The Storm - eARC

by David Drake

  “Unfortunately not,” I said. “The structure’s really complicated, and it’s a mixture of Here and Not-Here. There may be a third factor present, though I’m guessing that from gaps in what I can see.”

  I rubbed Sam again; doing it because I needed the contact, not because he was acting skittish.

  “What I figure to do…” I said, “is to go in as a Maker and open the gap enough for a person. The problem is that I can’t do anything else if I’m in a Maker’s trance.”

  “Sir, I’ll enter the cyst!” Osbourn said.

  “I’ll go,” Andreas said. “I’d be glad to go!”

  They were both as keen as you could ask, to walk into the situation. Which, from what I could figure, would be suicide for somebody with no more skill or experience than they had. As keen as I would’ve been in their places.

  That made me feel good about both of them. At least I’d gained that from dragging Lord Osbourn with me. I could apologize to May when we got back, and mean it.

  If and when.

  Aloud—pitching my voice so that Fox, behind us, would hear—I said, “We’ll decide how we enter the cyst after I’ve thought a lot longer and seen what I’ve got available. For now, I promise you both that if the time comes, you’ll have your chance to die heroically.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Learning Things; Not Always Good Things

  The keep where Master Croft had lived had thick walls and a steel door. The windows were narrow slits with internal shutters.

  Fox unlocked the door and stepped back for me to enter. Osbourn and Andreas followed and joined me in opening the shutters. Even so it was pretty dim.

  “I don’t see how you could fight here if you were attacked,” Osbourn said.

  “It’s not a fort,” Andreas explained. “It’s a refuge. When something came out of the Waste or bandits attacked, the lord and his family could shelter here until it was safe to come out.”

  “Nobody who did that could be much of a warrior!” Osbourn said. That was true enough, but it wasn’t a response to what Andreas had said.

  The interior was a single, round room about twenty feet across. The bed was no bigger than the cot I slept on in Guntram’s suite, and shelves for artifacts filled much of the interior space.

  I smiled. It was my sort of place; or Guntram’s at least.

  “I don’t think this bedding has been changed since the Maker was here,” Andreas said in a critical tone.

  “Well, I came in to see if there were any valuables,” Fox said from the doorway. “Nothing but trash as best I could tell, though you’re welcome to prove me wrong. Hemans, what do you say?”

  The old servant entered the room past Fox. “Nobody came in here after Master Croft died,” he said. “To tell the truth, nobody really wanted to come in. There was funny stuff. Lord Frans came in once or twice to look around, but then he locked the door. Nobody tried to get in after that.”

  Despite the dim light I found what I’d expected to, a stand with seven branchings in pale metal. There was a band of alternating white and black squares circling the main shaft at mid-point. I touched a white section and a branch shone brightly.

  Everybody watching me shouted and jumped back in surprise. For that matter, it startled me too. Osbourn and Andreas had drawn their weapons. It was much brighter than other Ancient lights that I’d seen, starting with the one Master Guntram had brought to Beune when he came to see me.

  I touched one of the adjacent black squares and the light went out. “This is just an Ancient artifact, like your shields,” I said calmly. “Not dangerous. I’m going to turn it on again, so don’t—”

  I fumbled at the candelabrum; the light had been so bright that when it went out, I could barely see at all. I found a white square, though, and a different branch bloomed with just as much intensity. A full-length mirror increased the lights still further.

  “Now…” I said. “Let’s search this place properly.”

  Hemans had retreated to the doorway where his master stood. Fox hadn’t really entered the room since he ushered us in. I went over the fragments of artifacts on the shelves. I could identify a few of them at a quick glance, but for the most part they were worn scraps whose purpose I’d only be able to winkle out in a trance.

  “Croft kept all his records in the manor,” Fox said from the doorway. “My uncle insisted on that. He didn’t like—”

  He gestured.

  “—all this any better than I do. I’m uncomfortable in here.”

