Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard (11 page)

Northeast quadrant of Pakistan

Karakoram Mountain range

December

Wednesday, 10:45 p.m. PKT

P
aul
awoke and sat up suddenly, an unknown fear chilling his entire body. Somehow,
he
knew
that something was terribly wrong, though his five normal senses
told him that nothing was amiss. Slowly, he looked around.

The sky was crystal clear, the clouds from earlier in the
day now long gone. The stars were shining brightly in incredible splendor. The
moon was just past its zenith, in its waxing gibbous phase, not far from being a
full moon. As such, it was casting a fair degree of light on the mountaintop.
The flowerbeds were visible, peacefully basking in the moonlight.

Then, near the cliff’s edge, a large shadow moved.

Paul’s fear spiked even higher. There appeared to be
something there, though he could not make out any details—just a shadow that
was moving very slowly in his direction.

For a few seconds, he couldn’t force himself to move or to even
generate a coherent thought; the fear was virtually paralyzing. Then he clinched
his jaw and reached out for his talisman. Its smooth throbbing sensation helped
him feel a tad bit better. Whatever was out there, he now had the power to deal
with it.

Paul snapped his fingers, and an intense ball of light
formed thirty feet over his head like an army parachute flare, throwing the
whole mountaintop into broad daylight. And with that light, Paul could suddenly
see his visitor with stark clarity. Startled, he stared at the...it...whatever
it was, with even more alarm and horror.

It wasn’t human. A tall as a man, perhaps a little taller,
with wide shoulders and a bulging chest. The head sported wild black hair, sprouting
out in all directions. Two long horns, just above the forehead, poked through
the hair. Eyes large and as black as coal glared at Paul. A mouth with outsized
jagged teeth smiled hideously. The creature’s skin was bright red, its clothes
a dark gray and vaguely militaristic in style.

Never, not in Paul’s wildest nightmares, had he ever
imagined such a creature! Nor had he heard or read about such a beast!

Paul heard a small noise off to the side, and he spun to the
left.

An identical creature stood near the cliff’s edge in that
direction too.

Fearing the worst, Paul turned and looked to his right.

Yep, there was one off that way as well.

He was surrounded. Paul gulped in total terror, his whole
body consumed with paralyzing panic.

The creature in front of him loosed a terrible cry, and Paul’s
fear somehow ratcheted even higher. With a second cry, the beast pointed
skyward with a hairy arm and a clawed hand. Paul’s light sputtered and died,
returning the whole scene to moonlit dimness.

Fear surged through Paul like a wild storm as he stared
unblinkingly at the nearest monster. He could sense the evil that all three of
these creatures radiated like radio waves. His life was in the gravest of
danger. It was fight-or-flight time!

With that thought, Paul was suddenly able to move again,
swinging his legs off the side of the bed. Quaking in fear, he somehow managed
to focus his thoughts a little better. Using everything that he had discovered
about using portals, he hastily assembled a spell for one to Delhi, India. Stammering
out the words, he waved one hand and the portal popped into existence. But
before he could even roll free of the bed, he heard another vicious cry, and
then his portal suddenly glowed with an eerie yellow-green light. Hesitantly,
Paul leaned forward to touch it and was shocked by a strong electrical charge, strong
enough to fling him backward on the bed. The portal snapped instantly closed.

This time, all three of the creatures bellowed out a cry of
weird noise.

Paul abruptly realized that they were laughing at him! His
blood turned to ice water.

But then anger stirred in his chest. He jumped to his feet
and shot forth his left arm, creating a blast of superhot plasma that streaked in
an instant across the distance toward the first creature.

However, four feet or so short of the beast, the plasma
bounced off an invisible wall, dissipating in all directions. Again, all three of
the creatures laughed at Paul.

With a wave of his arm, he yelled, “In the name of
Federation starships everywhere, SHIELDS UP!” And he was instantly enclosed in a
solid force field.

This time, the creatures laughed twice as long, gesturing
and pointing at Paul as if he were the funniest thing they had ever seen in
their lives.

