Page 47

Chapter 47

Curtains of Possibility

I entered the Pandoral demesne unencumbered by expectation– or any sort of viable plan. All I’d known about this realm was that its denizens were reputed to be small in number, no more than three hundred beings who stepped onto other planes of existence as tiny bug-like creatures. I’d assumed that swarms of glittering-carapaced flying beetles just happened to be a hardier solution for the Mortal realm than, say, dried leaves or choleric butterflies. Certainly, the evidence suggested that each Pandoral split their individual sentience across a multitude of tiny physical forms, my clearest proof being that my own consciousness was currently divided between the hundred or so bugs that had survived the recent assault.

It was kind of cool, really, fluttering about as a hundred separate pieces of oneself. Gives you an entirely different perspective on solitude. As for the esoteric environment in which I’d found myself, it was like nothing I’d experienced before. I wasn’t entirely sure it even qualified as any sort of measurable physical space. I was passing through endless curtains made of shimmering strands of a silky fabric that reflected everything around it, only. . . No, those weren’t reflections. The images were erupting from the strands themselves. Each one contained myriad unfolding events, like tiny stories inscribed along the threads of silk.

The images were incomprehensible at first, until I began to move through the tendril-like curtains and the events I was seeing became more familiar. People and places I recognised came into existence, lived and died a thousand thousand times in every way imaginable. I saw Corrigan, retired from his career as a mercenary wonderist, telling grand tales to a gaggle of grandchildren. Along the next strand, he was hurling bolts of Tempestoral fury at some sort of Infernal behemoth. In some, he was dying from Tempestoral sickness eating him up inside, despite being the age he’d been when I first met him.

The further I travelled through the curtains, the more I saw myself in those strands. My life unfolded with a multitude of different fates, different dooms. It was difficult to focus on them, although perhaps focus was the wrong word, since I wasn’t sure I even had eyes. Though I’d passed through the portal of my own body as a swarm of bugs, now my consciousness persisted inside tiny motes of glittering dust. Was this how the Pandorals experienced their own existences? If so, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad way to live.

‘You have to pull yourself together,’ said a voice behind me, which was odd, since there were so many of me you’d expect at least one of me would’ve been looking in that direction.

The swarm of dust motes making up my physical being spun in the air, momentarily leaving me dizzy until I was able to ignore the infinite strands of the curtains to observe a boy standing there. He was maybe eight or nine, with dark curly hair and bronze skin.

Well, at least I didn’t have to hunt through the entire Pandoral realm to find him , I thought. Then again, this entire plane might be the size of a back-alley brothel for all I know.

‘Think of hugging yourself,’ the boy instructed me, and because apparently he thought I was an idiot, he mimed the gesture. ‘You need to create cohesion between all the pieces of yourself, then you can take a proper shape.’

I attempted to do as he suggested. It was harder than I’d expected, because first I had to make all my dust-mote selves spin around one another to prevent them from colliding. The sensation was oddly cramped. After a few seconds– or maybe it was millennia; I had no idea how time worked here– I managed to shape myself into a somewhat formless blob with two spindly arms and one eye stalk.

‘Try harder,’ the boy told me, placing a hand over his mouth to stifle a giggle.

Cut me some slack, kid. It’s my first time at this. I’ll bet you were an ugly baby too, once.

After watching me fumble around as an awkward cross between a puddle of goo and a vampire kangaroo, the boy said, more usefully, ‘Use the strands to guide you.’

I let my awareness return to the shimmering, dangling tendrils and focused on those in which I was roughly the correct age and not either dead from blood loss (must remember to keep an eye on Temper if I get out of this) or dealing with the charred remains of an arm and leg severed by lightning (thanks, Corrigan).

‘We don’t have a lot of time,’ the boy pointed out unhelpfully.

I felt like swatting his head, but that required a working hand, so I went back to focusing on images of myself inside the strands while ‘hugging’ myself ever tighter. The sensations became more and more painful, like being crushed under thousands of rocks, until I felt the internal structure of skeleton, connective tissues, muscles and fat pushing back against that constriction. After a few dozen tries, I finally assembled myself into a reasonably Cade-like figure.

‘Your smile is crooked,’ the boy observed.

‘That’s the face I make before I slap impolite little snots,’ I told him. ‘But I make it a policy never to hit a child until I know his name. What’s yours?’

‘Hamun,’ he replied. ‘I am Hamun’ren of the House of — ’ Then he smiled, and damn if he didn’t have his mother’s smile. Without warning, he rushed over to me and threw his arms round my waist. His face pressed into my stomach as if he were trying to breathe me in. ‘I knew you’d come to find me.’

It was a strange sensation to have a child hug you as if you were really important to him. I’d given up any notions of being a parent when I’d first joined the Glorians, and nothing about my time as an Infernal wonderist had changed that conviction. ‘How could you know I would come?’ I asked. ‘We’ve never met.’

He let go of me, then dangled his fingers through the shimmering strands around us. They warped and shifted, showing moments that might have been pulled from my life these past ten years, though I couldn’t be sure which ones were accurate and which ones mere possibilities. ‘I’ve known you since before I was born, Cade.’ He said my name awkwardly, as if he feared being too bold. ‘You met my mother when she was still pregnant with me.’

