Bargman trudged on. He would have to go many miles to find unscavenged ground. There was a rumor of a newly found surface ruin beyond his normal twenty-five mile range. He was not sure that he had the strength for such a hike, but he had no choice. If he did not discover sufficient metals or plastics on this trip, he would not eat tomorrow.
He had come out during his normal off shift in an attempt to fill his quota. If he continued to fall behind, the Nutrition Section would be certain to withhold his work ration. He knew that that would be the beginning of the end. Scavengers who suffered denial of rations as punishment were doomed. Trudging the wasted surface of the world in the heavy environment suits burned extra calories that the normal food allotment could not provide. Such poor souls quickly succumb to starvation, many choosing to die on the surface rather submit to culling in the Underground. No one bothered to go look for them. Sooner or later, other scavengers would recover the corroded metals from their suits along with their nutrient rich bleached bones.
Everett blinked as the last vision faded, leaving him with the impression that it represented a far distant future, the final result of a technological triumph.
“Now do you understand?” Magic asked again.
“I think I do.”
“Good. Now, just head on over to Zheria and find my great-granddaughter. Don’t bother with trying to stop the invasion or anything else; you do not have the leverage to change events that are already in motion. You can only save Sarah and you must move quickly.”
“Couldn’t you just cheat and get someone closer?”
“No, the pogroms began almost six months ago. The Esatis have arrested most magickers in the Republic. The rest are in hiding or have fled to Alarsaria. Moreover, there are parameter constraints that prevent me from investing in a new hero. At this point, Everett, just believe me when I say that it is you or nothing. Now, get going.”
“Hold on. One more thing. What does Sarah have to do with all this, aside from being your descendant?”
“She has been highlighted by Destiny, who is, before you ask, also a noncorporeal sentient entity, as a Primary Pivot, an individual whose actions can exert extraordinary leverage on events. This means, without getting into all the additional whozits and whatfors, that if Sarah dies, Technology is almost certain to succeed. If she lives, the odds remain even. I manifested your eighth spell in order to save her from assassins dispatched by Technology’s minions. For me it was just a matter of the draw. Fortune, also a noncorporeal sentient entity, had already determined that you were due for a manifestation; I simply tweaked the process to present you with a spell that would get her out of harm’s way.”
“You’re telling me that I became involved with all of this as a result of bad luck?”
“I suppose you could see it that way, but regardless we have to proceed with the task at hand using the resources available.”
“Meaning me?”
“Yes.”
“Back to Sarah--”
“Everett, you are beginning to be something of a bore.”
“So I’ve been told. How is she going to stop Technology?”
“I know the answer but I cannot express it. The knowledge belongs to Destiny and they have neglected to become involved in the contest.”
“Please stop talking in riddles.”
Magic smiled sympathetically. “I am sorry, Everett. I am trying to be helpful, but I cannot tell you certain things that are outside my own scope. Why Sarah is important to the scheme of things is something I know, as we in the noncorporeal realm posses all knowledge in a communal fashion, but revealing that to you now without the permission of Destiny would be another violation of our operational parameters. If I cheat again then Technology will also be permitted to cheat in a similar way and this will remove all possibility that Technology will not prevail. Do you understand?”
Everett nodded begrudgingly. “Not really, but I guess that I’ll have to accept the fact that to save Sarah I must defeat Technology.”
“Fine. Now, let’s get going, shall we? I will continue to provide you with spells according to my perception of your need and subject to sensible limitations. You just trot along and find Sarah and kill that sorry devil.”
“Wait a minute. Did you say kill?”
“Physical elimination of his corporeal biologic is the only way to get Technology out of this realm. If his inspired body remains alive, he will persist in his attempt to eradicate all magic. That means that he will continue to support and direct the development of new mechanisms of war like the steam-mobile artillery. The longer he remains in this realm, the higher his chances of success.”
Everett did not comment. He would do whatever was necessary, but he was yet to be convinced that outright murder was necessary.
“Before you go, shouldn’t you tell me who Technology is?”
“Did we not cover that?”
“No.”
“Oh, sorry, Technology's corporeal biologic is Donald de Grosivna, Chief Minister of the Republican Directorate of Security and Technology.”
“What? Are you telling me that Technology isn’t Edwin or Baronet Rorche?”
“No, of course not. Why would you think that?”
“But I thought…oh, forget it.”
“Fine. Goodbye, Everett. I will not appear to you again unless I feel the circumstances warrant another intervention. Now get to work!”
TWENTY-FOUR
As soon as Magic faded from his sight, Everett thought of dozens more questions that he should have asked her, but even so, his head felt dunce thick with information that he had yet to process fully.
He looked about. The Esati squad remained frozen in comical poses of interrupted motion.
“Perhaps I should have asked how I get time to resume its flow?” he mused aloud.
A spell manifested to him, somewhat apologetically. Along with it came the inspired knowledge that it was the paired Potent to the previous and no doubt would return time to its normal condition.
“You know, it would have been useful if you had given me this sort of helpful information with every spell.” This comment, however, lured no further response from the noncorporeal realm.
