Chapter 15

The dragging away into darkness was probably a bit more troublesome than her attackers had reckoned it would be. They weren’t very good at it. They didn’t bother to knock her out, for one thing, and the moment she cried out “Unhand me!” they did so, while apologizing profusely. She yanked the bag from her head to find two hooded figures standing awkwardly in the empty hall behind her, their faces hidden in deep cowls.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she snapped at them.

They looked at each other sheepishly.

“We, ah–we’re meant to take you to the Inner Sanctum,” one of them managed eventually.

“Oh, is that so? And what were you planning to do then?”

“Oh,” said the one on the left, “I was probably going to go home and see if I couldn’t get a little reading in before–”

“Not that!” Olyrean shouted. “I mean what were you going to do with me?” She backed away from them, eyes narrowing. “Were you planning to put me on ‘vacation’?”

“Um, no,” said the hooded figure on the right. “We were just going to…well, I don’t know what they wanted to do. Nothing bad, of course not.”

“The Grand Exalted Master wants to speak to you,” said the one on the left.

The one on the right nodded. “I think they’ve got a good quiche down there right now,” he said hopefully. “You’d probably get a bite of that.”

“And who is the ‘Grand Exalted Master’?” Olyrean continued to back away from the two of them, and they both seemed too timid and embarrassed to do anything about it. “They couldn’t come to speak to me themselves? Oh, I ought to call Jack on you.” If only she could.

“No, no, please,” cried one, rushing forward. “Do not summon Encased Man. We meant you no harm!”

“We were only ordered to keep it a secret, and to take you by surprise,” fretted the other. “I thought this was how such things were done…”

“That’s right, it was all his idea–”

“He wove the bag–!”

“With hemp from your farm–!”

Olyrean relaxed a bit as the two bickered. Despite everything, she still had trouble imagining that Quizbarlings could mean any real harm. They clearly lacked the stomach for it. And likely the competence. “Who is this Grand Exalted Master you’re talking about?” she asked them. “What’s he the Grand Exalted Master of, exactly?”

The two of them fidgeted. “That is something only the Grand Exalted Master can tell you.”

“Well, we could tell you,” said the other. “We do know. Only, we were ordered not to tell you anything.”

“Be quiet! You’ve just told her that you can’t tell her anything! That’s telling her something, isn’t it?”

“Yes, well, you told her we were told to take her by surprise!”

“Enough!” Olyrean yelled. Some of the adrenaline had burnt its way out of her, and so now she considered the two of them more thoughtfully. What the hell, she thought, I have nothing else to go on.

“I ought to have Jack break you over his knee,” she told them. “And he will, if anything should happen to me. He knows exactly where I am right now, just so you know.” Well, very hopefully not, but they didn’t need to know that. “He’ll punch through your walls like cardboard if he needs to. He can, you know.”

“What is ‘cardboard’?”

“Never mind. Just bring me to this Grand Exalted Master of yours. I’ll talk to him.”

The two hooded figures were very relieved and frantically bowed their thanks to her. The bag had to go back on, though, so that she didn’t know the way to the Inner Sanctum. She rolled her eyes at them, but obliged. They didn’t bother to secure it very well, so she could see where she was going anyway.

As she suspected, they took her back to the hidden halls. These must be the mysterious archivists that had Fallen Nest as a guest. Did they know she had broken into their library? Had they come to give her a talking-to? Perhaps she’d be able to convince them to help her find what she was looking for. She could only hope that they weren’t bringing her back to the very same place Jack had gone to look for her. In the warren of hallways it was impossible to tell.

They guided her down a short flight of stairs and into a darkened room. “Watch your knees, watch your knees–there you are,” someone whispered to her as she was directed to sit.

Then the bag was removed and she found herself seated at a stone table lit by only a single candle. Across from her sat an elderly Quizbarling, gaunt and bald, his pale face seeming to float in the darkness. He merely looked at her in silence, for a long, quiet moment. His eyes were steely gray, his gaze cold and hard and electric. Then he leaned forward, slowly, across the table, his eyes never leaving hers, and pushed a plate across the table.

