Fugitives of Chaos Read online

  An illusion. Even my senses could be tricked by witchcraft.

  Her voice was behind me: "Here's Sulky Sue. What shall we do? Turn her face to the wall till she comes to."

  The cold force wrapping my limbs threw me facedown on the floor of the burial chamber.

  I could see her silhouette again, now stooping over me. "Is this the sweet voice I taught to sing, to say her prayers at bedtime, and is it now raised up to curse and revile me… ? Oh, tongue, hear me!"

  I had only a moment to say one thing. While she talked, I also talked. I said quickly, "Is this the witch who kidnapped me as a babe, to be raised as a captive in an alien land, surrounded by those who hate me? Is this the witch who stole my childhood and life, so that I never will know my mother's smile? Is this the witch who gave me nothing freely, but all her gifts were poisons, meant to trap us? Fire! Hear me!

  Burn this witch!"

  She stopped in the midst of her spell, hissing. For a moment, it was as if I could feel the fear radiating from her, as if she expected a fire to come burn her.

  I heard a little quivering sigh come from her. 'That spell might have worked, oh my clever girl, if you had any of the True Art in you. But you are a Helionide, aren't you? A daughter of the Nameless Ones? Your power works another way, with crooked angles and tangles of geometry, and stepping sideways into higher worlds. Well, there is no higher world for you, my kitten. Tomorrow you shall be back in your cell, and the day after, this will be a dream, and all your clever tricks and clever escapades will be blotted out.

  We'll know what to look for, next time round, and we'll flush more of you into obliv-ion. Years more.

  We'll induce the shape-change, if Gren-del will do his work. How'd you like to be a seven-year-old, eh?

  Oh, to be young again!"

  I said, "Thief of my life, thief of my soul; I call upon the lordly dead whose house you desecrate to avenge me."

  She struck me in the head with the handle of the distaff she carried. Thunk. My face was driven against the stone. I bit my lip and tasted blood.

  I spat the blood onto the floor.

  She said, "There are none to hear your prayers, little maid. I am old and wise in the ways of my art; this place is mine."

  I said, "I ask the Lord God of Israel, the God of Jacob, and of Isaac, and of Abraham, to save my friends from bondage and oppression. Of all the gods of all the tales told in ancient times, only He upheld the weak."

  She cackled. "And of all the tales, tales of that one are the most false! I knew Abraham! He was a liar and a child-murderer! If—"

  A shadow stood up out of the spot of blood I had spat on the floor. I could not see it with my eyes—during this whole time, I saw nothing with my eyes, as the tomb was dark—but the strands of moral force woven in and around her distaff all curled and fled away from him, revealing the negative outline of a tall shape.

  She began to scream, a high, thin, shrill noise like an animal might make. The shadow moved. I don't know what it did, but her voice diminished, and went mute.

  I wondered if I had gone deaf. But no, I could hear her rattling breath hissing through her teeth. I heard her feet rustle as she took a step back, then two. I heard the tap of her distaff on the stones of the chamber floor, and the hiss of her skirts.

  A cold voice spoke. In speaking, it did not breathe or pause for breath: "In life, I was Romus, son of Odysseus by Circe, set to watch the Lady Nausicaa. In that duty I failed, and was slain by cruel treason.

  For many seasons the evil of Boreas kept me locked in a coffin, unable to rest, and my watchfulness was turned against my mistress, and used, not to protect, but to enslave her.

  "Here is the witch who cast the spell on me, to confound my shade, and turn my fate awry.

  "Now, witch, I embrace you. Feel my cold dead arm clasp about you, closer than the lover whom you poisoned. When the Dog comes, we shall both be dragged down together. Hell awaits us."

  I heard a rustling noise in the chamber, a hiss of muffled horror, but I could see nothing.

  The cold voice issued forth from the darkness again, like icicles shaped into words: "There is my aunt, the sister of Circe, Phaethusa, who is of my house and blood; and there is the man who set my shade to rest, and paid, of his own hand, my toll to cross the hateful Styx. Rise ye both! And speak. What is in my power to grant, although I am but a handful of wind and dust, I shall perform."

  I got shakily to my feet. My head bumped stone. I could not see where I was. Maybe it was near the center of the chamber, at the dome's highest point. If so, the highest point was not very high.

  Quentin said softly, quickly, "Denizen of night, can you grant me my powers again?"

  The ghost said, "Not I. Only the hand that dealt the wound can cure it."

  Quentin said, "Granny, I will forgive your crime against me, if you will return my staff and swear to forgive all crimes I have ever done against you, and release me from all debts, past, present, and future.

