by Scott Meyer
Nilo jerked his head forward, free of Martin’s grasp, then spun at the waist, driving his left elbow into Martin’s ribs. Nilo quickly located Ampyx, and hurled the heavy staff as hard as he could. It pinwheeled through the air until the heavy plaster bust of Santo connected with the side of Ampyx’s knee. The guard’s leg bent at an unnatural angle. He cried out in pain, dropping his handful of throwing pebbles to clutch at his injured knee.
Nilo rose, grabbed Martin by the throat, lifted him to his feet, then slammed him back to the ground. Nilo repeated this process several times, laughing as he did so.
Vikram gave Sid a look that said, I’m going to do something, even if you’re not. Sid rolled his eyes, but bellowed, “All right, bub, that’s quite enough!”
Nilo had Martin back on his feet, but stopped short of slamming him to the ground again when he heard the magician. Martin took advantage of this lull in the action to savagely swipe at Nilo’s face, but since Nilo had him by the throat, and Martin’s arms were substantially shorter than Nilo’s, he connected with nothing but empty air.
Nilo turned to face the voice that had dared interrupt his fun. He saw Sid and Gilbert, resplendent in their Victorian formal attire, wielding their white-tipped canes at him, and Vikram in his orange robe, holding what appeared to be a flute.
Nilo faced the three of them smiling. “Do what you will,” he shouted. He shook Martin by the throat, and said, “But choose your next move carefully. I doubt you want to hurt your friend.”
A blindingly fast bolt of sparkling-green energy sizzled from the end of Gilbert’s cane and struck Martin directly in the chest, violently tearing him free of Nilo’s grip and sending him skidding to a stop several yards back.
Nilo stared at his stinging hand in disbelief, then looked at his three attackers in anger. He swiped at the air with the index fingers of both hands. Arrows materialized in midair. Nilo looked surprised when they fell straight to the ground, but immediately realized that since he’d eliminated Brit, the arrows had nobody to be attracted to. He quickly adjusted, summoning two more arrows, catching them in midair, and throwing them overhand at Sid.
He quickly found a rhythm, and was soon producing and flinging arrows at an impressive rate of speed. Vikram had just as quickly played a few notes in his flute, which had thrown up a force field. Once it was in place, he didn’t need to keep playing, so he and the magicians were free to talk while the arrows bounced impotently off of the shield.
Gilbert said, “Good work with that . . . what is that, part of an old bagpipe?”
“It’s called a pungi,” Vikram answered. “It’s played with circular breathing, like a didgeridoo.”
Sid said, “Thank you, Wikipedia. Anyway, when do you think he’ll stop throwing arrows at us?”
Vikram said, “Dunno. When he gets tired, I guess. He certainly doesn’t seem to be letting their lack of effectiveness stop him.”
“Yeah, about that,” Sid said, “Those arrows look familiar. I think this little display answers the question of who was trying to kill young Brit.”
Gilbert watched several more arrows bounce lamely off of the force field and add to the pile that was forming on the ground. “Indeed. I think it also explains why you’ve never heard anyone described as the world’s deadliest arrow-thrower.”
The two guards who were assigned to watch Brit the Elder’s patio were at ease. They didn’t know that Brit’s powers, like all of the sorceress’ powers, were derived from a computer program called “the Atlantis Interface,” or that the computer running the Atlantis Interface was located in Brit’s home (because she wrote it), or that the rules built into the Atlantis Interface made it impossible for a sorceress to teleport directly into another sorceress’s home, even if that sorceress was missing, like Brit the Elder was. They might have been dimly aware that the best way to gain entry to Brit the Elder’s home would be from the very patio they were guarding, but they weren’t worried about it, precisely because they did not know that Ida and Gwen were coming their way, both intent on denying the other the use of their powers.
