Static.
Transformation fluid.
Could they all be ... one!? And if so, could "blinded by sky" in the second stanza of the Hero poem be a reference to lightning?
Pfnaravin had made sure by asking questions. About static; about lightning, no one in this place knowing the term: transformation fluid.
It was when the lightning-man had gone that Pfnaravin -- with renewed hope -- planned his own escape.
Escape!
But in such a way he would not become a hunted beast.
Had executed his plan the night his "room mate," Laslow-Jacobs died, Pfnaravin dragging down the dead man, dragging him over and up into Pfnaravin's bed, Pfnaravin climbing into Laslow-Jacobs' bed.
No one would know because they looked the same -- wrinkled, with gray hair -- like all old men.
After the new down-light nurse had pronounced "Van Robin" dead, Pfnaravin had put himself into a Mage-trance so that he lay without apparent heartbeat. Was also found to have "expired."
And when the large machine-that-screamed came to take away two bodies? What would they think when there was only one left -- Van Robin? What had happened to the Laslow-Jacobs' body?
In that way, Pfnaravin knew, with two bodies, he had made a great confusion.
Escaping with a blanket when the machine stopped along its way -- Pfnaravin was now huddling under it, knowing that no one would hunt for "Van Robin" when it was the other dead man who had "walked away."
And Pfnaravin would also have died except for keeping the second key. The second key to the door of this, his house.
When first he'd dragged himself down the confusing streets -- moving by night -- finding his house at last, he'd tried to live in the woods surrounding it, digging out, as best he could, a depression under a fallen tree.
At first, during warm days, he had watched the man who was now living in the house. Watched him come and go. Come and go in his machine. Until Pfnaravin had known when the man would be away.
After that, using the second key, Pfnaravin had slipped into the house to warm himself during the morning hours. And to nibble at some food. A bite. A piece of bread. A sip of milk. So that the loss would not be discovered.
Inside, he had also made a puzzling discovery. That the man had nailed shut the stairs-door that led to the transformation point. (A slight problem in this horrid land of problems.)
From the woods edge, Pfnaravin had watched, first without understanding, then with amazement, a man who came to put a ... something ... on the house top. A thing that, in a blinding flash of inspiration, Pfnaravin understood to be what that teaching slavey had called a lightning rod. Incredible! That such a devise should be put up at this time, giving Pfnaravin his first, real hope!
Now was the time. If the man inside had gone to sleep. If the gathering storm produced the proper flow of transformation fluid.
Already, Pfnaravin had attacked the copper wire by the bottom of the house. Had used heavy stones to pound and to wear away the metal above the iron stake driven in the ground.
If the man at the house of the beds of death had told the truth, the lightning rod, with the wire not ... grounded ... would, itself, call down the lightning.
By the damp feel of the air. By the look of the black and getting blacker sky, it would be soon.
Pfnaravin, old, dying, must be ready.
Rested, warm enough to stagger to his feet, still clutching the blanket around him, Pfnaravin shuffled the three steps to the door. Shaking, drew out the key; groped it into the lock hole. Twisted slowly so there would be no metal noise.
And was inside! To blinding darkness and to ... warmth. Blessed warmth!
Pfnaravin leaned against the entrance wall to catch his breath.
Warm air having magic of its own, he found that he could walk.
Knowing the position of the chairs and tables by this time, he tottered forward, feeling his way around this and that, headed for the cooking slavey room -- in this world, named: kitchen.
To get a heavy knife from what was called a pull out drawer.
Knife in hand, stooped over, his breath ragged in his withered throat, Pfnaravin staggered to the front hall.
Discarding his hampering blanket, he sagged to his bony knees beside the stairs, almost crying out at the sudden bending of his stiffened joints.
Waiting while the agony subsided, he crawled forward, knife in hand.
Fumbling, he forced the knifepoint into the slanted door crack.
Using both hands, careful not to cut himself on the blade edge, Pfnaravin pried back on the handle of the knife.
