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  Chesed, the Emperor, mercy, leadership. Always, or at least for a very long time, this had been Septimus, indefatigable toiler in the hell worlds. Now, incredibly, and not reversed, it was that idiot Jules, whiling away his time in theological games, a plaything of the planetary Mind that comprised the Star Doll, the Matrioshka Brain built in another cognate by a culture old when Egypt and India were young. Sphere within sphere of whirling molecular bubbles, like Maybelline's Venusian vegetation sucking in sunlight, but ever so more efficiently, the inner shell seething with raw solar heat, running upon its own substrate minds vast, and fast, and terrible, spilling its waste heat to the next shell, and that to the next, and the next, to the frigid outermost zones of what had once been the Solar System, where Jules spun out his days, when he wasn't making a nuisance of himself elsewhere, in a sort of spinning Argentine bolo that gave him the illusion of weight along with the illusion of importance. He was a toy. He had allowed himself to become one. But then again, he treated the Matrioshka Brain and its manifestations, the whole cosmos really, as if it were his plaything. A fool. Not the Fool, that card had not yet been turned. But Emperor? Absurd.

  The final node or branch of the left-hand pillar of the Tree of Life was Binah, traditionally—and uncomfortably—her own. Another change. A jolt went through her. Had she been in the flesh, it might have loosened her bowels. This was the place of death and wisdom; she had expected to find Septimus here, since he was no longer in the Chesed station. Now another stood in his place, yet not another. Mounted upon a dreadful killing machine, standard in hand, minatory above a wretched mother turned away in terror while clutching a gaunt babe to her breast, a woman all in black armor gazed back across the reeking battlefield of dead to hold Avril's eyes.

  "Septima," the Sibyl whispered, fear coursing in her. "Great Mother, is she returned?"

  Her trembling fingers went to the Daath pack of discarded cards, plucked one forth. Very well. This was Knowledge, unexpected, from beyond the pale. It was, of course, Ruth, the archivist and coroner of slain K-machines. She placed it to the right of Binah, turned up the second last card, positioned it to the right of the Daath card. Here was Chokmah, in ancient times the Zodiac, now the Tegmark multiverse entire, in an infinite fractal. Inevitably, as always, this was Decius. He stood in a chariot, a burning star upon his head, representing—she now knew for certain—an entire collapsed cosmos, a cognate closed upon itself in controlled gravitational infall, guided to its central singularity by the near-godlike beings of its terminal history. Decius had spent his life at Yggdrasil Station, the vantage point created for him by the beneficence of the unborn god builders. Not even Decius supposed that he was the driver of that cosmological chariot, for all the symbolism of the card. He was an observer gifted with glory, and the lion sphinxes at his feet were the godthings born in the ignition of an entire universe crashing in upon itself. As she stood within the world of the card, one of the sphinxes glanced across at her, winked, licked its lips. It was not a lion, she realized with surprise. It was a cat, a mangy old tomcat missing the best part of one ear. She'd seen it before, in Maybelline's arms struggling to get free, cursing freely, or basking lazily in front of May's Heimat fireplace. Dear god, she thought; it's Cathooks. The foul animal is a godthing.

  She closed her eyeless eyes. Ten cards had been dealt out. One remained, as always. Relief went through her. Only one sibling remained to be accounted for. There was no room on the Tree of Life for the interloper. She had known him for a fraud from the outset. Something sent by the K-machines, probably. A lure, a distraction, doubtless worse. She turned over the last card, placed it at the top of the Tree.

  Kether, the Fool. But reversed. Ember, of course. Scapegrace, creator of the Good Machine and consequently an accomplice before-the-act in the most monstrous genocide any world had ever seen, even those tormented places in the custody of Septimus. Septima, she corrected herself. She reached without reaching to retrieve the pack, shuffle it anew, place it with due respect within its silk covering, its carved jasper box. Somehow one fingernail caught the edge of the Fool's card, tipped and reversed it back. Pain in her sternum tore like a ripped muscle, like a lesion exposed to acid.