The two sorceresses appeared at the same time, materializing out of thin air and falling about three feet to the ground. Ida hit the ground running, but facing the wrong direction, so she had to make a sharp turn to aim herself at the door into Brit the Elder’s home. This gave Gwen time to react, and she did, by creating a force field that blocked Ida’s path. Ida bounced off of the invisible field, a chaotic cloud of flying hair and flailing arms. She fell to the ground, looked up, and saw Gwen sprinting for the door herself.
Gwen only made it a few steps before she struck the force field Ida threw in her way.
Ida rose to her feet. She and Gwen stared each other down a bit, then Ida lunged hard to her right in an effort to catch Gwen by surprise. Gwen had expected this, and quickly threw another field, which Ida struck before she had gained any real momentum. Gwen capitalized on Ida’s surprise by sprinting to the side to get around Ida’s force field, but she wasn’t fast enough and ran face first into Ida’s second field.
Again the two women stared, each trying to guess what the other was thinking without letting any sign slip of their own thoughts.
Gwen got an idea, carefully thought through the motions required to make it work, then took a deep, calming breath. In one swift action, she sprung backward, while at the same moment placing a force field behind Ida, in case she followed suit.
Ida did not follow suit. Rather, she did the exact same thing at the exact same time. Both women bounced off the fields behind them, and fell to the ground cursing. Gwen took some comfort from the fact that they chose different curse words.
Both women knew that they each only had two unrestricted directions left in which to escape: up and to one side. They were now engaged in a high-stakes guessing game. Which direction would the opposition move next, and which would they block?
Ida quickly tilted her shoulders to her left, an obvious feint. Gwen placed a force field directly above her just in time to watch Ida fly directly into it. Gwen quickly cast one last force field, blocking Ida in completely, then she darted to her own right, and made it several steps before Ida managed to get a field in place to stop her.
Gwen picked herself up off of the ground, sneered at Ida, and raised her hand above her head. It hit a force field. Gwen was boxed in as well.
“Well,” Ida said, “here we are.”
“Yup,” Gwen agreed, spreading her arms out. “At least the box I’m stuck in is bigger.” It wasn’t much of a victory, but Gwen was happy to take it.
Ida, it turned out, was also willing to take it away from her. “Oh, it is, is it? Let me fix that.” Ida moved her left hand inward, causing the force field next to Gwen to move inward, pushing her along with it, her feet sliding on the patio floor until she was standing where she had started.
“Ooh,” Ida said, “that’s interesting!” Ida constricted her hands as if she were squeezing a large sponge. Gwen felt the walls and ceiling of her invisible prison start to constrict, forcing her to hunch over and curve her shoulders inward. She quickly followed suit, forcing Ida to bend at the knees in sort of an extended curtsey. The two of them stayed like that for several seconds, hunching and grunting and straining to remain upright while exerting as much pressure as possible on the other.
The two guards looked at each other, unsure how to proceed. One of them cleared his throat, and asked in a timid voice, “I’m sorry. May we be of some assistance?”
Neither Ida nor Gwen said anything, but they both gave him a look that answered his question more eloquently than words ever could. He reacted the way any intelligent man does when he receives that look: he stopped talking, looked straight ahead, and concentrated his energy on wishing he was somewhere else.
The guard did not know it, but he did help. He distracted Gwen and Ida just long enough for them to see the futility of what they were do
ing. When they turned their attention from glaring at the guard to glaring at each other, they did so with anger, but not blind fury. Wordlessly, they eased the pressure on each other. Soon, they were both standing upright. Gwen chuckled at her own stupidity and teleported five feet forward. She was free of the invisible cage in which she had been trapped. Ida followed suit.
The two women stood facing each other for a moment, then Ida cautiously turned toward the door into Brit the Elder’s abode. Gwen started to cast another force field, but stopped just shy of committing, instead saying, “Ida, you don’t really want to start that again, do you?”
“I suppose not. Okay, Gwen, what’s your next move?”
