A Path to Coldness of Heart (52 page)

Star Rider’s scheme was springing leaks. Only two demons remained. Success could require all four iron statues. Two might not be enough to dilute Varthlokkur’s strange sorcery. And the wizard would not be alone.

Improvisation had become imperative.

He was not good at making it up on the fly, despite so much experience. He was a master of the long, slow, complex machination, shogi with a thousand pieces.

He no longer knew real fear. Nothing had threatened him mortally in so long that he had lost the emotions surrounding the event. Last time of maximum risk had been during the Nawami Crusades.

He was uneasy, though. Definitely uneasy.

Little had gone well this past year, up to and including the last five minutes. There was no reason to expect his luck to turn around.

The new year was close, though, and the changing of the years always brought new hope. That was what new years were for. Not so?

He made sure he had the remaining demons under absolute control, then herded his companions down a long stair to a weathered court. A stiff-stepping iron statue missed its footing and tumbled, grinding and clanking, taking the fall alone. A human in the same straits would have grabbed at anyone and anything to save itself. It rose from the flagging wearing only a few new scratches. It waited on Old Meddler and the rest, then followed, creaking worse than before.

Old Meddler surveyed his surroundings. Curious. These fortifications had existed when first he had come to Ehelebe. Time had inflicted few changes. The dust was thicker. The sandy decomposition surfacing the building stone was just a little crustier.

Nowhere had so much as one plant taken root. Other abandoned places suffered the assault of vegetation beginning the moment its caretakers went away. In a few generations a mighty city could subside into jungle entirely, vanishing before its legends could fade.

Plants did not strive to reclaim this place, nor did any animal. Birds refused to nest, yet swarmed the cliffs across the strait. Every species of mammal but Man shunned the place. Bugs and spiders were rare. The few were warped compared to their mainland cousins. Only scorpions and some things with a thousand legs appeared to prosper.

Once inside, Old Meddler caught a scent that did not belong, body odor from someone who ate mostly rice and smoked fish. An ascetic, perhaps, who had visited recently.

His nose had saved him before. He trusted it completely.

The odor was unremarkable. He associated it with older Tervola. It had been there last visit, not as fresh, dissimilar enough to have been left by a different individual.

Tervola must be frequent visitors. But which? And why? Was the place being scouted as a possible secret base? It had served that purpose before. Some middle-level Tervola conspirator? The only access was by transfer portal. Only the Dread Empire owned those.

Yes. The woman ruling there would be a red flag to half the Tervola. Where better to plot an end to that abomination?

Too bad he was locked into this, which demanded swift resolution. Otherwise, he could sit here like a trapdoor spider, snapping up conspirators, adding them to his inventory of fools. Tools.

He heard a humming that could only be a live portal.

He headed for the kitchen area. It was there that he had seen workable portals last time. Could someone be there? Those portals had been too small to pass an adult. The man-size ones, in theory, could only be activated from the other end.

The racket his crowd made would have to have been heard. The hum might be somebody making a getaway.

He sent a demon ahead, backed by an iron statue. The demon, shrunken down to a beetle of human size, entered the kitchen walking upright on unnaturally robust rear legs, feeling the air ahead with antennae half as long as it was tall. Its wings lay on its back like fitted plate, polished purple-black. The statue, the one that had fallen earlier, clanked behind clumsily, right leg squealing as it dragged through the first few inches of each step. It had not been maintained. Old Meddler wished there had been time for an overhaul. There had been no time for years. Not a minute to invest in routine upkeep. Too often, not a minute for desperately needed sleep.

This task had become impossible once he lost his ancient associate.

A bad choice made, that time.

Old Meddler seldom acknowledged mistakes, even to himself. He did not make mistakes. He was who he was. He was what he was. He could not make mistakes.

Even so, that sloppy choice had cost him like none other since the cluster that got him sentenced to this hell. It had, worse, cost him the closest thing he had to a friend.