  “Ancient artifacts bother a lot of people,” I agreed, walking toward the cabinet I’d just seen attached to the wall opposite the door. “I don’t know why though, since you brought a weapon and a shield with you to Dun Add.”

  “That cabinet’s empty,” said Andreas. “I just checked it.”

  “Well, let’s see what I find,” I said, easing into a trance. I’d seen one of these—or a device like it—in Guntram’s collection. Guntram’s was just a knickknack, a toy that wobbled between Here and Not-Here. This one was a strongbox that shunted its contents out of Here into a place from which only a Maker could retrieve it.

  I mentally tweaked the tiny switch that determined the state, then came out of my trance. The previously empty cabinet contained a leather-bound notebook. Scraps of paper were stuck between pages at several places. Both Aspirants—looking over my shoulders—gasped in surprise.

  I picked up the notes and said, “I’ll take this outside and look it over. When I’ve done that, we’ll have a better notion of what to do next.”

  “Lord Pal?” Osbourn said. “How did you do that? That is, I watched as Andreas here opened the cabinet. Nothing was there.”

  “Master Croft was a Maker,” I said. I shrugged. “As you know I am. This cabinet is just a little trick, like a conjuror’s mirrored box. And I knew the trick.”

  When I looked toward Osbourn, my eyes caught on the crystal mirror beside him. The thin black frame around it was more than I’d realized when I entered the room. I walked past Osbourn, saying, “Let me take a look at this.…”

  The frame—at any rate, sections of the frame at top and bottom—were Ancient artifacts, skillfully pieced together with brass extensions by a Maker with more skill than I have. The frame formed a barrier, though I wasn’t sure what it was blocking.

  I put my hands on opposite edges and tried to lift the mirror away from the wall. It didn’t move. Andreas and a moment later Osbourn came over to help me but I said, “No, this isn’t the way. Let me check it.…”

  I went into a trance and probed the artifact on the bottom of the frame. I’d intended to switch it off completely, but an attack of caution intervened. I didn’t know what was on the other side of the barrier, but the man who’d set it up had known. I changed the opacity of the film on the back of the mirror—it was all part of the same thing.

  As I came out of the momentary trance, I heard the Aspirants both gasp. “What sort of hellpit is that?” Andreas said.

  On the other side of the mirror was a child-sized cavity. Around it was what looked like milkweed fluff with a greasy sheen to it. The fibers waved slightly—not together, but like each was separately animated.

  Osbourn had never put his weapon away. I felt an urge to grab mine but didn’t because I knew in my head that there was no danger. The foulness was not only behind a crystal barrier, I was pretty sure it wasn’t even in the same node that we were.

  I said, “Fox, come here!”

  It was impolite to shout for the local ruler that way, but the crawling mass had shaken me. Fox didn’t object, though he was understandably hesitant in obeying. I suppose I sounded as if I planned to cut something in half, which was certainly one of the thoughts that’d gone through my mind.

  “What’s this?” I said, pointing to the crystal window.

  Fox swallowed and looked away. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen it.”

  “Something was there,” I said. “Croft entered the cyst from behind, did
n’t he? The core was in that place and he removed it.”

  “I don’t know,” Fox whimpered. He’d closed his eyes. “I don’t know, I don’t know anything!”

  “Where’s the core, Lord Fox?” Andreas said in a more measured tone than I could have managed. “If you tell us the truth, we won’t hurt you.”

  “Well, I guess you mean the Beast that Hemans showed me in the tunnel when I came to Severin,” Fox said in a raspy whisper. His face was still turned aside. “I don’t know anything about it, just what Hemans told me. Hemans, come here!”

  The old servant had been easing back from the door, but he came when he was called. “I don’t know where it come from,” he said. “That was all Lord Frans and Master Croft.”

  I was getting on top of my nerves—getting over my fright, I guess; it was like having a spider jump onto your face. I switched the devices in the frame the way they had been, turning the window into a mirror again.

