- Soonmot
- Dec 19, 2002
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Entrapta fucking loves robots
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Grimey Drawer
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quote:
Chapter
XXII
I closed the door behind me. Stepped into the hallway. A passing fairy nodded at me, the respectful nod due to a
wounded fighter. What was I doing? Open the gate. Drop the drawbridge.
Why?
Um...
Open the gate, drop the drawbridge.
The monster whispering in my ear. But Etain was no monster. Etain was not Etain.
That damned David. Freaking glory dog, that's what he was. Him and Jalil working together to cut me out. Laughing at me behind my back.
Jalil wanted Etain. Or was it David? One of them. Both of them? Etain and April and everyone.
Down the hall. Down the turning, turning stairs. Like Sleeping Beauty's castle. I'm Sleeping Beauty, thats what it is,
I'm sleeping, way down here inside my own brain. My sword. I was wearing the sword old King Camulos had given me.
What was going to happen to the king and to Goewynne?
Oh, it would be okay. Senna would be decent to them. She wasn't going to hurt anyone, not the monster, not the monster Senna.
Out into the courtyard. Weird, fresh air. Fresh cold night air. First fresh night air in a long time. It was good to be out of the hospital.
Still a little shaky, though. Shaky. Weak. Walking like an action figure, stiff, unnatural.
Like a puppet.
Across the courtyard. There was the gate, massive timbers bound with iron straps. Two things: the inner gate and the drawbridge beyond it. Had to open both.
If Keith and the Sennites just made it across the drawbridge but ran into a locked gate, they were screwed. There was a narrow passage between the drawbridge and the inner gate, high walls looming over it all, firing positions everywhere. Come in the drawbridge and get held up by the inner gate, you were toast: crammed into a space twenty feet long and six feet wide with fairy archers above you, pouring arrows into you. Or worse, some of Jalil's acid bath.
It had to be both or Keith couldn't come in. But if they were both open, that would be okay. Then the little psycho could come in, run through the gauntlet of arrows. Keith. Senna. It was Senna. Senna was Etain and Etain loved me, wanted me to save her.
The gate. A fairy and a man on guard. Had to take out the fairy first. Take him by surprise, otherwise he'd be too fast. Then the man. The fairy, then the man. How? If I drew my sword wouldn't they freak? What was I supposed to do, take them both on? That wasn't me, man. Not me, man.
Don't be afraid, Christopher, it's all going to be fine. Etain will be yours. Happy. Everything as it should be.
The man was looking at me. Bored. A guard pulling late-night duty.
"Hi," I said. "Hey, you're probably a real expert and me, I don't know anything about swords. What's the handle part
thing here called, this part?"
I drew my sword hesitantly, unsure, an amateur handling a complex tool. The soldier smiled, smug and superior. The fairy ignored us both.
I drew and slammed the handle directly back into the fairy's face. Then I swung the blade in an arc, aiming for the man's neck, but he was quick.
He jumped back and the blade sliced him across the chest, right through the leather jerkin, biting flesh and spraying blood.
The fairy was staggered. The man just surprised. He was trying for his own sword. I kicked him where no man wants to be kicked. I swung my sword pommel again and caught him hard on the side of the head. Down went the Fiannan. I spun and stabbed at the fairy and the blade point hit bone. The fairy fell on his back and I could see he was out cold.
"Let's see David do any better than that," I crowed, wishing Etain were there to see how well I'd done; man, she'd be proud.
The gate's crossbar was heavy. Like a tree. I had to crouch under it and use my legs to lift. Slide it away. Slide and heave till it toppled off. It still blocked the left gate, but I'd be able to open the right door all right. I pulled with all my strength and the gate swung inward.
Now, there, a big pulley holding the spooled rope. The rope taut up to the guide that led it to the drawbridge.
"Who goes there?" a man's voice yelled from above, up on the wall.
I swung my sword hard and sliced through the rope.
"Alarm! Alarm! To the gate! Alarm!" A spear flew and nicked my left arm and stuck into the ground and the drawbridge didn't drop, it still stood, balanced. I ran straight at it, yelling, hit it with all my weight and bounced back.