A creak.
A nail loosening.
He pried again.
Another creak.
Again.
Creak.
A fourth pull, this time with a sudden grating.
Too loud!
The noise caused the sweat of fear to ooze down the furrows of his forehead.
Ignoring all else, there in the house's dark, Pfnaravin listened. .... Heard nothing up the stairs.
Again, rest.
Another pull-back on the knife blade handle and the door gave enough so that he could wedge the talons of his hands inside the crack.
Outside, the storm was coming at the pace of this world's violent wind.
He must hurry.
Again, he pulled back with all his weight.
A grate! Coming in a wind-lull!
Surely, even a soundly sleeping man could hear that noise.
No matter!
This must be the time, the storm clawing at the house; panting wet screams like grotesque creatures howling in the stripped-of-magic night!
Yes! As he had hoped, it was upon him now! The tingle-feel of crystal-power! ...... Not crystal-power, but another form of transformation fluid! What he had come to know in agonizingly small ways as static. In what the man had said was lightning, one-half of the lightning settling on the house, calling down ... the bolt.
Gaining new strength as the transformation fluid reached his body, kneeling in the hall before the slanted door, the knife discarded, using both hands, inserting all his fingers, Pfnaravin pulled back on the partially opened door.
Creak -- bang! The door was loose at last!
Noise no longer mattered!
Nothing mattered as the transformation fluid was full upon him. Building!
There was another sound!
With shock, Pfnaravin heard ... footsteps. On the stairs above.
Pfnaravin's ash-gray hair rising, struggling up on hands and knees, he backed into the transformation-tunnel under the stairs.
More steps! Above! Coming down!
Turning up his head, Pfnaravin saw the ... man. The man coming down the stairs!
It was in that fearful instant that the man ... the stairs ... the house ... the whole of this hateful, foreign world ... winked out!
-6-
John wakened with a start. Why? Was it the dream he'd been having?
Vaguely, he remembered dreaming that he was under the multi-colored sky of the other world. On the boat. On the Roamer, John just another sailor who, periodically, must row the boat from the rim of one huge, but tranquil cyclone in the sea to the next, counter-rotating spiral.
Beside him in the dream, leaning on the deck rail, was Captain Coluth. Large, big-boned, gentle -- the only person in the other world John could trust to be both competent and sensible, John asking Platinia to take John's crystal to the captain.
Had Platinia done as John asked? Taken the crystal to Coluth, Coluth presumably still tending the boy-king at the Stil-de-grain capital on Xanthin Island?
Platinia had always done what John asked before. But then, she seemed to be awestruck in John's presence.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say she was terrified of John's crystal and of the power that "gem" contained. John remembered she had shied away from the disk even before John became "drunk" with its power; long before John had "manhandled" her with his crystal-strengthene
d mind on the night before his return to this world.
As sleepy as John was, a wave of regret washed over him at the thought of bending little Platinia to his will. Of forcing her to reveal her petty secrets.
"Drunk" with crystal-power had been his excuse for mistreating shy Platinia. Every inebriate's alibi for reprehensible behavior!
John searched his mind again for any sign he'd revisited the night-terrors he'd been having recently.
In one, sweat-soaked dream, for instance, he'd barely escaped the gravity traps. Harmless looking spots between the up-light border of Malachite and Stil-de-grain where the gravity thickened dangerously -- here -- there. Places where gravity became so heavy it would crush any object or animal unfortunate enough to blunder across the "trap." Object or animal or man.
Other times during the recent thunderstorms of what was now early winter, he'd dreamed of Zwicia, the Weird. And of her larger crystal, the Weird's foot-in-diameter disk alleged to show the past and present -- even the future.
Whatever the truth about the pictures the crystal showed, John, himself, had nearly become "lost" in it. Or, as people of the other world would say, he'd caught the "crystal-sickness"; had been "out of it" while his military reforms for the Stil-de-grain Army and Navy were being botched; the fleet of Malachite boarding and capturing the incompetently led Stil-de-grain Navy.
