CHAPTER 38
You can never prove T'Chen
exists. I can never prove She does
not. Thus, the argument is moot. Neither of us can call our side fact. The truth stands forever fixed in the realm
of opinion. Let us then each believe as
we will and not press the other to
live in our view. If T'Chen truly
adores peace, She will approve of this.
- Sarwin Kliat Aria, 5453,
Letter to the Council of Elders
Like a machine, the guard opened the door
for Ampharix with a rigid precision that seemed unnatural. The old senator did not give the soldier the
slightest regard as she glided past, into the senator's chapel. The guard obediently shut the door behind her,
without a sound.
Today was Evitus, a minor holiday on the T'Chen calendar, which occurred on the fifth day of the month
of Cartoth. One was supposed to pay
homage to the ghosts of the past on this day and, ostensibly, that was what
Ampharix was here to do. But this day,
her mind was completely occupied by what was happening in space above her. At this very moment, she knew that Sarwin
and his band were on their final countdown for their foray into the past.
Ampharix
stopped before the austere altar and bowed perfunctorily. But instead of praying for long dead
ancestors, she went over the details of the plan she had in place, should
Sarwin return home with evidence contradictory to the Scrolls and Etyiam should
fail to stop him. The old senator's faith
in the ability of the girl to carry out her mission was tenuous at best. Ampharix knew that no matter how long they
remained in the past, it would appear to those in the present that they would
arrive back immediately after they departed, so Ampharix had her pawns in place
already.
She
had a small fleet of temple guard ships hidden, waiting for the time travelers
to reappear. As soon as they returned,
Ampharix's soldiers would board Sarwin's ships, purportedly as a quarantine
measure, to be sure they did not return with any of the great plagues from the
ancient times that the Scrolls speak of.
Once on board, her soldiers would determine what Sarwin had brought back
with him. If it was deemed innocuous,
they would be permitted to land. If
not, any offensive evidence would be vaporized.
If
for nothing else, Ampharix felt she could count on Etyiam to at least
collaborate the official line that there had never been any evidence against
scripture. If not, Ampharix would have
little choice but to vaporize the crew also.
Except for Siverelle, of course.
Ampharix would find some other way to deal with her renegade
daughter. None of the options would be
pleasant.
Of
course, many people would not believe the government's story and the rioting on
the streets would surpass any seen thus far.
But it would be less disruptive than proof contradictory to
scripture. Ampharix had placed the riot
brigades on full alert throughout the world, just in case.
The old senator reached up and
tilted the appropriate globe that adorned the simple altar, and the secret
panel through which she had taken the young Etyiam four days prior popped open
with a click. Ampharix ducked down and
entered. She walked the short, dark
passage to the tiny, secret room that laid at the end. As soon as she entered, the lights came up
automatically, bathing the room's only resident with a foreboding cobalt
glow. It floated in a large glass tube,
which was vacated of both air and gravity, to simulate the environment in which
it had been found, thus preserving the artifact. It had been found, almost forty years ago, drifting in space,
midway between the orbit of the World and the orbit of Brekkan; the small, red
planet next farthest from the sun.
Ampharix regarded the thing
dispassionately. The revulsion she had
felt upon first seeing it, decades ago, had long since dissipated. Indeed, the thing had an almost comforting
familiarity now, so regularly did she come to look upon it. Seeing the thing gave the old senator
renewed resolution as to the accuracy of the Scrolls and reinvigorated her
faith in the scripture.
The dried and frozen eyes of the Vartyiar mummy stared, unblinkingly, down at the old senator, as they always
did. The parchment skin of its hirsute
face, hideous enough to begin with, was twisted in a mask of agony that spoke
volumes of the horrors of Scoggast, of which surely this thing was born. As if that was not unsightly enough, three
prominent scars marred the horrid visage.
Even its strange clothing was indigo, the clichéd color of frozen hell.
But the thing most prominent in
Ampharix's mind was its right arm, which ended abruptly in a stump. Only the left arm bore the five-fingered paw
of a Vartyiar. The
coming of the Q'Talon shall be foretold by a demon that can only point one way. The words of the Scrolls drifted through
Ampharix's mind, as they always did when she stood in this room. She never knew what the words meant until
she had seen this odious devil.
