Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Kaslo looked beyond them to where the towers of the city loomed on the horizon. The distance was too great for him to be sure that he was not seeing a buzz of traffic in the air above the spires. Reflexively, he began to tell his integrator to use its percepts, then remembered its last contribution and stopped.

  He peered at the far skyline. He thought he saw a thin line of smoke rising. If he could see it at this distance, at the source it must be a thick column. In a moment, it was joined by another. And now that he let his eyes focus on individual towers, he was sure that he saw smoke issuing from near the top of one of the tallest.

  His imagination showed him volantes and heavier airbornes losing their power and crashing to the ground. Or losing their senses and slamming into buildings. It was too much to take in. He fought off a shudder; he had enough to deal with already.

  Down on the lawn, Phalloon had scaled the long slope leading to the prominence on which he had sited his castle-to-be. He paused where the land leveled out and watched impatiently as his henchmen labored up with his luggage. They stopped halfway up, consulted for a moment, then tried rolling the trunk up the incline, top over bottom. But Phalloon’s shrill squawk, followed by a high-pitched hectoring, returned them to their earlier, more laborious approach.

  Kaslo’s original plan had been simple: When Phalloon came within range, he would have used the disorganizer. That would technically have been murder, but the enemy’s bodyguards were armed, and the op had no doubt they would have shot first if ordered to. Proactive self-defense, he would have deemed it.

  But now, the great change had come and the disorganizer was nothing more than an intricately fashioned blunt object. Kaslo turned to Obron. “It’s your fight from here on in.”

  His employer had already made his way to the shelves and cupboards and was examining his rival’s possessions. He chose a few of them, and after a cursory examination lined up three objects on the workbench. Then he opened his satchel and from its contents added some items of his own. He pursed his lips, pinched the bottom one between thumb and forefinger, humming tunelessly to himself.

  “When will Phalloon encounter the barrier?” Kaslo asked him.

  The wizard broke off his musings and glanced out the window. “Soon,” he said. He drew Kaslo’s attention to the trunk. “Too bad about that,” he said.

  “Why?” said the op.

  “I had a rough idea as to what Phalloon possessed.” He gestured at the shelves and the bench. “These are the lesser part of it.”

  Kaslo saw the implication. “So, what’s he’s got out there—”

  “There’s some power in it.”

  “Can he collapse the barrier?”

  “Doubtful. But just because he can’t cross it, doesn’t mean that he can’t hurl things through it. At least some things.” Obron directed a thoughtful look Phalloon’s way. “I’ll admit he has more learning than I—I’ll assume he has more will, though not much more.” He gestured toward the objects on the bench. “I, however, have a few items—some of them thanks to you—that should even the odds.”

  “Who will win?” Kaslo said.

  “I expect some touch and go,” said his employer. “Judgment will play a role. His impetuosity and arrogance will weigh against him. And he has one serious problem.”

  “And that is?”

  “I am in here, above the node of the red and green. He is not. Proximity may be the key. Moreover, I believe I have progressed slightly farther into the green school.”

  He turned his gaze back toward the scene outside. Kaslo joined him. There was a definite pall of smoke above the distant crystal towers of Indoberia now, and a flicker of flames reflected in the shining spires. As he looked, a huge slab of one tower’s substance split off near the top, and fell toward the ground like an iceberg calving from a sea-touching glacier. As Kaslo saw tiny shards fly into the air, he reflected on how the builders would have used constrained forces to hold the great structures together. Now those powers were dissipated.

  His mind offered him a series of unsought images: All up and down The Spray, on the Grand Foundational Domains, on their secondary worlds now themselves grown ancient, even on the roughest minor planets, the products of engineering and science would be failing. Great orbitals were falling from the skies; sliders buckling and heaving, throwing pedestrians from their speeding surfaces, towers and arches collapsing, dams yielding to gravity-mad torrents.

  Again, he thrust the apocalyptic visions from his mind. There was nothing to be done about a universe gone mad. There was only what could be done in the here and now.

