, since divorcing her would be the very next to the last thing he did in this life, excluding only his last breath. She did promise to make his demise very quick, however, and painless, for ‘sentimental reasons,’ as she put it, which both males present had agreed was very considerate, considering that they didn’t exactly know if she was joking or not.
At the last minute, Phil had suggested that they include three witnesses, to preserve their options, as he’d put it, since some courts might insist upon male signatories with an unclouded history, so they finally wound up with both Mr. and Mrs. Lanyon as witnesses, with each being the backup for the other, plus Akcuanrut as either second or third witness, and a local resident to boot, as well as the duly-constituted local civil and religious authority, a servant of the Imperial Crown.
First Herbert signed as Dr. Herbert ‘Wildflower’ Lanyon the Sixth, MD, PhD, explaining as she did that she’d finally decided on a new name, and had deliberately chosen it to be similar to Windflyer, since, as she’d said, ‘Windflyer is my sister now.’ Then he signed as Emily Anne ‘Thundercloud’ Kennedy-Lanyon, hyphenating his maiden name as a remembrance of his patrilineal heritage. Acky signed last, of course, and had an elaborate series of names, dozens of titles, and a very intricate gold seal, which he applied to both copies of the contract with sealing wax and embedded ribbons, and which all made a fairly impressive document, even without formal calligraphy and elaborate colored inks. Then he cast a spell on both, which he explained would protect both copies from fire, flood, theft, and any possible damage or destruction.
Then came the fun part.
Akcuanrut and Thundercloud led Phil beneath the chuppah canopy, perhaps one of the more notable sights one might see, with an unclothed centaur and a formally-robed Wizard in ceremonial garb leading a young man in Highland dress — kilt, sporran, plaid, ruffled blouse and all — beneath the wedding canopy, where they waited while Windflyer and Wildflower led Selene — tastefully-attired in her leather bustier and not much else, aside from her ubiquitous knives — three times around the chuppah, which Phil explained reënacted through symbolism a wife’s particular power and duty to protect her husband, and her future family, from both moral and physical harm.
Then Phil took Selene’s hand, placed the ring he’d made upon her ring finger and said, “With this ring, I, Philip Avraham Cohn, consecrate and sanctify you, Selene, to me as my wife according to ancient Jewish tradition and betroth you to me in everlasting faithfulness forever. I shall treasure you, nourish you, and respect you as have all those husbands who have devoted themselves to their wives with love and integrity throughout the generations. ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart, like this seal upon your hand, for love is stronger than death.’ Let our home be built on truth and loving-kindness, rich in wisdom and reverence. May we always keep these words from the Song of Songs in our hearts as a symbol of our eternal commitment to each other: ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.’ I joyfully enter into this covenant and solemnly accept its obligations forever and for all time. My promises to you, in the presence of our loving friends, are valid and binding under the laws of this and every world.”
After Phil had finished, Selene took his hand in turn, placed the ring he’d made for them upon his ring finger and said, “With this ring, I, Selene Utterson, consecrate and sanctify you, Philip, to me as my husband according to ancient Jewish tradition and betroth you to me in everlasting faithfulness forever. I shall treasure you, nourish you, and respect you as have all those wives who have devoted themselves to their husbands with love and integrity throughout the generations. ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart, like this seal upon your hand, for love is stronger than death.’ Let our home be built on truth and loving-kindness, rich in wisdom and reverence. May we always keep these words from the Song of Songs in our hearts as a symbol of our eternal commitment to each other: ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.’ I joyfully enter into this covenant and solemnly accept its obligations forever and for all time. My promises to you, in the presence of our loving friends, are valid and binding under the laws of this and every world.”
Then they held hands and faced their guests, saying together, “We are now husband and wife, and joyfully enter into this covenant with each other in the presence of our loving friends as token and pledge of our eternal troth, and solemnly accept its obligations and joys. Our promises to each other, made in the presence of our loving friends, and including the full terms and written promises made in our marriage contract, are valid and binding under the laws of this and every world.”
Akcuanrut then stood before them both and began chanting in an arcane language that no one but he actually knew, but he’d assured them privately were the traditional marriage blessings on this world, and perfectly compatible with their own traditions. Mercifully, this part didn’t last too long, but then it came time for the toast, in which Phil raised a glass of wine to toast the good health of his new bride, something like RAF pilots toast the King, drank the wine, then wrapped the glass in a linen handkerchief and broke it, crying “Mazeltov!” so that the glass he’d consecrated to his bride could never be used for any other purpose, although of course no one present really knew exactly what the last word meant, other than Selene and Phil himself.
The guests knew enough about theater, however, to realize that it was time to cheer, the which they did with great enthusiasm.
After what seemed like an endless round of congratulations, hugs, and best wishes, the happy couple were shooed off into the darkness, toward a secluded bower wherein concealed were held private conversations in which we have no further interest.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Sixteen
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;— Lord Byron
The Golden Treasury
‘She walks in beauty, like the night’ [1875]
Selene didn’t think that they were any more insufferable than any newlyweds — not that she’d had much experience, since she’d obviously never been a bridesmaid, nor been invited to any wedding or baby showers. She was feeling a little miffed, though, when Rhea rolled her eyes at an offhand comment she’d made about Phil at supper time…. Okay, maybe it had been a tiny bit gushy…. “What? What’s your problem, Sis? Jealous?” She shot her an arch look than should have fried Rhea right down to a crispy pile of charcoal, if there were really any justice in the world.
To her surprise, though, Rhea didn’t make anything like one of her usual scathing remarks in reply, but simply burst into tears.
Which was an entirely different kettle of fish, of course, so she reached out to hug her close, saying, “I’m so sorry, sweetie. I didn’t mean to be so bitchy, not really,” and petting her hair, as if she were her best friend, which of course she was, when they weren’t getting on each other’s nerves. “What’s the matter, baby?”
Rhea couldn’t speak for a while, but than managed to gasp out, between sobs, “You have all the luck, honey. That bum Tim just bugged out on me…, but your guy stuck like glue!… And he was the only… real Earth guy… my age… in the whole… world!” The last words became increasingly incoherent and staccato, interspersed as they were with sniffles and tears, but the gist was clear enough.
It was very clear to Selene that she’d essentially abandoned her best friend, ignoring her when she was at her most vulnerable, and generally messing up big time. “I’m so sorry, honey. You’re my oldest friend and I’ve let you down, abandoned you when you were a stranger in a strange land. It won’t happen again, I promise.” She kissed her eyelids and petted her again.
“Really, truly promise?” she asked. “Or just, ‘Sure, sure, don’t bother me?’ ”
“Really promise. Too bad there aren’t any malls here, or we could go hang out and shop for stuff.”
“As if!” she pouted. “It wouldn’t do any good, anyway, ’cuz everything just turns into the same old boring barbarian babe outfits as soon as we put’em on.”
“There’s that. Maybe we could get Akcuanrut to put a spell on us to let us change outfits every once in a while…, well, maybe after we save the world and all. It’s handy not having to worry about learning to sew leather or anything, ’cause these foxy little numbers just heal themselves when they get cut or torn, and they seem to wash themselves as well, which is pretty handy in a world without washing machines or ironing boards. What kind of superheroes could we be if we had to say to the villains, ‘Hold on a minute! My Batman cape is out hanging on the clothesline until it dries!’ ”
“We don’t have Batman capes, you nut! Not that it’d be a bad idea. These leather bustiers get a little nippy on cold mornings.”
Selene did a lazy double take and smiled. “Nippy, hunh? I’ll ‘nippy’ you!” and started tickling her, which turned into an impromptu wrestling match, which lasted until they both lay exhausted in the grass, Rhea’s head on Selene’s lap as she played with tendrils of her friend’s blonde hair with one hand, the other behind her own neck as a sort of pillow, watching the stars slowly emerge from the deepening cerulean sky, first barely visible at the edge of her vision, and then as plain as the shadows of the trees overhead. “I’ve missed this,” she said, closing her eyes.
“Me too,” she said.
“Remind me not to forget that we’re the very best of friends, won’t you?”
“To be perfectly honest, I forget sometimes too, sweetie, so you be sure to remind me as well.”
“We weren’t always twins, you know,” Selene said.
“I remember, but what’s it matter anyway? We are now, and that’s what really counts.”
“I wonder if Acky could make us a twin of Phil. If he’d only had the foresight to have a damned brother, I think you probably would’ve liked him.”
“Maybe.” She yawned. “He’s a little bit too stuffy for me, though, I think. I kind’a liked Tim because he was sort of a ‘bad boy,’ more like me, but then he wimped out as soon as things started to get interesting.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe Tim wasn’t quite as bad as he thought he was, ’cause your ‘Mister nice guy’ turned out to be sort of a kick-ass hero when the chips were down. Go figure.” She shrugged, and Selene could feel the movement of her shoulder, if not quite see it in the growing darkness.
One of the moons was rising — neither one of them could really tell them apart yet, at least when they were low on the horizon, which overlaid their inherent color with the hazy bronze of suspended desert dust. Silhouetted against the dusky horizon, Selene recognized her husband approaching and nudged her sister. “Pssst. Here comes Phil if you don’t want to talk to him,” she whispered.
“Nah.” She didn’t move a muscle. “Let’im run away from me if he’s scared.”
As it happened, he wasn’t, saying only, “Selene! Rhea! I’m so glad I found you both, I’d appreciate your help with some strategizing, along with Thundercloud, Akcuanrut, and D’lon-Ra.”
Both women blinked once as they automatically glanced toward the other, subconsciously coördinating their movements as they rose, as gracefully as if they shared the première danseuse position in the Paris Opera Ballet. “What’s up, Phil?” they spoke in chorus.
“I want to talk to the movers and shakers here, all at once, and the two of you are the smartest strategists, especially when you work together. Akcuanrut, of course, knows the most about magic, but I want to go over your experiences in the Lost Temple of whatchmacallit.”
“Zampulus,” they said in perfect synchrony.
“Yeah, that,” he said impatiently. “It’s important, I think.”
They looked at each other and nodded. “Okay, let’s go,” they said.
Thundercloud, Akcuanrut, and D’lon-Ra were waiting for them, standing beside a crackling fire which radiated a little warmth — the evening was turning chilly — and was also in use to heat what smelled like a pot of some sort of stew. Most of the light was supplied by flickering torches which circled the campsite, posted on stakes driven into the ground. The stew smelled good, and the two women were hungry, so they detoured to the pot, found a small stack of flat bread on a cloth spread over a rock, and ladled out two portions.
“Excellent stew, whoever made it,” Selene said as she chewed a bit of stew and bread from her open-face sandwich.
“Yeah, it’s great,” Rhea managed from around a bigger bite. “Who called the meeting?”
“I did,” said Phil tersely, proceeding immediately to his purpose without preamble or apology. “What we’re doing won’t work, I think, because we’re simply reacting to what Na-Noc is doing, with no attempt to out-think him or form any sort of strategic response.”
“Yes, but what can we do?” Thundercloud asked, brows knitted, a little defensive.
In answer, Phil said, “D’lon-Ra, how far ahead of us is Na-Noc right now?”
The tiny warrior squeaked, “About a day and a half’s travel now.”
“How far ahead of us when we started?”
D’lon-Ra blinked, then said, “About eight hours, but that counts Thundercloud’s recovery time after he healed all those men.”
“So he’s been slowly pulling ahead of us, despite his extravagant flitting around?”
“Well, yes….” His squeak was more uncertain.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re being played, I think. It seems clear that Na-Noc is heading toward his Temple, for whatever reason, but we can guess, I think, that he has something stored or hidden there that he thinks may help him, which means that his arrival would be very bad news for us. The side trips are meant to slow us down, because we’re falling into the trap of giving a damn what he’s up to rather than focusing on our real mission, which must be, I think, to simply overtake and kill him on sight, in any way we can. We can’t make any progress on our own agenda while we’re still playing catch-up on his.”
“But what if he’s planting smaller copies of himself, meant to grow and form an army of some sort.” Rhea had raised the objection, but it seemed to be a general concern, to judge from the nods of agreement by several others around the fire.
Phil waved one hand dismissively. “Not a problem, I think. Thundercloud’s analysis at the time, as I understand it from his description of the actual events — and which seems accurate still, based upon what we’ve seen — was that an evil being can never trust anything, not even portions of itself, because Na-Noc knows that even the tiniest portion of himself would be greedy to take complete control, and ruthless once it had done so. Any portion of himself that he left behind would quickly grow in ambition until he became his own assassin.”
D’lon-Ra added, “Having been enslaved by him, listening to his thoughts, I have to agree. That great Champion Na-Noc has been utterly lost to the Light. I was only ‘saved’ — such as I am now — because Na-Noc was jealous of the Heart, and kept his victims well away from it, lest they grasp enough of its deadly power to overthrow him and rule the body in his stead. In this, he reasoned well, because we all would have destroyed him in a heartbeat, had our situations changed. In fact, that was probably the greatest temptation dangling before the slaves, to embrace the evil purpose of the heart in order to coöpt its power and wreak grim ‘justice’ upon the personality of Na-Noc.”
Akcuanrut said, “When you say ‘we,’ do you imply that these other personalities live on in you?”
D’lon-Ra looked a little embarrassed, or perhaps evasive. It was difficult to decipher his still-unstructured face, because it seemed somehow purposeful, a willful manipulation of the leftovers from Na-Noc’s formless body into a semblance of life, not truly life itself. There was no bone beneath the surface of his face, for example, no hidden truth behind the round dome that passed for his skull, because one was always conscious that it was a construct, as artificial in its way as the seeming body of Na-Noc himself. “To some small extent,” he said, “yes, but either they had already succumbed to evil and were burned away when Na-Noc was expelled from this fragment of the body or not enough consciousness was left behind from those few unfortunate individuals who remained to make up any complete individual after — in some cases — centuries of slavery and torture by previous rulers of other bodies and the Heart of Virtue, and then by Na-Noc himself, who came upon the Heart when it had been disembodied for more than a thousand years. I’ve had personal experience of being coöpted for Na-Noc’s purposes, so can testify that he kept his victims starved for any external input, which gradually drove them crazy. The former slaves were so attenuated by long exposure to the Heart itself that they’d been reduced to what might be called ghosts, incoherent memories of pain and malice that drifted through the new body like wraiths through an empty ruin. The newest slaves are the only ones with anything like real personalities, but we all began to drift away, even I, who’d had some magical training and could marshall my thoughts, found it difficult to maintain myself in a state of hope and anticipation, fit to reënter the world. But you see how weak the experience left me; I was only able to form a partial body, and can only hope that the Council may eventually be able to restore my former sense of self, and only then could I count myself as healed.”
Rhea asked, “How was the new body created? And why is it a sort of blob in its resting state?”
D’lon-Ra answered more confidently, possibly because it didn’t concern himself. “After Na-Noc was taken by the Heart, the structure of his body was lost to him, because every embodiment of Life has an inherent good purpose, to be fruitful and to create new living creatures to populate the world. This basic purpose is of course inimical to the Heart itself, and so had to be destroyed first of all. The purpose of the Heart is domination and destruction, only that, because those two intentions comprise the entirety of Evil, and Evil is the Heart’s sole virtue. At that point, the shattered remnants of Na-Noc’s will were able — aided by the malice of the Heart — to lash out against his companions and destroy them, adding their living energy and flesh to his own deadly intention, but the ‘blob,’ as you call it, is only a tool, not a true body, not even truly alive, only an instrument salvaged from the wreck of materials left behind after the Heart’s rampage of destruction, an instrument designed with one purpose in mind, to further dominate and destroy anyone or anything that comes within reach. What might seem ironic in the Heart’s full name, the Heart of Virtue, is literal truth when looked at through the lens of pure evil, because unending malice is the only evil virtue.”
There was a long silence after that, during which no one spoke and the crackling of the fire made the oppressive hush more palpable. Some sort of animal — whether an insect or some other thing off in the darkness beyond the light of the fire — began an irritating high piercing whine, almost at the edge of hearing, that didn’t stop.
Finally Akcuanrut said, in a conversational tone, “I’ll thank you either to keep quiet or go away,” and the shrill keening stopped.
Then Thundercloud spoke, “Well, we seem to be agreed that we have to stop him, and we have to reach the Lost Temple before he does, but how are we to accomplish either task? It seems like he has all the advantages.”
“Not entirely,” said the wizard without any pleasure at all. “His malice may lead him into time-consuming exercises, as we’ve seen in his murder of Red Paint and Medgrid, followed by his need to gloat about his crimes, and thereby cause more mischief, but that’s not much to hope for, since others would inevitably be harmed. Indeed, the greatest advantage his crimes allowed him was the result of the compassion showed by Thundercloud toward Na-Noc’s victims, which delayed us by quite a few hours, until Thundercloud had recovered. While it may be too much to hope that he stages a repeat performance, the possibility exists — which we mustn’t discount — but I can’t see many other particular causes for hope.” He seemed both tired and discouraged; the furrowed lines between his eyebrows deeper, and he stared bleakly at the fire.
After a moment, Phil spoke again, reluctant to interrupt whatever it was the wizard might be contemplating, “I’m not sure if this will work, but there’s a possibility that we might be able to find a shortcut, a way in which we could arrive ahead of Na-Noc, even though he’s faster than we are.”
“And how might this be, Apprentice?” Akcuanrut looked extremely interested.
“In my own tradition, there’s a phenomenon called Kefitzat Ha-Derekh, the Leap from the Path. It’s a means whereby a saintly scholar — let’s call him a wizard — can either be in two places at once, or transport himself instantaneously from one place or another, for the purpose of helping someone.”
“And this means?” Akcuanrut asked.
“After listening to my wife’s story of the trip through the Cave of Despair, it struck me that a similar phenomenon was exploited there, a method of folding space around itself so that what seemed far apart — two ends of a long tunnel — were somehow twisted or folded in such a way that they were actually right next to each other.”
“Yes, yes, and a very pretty trick it was, but what good does it do us now?” the wizard asked.
“First, the centaurs can never catch a fleeing biped over the long haul, despite their ability to put on astonishing bursts of speed over short distances, up to fifty or sixty miles an hour, I suspect. Close pursuit is not how cavalry was used in classical warfare, but was rather meant to supply the sudden rush of overwhelming force from ambush that punches right through enemy defenses faster than the men can run away. It was a good idea to organize an overwhelming force, but only if you can get around the fact that after any sustained effort, the centaurs need to rest and eat for a rather long time before they can do it again. This principle has been utilized over and over again throughout history, Cavalry requires advance planning and extended logistics, but fast patrols of any length are best performed by men on foot. Bipedal movement is the most efficient in the world; a fit man can outrun a fit horse over the long haul; and you can’t beat physics, no matter how hard you try.”
“So what are we supposed to do? Give up?” Rhea asked.
Phil shook his head in negation. “We need to take a shortcut, the Kefitzat Ha-Derekh, the phenomenon you all encountered in the cave. I know something about magic from my previous studies, and there are two overall ‘rules’ that define and constrain most magic, at least on Earth, and we know that there are similarities between the magic here and the equivalent back home, since Na-Noc was able to use it to return here, even though it seemed to be inimical to him personally. The first rule is The Law of Similarity; that is, if something looks like something else, or is in any way similar, it can form a link to it, allowing the magician to affect something far away by acting on something close to hand.”
Rhea scoffed, “So what are we supposed to do? Make a voodoo doll and stick pins in it?”
Phil looked thoughtful. “I hadn’t thought of it, but that might actually help, since D’lon-Ra was in close contact to Na-Noc for quite some time. It’s a style of magic that isn’t practiced here, as far as I know, but it can be very effective.” He glanced over at Akcuanrut, who seemed interested. “We’ll think about that later. Right now, we want to get ahead of Na-Noc, so we can lay a trap for him, rather than wait for him to lay a trap for us.”
“And does my esteemed Apprentice have any suggestions on how to make this miracle possible?” Akcuanrut seemed almost gleeful, as if he were listening to a good joke, for which he already knew the punchline.
“I do. I understand that an arrow and a length of cord were used in the so-called endless cave of despair, where the folding of space occurred. Do we still have these things?”
Akcuanrut blinked in surprise. “I believe so, yes. Yes, indeed. Do you need them now?”
“Not yet. In fact, I don’t want to touch them at all, because my own tradition is much more like the magic you showed me, Master Wizard, requiring the focus of the unaided will rather more than talismans and tricks with magical laws. I’d like to avoid contaminating the objects with conflicting traditions by contact.”
“True,” the wizard said. “I’d noticed that your execution of spells of pure power was flawless, but sigils, medallions, and talismans were not your forte. Nonetheless, the physical objects you describe are ready to hand.”
“Good, in fact, excellent, which brings me to my second point. Now the other general rule of Earth magic is the Law of Contagion, which posits that things once in contact with each other can continue to affect each other, even over large distances. This is the general principle relied upon by dice players, who believe that they can use ‘body english,’ for example, to affect how the dice roll even after they’ve left their hands, or may blow upon the dice with their own breath, ‘inspiring’ the formerly inanimate objects to follow the will of the player as if they were a part of his own body.”
“I’m beginning to see, my Apprentice, and find our rôles reversed for a moment; the student teaches the master. Although not expressed quite so clearly, I see the applicability of your two ‘Laws’ to our native sorcery, which uses the very same laws, as well as others you may not have on your world. So I have upon my very person an object which has been used to probe this ‘fold’ in space repeatedly, since we passed through it many times over many hours, and the fold itself is magical, and thus subject to the will. Having been once in proximity, this object can act as a fulcrum upon which my own will can act.”
“Yes! There’s a brilliant scientist in Earth’s history named Archimedes, who discovered how to calculate the volume of irregular objects when bathing in a large tub, based upon observing the volume of the water which had spilled over the brim of a washtub he was bathing in. He’s said to have run naked down the street exclaiming in glee, ‘I found it!’ Anyway, he was an expert in mechanical devices, the beginnings of Earth science, and he once said, ‘Give me a lever long enough, and a place on which to stand, and I could move the Earth itself.’ The point is that with appropriate tools, and an appropriate frame of mind, one can do almost anything.”
“Brilliant, my good Apprentice! My difficulty was in being able to shift my viewpoint far enough to one side that I could stand outside the problem, as it were; but you’ve given me a place to ‘set the fulcrum,’ the ‘place to stand’ from whence I too can move mountains, if not the world itself.” He turned to address Selene and Rhea. “Honored Ladies, does Phil’s analysis meet with your approval?”
They looked at each other without words, as if communing through mental telepathy, then Rhea nodded and it was Selene who spoke for both of them, “Yes, with one exception; we believe you should send only a portion of the herd, the largest portion, ahead. That is, if you have sufficient control of this effect to do it twice. We suspect that Na-Noc is spying on us, because of course he can trust in nothing, not even malice. So you should maintain your seeming pursuit of Na-Noc for at least a half day, or a full day more, falling steadily behind, as if your forces were weakening or falling into disagreement, which is exactly what Na-Noc would expect, we think. This would give Na-Noc the illusion that his tricks are working, and so encourage him to dawdle along the way, possibly seeking ways to inflict greater mischief. Only then should we bring the remainder of the group forward, having given the larger portion of our forces time to settle themselves in fortified positions suitable for ambuscade, and to offer shelter and support to the rear guard when it arrives. The only problem will be Thundercloud, we think, because it may be difficult to maintain discipline without his calming influence on the herd. With it split in two, there are potential problems.”
Thundercloud spoke up then, “I don’t think it will be all that difficult to maintain order. There are far too many mares in the herd for long-term stability, and plenty of centaur stallions hovering around over the hills on either side of us willing to take portions of the herd at a moment’s notice, although they’re intellectually interested in the breeding program, and have allowed their female companions to join us for the duration, but only for the good of their herds. Do you have any method of handling the problem magically? I find it difficult to imagine… visiting every centaur woman in turn, or in fact to so flagrantly violate my marriage vows, which are very important to me. For all my evident… prowess, Don Juan I’m not.”
The wizard laughed in pure delight, saying, “I think so, although you’ll have to find a single willing mare in estrus, but I can expand upon that one act to extend the effects through an arbitrarily large portion of the herd, just as I did with their appearance earlier.”
He looked at the Wizard suspiciously and said, “And are you aware of any particularly suitable candidates?”
“Of course, my dear Sir. I’d be a very poor Wizard if I couldn’t handle a simple fertility spell.”
“And the lucky girl is…?”
“As it happens, the only centaur mare just now entering estrus is Windflyer, of course, and I did promise her a boon.”
Emily rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, crap.”
The Wizard only laughed, but after the tension of their discussion of the Heart, the delightful sound of his untroubled laughter cheered up everyone but Thundercloud.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Seventeen
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Anyone who knows anything of history
knows that great social changes are impossible
without feminine arousal.— Karl Marx (1868)
“Late that night, after finishing his inspection of the outer boundaries of the host to ensure their collective safety, and to confer with some of the always-nervous and contentious flanking stallions, Thundercloud trotted back toward the campsite, where the human members of their party were sleeping. In a meadow nearby, Wildflower, his husband, and Windflyer, the previous leader of his herd, were grazing close together, head to head, so that one faced in the opposite direction to the other, guarding each other’s flanks in close coöperation.” He came to an abrupt halt, all his senses on alert, as he inhaled the faint trace of an intriguing, make that compelling, scent. He breathed deeply, noticing for the first time an increasing heaviness in his groin, a sense of fullness he’d never experienced before.
“Hello, Thundercloud,” both women spoke as one. “Fancy meeting you here,” Herbert… Wildflower added, turning to face him with a smile.
For some reason, he didn’t know what to say. Both of them were looking at him very strangely. “I… unh… I was”
Wildflower said, “What’s the matter, Honey? Cat got your tongue?”
“No! I was….”
Windflyer broke in before he’d had a chance to gather his thoughts, “I don’t know, Wildflower. I get the impression he’s not very happy to see us.” She twisted to face her companion saying, “Do you think he’s happy, Sister dear?”
“I think he looks awfully tense, Sister. Perhaps he’s just had a hard day. What’d’you think?”
Windflyer smiled. “Of course! That must be it. He’s had a hard day and he just wants to unwind a bit, kick back, put his feet up… Oh! Wait! He can’t do that any more, can he, Sister?”
“Not a bit of it. I told you how it used to be with him. Work, work, work, almost all the time, and of course he can’t sit down at his desk thingie like he used to do.”
Emily was confused. It sounded like she was conflating their lives together into a mishmash, so Emily was actually Herbert in her mind, and of course vice versa. “But… but…,” he stammered.
“Oh! Isn’t that so cute, Windflyer. He likes your butt!”
“Wildflower! Do you think he’s getting fresh with us?”
Herbert leaned over and stroked his pizzle, which Emily suddenly realized was fully erect. “Well, if he’s not getting fresh, Windflyer,” she said, “he’s certainly awfully glad to see us, aren’t you, dear?” She didn’t let go, but twisted around so she was somehow able to tickle his back at the same time with her other hand, right at the juncture between his withers and his human back, which somehow made him twitch, then made him want to rear up on his hind legs and do something, and all the while she was stroking him, and he could feel himself swelling, until the need to do something was almost overpowering, and then Windflyer was in front of him, her tail held to one side and she was somehow making her vulva open and shut, almost like winking at him, showing her engorged clitoris in the most shocking of manners, utterly shameless and depraved, and the scent of her sex overwhelmed his senses, clouding his mind, fogging his sense of anything around him until all he could see was Windflyer’s open vulva, winking at him. ‘Hello, Joe, want to give it a go?’ she seemed to be saying and then the tickle on his withers was to much and he had to scratch it, rearing high in the air and his forelimbs fell over her back, and Herbert was holding him right at her entrance, and he fell into a trance of thrusting, once, twice, and he gushed deep inside her, his hands on her breasts, some of his seed spilling out, dripping to the ground, even as he softened and was overcome with shame. “Herbert,” he started to say…
“Shut up, Thundercloud! There’s no Herbert here, only Windflyer and Wildflower and you, and it’s my turn now.” She let loose of him as he shrank slightly, flopping downward as Windflyer stepped forward, releasing him, and Herbert… Wildflower, turned to present herself to him, her feet planted wide, her tail held aside, just like Windflyer’s had been, and her vulva was winking at him, opening, then closing, than opening again, daring him to be what he’d promised, to be her spouse, her mate for life.
“Come on, Thundercloud!” she said, “Be a man! You managed to get it up for my sister wife, now get it up for me!”
“But, Herbert….”
“No more talking, Thundercloud! You belong to the herd, now, and you’ll do your duty for us, or you’ll be replaced by a stallion with some balls!”
“But…”
“Windflyer, dear,” she said mildly, “would you trot over to that copse of trees.” she tossed her head off to the right and pointed with a lazy gesture of her right hand, “and see if the strapping young stallion hidden there would be willing to come over here and take care of some very pressing business for me?”
“Of course, Wildflower, dear. I’ll be right back.” She made as if to start….
…and Thundercloud was furious, enraged! His women were talking about him as if he weren’t even there! Talking about a another stallion as if a stranger, an interloper, would dare to approach his women! “Windflyer! Don’t move! Wildflower, shut up!” He reared and struck out at the air with his forelimbs, trying to allay his fury in movement, and he felt himself swelling again, but when he’d lowered himself from his rampant stance, Wildflower was under him, as if by magic, and he’d managed to thrust himself into her with one stroke and had started pumping — it didn’t take more than two strokes — before he was flooding her with more of his copious seed, his hands gripping her breasts almost cruelly as he thrust hard inside her, milking himself with her vulva. ‘Take that, Herbert, and see what you make of it!’
He hadn’t realized that he’d spoken aloud until she answered him, “I intend to make something of it, Emily, in about a year, give or take a few weeks.”
“But, Herbert, when we go back….”
“Oh, do shut up, Emily. You’ve forgotten already that you were a woman, haven’t you? Miraculously enough, you’ve already learned to think just like a stupid man. We’re not going back, Emily. Capisci? Comprende vous? Verstehen Sie? Read my lips. Selene is married now. Do you think she’ll ever go back to being Jack? Rhea is thinking about marriage, and I’d guess that she’ll be married within the month, one way or another. I’m almost certainly pregnant; Windflyer is definitely pregnant, and if you think we’re going to drag our babies, centaur foals, back to Earth to be poked at and prodded by scientists — or spirited away to Area 51 — you’ve got a hole in your head big enough to whistle when the wind blows! This is our home, now, and all we have to do is save it from Na-Noc and his nasty little gang of Dark God thugs and we’ll have a good life here.”
“But our marriage….”
“What!? Our marriage hasn’t changed by one jot, one tittle, Emily; it’s just that the ‘whatever happens’ clauses have come into effect. You remember that part, don’t you? ‘For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health?’ It’s not an exhaustive list, so you can’t really quibble about this or that which may have been left out through oversight or lack of imagination. Our circumstances have changed is all, and so we have to accomodate them, just as we would any of life’s surprises. Our present culture doesn’t tolerate monogamy, so we’ve had to… adjust our stance on that, but it’s all part of ‘no matter what happens.’ You don’t get a pass because a few minor details have changed.”
“But….”
By now, Herbert… or rather Wildflower… was furious. “But nothing, ‘Thundercloud.’ You were big on talk just a few days ago, when you told me who was boss in no uncertain terms. Well, here we are. You’re the boss, and now you want to take it all back? What? It’s too much responsibility? No way, José! You made your bed and now you get to lie in it! You owe me, Mister, and you owe my sister-wife Windflyer big time, because she gave up her former life for you, and entrusted the herd to you, all on the strength of your goddamned word!” She turned pointedly away.
“But….” he started to say….
She whirled on him, angry and shaking, “Get out of our sight, you bone-headed lout! You pathetic little worm!”
He looked from one to the other, finding no sympathy at all in either stony gaze. “Alright,” he said, and walked away.
Phil was talking to Akcuanrut about the insights that Sir James George Frazer had brought to the study of religion and magic in his still-controversial book, The Golden Bough, which they’d discussed at some length in released-time classes during his junior year, but wasn’t having much luck.
“But why doesn’t everyone in your world share a common view of the supernatural realm?” the wizard asked reasonably. “It makes no sense. When I ventured out among the people of your world, I saw with my own eyes creatures clearly aligned with darkness, and others who’d devoted their lives to the Light, but now you tell me that this was all some sort of ‘joke,’ that the demons and angels were just children dressing up in fanciful costumes for their own amusement, and with no intention other than to obtain candy and sweets from others who were in on the ‘joke.’”
Phil shrugged. “That pretty much sums it up,” he admitted. “In fact, Frazer’s book — which tried to put religious ‘belief’ on a scientific basis, and refused to privilege certain belief systems over others — is still excoriated by many partisans as blasphemous and wicked.”
Akcuanrut slowly shook his head from side to side, clearly baffled. “Here in our world at least, everyone knows of the historical struggles between the Darkness and the Light, and you can easily see the effects, structures created by one side or the other, rock fortresses melted by demonic fire into slag, even here in the hinterlands, and people who can tell you which of their grandfathers, or great-grandfathers, fought in particular battles. Even now, we’re pursuing a minion of the Dark, and can easily see his inimical effect upon the world in the murders and social damage he’s managed to achieve in only a few days.”
“Well, it’s difficult to explain. Magic is widely seen on Earth as merely wishful thinking — the naïve imaginings of children and mental defectives — and the further-removed from any sort of verifiable reality belief in anything — whether good or evil, or any sort of God or Demon — is, the better we seem to like it. There’s even a joke about it, making belief in impossible things a sort of contest in which one gains points by embracing utterly foolish notions.”
Akcuanrut rolled his eyes. “It must be difficult, living in a world so far removed from objective reality.”
Phil laughed. “I have to confess that there’s an immediacy here that’s refreshing. It’s very easy to discover where people stand, because there’s a… smell — not really an odor, but more than a mere feeling, something tangible, perceptible — that let’s one know where people are on the spectrum from light to dark. I had a career planned, back on Earth, and expected to spend years working toward what I suspect may have been a fairly unsatisfactory existence, but have simply fallen into what seems to me like a perfect life straight out of high school, with a woman I love with all my heart, a life’s work that I’m proud to embark upon, and only the minor difficulty of the possible ending of the world to stand between me and perfect happiness. Even there, at least I know that I’m on the right side, whether we win or lose.”
“Very mature, my young Apprentice. It always helps to keep a sense of humor about life. That’s another interesting irony, that Na-Noc and those like him rarely laugh, or indeed take any real pleasure in anything. If you want to conquer the world, what’s the point if you can never have any fun with it? Is it time for breakfast yet?” he asked wistfully.
They both laughed. It was still dark, but rapidly progressing toward faint hints of a dusky-yellow dawn, the light of which was just now beginning to obscure the myriad stars visible in a sky that had never looked down on an electric light, had never been obscured by the overwhelming byproducts of an industrial civilization, the sort of unpolluted world that mankind had known in the earliest days of Earth, still unsullied here. It struck Phil suddenly that he was living in an edgy sort of Paradise, complete with subtil serpent and many dangers, but also containing the very real possibility of joy.
Akcuanrut was something of a gourmet, and made sure that everyone knew it, especially when dealing with the limited supplies they had with them. One of the few things he regretted about his unwilling plunge into the fascinating land of Earth, as he put it, was that he’d necessarily left most of his baggage behind, including his stores of victuals and drink. ‘It’s all very well traipsing off to save the world,’ he’d said often enough that Phil could already almost finish the litany of vague regrets for him in his own mind, ‘but that doesn’t mean that one must skip nourishing meals of delectable viands.’
“Well, if it isn’t, it will be soon. The centaurs will take forever straggling in, so we’ll have plenty of time to talk and eat. Would you like me to prepare something to tide us over?”
The wizard beamed. “Of course! You’re an excellent cook, my boy, and will make your wife very happy. I’ve already noticed that she’s not very domesticated.”
“True. She’s a wild one, but it’s far more delightful to have an eagle fly down and rest upon your shoulder than it is to have a chicken sit on your head.”
The wizard looked at him with deep suspicion. “I get the distinct impression that a joke has been made at my expense, since I know nothing of either eagles or chickens.”
Phil waved his hands in mute apology. “They’re two types of bird on Earth. The eagle is a majestic raptor, beautiful in flight, but a wild and dangerous predator when approached. The chicken is a small domestic bird raised by farmers for eggs, feathers, and meat, a commonplace notion in our world, if not a daily sight in city life. What I meant was that my lady wife is more woman than any woman has a right to be, that she’s dangerous and exciting, and that there’s no flattering comparison to be made between any domesticated hen and her.”
“Oh,” he said, then continued, “Well, that goes almost without saying; even I, a lifelong bachelor, can see that. We live in interesting times, my dear Sir, and it takes interesting people to thrive in such an age as this.”
“It does indeed, Sir. That’s why I feel comforted to have managed to latch onto an interesting woman who’s handier, it seems, at all manner of martial arts than two dozen mutant ninja warriors put together.”
“And I as well, although I’m not familiar with your Nin-Ja warriors. Never have I seen such prowess as the two sisters possess, and I’ve known Emperor’s Champions reputed to have been the greatest warriors in the world in their day. Your lady wife and her sister outshine them all, not to mention being much more attractive than any of them. Please take no offense, but I doubt that there exists in this world anyone even remotely like to either, much less the pair of them.”
“None taken, Sir. It’s churlish to quarrel with simple truth. There’s an old song about the plight of husbands with beautiful wives, the point of which is that it’s much easier to rest easy if one’s wife is rather plain. I flatter myself that I have no reason to worry, but in the end, we all depend upon faith and trust, and at least I don’t have to worry much about brigands and casual thuggery.” He smiled. “And if I get good enough at wizardry, maybe I can protect her every once in a great while.”
“Perhaps, my friend. We all have our rôles to play, and you have a natural talent for magic that’s perfectly astonishing.”
“Ahem!” Thundercloud’s voice came from the dark behind them, the speaker hidden by the shadows cast by the fire, but growing more plain as he approached, obviously dejected.
Akcuanrut spoke first. “What’s wrong, Thundercloud? You seem out of sorts, yet the spell I set on you last night has been triggered, so obviously our purpose has been well-effected, twice, in fact, and there are now one thousand, nine hundred, and eighty-five centaur mares pregnant in your direct bloodline, more successful in the reproductive sense than any centaur before you, and likely any centaur to come. The bards will sing songs about you.”
This knowledge seemed to affect him badly, because he groaned, put his hand over his eyes, and said between clenched teeth, “But I also managed to piss off both Herbert and Windflyer, and I’m not exactly sure how or why.” Then, he realized what the wizard had just said and his eyes grew wide. “That many? Oh, my God!”
“With that attitude, I’m not surprised that your wives are angry with you,” the wizard said acerbically. “Did you say anything else too them even half so stupid?”
“Stupid!? I just had sex with another woman! Then I had sex with my husband in front of her! I don’t know about you, but….”
“Be quiet!” the wizard shouted, angrier than either Phil or Thundercloud had ever seen him, “This is exactly what we’d agreed upon, the necessary means to attract the loyalty and service of a centaur army larger than any host that had been gathered before in all of recorded history! And now you have the nerve to betray your wives, to belittle their wished-for pregnancies, the potential salvation of your entire race, and now you have the effrontery, the unmitigated gall, to come whining to me, the Dean of the Emperor’s College of Wizards and the Emperor’s closest advisor, and complain about the singular honor accorded you by both the males and females of your adopted race?”
“But….”
“But nothing!” he said grimly. “I strongly suggest you trot back to your wives and apologize sincerely for your boorish behavior. Perhaps you can pass it off as a side effect of the spell that drained the vital forces from your brain, although I don’t ordinarily recommend lying to women. That might partially restore you to their good graces — if they choose to graciously give you the benefit of their compassion and forbearance, of which you are so utterly undeserving — though I personally doubt that it could possibly extend so far as to encompass such incredible thoughtlessness and cruelty on your part, and the longer you delay the more likely this whole enterprise will come unravelled, in which case you can rest assured that your last thoughts — as this world and your old world are utterly obliterated by the machinations of the Dark — will be that this pathetic fiasco, the deaths of billions of innocents, the destruction of every plant and animal that ever contributed their beauty to the vast panorama of life, was all your own damned fault.”
Thundercloud awoke with a start and looked around, bewildered for a few seconds, until he remembered where he was, in an open meadow, on a planet somewhere in space and time completely different from the one he’d grown up on, had matured, married, borne a child, Hastie, who reminded him so much of his father that it had seemed like a miracle sometimes, as if he’d been granted a look backwards in time, to when his own true love was young, just starting out in life, nursing, speaking his first word, walking, riding his first bicycle, going off to school — he hadn’t been scared at all, embracing whatever came his way — and finally coming here, where all their lives came together in a crucial entanglement of possibilities, where they made a stand, declaring what their lives had meant together, what they’d accomplished, where they’d been, and where they’d go on from here, this moment, this crisis where all possibilities ran together, where their fates collided with the future. It was still quite dark, getting on toward morning, around him the enlarged herd was gathered, scattered widely across the open meadow, two thousand of them, more or less. He’d dozed off, had dreamed for a moment, but was now fully awake and centered in himself, gathering himself together for the defining moment. ‘Si fueris Romæ, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito, sicut ibi’ he thought to himself, although he’d neither read nor spoken Latin since his youth. He’d been just a girl then, still in braces. “When in Rome…,” he spoke aloud.
“What’s that, Dear?” His husband… wife… had evidently been dozing too. Surrounded by so many centaurs, they could all relax a bit more than usual.
“Nothing, nothing at all. I was just dreaming, a nightmare, really, if I can say that without offense.” Idly, he wondered what sort of predators they had here that posed a threat to centaurs, aside from humans, of course.
“That’s good, dear,” she said. “It’s always good to be fresh and rested when one has a big day ahead.”
“It is indeed, my darling girl, my heart’s desire.”
“Looking forward to the start of our campaign?” she asked, moving toward him to take his hand in hers.
He took it gladly, desperately desirous of connection to what and when they’d been to each other before… before all this. “Of course,” he said. ‘One man in his time plays many parts,’ he thought.
“Well, I see Akcuanrut and Phil approaching, so it must be time. And Windflyer, of course, has been close by my side all night long. I can’t tell you how comforting it is to have a sister at last, since I grew up as an only child, and always wanted to have a twin sister.” She smiled at him with such heartfelt joy that a little of it communicated itself to him through the clasp of her hand, the animation of her face and body, the warmth of her familiar flank pressed close against his body. Oddly, he felt comforted, although he wasn’t exactly here for her, other than in a general sense.
“Hello, Thundercloud,” Windflyer said to him, approaching him from the other side, till then unnoticed, and taking his other hand. As if they’d practiced, both women leaned away, stretching his shoulders with the weight of their upper bodies, dispelling a tension between his shoulder blades he hadn’t realized existed until it was gone. Then they leaned back towards him, releasing his hands and wrapping their arms around his waist, bending over to kiss his taut belly in unison, one on each side, then moving up his upper body until they nibbled on his masculine nipples, so much smaller than he remembered but still sensitive, and then he smelled their hair, they’d twined flowers into their hair as if they were both his brides, the scent enticing in many ways, because it was beautiful in itself, and because it smelled… edible, and all the while their hands were moving over his body, fingertips dancing across his skin, as perfectly synchronized as the Rockettes, their lips touching him, first here, then there, and he felt heavy, swollen, filled with a lust so primal that it surprised him, and a strange new scent crept up from behind him, a heavy, musky odor that whispered inside his head, mute tendrils of thought filled with hidden meaning, an odd scotoma of light flooding the periphery of his vision, golden light with rays that fractured into jagged tessellation’s of every color in the rainbow, slowly merging into a brilliant web of light that caught him in its meshes, making him dizzy, until he staggered, and realized that he was standing on two legs, rearing up, towering over the women beside him, and they were moving, and he was moving, until he gathered one of them between his forelegs and clasped her close, the pressure in his groin communicating itself to her in a peculiar way, and she somehow clasped him to her, and he was moving, sliding, and a deep voice was chanting, the words somehow in harmony with their movements.
“Mabunga! Bombo!” Akcuanrut cried out from somewhere behind him, and the words thrust themselves into his mind, even as he realized that he’d entered a woman for the first time, a woman who stood braced beneath him as he took her virginity, his own first time in a new body, a mutual virgin sacrifice upon… within… a living altar composed of their two bodies, the sweet pleasure of their close connection insinuating itself into his brain, building a purposeful anticipation there that he’d never felt before, an excitement rooted in his groin, but filling his lungs with sweet breath, the very air intoxicating, and the woman was steady beneath him, her hooves rooted strongly in the Earth, as if she bore the entire weight of the future on her willing back, like Atlas shouldering the world, but he could also hear her breathing, at first steady, then excited, rough, the intimate catch in her breath at once so familiar and so strange, hearing it from a different perspective. At once he felt profoundly grateful, in awe of this beautiful woman who offered herself as the crucible in which the future of their people would be purified and exalted, the gateway to the future. Ave Regina Celorum, Felix Femina, Sanctum Sanctorum, Holy of Holies… and he erupted — it felt as if he’d bathed in his own fluids, which came pouring out of him and spilling into her body, into the world — and he gave a great shout of mingled joy and loss.
“Natusok ni manoy ang kanyang hiyas!” the wizard intoned, the bright words echoing inside his head, the light from the words spilling out from his eyes and hands like fireworks and spreading across the world, or was it dawn? He couldn’t tell, because everything was confused, whirling around him and he was still emptying himself, pumping into her womb, into many thousand wombs, and he could feel their hunger for what he offered freely. ‘This is my body, take and use it.’
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Eighteen
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Vixi Puellis nuper idoneus
et militavi non sine gloria…
Once I lived on easy terms with girls,
and in love’s battles was not without glory…— Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Carmina iii:26
Akcuanrut felt very pleased with himself, and with his Apprentice, who’d performed his part flawlessly, extending his range beyond the immediate horde to include every willing centaur mare in the immediate vicinity, all of whom were pregnant now, if they hadn’t been before. With those he hadn’t changed during his first conjuration, the results would be a little more uneven, but it was certain that a new and more robust race of centaurs would be worthy allies against the Dark, and that Thundercloud’s seed would eventually fill the world with his distant progeny. “Shall we be off?” he suggested.
“Sounds like a good idea. Time and tide wait for no man,” Phil said.
“What?” the wizard said, baffled by Phil’s words.
“It’s an Earth saying. It means that natural processes tick right along, whether one is ready or not. It’s getting on toward dawn, and the more distance we can cover before full daylight the better, I’d think.”
“Oh. Why not say so, then?”
“It’s a habit of obscurity, very popular amongst the wizards of Earth. One can speak the most ridiculous nonsense, and if one says it with enough conviction, a great many people will believe you.”
Akcuanrut, that great Wizard, merely rolled his eyes.
Phil was in charge of leading the pursuit, while Akcuanrut was to go off with the supposedly disaffected larger party, so they staged a loud public quarrel, complete with appearances by some of the other centaur stallions as a supporting cast, to stage public battles — a common enough occurrence amongst the stallions in any case — and a milling confusion amongst the larger herd slated to go off toward the rear in a huff. The mares had all thought the whole process was delightfully droll, but D’lon-Ra had assured them that this sort of fractious tension would be exactly what Na-Noc would expect.
Oddly enough, both Selene and Rhea were out of sorts, since Selene had been selected to go ahead with Akcuanrut’s larger group, while Rhea was to carry out the ‘pursuit’ with Phil’s remaining group, which included, through necessity, Thundercloud, as the most visible new centaur, and a number of his wives, all of whom were similar enough to Wildflower as to make no difference at any sort of distance, but neither Wildflower nor Windflyer were coming, since they had very high status amongst the mares, as the two who’d actually mated with Thundercloud, and would be able to hold them together as a unitary force without the ‘help’ of any interloping stallions.
Phil had had the devil of a time convincing Selene to go ahead without him, despite all the intellectual arguments in favor of having her there to supervise their initial investment of the Lost Temple. “Don’t you see, Honey?” he’d said. “I love your sister dearly, but she hasn’t quite the head for strategic planning that you do. I’d trust her with my life in a heartbeat, were we set upon by an army of villains, even two armies! but with all deference and respect, would hesitate to trust a shopping list written by her without your assistance.”
She scowled and said, “Yes, but neither do I trust her fully against the wily Na-Noc. What if he takes the opportunity to turn on the reduced Army, so as to defeat us in detail?”
“I doubt it, Sweetheart. He knows well the power of even two centaurs against him, and we have hundreds, in addition to what must seem to him a powerful Wizard, having seen — or at least we suspect he saw — me ‘defeat’ Akcuanrut with spectacular displays of sound and fury. D’lon-Ra will be able to keep me apprised of his whereabouts, so it seems unlikely that he could arrange any ambush other than a boobytrap, and without explosives it’s difficult to imagine any effective deterrent that could be arranged by a blob on the run, without support. There must be something back in the Temple which he believes will aid him, and since he has no higher purpose or belief than the survival of himself, he’ll have to take advantage of whatever it is. I can’t imagine him sacrificing himself to the ‘Lower Power of Darkness’ for any feelings of loyalty or love, since he has neither.”
She’d grumbled, but she’d left on schedule, after telling him that if any harm came to him, it had better be fatal, since she’d be sure to kill him if he came to any hurt. Phil was pretty sure that she was only indulging in a little hyperbole to make a point, but had assured her that he was probably immortal now, since he’s married a Goddess, and she was slightly mollified, kissing him when they’d parted as if she’d never let him go, but of course she did, and now Phil was faced with executing the biggest, boldest, ‘Hail Mary’ play he’d ever tried.
He called D’lon-Ra and Rhea over, after Selene had finished kissing her sister goodbye, and threatening her as well, if their mutual scowls were any indication, Rhea having been warned to bring back Phil intact, or suffer the consequences. Phil smiled. He loved his wife dearly, but was glad that they were here instead of back on Earth, since her socialization skills tended rather well away from the ‘ladylike’ norms in upstate New York, even in these modern times. He could imagine her discussing the latest issue of House Beautiful only with difficulty, and seeing her perusing the latest trends at Bergdorf Goodman with fashion magazine in hand seemed as ludicrous to him as the two of them flying to the Moon.
“D’lon-Ra, can you tell us where Na-Noc is right now?”
“Of course.” He pointed out across the plain before them toward a deeply-carved butte that rose starkly in the middle of the flat area they were travelling through.
There were other, similar, weathered outcroppings scattered across the plain, but this was the largest of them, about five miles away, if Phil could trust his sense of space and scale in this new environment. “What do you think, Rhea? Shall we make him nervous?”
Rhea grinned, much as a wolf might grin, with no sense of humor at all. “Oh, yeah. I’d like that very much.”
“Then let’s ride, guys and gals!”
With that, they swung aboard the largest of the centaur mares remaining for the trek across the intervening distance, aiming directly toward where Na-Noc lay hidden, spying on them to discover what they were up to.
Rhea whooped in delight to be involved in action at last. “Let’s give the nasty bastard something to really worry about!”
“Exactly!” Phil shouted as the herd of centaurs thundered across the plain, closing on Na-Noc’s lair with most excellent dispatch.
Na-Noc was frightened, panicking, although he’d felt a rush of loathing and triumph when he’d seen the disagreements break out amongst his pursuers. The remaining force was headed straight towards him, a war party of them, a mounted troop led by that cursed off-world Wizard and at least one of the barbarian warriors, galloping at him boldly, as if they could see where he lay hidden and were closing in in triumph, sure of victory. Although there didn’t seem to be as many of them as before, there were still hundreds of the cursed centaurs, and only two of them had been able to cut him almost to pieces with their burning hooves. Plus, that unknown Wizard who’d defeated Akcuanrut had powers that he couldn’t understand — and therefore feared — and he’d just seen the sort of spectacular power he could raise, lighting up the sky in weird rituals the like of which he’d never seen, evidently some intrinsic property of the strange world he’d come from, to judge from that room of hurtful wickedness he’d just barely escaped from there, half-filled with magical tomes whose sole property seemed to be enmity toward those like him, and magical snares, the glass windows which had exploded when he’d cast his Portal spell, burning him like fire, wasting his substance like a candle flame might wither cobwebs. He cursed his own stupidity in coming back to spy out the reason for their delay, because there was no way to retreat in safety until darkness, which was a good ten hours away, and the ice tower was at least two days beyond his present position. From the looks of them, they’d be here at his little impromptu fortress within the hour, probably sooner if they kept up their present pace. Unwilling to face them, he did the only thing he could, and poured himself down through the largest cracks in the rocks, trying to find some place of hidden safety in which to coalesce before the attenuated portions of his body could revolt against his mastership and betray him, either through splitting off to form a rival body, by absconding with the Heart, leaving him powerless, or by mere desertion, like that nasty piece of work, D’lon-Ra, whom Na-Noc could feel headed back toward the Heart, as inexorably as an iron nail drew towards a lodestone.
Akcuanrut, after studying the landscape, thought that they were sufficiently removed from the area that Na-Noc might reasonably have kept under surveillance, and so began his preparations for the masterstroke. As his clever Apprentice had pointed out, magic depends upon one’s stance upon the ground, and upon one’s knowledge of his tools, so he brought out the arrow and string he’d used in the Cave of Despair and levitated it, just as before. To his immense satisfaction, it pointed straight towards the point where it had last felt the mysterious force that twisted the corridor back upon itself, so from there it was a fairly simple task to open a small Portal, sized to fit the corridor itself, so people didn’t inadvertently walk into a wall. “Who’d like go first,” he said cheerfully.
“I will, of course,” Selene said, taking up a torch handily prepared and burning by the entrance to the open Portal, which glowed as a soft amber outline in the air. Without a further word, she ran lightly through the entrance and disappeared without a sound, nor indeed any indication that she’d ever been there.
There was a long silence as they all stood in a sort of inchoate dread and awe, caught between fear that something might have happened to her, and amazement at her casual courage, running boldly into the unknown.
After what seemed like an eternity, she ran out again and said, as nonchalantly as if she’d just stepped out to check the weather, “It’s all just as it was, clear to the entrance to the well we descended from the throne room, and back again to the awful room we found Na-Noc cowering in. I didn’t call up from the entrance to the corridor to see whether your party was still encamped in the throne room, but figured a sudden appearance would be safer, all in all. There’s plenty of room in the corridor for quite a force, especially if we use the cavern off the corridor as a staging point, so I’d say we were ready to proceed.” With that, she turned around, as if she planned to run back in.
“Wait!” Wildflower cried out, forestalling Selene’s impetuous intention. “I’d like to prepare the women to let them know what they’re walking into in slightly more detail. It won’t take but a moment, and we’ll need them to understand exactly what they ought to do. We don’t want them wandering around in areas we haven’t already explored, because there might be more traps, so I’d like Akcuanrut available before we wander off into any sort of unknown territory.”
Selene considered that for only an instant before she nodded her head and said, “Good idea. Go ahead, Wildflower. If we stage the herd in the room off the corridor, it’s immediately to the left, and I’ve already marked the entrance with two white rags on the floor of the corridor and scratched soot marks on the wall to either side. It’s a little difficult to see where the doorway is disguised, so it might be better if you went first to lead them in. Be sure to tell them not to touch anything until we can verify that everything is safe. Once we get up to the top of the well, we’ll hopefully find Acky’s lesser Apprentices waiting for us, and at least a few men-at-arms from D’lon-Ra’s retinue.”
Wildflower asked the obvious question, “What do we tell them about the centaurs.”
Akcuanrut answered, after a moment’s thought, “Nothing right now, I think. I’ll let them know that these are magic horses under my authority, and are not to be interfered with or disturbed by anyone, to prevent either fear or greed if any of the retainers discover that there are centaurs near enough to touch. The sheer size of the supposed ‘horses’ ought to be enough to discourage casual inspection, and fear of me, and of my magic, should disuade the exercise of any further curiosity.”
“In which case, perhaps we should clear the throne room before we clutter it with too many ‘horses,’ and make some provision for sanitation, ”
Akcuanrut blinked, obviously unaccustomed to handling mundane details. “Well, yes…. I suppose I can ask some of my Apprentices to handle that.” Then he brightened and said, “That will give me a reason to clear the throne room as well, to create a stable big enough for all my ‘magic horses.’ Just remember to tell your friends not to let their magic slip until we’ve prepared the way to make this startling revelation in safety.”
“Good enough, I’d say,” Wildflower said. “Shall we start? I’ll just tell everyone to follow the woman in front of her, and lead the way into the cavern off the corridor. It ought to be big enough to stage our forces for an hour or two, but I don’t want to be cooped up down there for any length of time.” She made a face. “Quite frankly, it’s too icky.” Then she had a thought. “Do you think any of the Dark Gods are still hanging around there? That’s where we encountered them before, after all.”
The wizard said, “No, not as I understand their powers, because the presence of Na-Noc gave them access to the room, and the presence of the Heart of Virtue, of course. With both absent, their purview and capabilities will be limited.”
“Okay, just wondering,” she said. With that, she walked back to the gathered centaurs and began talking to them quietly.
“Shall we start?” Selene asked the wizard, obviously anxious to be on their way.
“Yes. Phil will be able to find this spot easily, and restore the Portal now that it’s been set.” He beamed at her. “He’s quite talented, you know. By far the best of all my apprentices, from first to latest.”
Selene grinned back at the portly wizard. “I think he’s pretty darned swell as well,” she said. Then she called out, for the single cogent reason than she’d once seen an ancient John Ford video in monochrome, “Wagons, Ho!” and set off back through the Portal. Akcuanrut followed close behind, in case his magical services were needed, followed by Wildflower, Windflyer, the pair of them almost inseparable now, and the rest of the centaurs with most of the supplies they’d hauled along. It took quite a while before the last centaur had walked through the glowing door into the space hidden somewhere between the wide expanses of the world.
Inside the cavern, the physical darkness was held at bay by hundreds of flickering torches magically conjured by Akcuanrut as he explained how the corridor they’d just passed through was the entrance to the throne room high above their heads, but that they’d have to float up the well-shaft before they could actually see what the situation above them was. “First, though,” he said, “I’d like you all to take a look at the images sculpted on this wall, images in which our enemy so delighted that he chose them to decorate his private antechamber. This is what we’re fighting, a monster dedicated to the most depraved evil. Pay particular attention to the large relief above the doorway into the hall, because it shows centaurs being butchered for their hooves and bones. Our enemy, the Dark, is the being who corrupted human men by tempting them with centaur magic, but only by means of the expenditure of centaur blood and lives. Notice too that the images also depict the butchering of men, because our enemy hates all of life, men, centaurs, even the birds that fly through the sky, the mice that scurry through the grass, and the air we breathe.”
There was an angry murmur of voices that rose to a crescendo of fury. “Let our enemy beware,” one voice rose above the rest.
“Exactly!” said the wizard. “Now, let us go see who’s waiting for us in the throne room above, our one true enemy, or all our friends,” he declared, and with that led them through the door.
Wildflower followed close behind, anxious to be first, whether to encounter friend or foe, because she’d faced their enemy before. At the well shaft, she didn’t hesitate, but allowed the wizard to swing himself onto her back, which he did with surprising grace for such a stout fellow, and leapt out into the middle of the air, then began rising as the wizard began speaking in some foreign tongue, presumably a cantrip of some sort.
As it turned out, it was a good idea, because the wizard’s apprentices and some of the retainers were gathered around the edge of the well and two of the archers had already loosed arrows when the reached the upper edge of the shaft. The arrows halted in mid-flight and the wizard cursed, “Fools! Cowards!” he shouted. “Do you start at shadows and attempt to murder your friends and Master though timidity and nervous fits of utter folly? Use your nerve! Make yourself steel for the sake of our struggle, for our enemy has many tricks to do us hurt, not least of which is encouraging dolts to act in haste! Stand down! All of you, stand down!”
Their weapons lowered, the men at arms knelt and the apprentices quailed before their master’s wrath. “Pardon, Master, but you’ve been gone for so very long, we thought that you’d been killed.”
“So naturally thought to finish the job, now you see me returned from the dead?” he asked with caustic irony. Then his anger abated slightly, and he said, “As you can see, I am unhurt, but the same cannot be said for all our party. D’lon-Ra was sorely hurt, but still alive, I think, and will follow eventually. A caution, though, in that he was touched by our enemy, and is diminished from what he was, and in fact I know not exactly what he is now, so do me the courtesy of treating him well, but with some lingering suspicion. In other words, keep an eye on him when you see him, but with considerably more circumspection than you’ve shown just now. He’ll be the one impossible to recognize, but try very hard not to do him anything but outward honor, since he lost much in our battle with the Dark, which is currently personified in the empty shell of Na-Noc, once the Emperor’s great Champion. We may see more of him later, so beware.”
“Yes, Master,” said what seemed to be the head apprentice.
“My friends will follow at length, including an entire herd or two of enchanted horses, with whom no one is to meddle, nor will anyone make inquiry, other than to ensure that the arrangements are sufficient. Make the throne room ready as a stable immediately, with clean straw for the floor, and fresh grasses and grains and fruits for fodder, and bring me and my friends some food! Too long have I been made to endure camp rations.” Then, as an afterthought, almost, he added, “And someone send a swift messenger to the Emperor, that we have encountered the Heart of Virtue, but have it not yet in hand.” Then, as a second afterthought, he said, “And be very sure that the fodder is of a quality you wouldn’t mind eating yourself, because if I detect any filth or impurity, you will.” And with that he smiled, vaulted heavily off his mount, and took a seat at the same table he’d commandeered so long before.
When no one seemed to be stirring, seemingly still dumbfounded, he shouted, “What? Waiting for a formal invitation to be about your work? Get moving! All of you, get moving! Before I roast your lazy bums with fire!” and there was a sudden burst of energy and people started running….
…which was just as well, because Selene and Windflyer were next up the shaft, followed closely by a large number of centaurs, what seemed like an unending fountain of wild horses, to judge from the startled looks the servants gave them as they went running in many directions, all trying to comply with all the Wizard’s imperious demands at once. “That’s better,” he said.
“Hi, Acky!” said Selene, as she vaulted lithely from Windflyer’s back, who looked about herself in amazement, never having seen the interior of a human structure, nor indeed the outside of a structure big enough to contain the throne room, much less the throne room plus the abominable cavern in the basement.
“Just so you know, Selene, this temple is grandiose even by Imperial standards, made possible only by the fact that they seem to have carved most of its structure out of solid rock.” The wizard spoke as if to Selene, but addressed Windflyer’s obvious concern, confident that she would let the others know. “We didn’t have a chance to tour the entire edifice before we were so rudely called away, so perhaps we can take a ride through the empty corridors, to familiarize yourself with the layout.”
“Good idea,” she said. “In fact, let’s start now, so we can check out possible weak points and potential defenses.”
“Now?” he asked, somewhat wistfully, as he saw his apprentices bringing the first delectables from his store.
“Well, maybe we should grab a sandwich first. It’s been a busy day.”
Akcuanrut rolled his eyes and nodded, gritting his teeth in manful discipline, unwilling to speak just then, lest he regret it later.
D’lon-Ra was screeching in his squeaky little voice, pointing, “Up there! There it is! You can catch him now! Destroy him!” He was still on the back of one of the centaurs, but looked almost set to leap from her back, so eager was he to investigate a cave set high up on the side of the butte, worn and pitted as if by water, but dry as a bone right then. The slope below the cave looked slightly carved as well, possibly by a seasonal stream and waterfall, but the opening wasn’t all that big, and the putative waterfall was at most modest in size.
Phil turned to look at them, “We’re here to harry him, D’lon-Ra, until the main body of our warriors arrive. What do you mean by taking it upon yourself to order me about?” It hadn’t escaped him that D’lon-Ra had said, ‘There it is.’ so his deep suspicions were aroused.
“You! You’re just Akcuanrut’s Apprentice! And this woman is beneath contempt! I’m still the Emperor’s Champion, so I’m in charge here.”
“Shut up, D’lon-Ra!” Phil was instantly wary. That idiot D’lon-Ra obviously had an agenda of his own, and it was making him reckless and foolishly puffed up with his own cleverness and importance, all at once, a dangerous combination in a being less than one foot tall and a brain the size of a cocker spaniel’s.
“You! You!” D’lon-Ra screeched again. “He’ll get away, he’ll take it….”
High above the troop of centaurs and their three riders, Na-Noc was both listening and delighted. He’d evidently been mistaken about the identity of the Wizard from the other world, so the news that this one was merely an apprentice was welcome news. He crept toward the edge of his hiding place, just barely big enough to contain his body. Extending one eye carefully, as if it were a snake creeping toward the edge of the small cave, he managed to catch a glimpse of the centaurs below him, because he knew that it was these who held the power to burn him. There weren’t too many, and it looked like there was a rocky way back up the cliff above him, so if he could capture that noisy little D’lon-Ra again, they’d lose their ability to track him. Perhaps he could kill that apprentice wizard at the same time, weakening his enemies while making him that much stronger. Making his plan swiftly, while D’lon-Ra was still screeching, he gathered himself into warrior form and leapt towards his enemies below.
D’lon-Ra was the first to fall, snatched from the back of a centaur with one hand and clasped to his naked chest, to be instantly reabsorbed, along with all his memories, and Na-Noc then sneered at the pathetic presumptions of these amateurs posing at dangerous adventurers. “Now die, fool!” he cried as he turned from the spot recently occupied by D’lon-Ra toward the amateur apprentice, who stood his ground armed only with a dagger. Na-Noc reached out with one lazy hand, contemptuous of his laughable foe. He only hoped that Akcua… but when he touched the puny thing, something went horribly wrong.
Na-Noc’s screams were almost palpable — shifting up and down a desperate discordant scale at random — as Phil, ever quick at thinking on his feet, grabbed at Na-Noc’s disintegrating arm with his bare hand and began hacking at him with his dagger, and everywhere he struck the evil flesh beneath his blows melted into liquid, and then boiled away into fetid gas, releasing a foul stench into the air. Even the touch of his hand seemed like poison to the creature, the faux-skin and faux-bone melting beneath his fingers like warm gelatine, so it was difficult to maintain his grip, having constantly to shift his faltering hold closer to the thing’s main body, finding new undead flesh to hold, new parts to carve away with his knife, and all the while Na-Noc screamed, “Mercy! Mercy!” wailing in what seemed like agony, not that Phil cared overmuch. In the end, it was as if Na-Noc was pulling himself apart in trying to get away, his attack forgotten, the various bits of him stretching out in all directions, and some clumps were even fighting amongst themselves, such a hive of chaotic activity and disgusting seething that it resembled a time-lapse video of a decaying body, except that bodies don’t usually eat themselves, and don’t usually bubble and vaporize into thin air. Just then, a portion of the body about the size of a jackrabbit managed to separate itself from the main mass, reïntegrate itself into something ugly with four legs, then bolted off toward the cliff, scrabbling upward to escape, and the other bits of the still churning Na-Noc body began to coalesce into four distinct portions, shrinking themselves inward, separating from each other with what seemed almost like aversion once they reached a certain… firmness and structure. it seemed… almost… like meiosis! that form of cell division that creates both gametes and spores, where each part winds up with a different mixture of genes.
In wild surmise, he reached toward the separate portions with his hands and two particular lumps, diametrically opposite and still churning, tried to escape, while the other two showed no such reaction. Steeling himself, he plunged his hands into the mass of squirming not-flesh that didn’t like his touch, grasping all those bits that seemed averse to contact but leaving the rest alone, but every portion that attempted to escape withered and burned away, like Na-Noc himself, so he was left at last with two separate lumps struggling toward coherence and integrity, two nascent shapes emerging from the deliquescing goo that had been Na-Noc, until they looked like two dolls, quite a bit smaller than D’lon-Ra had been, but similar in structure, soft around the edges.
One of the lumps managed to form arms, then legs, a head, eyes, a mouth, and then the other, as if learning from the other’s experience, following along in slightly-tardy synchrony, and then the first helped the other to stand, at first faltering, then stronger, as they supported each other into shaky bipedalism.
Phil looked at the two ‘dolls’ in dawning comprehension, “Mr. and Mrs. Utterson, I presume.”
Both ‘dolls’ looked at him directly, their faces still blurry, not yet not fully formed, seeming twins still, and nodded.
One of the figures, it must have been Mrs. Utterson because he thought that he could see the slight swelling of her bosom, finally managed to open her mouth and speak, pointing toward him at the same time, “Behind you!” she squeaked, so shrill as to be almost beyond hearing.
He looked at her, puzzled. “What?”
She squeaked again, by now very angry, for her reactions were very quick, which made her voice rise to an almost ultrasonic pitch that he could barely comprehend. “Look behind you! You moron! That woman! She’s dying!”
“Woman? What woman?” Belatedly, he remembered Rhea charging with him across the plain to this very spot. “Rhea!” he shouted. He whirled around and looked behind him. Just as he’d been told, Rhea was sprawled across the path, her head hanging over the edge into the dry stream bed that led down from the dry waterfall, while the centaur she’d been riding lay dead on the path below, arms splayed, legs and eyes glazed over.
“Rhea!” he yelled, as if yelling could wake her. He knelt down to look more carefully, but she appeared uninjured except for a dark bruise on one breast, so he undid her watchamacallit to inspect the area more thoroughly. She was breathing, but just barely, and quite unconscious. He was inspecting the bruise, which seemed to be her only real injury, when he felt a tugging at his belt. When he looked down, the tiny woman was shouting at him again.
“She’s poisoned, you idiot! You’ll have to get the poison out of her somehow. If you diddle around like you’ve been doing, she be as dead as her horsey friend in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,”
“But how was she poisoned?”
She looked at him as if he’d suddenly sprouted a carrot on the end of his nose. “Really, does it matter? I assume your mother wasn’t quite as stupid as you are, because you’re still alive rather than being flushed down the toilet with the dirty diapers. Get it through your thick skull, dimwit, she’s poisoned! She’s going to Dee—Aye—Eee die while you sit here dithering. She was poisoned by Na-Noc, of course, and I presume his motive is obvious, or would you like to discuss the subject at length? I don’t know where he lived as a child, but doubtless you’ll find it a fascinating topic of conversation. Perhaps you could wander off and find an atlas of the world so we could try for a lucky guess. Nice weather we’re having today, isn’t it? Say, how about those Nicks? Twit!” She kicked his ankle in disgust, but he could hardly feel the impact.
Finally, his brain seemed to be working again, but it wasn’t doing him, or her much good. His touch had been inimical to Na-Noc, but he had no idea why, and when he’d touched her breast to inspect the bruise, not only had there been no entry point that he could see, but his touch hadn’t affected her. The bruise must be significant, though, and then he remembered something about Vodun and what they called ‘spirit arrows’ that could magically penetrate the skin and cause death through the ill wishes of the sender. Caught in time, the Mambos — the Vodun Priestesses — could supposedly cure the death wish with a blessing of some sort, but he had no idea what was involved. A chicken? No chickens around that he could see. Then he had a thought; if Na-Noc could kill with a wish, why wasn’t he dead? The only difference between them that he could see was that she was female and he was not, but that didn’t make sense, and he was married… she was not… “Eureka!” For some strange reason that he didn’t have time to figure out, kiddushin must have made the difference. The blessing? Quickly, he spoke the bracha of Refuah Sh’lemah, no joy. He had no water to wash his hands. Damn! He tried it again, this time touching her, laying his hand upon her breast, right on top of the bruise, which was growing rapidly draker as well as larger. Nothing, except she sighed as if she were giving up. Then in desperation, he did the only thing he could think of, a consecration, since a consecration requires no particular belief, a quality of existence and personal faith that he was a little behind on, even on his better days.
Quickly, he turned to the Uttersons behind him, “Be my witnesses,” he said, and conjured up about a pound or two of gold, surely enough, he thought, as a token.
“On this day, before these witnesses,”he said, speaking as quickly as he could, “I consecrate and sanctify you to me as my wife according to the laws and traditions of Moses and Israel. I will work, honor, feed, and support you in the custom of Jewish men, who work, honor, feed, and support their wives faithfully. I will give you the settlement of virgins, two hundred silver zuzim, which is due to you according to Torah law, as well as your food, clothing, necessities of life, and conjugal needs, according to universal custom. I further give you an additional two talents of gold, these sums to be paid from the entire best part of all the properties and possessions that I own under all the heavens, whether I own this property already, or will own it in the future. I further give you on your father’s behalf a dowry of some odd sheqels of gold, the amount to be determined upon weighing later. The obligation of this marriage contract, this dowry, and this additional amount, I accept upon myself and my heirs after me. All of it shall be mortgaged and bound as security to pay this marriage contract, this dowry, and this additional amount. It can be taken from me, even from the shirt on my back, during my lifetime, and after my lifetime, from this day forward and forever.”
Then he turned to the Uttersons and said, “Say that you have heard this contract made between us.”
Startled, they nodded, then said, “Yes.”
“Good enough.” He began to chafe her hand, saying, “Rhea, do you accept?”
She roused slightly, her color already improving. “Wha… yeah, sure. What’s going on?”
“Na-Noc poisoned you with some sort of death-wish, like a Voodoo curse.”
“So am I dead?” Now she was feeling much better. She struggled to get up but Phil put his hand on her shoulder to stay her.
“Lie still, Rhea, because you were very badly hurt and fell off your friend the centaur, who is dead through Na-Noc’s malice. I certainly hope you’re not dead, but move slowly until we can see whether the fall injured you or not, I’d hate to save your life and then lose you through over-zealous exercise of what might be broken bones, although I might be dead soon, when Selene finds out how I saved you.”
“Where is the nasty little turd, anyway?” She looked around them suspiciously.
“Na-Noc? He ran off like a jackrabbit, literally, only quite a bit uglier than the average jackrabbit. Bugs Bunny, he was not.”
Then she looked down at herself. “And could you please tell me exactly why my boobs are showing?”
“Look for yourself. See that bruise? That’s where the death-wish struck you, as far as I can tell. Ask her if you don’t believe me.” He pointed at Mrs. Utterson.
She blinked in surprise. “Who are they?”
“As far as I can tell, Mr. and Mrs. Utterson, distilled by magic out of what was left of Na-Noc’s body.” He thought about that for a moment. “Selene will be very pleased, I think. Perhaps enough to forgive me for the other thing.”
“What ‘other thing?’ Is that why someone removed my cute little leather bustier?” Oddly enough, she made no particular effort to cover herself, indeed, none at all.
Phil felt very awkward. He swallowed to clear his throat, then blurted out, all in a rush, “Well, Na-Noc tried to eat me, after he ate D’lon-Ra, which was after the little shit betrayed us, because he was after the Heart all along, just as Akcuanrut had feared. Anyway, when he — Na-Noc, that is — tried to absorb me, he started to burn up, and he was screaming, which was very distracting, but I managed to take advantage of his disadvantage to burn up quite a lot of him. Then, after a while, it became clear that there was more than one entity inside what was left of his body, one of whom I think was Na-Noc himself, but he escaped with the Heart off up the cliff, but very much diminished in size. There were four ‘lumps’ inside the body evidently struggling for control, and it reminded me of meiosis for some reason, the process by which eucaryotes create gametes for sexual reproduction, sorting out different characteristics into segregated haploid eggs or spermatozoa, so at that point I decided to use my newly-discovered ability to discourage creatures of the Dark by eliminating the two lumps who seemed to be evil — or at least they burned up when I touched them — so I think one of the two evil figures must have been D’lon-Ra, reverted to his natural state after being eaten for the second time. I have no idea who else was in there, but the two ‘good’ lumps got stronger over time, and gradually resolved into the two tiny people you see here, whom I firmly believe to be Mr. and Mrs. Utterson, Selene’s parents who were captured and absorbed by Na-Noc in the church. So thinking about the church made me think about how we were able to burn up Na-Noc with the hymnals, but I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t just burn up inside the church itself, and that got me thinking about the similarity between the hymnals,the stained glass windows, even the pulpit, and me. Every one of them — the hymnals and all, that is — had a dedication at the front, or on a brass plaque on or underneath it, where some family or person had dedicated them to the church as a particular gift set aside for religious services. Then I thought about our marriage, which uses a phrase that essentially does the same thing, consecrates and sanctifies one’s spouse as one’s wife or husband, so that’s when I had the sudden flash of insight: Dedication to a higher purpose must be inimical to the Dark, probably especially marriage, because it exists — at least in part — to sanctify sexual relations and the creation of new life, so I thought that Selene’s consecration of me as her husband is probably what saved me, nothing to do with me at all. Anyway, you were clearly dying, and Mrs. Utterson thought so too, and goaded me on, saying that I was an idiot — begging your pardon, Mrs. Utterson, but it made me mad — so I did the only thing that I could think of to ‘sanctify’ you enough to counteract the poison, and so married you with the non-egalitarian ceremony — which goes back to the olden days and only requires the wife to assent, not participate in the ritual of consecration as such — and you weren’t exactly capable of coöperating, for what it’s worth. And when you started to recover, you said ‘Yes,’ sort of, and were raring to go just a few seconds later. So there we are. Anyway, here’s your dowry,” he handed her a leather pouch he’d found among their supplies, but looked strong enough to safely carry the gold, so it was wasted on what looked like oatmeal, “and we can have the ‘marriage’ annulled later, so Selene won’t kill me.”
Rhea shook her head in instant negation. “Hold on a minute, cowboy! You say that this marriage will protect me from Na-Noc? Why on Earth — or wherever we are at the moment — would I want to give up magic armor like that in the middle of a war?” Then she looked at what he’d handed over, hefted it in her hand. “Say, this seems to be a whole lot more than what you gave Selene!”
“Well, I was in a hurry, and I didn’t have time to calculate how much I needed for the old-fashioned ceremony, and your father wasn’t there, so we couldn’t negotiate the necessary dowry, so I just sort of guessed what would be appropriate and gave you the required dowry on his behalf. It was all very irregular.”
“But it seems to have worked, didn’t it?” She looked thoughtful, an expression he’d seen on Hastie’s face many times, and didn’t fully trust at all.
“Well, yes,” he said reluctantly. “Although of course Na-Noc has other weapons. Knives, swords, even clubs are just as efficacious against us, but his peculiar horror, the ability to kill with a touch, and to absorb people into his undead body, seems ineffective against a consecrated opponent. The amounts are really symbolic, in any case, since they merely represent a moderately comfortable retirement in ancient times, so any amount will do, actually, as long as there is something of value given to the bride, so your consecration is spiritually valid, whatever the civil authorities back home might say.”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What about my ring? Where’s my ring? Isn’t that customary too? It’s a lucky thing you didn’t kill me, forgetting an important detail like that!”
“Well, yes, but….”
“I want to see a ring on that finger pronto, Mister.” She waggled her left-hand finger under his nose. “If I’m going to be protected, I want the first-rate stuff, the real McCoy. I might have a relapse otherwise. You never can tell about Voodoo curses. One has to be very careful for years afterward, and even then might turn into a zombie.”
“Years? But…”
“Do it now! Sweetie, or I’ll tell my sister you took advantage of me, and so had to marry me.” She smirked. “You certainly had my top off quick enough, and who knows what else you were up to while I was unconscious.”
“But…. Rhea,” he pleaded, “be reasonable about this! I can’t…. Selene….”
Rhea only smiled. She was quite sure that they could work something out between them, and she’d always been able to talk Selene into just about anything. If being married made her safer from that Na-Noc creep, then married was what she planned to be.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Nineteen
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific — and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.— John Keats On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1816)
“You did what?” Selene screamed reasonably. They were in a private antechamber off the throne room, which they’d commandeered as their quarters. The only light came from torches held in wall sconces, but it wasn’t half bad.
“Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Phil said. “You see….”
“Never mind,” she sighed. “Once was enough already. I don’t expect that hearing it a second time will make any more sense. Please tell me that this was Rhea’s idea. This has all the earmarks of one of Hastie’s ‘Really Great Plans.’ We both know where listening to ‘Hastie’ leads us.”
“Well, to be perfectly fair,” he said, “it was my own idea originally, but Rhea was unconscious at the time, and dying by the looks of it. The centaur she’d been riding, Bluebell I think it was, but it’s difficult to say with them all looking so much alike, was definitely dead, and she had the same sort of bruise on her neck that Rhea had on her upper breast, so I believe that Mrs Utterson, your mother I mean, had it right when she said that she was dying. I couldn’t let her die, could I? I mean, she’s your sister and all, not to mention a fellow human being.”
Selene sighed. “Yes… I mean no, you couldn’t actually let her die, but this is exactly how I always get sucked into her crazy schemes; she makes a ‘simple plan,’ and it all sounds so very logical and reasonable, almost foolproof, but then it turns out that it wasn’t simple at all, except by then it’s too late to stop and I’m trapped on a roller-coaster ride straight through Hell.”
“Well, it hasn’t been all that bad this time, has it?” He looked worried, as well he might, but wanted to point out what she seemed to have overlooked, “If it weren’t for Rhea’s ‘crazy plan,’ we’d never have met… well, you know what I mean… certainly would never have fallen in love and gotten married, so I’m afraid I can’t be too upset about her original plan in this particular instance.”
She thought for a moment, then reluctantly agreed. “True, and I apologize for the careless implication. You’re absolutely right; her last plan turned out well, and especially so for me.” She smiled at him and leaned into an embrace to show she meant it. “This one time, she got at least part of the equation right, and I’m profoundly grateful, but you don’t know what Hastie was like. She had an uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, usually when it came at my expense.”
“Sweetheart, we can’t blame her for Na-Noc, the Dark Gods, and the end of the world as we know it, because that was right on track to happen already, and we just stumbled along in time to… maybe… help to stop it, so that’s another time her schemes turned out to be… if not perfect, at least not so very bad.”
Her brows furrowed. “But isn’t polygamy illegal in Judaism?” she asked, grasping at a straw.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have a straw to spare. “Sort of. Although both legal and common among the Patriarchs, and thus encompassed within the purview of Jewish Law, it hasn’t been permitted for a thousand years, at least in the Western Jewish tradition, but like almost everything in the Law, there are ‘exceptions’ made where not allowing it would be dangerous, or even some sort of hardship. The usual case in which polygamy is definitely allowed involves a woman who is ill, or possibly infertile, but very much loved, and the husband wishes to marry again and have children, which is his obligation as a Jewish man. Theoretically, this sort of thing requires the agreement of a hundred Rabbis, but since there are exactly zero Rabbis available here, that would be classified as a hardship, so of course there’d be an exception made, if anyone were around to do it, and so the buck, as they say, stops here.”
“And as she cleverly pointed out,” Selene extrapolated, “if being consecrated to you in marriage might help to save her life if Na-Noc — or any of the Dark Gods — attacked her, which they’re almost certain to do eventually, since we mean to deliberately get in the way of their plan to destroy this part of the Universe, that would definitely be a hardship as well, and so permitted.” She sniffed. “Trust Rhea to find a sneaky way to look out for Number One and make it sound like it was someone else who did it for her.”
“That just about sums it up succinctly enough,” he admitted, “and you’re right in that staying married was her idea, in fairly pure self-interest. I’d immediately offered to have the marriage annulled, of course, once she’d recovered, but she refused in no uncertain terms, not to mention that she threatened to blackmail me if I even tried to annul the marriage by telling you that I’d made improper advances toward her, which I didn’t think that you’d believe, but one never knows, especially when caught in such an awkward situation, since you might reasonably take offense at my taking up a second wife, no matter how compelled I felt by desperate circumstance.”
“She can be utterly ruthless, when she wants something,” Selene acknowledged. “She’s such a sneaky conniver at times that I’m tempted to forget her good qualities.”
“I’d already formed the same impression of her — based, I have to admit, on prior experience with Hastie — but I truly don’t think that she ever means any real harm. She just wants her own way, and if what she sees as a ‘tiny little white lie,’ — or a tiny little bit of sneakiness — helps her to achieve her ends, so much the better. She’s an only child, with fairly distant parents, especially her father, who should have taken Hastie in hand from an early age, but he didn’t, which resulted in the happy-go-lucky Hastie we both knew and liked, at least, something of a child even as he grew towards manhood, but always fun to hang out with, with a reckless enthusiasm that many outgrow. I don’t think that we can truly blame Rhea for all her faults, and we each of us have faults of our very own, so it ill-behooves us to quibble about her particular selection.”
“Damn!” she said, “Just when did you get so smart and compassionate?” She reached out to ruffle his hair, and then she kissed him, just a little, just for luck.
“About the same time that I discovered how wonderful you are, I think.” He reached out to touch her hair, so gently that it seemed like he was afraid that she might break, despite observation and experience to the contrary. “It makes me humble, an attitude ‘Hastie’ was never encumbered with, and Rhea seems not to have developed in the interim. But you’re also getting the picture about Jewish Law, which isn’t nearly as inflexible as many Gentiles make out, and indeed seems much more compassionate than the doctrines of many churches, although I confess that I don’t know all that much about them. The official line is that we’re supposed to live by the Torah, not die by it, so where there’s any conflict between the strict letter of the law and either health or survival, life wins, and then it’s a positive obligation to break the rules as cheerfully as possible, and without messing around. In fact, when there’s any doubt, the most learned scholar of the Law present during the situation is obliged to personally violate the Law, if possible, although there are, of course, necessary exceptions for medical and other specialized types of intervention.”
“And since there are no greater authorities than you in this entire world, you’re ‘it,’ as far as the obligation goes, and I’m your necessary accomplice, since it’s down to me as well, as your wife and life’s companion.” She laughed with surprisingly good grace. “That little minx! Whenever she gets me into one of these awkward scrapes, she always comes out smelling like a rose.”
“But it’s not really your obligation, dearest, and there are ramifications that Rhea may not have considered. Marriage is meant to be a safe harbor for children, and I’m not at all sure that Rhea intends anything more than marriage in name only. Without forcing the issue in any way, since I have exactly no interest in taking advantage of her, I misdoubt me that a sham marriage would be spiritually valid.”
“Au contraire, mon bien aimé, it is my obligation. ‘Entreat me not to leave you,’ and so on. Wither thou goest, I go, and so we’re all one happy family. She’s absolutely right, I think — however reluctantly I admit it — to insist upon the validity of her marriage — even though she’s being irritatingly smug about it — since it’s already saved her life, and your marriage to her still stands surety for the life you’ve already saved, so it would be churlish of us to refuse her that safety and consolation. It also seems to me that it would be irresponsible of me to fail to point out the full implications of that marriage to her, since she will undoubtedly have failed to understand the full ramifications of her situation in a world without modern gynecological and obstetric care.”
At this, Phil’s eyes widened — visibly demonstrating his own sudden comprehension of their own situation and belated realization of his former insouciance — but he didn’t say a word, even as he contemplated any of many potential futures.
She sighed. “And so, in her best interest, I’ll attempt to both persuade and enlighten her. I’ve always loved her, in a sisterly way, so it’s not too much of a stretch for me to do the right thing by her, and to encourage you to do the same, even if it’s a little disconcerting to find myself confronted by the awkward necessity. I do insist upon one thing, however. I won’t have her flaunting her dowry at me as a point of superiority, and she’s already hinted at it, so I’ll want one of my own, and I believe that, as senior wife, I can insist that mine be larger.”
“I believe that’s not only fair, but in keeping with tradition, and your father is hardly in a position to supply one on his own. We can easily add it to the contract as a codicil, with signatures, witnesses, and so on.”
“Not too much, dear — that would be cruel — but a significant amount.”
“Whatever you say, dearest. Our marriage contract really only comes into play if I die, or if you sue me for divorce, so I sincerely hope that it’s not a problem I’ll face within my lifetime, on many levels. I’ll ask Akcuanrut for more of his fancy paper and his services as a witness, because I’ll have to set down Rhea’s Ketubah as well, with your parents as the primary witnesses, since they heard my declaration of the terms, the gifts I gave her, and can attest to its substance, if not its entire validity without further explanation on my part, which of course I’ll offer.”
She smiled very briefly, then said, “Let’s all retire for the night, then. We may as well start now.”
“But….”
“But nothing. If I am only for myself, then what am I? If not now, when? It’s your obligation to provide whatever… comfort… she needs, as well as protection, and I won’t have you shame our household by neglecting our hospitality through fastidious modesty, so it’s my obligation as well, letting her play Leah to my Rachel. Neither will I lie alone in the dark letting my imagination run away with me.” She laughed with more humor than one might expect. “If I have to put up with her, then she has to put up with me. She made her bed, now let her lie in it.”
“We should probably tell Rhea’s mother as well, since he ought to marry all his mares if we’re going to war.” He furrowed his brow slightly. “That sounds weird, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does sound funny, and yes, he simply must marry them all, although I believe centaurs have a magic of their own, but Bluebell’s centaurhood didn’t save her, so formal marriage can’t hurt. It’s bad enough that one woman lost her life through lack of that protection, but it might save his life as well, since I can almost guarantee that their original ceremony didn’t include those exact words, and magic seems to be mostly about words and will.”
“Damn!” he said thoughtfully. “Do you think we have to find a wife for Akcuanrut? Maybe I could lend him one of mine,” he said meaningfully.
“Phil! Don’t you dare! I wouldn’t wish Acky on Rhea if I were twice as mad at her, and besides that, you promised to care for her, whether your oath was made rationally and with prudent care — as it seems to have been — or rashly, which I doubt. You’ve a cool head on your shoulders, Phil, and I trust you to have made the right decision for all of us, even on the spur of the moment. There’s also the fact that the lack of cellphone service here made prior consultation difficult, so I’m not even offended that I wasn’t notified before I was presented with the fait accompli. Anyway, I don’t know about Akcuanrut. We’ll have to ask him tomorrow. If he’s some sort of Priest, maybe he’s already consecrated to something, or maybe Wizards have their own system.”
“He’s supposed to be the ‘Dean’ of the College of Wizards, and I know that ‘Dean’ used to be a religious title, at least in England, something like Squadron Leader, but not about armies.”
“Who knows? Next time we save the world, let’s make sure to ask for the owner’s manual, so we can read up on it before we try to put it all back together. Maybe we could take a class or something.”
“Good plan,” he said. “Next time, let’s figure out how to set up a WiFi Hotspot as well, so we can access the Internet.”
She laughed at that, “Exactly! Primitive worlds with no hot and cold running water are one thing, but no Internet access is really a hardship posting.”
“Not that much of a hardship, dear,” he said softly. “Any world with you in it is luxury enough for me.”
She smiled again. “ ‘Here’s my hand’,” she said, matching action to her words.
He smiled back again. “ ‘And mine, with my heart in’t.’ ” Then he sealed his declaration with a kiss.
After a long while — during which they were otherwise engaged — she finally said, “Why don’t I pop out for a bit and invite Rhea in for a little chat?”
“As you wish, my love. I’m in your hands.”
Akcuanrut was moderately unhappy. They were in the throne room, the morning after Phil, Rhea, and the rest of the centaurs had arrived, although it was much changed from when he’d first seen it. The threadbare draperies had been removed and the whole place had been thoroughly cleaned, so the torchlight did a slightly better job of lighting the distant reaches of the hall, and of course the centaurs had taken over most of the floor space, leaving only an area around the throne itself and the well shaft clear. The lower cavern, although guarded, was so disturbing that they kept sentry duties short and scheduled lengthy periods off between shifts. “It’s bad enough that D’lon-Ra abandoned his duty so quickly,” the wizard said, “but he did it at a very inconvenient time. It would be very nice to know where Na-Noc is right now.”
“Well,” Phil said, “unless he’s managed to find more people to eat, he’s at least smaller now, so if he does show up, he should be easier to handle, and almost all our outer sentries are centaur mares, all married and sanctified to their husband now, so they should be very difficult for Na-Noc to subdue with his usual tactics.”
“Perhaps, but his lack of bulk just makes him more difficult to spot. At the size you described, he could masquerade as almost any small animal. It’s too bad we don’t know how D’lon-Ra kept track of where the Heart is, since it’s certain that Na-Noc will keep it close.”
“Yeah. I guess he had his own heart so set on having it, for whatever twisted reason, so he could probably smell it from a mile away.”
“So you think that he never had a link with Na-Noc, then?”
“I don’t think so, although it undoubtedly suited his purposes to say so. From what Mr. and Mrs. Utterson describe, they were kept strictly separated from the Heart itself, although they knew that it was there, because it ‘sucked the happiness out of everything,’ in their words. They have no link to it, however, unlike D’lon-Ra, so possibly he’d managed to contact it at one point, perhaps during the battle in which he was taken. Conceivably, the Heart itself may establish a link to those who are vulnerable to its enticements, or may have already been corrupted by it in some way. The Uttersons were an accidental capture, so perhaps the Heart simply didn’t have the opportunity to subvert them, or didn’t bother, because it was privy to some intention of Na-Noc to destroy them. As I understand it, D’lon-Ra knew a bit about magic, so perhaps that gave him some sort of potential advantage in the initial struggle to subdue him, or perhaps the Heart contacted him directly, to judge whether he might be a better custodian than Na-Noc himself, if it felt that a being trained in magic might be a better tool for its purposes.”
“Very likely,“ the wizard said. ”As I told you at the beginning of our adventure, the Heart has an intelligence and purpose of its own, so can adapt itself to the exigencies of every situation it encounters.”
“I see no reason to doubt this,”Phil said, “but I also think it must be insane. As you described it, the thing sat in a room alone for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, time enough for the Lost Temple to fall into the decay we see around us. Intelligent creatures are typically social, and require contact and communication with others, or at least the outside world, to maintain their mental health. Sitting alone in a dark cave for an extended period is what we on Earth would call ‘sensory deprivation,’ which leads to severe psychosis in both humans and every higher animal. It seems incredible that a mere talisman could corrupt such stalwarts as Na-Noc and D’lon-Ra, formerly dedicated — one would think — to the cause of Justice and Law, with a mere touch. There must be, I think, some sort of adaptive purpose and interaction encoded in the thing, which is essentially a social skill. Such skills require practice, as I’m sure you must have encountered here if you have seen either hermits or prisoners kept long in solitary confinement.”
“Hermits?” Akcuanrut said, puzzled.
“People who remove themselves from contact with other humans for the purpose of meditation or other discipline. On Earth, hermits often become self-abusive, indulging in flagellation and other practices meant to cause pain to themselves, because they become desperate for any type of sensation or novelty.”
“I don’t think we have those here,” the wizard said. “We have quite enough of solitude and desolation in the wide world without going out in search of it, although of course there may be lands and customs somewhere that I’m not aware of, just as I was ignorant of your own entire world until I was hurled there by the Dark Gods. Our Wizards, at least, have a collegial tradition, since we learn from each other from our earliest steps in the field, so your own apprenticeship is part of a tradition of learning and teaching that goes back thousands of years. What would be the point of knowledge if one kept it to one’s self alone? What a crime against the larger world to keep any useful thing a secret!”
“A healthy attitude, I think. We have a book that purports to recite the beginning of the world, and one of the first things it says is, ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ It’s pretty good advice, I think, although the women in my life seem intent upon overdoing it.” He rolled his eyes toward whatever passed for Heaven in these parts.
“Well, women do want they want, for the most part. Consider our friend Thundercloud, who has some one thousand, nine hundred, and eighty-four babies on the way, from as many centaur mares, most of whom are here right now. I’m sure your own difficulties will seem trivial by comparison.”
The notion took Phil aback, although he’d been the one to suggest marrying his herd, “That many?” he asked.
“Yes. One pregnancy was terminated when Na-Noc killed the mother, but all the rest of his new wives are alive and doing fine.” The wizard smiled benignly. “The ladies are quite pleased with this new innovation, by the way, which gives them a certain financial independence which they believe will stand them in good stead in the new social order they have planned.”
“New social order?”
“Yes, indeed. You’re aware, of course, that the centaur society is matriarchal, so the introduction of a system of payments and obligations by the stallions offers an entirely new criteria of selection, for the first time making intelligence and flexibility valuable in addition to physical strength and courage.” His eyes sparkled in amusement. “I daresay we’ll be seeing more like Windflyer, who look beyond mere prowess to scry out the needs of the herd and act upon their intuition, and less like bully boys. We live in interesting times, my friend, highly interesting times.”
“I thought that the stallions ruled the herd.”
“Oh, no, indeed,” he laughed at the thought. “The herd rules the stallions. A centaur stallion who doesn’t produce superior young, or who leads the herd in what the older mares perceive as the wrong direction, is discarded as casually as an overripe fruit. The mares simply won’t mate with them, and either sneak off to find mates more to their liking or encourage other stallions to come and take the old one’s place, often both, until the old stallion slinks off in shame.”
“Oh,” Phil said, and then began to think about his own situation, wondering if he’d been snookered. Selene and her twin made a frighteningly effective military force, all on their own. Would it make sense to break up that unit in what might be a hostile world, one in which the safety of their children would be of paramount importance? He suspected that some private negotiation had gone on between them, after the fact, and that he might have wound up in the same complicated situation even without Rhea’s life-threatening injury.
“Don’t spend too much time thinking about this, my dear Apprentice,” said the placid Akcuanrut. “It rarely pays to let one’s wife — or wives — know that one isn’t quite as obtuse as most women think men are in general. Too much subtlety makes them suspicious, and this is never a happy thing in a marriage. Far better to appear genial and well-meaning, which encourages family harmony and helps to prevent ulcers in the husband.”
Not for the first time, Phil wondered if the wizard could read minds. “I’ll try to remember that,” he said.
Na-Noc was concealed behind an outcropping of rocks just outside the main gate of the Temple of Zampulus, waiting for an opportunity to present itself to gain entry to the throne room, but there were hundreds of those dangerous centaurs parading around both day and night, and he didn’t want to chance drawing their attention. He felt safe enough where he was, partially-obscured by what was left of a bushy shrub that had drawn enough moisture from small crevices in the main mass of stone to scrape by in the wilderness, as well as by a feigned camouflage that allowed him to look like the rock he was hiding behind. He’d absorbed a little more than half of the shrub already, trying to build up enough weight to be able to handle any interference from the guards — although the scraggly desert vegetation was a poor substitute for living flesh — so he wasn’t making much progress. All he’d found so far in animal form were a few dozen ants, two lizards, and an unwary bird which had landed on his body. He wanted one of the centaurs, who had flesh enough to recreate himself even more powerful than he’d been before, but they traveled in large groups, too dangerous to take a chance with at his present weight. He hated them for their freedom, laughing and talking amongst themselves, prancing around, even galloping at speed, while he was stuck here baking in the light to the two suns with no access to his weapons and sigils of power.
‘They’d pay,’ he swore to himself, ‘They’d all of them pay with their lives! Oh, how he’d feast upon their blood and flesh!’
“I’ve been a fool!” Phil said forcefully. “We’ve had the key in our hand all this time without realizing it!” It was the third day of their watch and nothing had changed. Either Na-Noc had bypassed the Temple entirely, or he was still waiting for a propitious moment to attack.
“What key might that be?” asked Akcuanrut with interest.
“The centaur woman who Na-Noc killed with some sort of Voodoo deathwish, Bluebell, I think her name was. She’s buried back at the foot of that butte where we managed to corner and confront him. If I’ve worked out the logic correctly, if we can retrieve her body, and if any trace of his attack on her still lingers, we should be able to get a handle on Na-Noc, or the Heart — wherever the ‘death-wish’ originated — and track one or the other through the Law of Contagion.”
“Ahh! Another application of your Earth magic.” He nodded sagely. “The link to our ‘shortcut’ is still available, so perhaps someone should go look.”
“Why not the two of us?” Phil said rhetorically.
The wizard beamed. “Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.”
It was hot and dusty on the fading trail from the Portal back to the butte where Na-Noc had attacked Phil and Rhea, but the wizard was as cheerful as a lark in the morning just to be away from the depressing Temple, lost or not. He had pack horses loaded with three days worth of victuals for what promised to a half-day trip, his apprentices to fetch and carry, a cart filled with magical paraphernalia, and an armed guard composed of a maniple of D’lon-Ra’s former troops. Leading the way, however, were Phil and his two barbarian wives, followed closely by a contingent of twenty centaurs from the herd, Bluebell’s personal friends for the most part.
“There it is,” Rhea said, “Up that dry stream bed.” She didn’t bother to point.
The place was unprepossessing enough, not spectacular at all. The butte itself was a dusty gray sand-color, not terribly imposing, and what little vegetation there was to be seen was either desiccated and scorched by the suns to a dull brown or just barely green, with a whitish waxy coating that made the plants look something like sculpted copies of the real plants that ought to be there, except that almost everything had thorns to defend itself against marauding predators, currently unseen, that mute hostility the only real proof of life.
The horses were a little skittish, perhaps caught up in the moods of their riders, since they all knew what they’d come for, and that it was just around the next bend of the shallow canyon, or perhaps the next after that. The centaurs either caught their own moods from the horses, or had feelings of their own, since Bluebell had been well-liked, and they were sad to be here, to need to be here.
Rhea, on the other hand, was working herself up into a proper fury, since anger was rarely far beneath her surface calm, even when she was cheerful, which she wasn’t right this minute, hadn’t been since they’d started out. “Crap!” she said, and they were there.
The site was undisturbed, as far as they could see. They’d rolled Bluebell’s body partway down toward the stream bed, or what would have been a stream bed if water were coursing through it. Then they’d covered her with flat stones, and then with sandy dirt, until nothing showed except the unnatural mound itself. It looked just like it had looked when those remaining from the previous expedition had left it where it was.
Rhea leapt from the centaur she was riding, and her jaw was jutted out, teeth clenched slightly, as she began to uncover the body of her friend.
Phil and Selene dismounted and went to help her without a word. It didn’t take long though, before it was obvious that something was seriously wrong. Bluebell had been a dappled gray and white pinto in her lower parts, a ruddy olive tone in her upper body, with straight raven-black tresses that reached almost to her waist, but the figure being rapidly unearthed was jet black, and far stiffer than any corpse ought to be. In a few more minutes it was obvious; Bluebell had turned entirely to black stone, like obsidian, like chalcedony, or something in between.
It took more than five hours to recover Bluebell’s petrified body. All of the wizard’s simples and supplies had to be shifted from the cart to bags, so the centaurs could conveniently carry a portion of the load, and then the men-at-arms were recruited to carefully manhandle the body into the cart, mostly upside down, unfortunately, since that was the only way she’d fit, but then they’d covered her with blankets to offer her a little more dignity.
“This,” said Phil, “is a horse of an entirely different color,” when they were finally on their way back to the Portal. It was almost dark, so they’d be returning to the temple of Zampulus in the wee hours after midnight, if they managed the entire journey before the next morning, since the heavily-laden cart slowed down their progress and they couldn’t rush, lest they break an axle or a wheel on the trail. Riding on horseback was interesting as well, since there were so many unique sounds and smells surrounding equestrianism, the creaking leather of their tack, the many hooves around them adding a sort of soft-shoe background to their progress that evoked every Western video he’d ever seen. And then there was the odor of the horses themselves, the similar — but different — aroma of the centaurs, less earthy, and the undercurrent of fresh dung, trodden in or not, that underlaid the smells of the wilderness itself. Riding was a much more coöperative activity than driving a car as well, demanding both less and more attention. Less, because one’s mount knew perfectly well how to amble along, and was very good at picking up cues from the other horses about the best way to go, not to mention the attention they paid to the centaurs, who seemed to be very high-status horses, as far as the horses proper were concerned. On the other hand, you had to be much more concerned about situations in which the horse might feel unsure of itself, when the footing was insecure, or when unexpected movements of animals — or even swaying shrubbery — in the dark frightened them. Then you had to be prepared for the horse to startle, jerk aside, or even rear — a challenge for a city boy — although Selene and Rhea seemed to take it all in stride, evidently one of the many eclectic skills they’d picked up during their changes, along with literally fantastic abilities with every sort of weapon, since they’d transformed themselves into nearly identical avatars of a single fantasy superheroine from an old movie they’d both seen on the TV.
After a pause, Rhea groaned. “Ya think? Good one, Phil. Way to show some respect for the dead girl, who was my friend, by the way.”
“Now, Rhea, dear. What Phillip meant was that this puts an entirely different complexion on things.” Selene snickered.
“Enough, already!” Rhea was really getting mad. “I so don’t want you to talk about her like this!”
“Don’t you see, Sweetheart?” Phil said, as Selene rolled her eyes dramatically, a movement he could see, even in the dark because it was already so familiar to him, “This may be a very good thing for all of us!”
“What? My friend Bluebell being deader than dead? Stone cold dead and turned to stone as well?” Rhea was disgusted by Phil’s callous remarks and behavior, not to mention Selene’s sniping, and twitched the reins to move her mount aside slightly, distancing herself from both of them.
“No, dear,” Phil said patiently, “because of the very important fact that her ‘death’ is beginning to look less like poison and more like evil sorcery.”
Rhea seemed taken aback and moved back slightly with another movement of the reins. “What’s the difference? Dead is dead, isn’t it?”
“Possibly,” he said, “but magic operates in the psychic equivalent of the physical universe, and just as most chemical reactions can be made to work ‘both ways,’ most psychic states and interactions are reversible, as I understand it, at lest to some extent, although there’s probably a psychic equivalent to entropy as well. The key fact is that physical entropy has apparently been suspended for Bluebell, and there’s no obvious sign of chemical or physical decay or deterioration, so my answer to your question is, ‘Let’s wait, and see what we can do,’ that’s all.”
“Do you think that you can help her?” She seemed poised somewhere between hope and disbelief.
“Let’s say that I’m guardedly optimistic,” he said, unwilling either to disappoint her or to give false hope. “I can promise you that I’ll try.”
They rode in silence for quite some time after that, before Rhea said, “Thank you, Phil.”
“I plan to strategize with Akcuanrut before I try anything, since I have no idea how the petrification was accomplished, and exactly what reversing it might do, but I managed to ‘cure’ your own nearly fatal encounter with Na-Noc, so I believe that we have cause to hope. Then too, it seems clear that the sorcery, whatever it turns out to be, is undoubtedly rooted in the Heart of Virtue, so I’m very optimistic that we can forge a link to it that will allow us to track its movements, and thus Na-Noc, which is a very good thing.”
“But if you can track him, can’t he track you?” Rhea asked, her free hand going automatically to her belt and the hilt of one of her many knives, as if the thought of Na-Noc might cause him to appear.
He shrugged with almost Gallic panache. “We already know that the Dark Gods themselves can do this, because it was they who sent you back to Earth the first time, as I understand it, implying that they were somehow aware of your entire journey. I don’t imagine that it would trouble them to tell Na-Noc where we were if it amused them to do so, so I can’t worry about it. It’s sort of like those ancient video shows where the ‘gunslinger’ always left a ‘calling card’ behind, whether a printed card or a silver bullet. On a psychic level, one inevitably ‘signs’ one’s work, just as an artist signs a canvas or a sculpture, because one invests a portion of one’s ‘soul’ in every working. Recognition comes with the territory.”
“So you’re famous already?”
“Oh, indeed. I imagine I’m the only Kohein — a direct descendent of Aaron — in this world, so it gives me a certain… je ne sais quoi” He grinned at this and presented his profile — both ways. “Did you notice?”
