Date: 2019-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Description: A novelette of 14,000 words, a sequel to the Windrose Chronicles, which began with The Silent Tower and The Silicon Mage. Antryg Windrose, exiled Archmage from another universe, is called upon by a Los Angeles biker who claims that his girlfriend has been abducted by shadowy beings from across the Void. Antryg and his companion, computer programmer Joanna Sheraton, go in quest of the missing woman, and find that other people, in other universes, are being inexplicably kidnapped, too. The quest leads to a ghastly secret, and a battle with dark magic and death.

JUST LIKE REAL PEOPLE

By

Barbara Hambly

Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

Copyright 2019 Barbara Hambly

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Just Like Real People

About the Author

Just Like Real People

The tattooed biker on the front porch said, “Is this where I could find – uh – Antryg Windrose?” He checked a scrap of paper in his palm. And – probably interpreting the look of profound wariness on Joanna Sheraton’s face behind the screen door – he added, “Jim Hasseloff says he’s a wizard. My name’s Nicky Crane.”

Jim Hasseloff was the manager of Enyart’s Bar on Ventura Boulevard, where Joanna’s partner – lover, friend, room-mate and lunatic – tended bar on weekends; hearing his name reassured her. With a second look at Crane’s face, as she opened the door and stepped back. He looked sober, and despite the club colors on the back of his jacket (The Hog Riders – nobody she’d ever heard of) there was no coarseness in the way he held himself as he stepped across the threshold.

She said, “Excuse me,” and crossed back through the cavernous shadows of the parlor to call up the stairs, “Antryg?”

He’d have heard the door open, and came clattering down the stairs from his workshop in what had been the dilapidated bungalow’s “sleeping porch”, like a six-foot three-inch phasmid in spectacles. The early July morning was warming up, though the western reaches of the San Fernando Valley wouldn’t get brutal for another week. In jeans, rhinestone earrings, and a thrift-store t-shirt (which advertised a long-defunct sandwich shop in Santa Cruz) he looked, as he usually did, like an over-age hippie who’d done one too many hits of Captain Sunshine in the sixties.

“There’s a fellow here named Nick Crane,” reported Joanna. “Jim sent him. He’s looking for a wizard.”

Antryg held out his hand to their guest with his daft, toothy grin. His fingers were crooked, broken by the witchfinders in his own universe. His voice was fathomless velvet, like the darkness beyond the stars. “Delighted to meet you,” he said. “And do you need a wizard?”

“Yeah.” Crane’s voice stumbled a little on the word. “My – my girlfriend disappeared.” Something in his brown eyes changed, as he struggled again with some terrible shock. “I mean, like, disappeared disappeared. I mean, she was standing there, twenty feet away from me, and this… this light – this darkness—” He tried to shape with his hands what he’d seen “–this sort of hole in the air opened. She tried to run away from it and I ran towards her, but these shadows came out of it, grabbed her—” He was watching Antryg’s face as he spoke, watching for the derisive disbelief he’d almost certainly seen (Joanna reflected) when he’d told this tale to the police…

Watching with wary desperation. You’ve got to believe me…

And behind the wariness, frantic grief and terror.

“And was this,” inquired Antryg softly, “at about three-thirty in the morning this past Wednesday, June 29th, 1988?”

Crane’s eyes flared: first shock, then suspicion, and fury.

“How the fuck do you know that?”

“It’s my job,” returned Antryg, rather grimly. “I felt the Void open at that time – and I’ve been rather hoping someone would turn up and tell me about it.”

Joanna thought, Ah…

For nearly a week, she had been aware that Antryg’s habitual scanning of what she thought of as the ‘weirdness boards’ – computer message-boards where users shared the inexplicable or the purportedly supernatural – had redoubled. Twice she had found him absorbed in the elaborate cats-cradles in which he could sometimes read signs invisible to ordinary eyes, and knew he’d taken to staying up late, or waking long before dawn, to spend hours laying out Tarot spreads or sitting, listening, among the vast design of pin-wheels and broken bottles he’d made among the weeds and avocado-trees of the back yard.

Watching.

Searching.

And because magic did not exist in this universe – only the deep stirrings in the darkness of his mind – finding nothing.

For nearly a week she, too, had been expecting something like this.

She shivered in spite of herself.

