“Are you saying you’d rather have been born a hunchback? Maybe with no hair and one eye set higher than the other?”
“No.” Some of the anger left her. “No, of course not. I just could have done with a little less of everything physical, I suppose.”
“Asi es la vida,” he said quietly.
“Si, es verdad.” She sat down on the grass again, crossing her legs. “There’s nothing I can do about it. But here”—and she gestured at the dark forest and the huge serpentine shape coiled nearby—“here things are different. Here my height and size are helpful and people, furry or human, seem to accept me as a person instead of a sex object.”
“Don’t rely on that,” he warned her. “For example our otter friend Mudge seems to have no compunctions whatsoever about crossing interspecies lines. Nor do very many others, from what I’ve seen.”
“Well, so far they’ve accepted me as a warrior more than a toy. If that’s due to my size more than my personality, at least it’s a start.” She lay down and stretched languorously. The fire seemed to spread from the burning embers to Jon-Tom’s loins.
“Here I have a chance to be more than what heredity seemed to have locked me into. And it’s like my childhood dreams of adventure.”
“People get killed here,” he warned her. “This is no fairyland. You make a mistake, you die.”
She rolled over. It was a warm winter night and her cape was blanket enough. “I’ll take my chances. It can’t be any worse than the barrio. Good night, Jon-Tom. Remember, when in Rome …”
He kicked dirt over the fire until it subsided and wished he were in Rome, or any other familiar place. All he said was, “Good night, Flor. Pleasant dreams.” Then he rolled over and sought sleep. The night was pleasant, but his thoughts were troubled.
The following day found them climbing and descending much hillier terrain. Trees were still plentiful, but on the higher knolls they tended to be smaller and with more land between. Occasionally bare granite showed where the ground cover had thinned, though they were still traveling through forest.
And the gneechees were back. Even when Jon-Tom was not strumming his duar, swarms of almost-theres were clustering thickly around the little party of travelers.
He explained to Flor about gneechees. She was delighted at the concept and spent hours trying to catch one with her eyes. Talea mumbled worriedly about their inexplicable presence. Clothahump would have none of it.
“There is no room in magic for superstition, young lady,” the turtle admonished her. “If you would learn more about the world you must disabuse yourself of such primitive notions.”
“I’ve seen primitive notions kill a lot of people,” she shot back knowingly. “I don’t mean to question you, but I bet you’d be the last person to say that we know everything there is to know.”
“That is so, child,” agreed the wizard. “If the latter were true we would not be making our way to this glade.” He snapped irritably at Pog. The bat was diving and swooping above their heads.
“You know you’ll never catch one, Pog. You can’t even see one.”
“Yeah. Dey don’t even react to my headseek either.” He snapped at empty air where something might have been.
“Then why do you persist?”
“Gives me somethin’ ta do, as opposed ta idly dancin’ in da air currents. But dat’s a thrill you’ll never know, ain’t it?”
“Do not be impertinent, Pog.” The wizard directed Talea to stop. He dismounted, looked around. “We walk from now on.”
Packages and supplies were doled out, stuffed into backpacks. Then they started uphill. The rise they were ascending was slight but unvarying. It grew dark, and for a while they matched strides with the mounting moon. Clouds masked its mournful silver face.
“We are close, close,” Clothahump informed them much later. The moon was around toward the west now. “I have sensed things.”
“Yeah, I just bet ya have, boss,” the bat muttered under his breath. He snapped hungrily at a passing glass moth.
If the wizard had heard, he gave no sign. In fact, he spent the next two hours in complete silence, staring straight ahead. No conversational gambit could provoke a response from him.
A subtle tingling like the purr of a kitten began to tickle Jon-Tom’s spine. Tall trees closed tight around them once again, ranks of dark green spears holding off the threatening heavens. Stars peeked through the clouds, looking dangerously near.
A glance showed Talea looking around nervously. She reacted to his gaze, nodded. “I feel it also, Jon-Tom. Clothahump was right. This is an ancient part of the world we are coming to. It stinks of power.”
