Wizard (The Key to Magic) (23 page)

Having lived on the orbital for ten months while he assisted with its construction, he knew the corridors and passageways like he knew his own face. He projected uncertainty. "Not exactly."

She stepped alongside him and linked her arm through his. "Come with me. I'll show you."

As soon as they had moved away from the group, she asked him, "How long will the emergency last, do you think?"

It was no secret that he was a Prime Operative and he now understood, with some disappointment, that she had not sought his company for social reasons but rather to find out if he had any more information on the evacuation than she did.

"I have no idea, really," he told her. "I had no warning at all. In fact, I was in the middle of an attempt to recruit a Participant when the Enforcement Officers showed up. I had to openly use a combat spell to be able to port away. The
drop everything and get out
signal arrived on my comm less than thirty seconds after that."

"It is different this time. The moves against the organization are not confined to the Commonwealth. I brought up two loads from the League in the
Wolf
yesterday.
"

Myra had not released his arm and he sensed genuine worry in her voice. After a moment of indecision, he decided that the physical contact would not necessarily be construed as a likely unwelcome romantic overture and patted her hand where it lay on his forearm. "Our contingency plans are functioning as designed. The Project is not in jeopardy."

"I suppose that you are right," she said, not sounding convinced as they stepped into a glide tube and were sped along spinward. "How long do you think that we will be cut off from the Commonwealth?"

"I could not say. As long as the Faction is in control, I do not think that we will be allowed to use the Commonwealth launch site."

"I was in Control when the League denied access to their site. Are we completely cut off from the surface?"

"No, the new site is operational. I saw the report last week."

"So I should expect my regular service schedule will resume at some point?"

"If it does, I do not think that it will be soon. It is impossible to land a shuttle in secret. Once we send one down, everyone will know where the tertiary site is, wards or no wards, and that would almost certainly mean that it too would be shut down. The tertiary site has always been intended as a last ditch back up."

She frowned, and to his surprise tightened her grip on his arm. "As large as this orbital is, it is still a small place and all these extra bodies are going to make it even smaller. If we are going to be up here for an extended length of time, we will all become very familiar."

"That would not be terribly unpleasant, do you think?"

"No," she agreed with a smile.

Still linked, he moved with her as she stepped out of the glide tube into the northeast quadrant main corridor.

Here she finally released his arm, but did not step away from him. "Meet me for supper?"

"Of course. Where and what time?"

"Earthside southwest quadrant common room at seven?"

"I will be there."

She leaned close and kissed his cheek, then hopped back into the glide tube and slid out of sight.

Smiling, he moved along the corridor until he saw someone from his Section, asked about the Section Leader, and was directed to the dispensary.

The dispensary was one of the largest compartments in the quadrant, but he caught sight of the tall figure of his Section Leader immediately, crossed to his table, and sank into the empty chair. Rather than a meal, half a dozen skry stones and a notepad were spread upon the table.

"I barely escaped," Mortyn told his long time friend with some heat. "Why was I not warned?"

His friend raised his hands in placation. "I did not have a warning to send. I had no inkling of the danger. My dreams are fixed upon the wars and the ether has been clouded for Chelsen for several days. We had less than half an hour's notice from a source inside the Faction."

"What of Bernis and Pavvly? They have always had clear sight of imminent danger."

"We have had no communication with either in two full days."

"Have they been arrested?"

"We do not know. We have lost contact with the other Chapters."

"What!
All of them?"

"As of three hours ago, the last of the Chapters in the League cities that we still had a comm link with went silent. We evacuated all personnel from the Republic last week just ahead of a nationwide raid. The last message that we received from the Chapters in the Alliance was to the effect that they had chosen to disperse and shelter in place."

Mortyn's expression became grim. "Is it a coordinated purge?"

"As far as the League Chapters, it appears so, but I think that there is no direct connection between the actions in the separate political blocks. The great powers are simply tightening their security in preparation for the coming wars."

Leaning back in his chair, Mortyn swung his head about to take in the sparseness of the group dining in the compartment. "How many did we loose from the Commonwealth?"

"None."

Mortyn raised his eyebrows.

"The majority of the evacuated members and the recruited Participants are going immediately into stasis. In a week, we will have only a complement of volunteers large enough to maintain the orbital still awake."

"So it has been decided to suspend operations?" He had known that the possibility had been discussed, but now that it seemed to have taken place, he did not want to believe it.

"Yes. My latest dreams show that the Project is in grave peril. Even without the missing Chapter Presidents, the Board had a quorum and the vote was unanimous. We have waited out chaotic disruptions of civil order in the past. We will wait out this one.

He thought about Myra and supper. "I would like to volunteer to serve on the maintenance crew. The thought of being preserved like a pickle in a jar has never appealed to me."

"This is as I expected. I made arrangements to have a place reserved for you."

"I appreciate that. What of you?"

His friend waved a hand as if to indicate the inherently confining quality of the orbital. "Rather than be canned like a fish, I will take the pickle jar."

Mortyn laughed as he extended his hand. "Good luck, Oyraebos."

The sorcerer extended his own hand for a firm grip. "Farewell, Mortyn."

TWENTY-EIGHT

Maintaining his position by encouraging the flow of the ether to slide around his body without affecting it, Mar hugged the metaphorical shoreline of undertime, the flux boundary that separated him from normal time. After a few subjective moments, he made out a backwater lagoon a short distance upstream and carefully sculled to it.

Growing a new foot gave him an agonizing focus for a time that could have been centuries or seconds and then he did nothing but rest for an eternity.

Or perhaps only moments.

When he tired of rest, he took out the text and studied for another eternity.

Or perhaps only moments.

