Fire and Dust

by James Gardner

  «We can't waste time,» she shouted. «Stand back.»

  As she raised her ice-staff, I shouted, «Don't do it!» She did it anyway.

  A split-second before the staff fired, it blazed as bright as the sun. Oonah's clothes instantly burst into flame; but her hands didn't waver an inch as she trained the tip of the staff at the door in front of her. A solid battering ram of ice shot from the staff, hissing as it contacted the fires around Oonah's body. Hot melt-water spattered us all; yet the flames only thawed the outer layer of ice, leaving the ram with enough mass to smack against the door with the sound of thunder.

  The wooden beam shifted a scant two inches.

  Screaming defiance, Oonah fired again. Another burst of magic-fueled heat exploded around the ice-staff, far too much to withstand so soon after the first flames. The staff vaporized in her hands, blazing so blindingly bright I couldn't see the result of Oonah's shot – my vision washed out in a blur of searing brilliance. Still, I heard the boom of impact, then the crunch of timber breaking to flinders. The door slammed open, letting in a rush of steam from the broken boiler.

  Oonah took one step toward the doorway, then dropped to her knees. The white dust fire had taken a terrible toll – none of the victims I'd seen at the courts had been so viciously burnt. Her clothes were gone, her skin now as black as charred wood. Kiripao leapt forward to hold her up… and as he grasped her hand, it broke off at the wrist, like a twig reduced to ash.

  «Go,» Oonah said, her voice nothing but a whisper. «Stop Rivi. Preserve justice.»

  And she toppled forward, a dead and crumbling thing.

  10. THREE TOOTS OF A WHISTLE

  Hezekiah screamed in horror at Oonah's death. I wished I could find my voice to join him; but there was more pressing business, so I drew my rapier and headed for the door.

  Kiripao beat me outside, of course… and before I reached the doorway, he dove back into the room, shouting, «Down!»

  I had time to throw myself against the wall before a fireball burst at Kiripao's heels. A gout of flame poured in through the doorway, lighting our faces with hellish scarlet; but no one was in direct line with the blast, and a quick glance around showed only minor scorching.

  Yasmin grimaced. «I take it the Fox has us bottled up.»

  «Hey,» I shouted out to the old barmy, «Rivi said you couldn't burn us.»

  «Oh, yeah,» he called back. «Sorry.»

  The next second, a storm of white dust came through the doorway with the force of a hurricane. Wheezle, just getting to his feet, was blown backward by the wind and smashed against the wall a second time. Kiripao gagged on silt rammed down his throat, then curled into a ball, racked with coughing. The rest of us did some coughing of our own, then took cover under whatever desks and tables were available.

  Looking through the transparent wall of the room, I saw the source of the new onslaught – Foxy had cranked up his dust grinder to full power and trained its punishing gush on the doorway. He didn't have a straight line of fire into the room, but it was good enough to get about half the grinder's output inside the door. Half was plenty. Already our exit was partly blocked by a mound of white, and the pressure of the spray was driving more dust inside. Within minutes, we'd all be neckdeep in that fine white silt; if we tried to escape in the meantime, we'd have to fight against the powerful jet of dust, then face the Fox's fireballs.

  I looked across the room at Yasmin. Her cheeks and forehead had accumulated a layer of dust sticking to sweat. «We have to make a run for it,» she shouted. «I'll carry Wheezle. When we get out the door, we scatter.»

  She had to know how desperate the plan was: no matter how fast we scattered, a single wide-diameter fireball could incinerate us all. On the other hand, did I want to stay in the control room and wait for it to fill with dust? Even if Foxy stopped the spray before we suffocated, we'd be trapped in grit until Rivi returned to rape our minds.

  I nodded to Yasmin. «Let's do it.»

  * * *

  Kiripao exploded out of the doorway in a frenzied scattering of dust. Perhaps he intended to charge the Fox, because he took a step in that direction; but Kiripao was an elf, fine-boned and light. The continuing torrent of dust pouring from the grinder smashed him off balance, spun him around, and battered him back against the outside wall of the control room.

  I didn't see any more than that… because I was next behind him.

