.
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End of the Line
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Before heading over to the ship Bronze had slept. The tenseness of a coming climax was as imperceivable but as real (and accretive) as the fatigue of making the trek to Murkwater. They were now on the last stage of the challenge and leaving the rising action for the first stages of the ending, or at least he was. He felt like a performer placed on center stage minutes before the rise of the curtain; settled in position with his first line held securely in his mind, he heard the unseen audience rattling programs and settling in their seats. He lived with a tight, tidy ball of unholy anticipation in his belly and welcomed the exercise that let him sleep. And when he did sleep, Cobalion made the nightmares leave. The dreamless haze that resulted was like the dead.
When he did awake, thinking of the last fight and what order of battle he would choose, Cobalion's airless, hanging voice announced that the Company would be going with him. "For at this ending, we would rather be together."
And so it was that the five of them went into the Gym. It had been carved into the wreck of an old treasure galleon that looked to be all the way from the late Middle Ages. A path from the mouth of Murkwater Cavern led south over the seashore and then into a divide between two scrubby hills, beyond which was a shallow bay where the treasure vessel rested in the sun, lying at an angle and flying no flag. The path went to some portable plastic steps, scuffed with brown shoemarks. Tess looked at the wreck with wonder. There had never been any shipwrecks near Rosecove, and certainly not so far up on the shore.
Bronze went up the steps and found that they moved beneath his feet, unsteady as the sand they were placed on. Before him was a portal of broken wood boards carved in the ship's side which, albeit unevenly, led into the Gym proper. He grabbed one board to steady himself, and found that it was warm from the sun and firm in his grasp. Careful not to risk the old wood snapping, he shifted his hands and latched onto two metal support rails that stuck out from the sides of the short passage, swung his legs up and over the gap between the stairs and ship, and went inside a gloom of sodium lamps and sunlight beams sneaking in from an uneven pockmarking of holes in the hull.
Though the interior was not actually very dim, he had spent so much time in the tropical sun that it seemed at first completely dark. When his eyes got used to it he though the ship seemed larger within than within. A moment later he became sure of it. The floor was the surface of what would have been the third deck, but the second deck's floor had been taken out and all that was left was the upper decks acting as a roof. There were still outcroppings of planks and rusted metal nodules where the second deck had been. The ship had to be at least five hundred feet from bow to stern and at least two hundred port to starboard. From outside, the old galleass seemed only a third as large and not nearly as tall.
The room was full of relics from the medieval merchant states of southern Kanto and Johto, scattered strips of parchment, golden candle holders, and old sea-worn cannons with the powder gone wet. There were also precious stones, gold masks adorned with red and white feathers, and stone statues embedded with jewels. The spoils of a conquest that the islanders and the northern traders had long ago forgotten, and that some adventurer had failed to tell his children about. He saw a blue and white Aredian carpet on the floor and stepped on it, standing in the middle of the room.
"It's all real," the voice of Brynn said. Once the awkwardness of the darkness amid a ship from a ruined age wore off, Bronze saw that the woman was reclining behind a flat, oblong piece of rusty metal in a corner of the room. He said nothing.
She was wearing a piratical overcoat and a bicorne hat with the cockade of the Association tied to its brim. Her hair had been wound into dark braids the same color as her boots. It was nothing like the wasted woman that had met them after the disaster in the bar. Here was a trainer indeed, and Bronze saw her regarding him with greed and an air of malice. Her eyes were looking into his own with a deadly intent, not only to defeat, but to humiliate and drive out in shame. When he felt that deadly stroke it was like some new evil consciousness had been awakened in the woman across from him. In her eyes a spark of needy fire was kindled within, as if taunting a prey with no hope left.
Stricken with horror he tried to back away but bumped straight into Cobalion. He looked around, released from the spell in Brynn's eyes, and saw his friends around him. Robert and Lily had just lifted themselves into the passage, no longer dressed in prisoner's rags,, but in the noble clothes of adventurers fresh from a big game hunt. He looked back at Brynn and saw that the pale-feeling enchantment had been broken.
"I've been waiting for you," said Brynn. "Do you come with a serious purpose, challenger?"
He began the litany which befit him, Bronze Tercano, chosen by the blind blood of his fathers to be the heir of Logaria. He had planned these words since the start of the quest, learned against the day when they would, perchance, become real.
"I come here for a serious purpose, Gym Leader. I come as an outcast from the courts of men. I come with my chosen weapons."
"So then you wish to have at me, boy?" said Brynn.
"I do."
"In whose name?"
"The holy name of ARCS and my father."
"Say his name."
"Robert Tercano of the line of Logaria."
"You will fight with your Pokemon and they will fail. You will not pass further than me. This is the way it ends."
"I fight with my heart, you salt-brained piece of sea piss."
Brynn scowled. "You are being rude and arrogant. These may be interesting traits to you and your rabble, but not to me."
Tess's face was frantic. She mouthed the words What are you DOING? Bronze ignored her; he had his hands full with Brynn, and he knew perfectly well what he was doing.
"Oh, I can be much ruder than I have been. I can call you a nonsensical, empty-headed, foolish, arrogant bitch. I can call you a stupid, unwise creature whose sense is no more than the sound of a winter wind in a hollow tree. I cannot say you are viler than the vilest beggar who ever crawled the gutters of the lowest street in creation, because even such a creature is better than you. I can call you a faithless creature, a coward who has delighted in the torture of the foolish and the slaughter of the innocent, a lost and bleating goblin who—"
"The spirit of trash talk is nice, but don't get ahead of yourself," said Brynn, raising a hand. "I command you to stop and wait."
Bronze's eyes blazed with such a wild fire that Tess shrank away from him. Dimly, he heard Lily and Robert gasp.
"Defeat if you will, but command me nothing!" roared Bronze. "You have forgotten the face of Arceus who made you! Now either make me leave or be silent and listen to me, Bronze Tercano, son of Robert, heir to Logaria, and lord of the ancient lands! I have not come across all the miles and all the years to listen to your childish prating! Do you understand? Now you will listen to ME!"
