A Game of Universe (34 page)

I left the
Grail Angel,
and walked into the casino, past the dice pits, through an ocean of cigarette smoke, and down rows of slots that stretched to a point of perspective. The crowds of tourists threw their money away, caught in the tides of good and ill fortune. The gambler tugged on my sleeve, but I ignored him. He had hijacked my body when last we were here. I was stronger now, much stronger. I had my own game to play.

My gaze lingered on the Universe tables, but not to watch the carnival of images that cavorted over them—colliding planets, and red giant stars, and comets with mercurial tails; nor did I watch the heaps of rainbow-colored chips pushed into the betting circles, won and lost. I watched the dealers, the full apprentices with their triangle-cut sapphires that glistened in the corners of their eyes … like Virginia’s.

A moment staring, then I marched to the hotel lobby, and asked the receptionist I spoke to before: “Mister Germain to see Mister Erybus.”

She smiled and summoned my escorts. They smiled, too.

The chrome cyborgs searched me again, and again removed my blade, but when they got to the Gucci bag, they hesitated. This is what I hoped for. Erybus previously had ordered them to leave it alone. I knew their little computer-enhanced minds remembered simple commands like that. They didn’t open it. Perfect.

When I entered into Erybus’s inner sanctum, it was dark. The light sculpture was dim, only a ghostly flickering. The whole chamber had a feeling of emptiness, silence that hung in the air, a faint ringing, and the barest scent of scorched metal and incense. His art collection was gone; the alcoves open and vacant. They looked too much like yawning mouths for my comfort.

“Come in, Mister Germain,” he said from the shadows. “Join me in my moment of triumph.”

I wasn’t about to grope around in the dark. Thumb to pinkie, I released the mnemonic for the ocular enhancer. The shadows were strange, too thick for my magic to pierce. However, a few details resolved. Inlaid upon the floor was a tarnished silver pentacle inscribed by a circle. It spanned five meters and Erybus stood on the far side. The silver crackled with static electricity, crawling along like a spider with too many legs. The hairs on the back of my neck stood tall. In the center of this, draped with a black cloth, was a pedestal. The Grail had to be under the cloth.

One thing I did not see: myself. Ghostly duplicate Germains had been present every time I had released my vision enhancing magic. If Setebos was right about them being a psychic residue, shadows in time, then their absence indicated that this was the first time I had gotten this far. Possibly the last time, too.

Erybus wore a shroud and a skullcap of human bone and obsidian. His face, previously vital and commanding, now looked older, pinched together in annoyance, pallid and wrinkled. I edged around the pentagram until he stood at noon, and I was at three o’clock.

“There can be only three reasons you have returned,” he said. “For curiosity’s sake, to partake in my ritual, or—”

I inched up to one o’clock. It was the ideal firing distance for a man with an accelerator pistol and one arm. I couldn’t miss. I diffused the bag, grabbed the gun, and pointed it at him.

Erybus laughed. “Or you have come to kill me. I thought you were on our side.”

He sounded too damn confident. I didn’t like it. “I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I want the Grail for myself.”

“And changed sides in the game, too. A pity. Had you come to pilfer the relic for yourself, I might have let you.” Unflinchingly he watched the gun pointed in his face. “We have observed your performance during this mission, and you were a perfect agent, lying and killing with a rare style. We had a place reserved in our ranks for you.” He sighed. “Now this distasteful act, this princess and her curse, and your unexpected
noblesse oblige
.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“A lie. How refreshing, but a trifling sin will not redeem you now. Do you not recognize me, Germain? Do you not see who I am, Sir Osrick?”

I blinked and he changed: nose elongated, hair lengthened, and a few chins appeared. Osrick recognized the scoundrel. He was the Queen’s adviser, the one who disappeared after Lily was cursed.

“You have played this game before,” I said.

“As have you,” he replied. “Osrick is within you. Did you know your Queen sold her soul for power? She invited me to curse her daughter, the little brat. What a help she was, sending her knights to search for my Grail. But how unfortunate of Osrick to lose his mind and foul my scheme. His drinking from the Grail was ruled an illegal move, for a madman cannot discern between good, evil, or his natural impulses. All his noble efforts were in vain.”

