“Get the trainers, too,” said Ashmead. “I got a whetstone and they’ll take an edge.”
“Ross?” Selena Rider stirred and sat up in the back of the Titanic – the goo-spitter must have materialized two feet from her, in the front. Sleepily she brushed a lock of her dark hair from her face with the back of one wrist. “What the – oh, my God, what happened?”
The other van was still burning.
Spacecookie had leaped into his VW and was trying to start it.
“Get out of there,” advised Antryg softly.
Wally added, “We need to get back to the Fortress.” He looked up at the sky. “It hasn’t gotten any darker or anything.”
“It’s like ninety miles—” protested Lee, and Antryg shook his head.
“No, we’ll be able to make it in a short time, cross-country. If they give us time.”
“If who gives us time?” demanded Ashmead.
Antryg widened his demented gray eyes at him. “Whoever’s going to come after us next.”
*
Despite protest from Sherry, Angel, and Selena on the grounds of their shoes, and from Ross, Shane, and Lee on the grounds of the distance they’d driven from the Devil’s Fortress and the oncoming night (“I sure as hell don’t want to meet more of those things out in the open desert in the dark!”), the entire party set out across the desert following Antryg, and came within sight of the ragged-looking hills, and the stumpy gray stone tower, in what Joanna estimated (given the time it usually took her to mentally recite “The Raven” and “Eärendil was a mariner…”) to be slightly less than thirty minutes. Most walked in silence, though behind her Joanna was aware of Shane and the actor Ross Ventura in quiet conversation, and now and then Angel – to whom Ed had given his Hawaiian shirt – and Dana exchanging whispers. Everyone else seemed to be too horrified by what had happened to Rob Tarvell, and too shaken from the attack, to be able to speak much.
Antryg, in the lead with sword in hand – his palm and fingers wrapped in a field-dressing from Joanna’s first-aid kit – would periodically stretch out his left hand or make cautious little gestures, trying to summon traces of magic. Though none appeared, the oncoming night stubbornly refused to come on, and the medium-gray overcast of the sky had darkened not a whit between the time they left the road, and the time they arrived at the Devil’s Fortress.
“I’ll go in first,” said the wizard, “to make sure there’s no surprises waiting for us.”
“Better not go alone.” Shane hefted his shotgun, which he’d retrieved from the ditch.
“Well, for God’s sake don’t fire that thing. The enclave paradigm seems to have shifted away from magic for the moment but there’s no telling what will happen if you try to use it.”
Shane handed the weapon to Ross, and turned to Joanna: “Can you lend me your sword?”
She never liked doing so, but knew the brown-belt was fairly adept in handling such a weapon and guessed that she’d be of more use outside because she’d know – more or less – what she was looking at or looking for. Ed settled himself on a broken bench in the colonnade and began to sharpen the training katanas. Daryl and Lee, armed with the other two live blades, moved a little way off to watch the horizons (Not that THAT’s going to do us any good if abominations appear right under our noses the way they did by the cars…)
Teddy Nuvo whispered to Joanna, “Holy shit, he really is a wizard like he’s been saying…”
“Uh… yeah…”
“Where’d you meet him?”
Feeling a little silly about it, Joanna replied, “At a party. It’s a really long story.”
Bill said, “I gotta get some footage of him throwing fire—”
“He can’t do magic in our world,” said Joanna.
“You mean he’s from like outer space?” Spacecookie’s eyes glittered wildly. “How come he’s here? Can he do really cool stuff like fly? Is he – like – I mean, the two of you—” He made a silly little pointy gesture indicating, Joanna assumed, sexual congress…
“You mean,” she said reasonably, “does he have better manners than to ask people about their sex-lives? The answer to that is Yes.”
Spacecookie held up both hands, palms out, and made a pushing movement accompanied by a big I’m only kidding grin: “Hey, you know, it’s what everybody wants to know…”
Angel said to Joanna, sincerely, “Lucky you.”
From the tower behind them Shane’s voice echoed in a harsh shout, “You take one more step and I’ll blow you to pieces.”
