The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (25 page)

Around them, the pillared vestibule of the church was like a well filled up with evil, evil such as Joanna had never encountered—nauseating stink and gluey darkness pressing in on them, swamping the feeble torchlight. The cold here was intense, far more severe than outside, and she no longer questioned how the villagers had believed the assertion of the thing in the church that it was the singularity point of eternal death.

The chalk made soft crumbling sounds on the granite slabs of the floor. Straining her eyes into the aphotic depths beyond the carved and painted pillars—no two alike and all gaily colored like psychedelic barber poles—she heard the whispery hiss of the torch as it burned in her hands and the faint, quick creaking of Antryg's belt as he moved here and there, drawing out a five-point star within the double circle around them. He hadn't made the original ring quite big enough, and once the star was drawn there was only a square yard or so in its center for them to stand. Joanna had known Antryg long enough to know without being told not to step over the chalked lines.

Somewhere among the pillars, something was moving.

She heard it blunder against the wood with a fumbling hollow sound, heard a kind of wet slither that turned her stomach with a dozen gruesome implications. The smell was growing stronger, too, in spite of the killing cold—meat long rotten, the fetid excrement of fear, and something else, something she had smelled in the Void. Don't panic, she told herself, forcing herself to breathe slow and deep in spite of the appalling stench. If you panic, you'll run, and there's nowhere to run to... The cold was a living thing, malevolent, eating her bones. She wondered briefly whether she could scream long enough and loud enough to wake herself out of this nightmare and, if so, in what place she would wake.

Antryg stood up, his face clammy with sweat in the wavery yellow light. He took the iron-bound staff from her left hand, the torch from her right. His voice was calm and unstrained. “Joanna, get down and cover your head. It's psychokinetic; I think it'll try throwing things first. Don't try to move about to avoid me. I'll avoid you.”

Joanna didn't even bother to try and guess how he knew it would be psychokinetic. She merely dropped to her knees, pulled off her backpack, tucked it beneath her—mostly to protect the worm-program disk—and assumed the position recommended by the California Public School System as effective protection against atomic bombs. Antryg carefully laid the torch down beside him on the floor and stood straddling her, the iron-bound staff in his hands. He'd kilted up his robe almost to his knees, and the rough wool brushed her back, weirdly comforting, as was the sight between her slitted eyelids of the brass rings of his boot harnesses. She clenched her hands more tightly over the back of her neck and tried to make herself small.

Somewhere in the blackness of the church beyond the pillars, she heard a knocking.

It was impossible to say where it originated or on what kind of surface. There were a few experimental taps, soft and strangely hollow-sounding, then suddenly a huge crashing like thunder or the slamming of some massive door. Heavier and faster the sounds came, iron boulders falling from some unguessable height to an iron floor, a vast fist beating a ringing wall—It's only noise, Joanna told herself, shutting her throat on a scream. The same as the darkness is only darkness, the cold is only cold, the smell is only a smell...

It wasn't. It wasn't.

Something flashed through the air with vicious force—metal; copper, Joanna thought, glimpsing it from the corner of her eye. Antryg swiveled and smashed it with the end of his iron staff, sending it whirling, bouncing with a hideous clatter against the nearest pillar. Joanna saw it was an ewer, an altar vessel. Antryg whirled and batted again, catching a heavy piece of stone that had once been a sculpted cherub's head with a force  that nearly snapped the staff in his hands. The next missile came in low and fast, aiming for his ankle. She gritted her teeth and turned her head away, but he caught that one, too. Cricket as well as baseball, she decided hysterically. At almost the same instant, she heard something connect against his other hip with vicious force and felt his knees give. The staff whined with an evil swoosh and she felt something strike him again and heard his grunt of pain.

Something glowing flashed between the pillars, swooping toward them with terrible speed. Fire, pale and flickering like ball lightning, streamers ribboning along the floor. Joanna flinched as it hit the outer magic circle, heard the faint crackle, and saw the flames dash, scattering around the perimeter before they vanished. Looking up, she saw Antryg's face set and grim, blood tracking down from a cut over his right eye and spreading everywhere as it mixed with the sweat pouring down his cheekbones. His gray hair formed a matted halo in the weak torchlight, broken by the diamond glitter of his earrings.