Clothahump moved nearer to Jon-Tom. Clouds of gneechees now dogged the climbers. “Can you feel it, my boy? Does it not tease your wizardly senses?”
Jon-Tom looked around uneasily, aware that something was playing his nerves as he would play the strings of the duar. “I feel something, sir. But whether it’s magical influences or just back trouble I couldn’t say.”
Clothahump looked disappointed. Somewhere an anxious night hunter was whistling to its mate. There were rustlings in the brush, and Jon-Tom noted that the hidden things were moving in the same direction: back the way the climbers had come.
“You are not fully attuned to the forces, I expect,” said the wizard, unnaturally subdued, “so I suppose I should not expect more of you.” He looked ahead and then gestured pridefully.
“We have arrived. One corner of the subatomic forces that bind the matter of all creatures of all the world lies here. Look and remember, Jon-Tom. The glade of Triane.”
XIII
THEY HAD CRESTED the last rise. Ahead lay an open meadow that at first glance was not particularly remarkable. But it seemed that the massive oaks and sycamores that ringed it like the white hair of an old man’s balding skull drew back from that open place, shunning the grass and curves of naked stone that occasionally thrust toward the sky.
Here the moonlight fell unobstructed upon delicate blue blades. A few darker boulders poked mushroomlike heads above the uneven lawn.
“Stop here,” the wizard ordered them.
They gratefully slid free of packs and weapons, piled them behind a towering tree that spread protective branches overhead.
“We have one chance to learn the nature of the great new evil the Plated Folk have acquired. I cannot penetrate all the way to Cugluch with any perceptive power. No magic I know of can do that.
“But there is another way. Uncertain, dangerous, but worthy of an attempt to utilize, I think. If naught else it could give us absolute confirmation of the Plated Folk’s intentions, and we may learn something of their time schedule. That could be equally as valuable.
“You cannot help me. No matter what happens here, no matter what may happen to me, you must not go beyond this point.” No one said anything. He turned, looked up into the tree. “I need you now, Pog.”
“Yes, Master.” The bat sounded subdued and quite unlike his usual argumentative self. He dropped free, hovered expectantly above the wizard’s head as the two conversed.
“What’s he going to try?” Talea wondered aloud. Her red hair turned to cinnabar in the moonlight.
“I don’t know.” Jon-Tom watched in fascination as Clothahump readied himself. Flor had the collar of her cape pulled tight up around her neck. Mudge’s ears were cocked forward intently, one paw holding him up against the tree trunk.
From beneath the leaf-shadowed safety of the ancient oak they watched as the wizard carefully marked out a huge ellipse in the open glade. The fluorescent white powder he was using seemed to glow with a life of its own.
Employing the last of the powder, he drew a stylized sun at either end of the ellipse. Red powder was then used to make cryptic markings on the grass. These connected the two suns and formed a crude larger ellipse outside the first.
“If I didn’t know better,” Flor whispered to Jon-Tom, “I’d think he was laying out some complex higher e
quations.”
“He is,” Jon-Tom told her. “Magic equations.” She started to object and he hushed her. “I’ll explain later.”
Now Clothahump and Pog were creating strange, disturbing shapes in the center of the first ellipse. The shapes were not pleasant to look upon, and they appeared to move across the grass and stone of their own volition. But the double ellipse held them in. From time to time the wizard would pause and use a small telescope to study the cloudy night sky.
It had been a windless night. Now a breeze sprang up and pushed at the huddling little knot of onlookers. It came from in front of them and mussed Jon-Tom’s hair, ruffled the otter’s fur. Despite the warmth of the night the breeze was cold, as though it came from deep space itself. Branches and leaves and needles blew outward, no matter where their parent trees were situated. The breeze was not coming from the east, as Jon-Tom had first thought, but from the center of the glade. It emerged from the twin ellipses and blew outward in all directions as if the wind itself were trying to escape. Normal meteorological conditions no longer existed within the glade.
Clothahump had taken a stance in the center of the near sun drawing. They could hear his voice for the first time, raised in chant and invocation. His short arms were above his head, and his fingers made mute magic-talk with the sky.