Into Antryg’s silence, Crane asked, “You really a wizard?”

Few people, Joanna knew, pictured mages walking around in jeans, rubber flip-flops, and shirts that had Hungry Harry’s Tower of Chow printed across the front.

“If I was the sort of person who’d lie about it,” explained Antryg apologetically, moving a cat and gesturing him to a seat on the dilapidated couch, “you couldn’t prove me wrong, you know. I mean, magic doesn’t work in this universe, so I can’t really do anything. What were you doing when this occurred Wednesday night? Or Thursday morning, if one wanted to be technical about it. Where were you?”

“Lytle Creek.” In the face of a factual question, the young man’s scratchy voice regained some of its confidence. “It’s in the mountains, about ten miles north of San Bernardino, in the Angeles National Forest. She – We…” He hesitated, not certain how to go on.

“Would you like some tea?” asked Antryg. “Or coffee? It’s a bit early in the day for beer.”

“Coffee’d be good.” Crane sounded a little uncertain about it. It’s Friday, thought Joanna, taking a second, longer look at the haggard unshaven face. Has this guy eaten or slept since he saw somebody he cared about disappear right in front of his eyes?

Antryg started to rise, and Joanna offered, “We’ve got some cold pizza in the fridge. Have you had breakfast?”

He stammered, hesitated (He hasn’t…), then said, “You sure?”

Joanna fetched it. But on her way back for the coffee (and tea, for Antryg) she paused at the foot of the stairs, then climbed swiftly to the workroom, and stood for a moment looking in.

Monday he’d begun sticking fragments of paper to the two walls in the corner, scribbled with notes in felt-tip pen in the elaborate, curliqueued script of the Empire of Ferryth. By Tuesday he’d started rigging lines of kitchen string – or in some cases red yarn – between them. He’d found an old portable chalkboard in the attic and lugged it down Wednesday night. More notes, more string, more connections – if that’s what the yarn was supposed to mean. She noticed that he was now tying things like jingle-bells and “gods-eyes” – the sort of thing hippies had used to make twenty years ago – to some of the places where the strings crossed.

Last night she’d asked him, “What is that?”

And he’d replied, not sarcastic or evasive but worried: “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

When she came back into the living-room, Crane was saying, “The cops thought I was crazy. Or that I was stoned, which I wasn’t. Neither of us were. Sharona…” He hesitated again, or maybe simply couldn’t get past the sound of her name. “Thing is, Sharona was doing a cleanse. I mean, like, a magic cleanse.” Again the glance, expecting disbelief if not derision. “Her ex called her last week, trying to borrow money, and they ended up having a fight. She said she’d been dreaming about him and wanted to, like, purge her mind of his spirit. She’s kind of a Wiccan,” he added, looking uncertainly from Antryg to Joanna.

“A cleanse is a perfectly reasonable thing to do under the circumstances,” agreed Antryg. “Thank you, Joanna—” taking the coffee. “And one doesn’t need to be mageborn – or be in a universe where magic works – to derive benefit from it.”

“I’d have mailed him a dead lizard, myself,” remarked Joanna, reflecting upon an ex of her own. She settled cross-legged on the end of the couch.

“Yeah, well, the police didn’t look at it that way.” Nicky Crane was silent for a moment. Then a slight tremor passed through him: weariness, anger, the echoes of shock. “And her mom’s filed a missing person report. She was never my biggest fan. By the end of the week the SBPD is gonna be on my doorstep asking what really happened, and I swear to God, that’s what really happened.” The flesh around his eyes tightened a little with his concentration, sun-burned, and threaded with amazing patterns of white squint-lines, from riding into the wind.

“She’d made like this little campfire about thirty feet up the hill from the creek bed, and came back to where we were camped to get her stuff: sage and tobacco and rock-salt, and some other herbs I think. I was back with the bike.” With meticulous care he sugared his coffee, mixed cream into it, set it on the side-table with his untouched pizza on a folded paper-towel, and, clearly, promptly forgot about it. “I’m not really into that, you know, Wiccan stuff. But I know it’s really important to her. And I knew how upset she’d been getting into it with Carson again – you look up the word ‘dick-head’ in the dictionary, and that’s his picture beside the article.”

For a moment he gazed into space again, trying to call it back. And sick with the recollection.

