THE HALF-BUILT TOWER was untouched. So were the buildings around it, although they had been built by the ConFeds without time-warping the stones. They had used the duplicator, which Wryan and I had installed in the subbasement of the tower, for production of the building materials.
At the time, Odin Thor had complained about having to carry the stones and braces up the long ramp. The complaints about that hadn’t resumed with the rebuilding.
A gaggle of summer lilies peered from the small flower bed planted by Jianne, one of the younger divers. Deric had insisted on flower beds around the tower. So we had flower beds. I stopped on the steps leading to the uncompleted south portal to look out at Mount Persnol, noting the too-frequent circular patches of brown on the lower slopes, wondering how many years before the vegetation erased the scars.
From the tower, I could not see where Camp Persnol had been, nor where the ill-fated non-divers’ village had been. Both were gone, just a few stone walls rising from brown dust and rock.
“Sammis?” Amenda, fragile-looking in divers’ blacks, appeared at the foot of the steps.
Two ConFeds, sweating in the sunlight as they toiled on the new ConFed administration building across the open space that was planned for a square by Deric, stopped and watched. One made an obscure sign, a ward against evil. The other laughed at him and said something, drawing an imaginary weapon, waving it in our direction. They both laughed.
“Yes.” I waited for Amenda, although I was really waiting for Wryan.
She looked overhead. “It’s … impressive …”
I thought so, too. For all his finickiness, Deric understood something about architecture. Either that or he knew where to find good design. I didn’t much care which as long as the results were good.
“The crystal lattices work …”
“Good.” I nodded. She had taken over the library functions after Arlean had died. The lattices were a Ydrisian invention for storing information, practically indestructible and with unlimited capacity, it seemed. One lattice the size of my fist could hold all of the information that had been in the entire Far Travel Laboratory.
Unfortunately, Arlean’s biggest problem was finding the knowledge to save. Most of the divers thought I was a little fanatical about my two projects—information storage and what I called the duplicator library—mint condition originals of any equipment we might need.
Already they saw the value of the second. So they just shook their heads about the first.
“What about the underground ConFed fort?”
Amenda shivered. “It takes a little getting used to, but I’ve located some engineering texts …”
“HUT … two, three, four … . HUT … two, three, four … .”
We both watched as a squad of ConFed recruits marched by the tower. They wheeled toward the ConFed building across the field that would one day be a square.
“HUT … two, three, four … .”
The forcer marching them wore a heavy Ydrisian energy pistol—a copy of the one I had originally brought back for Odin Thor, before I had been so successful in my time-meddling.
The sight of the energy weapon on the forcer’s hip sent shivers down my spine. With a duplicator … every ConFed could have such a weapon … but it was too heavy for most people to use. Except for Odin Thor’s troops. The gesture of the ConFed across the square took on more significance.
“Are you all right, Sammis?”
“Sorry, just thinking.”
“About what?”
“I’d be interested in that as well,” added another voice, one I knew well. Wryan appeared on the step next to me.
I squeezed her hand for an instant.
“Are you going to tell us?” asked Wryan.
I shrugged. “Just thinking. One of the reasons I was so effective as a diver was because of the physical conditioning I got from the ConFeds. One of the ongoing problems of too many divers has been lack of strength.”
“You want to make the divers into ConFeds?” asked Amenda.
“No. Physical conditioning wouldn’t hurt. Start with the younger ones …”
“Sounds like another one of your projects,” added Wryan.
“I have to go …” pleaded Amenda.
“You don’t …”
“Really …”
Wryan looked at me when Amenda had hastened toward her new crystal lattice library beneath the tower. “That wasn’t all you were thinking.”
“You don’t miss much, my lady.”
“Remember that. I am your lady.” She smiled and waited.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Her smile faded.
I sighed, enjoying the breeze, but knowing she would wait longer than I could. The ConFeds halted by the uncompleted building and broke ranks. In instants, there were a score working there, instead of a handful.
“Odin Thor is good at discipline …”
“So are you,” noted Wryan.
“I don’t like it.”
“What?”
I gestured toward the ConFeds. “They look like nothing’s changed, ready to use what we’ve provided to take over the world.”
“You could stop them.” Wryan’s voice was even.
“Why should I have to? It’s better that it never gets started. I need to talk with Odin Thor.”
Wryan frowned. “He doesn’t listen very well. Still.” Her face was troubled, yet faintly amused.
Across the field, the building rose, even as we talked.
I squeezed her hard, then let go. “No time like the present.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Call it a smaller force, a guard of some sort, half old ConFed, half new diver. Couldn’t be any more ConFeds than divers.”
Wryan pursed her lips. “He won’t agree.”
“I have to ask.” First, I added.
“I’ll come.”
“No. If he doesn’t see me as strong enough …”
She nodded, almost sadly. Then she squeezed my hand.