I landed on my back, winded. The drawbridge creaked and slowly, slowly, then faster, fell away. I rolled over, winded,
on hands and knees, tried to stand, tried to get up, saw a rush of fairies rushing at me, zooming, blurring.
Then behind me the sharp sounds of the old world. Pop. Pop. PopPopPopPop. Red flowers appeared in the fairies' chests and they fell.
I turned, bleary, lost now that I'd done all I'd been told to do, confused. I caught a Doc Marten in the head.
I was in the shower: "No!" Staggered back against the cool tile, rocked, uncomprehending. CNN Breaking News:
Christopher bewitched by Senna. Christopher gets everyone killed.
"No way, no way." I denied it, but no way to deny it.
Everworld me was there with an update. Everworld me had been taken over by Senna, a wholly owned subsidiary.
But not real-world Christopher. The fuzziness, the confusion, none of it affected me now. Now I could see it all with perfect clarity.
I had handed victory to Senna. She would kill us all. David and Jalil and April. And Goewynne and the king. And all the brave Fianna and the fairies and the druids, too.
And Etain.
I turned off the water, numb. What could I do? What had I done? What could I do now? I wrapped a towel around myself and ran for the phone. I grabbed it and dialed David's number. Ring. Ring. Someone picked it up. Not David. My brother picking up the extension.
"Dammit, get the hell off the phone right now or I'll beat you till you can't walk!" I screamed, panicked, hysterical. I couldn't be the cause of all those deaths, no, no, I couldn't be the one, I couldn't make Etain die. Had to be some way.
Ring. Ring.
"Levin residence, talk to me." David!
"It's Christopher."
"Yeah?"
"David. David, man. David, I..." All at once I was sobbing, unable to control my voice.
"Calm down, Christopher. Take a breath."
I took a breath. Took another. "I screwed everyone, David. Senna got to me. I opened the gate. Senna got to me. I let Keith into the castle, David."
"What?"
"David, man, they're in. They're in the castle."
A long pause. Then, "Yeah, they are," David said. "Yeah. Something happened. I'm down, Christopher."
David had just had his own breaking news. Everworld David was down, at least unconscious. Maybe dying. And now, thanks to my own recent close call, we knew what for so long we'd wondered about : Death in Everworld was death all the way around.
Call-waiting on David's line.
"I better get that," he said grimly.
He clicked over to the other line and I waited, trying to breathe, waiting to fade, waiting few death to reach me across the gap.
A long wait. Then David was back.
"That was Jalil. He was in and out. Unconscious, but then he thinks maybe he regained consciousness, he doesn't know for sure. You know how it is."
"Yeah. Jesus, David. I'm sorry. She was there in my room. I thought she was Etain. I mean, she was Etain. She got to me."
I know how it is, Christopher. No one knows better than me. Jalil says it looks bad. He doesn't know what happened to either of us. Its chaos over there."
"April?"
"She hasn't called."
"So maybe she's fine."
"Or dead," David said. "Don't give up. Don't wimp out on me."
I realized I was crying into the phone and that David could hear me.
"Let's go see Brigid," he said.
"Okay, man. I'm okay. I'm okay."
"I'll be there in five."
And I guess I was there when he drove up, I guess because Everworld me had just woken up in a world of hurt.
Like realistically based on having an entire other book left, I knew Christopher would open the gate, but I kept hoping he'd be stopped.
quote:
Chapter
XXIII
I was alive, but felt like I'd rather not be.
I was lying on my side. A dead man was sprawled beside me. Two dead fairies, one draped right across me. Dead
people all around. They thought I was dead. I'd been dragged and dumped with the dead bodies. And just then a druid and a servant from the castle came shuffling along carrying another dead man. They were supervised by a jeering, swaggering punk I'd never seen before. He had a Kalashnikov propped on his hip. He was eating a roll of some kind.
Everything was lit by fire. Night had fallen, but the village was burning, and the glow of orange reached up to dim the stars, I closed my eyes to slits. I felt the thud as the body was slung toward me. I saw another of Senna's boys, a big bruiser of a guy, head scraped bald, tattooed, a pair of automatic pistols in a leather belt, a machine pistol in his left hand, dragging a dead fairy along by the hair.
