Aeromancer

by Don Callander

  She and her Wizard-husband talked of home at the High, of their neighbors in Valley, but mostly of their children. Nothing stirred anywhere in the huge crater, nor on the rim, nor in the air above. Augurian’s storm hovered on the western horizon, blinking diffused lightning from time to time, still much too far off for them to hear its thunder.

  The sun dropped at last behind the thick clouds. The air was perfectly clear and still over the deep crater. Its colors, burning ambers and yellows and off-whites with deep black shadows, shifted to beiges and taupes and a hundred shades of cooling gray.

  “Here’s our old friend the honeybee,” Marbleheart said, breaking the long stillness.

  “Came by to tell you,” the black-and-yellow insect said after turning completely about three times in a polite bee’s greeting, “our honey scouts report something unusual on the northern edge of the crater desolation.”

  “Are there flowers there, then?” Myrn asked in surprise.

  “Clumps of heather, flowering cacti, and desert succulents,” explained the bee. “Worth the risk and the discomfort of the long flight for a few days of the year, you understand. Besides, we thought it might be helpful if we kept our eyes upon the flanks, Wizards.”

  “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate that,” Douglas thanked the bee. “I’m sorry! I should have asked your name last time you came to see us.”

  “I am Goldenrod, named so after my mother’s favorite flower,” replied the worker, quite pleased to be asked. “My hive is that of Queen Purple Sage. We’re a sect of the Eastern Rhododendron nation, which is the second-oldest and largest tribe of all High Desert Hymenoptera.’’

  “Goldenrod?” Myrn wondered. “Is that what your friends call you?”

  “Not quite,” the bee chuckled. “My friends call me Rod. You may call me that, also, for I feel we are already good friends, Mistress Wizard.”

  “Pleased to meet you socially.” Myrn curtsied to the bee.

  “Tell us about this disturbance to the north,” Douglas asked the bee, inviting him to settle on the back of his left hand.

  “Well, usually the cracks and vents there are just that—holes in the ground, filled with sand and small rocks, leaves and dried twigs and such. The scouts report that, an hour or so back, debris began to fly out of the vents. Blown out, would be more like it. Hollyhock said it was like some great beast snuffling out dust and sand and bits of leaves in loud sneezes.”

  “Ahhhh! Interesting,” Douglas commented, glancing at his wife. “Someone’s doing housekeeping down below!”

  “But, why?” Myrn wondered aloud.

  “A while later,” Rod continued, “Hollyhock’s people noticed that the vents were clear and the air coming up was very warm. Quite hot, in fact.”

  “Maybe we’d better investigate,” Marbleheart put in, anxiously. “Although goodness knows, I have no desire to crawl around inside hot air vents. Had enough of that on old Blue Eye.”

  “Remember, this is not a volcano,” Douglas told him. “Rod, what is happening, do you think?”

  “Another team of gatherers came back to the hive an hour ago. They said the air coming from the fumaroles had become burning hot. They were setting fire to the dried leaves and such, blown out earlier. If you look closely, you can see the smoke of the fires, over there!”

  They jumped to their feet and studied the northern side of the crater.

  “Yes, I see columns of sparks, maybe a whiff of smoke,” said Douglas, pointing.

  “I see it!” cried Marbleheart.

  “But what does it mean?” Myrn asked. “Any ideas, Pyromancer?”

  “It’s either our Wizards down beneath,” her husband mused aloud, “or... something the Servant of Darkness is doing. The second is my guess. The Servant is reacting to Flarman’s invasion.”

  “Makes sense,” Marbleheart conceded. “What should we do about it?”

  “Is there a lot of brush and grass over there?” Douglas asked Rod.

  “The lower northern hills are fairly covered with short grass,” the bee replied. “A fire there ...”

  “... would burn downwind for some distance,” the young Wizard guessed, sounding concerned. “I’ve seen it happen in Valley when a shepherd’s cottage fire threw off sparks. With nothing to stop it, it could burn for miles and miles with this west wind to push it along.”

  “It would destroy a lot of old, dried heather and stuff, but little else,” the bee agreed. “It happens every now and again because of lightning. It seems to refresh the plant life, afterward, so we don’t worry about it. Just keep well clear.”

