RING
By Gavin Mitchell
In those days there were legendary heroes and villains and grand romantic deeds and entire quests fought not to save a world, but to save a soul – because, in the final analysis, they could be argued to be the same thing. In another world the Nameless One was still trying to hunt down his lost memories, discover his true identity and destiny and learn what could change the nature of a man. Elsewhere Raistlin Majere would abandon his brother, his lover and his world in a nihilistic quest to commit the ultimate deicide and set himself up as the sole power of Evil. And Paul Atreides would take the Gom Jabbar, learn the skills of warrior and Mentat and Bene Gesserit, for though he did not know it yet, he was born to be Kwizatz Haderach and Emperor of the known universe.
But someone else said elsewhere, nothing is true and everything is permitted.
Sigil, the City of Doors, neutral border town between multitudes of warring planes and factions, had seen all this and more. The bizarre was so commonplace on its streets it had become mundane. But the inhabitants of that city knew what beings not to annoy – some were demons from beyond the dimensions of their minds, some were just people like them.
There was one man who was not so notorious as any of the luminaries above, but the living things in the streets gave him a wide berth. Some said he was a warlock, a damned immortal who had sold his soul to the darkest powers in the universe in exchange for the ability to be many places at once, to know the shadows of men's souls, and tempt others to an inner Fall as he had been tempted, and Fallen, himself. Some said he was a warrior, aspiring to be the greatest in the universe, come to Sigil to test his skills against baatezu, tanaari and others of the most powerful creatures to walk the City of Doors. Some said he was an interplanar arms dealer, selling the magic and technology of a thousand worlds to the highest bidder, caring nothing for causes so long as the price was right. But from the look in his eyes, hidden behind dark lenses and a wide-brimmed hat, and the sudden eruptions of violence he was allegedly prone to when attacked, it was clear that the average cutter or berk of Sigil would be best advised to leave him alone.
In his own world, though, he would be considered a fairly eccentric camper who'd been present at an Army and Navy store closing down sale; but alone was certainly what he was.
Anderson Louis sat in his favourite spot at the Burning Corpse Tavern, where he could read by the light of the famous fiery man and positively scope out every motherfucker in the room. At his elbow was a mug of his favourite rotgut ale, in his hand was a book on ninja mind magic he'd had to buy from America with proper Earth dollars and everything. In his 38 Webbing pouches were magical scrolls to the value of 30,000 copper commons which he'd gained from selling three Hattori Hanso swords to three githyanki soldiers, who no doubt would be using them to fight it out with githzerai zerths, who no doubt he'd be selling more weapons to next week.
So why didn't he feel good about it?
This bad feeling was creeping up on Anderson more and more these days. He'd been to places where the stars begin and end, where dragons and gods were born and died, and he'd fleeced punters for weapons of mass destruction in each and every one of them. He found himself back in the same rotten taverns in whatever plane he ended up in, hoping a fight didn't kick off so he had to use his skills and mix business with pleasure, reading books that had long since lost any emotional response for him and rarely connecting with anyone, even so to usually mock the narrow beliefs of Primes and clerics.
This feeling was increasingly familiar. He was realising he was at the point where he was more and more drunk, and knowing his own mind he had already determined the point at which the wretched courtesans of the Hive started to look attractive was the time when he went home to whatever impersonal inn he'd found that day, or maybe his tent, or in the worst case his 38 webbing poncho with his hat pulled over his eyes. At least his reputation meant people rarely if ever tried to rob him. Or they regretted it when they tried.
Yeah, I have my reputation to think of.
His lips curled back into a miserable grimace.
He tried to focus on the crisp white pages, considered magical here already simply because Tellurian printing presses were unknown. The thought arose fleetingly that he should sell the technology for that, but he dismissed it as unprofitable. The section was about animals and how they related to people's personalities, how certain martial or magical arts thought there were eight types, or twelve, or sixteen, and how the ninja used whatever system suited them at the time despite the various pissing contests between other schools. Anderson thought this was fair enough, but it was a subject he'd read before, and at this point he was wondering if he should contact the authors of the original book and advise them to sue.
They'd never win in a court of law, they'd say it was all down to ancient Chinese and Japanese crap and the case would be laughed away. The only profiteers would be the lawyers.
Why aren't I a lawyer?
That's it, there are professions worse than arms dealer. I'm going home.
Anderson got up to leave, his movements not even half-cut. The same emaciated, lorn, half-burnt woman was standing staring up at the burning man in loneliness and despair. Anderson was starting to think of her as a kindred spirit, and consider approaching her, when something by her feet caught his eye.
Anderson knelt to pick it up, not even bothering to conceal the speed of his movements, and altogether ignoring the expanse of sallow, withered female flesh that formed the woman's thigh as his face came near to it. It was a flyer, with words and symbols that struck him as oddly familiar.
TALES OF THE FIANNA
A special performance at the Civic Festhall
Fianna? Irish mythology?
And Anderson knew he wasn't going to any wretched hovel just yet.
The Civic Festhall was the famous home of the Sensate faction in the most upper class region of Sigil. Anderson avoided the place at all costs, as the people were happiest with their own, he didn't like them and they didn't like him. Still, he had decided where he was going today and he wasn't about to be stopped. The doorman turned up his nose, and due to not being a member of the faction and having no desire to be Anderson had to pay an hefty entrance fee, but apparently the bard had insisted that the event not be faction-specific so he was let in. Otherwise, the doorman and Anderson made their feelings for one another abundantly clear.
The room in which Anderson found the performance was far more sedate than he was used to – usually there were assorted bizarre creatures propping up the bar, including himself. Here there wasn't even a bar – there were chairs in neat arrangements facing towards a low stage in a plushly decorated room. Seated in the chairs were a variety of members of the Sigilian upper classes, and the Sensate faction – mostly humans, but some elves. The females wore the breathtakingly daring fashions of the day, their private parts covered with the absolute minimum of decency in favour of flaring weaves and spreads of material a long way from their actual bodies. Their naked expanses of flesh had met with the ne plus ultra of the makeup and dietary arts – which, to Anderson, robbed it of every possible erotic value. Perhaps that was the idea. The males wore far more cloth of far more elaborate cut, looking to Anderson far worse than the worst excesses of every European country during the Renaissance. The arms dealer watched with amusement as the various twits left him a wide berth at the back of the room.
But, as the door opened and the usher announced in musical elven tones that the performance was about to begin, Anderson lost all interest in political observation.
A young woman walked slowly and deliberately, head bowed, to the front of the room. Her face was framed with long straight blonde hair that was several shades paler than her skin. She wore a white duster coat of clearly Tellurian manufacture and carried a white vinyl classical guitar case. She walked up onto the stage, pulled her guitar from its case, set up a camping stool and sat down with the instrument across her crossed legs.
Anderson watched mesmerised.
I bet the way that denim skirt rides up her thighs sells a Hell of a lot of records where we come from. And those boots, that vest, that body... I can smell the money already...
The woman cleared her throat, and said in a voice slightly roughened by drinking, smoking and screaming, but in which an Irish accent still showed through:
'Thank you all for coming tonight. I'd like to share with you some poems from a life a long way from here. Tales of the Fianna, once my own people, and what our pride and lust and intolerance have done to us.'
Plucking the gut strings with individual fingers, she began to sing.
'The Red Hand of Ulster extends its grasp, to the furthest corners of our lives. The people of my native land, have fallen under the orange dream of 1690. The Fianna in our time of youth stand alone, in a continuous fight, to escape our tragic destiny...'
The assembled gentlefolk of Sigil watched politely with mild interest; they were used to hearing the bizarre concepts and music of a thousand worlds. As a heart-stoppingly beautiful elf-maid dressed apparently entirely in gossamer and spiderwebs and lustrous black hair walked around serving drinks and sweetmeats they politely took small portions and discussed the performance in murmured tones. At this point, though, Anderson didn't have to restrain himself from guzzling everything in sight. His attention was total.
From the look in her eyes you can tell she has been to all of these places. It's more than just a song to her. And those eyebrows, more like feathers than hair... she looks like she could have sprung fully formed, full of pride, from the Irish sea.
Talk about animal souls, she was a sea eagle in another life.
Eventually the girl's repertoire ended and her head bowed, to polite applause. Such few of the Sensates as wished to speak to her approached her at the front of the stage, where she raised ocean-blue eyes pale with exhaustion to them. Most left, and his gaze never leaving her, Anderson followed.
Anderson waited underneath a small café awning, nursing a small glass of wine, until such time as he saw the girl leave the Civic Festhall, guitar in hand. He abandoned the wine and described a circle to meet her, falling into step by her side. Head bowed and face drawn, she did not appear to have seen him.
'Good gig.'
The girl jumped, and turned to him in alarm. Anderson had found that people rarely noticed him move, and that he couldn't turn it off. Sometimes he wished he could.
'Excuse me?'
'Sorry if I startled you. I saw you play.'
'Oh...' The girl's brow cleared of doubt. 'OK. Thanks. You'll have to forgive me for not noticing you. I'm usually pretty detached at gigs.'