The punk said, "Hey, compadre, you ain't gotta be carrying them yourself. Get a couple of the prisoners to do it."
"The little ones don't weigh much," the big man said.
"No, but they're fast," the punk said. Then, with a laugh added, "When they're alive. Ha-ha-na, not too fast now."
The two of them walked off laughing at this wit and embellishing the joke further. Variations on the theme of "dead
people are slow."
I figured now was the time.
I felt for my sword. Gone. But the nearest fairy still carried his sword, more like a dagger, really. I slid it from his belt,
whispering an apology for robbing the dead. I slithered across the corpses, sick at heart, sick in every way, crawled and slithered across the drawbridge. If I was seen I'd have to run. Outrun bullets. No problem. But better than waiting around till someone noticed I wasn't exactly dead.
No popopop. No explosion of pain in my back. I got up and ran. Ran and ran, down through the burning town, gagging on the swirling smoke. I tripped over a charred body, got up and kept running. I was crying from smoke and weak rage. What was happening back up in the castle? What were Senna's monsters doing to my friends and Etain?
One thing was sure: David was either dead or unconscious. Couldn't pawn this off on David. Not his turn to play hero, not this time. This was on me. But what the hell was I going to do? No gun, no army, nothing but a knife.
This was so screwed up. And it was my fault. I should have been able to resist Senna. Should have been able to keep her from playing with my mind. All the times I'd made fun of David for being her sock puppet. And now whose hand was up my butt? I was the new star of Senna's very own Sesame Street.
I saw a column of men approaching and ducked into a black, charred, smoking alley between two hollowed-out
buildings. A dozen men, real-worlders, loaded up with guns. They were moving in a parody of military style, making the moves they'd learned from watching too many war movies. A dozen guys playing out their Action Hero Schwarzenegger fantasies, swaggering, poking guns here and there, imagining themselves on film, no doubt playing the background music in their heads.
Easy to ridicule them. But their guns were real enough.
One guy seemed to be in charge, a crew-cutted, beer-gutted guy of fifty who looked like the old Navy guy on Survivor. He was yelling orders the others occasionally heeded, "Secure that doorway! Cover that alley!"
Others were marveling aloud: at the castle, at the destruction, at all the cool burning, at the dead men and women.
At the dead fairies.
I didn't have the energy to run and hide anymore. I had the energy to breathe, that was about it. Fortunately, these weren't real soldiers. Some imagined movement down the street set them all to firing wildly and yahooing. Then they were past, and I wasn't dead.
So, Senna was still bringing in more men. How? Wasn't she in the castle? These guys had come up from the countryside to join the party, Johnny-come-latelies to the big party. The gateway must still be open.
Senna was back out there, out there in the countryside. Why? Had the ring of druid stones held some magic she could use? Was she really back there in that weird little dell? Shouldn't Queen Senna be in the castle?
No, she had to bring in more men. That was her top priority: She was in a hurry. Why? Because it wasn't over, that's
why. She was in a hurry to raise forces. She was expecting trouble. Not from us, we were beat, but from someone.
Merlin? Loki?
The opening of the gateway would send shivers through all the powers of Everworld. Brigid had said that. Loki would know. Ka Anor would know. Huitzilopoctli and Hel and Zeus and Athena and Neptune, they would all know. They were all on the same psychic-magic e-mail list.
But none of them would suspect what was really happening. It wouldn't occur to them any more than it had occurred to us, that the traffic through the gate was Chicago- style: one-way the wrong way. One way out. One solution, that was clear: Senna had to be stopped. Permanently. The monster I used to date had to be stopped.
No problem, Christopher, I thought. After all, you have a fairy sword, and what's Senna got, aside from magic powers and a bunch of guys with Kalashnikovs?
What should I do? What should I do? Go to the druid stones. Maybe because I could do something to stop her. Or maybe because her enchantment was still strong and I was like some low-level vampire drawn inexorably to the boss vampire. I couldn't even trust my own motives.
