The Medusa Plague tdom-2

by Mary Kirchoff

  By now, Zagarus did not land so much as he simply slammed into the ground. I… don't know… how much longer I can do this, panted Zagarus, staggering to his feet.

  Guerrand held out the bundle. "Just one more, old friend, and then you can rest for a year and eat all the fish you want."

  It's a good, thing, too… because I think Nuitari is about to rise. The gull took the bundle in his mouth, stumbled down the street with wings flapping, and took off.

  After watching the final batch of sigils head skyward, Bram turned back to Guerrand. "What about the moon's edge? Won't that still provide a tiny bit of light?"

  Guerrand had already rolled back his sleeves and closed his eyes in concentration. "Not if the spell works properly. If Nuitari becomes truly two-dimensional, its edge will not exist in this world. If you want to worry about something, worry that the spell won't work at all; that's far more likely.

  "I don't know how long I can maintain it," the mage continued, "so I'm going to cast the spell at the last possible moment, just as the sun disappears. I have to prepare now." He pressed his hands to his ears briefly, clueing Bram to stay back quietly.

  As the sunlight waned, Guerrand silently repeated the words of the spell over and over with great concentration, until he felt himself no more than a black hol- lowness, like the length of a flute through which the invisible sound passed. He repeated the spell like a mantra the entire length of his mind's body, opening passages to the power and stopping the interference of others. He dared not open his eyes, lest he lose concentration. He would know without seeing if the spell worked. The mage squeezed his eyes shut more tightly, and with every clenched and tingling muscle in his body, he willed the spell to work. He'd done everything he knew how to make it happen.

  Guerrand felt the mental presence of Zagarus at his side, telling him that all the scrolls had been dispatched. Guerrand pronounced the words he had been rehearsing.

  "lne jutera, Irtc swobokla, jehth Ine laeranma."

  A tremendous clap of thunder rattled doors and shook the ground beneath their feet like an earthquake for many moments. Guerrand's eyes flew open in alarm as he stumbled about, crashing into Bram, who was already on his knees.

  "What's happening?" cried Bram, struggling to keep Kirah on her straw mattress.

  But Guerrand could only shake his head mutely. What had he done with his rearranging of ancient symbols? A bolt of lightning cracked the dusky sky and zagged a path above the buildings of the village, straight to Guerrand. The bolt struck the mage full in the chest in the very instant he realized it would. To his greater surprise, there came only a slight tingling pain.

  Guerrand reached up a hand to the wound, but the earth dropped away beneath him, throwing him off balance. Yet he did not tumble down but flew forward, as if all the wind in the world were at the small of his back, arching him like a bow until he thought he might snap. The skin of his face drew back from the incredible speed of his passage, exposing the outline of every tooth and bone in his head. His ears rang, and his head felt stuffed with wool.

  Strangest of all, Guerrand seemed to be going somewhere in a great hurry. He was hurtling through a vast expanse of blackness broken only by tiny pinpoints of distant light. One of those points loomed larger than the rest, until its impossibly bright, blinding light was all that was ahead, choking out the blackness, burning Guerrand's eyes.

  And then the breakneck ride stopped. Instantly. Guerrand was thrown to his knees, and his head snapped forward painfully. He kept his eyes shut as he crawled to his feet, one hand rubbing his neck. He was afraid to open his eyes, but curiosity won out, and he spared a glance around him.

  The mage was in a room defined so only by the four crystal-clear glass walls that separated him from the vastness of blue-black space. Even the floor beneath his feet was transparent, cold glass, the view broken only by winking stars. The feeling was disorienting, as if a surface as thin as a soap bubble were all that kept him from tumbling through the heavens.

  Slow-paced footsteps abruptly hammered against the glass. Guerrand's head jerked up, eyes wide. A youngish man stepped into view from the blackness of space. His jet-black hair and long black robe seemed to form from the darkness beyond the glass. Pinpoints of starlight twinkled in his eyes, set slant-wise and sly and entirely ringed with shadows. He radiated a sense of majesty, cool and unreachable. Guerrand would have dropped to his knees in supplication if he weren't already kneeling.