“So she gets her stuff, and starts to walk back up the slope in the moonlight, and then this – and then this…” His hands spread apart, as if they would encompass a sphere that grew from the size of a basketball to about twice that of a very large beach-ball. Moving, as if they would mould from the air between them something which could neither be described nor even completely pictured.

“It was darkness,” he said quietly. “Only – only moving. Like it was alive. There was like… colors in it… and light that wasn’t really light. And kind of… fizzing. Like the air in it was full of molecules of something. But dark, dark like you’re in a cave, dark. And it grew, til it was higher than her head. Sharona backed up, and started to turn to run back up the hill, but… This sounds stupid, but I don’t really remember what I saw. I think I saw things coming out of that darkness, people maybe? I know she ran, and something surrounded her, grabbed her. I think she screamed but I don’t… it’s not clear in my mind. I can’t see that part. I swear to God I wasn’t drunk or stoned or anything. I don’t remember if I yelled or what—”

“No,” said Antryg softly. “No, you wouldn’t, you know. You weren’t even able to move towards her, were you?”

“Not… I mean—” Crane’s voice was hoarse. “I didn’t. Not at first. Then when I did it was too late. And it’s like I was trying to run underwater. Like I was dreaming. I was so fucking scared but that isn’t what kept me—”

“No,” said the wizard again. “No, they were keeping you back.”

“Who?”

Antryg replied, “Ah. Well.” And in his eyes Joanna seemed to see the maze of notes and string and unintelligible writing. “How far is it to Lytle Creek?”

“About three hours,” provided Joanna. “You think you should phone Enyart’s? Jim’ll kill you if you cancel out on him on a Friday night.”

He licked one finger and held it up, though the air outside the bungalow’s wide-open doors and windows was perfectly still. “Oh, I think we should be back by six,” he estimated – on what grounds, Joanna couldn’t imagine.

He poured the remainder of his tea into the hanging coleus just west of the end of the couch, took his katana from the rack – not the unsharpened training blade, but the ancient one that their Sensei had lent to them – set it on the coffee-table, and went to find his boots. Joanna caught up with him in the kitchen.

“You needn’t come if you don’t want to,” he said quietly, when she dropped a couple of bottles of Evian water into her mailsack of a purse. “I really should be back by six.”

Perched, presumably, on the back of Nicky Crane’s Harley.

“I’d rather—” she began, and stopped, seeing the concern in his eyes. Remembering some of the horrible things she’d encountered, that came through when the black gates of the Void were opened. Or on those terrifying occasions on which, in Antryg’s company, she had crossed the darkness herself. “You may need backup,” she said. “What are you afraid is going on?”

“Since last Saturday night I’ve felt the Void open twelve times,” he said, his wide gray eyes somber behind the round lenses of his glasses. “I’ve never felt so many gates created in so short a period. Everything feels… uneasy. Full of random movement. It’s an extraordinarily dangerous situation no matter what’s causing it, and as far as I know, I’m the only mage trained to sense the movement of the Void. The only one who is aware of these things at a distance. I can’t not go.”

No, thought Joanna. Pupil and protégé of the Dark Mage Suraklin, raised and instructed in evil that still woke him, gasping, from his sleep, her friend had a profound sense of responsibility. As the only mage aware of the inner workings of the gates that joined the moving worlds within the cosmos, of course he felt himself to be their guardian.

No wonder Gandalf and Merlin and Ged of Earthsea were all bachelors, she reflected resignedly. Who could live with someone who believed that a wizard’s gotta do what a wizard’s gotta do, on a day-to-day basis?

“But you’re not a mage,” she pointed out quietly. “You have no power to deal with whatever might be going on.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m free to turn my back on it. Besides,” he added, with a sudden jack-o-lantern grin, “I am the only one who knows what I’m looking at, and I can at least go out there and see what there is to be seen.”

From a cupboard Joanna took an old-fashioned pump bug-sprayer, loaded, not with insecticide, but with a silver chloride solution inimical (Antryg had told her) to most demons in pretty much every universe. This, too, she stowed in her purse, along with its usual quota of pens, checkbooks, flashlight, wallet, lighter (not that she smoked), computer backup discs – both 5 ¼ and 3 ½ inch sizes – a short length of coaxial cable, mace, two energy-bars, a phone-card, four tea-bags, little packets of nails, screws, table-salt, and wire, duct tape, three notebooks, a folded-up wind-breaker, and a Swiss Army knife that could qualify as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Antryg poured crunchies into the bowl for Spock and Chainsaw, and led the way back into the living-room, Joanna at his heels. She cringed at the thought of driving back to LA at rush hour – which it would certainly be by the time they had “seen what there was to be seen…”

But she had lived with Antryg long enough to have the queasy feeling, that it was a matter which had probably better not wait.

