Wizard (The Key to Magic) (14 page)

Ethereal Bindings had no such physical restrictions, of course, but it seemed to him that the same tendency to reuse familiar elements was a failing of the sorcerers of this ancient world. All of the Keys that he had so far divined had possessed a number of near identical flux modulations in common, and the Key to this ethereal wall was no different. He had not yet derived any complete signatures for the makers of these magical locks, but he was getting much better at predicting the next element in a Key sequence.

Readying fire and wind, he applied his Key.

As soon as he felt the ethereal presence of the wall of force fade, he darted across the armlength of space wherein the spell had manifested and used the Key again. As he had expected, the unseen barrier reformed immediately behind him.

Again, no alarm stirred the armsmen eight storeys below and as far as he could tell there was no change in the other spells that he could now sense about the stronghold.

He found and snuck through a second ethereal wall a dozen armlengths inside the first, Keying this one in even less time, and was soon hovering within an armlength of the outside of the building. With a delicate touch, he delved the black surface.

The facade was a third of an armlength thick, with a veneer of not-quite-glass over a solid mass of not-quite-stone. Above and below, he discovered windows of normal glass hidden behind ethereal curtains that mimicked the veneer, but the eighth floor had none. This made sense; having cells, this level had to be a gaol.

Floating upward to the side of the nearest window, he examined the ether for the disturbance caused by a person, found none within a dozen paces, then reached through the window glamour and began to feel about as noiselessly as possible. After a moment, he leaned back and frowned. The window had a single fixed sash and had not been designed to be opened. He had no tool to cut the glass and, knowing that sound would carry uncomfortably far inside, did not want the noise that bashing a hole in it would create.

After a moment's thought, he hummed
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
and then cast an air bubble barely half a fingerlength across that had as its center a point inside the thick pane. As the bubble took shape, a slender ring where glass and flux intersected started to glow orange. Around this circle the background ether boiled in protest, but he steadily strengthened the spell to prevent the collapse of the modulation.

For another subjective moment or two, it seemed as if the glass would win out.

Struggling to contain streamers of escaping flux, he redoubled the strength of the forming bubble and the ring shifted to an intense purple.

Then, with an abrupt transition, the bubble stabilized and the glowing ring faded, leaving a perfect circle of glass hanging in place.

He dispersed the bubble and held his hand up to the window. Contrary to his expectations, neither the circle nor the rest of the pane had been heated. He tapped the circle and it shifted languidly a fingerlength inward and then came to a halt mid-tumble as the effects of slowed time took hold once more.

Cutting a hole large enough to slip through took only fractionally longer. As soon as he was standing on the floor inside, he replaced both the tiny circle and the larger one, infusing them with lifting flux to hold them in place. This incomplete repair would not fool a close inspection but might be missed by a casual glance.

He released time to its normal pace and crept slowly forward along a hallway shrouded in deep shadow. The only light was that from the lamps of the city that strayed through the window behind him.

His magical sense gave him the gist of the place. Thin partitions divided the floor into a grid of hallways and small rooms. He stopped at the first door that he came to, eased it open, and peered in. The small office was equipped with the trappings of bureaucracy -- chairs, a desk, and stacks of paper. He scanned the ether as far as he could sense, but detected no bureaucrats.

The hallway ended at a lobby with two sets of the sliding doors identical to the ones that had opened onto the moving cupboard and a door to one side that had entirely unmagical hinges and doorknob. When cracked open, the latter revealed a brightly lit, utilitarian stairwell leading up and down.

Shutting the door without a sound, he turned about. The entrance to the gaol below would have the full attention of the guards and surely would be protected by numerous spells. While he thought it likely that each individual cell would also have its own complement of spells, the primary defense would be mounted where an attack would be expected.

He padded back into the hallway and spent the better part of an hour learning how to use his air bubble to cut various sized holes in different materials -- plaster walls, solid wooden desktops, metal chair frames, and not-quite-stone building columns. Then he passively read the background ether of the floor below to build a mental map of the gaol's rooms and corridors. While doing so, he located the presences of twenty people: ten in a loose clump no far back from the moving cupboards, eight in a similar clump at the midpoint of a wide central corridor, one in a small cell on the right side of the main corridor, and one in the cell on the opposite side. In total, there were forty of the cells arranged in four rows of ten, with two narrow corridors flanking the main. Both of the occupied cells were the eighth one, counting from the front of the gaol, so either could be designated as Holding Cell 8.

He went to the nearest occupied cell, which happened to be below the corner of a storeroom filled with neat stacks of labeled boxes. It was the work of several minutes to enchant and fly the boxes into a jumbled pile in the hall and several more to ferret out the Keys to the spells layered in the floor. When he was sure of all of them, he hummed
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
, disabled the spells one by one, and then began to cut a hole an armlength across.

A circle of carpet came up first.

Then a span thick slab of not-quite-stone.

Beneath the slab lay a chase with a large steel pipe bisecting the opening. When he removed a section of the pipe and discovered that it contained sewage, he was more than thankful for the extremely slowed time of his first spell.

Below the drain was another third of an armlength of not-quite-stone.

After this was nothing.

He kept time slowed as he descended head first into the hole, blinking at the harsh lights that lit the four pace square cell, and was able to get far enough inside before the resistance of the ether brought him to a halt to be able to identify the occupant.

Stripped naked, the prisoner lay sprawled on the bare metal frame of a bunk shoved against one wall.

The prisoner was a woman.

It was Nali.

