Orphans of Chaos

1.

Victor shouted up, in a voice of cold anger: “Where did she go?”

Colin gave a pantomime one-handed shrug (the axe was in his other hand), and shouted, “Since when can I control her?”

Quentin said, “She’s gone down the rock stairs to the White Ship. She said it was calling her.”

“Idiot!” Victor almost never lost his temper, but now he looked worried, angry.

“The curse is still fuddling her,” Quentin shouted.

“You’re a warlock! Can you stop the curse?” Victor called up.

“No such things as warlocks! But I can challenge the curse,” Quentin called down.

Meanwhile, during this exchange, I had taken the coil of rope and thrown it up toward Colin. It was an easy throw, and there was no way I could have missed it. I missed it. The coil spun through the air, clattered against the rocks some six feet below him, and fell lightly to the snow a dozen yards to my left.

Colin, helpful as always, called down to me: “Nice throw. Aim next time, Aim.”

I ran, picked up the coil, wound up, and threw again. Again, the rope coil fell short, bounced off the cliff side, fell back down to my level, and went spinning and bouncing another thirty or forty feet across the snow of the little glade. I ran after it again.

I was now about forty feet across the glade from the foot of the cliff where Colin and Quentin stood. I was at the top of the seaward cliff, the shorter one leading down to the rocky beach.

Around a shoulder in the rocks down below, I saw Vanity come into view. She was picking her way from boulder top to boulder top, while foam and spray from the waves fell around her feet. A larger wave sent spray reaching up past her head, and it fell like a shower around her. The water must have been cold, because she shrieked.

I shouted and motioned for her to go back, but she did not look up.

Looking back toward the cliff side, I saw Colin gesture toward me impatiently. Quentin was holding up his walking stick, and had his eyes closed. Victor was standing with his back to me, his arms akimbo.

I looked at the rope suspiciously. How could I miss two throws in a row? I have a good pitching arm. I closed my eyes and traced out the world-paths leading from the rope up to the cliff. The umbrella of possible paths spread out before me. Many of them were smooth parabolas leading up to the dark blotch representing Colin’s position.

And the parabolas were being warped. Like flower stalks bending in the wind, fewer and fewer possible world-paths led to the cliff, as they were pushed left and right, like a curtain parting.

I opened my eyes. Mrs. Wren stood on the cliff with Colin and Quentin.

2.

Mrs. Wren was about twenty yards away from the boys, standing on a tall rock she could not possibly have climbed. And she was in costume.

In her hand she held a broom. It was an old-fashioned besom, just a bundle of twigs and straw tied to a staff, obviously handmade, and by hands that were none too steady.

She wore a green cloak that bore a tall, pointed hood. Around the point of this hood, like a horseshoe around a spike, was a crown of holly leaves with bright red berries. Her face was a smiling mass of wrinkles, surrounding eyes of tired sorrow, eyes that gleamed like black pebbles washed smooth and bright in a stream.

She laughed and smiled, saying, “ ‘Goosey, goosey, gander, whither dost thou wander? Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber?’ ”

If anyone had ever told me I would be frightened to see Mrs. Wren in a dunce cap and wearing a Christmas wreath for a hat brim, I would have laughed. But I was not laughing.

Victor (always the logical one) shouted up, “If she got up, you two can get down. Push past her and find the path she used. Amelia and I are going to try to get to the beach where Vanity is.”

Quentin said, his voice trembling, “Her power comes from deep roots, from the core of the Earth. We can’t just push past her.”

Victor said, “Then kill her.”

A silence seemed to fill the area. Even the sea waves, for a moment, paused.

One seagull, below me, let out a mournful, high-pitched wail.

I said in a voice grown thick with horror, “You can’t mean that, Victor. What’s wrong with you?”

Victor said curtly, “This is not a game. Colin? Quentin?”

Colin, without taking his eyes from the old witch, nodded and hefted his fire axe. Quentin looked sickly pale and did not answer.

Mrs. Wren called out in a bitter voice of mingled mockery and sorrow, “Oho, kill old granny Wren, is it, my goslings? Not enough to leave her alone, and go scampering off, my little ungrateful ducks, no. Is this how you pay her back, the woman who raised you, fed you, and nursed your fevers, kissed your scraped knees and wiped your tears away, changed your shitty diapers, and taught you right from wrong? You pay me back in a false brass coin, my pups, my poppets, my young wolf-cubs. And now you think to wring old granny’s scrawny neck, it is, or chop her frail bones with a terrible sharp axe? Surely, surely, it is the greatest commandment, and the most ancient law, that thou shalt honor the woman who mothered you, that thy years shall be long upon the Earth.”

