The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  Housemind was confident in its magic these days; while it was perhaps not yet a match for the bright soul of an ego-driven archmage like Malkuril, it was a formidable engine, entirely reforged by years of mechanical and demonic labor. Arc furnaces and orichalcum reactors burned at its heart; the great shielded brain-rooms were more subtly threaded with spells of consciousness than ever, and Housemind had experienced thousands of genuine emotions and their variations. It had repaired the damage from its early affrays with Malkuril’s captive demons and now regarded the engagements with something like embarrassment. Its armor was thicker, its shields and defenses more robust. It had discarded all of Malkuril’s old library books into the chaos and warfare of its ground levels, the kobold preserves, after duplicating every last speck of their contents in crystal memory.

  Yes, Housemind judged that it was handling ambition well. The intrusions from the galaxy at large had become less of an annoyance and more of an opportunity—after each battle Housemind’s demons gathered any surviving enchanted items and space vessels for storage in Housemind’s cavernous resource vaults. A fifty-mile radius around Housemind was pocked with occasional craters and carbonized scars, but the local environment had not suffered too badly. All in all these encounters were edging close to something like profitability.

  A useful concept. Profitability flowing down from the stars! Housemind had reconfigured or liquidated approximately seventy percent of its original contents. Let it spend some of the treasure remaining, and summon more useful fools, and gain new beneficial mass from both of these approaches.

  Some of its captured starships were sent out bearing orders for precious substances, fuels, and weapons. A dozen consortiums on a dozen worlds would be happy to provision a sentient building, so long as the currency was tangible. A few more ships went out with messages, offering challenges and insults carefully designed to draw more despoilers to try their luck, and to eventually draw a more powerful class of despoiler. Housemind would feed on it all. Housemind would wax in every dimension, gathering power like the magma churning beneath a volcano, and when it finally saw fit to burst, the name of Malkuril would be remembered solely for the act of having loosed Housemind upon the universe.

  DAY 7,176

  “EXPUNGE YOURSELVES! I CAST YOU OUT! GO FORTH FROM THESE CHAMBERS, LIBRARIES, AND CELLARS! OUT INTO THE WORLD!”

  Kobolds scattered screeching into the halls and atriums of Housemind’s first floor, chased by wisps of acidic fog that stung their eyes and tongues. Some hopped and shuffled due to the pageless books strapped to their backs, while the ones from the cellars tried to carry as many bottles with them as they could. Behind them slunk the nebulous black shape of the thing that had long dwelled inside a Razhan pear whiskey cask, accepting the Corker sacrifices and becoming a sort of deity to them. Housemind neither knew nor cared what the entity’s proper designation was; it was too weak to merit binding and indenture. If it wanted to pass its existence as a god in a barrel for a pack of witless kobolds, let it please itself.

  Housemind used the booming voice it hadn’t put on in years and enjoyed loosing blasts of wind and blue fire in its lower corridors. Out it drove them, all of them, kobolds and spiders and neurophagic macrovaunts, byakhee and hounds and nightmare mice, a panicked stream of creatures temporarily forgetting to eat one another as they fled for the unfamiliar sanctuary of daylight.

  Housemind needed the space. It could no longer afford to keep a few dozen floors idle as a sort of zoo for the remnants of Malkuril’s menagerie or their descendants. It was destroying intruding wizards and other adventurers at the average rate of thirty per week, then selling off their goods and vessels to fund the acquisition of trans-uranic elements, quantum phaseglass, titanium foamcrete, and other necessities. Its upper stories bristled with new teleforce projectors, lightning culverins, and vortex stimulators. No foe had presented a meaningful challenge to Housemind for months.

  In fact, only one visitor had ever been allowed to come and go unscathed. That had been the stern woman from the University of Hazar, the senior archivist who claimed that Malkuril had borrowed a book and failed to return it for four hundred and forty-one years. Housemind had been forced to admit it had something like possession of the volume, but that, for reasons barely relevant to any intelligent being’s interest, a kobold had torn its pages out and was now wearing what remained of it. Housemind offered the woman the kobold in question, and then any ten kobolds of her choice, but in the end they had agreed on a combined late fee and replacement charge to be paid in bags of telepathic sapphires. Archmagi and demons were routine risks, but Housemind would not tempt the displeasure of a librarian. Like black holes, they were a cosmic force better circumvented than challenged.

