Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  Now I was at the door. My carry-all lay where I had left it. I threw down the disorganizer and scooped up the bag, looked about for Hespira. She had run a little way toward the rear of the cottage before stopping and turning to see if I was coming after her. She waited for me to cover the few steps between us, time enough for me to reach into the carry-all, find a line-of-sight energy pistol, and discard the bag.

  “Where?” she said.

  I looked around. The crystal still spun high overhead and the semi-opaque dome of the shield extended a good distance in all directions. Though it was meant to keep inimical forces out, I suspected that it would also keep us in. “Underground,” I said. “It will soon be very busy anywhere else. Look for a door.”

  The Arlem estate had been built as a series of subterranean halls, chambers, and passageways roofed in some places by light-admitting pools of water and in others by low, artificial hills. When I had first encountered the place, I had thought it the work of yet another of the eccentrics who were so common in this penultimate age of Old Earth as to perversely constitute the norm. But its creator, the late Blik Arlem, had been a collector of relics and arcana from the last reign of sympathetic association; it occurred to me now that he may have known of the significance of crossed ley lines and had deliberately dug his habitation right into the spot where two major channels of influence met. Only the scattered cottages that had housed his staff were built above ground.

  I would have liked to have had my assistant draped around my neck, to probe the earth and map a route for us, but I would have to rely on my own resources. I remembered the location of the main entrance, but that was too distant and even though the estate was no longer under the control of a house integrator, its front door who’s-there would still be active and possibly armed. It stood to reason, though, that somewhere near a servant’s cottage there would be a servant’s entrance, though designed to be unobtrusive.

  “There!” said Hespira, pointing to a low, turf-covered mound topped by a stone belvedere, set about with curved marble benches. I could not see whatever she had seen, but she took my arm and urged me along a path of crushed white stone toward the grassy slope. As we neared it, I saw what her sharp eye had spotted: an almost unnoticeable vertical line running through the short grass. I knelt and felt along its length until my fingers encountered a simple latch. I pushed then lifted, and an oblong of turf swung up on invisible counterweights, revealing a flight of stone steps descending into the ground.

  “In!” I said, then turned to see what was coming after us. I saw Devers back where I had thrown away the carry-all—an action I now regretted because he had stopped to root about in it and had found my old intensifier, a weapon I left in the carry-all for sentimental reasons. But there was nothing sentimental about the way the henchman unfolded the stock, threw the charging switch, and suddenly leveled the emitter at me. I lanced a shot at him with the energy pistol, wishing that it was set for beam instead of the charge-saving pulse, which merely boiled the dust in front of him—I could have raised a beam and bisected him.

  But the snapshot unsettled his aim. I heard the sizzle of the intensifier’s effect on the grass next to my head and smelled the charred blades. Now it would take the old blunderbuss a few minims to recharge, and I used the time to reset my pistol to discharge a beam. But when I looked again, I saw that Madame Oole had come up behind him, her face full of murder, and this time she had the wand. I ducked down the stairs.

  Hespira stood at the bottom in a utilitarian corridor scarcely lit by dim lumens set at far intervals in the ceiling. It stretched straight in what I was fairly sure was the direction of the sorceress’s clouded ship, the hatch of which I had last seen left open. I saw no sign of the shield descending this far into the ground—a flaw in the spell, perhaps, or it could just have been more effective in air than in soil.

  It was time to go, but the thought of the hovering crystal orb and the defensive dome that depended from it gave me an idea. I looked back up the stairs toward the oblong of daylight through which we had descended. And there, framed in the doorway, I could see the glittering sphere still spinning where Oole had thrown it.

  When all the good ideas have been expended, I quoted to myself, one might as well try a bad one. I raised the energy pistol, supported it with my other hand, and directed a thin beam of bright force at the crystal. My aim was a little off, but I corrected and brought the line of light to connect with the target.

