Broken Angels (33 page)

“He’s awake?” Robert asked.

It was normal for the chairman to be awake at this hour, but unusual for the toymaker. Robert had planned on entering the workshop on his own, and leaving a note behind when he left.

“Yeah,” Ava said, “but—”

“Thanks.”

Robert ran down the hall with Ava close behind. He’d simply have to ask for what he wanted and refuse to accept a negative response.

Zel almost looked as if he’d been expecting them. “Welcome back, Miss Darden. Robert, always a pleasure.”

“It would please me,” Robert said, “if I could borrow Darryl’s corresq.”

“Oh?” Zel said. “But it’s not finished yet.”

“It doesn’t need to be,” Robert said. “Whatever modifications you’re making can wait. I can use it fine just the way it is.”

“And I’d like to borrow the bow,” Ava said with a raised voice.

Zel and Robert both looked at her.

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to go out in the field unarmed this time. I’d rather just have to use my eyes for searching and watching.”

Zel looked at Robert, who only shrugged.

The toymaker pulled the bow down from its wall rack and said, “I presume you two are going out to try to find Darryl. Guess it’s appropriate you’re going armed with toys made for him.”

“It’ll be more appropriate to hand them back to him,” Robert said while scanning the workshop table for other devices he might like to borrow, “after we bring him back alive.”

“Yes,” Zel said, “and when you bring him back, Vince may have his project finished.”

Robert looked from the handheld laser he’d picked up to Zel. “What project?”

“The morning he left here, Darryl asked Vince to work on some kind of map for him.”

“What kind?” Robert asked.

Zel glanced at Ava. “I don’t know. All I do know is that Vince has been working on it feverishly since the alert about Darryl went out.”

“I’ve got to go see him,” Robert said. “Is he up?”

Zel nodded as Ava said, “I’ll come with you.”

“I still need to tell you how the bow works, Miss Darden.”

“I’ll come back for you, Ava,” Robert said over his shoulder while hustling through the door. “Promise.”

Vince was on his way out of his office and, after almost bumping into him, was startled to see Robert.

“Sorry to bother you, sir, but…Darryl’s missing.”

“I’ve heard,” Vince said. “I was just on my way to discuss the matter with Adam.”

“I heard you were working on some kind of map for him,” Robert said. “Can I see it, please?”

“Well, it’s not exactly finished,” Vince said as Robert followed him into his office.

“How did it start?” Robert asked.

Vince explained the project, giving Robert the overview Darryl had given him.

“So far,” Vince said, “it’s not much.”

“It’s enough for me,” Robert said as he ran his eye over the map. “Can I borrow this?”

“I have a copy.”

“Thank you, sir. And I realize Darryl came to you with this in confidence—”

“Yes, Robert,” Vince said with a weary smile, “and you borrowing it will also remain in my confidence.”

Robert put the map in his jacket’s inner pocket, thanked Vince again, and left the office. Ava was waiting for him outside the door. She was holding the crystalline bow. To Robert it looked natural in her hands, as if she’d been using it for years.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Even more than before,” he said. “Come on, let’s go for a ride.”

SEVENTEEN

Darryl flew as fast as his wings would carry him in Xyn, at nearly the speed of light. VanJill maintained a steady lead ahead of him— incredibly far, but still within range of Darryl’s far-reaching sight.

They flew through a burning blue, a purifying azure. That’s how, in a flickering moment of reflection, Darryl described it. Nothing but blue in every direction—he had to follow VanJill just to ensure he was actually going anywhere. Darryl had intuited the purifying aspect of the flight. There was no wind in this section of Xyn, but he felt breezes stirring and blowing within his soul, through passageways that would’ve been occupied, on Reality’s surface, by his body’s bones. He was sure this feeling, this process—whatever it was—was toward his overall betterment.