*

It was a long drive, down Highway 101 to the 10 Freeway, and thence out to San Bernardino: flatlands of housing construction, abandoned vineyards crisping in the sun. Gray asphalt sliding under the nose of Joanna’s blue Mustang and the hot glare of late-morning sunlight smiting the windshields of oncoming cars. Nicky Crane followed the Mustang on his Harley. Antryg, knees propped against the dashboard, seemed to be alternately meditating and tinkering with his thaumatrope, as if trying to conjure some image within the flickering circle on its spinning disk. As they passed through the scrub-grown hills above Pomona, Joanna asked worriedly, “Do you have any idea who might be doing this? Is that what that polytope up in your workroom is about?”

“It’s actually a tesseract rather than a polytope–” He folded his toys together, and tucked them into the pockets of his faded green Army jacket. “And it’s only a rough attempt to chart where any specific world is within the Void at a given moment. They’re always moving, you know.” He frowned into the distance, one elbow resting on the sill of the window, the wind tugging at the unruly graying curls of his hair.

“It takes a tremendous amount of power to open a gate, you see,” he went on after a time. “Which tells me at least one thing about whoever is doing this. It also tells me that whoever – or whatever – it is, it or he considers its reasons worth the risk of leakage from one world to another: the subsidiary gates that open at random all throughout the Void, and the appearance of abominations in the affected worlds.”

“Great,” she sighed.

“Great indeed. Great enough – I hope – to have left some mark on the site of the abduction, to at least give me some idea of where it’s coming from.”

“And there’s nothing special or weird about Nicky’s friend?” Joanna frowned at the dark stretch of highway ahead of them, slow trucks passing slower trucks up over Kellogg Hill, then the dip down to the so-called Inland Empire and the arid lands beyond. “She’s not a missing princess or a wizard herself or an alien in disguise?”

“According to Nicky, he’s known Sharona Bell for ten years – since High School – and so far as he knows, she’s always been as she seemed. A young woman seeking something beyond the world where she grew up – the world that everyone tells her is all the world there is. One doesn’t need to be a missing princess to do that.”

He reached out as he said it and touched her wrist, and though her eyes were on the road she felt his glance. Reading in her that same quest, that same conviction that there was something other than her mother’s scatterbrained pursuit of macramé and marijuana and the guru du jour. Something beyond going clubbing or shopping with the popular girls of her own High School days.

But by the time she threw him a quick look, he was back to studying the movements of one of his pinwheels in the hot breath of the half-open window, with the eyes of a colander-wearing lunatic concentrating on a broadcast from Mars.

*

Even Joanna – who was no Girl Scout – could see that somebody had come in and tracked up the site of Sharona’s disappearance. Cops, almost certainly – San Bernardino Police Department or the San Bernardino County Sheriffs. Flat-soled boot-tracks and tire prints criss-crossed the whole stretch of gravel and sand along the bed of Lytle Creek. Only a few gray wads of charred wood and ash marked the approximate location of the fire Sharona had kindled, to smoke-cleanse her mind of anger. Crane said, “Shit,” looking around him. “Down there’s where I had the sleeping bags spread out. We were gonna make a fire, later, to cook dinner, and sleep under the stars.” Joanna saw, half-buried in the debris at their feet, the gouged slip of wood that had been used for a bow-drill, the scatter of tinder. Nicky, in his own way, seemed to be a seeker after meaning in the world of nature as much as Sharona was. “She was walking up this way. I think she was about there—”

“Stand up there by where her fire was, if you would, my dear.” Antryg went to the place, took a yo-yo from his pocket, made a few experimental drops at the camp-site, then licked a finger and tested the wind direction again (if that was in fact what he was doing when he did that. Joanna was never sure). By Crane’s expression, he wasn’t impressed.

