by Garon Whited
“Yes, but I don’t know where he keeps it, just that he has one!” She paused and cocked her head. “I can feel we’re in some sort of large shielding spell and I can’t detect anything outside it.” As she spoke, she ran her hands through her hair, re-forming her hairdo. Her hands then stroked down her sides and a short, skirted garment manifested to cover her.
“Great. Could you help me out in the men’s clothing department?” She nodded and gestured my chiton outfit back onto me. “Thanks. Now, put your fingers in your ears.”
“Put my…?”
“Do it!” I barked.
She did so, looking puzzled. Since I couldn’t use a locator spell through the Ascension Sphere, I produced a powerful sonic pulse to generate echoes.
Yes, I shrieked and listened. Like a bat. I can be a stereotype if I want to. It’s in my contract.
My primitive echolocation didn’t tell me where I was, but it did tell me I wasn’t underground. We might be high up a tower or sitting on the third floor, but there were open spaces beyond each wall. That much I could tell.
“Do you have spells to hide us and transport us?” I asked.
“I can conjure such things, but Grandfather’s power is such he will penetrate my spells if he is looking for us, and I assure you, all his attention is on this room.” She kept her eyes fixed on me as she spoke, deliberately not looking at the abattoir. I didn’t blame her.
“How quickly will he overcome your spells? We only need a few minutes.”
“I think I can do that.”
“Good. Fire them up and get ready to teleport us if we can’t escape by other means.”
“Do we have anything resembling a plan?”
“Yes. Now do as I say!” I half-snarled.
“Yes, sir,” she replied, flinching. I suppose I can be a little frightening when I’m in that sort of mood.
She started her spellcasting and I started mine. I wanted better shields against a variety of effects—even if an anti-zappy shield only stopped one magical taser hit, it was one magical taser hit that didn’t drop me instantly. Mental attacks were also on my mind, as well as teleportation into unpleasant places, fireballs, and similar nastiness. I also cranked up my inertia-shedding spell on the theory people tend to expect normal movement. It might be helpful to change direction, accelerate to full speed, or stop nearly instantly. It was a heavy outlay of power, but I had power, more power on hand than I really knew what to do with.
Yeah, I might have gone a little overboard on my protections. Sue me. I wasn’t feeling at all safe.
I regarded the wall. It appeared to be mortared stone, suitable for most castle dungeons. It cracked like a stone wall, too, when I kicked it. I kicked it again, cracking the mortar, dislodging head-sized stones, sending dust and stone chips into the air. I stuck my head out. A high, cold wind whistled by and ruffled my hair as I watched a block tumble down the side of the tower and crash into a crystalline dome, shattering it. The lights within flickered and died as glassy shards collapsed inward.
We were not on the ground floor. I could survive the fall, since it was night, but I’d want several minutes and several dazhu. Mortal flesh and bone would probably splat, rather than crunch, assuming the shards of the dome didn’t slice it into hamburger.
“Okay, so much for running away,” I observed, loud enough to be heard over the wind. “I don’t do well with sprinting at altitude. Are you ready to whisk us away?”
“Yes, but what are we doing?”
“You’re teleporting us to a nexus. Directly. I’m going to open it as fast as inhumanly possible. Once that happens, you might want to notify anyone interested to come occupy it, because we’re going to be in a fight with your grandfather. We’ll probably need all the help we can get.”
“But with only one nexus—”
I rounded on her. She jumped and backed away from me. It’s the eyes that cause that reaction, I think. Of course, my hair was still burned off and my ears were visible, too. I suspect my fangs were out. It was that sort of night.
“You still want to take him alive?” I demanded. “That’s still your plan? Fine! You do it, if you can. I’m sure he’ll appreciate your kindness and respond by only trying to capture you. That’s what you want, right? A magical duel where nobody gets hurt? Just captured and interrogated and tortured?”
She shuddered and turned away.
“All right,” she whispered. “You’re right. He has to be stopped.”
“I’m so glad we’re in agreement. Are you ready?”
“Yes.” She straightened and turned back to me with a grim look. “Yes, I’m ready.”
“I’ll give it a one-two-three and then we go. One. Two. Three!”
I sucked up the power in the Ascension Sphere, draining it. Spells sparked and crackled around us on my shields and on Juliet’s. Then the world blinked and we were in a forest. Blink. An abandoned building. Blink. A ring of standing stones. I waited for a moment, but we didn’t blink out again. The place was Stonehenge Mark Two, apparently. I had a sudden burst of nostalgia, remembering Tamara and the ring of stones she used as a place of worship…
“We’re undetected,” Juliet whispered. “I think.”
“What’s with the multiple blinking?”
“He would track us if we came straight here. By bouncing from point to point, we should be ahead of his gaze. By the time he could track our teleport to the woods, we should have left. To be safe, I took a second detour.”
“Good work.”
“Thank you. Now hurry; he may begin probing nexus points at any moment. If he probes this one, I will not be able to deceive him for long.”
“Do your best.”
I stood in the center of the nexus and stabbed downward.
