“Nice map!” cooed Oyaji with sincere appreciation. “Topographical features too! I like a wizard that carries decent maps. This sounds like fun already!”
• • • •
It was only the work of a few minutes to open the stable doors, extract the night carriage and then load up all the “cargo” via portal from the castle’s Great Hall. With Paul on board, the interior was a little cramped for space, even with all the Oni stacked aboard like cordwood.
Satisfied that everyone was ready, Oyaji chuckled in glee and lifted ever so gently into the night air. As he sailed out over the outer castle wall, he banked gradually to the left and assumed a north-northeast course, ascending at a steady rate of climb at the breathtaking speed of 40 miles per hour.
“Not feel-feel-feeling g-g-g-good, Pops,” Daneel said, slurring his words. The image on his monitor screen was quietly sitting cross-legged on the floor of a grey room. His ashen face did not bode well and Paul was deeply worried about him.
“Just hold on, Son,” Paul said, encouraging him. “As soon as we can reach a secure network, we’re going to find out what’s wrong with you and get you all fixed up.”
“Thank-anks-anks, Dadadadadada,” the Scottie replied.
Despite himself, Paul found the gentle swaying of the night carriage to be mesmerizing. Combined with the exhausting events of the day, he was unable to keep his eyes open. He leaned back against the padding of the seat and was, within seconds, sound asleep.
• • • •
An easy shake of the carriage and the bumping of the wheels on solid ground again woke Paul out of his troubled sleep. The five hour nap had been of considerable benefit to him. He felt stronger and more alert. Stretching, he pulled himself to the rear of the vehicle and looked out.
They were indeed on the ground again. And the night sky was considerably lighter than before. Sunrise could not be far off now.
However, it was raining. Hard too. In the distance, Paul could hear the growl of thunder rolling across the hilly terrain.
The night carriage was moving slowly along a dirt trail that was barely wide enough to allow its passage. The area held a number of trees but Paul could see an open field off to the east.
“Here we be, at the place of your choice,” the mirror woman said. “Glad I will be, off this carriage! Tired I am, of being smack up against Oni!”
The night carriage came to a full stop.
Hopping out, Paul stomped around to the front, casting a quick spell to keep the rain off of himself.
“There is an entrance to the gypsum cave system you told me about,” rumbled Oyaji. “It is over there a ways, to our west. You must create a break through the trees and then widen the entrance with your powers. But the inside of the cave will be more than adequate for me to spend the day out of this rain until nightfall again.” The creature paused. “I want to thank you for this trip. Best fun I’ve had in decades and a chance to get out, tour the countryside again. Thanks.”
Paul leaned up to pat the carriage on one side. “And thank you, for getting us out of the castle and to safety. One day, I will come back again and we will take more trips like this one.”
Oyaji beamed with pride. “That would be wonderful! I look forward to that day!”
Paul nodded, turning to head towards the tree line. Time to clear a path for the carriage.
• • • •
Unloading everyone from Oyaji was the work of only a couple of minutes. Since Paul had nowhere else to put everyone, he simply laid them on the wet ground, exposed to the heavy rainfall. Well, not Daneel, no. To keep the rain off the Scottie, Paul formed another invisible umbrella.
Two of the Oni woke up but Paul simply put them back to sleep with another vacuum permittivity spell.
A check on Daneel revealed that the Scottie was not doing well at all. Paul was very worried about him. On his monitor screen, Daneel was laying on the ‘floor’ of a dark gray walled but empty room, breathing fitfully. No amount of calling to him would produce a response.
Not good. Paul had already relieved the Scottie of the need to generate his own electricity. There was no mistaking the fact that Daneel’s condition was getting worse.
In an effort to help, Paul spent a few minutes in Daneel’s virtual reality, studying the flow of information and the colored streams of the subroutines in operation. And though he could see the deterioration of the software’s performance, he was not able to trace the cause, let alone do anything about it.
• • • •
Emerging from virtual reality, Paul knelt beside Daneel, holding the metal frame close to his body.
“Hold on, Daneel! Hold in there, Son. Just a few more hours and I can get you back home and link you to a high-speed network where we can off-load your programming. We can find and fix the problem then. Just hang on, Son, please!”
A sudden sharp coughing fit drew Paul’s immediate attention. He could see in the LCD monitor that Daneel was even more distressed than before. The image of the young man was on his hands and knees, coughing and wheezing painfully.
“Daneel! What’s wrong?” Paul shouted, his eyes wide in concern.
“Can’t…wheeze…cough…cascade…wheeze…errors…cough…so sorry, Dad…cough…wheeze…”
And then, without any further warning than that, the screen went blank, followed two seconds later with a Blue Screen of Death listing several error codes. Even that screen quickly disappeared as the computer totally died.
Frozen in disbelief and horror, Paul could only stare at the display. Bitterness and anguish welled up inside his heart and he softly began to cry, bringing the now quiet hardware tight up against his chest again.
It just couldn’t be. No, not now!
He cried virulent tears.
For several minutes, he floundered in disbelief and pain. This was not supposed to happen! They had Capie now. The death of Daneel…it wasn’t supposed to happen!
