Mobius

by Garon Whited

  Thunder and lightning. Very, very frightening. Warm, humid air rose, chilled quickly, and fell back. Rain fell with it in big, heavy drops, splattering. Some hail pattered down, bouncing and shattering as it struck. Lines of force and air came together with a rush and the rain stopped, leaving a coldness on the land, a darkness under a starless sky, broken only by flashes of angry lightning within the leaden sky.

  Where two moving masses of air met, a turning movement began, a dance of swirling clouds. Lightning flickered in the high air as differing air masses brushed against each other. Thunder boomed, high up, as the growing rivers of lightning crackled and illuminated heaving masses of clouds from within. Fiery letters appeared, as planned. They faded in seconds, though, so I adjusted the spells, raising the conversion factor and tweaking the luminescence. The next time lightning moved through them, they glowed for almost a minute. Perfect.

  I left things as they were for the moment, building up the momentum of the winds. The swirling quickened, as though a god poked a finger in from above and started stirring, whirling faster and faster. In the city, people should be looking up at the sky-fire letters and wondering. If Hazir had anything to say about it, word would spread that the Temple was being ordered to surrender Leisel. And, with the letters of heaven’s fire blazing again and again in the stormy sky, how could they not? I waited five minutes… ten minutes…

  My mirror was still dark and silent. No one was trying to reach me—not directly, and not through any of my people in the valley.

  All right. Let’s take it up a notch.

  The whirl of air in the high sky quickened further as it descended. The circumstances were ideal, deliberately, for a tornado, so encouraging it wasn’t too difficult. Most of the sacrificial energy in my spell went into controlling it as precisely as possible. Rather than rampaging around the Temple compound, the cone touched down right on top of the Temple, surrounding it, whirling around the main building. Both being circular, it didn’t have any corners to grab, just reliefs and carvings. The Temple held firm, but anyone wanting in or out was likely to have a sudden and extremely uplifting experience, followed fairly quickly by a religious one.

  I checked my mirror again and found it still inactive. Nobody was trying to reach me. I know the Temples employed wizards, probably quite a few of them. I hoped I hadn’t destroyed so many of their scrying devices they were unwilling to use them on the Temple’s behalf… well, I sort of hoped. Half-hoped. It would be inconvenient at the moment, but gratifying, nonetheless.

  With no response forthcoming, magical or mundane—from my vantage, I would have seen anyone screaming and waving his arms in the air—I started the gravity-bending spells cycling. They fired off at random, running for one to three seconds, with the limitation they couldn’t fire unless one of the others wasn’t on. This made for a rather chaotic shifting. They were less effective than I anticipated, though. The area to affect was much larger than me and a giant horse, so the effective “tilt” was closer to one or two degrees.

  It still had to be disconcerting to anyone trying to stand.

  I watched from my vantage for a bit, waiting for some sort of response. There were still no calls on the mirror and I started to wonder what I’d have to do to get their attention.

  Then Leisel came sailing out the front door, obviously flung out, to be snatched up by the tornado winds and whirled up into the sky.

  I have a small predisposition to distrust religious authorities. I admit it. Most of the gods I know are self-centered brats with no fundamental kindness toward humans, only a pragmatic attitude toward their faith-producing cattle. I don’t like them, I don’t like their policies, and I don’t like their representatives. Nevertheless, I found myself intently disliking someone in that Temple. I wasn’t even sure who, yet, but I would find out.

  I lifted my wand and took a tighter grip on the reins of the storm. The spells I used were as precise as I could make them and sufficient for anything I thought I would want to do. Now, though, I wished I’d developed better ones. I could move the tornado around, both up and down as well as side to side. I hadn’t anticipated the need to control which way it spat out any given piece of debris!

  I focused on Leisel as she gained altitude. There would come a point where she was ejected from the rising air. I wanted that point to be where her tangent trajectory launched her in my direction. In that I had no steering wheel, only a gas pedal and brakes, I was not entirely successful. She came sailing out of the tornado several thousand feet up, headed about thirty degrees off from a straight-line course for me. I cursed in multiple languages and Bronze launched us into motion.