Then he walked, slowly, from the camp-site where the bike and Joanna’s Mustang were parked, toward where she and Crane stood in the midst of the trampled ash up-slope. He spread his hands out, fingers wide, as if he were feeling for invisible walls, or testing the heat of an unseen blaze not far away.

Joanna saw the polytope again in her mind, the lines of string and red yarn, the three-dimensional maze that only roughly approximated the constantly-moving layerings of world upon world. A dozen feet away Antryg stopped, knelt, then stood again. It takes tremendous power to open a gate… which tells me at least one thing about whoever is doing this…

Beside her, Crane asked quietly, “So what does he think happened to her?” He knelt, picked up the fragment of the bow-drill bowl, and as he did this, Joanna saw something else, mingled in the rucked-up dirt beside which they stood. She picked it up – it was a piece of thin leather, a circle a little smaller than her palm and marked on both sides with silvery ink – as he went on, “Is he—? I mean, can he…?”

“He is. And he probably can.” Joanna turned the thing over in her hand, and flinched as her fingers touched the markings. Like the stab of a silver needle in the bones of her skull, like the fluttering hallucination of migraine.

Magic. She’d run with Antryg enough to know the feel of it.

Like the smell of something she was allergic to…

Was Sharona Bell in fact an exile, a fugitive, a mage like Antryg, hiding out here…?

And if that was the case, was she doing something out here other than cleansing her spirit?

Panic flooded her, the cold sense of suddenly being in over their heads.

“Do you know what happened to her?” Crane asked, when she didn’t answer. “What those things were, that grabbed her?”

Joanna shook her head, thinking of some of the things she’d seen come through the Void. Nightmares. Hideous. And none worse than the evil thing, suave and charming and gentle-voiced, that had been Antryg’s teacher.

The Dark Mage Suraklin.

Antryg stopped again, close enough that Joanna saw the expression in his face. First puzzlement, as if at some unfamiliar sound, then… then shocked rage.

He knelt, and held his spread-out hands just above the rucked-up pebbles, weeds, and sand. He scooped up a pinch of the dirt, sniffed it, tasted it, then wiped his fingers on his t-shirt. Hot sun glinted from the green love-beads around his neck, his round-lensed glasses and tawdry rhinestone earrings.

Joanna called out, “Antryg—” and held up the circle of leather.

He stood up, called out to her, “Stay where you are, both of you. Don’t move.”

And of course Crane moved a step toward him and Joanna caught his wrist. He feels it, too…

Antryg marked the place in the sand with his forefinger, then walked quickly back down to the car. From its trunk he took the katana that Shimada Sensei had lent him, an old blade, forged by a shamaness in the mountains of Hokkaido. He slid the weapon into his belt and it wasn’t until he raised his hands that Joanna guessed what he was doing.

She yelled, “Antryg, NO!” and ran. Ran desperately, aware even as the vibrating light-drenched darkness of the Gate opened in the air before him that she had to catch him, had to reach him as he stepped through, or she would be lost. Her recollections of the Void itself were only a blender-chop of sensations – terrible cold, falling, peril… the knowledge that she could never, not ever, escape if she were lost in it.

Like throwing herself into death.

Whatever he saw just now, whatever he sensed, he’ll need backup…

Or he’ll never return.

And I’ll never know…

He stepped through into darkness and pulled the darkness in after him, and her fingers touched the bony point of his elbow as she fell.

She stopped breathing and the marrow of her bones turned to crystals of ice. She couldn’t even cry out, though she was conscious as she fell, and fell, and fell.

She was lying on sand in twilight, gasping and trying not to throw up.

The velvet voice said, “Stay here—” and his crooked hand patted her cheek. She started to protest but was too dizzy, this time, to get up. Somewhere she thought she heard Crane’s voice crying out, Sharona, tinier and tinier as it threaded away into infinite distance.

Darkness opened again and he was gone.

Or maybe she only imagined those distant cries. For one instant she thought she smelled the ozone whiff of the Void, and its cold made the sand whisper beneath her. Gray-black sand, like coarse crystals, hot with the lingering heat of some terrible day.

A vulture passed above her in the apricot sky.

Not a vulture. She blinked up at it hazily. A pteranodon, or a dragonette. A long whip of tail balancing the leathery kite of its wings.

The thing she’d most feared, since first she knew him, knew what he could do.

That she’d be left in another world, without him. Without any way of getting home.

