Trapped

by James Alan Gardner

  The Sorcery-Lord’s face formed a gentle smile—a fond smile—and she patted Hump on the cheek. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, dear friend. Several people in my family say whenever I walk into a room, something bad in my head won’t let me leave until I’ve killed at least one person. They tease me mercilessly; they say I’m compulsive. But you know what?” She leaned close to Hump’s ear. “Whenever I walk into a room, I find there’s always at least one person who needs killing.”

  Dreamsinger placed her hand lightly on the man’s shaved head. He growled obscenities and tried to duck away...but she simply squeezed tighter, her gold-painted Hafsah fingernails digging into the man’s scalp. With her other hand, she traced a complicated pattern in the air, as if spelling words in some arcane language. Soon she began to hum, a single tone that started in her throat, then moved without changing pitch: traveling into her nose, then opening up to get more lung-power and finally reverberating all the way to her diaphragm.

  Wind rushed past my ears—as if invisible forces were answering a summons, gusting out of the night to do the Sorcery-Lord’s will. Nanites, I thought. Nanites gathering by the billion for some hellacious spell.

  The flame on the Caryatid’s shoulder—burning all this time, even while the rest of us were frozen—disintegrated into a million tiny sparkles that flew in Dreamsinger’s direction: nano-sized particles of magic, ripped from the Caryatid’s weak power and drawn toward the Spark Lord’s greater attraction. Every atom of enchantment in the room, every high-tech microscopic mite except the ones still holding Hump frozen, came in response to Dreamsinger’s call. The unseen shell around Impervia evaporated; she gasped and crumpled out of sight behind the bar. I could hear her pant and wheeze, but didn’t dare move to help her.

  The expression on Dreamsinger’s face had become beatific...and my friend Caryatid also seemed transformed. Avid. Hungry. Like a music-lover who’s spent too long listening to amateurs tweedle on tin flutes, then hears the full glory of a great symphony orchestra: Yes, I remember—this is what it can be like. The Caryatid possessed only modest gifts of sorcery, but she knew the real thing when she felt it.

  The real thing. Magic. Just how good good can be.

  I saw it in the Caryatid’s eyes—recognized it from my own eyes twenty years past, when I was going to be amazing. When I was going to wield power. A world-shaking physicist/mathematician/composer/philosopher/hero. Revolutionizing society. Correcting the mistakes of previous generations. Cutting through the crap and never getting bogged down in distractions. Or self-pity. I’d stood on the verge of an epic life, and was certain no great deed would elude me.

  Remember the feeling that anything was possible? How we would ride Life like a wild stallion that only we could tame?

  I knew the Caryatid remembered as she watched Dreamsinger gather sizzles of magical force. My sorcerous friend once told me she’d invented her guild name, the Steel Caryatid, when she was only thirteen years old: a name that would look good in history books. Sorcery came so easily to her compared with everyone else in her little school. Then she went to the big-league sorcery department at her provincial university...

  You can fill in the rest yourself: shock, denial, bouts of crazed studying, bouts of depression, bouts of self-sabotage with men/drink/procrastination, finally leading to acceptance of a humbler destiny. But the Caryatid could still look at Dreamsinger with sharp-edged memories of what it was like to touch greatness. The power that might have been.

  Hump sensed the power too. Sweat glistened on his shaved head as he tried to slide out of Dreamsinger’s grip. She held on calmly, never once losing hold despite the man’s slick of perspiration. Her smile curled as tranquilly as the Mona Lisa’s...even as her hand began to glow a fierce gold.

  The enforcer must have noticed that fingershine—he couldn’t see the hand itself, but he couldn’t miss a new source of light so close to his head. Especially one as bright as noon. He poured out a new round of curses, but I wasn’t fooled by his bluster; panic underlay every syllable. As the light increased in intensity, he yelled, “What do you want, bitch?”

  Dreamsinger didn’t answer. Her one-note humming took on a tiny edge of pleasure.