After musing on what he had read, drawing conclusions, practicing the outlined techniques, and musing again, he left the eddy and approached the boundary.

Standing in the shallows with just his feet wet in the swirling flux and allowing the nearly quiescent current to nudge him along, Mar learned to flip through the days like the pages of a book.

It took him a while to understand how to use his magical sense to peer through the clashing curtain of disrupted ether that separated time and undertime. The curtain thinned or thickened with no perceptible pattern, obscuring and revealing the shore -- the domain of time -- seemingly at random. His views of the shore were abbreviated glimpses -- a flash of light here, an echo of a sound there -- but when taken in sequence were a lifelike portrait of individual moments of the world without. From time to time, the views became distorted as if by ripples, but he was always able to regain clarity by sharpening his mental focus.

Even the slightest perceived change of his stance or shift of his head would alter the view by time and location. These shifts, inadvertent and volitional, proved difficult to control in precise terms, but he was able to latch onto specific perspectives for extended periods.

The first scene that came into brief focus for more than a few seconds was both innocuous and ominous. Two armored, dusty men, perhaps brothers, were digging a hole on a hillside covered in dead grass. Overhead, a gray sky threatened rain and a stiff wind fluttered the warriors' long black hair. Mar's perspective was as if he were standing at the foot of the muddy excavation and looking up the hill. Above the crest, dark smoke rose from an unseen large fire. Both men worked ceaselessly but without desperation and neither man spoke. The image dissolved before either context or resolution were revealed.

More similarly unidentified and incomplete glimpses coalesced. Some went on at length and some lasted no more than seconds. At first, no connections between the scenes were apparent and the people -- there were always people in the visions; he never saw a deserted alley or vacant room or empty field -- were always different.

Then one scene came in sharply and persisted.

It was a battle. A great fortress lay under siege.

The forces arrayed against it marched under a yellow flag with curlicue lettering in blood red and the sorcerers that led the
automatons
and monstrosities wore yellow uniforms. No skyships flew overhead, but that seemed to be because a great many lay crashed and burning upon the approaches to the fortress.

At first he wandered among the Faction entrenchments. The besiegers had taken many casualties. Dozens of men screamed as they were cut from twisted and mangled monstrosities and many would never scream again.
Automatons
lay in heaps like windrows before the magically joined stones of the fortress walls.

His view jumped and then steadied, leaving him looking upon the battlements from a position just behind the sparse defenders, men and boys who wore homespun and leather and had long hair woven in braids. These served compact war engines of magical power so great that each launch rocked the ether like an earth tremor.

Here too, the losses were great. Many of the emplacements were blackened and filled with mangled wreckage and great rents had been made in the stone wall and the invisible ethereal walls that reinforced it. When he turned his head slightly, he saw covered bodies laid out by the score in the bailey behind the allure.

Bolts of light and fire from the Faction sorcerers fell constantly on the battlements. A good many slammed fruitlessly into the shielding flux, but an increasing number penetrated the failing barriers to shatter merlons and men.

A running armsman passed across Mar's view and shouted,
"We must hold the wall!"

Tall, lean, and bearing the same lines of jaw and nose that Mar had seen in Old Mar's face, the man had barked his order in Common, but he had a trilling accent unlike that of the people of Dhiloeckmyur.

Another armsman, bleeding from a head wound, rose to an embrasure to fire a
rifle,
was struck full on by a lance of ethereal flame, and toppled, burning and screaming, off the allure and out of Mar's sight.

Wearing armor that was much too big for him, a boy of no more than ten or twelve ran to the side of the man who had given the command. With a quick lunge, the man pulled the boy down into a crouch as the tempo of the assault quickened and the battlement began to shudder like a drum cadence from the magical barrage.

"Why did you leave the rear guard?"
the man demanded of the boy.

"Brother nMahr,"
the boy shouted.
"I am here to fight alongside you--"

A tremendous explosion consumed the battlement, blasting away the man, the boy, and dozens of other defenders along it. The wall came down and through the breach monstrosities poured by the hundreds, their weapons cutting down the few that rushed across the bailey to challenge them.

Mar stumbled in the shallows. When he regained his footing and recaptured his view, he was looking elsewhere, though still within the fortress.

On a fractured balcony of the main keep, a sliding catapult served by a girl and a badly wounded man fired constantly but with fading strength at the sky. Near them, a woman heavy with child stood at the shattered railing looking down upon the battlements. Her expression of horror showed that she had witnessed the explosion and death of the man and the boy. After no more than a moment, she backed away from the railing and turned to run back inside.

The view of the balcony vanished when a bolt of emerald light struck and Mar's view began to jump from spot to spot within the fortress.

Anything that would burn was ablaze and monstrosities were firing with no other purpose but destruction. The inner bailey and the keep were taking a steady bombardment from circling skyships and much of the main structure had begun to collapse. Then the inner gate went down and monstrosities and skyships drew back to give place to the sorcerers. In a courtyard at the heart of the keep, a slaughter of the wounded and those that cared for them began.

Mar stumbled again.

The pregnant woman ran before him, careening down a narrow passage that began to crumple around her. She reached an iron grating that was almost as wide as she was tall, shook a fist at it to cast a spell that made it rise out of her way, and then hurled herself in as falling stone buried the passage.

He stayed with her as she clawed her way through a tiny tunnel nearly full of black water and filth, crawling with no light more than two hundred armlengths. When she spilled out finally into a rocky gully washed by a polluted stream, she was shivering and begrimed. She took no time to rest, but immediately began to work her way down the shielding gully, climbing awkwardly, desperately, and painfully over slimed rocks and through stinking pools. The sky behind her was full of fire and smoke, but not once did she turn to look back towards the fortress.