There was a moment of shocked silence. No one breathed. Bronze stared sternly forward, his head high, his hand on Electavire's Poke Ball.
There was no response from Brynn for a long, long time, and when Brynn did reply, it was not with words. Instead, the walls, floor, and ceiling began to lose their color and solidity. In a space of ten seconds the Gym had ceased to exist. It was not a matter of windows appearing in the ship's curved walls; the entire room, floor and ceiling as well as walls, grew milky, grew translucent, grew transparent, and then disappeared completely. The ship seemed to be gone and the pilgrims seemed to be standing above the bay with no support at all. Brynn was sitting in a powder-blue swivel chair, her dusty, battered boots resting on nothing.
What happened was so spectacular that it stunned all of them to silence, although Cobalion, who knew much of modern technology and who had spent his entire life on comfortable terms with magic, was the least wonder-struck of the five.
Bronze started moving. Taking the initial step required a great deal of willpower, because his eyes told him there was nothing at all between the floating islands of furniture, but once he began to move, the undeniable feel of the floor beneath him made it easier. Then the walls clouded again and Brynn said: "Mark what you see closely, boy. Mark what you see well."
The walls turned transparent again. Tess and Lily screamed in unison. Robert took one look and clapped his hands over his eyes. Cobalion began to buck and chuff wildly. Bronze stared down, eyes wide, lips set in a bloodless line like a scar. Understanding filled him like bright white light. Brynn was a Ghost-type trainer, no doubt.
...
Below them was no longer a sunken tidepool: it was a sunken plain. It was as if the land had lain on top of a titanic, flat-roofed elevator, and at some point in the dim, unrecorded past the elevator had gone down, taking a huge chunk of the world with it. The ship, floating above this fallen land and below the rain-swollen clouds, seemed to float in empty space.
Even Cobalion felt human vertigo twist his gut as the land beneath them seemed to swell upward toward the place where they were floating. The picture that appeared was ugly beyond the god's past knowledge of ugliness, and that knowledge, sadly, was wide indeed. The lands below had been fused and blasted by some terrible event, the disastrous cataclysm that had driven this part of the world deep into itself in the first place, no doubt. The surface of the earth had become distorted black glass, humped upward into spalls and twists which could not properly be called hills and twisted downward into deep cracks and folds which could not properly be called valleys. A few stunted nightmare trees flailed twisted branches at the sky; under magnification, they seemed to clutch at the Company like the arms of lunatics. Here and there clusters of thick ceramic pipes jutted through the glassy surface of the ground. Some seemed dead or dormant, but within others they could see gleams of eldritch blue-green light, as if titanic forges and furnaces ran on and on in the bowels of the earth. Misshapen flying things which looked like pterodactyls cruised between these pipes on leathery wings, occasionally snapping at each other with their hooked beaks. Whole flocks of these gruesome aviators roosted on the circular tops of other stacks, apparently warming themselves in the updrafts of the eternal fires beneath.
They passed above a fissure zig-zagging along a north-south course like a dead river bed, except it wasn't dead. Deep inside lay a thin thread of deepest scarlet, pulsing like a heartbeat. Other, smaller fissures branched out from this. Bronze, who had read his share of the Legends, thought:
This is what the Golden Company saw when they reached the heart of Dor Daedeloth. This is the Land of Shadowy Horror.
A fiery fountain erupted directly below them, spewing flaming rocks and stringy clots of lava upward. For a moment it seemed they would be engulfed in flames. Then the flare died and rocks, many as big as factories, came thudding back in a soundless storm.
But the vision of Dor Daedeloth, though poisoned, was not entirely dead. They caught sight of figures below them, misshapen things that bore no resemblance to either men or animals or Pokemon, prancing and cavorting in the smoldering wilderness. Most seemed to congregate either around the clusters of cyclopean chimneys thrusting out of the fused earth or at the lips of the fiery crevasses that cut through the landscape. It was impossible to see these whitish, leaping things clearly, and for this they were all grateful.
Among the smaller creatures stalked larger ones-pinkish things that looked a little like storks and a little like living camera tripods. They moved slowly, almost thoughtfully, like preachers meditating on the inevitability of damnation, pausing every now and then to bend sharply forward and apparently pluck something from the ground, as herons bend to seize passing fish. There was something unutterably repulsive about these creatures; Bronze felt that as keenly as the others. But it was impossible to say what, exactly, caused that feeling. There was no denying its reality, however; the stork-things were, in their exquisite hatefulness, almost impossible to look at.
"This is no nuclear wasteland," said Cobalion, his horrified voice sounding like an old, weary man. "This is the domain of the Enemy. But it was sunk into the sea many thousands of years ago."
"It is a vision from my Pokemon, some of which are old enough to remember those times," said Brynn. "Should I turn off the holo-walls?"
"Yes," said Tess. "Oh my God yes."
On the horizon, a jagged nightmare mountain-range loomed out of the smoke; the sterile peaks seemed to bite at the gray sky like fangs. Turning around Bronze made out a faint shadow of greener lands to the south, if the bleeding, lightless sun, marked with oozing sores of ash, was even in the right position in the sky. Around the mountain slopes slopes were sterile valleys where gigantic beetles crawled about like landlocked turtles. Bronze saw something that looked like a huge snake suddenly uncoil from the mouth of a cave. It seized one of the beetles and yanked it back into its lair. Bronze had never in his life seen such animals or countryside, and it made his skin want to crawl right off his flesh. It was inimical, but that was not the problem. It was alien, that was the problem. Brynn might have transported them to some other world.
The air around them began to fill in with curves of color. The blue carpet appeared again, blotting out their view of the fuming land of Dor Daedeloth beneath them. The indirect lighting reappeared and they were once again standing in the ship.
...
