Jo Clayton: Blue Magic

It wrenched free of her and Danny, fled toward the top of the sphere. The air curdled up there as it compacted its misty substance, as far from her as it could get.

Brann broke from Danny again. Holding the table leg she struggled to her feet and reached for that mist.

With a kind of silent scream it flowed desperately away from her hand until it managed to ooze down between the windshield and the shieldsphere where she had no way of reaching it. Satisfied for the moment, she dropped back, settled herself as comfortably as she could while the table continued to rock wildly, to judder like a worm with hiccups, to slam between the wall and the dais. Her legs wrapped about the table’s leg, she spared a moment to heal the damage from the mist, Dan first, then herself, then she went back to feeding fire to him. She didn’t know what he was doing, only that it must be important if the intensity of his concentration meant anything.

Danny felt the small pains but ignored them. Sometime later he felt the upheaval when Brann interfered with his body as she healed the skin burns and the eye-damage; he ignored that too. He drove the tube up until it was clear of the elementals, bent it in a quarter circle and expanded it swiftly toward the nearest wall, holding it steady despite the careening of the sled. When it jammed against the stone, he heated the head end hotter than Amortis’ fire and melted the tube through; his Sight was cut off by the elementals, but he could See down the tube and expand that Sight a few degrees as soon as one end was outside the temple. He sent it arching down over the edge of the island, down and down until it reached the gray seawater. When it dippйd below the surface, he felt the cold shock of that water, shouted his triumph, “I’ve got you, Maks, I’ve got you now.” He heard Brann’s exclamation, ignored it and grew side pipes along the tube in an ascending spiral; grinning, he popped in the tiny pumps and started them sucking. “Brann, tell the changers there’s going to be a lot of water in here in just a moment. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but it’ll be wild.”

He reached again, sending an imperious call for water eIementals, felt an immediate, almost frightening surge as they answered him. Answered him in the hundreds. Came compressed, swimming up the tube with the water the pumps were hauling.

Water and water elementals spurted from the side-pipes, sprayed copiously over the earth elementals crawling weak and angry over the shield sphere. Converting them to a slippery mindless sludge that dripped, ropy and viscid, off the sphere.

Light flared through the shield, red light, gold light, light hard and bright as diamond.

Settsimaksimin and Amortis stood together, dais and chair, Maksim half sunk in her shimmering translucent female body. Black sorceror body, Black Heart in that Rose of Light, chant reverberating thunderously through the great chamber…

Lines of light webbed around the sled, closing on it. They were caught like fish in a tightening purse seine…

SEY NO KATALAM SEY NO PALAPSAM EKHO EKHO PALAPSAM

Dan shuddered under the power of that chant. Amortis and BinYAHtii and Settsimaksimin plaited like a gilded braid, their unstable meld building to a climax that was terrifyingly close. For a moment he sat passive, helpless, Ahzurdan exhausted riding up hill to the Chained God and the trap inside the ship…

SEY NO EKHO SEY SEEY UUHHH EY NO NO NO…

The water elementals flowed up the dais, pressed around Maksim and the Fire, not quite touching either, disturbing him so much it broke into the drive of the chant. Didn’t stop it, but the chant faltered and some of the power went out of it. BinYAHtii’s dull red glow flickered.

A smallish dark figure strolled up the burning air, moved easily and untouched through the ring of water, the shell of fire and stepped onto the half-melted chair arm. Thngjii balanced there a moment, then rested hisser hand on Maksim’s arm near the wrist, that was all, then heesh was somewhere else.

Settsimaksimin’s body jolted, his voice broke; he gave a small aborted cry, crumpled, tumbling off the chair and down the stairs to land sprawled on his face on the floor.

Ball lightning and jagged firelines snapped across and across the Dome Chamber, rebounding from the walls, bouncing from the floor and ceiling as Maksim’s stored magic disrharged from stone and air and his tormented flesh, squeezed its tangible elements into hot threads that braided themselves in a rising rope of fire that went rushing up and up, bursting through the dome, shattering it into shards which fell like glass knives onto the stone, glancing off the shield Dan kept in place about the sled until the worst of the storm was past. Amortis solidified into her thirty meter female form, looking wildly about and fled after the fleeing remnants of Maksim’s magic.

17. The End Of The End.

SCENE: Maksim sprawled on the floor, dead or dying. The changers stood beside him, once more in their bipedal forms. The table settled to the floor. Brann and Danny Blue, bruised, battered, weary, climbed off it and started around the ruined dais.

Danny Blue stood beside the crumpled body. “Looks like his heart quit on him. Old Tungjii found his crack.”

Brann frowned, disturbed as much by the dispassionate dismissing tone of those words as by the words themselves. She touched Maksim’s hand with her toe, feeling manipulated and not liking it very much. She’d helped destroy a man she might have liked a lot if things were other than they were. Before the eidolon appeared (a hollow image, yet with enough of his personality in it to intrigue her) she’d known him mostly through Ahzurdan’s comments, yes, and his attacks on her, which seemed to give her no choice; if she wanted to live she had to stop him, but the rise of the landfolk had shaken her badly. Abandoning a harvest only half-gathered with the winter hunger that might mean? leaving their houses open to plunder, their stock handy for the nearest light-finger? doing it to protect one man, the man that ruled them? In all of her travels, in all of her reading, she’d never heard of a king (not even the generally mild and intelligent kings of her home island Croaldhu), emperor, protector of the realm, whatever the ruler called himself, whose peasantry volunteered (volunteered!)

their bodies and their blood to keep him from harm. Nobles certainly, they had a powerful interest in who sat the local throne. Knights and their like, for gold, for the blood in it, for what they called their honor (being a true son of Phras, Chandro boasted hundreds of those stories about this one and that one among his ancestors and she’d heard them all). Armies had fought legendary battles but not for love of their leaders; they had their pay, their rights to plunder, their friends fighting beside them and the headsman’s axe waiting for the losers. Peasants though! What peasants got from a war was hunger and harder work, ruined crops, dead stock, burnt houses while their landlords refilled war-starved coffers out of peasant sweat and peasant hide. She frowned down at Maksim, caught her breath as the fingers by her foot moved a little. She dropped to her knees beside him. “Dan, help me turn him over.”

“w hy?,

“Because I damn well refuse to be some miserable meeching god’s pet executioner. If you don’t want to help, get out of the way.”

He shrugged. “It’s your game, Bramble. You take his feet, I’ll get his shoulders.”

When Maksim was on his back, the velvet and linen robes smoothed about him, Brann eased BinYAHtii’s gold chain over his head and tried to lift the talisman away without touching the stone; this close, it seemed to radiate danger. It rocked a little but wouldn’t come free. She laid the chain on his chest, the heavy links clunking with oily opulence; she looked at them with distaste, then used both hands on the broad gold frame fitted around the stone, pulling as hard as she could. The pendant lifted away from his chest with a sucking sound, a smell of burned meat. She swallowed, swallowed again as her stomach threatened to rebel, thew the thing away, not caring where or how it landed. “Yaril,” she said, “take a look inside, will you? I think I’d better not try this blind.”