by Garon Whited
Tort and T’yl looked up. Neither of them seemed to see me.
“Is he well?” Tort asked. “In his disembodied state, he may need to be contained.”
“I’m not sure the crystal’s big enough,” Tianna replied, casting her brilliant gaze over me. “He’s…” she searched for a word. “Big. Even bigger than I remember. He was a giant when I was a little girl; I thought it was because I was so small back then.”
“I know the feeling,” Tort muttered.
“Regardless,” T’yl interjected, “he may be losing cohesion. Can you talk with him?”
“Grandpa?”
“Yo,” I responded. She shook her head.
“I can’t hear him.”
“But you can see him? And he can see you?”
I nodded. Tianna nodded.
“Ask him how he… no, ask him if he feels all right,” T’yl instructed. I nodded again and gave Tianna a thumbs-up.
“He does. He can hear you, too.”
“That’s good.”
“He’s leaking,” Tianna reported. I glanced down at myself. I didn’t see anything wrong. I looked as I usually do—lean, wiry, and naked as a jaybird. Apparently, I don’t have a spiritual body-image that includes clothes. Somehow, I wind up naked far more often than I find comfortable or convenient. Where’s the Comics Code Authority to preserve my clothes, modesty, and what little dignity I have?
T’yl dragged the corpse out of the containment diagram, smearing blood everywhere as he did so. I waited while he whisked the blood away from the painted lines and double-checked the containment spells. While he did so, I carefully kept inside the lines on the theory they were there for a reason. If the surgeon is setting up an operating theater for you, you don’t go wandering off or play with the instruments. It’s rude.
Tort brought over a familiar-looking crystal. It was one of the quantum computer cores I’d brought back from my own world. She put it down in the middle of the diagram and everyone moved away.
“Ask him if he—excuse me. My angel, would you please try to enter the crystal?”
I shrugged and pointed a toe, as though slipping into a boot. I continued to slip into it, carefully.
“He’s trying,” Tianna told them.
As I continued to slide into it, I felt a sort of resistance, then a block. I made it in up to about my knee—about like pulling on a tall boot. I pushed a bit, but I thought I could feel it start to give. I pulled my foot out again and shook my head at Tianna.
“He won’t fit. He barely gets in up to one knee.”
Tort and T’yl glanced at each other. They didn’t like that. Tort’s spirit showed no change I could see; she seemed remarkably unmoved by the news. That seemed odd, possibly even unnatural. T’yl’s spirit showed more than a hint of humiliation and concern.
“I have a drastic idea,” T’yl said. “How badly is he leaking?”
“If the diagram will hold,” Tianna answered, regarding me carefully, “he should saturate the interior and stabilize in half a candle-band, probably less.”
“If it will hold?” T’yl echoed, somewhat affronted.
“Remember what we are trying to contain,” Tort reminded him.
“Goddess-biting monster,” he muttered, and rubbed his temples. “All right. We don’t have a crystal that will hold him. We can’t keep him in a diagram for long. My proposition is this: we put him in the mountain, itself.”
“It’s large enough,” Tianna mused, thoughtfully.
“Will not the mountain reject the invading spirit?” Tort asked. “It has done so before. When the Witches of Kamshasa tried to take control of it, it crushed the spirit of the—”
“It’s a risk,” T’yl admitted, “but he made the thing. It knows him. There should be room in there for it to let him share. It runs through the whole of the Eastrange most of Rethven, for the love of gods! For all anyone knows, it may have crossed the southern seas and eaten the Mountains of the Sun, as well. It can hold him. I’m sure of it.”
“I am not so sure,” Tort said. Tianna looked up at me. I shrugged. What was I going to do? Argue? Aside from waving my hands and mouthing words, how was I going to say anything? Maybe I should learn more sign language than “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t understand sign language.”