Both women rolled their eyes at this. “Not really,” they said in chorus.
“Well, according to our friend Akcuanrut, lineage counts for quite a bit in the wizard business, so having an unbroken legacy that stretches back well over three thousand years is a huge advantage. I’m more powerful than any of his other apprentices already, and I’m just getting started.”
“Can you really trace your ancestry back that far?” Selene asked.
“Not really,” he said, “but I do know that the DNA record tracing the Y chromosome is very uniform for Cohens in general, and keeping track of who descended from whom has been important for many thousands of years, so I imagine the genetic link to the original Aaron is accurate. It’s kind of spooky, when you think about it; that I have an umpty-umpth great-grandfather who’s mentioned by name in both the Bible and the Quran. When I was growing up, it kind of creeped me out.”
“So, it doesn’t any more?”
“Nah,” he said. “You get used to it.”
“I’m worried, Master Akcuanrut,” Phil confided privately, long after the body of Bluebell had been carefully lowered down the shaft in the throne room, and then carried to the terrible cavern below, where it was immediately obvious that the ‘sculptures’ and ‘carvings’ on the walls were suspiciously similar to Bluebell’s lifeless statue.
“As am I, Apprentice Phillip. We seem to be surrounded by actual death, rather than mere depictions of it.”
“With all respect, Master Wizard, I disagree. I believe that we’re in the midst of an ongoing torture chamber, and these unfortunates we see splayed and flayed upon the wals are alive and suffering even as we speak, caught forever like an insect in amber at the moment of their greatest pain and despair, and that their anguish continues in very slow motion, something very much like Earthly depictions of endless torment in Hell, a mindless cruelty that goes on and on without surcease or ease.”
Akcuanrut was horrified. “How can you know this?”
“Because of the nature of evil. This was a second, private, throne room. If these victims of depraved iniquity were merely dead, they’d be grim reminders of the final escape of their victims from torment, the mercy that the wicked perpetrators of this horror would never show, much less contemplate. The fact that these victims are visible implies that their suffering goes on, and their agony will never cease until we free them. The horror of it is that many of these poor people are so terribly wounded that freeing them undoubtedly condemns them to true death, which might well be mercy, but a ‘kindness’, which we’ll be forced to arrange, if we can.”
“But, are you sure?”
“I am,” he said bleakly. “Open your perceptions, Master Wizard. Can’t you hear them screaming? I can.”
“What I don’t understand is why you took Bluebell’s body down to that awful place down under the throne room,” Rhea complained later that afternoon in their quarters, where they were resting after their long overnight trek and its aftermath. “Don’t you think it’s just too horrible down there?”
“I’m sorry, Sweetheart,” Phil said. “I should have told you, but was too depressed. The wicked sorcery that killed Bluebell, the assault that almost killed you, and the evil miasma that lurks within the lower cavern seem to be related to each other, perhaps even one and the same — as far as I can guess — and so part of the same problem. I believe these things to be somehow linked to the Heart of Virtue, since the lower cavern existed long before Na-Noc was caught up in its evil. Akcuanrut and I plan to address them all at once, but we’re still working out how best to attack the problem.”
“Can’t you use the same technique you used to save Rhea?” Selene asked.
Phil shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that I can’t marry Bluebell — not least because she appears to be dead, but also the logistics seem slightly daunting. In general, I think it’s probably best not to marry outside one’s own species — so dealing with the nasty business down below probably requires a different strategy entirely. It can’t be just consecration, because the church in which we finally cornered Na-Noc had presumably undergone some sort of consecration ceremony, yet Na-Noc was not only free to walk around with no apparent trouble, but was somehow able to draw upon whatever sanctity or psychic power it contained to open a Portal to this world and drag us all back through it.”
“But the consecration of a church is meant to be for the purpose of a church,” she persisted, “which is to be a ‘house of prayer’ for everyone. Even Na-Noc is included on the implicit guest list, since he’s undoubtedly a ‘sinner’ who might conceivably be ‘saved,’ in the religious sense at least. Whatever there is in common between the consecration of marriage and churches, exclusivity isn’t it. Most churches are, by definition, more or less promiscuous.”
Phil thought about this for several seconds before he said, “Excellent point, Selene. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms at all. So we need to find something that’s not ‘promiscuous,’ as you put it, doesn’t have anything to do with marriage, and is still a sacred consecration. My mind is a complete blank. The only things I can think of are the rituals surrounding knighthood in medieval Europe, but it doesn’t seem particularly germane, and I don’t really know anything about them, except that I saw a video once that had the hero doing some sort of vigil in a chapel.”
Rhea said, “Aren’t there places that allow only monks of a particular order to enter? Or religious women, for that matter? Surely those places are consecrated in some way….”
“Monasteries, I think they’re called,” Selene said, “and nunneries.”
“Yes…,” Phil replied, “…and the ancient Temple in Jerusalem had special sections that only certain people could enter. The Holy of Holies was supposedly the inner room where only the High Priest could enter, but we don’t happen to have the stone tablets that Moses purported to have carried down Sinai, so that’s no good.”
Selene added, “And of course women weren’t allowed past the outer courtyard. Sexist pigs!”
“That goes without saying, my very dears. Practically everyone — or at least the men — positively reeked of sexism back in those benighted days.”
“Unlike today, when everyone with any sense at all admits that women rule,” Rhea said charitably.
“Indeed,” said Phil judiciously. “I heartily agree, of course.”
The next morning, Akcuanrut addressed the assembled centaurs and humans. “By the powers vested in me by Emperor Elvi of Myriad, ruler of these lands, I hereby declare Na-Noc to be legally-deceased, since the Heart of Virtue has corrupted his heart and mind beyond all recognition. Whatever it is that purports to be Na-Noc is therefore declared by me in the Emperor’s name to be an usurper and an outlaw, with every man’s hand to be upraised against him, and all property controlled by him, each and severally, including specifically the Lost Temple of Zampulus and the Heart of Virtue, are forfeit to the Crown. As a reward for his exemplary service and actions in routing Na-Noc from a distant world he had no right to enter, I therefore grant to my Apprentice, Phillip Avraham Cohn, son of Isidore Cohn, the right to purchase the entirety of this Temple, and all appurtenances, fixtures, and denizens thereof, for the token sum of one gold coin. I’m given to understand that he intends to use this gift to provide for the general welfare of the citizens of this province, and not for personal aggrandizement, lest there be any question of favoritism or corruption.”
Phil went to his side and presented the Wizard with a single coin, receiving in turn a formal deed, drawn up, as it happened, by Phil himself. “Thank you, Master Akcuanrut. I accept this with my profound thanks, and with my gratitude for all you’ve taught me.”
“You’re very welcome, Apprentice Phillip. May your use of this property be productive.”
“I do so plan, Master Wizard,” he said and bowed slightly.
“Then we’re done here, I think, although I believe that Thundercloud has something to say,” the Wizard said.
Thundercloud took his time picking his way through the assembled crowd of centaurs, who held back from the throne itself, and the dias upon which it stood, because they could easily see over the humans, both men-at-arms and servants, while the reverse was not at all true, and then through the assembled humans, almost delicately, as he came up to where Akcuanrut and Phil stood standing. “Thank you, Master Wizard and your able assistant both.” He turned to address them all, dropping his magical disguise as he did so, startling many of the humans gathered, as they saw an ordinary — if very striking — stallion turn into a centaur male in the twinkling of an eye. “My remarks are first to the humans present,” he lowered his head to scan the crowd, and so fearsome was he in his revealed magnificence that they cowered, just as they’d been afraid of the engraved centaurs above the gate to the temple. “First, I am Thundercloud, and I’ve come to rain on your parade. The centaurs have returned, and we’ve returned in strength and power. We’re reclaiming all of our traditional lands with the full support of the Emperor, whom we now look to for overlordship and protection. Luckily for you, most of these are either unused or used for seasonal grazing, which will instantly cease henceforward without specific authorization from and payment to the resident herds. Most importantly, though, no longer will we tolerate any trafficking in centaur magic nor body parts for any purpose whatsoever. Think well on this: Any human found to be in possession of same…” he glowered at them from his full height …“will be instantly slaughtered and their bodies used as fertiliser for our green fields. A period of grace will be allowed for those currently in possession of same to account for the circumstances by which they came into human possession, pay restitution upon a fixed scale to the centaur’s human representative, currently fixed upon as Akcuanrut, Dean of the Imperial College of Wizards, but delegable to such persons as he selects.” Here he paused again.
Then, after observing the silence, he continued, “Know all present that as the Emperor’s boon for my oath of fealty and support, I am granted both the high justice and the low over my people and any who harm them in any way. Think on this and be wise.”
There was some shuffling of feet, and a few throats cleared nervously, but no one said a word.
Then he looked up, back toward the surrounding centaurs. “And now, I offer my closing remarks to you, my gentle mares, lead mares, and all present under my protection.” In consultation with the Wizard Akcuanrut, we’ve decided that Na-Noc, the enemy we came to fight, has probably fled the scene — doubtless terrified by the thought of facing the mighty centaurs in their glory — and as you know, this gathering is too large to sustain itself in our wilderness homes, so I offer you all the chance to leave as you will, to choose new stallions from amongst the many who follow us, and to form such groupings as seem wise to you. Any who wish to stay with me, within reason, may do so. I leave you to work this out among yourselves, having the wisdom to know which decisions are mine, and which are best left to the collective wisdom of our womenfolk.”
This brought forth a collective high-pitched laughter from the said womenfolk, one of whom stepped forward and called, dropping her own disguise at the same moment, “Well spoken, Thundercloud. We see your wisdom, as well as your strength. We will do as you suggest… for the most part.”
There was another wave of feminine laughter at her last ironic comment, and then the majority started to leave, sorting themselves through silent signals into small groups, then into larger ones, until they queued to exit ten abreast through the wide main doors.
After almost half an hour of milling around and fond farewells, the hall was much less crowded, with the women from Windflyer’s old herd — now Thundercloud’s — left behind, and an extra dozen or so who’d decided to join up and see the world with one of the instigators of the new order.
“Well,” Thundercloud said, “now that we’re alone….”
There was another burst of women’s laughter.
“…we can disclose the real situation. It’s true that Na-Noc is afraid of you, but he’s still out there waiting for all or most of the centaurs to leave, because of his essential cowardice. Hopefully, he’ll be confused by the mass exodus of so many of us, and so be emboldened to attempt to get past our defenses by stealth. We believe that he has some sort of weapon concealed here — we don’t know exactly what or where — which he’s desperate to obtain. We aim to stop him, and have several simultaneous plans in progress to do exactly that, of which we centaurs are the last stopgap, when other plans have failed, although I don’t doubt that, given the success of Wildflower and myself alone against him — with the assistance of our human friends — our strength will prevail, if finally put to the test.”
Windflyer answered, “Those of us who’ve seen the horrors of the cavern below the throne need no prompting, Thundercloud, and we’ve all seen what he did to Bluebell from ambush. It’s clear that he has little stomach for any sort of fight, but rather prefers to torture those already in chains.”
“Then let us set our plans in motion,” Thundercloud replied, and led them from the throne room into the recesses of the temple.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
— Joseph Conrad
Victory: An Island Tale
Na-Noc was suspicious when the centaurs left, followed closely by the men-at-arms and servants, so kept careful watch for a full day and night after, to be rewarded by the sight of the Wizard himself leaving with a train of luggage, provisions, apprentices and servants, guarded by a small troop of men-at-arms. He hadn’t seen the off-world apprentice, but reasoned that he might have slipped away concealed in the great mass of centaurs, who’d raised a cloud of dust that might conceal a hundred apprentices.
Even then, he hid himself from easy view and spied upon the entrance to the Temple of Zampulus, wherein lay hidden his most powerful sigil, by means of which he could once more dominate those he encountered, even that upstart Apprentice who’d wounded him through trickery and some sort of collusion with the centaurs and the Wizard. His hands had burned, just like the centaurs’ hooves, so he didn’t doubt that the centaurs were the real force behind this Apprentice’s supposed magic. They’d pay, all of them, once he became strong again and gathered in his strength in the form of human lives and bodies. Once they’d been subdued, the secret cavern they’d invaded before the Dark Gods had cast him out into that horrible world of hobgoblins and cockroaches might sport a few more slowly-writhing decorations.
“Is he still out there?” Rhea asked, scowling and impatient as ever.
“Sure is,” Phil replied, “although he’s been creeping forward recently, then dodging back to his bush and pretending to be a rock.” Phil’s notion — that the harmful dart he’d magically wished into Bluebell’s body — formed a link to its origin by means of which Na-Noc could be traced, so Phil found it easy to keep track of him as he skulked outside, starting at dust and blowing leaves, to judge by his movements. All in all, the whole affair reminded him of fishing, an activity he’d never been at all fond of. He wasn’t at all fond of hunting in any sense, because of the cruelty involved in the so-called ‘blood sports,’ the same general impulse, he thought, that made creatures like Na-Noc contemplate killing with pleasure. The only man described in the Bible as a ‘mighty hunter’ was Nimrod — whose very name means ‘nerd’ or ‘klutz’ in modern parlance, and had other dark connotations in Rabbinic literature — the man who introduced the eating of flesh to humanity, who were purportedly designed to be vegetarians, the man who first made war upon other people, the man who tried to kill Abraham, the ‘rebel’ who thought to build the Tower of Babel in order to ascend to the Heavens and confront God, not that confrontation was necessarily a bad idea, but the Rabbis agreed that he was probably up to no good, or God wouldn’t have been in such a snit about it as to give everybody in the world different languages so they have trouble understanding one another. In any case, hunters have never had a good rep in Jewish circles, whether the distaste for the trade is based on Nimrod or the fact that an animal killed by a hunter is invariably treif, killed as if by wild beasts, in pain and terror. God is supposed to have allowed humans to eat meat because Nimrod introduced them to the habit, and he made the concession away from vegetarianism out of concern for mankind’s weakness, but then hedged the nasty habit about with so many rules that vegetarianism would seem attractive by comparison. There’s a popular story — well, popular in Jewish circles — about a small town in Poland whose butcher had died, and the citizens were concerned about finding a replacement who was especially punctilious about adhering to the stringent requirements of kosher slaughter, designed to ensure that the animal experiences no pain or anxiety. They interview several, and had turned them all down for one reason or another, whether they weren’t quite as knowledgeable about the law, their knives weren’t quite as sharp as they could be, or some flaw existed in their execution. Finally what seemed like a perfect candidate arrived, with sterling recommendations from a host of Rabbinic scholars, knives that were perfection in themselves, with edges so sharp that a hair floated down upon the edge parted in twain so effortlessly that it was as if the hair had been in two pieces all along, as if the blade had simply reminded them that they had other places to go and so just drifted apart on their way to separate destinations. The town elders asked to see a demonstration of the man’s technique, and the man obliged, slaughtering a lamb so delicately that it was as if the lamb had simply fallen asleep, without a trouble or care in the world. Contrary to his clear expectation, the town elders sadly told the man that he had not passed the test, and the man was astonished. Hadn’t his knowledge of the laws been faultless? His tools and techniques perfection itself? The elders admitted that, yes, all these things were true, but they had to look further because, they told him, ‘Our old butcher, when he drew the knife across the animal’s throat, he wept.’
“So?” Rhea asked. “Does it look like he might try sneaking through the gate any time soon.” She was irritated, he could tell, and idly wondered if she could read his mind, since he was pretty sure that he hadn’t spoken his rambling thoughts aloud.
“I don’t know, dear heart. My experience of social interactions with Na-Noc is very limited.”
“You don’t have to get all sarcastic about it!” she said forcefully.
“I’m very sorry, dear, I didn’t mean to be sarcastic, even if it sounded that way. I know that this endless waiting is hard on all our nerves, and I apologize for my lack of consideration. It’s easier for me, you see, because I can feel where Na-Noc is, and generally what he’s up to, all the time. I’ve been unpardonably thoughtless in not giving you periodic updates without prompting on your part.”
She thought about his reply for only an instant before she said, “That’s okay, sweetie. I’m just premenstrual, I think. Too many updates with nothing happening would be irritating too.”
“Uhm…. Okay.” Like many young men, Phil was a little nervous about the business end of relating with women on an intimate level, and Rhea and Selene’s casual attitude about their periods, and other intimate details about their bodies, sometimes bothered him a little. If they could change that much in just a few weeks — or month’s, he still wasn’t sure how exactly how much time had passed for them when they’d been here before, because they’d already been gone for several weeks on his calendar, long enough for him to have had time to practice quarterbacking with the team, if not quite long enough to become fully-confident in his new rôle, yet they seemed to think that it had been only a few days, and had been surprised that it was Halloween already, but they were acting as if they’d been women all their lives, as if Hastie and Jack had both been vivid dreams, from which they’d woken up to their old realities, as comfortable with their bodies as if they’d grown up in them, had had mothers to advise them about the mysterious changes in their bodies, and had grown into their breasts and hips and… other things… over years of familiar experiences — what did it say about the nature of one’s personality and being if they could change so profoundly in the blink of an eye? If they ever went back to Earth, would they send him to the store to pick up tampons as casually as his mother did his father? The impossibility of their situation overwhelmed him at times. He could see that Mr. and Mrs. Lanyon had been changed, seemingly beyond remedy, since the former husband was now one of many plural ‘wives’ and pregnant with a centaur foal besides. He himself was in a difficult situation as well; with two wives it might be difficult explaining to his parents how exactly this had come about, but he did want to see his parents again, if only to introduce his wives, of whom he was very proud, admiring their incredible skills, loving them both with all his heart, yet joyfully married in separate ceremonies that few amongst his peers — much less society at large — would accept as anything other than a serial crime, if not necessarily a sin. He hoped that his parents would understand, and come to love them both as he did, but didn’t know what strains the situation might provoke in his wider family, or among his friends. He’d known enough gay and lesbian kids, even in school, to realize how fraught family and social situations could become when children — even children who were almost adults — strayed beyond the lines in the social coloring book. He didn’t think that his own parents would mind terribly much that neither Rhea nor Selene were Jewish, since they were Reform, and ‘Jewishness’ was a matter of negotiation, not maternity, at least for their children…. Children! He hadn’t thought about children at all, but he supposed they were inevitable, since they hadn’t been taking any sort of precaution, nor were the typical ‘precautions’ available in what amounted to a medieval society with no more knowledge of modern biochemistry than they had of flying to the moons that orbited this strange planet. He’d heard about the ‘rhythm method,’ but had no clue about how it worked other than an ominous mention in his mandatory sex-ed class that it wasn’t at all reliable, although no details had been forthcoming, nor had he been particularly curious at the time. Already he could envision problems, though, with two potentially-pregnant wives, both demanding pickles and ice cream, in different flavors, on a world which had neither, as far as he could tell. It wasn’t as if he could run out to the Seven-Eleven at the drop of a hat. He’d have to ask Akcuanrut some probing questions about conjurations in his new milieu. He was quite good at conjuring gold and other metals, and had at least participated in large-scale shape-changing, but wasn’t fully aware of what was possible and what was not. Did an object have to have an instantiation in the world before one could conjure one up? Did one have to know the chemical makeup of a food before creating it? He’d noticed that the wizard carried his food along, rather than creating whatever he liked, but perhaps that was for ease rather than possibility.
“Eh, what’s up, Doc?” Rhea said, in a passable imitation of Bugs Bunny.
“What? Oh, nothing, just thinking really. I’m not used to standing watch by remote control. It’s a strange feeling, almost like a waking dream, or like having two heads, one of which is outside watching a bush out in the dry fields outside the temple, and the other in here with you.”
“I thought most guys had two heads, one of which did most of the thinking for them….” She started tickling him, then reached a little lower.
“Rhea! Hang on…!” he sputtered.
“I thought that was exactly what I was doing,” she said in perfect innocence, while demonstrating her grasp of the essentials with a firm assurance. “Think of this as a scientific experiment, seeing exactly how many heads you can juggle at once.”
“But… but….”
“But, Honey, I need it. I’m a little crampy, and there’s nothing better at relieving my symptoms.” She smiled slyly. “Unless you have a secret stash of Midol somewhere in your wizardry toolkit.”
“Well, no, but….”
“Then shut up and do your duty, soldier.”
As it turned out, one head was about his limit in this particular situation, so he missed almost the entirety of Na-Noc’s movements until he was actually slithering through the main gate. “Oh! Shit!” he said, trying to extricate himself from his current situation as quickly as possible. “It’s Na-Noc! He’s already through the gate! I’ve got to get to the throne room!”
“You were just barely through the gate yourself, sweetie,” she said sourly. “Remind me to kill that little twerp slowly.”
“I will,” he said in haste, trying to put on his kilt and shirt at the same time, frantic to beat said twerp to the throne room in time for his prearranged rôle in their little passion play.
“And you owe me, Mister.”
“I do! I promise! Get ready for your part in this, although I sincerely hope you won’t have any part to play….” He gave Akcuanrut a mental shout as he ran out the door of their chamber and sat himself on the throne itself, trying to control his breathing and appear calm whilst waiting for the ‘little twerp’ to show up.
Na-Noc was trying to keep to the shadows as he crept quietly down the corridor, but he wasn’t terribly disappointed to find the Apprentice sitting on his throne as if he belonged there. There was no sign of the centaur who’d been helping him before, and he knew that the Wizard had left, since he’d seen him with his own eyes, so he was looking forward to the first portion of his vengeance with great pleasure. He could almost hear his screams in his mind as he anticipated the first touch of his hand on the arrogant upstart’s heart, knowing from long experience how it would shudder, and then stop, as he squeezed it dry. “Your Master is gone,” he said with silky menace.
The Apprentice shrugged. “Of course he is, but the threatening tone would be much more impressive if you weren’t so tiny and your voice sounded less like Cyndi Lauper. Do you want to try a chorus from ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?’ just to set the mood?”
“Laugh all you want, Boy, but I’ll be much larger very soon, when I absorb your flesh even as I rape your mind.”
“Golly, you who used to be Na-Noc, I’m terribly sorry but I don’t date outside my species, so I’m afraid you’re just going to have to wank off instead. If you do, I wish you’d leave my throne room, as I’m sure the sight would be distasteful, even if there wouldn’t be much of mess on my floor.”
“Your floor? Upstart! Usurper! This is my throne room, and you’re sitting on my throne!”
“Sorry, but you’ve been outlawed by the Emperor, and all your putative possessions were forfeit to the Crown. Considering the inconvenient location, and the generally run-down condition, the Emperor has kindly allowed me to purchase the premises, including all furnishings and appurtenances, for one gold coin. It wasn’t even a very big coin,” he said, almost apologetically. “You’ve really let the place go, I’m afraid, and property vales aren’t really what they used to be. Of course, part of that was having you as a neighbor, so I’m hoping they’ll experience a resurgence once you’re gone.”
“I’ll show you gone,” the little creature sneered as he approached the throne slowly, the better to evoke terror in his prey.
Unfortunately, the prey showed no sign of the slightest discomfort as he said, “I notice that you’re carrying that strange creature, the Heart of Virtue, part of the furnishings which are mine, so I thought that I’d tell you formally that I consecrate that creature as hekdesh Mizbe’aah. Of course, we’ll have to wait for approval of its kosher status, but I’m sure we’ll have a Rabbi or two showing up in the near future, now that we have a growing Jewish community here.”
“What sort of gibberish are you mouthing, fool? Your ramblings mean nothing to me.”
“Oh, sorry. I reckon you may not be familiar with Hebrew jurisprudence. The Heart is consecrated to the Altar of the Lord, Supreme Ruler of the Universe, and I’ll thank you to hand it over for safekeeping.”
Na-Noc, alas, wasn’t listening to the last portion of this little speech, because he was screaming, crying out in incoherent anguish, which was the signal for Selene and Rhea to run out from their chamber by the side of the room, bows in hand, arrows nocked in readiness, while Thundercloud and Wildflower trotted out from the main door opening on the interior, followed closely by the rest of the herd, as well as Akcuanrut and two of his best apprentices, the last two individuals struggling with an iron casket measuring about four feet by three by three, while the wizard himself carried a smaller casket, less than a foot in all directions. “Well done, young Apprentice! Very well done indeed, although I’m not terribly sure exactly what it is that you’ve done.” He opened the smaller casket, took long blacksmith’s tongs already prepared for this task, reached deep into Na-Noc’s seething body with the tongs and extracted the Heart of Virtue, immediately plunged it into the casket and slammed down the lid, then worked at two clasps on the side opposite the hinge to lock it fast.
That done, he told the apprentices to set down the larger casket and go run and get the crucible of molten lead while the centaurs harried what was left of Na-Noc into the other casket as the only escape from their hooves, which were burning off pieces of him with every kick, filling the air with a nauseating stench. At last, Na-Noc had crept inside, the wizard slammed down the larger lid and locked it.
The apprentices had by now returned with a crucible carried between them, heated to a very dull red and sloshing heavily with molten lead, suspended in a four-handed crucible yoke and carrier that allowed them to handle it safely from a distance. In addition, each of them had a bucket of what looked like white mud suspended from one of the handles on their side of the yoke.
The wizard said to the apprentices, “Set down the crucible carefully, then mold a tinker’s dam around the seams between the lids and the caskets, and be sharp about it!”
They’d evidently practiced this task before, because they were sure and certain in their actions, molding a sort of thick clay gutter around the top of each casket, then whispered a charm to dry the clay instantly. “Ready, Sir,” they said in unison.
“Pour out then, the big one first, I think, so we can keep him safe during transport. I still have some small hope that we might rescue him, although the example of D’lon-Ra was disheartening.”
With surprising economy of movement, the two of them picked up opposite ends of the yoke, carefully brought the crucible to one edge of the gutter, and started the pour. The lead flowed like heavy silver water into and around the gutter until it lay shimmering like a silvery ring around the lid, sealing it hermetically, gradually filming over with a hazy film of cooling metal which wrinkled slightly as it shrank within the gutter, leaving behind a sunken valley which extended all around the center of the frozen narrow metal pool. That done, they shuffled over to the other casket and did the same, until the air was filled with the curiously hot smell of molten lead, combined with the earthy odor of whatever substance was mixed with the clay to help it hold its shape. Without a word, the apprentices then took wooden mallets and a chisel from some secret place within their robes, knocked off the clay dam from the larger chest, by now well-hardened, and then commenced to trim the excess lead from around the edge with economical blows of the mallet on the iron chisels. The smaller chest received the same treatment before the two said, once more in unison, “It is finished, Master.”
“Well done,” was all he said, then he turned toward Phil and the two centaurs who were Lanyon père and mère. “Shall we see what can be done with the sufferers downstairs?”
“We can try, at very least, Phil said.” He turned to Selene an Rhea, adding, “You’re welcome to come, of course, but don’t have to. I’m not sure there’s much that we can do for most of them.”
“We must come, Darling,” said Selene, “But couldn’t you do something like what you and Acky did when you made all the mares pregnant? They all changed their bodies as well, didn’t they? Or had them changed on their behalf, anyway. Why couldn’t you help them all? Surely being a centaur would be better than being dead, wouldn’t it?”
Phil looked over at Akcuanrut and raised one eyebrow. “Well, Master Wizard?”
“Not quite the same, I’m afraid. the spell I used is powered by the Fire of Creation, that is to say fertile sexual congress. Since both Wildflower and Windflyer are already pregnant, along with the rest of the larger herd, we couldn’t make any centaurs at all.” He paused to study the two barbarian women carefully. “On the other hand, Rhea here has just ovulated, and Selene is not at all far behind in her cycle. Either, or both, would be sufficient.”
“But I’m premenstrual!” Rhea said, eyes wide.
“I’m afraid your count may be slightly off, Rhea, an easy mistake in desperate times. Did you recently experience a ‘twinge’ or cramping?”
“Well, yes.”
“Breasts a little tender?”
She nodded.
“Not least, have you experienced any increase in sexual desire?”
Again, she nodded, and Phil blushed.
“You might get into the habit of checking your private parts, my dear woman, because you’ll probably notice a distinct change in the ‘slipperiness’ down there as well. We can go into the details later, if you wish, but rest assured that you’re extremely fertile now, and your sister is just now becoming so as well. If either of you, and my good apprentice, of course, would care to, I believe we could do as you suggest. This would, of course, be one route to the restoration of Selene’s parents to human form, although of course there would be one substantial alteration in Mister Utterson.”
Rhea cleared her throat. “I, unh… may have jumped the gun a little. We were… unh… in the middle of something just before Na-Noc arrived. I think my husband may have… unh, arrived just a little before that. I don’t know if that would spoil the spell, but I may be well on my way to being knocked up in any case.” She paused, then blurted out, “Not that I mind, of course! I want to have Phil’s baby, but I just wish I’d had a bit more fun doing it….” Her voice trailed off.
Selene laughed uproariously, then went over to Rhea and gave her a warm embrace, and an even warmer kiss. “Don’t worry, baby, we’ll make it up to you! We’re all of us in this for the long haul, so who’s counting individual kisses? Not me, that’s for sure. You know I love you both.” She looked over at Phil, then said to the wizard, “I reckon it’s down to me then, but that seems fair, since my parents will benefit if it works.”
“Then let’s go collect the Uttersons and ask them if they have any objection,” said the wizard, all business now that he had a plan.
Down in the terrible cavern, a somber but eclectic group was gathered, the Uttersons, Thundercloud, Windflyer and Wildflower, several others from the herd, as well as Phil and his two barbarian wives.
“You do understand, Mom and Dad, that you’ll both wind up looking a lot like Rhea and I do, once this is done, and will both be pregnant with Phil’s child, at least in spirit, so there’s no going back once the process is started.”
“Son… Daughter,” Mr. Utterson squeaked, “it doesn’t matter what we are, as long as it’s human again. After being trapped inside the body of that horrible creature, whose every thought stank of hatred, and of death and decay, I can think of no better way to get back in touch with the heart of life than to take part in its creation. We’d both be proud to bear Phil’s children, since it’s the two of you who’ll bring us back to full human life. I’m fairly sure the silent others watching us now would agree, and if not, they’re fools.”
“You understand, of course,” Phil added, “that you’ll both have a new lease on life as well, since you’ll both be exactly the age of your daughter, physiologically at least.”
“Yes, we do, ” Mrs. Utterson said, in an even higher squeak. “Selene is beautiful, and I may be able to help both her and her father through their own pregnancies, since I’ve been down this road before, so it would be my great privilege and honor to share in her husband’s heritage and gift of life, even by proxy, and to renew our own marriage vows under new names and bodies. If the cursed legacy of Dr. Jekyll has taught us anything, it’s that all things are possible if our hearts are pure, and that love abides, and is all that really matters. That tortured soul, whether Jekyll or Hyde, never did find happiness, because he was looking in all the wrong places, the same places that creature Na-Noc frequented, from which all roads lead to ruin and death.”
Selene was weeping openly by now, and Rhea in sympathy, “I do love you so, Mom!” she said, “no matter what you look like. I know it’s your kind heart and mind inside!” She knelt to pick her up and kiss her protean form.
She patted her daughter’s cheek with one tiny hand. “I know you do, dear, and thank you again for your gift to both of us.” She grinned and added, “It’s about time we were grandparents anyway, but now we know that we’ll have many more years to enjoy our grandchildren.” She beamed. “I do try always to look on the sunny side of life.”
“We know, Mom,” said Selene and Rhea in chorus.
“Well, then,” said the wizard. “While it didn’t matter with the centaurs, nudity being their natural state, ‘sky clad’ is the appropriate attire for sex magic, so if the principals will please disrobe?”
“Of course,” Phil said, and began stripping off his clothes.
Both Rhea and Selene doffed their own garments as well, and Selene said, “You never know, Phil, you may have a little left over for my sister here, just in case she didn’t catch the first time. If I’m going through morning sickness, she’s going to be going through it with me!”
“One for all, and all for one!” said Rhea, the third Musketeer in their ménage à trois.
“Centaurs!” said the wizard, “please stand ready to assist any whose position seems perilous when the change occurs. Human women are much less vulnerable than centaurs to a fall, but your height will help to ease the transition back to solid ground after being pinned to the walls like this, especially for those who had four legs before. I think Bluebell will be alright, as long as she doesn’t struggle during the transition, so one of you please keep an eye on her as well.” He paused to gather his strength, then said, Apprentice! Commence your part.
“I consecrate this temple,” he said, “and all contained in it or around it, both seen and unseen, overt and concealed, to hekdesh, for the purpose of healing and the alleviation of suffering wherever found, for the saving of lives, that is to say, of worlds, for it is said that whoever saves a life saves an entire world, for each experience of the world is unique and precious, more precious than gems and gold.”
After a short pause, the wizard raised his arms, aided by Phil, who stood sky-clad beside him, not cringing in the least, nor did his wives, who stood proudly by their man. “Dalaga! Dalaga Babae!” he cried, and it was the beginning.
This time the light started deep inside Selene somehow, centered in her womb, and gradually spread to fill the cavern, a greenish glow that seemed rooted in life, that filled the darkness with a green brilliance that exceeded that night in the field with Windflyer and the assembled herds by half again or more, penetrating every dark place and scouring it clean and bright again, green rainbows of glory in every shade of green, from deepest phthalocyanine green, almost black, through chartreuse, to the palest pastel tints of lime, all the horrors on the walls and ceiling of the cavern drowned deep in a sea of pure green, the deep green sea of women, sparkling like emeralds, as soft and all-encompassing as love, as strong as a mother’s faithful devotion.
“Ale!” the Wizard said, “Palitan Ale!” and spread his hands as Selene looped her arms around her husband’s neck and spread her legs, arching her body to capture his maleness in one swift jump and movement, as if this were the first movement in a dance as old as life itself, drawing upon the deep well of life, of love, that underlies reality, the endless explosion of life that radiates out into the void, all captured in one perfect pas de deux, the entrée of which had just commenced, proceeding promptly to the adagio, which lasted much longer, melding seamlessly into the first variation when Selene cried out, and her movements paused for an instant, then entered the second variation as her husband picked up the pace of their dance with an astonishing display of strength and power, bending her backward, still standing on one leg in an arabesque while she was cradled in his arms, then shifting one hand to grasp her thigh behind the knee and lift it higher, until she was poised in a reverse arabesque penchée, a vertical split, her body horizontal, facing up, perfectly receptive, yet dominant as well, because it was her need that he was serving, his body bowed low before her, almost to the coda now, his movements building to a slow explosion of brilliant color that overwhelmed the senses, left them all gasping for breath as he filled her womb with life and healed the world, or at least their part of it, and bodies started raining gently from the walls and ceiling, only dimly perceived in the blinding radiance of the light that centered in her breasts and womb, yet spread to flood the cavern with love and healing.
“Sukli! Gumamot!” the Wizard cried aloud, and the dance began again, this time with Rhea as the other partner in a new pas de deux. This time the light began in a deep blue green and shaded into blue, as healing energy filled the cavern and the minds within it with serenity and love, then fell back into the deep green sea of love that supports the world, floating on a brilliant swelling tide of dark passion that cradled the light, nourished it, focused the elemental power of it even as a rising bubble is made possible and visible by the liquid which surrounds it. This bubble world was filled with caring and benevolence, the selfless sacrifice of countless individuals to future generations, the yearning for completion which outlives the lover, spreading out like ripples on a pond, buoying up every floating speck in the deep blue-green sea and propelling it outward, onward, toward the future, bound for whatever destiny awaits us all.
The healing lasted longer than the generation, because it was more necessary, because both bodies and minds needed careful tending and surcease from pain, even oblivion where needed, to start from a past cleansed of everything horrifying or cruel.
When the explosion came, and the coda, it was gentle, fading quickly into warm peace and love, the perfect ending to a perfect day of love.
Phil straightened up and kissed both his wives, who kissed each other, then all strolled hand in hand, in no particular hurry, to where they’d dropped their clothes.
Around them, eyes slowly opening in wonderment, hundreds of women were waking up, their bodies free of pain and perfect, all of them strawberry blonde with green eyes, and wonderfully tall and lithesome. The Republic of Ireland would be very pleased to have any one of them on a tourism poster, because young men in droves — and quite a few women — would be on the next flight if any one of them were waiting at the landing gate.
“Ladies!” Selene called out above the general hubbub of voices, some of them alarmed, some simply gasping in wonderment, and said, “As you can see, you’re all alive and healthy, having been rescued from captivity and torment by the two wizards you see before you, and by we two, Rhea here, the blonde by my side, and me, Selene. Some of you may have noticed that you look a lot like me, because I supplied the spark that gave you new life, so we all look like sisters. Rhea supplied the final healing that made you whole again, so you might think of us as your two mothers as well as your sisters.” She smiled and said, “It’s a little complicated to explain, so I’m going to ask my husband to speak to you now. Please pay attention, because he’ll answer many questions.”
Phil held Selene’s hand for a moment before he began speaking, love shining in his eyes. “Ladies, I don’t know how long any of you have been held captive here, but I suspect it’s been a very long time, because your captors used magic to slow time passing, extending your torment for many, many years, perhaps centuries, so many of you will have no homes to return to, or may find your grandchildren occupying your former homes, or even strangers.” He paused to let a new murmur of conversation rise and fall before he continued, “Some of you — and please feel no pressure to reveal to any of us who you are — may not have been women before this new rising, but all of you can rest assured that we will supply dowries for all of you that will allow you to live in comfort, if not extravagance, for the rest of your lives, so you need neither fear poverty nor suffer any slightest constraint that might pressure you to trade your favors for sustenance or shelter.”
There was a new hubbub of comments and questions, too many to answer all at once, so he merely continued, “Ladies! I’ll answer individual questions later, but can tell you that we have absolutely no way of knowing what your individual situations were or are. The former owners of this citadel kept no records, and there are none left alive to tell us, so this day is the first day of your new lives, no matter what they were before, where you lived, who you were, or what you had in the way of family. If you choose to return to your family home, you may or may not be able to persuade the current residents — or any of your relatives or descendants — that you are in fact who you say you are, and how you came to be entirely different people, although we will supply a letter to those of you who want one, but it won’t really say anything other than what I’ve said just now, although it will bear the signature and seal of the Akcuanrut, Dean of the Imperial College of Wizards, which may, or may not, be helpful.”
He paused again, and then continued, “I’ve already explained that these bodies have been restored to you through magic, but an integral portion of that magic, the magic that gave you new life, was an act of love between a man and a woman, just as it is for every human child. As part of the process, you were impregnated as well, not for any prurient or dishonorable reason, but because it was only through an act of procreation that we were able to overcome your own deaths. Please believe me when I say that you were, for all intents and purposes, either quite or almost dead, and would be dead right now were it not for the fact that you carry a new life within you, as well as the life you were given. Please consider this a sort of trade we made on your behalf with Death, because you weren’t available for consultation, only your dying souls having been left behind. You have this life on loan, and may make of it what you will, but Death’s price had to be paid, and the price was the new life you hold within you. As I said, you’ll each of you have an ample dowry, so there should be no particular impediment to forming a new marriage, if you wish to do so, to live with any of the women here who share your experience, or to live on your own with your baby, whatever suits your inclination and temperament. It’s entirely up to you. We won’t force you to do anything, because you’re free women, all of you, ransomed out from the dominion of death and bondage into freedom and life. You’re free. Looking around you to your sisters, you can also see that you’re all very beautiful, strikingly so, if I may say so. If you’re minded to make a marriage, there are undoubtedly hundreds of men who would vie for your attentions and favor, some of whom may wish to lay kingdoms at your feet, or baronies at least. You inherit too a courageous spirit from your spiritual mothers here beside me, which will allow your hearts to soar to whatever heights you will, as well as an uncommon skill with every sort of weapon, which may help you out of any scrapes you happen to fall into. To be blunt, you’re the sort of women who won’t be buffeted about by fate without landing a few good blows of your own, the sort of women your own mothers hoped — or would have hoped — you’d be, and perhaps your fathers feared.”
There was an uproar of women’s laughter, and more than a few cheers, “Maybe you should be afraid of us, Magician!” one called out, still laughing.
“I’ll tell you this,” he said, laughing right along with them, “I have considerable magical skill and power, although not nearly at the level of my Master here, and am more than a match physically for almost any ordinary man, but even I wouldn’t mess with either of my wives!”
There were more hoots and women’s laughter, the general mood having been lightened considerably, as well as raucous comments from the audience. “You tell’im, Sister!” “Show’em who’s boss!” “Ride that bull!” and many more jibes like them, some not truly suitable for printing in a family chronicle.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-One
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.
— Laozi Tao Te Ching (c. 604 BCE - c. 531 BCE)
Na-Noc was alone in the dark, and he was bereft. The Heart of Virtue, his almost constant companion for many years, except for the brief period in which the interlopers had stolen the precious object from him, the source of his strength and power, was gone. Worse than gone, that upstart Apprentice had poisoned it somehow, so that it burned like the hooves of the centaurs, like the apprentice’s own hands had burned, with just a touch. The man was like a serpent, a basilisk, poisoning everything with some sort of gaze or touch, since everything around him just turned to death.
Life was so unfair. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone?
Just then, the room he was in began to shake, swaying back and forth, up and down with jerky movements, so he was getting nauseous, and then he vomited up some foul substance, filling the little room with a disgusting odor that made him feel even sicker.
Na-Noc began to cry.
The women were getting used to being alive again. Luckily, for at least some of them, the petrification process — however it had been accomplished — had slowed their thoughts so drastically that they’d only experienced a few hours of pain, subjectively, but many had been very confused when they were told that Elvi was Emperor now. One of them had asked, “What happened to Emperor Ingvi?” and had only then broken down in tears when Akcuanrut explained — as kindly as he could — that Ingvi had reigned over two hundred and fifty years ago. It was only then that she’d realized that everything that Phil had explained to them was true, that everyone she’d known was dead, and probably long-forgotten.
There had been a lot of stories like hers, and it was gradually becoming clear to many of the newly-woken that the women who’d shared their peculiar experience were the only real friends they had left in the world. If they hadn’t known each other before, they shared a common bond, that their last memories, if any, were of being taken by a monster, treated very badly, and then they’d passed through a sort of veil, and on the other side of the veil their new lives were waiting for them, right along with Selene and Rhea, the very models of their salvation, and Phil, the father of their children.
Selene’s parents had both been restored to fully-human bodies, of course, and had set up housekeeping in one of the many empty chambers off the throne room, seemingly as happy and contented to be together as two women as they’d always been as husband and wife, although they’d both changed as well, taking on quite a bit of his wives’ personalities in addition to their own, to the point that Phil, at least, had trouble telling them apart, the woman who had been Lucille Utterson — and the man who had been George — having been subsumed in Alice and Sarah, the new names they’d chosen for themselves.
All the women had done the same, in fact, and got along quite well with Selene and Rhea, treating them almost like older sisters — sharing a ‘familial’ outlook, but more in tune, perhaps, with the modern world — so Phil got used to seeing them at all hours, small groups of them talking quietly with their heads together as one or the other of his wives gave them the benefit of their wisdom, but especially they liked to talk about weapons. They all seemed to have inherited Selene and Rhea’s fascination and skills with all sorts of weaponry, and soon enough he’d began noticing rowdy gangs of them playing at juggling daggers in the corridors — sometimes with Rhea, Selene, or both, or neither — shooting well-aimed arrows at bales of hay in the throne room, and practicing their swordplay in the dusty fields outside the gate.
Not one of them, however, had so much as asked him to point their way back to civilization, much less asked for transport out of the wilderness, or for the dowry he’d promised them, but rather seemed perfectly content to set up housekeeping in the temple, one great sisterhood of (mostly) unwed mothers sharing pregnancy stories and folk beliefs on avoiding stretch marks right along with tips on the best way to disembowel a much larger armed opponent using ordinary kitchen implements.
It was more than a little unnerving. In the first place, he felt guilty. One way or another, all these pregnancies were down to him, even though the wizard had arranged the magical mechanics, so all these women carried his babies, at least some of whom he’d never see, if the women left. It hadn’t seemed to bother Thundercloud, but he supposed that centaur stallions had a long history of siring foals they might not have any real part in raising, since the real centaur family centered on the mares, with the stallions treated as expendable — and temporary — sperm delivery systems, to be replaced at need from the ready supply of them who lurked just over the nearest horizon.
On the other hand, he’d started out with one woman in his life — in what he’d thought of as a perfectly ordinary monogamous marriage, despite the fact that the guests had included centaurs and at least one wizard — but his marriage had turned out to have included his wife’s sort-of twin sister almost by default — since they’d refused to be separated from each other when the opportunity to be co-wives had presented itself — and Jewish men — amongst whom he had to include himself — had a very long history of living with powerful women who ruled at home.
The bigamy thing had been a little outside his comfort zone at the time, but he’d later gotten used to it, and then couldn’t imagine it being any other way, despite being a little odd by upstate New York standards — ignoring the historical example of John Noyes and the Oneida Community — because in some ways his wives were two halves of a single woman, seen from very slightly different viewpoints, so his relationship with both of them was enhanced and strengthened by their shared experience of their ‘other half.’ It helped too that neither of his wives felt at all jealous of the other — in fact, rather the opposite, and both were very insistent on ensuring that their sister wife was perfectly happy before they themselves felt truly satisfied — but now those two had many hundreds of almost identical twins wandering around, and even he had trouble sometimes telling whether a woman passing by was truly his wife, Selene, or one of her many twins. He dreaded waking up and finding that one or more of them had secretly traded places with one or another of his two wives, and he couldn’t just laugh it off as a silly idea, either, because Selene and Rhea had conspired together before, just like Rachel and Leah. It hadn’t at all escaped his notice either that Rhea’s name was an ominous portmanteau of those very names. Dealing with magic on a daily basis had taught him that words had power, that the map is not necessarily anything even remotely similar to the territory, but that changes on the map can change the territory in strange and sometimes frightening ways. Having so many essential twins hanging around was an invitation to magical disaster.
He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This niggling feeling that some awkward surprise was waiting to ambush him prompted some considerable consternation, then, when he strolled out from their bedchamber one morning to discover all the women silently assembled, obviously waiting for him to appear. Both Rhea and Selene were conspicuously absent. He’d looked quickly around him, hoping to find some safety or comfort there, or somewhere, until he realized that neither of his wives were present. ‘Dang!’ he thought, feeling a bit hard done by and abandoned. ‘Not again!’
One of the women stepped forward and said, “If you please, Sir Wizard, Selene and Rhea have been telling us about the legends of your world, in particular about the Amazon women and the Valkyries.”
“Yes?” he said guardedly, thinking about the Amazons in particular, who were rumored to kidnap men for bed partners, and then either enslave or slay them when they’d served their purpose. The Valkyries, on the other hand, merely grabbed wounded warriors and carried them up to the Scandinavian afterlife. He wasn’t anxious to experience any of these scenarios.
She cleared her throat, a little nervously. “Well, we’ve decided we don’t want to get married, or leave behind our sisters, and we were wondering if we could just continue living here like Amazons, or Valkyries. Would that be alright with you?”
He blinked. They were asking for something that he hadn’t even imagined, but it made sense, when he came to think of it. His own wives were nearly inseparable, and sought each other out when they’d been too long apart, and these women were spun from the same magical web. “Of course you can,” he said promptly. “I consecrated the entire temple for the purpose of providing for the welfare and healing of the community, so you’d have the right to live here, even if I objected, because all of you constitute the majority of our community in any case. I may have one vote, and my wives of course have another two of their own, but we could no more legally decide what could or could not be done with the property without your consent than we could fly to the moons.”
Now it was her turn to look puzzled. “But isn’t this held by you from the Emperor?”
He furrowed his brows a little. “I suppose it was, in the narrow sense, but the title was necessarily passed irrevocably from the Emperor to me, and I promptly turned around and passed it to a general religious and charitable purpose which is always administered by trustees and a community organization. I just haven’t bothered to set one up yet, although you could do this on your own as well, since you’re the community, not me. Akcuanrut and I arranged all this very carefully to fulfill both legal and religious requirements before we sprang our trap on Na-Noc, and then used the fact of its consecration to free you all.”
“So all this is ours?”
“Well, sort of, but not really. It belongs to the community in trust, but ultimately to God, the supreme ruler of the Universe, whatever that means to you. So there are limitations on even community rights. You couldn’t legally, for example — even collectively — sell the property and pocket the profits for your personal gain without risking the immediate return of the Dark Gods and their creatures to the temple, although you could legally sell the property so you could use the funds to purchase other property which would be dedicated to the same purpose, although that too might risk the return of the Dark Gods to this temple. I wouldn’t do it, and I’d advise against it in the most forceful terms, but it would ultimately be the decision of the trustees, that is to say, you all, or your authorized representatives.”
“So we can stay then?”
He blinked in his own discovery, somehow pleased, then realized that he was profoundly relieved. “This is your home, dear hearts. Of course you can stay.”
There was an excited chorus of women’s voices, but not the usual disorganized hubbub one might hear in other crowds, because all their voices were identical in tone and basic pitch, so the overall effect was melodious even without trying to stay on key.
Without realizing at first that he’d done so, because the emotion welled up from so deep within his heart, Phillip Cohn, rational young man of the Twenty-First Century of the Common Era, both smiled and wept for joy.
Later that evening, Selen and Rhea finally resurfaced from wherever they’d been hiding. “So,” Selene said casually, “I hear the girls are planning to stay?”
Phil rolled his eyes. “You knew they were all along, didn’t you? The two of you left me twisting in the wind, so of course I was imagining all sorts of wild scenarios when I saw what amounted to a peaceful lynch mob outside our door. Where were you, anyway?”
“Oh, out and about,” Rhea said airily. “We had things to do with Acky, and we didn’t want to spring too many things on you at once.”
“Really? I thought that he was preparing to leave with the Heart, taking it back to the Imperial College of Wizards for safekeeping.”
“Oh, he is,” Selene said with equal insouciance, “but he’s also been doing obstetric evaluations for all the girls, which take a little time, even using the latest magical hocus-pocus, so he’s fallen a little behind schedule. He sent Na-Noc on ahead, so the Wizards down south could get a head start on working with him, but kept back the Heart so its proximity to Na-Noc couldn’t build up a lethal potential.”
“I don’t think there’s any danger, but I suppose there’s no harm in being extra careful,” Phil said.
“We thought not, and it gave us time to do an actual head count on the girls, so you’ll be pleased to know that we now have six hundred and forty-five girls on board, and six hundred and forty-nine babies on the way.” She smiled benignly.
“I guess that means that we have a few multiple pregnancies then. Who’re the lucky girls?” He smiled.
“Well, as it turned out, both Rhea and I were pregnant already,” Selene positively beamed, “and Acky told us that the fertility spell he used is absolutely foolproof.” She smiled again, and Rhea smiled with her, but with just a tiny hesitation.
Time slowed to a crawl for him at that instant, as his mind started working, and he realized that his next words would affect him for the rest of his life, whether for good or ill. It didn’t take him at all long to choose, “That’s terrific, darlings!” he smiled with all his heart — it wasn’t difficult — and said, “You mean to say that you’re both having twins?” and gathered both his beautiful girls into his arms. “How wonderful! I’ve always regretted being an only child!”
“So you’re not upset at all, dear? About us being pregnant with twins I mean?” Selene asked. They were relaxing in bed the next morning, having whiled away some few hours the previous evening.
“Not at all, sweet hearts. On this world, I’m an adult, even enrolled in one of the most prestigious local colleges, evidently on full scholarship, so my career’s just ticking along famously. Acky’s already taught me how to conjure all sorts of metals, so money’s not a problem, and I’ve got the two most wonderful wives in all the worlds, and now I’m going to be a father. What’s not to like?”
“But don’t you miss Earth?” Rhea asked.
“Not really. This world is enough for me, at least it is with the two of you in it, my dearest loves, and now we know that all four of your parents are safe and sound, and seem to be very happy, even though their lives have changed, but who’s to say that those new lives aren’t better than their old ones? Your own parents, Selene, are much younger than before, and so have long lives ahead of them, and they seem very happy together. Your mother, Rhea, seems to have really come into her own as Thundercloud, the visionary leader of an entire race into freedom and a land of their own. I believe your father is happier too, and couldn’t be happier about her own pregnancy. I do wish that I could let my parents know that we’re all safe and happy, and I wish that they could meet you both, especially now that they’re going to be grandparents, but I can’t say that I regret any part of this adventure, since we managed to save the world and all. That last bit justifies any sacrifice, I think, and if that means that we can never go back…” he shrugged, “…there are others who’ve given their full measure of devotion without even the comfort of knowing that it made a real difference.”
Rhea smiled and snuggled into his left side. “I’m so lucky that Na-Noc poisoned me. Remind me to thank him, if we ever meet him when he’s in a better mood. I’d always heard the near-death experiences could change your life, and it sure did mine.”
“Maybe not so much, Rhea, dear,” said Selene. “I was missing you a lot. It might have taken a while, but I think we would have wound up together anyway.”
“Really?” Rhea asked, eyes wide.
“Really truly. Haven’t you had the feeling, sometimes, that we were led here for a reason? That everything that’s happened has been intended? Your Dad said it — it seems like a lifetime ago — that all our changes seemed to have been designed to help us survive and succeed in completing our task, and I don’t think that task is over yet, because we’re still changing, if not in form, in our associations with other people.”
“What do you mean, Selene?” Phil asked.
“I mean, we have the beginnings of two small armies now, Thundercloud’s herd of centaurs, and our growing band of Amazon sisters, and almost all of us essentially one family, related in one way or another to the Lanyons and the Uttersons. I can’t help thinking that there’s some purpose behind it, and that we three will play an important part.”
“You’ve forgotten something, Selene,” Rhea said.
“What’s that?” she said.
“Phil,” she said.
Phil tried to demur, “But I’m just….”
“…the best ‘apprentice’ Acky has ever seen,” Rhea continued, “the man who brought together the Lanyons and the Uttersons, who’ve never intermarried before — despite the close association of our families — over more than a century of family history, the man who fathered six hundred and forty-nine babies on six hundred and forty-seven women, including all three of the available Uttersons.” Here, she smiled. “It’s not every guy who manages to knock up his bride, the bride’s mother, and the bride’s father in the span of a very few days. It’s a record I suspect will never be broken, so perhaps we should contact the Guiness people when we get back.”
Phil was scandalized. “Of course we won’t, Rhea.”
“It was a joke, Dear, but I’ve been thinking about this; I don’t think there’s any reason we can’t go back to Earth and still be married, no matter what secular law says, since you said that under Jewish religious law, at least, it’s relatively unexceptional, just forbidden except in drastic circumstances, but you could hardly find anything more desperate than dying, so I think we get a pass. Anyway, I don’t care all that much about what the civil law says — since it really only exists to protect wives in cases of divorce or death — and I know you’ll fulfill your obligations to both of us, willy-nilly, as long as we’re all alive, and the rest is just a matter of insurance, estate planning, and legal directives of support and care. Any time you want to take us back to meet your parents is fine by both of us, but I think Selene and I should leave explaining about the other six hundred and forty-five grandchildren to you. There are limits to our powers of persuasion without hints of lethal force creeping in.” She smiled, without the least hint of the fierce lioness behind her smile.
“I take full responsibility, of course, and you’re absolutely right about planning. In fact, it might be a good idea for all of us to have advance directives and wills drawn up immediately to cover any eventuality — since we live in dangerous times. We should probably ask Sarah Utterson for advice, since she’s the lawyer of the family. She’ll have probably already thought of it herself, since she and Alice are in much the same situation if we ever wind up back on Earth. Whatever we do, we should probably ask Acky to keep copies, and carry a couple around with his signature and seal that we can file with your father’s law firm, Selene, if and when we wind up passing though town. We should probably get Acky to sign medical reports asserting your change of sex as well, since it might otherwise be difficult to prove who we say we are. In fact, the same probably goes for all the Earth people who’ve changed using either the Jekyll formula or magic, assuming there’s any real difference.”
“Isn’t there something you could do with magic?” Selene asked.
He grimaced and shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he admitted. “If there is, it’s more than I’m capable of right now, since records and identity documents are all tied into computer databases these days, so having a plastic card or paper document doesn’t really matter if the authorities can’t verify it electronically, other than as an automated ticket to a false ID charge, and possibly a stint in jail.”
“Drat!” Rhea said. “You’d think at least one of us would have been given the mystical power to cloud men’s minds, or something like those science babes who can dive inside a computer network and hack it from the inside out, like that Borg woman, what’s-er-face….”
Phil rolled his eyes in a slightly-exaggerated manner. “Honey, what we have is the ability to churn out almost unlimited quantities of money, which will open more doors than Batman on his best day.”
That piqued Rhea’s interest. “Uhm, what does ‘unlimited’ mean, exactly.”
“As much as we need,” he said, “basically. Why? Planning an around-the-world luxury cruise?”
“Well, it would be cool to have one of those new game consoles, wouldn’t it? I mean, if we go back to Earth. I do like it here, and I like the centaurs too. I think the whole herd is going to stay with our girls, no matter what we do, because quite a few of them used to be centaurs, and we all seem to have a special affinity with them now. With a few centaurs armed with bows, and a few barbarian babes armed with lances and swords, we’ll have a heavy cavalry that can’t be beat! All the local horses are puny by comparison, and the guys are mostly clumsy oafs, so even if they adopt our tactics they won’t be any good at it.”
Phil laughed in delight. His wives and their endless fascination with weapons and tactics were an endless source of amusement to him, whose only real interest in sports had been to build a ‘well-rounded’ resume for college, and possibly a scholarship. “Not a problem, Sweetheart. We can have a game console in every room if you like, but I do think it’s a good idea to live modestly overall, so one doesn’t stand out from one’s neighbors. Showy mansions and private jets attract the attention of kidnappers and burglars, all of whom I’d like to avoid, especially once our babies are born, however certain I am that either of you could ‘take out’ the bad guys at the drop of a hat.”
“What am I going to do with a private jet?” she asked, puzzled.
“Here? Not so much, I guess, since there are no airports and no fuel, but if we go back to Earth….”
“If we go back to Earth, it will be for a visit, not to stay. It wouldn’t be fair to Wildflower and Thundercloud, who’re pretty much stuck here, unless your ‘unlimited’ bankroll extends to buying Wyoming as a home range for them, and our mandatory wardrobe isn’t exactly unnoticeable in everyday life. Can you imagine us in the supermarket at the checkout counter? I can just see us having a nice conversation with the nextdoorsikeh about our fine taste in throwing knives, or being stopped on the street by the cops for the same reason. They’ll be really pleased when they discover that they can’t even take our knives away and have them stay taken.”
“She’s right, Sweetie,” Selene said. “We’re adapted to this world, not upstate New York. We’d stick out like sore thumbs there, and you’d need a small fortune just to keep us in clothes, since we could only wear them for about ten minutes before they started turning themselves into leather bustiers and hot pants. I don’t particularly relish the idea of going through a New York winter dressed like this either, although I suppose our archetypes would allow us to wear wolfskins or something, in which case all the animal rights activists would throw ketchup on us, or something worse.”
He frowned slightly. “You’re right, of course, but maybe we could do something like dye natural furs hot pink, so they would look fake and be real. Maybe a cape?”
“Ooooh!” Rhea cooed. “ Wouldn’t we both be fanboy wet dreams in fur capes! I’d look good in hot pink, but I really think Selene ought to have vibrant green…. And whips! We ought to have matching black leather whips!”
“Rhea! Be serious!” Selene said.
“Who’s joking? There’s nothing saying that we can’t accessorize, is there? We can carry things around without having them disappear on us, can’t we? Even action figures sometimes come with changes of clothes. I think we could pull off several different looks without violating the ‘buxom barbarian babe’ trademark.”
“Maybe. I guess we haven’t really pushed the limits of the characters, though, and all our experiments have been with modern clothing. In the videos, Red Warrioress had several outfits besides the chainmail and fur bikini numbers, including some that were quite elegant. It’s like she had outfits for kicking ass, other outfits for lounging around the house, and still others for fancy dress occasions,”
“Exactly! I’ll bet we can do barbarian chic just as easily! We just haven’t tried.”
“We’ll have to get some fabrics and try different designs. Even if we’re stuck with leather, what’s wrong with leather skirts? I get really tired of having to practically strip naked when I have to pee, so having the freedom to wear skirts would be a welcome relief.”
“We could do a lot of boho-chic things with fur and leather, although I do like the dreamy quasi-Medieval Pre-Raphaelite look, maybe something with a heavy silk damask. Oooh! I saw a Rossetti painting once with a woman in a beautiful silk lampas brocade gown, all red and gold. If it’s Medieval, that’s practically barbaric anyway. They hadn’t invented forks yet, much less indoor plumbing.”
“And skirts would be much more pleasant when we start showing, and you know we’re going to be huge. My bladder hurts just thinking about it.”
“Oh, golly. We’re going to need nursing bras too! That settles it, we’ve got to go back to Earth sometime soon, if we can possibly arrange it between saving the Universe and all.”
Phil rolled his eyes. Somehow, in all his tentative fantasies about marriage, somewhere off in what he’d imagined to be the distant future, he hadn’t imagined exactly this scenario.
Akcuanrut made the announcement over dinner three days later, “The chest containing Na-Noc has arrived at the Emperor’s Court, and is safely guarded and attended, so it’s time to leave this pleasant spot, together with all who choose to do battle with the Dark.”
“Are we going south to the capital?” Rhea asked.
“At first, we will,” he answered. “After consultation with the full College of Wizards, we’ll decide what to do next, but I believe that we will be focused first on tracking down the source of the evil in this world with a view toward eliminating the threat and destroying the Heart, without quibbling over which task to accomplish first.”
“But haven’t we eliminated the Heart as a threat already?” Selene asked. “It certainly didn’t do Na-Noc any good. In fact, it burned him, almost as if it weren’t evil at all.”
Phil took that question himself. “We neutralized it, but only on a temporary basis, using an obscure provision of Jewish law and a technicality.”
“Technicality?”
“A nifty one, to be sure, but one that can be worked around. First, I consecrated the Heart to the Altar in Jerusalem, which no longer exists on our Earth. Because of that, taking the Heart to Earth would ‘cut’ the link which makes it sacred, and thus subject it to the ordinary rules for charitable donations, by means of which it could be resold for profit, or even stolen, and rededicated to evil. Alternatively, the object could be taken to a world in which the Altar does exist, and a ruling would have to be made upon whether it was fit for the altar. I suspect that the decision could go either way, since as a creature, the Heart is a perfect and unblemished exemplar of itself. On the other hand, it’s of a sort not specifically mentioned in the Law as kosher for slaughter, so either strict or lenient rulings could be made. The Heart is clearly inimical to Life, so I think that an exception should be made, but one can’t depend on finding a priestly expert prepared to apply the Law ‘creatively,’ since historically many Temple Priests were very conservative.”
“But how can this Temple both exist and not exist?”
“Because the answer depends on where you are. Call it ‘quantum uncertainty.’ On Earth, the question is decided, and the Temple doesn’t exist. On this planet, we don’t know how it relates to the timeline of the Temple, that is, we don’t know if we’ve gone backward in time, forward, or even if our timelines are parallel at all. That’s the technicality I mentioned. Until someone makes an actual observation, the existence or non-existence of the Temple is undecided, like Schrödinger’s famous cat in the box.”
“Schrödinger?” said Rhea.
“Erwin Schrödinger was a very famous physicist on Earth and one of the first theoreticians who addressed quantum phenomena in detail. He was the guy who said that quantum phenomena were inherently ‘entangled’ with each other, what he called Verschränkung, because he was born in Austria, and developed an equation that mathematically described how the quantum state of a physical system changes over time, a accomplishment for which he won a Nobel Prize. Very clever fellow.”
“So what about the cat?” she asked.
“No one knows. Since it was only a ‘thought experiment,’ and the formulation is paradoxical, the experiment can’t actually be performed in any meaningful way. The only ‘interesting’ part of it is during the experiment, because the quantum wave collapses into ordinary reality at the very instant anyone actually observes the result, which is no more mysterious, really, than tossing a coin, except that the likelihood of the coin being heads or tails at any given time can be calculated with much more certainty than the instantaneous detection status of a Geiger counter.”
Akcuanrut interrupted this deep discussion with one simple observation, “Who cares? All magic is deeply personal and deeply situational. The outcome may depend on many factors, from what one had for lunch to whether a particular bird flew overhead at a particular time. Because this is a magical task, the destruction of an immensely powerful magic artifact, the undertaking will be fraught with peril, and the outcome will depend upon luck as well as skill, which I believe is all that you really imply with your anecdotes of Shrydinger and quintims.”
Phil laughed. “Probably,” he said. “You put it much more elegantly, Master Wizard.”
“Just as it should be, Apprentice Phillip.”
“Just so, Master, and now on to the business of our trip south with the Heart. I think we ought to take three hundred of our new sisters with us as a military deterrent to idle curiosity and potential brigands, and a matching number of Thundercloud’s herd, with whom they seem to have bonded, leaving the rest behind to guard the Temple from any intrusion.”
“That seems prudent, since my own guards left with the remaining portion of Na-Noc, although it seems unlikely that any brigand would dare to accost any Wizard of the Emperor’s College.”
“They might, perhaps, if impelled by the Dark Gods,” Phil said.
“True.”
“I’d also like to leave sufficient quantities of gold and silver to allow those who remain behind to purchase necessary supplies, as well as to supply the dowries I promised them if I don’t return for any reason.”
“Why don’t you let me handle that, since they’ll find it easier to use the coinage of the Emperor than raw metal.”
“Can you do that?”
“Of course. I designed the current coinage, both gold and silver, and will give you a complete set to aid your own visualizations. It’s quite attractive, if I do say so myself.” He smiled.
“Doesn’t that compete with the official mint?”
“Not at all. The College of Wizards is the official mint, and our expenditures boost the local economy wherever we travel, which means that we, and the Emperor, are very popular among the people we serve. Our world is overflowing with bounty of every sort, and coins merely encourage that abundance to be spread widely.”
“But doesn’t that lead to inflation, where it takes more and more money to buy a given item?”
“Why should it? The metal has intrinsic value, because it can be wrought by artisans into objects of great beauty. The more coins are available, the more objects artists are able to create from them, so this coin…” he produced an example and handed it to Phil… “is in its least valuable form. I don’t see how it’s any different from digging up metal from a mine and then melting it and pouring it into molds, which is difficult and dangerous work. Not only that, but any crude metal stamping process to create a design could be easily duplicated by a trickster who wanted to fool people by using lesser metals. My designs, on the other hand, are impossible to form without magic, and therefore a guarantee of quality, since all the wizards possessing sufficient skill are members of the Imperial College, so it’s easy for any Wizard — even those of lesser skill — to trace the lineage of any coin, and contact its originator at will.”
While the wizard had been speaking, Phil had been examining the coin. The wizard was right; the coin was a perfect three-dimensional sculpture with an interior structure that might have been reproducible in molded metal, but then would have required polishing with miniature tools which he imagined would be difficult to come by on this primitive world, and the effort involved would probably be more than the coin was worth. He tried to create a duplicate, and succeeded after a few false starts. The shape of it was wicked hard to visualize. “You’re right, Master Wizard. I spoke without thought, based on the crude physical processes in use on my own world, where most of our money is printed on paper.”
“But that’s insane! Who on your world would trust a coin made out of paper? Any spark could set it aflame! then pffft! your coin is gone.”
“Well, that’s a problem, I must confess. People have to be more careful of their money on my world, so most things are actually purchased through electronic funds transfers, a process of communication through which the buyer verifies that funds are available by means of messages that fly through the air, like the television you saw when you visited our world.”
Akcuanrut was profoundly uninterested in the so-called ‘television.’ He could have produced a better illusion of life when he was a mere apprentice. “It seems a waste of time. Do you have to carry around these ‘television’ things wherever you go, just to buy something?”
“Unh, no. Never mind. Your solution seems easier, for this world at least, and there are many people on our own world who argue for the gold standard, even today, without taking into account the practical difficulties, not least of which is the fact that there’s a total world economy of roughly eighty trillion dollars, while the total amount of gold produced every year is only fifty million ounces, more or less, and there have only been ten billion ounces of gold mined in the entire history of the world, a pile about the size of a small eight-floor office building, a cube of gold about eighty feet on each side, a pile that would easily fit inside the throne room, yet who would trade the entire world for a pile of gold, however large or small? Even figuring only the value of the world economy, that would make gold worth about one million six hundred thousand dollars an ounce — vastly more than its ‘real’ value, even depending upon fluctuations in the world supply of stupidity — and limits world economic growth to approximately six and a quarter ten-millionths of one percent a year at most — even discounting the tremendous costs of production and environmental degradation — a recipe for economic stagnation that’s just a tiny bit above zero — or less than zero once all costs are factored in — and so guarantees increasing world poverty as the population increases, not to mention the uncomfortable fact than anyone who sold the entire world for any amount of money would be an utter fool. In short, it’s a false equation designed by greedy idiots who’ve never managed to grasp any mathematics beyond the scope of their fingers and toes. Your way at least allows for substantial growth with no adverse impact at all that I can see, since your world supply of gold can be adjusted at will — limited only by the supply of available wizards — with zero environmental impact, no streams poisoned by mining waste products, no lives lost in dangerous excavations, and no real temptation to steal another country’s treasure, since it would be cheaper to make your own.”
“Exactly, O Apprentice Phillip. You’re well on your way to Mastery, I believe, although you’ll have to be examined by a panel of Wizards to claim the title fairly.”
“Why, thank you, Master wizard. I’m flattered by your regard.”
“No flattery intended, young man, just a simple statement of fact. You have a gift for magic that should have been treasured and nurtured since your childhood, were it not that the inexplicable scarcity of magic in your world prevented anyone from noticing.”
Rhea looked toward Selene and said, “That’s quite some husband you picked for us, Sis. How did we get so lucky?”
Selene looked back and answered, “I’m beginning to think that ‘luck’ had nothing to do with it, that we merely trod the paths of our separate destinies until we arrived at a common point.”
“Zivugim,” Phil said quietly, “One’s true life partners in every sense, more than just foreordained, since mere destiny can lead one to the wrong spouse. It’s said that it’s just as difficult to find the perfect life partner as it is to split the Red Sea in twain, and so requires a miracle.”
Rhea looked skeptical. “It really says that? Where?”
“In the Babylonian Talmud: Sotah 2-A, I think it is,” he said. “The actual word is from Greek, the same root from which we derive ‘conjugal,’ ‘zygote,’ ‘yoke,’ and ‘yoga.’ It’s a pervasive concept all through Indo-European philosophy and science.”
“Yolk? Like an egg?”
“No, ‘yoke,’ as in ‘join together’ for a common purpose. ‘Conjugal’ refers of course to marriage. A ‘zygote’ is the fertilized ovum that eventually develops into a new life. And ‘Yoga’ is a Sanskrit word referring to the union of the soul with God.”
“But how does ‘yolk’ come in?”
“It doesn’t, not really, other than by pure coincidence. Our English word ‘yolk’ is from a word that meant ‘yellow,’ which is why there’s an ‘L’ in it, from Middle English yolke, yelke, from Old English geoloca, derivative of geolu yellow. An egg, however, is not necessarily fertilized, just as a spermatozoa can’t grow into an embryo without joining with an ovum to form a zygote, the union of the male and female gametes to form a single new cell which is capable of division and growth, the which miracle we see, through an odd circumstance of fate, not two, but four examples of before us.”
Akcuanrut interrupted, “I see that declarations of undying love and ardent desire have changed since I was a young man. I highly recommend couching these curiously bloodless sentiments in more appropriate language, preferably in private, so that your lives together will be blessed.”
Phil, Selene, and Rhea all blushed and fell silent as the wizard swept out the door.
“I’m sorry, Sweethearts. I’m essentially a science nerd. If I didn’t play football and have perfect vision, I’d be a skinny kid with glasses held together with sticky tape and bad hair.”
“Don’t forget the pocket protector with ten different colored pens and pencils,” Rhea added. “Heck, when it comes to that, we were all science nerds. Selene here was the only approximately normal kid between the three of us, and she hung out with me, so she was probably suspect too.”
“Oddly enough, I can barely remember either of you as Jack and Hastie, although I know intellectually that we were on the same football team, and must have taken quite a few of the same classes over the years. Instead, I have vague memories of you both as younger versions of yourselves, just as beautiful, and way out of my league. You were both cheerleaders, and I was on the second-string squad who sat on the bench waiting for one of the guys to break a leg or something.”
“I was a cheerleader?” Rhea asked, not at all displeased. “I bet I looked hot in those cute outfits.”
“Sure were, and sure did,” he said. All the guys on the bench were in love with you, and half the rest of the male student body.
“Okay, this is seriously weird,” Selene said. “It’s like history is being rewritten on us, because I’m starting to remember the exact same thing, but I know that it’s not true.”
“Maybe it is, Honey,” Rhea said. “We’re setting out to change the world, so maybe the world is changing on us the closer we come to success. Wasn’t it in one of Lewis Carroll’s books where the White Queen says, ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’? Maybe it’s a poor sort of causality that only works forwards as well. Look at our bodies, Selene, we have breasts and hips that imply menarche, puberty, and normal development as young women, and our brains have obviously done the same, because we think like young women, as far as I can tell. I remember learning how to paint my nails, curling my hair — I wasn’t happy with it — and having sleepovers with my girlfriends. How does all that happen without a real history to match?”
“Through the Looking Glass,” Selene said.
“That’s the one,” she said.
“We seem to have stepped right through.”
Akcuanrut filled their quarters with a nice assortment of gold and silver coins before they left, enough to meet the needs of all their remaining number for the foreseeable future, plus enough to pay out the dowries of any of the sisters who wanted to leave, although that didn’t seem likely at present. And then they set off to see the wizards.
Sarah and Alice Utterson stayed behind, but saw them off with good wishes and fond farewells. Despite their newfound skills with knives and whatnot, they preferred, they’d said, to stay at home. Be sure to write, they’d said, as they waved their hankies very prettily. “Bye, bye!”
Selene wasn’t a bit surprised. Her parents had always been homebodies. “I will if I can,” she said, “Bye, bye,” she said, bleakly.
It was surprising, to Selene at least, how long it took for more than three hundred mounted riders to leave the temple. “This is really spoiling my exit,” she muttered to Rhea as their little band of adventurers rode out, led by Thundercloud, Wildflower, and Windflyer, with Akcuanrut mounted on one of the few actual horses they had left, together with his remaining guards, also on horseback, and the wagon, the same one they’d used for Bluebell, carrying supplies and the small sealed casket with the Heart of Virtue safe inside. The ancient centaurs carved rampant beside the doors of the temple seemed particularly fierce, their bronze eyes glinting in the early morning light, somehow sculpted in such a manner that they appeared to stare directly at the viewer, and then follow their movement with singular purpose. Their teeth were clenched tight, as if they thirsted for the blood of their enemies, and their eyes still followed as they finally rode down the valley into the dust left behind by many hooves.
Her parents had gone inside by then.
Selene and Rhea were singing the old Katie Melua song ‘On the Road Again’ about three hours later, tired of eating dust and trying to keep their spirits up. “This whole double column thing is stupid,” Rhea complained, when they’d finished the last verse they remembered. “Some sort of macho military thing, I suppose, but it reminds me of an idiot John Wayne movie. The centaurs have the right idea, moving gracefully in a sort of loose flowing mass, like a flock of birds, but not in the sky,” she added unnecessarily. “Who told them we have to travel like this? The centaurs can’t even grab a bite to eat along the way, because everything is trampled, and what isn’t trampled has dung on it.”
“I don’t know. Phil maybe?”
“He’d better not’ve. It’s dumb.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t sound like him. He’s usually pretty much of a ‘go with the flow’ kind of guy. I can’t imagine him as some sort of quasi-militarist tyrant.”
“In which case, he should’ve noticed that it’s stupid. I’m going to ride up and tell’im.”
“Good idea. Let’s both go.” They told their centaur friends what they planned to do, and the nearby mares thought it was a good idea too, so they broke into a gallop, covering the ground to the front of the column, more than a mile and a half, in about twenty minutes, since the front of the long line of centaurs and then horses kept on moving while they were catching up.
“Hey!” Rhea called out as they came up to Phil and Acky. “Wait up!”
They shuffled to a confused halt as the troops and horses behind them tried to figure out what they were doing.
Phil turned on his centaur, more than a little confused. “What’s wrong, Sweeties?”
“This whole marching in columns thing is wrong, is what,” Rhea complained. “The centaurs can’t grab little snacks along the way because by the time we see anything green someone has either eaten, trampled, or crapped on it. Weren’t you guys paying attention to anything but your noses up here? All you have to do is look behind you to see what’s wrong, and it’s terrible tactics besides, because it’s so obviously unnatural.” She looked at Phil with particular scorn. “You might as well be blowing bugles and announcing yourself as the incredibly stupid escorts to something extremely valuable, because you’re letting more than half of your forces get tired and hungry while you strut along here as the ‘leader of the pack,’ like you were in some sort of stupid motorcycle gang.” To say that Rhea was ticked off would be grossly understating the case. In fact, she was furious, and the dusty ride to the front of the column hadn’t improved her mood one tiny little bit.
Selene merely glared at him, which was even scarier.
“Uhm….”
“Don’t say a word!” Rhea cut him off. “We’re going to call a halt right now so everyone can recover from y’all’s stupidity, and then we’re moving forward as a loose herd, like both centaurs and horses do when they’re left to their own devices. Thundercloud, Mom, your natural place is to the rear or side, so you can keep an eye on everyone, which you can’t do right now unless you’ve got eyes on the back of your butt, and I’d suggest we put the cart and other luggage in the middle of the herd, to conceal it from view as much as possible. I’m going to pass the word to all the centaurs to use their magic to conceal the fact that they have riders, so they’ll look like an ordinary herd of wild horses from a distance.”
Phil said, “Unh…. Okay.”
“Don’t get us wrong, Phil, we love you, and we love how you’re blossoming in your wizard work with Acky, but we’re the military strategists in the family, not you, and not Acky. We have a mission to accomplish, to deliver the Heart and our heavy cavalry troop to the Imperial city as quickly as possible without compromising our strength in case of attack along the way. Please let us do that, while you and Acky concentrate on wizardry and other sneaky and/or mysterious stuff.”
“Uhm…. Okay,” he said again.
“Excellent plan, Rhea,” Acky said. “It was getting on toward lunch in any case, and I was actually feeling a little faint.”
“Oh, goodie, then we’ve rescued you as well.” She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. Then she rode back to where the Acky’s troops were waiting patiently and called out, “You men-at-arms! New marching orders! We’re going to be moving forward in a bunch — as best we can, depending upon terrain — and we want to keep our main strength concealed as much as possible, so we’d like to keep the wizard’s wagon, the pack horses, and you all in the center of the herd. That way, if anyone dares to attack us, we’ll be able to call upon your services as a rather nasty surprise for any brigands we encounter along the way.” Rhea could be surprisingly diplomatic, when she put her mind to it. It was a skill she’d practiced for those many occasions when she wanted to persuade people to do something against their better judgement.
Several of the men nodded sagely to each other, acknowledging the wisdom of this tactic, although one did shout back, “Do you have the Wizard’s authority to change our regular orders?”
In answer she shouted, “Wizard! Are my orders to be followed by your troops?”
“Yes!” he shouted back, and nodded vigorously, in case anyone failed to hear.
“Okay by you?” she asked her interlocutor.
“Yes, Ma’am!” he said promptly.
“The wizard would like a nice meal as well,” she improvised, “once you get situated, so we’ll have a good long break in our journey if you manage to take your time in preparing it.”
He nodded sagely, well-accustomed to military protocols. “Thank you, Ma’am! We appreciate it.”
“As do I, Soldier. As do I.”
It wasn’t until the third day that Rhea and Selene became nervous about their situation, despite Master Wizard Akcuanrut’s assurance that they’d had no trouble on the journey north. Before them was a range of high mountains, nothing to rival the Sierra Nevadas, but definitely more rugged and imposing than the Adirondacks. As they approached, the low river valley they’d been following became steeper and more narrow as they climbed up from the plains. The meandering river was now a rushing torrent, passing through rock formations that were deeply undercut. In some places the rocky beach at the side of the cascade was so narrow that there was barely room for a single horse to walk beside the tumultuous cataracts and rapids, so they’d had to dismantle the cart to carry it over the rougher sections. Worse, though, was the fact that their troop had been forced back into a narrow column, sometimes single file, so their flanks were heavily exposed to any sort of attack and reïnforcements would be difficult to bring to bear. The cliffs above them posed their own threat, since an enemy could simply drop boulders down on their heads, if they once achieved their heights. The whole situation gave both women the creeps. “Some fun, eh, Selene?” Rhea observed loudly, casting wary glances at the cliffs above them and trying to be heard above the constant ‘white noise’ of water eating away at the rock which tried to constrain it.
“Lovely scenery. Remind me not to go to Niagara Falls, if we ever have a honeymoon.” She was looking at the bend ahead, where the thundering river turned a dogleg corner, leaving them a view dominated by the rock wall they were approaching. The river itself told them that there was something around the bend, but they wouldn’t know what until they got there.
“Don’t let’s go to Niagara Falls for our honeymoon, Rhea, it’ll be entirely too noisy and damp. Leather bustiers become extremely irritating when they’re wet, which is something they never taught us in Home Ec.” They were walking along a rocky ledge of solid rock worn smooth by some higher level of river flow when, ‘snap!’ an entire section of the rock fell out from under them as they both hurtled down into the dark, a darkness quickly filled with vague squat shapes, like lumpy children, but these children were all waving long knives whose edges caught what little light there was.
“Oh, crap,” they said in unison, and started fighting, back to back.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-Two
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
I have said too much unto a heart of stone
And laid mine honor too unchary on ’t.
There’s something in me that reproves my fault,
But such a headstrong potent fault it is
That it but mocks reproof.— William Shakespeare speaking as Olivia, Twelfth Night, Act III, scene iv 4
“What ho, Sis!” Selene cried out in the oppressive gloom. “Gnarly little stinky men!” with six quick flicks of her hands, Selene sent six knives through six stocky throats, two at a time, and whipped out her sword
“Who you callin’ a ho, ho?” Rhea did the same, accounting for an even dozen between them, which left unknown numbers jostling to climb over a sudden low ring of inert bodies laid low. It can’t have been easy, because by that time Rhea had her own sword out and was cheerfully lopping off misshapen heads, one by one, but very deftly, which made a smaller pile in front of a growing pile of stocky little bodies. “You’re right about the stench, though. These little guys have obviously avoided soap and water like the plague. Pee-yew!”
“Shouldn’t that be a Yoo-Hoo?” Selene said, lopping off rather more than a few of her own. “Maybe a little high-fructose corn syrup would sweeten them up a little.”
“I’d rather have a V8! It’s healthier, and doesn’t have nearly as many empty calories,” she said conversationally. Her vorpal blade went snicker-snack, and a few more heads rolled back to the growing pile. Without a further word, she held out her hand to her twin and, in an astonishing display of acrobatics, fell backwards against the wall of heads and bodies behind her, using her momentum to catch Selene with her feet against her hips and hurl her up and over the pile of corpses, then did a cartwheel back and up over the other side, dropping into the midst of another press of struggling lumps. Since they couldn’t easily get behind her, she soon had another wall of death building in front of her, and the dwarves — for that’s what they were, now that she could see dimly in the light filtering down from high above them — began to falter in their attacks. From behind her, she heard Selene start chanting, accompanied by a grim percussion of swords and knives clashing.
“With exquisite grace I throw off my cap,
And abandon the cloak that protects me.
Cold steel in hand, I’ll tear down this trap —
With the help of the girl who completes me!”
‘Clang!’ ‘Pang!’ ‘Squish!’ ‘Crunch!’ their swords spoke in their own sharp language.
Rhea riposted, “Cyrano? You’ve taken considerable liberties with his French, not to mention his rhyme scheme, but I prefer a more lighthearted approach….
“One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.”
She suited her actions to these cheery words, more or less, and left another dozen dwarves somewhat shorter as she chanted, then punctuated her poetic remarks with a few extemporaneous bons mots from her sword. “The French, I think, tend toward lugubrious morosity.”
“Rhea? Selene?” Phil’s voice floated somewhere high above them.
“Give us a light, Love! Would you please?” Selene called out from somewhere near between two walls of little bodies, the staccato clashing of her blade unfaltering.
“And possibly a rope!” Rhea added, at the center of another ring of death, finding a few more knives to throw, all of which made very satisfying ‘thunks’ as they sank into craggy dwarf flesh.
“Close your eyes, Dears!”
Obediently, Rhea did just that, for just an instant, while hurling two knives into the press from memory, and a blinding light — even with her eyes closed — suffused the darkness with the light of a thousand suns, accompanied by the sound of dwarven voices screaming in apparent agony. “Good one, Phil!” she said, blinking away tears, so brilliant it had been, even with her eyes screwed tight, and a lesser level of light remained, emanating from a floating ball of bright white light that drove away the shadows, and evidently the dwarves as well, because those that were left fled gibbering and wailing into deeper recesses of what appeared to be a larger system of caves and tunnels.
“Nice fireworks, Sweetie!” Selene called out from her left side, rounding the corner of the jumbled pile of tiny body parts just as a pair of ropes uncoiled from somewhere high above them, where they could see a patch of blue above the gray rock walls which comprised the tiger pit by means of which they’d been waylaid.
They both twirled the nearest rope around one wrist almost as if they’d had their movements professionally choreographed, each allowing the remaining length to wrap around one arm — leaving their sword arms free — and called, “On rope!” in unison, whereupon the ropes began to rise toward the blue sky above them, as smoothly as an electric elevator, but much less substantial, and the two girls ascended towards freedom as gracefully as trapeze artists on their lift ropes, and almost as fetchingly attired.
As they cleared the top of the pit — nimbly wriggling over a mattress draped over the edge of the pit to prevent chafing their separate rescue ropes — they could see Thundercloud with a rope over each shoulder, trotting purposefully away from the edge — the powerful traction engine for their rapid ascent — and Akcuanrut chanting at the edge of the rushing stream, saying finally, “Iunat! Dumilat!” as a deep cleft opened in the solid rock with an eruption of red-gold light that flashed up into the sky, instantly creating a wide channel that let the river in, some portion of which took advantage of the handy shortcut to a lower elevation by rushing through it with even more enthusiasm than it had been crashing over the rocks and rills of the streambed just moments before, plowing across the ledge, then arcing gracefully down into the depths of the pit, the faint screams of its troglodyte inhabitants rising past the thunder of the cataract as the river fell into darkness.
“We’re gonna wash those creeps right out of our hair,” the two women sang in harmony as they watched the riverrunning through and down into the roaring depths of the granite moulin.
“Do you suppose we could name it after ourselves?” Rhea asked. “I’d like to call it ‘Rhealizing Ultimate Reality,’ I think.”
“I don’t know, Rhea,” Selene riposted. “I think the ‘Selening Power of Teasing’ might be better.”
“How about ‘Find a Hole and Phil It!’ ” said Phil, and they all laughed.
“Well,” said Phil, “at least we know that someone is worried about us, whatever that was.”
“Didn’t you know?” Selene said.
“Ummh… Honey, you were down the bottom of a well. We could hear a lot of excitement, but didn’t really know what the heck was going on, except that you were in trouble.”
“It was dwarves,” Selene said. “There seemed to be hundreds of them, shifty little swarthy types with black beards and moustaches. If they’d been taller, and a lot skinnier, they’d have made good villains for a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera.”
“Dwarves?” Akcuanrut asked. “What are dwarves?”
“Little guys,” Rhea said shortly, “about three feet tall at their tallest, and almost as wide as they are tall, but fully mature… other than their homicidal tendencies, of course. That shows a certain lack of spiritual development, at very least.”
“I don’t know these ‘dwarves’ you speak of. Perhaps the Dark Gods have sent them here to bedevil us.”
“It certainly seems to lie within their powers,” Phil observed. “They evidently had little or no difficulty in tossing you all back to Earth after your previous adventures on this world.”
“On the other hand,” the wizard mused, “it seems to argue for the efficacy of your strange rites of protection, since it would have seemed simpler to simply snatch all of us away, including the Heart of Virtue, if they’d been able to do so.”
Phil rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, crap!” then scowled.
“What’s the matter, Apprentice Phillip?” the wizard said.
“Ask them!” he pointed at his two wives….
…who began to laugh. “Poor Phil,” they said in unison, “Hoist on his own petard.”
“So how is this going to work?” Selene asked reasonably. They were camped for the night at the top of the pass, ready to descend the other side of the range and enter the Imperial city, which was situated on the banks of a mighty river, whose main tributary sprang from the valley before them. “Are you going to have to take all these women to bed?”
“I hope to Hell not,” he said, tossing a few sticks into the smallish campfire they were huddled around, since they were at sufficient altitude to be both cold and short of breath, but the stars were amazingly bright and wood was scarce. “Trying to fulfill my supposed ‘duty’ of providing conjugal relations and pleasure would kill me, and they’re all pregnant by me in any case, so I think that we can fairly regard this as a formality to ‘legitimize’ the babies they carry in my name, if that matters to them. I’m hopeful that we can legally — and spiritually — get away with not doing anything more personal under the precedent established by an extreme right-wing nutcase who was imprisoned for murdering some politician back in the early days in Israel. Another idiot supposedly fell in love with him — perhaps because she was a right-wing nutcase too — and first divorced her then husband and married the murderer by proxy, which is permitted under the Law, as long as the bride price is paid by the prospective husband’s authorized representative and accepted by the bride in his name. After that, the ketubah — which contains the formal consecration, as well as the husband’s financial obligations — is signed and witnessed as usual, and the marriage is valid. Because the groom was serving a life sentence, and in fact died in prison, there were no normal conjugal relations at all, as I recall — although, to be honest, it was long before my time — so there are obviously exceptions to the general rule, and I think this ought to qualify as one. I also think that couples like Alice and Sarah, your parents, Selene, should be able to contract a valid marriage on their own, and any couples — or others — who wish to form a marriage of their own should be allowed to do so. How could anyone legitimately claim that a man transformed against his will into a woman is forbidden to remain faithful to, or to reconsecrate herself, to her wife? Since we didn’t keep track of who was who when when we transformed the prisoners, I have no intention of even trying to enforce any post facto adjudication to try to enforce some medieval standard of propriety. Our sisters can do what they will, as Aleister Crowley once famously said.”
Rhea looked at him suspiciously. “Does this mean you don’t love me any more, Phil?”
He smiled at her in mild reproach and said, “Of course not. Not at all, Sweetheart. I was half in love with both of you all through high school, and I know you both love each other. How could I have ever dared to separate you? I love you both, and count myself blessed above all other men to have had the amazing luck to win the affections of two such beautiful and amazing women, for reasons I don’t even pretend to understand.”
Selene arched one perfect brow at him and said, “You always were a silver-tongued devil, Dear. Don’t ever change.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said, smiling, “dear hearts both of you. It’s my stock in trade, after all,” he added, and gathered them both into his capacious arms. “In all modesty, not to mention gratitude, two women are all that I can possibly handle, unless you tell me differently, although, quite frankly, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t. I do quite like being able to hold you both within my arms, and one more body in our bed would be way too complicated for my simple brain to cope with, I think. The way I see it — assuming we ever recover your ancestor’s formula, Rhea — is that we have these bodies of ours on loan, and when we get old, we’ll undoubtedly want to use the serum to rejuvenate ourselves, so I’ll be wife to two brothers, which is all I can imagine coping with as well.” He rolled his eyes toward heaven.
His two wives both laughed. “And we’ll be sure to keep you very busy, dear,” Selene advised him. “The way I see it, you’ll owe each of us two babies, so there’s no telling exactly how much we’ll have to practice, to keep you on your toes.”
“What? No interest on the debt? You’re letting me off cheap,” he said and laughed. “Although with two fine strapping young husbands to vie for my attentions, I imagine I’ll have you both jumping through hoops to keep me satisfied.”
“Honey,” said Rhea, twirling one half of an imaginary moustache, “we are gonna wear you out!”
He shrugged. “Fair’s fair, my darlings, but I can hardly wait to see you try!” He stuck out his tongue in conscious imitation of their habitual good-humored defiance.
Since the fire was dying down, and no one felt like scrounging around in the dark to find more bits of wood, they retired for the night then, wrapped themselves in blankets, and so kept warm by other means.
Everyone was up well before dawn the next day, because the temperature had dropped sharply under cloudless skies, so it was just too cold to be still, no matter how warmly dressed and covered. The stars were still beautiful, but neither Phil nor his wives could recognize any of them. Although there was a visible band of stars overhead — clearly the starry haze of some sort of spiral galaxy seen from the inside — it was much thicker and brighter than what they remembered of the Milky Way, and Phil theorized that they were in a different island universe altogether, possibly even a different plane of reality. “It stands to reason,” he said, “that the basic laws of our Universe hold true, since we can eat the food, drink the water, and so on without apparent harm. At the same time, we could be widely separated in either time, space, or both. The pattern of stars in the sky is completely different on a large scale, so I think that we can assume that it’s either a completely different galaxy or is our own galaxy at a much earlier stage of development. I think that I remember reading somewhere that galaxies evolve over time from an initial globular shape into the narrow spiral we see in our own galaxy.”
“Uhm, Phil,” Selene said, “I don’t see what difference it makes to anyone. We already know that we’re not on our Earth, so what does it matter whether we’re separated from it in time, space, or any other exotic measurement?”
“Because I’m trying to figure out whether magic seems to have disappeared on our Earth because of some general decay, or whether it’s some particular feature of Earth that caused it.”
“Like atomic bomb testing? Ozone depletion? Pollution?” Rhea suggested.
“Exactly!” he said. “We know that inside the church, which had thick stone walls, Na-Noc was able to tap into some sort of magical power, as was the wizard with his chanting, while outside the church, Acky was able to detect very little magic at all. On the other hand, your parents’ centaur magic seemed to work just fine, no matter where they were.”
“So we have to find the nearest church if we need to use magic…. What difference does that make?”
“Well, first of all, we don’t know whether it’s the church or the construction. Maybe the public library, or the town hall, would be just as good, since all those places were built with thick stone walls. Is there a suppressive field of anti-magic, like radio waves, that’s somehow blocked by the stone, just as the reception on your radio goes haywire when you drive through a tunnel, or was the church itself a point source of magic that Na-Noc and we were able to ‘tap,’ as if we were plugging in a light. Second, we know that the serum — more likely a magic potion — that originally changed Selene worked just fine in your parents’ home, and the walls are thick cobblestone, although the upstairs portion appears to have a perfectly ordinary roof, at least, and you didn’t have to find a church to change. Since we know that we’re in a struggle with creatures who use magic, the more we can find out about magic’s strengths and limitations the better. The only real exception to a general lack of Akcuanrut-style magical power — for lack of a better word — that we’ve seen so far on Earth — at least the only one we have control over — is the result of what might be seen as a religious rite, but also shares some resemblance to a commercial transaction, the end result of which seems to be toxic to at least some creatures of the Dark, although not the Heart of Virtue itself, despite the fact that it too has been rendered toxic to other creatures of Darkness by a similar rite. Are we better off with Wizards or Certified Public Accountants? Does the fact that I’m a Kohain make a difference? If so, why? In my branch of Judaism, being descended from Aaron makes no more real difference halachically than does the color of my hair. Do we attack with powerful spells? A special blessing? Or do we use a Writ of Attachment and demand to see their ledgers?”
“Okay,” said Selene, “now you’re being sarcastic.”
“I’m sorry, my love, but I’m not trying to be, and apologize if I was. It’s just so frustrating being able to work magic without the slightest idea of how it really works! Frazer’s so-called ‘Laws’ of similarity and contagion are obviously gross confabulations of some deeper structure, just as ‘epicycles’ controlled by angels were a completely false ‘explanation’ of the movements of the planets, and were simply hiding the real laws of gravity and orbital motion. For some reason, I can’t stand back far enough to put this into proper perspective.”
Rhea was sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Honey. I’m fresh out of ideas, ’cuz I don’t seem to have a trace of magical power — other than my fighting skills, of course — and wouldn’t recognize it if it bit me, although I loved that trick with the lights when we were down in that hole the other day. The dumping the river down the hole thing was cool too, but really, honey, we’re the action faction here, and any magic we have is innate, like the centaurs. Show us someone to pound into the ground… we’re your goto girls. If you want critiques of your prolegomena to a grand unified theory of magic…. Meh… not so much.” She made a little moue, shrugged, then sighed, which had an… interesting effect when performed within the confines of her leather bustier.
“I wish we could help, Dear,” Selene said, “I really do.” She shrugged and sighed too, without the pout, but it was just as… interesting.
Phil looked up toward the sky, pretending to find something of interest up there somewhere, and failing, although he did notice the first hints of dawn on the eastern horizon they were about to leave behind them. He gave up when they looked too. “It’s okay, sweeties. I’d be all thumbs with any sort of weapon more complicated than a peashooter, so it’s not as if I don’t appreciate the fact that we have our individual strengths, but just this minute we have to get ready to make our way down off this mountain, since I see that the wizard is up and his little gang of servants is loading up his gear.”
“He must be terribly excited to be heading home, then,” Selene said, ”since he hasn’t had breakfast yet.”
“Let’s see if he made sandwiches,” Rhea said sensibly. “I’m hungry, and it looks like a long way down the mountain from here.”
It took all day to reach what looked like a major bridge across the river in the distance, although the path was broad and inviting on this side of the pass, and the little rills turned into a lively creek, then a stream, and finally the beginnings of a river the farther down they came. “We’re almost at the bridge,” Rhea said unnecessarily.
“Amazing deduction, Nancy Drew,” said Selene.
“So, if I’m Nancy, are you Bess or George?” she riposted adroitly.
Selene glared at her. “Neither one,” she said, “since I’m neither a scaredy-cat nor a tomboy.”
“How cute,” Rhea gushed, “Then we must be twins. Nancy and Francie, girl detectives. I want a blue roadster!”
“Well,” Phil observed temperately, “I don’t particularly care to be Ned, and we’ll have to invent the internal combustion engine before we can get a blue roadster, not to mention building an empire-wide network of paved roads, so let’s not carry this metaphor too far.”
“Don’t be such a plonk!” they both said in that eerie unison chorus thing they had going sometimes. It reminded him of a classic Star Trek vid he’d seen once, something about a ‘hive mind,’ or something.
“D’accord, mes cheries Mesdames. Je vous en prie,” he said, as he bowed very low. “I’d do a curtsey, of course, but I don’t know how,” he added, and then grinned like a fox.
“Oooh! Phillip! You spoke French!” said Rhea with a lascivious leer, and then they both swept him off his feet.
He resisted, but not too much — to no avail in any case — and he was laughing.
Once over the bridge — an imposing assemblage of carefully-fitted stone arches supported on eight stone piers shaped like large boats, with the roadway at least twenty feet above the water, and protected on the banks by formidable bulwarks of stone, supplemented by riprap extending both up river and down — the road down to the Capital passed through a wood that fringed the river before debouching on an orderly pastoral landscape of farmsteads and small market towns, marked by a series of monuments that grew larger and more imposing the closer they approached what had at first seemed a fairly nondescript walled city split in two by the River, broad now — not the Mississippi, not near it — but wide enough that the even more elaborate stone bridge that crossed the river in the heart of it had eighteen piers. Below the bridge, there was a harbor, where what looked like seagoing ships lay moored, all of them sporting what looked like lateen sails, either fluttering slightly, luff to wind, or furled while the ships aligned themselves to the current. Above the bridge, the boats were long and low, either rowed or towed by horses on towpaths that ran along both sides, presumably because there were lower bridges over the river, or because their commerce was found on lesser tributaries. On the horizon, well beyond the city proper, a broad bay opened on what looked like a distant ocean.
The final monument was actually a pair of great stone pillars that the road ran between. The scale was difficult to judge until they drew near, when it became obvious that they were very large indeed, at least the height of City Hall back home, and perhaps twenty feet wide at the base, with every square foot of the surface carved with large vignettes of what looked like historic events. The largest actually wrapped around the pillar and appeared to represent the founding of the city, since the river and the bridge were clearly visible, but the buildings depicted on either side were modest wooden structures that looked vaguely like postcard views of Medieval villages in Europe. The rest showed either groups of people, with no context that they could make out, or featured the City as a background, so they could see several stages of construction, both of the walls and the surrounding community huddled up around them, and of the taller structures within the walls that loomed above them.
“You’d think there’d be a tour guide selling maps of the stars,” Rhea said.
“Yeah, maybe there are and we can’t see them,” Selene replied. “The writing is all hen tracks, as far as I can tell.”
“I guess maybe we’ll have to learn how to read again,” Phil said. “Too bad we didn’t get that along with the magic language lessons.”
“What’dya mean, Sweetie?” Rhea asked.
“What are the odds of landing in another world, in another dimension, where everyone just happens to speak English?” Phil said. “I didn’t notice anyone slip a Babel fish into our ears.”
“Babel fish?”
“A fictitious plot device in an old book the supposedly translates every language in the universe into brain waves and back again, thus eliminating the old Barsoom Problem, where the hero winds up in another world and has to learn the language. The author ‘solved’ it in his own stories through the equivalent of magic, but it’s mostly either ignored or finessed by postulating some sort of universal language that everyone both knows and uses in daily life.”
“Barsum?” Rhea asked, puzzled.
“Barsoom,” Phil explained, “the planet Mars envisioned as a dying planet inhabited by a dying race, inspired by the fanciful astronomy of Percival Lowell around the turn of the last century. He’s the guy who thought that Mars had ‘canals,’ so of course that meant that someone had built them, so Lowell imagined fantastic engineers, and a writer named Edgar Rice Burroughs spun that notion into an early sword and sorcery story with kidnapped Princesses, alien barbarians, and magnificent heroes with swords. Add to that incredible strength, since Martian gravity is around a third of Earth gravity, so the hero was always bouncing around with fantastic leaps through the air and bending steel bars with his bare hands. You might say that the video which inspired you is a direct descendent of Barsoom, because the women of Barsoom were scandalously — for the time — unbothered by mere public nudity, and wore scanty clothing, if any, by preference.”
Rhea wrinkled her brow. “What’s wrong with public nudity?” she said. “Our cheerleader outfits left very little to the imagination, and a properly-fitted bikini leaves even less.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with any of your outfits, of course, but back in the Nineteen Hundreds — when the books were written — they weren’t exactly haut mode. Women were still wearing skirts right down to the top of their shoes, with tight corsets and bustles to exaggerate their feminine figures, so the Barsoomian princesses were definitely ‘fan service,’ since it was mostly men who read science fiction in those days.”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “ ‘Fan service?’ ” she questioned ominously.
“Gratuitous partial nudity meant to provide ‘sex appeal’ to a storyline dominated by stereotypical male-oriented plot lines. ‘Boobage,’ usually, but other bits of female anatomy may be featured.”
“So! I suppose you’re referring to our outfits!” Selene interjected angrily.
“Sweetie,” he said placatingly, “The character you both used as a rôle model was from a video named Sword Maidens of Atlantis…. I think it’s fairly safe to say that it wasn’t exactly historically accurate. In the ordinary scheme of things, warriors, even Amazon warriors, aren’t usually arrayed in skin-tight bustiers, however beautiful they may be.”
“Well, Mister Smarty-Pants, our outfits may be a little on the skimpy side, but they have many great advantages as well. They fatally distract most male opponents, they never slow us down or catch on things, and they never get wrinkled or dirty, so there!” She stuck out her tongue, and Rhea joined her, with the addition of a raspberry of her own invention.
“True, but….”
“But nothing! In context, the disadvantages are very few, although they can be a little chilly on cold days, but we’ve talked about that and believe we have a way around it. The fact is that — along with our charming outfits — we gained a level of skill and dexterity that’s almost superhuman. We held our own against Na-Noc, for example — the Emperor’s vastly over-hyped ‘Champion,’ even enhanced as he was by the Dark Gods with preternatural abilities no mere human could match — with no trouble at all, really. If you don’t need armor, it’s a waste of time and effort just hauling it around. Just look at Superman and Batman, indeed most superheroes, and think about the fact that they’ve been prancing around in colorful bodystockings for years, although I must confess that Batman has gotten into body-armor fetish-wear in his latest incarnations. And you may also have noticed that our little ‘fan-service’ outfits are magical, so they supply new weapons whenever we need them. Unlike ‘real-life’ soldiers and warriors, we never run out of knives to throw, nor swords and spears to wield with devastating effect.”
Phil knew when he was both outnumbered and licked. “Okay, already. I was dead wrong, and you’re my heroines. You singlehandedly held off all those dwarves, thus saving all our butts, until I managed to conjure up a decent ball of light, and you did it without breaking a nail. I was just being snarky, and I apologize abjectly. Please don’t throw me into the Briar Patch, Sisters Fox!”
“That’s better,” Selene said with a smirk. “And your ball of light was very handy, as was Acky’s diversion of the river to drown what was left of the dwarves,” she added, magnanimously enough. “But it also seems very clear that the trap was specifically-designed to take us girls out, suggesting that our enemies know exactly where the primary threat to them lies.” She grimaced. “Just sayin’, of course.”
“Just saying,” he agreed glumly.
The Imperial Council Chamber was magnificent, more ostentatious than both the upper throne room and the lower cavern of the Temple of Zampulus, and far more beautiful, since there were windows piercing the thick stone walls of the Imperial castle, allowing natural light from the two central suns to illuminate the interior, so the painted and gilded walls blazed with color and golden brightness.
“Pretty swell, unh?” Rhea whispered to Selene and Phil. They were seated before the convened College of Wizards, and Akcuanrut had just finished delivering a precís of their adventures from the wooden podium, embellished with elaborately carved images of a unicorn and a dragon, both rampant supporters of what seemed to be a painted coat of arms, which Rhea imagined represented either the College itself or the current Emperor Elvi, who didn’t appear to be present, since there was a large throne on a dais behind the podium and its own small raised platform, but no one was sitting in it. Rhea sniggered and whispered to Selene, “Elvi has left the building.”
Selene rolled her eyes. “Shhh!” she whispered back. “Behave yourself!”
Phil did his best to ignore them, but found it difficult, because they were sitting on either side of him.
“And now, honored colleagues, Wizards, Sorcereses, and Scryers, I’d like to present my Apprentice Phillip, whose name translates from a language of lore called ‘Greek’ into what we would term a ‘friend to horses,’ and a magician in his own right from another world called Earth, upon which they have what they call ‘power tools,’ drills, saws, planers — and every sort of woodworking or blacksmith’s tool — which operate themselves through an ensorcelled power they call ‘electricity,’ the same power that creates lightning in the sky!”
“That’s my cue, ladies, so wish me luck!” Phil said as he rose and walked up to the podium, but not before Rhea managed to pinch his butt in a ‘friendly’ manner.