So now the Old Man was dead. All that he had done to help, when he had been awake, had piled itself onto Old Meddler’s weary shoulders.

So. There was no time for maintenance. No time for anything but handling the crisis of the moment.

Retina-blistering emerald light flared. A green shaft ripped through the demonic beetle, hit the iron statue in the right abdomen. Chunks of demon chitin flew, revealing the inside of the thing’s wing case to be orange and the body beneath as red and orange. Stuff flew off the iron statue, too. It staggered back a long step, leaning slightly, like a man kicked in the gut.

That flying stuff might have been globules of molten metal. They splattered, then hardened quickly.

This was not possible.

Blindness came.

He did not panic. He knew flash blindness was not permanent. He had lost vision this way before. He would recover, not as quickly as he might like. But…

That bolt, however generated, had immense power behind it, of a level not seen since… No, even the Nawami Crusades had produced no blast savage enough to pierce the frontal armor of an iron statue. Had it? This world had seen nothing like this. Someone had tapped directly into…

He could not concentrate. His eyes hurt. The pain threatened to become the focus of his existence. Despite past experience he had trouble managing his fear of blindness—though he must remain calm and controlled. He was deeply vulnerable at this moment, even with demons and iron statues to shield him.

The event had not been an attack. He understood that when no follow-up came. The demon had triggered some trap. Maybe there was competition for this place. Underground movement often wasted energy on internecine murder rather than battle the object of rebellion.

Or maybe he had been expected. That would explain the magnitude of the blast.

Unlikely, though. There was no way anyone could have predicted his visit. Some overly bright Tervola was determined to make a convincing statement to any fellow Tervola who stumbled onto his handiwork.

One of those master sorcerers had found the golden key, a way to suck power off the transfer streams. Must have. The dream had been out there for ages. No lesser source could have delivered that emerald violence.

Had he truly seen molten metal fly? He did now recall a similar instance in one rare moment where the Great One had chosen to inject himself directly into the Nawami conflict.

The Great One had used power stolen from the transfer streams. He had made himself a god by finding the way, and later became a denizen of the transfer streams, existing in all eras simultaneously while also constituting a parallel, prior entity in the world outside. The Great One inside had been the Great One the Dread Empire defeated in the eastern waste. Shinsan had gone on to root his fetch out and engineer its annihilation—though not before it reached back and fathered itself in an age long gone.

Those absurdities should have claimed devoted examination ever since. How could that happen? It had despite the logical implausibility. Could there be an even stronger ascendant coming now? Ssu-ma Shih-ka’i, whose ingenuity brought the Deliverer down? No! Not some ridiculous farmer grown too big for his trousers! But who else? There was no other significant name associated with those events. Not amongst the living.

Clearly, he had not looked where he should. But that was too hard when you were alone. Tactics devoured your time, leaving none to linger over the meaning of what might be happening behind what was distracting you at the moment.

His vision began to clear. He discerned frozen shapes. Disinclined to trigger another trap, his companions awaited his instructions.

The stricken demon had settled to the floor. Its birdlike skinny legs projected into the kitchen. Its through and through wound still produced wisps of black mist. Greenish ichors streaked the color where a wing and wing case had been ripped away. It was trying to reinstall something that had fallen out of its chest.

It was a demon. Its wound should not be mortal, in this world, but to survive it dared not flee to its own realm even though here it could survive only as a cripple.

The stricken iron statue remained fixed, almost unbalanced, in the process of taking an awkward step. The green shaft had not driven through but there was a six-inch circle of bluish purple shine on the statue’s back, bulging, where the light would have emerged had it not spent so much energy skewering the demon first.

Old Meddler’s vision continued to improve. He eyed that bulge. How could anyone set random traps that powerful? Where had they gotten the know-how?

Better question. More important question, right now. Were there more such traps? It was not reasonable that his evil luck should be so foul that he would trigger the worst trap first stumble. Far more likely that it was one of a battery.

