Shadowtrap: A Black Foxes Adventure

by Dennis L McKiernan

  Lyssa!

  The wraith was nowhere to be seen.

  Lyssa!

  Arik looked back at the looming arch. The stone itself was pearlescent, and blinding white filled the opening. Yet even as he looked on, the white vanished, revealing only the chaotic demonscape through the span beyond.

  Ky’s spell had expired.

  Kane dismounted and took the syldari from Arik and lowered her to the ground. Now all the others dismounted as well and formed a circle about her and Kane. The warrior-healer looked up and said, “She’ll come around in a moment, then we need to ride.”

  “Ride? Now? What about Lyssa?” asked Trendel.

  “Listen,” said Kane, “we don’t know what kind of alarm might have been set off when we came through that gate. For all we know, even now a band of demons is heading this way. I say we get down off here and out of sight.”

  Rith glanced at the ebony sun. “Perhaps Lyssa did come through, after all. But I think it’s daytime here in the demonworld, and so even as she arrived, she vanished, going wherever it is that spirits go during the day.”

  Arik looked at Trendel. The seer shrugged and said nothing.

  Ky groaned and her eyes fluttered open. Kane gave her a drink.

  Arik knelt and asked Kane, “Do you think she could cast another spell now?” At Kane’s negative shake of the head, Arik said, “I thought not. If she could have, I would have stepped through to see if Lyssa was on the other side of the gate.”

  Kane held Ky’s hand. “I don’t think she’ll be able to throw another great spell until this evening—assuming there are evenings in this blasted realm.”

  Rith cleared her throat. “Come on, Arik, let’s get away from this place. If Lyssa is here, we’ll see her tonight, when the black sun sets.”

  Arik cast a glance at the archway and sighed. “All right. As Kane said, a demon force may even now be coming to check on the gate. Besides, we’ve got to find Horax.” Arik stood and shaded his eyes and scanned the horizon. “But which way do we go?”

  Trendel cleared his throat. “I can’t find Horax, for I don’t know what he looks like. But, if he’s with the DemonQueen, Atraxia, she I can find.”

  Rith gasped. “You’ve seen the DemonQueen?”

  “In tapestries, my dear. The same ones depicting the Kalagar Gate. She’s all in armor and carries a great long blade . . . and is rather beautiful in an exotic way. —Oh, nothing like your black beauty, Rith.”

  “Black beauty?” Rith held up her greyish arm. “Gack! I look like a gnoman.”

  Trendel laughed. “Too tall, Rith. Too tall.”

  Rith smiled, her black teeth gleaming. “Let us hope I fare better than the last gnoman we saw.”

  Arik looked at Trendel. “DemonQueen it is, seer. Where is she, and how far?”

  Trendel concentrated briefly then pointed. “That way. Is it north? Whatever. She lies that way some ten miles—” Suddenly Trendel broke off and his eyes widened. “Huah. The distance is more like a thousand.” He maintained his concentration. “Hold on, something strange is happening. Now she’s twenty-two miles away—still north. What under Luba’s bed is going on?”

  “Perhaps spells don’t work well in the demonplane,” suggested Arik. He glanced down at Ky. The syldari was awake and aware.

  “Can you travel?” he asked. “Are you strong enough?”

  “Unh, I think so,” said Ky. Her voice was somewhat thready.

  “I will take some of the weakness from her,” said Kane.

  “Careful,” warned Rith. “Given what’s happening to Trendel’s casting, your own may act against you or her.”

  “Six hundred and three miles,” said Trendel. “Still north.” He broke off his spell.

  Kane took a deep breath and laid hands on Ky. Then he frowned in concentration. After a moment he released her and said, “How’s that?”

  Ky grinned up at him, her almond eyes flashing silver in black. “I’m all right now.”

  Trendel ran a hand over his green hair. “Hm, why did his spell act as normal, while mine behaved so strangely?”

  Rith paused in thought. “Perhaps they are both acting correctly.”

  “If that’s so,” said Arik, “then the DemonQueen lies northward, but the distance is haphazard. —Regardless, mount up and let us be gone from here.”

