His and Sarah’s situation, if anything, could only get worse. With her determined to stay, he could not and would not leave. That meant that the two of them would almost surely perish like the Alarsarians beneath the crushing wheels of the attacking mechanisms.
He considered himself a rational man. He had no fundamental opposition to action; in certain circumstances it was the only rational choice. But in this particular instance, it seemed to him that the steadfastly rational decision was to abandon the hopeless plight of Bayou Dorking and its doomed defenders. No matter how powerful his magic, the onslaught of the Republic of Zheria was without question unstoppable.
But what of the thus far unnamed patron who had altered nature itself to provide him with spells in time of need? Could it be possible that he would manifest a spell that would overthrow the entire Zherian invasion?
Was Magic really on his side?
He looked back at Sarah, searched her face, and gazed into her beautiful eyes. She looked back with a patient and unwavering confidence. Did she somehow know that this magical patron would intervene once again?
It was clear that he needed to know, one way or the other.
He made a decision, which, rational or not, seemed unavoidable.
“Stay here,” he told her.
Before Sarah could respond, he ran toward the front of the bunker and cast, “Give me strength!”
His next step hurled him forward in a great bound, the force shaking the bunker roof. “Take ye flight!”
He experienced a moment of authentic flight this time, propelled by his magically enhanced leap, and soared at great speed over the battle. He could now see clearly the wedge that the Zherian mechanisms formed as they lanced toward the town. Behind them came irregular skirmish lines of troops bearing the green and orange diagonal striped flag of the Republic.
He cast his flight spell again as he began to descend, using it to time his return to earth so that he landed just behind one of the clanking mechanisms.
Up close, the Zherians’ steam-mobile artillery was much more impressive. His estimation that they were the size of Bob’s road grader was off by a factor of at least two, and the weight of such a mass of metal pressed deep ruts in the ground behind it. Mounted on eight twelve-foot cleated steel wheels, it towered over him, a fright-inducing monolith that chugged dark smoke from stubs of smokestacks at its center. The construction’s armored sides sloped up to an arched roof and were crisscrossed by large rivet heads and occasional round-cornered hatches. Several rotating blisters extended out from the sides, each bearing a small gun barrel and slotted view port. One mounted on the blunt rear of the mechanism swiveled to track on Everett in obvious menace.
When the gun continued to point at him impotently, he relaxed slightly. The unspoken spell that had warded him from the guns of Mitchell and Suzette apparently continued to function.
“Give me strength!”
As he cast, he ran toward the mechanism and took a hold beneath a girder on its trailing end just under the gun port. When he made to raise it, the incredible weight pressed his feet down into the soil, making him stumble and lose his grip. He needed a firmer base to lift such weight! With an inarticulate growl, he ran to catch up, seized the edge again. “Take ye flight! Give me strength!”
This time, as he hovered a fraction above the broken ground and the power of magic flowed in him, he was able to raise the multi-ton vehicle, the girder groaning and crumpling at the strain. Its wheels continuing to spin, he hurried to hurl it over, so that it flipped, end over end, smashing with a terrible rending of metal through the wreckage of bunkers and trenches and came to rest on its side. Steam hissed through rents in its armored skin and then blasted violently outward as a muffled explosion, the boilers giving way, split it wide open. Other explosions followed, as the large gun shells and other ammunition began to detonate, and the mechanism became involved in a massive expanding globe of fire and smoke.
A six-inch shell struck alongside Everett, showering him with clods of dirt as it plowed through the churned earth. His heart froze, but the shell simply buried itself without going off.
He whipped his head about. A hundred yards away, another mechanism had changed course to charge across the advance directly toward him, its forward gun depressed so that he looked straight up its barrel. Clearly, the unidentified magic that protected him from gunfire had also protected him from the explosive artillery shell, but equally clearly there must be a limited range to the spell! He dodged to the side, his magical strength carrying him more than two hundred feet, as the big gun fired again and the shriek of the hurtling shell sounded. It might not explode, but if the round struck him, he would be just as dead.
