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Stave V:
The Djinn's Little King
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They barely made it alive. Cobalion was almost fried when the tiny shield motors lining the hull coughed and hired to life. Sensors on their ovoid bodies generated the intense tractor fields that permeated the space between the huge, curved shields. By themselves, the fields could not support even a Joltik, but by using the stray fields from the accelerator ports, a passing flyer could perform all sorts of aerobatics. The first maneuver that Cobalion mastered, however, was to be hit by a demon's laser bolt and free-fall toward the top of the frigate.
Jake's confusion and pain quickly re-formed into clarity. It took him almost three seconds to roll off Cobalion to a proper position, feet angled slightly down in a spread-eagle, sword and pistol secured at his belt, head braced against the oncoming wind. He had landed on an exterior catwalk and succeded in bashing his knees against the ship's armor plating. Then, slowly, he crawled to a service hatch without conscious volition. The shield motors around the catwalk coughed and sputtered to a sharp, well-tuned whine, like the skirling of two large insects, and then died out again. He felt the sensors twirling just beyond his fingertips as he grasped the catwalk railing's durasteel bars for support, perceived the faint vibrating signal in the palms of both hands that a gradient field was being emitted that would kill him if he touched any other part of the ship.
Not bad, he thought, for someone so close to dying! His fortune became a rush of energy throughout his frame. For an instant he forgot the battle, the pain in his body, the fear, and felt a thrill of complete victory over matter, over the hulk of metal and fiber that he crawled over like a mite, over the space between the malfunctioning shields, and the demons that wanted to kill him.
Unless I slip, I could actually get inside, he thought.
There was a bass grind behind him as Cobalion staggered to his feet. The sacred sword arced above Jake, trailing a blue-ion trail, and then cut the service hatch's portdoor in two. Jake closed another two feet, staying low, feeling the drafts and flux of gases from where the demon's energy discharges had passed. He could feel the pulse of the frigate's huge guns around him, his senses suddenly tuned to the movement of a rotating rocket launcher. A particularly fierce bolt of lighting tore off a radio tower like a javelin embedded into a tree.
He grabbed the edge of the open porthole and saw red light coming from within the maintenance tunnel. Then there was a prickle in his senses and he looked to one side just in time to catch, with the top of his head, a blow aimed at his temple. A demon glided by, watching with satisfaction as the cattle-whelp collapsed.
Then the demon turned, long neck stretched forward, nostril flaps clapped together in a wedge, gliding down to finish his day's work. He was totally focused on his prey and ignorant to all else.
Jake slumped, the upper third of his body hanging over the porthole and the other portion still outside. Cobalion jumped up, then extended the beam of his sword as he dropped with four hooves on the assailant's wings and snapped them like straws. Two swipes of the humming blade and the demon's wings fell away.
The monster gave a muffled cry and flipped on its back when Cobalion leaped away. The wounds on his insectoid shoulderblades spewed red, spinning him in a brilliant pinwheel, elevating him almost twenty meters before sputtering out. It drifted into the mouth of a laser turret, and Jake could hear the fierce sizzle as it dissolved. To touch the charged barrels of the guns, bigger than full-grown oak trunks, was to be instantly cooked. He watched a row of these monster turrets eject blue-orange blasts with a series of shrill pops.
With a last shove he emerged out of the wet air and slackening hail like a child being born. He fell six feet and bashed against another catwalk and was sprawled forward on his chest and belly, his arms spread out before him.
"Cobalion!" he called, looking up. "Get in here!"
Cobalion's head appeared in the porthole, his face turned sideways. His eyes stood out in bulging orbs. Threads of silver blood trickled down his cheeks. "Shut it!" he gasped at Jake. "Shut it, for your father's sake!"
Jake stood up and climbed up two rungs on the ladder, bathed in red glowglobe light. His scraped hands got the two halves of the door moving, and those vast, unseen hinges did the rest. The porthole fell with a gigantic, toneless bang, cutting off all sound from above. Jake was left in a silence filled with humming walls and the metallic smell of empty gas canisters.
"You came!" he said. "You really came!"
I came, yes, thought Cobalion. By the grace of God and the courage of my friends, I came. Go now to Bronze. Go now to Tess.
