by Garon Whited
Diogenes was ready on his end, of course; he always listens through the Diogephone. A robot arm extended through the memory-metal gate when it opened. The arm was really just a rod with several large coils of wire hanging on it. It immediately tilted down, slid the wire off, and retracted through the gate.
Mary didn’t actually need help to keep her gate open, but I leaned on it a little because I’m nice like that. Once Diogenes retracted the arm, Mary closed the gate and breathed a huge sigh of relief.
“See? That wasn’t so hard.”
She punched my arm. I pretended it hurt.
Laying wire was tedious, but not difficult. We tied one end to a carving on the wall and Mary started uncoiling as we went down. I carried as many extra coils as I could; I was limited by the length of my arms. We paused every hundred meters or so to splice ends together. In narrow spots, I handed through coil after coil, then picked them up and followed her again as she kept unwinding wire. When I was down to my last two coils, I handed them to her and ran upstairs again for more.
Tedious, yes, but not difficult.
Down by the nexus, I ran the wire into the central, faceted area. I could see magical charge already trickling away up the line, so I sent Mary back up to keep the charge from leaking away. She skipped off while I put together an actual power tap spell to draw energies directly from the nexus. Once I had it all in place, I went up to join her.
The sound of gunfire from above encouraged me to move at the speed of dark. I came up the final stairs and out of the basement-hatchway so fast I missed the floor entirely and hit a wall about fifteen feet up. It stopped me and I fell to the floor, taking in the situation as I dropped.
The place was crawling with frost-covered zombies. They were moaning and crackling and shuffling around, staggering into each other, into walls, into doorframes. Several of them were on the dais, struggling to get to Mary. Mary, for her part, was defending the hatchway. If the hatch braces were disturbed by these shuffling things, it might close. If it closed, it would definitely sever our wire. At least, that was my thought. She was probably thinking it would trap me underneath, leaving her alone with a roomful of frosty zombies.
Bullets to the brain didn’t seem to bother them. Wrong sort of zombie, apparently. When guns proved ineffective, Mary started hand-to-hand, flipping them, rolling them, tripping them, kicking them back, and basically keeping them too busy picking themselves up—now with a broken bone or two—to really be a threat to the hatch.
I drew Firebrand.
How do you feel about frost zombies? I asked.
I think they’re cold, unpleasant, and in desperate need of a good torching.
I still need the building.
I’ll bear that in mind, Boss.
Mary shifted her focus, kicking her victims toward me as Firebrand lit up. Beheading one didn’t kill it, but did worsen its already-poor coordination. If beheading didn’t kill them, I didn’t see a way to kill them quickly. Still, cutting one to pieces severely limits their ability to do you harm.
We dismembered them. We smashed and shredded and cut. They were mindless, staggering things, not combatants, and we crunched our way through them as quickly as they came. Many of them didn’t even come toward us, content to stagger in circles or simply bump into a wall like a robot with faulty programming. It wasn’t a pleasant chore, and it went on for a while. Firebrand showed great restraint in not setting zombies actually on fire, as such, but it saved me considerable effort by melting frozen flesh as fast as I could cut at it.
“Mind if I ask a question?” Mary said, breaking a back as she kicked one away from the hatch.
“Fire away,” I replied, splitting one in half as Firebrand whooped in glee.
“Why are there zombie hordes in the monastery?”
“I’m guessing it has to do with the wire dumping huge amounts of raw magical force into the vicinity,” I shouted, leaping over a group of six as they hemmed me in. The real trick to dealing with a horde is never let them mob you. Keep moving. Keep them loose and open.
“Now that we’re kind of on top of the situation, do you think you could, oh, maybe do something about that?” Mary yelled after me.
“Good plan. Hold them while I redirect it.”
“Can I borrow Firebrand?”
We sorted ourselves out at the other end of the room, luring the more aggressive zombies away from the hatch. I handed Firebrand to Mary and did my best to stealth around to the dais. It must have worked; the zombies still in the main chamber kept doing whatever random, mindless things they were already doing. The ones still interested in braaaaaains went after Mary and Firebrand.
I grabbed the end of the wire and started channeling power.
Ow.
Even in its depleted state, a major nexus is a terrible source of energy. I don’t think it would have killed me during the day, but it stung like hell even at night. I molded it as quickly as I could, shaping a power tap at the upper end of the wire, much like screwing a spray nozzle onto a high-voltage garden hose. Controlling the flow was the priority. Once I had the power contained, the zombies couldn’t draw any more of it.
But I could.
I directed energies through a basic attack spell—Glabrus’ Fist, a simple thing used for communicating the force of a blow over a distance. It worked very well. I punched the air repeatedly, targeting the legs. Femurs crunched all around the room. Again, it didn’t stop any of them, but it made them even slower and less likely to mob us.
As I broke them and Mary subdivided them into limbs and other pieces, they continued to slow down. Without the influx of fresh force, every movement expended some of their absorbed energies. They wound down like old clockwork and eventually stopped completely.
