Wizard (The Key to Magic) (6 page)

The wide corridor was empty but spells and guards swarmed the lobby into which it opened. Before he took a full step, he cast a wave of flux that plunged the area in darkness and then started ripping apart the Vessels of the other spells at random. Many of the resulting bursts of violated flux flared into explosions of ethereal and natural fire, hurling buffeting concussions through the confined space. A blaze sprang up in the wall on the other side of the lobby, vomiting smoke and frenetic red strobes.

Shouts and the shape of shadows running through the flashing rays pinpointed the guards and made them inconsequential. Staying low, he followed the right hand wall around to a set of smooth metal doors, pausing only once to allow a stumbling armsman to blunder by. As he examined the doors by touch, seeking either a physical or magical lock, he briefly grasped a raised part of the frame on the right side. This caused the doors to part silently to emit a shaft of white light that knifed through the swirling smoke. Hoping the confusion was severe enough to leave him undetected, he slipped into the small room beyond. After a moment the doors slid together again on their own, sealing out the uproar.

He had hoped for a way out, but a quick spin about did not discover another door. Having the same unadorned walls as the rest of the place, he did not think this a garderobe -- at least, there was no commode that he could detect. It was quite empty, in fact, and thus also hardly seemed to be a cupboard.

Feeling exposed should one of the guards think to search the tiny room, he shifted over to the right and tucked himself in the near corner. In the process, his shoulder brushed the short wall between the corner and the edge of the door.

With the single chime of a soft tone, bright blue symbols came into being on the unmarked surface of the narrow strip. Startled, he stepped back as the symbols began to change rapidly and he felt a sudden surge of upward movement as the floor pressed against the bottom of his feet. After a belated moment, perhaps prompted by knowledge impressed by the female
medic's
spell, he kenned the symbols to be numbers that were approaching zero from a deficit. The changing symbols did not stop at zero, however, but continued to increment and slowed only as the upward acceleration faded, finally freezing to indicate 42.

When the doors slid apart, he charged through.

And struck a yellow liveried woman standing in wait just inside the corridor beyond. Carrying a stack of multi-colored papers, his unintended victim went arse over pate and, bellowing but retaining her burden, crashed to the floor. He cut left, vaulted over the sprawled and now energetically shouting woman's kicking legs, and ran for all that he was worth.

Other doorways pierced the corridor, and other people were about, but the ceiling-high window at the end of the corridor snared his eye and he sprinted for it. Enchanting a large pot against the near wall that held a sickly looking plant, he swept it us as he raced along. He sent this missile barreling ahead of him as a battering ram and it obligingly smashed out panes and metal framework. With careless abandon, he flung himself out through the jagged hole it had created into the open night.

The great space into which he plummeted was a bit of a surprise -- he had hoped for a drop of no more than a few manheight -- but he swiftly cast enchantments to bear himself up above a vast landscape lit like a starfield by thousands of bright, dazzling lamps. As he fluttered in fits and spurts, steadily loosing altitude, above what he gradually came to recognize as a grand metropolis, he became genuinely awed by the city's horizon reaching size and the droning ethereal roar of its ubiquitous magic. This city was a hundred times larger than Mhajhkaei and shook the ether with a conglomeration of flux whose tremendous scope he could scarcely grasp. For several moments, he simply let the wondrous and magnificent sight fill his eyes and thoughts.

With the sounds of a whetted dagger plunging into flesh, steel-hearted darts of chilly, grinding-crimson sliced the air within fingerlengths of his head, slashing across his path and bringing him up short with a guttural yell.

FIVE

Throwing together a shroud of crude lisping-mauve, he began to batter the missiles aside. A few got through his defense, ripping by too fast to allow him to feel alarmed at their passage, and a number burst in showers of agonized flux and glowing sparks.

A compact formation of four skyships the size of hay wagons blazed by, diving toward the city below. With slick, air piercing shapes, sparse spikes, and odd-shaped protrusions, these skyships were strikingly similar to those of the Brotherhood and moved with equally frightening agility and speed. When the skyships swung about and began to gain altitude for another dive, he scattered the enchantment on his brigandine and let himself fall toward the mass of light below, using only the spell on his trousers to maintain a modicum of control. He would never be able to outfly these skyships. His only chance was to go to ground.

As the buildings, many-shaped multi-colored metal wonders whose soaring heights seemed impossible, rose up like the boles of a forest around him, the near silent skyships dove again. Spastic green and blue radiance flared all about as he began to deflect the darts a second time.

Casting his eyes about, he saw two towering buildings standing close together a few hundred armlengths off to his left. The space between the paired colossus looked to be no more than three or four armlengths and he revived the enchantment on his brigandine and made immediately for this possible shelter. Too small for the skyships, the space would at least give him some cover while he dropped to the hoped-for warrens below.

The skyships continued to close as he passed into the gap, but banked sharply away at a distance of no more than twenty armlengths. The gusts thrown off by their passage slammed the faces of the buildings, smashing against the numerous dusky windows and cracking and bursting many. Battered by the winds, he sped deep into the gap and then dove straight down, plummeting by windows and balconies, many lighted but some not, and began to peer into the gloomy depths for a place to hide. He did not try at all to slow his descent as the bottom of the gap neared. He could not dally to select a bolt hole. He would have to try the first nook that presented itself.

Something slammed into his abdomen with enough stunning force to spin him around, and as he rotated, he saw a red spray sling out.

Unbidden,
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
sprang to his aid as he recognized the red spray for his own blood.

The swarm of
automatons
bursting at that moment from blown out windows to either side of the gap froze in place, small black ports spewing near invisible masses of congealed flux that stopped within fingerlengths of him.