My previous attempt at tapping deep powers was a slow, careful thing. I drilled down with caution, knowing there was power, but uncertain about the quantity involved and how violently it would come flooding out. I had a legitimate concern about suddenly being the lightning rod when the bolt hit.
This time, I hammered the spike of my tendrils down into the nexus. Spell-driven in this charged environment, it was like driving a railroad spike with a railgun. The nexus responded as expected: The magic within the nexus erupted upward in a bright column, spearing into the sky. It crackled over me and through me, sizzling along the thing I think of as my soul. It hurt, but I’ve been hurt far worse, and recently. My decades in an Ascension Sphere served me well, here. The power surge could sizzle and sting, it could burn along the channels of my spirit, but it didn’t stand a chance of setting my soul on fire.
For a creature of darkness, I’m surprisingly resistant to combustion.
Juliet stepped back, eyes and mouth forming three circles of wonder. As well she might; it was a geyser of power fit to boil lakes and move mountains. Invisible to the untrained eye, it cast no shadows, threw no illumination, but it was a palpable, physical presence in the ether. Waves of it rippled outward, expanding through the countryside like a meteor strike in the ocean.
I drank from the fountain, power pulsing down the million-stranded tentacle of tendrils like a throat swallowing. I drank, and never felt full; I took it in and it poured through my spirit like blood through my flesh. I could have stood there for a thousand years, but I had promises to keep. I stepped out of the power surge.
Viewed from the outside, it was even more impressive. It reminded me of Amber’s assassination, with magic fountaining a mile into the sky like a pillar of coruscating, prismatic fire, splashing on the shimmering, heat-haze dome of power. Brilliant and volatile, yet visible only to those with the eyes to see it. I wondered what Sparky would think if she could look at it.
“I’ve alerted my allies,” Juliet informed me, shading her eyes from the brilliant column of force. “Do you want to try for another one before Grandfather catches on to why you’re opening them?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s already noticed this and is looking inten
tly at it; I’m blocking us from his vision, but I can’t hide that. If he thinks we’re doing this to gain access to power, he won’t expect us to open another one. In fact, if he comes here to cap it and tap it, he’ll be too busy to stop us from opening several.”
“I like this plan. Let’s go!”
The world blinked again.
We repeated the process twice more with results varying with the power of the nexus. Juliet assured me someone took control of them after we left.
“Someone we like?” I asked, standing over another nexus and reaching downward.
“It must be. Even Grandfather can’t seal and control two erupting nexus points at once. If he’s gaining control of any of them, it’s the first one we opened—the others are simply too much to handle at the same time.”
“Is there any way to contact your relatives and see if they’re on top of things?”
“Not without risking a distraction at a crucial moment,” she admitted.
I tapped into another nexus point and power erupted, blasting upward like a column of magma. I stepped out of the soul-searing glare as the opening widened to its maximum. I could see her point about not distracting anybody. Humans aren’t built for this sort of power surge. During the day, I’m not built for this sort of power surge.
As I finished this, the third opening of the evening, Juliet stepped into the flood of energies as I stepped out. She let it flow upward through her body and I tried not to interfere. My urge was to tackle her, get her out of the deadly stream of power, but she was a professional magus and, presumably, knew what she was doing.
“This one is mine,” she thundered. Her voice boomed and echoed, as though in a large room, despite the open area.
I could see her spirit’s pain at the contact with the rocket-blast of energy, but she seemed to welcome the sensation, like the burning feeling in muscles after an intense workout. A good pain, possibly—or one endured in the knowledge it was worth it. Her aura—the radiant field that surrounds all living things—interacted with the silent, invisible fountain of power. I could see her aura change, creating a bright nimbus of light around her. The colors of it, seething and swirling, washed out and faded, merging with the fountain of power. The colors turned to the scintillant brilliance of magic, colorless and bright.
I didn’t like it. Humans aren’t able to cope with this level of raw energy. They can use spells to cap the gusher off and feed power to other spells, but to stand in it? To absorb it? No. Even to channel it is laughable. It would be like standing in the path of a river when they blow up the dam. You don’t deflect it with your hands. You don’t deflect it at all. If you stand in it, it washes you away.
Much as the colors washed away. As her living aura washed away. Almost as though the colors were burned out of it, until it resembled Johann’s soul—monochrome, undifferentiated, the pattern of a soul inscribed on magic, without the actual person.
So that’s what having your soul set on fire looks like, I thought. It reminded me of some test subjects in my vampirism experiments. In a dim, dark way, the empty, soulless undead looked much like the soulless thing before me.
“If you say so,” I hedged. “Now, where’s your grandfather? We need to see about dealing with him.”
“That will not be a problem,” she laughed, raising her hands to regard them, flex them. She laughed aloud and the sound set my teeth on edge. It made me think of amused Things from the primal chaos. Was madness a side effect of this process? A little megalomania to go with your infinite cosmic power, maybe?
“Don’t get overconfident. You’re bathed in power, but power isn’t everything,” I cautioned.
“My confidence is fully justified,” she assured me.
“Okay, I’m listening. What’s your plan from here?”
“Our plan,” she corrected, and three glowing forms appeared. They were projections, illusions, of three people in similar circumstances—standing in opened fountains of wild, unfettered power. One of them bore a striking resemblance to Johann. All of them had the same bright auras, leeched of color, scintillating with nothing but seething magical forces.