  The dust buffeted me with the force of an ocean wave, threatening to sweep me backward like Kiripao. I leaned into it, hoping my feet wouldn't slip on the silken mound of silt piled on the floor. My eyes were closed against the dust stream, but I could tell the moment I cleared the doorway by the sudden change of sound – the tightly enclosed control chamber opening into the wide and echoing machine room. Grappling for the edge of the door, I propelled myself forward, cutting directly across the brutal flood of dust.

  My ear, the one facing toward the flow, filled immediately with the hammer-driven particles, clogging up so densely all sound from that direction was cut off. I wondered if this deafness just came from blockage, or if the pressure of the spray had ruptured my eardrum. For a moment, I panicked – loss of hearing or any other sense terrifies a Sensate. Fear spurred me on with desperate energy and I drove myself forward, harder, harder… until suddenly I escaped from the pounding barrage of dust, into the relative peace of the machine room.

  Peace: deaf in one ear, and now assailed by sickening humid heat, as the broken boiler continued to spew steam into the air. I took a moment to wipe a clot of dust from my eyes, then ducked behind a screeching fan-belt and turned back to see how my comrades fared.

  Kiripao had been beaten back into a corner of the room, unable to fight the unstoppable deluge of dust. As I watched, Yasmin joined him – she had been right behind me as I battled my way out the door, but had not been able to keep her balance with Wheezle in her arms. Woman and gnome had fallen together, and the cascade of silt had knocked them backward across the floor, both of them sputtering as the flood jammed dust up their nose. They struck Kiripao hard, all three pinned in the corner by the pummeling stream.

  «Got you!» the Fox squealed in delight. His voice was barely audible over the hiss of fast-flowing grit. I saw him raise his hands, heard him begin the chanting invocation to shoot a fireball that would bake my friends.

  «Stop!» I shouted, surging to my feet. But my voice was hoarse and I could never fight my way upstream against the dust spray in time to reach the Fox. Roaring, I threw myself into the storm anyway, hoping the old barmy might aim at me instead of Yasmin.

  Dust slashed deafeningly around me. When the fireball went off, I wouldn't see or hear it; I would only feel the passing of its heat, either striking me down or exploding around my three allies still pressed back into the corner. Exploding around Yasmin.

  Then, suddenly, the dust cut off like a blown-out candle. I had been leaning so heavily into it, I staggered and fell face down, landing on clotted dust as soft as a pillow. Immediately I lifted my head and saw the Fox a few paces away, his eyes closed in bliss, his lips still chanting the spell. Hezekiah stood beside him, the Clueless boy holding the grinder in his hands. He had cranked its output down to a fraction of the former flood… and he had aimed the resulting spray to sift lightly down over the Fox, coating him with the purest white.

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Let fate take its course.

  The Fox still wore a foundation layer of the brown dust, counteracting the anti-magic influence of the white. However, as the new shower of white dust rained over the brown, the balance of energies began to shift. Did the Fox notice? To my eyes, the effect was subtle at first: a gentle glow, a soft nimbus surrounding the old man as the white dust began to fluoresce. Miriam had told us the sorcerer was at home with fire – maybe he didn't feel the initial heat. But as the peak of the conjuration approached, I could almost feel magical energy ballooning around the Fox… and the white dust could feel it too.

  With a so
ft puff, every dust particle blossomed with the heat of a tiny sun.

  Hezekiah threw himself backward; or perhaps he was knocked away by the heat of a million dust motes blazing like molten steel. The Fox's voice choked in his throat, and his mad old eyes opened wide. White-hot flames sizzled around him; his face transformed to an expression of wonderment.

  Embracing the ultimate fire.

  Then the energies around him shredded his body to powder, and he exploded like the giant on the Mortuary steps.

  * * *

  The force of the Fox's explosion blew out the closest three pistons, blasting them into pieces of metal shrapnel that sliced through other parts of the massive engine. Immediately, the floor beneath me lurched like a wagon upturned on a stone in the roadway; and I wondered what the Glass Spider would do with one of its drive-legs put into the dead-book.

  I didn't intend to stay around and find out.