Walking through the uncompleted central hall toward the west wing, I could almost visualize what the tower would look like centuries into the future. And it would stand, more than centuries into the future. That I knew.
“Halt.”
Outside Odin Thor’s closed door—he had the only finished space in the tower, I suspected—stood a sentry. Hasslek. I remembered him.
“Hasslek, do I have to turn you into … .” I paused.
He had one of the energy guns pointed at me. He also had a nasty smile. I didn’t like either.
Crack
. Half-sliding under the now, I disarmed him with a chop to the wrist. Then I finished the job.
Thud.
I let his unconscious body drop face-down on the glowstones, hoping he lost a few teeth in the process and gained a little more respect for his betters.
Opening the door without knocking, I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, not bothering with the useless lock.
Odin Thor pulled his polished black boots off the desk and stood up.
“Sammis, how good to see you.” The stench of false jollity was almost nauseating. He must have seen something. He stopped. “Would you have a seat?”
I smiled as falsely as he had. “No. This won’t take too long. Since when have you been issuing energy guns?”
Odin Thor looked at me, then walked toward the window. “Well, Sammis … it’s like this …”
At that moment, I had the strangest feeling, as though Odin Thor and I were being watched from the undertime. I smiled, then gave the unseen figure I remembered the old Temple peace benediction.
Odin Thor, insensitive as he was, didn’t even notice. He was watching the ConFed building crew. “ … we really can’t maintain the projectile weapons. And after we routed the Frost Giants, a lot of the men didn’t feel really secure …”
I snorted. “We don’t need a force like you’re building.”
“Oh, and how would you keep order? Or have you forgotten Llordian?” He turned from the window.
“No. That’s why I want to propose something else.”
He walked back to the big desk. I wondered where he had found it and how many men had worked to refinish it. “Such as?”
“How about a guard force composed half of divers and half of ConFeds? It ought to be called a guard, a civil or a temporal guard.”
Odin Thor was shaking his head before I finished. “Won’t work. You don’t have enough divers.” He smiled, again broadly and falsely. “But we could use a timedivers section in the ConFeds. You could head that up.”
“I think you’re missing my point. If we don’t put the ConFeds and the divers together now, working side by side—”
“A lot of your divers are women …”
I’d thought of that. “I know. They’re a great stabilizing influence, and they’ll also reassure a lot of the remaining farmers and the few townies left.” More important, in time, they’d change the whole character of the ConFeds.
“They aren’t tough enough.”
“Is Wryan tough enough?”
“Yes … but …”
“Fine. I’ll guarantee the divers’ physical conditioning.”
Odin Thor was shaking his head violently. “It won’t work. It won’t.”
I waited, knowing he’d find some way to reject my suggestion. Except it wasn’t a suggestion.
“Sammis.” He was back into false jollity again. “You’ve done wonders in finding tools, in getting weapons, and in helping destroy the Frost Giants. And in time, the whole planet will be properly grateful to you. Right now, though, they’re scared of your timedivers. They need time to accept you. Setting up a divers section of the ConFeds would be a first step toward what you want.”
It wouldn’t, because Odin Thor would use us for all the dirty and hateful work, and then we’d be forever beholden to him for protection.
“I don’t think so. We need a dual guard, and we need it now.”
“Sammis, let’s not be hasty. We have a planet to rebuild.”
I took a deep breath, wondering how to set it up.
“Believe me, I have a lot more experience in this,” he continued expansively.
“No.” I smiled. “We’ll do it my way. You, Wryan, and I will head up this guard.”
“Sammis …” The phony heartiness disappeared, and his voice was heavy and rough. He also towered over me, even from a rod away.
Not that his size bothered me.
“There’s no way I would ever agree to that. No way.” His voice was honest and cold, and I liked that tone better than the phony jolliness.
I smiled. “But you will, Odin Thor. You will. Just think about it.”
Then I dropped under the now, leaving him with a puzzled look on his face.
ODIN THOR—WHy had I let the idiot who had created the mess get so far? That gesture of the ConFed had chilled me to the bone, bringing back all the old hate memories, the class distinctions …
But who was the idiot? Odin Thor or Sammis? I had known he would botch it up, but I had let him run the ConFeds. I had known killing the Frost Giants with nuclear weapons would fail, but I had let him use them.
Wryan, perched on a stool by the wide glass window, watched as I paced the glowstones. She sipped a beaker of citril.
“Still thinking about Odin Thor?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I let him get too far. Now …” I shrugged, stopping to watch the dark clouds form and reform over the needle peak of Frythia. In the twilight, they appeared even more threatening. As often as the clouds threatened the peak, assaulted it with thunder and infrequent lightning, it never changed. Neither would Odin Thor, not unless …
I walked to the bedroom, the glowstones warm under my bare feet, and began to pull on the blacks that had become my uniform, and by extension, I suppose, the uniform of the timedivers. Then came the black boots from Sertis, and the gauntlets, with the quick timeloop to arm them. Then a knife, a sharp one.