"Fight me or not, but stop playing games," said Bronze.
"That was the Djinn's realm of old," said Brynn. "I am Arcean as much as you and know what we should fear. Bronze, you will agree with me when I say that all must join forces, unless we would have the whole world become yet another ocean of rottenness. But that is not your wheel to turn, Tercano. I will not let you dismantle the Association."
"What do you care about the Association?" asked Robert. He did not raise his voice; he might have asked if they could start up the air conditioner.
"Men cannot rule themselves," said Brynn, "and if there was ever an irascible race of men, it's the Rorians. You will let them loose on the world, boy. I have read the signs. People want change, plain to see, but what's to come will be much worse than what they've got here and now. When you get into the League, Bronze, you already win. You'll be up on international television and radio, you'll be in newspapers, holocasters, everything that could give news about the League. And our words will be carried over Roria. It was never in your plan to win, was it?"
"No," said Bronze quietly, and then louder, "no. I do not need to win."
"Then I am the last, the final roadblock keeping the world safe from the Rorians and their unstoppable king, returning from the shadows of two millenniums. All the others are gone: you have defeated some, or gained the favor of those who would rather side with you or were too blind to see the danger that hangs around your shoulders like a stench. Gabe you beat, but he was always the weakest. I decided to watch and wait to see where your skill and fortune led. Sebastian gave the badge, his precious badge, to you without a fight. God knows what you said to Quentin, but he liked it enough to give you that Woodhall girl and his token and then run south. Stephan fought well, but by then we knew he could never defeat you. Ryan and his stinking band of thirst-addled desert rats are your lapdogs. Arvin, the leader in Flouruma, was killed by the ruin that you brought there. Aaron in Frostveil came the closest: you have no idea how hard he tried, how elaborate the illusions were made to account for every possibility. But even he couldn't stop you."
"So it's down to you," said Bronze. "You're the guardian of the rotten hulk that is Association rule, standing in the way of Arceus's will."
"The Association is our order of society," said Brynn. "If you want to get rid of it, you're betraying your ancestors and descendants who want to live in a stable world."
"Society is for the old and women. Everything the Association has given is insane and doesn't carry any benefit. If you're in a major city and you go outside you'll see crime, filth, traffic and chaos. They turned Roria from a society that valued its culture into a bureaucratic nightmare, disregarding everything that made my nation great. Of course I want my nation, children, and more to survive; so does everybody else. Our people are suffering but the Association kicks them in the face and treats them like cattle. I had hoped for a peaceful transfer of power, a revolution where the winners forgive the losers. And that might still be possible."
"You're delusional."
"You are. The Association views the downtrodden with complete contempt. Those who complain about how the last Chairman inflated the currency to half its previous value are called idiots. Those who return to the Arcean church after seeing that the ruling order has nothing to give them are called fanatics. The elite treats us as fools who should give up the last shreds of pride and freedom for 'progress.' I didn't want any of this to happen. Nobody normal did. I didn't want to be the heir that had to wake up and face the Alliance and Association. But it was not my fate to choose. Yield or be destroyed."
Around the ship electrostatic combat barriers were raised, created by blue-painted drones with nervous, delicate movements, enclosing him and Brynn in an energy gate from which all others were excluded.
"I do not yield."
Bronze stood on a carpet that earlier had appeared to be nothing, legs apart, his right hand on his hip and his left on the grip of his Poke Balls. He stood as he had stood so many times before, in volcanoes with the smell of ashes in his nose, sunny fields where the scent of picnic treats lingered, seaside cliffs and hollow rooms. It was just another showdown against an obstacle that the eternal enemy had put in his way. That was all, and that was enough. It was Arceus, quest, destiny, the return of the king. That the showdown always came was becoming a central fact of his life and the axle on which his plans revolved. Before him was the kingship, and further down into the unpredictable mists of the future stood Cypress with the fate of the world in his body, the true final battle. That this battle here and now would be fought with Pokemon instead of other weapons made no difference; it would be a battle to the death, just the same. The stench of killing in the air was as clear and definite as the stench of exploded carrion in a swamp. Then the battle-rage descended, as it always did, and he was no longer really there to himself at all.
"Your challenge is accepted. Do we know the other's weapons?"
"Three Pokemon against three."
"I accept this also."
"Be swift, then."
And as the battle began, Brynn knew that she was running against some unconquerable force. The will of Arceus was such a power that no man or woman could stand before it long. How dishonest it would be to think she would stop the wheel of change! Even if she won, the boy would find a way. Even if she withheld the badge, he would find a way. They were already in the climax and it was too late to move the dark cloud of Bronze Tercano aside. From here, the future would open, and the clouds part onto a kind of glory. If Bronze failed, the Rorians would say he sacrificed the League so that his spirit would lead them. And if he won, they would say nothing could oppose the heir to Logaria.
My doom has come upon me, then, she prayed. God, let me not be defeated without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.
.
.
.
Bronze loosed Electivire with nerveless fingers. And Brynn's Dusknoir advanced into the arena switching an iron stick from a huge grey hand to the other, one end of the beating rod pointed and sharp, and with the other wide and hard. The chained spirits that lived inside Dusknoir's body sighed flutteringly, like birds, as their warden stepped to meet its foe. When he heard the signing of the trapped souls a jolt of pure hatred filled Bronze's sinews and loins, mixed with a little internal guilt at feeling such malice against a creature who had no choice but to be a gaoler of hell. His own bright passion went into Electivire and for an instant, they were sharing a language that had no words, a language no less simple than the one that goes between a boy and his dog.
And I say, go forth and conquer, he thought into Electivire's mind.
I am your weapon, my lord, Electivire thoughts returned.
Did the Pokemon understand? And if so, did it understand fully? If it didn't, very likely all was lost. They had only near-animal intelligence, thought Bronze, after all was said and considered, and he might be hallucinating. It turned on surprise and on whatever stuff the Pokemon had within it. Would it only sit, disinterested and stupid, in front of the boy, while the Dusknoir struck it brainless with the iron rod forged from the souls of the damned? Or seek escape outside the arena in the hot, wild expanses of Crescent Island?
