Fire and Dust

by James Gardner

  The Fox had managed his escape with the help of the other leader of this group, a human woman named Rivi. She was not a sorcerer – Miriam claimed that Rivi hated sorcerers, although she got along well with a barmy like the Fox – but Rivi could still do things that struck Miriam as magic: reading minds, for example, or projecting her thoughts through the building to give orders to underlings.

  «Oh,» said Hezekiah. «Rivi must be psionic.»

  «What do you know about psionics?» I asked him.

  «How do you think I teleport?» he replied. «I'm not a magician.»

  «I thought you were.»

  «Nope. It's all mind over matter.»

  Hmm. If Hezekiah's mind could win that kind of contest, it substantially lowered my opinion of matter.

  * * *

  Miriam didn't know exactly what Rivi and the Fox were up to, but they wanted to find something that was buried in the dust a long time ago. The mysterious object had been unearthed once before, by an expedition under the leadership of Felice DeVail, Guvner Oonah's mother. The Fox had belonged to that expedition, along with members of many other Sigil factions; they had toured several planes including Dust, eventually jumping by accident into the middle of the Gray Wastes and finding themselves trapped between hostile armies in the Blood Wars raging there.

  Most of the party had died in short order; the Fox had been battered by evil magics, and driven insane; but a few, including Felice, had escaped unscathed, dragging the Fox with them and eventually making their way back to Sigil. Naturally, the survivors had all reported these events to their factions, depositing personal accounts of the expedition in the various faction archives. Just as naturally, the Fox had set about stealing those accounts from faction headquarters the moment Rivi freed him. His eagerness to return here suggested that the long-ago expedition had found some kind of treasure in the Plane of Dust but hadn't taken it with them. Now, the Fox had come back to collect that treasure, using the information he had stolen from the factions.

  Miriam's story introduced a dozen new puzzles about what was going on, but such questions could wait. At least we knew something about our opposition now: fire-wizard Fox, psionic Rivi, and an assortment of bashers from Sigil. There was only one other question in my mind, and I asked it. «If Petrov and his cronies captured some prisoners, where would he take them?»

  «To Rivi,» Miriam answered immediately. «She can do things to people's minds. She can… change you. Back when she and the Fox were recruiting people, they hired two first-rate knights of the post: sneak thieves. Only problem was, the thieves wouldn't work together – one was githyanki, the other githzerai. Hated each other like poison. So Rivi took them away for a few hours, and next thing you know, they're bosom buddies. Lifelong friends. She did something spooky to their brains.»

  «Is that really possible?» I whispered to Hezekiah. It irked me to turn to a Clueless for information, but he was the only authority we had on psionic powers.

  «Rearranging a person's thoughts can be tricky,» he whispered back. «Making it permanent is even harder. It once took Uncle Toby a whole day to stop two kings from declaring war with each other. Of course, he had to fix up their generals too, so that's what dragged out the time.»

  «Your Uncle… painted over their minds?» I pictured how easily I could change a frown to a smile with just a few strokes of the brush. Was it that easy for Uncle Toby? Was it equally easy for Rivi? If this brainpainter had enough time to work on Yasmin, to rape her mind…

  «We have to save the others,» I said. «We have to save them now.»

  «Where can we find this Rivi?» Wheezle asked quietly.

  «Her quarters are on the lower level,» Miriam replied. «I can show you.»

  I glanced at Wheezle, raising my eyebrows. «We cannot trust her,» Wheezle said, answering my unasked question. «On the other hand, it is safer to take her with us than leave her or kill her. As long as she remains in our hands, she has an incentive to cooperate.» The little gnome turned to her. «You understand what these wights will do if you betray us?»

  The wights leered in her face, but she just jutted out her chin. «I know the game,» she answered. «I'll play.»

  «And I'll make sure she does,» Hezekiah said. «I'll take her under my wing.»

