CHAPTER FIVE
A small group of people stood with their mouths open, their heads bent slightly as they stared at something on the ground between them. “There goes another one down,” said Fire Chief Cinder, nudging the collapsed form of the Great Karlini with one foot. He transferred his gaze up toward Jurtan Mont, and then next to him at Tildamire Mont. “Any of you folks ready to try whatever he was fixing to do?”
A hot whoosh! roiled up from the side. The three of them ignored it; it was just more of the Karlini laboratory building falling in on itself. If they had bothered to spare a glance, however, they would have noticed a curious spectacle within the smoke and flames. For a moment the flames and smoke themselves seemed to solidify into a regular gridwork construction, of three double pincer claws of fire reinforced by gray restraints of vaporous wire on a telescoping crane-like base, with the claws clamping themselves shut around the tallest piece of standing wall and yanking at it until it fell toward them in cascading fragments that ripped the claws back into coiling streamers of disorganized fire and the crane mount into a curling geyser and then a detached upward-breaking fireball; but that was clearly impossible, a purely random illusion of shifting shadow and light. “Not me,” said Jurtan. “Magic’s not my thing.”
Magic wasn’t his thing; Jurtan knew he couldn’t conjure the simplest effect to save his life. He wouldn’t even know where to start. Perhaps if he’d paid more attention while Tildy had been doing her exercises under the tutelage of Karlini’s wife he’d be equipped to make a try of it. But on the other hand...
On the other hand, the way Jurtan’s music sense operated often seemed like magic. What if it wasn’t merely like magic at all? Max and Shaa had commented that his music sense gave him capabilities that required the use of sorcery in others. So maybe there was something he could do. He’d put people to sleep before - why not a fire?
Yet there was no need to rush into the attempt. Quite the contrary. There were at least two magic-user professionals lying comatose on the street to attest to the potential hazards at hand here. Something was clearly out of the ordinary about this fire, not that one would expect anything different from a disaster associated with the likes of the Great Karlini. It was not necessarily surprising, therefore, that Jurtan gradually realized as he listened to whatever his internal accompaniment was trying to tell him about the conflagration that it also felt like something in the fire was watching him.
Fire Chief Cinder turned his attention from the youth staring blank-eyed at the engulfed building to the girl, and when she shrugged helplessly and shook her head he wiped them from his mind and strode back toward his forces. Even if he had seen the youth suddenly fumbling in his pocket, and then withdrawing with a triumphant flourish from the pocket a harmonica, it would have meant nothing to him, other than the fact that the youth might be yet another one of the breed of dangerous lunatics who often seemed to be the principal denizens of the Wraith District. It was prudent to spare enough attention to keep some track of the lunatics in the immediate vicinity, though, and Chief Cinder was nothing if not prudent. As a veteran, though, this cataloging rarely made itself felt at a level of full consciousness. The blond fellow a head taller than anyone else in sight making his way up the street at a pace faster than a trot, if less than a full-out run, and that with a side of crisped beef slung over one shoulder, for example, was worth at least a tick in the mental notebook. Not far away -
Something glinted in his peripheral vision, something fast, something above - a dull bronze sphere festooned with ... stuff, banking around the flames forty feet over his head but leaving its own trail of puffy smoke behind it. The flying thing spun around once on its axis, hesitated in the air, and swooped toward the ground, trailed by a squawking seagull. A gout of steam erupted from the matrix of vents in the ball’s underside, a set of spidery legs in a tripod configuration protruded, and then the machine was squatting on the pavement next to the fallen Karlini, temporarily obscuring him beneath the flowing billows of vapor. “Now this is what I call a mess,” said the ball.
The top of the vehicle pivoted back and the pointy-eared head of Favored-of-the-Gods emerged. “Who’s in charge here?” he demanded, just as the seagull, approaching from behind, pulled up sharply and slapped him across the head with its wing. Favored squawked in a tone much like the bird’s and fell abruptly from sight back into his sphere while the bird executed a much neater landing on Karlini’s chest and began fanning the fumes away from his face.