“Break a leg!” she whispered, as her sister tried not to laugh.
Phil managed not to laugh either, but it was a bit of a struggle. “Honored Colleagues, Wizards, Sorcereses, and Scryers, I’d like to thank you for the opportunity you’ve given me, to address this august body and present a few insights and potential innovations in the theory and practice of magic. As the Wizard Akcuanrut has already related, we’ve had intimate experience with the evil magic of the Dark Gods, including both what remains of Na-Noc, a former Emperor’s Champion who was overcome by the fell power of the so-called Heart of Virtue, and the Heart itself, which is now, as I understand it, in the safekeeping of this College.” He paused to look at his notes.
“During our interactions with Na-Noc and the Heart, several important discoveries were made: first, that the centaurs have an innate magic that is inimical to creatures of the Dark Gods, and they are able to fight them without fear of absorption into these creatures, although they are not invulnerable to physical assault, nor poisoned darts. Because of this, and through simple justice, the Emperor Elvi has declared these sentient beings to be protected supporters of the Empire, and has forbidden any assault on them whatsoever, or any participation in or continuation of the macabre trade in centaur body parts.”
There was a stir among the audience as one grizzled Wizard raised his hand and said, “Master Wizard Amonrat speaking. Does this mean that Centaur bone handles on Athames are now forbidden?”
There was a stirring of concern among the members of the audience, evidently because these relics were widely used.
“It does,” Phil said, “but we believe we have a replacement which will prove just as efficacious. I’ll address this issue next.”
The man lowered his hand and began scrawling a note to himself.
“In a related development, I’ve discovered that a particular formula of consecration appears to be just as potent against creatures of the Dark, and indeed both my two wives and I have used this magical defense to significantly weaken, and eventually overcome, Na-Noc himself in the center of his power, surrounded by his wards, and despite his intimate association with the Heart of Virtue itself.”
Another hand rose from the audience, and this time a tall dark woman stood, her jet-black hair unbound and falling gracefully to her waist, clad in a long green gown and cloak of what looked like silk. “I’m D’Shalika-Saar, Mistress Sorceress and Scryer. You say this defense of yours is also a weapon?”
“It is, Mistress D’Shalika-Saar. By means of it, I was able to destroy the largest portion of Na-Noc’s body, reducing him to the greatly-diminished size he is now, restore life to a woman — my lady wife here present — he’d poisoned using the foul magic of the Heart, as well as — with the invaluable assistance of Master Akcuanrut — restore the lives — though not the original bodies — of six hundred and forty-three of the Heart’s victims over the centuries, whose bodies and souls had been displayed on the walls of an inner chamber, held frozen in some sort of wicked stasis as a form of torture, and also to retrieve the Heart itself from Na-Noc’s body by making it inimical to him, so that it burned his purloined flesh away — and I believe would do the same to any creature of the Dark — so that he had to surrender it or die.”
“Does the Heart retain this poisonous quality at the present time?” she asked.
“I believe it does, but it would be impossible to prove without cruel experimentation on Na-Noc, whom we have in our power, or exposure to another creature of the Dark, which might be dangerous, if the experiment failed for any reason. Because this is all an unprecedented application of rituals practiced for thousands of years in my home world on yours, I’m not entirely certain of the theory behind these results, so I can’t extrapolate much further than the empirical effects demonstrate. In fact, I’d hoped that perhaps someone here might have insights that could spark further avenues for investigation.”
“Is the text of these spells available to the College,” she asked.
“It is. Master Akcuanrut has set them down in your writing system — which I confess I haven’t mastered yet — together with something of their context, because I suspect that part of their effectiveness lies in the fact that these formulas are very old, at least two thousand years or more, with minor variations, and from the same tradition in which I was raised, so there may be modifications you might make to fit in more comfortably with your own traditions, as long as the core concept, of irrevocable consecration, is retained.”
The woman nodded and said, “Thank you, Apprentice Phil. You been very helpful to me, and to this College,” and then sat down.
More questions followed, and Phil answered them fairly, admitting his ignorance when they strayed far from what he knew for fact, and adding conjecture when they touched upon things he thought he had some reasonable conjecture about, but had no way to test his theories. The one thing that really seemed to draw their interest, however, was the Jeckyll formula….
“So you’re saying that this simple compound invokes a full transformation?” one woman asked, evidently a Sorceress of some kind, dressed much like D’Shalika-Saar, but in red silk, but she didn’t introduce herself, “without further effort by any sort of Wizard?”
“First, it’s not a ‘simple’ compound, but it does appear to do exactly that, although I’ve only heard of its use described. You can see the results, however, in four of my traveling companions from my home world, my lady wives, the first of whom, Selene, was the first to be transformed into the beautiful woman you see before you, which happened on my own world, where — as Master Akcuanrut has already described — the magical field is curiously, and selectively, depleted. The other three transformations took place upon this world, and I’d like one of my companions, the Centaur Wildflower, who was once an ordinary — if brilliant — human being and doctor of medicine and philosophy, to answer further questions about this, because she is most cognizant of the pertinent facts, since the formula is a family legacy.” With that, he left the podium and sat back down between his wives, who were pleased enough with his performance to kiss him soundly, before they all turned to listen to Wildflower as she boldly trotted forward, and who didn’t bother to stand upon the platform, nor use the podium at all, since it was designed for humans, was entirely too small for centaurs of her size, and she had the height to easily dominate the hall in any case. Indeed, those sitting in the front rows had to crane their necks up, just to look at her. “Honored Colleagues, Wizards, Sorcereses, and Scryers,” she said with the confidence born of many years of classroom experience. “As my son-in-law has mentioned, the formula was actually invented more than a hundred years ago by a friend of an ancestor of mine, one Dr. Henry Jekyll, whom I believe in retrospect to have been influenced by the Dark Gods, or something very like them. He developed the formula impelled by a malevolent desire to ‘have it all,’ the respect and modest income provided by his small medical practice, and the more alluring fruits of criminal enterprise and licentious excess. To do this in perfect secrecy, he developed a transformation serum which coarsened his physical appearance to an astonishing degree, even to the extent of decreasing his physical size. To make a long story short, his use of the formula led to both physical and mental deterioration, which eventually led to his murderous attack upon a respected member of society, Sir Danvers Carew, and caused him to be the subject of an extensive manhunt by the authorities as an outlaw and felon. He died, however, before being apprehended, after taking another draught of the formula.”
“Why do you suspect the Dark Gods were involved in this?” one member of the College called out without troubling either to stand or introduce himself.
“Because of the effects, which were clearly magical — as well as savage and rapacious in every way — in a world in which magic is at least somewhat depleted. My ancestor, Dr. Hastie Lanyon, eventually died — or at least disappeared — probably after experimenting with the formula one too many times, but in the interim he had managed to alter it so that it no longer drew its power from the polarity between good and evil, but from the ongoing tension between masculine and feminine power, which I only discovered after using it myself. In short, instead of cycling between good — or at least a more outwardly ‘virtuous’ incarnation of an underlying depravity — and pure evil, the ‘improved’ formula used the power of mammalian sexuality to cause a transformation at least partially-driven by the mental image envisioned by anyone who took the potion. In the process, a radical change takes place in the body of whoever takes the potion, changing their gender completely, with the added effect of imposing a generally-desired form upon that body. In my own case, we were trapped upon this world in the northern wilderness, and had recently seen a herd of centaurs, so I conceived the notion that we would be able to travel more quickly in the form of centaurs, and carry heavier loads. At the time, I hadn’t realized that this would necessarily involve a change in gender, but it rapidly became apparent when first my son, who had been gravely injured, took the formula, then myself, also seriously injured, and then my wife, who was uninjured, and who stand before you as Rhea, Apprentice Phil’s second wife, and the stallion Thundercloud. Selene’s transformation was more-or-less an accident, meant as a form of ‘joke’ to obtain a perfect costume for a cultural celebration which, by strange coïncidence, marks a particular moment in an ancient spiritual calendar, Samhain, a harvest festival which marked the divide between want and plenty, between death and life. After sober reflection, I don’t believe that any of this was either purely accidental nor simple coïncidence, but was driven by the working out of some sort of Fate or Destiny, the exact nature of which I’m still unsure of, except that I, my former son Rhea, and Selene, her friend, are all three of us pregnant, ourselves poised upon the boundary between barren sterility and fecund life, all three pregnancies intimately coïncident with the transformation between between diminished states of being and vastly-expanded life. My own pregnancy saw the simultaneous creation of a new and more powerful race of centaurs — a restoration, I’m given to understand, of the ancient centaurs who created the Temple of Zampulus and other great works of antiquity — My daughter’s twin pregnancies were the spiritual spark that restored the lives of many hundreds of men, women, centaurs, and others captured by the puppets of the Heart of Virtue — that foul distillation of the Darkness — and tortured for who knows how many hundreds, or even thousands, of years.”
“You say that you were injured?” asked another woman from the gathered Wizards and Sorceresses in the audience.
She nodded. “Indeed, dying in very fact. The potion is a sovereign remedy for almost every injury or ill, although of course it comes with a price.”
“Does the potion work in reverse?” she enquired further.
“As far as we know, it does, though it cannot be taken again within a fortnight without serious risk of harm, and the possibility of being ‘stuck’ in the form you’re in at the time. Not only that, but as we’ve all four of us experienced, it can be surprisingly difficult to control exactly what happens when you do, even aside from the obvious, because few of us have complete control over our thoughts, and the sensations induced by the transformation are painful, and extremely distracting, since one’s entire skeletal structure, muscles, and organs shift around to accomodate one’s new form, so there’s an element of risk involved. It’s the old ‘Whatever you do, don’t think of pink elephants’ problem.”
She looked puzzled. “What are pink elofants?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon, it’s a type of very large animal on my home world, but it may not be native here. Substitute any memorable thing, a wooden horse, for example. The human tendency is to think of something as soon as the words naming it are mentioned, so if one was to take the potion and then some distraction occurred, say someone shouting ‘Look out! A giant purple centaur!’ you might well wind up as a purple centaur, whatever your previous intention.”
“I see,” she said, “so the ideal environment would be quiet, and free of distractions.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Of course, in the exigencies of the moment — as in our own case, the aftermath of a desperate struggle, when one of us was only partially conscious, and I myself was grievously wounded — you make do with whatever you can manage.”
“You mentioned ‘injuries and ills,’ but would there be any contraindications for its use?” She was taking careful notes, so evidently wanted to be as accurate as possible
She smiled and obliged her. “Well, pregnancy would of course preclude its use, because we have no idea what would happen to the developing child should its mother change suddenly into a male, nor indeed what would happen to the resulting male should the fetus remain in situ with no supporting internal organs. Just offhand, I’d guess that it would be fatal for both mother and child, and as a medical doctor would strongly advise against any such experiment on the part of any woman if there’s the slightest possibility of being pregnant at the time the potion is ingested.”
She nodded gravely. “Of course. I should have thought of that myself; it stands to reason.”
“I believe so. Although I don’t have access to my written notes back on Earth, I believe I can remember the formula, and the steps necessary for its preparation. I haven’t set these down, because I’d have to insist upon personal involvement should anyone see the need to prepare a batch, because my memory might be faulty, and the mechanical steps of actual preparation might help to refine my memory, and of course my daughter Rhea has prepared many doses quite recently, so I’d like her assistance as well. Between us, I’m quite confident of success.”
“I think we’d like to schedule that as soon as possible, then. If any mishap should befall you, this knowledge might be lost, which would be a shame, since the great benefit of cures for otherwise incurable problems seems obvious, while problems seem manageable with proper controls and supervision, especially in an age in which the power of the Dark appears to be focused on our destruction. We obviously do have the power to shift shapes, but this power is limited to copying physical models ready to hand. We cannot, as you seem to be able to do, embody an ideal form that doesn’t already exist.”
Wildflower thought about this for quite some time before replying. “I agree, and will undertake the preparation with your assistance, Mistress Whover-you-are.”
The woman seemed slightly startled, then realized…. “I do apologize, of course; I’m so used to being recognized that I forgot that, as travelers from afar, you might not be at all familiar with local notables. I am Empress D’Larona-Elvi, joined in marriage to the Emperor of these lands, and Mistress Sorceress and Scryer of the Imperial College of Wizards.” She gave her a wry look. “The ‘Old Boys’ like to ignore us in the name of their little ‘club,’ but there are actually more of us than there are of them.” She smiled. “It’s a natural gift.”
Wildflower returned her smile with a smile of her own. “I’m honored, of course, and at your service,” she said. “Perhaps we could arrange something in the near future, coördinating our schedules with my daughter Rhea, Selene, and Apprentice Phil, who possesses both a rare gift — as I understand it — for creating metals and other substances, and all three have a knowledge of Earth sciences that will allow us to communicate more easily.”
“Are you sure that you won’t outstrip me?” she asked with a smile.
“Fairly sure,” she said, smiling. “Before coming to your world, I was a professor and lecturer in biological science at a rather large regional university. My students rated me as one of the most popular teachers on campus, so I’m fairly confident of my pedagogical skills, and I don’t imagine that my change has done anything to make me less capable of holding the full attention of an audience.” She arched a brow….
…and the Empress laughed. “No, I don’t imagine that it would. In fact, why don’t we start right now, since everyone you’ve mentioned is right at hand, with nothing obvious to do except listen to quite a lot of fustian while the men debate endlessly over what clearly needs to be done.”
She looked around the room, but no one seemed to be particularly offended, so said, “Again, I’m at your service, Ma’am,” and walked off to the side of the hall, where she was soon joined by Rhea, Selene and Phil, as Akcuanrut took the podium once more.
The Empress took only a moment to gather up her things, and a small retinue of ‘courtiers,’ or whatever they were, so they followed closely as she whisked out a side door and entered rather smaller corridors than they’d seen heretofore. “I have my own Orrery just up these stairs,” she said, as they approached an enormous formal double flight of stairs leading upward. There were capacious landings at regular intervals, and large double doors on either side of the reception hall the stairs ascended from, all decorated in the same opulent style as the Council Chamber. “I believe they will be broad and shallow enough to accomodate you without problems, my dear Wildflower. My usual entrance is more private, but is a winding circular stairway through a narrow shaft, so I’m fairly certain that it would be uncomfortable for you.”
“This seems perfectly navigable,” she said politely, “and downright palatial in comparison to the pass over the mountains.”
The Empress laughed. “I see you have a sense of humor, which is lovely. So many of my colleagues are as dry as dust.” She began to walk up the stairs at a leisurely pace, so of course they all followed after.
At the top of the stairs was another hall, but smaller, with three large double doors on each of the three sides off the landing for the double stairs behind them. To the front, the doors were especially grand, and two of the courtiers quickly ran to open them.
The Orrery within was magnificent, with a pair of gilded globes suspended in the center that evidently represented this world’s binary sun system, and a number of smaller globes scattered at random, or so it seemed, dangling from a complex series of roughly circular tracks centered on the two suns. Directly beneath the central suns was a low padded dais, evidently provided for the comfort of the observer, since there was a small table beside it with various instruments upon it, what looked like a telescope, and astrolabe of some sort, and an octant, as well as other items with no obvious purpose.
“It’s a planetarium!” said Rhea.
“Yes,” she said, “a type of astrolabe designed to facilitate studies of the planetary motions and alignments, and of course our moons. It’s also my Oratory, well-supplied with simples and compounds of all sorts.”
“It’s amazing!” Selene said. “How does the mechanism work?”
“It’s quite simple, actually. The orbs are suspended from hollow copper floats, and the floats themselves rest on a channel filled with mercury.”
“But how do they move?”
She blinked in surprise. “They’re linked to the planets themselves, of course. ‘That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing’, as Hermes said so long ago.”
“Hermes?” Wildflower asked excitedly.
“Yes, exactly! You know of him?”
“We do. He’s the legendary founder of a school of ‘Hermetic’ philosophy and science, although on our world his work became sidetracked, I think, into mysticism and pseudoscience. One of our more famous Tarot cards, the first of the Major Arcana, titled ‘The Magician,’ depicts him standing at a table on which are displayed symbols of the Four Elements, above his head is a symbol of infinity, or alternatively eternity, and with his right hand he points up to the heavens with magician’s wand of power in his hand, while with the other he points down toward the ground, illustrating the principle, ‘as above, so below,’ and the ground is covered with blooming flowers, representing burgeoning life, while overhead a trellis supports more flowers, further illustrating the same principle, that there is life everywhere
.”
“Of course. The words are from The Emerald Tablet,” she explained, “and the image, while somewhat unfamiliar in exact detail, features symbols associated with Hermes on this world.”
“We have the same work on our world, by the same author, or God, depending on whom one asks, but don’t you see? This means that there has been contact between our two worlds before!”
“Well, of course there has been,” the Empress said with serene assurance. “Even the Dark Gods would have found it difficult to open a portal if there hadn’t been a preëxisting linkage, and of course Master Akcuanrut would have been perfectly capable of doing the same, were it not for the fact that he was fatigued after his magical duel with Na-Noc, and then Na-Noc did it on his own, but you’ll note that you returned to a place nearby the place of your first appearance.”
Wildflower cleared her throat. “Uhm… actually, I opened the portal on my end, using an invention of my own called the Trans-Spacial Portal, or TSP for short.”
The Empress was astonished. “You opened an interdimensional portal?” She studied the centaur carefully. “How curious,” she said. “Other than your peculiar centaurian magic, you appear to have no magical abilities at all.”
“I should hope not!” she said indignantly, “I’m a scientist!”
“Do you still have this talisman, or whatever it is?”
“Alas, no. It was destroyed when the portal opened, because the portal was larger than the apparatus itself, and so couldn’t contain the energies generated.”
“Were any special cantrips or formulas engraved upon it?”
“Other than ‘Danger! High Voltage!’ no,” she said. “It’s a machine, actually, which uses electrical power — and an apparatus of my own design — to induce a hypermagnetic field within the space-time continuum that causes the fabric of space itself to fold in upon itself, and thereby open a window into other portions of the multiverse. This was all theoretical at the time, of course, until proven by the rather catastrophic success of the experiment. I hadn’t quite counted upon so violent an effect, nor had I calculated the correct size of the portal which opened.” She furrowed her brows, contemplating her experiment. “I’ll have to work on that,” she concluded.
“Can you make one of these… ‘machines’ again?” the Empress asked.
She blinked. “Of course I can! I made the first one, didn’t I?” She seemed slightly indignant once again.
The Empress said, “I beg your pardon, Master Artificer, but this puts an entirely new perspective on things. Would you mind going back to the Council Chamber with me? This information should be presented to the College before they dither themselves into a plan which doesn’t include this new information.”
“I suppose not. I’m sorry that I didn’t mention it at the time, but it didn’t seem terribly important just then, because the most spectacular effects had seemed to be caused by the Jekyll formula, so I concentrated on the catalyst which seemed to have initiated our adventures. The TSP event seemed merely accidental by comparison.”
She laughed at that. “You must live a very interesting life, my dear Wildflower!”
Wildflower blushed. “Well, explosions weren’t exactly extraordinary in our household, I have to confess. A small rupture in the fabric of space-time was a little startling, though, and probably should have aroused comment, except that we were already fighting for our very lives before we had much time to reflect. Since then, it’s rather been one damned thing after another, as they say.”
She laughed again, a lovely peal of genuine good humor. “How apt! Considering our opponents, how very apt! You obviously have a great career on the stage ahead, should you ever give up artifacture.”
“Well, the odd quip does help leaven a lengthy lecture,” she admitted modestly.
“Perhaps you can teach some of our Wizards this skill,” she suggested. “Some of them need lessons in light-heartedness quite desperately. We can talk about this on our way back down,” and with that, she led the way out of the Orrery and down the long stairs.
As it turned out, Empress D’Larona-Elvi was right on target about everything. The wizards had accomplished exactly nothing since they’d left, although several factions were aligned on different sides of the Chamber, and were shouting at each other by now. When they’d finally noticed that the Empress had returned, the uproar died down and the men began returning to their seats, somewhat chastened, most of them, to be caught out.
“Honored Colleagues, Wizards, Sorceresses, and Scryers, please pardon my interruption, but information has come to light that I’m sure may be of help in resolving your differences. It seems that Wildflower here, through a very becoming modesty, had neglected to tell us that she’s actually a Master Artificer of considerable skill, and has in very fact constructed a device which allows her to open portals between the worlds at will.”
The uproar was almost instantaneous, punctuated by furious shouts of… “Fraud!” “Nonsense!” and many others less flattering.
It ended when Akcuanrut spoke a single word, “Sumikat!” which caused a brilliant flash of green light to erupt from his hands that dazzled everyone present. “I apologize for my ill-temper,” he said, as the assembled worthies blinked their eyes, trying to focus, “but your discourtesy toward the Empress and my guests annoys me. Although I haven’t seen this device, after seeing ‘portable power drills’ and ‘circular saws,’ I have no doubt that such devices are commonplace in the home of my kind hostess Wildflower, whom you malign with your boisterous remarks, which are more suitable for the lowest tavern on the riverfront than an exalted body of scholars which reports directly to the Emperor. I’ve heard reports of the new portal from my attendants, and can attest that it was, by description, somewhat dissimilar to any known portal, and was in a location not known to harbor any prior link between worlds. The urgency of our primary task, recovering the Heart of Virtue, and returning Na-Noc to safe custody, precluded my personal observation of the phenomenon, but if Mistress Wildflower says this thing, it’s true. Any who chose to quarrel with my judgement in this can feel quite free to have their most notable Apprentice bring forward a proper Advisement of Duel Arcane so that we can address the issue of precedence in a formal manner.” He smiled benignly. “I’m sure your chosen Apprentice would welcome the honor of carrying the document to my own Chief of Apprentices.”
Rhea leaned over and whispered to Phil, “Why would they welcome being a messenger boy?”
He whispered back, “As I understand it, this sort of contest is invariably fatal for one party or the other, and the Apprentice chosen to carry the document has first crack at taking his old Master’s seat in the College of Wizards, should he not succeed. Of course, Akcuanrut’s Chief Apprentice would have the same privilege if the challenge succeeded, but I somehow doubt that it would. He’s not Dean of the College as a mere courtesy.”
“Oh,” she whispered.
“It’s hardly ever done,” he said quietly, “or at least I don’t think it is, but the law is still on the books. I do have a Handbook for Apprentices, but of course I’ve never read it.”
She was about to ask why, but then she realized that she couldn’t read their funny writing either. “Oh,” she murmured.
“Now,” said Master Wizard Akcuanrut, if there are no further interruptions, I’d like you all to direct your kind attention to our Lady Empress, Mistress Sorceress and Scryer, D’Larona-Elvi, who appeared to be speaking before she was so rudely interrupted.
“Thank you, Master Wizard Akcuanrut, for your generous offer to accept an Advisement on my behalf, but I’d rather enjoy the challenge; it’s been simply ages since I’ve had the opportunity to rid the world of excess baggage.” She stared pointedly in the general direction of one of the loudest hecklers, who looked decidedly nervous, even looking around toward his erstwhile supporters, who all seemed to be studiously looking somewhere else at the time. “Be that as it may be,”she resumed, “we now have an interesting problem before us.” She paused to look around the room again, then continued, “I have no reason to doubt Master Artificer Wildflower, and when she rebuilds her portal generator, have no doubt that her device, when aided by the efforts of Master Akcuanrut and myself, will allow us to pierce the barriers the Dark Gods erected against us and take them in their stronghold. Too long have they hidden from us, working their mischief in secret, aided by willing dupes and proxies without daring to expose themselves to our full power, the while sapping at our strength through subverting those who would stand with us, and murdering those they couldn’t coerce or gull into submission.”
“Hear, hear!” someone said from the audience.
“What I propose,” she said, “is a small punitive expedition to drive straight through to the Dark God homeworld, after a stopover on Wildflower’s Earth to gather the necessary materials to reconstruct one or more portal devices and then build them, together with whatever supplies are needed for their operation, while Akcuanrut and I together work on ways to ensure alternative sources of magical power on this and other worlds we may encounter with depleted, or uneven access to power.”
Akcuanrut instantly said, “I second the motion before this body and call for the vote without debate!”
One by one, almost the entire room rose in assent, some more reluctantly than others, while those whose response was particularly tardy were carefully noted by both D’Larona-Elvi and Akcuanrut. “The motion is carried,” Akcuanrut said, “and this session is closed.”
Phil and his wives looked at each other in surprise. “Well, that went well,” Selene observed.
“Why,” Rhea asked rhetorically, “do I get the feeling that we’ve just been shanghaied?”
Phil just rolled his eyes.
The trip back took very little time in comparison to the journey south. Akcuanrut, having done this once before, simply set up a Gate in Empress D’Larona-Elvi’s Orrery which connected directly to the corridor below the Throne Room in the Temple of Zampulus, so their party, the original explorers and the three hundred or so centaurs, the two Mages, plus an assortment of Apprentices and men-at-arms, arrived up north the next day.
“Well,” the Empress said when they’d stepped into the corridor, “this is certainly a convenient way to travel. Do let us look at this little trick with the corridor, my dear colleague, while we have the opportunity. Just off hand, it seems similar to a portal, but held open in some sort of stasis, connected only with itself.” She studied the turning point with some care. “Fascinating,” she said. “I can already see applicability to the defense of the Capital City, and other strategic fortifications, not to mention the provision of covert supply lines in case of siege.”
“I’d thought,” the wizard said, “to use this as a staging point for our journey north, since there’s a largish town not too far from here where we can purchase supplies and necessaries.”
“Excellent plan!” the Empress said. “Now let’s go upstairs to this throne room of the ancient centaurs.”
The wizard smiled. “Alas, no stairs of any sort. Since centaurs designed it, the entrance is up a simple shaft, like a very large well, which posed no obstacle to the ancient centaurs at all. They were evidently notable builders, since the level of detail is impressive.”
“Of course! They’d simply levitate from level to level,” she mused.
“Exactly!”
During this conversation, Phil was becoming irritated. “Can we get on with it? While you’re standing here chatting, our friends the centaurs are waiting behind us, and we’ll soon have to send people back with brooms and shovels if we stand larking about much longer, not to mention what they’re doing in your Orrery, Empress.”
She blinked. “Oh! I hadn’t thought.” She looked behind her. “Please go on ahead, everyone, while Akcuanrut and I inspect this more carefully.”
“Just follow the arrows painted on the floor,” Phil said. “And watch for the end of the corridor, because the well shaft apparently goes down almost forever.”
Empress D’Larona-Elvi looked at Akcuanrut meaningfully. “Don’t you think there’s another portal loop there? It would be a safety feature, if someone stumbled down the shaft.”
“Of course!” the wizard said, enthused. “I didn’t think of it myself, but it’s obvious when you mention it. That obviously means that the magic was designed by the centaurs themselves, since those possessed by the Heart of Virtue wouldn’t care how many bodies piled up at the bottom of the shaft. We’ve been looking at this place the wrong way around, as if it had been designed and built by agents of the Dark Gods, but it’s too beautiful to be their work. They corrupted it, yes, and filled the lower cavern with their grotesque frozen acts of torture, but the centaurs who carved their own images on the entrance built this place. Everything is scaled for their comfort, not that of humans, except for the throne, which is probably a late addition to what was formerly a simple dias, since centaurs don’t sit down on chairs of any sort.”
“Indeed,” the Empress said. “It also suggests that there may be something hidden beneath the vertical portal, since those not privy to the secret would have no reason to question whether an ‘endless’ pit might actually have a bottom.”
“Doesn’t the same apply to the trick in the corridor?” Akcuanrut asked.
“Good point. It might,” she said.
“I’d like Phil to take a look at them both. He was very helpful in discovering the secret of the throne which covered the well shaft, and this is another puzzle, evidently posed by the same ancient builders.”
“Really? I hadn’t heard this part of the story,” she said.
He smiled philosophically. “You know how stories go, there’s always another corner to explore.”
“Indeed.”
Phil was glad to help, and started out in the corridor, since he preferred to explore on his own two feet, he’d said, rather then hovering in mid-air like a hot air balloonist. “You say that opening a portal takes a significant expenditure of energy?” he asked offhand.
“Usually,” the wizard said, and Empress D’Larona-Elvi nodded her assent.
“Okay. Let’s have a look… I wish I had a decent flashlight….” He was holding up a flickering torch, looking at the walls of the corridor.
“Flashlight?” Empress D’Larona-Elvi asked.
“A type of very bright torch that uses ‘electrical power’ instead of an open flame. They’re very handy, because you can carry one in your pocket and flick it on and off with a gesture.”
“Like magic?” she asked again.
“Almost, but much more accessible to the average human. Master Wizard, would it be too much trouble for you to make a little magical light here? Something like the one I did in the pit for Selene and Rhea during their adventure with the dwarves would be fine, but I can’t concentrate on looking for secrets at the same time I’m trying to float a light in mid-air.”
Akcuanrut narrowed his brows in magisterial disapproval. “It would be good practice, Apprentice Phil.”
“I’m sure it would, but time, I think, is rather of the essence here.” He raised one brow, almost as imperious as his tutor.
The wizard scowled. “Very well, then. Have it your own way!” and he created a brilliant orb of light which floated in the air, only the wizard’s luminary tended toward the amber warmth of candlelight rather than the brilliant white Phil favored. “You can push it around with your hand, ” he said in a sullen huff, “if you like, although I’m sure it won’t be half as good as one of your ‘flashlights.’ Hardly worth the bother, one might think.”
“Not at all! It’s excellent,” he said, “almost as good as a modern LED flashlight…” and bit back a smile. He spent some time inspecting the wall of the corridor opposite the entrance to the cavern, then moved slightly down toward the entrance to the well shaft. “In fact, now that we know that these things were created by centaurs, everything makes sense. The throne platform was controlled by a strong kick, like a centaur might give it in a hurry, and you’ll notice a slight scuff mark on the wall of the corridor, just here….” He gave the mark a mighty kick, almost as if he were trying for a field goal from the fifty yard line, contacting the wall exactly half-way up, so it was a bit of a stretch.
A section of the wall just opposite the cavern entrance popped open.
He smiled and said, “Voilà!”
The wizard rolled his eyes. “About time, too.”
“Well, it took a little while to work out the general principle from only one example. Humans tend to rely upon delicate manipulations of things using their hands when concealing secrets. Evidently, centaurs in a hurry prefer their hooves. Shall we explore?” He delicately pushed the ball of light into the opening which, like all centaurian passages, was very tall, at least twelve feet in height, through relatively narrow, only six feet wide, a tight squeeze for any group of centaurs walking abreast, but ample enough for single file.
“Phil went first, since he was the spryest — at least in his opinion — and had the light in hand.” The side tunnel, for that’s what it was, simply curved around the location of the minor ‘jog’ in space that marked the twist in space-time. From this side, he could see that the portal was obviously a gateway, the edges of it glowing with a soft amber light, just like the one Akcuanrut had made to cut their journey to the Temple short when they were chasing Na-Noc.
“I’ll be damned,” Phil said, as he looked on down the hidden corridor. It was the entrance to a vast library, in a cavern even larger than the one on the other side of the crazy looking glass that had hidden it from the world for what must have been thousands of years, if one could judge by the thick coating of dust everywhere he could see.
“What do you see, Apprentice Phil?” Akcuanrut asked from behind him, although there was room to stand beside him.
“Sir, could you ask Windflyer and Thundercloud to come down here? I don’t think that we should trespass into this sanctuary until some representatives of the centaurs are here to see the glory of their ancient civilization without our messy footprints traipsing through the pristine layers of undisturbed dust that offer mute testimony to its antiquity.”
The wizard looked over his shoulder. “I see what you mean, Apprentice Phil,” he said, then looked behind him to the Empress D’Larona-Elvi. “Empress, I think we should delay a little while before we enter, if that’s alright with you. Phil says, and I agree, that the centaurs should be the first to visit this place.”
With a quick glance past Phil’s shoulder, she took in the situation and instantly agreed, “Yes, they should.” She called out to the centaurs who’d been assigned to escort them up and down the well shaft, and were even now waiting in the corridor, “My dears, would you mind fetching Windflyer, Wildflower, and Thundercloud for us, and any others who might be interested in the history of the centaur people? I know some of the young women may have a particular interest as well. Tell them that we’ve made a very important discovery about the history of your people.”
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-Three
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Though they are only breath,
words that I speak are immortal.— Sappho of Lesbos (c. 630 BCE)
The Library was just the first of many treasures hidden behind portals. At the bottom of the well shaft was another camouflaged entrance to a secret cavern, this one a museum, or at least a storehouse, of sculpture and other plastic arts, with an annex filled with paintings — carefully wrapped and stored away for posterity, many of which had decayed past saving, or even deciphering, like the tapestries in the throne room above — but including one panoramic carved stone tableau on the wall of the first cavern depicting the systematic destruction of centaur civilization by several races, including dwarves, giants, and humans. It was colored and gilded in the same fashion as the bas-relief centaurs that flanked the gates of the Temple above them, with inset blocks of what appeared to be centaur writing, the same strange hieroglyphics as those above the gates. “Those guys,” Rhea had said, when she saw them, “those dwarves, are the same sort of crew who attacked us in the mountain pass when we were headed south with the Heart of Virtue. ”
“And this,” the Wizard said, pointing to an object held high by one of the dwarves, from which the stone centaurs fled in silent frozen panic, “appears to be an image of the Heart itself.”
“And this,” said the Empress D’Larona-Elvi, “is their last will and testament, or so I believe.” She pointed to two figures who held between them the engraved representation of a book, the lettering on the cover clearly visible. “Unfortunately, I don’t know this writing, but what one mind can create, other minds can comprehend.”
“But where is this book?” Rhea asked in irritation.
The Empress arched an eyebrow. “In the Library, of course, right where you’d least expect it.”
Rhea snorted in a manner most unladylike. “Well, why can’t we ask some of the centaurs if they can read it?”
“We’ll ask some of our sisters who used to be centaurs as well,” Selene added helpfully. “I don’t know how far back their memories go, but almost certainly around the time in which the Temple was abandoned by the centaurs, or at least taken over by those the Heart held in thrall. At least some of the captives may have been literate in their language still, despite everything.”
“Ask everyone,” the Empress said. “All the captives shared at least a common enemy, and we won’t know what else they shared unless we ask.”
As it turned out, the centaurs made the best librarians, since the shelves were sized for very tall browsers, and as tall as the many Selene/Rhea clones were in the human woman scheme of things, they were midgets from a centaur perspective. One of them, once a centaur herself, turned out to be the key to their unique alphabet, since she was just out of school at the time she’d been captured by the minions of the Dark, but the rest were useful mainly as messengers, or charwomen with dust mops and brooms. Eventually, the book depicted on the sculpted mural was discovered, along with well over fifty copies that they’d also found, each hidden away in a different location, some behind secret panels, others inside hollowed-out books, and almost a dozen that had simply been bound in different covers than the one depicted in the mural. The ancient centaurs had obviously taken some care to make certain that their book would eventually be found, just as the Empress D’Larona-Elvi had instantly intuited.
Akcuanrut had immediately seized upon the first copy found, and had started learning the alphabet as soon as the woman with the key was found.
Phil asked about that, since it seemed to be working backwards from what he knew of famous historical translations on Earth. “I don’t get it,” he’d said, “How does knowing the alphabet help in deciphering an ancient text?”
“It’s quite simple, really, and dates back to the first Emperor, Emperor Padwan of Myriad, and his Empress, D’Sigorni-Padwan. Together, they cast the Great Spell of Reconciliation which made all spoken languages existentially identical to each other, at least in our understanding, although the alphabets and symbols by which they were written down retained their former character, if you’ll pardon the small witticism. Once you’ve learned a new alphabet, you can simply sound out the words and hear them with perfect understanding, although it takes much longer to be able to create a written text in a language you don’t know.”
“But how does that work? On Earth, we have hundreds of languages, most of which are written in one of two or three alphabets that are more-or-less identical for most languages, but knowing the alphabet doesn’t make much difference, because foreign words written down in any alphabet are still written in a foreign language.
“That’s not very useful, is it?” said the Wizard. “I much prefer the Emperor’s system, and of course the universal simplicity of it is why the Empire exists to this day. The centaur alphabet, for example, looks like it has far too many letters, because it’s a special form of alphabet called a syllabary, which has one symbol for every consonant vowel combination found in the language itself. There’s an added complication, of course, in that some of the centauran characters represent whole words, which have to be learned by rote rather than sounded out, but these characters are few and far between, so we’ve been able to decipher most of them through context and through the aid of our best informant, the former centaur, and now young woman Daphne.” The wizard scribbled out a series of odd characters*: 𐀐𐀚𐀲𐁂𐀫𐁒. “Here, for example, is the centauran name for their own race. The first syllable is ‘Ke,’ the second ‘Ne,’ the third ‘Ta,’ the fourth ‘Au,’ the fifth ‘Ro,’ and the last a special ‘syllable’ used to represent ‘a final sibilant,’ what you would call in your language ‘Ess.’” Put them all together — with the addition of a little ‘creative license’ — and you have a nonsense ‘word’ that sounds like ‘Centaur’ as soon as you hear it spoken.” He beamed. “See how simple that is?”
“But that’s Greek!” Phil said excitedly. “Kentauros is the Greek word for Centaur, which is distantly related to the language I’m speaking now, if you go back far enough in time. It doesn’t look like Greek writing, though….” He felt suddenly doubtful.
Akcuanrut was nonplused, but only for an instant. “Well, writing systems change over time, if you give them long enough, and it would probably mean that the centaurs visited your Earth in the distant past, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” he admitted, “but why were we able to understand each other on Earth?” Phil was still confused. “It sounded like you were speaking English, and you understood us when we were speaking English. Why would the Emperor’s spell affect us?”
“Because the portal had been opened, of course, so my language spilled out through it, as did yours to me.”
“So everyone on Earth now knows your language, whatever it is, and you know every language? That’s impossible!”
“Adjust yourself to magical reality, Apprentice!” the Wizard said. “Any more impossible than stepping across dimensions? More difficult than your own feat of raising an entire army — although I confess that it was a very small one — more than twelve feet off the ground with the mere power of your mind?”
“Uhm….”
“Exactly! You admit, I hope, that your own nascent magical powers — which would never have been developed on Earth before the portal opened — were enhanced in the twinkling of an eye, once you were exposed to the magical field of our world. Just so, the leakage of our world’s enchantment into yours changed everything, although it’s very likely that no one there will ever realize it, because they’ll never actually hear any language from this world spoken in their entire future lives, and there are limitations to the spell, because it was designed for the needs of this world, and so treated the languages of your world as extraneous to its central purpose.”
“But I don’t quite understand how a relatively tiny door poked through space-time, or whatever it is, could change so much so quickly.”
Akcuanrut smiled as serenely as a friendly Buddha. “When I was on your world, I saw with my own eyes what you call a ‘refrigerator.’ It was a box with a door that kept the cold inside. Since everyone knows that cold is the absence of heat, it stands to reason that, when the door was opened, the heat rushed in to fill the box. You could actually hear the heat whooshing through the small crack as the door began to open! The Great Spell of Reconciliation is like that heat; since your world was empty of it, the Emperor’s spell filled it almost instantaneously as soon as your father’s TSP device opened the door. Since our world was empty of your language patterns, which the Emperor’s spell requires to perform its magic, these rushed through the open portal in the opposite direction, and so the system came to a new equilibrium, with balance restored through the dissemination of the missing magical qualities on either side through the same open door, just as the cold inside the refrigerator became warmer, while the warm room outside the refrigerator door became a little cooler.”
With his brow furrowed, Phil thought about the wizard’s words. While the wizard might be a little fuzzy on the Laws of Thermodynamics, not to mention Classical Physics, the general metaphor sounded close enough to what he’d experienced as magical reality to be somewhat truthy, if not the entire metaphysical truth. “Okay…. So if magic is inherently superluminal, outside the ordinary framework of Einsteinian space-time, I’ll grant you that the propagation of a magical wave might appear instantaneous from within that 4-Space. That would explain how I was able to ignore the warp in 4-Space caused by the planetary mass of this world and levitate all those centaurs and people without expending any physical effort, although the mental effort was considerable.”
Akcuanrut stared at him in utter incomprehension…. “I have no idea what you just said, which I suppose goes to show that even the Great Spell of Reconciliation has its limitations.”
Phil smiled. “In my language, it means ‘I’m very impressed.’ ”
“Well, you could have simply said so,” the wizard said indignantly.
“It’s true. I tend to over-think at times,” he said and grinned.
“By now,” the Empress said to the assembled crowd in the throne room — all the centaurs, the rescued women, and the men at arms who’d accompanied the Empress and Akcuanrut — “all of you have had the opportunity to visit the secret hiding places of the great treasures of the ancient Centaur civilization, or those left of them which have survived the passage of thousands of years and destruction at the hands of their enemies.”
They were gathered together in the Throne Room, although the throne itself — an artifact of the Dark Gods’ cohort — had been removed and burned, so the Empress D’Larona-Elvi stood upon the dias, as had centaur leaders in past ages.
“This place has been consecrated to victims of the Dark Gods, who include, I think, the entire race of centaurs, wherever they may be, as well as those human women here reborn from the vile constraint of the Dark Gods’ minions, whoever they were before. It’s fitting, therefore, that we dedicate ourselves here to the utter destruction of the so-called ‘Heart of Virtue,’ and to the ruin of the Dark Gods who created it.”
There was a rising murmur of assent, punctuated by sharp oaths and cries of implacable hostility.
“The ancient Centaurs, the first victims of the Dark Gods, had ample time to study them, and have left us in their writings several clues as to their origins and the true location of their covert lair, even hidden as it was amongst the countless dimensions of the extended universe, of which this world is only a tiny portion. Centaur Metaphysicians deduced not only their location, but their weaknesses, but had not the specific powers necessary to defeat them, since Centaur magic is primarily defensive, and resists efforts to inflict harm. Human thaumaturges, as we know, have no such limitations, although we lack many of the specific strengths and powers possessed by every centaur.”
Windflyer asked, “Is that why our ancient ancestors were defeated?”
The Empress answered, “We believe so, yes, and there were two other problems, the first being that the human study of magic was in its beginning stages, so that they could not have effectively come to the centaur’s aid at the time, even had they then possessed the best good will in the world. The second was that this all happened well before the first human Emperor, Emperor Padwan of Myriad, and his Empress, D’Sigorni-Padwan, had formulated and cast the Great Spell of Reconciliation which renders all our languages mutually comprehensible, so we humans could not have helped to the degree we can now, because we were unable at the time to coördinate our efforts, even amongst ourselves, although humans were also numbered among the Dark Gods’ victims, as most of you here gathered know, since there were as many or more humans murdered and tortured by these wicked villains as there were centaurs, even within these very walls. Indeed, our own records show that the Spell of Reconciliation itself was developed and executed under the hot spur of oppression by the Dark Gods’ minions, and it’s that spell that finally allowed us to turn the tide in their battle against us.”
One of the older mares made a sour face and said, “How can you say that you’ve ‘turned the tide’ when our expedition to the Capital was attacked just over a mountain pass from the very heart of the Empire?”
“It’s a fair question,” the Empress admitted, “but you’ll remember, I’m sure, that by all reports that sneaking ambush was completely ineffective — easily repelled by two rather extraordinary young human women, — and then the enemy force was utterly destroyed by the Master Wizard Akcuanrut and his Apprentice Phillip.”
“How do you know that?” the old centaur mare asked suspiciously.
“Because we sent troops and a Wizard or two back to see, of course,” the Empress said, completely without rancor, or even impatience, “and diverted Akcuanrut’s rather spectacular waterfall to make the caves accessible again, then subsequently found that no one remained alive in any portion of the extensive subterranean caverns and caves that lay under the original pitfall. After extensive interviews with Master Wizard Akcuanrut and his Apprentice Phillip, we’ve agreed in council that his presence in our world has altered the existential ground within which evil formerly flourished side by side with good.”
“How so?” the centauress asked.
“Because when the portal was opened between our two worlds,” the Empress said, “a new balance was struck between the magical underpinnings of this world and that one. Their world was suffused with a portion of our magical reality, and in the same way our world took on some qualities that resemble theirs. Apprentice Phillip’s Spell of Consecration, for example, never existed in this world, yet is now accessible to almost anyone, whether trained in magic or not. Likewise, our own Great Spell of Reconciliation has so thoroughly insinuated itself into their world that even children there were instantly able to understand and converse with our Master Wizard here — at a level suitable to their age, of course.”
“But why would that matter to us?” another centaur mare asked. “As we understood the plan, we were meant to attack the Dark God world, wherever that is.”
“Because it means that we can easily pass as natives. For magical reasons that I won’t go into now, we have tasks that we must accomplish on Thundercloud’s world, before we can proceed against the Dark Gods, and it would be helpful to have all of us gathered together in one place.”
She was astonished. “You mean we’re all going to travel to a different planet?”
The Empress laughed with unconcealed delight, her eyes shining in excitement, “Yes! Isn’t it just wonderful?”
They say an army marches on its stomach, well, Napoleon Bonaparte said so, anyway, so it didn’t surprise Phil at all that the details of moving even a small army through a portal into an upstate New York suburb were somewhat daunting. In the first place, there would be no way to hide three hundred or so centaurs in the Lanyon’s family home, much less hundreds of Selene’s more-or-less identical twins, so the first thing that came to mind was to buy a small farm — or even a large farm — and that meant money, lots of it, which in turn meant gold.
“Krugerrands, I think,” he said.
“What’s that, Apprentice Phil?” They were in private but desultory conversation, ambling through one of the empty corridors of the Temple toward a distant source of light, talking from time to time about the purely magical logistics of their journey between the worlds. The most prominent sticking point was Earth, and the necessity of planning ahead for a scarcity of magical power, which Phil thought could be largely compensated for with money, since pretty much everything had a price on Earth, where here the vast majority of property belonged in some sense to the Emperor and his Empress, feudal overlords from whom all temporary titles were held at the Sovereign’s pleasure. A special dispensation had been made for the centaur temple and the traditional centaur lands, as compensation for past injustice at human hands, but even then they’d had to swear fealty to the Empire.
“I said, ‘Krugerrands,’ a type of gold coin that’s widely traded. There are others, of course, and it wouldn’t hurt to diversify slightly, since that’s what gold traders do, or so I understand it. There’s a law against making unauthorized copies, of course, but I suspect that even I could make them impossible to detect as counterfeits. They’d be a trivial exercise for you, if we can access the same source of magic that Na-Noc did.”
“Of course,” the wizard said, “although I’d like you to try as well. The prospect of imminent danger is a wonderful spur to magical progress.‘
Phil smiled. “There’s a saying on Earth, ‘Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ I suppose the same principle generally applies to being clapped in irons.”
“Just so. When we intervened in the quarrel between the centaurs and the humans, for example, the danger this posed to your lady wives spurred you to a feat of mass levitation that might have daunted even a seasoned wizard of great power and long experience.”
Phil didn’t know exactly what to say. “Uhm….”
Akcuanrut frowned in his direction, his face indistinct in the dim light, then said pointedly, “There’s no place for false modesty in wizardry, Apprentice Phil. Would you entrust your life to a surgeon or apothecary who minimized his skills, or to a bridge whose engineer didn’t exactly know whether it would fall down or not? If you fail, it will quickly become apparent, and the Imperial College of Wizards may well intervene, but you owe it to those who will depend upon you to project an air of quiet confidence, because any fear on their part will infect the magical æther which pervades the world, thus causing the failure you ‘modestly’ predict in order to spare yourself the uncomfortable burden of having people entrust their safety and health to your care.”
Chastened, he said, “Okay, Sir. I’ll try….”
Instantly, the wizard cast a withering glare at him directly, catching his eye. “There is no ‘trying’ in magic,” he said forcefully, “only to do or not to do.”
“Yes, Sir,” he replied.
“That’s better,” he said, somewhat mollified, but still suspicious.
“Look, I apologize for my lack of certainty, but you’ve got to realize that I’d never thought that magic was real before, where the people on this world have grown up with magic as a background to their daily lives. On my world, the things that your world accomplishes with magic are done with ‘science,’ and you find that almost as mysterious as I do magic, despite the evidence of my own senses. In fact, on Earth we have a sort of witticism called Clarke’s Third Law, which says, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ It refers to the fact that what we might think is completely mysterious, almost like ‘magic,’ can almost certainly be accomplished through ‘science,’ the application of physical devices and/or forces just as straightforward as the rolling wheel of a cart, so that the merest child might accomplish it by simply flicking a switch, like the cordless power tools you so admired on Earth, which are powered by ‘electricity,’ the same force that makes a little spark when you scuff your shoes on a woolen carpet.”
Akcuanrut thought about this for a few seconds, then said, “Perhaps your ‘Clark’s Third Law’ has it backwards,” my dear Apprentice. “Perhaps the inevitable corollary to this so-called ‘Third Law’ is a fourth law, to wit: ‘Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.’ Wildflower tells us that she created a magical portal between our separate worlds using this ‘science’ of yours, but isn’t that almost a contradiction in terms? If a magical effect ensues, doesn’t that imply that magic was used? Just because Wildflower doesn’t realize that it was magic, or fails to see the magical principles involved, is it any less magical because she simply doesn’t understand?”
Phil’s jaw dropped slightly as he suddenly saw the wizard’s point; the original Dr. Jeckyll had used what he’d thought of as ‘science’ to achieve a ‘magical’ transformation, the exact same sort of transformation that he’d recently witnessed on a grander scale, performed right before his eyes using the unaided power of a human mind. “Of course!” he said in dawning awareness. “My world must have a ‘damping field’ of some sort, a general suppression of magic caused by a general disbelief in — or even hostility toward — ‘magical phenomena’ in daily life! Inside that church, the situation was somewhat different, because religious sanctuaries are amongst the few places left on Earth — or at least our part of it — where most people allow themselves to believe in miracles, or the reality of supernatural forces which might as well be magic.”
The wizard nodded sagely. “I see. So your current theory is that there’s a tension in your society between your so-called ‘science’ and magic, and that the conflict plays out on religious grounds?”
“At least to some extent, yes, although there are cultures on Earth with more innate religiosity, but these serve partially to confirm my rough theory — at least anecdotally — because many of these same sorts of cultures tend to experience more reported sightings of magical creatures, or support a widely-held corpus of legends and stories founded either upon the existence of magic in the present, or at some point in the recent past, like leprechauns and the Fairy Folk in Ireland, or La Llorona in Mexico.”
“I do not know these things, but what do you mean by ‘religiosity’ exactly?” Akcuanrut asked.
“Well, it’s an editorial meta-comment, I suppose. ‘Excessively religious’ is what the word means literally, although of course what seems excessive to one person may seem entirely reasonable to another. Most people in our local area are pragmatic about such things, so if they feel a little peckish, they go out to the kitchen and make a sandwich, or whatever they feel like having, rather than offer up heartfelt prayers for some sort of God or Goddess to order in a catered luncheon, and then pick up the tab.”
The wizard laughed, just as they entered a large room at the end of the corridor. “Very good! Speaking of which, isn’t it time for lunch?”
Phil didn’t answer at first, drawn to a large opening on one wall of the room, where he could see a broad balcony, a stone balustrade, and a range of mountains in the near distance. As he approached, he could see that the balusters were carved in a floral motif that reminded him of something, “Lotus flowers!” he said, and he realized that he was looking at the Himalayas, although which mountain was which was beyond him. He’d had a screensaver, back on Earth, which had featured random mountain images from that central Asian range, and he recognized the profile of the craggy mountain that he saw before him, with one face so sheer that it was free of snow and ice. “That’s Earth!” he cried.
“Stop! Don’t touch that!” the wizard shouted, almost before Phil realized that he was reaching out toward the opening.
Bewildered, he turned to stare at Akcuanrut, whose countenance was very stern. “But that’s Earth!” he said.
“And undoubtedly a deadly trap,” the wizard said. “Look around you. Do you see any signs of animals or birds, taking advantage of a nice warm nesting place or den? Look outside the portal; does it look like a friendly place in which to spend the night? For that matter, look down, without poking your fool head out. Do you see any hint of a safe place where one might safely stroll about?”
Phil looked down, gingerly staying well away from the opening itself, and saw nothing but air, and what looked like an alpine lake, thousands of feet below. “Oh!” he said.
“Exactly. The most important rule of magic is to avoid getting yourself into a situation where your last thought is, ‘Ooops! That was really stupid.’ The key to avoiding this sort of fatal dénouement is to use your head for something other than to keep your ears apart.”
“But….”
“But nothing! When dealing with magic, mysterious circumstances are quite often dangerous ones. You already know that some centaur portals only work in one direction, or do other strange things, and since there are no signs of anything living having visited this lovely vista point in many thousands of years, despite what appears to be an open balcony, it would seem that this may well be one of them. Further, the room is warm. Does this seem reasonable, given the frigid appearance of the world outside? This is further evidence supporting my instant hypothesis. If this is a one-way portal, as it increasingly appears, once you’d thoughtlessly poked your fool hand through, the only way you’d get out of the trap would be to cut off said hand at the wrist, and you wouldn’t have much time for larking about, because the blood that flows through your veins wouldn’t be able to return and would begin to clot within your arm. An instant spent in careful observation would have told you this, thereby preventing you from making a fatal mistake.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not as sorry as you would have been” the wizard said succinctly. On the other hand, you can reassure Wildflower that her portal would not have destroyed your Earth if this world had been destroyed, since this open portal would have been perfectly sufficient.
Phil rolled his eye toward the heavens. “I’m sure that will be a great comfort to her. It’s always nice to have someone to point your finger at when things go to Hell in a handbasket.”
Akcuanrut looked mildly affronted. “Well, it’s nicer than thinking, ‘This is all my fault!’ isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” he admitted, “but in the larger scheme of things, I doubt that a few milliseconds of self-loathing over one’s actions can be readily-distinguished from the same few milliseconds spent hating one’s self for not doing more to prevent it.” He shrugged. “I’m not even sure that the human brain is capable of processing a thought that quickly, so by the time the occasion for the thought arose, it would already be too late to think it.”
“But thoughts are instantaneous, aren’t they?”
“Not at all, recognizing a familiar situation, something one has thought about before, takes from three to four tenths of a second. So if you hear a man say, ‘Oh, no! I’m pregnant!’ you recognize the incongruity right away, but even then it takes some time for the sounds to register on your brain. Add in the time for your brain to respond, ‘That’s odd!’ takes a few more tenths of a second, and that’s about something that everyone already knows, that only women become pregnant. Ask an average person how long it takes for the Sun’s heat to reach their skin and they’ll probably take quite a while to figure it out, if they can answer the question correctly at all.”
“This is that ‘science’ of yours, isn’t it?” he said accusingly.
“I’m afraid so, Sir,” he said, completely unchagrined. “People become easily confused about time, because we maintain an internal illusion of simultaneity that allows us to move about in the world without stumbling over things. Our brains make very rapid predictions about where objects are going to be, and place them in our sensorium where they’re not, so we’re constantly amazed by the tricks of sleight-of-hand artists, who take great pains to act as if they’re doing one predictable thing while actually doing something completely different. This is Selene’s particular skill, and you can see it in her sword and knife work. Rhea, of course, probably inherited some of her gift through the mechanism of her own transformation, plus ample practice with Selene herself. They’re both very quick studies, as you know, and constantly teach each other new tricks as quickly as they discover them.”
“But….”
“Master Wizard, dear friend, our next stop is Earth, where science rules, and we’re likely to have to scrounge to find the magic we need. Better forewarned than taken aback.”
The wizard lowered his brows like thunderclouds in a clear sky and scowled most fiercely, but “Hmmph!” was all he said.
The next two full days were spent arranging the supplies for their expedition and preparing various documents, just in case they turned out to be handy. The first, of course, was the provision of sufficient grain to tide the centaurs over for a few days, in case it were a weekend or bank holiday and they couldn’t arrange for delivery. The second was human provisions for the trip back up north, which they calculated at five days, allowing for distractions. They assumed that the house would still be there, since their lawyers would have been notified when they turned up missing, since the firm was on both of their emergency contact forms at work, and likewise for at least Hastie. They were unsure about the Utterson home and their affairs, so one of the documents was a power of attorney pre-signed by both Alice and Sarah, since they’d never be able to pull off an impersonation. The last, of course, was a large quantity of gold, which they’d decided to supply as nuggets, so they could look about to find some Federal land still open to mining claims and ‘discover’ a rich deposit of alluvial gold. Whatever they did, it was sure to burn money, since one of the first things they’d have to do was buy a largish farm. “Is there anything we’ve forgotten?” Selene asked, having taken on the rôle of expedition military leader.
“Changes of clothes?” Rhea suggested.
“Good point! We’ll have to arrange some sort of covering if it turns out to be winter already, and to disguise the fact that a band of over three hundred buxom babes in scanty outfits has arrived in town. Halloween was a fluke; it’ll be Christmas at least by now. Do you think we should all practice dancing so we could pretend to be the Rockettes?”
Rhea smirked. “Not likely, although I do think we’d look swell in those little top hat and tail numbers they turn out in so often, we’ve sure got the legs for it, and our coördination beats theirs six ways from Sunday. We’re too tall, though. Their maximum height for dancers is only five foot ten and a half inches. Shrimps, the lot of them,”
Selene stared at her in amazement. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I probably read it in the program when we went to see them perform three years ago. I think it was the Christmas Spectacular. They didn’t do The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, though, so I was a little disappointed. Their minimum height is five six, I remember that too. Does it matter? I remembered about great-great-granddaddy’s formula from when I was just a kid. I just remember stuff is all, and I’ve always liked numbers.”
Selene sighed. “I just wish you could remember the formula itself.”
She raised one lovely eyebrow. “Oh, I can remember the formula numbers just fine. I just can’t remember exactly which chemicals it used. They were mostly stuff with twenty-five syllable names ’n stuff. Not the sort of stuff they’d have on hand locally anyhow, since they don’t have biochemical reactors and mass spectrometers and stuff to formulate and test them. In other words, we’ve got to go back to where we can order the stuff from our friendly biochem supply house, not the local grocery store. It won’t be a problem once we get there, trust me. Dad has a charge account at the place, and he has a copy of the formula itself in his safe deposit box, even if the Library copy is lost.”
“But the original Jekyll guy didn’t have any of those things either!”
“Yeah… so?” She looked at her twin askance. “He went crazy and died, remember?”
Selene just shut her eyes. “You’re right, Rhea. I apologize. I’m just frustrated is all.”
Rhea reached out and gave her a hug. “It’s okay, Sweetie. I still love you, and Phil still loves you best.”
Selene burst into tears and wept on her shoulder. “Oh, Rhea! I’m so sorry you feel that way!”
“It’s okay, Sweetheart. I didn’t exactly fall head over heels for him either. It was a bargain, and well worth it, I think. If he ever wants out, all he has to do is tell me so.”
“Don’t you dare! Rhea! I don’t know what I’d do without you… most days .” She smiled and kissed her. “You’ve been my very best friend ever since grammar school, and even before, so we were practically sisters even before we were twins. Almost minute of every day, I love you dearly, and you drive me crazy only once in a very great while, but the good times more than make up for the occasional irritation. Heck, Phil gets on my nerves from time to time as well….”
“Uhm, dears,” he ventured, “I’m right here, you know…”
Both women turned to him and scowled in wrath. “Who invited you into our private conversation?” they both snapped in unison.
“Uhm…”
“Just mind your own business, is all,” they said in chorus again.
“Yes, Ma’ams!” he said smartly and bowed his way out of their little tête-à-tête
Selene petted her almost-sister’s hair and said, “See, Sweetie. He’s very biddable. Give it a year or two, especially after our babies are born, and he’d cut off his arm before he let either of us go.”
“Meh, that’s not so much. He’d do that already.” Rhea replied.
“I heard that!” he called from the other side of the room.
“So? Is it true?” Selene asked demurely.
“Yeah, I suppose so,” he said, a little miffed.
“Then come over here and convince poor Rhea that you love her just as much as me,” she said. “She’s feeling a little down.”
“So you want me to feel her up?” He smirked, but not obnoxiously so.
They both laughed. “That would be a very good start!” Selene said.
“Then why don’t we all three of us retire to a more private chamber, and I’ll fill you both in on my latest plans where you two can be more comfortable. You’re both looking a little flushed, and I do think you should rest a bit.”
“Phil, Darling,” Rhea cooed, “you wouldn’t believe exactly how randy being pregnant makes you feel.”
“Rhea, honey, you wouldn’t believe exactly how randy your being pregnant with my babies makes me feel.” He picked her up easily, and held her cradled in his arms as he carried her through the doorway and into the gloom of the interior, since no one had picked up a light of any sort. “Beloved Rhea, Selene and I talked about this before we both agreed that you had a right to both our loves, and that it would be forever. We’re neither of us going to leave you, not ever, and never going to stop loving you either. We’re very serious about your marriage to both of us, dear heart, just as serious as we all are about each other. We’re a family, the three of us, soon to be seven, because of the new babies you both carry within you. We could no more cut you out of our lives than we could cut out our own hearts.” He leaned his head down to kiss her tenderly, and then Selene tousled her hair and kissed her as well.
“Silly girl,” she said tenderly, “all in a fret over nothing.”
“It’s the hormones, and the babies,” she groused. “I’m either moody, horny, hungry, or I have to pee….”
At which bon mot Selene burst into laughter. “I’ve got an idea!” she said brightly. “Let’s both of us blame Mr. Wonderful here!, since it’s really all his fault that we’re in this particular pickle.”
“Good idea, Sis! He has a guilty look about him already!” And with that, she began to tickle him under the arms, where she knew he was vulnerable.
“Stop!” he said laughing. “You’ll make me drop you!” he turned and squatted low, then fell carefully backward on their bed, still cradling her from harm. “You’re going to wear me out!”
“Think of this as a wind sprint, Dear….” Selene whispered in his ear. “It will be good for you…,” she breathed in his ear as she started pulling off his clothes.
Phil sighed, trying not to laugh again. “I know, I know, just lie back and think of England.”
“Not yet, Dear,” one of them whispered in his other ear; it was difficult to sort them out by voice alone, especially in the darkness, so he’d given up trying. “Next we have pushups on the menu, and who knows what else?”
Phil was confused when he woke up in the dark, because they always left a candle burning as a nightlight, in case one of them had to use the chamber pot at night. But then he remembered how they’d got here. with a huge yawn, he began trying to extricate himself from a tangle of very feminine limbs, although he took some extra time to gently trace the inward curve of one woman’s waist, now thickening slightly, and the exquisite curve of her hip. ‘This,’ he thought, ‘is the very essence of beauty. Even invisible, here in the dark, that particular fecund curve was alluring. He held it in his mind as well as his hand and realized that it was everywhere: The very pillars of the Parthenon held the subtle outward curve of a woman’s hip, an entire Temple dedicated to the beautiful Goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law, and justice, everything that was truly good about humanity; the legs of Victorian tables and chairs; the country French equivalent; even famous valleys. Was Half Dome in Yosemite notable because it was made of granite? Or was it because the eye was drawn to it like to a woman’s breast, a human shape in a vast wilderness, because the human hand reached out to it, the human heart yearned to encompass it?’
“You talk in your sleep, you know.” It was Rhea. She had a ready challenge to almost every situation. “Why is it so dark? It’s like the bottom of a well in here.”
“I somehow forgot to light a candle, and I guess the torch in the outer room burned out while we were sleeping. Hang on a minute while I go find a candle and a flint and steel to light it.” He still didn’t quite trust his fire spell. The last time he’d tried it, he’d almost set his pants on fire in a general conflagration. His glowing ball spell was first rate, though, so he started setting it up and said, “Cover your eyes for a bit, and Selene’s if she’s still asleep.”
With a brilliant flare of pure white light, the room lit up as bright as day, which was a pleasant change from the usual flickering torch and candlelight, almost like being back in civilization.
Thoughtfully, he shepherded the glowing orb over to the doorway, poking it magically just around the corner so the light was dimmer inside their bedroom. “Okay,” he said, “all settled now.” He started climbing over the prone body nearest the door, which must be Selene, because she didn’t seem to be awake yet, moving carefully so as to disturb her as little as possible. His pants and shirt were on opposite sides of the room, and for about the thousandth time felt especially blessed that he had no need for glasses. When he was finished dressing, he turned toward the bed to say something, but saw instantly that Rhea had curled up with Selene and gone straight back to sleep, so he just tiptoed out into the main room, where he sat down and started working on his lists again.
About an hour later, Akcuanrut popped his head in and said, “Working late, I see. Very diligent. We’ll have a meeting tomorrow morning after breakfast to gauge our progress. I think we’re about ready, though. The wagons are loaded, the young women are all packed, and I have sufficient supplies — magical and otherwise — ready to see me through almost any emergency on your strange world.” With that pronouncement, he popped right back out again, leaving Phil wondering if he should have said something, but then he shrugged and went back to work.
“Hi, Phil!” Selene and Rhea said together as they came out from their bedchamber hand-in-hand. “What did Acky want so early?”
“We have an after-breakfast meeting scheduled to decide whether we’re ready to leave or not” He rolled his eyes to let them know that he personally thought Acky a little obsessive, but then he shrugged, as if to say, ‘Since it’s really his expedition, he has a right to be.’
“Well, somebody has to be, and since you’re so obviously lackadaisical and devil-may-care, he probably worries that all those lists of yours are your tout sheets for the races up at Saratoga.”
He blushed. “Okay, so I’m a little OCDish as well. I do worry about possible contingencies, though.”
Rhea came over and kissed him good morning. “That’s your job, Phil, exactly as it should be. You handle the boring logistics, and we’ll handle the exciting rough stuff.”
Selene said nothing, but kissed him thoroughly before she mouthed, ‘Thank you.’ then turned to help Rhea in setting out new torches in their sconces. “Do you think we’ll need to light any of these?”
“Well, the magic will last another hour or two, but we’ll have to make sure to light a few before anyone else might drop in. Some of the new girls are a little creeped out by magic, not that I blame them. A lot of them have bad memories of evil sorcerers, and I guess it might be a ‘trigger’ for them.”
“Good point. I say let’s turn it off soonish, and go back to the long-ago days of yesteryear.”
“You’re the boss. As soon as you manage to kindle a taper, I’ll douse the glim.” He smiled at them both. “You’re both so much better at lighting fires with flint and steel than I am. With a propane firestarter, mind you, I’m a wonder, and as long as I have a good-size bag of charcoal briquettes handy, and a nice brick barbecue, I can turn out steaks to make any girl’s heart go pittapat.”
“And exactly who’s going to catch those steaks for you, Mister Man?”
“You are, of course,” he said with aplomb. “Aside from the odd feat of wizardly derring do, I’m pretty much useless at stabbing either animals or people. My sort of magic doesn’t hurt living things, and neither does that of Master Wizard Akcuanrut, I notice. Unlike the skills of a warrior, which can be exercised with dispassion and justice, magic springs from the heart, and working bad magic will eventually corrupt your soul, maybe sooner than later. It didn’t take long to infect D’lon-ra’s soul with evil, even standing on the sidelines, as he must have been. Perhaps once he was horrified, then inured, then envious, and so by degrees led toward coveting the same evil power he’d once despised.”
“I’m sorry I teased, you, Phil,” Rhea said.
“It’s okay. I knew that it was just teasing, but I want you both to promise me something….”
“What?” they both said with deep suspicion.
“I want you to promise me, that if you see what happened to D’lon-ra happening to me, you’ll put a stop to it, and do it quickly, because you won’t have much time. I’m really quite powerful, and would be a very dangerous opponent if I once drifted across that line.”
“But….” Rhea started to say something, which Selene cut off unsaid.
“We’ll do that for you, beloved husband, rest assured,” and both women started weeping.
“Don’t cry, my Darlings. You’ll be doing me a favor, because I, the man you love, would already be dead or dying, hating what I was becoming, and would much rather die a little early than hurt either of you. We’ve seen how dangerous it is, this thing we’re fighting. D’lon-ra was a little rough around the edges, but was a good man once, as was Na-Noc I’m sure.”
“But couldn’t we save you, like the Wizards College is trying to save Na-Noc, and D’lon-ra too, if he’s still in there?”
“Well, quite frankly, I think that they’re doddering old fools who can’t make up their minds what do do, because what sane person could live with himself if he’d murdered a small child, let’s say, and then eaten her, but was eventually miraculously ‘cured,’ but only after killing many more children, remembering everything, but now having no new desire to kill and eat small children? How does such a man live with himself after all that? Wouldn’t it be a life of anguish and shame? And if not, why not? Doesn’t this so-called ‘cure’ presuppose that on some level it’s completely ineffective?”
“Oh!” they said.
“What they’re really talking about is creating some sort of deliberate dissociative disorder, in which an individual can miraculously isolate himself from past wickedness. If you think about it, that’s almost exactly what the late Dr. Jekyll tried to do, and we see exactly how successful that little experiment was. How many innocents died while Jekyll was dithering around?”
“I understand, Beloved.” Selene said, and Rhea just nodded her head, by now crying again.
“The buck stops here,” he said decisively. “If I catch it quick enough, I’ll handle the job myself, and with dispatch, but I’m afraid that the process may be very quick, so that I can’t outrun it.” And then he gathered them into his arms. “We’re all of us standing unto danger, my Darlings, so we must treasure each moment as if it were our last. If I wind up laying down my life in this quest, then I lay it down with a right good will, with neither hesitation nor regret, but I fully expect us to succeed, because you two together are almost invincible against any direct assault.”
“But wait a minute,” Rhea said, “your glowing light killed a lot of dwarves when they captured us in that mine of theirs.”
“Not really, although it’s a slippery slope, I admit, with vague pitfalls and traps scattered at random. In a sense — a strong moral sense, I think — the dwarves killed themselves, when they trapped you in the dark, although you were doing an excellent job against what seemed to be thousands of them even then. Because you were in my care, and trapped in the dark, I was bound to give you light; the fact that my light might be fatal to them is something that they should have taken into account, not I, since they knew, or should have known, that I was capable of magic, as was Akcuanrut of course. I was simply helping you, which was and is my clear duty. If dwarves died by happenstance, my conscience bothers me not at all, because that was not my intention, while their clear intention was to harm you both. The same thing goes for Akcuanrut. As far as we knew at the time, the cave was either filled with dead things, or things which were caught in the act of a lethal assault and only temporarily dissuaded, so Acky simply helped to wash it clean and/or dissuade pursuit, thereby preventing either pestilence or murder. Neither of us actually knew whether any of these putative dwarves would be harmed by the water at all, although their noise did leave that impression, and they could have taken steps to preserve themselves from harm by not showing up with murder in their hearts to begin with.”
“But that seems like a legal quibble,” she said.
“Not really,” he explained patiently. “It’s the exact distinction which differentiates murder, which is always wicked, and manslaughter, which may be either entirely justified, or only potentially culpable.” He paused. “Now if Akcuanrut and I had bored a hole in the ground, looking for dwarves, and I then dropped in a ball or two of light, knowing that it was poisonous to them, and for no other reason but to kill them, and then he later poured a river down our murder hole, knowing full well that it would drown any remaining dwarves, both our actions would be deliberate murder, and that’s the exact point at which we’d start sliding down toward our own merry road to the Dark side.”
“But what about us?” Selene asked. “Aren’t we in danger too?”
“I don’t think so. You both talk a good murder, but in reality everything I’ve seen you do is classic self-defense. When you’re under attack by thousands, there’s nothing for it but to use as much force to resist their attempted homicide as possible, which usually winds up being fatal for your assailants. Not your fault at all. As soon as a reasonable escape was offered, you took it. Neither of you said, ‘Hang on a minute, while I go off and slaughter all the non-combatants, if any.’ You’re both inherently good, I believe, and there doesn’t seem to be a hateful bone in your bodies. In the fight with the centaurs and the townspeople, for another example, you managed to prevent them from hurting each other and didn’t harm a single one of the combatants, even though they too were doing their apparent best to kill you.”
“Don’t tell anyone, Phil,” Selene whispered. “You’ll spoil our ‘street cred,’ and we’ll wind up having to fight more.”
“I won’t, Sweeties. Just sayin’ is all. The difference between our powers, though, is that mine are more like a machine gun or heavy field artillery than a knife, so it’s like that ‘who drew their gun first?’ argument that goes on in the old Westerns. In my own case, I can shoot’em in the back, or from half a mile away, or from the day before yesterday, all without breaking a nail, and by the tens of thousands, so the moral hazard is much greater.”
“Then you must simply not do anything!” Rhea said firmly.
“That doesn’t work either, my dearest darlings. I’m part of the team, and an army needs both heavy cavalry — That’s our centaurs, and you and your sisters — and artillery — that’s Akcuanrut and me. — we were a belated but essential part of your final victory in the dwarf mines, even though our rôle was only ancillary. If either of us had deserted our clear duty, many more innocent lives may have been lost — although we don’t know exactly what other surprises the dwarves had in store for us — not least of which may have been yours, which in itself might be enough of a blow to start me slipping down that slippery slope.”
“Oh,” they said.
“Exactly. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. We just have to try to be careful.”
“It isn’t fair!” Rhea said.
“No, it isn’t,” he admitted, but it’s the same choice faced by an artillery commander who can see from miles away that enemy tanks are hiding behind a church, let’s say, in which they’ve gathered all the innocent children in town as human shields. The Laws of War are clear upon this issue; hiding a military force among a non-combatant population is a war crime, for which the just punishment is death, but the immediate choice for the artillery commander is dire in any case — attack the tanks, kill the hostages. Or spare the tanks, allowing your own troops, who depend upon you, and who are even now approaching the ambush, to die? Possibly the hostages will be killed anyway, out of malice and spite, but your sworn duty requires you to first protect those who depend upon you, even though it can twist your soul in two.”
“Crap!” Selene said.
“Exactly,” he said.
After breakfast, and after the group had decided to start just after an early lunch — Akcuanrut’s suggestion — they were back in their rooms, gathering together last-minute stuff, and eliminating things that at first they’d thought they couldn’t live without. Both Selene and Rhea had decided to take their dowries and other gifts, which got Phil thinking. “Remind me to conjure up a couple of hundred pounds of gold to take with us for personal use as well, and maybe some platinum, so when we arrive on Earth, we’ll have enough cash available to extricate ourselves from emergencies. I can rent a safe deposit box to stash some of it in, so we don’t have to lug it about, and one of my papers here — in quadruplicate — is a codicil to both your Ketubahs, adding the sums to your doweries, and a will in favor of you both, so you’ll be well-provided for if anything goes amiss.”
“Can you do diamonds?” Rhea enquired.
He blinked. “I suppose I could. It’s just a matter of visualization. Do you and Selene want engagement rings for when we visit Earth? I know they’re important for most women.”
Selene said, “Of course we do, Phil, whenever you’d like before we go, and if you could match our rings it would be nice. That way we’d all three of us have two rings on our ring fingers, which would make a nice statement.”
“Plus, a nice fat diamond makes a wicked glass cutter and tool for general mayhem,” Rhea added practically.
“More to the point, though,” added Selene even more practically, “is that diamonds might be more portable than gold.”
Phil shook his head. “There’s a problem, however, with the so-called ‘conflict diamond’ laws that require documentation of origin and a chain of custody. It’s a good idea, but it runs into problems in the USA and Canada, probably most of Europe as well. There was a time when it was a great idea, because diamonds are easily concealed and smuggled across borders, but that’s all spy stuff that we don’t want to get involved in, I think, especially until we have unassailable documentation. For your personal rings, and any other jewelry you’d like to have on hand, we can let that slide, I think, and claim that they’re family heirlooms, but a stash of loose diamonds would raise too many eyebrows.”
They glanced at each other very briefly before saying in chorus, “We’ll put together a list of things we’d like to have, and have complete faith in your wonderful artistic talents to come up with the actual designs. You know the sorts of things we’d like to wear, so we both trust your judgement on that.”
“Pierced?”
“Of course. Came with the territory, although we haven’t really had any earrings to wear since we came to this world. Heck, forget the list, just make a bunch of earrings, bracelets, and necklaces that we can put in a box, but be sure that at least some of the necklaces hang low enough to make men want to stare at our boobs. It makes the lechers easier to kill, if necessary.”
“And it so often is,” Rhea added happily.
Phil resisted the urge either to grin or to roll his eyes toward the heavens. “As you wish, my lady wives,” he said.
“And at your pleasure, our lord husband.”
Phil didn’t let the ‘lord husband’ quip go to his head, at least in any medieval sense.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
Note: Many or all of the characters Akcuanrut talks about may display improperly in your browser as they appear in the running text, but they’re duplicated — probably in a somewhat larger size — as an image directly below. If you’d like to see them properly inline, many or most of them appear in the Unicode fonts, Aegean, ALPHABETUM Unicode, Code2001, EversonMono, Free Idg Serif, MPH 2B Damase, Penuturesu, and others. Some of these, such as Code2001 and Aegean, are free for personal use and can be readily found on the Internet.
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-Four
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.— Robert Frost, from ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’ North of Boston, (1914)
“I see it!” Rhea shouted from the head of the herd as they meandered toward their place of emergence. She was riding Wildflower, and they were moving as the centaurs preferred to do in grasslands, loosely associated, with enough space between small groups of them that there was fresh grazing material available, although they really preferred fruits and vegetables, which were a lot less work to pick and chew with human mouths.
Phil was riding in one of the carts, drawn by a horse without reins, who was tagging along behind the centaurs perfectly well on her own. There was an open jewel case before him; he was idly working out new designs in his head as he rode along, then creating them in pairs, or pairs of pairs in the case of earrings, with a bit of eyes-closed concentration and effort. He found it restful, and it helped to pass the time. As soon as he’d covered one layer, he’d spread a new piece of some local cloth like velvet across the top of what by now was a thick pile of jewelry, and then begin on a new design. Idly, he picked up the case and weighed it in his two hands. Not quite the weight of a sack of cement, but getting close. He put the work aside for a while to attend to the outside world. “Any signs of recent activity,” he called out.
“How the heck would I know?” was Rhea’s acerbic reply. “There was a big pile of junk when we left, and there’s still a big pile of junk now, although I think there’s a bunch of wood that wasn’t here before. I think we burned all the wood we had that first night.” She looked around idly, then shrugged and called back, “I think this is all from when the attic disappeared. I see one of the doorknobs from home on the top of the pile, but there’s no way to tell exactly when it all got here. It’s all pretty mooshed up, and I don’t want Dad over there at all, because there’s a lot of broken glass. Maybe you could use your famous fire spell and melt it all into slag, although the tree is sort of pretty. I’d hate to see that burnt to a cinder. I bet the bunny rats would miss it, too, not that I’m all that fond of bunny rats,” she added idly.
Phil blushed in chagrin. “Lay off about my fire spell, okay? Real men don’t use fire spells to light a darned candle!”
By this time he and his horse-drawn cart were getting close, so she spoke more quietly, Wildflower having wandered off to find a little something fresh to eat. “But, Phil, sweetie, I just don’t understand it. You don’t have any trouble at all lighting my fire, and I’m a lot more complicated than any candle.”
He laughed out loud. “Honey, the difference is that you coöperate, but the candle doesn’t give a hoot whether it’s lit or not.”
Rhea narrowed her brows quite prettily. “Well, that’s a palpable point, I suppose. We’ll have to work on that soon. Perhaps your knowledge in one field might carry over into another.”
He grinned, climbing out of the cart to stand beside her and give her a little embrace. “It’s worth exploring, of course, if only as a hypothesis, but it would require exhaustive testing. Are you sure you’re up to such a strict regimin of experimental protocols? I can think of several hundred independent variables already, so it might entail thousands of trials to cover even the most likely. And then with double-blind protocols….” He did a quick mental calculation. “It might easily take years, what with randomization trials, documentation of results, and the publication, of course, and peer review.”
“But, Phil, you have no peers.” She spied the case on the bed of the cart. “Oooh! Is that our jewelry? Can I look?”
He smiled. “Of course you can. It’s yours, after all, well, the pair of you. I did everything in duplicate, at least, so you don’t have to worry about sharing, and there’s a great assortment of pure gold, platinum, intertwined gold and platinum, a few silver pieces, because I rather like the warmth of silver, although it’s a nuisance keeping it polished, and of course many of the pieces have various gemstones contained in the design, quite a few diamonds, some rubies and emeralds, which I thought would look good on Selene, and sapphires for you, of course. I learned how to do star sapphires, so I included a number of those. They should all grade out as natural gems — or so I suppose — but I’d avoid showing too many of them at once, for fear of depressing the market in general. Many of them must be quite rare, since they’re the very dickens to get right.”
She picked up the box and opened it, then started looking through it, layer by layer, saying first, “Good heavens, Phil! There must be a hundred pounds of jewelry here!”
“More like eighty, eighty-five, I think, but it could easily be more. It’s been a long time since I lifted a sack of cement, and I had a lot of time on my hands on the trip up here, so I just thought of it as knitting.”
“Knitting! Phil, you’re a fabulous artist in precious metals and jewels!” She held up one pendant in gold and platinum with a particularly graceful shape. “It that what I think it is?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly what you think it is, but you said that you wanted something to draw a man’s attention and ‘drive him to distraction,’ as you put it, more or less….” He took it and held it up to her neck, then handed her a mirror. “It’s cleverly-designed to appeal particularly to men, albeit subconsciously, without being blatant, and to many women as well, of course.”
She flushed. “Got the whole package there, cowboy.”
“God, I hope so,” he said. “It set my heart beating, just thinking about it. It looks much nicer in its natural setting, of course.”
“It’s not androgynous at all, is it?” she said, still admiring it from various angles in the glass.
“No. Few men, I think, would dare to wear that particular piece. It’s not just a bit of bling, and makes a very strong statement. There are earrings in there to match, if you like. I think I did a dinner ring as well. I do like to be thorough.”
“Selene is going to be so pleased.”
“If you are, Sweetie, I’m sure that she will be.”
“But where are our engagement rings? I thought you were going to make one for each of us….”
“Rhea, my own heart’s darling, there’s a delicate ritual involved in presenting an engagement ring, which I know you missed — through no fault whatsoever of your own — so I’d like to choose a slightly more romantic moment than sitting by a junk pile, surrounded by broken glass and finely-ground detritus.”
She reached out to take his hand, eyes misting. “Phil, wherever you are is Paradise enough for me. Selene got to marry you first, and I seem to have missed most of my ceremony, through being unconscious at the time; please let me be the first to wear your engagement ring.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” he said, and went down on one knee before her. “Rhea Lanyon, would you do me the great honor of being my wife?
“Of course I will, Phil, and thanks so much for finally asking.” She grinned, “Of course, you’ve managed to knock me up twice already, so this is just the perfect frosting on the cake.”
Phil tried to keep himself from laughing, and managed to say, “Then would you wear my ring?” From a hidden pocket in his sporran, he brought out a black velvet pouch and presented it to her, then kept talking while she unwrapped it. “I took into account the fact that you wanted something that would be useful, so it’s on the biggish side of tasteful, about five carets, I think, and set in a medieval band style rather than those delicate prong things that you could hardly use to smash a villain’s jaw without it bending. I did manage to capture a bit of fire, though, through piercings on the outside of the band, and inset those little holes with flat diamond ‘window panes’ to keep dirt and blood and stuff from getting behind the stone itself, so it should be self-cleaning with ordinary hand-washing.”
“It’s perfect, Phil. I love it!” She slid off her wedding ring to see how they looked together from several viewpoints, then slid both her engagement and wedding rings back on. “They go together perfectly as well!” She waggled her hand at various angles, catching the sunlight with it, and it did shine very prettily indeed. “It’s a good thing we’re both so tall,” she said. “Most women couldn’t pull off a five-caret ring with any grace at all.”
“True, but from my perspective, you’re both just the right height for dancing. Maybe we can go out for dinner and dancing sometime soon, once we’ve straightened out our living situation back on Earth.”
“Oooh! Let’s! Selene always loved to eat out, because her mom was an indifferent cook at best.”
“Your merest wish is my command, my lady wife. If you like, I can surprise you, or if you want to coördinate something special, just tell me what you want.”
“I think, surprise us, but here comes Selene, so we can just ask her. You should do a little ceremony for her engagement ring too, of course, so she won’t be jealous.”
He smiled. “Of course I will, Sweetheart. I’m an equal-opportunity husband, Title 9-certified, and a militant supporter of women’s rights in employment, housing, and every life opportunity.”
Rhea looked at him suspiciously. “You’d better not be making fun of us, Phil.”
“Not at all. With four babies on the way, each of them fraternal (or sororal) twins, the chances are that at least some of them are going to be girls, so I’ll have my own axe to grind in favour of my daughters, as well as my wives, of course.”
“I wonder if we should have Acky do a reading?” she said.
“Read what?” Selene had just arrived, mounted companionably on one of their centaur friends.
“Watch out for all the glass around the tree!” Rhea warned her. “I already had to dig a piece out of Wildflower’s sole, and it was quite painful, I think. I was just wondering if we should find out which sex our babies are, so we can start planning layettes and stuff. What do you think?”
She thought about this for only the blink of an eye before answering. “I’d rather be surprised, I think. After all the work, it’d be nice to have something interesting to find out at the end of it. Phil, how about you?”
“I opt for whatever you’re having. You’re doing all the heavy lifting, for which I’m profoundly grateful. It would be dishonorable for me to have any opinion other than awe and wonder. My only real job in this is loving you both, and neither kibitzing nor idle complaint is part of that job description.”
“Dishonorable? Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?”
“Not at all. Honor is an integral part of my moral code, which comes from deep inside me. You’re both of you deeply engaged in one of the most dangerous of life’s adventures, not only carrying a baby — already hazardous — but carrying twins, which only multiplies the risks. I believe that Akcuanrut can help to alleviate most of the most obvious dangers to your health, but we’re also in the midst of a war, which has inherent problems of its own, as well as raising the issue of possible delays in the provision of health care. For me to venture an opinion about any of this would be like me shouting out directions from the peanut gallery to the woman on the flying trapeze, as if she didn’t know her own business. You have the advice, I know, of women who’ve shared these experiences, but I have not. It would be as presumptuous of me to blather on about this as it would be to suggest how best you ought to parry an overhead attack with an axe, yet another subject upon which I am profoundly ignorant.”
The two women looked at each other. “Do you know what your trouble is, Phil?” they asked in chorus.
He blinked. “No, I don’t, actually.”
“You’re too darned perfect,” they said.
He shrugged in almost Gallic resignation. “Well, it’s a struggle, I admit, but I try to bear up as best I can without complaining about life’s basic unfairness….” He sighed.
“Poor dear,” Selene cooed. “Your burdens are so heavy, and so many, no wonder you feel down sometimes….” She patted his head as she drew it down to her bossom, This might have seemed more sympathetically dispassionate if she hadn’t been surreptitiously attempting to ‘lift his spirits,’ as it were, with one hand slyly drifting under the selvage of his kilt.
“Selene!” he whispered urgently. “We’re right out in the middle of a field, on a hill. People will see.”
“Don’t worry, dear. Rhea’s thoughtfully providing cover for me.” Her hands kept wandering, until… “What’s this?” she grabbed something entirely unexpected, which was strapped to his thigh.
“Drat! You’ve found my secret stash!”
“Secret stash?” She drew back and looked down at his thigh, which by lifting his kilt a bit she could now see had a little leather pouch strapped to it. “What is this?”
He hung his head and sank to his knees in an elaborate pantomime of shame. “You may as well know now, dear; I have a guilty secret.”
Her eyes darted around, sure that she was the butt of some sort of set-up, until she saw Rhea’s new ring. Her brows furrowed. “Phil, if you don’t show me my surprise this instant, I may scream!”
“Can’t have that,” he said, and unsnapped the top of the little case inside the pouch, bringing out the ring, which just happened to catch the sunlight as he held it out to her. “I’d be greatly honored,” he said, still kneeling, “if you’d wear this little token of my love as a companion to your wedding ring.”
She laughed. “Of course I will, you crazy man! It’s beautiful! And I can see from my sister’s hand here that it’s a perfect match to our wedding rings. With rocks like that, if we happen to run into anyone who doesn’t already know us, they’re sure to think that you’re either a Wall Street trader or a big-time gambler.”
He grinned. “I think that it amounts to the same thing, these days, but you can tell people on Earth that I’m a commodities trader. It’s almost the truth, in any case. I have a few odd bits of jewelry that you might like as well, all duplicated, so you two can mix or match your outfits at your pleasure. It’s all over there in the cart,” he added, and kissed her for good measure.
“So, let’s see your collection,” she said. “I want the full effect, although it’s slightly scary that you know me well enough to be able to predict so accurately where best to hide my ring that I’d be sure to find it.”
Later that afternoon, the wizard and the Empress together decided that the time was propitious to reöpen a portal between their worlds. It didn’t take long, with the two of them on the job, and soon enough the familiar amber outline of a portal hovered in the air well off to one side of the tree, because they hadn’t wanted to risk any interaction with the weakness left behind by the original rupture of the TSP portal. Close inspection revealed that the new portal opened into the garage space, which was perfect, as far as Emily was concerned, since there’d be plenty of room for the more than a few centaurs at once, when they were finally ready for them.
Phil went first, since he was the only one who actually had legal ID in his possession, the fortuitous result of wearing a rather capacious sporran. He also had a cellphone, although the battery was flat by now. “Wish me luck!” he said as he popped through, carrying two leather duffles stuffed with things he’d thought might come in handy.
The garage was empty, really empty, not the well-equipped workshop which had been described. Taking it upon himself to look around, he set down his duffles, kicked through the side door — which was locked from the outside — and went through into the sideyard, where he saw immediately that the house windows were boarded over with plywood, and there was a ‘For Sale’ sign on the untidy lawn. It appeared to be very early morning, from the looks of the dawn sky. Quickly running down the street, he saw that most of the houses were dark, so he stopped at the first house with a newspaper laying on the sidewalk outside. The date was April Fifteenth, more than half a year after they’d left. ‘Whoops!’ he said to himself, and ran back to the garage, threw his duffles into a darkish corner, and then ran back through the portal.
On the other side, his first words were, “Folks, we’ve got a problem.” and went on the describe what he’d seen.
After an excited babble of questions he had no answer to, he cut short the debate by saying, “First things first, I think. We’ve got to start the process of recovery with you, Thundercloud, because you have lawyers on call, and me, because my parents will be a partial key to establishing our bonafides, I think, as well as supplying instant local contacts.”
“But how will that work, Phillip?” Thundercloud asked.
“I think we should start with the truth, sort of, that an experiment went wrong, and accidentally transported us all into another dimension. From what I understand of Hastie’s reputation, and, begging your pardon, Thundercloud, your husband’s, this is more likely to be believed than not, and will go a long way toward explaining everything. It also makes almost everything completely understandable, with a little judicious ‘truthiness,’ even the sex changes of both Jack Utterson and Hastie Lanyon, and we have Akcuanrut’s letter, plus my testimony, to establish the fact of it. I don’t seen any particular reason to imagine that their fingerprints have changed, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We can finesse your own identity, since you can appear, as I understand it, to be exactly who you’ll say you are, as long as we can keep you out of elevators and other small places.”
Thundercloud pondered only for a moment before replying, “Sounds good to me. First off, let’s stop the sale of the house, because we need access to Wildflower’s portal, and we also want to prevent any accidental interaction with the random portal that seems to have been left behind. I’ll call the lawyers from a neighbor’s phone while you get started with your parents, and I think I may be able to start negotiations for a farm that we can use as a base of operations as well.”
A look around told him that there wasn’t any significant dissent, so Phil added, “Selene, Rhea, I’d like you to come over in the first crossings, mostly because I want you both to meet my parents, and second because we should get started on our experiments with alternative clothing styles, and there may be some of either your own or your mother’s clothes that would be suitable, at least for experimentation, if they haven’t been put into storage somewhere.”
“Good point,” Selene said. “Shall we wait here?”
“I think so, my darlings, although you could sit in the garage if you want. It’s probably more comfortable out here, though, because the garage has been stripped to the bare walls.”
With a glance around the meadow and a, “Any last-minute requests?” to which there were only bewildered looks, he turned around, followed smartly by Thundercloud alone.
On the other side, a quick glance around the garage showed that nothing had changed, but when they went outside, he saw that quite some time had passed, because it was full day already, “Who’s your most uninquisitive and most helpful neighbor, Thundercloud?”
“I’d say Edith Aaronson, who’s right down the street to the left, and retired, so she’s very likely to be home. She pretty much keeps to herself otherwise, though.”
“Let’s go there first, then, because we need to get connected.” He ran up on the porch when they reached her house, to save the centaur stallion any awkward moments at the door, and knocked. She appeared at the door quite quickly, so at least he hadn’t disturbed her sleep.
“Mrs. Aaronson?” Thundercloud called from the sidewalk in his human form. “Pardon me for not coming up, but I’m trying to keep an eye on my house to make sure no one sells it out from under me. Do you have a cellphone I can borrow for a moment? I want to call my lawyers and get all this straightened out.”
She seemed flustered. “But we thought you were dead!” she said.
“As you can see, those reports were obviously exaggerated. Everyone is perfectly safe, but our house appears to be for sale, and I’d like to put a stop to that as soon as possible.” He glanced down the street, as if to judge whether a passing car was going to tarry, and then continued, “A cellphone? Do you have one? Or should I ask someone else? I’d be glad to buy it if you’re worried.”
Then she looked more closely at Phil and said, “Phillip? Isidore Cohn’s son? Everyone said that you were dead too!” She looked again. “And why on Earth are you dressed up like a Highland Scot?”
“It’s a long story, Mrs. Aaronson, and as you can see, I’m not dead yet, but I’m very anxious to contact my parents to let them know I’m still alive, so if we could borrow that cellphone, I’d be very grateful.”
“Of course! Of course! What was I thinking? Let me go get it for you.” She went back into the house, but was out in just a few moments. “Here’s the phone, and its charger, since I can never remember whether it’s charged or not. I go out so rarely that I hardly ever use it, so just keep it as long as you need to, dear. I’m sure your parents will be so relieved to hear from you!”
“I hope so, Ma’am, if they haven’t given up hope entirely.”
“You call your mother first thing!” she said firmly. “Business can wait. Your family comes first!”
“I will, Ma’am. That was my intention. My ‘disappearance’ was completely inadvertent, the end result of a laboratory ‘accident’ precipitated by my friend Hastie Lanyon, though no particular fault of his own, I might add, but you know how he occasionally winds up in scrapes.”
She rolled her eyes. “I do indeed, but don’t dawdle! Call your mother!”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, and did just that.
He listened for a moment, and then said, “Hi, Mom.”
“Take it easy, Mom! It wasn’t my fault, I promise, and I didn’t run away to join the Foreign Legion. I got caught up in some sort of a trans-dimensional portal thing that the Lanyons discovered, sort of….” He listened for only a second. “Yes, Mom, those Lanyons. Anyway, we’ve just now got back. I’m over in front of Mrs. Aaronson’s house right this minute, and this is her phone, so you probably don’t have to bother calling all your friends. Just call Dad to let him know that I’m finally back, and I’d appreciate it if you and he could drive over here as soon as possible. I’ve got some people here I’d like you to meet, and if my car is still available, that would be swell as well. I’ve got some shopping that I really need to do, and many arrangements to make. Oh! do you know if my cellphone is still current?” He paused to listen. “Thank you so much, Mom! It would have been a great idea if I’d still been on Earth. Look, if you could find my charger, that would be great, but it’s no big deal. I can always get another, and I think I left the car charger in the glove box.” He paused again. “I know, Mom. I love you too, but there are other people here with loved ones and with their lives to get in order, and they’ll need to use this phone as much as I do. I’ll be outside the Lanyon’s house. You’ll recognize the place, big cobblestone house, just down the street from Mrs. Aaronson’s. I’m hanging up now, Mom. See you soon!”
He rolled his eyes as he handed the phone to Thundercloud. “Sorry to take so long, but you know how mothers are.”
Thundercloud looked at him rather darkly before he said, “Thank you,” and keyed in a number from memory. “Utterson, Dewey, and Messup? This is Herbert Lanyon, and I’d like to speak to one of the managing partners. No, not Mr. Utterson, since he’s here with me. No, he can’t come to the phone right now, but I have his power of attorney in hand. Now, do I speak to a partner, or shall I retain another firm to handle our separate malpractice cases against you?” He paused. “Thank you, I’ll hold for exactly thirty seconds, and then I’m hanging up and calling another lawyer, as well as the police.” After a very short further pause, he said, “Mr. Messup? I’m fine, thank you. Now, can you explain exactly why there’s a ‘for sale’ sign on the lawn of my family home?” A short while later, he said, “You were mistaken. Unless you hear from me directly, or see my bleeding body with your own eyes, you will henceforward consider me alive well into the foreseeable future, and until I tell you differently. You might also read the advance directive that you and the firm were responsible for carrying out. Now, you will instantly cancel this so-called ‘multiple listing agreement,’ fully restore any bank accounts, charge accounts, utility accounts, and all the rest of the mess you’ve made, including doing your level best to recover — at your own expense, I might add — any property or personal possessions looted and sold off by you, make full restitution on any damages discovered, completely unliquidated, and do the same for George Utterson and his family, who is very much alive and very annoyed right now. If you’ve absconded with his share of the partnership, or sold off his family home and belongings, he’ll expect to see everything fully-restored, and any costs involved borne by you and any of your cohorts that you can lay your hands upon.” He paused again, listening for a moment impatiently before he cut off further expostulations. “Mr. Messup, I have more money and resources available to me than you can shake two sticks at, and am prepared to spend the odd billion just to teach you a very bitter lesson if you balk at any of my terms, and then go after both your license to practice law and personal freedom. I don’t particularly care what legal defense you think you have, because I’m well aware of what my advance instructions actually said, and I have many copies. During the course of the inter-dimensional research I was engaged in, partially on behalf of the US Department of Defense, and under their imprimatur, this was exactly the sort of situation I foresaw and had left detailed instructions with your firm telling you exactly how to handle the events that actually happened. You want to start waving ‘legal presumptions’ at me? I can wave my specific instructions right back at you, so you’ve utterly and culpably failed in your duty as an attorney and an executor, either one of which may be grounds to move for your censure and eventual disbarment, especially if, as I suspect, any valuable property or funds managed to find their way into your personal pocket, in which case you may well wind up in durance very vile. You have exactly one choice right now; do my bidding, make it right, or regret this single moment for the rest of your miserable life.” He paused again, very briefly. “Good. I’ll expect to see you here at my home by early this afternoon, with three new cellphones, two separate debit cards, one in my name, and the other in the name of my wife, with at least five hundred thousand dollars in cash funding available on each, and bring along both a locksmith and a home renovation team, since some idiot seems to have boarded up my windows, and doubtless done more damage to the interior, as well as having evidently stolen well over three quarters of a million dollars in very expensive laboratory equipment, much of which was on loan from the US Government, so you may want to contact your own malpractice insurance agency on your way over, and hire a real lawyer, because the FBI will want to talk to you about criminal misappropriation of Classified government property. Please tell your insurance agent to talk to me first, though, since I have grave suspicions which may well render your malpractice coverage null and void, in which case you’ll be left twisting slowly on your own. Oh! and please do remember that I have contacts in law enforcement agencies all around the world, so if you’re visualizing a quick jaunt down to Brazil — or other so-called ‘safe haven’ from the power of extradition — please remember that they still have ‘death squads’ down there to help solve intractable problems, and our own CIA can easily become involved if you step one foot out of the USA. In short, Mr. Messup, you’re screwed, blued, and tattooed, one way or another, and instant coöperation may help to ease the inevitable pain.” Then, he thumbed the phone off in disgust.
Phil just blinked in surprise. “Weren’t you a little hard on him?” he asked.
“Not really. George Utterson kept him under tight rein, because he knew that he was an incipient crook, but George was always a soft-hearted man. With George gone missing, though, the fox was in charge of the henhouse. Well, the farmer’s back, and he’s about to set the hounds upon the erstwhile fox.”
“Do you really know how to contact death squads?”
“Well, I probably won’t have to, but Herbert has done quite a bit of work for various security agencies and military services all around the world, including Israel and the UK, both of whom have very serious and very scary intelligence services. It’s sort of like a racquet-ball club, with a very eclectic membership roster, so let’s just say that the Lanyons aren’t the sort of people one wants to swindle. Rest assured that we can make Counselor Messup very unhappy for a very long time if he doesn’t come through for us.”
When Phil saw his car being driven slowly past the house, he ran down to the curb and waved. “Hi, Dad!” His mother was right behind her husband in the family car, and pulled into the drive when his father took the spot on the street out front. “Hi, Mom!” They both rushed out of their respective cars and ran to embrace and kiss him, which Phil returned in very good grace, laughing. “I’ve missed you too,” he said, “but not quite as much, nor for quite as long. Remember I mentioned a ‘transdimensional portal?’ Well, time ran funny on the other side, so it turns out that lots more time went by on Earth than it did back where we were. It’s difficult to keep track without a calendar, since we were awfully busy, what with this and that, but I think we were only there about one or two months, maybe three on the outside, and then I saw that more than half a year had gone by back here only when I saw the morning paper, just after I showed up through a reverse portal we made back on the other side.”
“Couldn’t you contact us at all?” his mother asked.
“Nope. Not one little bit. We were all ‘over the rainbow,’ just like Dorothy in the Land of Oz. The original portal destroyed itself when it operated, and the second was created more or less at random by a villain — that’s the one I got caught up in on Halloween — so it took some arranging to create a third that we had the ability to control.”
Both of his parents looked bewildered. “But Phil, you said you had people we should meet, but I only see you and this angry guy stalking up and down the lawn. It that Doctor Lanyon?”
“It is, but you don’t necessarily have to meet him. He’s trying to deal with a crooked lawyer who let him down, among other things, so I don’t imagine he’s in much of a mood for chitchat.” He sighed, gathering his thoughts. “They’re all waiting on the other side until I return to say it’s safe, but there are two young women I want you to meet first, and please be aware that the next few moments will affect all of our lives for the foreseeable future if either of you embarrass any of us, or are less than perfectly gracious. When I was on that other world, I got married, with Ketubah, Kiddushin, and Nisuin, the whole nine yards, to two beautiful women, whom I love with all my heart, so it’s very serious indeed. I have certified copies of our actual ketubot here, and I’d like you to arrange having them mounted for display, perhaps even translated into Aramaic, whatever seems best to you, although I’m sure my wives may have suggestions. I’m very sorry that you were unable to attend our weddings, but you can, if you wish, help us to celebrate them, and also help us toward establishing a Jewish household, to which end I’d like you to arrange the purchase of a ridiculous number of kosher Mezzuzas, and all the rest of the usual gear, although I won’t need any of the medieval stuff.“
“Two brides?” was all his mother said.
“Just two,” he said and smiled. “It was both perfectly legal and the local minhag back where we were, and there were exigencies that made it highly advisable. Think of Rachel and Leah; and they are both sisters, sort of. My first wife is named Selene, and my second is Rhea, both dearly loved and cherished by me. Selene is a redhead, and Rhea is blonde, so you’ll be able to tell them apart, although they’re identical twins otherwise. You’ll see.”
“Uhm, is there anything else we should know?” his mother asked.
He hesitated, considering, then decided. “Well, I really ought to let them tell you, so remember to act surprised, but both Selene and Rhea are pregnant with our babies, twins in both cases.”
His mother fainted dead away, although his father managed to catch her, and he said, “Well, I wasn’t looking for quite so much naches, nor quite so soon, but congratulations, son! It’s a blessing to us that you’re back safe and sound, and married it seems. Mazel tov!” He grinned.
“Thanks, Dad. Just so you know, I have a very prestigious job back there — and here too, really — and am filthy rich. I know that so much stuff will cost a bit, so please take this little duffle to cover any expenses you’ll need to make on my behalf.” He hauled out the smaller of the two duffle bags he’d carried back to Earth with him and handed it to his father….
…who barely managed to hold it n one of his hands while he held onto his wife with the other. It was very heavy. “What is this? Gold or something?”
“Got in in one, Dad. There should be a hundred pounds or more, at least a couple of million dollars worth, so that ought to be plenty for contingencies, until I can deposit more. I’ll need a local accounting firm, so could use your help there, of course. I’ve never actually filed a tax return, and would prefer to know as little about it as possible. Mr. Utterson said that a special needs trust might be best, but what that entails I haven’t a clue, other than it’s to be used for the benefit of our children if anything goes wonky, with separate sums as the dowries and other payments due my brides in the event of any… ‘eventuality’ affecting me. I probably went overboard there, since I had no clue what a ‘zuz’ was, but it wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford it either. I’m pretty sure I covered all the bases, but you might have our local Rabbi look at it to be sure. Again. if there was any question, I went for going over so as not to come up short, but it would be nice to have an informed opinion. On the other hand, I can testify that both marriages were spiritually effective, no matter what any Rabbi says, so his approval would be only a formality, as far as I’m concerned, as long as there’s nothing there that would cast any doubt whatsoever on the religious validity of our marriages. If there is, we can fix it after the fact, as I understand it, since the Law existed before modern marriage codes.”
“Wonky?” He seized upon that one word. “Are you in danger, Son?”
“Yes, we are. The whole world’s in danger, actually, although the battle’s actually engaged in other dimensions. We’re going to take care of it.”
“How much danger?” his father asked.
“Ever read The Lord of the Rings when you were a boy?”
He nodded.
“Like that,” Phil said very seriously.
“Oh,” he said, eyes wide.
“And now, if you’ll excuse me, Sir, I’m off to fetch my lady wives.”
His parents followed him into the garage. “Oh, my!” they both said when they saw the glowing portal.
He turned to grin at them, saying, “Yes, it’s all true,, and I’m not crazy. Don’t touch!” as he popped through into whatever unimaginable reality that the portals wormed their way into, sideways, and then out again.….
…and stepped back, quite some time later, but continuing as if his words merely completed his earlier thought. “As I said, I’m not particularly crazy, except that I am crazy about these two lovely ladies, my wives Rhea and Selene.” He was followed closely by two buxom barbarian babes, and they were all smiling. “They can only wear entirely natural fabrics, especially leather” he said, by way of explanation, “so most modern stuff — what with chemical flame retardants and all — is right out the door.” He shooed them back out of the garage. “This place is about to get very crowded, so we’d better go back outside.”
“Hello, Selene, Rhea,” his father said smiling as they walked toward the garage door. “Phil has told us all about you, or at least the most important part, that he loves you both, which is a very good start.”
“And we simply must take a trip down to The City, my dears,” his mother said. “There’s a wonderful shop down there that does leather outfits for all the rock stars, and I can just see you two in jet-black leather full maxiskirts, especially for winter — perhaps with hooded leather capes — and I’ve even seen skirted leather bustiers — That rather flamboyant popular singer, Lady Bazongas, had one in scarlet — so it’s not as if you’re at all limited in your fashion choices. All their work is custom, so you can let your imaginations really run wild. You’ve both got the height and looks to carry off a lot of really striking outfits, and it would be a shame to let such beauty go unmatched by a large variety of really beautiful clothes.”