Bits and pieces of the crystal-visions he'd seen still haunted him. Had he glimpsed the other world under construction, a hawk-like ship "parked" in orbit about a thin, flat planet, space-suited aliens building a dome above the wheel-shaped world?
Interestingly, the natives of that backward culture also described their world as round, but flat -- with a sky-dome overhead that contained neither sun, moon, nor stars. Nothing above you but clouds at night and rainbow bands of color during the day, each color centered over its respective "band," each, concentric band-country with a different gravitational pull.
His mind flitting back to Platinia, was it his imagination, or had the small girl enhanced his crystal's power? Like she seemed to improve whatever he did when she was in the room? Or was it a fantasy that he was more successful as a leader when she was beside him? That his food tasted better when she was near? That the day went better with Platinia by his side?
With some embarrassment, John realized his mental ramblings about Platinia-power could be those of a man in love, the merest contact between lovers seeming to perfume the air!
He had to admit to himself that, in her doll-like way, Platinia had a kind of somber beauty. Like most Malachites, she had dark hair and eyes -- Malachite, the band she'd come from originally, before the priests of Stil-de-grain had stolen her as a child. Kidnapped her to put her through a kind of grizzly ritual because she was the princess of the night (or some such foolishness.)
Then, there was Golden. Another Malachite -- an entertainer whose real interest was in finding the lost crystal of Malachite (the gem of Pfnaravin that the safely-dead King, Yarro, was said to have stolen.) Golden's interest in the crystal was (he'd once admitted in a rare moment of candor,) to use it to lever himself onto the throne of Malachite.
Golden, the acrobat. Golden, who could climb dungeon walls like a hyperactive monkey. Golden (when liquored up) a balladeer. Golden the sycophant. Golden the obsequious. Golden -- John's gopher.
My God! John had never thought of it before, but Golden was a character right out of Shakespeare, an "otherworldly" Hamlet who, like the sullen Dane, considered himself to have been aced off the throne by a wicked uncle.
Now that John thought about it, there was a remarkable similarity between Hamlet's behavior and Golden's. A certain brilliance. A certain moodiness. A certain shiftiness.
Golden-Hamlet.
Both of them, men of many talents and the poorly hidden aspiration to be king. Both, possibly, a little mad. Both, dangerous enough to need ... watching.
* * * * *
John was awake again. Safe under the embrace of blankets, John rolled on his side, half missing the iron chain that supported his Mage-crystal.
It was then that John remembered the lightning rod he'd had installed in the hope that neutralizing a storm's static would banish his frightening dreams.
Creak!
What was that!? A sound, certainly, the storm not likely to have made it. In fact, the wind and rain outside had just died down, the cloudburst no longer pounding on the roof. (The proverbial lull before the real storm?)
Something other than the noises he'd heard that had first led him to discover that the storage space under the stairs was the gateway to another world, the sometime-sounds of chanting -- that John found later were the magical mumblings of the Mage, Melcor, as Melcor worked to bring the lost Wizard, Pfnaravin, back through the static-operated passageway that just happened to be under John's stairs!
There had been a glitch in Melcor's plans, though. Somehow, the Sorcerer's magic had backfired, first, to send Melcor's "slavey," Platinia, to John's world, then to bring down the tower room's ceiling blocks on the hapless Mage. (Though people in the other reality seemed to think that Wizards were indestructible, having your chest crushed by roofing stones made even Mages mortal!)
Poor, dearly departed Melcor had blundered in another way, too. Known to be seeking Pfnaravin in the "other world," John's appearance had the band-folks convinced that John was the newly returned Malachite Mage.
Of course, when the Bandworld's "medieval oriented" people found out John didn't want to be called Pfnaravin, they did what they were told -- mumbled John Lyon -- the locals so terrified of Mages they would call John anything his heart desired.