The pole-pet had said nothing to him beyond, “Come.” After that instruction, VanJill had spread its parti-colored wings and taken flight. Darryl had instinctually done the same. Harboring his own pole-pet seemed to give him certain advantages in the realm. Nothing, however, had given Darryl the advantage of being prepared for the sights he saw when—out of the blue—they entered a blinding blizzard.

Darryl lost sight of VanJill, but he tried to keep moving in the same direction he had been. It was difficult. The blizzard was a furious whirl of segues and incongruities: a storm of circuit boards that weren’t stiff boards, but rather white handkerchiefs imprinted with circuitous designs sparkling and crackling with blue sparks and green noises. The intricate cloths flew and waved like flags before turning into dead, gray leaves that displayed throbbing veins of sunshine-yellow and bloody-blue liquids. He saw what looked like leaves blowing in the currents of the angriest gusts until they all color-switched into swatches representing every hue imaginable and imprinted with an unending array of incomprehensible symbols.

The whole frenzied experience was like traveling through curtains and veils that can warp space and time and sense.

VanJill and Darryl emerged from this grotesque storm into the storm’s eye. They stopped and hovered, staring at a sight that could only be hidden at the center of such a bizarre blizzard.

The decapitated giant was standing on a frozen lake at least the size of Lake Superior. Maybe. Darryl always had trouble judging the true size of objects in XynKroma. He had no trouble judging gender, but this nude giant, whose jade-hued body was modeled generically after a human’s, showed no sexual organs, nothing to distinguish it as tending toward a male or a female. Its head didn’t help Darryl reach a conclusion. Gone, but not forgotten, it had been skinned down to a crystalline skull, a prism on which could be seen nothing but broken light. The skull was being held at the end of an arm stretching rightward, dangling by two short tangles of red-and-golden hair. The hair had been braided in such a way as to resemble chains. Three misshapen spheres were in the headless giant’s left hand, at the end of the other outstretched arm. They hovered above the upturned palm and seemed like giant grapes, already well on their way toward devolving into giant raisins, or evolving into giant, wrinkly brains. The spheres’ skins were translucent, and colorful gemstones could be seen at the core of each— an emerald was in one, a red ruby in another, and amethyst in the third.

“Her prison hangs in its right hand,” VanJill said as a bubble spelled its words.

“Her?” Darryl asked when the bubble popped. “The giant’s?”

“The Beautiful One. Her soul is inside, waiting to be rescued by one worthy.”

“Me, huh?”

“If you so believe.”

“And I’m guessing,” Darryl said, “no, I’m
believing
that prison there is full of all sorts of traps waiting to trip me up once I’m inside.”

“No,” VanJill said. “If you make it into the skull, you will find and deliver freedom.”

If ? Darryl looked over the scene again, this time focusing on all the free-floating rectangles. Each projected a ghost-like image of one of many different varieties of flowers. There were seventy-eight rectangles, he just knew without counting. Each was silvery white on the image-projecting side and ash-blackish on the other. They surrounded the giant from the waist up, the silvery sides facing outward. Darryl imagined the giant had once been wearing armor that had come undone; its pieces fragmented and were gradually floating away from the body, much like Earth’s moon was slowly floating away from its source. But the flowers comprising the holographic garden only puzzled him.

“This environment has changed immensely since The Beautiful One’s soul was imprisoned,” VanJill said. “She changed it, using the sheer strength of her will, trying to get free. This is the result.”

Darryl looked down below the giant’s waist, all the way down to the lake. Trees surrounded it on every side.

“She is still imprisoned,” VanJill said, “and she is still being guarded, but at least she managed to kill all of the mares and other equine monsters her jailor conjured. Your chances are greater than ever. But, in the end, your success depends on you.”

Darryl knew the danger was in the rectangles, the two dimensional cards, each of which was twice his soul’s size. But he had no strategy. He only knew what he needed to do. Darryl flexed and flapped his wings, and he flew straight toward the hanging skull.