“Oooh! Phil! We like the way she thinks!” they said in chorus, and then they were outside, where Thundercloud was still arguing with someone on the phone.
As it turned out, Counselor Messup appeared to headed for prison after all. In his haste to dump the lab equipment, he’d neglected to procure a Federal Arms Export License, and several other essential steps, such as establishing legal title, so there was a long list of countries who wanted to extradite and prosecute him — and any possible accomplices —including China, the UK, Israel, and Russia, not to mention the Feds, who had him right now. Not all these places were happy places in which to serve consecutive life sentences, and in China, life wasn’t even on the menu.
On the other hand, the USA was very embarrassed by his actions, since it affected what turned out to be important foreign nationals, and the State Department had rushed through diplomatic recognition of the Imperial Embassy of Myriad, now ensconced in the middle of a large farm — well over nine thousand acres fronting the Catskill Escarpment — in the borderlands of the Catskills, chosen by Phil, after much searching, because of the presence of a relatively unexplored — and entirely unexploited — limestone cavern complex beneath the Catskill portion of the property. Their caves were nothing to rival Howe Caverns, of course, but they had their own charms. About half the property was in pasture, orchards, and row crops, and the rest relatively untouched former rangeland gone back to something very much like sparsely-forested wilderness, so it was an ideal staging area for the centaurs, and offered much more privacy than anything in town, without being completely isolated from relatively easy access to The City, by helicopter at least.
“Excellent, my good Apprentice! The magic is strong down here.” the wizard said. They were in one of the largest caverns, a little after midnight, and the area was well-lit by some of Phil’s floating glowing balls.
“Thank you, Sir, but I’m not completely happy with the location. We’re too close, symbolically at least, to an attribute of the Dark Gods’ power, and I think that this introduces a potential weakness, but I have another plan, of which this is only a beginning, if you’ll assist me.”
“Of course, my dear fellow. what exactly does this plan of yours entail?”
He grinned. “Some heavy lifting, actually — my peculiar speciality — and a bit of stonework. I have the model laid out here.” He indicated an architect’s model laid out in styrofoam on a table in the center of the limestone cavern, the entirety of which was lit by several more of his glowing balls. The model was painted gray, in stark contrast to the white and orangish white stone native to the cavern, all of which was contorted into frozen sheets and waterfalls of limestone, much of it fantastically carved by thousands of years of dripping water. The air was humid, but quite chilly, as if the entire cavern were an industrial-sized vegetable cooler, exactly fifty-one point four degrees Fahrenheit, which he presumed held true the year around. He picked up one particular assemblage, saying, “Notice the joint here, involving a type of keyed mortise and tenon, but all done in stone, and designed to be self-centering.”
“What’s the purpose of the completed device, then?”
“It’s meant to act as both a shield from outside influences and as an amplifier of spiritual power, what one might think of as mana, and the alignments are more-or-less traditional on Earth, I think, dating back at least ten thousand years or more — to judge from the time differential we’ve experienced — but considerably developed and refined by me. You’ll notice that the stone structures around the central core form an almost solid wall, making it a modern analog of the peculiar structures we’ve discovered that shelter magical sources of power here on Earth, like the church in which Na-Noc created a portal at the start of my portion of this adventure, like this cavern here below the surface of the Earth, and like some other modern structures I’ve encountered, but based upon a new theory which I believe will amplify that power considerably.”
“And what am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“Help to fit them together is all, and even then only if it proves necessary, since I’ll be juggling the fine movements and positioning of several weighty items at once. I’ve already cut the individual pieces from a basalt quarry down in New Jersey, so delivery and assemblage is the only step left, and I thought I’d do that through magic as well, since I didn’t want to mar the beautiful isolation of the valley above us with a mundane road, nor draw undue attention to our activities here.”
Akcuanrut laughed aloud. “These delicate sensibilities do you credit, young Apprentice, and are one more step along the road to Mastery. Magic is art, my dear Sir, and artistic considerations are quite often paramount! So too is your desire to improve upon ‘good enough,’ — after successfully discovering and exploiting a new and potent source of magical power on this world — by creating what you consider a ‘better’ source.”
“Thank you, Master Wizard, but I also have my eyes on the prize, the utter defeat of the Dark Gods in this age of the Multiverse. To do that, I think, we’ll need quite a few ducks in a row, so this is what one might call a ‘set-up shot,’ if this were a pool table.”
He looked askance at this. “Pool table… an intriguing concept. How does one keep the water on it?”
“It’s simple, the water’s never on it. The word ‘pool’ is a reference to the collective ‘pool’ of bets — or what they call the ‘ante,’ — that begins most professional ‘pocket billiards’ games, a type of gambling game, something like golf, or croquet, but played indoors on a special table.”
“Ahh! Like skittles!”
“Sort of. There are a lot of variations, some with sticks, some with balls or other things, but all involving feats of hand and eye coördination in which the object is to make one or more objects do something special in relation to something else.”
“We have those, but they’re not generally popular among wizards, since the suspicion that the contest might be unfair casts wizards themselves in an unflattering light.”
“I can see how that might be. I rather liked carom billiards, a type of ‘pool,’ but rather as an intellectual exercise. In fact, what I’ll be trying to do here is a sort of elaborate exercise in position and relative motion which might easily be likened to a ‘run’ in carom billiards.”
He looked puzzled. “Once more we’ve run into the limitations of the Great Spell of Reconciliation. It assumes a commonality of experience that doesn’t always exist across the worlds.”
“No matter. The reference is trivial. Let’s get started.” He spoke rhetorically, since he well knew that Akcuanrut would stand well aside unless it became absolutely necessary for him to intervene, and the wizard’s notion of ‘absolutely necessary’ usually bore a striking resemblance to ‘never.’
No matter. Phil was fairly confident, first opening his mind to the presence of deep magic in the cavern, coursing through the bones of the Earth, circulating from its very core outward into space and beyond to the stars. He felt the presence of the Sun, and the movements of the planets, as if he were standing at the center of a larger version of the Empress’ Orrery, and could feel the subtle tug of their motions around the Sun, then traced the even more diaphanous thread that marked the Sun’s path through the plane of the Milky Way.
From there, he looked with ætherial sight down toward the South-East — where his New Jersey quarry was located — and selected his structural basalt slabs in order, wafting them into the air like curiously buoyant giant dominoes, freed from the surly bonds of Earth, then silently streaming them toward the top of the valley high above their heads.
He built the structure from the inside out, placing first the focal point, a flat slab of dense stone at the core of the structure, allowing the Earth to embrace it snugly to its bosom, then surrounded it with the first of the fifteen focal stones, forming the inner layer of the complex structure, and only then the imposing trilithons, five of them in an intentional parabola, all of them likewise deeply embedded in the welcoming Earth, but each joined at the top with a horizontal lintel, each locked together by a massive stone joint which both stabilized and welded them into the individual elements of a complex phased array.
Then came the circles, the first true enclosures to screen out any influences not directly related to the magical power he wanted to enhance, the inner circle consisting of thirty individual elements, rough cylinders that plunged into the Earth and anchored the entire structure, grounding it, connecting it to the surrounding grasslands and the mountains behind. The outer circle was the most elaborate, another thirty stones, likewise deeply embedded in the soil — more deeply than the originals — but larger too, all joined together with another complex series of joints, a topological ‘knot’ which joined thirty crosspieces to span each gap between the circle stones, creating an unbroken chain of stone and earth surrounding everything, although one could as easily say that the outer circle was actually the true inner circle, which encompassed the entire surface of the wide Earth, and was in turn enclosed by all the rest, trilithons and all, so although one might fairly say that the structure looked like a sanctuary, from another viewpoint one could as easily say that the structure sanctified the Earth itself, and made it holy.
The final step was the most delicate, and the one which differed most notably from the roughhewn original model, since the edge of the Catskills wasn’t anything like Salisbury Plain, and the valley dropped away beneath them, so the Sunstone, the final piece of the puzzle, looked something more like an obelisk, well over a hundred feet tall, although of course a substantial portion would be buried. This single stone’s placement was critical, for it marked the rising of the Sun on the summer solstice, and required a delicate sense of alignment with the ecliptic, taking into account the future position of the Earth, a little more than two weeks into the future, and so placed the final seal upon the structure as a whole, fixing it in both place and time.
“Remind me to look into this caram billious game of yours,” Akcuanrut said. “That was masterfully done.”
Phil laughed in pure happiness, then said, “The real proof lies in the pudding itself, though. Shall we go up and try it out?”
“We shall, but if you’ve succeeded — and I have every confidence that you have — you’ll no longer be able to wallow in the luxury of being a mere Apprentice, but must take up the burdens of a Journeyman Wizard of considerable power.”
“Then I’d better hope that it worked, I suppose.” He smiled. “You make it sound so enticing.”
“Hmmf!” the wizard grunted. “You’ll be very lucky if you ever see a decent meal again!”
To Phil’s surprise, considering the late hour, they were met at the top of the gated shaft which led down to the cavern by the Empress and both of his wives, these last two by now visibly pregnant, and all three of them resplendent in new clothes from a recent shopping expedition in the City. Selene and Rhea were both in high-waisted black leather maxiskirts with matching jackets, but each outfit had subtle differences in cut and the coloring of the stitchery and design details, although his wives’ outfits did share a thigh-high slit in common. The Empress was in heavy silk, and all three looked as if they had charter memberships in the top ranks of the glitterati.
“How do you like our outfits?” Rhea held up her arms and twirled, dangerously tall in stiletto heels. She reached down as if to brush at her leg, but suddenly a naked sword was in her hand, then tossed spinning lightly into the air before she slid it back under her skirt and into some hidden sheath. “This skirt is designed to allow concealed carry for six daggers as well,” she said happily, “but the saber is really my favorite with this outfit. Straight swords tend to tangle slightly when they’re drawn from under a skirt, and I’d hate to have to replace this lovely skirt when it’s still brand new. We haven’t tested the self-healing properties of our new outfits yet, so don’t know if they share the indestructibility of the old ones.”
“It’s beautiful, Darling, and I assume that Selene’s outfit is similarly versatile.”
“Of course!” she said, as pleased as Punch. “They’re even better than our old ones, at least in looks, and much nicer in the chilly weather here. We even have hooded leather capes, so we can swirl them around and trap people in their folds.” She lowered her voice to almost a whisper, “You’ve really got to drop by our new designer, though. Some of the stuff she has on display is seriously kinky!”
Selene added with a wink, “Who knows? We might even pick up a few ideas….”
“Ahem!” the wizard said, brusquely imperious. “We’re gathered here for an important purpose, not to discuss the latest fashions for warrior women in the modern metropolis, much less ‘kinky’ outfits.”
“I heartily agree, my dear Master Wizard,” said the Empress D’Larona-Elvi. “As I understand it, we’re here to judge your young Apprentice’s Master Working, whereupon we two will decide whether he meets the criteria for full membership in the College of Wizards.”
“Actually,” the wizard said, “he here submits two Workings, not just one, and each in my own opinion individually sufficient, but together worthy of higher honor than mere membership, if both of us agree upon the worth of these feats.”
The Empress said merely, “Proceed with your exposition, then, Master Wizard.”
He nodded. “First, an intractable problem in this world is a formerly-anomalous depletion in the total store of magical power. Through careful observation and experiment, young Phillip has not only deduced the cause of this depletion, but has formulated a general theory of where the best sources of magic might yet be found, and worked out a method of bypassing certain aspects of this general depletion by drawing upon what might be termed ‘fossilized’ magic left behind from other ages and workings.”
“So has this theoretical ‘method’ been proven in practice?”
“It has. Phillip has shown that exposure to a general attitude of factionalism and hostile skepticism on this planet has decreased the overall level of magic over tenfold, at minimum, and in many places much more. As a proof of concept, he has discovered and used a pristine source of magical power located deep within the Earth — where human beings have rarely stepped foot — and as a measure of the sort and amount of power available offers the new structure outside this very cave as proof. You may have noted it as you entered the cave during construction, since it took some time, but the separate parts of this massive instrument were fashioned through pure magic and then transported through the air a distance of many hundreds of miles, then aligned to the plane of the ecliptic in this solar system using a fine sense of time and place as accurate, I think, as that which is displayed in your own Orrery.”
“Very pretty, I’m sure, but what good is it?” the Empress asked.
“It is,” the wizard said, “according to Phillip, a focal point and amplifier of magical power, and he offers as proof a personal inspection of same. In fact, we were on our way to do that very thing when you and your dangerous entourage showed up.”
“Well, then, let us essay,” the Empress said, and turned toward the exit to the wide world outside the cave.
“It’s over this way,” Phil said. “You should be able to feel the power as we approach.” He hadn’t created a path, other than the one that led up the valley past the Sunstone toward the structure itself, but then he hadn’t planned on using it in the middle of the night either. There wasn’t even a moon, so their first approach was by starlight, and he could feel the great mass of stone as much as see a deeper darkness where it hugged the Earth, then became aware of a looming shadow against the starry sky. “Rhea? Selene? Could you please keep our guests headed in the right direction while I run on ahead?”
“Of course, Sweetie.”
He couldn’t quite say which one had spoken in the darkness, so simply said, “Thank you both,” and stepped up the pace, guided mostly by his memory of what he’d just made, plus the feel of it, pulsing with hidden power, until he’d passed the inner horseshoe, then trod upon the focal stone.
Instantly, the magical power flooded through his body, and he tossed a little constellation of glowing white balls into the air with a shout, turning night to day in an instant, but with many shadows crisscrossing the interior of the structure, more like the flattish illumination of a football field during a night game than true daylight. “I thought that this might help you to avoid running into anything,” he called out as both of his wives whooped in triumph.
“Nice one, Phil!” they both called out in synchrony.
“I always aim to please, dear hearts,” he said, as they walked up to the focal stone, followed closely by Akcuanrut and the Empress.
“Oooh! It tickles!” the two women said as they stepped onto the stone proper, and then Akcuanrut smiled, as he too felt the sudden rush of power.
“Congratulations, Master Wizard Phillip,” the Empress said. “You’re the first since Master Wizard Akcuanrut here to progress directly to mastery in our craft.”
“Thank you, my Lady Empress, I’m honored to stand in such august company.”
“I take it, then,” she said, “that these devices can be constructed anywhere on Earth?”
“They can indeed,” Phil answered, “anywhere one can buy sufficient land to hold one. It’s not really necessary to construct them using magic, merely a convenience. Heavy equipment would do just as well, and indeed the first examples of this general sort of structure were done during the Late Stone Age on Earth, without the benefit of metal tools or any machinery other than long levers of wood.”
“First examples? Is this not a new invention, then?” she asked frowning.
“Yes, and no,” he said. “The earliest examples we know of are quite unlikely to have worked, because they weren’t fashioned with the necessary precision, so they’re possibly copies of some lost structure that was properly-formed. Then too, the societies which last made them were pre-literate, so of course their meaning — if any hint of their original purpose remained by then — was completely lost to history.”
“Then how do you extrapolate a so-called ‘original purpose,’ if the only examples don’t actually work, and nothing is really known about them.”
He smiled. “Through guesswork, really, plus a long association — not quite a tradition — with magic of various sorts connected to these sorts of structures. The original of this one, for example, is said by some to have been constructed by Merlin, a famous — or perhaps merely legendary — wizard and magician thought by most to have lived thousands of years after it was actually constructed, and certainly not contemporary with the builders, if he ever really existed at all. Others believe that it was created by super-human beings from Atlantis — as far as we know an imaginary island, or continent which never existed in any way other than as a legendary retelling of the destruction in a volcanic explosion of an island named Thera, located in the Mediterranean Sea — of which there is no trace in the geologic record, so it seems as if the real Atlantis — if ever there was such a place — was not on this world at all. It’s entirely conceivable that it exists somewhere in some other world, possibly even a distorted report of your own world as related by the ancient centaurs, since it now seems likely that they visited here at some point in the distant past.”
“But how do you get from imaginary islands and anachronistic wizards to anything like the truth?” The Empress was obviously frustrated, and there was an edge to her voice.
“On this world, science quite often progresses by what they call ‘hunches,’ intuition, really, but intuition informed by a systematic and interactive system of investigation and analysis of the results of one’s tests of the tentative theories, hopefully getting closer to a coherent and comprehensive theory by approximation. I started from the knowledge that — for some unknown reason — there was a source of magic inside a particular building, the church used by Na-Noc, and that it wasn’t uniform, so Na-Noc was more-or-less trapped in one portion of the room. I also know that there’s a full-size replica of the original of this structure on the other side of the country, in Washington State, and that it’s not terribly effective, possibly because it was constructed using concrete — a hydraulic mixture of lime, sand, and gravel — instead of hewn native stone. My challenge, then, was to discover why the power existed, and why it wasn’t uniform. Added to that was the fact that a limited form of magic was used inside the Lanyon home. In both cases, the walls of the physical structures were of stone, but it was also true that huge gaps existed in both structures which weren’t stone at all, very many windows in the case of the church, and a wooden roof in the home. It was a puzzle.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently.
“So I made a lucky guess; that the great mass of stone was effective because it was parallel to the surface of the Earth, and that exposure to the sky was either inconsequential or beneficial. From there, it was simply a matter of visiting quite a few buildings and seeing what worked, and what didn’t. Rounded shapes were better than rectangular shapes, for example — several football stadiums and the Rotunda of the State Legislature in Albany proved that, despite the fact that they were made with concrete, but using massive amounts of the stuff, so there’s evidently some sort of tradeoff there — and orientation to the ecliptic also played a part, which I deduced from the most powerful examples of the many random alignments of various otherwise similar sports stadiums.”
“So, why isn’t this a sports stadium, then?”
“Two reasons. First, sports stadiums are very expensive, and take many years to build. Second, and most important, they weren’t particularly efficient, and I had another thought; what if the ancient centaurs, let’s say, had explored other worlds during their war with the Dark? What if they’d been trapped — or inconvenienced, makes no matter — here by the same scarcity of magic that we encountered? We know that they were masters of portal technology — far in advance, I think, of anything we’ve done lately. We also know that they had, and have, at least one portal connected to the Earth — for whatever reason. What if they’d constructed the original of the structure I created here? If Stone Age people had seen one of these ‘miraculous’ things in use, they may have tried to duplicate them, just as certain South Sea Islanders made replicas of airplanes during their spontaneous development of ‘Cargo Cults?’ That would account perfectly for the presence of the megalithic structures, even though they wouldn’t have actually worked, no more than ‘airplanes’ made out of wood and palm fronds could fly. It would also account for the fact that the legends of centaurs on Earth shows them both as warriors — they were at war, after all — and as wise counselors and teachers, friends to human beings.”
“So your existing ‘examples’ would be ‘primitive’ copies of more sophisticated devices that are now lost to history, but which may actually have worked!”
“Exactly! It’s only a hypothesis, of course, but I took a leap of faith, and began thinking about the first principles of magic here on Earth, that it appears to be rooted in the Earth, and is influenced by the alignments of the Sun and Earth at least, but also that magic has been diminished in recent history — by which I mean the last few thousand years at least — because of the rise of competing systems of magical theory and practice. We can see that this is possible because at least some of the magical influence of the Dark Gods is readily thwarted by the rite of consecration we now know of and use. I think that monuments like this may have been first constructed by the centaurs as artificial caves, to both focus the underlying magical field and to shield the practitioner from the influence of what might be seen as ‘counterspells’ cast by millions of believers in competing systems. These devices would have been refined by trial and error until a fairly stable form evolved.”
“But this looks nothing like a cave!” she said with some heat.
“Actually, it does, on a macroscopic level, but magic — whatever energy it actually consists of — obviously has a long wavelength, since there are large gaps between the elements that make up the pseudo-cave, just as the intervening windows in the stone structure of the church made little essential difference to its ‘cave-like’ nature, as far as magic was concerned. We also know that the magical field was strongest in the nave, that part of the church that most strongly resembled this one, and that the church itself was oriented more or less on an east-west axis, facing the rising sun, although I have no idea why, other than accidentally, because the city streets themselves have a similar alignment. That being the case, what we call a ‘phased array’ antenna structure of widely-separated elements is perfectly adequate, and allowed me to focus the power much more efficiently, resulting in a twenty-fold increase over subterranean power levels, which in turn are well over ten times greater than the poorly-focused field that Na-Noc used in the church. You can feel the result here and now, if you stand upon the focal point.”
“You mean there’s more?” the Empress said.
“I do.”
She stepped onto the stone slab, then walked around, feeling the incredible strength of the magic being focused on one particular spot — greater even than the magical field back in Myriad — then said, all business now, “Master Wizard Akcuanrut, be sure to tell someone with our liaison in the US government to provide diplomatic passports for Master Wizard Phillip and his wives. Give them some official title or another to impress the locals. It may save them some problems if the New York authorities take issue with the weapons and accoutrements of our official bodyguard.”
“Good point. I’ll do the same with all the twins, since they all have the same issues.”
“You should also take note, Master Wizard Akcuanrut, that both of Phillip’s wives felt the magic, so it’s my thought that we have at least two more potential Apprentices.”
“Already noted,” Phillip answered, “but it’s also true that both of my wives’ abilities in the martial arts are undoubtedly suffused with magic, since their weapons recreate themselves from nothing at all and their abilities are well beyond that of ordinary humans. I suggest rather another class of Sorceress entirely, call them Valkyries… or Furies… whose magic is innate, like that of the centaurs, although of course it would be wise to explore this at greater length.”
“What makes you believe that this magic is innate?” Akcuanrut asked mildly.
“Because the character upon whom both my lovely wives drew inspiration for their separate transformations was described as being descended from the inhabitants of Atlantis, the fabled land I mentioned in our world where magic was once supposedly common, and was ultimately granted divine powers by a Goddess. My wives discovered these abilities — as I understand it — at the moment of their transformation, without training of any kind, and retain those powers — or recreate them — from their original model, who was a fictional character drawn from a book. Like her, they are indomitable against any merely mortal opponent. By extension, all their sisters must share their supernatural nature, so I suspect that — as with the new race of more powerful centaurs — there’s something entirely new coming into being, impelled by forces greater than our own. You’ll also note, I’m sure, that each and every one of these powerful women is even at this moment pregnant — bringing forth a new generation even as we stand here talking — and both our worlds are changing, right before our eyes.”
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-Five
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
It is better to light a single candle
than to curse the darkness.— W. L. Watkinson (1907)
“Are we ready?” The Empress D’Larona-Elvi was mounted on a huge and highly-trained jet-back warhorse — a recent purchase — and armed with a consecrated sword in a golden scabbard at her side, one of several symbolic objects she carried as tokens of her participation in an ancient ritual of knighthood, a red tabard emblazoned with her ceremonial arms, a cingulum of spun gold, and golden spurs. Other than these, though, she was clad in the formal gown and robes of a Mistress Sorceress and Scryer, and her primary weapon was a wand of ash, although she also had a crystal ball wrapped in cloth of spider silk tucked away in one of her saddlebags.
Before her was the broad opening of a largish portal quite recently created using a combination of a new portable version of Wildflower’s Trans-Spatial Portal and the information gathered by ancient Centauran analysts, which opened on the nearest outlier of those places mapped out by the ancient centaurs as being at least partially in thrall to the Dark. Behind her, their small army was arrayed down the Catskill Ramparts valley, more than a thousand strong, with a large number of Selene’s many twins riding centaurs, individual centaurs, and quite a few Imperial soldiers on horseback. Master Wizard Akcuanrut, also mounted on a warhorse purchased on Earth, answered for all, “We are, my Lady Empress.”
“Then I suppose we ought to be on our way,” she said, and rode boldly through the glowing amber portal.
The others followed as quickly as they could, and quickly found themselves in a very strange world indeed, with an overcast yellow sky above them that cast a ghastly pall over a snowbound forest of stunted and misshapen trees that stretched out in every direction, equally ugly no matter where one looked. Things rustled through the underbrush as they rode by, too big for rats, but with the sorts of sounds that rats might make, if they were the size of small dogs. Whatever they were, they were careful to stay out of sight.
“Cheery sort of place,” Rhea remarked conversationally. “Now that I think about it, Niagara Falls is looking better and better.”
“It sure doesn’t look like the skiing would be anything to write home about,” Selene replied. “The place seems just about as flat as Kansas, but with lots less corn and sunflowers.”
“Doesn’t the smell remind you of something, though? I don’t mean roses, either.”
“It does, in fact, seem vaguely reminiscent of those stinky little guys who ambushed us beside the river.” She put her thumb and forefinger into her mouth and let fly a piercing series of whistling notes, and all her sisters responded with increased wariness. The men-at-arms loosened swords in scabbards, and swung their bucklers off their backs to carry them ready on one arm.
“Does it seem a little dark to you, dears?” Phil seemed concerned, but not overly so.
“It does seem a little dim, Sweetheart,” Selene said. “Why don’t you prepare a few lights so they’ll be handy if we need to peer into any dark corners? Just in case, of course.”
“As it happens,” he rode up to the head of their advancing force, where Selene and Rhea rode right behind the Empress, and handed each a leather duffle, which they both immediately opened and looked through, Rhea holding up one roundish lime-green object, like a small egg — but obviously an egg laid by a green hen — with a puzzled look on her face. “I took the precaution,” he said, “of preparing a handy set of portable tools for adventurers, including a few thousand little ‘flashlights.’ You throw them like an egg, and they break about as easily, once thrown, although they’re surprisingly tough otherwise. You’ll be pleased, I think, by the amount of light they’ll shed upon any vexing puzzle. Now that we have a better idea what we’re facing, the Wizard’s apprentices have many more of them in the cart, so I’ll have them passed out to one and all.”
“How thoughtful, Sweetie,” Rhea said, weighing the one she held in her hand. I love these things!
“These are an improved version of the hand-crafted originals,” he said, “because they keep track of whoever threw them, and focus most of the light away from the thrower, so they don’t have quite the tendency to dazzle.”
“Oh! That is special!” Selene said, pulling one from her own bag. “Can I try one?”
“Of course! There are a lot of really dark places in this scrumpy little forest that could use a little light.”
Quicker than thought, Selene and Rhea both threw their little easter eggs at separate shaking bits of low-lying shrubbery that seemed interesting and which turned instantly into screaming flight on the part of what were obviously a good number of dwarves, their hiding places exposed for what they were. “Well, that was revealing,” Selene said.
“Isn’t it, though?” Rhea answered loudly. “I’m hurt, simply crushed to note that no one’s come out to greet us.”
“Well, to be perfectly fair,” Selene said, “our last welcoming committee met an unsavory end, so they may be having some difficulty finding volunteers.”
“There’s no excuse for bad manners,” she said primly, “even if they started out by behaving abominably.”
“Hey! Little creepy guys!” Selene called out in a clear alto voice. “We come in peace, but if you keep sneaking around, we’re going to have to assume that you mean us mischief.”
“You won’t like that,” Rhea added, perhaps unnecessarily, since they obviously didn’t much like them already.
After an extended silence, one of the dwarves stepped out from behind one of the scrubby trees, black-bearded, with bushy black eyebrows and long black moustaches that seemed to merge imperceptibly with the long hair that hung lankly from his scalp, his skin was as pale as a dead fish, or a mushroom, which made at least some sense, if this was the best this dark land offered in the way of sunlight. Against his black hair, though, the effect was ghastly. “What do you want with us?” he snarled. “This is our land, and you have no right to be here! Go back where you belong!”
Akcuanrut rode up and said, “I am Akcuanrut, Master Wizard and Dean of the Imperial College of Wizards of Myriad. I’m not accustomed to speaking to sneaking cowards who conceal their names, so who are you to speak so boldly to us?”
The little man’s scowl grew deeper — if that were possible — and he answered, “Alvís is my name, and I am King of this land.”
“Alvís, eh? A King, you say? Then you’d know about those of your people who attacked me and my companions on my own world, wouldn’t you?”
“I do not,” he blustered. “My people are not slaves, to cower and cringe in supplication before undertaking any task!”
The Wizard was contemptuous. “So you’re saying that you’re a so-called ‘King’ in name only? A ‘King’ whose ‘authority’ runs only as far as the end of his nose? If that’s the case, I see no particular difference between you and any random brigand or thug.”
The little monarch gnashed his teeth in rage, then blurted out, “They were Dáinn and Náinn, together with their people, all outlaws who trafficked with wicked sorcerers!”
“So you do know who they were, do you? Why didn’t you say so before?”
He sneered before answering, “There’s no profit in spilling information on the ground like piss. We Dvergar are accustomed to payment before we offer anything of value.”
“A grim approach to life, I must caution you,” said the wizard. “It will yield you a bitter harvest if you persist in it.”
“And exactly when has our lot been anything less than ‘bitter,’ as you put it? You see the poor homeland we have, with its stunted trees and crops so sparse that we’re forced to barter for the very food we eat, and poor bargains we’re offered for it too, by greedy men and elves. Our only visitors come with demands and threats and tricks, ‘Make me some magic golden hair, O clever Dvergr!’ ‘I need a ship! A spear! A war hammer! A necklace! A ring!’ and even then they usually refuse to pay!”
“You work in metal?” Phil asked.
The dwarf King snorted. “Work in metal, indeed! We Dvergar are the finest craftsmen in all the worlds!”
Phil smiled. “Please allow me to present an example of my own poor efforts as a gift then, and as a token of esteem for a fellow craftsman.” He produced an intricately-carved armband, sized to fit the dwarf himself, and handed it over.
King Alvís looked at it with some suspicion, weighed it in his hand, then stuck out his tongue and tasted it. “It’s solid gold!” he said.
“Of course it is!” Phil said with some indignation. “Do you think I’d try to pass off plate to a metals connoisseur?”
He was still suspicious. “What do you want for it?” he asked.
“Nothing. It’s a gift, just as I said.”
“Does it have any special power?” the Dwarf asked.
He was taken slightly aback. “I’m afraid not. When you say, ‘special power,’ what exactly did you have in mind?”
“Well,” he said craftily, a shrewd concupiscence playing over his features, “some distant relatives of mine made a gold ring once, and every nine days, eight new rings dropped from it.”
“It was just a ring, not an armband?” he asked.
“It was, and rather plain at that, the sort of thing a king might give a thegn, and not crafted with any notable skill, like this is, although the multiplying thing was rather nice,” he admitted, grudgingly it seemed.
Phil thought about this for a moment, and then had a thought. He turned away and concentrated for a moment, then turned back holding out an identical armband. “Try this one. If I’ve got it right, tapping the two of them together will create another pair. I’d avoid doing this too often in any one place, if I were you, because it will increase magical entropy locally, at least to some extent, so eventually it will stop working, at least until you either move to another location or allow the magic to regenerate.”
The dwarf King took it in his other hand, looked at it, then clicked it together with the one he still held, whereupon two bands fell from their contact point to the ground, too quickly for the King to catch them.
Both Akcuanrut and the Empress D’Larona-Elvi gasped involuntarily, and both began to work some charm but….
…since the King was very small, they didn’t have far to fall, and luckily, the two new armbands didn’t fall in quite the same place, and rolled harmlessly away from each other. “This is a princely gift,” the King said, oblivious to the danger.
“Uhm, King Alvís? I’d be a little more careful with them if I were you,” Phil said. “If they happened to fall together, you’d have quite a pile of them very quickly, quickly enough to be a nuisance, or even a danger, if you were trapped in a small room with a growing pile of them.”
The King seemed very pleased to hear this. “Ah, good! Excellent! So it has a curse attached as well! All the best treasures do.”
Phil nodded, a little puzzled. “The moral is, I suppose, not to be greedy.”
The King agreed very happily, saying, “To be sure, but the best lesson to be drawn is to keep this curse quite secret, because the chances of your enemies being caught in it and destroyed are very great. Where better to create magical golden armbands but in some secret place? Perhaps even behind a locked door, to prevent jealous spies from learning of one’s secret source of wealth!” He appeared to view this prospect with great enthusiasm. “How quickly would this happen?”
Phil thought about this for a bit, then said, “It’s difficult to explain; do you know what an exponential progression is?”
The King looked blank.
Phil started over, “Think of it this way; in the first instant, two bands bump into each other, which makes four bands, which in the worst case all bump into each other in turn, which makes sixteen bands at most, then these bump into each other, which makes a maximum of, let’s say, two hundred and fifty-six, since each new armband can bump into any number of its fellows almost simultaneously, and the more bumps, the more likely it is for each ring to jostle against still more bands, for a maximum of sixty-five thousand, five hundred and thirty-six new armbands in just four generations… less than a second, surely. You’ll understand, of course, that this is just an approximation; it might be less, or might be many more, depending both on how much magic was available and sheer luck, or bad luck as the case might be. By that point, depending on how small the chamber was, the metal might fuse into one piece, melted together by the heat of compression and thereby stopping the reaction, or the chamber itself might explode, with devastating local results. Eventually, the magic would run out, either through exhaustion of the local supply, or through distortion of the armbands into unrecognizability, and thus non-functionality.” He thought a few seconds longer, then added, “Of course, you’d probably have quite a lot of gold, which would be exactly as useful as gold ever is. If you’re inclined to experiment, though, I’d advise you to be very cautious, and even then I’d appreciate it you’d give us a few days to get well away from here, because it might be a very dangerous place to hang around.”
The dwarf King laughed uproariously, enormously pleased. “Say, when you fashion a bit of cursed gold, you don’t just go about it half-way, do you?”
This time, Phil smiled as well. “No, I don’t suppose that I do. I just have the knack for it, I suppose.”
The wizard and the Empress just looked at each other — both scandalized — while the King laughed again in gleeful admiration and Phillip’s wives just rolled their eyes.
So pleased was King Alvís that there was nothing for it but to stay the night, because he wanted to throw a little feast in honor of his noble guests, the most important features of which seemed to be vast quantities of some dark ale, roast meats of various sorts, and heaps of coarse slabs of bread they used as plates, or sometimes missiles, which they hurled at those who failed to drain their horns of ale with sufficient panache, evidently best displayed by a tremendous belch. When the women asked for vegetables, they were met with incredulous laughter from all the dwarves. “Pig food!? Why would anyone eat pig food!?” one said, to hoots and whistles and raucous laughter from the assembled dwarves, which pertinent witticism demanded, of course, another round of ale, although the ladies were supplied with mead in several varieties, a sweetish spicy honey flavor, somewhat less sweet fruity versions, and one even more bitter than the ale, at the separate ‘ladies’ table’ at the foot of the hall — furthest from the King’s seat, which was placed upon a simple dais at the head.
Later, after they’d finally managed to retire for the night, Rhea said morosely in the darkness of their tent, “How long does it take to develop scurvy?”
“A few months, I think,” Phil tried to reassure her. “As I understand it, though, beer does have at least some vitamins, mostly B-complex, but some recipes have a bit of vitamin C as well. I don’t know about the mead.”
Selene added, “Don’t worry, Dearest, the high cholesterol would probably kill us long before vitamin deficiencies did us any harm. Hopefully, we’re just passing through, so we can get back to a healthy diet before too long.” She sighed heavily. “I do miss yoghurt, though, and decent salads, and garlic breadsticks, and….”
“Enough! Next you’ll be complaining about the notable lack of chocolate!” Rhea said with some heat, to which complaint Selene only groaned.
Phil had a sudden vision of a succession of overlapping imperious and conflicting demands for chocolate, pickles, anchovies, ice cream, and other exotic viands, all at inconvenient hours of the night, and ardently wished that his talents included conjuring things to eat. Wisely, he said nothing.
King Alvís had made such good use of his magical golden armbands that he’d hammered out hundreds of plain gold rings overnight, then distributed them to his most loyal followers, explaining that their visitors so loved the Dvergar that they’d offered gifts for all and sundry, which made their departure a stark contrast to their arrival, with what seemed like hundreds of dwarves standing cheering by the side of the narrow path that led onward toward their destination. To corroborate the King’s genial deception, Phil, with the King’s approval, produced two largish sacks of gold coins — each about the size of a US dollar coin, impressed with King Alvís’ likeness with the dwarven runes which spelled his name subscribed on one side, and the image of a horse and human rider on the other, to commemorate their visit — which he asked some of their men-at-arms to toss from side to side as they progressed, like Mardi Gras throws in New Orleans. To forestall any possible resentment on the part of the King, he left two similar sacks behind, and fondly hoped that their gifts might help to alleviate their general poverty, since the King had explained — after most of the guests at the banquet had fallen asleep either on their benches or the floor, their heads perhaps slumped over the table, in some cases lying in the soggy remnants of the bread plates, in others sprawled in the dirty straw that covered the floor — that they were once as tall as any man, but had gradually declined in size over many generations, which sounded vaguely like nutritional dwarfism to Phil, at least. He hadn’t bothered to ask either Thundercloud or Wildflower about the medical aspect, since there was really nothing else that they could do. They had, he thought, enough on their plate already.
King Alvís had given him a parting gift, a folding bridge, he’d said, between the worlds, which he thought might be useful to them if they found their path blocked. “Of course it has a curse on it, but a very useful one,” he’d said. “It will support the passage of an entire army, but the very instant that the last member of your party passes, the bridge refolds itself, returning to your hand.” He grinned at that. “It can be very satisfying to watch it fold up into its compact little pouch,” he’d said, giggling, “if anyone just happens to be hot on your heels.” And at that he’d laughed out loud.
For all the dwarf’s bloodthirsty sense of humor, Phil couldn’t quite help liking the guy. “Thank you, Sir,” was all he’d said. “I’m sure it will prove very useful.”
“If I were you,” he said, pointing straight up, “I’d head south. This is Svartálfheimr, the most pleasant of the northern lands, and there’s little profit to be had from the Hrímthurs, much less Hel.”
“Hrímthurs?” Phil asked.
“Frost giants, a very nasty bunch, but also very stupid, which is good luck for us all.”
“How so?” he asked.
“Well, they’re man-eaters, for one, and they make no particular distinction between Men and Dvergar, although, on the whole, they’d prefer a Man, but only because they make a better meal for a giant.”
“Oh,” Phil said.
“They’re better than the Fire giants, though. They want to destroy everything.”
This captured Phil’s interest completely, because it sounded like the Dark Gods. “Really? Tell me more.”
“Not much to tell, really. Surtr is their King. His name means ‘Black,’ but he’s supposed to fight Freyr, the ‘Lord,’ at the end of all things — which of course he’ll do, and win, because that idiot Freyr traded away his magic sword for a woman — and after that little debacle Surtr and his fellow Fire Giants will devour everyone and all the nine worlds.”
“He had a magic sword?”
“He did, a sword that would fight by itself, but it only worked if the owner of the sword was wise and, as we’ve seen, Freyr was and is a fool.”
“What happened to the sword?”
“That faggot Skírnir, his manservant, carried it off with him, and who knows where? It’s certain that he won’t be anywhere near the battlefield, in any case. His only claim to fame was in bullying the Jötunn woman Gerðr with Freyr’s former sword, threatening to cut her head off if she didn’t consent to allow Freyr to fuck her, and then swishing around his sissy-boy magic wand — as if he were a Völva — by means of which he meant to turn her ugly and give her dread diseases, so that all men would flee from her, unless she gave in to his many threats. He made one ashamed to share the same sex with him.”
“Völva?”
“A Seeress and Sorceress — as is proper among womankind — like your friend the Empress D’Larona-Elvi, who styles herself a Sorceress and Scryer. Same thing, different words.”
“But I’m a Wizard. Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not at all. I myself can and do wield magic, but I use it to make useful things, just as you do. Sometimes those things are weapons, which can be used to hurt people, but by no means would I — or any decent man — use magic to harm people directly. Women are different,” he said with sturdy logic, “because they have not a man’s strength or will, and so may properly use magic to defend themselves, their homes, and family. No one would dare to think less of them for it.”
“So this Skírnir fellow crossed the line between manly and unmanly behavior by threatening her with magic, but not when he threatened her with the sword?”
“Well,” he said reluctantly, “the magic was much worse. A man may be overcome with lust and rape — or threaten to rape — a woman, and still be thought a man, even if something of a coward, because he should have gone to her father, or other male kin, and demanded her hand in marriage, in which case he might make any threats he wanted to, as well as offer gifts, because there’s at least one man present to dispute his claim. But even then, her father and brothers would have a claim at law against him, and could demand either wealth or outlawry for her honor.”
“So what happened to Skírnir? Was he outlawed?”
“No one knows. Who cares where poofters wander? Mind you, Freyr should have done his own wooing, so that was more than a little limp-wristed in itself. What kind of man is such a coward that he sends another man to court his bride? Is the other man to have his wedding night as well?” He laughed coarsely. “Of course, with Skírnir he wouldn’t have had to worry about that problem, but I wouldn’t turn my backside to him in the sauna.” He winked in sly implication.
“So what happened to Gerðr? Did she marry Freyr?”
“She did, worse luck to her, the foolish girl. What pride could she take in a husband so foolish as to doom the entire world to destruction because he was too cowardly to declare his love for her directly, as a man ought to do? Instead, he sends a sneaking servant to abuse her, to intimidate her, and to degrade her while her father is away! Bah! With Gods like that, who needs enemies?”
“Freyr was a God?”
“Still is, as far as I know. He doesn’t get out much, as you might imagine, since people will laugh at him behind his back, and quite a few in his face. He’s one of the Vanir, who are supposedly wise, virile, and have the ability to see the future, but obviously Freyr is… an exception to the general rule, and he did employ Skírnir as a go-between, so there’s many as say he’d gone before, if you know what I mean.” He smirked.
Phil ignored the implication. “So if I wanted to meet this Surtr fellow, where would I find him?”
“Just keep heading south, toward the Sun. The brighter it is, the warmer you get, the closer you’ll be. You’ve got some balls on you, though, if you want to meet him!”
Phil smiled. “Well, you’ll notice that I have two wives.”
The King laughed. “That’s the spirit! It would be nice if someone dared to face him. As scrawny as we Dvergar may be in this age of the world, and as poor as our homeland is, I’ll miss it when the nine worlds all burn to a cinder.”
“Would you like to see it, the supposed End of things?”
The King was astonished. “You’d ask me to fight beside you?”
“I would, though I’d like to see a little Dvergr guile as well. You faced our party boldly, though we clearly outnumbered you, so your courage is obvious. I have the beginnings of a plan in mind….”
The little King grinned, straightening his spine and standing tall, for a little guy. “Guile or no guile, I’ll be proud to fight beside you!” the King declared.
“Stout fellow!” said Phil, “I’ll let you know how my plans work out, and what you’ll need to bring with you, besides your weapons, of course.”
“Late that night, they were camped on the edge of an impossibly-tall cliff, so high above whatever it sprang from that they could see only clouds float by below, with no hint of whatever lay beneath. To the south, above them, there was another precipice, nearly vertical from the looks of it, and just as tall, towering above the clouds that surrounded whatever land — or world — that distant island massif supported.”
“King Alvís says that it’s the land of the Giants, Jötnar, he calls them. They’re in our way, but a mixed bunch, some are fairly nice, but quite a few are rather nasty. Of course, there’s no particular equivalent to the Golden Rule here, or any thought, evidently, that one really ought to try to get along with people, so many are quite boorish, even the nicer ones, ready to start a blood feud at the drop of a slighting remark, or an imagined insult. In fact, insult contests are a kind of party game with them, with the winner being the guy who provokes someone into trying to kill him, whereupon everyone laughs.”
“How do we get there?” Rhea asked practically.
“Well,” Phil said, “we have several choices. The centaurs could theoretically fly us across, but it might be too far to support us all, since it’s difficult to judge exactly how far away it is. We could try to establish a portal, but never having been there, this might be difficult, although the centaur science of portals might help. According to their book, though, they never progressed beyond our present location, so it would be a shot in the dark, as they say. Finally, King Alvís gave me something he calls a ‘bridge,’ which can supposedly span any distance. It’s obviously some sort of magic, but I have no idea exactly how it works.”
“Well,” Selene suggested, “why don’t we see what this magic bridge thing looks like? If it seems too dicey, we can always try something else, but it has the advantage of being something from this world, and obviously something that your pal the King thinks will work.”
“Good point,” Phil said. “Should we try it now?”
“Darkness might be advisable,” Akcuanrut agreed, “to avoid drawing unwanted attention from any potential observers, although it looks like a very long way to travel in one night.”
“What the heck? Let’s give it a try. The King thought it would work, and the curse is relatively minor.”
“Curse?” Rhea said suspiciously.
“Well,” he said, “the bridge disappears as soon as the last of your party steps off, so it can be rather hard on anyone who tries to follow you. But the King said that all the best magical gadgets have curses. I trust him, as far as that goes.” With that, he took out the King’s ‘bridge,’ held tightly to the handle provided at one end, and flicked the rest toward the land of the Giants, something like casting a lure with a fly rod and reel, except it didn’t look like one. It actually looked quite a bit like a very fancy yoyo.
With a low musical throb like the lowest few notes of an antique cinema organ, the business end shot off into the darkness, trailing a very faint multi-colored glow behind it.
“Uhm, Sweetie?” Selene pointed out. “It looks a lot like a very dim rainbow.”
“I noticed,” he replied glumly, and tested the glowing end on the ground before him with one toe, as if it were a dead snake — or a live wire, as it turned out — only to be caught by the thing and carried along on it as if it were the escalator on the ground floor of Macy’s Department Store in the City. Before he quite realized what was happening, he was rising majestically, if unwillingly, into the air, while those on the ground followed his stately progress with open mouths and eyes wide. The worst part was that he could see them quite clearly beneath his feet, since — despite the glow — the ‘bridge’ was quite transparent. He resisted the urge to close his eyes, and instead smiled and waved, determined not to make his last moments — if these were them — appear pathetic.
After a moment of stunned inaction, both of his wives leapt onto the dim rainbow with a desperate shout, beginning their own slow rise toward the cloudy heavens, and Phil called back, belatedly, “Follow me! I guess…. It’s like the moving walkway at the airport!” before he was carried high enough that he could no longer see their army, still huddled on the edge of the precipice.
Akcuanrut was the last one across the bridge before it suddenly retracted itself into the handle, which Phil still had firmly in hand. It was night, and the sky was filled with strange stars. He wasn’t happy at all. “How many times” he said bitterly, “have I told you to be careful with magic! It’s a lucky thing we were all paying attention, or who knows how many might have been left behind!”
“Sir, I’m very sorry, but magic in this world appears to be inherently untrustworthy, perhaps because it’s seen as ‘feminine,’ and so mysterious in a relentlessly patriarchal and sexist culture. King Alvís regaled me last night with what seemed like dozens of what he thought of as ‘hilarious’ stories about men who used magic to disguise themselves, all of whom apparently wound up pregnant through rape, forced marriage, or other misadventure, eventually giving birth either to ordinary babies or monsters, depending — evidently — on exactly who the father was, ‘invincible’ magic weapons that turned out to have a secret weakness, which inevitably led their owners into fatal errors, and many more of that same ilk. What I failed to do was to take his stories to heart as something applicable to me, since in my experience — and probably yours — magic is both controllable and reliable.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Here, on the other hand, it seems to be unruly and capricious, with who knows what consequences for our mission. My only bit of optimism comes from the fact that it will probably be similarly unreliable for the ‘Dark Gods,’ since this magical mischievousness seems to be inherent in this universe, or set of ‘worlds,’ whatever it is. It’s certainly not the sort of universe we all came from, since ‘worlds’ don’t typically sit perched on top of some other thing, which for all I know is a giant turtle, or perhaps a lotus leaf.”
Both Akcuanrut and Empress D’Larona-Elvi looked nonplused. “What do you mean?” the Empress asked, but the wizard obviously had the same question in mind.
“Look over the edge of that cliff,” he said simply. “The tallest mountain on Earth is a tad less than five and a half miles above sea level, and the air up there is so thin that people quite regularly die trying to climb it.” “How far below us do you suppose those cloud tops are? Ten miles? Twenty? How far below that is whatever these island ‘worlds’ actually rest upon? How is it that we can breathe? How is it that these cliffs — which from the hazy shift toward a dark blue coloration they display as they recede below us must be many miles in height — don’t form valleys? Why are there no waterfalls? Gigantic piles of rubble extending up from the base?” He gestured back across the gulf between their new ‘world’ and the home of the dwarves. “It was overcast back there, but here it seems clear. Why would clouds respect the edge of a mere cliff? What keeps those clouds down there,” he pointed down over the cliff’s edge, “separate from those clouds over there?” He pointed back toward the land of the dwarves. “And why,” he said, “can we see those clouds so clearly in the darkness? From our ordinary experience we’d expect the bottom of a very deep valley to be darker than the mountain heights, yet the opposite seems true here.”
Akcuanrut blinked, and then closed his eyes in some sort of inner contemplation. “You’re right,” he said at last. “There’s plenty of magic, but it’s wild and unruly in comparison to what we’re used to in our world. I hate to think of what it might be up to behind our backs.”
“That would explain,” Phil said ruefully, “why my armband spell didn’t work the way I’d planned it, since the two duplicates were supposed to stay out of each other’s way without help.”
“The magic here seems actively intent on trickery,” the Empress observed. “I can feel it working against me even when I attempt a simple scrying. Phil’s light balls should still be untainted by wild magic, since he made them before we left Earth, but we must all be very careful with any magical working in the future, and try to be prepared for the unexpected.”
Both Akcuanrut and the Empress looked worried, as well they might. Unlike Phil, who’d stumbled across magic well past his childhood, both of them had grown up with well-behaved magic all around them, and were accustomed to casually using spells to accomplish even simple tasks like lighting a candle, the sort of thing one did naturally, like scratching an itchy nose, or flicking on the light switch when one walked into a room back on Earth. For the first time, he felt that they might have bitten off a bit more than they could safely swallow, and felt a frisson of fear as he looked south, toward the looming shadows of the unknown hills and mountains of the giant’s homeland.
They passed a night of miserable cold, despite their tents and blankets, and the view wasn’t that much more inspiring when the sun rose low in the sky the following morning. The hills and mountains were perhaps even more uninviting in the cold light of day, the mountains even more barren of life than the dwarves’ scrubby forest, and the hills directly before them more notably covered with lichen-covered boulders and broad fields of jumbled scree than anything like green vegetation. Still, their road lay south, and the oblique angle of the rising sun made that direction plain at least. It looked to make a short day, and nothing would be gained by dawdling with nothing but the cloudy abyss at their back. “Well,” Phil said to no one in particular, “isn’t this just a lovely day.” It wasn’t a question.
“Don’t be gloomy,” both Rhea and Selene scolded him in unison, “it’s unbecoming in a Master Wizard. You have a responsibility to project an air of confident command, lest your bad mood infect the people whose lives depend upon you.”
He blinked, surprised to be called on his lack of command presence by both his wives at once, but then realized that it wasn’t really different from a football game; as quarterback, he hadn’t been free to mope around, however short his tenure in the position had been. He was a team leader, although of course he’d had to take orders from the coach, but his leadership had depended on inspiring his team mates with his own enthusiasm as much as it had on his ability to strategize and think quickly on his feet. “I apologize, dear hearts. I had the good sense to follow your advice when first we met — well, except for Selene’s well-intended advice to ‘get lost,’ for my own safety —and should have been more firmly resolved to carry on in the same vein. I stand corrected, and let’s go kick some Jötunn butt!”
“That’s better,” they both said archly, “and see you keep it up!”
He wasn’t exactly sure how to take that last remark, but decided firmly to ignore any possible double entendre. “Yes, Ma’ams,” he said.
Neither Akcuanrut nor the Empress were in visibly better moods.
“Not the most enchanting view,” the Empress said.
“And no breakfast ready,” the wizard added.
“Yeah,” Phil said, “next time we try to save the world let’s see if we can arrange a better class of arch-fiends and villains. It would be nice if we could chase these guys through a series of delightful resorts and three-star restaurants worth a special trip to experience on their own.”
“There’s no need to be snippy,” the wizard said, while the Empress merely arched one perfect eyebrow.
“Don’t mind him,” his wives said. “He got up on the wrong side of bed this morning,” they said, and glared in his general direction.
Phil blushed and cleared his throat. “In any case, I’d like to start out as early as we can, since the less time we spend here the sooner we can get to where we’re really going.”
“Then we should start with breakfast,” Akcuanrut said. “Both horses, centaurs, and troops must be fed to be effective, and there’s obviously no forage to be had locally.”
“Share out from the supply wagons,” Phil called out to the soldiers, “and let’s be quick about it, so we can get this show on the road.”
Both of his wives smiled in approval, which was good enough for Phil, despite the disgruntled look from Akcuanrut, who doubtless had a leisurely breakfast in mind.
They hadn’t been traveling for more than an hour when they heard the first indications that their progress might have been observed in the form of a strange sort of brittle drumming, as if someone were rhythmically slamming a large boulder onto a very hard rock, both of which seemed especially ready-to-hand in this rocky place.
“Do you suppose,” Selene asked, looking up toward the heights, from where the sounds seemed to come, “that they’re talking about us?”
“One must presume so,” said Akcuanrut. “The timing is odd, at very least, though what the sounds might convey is a mystery.”
“Nothing good, I suspect,” was all Phil said, but he kept a wary mental finger on the slow throbbing pulse of the magic around him, in hopes of detecting any malevolent impulse aside from the random mischief inherent in the local magic itself.
With no warning at all, a giant chunk of the mountainside came crashing down in front of them, not twenty feet from the head of their loose column, and Phil reacted instantly, seeking out the origin of the push that had dislodged the mass of stone, and then the spite behind the impulse, then gave the Jötunn magic — which itself had a particularly malevolent impulse toward bellicosity and murder at the heart of it — free rein to drop the ground out from beneath the instigator of the first mischief — who already had a similar project in progress to follow his first effort — allowing the villain to follow the natural inclination of his body, which was to approach the gravitational center of this world’s mass. “Whoops!” Phil said, when a largish Jötunn hurtled down the mountain from above their heads and then landed, splat! on top of the very rocky heap of rock he’d already arranged for his arrival. It was a he, though not a very handsome one, especially since he looked much the worse for wear after his fall, or at least he did until he was swatted flat and buried by the very slab of mountain he’d meant next to push down on top of them.
“That,” Phil called out loudly, “was the fellow who caused the problem, although he seems to have arranged it very clumsily. I sincerely hope that no one else is inclined to follow his inept example.” He looked up toward the steep hills and cliffs around them, where he felt the presence of unseen watchers. “If so, they should be very careful to watch their step, since the mountainside seems a little damp and slippery this morning.”
Just then, another giant on a jagged ledge above the path picked up a very large rock with obvious intent to hurl it down upon their party, but Phil saw to it that the spirit of mischief that infected this place persuaded him to overbalance slightly as he threw his boulder, and managed — through some quirk of momentum and the physics of rotation — to wind up beneath the very rock he’d thrown, well off the path.
“The trick is,” he explained to no one in particular, “that the local magic sincerely desires every conscious act to fail, so it doesn’t take very much encouragement at all to ensure that every wicked purpose defeats itself.”
Rhea whooped, then said, “It’s Klown Kollege and the Krazy Klownflagration!” naming a circus act she’d seen once as a child, which had been punctuated by silly slapstick and pratfalls in profusion.
“Indeed,” Phil said, “but possibly harder on the participants, since they’re not using seltzer water syphons. We must all take care to watch our steps, and especially not to place ourselves in danger by thinking negative thoughts, much less initiating any hostile action, since the local balance between evil intention and the end result has been very slightly changed. In the words of a famous televangelist, ‘It’s nice to be nice.’ As the Buddha might say, or Hippocrates, ‘First, do no harm.’ Ahimsa, the first principle of peace, is also the first step on the path to true enlightenment.”
Both Rhea and Selene rolled their eyes. “Where’s the fun in that?” they asked rhetorically.
“Staying alive,” he answered succinctly. “We see before us the unfortunate results of two separate hateful actions. Let’s all strive to emulate the principles of non-violent resistance and satyagraha espoused by Mahatma Ghandi and many others across the ages.”
“Satyagraha?” said the Empress.
“The firm insistence upon truth in every interaction, by which he meant a common truth which respected the human dignity and rights of everyone. Of course, he wasn’t faced with existential enmity between supernatural forces — perhaps something like to Gods — involving at least one party who denies the right of other parties to merely exist. It’s difficult to imagine a middle ground between someone like Na-Noc — who feels that he has the right to eat people, both body and soul — and the people he tortures and consumes. I personally think that Ghandi was probably overoptimistic in some of his theories. They worked against the British, who were basically rather civilized, but I doubt that they would have worked against the Nazis, who weren’t, by and large.”
“Nazis?” enquired the Empress.
“An Earthly version of Na-Noc and his pals who did their best to conquer most of the world and then rewrite it to include only those people who seemed desirable to those in power.”
Akcuanrut was skeptical. “But what did they do with the others?”
“Killed them, of course, somewhere between twenty and thirty million people, taking all in all, then looted their bodies of anything valuable. As I said, much like Na-Noc’s little gang, but they did it the old-fashioned way — with weapons and poisons — all without the advantage of godlike powers.”
After those two belligerent encounters, the giants stayed away, although the lithic drumming continued, until they came to what seemed like a large settlement around a central hall, itself about the size of a World War II blimp hangar, and all surrounded by large but barren fields of broken rock and sand with neat rock walls around them. There, they were met by an affable Jötunn — dressed in patchwork garments of leather and fur, including a phrygian cap, each separate scrap evidently a whole hide, because the skin and fur of the legs and heads had been left to dangle — who wished them a good morning and asked them where they were going.
“Actually,” Phil said, looking way up to where his face was, but seeing mostly the underside of his thick blond beard, “we’re just passing through on our way to Vanaheim. Is it far from here?”
“Not too far. Visiting friends? Relatives?”
“Not really. We just heard that it was a nice place to visit, and the views of course are spectacular. Of course, your own world is very interesting as well. The mountains are very interesting and scenic.”
“Have you met any of our local residents?”
“I can’t say as how we have, since the local inhabitants seem terribly shy, although we did chance to see a tragic accident in which there was at least one fatality. The poor fellow was buried in a landslide, though, so there was nothing we could do.”
“That would be Baugi. He was always a clumsy fellow. I can’t think what he was doing in the mountains, though, as he was a farmer, and much more accustomed to the plains.”
“I have no idea,” Phil said. “Perhaps you could notify his family?”
“Already done,” the giant said. “News travels fast around here.”
“I thought somehow it might,” Phil said. “My name is Phillip, by the way, and these are my friends, fellow sightseers.”
“Loki is my name, but no relation that I know of to the other one. I see that you’re well-armed for a group of tourists.”
“Well, you’ll also notice that more than half of us are women, so please put your mind at rest. As for arms, one never knows but that one might meet brigands on the road, or wild beasts, so of course we carry those weapons that any traveler might require. I can’t, in good conscience, apologize for being prepared for any eventuality, especially with helpless women in our party.”
Both Rhea and Selene snorted derisively, but were ignored.
“I suppose not. Being well-supplied is always commendable. With so many women, are you minded to offer any as brides? We have many young giants with good prospects.”
“I’m afraid not. All are either married or have taken holy vows, as one might expect with pilgrims and sightseers.”
“All of them?” The giant frowned.
“Yes, indeed.” Phil said rather cheerfully. “Ask them if you like. I wouldn’t lie.”
The giant shouted out in anger, “You women! This man says that you’ve all taken vows! Is that true?”
The women answered, one and all, “Yes!” they said in chorus, since they all — except for the Empress D’Larona-Elvi, of course — had the same knack of it. It made quite a din.
The giant’s brows knitted themselves together, which wasn’t much of a trick, since he had what was close to a monobrow already. “Almost all of them sisters, I see. The other one’s married too?”
“That she is. I know her husband, a very nice man. You’d like him, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure I would,” he growled, so deep in tone that it was almost subsonic, and with such menace that Phil was quite sure that he didn’t mean the words with any benevolence at all.
“Perhaps,” he said, temporizing. “One never really knows, of course, until one meets in person.”
“We’ll just see about that!” the giant shouted, and stomped off toward the Empress, then fell to his knees, gasping and clutching at his chest.
The Empress D’Larona-Elvi said kindly, “I see that you’ve having a heart attack, probably brought on by bad diet and an excess of choler. Would you like me to help you?”
“You’re a Völva!” he said accusingly.
“I suppose I am,” she agreed, pleasantly enough, “if by ‘Völva’ you mean an extremely powerful Enchantress, Seer and Witch. Do you want my help to save your miserable life, or do you not? I’m rather busy just now.”
“Yes!” he gasped, clutching now at the ground, having been brought down to his face with a heavy thud, scrabbling at the ground with his fingers.
“Then be at peace, and you are deeply in my debt, since you owe me your life itself, despite your cruel intentions toward me, of which I am well aware.” She gestured toward him with a negligent wave of her hand.
He inhaled deeply, in a shuddering gasp for breath, and seemed slightly better, but was still prostrate as he managed to choke out, “I beg your pardon, Honored Lady! I had no idea who you really were.”
“See that you don’t make the same mistake again, since I can see your wicked thoughts before you form them.”
“Yes, Great Lady, and thank you for my life.”
“It’s a trivial thing, please think nothing of it,” she said ambiguously.
“Thank you, Lady,” he said, missing the point completely. “May I offer you all the hospitality of my hall?”
Phil made a show of thinking, then said, “I think not. We have ample supplies, and the ladies are very fond of their horses, are inseparable, in fact, and we wouldn’t want to impose’….”
“Think nothing of it!” Loki said, grinning broadly, “My hall is the largest within many miles, and can easily accomodate five times your number!”
“Well….” Phil seemed to hesitate.
“It’s settled, then! Throw open the doors!” he said to some unseen retainers, and the doors were opened.
With some hesitation, Phil, his wives, the Wizard and the Empress, and then the rest of their troop followed Loki into his hall, which was constructed of logs about the size of old-growth sequoias, and with a foundation of dry-laid boulders, each ten to twelve feet tall and three times as many wide. It seemed twice as large inside as out, and there was room enough inside to park a fleet of Boeing 797s.
Inside, there were row upon row of trestle tables and benches, in all sizes from those suitable for dwarves, to those for men, to those for the largest of giants, and all of them suspiciously already well-supplied with meats, ale, and viands of almost every kind.
“Welcome to my hall!” the giant said expansively. “As you can see, there is enough for all!”
“It does look nice,” Phil said cautiously.
“Before we eat, we always like to play a few parlor games to pass the time, and settle our stomachs.” He smiled winningly, or at least he thought he did. In reality his attempt to gull them was quite transparent.
The Empress spoke up directly, “I believe I’ll play your game, and wager that I’ll be able to wrestle that old woman there to the ground in three throws. As it happens, I have a spare life to wager, yours, my dear friend Loki, but of course you’ll be in no danger, because she is, after all, just an old woman, and everything is just in fun!” She laughed as blithely as a girl….
…but Loki blanched white. “Of course, Great Lady! In fact, we’ll just pretend that you’ve already won the contest, since it’s all in fun, and I’ll grant you any boon you ask.”
“I’ll take all the boons you have to give, ‘Friend’ Loki, since this is all in fun. You’ve remembered, I see, that I can read your thoughts.”
“Yes, Lady. I am your slave.” He knelt before her.
“Don’t try to trick us ever again, ‘Friend’ Loki, or it will go the worse for you. Any of us here could have told you that that ‘old woman’ there is Death herself — whom none can overthrow — and all your other proposed wagers will have similar tricks attached, as transparent to us as if you were a child who thought he was invisible because he’d covered his own eyes. Now you owe me three lives, your own twice, and the old woman’s, oddly enough, since you forfeited her life along with your own again.”
“But Noble Lady,….”
“Silence, Slave!” she screamed at him in fury. “I name you thus, and I’m quite accustomed to being obeyed, not argued with by churls and villeins.”
He blanched, to be so named before his fellows, who crowded the hall, but fell to his knees again. “Your pardon, Lady. It was a just a harmless joke….”
“Liar!” she screamed again. “Poltroon! You forget again that your thoughts are open to me, and your wicked lies transparent, despite having being warned, so I’ll name you ‘Nithing,’ and ‘Fool’ as well.”
“Yes, Great Lady.” This time he groveled on the ground, and there was laughter from his people in the hall, together with a few unintelligible jeers.
“Now, as my slave, tell me of the forces arrayed against us, and beware lest any jot or tittle be concealed, or I’ll take some portion of just one of your forfeits.” She thought for a moment, carelessly. “Perhaps both hands, since they seem rather too busy doing mischief, or perhaps that which you carry a little closer, since your people would be much improved without your contributions to the ancestry of any more Jötunns.” She gestured with an idle flick of her hand and there was a tall white staff instantly in her hand, exactly as tall as she herself was, carved with runes and headed with a faceted emerald as large as a goose egg.
The quiet laughter and muted taunts from the hall ceased instantly. “Your pardon, Lady!” said one of the largest, aside from Loki himself. “We meant no offense, but are rough warriors here, not members of a large Court, such as yourself. Our manners may seem coarse, I’m sure.”
“What’s your name, Warrior?”
“Gangr, Lady.” He bowed low.
“You have his place in the hall,” she gestured toward Loki, still flat on the ground, “if you can keep it.”
“I can, Great Lady and Völva. I’m one of the eldest here, and have wealth to rival his besides.” He looked at her slyly. “Am I to be gifted with that which was Loki’s?”
“You are, but if he has a wife, or other female dependents, they’re to keep their personal articles and clothing, including especially jewelry, gems, and other treasure, and have their own choice of where and with whom they wish to live.”
“As you wish, my Lady. You have my word on it.”
“Good. See that you keep it.” She turned to Phil and said, “Dear Phillip, would you mind tossing him one of your little bags of gold? I’m sure that this dear fellow will have a few extra expenses to make on my behalf, and I’d hate for him to be at all out of pocket.”
“Of course, Empress!” he said, and rummaged through one of the wagons for the largest he could lay his hands upon, which he lugged over to the giant Gangr. “Here you go, Gangr.”
Gangr addressed the Empress as if Phil had not spoken, as was proper in these sorts of transactions, “Thank you, Lady. It’s not necessary, of course.”
“But handy, none-the-less, I’ll warrant. I prefer that any services which I require be performed instantly and with a cheery good will, and there’s nothing like the lubrication of a little gold to make everything go smoothly.”
“You are wise beyond your years, Great Lady.” He bowed and smiled ingratiatingly.
“Wiser perhaps than you,” she said and flicked out her staff toward the hall, upon which tiny motion every bit of the proffered food disappeared from the tables like the illusion that it was. “I see that your predecessor neglected to properly serve the feast, so I’ll give you a few minutes to prepare, and be sure to include clean grain, apples, carrots, and other things that horses find good to eat, and be prepared to eat the same if I discover any filth or dirt.” She smiled. “In short, I will not be easily satisfied.”
“Nor should you be, Great Lady,” he said smoothly. “Everything will be exactly as you wish.”
She had a thought. “Oh! Gangr, please remember that we are not cannibals, so don’t dare to serve us man flesh, as is your wont, nor feast upon it ever again in this, my hall.”
He blanched and made haste to stammer, “Uh…uh…Of course, Noble Lady.”
“Good. We have an understanding, then,” she said.
“We do,” Gangr replied, and bowed very low.
The Empress merely smiled, then nudged Loki with her toe to prompt him to answer her previous question, which he did.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-Six
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Who is she that looketh forth as the morning,
fair as the moon, clear as the sun,
and terrible as an army with banners?— Solomon
The Song of Songs [6:10] (Circa 900 BCE?)
“Next stop, Vanaheim, Azusa and Cuuucamonga!” Wildflower shouted from behind Phil and his wives, who had pride of place because the portable bridge between the local worlds was, after all, his magical gadget. Everyone toward the front turned to look at her in puzzlement, because her last few words had made no sense at all.
She blushed. “It’s a running gag from the old Jack Benny radio show,” she explained, “which had gone off the air long before I was born, but I saw a special retrospective once on the net…. There were small towns called Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga in southern California, and people thought that their names sounded funny, or at least Jack Benny did….”
After an extended silence, she rolled her eyes and said, “Never mind!”
“Radio?” asked Rhea.
Wildflower tried to explain, “It’s what they had before the Net, but it wasn’t interactive.”
Rhea scoffed, “What was the point, then?”
“It’s hard to explain. It was like a constantly streaming news and entertainment feed, and you could set up a primitive sort of filter by setting a particular frequency on what they called a ‘radio tuner,’ so you could pick out particular shows to listen to, but only at the times that were published. It was all before the phrase ‘on demand’ actually meant anything except in a restaurant.”
Selene nudged her with an elbow. “It’s like school, Sweetie. If it’s one o’clock, it must be Mr. VanZandt’s boring civics class, but if you want to hear the lecture and discussion, you have to show up on time.”
She rolled her eyes. “What a stupid way to do things! I don’t know why he didn’t just do an interactive video feed from the classroom anyway, so you could check in from anywhere. Mrs. Hively let us do that for American Lit, and almost everyone really liked her class, ’cuz you could sit outside and get some rays while you read passages from Silas Marner and stuff. I think VanZandt just thought that the heat in those old classrooms would bake his lectures into our brains.”
Selene shrugged. “I don’t know, but misery loves company, they say. I just think that he hated teaching, and did his best to make us all just as miserable as he was.”
“He sure succeeded. I still can’t hear the words, ‘War of 1812’ without a faint twinge of nausea.” She thought for a second. “Of course, lately I can’t hear the words ‘Good morning’ without a twinge of nausea either, but that’s just morning sickness.”
“Good point,” Selene observed. “VanZandt made me sick of American history as well. I couldn’t believe that he had us coloring maps with rainbow pencils to show the various stages in the battles! It’s like he was stuck back in the Dark Ages, before online CAD programs and interactive displays!”
“I,” said Rhea, “was surprised he didn’t have us chiseling our maps in stone! Then spraying the outline of our hands with red ochre to sign them!”
“What a dweeb!” they said together, laughing.
“Oh! Look! We’re almost there!” Selene said.
“Good!” said Rhea practically. “I have to pee.”
From high in the air, descending toward the surface, Vanaheimr was a green and pleasant land of forests and lush meadows, rivers and lakes, with sufficient mountains and hills to make it interesting without making it tedious to travel from one place to another. Every few miles, or dozens of miles, there seemed to be small holdings or settlements near special features in the landscape, a sudden drop in a stream that might power a water mill, a particularly fine forest of old-growth timber, flat terrain that made farming easy, or large lakes to encourage fishing and trade with other regions. A few of the settlements were large, regional centers, perhaps, or seats of government, whatever passed for government here. They were descending, just as they had the last time, at the very edge of the precipice that marked the edge of the island ‘world,’ but the opaque layer of clouds below Vanaheimr was just as distant and mysterious.
Looking down, they noticed another difference in their landing place; they had a welcoming committee, most mounted on horseback, with banners flying and arrayed in tight ranks that would have done any Marine Drill Sergeant proud. Looking closer, they saw that the smaller group at the very front of the mass of troops, — for that’s what they were, on close inspection — was much less formal, and they were all women, chatting idly among themselves whilst watching their visitors descend smoothly toward the ground.
One of the women, a strikingly beautiful and tall blonde woman who carried herself with regal grace, spurred her mount forward, saying, “The bridge looks like Dwarvish work, but you are neither Dwarves nor Giants. Who might you be, strangers? And why have you come to Vanaheim?”
The Empress spurred her own mount to meet her and replied, “I am the Empress D’Larona-Elvi of Myriad, a world far distant from your own in both space and time. We come because our own world is under attack, we think from a land you call Múspellsheimr, but are not intimately familiar with your people, so can hardly tell friend from foe.”
The woman glanced at her lady companions, then replied, “I am Gefjon, Queen and Goddess of this land. I well believe that the Fire Jötunn, the Sons of Múspell, dwellers in Múspellsheimr, may look toward other worlds to wreak their peculiar havoc, since their hatred of life and all green things is boundless. I bid you welcome, if you come in peace, but warn you that you face a powerful foe if you are not.”
The Empress acknowledged her challenge with a graceful inclination of her head, then replied, “We have no quarrel with anyone not demonstrably an enemy.” She gestured toward the rest of their force, who were spreading out on either side as the bridge carried them down to the landing place. “You’ll notice, I’m sure, that most of our number are women, just as are your own warriors here displayed to welcome or challenge us, so I suspect we may easily find common ground. Please rest assured that we are not nearly so quarrelsome as the inhabitants of the land of Giants we just left behind us, nor even the Dwarves, whose bridge was a gift to one of my companions, the Master Wizard Phillip Cohn. The man just behind me, is Master Wizard Akcuanrut, Dean of the Imperial College of Wizards. Both they and I are what you might call Völvas, workers of magic, and in my own case a Scryer, what you might call a Seer, although I believe the definitions thereof and areas of expertise may vary slightly between our worlds.”
“We don’t usually see men as Völvas here,” she said suspiciously. “Most male practitioners of the arts of seiðr, galdr, and spá tend to be malevolent, and craven besides.”
“Nor male Scryers either, or so I believe, but I assure you that neither man you see before you has any taint of evil, and Phillip here has a fine sense of intuition, and will, I believe, eventually develop into a Scryer of some note, which is as rare in my world as male Völvas seem to be in yours. Of course, Phillip is from a world intermediate between yours and mine, so of course the various powers may sort themselves differently, and do in my own limited experience.”
“So you and your party are not from the Nine Worlds that we know?”
“Not at all. Our own party includes denizens of two worlds outside your personal experience, and in very fact we have persuasive evidence that there are an infinite number of worlds, more worlds than there are grains of sand on the shores of a thousand oceans.”
She seemed dumbfounded, then said, “This is difficult to grasp, as I’m sure you’ll realize. For hundreds of generations the Nine Worlds have been a matter of both history and legend, with no hint that there was anything beyond.”
“Imagine my own surprise, then,” the Empress responded, “to discover incontrovertible proof of two inhabited worlds where I had always assumed that there was only one, and then come here to find that the very foundation of your worlds is vastly different to my own, since mine is a round ball that floats though space, circling a central sun, where your sun appears to circle all your worlds at once, an arrangement almost as incomprehensible to me as ours must seem to you.”
She considered this statement carefully before replying, “Yes, I suppose that must have been disconcerting.”
“To say the least, but life goes on whether we understand exactly what’s going on or not, doesn’t it?”
At this she laughed and said, “You have children then, I see.”
The Empress smiled. “I do, a boy and a girl. Both grown now, with families of their own, but still my babies. And yours…?”
“All girls, for which I’m thankful, and each of the three by different fathers, so as different from each other as siblings can possibly be.”
The Empress smiled. “Well, it can’t have been boring, then.”
“No,” Queen Gefjon said. “It was never boring, but you have grandchildren? My own daughters have never been inclined toward maternity, not that I blame them, taking all in all.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the Empress, “but my daughter has two boys, six and ten, while my son has three girls, one twelve and the twins the eldest at fifteen, already mad for boys,” she said….
…as the wizard cleared his throat, “Esteemed Ladies,” he said delicately, “perhaps this isn’t quite the time to engage in the mutual exchange of anecdotes and fond remembrance. We have a mission of great urgency, and a purpose that cannot wait on matters of mere polity and precedence.”
Both women turned to look at him with something more like pity than condemnation. “Even as we speak, Sir Wizard,” said the Queen, ”my servants are gathering supplies to speed your onward journey. Please don’t believe that the world outside your immediate purview is frozen into an unproductive stasis, or that there is no communication between our worlds. I’m well aware of your overt mission, because King Alvís of the Dvergar has had gifts and runes delivered to my hand in an effort to both please and obligate me. Times being what they are, I was fully prepared for his protestations to be an elaborate ruse, but we two Sovereigns have been subtly engaged in mutual negotiation and reassurance by calling attention to the fact that we each have a foothold on the future, and are not minded to recklessly hazard our separate futures through trickery or hostile actions. In short, Sir Völva, you know little of statecraft, nor of women. Why aren’t you married?” She enquired with some suspicion.
Akcuanrut’s mouth gaped open and shut, like that of a fish out of water, and he blushed like a boy. “I… unh… I haven’t had the time, I suppose… my, unh… duties… duties have been all-consuming of late, so….”
“You must rectify this problem immediately, Sir Völva! A man without a wife is only half a man, and not necessarily the best half either.”
Rhea and Selene, who had been watching all this palavering with ill-concealed amusement, both laughed loudly, “Oooh! Phil!” they chorused, “you must be at least a man and a half! Probably even more, if you can count our many sisters, and we definitely think you ought to.”
“My strength,” he said modestly, “is the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”
“The strength of three hundred and twenty-three,” they said, “by our calculations, since you’ve thoughtfully knocked up six hundred and forty-five wives, and paid their dowries and bride prices very properly and in accordance with local custom, with the addition of kiddushin and ketubah to sanctify and safeguard them, only nisuin having been delayed for reasons of practicality and survival.” she arched one brow at him in warning, a subtle gesture echoed by her sister wife. “We have at least three hundred of your many wives with us right now!”
“And all of them pregnant, which makes you the rough equivalent of a hundred and fifty men,” Selene added helpfully. “At least by my hasty reckoning.”
“Well,” he replied, “sometimes you two like it a little rough. It must be that barbarian thing you’ve got going….”
“Now, Phil, dear,” Rhea chided him, “please don’t exaggerate. We never draw blood….”
“Or hardly ever,” Selene amended honestly, looking very slightly guilty.
The Queen, the Empress, and the Wizard were all three of them looking more than slightly bewildered, since they’d obviously never encountered Americans before, so hadn’t run into all that many people who didn’t really know how to behave around royalty and high officials of the realm, nor truly care, if truth be told.
As seemed to be the custom in these parts, the Queen had invited them to a feast the next day as casually as an Englishwoman might have suggested dropping by for a cup of tea, so Phil had taken quite some pains to create quite a few unique necklaces and other jewelry in gold for her in the interim, taking into account both the local popular taste, which ran toward excess, and the individual preferences shown in her dress and personality. He noted that the locals seemed to set great store in enchanted items, so he’d practiced on Rhea and Selene until he had a reliable beauty spell — which had drawn their attention almost as much as the enchanted swords he’d made for them as bribes to encourage their patience as he’d experimented — in several variations ranging from mere enhancement to the ‘all shall love her and despair’ variety that inspires both lust and war. His wives had particularly liked that one, since it tended to make male jaws drop — and quite a few female jaws as well — which both of them thought was an excellent feature, especially as a distraction in battle, since a stunned opponent is discommoded in very many ways.
Thinking about that, he’d put his mind toward magical protection as well, and incorporated spells of invulnerability, strength, and tirelessness into the general mélange, mindful of the battle in the church with Na-Noc, in which both his dangerous and charming wives had fought themselves to weariness. He’d rooted the power of these in both the general magical field and the magical powers — if any — of any putative assailant, so as to cover at least two potential situations in the real world, and increase the potency of the magic by simultaneously decreasing the strength of their opponents.
He’d smiled when he’d realized the improbability of the notion that the ‘real world’ might include actual magic having ever occurred to him before his encounter with Selene and Rhea at the ‘Big Game,’ back when his only real plan in life was to somehow make it into a decent university and graduate in Physics, or something like it. ‘How time flies when you’re having fun,’ he thought, which suddenly made him exquisitely conscious of his many blessings, and of their astonishing improbability, a thousand lucky ‘heads’ face up in a thousand tosses of a coin.
Then, as an afterthought, because he didn’t normally think that way, he’d added a mild curse to everything he’d made, the affliction of extreme clumsiness on any who dared to steal either sword or both, a similar awkwardness to any unauthorized holder thereafter, until the weapons were returned, and a proportional lack of both beauty and charm to the thief and every succeeding wearer of the jewelry until it was returned to its rightful owner, or her heir. All in all, it had been a good afternoon and evening’s working. Phil was quite pleased with himself, and both Rhea and Selene were very pleased with their gifts as well, which left him a little tired the next day.
They’d both been incredible athletes in school, dominating the cheering squad, the balance beam competition — despite their height — and unparalleled on the asymmetric bars. They’d also been outstanding on the vault and in floor exercise, and a killer combination on the basketball court, of course, as well as key members of a local camogie team, although neither camogie nor field hockey was offered for young women by their high school. They’d been approached by the US Olympic Committee when they’d turned fourteen, with a view toward the India Summer Olympics coming up back then, but had both declined, Rhea because she didn’t want to work that hard on just the one thing, and Selene because she didn’t want to leave Rhea behind. They’d been almost inseparable since they’d been Campfire Girls together, where they were sometimes known as ‘The Bobbsey Twins,’ ever since kindergarten and grammar school, but had never liked the nickname very much at all, since one of each pair of twins in the stories was male, which they didn’t like at all. Few had been so bold as to call them that to their face, since they’d had a peculiar ability to instantly pummel any opponent into submission and heartfelt regret for their unwisdom and temerity, even as little girls, and moved so quickly that there were very few (as if anyone would have dared) people who could truthfully say exactly how young Johnny came to have a bloody nose, just that he had one, and the two girls were laughing from half a block away.
“Aren’t you ready yet?” Rhea interrupted his reverie with an arch look as she popped her head inside their tent, as fresh as a daisy despite their late night. They were still bivouacked beside the vast chasm that marked the edge of this world, although they’d been invited to stay at the Queen’s Great Hall — Kvænhöllr, as she’d called it, or sometimes the Kvænhofr, the names seemed interchangeable, like the White House and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue back on Earth — but the hall was still at least a half-day’s quick march from where they’d landed, and they were more than tired. The centaurs and horses needed quite some time to eat enough for any sort of trek in any case, since they’d been on the road for quite a while, and rations had been short through Svartálfheimr, where hardly anything that grew was truly edible, and Jötunheimr hadn’t been much better, despite the eventual coup d’état by the Empress, so they’d gone through their stores at a prodigious rate.
“Pretty much, but I’ve been busy thinking about all we have yet to do, and worrying that I may have missed something essential.”
“Phil, sweetie, if God had thought to ask your advice beforehand, this sorry scheme of things wouldn’t be nearly as slipshod as it’s turned out to be.”
He laughed and smiled. “Well, Sweetheart, it’s nice to know I’ve got a fan club, anyway.”
“Fans? Heck, you’ve got a gosh-darned army. If you only had a rowboat or two, you’d qualify for foreign aid.”
“Foreign aid?” Selene — who rarely missed much — called from outside. It seems to me that we’ve been handing it out in bucketfuls, so our ‘diplomatic status’ back in the USA seems to have carried over to this crazy place as well. It’d be nice to have some ‘foreign aid’ handed back to us every once in a while.
“Now, Sweetheart,” Phil temporized as she squeezed by Rhea, who was still standing in the entry, “King Alvís gave us a perfectly nice bridge, which has certainly simplified getting around, and Queen Gefjon looks set to give us a bunch of supplies for our journey, which we would have had to pay for otherwise. I think their culture is centered on conspicuous generosity — aside from the odd murderous assault, that is — so I don’t feel particularly put-upon by making presents for the Queen, nor even in handing out bribes for the Empress’ new retainer back in Jötunheimr. He did put on a decent feast, and the gold costs me nothing but a little effort, with most of the power behind my creations supplied by the ambient magic around me. In some ways, I’m an artisan, making use of materials I find lying around to create useful objects that are more valuable than their ‘natural’ state, like a man might whittle a whistle out of a twig of willow. I’m beginning to appreciate Akcuanrut’s viewpoint as well, that gold coins in and of themselves have little or no intrinsic value, but are only a magical guarantee of quality and quantity that people can trust. It’s the objects those coins can be turned into that have real value, whether they be utilitarian rings or candleholders, sculptures, or fine jewelry. One would have to be a fool to melt one of my rings into mere metal, because the ring itself is worth at least twice to three times what the metal’s worth.”
“Why do you say that the gold has no intrinsic value? People have valued gold for thousands of years; were they wrong?”
“Not at all, because the reason gold was valued is because it was and is amazingly useful. It’s easily worked, fairly durable, and almost entirely unaffected by oxidation, so objects made of gold retain their luster and beauty for many, many years. Even in our own era — aside from gold fetishists — its primary uses in the real world are in the creation of objets d’art — like the stash of jewelry I made for both of you — and the manufacture of durable electronic devices, in which it’s still very valuable, but it’s not alone in being beautiful and useful all at once; platinum, for example, often called ‘white gold,’ shares many of gold’s properties. It takes a durable polish, has a pleasing luster, and is relatively resistant to any form of oxidation, unlike silver, copper, or brass, which all tarnish in some situations, but are commercially-valuable for their electrical and other properties. At one time aluminum was very difficult to extract from its many ores, and was considered so very rare and valuable that they made jewelry and fancy dishes from it, but of course it’s not nearly as haut mode these days, and you see people toss aluminum beverage cans away, despite the fact that they’re almost infinitely recyclable, and aluminum is still very useful as a coating for astronomical purposes, because it’s both amazingly reflective and resists corrosion so well.
”
“Phil,” Rhea said philosophically, “I’m often surprised we weren’t better friends in school, since you’re simply first rate as a science nerd.”
“It was fate, my dearest darlings,” he answered promptly. “Without the alluring aura of mystery, we might never have fallen in love.”
On hearing this, Selene suddenly grinned, caught him up in her arms, and carried him back to their pallet, followed closely by Rhea, who whispered in his ear, “You certainly have the gift of blarney, you cheeky rascal! Whoever said that silver wasn’t just as good as gold?”
“Phil? Selene? Rhea? Aren’t you ready yet?” the Empress called from outside their tent.
“Just finishing up,” said Phil hastily, as both of his wives started laughing hysterically in the dimly-lit interior. He began frantically trying to arrange his kilt in some sort of good order, but then couldn’t find his sporran, which he’d come depend upon after all this time.
“Taking care of some last-minute preparations,” Selene added unnecessarily.
“It’s delicate work,” Rhea murmured, stifling a giggle.
“Well, we’ve all eaten,” the Empress said in rather frosty tones, “so we’re ready to go as soon as your gear is packed up and loaded.”
Phil sighed as Rhea and Selene burst out laughing again. “Now, look what you’ve done,” he said. “I’ve got to work with her, and it seems to me that you were baiting her a bit.”
“Probably,” they said in unison. “What she’s really mad about, though, is the prospect of a long expedition with no nookie.”
Phil was scandalized. “But… but she’s the Empress!”
“What?” Rhea scoffed. “So that means she never gets a little randy? Didn’t you notice the lovely round bed she keeps in her little ‘workshop?’ Do you think it’s there so she can think deep thoughts about the organization of the universe while she gazes up at the fancy mobile on her ceiling?”
Selene added, “Trust me on this, Phil, she may be thinking ‘deep thoughts,’ but that love-nest-in-the-attic of hers is about as subtle as the Honeymoon Suite in a Poconos hotel.” She shrugged. “It’s a little gaudy for my taste, but whatever floats her boat is fine by me.”
Phil blinked in surprise, both that Empress D’Larona-Elvi seemed to be a fairly ordinary human woman, and then that Selene and Rhea had insights into her intimate life that he hadn’t had a clue about. “But how do you know what she does in her Orrery?”
They both laughed and smiled fondly at him in that peculiar way that women sometimes have, as if he were some sort of precocious child, in a manly sort of way. “It was obvious, Sweetie, but it’s a girl thing,” they chorused, and then were somehow fully-dressed in the blink of an eye, but in the leather maxi-skirt outfits they’d had made for them in New York, with the addition of matching longbows held casually in their left hands, but prepared, he knew, for instantaneous action. Their quivers, stuffed with a variety of arrows, were ready near the entrance.
Phil, on the other hand, was still looking for his socks.
When Phil finally made it outside, he saw that their camp was already mostly packed and loaded onto the carts, with quite a few of the women lounging around under trees, and most of the men-at-arms were playing some sort of gambling game by the side of the road. Whatever it was, it held their attention as they shouted encouragement to whoever it was who seemed to be winning, and placed side bets with a few among their number who seemed to be touts or bookies. The Empress and Akcuanrut were well out of the main campsite, gazing out across the island worlds that poked up from the distant clouds that covered the abyss. He walked over to the cart assigned to the wizard — recognizable by the painted symbols on its side — and dropped off a leather duffle containing the Queen’s gifts with the man who seemed to be in charge. Then he walked over to where his mentor stood talking with the Empress.
Akcuanrut smiled and said, “Ah, Phil! Up at last?”
“I’ve actually been up for quite some time,” he said cheerfully. “I have quite a pile of enchanted presents for the Queen, and one or two for you both that I thought might possibly come in handy.” He reached into his sporran and took out two golden pendants and their golden chains. One of them was decidedly more feminine than the other.
Both Akcuanrut and the Empress arched their brows in mute inquiry.
“They’re a sort of magical ‘battery,’ ” he explained. “Each medallion contains a very large ‘charge’ of undifferentiated magical power, which can be drawn upon if we encounter any situation like that on Earth, where magic is depleted or otherwise unusable for any reason.”
“How interesting,” said the wizard. “I can’t think of any equivalent in our own system of magic.”
“I got the idea from you, Sir, actually, or rather from the battery-operated power tools which had so fascinated you back on Earth. Since we were visiting exotic worlds with magical regimes which had unknown properties — as we saw back in Niflheimr, where the magic was somehow predisposed to trick or betray the wielder of it — it seemed as if a known source of magical power might be desirable, so portable power seemed to me an idea whose time had come, although I hadn’t yet discovered how to manage it, but I could foresee situations in which a handy source of dependable power might be invaluable. These medallions are the result, and are designed to filter out the worst of the bad stuff and channel the rest into more-or-less innocuous paths.”
The Empress was puzzled. “So these are charged with the magical energy you were able to focus on Earth?”
Phil shook his head. “They are not. Until we entered Svartálfheimr, I’d never experienced a magical field like that which we found in that world. I was able to use it to create the magical gift that I gave the King, but it fought me, almost as if there were some mischievous sentience behind it intent upon starting quarrels and doing harm. This quality is much less obvious here in Vanaheimr, although there’s still a muted undercurrent of trickery and malice which I’m sure you’ve both noticed. I was able to focus that impulse outwards, however, in the form of a curse, since I’ve taken the advice of King Alvís to heart: In these lands, all the best magical items have a curse attached, which has an obvious corollary, that without a curse, the mischievous magic bound up in any magical item will find the path of least resistance, which in most cases leads straight to the owner and user of the object.”
“And what exactly is this ‘curse’ of yours?” Akcuanrut asked skeptically.
“Once these have been in contact with your skin for any length of time, they become ‘attuned’ to you, so they won’t work for anyone else, and they will release their energy quite suddenly back into the general magical field if they’re separated from the wearer by any ‘safe’ distance, which varies by how much magical energy is currently stored in them. The effects of this sudden release of energy might possibly be deleterious to anyone nearby, but I imagined that the most likely reason for them to leave the vicinity of their owners was being carried off by a thief. It wouldn’t do to have this magical technology exposed to our enemies.”
“Can they be recharged?” the Empress D’lon-ra asked practically.
Phil smiled. He was particularly proud of this feature. “They recharge themselves, through a rather clever trick that I’m very fond of, but only where the ambient magic itself is not truly inimical. In that respect they act as something of a filter, or sieve, such as one might use to strain the water taken from a stream to free it from leaves and insects.”
“Very impressive,” the Empress said.
“Thank you,” Phil said demurely.
“And now,” she said, “are we finally ready to travel?”
“We are,” he said. While they’d been talking, the men-at-arms had packed up their tent and gear, stowing all their paraphernalia and luggage away with the rest of the luggage.
With a nod, the Empress signalled to Selene and Rhea, who’d taken over day-to-day leadership of the expedition, and they both let fly two piercing whistles, each rising in tone, and then a final lower tone. “Let’s go!” they shouted in chorus as they vaulted onto the centaur mares who’d volunteered to lead the loose assemblage of foraging horses and centaurs that formed their cavalry, with the men-at-arms either riding horses or walking, as it suited their individual inclinations.
As their little band of adventurers made their way into the interior of Vanaheimr, the true nature of the land, or world, became more apparent, a pastoral contrast to the worlds of Dwarves and Giants they’d seen before, with extensive forests of what looked like cedars, spruces, aspens, and firs surrounding large meadows filled with grasses, a few oaks, low stands of wild berries, wildflowers, and the occasional farmstead, the last spread wide upon the land with scattered fields melding almost seamlessly into the meadows around them, and a central core consisting of what was obviously a hall, much like those they’d seen in Jötunheimr, but with more intricately-carved and beautifully-decorated exteriors, including brightly-colored painted decorations, together with outbuildings that must be barns, threshing floors, and the like. It was all very bucolic, something like a Currier and Ives colored lithograph of the American landscape. In fact, it looked quite a bit like an older version of the upstate New York landscape they’d so recently left behind, at least if you discounted the utter lack of macadam highways, automobiles, and jumbo jet contrails overhead.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Phil observed as he rode up beside Rhea. She was riding one of the centaurs, but he was on horseback, an interesting experience in a kilt, but he’d been wearing his Halloween costume for so long that he’d not only gotten used to it, but preferred a kilt over pants these days, so he’d traded in his inexpensive costume version for a bespoke version made to order. Of course, he didn’t have a tartan of his own, so he’d used one of the ‘generic’ designs that went well with his complexion. He especially liked the sporran, because it gave him a way of carrying stuff without stuffing things into his pockets, which always looked nerdy, and it was very handy in other situations as well, much more comfortable than trousers in that regard.
“It is, but how in particular?” she asked.
“There’s no junk noise here,” he said, “sounds that have nothing to do with real life, but are only the end result of a satellite or other wireless transmission of some fossilized performance jammed out into the world in hopes of finding a listener. Everything we’re hearing, from the sound of the wind in the trees, birds singing, people chopping wood, to the sound of our own movements and voices, is being produced right now, unedited, and raw, by someone or something we could actually see, or even reach out and touch, with a little effort.”
“True, but on the other hand, there’s no Mount Sinai Hospital, no New York-Presbyterian, and no NYU Langone, any one of which would be awfully nice to have readily-accessible when we get closer to delivery.”
“I agree, and that was actually part of the need that first spurred my interest in magical batteries. With one of my batteries charged in Akcuanrut’s world, or in my stone circle, I can guarantee instant transport to almost anywhere on Earth, including the hospitals of your choice, once we get back….” He paused for a moment, then said, “I might have to scope out some handy and discreet landing spots near whatever hospital you choose, of course. My thinking hadn’t quite stretched that far,” he admitted sheepishly.
“No worries,” she assured him. “You managed to steer us clear of the local OB/GYN before we left, since it’d be awkward to have a two-month baby turn out to be a three-month baby four months later.”
“Right. The time differential could easily have tripped us up, if we’d wound up staying in the world of Myriad for any length of time, but it might be just the opposite here for all we know. We could wind up getting back the day after we left, or arrive a hundred years later, like Rip Van Winkle.”
“Or two hundred years before we left, so we could say hello to the lazy loafer himself.”
Phil thought about that for a while before he answered, “I’m not sure if that’s possible, and if it is, it’s worrisome, since the Dark Gods could learn from their mistakes in their first encounters with us and go back in time to finish the job properly before we had a chance to become more powerful and capable of combatting them effectively.”
“Oh. I never thought of that,” she said cautiously. “If they could do it, so could we, and we’d all be trapped in an endless recursive spiral of attack and counterattack, our own private version of the torment of Sisyphus.”
“Yeah. It’d kind of take all the fun out of saving the world, or worlds. I get the impression that all the worlds we’ve seen so far are related to each other, because everywhere we’ve been could arguably be linked to the world of the ancient Mediterranean, and that of the Viking lands of northern Europe before Christianity transformed them, essentially Western Europe, where the story of a final conflagration that destroys the world is almost universal, from the Ragnarök to Phaëton’s foolish mishandling of the chariot of the Sun, so it looks like there’s a natural limit on the scope of our task here. Presumably, we’ve missed the Dream Time of Australia, the various Heavenly hierarchies of the Orient, and many more, but these tend toward cyclical creation rather than malevolent — or accidental — destruction — at least to my knowledge — and we can’t solve everything.”
“Good,” she said. It would be nice to retire to some sort of quiet life, once the babies are born. Adventuring is all very well, but Selene and I will eventually need a safe harbor to build our little nest.
“I agree,” he said, “but it may be difficult. Assuming that your particular gifts are divine in origin, the Goddess who gave them to you may have other ideas in mind, and there’s also the question of whether your martial prowess is inherited. As I recall, there were an entire series of movies and graphic novels featuring your archetype, so opportunities for derring-do may present themselves whether we invite them or not.”
“Oh,” she said, pursing her lips. “Drat!”
“Indeed,” he agreed philosophically, “but it comes with the territory, so I’m open to whatever happens.”
“Are you sure? Aren’t you afraid that you’ll wake up one day and think about missing the quiet life you could have had?”
“Not a bit of it,” he said. “You know, Selene offered me the chance to back out that first night, before we all met at the church, after carefully explaining that I might be hurt or killed. In fact, she did her best to insist on leaving me behind, but I refused. If I didn’t bug out then, before I really knew either of you — much less fell in love with and married you — what are the chances I will in the future?”
“She did that?”
“She did.” He nodded. “If you hadn’t noticed before, I’m very decisive when push comes to shove, and I’m really stubborn, despite my mild-mannered air of amiable affability. Where your safety is concerned, I don’t mess around either. You’ll notice that there are several Jötunns pushing up daisies now who’d dared to lift a finger against you.”
She laughed. “I did notice their slapstick demise, yes.”
“Well — while I’m sure that either of you could have handled them if they’d come within range — their cowardly ambush from the heights was an ideal time to demonstrate the power of heavy artillery. Akcuanrut could have done the same of course, but his interest is and was decidedly less personal, so I was somewhat quicker off the block.”
A sudden look of concern washed over her face. “Phil! You’re not risking… you know… by killing our enemies like that, are you?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m quite sure that there’s no particular danger there. In the first place, protecting you in that sort of situation is a mitzvah, and I was using my best judgement and efforts to minimize any further loss of life. I applied minimal force, a sort of spiritual Tai Chi which used the momentum of their own attacks to thwart their intentions, and then loudly warned any listeners nearby to back off if they had any similar ideas.”
“And they did back off, didn’t they.”
“They did,” he assured her, “until the Empress put them all in their place with a similar warning and example in response to Loki’s more subtle threat. We all labor under similar constraints, so she’s no more eager than I am to inflict needless pain or suffering, but she’s also a natural leader with the responsibility for countless lives, so the buck, as they say, stops with her. My own writ is not quite so broadly defined, but I’m an official Justicar of the Empire — or so I’m given to believe — just as Akcuanrut and the other Masters of the College of Wizards are, so I have the high justice and the low within my scope, as well as a license to mint official coinage of the realm.”
“Oh, jeeze!” she said. “You’re a cop!”
He grinned. “I suppose I am, in a way, but considerably less constrained by rules and regulations. More like Judge Dee in the old mysteries.”
“Judge Dee?”
“A fictional character based on the historical Tang Dynasty Magistrate Di Renjie, who was what they might call in France a ‘juge d’instruction,’ an ‘investigating judge.’ In the stories, Judge Dee is the detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury all in one, which makes a very tidy bundle for a detective story, since whatever conclusion the detective arrives at is exactly what the court decides, sort of like a Perry Mason episode with no messy arguments from the DA, who always had it wrong in any case.”
“It’s a lucky thing that Perry’s clients were always innocent, then, wasn’t it?”
“It was, but both systems have their advantages, and in reality our own system has a bit of that involved as well, although it’s popularly supposed to be strictly adversarial. The defence lawyers are supposed to withdraw from the case before suborning perjury or other crimes, since both the defence and the prosecution are officers of the court, and the judge does quite a bit of investigation regarding the laws which are being applied in the prosecution case, and can ‘sanction’ either party if the rules aren’t being followed, which acts to level the playing field and hopefully ensure that justice is done.”
She thought about that for a few seconds, then said, “That’s sort of what we’re doing now, isn’t it?”
Phil considered her words for quite some time before he said, “I suppose it is, since we have only the ancient centaurs’ guesses for clues, although it certainly sounds like Surtr and his gang might be the ‘Dark Gods’ we’re looking for. In other ways, we’re a more-or-less traditional military punitive expedition headed toward hostile territory, since we can expect that the fire giants won’t be happy to see us, and there seems to be no doubt that the Dark Gods are to blame for the oppression experienced by the inhabitants of Akcuanrut’s world. Our only real question is whether the fire giants and the ‘Dark Gods’ are one and the same, although they seem to be playing for the same team.”
While they’d been riding along talking, the nature of the landscape had gradually changed, and they turned a bend in the forest road to find themselves looking out across a broad plain of grasslands bisected by a river about a mile down the valley with a range of snow-capped mountains out in the hazy distance. There were only a few stands of trees visible, and there were large herds of cattle peaceably grazing on the grass and minding their own business. “We seem to have wandered into Wyoming,” Rhea said.
“Or something like it,” Phil said. “It’s certainly cattle country.”
“I wonder if they have cowboys, too?” Rhea mused, looking up and down the valley, but there were none visible, although there seemed to be one of those now-familiar hall and outbuildings complexes becoming visible around a bend in the road they were following into the interior.
Phil studied it as they approached. “I wonder if that’s the ‘Kvænhöllr’ the Queen was talking about?” he said. It seemed, at least from a distance, to be much bigger than the farmsteads they’d passed earlier.
“Possibly. She didn’t mention a description, as far as I know, just that we’d recognize it when we came to it.”
Once around the bend, it seemed almost as if they’d ridden into another valley, because suddenly there were trees and meadows around them again, and what seemed like hills, although there had been none visible before they’d turned the corner, and they were still on a level road, as far as they could tell, but the tops of the hills were shrouded in a bright mist, so the total effect was somewhat ætherial. “This must be the place,” they both said simultaneously, and then they laughed.
“So! What are you two laughing about,” Selene called out as she rode up from behind them.
“Nothing much,” Rhea said, “except that we decided that this must be Queen Geyjon’s Kvænhöllr coming up.”
Selene took a long look around, noting the sudden change in the landscape, and the general otherworldliness of this new bit of Vanaheimr, and agreed. “This is the place,” she said. “It’s obviously the only place like this place, so this must be the place.”
As they drew closer, they could see people strolling about in the glades, or merely sitting under trees talking to each other, although most looked up and stared as they passed by. There seemed to be more women than men, for some reason, and as they drew nearer the hall they could see that the Kvænhöllr was huge — larger even than Loki’s former hall in Jötunheimr — but far more beautiful. Where the Giant’s hall had been somehow squat, despite its height, and had hugged the wide expanse of rocky courtyard it sat within, the Queen’s hall soared above the meadow, almost as if it were an eagle with wings uplifted, caught in the instant when it left the grassy lea with widespread wings. It was shaped like an enormous seagoing Viking longship, including the characteristic curves and detail of a lapstrake hull, with a tall prow whose upper reaches were carved into the shape of a dragon’s neck and head, while the stern looked like a dragon’s tail, and every square inch of it above the gunwale was carved with intricate runes, intertwined stylized snakes, and the side of the deckhouse that they could see had an intricately-carved swan wing running down the length of it, with the sculpted wingtip and flight feathers rising well above the cabin top, the entirety of fir. The entrance was broad, but located well above the ground, with what can only be described as an enormous gangplank — also of fir — stretching up to it. The mast reached toward the bright sky, disappearing into the brilliant mist before its full height was visible, and a square sail edged with gold — with the lower half of a golden sun embroidered on the visible portion of the red canvas — was set on an invisible spar somewhere above the misty clouds. It seemed almost to be sailing, and in fact there was a strong feeling of motion about it, even as it sat placidly on the ground.
“Dang!” Phil said in awe, as they rode up to the gangplank, at the foot of which Queen Gefjon was waiting on horseback with her retinue. The earthbound vessel rose up behind her like a wooden cliff, the graceful curves of the hull overshadowing the ground beneath it, despite the generally directionless nature of the light from the overcast sky.
“Welcome, warriors!” The Queen cried out. “All men and women of courage are welcome to Sessrúmnir!”
Empress D’Larona-Elvi approached her and they leaned toward each other to do one of those hug and kiss-the-air greetings that women do, both still comfortably astride their horses, followed by both Selene and Rhea with Wildflower and whichever centauress was carrying Selene — Phil had even more trouble telling the new centaurs apart than he did Selene and all her sisters, although there were subtle differences — as the Queen said simply, “Shall we go inside?” and reined her mount around to ascend the gangplank.
Riding up a gangplank was a little scary, or at least Phil thought so, although all the women, perhaps better horsewomen than he was a rider, seemed to think nothing of it as they chatted gaily, ducking slightly as they rode through the accommodation hatch, or whatever they called a honking big door on a boat.
Inside, the light was very dim, dimmer even than in the Dwarvish halls underground, or Loki’s hall in Jötunheimr. Looking up, he saw that most of the light was supplied by the bright daylight outside the hull, some refracted through prisms of glass set into the deck above his head, and more through the open hatches above wrought iron braziers which held glowing coals for heat. These were supplemented by a few open torches scattered along the walls and on uprights that evidently supported the deck, which seemed particularly hazardous, in Phil’s opinion, although he detected an undercurrent of magic which bound the ship together as an integral whole, and might be proof against fire, although he hesitated to pick at the separate threads of the spell. The interior was beautiful, or what he could see of it was, far more richly carved than Loki’s hall, and the carvings were more graceful and… feminine… than the giants seemed to favor.
The Queen turned her mount aside, toward a large open area beside the ‘doorway,’ and dismounted gracefully, along with the members of her entourage. “Please feel both safe and welcome in my hall, brave warriors; you have my word that you are all safe and welcome.”
The Empress followed closely, dismounting as gracefully as their hostess, saying, “Peace be upon this hall and all who dwell in it, you have my word that we mean you no ill, but only good, and will follow the universal customs of hospitality and mutual obligation.” She turned toward Phil and said, “Phil, would you mind presenting our gifts to Queen Gefjon?”
Dismounting less gracefully than either of the ladies, but not as disreputably as he might have some months before, he said, “I’m at your service, ladies,” and turned toward one of the carts — his own — just rolling through the hatch, waving down the driver to pause briefly while he snagged a small coffer from the top of their luggage, grunting a little, because it was heavy, though not nearly so heavy as the box he’d given to his wives.
With the box in hand he walked over to where the Queen and Empress stood and said, “I’m not sure of the local etiquette, but if you’d like to look at the contents at leisure it might be best to have a table fetched, since there are quite a few pieces here.” He opened the coffer with one hand, still supporting it from the bottom with his other hand, and lifted off the covering layer of cloth, displaying the most impressive pieces carefully arranged, several showy necklaces, bracelets, earrings, rings for the fingers, and hair ornaments. “If you’ve been in touch with King Alvís, you may already know that I’m a metalworker of some skill, so I fashioned a few bits of jewelry last night that I thought you might like, as a hostess gift of sorts, since we are guests and sojourners in your land.”