  And here came a thaumaturge who would surely do his worst. Phalloon’s men had got the trunk up the slope. Rubbing his palms together, the wizard turned from them and stepped briskly toward the structure’s main door. A quick stride, then two more steps, a third, though not a fourth—because the small nose projecting from his round face abruptly struck an invisible wall. But the wizard did not just rebound; he was picked up, his feet clearing the ground, then hurled back almost to where his retainers were wrestling the trunk forward. They stopped, gaped, set down their burden, unslung their weapons, found them dead, and took up the bolt-throwers instead.

  The wizard stood up, shook his head to clear it, and stood staring at the doorway. He struck a precise pose, moved his arms and hands in unlikely ways, and spoke words Kaslo could not hear. Then he felt his way forward, his hand outstretched until it was suddenly seized and jerked forward. Then again he was thrown back and down. Phalloon rose, his face now a moon covered by a dark cloud. He put his fists on his hips and glared at the door. Then he raised his eyes until he was looking up into the window from which Kaslo and Obron stood looking down at him. Kaslo could now see the whites of the wizard’s eyes, all around the irises. He need not be able to hear the words that Phalloon was mouthing to understand their meaning. Or the intent behind them.

  Obron offered the other wizard an ironic salute, then turned to the items he had arrayed on the workbench. “And so it begins,” he said.

  • • •

  If Phalloon’s weakness was an impetuous nature, he managed to overcome it for the initial passage of wizardly arts. He did not return Obron’s salute, but turned and gestured brusquely to his men to take up the trunk and carry it back down the slope. Back on the flat, at a distance of a hundred paces, he bid them set it down. He then stood behind the chest and made a sequence of hand-waves over its top, which obliged him by popping open. Phalloon disappeared behind the upraised lid as he bent to delve within.

  “I think I know what he’ll try first,” said Obron. He stepped to the bench and took up an object that resembled a three-pronged fork of green crystal, a little longer and wider than his hand. He voiced a few sounds over it and the chamber was immediately filled with a pervasive hum that became a buzz that quickly climbed in pitch until the op felt his teeth vibrating in his skull, before the frequency finally became too high for his ears to register.

  Obron held the fork aloft. It now shone from within, growing ever brighter as the wizard whispered sibilant phrases over it, until Kaslo had to turn his eyes away. The thaumaturge carried it to the window, needing two hands to do so. From the manner in which he wove a wandering path across the room, it seemed to Kaslo that the glowing trident was being pushed this way and that by invisible forces.

  The op could not see what was happening outside. Obron blocked the window and, besides, the light from the fork was nearly blinding. His master was still whispering incomprehensible sounds, while struggling to hold the trident in a two-handed grip that put Kaslo in mind of an angler trying to control a monster fish.

  Then from beyond the window came a warble of thunder, a sound like a giant gargling on thickened blood. A huge pressure began to build in the chamber, and Kaslo had to clap his palms to his ears to save their sensitive membranes from being battered into his skull. Obron grimaced in pain, but his grip on the trident remained strong and now he brought both arms down so that the three
ultraradiant prongs pointed through the slit in the wall. Instantly, the fork’s light was extinguished and the room shook to a ker-ack! louder than the discharge of any lightning bolt.

  The pressure in the chamber instantly dropped back to normal; the op had to yawn and stretch his jaw to equalize the sudden change. Through spots of color that bloomed in his field of vision, he saw Obron hurry over to the bench, discard the now dull fork, and begin leafing through Hentero’s Compendium.

  Kaslo went to the window. As his eyesight restored itself, he saw Phalloon sprawled upon his back in a circle of scorched grass. In the farther distance, the two henchmen half-ran, half-staggered away, one of them slapping at the back of his head, where small flames consumed his hair.

  Kaslo was about to congratulate his master—employer now seemed an old-fashioned term—on victory, but he saw the more distant wizard raise his head, shake it once, then get to his knees and from there to his feet. With an air of fell determination, Phalloon marched to the trunk and stood looking down into it. Then he cast toward the stone pile a glance so baleful that the op felt something inside him turn cold.