The wind strengthened with a panicky rush, and the woods were full of zephyrgossip. These moans and warnings swirled in confusion around the watchers, who drew nearer one another without comment.
A black shape rejoined them, fighting the growing gale. Pog’s eyes were as wide as his wing beats were strained.
“You’re all ta stay right where ya are,” he told them, raising his voice to be heard over the frightened wind. “Da Master orders it. He works his most dangerous magic.” Selecting a long hanging limb, the famulus attached himself to it and tucked his wings cloaklike around his body.
“What is he going to do?” Talea asked. “How can he penetrate all the way to Cugluch through the walls of sorcery this Eejakrat must guard himself with?”
“Da Master makes magic,” was all the shivering assistant would say. A wing tip pointed fretfully toward the open glade.
The wind continued to increase. Flor drew her cape tight around her bare shoulders while Mudge fought to retain possession of his feathered cap. Large branches bent outward, and occasional snapping sounds rose above the gale to hint at limbs bent beyond their strength to resist. Huge oaks groaned in protest all the way down to their roots.
“But what is he trying to do?” Talea persisted, huddling in the windbreak provided by the massive oak.
“He summons M’nemaxa,” the terrified apprentice told her, “and I don’t intend ta look upon it.” He drew his wings still closer about him until his face as well as his body was concealed by the leathery cocoon.
“M’nemaxa’s a legend. It don’t exist,” Mudge protested.
“He does, he does!” came the whimper from behind the wings. “He exist and da Master summon him, oh, he call to him even now. I will not look on it.”
Jon-Tom put his lips close to Talea in order to be heard over the wind. “Who or what’s this ‘Oom-ne-maxa’?”
“Part of a legend, part of the legends of the old world.” She leaned hard against the bark. “According to legend it’s the immortal spirit of all combined in a single creature, a creature that can appear in any guise it chooses. Some tales say he/she may actually have once existed in real form. Other stories insist that the spirit is kept alive from moment to moment only by the belief all wizards and sorceresses and witches have in it.
“To touch it is said to be death, to look upon it without wizardly protection is said to invite a death slower and more painful. The first death is from burning, the second from a rotting away of the flesh and organs.”
“We’ll be safe, we’ll be safe,” insisted Pog hopefully. “If da Master says so, we’ll be safe.” Jon-Tom had never seen the bellicose mammal so cowed.
“But I still won’t look on it,” Pog continued. “Master says da formulae and time-space ellipsoids will hold him. If not … if dey fail and it is freed, Master says we should run or fly and we will be safe. We are not worthy of its notice, Master say, and it not likely to pursue.”
A delicate gray phosphorescence had begun to creep like St. Elmo’s fire up the trunks and branches of the trees ringing the glade. Argent silhouettes now glowed eerily against the black night. The glade had become a green bowl etched with silver filigree. Earth shivered beneath it.
“Can this thing tell Clothahump what he wants to know?” Jon-Tom was less skeptical of the wizard’s abilities than was Pog.
“It know all Time and Space,” replied the bat. “It can see what da Master wants to know, but dat don’t mean it gonna tell him.”
There was a hushed, awed murmur of surprise from the otter. “Cor! Would you ’ave a look at that.”
“I won’t, I won’t!” mewed Pog, shaking behind his wings.
Clothahump still stood erect within his sun symbol. As he turned a slow circle, arms still upraised, he was reciting a litany counterpointed by the chorus of the ground. Earth answered his words though he talked to the stars.
Dark, boiling storm clouds, thick black mountains, had assembled over the glade with unnatural haste. They danced above the wind-bent trees and blotted out the friendly face of the moon. From time to time electric lava jumped from one to another as they talked the lightning-talk.
Winds born of hurricane and confusion now assaulted the ancient trees. Jon-Tom lay on the ground and clung to the arched root of the sage-oak. So did Talea and Mudge, while Pog swayed like a large black leaf above them. Flor nestled close to Jon-Tom, though neither’s attention was on the other. Branches and leaves shot past them, fleeing from the glade.