Mary didn’t. Judging from the way she kept cutting the bodies to pieces, I don’t think she likes zombies. Maybe they startled her as she came out of the hatch; thieves hate being surprised. I dismissed the Fist spell and waited while she chopped zombies like a teppanyaki chef with a grudge. She didn’t leave anything bigger than a finger—and fingers she stomped. I guess the idea of a frozen, undead finger slowly inchworming to the attack was distasteful.
“All done?” I asked.
“Yes. For now.” She rejoined me on the dais and handed Firebrand back. “Next time we’re going to deal with walking dead, warn me, would you?”
“I didn’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not even sure why they started moving. Magical force, yes—the nexus wire supplied the power, but what actually motivated them? Why did it make them get up and move around instead of, I don’t know, thaw out? Or turn into ethereal vapor? Or shift out of this plane of existence? I have no idea. I’ve never seen it before. I certainly didn’t expect it.”
“All right. Okay. This time. But in the future, bear in mind I don’t like undead.”
“Um… I hate to tell you this…”
“Messy undead,” she clarified. “Zombies. Grave-wights. Whatever.”
“Fair enough.”
“So,” she continued, changing the subject, “what are we here for, again?”
“Power. I’ll be creating a gigantic parabolic reflector in the psychic wavelengths and tuning a receptor spell at the focus to resonate with any trace of my Evil Alter Ego. Then we can see about sealing the Fries nexus-points.”
“Well? Why aren’t you doing it? I don’t want to stay here longer than we have to.”
“Of course. Keep me from being disturbed,” I added, handing Firebrand back to her. “Just in case.” Mary accepted Firebrand with, I thought, a level of relief. Everyone needs a flaming dragon-sword security blanket once in a while.
Nothing bothered us. Lucky for it.
I spent a good portion of the night building my spells. The receptor wasn’t too complicated; I’ve got the hang of psychic listening devices. The complicated part was constructing a precise parabolic antenna. It was finicky work to build a small one and get it exactly the right shape. Then I magnified it, enlarged
it, and adjusted it for precise focus again. Once I had it as large as the room, it became impractical to adjust the focus on it further; I need to see what I’m doing. All I could do was magnify it and hope I had it zeroed in well enough.
I probably overdid it. I have a nasty tendency toward overkill. I think it’s because I generally feel a little insecure about trying new things. Or a little insecure in general.
With my new, extra-jumbo psychic spell antenna hovering over the monastery, I parked my receptor at the focal point and did a slow scan, a full three hundred and sixty degrees. I picked up a lot of static, of course. Considering I was looking for the Black Ball, I wasn’t surprised to get a lot of sideband chatter from human greed, lust, envy, anger… it’s always there, and always strong. I was tuning specifically for something resonating with my own mental signature, however, so the excess chatter was merely background noise.
I realized, after my first sweep, that I had a problem. I was on a sphere, not a plate. I couldn’t just do a quick three-sixty and be done. I had to do a sweep of the planet, which involved scanning everything out to the horizon, relocating, and doing it again… and again… and again….
Fortunately, there was a faster way. I had a lot of power to work with, so I elevated the antenna, raising it into the sky, hoisting it on lines of magical force. It wasn’t a physical object, after all, only a confluence of power, a center of energy. It cost some extra power to move it, more to keep it active, and still more to control and operate it at such a distance, but a couple thousand miles of elevation let me search whole quadrants of the planet.
I got a hit. I actually got several hits, all of them in—probably—California.
If I hadn’t been dead at the time, my heart would have skipped a beat. Fourteen hits of various intensity and clarity, all of them with matching resonance.
Fourteen!?
Breathe. Take a big, icy, high-altitude, useless breath. Hold it.
Oh, right. Let it out, too.
All right, think about it. Why am I getting multiple hits? There aren’t fourteen separate Orbs of Evil. At least, there better not be fourteen separate Orbs of Evil. So, what does this mean? Has it left its mark on thirteen surviving minds, perhaps? Some sort of mental domination or conditioning so they resonate with the orb and are easier to control? If so, how do I figure out which one is which? If I jump on one, the rest will almost certainly know about it. If this hypothesis is true, they’ll be in a sort of psychic contact all the time. But the strongest contact should be the actual Orb—probably. It would help if I could differentiate between the psychic leakage through a demon-binding orb and the active radiations of a living mind affected by the thing imprisoned in the orb.
First order of business: Locate them.
It’s not easy to use a psychic antenna in orbit and coordinate it with a ground-based mirror so you can zoom in along the geometric line of the focus to locate a specific map coordinate in the physical world. It’s not even as easy as it sounds.
If I hadn’t been draining the last of the planet’s magical lifeblood, it would have taken me days to put together the spells for it. As it was, it took me the better part of a very hectic and hurried hour to coordinate everything—dawn wasn’t too far off—and get them all to work together. All that effort, and all I got were the general vicinities.
The psychic point-sources were clustered. Two in San Deigo, four in Los Angeles, and eight in San Francisco. My locator wasn’t too precise.
That was enough for me. Mary and I could go to those cities and use much smaller antennas to home in on them. From there, we could spy with magic mirrors, telescopes, flying camera drones, and vampire eyeballs. Then we could figure out what we wanted to do.
“Any luck?” Mary asked, once I unwound everything and relaxed.