  The face of the brat looked out at her, not watching where he stepped. He wore a tunic of budded universes topologically connected, a rose in his left hand, a wand in his right with a swag or wallet tied at its end. Glaring sunlight fell upon him from behind; he stepped heedlessly into a precipice, plainly a representation of the Schwelle system. A dog barked at his heels, presumably the animal that had sequestered her father's essence, or part of it, during their hidden years when the brat was conceived and born on some negligible cognate Earth. In the distance far beyond him, awesome mountain peaks lifted into pale-blue sky, the computational structures that underlay reality. It was unendurable. Everything—everything—was changed.

  August Seebeck was the Parsifal, the Tarot's Fool.

  Choking on saltwater, Avril flailed, caught one of her swans a slashing blow on the cheek. She found herself sinking, thrashed in the element she had always regarded as her own. Burning took her. She doubled up, vomiting, and the price of insight burned within her.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  August

  There was no door.

  I had the purloined sword in my hand. I raised the heavy, beautifully balanced blade above my shoulder, as I had in the place that no longer existed, brought the blunt hilt crashing against the white-and-blue wallpapered plaster of the wall where an alcove and the door to a staircase had been less than an hour earlier. My blows split open the delicate patterns, pitted the drywall surface. The wall was exactly as solid and as vulnerable as you'd expect in a nicely fitted-out cottage.

  In a fury, I brought the blade about, took the hilt in both hands, began hacking like a fool at the wall, as if the sword were an axe. Toby made no move to stop me. It was just as well. In my mood of despair, I might have taken a cut at him. I heard Lune's voice. Perhaps she spoke my name. I cut, I jabbed, I slashed; plaster dust flew into the air, gritted my eyes; the taste of it poisoned my tongue. Chunks of plaster fell at my feet. I was ruining the blade. My shoulders convulsed in a tremendous blow that drove the blade a good inch into the black oak of a vertical stud, where it jammed tight. I tugged at it. The goddamned thing refused to budge. I let go of the hilt. The sword hung in the wounded wall like a rebuke.

  "Fuck," I said. I backed away from what I'd done until my shoulders struck the corridor wall behind me. "So much for the theory that I'm the reincarnation of Arthur bloody Pendragon."

  Somehow my legs gave way. The weight of my body slid me down the wall. I took three great convulsive gasps, floating dust catching in my lungs, coughed, burst into tears. I was beyond humiliation. I was beyond sense, reason, trust; I was beyond the reassurances of love. I howled like a lost child, which I was. I placed my fists in the wet sockets of my eyes, and roared with inarticulate loss and grief and confusion. A hand touched my knee—I brushed it away, pressed my eyes against the upjutting bones of my knees, put the palms of my hands over my ears, and wept, shaking.

  I do not know how long I remained in that storm of fugue. It cannot have been an hour. When I recovered myself somewhat, Toby had withdrawn, and Lune sat quietly at my side, contained, alert, legs stretched out, hands clasped lightly on her thighs. When I looked at her, shaking my wet face, she turned her cobalt gaze upon me.

  "We're going to need some WD-40 to get that free," she remarked in a calm tone. "Or Teflon-Plus."

  "What?"

  "It's a bicycle lubricant. Pricey, but effective."

  I said nothing.

  "Or we could leave it there, patch the wall around it." She regarded the wrecked wall aesthetically. "A statement about, you know, Man's inhumanity to Man."

  It was wry, it was funny, I wanted to laugh but there was no laughter in me, not yet. I sent her a sketchy grin, a rictus spasm of my mouth, wanting to reach for her, pull her against me, take comfort from her solid
ity, her steadfastness. I shook my head, shrugged, let my head fall forward again. I closed my eyes. Everything was gray. I was tumbling into the gray. I caught myself, drew back from the edge of the precipice, opened my eyes, pushed myself to my feet. I felt as if I'd been beaten by canes until my flesh was bruised and my bones near to breaking. Lune was gone. The sword hung in the broken wall. There was still no door, no staircase. Someone had revised the rules, then changed them back. No certainties.

  The Contest of Worlds.

  Precisely.

  And we were not the Players, by Christ.

  We were the Pawns.

