The God-Stone War m-4

by Michael G. Manning

  For a moment I felt myself failing, I couldn’t force myself into Walter’s dead body. I have to listen. Stilling my inner turmoil, I let go of my doubts, and soon I began to hear the song that was Walter’s physical form; and within it, the melody of his now dwindling spirit. I had once sent my mind into Penny’s unconscious form when she was dying, but this was different. I wasn’t simply entering his body; I was assimilating it within myself. In part it was necessary, for Walter was no longer truly attached to the flesh and bone that had housed him for so long.

  Somehow I had to assume responsibility for his corpse long enough to reanimate it, and simultaneously I needed to keep the spark that was truly Walter from departing before I was done. It was a task that defied conscious thought, which was the very reason that the waking rational mind was incapable of such a task.

  Searing cold tore through me, my heart was no longer beating, my blood was cooling, and around me I could sense little more than darkness. I had become a flame, a burning light in an endless void, and yet I could still feel the dying flesh around me. In the distance there was another light, but it was flickering, drawn away as if caught in an inexorable and frigid wind.

  No.

  Pushing… I expanded, a searing light flaring within an empty hall, and the darkness receded. Pain tore through me; the sensation of a torn back and hopelessly damaged heart. I was driving his heart to beat, forcing his blood to move, while my thoughts were like fire along his damaged nerves. I imagined his heart whole and I felt the flesh knitting as his body struggled to conform to the imposition of my will.

  Even as his body mended I could see the light that was Walter receding. He wavered, on the verge of going out. Reaching out I tried to grasp him, but the distance between us seemed impossibly great. I was holding two bodies now, his and my own, and the effort to keep them both alive was greater than I had imagined. While the effort in terms of pure power was negligible, the complexity of the human body is staggering. All the things our bodies normally do automatically, I was attempting to do deliberately, for him as well as for myself.

  In the end I failed… but I refused to accept defeat. Instead, I released my own form and took up sole residence within Walter’s, letting my instincts keep his body alive, while I bent my conscious will toward the tiny light that was almost gone now. Goddamnit! You will not be allowed to go quietly. Come back!

  There was a sense of connection then, and I felt Walter’s mind respond for the first time, with a bewildering rush of fear and confusion. We were standing together at the edge of the abyss; a place where light twisted and turned, taking another direction… transforming into something so dark I couldn’t see it directly. It reminded me of the shiggreth. The void… this is the void, the place from whence they have returned. Even as that thought struck me, I could see myself eroding, as the source of my own light began to lose coherence. How did they survive this?

  I had no time for wondering though, using the connection we had somehow forged I drew Walter away, pulling and dragging him with all the energy I had left to me. For what seemed an eternity I struggled, until it seemed I had no strength left, until at last, with a snapping sensation, I felt Walter’s spirit reattach to his body. His heartbeat stabilized and I withdrew to make room, as his spirit bloomed to life within his once still form.

  “He’s breathing!”

  I heard the voice, but I couldn’t be sure whose it was. I was exhausted and all I wanted was sleep. The endless night around me was warm and comforting, and I felt myself drifting.

  “Mordecai isn’t!”

  That sounded like Penny, but the voice was muffled, as if it came to me from a great distance. She said other things as well, but I could no longer make them out. I just needed rest. I would ask her what she had said later.

  Mordecai! Come back! We need you. Elaine’s voice was loud and annoying and it cut across the distance that had muffled the others with no loss of volume.

  Shhhh, I thought back at her. I’m trying to sleep.

  You mustn’t sleep here. Your body is dying. You have to return to it, came her anxious reply.

  Make me, I replied rebelliously. Her continued presence wouldn’t let me relax.

  I can’t. I can’t see you Mordecai. I can’t follow you there. You have to return. Her thoughts sounded almost frantic now.

  Fine, I thought back. If it will shut you up. One of these days I’ll find a way to convince people to let me get some decent sleep. Angrily I focused my awareness and once again I felt my body close by. Seeing it from the outside, it seemed foreign to me, and a great lethargy had sapped my energy. With slow effort I began trying to re-enter, but it felt as though a shield of some sort prevented me from reaching my goal.

  I saw myself then, a fragile light beginning to fray and fade at the edges, like old cloth. I made one more desperate push. With a sudden ‘pop’, I broke through and once again I felt flesh enfold me. Drawing breath again for the first time seemed like a monumental task. My heart leapt to life in my chest, and I found myself lying on cold stone, gasping and coughing for air.

  Penny held me now and I felt her tears on my face. As she cradled my head, she said nothing and for a moment we were both content. Her lap was a peaceful place, and her hair filled the air around me with a sweet scent. All in all, I could think of no other place I might prefer to be… except for all the crying.

  “You’re going to drown me,” I told her, in a weak attempt at humor.

  She looked at me with tear streaked cheeks, “It would serve you right, you bastard. You nearly died this time.”

  I smiled weakly, “You should see the other guy.”

  “What other guy?”

  “Exactly,” I agreed.

