It wasn’t. It wasn’t.
Something flashed through the air with vicious force—metal, copper, Joanna thought, glimpsing it from the corner of her eye. Antryg swiveled and smashed it with the end of his iron staff, sending it whirling, bouncing with a hideous clatter against the nearest pillar. Joanna saw it was an ewer, an altar vessel. Antryg whirled and batted again, catching a heavy piece of stone that had once been a sculpted cherub’s head with a force that nearly snapped the staff in his hands. The next missile came in low and fast, aiming for his ankle. She gritted her teeth and turned her head away, but he caught that one, too. Cricket as well as baseball, she decided hysterically. At almost the same instant, she heard something connect against his other hip with vicious force and felt his knees give. The staff whined with an evil swoosh and she felt something strike him again and heard his grunt of pain.
Something glowing flashed between the pillars, swooping toward them with terrible speed. Fire, pale and flickering like ball lightning, streamers ribboning along the floor. Joanna flinched as it hit the outer magic circle, heard the faint crackle, and saw the flames dash, scattering around the perimeter before they vanished. Looking up, she saw Antryg’s face set and grim, blood tracking down from a cut over his right eye and spreading everywhere as it mixed with the sweat pouring down his cheekbones. His gray hair formed a matted halo in the weak torchlight, broken by the diamond glitter of his earrings.
Another flicker of light, wan and corpsish, appeared among the pillars, its reflections slipping wormlike up the lines of gold leaf. Joanna shut her teeth hard as something came rushing and weaving among the dark forest of columns, glowing with a horrible radiance. Antryg half swung toward it as it broke against the outer circle, then turned back as something else lunged, dark from the darkness.
A tsunami of stench struck them first, overwhelming. Even the brief glimpse Joanna got of the thing was heart-shaking, a slobbering, half-melted travesty of a face whose fangs, she realized, were broken-off ribs thrusting out from the corners of the rotting jaw. Bone showed where the flesh of two of the arms was falling off; the other two were reaching to grab. It’s material. It can cross the circle, she thought. She half rose to run, then dropped to her knees again. In front of her, Antryg braced himself, the staff balanced before him. Tall as he was, the thing topped him by over a head. He’ll never thrust it off...
The thing—monster, demon, god of rot—was almost to the edge of the circle when Antryg snapped the staff around and thrust its end like a spear into the creature’s belly. His long legs locked and his weight dropped to take the shock, the thing’s whole momentum slamming into the one-inch circle of the pole’s end. The iron ferrule punched through the rotten meat like an arrow, and an unspeakable fountain spewed out behind. With a violence that seemed to shake the floor, the thing fell just beyond the chalked line of the protective ring. It raised its head, fluid trickling from the working mouth. Then it dropped squishily and lay still. Antryg had to twist and level the rod to pull its dripping end free.
The silence in the church was more terrible than before. Under the fallen flesh of the face she half believed she saw the silvery gleam of an eye move. She sat up, cold and shaking all over. “Can you cut it to pieces with your sword?”
“I could,” Antryg whispered softly. “But if you’ll look at the way the muscles are rotting, you’ll realize that it’s psychokinesis that moves the whole thing, and the limbs probably don’t have to be attached to the torso for it to control them. So on the whole, I think I’d rather not.”
Joanna worked out the implications of that one and swallowed queasily.
Rather white around the mouth, sweat and blood tracking stickily down his face, Antryg stepped to the very edge of the circle. Like an image losing itself down a corridor of mirrors, the echoes of his deep voice chased one another away into the endless darkness of the columns. “Can you understand me?” he asked softly. “I’m not here to destroy you.”
It was waiting, Joanna thought.
Something wet fell on Joanna’s hand. Looking down, she saw a drop of blood. Another drop struck her, falling from the darkness above, then a pattering, hideous rain. Trails of it threaded their way down the bright paint of the columns and curled like ribbon across the floor. The smell of it, coppery-sweet and harsh, stung her nostrils. The dying torch smoked and sputtered in it; the darkness edged closer, like a ring of wolves.