The Queen smiled when she saw them and said, “How well you know me, and on such short acquaintance, to fashion treasures so close to my own tastes. Your many wives are blessed indeed to have such a husband, since I see that they are richly endowed with gems and jewelry to rival these gifts, yet each is unique, carefully crafted to complement the beauty of the wearer.”
“I do my best to please,” he said smiling.
She smiled back and then closed her eyes and chanted,
“Rich gifts you’ve given, bold enchanter and warrior,
Yet one gift you lack, a blade at your side.
Sore will your need be, in the dark days that follow,
Queen’s friend I name you, and gift you with Brenðr,
Ever sharp it will be, and a friend in the fight!”
She reached out without a word to a servitor behind her, who stepped forward as she finished speaking and handed her what appeared to be a sword in a black leather scabbard furnished with modest silver accoutrements and hangers. A plain leather belt with a silver buckle completed the outfit. She took held it fore her — raised on high, as if it were the Host — then knelt before him to buckle on the sword.
When she rose, she said, “You are my Champion against the Dark, Sir Phil, mark it well. This sword, once lightly tossed away, will return to you ever, until the worlds’ ending.”
Phil was both startled and embarrassed. “But I know nothing of swordplay, Queen Gefjon!” He made as if to unbuckle it, but was halted first by Rhea, who kicked his ankle violently, and then by stern glances from both his wives, so he grimaced and left off.
The Queen, observing this domestic byplay, smailed and said, “Never fear, Sir Völva. This weapon will turn out to be exactly what you need. Never let it stray far from your hand, because you, and you alone, will have need of it on your quest.”
He looked down at it, then really looked. “It’s ensorcelled!” he cried.
Queen Gefjon laughed. “Of course it is, my Champion. Whatever good would it be to you if it weren’t?”
He’d just started to say something when Selene hissed in his ear, “Don’t be a dolt! Just thank her very nicely and back off.”
Involuntarily, he glanced over toward Rhea, looking for some sort of sympathy, but there was none to be found in that quarter. “Thank you, Queen Gefjon. I’ll study it and put it to the best use I can, please rest assured.”
The Queen smirked. “All you’ll have to do, my Champion, is to whip it out, and I’m sure that your wives are well able to school you in that particular skill, if you’re not already familiar with the motions.”
He blushed, embarrassed to be the butt of a rather crude joke by the Queen. Somehow, it hadn’t seemed to be the sort of thing that queens do, but local customs here were obviously more liberal than they were on Earth. He’d seen several documentaries about Elizabeth II on the local educational station, and in not one had anyone mentioned a penchant for cracking penis jokes. “Thank you again, Queen Gefjon, for reminding me that I can always count on my wives to raise my courage. When I’m feeling down, and really need a boost, I’m sure that one or the other will give me a leg up, so very soon I’m feeling much better.”
The Queen laughed. “That’s the spirit,” she said. “I do love to see a man with a firm… sense of purpose.”
“I always aim to please, Ma’am.” ‘Okay,’ he thought to himself, ‘so it sounds like the locker room before a big game, I’ll be switched if I let a bunch of darned farmers outdo me in repartee! And in front of Rhea and Selene, no less! They’ve got some nerve!’
Suddenly, one of the onlookers, a big beefy man with grizzled hair and an eyepatch over one eye, shouted out, “Enough! Poltroon! Varlet! How dare you bandy naughty words with my wife!”
The Queen sneered at him. “In your dreams, little man. You forfeited that privilege when you took up with that giant slut in exchange for a glass of mead, not to mention all the others. And just to remind you, your two brothers are both better hung than you ever were, and twice as good in bed!”
“Strumpet! Whore!” he blustered and fumed in rage.
“Be quiet, old man! You’re in my country now, where it’s only men who must be faithful, not that you’re all that much of a man, as crippled and old as you are, while I’m still ever-young and lithe. No decent woman would have you, so you raped the helpless Rindr while she was tied to her bed, but her father had you up the ass first, while you were dressed up as a girl, so I guess you had your real fun there.” She spat on the floor with exquisite disdain.
This time he roared! “Blasphemy! I am the Lord of all! All-Wise, All-Father, all men worship me….”
She cut him off. “Pooh! You always were a liar, saying black is white and vice versa until we were all disgusted with your vainglory and pretensions. That’s why we finally kicked you out of Ásgarðr and why you spend all your time wandering on the road. My high seat Hlidskjalf, where I sat to create the worlds, was mine long before you ever crept up on it to spy on other women… and men, I suppose. You were never much of a husband in any case; the best you could get on me was that vapid little pretty boy Baldr, and he was even more of a fool than you are.”
“Liar!” he shouted. “He was the best of all of us, as beautiful as a maiden, as….”
She laughed, her voice filled full with scorn. “It’s so very interesting that you liken the looks of young boys to women, precious. Not only your brothers, but the giant Þrymr, all three have fathered bold and healthy children on me, while the only real women you screwed — once I tired of you — had beards! One can’t help but think, after all, what with dressing up as a girl whenever you could, and finding yourself with a man between your thighs every other night, that you just might have found your true calling.”
With an inarticulate snarl he threw himself toward the Queen with murder in his eyes, his hands outstretched and fingers grasping for her throat….
…and Phil straight-armed him with an illegal tackle to the face, pushing him right down to the deck, where he immediately rolled the old man into a cattle catch neck crank to keep him pinned. “Naughty, naughty,” he said disapprovingly. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you that it’s not nice to hit girls?”
“Mmmf!” he said, struggling to free himself, which put more pressure on his neck. As it turns out, it’s very difficult to speak if you can’t open your mouth, and it quickly becomes apparent to most opponents that breaking one’s own neck is not an effective option.
Phil was not particularly sympathetic, and said so. “You know,” he murmured quietly, his words meant only for his opponent’s ear, “I feel a particular loathing toward rapists, so I wouldn’t mind at all if you managed to break your silly neck through struggling, so please feel free to continue, although I’d hate to cast a sombre mood over our little party here by having to haul your lifeless body out the door and dump it in the trash. On the other hand,” he added thoughtfully, “I have the impression that many here wouldn’t be terribly disappointed to see the last of you. It might even be an occasion for rejoicing in some circles, and,” he raised his voice so all could hear, “I’m getting bored just lying here, so, if you’d prefer to avoid this lethal dénouement, please signify your total surrender by tapping your hand on the deck three times in quick succession, but please know that if you break your parole I’ll have no choice but to kill you, since I won’t be able to trust your word of honor again.”
The grizzled thug tapped out, so Phil let him up, but when the villain managed to struggle to his feet, still breathing heavily, but with an evil look of hatred on his face, the guy whipped out a wand of ash and began to chant in some strange tongue….
…and the Queen cried out, her voice gone shrill in alarm, “Seiðr…!”
…as Phil felt a deadly power building in the room, centered on the old man, so he whipped out his brand new sword — moved by an impulse he couldn’t identify, and only realized that the weapon’s blade appeared to have been fashioned of solid gold as it flew toward where it needed to be — and stabbed the hateful wretch expertly through the heart before his chant could be completed. “I warned you,” he said calmly, as the big man toppled lifeless to the floor. Then he looked at the sword more closely. It was as light as a feather, but the blade looked to be as sharp as any razor, undamaged by its passage through the man’s breastbone and as pristine as if he’d just had it polished by a goldsmith, in short or long, a mass of contradictions, and then it suddenly sheathed itself, as if it were modestly retiring until it was needed again. He looked up.
There was a moment of stunned silence before the Queen walked up to the corpse, spat on it, and said, “We’re all well rid of him, but you’ve made a few enemies, Sir Champion.” She paused, thinking, then said, “His brothers most ought to be concerned, since he was their kinsman, but he was in the midst of assaulting me, which they won’t be happy about either, and he was caught in the midst of breaking his sworn oath, and so brought further shame on his family. I think that they’ll be satisfied with a minimal wergeld, which I will pay of course, since you acted quite properly on my behalf.”
“Please don’t trouble yourself at all,” Phil said. “I have essentially unlimited funds available, and can easily pay any reasonable amount, if that’s the custom here.”
“It is,” she said, “and that should be an end to it.” She gave orders to her servitors to have the body hung upon a tree, as a warning to oath-breakers, but none of their party were minded to go watch it done.
As the small ‘funeral’ party left with their burden, Phil turned to his wives — who were still in some kind of daze — and said, “This is definitely not Kansas.”
They only nodded, wide-eyed and silent, for a change.
The Queen said formally, “Will someone please fetch the Lögmaður? I will pay his fee.”
“Of course, my Queen,” said one of her servitors and immediately ran off out the hatch.
“What’s a Lögmaður?” Phil asked.
“The Law-speaker, a man both learned in the law and of such an even temper that he’s able to fairly judge between rival claims,” she answered.
“Who would be the rivals, then? Are his brothers here?”
“No, but the Lögmaður will take their legal interests into account, as well as mine and yours. His brothers aren’t required to accept the judgement, but any dispute would have to be settled by private revenge, which would quickly mount in cost to the point that even a very wealthy man couldn’t afford to pay it.”
“How would the costs increase? Surely one can hire thugs, but they might have retainers of their own who would essentially work for nothing.”
“But the wergeld will have to be paid for every person killed in the prosecution of their feud, and you clearly have an army at your back, all of whom appear to be what we would call ‘prestigious,’ and thus require the same wergeld as the man who was killed. the costs mount quickly under our system of laws, and it has the advantage of being self-enforcing. If someone isn’t able to enforce the judgement of the Lögmaður for any reason, that individual can sell his interest to someone who can, and that party can collect the payment.” She paused, then said, “While there are hotheads who refuse to settle, their relatives soon bring them to heel, since they’ll be responsible for the payment of the sum total of wergelds if he can’t pay for any reason.”
“Such as being dead,” Phil said.
“Exactly! It’s all about family, and coalitions of families, so the wergeld represents the approximate worth of a person’s productivity in generating wealth for his or her family, but only roughly approximate, since each class in society has a fixed wergeld, and the richest man is worth only twice as much as the meanest free man, and even a thrall has significant value as a human being, somewhere between one and two years wages for an ordinary working man.”
“What about women?” Rhea asked.
The Queen smiled. “Women of child-bearing age, of course, are worth far more than men, because they are the creators of families, three times more, in general, but if a pregnant woman is killed, the wergeld is increased by the value of her child, which is generally calculated at half the value of an adult, except that if the fœtus was a girlchild, she’s counted at the full value of an adult woman. Twins, of course, raise the stakes considerably. No one in their right mind would dare assault a woman with murderous intent, because their own family might well kill them rather than bear the cost and shame of outlawry.”
Selene grinned. “What a sensible system! Just when you think that everything’s crazy, along comes something that seems so reasonable that one is astonished that no one else has thought of it.” She called out to the assembled throng, “Just so you know, both my sister-wife and I carry twins, and come from very prominent families.”
Rhea rolled her eyes and said, “Enough with idle chit-chat! I’ve got to pee and I’m hungry!” She scowled at Phil. “The rest will have to wait.”
The Lögmaður must not have lived too far away — or perhaps he’d been one of the guests —because they didn’t have long to wait. In fact, he arrived on the scene just as Rhea finished speaking. “Well, well, a pretty mess,” he said, glancing down at the blood on the deck, clearly visible in the diffuse sunlight that streamed through the open hatch he just walked through. “Would someone mind telling me what happened?” He was a hearty man, red-faced and a little portly, but with the iron muscles and callused hands of a farmer. He seemed quite affable, but there was a piercing intelligence in his eyes.
“It’s fairly straightforward,” the Queen said, stepping toward him. “My former husband here,” she indicated the congealing pool of blood as if the body were still present, “was quarreling with me. Words were spoken, tempers flared, and he took it upon himself to attack me with what seemed like murderous intent. The warrior Phil here,” she indicated him where he stood aside near his wives, who were seated at one of the long tables, “came to my rescue, taking him down with his bare hands and then pinning him with as neat a wrestling move as I’ve ever seen performed.”
“And how, exactly, did purely a physical contest turn to manslaughter?” the law-speaker interjected.
“I’m coming to that,” the Queen said, “because it lies right at the heart of the matter. As I said, my former husband was pinned to the ground by the superior strength and skill of my Protector here — whom I’d named and to whom I’d given gift of arms before the witnesses here present, and in this very spot, in very fact, just a short time before — My Champion asked, very reasonably, I thought, if he would yield and give his word to behave himself within my hall. At first, he struggled to free himself, several times, in fact, but upon the question being repeated he assented, pledging himself to peace — for the nonce, at least, you know how he was — so my Champion let him up and stood back to allow him to collect himself.”
The law-speaker asked again, “And what happened then?”
“My former husband took out a wand of ash — I have it here, and it’s clearly dedicated to seiðr of the most vile sort, since the tip of it is carved to resemble a man’s virile member — and began traitorously chanting an evil spell of seiðr, whereupon I screamed, ‘Seiðr!’ as the power of the chant began to affect me, and my Champion stabbed him to the heart with the weapon I had given him, thereby saving my own life, I think, for the witchcraft was directed primarily at me, but also threatened the life of my Champion, because he was at the secondary focus of the spell.”
“In short,” the Law-speaker said, “he broke his oath of peace and committed an unmanly act against a guest in your house, as well as persisting in his evil intentions toward you?”
“Yes,” the Queen said simply.
The Lögmaður turned to the crowd and asked loudly, “Are there any who can reasonably dispute this account?”
One man spoke up, “I can’t dispute the bare facts, since the deceased started the quarrel by calling this fellow here degrading names, but I thought that the Queen’s response to his insults was more than a little intemperate, and almost any man might have been tempted to rage.”
“She’s admitted as much,” the Lögmaður said, “but that’s not a particular excuse for breaking one’s sworn oath, and by no means a license to attempt a coward’s revenge through using magic. If he’d wanted to claim that the oath was extracted under duress, and so resume their quarrel, he should have asked his leave and stepped outside to where they could have continued the fight outside the hospitality of the Queen, and without disturbing her peace and and the pleasure of her guests.” He paused and looked around the room, evidently waiting for anyone else who might wish to speak. “Well, if that’s the situation, I’m ready to enter my judgement; who will pay my fee?”
“I will,” said Phil, “since it was my hand which slew him, and I will pay the wergeld, since it would be unmanly to have a woman pay on my behalf, although the Queen has offered me this boon, since I acted to preserve her life and safety as well as my own.”
“Nicely spoken,” the law-speaker said, “and here is my judgement: The wergeld is remitted, because the dead man was an oath-breaker and subject to outlawry for violating the peace of the gathering, and for practicing evil seiðr on persons there present. None-the-less, in consideration of the power and strength of his family, and to avoid further insult, I would recommend that you voluntarily offer a gift of one thousand ounces of silver in lieu of the wergeld to his brothers, for them to share out among his relatives as they think best.”
Phil spoke up immediately, but quietly as he moved closer to the law-speaker and the Queen — who stood near each other — so as to continue with as much privacy as possible in a public space. “I agree, of course, and in consideration of their eminence, and in recognition of their loss, do voluntarily increase the amount of my gift to one thousand ounces of gold, to honor both them and the former prominence of their dead relative, who may well have been touched by madness due to his dabbling in forbidden arts.”
The law-speaker blinked his eyes in obvious surprise. Evidently this was the point at which people might normally haggle. “This is a very handsome offer, Sir Phil, and shows a fine sense of delicacy in a matter of family honor, since I notice that you’re well-supplied with armed supporters. You do realize that my fee is normally a small percentage of any fine?”
“I assumed it, actually. What’s the usual amount?”
“Five percent, but I’d feel terrible about accepting that much of the large amount you propose.”
“And I’d feel terrible if you discounted your usual fee, since your judgement seemed both reasonable and fair, and I believe that your advice was very sound, and doubtless saved me no end of trouble, since I am unfamiliar with your laws. Please accept both my gratitude and my payment. I’ll have the full amount delivered by one of the Queen’s servitors, if she allows this, as soon as I can arrange it, which will be very soon. I assume that Queen Gefjon knows the proper etiquette involved in handling the payment to his brothers?”
“She does,” he said.
“I’ll ask her to have someone attend to these details, then, since I’m a stranger in these lands, and would hate to offer any insult to anyone through ignorance of your customs.”
The law-speaker looked at him carefully. “This caution does you credit, Sir, and shows a commendable reluctance to insert yourself into quarrels whose origins lie in the distant past. Most of my clients tend to be loud-mouthed idiots who let their emotions run away with their common sense.”
“I’ve got no dog in this fight,” Phil said, then saw that both the Queen and the law-speaker were momentarily confused and added, “It’s an idiom of my country which means that I have no personal or financial involvement with any party in the case. My only concern was that a big bruiser of a man was attacking a woman, which is cowardly behavior in any man, I think, and in any country, aside from the fact that every real man has an inherent duty to protect women and children from danger if at all possible. The fact that the queen had named me her particular champion didn’t alter my duty as a man of honor to succor her to any significant degree, and in fact I didn’t think of it at all within the immediate context of the altercation which followed. If the craven cur had assaulted a serving girl, I would have acted in exactly the same manner.”
The law-giver laughed. “You’ve got a set of balls on you, that’s for sure. Few would have taken up a quarrel started by your formidable opponent, if only out of fear.”
“If you’ve heard any rumor of our mission, you’ll know that we have more ‘balls’ between us than most, despite the fact that most of us are women.” He grinned at that, and indicated Selene and Rhea, still seated, but visibly interested in whatever was going on.
He nodded. “An army of women, no less, against all of Múspellheimr! You’ve either got balls or no brains, perhaps both.”
“It remains to be seen, of course, but such women, and we do have a few men along, to take care of spiders, mice, and other unpleasant things that the women tend to be squeamish about.”
“Indeed, I’ve noticed how shy and retiring your wives seem to be, and most of the rest look just like them. Sisters?”
“More or less. Cousins more like, but sisters is close as well. It’s a complicated story.”
He nodded, content to mind his own business. “So, what do you do when you’re not smashing spiders?”
“I work in metals, something like the Dwarves, I think, but not quite so short.”
He laughed uproariously. “Not so short! That’s rich! Do you have any samples of your work?”
“I do. I just presented Queen Gefjon with a nice assortment, which she may be willing to show you, but I always carry a few items of my stock-in-trade.” He reached into his sporran for a little velvet wallet and took it out, placing it on a nearby table and carefully unfolding it. “Do you see anything here that strikes your fancy?” There were an assortment of gold rings, earrings, and necklaces spread before them, each in a cleverly-designed sewn-in pocket to protect it without hiding much of it when the wallet was opened.
The law-speaker’s jaw dropped. “Like Dwarvish work indeed! These are exquisite. Are they for sale?”
“Of course, it’s my trade, as I said. Each piece is priced at exactly triple its weight in gold, although there is a minimum charge for tiny items, so if you want Njal’s Saga engraved upon a pinhead, it will be quite a bit more. You have a wife, perhaps? Would you like something for her?”
“I do, and I would. Our local smith turns out nothing so fine.”
“I do custom work as well — same price. If you could sketch or describe something, I’d be glad to incorporate anything you’d like, a particular rune, perhaps, or a flower, or an animal, anything which has meaning for her. If you’d like a ring, of course, it would be best if she came by, so I can fit the ring to her hand. The same is true for necklaces, but the fit is much more general. Usually, anything within two inches of the length she prefers will do, but some women are more fastidious. It has to do with how they rest upon the bosom, or so I’m told.”
“We’ll be at the feast later on, so perhaps we can drop by and I can return a bit of my fee on my wife’s behalf.”
“I’m sure she’d like that, and there’s nothing quite so nice as a happy wife.” Phil grinned at his fellow husband, another member of the community of men who’d aligned themselves with particular women and taken on their family responsibilities, feeling a sense of camaraderie that was becoming increasingly common as he became aware of the experiences and issues they often shared, so they stood there chatting for some few moments.
“You’ve been married long?” the law-speaker finally asked.
“Not all that long, but of course having two wives accelerates the accumulation of the wisdom one requires in a household with a pair of women in charge.”
He laughed, but then asked, “Two wives? Is this the usual custom in your country?”
“No, not at all, but they were inseparable as girls, and it seemed a shame to break up a matched set like that.” he smiled to indicate that it was a little joke. “In any case, we wound up as we are, and are all three of us happy about it. I do know that most such marriages in foreign parts are much less a woman’s choice than a man’s particular arrogance, but that’s not at all the case here, but more of a mutual understanding that crept up on us almost without realizing that it’s what we’d really wanted all along. I suspect sometimes that I’m not quite at the hub of our marriage, but just a little off center. It all works out, though, and I’m very happy with both my wives, a double blessing for which I’m very grateful.”
“Well, any man who’d dare to thwart old Ásagrimmr — and then plan an expedition to tweak Surtr’s nose — undoubtedly has the strength to cope with two wives, but I have to confess that one is all I can handle. She runs me ragged as it is. I shudder to think of what she and her sister could do to me if they were in league with each other.” He smiled to let Phil know that he could makes jokes as well, so they parted in good humor, just as Selene and Rhea walked up from the table they’d been sitting at, surrounded by the hubbub of voices and clattering palates and silverware that suffused the huge cabin.
“What’s up, Sweetie?” Selene said. “We noticed that you were thick as thieves with the law guy there. Did he have any good advice?”
“He did, actually. He suggested, and I think it’s very wise, that it would be circumspect to offer a payment to the angry guy’s next of kin, the same brothers who’ve evidently been sleeping with his former wife from time to time. He floated the notion of a thousand ounces of silver, since it’s not every day one kills a God, and I countered with an offer of the same amount of gold, which he thought would surely do the trick. I then sold him on the notion that I was an artificer in jewelry — which is perfectly true, of course — because it seemed wise to me — considering how suspicious they are of men who use any form of magic not directly related to the arts — to play down any hint of magical powers that I might, or might not, possess. In fact, I think I’ve made a sale; he wants a few pieces for his wife, so that will serve as further cover. All in all, it’s been a very profitable interaction.”
Rhea pouted. “You’re making jewelry for all sorts of women these days, Phil. We liked it better when we were your only clients.”
“I’ve just killed God, sweeties, which I think is public notoriety enough for us right now. For all our collective safety, it seems wise to be Simple Phil the Goldsmith and his lovely wives for a while, at least until the heat dies down. The guy had sons as well as brothers, and at least one of them is a hotheaded dolt, or so I’m given to understand.”
“What was it with that sword trick, anyway? Have you been holding out on us, Phil? That move was as quick and as sure as anything we could have done.”
“Not my doing, actually, although I’m sure it looked like it was. The sword that Queen Gefjon gave me is heavily infused with magic, and it’s actually intelligent, although it’s not at all talkative, for which last I thank my lucky stars.”
Rhea instantly saw the implication. “Like the Heart of Virtue?”
“Something like that, only this particular supernatural intelligence is on the side of life and light, with a particular impulse toward protection. You could think of it as a sort of metallic Lassie, except that this particular dog is willing to bite.”
“It sounds a lot like that sword that Freyr gave to that sneaky creep,” she said.
“It does, doesn’t it? I have no idea how Queen Gefjon might have wound up with it, or something like it, but it was very handy when whatchamacallum started chanting seiðr at the Queen and me.”
“How does it work?”
“All you have to do is lay your hand on the hilt, and it appears to assess the threat level and then take whatever actions it deems appropriate to save its owner.”
“Cool!” Rhea sighed, awestruck. “It’s like one of those cyborg things they had in Killer Zombies from the Eighth Dimension, with that bald-headed guy, what’s-’is-face….” Then she frowned. “No fair! Why can’t em have one of those?”
“What?” Selene asked. “Having the spirit of a pre-historic Goddess from Atlantis guiding and protecting us isn’t enough?” she said rhetorically. “Wouldn’t we be mixing genres then, with who knows what kind of crazy outcomes? Here we are in some kind of ancient Scandinavia having the time of our lives, and not once did we have to go through airport security thanks to our Phil here!” She frowned. “But how far do you think we’d get if we had titanium steel and positronic artifical cyborgs built into our bodies? Beep…! ‘Would you mind stepping over here for a full body scan and cavity search, Ma’am?’ Get real! Eventually we may want to go back to New York, if only for the shopping, and I’d really like to see a few of those Italian shoe designers up close and personal, in hopes of commissioning some really stylish pumps in my size. Most all the tall-girl shops in the City had shoes designed for midgets.”
Rhea sighed. “Okay! I get it! Just sayin’, was all.” She pursed her lips and added glumly, “It would have been cool, though….”
“And I’m sure you would have carried it off very well, Dearest,” Phil said, temporizing, “but don’t you see how nicely things are coming together for us? It’s like in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, where the perfect team is assembled — almost through fate or something — with exactly the set of skills and alliances required to save the world. We’ve got the wizard — or three, actually — two mysterious warriors with mystical powers, even the Dwarves, if King Alvís comes through for us, and he’s already helped us with that bridge of his.” He thought for a moment and said, “And I almost forgot the sword that was lost!” He hefted the hilt of his sword slightly, unwilling to draw it without need. “There are even prophecies that seem to say that this thing is one of the keys to saving the world.”
“Okay,” Rhea said, slightly mollified, “but what about the elves? Don’t we need some elves?”
“And what’s the next world listed on the centaur map?” he asked her.
“Alfheimr, why?” Then she thought about it and said, “Oh….”
When Phil woke up, there was a hand on his private parts, which wasn’t so very odd, considering, but then he remembered that he’d dozed off in a workshop that the Queen had set aside for him, since he’d sold a boatload of jewelry at the feast. One woman after another would lead her husband up to the table, look over his samples, and demand, ‘One like this, only…’ until he’d thought that his head would spin. But now it was spinning, after a conjuring session that had lasted well into the night, producing rings and things and fine array for the ladies of the court…. Then he felt someone clamber onto his erection, by now stiff as a board, and it was enveloped in a familiar warmth, “Rhea?” he said. No answer, only motion. “Selene?” More motion, much more urgent, and it was very near to coming to its inevitable conclusion when there was a tremendous flash of light! and he saw two very angry but familiar faces staring down at him from a very odd angle. “Rhea? Selene? What’s going on?”
“Our thought exactly, Phil,” they said in chorus, never a good sign. “What the heck is going on here?”
“But,” he said, as the blonde straddling him raised her head and he recognised the Queen. “Gah!” he shouted, or tried to, as his wives both wrapped their hands around his throat and squeezed.
“Didn’t I tell you, Sir Phil?” she said. “This is one of the perquisites of the Queen’s Champion. I thought you knew.” She didn’t seem flustered at all. In fact, there was a very pleased expression on her face, of satiety and… triumph?
“Urk!” he tried to struggle, but his two wives were very angry and very strong. Then — just as his vision faded to a swiftly-closing tunnel of black — he ejaculated, though there was no pleasure in it, and there was nothing….
Phil had a headache like he couldn’t believe as he struggled to recover his bearings. He was flat on his back, his head was spinning, and his thoughts were fuzzy and confused. “Wha…!” he managed to gasp out, but he couldn’t tell if he’d made any noise, because there were women laughing, talking loudly somewhere nearby, and they didn’t seem to hear him.
Then, a fuzzy shadow loomed over him and a familiar voice said, “Oh, good, you’re awake. It’s about time; almost noon, in fact.”
“Mmmf,” he was barely able to grunt, because his mouth was as dry and foul-tasting as a old gym sock full of cobwebs, and he didn’t seem to be able to move his tongue.
Another voice, also familiar, said from the other side of his spinning head, unless his head were really spinning, “The Bitch-Goddess here spiked your beer with opium, she says, mixed with some local mushroom juice. She claims that it’s both safe and foolproof, so we’re not mad at you any more.”
“We’re not terribly happy with her, of course,” said the other familiar voice, “but it seems that local custom gives her certain ‘rights’ in regard to travelers, especially Queen’s Champions, a tiny little factoid that she conveniently forgot to mention.”
“Urgh…,” he said cogently. His vision, still blurry, was getting clear enough that he could see that it was Rhea and his right, and Selene to his left. They were both looking down at him with expressions of amused concern, which irritated him for some reason. He tried to swallow…. It didn’t work; his mouth was still dry as he tried to move his lips, which hurt almost as much as the rest of him. “Whuh…, whuh….”
“He’s not very coherent in the morning, is he?” That must be the Queen, because these careless words were followed immediately by…
…both of his wives in angry chorus saying sharply, “Only when he’s been poisoned the night before, Miss Thing. You’d better be a little more pleasant around us, Queenie, because you’ve seen what he can do, and he’s a regular pussycat compared to even one of us. We don’t care what kind of Goddess you are, because if you want to get on our bad side, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
“So far,” Selene said judiciously, we’ve been good sports about your little trick, Gefjon, dearie, because we’re guests here, and customs vary in different countries, but neither are we patsies when we’re not being treated with courtesy and respect.
“If you’d wanted to borrow him,” Rhea added, “the polite thing to do would have been to simply ask, not drug him and then rape him while he’s unconscious.”
Selene chimed in — they were always good at tag-teaming, even as little girls — “Wasn’t that exactly what you were taunting your late and unlamented husband about? just before our Phillip killed him, I mean?”
“Or should that have been more properly described as goading?” Rhea said, shrewd and calculating, as ever. “Maybe we should give that Lögmaður guy a shout and ask him to reconsider the facts as we know them, why don’t we.”
Phil was getting a little tired of this bickering, so he closed his eyes and tired to concentrate, conjuring a nice mouthful of pure hydrogen dioxide; he could easily visualize the shape of the molecules…. ‘At last!’ he thought, swallowing, then coughing up some sticky mucus that had been stuck in his throat, which caused immediate consternation in the room. “Was anyone ever going to get me a little bit of water to help me clear my throat?” he asked drily.
“Phil!” Selene and Rhea screamed in chorus, rushing in different directions to grab not one, but three mugs of water and one bottle of what looked like whiskey, all of which were presented to him in the blink of an eye.
He smiled, selecting one of the mugs. “Water will be fine, thank you. It’s a little early for whiskey, since the sun’s not over the yardarm — as far as I can tell down here in Bright Mistyland —and I don’t drink the stuff in any case; it muddles the head.”
Rhea blushed. “Oh! I didn’t know what is was, actually. It just looked wet.”
“I only look like Indiana Jones. I don’t have his taste for booze, and neither do I share his philandering ways,” he shot the Queen a contemptuous frown, “despite the compromising appearance of recent events.”
The looks his wives gave her, on the other hand, were tinged more with homicide than disdain. “She explained that, Dearest,” they said in unison, but not happily, then Selene added, “Evidently, it’s the local minhag, meant to preserve the seed of heroes, for the good of the community.”
Rhea said, “And from the looks of at least some of the locals, they could use an infusion of healthy genetic material. We’ve decided to think of this as something akin to donating blood, and please don’t make any jokes about visits to the blood bank, either now or in the future. Believe me, we’ve already thought of all possible variations.”
“What, no cookies and apple juice?” he said, looking around the room.
Both women groaned. “Okay, so we didn’t think of that one….”
“Just so you know,” Selene said parenthetically, “little Miss Hot-to-Trot here is already pregnant with your child. Evidently being a sex and fertility Goddess has its perquisites, plus she’s a prophetess, or what they call a spækona locally, so she already knows that it’s a boy, and that he will live to perform great deeds, whatever the heck that means, which deeds she claims the time is not ripe to reveal, so we’re aunties, again, to someone who will eventually be famous. Whoopie….”
“We’ll be able to do bulk rate mailings for our holiday wishes cards,” Rhea chimed in, “which is a cheery thought, in spite of everything.”
“Oh, crap,” Phil said scathingly. “Another baby, just what we need….”
“Oh, come on, Phil, everybody likes babies.”
“Oh, I like babies alright, I just hadn’t ever, even in my wildest dreams, ever thought about having six or seven hundreds of them. It’s a lucky thing we’re as rich as Crœsus ever was, because we’ll be able to endow an entire university just with the tuition fees. Fifty-two million bucks ought to cover it, but what the heck, I’ll plan on two hundred, what with inflation and all.”
Selene clucked her tongue at his bad mood. “You’re just being grumpy, Phil, and there’s no excuse for it. The children are innocents, even hers.” She looked over at the Queen with disapproval, and if her glance had been even slightly more dismissive of the Queen, she would have been dead, but it wasn’t, the Queen was still alive, and they all had a problem. She looked over to Rhea, raising one eyebrow, and Rhea sighed and nodded, then said, “Phil, honey, you know we have to offer our protection, if only for the sake of your child.”
Phil rolled his eyes toward the heavens, jutted out his jaw in frustration, and said with tight control, “Queen Gefjon, None of us are very happy with you right now, but I’m honor-bound to tell you that you have the right to claim our protection and love, for the sake of our child, but only if you desire it and are willing to abide by our customs.”
The Queen looked at him scornfully, raising one brow. “Why should I care? I have my own warriors to fight for me.”
“We have a ritual of binding, a form of marriage which requires that the parties dedicate their lives to each other in what we call a consecration, a ‘setting apart’ from the vagaries of the world and its inconstancies, that has proved in the past to be an effective shield against some, but not all, creatures and weapons of the Dark. The conditions attached are very strict, and to avail yourself of this protection would require that you undertake to be bound by them.”
“What do these duties entail?” she asked carelessly, a sneer upon her lips.
“For one, you must promise faithfulness, ‘chastity,’ in fact, which means no ‘fooling around’ with other men, or indeed anyone outside your marriage.”
She laughed and laughed, then gasped out through her laughter, “Surely you jest, Sir Phil. I am the very essence of promiscuous sexuality, and the fulfilment of every desire. All acts of love and passion are my rituals. To deny this would be to deny my very nature, my ‘soul,’ and the soul of my people, the Vanes.”
“It’s your choice, of course,” he said, “and you’re under absolutely no compulsion to accept. My own duty ends with my offer, but know that we intend to destroy Surtr and all his minions, and all these worlds will change. For a thousand years or more your people, and the people who absorbed you, have been stuck like flies in amber, frozen into a pattern of self-defeating ennui, moping around fretting about the end of the world as you know it, frightened of so-called prophecies that foretold doom. But at least one prophesy isn’t coming true, because the man the wolf is supposed to kill is out there rotting by the side of the road, so I’ve changed the future. That particular prophesy is and was a lie all along. Maybe they’re all lies. We, my wives and I, and all those who fight with us, will change the future for everyone. The only question is where you choose to be when the future catches up with you, whether standing on your own two feet and figuring out the best way to move forward, finding your own path toward survival, or being carried along by the ghosts of long-dead prophets, following a script that was written for you before you were born, pathetic marionettes caught up on strings of gossamer, cowering in the middle of a spider’s web, stuck fast until the spider comes to suck the blood from your veins.”
Rhea sighed. “Isn’t he just the dreamiest?” she said to no one in particular. “He’s just bursting with sincere enthusiasm, and the way he strings words together is just like spun sugar candy.”
Selene moved over to take Rhea’s hand. “My Mom always told me to hold out for a man who can make your heart sing with his voice alone. I’m so glad I did. And he’s pure beefcake too, so you feel all girly when you’re with him, which is important when you’re as tall as Rhea and I are, and you simply wouldn’t believe how clever that man is with his hands. Have you looked at his hands, dear? Yum, yum.”
“Too true, Selene dear. It’s a drag hanging out with a guy who looks like your kid brother, and a man who can’t actually do things is a waste of space.”
She laughed. “Phil is definitely nothing like a kid brother. Gefjon, honey, you cheated yourself by drugging him, you know, and now you’ll never realize how great he really is in bed. ‘Acts of love and pleasure,’ my ass. I don’t care how long you’ve been around, you’ve never had anything like the undivided attention of our Phil, so bye-bye, sweetie, see ya in the funny papers.” She stalked off into the darkness, headed toward their quarters.
“Ta ta, honey,” said Rhea as she turned to follow Selene, and then she turned back around and said, “Oh! I almost forgot.” She handed her a bulky package. “Phil made these for you, as a parting gift, since he said that your hall would be much more beautiful with a little better light.” She left in no particular haste, but merely went.
“You made this for me?” she said. “What is it? You’ve already given me more jewelry than I’ve ever seen in one place.”
“Oh, nothing, really, just a dozen portable lights. You have to hang them in the sunlight during the daylight hours, but then they’ll burn all night long, and you can recharge them again for the next night. The little ivory button on the side turns it off and on, so go ahead and play with them. You’ll figure it out. I hope you enjoy them.” With that, he turned to follow his wives, leaving the Queen alone in the dim light that filtered down through a single deck prism.
Idly, she opened the package, which seemed to be a largish wooden box wrapped in some kind of soft cloth. Inside, the box was partitioned into twelve individual spaces, all identical, each of which contained some sort of contrivance made of brass. It looked almost like a normal candle lantern — albeit much more beautiful — but instead of pierced tin, it had a translucent white glass globe nestled in a cage of brass. On the side of the base, which was oddly thick, was the ivory button he’d described. Curious, she pressed it… and was almost frightened when the interior of the workshop was suddenly illuminated with a light that seemed as bright as day, so bright that looking directly at the brilliant shining globe almost hurt her eyes. She looked around, noticing that the walls and floor looked almost tawdry, so filmed they were by dust and dirt. She pushed the button again, and was plunged again into the familiar shadows, and the faint light from the deck prism — the light that had seemed perfectly serviceable for many lifetimes, hundreds and hundreds of years — suddenly seemed inadequate. “Damn that man to Hel!” she said aloud.
The feast that night was somewhat strained, because the expedition had been packing up all day in preparation for an early start on their passage to Alfheimr and because neither Phil nor his wives felt quite as well-disposed toward Queen Gefjon as they had previous to her taking advantage of Phil.
The Queen herself seemed a little miffed as well, since the Vanes seemed to regard sex as a rather delightful activity involving little, if any, emotional connection, so weren’t terribly bothered by the notion of playing a sexual ‘trick’ on someone like Phil, which they regarded as more of a droll practical joke than either a ‘sin’ or a personal affront. Sharing that general attitude, and the local customs, she obviously felt that Phil and his wives were being bad sports over what had been, for her at least, ‘just a little bit of fun.’
Phil also realised, belatedly, after talking to some of the people wandering around, that all the Vanish divinities were what the people back on Earth would call fertility Gods and Goddesses, all of them associated with some aspect of human sexuality, love, sex, childbirth, and so on, in countless variations. He was trying to be understanding, but he’d grown up in a much more sexually repressed society, and didn’t subscribe to the casual ‘hook-up’ approach to sexual encounters that the Vanes did. It was not, he’d convinced himself, ‘just like shaking hands,’ so he was still feeling rather aggrieved, but also felt somewhat awkward, since he was usually the first to defend some degree of ‘cultural relativism,’ but here he was being an revanchist absolutist when push came to shove… so to speak.
The Queen herself not nearly so, he thought, despite the fact that she obviously believed that all three of them were being ‘pills’ about the fact that she was only doing her job, after all was said and done, to preserve the seed of heroes setting off into battle, in case they didn’t survive, and to ensure the long-term health of their community, although she obviously didn’t have any scientific understanding of genetic diversity, nor of the need to maintain it. Phil could see her point, though just barely: Their situational imperatives obviously made strength a matter of survival. Their whole culture glorified warfare and competition for relatively scarce resources in a closely-linked group of difficult worlds, worlds in which they’d had the good luck to land in one of the best, in the middle of summer, with the harvests in and plenty of food for everyone, but the winters must be brutal, and not every world was equally blessed — even in Vanaheimr there seemed to be a Vanish Goddess whose primary realm of influence was skiing and snowshoeing, plus hunting with the bow, something like ‘Diana the Huntress’ of the North, although how that fit into a Vanish sexual paradigm Phil was reluctant to guess. He’d actually met her, Skaði she’d said her name was — so survival was at the heart of many of their customs. Even the seemingly ubiquitous duelling and feuds he’d seen and heard of — participated in, however unwillingly — at their heart were probably fairly efficient methods of selecting for the fittest males, much like the centaurs did with less lethal results, and he could see that Rhea’s parents had fitted themselves into this system with what seemed like relative ease, so Emily, now Thundercloud, was a polygamous stallion with hundreds of wives, and Herbert, now Wildflower, appeared to think nothing of it at all, other than as a source of pride, that she was part of the most prestigious herd there was, and that her former wife was the most powerful stallion of them all, able to contain and meet the exacting standards of the mares of a larger herd than had ever existed before, even in the ancient centaur past. Phil shuddered, anxious lest his own memories and past be rewritten to ‘fit’ into a new timeline, but how would he know, and would he even care, once the process was complete? Intellectually he knew that his wives had once been male, but it was… difficult to focus clearly on the memory, because he also remembered them as young girls. He remembered Selene telling him about being Jack, but the knowledge had been of minor importance, and made as little difference to him as it would have if she’d told him that she’d had an appendectomy as a child, but was all better now. Somehow, he thought, he ought to have been shocked, but he hadn’t been, even then.
The Queen, in the meantime, was being her usual self, imperious and charming by turns, dispensing dispassionate justice as efficiently as any bureaucrat when two or more of her subjects crowded forward, asking for a judgement, which task she performed with all the apparent wisdom and compassion of Solomon himself, and then gave advice to the lovelorn, or prescriptions to cure infertility, or remedies for any of the thousand natural shocks the flesh and mind are heir to, with the same feelings of inherent love and kindness he’d seen so often in his own mother, never refusing any interruption, no matter how trivial it might have seemed, because her people needed her. He began to soften his former harsh judgement of her actions, finding excuses for her behavior. She was, after all, the mother of one of his many children, and his own duty demanded that he treat her with the same sort of kindness she was showing to the people who depended on her. It was, he thought, a matter of honor.
She’d hung several of the new lights he’d given her around the dais, with the rest scattered through the hall and a special concentration on the aisle that led from the main hatch to the dias, but she’d had them covered with patterned silk scarves to dim the light a little, so as not to startle the attendees, and because too much of this bright new light made the place look a little… tired, but softening the lamps with a partial shade was a pleasing compromise. The total effect wasn’t half bad, although it was somewhat reminiscent of a hippie commune from the Sixties back on Earth, although the Queen herself wasn’t aware of it.
“It’s clever, what you’ve done with the lights,” he said in a quiet moment when there didn’t seem to be anyone pestering her too closely, “and I’m very impressed with the love you show your people; it shows a gentle heart, and an impressive understanding of human nature, and how best to reconcile their conflicting desires.”
She blinked, surprised perhaps to hear him speak anything more personal than, ‘Please pass the salt,’ or something equally banal, since the four of them had been maintaining a relatively stony mutual silence, for the most part, beyond mere superficial courtesies. “Thank you, Sir Phil. It’s a difficult task at times, and often thankless, but it’s my duty, so I make the best of it.”
“I see that, and have to apologize, since I see now that you were acting as you thought best for the good of your people, for which I can’t fault you, however much it jarred my personal sense of propriety, and those of my wives.” He shrugged with Yiddish eloquence and made a dismissive gesture with his hands.
“I have to ask your pardon as well,” she said, “since I’d assumed that you were familiar with our customs, because you speak our language so fluently. I thought that, perhaps, you were so worn out in ministering to your wives that you needed a little ‘encouragement,’ and of course we are the mistresses of this art.”
The light dawned in Phillip’s mind. “I think I understand, and the confusion was perfectly natural, since I’m not speaking your language at all.”
In response to her puzzled look he went on, “In the world of the Master Wizard Akcuanrut and Empress D’Larona-Elvi, there is an ancient spell that causes the languages of that world to be intelligible to others, and vice versa. Now that there’s a small English-speaking population there, I assume that English has been added to the mix.”
“So this mutual understanding is a spell?”
“It is, but not in the usual sense, because it’s both infectious and promiscuous, requiring no effort on anyone’s part to duplicate itself when it encounters a new world. To me, it’s as if you’d been speaking English all along, which is a language on my world that’s distantly related to your own, I suspect, because we know something of your story, at least third-hand, which supposedly happened in our own distant past. I should have realized what was happening, but it seemed so unremarkable, since the first world we visited was Akcuanrut’s, where the spell first took effect, that I didn’t even notice.”
“Your past? But how can you be here, then, now?”
“The time differential between the worlds depends on exactly how you approach the journey, I think, and I know that we spent between two and three months at most on Akcuanrut’s world during my first visit there, yet when I got back to my home more than six months had gone by. There’s a magician on my world named Albert Einstein who discovered the principle in theory, at least, before I was born. He called it ‘relativity,’ and proved that — if it were true, — it would come into play most noticeably when one traveled at very high speeds. Some years later, his theory was tested using very accurate ‘clocks’ — a device used to measure time the way one might measure a length of wood — and proved to be an accurate description of how the world works.”
She turned to Phil’s wives, who were sitting on the other side of him, and asked, “Do you know of these ‘clocks’ that Sir Phil describes?”
“We do,” said Rhea, “and of Professor Albert Einstein besides. It’s quite a famous experiment, because it enabled the development of a weapon we call an ‘atomic bomb.’ ”
“A weapon? What’s a ‘bömb?’ ” she asked.
Rhea looked smug. “A ‘bomb’ is a device used in warfare on our world. Its primary characteristic is that it ‘explodes,’ releasing quite a lot of energy in a flash of heat and/or light. The device we used to create the flash of light when we discovered you molesting our husband was a type of bomb that releases only light, so it can be used to startle people, although it can also harm those who are very sensitive to light. Phil invented them after a run-in with a gang of dwarves who’d tried to kill us.” She paused. “It seemed pretty effective, don’t you think?”
“It was,” the Queen said drily. “I congratulate you on your quick thinking. I also have to apologize for the misunderstanding which led to my hasty actions in regard to Sir Phil. I honestly didn’t understand, since your notion of ‘marriage’ isn’t quite as flexible as it is in Vanaheimr, nor does it really exist among the Vanes in the sense you seem to mean.”
“Think nothing of it,” Selene said magnanimously. “We were only mad because we thought that Phil here was actually participating, but when we saw that he was a victim rather than a perpetrator, our sympathies quite naturally laid with him.”
“And now that we know that you’re pregnant with his child,” Rhea added, “we can’t really hold a grudge, since we’ll have an odd sort of ongoing family relationship, and will have to get along.”
Selene explained further, “Believe me, we’ve had ample practice in getting used to the idea, since our Phil has fathered six hundred and forty-nine babies in total, plus one of yours, which makes a nice round number.”
The Queen blushed. “I’m afraid not, since I’m carrying twins. That would make it six hundred and fifty-one babies, I think, although one never knows with men.”
“Really?” they said in chorus. “We’re carrying twins as well, so we have six of Phil’s babies between us! We do wish you come with us! It would be such fun having three matched sets, and we’d be sure to draw attention wherever we went!”
The Queen was nonplused. “But… why in the worlds were you so mad, then, if he’s done this so many times before? Quite frankly, I’m surprised, since it belies Phil’s words so recently expressed about ‘fidelity’ and the ‘bonds’ of matrimony.”
“Oh, that was completely different,” they said in unison, “because it was as much our doing as it was Phil’s!”
“In fact, we were the only ones he actually touched,” Rhea explained.
“It was magic, because we’d discovered a large number of victims of the Dark Gods we’re chasing down who were frozen in a sort of stasis, being tortured in slow motion,” Selene amplified her sister wife’s statement.
Rhea took up the narrative as if she’d merely drawn a breath, “So Phil and Akcuanrut cooked up this spell to bring them back to life and make them whole again….”
“…and almost of all of them” Selene said in turn, “badly needed healing, because the Dark Gods like to hurt people, and had chopped off parts of them, and done other terrible damage….”
“One,” Rhea continued, “our friend Blue Bell, had only been killed and turned to stone, so she didn’t have much else wrong with her, but was caught up in the general healing.”
“Necromancy? Surely those two would have nothing to do with raising the dead?!”
“Well, she wasn’t really dead, of course, but we’d thought she was dead, because her life processes had bee slowed to an incredible degree using some sort of Dark God magic. I myself was affected,” Rhea said, “but Phil cured me of the spell using the ritual he spoke of.”
“It’s that powerful?”
“It certainly is,” Selene said proudly. Our Phil is very powerful, the first wizard to pass directly from Apprenticeship to Mastery, and in the space of a few months instead of the typical dozen years or more, likewise the first ever to have done so. We’ve had his ancestry traced, and we believe that he may be descended from Miriam the Prophetess, the woman who invented the alchemical bain-marie which bears her name. We know that he’s descended from the Prophet Aaron, who lived at least three thousand years ago, maybe four; it’s difficult to say, since the stories date from before there was an official calendar.”
“That might explain,” said the Queen, “why the Empress described him as a Seer, then — what we would call a Völva — if he has a large number of Völvas numbered amongst his ancestors. The gift does run in families, although usually only in girl children.”
That piqued Phil’s interest. One of many reasons that Reform congregations paid no particular attention to kohanim was the blatant elitism inherent in almost every such invidious distinction, but if the human gift of prophesy were a Mendelian heritable trait, then the traditional recognition of its significance within a particular lineage made at least some sense, or at least it did when stripped of sexism, and of course that very sexism would have almost precluded the possibility of recognizing the pattern, since half the carriers of the gene sequences involved would have been utterly ignored, although Jewish tradition did recognize a very limited number of women prophets, one of them Miriam, the sister of both Moses and Aaron, and a case very much on point — both of the two brothers also counted among the prophets — plus Sarah, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, and Esther. The list of male prophets was much larger, of course, which proves that it doesn’t matter whether one has the true gift of prophesy or not, if no one is listening; witness Cassandra and her many descendants. “What would be the likely result of the union of two such parents?” he asked.
Queen Gefjon raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure, since it rarely happens that male ‘Völvas’ are all that attractive to women, at least in our Nine Worlds.”
Rhea frowned, instantly affronted by the obvious slur. “But you’ve actually put this quaint theory to the test, haven’t you, dearie? Was this a selfless inquiry in the spirit of dispassionate research, or did you find our Phillip strangely attractive, considering?”
“Yes,” Selene added, smiling dangerously, “do please share with us your expert opinion of his relative prowess, I mean… compared with all the others in your vast experience, of course.”
“Mind you, Selene, Honey,” Rhea interjected, “our Phil was unconscious at the time, so he may have seemed a little distracted, or so one might imagine. To be perfectly fair, he should really be compared only to other unconscious people.”
“Or dead people, Dearest,” Selene said thoughtfully, “we mustn’t neglect necrophilia. Our lovely hostess, after all, is an expert on everything related to sex, so is presumably well-acquainted with these matters.”
Phil eased himself into their pointed ‘casual’ conversation with some caution, “Now, now, dear hearts, I hardly think that she could ever have claimed any such thing….”
Both of his wives turned to face him directly, frowning with distaste. “Oh, but she did, Dear, ” they said in unison. “We heard her distinctly, ‘All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals,’ she said. Of course, you were dead to the world at the time, so you probably weren’t paying all that much attention when she said it. You’ll have to admit, surely, that if having sex with unconscious people is all about love and pleasure, it rather begs the question of exactly where acts of love leave off and exploitation begins.”
Rhea continued alone, “We were just exploring the boundaries, since it’s important to understand and appreciate every nuance of the cultures one encounters in one’s travels.”
“And dead people seemed the perfectly logical corollary,” Selene added helpfully, “although I’m having trouble visualizing exactly how the corpse benefits from all this frenetic activity. Perhaps our esteemed hostess can explain, on the basis of her wide experience in these matters.” She smiled in the Queen’s general direction.
The Queen, who’d been sitting relatively quietly though this baiting, suddenly screamed, her patience at an end, and yelled, “How dare you….” as she drew her sword….
…only to be instantly disarmed by Selene, who was nearest, and who held her easily with one hand on her right wrist, which she’d twisted into an awkward, and painful — to judge from the Queen’s expression — position. “Tut, tut,” she said. “Naughty, naughty…. These late night hours you’ve been keeping have obviously made you a little irritable, but you might actually hurt yourself playing with sharp things like that.”
Rhea added soothingly, “We worry about you, Queenie. You may be hot stuff locally, but out in the wide world, you’re bound to meet truly dangerous women from time to time, women who don’t have our madcap sense of fun and adventure, and who just might not understand your darling little jokes.”
“Now, girls,” Phil said, puzzled over how quickly the mood had turned toward mayhem, “the Queen has apologized for….”
“…and then taken the trouble to make a snide remark about you, Dearest,” Selene said.
“…a nasty slur, in fact, which impugned your manhood, not to mention that she arched one perfect eyebrow at us, and then twitched her lip, in a manner which seemed offensive, at least to me, and evidently to my sister here,” added Rhea.
“We took umbrage,” said Selene, by way of explanation, “just as she’s apparently taken our light-hearted banter rather badly. Tch, tch,” she clucked her tongue.
“People who can’t take a friendly joke really shouldn’t dish them out quite so freely,” Rhea advised her sincerely, “since one might easily bite off quite a bit more than one can chew.”
“We’d just hate for you to get hurt, Sweetie,” Selene said quietly, “just when you’ve got your whole life before you.”
“I’m told that it flashes before your eyes, right there at the end…,” Rhea said cheerfully, “so you might want to take careful notes next time… for posterity,” she explained.
There was an ominous shift in the mood of the hall, which bothered neither Rhea nor Selene not one little bit, and their three hundred-odd sisters — who were scattered through the seated assembly nearest the dais — all smiled.
Phil took his time standing up, but when he did, he did so with sangfroid. “Ladies!” he said loudly, “Please be at ease!”
He turned to the Queen and said calmly, but in a voice that carried through the hall, “Queen Gefjon, my wives seem to be in dudgeon, and I’d suggest that you find some way to apologize very sincerely, since they are undoubtedly in the right, and could easily obliterate your warrior class, if you don’t leave off this quarrel, not to mention the effect of the several hundred warriors of similar ability at their beck and call, should you, or any of your friends, choose to escalate the general level of hostility.”
“But…,” The Queen began to say….
“…But me no ‘buts,’ Madam,” he said. “While I don’t know exactly what happened, I can guess. Something in the seemingly affable good humor of my wives irritated you, possibly caused by some lingering resentment on their part of your highhanded assault on my personal integrity — for which I blame them not at all, although I’m doing my personal best to see things from your viewpoint and forgive you — so you decided on your own to ‘put them in their place’ through some sort of passive-aggressive feminine word game that seems to have targeted me, judging from their irritated responses, so they ‘upped the ante’ through more word games until you snapped, which of course left you at their incomplete mercy. You’re very lucky that you’re not dead right now, since you rashly wielded a weapon against them, and please believe me, if they were truly furious with you, or felt even slightly threatened, you would be.”
“But…,” she began to say again….
“…I said, ‘No more!’ he roared. You have your choice now; swallow your pride and live, or continue this pointless oneupmanship and bickering and die, along with a very large number of your people. I personally would hate to see this happen, but it’s entirely up to you.”
The Queen looked around the room, where many of her warriors were nervously looking around, while the many women who looked just like Selene were studiously casual and unconcerned, although a few had half-smiles flirting at the corners of their lips, seeming somehow perfectly aware of the oppressive tension in the room, but blithely appreciative of it, and happy, as if it were the electrified atmosphere of an oncoming thunderstorm, set to plunge the dank air into darkness and wash it clean again in a torrent from above. She’d heard of the berserker madness, even seen it, but this was different, more like joy, like children anticipating an unexpected picnic in a lovely meadow, with cakes and tarts and all good things to eat. If not yet madness, all these women were touched with something like divine frenzy, a state she’d seen in the late and unlamented Ásagrimm. “I surrender, Sir Phil. I yield myself to you and to your wives, and beg for mercy for my people, if not myself.”
Phil just looked a little tired. “Don’t you get it, Gefjon? — Queen Gefjon, I should say — I don’t want your surrender, and neither do my wives. We don’t really give a damn about your people either. If they want to fiddle around waiting for the world to burn to a cinder, let them. If y’ll want to play dominance hierarchy games fighting over who’s first in line for the slaughter house, go right ahead. We just want to get on with our job without any drama from the people standing around on the sidelines with their thumbs up their… never mind.” He closed his mouth, obviously finished speaking.
The Queen just stared at him, while the Empress and Akcuanrut looked off toward the walls — or bulkheads whatever one was supposed to call them — whether in chagrin or indifference he couldn’t say, and didn’t particularly care. With a glance and the twitch of an eyebrow he queried Rhea and Selene and received equally silent replies. They rose as one and left the hall, walking out into the hazy night air. There was no sun to see, of course, but there was a hint of something — perhaps a moon — above the dim fog of the sky, some hint of diffuse light that made the darkness more familiar. The trees and vegetation seemed to thrive, though, so whatever good there was in sunlight was present in the glowing illumination that suffused this land during the daylight hours.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Selene said, “if slightly odd. It’s a shame they see it only as a fancy backdrop for the inevitable Götterdämmerung.”
Phil laughed. “Twilight indeed! How appropriate for our current surroundings, but that was Wagner’s editorial comment on the ancient Norse ‘End Times.’ The original meaning was the ‘Fate’ of the Gods, but the Wagnerian ethos preferred to think of the ancient Gods and Goddesses — although of course the latter hardly appeared upon their radar — as the quaint relics of a time before the real religion of rational men came along. He wasn’t the first to think so, nor will he be the last, I suspect. Most people think that their particular collection of fantasies is the only set worth having, whilst those of others are the pathetic imaginings of barbarians and fools.”
“Well, aren’t they?” Rhea grinned, to let him know that this was her little joke, since they were all three of them the beneficiaries of a modern liberal education.
“Yeah, right,” he said, and I’m the Queen of Romania.
“Your Majesty!” they both said, and bowed low.
“It’s about time I got a little respect around here,” he said smiling, and they walked blithely off into the tenebrous woods, all three of them laughing.
It was beautiful. There was just enough light to see well enough to avoid hidden roots or rocks in the paths that seemed to lead through the woods at random, opening suddenly onto broad meadows, or looking out onto a rushing stream. They were standing under what seemed to be a willow by the side of one of those streams — or it may have been the same stream along a different stretch of bankside, with ferns and wildflowers in profusion all around — when Selene suddenly asked, “Where does the water go?”
Rhea answered, “Downhill, obviously, but which direction is downhill?” She looked around, trying to detect the lay of the land — which should have been obvious, since they’d descended down into a valley — but it wasn’t obvious at all. Other than the rushing stream at their feet, and the grass and trees, they could have been standing in a Kansas cornfield.
Then Selene said, “And why isn’t anyone working? I don’t know all that much about real farming, but I think that it’s really hard work; farmers are working all the time, but no one ever seems to work here, even during the day. Even the meals are simply ‘available,’ laid out ready on the tables, but I’ve never seen anyone carrying trays of food back and forth, or clearing away dirty dishes, for that matter. All we ever seem to do down here is eat, sleep, and wander around”
“Down here…,” Phil said, looking around, just as Rhea had.
“We’re in Heaven!” Selene said suddenly.
“Well, yes…,” Phil said, “it’s Vanaheimr, the home of the Gods and Goddesses — or half of them, anyway — but what’s that….”
“People don’t work in Heaven,” she said, “whatever they call it here, they just wander around playing harps, or whatever they do for fun, and evidently these people eat a lot and have fights with each other, then they come outside and wander around, just like we’ve been doing, except that they probably have sex while they’re at it, either in the hall or out here in the woods, which seem perfectly-designed pour les rendez-vous intimes, with lots of nice soft bowers under the trees to snuggle in, and perfect weather to avoid catching a chill in a state of déshabillé. They’ve obviously never heard of the ‘no sex’ rule, since they seem to have finessed the ‘no date-rape’ rule as well.” She scowled.
“They’re living just like they did during life, only without the hardships,” Rhea added. “There aren’t even enough rocks on the ground to really hurt yourself if you stumbled, just enough variation to be interesting. The stream isn’t deep enough to drown in, and I’ll just betch’a that you could sit under one of those trees for a thousand years and never once be hit on the head by a falling branch!”
Phil looked around them again. “This Gefjon woman is supposed to be the Goddess of Love, right?”
“If you can call it that…,” his wives said dangerously.
“But didn’t those Goddess types all come in threes? You know, Maiden, Mother, Crone? That sort of thing?”
“Uhm, yeah? So what?” Rhea answered.
“So wasn’t it Persephone who ate the pomegranate seeds and wound up ruling in the Underworld for half the year or something, and then she was the Queen of the May, or the harvest, or fertility or something, for the rest of the year?”
“Yeah! That’s her,” Rhea said, “She was so beautiful that Hades abducted her and carried her off as his ‘bride,’ but her mother pitched such a fit about it that Zeus came down and asked, pretty please, if they could have her back, but that’s just lame Greek stuff,” she said with confidence. “In reality, Persephone was the Queen of Hades all along, and the people had to sacrifice the prettiest boy they could find to her every year so they could have a good harvest, which she gave to them in her guise of Demeter, but this one guy, Hermes, was so pretty that Persephone relented and didn’t demand his immediate death, so Hecate, the other, other side of the Triple Goddess, led her back to the surface so she could be Demeter again with Hermes by her side as her temporary King. They turned it all into the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promises a wonderful afterlife to those who know the secret ceremonies revealed in the various levels of initiation, so you know the magical passwords to give that dog of hers — Cerebrus, the one with all the heads — and other fancy stuff.”
Selene and Phil just stared at her in puzzled looks on their faces. “Unh…,” Selene said slowly.
To be met with Rhea’s impatient cross-eyed look. “It was all in the backstory to Hermes in the Underworld! Don’t you remember? We watched it together! Didn’t you ever look at the bonus materials!? The CGI action stuff was kickin’, but the extra stuff they put in with the boxed set anniversary edition was dynamite!”
“You learned all this from a video?” Phil asked.
“Yeah, so? That stuff’s all accurate these days, or the RPG guys’ll pan’em in the blogs and the vids never get off the ground.”
Selene blinked. “You’re right, of course, about the hard-core fan base, but I hardly ever buy the special editions of even the vids that I really like. It ticks me off that they’re just looking for ways to get more money out of their audience. They should give you a discount somehow, if you already own the first edition, because you’re paying for content that you already own, plus a half hour or an hour of out-takes that were too lame to put in the original edition, plus maybe three or four minutes that they couldn’t decide on the first time around, and then the stupid simulcast narratives that just tell you what the director was thinking about during filming, but if he’d done his darned job right the first time, you’d already know what he meant by it.”
Rhea stared at her. “A true cineáste, I see. You have hidden depths, dear heart of hearts, that even I was never fully aware of. I’m in awe.”
Selene furrowed her brow slightly, unsure about whether Rhea was teasing her or not.
“No, really!” she said. “My own tastes run more to beefcake and action sequences, but you’re much more aware of the art of the cinema than I am, and I’m just a little jealous. I only wish I knew enough about the craft of making films to appreciate them like that. If we ever see one again, I want you to talk me through one — or more — that you particularly like, so I can maybe see something more of what you see in them.”
Selene reached over to hug her. “Of course I will, Sweetie. You were always the intuitive genius at science and stuff, where I had to work at it more, but I had nerd hobbies as well, which you rarely had the time or patience for.”
“I’ll make the time, Darling. I owe you my life! much less the privilege of watching a few of your favorite artsy-craftsy chick flicks with you.” She gave her a sly look. “We’ll make Phil watch them with us, so he can learn something as well.”
“Good idea!” Rhea said, as pleased as punch.
“Yeah, great…” Phil said, somewhat less so.
The next morning, they rose early, their carts already fully-provisioned and themselves well-rested for their journey to Alfheimr, the next step that led toward their final destination on the roadmap laid out by the ancient centaur portal scientists, Múspellsheimr, the world of fire. “How should we dress?” both Rhea and Selene were curious, and hesitating before committing to walking out the door of the room they’d been assigned as ‘guest quarters during their stay in Vanaheimr. They wore their bustiers, but with the leather skirts they’d had designed in The City, which seemed appropriate for almost any occasion, and they both knew that they looked hot in them, lean and lanky and fierce.’
“I have no idea,” Phil said. “I think you both look more than fine. I suppose that we’re headed further ‘south,’ but I’m not exactly sure what that means, since I suspect that it refers to some sub-space twisting of the branches on Yggdrasil, the metaphysical ‘tree’ that the nine worlds are arrayed upon. I wouldn’t expect Miami, considering the way people dress around here, and it’s not as if we started out with steamer trunks of outfits for every occasion.” He grinned at this idea and said, “I completely forgot to bring a tux, for example, so formal dinners are out. Remind me to take you out dancing, once we get back to New York.” He made a show of buffing his nails. “I’m a very good dancer, or so I’m told. I took ballroom dancing and ballet as electives in my freshman and sophomore years, ’cause someone told me it would be good for my plan to excel at football and get a sports scholarship to NYU — or maybe even Cornell or Columbia — if I was really, really, good.”
Rhea grinned. “Oh, you’re good, Sweetie, but I don’t know if there’s a regional league program available.”
“There’s an intramural competition, I think,” Selene mused, “but they don’t have many scholarships available, and I’m not at all sure that you can safely compete any more, taking all in all.” She looked askance at him, but with a smile on her face. “And if you’ll recall, you promised to take us to dinner and dancing when we were back in New York, but stuff kept coming up… as it were,” she said slyly, running one hand across his tight end.
He chortled and smiled back, carefully moving her hand away. “No, I don’t suppose it would be, but people are waiting, and I apologize for forgetting about missing our dinner date. I got distracted. Then too, I don’t really need a scholarship any more, and have the local equivalent of a PhD by examination and thesis. With our families scattered across two worlds, I have no idea where we’ll settle for the long haul, so I can’t rule out the need for further education for all three of us, one way or another, but I reckon we’ll have to wing it, based on what happens during our quest.”
“Feh!” Rhea said dismissively. “We’re going to succeed. I’ve got a feeling about it. Shall we go?”
Phil looked around the little room but there was nothing left behind that they weren’t either wearing or had ready to hand. “We should.”
As they walked out into the main hall, they saw that it was empty, so they walked down the empty aisles of tables toward the main hatch, then out into the full light of day. The yard before the ship was empty of almost everyone except their party, but for a troop of horsewomen which included many of the same women they’d seen on their arrival, the women who’d formed the close-knit group which had surrounded the Queen as they’d arrived. As they descended the gangplank, the Queen herself rode up, dismounted, and stood patiently waiting at the foot of the broad wooden ramp. She looked, not toward Phil, but to his wives, and as they drew even with her, she spoke, “Ladies, I humbly beg your pardon for any affront I’ve offered to you, or to your husband. You’ve confused me, unsettled me, because you have the appearance of the women who are my handmaidens, women who are sworn virgins, those who have vowed never to submit to any man, and who in turn I am sworn to protect and shelter.”
They stared at her, equally confused, but Selene spoke for both of them, “Queen Gefjon, we’re at a bit of a loss. In our culture, a married woman retains her independence, and doesn’t ‘submit’ at all to male domination. Marriage is a mutual declaration of love and respect, and is meant to last forever, but if it doesn’t either party is free to act to dissolve their union, and to resume their separate lives. We haven’t had bride purchase for many hundreds of years, perhaps a thousand years or more, depending on one’s culture. Within the tradition in which our own marriages occurred, there are admittedly elements retained from the ancient concepts, but these have been transformed in ways which don’t bind the woman, but rather free her to live a separate life if she chooses to do so. Men are bound to marry, but women are not, and our husband here has given us an irrevocable gift of gold and jewelry sufficient to keep us and our children in comfort — even luxury — to the end of our days, should we ever tire of him, or he of us, for that matter, although we might have to kill him if he did.”
“Now see here…,” Phil began to say….
…only to but cut off by Rhea, who glanced at him and said, “Not now, Dear, this is between us women.” She turned fully to face the Queen. “You may well have noticed that we are very young, and perhaps thought that we had been sold to Phil by our fathers in some sort of medieval arrangement whereby we were chattels to be bought and sold against our will at the whim of some male, but the only thing about this notion with any truth is that we are quite young to be married, within our own cultural context, and would normally have furthered our education, perhaps established careers, all before marriage in the fulness of time, but had been thrown together on an unplanned adventure that required us to take adult roles upon ourselves, and so claimed the privileges of full adulthood within the context of our culture, to be married, and to start a family in the normal way, because we knew that each moment might be our last, and we desperately wanted whatever happiness we could grasp.”
Selene now took up the narrative. “Both my sister wife and I came from well-to-do families. My own father was a distinguished… lawspeaker in your context, what we would call a lawyer. Rhea’s father and mother are both of them medical doctors and scientists, and well able to command high salaries, although neither one is particularly greedy for money as such. Phil came from a much more modest background, and worked very hard to make his own way in the world, which is good for the character, I’m told.” Here she smiled at Phil, and said, “It seems to have worked in his case, at least, because a braver and more loving man I’ve never known, and his fortunes have been greatly improved, as they often are in fairy tales.”
“Then again,” the Queen said, “I beg your pardon. You have the right of it, of course, and my own high-handed treatment of him was an error in judgement based upon an overhasty appraisal of your situation. I should have realized that you were the warriors, and that he was under your protection. I can only plead ignorance of your customs, because such arrangements are exceptional here, and women are far more often raped and/or forced to marry than otherwise, not that I tolerate any such thing within the limits of my own domain, of course, but this is a small enclave within a much more extensive set of worlds.”
“And we,” said Rhea, “apologize to you for baiting you. We should have realized how it must have appeared to you, two young girls bound, as it would have seemed to you, to a young man of uncertain ancestry. We ourselves have seen with our own eyes how cavalier the Jötunns are about trying to take women who don’t particularly care to be taken, but the last such, one Loki, was promptly put in his place by the Empress D’Larona-Elvi, and is now her thrall, not that she wanted him, so we left him behind us when we left, his former hall given to a lieutenant who was willing to swear fealty to the Empress.”
The Queen laughed in pure delight, the sound of her untrammelled joy releasing all who heard it from every care or sorrow. “I’d have given much to see that,” she said. “He’s been a trouble to travellers through Jötunheimr for many years. I want you both to know that I bear you no ill will at all, for humbling me before my people. I deserved that, and more.”
“Please,” Selene assured her, “It’s already forgotten. We’re friends again, and we’re both very sure that you’ve witnessed many scenes of trauma, or comforted the victims thereof, and that grief obviously triggered your emotional response to what you falsely perceived.”
“I’m in your debt, and I’d like to make amends, if you’ll allow me to do so.”
“There’s no need,” Selene said softly. “Your presence here, with your daughters and dear friends, is more than enough.”
“Thank you, ladies, but I’ve recently discovered that ‘moping around fretting about the end of the world’ is beginning to wear upon my patience, as your husband so wisely observed, and being ‘frightened of so-called prophecies that predict inevitable doom’ is becoming tiresome. I want to go with you. My brother was and is an idiot, your husband now bears his sword because I thought him worthy of it, even when I harbored resentment toward him, which I no longer do, and I’d like to demonstrate that there are at least a few Vanes with both courage and sense.”
“Of course you may,” they said in chorus, then Selene added, “Your companions are welcome as well, if they choose to go.”
Queen Gefjon nodded her assent, and then turned for the first time to Phil. “Sir Phil, my Champion, you generously offered for me once, and have gifted me with treasures beyond those ever given to any woman in our history, enough to make me proud. Will you take me now as your wife, despite my shabby treatment of you?”
“I will, of course; it’s your right, and my duty, but there’s also a nobility and beauty in you that makes me want you in our lives, and my wives have already agreed to accept you as their sister. I truly believe that we will all grow to love one another, and that our meeting was somehow a part of the true destiny we share, as opposed to the pessimistic sense of fate that I made light of. The great thing about one’s destiny, I think, is that it can change, and that human hearts can change it, because love is rooted in the heart of all the worlds.”
Queen Gefjon blinked back tears. “Thank you, my husband. It’s far more than I deserve.”
“Not at all; far less, in fact, than you truly deserve, which is to be loved and cherished and happy, in token of which I offer you this ring,” he plucked it out of his sporran, as ever supplied with every necessity, and went down on his knee before her. “It’s an exact duplicate of the rings worn by Rhea and Selene, you’ll notice, and Selene also has a gift for you, a ring sized to fit my hand, which I’d be proud to wear as token of my troth to you and them. Will you be my wife, before this company, and accept me as your husband?”
“I will,” she said, and blushed.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-Seven
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.— Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan (1798)
As honeymoon suites go, a small tent pitched upon a grassy field leaves a little something to be desired. Phil discovered this when he woke up yet again on the outside edge of their sleeping mat — a simple canvas bag stuffed with straw and sweet-smelling herbs — and had no blankets over him at all. It was their third night on the road toward the jumping-off point for Alfheimr, and he had yet to spend an entire night in perfect comfort.
His three wives, on the other hand, snuggled close and warm and nicely covered in the center of the bed, sleeping the sleep of the just and righteous. He found a certain wry satisfaction in the fact that he’d predicted exactly this situation so long before, on their last night at the crest of that chilly mountain pass, just after their dangerous encounter with the dwarves, and just before they’d descended to the Capital of the Empire, although it all seemed a very long time ago, before they’d met people — and other creatures — he’d only imagined from fairy tales. Gefjon had introduced herself as a Goddess as well as a Queen, and if their speculations about the exact boundaries of her sphere of responsibilities were even remotely on target, an extremely powerful one.
Idly, he wondered if she was also immortal, since she was a Goddess and all. He hoped that she was, now that he thought about it, since she would be an island of stability if, as he’d also foreseen, the three of them eventually used the formula to rejuvenate themselves and swapped their genders, as seemed to be necessary with the Jekyll process, although he still wasn’t quite sure about the reasons.
He thought about that for a few moments. Even Akcuanrut’s magical interventions in the case of the centaurs, and then the victims in the lower cavern, had seemed tied up in sexual power of one sort or another, although there were obviously other sources of power, like that which suffused the wizard’s world, and was available in caverns and a select few other places on Earth. Of course, he’d never attempted a transformation using that power, and neither had Akcuanrut. It didn’t feel right somehow, so there must still be rules he didn’t fully understand yet, but he had a sort of intuitive… premonition about the existence of possible reasons that might eventually lead him toward an answer, just as he’d had a ‘hunch’ about the megalithic structures.
Glancing over toward the sleeping women, he noticed that one, at least, was awake and looking at him with eyes half open. “Good morning, Gefjon,” he said quietly. “I hope that you were at least moderately comfortable, since I’m sure that our accommodations are less luxurious than you’re used to.”
She smiled, then said, “I’ve been on campaigns before, and am not one of those soft women you see from time to time. The most disconcerting thing for me is the generous welcome offered to me by your wives, and the loving concern that you yourself have shown me. Many men would have been both insulted and deeply resentful to be tricked into fatherhood, and imposed upon with such contempt. How is it that you can forgive me so easily, and treat me with such kindness?”
He thought about her question for only a moment before replying, “I think that you were confused by warring emotions within yourself, so your behavior was, perhaps, a little bit erratic. At one moment you despised me for what you thought I represented, an oppressive tyrant who would impose himself on young girls, and at the next I flatter myself that you admired me, and it was that impulse which led you to ask for — perhaps demand would be a better word — my protection as your champion. Your bad opinions of me didn’t really bother me at all, since they were so far from what I am — the man I know myself to be — that it was clearly a misapprehension, so I think the violence of your reaction was the result of your own conflicting desires.” He paused, thinking, then added, “The other part of my reaction was that I was more than a little confused myself. When we first met, when we were stepping off the bridge which had carried us from the world of the Giants to your own, I felt a frisson of some deep connection that I didn’t fully understand, since I’m no philanderer, chasing after women for the sake of novelty or lust. I’m a family man, loyal, steadfast, and true, so that peculiar feeling was a strange experience for me, but it seems now to tell me that we were meant to meet you, and that you’re destined to be an important part of our journey toward the future.”
“So you planned to marry me all along?” she asked.
“Not at all!” he said honestly. “I don’t think that it would ever have occurred to me without the spur of your pregnancy, although I might be fooling myself. According to the customs of my people, the fact that we’d been sexually intimate is a presumption of the intent to marry, however it came about, and your pregnancy by me meant — as I was pointedly reminded by Selene and Rhea — that I now had all the obligations of a husband, to provide for you and protect you, to the best of my ability, for as long as you cared to have me do so. The fact that there was a pre-existing… attraction… made that obligation much easier, but didn’t change my clear duty, which is as much due our children as it is you, as the mother of our children. I believe, however, that there was always the possibility — perhaps even inevitability — of a deeper love between us, however this feeling may have confused and conflicted us both at first, and that we were meant to meet and be together, whether the Norns spun the separate threads of all our lives into a single yarn or some other power, destiny, fate, whatever we wish to call it, did the same.”
“Do you believe in fate, then, despite your claims?”
“In part, but only a small part. I don’t think that our destinies are immutable, as I told you once before, but at the same time I’ve seen a series of the most unlikely ‘lucky accidents’ conspire to further our quest to save all our worlds, so many that it would be foolish to assume that everything is accidental, or that the future is immutable. When my wives first came to the world of Akcuanrut and the Empress, for example, out of the entirety of time and space they happened to encounter the wizard in the middle of a journey far from home, and it was his help which allowed them to survive, come back to Earth, and meet me, for which I’m very thankful, since their presence in my life has been a source of continuing joy.”
“Isn’t he just dreamy?” Selene murmured, obviously awake by now. “He’s the sort of man who says what he truly thinks rather than merely what he thinks you want to hear.”
Phil grinned. “I’ve always been a bit lazy, and figured out early on that lying was a lot more work than simply telling the truth, because it left far fewer conflicting ‘fictions’ to keep track of.”
“Liar,” Rhea retorted promptly. “Don’t believe him, Gefjon, not for a moment. The fact is that he’s a sentimental softie, through and through, and only pretends to be something of a rogue to spare himself the embarrassment of being caught being all lovey-dovey by ‘the guys.’ ”
“Bosh!” he said. “One of our most sacred texts is a love poem, to wit, ‘How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.’ There’s a guy who doesn’t mind talking about his shoe fetish, much less his love for a beautiful woman.” He paused, looking carefully at the three women sprawled on the mattress before him, then said, “I agree with him about the joints of your thighs, though. There’s nothing on Earth, or any world, more beautiful than the graceful curve from a woman’s waist to her hip and thigh.”
“Well,” Rhea admitted with little reluctance, “I did forget to mention how incredibly brave he is as well, and so well-spoken, not to mention ruggedly handsome, which lovely qualities are enough to make most girl’s hearts go pitta-pat, although of course Selene and I are much more discriminating.”
“Brains plus beauty is our motto,” Selene confided, “but the fact that you can count on him in a pinch is his best attribute, we think, especially once the pregnancy hormones start running through your head.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve had three children of my own, you’ll remember, but could barely stand having their fathers around for much more than the time it took to shake hands.”
Both Selene and Rhea laughed at that. “If we ever get back to Earth, there’s a vid we’ve just got to show you.”
“A fid?” Gefjon asked, clearly very puzzled.
“It’s the punchline to an old joke,” they said, “and it’s difficult to explain without the lengthy shaggy dog story which precedes it. Don’t worry about it. It’s not very important in the first place, and we have all the time in the world.”
‘All the time in the world,’ Phil thought to himself. ‘All the time left for the world, as I sometimes fear, or all eternity?’ He closed his eyes as an oppressive sense of panic almost overwhelmed him, but then he reached out to touch the nearest of his wives, and that simple contact grounded him again, and narrowed his focus to what was there before him, far more than he deserved. ‘One does the best one can,’ he thought. ‘ “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.” ’ “All the time in the world,” he slowly mused aloud, “that’s more than enough time, I think.”
The southern edge of Vanaheimr was much like the northern edge they’d arrived on, and like that of the other worlds they’d seen, except that there was something like a rainbow spanning the immense gulf between two of the island worlds they could see far off in the distance, except that this rainbow had no particular relation to the sun, which was low on the western afternoon horizon as they looked to the south-east, toward the multi-colored arc of light. “What’s that?” Rhea asked, pointing toward the spectacular display.
Gefjon explained. “It’s Bifröst, the ætherial bridge between Miðgarðr and Ásgarðr, the worlds of human men and the Æsir, among whom was once numbered the old man you killed, my erstwhile ‘husband,’ although he never let the mere word limit the scope of his carnal adventures in the slightest.”
Phil laughed. “My very dear Gefjon, do I detect a certain lingering resentment? Surely an ignominious death at the hands of a mere mortal and the loss of any favorable reputation he may have had is punishment enough for any man. Should we try to resurrect him so we can kill him again?”
She smiled. “No, I suppose not. I have no particular fondness for either of his brothers, and see no reason to expose my new husband to a demand for wergeld that would benefit them. You may be very wealthy, but I’d hate to see you get the reputation of being a soft touch. One runs the risk of having a family — or a consortium of families — goad one of their less popular cousins into challenging you to a duel in hopes you’ll kill him and thus incur the fine.”
Phil was amazed. “People do that?”
“Of course,” she said. “Adventurers set off on dangerous voyages of all sorts, in hopes of bringing home a reward at the end of it to improve their own fortunes, and those of their families. If a few people die on the journey, so be it. If one comes from a poor family, five hundred or a thousand pieces of silver is a very large amount of money, perhaps enough to permanently change the family’s fortune for the better.”
“Do you think I gave too much then? To your former lovers, I mean.”
She thought about that for a good long time before answering, “In the first place, I wouldn’t call them ‘lovers,’ not exactly, they were just men I had sex with, primarily to spite my so-called ‘husband.’ In the second, I think that it was the perfect amount, because it was much more money than they had any right to expect, so they’d look like fools if they turned it down, and the Æsir hate looking like fools. They’re a dour sort, in general, and quick to quarrel, so turning down that much gold would have had people jeering at them for a hundred years or more and they’d spend the next hundred years fighting over one slur or another. They wouldn’t like that at all.”
“So what would you recommend to ensure that I don’t have people lined up to challenge me in hopes that I’ll kill them, if wishing to be dead can be called a ‘hope.’ ”
“If I were you, I’d hire Eiður Goðrúnarson — the Lögmaður who gave his judgement at your hearing — to be your advocate in any future quarrel, and let people know that you have him on retainer, since he’s widely known as being extremely learned in the law and as a very shrewd negotiator. He’s honest as well, which is always nice. There are limits to how far the law will go to protect fools from the results of their own actions, which is part of the reason why old Ásagrimmr wasn’t deemed worthy of any wergeld at all and — almost by definition — a relative non-entity without powerful relatives at hand who picks a fight with a skilled warrior who is surrounded by many powerful supporters is merely a fool. He was always more confident of his power than reality gave him reason to be. His own brothers cuckolded him without a thought, as far as I can see, which shows a certain contempt, I think, although — to be fair to their sense of loyalty — I'm somewhat difficult to resist.”
“I agree about Eiður,” Phil said, a little ill-at-ease with her casual attitude toward sexual encounters, despite her assurances. “He seemed very wise, and gave me his honest opinion, even when it wasn’t to his advantage.”
“That’s the sort of man he is. Your only remaining problem might be Þórr, since he’s a hothead and Ásagrimmr’s son, but Vili and Vé would be furious at him if he refused his share of their enormous compensation, because they’d have to give it back if he succeeded in killing you, so they’ll be working on him to keep him from flying off the handle, and might even threaten him with outlawry if their authority as the new heads of the family failed to move him to obey their edict. Even Þórr might well fear that, because he’s made many enemies over the years, who could then plot together to murder him with neither fear of reprisal nor judgement of wergeld to discourage them if they succeeded.”
“Remind me, please, to never get involved in local politics,” he said.
Gefjon laughed very prettily indeed. “Oh, but you are involved, and have made quite an impression. Taking out the old man with such dispatch has given you quite the reputation as a warrior — since he was a powerful warrior in his own right — and the fact that he was so desperate and unsure of himself after being easily bested by you in a physical confrontation that he resorted to foul seiðer in the midst of a large gathering just crowns your achievement with the stuff of legend.”
“But he was mostly trying to hurt you, not me…,” he protested.
“Shhhh!” She held her hand against his lips. “That’s certainly not the way my spies have spread the tale around, and I’d advise you to keep this bit of information to yourself. In the first place, no one will believe you, because even he couldn’t have afforded to pay my wergeld, which would have been multiplied enormously by his use of treacherous methods, but we have a sort of ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ to avoid mentioning crimes against women, because they bring shame upon the perpetrator and his family, however common such crimes might be in ‘real life.’ In the ordinary course of events I’d probably have to have sex with both the brothers to smooth their ruffled feathers, but I find that I’d prefer not to do that after all, so you see how easily I’ve been swayed toward you and your strange lifestyle. Please don’t let me down by a tiresome insistence on literal truth, when poetic ‘license’ is much more appropriate and useful to our purpose.”
“Yeah, Phil,” Selene complained. “Don’t be such a pill. If our sister here has to have sex with anyone to keep your butt out of the fire, we’ll have to act in solidarity with her and do the same, to uphold the family honor.”
“I’m with them,” Rhea said simply, then closed her eyes and rolled over to embrace Selene and Gefjon with a sigh before she fell instantly to sleep again.
Phil just laid there staring at his wives, who’d all of them closed their eyes in sleep within seconds of each other, and were hogging all the blankets again, seemingly as happy as clams. His friend Eiður the Lögmaður was right, he thought. Being married was a full-time job, and he was still an amateur. “Dang!” he said, aggrieved, then tried to get back to sleep without much success at all.
“Wake up, Dear, it’s morning!” Rhea said cheerfully from somewhere above him, but he was so groggy that he couldn’t quite focus his eyes to see her.
“Whatever are you doing sleeping on the wet grass when you could have had a nice warm snuggle in bed?” she asked, evidently unconscious of any irony.
“I dunno,” he managed to say, resisting the urge to spit out the foul taste in his mouth, still trying to clear his head and make sense of his surroundings. “Where are Selene and Gefjon?” he asked, suddenly unsure about whether he wanted to know the answer to that question.
“Oh, out and about,” she said blithely. “We can’t spend all our days in bed, can we?” With that cryptic remark, she was out through the flap and gone.
Grumbling, he managed to haul himself to his knees, mobile enough to scrounge around and find a flask of water, which he used to rinse out his mouth before opening the flap of the tent and spitting out what was left onto the grass off to one side of the entrance. Yawning, he tried to look around the area outside, shielding his eyes against the glare of the morning sun, but couldn’t see any trace of them, neither Rhea nor Selene nor Gefjon.
‘First things first,’ he thought to himself, and gathered together a fresh shirt and the rest of his clothes, dressed as well as he could manage, and then ducked out the door with his water flask, one of the frayed twigs that passed for toothbrushes here, and a rag, heading toward a nearby copse of woods and underbrush to perform his morning ablutions and arrange his brain into some semblance of order.
It didn’t take long, although he regretted for the umpteenth time the lack of hot and cold running water. Of all the pleasures that living on modern Earth provided, a long hot shower was the one he missed the most. That and big terrycloth towels to dry off with after. Camping out here in the wilderness, or even sleeping in what were essentially rustic mountain cabins with no plumbing or central heating — however grand they were inside and out — had been fun for a while, and he could live with it even for the long term, because of the overriding importance of their mission, but it would sure be nice to show Gefjon the sort of luxury that Selene and Rhea had grown up with, and eventually return to the comfort of their mountain home on Earth.
“Hej! Husband! Are you done in there?” Gefjon was yelling to him from the edge of the woods, invisible from where he stood.
“I am,” he yelled back. “Just thinking for a minute before I walked back to camp. I’ll be right there.” Checking the ground around him carefully to be sure that he hadn’t left anything visible behind, he turned and pushed his way through the brush until he saw her waiting in the morning sun, the light behind her framing her face with a soft bright halo of golden tresses, her face in the partial shade of her own head, but still radiant with inner light. “I missed you all when I woke up, but surely deserved it. I can only offer my apology for failing to realize that what on Earth would be seen as ‘proper’ modesty has a different meaning here in your country. I promise to be guided by your superior level of experience and knowledge in the future, and try to be as boastful as the men in this land seem to be by nature.”
She smiled. “Please don’t try too very much, my sweet man, just enough to get by without other men taking you for a ‘wimp.’ Quite frankly, your unwavering kindness and concern for others is part of what makes me love you. Selene and Rhea have already explained your natural reticence to me as a habit formed on your ‘Earth,’ where the constant preening and cockiness of our local men would be seen as a sign of insecurity, a type of compensation for an inner weakness. I am persuaded by them that you’re a bold knight and true, but that in your traditions of chivalry a nobleman cares more for the comfort of his lady than his own, and places her life and safety above his own as well.”
“True.” He nodded. “That pretty much covers the basics of manly behavior in our world, but you’ve left off a gentleman’s most important duty toward his lady, which is to love her with all his heart.” He took her hand. “Shall we go find the others?”
She grinned. “We should, and it’s early yet, so I’m sure that it will be some time before we’re really ready to leave. I know you didn’t sleep at all well last night, so perhaps we should take a little nap before we unfold your clever little bridge and set off to see the Ljósálfar.”
“It might be a good idea,” he said, a little sourly, remembering why he hadn’t slept well, “and I can practice being overbearing and annoying, so you can critique my performance. I’m fairly sure that with enough practice I can as much of a jerk as any local man.”
She smiled at him sweetly. “See, you’re doing better already. Next time, try to pout a little….”
Now, he really felt aggrieved. “Look! I’m trying to….”
She interrupted him, mid-rant. “I know you are, but I’m quite a bit older than you are, with a wider experience of at least this world, and I doubt that men and women in your world are all that different from the people I’m familiar with. Without any hint of disrespect or lack of love, I’m afraid you have a tendency to be too nice, which is a lovely change from the average man in these parts, but not necessarily ideal. Women, most women, like a man to be a bit of a ‘bad boy;’ not too much, but enough to make him feel like a male to her, a delightful contrast to her own softer femininity, and to let her know that he’ll fight like a savage wolf to protect her and her cubs.”
“But Rhea and Selene do know that!” he shouted, angry with her, and with Rhea and Selene as well, for putting him in this stupid situation. “And you, for that matter. Whether I’d had that sword you gave me or not, I would have protected you, and I think you know it.”
“But would you protect me from myself, Sir Phil?” She raised an eyebrow. “If you knew that I was planning to do something foolish, would you do your very best to prevent me? Would you fight for me, even if I were angry? If I were so overcome with fury that I said something hateful, set off to do something rash, would you fight with me to keep what’s yours?” She challenged him with her haughty stare as well as with her words….
…and that was all it took. “Yes!” he roared and reached for her, clutching her close to his body as she molded herself to him, digging her nails into his back as he rained hungry kisses on her neck, her lips “You’re mine!” he whispered fiercely, almost bruising her lips with his own as he devoured her, marking her neck, the swelling of her breasts, with his fierce nibbles at her body, tasting her, reaching down to her shapely buttocks to pull her toward his need as he ground himself against her moistening core.
“Yes!” she cried, reaching desperately down to snatch her skirt out of the way as she spread her legs to accept his thrusts and he lifted her with effortless strength and slammed her back against a tree, pulling up his kilt to free his manhood as he plunged himself inside her, taking her, owning her, forcing her to submit to his superior strength as she began to scream, “Yes! Yes! Take me! My stallion! My love! Oh, oh, oh, oh, unh!” and then she came and came again, screaming wordlessly, as he erupted inside her.
Heart pounding, chest heaving as he labored to catch his breath, he held her close until the tension left her body and she almost collapsed into his arms. Then he crooned to her, cradling her body in his arms, petting her hair, kissing her lightly on the eyelids with exquisitely gentle kisses. “Be still, my darling girl, be calm. All is well, and you’re held safe within my arms, your heart's desires my own, and your person mine always to defend.”
She stirred, then looked up into his eyes, and said with lazy lethargy and hooded lids, “That was very nice, Phil, a perfect mix of ruthless masculinity and tender concern.”
“I aim to please.” he said simply.
“And your aim is improving,” she said seductively. “Remind me to be naughty again very, very soon.”
“Somehow,” he said with gentle irony, “I suspect that you’ll manage to provoke my lust whether I remind you to do so or not, don’t you think?”
She smiled a cryptic smile. “I might. I might not. It all depends.”
“Depends of what?” he asked.
“On how well you keep me in line,” she said softly. “Some girls are just born bad….”
“And some have badness thrust upon them,” he said roughly, pulling her against him again, reaching down and under her already disheveled skirts to firmly cradle her center in his palm, using his thumb and fingers to stroke her into madness with sure skill, using just the right combination of gentleness and pressure to arouse her into a frenzy of wanting him inside her, but he made no move to take her properly, teasing her with her own hunger for him, molding her into his woman, only his, until she came helplessly for him, surrendering her will to his, and “Please!” was all she said, over and over again, “Please…!” until he finally relented and lifted her leg, then plunged his hardness into her molten core. She came instantly, and it was better than before, much better, and she came shuddering until she could no longer stand, her limbs like water as she fell into his arms.
“I hope,” he said, as he hefted her into his arms and carried her back toward their tent, “that this teaches you a valuable lesson, young lady.” At the entrance, he didn’t pause, but merely shifted his grip so he held her with one hand wrapped around her, cradling her buttocks in the palm of his hand, taking her entire weight easily as he lifted the tentflap and lowered her to their rough mattress, where Rhea and Selene lay resting, both looking up at him in amusement.
“I believe,” drawled Selene, “that I might like a little of what she’s been having.”
“I think I’ll have that too,” Rhea added, “so I hope we have enough to go around.”
“Ladies,” he said, “as I mentioned before, my strength….”
“…is the strength of ten,” they all three said in chorus….
“…because my heart is pure,” he acknowledged graciously.
After their ‘nap,’ during which Phil didn’t manage to sleep at all, they discovered that they couldn’t leave that afternoon in any case, because the Empress D’Larona-Elvi came to him with a strange request; to wit, she wanted to divorce the Emperor and marry Phil, which she commanded him to do forthwith, as his lawful sovereign. She graciously acknowledged that he was free to keep his other wives, since the safety of their mission depended on it.
They were outside their tent at the time, taking their leisure in the warmish noonday sun, which was high in the sky but not directly overhead because of whatever passed for latitude in this crazy world. “But…,” said Phil….
…only to be cut off by Gefjon, who said, “Of course you must be married, my dear friend Larona. In times of scarcity, we must all needs share and share alike.”
Oddly enough, neither Selene nor Rhea made any objection, but merely smiled at her. Rhea even winked, as if to say that she sympathized with her plight, a woman on a long journey from which she might very well never return, without the solace of a husband to keep her warm at night.
Phil didn’t know exactly what to say, nor exactly how he’d been able to read so much into her wink, so Akcuanrut was summoned to hear the official declaration of divorcement made by the Empress.
When the wizard arrived, however, he came across the grassy meadow accompanied by two of Queen Gefjon’s daughters, Hnoss, a comely blonde, and Gersemi a beautiful brunette, who were draped around his chubby neck like feather boas, both rubbing his tummy ‘for good luck,’ as they proudly announced. The portly man looked mortified, and somewhat frightened, but he was smiling at the same time — albeit a little dazed — and ‘The Twins,’ as their mother promptly introduced them to one and all, followed up their puzzling pronouncement with another, “We’re getting married! Isn’t he cute? We think he’s just too, too adorable! Is Menglöð here yet?”
Their mother answered, “Not yet; but she’s coming, or soon will be, I suspect,” at which all the women laughed, for some reason.
“Who’s Menglöð?” Phil asked.
“My other daughter, by Ullir, as it happens, but you haven’t met him. He wandered off quite some time ago, and I have no idea where he went, but that’s men for you,” she said flippantly, “here one day and then gone the next.”
Phil was a little confused. “But if Hnoss and Gersemi are twins, where’s your other daughter? I thought you had just three, but then you said that they all had different fathers.”
Heedless of the fact that they had a curious audience that seemed to be growing as people and centaurs trickled in from other portions of the camp, she answered, “Hnoss and Gersemi here are twins,” she explained patiently, as one might speak to a child, “because they were both conceived on the very same night, and born one right after the next, of course, but they do have different sires, as almost anyone can see. Vili and Vé are the fathers, in fact, so you’ll be able to meet them at the weddings.”
“Oh,” he said, suddenly realizing exactly how ‘adventurous’ his new wife had been, and exactly how uncomfortable he was discussing this before an audience, but then… “They’re coming here?” he asked, alarmed.
“Of course.” She was slightly taken aback by his seeming timidity and frowned slightly. “You wouldn’t want to be rude to your new brothers-in-law, would you? It wouldn’t be good politics, considering that you’ve just killed their brother.”
“Unh, no, I guess not….”
“Oh, good. You’ll have to take special care to watch out for them at the wedding feast, though, because they may start to feel a little… frisky… once they’ve had a horn or two of ale.”
“What do you mean, exactly, by ‘frisky?’ ” he asked, his brows deeply furrowed.
“I mean that they’ll be chasing after anything in skirts, of course, and that they’re not too picky. I wouldn’t trust either of them around any wife of mine, of course, but then I don’t have that particular problem.”
“And what problems might you have?” he asked suspiciously.
“Well,” she admitted, “I do have a soft spot in my heart for the fathers of my children, however distasteful they may be to me on a purely personal level. But you know how men are, of course; once they’ve sipped from the well, they often feel quite free to drink deeply again, whether the woman involved is willing or not, and of course they’ll probably be a little jealous too — aside from their natural distaste for the man who’s bedded their former lover and murdered their brother — and so may seek to ‘even the score’ a little by taking a little sip from one of your wells.”
Phil was beginning to feel like he was being played for a sucker, even more conscious of their audience,especially Akcuanrut, who might as well have been taking notes, so rapt was he in this particular matrimonial interaction. “This sounds like it’s being set up as a repeat of the unfortunate ‘incident’ with your ex-husband.”
“That’s where diplomacy comes in, Sweetheart.” She looked a little exasperated. “Do I have to spell all this out for you? I know how I’d do it with my women friends, of course, I’d have everyone over for a nice talk and we’d chat about things for a while and eventually come together in a sort of tacit understanding that didn’t actually hurt anyone’s feelings, or at least not too terribly much, and then we’d hug and kiss and nearly everyone would go home happy. I have the impression that men don’t operate that way, but don’t ask me to explain them to you, because I simply don’t know.”
“Believe me,” Phil said, “in my limited experience on Earth, I don’t believe that I’ve ever encountered a situation in which men stand around and ‘chat’ about sexual intrigue, murderous assault, and bloody revenge with all the sangfroid of the latest weather report, other than as mere tales told about people far removed from their daily lives.”
“Have you no leaders among your people then?” she asked. “Are there none who deal with affairs of state? I find this difficult to believe. We’re talking about people — including myself and the Empress here — who are numbered among the rulers and/or creators of entire worlds; do you suppose that you can mingle with them intimately without becoming involved with their areas of authority and conflict? You yourself have set off to murder Surtr and countless of his relatives and acquaintances; do you imagine that you can do this without taking lives?” She looked skeptical in the extreme.
“Well, I hadn’t quite got around to visualizing the actual encounter, in which I’m at fault, I think.”
“Probably. You’re young to be a war leader, but it’s almost always the young who march off to war. In that you’re not exceptional at all. And sooner or later you’re going to make grave decisions about life and death. Can this particular foe — now seemingly repentant and desperately anxious to survive — be trusted to keep his word? You’ve had several recent opportunities to observe that deceit and treachery can be involved in any interaction, and acted quickly and decisively in at least one to avoid being caught up in it yourself, and to protect those whose safety depended on you. Most importantly, though, can you bear to risk the lives of people you love and respect in separate encounters in which you have no possibility of intervening, trusting them to either succeed or fail on their own? ”
“So I’m coming to understand,” he said, his expression very grave.
“Then remember: The Sons of Muspell are the eldest of all, and not human in any sense, much less humane. They have no more regard for human lives — nor even those of the Æsir and the Vanes — than you might be concerned for insects. As a naughty boy might step on a grasshopper for his own amusement, just to hear the little ‘pop’ as its shell exploded, or pour water on an ants nest, taking a malicious delight in the sight of them scurrying around trying to save their eggs and Queen, so the Fire Jötunns delight in any death or suffering, unless it is their own.”
“We’ve seen their work,” Phil said, “and many of the women here with us were the victims of their malice at second hand, through a baleful object we know as ‘The Heart of Virtue,’ which seems inimical in its own right, and needs no external direction.”
She smiled, a little wan, “Like your sword Brenðr, for example, although it has a higher purpose, having been dwarf-forged at great cost specifically to turn the tide in the final battle. The Goddess Sinmœra, Surtr’s sometime companion, is rumored to have crafted a deadly weapon named Hævateinn, which she supposedly keeps locked in an iron chest with nine strong locks upon it, which will be opened at the ending of the world, to the world’s ruin.”
Phil looked down at his sword, which had trembled, whether in eagerness or loathing, at the mention of Sinmœra’s weapon. “Nine locks…. It seems a curious coïncidence that this number reflects the number of your worlds.”
“Perhaps not purely a coïncidence, Husband; this weapon was forged by Sinmœra herself at the very gates of Hel, which lies very near the roots of Yggdrasil, the foundation of all the worlds.”
“Is there anything that’s actually known about it, other than its mere existence?” The wizard was very interested in this as well, but refrained from comment.
“Other than the name, no,” she said, “and no one knows what the name actually means, other than, perhaps, Sinmœra herself, only that it’s predicted to drive all before it during the Ragnarök. Some say that it’s a fiery sword, while some believe that it’s a flail or whip of fire, but no one knows why it doesn’t burn, or even if any of these words, ‘fire,’ ‘sword,’ ‘whip,’ are reasonable terms to describe whatever it is that Hævateinn is.”
Phil had a sudden vision of the ancient centaur’s carved stone tableau that showed dwarves holding up the Heart while the centaurs fled in panic. “I think that our ‘Heart of Virtue’ and your ‘Hævateinn’ are one and the same,” he said, suddenly very sure. “In the Temple, or Palace, of the ancient centaurs, there’s a sculpted battle scene which depicts centaurs, dwarves, and giants fighting, although neither dwarves nor giants appear to be native to that world. In that battle, a group of dwarves were holding up what appears to be the ‘Heart,’ and the centaurs were all running away from it, which perfectly fits your description of its effects.”
“Perhaps it’s another weapon entirely,” Gefjon said. “How could Hævateinn have been transported from Hel’s Gates to another world entirely?”
“Perhaps,” Phil agreed, “but there’s a kind of rule of thumb called ‘parsimony’ on my world, which says roughly that the simplest solution that fits all the facts is probably the best working hypothesis. We have incontrovertible evidence of people from these worlds in one of ours, wielding a weapon which appears to be capable of exactly the effects that you describe, and the means by which it does this are terrible, since it dissolves the flesh and bone of its victims and then reanimates them as undead slaves to its own purpose. We also know that a recent attack was made on us as we were transporting the Heart to a place of safekeeping by a known group of dwarves from Svartálfheimr, whom King Alvís identified as Dáinn and Náinn, together with their people. I think we can assume from this that a portal exists here that allowed these Dvergar to travel there, possibly through Niflheimr, the world of the Nine Worlds closest to the root of Yggdrasil, as I understand it. That would explain how giants and dwarves from these worlds were able to attack the ancient centaurs, and how your ‘Hævateinn’ may have been transported to Myriad.”
“But what about the iron chest and locks?”
“Possibly a metaphor…? I don’t exactly know, but it makes some sort of cryptic sense that the Nine Worlds themselves could be described as the ‘locks’ that prevent access to the hidden entrance to Akcuanrut’s world, the so-called ‘chest’ in which the magic weapon is kept. It was, in fact, hidden ‘safely’ away for thousands of years, exactly how long I don’t know, other than the fact that many of the artifacts in the Temple had turned to dust, or nearly so, since last the centaurs had inhabited it. I understand that your poets are very much fascinated by elaborate ‘kennings’ to describe commonplace objects in clever ways that reference other famous stories or poems.”
“That’s true,” she said. “Wordplay and oratory are much admired by all, and challenging one’s audience to remember other famous stories that have some relation to your own is an important part of every performance, since those who remember the story will be amused by the puzzled looks of those who don’t, and everyone will be pleased by a skald who manages to reference many stories in the course of telling one.” She paused for a moment, thinking, then added, “Of course, it’s also a sort of self-advertisement, because he’s also claiming to know all those stories well enough to reference them spontaneously, and would thus be a good fellow to invite to the next feast.”
Phil smiled, since words were his other stock-in-trade. “In our world, we do the same, and so-called ‘literary references’ have formed a portion of our major works of art from time immemorial, and of course our language is partially-descended from your own, so our word arts have a direct relationship to the skaldic traditions you maintain in their purest form.”
“This claim is still incredible to me,” Gefjon said, “although you clearly believe it. If you already know our past, how does this differ from our own concept of Fate?”
“In the first place, we know very little, since in our world the practitioners of a foreign religion did their very best to obliterate or disguise all references to the Gods and Goddesses of the Nine Worlds. In the second, our future and yours obviously join together right about now, so the flow of time seems to have split apart between our two worlds, much as a river might take two paths down a shallow valley, and then come together again further downstream. On one branch of this imaginary river, the stream spread out and meandered, running lazily across a shallow plain, while on the other, it plunged down in a rapid torrent, only to meet its ‘other half’ somewhere down the larger valley.”
“You did mention,” she said, still puzzled, “that half a year had passed on your world while you dallied in the world of the Empress for only a few months, but it still seems impossible.”
“It’s a difficult puzzle,” Phil admitted, “and our ‘scientists,’ — what you might call either spækonas or artisans in metals and other things — are still arguing about the details, last I heard, but as a partial corroboration of my claim, we have a word ‘scold,’ — pronounced by combining ess, kay, oh, ell, duh — which is directly related to your word ‘skald,’ and refers to ‘flyting,’ a contest of insults which I understand is much admired in your worlds. We have another word ‘scald,’ which is pronounced in almost exactly the same manner, but with an ‘ah’ sound in place of the ‘oh’ sound, which means roughly ‘to burn someone’s flesh,’ and probably refers to the blush that a telling insult might bring to one’s face.”
Gefjon had just started to say something when she was interrupted by an angry male voice that seemed to come from nowhere, “Enough of these foolish blatherings! This whore who stands before us spreads her legs for any man! I mys….” the voice was suddenly cut off by a heavy grunt….
…as Rhea and Selene both hurled a dozen knives each into the empty air….
…which caused that curious vacancy, now decorated by the hilts of exactly two dozen knives seemingly suspended in mid-air, to topple to the ground, whereupon….
…both women snatched what seemed to have been a cloak, now tattered and bloodstained, from a wiry and muscular redheaded man who was writhing on the ground and trying to speak.
“Loki!” Gefjon cried. “We are undone through treachery!”
“Not hardly,” Phil said calmly, his hand already on his sword, which handily lopped off the said Loki’s head for him just as he’d begun to speak some sinister words of seiðer in an effort either to murder someone or escape.