  “A good idea, where there’s wildfire,” the Pyromancer said. “But at this time and in this place ...”

  “Wouldn’t Flarman or Litholt or Bronze Owl tell us if they were threatened by the heat or the fire?” Myrn asked.

  “They would ... perhaps,” her husband replied. “But I’ve heard no call from my Master.”

  “No news being good news,” Marbleheart muttered. “I hope!”

  “Rod, can your scouts keep an eye on this fire and heat, without getting in harm’s way?” Douglas asked the honeybee.

  “About to suggest just that,” buzzed Rod, launching himself from the Pyromancer’s hand. “Report back to you if... what?”

  “If anything changes. It may die down. It may be a natural phenomenon, after all,” Douglas told him. “As you can see, rain isn’t far off anyway. Send someone to tell us if the situation changes.”

  “Pleased to do so,” the bee hummed excitedly, preparing to fly. “The Hive of Queen Purple Sage is happy to serve!”

  He shot off toward Queen and home.

  ****

  The vent they followed down deep into the substrate of the crater narrowed steadily. Flarman was beginning to consider performing a Reducing Spell.

  “It’d slow us down considerably, however,” he said to Litholt.

  “Not just yet,” the Geomancer replied. “Hold it ready, just in case.”

  The Journeyman Air Adept, in the lead, slipped between two great, heat-glazed boulders. In a moment he called back that the tunnel beyond had widened into a fair-sized gallery.

  “Air’s clear of poisons, as yet,” Stormy Petrel reported. “Even though it smells somewhat like badly spoiled oysters.”

  He rode Cribblon’s left shoulder, sampling the very hot, dry air as they went.

  “I think I can just about make it through here,” grunted Flarman.

  With a volley of grunts and some well-placed groans, he managed to pass the narrowing of the way. Litholt followed more easily—she was quite slim by comparison.

  Bronze Owl and Black Flame came last. The cat sniffed suspiciously as he came through the gap.

  “The Darkness’s stench gets stronger by the minute,” he growled. “Whew! You should smell it easily by now, Owl.”

  Owl’s smelling was not his strongest sense.

  They stood together in the center of the long, high passage in which they now found themselves.

  “Everybody quiet! Listen for a minute,” Flarman ordered. “Let’s see....”

  The search party fell silent.

  Since leaving the surface they’d used an old and useful Pyromancy spell to light their way. Tiny but bright magic flames burned over their heads with a steady yellow glow, sparkling off the glassy walls, floor, and ceiling of the tunnel. Distorted reflections of the party roiled and jumped, stretched and shrank, depending on the curvatures of the mirror-smooth surfaces.

  In this, the first large room they’d reached, even the magic light failed to reach the far end. The ceiling was only dimly visible far overhead. Unlike familiar water-carved caverns, there were no stalactites nor stalagmites nor sheets of flow-stone—just hard, black, mirror-smooth surfaces that made it difficult to judge distances and directions.

  They stood quietly listening The silence was almost tangible.

  “Nothing!” murmured Litholt at last.

  “It’s playing games with us,” grunted
the older Pyromancer softly. “Let me call out to it... him. Can’t hurt... he knows we’re here ... and it might help.”

  “Dangerous, perhaps,” Litholt warned. “But, well... go ahead, Flarman!”

  The Pyromancer placed two fingers between his lips and blew a loud, shrill whistle, the kind used by shepherds in the hills above Valley to call their dogs or warn their flocks of predators.

  The sound echoed, shrilled, swelled, and rebounded about them. Litholt and Cribblon covered their ears and Black Flame shook his head in feline irritation.

  Bronze Owl seemed unaffected, but Stormy Petrel blinked quickly several times, a sure sign he, too, was bothered by the piercing sound.

  “Well, at least it gives me an idea how big this cavern is,” Flarman murmured when the echoes at last died. “Let’s—”

  “Wait!” hissed Bronze Owl, raising a cautionary claw.

  “What is it?” whispered Litholt very softly.

  “A sound... quite low,” Owl answered, just as softly. “Can’t anyone else hear what I hear?”

  “Something moving?” asked Cribblon. “Scraping ... ?”

  “Step back!” Flarman barked sharply. “Against the wall!”