“Speak to me if you can,” Antryg said. “I can help you if you’ll let me.”
Slowly the monster’s head moved, white sinews breaking through the slimy flesh of its neck. Joanna saw the chest rise and fall as if pressed like a bellows to force air through vocal cords that were all but gone.
“I—am—the—Dead—God.” The glottal stickiness of timber made her flesh crawl, thinking of what caused it. “I drink the power that shines from men’s flesh. All things are only lent to life, before they return to me. I am the Dead God.”
Black fluid leaked from its mouth and from the hole in its gut as it swayed to a sitting position, head lolling gruesomely. Fat droplets of slime hung from its wrists as it raised two of its arms; they elongated and finally dripped to the floor with a sticky splat. “The Dead God demands his due... transdimensional interface... I walk the boundless darkness in the pits of the world ...universal field theory ...xchi particles ...structural shift at the ylem...”
“What?” whispered Antryg.
Joanna looked up at him, startled. “Don’t you understand?” He shook his head, baffled. “Transdimensional interface?” She spoke the words in English, knowing that neither she nor Antryg had heard them in that language, though the Dead God had spoken, for the most part, in slurred and stammered Ferr.
He shook his head again. “You mean, you do get a translation through the spell of tongues? I mean, those words mean something to you?”
Joanna nodded quickly. The Dead God drew itself to its feet like a crumbling mountain, eyes gleaming slimily in the failing ruby light. “He’s from another world, he’s got to be.”
Still holding the staff warily in hand, Antryg walked to the edge of the circle. “Look,” he said, his deep voice echoing in the darkness, “I can help you. Send you back.”
“A wizard,” muttered the Dead God thickly. “Your power shines through your flesh. I will drink of your brain, your power will be mine. All power will be mine—psychokinesis at the molecular level—I am the Dead God
“I’m not getting through to him.” His eyes never moved from the thing that had begun to lurch toward them, one staggering step at a time, huge arms outspread and broken claws bent to seize. Antryg’s swollen knuckles shifted along the staff he held; his voice was low and rapid. “Do you have a weapon of any kind with you, my dear? I don’t think the gun will do much good—my sword-scabbard, maybe, as a club. Remember it’s only dead flesh...”
But Joanna frowned suddenly at the dark monster that loomed on the edge of the dying torchlight, her mind taken up with another question entirely. “You know, I bet it’s a hardware problem,” she said.
Any other companion in such adversity would have stared at her and said, “What???” in utter disbelief, but Antryg, who dealt completely in inconsequence himself, only said, “You mean with the physical bodies he’s taken to make up what he is now?”
“Not the bodies—the brain.” The stench was so terrible she could scarcely breathe, part of her mind screaming in panic, while another part, calm and calculating, worked out the logic of the situation. “Your software’s only as good as your hardware.”
“And he can’t put his thoughts through the brains of the people he’s taken,” the wizard finished, his gray eyes lighting up like a truly mad scientist’s on the verge of discovery.
“Yeah,” Joanna breathed. “Only as far as brain chemistry is concerned, it isn’t a simple binary—your hardware is your software. And his must be half-rotted anyway, even if he didn’t get it from some not-very-bright priest and whatever town drunks or troublemak
ers the local sacrifice lottery decided the community could best spare. He’s in there...”
“Poor bastard,” Antryg whispered feelingly, and Joanna, looking at that filthy colossus of decay, felt a shudder of horror and pity. “But he can hear us.”
“I’ll bet he’s only able to process information in terms of what was in those brains to begin with.” She was on her feet now, her back to Antryg’s; she slipped his scabbarded sword from his sash to hold like a baseball bat, knowing that her aim must be to strike, rather than to cut. The scabbard was lacquered wood and hard as iron, but it still felt like a hopelessly inadequate weapon in her small hands. “Look, we’ve got to get through to—to the original part of him, the part that still remembers what he used to be...”
“If he—or she—still remembers.”
