Chương 73: 72-Roll Call

The Keeper groaned as he felt the Icosahedron enter Belona. This was it, just what he feared. The other Keepers had not been able to stop the Losers from reaching his plane. Those bloody, good-for-nothing incompetents. Now the ball was in his court. The Keeper breathed deeply and focused on the task at hand. Not everything was lost. The previous attempts to stop the Losers had at least shed some light on what strategies would not work on them.

The Voice of the Maze had resorted to the classics: a huge army of celestial beings led by two amazingly powerful creatures. There was nothing they could not conquer, but the Losers did not have to conquer, only to escape, and they had. Strike one. Then, it was the turn of the Aeon Arbiter, who had not one, but two attempts to stop them. First, he tried to block their way into the dungeon with a mish-mash of armies, trusting variety over quality. Strike two.

Then he sent a horde of those bloody Timespiders, leaving time-meddling to professionals. Not only had they failed, but they had also increased the already dangerous levels of paradox. Strike three. Keepers were strange creatures, born from strange dungeons. Temporal dungeons were scarce. The creation of each one was a significant metaphysical event that marked both the maker and the dungeon. The Keeper wondered if Billy was aware of how much karma he had acquired when creating the Web of Ananke.

Its draconic brain, recalling the apparent ease with which he had achieved it, shuddered. Time dungeons and the creatures they spawned were the exceptions to the rules that governed the Universe. There was not a single time dungeon under the seventh rank—once created, they existed in all the timelines at once. They had no past in which to be only rank one. They were also the only structures to survive the ending of an Aeon and the beginning of a new one.

Time dungeons were the Black Ops squads of the cosmos: they broke every rule to ensure that everyone else followed them. And today, the Keeper was going to break a very big one. The Keeper considered the problem—he had all the resources of the universe to get rid of the Losers, but he needed to choose carefully which ones to employ. It was not only a matter of quantity; the quality of foes was essential. But why choose between quantity and quality when he could have both? Perhaps an army was not needed.

Perhaps what he needed were highly motivated individuals. An awful lot of them. He joined his mind with the dungeon and exerted his will upon it. With a sound like a million mothers screaming in childbirth, the passages began to divide, creating new ones that reached into unreachable places. There were only two directions in the Black Tower: What Was and What Will Be. The Keeper forced the creation of two new ones: What Could Be and What Could Have Been.

He created a thought and sent it through the newly created corridors. Come, come and be rewarded. The thought split itself an infinite number of times, each piece following a different pathway, looking for candidates. ◇ The Widow watched the fifteen warriors with cool detachment. These were from the Crimson Viper Sect, one of the many Assassin schools under her patronage. She had not seen them for some time. She seemed to recall they were the ones who fought with razor-sharp chains.

They had the opportunity to face the Widow in combat after the annual test that pitted one school against another. They had gained that distinction by finishing last. It would be the greatest honor of their lives, and the last. The Widow did not believe in positive reinforcement, but she was a great fan of the negative one. She rose slowly and went to stand amongst the warriors. She aligned her mind and body, feeling the familiar rhythms of the Jade Cloud style.

She had designed this style to fuse precision and economy of movement. With a slight nod of her head, she gave the Vipers permission to begin. They jumped at her as one man, howling their war cries and whirling their whip-chains around them—it was said that an expert Viper could behead a whole squad of enemies with a single swipe. The Widow moved with so much elegance and precision that she hardly seemed to move at all.

Space seemed to warp around her as she fought, causing her enemies' weapons to miss by the narrowest of margins. She hardly moved, but those few steps she took put vast distances between danger and her. One minute later, the Vipers were beginning to tire, and they had not come close to touching her even once. Boring. There are no true men anymore. She felt a lone pang of pain as the thought flickered through her mind. She missed him.

She decided to pay a little homage to him and shifted her foundations, attuning herself to the Celestial Harmony Style. The Vipers sensed the change and struck again, hoping in vain that she was perhaps getting tired. She struck each warrior with the tip of a finger, as she blew past them like an exhalation. Each blow was as light as a feather touch, but it started a cascade of resonating harmonies inside their bodies. She turned back and faced them. Love this novel?

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"Dismissed," she said. She had keyed the harmonics inside the assassins' bodies to that single word when spoken in her voice. All the bones of the Vipers turned into paste at the same time.

"The rest of you are dismissed, too," she said to the attending schools. They did not need to be told twice. She sat down on the now blood-covered tatami, thinking about him. She tried not to—it made her weak. Then, gentle as a whisper, an alien thought entered her mind: Do you want to kill the Skillmaster?

"I already did," she answered. Do you want to kill him again? For the first time in decades, the Widow smiled. ◇"This land is mine. I want you out of here. I won't ask again," said Red William. The man in front of him was some kind of officer from the invading army. They came with their blades and armor, but also with families, carts, and supplies. Not only invaders. Colonists. They had not yet defeated him, and they were already plundering his land.