  The group crowded close to him.

  With a terribly loud snap! and crack! a huge slab of the floor before them dropped suddenly away, leaving a dark opening—large enough, Bronze Owl later said, to drop a small house into—gaping at their feet.

  Air rushing up from the cavity crackled with intense heat. The edges of the hole glowed incandescently.

  “Back!” shouted Flarman. “Spell us some protection, Litholt!”

  The Geomancer was already waving her long, graceful fingers and muttering a Heat-shield Spell.

  At once the heat seemed to lessen. But when Bronze Owl flapped out over the open chasm his wingtips glowed blue with the blast-furnace heat.

  “Come back here!” cried Flarman. “You’ll melt!”

  “I’m fine,” the Owl called back. “It’ll spoil some of my usual bright luster, but it’s not hot enough to melt good-quality bronze—not yet, anyway.”

  He flew slowly forward through the hissing inferno, fighting the tremendous updraft and examining the narrow path left beside the chasm. By the time he returned, the heat had begun to subside.

  “We can go ahead, if you so decide,” Bronze Owl reported. “The passage ahead is really rather cool.”

  “Was that an accident?” Litholt wondered. “Or a warning?

  “Definitely a warning,” Flarman told her. “Perhaps you should—”

  “No, I’ll go on with you, Fire Wizard. We’re getting warm on his trail.”

  “Warm, indeed!” sniffed Black Flame. “No matter! Litholt’s insulation is holding well enough.”

  The Familiars and the bronze doorknocker followed the three Wizards around the open pit into a much cooler tunnel beyond.

  “How long can you hold your spell against burning, my dear?” the Pyromancer asked the Geomancer.

  “Days, if necessary.”

  “That’s a blessing. We may need it!” Cribblon sighed. “Follow me, troop! See? The tunnel changes just ahead.”

  Where they’d been following a smooth-walled, steeply inclined channel of heat-blasted, black-glazed stone without seams, branches, or side passages, they now entered a gallery of a different sort.

  Its convoluted, warped walls were of burnished metallic gray in places, a roughly pitted and blasted blue or purple in others, and sometimes a rich, crystalline green, broken into a million facets.

  “Emerald!” gasped Litholt. “Only tremendous heat could do this!”

  The way now was riddled with side passages ranging in size from as big as a horse to small enough to admit only mice, bottomless drop-offs in the floor, and ceiling vents that branched and rebranched away overhead.

  They’d found the remains of the meteor itself, Flarman realized.

  “Something’s ahead,” Bronze Owl cried softly.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Heart of the Meteor

  Cribblon, Litholt, and Flarman examined the exposed remains of the vast meteorite with great interest. In the light of the floating flames it looked like nothing so much as the interior of a vast, blackened Swiss cheese, with bubbles and holes and gaps and passages everywhere.

  “I’d have thought it would have completely melted and become solid ... iron?” wondered Cribblon, somewhat in awe.

  “It might have,” the Geomancer explained. “But the heat and the pressures were so intense that the material of the meteor bubbled and burst, roiled, and boiled, and burped—which explains the holes, you see.”

  “Hot enough, if you ask me, even now,” squawked Stormy. “Not my kind of place!”

  “Nor mine,” hissed Black Flame, pausing to lick his front paw pads, which, he thought, ought to be sizzling in the heat, but were really quite cool, as though he’d been walking beside Crooked Brook in midsummer.

  Bronze Owl was examining the pathway into the interior of the meteor. It was rough, twisted, and angrily stressed... but there were faint signs of the passage of the Servant, even so.

  Flarman straightened from his examination of a sparkling patch of deep blue amethyst.

  “I think we may be making a mistake, friends,” he said, gesturing them all closer.

  “Not a very usual thing for you, Pyromancer,” said Litholt, slipping her arm through his.

  “But it occurs to me, my dear, that having two full Wizards, a Journeyman, and a flock of Familiars on his trail may be making this Servant act... irrationally. I’m convinced he fears us to the edge of insanity. To him, we must appear rather loathsome!”

  “Us? Loathsome?” Bronze Owl hooted at the notion.