Joanna thought for a moment. Then, still keeping a wary eye on the creature that loomed in the darkness, she slid her makeshift weapon into her belt, dug quickly in a pocket of her backpack, and pulled out her Swiss Army knife. Kneeling beside Antryg’s feet, she tapped the metal knuckle of the knife three times on the stone floor.
She paused, then tapped again, once, hard and small in the terrible stillness. “I saw this done in Red Planet Mars” she explained breathlessly, and tapped again four times.
“Don’t get it wrong,” Antryg whispered, still standing braced only feet from the swaying form of the Dead God, his dripping staff held at the ready. “And pray the thing’s a mathematician.”
“I’m just praying the value of pi is the same in its dimension as it is in mine.”
Pause, one. Pause, five...
“Hmm. Sticky if it’s not.”
Pause...
Then, hollow and terrible, vast as the slamming of some great iron door, the knocking came as before—nine times. A silence, like the black weight of the air after thunder. Then two knocks, blows that shook the walls. Silence. Six.
The silence stretched into an elastic eternity.
“Five,” prompted Antryg softly, as Joanna, suddenly panic-stricken, blocked on the next number.
Tapping it out, she realized that to be a wizard, the ability to maintain the concentration for working a spell in any kind of bizarre emergency had to be the most vital of survival traits.
Three hollow booms answered her; five; eight...
“Can you make a Sigil?” she whispered.
“For what purpose?”
“Hardware. They’re only giant chips, after all—patterns of lines encoding symbolic logic, like the synapses of the brain. If you can draw one, or some, or as many as you need, on the floor, and give him an alternative communications hardware to what he has... Would that work?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said, an expression of dazzled, scholarly delight in his face wholly at odds with the bruises and blood that marked it, the hell-pit darkness around them. “I’ll need metal...”
“There’s about fifty feet of copper wire in my backpack.”
He hesitated. “And I’ll have to step out of the pentacle.” He had not taken his eyes from the thing before him; her shoulder to his side, Joanna could feel the swiftness of his breath.
She said seriously, “Not if you drew them real small.” For one second he glanced down at her, protesting, then realized she was joking and grinned. His hand was perfectly steady as he gave her the staff. Having seen him whip and twirl it like a cheerleader’s baton, she was startled by its weight.
“Don’t let it rush you head-on,” he cautioned softly. “It weighs three or four times what you do.”
“Do you want your sword back?”
He shook his head, dug a piece of chalk from the pocket of his coat, and gingerly stepped across the protective points of the magic circle. There was a flicker of blue light, like tiny discharges of electricity, among the pillars. Then silence again, that terrible waiting. Crouched like a lion gauging its moment to spring, the Dead God edged forward as Antryg knelt and began forming the complex shapes of the Sigils on the floor.
The torch was going; in the darkness Joanna thought she saw the lines on the floor begin to glow with a cold, frosty light, but it illuminated little save the mad wizard’s long nose and cracked spectacles and the wet gleam of the Dead God’s eyes. It was aware of her, she knew, watching with the mind that seemed to fill the icy blackness around her—as if it knew that it was she who held all the weapons, she who was totally unsuited to use them. Her hands shaking, she braced the staff under one arm and dug into her backpack, pulling out the copper wire and one of the several candles stowed in a side pocket, which she lit from the end of the dying torch. The light wasn’t much, but she knew Antryg could see in the dark. She felt the Dead God’s glance shift toward her and hastily set the candle down, praying she wouldn’t be panicked into stepping on it, then gripped the staff once again.
There was no sound but the crumbling slur of chalk on stone, and the swift lightness of Antryg’s breath.
Watching the pattern of the Sigils take shape, Joanna recognized some from Caris’ practice drawings: the Sigil of the Gate, the Sigil of the Single Eye, the Sigil of Strength, and the horned Sigil of Shadows which governs veiled and hidden things. Linking through them was the Sigil of Roads, that curious, oddball Seal which, like the Lost God who governed it, had no power in itself at all. Across the protective points of the circle she tossed Antryg the copper wire and duct tape, knowing from Caris’ explanations that metal was necessary in their workings, and still the Dead God edged forward, slime tracking down the broken ends of his bone fangs, his hands with their hooked nails stirring hungrily, uneasily, at the ends of rotting arms.
