Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3)

by Matthew Kennedy

  “You don't know how to use that. Give it to me.”

  The man looked up when she spoke and glared at her, but the woman said something and he dropped the Healstone into the bag and tossed it to her.

  Feather turned to look at the man on the blanket. His color seemed better now, and his eyes were open, but he still could not sit up. She lifted the Healstone out of the bag and held it in her left palm while she placed her right hand on his head again. Again she prayed to the Great Spirit and again the green glow flowed from the metal ball in her hand up her arm, across her body, and down her other arm to envelope the man's head and to a lesser extent the rest of his body.

  She continued praying for his healing until she passed out again.

  When she awoke the third time the man on the blanket was sitting up and talking to the others. He jerked his head toward Feather. “¿Quien es ella? ¿De dónde ha salido?”

  “No sabemos. Ella vino a nosotros y ella le sanó,” the woman told him.

  Feather got his attention and pantomined eating. “Your body will need to eat to support the healing,” she said.

  He eyed her. “You don't speak Spanish, do you? I speak a little English. I'm Vardo. Where do you come from? Why did you help me?”

  “You needed help,” she said, eyeing the rabbit meat in his hand. “I need food. I came over the mountain.”

  He passed her a piece of the rabbit and regarded her. “She says you came to them and healed me.”

  Feather tore into the meat before answering. Part of was burnt, part of it was undercooked, and all of it was like a sunrise in her mouth. “Yes,” she said, and finished the meat. Her body screamed for more, but they had no more. It would have to do for now.

  He watched her eat and said “necessita agua” to the woman, who passed Feather another cup of water. “You're from one of the northern tribes, aren't you? Where are your people?"

  “We were attacked by the men from the coast,” she told him. “Someone must have led them to us. I ran to protect the Healstone.”

  She showed it to him. The green glow seemed subdued now, but at least it was no linger flickering. He contemplated it for a while. “Some kind of Tourist artifact,” he mused. “How did you come by it?”

  “It has been in the Shrine for as long as I can remember.”

  “Then why is it here?”

  She told him about the men from the coast, and the wizard named Ludlow who led them. “They found the shrine. Somehow he kept us from seeing them until it was too late. I took the Healstone and ran. When they followed, I went over the mountain.”

  Late in the day, Julio returned, proudly grinning as he swaggered up carrying a young deer across his shoulders. When he saw Feather, his smiles vanished and his eyes narrowed, but when he saw Vardo sitting and building up the fire, his smile reappeared. Were they brothers or just friends? She had no idea, but after they spoke to each other in their strange language Julio approached her and siad something that meant nothing to her. Then he grabbed her into a bear hug and told her without words that he appeciated her help.

  Julio and the man with the bow produced knives to cut up the deer for cooking. When she saw the lifeless creature, Feather's heart cried...but her stomach growled at it to be quiet.

  They all ate well that night. Julio pressed more of the venison on her than she could possibly eat, but when he turned away, she slipped the extra into her herb bag.

  They kept the fire burning to keep wolves away. Part of her wanted to stay with these people. Julio was obviously a good hunter. But she had seen they way they looked at the Healstone.

  When at last they dozed, made sleepy by their meal, she slipped away and followed the mountain range, going south.

  Chapter 84

  Lobsang: Titanomachy

  “Deploy the military with surprise tactics”

  – The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse

  Sitting there in the driver's seat with a crossbow pointed at him, Lobsang wasn't entirely sure how he felt at the moment. The news of Xander's collapse made him want to pull over and rethink his intentions, but he could no more do that than he could turn around and head back to Denver. Would the School survive without its founder?

  Fortunately there was nothing he could do at the moment except go forward. For the first couple of miles, he had wondered if he'd outsmarted himself. This guard captain might decide to just shoot him to reduce the uncertainties of the situation. Fortunately, he'd realized that the vehicle itself was far more valuable than a dead driver whether or not he turned out to really be a wizard.

  Lobsang had counted on this. He'd never seen any functioning everwheels in Angeles, therefore the Queen must not have mastered that weave. Without a doubt, she'd love to get her hands on one, and since the guard had no way of controlling the weave, he had to keep Lobsang alive or drag it all the way into Angeles behind some horses.

  Well, strictly speaking, if the guard had known anything about the Gifts he might have been able to work out that by stroking the rear axle of the car he could tighten the everwheel weave and get the car moving. To do that, however (since he wasn't a wizard), he'd have to slide under the rear of the car on his back to reach the axle. If Lobsang had placed the weave on the actual wheels, there'd be less trouble getting at the weave. But he'd realized that this would require two weaves, one for each rear tire, and they'd have to be carefully balanced or the extra torque on one side or the other could snap the axle.

  And if someone managed to stroke the axle and start the spell, then the car would roll away and they'd have to chase it to climb in. Then, they'd have the opposite problem of stopping it when they reached their destination. And stopping would be even harder, because when they got out of the car to reach the axle the car would leave them behind. All in all, the everwheel-powered car seemed useless to anyone but wizards until they solved the problem of controlling the everwheel weave from the driver's seat.

