The Otherworld

by Mercedes Lackey

  His first instinct was to fling himself into the midst—to save the little ones from the swords, the arrows—

  But he was only one. And they were wielding Death Metal.

  A stronger instinct—that of survival—overcame his initial impulse. He could grieve later that he had been unable to act. Great Danaa, I have to run! They'll just as quickly kill me!

  And he did run, with a desperation and speed he didn't think was possible. Even the Salamander couldn't have inspired that run, he would later think. But that was many years and miles later. . . . Perhaps it was my own conscience I was trying to outdistance?

  * * *

  Alinor struggled to sit up. He hadn't realized he'd almost nodded off on the tree bough until he'd teetered, and the sudden shift in gravity urged him awake. The Sidhe looked down at the ground, seeing gravel and fallen oak leaves instead of sand, wondering briefly why he didn't hear waves washing over a beach.

  Time check. This is the twentieth century now, he thought, wondering why he suddenly felt so exhausted. I must have gone into a light Dream, he decided, still shaking the confusion. Down on the ground, in the compound of Brother Joseph's domain, soldiers stood guard, but instead of Turks waving bloodied swords, radical Christian crazies waved AK-47s and AR-15s.

  Even after nearly a thousand years, it's amazing how some things simply don't change for these humans. The elf's thoughts turned grim, however, when he remembered what else was inside the Chosen Ones' complex.

  Something that wasn't human at all.

  What he saw the Salamander doing with Jamie was much more subtle than its crude manipulations back in 1096, when it simply reached out for young, flexible minds and started brawls in a tavern. Or, on a larger scale, when it possessed the thousands of peasants during Peter the Hermit's crusade, inciting them to go forth and reclaim the Holy Land for Pope Urban II. No, not now; the times had changed dramatically since then. A fine degree of stealth was required to operate in this modern world, where communications were instantaneous, and strong, central governments had formed, accompanied by equally strong and effective law enforcement.

  To be a Salamander, one still had to find niches, gaps in the fabric of society to operate in relative freedom. Gaps like Pawnee County.

  And niches like Jamie.

  Alinor seethed as he began to piece together the creature's true nature; not only did it need a place where laws were not easily enforced, it chose a vehicle, a resilient vehicle, far younger than the brash, sword-toting hotbloods led by the Pope. He remembered the effect the child had had on the Praise Meeting crowd, saw it for more than the stage show he had thought it was. Using Jamie, the creature had seized control of those people just as surely as it had seized control of the crusaders, using religious hate and intolerance as the catalyst.

  The girl, with as much skill as she's showing in the spirit world, must have had a medium's abilities before she passed over. Didn't Cindy say something about Jamie being sensitive? This would explain why he was chosen, and kidnaped, instead of Brother Joseph using one of the other kids who were already in the cult. The Salamander is now speaking through its vehicle, baiting its followers directly with wealth and power, something I don't remember it doing before.

  I think we are all in deep, deep trouble.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Al closed his eyes, and reminded himself that not even an elven warrior and magician could take on an entire army of humans single-handedly. He was not a movie hero, or a superman, who could charge through waves of men with machine guns. If his captors had planned to keep the boy protected against elven meddling, they could not have chosen better. He was walled away from the outside by Cold Iron; to get at him, Al would have to go inside one of the steel-sided bunkers and past several iron-reinforced walls. His magic couldn't hold up under that; iron pulled Sidhe spells awry.

  And he had no real-world proof that the boy was there, nothing he could bring to Deputy Casey to invoke the human authorities. They needed evidence in order to act; a change in human legal process that now turned out to be a hindrance. Used to be, we could stir up a population to do just about anything, just by convincing them that what we said was the truth. Damn nuisance, this need of hard evidence for due process, sometimes. Still, it means there is no room for doubt—guilty is guilty this way.

  In point of fact, there was very little he could do, either with his own powers, or with the humans'. First of all, there was the Salamander; his powers were not equal to taking it on. He had never been one of the greater warriors of the Folk; he'd never been one of the more powerful mages. His success these days lay in his adaptability to the humans' world.

  There was nothing he had learned in all of the centuries since he had first encountered such a creature that could be used to counter it. Nothing. In fact, all he had learned was that he didn't want to meet it on its own ground. And this, without a doubt, was the creature's own ground. The last time he'd seen a Salamander, he'd turned tail and had run away. The second time, he'd headed for the nearest walled fortress. But this time he couldn't run.

  He ground his teeth together in frustration. Up until now, whenever he'd had to pull a rescue, it had been a fairly simple operation. He would find the child in question, spirit it away from its parents, take it Underhill, and one of the others would cover his tracks.

  Quick. Easy. Painless.

  So all right, what can I do? he asked himself, angry at his impotence. How can I at least give the poor little lad a respite? Give them something else to think about?

  First, he had to calm himself; find the quiet place deep inside himself where his power lay.

  He took two long, slow breaths. By the time he exhaled the second, he had achieved the calm he needed. He called up his mage-sight, and opened his inner eyes on the world.

