The Changeling Game, Chapter 85

85.
In Battling the Darkness…

Jack wasn’t sure why she was suddenly so angry, why she suddenly wanted to yell at Riddick. She didn’t even know what she wanted to yell.

On the bench beside her, he seemed to be having some kind of disturbing epiphany. She didn’t even try to read what it might be about—not that he’d let her read anything more than the stray emotion—still too busy struggling to fathom why she was so mad at him out of nowhere. It was something about the baby. Something about it that offended her.

It wasn’t the part where he’d compared her, and then Kyra, to the baby. That didn’t bother her all that much. She understood what he was saying. Confronted with actual suffering, especially the suffering of someone he considered an innocent, he couldn’t stay disengaged. Lola Esposito had told her about his youthful attempt at heroics and the children he’d rescued—

But that was the problem.

“Riddick,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as she could. “There were four little kids on the Santa Clara. The ship I was on when your Necromongers caught me. What happened to them?”

Riddick winced. “Fuck, Jack, you really gonna make me say it?”

“Yes.”

“The Necros kill children. You already know that.”

“So you only choose the baby if you can hear it crying,” she sighed, her heart twisting.

That was, she realized, what was upsetting her.

“Jack, I didn’t choose any of this.” He ran his hand over his face, looking abruptly exhausted. “You think I’ve been ruling the Necros for the last year? That ain’t what’s been happening.”

“You have the Moribund on your side, Riddick.” How wasn’t that ruling them?

“As of this morning I do. Before then… you ever heard of havin’ the tiger by the tail?”

She shook her head.

“The sayin’ goes: ‘once you have the tiger by the tail, you can never let go.’” He shrugged, his expression grim. “’Cause the second you do, it’ll turn on you and rip your throat out. This fuckin’ cult has this whole ‘you keep what you kill’ thing goin’. It’s straight out of that Emperoi Thanatou game. Whatever belonged to the person you kill becomes yours. His possessions. His women. His rank. I became Lord Marshal when I killed the last one, but now I’m locked in.”

He stood up, shooting her an angry look, and began to pace.

“I either run the show or I die, Jack. You don’t resign this position and there’s only one way someone else succeeds you.”

That was a chilling thought. Tiger by the tail indeed. He’d never been the suicidal type, she reflected. There’d have been a point when, in his place, she’d probably have just let go. She’d sure as hell tried to when she was thirteen. But he didn’t have that problem.

He glanced her way, nodding, his brows creasing with a look of pain. Had her thoughts about her suicide attempt, all those years ago, hurt him?

“Most of the Necros don’t care who’s sittin’ on the throne,” he continued after a moment, “long as their lives go on the way they like ’em. But if I tried to change things? Tried to change their Way? They’d all turn on me. One or two, or even a dozen, gettin’ it in their heads they wanna throw down… that I can handle. The whole fuckin’ Armada comin’ for me at once? What do you think’d happen then?”

Shit.

“Been savin’ more kids than you know by holdin’ ’em back and slowin’ ’em down. Ain’t about now when you figured they’d be attackin’ the Melpomene system? Why do you think that ain’t happenin’ yet?”

Fuck… “I’m sorry. I didn’t…” He’d been imprisoned the whole time. In the only prison, ever, that he hadn’t been able to escape. And she’d started to blame him for it…

“There’s a lot about ’em I find hard to stomach. Until today, though, if I’d tried to change any of it, I’d’ve gotten dead and it’d have kept going, maybe gotten even worse. You changed that, Jack. You brought me the key to takin’ control of them.”

The Moribund. If he was controlling the Necromongers… “Does he want children dead?”

“I’ll be sure to ask him. Could be he doesn’t care one way or the other. A lot of their worst shit comes from that game the first generation of Necros liked so much. Most of their Way don’t even come from him. They made it up themselves. If he ain’t behind it, he can stop it.”

“What if he is behind it?” The Moribund wanted all of humanity dead, after all. Why would he spare children?

“Maybe his sisters can change his mind. But then we have a new problem.” He walked behind her as he spoke and put his hands on her shoulders.

She shivered and then leaned back, resting the back of her head against his abdomen. “New problem?”

“What to do with a bunch’a kids when their parents are bein’ turned into Necros.”

Shit, that was an issue.

