by Scott Meyer
“So you helped him?” Gwen asked.
“Well, yeah. Gwen, he was just so cute. He was making all these plans, and figuring out how to best use the arrows and the explosives.” Ida smiled at the memory of it. “He thought of the thing with the submersible himself. Of course, he thought they’d just drown. He didn’t know about the water pressure, but still. It was sweet. He just wanted me to be in charge. And it was nice to see him getting so excited about a project of his own.”
Gwen shouted, “His project was murdering Brit!”
“Which isn’t possible, Gwen. I mean, obviously, if Brit the Younger dies, then Brit the Elder never existed, and the whole city would disappear, which it hasn’t, so clearly she’s still alive, somewhere.”
“Then where is she, Ida? Either of her, or Phillip, for that matter?”
Ida, smile faded slightly. She said, “Oh, I’m sure they’re all right.”
“Where are they?”
Ida laughed at how silly Gwen was being.
Gwen did not laugh. “Where, Ida?”
Ida’s laugh died, horribly. She shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”
Martin asked, “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I gave Nilo the ability to make his own portals. Setting up the arrows was such a pain. He was very particular about getting the angles just right so that the arrows would hit Brit exactly where he wanted them to. It turned into such a hassle. I just gave him portals and told him to go nuts.” Ida paused for a moment, the said, “That sounded really terrible, didn’t it?”
Gwen, Martin, and Ampyx all agreed that it did.
Ida held up her hands and whined, “She’s fine! Lighten up, okay? She’s clearly fine! We wouldn’t still be here talking if she weren’t!”
Martin asked, “What about Phillip?”
Ida replied, “What?”
“What about Phillip?” Martin shouted. “Wherever your boyfriend sent Brit the Younger, Phillip went there with her, and while the city still being here might, might prove that she didn’t die, which is a very different thing than being fine, by the way, it doesn’t prove anything as far as Phillip’s safety is concerned.”
Ida said, “Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, that’s a shame, but, really, it is Phillip’s own fault. I mean, if he hadn’t gotten involved in the first place . . .”
“By trying to save Brit’s life?” Martin interrupted.
Ida said, “Yeah. That sounded really terrible again, didn’t it?”
Again, Gwen, Martin, and Ampyx agreed.
“So, you don’t know where Nilo sent them?” Gwen asked, clearly out of patience.
“No”
“Then we’ll have to ask Nilo. I don’t suppose you know where he is.”
“Yeah,” Ida said. “He’s in there.” She pointed to a small door behind her desk.
Martin and Gwen looked at the door, then at each other, then at Ida. Gwen asked, “Has he been listening this whole time?”
Ida laughed. “No, he’s asleep. After the meeting he dragged me straight back here to celebrate. After that, he fell asleep, and he’s been out ever since. Anyway, even if he was awake he wouldn’t have heard us. When I moved a bed in there I also made the room soundproof.” Ida arched her eyebrows and stuck her tongue out mischievously.
Martin feared that Ampyx would have a sore neck later from all these approving nods.
Ida quickly saw that neither Martin nor Gwen was sharing her delight at how naughty she was being. Her expression darkened. “I suppose you want me to go get him.”
Gwen said, “Yes.”
Ida got up from her seat and opened the small door behind her desk. In a kittenish voice that, under these circumstances, sickened Martin, Ida said, “Honey? You awake?” In the distance, they heard a faint but very deep groan. Ida turned, gave Gwen a look that clearly meant I’ll be back in a minute, then went into the room, leaving the door slightly ajar behind her.
They couldn’t make out words, but the heard Ida mutter something in her softest, sweetest tone. They heard another deep groan, followed by a mumble and a laugh.
Gwen said, “I can’t believe this. How could she be so stupid?”
Martin shrugged and said, “Love does that to people.”
Gwen said, “Shut up.”
Martin said, “No, Gwen, I’m sorry. I wasn’t talking about you.”
Gwen said, “Good.”