Osrick wanted to grab the villain and strangle him. I controlled the urge, and promised myself we’d do it after the princess had been healed. I backed away from Erybus and stepped across the pentagram. There was a slight resistance, like pushing through a heavy curtain, then I was inside.

“Alas,” Erybus said and stepped closer, “this barrier only prevents my spiritous enemies from entering. Had I known of your return, I would have added a rune to ward against vermin.”

I yanked the dark veil. The Grail sat upon the pedestal. It glowed a magnificent blue: water and lilacs and summer sky, and was filled to the brim with a coagulated liqueur.

A quick glance at Erybus. His appearance had again altered. He wore wintergreen robes with gold threads, a gentle smile, and a white beard. He was Abaris.

“It was I,” he whispered, “who rescued you from Hades. It was I who taught you magic, and I who gave you my love. Is this how you return my friendship? You betray me?”

“Impossible. You cannot be my Master.”

“No? Your ocular enhancer would detect any disguise. Even our names: Abaris and Erybus. So close. Do you not sense the truth?”

Squinting, I saw no distortion in his outline from magic nor the flickering that always accompanied even the best virtual projections. He was solid and real.

“Abaris?”

“I groomed you,” he said, “you and my other Grail champions. Abaris was only one in a cast of hundreds. I was the pimp who seduced your mother, beat her, brought her to Hades, and sold her to your father. I was the miner, Rebux, who raped your brother—”

“No.”

“Yes. I raped him and I took you, too. Do you remember?”

“That’s not the way it happened.”

The psychologist whispered,
There is tremendous psychic activity from this creature. It probes our minds. I cannot keep it out. Exercise caution.

“I was your brother, Mike, when he sodomized you in the cellar. You killed me with a fucking jar of rotten peaches! And this is how you repay me? Twice murdered and you come back to steal from me and kill me again?” He laughed. “My, we are ambitious.”

He stepped to the very edge of the pentagram, and said, “Come Germain, I have need of an apprentice. Leave the Grail. I have always known that it was an accident, the releasing of that awful sorcery. I know you never intended to rip my mind apart. I forgive you.”

Look, junior,
Fifty-five said,
I’m no expert in magic, but if you destroyed Abaris’s mind to get that spell, how can he be alive? You killed him, right?

“Go to Hell,” I spat back at whatever it was that stood before me.

“Be a good boy and step away from the Grail. Step away or I shall have to
punish
you. Punishment. Do you know what that means?”

The word brought back Abaris’s death fresh in my mind. Fear welled within me, choked my throat closed; the borrowing ritual emerged in my thoughts.

“You’ll be
punished,”
he screamed, then stepped across the pentagram. His robes melted and his body thickened. A new face resolved, unshaven and covered with pin-prick scars. It was Rebux.

A vulgar scent, perspiration mingled with tequila, reached out to me, and the memory of how he had sold his “daughter,” how he had taken Mike to the cellar, and how he had tried to do the same to me—it was crystal clear. Did he rape me? I wasn’t sure anymore.

“Come here, boy. I have something to show you, something to show you in the cellar. Want to come with me down there? Come on boy! You’re old enough for it. Can’t you take your punishment like a man?”

It is a trap,
the psychologist warned.
Germain, do not listen. He is none of these people. It is illusion, fabricated from your memories.

A hole in time opened. I stood with my ear pressed against the cellar door. Mike screamed for help, but I couldn’t move. I was scared to death, and the borrowing ritual was foremost in my thoughts.

I held it back. I shot him instead.

Skin blasted away as the stream of accelerated ions ripped his flesh away from the bones, blasted that bastard back into Hell where he belonged. His body surged forward. He crossed the last line of silver—lurched into the center of the pentagram with me. The bloody corpse reformed again into a slender young man, handsome and strong.

“Mike?” I backed away and lowered my pistol.

“You little shit!” he hissed. “You ruined everything. You think I enjoyed what that guy did to me?” His hands balled into fists, and he shook them at me when he spoke. “One of us had to get it though, and it wasn’t you, you little coward. I could have lived with it too, but you had to go and break my perfect crystal. That was my ticket off of Hades. You blew my one chance off that rock!”

“It was an accident,” I stammered. “Please Mike, I didn’t mean to do it.”

“Sure you meant it,” he whispered, hate dripping from his words. “You’re evil, and that’s why I gotta
punish
you.”