“The perfect response to an improbable event,” he said, softly, punctuating with a tired sigh. “Stay put.” He readied the Windmjirnerhorn.

So. Yes. There were more traps, impressive in number, but with disposition and trigger choices that seemed naïve. Once you knew they were there you could deal with them easily. People as sophisticated as the Tervola ought to have built a network so cunning that the triggering of one instantly rendered the rest more sensitive.

Suppose they had been set in haste, to deal with an anticipated intrusion by mundane burglars? The traps could polish off a battalion of regular bandits. Unless that notion was what the trap builders wanted put into the head of a more sophisticated intruder.

Unless…

The curse of being Old Meddler was overthinking and seeing everything through the murky lens of his own twisted character. Of assuming that everyone was as warped of mind and motive as he.

He eliminated the most obvious traps. Even so, the iron statues triggered several more, better disguised, as they assisted his futile search the next few days.

Old Meddler grew increasingly disgruntled. He had one healthy demon left. The statue smitten by the green light had not moved since. It still communicated but that made it no less an oversize, man-shape heap of scrap.

He had planned to spend a few hours recuperating once he arrived, before investing a few more recovering weapons and tools from hiding places beneath the fortress. Magden Norath had left a lot. Old Meddler had hidden his own reserves here and elsewhere across the archipelago.

He had come to the emergency against which all that stuff had been cached.

Only… The hiding places were empty. Covert after covert, whatever had been hidden was gone, as though someone who knew every cache had systematically rid them of anything that might ever be of use to the Old Meddler.

Hours burned gathered into days of despair. What the hell had happened? Who had happened? Varthlokkur was not plausible. Had some incredibly clever Tervola matured unnoticed while developing the skills to root out the Star Rider’s hidden treasures? That reeked, too, but not as badly as the possibility that the bitch Tervola Mist might be responsible.

No. None of that was credible. Those were not people who could resist the temptation to use what had been hidden here. Tervola were dark of heart by definition, nor could Varthlokkur possibly be as goody-goody as he wanted the world to think.

All men did evil when they saw a chance to get away with it.

The Star Rider was a stubborn old beast. Yet another thirty hours of daylight and lamplight went into his search before he surrendered to the fact that every filthy tidbit was gone. The fortress had been stripped.

He had to get back west. Time was fleeing. “Enemy never rests,” he reminded himself, over and over. “Water sleeps, but enemy never rests.” He was not ready to spend the time necessary to look back and find out who had done this and what all they had done. That could cost another week. Meantime, leakage from the small freight portals had begun to weaken the Horn.

He could not destroy those. He needed them—unless he wanted to return to the Place and start over, which would take ages because he had conscripted the best iron statues and most tractable demons already.

Perhaps the universe itself was out to thwart him.

The hours fled on. He should have launched his attack long since, crushing resistance instantly using weapons which even Varthlokkur’s weird sorcery could not withstand. He should have passed through the final fire by now, and be headed back to the Place for a long rest, not still be out here with a stomach gone sour.

By grace of the Horn he learned that his missing treasures were not lost forever. They were out there, in the waters of the strait, thrown there by whoever had robbed him.

The Horn brought several relics ashore. That was a waste. Anything that had been unbroken when it went in had been damaged by the brine and battered by surf and current. Everything had been in the water a long time, not just days. His weakening had begun even before the Deliverer crisis commenced.

“Only one option left. The other islands.” A feeble hope, there. Little of value had been cached elsewhere. There had been no clear need for the redundancy.

His remaining demon hauled him hither and yon, from barren outcrop to empty sand pile. Each cache was as pristine as could be hoped. His enemy had either not known about them or had been unable to reach the lesser islands. His mischief had been incomplete.

Sadly, what he recovered was useless now—though, sweet miracle, he did discover copies of Magden Norath’s research records. Those would be invaluable later.