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  Bronze, cool enough to no longer blow fire involuntarily, turned in place to head for the ruined granary. Maybe the makeshift gate spell was still in it. I pulled out my Diogephone and prepared to transfer the gate locus from the phone to the larger opening.

  Diogenes didn’t answer. The dedicated micro-gate inside the phone failed to connect at all.

  I didn’t crush the phone. I didn’t throw it. I didn’t swear or scream or beat my fists against the walls. I dismounted and Bronze stopped, watching me but not interfering. I phone down with exacting care, and walked away.

  Boss?

  I unbuckled the belt and baldric and let both swords fall to the ground without breaking stride. Firebrand chose, wisely, to remain silent.

  One more damned thing. Another after another after another. I have only a certain amount of wits and I was at their end.

  A temper tantrum is not the way a mature adult deals with stress. Then again, I’m not always mature, I don’t adult well, and I can honestly say only a few people have been subjected to my stress. Maybe I can be excused a little bit of enraged screaming and rock-shattering.

  It embarrasses me to lose control. I don’t like losing my temper. Even with what might be called a good excuse, it still seems like a childish tantrum and unbecoming someone of my advanced years. I feel humiliated as well as frustrated, which only makes it worse.

  On the other hand, I did feel better. A little, anyway.

  I dug a rock chip out of my cheek while waiting for my hands to heal. The cornerstone I sat on was part of a brand-new pile of rubble. I flexed my fingers. Punching solid rock is unrewarding. Clawing it isn’t much better. I can gouge the stone, but I risk momentarily tearing loose a fingernail. It’s not pleasant, but I sort of welcomed the pain. It was that kind of day.

  Ah. Friday the thirteenth. Of course. I should have expected it.

  Bronze emerged from around a rocky hillock. She held my swordbelt in her mouth. Now that I was feeling better, did I want to put it on again?

  I buckled and fastened and adjusted, carefully, so as not to damage it further. I took the time to cover it with a repair spell and went ahead and hit my armor with better one, as well. Firebrand still didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t either. We were all somewhat quiet.

  I scratched a small circle on a large block of stone. With the Diogephone as a target link, I transferred the gate locus from the phone to the circle to look through it. That is, I tried, but it failed to transfer. It didn’t connect to anything, so there was nothing to transfer. I opened the phone case and looked at the micro-gate. The spell was still there and apparently functioning normally. Since it was a dedicated gate—it could only dial the corresponding communications micro-gate in Apocalyptica—I couldn’t force it to connect with the circle I drew. Using the circle to connect to the micro-gate would only prove it was an unbroken ring.

  Still, the spell was intact. The problem had to be at the other end.

  Well, fine. There’s more than one way to skin a cat—assuming I ever catch one, or even see one again.

  We returned to the granary. The granary was in even worse shape, of course, but the spell-gate was still there. I reinforced it a bit, just to be sure, before I opened it and we stepped through. Once we were in the mountain, in my upstairs gate room, Bronze moved to stand by the door and I turned back to my gate. If there was a problem in Apocalyptica, it was about to have a pissed-off Demon King solution. It might not be the ideal solution, but it will almost certainly kill whatever caused the problem.

  Disdaining the phone’s micro-gate, I manually dialed for Apocalyptica, aiming for the variable-sized gate in the residence. The gate opened in a ruined missile silo. Stale, fetid air with the smell of rust and rot wafted through. We stayed where we were and I closed it immediately.

  I tried again, this time for the variable-sized gate in the Niagara facility. The gate opened in the ruined girder-work of what was once a bridge. Looking around, I thought I recognized the viewpoint. We were close to the facility, but the aboveground structures marking the location were gone, as well as the retaining wall to divert the falls through our turbines. The falls poured over into Crater Lake in a magnificent display.

  I closed the gate again, shivering a little. If it had been daytime…

  Finally, I tried the old, old arch I once assembled out of a chunk of concrete, rebar, and woven strips of ruined cars. If I recalled properly, it should be in the basement of the old library. It wasn’t worth taking apart for scrap, and it was still an enchanted gateway.