Later, King Yarro's mysterious death had made possible John's promotion to Mage of Stil-de-grain, the "great" Mage expected to run Stil-de-grain with a hapless child-king on the throne and a foreign war brewing .......
Creak! Bang!
John was out from under the covers and on his feet in an instant. No dreaming that noise!
Though John couldn't imagine what it might be, the sound had been real, a noise that originated below him on the first floor.
A possible robber in the house, the "manly" thing was to go downstairs and get himself killed, John helped by being able to sneak downstairs with thunder as his "cover."
His bare feet receiving their marching orders, John grabbed his robe from the chair back beside the head of his bed and put it on hurriedly.
Sneaking into the hall, John was grateful to have his way illuminated by pulsing thunderbolts, the staccato rippling of the storm's electric ganglia penetrating the house's dirty windows.
At hall's end, John started down the stairs, his bare toes feeling for the steps, stair-noise lost in drumrolls from the sky.
One ... cautious ... step ... at ... a ... time.
Another step, static building on his body now, and John squatted down to look out where the stairs "broke free" of the walls, to see a head emerge from under the stairs! Like Platinia had come out when Melcor, the Wizard, had blundered ......!
No!
What John was seeing was the back of a head disappearing into that opening, the head lifting to show a man's face, his gray hair teased up by the same static John was feeling on his own body.
Later, all that John could remember was a blinding flash! A deafening roar! And ... falling .....
-7-
After Golden had been sent limping off through the fog to quiet the ponies in the inn's bramble enclosed corral, the rest of the "irregulars" had fallen upon the tiny, one floor building, Malachite soldiers inside, Hooc said.
"Irregulars"? Bandits, was Golden's name for them, even though Golden was grateful they took him in. No man alone -- to say nothing of a wounded man -- could live long in that swamp.
It had been weeks since the Stil-de-grain Army's disastrous rout through the Great Realgar Marsh, the marsh a nightmare of thorn-thickets, scrub, and sucking soil, a canopy of broad leafed, mere-trees darkening the bog's quavering ground. Swamp creatures slithered through kn
urled tree roots in the wet below. Stinging insects clogged the heavy, putrid air.
Bad though things were, Golden wondered how many soldiers of Stil-de-grain had been as fortunate as he.
"Tighten up," Hooc hissed, turning from his position in the front, Golden falling behind so that those ahead had faded into darkish lumps in the odorous mist. Limping faster, Golden dragged on the tether, a rope trailing from the lead pony's halter to each of the other ponies in turn.
Behind Hooc was Sassu, a small, quick man. Then came Iscu, Xevi, and the grossly deformed Renn. Bandits of the marsh; pretending to be Stil-de-grain partisans.
The thieves carried bulky packs, carryalls jumbled with booty from the inn. At the men's sides hung weapons. Swords. Clubs. Xevi, with a short, thick bow.
Leading was Hooc, a hulking man of middle age. Black haired. Sullen. Bearded. With a scar slashed brow above eyes of iron.
Though Golden had been left outside in the burnt-orange fog and wet of another oozy, Great Marsh morning, Golden was sure Hooc and the others had slaughtered everyone inside the tiny, bog-side inn. The screaming had told him that.
Even had Golden's leg been well, there was nothing he could have done to stop the butchery. The pack members were too many. He was alone and closely watched.
Nor was he permitted anything but a short, blunt belt knife for a weapon. At least, to the bandit's knowledge.
Golden was the new man. To be trusted only when he had murdered like the rest.
When the gang had came upon him in that oozy fenland, they had suspected Golden to be a Malachite -- though he lied that he was not. What had preserved his life at the beginning was that he had nothing fit to steal and that his military tunic bore the yellow stripe of Stil-de-grain.
Bothered by his dark looks, the squad had waited until down-light to see what language Golden spoke; when he spoke Stil-de-grain, had let him live. (Lowlifes like this would never suspect that Golden could speak more than a single tongue.)
Even though the robber band was seeking a recruit, Hooc had not liked letting Golden live.
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