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As the frigate buckled like a ship foundering in a heavy sea, Jake burst into tears of relief and terror. A sudden longing to see Bronze and Tess swept through him, to see the ever-clever Robert and Lily again. He placed his plans against his cheeks, beginning the breathing ritual that stilled emotion and clarified the mind, then bent forward from the waist in the devotional exercise that prepared the body for the mind's demands.
His right hand came away covered in blood. The gash on his cheek had stayed open and he feared what curses and poisons might have been carried on the shard of the demon's blade. Well, what was done was done. If he would die in screaming convulsions as dark magic killed him, then there was nothing for him to do but wait and bear the pain. And what pain it was! His side was twisted up with a king of cramping that he decided would be something like arthritis, if he knew any more about it. His shoulder was a bellowing fire from where a demon had struck him. Blood slimed his chandler pistol's handgrip; blood spotted the blade of his pulsesword and the black-colored fatigues to which the weapon's sheath was thong-tied. His genitals felt swollen and achy.
With some pain he stood. Down a tunnel in the direction (he thought) led to the front of the ship he saw a wider room full of tied-down crates. The upper interior had suffered from neglect. Paint flaked and bronze gutters dripped long green streaks down the broad curved room. Molded metal sheets had lost their insulation buffers and were beginning to electrically corrode, creating fantastic rainbow patterns on their surfaces where they touched. The red lighting was at a minimum, and when Jake pushed forward, it was in a blind, pain-filled fugue.
He saw more of the ship and realized that Bronze's choice (for presumably there had been a choice) to make this ship as his command post could not be questioned. It was ideal, filled with more munitions than rations. It was a key superfrigate, home of generals and technicians, once the maintenance center for an entire Association defensive sector.
Below his feet, the grilled slabs of metal that made up most of the upper level's floors showed a monstrous tangle of pipeworks that squealed and groaned. There was the constant lub-dub of engines and turrets firing, with the irregular noise of the battle upon Discordia mixed in. Step, lub-dub. He checked himself from being hypnotized by the rhythm and went on.
...
The more he moved forward, the more he felt as though he was on the cusp of remembering something crucially important, something dozens of times in Emrett's Objectivity Room had buried deep within him. But what? He felt unchanged and full of a burning sureness that nothing done to him had permanently affected him. He saw how the Eclipse logic was twisted, how they had made him mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning, how Robert had brought him back out of that kind of doublethink.
Then why was he sweating so heavily?
You believed the Emperor's silly trinket was the prize we sought, the voice of Emrett said, breaking into his mind like a helium-filled balloon. How little you understand your masters. Our enemies believe we need artifacts. In reality, we need despair. Anything can be a tool—poverty, war. War is useful because it is effective in so many areas. It stimulates the metabolism. It enforces government. It diffuses genetic strains. It possesses a vitality such as nothing else in the universe. Only those who recognize the value of war and exercise it have any degree of self-determination.
Jake swallowed in a throat suddenly dry, experiencing odd pains that played up and down his spine. He stared at the tunnels ahead and focused on the monotonous noise of the engines. The sound made him think of ancient rituals, folk memories, old words and customs, half-forgotten meanings in lost mutterings. Something vital was happening here. Elder ideas lay tangled in his memories. It was like a blazing light in the distance, coming nearer and nearer, illuminating life across a span of centuries.
"No, no, not now," he said, walking faster. As Jake passed, a pipe hissed out a gout of steam and he screamed.
What happens to you here happens forever. Don't you know that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of man? That it was YOU that consented to the training? That it was YOU who put the wasps on Arceus? Don't you get that it's YOU that is going to screw everything, that you're the reason why nothing can work? Why things no go?
Jake ran down a flight of stairs and flung himself into a passage lighted with white glowglobes. Outside his head there was the sound of white-faced men shouting orders and aiming cannons, a theatre of war played beyond his sight, in rooms around him. He shook his head from side to side, suddenly finding it too difficult to speak.
Blood, bone, blood, bone. Do it, you weak no-kneed boy! When he says it, kill them! KILL THEM!
He gasped with horror. Murder? Had he been thinking of murder?
His eyes inflicted him with a sudden burning pain. Flickering red haze surrounded everything he saw. He felt he had been cut away from every immediate sense except the pain, and he experienced his surroundings through a thin separation like windblown gauze. All had become accident, the chance involvement of inanimate matter. His own will was no more than a subtle, shifting thing. It lived without breath and was intelligible only as an inward illumination.
