Mobius

by Garon Whited

  “The prisoners! They’re gone!”

  So I went down into my dungeon to check. Sure enough, they were missing. The rock wall that so recently held them wasn’t broken, but the people were nowhere to be seen. They might have teleported out, turned to mist, shifted dimensions, or who knows what. Leisel was not amused and began questioning people. I started analyzing whatever might be left in the way of magical traces.

  The chief oddity was in the stone formerly in front of each prisoner. It crumbled easily to the touch, brittle and weak. Something affected it, but it was still intact, not broken out. I didn’t think it was reassembled, either, such as if someone reduced it to sand, removed a prisoner, and put the sand back in the same shape as the stone. The coloration, the texture—it struck me as being the original stone.

  A quick check confirmed the tower-construction spell could absorb and reconstitute the questionable sections. I let it do so while it opened the nooks in the walls. It would save time when embedding future prisoners. Assuming I had prisoners to embed. Apparently, it’s not as effective a restraint as I thought.

  On my way up, since we didn’t have doors installed, yet, I pushed the trapdoor open. One hand went on the edge, the other in the middle. The one in the middle cracked the wood and broke through. I finished opening the trapdoor and stood on the stairs, examining it. Whatever affected the stone seemed to have done the same thing to the wood. Not all of it, but a sizable chunk of it, mostly out of the middle and somewhat toward the upper end of the basement stairs.

  Something from the dungeon, coming up the stairs? Or going down?

  The traffic pattern on the ground floor is in two directions. People walk a path to the left and the stairs leading up, or a path to the right and the trapdoor leading down. I conjured several bright lights and paid close attention to the floor. The floor wasn’t exactly clean, but it wasn’t filthy, either. There was enough for a close inspection. Sweaty, bare feet, perhaps? Scuffs from shoes or boots? Perhaps a trace of scent, as of prisoners held captive for many days? Yes. Not headed for the door, however. The trail, such as it was, led to the wall opposite the front door.

  I had a feeling I knew what I’d find. I poked the wall and my finger went partway into the stone. Scratching at the wall, I found the border of the effect—an oval about five feet high, but it was probably larger before the tower started reconstituting the stone. I clawed at the center for a moment or two, digging through the crumbling material until I could see outside. With a hole to mark the spot, I went out and around to examine the ground outside.

  Footprints? Footprints. The pavement outside the tower didn’t take them any better than the floor inside, but I knew what I was looking for. The trail led away, using the tower as cover against the guards at the door. I lost the trail for a bit and had to hunt around when it turned sharply and headed for the treeline on this side—the southeastern side—of the river. It was the wrong direction for an escape, but it was the closest cover.

  In the underbrush, I saw signs of passage for at least one horse and the narrow gouges of wagon wheels.

  I met with Leisel to confer.

  “There’s a cart missing,” she reported. “It’s the new one you wanted, with the springs in it.”

  “Perfect for transporting people,” I agreed. “Have we a way to alert the bridge fort?”

  “During the day? Yes.”

  “Do it. I think this is Naskarl’s doing, recovering captives to prove he’s in command of the situation.”

  “I agree. We can’t let him get away with it.”

  “I’m glad we’re on the same page. Get me some more mirrors, please, both single mirrors and sets of two.”

  “Now?”

  “Not this instant. I’ll want them later.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Right now, send reinforcements to ride to the guard station. I’ll start a search of the valley, so get an assault party together.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  She went off, shouting. I went upstairs, fuming, and sent the answering service guard downstairs to turn people away.

  With the magical shenanigans going on, I had to assume someone had a spell or a device for walking through walls. If so, they should also have a device to avoid being located magically. I proved it pretty quickly with my Ring of Spying’s micro-gate. I know what I drew for the cartwright, so I hunted for it. Anything even remotely similar would show up, but it didn’t. Ergo, defenses were in play.

  But were they invisible? Ah, there’s another question entirely.

