by Bill Hiatt
Ascalaphus took his hand away from his sword. “From what I saw, you speak the truth. I will help in whatever way I can.”
We all breathed a sigh of relief at that, since Ascalaphus was still carrying the sword of chaos, and unless Magnus could put him to sleep or otherwise disable him, he could probably have killed at least some of us.
Shortly after we avoided that problem, Jimmie, uh, Atlante returned, but not in the way we expected. He appeared over Alcina’s castle, flying on the back of a beast we recognized from pop culture as a hippogriff: eagle at the front and horse behind. Atlante made a point of circling several times before landing, almost as if showing off. Even Magnus looked a little annoyed by the delay. After all, Vanora, or someone even worse, could pop through a portal at any minute.
“What is that?” asked Khalid. Unafraid of the strange animal, he raced over to pet it as soon as Atlante landed.
“Ah, that is a hippogriff, an extremely rare beast! I trained a few of them in my day, and this one has been looking for me for centuries.”
A hippogriff searching for Atlante for centuries just happened to be close enough to respond to his call? This was too odd a coincidence for me, but no one else seemed bothered by it. Of course, Khalid and Tal were engrossed in petting the hippogriff, which at least got another smile out of Tal. Gordy and the other guys were more concerned with logistics.
“That’s too small for all of us to ride on,” pointed out Gordy, and indeed the animal was not much bigger than a regular horse.
Magnus sighed loudly. “Stating the obvious again? Only Atlante and I will be taking this trip. The hippogriff can travel incredibly fast—I’m told even sometimes across the barriers between worlds. Once we reach a spot where none of us have ever been, and therefore probably not a place anyone will look for us, we’ll land, and I can open a portal back here to get the rest of you.”
Even Gordy had to admit reluctantly that the plan sounded decent. There was, however, one wrinkle that made Ascalaphus somewhat unhappy.
“There is one particular barrier between us and our destination that the hippogriff cannot cross,” said Atlante. “Good Ascalaphus, we require that amazing sword of yours.”
Even though none of the equipment Ascalaphus wore now had been his in life, he seemed oddly attached to it.
“A fighting man does not readily part with his sword,” he replied, fingering the hilt again.
“If you’ll look,” said Magnus, “you’ll find another dangling from your belt. You may recognize it as Harpe, the sword of Perseus, given as a gift to Alex, your current incarnation, by Hephaestus himself.”
So pleased was Ascalaphus by the idea of Harpe that he willingly handed Magnus a much more powerful weapon without realizing it.
Something about Magnus, who already had the lyre of Orpheus, getting his hands on the sword of chaos as well was unsettling at best, especially when he intended to fly away with Jimmie’s body to some unspecified destination. Gordy realized the danger in that idea, too, but he was standing too far away to prevent the transfer.
Tal had been able to use White Hilt, his flaming sword, like a flamethrower. He had also done the same with Zom, Shar’s antimagic sword, and with the icy Black Hilt. Magnus naturally had the same ability. That trick had never been tried with the sword of chaos, but if Magnus figured out how to do it, he could destroy any target, near or far. The power of the sword would no longer be limited by the wielder’s reach.
Yes, Magnus was on our side—right now. He wouldn’t always be, though. I was absolutely certain of that.
Once Magnus and Atlante had mounted the hippogriff and flown away on it, I shared my misgivings with the guys, who all agreed, except for Ascalaphus, who looked puzzled.
“You have strange ways for allies,” he remarked, his expression shifting from puzzled to unhappy. “Such discords helped speed me to my own death before the walls of Troy.”
“You remember the image of the Dark Zeus from Alex’s memories?” asked Gordy.
“All too well,” replied Ascalaphus.
“Magnus himself is a similar being, the dark side of one of our friends turned into a separate person.”
Ascalaphus reverted to his puzzled expression. “Then why do you follow him?”