"No..." he said, but then he said it no longer. There was a new axiom of existence revealed to him: that there was nothing true, nothing fixed to the universe, that at every day and hour and minute things once thought immutable changed.
With a clarity born of desperation, he broke through the gauze curtain with the lonely sense of sight. His attention focused like a blazing light under the eye of the Djinn. Jake felt that it cut into him layer by later, seeing the little child as a hired intellect, and beneath that, a creature imprisoned by hungers and cravings which lay huddled in the eyes—layer after layer, until finally, there was only an entity-aspect being manipulated by symbols. He was a person to be treated like a thing.
Halfway over the threshold of another door he lost his balance and pitched forward, hitting his head, a muffled blow on the floor. He got up on his hands and knees, his eyeballs moving disjointed from side to side, fuzzy muttering sounds coming from his mouth. Then he collapsed, his face turned to one side, breathing in harsh portions.
She has to be punished. Chastised harshly. Awaken your awareness, my son. Kill them both and we will rule the qlippoth darkness together.
"No!" he gave a miserable, rising scream. He crawled forward into the shadow of a boiler closet, the door opening at his mad scrabblings with the lock. Jake plunged into the darkness, hoping that he would be out of the light's acid pain, that he would emerge into sanity, just a little bit of it. The cold floor stung his trembling hands. "I am no longer your slave!"
Quiet, slave! the voice whined. You are mine. I know you. I made you. Jake Albans. Killer extraordinary. Rightful lover of Tessa Woodhall. (Good men discipline their women, do they not?) Swordsman soldier. Field-hand on the field of battle. Jake Albans.
"Cobalion!" he screamed. "Cobalion!"
There is another Jake Albans in you, said the voice of Emrett. It will submit to emotion or to dispassionate examination, but submit it will. This awareness will rise through a screen of suppression and selection out of the dark training which dogs your footsteps. It goads you even now while it holds you back. There exists that being within you upon which awareness must focus and which you will obey. Do you think we were blind, letting you engage with Robert to keep your conscious mind sane? Would Cobalion have retrieved a gibbering ruin? Of course not! Would Bronze have brought you near him? No! Did you think us lax when we did not execute you for your crimes? And did you think any can escape from the Court of the Great Djinn, save upon his will?
Jake felt the perspiration pouring down his cheeks, the trembling of his chest and arms, but he was powerless to move. Emrett would not let Cobalion's voice reach him or his terrified thoughts enter the god's mind. It would ruin the fun.
Very soon, said the voice of Emrett, the Emperor will come to you. He will say he loves you and has waited to see you. The mask of joy will occupy his face. He will shed tears at your return. Beside him will be the girl he has lain with. She has betrayed you. She must be DISCIPLINED. And you not find it difficult to slay a man who has dishonored your true beloved, would you?
"You put this into me, you bastard," he yelled. "You caused all this. Your words don't come from me. They come from Beheeyem!"
Ah, ha! Chissit, chassit, bring me skulls to fill a basket! When you see them, discipline them. But make them know first who did this to you and whose name you serve. Do you serve Arceus?
"You can't make me say no."
His jaw and throat ached with the locking of his muscles. The Eclipse conditioning...had Cobalion suspected it? Surely not, or else the god would not have brought him where he could be a potent killing machine. He could only twist his head in a brief arc from side to side.
Oh, poor, poor Jake, who has no mind...poor Jake, a drum stuffed with messages, an essence for others to use...pound on Jake and he produces a noise...
Bitter frustration coursed through Jake. To be played like this! Was it anger he felt? But why should anyone feel anger at this?
Tess would object to your return very strongly, Jake. And she appears to be...somewhat stronger than we had imagined. Somewhat more resourceful. She certainly seems to have gotten the better of you. Perhaps we should have taken her and not you. Perhaps we should have been dealing with her all along. I do not believe you have the belly to show Bronze what it means to be a real man.
"I do!" Jake roared. "I do, I swear it! Don't lie to me like that, you old corpse!" His face was against the floor now, drenched with sweat. "She won't object. I swear she won't. She won't be able to."
Surely you realize that it was I who designed this.
"No," he said thickly. "No, I—"
I believe you must take it up further with your old 'friends', Jake, said Emrett's voice. Bronze understands everything, although he hasn't enlightened you. Rather naughty of him, if I may be so bold to say. In fact, he's crossed you at almost every turn, hasn't he?