It had taken the Necromonger ship three days to bring her and the others from the wreckage of the Santa Clara to the Armada. Three hideous days in which most of her fellow passengers had undergone conversion, a few at a time, and she’d felt what was happening to their minds in the process. She’d felt the deadening of their thoughts and feelings, the loss of their initiative, the rise of an agenda that wasn’t their own, wasn’t even human…

She should have recognized the Moribund’s touch even then. But her mind had still been so jumbled and jangled, the tsunami of restored memories still frothing and chaotic, the moments of her life transformed into debris borne on its eddies in no particular order. Instead, she’d spent the whole time terrified of what might be done to her next. Part of her, she realized, must nonetheless have known she was being brought closer and closer to the creature that had tried to devour her a year earlier. Her terror had reached a fever pitch right as she was presented to Riddick, and she’d believed it was fear of him. Most of her thoughts from that night had been attempts to rationalize why she feared him instead of trusting him.

“You know I’d never try to hurt you, Jack,” he murmured.

“I do,” she admitted. “I just… got lost…”

“I know. And I got an idea about those kids… if you’re up for it.” There was a teasing challenge in his voice.

“What is it?”

“You take charge of ’em.” He sat down beside her on the bench, nudging her shoulder with his arm. “I figure it’ll keep you out of trouble until it’s time for your ‘hatching.’”

If I’m up for it… She was going to have to be, wasn’t she? Lives were at stake, and he understood exactly how much that meant to her. “I’m in.”

“The trick is… you’re gonna need more power than you have right now to pull that off. More rank. You’re gonna need a title on your name. So nobody thinks they can take the kids from you. There’s a few jackasses who walk around wearin’ strings of baby skulls. Don’t want any of their kind tryin’ to pull rank on you. Only so many people I can kill at a time.”

His voice was calm, with a hint of humor in it, but she had the sudden impression that he was getting nervous. “You have a title in mind?”

“Dame Riddick.”

Wait…

“Did…” She was suddenly having a hard time putting together words. “Riddick, did you just…”

He nodded, watching her with an especially intense gaze.

“I… I uh…”

He looked away. “I’ll give you time to think about it. Got some things I need to finish up. When I get back, I’ll know if the Moribund has anything against kids or it’s just more shit from that game.”

His voice had taken on a strange, impersonal tone. A moment later he was gone.

“Holy… shit…” Jack still couldn’t manage to put together words. This was… Not what I expected, even a little…

Had she already screwed it up? The way he’d pulled back and left…

“Goddamn. Lucy?”

Yes, Audrey?

“Is Riddick okay? I think I may have just upset him.”

He seemed upset with himself, not with you. Do you wish me to ask him to come back?

“Where was he going?”

To the “Chamber of the Quasi-Dead.” That’s where he took you, to read your memories.

She’d been unconscious through most of that. As exhaustion had claimed her, she remembered, she’d said something to Riddick about wishing he could just read her story right from her head. It had been so difficult to speak of much of it, to even put it into a coherent order. She was glad he’d taken her up on the offer…

…even if it did mean that he knew both every sex fantasy, and every doubt, she’d ever had about him.

“Never expected I’d get a proposal of marriage out of all of that…”

The Riddick proposed becoming your mate? A concerned tone had crept into Lucy’s telepathic voice.

She really didn’t want to talk about that.

“Why do you call him the Riddick?” she dodged. “It’s just his family name, isn’t it?” Maybe not even that if he really had just been a baby that showed up somewhere random after the Furyan Diaspora, she reflected.

You and he have been thinking about a game that was once played by humans, and especially by the humans who became the first Necromongers. Some of its lore persists among them. It includes lore of an… “enpeecee?” …who, if left unchecked, would destroy the realm that those playing the game wished to conquer for themselves. Evocation of that name, Lord Riddick, is evocation of a fundamental threat to everything they strive for.

“That’s a really weird coincidence.”

It’s no coincidence at all. Your Riddick was born Richard Booker. Shirah slipped the name from the game into the minds of everyone who handled him as a baby after he was taken off Furya. She didn’t just do it with him. Every Lightbearer and Lightbringer who escaped the attack thirty years ago now wears the surname, as a warning to our brother that he overstepped and owes penance. Especially after he allowed Zhylaw, of all possible people, to ascend to the throne.

“Wait, Michael’s last name is Riddick, too?” He’d never once, in the years she’d known him, shared his surname with her. No wonder.

Where else do you think I learned about the name and its meaning?