  “Out of the way,” said Obron, pushing him aside. “He’s employing Porthry’s Basilisk. He used to do it to mice and roaches, then offer us the results as parting gifts. As if anyone would be impressed by stone vermin.”

  He sketched a figure in the air. Kaslo actually saw the lines of some complex symbol in green fire, then it faded.

  So, too, did the chill in his belly.

  Obron was leaning out the window now, calling in a mocking tone to his dispossessed rival. Kaslo heard him say, “… couldn’t cohere your fluxions if your life depended on it,” and “I’ve seen fancier digitation when the neighborhood loon picks his nose.”

  “What are you doing?” Kaslo said.

  Obron stepped back from the window. “Phalloon’s weakness,” he said, “is his tendency to overreach. I must engage his emotions.”

  “I think you’ve already done that,” said Kaslo, as a stream of high-pitched vituperation sounded from outside.

  “I need him to try something truly large, something beyond his means that I can then turn and apply against him.”

  “And if it turns out to be beyond your means, as well?”

  The thaumaturge shrugged. “I thought you were a man who could take a risk.”

  “A calculated one,” said the op. “But the mathematics of your business are beyond me.”

  “The discussion is now moot,” said Obron, peering again through the window slit. Kaslo looked, too, and saw Phalloon blowing into the neck of what appeared to be a large red balloon whose surface was marked by occult symbols in gold and silver. The sphere was already twice the size of his head and growing with each exhalation.

  “As I hoped,” said Obron. “Prudence would see him using the breath of a well prepared subject—the best is a prepubescent boy fed on bread and milk. By using his own wind, he intensifies the force, but risks a rising dissonance that … Well, never mind. Now we will see.” He rubbed his hands together and went back to the items on the bench, chose a six-holed flute of yellow bone that had once been part of someone’s arm and returned to the window.

  Kaslo had been watching the inflation of the sphere. Now the red-faced wizard paused to take several breaths. Obron leaned out the window and called, “What, out of wind so soon? That’s not the puffed-up bladder of hot air we all knew as Phalloon the Severely Limited.”

  The taunt galvanized the puffing thaumaturge. He returned the neck of the balloon to his lips. His face turned first scarlet, then an alarming shade of purple as the figured orb doubled in size.

  “Lovely,” said Obron. “A driven elemental is one thing; an elemental seethed in maniacal fury is altogether a different pail of eels.”

  Kaslo had heard the term, but could not fit a meaning to it. “An elemental?”

  Obron pursed his lips and blew a short breath through the flute, apparently too soft to raise a note. But the op had the impression that the instrument grew a tiny bit larger. “An air elemental,” the wizard said. “And a very angry one. He is causing it great distress.”

  Outside, Phalloon was holding the balloon, now waist-high, by the neck, while his free hand made circular motions above it. The purple had spread to his neck and his bald pate resembled a large grape of surpassing ripeness.

  “And, for good or ill,” said Obron, “here we go.” Raising the bone once more to his lips, he began to blow and finger the instrument, though Kaslo heard no sound. Outside, the sphere of air in Phalloon’s grip had begun to move of its own accord, displaying transient bulges and top-to-bottom ripplings of whatever material it was made from. Though it resembled a balloon, its red had not faded to pink as it had expanded. If anything, it was a deeper shade. The symbols and figures on it stood out starkly, shining through the gathering darkness.

  Kaslo looked skyward. A black cloud had formed over the estate, a swirling mass of inky vapor, from which spirals of dark gray mist reached halfway to the ground before they were torn apart by eddies of air. Now Phalloon also looked up, and a vengeful smile split his flushed face. With a final clenching of his fist followed by a springing open of its thumb and fingers, he relaxed his other hand’s grip on the neck of the balloon.

  Kaslo had expected an eruption of gases, even for the inflated sphere to fly off as its pent-up contents were released. Instead, the sphere sat as if weighted to the ground, while from its open neck issued a white, swirling fog that convoluted and roiled upon itself, seeming as thick as curds. As more of the thick gas emerged from confinement, it formed a long, conical shape that began to rotate, at first slowly, then faster and faster as its mass increased.