  She was way up there when the tornado spat her out. Call it three thousand meters. The terminal velocity of a falling body is roughly fifty meters per second. The time to impact would then be on the close order of sixty seconds. Maybe a bit more if the weather cooperates and provides a trifle more updraft than one might expect.

  Bronze hit the slope of our lookout hill like it was a ski jump, doing her own gravity-tilt trick to make it even steeper. It was downhill all the way to Leisel’s projected impact, but I suspected we weren’t going to make it. At her best, Bronze can manage maybe three miles in one minute, but only under absolutely ideal circumstances and with every possible advantage I can provide. We had considerably more ground to cover and almost none of it on a straight and level roadway. Cross-country, even in farmland, is far from ideal. We tried anyway. Bronze blew fire like a demon locomotive and left scorched and smoking hoofprints behind us to be extinguished by the light rain. The scattered droplets hammered us like hailstones as we plowed through them. She kept her eyes on the terrain and pounded out speed while I kept my eyes on Leisel and gauged her fall.

  In the first five seconds, I confirmed what I feared. We weren’t going to make it.

  A dozen ideas flashed through my head. Depending on how she lands and on what, can I fix the damage? If she’s not bleeding too badly, maybe. Can I hit her with a spell? If she were to have no inertia, she would still fall at terminal velocity, but the impact would be harmless. I can’t hit her with the spell from here, though. It’s really only a touch-range kind of thing. If I opened a mirror gate, could I get it on her as she fell past it? Probably not. It’s a complex spell and takes time to get it on the target. Did I have anything simpler to slap on her as she went by to reduce her falling speed?

  I tugged on Bronze’s mane. She thundered to a stop as quickly as she could without unseating me. I needed a stable platform to concentrate properly.

  My scrying mirror flickered on, looking at Leisel. Now that she was outside the Temple’s wards, it was simple enough. I scanned forward and down, below her, moving the sensor like lightning, well in advance of her flight. With a point defined in space, I issued instructions and opened the mirror as a gate, locking the point in place with a brute force.

  A cloud of darkness slithered off my shoulders, poured through the gate, and fluttered away on the wind.

  I slapped the gate shut and the mirror into my pocket. I grabbed a handful of mane and Bronze rocketed forward again.

  If my cloak could fly well enough to intercept her, if it could grab her in free fall, if it could spread enough to slow her, if, if, if.

  Bronze crashed through something. I was watching the sky, but I think it was a fence. All I know is it was wooden and splintered and didn’t slow us down by so much as a single hoofbeat. If I’d had attention to spare at the time, I’d have been glad the world was a bit wet and the flaming toothpicks wouldn’t start a serious fire.

  The inky blot of my cloak stood out well—to me—against the swirling backdrop of grey clouds and lightning. It did manage to get under her as she fell. She hit it like a trapeze artist hitting the safety net, which was reassuring. I’m not sure how smart my cloak is, or if it’s some extension of my altar ego, or if it’s a vitalized piece of negative space—whatever that is!—capable of responding to psychic commands. I more than half feared she would
simply vanish through it into the big empty. I’d have to figure out how to get something back, and I’m not even sure how my cloak works in the first place. Leisel hit it and it distorted as it stayed under her, flaring outward like a giant funnel. Her fall slowed immediately and continued to slow as my cloak continued to expand. It was an odd-shaped parachute, but it was working!