“Quiche?” he said.

Olyrean picked up the quiche and threw it at him.

“No, I don’t want your quiche,” she told him as he brushed crumbs from his face. “I want to know why you sent two goons to kidnap me!”

The aged Quizbarling looked over her shoulder. There was a shuffling noise from behind her. “You are in the Inner Sanctum,” he began.

“I know where I am,” she lied. She thought it best to keep these people off-balance. “We’re in the secret halls you’ve got running all through this place. I know, I peeked.”

“You promised you wouldn’t!” cried one of the hooded figures behind her, dismayed. “Grand Master, she promised!”

The Grand Master held up a hand for silence, then turned his stare back to her. “I should have known,” he said, “I apologize for the manner of your…invitation, but we worried that you Americans had shut yourselves away, and we would no longer have a chance to speak. My name is Leaky Quill. I maintain the Holy Archives. I am also the Grand Exalted Master of the Occult Order of Divine Truth, and I am…” he paused for dramatic effect, “a heretic.”

There was a shuffling in the darkness and a murmur of voices. There were others there, in the shadows, who were clearly very excited by this.

“So what?” Olyrean asked. “I don’t see how this explains why you’ve dragged me down here.”

“Ah. It has to do with the nature of our heresy.” He smiled at her. Olyrean recognized that smile with a slow, sinking dread. It was the sort of smile someone gave when they had just been invited to speak for hours on some subject they found fascinating, but which everyone else found to be the most boring drivel imaginable past the first five minutes.

“Our order contains the true servants of The Radiant One,” he explained. “His closest and most devoted followers.”

“I thought that was Minor Fuss.”

Leaky Quill waved an idle hand. “Minor Fuss heads the Church. The Church, my dear, first and foremost serves the people. We serve the god himself. To the people, he will appear in ceremony, but it is in our secret halls he sleeps and lives. He will have a conversation with Minor Fuss, when necessary, but to us, he speaks every day.”

“When he’s around,” someone mumbled from the darkness.

“Yes.” Leaky Quill frowned. “So you see, everyone else knows the public face of our god. We, his most devoted, know his true face.”

“You’re his most devoted?” Olyrean asked. “I thought you said you were a heretic.”

“Yes, well.” Leaky Quill’s hands trembled a bit. “It…it takes much faith to see the face of your god, you see. When you see him every day, you see his…his…” he licked his lips and took a deep breath. “His weaknesses. It can be a shocking thing. And I have served him long, and seen him grow…weary.”

“He stumbles where once he ran,” said a voice from the dark.

“He shivers now, where before the winters could not touch him.”

“He’s not as good a kisser as he used to be.”

There was a small moment of silence.

“I mean, presumably.”

“You see,” said Leaky Quill. “It can…test the faith, to see your god behaving in ways so mortal.”

“So, what,” said Olyrean. “You don’t think he’s a god or something? You don’t believe in him anymore?”

“Of course not!” Leaky Quill looked shocked. “We worship him and love him. We love him even more, if anything! We mourn his suffering. We wish to relieve his burdens…”

“Look, what does any of this have to do with me–”

“I will explain,” said Leaky Quill. “It is this: It was when the first Americans came to Quizbar that I first began to doubt. We knew of space, of planets and of stars beyond our own, but always we thought that they were empty, devoid of the divine spark. We thought it was…oh, I don’t know. The Radiant One’s art project. Very pretty, but lifeless.”

“Uh huh,” said Olyrean. “And is that what he told you?”

“No,” admitted Leaky Quill. “But, well–he never disabused us of that notion. Imagine our surprise when it turned out that the stars were touched by divine grace after all. That was when the heretical possibility entered my head. The inevitable, blasphemous conclusion.”