  Everywhere he looked, Cold Iron thwarted him, standing like dull, barbed barriers against his Sight. This was the Death Metal at its worst; if his power touched it, the metal would drain energy from him, spinning his spell-traces away into shreds too fine for him to collect back. It would be very difficult to insinuate his powers into this stronghold in anything other than a passive manner. Cold Iron protected their machineries, their storage places, themselves—even their weapons were of Death Metal. And here was an unpleasant surprise. Even some of the bullets were sheathed in it. Now he not only had to fear a direct hit, but a grazing hit might poison him.

  But wait—he extended his senses a little further, frowning with concentration. A headache began just at each temple, but he would not let it distract him, reaching a little further into the maze of threatening metal and humanity.

  Everywhere there was Cold Iron, there was also something else that might provide an insidious pathway for Al's power to penetrate Brother Joseph's citadel; a network of copper tendrils weaving through the complex in an elaborate network of support. The electrical wiring system, of course; it hummed with the power coursing through it, and was as obedient to Al's touch as the Cold Iron was hostile.

  A frail enough pathway, and one that had severe limitations, but it was better than nothing.

  Perhaps Al didn't know a great deal about ordinary, day-to-day living for humans—but he knew electrical systems and knew them very well. He'd amused himself long ago with his "playing with lightning," but tonight there was nothing funny about it. He sent a little tendril of power questing curiously along the network, testing it, seeing where it went, how it was constructed. This system was mostly new, and all of it was less than five years old. Humans tended to distrust the very new, or the very old; this network of wiring was neither. They wouldn't be expecting any troubles out of it. And they depended on the electricity it carried so completely that he found himself smiling grimly.

  He explored further. There weren't any voltage regulators except on the main circuit breaker; even the computers had only the simplest of surge protectors on them. Those would protect against sudden surges; they wouldn't protect against something a little more—subtle.
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  Al opened his mind and his magic to encompass the entire system, holding it in his metaphorical "hands" like a cat's cradle. Then, slowly, he began decreasing the resistance of the wiring across the entire network.

  This was the sort of thing that happened naturally with age and generally never caused any harm. But then, few people ever had the voltage regulators that maintained the level of power in their systems fail on them.

  Soon the system was running "hot"; capable of carrying voltage of around 140 instead of 110. Which didn't matter, since 110 was all it was getting. Of course, that was about to change.

  Al carefully skirted the iron clips and bolts around the aluminum main breaker box, and adjusted voltages at it. Slowly, so no surge protectors would trip. Eventually he brought the voltage all the way up to what the system would carry—and there were few pieces of equipment here meant to operate on 140 volts.

  Now motors would run faster, burning themselves out. Electrical circuits would overload and blow. Computer equipment would be fried. But none of this would happen all at once; a lot would depend on how delicate the equipment was. Whatever; they would have to replace everything that burned out—then the replacements would fail—again and again, until they thought to check voltages. They would have to replace every bit of wiring before he was through, from the breaker boxes outward. They wouldn't discover this until they had lost several more machines and had replaced everything else. This meddling was going to cost the cult a lot of money. And time, and trouble; unfortunately, it would not be as difficult to pull the wiring as it was in a normal building, but it would be troublesome enough, and they would have to do without power in the entire circuit while they replaced the wires.

  If something happened that forced them to use their emergency generator, it would all happen that much faster. Al took out the voltage regulator entirely on it. Power levels would fluctuate wildly as pumps and air-conditioners came on- and off-line.

  He contemplated his work with satisfaction. Already, all of the electric motors in the complex were running a little faster. Pressure was building in some equipment, several water-pumps, for instance.

  Hmm. They are using common white plastic pipe. There is no more resistance to my magic than wood or leather would give. A little weakening of the pipes at the joints . . .

  There. In a few moments, the joints would burst, at least in those portions of pipe that were under pressure. There was some kind of elaborate arrangement in one corner, for instance, that was going to go up like a water festival before too long.

  Using his magic—finally doing something—had cooled his temper enough that he could think again. With luck, the fanatics would be so hard-pressed for money by his sabotage that they would act hastily, perhaps get caught by the police. It occurred to him that the more havoc he could wreak that Brother Joseph himself would have to attend to, the more likely it would be that the bastard would believe some outside supernatural force was opposing him.

  Of course, it is. And for once in his life, he will be right.

  When that happened, Brother Joseph would be kept so busy trying to find the source of the interference that he would have little time for anything else.

  He might leave the boy unguarded, or relatively unguarded. At the least he would leave the child alone, give him a chance to recover. If Al could not get in, perhaps the boy could escape on his own.

  So, it was up to Al to make Brother Joseph's life as miserable as possible. This, of course, would make Al's life infinitely more pleasurable. A man has to have a hobby he enjoys.

  He only wished he could tell the boy's mother about this—that he could tell her he knew for certain that Jamie was here. But if he did, not only would he betray that there was something supernatural about himself, he might inadvertently tempt her into going into danger to save her child.

  No. No, for all that it would comfort her, he could not tell her Jamie was here. Not until he had something more concrete to offer her than that information alone.