  I got the front door of the library, at least. There was no sign of my old archway. There was no sign I had ever been there at all. Dust lay heavy on everything in the ruins.

  I closed the gate and sat on the floor, angry and confused, to think about what the hell was going on.

  Someone approached at jog, clanking, so I knew it was probably a dusk. Carbon-composite armor clatters, but steel clanks. He stopped at the entrance. The door was mostly absorbed into the floor, but a new door was a long way from forming.

  “My lord!”

  “Get out!” I snapped, not even looking.

  Feet… scurried? Scampered? Ran like hell? Went away, at any rate. I grumbled to myself for using That Voice and climbed to my feet. Bronze and I left the upstairs gate room, both of us walking. I clomped along, she clop-gonged with me without trying to be stealthy. I noticed for the first time how her hooves rang with slightly different notes. I had a sudden vision of her dancing like one of those fancy trained horses… Lippizan? Lippanzer? Damn it, that’s not right and I can’t remember at the moment. I’m guessing she could be her own accompaniment if she tried. At any rate, we wound down through the mountain to my private gate room.

  No assassins leaped out. Maybe they needed more time to set anything up. Maybe they were all still stunned at the horrendous display of violence and were considering whether or not to risk attracting my attention. I know it would be one of my great concerns, were our positions reversed.

  I pivoted the door shut behind us and the mountain locked it by turning the door into part of the wall.

  Now, to think.

  Oh, who am I kidding? I don’t know what’s going on in Apocalyptica, but I mean to find out.

  Since I was temporarily vulnerable to solar incineration, I mounted my archery-gate on the wall. To avoid accidents, I covered a flat plate of stone with a cloth and pressed it to the gate. I couldn’t see the gate, but the blocking plate was small enough to hold in place with my hands and still touch the circle with my fingertips. If I accidentally dialed a sunlit location, leaking light would hurt my fingers, but I could close the gate without blasting my face off. If it wasn’t sunlit, I could simply lower the plate and look around.

  I used this setup as a sort of window, a spyhole into other worlds, by opening it in various places. I looked for Diogenes, or even signs of Diogenes’ activity. I even looked at the Moon. There were people on the Moon, sure, same as I expected, but of Diogenes or any of his works, there was no sign whatsoever. I even checked for the original computer out of which I took his first quantum computer processor. It was there, intact, with the processor still inside. I even found a giant ant mound, but I don’t want to think about it, much less talk about it.

  I closed my viewing-gate and considered.

  All right, was it possible I wasn’t aiming precisely enough? I’ve missed with my gate targeting before. I could hit an alternate timeline Earth where I never arrived to interfere. But, no, that wouldn’t hold up. The Diogephone’s gate was tuned to a specific micro-gate in the correct world. It couldn’t miss any more than two cans and a string could dial a wrong number. Ergo, including it as a component in targeting my larger ring-gate meant I was definitely hitting the correct world.

  You don’t undo decades of work by a Von Neumann machine in an instant. I’ve seen massive changes before, of course, such as when I hit the wrong world—an alternate timeline. Sasha’s house didn’t exist, as I recall,
but only because it was a world where it was never built in the first place. Clearly, this is not the case here. I’m not hitting an alternative world where I never visited, although I’m sure such a timeline exists. I’m specifically targeting where I was, and I keep getting this result.

  Fine. I have the correct world. So, I have the “where.” Let’s narrow down the “when” and maybe it’ll help with the “how,” which might lead to the “why.” I last spoke to Diogenes when he called me about getting a hit on the orb search. Between then and the next time I dialed the phone, it was how long? Minutes? And yet, somehow, in that time, everything in Apocalyptica was undone, fixed, reversed, until it was back to its original state, pre-Diogenes. No, farther than that. It was pre-me. It was as though I never showed up. Was this related to Diogenes’ world? Or was this related to me, personally? I know I tend to think everything is about me—well, trying to kill me—but only because experience is a good teacher.