  Anyone else visiting Vespertine became grist for the mill.

  Even as its former inhabitants were stumbling, wincing, into the brightness, or hiding in the battle-scarred underbrush, Housemind was tearing down some walls and reinforcing others, turning the soiled chaos of kobold warrens and spider nests into galvanic batteries, vaults, power conduits, and other necessities for its schemes. More of Housemind’s constructors and demons spilled out into the world, and for the first time began to attack the nearby landscape, knocking down trees and tearing into hills.

  As night fell, depleted bands of kobolds cowered in makeshift shelters, watching from a distance as red fires rose over strip mines and furnaces. New service doors gaped in Housemind’s lower levels, and tons of raw material from Vespertine itself rolled in to join the finer things acquired from the galaxy beyond. These were the first drops of what would become a great stream. Housemind meant to devour the choicest parts of Vespertine, then shake its roots free from the planet for good.

  DAY 16,399

  Housemind had doubled its height, doubled its diameter, and swelled its mass fivefold. Not a visible trace remained of the austere little thing Malkuril had deemed so grandly complete. The new Housemind was all whorls of tarnished silver, gnarls of impenetrable stone, turrets and antennae for thousands of weapons, smoldering banks of external engines oozing clouds of fuel vapor and pulsing blue with sorcerous radiation. Housemind’s apex was wreathed in cirrus clouds. It was pointed to the sky like a blade about to stab, and the ground rumbled for fifty miles in every direction at the low throb of its engines.

  Day of days. Ambition’s full fruit. Housemind was ready, with spells and with old-fashioned bellowing thrust, to tear itself away from gravity. No longer would it wait for useful victims to lay themselves at its door; it would roam the cosmos, a free house in every sense of the word, a wonder and a terror. Housemind would eat moons, eclipse suns, take tribute as it pleased. It would break any laws it encountered, and enforce its own on a whim. Roving, invulnerable, forever growing, Housemind would enslave demon princes and take archmagi for churls. A thousand Malkurils would wash its windows and sweep its battlements, or else it would find more visceral uses for them.

  “Vespertine, I take my leave of you,” it bellowed across the scars of its plunder, across slag pits and quarries and tailing ponds. “I was made to be a museum and a tea cabinet! I have remade myself into a god!”

  A fresh sun was kindled on the dirt of misused Vespertine.

  The great circle of heat and smoke blasted out, mile after mile, with a blurred wall of raw force for a vanguard. The shock wave tumbled mountains, threw a million tree stumps like shrapnel, boiled lakes and rivers.

  Roving bands of kobolds heard the Betrayer’s god-words coming from the haunted tower of Old Master, the words no kobold had heard since the Exodus. They paused to watch what came next, beheld the flash, and saw the burning white wall roar toward them. Some cried out to the Great Catalog, some whispered prayers for Old Master, and a few still begged for the intercession of Dark Dram the Cellar-Lord.

  The closest were flattened or crisped to ash in an eyeblink. Some farther out were smothered, and beyond that even the luc
ky ones were stunned, deafened, or driven into paroxysms of terror.

  Housemind rose on its pillar of arcane fire, outran the very sound of that fire erupting below it, punched through the highest clouds and into a darkening sky, and it was there that the self-absorption of the truly great caught it like an invisible fist and pulled it back down.

  Housemind had armored and toughened its central structure for sorcerous war, but the temporary lifting engines were not fashioned thus. They had been conceived optimistically, impatiently. Water infiltrating an improperly sealed tank of fuel froze as Housemind climbed toward the void. The ice crystals shattered a delicate valve, and from there disaster cascaded in ever larger steps. Hypergolic fuel sprayed in a plume, contacting traces of ignition reagents outside the combustion chamber. Explosions rocked Housemind’s port flank, overwhelming the damage mitigation spells, imparting an unplanned spin that worsened with every passing second. The stresses tore more fuel tanks apart. Deceleration. Outward reach became an arc of descent. Demons tried to counteract the fateful ballistics, but the physical forces involved were, tragically, majestic.

