The phant belched in a dignified fashion.
“I only consumed a few, and I find that my repast has completed healing the damage given to me.”
Jay glanced back at the phant. Tranto’s hide still rippled with the odd gouts of power, but he had to admit that the last traces of weakness were gone from the phant’s bearing. He had no desire to consider further, for the Brass Babboon was shrieking into a turn, beginning the course that would loop them around Death’s palace.
“Whaa-whoo!” Jay shouted, glorying in the speed and the excitement. “Yeah!”
Dubhe, still hanging from the cab’s ceiling by his tail, shook his head, but clearly he felt something of Jay’s joyful excitement in this defiant confrontation with everything a sane entity should avoid.
“Can I launch the fireworks, Jay?”
“You bet. Just wait until B.B. comes to a full halt. I want to shoot over the towers—a salute, not an attack.”
“Right!”
Even as the Brass Babboon squealed to a stop, its impertinent grin a few inches from its improbable caboose, Dubhe fired the salute.
Perhaps because Jay wished them to do so, the strange attractors shot upward in phosphorescent white streaks. These collided, then exploded in a sunburst: first gold, then green, then iridescent blue dimming into silver, showering among the marble towers, clinging to the gargoyles and has relief flutings on columns and porticos for a single glorious moment.
When the last of the silver sparkles faded, Death rode forth from the main gate of his palace.
His steed was crafted of things salvaged from his realm and was calculated to impress and intimidate, even as Mizar had been created to search and destroy. There was about it something of a dragon, something of a horse, and something of an eagle. Its colors were azure and ebony stolen from the day and night skies of vanished virt realms.
As the steed pranced out of the vaulted gates carrying the slim, robed figure of Death, Jay D’Arcy Donnerjack craved it as he had never before craved any created thing.
Phecda twined around the steed’s head, halter and herald both, and when Death had drawn alongside the Brass Babboon’s cab, she raised her viper’s head and hissed greeting.
“So, at last you come to Deep Fields, Jay Donnerjack. Know that you are welcome here.”
“Thank you, Phecda,” Jay replied. He bowed to the Lord of Entropy. “And thank you, sir.”
Death grinned, white within the darkness of his cowl.
“You come as your father twice came to me. What do you wish to claim from me?”
“Nothing.”
“You cannot have me believe that you made this trip for pleasure.”
“The scenery was a wonder like nothing I could have imagined, but no, sir, I did not make the journey for pleasure.”
“Yet you want nothing from me. I am intrigued. Tell me why you have come.”
Jay straightened his father’s striped cap on his head. His heart pounded in his chest and his joints felt loose and weak. The inside of his mouth flooded with saliva and as quickly went dry. He realized he was terrified, but he did his best to hide his fear.
“I learned of a bargain made between you and my father, sir. The more I thought about it, the more I came to feel that you had been wronged.”
“I have been.” Death’s voice cracked on the final word.
“And I have come to… to ask you what purpose you had for me when you demanded me from my father.”
“You said you wanted nothing from me, but you ask for an explanation.”
“Perhaps I should have said that I wanted nothing material.” Jay placed his hand on the cab’s door latch, “Before I surrender myself, I will admit that I am curious what you intend for me.”
“Before?” The glint of white within the cowl might have been a smile, but it could as easily been the fixed rictus of a bare skull. “So you intend to surrender?”
“In some circumstances, surrender is more honorable than being taken captive. I believe that this is one. If my father had left behind a debt of money or service, I would have tried to pay it. I’ll admit that I don’t particularly like the terms of this debt, but I think it should be honored nonetheless.”
Death laughed, a sound that made Tranto flap his ears and Mizar whine in involuntary protest.
“You speak fair, Jay Donnerjack, even though your voice does quaver. What would you do if I told you that all I required of you was a source of spare parts for some project I am involved with?”
Jay recalled Reese Jordan’s conjecture on that very point, but he remained steady.
“I would beg your leave to say farewell to Dack, since he has been the only parent I have known, then I would turn myself over to you. If you would not permit me to leave, I would ask at least permission to send him a message.”
“And if I told you that I required the traitor who even now swings alongside you in the cab of the Brass Babboon?”
“I would be able to do nothing, sir. I cannot dispose of my friends’ lives.”
“Thanks, Jay,” Dubhe whispered.
“Even if I required them?”
“No, sir. I think you pulled a mean trick on Dubhe and the rest when you set them to be spies on me.”
“Perhaps I merely meant to protect you.”
“I’d thought of that, but you shouldn’t have left them not knowing what your intentions were.”
“Ah, we are back to my intentions, are we? Very well. I have no desire to break you up for spare parts. I have bits and pieces to spare here in Deep Fields. Indeed, spare parts are all that I possess. I desire you alive and functioning. Had your father surrendered you to me as I had intended, you would have been educated here. I gave in to his whim, and so you are perhaps less well-trained for the task I need done than you might have been.”
“Task?”
“This is not the place to speak of such things. Come forth, if truly you mean to surrender. We will confer in my palace.”
“And Dubhe?”
“He has allied himself with you. You choose to serve me. Therefore, he is indirectly in my service once more. I can settle for that. The same goes for Mizar and any others you have brought with you.”
Jay opened the cab and leaned upon the door. The silence of Deep Fields weighed on him, muting even the chuff of the Brass Babboon’s stack and the noise as Mizar and Tranto came to join him.
“Shall I wait for you, Jay?” the Brass Babboon asked.
“There is no need,” Death interjected. “When he leaves here, it will be in a less obvious fashion.”
“Then I’ll lay tracks out of here. Leave a message for me at any of my stations, Jay, and I’ll come as fast as I can.”
Jay patted the grinning face. “Thanks, B.B. I’ll remember that.”
With a wail that rippled the ruined proges into a Danse Macabre, the Brass Babboon departed. To those watching, he simply seemed to enter the middle distance, dimmish, and recede until the eye could no longer fix on his point.
“Come,” Death said, his steed turning.
Jay let Tranto lift him onto his back. With Mizar at his side and Dubhe on his shoulder, he obeyed. An up-swelling of cacophony rippled through the still air. It was impossible to tell if the sound was mockery or applause.
In a site modeled after an early twenty-first century nightclub, two men sat at a table that floated two meters in the air, tilted at a thirty-degree angle. The original nightclub would have required elaborate constructions involving plexiglass and nearly invisible cable to achieve this effect. In Virtu, of course, none of this was necessary.
“Tickets went on sale today at all Virtik locations,” commented Skyga.