And anyway, I knew this: I wasn't going to kill her. Not my thing, you know, killing. It was different if someone was attacking you directly, trying to kill you. Then, in the absence of cops or troops or even a vice principal, you had to defend yourself, no other way. But to lie in wait for Senna and jump out from behind a tree and stick my fairy sword into her? Not me, and not anyone I wanted to hang around with.
Besides, Brigid had said it, right? No one was going to kill Senna.
Still all and all, there I was, walking down the too-well- trodden path like a man with a plan. Heading for the dell. So,
like I say, I had to question my own motives. Senna's hook was still in me: I was a trout and all she had to do was reel me in and fry me up in the pan.
Out into the countryside. Out into stone-fence and scruffy- tree country. The moon was at the quarter and sliding in and out of the clouds. ,
"What word, stranger?" a voice asked. A voice in the darkness.
I jumped approximately my own height.
"Peace, brother," the voice said. "Or if not peace, then at least have no fear of me."
When I had swallowed my heart again I peered into the darkness and saw a cloak and a beard. The face was obscured. But the voice was familiar.
"Merlin? Is that you, man?"
"Merlin indeed," he said.
"Yeah? How do I know you're not Senna pretending to be Merlin?"
The wizard laughed softly. "You have begun to learn the ways of Everworld, Christopher."
"Yeah," I said. "But that's not what's up right now, man. What's happening right now is that Everworld is learning the
ways of the real world."
He stepped closer. "The witch has opened the gateway. This I know."
"She's importing, not exporting," I said. "Senna's bringing over well-armed guys from the real world. Guns. Lots of guns. You want the short version? Lorg the giant? Dead. MacCool? Dead. Pretty much all the local Fianna are dead. Most of King Cam's fairies? Dead. My friends and Goewynne and Etain and all, I don't know, but Senna's people have burned the town and taken the castle and we're all pretty well screwed. So, what's new with you, Merlin?"
He stroked his beard and considered. "MacCool is dead, then? That is a terrible blow."
I was still not in the mood to hear how great MacCool was.
"MacCool didn't like to listen. He thought he knew what was what, and he ended up all full of holes."
Merlin looked up sharply. He looked like he might just decide to put some magic whim-wham on me to teach me not to back-talk him. Then his expression changed.
"Come. I will listen," he said.
quote:
Chapter
XXIV
So we sat down well off the road and damned if Merlin didn't brew up a pot of tea. Made himself a little fire out of
damp twigs that shouldn't burn and whipped a little teapot out of his rucksack. It was a Yoda moment. I expected him to start talking backward and moving like a Muppet. "Screwed we are, yes."
But the old wizard didn't get to be an old wizard by being stupid. He clammed up and let me pour out my whole tale of woe. And boy, did I pour. I gave it all to him.
He gave me some tea.
When I was done he did something that endeared him to me: He puffed out his cheeks and shook his head and said, "It looks bad."
Yes, indeed, it looked bad,
"It may be that the witch's power has grown too great for me to counter. She has learned much. She has great natural talents. And, of course, her armed men give her very great power."
"But you have it worked out, right?" I said. "I mean, you know how to stop her, right?"
He shook his head and made a slight, rueful smile. "No. Some of what you tell me, I knew already. A mutual friend on the other side, in what you call the real world, had alerted me to hurry."
"Brigid?"
Merlin nodded. "Yes, Brigid has done more for her people than will ever be known. Her powers are limited in the old
world, your world, but she has over these many centuries reached across the barrier to defend her people."
"Yeah, we noticed Ireland is doing a little better than the rest of Everworld."
"It is in large part..." He stopped. Froze. Seemed to be listening to something far off. "The gateway has closed."
I nodded. "I guess she's brought over all the guys she can find."
Merlin dumped out the last of the tea and made me give him back my cup. Then he stood up. "I can allow us to pass among them, but I do not know the form of them. I do not know their costume."
It took me a minute to get that. "What? You're talking the shape-shifting thing?"
"It is not shape-shifting, my young friend. It is mere illusion. The ignorant call it shape-shifting. The shift is only in their minds. But I must know the look of these armed men in order to allow us to pass among them."
"Us?"
"Us."