He fell silent. The darkness and silence were heavy with dread; pregnant with it. So heavily pregnant, in fact, that the doctor would be insisting by now that the dread baby seemed perfectly healthy but it was two months overdue at this point and, really, it was becoming a little concerning.

“And what was that?” Olyrean asked quietly.

Leaky Quill’s eyes blazed. “The Radiant One is not the only god,” he breathed.

In the shadows around them, there were a series of gasps and small cheers and speculation that maybe these other gods were good kissers.

Was that all? Was this really the first time such a possibility had occurred to…well, to any of them? Olyrean was dubious, but then she remembered the terrible politeness with which the Quizbarlings treated each other, and the small part of her brain that felt as though it were slowly drowning beneath it. It would be rude to contradict your neighbor’s beliefs, wouldn’t it. Foreigners were given the right to be rude, they didn’t know any better. But your neighbor?

“Well, sure,” she said, “there’s lots of them. But the other Americans must have told you that already.”

Leaky Quill leaned back as if a great weight had lifted off his chest, and waved for silence at the babbling darkness. A small smile crept across his face. “Of course they told us this. But this was just heathen belief, you see. You are polite with heathens, but you don’t believe them. It took much prayer and meditation for me to realize what must seem obvious to you.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“Okay. But I still don’t see why all of this required kidnapping me. Tell me why you did that, or I’m calling Jack right now.”

“Our apologies, our apologies,” he said very quickly. “We meant you no harm. In fact, we meant you great honor. We wish to invite the other gods to our world–so that they might take up some of The Radiant One’s burden, and relieve his weariness. We have seen your closeness with Libby, Queen of the gods. To others, you are known as Fuzzy Ears. Us, we call you Star Speaker! Can you help us?”

Olyrean nodded along as he spoke, and kept nodding until what he said actually made its way through her brain. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You are her High Priest, yes?” Leaky Quill smiled hopefully. “Or at least someone fairly high ranking in the clergy. I apologize if I’ve garbled your titles. Is it, um, Magnificent Potentate? Or Holy Pope? I know a little Americanese, but–”

“No, no,” she said. “Libby isn’t some…some god, let alone a Queen of them. She’s an Artificial Intelligence.”

“Ah, yes.” Leaky Quill’s hopeful little smile was suddenly very condescending. “I have heard this. I am sure there’s just some confusion with the theological terminology. She is all-knowing, after all, and you are her followers. And as far as the rest, I do not know if Queen is the proper title, but if there be a hierarchy of gods then surely she ranks far above The Radiant One. He has peopled only one planet, while she has brought life to hundreds of worlds!”

“Libby’s a computer, man! I mean–well, okay, she’s alive, she’s my friend, but she’s not all-knowing–well, okay, she knows a lot, but not everything–” Olyrean realized she was rambling. “Okay, well, look. She’s definitely not responsible for life on all worlds. I mean, she’s not even responsible for life on one world, as far as I know.”

Concerned murmurs and whispers from the shadows. Leaky Quill silenced them with one upraised hand. “Then who is?” he asked.

“Well,” Olyrean said slowly, “A lot of life wasn’t created at all. On most planets it just sort of happened by accident.”

Skeptical babble and derisive laughter from the shadows, and Leaky Quill’s smile became infuriatingly polite. “But, Star Speaker, this is very silly,” he said. “Life is far too complex, too well-designed to just have happened by mistake.”

“I think you’d be a little shocked to find what life is like off your planet.” Then she shook her head. There was no time for any of this. The fleets were on their way. “This is all very interesting,” she lied, “but none of this matters. If you’re so close to The Radiant One, can you get me an audience with him?”

“Ah, well…” Leaky Quill coughed into his sleeve, embarrassed. “We, ah, we don’t actually know where he is, at the moment. He pops out for divine meditation for…long periods of time.”