  As they started down the slope, Rith exclaimed, “I just remembered: didn’t Pon Barius say that Ranvir’s host crossed the Plains of Chaos? Perhaps that’s where we are—on the Plains of Chaos. If so, then that might explain the muddled answer Trendel’s spell yielded.”

  “Muddled?” protested Trendel. “Strange, yes; muddled, not at all. Besides, my confused little spellsinger”—he sniffed and lofted his nose in the air and pointed north—”it is definitely that direction.” Then he burst out laughing at the squinty-eyed look Rith shot his way.

  They rode out from the rounded barrow hill into a land which continuously churned and changed—subtle at times, violent at other times, but always hellish. Before their very eyes rocks would shift an inch or two or race away for miles; upslopes would lurch to become steeper or abruptly transform into downslopes. Within a few hundred strides, Arik looked back over his shoulder; the archway was nowhere to be seen, nor the mound on which it stood. He faced front once more and headed deeper into the mutable ’scape. North they went and north. Suddenly with great heaving and splitting a mighty rift opened before them, and as horses reared and plunged and mules bellowed, it thunderously slammed shut. A great cloud of choking dust rose up around them, and hacking and coughing they could but barely manage to breathe; yet just as suddenly the dust vanished, leaving ice crystals in its wake. In freezing cold, northward they fared as the demonday drew on, and a bluff ripped up out of the ground to steeply bar the way; boulders and pebbles and melon-sized stones crashed down from above, and the Foxes danced their horses this way and that to avoid the plummeting rocks. But one stubborn mule broke free only to have its hindquarters crushed beneath a great slab smashing down. And it screamed in agony and floundered and flopped as stone continued to rain. But at last the cascade ended, and as Arik cut the throat of the animal to put it out of its misery, they found themselves on a towering mesa with escarpments falling sheer. While Arik salvaged the goods from the dead mule, the others dismounted and walked the perimeter looking for a way down, finding none. Then the land mutated into a white lava plain. Northward they journeyed across the glaring stone as the black sun climbed up the yellow-orange sky. And as they rode, far-off hills raced away or moved close or grew tall or shrank into oblivion to leave vast sinkholes behind. A field of thorns burst up all around them and loomed tall in mere moments; they could not take even a step without enduring gashes and cuts and punctures, and here the animals suffered greatly, shifting about in fright. But the land mutated again, changing into a glacial plateau, where raging green fires ravened forth from the ground, and it was all the Foxes could do to retain control of their mounts and the two mules and one horse trailing after. Across this frigid burning high plain they went, which suddenly transformed into dark gravel dunes sloping this way and that, and the Foxes dismounted and led the animals slipping and sliding, for the gravel was entirely too loose for anyone to ride along the oceanic slopes. They stopped often to check hooves and to pick stones from the iron shoes. And as they did this, the dark gravel shifted subtly, ever so subtly, into miles of purple stone flats. They passed through an area where a field of monolithic boulders suddenly rose up from the rock and streams of green magma poured out to become, in a flash, hot sand cascading over a high bluff to fall with a bellow into a river of pebbles roaring down a solid stone hillside. Onward they pressed as pustules formed on blasted plains and became sulfurous fumeroles belching up blue mud as molten glass oozed out from frozen bluffs. Still the Foxes went forward, northward, and ever did the land shift, but always into something infernal, as of a landscape damned. Even so, the Foxes found passage over or under or across or through, Trendel poi
nting the way.

  As mid of the demonic day came, the Foxes stopped to rest and to take a meal on a spot of land which the seer deemed would be safe for the moment. And as they ate beneath purple rings with the sable sun beyond, Rith said, “Perhaps this is why demons have chaotic forms, the land being such as it is . . . Plains of Chaos, indeed.”

  “Huah,” grunted Trendel, “I think you are right, love, and the de—” His eyes flew wide and he jumped to his feet. “Look!” he exclaimed, pointing.

  At his call the Foxes turned ’round and peered to the north, then they, too, stood and shaded their eyes from the spectral light of the black sun overhead. In the near distance they could see jutting up from a desolate plain an obsidian mountain with an ebony castle clutched atop its jagged crest.

  And although it was too far to make out significant details, Kane growled, “I need no seer’s spell to tell me that there lies the dark towers of the DemonQueen, as black as her own black heart.”