  He moved to her side and smiled. Suddenly, he was terrifying again – his face didn't change a muscle, but his smile took on the unnatural brightness of a killer, the placid tranquility of a child who could slay its mother without conscience. In that face was all the cruelty of childhood, the taunts, the bullying, the inventive tortures of insects and younger siblings.

  «You'll be good, won't you?» Hezekiah told Miriam. Then he was simply a Clueless boy again, his smile only a smile, his face only an eighteen-year-old face.

  I couldn't stand to look at it.

  «Don't worry about me,» Miriam mumbled. «You're my high-up man, you are.» She edged away from him but kept her head lowered, like a dog showing submission to a wolf.

  «Then we're all set,» the boy said. «Let's get going.»

  * * *

  With a pair of wights taking the lead, we proceeded down the corridor. Below us, in the circular arena surrounded by the ring of the Glass Spider, other wights continued to wade through the dust, searching for who-knew-what. I wondered how big their target was. Something the size of a needle would take days to find, but something substantial, like a spellbook or a magic sword, would surely turn up soon; there was a lot of ground to cover out there, but there were a lot of wights searching.

  If we didn't rescue Yasmin and the others before the wights found their objective, I knew we'd all be in big trouble. No one went to all this bother for something innocuous.

  Soon, we were approaching the next intersection of a radial arm with the Spider's central ring. As before, a furniture-filled lounge occupied the area where the arm connected with the body; but in the center of the room was a spiral wrought-iron staircase leading down to a lower level. The iron was bare and unpainted, yet I couldn't see the slightest fleck of rust – either these steps were scoured daily by a platoon of wights with sandpaper, or there was some kind of magic at work, maintaining this place in pristine condition. I put my money on the magic: the whole Glass Spider was in good upkeep, but it had an air of antiquity about it, as if it had endured for eons, impervious to decay.

  Miriam gestured that we should go down the stairs. Wheezle stopped her and sent two wights ahead to see if the way was clear. They came back smiling their pointy grins and hissing in a relaxed fashion that suggested no one was lurking in ambush. We formed up our company again, wights at the head and rear, more wights tightly surrounding Miriam; then we began our descent.

  As we climbed downward, my ears picked up a rumbling in the distance. It took me a few seconds to identify the sound; but then I remembered a tour I had taken of The Lady's Chime, that huge clock tower just down the street from Sigil's Hall of Speakers. The upper floors of the tower had echoed with the clicking of gears, the whirr of flywheels, and the ratcheting of counterweights pulling time forward. The rumble I heard now had the same sort of mechanical edge to it – a giant clockworks muttering to itself. We must be approaching the machinery that allowed the Glass Spider to move.

  A long arcing corridor led us away from the stairs, and soon the air filled with the smell of metal: bare metal, oiled metal, hot metal. The corridor was lit by glass globes suspended from the ceiling; each globe burned bright and white from some inner fire. Their light revealed that Hezekiah had linked his arm with Miriam's as soon as we reached this lower floor. Clearly, he didn't want to risk her running away while he'd been appointed to watch her.

  The mechanical rumble grew louder as we continued forward. Ahead lay an open doorway, and beyond that was a room full of metal machinery: I recognized gears, chain-belts, cables, and other simple trappings, but the great bulk of equipment was beyond my comprehension. How could one understand a bank of square crystals glowing with hieroglyphs of light,
or huge metal drums that occasionally hissed steam through red-hot stopcocks? What was the purpose of a dozen metal pistons pounding in and out of smoking cylinders, or a gold stalactite mounted above a copper stalagmite with squirts of lightning leaping between their points? All I knew was that the air burned and reeked with oil, like the vestibule of some fiery hell.

  Wheezle stopped us once more and turned a questioning gaze toward Miriam. «It's always like this,» the woman shrugged. «You're a gnome – you should know about machines.»

  «I specialize in death, not devices,» Wheezle replied. «Are we close to where this Rivi would be?»

  «Her quarters are in this machine room,» Miriam said. «She likes it here.»

  «How can she sleep with all this noise?»

  «She says it just takes discipline. Rivi is hot blazing barmy about discipline.»