He felt the insistent First Enunciation nudging at his lips, but repressed it. His current extra-temporal status obviously would give him numerous advantages, and it behooved him to explore its potential. For some time, he studied how he could utilize interrupted time to his benefit and when the First Enunciation nagged for his attention, he simply gritted his teeth to forbid it.
As he contemplated the Zherians, he could not help but think of the little girl who he had seen die through the old man Hargrove’s eyes; the Esatis surely deserved some recompense for espousing a philosophy that had such results.
He began to experiment with the frozen world around him. He proved able to affect larger objects, at least to the extent of changing their location, though it took a great deal of effort to move anything more massive than a pebble. With his magical strength, he could pick up an Esati and reposition or reorient him, but was disappointed to learn that he could not in any way alter the soldier’s stance or the position of the items on his person, even down to the tiniest wrinkle in his jacket.
The idea of simply rearranging the men in comical positions struck him as unsatisfyingly juvenile, but he discarded out of hand all notions that would see them come to grievous harm. He could not summon the ruthlessness to kill them in cold blood for unrealized potential future crimes. Thus, at best, he could only hope to inconvenience these fanatics.
He thought for a few moments. His strength spell functioned here in this nether world, so, logically, his other spells should as well, but which might he make use of?
Then he grinned, as the obvious answer occurred to him.
“Manure, gather ye into a pile!”
The size of the mound that formed, oozing and slithering from under doors, out of side streets, and from crevices and cracks in every direction, surpr
ised him, until he realized that, in a town of this size, there must be literally hundreds of outhouses with associated cesspools. Moreover, the streets, subject to horses, must also produce a significant amount of droppings that would need to be stored in out-of-the-way piles.
Smiling as he took a great leap, he left the Esatis neck deep in the manure, much of it gleefully fresh.
As he soared upward, he reconsidered casting the spell that would free him from the frozen world. It seemed likely that his own personal time must continue to unfold, even though the lack of change in the world left him with no means of measuring it. He was thirsty, so logically he would grow hungry after a while, and become sleepy when his body determined that it should be night. If he stayed in interrupted time for relative days, he would surely age while all else and everyone else did not. Speculating, he envisioned himself somehow trapped in interrupted time, living his entire life in what would be to the rest of the world not even a single second.
This unnerving fantasy almost jolted a reflexive casting of the counter spell from him, but he clamped his mouth shut and forbade it once more. No matter the magnitude of the risk, he would not abandon the power it leant him.
His flight-assisted leap brought him down near the great crater to the north. Depending upon his magically enhanced strength to absorb the energy of his impact, he struck the ground at speed and marveled as his landing disturbed the wounded earth only slightly, raising not a single speck of dust.
The battlefield had the almost artificial look of a posed museum display and he took a moment to take stock of the current situation. Some Zherian scouts had begun to move back into the area, but the bulk of the invading spearhead continued to flow around the scar like water around a bolder in a stream. For a brief moment, he played with the thought of attempting to disrupt the invasion by physically scattering the Republican forces. When he realized that such an effort would take a huge amount of relative time, weeks or even months of his life, he found himself unwilling to pay such a cost to achieve a victory that might prove, in the broader scope of the conflict between Magic and Technology, entirely irrelevant.
Sarah had to be his main priority. Above all else, he must find her and remove her to safety. After that, if necessary, he would try to come up with a means to deal with the Zherians and, eventually, Technology.
He doubted that Sarah’s captors, without unusual magical or technological assistance, could have moved Sarah far in the time since her capture, which could only be hours at the most. Given the Esatis apparent abhorrence for all magic and all magicians, he felt that he could safely rule out the first. As for the second, it was an accepted fact that all technological means of travel were condemned to traverse physical space. Technological conveyances, as far as he was aware, could not, as magic routinely did, ignore real distance and were therefore subject to physical limits on speed.
Consequently, he was convinced that she must be reasonably close, within a radius of no more than a few dozen miles. He was equally convinced that she must remain in the claws of the Esatis, considering that she was known to them as a magicker. If he found the right batch of the fanatics, he would find Sarah.
Satisfied, he cast, “Give me strength!” and bounded into the sky.
Quartering the area in great flight-assisted leaps, he began to search over the invading force for the distinctive red jackets. As he sailed above columns of infantry, horse drawn supply trains, and steam-mobile artillery, he learned that the scope of the invasion was much larger than he had imagined, involving literally hundreds of thousands of troops and perhaps as many as a thousand steam-mobile artillery. To his surprise, however, there were relatively few Esatis and the small squads he did discover were scattered through the host and often not intermingled with conventional Zherian units.
Arrayed in a casual formation to guard a cottage, the first contingent that he found occupied a deserted hamlet only a mile to the northwest of Bayou Dorking. Thinking that he had lucked into finding Sarah at his first try, he swooped down, dodged around the statue-like guards, and pushed on the simple plank door of the stone building. When the door resisted his efforts, he cast his strength and slammed against it. The planks shattered into fragments but these did not fall or move farther than his initial impetuous and he had to shove the pieces to one side in order to open a hole big enough to admit him. In the small single interior room, he found a cowering young woman with ripped clothing and a tall Esati officer in the process of removing his pants. Incensed, Everett took the woman and moved her far to the south, leaving her near an unthreatened and still occupied village. On his return, he parked the officer in a nearby lake, barely resisting the impulse to plunge the criminal to the very bottom.