  I turned to my iridium assassination ring and checked some other places. Of the ones in a nighttime time zone, I found:

  The Ardent farmhouse was still there. There was a family of four living in it and the farmland behind it was a new neighborhood. I did not find a world where it matched my recollection of the ruins.

  The Tomb of Brahmantia was intact, complete with traps, zombie guards, and the Eye of Brahmantia. I did not find the one Mary and I looted.

  Applewood Hall was full of sheeted furniture. No signs of any school construction were to be seen. There was no garden out back, and there were no flowers around the (non-functional) fountain.

  Salvatore’s house was in good shape. He was at home for the evening and growling at a subordinate about “the stupid Micks.”

  I know Mary and I were in the Ardent farmhouse when it burned down. We raided the Tomb of Brahmantia. We killed Salvatore. Yet, all these things pretended they never heard of us.

  For these spot-checks, could I be hitting alternate timelines? It’s possible, I suppose, but could I miss so badly on all four attempts? It was technically possible, but it’s technically possible to be struck by lightning four times in one day, too. If I get hit by lightning four times, I assume someone is out to get me or I’m standing in an extremely bad place.

  I dialed my little observation gate for Nexus, seeking Mary. It locked on to a side mirror of the vehicle when it found her. She was in one of the automated, self-driving cars. From the look of her, she was headed for some high-end affair. Black, slinky dress, jewelry of rubies with a few tactical diamonds, hairdo perfect and, for the moment, black as my eyes. She was in the company of a mortal—fifty-ish, handsome, well-tanned, starting to hit the point where gourmet food started to get the upper hand on sportsmanlike exercise. At a guess, she was his plus-one to some swanky event prior to it being robbed of its most heavily-guarded treasure. I didn’t see a knife on her, but I doubted anybody would.

  Travis! Was there a headstone for Travis? I set my mini-gate to search for it, specifying the inscription I recalled to get the exact headstone. It searched for half an hour and still didn’t find one. I doubted someone would have shielded it from detection, so I assumed it didn’t exist. At least that was to the good. Sort of. I then searched for Travis and failed to find him, which annoyed me considerably.

  I looked for Sasha’s house—or the remains of it—and found it in roughly the same devastated condition I recalled. Would it be burned down anyway if she never met me? Or were there some signs I existed, but only up to a point?

  Well, I existed just fine, here in the world of Rethven. I could even find some other evidence of my life. There were a lot of half-buried cow bones in the back yard of Sasha’s old house, down the hill from the reflecting pool, proof Travis and I slaughtered a small herd. My name was still inscribed on a graduation plinth in one of the ruined University buildings. Things like that.

  Everywhere else, however, I wasn’t to be found. Not me, not my works, nothing. I searched quite a number of data points and the cutoff was fairly obvious. It’s as though I left Earth for Rethven and never returned. But I remember leaving Rethven for various Earth worlds. I know it happened! To work a cover-up on this scale would require either a bunch of determined angels or a time machine.

  …

  Son of a bitch.

  I looked at my archway on the wall and considered how it connected to the diagrams embedded in the floor. The metallic lines linking it to the crystals in the chamber made it unreasonable to paint fresh spell diagrams. I needed a new archway and a fresh floor.

  I had a lot of long thoughts over the long night and I long for simpler days. Most of my time was in my headspace, reassembling the spell used on the Great Arch of Zirafel and working out the inevitable bugs from my inexact copying. I saw and copied most of it, which meant I only had to fiddle with a few parts. It helped to have a fair idea of what it did, too. I’d hate to have to try and build it from scratch, but the Orb must have put a lot of time and effort into developing it.