  Furthermore, I want you to swear to…"

  I put my hand on his arm. He could not see the strands, but I could. If he asked for too much, it would go against him. If he asked her to forswear her oath to Boggin, for example, he would be doing something that would provoke a bad reaction.

  Romus said, "Speak, witch, and swear."

  Mrs. Wren's cracked voice trembled. "Thy staff and wand of office I make whole, and I forgive ye all crimes and ills you have ever done me, and release you from all debts, past, present, and owing."

  I saw the strands shift and sway.

  I said, "I will forgive you for kidnapping me, if you will release me from any obligations of fealty, thanks, or gratitude. I am no longer your child, or anyone's. Say it."

  She said, "I release you. You are free and independent. I accept your forgiveness. In addition, I will give you this gift…"

  I saw the strands twitch and begin to weave together…

  "No!" I said. "You are most kind, but I fear I cannot accept."

  The strands parted. The web that had snared us fell away and was gone. The witch's power over the two of us had failed. I felt joy, don't doubt it; but when the strands faded, I also lost the only guide that allowed me to "see" in this utter blackness. The usefulness of this burial mound to Erichtho had also faded. The place was dark to all my senses.

  Romus said, "I go now into the dreamless sleep of Elysium, where a fair white table had been spread for me. This last gift I grant. Witch: I give to you your life. Aunt Phaethusa: I grant you that you shall never be in darkness, wherever you go. Man of the Graeae: I grant you that your wand will come to your hand upon your call. Its dead spirit I breathe now back to life. It will inhabit any stalk or wand or spear or stick you shall hold in your hand, and it shall never be taken from you again, until the world ends. Anubis.

  Go into the stick."

  I saw the shadow move, and the utility-light, the usefulness to Quentin, of the distaff Mrs. Wren was carrying brightened a hundredfold. She screamed and threw down her staff, as if it had burned her.

  Quentin reached down in the dark and picked it up.

  I saw the shadow vanish.

  I said, "Well, this seems pretty dark to me right now.

  Quentin, is she in the boat you were in? She can't cast spells without her wand?"

  "I think so."

  "Mrs. Wren? How about a truce, long enough to get us all out of this burial mound… ?"

  No answer. I heard motion.

  Quentin tapped his staff on the ground. A pearly radiance issued from the top, where a hank of yarn was wound round and round it. There were shallow shelves to either side, where bones and dust gathered mold. Gold rings lay on the floor.

  The place seemed much, much smaller in the light. The door was mouse-hole-shaped, and hardly had room to crawl into.

  Quentin said, "She's making a break for it."

  "Let's crawl. How fast can she go?"

  So we both crawled.

  When we came out into the snow again
, there were columns of fire burning near the truck, which was scattered all across the slope behind. A complex-looking machine, blocky and square, made of engine parts, lenses, wires, lay on its side in a puddle of flickering gasoline. It had a big tube issuing from one end like a gun barrel, but I think that was only from the muffler.

  There were craters pockmarking the snow here and there, and fantastic, bubbles of oily-colored ice, like half-buried skulls, protruding from the snow.

  Victor was standing on bare earth. He was wearing the chain-mail jerkin.

  There was a wide ring of steaming snow all around him, but no snow where his feet were. His third eye was open, and there was light coming from it. That, and the light from billowing columns of fire to his left and right, illuminated the scene.

  We saw Mrs. Wren. She had her back to us and was facing Victor. Her shoulders hunched up as if in shock and surprise. She raised her crooked hands. "I call upon the spirits of earth and below earth!

  Wood! Water! Welkin! Fire and Iron! I call…"

  Victor looked impatient. As clearly as if he had spoken it aloud, his expression said, Inanimate elements cannot listen to you, you superstitious old woman,

  A blue-gold spark left his head and touched her. She slid and sat down in the snow, giggled, and slumped over.

  He turned his head. There was Colin lying not far away. Vanity sat in the snow with Colin's head in her lap. Victor played the beam from his third eye back and forth across Colin's body once and twice. Colin blinked and sat up. "Jesus! It's cold!" He looked around. "What the hell happened here?"

  Vanity said, "Everybody did stuff but me."

  I said, "Fell?"

  Victor closed his third eye and pointed off to the left. Fell lay like a broken doll, arms and legs spread out at odd angles.

  Quentin said, "I hope you didn't kill him."

  Colin said, "And I hope you did! Do you know what that horse's ass gave me on my last dom rag?"

  Quentin said, "If we commit a murder, it will go very, very badly for us. The influences friendly to us will turn."

  Victor said, "Don't worry. He's just stunned."