“And neither of you told me until now because…?”

It was not yet time for you to know.

“Why’s it time now?”

You are here, among the Necromongers. And the war with the true enemies, the Demons of the Dark, approaches.

“Almost showtime, huh?” Jack sighed. “Am I making a mistake?”

What mistake do you think you might be making?

“Oh fuck, any of it. Trying to bring kids into the Armada. Fucking my childhood hero. Maybe even marrying him. Shit. I really want to talk to Kyra about that but what if she thinks I’m stealing him from her?”

Lucy, who had been somewhere on the ceiling for the conversation until then, dropped down to the floor. For a moment, Jack caught a glimpse of her full, glorious n-shape, before her brain rebelled and redacted the image to a confused impression of shining black segmented legs and the sparkle of faceted eyes. Then don’t tell her yet, but perhaps your new friends could advise you on human relationships. All three of them seem likely to have had more experience with them than you.

“True… Lucy, the last time I had sex with a friend, it turned into a total clusterfuck.”

There it was, she realized. She was scared that somehow her involvement with Riddick would go pear-shaped the way things had gone with Dave. And she’d specialized in flings after him. Did she even know how not to keep Riddick at arms’ length? To let him in? He’d proposed to her, even if he’d kind of come at it sideways…

You fear that you’re going to put up the barricade that you kept between yourself and most of the other men who wished to have you as their mate for more than a few nights?

“I’m worried I already have.”

He has been planning to ask this of you since before you woke. He believes this is the only way he can protect you. But I think he planned to already have made the offer before he expected the two of you would be ready to have sex.

“Shit, and I just jumped right to it.”

You wanted to comfort him. He needed to be comforted. Fierce beings, such as he, often need the most comforting. And have the most difficulty accepting it. You gave it to him in a form he could appreciate.

“So, uh…” Maybe it should have bugged her that Lucy seemed to have a better bead on the men in her life than she did, but she was glad of it. If what had happened between her and Riddick would have harmed her somehow, she was almost certain Lucy would have interceded. “Is this proposal on the level? Or just… for show?”

I sense it is both.

“So. What do I do?”

This is neither a step on the path nor a step off of it. It is incidental to what must come. What do you wish to do?

“Shit. I don’t know. I’m not even nineteen yet.” She’d always assumed that, if someone she adored was going to propose to her, it would be Ewan. The Meziane tribe was big on family. But Riddick, in her mind, had seemed the type who might give her a few nights of attention before it was time for him to move on again, and she was an old hand at handling that. “Do things ever go as planned?”

Perhaps you should focus on something else for a while.

“Good idea,” Jack muttered, looking around. “So, you know what this place is like on the other side of its threshold. Habitable? I mean, for a critter with no exoskeleton like me.”

Habitable. Chilly and the air is stale but breathable. Are you ready?

“Yeah.” Jack closed her eyes—it made the process easier—and held out her hands, feeling the gentle touch of Lucy’s delicate, clawed tarsi on her palms. “Let’s go exploring a little.”

She could feel the change as Lucy drew her across; her sense of the other ’verses in her five-shape had finally developed to that point. As with the ’verse she’d aligned with on board the Santa Clara, she had no idea what number her newest one was assigned in the Quintessa Corporation database. Not that such things mattered much; careful intel from some of General Toal’s embedded agents had confirmed that the Corporation knew almost nothing about the nature of the other ’verses their ships ventured into and cared even less, just as long as the wormholes were stable and the ships returned in one piece. And as long as, when the ships didn’t, the results could be covered up without too much fuss.

The air chilled against her skin and turned oddly lifeless. She opened her eyes and looked around.

Nothing sat on the dressing table she’d chosen. On the bare marble floor nearby, no piles of clothing, no baskets of sundries, waited to be removed. Several pieces of odd jewelry, however, floated in the space where the baskets sat back in U1. Items, she decided, from the original flight of the Tenth Crusade, or made from materials it had carried. Items that had always straddled the ’verses. Little else, aside from the stone architecture and the heavy furniture, existed on that side of the threshold.

The vile statue of a man peeling his skin off his own body stood by the pool. Although she’d pushed it out of U1, she hadn’t been able to touch it on its other side. With a sigh, she walked over to it and put her hand on it again…

“Wait… what? Lucy, it’s still straddling ’verses. I mean, aside from the part I shoved into Wonderland. It’s in a third ’verse.”