As the villain’s head toppled haphazardly to the grassy area beneath the body, Phil added, “I think it’s safe to say, though, that the Dark Gods — whoever they may be — are aware of our presence, and undoubtedly our purpose, but that’s never been all that much of a secret.”
“Isn’t he just dreamy?” Selene and Rhea asked rhetorically in chorus, smiling broadly.
Akcuanrut and the Empress D’Larona-Elvi merely looked alarmed.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-Eight
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.— Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan (1798)
“Well,” Gefjon said calmly, “that will certainly simplify the order of battle at Ragnarök, since you seem to be decimating the ranks of those who were foretold either to be arrayed against us or to fail at their appointed tasks.”
“You’ll have to admit that I played a relatively minor rôle,” he said, “at least in this. Selene and Rhea had pretty much scotched his little plot — whatever it was — by the time I put the cherry on top.” He spoke offhandedly, since he was inspecting the remnants of the cloak, which was grey, evidently woven of spider silk, and whatever spell had been used to make the wearer invisible had been disrupted by the many holes poked through it by his wives.
“ ‘Cherry on top?’ ” Gefjon asked.
“A decorative but non-essential bit of fruit placed on top of a sweet desert to make it look pretty,” he said. It was some sort of Tarnkappe, he thought, but he wasn’t familiar enough with Norse stories to identify its provenance, just off hand.
“We’re just a little sorry about the mess,” Rhea and Selene declared, “but no one talks about our sister wife with such contempt while we’re around.”
“Think nothing of it, dears,” Phil assured them. “He was a spy in our midst, as Gefjon observed, and undoubtedly plotting to harm us in some way.” He turned to Gefjon and asked, “Do you have any idea where this cloak might have come from?” he asked Gefjon.
“I’d assume that it’s the work of the Dvergar,” she said, “but I’m not sure who or why, other than that someone probably either paid them or forced them to make it through trickery or threats. They’re quite ingenious, so if you want something made, all you have to do is tell them what you want and they somehow manage to do it. Loki is, or was, a notorious thief, so it could really have come from anywhere, but the fact that he was killed during his use of this thing makes me suspect that he’d either threatened the dwarf who made it or cheated him, since his death is likely to be at least indirectly the result of a curse put upon it by its maker. I myself have a dwarf-made feather cloak that enables one to fly, but have no head for heights, so I very rarely use it, but it works, and seems quite safe, but then I never tried to cheat the artisan who made it for me. I have a dwarf-made necklace as well, which is very helpful to me, because it has a minor curse on it, so it simply comes undone and falls off when I’m angry.”
“Why would that be helpful?” Phil asked her, puzzled.
“Ready anger,” she said, “while sometimes necessary, rarely becomes a Queen. The necklace Brisingamen reminds me to act like a Queen as well as be one. The necklace was given to me as a gift, so I presume that the donor had made the maker angry, but not angry enough to really annoy me, an innocent third party.”
Phil smiled. “I noticed how kind and patient you were among your own people, so it must have had something to work with, if it’s truly changed your behavior at all.”
The Queen smiled back at him and said, “And let me assure you that the least of your gifts is far more precious to me, and much more beautiful, than that old necklace. I do wear it, though, because it’s part of my formal regalia, and my people expect it.”
“But what about the fact that the Dark Gods know where we are,” Akcuanrut said angrily, interrupting their increasingly personal interaction, while the Empress merely raised an eyebrow to suggest that she had some concerns as well.
“Sir, Ma’am, it’s been obvious from the beginning, even before I became involved, that they had some method of keeping track of you, since they were able to intervene at a crucial moment when it looked like you were winning in the fight with Na-Noc. Their powers are obviously limited, though, at least through whatever means they used to open a portal back to Earth, which you were all sucked through, including the Heart of Virtue, which was and is apparently very important to their plans. The fact that it slipped out of their hands not once, but twice — or three times if you count the Heart’s capture of Na-Noc, who seems to have had his own agenda — implies that their powers are limited in ways we have still to explore, but at very least they don’t have the same level of control over portals that the ancient centaurs did, for only one example.”
“Couldn’t they do that again, though?”
“Possibly, but we’ve made great strides in understanding portals since then, and have studied the centaur texts to very good effect, in some areas, I think, even going beyond what the ancient centaurs were capable of. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we were now able to trace their meddling back to its point of origin — if they tried to do it again — in which case they’d already have lost, because we’d then have direct access to the center of their power.”
The Empress asked, “Is that why they sent a spy, do you think, instead of eavesdropping through magic as they had before?”
“I do. In fact, my guess is that they opened a portal somewhere near here — but not too near —to deliver their spy, so it might be worth looking for any traces left behind. I daresay you, Sir, would be able to detect a recent portal anywhere within a few miles, at least.”
“I suppose I could, now that you mention it. I’ll get right on it.” He turned….
…only to be met with the Empress’s frosty stare. “Not so fast, Wizard!” she said imperiously. “You have a few duties to perform first, I think. I require an official Court Witness, and Sir Phillip is involved, so he won’t do.”
“Yes, yes,” the wizard said in haste. “Do get on with it!” he said impatiently.
She arched a brow and frowned at him, then began to speak, “I, the Empress Larona, do hereby renounce and dissolve my marriage to the former Emperor Elvi of Myriad, on the grounds of long-standing impotence hitherto utterly resistant to cure or amelioration over the course of seven years, the which debility renders him unfit to rule, according to our ancient law and customs, or to serve any further purpose as Emperor of Myriad. Do you hear me and bear witness?”
He bowed slightly and said, “I do, Empress.”
“That said,” she continued, “I do hereby take Sir Phillip, Master Wizard of the Imperial College of Wizards, as my husband and Imperial Consort according to the law and customs of Myriad, and also announce my intention to follow the general customs of his own people in regard to certain specifics of our marriage. Do you hear me and bear witness?”
The wizard bowed again, this time lower, and said formally, “I do, Empress D’Larona-Cohn, and so must it be at once and ever onward.”
“Thank you, Master Wizard,” she said with equal formality. “You have my gratitude and a trebled benefice, as suits your new status in my esteem, the which I’m given to understand you’ll soon have need of, together with certain properties in homage.”
The wizard instantly knelt before her and said, “I am your liege man, my Empress, both myself and my heirs in perpetuity.”
“Well, that’s done, then,” she said brightly. “We’ll discuss exactly which properties and titles you’ll require if and when we survive. No sense bothering about tedious paperwork if we don’t need it, but do send on a formal notice to my Court at your earliest convenience, and please arrange for some sort of respectable pension for my dear Elvi.”
“I will, my Empress.”
At once, she turned to Phillip and said, “Will tomorrow be too soon for our formal ceremony, Dear? I’m not terribly familiar with your customs, but would like it to be as soon as possible for… deeply personal reasons.”
Phil looked toward his wives, who evidently knew all about this, and they nodded, although Selene also had the gall to wink at him. “It’s the sort of thing that I can accomplish whilst standing on one foot, and will perform right now, but considering your stature and Imperial office, I do think we should hold a more formal ceremony tomorrow. It will take that long, I think, for Master Wizard Akcuanrut to draw up the necessary documents, and possibly arrange for guests.”
She smiled, very pleased. “The members of our company will suffice, I think, since I can think of no more honorable or august entourage, and we should also arrange for the marriages of the Lord Akcuanrut and his new brides.” Then she reached out and took his hand in hers….
…to which gesture he replied, reaching into his sporran to grasp the ring he’d conjured earlier in preparation for this moment. “With this ring, I, Philip Avraham Cohn, consecrate and sanctify you, Larona, to me as my wife according to ancient Jewish tradition and betroth you to me in everlasting faithfulness forever. I shall treasure you, nourish you, and respect you as have all those husbands who have devoted themselves to their wives with love and integrity throughout the generations. ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart, like this seal upon your hand, for love is stronger than death.’ Let our home be built on truth and loving-kindness, rich in wisdom and reverence. May we always keep these words from the Song of Songs in our hearts as a symbol of our eternal commitment to each other: ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.’ I joyfully enter into this covenant and solemnly accept its obligations forever and for all time. My promises to you, in the presence of our loving friends, are valid and binding under the laws of this and every world.” He then broke off and added, “We can actually just as well do the rest tomorrow, in the presence of more formal witnesses, when we have your ketubah prepared.”
“Oh, good,” she said, then she lowered her voice and said, “While it hasn’t exactly been seven years — one has to be so discreet at Court — it’s been a good long time.” Then she made a wry face.
Once more, Phil was astounded by the shrewd perceptions of Rhea and Selene, who’d intuited the Empress’s ‘secret’ life after simply glancing at her Orrery. “I’ll do my best to make it up to you,” he said.
Selene and Rhea laughed. “Oh, Honey! We promise that you won’t be sorry! Our Phil is quite the man. It’s something to do with the bris, we think.”
“Bris?” the Empress said.
“I’ll explain later,” Phil said, more than slightly embarrassed.
“I can hardly wait,” she said, one imperious eyebrow raised, and with an air of intrigue.
“Please don’t be shy about expressing your personal desires, either,” Gefjon said confidentially. “Our Phil is very versatile, and quite inventive.”
Rhea and Selene laughed in pure delight. “We’re all going to be such good friends!”
“Wake up, Phil,” two familiar voices whispered into his ears. “It’s the big day already, so we have to get you ready.” Phil was surprisingly comfortable, because they’d all moved into the Empress’s pavilion, so the mattress was much larger, and the tent was huge, as befits an Empress, he imagined. Four wives wasn’t as difficult as three, he’d decided, because the whole arrangement was a little more symmetrical, from his perspective at least, so he’d wound up in the very center of the bed and was warm and toasty, despite being a little tired. He didn’t feel at all crowded, either, which was, he supposed, another perquisite that came with marrying an Empress who traveled in relative luxury.
“I’m awake,” he said, “and it’s a brand new day, although it’s a little difficult trying not to descend into cliché.”
“How’s this, then?” Gefjon said, “You’re going to be a daddy!”
“Unh, again?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Twins again.”
He turned to Larona and asked, “Is that okay with you, Sweetheart?”
Larona laughed and leaned over Rhea to kiss him. “Of course it is, Phil! One of the side-effects of having the local Goddess of love and fertility as one’s sister wife seems to be that I’ve somehow mislaid thirty years, so I feel lots better than I have in simply ages. The only problem I can foresee is convincing all the people who stayed home that I’m still me!”
Phil laughed with her and said, “Not to worry, Honey! I’ll bedazzle them with the theory of relativity and differing space-time coördinate systems until their heads spin right around and they’ll believe anything we say.”
“It will be much easier than that,” Gefjon said smugly. “I didn’t want my two favorite daughters saddled with an old man, so I set the wizard’s clock back to his late teens, so he has a slightly better chance of keeping up with Hnoss and Gersemi, so to speak.” She winked and grinned and Phil instantly revised his opinion of her powers as a Goddess radically upwards.
“I can see that being married to you three women is going to be a constant source of amusement and surprise,” Larona said, “but we’ll have to be up soon and about our day if we’re to accomplish everything in good order.”
“Do we have to?” Selene and Rhea said in plaintive chorus.
“I’m afraid so, dears, we have at least two Court weddings to arrange, one today, and one tomorrow, and if you’ll look in those chests over in that corner, I’ve conjured up a selection of courtly gowns for all of us, so we’ll have fittings to do, and last-minute adjustments to make before we’re quite ready.”
“Oooh!” Rhea said for both of them, “new clothes!‘ and bounced out of bed, followed closely by Selene, and they ran to the corner where they began opening the leather coffers and examining the contents, exclaiming over the array of lovely garments there neatly folded.
“Say,” the Empress said suspiciously, addressing Gefjon in particular “does this mean I’m going to have my monthly flow again?”
Gefjon laughed and said, “Well, not for nine or ten months from now, I can promise you that!” She lowered her voice then and added, “On the other hand, you’ll find yourself much more comfortable in other ways, if you know what I mean.”
Her eyes grew wide and she realized, then said, “So that’s the reason! I thought that it was just the excitement!”
“No, I do good work,” she said, “so now let’s look at these gowns of yours. It’s been ages since I’ve worn anything I didn’t make myself!”
They were both getting up with slightly more dignity than had Selene and Rhea when there was a sudden rush of hooves — at least two horses by the sound — and a shouted, “Hej! Are you in there, Mama?” from an alto female voice outside the pavilion.
“Halló, Sweetie! We’re in here,” Gefjon called out cheerily as a very tall blonde woman in a diaphanous yellow gown strode through the door, followed closely by two men-at-arms who looked both upset and unsure of themselves.
“That will do, men!” said the Empress instantly. “She’s our honored guest.”
“Yes, your Imperial Highness,” they said and backed promptly out the door, bowing as they left posthaste.
“Larona, everyone, let me introduce my other favorite daughter, Eir Menglöð, who will be a very valuable addition to our company, but she does present us with a tiny problem.”
“Which is?” Larona asked.
“Like me, she’s a sworn virgin, and not that fond of men in general, a predilection that I myself didn’t share with her, but as I understand it, being married is an important criterion for the members of our company.”
“So I’m given to understand,” Larona said. “All the men-at-arms have wives at home, and the very many sisters of Rhea and Selene here are married — as a formality, at least — to our Phil, whilst the centaur mares are all married to Thundercloud. The Lord Akcuanrut was the last detail to attend to, as far as I know, and now that’s taken care of, thanks to your lovely daughters.‘ She turned to face Rhea and Selene, who were happily trying on clothes, exclaiming over the thoughtfulness of Larona, who’d managed to create courtly gowns with concealed side slits and sheaths for their usual knives tidily tucked beneath their skirts. As warriors in their own right, they were entitled to carry their swords ready-to-hand in hangers at their side, of course, but their complement of other weapons was an issue, in a strictly formal sense. “Rhea, Selene, what do you say? He was your husband first, after all.”
They looked up and said in unison, “She’ll have to marry Phil, of course, first because we promise that she’ll just love him, because he’s not like other men, as you well know, Gefjon and Larona, and you will learn, Eir Menglöð, but also because both of us are very flexible in that regard, so you’ll have the best of both worlds!” They both winked, and Menglöð blushed.
Phil felt slightly aggrieved, since he was being discussed and parcelled out as if he were a stallion at stud. “Hey! Don’t I….”
“Don’t be silly, Darling,” they said in chorus, glaring at him pointedly. “You already know that you’re the right man for the job, and we all have to compromise from time to time, so be nice and introduce yourself. In fact, why don’t you both take a little walk outside? There’s a beautiful woodland right outside the door, and lots to see. Once you get to know one another, things will all work out, you’ll see.” They then turned back to the trunks of clothes, critiquing each item and assigning it to its intended wearer with practiced eyes. “Larona, Sweetie,” they called out to her, “if we ever get back to Earth, you have a fabulous career waiting for you as a fashion designer! You have an excellent eye for what makes a woman feel attractive and powerful, both at once! We never saw anything as wonderful as these, even at the very best couturiers in the Garment District in midtown Manhattan.”
“Thank you, girls,” she said. “That’s obviously high praise indeed, since your everyday outfits show excellent taste. I tried to accommodate your own sense of style, as well as your peculiar needs.” Then she turned to Phil and said, “Well, what are you waiting for? We have a lot to do today, and little time for dawdling.”
Phil turned to Menglöð and said politely, “It seems we’re in the way right now. Would you care to step outside? There’s a lovely view of Bifröst to the southeast, and the woods of your homeland are lovely, as they said.”
At first she seemed reluctant, but then said, “I would…, Phil? did they say?”
“It’s short for Phillip,” he said, “Phillip Cohn. ‘Phillip’ means ‘a lover of horses,’ in an ancient language back on Earth, where I was born.”
“Well, you’ll simply have to meet my horse, then. Sleipner is his name.” She escorted him through the entrance to the pavilion and showed him to a magnificent stallion standing patiently outside, idly munching on a stack of hay and barley in a manger off to the side, and being watched warily by both of the guards, because the beast had eight legs, four each at front and back, and was bigger even than Thundercloud, twenty-eight hands at least. “It means, ‘Slippery,’ or something like that.” She looked at him. “Would you like to take a ride?”
“Of course!” he said, but slightly daunted by the prospect of somehow climbing onto the back of an animal more than nine feet high at the shoulders.
She lightly vaulted up to his back, despite the fact that it was bare of either saddle or stirrups, although he had a halter, bit, and reins on his proud head. She then reached down to help him up behind her, which he managed to do without embarrassing himself unduly, so he put his arms around her waist and they were off as the horse sprang into the air and kept on going, up and up until he could see the whole long road behind them, and the complex outline of the island world of Alfheimr became clear. “Quite the view, don’t you think?” She laughed out loud in pure joy as they flew through the air. “Feeling a little nervous? I know some people aren’t comfortable on Sleipnir when he runs at speed.”
“Not at all!” he raised his voice slightly, to overcome the rush of wind, and tightened his grip on her waist as she reined her strange steed into a tight turn, headed back the way they came and to the edge of the impossible cliff above the cloudy chasm below.
“Hang tight!” she said as she spurred Sleipnir down with well-placed nudges of her heels and they plunged down and down, faster than gravity could keep up, so they were weightless, held to Sleipnir’s back only by the strength of her hands in his mane and the grip of their heels around the thick barrel of his body.
“Whoohoo!” he shouted as they more than fell, the wind of their passage snatching his excited exclamation away almost before he could hear his own voice.
“Nice, isn’t it?” she shouted as they plummeted through the highest clouds, and he instantly felt the moist chill of something very much like fog as they flew blindly through the mist.
Then, below them, he saw what looked like an enormous branch, the bark rough with chasms that reminded Phil of pictures of the Grand Canyon back on Earth, except that there were hundreds of them, all roughly parallel, lined up along the length of what looked like a tubular planet which twisted off into the mist in both directions. “Yggdrasil?” he shouted in her ear.
“Yes!” she shouted back. “Would you like to stop off for a closer look?”
“Of course!” he yelled in her ear.
With that, she pulled up on the reins and Sleipnir slowed, then rushed toward the… ‘ground,’ where they settled at the edge of a barky plain, just at the edge of an odd chasm that looked toward a wooden cliff off in the misty distance.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispered in the sudden silence, which was broken only by the sound of the stallion’s heavy breathing. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He looked up and down, then back toward the the craggy plain, but saw nothing living. “Does anything actually live here, besides the tree itself?”
“A few creatures,” she said quietly, “three or four near the roots, and a few deer who feed on the bark, plus eagles, of course, though what they eat I don’t exactly know. I’ve never seen any other birds, and fish seem unlikely up this high, although there are enormous rivers down below.”
“Do you come here often?” he asked.
“I do,” she said. “It’s very peaceful here, so I come to restore myself when I’m feeling downhearted.”
“I can see that,” he said. “Are you feeling sad now?”
“A little. My mother seems to think that I should be married, which I’ve never wanted to do, meaning no offence, of course.”
“None taken,” he said. “I’m not a ravisher of unwilling women, and am very happily married, all in all, although I never expected to be married to quite so many women. I was quite happy with one, but then… things just happened.” He shrugged and looked off into the distance, where he thought one tiny speck might be an eagle.
“So I see. What do your many wives see in you that makes them so willing to share your attentions?”
“I don’t exactly know,” he admitted. “Rhea and Selene grew up together, and were best friends almost from birth, as far as I can tell. They tell stories of being toddlers, then young girls, and growing up together, almost like twins, although they have very different parents.”
“They do look almost like twins, with the exception of their hair and eyes, of course. How did you choose between them? Or did you choose both at once?”
“Not at all!” he said. “I fell in love with Selene, she’s the more thoughtful of the two, and then a situation arose which required me to marry Rhea, although I was unwilling, at first. I couldn’t live without the both of them in my life now, of course, but it was a slightly awkward transition precipitated by Selene’s insistence, not mine.”
She looked at him curiously. “You’re an odd man, Phil.” She said nothing more.
“I suppose I am,” he said, after a long silence, during which they both stared toward the distant other side of the vast rift in the bark of Yggdrasil.
“Is it true, what they implied, that Rhea and Selene are lovers of women?”
“Well, yes and no. They seem to like me just fine, but they were both virgins when we married, I think, and I know that they were intimate with each other before we’d even met.”
She smiled. “So you were reaching for the stars, I see?”
“I suppose I was, but Selene was the most fascinating woman I’d ever met, and we just seemed to hit it off when we were thrown together by happenstance.”
“How exactly did my mother come into the picture?”
Phil blushed. “She drugged me, actually. It wasn’t my idea at all.”
Menglöð whooped, laughing, “That’s my mom, alright! She was never one to let mere reluctance stand in the way of a good shag!”
Phil rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I got that impression, but she fell instantly pregnant, so there you go. We had a few rough spots, but she’s quite loveable, once you get to know her.” He laughed. “I’d say that we got off on the wrong foot at first, but our feet weren’t exactly involved.”
Menglöð laughed at that, then said, “I’m glad to see that you have a nice sense of humor about all this, but what’s your interest in me?”
“Quite frankly, none at all, except that you seem to be a lovely woman with a wonderful personality, and your mother and the Empress, both prophets, seem to feel that we were made for each other, not to mention that Selene and Rhea apparently take their side. If anything, this is an ‘arranged’ marriage, but only if you want it. I’m certainly not going to force myself on you, nor even allow my other wives to do the same, especially your mother and the Empress. They may have a say in our lives, but they’re neither one of them my owners, with any inherent right to tell me what to do.”
“So, you like me?” she asked, as bold as brass.
“I do, very much so. You have a sense of fun and adventure that I admire, and I’m quite sure that we can be good friends, no matter what we decide to do on other fronts.”
“And Rhea and Selene find me attractive as well?”
“They said so, or implied it, and they wouldn’t have said it if they didn’t mean it. Like you, they’re neither one of them either shy or retiring.”
She nodded. “Okay. Take off your clothes.”
“What?” he said, surprised.
“You heard me. If we’re to be married, I want to know what I’m getting myself into, and the bark here, though moderately soft, is itchy, and I’m not lying down on it without something like a blanket beneath me. That skirt you’re wearing looks perfect, once you’re out of it, and the little cape will suffice for a pillow.” She looked him up and down. “You look very fit, and I like that, but I want to see that cock of yours before I do anything else.”
Phil blushed again, but he complied. “Well,” he said, when he stood naked before her, ”it’s actually what we call a ‘kilt.’ “
“Whatever. Call it what you like, it looks just like a skirt to me, although it seems a little short for practicality in a chilly climate.” She looked him carefully up and down, paying special attention to his private parts, which swelled a bit under her piercing gaze, to his chagrin, and then she said, “Say! You’re the guy who killed Ásagrimmr!”
“That was me,” he admitted. “He tried to kill your mother, which I couldn’t stand by and allow.”
She nodded, then said, “He complained about you when I interviewed him, and had evidently caught a glimpse of your private parts during your wrestling match, because he thought you freakish, maimed in some strange way.” She made a little moue. “I think it’s quite pretty, though, much nicer than those sloppy things most men sport, and they usually stink besides.”
“Interviewed him? What is it, exactly, that you do? And how were you seemingly able to talk to him after he was dead?”
“Because I’m the chooser of the slain for my mother, of course, who has first pick of all those who die.”
“Like the Valkyries?” he asked.
“Those slags!” she exclaimed, indignant. “Not likely. They scavenge my leavings, taking only the worst and most malignant ruffians, the ones old Ásagrimmr preferred — before I sent him straight to Hel, of course, since he wasn’t even qualified for the slut Valkyries, because he was slain in the midst of committing an act of vile cowardice.”
Phil blinked. “So you’re like… the angel of death?”
She smiled. “Well, a Goddess, to be precise, and my first name actually means ‘Mercy.’ I prefer to think of what I do as a kindness, since I deliver the best and most noble to their eternal reward in my mother’s domain, both men and women, but especially unmarried women, because it takes a special kind of courage and resolve to remain a maiden in our world.” She looked at him carefully. “Didn’t you recognize my horse, Sleipnir? I thought you uncommonly brave to climb onto his back, since most people already know that it’s usually a one-way trip from this world to the next. Much more often than not, my reception carries some taint either of resentment or fear.”
“I thought I recognized the name, but had vaguely thought that it was some guy named Óðinn’s horse.”
“Bah!” she said scornfully, none-the-less amused. “I let the old fool borrow him for a few errands, when he was still banging my mother, but he hasn’t touched my Sleipnir for a thousand years. He’s Loki’s get, you know, when Loki had shape-changed himself into a mare in heat and was up to his usual trickery. The trick was on him, though, because the stallion he was trying to lure away from his appointed task caught up with him in the woods and taught him a good lesson in how to handle a pizzle.” She grinned. “Have you ever seen a stallion’s virile member? Sleipnir’s is four feet long if it’s an inch, and I can hardly imagine having that sort of weapon up inside me! It’d be coming out my nose before he was finished, so I figure Loki got some proper rogering before he was thoroughly knocked up and got his year’s membership in the ‘bun in the oven’ society.”
Phil liked this brash young woman, and she reminded him a little of both Rhea and Selene, although a bit rougher around the edges. “I hope he doesn’t mind,” he said, “but Rhea and Selene and I polished off his ‘mother’ while he was chanting seiðer at us.”
“You’ve killed Loki too?” she said, laughing. “I didn’t actually see him, but I suppose that I wouldn’t, since he’s — was — actually a Jötunn, despite his pretensions of being an Æsa, and they have a separate destiny to the rest of us.”
“Well, Selene and Rhea did the hard part,” he said modestly, “puncturing his inflated ego with their knives while he was invisible. I merely lopped off his head when he started working evil magic, but he was quite visible by then.”
“Well, Sleipnir won’t mind about it, in any case,” she assured him. “He’s a lovely beast, but he is just a horse, after all.”
“One never knows, with magical beasts and such. I know quite a few people who look quite a bit like horses, but they’re as human as anyone.”
“Do you mean those half-human, half-horse things hanging about your campsite?” she asked, perceptively.
“I do, but most people can’t see them that way.”
She considered that for a moment before replying, “I did notice a little fuzziness around them, as if they were blurry somehow, but of course in my profession I concentrate mainly on the souls of the people I encounter.” She paused again, then said, “Yours is quite nice, you know.”
He grinned. “So my other wives keep telling me; I do the best I can.”
She grinned back, but didn’t actually say anything for quite a while, but stood alternately gazing off toward the distant other side of the chasm they were perched at the edge of, and then again at his face, studying it with a peculiar intensity.
Phil began to feel a little chilly. “Look, should I put my clothes back on? It feels a little awkward being the only naked one around, not that you’ve been anything less than charming, of course.”
“Don’t you really like me, Phil? I know you said that you did, but men lie about these things all the time.”
“Of course I like you, Menglöð,” he said truthfully. “You remind me quite a lot of Rhea and Selene, and you’re quite lovely to boot, but you don’t have to do anything just because your mother thinks that it would be a good idea.”
That seemed to change something between them, because she got a look of grim determination on her face and she said, “I don’t particularly care what my mother wants for me, but I want to shag you in any case, just to try it out, and I think I like you too.” She began taking off her clothes.
Phil blinked in surprise. “Unh… I….”
She glanced up and said, “Don’t say anything, or I might lose my nerve!”
He shut up. She was, he thought, magnificent, in her own way. Her breasts were simultaneously the largest and the… perkiest… he’d ever seen, not that he had that much experience, and both Larona and Gefjon thought that she was crucial to their plan. ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ he thought, and resolved to soldier on.
She took some time arranging his clothes carefully on the ground beneath her, then added her own over them before she sat down, then reclined and said, suddenly unsure of herself, “What do we do next?” with an expression of anxiety apparent on her face, and in the tension in her shoulders and arms.
That’s all it took to melt his heart, and he walked to her side, then sat down behind her and wrapped his arms around her with the lightest touch he could manage, just barely skating over the surface of her skin with feathery strokes of his fingertips before he laid the inner surface of his forearms around her shoulders, his hands skimming down her arms until he was pressed against her back like a silken shawl, covering her, lending her his warmth, but with no sense of urgency at all. “Nothing you don’t want to do,” he said. “We’re in no hurry at all, and we’re meant to be dear friends, I think, and friends watch out for each other. I’ve got your back, and there’s nothing at all to worry about.” He kissed her gently on the neck, then raised his hands to her shoulders and began to soothe her, then to gently massage the tension from her body, starting at the nape of her slender neck, then proceeding to her shoulders, feeling out each point of blockage and teasing out the pain.
She sighed. “That feels nice. Is that all there is?”
He drew her in slightly, a little more intimate as his chest pressed into her back, letting her feel him, demanding nothing. “That’s all there is,” he murmured, his breath on her neck teasing her with his nearness. “Don’t worry, sweet friend. We have all the time in the world, with nothing to prove, and no place to be, suspended between the worlds in a place entirely our own.”
She sighed again and said, “You’re almost as nice as a woman, you know, so gentle and easy, like a warm breeze against my back. All you really lack are breasts.”
He didn’t laugh, although he was tempted, but merely said, “I’ve been told that before as well, or words to that effect.” He began to tease the tendrils of her hair, as soft it was as silk, and twice as fair.
He was petting her, still soothing, when she suddenly turned in his arms and laid her head upon his chest, and then giggled. “You have hair on your chest; it tickled my back, and now it’s tickling my ear and cheek.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, her voice muffled slightly as her lips pressed against his skin, “it’s nice, and reminds me that you’re not a woman at all, which is nice too, for a change at least.”
“We can’t all be perfect,” he said, meaning what he said.
“No, you’re perfect too, in your own way. I don’t think I’d like you at all if you weren’t exactly who and what you are.” She had her head pressed against his chest, evidently listening to his heartbeat, because she said, “Your pulse is very slow. Are you sure that you’re alright?”
“That’s actually fairly normal for athletes, especially male athletes,” he said. “I usually average about forty to forty-five beats per minute at rest, and much more, of course, when I’m running or exercising energetically.”
“Really?” she said. “I’ve never paid that much attention to my own.” She kept her head against his chest and said, “It’s very soothing, the sound of it, don’t you think?”
He thought about that for a moment, than said, “I don’t really know, since I usually can’t actually hear it beating, except sometimes very late at night, when it’s very quiet, and I can hear the flow of blood through my own ears as a kind of rushing throbbing.”
“Here,” she said, scrambling up on his lap, “listen to mine!” and pulled his head toward her chest.
Her heart was beating, sure enough, and the feel of her breast against his cheek was delightful, but he held very still, afraid lest he startle her, and said, “It does sound nice.”
Then she shifted her weight again, and bent her head down toward his chest, then listened for a moment. “It’s beating faster,” she said, and then added, “And your… thing seems to be growing.”
“I think it is,” he admitted.
“Did I do that?” she asked.
“Yes, I think you did, but your own heart seems to be beating slightly faster as well.” She was wriggling slightly as she shifted around, which had… consequences, at least for him.
“I feel different as well,” she said. “I can feel it swelling!” She allowed her hand to drift down his cheek, then to his belly, and finally further down as she shifted again to make room for her to wrap her fingers around his shaft. “Oooh! It is growing, especially now,” she said.
“It is,” he said, “but it’s at a sort of awkward angle, so it’s a little uncomfortable just now.”
“Oh! you poor boy,” she said, and shifted around again so she could get a better look at it. “There! It’s perfectly straight now; does that feel better?” She had her hand on it, her fingers wrapped lightly around it as she looked down at it between their bodies, and was wiggling it up and down to be sure it had plenty of room between her legs, which by now were wrapped partially around his waist.
“It feels really nice, right now,” he admitted.
As it enlarged, it grew harder for her to keep moving it without it slipping between her thighs, and then her nether lips, but she kept stroking it, then said, “I quite like it like this.” She was panting. “In fact, I think,” she shifted again and settled herself on him, gradually working it further inside her, until she said, “Oooh! that’s even better! Oh!” she said, “Something’s happening!” and it suddenly slipped past a barrier and was buried deep inside her and she gasped. “That hurt a bit,” she said, “but it’s getting better now.” She was rocking herself against his crotch, grinding herself down on the top of his cock, and he realized two things, that she’d been a virgin, and that neither of his two first wives had been, so evidently they’d had a dating history that they’d neglected to mention. ‘Oh, well,’ he thought. ‘It’s nice that one of us was a virgin, at least the once.’
“Ummm,” she said, “would you mind if I laid down now? I think I’d like you on top of me. For some reason I want to feel your weight pressing down on me.”
“Your wish is my command,” he said, and lifted her up by her thighs, then carefully arranged her on top of their clothes until she seemed perfectly centered and comfortable before he leaned her back to the ground and began to make love to her in earnest, and she began to pant as he plunged inside her, gradually becoming more excited as their mutual passion mounted, and then she screamed, “Phil!” and bit her lower lip between her teeth as she shuddered into orgasm, and he came inside her, both of them panting after their strenuous exertions.
She lifted her head up to his chest and listened carefully, then said, “It’s really beating now! Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump!” She looked up at him and smiled.
He smiled back, relaxed and satisfied, but said nothing in words, just held her close.
After a few more minutes she said, “That was really nice; can we do it again?”
“Of course; as much as you like,” he said indulgently. “We’re much better friends now, I think, and this is still our special spot between the worlds, all by ourselves.”
“I’m still thinking about this marriage stuff,” she said, “but I’m thinking that it might not be as awkward as I’d thought at first.”
“Take all the time in the world,” he said. “When and if it ever sounds like a good idea to you, just say so and I’ll ask you for your hand in marriage quite formally, but you’re perfectly free to refuse me, and we’ll still be friends. I’ll never pressure you to do anything that you don’t want to do.”
“That’s kind of a magic phrase, I think. It makes me feel… good somewhere deep inside my heart.”
“Maybe. I don’t mean it to conjure you, though; it’s simply the truth.”
“Right now,” she said, “I want you to make love to me again, and please take all the time in the world.”
He smiled at her, “That’s what being married actually means, you know. It’s our promise to each other that we’ll always take all the time there is in all the worlds.”
“You’re trying to persuade me, aren’t you?”
He laughed in surprise and looked at her with an intense awareness that he loved her. “Of course I am. If I valued you so little that I didn’t care one way or another, what sort of man would I be? For me at least, this isn’t some sort of casual dalliance in which I walk away after taking some sort of unfair advantage of you, then laugh about while drinking toasts with ‘the guys’ at the local public house. In all my life, I’ve never kissed a woman whom I didn’t love, and with whom I didn’t see the possibility of a life together. I’ve never made love to a woman with whom begetting a child together would be unwelcome, and with whom I wouldn’t willingly spend a lifetime fulfilling my responsibilities to her, and to our child, with an ongoing sense of pure joy. I love you, Eir Menglöð, sweet angel of mercy, and I always will, because you’ve touched my heart with your courage and your compassion, and I hope that you can love me too.”
Tears trembled at the bottoms of her eyes as she said, “You don’t mind that I’d like to… make love… to Selene? Rhea too, I think. They’re both very beautiful, and I like women, as a general rule.”
“How could I? Their happiness is essential to my own, as is yours, now that I’ve realized that I love you, and I’m quite fond of making love to both of them, so I could hardly complain if we share the same passions in life. I know that they’re attracted to you, or they wouldn’t have suggested that we ‘take a walk outside’ in the first place, since they’re both very clever, smarter than I am, probably, and definitely not at all shy about telling people what they want.”
She looked at him, searching in his eyes for something, then said, “You should ask me now, before we make love again.”
He smiled in acquiescence, then said, “Eir Menglöð”, beloved, would you do me the honor of being my wife, of sharing my life, for all the time there is in the world?
“I will,” she said, “Phillip Cohn, will you be my husband, will you share my life, for all the time there is in the world?”
“I will,” he said, “with all my heart and soul.”
“Now make love to me,” she said, “and make it very sweet indeed, because I’m feeling lucky, and I want to remember this time especially.”
He leaned toward her with a kiss upon his lips that he wanted to give her, and she reached up to him with one of her own, and then he said, “I will, both now and always.”
“Phillip Avraham Cohn!” Rhea scolded him as they walked into the pavilion. “Just where have you been for all this time?”
He blinked, “We went for a walk, or something like it, just as you’d suggested.”
“But it’s tomorrow! You’ve missed your own wedding, so you are getting married today for sure!”
“Tomorrow?” he said, confused.
“Tomorrow!” she declared. “I certainly hope that you’ve asked her, and that she said ‘yes,’ because we took the liberty of having Akcuanrut draw up her ketubah, nice and proper, and Larona made a lovely gown for her, together with an ample trousseau for court appearances and everyday, and we’ll have to have a triple wedding, since you stood up our sweet Larona yesterday! not to mention mucking up Gefjon’s plans, who was supposed to have today clear for all her guests.”
“I did?” he said, still bewildered.
“And, boy, was she pissed off!” Rhea added helpfully. “You’re lucky this isn’t Alice in Wonderland, or you’d be minus a head, or possibly two.”
“Now, Rhea,” Larona chided her from the other side of the pavilion, where she was fussing with another outfit, trying to manage just the right amount of fullness in the skirts. “I was really only irritated for a while, but once I’d realized that it was Gefjon’s other daughter, I assumed that something had simply come up. No harm done, and it allowed Hnoss and Gersemi to have plenty of time for a lovely private ceremony with Akcuanrut and we were all able to attend without any possible impact on our own preparations, although I think he might have liked to see you there, since he was the only man involved at all.”
“Tomorrow?” he said again.
“Never mind, Phil,” Menglöð said gently, then turned to Rhea and explained, “We were down on a limb of Yggdrasil, the World Tree that supports all the Nine Worlds, and time runs at a different rate down there. We’re sorry if we’ve spoilt your plans in any way, but he did, in fact, ask me to marry him and you, and I both accepted and asked him to marry me.”
Selene laughed, just coming into the pavilion with a stack of clothing in her arms, “Oooh, Phil! Another modern girl who knows her mind and won’t take crap from anyone! Our favorite kind of woman! Now that you’ve delivered both bride and bridegroom, though, it’s time to make yourself scarce, so we can whisper naughty secrets to each other without any nasty boys around.” He promptly grinned at her and left with a cheery wave as she turned to Menglöð and said, “You go, girl! He’s obviously head over heels for you!” Then she reached out to hug her, then kissed her thoroughly, with more than a little tongue in play, before she released her and handed her a strikingly red gown with a bodice embroidered with gold and diamonds from the stack of alternates in her arms. “Here’s the one we thought would look best on you, but we have several others if you don’t like it. Larona made them, and she’s just a wonder! You’ll love being married to her, if you have any fashion sense at all! There’s dainties here as well, if you like them, but I see…” she said, looking at her appraisingly, “…that you like to go commando, which saves a lot of time when you’re in a rush. Has he had you up against a wall yet? It’s just delicious being screwed like that, surrendering to his manly strength, but riding him at the same time, controlling him, milking him, subduing him with your infinite feminine power as the kundalini energy rises through your spine and flowers into bliss!”
“Uh, no, not yet,” she said, more than slightly confused, “but it does sound fascinating. I’ve had very little experience with men at all. In fact, Phil’s the first man I’ve ever been with, so I’m afraid that I must seem terribly naïve to you and Rhea.”
“Don’t worry about it at all, Darling Menglöð, we’ll teach you everything we know, and we know lots about boys and men.” She held up a second gown against her body before shaking her head, and then tried a third, this one in traditional white with a plunging neckline and pearled bodice that she thought would look trés haute mode with her fabulous boobs. With a cocked eyebrow, she enquired….
…and was refused with eyes wide with shock at the very idea. “You can call me ‘Eir,’ if you like, It’s a little easier to say, and seems more intimate, since most people use my longer name.”
“Alright, Eir,” Rhea said, kissing her soundly, “What a strange coïncidence, though, since my name is yours said backwards! It’s like fate, or something. In any case, welcome to our growing family.” She indicated her swelling baby bump, “As you can see, we’re growing in more ways than just the one. Our Phil’s so virile that we sometimes think that he could make you pregnant just by shaking hands.”
“But aren’t you two jealous at all? We’ve just come back from an intimate ‘walk,’ during which he made love to me, and I made love to him, several times in fact. Most women would be jealous, I think.”
Selene and Rhea both took her hands and kissed her soundly. “Darling Eir, Sweetheart,” they said in unison, “our Phil’s a national treasure. It would be selfish of us to keep him just for ourselves, and what a waste it would be to deny other women their fair share of his love when there’s so much love and passion in him to go around.”
“It’s true, daughter,” Gefjon said, sorting through her own preparations, which included a regal gown in green tapestry with hoop skirts and a veil, a little anachronistic for her culture, but Larona had made it especially for her and she loved it. “Look how jealous I was over that turd I’d married, but he wasn’t half the man that Phil is, not even a tiny fraction, because he never loved any woman more than he loved his dog, much less himself, while Phil thinks only of others, as far as I can tell, and I ought to know. Every woman deserves to be loved like Phil loves, with absolute dedication, but very few actually get the opportunity. I don’t mind sharing him with any of my sister wives at all, much less you, because I know that he will never abandon any of us, even if I schemed to make him try, and you, of all women, would know that there’s no other woman —in all modesty — who could possibly wield the sexual power that I can. Even with drugs and magic, I couldn’t do more than render him unconscious, but when he’d recovered from his stupor he was instantly himself again, inviolate and immovable, like a mountain that had been struck by a moth, despite my strategems. The whole sordid episode made me feel ashamed of myself, and as many of you know, I’m widely known for being utterly shameless.” Then she began to weep.
Rhea and Selene were instantly by her side with their arms around her, kissing her and smoothing her hair. “It’s okay, Sweetie. After so long without any real love worth having, a straight shot of Phil is like whiskey to an alcoholic, so you were undoubtedly desperate, and only acted out of panic. We’ve long ago forgiven you, and love you with all our hearts.”
She looked up at them and said tearfully, “Thank you both so very much, my darling girls. I don’t know what I’ve ever done to deserve such love and happiness.”
“That’s the beauty of it, Dearest,” they said to her, “it’s a gift, not a reward for services rendered, and our Phil is not now, nor ever has been, the petty autocrat so many men seem desperately to want to be, but is our loving fiend and servant. He’s our shared lover, to be sure, but a lover we control.”
“That’s the way I felt about him almost instantly,” Eir said, realizing the truth of it as she slipped into the red gown she’d chosen whilst they talked. It was perfect, she thought, as she looked herself over in a handy looking glass. “I’d never been with any man, but Phil gave me not only his love, but actually enhanced my sense of autonomy and… self. It was something like riding a horse so finely attuned to my desires that we move almost as one through the worlds. It was as if I were piloting his body through the maze of my own conflicting emotions and desires until I made him bring me to a peak of pleasure I’d never known before, almost like masturbation, but a hundred times more satisfying, because it wasn’t masturbation, but an ingenious man dedicated to my pleasure, not his at all. I like to think that I gave him pleasure, but it was only what I gave him, and nothing at all that he took away from me. The whole experience astonished me, because I’d never known, or even heard of, any man — or woman — capable of anything of even half his… utter…” she struggled to find the right words, “…renunciation of selfishness and ego.”
“Exactly!” Selene exclaimed. “It’s like he’s so attentive to your slightest shift in mood or desire that he instinctively supplies your needs as if they were his own.”
“Yes!” Eir said in awe and wonder. “He instantly intuited my deepest heart’s desire and gave it to me with not the slightest hint of anything like calculation, but with honest love and nothing at all that was either false or base.”
Gefjon added, after a slight hesitation whilst she put on her shoes, “Whatever else he’s given you, my darling daughter, he’s also supplied a deeper need, the inmost desire of almost every woman’s heart: life itself, and an immortality beyond mere divinity.”
Eir glanced at her, at once aware of her implication. “I’m pregnant now,” she said, strangely pleased, although she’d never contemplated pregnancy before.
“You are,” her mother said with a shrewd glance at her daughter’s still-flat belly, ”and about time you made me a grandmother too.” She grinned in both pleasure and sympathy.
“Mother!”, she said with outrage, scandalized, as daughters always are, by the notion that her mother knows as much about sex as she does.
“Oh, it’s much worse than that, my darling daughter, since the very same man’s gone and knocked up the two of us, so they’ll be sisters as well as aunt and niece to each other. My head is spinning already!”
Eir looked at her with shrewd calculation. “For that matter, Mother dear, we’re sisters now, as well as mother and daughter, so we’ll need a whole new vocabulary just to keep track of our interlocking relationships and social rôles.”
“Oooh! a touch, a palpable touch!” Selene said laughing.
Rhea riposted instantly, “Are we really keeping score?”
Selene rolled her eyes while simultaneously arranging Eir’s hair in an attractive thick single braid that roped down her back and almost to the tops of her thighs. Then she added two ruby-encrusted combs that picked up the color of her gown. “No, of course not. If it’s true that we’re all sisters, it’s also true that we’re all each other’s wives, so you might easily say that we have the same obligation to care for each other as Phil does for us.”
“Or shareholders in a feminist coöperative,” Rhea said, “in which case we’re all members of the governing board.”
“Perhaps,” Eir said thoughtfully, “We’re more like explorers on an undiscovered island, and we’re creating our own new nation, freed from oppression by either Kings or Fatherlands, a place of our own in which only women rule.”
“Hear, hear!” Larona said, well over her anger, now that Phil’s temporary absence had been explained. “I’ll second that motion. We’re at a crossroads I think, where we have a choice between many paths before us, and the freedom to shape our own future, whether it be a mindless recapitulation of what’s happened before, or something entirely new, grounded in our present reality rather than the bad habits of a bunch of men long dead.”
“I myself,” Selene commented offhandedly, while selecting appropriate ornaments for Eir’s braid, “am awed by the multitasking power of women’s brains, since we seem to be fomenting a feminist revolution and making cogent plans for its implementation in the midst of mundane wedding preparations.”
Rhea paused in her own preparations to briefly comment, “You know well, Dear, that women’s brains are designed to handle many tasks, since the survival of our children — and our species as a whole — depends on our ability to go about our daily business while keeping an ear out for bears and marauding brigands, not to mention crying babies who need either feeding or changing, and instantly knowing which is which.”
“True,” she admitted. “Men tend to be more single-minded, which can be lovely when their focus is on you, but not so much when they’re watching a football game and would barely notice if their pants caught fire.”
All the women giggled at the image she’d conjured up, which seemed so perfectly apposite, although almost all of them had entirely different notions of what a football game actually was.
“I can hardly believe that this is all happening so fast! I just met Phil yesterday, and suddenly I’m getting married with a cast of thousands.”
“Well, that’s mostly Larona’s doing, because she decided to divorce her old husband and marry Phil, but there’s some arcane law in her Empire that requires an Emperor, although Larona herself holds all the actual political power.”
Larona took the time to offer a slightly more cogent explanation. “It’s the result of societal habits of thought that come down from the history of our people, the same archaic attitudes that require me to instantly change my name from D’Larona-Elvi, to indicate the theoretical position of my former husband as the ‘head’ of our family, to D’Larona-Cohn, to likewise honor Phil, when I have a perfectly serviceable family name of my own.” She shrugged. “It’s no big deal, really, because even that name has nothing to do with my mother, from whom my title and office actually descend, and Phil himself was just as willing to take my family name if it proved necessary — or make no changes at all — as I was to take his. In the end, we decided to follow ancient custom, so as to officially pretend that Phil was the real Emperor, and I was his ‘assistant,’ when in fact he’s just my paramour, while I hold the reins of power.”
“How does this affect our separate sphere’s of authority?” Gefjon asked, since she was a regent in her own right.
“As little as possible, I think. Once the Dark is finally defeated, I’ve already requested that Master Wizard Akcuanrut arrange to construct permanent portals between our three worlds, so we can come and go as easily as stepping into the next room. We’ve already ascertained that there are innate ‘time differentials’ between our worlds — although I can’t pretend to understand exactly why or how these operate, even though we’ve seen these effects quite recently, when Phil disappeared for what he thought of as an hour or so, but then came back after having somehow missed an entire day — so we’ll have to select one world — at least temporarily — as a central meeting place that causes the least disruption to our respective schedules. Phil, however, is very hopeful that he’ll be able to construct a ‘mechanism’ whereby these…slippages can be counteracted through what he calls ‘technology,’ so that the act of stepping through the portal carries one back to the very instant from which one left, no matter what’s transpired between those times, and no matter what the ‘differentials’ might be between our separate worlds. I’ll take his word on that, because I already know that he’s extremely clever, and if it can be done, he’ll manage it.” She smiled at that and said, “I do love a man who’s clever with his hands….”
…at which witticism all the women laughed in easy familiarity with the feeling.
“Waddaya wanna bet,” Rhea said to Eir, “that a month from now, heck, a week from now, you’ll look back on this day and think it was the best day you’ve ever had in your entire life?”
“Not much, I think, because I’m pretty sure already that I’d lose my stake. I truly believe that I’ve longed to meet you all, somehow, or someone like you, and it was Phil who made that possible, and has generously offered to share you all with me.”
Both Rhea and Selene laughed at that, then Selene said, “We think you’re pretty hot stuff yourself, Eir honey, but there are a few highly flexible rules that govern our informal ménage: While ‘private times’ like you just had with Phil are perfectly fine when warranted by circumstance or urgent predilection, as a general rule, we like to sleep together, because that way we know two things, that anyone we might be jealous of is enjoying a wonderful experience, and that there’s no favoritism developing. At the same time, we’re free to instantly demand a turn ourselves through mutual negotiation, so if watching another woman getting laid has turned you on — and you might be surprised how utterly randy watching your lovers make love can make you — you can easily say, ‘It’s my turn now,’ and the woman who just made you incredibly hot with her screams of ecstasy will now get equally hot whilst listening to yours, and then you can both have each other for dessert while Phil gets randy watching you, which is fabulously arousing on its own because almost every woman we know is a natural narcissist who can feel the rapture another woman feels just by looking at her face and listening to her moans of pleasure. We all wind up getting more great sex than you could possibly imagine — especially if you’ve ever listened to most married women complaining that ‘the thrill is gone,’ — and women, unlike men, never ‘peter out.’ Not that Phil has any trouble in that regard that I’ve ever actually seen, but there’s a first time for everything, and he seems to be collecting a lot more wives.”
“I think,” Rhea mused, “that it’s because we’re getting close to succeeding, and we’re recruiting more ‘vessels’ of burgeoning life as we go along, so the opposite of death is exactly what we are, the Dark Gods’ natural enemies and life’s fiercest partisans.”
“That’s an interesting observation, Rhea. There’s a curious paradox in this,” Gefjon added, “that my daughter and I are both embodiments of love — in different forms — but also intimately associated with death, because we’re the Goddesses who turn death on its head, who create new life in the midst of death, and turn the so-called cycle of life into practical immortality through the perpetual fecundity of human minds and bodies.”
“There’s a huge difference, though,” Eir responded, “between the natural cycle of life and death which is our domain — in which life slips relatively comfortably into death and then back again into glorious rebirth — and the vicious cruelty of the Fire Jötnar, whose perverted notion of death is overlaid with horrific torture, grim despair, and utter nihilism. Where we work through creative mortality to build our common future, they seek to destroy not only the future, but even the memories of the past.”
There was a long and uncomfortable silence before Rhea said brusquely, “On that happy note, why don’t we adjourn to the meadow outside? We have three weddings now to carry on with before we can set off properly to save the world, so we might as well get started.”
“Absolutely!” Larona said smiling. “Our Bridegroom’s already had his three brief honeymoons, and he’s managed to find some sort of time warp to hide in once, which worked very well to delay the responsibilities of high office for one more day. Goddess knows what contortions signing all those proclamations will put him through, though, much less his formal investiture as Emperor of Myriad. I do like that dashing ‘kilt’ outfit on him, though, since it shows off those muscular legs of his to their very best advantage.” She looked around the room. “What do you think, girls? Should we let him skip the traditional knee britches and bulging codpiece?”
Selene rolled her eyes toward the invisible sky, since they were still inside the pavilion, then sighed. “I’m sorry, Larona, but I think the padded prick thingie looks like a bawdy clown suit. I’m sure it has a long and distinguished history on your world, but I can’t guarantee that those of us from Earth won’t burst out laughing if he walks down the aisle with that grotesque thing bouncing along in front of his crotch.”
“I have my own misgivings about it,” she admitted, “since the last time I saw a similar ensemble it was being worn by my former husband, and the incongruity of a giant faux-erection on a man who couldn’t get it up if he had a string tied to his pecker was horribly depressing.”
Rhea touched her arm in sympathy. “Well then, I think it’s time for a new tradition! If what’s essentially a symbolic dildo can be a stand-in for true virility, surely the bold reality of a garment that allows a man to ‘whip it out’ in a heartbeat would be even better. The one’s mere braggadocio, while the other is more in the nature of an offer to demonstrate.”
“I haven’t actually known him for that long, but can he really do that? Perform on command, I mean.” she said, eyes wide.
“Oh, honey! He can do that and more! Didn’t you hear me asking Eir about whether he’d had her against a wall? Ask Gefjon about her last little ‘trip to the woods,’ if you know what I mean. He can do you hard and fast, or he can take his sweet slow time, anytime and anywhere, but it’s always guaranteed to be really, really great sex.”
“I’ve never been disappointed,” Selene chimed in, “although I was a tiny bit worried when we married Rhea. My fears were completely groundless, though, and I’ve never been happier. I’ve got my high school sweetheart and my best friend all in one package, and now the Goddess of love, an Angel, and the Empress of an entire world to make an even larger and more resiliant family. In our world, families have gotten smaller over time, and far less stable, succumbing to various forms of loss almost at random, so for the three of us, this is a return to something more like the human family as it existed for a million years before our modern ‘scientific’ civilization came along.”
“A million years?” Gefjon was puzzled. “Our world’s not nearly that old.”
“Nor ours that we know of,” Larona said, “but I’m persuaded by Phil, with the assent of Akcuanrut, that much more than this age can be proved on his world, and that humans came along well after entire populations of distinct animal groups had flourished and then died off. It’s a radical change from our own thinking, but Phil was able to point to a few odd rocks in the Imperial Archives which represented, he said, the ‘fossilized’ skeletons of marine creatures which no longer existed in our world. Through the use of magic, Akcuanrut himself was able to demonstrate that this was undoubtedly true. I’m not quite persuaded about the totality of Phil’s claims, but the existence of the ‘time differentials’ we’ve observed so recently convinces me that our worlds are very strange places in which almost anything might be possible.”
Some sort of business goes here, perhaps... Skip the wedding itself, since we’ve seen the same ceremony three times now, more or less. -->
When Phil walked out through the entrance to the pavilion, which had an embroidered awning staked out to make a shady transition between the great outdoors and the interior, he was surprised by the difference between the temperature of the interior, that under the awning, and the warmer outside air, now heated by what appeared almost to be the noonday sun. He hadn’t noticed it last night… or the night before last, when they’d moved in, and he’d been busy since, and distracted when Eir and he had sauntered in a short time before, but it was obvious now. ‘It must be some sort of magic,’ he thought to himself, and started picking at the threads of it with his mind. “Holy crap!” he almost yelped, as the twisted threads of the fabric almost caught his questing thought in a painful binding. ‘It’s a type of portal! a magical “heat exchanger” that drains excess heat from this world to the interstellar void!’ Suddenly, he felt a frisson of physical danger, since this ‘primitive’ technology could, if uncontrolled, pose a very real danger. Abandoning his inspection, he trotted off to find Akcuanrut.
He wasn’t difficult to find. He’d barely started searching for his distinctive cart, reasoning that his tent would be located somewhere near, when he saw it, and then the great man himself, who was standing outside his tent in a brand new set of clothes, and as he approached more closely, he was astonished to see that the portly old wizard had been metamorphosed into a somewhat lanky young man of about Phil’s age, as skinny as a rail. “Acky!” he exclaimed in surprise, before he remembered that Master Wizard Akcuanrut hated the ‘cutesy’ nickname his wives had given him.
The slim youth glared at him in anger. “Phillip Cohn! Where were you when I needed you!?”
“Sorry, Sir, but I’d fallen into a sort of time warp that Gefjon’s daughter Eir was kind enough to show me. I didn’t realize that time had slowed for me until I just recently discovered that an entire day had gone by in the space of what felt like an hour or two.”
“Do you see what’s been done to me!?”
“I do, Sir, and I admit that it’s a surprise, but it looks like you’ve been given a new lease on life.”
He sputtered in rage. “New lease! New lease! One of my own men-at-arms ordered me to fetch a pail of water for the horses just this morning, and actually threatened to cuff me when I didn’t move fast enough to suit him!”
“You set him straight, of course.” Phil tried not to smile.
The wizard scowled. “I did. I set his pants on fire.” He smiled before he added, “I put them out immediately, of course. The poor man can’t help being stupid.”
Phil smiled back at him. “I’m sure he’ll tell his fellows, so you shouldn’t have to endure the vicissitudes of boyhood in the lower classes in future.”
“Well, perhaps not,” he admitted, grudgingly, to be sure.
“How are you finding life with Hnoss and Gersemi? I’d imagine that they’d be pleased, at least.”
He blushed immediately. “Well… yes…. It has been a… a change….”
“I understand that our presence is required for the formal ceremonies this afternoon.”
He frowned, but not as fiercely as he had been, and answered, “Yes. I have to be there as a witness as well as a participant, I’m told.”
Phil tried not to grin, without much success. “By different women, I’d guess.”
This time, Akcuanrut managed a proper scowl. “Yes, the Queen’s two daughters, who seem to have taken over my life with the help and approval of Empress D’Larona-Cohn. It’s quite the shake-up in Court politics, and I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or not, although it seems like progress, since her… dalliances… with paramours were bound to cause a scandal eventually.”
“I think it will be, in the long run,” he said, “but I have a question for you before we put on our fancy outfits and make our scheduled appearances. What do you know about the fabric used in the pavilion of the Empress herself. I notice that it’s not common.”
He was instantly dismissive. “It’s a folk art, and a minor magic indigenous to the nomads of the high deserts of the deep north, where it makes their tents more habitable during the hottest months of summer. It’s been used in the Imperial pavilions as a sort of affectation for hundreds of years that I know of, but why would anyone care? It’s very rarely warm enough in Myriad proper — at least in or around the City and the surrounding countryside — to truly require its use, so its primary benefit is the conspicuous luxury of using a fabric that costs half its weight in gold.”
“Have you ever inspected it closely?”
“No, why would I?”
“Because it’s actually a very sophisticated use of tiny portals woven into and through the cloth, and I’ll leave it to your fecund imagination to deduce the clear dangers inherent in the nasty stuff.”
Akcuanrut blanched and blurted out, “Portals!? Portals here?” he gathered up his staff and began running toward the pavilion.
“I thought he might be alarmed,” Phil said aloud as he ran after him, back toward the pavilion. He himself wasn’t quite so worried, at least partly because he was confident of his wives’ ability to handle any surprises, but also because, in his opinion, the devices would be difficult to subvert.
The wizard was shouting now, “Empress! Get out! Get out! Everybody out of the pavilion at once!” and he flourished his staff and began chanting as the four guards at the entrance looked up in surprise, then looked around wondering what they were supposed to do.
As Phil had surmised, his wives reacted instantly, and had everyone bundled out of the tent before the guards had quite figured out whether to help or salute. “What’s up, Phil?” Rhea asked, completely unflustered as he ran up to where they stood, a good distance away from the now-empty pavilion. Akcuanrut followed close behind. The wizard might be younger, but he didn’t have Phil’s advantage of having systematically strengthened his body and honed his running speed and agility since childhood, always focused on sports as his personal key to future success.
The wizard was breathing heavily when he ran up behind Phil, but managed to say, “Danger, from the fabric used in the pavilion!” before he had to stop and breathe deeply.
Phil took up the narrative, “There is a danger, but I’m not sure that it’s imminent. I discovered just a few minutes ago that the fabric used in the pavilion itself and its awning has a large number of very tiny portals woven into its fabric. They appear to be used to ‘leech’ heat from their surroundings and radiate it into extra-solar space, which of course makes the fabric into a perpetual heat sink which cools the surrounding air.”
The wizard interrupted, “That’s what it’s been used as for hundreds of years that I know of, although I don’t know exactly when they were introduced. As Phil said, they have what seems to be an innocuous use, but we now know that any portal can be enlarged, so there’s a clear danger to the person of the Empress if they’re anywhere nearby.”
“Exactly,” Phil said. “Akcuanrut told me that this is a ‘folk art’ that originated among the nomads of the northern desserts, but of course that’s centaur country, so I imagine that the true origins are somewhat further back in time. So far, it seems unlikely that our enemies have access to portal technology with quite that versatility, to judge from our recent experiences with them, but things do change in any war, because everyone is desperate to survive their encounters with the enemy, so devotes enormous wealth and resources to research and spying.”
“And these tiny portals,” the wizard interrupted, “could be easily subverted for constructing nearly-undetectable listening posts, and then transformed, with much more effort, into sally ports from which to launch surprise assaults.”
“True,” Phil conceded, “but there’s another danger; since they currently open into interstellar space, merely enlarging them could open a hole directly into an enormous vacuum. Although it would take a very long time for the entire atmosphere to be vented into the void, they’d probably cause local low pressure cells that could feed enormous storms and make life very difficult for anyone within many miles who wasn’t sucked immediately through the holes.”
“Like flushing a toilet,” Selene said, which of course no one present understood except for Phil and Rhea.
“And I think how the dwarves who attacked you on that mountain trail sprang their trap,” Phil said. “There was no actual mechanism left behind, so I believe they simply opened a portal that gobbled up the intervening rock, allowing you to fall into their hands.”
“But why didn’t they drop us right into their stronghold in Svartálfheimr?” Rhea insisted. “They could have brought more troops to bear on us if we’d been transported out of those stupid tunnels of theirs entirely. As it was, their own dead bodies formed a wonderful defensive fortress for us, and they couldn’t really flank our position effectively, and of course once you dropped down your little flashlight so we could see properly, they were doomed, even without the wizard’s spectacular waterfall.”
Phil smiled at the remembrance of that day, very glad to have been of service to his lady loves. “Cowardice? Lack of fine control? Perhaps even a cautious wisdom? It’s certain that if they’d left their portal behind, even for an instant, Akcuanrut and I could have held it open, easily brought our entire force to bear upon them, and then had a permanent entry into their supposed fortress which they couldn’t close, even if they’d tried.”
“So, Master Wizards,” said the Empress in her official persona, “what’s your official advice for me?”
“I believe,” Phil said, “that Akcuanrut and I should spend an hour or two figuring out how to close down many thousands of portals in wholesale quantities, rather than one at a time, and then we should continue with the official wedding ceremonies, which ought to leave you all plenty of time for your necessary preparations, even with this little interruption.”
She looked toward Akcuanrut and asked, “Do you agree?”
“I do. On sober reflection, now that any immediate danger has been safely contained, I think an hour might be enough, although two will allow a bit of time for in-depth exploration of this new technique.”
“Let it be so, then. Can we have servants in to remove our clothing and other personal items from the pavilion?”
“Yes, with nearly perfect safety,” Phil said. “Akcuanrut was very much concerned about even the remote possibility of danger to your person, but I believe he may have been unduly alarmed, although of course he has much longer experience in statecraft than I do. Then too, I’m taking into account the overall danger inherent in your being part of an armed expedition against our existential enemy, whose plans to kill us all are well-developed, then weighing that against the relative unlikelihood of them discovering a brand new avenue of assault which seems vastly superior to anything they’ve demonstrated heretofore. On the other hand, I have a hunch that we may well be able to fashion this ‘new’ discovery of an ancient centaur technology into a potent new weapon against the Dark.”
Larona nodded her assent, her visage grim, then said, “That’s why I accompanied our forces. There comes a time when Emperors must take the field, because the hazard of our very lives is the coin with which empires are purchased. When my beloved subjects are in danger, it’s both my duty and my noble privilege to place my body between my people and the cruel suffering of war.”
Closing the many almost infinitesimal portals was a little more difficult than they’d imagined, but the effort paid off handsomely, since they also discovered how to create them in large numbers at will, all of which had the very properties that Akcuanrut had seen as dangers. As Phil had discovered almost immediately, they could be created in pairs, each of which maintained a durable connection to its mate, which is how, they imagined, the centaurs had first managed to use them as radiative heat sinks, although they were still at a loss as to how half of those original pairs had been hurled into space, but they were still there, and available for their own use, should they be needed, since they had the remaining closed portals that matched them ready to hand in the form of very many yards of the fabric used in the pavilion and awning.
Closing that connection, on the other hand, was a difficult task, since the closed portal had to retain its linkage to its twin somewhere out in the void without being open to it. It took three hours, plus a bit, and stretched the limits of everyone’s patience, since the guests were milling around, as guests do, eating and drinking, then drinking and eating, and chatting. Their company grew quite garrulous.
“Are we ready?” the Empress said when they finally reported their success.
“Except for changing our clothes, yes,” Phil reported, a little tired, and still game.
She smiled, then said, “Hold very still!” and conjured identical outfits directly on their bodies, leaving Phil, at least, mystified over what had become of their old outfits.
“Uhmm…. Larona, Sweetie, what happened to my old sporran?”
“That purse thing? I replaced it with the new version, of course. It was getting a little dingy, and it didn’t match the shade of your new ‘plaid,’ I think you called it.”
“Yes, well….” he was checking the contents of the new sporran, and was visibly relieved to discover that all his stuff was still there, if rather more neatly arranged. “It’s an interesting color scheme. However did you manage it?”
“It’s just a lighter shade of Eir’s gown, and mine, since I thought it would be lovely if you matched. Do you like it?”
Phil smiled manfully and said, “It’s perfect, and certainly unique, since I’ve never seen a pink plaid before. Please believe me, I’m honored by your kind attentions.”
“Oh, good,” she said smiling, “Eir had said that your old one was far too short for practicality, so I added a little length, and here come the girls.”
“Phil!” Selene cooed, smiling, “Great new look! It does wonders for your hair and eyes! The whole outfit just pops, as they say, and really pulls the whole wedding party theme together.”
“Thank you, Selene,” he said with quiet dignity.
“I like it too, Phil,” Eir said, “Having the stripes on the diagonal is much less formal, as befits a day of celebration and joy.”
“Thank you, Eir,” he said with equal dignity. “I’m at your service.”
Rhea, on the other hand, just laughed out loud, which briefly mystified everyone except Selene and Phil. She very wisely didn’t explain her outburst, not then nor ever, which was unusual for her. “Shall we be off, then?” she said. “The wedding feat… pardon, the wedding feast, awaits!”
And off they went, in very good order.
The camp had been altered slightly, since the last time he’d been this way. Where the old arrangement had a clear lane flanked by tents leading straight toward the pavilion, plus a mess tent for the soldiers set well off to one side, the new arrangement had what amounted to a central meadow with the pavilion at the head of it, then what could only be described as a stage raised almost seven feet high, with wide stairs on either side placed at the other end, with rough tables and serving counters spread across the slightly muddy sward.
Gefjon was already standing on the stage, looking regal in an elaborate gown fashioned from some sort of green tapestry, with wide hoop skirts and a shimmery veil, none of which had Phil ever seen before. It was very attractive, despite looking a bit like the outfit he’d seen the Queen of the Kingdom of the East wear at a Society for Creative Anachronism shindig one summer during his Junior year at school, not that he’d been all that interested at the time, since he was already focused on his physics studies and sports. In retrospect, he regretted not paying more attention, since they’d seemed to have medieval technology down pat, although he had noticed that the Queen of the East had also worn wireless stereo earpieces in her ears back then, and what looked like the very top of a smartphone nestled discreetly in her décolletage.
Gefjon, on the other hand, was wearing gold and emerald earrings — a pair he’d made for her, he was very pleased to see — a rather gaudy gold necklace which he presumed was Brisingamen, and their present surroundings were medieval, with no smartphones or car keys either hidden away or tossed negligently on a table.
Larona and Eir stood beside her, one on either side, and their gowns, while not as elaborate as that of Gefjon, were obviously designed to complement hers, both in a striking bright red, Eir’s with a bodice intricately embroidered with gold and diamonds, while Larona’s was similarly decorated with emeralds, what looked like blue sapphires, and some sort of symbolic pectoral in beaded pearls both black and white. He could easily see that his own outfit was perfectly matched to those of his brides, or at least fit into the overall color scheme, because the gowns of Hnoss and Gersemi, who were also marching along with them, were also red, and also distinguished by unique decorative elements which Phil had not the vocabulary to fully explain, although he was quite sure that either Rhea or Selene could do so in detail and with exactitude, featuring style references to eras in both ancient and recent history on Earth. He’d heard them do it, and it was an almost constant source of surprise and bemusement. He’d heard them discussing ‘dirndls’ once, and still had not the slightest idea what a dirndl was, much less how they differed from anything else, or what similarities allowed one to treat them as a distinguishable class of logical predicates.
There were three canopies erected on the stage as well, so he instantly presumed that he was going to be going through the ceremonies of ketubah, kiddushin and nissuin with Gefjon again, as well as with the Empress Larona and Eir. That made sense, since they hadn’t had a ketubah ready for their first hasty marriage before they’d left her fantastic ship behind, and it was probably important for dynastic reasons to have a wider public available to witness the ceremony. The others would be for Larona and Eir, since many brides liked to save their individual wedding canopies, because the cloth of the chuppah was often embroidered and decorated by friends of the bride and groom, and the totality of it, including the four poles that held it up, symbolically represented both their first home and their mutual intention to generously extend the hospitality of their family to all, because the wedding canopy is always open on every side. He knew for a fact that both Selene and Rhea had their chuppahs saved back on Earth, assuming that there would still be an Earth to go back to at the end of all this.
As he approached the stage, the sheer weight of the many responsibilities he was undertaking almost overwhelmed him, the stage itself seemed almost a scaffold, the setting both of an ancient ceremony celebrating joy and burgeoning life, and the metaphorical ‘sticking point’ of life’s desperate struggle to survive the many forms of death that beset it on every side. In one sense, he was taking on the personal responsibility to care and provide for three individual women, but in the other, he was taking on the burden of responsibility for every life there was, all the people looking on, the people who didn’t even know that this small pageant was going on, and those for whom the future was simply vague possibilities. This moment, this very instant, mattered just as much to him as if he were walking up not to be married, but to face the hangman’s noose. ‘It matters!’ he thought. ‘Everything matters! No one is a mere spectator! We all of us are standing on one foot, precariously balanced between stepping off into the future, and life, or stepping through the trap, and into death.’
He looked around him, at the women who accompanied him toward the stage, Larona, a woman who’d lived a life of incredible luxury, surrounded by servants to fulfil her every whim, yet had abandoned that life in a heartbeat, was facing death even as she approached her formal wedding, for the sake of her people and perhaps her own pride; and then Gefjon, a Goddess with incredible powers, the divine ruler of an entire ‘world,’ a woman who might well survive the coming struggle if she simply stood aside and waited to see what happened, but had rather joined Larona on her path toward the dangerous front lines, where true death was always a possibility, even for a Goddess; and then Eir, the Guide between life and death, the final judge, no stranger to battle, a witness to individual courage — and cowardice — on a scale he could scarcely comprehend, and yet she’d cast her lot with all the rest, humans, even birds and trees, life itself. He felt humbled by them all, profoundly unworthy, even as they carried his children, his own hope for the future — whatever happened to him — sheltered deep within their bodies, a level of personal responsibility that he could barely comprehend. Larona had talked about her obligation to place her body between her people and the cruel suffering of war, but every woman since the human race began did exactly the same thing with every pregnancy, placing her body and her life between her child and any harm. In human terms, this level of devotion was a commonplace of daily life, either heroic and typically unacknowledged, or part of the bargain we all made when we were born, to take the good with the bad, and to create the future through the limitations and powers inherent in one’s own self.
“I like the outfit, Phil,” Rhea whispered as they approached the stage. “It’s very slimming, and it makes you look taller somehow.”
He glanced down at his new kilt, which looked rather more like a woman’s maxi-skirt in this new incarnation. “It is rather nice, isn’t it?” he said, also whispering. “Eir was right; it’s a lot warmer than my old one. Maybe I should adopt this as my new look, as long as we’re at war, since it’s always important to look one’s best.”
She frowned slightly in his direction. “It’s not going to be any fun teasing you, Phil, if you’re going to be so darned nice about everything.”
“What? I should be rude to Larona, who made it for me with the best of intentions, or Eir, who thoughtfully suggested the new length because it seemed to her more practical? Or should I be irritated with you and Selene, who didn’t bother to inform either of them of the subtle distinctions between the styles normally worn on Earth by men and women? How many bridegrooms back on Earth have wound up in lavender tuxedos because they fit into an overall color scheme? I’m lucky that it’s only pink, because it could easily have included delicate lace ruffles, or the grotesque codpiece that I was almost saddled with, as I understand it. In fact, I blame no one, and am grateful for every kindness, and also every opportunity to amuse my cheeky wives.” He grinned at her. “If you’d like to see me dance en pointe in a frothy pink tutu and body stocking, or put on whiteface and perform an ‘invisible box’ mime routine, just let me know, why don’t you? I always aim to please, and I’m sure that it would be good exercise.
“Oh, no!” cried Selene very, very quietly. “Not the invisible box! Anything, anything but that! I’ll talk, I swear I’ll talk! What do you want to know?”
Eir Halló, tall blonde woman in a strikingly red gown with a bodice embroidered with gold and diamonds
Gefjon regal gown in green tapestry with hoop skirts and a veil
Larona a red gown in exactly Eir’s shade, but with a bodice covered with at least a thousand emeralds and a pectoral of pearls.
-->
“Me?” he said, still whispering, “Not much, just what did I ever do to deserve you two in my life.”
Both Selene and Rhea smiled broadly. “Oh, that’s no secret, Dearest,” they whispered in chorus, “It’s because you’ve been a very good boy, and that warrants a little treat from time to time.”
“Well, then,” he said, “I’m satisfied.”
“We are too,” Selene said. “Believe me.”
Akcuanrut made the first speech, introducing Queen Gefjon, in whose world they were guests, praising her hospitality, and explaining that they were here to celebrate her marriage to Phil, a member of the Imperial College of Wizards in Myriad, and a man whose origins lay in yet another world, a place called ‘Earth,’ where many wonders existed, and so three worlds would be brought together. He went on at some length, because the wizard was a loquacious man of words, but at length he yielded his place to Phil, who had a few words of his own to say.
“In the journey,” he said, “which brought me to this place and time, I’ve learned many things, not least being that many things I thought were only fantasy are very real. In my world, my people have a sort of law which requires men to marry and support at least one wife, a law which I never really understood until just a few moments ago. I thought it odd, perhaps unfair, that women had no similar obligation, but then I realized that I’d been stupid. Women, I think, have an inherent stake in the future, because only they can bring new life into the world. The laws of this world recognize this by defining the life of a woman as being worth three times that of a man, because a man has no similar commitment to the future, nor extraordinary value to the larger community, unless he chooses to do so.”
“Our law requires a man to choose, to cast his lot with those who create the world anew, who carry babies, nurture children, and build families so that we all survive.”
“This woman,” he indicated Gefjon, “the Queen and sovereign of this world, is such a woman, and this woman, her daughter, with powers so far beyond me that I’m awed, in her own right exercises sovereign power within her personal sphere of authority, as does the Empress Larona standing by me, yet each of them have freely chosen to accompany me on this quest, placing their own bodies between their loved ones and the desolation of war, choosing life, protecting life, nurturing life within their own bodies, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude.”
“These women also here beside me,” he indicated Rhea and Selene, have freely chosen to accompany me on life’s journey, to create our small portion of the human family, and to serve life. I choose to cast my lot with them, to be a man within the context of my people, and pledge to do my part to help reconstitute and preserve the worlds, to protect them from any harm, to serve them with my body and my life, a sacred duty which the ceremonies you’re about to witness symbolize. So here I pledge also my friendship to all my wives’ extended families,” here he indicated especially Vili and Vé, who’d shown up with a small retinue of servants and armed supporters, but who seemed content to enjoy the general hospitality, and who both promptly raised their ample horns of ale in a toast to signify their benevolence and general bonhomie with friendly smiles. No matter what or exactly how, they had a connection to his larger family that he couldn’t simply ignore, and they all of them would just have to get along with each other, regardless of any discomfort or resentment they might ordinarily have felt.
Akcuanrut cleared his throat, now that Phil seemed to have finished his heartfelt outpouring of sentiment, and said, “I thought, to save time, we might sign all these documents at once, since no one but us will be able to see or really understand what’s going on.”
That sounded like a good idea to Phil, so he promptly signed all three ketubot, then stood back while his new wives signed their own marriage contracts, and then Akcuanrut and a few more prominent witnesses, including Eiður Goðrúnarson — the Lögmaður, signed them all as well. Although he couldn’t arrange for Jewish witnesses perforce, he did the best he could, and the local Reform Rabbi back home had been perfectly happy with the ketubot of Selene and Rhea — if a little bemused until he’d explained that they weren’t actually on Earth at the time, which intrigued her even more than the magically-protected parchment on which they were written, and the glowing sigil of Akcuanrut — although of course she couldn’t speak for the Orthodox or Conservative communities.
Phil hadn’t cared, since they were living in America at the time, and the Orthodox Rabbinate had neither impact on his life nor weight in his mind, because the principle of consecration they depended upon preceded the modern Rabbinates of any particular movement by a thousand years or more. Absent a functional Temple and a Kohen Gadol, the LOR had no more weight in any possible dispute than would the Man in the Moon.
Their actual vows went very well, and proved popular with their audience, who shouted and clapped during the more flamboyant theatrical portions of the services, especially when Phillip and his new wives made their conspicuous exit to a private space — the pavilion, in fact — which sparked uproarious laughter, loud comments on the groom’s virility, and offers to assist if he had any difficulties. There was a smallish brawl at the table of Vili and Vé, but it had been expected, and there were enough disinterested men-at-arms handy to break it up with no fatalities, nor even hard feelings, as far as anyone could tell, because they were all singing what appeared to be bawdy songs together within a very few minutes, proposing toasts, and eventually fell asleep on their benches.
When Phil finally noticed, after he and his new wives had emerged from their symbolic cohabitation, he commented favorably on how well they’d behaved, and how surprised he’d been.
“You needn’t have worried,” Gefjon told him carelessly. “I had Rhea and Selene watching out for them, and of course I’d also drugged their beer…,” at which revelation all his wives had laughed.
Later that evening, the party was winding down and people were either going home to either tents or nearby halls or arranging cloaks and spare clothes to bed down on benches, as had Vili and Vé much earlier, when a small delegation of women walked up, a dozen of Selene’s many twins. “Could we have a word with you?” they said to the wedding party in general, but they were pointedly looking at Phil.
“Of course,” he said, blinking in surprise, since they generally kept to themselves, having an intimate camaraderie and sororal relationship between them that tolerated few intrusions.
“We were all very moved by your speech,” one said. “I was Bluebell, one of the first you saved, and I’ve gotten quite used to my new body, although it was something of a shock to wake up from my deathly stupor so much shorter, and pregnant besides.”
“I imagine it must have been,” Phil said sympathetically, “but we couldn’t stand by and let you either suffer in the spell imposed upon you by the Heart of Virtue or die, since to do that we would have had to deliberately kill you.”
“Don’t get us wrong!” she said fiercely, “We’re not at all complaining about that! Far from it! All of us are very glad to be alive, but we’re all of us facing our lying in without the support and love you’ve publicly shown and proclaimed for your other wives. Since we’re all having your babies, we thought that we should be able to have some of the fun stuff that usually precedes pregnancy and birth. We simply want our fair share.”
There was a long silence before Phil managed to say, “Uhm….”
…and the five wives arrayed behind him all began to giggle, then to laugh in hysterical amusement.
“Oh, Phil!” one said, he couldn’t tell which, because his head was spinning, and his vision growing dim around the edges, and then the grassy meadow was rushing toward his face.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Twenty-Nine
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Things alter for the worse spontaneously,
if they be not altered for the better designedly.— Francis Bacon (1561—1626)
“Phil? Are you all right?” Selene’s sweet face loomed large above him, a tiny furrow of concern between her thin red brows. ‘She must pluck them,’ he thought, incongruously, although he’d never actually seen either Rhea or Selene engaged in beauty regimens.
He blinked, suddenly nauseous at the slight movement of his head as he tried to nod, and he felt somehow partially disembodied, as if his soul had wandered off and was just now returning, settling into its familiar home a little gingerly, still floating around a bit before fully relaxing into solidity. “I’m fine,” he managed to say, “just a little surprised.”
“Well, who wouldn’t be?” Rhea answered with a trace of sarcasm. “That speech of yours made me all gooey, so those poor girls must have felt quite desolate, hearing you so movingly describe the profound joys of marriage that they’d been utterly denied.”
“Wait just a minute!” Phil complained. “You can’t possibly suggest….”
“Well, what on Earth did you expect?” Rhea asked, rather unsympathetically, he thought.
Selene looked down at him with pity, he thought. “It probably wasn’t the most auspicious time to wax poetic on the subject of marriage, Dearest, considering how many women there were in your audience who couldn’t really be described as having happy and fulfilling conjugal relations.”
“So you’re saying that this is all my fault?” he said in wounded pride, struggling to his feet, still feeling a little woozy, as if he’d taken a hard tackle and had wound up flat on his ass with some big bruiser sitting on him.
“I’m sorry, Dearest, but when we set up this system of marriages-in-name-only, I thought that we’d all agreed that it was a compromise between what we were capable of and what our sisters truly needed. You thought, and we were of the same mind, that the technicality you’d thought of, where a woman married a man who was serving time in jail and so couldn’t consummate their relationship, would offer protection to our sisters without making impossible demands on your own abilities, and certainly your own spontaneous marriage to Rhea — undertaken in desperate haste to save her life on a wonderfully intuitive ‘hunch’ — was immediately effective, even though you hadn’t then had any sexual relationship at all, nor any immediate plan to do so.”
“Yes,” he said, “but….”
…only to have Selene cut him off. “What we failed to do, and I partially blame myself in this, was to involve our sisters in our discussions to begin with, as we should have done.”
“I’m afraid she’s right, Phil,” Rhea said. “She was always much more sensible than I was, since I tended at times toward eccentric genius….”
Selene snorted, “In your dreams! More like ‘Mad Scientist’ most of the time. Mwah-ha-ha!” she cackled in her best Lon Chaney fashion and threw up her hands into the air. “It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!”
Rhea glared at her sourly. “Well, even you have to admit that my plan of taking the Jekyll formula has worked out well for both of us! I, at least, have never been happier!”
Selene’s sense of dudgeon simply evaporated at that, and she leaned in to kiss her. “Of course, it has, my darling! I never said that you didn’t have flashes of pure genius.”
Phil admitted, feeling a little like a low-down dirty dog as he realized, “It’s my fault, really. We spent months back on Earth preparing for our expedition here, and never once did it occur to me to check the facts on which I’d based my theory, nor even think about the ultimate insanity of the notion that I could ‘marry’ all those women to ‘protect’ them without incurring any real obligations that a little gold couldn’t rectify. Perhaps the prison where the right-wing loonie was incarcerated had ‘conjugal visits’ on offer, so my whole premise may have been a stupid blunder, and I certainly should at least have discussed our situation with our sisters more thoroughly while we all sat at leisure on Earth, going on shopping expeditions, exploring the neighborhood, and just ‘fooling around’ for long periods of time. I checked on the validity of our marriages, but did nothing about theirs. In fact, I didn’t actually do anything to resolve the issue, and left all these women to their own devices, sink or swim, and by-the-way thanks so much for filling in as lowly foot-soldiers as we head off into mortal danger.” He made a sour face. “Feh!” he said, “I disgust even myself!”
Eir, having been quietly observing their interaction for some moments, said, “Don’t be hard on each other, Sweethearts. It’s difficult to see the consequences of all one’s actions, and impossible to control everything, because life is constantly ongoing. Do you order your heart to beat? Your lungs to take in breath? Daily life is more than enough to occupy our minds if we’re living in the moment, and as you know, my job allows me to fairly judge between missed opportunities and real failure. You all of you meant well, and did the best you could, given the information you had ready to hand, and I can help you all.”
They looked at her amazed, because they’d never actually heard her say much of anything of what was on her mind, since she seemed always focused on the present moment, which she’d just implied was truly enough. “Help us?” Selene asked her. “How?”
Rhea acknowledged her own curiosity with a raised brow, but added, “Yes, how?”
“As you know,” she said, “I choose the slain for my mother’s hall here in Vanaheim, and leave the dregs for Valhalla. How many quarrels do you suppose are going on right now, and how many people are dying?”
“Uhm… lots?” Rhea hazarded a guess.
“One thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-eight… seven…,” she said promptly, “and I am there for all of them.” She smiled benignly.
And the hair rose on the back of Phil’s neck as he realized just who it was he’d married. “But that means….”
“…Exactly what it means,” she said. “If our Phil here,” she said, addressing all of them, “desires to have intimate conversations with his many wives, I can simply take him with me to visit them, and then retire to leave them in private conference until their interactions are concluded to their mutual satisfaction.” She arched one perfect brow, at once perfectly compassionate and perfectly imperious.
“Well,” Phil said, suddenly decisive, “there’s no time like the present. Eir, do you know who they all are?”
She smiled in patient amusement. “Of course I do. Would you like to include those you left behind on the world Akcuanrut and the Empress Larona were born in?”
Phil blinked in surprise, then said, “Yes, I would.”
She looked over to Selene and Rhea and asked, “Is it all right with you? We’ll be back in just a few hours, I believe.”
Rhea said, “As Phil said, there’s no time like the present.”
Selene succinctly added, “The problem has existed for far too long; it’s high time that it’s taken in hand.”
“Then we’ll see you later, ladies. Please convey our love to Larona and my mother if they drop by.” She turned to Phil and said, “Shall we start off, husband?”
Taking her hand, he said, “Lead on, wife. I’m in your hands.”
They walked off toward the pavilion, where Sleipnir was calmly munching aged hay and barley from a convenient manger. “Up, Sleipnir!” she said, and the unearthly horse responded with a whinny as she vaulted to his back, then reached down to lift her husband up behind her, and with a shout, they leapt up into the sky.
This time, their flight was different than the last, because Phil felt somehow stretched and attenuated as they rose into the clear air, as if he were somehow being separated from himself, but he was still the same man, and they plunged straight into the midst of the camp, landing near a single tent, where Eir said, “She waits within.”
Phil slid down from Sleipnir’s back and approached the tent, called out “Hallo!” and waited for a response, which wasn’t long in coming.
“Phillip?” she said as she looked out from her modest tent, startled by his presence. She then looked over to where Sleipnir and Eir were waiting, but the field around them was strangely empty, though they were in the middle of a crowded camp.
“Hello,” he said. “We spoke this afternoon. I believe you introduced yourself as Bluebell.”
“I was Bluebell, but I call myself Belinda now. I didn’t like being constantly reminded of what I’d lost, everything that had been taken away from me by the evil Na-Noc.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “I’m very sorry that we couldn’t restore everyone to be exactly what they were before they were captured by the minions of the Heart of Virtue.”
She frowned and said, “Why are you here?”
“You presented me with a… demand… just this afternoon,” he said sincerely, “a request that I’ve concluded was perfectly fair and reasonable, and my other wives agree. I’ve been unpardonably callous in my treatment of you all, and I’m here to make whatever amends I can.”
“What about the other women, my sisters?” she said suspiciously.
“I plan to spend time with all of them, and there will be no further distinction made between any of my wives. You all of you carry my children, although we mostly didn’t come to our sudden relationships in the normal course of events, and so my clear duty is to love and protect you as best I can. I’m not perfect, and occasionally do stupid things, but I imagine most men do.”
“You’ve got that part right, in any case. Some of the men-at-arms have come sniffing around, but we have it on good authority that they’re all married, despite what they may claim.”
“Should I speak to the officers, do you think?”
She snorted. “Nah! It’s pretty clear that they’re mainly interested in our money, since a few of us haven’t been nearly as cagey as a woman ought to be about the value of her goods and other property.”
“Well then, you might want to keep the fact that the Empress of Myriad is your new sister-in-law quiet too, since then you’ll have social climbers after you besides the fortune hunters. Speaking of which, I wanted to let you all know that I’ve had the wizard Akcuanrut add an amendment to your marriage contracts making your dowries exactly equal to those of my other wives. That was another of my bad ideas, and I apologize for that as well, but it was wrong of me to make any invidious distinction between any of you.”
“How much have they been changed, exactly?”
“Well, as you undoubtedly know, I’m a Master Wizard of Myriad, and my gifts to my other wives have been rather generous, so I estimated it at roughly two hundred pounds of gold, plus your choice of any custom jewelry you might want to have, or anything else you might need, for that matter, since I’m obligated to provide your food and clothing, as well as other ‘creature comforts.’ Just let me know what you’d like, and I’ll either make it for you or purchase it.”
She laughed at that. “When you feel guilty, you don’t skimp on either your apologies or amends, do you?”
He laughed along with her. “Well, since it took a dozen women to remind me that I was being a putz, I have a lot to apologize for, don’t I?”
“You do,” she said smugly. “So where do we go from here? Do you screw me while the blonde Goddess waits outside? Then run off to see to the others?”
“Not at all, unless you want me to. She’s here to offer transportation to somewhere a little more private; it’s a gift she has for traveling, and we can take as long away as you like.”
“And what about the rest of my sisters, and your more privileged wives for that matter, while we’re off wandering hand-in-hand through fields of clover? Do they just sit around and wonder where the heck we’ve gone?”
“No,” he said simply. “As I understand it, Eir — that’s the ‘blonde Goddess’ waiting over there — can bring us back to the very instant we left, although I’m not sure exactly how she does this. As I said, it’s her gift, not mine.”
“And where did you plan to take me?” she asked, evidently already familiar with dating etiquette, either from Selene’s memories and skills or from talking to the two of them during their sojourn in the centaur temple.
“Well,” he said. I thought that the valley near Gefjon’s hall was very nice, and there’d be food and shelter available. The only other place I know nearby is down over the edge of the cliff, and it’s not terribly comfortable down there.
She thought about that for a few minutes before finally speaking, “The valley, I think. It was nice there; some of those little paths off through the woods seemed to wander around forever, but somehow you could never get lost. Just when you started to get tired, or thought about going back to the hall for a little bite to eat, there it would be, just around the next bend or two.”
Phil smiled at the memory. “It was awfully nice, wasn’t it?”
“I thought so.” Then she stopped and looked, really looked at him, then said, “Why are you really doing this, Phil? We all know that we’re headed into a confrontation with the things that had captured and tortured us, and that we might not survive.”
“Belinda, I believe that we have a really good chance of surviving, most of us, anyway. What we did to you all after we saved your lives was wrong, I think, and you made us all realize it. It’s like on our trip north, when we fell into military columns, because we got caught up in the ‘official’ military expedition led by Akcuanrut and D’lon-Ra, the man who was captured by the Heart and ultimately died. It took Rhea to bring this even partially to my attention, when she made us spread out a little to accommodate the natural behavior of the centaurs, and stop marching in those stupid columns.”
She narrowed her eyebrows and asked, “Then why did it take you so long to notice?”
“Because, at the time,” he said honestly, “I was mostly still just a football player, part of a team, something like all those soldiers, so I was used to following orders and simply fell in line, as most of us did. Rhea was always much more of an individualist, and so saw the foolishness of it sooner, as did Selene.”
She smirked. “Why do you suppose they saw it first, then?”
He laughed. “Because they’re like you, of course,” he said and grinned. “I think women tend to be natural anarchists, where men most often ‘toe the mark’ when someone seems to be in charge.”
“We did wonder when you’d finally realize that we’d travel faster if we were able to forage for food as we made our way to the capital of the Empire, not that it was in any way our Empire back then.”
He grinned again. “Well, as I said, women are the natural anarchists, and it takes time for dunderheads like me to learn to ‘think outside the box.’ ”
She thought about that for a while, unfamiliar with the idiom, before she agreed. “Evidently, but you’re surprisingly humble, for such a brilliant star among the powerful leaders of the Empire, a young man who’s gone from being a mere ‘football player,’ whatever that might be, to Master Wizard and Emperor of Myriad.”
“Well, to be perfectly humble,” he said, “the Empress Larona has made it perfectly clear to me who’s the real boss, in a political sense, and both Queen Gefjon and Eir seem to be real Goddesses with astonishing powers of their own, so my sense of proportion is still fully intact.”
“Poor Phil,” she said with a sympathy that seemed only slightly ironic. “With more wives than any centaur stallion before Thundercloud, there’s not a single one of them without the pure gall to make unreasonable demands.”
“Not unreasonable at all, Belinda. It’s I who acted badly in regard to you, and I owe you my love and service. You just reminded me of my plain duty. I was remiss, not you, and I apologize.” But then he grinned and said, “I had the impression, though, that at least a few of the many souls we saved weren’t terribly interested in me, at least in any physical sense. The Uttersons, for example, seemed perfectly content the way they are.”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” she said judiciously. “Alice and Sarah, like all the rest of us, are basically themselves plus quite a lot of Selene, and Selene’s the woman who first fell in love with you. They love each other, of course, but if the subject ever came up, I don’t think they’d either one of them mind a little more intimate interaction, because we’re all at least half in love with you, no matter who or what we were before. You might think of it as chemistry, or fate.”
Phil was startled, then taken aback. “But….”
She smiled at his discomfiture. “See what you learn when you start talking to all your wives?”
“Kvænhöllr and environs was beautiful, as always, and Phil and Belinda spent several days wandering around exploring. Several times, Phil saw off in the distance, or just disappearing around the bend of a path, what he thought must be himself in the company of yet another of the many sisters of Selene, since he doubted that there were all that many men in this little corner of the world walking around in a long pink kilt. He made no effort whatsoever to catch himself up, since he had no idea what temporal paradoxes might potentially ensue, and in fact the strong sense of déjà vu he felt on seeing himself and his alternative companion almost made him nauseous, because it wasn’t at all like seeing himself in a mirror, so he left well enough alone, stopped briefly to collect himself, then turned to go in quite another direction.”
“What was that about?” Belinda asked on the first occasion, so he’d explained exactly what he’d seen.
“Oooh! How fascinating!” she’d exclaimed, and had wanted to follow, until he’d explained the uneasy feeling it had given him, whereupon she’d said, “Men can be such babies sometimes!” but then let it drop, to his relief.
All in all, he thought they’d spent a week or so in idle acquaintance when she suddenly declared, “Let’s go back! I’m missing having all my sisters around, and I feel guilty just having fun when the world is still in danger.”
“I don’t really think that’s it’s an issue,” he said. “Eir said that, however long we stopped here, we’d return in the instant that we left, and I trust her.”
She thought about that, then said, “Well, I still miss my sisters, but why don’t we stop by that stream we keep running across before we set off back. There was a lovely patch of meadow overlooking it that seemed enticing.”
“Of course, my love,” he said indulgently, and followed her lead as she set briskly off.
When Eir dropped them off at Belinda’s tent, Phil was staggered by the sudden merging of well over six hundred of his separate selves, with a week or more’s freight of memories instantaneously loaded into his brain. He almost fell, had Eir not caught him. “It sets your head spinning sometimes, until you get used to it,” she said unnecessarily.
Belinda asked, “What’s up, Phil? A lifetime of dissipation catching up to you?” She did seem interested, if not particularly sympathetic.
“Something like that,” he said. “All my separate timelines seem to have merged, which is an interesting experience in the same sense that having someone sit on your chest and drop a boulder on your skull is ‘diverting.’ ”
“Really?” she said.
“Really,” he said. “I have very clear memories of more than twelve years of married life with you and your many sister wives, which is a little disconcerting, since I’m barely nineteen years old, last I looked, and we’ve only been married for less than four months, despite my memories.”
“Oooh! Phil!” She grinned at him and cooed, “I’ve always been attracted to older men!”
Phil rolled his eyes and said, “I’m not exactly an old man, yet.”
“No, not yet,” she agreed with more than a trace of gloom, “but just wait for a bit; with this many wives, I’m afraid we’ll wear you out before too long.”
“Don’t worry about it, Sweetheart. I’m sure young Akcuanrut will have a solution, and Gefjon definitely has a handle on it, because she’s evidently the cause of his sudden loss of weight and return to youthful vigor.”
“Handle?” she said, puzzled by the idiom.
“…is well able to take care of things; that is, she has it under control.”
“Aaah!” she said, enlightened.
“Phil, Belinða, it’s time you were getting ready,” Eir suggested with a perfectly charming slight accent.
“Ready?” he asked.
“I believe that Larona and my mother await your return, not to mention Selene and Rhea, and there are… other things as well.”
Mystified, he said, “Okay, let’s go then.”
She leaned down from Sleipnir and took his hand, then lifted him bodily from the ground and up behind her as Sleipnir leapt into the air and was standing before the pavilion almost in the blink of an eye. Eir vaulted from the weird horse and lifted him down again, then they walked past the guards and through the vestiblue to where his four other wives were waiting, along with Akcuanrut and his two. “We’re here,” Eir said.
“Good, good!” Akcuanrut said. “We have reason to believe that the Dark Gods — or Surtr and the Fire Giants, it makes no particular distinction, we think — are rising, because there have been a series of killings along edge of the gulf between Múspellheimr and Miðgarðr. As you know, and as we have actually seen, the burning rainbow bridge named Bilröst spans the gulf between Múspellheimr and Miðgarðr, so it would be a natural avenue of attack, because Yggdrasil itself is so vast that launching a direct attack against either the Æsir or the Vanes would be extremely difficult, according to Eir, especially for the Fire Giants, who might well set the great tree itself alight and thus undermine the foundations of their own world.”
“But how are they crossing the gap between the worlds, if they can’t use the mighty branches of Yggdrasil?” Phil said.
“We don’t know,” the wizard admitted. “It’s possible that some some renegade group of the Dvergar have made a bridge for them, or they might have exploited a portal between their world and the world of Men.”
“That doesn’t really make sense either, except…” Phil paused, thinking, then said excitedly, “…when they opened a portal between the cavern beneath the throne room and Earth, they seem to have exploited the very portal opened by Wildflower’s TSP device, because the Lanyons and Selene wound up back in their own living room, just beneath the rift, or weakness, left by the creation of their portal when it partially collapsed. Na-noc didn’t follow them exactly, but was obviously in close proximity, so let’s assume — for the sake of a possible explanation — that they’re able to use existing portals — remember that there was a portal just outside the door that led to the cavern itself, — and even offset them slightly, but don’t have the knowledge or magical power to create their own from scratch.” He thought for a moment, then asked, “Did you ever find any trace of any nearby portal that they might have used to transport Loki? I meant to ask before, but was caught up in losing a day in a space-time slippage, and then dealing with multiple aftermaths.”
“I did,” the wizard said, “and got caught up in my own series of… distractions, so I didn’t actually remember to tell you when you finally appeared at our door just now. It was well over ten miles away, and bore certain resemblances to the portals created by the ancient centaurs, so I suspect, after listening to your own theory, that it’s something that they found, rather than created.”
“So,” Phil thought aloud, “if the centaurs had also discovered Miðgarðr, there could also be an unguarded ancient portal there, just as there is at least one known centaur portal on my Earth, and probably more which we simply haven’t found, which Surtr and his gang might have found and then thought that they could use it as a way to bring force to bear on Bilröst as their road to enter Ásgarðr and assault the Æsir.”
Larona interjected a pertinent question, “But why is there any special enmity between these Fire Giants and the Æsir?”
Gefjon answered for the Nine Worlds, “Both the Jötunns and the Æsir are very quarrelsome by nature, and the Jötunns in particular feel that all other beings — or at least those within the Nine Worlds — are their inferiors and natural slaves or food.”
“The first Jötunn, ” she continued, “was Ymir, and from him all the other Jötunns were born, or so they say, although women are conspicuously absent from this story.”
“Aren’t they usually?” Rhea said sourly.
Gefjon gave her a wry look, then shrugged, “One lives in the world one finds beneath one’s feet.” Then she continued her story, “The first of the Æsir was Búri, whose son was Borr, and his grandsons out of Borr were Oðin, Vili, and Vé. These three became jealous of the Giants, and decided to kill Ymir and fashion other beings out of his body, among whom were the Dvergar, or so they say, although others say that the Dvergar were born directly from the rocks.”
“Where did the Vanes come from, then?” Selene asked.
“No one really knows, except that they were created, or arrived, after the Jötunns, but before the Æsir, and that the two groups of Gods warred with each other for quite some time before hostages were exchanged and a relative peace was established between them.”
“Hostages?” Phil queried.
“It’s a rather vague term,” she explained. “Theoretically, a hostage is at the mercy of their ‘host,’ but in practice, in dealings with powerful beings, the line between ‘hostage’ and ‘custodian’ can be rather more flexible than it sounds. I, for example, was ‘given’ to Óðinn — you know him as ‘Ásagrimmr’ — as his nominal ‘wife,’ but I never let it particularly cramp my style, you might say, and maintained my residence here in Vanaheim, despite being officially part of his household. He was never one to hang around in any case, so it didn’t really matter where I was, nor whom I might be with in any given period of time.”
Before his recent experiences, Phil might have been more upset by her casual words, but he’d become a little more… flexible about the notions both of temporality and fidelity. With six hundred and forty-five wives so far, he could hardly feel upset — or at least not reasonably upset — about the fact that most of them were as much ‘involved’ with each other as they were with him, and the notion that many of them may have been involved with other people in the past was becoming more like a biographical detail than disconcerting news. Heck, he knew for a fact that quite a few of his wives had been men. None-the-less, he was discomfited enough to pry, “In everything I’ve read, which isn’t much, since our knowledge of your worlds is so sketchy back on Earth, Óðinn’s wife was named ‘Frigg,’ so I’m a little confused about that. Did he have several wives?”
“No, of course not,” she said, annoyed, “but the name ‘Frigg’ means simply ‘Beloved,’ that is, either ‘Wife,’ or ‘Lady,’ so it’s not terribly complicated. Óðinn himself had many names, some chosen deliberately to conceal his identity in his travels, but many simply reflecting his different rôles,” she said. “Don’t you do the same on Earth? As Rhea has explained to me, the names ‘Lord,’ ‘Almighty,’ ‘Father,’and ‘Jehovah’ all refer to the same entity, the chief God of the divine pantheon, as do ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Zeus,’ so you might just as well list those names as cognomens for Óðinn as well, although we usually reserve ‘Lord’ for my stupid brother Freyr. You yourself are well supplied with names and appellations, and Rhea too has used several names; why should we be any different?”
Taken slightly aback, he said, “I’m very sorry, Gefjon. I’m just trying to figure things out, and it all seems terribly complicated to me, so I’m very confused about Óðinn, because he seemed like such a vile man, at least during my own brief encounter with him.”
“Well, things usually do look tangled,” she said, “looking from the outside in, but it all seems fairly simple to me. Does the word ‘hostage’ mean nothing in your language? I was the chief Goddess of the Vanes; he was the chief God of the Æsir. It was an ‘arranged’ marriage meant to cement — or at least make slightly less unstable — a political alliance which was never by any means a love match. As far as I was concerned, the only good thing he ever did was to create quite a bit of very moving extemporaneous poetry, and he was fairly popular at gatherings because of it. That last was especially nice, in my opinion, because he’d usually run across some empty-headed chit who thought that he was amazingly clever, so he’d take her to bed instead of me. I’m just glad that I only had one child by him, Baldr, the vaunted ‘Beautiful Boy’ the Æsir fawned over and eventually slaughtered through their reckless enthusiasm for death-defying bravado. Twits and crêtins, the sorry lot of them.”
Larona interrupted, easily assuming the grim authority of the Empress of Myriad, saying, “I hate to interrupt this fascinating discussion of domestic arrangements, but I believe we were discussing the recent suggestions that the Fire Giants might be preparing to move on Ásgarðr, weren’t we?”
“Exactly!” said Akcuanrut, quite willing to change the subject as well. “Phil had suggested that there might be centaur portals there, which the Fire Giants might have used. Unfortunately, the records we’ve found don’t mention them, or at least in any recognizable way.”
“The question is, I think,” said Phil, feeling a bit hard done by, “whether our next move should be toward Asgard, to assist the Æsir in repelling any possible assault, or toward Miðgarðr, to spy out their intentions there, if any.”
Gefjon said, “It seems odd that they would move to cross Bilröst now, since they’re supposed to wait until the Fimbulvetr, which will precede their attack on the Gods, according to prophesy.”
“And this Fimbulvetr is?” Phil asked.
She answered, “The Great Winter, the Three Years Without a Summer, when life is at its ebb and the Gods are weakest.”
“Is there anything else which supposedly precedes their attack across Bilröst?”
Gefjon looked startled, then said, “I think so. There are supposed to be three great battles, but that all happens before the Fimbulvetr, and the prophesies don’t specify where they happen.”
“Haven’t you been interested at all?” Phil asked.
“It didn’t seem possible,” she said, bewildered. “There are battles going on all the time. Which ones among them might be numbered among the three significant battles?”
“I see the problem,” he responded, “but if the Giants have found their way into Miðgarðr, might these present forays be the lead-up to those significant battles? It would certainly help their cause if they had some sort of base from which they could launch their attack.” He turned to Eir. “Eir, have you talked to any of the people who were killed in these attacks?”
“I haven’t. I can feel their deaths, but when I arrive, there’s nothing left, neither body nor soul. That’s why I suspect the Fire Jötunns. The Hrímthur, the Frost Giants, can’t destroy the soul, and neither can the ordinary Giants you encountered in Jötunheimr, but no one knows what the Fire Jötunns are capable of.”
“I seem to recall,” Phil said, “that almost all human beings are killed during this overall destruction, but if the Gods are eventually victorious, when exactly are the humans killed?”
“How do you know so much about this, Phil?” Rhea couldn’t help asking.
He looked uneasy, but answered anyway, “My father, for some strange reason, is a big fan of Wagner, and made us sit through the entire Ring Cycle one summer at the Met. I read the program notes.”
The others all looked puzzled. “Fagnr?” Eir asked.
“It’s what we call an ‘opera’ — skaldic poetry accompanied by music and song — written over two hundred years before I was born by a man named Richard Wagner. It’s fairly popular in some circles, but it’s usually presented in four big chunks, spaced widely apart in time, because you’re expected to sit still during the performance, and can only get up during scheduled ‘intermissions,’ for a total of fifteen hours or so. It probably wouldn’t appeal to your people here, and it doesn’t follow the events of our real knowledge of the legends very closely at all, because Wagner had some sort of social agenda other than telling the story as handed down from the skalds.”
“But why is it strange that your father liked the… o-per-a?” Eir asked.
“Because Wagner was a notorious antisemite, that is, he hated and despised my people. His work was very popular amongst the leadership of a group called the Nazis who exterminated roughly six million of us during one period of Earth history.”