  The aristocratic man stepped to the middle of the room, a curious smile playing about his mouth. He bent at the waist, and a chair grew beneath him, rising out of the floor like stretched, heated glass. He casually crossed his legs and raised an arm, and a table grew similarly beneath it. He appraised Guerrand with a serene visage, his eyes alighting with brief interest upon Guerrand's red robe. If not for his venerable aura, the man looked at a distance like any intelligent listener sitting at a table in an inn, with fried root vegetables and a cup of lily wine on the table before him.

  "Why are you scribbling on my moon?" he asked coolly.

  "Your moon?" Guerrand gasped. With a small jerk of his head, he looked all around the glass walls and noticed the dark, circular shadow that loomed taller than a cliff face. He could almost make out smaller shadows of familiar magical runes scratched upon the darker shape. Guerrand's head snapped back to the man at the table. The red-robed mage grew paler than a mushroom, when, with simple, terrible understanding, he realized he was looking at the god of dark magic himself, Nuitari.

  "Did you think I wouldn't notice?"

  "I–I didn't think-"

  "Always dangerous for a mage," broke in Nuitari, his lips pursed in displeasure.

  "I had good reason," Guerrand began again feebly.

  The god smothered a yawn. "You earthbound mages always do."

  "I'm not some ordinary mage playing at spellcasting," Guerrand managed. "I am one of the wizards who was chosen to man Bastion, the stronghold that defends against entrance into your Lost Citadel."

  The mage dispatched Bastion with a flick of his long, tapered nails. "Do you truly believe I need your help to protect anything?"

  "N-No," stuttered Guerrand. "I just thought-"

  "That a position I did not bestow should grant you favor?"

  "No!" exclaimed Guerrand. "I just thought it would not displease you if I prevented another mage from continuing to use the power of your moon without your leave."

  Nuitari's dark-ringed eyes narrowed. "Explain."

  Guerrand quickly complied, taking heart from the fact that Nuitari, drumming his nails on the glass table, seemed to seriously consider his story about Lyim.

  "I knew of it, of course. But why should I care about this other mage's purpose," he posed at last, "as long as it increases the presence of my dark magic in your world?"

  "But this mage was not even of the Black Robes!" exclaimed Guerrand.

  The god frowned, reconsidering again. "It is somewhat distressing to have power drained without devotion paid to the proper god." He shrugged. "Still, the end result is the same." His slyly slanted eyes narrowed still further. "At least he was not scribbling on my moon."

  "The inscriptions are only temporary," revealed Guerrand in his most conciliatory tone.

  "You think that mitigates the fact that they are there at all, and without my permission?"

  Desperate, Guerrand dropped to one knee and bowed his head. "Then I humbly ask your leave now."

  'Too little, too late, don't you think?"

  Guerrand looked into the god's sparkling star eyes and said gravely, "I know only that it grows late for my sister and the others whose very lives depend on me hiding the rays of your moon for this one night."

  "We are between times here," Nuitari said dismissively. "It will not pass for those you left behind until- if-you return." Again he drummed his dark nails, considering some point. After staring at Guerrand's red robe briefly, he seemed to come to a conclusion.

  "Perhaps it's not too late for both
of us to benefit from this unfortunate episode," he said in a soft, gray voice. "Never let it be said that I let anger cloud my vision from opportunity."

  Guerrand shook his head slowly, fearfully. "I don't understand."

  Nuitari gave a patronizing roll of his shadowed eyes. "What I'm saying is, cast your little spell to change my moon to two dimensions-temporarily, that is," he said. "I will even advise you, free of obligation, that you would be better served to rearrange the final two symbols. Doing so will lengthen the duration of the dimensional change, to last until the rising of the sun."

  "That's it?" Guerrand asked, incredulous. "You're going to let me return to Thonvil and finish the spell?"

  The god looked amused. "Nothing is ever that easy, mage of the Red Robes."

  Guerrand jumped as if electrically shocked when Nuitari reached out with black, manicured nails and gently fingered the cloth of his red robe. "I ask only one thing: Remember this favor I have granted you."

  Every muscle in Guerrand's body froze. He played the god's words through his mind again in disbelief, then shifted just one eye up to Nuitari's pale face. "Are you asking me to change…?"

