Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Catastrophe

Static charge crackled - another of the heartbeat change-pulses. The stone walls heaved in a long rippling wave like the snap of a whip; behind them, the hall they’d just used as an entrance folded in on itself ceiling-first in a cloud of billowing dust. “That was our exit!” Karlini yelled over the noise.

“We’ll blast through the outside wall and jump if we have to!” Max yelled back.

Karlini’s reply was drowned out by another massive rumble. The floor rocked forward, back, then subsided into a low shudder, several degrees of new tilt added onto its previous downhill slant. The armchair had been enveloped in a swarm of darting blue mites as the disc split and split again, and Max could feel its energy beginning to flow through the transformer coupling into his own body. Max leaned in through the tower entry and glanced up; through his lens he could see red waves of pulsatile light spilling down from above, the staircase seeming to writhe and snap like a plucked string. He reached gingerly upward with a passive probe - yes, the mad god was still there, still gathering strength through the black cables, but also apparently still unaware of their presence below. With a muscle-wrenching pass over the chair, he started to formulize the framework for the first confinement shell.

Karlini had one palm pressed flat against the stone of the wall, his teeth clenched in concentration; his other hand was carefully sketching figures in the air. The figures were oozing from magenta to silver, losing their separate forms and breaking into small round plates like scales. The scales spun away from Karlini in the shape of a miniature tornado and began to fill in the surface of a large glistening teardrop-shaped glob suspended next to him. A ripple ran through the glob and it started to oscillate, its form sliding from long and thin to short and plump and back again like a pool of hanging quicksilver, its colors reversing figure-for-ground at each pulse; then all at once the glob surged forward and flowed into the wall. Just as it entered the wall the pool fractured into a sudden cloud of smaller droplets. Each droplet darted toward one of the coiling black cables and sunk into it, and began to spiral down along the cable toward the heart of the castle. “Are you ready, Max?” Karlini said.

A nestled series of counter-rotating meshwork spheres hung over the remains of the chair, apparently forming one continuous surface communicating along twisted shifting boreholes. “Yeah, almost,” Max said, “but I’m still a little out of range. I want to get closer.”

“Better move it, then; we should see something from the stability points in under a minute … what’s that?”

The sphere-construct had moved ahead of Max and was floating up the stairs to the tower. A rolling blue cloud finished condensing around Max’s hand; he made a final pass above the cloud with his other hand and the cloud heaved and took off, trailing a line of knotted blue behind it like a fishing line. The cloud banked for a quick turn once around Karlini and then dove straight into his chest. Blue smoke puffed out around his torso. The blue line had stretched out across the room, growing wispy and almost invisible against the stone, but it became distinct again where it terminated in a solid blue bracelet locked hard around Max’s wrist. “If we have to bail out before I get back down I might have to crack you loose by remote,” Max yelled to Karlini, now following the sphere up the stairs, “and I think we’ll have enough going on without having to run a fresh spell-guide too!”

“Okay!” Karlini said, his voice ringing in along the blue line. “Be careful!”

“Yeah,” Max muttered. His whole body was tingling from the slug of energy he’d absorbed from the chair; he’d have to use that energy soon or blow it off, or he’d go unstable himself. Another turn up the stairs, and the red glow from the top was becoming harsh in its glare. Black coils of power surged up around him through the walls. Max stretched out, felt around - yeah, there was the Death, all right, still orbiting the tower and sucking in power from the castle. Max tugged at the confinement sphere, adjusting control parameters. The sphere broke apart, segment by segment and layer by layer in a quick radial stream, the fragments shot toward the walls and dove through them to merge with the black current, and the disassembled pieces shot upward toward the mad Death.

“Here it goes!” came Karlini’s voice, and at the same moment the stairs lurched underfoot. A rending groan so low in pitch that Max felt rather than heard it vibrated through the stone. Riding on top of the groan was a throbbing whine, pulsating out-of-time and out-of rhythm against the heartbeat pattern of the castle as a whole. A wave ran up the black energy coils; their progression speeded up, slowed. reversed, surged forward, stopped, and went into a pattern of quick jerks back and forth. Max felt out again and snarled - the Death had sucked up part of his confinement matrix along with his power feed, but not enough of it for full activation.

Max bled power into the confinement framework, trying to force more matrix elements toward the Death along the guide of the black carrier beams. The now-stalled current heaved sluggishly. The Death inhaled again, more forcefully, like a man trying to draw in oxygen through a clogged air-line, the current lunged ahead -

Through his control-link with the matrix framework Max felt a click, a SNAP, a swirl of agglomeration! The Death had sucked up the pieces of the matrix! Embedded in the substance of the mad god, spread around him and through him, binding him in coils of constricting power, the confinement spheres were locking together! A trailing barrage of solidification fronts ran up the black feeder tendrils, leaving crystallization in their wake. A boil appeared on the side of the outer sphere and popped, ejecting the matrix’s keel-string. The keel-string shot out and embedded itself deep in the castle stone; the confinement field, still gaining strength, began to constrict; then, all at once, a gout of heat and flame and raw heaving power came bursting through the not-yet-closed interstices in the overlapping matrix spheres, as the Death recognized suddenly that it was being trapped, and was not pleased, no, not pleased at all.

Max threw power, power into the matrix grid, power into the feeder cut-offs, power into the keel-string. The mad god was definitely weaker than an instant before, wilder, disoriented by the gyrations of the castle’s internal mechanisms as they tried to compensate for the destabilizing forces beating at it. From his infusion of energy and his level of preparation, Max was stronger than he’d been earlier, back at Oskin Yahlei’s, but that didn’t mean the Death was weak yet enough to surrender or that Max was strong enough to force him. A section of tower wall half-a-turn below Max crumbled and fell away. The stairs writhed beneath his feet. Max refused to be distracted by more antics of stairs; he was concentrating instead on using his last power to hold on. It wasn’t until the section of circular stair above him whipped flexibly back over his head and wound itself twice around his body that Max caught on, too late, to the fact that the entire tower was folding and writhing, shattering rocks were flying off to the sides, and the tower was sliding off the face of the castle toward the river.

Not again, Max thought, his stomach knotting with the abrupt downward acceleration. He pulled his left arm loose; then, with a THUD that threw his head straight back into one of the dancing stones above him, the remains of the tower hung up against a lower battlement and began to rotate outward, the tower toppling over onto its side; and then, with a THOOMP!! like the tail of a mile-long beaver slapping a pond the tower sank flat and full-length into the river.