  ***

  I dusted myself off, went back to the guest bedroom. Lune was not there, for which I was grateful. From the living room at the front of the cottage I heard her soft murmur, Toby's gruff, restrained answer. I closed the bedroom door, took my clothes off, went into the en suite bathroom, had a very satisfying shit through a warm-breezed Schwelle into what I hoped was an empty cognate world, and got back under the shower to wash away the tear-clotted plaster dust. It seemed to me in my mordant mood that I was spending far too much time in this place under the shower. But the water was free, refreshing, and for some reason standing there under the warm rain of yet another optional wormhole into yet another Earth cleared my mind and kick-started my sluggish engagement with this preposterous reality. I had tried to batter my way through a solid wall. There was a better way. I opened a Schwelle upon a gust of hot desert wind, shook my wet head, droplets flying from my hair. What an idiot.

  No point looking for new clothes. I dragged on the old ones, went straight back to the corridor. Strictly speaking, there was no need to do this, no need to leave the bedroom. But I wanted to see if the alcove and door were back. Nope. I looked ruefully at the mess I'd created. There was a grammar inside me. So I'd been told. It had not let me down yet, except when I'd neglected to access it or when someone else with authorization had indicted my requested actions. I tried to remember how I'd found my way back to the house I'd shared with Great-aunt Tansy before the Deformer brutes had smashed it into collapsing rubble. The Schwelle operating system seem to possess at least some degree of intelligence, perhaps artificial intelligence. There was leeway; probably it made its best guess at construing what you needed, even in the absence of an exact deictic address. Okay, let's give it a shot.

  First, though, I tried once again to pull the sword out. It was jammed tightly in the heavy grain of the upright stud. Hey, maybe two birds with one stone.

  "Give me the, uh, Round Table room," I told the system, holding tight to the sword's hilt as I did so. Canvas tore. I pitched slightly into darkness, the weight of the freed sword pulling me forward. My mood lifted, and the corners of my mouth. "Too cool," I said, grinning at myself. "Maybe I am Arthur, after all." But in truth I was not Arthur; I was myself, not about to be conscripted into some mishmash of myth. I dropped the sword on the floor with a clang and left it there.

  The iconic dodecagon grew visible before me as my eyes adapted: ultraviolet, blue-tinted. It swung down, formed its table, showed me its heraldic cast of characters. I looked for its empty seat, waiting for me, and my smile vanished. I sat there at the table, between Marchmain and Toby, dressed in some sort of highly dubious tunic with long floppy sleeves and a pair of rolltop calf-high boots that you wouldn't be seen dead playing hoops in. The tunic was decorated with glittering spheres of light that budded from each other. At my right heel, crouched down with his nose on his paws, was my beloved dog, Dugald O'Brien. For a moment, my eyes burned again with tears, but they were tears of grief. Do Good had died in the deformers' attack, and I had recovered him from death with the power given to me by the creepy thing embedded in my right hand, the X-caliber device imposed upon me in Septimus's war room. And now Do Good was gone once more, fused back into the reunified person of my father, Dramen Seebeck. Was all this, then, the work and design of Septimus? I stood behind my phantom self, resisting the urge to crouch down and cuddle my old doggy friend, gone, gone, and looked instead across the table to Septima, the twin or female doppelganger of my hellworld brother. Her image regarded me unflinchingly. Once again, it came to me what I must do.

  "Give me Septima," I said. Septic, muttered some idiot punning commentary from my unconscious, sempiternal. Septifragal, said another kind of voice, almost in my ear, not quite sounded, botanical: dehiscent breaking away from a natural dividing line.

  What the fuck?

  But the portal had torn open. A foul stench blew through, rotting meat, corroded metal, filth, and corruption. I gagged, instantly covered my mouth and nose with my hands. The small, stocky woman in black protective gear looked up from her work. At her back, a large autonomous machine delved among the protruding bones, the faces eaten to the skull, the half-decayed limbs with, appallingly, fingernails still attached to the yellowed, bloated claws. She held a child in her arms. The poor little thing was mute in its terror, its loss, skin shrunken upon its bald head, limbs like sticks, belly swollen. It gazed at nothing with its dead eyes, but it was alive. Barely.

  "August," the woman said, voice muffled by her mask. "I've been expecting you, lad. Here, take this child."