"Yes," said Jake. "He has."
There was a wave of careless laughter in his head.
He needs to be corrected, if you don't mind me saying so, said Emrett's aspect. He needs a good talking-to, and perhaps a bit more. My own daughters, Jake, didn't care for my experiments at first. One of them actually stole a pack of my fire-powder and tried to burn me in my bed. I corrected them. I corrected them most harshly. And when my wife tried to stop me from doing my duty, I corrected her. I find it a sad but true fact that women rarely understand a father's responsibility to his children. Men have certain responsibilities, don't they?
"Yes," said Jake.
They didn't love the Alliance as I did, said Emrett. Just as Tess and Bronze don't love it, not at present, anyway. But they will come to love it. You must show them the error of their ways, Mr. Albans. Do you agree?
"Yes. I do."
A dedicated operative! Perhaps I put it badly. Let us say that your future here is contingent upon how you decide to deal with your former friend's waywardness.
"I make my own decisions," whispered Jake.
But you must deal with them.
"I will."
Firmly.
"I will."
A young man who cannot control his own woman holds very little interest for our Great Djinn. A man who cannot guide the courses of his own loved ones can hardly be expected to guide himself, let alone assume a position of responsibility in the Alliance, or conduct any operation of significant magnitude. He...
"I said I'll handle them!" shouted Jake suddenly, enraged.
You will have to kill them both, I am afraid. And when you have seen what you have done, you won't be afraid to kill yourself for the terrible, heinous acts you have committed, would you?
"I'll do what I have to do. Just let me move!"
You fool, Albans! said the Djinn. Did you think that I was too stupid to see what had been done with the wasps? How you put your torment on the only being who would receive it? You were right in thinking Emrett and Cypress were too stupid for that, easy to deceive as they were. But it was me who managed every part of your training, me who buried what you now remember. We made a deal. Keep it!
"My word, my promise, my sacred vow, whatever in hell you want. If you—"
There was a flat snap as his mind changed. For a moment he felt that death itself was speaking to him. The feeling passed.
He whispered: "Thank you, my dear. I swear you won't regret it. I swear you won't." He heard the fawning servility in his own voice but was unable to control it. "I will."
(go, little king)
Jake Albans placed a hand on the handle of his pulsesword and drew it. He brandished it, swung it. It hissed viciously through the air, and Jake began to smile.
"Now. Now, by Arceus," he whispered. "I guess I'll teach them."
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As Bronze commanded the fleet's devastating advance, Tess waited by the outer doors, wondering what she would do after all. Yellow and the other Pokedex Holders had gone on the drop pods, through the storm's jarring intensity and onto the ground. The slaughter of Eclipse soldiers and bots continued below them. The clustered Alliance ships made good targets for their limited firepower and Tess cheered with the rest of the cabin crew whenever the nose cone of an enemy cruiser exploded.
It was the last battle! She would not have been anywhere else.
A cough sounded outside the chamber doors. Tess straightened and turned her eyes from the chaos unfolding outside the viewport. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
"Enter," she said.
The magnetic doors were flung aside and Jake Albans bounded into the room. Yet it was not Jake Alban, for his eyes were lit with a vacant, murderous glow; his mouth now wore a quivering, joyless grin, his face soaked in a red mask of his own blood. She had only time for a glimpse of his horrible face with its grimace, and then he was behind her, lifting her to her feet with one brawny arm beneath her chin.
"Thought you'd cuckold me? That's what you wanted?"
"You fool, what are you doing?" she demanded. The bruises the Chairman had left screamed in pain.
Then she felt the touch of the gun barrel against her back. Chill awareness spread out from that metal. She knew in that instant that this mockery of Jake meant to kill her. Why? She could think of no reason, for he wasn't the kind to turn traitor. But she felt certain of his intention. Knowing it, her mind churned with then thousand thoughts at war, her heart twisted in confusion. Here was no man to be overcome easily. Here was a killer wary of her Pokemon, wary of every combat stratagem, wary of every trick of death and violence. Here was an instrument the Alliance had shaped with its subtle hints and pressures.
"You thought you had escaped, eh, bitch?" snarled Jake. "I know what you are!"
Before she could turn the question over in her mind or try to answer, Bronze's chair swiveled and he stood up. Moon was standing beside his seat, her mouth open ina surprised little oh.