It took hours longer, relatively, and dozens of other equally fruitless searches, but he finally came across an Esati escorted wagon traveling north along a side road about ten miles from the front. With one of the magic canceling mechanisms mounted at each corner, the wagon carried a large cage constructed of riveted iron slats.
When he landed next to the cage, he saw but a single person lying within: Sarah.
In his haste to reach her, he ripped the cage apart, leaving the splinters and mangled bars hanging in a cloud all about the frame of the wagon. Shaking from the effort, he scrambled onto the denuded bed and knelt beside her.
She appeared asleep, or, at least, her eyes were closed. Part of her shirt over her shoulder had been cut away and a large cotton bandage was visible. Gently, he took her statue-like form in his arms and bounded away, casting continuously to cover distance until he was perhaps fifty miles to the south of the invasion. Landing finally beside a tree-lined stream that ran deep and dark in sinuous curves along the border of a sheepfold, he placed her on a swatch of dried grass in the shade of a bank-clutching cypress.
“Time, resume thy flow!”
Sarah stirred and opened her eyes briefly, then sat up with a sudden start. Recovering quickly, she eased back into the grass, favoring her injured shoulder, and leisurely surveyed her new location.
“It’s about time you showed up,” she chided at last, grinning.
He wrapped her in his arms in a desperate hug.
She winced, her face tightening in pain. “Easy, Everett! I know that you’re happy to see me, but let’s save the festivities for later! When you squeeze me so tight it hurts.”
He released her, reddening. “Sorry. Are you injured badly?”
“Nothing life threatening. The bullet went cleanly through without striking bone or artery, but it hurt when it hit and it still hurts now. Some Zherian medic patched me up and then those red coats tossed me in the cage. They didn’t say where they were taking me, but I doubt that I would have enjoyed my reception very much.”
“The Esatis are scum. They intend to kill all magicians.”
She examined him thoughtfully. “You’ve gotten more spells, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How many do you have now?”
He made a quick tally in his head. “There's four new ones, three that I can use whenever I want and one that might be too dangerous to use. I suppose I should also count the two persistent magical effects. So, sixteen.”
“You have sixteen spells? Nobody gets more than thirteen spells, Everett.”
“Well, I do. Magic is cheating in my favor.”
“Magic is cheating? Tell me everything.”
He did, though it took the better part of an hour. She questioned all and made him repeat much of his experience, particularly the things that Magic had told him.
“Amazing,” she said finally.
“Did you know that Magic was your great-grandmother?”
“Not really. It has always been something of a family legend that we have been favored by Magic, but none of us ever suspected that great granny Miri was Magic itself. Are you going to do what she wants – kill Technology?”
He took a deep breath and let some of the tension ease from him. “Not if I can help it.
You’re safe and I’m not persuaded that I can do anything to stop this war. The Zherians are invading with hundreds of thousands of soldiers. No single man could hope to throw them back.”
Sarah rubbed her shoulder, the muscles in her jaw tightening. “I used to think – well, it doesn’t matter.”
Everett rose and offered her a hand. As she took it and stood, taking care not to jostle her shoulder over much, he realized that some large measure of her former confidence was missing. Perhaps her ordeal had convinced her that there were indeed calamities that even her indomitable will could not overturn.
“What do you want to do?” he asked her.
“I … I don’t know.”
Suddenly and deeply feeling the weariness of his long search, he chose to be blunt. “Do you want to go to Kleinsvench or fight the Zherians?”
She looked around for a moment at the bucolic sheepfold and the quiet stream and then turned back and nodded. “Let’s go home, Everett. I’ve had enough of war for a while.”
“Right. Stay your passage, O Time!”
It had not occurred to him to ask how she wanted to travel. The undeniable inherent logistical advantage involved in traveling in a timeless state made all other means of transport seem a waste of, as it were, time.
It also had not occurred to him at first that he did not actually know the exact location of Kleinsvench, but he did not concern himself overly with this problem as his spell gave him, so to speak, all the time in the world.
Luckily, the Alarsarians had a comprehensive highway system and a manifest dedication to signage. When he crossed the invested but unfortified border into the Grand Duchy of Filingham, he stopped at a crossroads outside a small town reputed to be Oakbrook, intending to resume time and get final directions from Sarah. Taking exaggerated care, he stood her posed figure back on her feet and took a moment to look around. The wider of the two routes led more or less north and showed the greenish discolorations of fresh horse manure and heavy wagon ruts in its packed gravel macadam. A great deal of traffic had passed upon it recently. No doubt, units of the Royal Alarsarian Army had moved up to emplace along the Republican frontier.
Inconvenient Magic 01 - Potatoes, Come Forth! Page 20