Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Catastrophe

Max flipped the lens up on its circlet and nosed over into the water. A wave came up behind him, lifting him as he paddled. Would it be high enough? … it was. The wave broke against the curtain wall of the castle, but Max was riding it toward its peak; he slipped with the crest between two square crenellation stones, across a small lagoon covering an underwater courtyard, and washed up next to the interior wall facing onto the yard, just below a window. He pulled himself up on the sill, saw nothing inside, and rolled through.

The floor was awash to ankle-depth but the room was empty. Max crossed it quickly, trying not to splash, positioned his lens again in front of his eye, eased open the door, and peeked out onto a flat landing off a circular staircase. The same sheet of shallow water covered the landing. A deeper pool hooded the descending stairs, large bubbles bursting on its surface. A low orange glow suffused up through the water from some unseen source below. In the vague light Max’s right eye made out the features of stair and stone resting quietly and apparently inert. His left eye could see the scene more distinctly through the lens, but the viewer revealed no sign of greater activity. He moved up the stairs.

Through the lens, the stairs rippled and revolved, seeming to suddenly point down when he was still obviously going up, abruptly receding to a distance of miles and then popping back to sit atop his nose. He passed a room on his right; his right eye saw it as a simple sitting chamber but his left added a churning blue disc hanging in the air at neck-level. Additional rooms passed on the left, the staircase coiled tighter and steepened its pitch, and then the wall opened on the right into a level corridor. Max took a step toward the corridor and froze. The corridor was constricting about thirty feet ahead, drawing together from all four sides like a soft tube pinched around by fingers; his left eye saw it and his right eye saw it too. In the center of the constriction zone dangled a small kaleidoscopic vortex. Max spun back to the staircase and froze again. Something from below was following him rapidly up the steps.

Max backed warily upward. Give me a break, already, he thought, I don’t have time to waste like this. He had to find Karlini - an orange glow spread up the stairs, strobing with the heartbeat rhythm of the castle. A distant tremor ran through the floor. Max glanced around, behind him, down - DOWN! He flung himself back, scrabbling convulsively upward, as a twisted mass festooned with pincers and shining with a sick orange glare sprang up through the stone floor itself and spun toward him. Max flung a destabilizer at it, followed by a barrier disk; the disk folded twice along sudden orange creases and toppled melting to the floor while the destabilizer dart degraded into a pile of tiny leaves that hung fluttering in the air; the orange thing pulsed again and changed, gaining several long-stalked eyes with multiple pupils and a set of mobile jaws; and Max turned and ran full-tilt away from it up the stairs. A turn-and-a-half above, the staircase ended at a dead-wall landing. A single doorway opened to one side.

The construct was right behind him, now sporting a dragging tail and ventral fins. The walls around Max as seen through the lens were squirming with life, the veins of black energy in them throbbing with knots of slipping silver. Half-a-dozen veins had leapt out from the walls and were embedded in the orange construct, feeding it silver globs - that gave Max an idea. He backed through the door, trading maneuver room for time while his fingers wove in the air. He had entered a circular chamber twenty feet across with a peaked ceiling and several open windows, an observation turret slapped onto the side of the major tower. The orange creature shot after him, its pincers gnashing, but missed the doorway and plowed into the wall. That didn’t stop it; with a grinding growl a five-foot section of stone next to the door exploded into gravel and smoky dust, and the creature pushed its way into the room. The thing’s half-dozen eyes turned to face him.

It had been a long time since Max had worked this particular kind of transformation and it was a complicated one to boot, but the technique was coming back. He pumped activation potential into the transmutation bridge – there, he had it! The air curdled behind the creature. A foot-long section of each dancing feeding tube turned gold, then yellow, then gray; the construct paused, three of the eyes whirling to peer around behind it; and the tubes of energy began to stretch and fall toward the floor like wisps of smoke suddenly possessed of solid weight. That was in fact close to the truth; Max had gotten them with a solidification bridge that was warping mass into their immaterial matrix structure. Two of the veins cracked in mid-air and splintered. The creature was waving its pincers around, lights and refractive effects sparkling around them as it snapped off wards and counterfields, but the bridges had their contacts firmly bound and with its power rapidly declining the creature couldn’t shake them. Its orange color faded toward a translucent yellow. Then the eyes wobbled up to peer at Max and one of the hanging mouths broke into a nasty grin. The construct grabbed at the solidification bands, reversed its own polarity, and yanked. A wave of accretion poured along the feeding veins and burst through the construct in a surge of pulsing gray.

The statue that had been the construct dropped toward the floor, the snarling mouth lagging in the air for an instant behind it, the whole assembly still gaining mass at an accelerated rate. Max began to lunge around it toward the door. The mass hit the stone floor weighing a ton or more, the floor cracked around it, a giant shudder shook the room as the cracks ran up into the walls, the floor canted abruptly outward, and with a final lurch and rumble the entire room pulled free from the tower wall and started to fall. The doorway slid up and away barely short of Max’s fingers. He turned and vaulted across the room, hit floor and leapt again, sprang headfirst in a clean plunge through the window space opposite the doorway, and arched over in a long swan dive toward the water far below.

The falling turret entered the water thirty feet to Max’s right and a second ahead; the splash had barely begun to reach him when he sliced into the river. The blow drove the air from his lungs. He let his momentum carry him deep, felt his ears pop as the pressure wave from the turret radiated past overhead, turned, stroked back to the surface, shook the water out of his eyes, took a deep gasping breath, and looked around. He had shrugged out of his backpack in mid-air so the impact wouldn’t rip his shoulders off; now in the river swells starting to carry him downstream there was no sign of it. A flash caught his attention out of the corner of his vision. Upstream and high in the air, a moving pinpoint slid down against the stars, no, more than a pinpoint, a dot, not a dot at all but a disc, a disc with sprouting lines on both sides, flapping lines; and then abruptly the moving dot was a large swooping bird, claws down and open and grasping, painted dim white by the light of the moon, gliding toward Max over the surface of the water. The bird flapped once more, Max raised his arms, the claws swelled, and with a thud to his chest and a lurch in his stomach he was jerked into the air. In two powerful wing thrusts the bird gained altitude and banked toward the castle. The river tilted crazily below. Max looked up instead.

A hood with two bright sparks at about the right place for eyes peered back at him around the neck of the bird. “Fortunate are you waited I around,” Haddo said.

Another wing-flap, and the bird cleared a battlement with no more than five feet to spare. “Thanks, Haddo, you’re a handy guy!” Max yelled up. Haddo had been planning to loiter in the vicinity of Roosing Oolvaya to see what happened there before heading back to the castle. Of course, it had ended up saving him a trip, since the castle had come to him instead. “What’s the situation?”