Netheril - Dangerous Games Part 3

We discussed that at length. There is no other way. We shall be safe. Their idiocy shall scour the earth, but not penetrate here.

If we are careful.

We are always careful. We must be, for we are so few.

We are the oldest living things on the planet.

All the more reason to safeguard.

The humans will be undone, have no fear. They are soft and cannot last.

Look how our drain spell sucks the nourishment from their food. Soon they will have naught to eat.

They'll eat each other.

All the better. Their bones will enrich the soil. And we will again hold the worlds above and below.

If we give them magic enough to choke.

The humans are foolish to use magic so freely. Don't they see it hastens their demise?

They see nothing, know nothing. They will burn out and cease to be.

This new magic we've pulled from the sky will add more dweomer than ever before. Mountains of magic!

For an orgy-a holocaust of magical energy!

But it will take time. Many revolutions of the sun.

Not so many. Not so ...

It felt good to have soft earth and needles under his boots, to smell pine sap and wet moss, to hear warblers trill and red squirrels chitter, to feel the wind on his scalp. Sunbright felt at home.

But more exciting, he thought he recognized this stretch of forest.

It was hard to say, for he'd dreamt it, at night, when distracted by the vision of Greenwillow. But the folds of land looked right, the configuration of those two joined pines was familiar, and the spidery bulk of that bull pine called to him. His lover, his sweet elf, had floated that way, he thought. Always having lived more by emotion than by logic, Sunbright followed.

It felt good to touch nature again, and also to shoulder his traveling gear. He wore the heavy Harvester across his back in a new bull-hide scabbard and at his belt hung the warhammer of Dorlas, son of Drigor, a weapon he'd inherited and promised to someday return to the Sons of Baltar in the far Iron Mountains. A new goat-hide vest was laced across his chest and a bright green s.h.i.+rt hung to his knees. Around his waist was a thick, studded belt, and his tall moosehide boots with the rings and buckles were newly-blacked and the leather oiled. The workmans.h.i.+p of his clothing and tackle was exquisite, hand-st.i.tched by Lady Polaris's seamstresses and saddlemakers. Not that he cared: he would have gone abroad in rags to tramp the forest.

And tramp he did, past trees like pillars, in a hushed, green-filtered, luminous light. He moved quickly, driving game before him, delighting in their quick fluttering. The flick of a deer's white tail as it bounded away. The snuffling of a badger dragging its striped head back into its sett. The twitter of chickadees tracking him from twig to twig. The slither of a green snake as it oozed around a bole and clung to the bark with its belly scales, tongue flickering. Sunbright breathed deep and laughed aloud, glad to be back, as if he'd been gone years and not a few days. The only dark cloud was the need to return to the floating castle high above like a squat stone cloud. But he pushed that thought aside and gloried in his freedom, like a child let out of school.

Walking for miles, he watched everywhere, naturally curious and trained to be cautious. At one point he halted, bemused. Drawing his sword, he hunkered alongside a pine, slowed his breathing, unfocused his eyes to better detect movement.

Something had alerted him, but he didn't know what. A sense of being watched or, oddly, spoken of. (Though he couldn't know it, he sensed the Phaerimm plotting far below the earth.) In time, doubting his own senses, Sunbright sheathed his sword and moved on, walking warily until he was half a mile away. Finally he dismissed the unease with an old adage. " 'Imagination is a two-edged sword: a blessing and a curse.'"

Pausing to rest, he lay flat and drank from a rippling stream, surprising a frog. He ate a meager lunch from a haversack, pressed on. Somehow he knew which paths to follow, for Greenwillow had shown him. In the same way, he knew she was still alive, waiting for him, helping him. Helping him find her.

Then, abruptly, he found his (their) destination. And it made sense, for the shooting star and Greenwillow's warning had broken his sleepwalking, kept him from pitching out a window.

Here the shooting star had plunged into a hillside, blowing open a crater like a tumbled mine shaft.