  Time for the eternal chorus of anyone venturing onto the planes, more universal than any prayer or chant or battle-cry; and all of us yelled it in unison.

  «LET'S GET OUT OF HERE!»

  Miriam added, «I know the closest exit.» I'd forgotten she was still with us, but thanked the gods of luck we had someone to show us an escape route. Without waiting for discussion, she took to her heels out of the machine room, leaving a trail of dusty footprints on the floor. Hezekiah followed, not even sparing a glance for the rest of us… not that we were dallying ourselves. As I staggered to my feet, I saw that Yasmin and Kiripao were already moving, Yasmin cradling Wheezle's small body in her arms. I didn't like the look of that – Wheezle hadn't moved under his own power for quite some time.

  Still, only an addle-cove would mull that over in a room that was ripping itself apart… which was precisely what the machinery was doing. Steam roiled all around us, clouding the farthest reaches of the chamber; and every few seconds, a chunk of hardware would rocket out of the mists with the speed of a sling bullet. Gears… ball bearings… thick swatches of conveyor belt… lumps of debris, some smouldering, some crackling with sparks of blue lightning.

  In its way, the destruction ripping through the room had an admirable kind of vitality. An elegant thoroughness. An unrestrained energy that didn't care a whit for any flesh and blood that happened to stand in its way…

  «Get moving, you Sensate leatherhead!» Yasmin shouted from the doorway. «You want a slice-job from some flying camshaft?»

  At that very moment a tiny cog whizzed past my ear, whirling as fast as a buzz-saw; and I acknowledged that some experiences are best postponed for one's golden years.

  * * *

  A minute later, we had caught up with Hezekiah and Miriam who were taking a breather some distance down the corridor. Hezekiah still held the grinder, which pleased me no end – without that «wee bauble», Rivi's plans would go nowhere.

  «All right,» I said to the boy, as I drew even with him. «You want to tell me how you did that trick back there? One second you were behind me in the control room. The next, you were showering the Fox with his own dust. I thought Rivi had blanked you from teleporting.»

  «I thought so too,» he answered, panting a bit after his run down the hall. «But…» He lowered his voice. «Oonah died right in front of us – she sacrificed herself. And then Miriam was watching me, as if she knew I'd do something to save everyone… I don't know, Britlin, it made me so mad and desperate, I felt this surge of energy, as if a little sun had caught fire inside of me. The next thing I knew, I was standing beside the Fox… and he'd left the grinder just lying on the floor while he was casting his spell… I didn't mean to kill him, Britlin, I just thought it would stop him from finishing the enchantment…»

  Miriam took the boy's arm and squeezed it with fierce protectiveness. «The old berk had it coming. Barmy as a bison and twice as nasty.»

  «You used to work for him,» Yasmin coldly reminded her. «And Rivi.»

  «Yeah, well.» Miriam dropped her gaze to the floor. «I took Rivi's jink, sure… but I didn't give a tinker's about her cause. No one did. And Rivi didn't give a tinker's for any of us. You saw how she treated Petrov; she'd do the same to me as easy as breathing, and I'd return the favor if I could.»

  «What a paragon of loyalty you are,» Yasmin muttered. Turning to the rest of us, she added, «Let's all bear that in mind, shall we?»

  «Honored Handmaid,» Wheezle said, staring up at Yasmin like an infant in her arms, «we have greater concerns than this woman's feelings toward us.»

  «That's right,» I put in, «like your state of health. How are you doing, Wheezle?»

  «Most of me is doing well, honored Cavendish. However, I have no feeling in my legs.»

  Hezekiah's face went pale. The boy whispered to me, «Wheezle hit that wall pretty hard…»

  «I know… could be a spinal injury.» In a louder voice, I told Wheezle, «Don't worry – whatever it is, they'll be able to fix it in Sigil.»

  «Indeed,» Wheezle nodded, «many of those in my faction have quite remarkable magic for curing —»

  The floor suddenly heaved beneath our feet, whipping all of us against the left-hand wall. By luck, I happened to be standing between Yasmin and the wall's glossy steel, which meant I could cushion her and Wheezle from full impact. The experience was not quite so cozy for me – Yasmin was no featherweight debutante, starved down to look good in taffeta – but I'd had it easy so far compared to the others, so I couldn't complain about a few bruises.