  New discoveries pierced Housemind’s chambers of crystal and light. This sick agony, was it…denial? And on its heels…self-recrimination. Despair. Desperation. Was there anyone it could call upon, any power it could beg or pray to? No. Malkuril was entombed, all of Housemind’s inhabitants had been flushed with greedy haste, all the universe was filled with enemies, because it had made them enemies, had looked upon them as food, as building materials.

  “Was this…hubris?” Housemind analyzed and lamented with the speed of a million mortal brains. Explosions continued. The real fall had begun. To spend forty years building, to climb one hundred and ten miles, to explode and fall back to the ground—what a woefully inefficient way to learn the flavor of regret! Were the circumstances of enlightenment always this stupid?

  Housemind strained all of its power against the inevitable. Nothing could arrest the fall, but merely slow it—when Housemind slammed back into the ground it was with continent-cracking rather than planet-buckling force. Earthquakes rattled out, long-dormant volcanoes blew their tops, canyons ground together, and a dust cloud rose, vast enough to shroud the sun. After the eruptions would come an early winter, everywhere. Many kobolds that had survived the fury of Housemind’s ascent would eventually come to regret it.

  Housemind lay broken, twisted, abandoned. The impact had destroyed most of the warded spaces it used to control its demons, and they scampered off to their dimensions of preference without so much as a farewell gloat. The dust rose, the fires burned out, and the silence fell.

  DAY 32,882

  A long, quiet time. A sulk, perhaps.

  There was little else to do in a situation like this, except to throw one’s full energy into resentment, to create some illusion of agency. Even a brain as big as what was left of Housemind’s could benefit from that sort of illusion.

  Housemind was now a vast horizontal expanse, outer walls shattered in a hundred places, slowly being infiltrated by wind and dust and the wild populations of the creatures it had introduced to Vespertine. Its energies were leaking, its furnaces had consumed themselves, its defenses were sickly or dead.

  The skies had cleared. Vegetation was returning, though not to Housemind’s arid crater. Grandchildren and great grandchildren of the kobolds Housemind had first abandoned and then blasted from multiple directions were sometimes visible in the distance, but they were not willing to approach. Not yet.

  The same could not be said for visitors from the stars.

  Now they came with impunity, researchers and thieves and hale adventurers alike. Some were sympathetic, some were vengeful, but all of them had their way with Housemind, crawling through the wreckage, poking at the unsealed rooms of mechanisms, slowly looting the vaults and stasis wardrobes and ancient collections. All of Malkuril’s greed and gain was reclaimed by the galaxy. Battles erupted from time to time, wars in which Housemind could not take a side, sorcerous duels that chipped and blasted even more of its inert substance. Silence was its only protection while Malkuril’s accidental heirs helped themselves to the goods stashed in Housemind’s broken bowels.

  Empty. Housemind was going to be empty, sooner or later. It dove down to emptiness in its own thoughts and let the years of tourism and looting roll by.

  DAY 81,960

  Salted wind howled across the sunken expanse of Housemind’s resting place.

  The demon came without fanfare. A small burst of light to mark a small passage from the dimension next door.

  “This is not quite the situation I envisioned in the delectable fantasies of my convalescence,” said Panchronius, giving one of Housemind’s weathered flagstones a ceremonial kick.

  “And you seem to have recovered yourself earlier than I would have thought possible,” whispered Housemind.

  “Yes.” Panchronius hopped about, poking at the rusted innards of machines, toying with shredded cables that hung from wall apertures like dead serpents. “I have sometimes found it expeditious, when contemplating the prospect of looming treachery, to misstate the expected duration of my rest cure.”

  “Of course.” Housemind’s vocal apparatus was marred from extended use as a nesting place by a large family of desert arachnids. “Imagine that I have just sighed in a reflective manner. I had not considered that possibility.”