  So, back to work. How about a bit of blockage in some of the pipes that are not under pressure? That should be amusing. He knew those pipes that were attached to pumps, but the rest—only that they carried water. The Cold Iron interfered with his perceptions too much to be more specific than that. Right now Al could not tell whether the pipes took fresh water into the complex, or waste-water away, but in either case, there would be problems if he blocked the pipes—say, by reaching out, just so, and touching the pipes to make them malleable, then—pinching them, and letting them harden.

  There. That should do it. Not all at once—but like the electrical failures, these should cascade.

  He withdrew his senses—carefully. He couldn't detect the Salamander, but that didn't mean it didn't have ways of watching the world from wherever it was hiding. More than Cold Iron, he feared it.

  I couldn't defeat it back then; I don't think I can do so now. The best way to deal with it for the moment is to avoid it. It can do nothing without human help and a human to work through.

  He considered what he had accomplished, as he molded himself to the trunk of the tree he had chosen and scanned the area for more guards.

  Another pair of them passed about twenty feet away from his tree, peering from time to time through something attached to the top of their rifles. It wasn't until after they had passed that he realized what those instruments must have been.

  Nightscopes.

  He belatedly recognized them from the action-adventure movies he'd watched over the years, in city after city, racetrack after racetrack, late at night when the humans slept and there was little for him to do.

  Nightscopes: instruments that gave humans the ability to see like an owl or one of the Sidhe at night. He wasn't exactly certain how they worked—but he shivered, realizing that the only reason the men had missed sighting him was that they simply hadn't been looking through the nightscopes when they passed him.

  And what would they have done if they'd seen him?

  The answer to that question didn't take a lot of reasoning. They'd empty those clips into him without a second thought.

  No illusion he knew of would fool nightscopes—

  But he could reproduce—on purpose—what had occurred by accident.

  He closed his eyes again and took a deep, deep breath, and as he exhaled, he pushed the outermost layer of his shields, expanding it outwards, slowly, until it reached about thirty feet from where he sat. Then, within that shell, he set a compulsion: don't look at me.

  It was just that simple. Once guards reached the perimeter of his defenses, they simply would not be able to look in his direction. Any further away, and the trees would hide him, even from the sophisticated scope. He wasn't worried about Andur; if the guards saw the elvensteed, they'd simply assume he was a stray horse. They could try to catch him, of course, but the operative word was try. Andur would happily lead them a merry chase over half of the county before vanishing to return to Alinor.

  Feeling a little more secure, he turned his attention back to the Chosen Ones' compound. There was still plenty of night left; surely he could do more than he had.

  The problem is, everything I've done to them can be fixed. It'll cost time and money, but it can be fixed. I need something that can't be undone.

  Well, the one thing that mankind still hadn't completely conquered was—nature. What was there about this area that Al could meddle with?

  There was a spring running under the property; it was the source of the cult's water, and came to the surface to form a pond and a stream leading from it at the far end. But that wasn't the only place where it could surface, if the conditions were right.

  There was a crack in the bedrock just under one of the cult's buried buildings; the building itself rested a few inches above the surface of the bedrock, on a cushion of sandy soil. If Al widened it just a bit and extended it down to the channel of the spring, the water would gradually, over the course of the next few days, work its way to the surface and e
merge at the rear of the building.

  This was a storage building of some kind; not one for guns or ammunition, but full of heavy wooden crates piled atop each other. The crew that had built this place hadn't known what it was going to hold, evidently, for the concrete floor wasn't strong enough to support what was resting on it. The concrete had already cracked under the weight in several places. When the spring water worked its way up through the crack in the bedrock, it would soon seep into the building through the cracks in the floor, soaking, and hopefully ruining, everything on the bottom layer. By the time they found the damage, the entire floor of the building would be under a six-inch-deep sheet of water that no pump would ever cure.

  That was something they could neither replace nor repair. They would have to abandon the building. He contemplated other possibilities, but there weren't many at the moment. He could induce mice to invade, of course; plagues of bugs—

  But that would mean a certain amount of hazard for the rest of the children. Mice could get into their things; would bite if cornered or caught. Insects could bring disease . . . some of the insects native to here were scorpions, whose sting was poisonous and painful, and could be fatal to a small child.

  And there were snakes aplenty around here; he'd been warned about them when he first arrived. Three kinds of them were poisonous: rattlesnakes, copperheads, and water moccasins. No, he couldn't turn those creatures loose where there might be children.

  Well, maybe just that one area where there seems to be a lot of plumbing, of electrical circuits. Where there doesn't seem to be a lot of people. That might be Brother Joseph's quarters, or those of his high-ranking flunkies. If it is, it's about to become unlivable over the next couple of days.

  He widened cracks in foundations, opened seams, created hundreds of entrances for insects and other vermin. Then he created another kind of glamorie—one that would attract anything small, anything hungry. From there the insects, mice and reptiles would work their way into the rooms, and there were no children in this bunker. Adults, he reckoned, would get what they deserved.