John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

Then down. Victor did not fly like Boggin had, prone, like a man doing a breaststroke. He stood in the air like a man riding an elevator, while an invisible electromagnetic force picked him up, moved him over, set him downn again, as if he were a chessman being moved by an unseen hand.

Then he was up again. I was the first one here, and I looked around at the barren top of the barrow mound, wondering what was here.

Victor plunged down again. Vanity. She gave me a hug and big smile, her first time flying. She half-stepped, half-slid down the side of the barrow mound, and started touching the slabs of uncut stone that formed the base of the mound, where it met the earth. The archeologist, or someone, had spaded and cut away the turf, which otherwise would have covered it, so a snowy ditch ran in a semicircle around the base of the mound.

Victor plunged down silently from the sky, holding a disgruntled Colin. Behind him was a dark shadow shaped like wings, which fluttered and flapped but made no noise at all. The shadow touched the ground on the far side of the mound from where we were. A moment later, Quentin came into view, walking over the top of the mound and down toward us.

I pointed at him, made a flapping gesture with my hands, shrugged, tapped my forehead. Apparently he understood what I was asking. How did you remember how to fly ? He just smiled, held up the distaff he was carrying, pointed to his ear, pantomimed listening. / did not remember , he was saying. Apsu did.

They didn't erase his memory .

Vanity touched a stone, and it slid back without noise. There were stairs leading down to a tunnel. She gestured like a showgirl on a game show displaying a new prize the contestants have just won.

We passed through less than a hundred feet of tunnel, and emerged four miles away.

2.

The tunnel itself was five feet high, the curved roof just low enough to make a tall girl claustrophobic. The walls and roof were brown brick; the floor was leafy mold above cracked yellow concrete. There were brackets in the walls for holding torches, and dark angles of stain across the brick above these brackets.

Every twenty paces, there was an oval hole in the curved roof, smaller than a woman's fist, where air and a little moonlight trickled in. There were pale ivy vines and thorny bushes growing in cracks in the stones just under these holes, as if seeds had dropped in, and enough sunlight reached there to sustain them.

At the far end of the tunnel was a tiny room like a guardroom, also made of brown brick. To the left, rusted hinges hung above a tiny niche or alcove. Three metal braces formed a crude ladder leading to a circular door at shoulder level. A hatch, I suppose. One brick at eye level was missing from that wall; this was a peephole or loophole that overlooked the door.

I could hear the ocean. Through the loophole, I could smell salt spray.

The latch for the door was just inside that missing brick. From the setup, it would take at least two people to open the door from the outside: one to stick his hand into the missing brick to reach the latch, one to pull on the door. Any defenders inside could just smash the incoming hand with a rock, or chop it off with a sword, I suppose.

Next to the door was a white stone, clvds imp et rex, l. jov anno xxi. What the hell did that mean?

Vanity worked the latch. She had to put her shoulder to it, and strain. The door groaned and opened.

Out she crawled.

The outer surface of the secret door was shaped like a rock, one of several rocks, which had slipped from a waist-high shelf of stone. Behind this shelf and above it was a cliff, which reached perhaps ten feet above our heads.

In the other direction was a drop to the rocks and the roaring foam. We stood among the sea cliffs. Like a giant staircase, the limestone cliffs formed shelves, one below the next, in crooked piles tumbling toward the sea.

Vanity found some handholds and footholds in a little chimney indented into the cliff behind us. She climbed up about less than a dozen. There was grass and a few stunted trees there, their branches naked of leaves.

Up we climbed.

The Kissing Well was less than a stone's throw away from us. We had traveled from the Northeastern to the Southwestern border of the estate in less than ten minutes.

Vanity announced, "It's okay to talk. We've lost him."

Colin looked to the West, staring at the moonlit waves. "Can we see a show of hands here? Who is confused besides me? Where the hell are we?"

Vanity said, "There were no prints showing Mrs. Wren going into the burial mound. No footprints. I knew there had to be a secret passage she had come in by!"

I said, "I think Vanity created the tunnel. I think she bent reality and wished it into existence."

Vanity said, "Then how did Mrs. Wren get into the burial mound? I saw her come out."

Colin said, "This is going to sound like Victor, but, how could Vanity have created a tunnel? Did she make the plants and the bushes? There was a Roman inscription on the wall, and the remains of a fire."

Victor said, "You are assuming newly created objects lack details. Since Amelia has not yet postulated a mechanism for the creation, we are not in a position to assess the likelihood of the hypothesis."

Quentin, of all people, said, "It is not an hypothesis. It is an article of faith. An hypothesis can be proved or disproved by evidence. The faith that Vanity can create a detailed object involves the assumption that she could create any evidence needed to support the object. If she can create a tunnel, why not books and blueprints showing the tunnel existed, or even people who remember building it?"

Vanity held up her hand. "Stop. I am the Dark Mistress now, and I order us all to stop jabbering about the philosophy of science! I am also turning control back over to Amelia, since I do not know what the hell to do next."

I said, "If you can turn control over to me, I can turn it back over to Victor."

Victor looked annoyed. "Fine. I order you to lead us. After you tell us what is going on, I'll be happy to serve as second-in-command, and take over if you get killed."

It was the matter-of-fact way he said that, that made us all pause and look at each other, and remember what a serious business we were involved in.

I bit my lip. "Okay, fine. Here is my thinking so far: We can't just run away. Since they have powers like Quentin's or Vanity's, they could just find us again, by magic. The moment Boggin knew we were making a break, he sent his people to guard the borders and, if he is smart, to guard the green table in his office, the big green table in a warehouse somewhere that he stole from Mestor…"

Vanity said, "Who is Mestor?"

"… Drinkwater. And Boggin would protect the safe in the Great Hall."

Colin chimed in, "Or booby-trap it."

"Since each power has one that cancels out another, he would put Mr. Glum to the South, to stop me; Dr. Fell to the North, to stop Quentin; Mrs. Wren to the West, and Miss Daw to the East. Since Wren left her position to go help Fell when they discovered we were up North, here, West, is the safest spot.

And we do not need to go East, because Victor got his powers back anyway, including some he did not have before."

Victor shook his head. "Don't overestimate me."

I said, "You beat Dr. Fell!"

"I'm sorry I didn't make this clear before. All I was do-ing was intercepting and copying the information packages Dr. Fell was sending out to control his nanites, and using his nanites to produce certain preprogrammed effects. During the fight, I had the creature Amelia put in my bloodstream operating to block his attempts to invade my nervous system. Since my security firewall was a living entity with free will, Fell wasn't able to come up with an attack combination. The creature was also the one who enabled me to intercept Fell's control codes, since it originally was made from him, and was tapped into his frequencies and ciphers. In effect, I had Fell's codebook in my hands during the fight. I would not be able to defeat another Cyclopes."