by DD Barant
“So, great minds think alike,” a voice whispers behind me.
I look around. All I see is another golem—it takes me a second to recognize Azura.
“What are you doing here?” I hiss. “We were supposed to rendezvous behind the Circus Circus afterward.”
“Afterward? You mean you managed to—”
“No, I couldn’t get near him.”
“Even with the lights out?”
“You mean in the ten or so seconds before the emergency lights kicked in? No, amazingly enough, that wasn’t enough time to sneak past four heavily armed guards, penetrate the nerve center of a global military-industrial conspiracy, and assassinate its über-powerful wizard-dictator. Guess I shouldn’t have paused to stick my bubblegum on the wall.”
“Well, tactics clearly aren’t your strong suit. Why’d you come down here?”
“I saw an opportunity to cause trouble and screw things up. You?”
“I came up with a slightly more constructive plan. You see the earth-face the stormstalk root protrudes from? That’s where the original tunnel appears to dead-end. In fact, there’s another tunnel just behind it, running parallel. A short distance to the right there’s even a hidden entrance connecting the two. Unfortunately, the tunnel that leads to it is not currently in this dimension.”
“How short a distance?”
“Five feet, give or take.”
“Let’s say we dig through five feet of Las Vegas soil—what then?”
“Then we’re in the network of tunnels that underlie Night’s Shining Jewel. They’ll let us move about undetected, and reach the root bundle buried at the heart of the city.”
“And do what? Destroy it?”
She shrugs with massive golem shoulders. “I don’t have the kind of power to do that—and I wouldn’t destroy the bundle even if I could. But I might be able to disrupt or redirect the golem spell.”
“Then all we have to do is get through five feet of soil. Any ideas?”
“I have one,” a voice says behind us.
We both turn. Tair, in fully human form, smiles at us. “Hello, ladies,” he says. “Nice glamour spell. A shame my nose is a lot sharper than a lem’s…”
EIGHTEEN
“Oh, crap,” I say wearily.
“Nice to see you, too, Jace. Well, smell you, anyway.” He’s dressed a little sharper than the last time I saw him, in a two-piece suit of dark gray with a thin purple silk tie and a white linen shirt. He must have raided a clothing store while they were all deserted.
We’re standing a little way off from the main body of lems milling around, and no one else seems to have noticed us yet. I wonder if simply shooting him and yelling Spy! is the best option.
“Take it easy, both of you,” he says. “I’m not going to blow your cover. Not as long as you behave.”
“What do you want?” Azura asks tersely.
“That is the question, isn’t it … well, for now let’s just focus on what my employer wants. Actually, let’s start with what he doesn’t want.”
I take a stab at it. “Silver polish that gives him hives?”
“Have you been looking at my Christmas list? No, what Silver Blue really, really doesn’t want is a planet run by rogue golems.”
I frown. “But—he’s human.”
“He’s a human arms dealer, Jace. International conflict is his stock-in-trade, and he does extremely well at it. One of the by-products of this takeover will be a unified world government—okay, a world dictatorship, but the quaint notion of separate nations is about to get dumped in the junkyard of history. Mr. Blue would prefer to stay an independent entrepeneur in an unstable world, rather than a pet aristocrat in a police state.”
“Understandable,” Azura says. “I take it that he hasn’t made his objections known to Asher yet?”
“Mr. Asher is convinced that Mr. Blue is onboard and heartily approves of all the changes being made. This is why I have free run of the place—though my failure to capture you two has, sadly, reduced my stature in certain eyes. You can’t have everything.”
“Yeah, where would you put it? Oh, wait, I guess you could always store it on the planet you just conquered. But if the guy whose side you’re not on has everything, what does our side have to offer?”
I’m sorry I said it as soon as it leaves my mouth. Tair gives me a long, thoughtful look before answering. “If only you didn’t look like a big plastic bag full of sand at the moment … I guess I could close my eyes, but it just wouldn’t be the same.”
