Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (31 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
notice, which means he would have to bring them in to a place where their isolation is guaranteed until he has a sufficient force to prevent disruption." Crowley nodded his head. "That means he'd have to have a secure site that is in very good supply."
"Right." I winked at Crowley, knowing we were on the same wavelength.
Hal shook his head. "You two obviously know the game plan, but I'm missing something."
"Hal, it's easy." We broke through the brush and looked up at the terraced hillside dotted with dolmen.
Over half of them had windmill propellers affixed at the top. In the proto-dimension's light breeze, the
props spun away lazily. "There's your key."
The African-American squinted for a second, then nodded sheepishly. "Energy."
"Exactly. This casts a new light on the battle over Ryuhito, doesn't it?"
"Ryuhito's sun-god displays were enough to power his army here. With training..." Hal slapped his forehead with his left hand. "And Fiddleback wanted Ryuhito because he could provide more power than the whole of the Frozen Shade, which means he could have powered the dimensional gate that's built into
the Phoenix maglev train circuit."
I slapped him on the shoulder. "That's right. Pygmalion needed to prevent Fiddleback from coming
through to Earth. He did it by removing the battery that Fiddleback wanted to use. Presumably he didn't
just blow the maglev line because he knew it would be valuable some day for moving troops. He arrived,
took Ryuhito away and made some vague threat about returning with Ryuhito to enslave the world.
"That meant that all of us took his threat as being dependent upon Ryuhito in some way. We focused on Ryuhito and devoted a certain amount of our planning to ways to eliminate or neutralize the prince." I
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grinned wr
yly. "And if Pygmalion is even half as intelligent as we've given him credit for, he's alread
y
worked the
same sort of failsafe into Ryuhito's brain that Fiddleback has with me, preventing either
one
of us from assuming the powers of a Dark Lord in opposition to our mentor's wishes."
"Well,
we've
got Ryuhito now, so he's out of the equation." Crowley toyed with the tip of his goatee.
"This puts us back to square one, but with a caveat: We know Pygmalion intends to conquer the Earth
with an army of soldiers built on the Mickey prototype. What we don't know is where his staging area is.
If what he needs is a place deserted enough to let him bring his armies in, he could be almost anywhere."
"1 don't think so, Damon. 1 think he made a mistake there." 1 smiled openly. "Pygmalion took Mickey from Flagstaff. Jytte Ravel was found somewhere in Arizona."
"Kingman, I think," Hal offered. "She never said anything about it, but I recall Coyote or Marit mentioning one time or another."
The shadow man canted his head slightly. "So, you think he's operating out of the northern area of
Arizona?"
"That, or the California badlands, or the Nevada desert, or southern (Jtah. There's a lot of open space out there."
Hal dropped to one knee and plucked an azure strand of grass. "It'll be like finding a needle in a
haystack."
"Mo it won't," I assured them both. "We have Jytte, and she once lived in the eye of that needle. To find Pygmalion's base, all we need is to convince her that she wants to lead us back to the place from which
she escaped."
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Crowley and 1 took an indirect route on our return to Earth. We walked through the dimensions within
the same entropy sphere as Turquoise. Crowley carried on a vague travelogue that let me know why the
Yidam and Will Raven had selected the proto-dimension they had used for their staging area. As always,
I found the reasoning decidedly logical and nodded in agreement that the correct choice had been made.
Crowley held out a silhouette hand to slow me as we approached Pygmalion's factory dimension. A
grayish-purple fog filled the area surrounding it and appeared to be without surfaces or movement. By the same token, I could feel something solid beneath my feet, and I found the sensation of a gentle breeze in my face a constant.
We pushed on forward and I found the breeze stiffening. By the time my kilt started flapping in the wind, the fog came to an abrupt end. Standing on the edge of a brilliantly lit void, I felt as if 1 had worked my way through the surface of some giant tennis ball and now stood looking at a miniature sun burning at its core.
Crowley spit at the burning ball of a dimension suspended like a star in front of us. His spittle made it barely two feet from his mouth before crackling loudly and
exploding into a wisp of steam. "No welcome mat here."
I shielded my eyes against the light streaming out from the proto-dimensional sphere. "For someone who needs energy, isn't this a wasteful display?"
The shadow man shrugged. "The heat layer is very narrow, but quite sufficient to hurt most things trying to crawl through it—present company included."
"The sphere doesn't look very big."
"It's bigger on the inside than the outside. I think he means it as a statement about himself, really."
Crowley rested his hands on his hips. "Arrogance seems to be an attribute that all Dark Lords share."