  He expected that the Queen would want the car. If he couldn't defeat her he could always talk her into keeping him alive long enough to teach her the everwheel weave.

  Stop thinking like that. I shall defeat her.

  He turned to the guard beside him. “How long have you worked for the Queen?”

  The man looked at him as if he were a simpleton. “Are you serious? For the last fifteen years, like everyone else here. Ever since she seized the throne.”

  Lobsang swerved around a pothole. “Before the day is over,” he said, “either things will be different or I will be dead.”

  The guard scratched his head. “That sounds like black-and-white thinking,” he said. “Are you sure there are only two possible outcomes? She could spare your life.” He paused. “Or I could just shoot you now.”

  “You won't,” said Lobsang.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you're curious to see if I can beat her.”

  “Beat her?” The guard laughed. “I'd be amazed if you can even survive her.”

  “That's why I see only two outcomes,” said Lobsang. “She can't afford to spare me, and I can't afford to die this young.”

  “You're a funny fellow,” said the guard. “You know the Queen, and you're not afraid of her?”

  “Have you noticed this car is powered by wizardry?”

  “Yes, I saw that right away. That's why I thought it would be a good idea to take credit for capturing you.”

  “All right. Now ask yourself how I am controlling it.”

  The guard frowned. “With the wheel you're holding.”

  “That's a good guess, but it turns out to be wrong,” said Lobsang. He reached back with his mind and turned down the torque on the everwheel weave so that the car halted. “Would you like to try driving?”

  The guard eyed the wheel. “But then I wouldn't be holding the crossbow on you.”

  “True. But you'd have total control over where the car goes,” Lobsang told him. “If I tried to escape you could turn around and run me over.”

  The guard consid
ered it. “All right,” he said. “I'll give it a try.” They got out and swapped positions. Lobsang closed the passenger side door. “Okay, go ahead and grab the wheel.”

  The guard gripped the wheel and waited. When nothing happened he wrenched it left and right. Still nothing happened. “Why is nothing happening?”

  “Because that wheel is just for steering,” said Lobsang. “The power is in me, not the car. “Now we will proceed.” And he reached out and turned the everwheel weave back up again. The car rolled forward. “Keep your hands on the wheel!” he said. “Our lives are in your hands.”

  The guard appeared to enjoy driving, once he got over the shock of the car moving by itself and learned how it responded to the wheel. Lobsang increased the speed a bit when the road was clear, and slowed or stopped the car when necessary.

  “All right," said the guard, “you're some kind of wizard. But that doesn't mean you can defeat the Queen.”

  “The Queen doesn't have any cars like this, does she?”

  “Not that I know of,” the guard admitted.

  “So there's one reason I might win,” said Lobsang. “I know at least one thing she doesn't know, maybe more. She has more experience, but I have more knowledge.”

  “I don't know,” the guard said. “It seems like a long shot.”

  “It's the only shot my family has,” said Lobsang.

  When they arrived at the Palace, the guards there told them the Queen had gone an hour or so earlier, off to her Perch.

  “What are they talking about?” said Lobsang.

  “I've heard about this,” the guard said. “They say she goes up to the top of one of the 'scrapers.”

  “Which one?”

  “Dunno. I'm from the outer suburbs myself. But they said it's no secret. We can ask for directions on the way.”

  They turned back onto 101 and headed into the city. Why would she want to be there in the heart of destruction?

  A cynic might describe large cities as examples of building cancer. In the body, cancer cells do no useful work. They become parasites in a host body, consuming sugar and glucose and doing little except multiplying as the tumor grows.

  Consider a large city in the times of the Ancients. The city does not produce food and water. Farms and rain provide those. Many of the cities of the Ancients had originally contained factories which actually did produce useful items. But as the cities metastasized, the factories tended to relocate out to the edges, where there was easier access to airports, highways, and room to grow out sideways instead of only vertically.

  In the hearts of the cities, the buildings rose like mushrooms after a rain, because the only direction to go was up. The high-rise apartment buildings and office buildings of the Ancients were marvels of beauty and ugliness. Their beauty as incredible engineering feats came at the ugly price of inner city congestion. Like a growing tumor, the growing city required ever-increasing amounts of food, water, and human labor in order to survive and keep growing.

  It was hardly a new problem, as he knew from the history books. Even ancient Rome had wrestled with the problem, and had attempted to reduce the inevitable congestion of incoming deliveries of food and other necessities by mandating that deliveries could only come into the city at night.

  In theory, the trains, cars, and planes of the Ancients could have alleviated the problem. But in actuality they merely encouraged it, fueling the growth of cities far more efficiently than the horse-drawn carts of Rome ever could. This meant that the cities of the Ancients became magnified versions of Rome, and the inner city dwellers had to deal not only with the clop clop of horses and the rattling of carts, but with an entire symphony of blaring horns and sirens punctuated by the percussion of metal vehicles smashing into each other twenty four hours a day.

  When plague had come in 2031 the cities were doomed by their own success. In pre-Ancient times disease could spread only by sailing ships or horse-drawn victims, but by the time of the Ancients every major city had high-speed connections to the rest of the world by highways, trains, and planes and ocean liners that ferried germs across mountains and oceans. A virus could go global in a matter of hours instead of years. And one did.