'That's all right.'
By this point the girl was looking him up and down and looking somewhat perturbed. 'Your clothes... Tellus Prime?'
'That's right. It's where I'm from.'
'Oh,' said the girl in somewhat cooler tones. She withdrew slightly and started to look around the street.
Anderson read the signs. 'Your accent... you must be Irish?' he queried.
'Yes. I am.'
'North or South?'
Her eyes, with the lashes and brows so pale they were almost white, looking more like feathers than hair, narrowed dangerously. 'A very pertinent question, Mr...?'
Anderson stuck out his hand. 'Louis. Anderson Louis.'
'Eva Thomasen. Well, nice meeting you Anderson. Still...' The girl looked up, clearly about to say something about the position of the sun in the sky. Seeing no sun, only a pale unsourced light and the rest of Sigil arching off over her head, she balked.
'So, can I offer you a drink?'
The girl looked down from the impossible sky, clearly uncertain about the prospect. But as she looked around the street, seeing abelaats, githzerai, tieflings and even stranger creatures, clearly some decision was changed.
'All right... not for long, though.'
Knowing better than to let her change her mind again, Anderson led her to the same drastically expensive and upper class café in the Clerk's Ward, where they sipped elven wine from a distant dragon-dominated world.
'Sigil's a far cry from Belfast, then,' Anderson prompted.
'Yeah, well...' the girl turned her head and stared off into space, her jaw tight. Anderson thought it best to change the subject.
'When was the last time you saw Earth, then?'
'Oh, February 15th, 2003. I had to take part in the war march. That monkey in the White House is even worse than his father. I supported Clinton. I prefer a man who wants to shag his secretary to a man who wants to annihilate the known world.' Her brow furrowed. 'Then again, you may not even be from the same time stream as me, right?'
'Oh, I am. I'm sorry, but your efforts failed. The war went right ahead.'
'Damn.' Eva grimaced in bitter anger, staring down as her grasp tightened alarmingly on the delicate elven glass. 'That's all we need. Another crucifixion... for another holy war.' Realising the tension in her fingers, the girl looked down and almost unconsciously swallowed the entire drink. 'Is it my round?'
Rock and roll! thought Anderson.
'Yeah, Silvanesti sweet white, please. I guess you must be pretty close to the Troubles, then...'
'Is that why you came to my concert?'
Anderson shrugged. 'I saw your flyer. I recognised the word.'
'Yeah, well... it is always the young people who have suffered the most in Ireland.'
'I don't doubt it. It's always been rumoured to be the country's biggest export.'
She glowered. 'That joke isn't funny anymore, if it ever was. My own father was exiled from Belfast by the paramilitaries because he married a Catholic woman. Now that he's broken his spine, he'll never see his homeland again.'
'Sorry.'
'What are you apologising for? That's one thing we can't even bring ourselves to blame on the Brits.'
'Which paramilitaries was it? UVF or UDA?'
She recoiled in alarm. 'I don't know! What do you know about it?'
'Nothing, relax, would you? I just try to keep up on Tellus Prime political history. After all, I'm rarely if ever there.'
In point of fact, Anderson was trying to remember which of the two groups he had sold some spell scrolls written in devil's blood by chaotic evil fiends in Hell. He suspected it was the more fundamentalist Christian one, the ones who had refused to recognise the Good Friday Agreement. But he couldn't quite make the connection.
Damn good money, though. It came from drugs.
Eva relaxed somewhat, though the suspicion didn't entirely die in the ocean-blue eyes. 'You have some very scary knowledge, Mr Louis.'
'I wouldn't worry about it,' Anderson said with some bitterness. 'Most people find me scary.'
Eva's face went from suspicious to almost sorry.
'Anyway... if your father was forced to leave, how come you consider yourself as coming from Ulster?'
'Well, I went to the University of Belfast. I reckoned if I abandoned Northern Ireland to its fate, I was no longer part of the solution but part of the problem. At least if I went back I could make some sort of difference...'
Anderson's eyes widened in almost reluctant admiration. 'Fair play. You must have seen some serious deep shit, though...'
She shrugged. 'It was worth it. Without it, I wouldn't be what I am, I wouldn't be where I am now. What made you become a planewalker, anyway?'
Anderson coughed. 'You seem to have finished that. Can I interest you in somewhere else?'
She looked up in some confusion. 'This place seems all right.'
'Well, it isn't the kind of place I'd normally drink, to be honest. I could show you some of the sights of Sigil.' The corner of Anderson's mouth turned up with a total lack of warmth or mirth. 'It'll be a new experience for you...'
'Well... OK.' Anderson watched the girl stand up, push her chair back under the table. He watched the slight flush in her face, the slight clumsiness and lack of speed of her movements, most especially, he watched the way the short denim skirt moved over her thighs as she did it.
Out with an exhausted half-cut drop dead gorgeous Irish folk singer. In Sigil.
This is the best night I've had in ages.
'Are you sure this is the way?' said Eva to Anderson as they progressed through increasingly run-down areas of Sigil. Anderson watched with not entirely charitable intentions as she shrank increasingly closely to him, for all that she was as big as him, strapping and athletic.
'Yeah! It can't be much compared to Belfast.'
'I don't know, though...' muttered the girl as she watched three Razor Angels go toe to toe with a black abishai.
'Relax, we'll be there soon.'
But from the look in the girl's eyes as they walked into the Burning Corpse Tavern, with the noise, the smells and above all the fiery man himself, it was clear she was horrified. Anderson began to think he'd made a mistake.
'This place is terrible! It's obvious that all these people are only here because they enjoy the pain of others.'
Unnoticed, at a table by the corner, a small young woman with neck-length blonde hair framing her face, wearing what looked like the robes of a Dust faction member cut off at the elbows and knees, looked up at the odd couple speculatively.
Anderson felt almost hurt at the slight to his pub.
'Relax, it's not that bad. Look, you see the burning man? He doesn't look in pain. Look at his eyes, they're ecstatic, his mouth is open, he's revelling in the flames...'
Eva turned her back decisively. 'I don't want to know. Get me a drink before I think better of this.' She stalked over and annexed a table as far from the burning man as possible. A party of dark dwarves raised a ribald cheer at her approach; she silenced them with a murderous glare.
Realising the dangerous nature of the hand he'd just played, Anderson ordered his favourite rotgut ale for himself, but the finest wine available in the tavern for the lady. Unfortunately the grape of the outcast elves of the Avari was the best they could stretch to. Anderson hoped, belatedly and without much hope, that the lady wouldn't notice.
As he returned to the table she looked up at him with some considerable anger.
'Now I know who you are. I think.'
'I used to like that song before I found out it was by Nickelback.'
Her eyes narrowed in rage, and Anderson realised it was the wrong joke at the wrong time. 'Don't use your sophistry on me. Don't think this is my first time in Sigil or the Planes just because it's the first gig you've seen. I've heard rumours about you.'
Anderson sighed, resorting, in the last resort, to honesty. 'Unfortunately, Eva, you have to understand that whatever rumours you hear about me are going to be true. My only defence is to lead a life even more unbelievable than what they actually say.'
Eva balked in confusion, which was the best reaction Anderson could have hoped for. 'So it's true that you're a warlock? That you sold your soul to the devil. That you're obsessed with being the ultimate warrior. That you're a planewalking dealer in arms and death spells.'
Anderson bowed his head, shaking it, before looking up into the sea blue eyes. 'Well, Eva, I can't say I acknowledge concepts like devil, or soul, or that it's possible to make that kind of bargain. I wouldn't say I was obsessed with the path of the warrior, but everyone should have a goal. As for the rest... well... we all have to make a living. Don't tell me you sell CDs with those songs and that face and that body for free...'
'So it is true, then.'
'Which part?'
'You sold your soul to the devil.'
'I don't believe in either.'
'You can't not believe in devils! We saw one five minutes ago!'
'Yeah, we saw a devil, a creature which has been called a devil by humans in the human tongue. All that creature looks to me is a being from another evolutionary path, a different species of the same genetic basis as insects. Not remotely a devil in the sense you mean, a near-omnipotent unknowable being. Abishai are just animals with easily definable – and limited – powers.'
'I think I know what you mean...'
'And what do you mean by soul? What's a soul?'
'How are you sitting there drinking that shitty ale and annoying me without a soul?'
'Mind' Anderson growled. 'I acknowledge mind.' Next question.'
'So you're the greatest warrior of the planes, then.'
'Well, not exactly, no. I've trained with a few people in a few places. I'm chiefly hoping to win the support of a githzerai. They're so fucking fast they could take any human. They could teach me a thing or two.'
She frowned. 'I've heard of the githzerai, but not had much to do with them. I hear they don't have much respect for humans.'
'They don't.'
'And from what I hear, you don't have much respect for any life at all. It's true you're an arms dealer, then.'
Anderson shrugged, helplessly. 'Crumbs Guv, it's a fair cop. Not just arms but magic and technology, too.'