The clanging and clattering from within the vehicle subsided, and two hands’-worth of long spidery fingers reappeared grasping the lip of the hatch. They were followed again by the now considerably more annoyed face of Favored. “What the hell happened to him?” he snapped, looking over the side at Karlini and the gull. Fire Chief Cinder noted that the gnome, and for that matter his entire vehicle, smelled of smoke.
There was a lot of smoke around today in general. “Are you a magician?” Chief Cinder asked.
“Better than that,” snorted Favored. “A fire this hot should sterilize anything biological, but something in there’s still leaking energy anyway. What you got to worry about is whatever that stuff is dripping into the water table. Now here’s what the situation looked like on my overhead pass just now.”
Jurtan had stepped out of the way of the seagull and was humming carefully on the harmonica, trying to feel his way to the rhythm of the fire. Atop the fire’s heavy bass roar, though, querulous meandering snatches of melody kept twisting out of nowhere like a cloud of darting gnats. They could be associated with the licks of leaping flame, but then there was a chance they might really be related to something else instead. Roni had had those vats of magical organisms in the lab; surely the fire would have sterilized them to lifeless ash... but it did seem as though something was surviving most improbably in the midst of the furnace. Or beneath it, perhaps, somewhere in the basement?
Then suddenly Jurtan knew what the fire was playing, atonal and harsh though it was, and he began to lay his own groove down around it.
“If you make a drop with the fire-retardant chemical just as we hit it with our last water bomb,” Chief Cinder was telling Favored, “maybe we can -”
An insistent beeping erupted from inside the ball-vehicle. Favored ducked his head down, muttering. “What the hell is it this - wait a minute! That’s not bad, kid.” He popped back up, eyeing Jurtan across the pavement furiously jawing away now with his instrument. “Okay, Cinder, so let’s try the bomb and the - wait, this is even better - over here, you idiot!” Favored yelled down the street, standing up on the hatch rim and waving his arms vigorously. “What the hell took you so long?”
The tall man with the side of beef loped up and set the meat on the ground where it rolled about, moaning. “Ice,” said the tall guy.
“Perhaps I will redeploy my forces,” suggested Fire Chief Cinder under his breath as he edged back out of the way. Very well; he was finally willing to admit it, it was time to put in for a transfer. Wraith District clearly had the better of him. He had lasted longer than his immediate two predecessors, by at least two months. That should be good for something, if not a full month-long rest cure.
“He doesn’t look real useful to me,” said Favored, inspecting the charred yet still-writhing form of their recent adversary Dortonn.
“We spoke during our journey from the water,” Svin told him. “He may be stronger than he looks.” Svin bent down and hauled Dortonn effortlessly to his feet, then shook him out. Dortonn persisted in his moaning. Svin brought his own face close and addressed him with his deepest, most resonant voice, which was resonant and deep indeed. “Dortonn, the time to act is now.”
“Well, I’m gonna do this pass with the chemical,” Favored announced. Gears clanked, vapor whooshed, and the ball lurched again into the air. “Remember your master Pod Dall,” Svin was exhorting Dortonn.
“Screw Pod Dall,” Dortonn mumbled through his cracked lips, but he clenched his teeth and raised his arms anyway, in a slow sequence of stiff jerks. The blackened claws at the ends of his hands began to unknot, showing raw flesh at the charred joints.
Tildamire Mont drifted aimlessly back and forth at the far side of the street. Too much, it was all too much. Roni was gone, and all her husband could do was pass out on the ground, and all her idiot brother could do was stand there playing his harmonica. It was like a convention - that creature flying around in his machine, now with orange dust cascading out of it above the fire, the firemen loading a taut water bladder that must have been eight feet in diameter onto a winched-back catapult, even that barbarian fool Svin steadying that other person who couldn’t be anything other than dead. And there was still no sign - and likely never would be again - of Senor Ballista, who had rescued her from the bridge and then sacrificed himself to save her from the Creeping Sword. But of all of them, she was the one left with nothing to do, however futile, however insane. She never should have left home. When her father, the former Lion of the Oolvaan Plain, heard about this, he’d never take her seriously again. He’d know; even back in Roosing Oolvaya, he’d know. She’d failed when people had been depending on her. She never should have -
SPROING! The water bomb left the catapult and arched overhead. Favored banked over its landing spot and dumped the final bag of fire retardant over the side, noticing as he did that a layer of mist seemed to be spontaneously condensing out of the air around him. Then it was more than mist, it was a cloud, water, rain, being wrung out of the humid sea atmosphere as though it were a mopping cloth. A sudden deluge washed over Flotarobolis, then something more solid; hail, ice. The ball shuddered and Favored felt the craft begin to lose altitude.