The odor of peaches was suddenly in the air, fermented peaches along with the tang of blood, peaches from the jar that exploded and cracked Mike’s head open. There were no jars to save me now. I had a pistol, useless against his shifting shapes. I was trapped. I was about to be punished.

From my fear it came, swam up from my unconscious, the borrowing ritual, the mind rape. The knowledge aligned and strained to be released, even though I hadn’t keyed a single mnemonic. I let it go, let it uncoil, a deadly serpent of magic alive in my thoughts, wild and hungry. It went forth to destroy my brother, Rebux, and Abaris.

“Give me your life,” I whispered.

Our minds touched. I braced for the struggle, for the contest of wills, but there was no resistance. His mind was blank. Something was dreadfully wrong.

“Oh no,” my brother hissed from the shadows, “nothing is wrong. You have a tiger by the tail, I believe the saying goes.”

A tingle of contact—we were indeed linked. Where his voice came from, an outline emerged, large, pointed at either end … one of which I held. It grew heavier and became scaled. Reptilian musk filled the air, pungent. One end of the shape sprouted a head—a snout full of alligator teeth, and two lighted lamps that opened and blinked at me. Between the head and tail, its body: four legs and huge wings unfolded wet like a butterfly fresh from its cocoon. It was a dragon come to life from the pages of my adolescent legends, a dragon to keep me from my princess, a dragon to eat me.

Mirrored black scales crystallized upon his hide. And upon each, etched, marked in wax pencil, spray-painted, inked in calligraphy, and glowing in crimson neon, from gigantic to microscopic in size, were the words THOU SHALT NOT.

It scrutinized me, looked down from ten meters high to see what insect held its tail. The dragon hissed smoke. Cold terror poured into my bowels. The battle of wills began.

It engaged me, crushing my resolve with a thought. Without a struggle he won. I was his.

“You do not care for my true form?” the dragon inquired. “Then don’t look!”

He scrambled my occipital lobe and stole the knowledge for my ocular enhancer as well. I went blind.

“I—”

“You have no need to speak either,” it rumbled, and severed the language-centers within my mind. I went mute as well. “Truly, you shall require none of your senses where we go.” He rampaged through my intellect, tore my sense of smell apart, ripped my hearing to shreds, erased my touch, and burnt my taste to ashes.

He left me numb and in absolute darkness.

“How is that?” he inquired. “Comfy? We wouldn’t want you to feel anxious before the fun begins.”

There was a firestorm through my mind. He cracked it open and clawed through its contents. “Taste the whip of memory, mortal!”

My recollections of pleasure he destroyed first, and quickly, so I had only the briefest glimpse of them before they were lost. The elation of my corporate graduation ceremony, the surge of power when I killed Fifty-five in the sewers, a joke shared with Quilp, Mike and me playing commando in the fields of Hades, the full ripe lips of Virginia, the taste of brandy, my first magic, friendship, lust, love.

Gone.

“So few?” he said. “Not that it matters, but you should have taken the time to have a little more fun with your life. Let us move on to the pain.”

These memories he went through with deliberation, showing them to me in exact detail before he ripped them apart. I relived every unpleasant experience. It was not like what Necatane put me through. This pain the dragon amplified and distorted. Mike tortured me on a pile of dirty heat suits with shards of green glass, my father abraded my chest with the sonic scrubber, Abaris piled books and manuscripts on my body until I suffocated, Medea loved me with her razor, Fifty-five made me drink a liter of sewage before he shot my limbs off, Virginia blasted my face off with her plasma cannon, and Quilp shot me full of amphetamines, watched my heart explode and my mind burn. They all laughed at me, ignored my pleas, pissed on me, and left me.

“These two,” Erybus whispered, “your guilt and your sorrow, I shall allow you to keep for the moment. They shall be our dessert.”

The psychologist spoke up for me:
Why torture him so? What purpose can this possibly serve?

“Purpose? It has no purpose, parasite, and that is precisely why I do it. Because I can. Because I derive pleasure from it.”

He took them away, too. The gambler, Medea, Fifty-five, the psychologist, and Celeste, all of whom I had come to rely on in the past, vanished. For the first time since I was a child, I was alone. It terrified me.

Only my personality remained, a few emotions, and the primitive automatic functions that kept my body working.

“You won’t need any of those in Hell,” he said.