by Rick Cook
"Give me your hand."
"What do you want that for?"
Mikey picked up the Exacto knife lying next to the hibachi. "I don’t, I want some of your blood."
Craig winced as Mikey drove the point into his fingertip. "Hey! Not so rough, okay?"
But the blood flowed freely and Mikey held Craig’s hand over the hibachi, letting the dark red drops drip onto the glowing coals.
Craig wrinkled his nose at the odor, but Mike didn’t seem to notice. He reached into the coffee cup, picked up a four-finger pinch of the powder there and cast it onto the coals where Craig’s blood still sizzled. The powder sparkled as it hit the charcoal and heavy sweet-smelling smoke boiled up out of the hibachi.
Craig coughed and his eyes watered, but he grabbed Mike’s outstretched hands in his across the glowing coals. Then he looked down at the notes to the side of the hibachi and both of them began to chant, reading the words in unison.
The smoke got thicker and thicker until Craig could hardly see the paper and the sweetish, pungent odor made his head swim. He shut out the discomfort and chanted for all he was worth as the room began to shimmer and dissolve around him.
Eight: THE OLD ONES
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Old Arab proverb
So with friends like these, who needs enemies?
Old Jewish proverb
Smoke and fire and candlelight…
At first Craig thought the place was on fire. There was smoke or fog everywhere and a dim red light coming from the wrong angle. Between the smoke and the dim red light, Craig couldn’t see very well and somehow he was very glad for that. What he could see was wrong, like an optical illusion.
They were in a cave, or maybe on a mountain crag. The ground under them was rough rock, kind of, and it sloped away so steeply that Craig was afraid to take a step. The air was thin and hard to breathe, or maybe just so full of smoke there wasn’t much oxygen in it. His chest heaved as he sucked great, unsatisfying lungs full. He clutched Mikey’s hands tight in his own. Mikey squeezed back so hard Craig’s hands hurt.
Craig was scared. For the first time in his life he was so afraid the very marrow of his bones chilled. He didn’t care about treasure, or adventuring, or magic. This place played on dark half-realized places in his psyche in ways that were horrible. He just wanted out.
Then he realized they were being watched.
It loomed above them in the fog, tall and manlike. There was a hint of distance about it as if it was enormous, but there was no way to tell. In the smoky red haze Craig could make out the outline, including the pointed ears. There was a suggestion of body hair, or maybe fur. Worst of all, it seemed to twist and flicker like an image in a mirage. Looking at the thing made Craig’s eyes hurt, but he couldn’t make himself look away.
Craig wanted to moan in terror, to yell a warning, to scream, but he couldn’t get his breath to do any of it. All he could do was stare at the half-seen creature and cling to Mikey’s hands for dear life.
"Who are you?" Mikey finally got out.
We are what was and what might be. The voice filled Craig’s head like ringing thunder until he wanted to clap his hands to his ears to shut it out. We are what will be again. The voice pressed on. We are the dawn and nightfall and deepest night. We are… Ur-elves.
"We, ah, we weren’t expecting this."
We know, the voice came again and there was amusement in the rolling words. But you called and we answered.
"Why did you bring us here?"
To serve.
"Then you want to make a deal, right?" Mikey said, the words low and fast, as if he was desperate.
We have a bargain, the voice thundered inexorably. Sealed in blood. Craig thought of his finger, still throbbing where Mikey had pricked it, and moaned aloud.
Your talents will serve us. Your magic will be the spearhead of our power. You will bring down those who stand between us and our fulfillment and lay waste to their world.
Craig closed his eyes tightly and moaned again. The thing and its words were awful and terrifying and…
Attractive.
Nine: WORLDS’ MEETING
Come closer, the thing said. Come closer and watch.
As if moving through a zoom lens Craig and Mikey were sped to the side of the Ur-elf. Craig still couldn’t form a clear impression of what it looked like and for that he was just as glad.
Craig had the impression of two huge, shaggy hands cupped before him, hands with claws for nails. There was something glowing in the hollow, like a living coal. The radiance expanded and grew brighter until his face was bathed with yellow light. The light turned cloudy. Then it cleared and they were looking down on a world held in the Ur-elf’s palms.
There was deep blue ocean and spotted through it were islands. As Craig watched the islands formed as faceted images, then smoothed and took on color and texture. Vaguely he sensed that one end of this place connected to his own world and the other end to the world of magic.
Again the zooming effect and they were falling toward a large island in the center of the ocean. The place was long and narrow, with reddish brown desert shading from mountains at one end down through brown-yellow plains in the center to lush gray-green at the other end.
Faster and faster they fell, closer and closer to the mountains at the desert end. Craig sucked in his breath as the mountain peaks rushed up toward them.
Then suddenly they were standing on the tallest peak of all, looking out over the mountains and desert.
In this place the magic of both worlds works, the voice inside their heads told them. It is yours for now. Make good use of it.
And then they were alone on the crag.
Craig tasted bile on his tongue. His head hurt with a roaring, throbbing ache that threatened to take the top of his skull off with every beat of his hammering heart. Mikey didn’t look too much better.
The two looked at each other for a long moment while the chill mountain wind whipped around them and tugged at their clothing.