“There, are you satisfied?” croaked Dortonn at Svin, watching his ice sheet drop toward the fire, already breaking into steam. “May I die yet?”
“Is not your master Pod Dall a god of Death? Would you not just be delivering yourself to him, and with your mission not accomplished?”
Dortonn grunted. “Are you a barbarian or a lawyer?”
Abruptly Svin picked him up by the neck and shook him. “Are you performing sabotage?”
“What? -” The flying machine was falling into the steam clouds, tumbling erratically, most of its vents frozen closed. Dortonn made a creaky pass, easing back on the thermostatic regulator, as the vehicle was lost to sight in the mist.
Fire Chief Cinder felt increasingly morose as he watched a new gout of flame arch up through the huge billows of steam. A tremendous quantity of liquid had been thrown at this block, enough to reduce any normal fire to soggy mush, yet still it burned; still it kept flaring. Something had to be leaking energy into it, probably the same something that had socked those magicians out cold on the ground. So why was this other magician, the charred walking cadaver, still functioning? “Excuse me,” said Chief Cinder, moving just barely into conversational earshot, “do you detect a malign influence keeping this conflagration alive? I would suggest not probing directly,” he added hastily.
Only Svin was close enough to hear Dortonn mutter his usual complaint before bending himself to the task. What was he saying now, the best way to fight fires was to never touch them directly? Well, that apparently had been his strategy; not to probe the fire at all, merely to drop liquids on it from above. “‘Malign influence,’ he says,” rasped Dortonn. “‘Malign influence’ - phaugh! Fuzzy-headed thinking, misuse of - huh!”
“What?” Svin demanded.
Dortonn was concentrating more than Svin had seen him since they’d arrived. “Not ‘malign,’ but indeed an influence. Fairly powerful -”
In a rapid fan outward from the fire-wracked buildings across the street, the cobblestones of the pavements began riffling upward and hurling themselves into the air, the ground beneath them hissing and lashing. Svin thought he might have heard Dortonn change his last remark to “very powerful,” but that could have just been his own mind’s own reaction to the latest development. Perhaps a dozen feet worth of cobblestones had left the ground when the prodigy suddenly ceased; at the same time, in fact, that some of the airborne stones could be observed to be coming apart into pebbles, gravel, sand; and other stones were flowing and melting like cobble-shaped molds of gelatin or perhaps loosely constituted rubber. Then the transfigured stones began to rain back to earth. “I did not cause this,” stated Dortonn, bending down and covering his head with his arms.
Everyone in sight was trying to cover themselves, those who were not actively fleeing the scene or standing gape-mouthed frozen in amazement. Or those who were still playing their harmonicas. Maybe the real problem here isn’t the fire at all, Jurtan Mont was thinking, doing his best to ignore the fragments cascading around him, and especially those few (fortunately small) pattering onto his head; he had the fire’s meter and key and didn’t want to lose them. But perhaps the real danger was related to those other dancing harpsichord runs, the ones he’d been trying to ignore as a distraction, the ones that had come to their most coherent life in a rippling rush perfectly coordinated with the unusual behavior of the pavement just now. Jurtan made his focus shift...
- and suddenly felt as though he’d tossed his line into a bucket and hooked a whale! His head shrieked at him, his vision blurred behind a wash of smearing green, he felt a knife-stab pain in first one ear and then the other, the harmonica bashed itself against his gums like a thing possessed - and the only thought in his mind was the irrelevant observation, “You’re in the big time now, Jurtan.”
But he was, he clearly was, and damned if he was going to let whatever-it-was get the better of him.
