Infiltration (30 page)

I was getting ready to try it a third time, but instead of getting up normally, Diabolist Mage simply rose up into the air, floating in the center of the room. Around him was a bubble made of purple light — the same kind that had protected him from the grenade in the armory. There was no laying a finger on him while that was in place.

“Give me the staff!” he screamed in blatant frustration.

“And if I do, you’ll let me go, right?” I responded — as if there were any chance of that happening.

“You can’t hide forever,” he said, filling the air with more fireballs.

“Actually, I can,” I said, teleporting around the room as I’d done in the armory to keep him from getting a fix on my location. “This room may be all there is of the universe as far as we’re concerned, but it’s big enough for me to be able to keep away from you, whether I’m phased, invisible, or just teleporting around the place.”

For show, I became visible for a moment, and then teleported, appearing first next to the box containing Rune, then popping up next to a worktable (where I swiped my arm across the tabletop, intentionally knocking a bunch of stuff to the floor), and finally popping up just an arm’s length away from the Diabolist and sticking my tongue out at him before teleporting away.

“I could do this all day,” I said.

“Very well,” the Diabolist said. “You’ve forced my hand.”

He looked towards the box that held Rune, and then made a come-hither gesture. Rune’s unconscious body rose up forcefully, puncturing the box’s glass top as if thrown through it, sending shards of glass flying. Held loosely upright, the body floated over next to Diabolist Mage.

“Now, give me the staff,” he said, “or I kill your friend.”

There was a moment of stunned silence while I gathered my thoughts. “You wouldn’t,” I finally blurted out. “He’s the source of your power. You’ve been siphoning off his magic to use as your own.”

“True,” he said, “but I need the staff to continue doing so. It’s been imbued with the Kroten Yoso Va, and is now more powerful than you can imagine. Without it, the power I currently have will eventually fade, and I’d rather die than go back to being the pathetic excuse for a magician that I was before. So yes, I’ll kill your friend if I don’t get it. You have until the count of ten to decide. One…”

The Diabolist began counting, but I paid him little attention. While he’d been speaking, I had reached out empathically, trying to determine if he was serious. Every emotion that I got from him rang with sincerity. He would indeed kill Rune if I didn’t give him the staff.

I looked at Rune, trying to figure out the right course of action. I couldn’t give this madman the staff; he’d be far too powerful. But if I didn’t, he’d kill Rune, and it would be my fault.

As I looked, the symbols on Rune’s body continued swirling — changing shape, size, position. A chill passed through me as realization dawned, and I knew what I had to do.

“…Ten. Time’s up,” the Diabolist said.

“Okay!” I shouted. “You can have it!”

I teleported to a position off to the side that put the Diabolist directly between me and Rune, and then became visible. The staff, visible now as well, floated next to me.

Diabolist Mage must have noticed my appearance via his peripheral vision, because the moment I became visible, he turned in my direction. He smiled when he saw the staff floating next to me, and the downcast expression on my face.

“Don’t feel bad about losing this battle,” Diabolist Mage said. “It was the only possible outcome. Even taking the staff couldn’t change things, because it only yields up its power to a master of the mystic.”

I smiled. “Thanks, I kind of figured that out.”

The Diabolist frowned, plainly confused by my meaning, but I didn’t give him time to dwell on it. Telekinetically, I threw the staff at him. It flew at the Diabolist in a straight line, like a javelin.

The bubble around Diabolist Mage vanished and he held out his hand, preparing to catch the staff in mid-air. I would have paid a million bucks to have a picture of his face as it literally passed through him and then struck Rune in the side, like a lance.

Chapter 39

From the reactions of Diabolist Mage, you would have thought someone had speared
him
rather than Rune. At first he appeared shocked, as if he’d just turned into a fish and was having trouble breathing on land. Then he became angry, furiously trying to get a grip on the staff that was sticking out of Rune but having his hand pass through it every time. Finally, raw fear and panic set in as he realized that he wasn’t going to get the staff after all.

All of this took place over the course of about ten seconds.

Of course, after throwing the staff, I had phased the Diabolist, making him insubstantial just before it reached him. The point, needless to say, was to get the staff to Rune. It had taken me awhile, but I had finally paid attention to the changing patterns on Rune’s body and understood that they were forming words, trying to give me a message — one that I didn’t really see until almost the very end.

For a moment after the staff struck Rune, I thought I’d made a grave error. After all, having what was essentially a six-foot-long stake driven into your body isn’t really on the Surgeon General’s list of healthy activities. Moreover, Rune’s body didn’t initially react to the impact, although I did note that the entry wound didn’t bleed. A few seconds passed by — during which time I was treated to the Diabolist’s antics in trying to remove the staff — and then Rune’s body jerked spasmodically. Then again. And a third time.

A strong, steady amber light began to shine from him, and Rune’s body floated higher, chest thrust upwards and arms dangling. The light grew brighter, and Diabolist Mage, who had dropped to the floor in terror, held up a hand to shield his eyes. On my part, I switched my vision over to another wavelength, one where the light was less bothersome.

The designs on Rune’s body went completely bananas — madly swirling, spinning, and shooting back and forth. His body itself expanded, grew monstrously huge. It didn’t stop until he was the size of a giant — at least twice my own height.

Suddenly, Rune’s eyes snapped open, glowing crimson, and his body jolted upright — still with the staff sticking out. His eyes swept the room, a look of insane fury on his face, until they came to rest on Diabolist Mage.

“YOU!” he said in a booming voice, even more sonorous than the White Wyrm’s bellow. “YOU HAVE MUCH TO ANSWER FOR!”

“No, please!” the Diabolist said, almost whimpering and cowering on the floor. “Mercy, I beg of you!”