  A moment later, the floor's motion stopped; but the whole corridor remained slanted with a leftward slope of about five degrees. I didn't want to guess what was happening to the Glass Spider now that one leg was blowing its gaskets. Long ago, one of my father's friends had told me stories about all the planes, including the Plane of Dust: «There's places there, boy, where the dust runs a thousand miles deep. You can be walking along, dust only up to your ankles, and suddenly, the floor just drops away and you sink forever.» If the Spider's malfunctioning leg had somehow kicked us off the edge of safe ground into one of those dusty morasses…

  «Miriam,» I said, «I believe you were showing us the closest way out?»

  «Follow me,» she answered.

  And we followed.

  * * *

  Corridors blurred by. At first we ran full speed, but another lurch from the Spider sent us toppling again, banging painfully into the metal wall. From that point on, we slowed to a nervous trot, as fast as we could go while still retaining some hope of staying on our feet at the next shudder. Three more times, the Glass Spider quaked; and each time, the floor tipped a little more sideways.

  «This feels like a sinking ship,» Hezekiah blurted out as we pressed on after the third upheaval.

  «I suppose you've been on a sinking ship,» Yasmin said.

  «No,» Hezekiah replied, «but my Uncle Toby —»

  «How far is it to the exit?» I interrupted: anything to avoid more about his sodding berk of an uncle.

  «Not far,» Miriam answered. «Every one of the Spider's arms has a portal at the bottom end. The one back to Sigil is too far away, but there's a portal nearby that goes to Mount Celestia.»

  I grunted in approval. Mount Celestia, the Plane of Lawful Good, was a bit restrained and conservative for my tastes, but it certainly qualified as a safe bolt-hole under the circumstances: the people were tolerant and friendly, the climate mild and hospitable. Sensates who visited there claimed it had the most boring night-life of any plane that wasn't actually encased in ice; at the moment, however, a short stint of tedium was just what I needed. No doubt we could find a portal from Mount Celestia back to Sigil, and then we could put this whole mess into the hands of Lady Erin.

  We came to a spiral staircase just like the one we'd descended to get to this level. As each of us climbed, I waited for another Spider-quake, one vicious enough to toss us screaming off the steps; but the Fates were kind and we all reached the top before the next tremor hit. This tremor had none of the snap and tumble of the previous ones,
but it seemed to go on forever: a slow and persistent drag that dropped one side of the Spider until the floors were all slanting at a tilt of thirty degrees.

  «The ship is definitely sinking,» Hezekiah muttered.

  None of us bothered to reply.

  * * *

  Miriam led us to the right, down a corridor that ran around the outer ring of the Spider's body. Looking out the window, I could see that the closest legs to us had lifted right off the ground – the opposite side of the Spider must have plunged so deeply under the dust that the legs on our side could no longer reach the surface. I took some comfort in that; on this side, we'd keep our heads above ground level substantially longer.

  In fact, I was feeling positively chipper until we ran into the wights.

  Twenty wights – yes, twenty – waited in the next lounge area around the circumference of the circle. And at their head was a milky transparent image of Rivi herself.

  «Hello, darlings!» she called. «After the Spider started its jumpy wee dance, I assumed you might head for this exit. Did you miss me?»

  «That's just a projection,» Hezekiah hissed, pointing at the ghostly Rivi. «She can't exert any power through it.»

  «True,» the projected Rivi smiled. «But I can still command these dear obedient wights to rip out your entrails if you don't give me back the grinder.»

  «Sorry,» I told her. «We've grown quite attached to the wee bauble. It would look simply precious on my dining room table.»

  Rivi's projection flickered momentarily, but I could see a storm of murderous fury sweep across her face. It lasted only a moment; then she forced it away and the ghostly image stabilized once more.

  «I don't want to kill you, I truly don't,» she said. «You're dangerous people; I admire that enormously. You've killed the Fox, crippled the Spider, and terrified all my lackeys. I'd love to have you conquer the multiverse by my side. But you must give me the grinder.»