by Jack Heckel
He gave another shrug. “Knowing how heartbroken you were at the loss of your pet, I had intended to spare you any more suffering, but if you insist . . .”
“I do.”
“Have you wondered how we found you so quickly?” he asked as he inspected his nails.
It was a good question. On reflection, it did seem terribly convenient that the Administration would find Rook’s secret meeting place on the day I first came to it. A suspicion crept into my mind, and a cold prickle of fear ran up my spine.
He flicked away an invisible speck of something. “We got a tip. A loyal mage uncovered information about where a dangerous group of renegades would be meeting. He was worried his friend might have fallen in with a bad crowd.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a rasping whisper. “Eldrin really does care about your well-being, Dark Lord.”
“You lie.”
He shook his head, an almost imperceptible movement. “You know it’s true.”
I didn’t know it was true, but the fact I didn’t was almost worse. The key was in my hand before I’d made a conscious decision to attack, but Valdara was at my side even faster. This time she gave me no choice. Wrapping her arms around my body, she carried me back to the door to where Rook and Drake were waiting.
“We are at war, Dark Lord, and they are the enemy,” Moregoth called out. “If they are not destroyed, Mysterium and all the wisdom of the ages will be lost. You know it, I know it, and Eldrin knows it. It isn’t too late to rejoin us, your true friends, and take your rightful place in creation.”
As Valdara pulled me backward through the door, I shouted, “I will kill you, Moregoth!”
He gave me a mocking little wave goodbye. “Remember this day! It’s your first as a slave.” His hideous, rasping laughter followed me into the bathroom.
Chapter 21
Hysteria in the Hypocube
Even after the door closed, I continued to struggle with Valdara. “I’ll kill you!” I shouted. “I will find you and I will kill you!”
“I like where your head is at, kid,” Drake said wearily. “But I don’t think he can hear you anymore.”
I knew he was talking sense, but I wanted to hold on to my anger. The only alternative was despair. I thrashed about in Valdara’s arms, trying to break free, but it was like trying to wrestle a stone. Eventually, I wore myself out and was reduced to cursing. When I ran out of abuse to hurl and energy to struggle, Valdara pulled me into a hug.
“I’m sorry about your friend, Avery.”
Rook poked his head out of the bathroom stall and grunted, “I’m sorry also, because right now I need help fixin’ this hypocube, and the two of you seem intent on dancin’ with each other instead.”
I’m not sure I even heard him. I was too consumed with thoughts of Eldrin and Dawn, and whether they were on the Administration’s side. When I finally shook myself out of my reverie, I was confused to see that some amount of time had passed. Rook and Valdara were standing by the door of one of the metal-walled stalls. It had been painted a bright blue and clashed hideously with the warm earth tones of the rest of the bathroom. The dwarf was cursing volubly. I went to Drake with the idea of asking him what was going on and when we were planning on leaving, but he looked awful. He was leaning against the tiled wall; his face was pale and sweat was beaded on his forehead.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “Just tired, kid. I haven’t had to hold a ward for this long in years. I guess I’m a little—” he took a series of shallow breaths “—a little out of practice. Besides, now that you and Moregoth aren’t engaged in philosophical discussion, he seems real intent on breaking through.”
“Maybe he needs to go to the bathroom,” I suggested.
Drake tried to smile, but another wave of fatigue seemed to come over him. His head drooped until he seemed to be hanging from his staff. I noticed the light of the crystal was not as bright as it had been, and seemed to be wavering: now dimmer, and then brighter again.
I moved to stand next to Valdara. She was looking down at Rook, who was kneeling in the bathroom stall, but instead of a toilet, the interior consisted of a small square chamber with an angled control console set in one wall. The controls themselves seemed to be random to the point of noncoherence. There was an old-style, green-colored oscilloscope screen surrounded by an odd assortment of levers, buttons, switches, rheostats, a manual typewriter, and what looked to be a set of faucet handles.