  “I’ll kill you, bitch,” the man wailed. “I’ll fucking kill you.” The bravado rang so hollow I would have ignored it...if I hadn’t noticed Dreamsinger’s lips move at the same time, mouthing the identical words. “Let me go, or I’ll rip out your throat.” The man spoke; Dreamsinger spoke with him. Her eyes blazed with inner amusement. When Hump jerked his head, trying to snap out of the Spark Lord’s grasp, Dreamsinger’s head moved too. Duplicating the motion in perfect unison.

  That’s when I noticed her own head had begun to glow: the same golden color as her hand, dim at first, but brightening quickly. Hump continued to curse; Dreamsinger continued to mimic his words and actions; the golden shine grew fierce.

  I realized I was witness to a Twinning.

  Twinning spells were legendary: sorcerers linked then-thoughts to someone else as a way to pluck information from the target’s brain. People talked about “copying brain waves,” but I knew enough about cognition to realize it wasn’t so simple. To clone thoughts from one brain to another required drastic restructuring in the receiver’s mental architecture—not just writing a few chance thoughts onto the surface, but shuffling billions of neural connections. Our thoughts aren’t superficial things; they’re the conscious tips of unconscious icebergs, the end results of uncountable electric pulses channeled along complex chemical pathways. To duplicate the knowledge in someone else’s head, you need the same chemical pathways: the same underlying linkages. Twinning wasn’t just telepathic eavesdropping; it was gouging out your old brain, reconstructing every synapse to match someone else’s blueprints, then seeing what useful information you could now recall.

  Some people named it the Sorcerer’s Suicide. Certainly, the spell could be used that way. Enchanters who hated their lives (the terrifying rituals, the fear and mistrust from “normal” folks) might grab someone who looked contented and perform a complete Twinning. Exit the sorcerer, enter a duplicate of a more cheerful person. Or rather, a would-be duplicate. Many a sorcerer had Twinned another man’s happiness, only to discover the man was happy because he loved his wife, his children, his friends. The sorcerer now loved the same people...but they didn’t love him back.

  More misery. Much potential for disaster. Twinning never guaranteed “happily ever after.”

  It didn’t even guarantee information. Consider Dreamsinger as she Twinned with Hump: presumably she wanted the name and whereabouts of Dover’s smuggling boss. To get those facts, she had to absorb some significant quantity of her victim’s mind—you can’t pick and choose which memories you get first. Eventually, the spell would provide what Dreamsinger wanted...but by then, she might also have absorbed the enforcer’s surly personality. She might, in fact, be the enforcer; maybe not a hundred percent, but enough to be unhealthy for those in the same room.

  Yet she was doing it anyway—as if she believed her own personality sufficiently strong to resist being corrupted. If she was lucky, she’d discover the relevant information soon enough that she wouldn’t change much: only a few of her own traits, memories, and perceptual matrices would get wiped out, replaced by ones copied from Hump. She could then halt the spell and walk away, only slightly damaged. If she was unlucky, however...we’d get two enforcers for the price of one.

  The radiance around their two heads grew more brilliant by the second, a blazing gold so intense it was like staring into the sun. I had to look away...and as I did, I noticed a third golden blaze in the room. It came from Dee-James, still frozen in the act of rolling off the table. He burned with his own golden fire: a third sun orbiting at a distance from the other two.

  I wondered how long he’d been glowing. With so much light from Dreamsinger and Hump, I hadn’t noticed the third flare-up. For all I knew, he could have been ablaze for the past few minutes.


  Even as I watched, his body unfroze; Dee-James fell to the ground with a dazed thump. The light surrounding him hurt to look at—I had to close my eyes. But why was he part of the Twinning? What did he have to do with...

  Someone screamed. Ear-splitting. Then Dreamsinger croaked in a strangled voice: “Warwick Xavier, Nanticook House, four armed guards, and an antiscrying field. Three dogs patrolling the estate.”

  “That’s all?”

  The question came from Dee-James. Surprised, I opened my eyes to see Dreamsinger spit with rage toward him. The Sorcery-Lord shouted, “What the fuck else do you need, you little shit?”

  “Nothing,” Dee-James said, “and everything.” He walked forward slowly, answering Dreamsinger’s fury with a smile. “Dearest, dearest sister, you’re so precious and lovely.”

