by Lyndon Hardy
Melizar paused and jabbed Jemidon on the shoulder. “Yes, be my apprentice. The choice is a wise one. Serve without failure and you will be rewarded well.”
Jemidon held his breath. The goal that motivated his coming to the tent had been achieved. Even more, he now understood not one metalaw but two. But the disquiet that had impeded him before was still there.
He looked at Delia, who was still staring blankly into the distance, and fingered the coin around his neck. He thought of his father sleeping on the downslope and what the old man would say. With one decision, he could exorcise all the ghostly burdens and be close to what he wanted for himself as well. Perhaps with time, when Melizar realized his true worth, he could learn more and complete the last pieces of the puzzle. He glanced at the cold one’s cube and then looked up to stare at Drandor’s slack-jawed face.
But at what price was he willing to pursue his quest? The robe of the master was supposed to bring the respect of peers and followers—a proof that he, too, was a man. Would it be there, if won by treachery and guile? If the order of all things were destroyed in the process? If he were the lackey of one so cold and strange? Jemidon drew his lips into a firm line. He wanted the robe, but not if he lost everything else in exchange.
“No,” he said quietly, his voice as soft as Melizar’s own. “I have changed my mind. It is too much power. The laws were not meant to be altered.”
“Whence I came, the laws were not meant to stay the same.” Melizar stepped forward. “But no matter. By one means or another, you will serve. Seize him, Drandor. If he chooses not to offer his mind and muscle to me, then the manipulants will enjoy his marrow.”
Jemidon stepped back, wishing that he had a weapon. As he did, he saw the imp light about Melizar’s head brighten to a fiery incandescence. Too late, he tried to dodge a handful of dust that Melizar splashed into his face. He felt the beginning of a numbing torpor. Then nothing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Door into Elsewhere
JEMIDON felt a gentle touch on his forehead and forced open his eyelids. A bouncing glow of reddish light and strands of golden hair filled his view.
“Delia!” he said thickly. “It was you whom I came to rescue.”
“With about as much forethought as when we raced into the presentation hall.” Delia pulled away to give him room. “And your discussion with Melizar seemed to focus on other things. Even though bound by the animation, I recall most of what was said.”
Jemidon rose to sitting. He felt stiff and sore. His mouth was dry and the taste rancid, as if he had been awakened from the middle of a drunken sleep. Hovering a few feet from his head was a large, glowing sprite, its bony arms crossed in front of a shallow chest and its legs coiled into a knot. The forehead bulged with bumps and mounds. Tufts of coarse hair protruded from tiny ears. The nose lay smashed across a broad and pockmarked face. Except for the whine of rapidly beating wings, it seemed like the well-preserved remains of a grotesque child.
Jemidon ran his hands over his leather vest, touching the reassuring smoothness of the coin about his neck and the lump of Benedict’s changer underneath. He placed his palms down at his sides and felt a tingling from a surface that was glassy-smooth. As his senses returned, he detected the same vibration through his thighs. He looked around in the sprite light and saw rock everywhere. He and Delia were enclosed in a perfect sphere, centered on the small demon and showing no seam or exit. As if from the polished face stone of some great palace, specks of quartz and mica cast back pale reflections of the flickering luminescence.
“A rockbubbler,” Delia said. “It can maintain a void several arm spans about itself in all directions, even at the greatest depths. One of the score or so that keep open a pit under Drandor’s tent. And apparently I have some degree of control over this one. He responds to my bidding, as long as it does not conflict with his other instructions.”
“The Law of Dichotomy,” a small, squeaky voice radiated from the gently bobbing devil. “One of the two upon which wizardry is based. ‘Dominance or submission.’ There is no other choice.” One small eye cocked to the side and stared at Delia. “I have a master and I must obey. I fulfill your request because it does not contradict and it is my choice.”