As they drew close together, Electivire suddenly halted in his tracks. Bronze saw Brynn's old warrior eyes drop to the Pokemon and widen with surprise and slow-dawning comprehension. Now she understood.
"Oh, you little fool," Brynn nearly groaned, "I thought you were a ranged s—" and Bronze was suddenly furious that he should be spoken to so.
"At it!" he cried, raising his arm.
And Electivire ran like a silent charged bullet, ran so fast that it flew, thick legs pumping once, twice, three times, before crashing into Dusknoir's face faster than it could check its enemy with the rod, fists searching, claws digging. Golden drops flew up into the hot air. Silver tendrils went to the roof as souls made their sighing way to whatever afterlife awaited them.
"Ya-ho! Bronze!" Robert screamed deliriously. "First blood! First blood to my bosom!" He struck his chest hard enough to leave a bruise there that would not fade for a week.
Dusknoir made a floating stagger backwards, off balance. The iron staff rose and beat futilely at the huge creature that was trying to get it in into a death grip, a clutching embrace to squeeze and then implode. The scrum was an undulating, blurred bundle of sparks and screaming, spewing souls. This was the only chance he had to turn the tide early, Bronze knew.
Still, Dusknoir was almost too quick for his plan. The body of Electivire had covered ninety percent of Dusknoir's vision, but the iron came up again, spatulate end forward, and Brynn had it cold-bloodedly perform the only action that could turn events at that point. It beat the back of Electavire's head, arms flexing mercilessly.
Electivire fell away, its neck broken and twisted. One leg stamped frantically at the ground. Brynn's cold, predator eyes stared fiercely into Dusknoir's streaming face, caulked with golden blood. Its red eye now whirled blindly around its socket.
Then Electivire threw the Logarian dagger at Dusknoir's temple, connecting solidly and then returning to its bearer's hand. It should have ended it, but it did not. For a moment the creature's eye went slack; and then it lunged, grabbing for Electivire's foot. The Pokemon skipped back and tripped over its own feet. It went down asprawl. Bronze heard, from far away, the sound of Tess screaming in dismay.
Dusknoir was ready to fall on Bronze's Pokemon and finish it. He had lost his advantage and both he and Brynn knew it. For a moment they looked at each other, the Gym Leader standing behind her fighter, the Dusknoir with gouts of golden blood pouring from the left side of its mouthless face, the eye socket now closed except for a thin slit of red. There would be no female mates for this Pokemon tonight, Bronze thought.
Something ripped jaggedly in Bronze's memory. It was the knife, which Electavire was tearing blindly at whatever it could reach. A pulse of thought rang out in his head and Electivire heard it. It grabbed the knife like a stone, unmindful of the jabbing, diving rod that was taking the flesh from its body in ribbons. As Dusknoir flew at it, all spread-eagled, Electivire threw the knife upward.
"Hail, Pokemon! Kill!"
The knife was smashed between them, and Electivire felt a stony thumb probe for the socket of its eye. It turned it, at the same time bringing up the slab of its huge thigh to block Dusknoir's second crotch-seeking blow. Its own hand flailed against the tree of Dusknoir's neck in three hard chops. It was like hitting ribbed stone.
Then Dusknoir made a hollow, ghostly grunting. Its body shuddered. Faintly, Bronze saw one hand flailing for the dropped stick, and with a jackknifing lunge, Electivire kicked it out of reach. The knife had hooked itself mercilessly at the ghost's right cheek, making it a ruin. Cold ichor splattered Electivire's face, smelling of flowing alkali.
Dusknoir's fist struck the knife once, chipped its handle. Again, and the blade snapped away at a crooked angle. And still the knife clutched. There was no cheek now; only a black hole tunneled into the side of Dusknoir's skull where howling shades leaped out. The third blow sent the blade flying, at last clearing Dusknoir's face.
The moment it was clear, Electivire brought the edge of its hand across the bridge of Dusknoir's nose, using every bit of its strength and breaking the stone. Golden blood sprayed. Dusknoir's grasping, unseeing hand ripped at Electavire's tails, trying to pull them hard, trying to hobble it. Electivire rolled away, found Dusknoir's stick, and rose to its knees.
Dusknoir went upright, saw Bronze grinning. Incredibly, they faced each other that way from either side of the middle line of the arena although they had switched positions and Dusknoir was now on the side where Electivire had begun the contest. The old creature's face was curtained with gore. The one-seeing eye rolled furiously in its socket. The face was smashed over to a haunted, leaning angle. The stone plates that grew from its neck hung in broken flaps. Electivire held the creature's stick like a giant waiting for some terrestrial dinosaur to entire his hunting trap.
Dusknoir double-feinted, and came right at Electivire. Bronze was ready with his command, not fooled in the slightest by this last trick, which both knew was a poor one. The iron rod swung in a flat arc, striking Dusknoir's skull with a dull thudding noise. Dusknoir fell on its side, looking at the boy and his Pokemon with a lazy unseeing expression. A tiny trickle of gold came from the side of its eye socket.
"Yield or die," said Bronze.
"Never," said Brynn, her mouth sounding like it was full of wet cotton. "Look at your Pokemon."
And he looked. Nearly all of Electivire's consciousness was gone, and it would remain tended in its Poke Ball for a week afterward, wrapped in the blackness of a coma, but now it held on with all the strength of its pitiless, shadowless life. Bronze saw the need to rest in the Pokemon's, and even with a curtain of blood between the two of them, understood that the need was desperate.
"A fine weapon you were," he whispered. Electivire returned to its Poke Ball and slept.
...
Their next Pokemon faced off. Absol rested on its four legs, looking at its foe. At the other end of the arena was a motionless, cracked gray stone. On the stone, holes like black teardrops and jagged lightnings gave the impression of a face. A freezing wind picked up and the lights dimmed to a cold white glow.