"Come on," Mikey said at last. "Let’s get to work."
The amazing thing was, Craig realized, he already knew this stuff. He didn’t have to think about how to do it, he could already make magic.
Working alongside Mikey, he sketched out the form of their new home, the citadel and fortress which would be their base for the attack into the new world.
Shadowy cloud forms hovered around the peak as the pair pushed and shaped the outlines of their castle. It would be small at first, covering no more than the top of the peak. But already Craig could visualize its spread as a great stronghold and arsenal to pour forth the sinews of conquest.
It was somehow right that they should conquer this world of magic. It was the natural order of things, meant to be. As he shaped and formed, Craig realized in the back of his mind he hadn’t always felt that way. But that was immaterial, like a long-ago dream. This was fated and he would bend all his talents to seizing this other world.
Something told him that those talents were now considerable.
A push, a twist, a sudden shimmering coalescence and their magic castle was done! Craig breathed a sigh and admired their creation.
The walls soared straight up out of the sides of the peak. Towers and turrets sprouted everywhere, flags flew from the staffs and whipped in the incessant wind. It was magnificent!
At least it was magnificent for a first effort. He had to admit that the walls leaned askew in a couple of places and that some of the towers slumped as if half-melted. Some of the windows were funny shapes too. And somehow it wasn’t as big as he had imagined it would be.
"Needs a lot of work," Mikey said.
"It’s pretty good for a first effort."
Mikey shrugged. "Come on. Let’s get the hell out of this wind."
Together they strode over the canting drawbridge and through the lopsided gate of their redoubt.
Craig looked at his handiwork sitting in the flagged stone courtyar
d and suppressed a pang of disappointment. It was smaller than he had thought it would be, maybe ten feet from wingtip to wingtip. The color was a nice battleship gray, just like a real F-15, and the twin tails stood proudly above the jet exhausts, but somehow it didn’t look just right. It looked kind of like an F-15 Eagle, or maybe a Russian Foxhound or Flanker interceptor, or maybe even a Navy Tomcat. He tried to remember just exactly what an F-15 looked like and found he couldn’t separate the images of twin-engine, twin-tail interceptors in his mind.
Well, all right, it would have to do. They needed air defense, didn’t they? This might not be exactly right, but it could fly and it could fight. That was good enough.
Anyway, there was some good stuff. The conformal fuel tanks along the sides of the fuselage under the wings were right. And the missiles and drop tanks hanging from the pylons beneath the wings and body looked right. Who cared if it wasn’t perfect? It was wicked and it was all his.
"Hey Mikey," he yelled, "look what I’ve got."
"Yeah?" Mikey came out of the main keep, wiping his hands on a rag.
"There," Craig gestured proudly. "It’s a robot F-15."
Mikey walked over to the plane. "Bullshit."
"Huh?"
"Bullshit. Look, you’ve got a missile under the left wing and a drop tank under the right."
"So?"
"So what happens if you drop the tank or fire the missile? You’ve got an unbalanced load on the plane. And anyway, that missile isn’t off an F-15. It looks Russian or something. And you’ve got the center drop tank painted with a red nose, like a bomb."
"So who the hell cares? It will fly and it can fight. All right? That’s what’s important, isn’t it?"
"Who’s it going to fight?" Mikey demanded. "We’re the only people in this world. You think the Russians are going to come swarming in here or something?"
"We’re here to fight someone," Craig said stubbornly. "They told us so."
"Oh yeah," Mikey agreed. "We’re gonna have to fight all right. But shit like this," he gestured at the plane, "isn’t going to be what decides that battle."
"Oh yeah? Well, what will decide that fucking battle, hotshot?"
Mikey got that sneering smile Craig had come to hate. "Something a lot more powerful than any robot airplane. You’ll see when the time comes."
Well, fuck you very much! Craig thought as Mikey disappeared back into their lumpy castle. He picked up a loose stone and threw it against the castle wall with all his strength.
He needed a better way to do this. He’d created the F-15 just by imagining it, but the problem with that was that you had to imagine all the details at once. That was too hard.
Okay, so what about breaking it down? Suppose you could imagine something one part at a time, like drawing it out on paper? Or on a computer screen! Yeah. Like a workstation!
What he needed was a magical workstation. Already the image was forming in his mind. He’d never seen a jet fighter up close, but he knew exactly what a workstation was like. Of course, he’d want to make a few improvements.
Craig left the misshapen fighter sitting in the courtyard. He’d do a hell of a lot better the next time, but he was going to build that fighter anyway. Squadrons and squadrons of them, just on principle.
* * *
It took him nearly three days, but at last Craig had his workstation. The "screen" was a gently glowing rectangle nearly a yard across. There was a keyboard and a mouse, of course, but the system also had voice input. If he really wanted he could just think hard at the screen and make things happen.
The display was an engineer’s dream. Infinite resolution, at least sixteen million colors, three-dimensional, fully shaded modeling and redraws at better than sixty frames a second. He could design anything on this baby!
Craig stared at the glowing surface and tried to think of his first project. Maybe jet fighters were a little old fashioned for what they needed to do. They needed weapons that were more far-out, more science-fictional.