'How can you do that? You have no morality, or honour?'
'I don't see as how the actions of the customers reflect upon me. It's not me that fires the gun or plants the bomb or casts the deadly spell...'
'How interesting. I've always wanted to ask Noraid the exact same question!'
The pair stared at each other in absolute blazing rage and hatred. With eyes only for each other, they didn't notice the young woman with the neck length hair nodding with an increasingly big smile.
Eva stood up.
'Fuck this. And fuck you.'
'OK, man, whatever.'
'Oh, and mighty warrior-warlock-warmonger, whatever you are, the least you can do is walk me back to my hotel in the Clerk's Ward. You brought me into this area of shit. You can get me out.'
'Challenge accepted.'
The pair walked back towards the Civic Festhall in furious silence, arms in hostile postures, but elbows still almost touching. Both were so annoyed with each other (and partially, at themselves) that fatally, they failed to notice stealthy figures melting out of the shadows.
The two humans only looked up when their way was blocked by two alien figures standing very tall and outflanking them on both sides. Their spirits sank as they realised that another form was directly behind them both.
The githyanki soldiers were seven feet tall and more slender than any human could survive. Their green skin and black hair was modified and scarified and tattooed and pierced into designs beyond what any human Tellus Prime could have seen. Their armour was boiled leather of the skins of beasts from the astral plane. They were all grinning like sharks as they held out the Hattori Hanso swords Anderson had sold them the previous day.
As he looked from face to face, Anderson realised exactly what this was about, but knew there were a few more expected moves of this entirely predictable game that were left to play.
What he didn't expect was the feminine arm that suddenly hooked into his and held it with a grip like iron.
'So, gith. What's all the commotion?' said Anderson tersely.
'You need to ask, hu-man?' grinned the one on his right. 'We didn't like the price you charged us for these human weapons. We don't see how your reputation is supposed to be so superior.'
'Damned by my own reputation.' Anderson commented grimly. 'Evidently my reputation is a harlot.'
This evidently confused them, but they rallied. All the time, Anderson was trying to sense, which the whole of his five senses stretched to their limit in the semi-mythical Zen awareness of haragei, where the third githyanki was. He was almost directly behind them holding the sword almost directly between the human man and woman. This was bad, but it could have been worse.
'Your false human sophistry betrays you, oh great warlock,' sneered the gith on the diagonal left. 'We'll make it simpler for the younger race. We keep the swords. We keep the scrolls also. We don't rape your girlfriend while you watch, then cut you up while she watches!'
'I'm not his girlfriend!' Eva snarled.
During this insulting, and to Anderson's mind, entirely pointless exchange, time had slowed to a crawl in his awareness. In the realm of the mythical Zen zone he was ignoring the actions clearly intended to be distraction and recalling everything he had ever known about the githyanki.
This wasn't much, but he had had rather more dealings with githzerai and believed them to be, at genetic root, the same species. He knew they were blindingly fast, with much more speed and dexterity than the fastest human could hope to even visualise. He knew they were experienced planewalkers, their ancestral home upon the Astral Plane and routinely fought it out with the denizens there. He knew they were ruled by a lich queen in an utterly repressive and draconian society. He knew they had innate psychic powers humans could only grasp after years of effort.
It doesn't make them smarter.
Anderson had already clocked that they were holding the Hattori Hanso swords all wrong, that the sale had not included even the modicum of training in the exquisite art of the samurai sword, and he hoped that the githyanki wouldn't have the remotest chance of wielding with any efficacy any sword balanced completely differently to how they were used to.
That hope let to his determination to do what he was now doing.
Locking his grip tight onto Eva's arm to control her movement and keep her away from the blades, Anderson swept his entire body round in a circle kick, knocking the swords out from in front of him with the heel of his German paratrooper boots. Thrusting the girl away from him with his momentum, he slashed his other hand across the front of the githyankis' throats. They staggered back, gagging. With the hand freed from Eva, he turned back and struck the githyanki behind him full in the sternum. He heard it shatter as bones that had never grown under the tyrannical gravity of Earth are wont to do. Dropping to one knee, he picked up one of the fallen swords with it, and in the same movement as standing sliced the blade through both githyanki in front. They fell with horrified expressions but without a murmur.
Anderson theatrically leaned back and swung the blade down ceremonially, sweeping the black githyanki blood from it, and turned to Eva with a smile of triumph.
'Guess we won...'
She was looking down at his midriff with eyes as large as saucers.
'What?'
At that moment Anderson felt a dull sensation of discomfort, turning to an increasing bright point of agony, and looked down to see the Hattori Hanso sword that had been stuck completely through his abdomen from behind.
Anderson found himself on his knees, staring down at the curved foot of razor sharp steel sticking straight out from his gut. There wasn't much blood; presumably the wound was that clean that the blade itself was blocking the flow. He suppressed a grimace. His shirt would certainly be damaged, though; at the very least it would need patches over the holes.
He also realised he was going to have to get the blade out. His hands plucked in spasmodic futility at the air around the blade protruding from his stomach as his brain realised that trying to pull it out from the front would not only probably lacerate his fingers, but also result in him jamming the tsuba into his back and it would never come out. Fall forward? This would only push the blade back into his body and almost certainly do more cutting damage.
There was nothing for it. He was going to have to pull the blade back out from the rear.
Anderson reached with shaking hands into his belt pouches and drew out the chainmail and Kevlar gloves which he kept for battle.
Abruptly a figure rushed up to his side.
'Wait, stop! What are you doing?'
'I'm going to pull the sword out from behind, what does it look like?'
'You'll bleed to death! It looks like it's pierced your liver.'
'Well, I can hardly wander along looking for a healer with a sword sticking out of my belly. I'd be the laughing stock of Sigil.' Anderson winced through the quip. The blade was now starting to feel red-hot, though he shivered with a chill.
'You have to leave it in until you get medical attention, otherwise you'll only do more damage...'
'What, you think I'm going to just saunter along to the nearest A and E department? It would be about five portals and fifteen million light years away!' Anderson grimaced again and reached around to the small of his back.
Eva sighed. Anderson, consciousness starting to turn distinctly odd with pain and stress, felt her kneel down beside him, her bare knees pushing down into the black blood staining the cobblestone roads. He felt his hands gently put firmly gripped by the wrists and pushed away to rest on his thighs.
'Then there's nothing for it. Given your crimes and character, I wouldn't normally do this, but...'
The girl shifted her weight and placed her right hand on Anderson's stomach so that the blade was between her second and third fingers. With her left hand she took hold of the hilt of the sword, still sticking from Anderson's back. She inclined her head, closed her eyes and went utterly still and silent.
Anderson felt a distinct warmth spreading from her right hand, a warmth quite different in character from the now red-hot seeming blade in his vitals. The warmth grew until it was almost all he could feel, one of the most intense, yet not unpleasurable, sensations he had ever felt. At the same time he felt an irresistible pulling from the region of the sword. The warmth rapidly spread through to his back and seemed to overwhelm the pulling, and everything else. Anderson surrendered to the feeling.
The next thing he was aware of was the girl maneuvering the Hattori Hanso sword between them, point down, in her left hand, and drop it to the floor ahead of him.
'There,' she said, sounding utterly drained. 'Your wound is healed now.'
Anderson's eyes widened in disbelief. He stood up slowly, feeling in the neat cuts in his shirt to whole, unscarred skin beneath.
'What did you just do? I have not seen healing like that anywhere in the Planes, let alone from a Tellus Prime.'
'Live and learn,' said the girl with a dead lack of affect. She stood up, seeming barely able to co-ordinate herself. She flicked ineffectually at the blood and dirt encrusting her legs with feeble, unresponsive fingers.
Anderson turned to face her. 'That must have taken a lot out of you...' This seemed an understatement. She had looked tired after her performance, currently, her pale skin had faded to ashen grey, and her eyes were ringed with dark circles.
'Well, whatever. I suggest that you drink some water and try to ground yourself. The healing process can be traumatic. In the meantime, I think that concludes this evening's entertainment.'
'Hey, wait. I think it's you that needs grounding. I should at least take you to get some food and rest.'
'I ask for nothing... certainly not from you,'
'Really? You don't look like you could get far on your own. And the Clerk's Ward again, eh? I won't inflict the Burning Corpse Tavern on you again.'
'If I must.' Eva muttered, though in truth she looked in no state to argue. It seemed all she could do to lean back against a nearby wall and massage her temples with her hands.
'Well, yeah, it seems only fair. One of the spells they paid me with was a Recall scroll, it'll take us back where we came from. But there's just one thing I want to sort out first...' Leaving the Recall scroll tucked under his arm, Anderson started leaning down over the githyanki corpses, picking up the infamous swords, wiping them down, matching each to a scabbard and shoving them into a cylindrical canvas bag.
Eva broke out of her inner exhaustion to stare at him with a mixture of disbelief and disgust. 'What are you doing?'
'Well, it's what they would have done to me. This way I get a bunch of expensive weaponry and the payment as well. Turned out nice again!'
