Authors: Unknown
His
hands trembled. Long scars traced along his wrist. As with all things worth
doing, there had been a price to be paid for this trick. Half of the marks upon
the floor had been made with pastel chalk and laundry markers . . . the rest,
however, had been inked with his blood.
How
he hated this feeble flesh. Yet hadn’t it been that ephemeral fragility that
had captured his heart so long ago? Is that what he now felt for Eliot?
Or
was it some temporary weakness that would pass? Like so much gas.
No,
he was proud of his son. The boy had stumbled across his partially
reconstructed master symphony and he had finished it. Truly, what else should
he expect from his progeny?
Louis
curled his hand into a fist until the knuckles popped. These feelings he had
for Eliot were a toxin coursing through his soul. Love?! First God, then what
he had thought had been the perfect woman, and now again with his son? Hadn’t
he learned this lesson the hard way? Nothing good ever came from love.
Perhaps
there was some antibiotic to rid himself of this diseased thinking before his
limbs turned gangrenous, blackened, and fell off.
“Talking
to yourself?” the shadows asked. “You sound crazy.”
Louis
looked up. The darkness in the corner of the basement collected into a large
man. Parts of the shadow resolved into broad Samoan features
64.
Zhe the Blind was one of the Buddhist monks known to have introduced paper to
Japan in the sixth century. After folding a partially accurate (and
unflattering) origami figure of a Soga clan matron, he was sentenced to death
and imprisoned. When Prince Regent Shotoku Taishi heard this, he raced to save
Zhe, only to find he had disappeared from within a guarded thirty-foot-deep
pit. Zhe was never seen again. In 1899, however, the Lambent Water Scrolls,
penned by Zhe, were unearthed. A lost method of wet-paper folding was
discovered, as well as diagrams that mathematicians are only now beginning to
understand with modern topology and supercomputers. Gods of the First and
Twenty-first Century, Volume 8: Eastern Myths, 8th ed. (Zypheron Press Ltd.).
and
hard, glittering eyes. It took two steps toward him. The figure’s black shoes
sank and mingled with the symbols in the foundation as if they were mud.
Urakabarameel,
Master of Shadows and Whispers—his appearance momentarily confused Louis, for
he was Beal’s lackey, not the third party he had anticipated come to stop their
bargain.
Unless,
he was both?
Uri’s
soul belonged to Beal, but his heart might still be held by the Queen of
Poppies.
Louis
sighed with relief. Uri was like a common chess rook. He moved with murderous
efficiency, but his patterns were straight lines. So easy to predict.
Uri
gestured to the mess of symbols. “Was this supposed to keep me from wringing
your neck?”
Louis
laughed. “Just a precaution, Cousin. You know what it’s like, politics and
Board members trying at the last moment to get the upper hand on one another.”
Uri
scowled.
“I
guess you came to discuss only business?” Louis asked. “A pity. In the old days
we would talk for hours.”
“We
never ‘talked.’” Uri took a step closer, pushing against some unseen resistance
in the air, dragging himself through the mire of geometry on the floor. “I only
recall your endless teasing. Less talk with you is best.”
Louis
pretended to be hurt. Perhaps Uri, though, had learned a few things in his
absence. Louis looked carefully at his cousin, trying to discern the telltale
bulge of the sheathed blade near his heart.
It
was there still. Saliceran, Sealiah’s infamously ever-poisoned blade, a living
shard of metal that delighted in murder almost as much as its mistress . . .
and still over foolish Uri’s most vulnerable organ.
“So,”
Louis said, straightening, “to business then, my laconic anthropophaginian.”
Uri
crinkled his forehead.
Louis
must take care to use more monosyllabic words. No need to torture the poor
puppy.
“Your
new master has revised the deadline,” Uri said. “He commands you to move
immediately. Trap the girl, Fiona, in the Valley of the New Year. Then deliver
Eliot to him.”
“You
have access to the Valley of the New Year? How interesting.” Louis
flashed
his armored smile, behind which he hid his sudden unease. “I didn’t think he
was allowed to change terms. The original pact is binding. We rolled—”
“You
say ‘we’ as if this deal is not one-sided.”
Louis,
of course, was expendable as far as Beal was concerned. It wouldn’t violate any
pact of theirs to have Louis transformed into a bloody smear.
“Yes,
I understand,” Louis said. “But it would help if I understood the urgency.
There are so many Immortals and Infernals in Del Sombra, I can barely move
without stepping on toes and talons.”
“Things
are complicated.” Uri hesitated, considering his words carefully, then said,
“What if I told you that others wished you to take your time with the young
Master Eliot? And that their rewards would be just as generous as Beal’s?”
This
was it: Uri’s counteroffer on behalf of some unnamed third party to betray
Beal.
Louis
continued to smile . . . and his mind raced. It would take cooperation for the
Board to open a passage to the Valley of the New Year—a distressing development
in and of itself. If his cousins actually worked together, there was nothing
they could not accomplish.