“By whatever justification, the end result is the same,” Delia said. “I instructed him how to trick two others of his kind with which he had a petty feud. And now he has kept his sphere just tangent to the others so that the manipulants could not find you, Jemidon, before you awoke.” Delia stopped and shuddered. “Although with the fighting that will eventually happen above, they will have many from whom to pick.”
“What has happened?” Jemidon shook his hands at arm’s length to restore the circulation. Any excitement from being with Delia was muted by the remains of a deep lethargy. “Where are we? The last I clearly remember is Melizar casting some powder in my face.”
“Torpordust,” Delia said. “Something that can be made with the new magic. He uses it to slow prisoners for the manipulants.”
“I thought it might have been a freezing.”
“The cold does not come from Melizar. It is generated by the imps that circle his head. Without them, he would have to sleep with the rest, I suspect he can barely tolerate moving among us as it is. When he must concentrate deeply, he requires it to be even more frigid.”
“Then where is he from?” Jemidon asked. “From what he has said, not across the sea or from another star in the sky.”
“No, not another star.” Delia shook her head. “Somehow, it is farther than that. I asked him once and he laughed. He said that on all our worlds the laws are the same. It was only through the demon’s portals that one could journey whence he came.”
“The realm of demons,” Jemidon said. “It may well be the lands beyond the flame from which the djinn appear when they are beckoned.”
“My master forbade me to speak of it, or I would tell,” the sprite said. “But even in sleep, I must honor his will.”
“These manipulants?” Jemidon asked. “Are they demons too?”
“No, I think not,” Delia said. “Even demons would not behave as they do.”
“But if not djinns, how can they exist behind the flame?”
Delia reached out and grabbed Jemidon’s hand. “There is little else that I know. Little else except for some of the workings of Drandor’s animations. Melizar has been teaching me the craft and has made sure that I remained unharmed. The cold one wants the trader to know he can be replaced if he does not continue to comply. There is nothing with which Drandor can bargain, not even the exercise of the new sorcery.”
“And I?” Jemidon looked around the featureless sphere. “What do I have that is any better?”
“At least you are fully awake,” Delia said. “For four days you have slumbered, while I kept the rockbubbler apart from the rest. Now you must use your wits to aid me as you have done before. Come,” she said. She turned until she was on hands and knees. “Follow the sprite. You will see what else lies in the rock under Drandor’s tent.”
Jemidon frowned as the small demon turned in Delia’s direction and began to drift slowly away. Delia’s answer to his question was not what he had hoped to hear. But before he could say more, he felt the sphere rotate beneath him, pushing with increasing firmness behind and then finally toppling him forward to sprawl by Delia’s side. He looked up to see what appeared to be a tiny opening form in the curved wall directly ahead.
As Jemidon scrambled into a crawling position, the circle grew, revealing a larger cavern beyond. Sliding his hands along the smooth surface and pushing with his feet on the slope behind, he managed to keep up with the slow rotation of the sphere.
In a moment, the opening had expanded to the maximum extent. The rear of the bubble became a hemispherical bulge on a larger volume. Like a sealed chamber in a dungeon, the void in the rock was heavy with damp air and the smell of decay. The floor looked like the crate for an array of eggs, a lattice of shallow depressi
ons that matched a similar set of indentations in the ceiling above. In between, in a more or less geometrical precision, hovered other rockbubblers, eyes closed and arms and legs crossed.
Like a rag doll flung aside, Drandor lay in the center-most sphere. The trader’s eyes were barely open and his chest heaved with deep breaths. Occasionally he lashed out with his good arm, swatting the empty air. Dots of light showed where imps, much smaller than the hovering rockbubblers, flitted above him, dropping a fine mist of sparkling sand.
“More torpordust,” Delia said. “It keeps the trader in lethargy until Melizar requires his efforts.” Delia paused and swallowed. “And except for those, the manipulants, it would not matter.”