She shook her head in contempt, but seemed unable to prevent the corner of her lip turning up. 'I so wish I had sufficient energy to just walk away from you.'
'Well, fortunately for me, it looks like you haven't.'
After a few more glasses of Silvanesti elven wine and starter of melange fried angel fish some colour had returned to Eva's skin. Meanwhile, however, the two found themselves in an increasingly prolonged silence.
'So you were going to ask me where I learned to do that,' said Eva flatly after a while.
'Actually I was going to ask you how I got into planewalking. It's not the most accessible of career paths where we come from.'
She sighed. 'Quid pro quo, eh? How about you tell me the same thing, then I reciprocate? And don't just say you do it for the money. No doubt there would be easier ways to do that on Earth.'
Anderson grimaced. 'You'd be surprised. I found myself in the midst of a recession, unemployable, the only way to get round it was to start a business exploiting the one thing that was booming – guns. I started off wildcatting -- buying used .22 cartridge cases from target practise ranges, putting new cordites and bullets in and selling them to improverished and unscrupulous gun users. I was very successful. Increasingly the cartridges started getting to be heavier and heavier calibre, and I stopped questioning where they were coming from. It's a slippery slope... The, er, overseas customers came on board around the same time the actual dealing in weapons themselves started.'
'Charming...' sneered Eva in open contempt.
Anderson sighed. 'We do what we gotta do. Perhaps you should question the fact that I never did anything illegal, never had to. Seems the government doesn't really care.
'What was odd was that part of the business was for medieval and Asian weaponry, this was more my hobby to begin with, but increasingly the paying customers started buying those as well. This part of the business having more of an emotional response for me than guns, I started trying to buy some of these items as well... picked up some very strange pieces. As I got more and more business more and more of these people started paying me off in gold, or gems, or uranium, or like for like, or scrolls no one I could find could read... Eventually the firearms became just a means to finance keeping tabs on the strangest of my customers and find out where the most unusual of their wares were coming. It had become clear to me long ago that some of these weapons were unknown to any culture our planet had ever seen.'
Eva shrugged. 'Fairly obvious when you think about it.'
'Well, yes, now. A lot of my customers were too weird to really fit into society very well and not remotely au fait with the kind of technology I was using to track them with.' He grinned. 'Plus not many of them had much idea of the difference in the value of gold and gems and uranium between their worlds and mine, which as well as being a dead giveaway made me a fucking fortune. Which was nice. Anyway, it wasn't long before I filmed someone opening a portal, replicated the effect myself, and the rest is history. Of course, many of my previous good customers and clients didn't much like being tracked back to their home worlds, and I have the scars to prove it, but I'm still here.' He grinned mirthlessly.
'Well, that's... nice,' muttered Eva.
'So...'
'Well... I went to Belfast around the time my dad became paralysed, which was... traumatic, to say the least, particularly since I couldn't afford to go back and see him very often. I studied counselling, chiefly because the doctors had said that was the last thing had any chance of helping my dad. I was into the music scene, but also fell in with a lot of New Agers, who were into energy healing, reiki and all that business. I was clutching at straws... I wanted to believe in anything.
'I threw myself into as many courses on esoteric healing as I could find. Western medicine had failed my father, but I wouldn't. Reiki, crystal therapy, acupuncture... apart from music that became my whole life.
'What was worse, I didn't expect it to work, but it did. In the back of my mind I thought it was just something I needed to get out of my system and it was all really just a bunch of tree hugging hippie crap. But it wasn't till I actually started doing healings, spontaneously, that it worked.
A shadow passed over her face. 'Someone threw a bottle at one of my gigs, split the cellist's head open. I rushed over and closed the wound without a scar without even thinking about it.'
'Which is precisely the way you're supposed to do it,' said Anderson softly.
Eva grimaced. 'Yeah. Well. She didn't see it that way, not being a Presbyterian. That's why I perform alone these days.
'Anyway, not only the musicians but also the New Agers avoided me after that. I didn't know why, surely I was the living proof of their way of life? But I realised it had just been a game to them, a way of making friends or rebelling against their middle class upbringing. None of them had wanted the powers the way I did and once they encountered someone who did, they had nothing but suspicion and fear.'
Anderson shrugged. 'Sorry,' he said. 'But that's human beings for you.'
She scowled. 'Maybe. Anyway, my band gone, my friends gone, I was alone. I was just waiting till I could return home and fulfil my last hope, try to heal my father. After which he'd probably say it was the devil's work and disown me himself.'
Pausing, she fell silent.
Anderson's eyes moved from left to right. He belatedly realised the room was filled with more of the same scantily clad Sensates and elves and waitresses and high class escorts and he hadn't noticed a single one of them. 'Er... and?' A slender woman with blonde hair clad in rather simpler dress stared back at him speculatively, but he did not notice her.
'Then one day a pelican landed on my windowsill, and told me it was the animal soul of a witch from another world who was over five hundred years old.'
Anderson's eyes opened wide. 'That can happen,' he said.
'You wouldn't think so, would you? But by that point I was prepared to believe anything. I followed the pelican through a portal. I learned the witches' skills, they learned mine. Having absorbed all they had to offer, I asked them where else such portals could be found, and that was that for me.'
She lowered her eyes, and sucked deeply on her wine.
'Did you ever return to Belfast?'
'No, nor have I seen my father since, before you ask. As far as my family are concerned I'm still in Belfast, making a living as a counsellor and musician. I send them letters every so often. I'm not ready to go home yet. That's not a test I'm prepared to take.'
Anderson sighed. 'I know how you feel. I can never go home again. Not many people are prepared to call be friend or family of an arms dealer of any stripe.'
'Bit different though, isn't it?' said Eva bitterly.
Anderson only shrugged.
Both of them drank their wine, and ate their main courses, and subsequently their desserts, in silence after that. After the plates were cleared there seemed nothing more to say. Eventually Eva spoke.
'I guess you've got what you wanted, then. This is far too late for me. I was headed back to my hotel right after this. I guess I'll see you round.'
'Wait... I was wondering where you were headed after this?'
'My hotel, like I said.'
'I meant... what final destination? What world?'
She looked taken aback. 'Hadn't thought about it. Why?'
'I was wondering if we could travel together awhile...' Anderson, who prided himself on never showing emotion to a client, winced inside at the note of pleading that had crept into his voice.
Her eyes bulged. 'Me come with you, and watch dirty deals done dirt cheap for weapons of mass destruction on worlds that haven't even invented gunpowder yet? No fucking thank you. I have better things to do with my life.'
'So do I,' he said, surprisingly himself.
'What?'
'Eva... there are possibly an infinite number of universes out there, mundane universes, magical universes, even empty universes. There are multitudes of species of intelligent beings we can't even begin to imagine, graceful and wise, artistic or practical.
'And all I ever see of any of them are the war zones, and all the beings I ever meet are the ones who want to destroy each other. The story is always the same; nothing ever changes but the ideology or the religion or the economics. I've had enough. I want to be a planewalker again, see something new and different. I thought maybe you could show me.'
Eva stopped, clearly hesitating. While she was obviously set to refuse, there was something in the voice and eyes, a raw appeal and pain which the apparently cold and amoral arms dealer was not entirely able to hide. It seemed that he realised it too.
Anderson attempted his characteristic cynical smile, which didn't quite come out. 'Think about it man... We have a very good cross correlation of skills. I defend you from fuck off monsters, you patch me up. It's an easy choice if you ask me.'
Eva smiled slightly. Despite the flippancy, her choice had already been made. And, as both had agreed, neither of them could go home again.
'Well, if you put it like that... I accept.'
Anderson's eyes widened. It seemed he hadn't actually expected to succeed. 'Hey, great! When do we start?'
'Well, I really do need some sleep, you know...' She started for the door.
He followed her. 'Er, about your hotel? I suspect it might be quite a bit better than mine...'
She laughed. 'Well, you'd better have money. The Sensates agreed to put me up, and they're obviously loaded. And don't even think you're sharing my room. I've seen the way you look at me.'
'Money? Hell, you just saw the kind of win-win deals I make every day? And as for that comment, I don't know what you mean.'
The two were almost at the door when a figure stood up and approached them.
'Anderson Louis? Eva Thomasen?'
Both halted abruptly. They had been accosted by a slender, petite woman with neck-length blonde hair and a modified dress apparently based on the Dustman mode. Her eyes had an odd aspect that they were unable to look away from.
'That's me.' 'I'm here,' the pair uttered at the same moment.
The young woman smiled in a mirthless, triumphant way that seemed too old for the young face, and a sudden, overwhelming impulse hit both Eva and Anderson that what they were dealing with here was a soul not only more ancient and powerful than its shell appeared, but more so than any they had yet encountered.
'Please allow me to introduce myself. In this universe as well as all possible universes, I am called Cocoon; you see here the incarnation I hold in Sigil. In all current incarnations, I am the last of the Boddhisattvas, and I have a proposition in which I believe the two of you may be interested...'