  Phalloon stepped back, his hands busy in the air before him, his mouth constantly moving. The enlarging cyclone hung between earth and overhanging cloud, swelling as it spun at ever-increasing speed. It was paler now, the color of skimmed milk, and as it reached higher the dark cloud above began to rotate in harmony. The tendrils of gray mist that reached down now grew darker and more substantial, and when they touched the top and sides of Phalloon’s elemental, they were instantly sucked into its spin.

  Kaslo could hear it now. It had begun as a soughing moan, as of wind playing about a house’s eaves, but it soon grew to the strength of a gale and kept building, as more and more of the overhead cloud was drawn down into the tornado. And now it was a roaring, ear-battering, constant blast.

  The whirlwind towered up to the sky, where black clouds were racing from all directions to join its ever-growing mass. Phalloon had stepped back, his clothes and hair-fringe flapping as if frantic to escape. He glanced up, and Kaslo saw a worried look briefly cross the wizard’s round face, but then his fury returned. Phalloon bit his lip and raised a hand, its digits bent into strange alignments. He paused, then brought his arm down in a chopping motion that ended with his forefinger aimed squarely at the window where Kaslo stood.

  And where Obron also waited, bent over his six-holed humerus, blowing his breath across the aperture at one end, his fingers rising and falling. Kaslo still could hear no sound from the instrument, though the wizard’s fingertips covered and uncovered the stops in what seemed a complex pattern. Obron’s brows were drawn down in intense concentration, and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and upper lip.

  Impossibly, the sound from outside grew even louder, causing the op to clap his hands to his ears once more. The whirling white cone had absorbed so much substance from the lowering clouds that it was now the color of black iron. And it was advancing steadily toward the half-built castle.

  Until it met Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter. To Kaslo, it was like seeing dense fog come up against clear glass. The swirling mass of gray vapor flattened against the barrier, and the op could see into the whirlwind’s raging center. The spell had clearly stopped the elemental, he thought, but beyond the cyclone he could see Phalloon’s arms still thrashing the air, his mouth opening and closing as he chanted fre
sh words of power.

  The barrier did not break—but it began to bow inward. Kaslo looked to the wizard he had chosen to follow, and wondered again if he had backed the wrong contender. Obron was piping for all he was worth, his fingers flying over the bone flute’s stops, perspiration now pouring from his brow, desperation in his eyes. Proximity to the ley-line node or not, Kaslo saw that the attempt to counter Phalloon’s power was failing. Obron had gambled, and was losing.

  Kaslo looked around the chamber. Magical paraphernalia abounded, but it was of no use to him. He drew his energy pistol and realized that it was no more useful than a rock he could throw. He let it drop. Then he remembered.

  To Obron, he said, “Keep blowing. I have an idea.” He left the chamber and found the stairs to the cellar. The plump, balding man was where he had left him, even though the restraint had ceased to function when the great change had come. The servant was sitting against the wall, staring at the broken bottle, his face an image of misery.

  “You could have escaped,” Kaslo said.

  The man did not look up. “To what?” He gestured to the smashed glass and pooled liquid. “That was a Grand Empyreal, of the 5546 vintage. The master will have my hide.” He blinked morosely then said, half to himself, “And, sad to say, that is not a metaphor.”

  “It was not your fault.”

  “Phalloon does not trifle with irrelevancies. I am the wine steward. Grand Empyreal stains the floor. No more need be said.”

  “He values his wine highly?” Kaslo said.

  “The refinement of his palate is his great pride.”

  “And, society being in the process of falling apart, these are now irreplaceable.”

  The majordomo nodded, tears in his eyes. “They were scarcely less so before the event. And I, of course, am not.”

  Kaslo looked about the cellar. There were other racks, deeper in shadow, all filled with dusty bottles. “Which of these,” he said, “are dearest to Phalloon’s refined palate?”