Glaeken dropped heavily into a chair.
"The Lady's gone. We're done. He's won."
The words barely registered through the emotional storm whirling through Jack, but when they did, he raised his head from where he'd lain it on Weezy and stared at him.
Glaeken had changed since this morning. He'd lost something. A spark had died. He looked older than ever, and seemed to have shrunk. Something had gone out of him.
Something had gone out of Jack as well. Losing Kate and Dad to violence had been awful, but this ... this was unbearable ... unspeakable. And yet ... his father and sister had been collateral damage. Not Weezy. She'd been an active participant in the war. She'd died in battle. And to concede defeat right after she'd sacrificed everything ... was obscene.
"I don't want to hear that."
"We have to face it, Jack. It may take a week, it may take a month or two, but the Ally will soon realize that this corner of reality has stopped emanating a sentient signal, and it will abandon us. The Otherness will have a clear field, and humanity cannot stand long against it. It's too vast, too powerful. Without the counterbalance of the Ally, we're helpless."
Jack rose to his feet. Weezy's blood soaked his jeans from the knees down. His hands were caked with it.
"Fuck 'em both."
"I share the sentiment." Glaeken shook his head. "But it's like expecting a tiny anthill to survive against a human armed with gallons of insecticide."
Jack's grief burned away in a blast of fury. He stepped over to the straight-backed chair and grabbed the Gaijin Masamune. He hefted the handle in a two-handed grip and inspected the bloody, pitted blade.
"Weezy's blood," he said. "And Eddie's."
"And the baby's," Glaeken said.
Of course ... the baby's too.
He remembered the Lady's words when he'd asked her about the katana.
It might now be a weapon only for good, or only for evil. Or, like any blade, it might cut either way, depending on who wields it. But it will be used for something momentous.
She'd suggested he dump it in the ocean, but hadn't given him a good reason why.
... something momentous ...
She'd been right about the momentous part.
... depending on who wields it ...
Why hadn't he listened? Why hadn't he hopped on a boat right then, motored to the edge of the continental shelf, and dropped it off?
Maybe because the Lady had once told him there'd be no more coincidences in his life, so he'd assumed it was no coincidence that the sword had fallen into his hands. At the time it had seemed logical to assume he was expected to come up with a way to wield the blade against Rasalom.
Instead Rasalom had done the wielding, to disastrous effect ... for momentous evil.
Contact with the katana now opened a door within him and darkness swirled free, filling him, seeking a victim. Glaeken was the only other living being in the room, and Jack almost turned on him. But at the last moment he found another target. With a wild cry Jack swung the blade at the chair. The otherworldly steel sliced through the wood of the ladder back and into the seat. Another swing and he'd cut the chair in half. It felt good to destroy.
He turned to Glaeken. "It's not over." The words grated through his clenched teeth.
But Glaeken was staring not at him but at the katana. He extended his hand. "Here. Let me see that."
He took the sword and held it before him, turning the bloody, pitted blade this way and that. A spark had returned to his eyes.
"Perhaps you're right. Perhaps it's not over."
"That's more like it."
But Jack's defiance had been all emotion. He had no idea how to proceed against the coming darkness. He looked at the remains of Weezy and Eddie and felt the fight start to leak out of him. He'd failed them. He'd failed everyone who had depended on him.
"You have a plan...?"
"No, but I have an idea. We must locate certain people, certain objects, and a nonhuman being. We must gather them, and maybe, just maybe, we can fight back. But it is such a long shot, such a terribly long shot."
Jack felt a twinge of hope. "I'll take a terribly long shot any day over no shot. Tell me what you want me to do."
"Right now it is what I must do. I must search out who and what we need." He hefted the katana. "This is just one of the things I need. There are others. When I find them I will need you to help bring them together."
"Just say the word."
The spark grew in Glaeken's blue eyes. "We are going to fight, Jack. We may lose - in fact we most likely will lose - but before this is over, Rasalom will know he's been in a fight."
Jack turned and caught sight of Weezy again. Crushing grief washed the rest of the fight out of him.
"Yeah, well, whatever."
He knelt at her side again. He glanced over at Eddie - his head, his body ... he'd have to do something with what was left of him. But right now ...
He slipped his arms beneath Weezy.
"What are you doing?" Glaeken said.
The words slipped out. "Making her comfortable."
He wasn't sure what he meant. Just something to say. But he knew he couldn't leave her on the floor a moment longer.
He rose and carried her to one of the Lady's unused bedrooms - all unused, because she never slept. He positioned her on her back on a queen-size bed in the nearest room and pulled the spread over her, up to her breasts, covering her wound. He closed her eyelids. In the dark, with only the backwash of light from the living room around the corner, she could have been asleep.
He sat next to her as an emptiness yawned within him. She'd become such a part of his life since she'd reappeared last year, what was he going to do without her? A light had gone out. The world without Weezy ... it wasn't right, it wasn't fair, it wasn't ... whole.
His voice broke as he took her bloody hand in his and whispered, "Weezy."
A man who is something more than a man goes to the mountain and shouts his name.
Not "Rasalom." And not his birth name, the one his mother bestowed on him. He discarded that back in the First Age when the Otherness held more sway in this sphere. When he tapped into that mother lode of power and strangeness he took on a new name, an Other Name he had protected like a wolverine guarding her young. But the time for secrecy is past. He can now shout his Other Name anywhere and it will not matter.
From here atop Minya Konka, through a break in the clouds, much of what is now called China spreads out in the darkness nearly five miles below. His birthplace is not far from here. It is bitterly cold on the mountaintop. Gale-force winds shriek and howl as they swirl the frozen air about his naked body. He scarcely notices. The power within protects him, fed by the delicious woes of the world below.
The horizon brightens. Dawn does not break at this altitude - it shatters. He stares at the glint of fire sliding into view and focuses the power he has been storing during the months since the death of the Lady. Eons of frustration fall away as he finalizes the process to which he has devoted the ages of his existence. No gestures, no incantations, just elseness, Otherness, vomiting out of him, spreading out and up and around, seeping into the planet's crust, billowing into its atmosphere, saturating this locus in the multiverse.
Soon all shall be his. The Enemy has moved on. No one and nothing opposes him, no power on Earth or elsewhere can stop him. He drops to his knees, not in prayer but in relief, elation.
At last, after so many ages, it has begun.
Dawn will never be the same.
On May 17, the sun rises late.
And so it begins ...
COMING SOON ...