  "I'm asking you nothing," interrupted the god of dark magic. "I have no use for another minor supplicant at this moment. Later?" Nuitari shrugged. "Who can say? For now, simply remember the favor I have granted you. I will."

  Guerrand bowed his head and said nothing. When he looked up, for a brief moment the features of Rannoch, the black wizard who haunted his dreams, played across the face of the god of dark magic. Guerrand blinked in disbelief and the illusion was gone, some trick of his overtaxed mind, he supposed.

  Nuitari's laughter rang in Guerrand's ears as the glass floor sagged beneath his feet. There was a loud ping! as if a large bubble had burst, and then Guerrand dropped into the darkness of the heavens. He plummeted head over heels, past bright Solinari, past the red glow of Lunitari, past a thousand unnamed stars. He didn't know whether he would live or die, whether Nuitari had already reneged on their unspoken deal, only that he was falling.

  And then, in the blink of an eye, he stopped. Like a teleport spell, one moment he was tumbling through space, and the next he stood in the exact place and position, arm gestures and all, as before he'd been thrust into the heavens by Nuitari. The moment had held.

  "Guerrand? Uncle Rand!" The last was a bark from Bram's mouth.

  The mage's vision finally sighted the face of his nephew. Guerrand's gaze traveled to his sister lying beneath the lone tree, looking wan and hopeless in the moment before her death, and he well and truly came back from wherever he had been.

  Except in one regard. Guerrand silenced Bram with a stinging glance. He snatched up one last piece of parchment, hastily scrawled the rearrangement of the final two symbols he had placed upon the black moon, and sent Zagarus skyward one more time.

  Guerrand waited for some earth-shattering, cosmos- shifting sign. But white Solinari and red Lunitari drifted without concern across the dusky sky as before. There could be no question that the sun had set, for no last orangy beams stretched eastward from the west. Guerrand refused to look at Kirah, to even turn his head slightly to see if she still moved. Neither he, nor Bram, nor Kirah seemed to draw breath. A few dead leaves skipped over the cobbles in the breeze, and still the three waited, as still as statues, for the end to come or the beginning to start.

  Bram blinked in wonder at the sky. 'The night seems brighter than usual, as if daylight's wick has been turned down just one notch."

  "Nuitari's black light," Guerrand began to explain, his voice thin but growing, "usually mutes the intensity of Solinari and Lunitari's rays. Without it, the moonlight is much brighter."

  "And that's not all," Bram fairly shouted. "Look, near the crown constellation!"

  Guerrand scanned the sky looking for the familiar crown-and-veil arrangement of stars. It was obscured, not by clouds or night mist but by dark, fleeting shapes. The sky seemed suddenly crowded with them in the area where the crown of stars usually twinkled. Guerrand saw nothing obscuring the nearby constellations: the graceful double ellipses of Mishakal and the massive bison zodiacal symbol of Kiri-Jolith were clear. To the far side of the bison, where the constellations should have portrayed a broken scale and a dragon's skull, the stars were again obscured by darting bits of darkness.

  "What does it mean?" Bram wondered aloud, turning in a circle to view the odd sky.

  "I can only guess," Guerrand replied. "Those constellations that are obscured tonight must usually reflect the light of evil Nuitari, now absent. It is a good sign, I think."

  Guerrand's musing was cut short when Kirah's snakes suddenly became agitated. Her limbs thrashed wildly beyond her control, upsetting the blanket she had insisted upon covering herself with out of an uncharacteristic sense of vanity.

  At first Guerrand and Bram were worried that the fighting was some new manifestation of the disease, until they noticed that the snakes appeared to be in great pain. Then the creatures began to attack and bite

  each other, those conjoined on the same limb, as well as from one limb to the next. Kirah struggled in vain to get as far from her warring reptiles as possible. She had to settle for turning her head and squeezing her eyes shut, though she couldn't silence the sound of their violent hissing and thrashing. She began to scream, a long, low wail of pain that gave the snakes only a brief pause. Finally Kirah fell still, unconscious, either from shock or as an escape, or both.