Absol came to a sudden start and hit the stone down its middle. The blow chipped a sliver away but did not crack the stone along its recessed edges. From inside it a low groaning noise began, as if the stone was beginning to tear itself apart. It began to swell outward, pushing out a purple mist from its interior. The cold made Tess shudder; the lights began to turn on and off in ripples. From inside the rock, Bronze could hear dry snapping sounds as the stone broke, rearranging itself into some new, as-yet-hidden shape. And still the sound increased. Only it was no longer precisely a groan; now it sounded like a snarl.
He stared, hypnotized, unable to pull his eyes away. The stone didn't crack and then vomit outward in chunks; it seemed to have become plastic, and as the rock continued to bulge, making an irregular purple bubble-shape of mist from which scraps and draggles of green steam hung, the surface began to mold itself into shifting hills and curves and valleys. Suddenly Bronze realized he was looking at a huge ethereal face, made of a toxic mist that was pushing itself out of the stone in torrents.
There was a loud snap as a chunk of broken stone tore free of the rippling stone. It turned into a bulging cloud of mist that became the jagged pupil of one insane eye. Below it, the gas writhed into a snarling corpse-green mouth filled with curves that suggested teeth. Bronze could see fragments of ectoplasm clinging on its ephemeral gums. Now the swirling face was all the way out of the stone and staring at Absol with its eyes. Around the mouth and eyes knots of the green mist floated, enclosed in the purple body, dancing like weird tattoos. There was a wrenching sound as the thing began to glide forward.
Bronze's paralysis broke when the Spiritomb picked up speed. Absol howled. The whole room now seemed alive; the air resounded with splintering wood and squalling beams. The humming, insane voice of the Spiritomb and the dark energy of Absol was everywhere.
This was this Spiritomb that woven a spell of terror and panic in Brynn's eyes, the Spiritomb that had shown them a vision of the Dark Lord's hell-land. The cloak of coldness dropped over Bronze, a cloak he had worn many times. It was the only armor the true king ought to possess and all such a one needed. At the same moment, a voice spoke in his mind. He had been haunted by such voices over the last three months; Cobalion's voice, Arceus's voice, and, of course, Tess's. But this one, he recognized with relief, was his own, as far as the mind of repentant man can be separated from his creator. It was calm and rational and courageous.
"Get out, you old wight!" he cried in a voice that was almost a laugh. "No more of your nightmares. By the grace of God and the courage of my friends I have come. Here is the lion of Logaria!"
Spiritomb flew to Absol at once, tendrils of violet mist extending as if in love. There was an instant of terrible hollowness, terrible emptiness. Then heard an unearthly shriek of pain and surprise begin to issue from Spiritomb's throat, and then it was muffled, crammed back. These feelings of horror were at once overshadowed by relief and a grim sense of nastiness. As its invisible weight evil away, he glimpsed it: an inhuman shape like a manta-ray with huge, curling wings and many things at the ends of its hands looking like cruel bailing hooks.
Absol pushed forward and lashed out twice into the aimlessly contracting body, vaporizing one of the crude green eyes. At the blows, the face of the Spiritomb had gone from violet to a dingy purplish-black, as if it were choking on something, as if some huge object had been vomited up from its stomach and got itself desperately caught in its throat. From inside the keystone came a cauldron of black sounds: squeals, grunts, thuds, crashes.
"End it!" yelled Cobalion. "End it, for your father's sake!"
What had been happening was undeniable: the thing was tearing itself apart. The floorboards shook as good and evil spirits came at each other in a merciless gallery, fighting a destructive war like an internal infection that the immune system reacts to like a drunk berserker. Bronze felt the Spiritomb's madly conflicted nature: a hundred and eight souls, angels and demons, bound to a stone and making a phantasmagorical body. He smelt the purity of the White spirits like a rush of eyewatering juniper and roses, and the raw hunger and hatred of the Darkened Ones, as full and urgent as a pulsing artery. Brynn howled and cords stood out on her neck but the Spiritomb would not take her commands.
"In the name of the White," said Bronze, "I release the fire of God to consume every demon that stands before me, and to cast them into the abyss."
But you can't really command that, can you? the voluble self inside him protested.
The effect the words had on the Spiritomb quieted the panicked voice. It had been a time for battle only seconds ago but now he must act on the power of Arceus. Turned his eyes to Brynn, he watched her face as a sulfurous odor came from inside the keystone, strong and nauseating.
"Let us go, praying man!" a voice audibly warned.
Bronze asked, "Spirit, how many of you are in there?"
"Millions!" Then it cringed as if it had been jabbed. "Awww! Thousands! Thousands!" Another cringe. "Aww! No, we are fifty, only fifty!"
"Leave your keystone and depart from the region."
"Never! We're not alone, you know! There are many of us!"
"Only fifty by my count. And we have a god to fight you."
"Yes, yes. But you'll never get to us all. Go ahead and cast us out of this place; there are still millions on the island. Millions!" The demons laughed uproariously.
Brynn ventured a question, looking to Bronze as if she understood what was the matter. "And what are you all doing here?"
"This is our Pokemon! We own it! We're going to stay, forever!"
"We'd better solve this before fighting again, Brynn," said Bronze, receiving a nod.
"We're going to cast you out and end this battle," said Cobalion to the demons.
They only laughed and said, "Go ahead, try it!"
"Come out in the name of the White and Arceus!" cried Tess, despite a nervous feeling that it was not her battle to fight.
The demons held tightly, desperately, to the keystone. The whole mass of purple and green swirled, its face melting and reforming while gaps appeared in its body. Absol struck it across the stone, hard.
"In Arceus's name, leave!"
"We don't need to listen to you, praying man! You will never defeat us! You will die before you defeat us!" Spiritomb formed a face that glared at the six of them and screamed, "You will all die!"