  I don’t know why the sight bothered me so much. I couldn’t find any words that would make it sound worse than a bed of dirty wool.

  “They put it down in the tunnel that runs from the manor to the keep here,” Hemans said. “The tunnel ran the other way to begin with—from the keep to a grove so that folks could get out if they had to. Lord Frans built the manor where the grove was, and he put a trap door in his bedroom, just in case. The two of them carried the thing themselves, all chained up, into the tunnel and put it in the cage they’d had built. I only know about it because I have to feed her.”

  “Her?” I said.

  Hemans shrugged. “Croft called it her,” he said. “I don’t know myself. I just push gruel between the bars with a pole.”

  “All right,” I said. “Take us down to the creature now.”

  I wasn’t sure what I expected to learn from the captive or even whether this female could communicate. The Beast which had come to warn me that Guntram was a prisoner had spoken inside my mind, but I’d only seen one other of the race—a passing meeting on the Road.

  The best I could say about that contact was that we hadn’t tried to kill each other, probably since both of us were considerably the worse for wear at the time. In any case, we hadn’t communicated.

  “Well,” said the servant, “I think the door on this end’s here under the bunk—”

  He pointed.

  “—but I always go through the manor because that’s near the kitchen. The masters, that’s Frans and—” a nod “—Fox go that way too, and there’s a light like this one there so you can see things without taking a candle.”

  I looked at Fox. He must have felt my eyes, because he shrunk even further. “I wanted to know about the treasure,” he said, almost whispering. “She said there was a diamond, a huge diamond. But she wouldn’t tell me how to get it, no matter how hard I asked.”

  I took a deep breath. “All right,” I repeated. “We’ll go to the manor now and take a look at the creature.”

 

  Hemans led us to a ground floor room in the old part of the manor. Fox had lodged us in a large room on the second floor; I thought it must have been intended for formal banquets, though now it held only three mismatched beds which had been brought in for the purpose.

  I hadn’t thought about that at the time, except to be glad that we were together. Now I wondered if Fox had hoped to keep us from noticing Hemans going down to feed the creature.

  The servant led the way with a wand whose end glowed with a pastel tracery, like a torch that burned with softly colored flames. I told Fox to follow right behind the servant, mostly because I didn’t like Fox much better than I did the cavity we’d uncovered behind the mirror. I didn’t want to turn my back on him.

  The trap door was in the middle of what seemed to have been a bedroom. No furniture covered it now. Hemans tugged it open and went down wooden steps, not too steep. We trooped after him, down a wood-lined corridor that was low enough that I instinctively ducked—though I don’t think I would really have hit my head if I’d walked upright.

  We went almost a hundred yards—the full distance from the mansion to the keep—before we came to a rotunda. In it was an iron cage, a cube less than five feet on a side, welded from six gratings. Inside was a slightly smaller version of the Beast I’d talked to.

  I walked to the cage. The wavering light threw shadows which the creature’s shifting form distorted even further. Beasts were never completely visible in Here or on the Road. Their edges shimmered in and out of view. The meshes of this cage were too small to pass this Female, but until I got close to the creature I didn’t see how Croft had been able to hold it before the sides were welded into place.

  The Female was bound with loops of what I thought was copper. Attached to the network was an artifact which switched rapidly back and forth between Here and Not-Here.

  I really wished I could have met Master Croft. He’d been amazingly skillful, and he seemed to have had a mind that kept looking for new ways to accomplish things. I probed the bonds holding the Female. As best I could tell, no part of the device had been made by the Ancients. I didn’t think even Master Guntram could have done that.

  “Since she’s in the cage…” I said, “why not release the bonds? They must be really uncomfortable.”

  “She was this way when I came here,” Fox said. “I didn’t see any reason to change anything. Besides, wouldn’t it be dangerous?”

  “I suppose it would at that…” I said. Suddenly I didn’t feel so warm and friendly toward the late Master Croft, though.

