By the Sword

    "But I don't want it."

    "No sane man would. But only a certain type of man qualifies. He must have a sense of duty and honor and—"

    Jack snorted. "Considering my lifestyle, I think I'd have a permanent spot on the bottom of the list."

    "You may be what your society considers a career criminal, someone it would lock away if it knew you existed, but I gather you must be someone who does not easily turn his back on problems, and who finishes what he starts."

    "What do you mean, 'must be'?"

    Veilleur shrugged again. "Though I don't know you all that well, those are the qualities the Ally requires, so I must assume you possess them."

    Yeah, well, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Navel gazing wasn't his thing. And even if it were, who had time?

    Jack leaned forward. "What's it like being the Ally's point man? Does it change you?"

    "You mean physically? Of course you're changed, but you feel the same as you ever did. The only difference is you stop aging. If you get sick, you beat the infection quicker than anyone else; if wounded, you heal faster."

    "Immortal." The word tasted bitter.

    Veilleur nodded. "So to speak. But not indestructible. You can die, but it takes a lot to kill you. An awful lot. But it's the living on and on that changes you. Watching your loved ones age and die while you stay fit, young, and vital." Flashes of infinite hurt danced in his eyes. "Friends, lovers, children, family after family dying while you live on. Watching their wonder turn to hurt as you stay young while they grow old, stay well as they sicken; the hurt turning to anger as you refuse to grow old with them; and sometimes the anger turns to hate as they come to view your agelessness as betrayal."

    He sighed and sipped his Murphy's in silence while Jack put himself in those immortal shoes… watching Gia age while he didn't… watching Vicky grow until she was physically his contemporary while her mother moved on through middle age and beyond… burying Gia… burying Vicky…

    The prospect made him ill.

    Veilleur broke the silence. "Maybe it is a betrayal of sorts not to tell them from the start that you'll go on and they won't, but I've tried it that way and it doesn't work. First off, your lover doesn't believe you, or perhaps concludes you're slightly daft and accepts that. Because in the heat of new passion, her lips may acknowledge what you've told her, but her heart and mind do not embrace the possibility of it being true… until bitter, sad experience confirms that it is." He shook his head. "Either way, it nearly always ends badly."

    Jack saw a bleak landscape stretching before him—possibly.

    "So that's what I've got to look forward to."

    "Not necessarily. If the Adversary has his way, you and I and the rest of humanity will have a very short future."

    "About a year or so, from what I've gathered."

    "Yes… next spring if all goes according to his plans. But that's only if his way is unimpeded. That's if we don't interfere with his plans."

    "But if Ra—"

    Veilleur held up a hand. "I assume you've been warned about saying his name."

    Jack nodded. "Seems weird but, yes, I've been warned."

    He'd been told on a number of occasions over the past year never to utter the name Rasalom, to refer to him instead as the Adversary. Rasalom allowed no one to call him by his name or even speak it—although he used anagrams of it for himself. Say the real thing and somehow he knew—and came looking for you.

    Jack had witnessed what happened when Rasalom caught up to someone who'd been using his name. Not pretty.

    "How old is this Adversary?"

    Veilleur pursed his lips. "It's hard to be sure, what with the fall and rise of civilizations, each keeping track of time in different ways. Counting from his first birth, he's a few years older than I am—about fourteen, perhaps fifteen thousand years."

    Jack sat in stu

    "Wait… you said 'first' birth?"

    "Yes. He's hard to kill. I helped bring about his demise on our first meeting, but he didn't stay dead. I thought I had finished him for good—so had the Ally—on the eve of World War Two. In fact, the Ally was so sure he was gone it freed me and allowed me to start aging."

    "But wrong again."

    "Unfortunately, yes."

    "But the Twins—where did they come in?"

    "They were created to watch over things in the aftermath of the Adversary's supposed death and my return to mortality. The Adversary was gone, but the Otherness was very much alive, so they restarted the yeniçeri to—"

    "The yeniçeri…" Jack ran a hand across his face. "Oh, man. What a nightmare. Wish I'd never heard of them."

    "I'm sure the feeling is mutual. They answered to me until the fifteenth century when I locked the Adversary away—for good, I thought. After that, their numbers dwindled until the Twins resurrected them."

    Jack pounded a fist on the table—once.

    "And if the Twins were still around, they'd be taking care of business and I wouldn't be involved in any of this, and you and I wouldn't be having this conversation."

    He wanted to kick himself, but pushed back the regrets. If only was a futile game, and since he couldn't exactly call Peabody and Sherman and have them crank up the Wayback machine, he'd have to play the hand he'd drawn.

    "Take it two steps further backward: If a German army patrol hadn't breached a wall in the Adversary's prison, he'd still be there. Or just one step back: If the Adversary had died back in 1941, as thought, even the Twins would have been redundant. By a quirk of fate—and this I believe was a true coincidence—his essence found a home in a man of, shall we say, unique origins. But though he was undetectable, he was also trapped and powerless. Until that man fathered a child. Then he was able to move into that child—become that child."

    "When was this?"

    "Early in 1968."

    Jack did a quick calculation: He'd been born in January of 1969, which meant…

    "Early 1968? Hey, I was conceived in sixty-eight."

    "Not a coincidence. Once the Adversary merged with the fetus, the secret was out. Plans were set into motion. You were one of them."

    Jack leaned back and stared at the wall. "So I was part of this even before I was born."

    Some things he'd learned as a kid suddenly made sense.

    Veilleur nodded. "Perhaps I was too."

    "Why all this cloak-and-dagger crap? Why don't the Ally and the Otherness duke it out mano a mano—or cosmo a cosmo, or whatever they are?"

    "Because that's not how the game is played. And though it's a life-or-death struggle for us, to them it's something of a game."

    "And we're the pieces they move around."

    "Reluctant pieces in our case. Not so the Adversary. We're still fully human, but he's something else now. That's what happens when you align yourself with a power that is inimical to everything we consider good and decent and rational. He became the agent provocateur for the Otherness. He gains strength from all that is dark and hateful within humanity, feeding on human viciousness and depravity."

    "And he's gaining momentum, isn't he?"

    Veilleur leaned closer. "Why do you say that?"

    "I can feel it. Can't you?"

    He sighed. "Yes… yes, I can. The pieces of his endgame are falling into place, I fear. Some of them I can't identify, but I can feel when they fit together."

    "So where's the Ally? Why isn't it fitting its own pieces into place?"

    Veilleur paused a moment before speaking. "I can't say for sure, but my sense of it is that after I appeared to have ended the Adversary's existence, the Ally retreated in a way—downgraded its surveillance of our corner of reality. An infinitesimal speck of it is still watching, still acting, but in a limited capacity. I don't think it senses any imminent danger, so it's maintaining a state of readiness or preparedness and little more."