I will show you the way to that one later. When the time is right. I suggest you pull the part in Wonderland back into this ’verse, though. Some of the cold is transferring from the portion that is suspended in deep space there.

“Oh. Yeah, good idea.” Jack focused on the stone, aware of the chill coming from an entirely different world. She pulled her hand away fast as the portion in Wonderland crossed over the threshold. “Shit, that’s cold!”

She would, she decided as she walked around the bathroom and then out into the reception area, realigning bits of gruesome artwork, need to push things into this ’verse rather than Wonderland in the future. These rooms, on this side of the threshold, were becoming almost glacial from the cold of deep space that their stonework had been exposed to. Finished, she isomorphed back into U1 with a shudder.

“Holy crap!”

Lola had returned to the suite while she’d been on the other side. Her abrupt appearance in the center of the room had sent the woman into a defensive posture.

“Sorry, Lola. I didn’t mean to scare you.” She was going to need to be more careful.

“Where the hell did you just come from?” Lola rose from her crouch, clearly struggling to relax.

“The other ’verse this ship is straddling.” Well, one of them, anyway…

Jack had told Lola, Vanessa—and it was still hard to think of Nurse Raymond as Vanessa—and Poly about her ability to move between ’verses, but she had a feeling none of them had really believed her. Even Ewan, who had believed, had been unable to restrain a startled oath the first time she appeared before his eyes—

God, I can’t think about him right now… Her mind recoiled back from evoking memories of Ewan so near the bed she and Riddick had shared.

“I thought Riddick said the Underverse isn’t real.” Now Lola was frowning.

“Dunno about that, but there’s nothing especially exciting about the ’verse I was just in. Just empty rooms. Mostly empty, anyway.” Time to change the subject, though. “Are your new rooms okay?”

“They’re fine,” Lola sighed. “They’re lovely. The crews are almost done cleaning them out and are putting things in the hallway outside for you to figure out what you want to do with them. Are you okay?”

Hours earlier, after all, she and the others had left the rooms while Riddick was clinging to her as if she was a buoy in rough seas.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t hurt me.” Quite the opposite; he’d known exactly how to touch her and what to do next at every moment. She felt absolutely safe with him—

So what, she wondered, was the problem? What was she so confused about?

“Did you two…?”

“Several times.” She’d showered most of the evidence away, but there were some telling marks on her throat that she had no doubt Lola could see. She could sense the ex-cop’s concern, her worry that Riddick was taking advantage… “He asked me to marry him.”

“He what?”

“Officer, I swear I didn’t get him pregnant or anything.”

“That’s why you seem so uneasy.” Lola had the look of someone experiencing an epiphany.

“I just…” Jack let the air out of her lungs in a rush and took a new breath, feeling like she kept choking on her words. “I never thought he’d ask me anything like that. He seems to mean it, too.”

“I’m curious, Jack. What did you think you two would be to each other when you met again?”

“I didn’t think we ever would, Lola. Did you think you would?”

Lola shook her head, looking around the reception room. “You need some of the furniture we pulled out from the other suites in here. Unless it really will be just the two of you most of the time.”

When she’d been hauled into the room the first time, there had been one desk, one chair, one pile of upturned tapestries covering a hideous statue, and a whole lot of empty space. “I wasn’t even sure Necromongers had much furniture,” she said. “What were your old rooms like?”

“I was in a barracks with about twenty other women who fight—or, I guess, are intended to fight, because we were all new converts—in the Armada.” Lola shrugged. “Nobody talks much after conversion. ‘The Underverse is all.’”

Yikes. “So I’m guessing cots and foot lockers.”

“Pretty much. The high mucky-mucks get better rooms, like the one I’m in now.”

And Riddick, stuck in a palatial suite, had emptied its reception room of all of the furniture that would allow him to receive. He was going to have to let her bring some of it back if he wanted her to play the wife here. Especially if he was going to put her in charge of God only knew how many children.

What have I gotten myself into here? “Okay, let’s take a look at all of this stuff.”

Lola laughed as they walked toward the outer doors. “You might sound a little more enthused.”

Jack shrugged as she followed Lola out into the hallway. “Never been much on stuff. You either have to leave it behind when you cut and run, or you have to plan on losing it somewhere along the way.”

The image of Kyra’s lost stuffed rabbit tugged at her mind.