Gradually, the awareness of his situation returned. Around him, the heavy fall of rain continued, the sound of it hitting the ground and the trees a grim and desolate reminder of the brevity of life and of the pain and suffering that seemed to fill so much of it. A peal of thunder rolled through the air, accentuating the pain of grief in Paul’s heart.
He looked around at the soaked and dreary landscape. The gloom of death.
“Ah, Daneel!” he cried, shedding even more bitter tears.
TWENTY-THREE
Near an entrance to Priest’s Grotto
Korolivka
Lviv Oblast
Ukraine
September
Saturday 6:04 a.m. EEST
They could not stay here. They were not safe. Capie was not safe. He must go on; must move her, take care of her. Daneel’s death…(sniff)…his death could not and must not be in vain. The Scottie had made the supreme sacrifice. It made no difference that the young man was made of silicon chips, copper, and a host of other metals. He had been just as human as any other boy—his son.
Getting to his feet, Paul set the hardware down. He must force himself to put the mourning off until later, when there would be time to do so properly and in greater depth.
With a heavy heart, his soul screaming in despair, he opened a new portal, this one to a dirt farm road alongside an open field of winter wheat, one hundred miles to the east of Korolivka. He levitated the Oni one at a time and floated them through. Next came Capie, Hamadi, the mirror and Daneel, followed by himself.
He worked the same pattern with the next three portals, gradually turning southward but keeping a respectful distance from Chisinau, the capital city of Moldova.
The latest portal left him on a white sandy beach on a spit of land jutting out into the Black Sea, forty miles east of the city of Odessa, Ukraine. The weather here was not any better than in Romania, with low gray clouds racing through the air and rain falling in bucket lots on a wild white-capped sea the color of night.
With a heavy heart, Paul cast his next p
ortal spell, this one 172 miles to the southeast, to the rock summit of a mountain along the southwestern tip of Crimea. And with great weariness of spirit, he pushed everyone and everything through to the zenith of that mountain.
From the top of this crest, he could see all the mountains to the north and east of him, including Mount Ayya to the northwest. And, despite the inclement weather, he could see a very long way out into the Black Sea.
Gloomy rainy weather.
Sighing, he sat down on the wet rock and removed his shoes and socks.
Right now, his challenge was how to move all his passengers to Australia. Well, not all of it, not exactly. He really didn’t want to haul Hamadi and his Oni all the way to Kalgoorlie. There was no place there to keep them. Instead, it made a great deal more sense to drop them off someplace along the way, a safe place, one just like he had chosen for McDougall and his Oni. A nice small desert island. And he knew just the spot too.
When moving McDougall, Paul had pretty much faced the same problem, namely transporting a great deal of mass over a long distance.
Paul was strongly considering the use of a similar method in this situation as well. He opened a link to Google Maps, studying the geography involved. Within a half hour of surfing the net, he had made his selections and closed the web link.
He stood, placing one bare foot squarely on the coarse cold stone of the massive rock formation beneath him. With that connection made, he waved a portal into existence, to the summit of Fisht Mountain, in the extreme western portion of the Caucasus Mountains in southwestern Russia. He leaned forward, through the portal, planting his other foot on the even colder rock of Fisht and made a connection with that foot, forming a second portal, this one to the monolith of Savandurga in Southern India. He brought this portal in close enough for him to reach through so that he could physically touch that mountain with his right hand. Using that connection, he formed a third portal, leading from Savandurga to Mount Sinaburg on the northwestern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia. This portal too, he brought forward, close enough that he could reach it with his left hand, forming a fourth portal, connecting Sinaburg to Cartier Island, a distance of just over 2,000 miles. Together, all four portals connected end-to-end spanned nearly 7,000 miles. In one fell swoop, he was moving more mass a greater distance than he had ever accomplished before.
With a nod of Paul’s head, the first Oni body moved forward, on its journey to the tiny island of Cartier. That island, a mere one acre spit of pure sand in the middle of the Timor Sea, lay 181 miles from Australia and 119 miles from Pulau Rote, the nearest inhabited island in Indonesia. Paul had no doubt that Hamadi and his brood would be safe enough on Cartier for a while, at least until he could deal with them on a more permanent basis.
He kept all their talismans, of course.
When the last of them had moved through, Paul broke the spell for the fourth portal and reached into his shirt pocket where he withdrew a mechanical pencil and his small notepad. Tearing forth one of its small sheets with one spell, he used another to hold the paper steady. Slowly, with cramped fingers and straining eyes, he wrote:
Hamadi, old friend!
I was here and you were not. Now you are here and I am not!
But I will be back, I swear, later today, if things work out.
You are many miles from any other human or any shelter.
You can stay on the island and be safe. Or walk into the ocean and drown.
I care not which.
Paul Armstead
Grinning at his own cleverness, he reached forward to recreate the fourth portal, then sent the note flying through the air to stuff itself into Hamadi’s unconscious hand.
Mission accomplished, he backed away, closing each portal in turn until he was fully back on Crimea.
Rubbing his hands vigorously together, he turned toward the mirror.