“We did not think you could be so easily persuaded to open up so many,” Juliet added. “Now we do not need to open them ourselves. Each of us has a nexus of our own.”
Weirdly, I felt a strange sensation, as though watching the whole tableaux from a distant point. It was a sensation I remembered all too well. Pieces clicked together like tumblers in a lock, opening the door of memory. And then it was all clear to me.
I badly underestimated the ancient and complex magic of Atlantis. They had an Ascension Sphere in California. I should know; I made it. And yet, when I cast my sensor spells, looking for the Orb, even the most powerful pulse did not encounter it. My sensor spells should have expanded out from me until reaching the power circle; on contact, the power circle should have sucked them in.
But they knew this. All they had to do was hide the Ascension Sphere.
Put the Evil Orb inside the Sphere and it would sit there indefinitely, even happily. The Thing inside the Orb would know intimately how to hurt me, as well as where to go for victims. It could tell them about Karvalen. It could tell them everything they needed to know to find me, how to set me up, and how to use me.
The Ball of Awful might even have thought to use Juliet, the damsel in distress, with her plea for my help. The noble purpose of rescuing dear old Grandpa from himself. The capture, the torture—was it real? Or merely an illusion in the glass wall?—the escape, and the release of powers they needed and only I could provide…
And no need for any of it, really, if they asked nicely. I could have been persuaded without all this. Of course, that wasn’t the point, not to the Black Ball. Doing it in a civilized, reasonable way wouldn’t have hurt.
The Orb might not be in charge, but it had influence. Whether supernatural influence over minds or the whispered promises of power, did it matter? It hated me even more than I hated it. Its cruelty, unlike mine, was without limit.
“You’ve got my Orb,” I accused, looking at the spirit-forms standing in a row.
“Indeed,” Johann replied, his glowing, immaterial smile like searchlight. “It has been most valuable in our quest to attain power. As have you.”
“Tell me something. Did you really want to learn how, or did you just want me to open the nexus points for you?”
“Why would I ever want to open one? My surviving children and grandchildren are the only ones who need such power. We have no need to open others.”
“And you used me to get it for them.”
“You were more useful than my wildest hopes. Alas, now that you have opened our power-points, your usefulness—”
I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid. I knew how the sentence had to end. People always start by saying something nice, then they add a qualifier. I started into hyperdrive at “alas” and kept my foot on the gas, so to speak.
A family of magi, all loaded for vampire and sitting on fountains of power? Not my first choice for adversaries. They weren’t even physically present, aside from Juliet. This couldn’t be a fight. It would be a slaughter and I was on the wrong end of it. If they were going to try and kill me—and they were—I’d rather they had the logistical troubles of reaching across universes.
No one living understands the intricacies of a gate spell like I do. I’ve studied it. I’ve used it. I’ve taken it apart and put it back together like a favorite jigsaw puzzle. I may not qualify as the ultimate master of the spell, but you can be damn sure I’m an expert.
An appalling amount of power still flowed all around me, waiting to be used. I had all the charge of a credit card on Black Friday. I grabbed the energy while I whipped tendrils around me, scored the ground in a circle. It wouldn’t be ideal, but the definition of a border was the important thing.
This really was not a good way to go about it, but speed was the only thing that mattered.
I dumped everything I had
into my escape attempt. It seemed to me if I didn’t get away, holding on to a reserve wouldn’t help. Either I got off the line quicker than they did, or they would run right over me, squashing me into vampire paste in the process.
They reacted immediately, attacking. Energies of various sorts erupted in my direction.
I dropped into the swirling vortex before it was fully formed. Searing light and screaming colors exploded above me as I fell through the open whirlpool of twisted space, spinning in strange directions.
The vortex closed like thunder around me.
It’s cold.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been this cold.
The darkness visible is a formless thing, mixed of all the colors beyond the reach waof light, beautiful and terrible. It swims, it swirls, it flows like rivers of clouds and I am borne upon it as a leaf upon the waters. A mammoth current swirls around me, carries me in a direction I cannot fathom. Even so, I know where it takes me, feel my course through the void.
I see at last. The void is not empty, merely a place of things beyond the knowledge of man, for it is older than man. It existed before the first pinprick islands of light came to be, before worlds or life or thought, and still it remains. It is home to Things that love the light, hate it, hunger for it, or ignore it. There are the little ones, the big ones, and the great ones, all abroad within this realm and none of them concerned with me.
Do I belong here? Is this the place where the blood-drinking creature of the night might find a home? I sense a kinship with this place, a sense of homecoming and alienation and of loss, all intermingled... Are these kin to the spirit that makes me something other than a man? Or do the Things dwelling within the darkness visible simply have no interest in a half-breed mongrel scampering along the gutter?
Questions, questions, questions. All I ever have are questions. Life is questions with no promise of answers. Perhaps that is why religion is so popular. It promises ultimate answers, but only when life is over.
I spin through the ever-full void, slipping through the cracks between the worlds, tiny in the darkness, borne upon a river of twisted space, and I fall.