After thinking for a moment, Martin said, “Of course, the fact that you thought I was clearly—”
Gwen said, “Shut up.”
The tone of the nothings being whispered in the other room had become noticeably less sweet. Ida sounded insistent. Nilo sounded defiant. Finally, Ida appeared at the door and said, “He’ll be right out.”
Nilo shuffled into the office, looking surly. His demeanor clearly showed that he had simply dragged himself out of bed, pulled on his uniform, and come straight out to face his accusers.
Gwen took the lead. “Okay, Nilo. What have you done?”
Nilo laughed. “You don’t understand? No, of course you don’t. You sorceresses, you all think you’re smarter than everyone, but I’ve shown you. I’ve shown you all.” He looked at Gwen and Martin with a mixture of amusement and disgust. He shook his head and said, “Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you see what I’ve done? Do you really need me to explain it to you?”
Uh-oh, Martin thought. I don’t like this. Have we underestimated him? Has he been playing Ida all along?
Nilo said, “I have killed Brit the Younger.”
That answers that question, Martin thought.
Ida said, “Dear, you haven’t killed Brit.”
“Yes, I have,” Nilo said. “I killed her!”
Ida said, “Okay, okay, you’re right. You killed her.” Nilo turned back to Gwen, feeling vindicated. Ida smiled at Gwen and winked.
“Why?” Gwen asked. “Why did you do it, Nilo?”
Nilo shook his head. He looked amazed at Gwen’s stupidity. He turned to Ida, who play-acted his amazement back to him. He turned back to Gwen and replied, “Because I wanted her dead, obviously.”
Ida looked as if she might laugh, but she peered up at Nilo with adoration in her eyes, like a pet owner watching her clumsy puppy trip and fall.
“Well, I knew that,” Gwen said.
“Sure you did,” Nilo said. “That’s why you had to ask. Because you knew.”
“Clearly if you were trying to kill her, you wanted her dead. That much is obvious.”
“Obvious now that I’ve told you. I suppose you also realized that killing Brit the Younger would also kill Brit the Elder, and with both of them gone, Ida is in charge.”
“Well, of course,” Gwen sputtered, “but that can’t work!”
“It has worked, and anyway, if you already knew everything, why didn’t you stop me?”
“Well,” Gwen said, “we didn’t know it was you doing it.”
Nilo laughed contemptuously. “You’re making yourself look dumb. If you didn’t know I was the one doing it, then you can’t have known what my plan was, because you didn’t know it was my plan. Think!” He pointed at his head to drive his point home.
Martin felt for Gwen. She was arguing with a dumb person, which never works. For a smart person to argue with a dumb person, they have to dumb down their logic on the fly, while the dumb person thinks in dumb logic naturally, giving them an advantage. Martin decided to end Gwen’s suffering.
Martin stepped forward and asked, “Where’d you send them?”
Nilo asked, “What does it matter? You’re all so much smarter than I am, and you say my plan can’t have worked, so it can’t matter where I sent them, can it?”
Martin tightened his grip on his staff, gritted his teeth, and grunted, “Where?”
Nilo laughed, clearly uncon
cerned. “Okay, big man. Don’t get upset. I’ll tell you. I had two ideas. I thought I might just throw them high up in the sky over the city and then watch them fall to their deaths.”
Gwen said, “That wouldn’t have worked.”
“Could have,” Nilo replied.
“They can fly,” Gwen persisted.
Nilo shrugged. “So you say.”
“You’ve seen Phillip fly with your own eyes!” Gwen yelled.
“Eh,” Nilo said. “I don’t know. Maybe he needs to run real fast to take off. Maybe he was being held up by very thin ropes. Point is, it was worth a shot.”
“No it wasn’t!”
Nilo smiled, “Well, luckily, that’s not what I did.”
Gwen shouted, “Obviously!”
Martin put a calming hand on her shoulder, and repeated his last question. “Where did you send them, Nilo?”