He landed in the midst of a group of helmeted Zherian infantry in red-brown and suddenly found himself the target of more than a dozen rifles. Triggers clicked uselessly all around and confusion seized the faces of the soldiers. Several immediately ejected cartridges, reloaded, threw rifle butts to shoulders and took aim again.
Everett recast his strength and jumped straight up, casting flight at the top of his leap so that he hovered hundreds of feet up in the air with the battlefield, now washed with the red hues of the setting sun, once more spread out beneath him. His destruction of one of the mechanisms had done little to stall the attack; the remainder continued, firing constantly as they bridged the Alarsarian earthworks. He was instantly convinced that he would be able to do little to disrupt the attack with the spells available to him. There were simply too many of the steam-mobile artillery; sooner or later one would get lucky and either run over him or hit him with a shell. He could not stop the Zherians and must return and compel Sarah to escape with him, even if he had to use his magic to carry her away bodily.
And then he experienced the most intense magical Epiphany of his entire life.
The spell was magnificent and strange, an incomprehensible and difficult collection of word sounds and tone syllables that suggested no familiar language. Frightened by this bizarre manifestation and not knowing what effect the spell might accomplish, he tried to repress the First Enunciation, but the words had a dark, almost malevolent energy of their own and would not be denied. They screamed from his lips with jolts of sparkling energy and their magic actuated in a vast shock that almost seemed to fracture the sky.
Light flared, casting sharp shadows across the darkening ground and then the whole of the battlefield disappeared in an enormous outpouring of light and ash that rushed upward to envelope him. Blinded, scalded and suffocated, he felt his consciousness fade as the entire world went black.
TWENTY-TWO
Everett woke with dirt covering his face.
Frantic, he thrashed about until he could suck an unobstructed breath and then pried his eyes open against a crust of caked ash. He saw a morning sky gray with dust and smoke, the rising sun totally obscured. Craning his head, he peered about to discover that he lay on his back, partially buried in loose soil and debris. He struggled free of the confining earth, slowed by aches and pains in every part of his body, and stood up. He was filthy with dirt and soot, scratched and bruised. His clothes were likewise tattered and scorched with one of his boots missing, but he appeared to have suffered no grievous wounds.
In front and below him stretched a great gaping hole in the ground, a crater at least five hundred feet across and greater than seventy-five deep. Beyond it lay the still smoldering wreckage of several Zherian mechanisms, many partially covered by ejecta, and a landscape burned and blasted by flame and wind. Though he immediately saw nothing that he could readily identify as a body, nothing living moved within his sight.
Whatever the newest spell had been, it had caused a great and devastating explosion larger than anything any human had previously created, either with magic or with technology.
Realizing that he had lain senseless through the night and into the next morning, he looked back along the line of the Republican advance to see what his magic had gained. The scope of the destruc
tion extended, with diminishing effect, for a distance of perhaps a mile, but beyond that he could still see many of the steam-mobile artillery mechanisms and accompanying infantry. Fortunately, they were not moving toward him directly across the violated ground, but were cutting across the flanks of the area. Even if his spell had given them pause during the night, their advance had resumed with the new day and the Republicans looked to have lost none of their determination to capture Bayou Dorking.
Swinging around, he found that the town appeared mostly unfazed, though some of the leading buildings looked to have suffered wind damage. One or two had been set ablaze, and tall pillars of black smoke still rose from them, spreading a grimy haze across the area. Near the town edge, about half a mile from the crater, many of the bunkers and blockhouses still stood in what seemed good shape and the trench lines, though mangled, were visible. The majority of the defenders had been concentrated in this area, so hopefully most had escaped the brunt of the spell.