"Spirit," said Robert, "I command you to tell us who you are in the name of Arceus!"
"Don't you mention that name!" the spirits hissed and then cursed.
"I will mention that name again and again," said Robert. "You know that name has defeated you."
"No! No! I'm Cerrunos of Galar!" The air was full of panting. "Eternatus," the demons cried, "Ba-al Eternatus!"
"I've never heard of that demon," said Cobalion, sounding worried.
"Say that again?" said Lily. "Who is Eternatus?"
"Eternatus...is Eternatus...is Eternatus...is Eternatus..." Spiritomb's body twitched, and it spoke like a sickening broken record.
"And who is Eternatus?" asked Brynn.
"Eternatus rules. He rules. Eternatus is Eternatus. Eternatus is lord."
"Arceus is Lord," said Bronze.
"The Djinn is lord!" the demons argued.
"You said Eternatus was lord," Tess said.
"The Djinn is lord of Eternatus."
"What is Eternatus lord of?"
"Eternatus is lord of Galar. Eternatus rules Galar."
"Where's Galar?" Robert asked, cautious at the creature's nonsense words.
"Eternatus is prince. Prince of Galar."
"Well, we rebuke him too!" said Lily. "We've had enough of your silliness. Come out in Arceus's name, now!"
"I'm going, I'm going," the creatures hissed, before streaking away. Spiritomb turned milk white and dissolved, the mist beginning to slip loose from the binding tether of the keystone. The stone shook and writhed as if in terrible pain. Tess saw/sensed the last demons strike the floor as if hit by a wrecking ball and flutter about in the air. Cobalion glared at them and they fled the Gym. The last threads of violet smoke vanished while the keystone was left cold and dead.
...
"You have killed my Pokemon," said Brynn, "or dissolved it. Maybe I should be angry, but clearly, nothing was what it seemed. I am not sure what to do or how to feel."
"Admittedly there was some outside interference," said Bronze. "We ought to call that round a draw. I will fight with Absol and you may use whatever Pokemon fits your strategy. Or else we can call for counsel and let our blood cool."
"Nay, no counsel," said Brynn, and he saw his death in her eyes. "I'll fight."
"Then may your blade chip and shatter."
"And let the shadows of night cover your eyes."
...
The Mismagius that Brynn sent out changed everything. The universe became void and absolute blackness descended. Nothing moved and nothing was. His eyes were open but all round him was a strange, vaguely greenish darkness. He listened, listened, and through what seemed at first to be a sound somewhat like the shrilling of insects on a summer night, he thought he could hear, or perhaps it was feel, a steady, regular pulsing. All the space around him was moving like a huge heartbeat in endless, galvanic convulsions. A gust of lukewarm wind was blowing. Perhaps the noise was a heartbeat, for the darkness around him was living. It was warm and hummed with the ancient melody whose notes had been taught to him in so many times and places.
But it was darkness nonetheless. His panic grew as he realized that he was standing on nothing but maintaining his position in this otherworld, as if falling or floating in place. "No," said Bronze, and his word on it was flat and echoless in the black. It was darker than dark, blacker than black. Beside this, the darkest night of a man's soul was as noonday, the darkness under the mountains a mere smudge on the face of Light. "Please no more, no more, no more..."
Someone hurled a stabbing thought to him. "Where are you, boy?" said Cobalion, panicked in his urgency. "What do you see?"
"It's all black," said Bronze, "but it's warm."
"Listen to me. You have been brought to another world, close enough for my thoughts to reach you, but not so near you can get out easily. Think the language of Heaven and tell me what you see."
"Darkness, with a greenish tint."
"What do you really see? The Mismagius has taken control of your heart and eyes and body. That should make you angry. Open your eyes."
"Where am I, Cobalion?"
"The planet of Obion, so far away from Earth that the concept of distance is fundamentally useless."
"That's inconceivable! What's this thrumming I feel?"
"The heartbeat of the planet."
"I can't see."
"Nothing on Obion sees with eyes. They aren't needed. It's what might be called a circadian rhythm. All life needs rhythm. Open your eyes."
Bronze sighed with a kind of anxious fatigue, suddenly realizing the enormous amount of energy taken by the darkness. What had the demon Mismagius done? Cobalion moved lightly, swiftly within him, and his telepathy moved through and beyond his senses to an awareness he had never known before. He groped to contain it in images that were within physical comprehension.
He saw a forest of swaying palm trees with serrated leaves. Their branches were black and pale brown, as if they had been sere for a long time. They were trees with silver-gold-green foliage that undulated regularly, rhythmically, not as though the long fronds were being blown by wind or current but of their own volition, like the undulation of those strange sea creatures halfway between plant life and animal life. To the visual images music was added, strange, unearthly, rich, the surging song of the surrounding sea.
They are not just trees, he thought.
The starless sky was not brighter than the void that had come before, but everything in the planetary foreground had an odd, wholesome, white aura to it, like those pictures of the lunar landscape where the foreground is blindingly illuminated. The short lichen-filled grass around the grey bases of the trees was colored pale, like the plants in earthly forests after the first snows of late fall. He saw white mountains in the distance but without clouds or snow: they were as white as the salt heaps in the Frostveil foothills. To his left there was a massive depression that stretched from the end of the forest to the mountain foothills, filled with some substance black as pitch and unruffled as a mirror. It was some near-equivalent of a lake. All of this he sensed, half of it he really saw. The thick air tickled and maddened him like an infuriating spiderweb.
The trees shook and their trunks bent like limber dancers. His thought strayed and the vision dimmed back to the green darkness, before being jolted back to the world he had found himself in. Then it pressed over him, a body made of the wind, a breath of fragrant jasmine, rose, and honeysuckle. Over him and beyond the static crackles in the leaves, he could see the mountains, hard and brutal and full of teeth.