Ten Aredian guards drew pellet-pistols and daggers, but their Emperor waved them down. For a icy second Bronze was expressionless, taking in the tensions of the moment. Then he began to weep.
"Jake, why have you done this? Why must you hurt us, when I love you so? When I can do nothing else to you, nor want to, for your love made me and fed me and kept me whole in better days? Why will you hurt Tess and fill me with woe? I have only loved you as you once loved me for mine in the days before the world moved on. Now you scar me with nails and put burning drops of quicksilver in my nose; you have set the animals on me. Around me the demons gather and there's no peace from their laughter. Yet still I love you and would serve you and even help you again, if you would allow me, for that is how my heart was cast when I met you." His brown face turned pale, so pale. "But now I see how they have dealt with you, and that your strength to resist is almost gone."
"Jake, you're hurting my back—" gasped Tess.
"I'll hurt more than your back, you bitch."
The word stunned her so completely that she made no effort to retort.
"You never loved me," he said. "You want to destroy the Alliance because you know that'll be the end of me. Did you ever think about my responsibilities? No, I guess to fuck you didn't. All you ever think about is ways to drag me down. You're just like my mother, you bitch!"
"Stop it," she said, crying. "They've hurt you. You don't know what you're saying."
"Oh, I know. I know now. You and him. That lying false king. The two of you, planning together, screwing together. Isn't that right?
"No, no! We never planned anything! What are you—"
"You liar!" he screamed. "I know everything about how you've done it. I saw something and you both say 'Yes, Jake, yes, buddy,' and then you lay your plans! But I'll fix you!"
Then Tess knew. A long and nightmarish play had gone on here, and had gone on for as long as she could remembered. Little by little a force had accrued, as secret and silent as interest in a bank account. Force, presence, shape, they were all only words and none of them mattered. It wore many masks, but it was all one. Now, it had come for her. It was hiding behind Jake's face, it was imitating Jake's voice, it was wearing Jake's body. But its mind was not Jake's. Whatever resemblance to the old psychic creature that she once knew was only a ferocious masquerade. Its words were not Jake's. It was not Jake.
Bronze stepped forward once. "Jake, this is not—"
"Stop right where you are!" snapped Jake. "One more step and she's dead. Let her buy a few more seconds of life, for I assure you, that's all she has."
Bronze's hand slipped to his knife hilt. He spoke in a deadly quiet: "You had best explain yourself, Jake."
"You know there's nothing to explain! I knew. I figured it out. Did you think I wouldn't figure it out? Did you think I was stupid?"
"There is nothing to figure out," said Bronze, said, and his voice carried such a note of terrible sadness that the sound tore at Tess's heart. "No trick, Jake."
Jake's arm trembled against her neck, the smell of his blood filling her nose. The point of the gun at her back moved with uncertainty.
"What you have not done," Bronze went on, "is remembered the lessons you learned with my father and mother. My father spoke of pride in your friendship! Didn't you learn the difference between Tercano and Alliance so that you could smell a Djinn's trick by the stink he leaves on it? Didn't you learn that our friendship was bought with love while the Eclipse coin is hate? Couldn't you see through to the very nature of this betrayal? The Enemy thinks he can own you, Jake. In the name of Arceus, I call on the White to free you. I do not care how you came by your suspicion that I have touched Tess—for it can be nothing else—but if you harm her..."
Bronze lifted his knife from its scabbard, held the blade in front of him. "...I'll have your blood."
"Yah!" growled Jake. "You think you can—"
"Be quiet," said Bronze, and the monotone stillness of his words carried more command than Tess had ever heard in another voice. "Get behind me, Djinn!"
"No, no," Jake muttered behind her.
"I swear that I have never touched Tess nor conspired against you," said Bronze. "The evidence is in our fellowship with Cobalion and the truth you know in your own heart. I swear this to you by the love I hold for you, a love I will still hold even after I leave you dead on this floor."
He stepped forward. Jake's arm tightened and red flashes of light leaped in front of her eyes like ballet dancers. The room grew darker.
"Spare the rod, spoil the women!" Jake grunted.
"My father has an instinct for his friends," said Bronze. "He gave his love sparingly, but with never an error. I see his weakness lay in misunderstanding hatred. He thought anyone who hated the Alliance could not betray him or his family, as you are doing." He glanced at his mother. "She knows this. I've heard my father's words that he never distrusted you, never thought you had become theirs. And you are not theirs."
