Firemaggot (Windrose Chronicles)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “You believe this guy?”

  “Does it matter?” Impatiently she yanked the foil off the box, opened it, thrust it at their guest. “Have you ever seen anything like this in this universe? Heard of anything like it?”

  “Hey, I’m not a scientist—”

  “You think a thing that did this to other animals – that devoured them into itself this way – wouldn’t have been on Wild Kingdom or some show like that? In the three weeks since we found this thing, I’ve been on the phone to every clipping-bureau and local weird-news newspaper between Pismo Beach and the Mexican border. I’ve hit every bulletin-board on GEnie, Delphi, on the ARPANet,FidoNet and UseNet systems, looking for mention of some kind of weird find like this, and I’ve found three, all of them in Southern California. Two were found within a week of this one. All of them were within a hundred and fifty miles of Los Padres National Forest, which is what’s due north of Misselthwaite Manor. Does it matter if we call it a mutandion or something else? Antryg’s seen them before, and he knows how they work. Does it matter where?”

  “It does if he’s making it all up.” Ricky had drawn back, and looked as if he were getting ready to leap to his feet and head for the door. “You show me a box of squirrel-bones and some other bits of stuff that don’t look anything like that picture—”

  “Quite right.” Antryg stood, and collected the box to return to the freezer. “And if you wish to return to Misselthwaite Manor and try to steer your friend into some kind of therapy for his personality change, Joanna and I certainly have no argument. But please – if you would – could you help us get into that maze? Because the creature that spawned this embryo—” He touched the box again, “—will spawn others like it, in appalling numbers. And it is almost certainly in that maze. It is drawing to it the minds of those nearest it, to increase its power, and to keep others away from it. It drew your friend’s. Very soon it will begin to draw yours.”

  “How do you—?” The guard stopped himself, clearly seeing his dilemma.

  You either believed Antryg, or you didn’t.

  “It will draw yours in dreams,” said Antryg gently, and Joanna saw the change in their visitor’s eyes. The shock, and then the fear.

  She asked, “You want to take both cars, or one?”

  *

  She was upstairs digging out a heavier sweater for herself when the yellow hallway-light darkened in the door behind her. “You don’t need to come,” said Antryg’s deep voice.

  She turned around, regarded him in the reflected 100-watt glare. “Neither do you, sweetheart.”

  He drew breath to reply, then let it out. Looking up into his beaky-nosed face, she found herself thinking, He’s forty-five years old. Since he was ten he’s been able to take charge of things because even then he was the most powerful wizard in the world.

  And now he’s not.

  He would have felt more at ease, if the Council of Wizards had cut off both his legs..

  His voice almost stammered over the words, as if they were unfamiliar to him. “I can’t let you—”

  She turned, and took his hand, almost twice the size of her own. “You can’t stop me.”

  “I—” And again, he let the rest of his breath go unused. Only stood looking down at her, naked helplessness in his eyes.

  And grief for what he could no longer do.

  Joanna thought about the thin, savage whine of the spawn’s wings in the darkness over their heads. About the way the squirrel’s bones had looked, liquefied and spongy where the thing’s head had dug its way through the skin. She had to take a few deep breaths of her own before she answered. “You don’t have magic anymore,” she said quietly. “I get that. But you still know what this mutandion thing is – this Firemaggot that The Daemon thought was his muse. You still have the knowledge.”

  “I know,” he said grimly. “And I know that I won’t be able to protect you from it.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  “You would if you’d ever dealt with one.”

  Since there was nothing else to say, Joanna retorted, “Says you,” and this brought back his grin. And then, more quietly, she asked, “Will you be all right?”

  He was a long time in answering. At last he whispered, “I don’t know.”

  She reached to put her hand on his wrist again. For a time neither spoke, for there was no more to it than that: that he was not what he had been, and was obliged regardless – because, she reflected wryly, that was what wizards did – to do what he had always done. Then his smile returned, tired and wry and daft as ever.

  “I suppose this is the night we find out.”