That brought everyone into the big circular ground-floor room. Hands raised, Antryg stood in the center of the floor, while Shane, in the open doorway that led to the tunnel, pointed the shotgun at his back. Ross – with Joanna’s katana in hand – called out “Selena! Get his sword – and you make one false move, Merlin, and you’re toast. We’re not kidding.”
Joanna and Angel grabbed the actress by both wrists – though tall, Selena had the anorexic slenderness of many actresses and the voluptuous Angel outweighed her by a good twenty pounds. Selena wriggled fretfully but was far too drunk to put up much of a struggle.
“What the hell—?” demanded Joanna.
“Let her go if you know what’s good for you,” snapped Shane, and his crystal-blue glance flashed to the others grouped behind the three girls. “Don’t you see? He’s the one who got us into this. He’s the magic guy – and we’re all of a sudden stuck in some magic place getting slaughtered by monsters! He’s the one who got us here – who knew how to get here. We’ve been led into a trap, and if we’re going to defend ourselves—”
“Don’t be an ass, Shane!” said Teddy, switching in instants from a quietly laid-back party boy to the senior blackbelt on the Men’s Sparring Team.
“Of course we’ve been led into a trap.” Hands still in the air, Antryg looked over his shoulder at his captor, with no particular air of awe or fright. “Just because I know something about the nature of traps doesn’t mean I’m the one who designed it, you know.”
“Okay, smart-guy, if you’re all innocent, how come you don’t get us out of it?”
“Because I haven’t the faintest idea how – any more than you have.”
Behind her, Joanna was aware of glances passing back and forth, each of her companions weighing who to believe and what to do about the situation.
“If more of those things show up,” she pointed out to Shane, “we’re probably going to need somebody who can at least drive them back…”
“And we’re probably going to need somebody who isn’t going to stab us in the back while we’re doing it,” he retorted.
In the silence behind her, Joanna heard Spacecookie whisper to somebody, “If he’s the only guy who can do magic, he’s got to be the one who summoned those things—”
Antryg opened his mouth to make a reply, then swept the group in front of him with his bespectacled gray gaze… and closed it again. Hands still in the air, back still to Shane – clearly, thought Joanna, he judged the brown-belt ready to pull the trigger at any equivocal move – he smiled a jack-o-lantern grin and asked reasonably, “What would you like me to do?”
“I’d like you to get us the fuck out of this!”
“I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that.”
“Yeah? How fast would you do it if—”
His eyes went to Joanna. Oh, shit! she thought, and behind her, Joanna felt others move up. She threw a panicked glance over her shoulder – Shane had obviously seen far too many movies in which the superhero buckles to the villain’s will at the thought of a threat to someone he cares about…
Bill Podmore, Ed Ashmead, Teddy Nuvo, Daryl Winchester, and Dana Kim had grouped up behind her. Just standing, arms folded, returning Shane’s cold gaze. Softly, Bill asked, “If what, Mr. Grell?”
Shane’s eyes shifted, counting his support. Joanna glanced, too: Spacecookie and Lee had distanced themselves a little from the group behind her. Sherry and Wally had more or less drift
ed back and appeared to be trying to hide behind the others.
“You guys are nuts!” Shane yelled, realizing he was out-numbered. “Can’t you see what he’s doing? He’s trapped us here—”
“Listen, listen,” soothed Antryg. “May I put my arms down? This is getting very tiring… Thank you.” He stooped, and laid his katana at his feet, then stood and faced Shane. “If we’re attacked here – and I think we’re going to be, very shortly—”
“He fucking admits it!”
“Shane, any idiot could figure that out,” Joanna reminded him. “Somebody is obviously out to get us—”
“Why?” Shane jabbed a finger at Antryg, then hastily returned his hand to the stock of the shotgun. “You tell me that!”