  Arik glanced at Trendel. “Well done, seer; we are on the right track.” But even as he looked northward again, the ebony mountain sped straight away from them and disappeared beyond the horizon.

  “Aha,” said Trendel, “that’s why the distance to the DemonQueen shifts.”

  “Hm,” murmured Ky, “I wonder, how we are ever going to get aboard, what with its racing to and fro like that?”

  “Never mind getting aboard,” rumbled Kane. “Instead tell me how we will keep from getting run over.”

  Again they started their northward journey across the mutating land, with its howling blizzards of boiling mud and flaming stones falling from the sky, and its grinding whirlpools of jagged rocks and thunderous winds shrieking along knife-edge ridges, with its trackless wastes of burning sand and rivers of fire through ice-choked gorges and pitching slopes of jolting steep mountains . . . and more. And all the while, the spectral black sun moved down through the ocherous sky and umber clouds floated above.

  Now and again the obsidian mountain would reappear, sometimes close, sometimes far, but always would it retreat northward to vanish beyond the horizon.

  “Luba,” exclaimed Trendel, “this is like chasing a friar’s lantern, a corpse candle, a dancing will-o’-the-wisp.”

  “Oh, don’t say that,” cautioned Rith. “The last time we tangled with a will-o’-the-wisp it ended in Arton’s death and Lyssa’s becoming a ghost.”

  “Horax the Bastard’s doing,” growled Kane. He slammed a fist into hand. “If he’s on the mountain, then he will pay dearly.”

  “But not before he restores Lyssa to her rightful form,” admonished Ky, glancing at Arik in the lead.

  “Do you truly believe that he did it?” asked Trendel, shaking his head. “Changed her into a ghost, that is?”

  “It was his swamp, his will-o’-the-wisp, his traitorous ways,” growled Kane. “Who else could have done it? Who else would have done it?”

  Trendel took a deep breath and sighed and shrugged his shoulders . . . then hunched over as phosphorescent black hail began hurtling down on the green burning land.

  The shadow-wrapped sun was nearly to the horizon when suddenly the black mountain stood at hand. Arik spurred forward, Foxes following, and onto dark rock they clattered. They raced ahead a hundred yards or more, only to be barred by a yawning abyss standing across the way, and here the Foxes reined to a halt, horses sidle-stepping, hooves clacking on stone; green fire shone up from the depths of the crevasse and choking fumes arose. Looking left then right, Arik called, “This way!” and rightward he spurred.

  They came to a narrow span, a footway too narrow for the horses to traverse, and it held no rails. It bridged the abyss to meet a path twisting up the mountainside.

  “Quick,” cried Arik, leaping down from his horse, “we must cross before the mountain moves.” But even as he said it, Trendel cried, “Not so!” and he pointed back along the way they had come. The land behind was racing away southward. “We are on the mountain even now.”

  Hundreds of feet down, the abyss was filled with fiery green magma, heaving and churning, enormous hot bubbles belching to the surface to burst with ploppings and plappings and retch out great clouds of acrid fumes, the dark emeraldine gas rising upward to strangle anyone who would dare to cross over the span. Yet the Black Foxes did so, Arik leading, Rith coming last, the bard spellsinging to calm them all, especially Kane treading in fear above the long and terrible fall.

  On the far side they moved away from the frightful crevasse, then stood at the base of the mountain and surveyed the obsidian steeps.

  Finally, “There,” said Rith, pointing at the sable peak where stood a fantastic castle, ebony in aspect, with flamboyant towers and ornate turrets reaching up into the aberrant sky. “There’s where we’ll find Horax the Bastard.”

  “And the DemonQueen,” added Trendel.

  Arik glanced at the black sun even then lipping the horizon. “If we start now it will be night by the time we reach it.”

  “Good,” grunted Kane. “Let’s go.”

  With helms on their heads and shields on their arms and with their weapons in hand, upward they started, walking in silence to follow the wide pathway as it wended and snaked up the slopes. Yet as they rounded the first of the turns, there before them stood an array of white-armored drakka in full plate with helmed visors of hideous aspect and metal horns jutting up, their stone-barbed lances and jagged-edged stone-bladed swords leveled and ready. And among them capered jeering skelga, teeth and talons wickedly flashing, while behind something bright and chaotic loomed.