Nilo said, “The middle of the ocean.”
“The middle of the ocean,” Martin repeated.
“Yes. I picked a spot far away from any land, and placed the exit portal just above the surface of the sea. As soon as your friends disappeared into the wall, they reappeared out among the waves, and immediately sank into the sea and drowned.”
Ampyx muttered, “A terrible way to go.”
Martin, Gwen, and Ida all knew that while wizards, sorcerers, and all other magic users were impervious to physical damage, disease, and aging, they could still die of thirst, starve, suffocate, or drown. Martin looked at Ida. She didn’t look angry or horrified. She had a slightly disgusted look on her face, like a cat owner who has found her beloved kitten playing with a freshly killed mouse.
Quietly Gwen said, “That wouldn’t work.”
Nilo asked, “What?”
Gwen said, “That would never work! You know that can’t work! You blew up Brit’s sphere when they were hundreds of feet beneath the surface and it didn’t kill them! Why should dropping Brit in from the surface be any different?”
Nilo puffed up his chest, raised his nose in the air, and revealed his master stroke, “Because those arrows that were stuck to her were tied to a very heavy rock.”
“But she has magic,” Gwen was yelling again. “Both she and Phillip can do magic!”
Martin leaned toward Gwen, and in a quiet voice, said, “Phillip couldn’t. He dropped his staff before he went through, remember? Without that, the shell wouldn’t recognize him.” Martin didn’t add that Phillip very well could have drowned. He didn’t have to.
Gwen said, “Well, that’s always been the shell’s main design flaw. Brit doesn’t use the shell anyway. She uses the Atlantis Interface.”
“Yeah,” Martin said. “You use that flicking through options with your hand, right? Her arm was gummed up by the arrows.”
Gwen said, “You can use either hand, Martin.”
Martin said, “Phillip was holding on to the other hand.”
It was too terrible to think about, but also to terrible to put out of their minds. Whether out of love, or panic, or just plain stubbornness, it was possible that in trying to save Brit’s life, Phillip had killed them both.
Martin noted that for the first time, Ida looked genuinely concerned. “Well, there you have it,” he said. “Through a combination of dumb luck, and just dumb . . . ,” Martin trailed off, looking at Nilo, trying to find the perfect word. Finally, he continued, “Dumb, dumbness! Your boy toy may have killed two people, and you helped. What are you going to do about it?”
Ida thought for a moment, then said, “That is the question, isn’t it? I guess I do have to decide how we proceed from here, since I am the only surviving member of the council of three.”
Gwen said, “Ida, you don’t honestly think that means anything, do you? The council only existed because Brit the Elder wanted it to and even if it did mean anything at all—”
“True,” Ida said. “But Brit the Elder is gone, and so is Brit the Younger, and I was popular enough to get unanimously voted president. I think there’s a good chance the sorceresses will follow me now that there’s nobody else to follow.”
Gwen asked, “But what’s the point? We already have all the food, money, and security we could ever want. Why do you have to be in charge?”
Ida laughed. “So that everybody will do what I say, hang on my every word, and look up to me, like they do to Brit the Elder. Being president has given me a taste. Turns out I like it. I didn’t plan any of this, but I think we might be able to make the best of it.”
Gwen said, “There’s no way the sorceresses are going to let you stay president once they know what you two have done.”
Ida said, “I suppose that’s true.”
Nilo stretched himself to his full height. He glared down at Martin and said, “I’ll just have to stop you from telling anyone.”
Martin glared back, and said, “Try and stop us.”
Nilo cracked his knuckles, then quickly swiped his finger through the air and poked it forward, making a selection. The floor beneath Martin, Gwen, and Ampyx shattered with the sound of several champagne corks popping. The three of them fell several inches into the portal that Nilo had set up just beneath the floor in case of a situation like this.
33.
