Wizard (The Key to Magic)

by H. Jonas Rhynedahll

  After a moment's thought, he hummed The Knife Fighter's Dirge and then cast an air bubble barely half a fingerlength across that had as its center a point inside the thick pane. As the bubble took shape, a slender ring where glass and flux intersected started to glow orange. Around this circle the background ether boiled in protest, but he steadily strengthened the spell to prevent the collapse of the modulation.

  For another subjective moment or two, it seemed as if the glass would win out.

  Struggling to contain streamers of escaping flux, he redoubled the strength of the forming bubble and the ring shifted to an intense purple.

  Then, with an abrupt transition, the bubble stabilized and the glowing ring faded, leaving a perfect circle of glass hanging in place.

  He dispersed the bubble and held his hand up to the window. Contrary to his expectations, neither the circle nor the rest of the pane had been heated. He tapped the circle and it shifted languidly a fingerlength inward and then came to a halt mid-tumble as the effects of slowed time took hold once more.

  Cutting a hole large enough to slip through took only fractionally longer. As soon as he was standing on the floor inside, he replaced both the tiny circle and the larger one, infusing them with lifting flux to hold them in place. This incomplete repair would not fool a close inspection but might be missed by a casual glance.

  He released time to its normal pace and crept slowly forward along a hallway shrouded in deep shadow. The only light was that from the lamps of the city that strayed through the window behind him.

  His magical sense gave him the gist of the place. Thin partitions divided the floor into a grid of hallways and small rooms. He stopped at the first door that he came to, eased it open, and peered in. The small office was equipped with the trappings of bureaucracy -- chairs, a desk, and stacks of paper. He scanned the ether as far as he could sense, but detected no bureaucrats.

  The hallway ended at a lobby with two sets of the sliding doors identical to the ones that had opened onto the moving cupboard and a door to one side that had entirely unmagical hinges and doorknob. When cracked open, the latter revealed a brightly lit, utilitarian stairwell leading up and down.

  Shutting the door without a sound, he turned about. The entrance to the gaol below would have the full attention of the guards and surely would be protected by numerous spells. While he thought it likely that each individual cell would also have its own complement of spells, the primary defense would be mounted where an attack would be expected.

  He padded back into the hallway and spent the better part of an hour learning how to use his air bubble to cut various sized holes in different materials -- plaster walls, solid wooden desktops, metal chair frames, and not-quite-stone building columns. Then he passively read the background ether of the floor below to build a mental map of the gaol's rooms and corridors. While doing so, he located the presences of twenty people: ten in a loose clump no far back from the moving cupboards, eight in a similar clump at the midpoint of a wide central corridor, one in a small cell on the right side of the main corridor, and one in the cell on the opposite side. In total, there were forty of the cells arranged in four rows of ten, with two narrow corridors flanking the main. Both of the occupied cells were the eighth one, counting from the front of the gaol, so either could be designated as Holding Cell 8.

  He went to the nearest occupied cell, which happened to be below the corner of a storeroom filled with neat stacks of labeled boxes. It was the work of several minutes to enchant and fly the boxes into a jumbled pile in the hall and several more to ferret out the Keys to the spells layered in the floor. When he was sure of all of them, he hummed The Knife Fighter's Dirge, disabled the spells one by one, and then began to cut a hole an armlength across.

  A circle of carpet came up first.

  Then a span thick slab of not-quite-stone.

  Beneath the slab lay a chase with a large steel pipe bisecting the opening. When he removed a section of the pipe and discovered that it contained sewage, he was more than thankful for the extremely slowed time of his first spell.

  Below the drain was another third of an armlength of not-quite-stone.

  After this was nothing.

  He kept time slowed as he descended head first into the hole, blinking at the harsh lights that lit the four pace square cell, and was able to get far enough inside before the resistance of the ether brought him to a halt to be able to identify the occupant.

  Stripped naked, the prisoner lay sprawled on the bare metal frame of a bunk shoved against one wall.

  The prisoner was a woman.

  It was Nali.

  SIXTEEN

  All of her hair had been burned from her head and the same fire had seared the flesh of her scalp, leaving it black, crinkled, and seeping like the skin of a roast pig. Someone wearing rough gloves that had raked gouges in her cheeks had beaten her in a very methodical way, leaving nearly black bruises that made her face lopsided and misshapen. The swelling had pinched both eyes shut and a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of one suggested that it had been ruptured. All the fingers of her left hand were broken and some of the bones stuck out obscenely through crusts of blood. With her mouth hanging partly open, her damaged face was unnaturally slack and she was very still.

  He dropped to the floor, took two quick steps to the bunk as a screeching, mechanical wail pierced the air, and then recast The Knife Fighter's Dirge to seal out the distraction.

  Nali's ethereal presence showed her to still live, though the vigor of her life was weak and fading. Disarranged by a caterwauling umber that emanated from a pool of blood that had formed at the cracked base of her skull, all of the sound-colors of her body were maudlin, stressed, and failing.