3.

Victor was walking quickly across the snow toward me. “Can you see a path down?” he shouted.

I said, “The cliff is lower both to the left and right. We can make it down by going either…”

I heard music to my right, beautiful, beautiful violin music.

About thirty yards away, at the point where the cliffs to my right dipped down to a slope leading to the beach, looking as pretty as a china doll in her white fur and earmuffs, Miss Daw was standing in the snow, one fur-lined glove on her bow, one fingering the slender neck, of the violin she had pressed up to her red cheek. She wore a slender buff-colored coat, cute little black boots, and she had a hat of silver fox fur shaped like a dandelion puff on her head.

Victor turned and looked at her. He had come forward toward me, and so was about twenty feet closer to her than I was.

I could see wheels of ivory, as solemn as floating angels, as quiet as U-boats, approaching from the fourth dimension, the high-energy “blue” direction. The nearest had already dipped an arc into three-space, and was sending out concentric waves of energy, whose cross-section manifested themselves in our continuum, as music.

I ran a few steps toward the left-hand slope, not even bothering to wait for Victor.

Scrambling on all fours up the icy granite rocks was Mr. Glum. He was nude, except for a loincloth, and he had what looked like a bearskin rug draped over his head and back. The jawless skull of the bear was on his scalp like a hat; the claws had been tied to his forearms, he had painted his face with a wide brown stripe above the eyes, like a Red Indian. He was watching the placement of his hands and feet, and hadn’t seen me yet.

Over my shoulder, I said to Victor, “Victor, you have to stop Miss Daw! Her power is the one that cancels mine out! I’ll meet you down on the beach with Vanity.”

He said, “Glum is somewhere that way. I can see his emission trail. Can you make it past him?”

I twisted my hips into the fourth dimension to bring another aspect of my legs into this continuum. Centaurish, I now looked like a sleek silver doe from the waist down. I shifted the aspect of my back, so that my wings, made of white light and surrounded by little echoes of music, dipped into this dimensional plane, also. A cluster of misty fireflies and silver bubbles appeared in the air around my head, like a halo, when I “opened” my higher sense-impressions. I could feel my flesh growing denser and hard, hard enough to stop a bullet, as more mass was pulled into this cross-section. This increase in mass-energy made a bluish light shimmer from my flesh.

I reared up on my hind hooves and lashed my unicorn tail. “He’ll have to be pretty quick to stop me!” I said in a voice like a silver bell.

4.

I spread the possible paths down to the beach in front of me like a fan, selected the briefest one, and charged down the slope, with little sparks of energy from higher dimensions flickering and shining around my deer hooves.

With my manifold senses, posted many fathoms in each direction on the shifting foam of curved space, I could now see, not merely in 360 degrees, but globally, overhead, underfoot, in all directions. Surfaces did not impede my sight.

Other senses came into play. I could sense the internal nature and utility of objects; I could see the flow and ripple of time and probability; sense nervous system energies and distortions; I could see moral order (and disorder) like webs (and snarls) interconnecting all the free-willed beings in the area.

Strands went up to two places above the clouds. From the interrelationship of moral duties between the two points, I knew they were brothers. One I did not recognize; the other had an internal nature that was jolly, cold-hearted, kindly, sinister, and calculating. Boggin. The other point must be his brother, Corus, the blue-winged man.

Elsewhere, I could see another strand of moral order reaching to a point beneath the sea, and saw the world-paths caused by the rapid approach of the Atlantean, Mestor.

I focused a distance-negating sense on him, and saw. He had his arms back in a swan dive, legs pointed, and was simply being propelled forward through the deep, his black hair streaming.

The propulsion was a space-effect. The scales on the armor amplified it. I could sense the aura of a similar effect around the white ship, and also deep in the cells of Vanity’s body. The Phaeacian power?

Mestor reached out into time and… did… something.

In the time-images I saw around Vanity, I saw first one, then nine, then eighty-one, and then all of the images changed, as one probability suddenly shifted to a certainty.