  «Why doesn't that surprise me?» I muttered. But Wheezle was already leading us forward.

  * * *

  A machine room full of moving parts is no place to go when your nerves are on edge. Gears clank; you whirl, expecting an attack. Steam erupts from a release valve; it leaves cloudy films on nearby surfaces, looking like ghosts out the corner of your eye. Pistons bang and conveyor belts flap; so much motion, so many nooks for enemies to hide. Every second, there was something new to jump at.

  «There's a control room over in the corner,» Miriam said above the clatter of machinery. «That's where Rivi spends most of her time.»

  «Then you stay here with Hezekiah,» I told her. «Wheezle and I will see if Rivi's home.»

  «Whack her the second you see her,» Miriam advised. «She'll addle your chops if you don't.»

  «No loyalty toward your former boss?» I asked.

  «None,» Miriam replied. «If you don't put Rivi down, she'll turn my brains to cheese for helping you.»

  «We shall try to avoid that eventuality,» Wheezle said. Kowtowing briefly to those who were staying behind, he gathered a selection of wights and gestured for me to take the lead.

  The control room in the corner had thick concrete walls without a single window. An odd design – if you were a worker controlling the machinery, wouldn't it be nice to see what the equipment was doing? On the other hand, perhaps the room was not a command post where you calmly watched gauges so much as a bunker to take cover when you pushed the wrong button.

  The door to the control room was closed. I took one side of it, Wheezle took the other, and the wights stood directly back from the opening, ready to charge in as soon as I turned the knob. Holding up his fingers, Wheezle counted off Three, Two, One. Flick, I threw open the door, and with a clatter of toe-claws across cement, the wights leapt forward. I jumped in right behind them, my rapier drawn and ready to impale anyone who could paint obscenities over other people's brains.

  There was nobody home.

  Undoubtedly, however, someone did live in this room. In the back corner was a small cot, its crisp sheets tucked and folded with a precision that would satisfy the most fastidious member of the Harmonium. Around the walls, wooden tables held neat stacks of paper, numerous books alphabetized by title, and a few scrolls hung on pine dowels. The whole place had an air of obsessive organization.

  I turned my back on it. «Rivi's not here.»

  «True,» Wheezle nodded. «But her library is. It could teach us a great deal about her intentions.»

  «It would take days to read all this, and that's assuming it's written in a language we understand. Let's keep moving.»

  «Surely we can spare a minute to glance at a page or two,» Wheezle said.

  I waved my arm at the collection. «Which page?»

  «The oldest.» He shuffled to the closest table and peered at the stacks – paper, parchment, vellum, papyrus. «The oldest,» he went on, «is most likely to tell of the beginning of things. Obscure secrets. Forgotten wisdom.» He moved to another table. «I have studied a number of ancient languages and am quite fluent in… ah, this looks interesting.»

  Standing on tiptoe, he pushed away a stack of papers to reveal something underneath: a clay tablet, covered with scratchy marks like the footprints of a mouse. At some point in the past, the tablet had broken into three flat pieces; later on, Rivi or someone else had reassembled the pieces like parts of a puzzle, imbedding them in newer clay to hold them together. I had to admit, it certainly looked like the oldest document in the room.

  «Can you read it?» I asked.

  «I have seen the script before,» Wheezle replied. «The language is called Urqlish – extremely old. Some say it predates the eldest gods. No one knows how to pronounce its words, but my mentors taught me how to decipher such writings. The Urqs, whoever they were, left massive volumes of text to posterity. Much of it deals with incomprehensible facets of their culture, but this… this is something different.»

  «What does it say?»

  «Let me see. The Words of Savant… I can't make out the savant's name, but it doesn't matter. The Words of Savant whoever to his liege lord: Know, O Queen…»

  Know, O Queen, that in the mists of the past, things were not as they are today. There was a time when the secrets of magic were hidden from the seven races; indeed, some scholars say there was a time before magic was born, when humans alone lived in a fresh and simple world.