GAVIN MITCHELL 05/08/04
By Gavin Mitchell
In those days there were legendary heroes and villains and grand romantic deeds and entire quests fought not to save a world, but to save a soul – because, in the final analysis, they could be argued to be the same thing. In another world the Nameless One was still trying to hunt down his lost memories, discover his true identity and destiny and learn what could change the nature of a man. Elsewhere Raistlin Majere would abandon his brother, his lover and his world in a nihilistic quest to commit the ultimate deicide and set himself up as the sole power of Evil. And Paul Atreides would take the Gom Jabbar, learn the skills of warrior and Mentat and Bene Gesserit, for though he did not know it yet, he was born to be Kwizatz Haderach and Emperor of the known universe.
But someone else said elsewhere, nothing is true and everything is permitted.
Sigil, the City of Doors, neutral border town between multitudes of warring planes and factions, had seen all this and more. The bizarre was so commonplace on its streets it had become mundane. But the inhabitants of that city knew what beings not to annoy – some were demons from beyond the dimensions of their minds, some were just people like them.
There was one man who was not so notorious as any of the luminaries above, but the living things in the streets gave him a wide berth. Some said he was a warlock, a damned immortal who had sold his soul to the darkest powers in the universe in exchange for the ability to be many places at once, to know the shadows of men's souls, and tempt others to an inner Fall as he had been tempted, and Fallen, himself. Some said he was a warrior, aspiring to be the greatest in the universe, come to Sigil to test his skills against baatezu, tanaari and others of the most powerful creatures to walk the City of Doors. Some said he was an interplanar arms dealer, selling the magic and technology of a thousand worlds to the highest bidder, caring nothing for causes so long as the price was right. But from the look in his eyes, hidden behind dark lenses and a wide-brimmed hat, and the sudden eruptions of violence he was allegedly prone to when attacked, it was clear that the average cutter or berk of Sigil would be best advised to leave him alone.
In his own world, though, he would be considered a fairly eccentric camper who'd been present at an Army and Navy store closing down sale; but alone was certainly what he was.
Anderson Louis sat in his favourite spot at the Burning Corpse Tavern, where he could read by the light of the famous fiery man and positively scope out every motherfucker in the room. At his elbow was a mug of his favourite rotgut ale, in his hand was a book on ninja mind magic he'd had to buy from America with proper Earth dollars and everything. In his 38 Webbing pouches were magical scrolls to the value of 30,000 copper commons which he'd gained from selling three Hattori Hanso swords to three githyanki soldiers, who no doubt would be using them to fight it out with githzerai zerths, who no doubt he'd be selling more weapons to next week.
So why didn't he feel good about it?
This bad feeling was creeping up on Anderson more and more these days. He'd been to places where the stars begin and end, where dragons and gods were born and died, and he'd fleeced punters for weapons of mass destruction in each and every one of them. He found himself back in the same rotten taverns in whatever plane he ended up in, hoping a fight didn't kick off so he had to use his skills and mix business with pleasure, reading books that had long since lost any emotional response for him and rarely connecting with anyone, even so to usually mock the narrow beliefs of Primes and clerics.
This feeling was increasingly familiar. He was realising he was at the point where he was more and more drunk, and knowing his own mind he had already determined the point at which the wretched courtesans of the Hive started to look attractive was the time when he went home to whatever impersonal inn he'd found that day, or maybe his tent, or in the worst case his 38 webbing poncho with his hat pulled over his eyes. At least his reputation meant people rarely if ever tried to rob him. Or they regretted it when they tried.
Yeah, I have my reputation to think of.
His lips curled back into a miserable grimace.
He tried to focus on the crisp white pages, considered magical here already simply because Tellurian printing presses were unknown. The thought arose fleetingly that he should sell the technology for that, but he dismissed it as unprofitable. The section was about animals and how they related to people's personalities, how certain martial or magical arts thought there were eight types, or twelve, or sixteen, and how the ninja used whatever system suited them at the time despite the various pissing contests between other schools. Anderson thought this was fair enough, but it was a subject he'd read before, and at this point he was wondering if he should contact the authors of the original book and advise them to sue.
They'd never win in a court of law, they'd say it was all down to ancient Chinese and Japanese crap and the case would be laughed away. The only profiteers would be the lawyers.
Why aren't I a lawyer?
That's it, there are professions worse than arms dealer. I'm going home.
Anderson got up to leave, his movements not even half-cut. The same emaciated, lorn, half-burnt woman was standing staring up at the burning man in loneliness and despair. Anderson was starting to think of her as a kindred spirit, and consider approaching her, when something by her feet caught his eye.
Anderson knelt to pick it up, not even bothering to conceal the speed of his movements, and altogether ignoring the expanse of sallow, withered female flesh that formed the woman's thigh as his face came near to it. It was a flyer, with words and symbols that struck him as oddly familiar.
TALES OF THE FIANNA
A special performance at the Civic Festhall
Fianna? Irish mythology?
And Anderson knew he wasn't going to any wretched hovel just yet.
The Civic Festhall was the famous home of the Sensate faction in the most upper class region of Sigil. Anderson avoided the place at all costs, as the people were happiest with their own, he didn't like them and they didn't like him. Still, he had decided where he was going today and he wasn't about to be stopped. The doorman turned up his nose, and due to not being a member of the faction and having no desire to be Anderson had to pay an hefty entrance fee, but apparently the bard had insisted that the event not be faction-specific so he was let in. Otherwise, the doorman and Anderson made their feelings for one another abundantly clear.
The room in which Anderson found the performance was far more sedate than he was used to – usually there were assorted bizarre creatures propping up the bar, including himself. Here there wasn't even a bar – there were chairs in neat arrangements facing towards a low stage in a plushly decorated room. Seated in the chairs were a variety of members of the Sigilian upper classes, and the Sensate faction – mostly humans, but some elves. The females wore the breathtakingly daring fashions of the day, their private parts covered with the absolute minimum of decency in favour of flaring weaves and spreads of material a long way from their actual bodies. Their naked expanses of flesh had met with the ne plus ultra of the makeup and dietary arts – which, to Anderson, robbed it of every possible erotic value. Perhaps that was the idea. The males wore far more cloth of far more elaborate cut, looking to Anderson far worse than the worst excesses of every European country during the Renaissance. The arms dealer watched with amusement as the various twits left him a wide berth at the back of the room.
But, as the door opened and the usher announced in musical elven tones that the performance was about to begin, Anderson lost all interest in political observation.
A young woman walked slowly and deliberately, head bowed, to the front of the room. Her face was framed with long straight blonde hair that was several shades paler than her skin. She wore a white duster coat of clearly Tellurian manufacture and carried a white vinyl classical guitar case. She walked up onto the stage, pulled her guitar from its case, set up a camping stool and sat down with the instrument across her crossed legs.
Anderson watched mesmerised.
I bet the way that denim skirt rides up her thighs sells a Hell of a lot of records where we come from. And those boots, that vest, that body... I can smell the money already...
The woman cleared her throat, and said in a voice slightly roughened by drinking, smoking and screaming, but in which an Irish accent still showed through:
'Thank you all for coming tonight. I'd like to share with you some poems from a life a long way from here. Tales of the Fianna, once my own people, and what our pride and lust and intolerance have done to us.'
Plucking the gut strings with individual fingers, she began to sing.
'The Red Hand of Ulster extends its grasp, to the furthest corners of our lives. The people of my native land, have fallen under the orange dream of 1690. The Fianna in our time of youth stand alone, in a continuous fight, to escape our tragic destiny...'
The assembled gentlefolk of Sigil watched politely with mild interest; they were used to hearing the bizarre concepts and music of a thousand worlds. As a heart-stoppingly beautiful elf-maid dressed apparently entirely in gossamer and spiderwebs and lustrous black hair walked around serving drinks and sweetmeats they politely took small portions and discussed the performance in murmured tones. At this point, though, Anderson didn't have to restrain himself from guzzling everything in sight. His attention was total.
From the look in her eyes you can tell she has been to all of these places. It's more than just a song to her. And those eyebrows, more like feathers than hair... she looks like she could have sprung fully formed, full of pride, from the Irish sea.
Talk about animal souls, she was a sea eagle in another life.
Eventually the girl's repertoire ended and her head bowed, to polite applause. Such few of the Sensates as wished to speak to her approached her at the front of the stage, where she raised ocean-blue eyes pale with exhaustion to them. Most left, and his gaze never leaving her, Anderson followed.
Anderson waited underneath a small café awning, nursing a small glass of wine, until such time as he saw the girl leave the Civic Festhall, guitar in hand. He abandoned the wine and described a circle to meet her, falling into step by her side. Head bowed and face drawn, she did not appear to have seen him.
'Good gig.'
The girl jumped, and turned to him in alarm. Anderson had found that people rarely noticed him move, and that he couldn't turn it off. Sometimes he wished he could.
'Excuse me?'
'Sorry if I startled you. I saw you play.'
'Oh...' The girl's brow cleared of doubt. 'OK. Thanks. You'll have to forgive me for not noticing you. I'm usually pretty detached at gigs.'
