Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (36 page)

We stepped through the portal and into a cavern with rough stone walls, illuminated by sparse torchlight. The trip took all of a heartbeat. No hoofing it through the Hub. No traversing the pitch-black, formless landscape of a custom Way. This was an instantaneous portal, a direct flight, with no layovers and no hassles. Mega-cool. I’d seen the Crook of Winter pull off a similar trick while in my possession, but it was too dangerous to use, even if it was supremely convenient.

Still, I could sure as hell get used to travelling like this.

I was expecting a greeting of some sort from Lady Fate, but none met my ears.

I turned, taking in the yawning cave, before finally surveying the rustic space, which passed as Lady Fate’s living room. The walls of her personal quarters were rock, but the stone was smooth and polished, and a few pieces of needlework hung in yellowing frames. There was a quaint wooden table with a trio of stools, a well-worn rocking chair in one corner, a closed cupboard, and a great stone fireplace with a tremendous kettle resting over a cold fire. Place looked like the
Twilight Zone
version of
Little House on the Prairie
.

But the woman—or women, depending on your definition—we’d come to see was MIA.

“Bother,” Fortuna said with a sniff. “The Tapestry’s been giving us more and more problems lately. As more Seals are introduced into play, the less distinct the future becomes, and the harder the Tapestry is to accurately discern.” She frowned, tapping a foot restlessly. “She must be in the Archive. She’ll hate having you in there, but we don’t have time to waste. This way,” she said, striding away from the cozy living room area and deeper into the huge cave.

There was nothing for me to do but follow along like a lost puppy, sticking to Fortuna’s heels as she moved.

My boss beelined toward the far wall, and I was surprised to see a connecting tunnelway—a cleft in the wall, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding rock—leading deeper into the cave. At first, the hallway was dark as pitch, but as Fortuna led me deeper in, an uneasy glow, soft and cerulean, seeped from the stonework, cast by veins of blue deep within the earthen walls. In some ways, those branching lines of blue almost looked like actual veins, lying just under the surface of stone skin.

It wasn’t long before I spotted the first connecting hallway, just another passage of dark rock, cutting wildly into the heart of this place. A few more nondescript hallways followed—more of the same—but then came the rooms.

Holy shit, those rooms:

The first was a cavernous space shrouded in thick silver fog with some strange half-seen city looming in the distance. I couldn’t place the city, but it was some modern place with sleek skyscrapers of metal and glass. Except the city, wherever it was, had the look of desolation about it. The glass broken. Buildings charred. Cars, empty and abandoned, littered the streets. I had a sneaking suspicion it was some future reality under observation.

Another room let out into a lush meadow basking in the yellow glow of a massive crystal overhead. The meadow, an idyllic place for an afternoon picnic, was surrounded by towering trees with a fairy ring of wildflowers in the center. I wanted nothing more than to go lie in the center of that ring, to drop into the lush green grass and take a nap. At least I wanted that until I noticed the ground burble and roil beneath the fairy ring, as though some gargantuan worm waited just below the surface. Hungry and patient.

There were also rooms of a more mundane nature: modern-day offices, manned by a small platoon of lumpy, malformed, ashen-skinned men and women—none of them over four feet—with huge spidery hands and luminescent green eyes. Goblins, I’d reckon, but these were all dressed in business casual attire. Mostly, they ignored our presence, methodically going about their tasks, though a few did stop to offer Fortuna bows or curtseys of deep respect.

There were also storage rooms or maybe, more accurately, armories:

We strolled by a blocky cavern on the left filled with weapons from every conceivable century.

Gleaming blades in every shape and variety neatly lined a wall—Japanese katanas, curved Moorish scimitars, European bastard swords, Roman gladiuses, nimble rapiers with elaborate basket hilts, inward curving falcatas. Next to them sat battle-axes, maces, various polearms, and war hammers. But there was also a huge array of modern armaments. Shelves and shelves full of ’em. Civil war era muzzle-loaded muskets propped up against M4s and AKs. A table full of frag grenades and flashbangs hanging out with German stalk grenades from WWI. And handguns galore. Enough to arm a battalion of troops.

Not to mention bigger caliber bad boys that I would literally kill to get my hands on. Browning .50 caliber heavy machine guns. Beefy chain guns. A Milkor MGL lightweight automatic grenade launcher. And sitting in the back of the room, like the bad boy in the class, was a M777 Howitzer. A friggin’ Howitzer.

Another room on the right was identical to the armory, but instead filled with body armor ranging from segmented metal Roman
lorica
to modern tactical Kevlar.

“What in the holy mother of God is this place?” I asked, my hurts and aches momentarily forgotten as my inner mercenary rubbed his hands together in greedy glee. “I thought Lady Fate was some cloistered old broad living by herself in this dingy cave. But this? Friggin’ hell, what is all this?”

Fortuna looked at me over one shoulder as she walked, the ghost of a smile tracing her lips, one eyebrow cocked. “The Lady Wyrd has a strange sense of propriety. Whenever she entertains guests of the mortal variety, she likes to put on the dog and pony show with the rickety furniture and the black kettle—it reinforces a certain image she wishes to maintain. But behind the scene things are quite different. Though Lady Fate may seem a humble woman, a great trust has been bestowed upon her. She is not only protector of the Tapestry of Fate, she is its enforcer, which is no small thing.”

“Okay, I get that,” I replied. “But what’s with all the weapons and armor? Can’t exactly see Lady Fate leading a raid, and, no offense, but I have an equally hard time seeing you handling a fully automatic shotgun.”