And
yet, it also appeared to be business as usual: some friendly doubledealing, a
few backstabbings here and there, sharks smelling fresh blood in the waters.
Eliot
and Fiona had stirred up the clans in ways he had not foreseen. They were far
more dangerous than he had realized—which made his decision all the more easy.
After all, if he was going to play, why not play with fire?
Uri
struggled with his steps, pushing closer to Louis’s circle. The symbols and
lines on the concrete dragged behind him, snarled in tangles about his ankles.
He grunted as the resistance increased. “Well?”
“I
cannot accommodate your requests. Either of them. I will honor Beal’s deal to
the letter, and according to the original timetable.”
Uri’s
muscles bulged with effort, and his massive hands clenched. The air about him
rippled from the tremendous pressure he exerted.
“I
gave you a chance to live, Louis. Refuse me and I will have no choice.”
Louis
laughed. The notion that Uri could actually save his life . . . how amusing.
“Refuse? I shall do much more than that, Cousin.”
Uri
halted and his face flushed. To his credit, however, he actually attempted to
puzzle it out. “Why would you tell me such a thing, unless . . .”
Louis’s
armored smile dissolved. “Unless I was about to do to you what you had to come
to do to me?”
Uri
glanced about. He stood in the center of a morass of symbols and lines that he
had hauled into a hopeless knot. Then he finally understood that he had been
looking at this the wrong way.
Louis
allowed the layers of bent space to relax and revealed the true geometry of the
room.
The
normal perspective tilted . . .
. .
. and the “floor” that Uri stood upon was neither flat, nor under his feet, but
curved up and around him. He was inside a seamless cylinder, trapped like an
insect within a web of tiny lines and symbols and letters.
Louis
was above him, peering down through a tiny circle into this cocoon of his own
devising. “You will find nothing to gain purchase upon.”
Uri
glowered up at him, his eyes blazing red, foam upon his lips. His muscles
bulged and flexed to gargantuan proportions.
Louis
opened his mouth to say more, but hesitated. He hated to goad Uri further. It
was as foolish as standing on railroad tracks and daring the onrushing
locomotive to come closer.
But
he could not help himself. “Solomon used these, remember? Klein bottles with
their frictionless Möbius-like surface? He trapped all those pesky jinn
spirits, and they were never heard from again.”
Uri
roared and struggled, but all this accomplished was to further entangle himself
within the snare of sticky ciphers that Louis had drawn upon the floor.
Until
one taut string of symbols, drawn in lime-colored chalk (never approved for
such ritualistic purposes), “pinged” from the stress.
The
dots and Greek letters upon this line shuddered and fell free, vaporizing into
puffs of green smoke.
All
traces of victory evaporated from Louis’s face.
Uri
bared his teeth, half a grin, half-gritting. He grabbed the shuddering line
with both hands and pulled. The construct of tangled icons twisted and resisted
his efforts . . . and then the line pulled free—and the Klein-bottle construct
unraveled.
Heaps
of symbols and geometries inked in blood and marker and pastel chalks spilled
upon the concrete floor in a tidal wave of red, black, and muted rainbows.
Louis
fell, bowled over by the surge of power.
Uri
remained standing, immune to the pull and the swirls of color about him as if
made of immovable granite.
With
three mighty strides he crossed to Louis.
Louis
started to explain how this was all a mistake. Even as the words formed on his
lips, however, Uri balled one of his hands into a gigantic fist and hit him.
It
was everything Louis expected it would be: sledgehammer hard, an atomic-bomb
explosion of pain, a semiconscious floating-away sensation—the crushing return
trip to reality as he bounced onto the concrete.
Louis
blinked away reddening tears. He rolled over, dazed, but not so much that he
did not know what was coming next from his cousin.
Blood
and mucus drooled from his nose onto his hands . . . and there germinated the
seed of an idea how to squirm free. He snorted, blowing clots and snot over
both arms, then rolled over just in time.
Uri
loomed over him, blotting out all else.
His
cousin had pulled that punch. He could have shattered every bone in Louis’s
body had he wanted, but his desire to play with his food was too great. Louis
gave brief thanks for Uri’s stupidity.
Uri
grasped Louis by his shoulders and hauled him up.
Louis
looked for the thing he needed to make what might be his last desperate
deception work. He spotted it: the slight bulge of a knife sheath under Uri’s
shirt.
Louis
brought up his hands, close to his own chest, so this action could not be
misrepresented as anything threatening . . . only a pitiful, pleading, “have
mercy” gesture. It was a ridiculous thing to do considering what he faced, but
necessary to get his blood-, snot-, and sweat-soaked arms and hands into the
proper position.
Louis
had seen Uri kill. He liked to do it up close so he could feel his prey squirm.
He enjoyed the perfume of fear.
As
predictable as the tide, Uri crushed Louis in an enveloping hug.
Uri
took it nice and easy—this initial embrace only made Louis’s lungs collapse,
and his bones pop . . . but not quite break. He could take ten seconds of this
before he blacked out or his spine snapped.
Worst
of all, though, Uri smelled like wet dog.