  Parking a scrying sensor over the valley didn’t work too well. The trees are thick enough to be a problem. I tried it, on the off chance they were crossing one of the thinner areas, circling around the cleared region, or even on the road toward the bridge. No, whoever was in charge of this rescue was too clever for that.

  What about a nice thermal image? I tried a spectrum-shifter, but it didn’t help. We’re in the tropics, it’s a hot day already, and the spell isn’t as sensitive as a technological thermograph. I saw some things, high up in the trees, but the blanket of warm leaves in the sun was enough to drown out the other visuals. At night, it would no doubt work perfectly—cool leaves might blur the thermal signature of people, but they wouldn’t mask it.

  I miss Diogenes. His thermograph would be sensitive enough to pick out bugs. Or he’d send hundreds of drones flitting through the trees in a sweeping search pattern and find everything.

  I don’t have a hundred drones, but I do have a mirror—and a scrying sensor is, in some ways, like a camera drone. I can send one along a straight line at high speed. If I grid the valley and send the sensor through the forest—and through everything in the way—at slightly above the level of the underbrush, I don’t have to locate anything. All I have to do is glimpse it.

  I grabbed a double handful of large, brittle chunks from the busted wall and brought them with me. They crumbled nicely into a powder. I didn’t have my sand table to work with, but I slapped together a mapping spell so the dust was a mini-model of the valley. I also laid a grid along it and used it as the map for my eyeball examination.

  The mirror lit up with a view past the trunk of a tree, partially obscured with vines. I set the sensor off on its run along the edge of the valley. The viewpoint shot through vines, tree-trunks, and open space. It reminded me of riding Bronze, but without the heat, smoke, and vibration. It was a camera view, the vision from the nose of a bullet train down a tunnel. Everything was brown and green and blurred beyond recognition for all of two seconds.

  I turned the scrying sensor around and dialed down the speed. The return shot took maybe two minutes, but I felt sure I didn’t miss anything wagon-sized.

  With the idea sorted out, I moved the sensor a dozen yards away from the edge, spent another two minutes shooting along a parallel course, turned around, moved it farther to one side, and looked along a new stretch of valley on the return trip. Back and forth, back and forth, cutting visual swathes through the jungle…

  I halted about halfway through the northern half of the valley. The intense concentration and the blurringly-fast virtual movement brought on a terrible headache from the eyestrain. I wrapped my head in a healing spell and closed my eyes for a minute, waiting for it to pass. I took a few extra seconds between passes after that. My eyes still hurt, but it stayed at a tolerable level.

  The scrying sensor flashed past something and winked out. At such speeds, I doubted anyone could notice it, much less shoot it down. It must have hit a scrying shield of some sort. I dialed in on the location, or near it, and started slowly panning around, piloting the sensor manually through the forest.

  Six naked men and a wizard. I knew he was a wizard by the bandoliers of pouches and the wand. The men were in the stolen cart, sitting or lying down, while one horse pulled it. The wizard sat up front and drove. It wasn’t easy going. The land was fairly flat, but the jungle wasn’t cooperative. They were obviously circling wide around the cleared areas as they
worked their way northeast, toward the bridge. Personally, I wondered how they planned to get past the guard post. Then again, if they felt up to it, they could leave the horse and cart behind to go on foot through the mountains. It’s doable, although difficult. It might be how the wizard got in, but I wouldn’t bet on it. If he entered magically, he obviously wasn’t up to extracting everyone else in the same way.

  I noted the scrying sensor’s location on my dust-map of the valley.

  “Leisel!”

  Several minutes later, Leisel came up. I showed her the map, the location, the probable course, and warned her the guy driving was a wizard.

  “He is busy defending himself and others from being detected?”

  “Yes?”

  “Then he is not expecting to be attacked. I will see to it he is.” She departed before I did more than open my mouth to ask a question.

  Obviously, I wasn’t invited. Was it a case of being too valuable to risk? Or did she want to prove her own worth? Good questions. Pity about the answers.

  I think she’s eager, Boss.

  Eager?

  Yeah, like when she grabs you by the—

  Thank you, I know what “eager” means. How is she eager in this particular case?