Rook gave another curse and pounded at something on the underside of the console with the flat end of his ax.
“I don’t want to interrupt any subtle adjustments you may be making to . . . whatever this is,” I shouted over Rook’s hammering. “But Drake doesn’t look good. I don’t think he’ll be able to hold his ward much longer.”
“I’m fine,” he sighed, but then his legs sort of folded and he slid down the wall to the floor.
Valdara leapt to his side. She put a hand to his forehead and her brow wrinkled with worry. “Right!” she yelled. “That’s quite enough banging about, Rook. We have to leave now, whether this contraption of yours is ready or not.” With surprising ease, Valdara lifted Drake to his feet and walked him to the stall.
“Fine!” Rook grunted irritably. “I was only doin’ some fine tunin’ anyway.”
He got up and sat down in a swivel chair I hadn’t remembered seeing before. With the chair and the console there was precious little space left. I was still trying to decide where to stand when I felt Valdara’s hand in my back. She pushed me through the door and crowded in behind. I heard the door shut and lock. I found myself squished between Valdara and Drake on one side and Rook’s pilot’s chair on the other. The ceiling also seemed to have dropped and the floor risen, forcing us all to hunch uncomfortably. It made me wish I had taken yoga at some point in my life.
“Rook!” I said, trying to turn around without jabbing my elbow into anyone. “What is this place?”
“It’s a hypocube,” he said as though that word by itself answered the question.
Drake gave a long drawn-out sigh and his head flopped to one side. The light of the crystal wavered, flared one last time, and then went out altogether. There was a loud explosion from outside.
“I think we’re going to have company!” I shouted.
“Don’t worry! I’ve got this under control. Get ready for extradimensional travel, the Mysterian way!” Rook said with unaccustomed enthusiasm.
He rubbed his hands together, threw a few switches, twisted a couple of knobs, and pulled up the stopper on the faucet. There was a rhythmic wheezing sound that seemed to echo through every fiber of my being, a sound which I could imagine was heard across the multiverse. When it stopped, there was a deeper, resonant boom of finality.
“Was that it?” I asked expectantly. “Where are we?”
“I imagine we’re in a coffee shop on Bleecker between Carmine and Leroy,” Rook replied irritably. “It didn’t work.”
“What do you mean it didn’t work?” asked Valdara.
“It’s not my fault,” said Rook with a scratch of his tousled beard. “It should be workin’. There’s not enough power. I think it’s Moregoth. He must be interferin’ with the time-space pattern, or the energy-flux matrix.”
“Either that or you forgot to recharge,” I said dryly, and pointed to a flashing light next to label that read in big, bold print please recharge me.
Rook slapped a palm down on top of the alarm. “We need to stay focused, people! It’s clear we’ve been sabotaged.”
An explosion shook the interior of the hypocube. I could hear shouts outside. “We are running out of time, Rook!”
“This ship is tough. It’ll take ’em a while to get inside,” Rook said confidently, but then a second blast rocked the chamber and he said less confidently, “But not forever.”
“What do you need besides raw magical power?” I asked, fingering the key in my pocket.
Rook pushed some other button
s, flipped switches, and twisted a few faucet handles before grunting, “Basically, that’s it.”
I pulled out the key. There was still a little magic left in it. I concentrated on that and added as much of my own strength as I could. I focused on trying to pool the magical energy into a concentrated burst, and then I touched the key to the control console. It morphed again, stretching and flattening. When it was roughly the shape of a USB-c connector, something inside the hypocube latched on to the source of magic and devoured it. The engines of the hypocube, or whatever passed for them, activated with a lurch and knocked me backward.
“Here we go!” shouted Rook. “It’s easy sailin’ from here.”