“An unusual perspective,” Poly said from the side, “from a girl who spent most of her childhood in a recreation of Small Town America.”

Tables had been set up throughout the hallway and piled with random objects. Couches, chairs, and free-standing light fixtures crowded the space as well. Jack spotted an attendant arranging things and walked over to her after smiling and shrugging at Poly.

“Hi,” she said to the woman. “I’m Jack.”

“Olwyn, My Lady.”

“Olwyn, that’s pretty. Um… back in the Lord Marshal’s bath, there are some piles of things that need to be brought out. Anything that’s sitting on the floor and doesn’t have someone’s name on it can come out here and join this other stuff.”

“Of course, My Lady.”

“Just Jack is fine, please.”

“Of course… Jack.” Olwyn curtseyed and moved off, summoning two other attendants to follow her into Riddick’s rooms.

And Jack made herself look around at all of the clutter.

“If I’m gonna do this, I guess this is how it starts,” she muttered to herself. Playing at housewife had never been on her agenda.

Think of it, she told herself, as undercover work.

She’d spent the years after her return to Deckard’s World pretending to be an ordinary schoolgirl. She could pull this off, whatever it was, too. Hopefully Riddick wasn’t just trying to stick her on a shelf, safely out of harm’s way, with this proposal of his.

She picked out a few arrangements of furniture and had them set up in Riddick’s reception room—

Our reception room, I guess… looks like I’m getting married…

—listening in amusement as some of the regular attendants tried to figure out what had happened to the statue that had once been in the room. Most of the hangings and statuary that now sat in the hallway were disgusting enough that she doubted any of the people Riddick had de-converted could possibly want them.

“Offer them to the other ranking lords of the Armada,” she told Olwyn. “I guess they like these kinds of things.”

There were clothes, baubles, trinkets… she picked out a few things, spotting a set of nearly-new boots in her size, a few more articles of clothing that were in her preferred colors and near enough to her size not to look ridiculous, and a small bottle of her mother’s favorite perfume. All of the jewelry was too ostentatious to appeal.

“Take what you want of the rest,” she told Lola, Poly, and Vanessa. “And then let the group I’m not supposed to know about yet have at what’s left.”

She snickered at the shocked look on their faces. Even Riddick seemed to forget that she was an esper and would know what was going on even if everybody was trying to be quiet about it. Except for the things that were being hidden from her by the Apeiros themselves.

One last table had something of actual interest to her on it: books. She suspected she was going to have some time on her hands that they could fill.

Most of the titles, she decided as she searched through the piles, were not all that interesting, even a little distasteful. Someone had diligently collected the works of an author named John Norman, and all of the covers—dozens of them!—depicted buxom, half-naked women in states of disturbing subservience. She was just about to give up on the whole table when a name on a cover caught her eye.

Minnie Sulis?

Two books, both hardcovers, sat near the bottom of a pile. She pulled them out for a closer look.

Magic Is Real

By Minnie Sulis

A familiar image graced the cover: the picture of Minnie that had been on the poster in Kyra’s dream. She opened the book up and looked inside.

It had been published in 2075, at the height of Minnie’s stage career; the copy in her hand was a First Edition, the kind of thing people put a lot of value on back on Deckard’s World. Minnie had autographed the inside cover.

To Chapman,
Keep dreaming big, and the magic will happen!
—Minnie

Chapman Marshal had gotten Minnie’s autograph, some ten years before he created Emperoi Thanatou, some six years before Kyra was born. Intrigued, Jack turned to the second book.

Magic Isn’t Real

By Minnie Sulis

Minnie’s face didn’t grace this cover. Instead, there was an illustration of a broken crystal ball and a snapped magic wand. It had been published in 2083, when Kyra had been a toddler, and was also a First Edition. Inside, there were two autographs. The first, in different handwriting, was addressed to Chapman:

Chap,

I know the book’s a bit of a downer, but I want you to have all three of Min’s works for your journey. She even signed it. May bold adventures await you, O Pioneering Crusader!

Joren

Kyra had thought about a cousin named Joren in her dream. Was that who had given the book to the would-be King of Delubrum?

The second autograph, lower down on the page, was in Minnie’s handwriting:

Joren,

“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”

Take care that, in battling the darkness, you don’t become one of its demons.

All my love,
Minnie

“Holy shit…” Jack breathed, right before she felt the tickle of Lucy’s mind on hers and something vanished from her awareness.