“We need his magic to help our friends, one of whom is Alex,” said Carlos. “As you heard, they are under powerful spells, and none of us can do magic.”
At this point Tal went very pale. I stepped over to him and pulled him away from the others.
“Magnus is…is me?” he asked, voice trembling. “I knew he looked like my older brother, and he said we were closer than brothers, but I didn’t think—”
“Tal, you have to not let that bother you. He isn’t really you. He’s the worst part of you.”
“But he’s so mean. He took Jimmie’s body away from him!”
“We all have some bad thoughts inside us. When someone is whole, like you are, though, you can choose to ignore those thoughts. Magnus isn’t whole. Tal, uh, your sixteen-year-old self insists Magnus isn’t completely evil, but his balance weighs much more heavily toward evil than yours does. He isn’t you, and he’s not your fault.”
The last part was a little lie. Tal’s use of dark magic created Magnus in the first place, but even in that case, Tal’s motives had been good: he had been trying to save Carla from control by Alcina.
Tal relaxed a little as I explained. “That makes sense. I wish someone had told me earlier, though. I couldn’t figure him out, and he made me nervous.”
“None of us really knew how to tell you,” I replied.
At that moment Tal was distracted by something in the air above. Turning, I saw Khalid teaching Ascalaphus how to use the winged sandals the king hadn’t even realized were part of his equipment. As with all new fliers, Ascalaphus’s attempts were clumsy at first. Tal actually snickered, and I felt a little better.
Aside from watching the air show, we all felt the time drag. Considering we could theoretically be found any minute, waiting was more stressful than boring. I doubted Magnus and Atlante had intended to leave us alone this long, which meant that something could have gone wrong. Actually, a lot of things could have gone wrong.
“Try not to worry,” Carlos told me. “Vanora’s never been here, and Carla’s…unable to travel right now.” That was certainly the most understated way to describe a coma that I’d ever heard.
“Alcina is too strong an ally for Vanora to just throw away,” I pointed out. “I don’t think Magnus ever expected her to get to the hospital. I think he intended that run to the town border as a distraction to help us get away.”
“You mean he knew she and the security guards wouldn’t get out?” asked Gordy.
“I think so. I’d be angrier about that, except the doctors couldn’t do anything for Carla anyway. Vanora, on the other hand, probably will get enough sorcerers together to cure her. As soon as Alcina is awake again, though, she can travel here or help anyone else get here. We could be surrounded by security men any time.”
“Or worse,” said Lucas. “If the Olympians we saw are any indication.”
Conscious of Tal’s delicately balanced mood, I tried to steer the conversation in a different direction. Lucas, taking the hint, sat down with Tal to tell him how Tal and some of us had rescued Lucas from shadow assassins just a short time ago. Lucas was a good storyteller, and Tal sat enthralled for at least half an hour.
Just as the story ended, a portal swirled open in front of us. We all spent a second imagining what army of horrors might spring through it. Instead, Magnus came through with a big smile on his face.
It was one of the few times I was even remotely glad to see him.
“Atlante and I have found a good spot to establish headquarters,” he told us.
“And where is that?” I asked.
“Oh, on the moon,” he said casually.
Chapter 6: Home Is Where the Hack Is (Stan)
I’d lost track of time. For some
reason, the guards took my watch away from me. It really didn’t matter what time it was, though, except that it was time to get out. I’d spent too long worrying about all the things I couldn’t know. Why had Vanora done this? Were the others alive? Were they all free? What was happening to our parents? Stuck in the “dungeon” below Awen, I couldn’t answer any of these questions.
What did I know? The only truly comforting thing was that Vanora didn’t want to kill us. If she did, she could have done that much more easily than imprison us. If I had to guess, I’d say we were hostages, which meant that at least some of our friends were still on the loose.
I also knew there were three of us in the dungeon: Dan, Shar, and me. Our cells were close enough together that we could shout to one another, but the guard on duty always hushed us.
Yeah, guard singular. When you have prisoners in locked cells, and those prisoners are chained to the wall, I guess you’d figure one guard is sufficient.
The wall chain was probably overkill, actually. None of us had our weapons, and the guards tranquilized us anyway when they wanted to enter the cell, like to drop off food. They’d also taken away our dragon armor and given us guard uniforms that didn’t really fit us. Anyway, the wall chain was designed to restrain magical prisoners, and none of us had any magic. I guessed Vanora must have been taking no chances with us. After all, we had taken down supernaturals with considerably more power than she had.
For all that caution, the guards had missed one thing. They’d gotten everything in the pockets of my dragon armor. They didn’t spot the cell phone in my jacket, sealed away in a hidden pocket Carla had sown for me. Having found a cell phone, it hadn’t occurred to them I might have another one. They also hadn’t taken the jacket, which lay in a heap within arm’s reach. If I could, I would make that one mistake cost them big-time.
Fortunately, the cell phone was part of one of Tal’s experiments. Only he, Carla, and I knew about this particular project. He would have told Vanora once we’d perfected the phone, but he hadn’t told her anything yet.
Last fall Tal, with a little help from me, had managed to get magic to affect technology. Any sorcerer could have zapped a computer with lightning or something like that, but none could execute a command on a computer using magic. In the highly magical realms, advanced technology wouldn’t work anyway, and typically most supernaturals stayed away as much as possible from the realms where it did work, so there hadn’t been that much incentive to bridge that gap. Preparing to fight Ceridwen, who had both magic and electronic security, as well as security guards with guns, Tal had built that bridge and crossed it.
Tal always said that what a sorcerer could accomplish was partly a function of what the sorcerer could visualize, and Tal wasn’t that great with math and science. Fortunately, I was, so once Tal had worked out the ability to read minds, he used what I could visualize to understand how the technology worked. From there it took some experimenting, but eventually Tal was able to do things such as prevent guns from firing. He could also use his mind to log on to computers without a password and make them do pretty much anything he wanted. That came in handy more than once with the security system at school, particularly the server that handled the security cameras.
The continuing threat of Dark Me and the various ominous prophecies Tal had heard recently made him want to do more to integrate magic and technology; such integrations would give us one more tool our enemies didn’t have. The development of the sagephone (since smartphone and wisephone were already taken) was our first success with a magic-technology hybrid.
The sagephone’s “provider” was actually magic radiating from Tal’s house, but it could fake credentials for pretty much any cellular or Wi-Fi network. It still couldn’t connect one plane of existence to another, which had been Tal’s main objective, but it did have the ability to accept thought commands—well, from me, anyway. That gave me the ability to input data or instructions faster than I could on any other device.
None of that would have meant anything right now, except that Vanora had involved me in the updating of her security network, her thinking being the job was safer with me than with some outsider. That was probably why the guards were so zealous about making sure I had no tech. They must have had some vague sense that I mad computer skills, though, but they didn’t know my little secret.
As programmers used to do in the old days, I had left myself a back door.
I don’t really know why I did. I certainly wasn’t expecting to have to hack the system. Maybe I had some vague idea of helping Vanora out if she got into trouble—ironic now. As for the hidden pocket in my jacket, that was more Tal’s idea—and since we’d been captured in the past, not a bad one.
I had one problem, though. Vanora’s security system worked the cell doors but not the wall chains. For that I needed the guard’s keys.
As soon as I was ready, I started yelling for help as if I were dying, counting heavily on the idea that Vanora wanted me alive.
The guard could have called for backup and then come into the cell, but I was by far the most nonthreatening looking of Tal’s warriors. I’d been working out a lot since August, but the baggy guard uniform made that less apparent, and I still wasn’t as well muscled as Shar or Dan, so I’m sure the guard saw me as more like the little nerdy Stan I used to be, an impression my pathetic cries for help probably reinforced. He also wouldn’t necessarily have remembered that I had King David of Israel, my past life persona, inside of me. Anyway, people forget that David had to live as a fugitive from Saul for years, essentially functioning as a guerrilla leader. In other words, David was much tougher than I might have expected from the references to him in Hebrew school—or than the guard might have expected from his memories of Sunday school.
I let David take over for a short time. The guard didn’t want to tranquilize me without knowing what was wrong with me, and I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to get strangled by the chain when he came close enough to take a serious look at me. David cut off his oxygen supply just long enough to knock him out for a while. Come to think of it, they really should have made those chains shorter.
Once the guard was out, David handed control back over to me. Then I took the guard’s tranquilizer gun, walkie, and keys, unlocked myself from the wall, and retrieved the sagephone.
Vanora’s security network wasn’t connected to any outside system, but it did have its own Wi-Fi network so that guards on the move could input access requests or relay information directly into the security system without having to be at a wired terminal. The sagephone, responding to my mental instructions, connected to the security Wi-Fi and used my back door to enter the security network itself, giving me access to all administrative functions.
Guards needed authorization to open a cell door, but with my fake admin credentials, it didn’t take long to generate authorization and pop my cell door open. Any secret agent would have been jealous of how fast I did it.
It wasn’t hard to find Dan and Shar, nor to open their cells and unlock their chains. Getting our gear back would have been far trickier, except that security had obviously been busy lately, and all of the gear was stowed in a locked storage area on the dungeon level, also accessible through the security system. In a few minutes we were back in dragon armor and rearmed.
And then, embarrassingly, I realized I had no exit strategy.
If I’d had a full-size monitor, I could have pulled up a display that showed me where all the security guards were—even where Vanora was—but that was pretty hard to do on a cell phone, and as I scrolled, they moved. Neither the stairs nor the elevator up from the dungeon would get us anywhere near an exit. We could try to fight our way out, but security’s guns had a much better range than our swords.
“I don’t think we have much choice,” said Shar, after I explained the problem. “If we stay here, we’re going to get caught again eventually. I agree with you they don’t want us dead, so the worst that happens is we end up back here.”
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br /> “No, since we already escaped, we end up worse,” said Dan glumly. “They’re bound to find Stan’s sagephone and take it away. Then we won’t have any way to escape again.”
“I could set off a fire alarm,” I suggested. “If everyone evacuated toward the front as planned, we might slip out the back…but I have to think Vanora or her security chief are going to figure out it’s a false alarm pretty quickly.”
“Are we assuming the rest of the gang is still free?” asked Shar.
“I guess,” I replied. “They aren’t here, though I suppose someone else could be holding them prisoner.”
“Can you cut off access to this level?” he asked.
“I can cut off physical access, but nothing would prevent Vanora from using a portal to get down here. Even if she couldn’t, what would be the point? Security couldn’t get down, but we still couldn’t get out.”
“Maybe it’s not about getting out,” said Shar. “Maybe it’s about distraction. We draw her attention away from what our friends may be up to.”
“Which would be a great idea,” said Dan, “if we had any idea what they’re up to, if anything. Your plan depends on a small delay being enough. Not knowing what’s happening outside, we don’t know whether keeping her busy for a short time does any good at all.”
“I’m not sure it would be a short time,” replied Shar. “This level is pretty much all narrow corridors. There isn’t room enough for the security guards to surround us unless they can come in from more than one direction. That’s only possible if Vanora opens multiple portals in, and to do that she’d probably need to stay upstairs. The guards would have to have very precise aim to take us down with tranquilizer darts that won’t penetrate our dragon armor—”
“That didn’t seem to impede them much when they captured us,” Dan pointed out.
“They had the element of surprise then. They wouldn’t this time. I’d say we could press them at least hard enough to force Vanora to come down in person. Zom makes me immune to magic—and you, too, if you stand close enough to touch the hilt. You know have often we’ve used that strategy successfully. If Vanora comes down, it’s possible we could capture her.”