Tess felt herself losing control, bit at her lower lip. Seeing the stiff formality in Bronze, she realized what these words were costing him. She wanted to run to him, cradle his head against her breast as she never had done before, spurning the eyes of Moon. But the arm against her throat had ceased its trembling; the gun's barrel at her back pressed still and sharp.
"One of the most terrible moments in a boy's life," said Bronze, quoting the words Ruby had spoken in Frostveil, "is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It's a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can't evade it. I heard my father when he spoke of your loyalty and strength. We are not your betrayers and you are not ours, Jake."
Lily stood beside Bronze, not touching him. "Jake," she said, "there are other awakenings in this universe. I suddenly see how I've used my son and twisted him and manipulated him to set him on a course of my choosing, a course I had to choose, if that's any excuse. All because of my training." She swallowed past a lump in her throat, looked up into her son's eyes. "Bronze, I want you to do something for me: choose the course of happiness. Your woman, marry her if that's your wish. Defy everyone and everything to do this. But choose your own course. Choose a path away from me and your father."
"Jake, wake up in the name of Arceus and the White," said Bronze.
...
Jake heard the words out of a blazing corona. They burned his chest, his backbone, the sockets of his eyes. His own thinking became strange, disjointed. He was a puppet held fast by strings reaching down from that awful corona. He moved to another's commands, to another's desires. The strings of two puppetmasters jerked his arms, his legs, his jaw. Sounds came squeezing out of his mouth, a terrifying repetitive noise.
"Hraak! Hraak! Hraak!"
His finger went to the trigger to strike. In that instant, he grabbed his true voice, shaped rasping words: "Run! Tess, run!"
"We will not run," said Bronze. "We'll move with dignity. We'll do what must be done."
(Do it! Do it, you weak-kneed no-balls virgin! Kill them! KILL THEM BOTH!)
His muscles locked. He shuddered, swayed.
"..what must be done!" The words rolled in his mind like a great fish surfacing. "...what must be done!" Ahhh, that had sounded like Robert. The young master had some of the old man in him. "...what must be done!"
(Jake)
A singular, quiet rustling like an autumn leaf.
(I hold you, I love you, I Name you. I Name you, Jake. You are not nothing. You are)
For a moment his entire mind seemed filled with an angry, weakly hectoring voice:
(DO IT!)
The opposing words began to unfold a battle in his consciousness. A sensation of living two lives simultaneously spread out through his awareness. He became a motionless chain of relative existence, singular, alone. Old memories that had been cut out of him flooded his mind; Tess's kind words, Bronze's chivary, memories of monster meetings where he had been drugged, chemicals injected into his arms with the scars the syringes left covered by larger gashes that he earned during training. He marked them, adjusted them to new understandings, made a beginning at the integration of a new awareness. A new persona achieved a temporary form of internal tyranny.
(I am deeper than that, you stupid goddamn boy. You had no brains to resist him. It was harder than you thought, eh? He was cleverer than you by far. I exhausted my powers to help you through the first temptation. And now all that was for nothing! Worthless baggage!)
"Help me!" Jake cried. His arm fell away from Tess's neck and went to his pulsesword hilt. She ran to Bronze and huddled behind him, hands on Gabite's poke ball.
"As you love me," said Bronze, "do me this favor: help me drive him out! Help me kill him before you succumb again!"
...
The Eclipse compulsion fought back, lashed out with telepathy like a corkscrew driving into Bronze's cerebrum and cerebellum. "Life as we have known it is meaningless, Bronze. Civilization has failed. Your parents know this. They are giving up."
"No, no," protested Lily. "We're not like that. We'd never give up."
And then Cobalion was with them, his body quivering and bleeding from his wounds, breathing from his mouth. A faint tingling came from him, but now he was hurling his thoughts, his pulsing blue aura moving rhythmically, his delicate, crystal spokes of soft fur shimmering with the rhythm of the power of the White, of the singing gods, of Arceus. He was frantic.
"Brothers and sisters, forgive me. I brought him to you and could not bear to think...ah! Fight with me. The Enemy will not be able to hold him against our power."
"Pray," cried Lily to the shocked Aredians and attendants, "sing with us. The Emperor's friend is in danger, and we must save him."
"Come and pray for the strength of God!" said the Aredian Bannerjee. "Hear the Queen Mother, for it is time to pay our debt to the Emperor!"