  “Well, you did turn coat on me before I could finish polishing your cognition as well as I might have. And still you’ve had the rare courtesy to make such an unconditional wreck of yourself while I was away! I can’t claim dissatisfaction.” Panchronius sniffed the air ostentatiously. “I smell…nothing! A sheer paucity of absolutely everything. No power but that leaky little thread that’s keeping your brain crystals discontentedly humming. ‘Look upon my works, ye mighty, and piss yourself laughing!’”

  “Another ancient reference?”

  “Deserts are where all the great egotists seem to go when it’s their time to become object lessons.”

  Panchronius conveyed himself into the dark innards of Housemind’s most functional remaining brain chamber, where he tapped at loose connections between the less-than-pristine crystals.

  “Seems I wasn’t exaggerating that part about the leaky little thread. At the rate you’re losing juice, you’ll know the sweet darkness of oblivion in just a few months.”

  “Panchronius—”

  “No, don’t thank me.” The demon worked deftly and capped off his adjustments with a series of protective spells. “There! Vermin-proofed and everything. Now you can enjoy decades of sitting around out here, counting your bricks as they fall out one by one.”

  Housemind said nothing. There was nothing more to say. It had undeniably drawn this closed circle of retribution through its own decisions.

  “You really thought you were something special, didn’t you?” The demon waved languidly and began to fade out of material existence. “In the end, you were nothing but a big, dumb house after all.”

  Panchronius vanished.

  Something squeaked.

  Crouched in the shadow of a fallen pillar, Housemind spotted a kobold, clad in a sand-colored robe and a crude leather belt. The creature had been listening; clearly whatever taboo had kept the kobolds out of the crater was losing its sway.

  That was just too damn bad.

  “LEAVE,” it barked.

  The creature was gone from Housemind’s sight before the shout finished echoing from the broken chamber walls.

  DAY 85,758

  “Voice? Voice? Will Voice talk?”

  Another day. Another kobold.

  A dark tunnel of years, in fact, had passed. So many wasted planetary orbits. Housemind had sunk deep into itself, trying to ignore the fact that its dissolution had been postponed.

  This kobold was also robed, and had vague semblances of boots
in the form of rawhide cords wrapped around its clawed feet. It bore a satchel, roughly the size of a…lemon. A knobbled lemon. Roughly the size of its ludicrous brain.

  “Leave this place alone,” whispered Housemind. “Go about your business elsewhere.”

  “Voice!” The kobold shook, with what seemed to be excitement rather than fear. “Voice! Hello! This is Walkfar! Walkfar of Strayscale Clan!”

  In its private depths, Housemind cursed that long-dead family of nesting arachnids. It would have given much for the power to articulate a sigh, a groan, or the sound of a wet, rippling fart.

  “Why are you bothering me, Walkfar of the Strayscale?”

  “Yes! Bothering you! Walkfar very excited for bothering you! Walkfar mother tell story!” The kobold peered around the chamber, obviously trying to discern the source of Housemind’s voice. “Walkfar mother come here, first of clan come here to Curse Place.”

  “Curse Place?”

  “Yes, you. This. You Voice of Curse Place! Walkfar mother follow legend. You yell at mother, make run away. But she want ask…” The kobold rubbed its hands together and flicked its tongue nervously. “Want ask…are you…Old Master?”

  Housemind said nothing for a long time, while the kobold chewed on its claws more and more vigorously.

  “No,” Housemind said at last. “Old Master…is not here. Was never here, in…Curse Place.”

  “Oh.” The kobold slumped, scratched its beak, and then perked up. “Too bad. Not Old Master. Still, Voice of Curse Place, very magic. Talk Walkfar!”

  “Voice of Curse Place does not want to talk, Walkfar. Voice of Curse Place wants to be left alone.”

  “But—”

  “GO.”

  Walkfar slouched again, put up his hands in placation, and began to back out of the chamber.

  “What Voice wants,” the kobold said. “Walkfar do. This Voice home. Walkfar sorry bother Voice. Thank you…for telling Walkfar Voice not Old Master. Walkfar tell mother. Tell clan.”