His mouth felt full of metal. From the twisting, lunar-grey groves there was a sigh and a sound of weeping. There in the exterrestrial willows, something was moving. He saw it through a veil that hung before his eyes like the dust-filled light of a theater projector: hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. It gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly, coiling on upon itself like smoke. It settled downward near the bushes with little puffs of rotten silver and then began to head for him over the colorless undergrowth.
He ducked and collapsed on the dry branches, feeling his joints pop. The shadowy form was swinging towards him through the bushes and the smell of oil was intense. He was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and that, and replaced them quivering. Something passed above him with overwhelming heat. His throat threatened to cut off his breathing: a feeling that his consciousness was expanding, extending out into space, was swiftly giving way to another feeling that he was losing it altogether, and about to die.
A swarm of great invisible bees might have been about him in the air. Whatever thing that had tried to attack him clearly had suffered a failed pass. The sound seemed to thicken the very atmosphere, and his lungs worked with difficulty. He flipped over, aware that the oily smell was gone and had been replaced by an unpleasant jack-o'-lantern rottenness. In the air was a face, or what he could call a face if feeling charitable. It was only half-drawn, surrounded by currents of loud hummings that orbited in a vast commotion. Bronze felt an atavistic crawl in his intestines when it saw him.
It was the Mismagius, though its body did not look very defined at all, and instead seemed flickering and dead, like an animated paper-mache statue of what a Mismagius should have been. Its flowing, gaseous body was thrumming with a knifelike sideways motion among the wavering tree boughs, pulsing out of sync with the ambient heartbeat of the colorless land. He felt the awful throbbing of both Mismagius and the distant dimension mix, creating a discord that filled with his teeth and nerves.
"Stop it!" he cried.
"Be quick," urged Cobalion. "Mismagius is in our world, fighting your Absol. There's small chance of your Pokemon winning without you to command it. But there's a pseudo-Mismagius in this here reality that you can defeat, and that will end it all, whether in the world you're in or the other."
"How does it have this power, to jaunt me out of reality and into another?" said Bronze, feeling and seeing the floating thing charge up hotly for a strike. "And my Pokemon is out of my reach."
He saw the light of Arceus like a red hill. Ahead of him was a tremendous rhythmic swirl of wind and flame, but it was wind and flame quite different from the cherubim's; this was a dance, a dance ordered and graceful, and yet giving an impression of complete and utter freedom, of ineffable joy. As the dance progressed, the movement accelerated, and the pattern became clearer, closer, wind and fire moving together, and there was joy, and song, melody soaring, gathering together as wind and fire united.
"Awaken, Southstar! You are in a double battle, one where neither duo of Pokemon can see the other. Choose your fighter, and go and conquer. This is the end of the end's beginning."
...
This emboldened him enough to shut out Cobalion, stand up, and face the hanging wraith. "I am a servant of Arceus, you filth. Come and fight me. Your trainer dabbles in hexes and devils such as you. The White will not let you pass. If you come near me or my Pokemon, I will shrivel you from cloak to head!"
You have no power here, praying boy, it thought at him as it lunged mid-sentence.
His draw was true and Magenzone was out to defend him. There was a tremendous crash of metal, like a bucket of copper screws falling onto a mountain's stone. An acute spasm of pain passed through Bronze's arm and he dropped the Poke Ball, but its work was done. The eidolon had hurled itself at an impassable shield of light, flying into the dry shrubbery of the woods, landing hotly by the base of a palm down by the lake. The liquid around it bubbled, steamed away into alarmingly black steam, and the tree went up like a candle of blue fire while the thing thrashed.
Good strike, he thought hazily.
Cobalion quickly thought, "This world is one of many that can be accessed by the Ways, natural gateways to other realities. Such Pokemon as Mismagius can control the passages, at least for a little while. There is no illusion here: Olbion is real in its own when and where. A Mismagius and its trainer are far less limited by time and place, because certain Pokemon can go through anywhere the Ways lead whenever they want; distance doesn't matter to them. You are not even in your universe but are still fundamentally connected to Arceus, who rules all worlds."
"They can move things through the Ways, then?" thought Bronze. "So how do I get back?"
"I'll be able to pull you out when the time is right. Go and end it, Southstar."
Magnezone fired dozens of lightning beams at the squirming thing down by the shore. Many of the thunderbolts went well astray and lit up the dancing trees with fire as swiftly as the pseudo-Mismagius's wild energy. The air heated too quickly to stop and the hair on Bronze's arms ignited for a moment, before being put out by a burst of wind. What he saw, which was only in his mind's eye, was that he was firing at nothing. The thing had sludged out of the black liquid and fled.
"Come back here!" he yelled, and instantly felt rather foolish. Magnezone's searchlights (if it had any problem seeing in the different reality, Bronze could not tell) looked through the trees and eventually found a spot where the forest lost its height and lushness. Trunks were twisted and roots seemed to struggle with the grey earth in a tortured hunt for moisture, despite the lake only yards away. The purple shadow passed across the spot and Bronze started following.
Through it all came a vivid image of a weakening Absol blue and gasping, his parents standing by the arena screaming at Brynn for taking their son away; Mismagius throwing whip after whip of dark energy, Tess standing with her back to the door as if to bar defeat and death from entering the room.
We are the song of the universe, he heard the trees sing. It was not the words he sometimes fancied to hear out of the nighttime noises of rock and branch: they were clear harmonies descending on his heart like gentle snow. We sing with the angelic host. We are the musicians. The gods and the stars are the singers. Our song orders the rhythm of creation.
"I'm sorry for bringing evil here," he said aloud as Magnezone closed the distance. All around him the world was becoming a vast, echoing tunnel: the light was becoming like television static. Wind, flame, dance, song, cohered in a great swirling, leaping, dancing medley of thoughts as if pouring from the deep sap of the living, silver trees into his heart.