“You might be surprised,” she said, a glint in her eye. “But you are right in that those weapons aren’t for us. We have a surprisingly large workforce, and we like to make sure our freelancers have whatever they require. Lady Fate oversees not only the spinning of the Tapestry but ensuring its integrity, and that means monitoring the time stream in both directions. Can’t have hostile agents mucking around in time, making unplanned changes. You’ve already met our senior officer, Sir Galahad—the fellow you and Ferraro saved in future Seattle. He patrols the Mists of Fate and guards the Repository on top of the Holy Grail.”

“Wait, that goody-two-shoes knight works directly for you?”

She shook her head left and right. “Technically he works for the White King, but Lady Fate is his immediate supervisor.”

“And he needs all those weapons?” I asked, suddenly revising my opinion of the douchey Sir Gal, who still definitely had a girl’s name. Anyone who got to fire off a friggin’ Howitzer had to be alright.

“No, not Sir Gal—he has
Varunastra
with him, after all, direct from the Lady of the Waters. But we have other freelancers who regularly take commissions, and if they take on an assignment in ancient Rome or Colonial America, they need to be properly armed.”

I had no words. I mean, what could you even say about something like that?

We walked on for a beat in silence, until, at last, we came to the end of the hallway and a drawn gate—dark wood, ancient brass fixtures, and runic symbols gleaming like radiant moonlight—preventing us from going further.

“This,” she said, wheeling about to give me a long, weighing look, “is the Archive. The resting place of the Tapestry. Few immortals and fewer mortals have ever gazed on it, so count yourself among the lucky.” She snorted and slapped at her thigh. “
Lucky
. I kill myself. Anyway, before we proceed, a word of caution. Lady Fate is most definitely inside”—she closed her eyes and canted her head, listening to some unheard thing—“so she’ll be in her true form, which can be …” Her lips curled into a fine, tight line. “Shocking if you aren’t prepared. Please don’t overreact. She can be a bit sensitive about her appearance.”

She turned and, without giving me further warning or instruction, grabbed my hand and pulled me
through
the gate.

TWENTY-NINE:

The Archive

The hulking gate didn’t open, didn’t budge, we just walked right through the damn thing—a sizzle like the static from a high energy line washed over me—and then we were standing on a rough stone platform hanging over a massive chasm like nothing I’d ever seen before. The unending abyss stretched out in every direction—a void unfathomably deep and incomprehensibly high that vanished into the horizon.

Huge boulders of craggy stone—small mountains in some cases—hung suspended in the air, completely unsupported, defying gravity by their nature. Running between the boulders, up and down for as far as I could see, was what had to be the Tapestry. Except it wasn’t even remotely like what I’d expected. It was a ginormous spider web, spun from radiant, golden silk, running from everywhere to everywhere. A manic tangle of strands without rhyme or reason, at least not to my eye.

Some of those strands were wispy and thin, only tenuously connected, while other cables of webbing were as thick as bridges.

A scuttle of movement near one of the boulders nearest me caught my attention; a heartbeat later Lady Wyrd scuttled into view. I wanted to vomit in my mouth.

The Three-Faced-Hag had never been much of a looker—spoiler alert, the name totally gives it away—but compared to the thing descending toward me, the Wyrd in human form was like a recently bloomed rose, sparkling in the early morning light, fresh with dew droplets dotting its petals. The first time I’d met Lady Fate, she’d appeared as a hunched, matronly woman sporting a homespun gown of drab brown. Pretty average, aside from the fact that she had three faces, one forward facing, the other two protruding like cancerous growths from either side of her head.

Gross to the max, am I right? Wrong-o.

The creature dropping toward me on a fat strand of silk beat that in spades.

A spider, big as an M1A1 tank, spooled toward us, its legs gold and red, oddly delicate, and studded with black hairs. Its monstrously oversized thorax was neon green, spotted with brilliant crimson, and bristled with gleaming spikes like golden K-Bars. And the head …
Shiiiit
. It had a giant maw with fangs the size of short curved swords, but instead of the customary arachnid eyes, the creature had three human faces bulging out.

The same three faces I’d seen the first time I’d met the Wyrd:

A young woman with creamy skin, high cheekbones, and flawless lips.

A middle-aged woman, cheeks too thin and hollow, worry wrinkles sprouting across her forehead, around her eyes, and at the corners of her mouth.

The last a wrinkled hag, a crone, with a horribly disfigured mouth, lopsided by stroke on one side.

None of the faces had eyes, just empty sockets, dark as the grave and murky as the future. Unfortunately, those eyeless faces reminded me too much of my own marred visage and I had to turn away, disrespect or no.

“Handmaiden,” the withered grandmother faced crooned, looking at Fortuna. “This is most unexpected. You were to deliver the brief to the young man away from our realm. Why is he here?”

Fortuna offered a curt apology and then launched into an immediate and concise explanation of the circumstances.

“We should’ve seen it, of course,” the grandmotherly face said, then offered a long sigh. “It’s this damn Tapestry,” she said, facing me. “The Seals are throwing everything off. Everything. And the longer this whole mess goes on, the more unclear things become. Soon we will be blind in truth, at least where you are concerned, young man.” She descended the rest of the way, her fat body lowering onto her crab-like legs, squat abdomen resting on the ground.

“Well, what’s done is done,” the Wyrd said, “but Fortuna, dear, ring ahead next time, won’t you?” The lovely young face frowned. “We’ve had designs on our Champion since first we laid eyes on him,” the maiden face said. “We’d so hoped to seduce him into a night of passionate lovemaking, but he’ll never be amicable to the idea. Not now. Not after seeing us in our true form.” She looked crestfallen.

I was crestfallen too, crestfallen because I still had one eye and had to watch this gigantic spider freak try and put the moves on me.

“No point wasting time,” the middle-aged face said directly to the younger. “We’ve got work to do, yet—much and much work to do—so let’s see to our Champion’s needs, then send him on his way, shall we? Have you given him the original brief, Fortuna?”

Lady Luck shook her head.