Like giant robots! Yeah, now there was something he could really get into. He’d always liked Robobattle, where the gamers slugged it out in twenty-fifth-century robot war machines. Now he could actually build something like that.
Instinctively he reached for the mouse and began to sketch designs on his super-workstation. More accurately, he tried to remember what the warbots in Robobattle were like. They were nice and impressive and in the game they had a lot of firepower. Then there were the giant intelligent tanks from Orc. And magic! Yeah, what would it be like to have a couple of hundred megaton/seconds of firepower and the destruction spells of a Seventh-Level Mage? That would be really something.
Working with bits and pieces from computer games, role-playing games and old television shows, Craig began to fashion his engines of destruction. It never occurred to him that he had the power to do something original.
"See?" Craig said eagerly. "I can design stuff here on the screen and then build it magically."
Mikey looked over Craig’s workstation and didn’t say anything.
"I don’t have to imagine it all in one piece. I can work on it a piece at a time, and…"
"So build me a planet buster."
"Huh?"
"Come on. Whip me up something that can blow up a whole planet." He smacked his fist into his palm. "Pow! Just like that."
"It doesn’t work that way," Craig said uncomfortably.
"Why not?"
"You’ve got to have at least a general idea of how something’s supposed to work before you can build it."
"You mean we’ve got to sit down and fucking design all this shit?"
"No, not that bad. But we’ve got to know how the stuff functions or it won’t work."
"Jesus fuckin’ Christ," Mikey muttered. "What a pile of shit."
"You wanna go back and tell them that?" Craig snapped. "I sure as hell ain’t gonna."
Mikey grinned in that nasty, superior way of his. "Maybe I will do that the next time I talk to them."
Craig’s jaw dropped. "You’ve been talking to them?"
"They’re around, if you want to make contact."
"But Jesus, I mean…"
"They’re real interesting too. I’m learning a lot from them."
The way he said it made Craig uncomfortable. "You mean magic and stuff?"
Mikey grinned again. "Oh, I’m learning lots of things."
Craig knew he needed to learn more about how magic operated, but the thought of even seeing an Ur-elf again made him weak in the knees.
"Look, suppose you concentrate on the theoretical stuff and I’ll keep working on the robots and shit."
"Okay," Mikey said with a little smile. Craig had the uneasy feeling he’d been outmaneuvered again.
Mikey stopped at the doorway and turned back to Craig. "Oh, if you want to do something useful, redesign this fucking castle and make it more livable."
Okay, Craig thought, turning back to his workstation and away from thoughts of Ur-elves and magical theory. Let’s really turn this sucker into something!
Craig stood at the topmost point of the highest tower, surveyed his work and found it good.
The skimpy, saggy little castle they had formed out of pure magic was long gone. Now the entire top of the mountain had been terraced and leveled. What had been the original castle was now just the central piece of an elaborate structure. Even it was much changed.
Caermort-the Castle of Death, he thought. That’s what we’ll call it.
It certainly looked deadly enough. Energy cannons poked their ugly snouts out of domed turrets on the stone ramparts. The central tower of gleaming steel soared to neck-craning height, glittering like a mirror in the afternoon sun. Several of the courtyards had been roofed over with domes of crystal. Random bolts of lightning flew between towers and played over the domes. Further up the air sparkled and flickered as the protective magical shell around the castle interacted with random dust motes which were wafted into it.
W
ithin the castle itself hordes of servants, robots and living creatures hurried to do his bidding. In the caves dug into the mountain giant robots worked with monster tools to assemble more of their kind and other engines of destruction to boot.
It still wasn’t absolutely perfect, he admitted modestly. If he did not work a thing up in complete detail on his screen the details were likely to be filled in haphazardly.
But all in all it was a marvelous engine of destruction. All this power aimed at a single goal. Conquest. Already his drones scouted the limits of this world and his robot legions formed in the huge caverns beneath the mountain or exercised on the desert plains. Mikey might sneer, but he’d stop when Craig’s mechanical armies marched across the border between the worlds.
The border between both worlds, he amended silently. Why limit himself to the one where magic worked? There was no army on Earth that could stand against his creations.
Better to be Lord of Three Worlds, than Lord of Two, he decided.
Ten: WRECK’S WARNING
The programming team was up to its elbows in source code when Arianne came into their workroom.
"Forgive me, my Lords, my Lady," the tall blonde lady said as she entered the room. "Are you occupied?"
Wiz turned toward the door. "Occupied, but not super busy. What’s up?"
"Bal-Simba sent me to request your presence."
"Sure. In his office?"
"At Oak Island off the south coast. A strange thing has washed ashore at the village. Bal-Simba asks that you examine it."
Wiz looked over at the pile of scrolls and the shimmering letters hanging above his desk and paused. A summons to meet Bal-Simba here was one thing. A jaunt to a distant village to look at something was another matter. Even walking the Wizard’s Way, such a trip would probably eat the rest of the day.
"Can’t we just send one of our searching units?" he asked. "We do have to get this stuff done before-"
Arianne hesitated. "Lord, I think you had better see this personally."
