Through the sand, there was a road. One day, Bonney decided it was time to return to the world of cars and concrete and people. She had learned all that the moon and the sand could teach her, and she must search elsewhere. Eventually, she would kill Seth, but in the meantime she had to change herself. She was a walking weapon already, but Seth had only made her into a rough flint axe. She must hone herself into the likeness of her beloved stiletto. She would only have one shot, and she had to be ready to make it count.
She sat by the road and waited, for three days. The sun and the moon passed overhead, the one beating, the other whispering. She heard the motorsickle coming from twenty miles away, and had time to prepare herself. She stood up on her two legs, and purged the animal from her soul. She must be a human person again. Her face was still crooked, but her body was fully healed now, lithe and strong. She set her torso at a provocative angle on her hips, arched her knee a little, and stuck out her thumb.
The cykesound became a speck on the road, and grew bigger as it approached. From the engine noise, she recognized an Electraglide. Out here, that meant the Maniax were back, or perhaps one of the minor biker gangcults, Satan's Stormtroopers, the Apple Valley Hogfreakers. She knew what to expect from the cykeman, but she was counting on his not knowing what to expect from her.
The sickle slowed as it approached, and she imagined the biker licking his lips inside his helmet, anticipating a tasty morsel. He was a Maniak all right, flying colours, with a pair of sawn-off pumpguns crossed on his back, and a long braided pigtail whipping out like an epileptic snake from under his horned skidlid.
She was wrong about the biker. He was smarter than most. When he got within twenty yards of her, something spooked him and he gunned the hog, speeding past her. A shower of pebbles fell short of her shin. He punched the air and yelled something as he weaved from side to side across the road, zig-zagging into the distance.
She realized he was expecting to be dodging gunfire. She had been relying on her blade, her teeth and her hands for too long. She had forgotten the sidearm, which she had kept sand-free but not discharged in months.
The next one, she swore, she would shoot for his ve-hickle and leave alive for the predators.
She had to wait four more days. And this time, there was more than one rider…
VI
Duroc had never seen Nguyen Seth like this. Usually, his face was as unreadable as a mummy's bandage mask. Now, he seemed to be in pain, and the lines on his cheeks were almost cracks. He took off his dark glasses, and Duroc could see points of blood in the Elder's ancient eyes.
They were in the private library, where Seth kept his books. It was a unique collection of the forbidden, the outre and the mystical. Duroc thought the library was something very near to Seth's autobiography. Through the pages of hundreds of books, many famous and some unknown, the undying one could trace his passage down the years. Not since the fire at Alexandria had there been such a concentration of the world's True Knowledge in one building. Here were the secret histories, the stories behind the stories, the truths so terrible they could only be written as fiction, the chronicles of the insane, the lives of the damned.
Somewhere here were the contributions of Duroc's ancestors: a series of articles co-written by Pierre Henri Duroc and Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, speculating on the limits of the human mind when confronted with endless pain; some transcripts from the meetings of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety, in which the fates of some of the first families of France were decided on a whim; a suppressed account of certain discoveries in a pre-human city that came to light in 19th-century French Equatorial Africa before the cyclopean stones mysteriously sank into the soft jungle earth;
Sitting at his huge desk, surrounded by his books, Seth wore a Chinese robe, embroidered wim dragon gods, and a black skullcap. His hands were those of a week-old corpse.
'The girl,' he said, his voice uncommonly thin. 'Jessamyn Bonney.'
Duroc remembered. Elder Wiggs had told him all about Spanish Fork. 'Jazzbeaux? She must be dead, surely. You took her out into the road and…uh…battered her fatally. That must be an end to it.'
'No,' Seth said, raising a long-nailed finger, 'she is not dead. She is in the desert, changing.'
He pressed his finger to his forehead. 'And she is in here. She wore the spectacles, and now some fragment of her is inside my mind, just as some fragment of me is lodged in hers. Tick-tock, tick-tock.'
Duroc was perturbed. Seth rarely talked about the things that set him apart from the rest of mankind.
'And is that serious?'
'Roger, it could jeopardize all we have worked for…everything.'
Duroc remembered the files he had accessed from Bruyce-Hoare in Denver. He made a point of checking up on people who got in the way of the Pam of Joseph.
'Jessamyn Bonney. She's just a girl, a juvenile delinquent.'
Seth's thin lips assumed a configuration that might have passed for a smile. 'She was, Roger, she was. Now, she is turning into something else. Through me, she has been extended. I believe that she may be the focal point through which the Ancient Adversary will try to thwart the designs of the Dark Ones.'
Duroc had barely heard of the Ancient Adversary, but he knew this entity was one of the few Great Unseen Powers that stood in opposition to the Dark Ones, the extra-dimensional masters to whom Nguyen Seth had dedicated his long life. The Ancient Adversary had other names: Harry Half-Moon, Puitsikkakaa. The Dawn Reptile.
'I made her, Roger. Each man makes the sword which will kill him, and I made Jessamyn Bonney.'
There was something disturbing in all this, beyond the threat to the Great Work. Duroc got the impression that Nguyen Seth was almost proud of the girl he feared. For centuries, no one had come along who could make him afraid. Perhaps the old man found that…stimulating? Exciting? Underneath it all, Seth was still at least partially a man. Duroc could never hope to understand his master fully. That was one of the challenges of his life.
Seth was paging through a book. It was not what Duroc would expect, not the
'I knew J.M. Barrie, you know. I was there in 1912, when he unveiled the statue of Peter Pan that still stands in a London park.'
Suddenly, it clicked. 'Tick-tock, tick-tock! It's part of the story, isn't it?'
'Yes, Roger. One of the prophecies. I am Captain Hook and she, the crocodile. She has a part of me inside her, and I know she will come for me some day. I can hear her. She too has a clock ticking inside her.'
'Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.'
Seth's smile soured, and he shut the book.
'Bring me the head of the crocodile, Roger.'
'I'll see to it personally.'
'No, you are too important to the Great Work to get sidetracked on this thing. Just make sure you secure the services of some capable people. The longer we wait, the stronger she gets.'
Duroc left Seth in his library. In among the books, there was a long-case clock. As its pendulum swung, it ticked. Second by second, the world crept towards its End.
VII