  He had to adapt his new spells to her unique flux modulations, but the magic worked as well on her as it had on him. He did the easy things first. With a slurping-yellow corralling and renewing the layers and components of her outer flesh, the black of the horrendous burns on her scalp quickly transformed into the pink of new skin. Many of the tiny roots from which hair grew had to be recreated entirely from the few surviving examples in a multi-step, time consuming process. Rather than concern himself with purely aesthetic considerations -- her hair would grow back in time on its own -- he only devoted sufficient effort to encouraging the growth to see a thick stubble sprout. The bruises on her face gradually lost their evil purple color as he convinced veins to draw away blood and fluid, and then her skin grew together to close abrasions and cuts, which almost immediately transitioned to white scarring as his spells continued to accelerate the process of natural healing. These scars finally faded and the normal tone of her skin returned. Her hand was a terrible puzzle of splinters, ripped ligaments, burst skin, and ruptured blood vessels that took a great deal of time to set right. Even consulting the pattern of her undamaged hand, he made errors and had to undo his patient assembly more than once, but eventually he had knit the flesh and fused the bones in a normal-seeming semblance. He would only be able to tell if he had gotten everything right when she was awake and could flex her fingers and wrist.

  While the damage was less severe, her eye took twice as long as her hand, but only because he took the opportunity to study the connections made between the orb and her brain in depth.

  As he came finally to Nali's head injury, he paused. But a single mistake here might doom the courtesan. Even Llylquaendt's fantastic healing devices could not save someone who had suffered a grievous wound to the brain.

  When he did begin to heal the damage, he proceeded systematically, stopping often to monitor the multitude of flux modulations that comprised her presence for any sign of upset. At great length, he completed the task without causing any harm that he could detect.

  Finally, she lay as if sleeping, her body relaxed and her breath regular and strong.

  If he had had a spell that would deepen her sleep, he would have cast it. At rest, she would be a much more convenient burden -- especially if she was mind
ed to be emotional or difficult as a result of her ordeal.

  He turned from the woman and considered the heavily armored door.

  The other prisoner, his actual objective, remained across the corridor. Crossing that guarded space while dragging Nali would subject the two of them to the contrary ministrations of the guards. Unless they had more potent weapons than the monstrosities, skyships, and automatons that he had engaged before, he should be able to fight them off, but a full fledged assault would make his planned quick exit from the stronghold difficult.

  A scan of the ether showed men close to the other side of the door, guards no doubt frozen in the act of preparing to burst in. The wail that he had triggered would also have alerted the entire garrison and reinforcements would be on the way, but they would rally to the gaol entrance.

  He could return through his hole and cross the floor above, but he did not want to backtrack. In his former life in Khalar -- five millennia from now -- he had had several bad experiences when doubling back on his own path. A place that he did not know focused his attention in a way that resolve alone could not. He was always less alert with the familiar and had an unfortunate tendency to overlook crucial warning signs. Not too long ago, that failing had seen him crucified and immolated.

  If he did not go up, he had to go down. The lower floor might be occupied, but he could detect no one within his range and thought that a good chance existed that, like the one above, the entirety of the floor was deserted. It would take more than one floor of bureaucrats to administer a city the size of Dhiloeckmyur -- perhaps nearly an entire building full.

  Still protected by slowed time, he cast an air bubble to cut another hole. Only a single plug of not-quite-stone backed with thin steel came out of this one and as soon as he had poked his head through to confirm that a dark office lay below, he rose back up and considered Nali again.

  As she had no clothes, he could not use his lifting spell to tow her along behind and hoisting her over his shoulder would probably wake her immediately. After squashing a discomforting moment when he realized that he was effectively embracing a naked woman that was not Telriy, he carefully scooped up the courtesan. She did not stir, remaining limp so that he had to bundle her firmly against his chest.

  Nali was slim, but she was not a small woman and, finding that she weighed more than he could carry very long without a strain, he bathed his muscles in a coughing saffron that doubled his strength. After an experimental step showed that he could move without awkwardness, he sidled to the hole and drifted downward as far as the resistance of the background ether would allow.

  Extending his arms, he released Nali into interrupted time and while she hovered motionless in mid-air, he rose back up to enchant and shift the plug back into place. To give the guards a false trail to follow, he left the hole to the upper floor open. The cell was otherwise vacant, so just before he sealed the lower hole, he cast an ignition spell on the cot, creating a spark that would blossom once he removed the influence of The Knife Fighter's Dirge. Knowing that rock would burn, he thought that steel surely would also. The metal uncooperative, he had to make the modulation fairly intense, driving several folds of flux into the thin tubing, but the spell appeared stable when he was done.

  That should provide the guards with an unpleasant surprise and present enough of a distraction to prevent them from immediately trying to find what had become of their prisoner.

  After returning to Nali, he drew her into his arms once more and then left off his song.

  The thud of the explosion shook the building. Fire squirted through the tiny gap around the circle of not-quite-stone, but his magic held it firmly in place.

  "A little bit too much flux," he whispered to the unheeding Nali. He allowed himself half a chuckle as he charged through the office door into the corridor without.

  Bells began to clang all across the floor and all of the overhead lamps came on at once.

  Keeping a hard clamp on his nerves, he did not allow this sudden clamor to rattle him as he used his magic sense to orient toward the other prisoner.