  Patches of the Female’s shifting skin showed a russet undertone. I could see similar discolorations bordering the copper bonds. I could imagine what it must have felt like to be trussed like that for years.

  “Look, I’m going to let her loose,” I said, taking out my weapon.

  “But she knows how to get to the treasure!” Fox said.

  “I don’t see why she would,” I said. “Anyway, I’m going to do it.”

  I cut through the riveted clamps on top. Iron burned, scattering white sparks. Some of them fell on the Female, causing her to writhe.

  Bloody wonderful! I heard whimpering, but I wasn’t sure whether it was in my mind or through my ears in the usual way.

  “Look, I’m going back to get food for, you know, when she’s free!” Hemans said. He leaned the truncheon of colored light against the corridor wall and scampered back the way we’d come. I didn’t blame him.

  I couldn’t reach through the meshes of the cage to get at the remaining clamps from the inside. I said quietly to the Female, “I’ve got to cut at least one more of these. I’ll be as careful as I can.”

  She wriggled toward the other side of the cage, but there wasn’t much room. At least she was hearing me.

  I cut the clamp on the right side. I was using the weapon at maximum intensity, which meant I had to be extremely careful of where the end of the blade was pointing while I cut close to the hilt. Again there was a spray of sparks. The Female didn’t react, though, so I could at least hope that they hadn’t hit her this time.

  I dropped the weapon in my pocket and grabbed the top of the front. It was warm, but I’d made only a brief cut and my hands are callused anyway. When Osbourn saw what I was doing, he gripped the cage also; between us we were able to bend the side outward until a rivet popped on the remaining left clamp and the grate banged down without additional sparks.

  We straightened. We were both breathing hard.

  “But what if it gets loose?” Fox said.

  “She’s going to get loose,” I snarled. I couldn’t undo three or more years of mistreatment, and I sure couldn’t object if the Female, when freed, lashed out at whoever was closest. Just like a human would.

  “Look,” I said. “You all get out of this tunnel. Wait up in the manor. And close the bloody door. I’ll knock on it when I want you to open.”

  “I can’t let you do this!” Osbourn said, frowning at me.

  “Listen, you spoiled
little twerp!” I said. “I brought you along because I didn’t think you could do any harm, but if you start getting in the way of my duties you can start hiking back to Dun Add now! And you can whistle for your chances of ever becoming a Champion!”

  Osbourn looked stricken. “Sir…?” he said. “I—”

  “Get out of here now!” I said. I suppose I sounded furious. The truth is that I was scared right down to the bones by what I was about to do, but I was letting the emotion out as anger because that wasn’t as embarrassing.

  Anyway, it worked. Osbourn turned stiffly and walked off down the corridor. Andreas was two steps down the corridor, and they marched in unison when Osbourn reached him. Fox was already gone.

  The pastel torch remained with me, though I didn’t need it.

  I sighed and lifted the Female out of the opened cage. She seemed to weigh almost nothing. I laid her on the corridor’s floor of trampled earth and lay down beside her, pillowing my head on the crook of my arm. Within seconds I was in a trance and entering the artifact built into the loops of copper.

  It was a complex device and again, I wasn’t sure that it was actually built by the Ancients. It took me some while—time doesn’t run at normal speed when you’re in a trance—for me to understand how it worked. When I was sure I really got it, I moved metal atoms of the crystalline structure out of the points they’d been placed in and made them simply a sheen on the exterior of the device where they couldn’t function anymore.

  I felt the form of the device change while I was still in it. It would no longer freeze the Female into Here. Now that she was able to switch her state into Not-Here, she had only the mechanical bonds of the copper to contend with. She could be completely free within a minute at most, and if she was as angry as she had every right to be I didn’t want my face to be as close to her as it had been when I went into the trance.

  I hadn’t had any choice about that: no Maker could work on an object at any distance from him. How close depended on the individual, but for me a matter of inches was all.