I glower at him, but it’s hard to tell how much gets through the illusion. Lems tend to be pretty good at glowering—Charlie sure as hell is—but I’ve only experienced it from the other end.
“Anyway, here it is,” Tair says. “Zombie magic.”
“Zombie magic?”
“Zombie magic.”
“I see,” Azura says. “And in return?”
“I won’t turn you in. In fact, I’ll help you get to that hidden tunnel entrance you were whispering about, and do my best to prevent anyone from following you.”
“Wait,” I say. “I don’t see. This is about the underdead? About turning corpses into cheap labor? How does an international arms dealer profit from that on a planet where thropes live for three hundred years and pires don’t die, period?”
“It’s not about the underdead themselves, Jace,” Azura says. “It’s about the enchantment they channel.”
“What, you mean the way they can make other things decay instead of themselves?”
“Or stop that decay entirely,” says Tair. “I understand it has something to do with strengthening the atomic bonds that hold matter together. I’m sure you’ve seen examples of it over the last few days: cloth made rigid, or bamboo given the tensile strength of steel. And all without increasing the weight of the object at all.”
And suddenly it makes perfect sense. In a Stone Age culture like Nightshadow’s, it let you make more durable structures, gave you stronger and sharper tools, provides an alternative to refrigeration. But in a technologically advanced civilization, the effect would be staggering: super-strong, super-lightweight materials—available at practically no cost at all—would revolutionize every industry from transportation to housing, as long as you protected the outer surface from direct exposure to sunlight.
But the very first business to feel its effects would be the military. Body armor, planes, tanks, blades with an edge a molecule thick that never broke or wore down. No wonder Silver Blue wanted the secrets of the underdead; they could make him the wealthiest, most powerful man in the world.
As long as that world wasn’t being overrun by golems in the service of a mad sorcerer.
“Okay, I get it,” I say. “But why are you asking me and Azura? The underdead I’ve seen aren’t exactly hard to catch—why not just grab a few of the ones you plowed through to get to us?”
“It’s not that easy,” Azura says. “The underdead channel the enchantment, but they do not understand it. If they were removed to another world, they would not be able to replicate it, nor could the enchantment be duplicated by another shaman through studying the underdead. It is a secret held by the Lyrastoi alone, for within it is the secret of their own immortality.”
“Oh, don’t be so modest.” Tair turns his smile on her. “I’d think that if anyone had access to Lyrastoi spells, it would be their most trusted advisers—right?”
Azura doesn’t answer, which is answer enough.
“So here’s the deal. I get you to the root bundle, you get me the underdead recipe. You save the world and I get a big fat bonus from my boss. Cool with you?”
And after a moment, Azura nods.
* * *
Tair’s plan turns out to be amazingly simple. He tells us to follow him, then approaches a couple of other lems and tells them to go get a couple of shovels. When they come back, he hands them to us and tells us to get to work. The lems he talks to don’t question anything he says; apparently he has
more clout down here than I thought.
And then we dig. Tair instructs a couple more lems to shore up our new tunnel as we go, then decides we aren’t digging fast enough and gets us and them to swap jobs. The digging goes a little faster.
And when we’ve gone far enough in, Azura gives Tair a nod and he pulls the other two lems out. He tells them to get a tarp and cover the mouth of the tunnel with us inside, then guard it. Neither of them asks a single question as to why; sometimes, you just gotta love the military.
Tair sticks his head around the edge of the bright blue tarp from the other side. “Sooner or later somebody’s going to check up on this,” he says. “I’ll do my best to stall them—but I’d hurry, if I were you.”
“If you were me,” I snap, “you’d already have stabbed Azura in the back.”
“Maybe,” he says cheerfully. “Luckily for you, I happen to think your back is worth guarding.” And then he’s gone.
“Interesting,” Azura murmurs.