‘And you remember events from before she gave birth to you?’

‘You can find everything here,’ he said, tugging on a single shimmering strand. The images trickling down its length showed the same vision I’d seen in the Glorian Archives when Eliva’ren had somehow drawn me to her in the past. ‘Everything that touches one’s existence, everything that could touch one’s existence.’

‘This is. . .’ I was staggering under the implications– all the spells I might have been able to discover being attuned to the Pandoral realm, all futile now because even if I somehow survived the war unfolding on the Mortal realm, Eliva’ren had made it clear this plane of existence was going to be obliterated.

‘Hamun,’ said a woman’s sternish voice: a show of authority mixed with a hint of affectionate amusement. ‘What have I told you about conjuring strange men?’

Out of the coruscating curtains stepped Eliva’ren.

No, not Eliva’ren , I quickly realised, but the manifestation of her the Pandorals conjured to raise her son.

Aside from the unassuming robes and the basket of bread she was carrying under one arm, she looked much like the woman I’d left behind in my own realm– the woman who’d sworn to bring me to my doom. Before I could ask whether she intended to do so here, someone else spoke, a voice that shook me to my core.

My voice.

‘Don’t badger the poor kid,’ said a lean fellow wearing the sort of long azure coat I generally favoured. He was my age and height, his raven-black hair smoothed back from his forehead. We might’ve been reflections of one another, except that he greeted me with a patient smile my own mouth wouldn’t even know how to form. ‘Weird, isn’t it?’ He came closer, offering himself up for inspection even as he ruffled the boy’s hair with fatherly familiarity.

I looked down at Hamun, who was staring back at me with a sheepish expression that couldn’t hide his anxiety over how I might react to meeting myself. ‘The Pandorals created a. . . a replica of me in their realm?’

‘Hamun didn’t want me to be alone,’ the mystical construct of his mother said, then she playfully swatted the back of the boy’s head. ‘Though why he asked the Pandorals to summon an ill-bred, ill-mannered wonderist instead of any number of worthier suitors is ample proof that children shouldn’t dabble in such affairs.’

‘Oh, come on, sweetheart,’ the other me said, throwing an arm around her shoulder. ‘Have I been so bad a husband? I mean, the jokes alone — ’

‘Ugh,’ the other Eliva’ren groaned, then she batted at the shimmering strands around us, sending images of me at all kinds of awkward moments in my life whirling around us. ‘Was there not a single path in the life of Cade Ombra in which you were capable of subtle humour? Must your entire existence be an endless series of jokes about genitalia and vampire kangaroos?’

‘To be fair, most of those are Corrigan’s,’ I replied, and only in the echo from the other me did I realise we’d spoken at the same time.

Aw, aren’t we cute? I thought.

The Eliva’ren who’d raised the son who belonged to a different version of herself looked troubled as she reached out a hand to still the strands around us. They were vibrating at an increasing rate. ‘The potentialities are beginning to intertwine. The Pandoral realm is collapsing at last.’ She knelt before Hamun and hugged him fiercely. ‘You know what must happen now, don’t you, my darling? You know what to do?’

He hugged her back, so tightly his feet almost came off the ground. ‘I do, Mother.’

‘No weeping,’ she said, though she herself was crying. ‘Everyone has three dooms, my love, and this is the very best of mine.’ She gently pulled his arms from around her, then placed his right hand in mine. ‘Go with him now. He’ll take you to your mother.’

The other Cade grabbed my shoulder, squeezing hard enough to remove any doubt as to the sentiment– if not the words– he was about to convey. ‘Hey, shithead. Don’t fuck this up, okay?’

‘Daddy!’ the boy said. ‘You’re not supposed to swear.’

Cade looked at me, a pained expression on his face. ‘Nine years without swearing. Can you imagine what that was like?’ Then he grinned at Eliva’ren. ‘Though there were a few compensations.’

‘Go,’ she said to me. ‘Hamun will know how to navigate the strands. The two of you must follow what will at first be the mere potential of the gate back to your world, through its varying probabilities until you find its inevitability. Don’t look back– and whatever you do, don’t let yourself be drawn into other potentialities. This realm is about to collapse.’

I felt oddly guilty for the Pandoral being who had helped me get here and was now going to witness the end of his own plane of existence. Then again, he’d known what was coming, and in that brief moment of connection I’d had to him through the bug-being I’d created from one of the insects making up his swarm, he’d reminded me, ‘ Order is only temporary. Chaos is eternal. The Pandoral realm will arise again, and when it does, you stupid meatsack, we’ll come for yours. ’

‘Come on, Cade,’ the boy said, tugging on my hand. Even as we slipped between glittering strands of potentiality, I paused to glance back at the other me, holding his Eliva’ren in his arms and watching existence crumbling around them.

‘Hey, arsehole,’ I called out to the me who’d experienced at least a few years of a life I’d never imagined for myself, ‘what was it like?’

He didn’t have to ask what I was referring to. For a moment, he looked starry-eyed, which was surely just the tears coming. Then he smiled, a smile I badly wished my own lips had ever had reason to shape. ‘There are no words, Brother.’

And with that, Hamun and I raced through a landscape without ground or sky or direction with the jaws of oblivion snapping at our heels.