"You can do it to me, too?"
"I could make you appear to be a troll or a wolf or a wench," Merlin said, not without some cockiness.
"Yeah? Could you make me appear to be somewhere else?"
No answer.
I sighed. This was a disturbing idea, but I didn't see how I could decently weasel out of it. So I set about telling Merlin how to dress the part of a gun nut.
I drew pictures in the dirt. I painted word pictures. And when it was all done the old man turned himself into an extra
from a Mad Max movie.
"A little less flamboyant, maybe," I suggested. "The pants should be looser. Longer. The boots are black, not brown."
He adjusted.
"And the gun... well, it looks too smooth. You need more, I don't know, like slots and stuff. You know what, it'll pass in the dark, and then you can adjust when you see the actual guys."
"Yes, that is what we shall do," he said, again with a not- too-subtle emphasis on "we."
Then he did a kind of cool little trick: He swirled his hand in a tall oval, and there, shimmering, hanging in the air, was a mirror. In the mirror, a reasonably convincing version of a skinhead. I ran my hand over my scalp. Weird. I could feel hair, but in the mirror I saw shaved scalp. In my hands I cradled a gun I couldn't actually feel. Air gun.
"A tattoo," I suggested. "Here, on my arm. A dragon swirled around a Confederate battle flag and the words 'Born to Raise Hell.'"
The tattoo appeared, although the flag in question was closer to the British flag.
"Good enough. Now what?"
"We wait," Merlin said. "They are coming."
Sure enough, when I looked down the road I saw a ragged line of torches.
"Shouldn't we hide?"
"No. We should merely be silent."
They came on, and we stood there in plain view, but apparently invisible. They came on, maybe twenty men, all
armed to the teeth and favoring the camouflage look. They were singing as they went, and I kid you not, they were singing "Dixie."
"Dixie." A bunch of guys from Chicago, for God's sake, singing "Dixie" like they were somehow the natural heirs of
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the jackasses. And there was Senna at their head. Senna but not Senna.
This was an enhanced Senna. Senna on steroids. The action figure of Senna. She had turned herself into the Frank Frazetta version of Senna: rippling muscles and costume straight out of some maladjusted comic-book reader's sadomasochistic fantasy. She was swaggering in a very un-Senna sort of way. Wearing a sword and a winged opera helmet. A Valkyrie, I realized. We'd seen the actual Valkyries, and she had copied their look.
I almost giggled. I mean, come on: Even in Everworld there should be some kind of a limit on fashion choices. But I guess she was giving the troops what they wanted: some overblown, Edgar Rice Burroughs heroine. Big Babes on
Mars.
She came nearer, lit by high-held torches, keeping step with the shouted, defiant song, high on her own power, pumped both physically and psychologically.
The illusory gun I was holding changed subtly as Merlin saw some of the real thing. Senna came level with us. A frown. A look of uncertainty in her eyes. She felt our presence. She was going to kill me. She was going, I swear to God, going to kill us, going to see us, reach right over and kill me.
I held my breath. Glanced nervously at Merlin. He was watching Senna, eyes glittering, focused. He didn't look too
relaxed himself. Then Senna shook off her doubts and marched on. The column passed by and at the end, we stepped onto the road joining the column. We were visible now. The guy immediately ahead of us turned and gave us a suspicious look from under the brim of his Wehrmacht cap. Merlin smiled at the guy and the guy went kind of blank and then nodded, like we'd known each other all along.
Merlin went to work with shocking efficiency. He stepped up behind Wehrmacht Cap and calmly cut his throat. I had to cover my mouth to stifle the surprised yelp. Merlin bent over the body, yanked the guy's Uzi away, and handed it to me. "I take it we need this instrument?" he said.
I nodded and tried not to think about what I'd gotten myself into. "I need the guy's ammo belt, too," I said.
Now I was carrying a real weapon, not an illusion. That was comforting. Not real comforting, but all in all, if you're going to end up in a gun fight you want to avoid carrying an imaginary weapon. Pointing your finger and going, "Bang! Bang!" is not all that effective.