Another flicker of light, wan and corpsish, appeared among the pillars, its reflections slipping wormlike up the lines of gold leaf. Joanna shut her teeth hard as something came rushing and weaving among the dark forest of columns, glowing with a horrible radiance. Antryg half swung toward it as it broke against the outer circle, then turned back as some thing else lunged, dark from the darkness.

A tsunami of stench struck them first, overwhelming. Even the brief glimpse Joanna got of the thing was heart-shaking, a slobbering, half-melted travesty of a face whose fangs, she realized, were broken-off ribs thrusting out from the corners of the rotting jaw. Bone showed where the flesh of two of the arms was falling off; the other two were reaching to grab. It's material. It can cross the circle, she thought. She half rose to run, then dropped to her knees again. In front of her, Antryg braced himself, the staff balanced before him. Tall as he was, the thing topped him by over a head. He'll never thrust it off...

The thing—monster, demon, god of rot—was almost to the edge of the circle when Antryg snapped the staff around and thrust its end like a spear into the creature's belly. His long legs locked and his weight dropped to take the shock, the thing's whole momentum slamming into the one-inch circle of the pole's end. The iron ferrule punched through the rotten meat like an arrow, and an unspeakable fountain spewed out behind. With a violence that seemed to shake the floor, the thing fell just beyond the chalked line of the protective ring. It raised its head, fluid trickling from the working mouth. Then it dropped squishily and lay still. Antryg had to twist and level the rod to pull its dripping end free.

The silence in the church was more terrible than before. Under the fallen flesh of the face she half believed she saw the silvery gleam of an eye move. She sat up, cold and shaking all over. “Can you cut it to pieces with your sword?”

“I could,” Antryg whispered softly. “But if you'll look at the way the muscles are rotting, you'll realize that it's psychokinesis that moves the whole thing, and the limbs probably don't have to be attached to the torso for it to control them. So on the whole, I think I'd rather not.”

Joanna worked out the implications of that one and swallowed queasily.

Rather white around the mouth, sweat and blood tracking stickily down his face, Antryg stepped to the very edge of the circle. Like an image losing itself down a corridor of mirrors, the echoes of his deep voice chased one another away into the endless darkness of the columns.

“Can you understand me?” he asked softly. “I'm not here to destroy YOU.”

Another flicker of light, wan and corpsish, appeared among the pillars. It was waiting, Joanna thought.

Something wet fell on Joanna's hand. Looking down, she saw a drop of blood. Another drop struck her, falling from the darkness above; then a pattering, hideous rain. Trails of it threaded their way down the bright paint of the columns and curled like ribbon across the floor. The smell of it, coppery-sweet and harsh, stung her nostrils. The dying torch smoked and sputtered in it; the darkness edged closer, like a ring of wolves.

“Speak to me if you can,” Antryg said. “I can help you if you'll let
me.”

Slowly the monster's head moved, white sinews breaking through the slimy flesh of its neck. Joanna saw the chest rise and fall as if pressed like a bellows to force air through vocal cords that were all but gone.

“I—am—the—Dead—God.” The glottal stickiness of timber made her flesh crawl, thinking of what caused it. “I drink the power that shines from men's flesh. All things are only lent to life, before they return to me. I am the Dead God.”

Black fluid leaked from its mouth and from the hole in its gut as it swayed to a sitting position, head lolling gruesomely; fat droplets of slime hung from its wrists as it raised two of its arms; they elongated and finally dripped to the floor with a sticky splat. “The Dead God demands his due... transdimensional interface... I walk the boundless darkness in the pits of the world... universal field theory... xchi particles... structural shift at the ylem...”

“What?” whispered Antryg.

Joanna looked up at him, startled. “Don't you understand?” He shook his head, baffled. “Transdimensional interface?” She spoke the words in English, knowing that neither she nor Antryg had heard them in that language, though the Dead God had spoken, for the most part, in slurred and stammered Fern

He shook his head again. “You mean, you do get a translation through the spell of tongues? I mean, those words mean something to you?”