Jemidon followed the sweep of her arm. On a large sled with rounded runners that fitted the curves of the floor he saw six humanoid forms, dressed only with loincloths and all lying prone in apparent slumber. They were tall and slender, more suited for the dance than for wielding blades. Their skin was an almost translucent gray. Beneath the tough elasticity, Jemidon could see the course of the major arteries and veins. Half wore massive ornamentation, nose rings, necklaces, and anklets, their fine black hair coiled in elaborate swirls. Sharp planes of bone defined blocky faces. Filmy lids covered deep-set eyes. Below the bulge of the nose, each had large pinkish lips that looked like the suction cups of an octopus or squid. Cupped in each left hand was a can with holes in the lid. On a chain from the waist dangled small picks like those used in gemstone mines.
“I have seen them before,” Jemidon said, “on Morgana, in Drandor’s animation the night of the storm, the one that shifted the Rule of Three to the Rule of the Threshold.”
“Too close,” one of the nearest sprites interrupted Delia’s reply. “First you move away, barely maintaining contact. Now you press in on my space, my innermost core. Back whence you came, prickly one. I would rather you not support my flank than push with so much pressure against my chest.”
“Poxblisters,” the sprite above Jemidon’s head shot back. “For you there is no distance that pleases. You would be better off as a solitary. Always bickering, trying to force the swarm to your own natural harmonics. Never just accepting what resonates with the entire clutch.”
“You are no better, mintbreath,” the other replied. “Your wings must have been unbalanced in the egg. They have vibrated your brains to mush. You have no frequency that stands above the noise. You keep flitting like a djinn in heat around the soft and golden one—and not even your master.”
“Vibration is what makes the lips quiver and the foolish noises issue forth,” Delia said. “It is strange that you would be one speaking of balance.”
A high-pitched whine bounced around the room. Jemidon guessed that the other sprites were twittering at what she had said. The demon directly ahead snapped shut his mouth and, except for the hum of wings, the pit plunged into silence.
For a moment, nothing more happened. Then one of the manipulants suddenly stirred and crawled from the sled, sluggishly groping over the dimpled floor. Like a newborn puppy, he seemed to flounder instinctively toward food and comfort. The manipulant bumped against Drandor. With uncoordinated jerks, it closed around the trader’s boneless forearm. Drandor’s eyes flickered and his face contorted into a mask of strain. With glacial slowness, he struggled to crawl away, but the manipulant was slightly quicker and pinned him where he lay.
In staccato bursts of motion, the left hand with the shaker positioned over the trader’s elbow. Jemidon saw a fine powder fall onto the pliant flesh, and then, after several misses, the large lips contacted the glistening surface. A loud slurping noise blended with the demons’ hum. Drandor’s entire body trembled; he opened his mouth with an ear-piercing scream.
“As Melizar would look without his hood,” Delia said. “They suck the marrow through the skin after somehow dissolving the bone. That must be what keeps them alive as they wait. Apparently this place is so warm that they languish like lizards in a desert sun.
“Melizar let me remain awake so that I could avoid the manipulants,” Delia continued. “He did not suspect that I would influence one of the sprites as well.” Her voice shrank to a whisper. “I could have dragged the trader away, just as I did you. But each time I think of it, I also remember his crude sketches of my disfigurement, his tongs and pinchers, and the fact that it is because of him that I am here.”
Jemidon hesitated, wondering what he should do. Drandor had released the beasts after them on Morgana. He had abducted Delia to this oppressive tomb. Jemidon looked again at the trader’s mutilations. He felt the line of his own jaw and then the reassuring firmness of his forearm. He saw Delia shudder and instinctively drew her close. She did not resist, but rested her head on his shoulder. The touch of her cheek was cold.
While Jemidon wavered, the manipulant suddenly released its grip with a loud pop, like that of a bursting bubble. Drandor struggled away to collapse in the bottom of an adjacent sphere. His eyelids snapped firmly shut. His chest resumed its slow and steady cadence. The manipulant groped over the cupped floor, bumping into Drandor a second time and then one of the walls. Eventually it found the sled and crawled sluggishly back into its space.