  She frowned at me, but I heard Dorian chuckling behind her. At least he understood my humor.

  Chapter 10

  The next few days passed slowly. My experience on the edge of death had exhausted me far more than I had expected. Worse, I had begun hearing a faint song, one that I had never noticed before, a dissonant sound. I avoided thinking on it directly, but it bothered me.

  After a week had passed I returned to Albamarl, to see my friend Marc. Since I had been convalescing over the past few days no one expected to see me out and about, so I took the opportunity to sneak out and visit him without any of my usual escorts.

  He was surprised to see me when I turned up one afternoon. I had teleported into the house in Albamarl, and after a brief search I found him downstairs. He appeared to be organizing a chest of clothing and other sundries. “You’re going to leave that soon?” I asked suddenly.

  “Holy!” he exclaimed, as he jerked and fell away from me. “Damn Mordecai! You scared me within an inch of my life.”

  “That was my plan,” I retorted.

  He grimaced before standing up and embracing me. “I heard you nearly found an early grave yourself.”

  “The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.”

  “I’m sure Penny didn’t appreciate your close call,” he observed.

  I snorted. “I probably would have passed on, but she wouldn’t give the grim reaper permission to enter the room. Did you hear about her battle with the assassin who tried to kill King Nicholas?”

  Marc laughed, “Yes indeed. For a woman who is no longer your Anath’Meridum she still has the instincts of a rabid tigress.”

  “You try chasing four children around all day… the man is lucky she was in a good mood,” I replied.

  “He survived?”

  “No, her final blow broke his nose and killed him near instantly. If she had been in a bad mood, she might have drawn things out for a while,” I explained. “The one good thing that came of the whole thing is that the King of Gododdin now regards her as his personal savior.”

  Marc grinned, “You can never have too many friends.”

  Those words and his smile sent a shadow across my heart, as I thought of his words at our last meeting. There are some friends you can never replace, I
thought silently. “Where is Marissa?” I asked, hoping to distract myself from those thoughts.

  “Shopping,” he replied simply. “There are a hundred different things we need for our journey.”

  “So we have the place to ourselves?” I said amiably. “Like a couple of old bachelors.”

  “Hardly,” he remarked. “You haven’t been an old bachelor since… hell, you were never an old bachelor! You went straight from teenager to married life.”

  “You have me there,” I admitted.

  He shrugged. “Stop changing the subject. Did they ever figure out who tried to assassinate you?”

  “James had the palace searched from top to bottom,” I began, “and by the time it was done, they found two more accomplices hiding in the wine cellar, not that it did us much good. We still aren’t even sure who their primary target was.”

  “They wouldn’t talk?” Marc frowned.

  I shook my head, “They took poison. They were dead within half an hour of being captured.”

  “Fanatics,” Marc noted. “You had best be careful my friend.”

  “That seems like a snap judgment,” I offered.

  “Not many will take poison.”

  I thought for a moment, “Perhaps they preferred that to torture.”

  “Did they find out how they got into the palace?” he asked.

  “According to the seneschal, they were all hired as guardsmen over the past year. They didn’t have to ‘get’ in, they were supposed to be there,” I said, relating the news I had heard from Dorian two days before.

  “And they all had guard duty in the dining hall on the same day?” Marc asked with a curious tone in his voice.

  “Of course not,” I said dismissively. “As they soon found out, they slew several of their fellow guardsmen and took their places on the roster that evening. They found the bodies hidden in the stables.”

  “You’re lucky there were only six of them,” Marc observed. “From what I heard described, they nearly killed Walter and King Nicholas both.”

  I nodded, “That’s one thing that still has me puzzled. Why didn’t they have all six of them attack us in the dining hall? Only four of them came at us there, while the other two were found hiding in the cellar.”

  Marc stared back at me. “You’re right. If they weren’t participating in the attack, why hide at all? They could have made a second attempt later. It isn’t as if anyone knew they were associates of the assassins in the dining hall.”

  Something tickled the back of my mind but I couldn’t lay my finger on it, and after a few minutes of musing over it I decided to worry about it later. Often my mind needed time to work on things in the background before presenting me with a fully formed idea after a few days.

  “On another note, I came by to ask you about your book,” I said suddenly.

  Marc squinted at me. “You say that as if you have some purpose.”

  I smiled. “I do. I think I’ve figured something out.” Over the past few years, Marc and I had begun having detailed discussions regarding the nature of magic. I had shared most of my observations about the workings of magic, wards, runes, enchantments and how they relate to language and thought. Marc for his part had already had quite a bit of experience with magic while he was occupied by his goddess, or rather, his ex-goddess. His initial search to find a method for defeating the gods had been futile, but during the course of our talks he had decided to compile our observations into a tome; a guide to those who might come after us someday, curious about the nature of magic.

  I had scoffed at the idea in the beginning, but after reading the first few chapters and comparing them to what I had learned via other means, it was easy to tell that he had something valuable to offer. The distillation of our hard won experience in plain language might not be necessary to us, but someday it would be invaluable to others.