“Sammis? Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
The tone of my voice must have indicated my intent and my resolve. Wryan shivered by the window, but her eyes remained strangely calm as she watched me complete my preparations.
I glanced again at the tip of Frythia, disappearing into the coming night, then took a deep breath and dropped under the now—
—and broke out in Odin Thor’s new office, in the west wing of the tower, further around the globe that was Query, around to the site of lost Inequital, where the sun still shone.
“Sammis …” He was still in his fancy new ConFed uniform. He wore both the heavy energy pistol and gauntlets—a needless duplication.
But then, I had never seen him without them, not since I had given them to him.
“No. Call me Verlyt, or Hades, or fate, Odin Thor.”
He wasn’t slow, but I had seen his action coming and dropped sideways and undertime even before the energy sheeted off the time-protected stones behind where I had stood.
Crack
! My stiffened hand slashed across his unprotected wrist.
“Fate, Odin Thor.”
He tried to bring the gauntlets to bear again.
This time I dropped out of the undertime and slashed the other wrist. “Verlyt, Odin Thor …”
I slapped his cheek.
“Coward! Dancer!”
I answered his taunt with a well-placed kick that threw him onto the floor beside his enormous wooden desk.
“Why don’t you just kill me?”
“Because,” I answered from behind him, dropping undertime and reappearing again to finish the sentence, “you have to live to make amends.”
“Coward! You can’t kill me! You don’t have enough nerve.”
I slipped behind him, delivered another side kick hard enough to crack his ribs, and dropped away.
Another blow to the face, and I barely dropped undertime before his good arm clutched for me.
I watched for a moment from under the now, sliding with the real time as Odin Thor peered around the disordered office. One corner of his new desk smoldered where his gauntlets had burned it.
With help from my jab, he crashed into the chair, then teetered to the floor.
His own weight snapped the wrist.
“ … bastard …”
I watched in realtime from the corner behind him as he staggered upright, blood streaming down the back of his neck, one wrist off-angled.
“We’re going to take—
“—a trip,” I concluded from the opposite corner.
My knife nipped his right biceps, a little deeper than a surface cut.
A cut across his thigh, and I was gone.
“ … coward … stand … fight … bastard …”
“Fate, Odin Thor …”
Another slice on the left biceps.
He stood there, panting, looking from one side of the room to the other, twirling to try to surprise me if I came up behind him. I let him twist and turn, twist and turn, just hanging in the undertime, waiting.
Another slash, this time across the back of his shoulder.
The room was smoky, laden with ozone, and reeking from Odin Thor’s sweat and blood, the chairs strewn around. My own forehead was damp, my sleeves streaked with blood lost in the black fabric.
“ … never take me …”
I had to disagree. So I planted a fist in his gut, and an open-palmed slam on his chin.
Thud!
After hitting the stones, trying to cushion his fall with his good left hand, he turned, and I ducked undertime.
I was less delicate, with a kick to his jaw.
He was out, sprawled on the floor. His jaw was probably broken as well.
I took off his gauntlets, his knife, and the energy pistol, then bound his wrist up as well as possible. The jaw would need more professional help.
Sitting there, I sheathed my knife, after wiping it on his uniform, and waited until he began to wake up. Then I forced us both under the now.
… back toward Bremarlyn, toward a house being fired, and the agony of two people …
… back toward a crossroads where an innocent girl was consumed in flames.
There I held Odin Thor, letting their agonies flow through me and into him.
… back to an underground camp where … .
AAAAAAeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee … . …
Nooooo00000000000000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
… Verlytttt!!!
…
… dying … dying … dying …
Red lenses slashed across my eyes—again. Needles lanced my lips, and acid etched my throat. Breathing fire, I tried to rip my guts out, spew my innards across the cold of undertime … trying to escape the pyramiding agony …
Flares flashed across my visions … the visions I threw to Odin Thor—
… a thin man slashing his own throat …
… a woman grabbing a brain-spattered projectile gun from a dead ConFed’s hand, to turn it against her own skull …
… a man with shaking hands injecting himself, biting his lips raw and trying to keep from screaming …
… a young soldier, crawling, scrabbling, leaving a pink-frothed trail on the stone behind him …
… a captain, standing in the doorway of an underground barracks, propped against the casement, slowly bringing up the heavy riot gun while trying to keep from shaking, trying to bring the gun to bear on the men writhing on the floor …
The second time, or was it the third—wasn’t so bad, perhaps because I knew I wouldn’t die, or perhaps because I threw all the agony at Odin Thor.