“Ah, this ain’t exactly inspiring confidence,” Paul muttered
unhappily to himself.

The ogre on the right raised its hand, and suddenly the
ground at Paul’s feet turned red-hot. His shield didn’t protect the ground
beneath his feet, and he instantly found it too hot to withstand. He jumped
backward, behind the bed, his shield collapsing, his feet blistered from the
heat.

More laughter. They were actually
toying
with him!

Overcome with great anger, Paul lashed out again, putting
all the power he could into a single blast of pure energy that ripped forward—

—into an invisible wall twenty feet in front of him, the
blast boomeranging backward, hurling him to the ground, singeing his hair and
clothes, and instantly setting the bed on fire.

He managed to sit up and stare wild-eyed at the monster that
had so nonchalantly defeated his best spell.

The creature on the left then sent a blast in Paul’s direction,
and Paul, acting on impulse, extended his left arm forward, creating another
invisible barrier.

The firepower of the creature’s discharge enveloped Paul’s barrier,
disintegrating it in a flash and flowing up Paul’s arm, all the way to his
elbow. The energy of the blast detonated, consuming everything in its wake in a
violent discharge of light and energy. Paul was slammed savagely to the ground,
and a sudden surge of pain threatened to overwhelm him.

In disbelief, Paul raised his left arm and stared at the charred
stump, now missing everything from his fingertips to up past his elbow. How
could such a thing happen? He gritted his teeth as wave after wave of pain
pushed him toward unconsciousness. With a terrible sense of urgency, he cast
another spell, clamping down on the nerves of the arm, dampening the pain. Panic,
hopelessness, and despair gripped him so hard that he could hardly breathe
anymore. Why wasn’t his magic protecting him? Yet again, there was laughter from
the creatures. In the back of his mind, there was a small voice gibbering
wildly in fear. He was about to die a horrible death, and there seemed to be no
way to stop it! His heart raced as terror flooded his body from head to toe.

He gaped at the three beasts as they slowly closed the gap
between them. He was seconds away from death, and he could think of nothing to
save himself!

Paul clutched his talisman with a death grip in his right
hand.
Think, Paul, think!
And he cast a small spell on his own brain, frantically
trying to concentrate, to come up with an idea, any idea that might save him
from imminent death. He couldn’t fight these creatures! They possessed more magical
power than he did. And he couldn’t run from them, either!

The old science-fiction movie that he had recently watched somehow
came rushing unbidden to the forefront of his thoughts. Seizing the memory, he
desperately cast a spell on himself, cocooning a bubble of space-time around his
body.

And he fell into the Earth.

• • • •

Physicists the world over understood that matter, for the
most part, consisted of mainly empty space, lightly populated with subatomic
particles. Paul’s spell allowed the atoms of his body and clothing to fall
between the atoms and molecules of the mountaintop. The trick had been to make
the spell link his atoms together, lest they get “lost” in the surrounding
rocks.

He was in freefall, heading toward the center of the earth
and accelerating. For a couple of seconds, he allowed this to happen, and then he
mentally conjured up a spell to bring himself to a halt. There was no air to
breathe, no light to see by, and nothing to hear. He couldn’t stay here for very
long. Yet he felt an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude wash over him
that the spell had worked. At least here, the evil monsters weren’t threatening
to blast him into teeny-tiny particles.

Thank you, Robert Lansing, 4-D Man
.

Paul struggled to his “feet” and hastily began to “run.”

The mountaintop retreat had sheer cliffs on all sides. Paul
realized that it wouldn’t take long for him to reach that cliff wall from the
inside of the mountain and to burst out into the open air again. At least, it
had better not take him too long to extract himself!

And when that happened, he needed to be instantly ready with
a spell for a new portal, lest those monsters catch up to him again. He
concentrated hard, gathering the right words together.

His lungs were burning from the lack of air, but he exerted
more effort on running faster.