"Look, lad, this is not an invasion. We are trying to build a town. You are the first native we have met, and we certainly do not want to start on the wrong foot with the locals. Tell us which land is yours, and we will keep out of it."

"All of it," answered Red William.

"All of it?" asked the captain incredulously.

"You are talking about half a million acres, lad. Are you mad?"

"Leave now."

"Sorry, can't do that, lad," the captain answered.

"What are you going to do? Fight all of us? Send twenty thousand men packing?"

"None of you is coming back home," said Red William. Then he attacked. Three days later, he killed the last of the interlopers. The man was some driver who had tried to hide behind a cart. The red rage left him, taking with it his powers and the memories of what he had done. He was grateful for that. There had been families among his victims. A thought fluttered against his mind. Do you want your soul back? ◇ The Maker held the orb in his hand, studying his latest creation.

A small orb, the size of an egg, with whole continents and a miniature civilization inside it. His eye critically studied it. There was something not quite right. There. At the southernmost point of the largest continent. There was supposed to be a mountain range there, but part of it had collapsed into the sea. It was still a nice world, with its fauna, its flora, and those funny humanoid beetles with their love of poetry and their fatalism.

But it was not the world he had envisioned when he began creating it two days ago. He sighed and dropped the orb on the floor. He crushed it with his heavy boot. Pity about those beetles. They would surely have appreciated the irony of their end. Probably composed a sonnet or two about it. Time to start again. A thought entered his mind. Do you want materials for your craft? An inexhaustible supply of them? ◇ Sultry Stella continued her dance. The whole club had stopped to watch her.

Not only the clients, but also the girls on the adjoining platforms. No one knew who this stunning beauty was. She had come through the front door as if she owned the place, climbed to one of the empty platforms, and started dancing. She made the other dancers look like chimps throwing feces at the audience. She performed a new acrobatic figure on the pole, the world spinning around her as she gyrated, keeping time with the music. People gaped at her in adoration.

Inside her, more faces, seething with envy and resentment. Give it up; you have been at it all day, said Fast Felicia. It is not fair. I have not been outside for months, growled Strong Susan. Just give it up. Give up the spotlight, you bitch! screamed Vicious Violet. Sultry Stella laughed as she ignored the demands of the other inhabitants of the House. She was dancing. She was being desired. She was sultry. This was her kingdom, and no one could take it away from her.

Sooner or later, she would have to give the spotlight up and return to the House, but not yet. Not as long as someone desired her. She finished her number and descended gracefully among her admirers, a goddess made flesh. Then something happened—she felt someone grasp her forearm. Someone had touched her. Her gaze traveled from the hand clutching her arm to its owner, a greasy, disgusting man with lecherous eyes and sweaty skin.

"Want to have a good time, honey?" he asked. She felt anger. No. No. Not anger, please, no. It was too late. She felt her soul sucked into the House as someone else took her place. The disgusting little man screamed in horror as her body cracked and rebuilt itself, becoming larger and much less attractive.

"Who the hell are you?" the man asked.

"I am Angry Anne," the monster said as she tore his head off. Thirty minutes later, Clever Cathy woke up in the midst of the ravaged town. There was not a single building left standing. The street was littered with corpses. She chuckled. Anne had really let go. Then an alien thought hit her powerful mind. She needed only a picosecond to process it and accept it. Do you want a House for each of you? Your own House? ◇ The Master achieved a state of total serenity.

His mind, soul, and body fused into a single unity of purpose. He felt the whole universe spinning around him, and by force of will, he became its center. Unravaged by time, uncontained by space, unassailable to thought, unbound by fate. He was the immovable object, the frame of reference, the fundamentals, and the purest essence. He raised his eyes and saw fiery death falling from above: the asteroid had already entered the atmosphere. Its size and speed were enough to shatter the planet into pieces.

The Master calmly raised his right hand. Size was an illusion. Inertia was an illusion. Distance was an illusion. The asteroid was engulfed by his fist. He felt a brief pang of pain. He opened his hand and saw a faint trail of smoke rising from it. He looked back at the now-empty sky. He had saved this planet. This barren, lifeless planet. He sighed, missing what could have been if he had taken his studies more seriously. Then the thought intruded into his mind. Do you want to stop another meteor?

Not just any meteor—the one that destroyed your planet. The immovable object moved. ◇ The Keeper sighed, satisfied, as he saw the first of his assassins coming from a world that never was. They ignored each other, each focused on claiming their own prize. Each one was powerful enough to ravage an army. He was sending sixty-three of them to Belona. That was the maximum amount of Paradox he could concentrate in that place without tearing the cosmos apart.

He relaxed, diving back to the bottom of his pool, confident he had fulfilled his function. History would be served.