'That's all right.'
By this point the girl was looking him up and down and looking somewhat perturbed. 'Your clothes... Tellus Prime?'
'That's right. It's where I'm from.'
'Oh,' said the girl in somewhat cooler tones. She withdrew slightly and started to look around the street.
Anderson read the signs. 'Your accent... you must be Irish?' he queried.
'Yes. I am.'
'North or South?'
Her eyes, with the lashes and brows so pale they were almost white, looking more like feathers than hair, narrowed dangerously. 'A very pertinent question, Mr...?'
Anderson stuck out his hand. 'Louis. Anderson Louis.'
'Eva Thomasen. Well, nice meeting you Anderson. Still...' The girl looked up, clearly about to say something about the position of the sun in the sky. Seeing no sun, only a pale unsourced light and the rest of Sigil arching off over her head, she balked.
'So, can I offer you a drink?'
The girl looked down from the impossible sky, clearly uncertain about the prospect. But as she looked around the street, seeing abelaats, githzerai, tieflings and even stranger creatures, clearly some decision was changed.
'All right... not for long, though.'
Knowing better than to let her change her mind again, Anderson led her to the same drastically expensive and upper class café in the Clerk's Ward, where they sipped elven wine from a distant dragon-dominated world.
'Sigil's a far cry from Belfast, then,' Anderson prompted.
'Yeah, well...' the girl turned her head and stared off into space, her jaw tight. Anderson thought it best to change the subject.
'When was the last time you saw Earth, then?'
'Oh, February 15th, 2003. I had to take part in the war march. That monkey in the White House is even worse than his father. I supported Clinton. I prefer a man who wants to shag his secretary to a man who wants to annihilate the known world.' Her brow furrowed. 'Then again, you may not even be from the same time stream as me, right?'
'Oh, I am. I'm sorry, but your efforts failed. The war went right ahead.'
'Damn.' Eva grimaced in bitter anger, staring down as her grasp tightened alarmingly on the delicate elven glass. 'That's all we need. Another crucifixion... for another holy war.' Realising the tension in her fingers, the girl looked down and almost unconsciously swallowed the entire drink. 'Is it my round?'
Rock and roll! thought Anderson.
'Yeah, Silvanesti sweet white, please. I guess you must be pretty close to the Troubles, then...'
'Is that why you came to my concert?'
Anderson shrugged. 'I saw your flyer. I recognised the word.'
'Yeah, well... it is always the young people who have suffered the most in Ireland.'
'I don't doubt it. It's always been rumoured to be the country's biggest export.'
She glowered. 'That joke isn't funny anymore, if it ever was. My own father was exiled from Belfast by the paramilitaries because he married a Catholic woman. Now that he's broken his spine, he'll never see his homeland again.'
'Sorry.'
'What are you apologising for? That's one thing we can't even bring ourselves to blame on the Brits.'
'Which paramilitaries was it? UVF or UDA?'
She recoiled in alarm. 'I don't know! What do you know about it?'
'Nothing, relax, would you? I just try to keep up on Tellus Prime political history. After all, I'm rarely if ever there.'
In point of fact, Anderson was trying to remember which of the two groups he had sold some spell scrolls written in devil's blood by chaotic evil fiends in Hell. He suspected it was the more fundamentalist Christian one, the ones who had refused to recognise the Good Friday Agreement. But he couldn't quite make the connection.
Damn good money, though. It came from drugs.
Eva relaxed somewhat, though the suspicion didn't entirely die in the ocean-blue eyes. 'You have some very scary knowledge, Mr Louis.'
'I wouldn't worry about it,' Anderson said with some bitterness. 'Most people find me scary.'
Eva's face went from suspicious to almost sorry.
'Anyway... if your father was forced to leave, how come you consider yourself as coming from Ulster?'
'Well, I went to the University of Belfast. I reckoned if I abandoned Northern Ireland to its fate, I was no longer part of the solution but part of the problem. At least if I went back I could make some sort of difference...'
Anderson's eyes widened in almost reluctant admiration. 'Fair play. You must have seen some serious deep shit, though...'
She shrugged. 'It was worth it. Without it, I wouldn't be what I am, I wouldn't be where I am now. What made you become a planewalker, anyway?'
Anderson coughed. 'You seem to have finished that. Can I interest you in somewhere else?'
She looked up in some confusion. 'This place seems all right.'
'Well, it isn't the kind of place I'd normally drink, to be honest. I could show you some of the sights of Sigil.' The corner of Anderson's mouth turned up with a total lack of warmth or mirth. 'It'll be a new experience for you...'
'Well... OK.' Anderson watched the girl stand up, push her chair back under the table. He watched the slight flush in her face, the slight clumsiness and lack of speed of her movements, most especially, he watched the way the short denim skirt moved over her thighs as she did it.
Out with an exhausted half-cut drop dead gorgeous Irish folk singer. In Sigil.
This is the best night I've had in ages.
'Are you sure this is the way?' said Eva to Anderson as they progressed through increasingly run-down areas of Sigil. Anderson watched with not entirely charitable intentions as she shrank increasingly closely to him, for all that she was as big as him, strapping and athletic.
'Yeah! It can't be much compared to Belfast.'
'I don't know, though...' muttered the girl as she watched three Razor Angels go toe to toe with a black abishai.
'Relax, we'll be there soon.'
But from the look in the girl's eyes as they walked into the Burning Corpse Tavern, with the noise, the smells and above all the fiery man himself, it was clear she was horrified. Anderson began to think he'd made a mistake.
'This place is terrible! It's obvious that all these people are only here because they enjoy the pain of others.'
Unnoticed, at a table by the corner, a small young woman with neck-length blonde hair framing her face, wearing what looked like the robes of a Dust faction member cut off at the elbows and knees, looked up at the odd couple speculatively.
Anderson felt almost hurt at the slight to his pub.
'Relax, it's not that bad. Look, you see the burning man? He doesn't look in pain. Look at his eyes, they're ecstatic, his mouth is open, he's revelling in the flames...'
Eva turned her back decisively. 'I don't want to know. Get me a drink before I think better of this.' She stalked over and annexed a table as far from the burning man as possible. A party of dark dwarves raised a ribald cheer at her approach; she silenced them with a murderous glare.
Realising the dangerous nature of the hand he'd just played, Anderson ordered his favourite rotgut ale for himself, but the finest wine available in the tavern for the lady. Unfortunately the grape of the outcast elves of the Avari was the best they could stretch to. Anderson hoped, belatedly and without much hope, that the lady wouldn't notice.
As he returned to the table she looked up at him with some considerable anger.
'Now I know who you are. I think.'
'I used to like that song before I found out it was by Nickelback.'
Her eyes narrowed in rage, and Anderson realised it was the wrong joke at the wrong time. 'Don't use your sophistry on me. Don't think this is my first time in Sigil or the Planes just because it's the first gig you've seen. I've heard rumours about you.'
Anderson sighed, resorting, in the last resort, to honesty. 'Unfortunately, Eva, you have to understand that whatever rumours you hear about me are going to be true. My only defence is to lead a life even more unbelievable than what they actually say.'
Eva balked in confusion, which was the best reaction Anderson could have hoped for. 'So it's true that you're a warlock? That you sold your soul to the devil. That you're obsessed with being the ultimate warrior. That you're a planewalking dealer in arms and death spells.'
Anderson bowed his head, shaking it, before looking up into the sea blue eyes. 'Well, Eva, I can't say I acknowledge concepts like devil, or soul, or that it's possible to make that kind of bargain. I wouldn't say I was obsessed with the path of the warrior, but everyone should have a goal. As for the rest... well... we all have to make a living. Don't tell me you sell CDs with those songs and that face and that body for free...'
'So it is true, then.'
'Which part?'
'You sold your soul to the devil.'
'I don't believe in either.'
'You can't not believe in devils! We saw one five minutes ago!'
'Yeah, we saw a devil, a creature which has been called a devil by humans in the human tongue. All that creature looks to me is a being from another evolutionary path, a different species of the same genetic basis as insects. Not remotely a devil in the sense you mean, a near-omnipotent unknowable being. Abishai are just animals with easily definable – and limited – powers.'
'I think I know what you mean...'
'And what do you mean by soul? What's a soul?'
'How are you sitting there drinking that shitty ale and annoying me without a soul?'
'Mind' Anderson growled. 'I acknowledge mind.' Next question.'
'So you're the greatest warrior of the planes, then.'
'Well, not exactly, no. I've trained with a few people in a few places. I'm chiefly hoping to win the support of a githzerai. They're so fucking fast they could take any human. They could teach me a thing or two.'
She frowned. 'I've heard of the githzerai, but not had much to do with them. I hear they don't have much respect for humans.'
'They don't.'
'And from what I hear, you don't have much respect for any life at all. It's true you're an arms dealer, then.'
Anderson shrugged, helplessly. 'Crumbs Guv, it's a fair cop. Not just arms but magic and technology, too.'