  When they came downstairs together – Joanna wadding her curly blond mane into a ponytail – Saldana was examining with gingerly care the sword that still lay on the table. “Is that a samurai sword?” he asked, as Antryg picked up his weapon again.

  “Of course.” Antryg unsheathed a few inches of razor-sharp blade. “I may be insane but I’m not stupid.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  Antryg widened his eyes at him. “I borrowed it from a samurai.”

  *

  Driving two cars – Antryg ahead in Ricky Saldana’s truck, Joanna following in the Mustang through the empty black of the Angeles National Forest in the dead of night – they reached the stone gateposts of Misselthwaite Manor at three-thirty in the morning. The moon had set. Saldana’s headlights showed up two other trucks on the gravel sweep in front of the house. When Joanna climbed out of her Mustang – her own weapon held ready - she saw that Antryg had his sword drawn, the old katana’s edge glimmering in the starlight. When the young guard had shut the gates behind them walked back, however, he made no comment. Joanna would have given much to have heard what Antryg had said to him on the drive.

  “I can’t raise either Che or Nagy.” Saldana slapped his mobile unit with the flat of his hand. From the license-plate on the three-quarter-ton red jimmy parked closest to the gate – GO NAGY – she assumed Officer Nagy was who Holdfast had sent in response to the young man’s call. “But the channel’s open.”

  “That may not have been such a good idea.” His left arm moving with gingerly stiffness, Antryg reached into his backpack on the truck-seat, and fished forth two pinwheels and a cat-toy of the fishing-pole variety, onto whose string he had tied three old-fashioned keys and a lamp-prism. “If you would stand over there for a moment, my dear – Ricky, over there—” He handed them each a pinwheel. “And watch out for—”

  Joanna yelled, “Incoming!” at the first flash of eyes in the darkness around the house but she thought Antryg had already dropped his cat-fisher and was turning. Saldana had his pistol out, tracking the three—dogs? They looked too small to be wolves—as they charged, but didn’t fire until they were within a few yards of Antryg. For her part, Joanna bolted for a spot far enough behind Antryg to be out of the way of his sword-arm, and he stepped forward as the first of the animals leapt for him. Saldana’s pistol crashed, Joanna had a flashing vision of staring wild eyes and snarling mouths.

  A yelp, the stink of the blood that bannered off the blade as it caught first one dog, then the third on the reverse-stroke – “Get behind me!”

  Since this was his first experience with Antryg in a crisis, Saldana just stood there, of course, looking around him at the night – waiting for another dog, probably, or for the ghost of The Daemon brandishing a flaming guitar. Something screeched insanely in the darkness over their heads and Antryg yelled, “Get down!” as a whirling ball of feathers and talons dropped out of the night and seized the guard’s face.

  Saldana yelled and fired again, panicky and ineffectual; Joanna heard him rather than saw, because she’d dropped to her knees in classic 1950s anti-nuclear-device defensive position and clasped her hands over the back of her neck. She peeked up in time to see the guard swat, scrape, thrash at whatever it was – owl or hawk – that was ripping at his eyes, as Antryg slashed again – a perfect katate kesagiri, Sensei Shimada woul
d have said, that avoided Saldana’s head by inches – and the two pieces of the bird dropped in a shower of blood.

  Saldana dropped then into duck-and-cover and stayed there while Antryg crouched over him, sword drawn, listening. Then the wizard reached down and picked up the dropped cat-fisher, and held it up for a moment, glimmering in the starlight. Joanna saw the line with its keyes and its prism begin to slowly swing.

  Antryg straightened, blood-shook the sword and wiped the blade before sheathing it again. “Are you all right?”

  Saldana gasped out the incoherent obscenities of semi-shock as Joanna ran over to them and pulled the med-kit out of the backpack.

  “Look at me—” There didn’t seem to be any reason not to use the big flashlight to examine the gouges in the young man’s cheeks and forehead. Whoever was in the maze obviously knew he had company. “You got one,” she added, nodding toward the dead dogs. “Poor things—”

  “Coyotes.” He sounded a little more himself, though it clearly cost him something. “You see ‘em all the time around the garbage. But they never attack—”

  “Nor would they,” said Antryg, “if the thing in the maze didn’t know we were here. The same with the bird – a red-tailed hawk, I think.” He touched the bloodied feathers with the toe of his boot. “Do you want to stay in the truck?” he asked, as Saldana got to his feet.