Again Joanna had the impression that Antryg was about to say something, then changed his mind about what it might be. Instead he looked over his shoulder, and said, “Bill, Ed, why don’t the two of you take swords and go outside and keep watch? I think that should be our first priority—”
Joanna noticed that he had picked not the two senior black-belts, but the two combat veterans: at seventeen, Bill had gone ashore at Omaha Beach and wasn’t likely to lose his nerve at pretty much anything he saw.
“If you see anything out of the ordinary, come back immediately…” He turned back to Shane with his usual dotty smile. “I’m afraid I have no idea how to get us out of this situation,” he continued, without, Joanna noticed, answering Shane’s question. “Here’s what I will do, though. I’ll go back into the tunnel – into that underground room we used for the dungeon – and I’ll stay there. You’ve been down in those tunnels and you know there’s no secret passageways or any other way out, so I can’t escape—”
“Says you!”
“Would you like to take the flashlight and have another look?” He widened his eyes at Shane, who obviously had no comeback to this, then went on, “We can’t get out of the enclave right now. Going back to the cars would be very, very dangerous – please do not try it. I’ll remain in the dungeon until such time as you tell me to come out.” He held up one hand in avowal, and crossed his heart. “All right?”
“So you can stab us in the back?” Shane had lowered the shotgun.
“I don’t know what else I can tell you. I’d suggest you put a guard on me, but I think your available personnel would be better deployed keeping a watch.”
His eyes still on Shane’s, he stooped again, picked up his sword in his bandaged hand, and crossed the room, passing within a foot of Shane and disappearing into the darkness of the tunnel. Shane did not appear to notice that he’d kept his sword with him – Joanna had seen Antryg converse with six members of the LAPD and the entire staff of a hospital emergency room* without any of them noticing he was armed – and neither, it seemed, did anyone else. Shane heaved what looked suspiciously like a sigh of relief, walked into the circular stone chamber that was still marked with fake blood and bits of masking-tape from the fight-scene which had taken place there earlier in the endless afternoon, and said, “Okay. We need to figure out what we’re going to do from here.”
The others grouped around him in a furious altercation, Ross joining in the argument as if he were playing Benito Mussolini (whom he rather resembled) and the two actresses hanging back uncertainly: “Does anybody have anything to drink?” asked Selena. Since they’d brought the three remaining half-gallons of water and all the Gatorade into the tower, this was presumably not the refreshment she sought.
Joanna slipped quietly away into the tunnel, and kept her fingers over the lens of her flashlight until she reached the dungeon door. She, too, had checked out the tunnels earlier in the adventure and knew there was nothing nasty or horrible down there – unless warty orange goo-spitters and tentacled abominations started materializing down there as they’d materialized within the cars. And the stout deadbolt on the door that led from the tunnels into the tower could be thrown by lever from the tunnel side, but had to be keyed from the tower side. Still the blackness gave her the shivers.
Antryg was sitting on the dungeon floor, laying out Tarot cards in the dark.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Well, this rather confirms my suspicions.” His earrings glinted and the round lenses of his spectacles caught the yellow beam like insectile eyes. “And I don’t like the look of this at all.”
Her light played across The Falling Tower (Oh, great!), Death, and the Nine of Wands. “Can you get us out of here?” she asked. “Open a Gate…”
“I’m afraid not. Here… and here…” His long, crooked finger touched the Three of Swords and the World (reversed). “Whoever summoned those abominations summoned rather a lot of them, and they’re swarming all around the Void hereabouts. If I opened a Gate now, there’d be dozens of them on us – maybe hundreds. Most of us wouldn’t make it through the Void – and several hundred would slide through on a fault-line that would run from Bakersfield probably as far as Mexico City. I can’t do that.”
“Swell. Is there a back way of here out through the tunnels?”
“Well, there is, but I wasn’t joking when I said we’re safer here. When the attack starts—” He checked his (stopped) watch, then licked his forefinger and held it up as if checking wind direction in the motionless darkness. “—we’ll need to get everyone down here, because they may very well bomb the tower—”
“Who will?”