'How can you do that? You have no morality, or honour?'
'I don't see as how the actions of the customers reflect upon me. It's not me that fires the gun or plants the bomb or casts the deadly spell...'
'How interesting. I've always wanted to ask Noraid the exact same question!'
The pair stared at each other in absolute blazing rage and hatred. With eyes only for each other, they didn't notice the young woman with the neck length hair nodding with an increasingly big smile.
Eva stood up.
'Fuck this. And fuck you.'
'OK, man, whatever.'
'Oh, and mighty warrior-warlock-warmonger, whatever you are, the least you can do is walk me back to my hotel in the Clerk's Ward. You brought me into this area of shit. You can get me out.'
'Challenge accepted.'
The pair walked back towards the Civic Festhall in furious silence, arms in hostile postures, but elbows still almost touching. Both were so annoyed with each other (and partially, at themselves) that fatally, they failed to notice stealthy figures melting out of the shadows.
The two humans only looked up when their way was blocked by two alien figures standing very tall and outflanking them on both sides. Their spirits sank as they realised that another form was directly behind them both.
The githyanki soldiers were seven feet tall and more slender than any human could survive. Their green skin and black hair was modified and scarified and tattooed and pierced into designs beyond what any human Tellus Prime could have seen. Their armour was boiled leather of the skins of beasts from the astral plane. They were all grinning like sharks as they held out the Hattori Hanso swords Anderson had sold them the previous day.
As he looked from face to face, Anderson realised exactly what this was about, but knew there were a few more expected moves of this entirely predictable game that were left to play.
What he didn't expect was the feminine arm that suddenly hooked into his and held it with a grip like iron.
'So, gith. What's all the commotion?' said Anderson tersely.
'You need to ask, hu-man?' grinned the one on his right. 'We didn't like the price you charged us for these human weapons. We don't see how your reputation is supposed to be so superior.'
'Damned by my own reputation.' Anderson commented grimly. 'Evidently my reputation is a harlot.'
This evidently confused them, but they rallied. All the time, Anderson was trying to sense, which the whole of his five senses stretched to their limit in the semi-mythical Zen awareness of haragei, where the third githyanki was. He was almost directly behind them holding the sword almost directly between the human man and woman. This was bad, but it could have been worse.
'Your false human sophistry betrays you, oh great warlock,' sneered the gith on the diagonal left. 'We'll make it simpler for the younger race. We keep the swords. We keep the scrolls also. We don't rape your girlfriend while you watch, then cut you up while she watches!'
'I'm not his girlfriend!' Eva snarled.
During this insulting, and to Anderson's mind, entirely pointless exchange, time had slowed to a crawl in his awareness. In the realm of the mythical Zen zone he was ignoring the actions clearly intended to be distraction and recalling everything he had ever known about the githyanki.
This wasn't much, but he had had rather more dealings with githzerai and believed them to be, at genetic root, the same species. He knew they were blindingly fast, with much more speed and dexterity than the fastest human could hope to even visualise. He knew they were experienced planewalkers, their ancestral home upon the Astral Plane and routinely fought it out with the denizens there. He knew they were ruled by a lich queen in an utterly repressive and draconian society. He knew they had innate psychic powers humans could only grasp after years of effort.
It doesn't make them smarter.
Anderson had already clocked that they were holding the Hattori Hanso swords all wrong, that the sale had not included even the modicum of training in the exquisite art of the samurai sword, and he hoped that the githyanki wouldn't have the remotest chance of wielding with any efficacy any sword balanced completely differently to how they were used to.
That hope let to his determination to do what he was now doing.
Locking his grip tight onto Eva's arm to control her movement and keep her away from the blades, Anderson swept his entire body round in a circle kick, knocking the swords out from in front of him with the heel of his German paratrooper boots. Thrusting the girl away from him with his momentum, he slashed his other hand across the front of the githyankis' throats. They staggered back, gagging. With the hand freed from Eva, he turned back and struck the githyanki behind him full in the sternum. He heard it shatter as bones that had never grown under the tyrannical gravity of Earth are wont to do. Dropping to one knee, he picked up one of the fallen swords with it, and in the same movement as standing sliced the blade through both githyanki in front. They fell with horrified expressions but without a murmur.
Anderson theatrically leaned back and swung the blade down ceremonially, sweeping the black githyanki blood from it, and turned to Eva with a smile of triumph.
'Guess we won...'
She was looking down at his midriff with eyes as large as saucers.
'What?'
At that moment Anderson felt a dull sensation of discomfort, turning to an increasing bright point of agony, and looked down to see the Hattori Hanso sword that had been stuck completely through his abdomen from behind.
Anderson found himself on his knees, staring down at the curved foot of razor sharp steel sticking straight out from his gut. There wasn't much blood; presumably the wound was that clean that the blade itself was blocking the flow. He suppressed a grimace. His shirt would certainly be damaged, though; at the very least it would need patches over the holes.
He also realised he was going to have to get the blade out. His hands plucked in spasmodic futility at the air around the blade protruding from his stomach as his brain realised that trying to pull it out from the front would not only probably lacerate his fingers, but also result in him jamming the tsuba into his back and it would never come out. Fall forward? This would only push the blade back into his body and almost certainly do more cutting damage.
There was nothing for it. He was going to have to pull the blade back out from the rear.
Anderson reached with shaking hands into his belt pouches and drew out the chainmail and Kevlar gloves which he kept for battle.
Abruptly a figure rushed up to his side.
'Wait, stop! What are you doing?'
'I'm going to pull the sword out from behind, what does it look like?'
'You'll bleed to death! It looks like it's pierced your liver.'
'Well, I can hardly wander along looking for a healer with a sword sticking out of my belly. I'd be the laughing stock of Sigil.' Anderson winced through the quip. The blade was now starting to feel red-hot, though he shivered with a chill.
'You have to leave it in until you get medical attention, otherwise you'll only do more damage...'
'What, you think I'm going to just saunter along to the nearest A and E department? It would be about five portals and fifteen million light years away!' Anderson grimaced again and reached around to the small of his back.
Eva sighed. Anderson, consciousness starting to turn distinctly odd with pain and stress, felt her kneel down beside him, her bare knees pushing down into the black blood staining the cobblestone roads. He felt his hands gently put firmly gripped by the wrists and pushed away to rest on his thighs.
'Then there's nothing for it. Given your crimes and character, I wouldn't normally do this, but...'
The girl shifted her weight and placed her right hand on Anderson's stomach so that the blade was between her second and third fingers. With her left hand she took hold of the hilt of the sword, still sticking from Anderson's back. She inclined her head, closed her eyes and went utterly still and silent.
Anderson felt a distinct warmth spreading from her right hand, a warmth quite different in character from the now red-hot seeming blade in his vitals. The warmth grew until it was almost all he could feel, one of the most intense, yet not unpleasurable, sensations he had ever felt. At the same time he felt an irresistible pulling from the region of the sword. The warmth rapidly spread through to his back and seemed to overwhelm the pulling, and everything else. Anderson surrendered to the feeling.
The next thing he was aware of was the girl maneuvering the Hattori Hanso sword between them, point down, in her left hand, and drop it to the floor ahead of him.
'There,' she said, sounding utterly drained. 'Your wound is healed now.'
Anderson's eyes widened in disbelief. He stood up slowly, feeling in the neat cuts in his shirt to whole, unscarred skin beneath.
'What did you just do? I have not seen healing like that anywhere in the Planes, let alone from a Tellus Prime.'
'Live and learn,' said the girl with a dead lack of affect. She stood up, seeming barely able to co-ordinate herself. She flicked ineffectually at the blood and dirt encrusting her legs with feeble, unresponsive fingers.
Anderson turned to face her. 'That must have taken a lot out of you...' This seemed an understatement. She had looked tired after her performance, currently, her pale skin had faded to ashen grey, and her eyes were ringed with dark circles.
'Well, whatever. I suggest that you drink some water and try to ground yourself. The healing process can be traumatic. In the meantime, I think that concludes this evening's entertainment.'
'Hey, wait. I think it's you that needs grounding. I should at least take you to get some food and rest.'
'I ask for nothing... certainly not from you,'
'Really? You don't look like you could get far on your own. And the Clerk's Ward again, eh? I won't inflict the Burning Corpse Tavern on you again.'
'If I must.' Eva muttered, though in truth she looked in no state to argue. It seemed all she could do to lean back against a nearby wall and massage her temples with her hands.
'Well, yeah, it seems only fair. One of the spells they paid me with was a Recall scroll, it'll take us back where we came from. But there's just one thing I want to sort out first...' Leaving the Recall scroll tucked under his arm, Anderson started leaning down over the githyanki corpses, picking up the infamous swords, wiping them down, matching each to a scabbard and shoving them into a cylindrical canvas bag.
Eva broke out of her inner exhaustion to stare at him with a mixture of disbelief and disgust. 'What are you doing?'
'Well, it's what they would have done to me. This way I get a bunch of expensive weaponry and the payment as well. Turned out nice again!'