Despite Rook’s assurances, traveling by hypocube was damned uncomfortable. It wasn’t that you suffered the same type of disorienting brain-inverting sensation traveling by portal gave you. In fact, after launch, the inside of the craft was so quiet I could not have told you if we were moving or not. Instead, the hypocube was uncomfortable in the same way I imagine traveling by clown car would be uncomfortable.
It wasn’t the design of the craft itself that was odd. The chamber was square, with Rook’s pilot’s seat and control panel set at one end, and a pair of bench seats facing each other across a central aisle that ran down the back of the craft to the door. By all rights, there should have been enough space for us to stretch out and get a little sleep, but the four of us filled it to an almost absurd extent. It seemed no matter how carefully we arranged ourselves, we were always elbowing each other, or trodding on each other’s feet, or . . .
“Excuse me,” Valdara said as she tried to move past me along the aisle to sit next to Drake. Although he was conscious, that’s about all he was.
I stood to let her pass, but standing only seemed to make things worse. Now that I was up, we were pressed against each other like commuters in a Tokyo subway car. I had nowhere to put my hands that didn’t seem wildly inappropriate. I took a step back and somehow wound up in Drake’s lap even though I could have sworn he’d been on the opposite side of the aisle a second ago. He grunted and I sprang away, launching my head into the low ceiling. With a hiss of pain, I stumbled into the back of Rook’s pilot’s chair.
“Dammit!” the dwarf barked. “Would you be still? It’s like you’ve never traveled by hypocube before.”
I rubbed at my forehead and stated the obvious. “None of us have ever traveled by hypocube, Rook. Until ten minutes ago I didn’t know a hypocube was a thing, and even now I’m not sure what that thing is.”
Though Rook was turned away from us, the stillness of his body let me know that I’d made him think. He scratched the back of his head. “Oh, well, that explains it.”
The three of us looked at each other. By silent agreement, Valdara asked the next obvious question. “What exactly is a hypocube?”
The dwarf took a break from fiddling with the craft’s controls, and swiveled his seat around to look at us. “This is a technological marvel, that’s what it is. The hypocube can travel anywhere in the multiverse.”
“And . . .” I asked when he began to return to his controls.
“And that’s a miracle, that is, laddie!”
“Why not use a transport circle?” I asked. “Seems a lot easier and—” I gave a grunt of pain as Valdara kicked me in the shin trying to cross her legs “—a lot more comfortable.”
The dwarf bristled his brows. “To use a transport circle you have to know where you’re goin’. With a hypocube you can travel to places you don’t even know you want to go.”
“Does that mean you don’t know where we’re going?” Valdara asked, which I thought was entirely reasonable.
“That’s not what I said,” he growled, pointing a shaking finger at her. “I know exactly where we are goin’, just—” he paused and stroked his beard thoughtfully “—not where we might end up along the way.” We all puzzled over his answer, and it gave Rook enough time to turn back around to his controls.
“Well, you might have made the thing bigger,” Valdara said irritably. She was having a hell of a time trying to find a place to put Drake’s staff that wouldn’t hit someone in the face.
“There would be plenty of space if you three would stop moving,” Rook grunted.
“It’s hard to stop moving when you have someone else’s elbow in your ribs or their stick knocking you in the side of the head,” I countered, and then shouted, “Valdara, put that damned staff down! That’s the third time you’ve nearly brained one of us with it.”
“Don’t you think I want to? It’s impossible!” she shouted back. To demonstrate, she showed me that no matter which way she positioned the staff it simply didn’t seem to fit inside the cube, which was odd as we were in the cube, and so, presumably, was the staff.
Rook spun back around and seized Valdara’s wrist. “Stop,” he said, and it was the softest, calmest voice I’d ever heard the dwarf use. “I want you to close your eyes and sit still for thirty seconds. I will count for you.”
And he did. When he got to zero he asked us to open our eyes, but only after he exacted a promise that no matter what we saw, we would not move. When we opened our eyes again I found myself alone on a bench that looked easily large enough to sleep on. Valdara sat comfortably opposite me. Drake was stretched out across the bench with his head in her lap. The staff leaned casually against the wall next to them.