When Antryg straightened up his face seemed very white in the ghostly glow of the Sigils under the stitchwork of tracked blood. Around him the Seals of those ancient gods lay in a lace of light, wire, and duct tape, seeming to float on the stone. He took a deep breath, walked forward, and held out his hand to the Dead God.
With a gluey snarl, the Dead God raised two of its hands. Antryg saw what was coming and ducked, but not quickly enough. Claws raking, they caught him a stunning blow, flinging him against the closest pillar, as if he’d been in truth the scarecrow he so often resembled; then the Dead God was upon him.
Not knowing what else to do, knowing she could never cross the distance between them in time, Joanna swung the iron staff and caught the pillar behind her with a crack like a gunshot. The Dead God’s head swiveled horribly on its neck, one eye glaring, the other drooping sickeningly as the muscles that held it began to come loose. Picking up one of Antryg’s discarded pieces of chalk, she stooped and marked the floor:
//////
//////
//
/////
//////
The Dead God stood for a long moment, staring down at the pattern of chalked lines. Then it turned to where Antryg still slumped at the base of the pillar. Closing one huge hand around his arm and another around the nape of his neck it hauled him to his feet. Their eyes held, the Dead God’s glinting like a half-mad animal’s, Antryg’s calm and completely without fear. At length he took the rotting wristbones in his hands, and drew the thing toward the pattern of Sigils; it let him guide its hands to the points where metal and magic entwined, and left them there when Antryg rose and walked to the other end of the symbolic Road.
The wizard glanced down at Joanna’s binary code. “What is it?”
“Planck’s Constant.”
“I’m sure Mrs. Planck is pleased to hear it.” There was a note of strain in his voice, and she guessed by the way he moved that he’d cracked a rib against the pillar.
“If he’s a scientist he’ll recognize it. It’s the ratio of energy to frequency of light and it occurs over and over again in physics. Like pi, it was a way to tell him that we knew he isn’t the Dead God. That we knew who he is really.”
Antryg knelt down near the Sigil of Shadow and touched the glowing latticework of wire and light. “Perhaps he needed reminding himself,” he said soft
ly and wiped the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. Joanna set down the staff and, shivering slightly, stepped across the psionic barrier of the pentacle to kneel at Antryg’s side.
“I think you’re going to need a technical consultant.”
Behind the blood-flecked glass, she saw the quick flare of concern in his eyes, but he couldn’t deny the truth of what she said. After a hesitation, he took her hands, his long fingers and the leather of his gloves sticky with the gross corruption of the monster’s touch, and guided them to the wan stringers of crisscrossing light. “I don’t know how much you’ll be able to hear,” he cautioned softly. “If you feel him trying to get a grip on your mind, pull out at once. Don’t try to help me. All right?”
Joanna nodded uneasily.
“Good girl.” He drew a deep breath and flinched at the stab of his injured ribs, then seemed to settle in on himself, half closing his eyes, not working magic, Joanna thought, but drinking of the magic of the Sigils themselves.
Not being mageborn, she felt very little, only a kind of warmth where the light lay under her fingers. For a time she heard nothing, but glancing up in the dim amber reflection of the distant candle, she saw Antryg’s lips move and realized that her own nervous observation of the Dead God in the darkness that surrounded them was blocking her concentration.
Great, she thought bitterly. What a time to have to pick up meditation techniques. But she had read enough to have some idea of what she must do. Perhaps the hardest thing was simply to close her eyes, to release all thought, all fear, and all planning of what she’d do if... to think of nothing...
Like the distant murmur of a metallic wind, she heard the Dead God’s voice.
“...The more lives I take, the greater my power will grow. I can drink the magic of your brain, Windrose—magic to keep this flesh from corrupting, magic to take, to hold. Why should I return to my own world, when with the powers of a god I can spread my will across the earth here?”
The Silicon Mage Page 20