She shook her head in contempt, but seemed unable to prevent the corner of her lip turning up. 'I so wish I had sufficient energy to just walk away from you.'
'Well, fortunately for me, it looks like you haven't.'
After a few more glasses of Silvanesti elven wine and starter of melange fried angel fish some colour had returned to Eva's skin. Meanwhile, however, the two found themselves in an increasingly prolonged silence.
'So you were going to ask me where I learned to do that,' said Eva flatly after a while.
'Actually I was going to ask you how I got into planewalking. It's not the most accessible of career paths where we come from.'
She sighed. 'Quid pro quo, eh? How about you tell me the same thing, then I reciprocate? And don't just say you do it for the money. No doubt there would be easier ways to do that on Earth.'
Anderson grimaced. 'You'd be surprised. I found myself in the midst of a recession, unemployable, the only way to get round it was to start a business exploiting the one thing that was booming – guns. I started off wildcatting -- buying used .22 cartridge cases from target practise ranges, putting new cordites and bullets in and selling them to improverished and unscrupulous gun users. I was very successful. Increasingly the cartridges started getting to be heavier and heavier calibre, and I stopped questioning where they were coming from. It's a slippery slope... The, er, overseas customers came on board around the same time the actual dealing in weapons themselves started.'
'Charming...' sneered Eva in open contempt.
Anderson sighed. 'We do what we gotta do. Perhaps you should question the fact that I never did anything illegal, never had to. Seems the government doesn't really care.
'What was odd was that part of the business was for medieval and Asian weaponry, this was more my hobby to begin with, but increasingly the paying customers started buying those as well. This part of the business having more of an emotional response for me than guns, I started trying to buy some of these items as well... picked up some very strange pieces. As I got more and more business more and more of these people started paying me off in gold, or gems, or uranium, or like for like, or scrolls no one I could find could read... Eventually the firearms became just a means to finance keeping tabs on the strangest of my customers and find out where the most unusual of their wares were coming. It had become clear to me long ago that some of these weapons were unknown to any culture our planet had ever seen.'
Eva shrugged. 'Fairly obvious when you think about it.'
'Well, yes, now. A lot of my customers were too weird to really fit into society very well and not remotely au fait with the kind of technology I was using to track them with.' He grinned. 'Plus not many of them had much idea of the difference in the value of gold and gems and uranium between their worlds and mine, which as well as being a dead giveaway made me a fucking fortune. Which was nice. Anyway, it wasn't long before I filmed someone opening a portal, replicated the effect myself, and the rest is history. Of course, many of my previous good customers and clients didn't much like being tracked back to their home worlds, and I have the scars to prove it, but I'm still here.' He grinned mirthlessly.
'Well, that's... nice,' muttered Eva.
'So...'
'Well... I went to Belfast around the time my dad became paralysed, which was... traumatic, to say the least, particularly since I couldn't afford to go back and see him very often. I studied counselling, chiefly because the doctors had said that was the last thing had any chance of helping my dad. I was into the music scene, but also fell in with a lot of New Agers, who were into energy healing, reiki and all that business. I was clutching at straws... I wanted to believe in anything.
'I threw myself into as many courses on esoteric healing as I could find. Western medicine had failed my father, but I wouldn't. Reiki, crystal therapy, acupuncture... apart from music that became my whole life.
'What was worse, I didn't expect it to work, but it did. In the back of my mind I thought it was just something I needed to get out of my system and it was all really just a bunch of tree hugging hippie crap. But it wasn't till I actually started doing healings, spontaneously, that it worked.
A shadow passed over her face. 'Someone threw a bottle at one of my gigs, split the cellist's head open. I rushed over and closed the wound without a scar without even thinking about it.'
'Which is precisely the way you're supposed to do it,' said Anderson softly.
Eva grimaced. 'Yeah. Well. She didn't see it that way, not being a Presbyterian. That's why I perform alone these days.
'Anyway, not only the musicians but also the New Agers avoided me after that. I didn't know why, surely I was the living proof of their way of life? But I realised it had just been a game to them, a way of making friends or rebelling against their middle class upbringing. None of them had wanted the powers the way I did and once they encountered someone who did, they had nothing but suspicion and fear.'
Anderson shrugged. 'Sorry,' he said. 'But that's human beings for you.'
She scowled. 'Maybe. Anyway, my band gone, my friends gone, I was alone. I was just waiting till I could return home and fulfil my last hope, try to heal my father. After which he'd probably say it was the devil's work and disown me himself.'
Pausing, she fell silent.
Anderson's eyes moved from left to right. He belatedly realised the room was filled with more of the same scantily clad Sensates and elves and waitresses and high class escorts and he hadn't noticed a single one of them. 'Er... and?' A slender woman with blonde hair clad in rather simpler dress stared back at him speculatively, but he did not notice her.
'Then one day a pelican landed on my windowsill, and told me it was the animal soul of a witch from another world who was over five hundred years old.'
Anderson's eyes opened wide. 'That can happen,' he said.
'You wouldn't think so, would you? But by that point I was prepared to believe anything. I followed the pelican through a portal. I learned the witches' skills, they learned mine. Having absorbed all they had to offer, I asked them where else such portals could be found, and that was that for me.'
She lowered her eyes, and sucked deeply on her wine.
'Did you ever return to Belfast?'
'No, nor have I seen my father since, before you ask. As far as my family are concerned I'm still in Belfast, making a living as a counsellor and musician. I send them letters every so often. I'm not ready to go home yet. That's not a test I'm prepared to take.'
Anderson sighed. 'I know how you feel. I can never go home again. Not many people are prepared to call be friend or family of an arms dealer of any stripe.'
'Bit different though, isn't it?' said Eva bitterly.
Anderson only shrugged.
Both of them drank their wine, and ate their main courses, and subsequently their desserts, in silence after that. After the plates were cleared there seemed nothing more to say. Eventually Eva spoke.
'I guess you've got what you wanted, then. This is far too late for me. I was headed back to my hotel right after this. I guess I'll see you round.'
'Wait... I was wondering where you were headed after this?'
'My hotel, like I said.'
'I meant... what final destination? What world?'
She looked taken aback. 'Hadn't thought about it. Why?'
'I was wondering if we could travel together awhile...' Anderson, who prided himself on never showing emotion to a client, winced inside at the note of pleading that had crept into his voice.
Her eyes bulged. 'Me come with you, and watch dirty deals done dirt cheap for weapons of mass destruction on worlds that haven't even invented gunpowder yet? No fucking thank you. I have better things to do with my life.'
'So do I,' he said, surprisingly himself.
'What?'
'Eva... there are possibly an infinite number of universes out there, mundane universes, magical universes, even empty universes. There are multitudes of species of intelligent beings we can't even begin to imagine, graceful and wise, artistic or practical.
'And all I ever see of any of them are the war zones, and all the beings I ever meet are the ones who want to destroy each other. The story is always the same; nothing ever changes but the ideology or the religion or the economics. I've had enough. I want to be a planewalker again, see something new and different. I thought maybe you could show me.'
Eva stopped, clearly hesitating. While she was obviously set to refuse, there was something in the voice and eyes, a raw appeal and pain which the apparently cold and amoral arms dealer was not entirely able to hide. It seemed that he realised it too.
Anderson attempted his characteristic cynical smile, which didn't quite come out. 'Think about it man... We have a very good cross correlation of skills. I defend you from fuck off monsters, you patch me up. It's an easy choice if you ask me.'
Eva smiled slightly. Despite the flippancy, her choice had already been made. And, as both had agreed, neither of them could go home again.
'Well, if you put it like that... I accept.'
Anderson's eyes widened. It seemed he hadn't actually expected to succeed. 'Hey, great! When do we start?'
'Well, I really do need some sleep, you know...' She started for the door.
He followed her. 'Er, about your hotel? I suspect it might be quite a bit better than mine...'
She laughed. 'Well, you'd better have money. The Sensates agreed to put me up, and they're obviously loaded. And don't even think you're sharing my room. I've seen the way you look at me.'
'Money? Hell, you just saw the kind of win-win deals I make every day? And as for that comment, I don't know what you mean.'
The two were almost at the door when a figure stood up and approached them.
'Anderson Louis? Eva Thomasen?'
Both halted abruptly. They had been accosted by a slender, petite woman with neck-length blonde hair and a modified dress apparently based on the Dustman mode. Her eyes had an odd aspect that they were unable to look away from.
'That's me.' 'I'm here,' the pair uttered at the same moment.
The young woman smiled in a mirthless, triumphant way that seemed too old for the young face, and a sudden, overwhelming impulse hit both Eva and Anderson that what they were dealing with here was a soul not only more ancient and powerful than its shell appeared, but more so than any they had yet encountered.
'Please allow me to introduce myself. In this universe as well as all possible universes, I am called Cocoon; you see here the incarnation I hold in Sigil. In all current incarnations, I am the last of the Boddhisattvas, and I have a proposition in which I believe the two of you may be interested...'
GAVIN MITCHELL 05/08/04