SIXTEEN

All of her hair had been burned from her head and the same fire had seared the flesh of her scalp, leaving it black, crinkled, and seeping like the skin of a roast pig. Someone wearing rough gloves that had raked gouges in her cheeks had beaten her in a very methodical way, leaving nearly black bruises that made her face lopsided and misshapen. The swelling had pinched both eyes shut and a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of one suggested that it had been ruptured. All the fingers of her left hand were broken and some of the bones stuck out obscenely through crusts of blood. With her mouth hanging partly open, her damaged face was unnaturally slack and she was very still.

He dropped to the floor, took two quick steps to the bunk as a screeching, mechanical wail pierced the air, and then recast
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
to seal out the distraction.

Nali's ethereal presence showed her to still live, though the vigor of her life was weak and fading. Disarranged by a caterwauling umber that emanated from a pool of blood that had formed at the cracked base of her skull, all of the sound-colors of her body were maudlin, stressed, and failing.

He had to adapt his new spells to her unique flux modulations, but the magic worked as well on her as it had on him. He did the easy things first. With a slurping-yellow corralling and renewing the layers and components of her outer flesh, the black of the horrendous burns on her scalp quickly transformed into the pink of new skin. Many of the tiny roots from which hair grew had to be recreated entirely from the few surviving examples in a multi-step, time consuming process. Rather than concern himself with purely aesthetic considerations -- her hair would grow back in time on its own -- he only devoted sufficient effort to encouraging the growth to see a thick stubble sprout. The bruises on her face gradually lost their evil purple color as he convinced veins to draw away blood and fluid, and then her skin grew together to close abrasions and cuts, which almost immediately transitioned to white scarring as his spells continued to accelerate the process of natural healing. These scars finally faded and the normal tone of her skin returned. Her hand was a terrible puzzle of splinters, ripped ligaments, burst skin, and ruptured blood vessels that took a great deal of time to set right. Even consulting the pattern of her undamaged hand, he made errors and had to undo his patient assembly more than once, but eventually he had knit the flesh and fused the bones in a normal-seeming semblance. He would only be able to tell if he had gotten everything right when she was awake and could flex her fingers and wrist.

While the damage was less severe, her eye took twice as long as her hand, but only because he took the opportunity to study the connections made between the orb and her brain in depth.

As he came finally to Nali's head injury, he paused. But a single mistake here might doom the courtesan. Even Llylquaendt's fantastic healing devices could not save someone who had suffered a grievous wound to the brain.

When he did begin to heal the damage, he proceeded systematically, stopping often to monitor the multitude of flux modulations that comprised her presence for any sign of upset. At great length, he completed the task without causing any harm that he could detect.

Finally, she lay as if sleeping, her body relaxed and her breath regular and strong.

If he had had a spell that would deepen her sleep, he would have cast it. At rest, she would be a much more convenient burden -- especially if she was minded to be emotional or difficult as a result of her ordeal.

He turned from the woman and considered the heavily armored door.

The other prisoner, his actual objective, remained across the corridor. Crossing that guarded space while dragging Nali would subject the two of them to the contrary ministrations of the guards. Unless they had more potent weapons than the monstrosities, skyships, and
automatons
that he had engaged before, he should be able to fight them off, but a full fledged assault would make his planned quick exit from the stronghold difficult.

A scan of the ether showed men close to the other side of the door, guards no doubt frozen in the act of preparing to burst in. The wail that he had triggered would also have alerted the entire garrison and reinforcements would be on the way, but they would rally to the gaol entrance.

He could return through his hole and cross the floor above, but he did not want to backtrack. In his former life in Khalar --
five millennia from now
-- he had had several bad experiences when doubling back on his own path. A place that he did not know focused his attention in a way that resolve alone could not. He was always less alert with the familiar and had an unfortunate tendency to overlook crucial warning signs. Not too long ago, that failing had seen him crucified and immolated.

If he did not go up, he had to go down. The lower floor might be occupied, but he could detect no one within his range and thought that a good chance existed that, like the one above, the entirety of the floor was deserted. It would take more than one floor of bureaucrats to administer a city the size of Dhiloeckmyur -- perhaps nearly an entire building full.

Still protected by slowed time, he cast an air bubble to cut another hole. Only a single plug of not-quite-stone backed with thin steel came out of this one and as soon as he had poked his head through to confirm that a dark office lay below, he rose back up and considered Nali again.

As she had no clothes, he could not use his lifting spell to tow her along behind and hoisting her over his shoulder would probably wake her immediately. After squashing a discomforting moment when he realized that he was effectively embracing a naked woman that was not Telriy, he carefully scooped up the courtesan. She did not stir, remaining limp so that he had to bundle her firmly against his chest.

Nali was slim, but she was not a small woman and, finding that she weighed more than he could carry very long without a strain, he bathed his muscles in a coughing saffron that doubled his strength. After an experimental step showed that he could move without awkwardness, he sidled to the hole and drifted downward as far as the resistance of the background ether would allow.

Extending his arms, he released Nali into interrupted time and while she hovered motionless in mid-air, he rose back up to enchant and shift the plug back into place. To give the guards a false trail to follow, he left the hole to the upper floor open. The cell was otherwise vacant, so just before he sealed the lower hole, he cast an ignition spell on the cot, creating a spark that would blossom once he removed the influence of
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
. Knowing that rock would burn, he thought that steel surely would also. The metal uncooperative, he had to make the modulation fairly intense, driving several folds of flux into the thin tubing, but the spell appeared stable when he was done.

That should provide the guards with an unpleasant surprise and present enough of a distraction to prevent them from immediately trying to find what had become of their prisoner.

After returning to Nali, he drew her into his arms once more and then left off his song.

The thud of the explosion shook the building. Fire squirted through the tiny gap around the circle of not-quite-stone, but his magic held it firmly in place.