Jacoby disembarked, walked to the end of the pier and looked about. “What, no Cerberus at the gate? No Virgil to guide my way?”
The ebony boatman raised a thick arm and pointed to a flight of steps rising from the riverbank. He spoke in a voice as deep and as slow as the black waters he plied: “Go forth from this place. Go up into the light of day. Do not return.”
“I shan’t, you needn’t worry.”
Jacoby climbed the steps, which eventually led into a passage that cut through the rock, bearing ever upward.
Hall Of The Brain — And Elsewhere
“Ready, Linda?”
Perched on Snowclaw’s mighty shoulders, Linda tucked her feet more tightly under his arms. “Yep,” she said. “Climb on, guys.”
Gene jumped up and locked his legs around the arctic beast’s middle, couldn’t hold on, and fell off.
“Let’s make this simple,” Snowclaw said, grabbing him and lifting him up with one arm. He gathered in Osmirik with the other and hoisted the scribe up.
The four now looked like an odd circus act.
“Jesus, Snowy,” Gene said. “You sure you can hold us?”
“This ain’t gonna take but a second.”
“You got a fix on the Brain room?”
“Yup. I been there, so I know where it is, so to speak.”
“Okay.”
“Ready?” Snowclaw asked.
Gene said, “We all know what to do, right?”
Nods all around, except for Snowclaw, who couldn’t.
“Okay, gang,” Snowclaw said, “here goes.”
And suddenly they were there.
Gene jumped off Snowy, drew his sword and sized up the situation. It was just as Snowclaw had described it. There was one soldier and five servants. No, only four. Then Gene saw the young boy lying down in front of the kneeling Melydia. White, blood-daubed bandages were wrapped around both his wrists. Melydia was undoing one of them.
The soldier spun around. “Your Ladyship!”
Melydia turned her head. She did not seem in the least surprised.
“Okay, Super-Bitch,” Gene said, stepping down the last stone terrace onto the circular floor. “The game’s over. Stop what you’re doing.”
Sword drawn, the soldier stood his ground. His eyes were fixed fearfully on Snowclaw, who was rushing toward the cage. Nearby the battle-ax lay where Snowy had dropped it.
“Let me handle him, Snowy,” Gene called.
The servants, all of them unarmed, had jumped to their feet and were warily retreating in Melydia’s direction. Then, suddenly, all halted to stare in wonder at the swords and shields that had materialized in their hands.
“On second thought, Snowy old buddy, old pal …”
“I got ‘em, Gene,” Snowy said as he rushed by with broadax raised.
“Fight!” Melydia shouted. “Protect your mistress!” The servants glanced nervously at her, then advanced.
Gene found that his left arm was looped through the handles of a heavy shield. “Thanks, Linda,” he said over his shoulder.
The soldier charged him.
The fight was quick. Osmirik, armed by Linda, took on one servant while Snowclaw battled three. Osmirik’s opponent held his own against the scribe, but the three were no match for Snowclaw. He made quick work of them, then came to Osmirik’s aide and dispatched the remaining servant. By that time Gene’s expert swordsmanship had backed his adversary almost to the base of the black rock. The soldier desperately fought off Gene’s blows, his eyes fearful and wondering. He knew it was only a matter of time.
Gene slashed crosswise, putting another dent in his opponent’s shield, then feinted a thrust under the shield, which the soldier lowered a bit too much, laying himself open to Gene’s quick thrust to the shoulder of his sword arm. The point penetrated, and the soldier yelled and dropped his sword. Gene hacked at the shield, knocking it away, and his next blow laid open the soldier’s throat. Gene stepped back and watched him fall.
Gene took a slow, deep breath. He had never killed a man before.
Melydia seemed unconcerned by all this. She was still busy tracing designs in the air, muttering, making other strange movements. The boy lay dead at her feet. The brazier into which she’d poured the last of his blood still smoked.
Gene ran toward her. “Stop what you’re doing!”
She did not even look at him. Her hand went out, made a movement.