“Six million! Impossible! There can’t be that many people in a world! What would they eat?” Gefjon said dismissively.
“On our world,” he said, “there are roughly eight billion people alive right now. The Nazis systematically murdered at least thirteen million people, including Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, members of opposing political factions, disabled persons, and unknown numbers of Russians and other Slavic peoples, although at least twenty-one million Russians and Slavs died during the Nazi war on them. Including soldiers and other combatants, at least sixty million people were killed in the wars against the Nazis and their allies. You may think that these are violent worlds here on Yggdrasil, but on Earth, we do it in wholesale lots. I don’t think there’s been a time in the last hundred years when some kind of war wasn’t raging somewhere. I wish we had your system of mandatory wergelds, since the level of wanton destruction we see in our wars would likely bankrupt the perpetrators.”
“It sounds to me as if we ought to be as leery of some of your Earth people as we are of the Fire Jötunns,” Akcuanrut said.
“It’s not a bad idea. I certainly wouldn’t encourage any sort of wholesale immigration — or ready access to the portal technology invented by Wildflower — because at least some of these immigrants would be very likely to bring their old quarrels — and murderous methods of settling ‘feuds’ — along with them as hidden baggage.”
“Yes, well,” the Empress said, “right now, we’re in the Nine Worlds and faced with an existential threat to all our worlds, whether those worlds are peaceful or not. I think we can discount for now any worries about our contacts with Earth, since none of us will survive if the Fire Jötunns succeed in their purpose. We can sort out the remaining problems once the main problem is taken care of.”
“So,” Phil asked, “where do we look first?”
“Miðgarðr, I think, in hopes that our two Master Wizards may be able to find and close the portal, if any, in that world. I took the liberty of asking Akcuanrut to shut down the portal used by Loki when it was reported to me, so at least one ‘back door’ is shut to them, and this portion of the Nine Worlds made safer.”
“So we use King Alv ís’ bridge?” he asked.
“We do. I’m leery of using any portal magic where it might be observed by our enemies. Whatever they can do now, it’s not as much as we can do, so the longer we can protect our secrets the better, I think.”
“About the cooling fabric, then; I have an idea about how it might be used as a weapon. It’s currently stored in an iron casket, something like we used to contain the Heart of Virtue, and I think it would be difficult to close those tiny portals in any case, since the far end is at least a light day away, and probably more like a light year or so, out in the Oort Cloud somewhere, or the local equivalent.”
“Light year?” The Empress asked, already knowing that she wouldn’t like the answer.
“The distance that a beam of light can travel in one year. It tends to be the furthest distance reached by comets as they orbit the local solar system.”
She didn’t, as expected, but said nothing more than, “How very interesting.” She then called out to the guards stationed outside the pavilion, “Yeomen of the Guard, rouse the camp! We’re moving out!”
Of course it wasn’t as easy to do as it was to say, but three hours later, the last cart was packed and they were lined up on the edge of the cliff facing Miðgarðr and Bilröst.
“This isn’t a bad idea,” Phil commented to Rhea and Selene, who were at his side as always as they waited for the Empress to receive the report of readiness from the back of the long column of troops, centaurs and his wives, plus the baggage train at the rear, “since we’ll be in a good position to flank the Giants if we wind up supporting the Æsir.”
“That’s nice, Dear,” Selene said, “but why don’t you let us handle strategy and tactics.”
“We’re ready, Phil,” said Larona.
Phil shouted, “Forward…” and waved his left hand in the air as a visible signal as he flung the bridge off toward Miðgarðr with his left, heard the now familiar musical throb as the bridge shot off toward their destination, the multi-colored glow it carried behind it almost invisible in the sunlight, and stepped onto the bridge without the slightest hesitation.
Unlike the last time, he was prepared for the sensation of being carried along by the bridge and continued his command immediately, “…March!” as he rose up into the air and out beyond the edge of the cliff.
Ahead of them, he saw Eir and Sleipnir flying back from Miðgarðr towards them, and as she came rushing through the air, Sleipnir’s eight hooves finding purchase on the empty air, she shouted, “That will be Heimdallr’s horn you hear!”as she hurtled past and the notes of a horn followed her, pitched much higher than he would have thought, like a huntsman’s bugle, until he realized that the Doppler effect would have raised the pitch of even a tuba, traveling as fast toward the source as they were.
Looking behind him, he saw that Eir had urged Sleipnir into a rapid turn and they were quickly catching up. She shouted again, “Your landing spot is clear, but be very quiet, since the Fire Jötunns are right over the hill you’ll see before you, and this end of Bilröst is to your right.” Then she somehow persuaded Sleipnir to sidle right up to the bridge, so she could lean right over and kiss him, then Rhea and Selene as she flew through the air more precisely matching their speed and course than the US Navy Blue Angels on their very best day, then she said quietly, “I can’t take their souls, if they have any, but I can spread a little chaos and confusion through their ranks while I await your somewhat leisurely arrival.” With that, she grinned, took out a sword like a diamond needle, bright and sparkling, and nudged her unearthly mount gently with her heels, spurring him to tremendous speed again as she hurtled back where she’d come from. “Give my best love to my mother!” was the last they heard from her as she flew off into the growing dusk, her voice already stretching out from alto into tenor.
Looking ahead into the distance, their landing place seemed dark, but they could see a red glow beyond the low hills, and the corruscating rainbow of Bilröst rising above those same hills, but further off to one side.
Phil turned to address Larona. “That red glow is caused by Fire Giants. Tell everyone to be as quiet as possible until we get into some sort of order on the ground and plan our strategy. You can see Bilröst on our right.”
As the Empress turned back to pass on her instructions, Phil turned toward Selene and Rhea to say, “Out of the frying pan, eh?”
“Cheer up, Phil,” Rhea said. “We’re somewhere over the rainbow, and we’ve got the Wizard of Oz right here. What more can life bring?”
“Munchkins?” he guessed.
They smiled at him serenely. “We’re working on that too,” they said in chorus.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Thirty
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Life is just one damned thing after another.
— Anonymous
“What was that?” Phil had heard a rustling noise behind him, and whirled around to look. It was Eir and Sleipnir, just now landed as lightly as a cat might, landing on the ground with barely a hint of noise. They were in the meadow where their army was staged, still packed but waiting for an order to either move on or bivouac.
Eir dismounted and walked over to where they stood waiting.
“I gather that they’re still over the hills there,” he said, indicating the direction of the red glow they could see more clearly now, as full night enfolded Miðgarðr and the stars had started to appear overhead.
“They are,” Eir said quietly, “together with what look like stone trolls, but they have an odd glow about them that I’ve never seen. Whatever they are, they’re clearly poisonous to life, since I can see and feel small insects and animals dying wherever they pass.”
“A glow?” Phil said. “What sort of glow?”
“It’s almost like the light from the embers of a fire dying down, but strangely blue, rather than varying shades of yellowish orange.”
Phil was instantly suspicious and asked her, “Can you take me up to see? Best make it from a very safe distance, I think.”
“Of course. Now?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Then let’s be on our way,” she said, and ran back to her mount, leapt up upon his back, turned him with a beautiful rearing deboulé that would have made every one of the Lippizaner Stallions insanely jealous, rode toward Phil at speed and then bent down to hoist him up behind her on the fly as Sleipnir took instantly to the air, quickly rising up and over the hill to where the Jötunn forces were gathered.
Phil grinned and whispered in her ear, “Remind me never to say, ‘with breakneck speed’ when I’m asking for a lift.”
She laughed quietly but made no further noise until they were high over the Jötunn encampment. “That’s them,” she said in a hushed voice, pointing down toward the outskirts of their ragged camp. “I managed to separate a few Jötunn souls from their bodies, but where they wound up I have not the slightest clue. Their cold bodies are still lying where they fell, so it seems that they’re not all that fond of funerals.”
In the darkness, he could see that the skins of all the Fire Jötunns he could see were glowing with a deep amber light, as if their metabolic processes were speeded up to an incredible level. “Fire Giants indeed,” he whispered.
“That’s why they call them that, I presume. I’ve never had any personal dealing with them, though, for which blessing I’m very glad.”
“Indeed,” he barely breathed. “Where are the stone trolls you mentioned?”
“Outside the main camp,” she said, “They have them chained to iron spikes pounded into rocky outcroppings there,” she pointed, “and there.” She indicated another group of them and urged Sleipnir towards the second group, which seemed to be further from the camp.
They were ugly beasts, misshapen and lumpy, as if they’d been roughly formed from lava as it cooled, and it was instantly clear to Phil — now that he could see them clearly — that the faint bluish ‘glow’ that surrounded each of them was Cherenkov radiation emanating from the moisture in the air as what must be a fantastic flux of high-energy particles stumbled over the water molecules that the misty air contained. “Eir! Get us out of here! As quickly as you can, please.” he said as calmly as he could.
She wheeled around her strange steed and they galloped… flew… in utter silence back to their landing place.
As they landed, all eyes turned to them and Phil had a dour look on his face. He thanked Eir and suggested that they both consult with the leaders of their party, so they walked over together, leaving Sleipnir to graze on meadow grass. Phil said gravely, “Empress, Queen, Master Wizard, I have very bad news.”
They nodded, but answered not at all otherwise.
“The Fire Jötnns have brought along beasts — Eir calls them stone trolls — and they incorporate a deadly weapon indeed, a type of nightmarish internal fire that burns from the inside out, and will be very quickly fatal to any of us, I think, after any close exposure. Pregnant women are at particular risk, since this almost invisible fire interferes with the development of the baby, and will either kill it immediately, along with the mother, or introduce what we call ‘mutations,’ genetic damage that can take almost any form, preventing limbs and organs from forming properly, deforming the pathways of the brain. You name it, it can happen.”
Rhea said, as soon as he’d fallen silent, “Radioactivity, then….”
“Exactly that, and with enough power that the ‘trolls’ glow with the blue light of Cherenkov radiation, at least when shrouded by fog. They’re staked out with chains, well away from each other, and in two separate groups. I’d guess at worst that the Jötunns have figured out that they can initiate thermonuclear ignition by slamming two or more of them together using some unknown mechanism, or at least increase the emission of what would have to be termed a spherical ‘death ray’ by putting a few of the trolls in close proximity to each other.”
Eir, the wizard, and the two sovereigns were mystified. The Empress spoke first, “I have no idea what sort of magic you’re describing, Phil, so suspect that it has to do with this ‘science’ magic of your world. Are there any steps that we can take to combat this strange threat?”
“I’m not sure, and would like to consult with you and Akcuanrut before we jump to any hasty conclusions. In the meantime, I think we should prepare to send all the women back to Vanaheim, since I don’t think that we can morally risk the insidious death by poison of our innocent babies. In the worst case, we might even be forced to open a portal back to Earth and contact the United States Government, because the people of Earth have lived with these types of weapons for many years, and have a limited ability to effectively destroy both the weapons and their users, albeit at tremendous cost. Certainly the leaders back in the USA would be very alarmed, particularly if it was pointed out to them that the Fire Jötunns planned to include Earth within their sphere of destruction.”
“Why don’t we simply do that first?” the Queen asked, reasonably enough.
“Because Earth leaders would very likely use the same sorts of weapons, thermonuclear explosions and fire, and might very well destroy your world in order to save theirs. I’m personally certain that they wouldn’t hesitate to do exactly that, if it seemed the lesser of two evils, which it probably world, since mortal danger tends to bring out the worst in many people.”
“Why don’t you use some of those miniature portals you discovered in the fabric of the pavilion to transport them out into the local Oort cloud?” Selene asked. “They certainly couldn’t do any harm there.”
“In the short term, probably not, but I’m not at all sure that the trip would kill them, so it might be just a matter of delaying their plans until they figured out a method of returning. They’ve already demonstrated some ability to manipulate existing portals, and there are hundreds of thousands of the ‘heat-sink’ portals used in that fabric, at very least, and possibly many orders of magnitude more, since I don’t know how much of that fabric has been woven over the years, nor everywhere it might be scattered.”
Rhea saw the problem immediately. “The chances of them stumbling across one, even if there are billions of them, would be remote in so vast a volume of space, but it would eventually happen, since they seem to be immortal, duelling near-infinities.”
“Well, not infinities, exactly, but very large numbers.”
“I know,” she said, rolling her eyes, “it’s like the Pentagon budget; a billion bucks here, a billion bucks there; first thing you know, you’re talkin’ ’bout some serious money!” She kicked at a random stone on the ground, venting a little, but not all, of her anger. “Those slimy sorry-ass schmucks!” she said in fury, kicking another stone, but with considerably more force.
“All too true,” Akcuanrut observed, “but hatred is most useful when focused on revenge.”
“You’re right, of course….” Then she changed the subject right around, “Gefjon, what’s the Sun made of?”
She seemed surprised. “Why, it’s a burning ball of fire, of course. Is it different in your world?”
“It is, but we won’t go into that right now.” She turned to Phil and Selene and said, “I don’t think that we can take a chance that it’s not a burning ball of fire here, since Yggdrasil doesn’t seem to be any kind of metaphor, but a physical reality, despite the temptation to turn it into a metaphor for some sort of extra-dimensional linkage between the Nine Worlds. That leaves Earth and possibly the world of Myriad.” She thought for a moment before she said, “Earth, I think, since we can’t vouch for the stability of close binaries over long periods of time, and who knows what damage we could do by dumping large amounts of energy into either of the pair.”
Phil was bewildered, and the rest of them were much more confused than that, when Selene cried out, “Of course!” then quickly looked around and realized that she’d shouted when they were supposed to be keeping quiet. “Sorry,” she said quietly to all and sundry.
“Never mind, Sweetie,” Rhea said, then buttonholed the Empress, Phil, and Akcuanrut. “How long would it take you to make a one-way portal — like the centaurs did in their temple — on or very near our Sun?”
Akcuanrut seemed flustered. “It’s never been done! It can’t be done!”
“Don’t give me that, Acky,” she said impatiently. “I know for a fact that Larona here was able to establish a link to your twin suns back in your world, because that’s exactly how she makes her Orrery work. If she can link to them, you simply must be able to establish a portal, just as you did to the one-way portal back in the basement of the Temple of Zampulus.”
“But it’s never been done like that!” the wizard sputtered, somewhat redundantly, since he’d already said that, and outraged respectability wasn’t nearly as becoming in a teenager as it might have been in an old man. “That portal was already present when I started!”
“Don’t be such an old fuddy-duddy, Acky! You’re only as old as you feel!” she said as she pinched his butt, “and you feel like a young man to me.”
Akcuanrut was about to say something rash when Hnoss and Gersemi came up behind him and wrapped their arms around him whilst Hnoss whispered, “Go ahead, Acky, you know how much fun it would be to show off a little and teach that young girl a lesson in what a real wizard can do when he puts his mind to it.”
Gersemi whispered in his other ear, “We’ll make it well worth your while as well….”
…at which the Wizard blushed right down to his toes, but said, “Well, I think it might be possible, but that means opening up a portal back to Earth! Can we afford to take that risk?”
“Think nothing of it, Sir,” Phil said with confidence. “They already have a portal mapped out on Earth, which undoubtedly formed part of their plan almost from the beginning. As far as we know, their fond visions of mayhem and destruction included only their home worlds at first — or so the local prophesies tell us —, and then Myriad and Earth almost as an afterthought, possibly triggered — or at least facilitated — by the explorations of the ancient centaur portal scientists themselves, or by the Giant’s discovery of a portal back to the world of Myriad when they hid their super-weapon, the Heart of Virtue.” Then, he added, “I’m pretty sure that we can link to almost any heavenly body, Sir, since I myself was an amateur at the task when I aligned my monumental focal point and amplifier of magical power to the summer solstice and to the plane of the ecliptic. I’m pretty sure that — between the three of us — we can manage Earth’s Sun, since there’s only one of them, and the entire Solar System revolves around it as one focus of the slightly eccentric ellipses that trace the orbits of the planets. It’s kind of hard to miss.”
“There’s one problem, though,” Rhea said. “Before you can go gallivanting off to arrange our reception for the Giants, we need to do something about the most immediate threat, the blue trolls.”
“But,” Phil said, “this new scheme of yours will take care of both problems, I think, with exemplary finality. Sending them off into the sunset seems a particularly fitting ending for the fiery bad guys in this particular movie.”
“But not quick enough, Phil, even if you could flit back and forth to Earth and back in the blink of an eye. We don’t know what time slippages you may encounter, and it may be night when you arrive on Earth, which might interfere with your workings, even with the three of you doing your best.”
Selene chimed in with her own two bits. “We need to have a Plan B, Phil, to cover the most pressing danger, which is the initiation of a thermonuclear event, whether it rises to the level of an explosion or not. The prophecies say that Bilröst is destroyed by the Fire Jötunns, and they could do that any time now, unless we do something to slow them down.”
“What were you planning to do with the pavilion cloth before, Phil?” Rhea said, seemingly out of the blue.
“Well,” he answered, “because they were Fire Giants, I had an idea to use the cloth fibers as a sort of fire extinguisher, by separating out the ends of each thread to make a sort of dust which I could use to smother fires by sucking out the heat and combustible materials and poking them into outer space.”
“That sounds like a great idea, Phil! Now, what if we think of the blue trolls as stacks of wood, and the radiation as ordinary fire? If we disperse a million bits of sliced-up trolls into a high energy vacuum, I doubt that they’d ever spontaneously put themselves back together again, and I don’t think they’re clever enough to do anything on their own, or at least Eir doesn’t think so, assuming that they’re roughly as stupid as the average stone troll.”
“That might work…,” Phil said doubtfully,”but it’s not going to do anything to clean up the radioactive contamination those things will leave behind.“
“Phil,” she said kindly, “there’s an old saying, ‘Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.’ Let’s not worry about cleaning up the mess until the litterbugs are taken care of.”
“Phil,” Selene added, “Why don’t you make your little ‘fire extinguishers’ and let Rhea and I get on with making sure they get to where they need to be.”
“But I don’t want either of you anywhere near those infernal things!” he shouted.
“Phil… Phillip, who among us is more qualified to throw any sort of object at a distant target? You? Or Selene and I? You know very well that you’d have to have Eir fly you up close enough to spit on them, risking both her life and yours, whilst the two of us can keep well away and hit them from anywhere within a hundred feet or more. If we’re above them, we could probably do it from five hundred feet, more or less, assuming that there’s not much wind. But if you keep us standing here so you can argue with us, there will be a wind, because it will soon be morning, and there’ll be a stiff breeze, by the look of things.”
“Face it, Phil,” Rhea said, “we’re going.”
“But… the babies!” he expostulated.
“So,” she said sarcastically, “to ‘protect’ our babies, we’re supposed to let you ‘nobly’ try and fail? Get real, Phil! You’re in the officer corps, so use your damned brains while we soldier on and kill the bad guys, won’t you please? It’s our damned job!”
He was about to say something… but stern looks from both sovereigns shut him up. “Okay,” he said, in sullen dudgeon.
“That’s Mama’s good boy!” they cooed. “Now go along with Acky and whip us up a batch of ‘fire extinguishers’ — about the same size as your little light balls would be nice, since we’ve had plenty of practice with those, but almost anything will do, as long as it gets the job done.”
“And be sure,” Selene added, “to include a boatload of spares, in case they trot out the day shift after sunrise, and just on general principles. As Helmuth von Moltke once said, ‘No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,’ or as the Girl Guides still say, ‘Be prepared!’ ” With that, they smiled cheerfully and wandered off with Eir to cook up a more detailed strategy, Moltke not withstanding.
“I think,” said the Empress Larona to the two wizards, “that I’d like to sort out the deconstruction of the fabric, since that’s my particular area of expertise, with any needed assistance from you, dear wizards, while at the same time letting you concentrate as much as possible on the actual means of altering our existing portal magic to meet our new demands. Most of this should probably be done off-world, since we know that our enemies are aware of and sensitive to at least some level of portal sorcery, and I’d be loath to conduct the most critical of our experiments in what’s essentially public view.”
“That’s a very good point, Empress,” Akcuanrut said. “I hadn’t yet thought of that last reason for caution. We can have a portal back to our ‘jumping off’ location in New York open within five minutes, and close it down within seconds, so I have every reason to hope that we can be gone before our enemies even know we’re here.” He nodded toward Phil then and said, “I believe that Phil here may have a handle on synchronizing temporality between our worlds as well, although it’s still theoretical. By incorporating your own Orrery spells, which as you know represent an extremely accurate ‘clock,’ within the framework of our portals, he now believes that we can return to any particular instant in time, so we should be able to conduct our experiments on Earth, and then appear back here in what will be literally the blink of an eye.”
“Have you actually tested this?” the Empress asked. “Can we depend upon it now?”
“We haven’t rested it, no,” Phil said, looking not the least abashed, “but can do so very quickly. In fact, if my theory is correct, we can can take all the time we need in testing and modifications before we return and still return in essential instantaneity.”
“But how can you know this?” she asked, incredulous.
“Because our experience has shown that passages through portals between worlds appear to act in a manner we call a ‘drunkard’s walk’ back on Earth,” Phil said, feeling very pleased with himself to be back on ground where he was a master. “Unlike portals which link two locations on a single world, which act in apparent simultaneity, probably because we expect them to, passages between worlds do not, probably because the frame of reference changes so drastically. During the first excursion, for example, which happened before I came upon the scene, the Lanyon family and Selene left Earth a very few days before a holiday we call Halloween, spent quite some time on your world, and then returned to Earth on the very day of that same holiday, essentially in parallel to the passage of time in your world, or possibly even a reverse ‘slippage,’ gaining back at least some of the time they’d actually spent on their journey. I think they actually gained a day, but they weren’t keeping careful track of their time, so I can’t prove it. On their second foray into your world, in which I was included, we spent at most a month or two, yet fully six months had seemingly elapsed by the time that we returned, so I know that we experienced a drastic ‘slippage’ at that time. But then, when I stepped back through the portal for a consultation with you and Akcuanrut, our conversation can’t possibly have lasted any longer than a few minutes — even including the time spent gathering up Selene and Rhea for the return trip — I found that many hours had passed on Earth, a slippage which, though fairly small in real terms, was proportionally very large indeed.” He paused to let them all think about this. “I believe that the reason for this random behavior was that we made no effort at all to control our temporal relationship to our original timeline when we returned, and I believe that your Orrery spells might hold the key to synchronizing our departures and arrivals because they’re grounded in exact instants within time, and so can be a ‘target’ in the same general sense that your Orrery itself targets the current positions of the suns and planets of your own solar system, even when they can’t be seen by the eye.”
“But how,” the Empress said, “do you propose to return to Earth at any exact moment? We haven’t set up any such model of your planetary system there, or at least I don’t think so.”
“Actually,” he said, “we have, in two separate ways. First, my magical amplifier is precisely aligned with a particular point against the fixed stars which tracks the movement of the Earth in its orbit around our Sun at a very precise instant of time, sunrise on the summer solstice on the specific date the device was formed. Due to the precession of the equinox, an Earth-centric term for the specific axial precession of the Earth, it also marks a specific period within a cycle lasting, on Earth, roughly twenty-six thousand years, approximately one degree every seventy-two years. At the time I created it, I was also aware of the Earth’s position in the orbit of our Sun around our galaxy, a period of roughly two hundred and twenty-five to two hundred and fifty million years, which is enough precision for ordinary accuracy.” He paused, thinking about something.
“Well,” said Akcuanrut, “is that it?”
“What?” he said, refocusing his attention.
“What’s the next thing?” the wizard asked. “You said that your amplifier was the first.”
“Oh!” He smiled and held up his wrist, upon which was a Frank Muller Aeternitas Mega 5, a present from Selene and Rhea, who knew how much he liked gadgets. “My first two wives, Selene and Rhea, gave it to me. In its way, it’s a tiny version of your own Orrery, Larona, although it only displays the inferred positions of our Sun and our single Moon directly.” He held it up so they could see the Moon phase display, and the many dials and indications. “Unlike most such devices, this one indicates the exact moment within a thousand year cycle, which I believe is sufficient accuracy and repeatability for our purposes, although I’d like you, Larona, to set up a simple Orrery here, so I can see how it’s done, and so that Akcuanrut and I can set up a similar device on Earth to provide an alternative time source as a backup if any of our other standards fail. I’ve taken the liberty of fashioning a simple miniature orrery in platinum and gold, with mercury bearings,” here he produced a small hardwood box, about eight inches on a side, which he opened to reveal a model, not to scale, of the Nine Worlds, showing greater detail on those they’d visited thus far, with a suspended set of colored balls to represent the Sun of these worlds, plus the Moon and planets, “to serve as a framework for your spell, although I can change it if it’s not suitable for any reason.”
She looked at his contrivance very carefully, then nodded and said smiling, “It will do very nicely, Phil. I wish I’d known you when I had my own more elaborate version made, since this one’s been much improved.”
He smiled back and said, “Of course, this one’s not nearly as pretty when you’re… resting, so I think you received good value for their efforts.”
“In retrospect, dear Phillip, I have to disagree, but perhaps I’ll change my tune if we ever return to the Capital.”
“When we return to your Palace, my very dear Larona, I’ll look forward to persuading you to sing in a higher key.”
“I’ll be anticipating your score, then,” she said and smiled. “Perhaps we can manage to work in an extended duet.”
It was well after midnight, local time, before Selene and Rhea were ready for their foray into sabotage behind enemy lines, since the Empress had run into trouble trying to unweave and repurpose the heat sink cloth. It had turned out that the individual fibers were fused together by gossamer ‘bridge threads’ that spanned the distance between the center of one fiber and the next, making the overall task more difficult, because she’d had to devise an unlinking spell that didn’t destroy the useful structure of the portal fiber before she could weave them into another form. Once done, however, it was surprisingly easy to use the trigger spell Phil had designed for the light balls to cause the new portal devices to blossom into a dispersive dandelion that did its work almost instantaneously, then disappeared into itself like the Worm Ouroboros, the magic itself dissipating as the individual fibers were shredded into atoms and simultaneously transported out into the interstellar void.
All in all, Selene and Rhea were very pleased with their new toys, although they lacked the satisfying heft and beauty of a finely-crafted blade.
Carrying two bomb bags each slung over their respective shoulders, they walked up to Eir Menglöð and said, “We’re ready, Sweetie, shall we be off?”
Eir grinned broadly, excitement shining in her eyes as she said, “I’m ready, but I think that we should split up, so we can attack on two fronts simultaneously, which might serve to further confuse any efforts they might make to defend their little ‘pets.’ ”
The two women looked a little puzzled. “How does that work, exactly?” they said together.
“Easy; climb aboard!” She reached down help them up and then immediately leapt up into the air, but Selene and Rhea were astonished to find that they were each alone on their own Sleipnir, galloping in close formation with two other Sleipnirs, only one of which carried Eir.
“How do we steer these things?” they each yelled separately, though the sound of their voices blended together seamlessly.
“That’s easy too,” Eir shouted, just think about where you’d like to be and Sleipnir will find it for you. He’s quite clever, for a horse.
“But you don’t have any of Phil’s fancy gadgets!” they called out in close harmony.
She shrugged. “I was never very good at throwing stones either, so I’ll just make do with Cortana here!” She drew her slim diamond-bladed sword, wielding it as lightly as a feather, but it looked far more dangerous than any feather one could imagine. “You two take good care of the blue trolls whilst I try to keep the Fire Jötunns amused until our main force arrives!” With that, she pointed off over the hills before them, evidently indicating the rough position of the blue trolls, and turned her own mount toward Bilröst, clearly visible in the night sky toward the North.
Selene and Rhea galloped on toward the last reported location of the trolls, but were prepared to search for them if they’d been moved for any reason. As they cleared the hills, though, they could see the exact scene that Phil and Eir had described, so immediately split up, Selene to the north side of the camp and Rhea toward the more distant southeast side, where rocky outcrops still served as makeshift pastures where the trolls had been staked out to do whatever it was trolls do in their off time.
Selene saw them immediately, ten widely-spaced ugly trolls surrounded by a very faint blue glow, presumably less bright than Phil’s description because it wasn’t as misty now, so there wasn’t as much suspended water in the air to provide the local violation of the speed of light that Cherenkov radiation requires.
Making her plans quickly, she visualised the path she wanted to take high over the chained trolls, since she didn’t imagine that the nearby Jötunns would find her ærial bombing run amusing.
Sleipnir — her individualized version of Sleipnir anyway — hastened to obey as she quickly threw three gadgets per troll down upon the hulking beasts from high above them, that particular number chosen to account for any sudden movements they might make when the shit hit the fan, allowing approximately five seconds for the drop, which she thought was plenty, considering that she’d thrown them with a fairly high initial velocity. ‘Better to err on the side of pessimism, if err we must,’ she thought.
The interval seemed almost endless, but soon the dandelion blossoms flashed into a momentary trail of staccato amber brilliance and then immediately disappeared, leaving not a single troll behind, and half a Jötunn, the only one who’d had the misfortune to be passing by when her little hand grenades impacted, a good night’s work, over all.
Quickly, she wheeled her personal Sleipnir higher and they galloped through the slightly misty air toward Rhea’s destination, where she could see an alarming display of fireworks flashing, almost like lightning in reverse.
Rhea held one bag of bombs in her lap as she directed Sleipnir towards the last reported location of the trolls, but quickly saw that they were on the move, being ‘herded’ by a dozen Jötunns in the general direction of Bilröst. ‘Crap!’ she thought, by no means foolish enough to speak her curse aloud. Thinking quickly, she picked up the bag she held in her lap and whirled it over her head, scattering two hundred bomblets like deadly rainfall to carpet the entire area, then she grabbed the second bag from her shoulder and began picking targets.
She ordered Sleipnir lower with a thought, to about three hundred feet — a reasonable limit, according to Phil, and he was a known paranoiac where either Selene or Rhea herself were concerned — since even a clumsy oaf might successfully avoid a missile dropping under gravitational acceleration — no matter how forcefully given its initial velocity — assuming that they could actually see them falling against the night sky.
First, she sent three bombs each to target specific trolls, or at least the seven she could see still visible as the first hailstorm of bomblets puffed into amber brilliance and disappeared, taking trolls — or parts of trolls — into oblivion with them. Quite a few Jötunns were inconvenienced as well, and the survivors began peering up into the sky to try to ascertain where the startling bombardment had come from, the which made doubly mysterious by the fact that there was nothing left behind except the odd chunk of troll, or Jötunn, butchered as cleanly as if whacked off by an invisible cleaver.
She aimed for the trolls still stumbling around first, then the chunks, unsure what damage could be done if the stray bits of troll were all gathered together, and then began on the shepherds … ‘trollherds…?’ left standing, since they seemed the most likely salvage party, if one were to be arranged.
She was making great progress on her task when one of the ‘trollherds,’ the biggest, reached down to his side for what looked like a coil of rope.
It wasn’t. The big Jötunn took hold of a handle protruding from the coil and shook out the ‘rope,’ which instantly transmogrified itself in her thoughts into a scourge of what looked like nine strands, all of which burst instantly into flame. “Oh, crap!” she said again, this time with greater volume, which turned out to be a mistake, since the Jötunn instantly swiveled to face her and lashed out with his fiery whips in exactly her direction.
She could see the fiery tongues of flame writhing and twining together — almost as if they were alive and filled with specific malice — as they hurtled directly toward her. “Crap!” she screamed, as Sleipnir, having a nicely-developed sense of self-preservation of his own, wheeled about and hurtled toward the heights again, while Rhea, her wits belatedly collecting themselves from whence they’d flown, turned partially around and hurled three more bombs toward the hostile Jötunn, just for luck. She wished she’d thought to bring her hurley along on this strange journey, because she was wicked clever at camogie and Phil’s little balls were about the size of a sliotar.
“Sleipnir, honey! Do your stuff!” she said quietly as she wheeled him into a sweeping turn with a thought, then threw three more grenades at the bad-tempered Jötunn lashing randomly at the sky with his flamboyant weapon, obviously enraged, but unable to find her against the overcast sky, still partially-shrouded in mist as they were.
The Jötunn’s surprising scourge, as improbably extensible as it seemed to be, obviously had limitations, since not one of his spectacular flailings had come close to reaching the heights at which Sleipnir and she were circling, which was closer to their original height than not.
“Still taunting the boys, I see!” Selene’s voice came from overhead.
“Oh! Hi, Sweetie!” she said. “I seem to have annoyed the creepy clod, I must admit, but that’s his own darned fault! I can’t help it if he can’t take a joke!”
Selene surveyed the landscape below, eerily visible in the surreal flickering light cast from the flaming lashes, each of which seemed trace its own path through the air below them. It was cratered by hundreds of semi-spherical gouges, as if some Giant Julia Childs had taken a giant melon ball scooper to it, and was littered with almost as many Jötunn corpses or casualties, depending on which bits of them had been vacuumed into oblivion by Phil’s little inventions. “Well, one can hardly blame him for being a little ticked off, since you seem to have made a mess of the camp. Maybe he’s the janitor, and will have to clean up the mess.”
“That’s not my fault either!” she said angrily. “They were moving my trolls over towards Bilröst, and had them strung out all over the landscape, so naturally I didn’t manage to be quite as tidy as I’m sure you succeeded in being, Sister dear!” She looked down at Angry Male, still flailing about with his scourge of flame, and added, “I don’t think that’s the janitor, though; I think it’s old Surtr himself. He has that ineffable ‘I’m entitled to be a jerk, ’cuz I’m the Boss!’ look about him.”
Selene took another gander, then said, “Oh, he’s effable alright,” she said sourly. “Have you tried offing him?”
“I have,” she said in pique, “but he’s managed to destroy every one of Phil’s clever little gadgets that I’ve tossed at him with that crazy scourge of his. I think that’s part of the reason he keeps flailing about with it now, because the light not only lets him see what he’s aiming at, but also whatever may be aimed at him by me, for instance.”
“Bummer,” Selene mused, staring down at him thoughtfully, as one might contemplate a difficult position on a chessboard. “Of course,” she continued slowly, working out an idea on the fly, as it were, “by now he’s gotten used to the idea that the only way these things arrive is on a ballistic trajectory, and from a single origin. What if we presented him with a slightly different puzzle?” Then she smiled, not prettily at all. “Here’s what we can do….”
Rhea urged Sleipnir higher, higher than he felt entirely comfortable, to judge from his skittishness, then turned back down toward the battlefield, down and down and down, urging him to go faster, which he wasn’t at all loath to do, until the wind whistled past her ears, almost peeling back her eyelids as she hurtled like a meteor from Heaven, and only then did she release a largish flight of bomblets directly aimed at the nasty guy with the whip.
Without pause, she pulled her lovely steed up, braking his descent just shy of where that scourge could reach, and let out a piercing scream to draw his attention.
Nearer to the ground, concealed only by the edge of the forest, Selene stood waiting until she heard her sister’s scream, and then stood ready, a doubled leather strap held loosely in her hand, until the Jötunn began flailing at the sky with greater vigor, then she quickly placed a grenade in the loop of the strap, held loosely in position by a hole she worked in it with the point of a knife, and then hurled it toward the Giant with all her strength, then did the same while the first was still in flight, and then ran up and did a spinning vault unto her Sleipnir’s back, a flashy mount that she’d perfected in the gym at school, urging him to flight with both her heels in his side and an urgent thought.
As quick as that thought, they were in the air and climbing before the first of her missiles struck, but she didn’t turn to look, not until she was back up to five hundred feet, where Rhea was waiting.
“Hey, Sweetie,” she said. “How’d we do?”
“Well,” she said smiling, “There are a lot more holes in the ground, and he’s missing one hand, the hand he held that lash of his with, by happenstance.”
“I only got off two sling shots, but I think that I connected with one, at least. Did you happen to see what happened? I was running hell for leather by the time they would have connected, so I didn’t have time to look.”
Rhea grinned like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. “Oh, you got him all right! He won’t be dancing for a while, that’s for sure, since he’s missing one leg right up to the knee!” Then she laughed….
…and Selene joined in, laughing. Then she said, “I wish I could have seen that, but let’s beat feet pronto, pardner, and head for home right now! Phil ought to be back, if his theories turned out right, and he’ll be fretting about us if we dawdle too long.”
“True. I’d hate for him to worry. I wonder how Eir’s doing up at Bilröst?”
So, without another word, they flew back the way they’d come, almost as quick as one could blink.
Eir was having the time of her life, since she usually waited on the other side of the battle, receiving the souls of the slain, and deciding where they should go. She guessed that Rhea and Selene were keeping Surtr busy, since he hadn’t shown up so far, and even her stupid uncle Freyr was doing well, vanquishing Jötunns right and left. He’d even managed to slice the head right off of the monstrous wolf Fenrir, which would be a source of grief only to his mother Angrboða, a particularly nasty piece of work, spiteful and mean, so it couldn’t happen to a more appropriate Jötunness.
She wasn’t doing too badly either, having accounted for over a hundred Giants in slashing/stabbing attacks from the air, and even Sleipnir had managed to kill a few, kicking their heads in with four hooves at once when they spun to change direction.
On this side of Bilröst, the Jötunns were beginning to mill around instead of trying to advance, since this wasn’t going quite the way they’d planned. Their leader Surtr, who was foretold in ancient prophesy to lead the charge across Bilröst, hadn’t bothered to show up at all, and the Gods were doing better then predicted, not to mention at least one Goddess nipping at their heels, though it was difficult to tell exactly how many Goddesses there were at any one time, since they all looked exactly alike, and were riding what had to be a herd of very odd flying horses. No matter how they looked at it, this wasn’t the best of times for them.
A few of them were quietly hanging back, sidling toward the woods with innocent concern pasted on their faces, even as they looked around to see if Surtr was ever going to bother showing up to lead his conscripted army toward the completion of his damned battle plan. Finally, a Jötunn posted as a lookout on the highest hill above the road leading up to Bilröst shouted down and waved, having evidently seen their leader on the road behind them.
Taking courage, the loiterers began to sidle back toward the center of the field, concerned lest they be seen as anything less than enthusiastic supporters of their fearless leader’s plan.
Soon, the word having shot through the milling crowd of Jötunns like a bottle of cheap fortified wine through a drunk, all eyes were turned to watch the road behind them, as even the Æsir currently holding Bilröst itself paused in their attacks, anxious to see what new danger was approaching.
Then they saw the outline of Surtr’s fierce head of wild black hair against the dawning sky begin to show above the rise of the road as he approached the anchor point of Bilröst and a coarse cheer went up from a thousand Jötunn throats! Their fearless leader was approaching, and so his plan was well on track.
Even the Æsir faltered slightly, their spirits dashed down by the sudden appearance of their most fearsome opponent, but the Jötunns kept right on cheering, some of them even laughing as they turned to call out jibes and taunts to the silent Æsir, confident now of the victory that had been prophesied throughout the long ages before this rippling moment in the pellucid pool pool of time.
But then, first one, then all the Gods were laughing, pointing toward the Jötunns, slapping each other on their backs in infectious risibility, and beginning to jeer and jibe at them with the same enthusiasm that the Giants had shown before.
This wasn’t going at all to plan, so the Giants looked back toward their leader for guidance, but then … disaster! Now that Surtr had come closer, they could see that Surtr wasn’t the fierce Jötunn he used to be. He was missing an eye, for example, and had a big gauge carved into the side of his face where that eye used to be, and he was missing a foot as well, and one hand, so he was hobbling along using a broken pine tree as a staff, its branches roughly stripped off, and his garments were dirty and stained. He looked like a bum.
Just then, that damned Goddess galloped overhead on that stupid horse of hers and called out to the stunned throng of Jötunns, “You might be interested to know, dear cousins, that Surtr here was utterly routed by two human girls! There’s a whole army of such girls on their way here right now, in fact, so now might be a good time to go back home. Surely you’ve all got better things to do.”
Just then, Surtr made it to the back of his army of Jötunns and started cursing, “Turn and fight, you dogs!” He dropped his crude staff and with his one remaining hand, reached for his fearsome scourge of fire, tottering slightly as he tried to balance.
Without a word, the nearest Jötunn took his sword and calmly stabbed him through the heart, spit on his corpse as it thudded to the ground, then stepped over the body to start the long and weary march back through Hel to Múspellsheimr.
Slowly, disheartened and ashamed, the other Jötunns followed, a slow process, because they all felt the need to spit on Surtr’s corpse as they passed over or around it, all of them headed back toward home.
Even the formerly boisterous Æsir stood silent, in that grim camaraderie that warriors sometimes share, watching their defeated foes march off the field with perhaps some small measure of sympathy for those who’d wound up on the losing side, and they could well afford to be magnanimous, since the true victory hadn’t been won by them at all, but by two girls, if Eir Menglöð was to be believed, and not one of them would dare to question her word, since she’d eventually hold all their fates in her two hands, sooner or later.
Eir watched all this byplay with some amusement, then clucked her tongue to get Sleipnir’s attention as they walked up to the brilliant rainbows that formed the entire substance of Bilröst, then stepped out onto the transparent surface before riding up to her uncle. “Uncle,” she said, “How’s Gerðr doing? Well, I hope.”
“She’s doing well,” he said, “and is much nicer than you and your mother give her credit for.” He paused before adding, “Her father was abusive towards her, you may be interested to know, and had fell intentions toward her.”
“I didn’t know that, Uncle, and heartily apologize for any slight I’ve shown either you or her during the long years of our estrangement. I should have asked you for your side of the story.”
“It’s forgotten already, Eir Menglöð, and you’re still my favorite niece. Please feel free to drop in any time and meet all the members of my family.”
“I will, and soon, but perhaps you’d like to tarry for a while and meet my husband, and my sister wives, only two of whom put paid to Surtr, and thus led to his downfall and your victory here.” Then she paused and added, “You might be interested to know that my mother is back at our camp as well, having thrown in her lot with ours at very nearly the last minute.”
“Your mother? Here? I’d never thought to see her out of Vanaheimr in a thousand years!”
“Things change, Uncle, and she’s married now as well? Perhaps her heart has softened to you. Are you bold enough to come and see?”
“Bold enough? Me? I’m a lover, not a fighter, but you see me here in the front ranks of our armed band.” Then he smiled and said, “You always were a bit of a tease, dear Eir.”
“I know I had you wrapped around my pinkie finger as a girl. It’s a heady experience, you ought to know, and doubtless contributed to my confidence and sense of personal pride as I was growing up.”
“I’m very glad to hear it, then. I worried about you, in Óðinn’s hall.”
“And you were right to do so, Uncle. Óðinn was a grim and horrid piece of work.”
“You say was, and I’ve heard that he was dead. Is it true? Or just another of his many tricks?”
“He’s dead,” she said. “My husband killed him, and I’ve held his soul in these two hands, and sent him straight to Hel, as he so richly deserved. He won’t be coming back.”
“Good,” he said. Can I ask you a favor?
“Of course, Uncle. I’ve always owed you courtesy, so you have but to ask.”
“Would you mind stopping by my hall in Álfheimr,and telling Gerðr that I’m all right? She’ll be worried, of course, because of the prophesies, and I hate to think of her unhappy, even for an hour or two. She’s had more than enough sorrow in her life.”
“Already done, Uncle. You had but to ask. I’ve taken the liberty of inviting her to meet my mother, if that might influence your decision slightly.”
He laughed out loud at that. “You minx! You’ve still got me wrapped around that pinkie of yours, but don’t tell Gerðr, please. She thinks I’m a big bold warrior.”
“Your secret is safe with me, Uncle, and I’ll be sure to tell her of your heroic efforts at the forefront of the fighting on Bilröst as we ride along.”
“Thank you, niece,” he said indulgently, “would you care to ride with me? or shall we share your more formidable steed?”
She laughed. “Uncle, you’re obviously both a rough and tumble warrior such as the world has never known before, and you don’t know all that much about women, for I doubt that there are any women who’d sit anywhere near that boar of yours. You must have iron plates welded to your ass!”
“Well,” he said modestly, “riding Gullinbursti does require a certain mastery of proper posting technique, but I would never ask a lady to sit upon his back when my own lap is infinitely more comfortable.” He smiled.
“You dog! You’d better not be cheating on my lovely aunt, with whom I’m chatting happily at this very moment.”
“Of course not,” he said indignantly. “Not since we married, of course. But before that, I had a certain reputation to uphold as the God of Fertility and Love.” He cleared his throat a little nervously. “There are certain … uh … duties associated with high office that can’t really be … uh, delegated.”
“Sure ….”she said cynically. “I’ll bet that’s what you say to all the girls. Just remember, Uncle dear, that nobody can keep a secret from me forever.”
“Well, isn’t that just a case of the pot calling the kettle ‘black?’ You’re the one sharing one husband with two wives. What’s the difference?”
“First, that we’re married, and there’s no sneaking around; second, that it’s just as true that my husband shares his wives with me! so our positions within our marriage are essentially symmetrical, except for the lovely coincidence that he has certain … equipment that comes in very handy … from time to time. I’m pregnant now, for example, and my fellow wives and I could never have managed that on our own, even with the very best intentions in the worlds.” After a pause, she added slyly, “In fact, my mother is pregnant as well, so you might watch out for your job here.”
“Bah!” he exclaimed, “He can have the blasted job! Some days it seems as if everyone in the whole Nine Worlds is whining about absent lovers or missing babies! It’s a miracle I get any sleep at all. In fact, he can have Alfheimr as well! Just let me keep my little hall so Gerðr and I can raise our own babies …and maybe a few cattle. And some acres for vegetables and grain, of course; she does like her carrots and bread.”
“He’d have to be numbered among the ranks of the Ljósálfar, then, and of course I can’t do that on my own, unless he’s dead, of course, but I have future plans for him that don’t involve his being dead. I want another baby, of course, and maybe something more….”
“Yes, yes! Done!”
“…and of course my fellow wives….”
“Done, and done! As many as you want! I simply don’t care!”
“Oh, goodie, then. I’ll be sure to tell him, then, as soon as we see him. You won’t be sorry, I promise, and my dowry will make you a very wealthy man.”
“Why would I have any share of your dowry?” he asked reasonably enough, but puzzled.
“You can hardly expect me to give it to my mother, can you? And her putative husband is dead, with his two brothers having forfeited their rights to it through messing around with his wife, my lovely mother. My own father, Ullir, has vanished without a trace, so if he ever shows up you can dicker with him over your management fees for taking care of it on his behalf, and I think that it ought to be at least half, considering the complexity and expense involved in taking care of all that much in gold and silver.”
“Gold? How much are we talking about, exactly?” he asked, his interest aroused.
“Oh, she said casually, roughly a hundred pounds, as my bride price, and quite a bit silver along with it. My Phillip is a very generous man.”
“And wealthy too, if he’s paid that much for several brides! Exactly how many wives does he have? Not that it’s any of my business, of course.”
“Six hundred and fifty wives, and six hundred and fifty-four babies on the way,” she said promptly, having always had a good head for figures. “And of course my mother might want to have you look after her bride price as well, just to keep things in the family, and her price is exactly the same amount.”
His eyes bulged. “There’s not that much gold in all the worlds!” he said, amazed.
“Oh, there is, believe me, but much of it is on his world, or safe on the world of many of his other wives, so I guess you could fairly say that it is outside the nine worlds we know.” She paused to think for a moment, than said, “Ask King Alvís of the Dvergar, if he’ll give you a straight answer. My Phillip gave him two sacks of gold weighing at least eighty to a hundred pounds, plus a pair of magical gold armbands which drop identical armbands on command.”
“What did he ask for in return?” he queried.
“Not a thing. He gave these things in pure generosity, to honor King Alvís’ friendship. King Alvís responded to his generosity with a magical bridge that allows Phillip to pass freely between all the Nine Worlds, and pledged his support in any battle to boot, which I believe he has never done before. In fact, I believe that King Alvís’ hard heart is quite melted, and in future generations his people will grow to match their hearts, perhaps eventually to rejoin the ranks of the bright Ljósálfar.”
“Is this a prophesy?” he asked.
“Perhaps more than mere prophesy, Uncle, since I am the final judge of all such things, surpassing even my mother in that regard, although she has the keeping of many I have judged. Even you, Uncle, will submit to my judgement eventually,although …” she smiled, “I sincerely hope that it’s many a long age from now.”
He bowed to her with old-fashioned formality. “Great Lady, beloved niece, I too hope for that. I’ve many a crop of carrots and cabbages to raise, after all, and my herds might well benefit from careful management.” He smiled at her in sly amusement.
“You old reprobate!” She began to laugh. “Let’s go, before you try to get under my skirts and I have to break your all your fingers!”
“I’m at your service, dear kinswoman, both now and always. If I may be forgiven any slight trespass on your proper sphere of authority, I foresee a new era in which the balance between the Æsir and the Vanes will be reworked, and the spirit of peace and harmony prevail for the coming age.”
“I hope so, Uncle, although there are powerful enemies still waiting just beyond our gates. Surtr is dead, and Loki, and you yourself killed Fenrir, but Jörmungandr still lives, and many others with reasons good or bad to hate us.”
“To the new age, then! And let’s both of us be off. I want to see my wife, and doubtless you have many who are anxious to see you….”
“If we stood here talking for an entire year, we’d still arrive on time, Uncle, and well you know it.”
“Oh, I do, Niece, but I’m getting on in years, and find I grow impatient with too much talk.”
“Well, what are we waiting for, then? Climb aboard!” She reached down her hand to him, and he took it.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Thirty-One
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Every new morning is a gift you’ve just unwrapped.
That’s why they call it the present.— Emperor Philip of Myriad, Year One
When Phil returned from Earth, he was almost beside himself with excitement; he’d not only solved the problem of temporal accuracy when using portals, he’d also discovered that time paradoxes were probably impossible, since the temporal process had an irreversible arrow. One could go forward, or return to the same instant one had left behind, but one apparently couldn’t go back to an instant that one had already experienced. The maths to prove this were still beyond him, but he had a very strong hunch that that theory would prove him right, so in that sense, he knew it. He’d also solved the problem of the weapon, and had a one-way portal set up that hovered just above the charged plasma ‘surface’ of the Sun, deep within the Sun’s gravity well and not in orbit, since as a magical construct, it wasn’t subject to the laws of ordinary physics, including any potential interaction with Solar prominences, magnetic storms, flares, and other Solar ‘weather.’ He saw Rhea and Selene walking toward him, both of them holding hands with Eir, but wasn’t surprised to see them still here, since he’d just left, after all. “Hey! Eir! Rhea! Selene! I have the new weapon ready to go, so you won’t have to depend on those dandelion things I made with Larona!”
Selene smiled and said, “It’s not a problem, Dearest! The war is already over! We won!”
Rhea gave him a ‘thumbs up’ and ran to kiss him. “Welcome home, Sweetheart! We knew that you’d succeed.”
“But….”
“Don’t worry about it, Phil,” Eir said. “In your world of classical physics, what you’ve just demonstrated about ‘time’s arrow’ is absolutely true, but you forgot to include the decidedly non-classical reality of the divine presence in our lives, such as, for example…,” here she smiled very prettily indeed, “…me. I exist outside of time, as you well know, since you and all your many wives had all the experience of six hundred and fifty ‘honeymoons,’ each lasting several weeks at the very least, and a few that extended over several months. When we returned, as you’ll recall, you saw that essentially no time had passed in the outside world, but the very pleasant and memorable reality of those many supposedly separate experiences remained.”
“But… how…?”
“Phil, sweetie, we’ll have many conversations about this over the years. In fact, your personal experiences with time will form an integral part of the basis for your doctoral thesis and later career, so I’ll ‘cut to the chase,’ as you like to say.”
Then she paused, looking deep into his eyes for some sign of comprehension which she evidently found. “I live” she continued, “as a sort of ‘standing wave,’ a seiche within the bounded fabric of ordinary reality.
“Just as your own sense of consciousness is a similar sort of wave driven by, but not synonymous with, your physical body. This signal has an independent existence beyond the mere chemical and biological reality of your brain. Just as, in dreams, you can visit your own past, or imagined futures, so I’m free to roam the totality of my existence, and have the peculiar power to carry others with me. Think back to the most wonderful moments you’ve experienced in your life, say…, your first night with Selene, or Rhea — to name only two — the two nights when you first experienced your twin realities of married life; are those moments simply gone? Are they even truly out of reach? Or are they perpetually recreated by the internal reality of your consciousness? My answer is, and I know that your own answer will be, ‘They are real, they exist.’ Our love for each other is a small portion of a truly boundless eternity, and has an eternal reality, just like the DeBeers diamond advertising says it is. Our marriage is forever, far more so than even the most spectacular diamond, which can burn to a cinder in a heartbeat, yet not affect the precious love that diamond represents at all.”
“You know about DeBeers?” he asked, amazed.
“Of course I do, silly. We’ll live together on your Earth for over fifty years before returning here so you can take up your duties as the sovereign of Álfheimr and the Nine Worlds. Our first grandchild will be born there, and our own first baby will be born in New York City, because your first two wives insisted.” She smiled at her sister wives, then took their hands. “Trust me on this, Phil; although you’ll be present at the birth, women make the very best and most reliable LaMaze partners.”
“Well,” he said, a little reässured, although still very confused. “I reckon men can usually afford to be squeamish about these things, and have a rather more personal and anxious interest than that of a mere dispassionate observer of the mortal struggle in which their wives are engaged. I hope I didn’t let you down by fainting or anything.”
“Not at all, although you will have to sit down for a bit. You’ll be fine for the next birth, though, and you’ll have to admit that being present for the births of two sets of twins in essential simultaneity is a quantum leap above what most new fathers experience.”
“You do know that this is a totally weird conversation, don’t you?”
“Of course. You forget that, from my perspective, we’ve already had this conversation… or will have it soon. It all depends on when I am at the time.”
Rhea patted his arm and said, “Don’t worry about it, Phil. We’ll all be very happy. Eir took us on a tour of our future lives already, and everything turns out great! You should see what we do for the twenty-one hundred election cycle.”
“Election?”
“Sure! You’re running for President, and you’ll win, of course, so don’t worry about it at all. Did you know that there were no US Presidents who were Nobel Prize winners before you?”
“Unh, none?”
“Exactly!” she smiled brightly. “We knew you were smart. Look, we just wanted to make sure that you didn’t worry yourself to death while we’re out there fighting the bad guys, but we do have to get back so we can catch up with our mundane timeline now, before anyone else sees us, of course, so we’ll see you soon, okay?”
“See’ya, Babe!” Selene added, and then they all three of them just vanished into the air, into thin air.
“Babe?” Phil said aloud.
“Phil!” Larona screamed in joy from behind him. “You were right! You just left a few seconds ago! Obviously the time thing worked, but did everything else work the way you’d predicted?”
Phil had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, so strong that it almost made him dizzy. “Unh, yes, it did, actually, but I can’t concentrate on that right now.”
“Of course you can’t, not with Rhea and Selene out there battling the Giants! Please forgive me for being so insensitive and crass!”
“No, it’s all right, they’ll be fine. They told me so.”
“Of course they did, my Darling!” She clutched him to her ample bosom in sympathy. “Both they and you are so incredibly brave! Never say die! Simper Fidel, as they said….” She stopped, with a puzzled look. “At least I think that’s what they said.” Her brows furrowed slightly in thought before she kissed him. “Never mind!” she said, instantly dismissing the issue as inconsequential. “You know,” she confided quietly, breathing slightly into his ear, “such raw masculine courage in the face of adversity makes me feel incredibly hot, so maybe we could retire to our pavilion to… cool down a bit. I’m sure some of your other wives are there as well, waiting for news of the battle against the Giants, and we’re all of us so terribly worried — not possessing your own bold audacity within our womanly hearts — and they’ll probably need comforting as well.”
“Unh, Okay. I’ll be right there.” He wished Eir would come back. The sooner he learned how to do that extra-temporality thing she did the better, as far as he was concerned.
Later, much later, Phil emerged blinking into the bright light of day. Rhea and Selene were idly chatting to Eir, while they lounged lazily on two of the long benches at the side at one of the tables near the edge of the clearing, but in the shade of a huge oak tree. Eir was standing, but seemed very relaxed as well, and a man who looked like he was vaguely related to Gefjon stood beside her, so Phil thought he must be Freyr. “Rhea! Selene! Eir!” he shouted, running over towards them. “You’re back!”
Selene raised one eyebrow and said, “Of course we are, Phil. We told you we won, didn’t we?” She furrowed her brows in puzzlement. “Did you forget already? It took you long enough to notice that we’re back from the front lines.”
“Well,” he blushed, “I was a little busy just now, but of course I didn’t forget,” he said in frustration, “but that didn’t stop me worrying about you.”
“Oh, Sweetie!” Selene and Rhea cooed. “How romantic, but quite unnecessary.”
Then Rhea said, “We were perfectly safe, mostly, and put that Surtr guy hors de combat straight away with those cute little dandelion things of yours. They worked perfectly on the blue trolls, so we took care of them right away! They even worked on Surtr, although we had to work a few tricks on him to finally scotch his little wagon, because he had a fiery scourge thing and he kept lashing at our dandelions, setting them off prematurely, which seemed more than a little swish to me, too girly by far for a rough-and-tumble Jötunn King. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Different strokes for different folks, that’s what I always say.”
Then Selene took up the story again, “Whatever he was, he hadn’t counted on a combination of ærial dive-bombing and sling-based artillery, though, so Rhea poked him in the eye whilst I discovered his Achilles heel, and it was all over after that.”
Then Eir said, “He stumped off toward Bilröst then, evidently trying to salvage his nasty operation, but his own friends were so irritated with him — after he’d put them through all that hoorah for nothing — that they killed him as soon as he showed up, since the Fire Jötunns don’t tolerate weakness in a leader. As invasions go — and especially as ‘The-End-of-the-World-as-We-Know-It’ — it was pretty much a dud, all sound and fury, signifying nothing. By the time I stopped by Bilröst to see if I could be of any help, there was hardly anything left to do for the guys defending it.”
“The Jötunns were already headed home by the time we got there,” Rhea said, “and we let them go, since they didn’t seem to have any further desire to fight. That Gjallarhorn thing of Heimdallr’s was cool, of course, but we’d hardly arrived before he stopped blowing it, so our part of the battle was really the whole thing, and that took hardly any time at all.”
“By the way, Phil,” Selene said, “this is Freyr, Eir’s uncle and Gefjon’s brother. He was at the bridge, practically in the front lines, and managed to kill Fenrir, the monstrous wolf that was supposed to eat Óðinn, one of Loki’s get, I think they said, but he’d already been skinned for his pelt by the time I saw him, so it was difficult to see any particular family resemblance.”
“Pleased to meet you, Freyr.” Phil said, ignoring the bloodthirsty reminiscences of his wives as best he could. “I’m very sorry there’s been bad blood between you and your sister, but perhaps we can clear up any misunderstandings while you’re our guest.”
Freyr laughed. “How diplomatic you are, Phil. I suppose that must come in handy, with the many wives my niece has been telling me about.”
“Well, yes,” he said, “but I’ve always been a friendly kind of guy.”
At that Freyr laughed. “I suppose that the word ‘friendly’ must have something of a double meaning for a man so seemingly irresistible to the ladies, but I was thinking about your encounter with your encounter with Óðinn, the Alföðr, and not too friendly there, I hear. You seem to have put paid to Ásagrimmr rather quickly, which turns out to have been a blessing in disguise.”
“Not so very well disguised, Sir. He was trying to harm your sister at the time, violating the rules of hospitality and common decency, both at once. Given the choice between living in a world with him still thriving, and one without your sister, I naturally took her side of the quarrel.”
“And herself as well,” he said, “or so I hear.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, Sir, but yes, I did.” Then he added, by way of explanation, “You see, I love her.”
Freyr laughed in pure good humor and said, “Spoken boldly, like a man! I see my niece was right about you.”
“Pardon?”
“She said you were a very worthy fellow, and wouldn’t let me down.”
“Let you down? I don’t understand….”
“No need to worry, the place practically runs itself, but it’s been ages since Gerðr and I had a chance to really get away, so we’ve never had a proper ‘honeymoon,’ I think you call it, very clever, are you sure you’re not a skald?”
“No… I mean yes, I’m not a skald. What are you talking about?”
“A skald is a type of poet, but a very talented poet with more of a way with words than most. You see….”
“No, I meant what do you mean by ‘the place practically runs itself?’ I wasn’t aware of any place that needed running. Am I given to understand that I’m elected?” he asked suspiciously.
Freyr positively beamed. “You are clever! You really ought to take up poetry; you’d be much admired, and very many Kings are widely noted for their skill with words. Were you aware that the surest indication of one’s overall level of intelligence and mental acuity is one’s facility with words?”
“I was,” he said and looked pointedly at Eir, who merely smiled. “I take it, then, that I’m ‘volunteered’ to ‘look after the place’ whilst you and Gerðr flit off on your ‘honeymoon?’ ” He glanced at Eir again, and then at Selene and Rhea, who’d evidently found something to admire somewhere up in the oak tree above their heads. It must have been amusing, whatever it was, because they were trying not to giggle. “Well, I’d hate to prove your theory wrong, so I agree, whatever it is that I’m being agreeable about. Another indication of intelligence,” he confided, “at least in men, is an unwillingness to either argue with or thwart the obvious intentions of their wives.”
Freyr laughed, a little wryly, and said, “I quite agree. In fact, now that Gerðr knows about these ‘honeymoon’ excursions, she wants several, to make up for having missed the one she was evidently due when we married, and was a little miffed that I hadn’t thought up the notion on my own, which is why we’re going. So you see you’re a trendsetter already, which makes perfect sense, since you actually had the job I’m offering already, by right of conquest, the same way Óðinn had it, and my lovely niece, Eir Menglöð, has thoughtfully explained that you’re already an Emperor, albeit an Emperor temporarily embarrassed by an unfortunate lack of kings and kingdoms to rule over.” He grinned at that, then added, “So you see, of course, that this will do absolute wonders for your standing in the political world, as well as for your marriage, since wives tend to fret, I’ve observed, over husbands without a proper job that they can brag about to other wives. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, in fact, if this didn’t lie at the heart of this Elvi fellow’s… embarrassing… problems before his recent divorce.” He thought for only a monent before continuing, “Did you know that the male stickleback actually changes sex when defeated by a rival, a type of ultimate submission to the victor, to whom belong all the spoils of war.”
Phil blinked before he answered, “I did, though only vaguely. Fish were never all that fascinating to me.“ Then he thought about what Freyr had told him. ”So I’m the Alföðr now…, the All-Father,” he said glumly and, as if to match his mood, two enormous ravens flew down from somewhere up the highest branches of the oak tree, or perhaps from out of the sky, and perched on the table near him, looking askance at him, as birds often do, without the slightest hint of any reproach. “Jesus Christ!” he swore, utterly devoid of either irony or sense of blasphemy.
“Well,” Freyr observed with either respect or pity, it was rather difficult to say from his expression, “with six hundred and fifty-four babies on the way, and every one of them sanctified by wedlock, acknowledgement, and inheritance, I freely admit that I can’t think of any better appellation, just offhand.”
Philip Avraham Cohn was obsessing with a notebook and a pen in his two hands, an inkwell precariously balanced on one knee as he sat on a stool at the edge of the clearing, since most of their party was at lunch, in very good spirits, and all the available tables were packed with food and elbows.
His talk with Freyr had crystallised for him exactly how much of a responsibility the birth of many hundreds of children would be in real life, so he was making lists: what sort of care would be needed, and for how many women and children, diaper service, housekeeping help, babysitting, even how to provide suitable interactions with male rôle models, how much gold he’d need to leave to provide for all that, should he not survive any future conflicts. He didn’t bother deluding himself that their troubles were over just because the Fire Jötunns had — seemingly — all packed up and headed home.
He knew, for example, that at least two of the traditional opponents of the Gods were still lurking around somewhere, Jörmungandr, the huge serpent that encompassed the world, was one, and that giant phallic snake and Þórr were supposed to kill each other during the Ragnarök, but the wily beast had managed to avoid the battle entirely, by all reports. And then there was a dragon, Níðhöggr, which was supposed to kill almost all the humans, leaving Miðgarðr, Middle-earth, the world of Men, completely empty of human life.
Phil thought that the Þórr/Jörmungandr battle might be seen as an early metaphor, perhaps, for mutually-assured destruction, the policy that currently governs the world arsenal of nuclear weapons. In fact, the ancient trope could fairly easily be stretched to cover almost any sufficiently weighty situation in the present day, since Þórr is in some sense a personification of humanity itself, specifically the human art of war, and the dragon Níðhöggr, the other major player in the Ragnarök scenario, is also called a serpent, so it was entirely conceivable that from a modern perspective Níðhöggr and Jörmungandr were alternate ‘takes’ on the same underlying situation, the mutual dependence and hostility between the finite world and purely human cultures beset by overarching greed and limitless arrogance.
‘Níðhöggr was depicted as gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil,’ he thought, ‘the mighty ash tree which supports the worlds, whilst the serpent Jörmungandr poisons a metaphorical Earth in Þórr, and is in turn destroyed by the Earth itself (that is, Þórr) and also destroys the Earth when it sends the encircling ocean crashing over the Nine Worlds in its death throes.’ This last was as neat a naïve description of global climate change and the continuing rise in sea levels that Phil could imagine a Medieval monk in far-off Iceland conceiving. Maybe the world ends not with Surtr’s thermonuclear bang but a long slow whimper as coastal inundations and inland droughts destroy world food supplies and global resource wars ensue.
Both monsters are somehow related to the destruction of humanity and the world, but seen from different viewpoints, with Þórr the common thread. And then there was the infamous Heart of Virtue, which in Phil’s current opinion couldn’t have been created by the Jötunns — if Surtr was any example of their overall level of cleverness — so there must be some hidden player in the game, the secret mover behind both Jötunns and the various monsters, the true Dark God, or Gods.
Belatedly, Phil realized that some kid was standing in front of him, speaking loudly and trying to get his attention. Without really looking up from his writing, he said, “I’m busy right now, young man, so possibly you could speak to your troop leader…”
“Philip Cohn!” the kid yelled at him. “Look at me, you fool!”
Puzzled, he looked up and the ‘kid’ came fully into focus and he saw…. “Master Wizard Akcuanrut! I’m so terribly sorry! I didn’t recognize you!” As a teenager, the wizard was fairly nondescript, but Phil was terribly embarrassed to have been so oblivious to the lad’s obvious consternation.
“Obviously!” The wizard fumed. “While you’ve been dithering in your notebook, the world has been falling to pieces all around you! The Heart of Virtue has been stolen! Seventeen Wizards of our College are dead! And who knows what’s been happening back in Myriad!”
Phil responded with an air of serenity, secure in the knowledge that — with his new understanding of controlling portal transit temporality — at worst they could return to Myriad in the seconds immediately following their departure. “Calm down, Sir. Whatever news you’ve had, setting everyone to run around like a flock of chickens frightened by a hawk isn’t going to help. Whatever’s happened, we can now respond in force and with essentially no delay, however long we spend in gathering our wits.” He fell silent, considering. “Does your news source provide any details of the incident, other than the bare facts of the theft and fatalities?”
Akcuanrut seemed a little put out to be interrogated by his former apprentice, but said, grudgingly, “The information was obtained by scrying, but the Seer wasn’t terribly skilled, so the images were confused. She did say that children were involved, but I assumed that this referred to the relative youth of the perpetrators, or may have simply been a jumbled reading.”
“Or it may have referred to Dvergar,” Phil pointed out, “since we know that Dwarves have been used as tools in Myriad before.”
“But why don’t we simply open a portal and go see what happened?”
“Because that would commit us to a single space-time worldline, which means that if we overshoot the mark, our enemies’ plans will have already been executed, while if we err in the opposite direction, nothing will have happened for us to investigate.”
“But this is an emergency!” the young wizard said excitedly.
“No, in fact it’s not. Whatever damage has been done, is already done the Dark Gods, or their surrogates, have regained control of the Heart of Virtue, and since the events surrounding the Ragnarok transpire here within the Nine Worlds, involving at least two known monsters native to these worlds, it would seem logical that the Heart will arrive here if we simply sit around and wait. Before doing anything rash, we should investigate using psychic and magical means to the greatest degree possible before we actually do anything, because only when we have a better sense of what actually happened can we have a better chance of acting in such a way that we make matters better instead of worse. Right now, the diverse quantum timelines of our two worlds are still in a state of flux, diverging rapidly from the instant we left Myriad to go to Earth, and then here into the Nine Worlds, but will collapse into certainty in the instant of physical observation. We should consult with the Empress first, I think, both because of her position and because she is a Scryer of considerable power, so may be able to discover things that your previous sorceress was not. We might also ask Eir Menglöð if she might have any advice, since she deals with temporal ambiguity on a daily basis, and may be able to help us, even though Myriad is probably outside her sphere of authority.”
“Did I hear my name mentioned?” Eir said from behind him.
Phil turned to her and said, “You did, Sweetheart. Master Wizard Akcuanrut here tells me that the Heart of Virtue has been taken, and a number of Wizards of the Imperial College murdered — probably the crew who were guarding it — possibly by Dwarves. I was counselling caution, and recommended against an immediate response lest we inadvertently miss the opening and closing of a portal.”
“You’ve had Dvergar in Akcuanrut’s world? Did any of them die?” she asked.
“Quite a few in the first incursion,” Phil told her, mystified by her curious question “at least hundreds, if not thousands. As for this latest, I don’t know. Larona may be able to help us through sorcery.”
“She may, but if you can show me the way to your world, I’ll soon sort out who sent them, and whatever it is they knew.”
“You can do that?” Phil asked. “How in the worlds is that possible?”
“Because the Dvergar, the Svartálfar, are numbered amongst my people, and you are their lawful overlord.”
“I am?”
“You are, both as a result of my brother’s selection of you as his ‘temporary’ replacement in Álfheimr, and as the victor in a fair contest with Óðinn, despite his later attempts to use unmanly means to renege on his formal surrender after ignominious defeat. He was well-armed with a man’s sword, and other lawful weapons, but chose to use foul seiðr to attack both my mother and you after you’d overcome him in hand-to-hand struggle. The fact that you’ve thus far declined to claim the prize means nothing, since Óðinn himself was often absent for months or years. Who rules Ásgarðr and Goðheimr, rules the Nine Worlds, at least officially, or until an ambitious claimant chooses to contest your overlordship and wins.”
Phil had a sudden vision of an endless stream of would-be kings and wannabe ‘top guns’ dogging his footsteps like B-Movie ‘gunsels,’ or whatever it was that they were called. “Unh… What if I don’t want to fight?”
She looked at him with scorn. “First, they’d have to kill you before they could claim victory, so you might as well fight rather than be dead and branded as a coward. Second, your followers and wives would be the prizes of the victor, and we wouldn’t like that; so in short, you’d better fight, or any and all of your wives, at least, might feel more than simply murderous toward you, but betrayed.” Then she looked at him with something like pity. “You’re not on your Earth right now, Phil, and not living by Earth rules. Or, as we like to say on Earth, ‘Get with the program! Phil!’ lest you let your teammates down.”
“Our Phil? Let any one of us down? Impossible!” Larona’s voice came from behind him, so he turned to look as she and seven Selene döppelgangers came up on their small group, looking very refreshed after their afternoon sojourn in the pavilion.
“Oh,” said Eir, “not to worry. He’s just having a few qualms as he comes to grips with the obligations of a King, which isn’t nearly as much a bed of roses as some not to the manor born make it out to be.”
“True,” she said, nodding. “Amongst the many royal prerogatives are an even larger number of royal obligations, including the duty to cheerfully die for one’s people, if it comes to that.”
Hearing that from Larona suddenly made quite a few things clear to Phil. She came from a long line of Kings and Queens, and surely many of them had done just that. She lived in luxury, but that luxury had a price in her mind, one that she was ready to pay when the bill came due. “We don’t have all that much experience with royalty in my homeland,” he admitted, “so its traditions sometimes seem strange to me. I do my best to understand.”
“No royalty?” she said, bemused, “No real leaders? However do you cope? Surely this would encourage recklessness and profligacy in almost any society.”
He paused to consider her words and saw the wisdom in them. “You’re right, of course; it does. Those advisors and legislators temporarily ‘in charge’ rarely, if ever, have to face the real consequences of their actions, however rash or ill-advised, since they hold the people as a whole hostage to their personal agendas with no possible repercussions for them personally to moderate their rash actions.”
“I think you’re too kind,” she said, “since such ‘advisors’ would necessarily be open to bribery and blandishments of many kinds. Deeply offending an absolute monarch carries the risk of death, which tends to temper any tendency toward excess, where an utter lack of personal responsibility breeds contempt for those one supposedly ‘serves.’ If there is no one actually ‘in charge,’ then no one is in charge. Fractious children are in control of the ship of state, to run it onto the rocks, or into the storm, with nary a trace of parental supervision.”
He thought about the sandbox squabbles and posturing of the legislative process as he knew it, and said, “I have to agree. With no ‘skin in the game,’ it doesn’t matter what stupid plays you call, since someone else will run them out, and any casualties will represent other people’s losses.”
In the end, they decided not to investigate the theft of the Heart at all. It was done — however it was done — and the Wizards of the College were just as dead whether they clapped eyes on them or not, so the real issue lay not in figuring out which doors should have been locked, nor how the theft should have been prevented, nor whom to blame, but in who had it now, and what to do with the information — if one could discover it — and where they should go right now.
“Svartálfheimr!” Phil shouted. “That’s it! Where this all began!”
“What the heck!?” Rhea said grumpily. “Do you know what time it is?” It was the middle of the night, and they were lying in a muddle of sheets, blankets, and bodies, as messy and confused as a clowder of sleepy cats.
“What’s up, Phil?” Selene asked, herself in that dreamy state between sleep and waking.
“I realize now that we have to go back to the beginning, back to when we first entered this world, in Svartálfheimr, where we met King Alvís and his people. They’re the real key to this peculiar puzzle!”
“Why do you say that?” Rhea asked.
“It was something that Eir Menglöð said to me, that the Dvergar, the Svartálfar, are numbered among her people, and I wondered how this could possibly be true. Her brother Freyr ruled over the Ljósálfar, the Light Elves, after all, and the Dwarves were the ‘Black Elves,’ who seemed to be their exact opposite.”
“Well,” she said, “aren’t they?”
“No, and King Alvís himself gave me the clue, when he said that he’d be proud to fight beside me. Then I thought of that verse in Tehilim, ‘Praises’ what the Gentiles call the Psalms, ‘I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; for I do not forget thy commandments.’ The King of the Dvergar, the Dvergar themselves, are not ‘Dark,’ nor are they of the Dark. They’ve gone astray, perhaps, but only that. They know what it is to be honorable, but have been ground down, I think, by poverty, and perhaps poor choices in life, but they still aspire to greatness, to nobility. That’s why they’re numbered amongst Eir’s people, not Surtr’s, nor are they at all like the Dark Elves, the dökkálfar, those who have embraced the Dark. The Dvergar are only ‘black,’ like night before the dawn, and diminished in size, possibly through genetic dwarfism selected for through living in a starvation economy.”
“I don’t understand,” said Selene.
“We took the wrong path, almost from the beginning. Every time we came to a choice, in seeking out the Dark, we chose the path toward light, always toward the Sun, like flowers tracking the day. Looking back, it seems so foolish, but every step seemed logical, almost inevitable, and of course it turned out for the best, in the end. I’m not sure how the Æsir would have fared at Bilröst without your help, or Freyr against Fenrir. Perhaps it was destiny, or something like it, but it took us far astray; the True Dark lay North, toward the cold, away from the light, toward Niflheimr and Hel, Sinmœra’s domain.”
“Sinmœra?”
He nodded. “The Queen of Hel, the woman who forged Hævateinn, the weapon intended to destroy the Gods and everything living, which I now believe to be the Heart of Darkness itself, perhaps deliberately conflated with Surtr’s fiery scourge, a bit of theatrical ‘flash’ meant to draw our attention away from the real danger.”
“The Heart is a weapon?”
“Yes, and a terrible one. We saw the frieze the centaurs left behind, which showed them running away in terror, but we never stopped to figure out exactly why they were running away.”
“But the Heart is terrible!” Selene said indignantly. “You saw what it did to my parents, and D’lon-ra, for that matter. It destroyed his body, and then corrupted his soul. I’m only thankful that it only destroyed my parents’ bodies, but left their souls untouched, so you could rescue them unharmed, at least in their sanity and love for each other.”
“I am too, Sweetheart, profoundly grateful, but the Heart never terrified any of us. It was dangerous, sure, and we had to be very careful when we were fighting it, but it had to sneak up on your parents through a trick, and Na-Noc fled in fear, frightened by one old Wizard, two young girls, a couple of powerful centaurs, and a very inexperienced Apprentice, hardly the terror weapon depicted in the centaur records of their epic battles.”
“But what is it then?”
“I don’t know, exactly, although I suspect that it has something to do with its power to subsume and twist both souls and bodies to its fell purpose. Perhaps, in the hands of an expert wielder of its powers, it can reach out and transform people at a distance, or possibly subsume people’s minds and souls so that they instantly turn on those they love most. I just don’t know, but I do know that it must be terrible to see, since the ancient centaurs were doughty warriors, and clever enough that the Heart of Virtue was trapped here for thousands of years before the meddling of the Imperial College of Wizards set it free. Not once in all that time did Na-Noc — whoever he was before the Heart took hold of him — nor any of his predecessors, discover the secrets that the centaurs wanted hidden, except possibly the hidden passage and cavern beneath the throne room, whatever it was originally, and even that seems to have been designed as a snare, to distract those who might seek to penetrate the true centaur secrets.”
“So, what do we do next?” Rhea said, stretching luxuriously as she thought seriously about getting up.
“We go to Hel,” he said, “and defeat Sinmœra, hopefully wresting the Heart from her grasp. If anyone knows how to use it, it must be her, but I’m hoping that she herself requires someone fit to use it, and that he or she isn’t there yet, since she evidently had the weapon in her hands, but didn’t use it for so long that it went missing. This can’t have been part of any overall plan.”
“Oh, great!” she groused, “Why didn’t you just say so the first time, Phil? It all sounds so simple when you put it like that: We go to Hell, twist the she-devil’s tail, and then rain her own Hellfire on her head. What could possibly be easier?”
He laughed at that, then said, “Well, it might be a little more complicated than that, but I’m quite sure you and Selene will manage to correct me if I’ve gotten anything wrong.” He smiled winsomely in her general direction.
“Oh, heck!” she said grudgingly. “When you put it like that, I suppose we’ll have to.”
“Remind me again what we’re doing here,” Selene said quietly.
They were threading their way through a series of frozen cordilleras in Niflheimr, the closest thing to a very chilly Hell that one could possibly imagine. Whoever it was who’d coined the expression, ‘When Hell freezes over,’ had obviously had this place in mind.
“We’re looking for the gates of Hel, or something like them,” Phil whispered.
They were alone, the three of them, accompanied by three centaurs. They were dressed in heavy long white woolen robes, like an Arabic burnoose, over their regular clothes, in an effort to be inconspicuous, but the centaurs, of course, had to rely upon their own powers of disguise, which were considerable when they put their minds to it. They’d seen Hrímthurs, Frost Giants, stalking along in the distance, but none had turned to look, nor looked at much of anything, as far as they could see, since they mostly trudged along with their heads down, possibly avoiding the direct glare of the arctic Sun glancing low off of the endless ice plains and mountains.
And then he saw it, the glint of sun on metal, not ice, and knew he'd found it. Ahead was a mountain of ice, not all that different from the other mountains around them, other than that one flash of polished steel. Carefully, he felt the æther around them and found the telltale signature of a shrouded portal, probably the portal she'd used to send the Dwarves to ambush them in Myriad, although of course he couldn't tell for sure without a closer inspection. He raised his hand slightly, enough to attract Selene and Rhea's attention, which wasn't much at all, and hissed quietly through his teeth. “That's it!” he said, as much like a sighing breath of wind as he could manage.
They nodded, then disappeared, and their mounts with them, as the centaurs extended their own powers of disguise to make them look like slowly drifting flurries of snow.
Phil trudged along, making no further effort to conceal himself, since he now wanted to attract attention. Quickly, he approached the mountain, where he did, in fact, discern a polished iron gate set into the light grey rock of a cliff, half-covered in ice and snow. As the Gate of Hel, it left a lot to be desired. It was drab, small, and utterly devoid of architectural distinction, more like a sewer cover set on end than the entrance to an underground dominion
On the other hand, it was enough, just as a sort of decoration, because the most notable feature of the entrance to Hel was a glowing forge as big as garbage truck off to one side, as big as one of those behemoths with the hydraulic mangles that smashes up the stuff in the cans when the automatic levers pour the bins inside its gaping maw. Standing before that forge was a Jötun woman, as big as Surtr, but as black as night. Not black like she'd come from Africa, but as if she'd been formed from molten pitch, her naked breasts reflecting the glow from the forge with a deep and shiny dark amber glow somehow inside her, moving as her breasts swayed and she worked the forge, shifting whatever she held in the coals with iron tongs as thick as cast iron water mains. Then she lifted up her workpiece, it was the Heart of Virtue, surprisingly dainty in the midst of all the outsized blacksmithery, and it was on fire.
Then he noticed something else, half hidden behind the forge and its grotesque blacksmith, the head of a giant snake, Jörmungandr, just snaking around the corner of the mountain.
‘Oh, crap!’ he thought, as everything became suddenly, horribly, crystal clear.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Thirty-Two —
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln,
did you enjoy the play?— Anonymous
With no time to lose, he yelled, “If he opens wide, pop a pill in!” hoping that this would be cryptic enough to confuse Sinmœra for a few seconds, yet clear enough for Rhea and Selene, who’d gone ahead with his more instantly lethal replacements for the ‘dandelion’ bombs in duffels slung over their shoulders. He only hoped that they’d been quick enough in getting to some sort of strategic place from which to throw them.
“Hey! Hel Hag!” he yelled again with a bravado he didn’t exactly feel. “The game’s up! Come out with your hands in the air, and drop your weapon!”
Sinmœra laughed cruelly, holding the Heart of Virtue casually in the tongs, careless of the flames licking up from it as she held it up before her like a talisman. “You’re in my domain now, tiny man, and I make all the demands.”
Phil began to ready a spell as he approached the Giantess, but said, “Your days as a Queen are numbered on the fingers of one hand, foul enchantress. I, Emperor Philip of Myriad, do name you outlaw, and banish you forever to the outer wastes!”
“Fool! Arrogant Fool!” she cried. “You see before you the Bane of All Things Living! The Heart of Darkness! Death! The Destroyer of Worlds! You have no power here!” She held up the Heart and began to chant, and Phil could feel the fell grip of its perverted mockery of life-in-death take hold of him, even as he took hold of it and her with a spell of power. He continued advancing, until he was close enough almost to touch her. He was smiling. “Now, Death, thou shalt die,” he said simply, as he opened an instantaneous centaurean one-way portal beneath their feet and instantly lunged out, reaching to make physical contact with the Heart itself, wrested it from the witch’s tongs and bent it to his will, touching it to her flesh, then felt himself falling, saw the witch — taken completely unawares — falling, the Heart falling with them, bound together tightly with ensorcelled ties more strict than death, and he fell into the very heart of light with a shout of pure joy… before he died suffused, torn asunder, scattered into atoms, then ionized, by the bright thermonuclear glory of victory.”
From their positions above Phil’s confrontation with the witch, Rhea and Selene saw Jörmungandr rear and open its gaping maw, preparing to strike at Phil so, as he’d presciently advised, threw three weapons each — Phil’s new bombs — neatly into the serpent’s mouth, where they went off and silently decapitated the worm, sending the atoms of its head and brains into the Sun to flash instantaneously into plasma just as they saw Sinmœra, the firey Heart she held, her entire forge, and Phil himself fall through a handcrafted version of the same effect to the same fate — a swiftly-fading amber glow upon the icy rock and the hollow echo of Phil’s last shout the only remnants of his passing, and they both screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
Numbly, they picked through the rubble left behind, searching for some clue, but there was none, other than Phil’s discarded duffle. The witch Sinmœra, late Queen of Hel, was dead, ding dong, but so was Phil, and it seemed so pointless. He’d obviously had something in mind when he’d told them so cryptically to kill the serpent, but exactly what — or even roughly what — was a mystery. They’d seen the Heart vanish, of course, but why had he invested his own life in taking out Sinmœra?
“Crap!” Rhea cursed, kicking at a rock on the icy ground, then looking around for something, anything more satisfying to kick or break, but there was nothing but an enormous river of dead snake extending back up the valley, and there seemed no point in doing anything with it. It was cold enough that this part of it seemed likely to rest unputrefied forever, a frozen carcass for some future palaeontologist to discover and wonder about.
Selene said nothing.
The three centaurs had gathered together, huddled close for warmth and comfort in the bitter cold, and likewise more accustomed, perhaps, to sudden death in wild places, because one called out from where they stood, tails toward the wind, “Rhea, Selene? We’re terribly sorry about Phil, but we’ve got to head back. We’ll be on very short rations before we reach the edge of Niflheimr as it is, and we still don’t know if either of you can make Phil’s bridge operate to take us back to Svartálfheimr.”
Selene answered, “Of course, dear friends. I was just trying to imagine what he saw in those last moments that convinced him that whatever it was that Sinmœra was planning to do with the Heart of Darkness was so terrible that he had to stop her, at any cost.”
“Well,” Rhea said, “other than working her way toward destroying all the worlds and every living thing, what could be worse?”
“I don’t know, Honey. I don’t know. I wish I did. It must have been something sudden, because I can’t imagine him not saying something to us, otherwise.”
“No, I suppose not,” she said listlessly. “Nothing matters anymore.”
“Don’t ever say that, Rhea!” she said fiercely. “We have to work toward completing whatever’s left of Phil’s life work! If nothing else, we have to do that for him. Remember what he said? ‘It’s not incumbent on us to finish the work, but neither are we at liberty to desist from it.’ We have a duty to perform, and I intend to do my part in it, the first being to see to it that our friends the centaurs are able to safely rejoin their herd. Whatever it was that he was up to in his last moments, making sure that we were safe, — that all his friends and dependents were safe — that all the worlds were safe — was part of it, I know.”
The journey south was a grim trek through an empty landscape, since the hulking Hrímthurs they’d seen from time to time on the road north had inexplicably vanished, perhaps dealing with the sudden and drastic alteration Phil had made in their social pecking order. The one Frost Giant they stumbled across — evidently a sentinel stationed near the border of Niflheimer to keep out the riffraff — was dispatched almost offhand, as soon as he’d made an obviously hostile movement toward them, and without the usual banter and cheerful sangfroid they normally displayed in combat.
There was a pervasive air of melancholy that surrounded the entire party, but especially Selene and Rhea, who still expected Phil to appear at any moment, as if he’d simply wandered off to look at a particularly interesting rock formation, and might be just around the next corner.
Of course, he wasn’t, and never would be again.
Even their abrupt and brief encounter with the hostile Hrímthur had failed to cheer them, and the two women approached the edge of Niflheimer with an air of distracted ennui. The centaurs, perhaps wisely — or perhaps more in kindness — held themselves slightly apart, trudging along behind them, allowing them the privacy of their thoughts.
There it was, the precipice, and the same bright clouds below. “Well, here we are,” said Selene.
“Do you have any idea how that bridge thingie works?” asked Rhea.
“Not a clue,” was the reply, and she dug through Philip’s duffel, looking for it. When she found it, she held it up between them, as if their shared ignorance might penetrate its secrets. “I wasn’t paying much attention, actually, but I had the impression that he held it like a fishing rod and sort of ‘flicked’ it toward where he wanted to go.”
They both studied it carefully. It was long and thin, almost like a wand, and made of metal with joints so cleverly fitted that they seemed almost like engraved lines upon a solid rod. “Which end is the handle?” Rhea asked.
Selene shook her head. “Again, I haven’t a clue. I was never all that much interested in machinery. Phil always took care of stuff like that.”
Rhea nodded, glumly. “Me too,” she said. She reached out, as if to touch it, then changed her mind.
Selene was holding it rather gingerly, as if it might explode into its expanded form with a touch. Then, for lack of something better to do, she stared off into the distance, where she could see the island world of Svartálfheimr, where the majority of their expedition were camped on the opposite ‘shore,’ as it were. “I wish we’d thought to have Akcuanrut along as… never mind.” She’d almost said ‘backup,’ and then silently cursed herslf for thinking it.
“I know what you mean,” Rhea said, and burst into tears, which of course opened the floodgates of grief for both of them, and they wept, then sobbed, then clutched at each other for comfort as they both collapsed into helpless suffering and heartbreak, winding up on their knees, each held upright only by the strength of the other.
Then flying Eir Menglöð and Sleipnir came rushing through the air, Sleipnir rearing to a stop as he himself touched down, and Eir herself vaulted from her mount’s back and caught them both up in her strong arms, saying, “Hush, my lambs, my darling girls. He’s only dead. He died a hero!” and tried to kiss away their tears.
“How can you say that?!” they wailed. “You loved him too!”
She smiled, then laughed. “And who am I but The Chooser of the Slain? What happens to heroes in this world?”
“But he’s not in this world!” they both screamed at her. “The bloody idiot jumped into the damned Sun!”
“Well,” she said, “I have to confess that this does present a problem, since I rarely have to fetch my people from across dimensions and the vastnesses of space, but all things are possible with the help of a pure heart and good intentions, which you’ll have to admit, I have in full measure.” She looked up and said, “In fact, here I come.”
Then flying another pair of Eir and Sleipnir avatars came rushing through the air, pulling up only as the other version of Eir vaulted from her other mount’s back and said, “Dear hearts! Don’t worry! I’m looking for his soul, even as we speak. That Sun of yours is a terribly confusing sort of place, with all sorts of violence going on, all at once, like a giant Mælström of elemental fire.”
“He’s still alive!?” they both cried out, hardly daring to hope.
“Well… no… not exactly,” she admitted. “He’s dead, of course, but his spirit is made of stronger stuff, especially since my uncle Freyr elevated him to the status of a Ljósálfr, a necessary prerequisite for taking on the rôle of King of Álfheimr and of the Ljósálfar, so it’s really just a matter of time.”
“How much time?” Rhea asked sceptically.
“It’s difficult to say,” she said, “since I’ve never actually encountered a similar situation, I’ve spent several years in exploring your Sun already, but have every confidence of eventual success.”
“Do you know how big the Sun is?” Rhea asked, conversationally, which wasn’t a good sign.
“Well, no, other than that it’s very large.”
“It’s an almost perfect sphere, roughly eight hundred and sixty-five thousand miles in diameter, or approximately three hundred and forty billion cubic miles. Assuming the the Sun was frozen solid, and that it takes you one second to search every cubic mile thoroughly, it would only take eleven thousand years or so to be sure of finding him, but in the meantime solar magnetic storms and convection cells are churning it around at a fantastic rate, with bits and pieces being flung off into interstellar space at random intervals, so I think you might be more certain of success in a billion years or so, but who’s counting?” Rhea smiled, but not at all nicely.
“That big?” Eir asked, stunned.
“That big,” Selene assured her.
“Oh,” Eir said. “Well, it may take a bit more time, then.” With that, both pairs of Eirs and Sleipnirs left, flying off in two different directions.
Selene and Rhea watched them as they grew smaller, then vanished. Rhea said, “Dang! We should have asked her how to work the bridge.”
Selene turned to her and said, “Yeah, we should have done.”
At dusk, they got out two of Phil’s light balls and turned them on to cast a brilliant light across the gap between the edge of the cliff and the distant island in the clouds that was Svartálfheimr, hoping that someone in the camp would see them and figure out how to send someone across, since no amount of banging and flinging of the so-called ‘bridge’ had any effect at all. “You’d think Phil would have shown us how this stupid thing worked!” Selene said, not irritated, exactly.
“Yeah,” Rhea said. “He probably wasn’t figuring on not being around….” Then she shut up and they sat in silence for a good long time, long enough for the pair of lights to flicker into a dim glow, then cast no light at all.
After some time, Rhea got up and got two more light balls from Phil’s duffle, then turned them on and placed them on the edge of the precipice, surrounding them with bits of rock and icy snow to make sure they could be easily seen and not drift off if the wind picked up. “I wish we had more stuff for the girls to eat,” she said. “I’m not particularly hungry, but they must be famished.”
Selene nodded her agreement, but had nothing much to add, so they sat in silence, waiting.
Eventually, Rhea started singing in a clear soft voice, almost like a lullaby. It was the romanza from the second act of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore — a classic soprano solo — though her expression of it was slightly darkened by emotion. The pitch, even a cappella, was perfect, the phrasing spot on. She had a gift that way.
“Una furtiva lagrima
negli occhi suoi spuntò:
Quelle festose giovani
invidiar sembrò.
Che più cercando io vo?
Che più cercando io vo?“M’ama! Sì, m’ama, lo vedo. Lo vedo.
“Un solo istante i palpiti
del suo bel cor sentir!
I miei sospir, confondere
per poco a’ suoi sospir!“I palpiti, i palpiti sentir,
confondere i miei coi suoi sospir…“Cielo! Si può morir!
Di più non chiedo, non chiedo.“Ah, cielo! Si può! Si, può morir!
Di più non chiedo, non chiedo.
Si può morir! Si può morir d’amor.”
“Very nice,” Selene said, after a suitable hush. “I don’t speak Italian, though.”
“It’s a song about tragedy, and how one might die of love for all the wrong reasons, even stupid reasons.”
“Yeah,” she said, and sighed. “Would you mind singing it again?”
It was getting close to dawn, Selene decided. The sky overhead was definitely getting lighter, although it was also heavily overcast, so they couldn’t see any stars, so it was difficult to judge exactly how far along it was toward sunrise. Looking off toward Svartálfheimr, she thought that she could see a little more detail on the gloomy edge of the cliff that was closest, although the odd luminescence of the cloud layer beneath them made it hard to judge that too. As night-lights went, the glowing clouds that concealed the branches and trunk of Yggdrasil were peculiarly ineffective.
She was wondering why, exactly, this was so when she thought she saw a motion of some sort, against the dull haze of the clouds that seemed almost clamped down upon what she could see of the distant horizon, which was little enough. She nudged Rhea, who was huddled close beside her, for both warmth and comfort. “Rhea! Are you awake?”
“Yeah,” she said grumpily. “What’s up, buttercup?”
Selene smiled, thinking of sleepovers in their childhood, and answered accordingly, “What’s the word, hummingbird?”
“No fair!” she said. “I asked you first.”
“I think I see Sleipnir and Eir heading toward us.”
“Does she have Phil with her?” Rhea, as always, came straight to the point.
She looked carefully, wishing that it were lighter. “I don’t think so.” Although she was still far off, the distant figure astride the flying horse seemed slim, and Phil’s bulk would surely have been visible, even riding behind her.
“Then I’m not interested,” she said, and snuggled closer.
“Rhea, sweetie, be nice. I’m quite sure that she wants to find him just as much as we do, but we know that it’s going to take a while. Besides,” she added, “we need to ask her to ferry Akcuanrut over so he can figure out how Phil’s little bridge works.”
Rhea was staring off toward the approaching rider. “I don’t think we’ll need to ask. Through some miracle of prescience, Eir seems to be toting King Alvís along with her.”
Sure enough, they could see the dwarven King hanging onto Eir with his eyes screwed tight shut as Sleipnir lightly touched down and Eir picked him up from behind her with a lithe twist and set him down upon the ground as carefully as she might an infant, all without dismounting. It was an astonishing display of strength and flexibility. “Here we go,” she said. “Safe back on the solid ground!”
“And about time, too!” he said, glaring at the icy rocks and frozen snow around him as if they’d personally insulted him and he was spoiling for a fight. “I don’t hold with gallivanting around in the sky, let me tell you, begging your pardon, of course, Ma’am.” Then he looked at her ingratiatingly and asked, “I’m not dead, am I?”
“No, you’re not,” Eir Menglöð said to him, dismounting without any noticeable effort, “but I thought your unique talents might be useful here, since one of your cunning devices is inadvertently thwarting the efforts of my sister wives to return to your homeland with their friends.”
The little King looked around the barren ground and said, suspiciously, “Where’s my good friend Phil?”
Eir blushed and said, “I seem to have temporarily mislaid him. Please rest assured that I’m sparing no efforts to find him, but he was involved with an altercation with Hel, Sinmœra, to be more precise, so his current manifestation was destroyed and of course returned to the Sun, his natural form, but in another plane of existence.”
“Another plane of existence? He’d said that he wasn’t from our Nine Worlds, but I’d thought that it might simply be a touch of the divine madness. You know how they get, the Gods, I mean.” Then he thought better of what he’d just spoken and added, “Meaning no disrespect, of course, Ma’am.”
She laughed and said, “None taken, dear Alvís. You’re getting taller by the minute, you know.”
“Taller? Why in all the worlds would I want to be taller?” he said indignantly. “I’d be forever hitting my head on low doorways…. Why, I’d have to rebuild my whole feasting hall!”
“That would be a problem,” she said sympathetically.
“Well, never mind,” he said brusquely. “Let’s have a look at my device.”
Selene handed it over, since she had it handy. “Here it is,” she said.
He looked at it carefully, then — strangely — took her hand and studied it, then said, “I see what the problem is. Do you see these areas on the shaft?” He carefully pointed them out, three ovals in a very slight curve around the shaft of the device, another slightly offset counterclockwise below, and a larger oval above them all, offset clockwise almost entirely to the opposite side. “They make a sort of spiral. They’re meant to fit Phil’s thumb and four fingers quite precisely — a sort of personal ‘key,’ — but if you know the trick of it, you can simply contort your hand slightly to fit the ‘fingerprints,’ you might say, instead of falling naturally, the way one would, of course.” He handed it back to Selene and said, “Here, try it one finger at a time, but not all at once, or the bridge will expand, which is not a terribly good idea without a clear destination in mind.”
She picked it up with some trepidation, since she wasn’t all that fond of magical devices, other than Phil’s little hand grenades, of course, and the light globes. “Okay,” she said, and very carefully tried out the indicated positions one finger at a time, the others held stiffly away from the shaft of the device to avoid mistakes. It felt awkward, even strained, since Phil’s hands were so much larger than hers, but she thought that she could manage it. She looked down at the dwarf and said, “I think I’ve got it. Keep the destination in mind, place my fingers on the right spots, and it pops out like a self-unfolding umbrella.”
“Umbrellr?” he asked.
“It’s a sort of rain shield that you hold over your head in rainstorms to keep from getting wet, although people also use them to shade themselves from the sun in hot climates. The word actually means ‘little shade,’ so that was probably its primary purpose at one time, but these days we tend to call an umbrella that’s designed primarily to furnish shade a ‘parasol,’ and reserve the name….” She noticed that his eyes were glazing over and said, “Never mind. I’m sure that you’d come up with something far more clever if you ever felt the need.”
At that, he brightened up. “Undoubtedly!” he enthused. “We Dvergar make the best of everything! And I, of course, craft the very best of the best!”
“They are, King Alvís. That’s for sure. Would you like to ride back with us on your darling little bridge, or would you like to go back with Eir Menglöð, the way you arrived?” Selene had a notion that he’d prefer to keep his feet on the ground, or something like it, but thought she’d ask.
He shuddered. “If I never fly through the air again, it will be much too soon! I’ve got a bone to pick with Phil, though, when and if he returns. He’d told me that he had a plan to use my dwarves and me in the battle with Surtr and his Fire Jötunns.”
Rhea grimaced and said, “That was our fault, actually. By the time we reached Múspellsheimr, the battle was already underway, and Phil wasn’t quite ready, so retired from the field to prepare a weapon to use against the Giants. In the meantime, Selene and I, with the able assistance of Eir Menglöð, managed to cripple Surtr, and when he showed up at Bilröst, his own army killed him and simply went home. The official Ragnarök was over just like that, and even Phil was a little put out when he came back with his weapon and there was no war going on that he could use it in.”
“What does this ‘weapon’ actually do?” he asked.
“It opens up a gateway between this world and our Sun,” she said.
King Alvís nodded in instant comprehension. “So Phil was caught up in the backlash of his own weapon? I’d warned him about magical devices, even in Svartálfheimr. The curses associated with magic are much worse in Niflheimr, and more difficult to handle.”
“It wasn’t a curse, though,” Rhea protested. “Something happened — or Phil saw something happening — that he must have felt that he had to prevent at any cost. He sacrificed himself to pull Sinmœra and the Heart of Virtue bodily into the gateway that led into the heart of the Sun, before she could do whatever it was that she was planning.”
His brows furrowed and he said, “Could you show me this place?”
Rhea and Selene looked at each other, then said, “Well, ordinarily, yes, but we’re all very tired, and we haven’t actually had anything to eat since yesterday. I’m afraid some of us might not survive the journey.”
He grimaced, then turned to Eir and asked, “Could you fly us there?” Then he clamped his jaw shut in grim determination, as if preparing himself to cut off his own arm.
She smiled. “Taller every day,” she said.
King Alvís merely scowled.
At the gates of Hel, nothing had changed that they could see, except that the body of the serpent, Jörmungandr, was frozen solid, and the steel gate in the rock cliff was beginning to rust. “Describe what happened, if you would. There’s not much left behind to see.”
Selene told the story, from Phil’s sighting of the door, to their separation, Phil’s cryptic order to kill Jörmungandr, and the final scene at the forge, although she couldn’t remember exactly what had been said as Phil was closing the distance between them. When she got to the very last moments, when she was trying to describe the look of triumph on Phil’s face as he’d shouted joyfully, even as he fell through the portal, she broke down, and Rhea with her. At last, she managed to control her emotions enough to speak, and she began to speak….
…only to be cut off. “I’ve heard enough to make an educated guess, based on Phil’s previous description of the Heart. As I understand it, this weapon is somehow able to corrupt and reform bodies, bending them to its will?”
“Yes!” Selene and Rhea said in chorus. “We’ve actually seen this happen, when the Emperor’s Champion, D’lon-ra, was taken and absorbed by the Heart, corrupting not only his body, but his mind and soul.”
“Then it’s clear that the witch Sinmœra planned to use the Heart to do the same to Jörmungandr, and I think it must have been equally clear to Phil. With a serpent big enough to wrap itself around all the worlds corrupted and totally subsumed into its own evil nature, it would be a simple matter to destroy all our worlds through mere strength, much less the power to eat the world itself into the bargain. He obviously asked you to destroy it so that the snake itself couldn’t be influenced by the Heart to reach out to take the foul thing into its own mouth and so coöperate in its own destruction. Then he took the burning Heart into his own hand to prevent the witch from gaining control of it — possibly to distract it as well, a dual purpose very useful in a contest of wills — and then he used the Heart to destroy the witch herself, and then plunged himself into cleansing fire, destroying both the Heart and the witch Sinmœra with utter finality.” He shook his head in awe. “What a Warrior stood there! Steadfast and bold in the face of Death! What strategic insight, steely courage, and grim resolve! I only wish that I’d been there to die in his company. The poets will be singing of this victory for a thousand years or more!”
Rhea rolled her eyes and glanced toward Selene, who seemed to have the same opinion. Whatever else King Alvís was, he was still a man.
On the edge of the cliff, Selene stood concentrating on the distant outline of their landing place, where all the rest of their party — all but one — were gathered. She’d studied the bridge mechanism until she thought that she could grasp all five points of it without looking. ‘If not now, when?’ she thought, and said, “Ready?”
At their nod, she looked long and hard at the edge of Svartálfheimr, then pressed the oval triggers and cast out the tip of the gadget like a badminton racquet. Like magic, the bridge began to unfold, just as it had for Phil, and she felt a frisson of excitement. “Alright, people, let’s go!” she cried, and stepped onto the surface of the bridge, feeling the familiar ‘escalator’ feeling as she arched up into the sky, followed closely by King Alvís — rather too closely, she thought, since he seemed to be staring directly at her butt — and then the rest of their party, save only Eir, who had her own transport ready.
When the last of them had stepped onto the bridge, she mounted Sleipnir and galloped up until she rode easily beside them, loping along in casual camaraderie as she kept them company on the journey south. “Your description of Phil’s last assault upon the Heart of Virtue and Sinmœra was very moving,” she said. “I haven’t gone out of my way to see the actual moment, because I thought that it might be too much to bear, but your account of it made me very proud.”
“I don’t know about you, Eir, but I’d just as soon not remember it. This whole thing has been very painful, despite your reassurances that all will be well in the end.” She blinked back tears again, even though she could blame them on the wind of their rapid passage toward Svartálfheimr.
Eir kept silent through the rest of their flight.
Selene couldn’t remember the ground rushing up at her so quickly as it seemed to now, but it was a relief, to be back in camp, surrounded by everyone she knew, Gefjon, Larona, her oldest friend, Rhea, and Eir, and all the women they’d saved from death and pain, all those faces, so familiar, like looking in a mirror, except the thoughts behind those familiar faces weren’t hers, or not exactly. She smiled. ‘Let’s see the Dionne Quintuplets match this!’ she thought. They were more than merely ‘twins,’ the same person, in some sort of weird ontological sense, identical down to the cellular level, each gene sequence precisely mirrored, their fingerprints, even the flecks in their corneas identical, beyond the ability of anyone on Earth to tell them apart. ‘Take that, CSI!’
Gefjon came up to her first, and she was grateful, although it was difficult to understand exactly why she felt so close to her. Perhaps it was that her relationship with Phil was almost as complex as her own, overlaid with alternate histories, misunderstandings, and confusion, but they were truly sisters, sharing the same grief, the same loss, the selfsame hole in their hearts where Phil used to be.
“Selene,” she said quietly, leaning in to enfold her in her arms and then kiss her. “I was so terribly grieved to hear about Phil’s death.”
“Gefjon,” she replied. “Eir claims that she’ll find him, eventually, but it’s difficult to ignore the reality of our final sight of him falling into the unimaginable fury of the Solar photosphere, and equally hard to comprehend the odds against finding him, lost as he is in an enormous churning chaos of nuclear fusion moderated only by the opposing pressures of light and gravity.”
Gefjon stroked her hair and murmured in her ear in a voice as soft as summer moonlight, “I know, honey, but I trust my daughter. If she says she’ll find him, she will.”
“But it’s taking so long!” she wailed, and fell to crying again, but it was better with Gefjon’s strong arms around her.
“Hush, my lamb, my darling girl,” she whispered. “He’ll be back, and soon, I feel it.”
Life went on — with or without Phil — and although the immediate danger was gone, with not a hint of trouble anywhere within the Nine Worlds, Larona’s scrying revealed that the rogue Dvergar were wreaking havoc in Myriad upon the people of the Empire, using Dwarvish devisings crafted by either Dáinn, or Náinn, or both together, with what remained of their people, still outlaws who defied the authority of King Alvís.