Gwen said, “You won’t like it, I know I don’t. I really hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”
Ida’s face fell as she realized what Gwen intended to do, but by then it was too late. Gwen’s hand had selected the menu item that opened a direct voice link with every sorceress in Atlantis. It was meant for emergencies and Gwen had decided this was one.
Gwen shouted, “Come quick to Brit’s patio. Ida and her servant are the ones who’ve been trying to kill Brit, and she just tried to cut me out of the interface! Without the Brits here, she figures she’s in charge! I need help to stop her!”
It wasn’t a bad speech for someone who was under stress. It was concise, informative, and fraught with genuine emotional content. Unfortunately, once Ida realized what Gwen was doing, she put out a distress call of her own, basically blurting out, “No! That’s not true! I can explain! Don’t listen to her! She was going to cut me out too!”
Gwen’s entire message after “Brit’s patio” was unintelligible because of the cross-talk. None of her accusations got out and she knew it. She gave Ida a look that would have utterly destroyed a person who was capable of feeling shame. Ida smiled and shrugged.
Gwen took a second to ponder her next move, then realized she didn’t have to, because sorceresses started materializing en masse. The bulk of her message had been garbled, but the most important part, “Gwen and Ida are fighting at Brit’s patio” got through loud and clear, and it was obviously enough to draw a crowd.
After many dozens of arrows had been thrown, even Nilo realized that they were not going to hurt anybody as long as the wizards had a shield up. The act of throwing them had distracted him long enough for Ampyx to hobble out of harm’s way, into the crowd, which was getting larger by the second. Ampyx was greeted by the two wizards from China, who used magic to dull his pain and listened as Ampyx told them the story up to this point.
Martin had gotten his wits back, and that’s why he kept quiet. He was in a crouch behind Nilo, whose attention was focused on the shield Vikram had raised. Martin knew that if he engaged Nilo without his staff, the result would just be another ignominious beating until Gilbert or Sid chose to shoot him out of Nilo’s hands again. He could see his staff lying on the ground only ten yards away, but it was in front of Nilo. If Nilo saw him dive for it, he’d likely grab Martin before he could get to it. Martin waited. Soon Nilo would get distracted, and that was when he’d strike.
Nilo was not one to keep doing something futile when he had another equally futile idea to try. True to form, he stopped throwing arrows and started producing and throwing what appeared to be small lumps of clear putty. Vikram, Gilbert, and Sid, standing safely on the other side of Vikram’s shield, looked at each other, confused, as several lumps of the stuff clung to the shield, apparently hanging in midair. Nilo traced another crude shape in the air, and they all exploded with a sound like a twenty-one-gun salute, delivered with bottles of champagne instead of rifles.
Of course the explosions, though powerful, did not penetrate the shield. Their main effect was that they caused Sid to say, “And that explains how he brought the statues down.”
“Yes,” Gilbert agreed. “Of course, it’s an open question as to how he got his powers, and what all powers he may have.”
“I don’t know,” Vikram said, “I suspect the arrows and the explosions may be his whole bag of tricks.”
“Either his repertoire is limited, or his imagination is,” Gilbert said. “Either way, I dare say the advantage is ours.”
Sid saw that other delegates had started arriving. He didn’t know if they’d been drawn by the noise or the excitement, or if word had simply gotten out that there was a magic battle underway. He recognized John and his cohort from the Chinese delegation, the Romany Gypsies, the Egyptians, and at least one Incan. He also saw Richard, the wizard who wore only a loincloth and a hat made of a wolf’s skull. Sid said, “We have plenty of backup if things go pear-shaped. Let’s give him a scare and see how he reacts.”
Gilbert smiled. “Splendid idea. On three?”
The two men counted to three, then doffed their top hats in unison, swirling their canes with a decorative flourish. They were enveloped in a shimmering blue light. When that light dissipated, they were both transformed.
Gilbert’s head was smooth and bulbous. His eyes glowed red. His lower face was obscured by a tangled mass of twitching, coiling tentacles. A pair of leathery bat wings sprouted from his back and flapped, making a noise like someone opening an umbrella made of suede.
Sid’s hair had grown long and matted into jet-black curls. His forehead had swelled and distorted with countless ridges. His eyes were glistening, evil jewels that peered out from deep, cruel eye sockets. His nose was a pair of nasty holes in the middle of his now equally nasty face, and his mouth was a slathering mass of viscous saliva and fangs.
Both men had grown by several feet, and had become much more physically massive, but their suits had expanded with them. Sid nodded to his counterpart and placed his now much larger top hat atop his mass of oily black curls. He tilted his head toward Nilo, who had been momentarily stunned into inaction, and said, “Shall we?” His mouth emitted as much saliva as it did sound.
Sid placed put on his hat, got a firm grip on his walking stick, and with a hand that now featured five squirming tentacles where fingers had once been, gestured toward Nilo. In a tentacle-muffled voice, he said, “After you.”
The monstrous magicians advanced on Nilo, their walking sticks held before them menacingly. Nilo screamed as if all of his nightmares were coming true, but he stood his ground and defended himself the best way he knew how, by throwing arrows with one hand, and exploding goo bombs with the other. Wearily, the magicians raised their own protective force fields.
Sid snarled, “We’d better think of something quick. If he ever thinks to start sticking the exploding goo to the hand-thrown arrows, we’re all done for.” Gilbert wouldn’t have thought it was possible to sound sarcastic and dismissive while snorting and drooling, but Sid managed it.
Martin saw that Nilo was in a blind panic. Clearly, none of the sorceresses had ever brought a copy of Fangoria back for their coffee table. Martin knew this was his chance. He made his way to the outer edge of Nilo’s peripheral vision and prepared to make a dive for his staff. He planned what spell to use as soon as his fingers made contact. All he needed was the right moment.
Gilbert parted his face tentacles to be heard clearly. “This is no good,” he said. “Scaring him is not enough. We need to subdue him.”
Sid slobbered, “We could just pin him to the ground with a force field.”
Gilbert shook his head, causing his tentacles to swing like the tassels on a ballroom dancer’s dress. “Let me rephrase. We need to subdue him, in the most entertaining manner possible. We don’t get to use our powers this way often. It would be a shame not to capitalize.”
Sid said, “Fun is fun, but the longer we draw this out, the better the chances are of one of these spectators getting hurt.”
Vikram shouted, “I have just the thing! Gentlemen, shield the crowd! Just leave a hole in front of me!”
Every delegate in the crowd did as they were asked, instantly surrounding the open
space in a protective field, sealing in Nilo and Martin as well. As Vikram again raised his pungi to his mouth, Martin made his move, diving for his staff. Sadly, it was too late. He saw some sort of dark mass shoot at high speed from the end of the pungi, and was driven to the ground under the weight of what people outside the force field could see was an undulating mountain made up of millions of live cobras.
The crowd that had gathered to watch the battle dispersed instantly, screaming and fleeing from the horrific scene. They ran far enough away to not be afraid of the cobras, but not so far away that they couldn’t see what would happen next.
The delegates from different cultures and times worked together to keep the snakes contained, and Nilo and Martin contained, buried beneath the squirming serpents like children hiding in the ball pit at a Chuck E. Cheese. Vikram looked proud. Gilbert and Sid looked delighted, or as delighted as they could in their current condition.
One of the Egyptians turned to the other and said, “Asps. Very dangerous. You go first,” which got a nice laugh out of all of the delegates.
Brit the Elder’s patio was large, more than large enough to host every sorceress in Atlantis, and that was a good thing, because they had all teleported in, drawn by the promise of some genuine drama. At first there was quite a bit of chaos. They were all accustomed to deferring to Brit the Elder, but she wasn’t there, leaving a power vacuum. The next obvious authority figure was Brit the Younger, who was also gone. That left Ida, but to Gwen’s relief everybody seemed to recognize that neither Ida nor Gwen should be running the show, since they both clearly had an agenda.