Olyrean tried very hard not to sound as increasingly desperate as she felt. “Well, look. I’m sure you’ve noticed the Americans are very upset. I’ve seen that there’s an American computer in The Radiant One’s room–”

“You’ve been in The Radiant One’s room?” Leaky Quill asked, aghast.

“He was talking to someone on it!” she shouted, bowling him over and quieting the scandalized murmurs from the darkness. “I need to know who–was it Murtlebix? What did Murtlebix say to him when he visited? You record everything The Radiant One says, don’t you?”

Leaky Quill looked to be various shades of scandalized and confused. “No–”

“That’s what Fallen Nest said!”

“Fallen Nest–” Leaky Quill sighed. “He is…not one of our brothers. He was interested in our order, wanted to get closer to The Radiant One, but…he was ill-suited for the task. And mistaken about this, I’m afraid. There are, of course, some things that remain private to The Radiant One.”

Olyrean despaired. “There’s going to be a war,” she said. The old Quizbarling’s eyebrows arched upwards. “The Americans are going to invade, because you people have kidnapped some of us and sent them…on…on vacation.”

“There was no kidnapping,” Leaky Quill said, though he clearly seemed uneasy. “They are perfectly safe. And there will be no war. We did not even know that word before we learned it from you. If there is any threat, The Radiant One will handle it.”

“Yes, but, well–this is Libby, you realize. She’s upset, too. You don’t think a god could make trouble for another god?”

Leaky Quill looked around and frowned. “But you just told us she wasn’t a god.”

“Crap,” Olyrean muttered to herself. “I mean–haha, that was a joke. She is one. Now can you bring the missing Americans to me so we can prevent this war? Please?”

Murmuring from the shadows, and Leaky Quill looked very troubled. He considered her for a long moment. “I could not,” he told her eventually. “I do not know where vacation actually is, you see. Only The Radiant One knows that.” He paused, then breathed out a long and weary sigh. “But I can bring you to where your previous team was, right before they went to vacation.”

“Where?”

A hushed silence fell over the room. “The Shrine of Sacred Origin,” Leaky Quill whispered into it. “Where The Radiant One first came to our world. Where the doorway to the realm of divinity still stands open.”

“Really?” Olyrean said. She hadn’t seen any hint of this in the previous team’s notes. Only reams and reams of minute details about hexasoccer rules, and Quizbarlings picking out team names, and all sorts of boring nonsense. Why would they have left this out?

“Yes,” said Leaky Quill. He fidgeted. “Its existence is…ah…somewhat of a secret. We were…ahem…a little upset when they found out about it. But, well, they were very insistent, and…”

Olyrean stood.

“Take me there,” she demanded. “And give me some more of that quiche.”

***

The Grand Exalted Master had offered to take her personally to the Shrine of Sacred Origin, after it became clear that all of his servants were too nervous to do so. It was somewhat of a taboo, it appeared, but at the very least it seemed that Leaky Quill was taking the threat of war somewhat seriously.

They rushed quickly out of the secret halls and through the Grand Temple. They passed a few of Jack’s beetling camera-drones on the way, clinging to the walls and being prodded at by curious groups of priests. A few turned to focus their lenses on them as they ran past.

“I’m going to find the team, Jack!” Olyrean shouted at them. “I’m fine! I’m okay!” The little robots gave no indication that they understood.

Once they were out on the streets of Gorgeous View they got a few glances, but with a hood up she could pass as a particularly short Quizbarling unless someone decided to look too closely. Nobody did. The Quizbarlings in the city seemed very different, today: nervous and whispering among themselves, occasionally glancing in the direction of the Grand Temple. It seemed the news of the Americans holing themselves up had spread outside its walls, and caused no small amount of consternation.

They would be doing a lot more than whispering, Olyrean thought to herself, if they knew what was coming.

They were breathless by the time they reached their destination: Korak’s abandoned store, out on the outskirts of the capital. Or, rather, Olyrean was breathless. Leaky Quill, despite looking old enough to be her grandfather, had bounded effortlessly ahead of her almost the entire way here, pale legs flashing beneath his robes. Quizbarlings really were naturally quite fit.