  With Arik on point, Kane to his right, and Trendel to his left, and Ky and Rith behind, the Black Foxes leapt forward to do battle, sword and spear and axe gleaming black, silver fire playing about Ky’s fingers, and Rith starting a song. Yet before weapon or magic could strike, the Foxes fell back, numbed, trapped by a powerful spell, their minds held in thrall.

  As if acting on command from an unheard voice, the drakka beringed the Black Foxes and, with pale skelga leaping about and japing and the chaotic whiteness churning ahead, they marched them unresisting up the pathway and toward the ebon castle above.

  And as the Foxes moved woodenly upward, the black sun gradually sank into the horizon and slowly disappeared, just as it seemed did their chances.

  46

  Cephaloruptor

  (Coburn Facility)

  “Damn! Damn! Damn!” cried Mark Perry. “They’ve lost!”

  Stunned, the observers in the control center watched as the Black Foxes were marched up the twisting path and toward the soaring ebony castle, the ring-filled sky above shading toward a pustulant green with the onset of the demonic twilight.

  “He’s done something unethical,” said Greyson, taking off his half-glasses and staring at them abstractly.

  “Who?” asked Kat Lawrence.

  “Avery,” answered Greyson.

  “Unethical?” exploded Perry. “Of course he’s unethical! He’s a goddamned sociopath!”

  “What has he done, John?” asked Toni Adkins.

  “He’s broken two of his most basic VR rules: one, he didn’t give the team a fighting chance; and, two, he stripped them of their free will.”

  Stein burst through the doors and headed toward the VR rigs. “I have solved it!” he declared, waving a schematic toward his medtech crew.

  Toni called out and beckoned to him, and loath to do so, still he complied. And when he reached her side at the console, she said, “Show me.”

  Annoyed, he slapped the schematic to the table and spread it out with irritated jabs. Drew Meyer and John Greyson moved to join them to see what was afoot. Stein glanced about. “Some of you may actually understand this: all we have to do is jack into the aux port of the hemihelm with a modified CR. It’ll act like a broadband shocker.”

  “Broadband?” asked Drew. “How do you plan on making it so?”

  “A CR? A shocker? —What are those?” asked Greyson.

  Stein ignored Greyson an
d pulled Drew closer. “Here and here,” said Stein, his finger stabbing at the schematic, pointing to portions circled in red with their values changed. Drew bent over to look, then reached for his minicompad.

  “Would somebody please answer my questions?” appealed Greyson.

  Toni turned to the philosopher and said, “A CR is a cephaloruptor—a therapeutic instrument specifically targeted to treat certain types of depression untreatable by other means. A cortical shocker is an instrument of torture, first used by the junta in the recent Kazakhstani oil wars. It acts directly on the brain, especially the centers of fear and pain.”

  Greyson took Stein by the shoulder and spun him to stand face to face. “You are going to torture the alpha team?”

  “Of course not, you fool,” bit Stein. “But by using modified gear to give them a jolt of shock therapy, I can break the hemisynch while simultaneously stimulating their brains into functioning normally again.”

  “Damn you, Henry,” cried Greyson, balling a fist and shaking it in under Stein’s nose, “don’t you realize that the true essences of these people are trapped in Avery, and if you shock the brains back into activity, you, we, all of us will have six people on our hands, none of whom will have a soul?”

  Stein batted Greyson’s hand away. “Understand this, you superstitious braying ass: those mental patterns in the AI are merely duplicates. The real brains are over there. Shut down. And I have a way to reactivate them.”

  Greyson stepped back, frustration and horror raging in his eyes. “My God, Henry, you are not only Doctor Stein, you are Doctor Frankenstein! He reanimated a brain and created a creature without a soul; and now you want to do the same, only sixfold over! Who, then, is the monster here?”

  Toni stepped in between them. “Stop it, you two!” She gestured at the holovid. “The game is not over. The Foxes may yet win”—Stein snorted and Mark Perry threw up his hands in disbelief, but Toni continued—”and if they do, then in all likelihood their minds will be set free by Avery. And if that’s not the case—” She broke off and turned to Doctor Meyer. “Drew, will those changes actually work?”