We marched on our frolicking way: 'Roid-Senna in the lead. Merlin and me in the rear, and in between twenty or so living proofs that white people aren't really superior. Through the countryside. Into the town, mostly charred rubble now. Over the bodies. Up the hill to the castle. In the gate.
And there it was, the scene Senna must have dreamed about for a long time: The courtyard was filled with her soldiers, all cheering wildly at her entrance. They lined the walls of the courtyard and the tops of the walls, poised atop the crenellations, many if not most holding torches. How many? At least fifty, seventy-five with our contingent added. It seemed like more. All armed to the teeth.
In the center of the courtyard a dozen people stood staggering under the weight of massive chains. David, Jalil, King Camulos, Fios, Goewynne, a handful of druids I didn't know, and Etain.
The chains were looped around legs and waists, over shoulders, around necks. Here and there massive, primitive locks had been placed. The chain links were each big enough to stick your hand through. The chains weighed a ton. Etain was on her knees, unable to carry the weight, her head bowed low. Her clothes were ripped, shredded. Goewynne had been hit. Her face was bruised. The king was badly wounded, clutching his side, blood seeping from a gut wound. A blue druid, a young guy with an incongruously full beard and strange green eyes, was trying to help stem the flow of royal blood.
David was a mess. His own mother wouldn't have recognized him. He'd been professionally beaten. One eye was
closed by a knot the size of a lemon. Jalil wasn't much better off. April was nowhere to be seen. That was the worst of it, because although seeing them like this made me burn, not seeing April, not knowing what had happened to her, or was happening to her, that was worse still.
I felt Merlin's hand on my arm. Restraining me. He looked at me with eyes that were not his own, and shook his head slowly. I unclenched my fists. Forced myself to breathe. Loosened the finger that had wrapped around the Uzi's trigger.
"Silence!" Senna roared.
The yelping and hollering and yeehahing and sieg-heiling calmed down. An expectant pause.
"Hello, David. Hello, Jalil," she said in a sneering voice intended to reach most of her troops.
No answer. The crowd leaned forward expectantly. They wanted to see what the Great One was going to do. I guessed that most of these guys didn't really know what they'd gotten themselves into, or who, exactly, they were following.
"Nothing to say, David?" Senna demanded.
David just looked at her.
Keith stepped up behind him and nailed him in the kidneys with his rifle butt. He went down, gasping for breath, an
involuntary whimper of pain escaping. But then he levered himself back up, fighting the pain and the weight of his chains.
"Where are the other two?" Senna demanded in a hiss of a voice.
The question was directed at a guy I hadn't noticed before: a skinhead wearing a muscle T-shirt over plenty of muscle.
Muscle Shirt looked uncertain. "What other two, Great One?"
"April and Christopher," she said. "Where are they?"
"The uh... the blond guy, that's Christopher, right?" Muscle Shirt stammered. "He got killed. He's... the body is right over, you know, Great One, with the other bodies."
"Bring it here. I want to see it," Senna ordered.
This ought to be good, I thought. A bunch of toadies raced off to rummage through the grisly heap of bodies by the gate. I was pretty sure they weren't going to find my body. Senna waited impatiently, staring holes through Muscle
Shirt. The flunkies returned empty-handed.
Senna drew her lips back in a feral snarl I'd never seen before. "You let Christopher escape. Well, that's okay, I'll let that go. He's irrelevant. But April... that's a different matter entirely. Where is my favorite half sister?"
Muscle Shirt looked around like someone else might come forward to take the blame. Oddly enough, no one volunteered.
I spotted Keith in the crowd. He was carefully looking down at the ground.
"No April," Senna said regretfully. "And yet, my orders were clear: At all costs get the four real-worlders. Despite this, I see only half of them here. Well, half a failure earns half a punishment."
She waved her Demi Moore arms very theatrically, and instantly Muscle Shirt's body burst into flames. No, only half. He burned only on his left side. Burned as if someone had poured lighter fluid all over him and struck a match. He screamed and flapped at himself as every glittering eye gazed on in horror and fascination. Muscle Shirt's flesh crisped and peeled like pork cracklings in the barbecue.
Senna was burning a man alive.
116 of 128, we finish tomorrow.
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