Jo Clayton - Blue Magic

A whitish waxy muzzle nosed slowly, awkwardly, through the low arch. He waited. When the thing emerged a bit more, he was amused to see it was an inverted table with Brann and Danny Blue crouched betwe ,:m its legs. Floating a yard above the floor, it inched forward until it was clear of the arch then stopped, rocking gently as if blown by summer breezes on a summer pond. The changers followed it in, twin glimmer-spheres so pale they were visible only as smudges of light against the blackstone wall as they hovered one on each side of the table.

For a breath or two he considered calling to them, working out some sort of compromise, but Amortis was seething overhead, ready to seize and swallow at the first sign of hesitation, not caring whom she took, him or them, BihYAHtii trembled on his chest, hungrier and more deadly than the god, and, beyond all this, he remembered the thousands of landfolk who’d left home and harvest for him, trying to interpose their bodies between him and those on that table. There was no room left for talking. There never had been, really. He swung the staff up, knocked its end against the dais three times and took all restraints off his voice. “I give you this warning,” he roared at them, “This alone. Leave here. Or die. There is nothing for you here.” While he was still speaking, before the warning was half finished, he fingered the staff and loosed a sucking airtrap, throwing it at the table. There were many ways of managing that lift effect; it didn’t matter which Danny Blue had chosen, for the trap would negate the magic behind the effect, send the table crashing to the floor and prison it with its riders in one or another of the stonetraps.

Nothing like that happened. Danny Blue didn’t even try to counter the trap. While it twined about the table and withered futilely away, Dan spat into his palm, blew at the spittle. It flew off his hand, elongated into a blue-white water form that arrowed at Maksim, a water elemental (which surprised Maksim quite a lot since Ahzurdan’s forte had been fire and fire-callers, like earth-singers, seldom could handle water at all, let alone handle it well; this was either the Godalau’s work or the Akamarino melded with him, which made one wonder what else he could do and what his weaknesses were); Maksim drew briefly on the chair’s power, channeled it through his staff and twisted a tunnel through the air that sucked in the elemental and flung it into the bay.

The table moved az ,hair or two forward. Dan was frowning, trying to read floor, air, ceiling, walls as if he had forty eyes not two. The Drinker of Souls knelt beside him, silent, frowning, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. The changers drifted beside the table, waiting. For what, Maksim did not know, perhaps they wanted to get closer before they came at him; one thing he did know, he did not want them anywhere near him. He prodded a reluctant Amortis, ordered her to stir herself and start attacking, wanting her to draw the changers into striking back at her, thereby taking themselves out of the game. While she shaped and flung a storm of firedarts at the sled, he scanned his prisoned demons, chose the players for his first demon gambit.

Third cell on the right: small bat-winged flyers with adamantine teeth and claws, a poison dart at the tip of whippy tails. He released the pentacle and sent the flyers racing at the sled.

Third cell on the left: one creature there, a knotty tentacled acid spitter, capable of instantaneous transfer across short distances, capable also of terrific psychic punches when it was within touching distance. He tripped the pentacle on this one a few seconds after the other, waiting until Danny Blue was focused on the first set of demons, fishing for the release call that would send them home.

Demons in the remaining ten cells, waiting to be loosed to battle.

In two separate cells, two vegetative serpents thirty feet long and big around as a man’s thigh, immensely powerful with shortrange stunner organs that they can use to freeze their prey before they drop on it.

In three separate cells, three swarms of Hive demons each three inches long, they suck up magic like flies suck up blood, hundreds of units in each swarm.

In three separate cells, three tarry black leech things, eyeless, with feelers that they extrude and withdraw into themselves, each with a rhythm of its own; like the hivers they drink magic rather than blood, they are capable of sensing traps and avoiding them and nothing but death or dismissal will take them off a trail they’re started on.

A mist creature, a subtle thing, slow, insinuating; given sufficient time it can penetrate any shield no matter how tight; once in, it consumes whatever lives inside that shield.

A roarer, a swamp lizard mostly mouth and lungs, it attacks with sound, battering with noise, stirring terror with subsonics, drilling into the brain with supersonics.

Dan shouted the release that flipped the flyers to their home reality a micro instant before the tentacled demon slammed into the shield sphere, gushed acid over it and wound itself up to punch at the people inside. As the sled rocked and groaned under the added weight, before Dan had time to shift his focus, Brann had the stunner out of his pocket; she thumbed the slide back and slashed the invisible beam in a wide X across the creature.

It howled in agony, pulled its tentacles into a tight knot and tumbled off the shield, crashing to the floor inside one of the pentacle traps which locked around it and held it stiff as a board against stone that sucked at it and sucked at it, slowly slowly absorbing the demon into its substance.

The changers wheeled above the shield, catching the firedarts and eating them. Amortis stirred uneasily in the dome and stopped wasting her substance for no result.

Danny Blue shivered the shield to rid it of the remnants of the acid, then he scraped the sweat off his brow and peered into the air ahead of him, searching out the airtraps, inching the sled between them, gaining another foot before he stopped to catch his breath and prepare another attack.

Maksim frowned. That shield should be costing Danny Blue more than he could afford-unless he had something similar to BinYAHtii feeding him. Her. Had to be her. Forty Mortal Hells, I have to get to her. How, how, how… ah! The sled had whined and dropped lower under the weight of the demon. If he could crash it, if he could put them on foot…

Second gambit. Complex. Crushing weight, pile stone elementals on that shield sphere, attack on every side with everything I can throw at them, distract the changers, tempt them once more to attack Amortis.

Settsimaksimin tripped the pentacles, flipped the serpents and the roarer at the sled and left the others to make their own way; he goaded Amortis into attacking again, instructing her to slam the sled about as much as she could while she flooded it with fire; he reached deep into the stone, wakened the elementals sleeping there, sent them boiling up (bipedal forms with powerful clumsy limbs, forms altering constantly but very slowly, growing, breaking off into smaller versions like a glacier calving icebergs, gray and black and brown and brindle, stone colors, stone flesh, stone heavy), standing on each other, climbing over each other until they were up and over the shield sphere, saving only where the serpents were. Once they were in place, they swung their arms and crashed their fists into it, pounding it, pounding…

The Roarer crouched on its bit of safe ground and hammered at them with with great gusts of SOUND, blasts so tremendous they seemed to shake the temple, threatening to bring the columns crashing down around the chamber. The effect of this SOUND was diminished slightly by the insulating effect of the crawling stone bodies of the elementals, but not enough, not nearly enough. The serpents tightened their grip on the shield, flat sucker faces pressed against it, sensors searching for life within, stun organ pulsing, ready to loose its hammer the moment it had a target…