Then, before that muted pain could subside, for I knew the ConFed did not feel so sharply as I did, we dropped foretime to …
… Llordian, where on a black hillside lit by torches …
WWWWHHHHHSSSSTTTTTTT!!!!!
The entire pile of etheline missiles burst into flames, cremating a dozen townspeople as instant torches.
Using the light of the human bonfire, and shooting from the shadows uphill, the farmers dropped three more townies, as the mob began to trot toward the farm buildings revealed near the hill crest by the flames from the road.
“ … food … we want … food …”
Burning flesh, reeking, and the searing agony of death by fire, again charred my soul, and again, I poured it through the undertime link to Odin Thor.
Then, I staggered forward in the undertime, to …
EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeee …
The scream of the vest-pocket nuclear device vibrated even in the undertime north of Inequital, from the wasteland that had yet to recover from the first Frost Giant attack.
… eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee …
My head ached from the vibration and energy flashes that weren’t supposed to have a physical impact in the undertime—and my soul wept from the old pain and from throwing it at Odin Thor …
“ … noooooo …” The non-voice was mine, trying to close eyes that would not, could not, close in the undertime.
… blue flashes, like jagged edges of a mirror, cut through my head.
… an image of a small blue and blocky figure, four-armed, surrounded with warm blueness … .
… a dull red plain … standing beside another blueblock figure … reassuring heat … flashing back and forth …
… so much heat … pressure … like knives cutting from inside … .
… and more blue shards knifing their way through my head, already fading as they cut.
I staggered back toward the now, wondering if I could take another jolt, knowing that Odin Thor needed one last agony. So we stopped and watched and found …
… a circular gray-brown wasteland, covered with fog as the heat from the surrounding area poured back over the frozen surfaces. A wall of thunderclouds towered against the low mountains.
… a plateau that had been tree-covered with a walled encampment centered upon it … covered with lifeless sludge, screaming with the death agonies of two hundred hapless souls …
… pelting rains and gusty winds sweeping across another gray-brown wasteland, where new gullies appeared in the waist-deep sludge of fragmented cellular matter that had been largely living days earlier, cut by the force of water and gravity. The stone walls stood stark where they had stood for centuries, now alone in rearing above the gentle undulations of the plateau surface. Stone and sludge. Just stone and sludge and rain beating down on the echo of another hundred deaths.
With a final push, I broke out within the west wing of the tower, almost losing my balance.
I dropped Odin Thor on the floor of his office, as gently as I could manage. His eyes were open, and he was breathing, although his fancy ConFed uniform was a mass of cuts and blood.
My guts were close to turning inside out, but I just stood there and watched until his self-awareness began to return, amazed that he was insensitive enough to recover at all. Asking myself if I should have exposed him to even more, although I wasn’t certain I could have taken any more myself.
His eyes blinked, then came to rest on me.
“Fate … Odin Thor …”
“ … you … the damned deathgod …”
I shook my head. “That would have been easy. I want you to live with the feelings of all those deaths. If you ever put on that ConFed uniform again … if you ever think about forgetting … if you ever …”
Odin Thor shuddered and dropped his eyes from the blackness he saw in mine.
“ … and much as you hate me, we work together … because I’ll always be here … always …”
I took a ragged breath, forcing back the still-felt screams of the dying, and the searing throbbing within my head. “ … remember … death is easy … you ever
think
about playing emperor … I’ll leave you dying … forever …”
He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t have to. He knew, and I knew.
Odin Thor would recover enough without me. He could get his own help. So I dropped back undertime and across continents to where I belonged.
Wryan was waiting, not that I expected otherwise, pacing before the black expanse of the window. She was looking toward Frythia, though the time difference between the retreat and the tower at Inequital ensured that mere eyesight saw nothing except the darkness.
That was all we often ever saw—the obvious light or dark.
Her eyes widened as she stepped toward me, then stopped.
Looking down, I could see why, with the blood splattered on the back of my hands, caked on my sleeves enough to be obvious despite the blackness of the fabric.
“You …” Her eyes were neither upset nor accusing, just asking.
“No … he is somewhat … scored. At least one broken wrist, some cracked ribs, and probably a broken jaw. That doesn’t include the severely punctured ego.”
My lady nodded slowly. “Now you know, and Odin Thor knows.”
I shrugged. My shoulders ached, and my skull throbbed with the still-remembered agonies I had forced through myself to our would-have-been tyrant. “I suppose so. I suppose so.”
It wasn’t a question of supposing. Odin Thor knew. Knew that I had held him in the palm of my hand and judged him. Knew that I could visit death—or even worse—upon him. Knew that I understood death better than death itself, something that had taken me a long time to accept. But after feeling, individually, hundreds of deaths, I knew that death was not to be feared. Dying was another question, and I could leave Odin Thor dying endlessly.