  I heard a scream of rage from above, then a blast of wind came down the stairwell. But Hespira and I were already running down the corridor when the wind caught us. It threw us down and rolled us over and forward a few times, but it seemed to have dissipated most of its force against the wall of the corridor directly opposite the stairs. We picked ourselves up and ran. From behind us, I heard Madame Oole’s voice shout, “Servant!” but sometimes the subtlest stratagem must yield to a child-simple countermeasure; before she could add an instruction, I clapped my hands over my client’s ears and made loud noises of my own.

  We ran on, finding a small door at the end of the corridor that opened onto a spacious but empty room whose ceiling was the transparent bottom of an ornamental pool. A wider hallway led out of here, passing a series of drawing and retiring rooms, all long since stripped of their furnishings and decorations. But many had light-admitting ceilings and the waters above reflected down to us the flash and flicker of weapons, sometimes distorted when the pools’ surfaces were rippled airblasts and concussions. We even felt some of the latter through the mosaics that adorned some of the floors.

  “The shield has apparently collapsed,” I said. “Madame Oole will now be too closely occupied to bother us. Let us find a way toward her clouded ship and see if we can deny her an escape.”

  #

  When we stepped through the vessel’s open hatch, the ship’s integrator was dubious. “I have no instructions to admit you,” it said. “Leave or be harmed.”

  We had risen quickly on the ascender, quickly enough that we had not been seen by the combatants intent on each other before we stepped through the cloud. I did not wish to go outside again until the war was concluded, so I hastily said, “I bring you instructions from your owner.”

  “And who are you that I should believe your bold claims?”

  I gave my name. “Surely you have heard of me? It was to collect me that you came to this place.”

  “I have heard you mentioned.”

  “And you must recognize—” I gestured toward Hespira. “—your owner’s servant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then admit us. Your owner wishes us to wait for her here while she tidies up a few inconsequentials.”

  “I will admit you to the salon,” the ship said, “but I will take no further instructions except directly from my owner.”

  “She mentioned that you cannot contact her, nor she you, while the cloud is in place.”

  “That is true.”

  “She also told us that your ship’s bread and punge meet the highest standards of shipliness. We are hungry and thirsty.”

  Moments later, a selection of delicacies appeared on the sideboard along with a pot of punge and two mugs. The fare was as good as the Gallivant’s, but I would not bother to mention that to the ship. Hespira and I settled down to refresh ourselves. Occasionally, I would rise and go to the hatch and press enough of my face through the cloud to put my eyes into the clear so that I could know how the battle was progressing.

  The attack had come from two sides, Hak Binram and Chai Esquilieu cooperating to the extent that each disposed his forces on one of the two fronts. Madame Oole and Devers had been caught out in the open when my pistol beam had undone her domed shield. But she had managed to catch the crystal as it plummeted to the ground, apparently unharmed, and had recast the spell to cover a narrower circumference: indeed, it was so narrow that it covered only her own person, and left her mute henchman scrabbling for shelter on the ground.

  The bravos of t
he halfworld and the operatives of the Hand closed in on her, keeping up a steady fire that stressed the capacity of her shield. For her part, the sorceress replied with bolts of ethereal force and concentrated blasts of air. Her aim was good and her weapons powerful: I saw one of the Hand’s operatives go dancing spasmodically into the trees, limbs jerking and contorting within an aura of electric blue, then one of Binram’s bravos was thrust against an ornamental stone wall with such an impact that two solid blocks shattered; the damage to the man was even greater.

  Oole’s aim continued true, her shield degrading only slowly. But the opponents could bring up reinforcements. I saw a stalemate developing. Eventually, so did the combatants. The rate of exchange slackened then stopped. After a pause, I heard Binram’s high tenor call out, “Where is Hapthorn?”

  “Yes,” said Esquilieu, “give us Hapthorn and you can go.”

  “Do you think I have him in my pocket?” Madame Oole shouted back. “He escaped into the underground rooms and tunnels.”

  “What is in the sack?” said Binram, for the sorceress had picked up the booty Devers had scrounged from Osk Rievor’s study.