Darryl didn’t see them emerging. They were so swift—moving, shifting, and striking faster than thought, coming at him at once from all sides, stinging his shoulders and wings, rendering him helpless. Darryl knew his attackers had jumped out of the cards, but he hardly saw them. Next thing he knew, his face and eyes were pointed toward his new uninviting destination: a section of the tightly packed cluster of trees surrounding the frozen lake.

It seemed to take him an hour or more to fall; gravity was fickle in Xyn, when it played a role at all. While he fell, and the breezes within the hollows of his soul turned themselves into several tiny hurricanes, Darryl thought about everything that had happened over the last few days, and about everything that had brought him to this scenario. Memories could be worse than any blade or bullet.

His soul crashed through the trees, breaking branches, bringing down a bewildering variety of leaves and fruit, until he hit the ground. Hard. But he was neither broken nor buried. Not yet. He was certainly in pain, but it was nothing like the level of pain he’d experienced on the way down, or even in the dark room on Reality’s surface.

Darryl stirred. When he felt ready and able, rather than stand, he stretched his wings and floated, rising to hover just above the treetops. He stayed there for a while, gazing up toward where he’d been stung.

As well as his vision usually worked on Reality’s surface, in XynK-roma that vision might be enhanced or diminished depending on where he was and in what condition. At the moment, his eyes were operating like the most powerful telescopes.

VanJill was nowhere in sight. Darryl only saw the giant, the floating rectangles, and the seventy-eight beings that had come out of them. Comprised of a wide variety of green lights and black shadows, the beings were shaped like human women, nude except for the serpent-like organisms writhing, vining, and twisting about their bodies. Out of the card-garden of ghostly flowers, emerged seventy-eight evil Eves.

Seventy-eight women had caused him to begin this journey, and now seventy-eight stood in his way…Seventy-eight things that looked like women, but actually weren’t. They were just symbols, killer metaphors. It was a taunt. It was supposed to be a deterrent. After what he’d been through in the dark room, after successfully answering the leviathan’s riddle, this was supposed to scare and stop him; his drudged-up memories were supposed to freeze him.

It wasn’t going to happen. He knew what he had to do to make his way through.

Dare All, he thought, and Spare None.

He flexed his wings and flew, fast as lightning, straight as an arrow, as he ceded temporary control over his reflexes, over every possible voluntary and involuntary movement of his soul, to his pole-pet Sprat, the one that was of this realm and well-adapted to it.

Although an adroit manipulator of light on Reality’s surface, Darryl couldn’t figure how he might defeat beings comprised entirely of it at this level; so Sprat made the jump, not settling on a sure-fire way to control the beings, but on a definite way to annihilate them. As he flew, the feathers of Darryl’s wings converted into razor-sharp shards of crystal. Each shard was to act as a prism, capturing light, breaking it apart, and holding it until extinguished.

When the seventy-eight phantasmal warriors converged on him, Darryl threw punches and kicks to get them where he wanted them while his wings performed multiple tasks: keeping his soul afloat, maneuvering his soul out of harm’s way, and slashing through his attackers’ bodies.

It was a massacre without the mess of blood or the echoes of screams. The warriors fought with skill, with vigor and, it seemed, with a purpose higher than simply keeping Darryl away from the skull-prison. But Darryl was relentless. He engaged them all as if he were just a shade away from berserk.

When it was all over, he didn’t even pause to survey the results. He just flexed his wings and darted for one of the eyeholes in the skull, ready to take on whatever opponents might be waiting inside.

But there were none. There was nothing inside the cavernous skull except a lump of something floating in the exact center of all the otherwise empty space. Darryl approached it with caution.

He determined as he got closer that the hovering lump was nothing other than frozen light, sculpted to resemble the body of Marie-Lydia McGillis. Dark green, leafy weeds covered it in parts near the torso and strangled it in sections of the neck, arms, and legs; otherwise the opaque ice-light sculpture had the hue of an even-toned frost. Darryl stared at the head of the frosty figure, perplexed as to why it didn’t move. It gave him a blank, unblinking stare in return.