“Gene!”
Gene turned at Linda’s yell. She was pointing behind him. Gene whirled and saw the soldier getting up and retrieving his sword and shield.
“What?”
Snowclaw growled. The servants were also rising from the dead, zombies now, whey-faced and gaunt-eyed.
Melydia made another hand movement.
Gene swiveled his gaze back and forth. He couldn’t believe it. Now there were eight servants and three soldiers.
The next phase of the fight was complex, and grew increasingly strange. Gene held his own against three opponents, but at some point he looked around and saw that there were other people in the room. Not exactly other people — duplicates of himself. And duplicates of Snowclaw, fighting other doppelgangers of the soldier and Melydia’s servants. There were even duplicates of Osmirik.
He fought on. Presently he grew aware that the room had become increasingly bright. The light seemed to be coming from the jewel, but he couldn’t afford to look up.
He stumbled over a body and fell, then rolled and jumped to his feet again. He looked down. It was himself, one of his magical twins, with a bloodied shirt front and an oozing slash across the forehead. Other fallen duplicates of himself lay about. But that wasn’t the worst of it. New combatants had appeared, and these weren’t human. A yellow-skinned, green-eyed, scaly being attacked him with mace and chain. Gene blocked, slashed, blocked, and thrust, making short work of it, but another variant of the same creature, this one green of scale and yellow of eye, took up the fight. He dispatched it, then whirled to find two horned goatlike creatures advancing on him, one with an ax, the other with a halberd.
Linda continued her slow advance toward Melydia. It was like walking through a swamp, like mud sucking at her feet. The melee went on around her. She had matched every duplicate that Melydia had conjured, every magical creature, and now that part of the contest was over. This duel was really between Melydia and her.
Brilliant amber light from the jewel flooded the chamber. The floor vibrated, and then began to heave.
Linda felt her powers grow. No longer were they limited to materialization tricks. She felt energy flowing from the jewel, and at the same time sensed a waning of the restraining force exerted by the rock. Power coursed through her, but it was all she could do to keep moving forward. Intense waves of force emanated from Melydia. Linda knew that the witch’s power, too, was growing.
A wind — not moving air but currents of force — rose up and tore at her. Above, the jewel glowed and pulsed, pumping more energy into the whirlpool. A swirling vortex of energy formed as the fighting continued. Linda held her ground. She was about five yards away from Melydia, who still faced the rock, performing ritual movements and speeches. The closer Linda got, the more resistance she felt. She tensed her muscles, leaned forward as if bracing against gale-force winds. She inched forward, fighting a battle for every step. If only the floor would stop shaking, she thought. But it shook all the more. She knew what she would do if she reached Melydia. She would strangle the horrible woman with her own hands. The thought didn’t upset her in the least. She could feel the woman’s evil. It was the most loathsome sensation she had ever experienced. Somehow Melydia’s mind was in contact with hers — not directly, but they were tapping the same source of power. It was as if they shared an electrical outlet. Even that limited proximity produced in Linda a profound revulsion. The woman’s mind was a cesspool of hate, jealousy, contempt, fear — every negative emotion inflated to astonishing proportions, and the sum of it amounted to nothing less than h
atred of life itself.
She struggled forward. About three yards now. The face of the boy at Melydia’s feet was dead white.
Melydia began the last incantation. It was the most subtle and difficult of all. One missed syllable, one slip, one flub, and she would have to go back to the Lesser Invocation and begin again. She knew she wouldn’t have time for that. She could handle the distractions going on around her for only so long. But she still had a little time, just enough. She began.
At the end of the second statement, the Anticlastic Argument, a hand movement was called for. She executed it, and went on. The third statement, the Synclastic, demanded a rigid body posture, measured breathing, and as little eye movement as possible. She enunciated it perfectly and went on to the next set of Arguments, which she completed flawlessly.