Her hand tightened over the curled scrap of leather. It felt like nothing but leather now, but in the Void it had burned her palm like cold acid.

Can he find his way here again?

What if he can’t?

Another pteranodon, as twilight thickened.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit….

She sat up. Dark glittering flatlands, broken – it was hard to tell in the failing light – by clumps of some kind of plant (cactus analog?).

She began to shake, struggling with tears of terror. Unfolded the scrap, with its interlocking rings and polyhedrons, its lines that looked so queerly like the lines of a human palm. It meant nothing to her, and the silvery ink had faded nearly to invisibility. But still that smell clung to it, of magic.

Of power.

And, very, very faintly, of blood.

Antryg, God damn it…

Movement under the sand, a quarter-mile away. The lead-colored grains slid like water over something that surged beneath it. Whatever it was curved its back and sounded deep, like a whale or some horrible creature in a science fiction movie.

Shit, what kind of things are going to come out when it gets dark? On one side of the sky stars prickled the indigo stain of coming night. What kind of things might have dropped through around here when the Void opened?

There were now five pteranodons.

Don’t do this to me…

But she knew she’d done it to herself. He’d told her to stay put…

No, she thought, her hand tightening on the circle. He had to know about this. Whatever it is. Whatever it means.

People were running like deer towards her across the black sand. Clothed and booted in what looked like cured hides, dark-skinned, dark hair wound and braided on their heads. She stuck the leather scrap into her purse, not willing to risk what their reaction would be if they felt in it what she had felt. They carried spears, and things like small velociraptor dinosaurs ran among them, red eyes glinting.

Antryg, that spell of tongues you put on me all that time ago better still work…

They surrounded her at a distance of twenty feet, easy spear range. A young woman came forward, cautious, the others edging up behind, keeping their spears pointed. They were nothing like movie spears and Joanna saw that the rawhide strips that bound the shafts were dark with old blood. Those sharpened bone points could kill.

The woman said, “Where is Red Sargin?” and Joanna understood – Thank God that spell works! – that the velociraptors that drew back, hissing, were sargin.

She held up her hands, showing them empty. “I don’t know.”

She was still trying to think of a convincing explanation of what the hell she was doing there when she smelled, sudden and acrid, the ozone whisper of the Void. The hunters retreated, hastily, several paces. Wind whirled and scattered the black sand and the sargin shrank still further away, hissing and warbling with terrible shrill ululations. But the woman stood her ground, and the young man who’d come up beside her, and an older man, with gray in his hair and horrible scars on his breast.

Antryg stepped out of the shuddering black maw of the Void and dropped Crane’s unconscious body beside Joanna, then turned toward the hunters and their spears. “Show me the place where your friend disappeared,” he commanded. Like Joanna, he lifted his hands to show them empty, though he still wore the long, slightly curving sword thrust through his belt. “We, too, seek for one who was taken.”

*

Red Sargin was the healer of the Many Waterfalls People, Yellow Butterfly – his wife – explained. While the People hunted and fished in the canyon bottomlands an hour’s walk (Joanna calculated) to the south, her man had gone out into the desert to catch scorpions, whose venom cleaned wounds. She and young Garseel (the word meant a kind of small pteranodon) had gone with him, and they were the ones who had seen the Dark Hole open in the air, and the Night People come out to seize their friend, full in the chill light of morning.

“So they were people?” asked Crane. He had by this time regained consciousness, and was sitting up beside the fire that the hunters had kindled on the black sands. He looked much worse, Joanna thought, than she herself felt, sick and shaken to pieces. But he had recovered enough to watch with an almost professional interest when old Second-Star (evidently in his youth there’d been another named Star in the tribe) had coaxed to life the coals that he’d carried, smouldering, in a shell hung in a string bag at his hip.

“They were like yourselves,” said the Butterfly. “Like us. Tall people who walk straight. Not like the mnenskitch.” (A mental image of slouching, dog-faced creatures with intelligent eyes). “And like yourselves they wore garments all over. But these hung down around them, like creepers over the face of a cliff.” With a bone awl she sketched in the sand a robed figure with long hair. “They were young.”

She looked from Crane to Antryg as she spoke, eyes narrow with calculation. Crane said, “You mean they didn’t have beards?” Neither he nor Antryg did, though Antryg’s tousled mop of hair was graying.