Spells that he had devised in undertime staunched the blood flow, sealed the matching punctures in his abdomen and lower back, and regenerated pierced muscles, entrails, and liver. Another topped off the fount of his blood to forestall an impending faint and a final one stilled the surge of fear that had begun to race through his veins.

A spell that he did not have was one that would sweep the panic from his thoughts and it took a number of subjective moments of harshly imposed mental discipline to gain enough clarity to delve the
automatons
. Without surprise, he discovered them and their missiles immune to flux manipulation. Each the size of a hogshead, at least four dozen
automatons
had emerged from the buildings and he could sense the better part of a hundred more following behind. Their deployment spread them in a broad net and the distance that he could move in slowed time would not be sufficient to bring him clear of their interrupted fire, which left only undertime ... or the Compliance Officer's bracelet.

Would it return him to the large room?

He dug out the bracelet, decided that he would know soon enough, and touched a finger to the travelling segment.

He arrived in the open, again above the city, but did not have any time to get his bearings. A thick mass of
automatons
appeared around him
,
roiling the background ether with a humming-teal wake as they emerged from the fringe of undertime, and he had no doubt that it was the very same group that he had just escaped.

Again,
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
bought him a reprieve.

Somehow, the
automatons
had tracked him. He could not have left any physical spoor, for he had not traversed the intervening space. It had to have been magic that had betrayed him.

Neither the spells that he had established as a shield nor the lifting and driving spells on his garments left any residue in the background ether. They had a distinct presence when active, as now, but made no stir when not. He dispersed all three and touched the bracelet again.

On arrival, he dropped uncontrolled through a dark sky that had begun to brighten to the left.

The swarm enveloped him within seconds and he stole time again to interrupt their attack.

He fixed his eyes on the bracelet in his hand.

It made sense. His unschooled ethereal methods were as alien to this time as he was. Save for naturally occurring modulations, his simple spells were like nothing that he had seen here. The Oaurlervy sorcerers would logically attune their devices to detect similarly advanced modulations. It was even possible -- if not likely -- that the bracelets themselves could speak to the
automatons
in some hidden way.

The bracelets would have to go.

He brought the second from his pocket and briefly tried to infuse the metal with an overload of flux. When the devices showed resistance, he thought of the key, produced it and allowed a half grin when it accepted an infusion without complaint.

Forcing the driving spell in his brigandine to its maximum, he drifted to the nearest automaton, a distance of a little more than two armlengths. Then, against mud-like resistance, he reached his arm between twin frozen streams of ethereal fire to nestle the bracelets and the key against the hull of the device. Having a quick additional thought, he extended he index finger, pressed the transporting segment, and immediately withdrew the digit. As he had hoped, the initial spark of the spell paused mid-flare when he broke contact. Finally, he infused the key with a hundred times the flux that it could safely contain.

Using a tortuous, snaking process, he moved as far from the sabotaged decoy as he could get, wiggling through the inner rank of automatons and wedging himself between a pair in the next outer rank. After confirming that he was completely out of the line of fire of any of the devices, he created a bubble of compressed flux that he warped tight to his body, and after a brief pause to ready himself, doused
The Knife Fighter's Dirge.

The blast knocked him out and down with an accompanying shower of shredded, smoking, and melted
automatons.
In defiance of his plan, the key had detonated before the bracelet could whisk it away. Happily though, from the amount of debris blazing around him, it appeared that few, if any, of the
automatons
had survived and he relaxed slightly as he allowed the pull of the earth to accelerate his fall.

He remained unmolested as the city rushed up to meet him, the brightening day revealing the fine details of boulevards, green spaces, promenades carried on spindly bridges, and all manner of buildings. As he reached an altitude of no more than ten manheight above the sprawling rooftop of an extensive structure, he started to slow his fall. With his attention fixed on searching the roof for a stairway or skylight, he did not detect the invisible ethereal wall below him until only seconds before he crashed into it. His own ethereal armor protected him from the flux burst released by the collision, but he was blasted upward by the concussion.

His brigandine brought his arcing flight to a halt, leaving him bobbing unsteadily in a bright beam of sunlight that peeked over the top of an imposing spiraling edifice composed entirely of rose hued glass. As the wash of warm light made him cover his eyes with his hand, he felt a moment of intense frustration. He had to be in plain sight of hundreds if not thousands of people behind the darkened windows of the nearby buildings.

He bolted into the shadow of another colossus, loosing altitude as he aimed for a sprawl of lesser buildings that flared away from it toward the west. As he descended, he scanned the ether in his path for any sign of another defensive flux wall.

Sensitized to the peculiar shock of the transporting magic, he felt the arrival of half a dozen
automatons
in front of him in time to swerve sharply. The devices immediately gave pursuit and he tweaked his enchantments to drag him into a sharp climb, struggling with the intensity of the flux that he was forced to pump into his brigandine in order to stay ahead of them. The damaged leather could not withstand even a dram more and threatened failure if he could not reduce the lifting flux soon.

Skyships zoomed overhead, spewing darts that struck his ethereal armor with bruising force. More
automatons
appeared in groups of ten or a dozen and began to close to surround him.

He fought back with ethereal fire and geysers of air, blasting holes in some and smashing others, but the new swarm continued to grow, relentlessly blazing away.

He had to get out of the open.

Desperate, he wished for the lightning.

The bolt fried a score that clustered close together, the flash leaving a white gash across his vision and the thunderclap causing his ears to ring, and when the devices shattered and fell away, he dove through the breach and accelerated back toward the city below, increasing the driving sound-color in his brigandine to a reckless intensity.

The
automatons
followed, swooping in a twisting column very much like a whirlwind.

Another lightning bolt blasted straight up through the center of the column.