None of the swirling debris struck the chanting wizard. The winds roared down into the double ellipse, then outward, but avoided the sun symbol. Above the center of the glade the billowing storm clouds jigged round and round each other in a majestic whirlpool of energy and moisture.
Lightning leapt earthward to blister the ground. No bolt struck near Clothahump, though two trees were shattered to splinters not far away.
Somehow, above the scream of wind, of too close thunder and the howling vortex that now dominated the center of the glade, they could still hear the steady voice of Clothahump. Trying to shield his eyes from flying dirt and debris, Jon-Tom clung tightly to the tree root and squinted at the turtle.
The wizard was turning easily within his proscribed symbol. He appeared completely unaffected by the violent storm raging all around him. The sun symbol was beginning to glow a deep orange.
Clothahump halted. His hands slowly lowered until they were pointing toward the small heap of powders in the center of the inner ellipse. He recited, slowly and with great care, a dozen words known only to a very few magicians and perhaps one or two physicists.
The ancient oak shuddered. Two smaller trees nearby were torn free of the earth and hurled into the sky. There was a mighty, rumbling crescendo of sound that culminated in a volcanic rumble from the glade, and a brief flash of light that fortunately no one looked at directly.
The shape that appeared out of that flash within the inner ellipse took away what little breath remained to Jon-Tom and his companions. He could not have moved his knuckles to his mouth to chew on them, nor could his vocal cords give form to the feelings surging through him.
Soft, eerie moans came from Flor and a slight, labored whistling from Mudge. All were motionless, paralyzed by the sight of M’nemaxa, whose countenance transfigures continents and whose hoofbeats can alter the orbits of worlds.
Within the inner ellipse was a ferociously burning shape. The form M’nemaxa had chosen to appear in was akin to all the horses that had ever been, and yet was not. He showed himself this time as a stallion with great wings that beat at the air more than sixty feet from tip to body. Even so the spirit shape could not be more than partially solid. I
t was formed of small solar prominences bound together in the form of a horse. Red-orange flames trailed from tail and mane, galloping hooves and majestic wings, to trail behind the form and flicker out in the night.
Actually the constantly shed shards of sunmeat vanished when they reached the limits imposed by the double ellipse, disappeared harmlessly into a thermonuclear void only Clothahump could understand. Though wings tore at the fabric of space and flaming hooves galloped over the plane of existence, the spirit stallion remained fixed with the boundaries of sorceral art.
There was no hint of fading. For every flaming streamer that fell and curled from the equine inferno, new fire appeared to keep the shape familiar and intact, as M’nemaxa continuously renewed his substance. A pair of fiery tusks descended from the upper jaw of the not quite perfect horse shape, and pointed teeth burned within jaws of flame.
Among all that immense length of horsehell, a living stallion sun whose breath would have incinerated Apollo, there were only two things not composed of the ever regenerating eternal fire—eyes as chillingly cold as the rest was unimaginably hot.
The eyes of the stallion-spirit M’nemaxa were dragonfly eyes, great black curving orbs that almost met atop the skull. They were far too large for a normal horse shape, but that was only natural. Through the still angry cyclone, Jon-Tom thought he could see within those all-seeing spheres of black tiny points of light; purple and red, green, blue, and purest white that stood out even against the perpetual fusion that constituted the body shape.
Though he could not know it, those eyes were fragments of the Final Universe, the greater one which holds within it our own universe as well as thousands of others. Galaxies drifted within the eyes of M’nemaxa.
Now a long snake tongue flicked out, a flare from the surface of a living horse star. It tasted of dimensions no puny creature of flesh could ever hope to sample. It arched back its massive flaming head and whinnied. It stunned the ears and minds of the tiny organic listeners. The earth itself trembled, and behind the clouds the moon drew another thousand miles away in its orbit. Rarely was so immense an eminence brought within touch of a mere single world.
The Spellsinger Adventures Volume One: Spellsinger, the Hour of the Gate, and the Day of the Dissonance Page 20