  Victor explained in a few curt sentences that he had used a catalyst to precipitate out of the atmosphere the "nanites" (as he called them) that Fell had shot at him in the open thrust of the duel.

  Victor said, "They just rained down on top of him. He did not notice them until it was too late.

  Apparently they were topically active. The nerves near his skin carried the cryptognostic signals to the motor centers of his brain, and shut him off."

  Quentin pointed at the squat machine with the protruding muffler, which Victor had apparently put together out of bits and parts of the engine. "And what did that thing do?"

  "That gave him something to look at while invisible nanite particles settled on his skin." Victor gave one of his rare smiles. It was a small smile, just a tension of muscles in his cheeks, but I thought it made him look wonderful. "He was not expecting me to waste energy building something merely to distract him. That expectation made it not a waste. You are the one who taught me the principle, Quentin. The hand the stage magician waves in the air is not the one to look at. Fell was too much of a scientist. He should have studied stage magic."

  I said, "What about her?" I nodded at Mrs. Wren.

  He said, "Cryptognosis. Her body is adjusted to react to alcohol. I triggered the habitual reaction in her glands. I sent the false signal that she was drunk to her midbrain, pons, and medulla oblongata. The cells in her body will run through the cycle they learned to get rid of alcohol poisons in the bloodstream, which includes sleep and liver activity."

  I said, "They'll die if we leave them asleep here in the snow."

  Colin said, "Bugger 'em, if you don't mind my saying so, Dark Mistress."

  I looked around at the group. "Ah, wait a minute. I want to resign as leader! Both Victor and Quentin have their powers back, and Victor seems to have his memory back."

  Victor nodded. "I remember the first escape attempt. Everything up till when we were on the beach, and Miss Daw started playing."

  I said, "I want to put Victor back in charge! He can decide what to do about the sleeping people in the snow."

  Victor said, "Bad policy to change leaders in mid-mission. Besides, you clearly figured out more than I have. I don't know whether you talked to Daw or Boggin or where you got your information, but you still know more than I do, and I am not sure you can fill me in on all the details quickly enough."

  Quentin said, "You're doing a fine job, Amelia. And we can't stop to debate. Where is Boggin? I thought you said he could fly and bend space."

  "And spanks," said Colin. "Don't forget he spanks."

  I said, "I want a vote. Thumbs up or down. I've messed up practically everything so far, trust me."

  Quentin said, "No time. Sorry, Amelia, but the whole point of having a leader is to have someone make the decisions—even bad decisions—when there is no time to debate things. When there is time to debate, we don't need a leader, because we can form a committee."

  Colin said, "Besides, Victor already said, and Quentin agrees. That's two. I vote yea, just because I like saying the phrase 'Dark Mistress.' Three is a majority. Vanity, your vote is wasted."

  Vanity turned her head. She said, "He just heard us. Boggin. I don't know where he was or what he was doing before, but he's listening now."

  I had wanted to see if I could get the molecular life-form to come out of Victor's body and inject itself into Fell, either to erase his memory, or make him loyal to us, or something. Now there was no time to experiment, and no piece of paper to write it on, and only fitful light to see by. However, there was enough heat coming from the twin columns of fire that I did not think Mrs. Wren would die of exposure, not in the short time it would take Boggin to get his coat off and fly here.

  I said in a loud, clear voice, "Boggin! Two of your people are lying here in the snow, unconscious. I don't know how long they can keep. You can either chase us or go save them. You decide. Okay, people!

  We're splitting up! Pick a direction and run!"

  Vanity tugged on my arm, looking like she was dying to tell me something, and she pointed at the burial mound. She made little finger-walking pantomimes, opened and shut her hands a few times, waved her arms___

  I tapped myself on the head and pointed at her. There. You are in charge.

  Ho ha. Them and their policy of no votes during missions.

  1.

  Vanity pointed at Victor, made flapping bird motions with her hands, pointed at each of us in turn, and pointed left, right, here and there. Then she made a circle with her arms, flapped them again, and pointed at the mound.

  I got it. I sprinted off to the East. Colin and Quentin and Victor each went other directions. Vanity ran, too.

  After less than a minute, long enough to leave many clear footprints in the snow leading away from the mound, I saw Victor fall gracefully and silently out of the sky and hover a few feet off the ground before me.

  I put my arms around his neck, and he hoisted me up with his hands.

  Funny. He did not do even as well as Quentin had. Like I was a sack of potatoes, or something.

  I flew. My hair streamed and whipped in the quick wind, and I clung close to Victor. In the nocturnal darkness, there was little to see, just the bumpy texture of snow underfoot, the barrows and hills in the moonlight. With no sense of height, it seemed curiously close and small.

  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-sli
d 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.