Then suddenly, Paul was out in the open air again, nothing
underneath him but empty space and the rocks a very long way below him. He gasped
wildly for breath, flailing while he fell, then he reached forward, casting a
spell for a portal. It snapped into existence just below him, and he fell
through the center of it—

—and onto the grass of the soccer field in Laleh Park in
Tehran, Iran. Paul struggled to his feet—difficult to do one-handed—and ran for
the goal line, still tightly gripping the talisman in his right hand. Ahead,
past a line of trees, was the Carpet Museum of Iran. With a quick spell, Paul
levitated over the road and up to the roof of the building. Collapsing to his knees,
he turned and looked back over the field.

It was dark in Tehran, but the street lamps cast enough
light to let him see most of the soccer field. He threw a small spell on his vision,
for light amplification as well as 2X magnification.

There was no doubt in Paul’s mind that he had caught his attackers
by surprise. They had not anticipated that he would escape downward into the Earth.
But who and what in the devil were they? How had they found him? And why in the
name of Abraham Lincoln did they want to kill him?

And was he truly free from them now? What if he wasn’t?! It
seemed preposterous that those monsters could follow him to this location,
hundreds of miles from that isolated mountaintop. And yet…what if they could?
Okay, so maybe it was just his paranoia talking. Under the circumstances,
considering that he was still trembling in fear, was it really so outlandish a
concept?! They
had
nearly killed him back there! So it was possible that
his life might still literally be on the line, even now, even here. After all,
what he didn’t know about magic could fill entire libraries. Maybe, just maybe,
he should play it on the safe side and prepare another portal spell, one for a
expeditious exit from Tehran, if only as a precautionary measure.

He promptly got busy with the words, this time finding it a
bit easier than before. If he lived long enough, the casting of portal spells
might get to be second nature to him. He frowned. For some reason, he found
that idea to be less than reassuring.

When he thought that he was ready and could cast the spell
quickly enough, he took a few seconds to breathe deeply several times, all in
an attempt to calm his racing heart rate and trembling body. And for a moment,
it seemed to be working.

And then all his thoughts screeched to a grinding halt, the
sudden lump in his throat making breathing impossible, while his eyes bulged
wide.

 Another portal had appeared on the grassy soccer field
below him.

Apparently, the ogres had been able to follow him after all.

Two of the monsters fanned out, scouting the immediate area.
The third held up some device in its hand, panning it back and forth. Suddenly,
the creature swung it in Paul’s direction, angling it up toward the roof. And
it looked up at Paul and grinned.

Paul’s blood froze. Apparently, they had some sort of device
that could track him. How the devil was he going to escape that?

Without hesitation, he muttered the appropriate words, formed
a portal behind him, and rolled through it.

• • • •

Such began Paul’s frantic flight. He fled from a moonlit beach
on the Israel coast to a darkened forested mountainside in northern Italy to a foggy
trash laden alley in Lisbon, Portugal to a sunset burnished tiled roof of a hotel
in the Azores before doubling back to the east to the gritty sands of an
Algerian desert.

There he collapsed on all fours, gasping like a chain smoker
after a hundred yard dash. Portal hopping was too new to him and, as such, was
arduous work; each leap taking a heavy toll on both his mental and physical
stamina. All he was doing was buying himself some time, but he was exhausting
himself in the process.

Between the exertion and the panic, he just couldn’t make
himself think, his mind a virtual blank.

He needed help!

Merlin!
But of course!
Why had he not thought
of the old wizard before now?

“Merlin?! Help me!
Please!”
he croaked between gasps,
squeezing his eyes tightly shut in pain.

“Tut, tut, young man,” came the now familiar voice behind
Paul, in a disapproving tone. “If only you knew how to defend yourself with a
certain magical sword.”

“Those monsters…
wheeze…
tried to…
wheeze…
kill
me!
Wheeze…
need your help!” Paul wearily tried to stand but instead just
crumpled to the cooling desert sand where he barely managed to assume a sitting
position instead.

“There’s not much time,” observed Merlin dispassionately.
“They’ll be here in a few minutes. I recommend that you leave and quickly.”