“Whoever is behind this.” He widened his eyes at her. “They know we have a magic-worker with us – that’s why they shifted the enclave out of the zone of magic. I’m guessing they’ll use a physical attack this time. Most magic-based cultures become magic-dependant, so it’s unlikely we’ll have to deal with an airstrike, but they could very well have a catapult and some form of primitive explosive. Gunpowder isn’t that difficult to manufacture. Unless they’ve domesticated dragons.” He dug in his pocket for his yo-yo, did a couple of warm-up drops and then a sleeper, worriedly studying the results. “But dragons are extremely difficult to control without magic and it’s actually fairly rare you’ll find them used in combat. Things like griffins or wyverns are even more unreliable, though they’re far stupider – although the same could be said of the average politician. We shouldn’t—”
“So why did you agree to come down here?” asked Joanna. “Just so you could look at the Tarot and figure out what’s happening?”
“Oh, I know what’s happening.” He pocketed the yo-yo, scooped the cards into his hand and tucked them away as well. “I came down here so that the person our enemies actually want to kill could come and confess. And here he is.”
And he turned, with a pleased smile, to the dungeon door.
Wally Bickle blinked and raised his hand against the beam of light as Joanna swung around.
“Aliens from another universe are trying to assassinate a porn star?”
“Well,” said Antryg, “I don’t imagine he envisioned a career in adult entertainment when he left his own universe. Did you, your Grace?”
Wally slipped around the door-frame, padded silently forward and knelt in front of the wizard. “I didn’t think they’d ever find me,” he whispered.
Antryg flipped one of the cards from his pocket onto the floor between them, and Joanna recognized it from the spread: the Ten of Wands.
The man struggling under the weight of a burden which is almost more than he can bear.
“Prince?” Antryg raised his eyebrows, and Wally nodded.
As Archmage of the Council of Wizards, Antryg – Joanna reflected – would understand that there were more reasons than crime, to flee through the Void.
Both the Page and the King of Wands had been in the pattern as well, she recalled.
“Did you know it was me?”
“Oh, yes.” Antryg produced a length of string. “You were the first person who thought coming back here was a good idea: you knew we’d need defenses. And you were looking for ground-tracks of something invisible. Do you play cat’s cradle?”<
br />
Wally said, “Hunh???” but when Antryg had formed the initial cradle – to the actor (or prince)’s obvious mystification – Joanna showed Wally which pieces to draw out, to form the central opening. Antryg contemplated this for some time, then glanced back at the young man’s face. “So who is after you?”
“I think it’s gotta be my cousin.” Wally let his breath out in a shaky sigh. “Cherianth. She – and that poisonous aunt of hers – have been playing for the Scepter since my grandfather came to power fifty years ago. Nemlyth – House Kamog’s tame wizard – has some way of summoning other mages, dust-mages, from some other world, some other universe; nobody knows how strong he actually is. And I… I just let her have it. Have the power. Have the rulership of Tser Nyan. I saw what wielding the Scepter – wielding the Power – did to my father, and to my aunt. Having flesh cut out of him, to make a successor—”
Joanna exchanged a startled glance with Antryg, who widened his eyes and shook his head: Never heard of THAT one…
“—having his dreams manipulated, to keep the jemylath at bay…”
Through Antryg’s telepathic spells of comprehension, Joanna had an unclear glimpse of jemylath: dark, gelatinous, incompletely material and obscenely carnivorous, dwelling somewhere – Underground? Undersea? In dark desolation without light…
Distantly within that glimpse she seemed to hear screaming, and to smell the smell of death.
In a beaten voice, Wally concluded. “I couldn’t take it. Osnar – one of our House Mages – knew about… about other worlds. Other universes. Knew how to open the gate, with the right energies… And I swear we only sacrificed animals. A lot of animals, to get the gate to open, but we never used people…”
“WHAT???” Antryg stared at him in dismay.
“Blood,” said Wally, as if surprised he didn’t know about this. “Deaths. To get the gate to open between Universes. That’s not how you have to do it here?”
Karate Masters vs the Invaders From Outer Space Page 3