Having had more than enough of magic, he eschewed his spells and started slogging across the uneven, blackened terrain. Favoring his bare foot as he skirted heaps of earth and mangled metal and surmounted low ridges sculpted by the blast, he had gone only a hundred yards toward the town when his sluggish thoughts cleared enough for him to realize that he should summon Sarah.
“Beautiful Woman, come forth!”
He felt the actuation, knew the enunciation was correct, but Sarah did not appear.
“Beautiful Woman, come forth!”
Again the same.
He almost screamed the spell another desperate time. “Beautiful Woman, come forth!”
On his locus, a charred patch of dust only inches in front of him, nothing stirred.
Overcome by such dread as he had never before experienced, he fell to his knees, moaning.
Vital Transportation Variants only worked on living things. The spells would transport non-living items, but only with a breathing target. The only reason that the spell would not transport Sarah was if she were dead.
She had not appeared.
So she must be.
Dead.
When his father, the anchor of his life, had died, he had felt a great, staggering blow. This was infinitely worse.
He had loved Sarah.
Another might have argued that it was simple infatuation, but he knew it was not.
He would never have told her, would hardly have admitted it to himself before this, but he had loved her, perhaps from the very first moment. Hopelessly. Foolishly. Dementedly.
Certainly, his feeling was a gross violation of all common sense. He knew that she would never reflect his sentiment, that he was to her simply a means of returning to Kleinsvench, and that she would pass from his existence and forget him as soon as she found her way home,
Throughout his life, he had suffered the burden of the expectation that he would, one day, achieve greatness in magic. His family had hoped for it, his chums in primary school had teasingly suggested it, and his instructors in the study of magic, at least at first, had practically demanded it. He was a prodigy, one of the rare ones that had manifested early, undoubtedly destined to enter the ranks of wizardry! As each of his spells manifested and proved unsatisfactory, the repeated refrain had been, "Don't worry. The next one will be a good one!"
Driven by the crucifying knowledge that a magician could do nothing to improve his magic, he had thrown every ounce of his energy into improving his study of magic. He had memorized dissertations, sought rare monographs, and bored ever deeper into a single-minded pursuit of the collected wisdom of the great magicians who had come before. Rather than indulging in recreation and ease as had all the other students at Friar Albert’s Advanced Academy, he had spent his free time buried in the sepulchral library surrounded by a shielding wall of books. On graduation, he had hardly known the first names of three of his fifty-seven classmates. He had told himself that he would have time for friends, family, and marriage after he found his key to success.
That discovery had never come. As he had grown older, the self-imposed isolation of the first half of his life had simply become a habit.
Sarah had been an aggravating, irritating, but entrancing addition to his monkish existence. Only a man with no heart at all could have failed to have fallen in love with her.
And now she was forever taken from him.
With a dead voice, he tried one last time. “Beautiful Woman, come forth!”
After a moment or two, he stood and walked woodenly toward Bayou Dorking, leaving the dark spots of silent tears in the dust along his path.
The defenses of the Alarsarians were vacant and he went unchallenged as he negotiated wire, traversed trenches, and circled bunkers. There were no bodies either, just smoldering trash, shinny brass shell casings, and large chunks of metal and stone hurled from the site of the explosion. The Alarsarians, it seemed clear, had been able to retreat, taking their wounded and dead with them. He wandered across a road paved with tan brick and followed it.
Up close, he found the damage to the town to be more severe. Almost every house and shop on the leading edge of Bayou Dorking had sustained heavy blast damage. Roofs had been ripped away, windows disintegrated, and walls collapsed. Shattered bricks and splintered lumber were scattered everywhere and drifts of debris often blocked the road. After a block or so, however, the destruction lessened, so that he began to pass buildings that were in the main untouched, though empty and quiet. He considered returning to the bunker at the inn, decided he had no wish to discover Sarah’s body, and listlessly continued walking.
“Everett!”
The sound of his name brought him up short in front of a butcher’s shop with a fanciful façade of a hunting scene made out in multi-colored tile.