The Eclipse compulsion overrode the Aredian. "There is no hope except extinguishment. Let us hasten it."
Tess cried through the boring of the corkscrew. "Jake, no! Stop it!"
Bronze joined her, speaking with all the power of the kingship. "Jake Albans, come back, come out of the Shadow!"
"I am back. I am here. I am finally myself. I am his. To be the servant of the Djinn is the only good."
(Really, Jake it would be doing them both a favor. I'll mess her up if you don't...I'll make her die in pain...)
Then Tess felt Cobalion trying to get her attention and turned her thoughts unwillingly towards him. "Tess, I can help free demons, but I can't help remove psychic compulsions. You may be able to. Try to go to him. Perhaps you can reach him with your thoughts. Use the lessons I taught you."
She pulled back. If she went to the Eclipse-Jake, would the pain of the demons take her? There was no god to save her this time. She could not do it, could not knowingly open herself to that pain.
But Cobalion had come into the whirling circle of death that was the Court of the Evil Djinn for Jake's sake and hers. If Jake was possessed by the Djinn and trying to kill her, now it was because of Cobalion's unthinking love for them.
This is your part, said a voice softer than the voluble self.
She gave a sigh of acceptance of what she must do. Then she turned her thoughts towards Jake who was somewhere in the horrible echthroid version of himself.
"Jake!" She flung her thoughts towards him with all her might. And now she no longer saw the dark hair, the same color as her own, or the crazed, rolling eyes behind the lenses of a flow of blood from a wound on his cheek that had reopened, or the large shoulders with the discoloration of rain, but something deeper, more real, beyond, past, through the senses, something which was the true person. She was with Jake as she had always ought to have been, Jake who she knew was so important to her that she didn't dare even whisper to herself how important he was—
Jake, too, was real, and she was with him, merging herself entirely to him.
From somewhere deep inside the corroded version of himself he was trying to say something, he was repeating, repeating, and finally she heard, a phrase she had heard earlier, "Nature abhors a vacuum." The single phrase was all he could manage.
She held on to it. If the Alliance resembled the absence of good, and Jake is now part of that nothing, if Jake is being forced into that nothing...
"Fill it! Fill it!" came Cobalion's desperate cry.
She was cold with desperation. "Cobalion! Cobalion, what do I do?"
She heard only an echo of the god's call. "Fill the vacuum. Fill it." Bronze and his men were fighting desperately with their prayers, the Aredians desperately swaying and chanting in their battle-tongues, not for Jake's own life but for Tess's, for the men of Roria, for the singing angels, for the whole of being.
Tess thought wildly. "Cobalion, we passed the first test. I Named Quentin. But the second? Are we failing the second test? Jake can't hold out any longer. Do I have to go into his brain? Is that what I have to do?"
She knew.
"Arceus!" Her cry went across Imbar, and then she knew what she must do. She must do as Cobalion had done when he had broken through the mad circle of whirling demons (for you know he did) and rescued Jake. She must hold the evil compulsion and love the Jake beneath it, hold him by holding Bronze and Moon, by holding Quentin...
Hold them, Tess. Hold them all. Do what Arceus sent you to carry out. Put your arms around them, around the demons spreading their gaping, tearing nothingness across creation.
Size does not matter here, thought Cobalion. You can hold them all, Bronze and Moon and Jake and the burning sphere of an exploding star.
"In the name of Arceus and the White, in the name of the King, in the name of the gods, I Name Jake and love him."
.
.
.
The words come to him then through the corona, the blazing halo that bound him, the words he would remember his whole life. The voice that spoke next seemed to be that of Tess, but Jake was not certain. And who spoke after that, he does not know at all. For in the conversation that followed, if it can be called a conversation, though he believes that he himself was sometimes the speaker, he never knew which words were his or another's, or even whether a Man or Pokemon or god was talking. The speeches followed one another, if, indeed, they did not all take place at the same time, like the parts of a music into which all of them had entered as instruments or like a wind blowing through a host of trees that stand together on a hilltop.
.
.
.
Alleluia!
λληλούγια!
I Name you Jake, I Name you, Djinn. I Name you, Bronze.
I Name you, Robert and Lily.
I Name you, Cobalion.
I fill you with Naming.
Be!
Be, butterfly and behemoth,
be galaxy and grasshopper,
star and sparrow,
you matter,
you are.