  He threw his arms around Dreamsinger, squeezing her close and beginning a deep hot kiss. The man was good-looking but nothing compared to the Spark Lord’s Hafsah beauty—his clothes were worn, his face a bit dirty—but in that split second, Dee-James seemed stronger and more self-possessed than the Sorcery-Lord. Venting some passion that was so demandingly right, it could overwhelm even a Spark.

  But the kiss lasted only an instant. Then Dreamsinger lashed out with both hands, shoving Dee-James away so fiercely he slapped hard against a table. The impact must have hurt—his elbow thunked heavily on the table’s edge, the sort of impact that sends pins-and-needles shooting through one’s arm—but Dee-James only laughed. “Ooo, what a bully. Push me around some more.”

  Dreamsinger snarled and charged. She held her arms out from her body, an ungainly way to run...till I realized her brain must be so dominated by Hump’s, she thought her arms were covered with razor-sharp spikes. When she reached Dee-James, the Spark Lord slammed her forearm toward the man’s face—a vicious attack, even if you didn’t have bone-spurs jutting from your body—but Dee-James, still chuckling, didn’t flinch.

  The instant Dreamsinger’s blow made crunching contact, both the Lord and Dee-James were engulfed in gold light so searing I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the eyes. I snapped my head away, trying not to cry out. Eyes shut, I could still see an image scorched into my retinas—the Sorcery-Lord bringing down her arm, Dee-James smiling as he got his face clubbed, the burst of unbearable radiance.

  Twenty seconds passed before the ache in my eye-sockets subsided. When I opened my eyes again, I could barely see through my blur of tears...and what I saw didn’t make sense: Dee-James was back sprawled on the table, and Dreamsinger had pressed down on top of him, gasping through another fierce kiss.

  I blinked. My vision cleared a bit, but the sight didn’t change. A Spark Lord kissing a nobody. The nobody kissing back. The two of them almost convulsed with passion. I had time to blink once more; then Dreamsinger pushed away slightly, her face still close to Dee-James. “Your breath reeks.”

  “Awful me.” The man’s words were slurred; Dreamsinger’s blow half a minute before had split his lip. It might also have broken some teeth—blood dribbled from Dee-James’s mouth. He lifted himself on one elbow and spit red onto the floor. “If my breath is so foul, perhaps I should kill myself.”

  “I could do it for you,” Dreamsinger said.

  “And rob me of my fun? Fuck you.”

  “If only there were time.”

  They both laughed and Dreamsinger stepped away, leaving Dee-James on the table. The man reached down toward his foot and drew out a bone-handled knife from an ankle sheath. Not a big blade, but practical. He rubbed his thumb on the blade to test it: not lightly across the metal edge, but hard down the length, slicing his skin clean open. “Sharp enough,” he said, extending the bloody thumb for Dreamsinger to see.

  “I envy you,” Dreamsinger said.

  “Of course,” Dee-James answered. “Here’s what ‘expendable’ means.”

  He lay back comfortably on the table and planted the knife-tip just below his ribcage. With a strong upward jerk, he plunged the knife into his own heart.

  Dreamsinger put one palm on the butt of the knife, then slapped hard with her other hand, driving the blood-drenched blade even farther into Dee-James’s vitals. The gesture was unnecessary—the man had done an expert job of skewering himself, a quick and certain kill. Dreamsinger obviously didn’t care; she wrapped her hands around the knife handle and tried to twist, as if the man still weren’t satisfactorily dead. “Dear sister,” she whispered. “Dearest, dearest sister.”

  She bent to give the dead man a last soft kiss...and finally I understood what she’d done.

  Before Dreamsinger stole the enforcer’s brain, she’d copied her own mind into Dee-James. A forced Twinning; it explained why Dee-James had been surrounded by golden light. The man’s mind had been expunged, totally replaced by the Sorcery-Lord’s. In effect, Dee-James became Dreamsinger...with all the sorcerous knowledge that entailed. Then Dreamsinger had proceeded to Twin with Hump, safe in the knowledge that her original personality was preserved elsewhere—”on backup,” as OldTech computer programmers might say. Once the desired information had been obtained (“Warwick Xavier, Nanticook house...”), the Dee-James copy of Dreamsinger used another forced Twinning to restore the original Dreamsinger’s brain.