They came upon the entrance. Leaky Quill dramatically flung the doors open.

Inside, a cashier drone dressed as a dog was playfully chasing around another drone, this one wearing cat ears, while it meowed suggestively.

Olyrean and Leaky Quill froze by the door. The cashier drones froze in their chase. Fluttering Zeeskee birds by the ceiling which had been watching the drone’s escapades in amused wonder froze out of secondhand embarrassment. There was a general freezing overall, followed by a long moment of awkward silence as everyone involved contemplated what choices in their life had brought them here.

“What,” said Olyrean.

“W-we’re closed!” shouted the dog-drone while its partner quickly hid its cat ears behind it. “Get out of here!”

“No!” Olyrean shouted back. “Under the authority of SPECTRA, bring me to your foreman!”

She shook her bracelet at them so they’d get the picture. The two drones glanced at each other and then zoomed away, disappearing into some back room. Moments later another drone wobbled out and greeted them.

“I’m, uh, the foreman,” the drone said calmly. It looked suspiciously like the one that had been wearing cat-ears. “What can CubeCorps™ (DO NOT QUESTION THE CUBE) do for you today?”

The foreman-drone was the one in charge of all the underground factories that had stocked all the sadly undesirable products in Korak’s store, and Olyrean only prayed that they could manufacture what she wanted. “I need a vehicle,” she said. “A ship. Not a starship, just something that can get us from point A to point B on this planet, as quickly as possible.”

“Alright. And what sort of options would you like? I’ve got fins, domed glass, flame decals–”

“Whatever you can make, as quickly as possible!” Olyrean yelled, rattling her bracelet at it. “SPECTRA!”

The drone huffed. “I’ll see what I can do,” it said as it grumpily stomped off.

Soon enough the ground beneath the floor was humming and shaking with industrial activity. After only a few minutes, a large hole opened up in the floor with a hiss and a gust of chemical-scented steam, and her ship rose up on a platform.

She had requested speed and function, and they had given it to her. Clearly no attention had been paid to aesthetics. It looked a little bit like a gigantic silver duck popping out a pair of little ducklings mid-flight, despite ducks not having much of a reputation for live births. She looked at it from another angle to see if it looked any better and immediately wished she hadn’t. It now unmistakably resembled a gigantic, gleaming penis. She couldn’t unsee it.

“Oh my, they made this just now? Very impressive,” Leaky Quill said, gazing at the ship in admiration. He didn’t seem embarrassed by it at all. Well, maybe there was no reason for him to be embarrassed; perhaps it didn’t resemble his species’ genitalia at all. What did Quizbarling genitalia look like, anyway?

Olyrean told herself to stop thinking.

“Hop in!” she cried, and they both clambered into the ship. It was only equipped with a primitive onboard AI, but cross-referencing Leaky Quill’s directions with satellite imagery of the planet allowed it to pinpoint the location they were headed toward in mere moments. It did not, however, have the wherewithal to wait for the roof to be lowered. With a rattling crash they blasted through, and then they were gone, screaming across the sky.

***

A small family of bouncing bandyfrogs (harvested by the Quizbarlings to make waterproof socks from their skins) shivered as the peculiar-looking ship, quite unlike anything they had ever seen before, tore through the sky above them. Flocks of birds scattered as a sonic boom followed in their wake. Some of the local farmers they passed over watched it go, scratched their heads, then shrugged and went back to work.

“Must be the Americans,” they told each other.

With the speed the ship traveled at, it was not long before they came upon the Shrine of Sacred Origin: A stone pyramid nearly as large as the Grand Temple itself, and seeming all the more majestic because it stood all alone, on an island lapped at by frothing waves in the midst of a gentle blue sea.