“We will try it,” Tianna decided. Tort wanted to argue, but swallowed it. T’yl moved quickly to get the chalk and start editing the diagram. Tort helped and, to my surprise, so did Tianna. I guess she decided to study wizardry after all.
They worked quickly, albeit with a few, “No, no, no! That goes here, this goes there!” moments. That’s one problem magic-workers often have; they all think they know how to do the spell and the others are wrong. It’s sometimes hard to get them to cooperate. Still, they were in a hurry, so I’m sure they ignored each other’s “mistakes.” Close enough for government work and all that.
Huh. Technically, I’m a king. It really is government work. This amuses me more than it probably should.
Once the diagram was complete, they paused to look it over and make sure they had it right. Tianna asked a question about the juxtaposition of a couple of symbols. Tort and T’yl took her questions seriously, but affirmed that the symbols were correctly drawn and placed—or close enough. There is always a lot of compromise when magicians work together.
“Ready?” T’yl asked. Tianna glanced up at me. I gave her a double thumbs-up. I had no idea what this was going to be like, but they obviously thought it was a life-or-death thing. I was along for the ride. What the hell.
Tort started the spell, T’yl chimed in, and Tianna gestured up a cloud of not-exactly-fire.
Then it all went swirly and the floor rushed up at me.
As a note, I’m not a creator. Life, energy, matter, it’s all the same. I move it around, change it, convert it. I can’t actually create life, only take it from somewhere and put it somewhere else.
Case in point: My mountain. It’s a rock. It’s a really big rock, but a rock. When I dumped living energy into it, I didn’t create a living being. All I did was allow it to take on some of the qualities of life, temporarily. It would eventually expend that living energy and return to being just another rock.
Later, while I slept within the stone, I dreamed up my nightmare of a matter-conversion reactor. With the power-transforming spells around it, turning energy into vital force, the mountain had an ongoing supply to keep it in a quasi-living state. Fundamentally, it was still an unliving rock, but it had a constant supply of vital force to keep giving it an artificial semblance of life.
See what I mean? I don’t create anything. All I do is move stuff around.
When two magicians and a fire-witch put me into the mountain, I found I suddenly had room and to spare. The mountain wasn’t merely a mountain; it was a body of stone, full of vitality. Sentient, but not sapient. It perceived experiences; it felt, it sensed. It didn’t reason. It didn’t think. It was alive without being intelligent. It didn’t have a soul.
It felt me enter into it and reacted to me as if I were an invader. Some reflex action directed a massive amount of power at me; my entry was similar to sticking a pin in a tiger. The moment it touched me, in the instant it reached for me to destroy me, it also knew me—knew me as though I were a part of it, a long-lost piece of the stone itself, and the destructive wave of energy vanished into a warm glow of well-being. It accepted me.
I say “it accepted me,” but it wasn’t a conscious decision. It was an automatic reaction, both the attack and its sudden halt. No one was in the stone with me. There was only me and a sense of presence. Nothing more.
The place was empty, aside from the feeling I wasn’t alone. It was just a feeling.
I stretched out, occupying my new and hopefully temporary body. It was a huge mountain, yes, but that was barely a beginning. It reached north, south, and west, occupying much of the Eastrange, and laid down long streamers of stone beyond, into and across Rethven. A thin line stretched eastward
, as though seeking after something. I could feel it like I could feel my skin, sense the passage of feet and hooves, wheels and runners, the flow of water, the movement of air. It was vast; I was vast. We were shaped by necessity and desire, guided by the warm thoughts of the other one—Tort? Probably Tort—and in thousands of little ways by the touch of hands and minds.
Deep beneath me—that is, deep beneath Karvalen proper—I could feel the burning heart of the mountain, deeper than ever before, buried under more and more stone as the mountain grew downward, sinking its roots into the world.
It was my mountain. I knew it in that moment, all of it, understood it completely, and I loved it. I was it.