  “His reactions,” murmured Black Flame thoughtfully. “Even a trapped mouse will turn on his hunter. You may have hit upon it, Flarman! He’s terrified of us.”

  “And a terrorized magical Being is triply dangerous,” Litholt agreed with a quick nod. “Fire Wizard, I believe you’re right!”

  “The solution is... ?” asked Stormy Petrel, fanning his wings to stir up some cooling air.

  “The solution is to send just one of us forward to approach this panicked Servant. He is, by his own lights, young, inexperienced, and very frightened.”

  “Yes, I sense it now that you suggest it,” Litholt slowly agreed. “We should face him on a more gentle, one-to-one basis.”

  “You’re his greatest enemy, Flarman Flowerstalk,” Bronze Owl added. “You were one of the fearsome Fellowship that drove back The Darkness beside Bloody Brook. He knows of you. And of you, perhaps, Litholt.”

  “That leaves me, then,” decided Cribblon. “Good! I’m the one to bring a breath of cool reason to this young splinter of Darkness.”

  And before the older Wizards could further discuss or object, the Journeyman Aeromancer hitched up his robe, nodded to the company, and trotted off down the main tunnel into the heart of the meteor.

  “Go with him,” Flarman muttered quickly to Bronze Owl. “Take one of the lights, too.”

  Without a word, Bronze Owl spread his scorched wings and flew after the middle-aged Journeyman. One of the Wizard-lights wavered, then followed, casting weird and flickering shadows on the twisted, blistered walls of the narrow passage.

  Cribblon later said he moved forward in abject terror, hardly breathing. Bronze Owl would say he didn’t believe it, judging by the sight of the straight-standing, firm-striding Journeyman following the Servant’s traces into the middle of a fallen star.

  Even with his relatively weak sense of smell—all owls, bronze or bird-flesh, depend on eyesight to hunt, rather than smell—Owl soon realized they were passing through an almost-invisible cloud of poisonous fumes.

  Cribblon had detected the deadly gas and was shrouded, now, by a bluish aura that filtered the gas from his immediate space. He went on steadily at walking speed, never hesitating.

  Owl followed, unaffected by the deadly atmosphere and inten
se heat.

  “Now, if he tries extreme heat...,” Owl muttered uneasily to himself.

  Cribblon gestured for the light to move ahead of them to guide their way, which had become ever rougher and more treacherous underfoot.

  They came suddenly to a vast round space, a huge bubble within the meteor’s tortured fabric, a great, globular room big enough to hold a half-dozen Wizards’ Highs, with room to spare.

  In its center hung a great, rolling cloud of intense, formless blackness, fully thirty feet across, spinning slowly around and around on a wobbling axis.

  Cribblon stopped just inside the entrance to study the Enemy for a long moment.

  Bronze Owl stopped under the entry archway.

  “Come not one step farther, Foul Wizard!” crackled a hollow voice from within the black cloud. “Or I will destroy us all!”

  “Not a particularly intelligent idea, I’d say,” Cribblon answered calmly. “For one thing, it would offer a tremendous advantage to your former Master, The Darkness itself. Himself. Whatever. If you destroy us and yourself, Servant, you destroy not only me, a lowly Journeyman Aeromancer, but a Pyromancer and the Geomancer as well. Who then could distract your terrible Master from you ... if you should manage to survive? Unwise, I’d say.”

  There was a long, shuddering silence in the middle of the meteor’s empty heart.

  “Well, at least you and I would not be around to suffer the consequences,” rumbled the Servant at last. “We would be ... annihilated! Utterly destroyed!”

  “Most likely,” agreed Cribblon, then he added slowly, “I’ve never thought much about reputation, about creating memories and legends. I suppose total destruction, followed by the enslavement of everyone who survived me, would destroy any place I might have won in history. The question I ask myself is—Do I care?”

  “And do I care?” the Servant hissed. “About either of us? We are nothing in the Great Scheme of The Darkness!”

  “You could go back to him, however,” Cribblon responded. “Could you not? Having destroyed at a blow the entire Fellowship of Light—Flarman Firemaster, Augurian of Waterand, and Litholt Stonebreaker, not to mention Douglas Brightglade, the young Pyromancer. I’d think your Master would welcome your return with open ... whatever you Beings use as arms.”