The ship’s AI took them in for a landing, which looked either somewhat like a beleaguered mother duck slamming into the ground headfirst or a particularly painful sex move. Depending on how you looked at it. Olyrean practically leaped out the moment they touched the ground. She was very aware that the day was growing long and she didn’t have much time left to…do whatever it was she thought she was doing.

Preventing the invasion? It would end up with Quizbar’s liberation, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t be the most terrible thing in the world to happen. But she knew that innocents would die in the process. That was just the nature of war. And The Radiant One would certainly need to be killed, and she wasn’t sure he deserved that either, even if he was responsible for a library full of banal nonsense.

“Come on!” she shouted to Leaky Quill, who was frozen still in the ship’s crew chamber, staring up at the shrine in awe. He remained silent, staring for a few agonizing moments. She stamped her feet and growled, then considered throwing her shoes at him.

“I…I am sorry, Star Speaker,” he said finally. “But I cannot accompany you inside. The Radiant One has forbidden it. It is an oath that I–”

There was no time for this. She interrupted him. “Fine then, wait by the ship.” And then she dashed toward the shrine.

There was nothing to bar her way, no impassable stone doors, no traps, nothing of the sort you might expect from a forbidden holy ground. Like everything else on Quizbar, it operated on trust and good neighborliness. The Radiant One asked that nobody enter, and so nobody did. It was, she thought as she entered the pyramid, a pathological overabundance of good manners that would be the biggest obstacle when it came time for the Quizbarlings to integrate as Americans.

At first she worried that the enormous stone pyramid might contain endless hallways for her to get lost in, as much as the Grand Temple did. But unlike the Grand Temple, most of this building was for show. There was only one hallway, and that led down a narrow stair, deep into the earth.

She didn’t have a flashlight, but that was fine. Because the previous team had stuck CubeCorps MegaGlo lanterns to the walls. They still worked (UNTO THE VERY ENDS OF THE UNIVERSE, as The Cube guaranteed). A thrill ran through her as she passed beneath their greenish, flickering light. It was the first sign she had found of the previous team. They were here, she was close, she could feel it. Maybe, just maybe, she would be able to pull this off.

And she could feel something else, too.

A hum. A low singing.

Except there was no sound, other than that of her footsteps. No, this was a song whose instrument was within her. It was her soul that sang. It filled her with lightness, and a sort of mad hope, as she flew through the halls. She passed by stone walls carved with a curious bas-relief that she eventually realized were the winding, stretching roots of a tree. And as she dove further and further into the shrine, following the lights left by those who came before, that music grew only stronger within her until it had blotted out almost all thought entirely.

Finally, the halls opened up into a chamber of soaring walls and stone pillars that rose to a ceiling so high that it was lost to darkness. It must go all the way to the top of the pyramid. And here, the MegaGlo lanterns were unnecessary. For in the center of this wide, empty place, spinning in the air, was a circle, shining like the sun.

A portal.

But so unlike those made by American portal technology. Those were like holes torn in reality. This was–this was meant to be here. This was more like an open doorway. A door to the world’s most beautiful home. Built with care, with hope, with life and love that filled her until she felt her every cell was suffused with it.

Olyrean approached slowly. Light poured from the portal, and it tingled where it touched her skin. Some part of her mind babbled a warning about radiation, but she didn’t think this was something she had to worry about. Not here, not with this. Not with something that was simply so right.

Was this where the previous liberation team had gone? Had they gone through this portal? They must have. They could not have seen it and chosen not to walk through. It would have called to their hearts as it was to hers.

She wept with the sheer bliss of it as she drifted, almost without noticing, closer, ever closer.

Her bracelet rang.

“Uh, hi, yeah,” Tordle’s voice rang out. “I’d like to order a half-quart of Looloobian jumping slurp-noodles and an order of a dozen Snood dumplings. Vee, what did you want?”

“Hang up, you idiot, you’ve got the wrong number–”

Olyrean stepped through the portal.