When asteroid minors originally
discovered it, scientists got hold of it first. After some molecular analysis, they concluded that the thing was
distantly related to the small mammal vermin that infested the World
today. They also said it was millions
of years old and that only the frozen vacuum of space had preserved the mummy
so well. Some went on to theorize that
this creature was not a child of Scoggast, but of an advanced mammal species
that had ruled the World before saurians evolved.
Of course, the church could not
tolerate such nonsense. The mummy was
seized and eventually smuggled here, where it remained secretly sequestered
ever since. The scientists were either
discredited or liquidated, depending on how resistant they were to the
authorities. The temple's grip on the
media made sure nothing more was ever said of it and today few saurians even
remembered the few rumors that had leaked out about the find.
It was better this way. No matter how truthful the words of the
scripture was, science had an uncanny way of poking holes in it. Best to keep this Vartyiar out of the
laboratory and in the watchful care of the temple, where no dangerous
conclusions would ever be drawn from it.
Ampharix checked her timepiece and
realized Sarwin's chronoleap would be occurring in just a few minutes. She turned and departed the mummy chamber,
then exited the chapel and took a private elevator to an observation deck on
the roof of the huge senate building, where she could witness the departure.
The great metropolis of Uron spread
out around her in all directions.
Through it snaked the River Keltay, which glittered in the gathering
dusk. In the west, a spectacular sunset
was occurring, the colors somehow more ominous than usual. But Ampharix turned her back on astral
display to look for the flash of the chronoleap, which she had been told she
would be able to witness in the emergent darkness of the eastern sky.
She made a quick and silent plea to
T'Chen for the safety of her daughter, but withheld any prayer for the
others. As always, she completed the
silent entreaty with the customary conclusion, which she spoke softly aloud.
"T'Chen tala forshick
pruthon."
As
soon as she finished, a great white flash winked in the twilight sky, right on
schedule. Ampharix raised her hand to
shield her eyes from the glare, for it was far brighter than she had been told
to expect, but it did her little good.
The brilliant light glared right through her hand, as if her flesh had
suddenly become translucent. She could
see the bones of her fingers like she was looking at an x-ray, then she
realized to her horror that the bones were now fading, too. Their opaqueness turned lucent as she
watched, then began to effuse into vapor.
But
what was happening to her body paled compared to what was happing in her
brain. She could feel her mind fading
also, slipping away, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. She stood in stupefied horror as she felt
her memories wink out, one by one, like bulbs in a great machine that was
shutting down forever. Frantically, she
tried to pray to her god for salvation.
She called upon T'Che... What
was the name? It was gone from her
consciousness. She shivered at the
notion of forgetting the name of her god, but before the thought completed
itself, she had no memory that she had even once known a god. Only an icy, vacuous hole remained where
faith had once been.
The
vestiges of reason and logic evacuated her brain like wasps fleeing their
ruptured nest. Now there was nothing to
shield herself from the terror. No
mental handle to grab, no emotional toehold to find... Every good and pleasant memory she had, few
as they were, evaporated from her mind.
With nothing left to hold it at bay, caustic regret ballooned outward,
filling the emptiness.
All
that remained of Ampharix's mind now was a bitter stew of her malevolent
stubbornness mixed with this overwhelming lamentation. All she could remember now was the faces of
the many people she had watched put to death at her command, mixed in with the
faces of those loved ones she had rejected in life; her brother, her daughter
and her grandchildren among them.
Though all of this happened in an
instant too short to be measured, it seemed to Ampharix that this terrible
transmutation went on forever. She felt
her mind fade toward nothingness until all that was left was this final
reflection of utter horror and infinite grief.
Then these pitiful remnants of her consciousness froze entirely, fixed
permanently in time. No hell her sadist
priests had ever dreamed up could rival this woeful, empty and eternal horror.
Even before the flash subsided, what
was the physical body of Ampharix was no more.
She did not actually die, because she had never been born. The senate building on which she stood faded
and vanished. It was not destroyed,
because it had never been built. The
vast, surrounding metropolis dissolved and disbursed. It was not conquered, for it had never been founded.
Only the winding river remained,
though in this reshuffled reality, it bore a different name. It had no memory of Uron's glittering domes
and graceful spires, for its shores had never caressed them.
Its course directed by erratic
events it could neither foresee nor avoid, the great river, like time itself,
flowed indifferently onward, eventually rejoining all the other itinerant
waters of the Earth, swallowed in the end by the reunifying sea.