I don’t know how long I spent being part of the stone, a living piece of the world. My reverie was broken by a flare of power directed at me. I recognized it as a spell closely akin to the one I used to communicate with the mountain, long ago. It was a message in a spell, slowed down to match the pace of a living piece of rock.
I couldn’t understand it. It was playing the message at a rate appropriate for a piece of living geology, far too slow for me. Which begged the question of how I was thinking if I didn’t have a brain? Silicon? Piezoelectric crystals in neural patterns? Silver strands for nerve connections and semiconductor metals for neurons? Did the mountain have these things already, or was it forming them because I was inside it? Would it retain and use such things after I left? Or was there some other, less physical explanation?
With some effort, I narrowed my focus of attention, zeroing in on the place where the message spell originated. I could feel the containment diagram in that room, high up, under the peak of the mountain, with T’yl still standing next to the wall. He touched the wall, monitoring the message spell’s progress. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel his presence.
I put some feedback into the spell. T’yl jerked his hand away from the wall; this caused him to fade somewhat from my awareness. He was still there, but ghostly, less definite.
A moment later, he came back into focus, so to speak, and I heard him.
“Are you in there?”
“I am.” I’m not sure how we spoke, but I think he simply projected thoughts through a magical filter. When I projected back at him, he heard me.
“Then it worked. Good. Tort is on her way to deal with your doppelganger. Tianna is working with Beltar and Seldar to try and suppress the uprising, assuming this works.”
“Uprising?”
“You were a great king,” T’yl told me, “because you knew your limits and used people who were better than you. Your doppelganger insists—insisted—on ruling absolutely, which has given Tyma an enormous amount to work with regarding tyrants.”
“…and?”
“She has been your worst enemy—your other you. If he had ever managed to find her, I doubt not she would be screaming in the dungeons even now.”
“Ah. Yes, I can sort of see that. She isn’t the most tactful person.”
“That’s not how I would put it. At any rate, her songs are popular on the other side of the Eastrange, less so in Karvalen. Nonetheless, there are those who dislike you.”
“I’m not surprised. Now, about this uprising?”
“The Church of Light still exists.”
“I thought I destroyed them.”
“You destroyed the Hand,” T’yl corrected, “or mostly. The Church hierarchy continued to exist, albeit greatly weakened. The structure may have toppled, but the religion remains. Since they are actively persecuted on the western side of the Eastrange, many of them are here, in Karvalen. Beltar thinks they know—somehow!—that the King may visit, and so are planning an attempt on your/his life.”
“Seems reasonable. I’ll want to know more about this.”
“I understand, but we are on something of a schedule.”
“Oh?”
“Once our plan was set in motion, we cannot stop or go back.”
“Fair enough. Are we in a hurry right now?”
“No. We’re waiting for the next phase.”
“So, while we wait, what have we got?”
“First, the plan. Tort has a method to vacate your body, empty it out. If that works, you must be ready to listen to the Dragonsword.”
“Whoa, hold it! If the body is emptied of any animating spirit, it goes on autopilot—it becomes a soulless thing that operates according to the personality imprint in the brain. Are you sure that’s wise?”
“You would rather be plunged into spiritual combat with your own darker nature?” T’yl asked, sweetly.
I had to admit, he had a point. Not one I liked, you understand, but a point.
“What’s the rest of the plan?” I asked, grudgingly.
“Firebrand will be on his hip. With your body emptied out, the Dragonsword should be able to guide you into possessing it. Since it is yours, you should be able to take up occupancy again with no trouble.”
“I hear more than one ‘should’ in there.”
“It has never been done before in this manner,” T’yl admitted. “You are the only—ha!—living expert at the transfer of souls. Tort has never done it; it would have raised questions and suspicions for her to even try. She has risked herself too often as it is to gain enough information and trust to formulate this plan.”
“So, when Firebrand calls me, I go where it points?”
“That’s the idea.”
“What about Bronze?”
“She must remain hidden. If he knew she was here, he would destroy her, or so she seems to think. No one can really understand her, but she can nod or tap a hoof in answer to questions.”