Easing his sword from its scabbard, though he sensed no danger, Sunbright paced forward. The forest here was scrubby, rife with pin oaks and mossy granite rocks taller than himself. Yet several rocks had been blown aside like dandelion fluff when the star crashed. The forest was hushed, for animals still avoided the area. Quietly, wary of hidden holes, Sunbright padded across old leaves, then onto fresh-turned dirt of yellow and brown. The hillside was not high, and the impact had split the top like a loaf of bread, leaving a large hole. Sunbright tiptoed to peek inside.

The bottom was ten feet down at a slant. Nothing showed but dirt. Considering the size of the hole, and being unfamiliar with shooting stars, Sunbright had no idea how deep the star might be buried.

He stood up straight and checked the forest all around, but saw nothing but a pair of cardinals chasing each other through a wild rose bush. The sun was one hand over the horizon, for he'd spent the afternoon walking. Now that he was here, he didn't know what to do. Once he called quietly, "Greenwillow?"

No answer.

Humming a love song to himself, he swept clean a rock and sat down, to wait for sunset, Harvester across his knees.

"There you are! What's this hole?"

Sunbright rose to meet the arcanist. Candlemas, always curious, sank sandal-deep in fresh dirt as he climbed the low hill and peered into blackness.

"A shooting star landed last night. I saw it from a window." The memory of almost tumbling out made Sunbright's knees shake, but he clamped them straight. "I don't know how deep it is."

"Keeper of the Sun!" Candlemas reared back as if from a bonfire. "Feel that enchantment!"

Sunbright stood alongside, but felt nothing. "What? It's magic?"

"By Jannath's Tears, I'll say! My, it's-imagine how strong the magic must be if we can feel it at a distance!" The stocky mage jumped in place like a child offered a treat. "We must dig it up! I must have that star!"

Shrugging, Sunbright sheathed Harvester, cast about for some digging implement, for he wouldn't ply his sword as a shovel. Breaking a dead branch clipped by the fallen star, the barbarian slid down into the hole and dug. Candlemas helped, shoveling dirt with his hands like a dog. As the sun disappeared, he picked up a stone, muttered a small cantra, and set it glowing like cold fire.

"That's a handy spell," Sunbright told him.

"It's nothing."

The star was not deep, it turned out, not over two feet buried. Sunbright missed it at first and started to dig around, until Candlemas stopped him. "What are you doing? Dig it free!"

"This?" The barbarian thumped the branch on the star. It looked like a plain, lumpy stone, burned black. "This can't be it."

"Why not?" Candlemas hunkered on his hams above the hole. "What did you expect?"

"Shouldn't it glow, like your rock there?"

A snort. "No. It was afire when it fell, like iron in a forge. It was snuffed by the dirt."

"Seems pretty ordinary for something so magical."

"And what's an emperor's crown but a hoop of pointed gold? Yet it can move mountains." The mage ran his hands over the burned, sandy surface lovingly. "My, my. I might get my own floating city after all. Imagine the value of this thing! I'll be rich."

"It'd make a fine anchor." Sunbright tried and failed to lever the thing up. "It's powerful heavy. Or else stuck."

"It's not stuck. Here, give me a hand."

But dig and grab hold as they might, the two men couldn't budge the star, though it was no bigger than a pumpkin. If anything, the star settled deeper into the hole they scratched, as if alive and wis.h.i.+ng to hide.

Sweating, swearing, Sunbright opined, "You'll have to dig away the hillside, and hitch an ox team to drag it out. It weighs more than lead!"

"I think you're right." Candlemas's face and hands were sooty, his arms sandy to the elbows. "It must be made of... I can't think what. The densest metals are lead and gold, though the old books speak of adamantine being harder and denser. Still, this is the most solid stuff I've ever seen. I doubt your sword could scratch it."

"We'll never know," countered the barbarian.

The forest was dark. In a distant bog crickets chirped and peepers cheeped. Candlemas reached out, grabbed the small stone he'd illuminated, snuffed its magic and turned the hole black. "We'll return on the morrow. I'll have Damita from the stables bring a hitching rig and a stone boat. Then-"

"What's that?" Sunbright snapped his head up, out of the hole. "There's a rus.h.i.+ng in the treetops."

