Timegods' World (81 page)
Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy
While I struggled with his words and the memories, and his logic
about my wanting to force others to admit things, I could hear the change winds howling toward the now like night eagles swooping in for the kill.
about my wanting to force others to admit things, I could hear the change winds howling toward the now like night eagles swooping in for the kill.
“Your saving grace,” continued Sammis implacably, “has been your willingness to undergo punishment for your mistakes, even to punish yourself. And to try to avoid deluding yourself—even as you have.”
Sammis delivered the words quietly, as if he were stating well-known facts or established truths.
“Where’s Wryan?” I wasn’t quite grasping at straws.
“You’ll be able to find us. You always could. Just look at the bell.” He pointed at the bronze bell. “It’s a wide universe. Treat it kindly.” He vanished as I watched. He was diving to Wryan.
I looked at the bell, and I recognized the script—Terran—courtesy of my last language implant, the one I had needed to find Dr. Odd-Affection and remove the Locator tag.
I shook my head to clear it. Duty, if I could call it that, would be to finish what I had started before the change winds unleashed their all-too-long-thwarted fury on Query.
I could not meddle with other cultures as devastatingly as I had on Sertis, Altara IV, or the offshoot of Heaven IV. Time was short, its noose tightening, but at times knowledge can be enough of a lever.
I had eleven tablets left. I intended to deposit each one on a different planet, each in one of the times/locales identified by the now-sundered data banks as promising for high-tech development, knowing that my very appearance in a cloud of flame would spur something.
Midgard was first, close-time, and I dropped the tablet on the ceremonial steps of the Asgard, thunderbolting the statue of the Serpent as I did.
The next nine were a blur, and when I struggled across the bucking timepaths to the last, Weindre, and forced my way into the Technarchial Center to deposit the last eternasteel tablet, I could hear the creaks in the warp of reality while still undertime.
As another last gesture, I etched the black thunderbolt across the front of the Technarchate’s Fountain of Power and placed the tablet under it.
For better or worse, the Guard’s corner of the galaxy would not be the same—and no one would undo what I had done.
Hell and Timefire! No Guard, no god, but Loki, could tread the paths of time in those instants against the wild change winds. And next would I assure that none would so tread after the winds passed and the worlds and stars settled into new histories.
Some things I could not have avoided, no matter how I pretended,
and some matters were not to be handled by stealth. Nor would I have had the appellation “coward” stand in the memory of those who cared, and those who survived.
and some matters were not to be handled by stealth. Nor would I have had the appellation “coward” stand in the memory of those who cared, and those who survived.
I broke out in Assignments.
Heimdall was absent.
“Loki!”
Nicodemus reached for a stunner. I knocked it clear of his hand with a trickle of fire from the gauntlets. Not exactly, for I looked at my wrists, and the gauntlets were fused metal encircling my lower forearms—merely metal decorations. I knew I no longer needed them, but I left them in place.
“Where’s Heimdall?”
“Tribunes’ spaces,” answered Nicodemus, with a look that demanded I destroy him.
I refused to oblige his whim.
Before, always before, I had avoided the Tribunes’ spaces, at least in real-time, but power blocks or no, I had no intention of avoiding them, and I did not, smashing through the physical and paratime barriers as if they did not exist, hurling myself into the center of the once-sacred Tower.
Heimdall, Eranas, Freyda, and Kranos stood around a black crystal table, waiting—waiting for me.
Heimdall wore gauntlets. The others were dressed in their black jumpsuits and were without overt weapons.
“Greetings, fallen gods, and Heimdall, whom I shall call false god for the sake of convenience.”
“Proud of yourself, Loki? Happy to destroy a million years’ worth of dreams in an afternoon?” That was Kranos. He’d never understand.
“The sins of the father’s sons.” That was Freyda.
“Why?” demanded Eranas, in anguish, face twisted. He thought he had been fair, and he had, in his own way.
Heimdall didn’t bother with words. He just pointed and fired, and Freyda smiled. His aim was good, but it didn’t matter.
I let the energy sheet around me. I walked toward him, around the black crystal table filled with images from time, and he leveled another thunderbolt at me. I gathered the energy to me, and kept walking.
Freyda smiled sadly and vanished undertime. No matter, she would accept what came, trying to twist it to her advantage somehow.
Heimdall backed away.
Kranos also stepped back, almost drawing time around himself, until he froze into a time-locked cocoon, withering as I watched. I shook my head, not realizing such a death existed.
Eranas stood motionless, the blackness growing in his eyes, as I moved toward Heimdall, who retreated step by step until his back was against the time-protected wall.
Heimdall, the honorable, the Counselor, the Guard who would have been Tribune, turned the full power of his gauntlets upon me. And though I could feel the power sheeting around me, it was as nothing, and I took another step.
As both gauntlets separately had failed to destroy me, he linked them together and blasted the thunderbolts of Hell toward my face. They flared around and past me as if they were no more than smoke, and in the slowness of that “now,” I took another step toward the false god who would have been king of a battered corner of a beaten galaxy.
He lifted his hands to strike me, and with two fingers I crushed his wrist into powder.
Heimdall, the once-mighty, the schemer, the demigod who would have flattened Query and countless worlds to lift himself, gasped once, gasped twice, squared his shoulders, and dropped his arms.
“Do your worst, with your hands dripping blood and fire! Do your worst and feel righteous in your slaughter!”
I broke his neck with a single blow.
I took in the black room, the crystal table of time, for that was what it was, a tool of the Tribunes sheltered and used in secret. Then I stared at the black crystal, willed it to shatter, and it did, with the falling shards themselves exploding into dust that was no more.
Where Kranos had stood was but a pile of dust.