  If a locomotive leaves a hilltop to travel six point eight miles while a falling object accelerates to terminal velocity from an altitude of ten thousand feet, how far away is the locomotive when the object hits the ground? As if the problem wasn’t complex enough, at time t plus thirty seconds, assume terminal velocity decreases by fifty percent, then by an additional one percent of the current value per second until impact…

  Doing these estimations in my head while galloping hell-for-leather through the night when Leisel might be plummeting to her death was also less than ideal. I eyeballed it, decided we stood a chance, and slowly realized the shape of my cloak was altering. It still acted as a parachute by creating drag, but it also flattened out, drawing the long, deep sack in the center back up and spreading the rest. It was also rippling, becoming more wing-like than cone-like, and turning in our direction. It veered against the wind like a hang glider, slowing almost to a stop in the air before deliberately diving to avoid a stall. It curved around again, spiraling through the buffeting winds as it descended, always a little more toward us on every loop.

  Bronze slowed as we approached, uncertain how to handle this. I gave her directions and we chased after my flying cloak, holding a straight, steady course while it circled around and approached us from behind. I grabbed upward with invisible tendrils, my cloak steered toward me and folded up… and Leisel landed in my arms, like a child in a blanket.

  She wheezed, shivering, and croaked two words in amazement.

  “Not right now,” I demurred. “Later, when we have more privacy and comfort than a wet field.”

  “What have you done?” she rasped, still shaking. Soaking wet and recently at ten thousand feet? I started to wonder about hypothermia as well as the sudden altitude changes. What’s the safe limit on a skydive without air tanks?

  “More than I should have, possibly, but what I felt needful. Can you ride?”

  “I’ll crawl if I have to.”

  I took the opportunity to examine her for injuries. Aside from a few burns and some breakage of smaller bones, it was mostly inconveniences and indignities, which did my temper no good whatsoever. Her high-altitude flight did her no lasting harm, merely gave her a profound sense of mortality. No doubt she was suffering from shock, but I can deal with shock. I did my magical first aid right there, holding her sideways on Bronze’s back.

  When she stopped shaking and settled down to mild shivering, I swung her around behind me and my cloak wrapped itself around my shoulders again. It settled over her, more than half-containing her, as it hung flat against my back. She either didn’t notice or refused to, since it did shield her from the wind and rain. I already had her in a heat-conserving spell, so she didn’t need it for insulation.

  Now that I think of it, maybe it should have stayed a cloak instead of a hole. It would have been more comforting, I think. At least it explains why she continued to shiver.

  I made some final gestures with my wand in the direction of Sarashda and the Temple, resetting and redirecting the energies in my spells. I thrust the wand into my belt again and we set off for the cave previously used for our arrival locus. It wasn’t strictly necessary for getting back, but I’d burned through most of my magical power budget and I wasn’t feeling my best.

  “What happened?” I asked, shouting over the rushing wind. She stayed crouched behind me, under my cloak, and shouted her own questions into my back.

  “Where? In the Temple?”

  “No. Yes. I mean, how did they get you? Then what did they want with you?”

  It wasn’t the best way to have a conversation, but between her explanation, Firebrand’s amplification, and a little deduction, I assembled a case to fit the facts.

  The prostitute class of the Empire typically wears purple. It’s the color of physical pleasure, apparently, but don’t ask me why. Of this whole class of society, some are exceptionally religious. Out of this smaller pool, a few are also somewhat experienced at killing individuals who are less than forthcoming, so to speak, when it comes to paying their fees. The Temple hired one of these—possibly one of the ones I suspected of being raised and indoctrinated by the Temples—to go forth and do me in most of the colloquial meanings. If she succeeded, great! If not…

  Unlike scrying spells, the spells to look through another person’s eyes are not blocked by a scryshield. Scrying involves a correspondence of spaces to transmit visual information in a light-based or psychic-based format. Linking minds to connect to someone else’s eyes is a purely psychic connection, not a space-correspondence connection.

  Not wanting to be detected, they didn’t look out through her when she went in through the scrying shield. They waited. Much later, after I locked the Temple’s prostitute—excuse me, the devout prostitute hired by the Temple, since they don’t grow their own—in the dungeon, someone made contact, just to see if she was still alive. Since she was, they used her eyes to take in the situation. Possibly even made some sort of mental contact with her to get a report. With this information, they decided it was likely I would come back and continue my interrogation.