What is the Mont boy doing? Svin wondered, straightening up again and letting rocks cascade off his back. He had been sheltering Dortonn with his body; the other Mont had unfortunately been too far back for even him to reach in time, although that had also put her out of range of the worst of the sudden downpour of solids. Had Jurtan been bashed once too many in the head? He was jittering like one of those multi-jointed puppets on an elastic string, blood pouring from both ears and running freely over his shoulders, still clutching of all things his absurd instrument. And not merely clutching, playing, although as with most of the music he attempted, it sounded (to be charitable) as though he was merely following one small part in a large orchestral score. But this time he had clearly lost his mind.
Svin realized Dortonn was talking to himself. His voice had not improved - if anything, it had gotten worse - but even though the sound was cracked and distorted and barely audible to boot, the words could be still be ascertained. “It must be hiding underneath,” he was saying, “using the power of the fire to go burrowing into the earth - intelligent? No, I feel no intelligence - but instinctual motivation? Yes?”
Should Dortonn be interrupted? Svin wondered, caught up as Dortonn clearly was in a professional challenge? Should or not, he must be dragged back to the issue at hand - but how best? Why not just presume on his competence? “Can you kill it?” said Svin. “Poison it? Send it to another dimension?”
One baleful red eye swung up to glare at him. “You will owe me more than you can pay when this is finished.”
“Just deal with it,” Svin said. “Talk later.”
Overhead, Favored-of-the-Gods made another erratic swooping pass in his ball-vehicle. His scanners showed another upwelling deep beneath the fire. He’d seen the same indications before that strange bit with the animated cobblestones - something putting out enough thaumaturgical sideband radiation to leave a crater thirty feet deep if it all let loose at once. Whatever was down there was using a pumped-resonance cycle, feeding a catalytic amount of energy to stoke the fire and then turning on the siphons when the fire took the bait and exploded. It had to have some shield, though; it couldn’t survive in the middle of those flames, and it clearly wasn’t a creature of flames itself, no matter the manifestations its emanations had shaped. So it must be using a disinclination shield of some sort, or perhaps a misdirecting trick... and it bore remembering that craters, of course, were scarcely the real danger at hand, nor was energy, no matter how prodigiously employed.
Did he have any acid bombs left in this thing?
Jurtan was still fighting the leviathan, but at least he still had it on his line. He was starting to get a feel for its jerks and thrashes, though, and even better was the fact that it didn’t seem to realize yet that he was playing it. If he could just hit it with the right out-of-phase harmonics he might even be able to do better. He’d try a different chord progression.
Svin was now watching Jurtan Mont even more closely than Dortonn. What if the kid wasn’t insane after all? “Dortonn!” Svin said. “Pay attention to Mont, there. What is he doing?”
“Nothing, I’m certain,” growled Dortonn, diverting a crispy hand to wave indifferently in Jurtan’s direction. “Stop bothering - wait! You’re right.” He cocked his head to the side, listening with his residual fragment of earlobe. “I can only detect his side-scatter, but yes, yes, if he does that, than I will do - so!”
The flying machine was making its steepest approach yet to the center of the fire in the center of the Karlini building, Svin noted, coming in almost straight toward the ground. Had it lost control again? But then a small egg of gleaming copper metal emerged from a protruding tube and disappeared into the flames as the ball lurched away in a spasmodic roll that took it into a leaping curtain of flame... and through, badly scorched, on the other side. At Svin’s own side, Dortonn gave a sudden shudder, his fingers writhing and his mouth moving without words; then Dortonn seemed to abruptly lose five pounds of his remaining weight in Svin’s grip, and sagged limply. Jurtan Mont’s instrument gave a final discordant blare and burst into fragments of reed and horn. Mont took a unsteady step to the rear, his bloody hands still held out in front of him, then went over onto his backside.
Well, that is that, Svin thought. The last participants were now out of commission, and no further reinforcements were in sight. A tall splash of flame erupted, as though a new barrel of oil had been added to the wreckage, and in its wake Svin felt a wind tugging him toward the building. Not strong enough to pull him off his feet, it still had the force to lift ashes and embers and some of the scattered small rocks and twirl them toward the inferno, and pull over the remaining standing wall, and suck in at the leaping flames... but then the wind died, and amazingly enough the fire seemed to suck in on itself as well, and puff out.