  Guerrand and Bram watched helplessly, both wondering if they should stop the snakes from killing each other, but not knowing how to go about it. Bram made a move toward the thrashing black creatures, but Guerrand stayed him by grasping his arm.

  "For better or worse-for Kirah's sake-we've got to let the malady reverse itself," he said softly.

  Then Bram emitted a gasp and pointed down the street. "Look, Guerrand-snakes!"

  Guerrand followed Bram's pointing finger until he, too, saw them. Knots of thrashing snakes were clearly visible in the bright moonlight. They had emerged from their hiding places all around town and, like the snakes on Kirah's limbs, were fighting to the death in squirming knots. Bram picked his way carefully down the street to the village green. When he returned, he reported that hundreds of snakes were attacking each other all over the town, seemingly driven mad by the light.

  The last snake on Kirah's body, vibrant colors now dull, died of its wounds just before sunrise. Kirah was unconscious until that very moment, when her eyes flew open wide, hopeful, and instantly alert. As the first rays of the fourth day's sun cut across her face, the lifeless snakes simply slipped away with the last traces of moonlight, replaced with fully formed arms and legs the pinkish hue of a newborn babe.

  Face shining with joy, Kirah planted her new legs beneath her with the awkward gait of a colt. Bram stumbled forward to help his aunt, while Guerrand stood back and watched with joyous amusement, recalling Kirah's first toddling steps as a child. They could hear the jubilant shouts that began ringing all over the village that, just yesterday, had been as silent as the tomb it had become.

  Kirah's pale eyes welled up as she looked at her brother. "I'm sorry I doubted you, Rand. Ever."

  Guerrand sank to his knees with relief at the sound of her voice. He struggled to control the flood of emotions coursing through him, to find something uplifting to say, but no clear thought would settle upon his lips. His nephew squeezed his shoulder encouragingly.

  The mage felt utterly empty of magic, could sense the void where his power should be. He was certain it would take some time before it returned, at least a night's sleep. What he had done to turn the moon had drained more from him than any act of magic ever had. Yet, seeing his sister restored, hearing the villagers' happy shouts, Guerrand thought all the strain had been worth it.

  The mage found himself raising his eyes to the heavens in silent tribute. But the smile upon his face froze, and his heart skipped a beat. Clear to his view for the first time, next to the white and
pink bones of Solinari and Lunitari in the lavender morning sky, was the darker shape of Nuitari.

  The moon no decent person could see.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The celebration was brief, considering Kirab's weakened condition. She, of course, wanted to dance in the streets, but a few coltish steps proved the young woman was a long way from doing a jig. At last Kirah agreed to let Bram carry her, frail but with restored limbs, across the road and up the stairway to her room, where she could rest in comfort.

  Seated upon the bottom step near the entrance to the bakery, which was still dark, silent, and scentless, Guerrand waited for him to return. The mage scarcely noticed the street around him; he stared at it, without really seeing.

  What did it mean, seeing the black moon? Was he disposed toward Evil now? Guerrand didn't feel any different. Maybe that was the point. Perhaps evil people weren't all the same, or even as different on the inside as he'd believed. Hadn't Justarius said that same thing after Guerrand's Test?

  Bram slipped down the staircase and joined his uncle. "Kirah's as scrappy as ever," the young man said fondly. 'Tried to talk me into taking her for a walk in the sunlight, but I finally got her settled. She fell asleep before I could get to the door."

  Guerrand nodded his head to acknowledge the comment. One by one the limbs of plague-stricken villagers had returned to normal, reassuring them that the plague's spell had been broken. Just yesterday Thonvil had looked and sounded like a ghost town, the deadly stillness that had pervaded broken only by a groaning spring wind. This sunny morning a handful of people walked the streets, stirring up the noises of living, though where any of them were going when no shops were yet open was anyone's guess.

  But the greatest sign that fear had passed was that folks would meet each other's eyes again.

  "They don't even know you're the one who saved their lives," Bram said when a young girl and her mother, both with head shawls lowered to feel the heat of the sun on their chocolate-brown hair, nodded in greeting.

  "It's better that they don't," Guerrand said soberly.