  She lives for this sort of thing, Boss, and she hasn’t gotten into a real fight in how long?

  Mmm. I see your point.

  And she wants a wizard to see hers. Approaching in a thrust for the eyeball, I think.

  And I think, I replied, I’ll sit here quietly.

  Really?

  I’ll also watch. With a couple of potential gates handy. I can’t open a gate inside his scryshields—I can’t get a lock. But I can brute-force a gate nearby and stick something through, whether it be a spell, a dragon-blade flamethrower, or me.

  I like the way you think, Boss.

  Half an hour later, the cart came to an abrupt halt. The wizard—not Kellonol, I noted, but presumably someone else working for House Sarcana, judging by the tabard-like thing under the bandoliers—stood up in the seat and looked around. He shook out a little powder from a vial, held it in his hand, and drew his wand. He threw the powder into the air and moved the wand as though scribing a diagram in the air before him, in the hovering dust. I say that because I saw the lines of power hanging in the air. It looked like the beginnings of a locator spell. Possibly he heard something and was checking to see if it was something to worry about.

  Before he completed it, however, an arrow hit him in the guts. He grunted and bent around it, dropping the reins and dropping to the seat again, hand curling around the shaft. Three more arrows came his way, only one striking him, piercing the outside of his right shoulder.

  This is why I wear armor. It’s hard to keep a deflection spell running all the time.

  The naked men in the cart shouted and bailed out of it. Each carried a stick or a rock. Two with a rock collection took cover behind the cart and prepared to throw. The rest started working their way forward, using trees as cover. The archers forced them to go slowly. Three of them shot at men who showed themselves. The fourth kept shooting the wizard, putting another shaft into his body. The wizard, not wanting any more arrows, chose to fall backward into the now-empty cart, out of the fire and into the frying pan, so to speak.

  Someone blew a horn. From behind the archers, over a dozen warriors charged, feet thudding, armor jingling, swords glinting in the stray shafts of light. I spotted Velina in the lead, shield up to ward off flying stones. The men, now realizing the full scope of the ambush, were in a poor position. They initially advanced to deal with a few archers. Now they realized they should have stuck to the cart and used it as a defensive position.

  Unfortunately for them, warriors on horseback were coming up behind them. I presume they were far enough behind to avoid detection; horses—with one enormous exception—aren’t known for their stealth. The cavalry advanced at the sound of the horn and executed a pincer movement while more infantry charged up the center.

  Someone—the archer tasked with killing the wizard—headed straight for the cart, drawing his sword as he did so.

  The wizard wasn’t lying idle. First, he pulled out the arrow in the right side of his chest. After screaming, he panted for a moment and evidently decided yanking them out was not a productive activity. He fumbled something out of a pouch, a vial, and drank the contents. He lay there a moment and I watched with interest, magnifying the image, as his wounds healed. Unfortunately, they healed around the arrows without pushing them out. Presumably, one normally removed the offending object or objects before drinking the healing potion. Still, it must have cut down on the pain and allowed him to concentrate. He raised his wand again and touched it to the two remaining arrows. They broke off at slightly outside his skin, making it easier for him to move around. He started to trace a diagram of power in the air above him.

  About then, one of my warriors came over the seat and down on him, planting one foot squarely in his belly. He might have held his spell, I think, except the warrior also landed on what remained of the arrow still in his guts. This distracted him rather forcefully and disrupted his beginning spell—a shield of some sort, I feel certain. Then a sword went through his throat and disrupted other important things.

  In a matter of minutes, five prisoners and two corpses were loaded up on the cart again. Two of the prisoners were badly wounded, but they were bandaged well enough to stop the bleeding. The whole caravan started off again, this time for the tower.

  I didn’t have to do a thing. I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or not. Not because someone else went out and did the dirty work, but…

  “But” why? Would I rather go do my own dirty work? Yes, I would. But that wasn’t it. Or, at least, not all of it. Did I want to kill someone? Was that the answer? A bad-tempered urge to beat the hell out of someone on the way to killing them?