Magnezone's attacks blasted their heavy, mechanical sound and struck the fleeing shade in the back of its bulging head. And then all thoughts dissolved in the glory of the melody and the dance. The trees lifted up their tendrils and the heartbeat magnified as if shocked at being so fundamentally relieved. The sky like a dead computer screen suddenly turned into life, turned into pattern of icy nebulae, all clustered above him into bigger and bigger wells of light. The fire of the sound and the green-black static that had now drowned out his sight was like a song that was fire and came itself out of the husks of burning worlds, ancient worlds without men, planets and universes who had never sinned and for whom He only died to fulfill but not to save, new theology to consider and more wonders to uncover but he was falling—
Cobalion's voice came like thunder. "NOW!"
He and Magnezone were pulled up through the heavens of static and into Cobalion's cherubim body again, into the beat of the great heart, into the darkness of the eyes, into the—
No! He was being consumed by flame. He sensed a violent jolt to the cosmic rhythm, a distortion of wild disharmony and repugnance. He tried to scream, but no sound came. He felt pain so intense that he could not bear it another second; another second and the pain would annihilate him entirely.
Then the pain was gone, and he felt once again the rhythm of the cherubic heart, very rapid, faintly irregular.
"Did it have to hurt that much?"
Shock and pain made him loud and angry. Everything was a red screaming haze. His limbs trembled weakly. Cobalion seemed to be having trouble; his heart continued to race unevenly. He thought he understood him to say, "We had a brush with Darkrai again."
...
His own breathing was a shallow panting. He felt that he was all there, all his atoms reassembled, the clouds falling away from eyes. He was in the arena again, where Mismagius had taken him away from. And oh God, there was something in agony before him and Magnezone and Absol, something like a screaming skinless mutant whose muscles were sloughing off. He had to kill it, end it now. Both Pokemon opened up their attacks and didn't stop firing till he could no longer see the hideous, pitiable creature wailing in a pain beyond understanding on the arena floor.
Then his eyes cleared. Mismagius was lying twitching and smoking by Brynn's feet. The woman had fallen to her knees, moving her lips soundlessly from a smile to unheard words, as if unable to comprehend the reality of what had just happened. Tess and his parents were screaming in joy but he hardly heard them. He released the sleeping Electavire for a moment, and took the knife that it had taken a liking to as a child loves a cradle-toy. Seizing one of the floating drones that had been generating the energy cage, he pressed its emergency shutdown button and ended the fight.
As soon as the coursing plasma beams were gone, Lily strode forward and cuffed Brynn viciously on the jaw.
"That's for making my son disappear, you bitch," she shouted, pulling back her hand for another strike. Brynn would have gotten two black eyes and many more bruises if Cobalion hadn't stopped the fight. Then Lily collapsed into tears of joy and grief.
"Yield and give me the key to my birthright," said Bronze.
And Brynn smiled. "I yield, my king. I yield smiling. You have this day remembered the faces of your father and all those who came before him, and won a great victory in the name of Arceus. And for that I call you my liege and emperor. What a wonder you have done!"
The others were around him now, their hands trembling to thump his back and hoist him to their shoulders; but they held back, afraid, sensing a new gulf before son and mother and father. Yet this was not as strange as it could have been, because there had always been a gulf between this boy and the rest of the human race.
"The badge, Brynn," said Bronze. "I need it."
"Is your need so fearsome, then?" muttered Brynn, as if in her sleep. "So pressing? Yes, I feared so. I knew so. So much need should have made you stupid. And yet you won."
"Arceus."
"Arceus, yes."
"He is always with me. The badge."
"That Electavire was your finest Pokemon I saw. A fine creature. How long did it take you to train the bastard?"
"I never trained Electavire. I received and friended it. The badge."
"Yes, it's on my belt." She unclipped a token that looked at first like an eight-pointed star, but on a closer glance seemed to be a wooden ship's wheel. Bronze took it and clutched it in his hand, restraining the mad urge to thrust it up to the sky in a salutation of victory.
He got to his feet and was finally turning to the others when Brynn's hand fumbled for his foot. For a moment Bronze feared some last attack and tensed, but Brynn only looked up at him and beckoned with one finger.
"I'm going to change my ways now," she whispered calmly. "I'm going to walk the path of God and get right with Arceus. Perhaps even serve you better when the time comes, I don't know. I teach you no more, my emperor, and never had much for you to learn at all. You have surpassed me, and two years younger than the last challenger, who was the youngest. But let me counsel you."
"What?"
"Wait a few weeks, and do not stake everything on those who will be watching the League. Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry both." Her eyes flicked over Bronze's shoulder to Cobalion. "Fools, perchance, will say you a holy one attended by angels. Use that well. Let your shadow grow hair on its face. Let it become dark." She smiled grotesquely. "Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter." And in a breath so low only he could hear: "They might even start a jihad. Do you take my meaning, great emperor?"
"Yes. I think I do."
"Will you take my counsel as your subject?"
"I take it."
The others still watched him, caught in a bated moment that none of them could immediately break. They still looked for the faint crown to change into a corona of fire, or a magical change of features. "Shall I help you tend your Pokemon?" asked Robert.
"Yes," said Bronze. "That would be lovely, father."
"So onto the League," said Tess, perceiving only the end of the road ahead.
"To the League," said Bronze, considering the possibility that this treacherous road would only come upon some larger way. His feet would join it and go on. To where he could not say or bear to think.
And later, when darkness had come and the rushing tropical thundershowers with it; while huge, phantom caissons rolled across the sky and lightning washed the crooked streets of the town in blue fire through the eye of the cave, Bronze prayed and prayed with ferocity, lying prostrate in the dark shadows of his room, now and then changing from the posture of a penitent to counting his eight badges, hundreds of times just to make sure of the absolute certainly of their existence, until he collapsed on the floor. Downstairs and far away, someone was playing a ragtime. Bronze's mind turned reflectively inward. It was in that hail-splattered silence, just before sleep overtook him, that he thought he might soon do things that would make him unable to sleep again.