  The urgent need to vomit had not abated. My ears rang. I clamped shut my nostrils and epiglottis, trying to breathe without breathing. I held out my arms, and Septima lightly laid the wretched child in my clasp. He did not look at me—I saw now that the tiny, ruined body was male—and he hung limply. Sores covered his skin. His mouth opened once, and his tongue was swollen within it. My arms brought him up against my breast of their own volition. This violence was unspeakable. I felt my heart breaking. When I spoke, my voice was broken as well.

  "Where can we—" I cleared my throat. "We have to get this baby to hospital."

  A soft buzzing; the machine backed up, and Septima stepped down into the cavity it had opened. Something moved. Something uttered a feeble cry. My sister reached into a space between a leaking water pipe and a heap of fractured concrete, humming gently, brought out by one hand a small, shuddering girl child who held a piece of blackened rag pressed against her mouth. Perhaps it had been a bib or part of the covering of a favorite stuffed animal. The little girl whimpered. Her eyes swiveled between us in fright. Septima must have seemed to her a demon, a ghost, a monstrous enemy. Yet in her release from fatal captivity the child clutched at my sister's hand and arm with ferocious intensity. Her gaze fell then upon the bundle in my arms. She took a step forward, held out her own spindly arms, croaked a name. The baby did not move, his emptied gaze fixed nowhere. I could not make out the name; I doubt that it was one I've ever heard before, nor that the child spoke any language of my world or its nearest cognates. But what would I know? Each inhabited world is choked with the fluent grunts and clucks and pitched songs of tongues most of us will never hear uttered.

  The little girl cried out that name once more, twice, looked away doubtfully, fell silent. Septima waited. The child turned back to her, wrapped her arms around one dark-garbed leg, and pressed her face into my sister's thigh.

  "I have a refuge prepared," Septima told me softly. "Come with me."

  She lifted the child into her arms, muttered a deixis code, opened the portal. I followed her through into a softly lit circular space in soothing pinks, yellows, pale blue. A console with a large flatscreen showed in muted colors a sleeping child, thumb in rosebud mouth, hair fluffy except where it was crushed into a pillow, presumably from an infrared CCT feed. Doors stood closed every three meters or so, decorated with green giraffes, purple lions, other birds and animals I did not recognize, including several dinosaurs merrily spotted and feathered. Septima touched a key at the console. Almost immediately, a door opened and a short man in a nondescript tracksuit came briskly in.

  "Coop," I said, taken aback. His hair was neater than usual. The dreadful meerschaum pipe was absent from his fake teeth. He looked first at the children in our arms, then to Septima, finally to me. He had never seen me before.

 
; "Oh, sorry—" I started to say, as he said to me, "Apologies, sar, we've not met. You must be thinking o' one of my fellow avatars. Here now, let me have the little one." He took the gaunt ghost of a child from my arms with the easy skill and care of a man with a dozen children of his own. It was impossible, in that moment, to regard him as a mechanism, let alone a renegade killing machine.

  "August, this is Mr. Happy. Meet my brother," she told the twin of James Cooper Fenimore.

  "Another Seebeck sibling, eh? Pleased to make your acquaintance. This infant is badly dehydrated. I have to put him on a drip. Is the other child related?"

  Septima had removed her isolation mask, and started to peel off her suit without detaching the older child from her leg. The girl whimpered faintly, darted glances at the dying baby. "Unknown, although that's my guess. The genome scan will tell us. Put them in a room for two, cots for both of them. Now, sweetie, you're going to have to let go of me for a moment. August, can you look after her? Happy, we'll need assistance."

  I crouched down, took the little girl under her armpits, lifted her free. Or tried to. She shrieked in terror, a piercing ululation, and clung more tightly to my sister. I released her, drew back a hop, placed my left hand lightly on her back in what I hoped was a comforting gesture. More shrieks and shrinking. Septima's protective suit hung from her waist. Beneath it, she wore a ballet leotard in a surprisingly sprightly electric blue. Somehow, I could not see her variant incarnation, Septimus the Promethean alpha male, wearing such a thing. Another door opened, and the child's shrieks cut off. Me, I'd have screamed twice as loudly. I very nearly did anyway.