“Lieutenant!” Clay hissed at him from the open doorway. “Get over here!”
He stared at her dully. Presenting a generally grubby appearance, as if she had spent a lot of time crawling across the ground, she still had her slouch cap, though it looked like it had a bullet hole in it, and the cartridge belt around her waist was mainly empty.
Cursing, she ran out, rifle in one hand, and grabbed his arm. “Come on! Get out o’ sight! There’re Republican skirmishers on some of the buildings! They’ve taken a shot or two at me!”
Without caring, he let Clay drag him into the shelter of the shop, whose bare dusty shelves and empty counter gave evidence of the length of time since its owner had been evacuated.
Clay made him crouch behind the counter, then grinned and slapped him on the back. “I thought you were dead.”
“I might as well be. Sarah’s dead.”
The soldier took a long breath and let it out slowly. “She might be. I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“The brigade started moving out just after midnight, but we hung on, mainly to see if you would show up. About dawn, the Zheries infiltrated something like a company o’ skirmishers along the eastern flank of the town and they came across our bunker. I suppose they were just intended to create mischief in our rear. We got lucky and caught sight o’ them as they came up the hill and pulled back to the inn right away. When it looked like they were going to surround us, we tried to make a break deeper into the town, but some of them cut us off in the middle o’ the street. Serheighmon and I got off a few shots, but then Sarah cast a spell and a whole bunch of Zheries fell over.”
“She just put them to sleep. That’s one of her spells.”
“Yeah, but the rest went to ground and started shooting. She just stood there in the open and started laughing like she was crazy. Then she started setting things on fire -- buildings, rifles, equipment, uniforms -- and they started running away. Serheighmon and I got the others into a house, but she hung back, saying she would cover us.”
“Was she hit?”
“Not right away. I made Serheighmon take the magickers out through the back o’ the house while I went upstairs to give her cover fire. She seemed to
be about to run inside when a Zherie in a red tunic ran up on her blind side and threw something at her. I took a few shots at him, but he got under cover too fast.”
“A bomb?”
“No, just a mechanism, I think, but somehow her magic stopped working. I saw her casting, but nothing happed. Then a rifle bullet got her and she went down. I’m sorry, sir.”
“She was killed?”
“I don’t know. They started unloading on my position and I had to bail out o’ the house. After a while, I managed to get up on a roof a few blocks away and get my eyes back on her. The last I saw they were carrying her off on a stretcher, which makes me think she was only wounded. Then a wad o’ regular Zherie infantry came up and I had to get out o’ there. Right now, I think we’re well behind their advance. I’ve been hanging around since, trying to gather intel. I was getting ready to pull out when I saw you.”
“You haven’t seen Sarah again?”
“No, sir.”
Everett stood up. “I have to go find her.”
Clay grabbed his arm again and tried to pull him back down into hiding. “Don’t be stupid! That mechanism? It had to be something that neutralizes magic. No matter how great a wizard you are, you’re powerless without your magic.”
Knowing that what she said was true, he suppressed a lightning burst of irrational anger, and sank back to a crouch. “Tell me about that. Are you sure it was technological?”
“I don’t think it was magic, if that’s what you mean. It was metal, about the size o’ a goose egg or maybe just a little bit larger. There were a few stiff copper wires hanging out, but as far as I could tell it didn’t do anything.”
“Did it make any noise of any kind? Mechanisms always make some type of sound.”
“Not that I could hear from where I was.”
He was unaware of the existence of any technology that could affect magic in any way, but now believed without a doubt that the natural order of things was out of kilter. If he could manifest spells in gross violation of the known rules of magic, then it was entirely likely that the Zherians could have manifested a schematic that allowed them to suppress magic. Granted that that was so, then that explained why he could not transport her and, he realized with a comforting wave of relief, she might still be alive.
Inconvenient Magic 01 - Potatoes, Come Forth! Page 18