  I hope not. Or am I wishing? One of these days, I’m going to have to go down into the mental basement and have it out with some of my darker complexes, if only to catalogue them all. Maybe I can find what’s left of my soul, while I’m at it.

  I went downstairs and found four guards on the ground floor, the door barred, and weapons drawn. Kasara and Tellith were two of them, so I asked Kasara the obvious question.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Leisel ordered us to guard. Said this might be an elaborate scheme to get us out and searching, make it easy to get to you.”

  “Anybody who gets to me gets what’s coming to them.”

  “Still got ordered to guard.”

  “Fair enough. They’re on their way back.”

  Tellith pounded on the door. Someone outside called out to say it was clear, so Tellith unbarred it. Two more women stood outside.

  We regrouped in the courtyard and waited. The attack force came back with the cart, Leisel leading them. We heard them singing before we saw them. The prisoners were treated for their wounds and placed in the dungeon again. The corpse of the wizard found its way up to my workroom, “to show it on the mirror,” or so I claimed.

  Leisel gave more orders, increasing the watch, starting a search of the village for anyone else, and all the other things one does when security is breached. I questioned whether a search was necessary, but only to myself. Clearly, the wizard did not arrive by the usual channels—or somehow slipped past everyone, either smuggled in or invisible. Leisel was right. There might be more.

  Since she took charge, I let her. I went up to the workroom, did a quick check for magical signatures around the village. My idea was to check for magic, rather than try to scry on everything. Kind of like using a thermal camera, I wanted to see the magical objects. I figured it ought to be more practical than a location spell, since a hidden wizard would be shielded from scrying and similar forces.

  I found lots of enchantments. Magic cloaks, magic armor, magic swords, magic lamps… this place is steeped in magical objects. On the other hand, I started eliminating categories of enchantments.
Once you have a map of all the magic in the area, start dropping the armor, swords, cloaks, lamps… what does this leave? Quite a lot, actually, but the process is a process. It takes a while to sort through a thousand objects of any sort.

  Still, once I accounted for all the known and usual enchantments, I had a few left. Those I tried to scry on and succeeded. None of them were scry-shielded and none of them appeared to be invisible wizards. Either my technique has a flaw and the hypothetical wizard is still hidden, or there isn’t one. Which, of course, is hardly a comfort. If the mundane search didn’t turn up an invisible wizard, I’d have to assume there wasn’t one.

  Grr. Maybe I should start assuming there is always an invisible wizard lurking nearby.

  While the search parties combed the village for suspicious characters, I checked the corpse of the visible wizard. As I thought, the bandoliers and belt full of pouches contained powders, feathers, vials, bones—all the usual paraphernalia for spellcasting. I had no idea what it was all for since I’m not versed in the local magical traditions.

  He did have another potion—that is, a magical liquid, rather than something in a vial for use in ritual spellcasting. It wasn’t hard to figure out what it did—the healing portion of the spell was obvious enough—but I wasn’t entirely certain about how it did it. I think, and this is only a guess, it did much of what my own generic healing spell does. It tells the body to devote more resources to healing whatever is broken, specifically wounds. The rest of it is the real guesswork. If I’m right, it provides… hmm. Glue? Spackle? It magically provides something like a spray-in, high-tech foam bandage. Imagine squirting something into a wound to fill it, stop the bleeding, and stabilize it until your body can take the time to fix it properly. The difference here is I think it becomes part of the body, both from adding to it and diffusing the surrounding tissue into itself.

  I’m not going to poke a hole in someone to test it. I might buy some more potions, though, and run them through the equivalent of a magical gas chromatograph, though.

  The wand was of more interest. It was a typical stick, about eighteen inches long, maybe an inch in diameter at the base and tapering to a rounded tip perhaps a quarter of an inch across. It was carved and grooved with eye-watering lines all along its length. The magic in the thing was obvious even without the eyeball-warping geometry of the lines. Analysis of the enchantment revealed it was a power concentrator.