  “Pray tell,” he prompted.

  “Before the attack, I helped your father by giving King Nicholas a tour of the World Road, and while we were there he asked a number of questions. While I was answering one of them I had a flash of insight.”

  “What were you discussing?” he asked.

  “Enchantments, more specifically, the reasons why they don’t require a constant input of energy,” I said leaning forward intently.

  “In the past you stated that the rune structure was balanced properly to contain the magic without loss.”

  I nodded. “I did, but as I was restating it for Nicholas, I saw it from a different angle. Magic works in four dimensions, the three of space and one of time, right?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “No. Listen,” I interrupted. “The geometry of the runes is set precisely to isolate the magic with respect to the fourth dimension. While it may involve some constraints, for practical reasons, in regard to the three spatial dimensions… it is the fourth dimension, time, that the structure controls most particularly.”

  My friend was one of the most intelligent men I had ever known, but even his brows furrowed after the mouthful I had just regurgitated at him. “Wait, what?” he said articulately.

  I reached into the special bag at my waist and drew out my staff. It was one of the earliest enchantments I had done, and in many ways one of the simplest. “Alright, we talked about this one before,” I began, “but the staff has an enchantment built along the wood called a ‘rune channel’.”

  He waved his hand at me, “I remember… what about it?”

  “The rune channel has a structure that allows magic to be focused along its length, for purposes we have discussed before. Because of that, the runes are built into a structure that resembles a hollow tube, which constrains the magic along two physical or spatial dimensions, right?”

  He gave me a quick nod.

  “But the structure does more than that,” I added. “It also controls the magic completely with regard to the fourth dimension, time.”

  “No it doesn’t,” Marc argued. “Once you channel a line of focused power through that staff it strikes something and dissipates. It doesn’t stick around forever.”

  “Touché,” I replied, “but you miss the point. The magic that is contained within the staff’s runes does not dissipate. The aythar that is channeled along the length of the channel, also temporarily becomes immobile along the time axis, until it interacts with something else.”

  Marc looked doubtful.

  “Perhaps the staff was a bad example,” I admitted. “But it occurred to me because of the shiggreth. In the past they have proven almost immune to all normal magic, except for magic that had been channeled through something like my staff. Now I understand why… because that magic is temporarily immobile along the axis of time.”

  “Give me a different metaphor,” said Marc.

  I thought for a moment. “Ah!” I exclaimed at last, “The stasis enchantment!”

  “The one that kept Moira alive for over a thousand years?” he answered.

  “Yes. In the case of the stasis enchantment, the magic is not simply being isolated along the time axis to preserve a physical effect in three spatial dimensions; the enchantment itself is built entirely to exploit that effect upon a set area. In that case, it was built so that an area the size of a cradle was entirely within a space quarantined from normal time,” I explained. “Normal enchantments do the same thing all the time; they just don’t affect the time axis for anything except themselves.”

  Marc’s face lit up as he caught on.

  “We can do the same for you,” I added.

  “What?”

  “I’m starting to understand a lot more. You heard about Walter right? He wasn’t just wounded, Marc. He was dead. Now granted, he was just barely dead, and his spirit was still there, but even so, I was able to repair his body and hold him there until he reconnected with it. There may be a way to do something similar for you.” There was a desperate fervor to my words.

  “What does that have to do with the stasis enchantment?” Marc asked.

/>   “I can create one for you… to stop your decline long enough for me to figure out how to repair whatever is causing it.”

  He laughed, “So you want to store me, like salt pork, with the intention of reviving me later?”

  “Well I wouldn’t have chosen those words exactly, but… yes,” I admitted.

  The look in his eyes was anything but humorous, despite the tone of his words. Marc stepped close and put his arms around me again. “I’m sorry brother, but no.”

  Tears stood out in my eyes, though I have no idea how they appeared so quickly. “Why!?” I demanded. I refused to hug him back.

  Pushing me out to arm’s length, he studied me carefully. “My illness isn’t a matter of a damaged body or a disconnected spirit. The very wellspring of my life is dwindling, like the atrophied muscles on an old man. There’s no way to fix that, at least not with what you have told me about so far.”

  Rationally I agreed with him, but I still held hope that I might figure out a method later. “It’s as if you’re trying to die.”

  “I’m tired Mordecai, and nothing has really changed since our promise all those years ago. Now that matters are well and truly out of our hands, I would rather accept it gracefully,” he said solemnly.

  “I wonder how Marissa would feel about this…” I asked aloud. “Perhaps we should include her in this discussion.”

  “I wonder how you’d like a split lip and a broken nose,” Marc answered pointedly. It was an empty threat of course, given my shields, but his voice was angry.

  The fight drained out of me suddenly and I returned his hug at last. “I hate you sometimes,” I told him.

  I sensed his grin even though his head was over my shoulder, “I hate you too, brother.” Both of us remembered the conclusion of a fight long ago between Penny and me, when we had all admitted our hate/love for one another. After a moment he let go of me and we stepped apart. “I have one final question for you though,” he said.