John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

"I'm not paying for that," said Colin, who was facedown on the deck.

An alarm hooted through the ship. I heard tumbling crashes, shouts, and screams of alarm and panic ringing from the other cabins and staterooms.

"That felt like we hit an iceberg," said Quentin, from somewhere behind me.

The lights in the cabin flickered and went dark. It was black as pitch. There were no lights anywhere.

"No," I said, raising my voice to be overheard above the rising wail of mixed people's voices crying out from the cabins around us, the hoots and klaxons or various alarms. "It's Echidna. Grendel's mom. She's pulled the ship off course."

5.

Yellow emergency lights spluttered and came on. As soon as the ship was done with her sharp-angled turn, the deck went flat again. The captain's voice, immensely amplified, rang from loudspeakers, telling the passengers that the ship was still afloat, urging them to be calm. "We may have caught up against an obstruction. We are investigating the cause…"

I was looking through, or, rather, "past" the decks and bulkheads and hull of the ship.

Victor said, "Do you see what's happening?"

I said: "The water is dark, but, when she grabbed the keel of the ship, there was a flash like emerald-green lightning igniting the water in the sea for a moment. She has transparent flukes like an eel and a sting in her tail like a scorpion sting. I can see the shape of her arms and hands, and the cloud of her long hair as it streams back. She had just ripped away the rudders and propeller of the ship; they were tumbling in the water around her. Her face is very beautiful, but pale and terrible.

"There is something else: ahead of us, at right angles to this normal continuum, is another time-space, intersecting. The intersection takes place along a tubelike zone of discontinuity. Where the tube meets the water, there is a circle of ocean whose inner nature is slightly different than that of our world. Directly below this circle of water is an undersea mountain with a flat top; there is a courtyard and a temple atop this flat area, and lights shining in the windows of the temple. In the courtyard is a sailor, tied upside down to a post, with his eyes torn out. The remains of a sailor. It is about fifty fathoms down. That is where she is taking us. We are going to be passing over that position."

There was a moment of silence while Victor absorbed this information. Everyone looked blanched and strange in the harsh glare of the emergency lights.

Colin said, "Orders, Leader? And let me just take this moment to say, I hope the words 'run away'

appeal' somewhere in the commands you are about to baric: out. And I think I speak for all the parts of my presently unkilled body when I say this."

Victor said slowly, 'There may be complicating factors. This isn't Lamia. Grendel's mother may be here simply to kill the human beings aboard. If we are obligated to risk or sacrifice our lives to save the mortals, we cannot run away."

Colin quirked his mouth to one side. "Hmph. Sacrifice lives. I did notice the words 'run away' did appear in the orders, but not exactly in the word order I would have wanted…"

"Enough chatter. The question may be moot," Victor said, frowning. He looked at Vanity.

She said, "I can't tell how far away my boat is! She heard me when I called; I can tell she can tell where I am and she is coming, but I don't know any more than that"

Victor turned to Quentin. "If this is Grendel's mother, and she operates on his paradigm—that is the psionic paradigm, right? The inspiration paradigm? Quentin, you are supposed to be able to trump that paradigm. Can you summon up or banish the inspiration energies, the power source, she is using?"

I said softly, "I know what it is. The inspiration. She is coming to build another pile of skulls in her garden behind her house."

Quentin said, "Let me see what I can do. Incanto sanctum circumque" He tapped his wand on the ground and a soft, pearly light issued from one tip. He held it out at arm's length and waved it around his head. The pearly light drew a clearly visible line of light into a perfect circle around him. A ring of pure light hung, floating, in the air at about the level of his shoulders, serene, luminous, wonderful. It was one of the coolest things I had ever seen.

Quentin took out a hand mirror and placed it on the carpet between his feet. He lowered his head and stared down at it, muttering: " Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas …"

Victor turned to Vanity. "Either to fight, or to flee, or to find your vessel, we will have to get up on deck.

All the normal passageways and hatches were locked after the storm reached hurricane proportions.

Look for another way out."

Vanity said doubtfully, "I don't think people build secret passageways on boats."

"Look for one nonetheless."

There was noise from the corridor. I could hear voices, calm, loud, authoritative. It sounded as if a gang of the ship's staff were going from door to door, reassuring people and asking if anyone needed help.

Victor said, "Amelia, keep an eye on Echidna."

Vanity yelped. "She can hear it. When you say her name!"

Victor said calmly to the rest of us, "No one say her name again. Say 'fishmonger.'"

Victor stepped over to the door. When the officers knocked, he called out that everything was fine in here. I did not see whatever energy or particle-beam left his body and flashed through the door at them, but I sensed its utility to Victor, and its internal nature. Glassy-eyed, the men turned and continued on down the corridor.

Victor looked over his shoulder. "Progress?"

Colin said, "I am doing a whole fat lot of nothing here."

Vanity said, "Found it. The air duct. For some reason, they built it large enough to crawl through. You would think they'd only make it wide enough to let air pass, wouldn't you? But here it is."

Vanity had her head halfway into a square hole which had opened in the wall above the wet bar. With a click, electric lights came on in the hole, and shone around her body. "There is a switch," she said.

I said, "Something is distorting space-time. That undersea mountain is no longer far away. Now it is almost directly underfoot. We are about to pass into the intersection zone."

Colin looked at the porthole, as if to see outside.

Blackness pressed up against the glass. The roaring waves of rain beat a tattoo on the glass.

A whisper came from the light-encircled Quentin. It sounded like his voice, as if he were doing ventriloquism. His voice seemed to be coming from the mirror at his feet. I could sense it was useful to someone other than Quentin, that voice, and its internal nature was alien to this time-space.

"Death, painful death, is all fate holds in store; some will die for want of air, some for terror, hunger and despair. Death if you approach her, one or many, of your four. And yet among your number there are five. Let her return what she has stolen, and she may yet return a…"

Colin cried out and put his hands up as if to ward off a blow. The mirror at Quentin's feet cracked. The mirror above the wet bar turned into a spiderweb of shatter lines with a noise like a gunshot. From the bathroom, I also heard tinkling glass and the clatter of falling shards.

The stone on Vanity's necklace gave off a lancing green dazzle, like a flash of summer lightning. And she shouted. Her shout was a shout of joy, however.

I turned to look at the bathroom, expecting to see the mirror broken there. But instead, walls and surfaces blocked my view. For a moment, I was confused. How could a merely three-dimensional surface prevent me from seeing "over" it? Then I squinted, letting out a low moan of fear and annoyance.

I had been girlified again. Three-dimensionalized. Ameliorated, so to speak.