One image, a certain one, remained: Mestor, all shimmering with sea spray, was about to rise up out of the waves, his blue-and-green-and-white scale jacket ringing, and grab Vanity. One hand would go over her mouth and nose, another around her waist, and he would fall back into the ice-cold ocean, dragging her along. He would wrap his cloak of mermaid hair around her, so that the cold would not kill her, and he would pinch her nose and breathe bubbles into her mouth, while she struggled in panic…

I charged down the slope toward Vanity, gathering my legs beneath me to carry me “past” the volume of space occupied by Mr. Glum. He had seen me now, and he stood up on his legs and spread his arms, as if ready to catch me.

It looked so foolish. As if a flat cartoon man in a two-dimensional world were trying to reach out of his cell to stop a bird from flying past.

I laughed and leaped, spreading my wings, shedding silver notes of light and motes of music from them. The world turned red, flattened, and receded.

5.

In hyperspace, the world is merely a flattened disk, surrounded on either side (red and blue) with energy-structures that inform its laws of nature and the shape of surrounding space-time.

There is no visible sun here. Gravity works in an inverse-cube rather than inverse-square law, and radiant energy likewise. There is no way to form stable orbits, stable atomic arrangements, or to see the reddened, reddened light from even a nearby star.

But there was something here, a thick more-than-matter that filled the ambient hypervolume.

The medium absorbed and flattened the ripples in time and space issuing from our continuum, like a heavy blanket. The gravity well of the Earth also forced the time-space into a curve. Unfortunately, the curve was negative; “away” from me in all directions. Rather than being the shortcut I had hoped, I encountered more time-intervals per second than in three-space. The moments here were longer.

Distances were, in effect, greater between two points here than in three-space. It would take me, not just one, but several seconds to pass “over” Mr. Glum’s position.

6.

I had the time to spare a glance at the cluster of energy-lines I had oriented to watch Quentin and Colin.

I space-folded a light-receptor away from the scene faster than the speed of light, so that I could see what had happened. Slightly to my past (during the same moment when I had first seen Miss Daw, and exchanged a brief word with Victor) Quentin raised his walking stick as if to ward off a blow, and said loudly back to her, “Wise One! You misquote the scripture! The Commandment is to honor the mother, not the nurse! What is the penalty for twisting the words of God? Does that not take His name in vain…?”

Before he could finish, she said back, “Your mouth is stuffed with stolen food. Thief! I steal your voice!”

Quentin choked.

Colin started running at Mrs. Wren, brandishing the axe. My sense impressions around him went black as he negated reality itself in some way, and leapt up the rock she stood upon, in a leap no legs could make. He was carried by nothing but his desire.

Mrs. Wren ignored him as he closed in on her, and instead pointed her twiggy broom at Quentin. “You turn my teachings against me; my birthday gifts to wound me; Ingrate! Reprobate! The Spirits of the Great Mother recoil at your crimes! Your staff is broken!”

Quentin’s walking stick shattered in his hand. He fell to his knees and clutched his head.

Even Colin could not bring himself to chop down an old woman. Colin struck her with the flat of his hand, knocking her crooked body backward onto the stone, and stood over her, flourishing the axe.

“Cut it out, old witch! Stop it! Stop it or I’ll kill you! I swear I will!”

She smiled up at him. “ ‘There I met a brash young man, who wouldn’t say his prayers; I took him by the left leg, and threw him down the stairs.’ Have you not said your prayers, little dragonet? Say them now.”

He struck with the axe.

It missed her.

Colin chopped himself in the leg. Red arterial blood sprayed out. I heard the distinct noise of a bone cracking.

Anyone else watching would have seen Colin stumble back, drop the axe, and fall…

But I saw the strands and lines of moral order snarl into a twisted fist, reach down, and slap the axe from his hand, and then lash back to pick him up bodily and throw him headlong from the top of the cliff.

Over the brink he went, screaming…

7.

With another group of lines, I was watching Victor. He closed in on Miss Daw, running down the slope, his legs like pistons, his eyes watchful, his face without expression. Since her power was the one that stopped mine, it was logical to assume that she could not stop him. How hard could it be for a strong young man to take a delicate violin out of the hands of a slender woman a foot shorter and one hundred pounds lighter than him?

I saw the energy-chord carrying her music reach into his nervous system from four-space and twist his monad out of alignment. Sections of his nervous system went dark. Energy-bundles carrying control signals reached down at the same time and seized his motor centers.