She took a deep breath, assessed the increasingly violent situation in the chamber — then began the group of statements leading up to the Concluding Argument, the last word of which was the Dodecagrammaton, the word that would trip the spell and liberate a force the world had not seen in three thousand years.
She began. Her lips moved, the words barely audible. Then … after years of planning and scheming, one word remained.
She felt a warm hand on her neck.
She declaimed the Dodecagrammaton, rapidly, confidently, forcefully, every syllable rolling perfectly off her tongue, every phoneme sharp and crisp, twelve sounds like hammer blows driving the last nail into the coffin of a world she despised, hated with every fiber of her being.
Hands snaked around her neck. She whirled and looked the girl in the eye.
“You are talented, my dear,” she said. “And very brave. But you are too late.”
An eddy of force carried the girl away from Melydia and into the whirlwind.
Gene thought: Things are getting out of hand.
He was floating high in the chamber, caught up in a terrific cyclone of multicolored streamers of fire. Snowy floated by — or maybe it was one of his doubles. But then, how were you supposed to tell the real one? He wondered if he himself were the real Gene or just a conjure-twin.
Another of those horrible things wafted by, and he took a swipe at it with his sword, which he had stubbornly hung onto. The creature snarled at him, then vanished in a puff of flame.
There was no sense of physical place now, no Hall of the Brain, no castle, only a swirling maelstrom of energy whose focal point seemed to be a bright starlike object somewhere off in the distance. Gene floated, then fell. There was no air, and he couldn’t breath. Yet he could speak.
“I love you, Linda,” he said.
Then there was nothing.
Through the smoke and the vapor and the nebulae of circulating fires there came a gap, a way, a protected lane. It clove the chaos in twain, and a figure walked it, purposefully, gracefully, without fear or hesitation, advancing toward the island of calm in the middle of the storm.
Melydia watched the figure grow into a man she knew.
“You have come,” she said.
“Melydia,” he said. “How good of you to visit me.”
“It is my pleasure. You are too late, Incarnadine. Why have you held back?”
“Is that how it looks? My dear, I fought you with every means at my disposal. You are more powerful than I could ever hope to be.”
“Yes, I am. Why did you not tap the deepest source of magic?”
“I would have had to do what you have done, Melydia. I did not want to make a pact with Evil itself.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“Do you hate me that much?”
Her scornful laughter held overtones of the cries of a tortured animal. “Is that why you think I did this? Because of you? You … you weakling! You dilettante! You were born to supreme power, and you did nothing but toy with it! Irrevocable power, ultimate might! You have spent not one lifetime, but several, throwing it away! Expending it on useless trivialities! You have withdrawn from the world. Castle Perilous should be the seat of world power, yet here it sits, an empty hulk, a legend without substance, a curiosity. But it will sit no more! Your house of uselessness is gone, or soon will be, and you can do nothing to stop its going. But I will build another to replace it. It will be fashioned from a transmogrified body — not that of a demon, but of a king. You will be my new castle, Lord of the Western Pale, and when men speak of Castle Incarnadine, it will be in hushed and fearful tones.”
She fell silent. The smoke and fire swirled around her.
“When I rejected you,” Incarnadine said, “it was not shame or humiliation you felt? Only regret that you would be denied residence in the citadel of absolute might?”
“I was a young girl. I suppose I suffered as any young girl would at the hands of a scoundrel. But that was long ago.”
“Did I ever tell you why I broke our troth?”
“You may have. I do not remember.”
“It was because I foresaw this day, Melydia. Not in detail, but in substance. Your madness was a seed then, but it had already sprouted. It was not I who planted it, Melydia.”
“Enough of your lies. There is no more time for them, Incarnadine.”
“Do you really think you can control Ramthonodox?”
“Yes. I know I can.”
“You cannot. And the reason you cannot is something you never could have anticipated.”
She was silent for a moment. Then: “More desperate lies.”
“You could not have known, but you should have sensed it, Melydia. You are proficient, but not as subtle an adept as you might think. But your attention was on other things, was it not?”
“What should I have sensed?”