  “Hell, no! I seen the movies – it’s always the guy who stays behind in the truck who gets lunched.”

  Antryg grinned. “Good man.”

  Saldana picked up the backpack. When Joanna reached to take it he said, “What, you think I’m gonna make you carry it on your head and walk ten paces behind us, too?” and she laughed. And to Antryg, “So, you gonna use magic on that thing in there?”

  “Well, that’s the awkward part of all this,” admitted Antryg. “Unfortunately, magic doesn’t work in your universe.”

  “So what, you were just wearing your Anti-Coyote-League t-shirt or something?”

  “Most magic,” he amended. “My magic, at any rate. And as you notice, at least outside the maze, the mutandion has to work with altering the minds of the inhabitants of the outer world: the coyotes, the hawk, and – unfortunately – your friend Officer Esparza. Inside it may be a different story.”

  “You mean it—” Saldana caught himself, as if Antryg’s words had finally sunk in. “Look, man, if Che comes at us, you’re not going to – I mean, you wouldn’t use that thing on him—” He nodded at the sword.

  For someone with a reputation in his own world for deviousness, Antryg had a tendency to be naïvely truthful at the most awkward times. “I don’t want to have to,” he said. (Well, reflected Joanna resignedly, Ricky probably wouldn’t believe, Certainly not! How can you think such a thing?) And when the guard opened his mouth in furious protest, he went on, “Which is why we need to find our little friend and dispose of it as quickly as possible.”

  At the gate Antryg turned back to watch behind them, sword held ready, while Saldana unlocked the silly quasi-medieval iron-studded gates.

  “And if it’s got magic and you don’t,” asked Joanna softly, knotting one end of a reel of kite-string to the gate-post, “how we gonna do that, Kimo-sabe?”

  Antryg sighed. “I honestly haven’t the slightest idea. Onward and upward?”

  “Onward and upward.”

  *

  The first body lay about a hundred feet from the gate. The gate itself opened onto a transverse aisle, fronted with what had probably at one time been a wall of neatly-trimmed hedge – probably clipped into an ornamental arch that housed a statue, whose empty eye-sockets stared bleakly from the overgrown masses of inky shadow and leaves. Antryg sheathed his sword, removed his gloves, and held one hand – long fingers outspread – near the tangled wall of foliage, first to the right of the gate, then, crossing over, to the left. The aisle itself was nearly obscurred by the unkempt shrubs that formed the maze’s walls, what had once been wide, gravelled paths choked down to traces. He plucked a sprig of the nearest hedge, sniffed it, and whispered, “Yew. The tree the Druids planted at tombs, to guide the dead.”

  “What’s that sound?” Joanna whispered, and Antryg looked at her sidelong, in a way that told her that he heard nothing.

  But Saldana replied, “It’s moving. Behind the bushes.”

  But that wasn’t what Joanna heard.

  Antryg slid sword from scabbard again, and turned to the right. Ricky’s flashlight showed up where the body lay, down the first leftward-leading aisle. “What the—?”

  Antryg, after a moment’s hesitation, went to it, the others staying close behind. Joanna, too, knew what happened to whoever was bringing up the rear in any maze or maze-like environment in every horror-movie ever filmed, with the exception of the original The Maze (1953) itself.

  “Is that your homeless squatter?”

  “I don’t see how it could be. This guy’s been dead longer than since May.” With the barrel of the pistol he carried, the guard touched the dried and sunken skin of the outstretched hand. “Looks like a year, year and a half—”

  “Which brings up the question,” murmured Antryg, “of why neither you nor your partner – nor any of the other guards on the other watches – ever smelled him?” He stood, and looked back down the overgrown aisle, where Joanna’s kite-string disappeared into the darkness. “Where was The Daemon’s body found?”