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing. The entrance should be right around … here.” She probes with her hand into the earthen wall, then pulls. A hinged trapdoor that looks like it’s made out of dirt swings out. Azura goes through, then me. I close the hatch behind me.
The new tunnel isn’t completely dark; there’s a faint white glow ahead, probably being given off by the stormstalk root. Azura heads that way and I follow her.
Sure enough, there’s the root, running along the roof of the tunnel. The tunnel only follows it for a few yards before angling off to the right.
“We’re about to enter the part of Night’s Shining Jewel known as the Burrows,” Azura tells me. “It’s far more complex and chaotic than the tunnels we’ve been in thus far. The Burrows is home to the city’s thieves and black marketeers; they tap into the stormstalk system wherever they can and bleed off power. The City Guard tries to discourage this, but those who live here are both crafty and stubborn; they’re always finding new ways to conduct their business.”
I’m reminded of the elaborate drug tunnels the DEA keeps finding beneath the US–Mexican border. “Yeah, I’ll bet. So this isn’t going to be a straight run down to the root bundle, huh?”
“Hardly. Fortunately, these tunnels should be deserted at the moment; that’ll make getting through easier. But before we go any farther—”
She stops and makes a few passes through the air in my direction, muttering under her breath. Both our disguises fade away, leaving me in a black blouse and Azura in black pants and a sports bra. “Better we don’t look like soldiers of an occupying force,” she says.
“Yeah, much better to look like refugees from a burning building. Or whatever the equivalent is—”
Azura takes her pants off with what I assume is years of stripper-experience efficiency. “Here,” she says, handing them to me. “I’m fine with undergarments alone. Besides, you look absurd.”
“No argument there,” I say, putting them on before she changes her mind. “I can pull off the shirt-as-a-skirt look, but the shoulder holster kind of ruins the effect.”
We set off down the tunnel.
* * *
While we travel, I have time to think.
The more I consider it, the more I realize how far reaching the effects of zombie magic could be; so much of what’s possible is limited by the strength and weight of materials. Take those limitations away, and the sky’s literally the limit; even wild science-fiction ideas like an Earth-to-orbit elevator become doable.
But while the idea of thropes establishing a full-time colony on the moon is interesting—party time, dudes!—it’s not what I find scary. It’s what could be done with golems.
Right now, golems occupy an interesting social niche, somewhere between second-class citizens and walking guns. And while the human-size lems working in law enforcement are comparable to Glocks, the bigger military ones are more like tanks.
But even tanks have to pay attention to physics, especially ones that stand on two legs. Weight goes up faster than height, which means that if you make a golem ten times bigger, you’re also making it a thousand times heavier. For already heavy beings, this means they can’t get above a certain size before collapsing under their own weight.
But zombie magic changes all that. You could build an armada of golems the size of Godzilla and have them stomp all over any city that got in your way. Some of those military lems already have internal flamethrowers built in, too. If I were Tokyo, I’d be awfully nervous right about now …
It takes us the better part of a day to reach the nexus of the stormstalk system, largely because we have to go slow and careful. Azura manages to locate and avoid every single trap—which range from pits full of sharpened stakes to confusion charms that swap left with right—and the only real trouble we have is with an angry snake that was left in a concealed recess at head height. It ignores Azura for some reason, but decides I’d be perfect to chomp on. Fortunately, I have my scythes out and ready; all I see is a flicker of movement before my reflexes cut in. I’m not even aware of what it is until it’s in two still-twitching, neatly severed pieces on the floor.
“I’m impressed,” Azura says, nudging the corpse with her foot. “Deep vipers are notorious for their speed and stealth. Even so, I’m embarrassed it got past me.”
“Nice to know I’m not just deadweight.”
“Not yet,” she says cheerfully.
The tunnels don’t take us directly to the bundle; that’s protected by all kinds of major mystical mojo, enough that Ahaseurus figured it was easier to just steal the whole city. The root we’ve been zigzagging around takes a sudden turn downward, diving toward the spot where it connects with the other six major stormstalk roots deep below.