When Gwen, Martin, and Ampyx fell through the portal, emerging in a shower of shattered floor fragments thousands of feet in the air over the city of Atlantis, they were all surprised and angry. Ampyx was surprised and angry at Nilo for trying to kill him. Gwen and Martin were surprised and angry at themselves for allowing someone to get the drop on them again.
Of course, the last time they had been amongst twenty other wizards, and they had all been stripped of their powers. This time was not nearly as bad. Gwen was tied into the Atlantis Interface and the Camelot shell. She was already flying toward Ampyx with great speed.
Unfortunately, Martin’s staff had gotten hung up on the side of the portal as he fell through, and in his shock, he had let it slip from his fingers.
Martin’s eyes darted about, stinging in the wind as he reached terminal velocity. I’m okay, Martin thought. Even if I don’t get my staff, the fall won’t kill me. It’ll hurt like hell, especially if I hit one of those glass and diamond buildings in the city. Those don’t look very soft. I could hit the water, but they say that’s as bad as landing on concrete.
Martin quickly decided that plan A was to get his staff and fly gently to the ground, and plan B was to aim for a grassy area in the park at the center of town. He preferred plan A.
After a moment of panicked searching, he saw his staff tumbling end over end as it fell, a black speck suspended between the blue expanse of the sky and the darker blue expanse of the ocean. He straightened out and pointed his body toward his staff. Progress was slow at first, but he soon started gaining on it.
Martin thought, Why haven’t I ever made a macro that makes my staff fly into my hand on command? That’d be sweet! Like Thor’s hammer! I’m about to be attacked, I hold out my hand and yell “Santo, aqui,” and it sails through the air right into my hand, and whoever’s about to attack me then wets themselves. Of course, the shell won’t execute the macro unless I have the staff already. That’s a problem. Maybe I could sew a wand into my robe somewhere. The shell might recognize that. But then I wouldn’t need my staff in the first place. Hmm. Oh! Hey! I need my staff!
Martin snapped out of it just in time to overshoot his staff. He cursed, then arched his back and spread his arms like he’d seen skydivers do on TV. He swung around and made another attempt to reach his staff, which was now falling straight down like a spear due to the wind resistance caused by the bust at the staff’s top.
Time slowed. The wind was deafening. The light was unbearably bright. Colors seemed more vivid. The ground was getting unnervingly close. Martin’s fingers were inches from the staff, and closing.
This is pretty James
Bond right here! he thought.
He pictured himself grasping his staff, saying the flight spell (rather than the obvious joke), and soaring back into the sky just before he hit the ground. He wished there was a way to get a video of it to show the guys later.
His hand was getting closer. Closer. He was almost there. It was within his grasp. He stretched and closed his hand.
Martin’s fall stopped abruptly. His hand closed on thin air as the staff continued its fall. He would have cried out in anger and shock, but the wind had been knocked out of him. He could tell from the glow that surrounded him that he was being held in a force field. He groaned, and rolled onto his back. The force field was coming from Gwen, who was far above him. She had her wand in one hand, generating the field that held Martin. The other hand held Ampyx by the shoulder as he floated weightless beside her.
The force field had stopped him more gently than the ground would have, so it hurt less, but that pain was spread out over a longer deceleration, so Martin figured it was a wash. Anyway, he had plenty of time to recover, since Gwen and Ampyx were hundreds of feet above him, and took their time coming down to his altitude. Martin looked below. He figured he was about five hundred feet above the rim of the city; the city center was substantially farther away. From this height, the city looked like a bowl full of sugar cubes with a bad ant infestation. Martin scanned the roofs that lined the inner bowl of the city. Luckily, since the roofs were white and the staff was dark, it stood out. It had come to rest on one of the smaller buildings, just below the rim. If the wind had pushed it just a little further, it would have landed in the ocean beyond the city wall. It might have sunk and been lost forever.
Martin turned over onto his back again, and saw that Gwen and Ampyx were almost to him. He yelled up at them, “That hurt!”
Gwen yelled back, “Would you rather I let you hit the ground?”