“That one of the demon’s aspects is missing. It now has only 143,999. For demons, such a number is untenable.”
Melydia’s eyes widened. “How do you know this?”
“I may be a dilettante, but I know a thing or two about demons. I happen to live inside one. Aspects are very important to demons. It is very difficult to explain, but supernatural beings have structure to them, just as do mortal creatures. Did you know that? Not flesh and bone, not blood and sinew, but parts and pieces and bits and things. Things difficult to understand. But with a little study, some light may be shed on them.”
“I know something of them —” She broke off and raised her eyes. “The moment is come. The process of detransmogrification is almost complete.”
“I hope your protection spells are sufficiently efficacious.”
“I hope the same for you. Although they will not be sufficient to protect you from me. Later.”
“Thank you for the warning.” Incarnadine looked about. “I sense someone nearby who is not a Guest, one who has not entered the castle by dint of magic.”
Melydia searched off to one side. “Osmirik, perhaps. My scribe.”
“He is still alive. I will have to extend my influence to protect him.”
“Look to your own safety, Incarnadine.”
“I always do, Melydia. But I’m bound to see to the welfare of my Guests. You did not consider what would happen to them, did you?”
“I do not care.”
“Of course not. But did you know that detransmogrification entails some spatiotemporal effects?”
“I am not familiar with your terminology.”
“You really should study some natural philosophy. Magic is only one way of looking at the universe. At any rate, my Guests will not die, but they will be swept back along their individual time lines to a point just prior to their entering the castle. At least that is my best guess as to what will happen.”
“Time, say you? Time has run out, Incarnadine.”
The smoke and the vapor and the traceries of fire were swept away by an explosion of white light.
On The Plains Of Baranthe
Shouts roused him from sleep and brought him out of his tent. He strode out from under the sun screen, looked up at the citadel, and was awed. Dark clouds lay piled like mountains abov
e the castle. The castle itself glowed like an ember, and great flaming prominences rose from it: sheets of pink flame, wreaths of incandescence, starbursts of fire. Forked lightning shot from clouds to castle.
A strong wind rose, and Vorn closed his cloak about him. He watched. Pointing, gesticulating, nervously shouting, his men watched with him.
The castle changed color, turning to orange, then to yellow. Glowing streamers unfurled from it, and white smoke rose. Its hue shaded to a lighter yellow, a sun-yellow, then to yellow-white, pure white, then to searing blue-white. It grew unbearable to look at.
Vorn watched for as long as he could, then averted his eyes. There was a brilliant, actinic flash. When he could, Vorn looked again. A white ring of vapor was expanding at astonishing speed from the epicenter of the explosion. But the epicenter itself — that he could make no sense of, at first. It was something huge and dark. It was not smoke or fire, but a shape, a thing.
Then the thing unfurled its wings and darkened the world beneath. Its head reared up, and its eyes were like windows to Hell. Its great taloned feet splayed out, eager to pounce, to tear, to crush.
Vorn found himself screaming. He wanted to run but he could not. The face of the beast stopped his heart, its eyes pierced him to the soul. Shouts, shrieks, curses, appeals to deities rose up from the troops. Some began running. Most, like Vorn, were transfixed.
The ring of vapor reached them with the sound of thunder, much like that produced by the flying ship that had sailed overhead a while ago. A blast of air hit, and tents blew down.
The titanic beast was on the wing, coming this way. Its faceted eyes searched the ground, its horrid mouth opened, and a cataract of fire spilled forth.
Vorn’s mind slowly formed dim thoughts. He had been bewitched … she had been lying … he was dead, as were all his dreams of empire.
So be it. He dropped his cloak and drew his sword. He was still Vorn, Prince and Conqueror. He raised his head. The beast blotted out the sky with its vast obscene bulk. Vorn beheld, but could not grasp it. No human mind could apperceive its structure, or figure its lineaments, or live to tell of the horror of its ugliness, its loathsomeness, its frightfulness.…
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