I still couldn’t get around the manifestation part. “You stole a cow,” I said.
She scoffed at my feeble attempt to understand her. “I stole creation. I stole destiny. I stole the spark of all things so that all things could exist. It’s not a cow, you fool. It’s a metaphor for the power of the Wheel of the World,” she said.
“And all those people you listed—you—you’re all here, now, because, uh, the cow’s here?”
Satisfied, she leaned back again. I took her for mad, but she seemed much too calm and confident for the crazy talk. “Now you see. I have spent over a century diverting attention elsewhere, so that none would suspect the power hidden in this city. I kept Donor off-balance, concerned about his petty kingdom abroad while I sought the tools to access the power here. You were gifted the sword against my wishes. In my surprise, the spear claimed you. The faith stone has fallen into your hands. I have them all now, save the bowl. I know the bowl is here. I felt it when I arrived. I know you must have it. You’ve drawn the others to you. The bowl is no different. Give it to me so that Faerie may live.”
I shook my head. “Give you the power to destroy everything I know in the name of creating everything you want? I won’t have that blood on my hands.”
She stood and placed the tip of the spear against my chest. “I have no problem with your blood on my hands.”
I smirked up at her. “Then you’ll never know where the bowl is.”
She pressed the spear forward. “It matters not. I have the spear and the sword. I can pull the faith stone from your mind. They will bring the bowl into my hands. They are all a piece of the Wheel of the World. They call to each other. With the three together, the bowl will arrive. I would have you at my side again when that happens, but a Faerie without you is better than no Faerie at all.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
She gripped me by the head, her palm resting against my forehead as her fingers clutched my scalp. Her hand glowed with essence, and she brought her face close to mine. “You must remember who you are. It’s true I started the war, but I didn’t cause Convergence. You did.”
I screamed as her fingers bored into my skull and
40
Black.
I drifted in a sea of black, a thick sluggish current that neither warmed nor cooled, a neutral texture that clung to my skin. I moved, my sense of balance registering a slow tumble through the black. It was black, then black, then black.
I didn’t know how long I drifted before I realized I was painless. I had lived with pain for so long, I no longer felt like it. It felt like me. Numbness had replaced feeling; indifference to pain had replaced reaction to it.
Dazed, I tumbled, my mind blank, my thoughts disconnected. Black was black. It was a thing, confronting me with a nothingness of nothingness, relentless and infinite. I tumbled, and it was black, then black, then black.
“Focus.”
The word cut across the black like the thrum of the deep. A curiosity surged through me at the break of the monotony, but only for a moment. The black returned, black and silent. Even as I considered I had imagined it, I lost the sense of it and faded away into the black.
“Grey.”
The word cut across the black like the thrum of the deep. I had heard a sound that formed a word that formed a meaning. I was the sound that was the word that was the meaning. I was Grey. I knew this and remembered this and held on to this as the idea faded away into the black.
I remembered then the other word. I had a memory of another word. My name was not the first word, the first sound. It had been another word with a sound and a meaning, and I knew that, too.
“Focus, Grey.”
I heard the words, pausing as I heard them, wondering whether I heard the words in my memory or heard them again in the black. It mattered not in the black. It felt the same. I heard the words and the memory and held them in my mind and remembered who I was.
A pinpoint of light stirred in the black. I saw it, then black, then black. I was tumbling again. I saw it, then saw it, then black. I saw it. The pinpoint of light stayed in my vision. It stayed, no longer shifting to black. I was still. The pinpoint of light in the dark moved, and I saw it and knew it for what it was: essence in the black.
There was light.
Light floated in the distance, essence light that soared toward me. Bursts of color flared, fireworks against the black, fading to darkness. I wondered if the colors were essence or simply a physiological reaction to the enveloping darkness. I wondered if they were the afterimages of essence I had seen, memory images of the colors of essence or levels of essence I couldn’t normally sense with light. The colors flashed and flared, then faded, and always the darkness returned, except the pinpoint of light remained, growing in the black
The pinpoint changed, became shape, first a circle, then an oval, then a line. The light became what it was: essence in the black, essence moving toward me, essence I recognized, the shape of a body signature, shifting from white to blue to evergreen. The body signature arrived at last or in an instant. I wasn’t sure which. I was sure of the body signature, though, and of the face that belonged to that signature and floated in front of me.
“Am I dead?” I asked Bergin Vize.
I had spent years as a Guild agent chasing Vize, elf terrorist and chronic adversary. I remembered that now. I had lost my abilities because of him—and he had lost his. He returned to Boston again and again, and each time I faced him and lost, until the last time. The last time he showed his face, he died in the destruction of a building. I watched him fall. I did not see him rise. No one found him. He was buried under tons of concrete and stone, the building he helped destroy, his tomb.
The face before me—Bergin Vize’s face—did not smile. “Not quite. Not yet.”
“I watched you die,” I said.
“It’s not important,” he said.
My mind cleared, a lifting of fog and confusion. I was floating in darkness with Bergin Vize. “I think it is. If you are dead, I’m hallucinating. If you’re alive, I need to kill you.”
He did smile then. “After all this time, you still see only two alternatives? This has always been about us but never between you and me.”
“Here we go again, Vize. Tell me how you want to save the world by destroying it,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not me. Maeve.”
Maeve. Of course, Maeve. She wanted to destroy the world. Vize did, too. Everybody wanted to destroy the world to make it something else. “I think she killed me. I think I’m dead. TirNaNog is gone, and I’m left with looking at you in the dark for eternity,” I said.
Vize stared, serene and patient. In the black, his body shimmering, essence forming the shape of him except his right side. Where his arm should have been was nothingness, the stain of the same darkness in my head manifesting itself on his arm. Something glittered in the darkness, though, down where his hand should have been. Something familiar. “Maeve has made a fatal error, Grey. She does not know I am here. She doesn’t know about this place. Even better, she does not believe it exists. There lies my final chance.”
“All right. I’ll play, Vize. Where am I then?” I asked.
His face shifted, the essence of him flickering and re-forming. “You know where we are. It’s a place and a thing and an idea. It is the same thing that’s been consuming us for the last three years. We are in the Gap. We are in the darkness that is nothing. We are here and not here.”
I reached up and grabbed him by the neck, felt his pulse beneath my grip. “How about this? Does this feel here? Want to rethink that nothing and not-here crap?”