Ariel-Leira had been silent for the whole trip, ever since the mirror had been pulled from the night carriage. Several times, Paul had noticed that she was jumping for joy, pointing to a great variety of things and, apparently, giggling like a school girl at all of the sights. Things that Paul took for granted seemed to amaze and delight her.
On second thought, Paul realized that if he had spent a few hundred years in a castle trapped in the same room and hanging from the same wall, he might get a little excited too, when he was finally freed of the place.
“Alright, Ariel-Leira, it is time to give me the details of how to get my wife out of stasis,” he told her firmly, his mouth set in a grim line as he sat down to put his socks and shoes back on.
“Wizard, yes! Right I was, to trust you,” she crowed, her eyes streaming tears of joy. “Free at last, I am of that accursed castle! Seen things I have now, that I’ve never known! Clouds, rain, ocean, mountains—yes, yes, impatient you are, I know. Secrets of stasis containment I now share. Tibet, you must go to. Rare incense, for the spell you must use. Details are these…”
• • • •
Never in Paul’s wildest imagination would he have expected to need incense—and a rare special type at that—in conjunction with a spell to release Capie from the stasis field. Why the burning of incense was important was a total mystery to him. Science and technology just didn’t need or use such a process! He really was going to have to spend some time someday investigating more of the obscure details in how and why magic worked!
That was for later, however. If incense from Tibet was what he needed to get Capie out of stasis, then incense from Tibet was what he was going to get.
Using the serial linking portal spell again, Paul pushed Capie, the mirror, Daneel, the Oni talismans and last of all, himself from Crimea through another portal on Mount Fisht to a mountain valley in the Karakoram Mountains not far from K2 (the second tallest mountain on Earth) in the Himalayan Mountains.
From there, it was a fairly short 300 mile portal hop to the small village of Rutog, in the far western portion of Tibet, a tiny town of only 1,000 or so people.
He left Capie and everything else on a relatively trifling mountain summit just north of town and then portaled down to the main thoroughfare. According to the mirror woman, this was the most likely place to find and purchase the rare Tibetan rope incense he would require for the spell. After checking two small stores on the major roads in town without finding what he needed, he asked a local for help. The old woman, dressed in a faded scarf, brown shawl, and flowered cotton skirt, directed him to a small hole-in-the-wall shop down a short, dirty and cramped alleyway. The shop owner in the place, an old stooped man of indeterminate age, waved at one of the shop’s many dusty, cluttered shelves where Paul, after a minute’s search, found two small jars of the incense he had been looking for.
As long as he was here, Paul thought it prudent to buy all that they had in stock. Oh, and too, he also searched for, found and bought a dozen candles and eight censers. The store owner himself bagged everything up for him, grinning at the obvious American customer that had been so successfully and outrageously overcharged.
Practically giddy with success and humming a nameless tune, Paul left the shop, ducking deeper into the alley, stepping through a portal back to the mountain.
With the small bag of supplies now in hand, he had the means to revive Capie as well as to deal with Hamadi and his brood on a long-term basis.
• • • •
It was nearly nine p.m., AWDT when Paul opened a set of serial portals from near the K2 Mountain, creating a conduit through Savandurga and Mount Sinaburg again to the small sandy island of Cartier. With a jerk of his head, he cast a spell sending Capie through first.
And was shocked when her stasis field was physically attacked, the container field violently shoved hard to one side!
With a fast spell, he flung a blindingly bright white light through the portals, followed by an intense vacuum permittivity spell.
A snap of his fingers brought up a display window in front of him, providing a remote view of Cartier Island just past th
e end of the last portal.
And he frowned. Somehow, in the few hours that they had been on the island, his prisoners had freed themselves of the bands around their wrists and ankles and had been lying in wait for Paul’s return. In the darkness, the Oni had apparently jumped the gun and attacked the first thing through—Capie’s stasis field—instead of biding their time and waiting to attack Paul. All around Capie’s stasis field, Paul could see the unconscious forms of Oni (and Hamadi too) lying strewn around in various haphazard positions.
Served them right!
When he had Daneel, the mirror, and his Tibetan supplies through and on the island, he closed the portals behind him and next cast a spell for a scattered set of fifty bright work lights, all set ten feet in the air, pointed downward. With the small island now bathed in white light, Paul clapped and rubbed his hands together. With a scowl, he cast a spell raising the mirror five feet into the air and locking it into a hover position. Ariel-Leira watched him with an amused smile.
“Now,” Paul said, with a quiet grim smile. “It’s time to see if I can master the art of creating stasis fields. Let’s start with getting the candles in the censers. Then you can tell me what comes next.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Blue Seas Resort motel room
Broome, Western Australia
September
Sunday 6:17 a.m. AWDT
He was still beset by the memory of Daneel’s death the previous day. Grief continued to batter his soul. Daneel’s death shouldn’t have happened, but Paul simply didn’t know what he could have—or should have—done to have prevented the tragedy. No two ways about it, Daneel had saved his bacon, and in the process, Capie’s life too. And yes, Paul had understood that there might be some risks in giving Daneel his magical powers this early, but there had seemed no other choice at the time. Nor even now in hindsight.
Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 29