"Night wind. It's-no, wait."

Candlemas squinted in the dark. The little star was glowing. Ripples of green light chased each other across its surface.

Sunbright glanced down, hissed, "You said it wouldn't glow!"

"It shouldn't!" Candlemas backed up, slid on sand, landed back on the cooling star. Eldritch fire illuminated his hairy toes. "It's magical, but-"

Near Candlemas's shoulder, Sunbright ducked as the rus.h.i.+ng sounded again, louder, as if a giant bird beat the forest, hunting them, or a hurricane stirred the tree crowns. But the sound was loudest in the hole. The rus.h.i.+ng came from the fallen star. "It's hissing! It's working! It's-"

"Get out!" Candlemas grabbed the barbarian's belt to haul himself along even while pus.h.i.+ng. "Get out! It's going to explo-"

Green light flashed from the star, engulfed the two men, and winked out.

The smoking hole lay empty.

Chapter 4.

Mouth open, hands clawed in an instinctive flinch, legs splayed to dive out of the hole, Sunbright stood frozen, unable to move anything, even his eyes. All that worked was his brain, and it wondered at what he saw.

The dirt and rock and black sky were drawn from solid objects to fine threads. A stone under his foot shrank and elongated, until it was a gray line like a pencil mark traveling from underneath him out of the hole, into infinity. So too went the dirt, and the nothingness of the hole itself. The night sky was shredded into splinters that sailed past him like black spears to mingle with strings of soil and tree roots that could encircle the world. All these objects stretched in two directions, all intermingled yet all separate, so Sunbright could follow the lines of each with his stiff and staring eyes.

Even Candlemas was drawn thin, like gold wire under a smith's tiny hammer, the outlines of the arcanist's body flattened and smoothed and stretched. Yet it was still the pudgy mage, Sunbright knew, whole and intact, but hair-thin. And so, he supposed, he must look to Candlemas. Sunbright shaved into a thousand splinters laid together like hair in a horse's tail.

They were moving and yet not moving. But if the lines of themselves were stretching from the hole to somewhere else, where were they going? Was this magic, or some other force? Certainly Sunbright had never heard of anything similar. Had the magic star somehow fas.h.i.+oned this weird not-spell? For it too was not an arm's length away, yanked fine, sailing through s.p.a.ce, yet lying still as ever.

It was confusing, frightening, maddening. Sunbright wondered if it would last forever: certainly he felt like a granite statue. What if the fallen star sought to protect itself, and had suspended them in a spell forever? Could anything break it? Was this the ultimate curse, to stand and think unmoving for eternity? Could they be rescued, or even found? What if the hole collapsed about them, and buried them unmoving? How many seasons would pa.s.s before they saw sunlight again?

And if Sunbright stayed frozen this way forever, how would he ever find Greenwillow?

He stood for years, centuries, longer, waiting and fretting and wondering if this strange journey would ever end.

Then it was over.

Sunbright fell over and sprawled awkwardly on ornate tile painted with flowers in dozens of colors.

He rolled on his shoulder and toes, shot to his feet, and whipped Harvester from its scabbard.

Before him was a skinny young man of average height, with tousled brown hair, grizzled beard, and sparkling golden eyes. With a bright smile, the stripling flicked his fingers in the air.

A striped cat as big as a horse reared on two broad cloven feet before Sunbright. Claws tipped appendages that were half-hands, half-paws. The cat's muttonchops and mane were white and stuck out at right angles. Its back was flaming orange with white and black stripes, and its broad chest blazed a snowy white.

The cat-man monster roared and slashed at Sunbright with finger-long talons.