  Naturally the cities were hit harder than other places. With multiple entry points and millions of humans concentrated into small regions, breathing the same air in their glass and steel towers, megadeath could not be prevented. The development of an effective vaccine saved the species, but not the cities.

  Which, when you thought about it, had saved many lives when the earthquake of 2042, the Big One, knocked over most of southern Cali. Well, not exactly saved them...because they were already dead years before the shaking started. But technically the deaths were less than they would have been, because the devastation wrought by the plague had drastically reduced the pool of potential victims.

  So why would the Queen be hanging out downtown?

  The Ancients had rebuilt Angeles after the Tourists arrived with their Gifts in 2083. People flowed back into the city as swizzle plumbing and ventilation made the 'scrapers blossom again. For a time that some still called the Golden Age, the cities seemed to come back from the dead, thriving again as the peace and prosperity began to replenish the Earth's population.

  But nothing lasts forever, does it? he thought grimly. After the Tourists left and their Gifts began failing, history began to repeat itself. When the swizzles that had replaced pumps started dying, the 'scrapers were hit hard. If you live near a river you can always go down to the banks and collect water. But if you live or work on the thirtieth floor of a 'scraper, how does that water get to you?

  The problem went way beyond making tea or taking baths. Food and water go into humans, but eventually they come out again, and toilets need water to carry it away. In the times before the Tourists, building codes had been changed to force flush toilets to have smaller water tanks that filled quicker. But when swizzle plumbing failed, 'scrapers became uninhabitable because of the waste disposal problem. In some cases people imitated the low-tech garderobe solution of medieval Europe. Originally a name for a closet for clothing (morphing into the word wardrobe because to ward meant to guard), the garderobe had become also a place to put a toilet that dropped waste down a long shaft to ground level moats or cesspits.

  But 'scrapers had no moats or cesspits. Real estate in large cities was too valuable to allow for a moat around every building. As more plumbing (and elevators) failed, the upper levels of all 'scrapers depopulated from the top down. Sure, you could still climb the stairs to the top floors if you were in good shape, but you'd be climbing down again soon after you got there...unless you wanted to starve and dehydrate. Rooftop gardens and rain cisterns were still viable in some places, but Angeles, with its low rainfall, was not one of those places.

  So why would she want to spend time in the inner city?

  In places like Denver, where no major earthquake had ruptured the underlying sewage and water pipes, the 'scrapers could become viable again, as Xander had demonstrated with Kristana's building. But maybe that was a special case, because it had been built during the Golden Age. Older structures, built before the coming of the Tourists had been partially retrofitted before the Fall, but only the newest constructions were fully swizzled. For them, Xander's new generation of psionic engineers could restart the swizzles and make the 'scrapers viable again. They'd still have to find a replacement for the elevators.

  As they neared the center of the city the Guard (whose name Lobsang had finally learned was Henry) had to detour around the tectonic scar tissue of the ruined metropolis, which required numerous stops and starts and changes of speed.

  When Lobsang tweaked the everwheel weave to accommodate these changes, he began to become aware of a distant mental echo: the Queen.

  Was she aware of him too? If she were sleeping or distracted, perhaps not. But if she used her abilities, she'd quickly know a wizard was approaching her.

  So be it. Ever since he'd reached the point whe
re he could sense his fellow students, Lobsang had realized there was no practical way for one wizard to sneak up on another. I have to assume she knows I'm coming now. He began to wonder how fast a crossbow bolt would have to move to get through the car's glass windows.

  “We don't have to stop for directions,” he said. “I know where she is. Turn right at the next intersection.”

  Henry lifted an eyebrow at that. “How do you know where she is?” he asked as he swung the car to the right.

  “It's a wizard thing,” said Lobsang.

  “Then...she knows where you are too.” It was not a question. “Doesn't that worry you?”

  Lobsang actually grinned. “Not as much as it worries her. I know who I'm approaching, but all she knows is that an unexpected wizard is getting closer. The unknown is always scarier, whereas the known always has limits.”

  After another block he caught sight of the royal coach up ahead. A figure that had to be Rochelle stepped from it, looked in their direction, and then darted to a wooden box the size of a generous outhouse that sat next to the base of a 'scraper.

  After a second or two he heard a roaring, humming sound that reminded him of Xander and the School's graduation flight, except that is was much louder. The box lifted off the ground, nearly knocking over a couple of pedestrians with the exhaust thrust thundering out of the bottom, and began to fly up the side of the 'scraper.

  He stared at the rising box, squinting until he could make out four guide cables. I'll be damned. She solved the elevator problem! Part of him wished he could tell Xander about it, but without a blue ring there was point in wasting time even thinking about it.

  “Unless she sends that back down for us,” he told Henry, “I'm afraid you have to wait here.”

  “And you don't?”

  “Believe me, I wish I did,” Lobsang growled, grabbing his staff from the back seat and leaping out of the passenger-side door to rip the end caps off the pipe before the guard could decide whether he should pick up his crossbow. He wrapped himself around the bottom half of the staff.