  If you can’t search for your destination with a gate spell, you need some way to target your teleportation arrival point. I presume looking at it would work, even if it’s through someone else’s eyes. So, whatever method of non-spatial movement they used, they teleported one or ten wizards and warriors into the cell to rescue their bait, but mostly to wait in ambush.

  From a functional perspective, I think I would have left her there, put up an illusion of a wall on one side, and hid behind it. Once the cell door was closed, then we jump our target and make our getaway. Leisel wasn’t sure what happened, precisely, but it matched my guess.

  Since Leisel was the one to interrogate the prisoner, they settled for my chief lieutenant and put a trap on the door, hoping to kill me if I came to find Leisel.

  Leisel was taken back to the Temple, interrogated with mild torture, some deprivation, and spells. Since she has some training as a wizard, the spells were less effective than they hoped. The wizards casting them didn’t even consider the warrior might be as capable as another wizard in these matters—hooray for preconceptions and cultural blind spots! But the more mundane methods were continued for days on end until the weather took a turn for the worse. Then a spear from heaven suggested it might be wise to release her. Instead, they dragged her from the auxiliary building where they kept her and shoved her in front of the guy in charge of the local Temple—the branch manager, I suppose. He quizzed her about what she knew while the letters of lightning appeared in the sky, the Temple started to shiver, and the weather grew steadily worse. Eventually, he was angry and frightened enough to throw her out into the storm.

  Bronze pranced cheerily to a halt beside the shallow cave. I dismounted due to the height issue and helped Leisel down. In the semi-shelter of the cave, I also took a few moments to double-check her broken fingers and her general state of health. She was in no danger of dying, but it would take some time to get her up to full speed again.

  The mouth of the cave became and gate and we were home.

  Leisel wanted to get right to work. I nixed the idea. There was nothing requiring her instant attention. I had food put in front of her, ordered her to eat it, and eventually put her to bed. She wasn’t pleased. I didn’t care. She was spending the rest of the night resting and recovering if I had to put a sleep spell on her, which I did.

  I also spent an hour going over her, looking for anything and everything even vaguely hurt. I adjusted some previously-broken bones, did some fine work on both of the broken fingers, dealt with a couple of deep scars, and smoothed out and
streamlined anything I could. I set up a deep-work healing spell, patterned after some elf biology. Her body’s natural healing processes would take up more of her metabolic energy, although not as much as a full-on healing spell—those are for people in a hurry. Instead, it would link in and demand a more stringent quality control, making sure every cell division was more accurate, closer to perfect. I suspected it would extend her life, but I mainly wanted to see if it also prevented or reversed scarring. I tied it all up, nice and neat, and made sure it was set to draw power from around her, not from her own vital energies.

  When she turns eighty and doesn’t have a reason to complain about her joints, she can thank me. Then again, she’s a warrior. I’m not sure if she’ll want to do what Huron did, but she’ll have the option. At the very least, I’ve put the decision off for an extra decade or two.

  After my bedroom activities—bedside activities? Medical work in the bedroom—I did some more scrying and some note-taking on the Temple forces. They were next on my To Do list and I was looking for anything to think about besides the temptation. The Temples are practically begging me to turn them into rubble, but I’m trying so very hard not to give in to my baser impulses.

  So I spied on the troops. I needed to get a better feel for them, which involved a lot of watching. I don’t know if I learned a lot or not, but I did come away with some impressions. They don’t march, they trudge. Their logistics train is three times the size of what it should be—they tend to travel in style. A tent for every man, extensive cooking gear and food supplies, various creature comforts, even quite a few non-combat servants! Those sorts of things. They don’t have much of a wizard contingent, possibly for financial reasons, possibly for cultural ones—wizards aren’t warriors, after all. Their most heavily-armored fighters are in command, not in front. They’re willing to carry their tents and furniture on the remaining wagons, with enough food to last them until they can unload and send wagons back for more.