Victor was not like the other two boys. In many ways, he was flatter in the direction of four-space. Once the matter in his brain had been affected, there was no other part of him to fight back.

The Victor-puppet stopped, and sat down on the ground, looking calm as ever.

At least she was being somewhat of a good sport about it. She could have made him dance a jig.

8.

I felt a disturbance in my own nerve patterns. Two thoughts came to me, more or less at once.

First, why had Victor and I split up? It had been my idea, but where had that idea come from?

I realized that the curse, the influence which had been trying to get us to split up, to make noise, to act rashly, had not been driven out of my brain; while I had been distracted, it had altered itself and grown again. It had wanted me to go this way, and alone.

The point of splitting us up was to get us into the hands of the person who could trump our powers. They wanted to come at us in ones and twos. That is why they were closing in on us from different directions.

Second, I realized that if Miss Daw’s power was the one that negated Victor, then she was merely my equal. We shared one paradigm.

Whose power negated mine?

Dr. Fell’s power trumped Quentin; that seemed clear. Quentin and Mrs. Wren operated out of the same paradigm: both were magicians. Dr. Fell and Victor were both in the same paradigm: materialists. That left…

As I passed through Mr. Glum, reality shut off for a moment. Mr. Glum put his hand out. With a bump, the world snapped back into place. My new senses went blind.

I was a girl again, not a centaur. I was toppling through the air, falling onto Mr. Glum.

For a moment, as I hung there, I saw his face, his terrible face, all red with cold, and lust, and hate, and desire. I saw his eyes, surrounded by war paint; I saw the sick little gape-grin of his mouth.

Somehow, I knew that his desire to capture me, to force me back into the shapely body I had been so proud of, was greater than my desire to get away. I had flinched at the idea of killing an old lady in order to get away; I saw he would not have flinched.

No wonder his world was filled with lust and hate. His desires, his burning, frustrated desires, gave him strength.

Mr. Glum drove his elbow into my midriff as he caught me. Little black metallic lights danced before my eyes as I dropped to the snow, dazed, with no strength in my limbs.

9.

“Well, well, the proud blond princess going to run me down, eh? Ah, what’s this? You brought me some rope. What to do with it, I wonder?”

I felt his arms go around my waist, pin my elbows to my sides, while I was still struggling to get a breath. I felt his desire somehow enter the rope, and it writhed like a snake, twisting tightly around my elbows and waist, forming knots he could not possibly have tied that quickly.

During this horrible moment, I kicked at him with strengthless legs and made a hoarse noise, not yet quite a scream.

He yanked my wrists together, crossed them. My hands were tied together, pinned in place behind my buttocks. Again, the rope of its own accord lashed itself tight more quickly than it should have been able to.

A second hank of rope ran from my wrists to several quick turns around the ankles of my boots. The hank was short enough to prevent me from standing up.

I wondered if the knots were like the one Colin had playfully made in my apron string; a topologically impossible knot, impossible to untie.

He pulled the scarf off from around my neck, the same one Quentin had used to blindfold me last night. I clenched my teeth, knowing it was nearly impossible, without hurting someone, to get something in past clenched teeth.

He put his fingers on my jaw and my muscles lost all strength, and he pushed a wad into my mouth and wound the slack around my head to gag me.

I could not make a noise. That was also, by the way, impossible. Merely having a wad of cloth between your teeth, you can still make noise with your nose, and scream, and carry on, and even make a few words. It is only in the movies that gags block all sound.

He was doing it. Mr. Glum was making me silent. His willpower. The cloth in my mouth was just a symbol.

Looking up at him in his silly bear skull and furry skin outfit, his skin beneath turning blue in the cold, I had the terrible intuition that he was able to do this so quickly and easily because, as Colin might say, he had put his “energy” into it. He had daydreamed about it by day, imagined it at night. Perhaps it was Vanity who had appeared in his visions more often than me, but I could not believe I had been absent.

Night after night, for years. How much “energy” was that?

“She wants to run away from Boggin, my pale gold princess, does she? Aye, well, who doesn’t? A right fine idea, in fact! Let’s see how far we can get.”

And he threw me over his shoulder, like Tarzan carrying Jane, clamped a meaty hand on my buttocks, and went leaping from rock to rock in awkward, giant thrusts of his legs, around the shoulder of the cliffs, out of sight of the others, and away.