“Yes and no,” I replied, and filled her in on my intelligence-gathering.
“I say we hit San Francisco first. If I were an Evil Orb, I’d want guards.”
“You may have a point. We’ll start there and see what we can find. It may be in San Deigo with one thoroughly-dominated servant as its arms and legs.”
“Either way, we’ll hunt it down,” Mary assured me. “What’s next?”
“Nexus closings. The open ones the Fries were using.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“Remember your suggestion about gating in?”
“That was when the blasting spells were still going,” she pointed out. “I thought we could turn them off, gate in, fix the nexus, and gate out again. The blasting would keep other people away until you were ready to do your spells. Now those places are likely to be crawling with people.”
“Yes and no. They bombed and shelled and missiled the centers of the domes, remember?”
“You’re thinking craters don’t have a lot of people in them?”
“Yes.”
“How about we look them over, first?”
“I like how you think, but we’ll have to hurry.”
“Why?”
“Dawn isn’t far away and I’d like to gate away from here before then. There’s about a ten-hour time difference between here and the eastern-most one—the one a trifle north of Fayette, New York. My plan is to make sure we’re all charged up here, gate to that one, use it to prepare another gate spell, seal it, and head for the next one. On the last one, we gate back to Lisbon after we seal it. Because of the change in time zones, we should be in darkness for the whole process. I don’t want to try sealing a nexus, even a minor one, even after they’re mostly depleted, during the day.”
“Seems reasonable. So let’s look and see why it won’t work.”
“Your pessimisim is depressingly justified.”
I popped a scrying sensor—a psychic one, not a television one; I dislike being fried by sunlight—over the northeastern United States and moved it down, zooming in. The site of the first nexus was a cratered ruin. People were there, yes, working under banks of lights. They were sifting dirt, running instruments over the ground, and wearing environment suits. If an alien spacecraft had crashed there, it wouldn’t look much different.
“Problem?” Mary asked. I touched her tendril with mine, linking with her, and showed her my pocket mirror. She nodded. “I thought as much. When the psychic nastiness went away, they moved in.”
“Now what? Forty-four thousand federal agencies are crawling all over the nexus sites. I may be hard to spot, but I never did perfect an invisibility spell.”
“Well, do you have to be on-site to do a bandage spell?”
“Yes. Oh, I could probably use one spell to target a self-contained ‘bandage bomb’ spell. If I over-build one and lob a half-dozen or so at a nexus, it’ll probably layer it well enough to be sealed. It’ll take a while, though, to launch multiple bandage-warheads from here, and we just don’t have the time.”
“I’ve got two solutions.”
“You have my undivided attention.”
“You know, that’s kind of scary.”
“What is?”
“Having all your attention. In this context, anyway.”
“In an ancient magi monastery, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by dismembered frost zombies?”
“Yes. It’s a trifle unnerving.”
“I can’t imagine why. But what are your solutions?”
“First, wait until tomorrow night. We’ve got a wire to the nexus and it’s capped off. We can kill a day on a mountaintop and start launching your nexus-bandage-bombs first thing in the evening.”
“Possibly. The other idea?”
“Prepare your bandage spells. Then open a gate—a small one, about head-sized, using the brute-force method, directly over the nexus—and apply your spell by reaching through. Or just throw your spells through. Don’t actually go there. The sunrise window from the time zone changes will narrow our operational time, but you can spend all day getting ready and, if you have to, just do one every day.”
I did some mental juggling. Rate
of power flow, power requirements for a bandage spell, minimum diameter of a gate for effective casting, time to cast prepared spell vs. energy requirements of the gate… It might work.
Nexus, Sunday, April 4th, 2049
Sunrise annoys me. To some extent, it always annoys me, but I’m especially annoyed when it sneaks up on me.
Mary and I ducked down through the hatch and hurried below. The main chamber above had far too many windows and skylights and whatnot. Fortunately, the tingling that precedes dawn is usually fairly noticeable, and none of the windows was aligned due east.
With plenty of power on hand, cleaning spells weren’t a problem. Neither were insulating and warming spells.
“How did they heat this place?” Mary asked, shivering.
“I have no idea,” I admitted, finishing a thermal barrier around her. “Maybe they exercised mental disciplines to feel warm. Maybe there’s an ancient spell to keep the place from freezing and it disintegrated when the world ran down below a critical level. Power deprivation can be a problem for permanent spells. Or maybe they did what we’re doing with personal spells.”
“Is it the same for breathing?”
“The air is a bit thin,” I agreed. “I don’t think I want to exert myself.”
“Me, either. Does working magic use up more oxygen?”
“Probably, but it can concentrate it.” I set about building spells around our heads to raise the oxygen level. “How’s that?”
“Better. Being a part-time mortal is a pain.”
“Could be worse,” I replied, leading her up into the monastery again.
“Don’t explain. So, what do we do for the day?”
“I plan to scry on our targets, build some preliminary spells, partially fold a gateway, and do some light enchantment work.”
“We’re going to spend all day getting ready for this evening?”
“Yes. Unless you have a better idea?” I asked, handing her up from the hatchway.