“Their needs are minimal,” Delia explained. “It will be another week before that one ventures forth again. Drandor is safe until the next arouses in perhaps the length of a day.”
Jemidon let out his breath and patted her reassuringly on the shoulder. “Do not build a pit of guilt in which to trap your thoughts,” he said after a moment. “Believe me, they can be a stronger master than any other.”
“I am in command of my own spirit. Nothing would be served by succumbing to despair.”
Jemidon looked into Delia’s eyes and then back around the entombing rock. “That is a spirit I must admire,” he said. “There are few who could keep their minds intact when faced with such as this.”
Delia rubbed his hand on her shoulder. “And when I was summoned above and saw it was you, I felt the first real hope since I was confined.”
Jemidon smiled. “It has been an eventful quest,” he said. “Let me tell you what I have learned while we were apart.”
Quickly he related all that had happened. To his surprise, he found that mentioning Augusta made him feel awkward. With a wave of his hand, he passed on to talk in more depth about meeting Melizar and the discovery of the two metalaws.
Somehow as the words came out, the driving force of his quest seemed to be more for Delia and less because of his hunger for the robe. But she listened quietly and did not contradict. With an intense concentration, she absorbed everything that he said.
“And now that you have rejected Melizar,” she whispered when he was done, “how can you hope to achieve what you truly seek?”
Jemidon shook his head to calm the rattle of conflicting thoughts. He had wanted the mastery of a craft above all else. And yet, when faced with the choice, he could not submit to the one with the power to guide him to his goal. A few months ago, such an act would have been unthinkable. The quest for the robe was everything; his entire life had been bound up in it. But now there were other goals, other values that tugged on which way he should go.
Jemidon sighed. He should have followed his original instincts all along. There was no doubt Melizar must be stopped. The cold one admitted that no less than complete control of everything was his plan. The universe, he had called it—this world and all the others in the sky. And if he succeeded, the oppressions of Kenton and the other nobles would be nothing compared with what could transpire. As Jemidon had first decided in Pluton, he must aid the forces opposing the changer of the laws.
“We must escape and convince the masters the world over,” Jemidon said at last. “Convince them to exercise the remaining laws to their fullest extent. Melizar has to be prevented from changing any more.”
“I agree. Melizar must be thwarted,” Delia said, “but that is not the answer to my question.”
Jemidon frowned. He clutched t
he coin about his neck. What was it he truly sought? Saving a world from the domination of one such as Melizar was far more important, to be sure. But still, if not a master, what could he possibly—
Suddenly a flicker of light near the ceiling broke Jemidon out of his reverie. He watched one of the small imps appear through the solid rock and the rockbubbler in the center of the cluster rise to meet it.
“Curse the binding,” it grumbled as it rose. “With any normal master, my decisions would be my own while he slumbered. But no, I am to bounce like a ball every time an imp flits into view. Such was his last command before he drifted into slumber.”
Jemidon watched a column of rock seem to rise beneath the ascending bubble and a hemispherical void push into the ceiling. At the apex, a tiny iris of black widened into a larger, circle. Through it, Jemidon caught glimpses of stacked crates and flickering light beyond.
“Another compartment of the tent,” he mumbled as he recognized some of the contents. “The one behind the counter where we first met. This pit was beneath it all along and I did not suspect.”
Delia grabbed his arm and pointed at the opening. Jemidon saw two boots drape over the edge to dangle into the void and then the rest of another body crash down into the sphere. The sprite increased the beat of its wings in response to the load. Slowly it reversed its direction, settling back to the same level as the others.
Jemidon shook himself out of what remained of his lethargy. He groped his way from one circular depression to the next, reaching the slumped form and turning him face up. “Burdon,” he said over his shoulder as Delia followed. “One of the lords at Kenton’s castle when I was there. Melizar grows bold indeed if he can snatch away the nobility as well as bondsmen.”
Jemidon looked down at the sleeping lord and rubbed his chin. “He may know something of value. If we secure him away as you did me, how long until he can speak?”