The Empress D’Larona-Cohn called a war council, including Akcuanrut, the leaders of her men-at-arms, Selene and Rhea, and King Alvís, as the ultimately responsible authority. “King Alvís, I’d like you to go with us to help bring your people back from my world, for you to punish as you see fit, but I do want to try to avoid killing them in wholesale lots, as we did before, because I suspect that they were lured by promises of an escape from your people’s former poverty, and didn’t realize the full consequences of their actions, since no one but a fool would take a bribe to help destroy the world he lived in, however greedy.”
Alvís answered fairly, “Empress Larona, your generosity and kindness does you credit. I accept full responsibility for the actions of Dáinn, Náinn, and their people, and will do my best to set it right. Emperor Philip’s generous gifts to me have left me in a much better position than I was before, since I now have the wherewithal to reward loyalty as it properly merits, and to punish traitors as they deserve. My Dvergar are at your service to help roust the traitors out from whatever secret places in which they choose to hide.”
“I could ask no more, King Alvís, and to show my gratitude guarantee the construction of a portal between our worlds which you and your subjects can make use of to supply and purchase trade goods at whatever price you choose and the marketplace allows. I further grant your people free access to the extensive caverns beneath the mountain ranges near our capital, to establish homes, roadhouses to accommodate travellers, shops and warehouses, or for whatever purpose you choose, with the guarantee of peaceful occupation under the laws and authority of our Empire. Never again will your people be entirely at the mercy of thieves and liars, and I believe that you would all be a very valuable addition to our body politic.”
King Alvís promptly knelt before her in feudal homage. “Your Imperial Highness, I’m overwhelmed. On behalf of myself and my people, I accept your protection and offer fealty and service in return, as is customary.”
“Rise, King Alvís. You’ll have a place on the Imperial Council, of course, and the customary titles and privileges within the Empire. Please feel free to contact the Imperial Herald with the arms and bearings of any of your nobility who choose to immigrate to our world.”
Selene was astonished by how quickly things were progressing. Larona, it seems, wasn’t at all inclined to ‘dick around’ with empty posturing and/or ‘negotiations’ meant to maintain either the status quo or to ensure advantage for one side over another. In one shrewd move she’d guarded her northern border with a staunch ally well-suited to mountain life, and those uninhabited mountains were a paradise in comparison to Svartálfheimr, with ample sun, rivers teaming with fish, forests for lumber and fuel, and potential mines for raw materials currently unused. Both she and Alvís were very likely to vastly increase their wealth with essentially no particular effort on the part of either.
With a population of ‘legitimate’ Dvergar in place, crowding out the rogues would happen almost automatically, since the new immigrants would be fighting for their future homes, whilst the interlopers would be trying to hang on to a temporary refuge and ‘hideout’ with their only lasting hope being surrender and reconciliation.
‘Checkmate,’ she thought.
Once the overall scope of the effort was decided upon, the preparations took surprisingly little time. Alvís sent out word to his people and had an army of a thousand Dwarves ready within three hours, after it was explained to them that they would all be supplied with food and other necessaries immediately upon their arrival in Myriad.
When the army of dwarves actually arrived, their appearance only reïnforced her guess that this episode marked the beginning of the endgame, since they arrived with wives and children, and many of the wives were armed. So terrible they seemed, their eyes filled with fierce sudden hope and grim determination, their clothes so threadbare and torn that patches of white skin showed through, that she thought the rogues might simply throw down their arms in terror as soon as they got a good look at them. It’s not for nothing that the Greek Furies were women, for women — once roused to anger — give no quarter, and will tear an armed man into pieces with their bare hands and teeth if their children are involved in the quarrel, and they were involved in this one, because the great mass of the Dvergar were obviously in desperate straits.
Their tentative plan was to set out from the Capital to the mountains — where the rogue Dwarves had carved out a stronghold well away from the river, having learned their lesson after the first abortive attempt to take out Rhea and Selene — and there lay siege to the enemy with an army as readily-adapted to fighting in the dark and in close quarters as they were themselves.
Akcuanrut had set a batch of apprentices to churning out Phil’s light balls by the hundreds and the Dvergar were sharpening knives and preparing cunning devices of all shapes and sizes, evidently quite secret — even from new allies — since most of the dwarves hastily concealed what they were doing whenever anyone came close enough to spy out whatever it was that they were doing.
There was one new thing which wasn’t secret, and it was Selene’s doing, or so King Alvís said. He’d made what looked like a beekeeper’s suit, complete with broad-brimmed hat and closely-woven net, and had supplied a troop of assault troops with this as their uniform. “I call it my umbrella-suit,” he said with glee. “I know what those light balls of Phil’s can do, but this blocks out their light automatically, but still allows the wearer to see perfectly, even when the lights explode suddenly and then disappear. It all has to do with tiny shutters woven into the fabric of the head-net, which open and close in a fraction of a second at any preset level of brilliance. It’s all to do with certain chemical salts, you see, which undergo an almost instantaneous change of state when exposed to light, exerting torsion on the fibers of the cloth when stimulated, then relaxing when the light goes out.” He looked quite pleased with himself. “Even when the shutters are completely closed, I designed in enough small openings that one can easily see through the glare and attack one’s enemies with little fear of reprisal.” He turned to Selene and asked, “What do you think, Selene?”
She paused before speaking, since she didn’t want to rain on his parade, but it all struck her as being terribly bloodthirsty. “It seems awfully clever, King Alvís, and would certainly give you an advantage in fighting underground if Phil’s light balls are used, but I’m really hoping that the rebels surrender when they see how much power is arrayed against them. After seeing how desperately poor so many of your people are, I can easily see how they might have been coerced into coöperation by the true villains in these actions — surely Sinmœra, the Fire Jötunns, and their confederates — through hunger and a grinding poverty that left only despair and hopelessness in its wake. I suspect that at least some of them might have volunteered to be hung, if only they’d been guaranteed a nice last meal, and especially if they’d been allowed to give that last meal to their wives and children.”
The King frowned slightly, then said, “We do plan to offer them the opportunity to surrender, Selene. The Empress has very kindly volunteered the use of the many Scryers within the Imperial College of Wizards to ascertain individual guilt or innocence before any adverse decisions are made, and I’m here both to order their surrender as their legitimate Sovereign, and to guarantee their safety if they are innocent of any crime.” He paused and then added, “You must realize, though, that the savagery demonstrated in some of the attacks on the largely defenceless Wizards who’d been guarding the Heart of Virtue demonstrates that at least some of these ‘rebels’ were not innocent bystanders. We can’t be so tenderhearted that we allow very real villains to escape unscathed and make a mockery of our collective sense of justice.”
“No, I suppose you’re right,” she admitted. “On the other hand, when we fought the supposedly fierce Fire Jötunns who were destined to destroy the Nine Worlds and almost everyone in them, it amazed me how few of them really wanted to fight when it came right down to it. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, everybody simply packed up and went home. It was almost as if they were looking for an excuse to walk out that didn’t wind up with them looking like chumps.”
King Alvís thought about this for a while and then said, “There’s another way of looking at it, though. After all this build-up, after the Fire Jötunns had been fed a steady diet of ‘We are invincible!’ two young slips of girls, both visibly pregnant, whip the ass off the biggest and baddest Son of Múspell there ever was, in spite of the fact that he had a magic terror weapon that was supposed to make him invincible and neither one of the girls even break a nail. It may be that the Fire Jötunns thought that they looked like ‘chumps’ already, and were simply trying to avoid utter humiliation by blaming everything that happened on Surtr. He was the ‘chump,’ not they. By killing him, they were eliminating anyone who might contradict this happy theory, since — if he should chance to recover, and then prove to be as formidable as they’d thought he was — that would prove that all the Fire Jötunns were very likely ‘chumps’ as well, and just as inept as their former leader.” He waited while she thought about this for some moments, then added, “In fact, if I were inclined to wager, I’d bet that they were afraid of you two young girls, not to mention Eir Menglöð, and chose, like a beaten cur, to bite some weaker dog with an angry snarl before running off with their figurative tails between their legs.”
“Cognitive displacement!” she cried suddenly, then since he was obviously puzzled, added, “Just as you said, they redirected their fear and anger toward a ‘safe target,’ thereby neatly avoiding any further confrontation with the people they were afraid of.” She scowled, then said, “Dang! And here I’d thought to have discovered a hidden reservoir of common decency in the Fire Jötunns.”.
Alvís smiled indulgently and said, “Perhaps you have. Fear is often the precursor to wisdom. We should note, though, that they didn’t stop to apologize for all the mess they’d made, nor volunteer to help clean it up. I personally think that they’re as dangerous and cruel as they ever were, but simply ran up against foes they were afraid to face.”
She sighed. “That’s undoubtedly the prudent course. Okay, so we may not be met with flowers and sincere apologies when we finally confront the rebel Dvergar.”
He laughed. “On the other hand, we can count on fear, which may make them more ‘reasonable’ than they’d otherwise be inclined to do, and we have the Empress and her Sorceresses to help sort out the sheep from the goats.”
“So they’re not exactly going to be happy to see you, then?”
“No, they won’t be. While they might trust their underground burrows to protect them from our human friends, they’ll soon realize that they’ll be facing foes who already know whatever tricks they may think to have concealed. If I were them, I’d be hiding under the mattress in hopes that I’d simply be overlooked in the general rout.”
“Not you, I think, King Alvís the Bold. You stood alone before us, but still proud and defiant, when our powerful army abruptly invaded your domain, and we were not then terribly concerned for your safety, having recently been murderously attacked by those who looked very much like you.”
“Well,” he said, modestly enough, “one doesn’t become King of the Dvergar without a certain amount of nerve. We tend to be a fractious bunch, so it takes a fellow who doesn’t mind a little rough and tumble to keep the rabble in line. Don’t worry too much about the rebels; they’ll soon fall in line, as soon as they realize that I’ve found their little love nest in the clouds and am here to collect the back rents.”
She smiled and said, “You big softie! You’re worried about them aren’t you?”
He cleared his throat noisily and said, “Worried? Not me! It’s them that should be worried!”
She nodded sagely and said, “Absolutely! You’ll be very stern, I’m sure! They’ll be quaking in their boots!”
“Indeed!” he said grumpily. “They’d better act like they’re quaking, anyway!”
The expedition up into the mountains wasn’t nearly as involved or lengthy as it had been coming down. The Wizard had developed quite a bit of skill with portals in the interim, and simply opened one up to the meadow they’d camped in at the top of the pass, before descending to the valley. The location of the Dvergar hideout was only a few hours walk from there, just long enough to work the kinks out and become used to breathing at high altitude.
When they saw the location of the hideout, it was inconspicuous of course, but Akcuanrut said that they had an open portal, which was about as subtle as banging on a drum. He said so to the King. “I’m afraid, King Alvís, that your subjects aren’t very clever at keeping their location secret.”
“To be fair, Master Wizard, I’m quite sure that they know next to nothing about these portals of yours, and have been handed one as one might loan a man a plowhorse, so their ignorance of how to breed and train a horse, or a portal, can be forgiven.”
“True,” the wizard said. “I was being unkind.”
“No need to apologize,” King Alvís said, shaking his head. “They’re idiots. They can’t help themselves. I blame inbreeding; they’re from a rather remote village, and don’t get out much.”
“Well, we all have our burdens,” the wizard said. “Shall we give them an ultimatum, or just barge in swinging swords and such?”
“An ultimatum, I think. It always sounds good when the poets sing about it later, and it gives them a good excuse to make vague references to Kings that no one has ever heard of, and that keeps them happy, so they don’t secretly circulate cruel satires making fun of you.”
“Good point.” Akcuanrut stepped out into the meadow and shouted up to where the entrance to the Dwarves’ hiding place was located, “Hey, Dvergar! We know where you are! You have five minutes to collect your valuables, leave your weapons behind, and start walking down to this meadow, where we’ll accept your formal surrender!”
As Master Wizard finished speaking, there was a clap of thunder as a tall blonde woman clad in a diaphanous red gown, but with a fistful of golden spears in hand, driving a bright bronze war chariot drawn by two powerful horses that flew down from the sky as she shouted in a clear contralto voice, “Naughty Dvergar of the Nine Worlds! Beware! I am Sól, Goddess of the fiery Sun above your heads, whom you have excellent reason to fear! Surrender instantly or I’ll rain down light and fire to penetrate every secret corner of your pathetic little hidey-hole!” To emphasize her demand, she hurled just one of her spears, which blasted a huge smoking crater into the rocky ledge before the entrance to the Dwarven stronghold, and the basalt edges of the fumarole were glowing brightly red, even in the daylight, slowly slumping, like butter in a hot frying pan, and every eye was riveted to the very real Goddess seemingly parked, or double-parked, in the thin air above the mountain chosen by the hapless dwarves as their impregnable redoubt.
“Wow!” Rhea enthused. “That chick doesn’t mess around, does she? I want her for our team! Do you think we can call ‘dibs?’ ”
“Evidently we won’t have to,” Selene replied, “but where’d she come from?”
“The Nine Worlds, obviously, but why now? We haven’t seen the Æsir take any interest in much of anything besides their little bailiwicks, but here she is as big as life and twice as natural.”
Just then, someone up in the Dwarves’ ‘hideout’ stuck a rag tied to a long stick out the door and called out, “We surrender! We surrender! But we can’t come out until it’s dark!”
The big blonde shouted back pleasantly enough, “No problem! Let me just take care of that little problem for you.” With a negligent wave of her hand, she beckoned heavy clouds into being, until what had been a cloudless sky had a massive thunderhead directly over the Dwarven hideaway, which cast a gloomy shadow over their portion of the mountain, but left the sun shining everywhere else. It looked totally weird, but the rogue Dvergar were sufficiently impressed that they started coming out into the shade, pointedly unarmed, and with their hands held well out to their sides to show that they were empty.
Akcuanrut quickly took charge, opening a portal directly back to the Capital, where they’d set up a large barracks and enclosure for any future prisoners, which they suddenly had in buckets full. Quickly, he ordered the men-at-arms to begin escorting the Dwarves to the portal, and called out to them, “Your surrender is accepted, and your safety guaranteed by the Empress D’Larona-Cohn of Myriad. If you’ll allow my guards to help you, you’ll be taken to a secure facility where we can sort out exactly what to do with you. Your legitimate King, Alvís of Svartálfheimr, is here as well, and stands personal guarantee for your fair treatment on very favorable terms, I think, but you must all exit your hiding place now.”
King Alvís said abruptly, furious with them all, “All of you! Dáinn! Náinn! You miserable pack of scoundrels! Get out of there right now before I send Dvergar warriors in to roust you out at sword’s point!”
The exodus sped up enormously after the King’s outburst, and two of them — possibly Dáinn and Náinn — ran out crying, “Cousin Alvís! Cousin Alvís! We were tricked by the Jötunns! They threatened us! We had to do what they told us to do or they promised to throw us on the grill and eat us!”
“Bah!” the King exclaimed. “Eat you? Not likely, as tough and stringy as I’m sure you’d turn out to be. Rather, you’ve been caught out through your own greed and stupidity. You were never the smartest of the cousins.”
“But it’s not our fault!” they cried, as they were led smartly to the glowing amber portal and pushed toward it. “It’s… all his fault,” they said, pointing at each other, but any further recriminations were cut off abruptly as they were rudely shoved through the opening.
The rest of the Dwarves passed along with much less noise, until finally there were none.
The imposing blonde flicked away the clouds with a negligent movement of her hand, then gave the reins of her team another flick, and trotted down to meet them on the ground, where she paused the team and looped their reins loosely over a hook on the side rail, obviously designed for that very purpose. Then she stepped gracefully out of her chariot and walked over to meet them. “Akcuanrut, Selene, Rhea, and even King Alvís! I’m so terribly sorry that it’s taken so long to get here, but my last certain time reference was on the cliff of Svartálfheimr, and by the time I was able to escape you’d already gone, so it took me quite some time to finally locate you!”
She smiled at Selene particularly. “Hi, Sweetie. Long time, no see,” she said, and Selene fainted dead away.
Rhea said, puzzled, “Phil? Is that you?”
The tall and buxom blonde merely grinned, and Rhea fainted too.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Chapter Thirty-Three
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Plus ça change,
plus c’est la même chose.The more things change,
the more they stay the same.— Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes, January 1849
“So, Phil, should we call you Phyllis now?” Rhea was more-or-less reconciled to her husband’s new form after two nights of becoming ‘better acquainted,’ and they were lounging on their bed in the pavilion with their usual ever-changing cast of fellow wives, except that Larona, Gefjon, and Eir were off somewhere, taking care of affairs of state that held no interest for anyone else.
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” she said, “but it’s probably appropriate since, in Greek legend, Phyllis died for love. Philippa sounds like I might be my own grandmother, so I’d have to veto that particular variation on my name. ‘Phil,’ or ‘Phyl’ with a ‘Y,’ makes a perfectly nice nickname for Phyllis, though, so it’s really up to all of you. I’m easy. Whatever you feel comfortable with is fine by me.”
“I don’t understand how you can be so comfortable with yourself, though,” said Selene.
“Well, I’ve had plenty of time to get used to things, since I was trapped inside the Sun for more than fifteen years, I think, through several sunspot cycles, I know. It may have been longer, since my brain wasn’t working properly for quite a while.”
“It took Eir Menglöð that long to find you?” Rhea was surprised, though why, she didn’t know, since she shouldn’t have been able to do it at all.
She shook her head. “She didn’t find me at all; I found myself. In fact, I don’t think that Eir could have found me, since my consciousness was very quickly diluted and expanded to fill the entire volume of the Sun. It just took me a while to figure out how to get off the merry-go-round.”
“Merry-go-round?” Selene asked.
She nodded. “My thoughts kept getting torn apart and scattered by magnetic currents within the Sun,” she explained, “especially during periods of intense solar activity, but it was a constant problem, more or less. I finally broke free during a solar minimum, when the pace of these disruptions slowed and left me just enough free time to think things through. I still had to choose my moments carefully, though.” She grinned with her characteristic cheery expression, but a little softer, perhaps more wise. “As a blonde, with a brain composed entirely of ionised gas, I suppose,” she said laughing, “that I was the ultimate ‘airhead.’ ” Then she laughed loudly, with her familiar ability to make a merry joke at her own expense as both Rhea and Selene rolled their eyes. Whatever else Phyl was, she was still a bit of a wildcard and a natural clown.
“It’s just so weird,” Rhea said, “talking to you like this, because I know that you’re my husband, but it also feels like I’m talking to a best girlfriend that I’ve known forever.”
She smiled again, then reached out and took her hand. “It’s because, I think, that I came into being with a ‘backstory,’ just like you two. I remember being Phil, of course, but with a curious sort of detachment and unreality, and I also remember every minute detail of my life as a young girl, playing with my dolls, long and intimate talks with my mother, becoming a young woman, dating — not much of that, of course, since arranged marriages were the fashion then — and finally getting married; I have two children, you know, a girl, Bil, and a boy, Hjúki, as well as a sister and a brother.”
“You’re married to a man!?” Selene exclaimed, both shocked and disappointed.
“Well,” she said, “that’s the usual manner in which one becomes pregnant and has children, isn’t it? Or have things changed so much from when I was a young girl? His name was Glenr, or Glaur, depending on whatever rôle he was playing at the time, and he was a Vane, so of course he didn’t stick around for long. I have no idea where he is these days, so you needn’t worry about him showing up to claim his ‘conjugal rights’ at any time in the near future. I never liked him all that much in any case, since he was a bit of a pig, although of course he was a Vane, and so awfully good in the sack.” She rolled her eyes expressively and grinned again, which was either cute or scandalous, Rhea couldn’t quite decide which.
Phyl picked up on her uncertainty immediately, of course. “Oh, come on, Rhea! You and Selene both had boyfriends before me, didn’t you? And girlfriends too. Did I ever sulk about it?”
She blushed, since she hadn’t ever known that Phil had ever realized this, but then remembered that she wasn’t exactly ‘Phil,’ but rather ‘Phyl,’ and much more sensitive to nuance and body language. “No, you’re right, of course. It’s just taking a little time to get used to the new you.”
“Sweetheart, Sweetie, my darling girls, I’m still the old me inside here too, and I still love you both as much as — or perhaps even more than — I did before, because our hearts truly beat as one now. It’s complicated, I know, but when have our lives together ever been simple?”
Rhea rolled her eyes and said, “Never, of course.”
“And you’ll have to admit that I’ll be a much better Lamaze partner now, since I’ve had two children of my own, and know exactly how it feels and what you’ll be going through.”
Rhea made a face and shook her head. “This is a totally weird conversation again, you know.”
She smiled impishly. “Of course. I’ve always liked surprises, and there’s no better surprise than vicarious déjà vu.”
Selene interrupted to ask, “Where are your children now, though? Do they still live at home?”
“Oh, no. They’re long grown up,” she said, “and out on their own. They usually hang out with my brother Máni, the Moon God, because the Moon is a much more restful place than is the Sun. We can visit them, if you like, some day soon, since I’d love to have you meet them. Now that I’m free of the Sun, though, I don’t plan on going back to visit anytime soon, although at least I do know how to escape, which is a comfort.”
“I still don’t understand exactly how you survived, though, Phyl,” Rhea said. “I’m pretty sure that no one else could possibly have done so.”
“It was all down to Eir Menglöð, of course. When she put me up to her uncle as the interim sovereign of Álfheimr, she had her brother promote all of us into the ranks of the Ljósálfar, either angels or Gods, depending on how you look at it. When my Ljósálfr ‘soul’ was engulfed by the Sun, I took on the Sun’s attributes and connotations in this culture, among which was my present form and history. If we’d been in ancient Greece, that history would have incorporated a male Sun God, I suppose, but that’s not where we were, so here I am as you see me now, the inevitable product of the local Zeitgeist, and I can’t say as how I’m at all disappointed.”
“But aren’t you angry about having your manhood stolen from you?” Selene asked.
“No, why would I be?” She seemed surprised that anyone could possibly think that. “We had a conversation about this same issue long ago, as I recall, in which I said that I believed that we had our bodies on loan, and that someday we might want to rejuvenate our lives and love by taking the Jekyll formula again, and thereby swapping sexes. We had a big laugh about it, didn’t we? We joked about imagining me as the wife to you two brothers, and you both promised to ‘keep me very busy.’ Well, here I am, ready and willing, perhaps even eager, because I know exactly how sweet our love could be, no matter what forms you choose for yourselves in the long years ahead of us. As an immortal Goddess, I have the impression that I’m not perfectly free to change my essential nature, but you’re both still free, I think, to do as you please, if you’d prefer a heterosexual marriage, although of course we’d have to wait until you come to term and give birth to our children before we could really contemplate any drastic changes, and even then you might consider waiting until the children are grown. There are few things more fulfilling than nursing your babies, then helping them through their toddler years, guiding them through their childhoods, and finally seeing them happily married with children of their own. I’d be reluctant to give up a single minute of my own experience of motherhood, I know, although I have to admit that I’ve never really known what fatherhood is like, so my judgement in this may not be perfectly dispassionate. My own experience as a mom was a blessing beyond compare, though, and was and is a source of continuing joy, so I may be prejudiced by my past intimate involvement on the maternal side of things.” Here she grinned again. “The sex was pretty good as well. I’m not at all sure that I’d be willing to give that up for any length of time either, especially after fifteen years or so of enforced celibacy, but of course that’s just me. Your own mileage may vary.”
Selene stared into her eyes, trying to figure something out. “Would you want to have sex with men?”
She grinned. “I wouldn’t mind, of course, but we’d have to work out some arrangement to ensure that we were all happy with the details of our intimate lives. Just knowing that you’re both pregnant, with twins no less, is making me feel a little broody in sympathy, and you yourself might not want to stop at two, so I think that we should keep our options open. In a very long life, there should be ample room for a lot of detours and bypaths, I think, and I know that I wouldn’t stand in the way of either of you if you wanted another child or two.” She smiled again. “It’s not as if I could possibly be jealous of any man; no more than I’d be jealous of someone who owned a lovely screwdriver. Screwdrivers are a dime a dozen, and very handy on the odd occasion, but I’d hate to have to lug one around all the time on the off chance that I might want to have something or another screwed by one.” She winked at the two of them lasciviously. “You know that they say, don’t you? ‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd, but four makes a perfect vice ring.’ Of course, we have rather a large number of wives on hand, so the possibilities for interesting combinations are really almost endless.”
“Dang! Phyl, you are a dirty girl!” they both said in chorus.
“Yeah, well,” she said, “just you try going without any sex at all for fifteen years or so in the craziest sensory deprivation tank that you could ever imagine and see how you feel after the ordeal. I was never meant to be a nun, so by the time I got out of stir, I would have gladly fucked a camel! Hell, I didn’t even have hands, much less a physical body, so being reïncarnated in the incredibly beautiful and responsive body you see before you and finally finding my way back to you is like dancing in the rain after fifteen years in the arid Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter of the Sahara desert, like first tasting chocolate after decades of starvation, like falling in love again, for the very first time. You’re both so incredibly beautiful, the scent of you so exotic, your touch so delightful, that I could easily spend the next twenty years just tracing the well-remembered, longed-for, surfaces and intimate depths of your bodies, touching you, tasting you, smelling you, plunging back into the sweet fecundity of your precious bodies, of life, immersing myself in the intimate carnality of sexual desire, of love, of hunger, and of orgasmic ecstasy.” She laughed aloud in exquisite delight. “Just the idea of touching your skin with my fingertips fills my heart with joy. Do I want another child? Damned straight I want a child in my womb again! I’d love to have you put it there, or be there when it’s done. I want to be filled with precious life, to fill the world with life from my body! Sweet life! Delicious life! Warm and breathing life! Life more infinitely precious than all the dead gold and jewels there are in all the worlds!” Her voice had risen to a ecstatic cry of exultation by the time she finished speaking, and she sealed her joyful proclamation with very many kisses, both deep and small.
Selene laughed in pure rapture. “Oh, Phyl, my darling Phyl, you always were the master of subtle understatement.”
She smiled and said modestly, slyly, “It’s a gift.”
“How are we going to handle the issue of Myriad and the Imperial succession, Phyl?” Rhea had asked the question, but it had been in all their thoughts for several days while their army and the loyal Dvergar who’d accompanied King Alvís cleared out the buried citadel of the rebel Dwarves as a start on their new home.
Larona herself was fairly happy with Phyl as she was, but when she got back down from the mountains to her regular business as the Empress of Myriad, people would notice if the mandatory male went missing for any length of time.
Eir Menglöð immediately replied, “I don’t think that it will be any problem at all, since Phil and Larona had a long honeymoon outside the normal timestream. If we swap out Larona for her time-shifted ‘twin’ at any crucial moment, we can have the old Phil impregnate her if she wants more children, and the rest is just a bit of legerdemain, teaching Phyl how to alter her appearance, which really isn’t any trick at all. Even that dolt Þórr was able to transform himself into a convincing replica of my mother, enough to convince the Jötunn Þrymr that he was a she and a suitable marriage partner. In fact, the lovely Þorgerðr could have gone blushing to her marriage bed and Þrymr wouldn’t have been any the wiser, since the disguises of the Æsir and the Vanes leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. Loki managed, if you’ll recall, to bear my lovely Sleipnir when ‘disguised’ as a mare, which was a neater trick than merely holding court from time to time — or issuing solemn public proclamations — and Loki was only a Jötunn, a rather inferior grade of supernatural beings.”
“But if that’s the case,” Selene asked reasonably, “why couldn’t Phyl simply knock her up directly, without fooling around with slipping in and out of Vanaheimr at crucial moments.”
“No trouble at all,” she said, surprised, “except that I’d understood that Phyllis had no desire to function as a man again, and I’d certainly never force her to, nor imply that it was necessary. The only limitation would be that if she wants to have another child — as she’s clearly said she might — she’d be ‘stuck’ in woman’s form throughout her pregnancy until she was delivered of her child, and for as long as she continued to nurse her baby. Loki, for example, was out of circulation for the best part of two years while she was in heat, then pregnant, until she came to foaling and then nursing my darling Sleipnir, at least until he could take up solid food. I don’t imagine that Loki was happy about it, but those who dance the piper’s tune must pay the piper’s fee, as we say. As far as I’m concerned, becoming a mother for my Sleipnir was the best and noblest thing that Loki ever did, and I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for him, despite his many faults.
“I’m sorry then, Eir, that he perished by my hand,” Phyl assured her. “I had no idea that you cared for him.”
“Oh, please!” she said, amused. “He was a wicked, evil man. His only good moments came when he was a mare, which was only a couple of years out of a long and nasty life. I only said that I had a certain measure of sentimental attachment to him as the natural dam of my horse Sleipnir, not that he was my dearest sister, or anything even close. I’m the Chooser of the Slain, you know, and well-accustomed to judging souls and assigning them to their proper fates. Loki’s soul is numbered amongst the vile Dökkálfar, the Dark Elves in Hel, where I’m sure it remains, despite the absence of the Witch Queen, Sinmœra. Some other Dark Power will arise to take her place eventually, perhaps Loki, since she’s had ample experience as a female and is nasty enough to hold the position against her rivals. Perhaps she’d make a better Queen than the old one, perhaps not. I shan’t lose any sleep over it, either way.”
Phyllis was laughing helplessly, temporarily disguised as Phil. “I can’t help it,” she managed to gasp out, “that thing!” she pointed at it as if it had been especially imported from Mars, “is just so ridiculous! The way it flops about is just too funny for words! And how in all the worlds did I ever manage to walk with those other things drooping from my quim?”
The experiments in disguise, even with Eir’s assistance and advice, weren’t going terribly well. Phyl was having trouble with the actuality of Eir’s scheme to disguise her, although she’d picked up the basics with ease.
Phyl’s experiences in sensory deprivation had evidently broken the link between her homunculus — her own internal mental image of her body — and her physical form so drastically that she couldn’t take her disguise seriously at all, and kept breaking out in helpless giggles — which quickly progressed to outright laughter — whenever the strange sensations inherent in her manly form impinged upon her consciousness.
Even Eir Menglöð rolled her eyes, and Rhea and Selene were openly irritated as Selene said, “But you simply have to be able to carry this off well enough to perform your duties as the supposed head of state!”
“But why?” she said reasonably. “If it’s all pretence, why should I have to prance about like a puppet in a pantomime? Let’s just hire an actor who knows how all this… stuff… actually works, and who won’t be overwhelmed by strange sensations every time he moves?”
“Because,” Rhea said with surprising patience, “this is a State Secret of incredible sensitivity.”
Phyllis giggled at the word ‘sensitivity,’ and then she was off again, laughing as she clutched with exaggerated deference toward her faux ‘sensitive parts.’
Both Rhea and Selene glared at her, and Rhea said in anger, “Look! You simply have to take this seriously! Larona’s entire Empire is at stake here, and who knows how many innocent people would die if any sign of weakness or contempt for the laws of the Empire cast doubts on her ability to rule? There are always jackals hanging around waiting for a chance to promote themselves over the needs of the Empire and its people!”
“Well, then, if you think it’s so darned simple, why don’t you do it?” she said defensively, almost pouting, which didn’t look entirely manly when performed by a reasonably realistic Phil lookalike.
“Because we’re both pregnant, you ditz! All your wives are pregnant! You’re the only one of us who’s even potentially capable of pulling it off!”
Her face fell. “Oh,” she said, disheartened. Then she had a brilliant idea. “Look! What if I just eliminated the junk between my legs and disguised myself as my former self in all the other ways? Surely, there aren’t going to be spies lurking in the bedroom when I take off my clothes. Even if there were, I think I could manage it as long as I didn’t have to walk around.” She thought quickly. “I’ve got it, surely there’s a bath attendant when I bathe, isn’t there? As long as I’m sitting still, I think I could pull it off…” she started to giggle, then recovered, “I could simply arrange to be seen as visibly ‘intact’ in obvious ways without straining my own sense of incongruity through feeling those disconcerting, often painful, sensations down there when I move. In fact,” she sat and stared down between her splayed legs, concentrating slightly, as her penis swelled to impressive proportions. “How’s that for an Emperor’s cock!” She smiled up at them, proud of both her accomplishment and her ingenuity. “I’ll be the talk of the town, unless I mistake the power of rumor and innuendo, and I rarely do.”
The Empress Larona, who had kept her peace until then, said, “Enough! Let me talk to her for a moment or two, alone!” She raised one eyebrow and gestured eloquently toward the pavilion entrance with a proud toss of her head.
Taking the hint, exeunt omnes.
“Now, my girl, let’s talk about this ‘disguise’ of yours…,” the Empress said as she walked toward her supposed husband, her eyes glinting as she stared down at her crotch….
About an hour later, the Empress walked out of the pavilion and said that the problem was solved. “We’ve agreed to her conditions,” she said simply. “She’s free to maintain her natural gender when she’s walking around, other than her breasts of course, as long as she maintains Phil’s outward appearance otherwise, but has agreed to alter her external genitalia when in her bath, lying down, or otherwise relaxed. That should handle the inevitable interruptions and accidental discoveries of nudity when surrounded by privy servants in a large palace, and we’ve further agreed that her latest ‘trick’ will make the very public reasons for my divorce more believable, especially by comparison, so we’ll make an actual effort to arrange for these kinds of ‘accidental’ exposures with fair regularity, and encourage both rumors and gossip, possibly with the assistance of my own secret service. In short, or perhaps I should say long, I’m satisfied.”
To her credit as a stateswoman and sovereign, the Empress Larona never cracked a smile.
Empress D’Larona-Cohn was thoroughly ticked off. They were still high up in the mountains several days later, after Rhea had thoughtfully pointed out that they had a slight logistical problem left, as well as a security problem, in that far too many people — including the remaining hostile Dvergar — had seen Phyllis, as Sól, play a key role in the capture of the dwarvish rebels, and Álfröðull, her chariot, together with her magical horses, Árvakr and Alsviðr, were part of her defining regalia, so could neither be left behind nor ignored. They had a similar problem in Eir Menglöð and Sleipnir, of course, but she wouldn’t have to lead a double life. Unlike Sleipnir, Árvakr and Alsviðr were one-woman horses, and would tolerate no other touch, nor were they fond at all of the Philip disguise, so Sól in all her glory would have to arrive at the Capital in order to drive them, and she’d have to make daily appearances thereafter in order to see to their care. This meant, of course, that they’d need to provide apartments and plausible living arrangements for both, and hope that no one would notice that Sól and Emperor Phillip Cohn never appeared in the same room together. Of course, the former Emperor Elvi hadn’t been much out in the public view, all in all, so it wouldn’t be glaringly obvious, but they’d have to think of hobbies or magical investigations that would keep him out of the way of servants, who were both numerous and ubiquitous, since the business of providing food, picking up soiled clothing and replacing it with laundered equivalents, not to mention polishing the brass and many other such tasks, went on almost around the clock.
“I do wish that you’d left well enough alone, Phyl. We could have handled the Dvergar on our own, I think.”
“Possibly,” Phyllis agreed cheerfully, “but then they had a projector ready of what we called on Earth ‘Greek Fire,’ a clinging semi-liquid substance that can be hurled to great distances by means of a diabolical engine of war and burns whatever it touches, creating terrible wounds which rarely heal. How many of your army would be dead now, or horribly wounded, scarred for life and maimed, if I hadn’t intervened with force majeure? It’s even possible that you yourself, or Rhea, or Selene, would have been amongst the victims of the foul stuff, since it would have been completely unexpected and impossible to defend against without the sort of supernatural intervention that I provided. We play the parts we’re handed in life, and there are no ‘do-overs,’ so we’re stuck with our present reality, not a fantasy of perfection.” She paused to reach out and hug her close, saying, “Let’s not quarrel, dear heart. I know the situation is awkward, and that I’m not at all what I was when we married. My only excuse is that I’d set out on my very small expedition to Hel expecting to find the portal connecting Niflheimr with the world of Myriad, and didn’t at all imagine that I’d stumble across the Heart of Virtue itself, together with the witch Sinmœra who’d forged the evil thing and knew full well its uses as a weapon of ultimate destruction. Most importantly, I didn’t expect to die. Taking all in all,” she said ruefully, going for the joke, if Larona could be persuaded to see it, “I’d much rather be alive and present a serious problem that I have some small hope of solving, eventually, than be dead and be someone else’s problem.”
Larona had smiled, very slightly, and said, “That’s so like you, Dearest. I can always count on you to put a ‘sunny’ face on things,” and then they both laughed together. “You’re completely crazy, I hope you know,” the Empress said.
“I do. As a heterosexual woman, I find myself blessed with hundreds of wives — including you, dear love — to whom I’m obligated to provide sexual satisfaction on a regular basis — and I hasten to assure you that I love you dearly, and truly want to do this for you — but I’d also like, at least once in a while, to be made love to as I’m made to be loved, and as I truly desire.”
“Say no more, my darling girl. I have just the man in mind, a young Captain in my personal bodyguard who is very discreet, very talented, and will keep his mouth firmly shut, since I am the support of his entire family, and he’s very grateful. I had planned to let him go as an early pensioner, since I thought that I had you to supply my needs, but I’m sure that he’ll be very pleased to find full employment in his future. Of course, we should talk to Rhea and Selene especially about this, but I’m sure the others will understand, as long as you don’t flaunt your intimate relationship with him in their faces. I know my former husband did, but this sort of arrangement is fairly common in the ranks of the nobility, much less royalty, since marriages are almost always made for reasons of statecraft, and very rarely made for love.”
“I already have talked to them, actually, and will again. I appreciate your foresight and prior experience though, as I’m sure I would have botched it if left to my own devices. My own implanted ‘memories’ of my ‘marriage’ are from another culture entirely, in which marital fidelity wasn’t really expected, since — as seems to be the case here — marriages were arranged for purposes of inheritance and political convenience, not love, so your local customs seem strangely familiar to me.”
Larona looked closely into her eyes and asked, “If you’ll pardon my curiosity, what’s it like, having the memories of a woman’s entire life simply poured into your brain, as if you were an empty pitcher that had formerly held beer being refilled with wine?”
She thought about this for a second or two before answering. “Well, in the first place, it’s not quite like that at all. I still remember being Phil in great detail, and his emotions are fully present in my new body, so it’s really more like the ‘pitcher of beer’ has been poured into a barrel of wine. I know in my heart that I’m still Philip, sort of, but everything tastes like wine, albeit with quite a few ‘bubbles.’ ” She smiled. “Does that make any sense at all?”
“It does, actually, which is a little scary. So you actually remember this other life of yours, in which you were a wife and mother, and are more comfortable in your ‘wine barrel,’ your current body, even though you also remember being ‘beer?’ ”
“Sort of, as I said. I can’t actually remember ever having had a man’s body, although I realize that I must have had one, but without that physical referent, a lot of my memories are somewhat disjointed and have a sense of unreality, as if they happened in a dream.”
“Like flying,” Larona said promptly. “I have that dream quite often, but when I wake up, I’ve never once discovered that I suddenly had wings.”
“Exactly!” she said, then frowned slightly, “although of course I can fly, at least in Álfröðull, with my horses to help me.” Then she thought about the problem more carefully and said, “Unh, actually, I can fly, now that I think about it, even without my chariot. It’s an inherent power of the Goddess tradition that I represent, particularly those who embody objects in the heavens, like the Sun and Moon. Certainly I ‘flew’ from inside the Sun of Earth through the space-time dimensions to the Nine Worlds, wherever they are in relation to Earth’s solar system, but then came here using something close to — but not synonymous with — portal technology.”
“Oh, great!” Larona said, rolling her eyes, “Make me jealous!” but then she laughed to show that she didn’t really mean it.
“Sorry! Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful! as that advertisement says. That comes with the territory too, right along with the power to grant good harvests to farmers and calm seas for mariners.”
Larona stared at her, slightly uncomfortable with her instant realization that her sometime husband and lover really was divine in some sense other than mere beauty. “It’s certainly very strange. I’m fairly sure that I’ve never talked to a Goddess before, much less made love to one, although I have to admit that you were totally wonderful, more exciting, I must confess, than even my lovely young Captain of the Guard, but of course you were much more thrilling than him when you were only Phil as well.” Larona stared at her intently, then added. “I wonder if you were always more or less divine. When I think about it, it doesn’t really make sense that you can be an ordinary human being one minute and a Goddess the next.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s a common notion in human culture, enough so that the Greeks had a special word for it, ‘apotheosis,’ deification. Some scholars believe that all Gods and Goddesses arise from social interactions, so that particular leaders, or even poets and sports figures, pass from fame, through heroic status, adulation, and eventually to divinity.”
“But that’s obviously not what happened to you,” the Empress argued. “Quite a few people admired you, sure, but they admired you as a man, so how does that translate into supernatural powers and essential femininity?”
“I don’t exactly know,” she confessed again. “It’s certainly not what I would have chosen, but in some sense it was handed to me through the intervention of a family of what we might call hereditary Gods and Goddesses. Evidently there was an ‘opening’ available, and I came along at the right time to fill it. I have no idea what happened to the original Sól, but I know that there must have been one, because I have her memories, including having had sex with her husband, taking several lovers along the way, and having borne her children. I’d think that this is the sort of thing I would have noticed, even when I was a clueless male, so the whole thing’s a complete mystery to me, since these things evidently happened long before Philip Cohn, the guy I thought I was, and intellectually, if not physically, remember being, was born. It plays the very hell with my understanding of causality, of the arrow of time, and with half of modern physics.”
Larona was mystified by her words and shrugged. “Then it’s even more of a mystery to me, Dearest. Why don’t we rest for a bit and you can try to explain while we recline in comfort, and perhaps you could show me that special trick of yours again. Although I love you dearly in your new form, I share your fondness for men, but don’t dare retain the services of my Captain after so public a repudiation of my former husband and marriage to one who must be widely seen and known to be — ironically — a real man.”
Phyllis, seeing perfectly the humor in their situation, laughed gleefully before kissing her and saying, “I’m at your service, Dear, as always. Can I keep my boobs? I love it when you pay attention to them, as you well know.”
“Of course, my dear. Rules, I always say, are meant to be broken, or where’s the fun in being an absolute monarch?” She languidly laid herself down upon their bed in the pavilion, drawing Phyllis after, losing herself in their shared kisses, and in the sensuous masses of Phyllis’s blonde hair draped over her body as they kissed, and a familiar heat began to build between them.
“Okay, troops, are we ready?” said Rhea, as their party assembled in rough order for their formal progress down the mountain, meant as much to allow time for the Palace staff to finish preparing their complicated arrangements for apartments and common rooms as it was to allow the people to see their Empress and their new Emperor publicly entering their walled City and fastness after two notable military victories. There were artisans even now preparing two new friezes at the top of the twin stone pillars at the entrance to the City, to commemorate their victories over the Giants at Bilröst and the Dwarves in the mountain pass. They’d had an artist, in fact, prepare likenesses of all the major players in the campaign to guide the sculptors as they worked, paying special attention, of course, to the Empress and to ‘Philip.’ In the business of Empire, it pays to advertise, so their rendering of Surtr, in particular, and the Giants in general, was perhaps a bit exaggerated in size and overall ugliness, and the parts played by the Empress and her new Emperor were definitely confabulated. Neither Rhea nor Selene were bothered, and Eir Menglöð could hardly care less, although both she and Sól were featured flying high above their respective battlefields, since they made for an exciting sculptural dynamic in a vertical dimension.
Phyl laughed as she rode through the gates as Sól in her chariot, the wheels safely on the ground so as not to frighten the throng of cheering onlookers, her male part being played by Eir — the most skilled in altering her seeming without having to make substantial changes to her gravid female body in any way harmful to her baby — who was riding with the Empress near the front of the stately column of troops. With a bulky padded suit of completely anachronistic armor conjured up at the last minute by Phyllis, who hadn’t — oddly enough — lost any of her skill in working metals and gems, Eir was tall enough that the masquerade was flawless, and presented an additional option for confusing public perceptions, and would allow — until her pregnancy became considerably more advanced — for at least some of ‘Philip’s’ public appearances to be handled by Eir. Her part in the parade, on the other hand, was played by Selene, since Sleipnir liked and trusted her, and the difference in their heights wasn’t terribly noticeable on horseback, especially when the horse had eight legs which were fairly certain to draw more attention than his rider. ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ Phyl thought idly, ‘when first we practise to deceive.’
It had been decided to present the centaurs as themselves, so there was a large party of the centaur mares spaced through the column of soldiers and about half of King Alvis’ Dvergar army, as well as King Alvis himself on horseback, both as an additional distraction and to emphasize the fact that both the centaurs and the Dwarves were citizens in the new Empire, and were well-armed at that, the centaurs with longbows and swords, and the Dwarves with sturdy bucklers and heavy axes.
The notion of marching around in broad daylight had made the Dwarves nervous until Eir had pointed out the fact that the Sun hadn’t bothered them during their assault upon the rebels, and then explained that she had made very certain that their alignment with the Ljósálfar had been strengthened when they’d chosen to defy the Dark, and that they need no longer fear the Sun, nor full daylight, so the Dwarves especially were looking around in wonder as they marched, seeing a whole new world unfold before their eyes, and new possibilities, like farming, growing their own food instead of being forced to barter, of fishing in the streams and lakes of their mountain fastness, and of having ordinary people, such as those who lined the road and leaned out of the windows in the villages they passed through, not only show them a modicum of respect, but cheer them as they marched past, fully armed. Eir Menglöð smiled as she looked back at them, her special charges. They were all of them growing taller, bit by little bit.
Das Leben gehört den Lebenden an,
und wer lebt, muß auf Wechsel gefaßt sein.Life belongs to the living,
and whoever lives must be prepared for changes.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 1821/1829
“You minx!” Selene chided her, but not unkindly, after the young Captain had done his portion of the task she’d undertaken and left the room, still thanking Sól profusely. “You’ve managed somehow to arrange things so that you’re just as pregnant of the rest of us, and so excused from maintaining the Phil disguise.”
Phyllis smiled. “Nothing so unscrupulous, dearest love, I’ve never been so simple, nor transparent, especially now, although you’re right in that I’m pregnant. What I’m doing is ‘mip’nei tikkun ha-olam,’ for the sake of healing the world.”
“Which means?” She looked mystified.
She tried to explain, although her own thoughts were in a whirl about this, yet she could see what looked like a clear path ahead. “The Nine Worlds were broken long ago by greed and strife; you can see it in the perpetual enmity between the beings there — I won’t say ‘races,’ because it’s quite clear that all the diverse peoples of those worlds are fully human, as human as ourselves, because they’re all of them cross-fertile — even the Gods and Goddesses, so much alike otherwise, are separated by ancient rivalries and old grievances, yet they have children together, the best and surest reason to work toward a better world for all of us, but they’ve somehow missed the point, much less the mark.”
Selene thought about this, then made a gesture of agreement. “Okay, but how is taking on this Captain’s dead child here going to help the Nine Worlds?”
“Because it’s not just the Nine Worlds, it’s all of them.” She looked over to Eir Menglöð and said, “Captain Hol-Dur’s soul is that of Höðr, is it not?”
She looked startled, then thought through what must be billions of souls that she’d encountered over the long years, then said, “Yes.”
Phyl nodded, pleased to have her inchoate hunch confirmed. “The quarrel between Höðr and his brother Baldr is what shattered the peace of the Nine Worlds originally, because Höðr accidentally killed his half-brother Baldr, Gefjon’s child by Óðinn, which of course led to Höðr being killed by another of their many relatives named Váli, another son of Óðinn by a Giantess named Rindr, as ‘vengeance’ for Höðr’s supposed ‘crime.’ It’s the damnedest crazy system, and it has them positively mired in an endless round of plots and schemes to ‘get even.’ Of course, the fact that the saintly Baldr — who was viewed as one of the Æsir, because of his father, while Höðr, because he’d been reared by his mother, a Vane to whom Óðinn didn’t happen to be married at the time, was counted as a Vane — was porking Höðr’s wife on the sly, didn’t help to soothe anyone’s troubled feelings.”
Eir nodded. “This was indeed the first evil event that started the inevitable progression toward Ragnarök.”
“Inevitable my sweet ass!” Phyllis said sourly. “What it started was a covert blood feud that’s lasted for hundreds of years, with people like Loki — who somehow caused the ‘accident’ that killed Baldr in the first place — egging on one side or another for their own perceived advantage, and to Hel with anyone who got in their way. I strongly suspect that Óðinn was involved in a lot of the worst mischief as well, since he and Loki seem to have been two of a kind, when push came to shove.”
“But what’s that got to do with…? Oh!” Rhea said, quickly putting two and two together.
“Exactly,” Phyl said. “Höðr was ‘blind’ in the original fairytale — which was written down long after the advent of Christianity had muddled the story back on Earth — which is the traditional description of a cuckold, although in the violent and generally misogynist culture of the Nine Worlds it evidently matters not at all whether the woman involved was willing to participate in her ‘seduction’ or not. Nanna, his wife, committed suicide not long after — just like Hol-Dur’s wife, we might note — by which time both Höðr and Baldr were dead. Sound familiar?”
“It does,” Selene said, “but it’s all twisted around….”
“And why wouldn’t it be, after who knows how many distortions of the story through many reïncarnations, perpetually reënacting that primal rivalry?”
Eir said, quite pleased for some reason, “So the prophesies regarding the rebirth of the Nine Worlds after Ragnarök will be fulfilled — as long foretold — and all things made new again, with the beginnings of a new and purified humanity, when Höðr and Baldr are finally reconciled on the Splendid Plain, Iðavöllr.”
Phyllis smiled broadly, then she turned to Eir Menglöð and said, “Which ‘happy ending’ I believe we’ve made possible by our actions here, dear cousin. Of course, I’m still depending on your assistance, since the shuffling of souls is your bailiwick, and in fact the timing of ‘Baal-Dur’s rebirth as Baldr will be critical, because we’ll want him present and aware when young Captain Hol-Dur shows up on the Splendid Plain. I apologize for not bringing everyone into the loop during the planning of all these interlocking schemes, but I was improvising, and didn’t really know exactly what I was doing all the time.’ Then she smiled and added, “Of course, the fact that we’ll all have the services of the young Captain available to us through our pregnancies might be some compensation as well, and Eir and I, I think, can manage sufficient overlapping coverage as ‘Philip’ for these first months before our bellies swell to unmanageable proportions to establish his indisputable ‘reality’ that it won’t seem all that odd when our esteemed ‘husband’ has to take a temporary ‘leave of absence’ to go hobnob with his fellow wizards back in Oz, or wherever.”
Selene and Rhea both laughed, then started singing the first verse from the Wizard of Oz song, but then Phyllis joined in, so they modulated the simple melody into three-part harmony.
The Splendid Plain Iðavöllr was just that, a broad expanse of pastureland — a hundred leagues or more — with ample woodlots and streams, with one large river for easy commerce, ideal farming country, facing the sea, but not near enough that salt spray could blight the fields, and with high mountains on the leeward side to wring the rain out of the clouds. It was early morning, and larks were on the wing above the small lake that they were passing by.
“It is beautiful here,” Phyllis said to Hol-Dur, her escort for the day. “Your dear wife and parents must be very pleased to find safe harbor after the years of want.”
“They are, my Lady Sól, and Nanna is especially anxious to greet you. I see you’ve brought our son, as promised.”
“Of course I have!” she said. “Did you think I’d let either of you down?”
He shook his head, “No, I trusted you, but none-the-less I feared, as one does, when a great treasure has been given into the keeping of another. Nanna, of course, has been almost beside herself with worry. ‘Might she be waylaid on the strange roads between the worlds?’ she asked, and fretted over countless other imagined problems on your long journey.”
“I’m sorry, then, to have worried her, but there was never any danger. I may not look it, but I’m a fairly dangerous woman to cross, and the roads here are safe, and getting safer, even in Jötunheimr, much less Miðgarðr. The Emperor’s Law holds sway, even in Múspellsheimr, although there are still parts of Niflheimr one wouldn’t want to tarry in.”
“How is the noble Emperor, whose generosity has done so much for all of us?”
“He’s fine, as is his Empress, and they send the customary fostering gifts, as partial payment for the many joys your son has brought us all.”
“He didn’t mind that you carried our child for us? Your first?”
“Not at all,” she assured him. “You know what they say, that a man and his wife are one flesh, so my joys were and always will be his, as his are mine.” She smiled an enigmatic smile. “And of course it was good practice, since I’m pregnant now again, with the Emperor’s child, although I have to confess that it’s only one of very, very many, each and every one the sweet apples of our eyes.”
Hol-Dur shook his head ruefully, “I can hardly imagine, despite having been nearby for most of their births. For several weeks there, it seemed as if there were a dozen or more of the Emperor’s wives going into labor every hour or two. I’m still amazed at his stamina, to have kindled so many children in the space of one or two nights, if one can believe the stories, and it can’t have been many more than that, since their conceptions were obviously nearly simultaneous, if not precisely.”
She laughed and said, “Well, he does have a certain knack for pleasing women, not to belittle your own talents, of course. You have many admirers amongst the wives, if you ever want to take up your former… position… again.” Then she grinned lasciviously.
He laughed with an open heart and said, “I think not, my Lady Sól, although I’ll always treasure the memories I carry of you all, but especially you, of course, since you’re the mother of our first child, and were so generous with your love. I have responsibilities now beyond the bedroom, and I’d never be able to get anything done if I had to cope with even half of the Emperor’s wives again!”
At that they both laughed, and the sound of their laughter preceded them to the Hall, Breiðablik, so Nanna was waiting at the door, smiling and anxious all at once to see again the child she’d thought she’d lost forever. “Husband, and Sól, my dearest sister! Welcome to our home, great Lady.”
“Greetings, dear sister Nanna,” Phyllis said, as she carefully dismounted, a little more awkwardly than usual because she was managing not only a babe in swaddling clothes in one arm, but also a pronounced ‘baby bump’ which threw her balance off a bit, despite her previous experience.
Nanna rushed to help her, saying, “Take care! my Lady, and please let me touch my babe, if you will!” and after cooing and tasting his sweet baby skin for a few moments said, “You must be exhausted after your long journey! Would you like to take a short nap before supper?” Then she said, “We only have the one bed, of course, besides the baby’s cradle, but I was hoping that you wouldn’t mind sharing, since we’d both like to thank you properly… for all you’ve done for us… and I’d like to see how our child began, in love I’m told, and tenderness, which is exactly what I’d wish.” Nanna looked deeply into Sól’s blue eyes, searching for the love she hoped to find there, and she did find it in full measure.
Phyllis smiled and kissed her thoroughly, paying special attention to her lips, and those little nooks behind and beneath her ears. “That sounds delightful,” she whispered as she nuzzled into her neck, inhaling the rich texture and aroma of her freshly-scented hair, “and I am rather in need of a good lie-down, now that I think of it, after so long a journey.”
And so the four of them walked through the open doors of Breiðablik hand-in-hand, with the babe, though weaned, rooting at Nanna’s breast as she carried him.
“So, Phyllis,” Rhea asked, “Are you here to stay?” Phyl was pregnant again, so obviously committed for some time to come.
“Not forever, no. We still have our lives on Earth to get back to, but after giving birth, and then giving up my baby for adoption by his rightful parents, I felt a sense of loss that had to be remedied, so arranged a visit with a future version of Selene, and may want to do the same with you, if you don’t mind. Two babies sounds about right, one each, which was our original bargain, if I recall.” She looked up to the ceiling, as innocent as a lamb, and obviously just as guileless.
Rhea laughed in perfect glee, then said, “You know darned well that you owe us at least two babies each, as I clearly recall, and I think my sister will back me up!”
“Well,” she admitted, “I may remember something like that, and I have been feeling broody. Four wouldn’t be too many, at least for now, eight counting your own twins, but I’d like to space my ‘fair share’ of babies out a bit — just to simplify the logistics of it all, since eight babies all at once might be a tiny bit too much — but we have many lifetimes to worry about ‘keeping score,’ since I’m pretty sure that everything will work out perfectly.”
“Lifetimes? Do we solve the riddle of the Jekyll formula? Is that why there’s a future male Selene?”
“Well, yes and no,” she answered, “we do solve the riddle, but by then we won’t need it, although it will be an enormous advance in medical science, saving many lives that would otherwise be lost.” She smiled, “In fact, it will be your doctoral research that finally makes the effect controllable and reproducible, so the medical tradition of the Lanyon family will continue on Earth into the foreseeable future, so perhaps we have at least one baby name picked out beforehand.” she smiled and gave her a little flirtatious wink.
“Oh, no!” Rhea said, alarmed. “Not another Hastie!”
“Now now, dear,” she murmured, patting her hand soothingly, “You’ve turned out very nicely indeed. I’d hate to deprive our future Earth of the benefit of our son’s exuberance and brilliant enthusiasm.”
“How do you know all this, anyway?” Rhea asked. “Did Eir give you a tour of our future together, as she did the two of us?”
“No, not exactly, I took my own tour, just to check out the ‘lay of the land,’ as you might say.”
“But how?” Selene asked.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Eir said from across the room, where she was seated in a rocking chair and knitting a very small jumper, the very image of happy domesticity. “My Uncle Freyr made Phil, or Phyllis here, monarch of Álfheimr and the Ljósálfar during his extended honeymoon, which might just last forever. He’s always been a little flighty.”
Rhea’s eyebrows furrowed slightly. “Ljósálfar? We never met them, I don’t think. We were supposed to visit Álfheimr, but we never made it before everything crumbled into chaos and improbable victory.”
“The angels, you might say.”
“Oh, crap!” Rhea said, pouting as she realized exactly what that meant. ‘So Phyllis here is the damned Queen of All the Angels, and who knows when we’re going to see Phil again.’
“Well, not for a few years,” Phyl reassured her, “since we have to be realistic about the demands of pregnancy and motherhood for all of us, but we have all the time in the world to make up for my alter ego’s temporary absence, and I love sharing you with my other wives, and perhaps the occasional handsome Captain of the Imperial Guard, just as I am.” Her voice softened and she touched her arm, “It’s you I love, dear Rhea. You must know that by now, not just your luscious body. I’m in our marriage for the long haul, until death us do part, as they say in the traditional Christian ceremony — which has always seemed a very unambitious goal to me, but perhaps that’s just me,” she added parenthetically, “but never mind.” — “In our case, it will be a very long time indeed, all the time there is in all the worlds.”
Rhea smiled — she smiled a lot these days — and said, “Well, I reckon I do know, but it never hurts to remind me.”
“If I’ve been remiss, sweet wife, I humbly beg your pardon. I can only plead the exigencies of pregnancy, of saving the worlds, and then tidying up after. I’ve always been neat, as you may well remember, and dislike loose ends.”
“I do as well,” Eir idly commented, looking over at them for a moment, “in knitting or in life’s byways. In that, my cousin and I are much alike.”
“So how did you two become cousins, Eir? Are you Jewish as well?”
“Not really, since Earth’s obsessions haven’t reached either Myriad or the Nine Worlds. It’s difficult to work up much enthusiasm for this deity or that when one is divine in one’s own right. We’re cousins because we share ancestors, and because our true origins lie very deep in ancient history, long before the Vanir and the Æsir quarrelled, even before Moses ascended Sinai. We take the long view, my cousin and I, which I suppose is one of the reasons I enjoy knitting.” She smiled benignly, and held up her work, visibly more complete than it had been an hour or two before.
Rhea and Selene looked at Phyllis in astonishment. “You’re not Jewish? How did our marriage protect us then, from Na-Noc and the Heart?”
“Well,” she said, “I’m certainly not circumcised now, but Judaism is very flexible, since the very best Jewish scholarship informs us that we know right next to nothing about the true nature of divinity, but we strongly suspect there’s something there, whatever it might be, and however little mere humans can understand whatever it is it is. In all honesty, I have to agree, but I was circumcised, and that’s a sort of promise made on one’s behalf by one’s parents, and you know how I feel about keeping promises. If there’s one thing that realizing that you’re an immortal and all-powerful Goddess does for you, it makes you very humble.” She smiled as benignly as Eir Menglöð had.
“But which came first? Phil? or Sól?”
“Both, of course, or neither. I was born as Philip, grew up, fell in love for the very first time, married, and then took a very odd trip through space and time that led me to discover other ‘true’ selves, all unique, and all exactly the same, all of which are just as real as Phil is, and all of them in love with you. As Sól, I’m much older then the entirety of recorded human history, long before Sinai, before the Pyramids, even before Göbekli Tepe in neolithic Anatolia, but as Phil, I was here long before I was ever Sól, so it all depends on how one looks at it, and how you hold the entirety of my many lives up to the light and peer at them, or it. All I really know is that I’m still me, and that my love is constant and true, which is all I really need to know.”
“But it’s all so confusing!” Rhea pouted very prettily.
“No more confusing than you are, sweet lover. You had a life as Hastie before you were Rhea, but it’s equally true that you were Rhea before you were Hastie, because it’s Rhea who fell in love with me, not Hastie. Who are you, really, Rhea? The ‘Hastie’ who made it possible for you to love me by recreating his ancestor’s serum? The Rhea who grew up loving Selene, so that her love for both of us had fertile ground in which to flourish and grow? We’re left with an essential paradox: without Hastie, and the serum, our relationship would be… difficult, at best, and perhaps impossible, since I suspect that Hastie would never have been inclined to marry me, and would certainly have been extremely unlikely to want to bear my children.”
Rhea smiled. “I suppose not. He never once spent the afternoon snogging on the couch with Jack, so even if you’d managed to seduce him, I doubt that I would have been included in your little ménage.”
“You see the problem then, and the solution. It’s just like François-Marie Arouet had Pangloss say in Candide, ‘Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’”
“No,” she said cynically, “Voltaire was being sarcastic, ‘We must cultivate our gardens,’ was his succinct rebuttal to Pangloss.”
“That too!” She smiled. “That’s exactly what we’re doing now! Cultivating our gardens and growing our own shared future, but in the hope and sure belief that we can make the world better for our children. Neither starry-eyed optimism nor the gloom and doom of Leibnizian determinism make any sense in a purely human context. It’s obvious to most of us that it’s good to be alive and working toward the perfection of the world, even if it isn’t quite good enough for everyone just now. As Julian of Norwich, the English Anchoress and eventual Saint who told the English all about God the Mother, said, ‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,’ way back in 1393 or so. She taught that God was the Mother of us all, and that motherhood was ‘the truest of all jobs on earth,’ and who am I to gainsay her? I’ve discovered that I feel almost exactly the same way about it. In fact, if the subject ever comes up, I’m not at all sure that extending suffrage to men was or is an entirely good idea.”
“That’s our Phyllis, a radical feminist to the core,” Selene quipped.
“Is that surprising? Even as Philip, I passionately supported women’s rights in everything. How could anyone possibly love any woman and feel differently?” She grinned and added, “Of course, now that I’m batting for the other team, and in primarily lesbian relationships with many women, my positions may have shifted slightly, but not so much as one might think. I quite like at least some men, in many ways, not just in bed, but I’m by no means overawed by them, and find the tedious arrogance and quarrelsomeness of so many of them extremely irritating.”
Rhea snorted, most unladylike, “Men! Can’t hardly live with’em, can’t really shoot’em neither.”
At this bon mot, they all laughed, but Selene added, “I do miss having Phil nearby, though, with no offence meant at all, Phyllis, but he was a lot of fun to hang around with, and not just in bed.”
“And have him you shall, my dears. I’m still not nearly as skilled in skipping between the various instantiations of my timeline as Eir is, but I’ll get there eventually, whereupon all things will be possible, but I’d also quite like to experience being married to all of you as men, if you’re comfortable with an altered reality, that is. I do know that we three all have masculine incarnations already available in our collective pasts — which are accessible to us as Ljósálfar, therefore no longer limited by strict rules of causuality — so it should be fairly easy, once we have the skills down pat.” She grinned again, very much reminiscent of ‘Philip,’ and said, her voice gone sultry and sexually enticing, “Admit it, ‘boys,’ wouldn’t both of you really like to screw me silly?”
Neither Rhea nor Selene actually answered, but they both looked at her from an entirely new notion of perspective.
Sól and Eir Menglöð were both knitting by a warm fire in the Palace in Myriad. Despite access to the modern world of Earth, or the untrammeled wilderness of the newly refreshed Miðgarðr, the Palace was a nice compromise between peaceful isolation and the comfort of having people bustling all around, the homely scents of countless meals being prepared in kitchens large and small, even the pungent odors and random sounds of the animals who served as transportation and locomotion, the robust indications of human life, and other life, all around them made their cozy rocking chairs somehow more comfortable than they would have been on Earth in an air-conditioned microclimate and R-80 insulation that isolated one from the outside world of sound as much as kept the temperature differentials between inside and out distinct. Their conversation was desultory, because both were working on the local equivalent of Aran sweaters, heavy wool with cabled patterns and twists that required concentration from time to time, managing the spare cable needles in their proper order, linking up the many yarns to their proper loops, the whole still growing and unbound.
Selene and Rhea had no patience for knitting, of course, and were juggling razor-sharp knives back and forth in a dazzling display of martial skills that seemed to become more impossible every day, today augmented by the addition of Japanese-style ‘shuriken’ and “shaken” in various styles and shapes.
“It’s funny,” Phyllis observed to no one in particular, “How the intricate and noisy dance of death being performed in the middle of this room mirrors almost precisely the paths these separate yarns are taking here by the fire, in the process of being joined together, where those other paths are meant to keep apart.”
“Pish tush!” Selene said calmly. “Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud. In the first place, this is a meditative discipline exactly as serene as your own noisy click-clacking, but armed struggle against armed opponents is as much a part of life as combatting the chilly cold and damp of winter gales with knitted sweaters. They’re both of them efforts to prevent something uncomfortable from happening, or to encourage another outcome in an awkward situation.”
Phyllis thought about this for only an instant before she said, “You’re right, of course. I was mistaking my own reluctance to use edged weapons for a general principle, and one which Gefjon neatly sidestepped with her gift of Brenðr, which allows me to be squeamish at no cost. I apologize.”
“La, la,” Rhea said. “Don’t worry your pretty head about it, Dearest, since we already knew that you were in the wrong, so didn’t take your complaint at all seriously. Both of us have gone through that stage in our own pregnancies, where almost everything just irritates you for no good reason, or makes you feel depressed. It’ll get better in your second trimester, although we’ve been told that it might get rough again towards the end.”
Phyl frowned, considering her words. “Funny, I don’t remember any such symptoms in my other pregnancies, but it’s been quite a while, so maybe I’ve just overlooked it. There was a lot more external stress going on back then as well, most of the time, so it would have been easy to overlook ‘unexplained’ mood swings in the midst of a thousand ready reasons for rage.” She shrugged and raised her hands in a sort of mock surrender. “I was quite a bit more isolated as well, so any remaining gaps in my memory are probably insanity. Please carry on.” She winked at them and went back to her knitting.
Selene and Rhea put away their weapons — vanished as usual into secret locations on their persons — then they walked over and studied Phyllis and Eir as they worked. After several minutes spent in silent study, Selene said, “Teach me how to do that, please.”
Phyl looked at her suspiciously. “Why?”
She raised one eyebrow. “Those knitting needles are almost invisible to the casual glance, since women do knit from time to time. It struck me that it would be a useful thing to know if one had the occasion to lurk quietly by an ingle nook and bide one’s time, ‘defenceless,’ yet fully-armed.” She grinned like a wolf in a paddock, head held a little low.
Both Phyllis and Eir burst into laughter, but Eir said, “I do enjoy seeing such innocent ferocity in a girl. It reminds me of myself when I was younger.”
“Why, thank you, Eir,” they said. “We both admired your own ferocity when we fought the Jötunns near Bilröst as well. It was especially lovely being allowed to ride Sleipnir, so if you ever want him exercised, we’re your goto girls.”
“Too bad Loki’s dead,” Eir said offhandedly, “or we could set him out to stud with Svaðilfari and get another foal or two,”
Selene and Rhea’s eyes lit up with instant cupidity. “Uhm,” they asked in chorus, “is Loki’s body as a mare still accessible? without Loki’s evil spirit in it, of course.”
Eir thought about this for a moment, then said, reluctantly, “It might be, but it would take some fancy footwork.”
“How’s that?” Rhea said, intensely interested.
“Well,” Eir said thoughtfully, “when a mare’s just foaled, she’ll come into heat again roughly nine days later, and we know that Loki remained in mare’s form long enough to nurse her foal, so she must have gone through ‘foal heat’ at the start of that time, and it’s equally obvious that her instincts were intact, since Loki would have had to ensure that Svaðilfari found her ready when he chased and caught her, and that the mare’s own instincts caused her to assume the ‘firm stance’ and other instinctive behaviors required to entice the stallion for breeding. The real trick would be to ensure that Svaðilfari was available, but we do know that Þór killed the Hrímthur who actually owned the stallion, so he’d obviously have no further use for him.”
Rhea was quickly becoming enthused by this idea, since it was exactly the sort of scheme she’d liked to pull off as Hastie. “It sounds like all we have to do is lead Svaðilfari away to safety while Þór and his pals are trying to weasel out of their contract with the Giant by killing him, and as long as we kept Loki pregnant or nursing and we still had her horsey boyfriend available, her own instincts would trap her! Heck! We might be able to rehabilitate the poor sod by appealing to her higher nature as a mother! Surely having three children of her own would be a blessing that she couldn’t ignore, and at very least it would keep Loki out of mischief for three to four years or more, depending on how quickly her foals were weened. Can she nurse and be pregnant at the same time?” This last was addressed to Eir Menglöð. Rhea always did tend to think on the fly.
“Easily,” Eir assured them. “In fact, that’s the normal situation, since gestation lasts eleven months or more, and a good breeder of horses would try to get one foal a year, to maximise his ‘yield’ of valuable foals and eventual yearlings.”
Rhea beamed. “It’s simple, then! In fact….” She went to Eir and whispered in her ear, whereupon Eir left the room.
“This is going to be the best trick ever!” Rhea chortled, ”and it’s a good deeed besides!”
Selene objected, “You make it sound, Dear, as if it were our duty to try and save his life….”
Rhea interrupted, “Well? Isn’t it? We know what course his life takes thereafter, and if we have the chance to rehabilitate him, wouldn’t that be the kindest thing to do? You know what Phil always said, ‘Who saves a single life, it is as if he saves the whole world,’ but we’ve already done that! For our next trick, we should definitely pull a rabbit out of a hat!”
Selene just barely breathed, sotto voce, as she whispered, “Tell me again, Dear, how this is supposed to work.” They were hiding in the woods outside the unfinished walls of Ásgarðr disguised as humble peasant women, with coarse woollen skirts and tucked-in blouses, confined by close-fitting bodices, and with their hair modestly tucked up in white mobcaps — near a huge pile of squarish stones, the building materials, obviously — watching Loki as he looked carefully around, unaware that he had a hidden audience, and began laying out his materials for an act of seiðr.
“It’s simple!” she whispered, “All we have to do is catch Loki off guard, and we know he’ll be distracted and filled with overweening pride, because he’s just concocted a clever plan to cheat the poor Jötunn of his pay, and save his own life in the bargain, since the Æsir have threatened to kill him if he doesn’t manage to prevent the Giant from finishing the walls before….”
Selene interrupted her, still whispering, “Don’t forget, Rhea, that his ‘pay’ is supposed to be the hand of Gefjon in marriage, so I imagine our sister wife will be a little ticked off if this plan of yours doesn’t work, not to mention the fact that the rest of his promised fee is the Sun and the Moon, the disappearance of which might discomfit any number of innocent bystanders.”
“No chance of that, she said confidently, since I have all the bases covered this time. Watch this….” Stepping out of concealment and quickly out of the woods entirely, she walked blithely past Loki, who was busy at his magical preparations and didn’t see her at first.
But then he noticed. “What have you got there, girl?” he said angrily.
“Please, Sir, it’s only mead, for the feast you know.” She indicated the small keg she was carrying in a leather sling across her shoulder. I was told that the noble Æsir required bee’s nectar to celebrate their victory over the Giant.
He scowled, a look of fury crossing his face for a moment before he said, now seeming pleased and angry, both at once, “Their victory!? I see.” His irritation was obvious, though for what reason, or to what purpose, who could say? “You can give your burden to me, then, because I’m about their business, and will carry it to my fellows when I return.”
“But I was told….”
“Silence! ale-Gerðr! I will carry the cask. Unworthy you are to enter the presence of the noble Gods!”
“Yes, Sir. I beg your pardon, Sir,” Rhea cried, her voice quavering in obvious fear, and she dropped the keg and ran back toward the woods.
Loki laughed as he watched her scampering, and then knocked out the bung, took a deep draft from the keg, and then took up a carved wand of ash and began chanting, concentrating on his spell.
Suddenly, Loki’s body seemed to lose cohesiveness, as if it were melting gelatine, beginning to flow into a new and different shape as the whole mass of his body actually enlarged, splitting his breeches into shreds as his expanding thighs strained the limits of the cloth, followed quickly by his multi-colored tunic as the barrel of his chest ballooned and split the fabric. Then he leaned over, groaning in anguish as the actual shape of his skull changed, his jaw impossibly extending, even his teeth changing in his head, enlarging, others loosening in their sockets until they dropped from his jaw and he spit them out upon the ground as he developed a pronounced overbite, then hair flowed over his distorted face and he dropped onto all fours, almost naked now, his former clothes in tatters on the ground, and within minutes he was fully-transformed into a giant bay horse, a mare by all appearances. He… she! shook her head and nickered just as an enormous Jötunn with a powerful black stallion appeared over the crest of a hill about five hundred yards away, coming quickly down the dirt track that led to the walls, ready to begin another day of labor. The stallion was harnessed to a large wooden sledge, which had more of the squarish stones as payload.
The stallion suddenly looked up, neighed out a challenge of dominance and lust, then kicked out of his harness and broke away from his owner, heading directly for the mare, who bowed her head submissively before coyly turning her backside to the oncoming stallion, lifting her tail to one side and ‘winking’ her vulva in what seemed to be an obvious display of sexual heat, and then trotted off into the woods. The stallion quickly followed at a full gallop, completely ignoring the angry shouts of his owner, who was furious by then, screaming at the stallion to return, throwing his hat to the ground and stomping on it, then cursing as he turned to the rocks and began struggling with them, trying to drag one at a time to the gap in the wall, obviously desperate now to plug that gap with stones.
The two women watched in silence as he labored, but neither stallion nor transformed mare returned, and after a few minutes they gave up their observation post and made their careful way back to where Eir was waiting, the stallion Svaðilfari — already captured after his dalliance with the transformed Loki — was now tethered nearby, somewhat ill-at-ease to be near Sleipnir, glancing at him wall-eyed and nervous from time to time, but Loki as mare in œstrus was nowhere to be seen, so they weren’t actually fighting.
“Did it work?” Eir asked.
Rhea almost crowed. “Work!? Of course it did! My plan was perfect! It was the absolute best trick ever!”
“But what did we just do?” Selene asked, frustrated, because Rhea had refused to explain her ‘clever plan,’ as she’d modestly described it.
“Nothing! That’s the beauty of it, except that I chased away the girl who had been carrying that keg and finished her task for her. And then Loki responded to her sudden appearance just as he did the first time, and so he’s good and truly screwed!”
“But I don’t understand,” Selene said, irritated. “If you did nothing, how can there be any change? I don’t see what you’ve done at all!”
“It’s simple,” she said smugly. “I asked Eir here use her ability to flit through time and space to find and recover the vials of serum that I’d already prepared, but were left behind on Earth when we got sucked through Dad’s TSP device.” She hefted a satchel, the contents of which clinked quietly as she wiggled it. “Then I poured a number of them into the keg I’d ‘borrowed’ from the girl who’d been originally sent off with it to the feasting hall.”
Comprehension dawned. “So when Loki-as-new-mother finally tries to use seiðr to change herself back into Loki proper, it won’t work, because his changes were due to the Jekyll formula, and not his seiðr at all!”
“Exactly!” Eir said laughing, “and we’ve got Svaðilfari, and the beginnings of a very small stud farm.” She laughed again. “It really is the best trick ever, and I’m sure that Loki will be very pleased, once she gets used to the idea, which she will, as I understand the effects of this ‘formula’ of yours, because Loki will eventually remember her own life as a mare, and become more and more comfortable in her new rôle in life. The old Loki, of course, would appreciate the irony, but the beauty of it all is that we’ve saved her life and given it renewed purpose and meaning beyond his old resentments, plots, and schemes. Where old Loki did his best to twist the world into horrible shapes and to destroy, new Loki is deeply involved in creating a new life within her even as we speak, and will continue to fill the world with joy and life hereafter, a more fruitful ‘penance’ I can hardly imagine.”
Ambiló and Almilón, Loki’s first foals by Sleipnir, had bred true to type, but were slightly smaller than those crossbreeds sired by Svaðilfari — which was just as well, since Selene and Rhea were a skosh less tall than Eir — and the new purebloods were both mares, and thus slightly more tractable for two heavily-gravid young women who hadn’t grown up on horseback, but none-the-less possessed a level of skill and confidence that many born riders might envy, courtesy of the whole ‘barbarian warrior babe’ package deal.
Since their original coöption of Loki as a broodmare, she’d given birth to well over three hundred foals — both crossbreeds with Svaðilfari and purebloods with Sleipnir — and seemed to have found her true calling as a mom, since she’d evolved into a very gentle horse who seemed to love everyone, but especially human children, upon whom she doted. In fact, the only reason that one might choose not to depend upon her for babysitting was that she couldn’t really change diapers.
All three of them, Selene, Rhea, and Eir Menglöð had spent time with her back in the past, teaching her as best they could the wisdom of mares and — since she was immortal and retained at least something of the Jötunn Loki’s cunning — she had plenty of time to learn, but had rather quickly developed a canny sense of self-preservation and the ability to instantly assess the situations a mother horse encounters in the course of a very long life.
Oddly enough, she didn’t seem to harbor any sort of resentment over her transformation, which puzzled them until Eir pointed out that Loki, while hateful in his former life, was also very intelligent, and may well have resented his position as a Jötunn in a social milieu dominated by the Æsir and the Vanes, one in which Jötunns were generally despised, except by other Jötunns. While some, like Skaði, had achieved high social status, these were generally the best looking, most usually women, and had often gained ‘respectability’ through being married to one of the Æsir or the Vanir. Skaði herself had been married to Njörðr, Eir’s grandfather, but it wasn’t a love match. In fact, she’d been bartered to Njörðr as partial compensation for the killing of her father, Þjazi, in a complex tangle of theft, rape, coerced marriage, and murder mediated by… wait for it… Loki, but prompted by Óðinn and Hœnir, two-thirds of the trinity of the Æsir Gods who’d created humanity, or so they said.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, They were all of them back in upstate New York for their deliveries, even the Empress D’Larona-Cohn and Gefjon, since Phyllis had persuaded them that having access to a modern hospital was a very good idea as one approached one’s time of lying-in, even if one had wizards and sorceresses at one’s beck and call. The women all knew the ‘magic’ word, ‘epidural’ now, although the concept and the science behind it was still a little ‘hazy’ for most of them.
The Empress, especially, had been somewhat reluctant to leave because of her concern for the state of the Empire should something happen whilst she was away, although when real danger to her people had threatened, she’d left without delay.
Phyl had explained that they’d receive regular updates and messengers through her new and permanent portals between their embassy and the Imperial Palace, that she could return for daily visits, if she’d like to, and that Selene and Rhea’s new ‘air force’ of flying cavalry could certainly overawe any possible invasive threat within moments, although their unique mounts were currently pastured on the fields surrounding the Embassy proper since, like Sleipnir, the chimeric horses had formed very close attachments with the women who rode them, and so they’d brought Loki forward as well, to the relative safety of the pastures surrounding the Embassy on Earth, where the mares among them formed a stable herd, with Svaðilfari as their stallion.
Sleipnir, of course, had other duties, so they set the younger stallions out in a pasture well away from the mares, and Phyllis and Akcuanrut set a magic ward, powered by Phil’s monumental stone amplifier, to keep them from flying around and getting up to mischief.
Níðhöggr wriggled his way between the worlds, looking for the source of life and happiness that bombarded his cryptic senses, since he was blind, and after Sinmœra disappeared, he hadn’t felt any living souls in Hel, which had been strangely empty of any but the dead since she’d passed beyond his ken. As he felt his way through the shifting planes of reality, he smelt the distinctive odor of a being he’d felt nearby at the very moment that Sinmœra vanished, but the scent had changed slightly, confusing the giant wyrm, but not enough to put him off the track. He slithered on.
Thundercloud looked off across the open range from the top of a low hill. His herd was ‘grazing’ from fruits and vegetables and grains laid out fresh upon a row of high tables that surrounded an artesian fountain. The fountain itself sprang from an unhewn boulder above a large stone basin, which was carved with intaglio images similar to those in the Palace of Zampulus back in Myriad. It had an inset spillway that let the water plunge down into a rocky pool that fed a stream that coursed down the valley, ran through a wood, and then entered another property on its way to join with other streams running to the sea.
The setting was idyllic, and the vista suitable for postcards. Thundercloud loved this place, not least because he relished the chill in the air, the beginning of winter — the high point of the year as far as he was concerned — although he missed being able to digest the traditional Thanksgiving meal that marked the transition from fall to winter. He used to love the whole ritual of preparation involved in the holiday, planning the guest list, preparing the turkey, serving out the plates and bowls heaped high with food, and then dessert, back when he was Emily.
“Do you miss it?” he asked Wildflower, who stood nearby, delicately holding a plate of apples and raisins in one hand whilst using the other to take items from the plate and pop them into her mouth.
She looked up. “Miss what?” she asked.
“All the things we used to do… watching television in the den, sitting around the dining room table chatting about our daily lives.”
She looked at him curiously. “Not really. Why?”
“Don’t you miss going to work in your laboratory? Inventing things? Writing papers for submission to the scholarly journals?”
“Nope. Not at all.” She sounded definite. “It was how I made a living, and I was good at it, but in the long run it was just a job, and I have a new job now, carrying our foal and preparing myself to be a good mother. My old skills in scientific research and exposition were all well and good, but now I see them as a perfect preparation for the task we have before us, restoring the glory of the centaur peoples and republic, and completing the translation of the ancient documents into modern languages — many lifetime’s labor right there — but perhaps even trying to trace the true history of the centaur peoples of Earth, and discovering what happened to them in ancient times.”
“But how are you doing all that while we rusticate here on Earth?”
“This is the modern age, dear.”
She sounded almost patronizing, although he supposed that they’d have to invent a new word, ‘matronizing,’ to describe this new social dynamic. Their new society was based on parallel dominance and submission hierarchies, and he was a war leader, able to control large groups of stallions, more or less, and to lead the herds as a whole in times of war, but in times of peace the male hierarchy broke down to some extent, supplanted by the parallel domination of the younger and less powerful mares by the older and more powerful mares, who were more concerned with the future welfare of the herd than with mere physical survival.
“We have a team of research assistants digitizing the entire contents of the library, already making selected portions available on the web to qualified scholars, so we can work on the basic task anywhere we have either wired or wireless access using any personal computing device.”
Thundercloud was puzzled. “But… why haven’t I heard anything about this?”
Wildflower looked slightly embarrassed as she said, “Well, we normally don’t bother the stallions with tedious details like that. So few of them have the head for serious research….”
“I see…,” he said gravely.
She understood at once, of course. “Don’t be like that, Emily.” She used his old name for emphasis. “I do try to include you, but it soon degenerates into an endless series of ‘I can’t believe that a mere stallion could…’ and tedious justifications. It’s just easier….”
“I’m sure it is, Herbert,” two could play at that game, “but that doesn’t make it right.”
“You’re right, of course. I’ll try….”
“Never mind.” He cut her off. “You’re right too. It is easier. I get tired of being treated like a talking dog whenever I venture an opinion ‘outside my proper sphere of interest.’ It’s just ironic that I find myself in much the same position that you were in our former life, vaguely present in the lives of your fellow Lanyons, but somehow disassociated as well. I do quite like my sudden elevation in formal status — everyone does pay instant respectful attention when I speak — but then they don’t usually alter their behavior in the slightest. And it’s nice being present in the real world outside the confines of teaching, being a housewife and a mother, but I also miss being the one Hastie turned to when he was in serious trouble, although I suspect every mother goes through a similar experience when a daughter marries, since Rhea now looks to Phil, or ‘Phyllis,’ as they’re calling her now. I never paid much attention to these things before, because it was the rôle that I grew into, because our larger society expected — perhaps demanded would be the better word — that I play with dolls, play at being a mother, a ‘proper’ young lady, and then a wife, so it wasn’t a shock at all when all my playacting became real.”
“I understand, Dear,” she said soothingly. “I had no preparation at all for being a wife, and then a mother, and the latter thought still terrifies me sightly — although I’ve had some time to get used to the idea — but the strangest thing for me was how my sexuality changed — suddenly and completely — from a rather intellectual and detached occasional desire to an instinctive compulsion to submit myself to what I perceived to be the strongest male in my immediate vicinity. It both frightened and humiliated me, to be a slave to what I thought of as my ‘baser instincts’ — where before I’d thought of myself as the master of my body, the quasi-literal ‘ghost in the machine’ — to experience sexual heat to a degree that threw intellectual detachment right out the window and forced me to realize that my new body ruled my mind, and not at all vice versa.”
“It’s not much different for me, Dear,” he said. “Although I tried to resist at first, the tantalizing aroma and appearance of a mare in estrus drives me to a frenzy of lust, and I simply have to act upon it, so I suppose our ‘animal natures’ are rather closer to the surface than they were when we were fully human.”
“We are still married, though, just in a slightly different form,” she said confidently.
“I beg to differ, Dearest — neither taking nor meaning to give offense — although we’ve had a marriage ceremony, we’re neither of us capable of the sort of commitment and faithfulness that human ceremony contemplates. Just as any mare in heat is irresistible to me, so any stallion who might be able to defeat me would be irresistible to you and all my other so-called “wives’.” He seemed a bit despondent after saying this.
She immediately tried to allay his chagrin. “Sweetheart, when I think about it, it’s not really so different for us now than it has been for most of human history. The victors in every battle either take the women or kill them. There’s even a procedure to be followed when abducting a woman for sexual purposes in the Bible, not that most armies have paid all that much attention to what it says in the Bible.”
Thundercloud blinked in surprise. “I never knew that,” he said. “They certainly didn’t lay any stress upon it when I went to Sunday school.”
“It’s there, Deuteronomy 21:10-14. I obviously went to a more liberal church, because they not only pointed it out, but used it as only one example of the many ways humanity has grown beyond the often savage worldview of the Bible. In any case,” she added, ”and this does rather go against the letter of most of the less liberal religious teachings, we really can’t help being what we truly are.”
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
— William Blake, The Sick Rose, (circa 1794)
Níðhöggr wormed his way past a final barrier only to suddenly feel the burning heat and radiation of a sun and quickly recoiled, shrinking back behind the imperfect veil between himself and the being who’d been present when Sinmœra had vanished. He could still dimly sense the danger, but he was safe for now. Suns moved, he understood instinctively, and so settled back near the edge of the barrier, prepared to wait for as long as it took.
“So, Phyllis,” Rhea said, “ do you really think we have a chance of taking the vote away from fat old men?”
It was very late in the afternoon, getting on toward evening, and the winter Sun was slightly pale and wan, hanging low in the frosty western sky and somewhat obscured by a high overcast. The three of them were walking past Phil’s new and improved version of Stonehenge, just idly chatting.
“I don’t see why not,” she said, laughing. “It’s just a matter to tweaking the Constitution a bit, and there are few things more delightful than ‘kicking against the pricks.’ I am a Goddess, after all, and so relatively unconstrained by the bonds of naïve causality. In fact, we even have an Trinity, of sorts, Mother, Daughter, and the literal Sun, which will help to confuse the issue in primarily English-speaking precincts at least. There doesn’t seem to be much actual competition on the ground these days, as Friedrich Nietzsche once succinctly observed — or perhaps nothing at all beyond vague yearnings — so I can’t really imagine any countervailing miracles coming down the pike.”
Selene riposted, “But what about bigots in general? Who do we really want in our fantasy electorate?”
“Why have an electorate at all? Why not just have Phyl handle everything?”
“I can answer that one,” Phyllis said, “because I don’t want to spend my time deciding whether or not to have a Heroes of Philately National Holiday, or whether Peoria really needs new subterranean mass-transit and high-speed rail systems. I’m not even sure if every fat old white man should be excluded; Santa Claus seems alright, for example, even if he is a reïncarnation of Óðinn.”
“Get out of here!” Rhea said. “Are you telling me that Santa Claus is that old deviate?”
“Of course,” Phyllis said, shrugging her shoulders with almost Italian eloquence. “People can change, even those one might think of as evil incarnate. One of the reasons that Eir Menglöð allows him to use Sleipnir is so that he can visit all the children in a single night, which you’ll agree would be very difficult without Sleipnir’s help.”
Rhea was stunned…. “But what about the reindeer?” she finally managed to ask.
“What about them?” Phyllis said. “They’re a metaphor for Eir’s Sleipnir, of course. That’s why there are traditionally eight reindeer who draw his sleigh, one for each leg, and the stockings that were ‘hung by the chimney with care’ were originally filled by the children with apples and grain, gifts for Sleipnir, in grateful appreciation for his generous effort in hauling that capacious sleigh filled with all those presents around.”
“The really scary thing,” Selene said, “is that this is all starting to make a horrible sort of sense. I thought Óðinn was back in the Nine Worlds!”
“He is, of course,” Phyl said, “but it’s all one world — as you might remember me saying recently — or rather all of our worlds comprise one composite world; all these supposedly ‘separate’ realities are just different ways of looking at the same thing.”
“But how can Óðinn and Santa Claus be the same?” Rhea said. “They’re almost exact opposites!”
Phyllis smiled. “Or you might call them different sides of the same coin, or perhaps different choices that might be made in a single life. The possibility of evil exists in all of us, even me, even you, though I suspect it might lie closer to the surface in me than in either of you two. I asked you, remember, to keep a careful eye on me as I gained more power; with great power comes greater moral hazard, so I was always aware of the danger this posed, and fearful of succumbing to the temptations I was facing. You yourselves have discovered the good heart that beat in even Loki’s breast, so why would either of you be surprised that Óðinn, the Father of us all, could remember his former self when given a chance to reflect on his past, the chance I offered him in his death.”
Whilst they’d been talking, the sun had finally sunk below the hills and it was beginning to get dark. As the air cooled, an evening mist began to coalesce, forming itself into clammy tendrils of fog, growing denser by the moment, almost imperceptible until one glanced away, then obvious when one glanced back, like the minute hand of an old-fashioned analog clock.
It was at this moment, the uncertain time between twilight and night, that Níðhöggr finally chose to strike, quickly burrowing through the barrier between himself and the woman — he felt that it was a woman he’d sensed before, despite some changes — and he reared up to fell her with his mighty claws and consume her with his jaws.
From Rhea’s viewpoint, it was as if a hole had suddenly formed within the fog, the wisps and tendrils swept away, leaving only empty air behind. “Phyl!” she screamed, whipping out her sword, prepared to defend them all, because she was the closest.
Selene’s sword was out as well, equally and almost instantly ready, delayed only by the microseconds wasted in the propagation of the light wave that demonstrated Níðhöggr’s invisible presence. “I’ve got your back, Darling,” she said tersely, as they both waited for the beast’s onslaught.
“Níðhöggr! Stop!” Phyl said urgently.
The beast halted suddenly, confused.
“It’s me, sweetie, Sinmœra! Come take a sniff!” She held out her hand and petted the invisible wyrm’s nose. Oddly, the invisible beast began to purr.
Selene and Rhea both looked at Phyllis in fear. “You’re Sinmœra!? What happened to Phil!?” they said in horrified chorus.
“Don’t worry, Darlings, I’m still here, and mostly Sól and Philip, but Sinmœra fell into the same atomic mælström with me, so a few little parts of me are condensed from her soul as well.” She smiled at them both. “Luckily for us all, my soul was much larger.” She moved to embrace Níðhöggr in her infinitely capacious arms. “My dragon loved her, and I still love my darling dragon in return.”
“But isn’t he a monster?” they said as one.
“Not really. My sweet little Níðhöggr represents the forces of entropy and decay, without which life is impossible. In the ancient texts, he ‘gnaws at the root’ of Yggdrasil, which represents the Universe, and is of course the base of the metaphorical tree of which we are the fruit. Without the transition from high-energy states to low, we’d none of us be here, since metabolism consists of breaking down what other creatures — mostly plants and fungi — have painstakingly built up.”
“You do realize that this is seriously crazy, don’t you?”
“Welcome to the monkey house,” Phyl said, smiling.
“So, Phyl, is this the happy ending?”
Phyllis thought for a few seconds before answering honestly. “I’m not sure,” she said, “It’s also a time of coming to terms with loss and tragedy. I’m alive, and that’s always good, because at least I have a platform from which to recover, but I’m also profoundly wounded, having suffered the utter disintegration of myself. I’m walking around, and apparently ‘healthy,’ but I’m also filled with sorrow.” She gazed at them with love and finally said, “I love you both, and I know that you carry my children, but I can’t remember the actual acts of love that brought those precious lives into being with any more immediacy than I might remember a story told about my grandfather, or after having watched a video online, something a stranger did, or an actor, not me.” She paused again. “That hurts. I want to remember. I’m aching to remember exactly what I felt, how it felt to hold you in my arms, but I can’t.”
“Phyl,” Selene started to say, reaching out to….
Phyllis shook her head in instant irritation. “No! No pity, if you please. I have to work this out myself, because the damage is inside my brain. It’s not the sort of thing you can put a bandage on, or apply a soothing topical analgesic. It’s the loss of my soul, or something like it, even though I’ve been replaced with something ‘nearly’ as good, a complete replacement soul, with a lifetime guarantee!”
Rhea and Selene both looked at her warily.
“Don’t worry, Sweeties, I’m not mad at you at all. I’m just still struggling to recover from that ‘little death’ that destruction of my physical body, and even the memory of my body,” she said with an odd air of detachment. “Sometimes I feel like one of the patients in those books by Oliver Sacks, where he talks about people trying to cope with profound injuries to their brains, and it hurts to realize that I’d be yet another ‘case study’ for him, if he were still alive, but one whose problems can’t possibly be solved by chemicals or surgery.”
“Hi, girls!” Eir Menglöð shouted cheerily from high in the night sky above them. “I felt a ‘disturbance in the force,’ as they said in those videos, and thought you might need a little cheering up.” She landed lightly before them and sprang to the ground as Sleipnir calmly looked around for something to eat.
“How’re you feeling, cousin Sól?”
“Not so hot, actually,” she said. “I’ve been feeling a little down at the mouth, as the man said when he woke up and discovered that his pillow had disappeared overnight.”
Eir smiled. “Still cheery, though. That’s always a good sign.”
Phyl bit the figurative bullet. “Does your memory of your body always vanish when you die?”
“Pretty much,” she said. “It would get pretty crazy after a while, if it didn’t. Mind you, sometimes it happens, but it’s fairly rare, perhaps manifesting as a sense of déjà vu when one encounters a place one has never actually seen, and sometimes in other ways, although some of those are delusions, of course, like the thousands of people who are absolutely certain that they were Cleopatra, or Napoleon, in a past life. Of many millions of shades I’ve guided to their reward, only a handful have remembered anything, much less details of their lives.”
“But I do remember,” Phyllis said plaintively, “but without any sense of immediacy.”
“Which is good, when you really think about it, isn’t it? Would you rather feel like a puppeteer inside your own body? Would you rather be forever disconnected from the body you actually have, remembering a body you’ve left behind in a sort of misplaced nostalgia? Let it go, Sweetie; let it go. You’re you now, not someone else. Make the best of what you have. Wake up!”
“Wake up?” she said, all at sea.
“Remember who you really are,” Eir said, “a woman with a very long life ahead of you. It’s all very nice that you have memories of a former life, but would you want to have memories of all of them?” She kept quiet for a while, waiting….
Phyl thought about that. “I could hardly miss what I didn’t remember, could I?”
“No, you couldn’t. It’s something like those people you resurrected from the stasis the Heart of Virtue left them in. They were all of them stuck like flies in amber, frozen in pain, unmoving, only suffering. You and your wives gave them all new bodies, and most of them chose quite consciously to ‘move on,’ to accept that they actually were whoever it was that they wound up as — no matter who they were before — and made themselves happy about it, all in all.”
“Why does it seem hard for me, though?”
“Perhaps because it was so very sudden. One minute you were alive, and the very next second blown to smithereens. Or perhaps it was because all the victims of the Heart had plenty of time to get sick and tired of being stuck in whatever was left of the bodies, and were anxious to move on, so didn’t let the door catch their fingers in the jamb as they ran through into the next room and flung their arms wide in perfect joy. You might ask one or two, if you dare, since your own history is existentially similar. The timing is different, of course, but you share the core of their experience.”
“Do you know who else I’ve been?”
“Of course, but if you think about it, you know too. It comes with being a Goddess.”
Phyllis concentrated, brows furrowed, until she remembered another life, but only vaguely. “I was Nanna. That’s why I recognized Höðr when I met him, and why I was driven to bear his child. It had all happened to me before, but I’d forgotten.”
Eir smiled, nodding. “But that hint of knowledge gave you the wisdom to make better choices, the second time around, so the Nanna who replaced you will have a better life, blessed by your love and generosity toward her, and to her husband and foster child.”
“Is that all there is?”
“All? That’s what there is for all of us, the possibility of love, of passing that love along to future generations, and of creating an onrushing wave of love than spans generations, sweeping on into the future. You’ve been privileged to see the first fruits of your present life sailing on before you, spreading your particular blessing into another family’s future. If you really think about it, you’re not only a foster mother, but a grandmother now.” She grinned, then laughed. “Do you feel any older?”
Phyllis laughed as well. “I suppose I do.”
“In our world here on Earth,” Selene said, “there are things called ‘catalysts’ which facilitate radical change without being consumed by the change itself. Phyllis here, I think, is a sort of human catalyst who changes everyone she touches into someone better than they were before, and she does it, as far as we can tell, by simply loving them. Rhea and I were beautiful ‘party girls,’ total ‘babes’ before we met her, insanely popular, but who mostly sat around talking about makeup, clothes, and which celebrity was boinking whom in the tabloid news. Then Rhea here got the crazy idea that she knew how to win the big game at school, but she made me go tell her, even though we were just cheerleaders! Phyl listened to me, did exactly what I’d told her to do, and our school won the game. And then she asked me for a date, even though she was supposed to go out with Rhea, who was always more popular than even I was, and I wanted her like I’d never wanted anyone before or since, and I was smarter, much smarter, and much more powerful than I’d ever been before. Phyl had somehow reached back in time and made both of us into better people than we’d ever been before we met her, so now we were suddenly engaged in saving the world, both of us intimate participants in making the future through our pregnancies and our new skills. We’re both warriors now, more powerful than any woman we’ve ever heard of, except maybe in stories, the sort of women you may have seen in videos and games aimed at adolescent boys and young men, ‘hot chicks’ who kick serious ass, and are totally unobtainable, except in boyish fantasy.”
“It’s true,” Rhea said, taking up the narrative. “I wanted her too, and was bitterly disappointed that I’d wound up with a complete jerk on our double date, but I was still thinking then that I had to have all of her or nothing. Selene and I had been lovers for years before we met her, so going all gooey over someone who seemed to be a boy at the time was a big change for both of us, but she’d already worked her magic on us, so all of a sudden I knew physics, chemistry, and fifty ways to kill a troll! I was like Wonder Woman without all the stupid ‘girly’ restrictions on my magic powers! I was in Heaven!”
“We could hardly believe our good luck!” Selene added enthusiastically. “Everything about us that was essential, our love for one another, for example, was just the same, but we ourselves were better, more worthy of each other’s love, and we’d discovered Phyl besides, who was an interesting combination of masculine and feminine qualities that just hit the right note for both of us.” She sighed. “There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of unprotected intercourse with a man like Phyl was, because her… stuff… is a potent brew of mood-altering hormones like testosterone, œstrogen, follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, prolactin, and several different prostaglandins that act as a wonderful tonic and antidepressant — for women, at least — that just leaves one feeling cheery and on top of the world all day long.”
“And of course she had to turn back into Phyllis — or into Phyllis after having been Philip, I’m not quite sure which version of her came first — before she could have sex with Höðr and give rebirth to his unborn son, an important portion of the eventual reconciliation of the two feuding brothers.” Rhea teared up a little, contemplating a romantic ‘happy ending.’
“So all this… this mishegas,” Selene said, “was just a family spat?”
Rhea looked at her with love. “Of course it was, silly! But not just any sort of craziness. This whole adventure has been all about family, when you think of it, about the first Hastie Lanyon, whose friend Jekyll was yet another warring pair of ‘brothers’ — Remind me to ask Eir if the good Doctor Jekyll was yet another incarnation of the Höðr/Baldr pair — about the Uttersons, Cohns, and all of us, a huge family of mostly girls. Hell, if we weren’t all a little ‘kinky’ we could be the Omnibus version of Little Women.”
“Without that sappy Laurie!”
At which they all laughed, since hardly anyone likes Laurie. “Yeah,” Rhea said, “Fritz Bhaer, was a lot more interesting, and he at least supported Jo in her career ambitions, which was pretty cool, for its day.”
“Yeah,” Selene answered, slightly truculent, “but he was still a putz, in his own peculiarly condescending manner. Our Phyl was ‘supportive,’ but lots more, she actively worked to help us, like figuring how we could carry more and better weapons, and even designing our rings so….” Both women fell instantly into silence, then looked hard at Sól, who after being incinerated into ionized vapor in the very heart of the Sun, and after having painfully reconstituted herself after years of struggle, still bore upon her hand their ring, obviously recreated — since the original would have been vaporized in microseconds — and from the first instant they remembered seeing her, although they hadn’t taken special note at the time, but they would have remembered the change, had it suddenly appeared, since keeping careful track of things was just one of their many special gifts.
“Phil,” Rhea said, her voice gone soft as she stared into Sól’s eyes, “you old softie, you. You really are in there, aren’t you?”
She blushed. “I said I was, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” she whispered, her voice husky with emotion, “but sometimes it’s the little things that really get you.”
“I know,” she said weeping, “I’m so very sorry that I’ve lost my body’s memories of you, and that’s the bitterest loss of all, because I know that they were sweet, precious beyond gems and pearls, but they were lost with my brain and body when I died.” And she then fell deeply into tears.
“Phyllis,” Selene said, caressing her body with the tenderest of emotions suffusing every touch and movement with love and caring, “Rhea’s father told us both something terribly profound and practical, once upon a time, toward the beginning of our incredible adventure, that in a long life, one must be prepared to abandon one’s luggage every once in a while, because what really counts is love. We can make new memories, Sweetie, and new memories on top of those, until that silly ‘hole’ in your head is so full of precious memories that you won’t know your sweet ass from a teakettle, much less which of those sweet memories came first.”
Phyllis looked into her eyes, and then deeply into Rhea’s “Promise?” she asked.
“I do,” they said in chorus.
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird’s Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist’s getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
Everything that perishes
is only a metaphor;
Our shortcomings
are here perfected;
The utterly indescribable
will be revealed;
The Eternal Feminine
draws us beyond ourselves.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved
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The Jekyll Legacy
Appendices
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Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?
There’s no story so long or tedious
that it can’t be improved by a few appendices.— Levanah Greene, Collected Aphorisms 2012
The Ásynjur, Ás Goddesses:
Frigg is the first; she possesses the right lordly dwelling which is called Fensaler.
The second is Saga, who dwells in Sokvabek, and this is a large dwelling.
The third is Eir, who is the best leech.
The fourth is Gefjun, who is a may, and those who die maids become her hand-maidens.
The fifth is Fulla, who is also a may, she wears her hair flowing and has a golden ribbon about her head; she carries Frigg’s chest, takes care of her shoes and knows her secrets.
The sixth is Freyja, who is ranked with Frigg. She is wedded to the man whose name is Oder; their daughter’s name is Hnos, and she is so fair that all things fair and precious are called, from her name, Hnos. Oder went far away. Freyja weeps for him, but her tears are red gold. Freyja has many names, and the reason therefor is that she changed her name among the various nations to which she came in search of Oder. She is called Mardol, Horn, Gefn, and Syr. She has the necklace Brising, or Brisingamen, and she is called Vanadis, which means ‘The Spirit of the Vanes.’
The seventh is Sjá¶fn, who is fond of turning men’s and women’s hearts to love, and it is from her name that love is called Sjafne.
The eighth is Lofn, who is kind and good to those who call upon her, and she has permission from Alfather or Frigg to bring together men and women, no matter what difficulties may stand in the way; therefore ‘love’ is so called from her name, and also that which is much loved by men.
The ninth is Var. She hears the oaths and troths that men and women plight to each other. Hence such vows are called vars, and she takes vengeance on those who break their promises.
The tenth is Vör, who is so wise and searching that nothing can be concealed from her. It is a saying that a woman becomes vor (ware) of what she becomes wise.
The eleventh is Syn, who guards the door of the hall, and closes it against those who are not to enter. In trials she guards those suits in which anyone tries to make use of falsehood. Hence, the saying “Syn is set against it,” when anyone tries either to assert or to deny ought that they should not.
The twelfth is Hlin, who guards those men whom Frigg wants to protect from any danger. Hence the saying that ‘he hlins’ who is forewarned.
The thirteenth is Snotra, who is wise and courtly. After her, men and women who are wise are called Snotras.
The fourteenth is Gna, whom Frigg sends on her errands into various worlds. She rides upon a horse called Hofvarpner, that runs through the air and over the sea. Once, when she was riding, some Vanir saw her faring through the air and were amazed.
Sól and Bil are also numbered among the goddesses, but their nature has already been described.
Inside the hall, the deck and shape of the hull is supported by many hundreds of wooden pillars, ribs, and cross-members fashioned from fir, each carved with intricate patterns reminiscent of Celtic knots, but more clearly representative of snakes, since the heads and tails were visible if one looked carefully for them.
The pillars are an average of four feet in diameter at the base, tapering slightly towards the roof, which is pierced with inset deck prisms for light, as well as many hatches which serve both as light sources and smoke outlets for the many glowing fires on raised iron braziers that hold blazing smaller chunks of firewood and coals for heat, and and added source of light after sunset, one presumes, although there are also unlit torches in sconces which are placed along the walls at regular intervals, and which ring most of the pillars.
A portion of the hall near the stern, far from the main entry, is partitioned off into the Queen’s apartments and council chambers, but overnight guests doss down in the hall itself, simply unrolling their bedrolls on low shelves that run between the pillars along the length of the hall.
The Queen herself has a large dais and feasting table at the end of the hall, just before the doors into her private rooms, but there are also tables in two long rows running up the center of the hall, all of them about twenty feet long, with broad aisles between to accommodate servitors and passage from one side of the hall to another.
Kvænhöllr is also called Sessrúmnir (The Seat Room) or Kvænhoff (The Queen’s Shrine)
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved