Demonhome

by Michael G. Manning

  He had been fighting for most of the day, and he had run through his normal reserves several times over, replenishing them with aythar stored in his iron spheres. While he had enough power to fight, he was a hundred miles from being anywhere near his best. His fatigue would have broken him already if he hadn’t bolstered himself artificially with a spell earlier, and that was beginning to wear thin.

  He had a solution, though, and he lifted it from his pouch: a flat, triangular piece of metal, covered in runes. In appearance, it looked similar to some of the odd throwing weapons that Cyhan’s people used, but it was far deadlier.

  Its function, when activated, would produce a triangular translation pane, three feet wide on each side. If thrown and then activated, it would pass through anything in its way—metal, shields, nothing could deter its path; it would slice through anything that existed. It was quite literally a blade that cut through reality itself.

  He had used a spell to do something similar once before, when he and Gram had fought the dark god, Chel’strathek. At that time, he had constructed the spell on the spot, but it had taken him several minutes. The enchanted weapon he held was much better since it could be used in an instant.

  The problem was also that it could cut through anything, including the immortality enchantment that had made the dark god invulnerable—an enchantment very similar to the one that sustained the dragon around his enemy’s neck.

  If his attack hit the dragon, it would destroy it. Permanently. The fact that the resulting release of nearly a full Celior of aythar would also destroy him and everything else for miles around didn’t even enter into the equation for him. He wanted his dragon back.

  Another warning, and another near miss. His body couldn’t keep this up for much longer, but he still wouldn’t use the weapon. His opponent’s attacks were growing more erratic, and he thought he knew why.

  It was beginning to experience burnout.

  It was a problem that in the past had mainly happened to channelers—humans using the power of the shining gods. The power they used was far greater than their human forms could handle, and it eventually killed them. Mages rarely encountered that problem since they exhausted themselves before reaching that point. The dragon made it entirely possible, though, and the machine was using its power profligately.

  If he could hold out long enough, the machine might kill itself, or at least render itself unable to use power. With that newfound hope, he dodged again.

  And fell when his foot came down on something that rolled beneath it.

  The edge of the blast clipped him, and only the enchanted leathers he wore kept it from ripping his side apart. It spun him around and he fell, bleeding from his shoulder and thigh. The smooth metal of the Fool’s Tesseract lay in front of him. He had tripped over it.

  Had his talent made him dodge in that direction so he would find it? That was a question he could ponder later. Grabbing it, he levered himself up and activated it. “Talto maen, eilen kon, sadeen lin, amyrtus!” Matthew was wrapped in comforting darkness as the six translation panes sprang into existence around him, protecting him from the outside world.

  It was hard to catch his breath. He was breathing hard and everything hurt, but he could finally relax. Maybe his foe would finish burning itself out while trying to blast him inside his perfect defense. The Fool’s Tesseract was seven feet long on each side, big enough to stretch out and take a nap in if necessary.

  Not that he would be that foolish. Slowly, he got to his feet and began an inventory of his injuries. Thigh muscle, torn and bleeding, shoulder dislocated, bruises everywhere, and I’m definitely concussed. It was surely time to retreat.

  Instead he fingered his triangular weapon with his left hand. The cool metal felt good against its fevered flesh. If he could find a way to separate the dragon from his enemy, he could kill it.

  Then the android appeared inside the tesseract, standing a foot from his nose. It had teleported, to the interior of his defense.

  Cold dread gripped his heart. His death was only inches away, smelling of oil and cool metal. A metal arm rose, too quick to avoid, and smashed into his chest with bone breaking force. He was falling.

  Lifting his arm as he fell, he activated the weapon without throwing it. The translation pane sliced his hand into several pieces—and neatly bisected the android, as well as the staff that maintained the Fool’s Tesseract.

  Suddenly there was sunlight again, blinding him. The tesseract had been destroyed, but he hardly cared. Matthew was struggling to breathe.

  Bleeding, that’s easy, but breathing is a bitch. Something was broken in his chest, and his ruined hand was pumping blood out onto the ground rapidly. He managed to seal the artery and stop the bleeding just before the sun went dark and he lapsed gratefully into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 53

  Someone was staring down at him. He could see a face with a halo of golden hair around it. The sun made it seem as though it was glowing.

  “Are you awake?” came a voice that was beautifully resonant and melodic. It was a man’s voice.

  “Not sure,” he mumbled. Matthew’s throat was dry and he sounded hoarse. “This is probably a dream.”

  “This isn’t a dream,” said the man. “You have to shift back home, before they find you.”

  He tried a joke. “They already found me, several times.” Then he asked, “Who are you?”

  “It’s me, Gary. I forgot, you wouldn’t recognize me in this body.”

  “But you’re human,” protested Matt. Definitely a dream.

  Gary patted his chest. “No, still a machine. This is a civilian android. It belonged to one of the researchers at the Whittington lab.”

  Something else occurred to him. “I sent you back to my world. How can you be here?”

  The android shook its head. “You send a piece of me back. The rest of me was still here, in hiding. ANSIS controls everything now. I only managed to steal this body during the confusion when you destroyed my late-wife’s prototype. The entire system went into a kind of shock after that, but it won’t last long.

  “They’ll begin combing the area soon. ANSIS has already noticed my deception. You need to go home quickly.”

  Matt wanted to laugh, but it hurt too much to try. “Look at me. If I shift back, I’ll just drown in the ocean or die in some deserted wilderness. I can’t move. Besides, I’ve already made up my mind. I came for my dragon, and I’m not leaving without it.”

  “Such stubbornness,” observed the android. “Who did you inherit that from, I wonder?”

  Matt grinned at him through bloodstained teeth. “I got a double helping of stubborn on both sides. I come by it honestly.”

  Gary bent down and lifted something from the ground, holding it up so Matthew could see it without turning his head. “This is what you wanted, is it not?”

  It was a dragon egg.

  Relief flooded through Matthew. He hadn’t destroyed it. Killing the machine-mage, the one bonded to it, had caused the newly hatched dragon to die. The enchantment had reverted back to the egg state, awaiting a new bond.

  “Yes.”

  Gary placed the egg in Matthew’s still-good right hand. “Now shift back. You’ve accomplished what you intended.”

  “Come with me.”

  Gary gave him a sad look. “There’s no point. This body won’t last. In a week, the batteries will be depleted. They don’t put RTG’s in civilian androids.”

  “It will last longer than I will if I shift back alone,” argued Matthew.

  “You have a point,” Gary agreed. “Very well, bring me along.” Kneeling, he took Matthew’s hand in one of his and held the egg in his free hand. “Let’s go.”

  They did.

  It wasn’t easy. Planeshifting wasn’t particularly draining, but it took focus and concentration, things Matthew was in short supply of currently. After several minutes and a few false starts, he finally managed it.

  For once, they didn’t arrive over the o
cean, and Matt found himself lying on a bed of soft grass. But his peace was instantly broken when Gary lifted him up and moved him several feet over, and then began slapping and brushing at his side. He screamed in agony, but the android refused to listen.

  When it was over, Gary explained, “There was an anthill beneath you.”

  Matt glared at him, “Sadist. You enjoyed that!” He knew it wasn’t true, but he hurt too badly to say otherwise. Then he passed out once more.

  When he finally woke up, several hours later, Gary helped him drink some water. After that Matthew attempted to mend some of his broken bones, but quickly gave up. His concentration was shot, and his magesight suffered from the same sort of blurriness that his normal vision did.

  His sternum was cracked, which was why breathing was so difficult, but beyond that, and his mutilated hand, his body was fairly sound. He had an amazing collection of bruises, his thigh was lacerated, and somehow he had lost most of the hair on the left side of his head. The part that remained smelled burned, but the skin of his scalp was unharmed.

  He needed to go home.

  To do that he would need a teleportation circle, but he doubted he could draw one in his condition. Fortunately, Gary was there. He didn’t even have to describe it or do the calculation to create the local rune key. The machine had seen him make them before, and Matt had already taught him the formula for the key.

  The android patiently cleared a wide area of grass, and using a small stick, drew the lines and runes on the fresh soil. The circle wouldn’t survive past the next rain, but it didn’t need to. Hefting Matthew with strong arms, he carried the wizard into the circle.

  Matt couldn’t help but cry out when he was lifted, but he consoled himself by deciding it was a ‘heroic’ cry of pain, rather than the more ordinary, pathetic sort.

  Once they were in the circle, he put forth the small amount of aythar necessary to activate it, and then he was home.

  ***

  When he woke next, he was lying in bed. His bed, in his room. He didn’t move at first. Just enjoyed the silence and the lack of pain. It might have been perfect, but his sister was sitting in a chair beside him.

  He turned his eyes to look at her without moving his head, just to be safe. “Moira.”

  “Myra,” she replied. “She let me have a turn.”

  “Oh,” he said, somewhat surprised.

  “Everyone’s been taking turns,” she added, “even Conall and Irene. Mom was sick to death with worry when she saw you.”

  Matthew shifted slightly, noting the lack of pain in his chest. His sternum was fixed. A quick check showed that his other injuries had been similarly remedied. His hand was strange, though. He could feel it, but it was absent in his magesight. He lifted his arm to look at it.

  It ended three inches short of where his wrist should have been. The stump was wrapped in a heavy linen bandage. A profound “Oh,” emerged from his lips. He had known it would happen. He had been warned, but he still wondered why it was all gone. The translation pane had only taken half his hand off. The wrist, half his palm, and part of his thumb should have still been there.

  “We couldn’t save it,” sympathized Myra. “They let Moira do most of the healing, since Dad was so impressed with how well she had put your arm on after you cut it off that time.”

  “That was a secret,” he said sourly. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”

  “Moira made that promise,” said Myra promptly. “That was before I existed, but I thought he should know. He was amazed. You hardly have a scar from that, so he let her do the healing.”

  “And she let you do it for her,” he finished for her, jumping to the conclusion.

  She blushed slightly. “Yes. Since I’m not ‘tainted’, she felt safer letting me do it.”

  “Is this problem of hers like a disease?” he asked.

  “Sort of, but it isn’t one you can catch,” Myra replied. “It’s more of a temptation. She worried she might change you since you were unconscious and your defenses were down.”

  “Change me?”

  “Alter your personality,” Myra supplied. “She did a lot of it in Dunbar. Once you start doing it, it’s hard to stop. It’s a little like being a drunk. ‘Just one more drink,’ they say, but they can’t stop. In this case, it’s ‘I’ll just fix that one annoying quirk’.”

  “Wow,” he said mildly. The more he learned, the more it sounded like his sister had a serious, and disturbing, problem. He decided to drop the issue and return to the matter at hand. He lifted his abbreviated appendage. “Back to this.”

  “We couldn’t save it,” she repeated. “I sealed the wound, the skin, fixed the blood vessels, but it just kept festering. I don’t know what you did to it, but the flesh was dying. Even the parts that looked undamaged blistered and then began to rot. You caught a fever from it, and Lady Thornbear was worried it would turn gangrenous.”

  By ‘Lady Thornbear,’ she meant Elise Thornbear, Gram’s grandmother. While the old woman was no mage, she was highly skilled in the healing arts, particularly with herbs—and sometimes poisons.

  “She tried several poultices, but nothing worked,” said Myra, continuing. “Eventually, she advised us to remove it. You might have died otherwise.” She sounded apologetic.

  Matthew sighed, “It’s all right. I didn’t expect to keep it. I made the choice, and this was the price.”

  “You sound like you made a pact with a dark god. Like a story in an old fairy tale,” said Myra.

  He laughed a little. “You could think of it that way, but it was nothing so sinister.” Then he laughed some more at his unintended pun: sinister. It was probably the opposite of sinister to lose one’s left hand. “I just knew that if I used it to recover my staff that it would be ruined. It was either that or give up and come home without the egg.” That prompted another thought. “The egg…”

  She understood immediately. “Zephyr’s out hunting. He’ll be back in a while.”

  Now he was confused. Had they let someone else bond with the egg while he was unconscious? He knew there were other eggs, but after everything he had been through, it seemed callous. “Who…?”

  “You bonded him, when you woke last,” she replied.

  “How long have I been out? I don’t remember waking.”

  “Over a week,” said Myra. Then she reached over and touched the side of his head. The scalp had been shaved clean. “Examine that spot,” she told him.

  Since he didn’t have a hand on that side, he used his magesight, and was surprised to find that a small hole had been drilled through his skull. “What’s this about?”

  “It was Dad’s idea,” she answered. “Your brain was swelling. He made the hole to let the pressure out. Apparently, he’s done something similar before, or I’d never have known it was a possible solution.”

  “You’ve been up several times,” she went on. “Relieved yourself, eaten, taken water. But you seemed dazed, and each time we weren’t sure if you were really conscious or not. You responded to commands, but this is the first time you’ve spoken.”

  “And I bonded with the egg like that?”

  She nodded. “It was the first thing you did. Then you passed out again. That was before the swelling and the trephination, so your thoughts might have been clear that time, but you didn’t say anything to anyone.”

  “Trephination?”

  She tapped her skull. “That’s what Elise called it. Apparently, it was an old medical practice, but she thought it was quackery. She told your Dad it would kill you, but he ignored her. I think she was annoyed when he proved her wrong.”

  Reaching over his head with his right hand, he felt the soft spot where the bone was missing. It was disconcerting. “Couldn’t he have put the piece of bone back?”

  Myra laughed. “It had to stay open for several days.” Then she held up her hands. “Not to the air, of course, or you might have gotten sick. He closed the skin over it immediately. But the bone had to stay out so that
fluids could escape the skull. Anyway, he said you’d probably need it open so you could survive when Mom finally gets a chance to try and beat some sense into you. No point in having to do the trephination twice.”

  Somehow, he didn’t find the joke as funny as she obviously did. A knock at the door interrupted their conversation, and his magesight told him it was Karen.

  She entered a moment later, and her eyes grew wide when she looked at him. “Is he talking?” she asked Myra.

  His recently minted sister nodded, and he merely responded, “Of course.”

  Things rapidly devolved into chaos after that. First Karen descended on him, and he thought he might die under the onslaught of her hugging and tears, but it got much worse when the news escaped the room. Soon he was mobbed by his entire family. His sister Irene was beside herself, sobbing so much he thought she must have developed a mental condition.

  Idly, he wondered if she was competing to see who could cry more, she or their mother.

  Conall took the news more stoically, but he was obviously relieved. There were no dry eyes in the room. Even Moira grew weepy, after Myra let her resume control of their shared body.

  All in all, he was happy to see them, but the tears and continual hugging made him feel as though he were suffocating. He was grateful when Penny finally shooed everyone from the room so he could rest.

  Naturally, Penny remained. She had probably run everyone out just so she could have him to herself, as much as to grant him relief from all the fussing, but contrary to Myra’s joke, she did not attempt to ‘beat some sense into him.’

  She fussed over him without interference, as was a mother’s right. They talked a while, and then he pretended to sleep, and she pretended to believe he was sleeping, content merely to watch him.

  After a while, his pretense became reality, and he drifted into dreams.

  Epilogue

  The weeks passed into months, and Matthew grew steadily stronger. Despite all that had happened, he was surprised at how long it took him to recover fully. His head injury had been worse than he had realized at the time.