She shook her head. Her dusky skin was weathered and scars marked the muscle of her right arm, but the dark, coarse hair piled on her head was untouched with silver. Joanna guessed she was younger than she looked, and she didn’t look more than twenty-five, a few years younger than Joanna herself. Except for her eyes, of course…

She still had all her teeth.

“They moved like half-growns,” said the Butterfly at length. Her voice was deep, and through the translation effect of the Spell of Tongues, Joanna could hear that the native language of the People was elaborate and flowery, filled with alternate constructions of past and conditions and status. “They feared Red Sargin, and backed from him when he turned to fight them. I thought he would escape them – or at least hold them back until Garseel and I could reach the spot, running… But they had a magic, and he cried out, and fell, as if they’d poisoned his belly without touching him. They kicked his spear away from him, grabbed him by the feet and dragged him into the darkness.”

Her dark eyes slitted still further with anger. “The darkness was gone, when we reached the spot.”

Crane said, “Fuckers,” quietly and from the bottom of his heart.

Joanna took the little circle of leather from her pocket. “This was in the ashes of Sharona’s fire,” she said to Antryg, quietly. “I don’t know if it was hers, or theirs.”

He reached for it, but when his fingertips touched the leather he jerked away, as if burned. He said, very softly, “Ah.” For a moment his gray eyes lost their focus, or, rather, changed. Seemed to look beyond the fire, beyond the darkness, beyond the horizon. Then he put his arm around her shoulders, looked down at her. “Thank you. This… tells me a great deal. I was remiss, not to look at the fire first – I didn’t think she’d have fled so far. Was this what you followed me for? To give me this?” And he gathered the loose blonde curls of her hair into one hand, bent his head to brush her lips with his.

“I followed you because you’ll need help,” she said. “If even I can feel their magic just – just touching that thing, in a world where magic doesn’t exist… You don’t know what you’ll be up against.”

“I don’t…” He stopped himself and sat, his hand resting on her nape and his forehead on her brow. Then a corner of his mouth quirked down and he held up the ugly little spell-circle in his other hand: “Well, I have a better idea of it now, anyway. And I can’t say I’m comforted.”

She only looked at him in silence, barely conscious of the hiss of wind, the murmur of voices on the other side of the fire, and the bird-like twitters and coos of the sargin as they made little hollows for themselves in the warm sand.

At length he said, “I don’t want you to be hurt.”

“And I don’t want you to be hurt,” she returned. “Do you think two of us – or three of us—” She glanced toward Crane, deep in conversation with Galseel and the Yellow Butterfly, “—stand a better chance of stopping whatever they’re doing, than you by yourself?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He turned the circle in his crooked fingers, studying it. All visible signs had now vanished from the thin, fine-grained leather. “I’m afraid it’s not going to make that much difference, you see. I’ve lost—”

He hesitated. “It’s just that I don’t think I could stand to lose anyone else.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

He began to reply, then closed his mouth again.

As soon as Crane was able to stand, and the cold shock of being lost in the Void had passed off, the hunters whistled up their sargin and led the travelers out across the desert. “Will you need help?” asked the Yellow Butterfly. “These people, these abductors, had magic, the kind tale-tellers speak of. Even that weapon you carry, Tall One, will do you no good against them.” But she looked with hungry and curious eyes at the sword.

Antryg shook his head. “If we’re up against mages, numbers may not help us,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for protecting you.”

“We will protect ourselves, Tall One. And you,” she added, with a half-grin, which Joanna, catching her eye, returned. Then, more quietly, “We are the warriors of the Waterfalls People. We do not abandon our own. Nor do we fear death. No more than these your friends do, in their striving to help those they care for.”

“If you do not take us,” added Garseel, and brandished his stone-headed ax, “we will follow you through the hole you open into darkness, whether you will it or no.”

“Didn’t we just do this?” Antryg looked from the two hunters to Joanna and Crane. “I tell people to stay put, and they never do.”

“Would you?” asked Joanna.

“Well, I know what I’m doing. Pretty much,” he added. “Most of the time. Let’s see what we find at the site, shall we?”