"As long as they continue to underestimate us, I don't mind." I pointed toward the dimensional ball.
"Making it in there would require either a lot of energy to overwhelm the defense or a dimensional gate, right?"
"As I understand it, yes." Crowley nodded slowly. "Pygmalion has to be devoting a certain amount of his concentration on keeping this dimension inviolate. While we can't strike at him, it does pin him into
place."
"So we know where we will meet him, but he's choosing the battlefield."
"Right, which means he has a hell of a home field advantage. By the same token, it probably means he has not begun to ferry troops into Earth. He will be vulnerable when he does that, because the amount of
energy required to establish a link will be more with his dimension armored like this. Sustaining that over the time required to move a billion troops, or even the number needed to secure a staging area, is going to be draining."
I nodded. "So he will drop his defenses here at that time, you assume, which leaves him open to a strike."
"Yes, but you know as well as I do that hitting this place at that time would be suicidal."
"Because he'll have all his troops ready to go and just
waiting to eat up opposition." I turned away from the burning sphere and headed back into the fog. "We have to pre-empt his strike at Earth, and we have to do it in his dimension, because we'll nee< 1
Fiddleback with us, and giving him access to Earth isn't part of the game plan." Crowley slapped me on the back. "That's how 1 read it. Let's get back to Phoenix and see if we can find a spot where we won't mind letting two Dark Lords have a war."
We arrived in Phoenix late in the evening. Appearing the the suite of rooms I maintained at the top of the Lorica Industries corporate citadel, 1 left Crowley to call Jytte while I took a shower and dressed in jeans, an aquamarine shirt and a pair of docksider loafers. I took my time dressing because I needed time to
think a bit.
Oddly enough, feeling the starchy stiffness of the shirt's collar and cuffs helped focus me. The shirt felt uncomfortable, but I wore it because it helped define who and what 1 was. The kilt, while functional, was
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not me.
I was not a Greek hero coming back from a time in the underworld; 1 was a Dark Lord's m
inion,
and 1 sin
cerely doubted that made me a hero in anyone's book.
1 realized that, in creating me, Fiddleback had forged a formidable weapon indeed. My predecessor had
seen that and had chosen me to replace him. 1 had no doubt that his choice had been motivated by his
belief in my ability to oppose my former master. 1 also had to imagine he did not discount my ability to
face off with another Dark Lord. If his causing me to destroy a Reaper base was an indication, he
expected me to destroy the Empress of Diamonds when push came to shove.
Things had changed from what he had envisioned. Pygmalion supplanted Fiddleback as the primary
threat to humanity. Eliminating that threat called for an alliance with my former master. I could imagine Coyote approving
the alliance and even my striking a bargain with the Empress of Diamonds to ambush Fiddleback, if
necessary.
What I couldn't tell is how he would take what I needed to force Jytte to do to eliminate Pygmalion. For
as long as I had known Jytte, which was not, granted, that long a time, she had been a gorgeous doll, a
living automaton. She did everything she could to downplay her beauty. She dressed down, she acted in
only the most subdued ways and seemed to do everything she could to distance herself from all other
human beings.
It occurred to me that the only emotion I had seen her display came after I had spoken with the ghost of
my predecessor. In the back of my mind, I had wondered if Coyote and Jytte had been lovers or otherwise
emotionally entangled. Certainly if Coyote had helped to rescue her from Pygmalion, she would have
been greatly in his debt. I knew that he was the only member of his group she trusted with the secret of
his plan concerning me, which means he had also confided in her the reason he needed to be replaced.
Given the likelihood of some ties there, 1 had to wonder what he would have thought of my need to have
Jytte lead us back to the place where Pygmalion kept her before her escape. She would resist—she had to
resist if she wished to maintain the minimal control she had over her life. She used her amnesia as a
foundation, but I had to get her to dig deeper. I had to sacrifice the welfare of one for the good of the many, or so I meant to be doing, but I really did not know if my plan would work.
It also occurred to me that in doing what I would be doing to Jytte, I would be no better than a Dark Lord using someone. My only hope, my only difference with those we opposed, was that I would try to get
Jytte to listen to reason first. I would try to get her to work with me. I had to at least
try that, or there was no reason in trying anything at all.
I left my dressing chamber and threaded my way through the corridor to the central sitting room. The white upholstery of the couch and chairs matched the white marble covering the floor. A teak coffee table with a glass top pinned a small piece of carpet in place in front of the couch. The room's northern wall looked out toward Squaw Peak and Camelback Mountain, with both of them rising above the black, Frozen Shade ocean