  “Bric-a-brac,” she answered. “Some compensation for my troubles. In the meantime, you are letting Hapthorn escape.”

  Another pause ensued. I drew back from the hatch to keep well within the ship’s exceptional cloud.

  “He is gone,” said Binram, “though I detect recent traces in several underground spaces, moving in the direction of the trees.”

  “He has abandoned his aircar. He may be seeking to flee on foot.”

  “Then the truce is off,” called Esquilieu. His men promptly opened up on Binram’s, who cursed and returned the discourtesy. Under streaks and streams of contending energies, each side fell back to its respective fleet of volantes and lifted off. One of them, departing, lashed out with a tumble-thrust at my hired aircar, crushing it and driving most of it into the ground.

  Madame Oole remained within her shield until she was sure the Hapthorn-hunters were gone. Then she dissipated the protection and looked about her. The air still crackled with energies both natural and not, smoke rising in several small columns and geysers of gray ash puffing up from superheated pockets in the ground. Peeking through the cloud, I saw that her face was haggard, deep lines etched on either side of a mouth set in a comprehensive frown.

  “Devers!” she hissed. Receiving no response, she aimed her wand at the charred skeleton of an ornamental shrub and spoke. A lance of red fire passed through the carbonized branches and struck a heap of ash beneath it. The heap erupted and cast forth her soot-smeared henchman, capering and holding his seared fundament while emitting a keening whine.

  “The bag!” she said, then turned toward her ship. I drew back until only the lashes and cornea of one eye passed through the cloud and watched her approach. “She comes,” I told Hespira.

  “Should we not flee? It is her ship. We are trapped here.”

  Her fear troubled me but I pushed aside the emotion. “We are taking a calculated risk,” I said. It was an exaggeration; even using congruencies, the abstruse mathematics of chaos, I had found the odds impossible to calculate with any reliability. But it was definitely a risk.

  I lost sight of Oole though I could still see Devers toiling toward us. “Where did you leave the descender?” she said.

  The mute could only answer by arriving and pointing, but the disk was not there. Indeed, it leaned against the wall next to me, deactivated and unrevivable until the component I had removed and put in my pocket was reinstalled.

  “Hapthorn!” It wasn’t a call for my attention; rather it was spat out like a foul profanity. I saw no need to reply and let the silence grow. When next she spoke it was in a reasonable-sounding voice. “The ship will not obey you,” she said.

  “I believe it will not obey anyone who is not within its cloud,” I replied. Her silence confirmed my supposition. I said to Hespira, “Our odds have just improved.”

  “It is my magic,” Oole said, letting her anger half-slip its leash. “I can overcome it.”

  “In time,” I replied. “Do you have an adequate supply of time?” That was the next variable in my planning. Madame Oole had come very quickly, once she knew Hespira was within the ambience the sorceress thought was mine. There might be others like her, competitors who might come and scoop up the prizes she had played for, while her energies were drained.

  And so it seemed. “Perhaps we can come to an arrangement,” she said.

  “Like the one you have with Devers? I am no one’s cringing pet.”

  Now I heard true profanity, some of it quite inventive. I waited until she wound down then asked her if she had picked up some of the more extravagant phrases in the docklands of Wathers? The result was startling; I wished my assistant was here to record it; I could think of at least two salons in Olkney whose members would have been gratified to hear the complex obscenities of which Madame Oole was capable.

  “She grows very angry,” said Hespira.

  “That is necessary,” I said. “She must think of it herself and act upon it without pause to consider an alternative.”

  “Think of what?”

  I heard the sounds of rummaging in her skin bag, then the rustle of parchment pages. “There it is,” I said. I inched forward and peeked out of the hatch. Below me, I saw the top of the sorceress’s head and could just make out the translation spectacles perched on her strong nose. She was sorting through the fragments of the ancient text that revealed how to train grinnets.