“THERE WILL BE NO MERCY! NOT HERE! NOT FROM ME!”

As he spoke, Rune held up a tightened fist in front of him. At the same time, the Diabolist rose up off the floor and into the air. He kicked wildly, clawing at his neck as he was lifted by invisible hands around his throat. In just a few seconds, his tongue was lolling out and his face was turning blue.

“NOT YET, DIABOLIST!” Rune said, dropping him to the floor, unconscious. “DEATH WOULD BE TOO GOOD FOR YOU AT THE MOMENT! MAYBE AFTER A CENTURY AS MY ‘SPECIAL GUEST,’ BUT NOT NOW!”

Rune angled his head in my direction, and then started floating towards me.

“AND AS FOR YOU, ‘KID SENSATION’!” he said, pronouncing my sobriquet with a sneer. “IMPERTINENT TEEN! ARROGANT SUPER!”

I reached out empathically in desperation, trying — and failing — to get a read on him. I didn’t know if his ordeal had pushed him over the edge, destabilized him somehow so that he didn’t know his allies any more. Regardless, I didn’t want to hurt him — didn’t know if I could — but I wasn’t keen on letting him hurt me either.

As the gap between us shrank, I prepared to teleport to another part of the room, run around much like I had done a short time earlier with Diabolist Mage.

“LANCER OF THE DEFENSELESS!” he said, continuing to call me names. “TO YOU I SAY ONLY THIS—”

The giant Rune vanished, replaced by Rune in his original form, who gestured at the staff still sticking out of his body.

“Really, dude?” he asked. “A hole in my side? This was the best you could do?”

Chapter 40

Mouse had been right in saying that Rune was the guy to come to with any problems of a mystical nature. After yanking the staff out of his side himself (leaving a gaping hole that, to my surprise, promptly began to heal), he had immediately commenced cleaning house. This involved making the chamber where he’d been held part of the castle once again, then floating through the place room by room — with me in his wake — promptly dispatching any bad guys that we came across (which was basically anybody who wasn’t him and wasn’t me). The methodology for doing this was rather simple: Rune would just point the staff at someone, and they vanished.

Initially, I had thought that maybe in taking out the bad guys he was actually
taking out
the bad guys, Italian mafia style. It turns out, however, that the castle actually had an oubliette, which is a type of dungeon that only has one entry and exit point: a trapdoor in the ceiling. In short, an oubliette was used when you wanted to lock someone up for good, with no possibility of parole, and that was where Rune was transferring everyone. (The fact that the White Wyrm had one as opposed to a regular type of dungeon said a lot about his manner of dealing with adversaries.)

For the most part, I kept quiet and stayed out of the way, hoping for an opportunity to quiz Rune later about everything that had happened. However, at one point, after we had come across maybe half of the castle’s inhabitants, I mentioned to Rune that the oubliette had to be getting crowded. His response was nonverbal: a facial expression of the do-you-think-I-care? variety. I stopped being an advocate of prisoners’ rights at the point.

A short time later, all the bad guys had been rounded up, and we had most of the castle to ourselves. I took a deep relaxing breath; it was the first time I’d really felt safe since arriving here. Oddly enough, we had ended up in the chamber where I had first appeared in the castle.

Rune snapped his fingers, and the next second he was dressed in the clothes (or very similar attire) that I had worn when I arrived here. “Much better,” he said to himself (and I had to admit it was an improvement over the loincloth).

“Now, you must have a million questions,” Rune said, turning to me. “With all threats currently removed, it’s the perfect time to lay them out.”

He was right, of course; I actually had more like a
billion
questions, and had been waiting for a chance to ask them. I tried to sort them out in my brain, but simply didn’t know what to ask first. Finally, I just opened my mouth and let fly.

“What are you?” I asked.

Rune laughed, a deep and hearty sound. “I’m a man, of course, like anybody else.”

“Come on. You’re about as much of an ordinary guy as Alpha Prime.”

“Alright,” he said, still chuckling. “After everything you’ve been through, you deserve a better answer than that. I’m an Incarnate.”

“What’s that?”

“The physical embodiment of certain…powers, for lack of a better term.”

“And you can really warp reality?”

“I’m not sure ‘warp’ describes it properly, but yes, I can do that and more.”

“Like what?”

Rune laughed again. “It would be a lot easier to list the things that I
can’t
do than all those I
can
.”

From anyone else, it would have sounded like bragging, but from Rune it merely denoted simple fact — like saying that two plus two equals four.

“So we really are outside of space and time?” I asked.

“At the moment, but it’s not unprecedented,” he replied. “For instance, you’ve probably heard stories of people who maybe got lost in the woods, met up with some strangers or spent the night in a strange place, and when they returned home found that something like a hundred years had passed.”

I nodded. “Rip Van Winkle.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Although Rip was supposedly gone for only twenty years and actually grew older, which — being outside of time — you actually wouldn’t expect.”

“So if you don’t age, you could stay in a place like this forever?”

“Yes. Time doesn’t progress for you in here. Haven’t you noticed that since you arrived you haven’t been hungry, thirsty, or anything like that? Aside from something catastrophic happening to you physically — like being speared in the side with a staff — you could live in here indefinitely.”

“Wait a minute!” I said in sudden alarm, remembering that Proteus’ watch had stopped working (and now understanding why). “How long have I been here — compared to the people back home?”

Rune seemed to take a second to do some mental calculations before responding. “About four days.”

“Four days! I didn’t think it had even been twenty-four hours!”

“Not a big deal. When we go back, I can actually return you to any point in time after you left to come here, although I’d recommend insertion at the proper juncture.”

That shocked me a little, and it must have shown on my face, because he went on.