Joanna nodded quickly. The Dead God drew itself to its feet like a crumbling mountain, eyes gleaming slimily in the failing ruby light. “He's from another world, he's got to be.”

Still holding the staff warily in hand, Antryg walked to the edge of the circle. “Look,” he said, his deep voice echoing in the darkness, “I can help you. Send you back.”

“A wizard,” muttered the Dead God thickly. "Your power shines through your flesh. I will drink of your brain, your power will be mine. All power will be mine—psychokinesis at the molecular level—I am the Dead God...

“I'm not getting through to him.” His eyes never moved from the thing that had begun to lurch toward them, one staggering step at a time, huge arms outspread and broken claws bent to seize. Antryg's swollen knuckles shifted along the staff he held; his voice was low and rapid. “Do you have a weapon of any kind with you, my dear? I don't think the gun will do much good—my sword—scabbard, maybe, as a club. Remember it's only dead flesh...”

But Joanna frowned suddenly at the dark monster that loomed on the edge of the dying torchlight, her mind taken up with another question entirely. “You know, I bet it's a hardware problem,” she said.

Any other companion in such adversity would have stared at her and said, “What???” in utter disbelief, but Antryg, who dealt completely in inconsequence himself, only said, “You mean with the physical bodies he's taken to make up what he is now?”

“Not the bodies—the brain.”
The stench was so terrible she could scarcely breathe, part of her mind screaming in panic, while another part, calm and calculating, worked out the logic of the situation. “Your software's only as good as your hardware.”

“And he can't put his thoughts through the brains of the people he's taken,” the wizard finished, his gray eyes lighting up like a truly mad scientist's on the verge of discovery.

“Yeah,” Joanna breathed. “Only as far as brain chemistry is concerned, it isn't a simple binary—your hardware is your software. And his must be half-rotted anyway, even if he didn't get it from some not-very bright priest and whatever town drunks or troublemakers the local sacrifice lottery decided the community could best spare. He's in there...”

“Poor bastard,” Antryg whispered feelingly, and Joanna, looking at that filthy colossus of decay, felt a shudder of horror and pity. “But he can hear us.”

“I'll bet he's only able to process information in terms of what was in those brains to begin with.” She was on her feet now, her back to Antryg's; she slipped his scabbarded sword from his sash to hold like a baseball bat, knowing that her aim must be to strike, rather than to cut. The scabbard was lacquered wood and hard as iron, but it still felt like a hopelessly inadequate weapon in her small hands. “Look, we've got to get through to—to the original part of him, the part that still remembers what he used to be...”

“If he—or she—still remembers.”

Joanna thought for a moment. Then, still keeping a wary eye on the creature that loomed in the darkness, she slid her makeshift weapon into her belt, dug quickly in a pocket of her backpack, and pulled out her Swiss Army knife. Kneeling beside Antryg's feet, she tapped the metal knuckle of the knife three times on the stone floor.

She paused, then tapped again, once, hard and small in the terrible stillness. “I saw this done in Red Planet Mars, ” she explained breathlessly, and tapped again four times.

“Don't get it wrong,” Antryg whispered, still standing braced only feet from the swaying form of the Dead God, his dripping staff held at the ready. “And pray the thing's a mathematician.”

“I'm just praying the value of pi is the same in its dimension as it is in mine.”

Pause, one. Pause, five...

“Hmm. Sticky if it's not.”

Pause...

Then, hollow and terrible, vast as the slamming of some great iron door, the knocking came as before—nine times. A silence, like the black weight of the air after thunder. Then two knocks, blows that shook the walls. Silence.
Six.

The silence stretched into an elastic eternity.

“Five,” prompted Antryg softly, as Joanna, suddenly panic-stricken, blocked on the next number.

Tapping it out, she realized that to be a wizard, the ability to maintain the concentration for working a spell in any kind of bizarre emergency had to be the most vital of survival traits.

Three hollow booms answered her; five; eight...

“Can you make a Sigil?” she whispered.

“For what purpose?”

“Hardware.
They're only giant chips, after all—patterns of lines encoding symbolic logic, like the synapses of the brain. If you can draw one, or some, or as many as you need, on the floor, and give him an alternative communications hardware to what he has... Would that work?”