  Devers was looking up and saw me. Oole, too, cast her gaze up. I knew, from the smile that stole across her tired face, that she was seeing my look of deep dismay. Then I ducked back into the clouded ship, counted to five, then called down in a hesitant voice, “I suppose we could talk.”

  “Hah!” was the response from below, followed by another shuffling of age-dried pages. Then I heard her reading aloud, a string of syllables that sounded like nothing so much as a command, and ended with the name “Yeggoth!”

  A rumble of thunder sounded from beyond the trees. I put my head out again, saw Oole scanning the skies. “I am sure we can come to some understanding—” I called down.

  “Too late!” she cried, adding a laugh that was more of a cackle. Devers, too, was looking up with a smile of cruel anticipation. “I will use your own grinnet to focus and intensify my powers,” Oole said. “Soon, I will be up there and you will be groveling.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said, showing a trembling lip and fear-filled eyes. “I am dreadfully sorry—”

  “Hah!” I was beginning to understand that she took a genuine pleasure in that explosive interjection. She called out the grinnet-summoning command again, louder this time, shrieking the name above the new peal of thunder that burst over us as the sky darkened.

  There came a heavy silence, broken only by a loud pop! The magic-sensing disk that Osk Rievor had tossed to the ground near Yeggoth’s shattered pen had suddenly burst in a shower of dark red sparks, as it was overloaded by a vast upsurge in the immediate ambience. A shadow fell over me and the ship and the man and woman below. I did not look up. It was more instructive to regard the upturned faces of the sorceress and her henchman as the jewel-and-coin-encrusted god they had lately been so grievously annoying loomed over the trees and the clouded ship. Grown huge on the thick ambience of magic Madame Oole had generated, and furious at the repeated taking of its name in vain, it roared at them once more.

  I ducked back inside and said, “Ship’s integrator, prepare for impact!”

  The ship did not argue with my right to issue commands. It instantly deployed its cushioning processes—a most fortunate outcome for Hespira and me, because Yeggoth’s glittering foreleg casually brushed against Oole’s ship as the god’s immense triangular head darted down with surprising speed. To give her credit, she did thrust her wand toward the oncoming doom, although I could have told her that further increasing the magical ambience of our locale would onl
y have made her nemesis grow yet larger.

  But then the several rows of conical teeth—each no longer a needle, but easily twice as long as I was tall—closed upon the sorceress. She was dead too quickly to have screamed, but curiously, she did make a last sound: a puff of air that involuntarily escaped her crushed lungs and sounded much like “Hah!” Then her two halves fell to the grass far below.

  By then the ship was toppling and the cushions took hold as it fell and rolled down a short slope before its protruding aft sponsons brought it to a stop against a decorative topiary. The restraints released us, and Hespira and I made our way to the hatch, crawling over a wall which was now become the floor. The opening had ended up facing the way Yeggoth had gone in pursuit of Devers, and we were in time to see what all the henchman’s cruel teasing of the god, when it was just a little creature in its pen, had earned him.

  With considerable delicacy, the avatar’s front teeth caught the back of the man’s collar. Then its broad neck straightened, the huge head rising to toss Devers high into the air. He seemed to hang at the top of his ascent for a long moment—indeed, perhaps he did; Yeggoth’s powers were uncalibrated—before he fell, arms and legs flailing as if they could swim him to some safe shore. But all that awaited him was the wide-gaping mouth of a revengeful deity. That thin, keening whine came again, then I saw the gem-studded throat move, and the sound was swallowed, as was Devers.

  This had happened just short of the cottage, toward which the man had been fleeing. Now, down the side of the humble structure, blinking sleepily and looking about in some wonderment at the ruin and devastation of his back yard, came Osk Rievor, his grinnet leading him by his hand. My other self looked up at the glittering hugeness above him, smiled and dug in his pocket for a gem. He spoke some words in a tongue I did not recognize and tossed the green stone toward Yeggoth, which dipped its great head and deftly caught the offering in a curl of its long, darting tongue. Then it applied the jewel to a place just beneath its left eye, hissed a blessing in return, and disappeared.