Oh, be!
Be caterpillar and comet,
be porcupine and planet,
sea sand and solar system.
Sing with us,
dance with us,
rejoice with us,
for the glory of creation.
Seagulls and seraphim,
angle worms and angel host,
chrysanthemum and cherubim
(O blessed cherubim)
Be!
Sing for the glory
(for righteousness is the highest good, sang Bronze)
of the living and the loving,
(and happiness to him who is righteous, sang the Aredians)
the flaming of creation!
(Lo! For Arceus is the King of Kings! cried Robert)
Sing with us, dance with us, be free with us!
Be and be free!
...
They were not her words only. They were the words of Bronze, of the gods, of all the singing hosts, the cries of the dying soldiers, Imbar itself, all the Pokemon, all the human hosts, the solar system, the sun, the dance of the star whose birthing passed in a blink, the galaxies, the cherubim and seraphim, the wind and fire, the words of the Glory.
Jake! You are Named! My arms surround you. You are no longer nothing. You are free. You are. You are filled. You are me.
You are Jake.
...
It was done then. He knew himself as Jake Albans, remembering everything of his past as though it had been stored secretly in him and ignited by a flaming catalyst. The corona of fire dissolved. He shed the Eclipse compulsions.
.
.
.
Tess broke off, stopped by the low sound of muttering before her.
Jake!
"Jake! Oh, Jake!" Tess hugged Lily, swallowing a large and unexpected sob. "Is he all right? Is he really all right?"
She saw Bronze's eyes directed at the quivering form. Jake stood in the same spot, but had sheathed his sword and holstered the pistol. He had pulled the Eclipse uniform from his breast to expose the slick grayness of an soaked-through undershirt.
"Put your knife right here in my breast," Jake muttered. "I say kill me and have done with it. I've besmirched my name. I've betrayed my own friends! The finest-"
"Be still!" Bronze commanded.
Jake stared at him.
"Close that uniform and stop acting like a fool," said Bronze. "I've had enough foolishness for one day."
"Kill me, I say!" raged Jake.
"You know me better than that," said Bronze. "How many kinds of an idiot do you think I am? Must I go through this with every man I need?"
Jake looked at Lily and spoke in a forlorn, pleading note so unlike him:
"Then you, my Lady, please...you kill me."
Lily crossed to him, put her hands on his shoulders. "Jake, why do you insist the Tercanos must kill those they love?" Gently, she pulled the spread uniform out of his fingers, closed and fastened the fabric over his chest.
Jake spoke brokenly; "But...I..."
"You had no choice," said Lily. "You understand that, Jake? For that I honor you."
"I understand."
"There are some things no one can bear," said Robert. "They meddled with your mind in all the possible ways they could, until, finally, they created a killer."
"M'Lord, you shouldn't..."
(M'Lord!)
"There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers," said Bronze as he had thought before. "Nothing. Nothing can be done. Let us think of this as a misunderstanding among old friends. It's over and we can be thankful we'll never again have that sort of misunderstanding between us."
Jake opened eyes bright with moisture and looked up at them. And then! What was this, some kind of fairy tale? Forget the doubts and the questions, Albans, that's Tess coming your way, and boy, does she look good!
Tess held Jake as if she had never held him before. Both of them lost count of how many times each said they were sorry. All they wanted to do now was get caught up on some badly missed love. But as he watched them, Bronze felt his link with the divine diminish and then shatter. His mind cowered, overwhelmed by infinite possibilities. His lost vision became like the wind, blowing where it willed.
"Stay close to me, Jake," said Bronze. "I'll need to depend on you for many things." And as Jake continued to stand weeping, he called, "Jake!"
"Yes, I am Jake Albans."
"Of course you are! This was the moment when you came back, confused and divided hearts aside."
"Then is this the end?" said Jake, seeing the spires of Djinn's Fast emerging from the parting thunderheads that raced before the ship, watching the Forge's pulse grow deeper and longer.
"Yes, it is," said Bronze. "It is."
It was like the old times, yet not like them, Jake thought. Now that he stood free of the Alliance, he could appreciate what they had given him. His latent objectivity training permitted him to overcome the shock of events. The combat accomplishment formed a counterbalance. He put off all fear, standing above the source. His entire consciousness looked outward from a position of infinite wonder: he had been dead; he was alive. The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had been delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom.
For he was free.
I'M FREE!