Eranas, who looked and would not see, who saw and would not complete his actions, stood rooted in his own private and forever “now,” his vision locked into a universe that soon would never have been, darkness creeping over his soul.
He, too, would vanish when the change winds whistled around the Tower and stirred the silent dust of time, for his mind could not bear the weight of its own past.
Some things I had to finish, and I slid straight for Freyda’s mountain hideaway, the one overlooking Quest that had been in her family for millennia.
As I broke out of the undertime, the invincibility broke also, and I was scared, or sore afraid, as my would-be-god persona might have said. I was sore afraid, for the changes I had wrought could have been far beyond my own conception. How small that conception was had just begun to dawn.
Freyda was sitting in the hidden balcony, watching a hawk circle over the valley in the afternoon sun, sitting a bit too upright to show as much
ease as she meant to convey. She acknowledged my entry without turning, staring at the city below, still wearing her Tribune’s black, star and all.
ease as she meant to convey. She acknowledged my entry without turning, staring at the city below, still wearing her Tribune’s black, star and all.
“I assume that’s you, Loki—god of fire, god of destruction and madness.”
“You expected me.”
“Sooner or later. I was one of the few who didn’t underestimate you. Gods take longer to grow up and learn the extent of their powers.”
I didn’t correct her assessment of me as a god. For Freyda, in some ways, things were simple. Either I was a god, or I wasn’t, and I’d unconsciously accepted her frame of reference, until Sammis’s questions, while somehow knowing it wasn’t correct and fighting the simplistic definition.
Now definitions didn’t matter. The actions, my actions, mattered.
“Why didn’t you stop me, then, if you were so wise?”
“Ten years ago, it was too late to stop you. Your mother said it was too late to stop you when you were born. You don’t think people didn’t try? Heimdall tried the sneaky way, and you were sneakier. Gilmesh tried to ignore you, and got ignored. Eranas tried to awe you with the power of the Guard, and you not only refused to be awed but proceeded to awe the Guard with your own power. The technicians tried to use technical expertise to reform the Guard, and you used greater expertise to confound everyone.” Freyda sipped from her glass.
I waited. It was her turn to talk, and I owed her that.
“I’m not sure the entire Guard could have destroyed you after you recovered from your sentence on Hell. Sammis was convinced that you went only as a penance. One way or another, with your birth, the Guard we knew was doomed.”
“I think that’s overstating things.”
“Loki, don’t you see? It didn’t matter. If the Tribunes had strangled you at birth, the guilt would have rotted us from within, at least those of us who counted—assuming Sammis would have ever let us, and he was the god of death once.” She shivered. “If you had died on Hell, or we had let you, no Guard would ever have trusted the Tribunes or Counselors again. And what about you, the real you? Have you ever really been forced to do what you didn’t agree to?”
“I’m sure I have,” I answered, but Freyda stopped and sipped her drink.
The sun flashed through her hair, and the effect as she turned was the instant impression of silver, of age before her time, which disappeared even as I noted it.
“Sit down, young god. Sit down and watch the end of our era and the beginning of yours.”
I sat.
“What’s the insistence on the god business?” I protested. “I’m no god.” I knew how she thought, but I had to try.
“Oh, not in the theological sense, but with your powers of mind over matter, in practical terms it doesn’t make much difference. You throw thunderbolts without bothering to use microcircuits, use the undertime to walk on air and water, heal yourself, destroy with a glance, go when and where you please regardless of barriers raised against you, and you cast down and raise up whole planets and cultures.”
Her dark eyes pinned me where I sat.
“Now … define a god for me,” she finished.
What could I say that she would accept? Yes, I could certainly do most of what she described. But I was certainly not all-knowing, nor all-understanding, and certainly not all-powerful.
“Then I guess you’ll have to call me a god.”
Her attitude made one decision, or sealed it for me. Living legends, particularly those reputed to be gods, never live up to their image. And I had no desire to remain on Query—it would be fair neither to Queryans nor to me.
Freyda turned full face to me. “How does it feel to destroy the oldest institution in galactic history? Does it make you feel grand?”
That was the first real bitterness I had heard from Freyda.
I shook my head, not caring if Freyda believed me or not, thinking more of Verdis, Loragerd, Brendan—all the technicians who had hoped that solid work would make the Guard better, even while the old schemers plotted, and Loki destroyed.
Whatever happened, if it continued, the Guard would not be the same meddling force that the Tribunes had sculpted from the original model of temporal restraint formed by the ancient Triumvirate. I had seen to that. Yes, I had seen to that.
Freyda, the last of the Tribunes, sat on the balcony of her retreat in the hills overlooking Quest and pointed to the City of Immortals.
“Can’t you feel it?”
I glanced at Freyda, seated in her sculpted chair and gazing out at Quest from her protected terrace. So crisp she was, every white-blond hair in place, golden skin smoother than glowstone, black eyes glittering.
“Can’t you feel it?”
The change winds were boiling just under the horizon of now, their black chill building.
I nodded, and in that instant when the winds of time-change struck, everything went out of focus, from Freyda, the firs framing the view of Quest, to the Tower of Immortals rising from the central Square. And the wind of time howled; the icicles marched up my spine as I stood in the sun, the golden sun that hid behind the clouds that were not there; the very ground trembled; and black cracks in the fabric of the instant splintered across the sky.
The histories, the might-have-beens, the was and the were, the is and the are, warred upon each other. Through the black windows of time hung in front of us, battles never fought were fought, all at once, all together, and the new turning points of history and parahistory, of space and paraspace, were hammered out in the fires of paratime.
Freyda sat, her face frozen, for she did not see the windows of the brand-new past opening into the new now.
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