We descend by means of a ladder that parallels it around fifteen feet away, light provided by one of Azura’s handy globes. The ladder goes down at least another hundred feet before ending at a small alcove and a much smaller tunnel, no more than three feet or so high.
“This leads close to the central chamber,” Azura says. “We’ll have to dig to break through.”
“How far?”
“I’m not sure. Ten feet, maybe more. We must be quick; this far underground, a tunnel collapse will be fatal.”
“Terrific.”
I’m not usually given to claustrophobia, but crawling into a narrow, dark tunnel on my hands and knees doesn’t qualify so much as a phobia as simple common sense: Don’t go in there—you’ll be buried alive and die.
Shut up, brain. You may be right, but I’m still in charge. Stupid, but in charge.
The tunnel doesn’t go far, maybe five feet or so. When Azura gets to the end, she starts to dig with her hands. I wish I could help, but there isn’t enough room for both of us side by side. I take the dirt she’s pushing backward and try to move as much of it as possible behind me. The soil is wet and muddy, and before too long I know how an earthworm feels after a downpour.
Strangely enough, I feel great. I find myself humming the hi-ho, hi-ho dwarf song at one point, which is cheerful but a little crazy. Azura’s warned me about this—the stormstalk roots radiate pure life energy, which makes everybody around them just a little perkier than normal. Magic Prozac radiation, provided free of charge; if I do die by being buried alive, at least I’ll have a smile on my face.
I never thought it would take so long to travel ten feet in my life. When Azura finally breaks through, my happiness level zips up into the red. I actually burst into tears of joy.
I scramble out of the hole behind her. We’re in a large cave, with the world’s biggest, weirdest chandelier hanging from the ceiling: seven glowing stormstalk roots, each of them as big around as a subway train, extend from the far edges of the cave roof to the center, where they’re woven together into one massive, braided trunk. The trunk dangles down toward the floor of the cave, but never reaches it; instead, it somehow gets farther and farther away as it gets lower, shrinking until it vanishes into the distance.
“Neat trick,” I manage eventually. I’ve been staring at it for a while, but I’m not sure how long.
“Yes,” Azura says. “I know it’s difficult, but try not to stare at it. It’s quite hypnotic.”
I tear my eyes away reluctantly. “Okay, so we’re here. What happens now?”
“I’m going to make physical contact with the bundle.”
“How? It’s like a gazillion miles away.”
“That’s largely an optical illusion. All you have to do is stand directly beneath it and reach up—as long as you have the proper training, of course.”
“What’ll happen then?”
“I’ll commune with the energy coursing through the bundle. More than likely, I’ll encounter another myth, the central one that Ahaseurus is using to tie all the others together. I’ll see if it can be altered or disrupted.”
Like Tair did with the thrope myth. “I’m going with you.”
“You’d only be in the way.”
“Not buying it, Tink. At the very least, you’re going to need someone to watch your back while you try to undo things. I’m going.”
She sighs. “Very well.” She holds out her hand, and I grab it.
Together, we step under the bundle.
* * *
I don’t know what I expected, but I’m pretty sure a gigantic, 3-D sign announcing that the following trailer was rated General for All Audiences wasn’t on the list.
“What the hell?” I say. At least I have a body this time; I’m standing in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, just one of a crowd of tourists who are looking up into the sky.
“Cultural bleed,” Azura says from beside me. I glance over and notice that we’re both dressed like clichéd tourists; loud Hawaiian shirts, baggy Bermuda shorts, tacky straw hats. I’ve still got my gun in its holster, though, and both my scythes. “This is a Nightshadow myth seen through the eyes of people from your world—your adopted world, I mean.”
The sign in the sky disappears. I’m almost expecting a big, Star Wars type of prologue to start scrolling into the clouds, but what I get instead is the Voice—specifically, that deep, slightly vibrato Voice that every movie trailer in the universe uses.