  The bells did cause Nali to come awake with a sharp intake of breath. She shivered, then blinked up at him in confusion. "What are ... did they catch you too?"

  Humming to slow time again, he shook his head to tell her that he was too busy to talk and began push through the ether toward his goal.

  Not understanding or not content with his dismissal, she looped one arm around his neck to give herself purchase and twisted slightly in his hold so that she could look around at the static tableau of interrupted time.

  "Are you doing this?"

  "Yes." He plowed forward as far as the envelope of resistance would permit, interrupted his song, started it up immediately again, and then repeated the process.

  "Is that the tune to I'm a silly old drunk lalala?

  "No."

  "Are you sure? The first verse goes, 'I'm inna gutter, inna street, a silly old drunk am I..."

  "It's a spell. Could you be quiet for a few minutes?"

  "Sorry. It's just nerves. I think I'm dreaming and you're not really here. I have to be dreaming, because I'm hurt and now I can't feel it."

  "I took care of that. You're not dreaming."

  "If I'm not dreaming, why is nothing else moving?"

  "Again, a spell."

  "The yellow jackets had me."

  "I know. I took care of that too."

  "They want to find out about you really bad."

  "What did you tell them?"

  "Nothing. If I had given you away, they wouldn't have had any other use for me and I'd be dead."

  She linked her hands to draw herself close and began to trail warm, delicate kisses along his neck and jaw.

  "Would you mind not doing that? It's a distraction and I have a lot to do right now."

  Relenting with a reluctant flounce -- not an easy thing to accomplish while being carried -- she rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder, moving slightly so that her cheek caressed him. "You saved me. I was just showing my appreciation."

  "You owe me nothing. I didn't come here for you."

  "You're rescuing another woman?"

  Ignoring her, he stopped in the middle of a cross corridor and stared up at the spot where he could sense the presence of the other prisoner. An air bubble large enough to include the man, who appeared to be of above average height and in a standing position, would have to take out four armlengths of the cell floor, but he could think of no reason why that should be a problem -- at least not for him. He cast his spells.

  He had to allow normal time to advance to get the wide circle of cell floor and its passenger all the way down and, as he needed the man to operate under his own power, he did not resume The Knife Fighter's Dirge.

  The man was taller than Mar, lean, blonde, and clear-eyed. Save for clothing that looked slept-in, he did not appear to have suffered from his imprisonment.

  The prisoner stared at Mar and his passenger with wide eyes. "Did they put something in my tea? Am I hallucinating?"

  Mar frowned. "No. Of course not."

  "Then why are you holding a bald and naked woman?"

  Nali beamed. "Hello, my name is Nali. I'm being rescued."

  "I see," the man said, though clearly he did not. "I'm Byon. Glad to meet you."

  "Just follow," Mar ground out, starting along the corridor toward the nearest outside wall.

  Jaw twitching, Byon did not move. "I'd rather that you finished me here. There's no need to wait."

  Mar unleashed a stream of curses that defamed two dozen of the Forty-Nine. "I'm not here to kill you! I'm here to get you out. Follow me now."

  As a chastened Byon stepped off and away from the pedestal-like section of cell floor, a fusillade of blue-glowing projectiles blasted from above and smashed into the not-quite-stone.

  Startled by the deadly racket behind him, Byon ducked needlessly and Mar, exasperated, cast a pair of enchantments on the man's clothing and dragged him along as
he began running.

  They had to get out before the anthill boiled over.

  As the three of them, Byon yelling and Nali cheering, approached the side of the building, Mar made a hole, enchanted the plug to spin it clear, and dove out, all without missing a step.

  As both of the others fell silent for whatever reason, he cast his new glamour to enclose them all, then forced all the speed that he dared out of his flagging brigandine and Byon's clothing. He keyed the first wall no more than half an armlength short of it, blazed toward the second, keyed that one with the same scarce margin, and then sailed on as fast as his spells could carry them.

  Nali gasped, causing him to turn to see thousands of automatons flash into being not twenty armlengths back. The devices immediately shifted into a regulated formation, closing a physical net around the stronghold that a gnat could not have flown through. None made a move to follow and he swung his head back around to concentrate on the taxing chore of keeping all three of them airborne.

  Nali, of course, was mere dead weight and a further drag on his brigandine, coat, and boots, and only Byon's shoes, apparently cobbled of natural leather, responded well to Mar's spells. He had to constantly monitor the modulations in his own clothing and refurbish those in Byon's just to maintain their altitude, but continually lost headway in spite of his best efforts.

  After struggling to fly half a league, he gave up and brought them down on the first likely looking roof that he saw. When they landed on the mostly dark but crowded surface, he put Nali on her own feet, discharged the strength that had begun to make his nerves jump and his eyelids twitch, and sank down on his haunches to recuperate.

  They were well hidden here. A high sheet metal parapet meant to conceal the thicket of bulky magical devices, steaming apparatus, and bouncing hexagons rose up above their heads all around. The place was not lighted, but the equipment produced enough consequential light to get about.

  Nali rubbed her hands over her stubbled scalp then gave him a look. "You couldn't make my hair grow?"