“What just happened?” I asked a fraction of a second before Valdara could.
“If you can change the size of the cube, then why make it small to begin with?” she asked.
“I can’t,” Rook answered.
“But . . . wait . . . what?” I countered with my typical eloquence, and gestured about at the obviously expanded interior.
“It’s not me, it’s the hypocube,” the dwarf said.
“You keep saying that word, but what does it mean?” I asked, my frustration boiling over.
“A hypocube is an enterdimensional space . . .”
“Like Avery’s piece of folded reality?” Valdara asked.
Rook shook his head. “It is the opposite of Avery’s piece of folded reality. Folded reality is an extradimensional phenomenon. You take a small piece of real space and you fold it around a pocket of extradimensional reality so you have more space than you should. The hypocube is an enterdimensional construct, which means you take a large piece of reality and cram it into a very small extradimensional space, like this cube.” Rook raised a finger to the ceiling, which seemed to lower to meet his hand. “What is more, hypocubes are dimensionally aggressive.”
“I know what both those words mean, but when you put them together it sounds like a lot of gibberish,” I said with a sigh.
“It means . . .” he started to say, but then stopped himself and thought about it a little more. “You see . . .” He stopped again, discarding his second explanation also. After a time, he tried again. “All you need to know is the more room you need, the smaller the hypocube gets. So, the more you move around, the less room you’ll find you have.”
“You’re saying it’s smaller on the inside than it is on the outside?” Valdara asked in a voice that was basically begging Rook to tell her she was wrong.
“Exactly,” he said with relish. “So, stay still and let me figure out where we’re goin’ on the way to the place we want to reach.”
He began to swivel back to the control panel, but I was having none of it. I grabbed at the arm of Rook’s chair to stop him, found it was much closer than I’d judged, and nearly decked him in the process. He rolled his eyes and gestured for me to sit down. I did. I closed my eyes and counted to ten. When I finished my countdown, I opened my eyes and found the dimensions of the cube had returned to “normal.” Whatever that was.
“I think I understand what you’re saying,” I said calmly. “But it makes no sense. Why in the world would you make a construct that is always fighting you for space?”
“He’s right,” Valdara said. “Why build something that mi
ght shrink by a couple feet simply because you need it?”
“Or have a sudden desire to stretch?” I suggested.
Rook fixed us with his sternest stare. “How else would you geniuses propose to make a hypocube?”
This was a stumper, and I decided it made sense to abandon further questions about the hypocube to ask him something more pressing. “You are a Mysterian . . .”
Rook sat back in his chair. “Yes, I’m a Mysterian. I thought we’d established that already.”
“Then I want an answer to the question I asked back in your coffee klatch. Why haven’t you all done something about what’s going on at the university?”
He bristled his brow. “We did answer—”
“No!” I said sharply. “All you said was you’d been defeated. That’s an excuse, not a reason.”
The dwarf fiddled with the end of his beard nervously. “You have beliefs about what Mysterians are and are not, and about what they can and canna’ do. I may be a Mysterian, and we may have some clever tricks left around from the old days like the cubes, but as a race we are only a shadow of what we once were. We are hunted in our own homeland. We are reduced to meetin’ in back rooms of coffee shops. And you saw what happened when those bloody Administration goons came. Rather than fight, most of my people skulked back into the shadow of subworlds like rats.”
“But you created Mysterium. Your reality has to be stronger than these usurpers! Why can’t we use that raw power to fight them?”
He gestured about in wild frustration. “See, this is what I’m talkin’ about. You university-educated mages think you know so much about magic, but you know nothing. When you were on Trelari your reality was much stronger than everyone else’s. Why didn’t you simply march in and impose your will? After all, Vivian was only a subworlder.”
“It’s not the same,” I protested. “My spell was in progress and she had—”