  The rest of my time I spent out in the physical world, drawing on the floor and walls of some random, empty chamber. I was hiding. I admit it. When not in my headspace or actively drawing, I sat on the floor, banging the back of my head against the wall. Bronze was mildly concerned, but only mildly. She knows I have to work some things out for myself, but it does help to know she’s always there. And she was always there. She stayed near me instead of going to a manger of coal off the throne room. She was worried for me.

  I like to think I’m a relatively stable personality. I may be delusional. What I think and perceive doesn’t prove anything. I may be in a self-hugging jacket in a mental ward, raving about my vivid hallucinations while the staff prepares me for another round of electroshock. If so, the orderlies better remember the mouth guard if they know what’s good for them. I may bite.

  Bronze was still worried for me, and possibly with reason. My grip on sanity may be slipping a bit. I’m still trying to cling to it despite some recent setbacks and a massively shortened temper.

  Is there a world where I can have a discussion about sanity with a disappearing cat? Or will it hate me, too?

  And, as another item of concern, is a shortened temper a sign of a deficient soul? Have I been eating away at it with some of the things I’ve done? It’s quite a list, if you think about it. I’ve been thinking of myself as a monster, or trying to, since some of my requirements for survival are monstrous. What makes a monster? Doing monstrous things, or not minding doing monstrous things?

  The spell, as I suspected, was primarily a resistor. It slowed down the effect of the Great Arch as it turned itself into energy. Fundamentally, the principle is no different from letting a standard spell eat itself when the charge runs out, but on a much larger scale. The Arch wasn’t designed to do that, of course, hence the need for a bolt-on spell.

  The second thing about it to disturb me was the way it operated. It affected the targeting of the Arch—or, presumably, any gate to which the spell was attached. Some of the spell ideograms manually set the target point in a fashion for which gate spells are not designed. It aimed the gate from itself to itself, forming a closed loop. Since it was destroying the gate—a requirement, in this case—it linked the end of the gate back to the beginning.

  Without addressing n-dimensional math, it’s kind of like an old-fashioned movie reel of film. Each frame is an instant in the existence of the gate, starting with the moment it becomes an actual gate—I think. Normally, the film is looped around and around on the reel, growing a new frame every instant, spiraling forever outward on the reel until it reaches the last frame—the moment it stops being a gate.

  However…

  If you take the present frame—the latest one—and feed it back around to the first frame, you can kind of splice them together, forming a loop of film. The moment you do this, the gate stops existing. It doesn’t create any more frames of film because now it starts over from the beginning. Much like a brute-force gate, it appears in two places
at the same time—or, in this case, in the same place in two times.

  If your desire is to use it as a portal to the past, you’re out of luck. You just spliced it into the beginning of itself and it instantly stopped marching forward in time with you. Click the switch and the light goes out. So does the gate. Hence the need for a delaying spell.

  This is not cheap in terms of power. We can step across space between two gates, no problem. We can step from one gate to another place. We can even cast a spell without a gate to move from universe to universe. But, despite gates being multidimensional constructs designed to abuse and misuse the tender and forgiving nature of spacetime, they are not designed to loop back on themselves. However, with some bolt-on accessories to the gate design and enough brute force, you can turn it into a one-shot portal by destroying it—although, paradoxically, it isn’t destroyed so much as put wherever it was to start over. Kind of.

  There are good points about the process. They can’t miss the target, for example. The resonance connection between the departure and the destination is, I venture to guess, absolutely perfect. The drawback, of course, is you can only go back to the beginning. To go anywhere else along the line, you have to cut the film before the end, which would create a new ending and eliminate the gate you have on hand before you tried to use it. I’m not sure that can be done. To be perfectly honest, if I’d had this idea myself, I wouldn’t have been sure it could be done. Having seen it work, though…

  Maybe a garden hose is a better analogy. Time flows along it, like water. However, if you want to, you can connect one end of the hose to the other, forming a container of sorts. It won’t get any new water, but it won’t run out of water, either. And you can’t pick just any spot along the hose. You can connect the ends, but not the middle. Cut it anywhere else and the water escapes.