“All right. How long do we have to wait?”
“Until after sunset—three or four bands of the candle, no more. Tort will pretend to assist him in locating the source of the psychic penetration—when the Dragonsword opened the way for us to draw you out. The story she will tell is that her mirror will show what happened during the psychic assault. He will want to see. Once his reflection is in the mirror, she will transfer the creature out of your body and into the reflection. Then you will be free to retake your body while Tort keeps him trapped in the mirror. Then you destroy the mirror. Firebrand will guide you through it.”
“And what are Tianna and Beltar doing? And Seldar? And where is my daughter?”
“Amber is in Mochara, preparing to intercede with the Mother of Flame in the hope She will either aid us in this endeavor or, at the very least, fail to actively oppose it.”
“Fair enough.”
“Publicly, Seldar is in town to visit the Temple of Justice here. He is actually looking into the Church of Light and attempting to discover more about their current organization and plans. From what I’m told, you are known as a horrifying monster in Carrillon and as a savage conqueror elsewhere in old Rethven. Locally, in Karvalen and Mochara, you are more pleasantly regarded—there was no need for savage conquest here, your daughter and granddaughter speak highly of you, and the Church of Shadow is based here.”
T’yl paused to sigh.
“It would have been so much simpler if you had simply banned the worship of the Lord of Light,” he told me.
“I had other things on my mind.”
“Apparently. The appointed Baron forbade it for you—whether because your other self ordered it or out of a personal distaste, I have no idea. They still seem to find Karvalen a congenial location, though. Whether it is because you moved your capitol—and presence—to Carrillon, or because they feel being close to your chief Temple of Shadow is important, I cannot say.”
“But… okay, hold on. There’s a baron in charge of Karvalen?”
“Appointed to the post, yes. Baron Gosford.”
“And the Church of Light is—is it based here, or just gathered here?”
“That’s one of the things Seldar is attempting to ascertain.”
“I see. I think I see. Well, no, I don’t, but I’ll accept what you say pending further explanation. Back to the more immedia
te concerns?”
“Of course. By now, Tianna is helping Apostle Beltar evacuate the interior of the mountain—”
“Apostle Beltar?” The actual word was deveas (deh-VEE-ahs), meaning messenger, or one sent forth, with a clear understanding either the message or the sender thereof was of divine origin.
“Sir Beltar is First of the Faithful, High Priest of the Church of Shadow and leader of the Knights of the Order of the Shadow.”
See what happens when you believe in someone? They turn around and believe in you right back. I could think of other ways he could have shown his gratitude. Becoming a priest was not my first choice. Meanwhile, T’yl continued talking.
“Tort has told your other self the evacuation of the mountain is for security. With the Church of Light presence in the city and a strong anti-king faction within the Wizards’ Guild, it is a valid concern. The usurper agreed. He’s rather paranoid, and he cares not a bit for the trouble and time this will cost others.”
“I’m not surprised, especially if he knows I’m not in the basement anymore.”
“Basement?” T’yl asked.
“Long story.”
“We do have a few bands,” he pointed out. Since they tell time around here by using banded candles, that worked out to a couple of hours. What the hell. I went ahead and explained. T’yl was, of course, horrified. Magicians who messed around with the architecture in their own heads seemed to always go insane. It was one of the things he and Tort had emphasized in their lectures and training at the Wizards’ Guild. A mental study is all fine and dandy, but once you’ve got it, stop messing with it!
A lesson I failed to learn, obviously. At least, until it bit me. The burned hand teaches best, and all that.
“It sounds as though if you hadn’t upset the natural balance of your mind,” T’yl told me, “you would have been able to defeat it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Rub it in. I don’t need you to tell me that; I figured it out all on my own. Sucking it straight in was a mistake, too. I’ve got a lot of those on my record, okay? I’m awesome, not perfect.”