Fire Chief Cinder was hollering again, waving his men in his line of sight back from their spread-out positions along the block, where they had been fighting the secondary blazes and trying to keep the situation from spreading too far downwind. New streams of water hit the site of the lab building from several angles at once, and for the first time the bounding flames and towering gray smoke were supplanted by steam and a welcome white smoke. Dortonn was breathing but unconscious. Jurtan Mont was breathing as well, and his eyes were open, but he seemed more glazed than truly aware of his surroundings. From the amount of blood in evidence, that might be just as well. In tearing itself apart, his harmonica had ripped its way across fingers and lips and -
“This time you’ve really done it, you fool,” Jurtan’s sister, Tildamire, was saying in a particularly hectoring tone as she rushed toward him. Her face, however, was the white of a grub found in the lightless hollow under a moss-encrusted boulder, and her stride was so wobbly that watching her Svin expected another comatose body to hit the ground any instant now.
Dortonn would keep. Svin grabbed up one of the few water barrels remaining undrained from the firefighters’ wagon and strode toward the Monts. Tildamire, still unaccountably on her feet, turned her uncertain gaze on Svin, said “What -” and then “no! -” as she saw the barrel raised to the considerable height of Svin’s arms outstretched above his body, and finally said nothing more as she disappeared beneath a cascade of water. The water scoured across Jurtan too, or indeed principally Jurtan, washing away blood and grime as well as the scum and stench still remaining from his recent plunges into his offal-laden mudbank and the Tongue Water, which of course wasn’t much better.
With cleanliness returned attentiveness. “Wow!” said Jurtan, followed immediately by “Ow!” as the catalog of his injuries descended on him at once.
“An inspiring performance,” commented Svin. “The danger has passed?”
“Looks that way,” said Favored-of-the-Gods, leaning from the open hatchway of his once-again-landed vehicle. “There’s still mopping up the fire, but at least I think we wiped out all the nasty stuff. Better keep an eye on it just to be -” Something within his machine began an insistent beeping sound. Favored ducked from sight but his voice continued, although unintelligibly. After another moment he peeked up again long enough to say, “Gotta run.” Then the hatch swung back into place and the sphere wobbled into the air with the typical attendant prodigies of brimstone-laden vapors and strange clanking noises. The machine swooped off down the street, barely missing with its retracting landing-gear assembly the remaining Karlini retainers just now striding up the block.
Haddo gibbered something particularly unpleasant-sounding from the depths of his black hood, waving a gauntleted fist in the air as he did so. His companion, Wroclaw, merely sighed. “Oh, my,” he said, surveying the scene.
They both looked about ready to keel over themselves. Haddo broke off his imprecations to ask the key question of the hour. “Under control situation is?”
The dripping, hair-plastered Tildamire was the one who answered. She had just decided to forgive that oaf Svin for his water treatment, since it clearly had done her good, not only from a standpoint of her own level of ash and grime, but from the way it had cut through her total mental paralysis. Being reminded of the facts of the situation, furthermore, might make it appropriate to have him do it again. “If you don’t count Roni,” she said heavily, “I guess it seems to be.”
Svin was watching Wroclaw, so he was in position to view not only the stiff backward snap of his head as though he were recoiling from a sudden blow, but the brief sharp glare he cast at Haddo immediately afterward. What does he know? Svin wondered, and of what does he accuse Haddo?
It never stopped, did it? Here they were, gathered around a scene of devastation, just beginning to acknowledge and mourn the presumed death of one of their number; smoke was still in the air and blood on their faces; yet the first agenda item was one of suspicion and distrust and the assumption of some hidden plot.
But on the other hand, that was just the way the world was.
Could Svin change things on his own? No, he told himself, clearly not, and the attempt would only increase the chance of someone else coming to grief. This was the game of civilization, and he had already discovered that joining it was a one-way trip.
Of course, even as a barbarian, the freedom of the frozen steppes had been its own illusion, he understood now, what with Dortonn exercising dominion over his people in the name of his master Pod Dall, and Haddo and his people plotting against Dortonn in their turn; intrigue and subterfuge and open warfare. That had been the game then; that was the game now.
Only who from among them would be left to reminisce about this installment in another dozen years?