  Saldana nodded toward the blackness that lay in the other direction. “About ten feet from here.”

  “Was he coming out—” Antryg’s boot-toe gently nudged the huddled shape before them, the arms in the decaying coatsleeves reaching toward the corner they had just turned, “—or going in?”

  “Going in.”

  Joanna said, “Right,” and reached back to shift her own weapon to the fore on its sling.

  Saldana whispered, “You gonna spray for bugs?” and Joanna replied,

  “Yeah. You saw the snapshots.”

  “And that’s gonna stop ‘em?” He stared disbelievingly at the old-fashioned pump-sprayer, slung on its strap around her shoulder.

  “Most demons are susceptible to silver,” pointed out Antryg. “Aqueous silver nitrate is fairly easy to obtain and won’t hurt a human – unlike silver bullets, for instance—”

  “Or your sword?”

  “Or my sword.” He grinned like a jack-o-lantern. “What did The Daemon die of?”

  “The police report said probable heart-failure,” replied Saldana. “But he was only thirty, for Chrissake. He had four refridgerators full of health-food, but he was starved down to a hundred and fifteen pounds. That would have done it. But it was hard to tell,” he went on, “because when they found the body – he’d been missing for like two days - something… coyotes, birds, whatever – ate off all the flesh of his face and hands. When they found him, it was just bone. Would this mutant-thing we’re looking for have done that? I mean, is that what they do?”

  Antryg said softly, “No. It wouldn’t have killed its protector. Which means that—”

  He turned sharply at the whirring of wings. Joanna spun, too, weapon to the fore, and in the dim yellow glare of the flashlight glimpsed the thing she had seen, three weeks ago, in her bedroom, that had caused her to – in between her grim search of bulletin-boards and clipping-bureaux – purchase a new mattress and new bedding and take to the dump those on which Chainsaw had deposited her prey. In its original form – without the twisted and misshapen body of the squirrel that it had been in the process of devouring – it was about the length of her own small hand, a gleaming aquamarine blue with wings like barbed silver foil that made a queer, musical rattling when it flew. She quelled her first panicky instinct to fire, tracking it as the flashlight beam picked it up, waited until it landed on an outthrust branch of a hedge before she sprayed—

  And had the relieved pleasure of seeing the thing spasm and flop, dissolving, to the ground a yard beyond Antryg’s feet.

  “Holy crap!” breathed Saldana.
“It really does work! Good shot, lady!” Then he frowned, watching as the last fragments of the spawn melted into bluish goo on the ground in the puddles of glistening silver-black. “What’s that?” The beam moved a few feet further on, picked up a dark glister beneath the overhanging boughs. Hesitantly, the guard walked forward, knelt: touched the blackish dust and brought up to the light fingers darkened and queerly sparkling.

  “At a guess,” said Antryg softly, “it’s silver dust of some kind. We can take some back and test it – look, here’s more of it. This is where the body was found, wasn’t it? This very spot?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.” Saldana straightened up, looked around. “That was six years ago, and I don’t think these hedges have been clipped or any kind of work’s been done here since then. It was around here, but I can’t tell in the dark.”

  They moved on, into blackness thickly scented with roses and datura and the smells of drying leaves. Straining her ears for the silvery rattle of the flying spawn, Joanna found herself plagued again by the sensation of whispering, of fragments of barely-comprehended voices yammering just beyond the range of hearing, then dying away…

  “Do you think he knew it was here?” she whispered, to take her mind from the sounds. “I mean, do you think he became its protector consciously?”

  “He did a lot of drugs,” pointed out Saldana. “He could have been having tea with the thing three times a week and forgot about it completely the next morning.”

  “Not completely,” Angryg murmured, as they stepped through a gap in the hedges, and Saldana’s flashlight-beam glistened on a sudden round clearing whose floor sparkled harshly, eerily. “Consciously or unconsciously, the mutandion was instructing him in building a geo-sourced occult resonance-field—”

  “Is that broken glass?”

  “It should be.” Antryg consulted his map.

  “What do you mean, It should be? That’s looney.”