  But the flower of magic blossomed in its time, and the simple world yielded to a more complicated age. Wizards seized great power for themselves; and in the way of all souls, some used their power for good while others used it for evil. Often, rival sorcerers waged terrible war on each other, devastating the land and slaughtering innocents by the thousands.

  At that time, our gods were not yet born. Some sages claim that the beings who walked the hidden places of the land were not true gods at all: they were mere mortals, but able to command engines of such puissance that our ancestors mistook them for gods. I do not know the truth of it, O Queen; but I can tell you there were celestial powers of one type or another who watched the havoc wrought by magicians and shook their heads in sorrow.

  Some of these powers sought to curb the destruction by creating sorcerers of their own: priests who would shape the forces of magic in obedience to their patron's will. Thus began the practice of gods granting spells to the most devout of their followers.

  But some celestial powers believed that fighting magic with magic was purest folly. «Surely,» these powers said, «the best way to stop this madness is to stop magic itself.» For many days, they debated how they could do this. The flux of magic had come to fill the multiverse, and no one was strong enough to exhaust the supply. At last, however, one group of powers, the most exalted among their colleagues, devised a plan: if they could not shut off the flux itself, they could at least prevent lesser beings from sculpting the flux, so that humans and others could no longer wield the stuff of sorcery.

  Then gathered the greatest of those powers. Their names are forgotten; we know them only as the Warrior, the Poet, the Witch, the Prayer, the Healer, the Scholar, and Death. Using all the knowledge at their command, they constructed a laughably simple device – a grinder, such as a peasant might use to grind out pepper or salt. This grinder, however, ground out a never-ending supply of sticky white dust.

  Such a simple thing; and yet, the dust was not simple. In the presence of a concentration of magic, the dust fed on that magic and grew as hot as molten steel – a magical heat so pure and piercing it could burn the very fiends of the pit. Now imagine, O Queen, what might happen to your court mage if he had particles of such dust on his clothes or skin. As he began to cast a spell, he would draw into himself the flux of magical energies, concentrating it within his being… when suddenly, his skin would sear with agony, his clothes catch fire! Wracked with pain, he could not complete the spell; or if he pressed on by sheer force of will, he would continue to burn until he turned to ash.

  This was the plan of the celestial powers – to grind out such dust and spread it throughout the world… indeed, through all the realms of t
he multiverse. In every place, the dust would disperse, settling on people, on plants and animals, on houses and seas; and how could mages escape that dust? It would settle on their bodies, their clothes, their food, their drink… no amount of washing could get every particle.

  Armed with the grinder, its creators began to tour the Ten Thousand Worlds. Wherever they spread their dust, magicians quickly ended their sorceries. Of course, some sought to develop spells to protect themselves from the dust; but how could they cast such enchantments? Even those who thought themselves flameproof, who danced with fire and drank molten rock, found themselves ravaged by the dust's awful heat. Thus all sorcery was suspended, and for a time, the Ten Thousand Worlds returned to the simplicity of life without magic. Most people, I believe, breathed a sigh of relief.

  But what of the other celestial powers… the ones who had armed their priests with magicks of their own? Those powers raged in fury at the anti-magic dust; for the deities with magic-wielding followers revelled in the influence exerted by their priests, and without magic, the priests were mortals like anyone else. Congregations began to ask uncomfortable questions, the most important being, «Do I truly want to worship this god?» People may bow their heads to any deity if there are sufficient rewards for devotion, or punishments for disobedience; but if the rewards and punishments stop, congregations soon realize some deities are less worthy of worship than others.

  Great were the howls of wrath from celestial powers snubbed by their flocks. They raged against the creators of the grinder, and banded together to declare a war of vengeance. Long did the battle thunder through the heavens. The seven creators were the greatest of the powers, but arrayed against them were so many angered deities that at last the seven were defeated. I cannot tell you their fates, O Queen; some scholars say the creators were obliterated, while others say they were torn apart but soon re-formed to become the gods we revere today.