  The kiss between Dee-James and the Spark Lord had been Dreamsinger kissing herself.

  Then Dee-James had rammed a knife into his own heart. Dreamsinger committing suicide. Why? Because she could die happy, leaving the horrors of existence to her other self?

  As the duplicate died, the real Dreamsinger had said, “I envy you.”

  So much for the myth that Spark Lords revere life. And let’s not forget Dreamsinger had wiped Dee-James’s original mind as casually as borrowing a piece of paper to write down a note. The Sorcery-Lord needed a mental receptacle, and the man was close to hand.

  Poor Dee-James. Martyred because he happened to be convenient.

  And if he hadn’t been there, would Dreamsinger have used someone else? Impervia? The Caryatid? Me?

  I shivered.

  “Dear friends,” said the Spark Lord. “Shall we go to Nanticook House?”

  Impervia, the Caryatid, and I nodded in cowed silence.

  On our way out the door, Dreamsinger stopped with a dimpled smile. “Almost forgot.” She turned back toward Hump, still frozen above the bar. “Boom,” she said.

  Hump went boom.

  For weeks afterward, they’d be finding pieces of him caught in cracks of the walls.

  11

  BROKEN GLASS AND GOSSAMER

  Nanticook House sat atop the bluffs east of town: the same pricey neighborhood as my on-again/off-again Gretchen. But “neighborhood” was the wrong word—people there didn’t know what “neighborly” meant. The estates were big enough that you could see the house next door only with a telescope, assuming your telescope could pierce the high brick walls around each property. Nobody cared to view or visit the folks nearby. The only sense of community came from the packs of guard dogs who patrolled these grounds; some nights, the dogs on all the estates howled at the moon in unison.

  The humans, however, avoided contact with each other. That’s the difference between the small-town rich and their city counterparts. The urban upper crust enjoy getting together: they hold masquerades, go to the opera, and try to outdo each other with big weddings as they marry off their children in strategic alliances. There’s always a whiff of arrogance (and often jaded decadence), but the aristocrats in cities are sociable. They have fun with each other; they talk.

  The wealthy in Dover-on-Sea were different. They’d chosen privacy over personal contact; they had secrets to hide. My Gretchen, for example, entertained many a gentleman visitor from out of town, but never left her own property. Nursing her secrets. And Warwick Xavier of Nanticook House apparently had secrets too...most notably, his position as Dover’s Smuggler Supreme.

  I’d passed his place often on my way to Gretchen’s: his mansion was a two-story sprawl built around a big inner courtyard. F
rom above it would look like a picture frame surrounding gardened greenery—a pleasant design for Mediterranean climates, but not very practical in Feliss winters. Every room was exposed to the elements on two walls, the outer and the courtyard side, so it must have been hell to keep the house heated. Most likely, Xavier walked around all winter in three layers of long-johns, looking like a wool-swaddled teddy bear. Then again, if he was Smuggler King, he could afford fireplaces in every room, plus warm-bodied companions who’d cuddle close whenever he felt a chill.

  As we approached the estate, multiple chimneys were pouring out smoke. The wind blew toward us; soot had accumulated on the few piles of snow untouched by thaw. Though the wall blocked our view of the house, we could see fights shining up into the night. Warwick Xavier seemed to be awake, despite the late hour.

  “Dear friends,” Dreamsinger whispered, “leave your horses here. And please, please be quiet.”

  As I tied Ibn to a sapling outside the walls, I reflected how unnecessary it had been to ask us to shut up—we’d barely spoken a word since The Buxom Bull. I was the only one who knew where Nanticook House was, so I’d taken the lead; apart from the occasional “This way,” we’d walked in complete silence. It would have been nice to speak to Impervia or the Caryatid, if only to ask what Dreamsinger looked like under the Hafsah illusion...but the most I could do was meet my friends’ eyes and exchange plaintive looks.

  Now the Sorcery-Lord moved to the front, making no sound as she led us forward. I wondered why she kept us with her. A Spark didn’t need schoolteachers to protect her—if things turned messy, we were more likely to get in the way than provide assistance. Unless, of course, Dreamsinger needed us the way she’d needed Dee-James, as a holding tank for her mind.