Sucking in his belly, Sunbright skipped backwards, feet shuffling, b.u.t.ting aside a dazed Candlemas. He hoisted from knee-high to slash upward and across: he hoped to crease the animal if possible, or split its muzzle, but at least drive it back. He missed as the cat leaped in the air. Hooves clattered as the beast landed, skipped to match Sunbright, and lashed out with a lower leg. A chitinous hoof tunked on Harvester. The blow rang like a sledgehammer's, knocking the heavy blade skyward. Before Sunbright could recover, the beast jig- trotted in place and kicked him soundly in the breadbasket.

Sunbright had barely hopped backward in time, and still grunted at the pain and fear of shattered ribs. The fighter sucked wind and hopped backward once more, forced to take the defensive. Behind that cat's muzzle lay a churning, thinking brain. Grasping his sword two-handed, he lowered the pommel near his short ribs so the long steel blade pointed straight. Unarmed, the monster would find it impossible to avoid a thrust. Or so he hoped. Meanwhile, he watched for an opening, marked a spot under the beast's arms and the pit of its lower belly.

All this in seconds, for the tiger-man slashed the air in dizzying circles, paw-hands a blur. Before Sunbright could lunge or duck, Harvester was again slapped aside, so hard the hooked tip caromed off a painted wall. The beast was too strong: it could crush him with a paw. But that was his mind recoiling. His sinews instinctively used the momentum of the impact against his a.s.sailant.

With a grunt of exertion, he dragged around the rebounding steel and added his own brute strength.

Slas.h.i.+ng backhanded, he slammed Harvester's barbed tip past the tip of clawed fingers to bite deep into the monster's neck. Hollering a nameless battle cry, he ripped downward to sink the hook in life- giving veins and tear them loose. And succeeded.

Frothy red blood gouted from the cat-man's neck. Red splashed the side of its face, soaking whiskers and pointed ears and white muttonchops in gore. More blood spattered Sunbright, rained on the wall and ceiling. The beast yowled in agony, but the sound trailed to a mew. Light sparking in its eyes winked and died. Sunbright barely skipped aside as the monster's back seemed to break and it plunged forward at him. A claw tore the barbarian's thigh as the dead thing's head struck the wall with a clonk m.u.f.fled by thick orange-red fur.

Sunbright backed, panting, wary of any final kicks from those anvil-like hooves. He held his banged side, which throbbed with every sobbing breath. But he kept his sword ready for another attack.

There had been a young, tousled mage, he recalled suddenly, who'd flicked his fingers and- "You!" The barbarian whirled. "You conjured that fiend!"

"Yes, more or less. But it wasn't really here, so it doesn't matter."

The young wizard wore an expensive but rumpled and frayed robe embroidered in green-blue and white lace. By contrast, his hair was a rat's nest, his fingernails cracked, gnawed, and filthy, his chin stubbly, his bare feet black with grime. And he needed a bath. Yet his eyes were golden, like melted gold swirling in a vat, and arresting. He smiled in a c.o.c.keyed way and waggled the fingers of one hand. The tiger-man disappeared, as did the blood on the walls, the blood on Sunbright's sword, and even the blood on his hands and arms. The barbarian felt a tug at his side, and realized the pain of that frightful kick had disappeared too.

"You-" Sunbright's breathing was still a sob, "that was an... illusion?"

"No. It was real, mostly. It hurt, didn't it?"

"Why . . . attack me?"

A bony shrug. "You had that curious sword. I just wanted to see how you'd fare in a fight."

"I'll show you how!" Sunbright slung Harvester far to the right to give it weight, swung it back hard, slapped his left hand on the pommel to add his own weight and cleave the interfering idiot in half. Harvester split the air, wind off its blade making a high keen- But suddenly he was upside-down, his horsetail and scabbard flopping, blood rus.h.i.+ng to his head, feet pedaling uselessly. He fought to focus on his target, saw the idiot fifty feet off across a tiled and painted floor, or ceiling. Sunbright growled in rage, but his voice was choked by a thickening in his throat. He felt helpless as a fox hoisted in a snare. Wordlessly, he cursed freely and long.

At the same time, the wary barbarian scanned his surroundings, automatically hunting danger, exits, things to use as s.h.i.+elds and weapons.

But even upside down, nothing he saw made sense.