*

It was full dark when they reached the place, and the moon had risen, huge and red, with its tiny white companion dogging it in the star-washed sky. The hunters had brought torches with them – short sticks of green wood with one end bound up in dry twigs soaked in fat – and by the flickering light Joanna could see that the spot had been just as trampled by the shocked and frightened Waterfalls People as the one at Lytle Creek had been by the SBPD. There was no reading of tracks possible. No guessing as to what had actually happened.

But Antryg knelt at the spot, and passed his hands again over the rucked-up sand; rubbed the coarse, glittering grains, first between his fingers, then across the thin, curled leather of the disc. With the torchlight turning his spectacles into rounds of flame, Joanna couldn’t see his eyes, but she saw in the tightening of his shoulders, and the way he stood, with sudden sharp decision, that he was angry at whatever it was he’d found.

“It takes a great deal of magic to open the Void,” he said quietly, when she came near. “These people – there are three of them – don’t have it. They have a certain degree of power but they’re sourcing this from somewhere else. That’s what this is.” He held up the disc. “A sigil, a portable, temporary power-sink, to get them through the Void. But that means that they themselves haven’t been trained in why traversing the Void is so dangerous… and what can go wrong. Butterfly, my dear—”

He turned to the hunter, and bowed deeply, a gesture which left the young woman nonplussed. “If you do come with me – and your brother…” He nodded toward Galseel, “—I must warn you that when these holes open between one world and another holes can open in other places near-by. Things sometimes come through, terrible things. Monsters – creatures – some large and some tiny and some more deadly than poison. It would be best that most of your hunters remain here, to protect your people. I don’t know what form these things will take or how many of them there will be.”

“Such things could have come when these Evil Ones came through the first time to take Red Sargin,” she replied. “If as you say they wield great power but are very young and untrained to its use, you will need help. Perhaps more than the Lady Joanna can give. Red Sargin, and the Lady Sharona—” She nodded toward Crane, “—will need help.”

“Very well, then,” sighed Antryg. “Hold hands – and whatever happens, don’t let go.”

*

The disorientation was worse, crossing through the Void a second time so soon after the first. Joanna clung to Crane’s arm, struggling to focus her eyes and mind, struggling not to collapse on her knees when the searing cold, the shuddering darkness ceased. She was dimly aware of the Butterfly and Garseel deploying themselves defensively on either side of them – less shaken up, or tougher – and it passed through her mind that one reason Antryg might hesitate to bring others with him across the Void was because they would be helpless in those first few, fatal minutes…

But there was no threat.

It was early morning. They stood at the edge of tame, well-tended woodland, overlooking a village of round huts. Smoke curled from holes in their thatch. The smell of cow-byres and pig-sties, the crowing of chickens. Antryg turned his head, listening, sword unsheathed in his hand. His left hand he extended, palm outward and fingers spread. Yellow Butterfly moved to Joanna’s side and murmured, “Is that a… a camp?” and Joanna understood that the younger woman had never seen a stationary house.

“It’s how people here live.”

The hunter wrinkled her nose. “It stinks. There is filth down there, years of it. They must get sick all the time.”

“Can’t argue with you there.”

Joanna got to her feet – aching and rather giddy – and looked down the hill, to the cropland that lay east (the sky’s lighter in that direction, it must be east…) of the village. At its edge, a little way beyond the hedge that marked it, the long-leaved plants had been trampled and, in one place, burned. Antryg glanced toward the village, which lay still as death – suspiciously still, thought Joanna, for an agricultural community – then signed to the others, and made for the place.

The crop-plants – seed-heads of some sort – had been broken and trodden on, where a path had been pushed between them from the village. Someone disappeared here. Everyone came out looking…

Like Antryg, she looked back at the village. No sign of movement, save those occasional curls of smoke.

From childhood Joanna had abhorred “outdoorsy” life and cringed at the thought of going anywhere near “back to the land.” But she knew that it was past time for all good farmers to be awake and milking their cows.

Dead? Barricaded in their houses with terror?

Did abominations come through, too? Are they still around?

Is anyone alive down there?

At the edge of the trampled area, nearly hidden in the plants, lay the carcass of a dog. An irregular streak had been burned into its hair and flesh, from the side of its head down to its right flank. Blood crusted on its half-open jaws. The Butterfly said, “This was done yesterday.”

“He was trying to defend his owner.” Antryg knelt, and gently touched a shaggy brown ear. Behind his thick-lensed spectacles his eyes gazed for a thousand miles, eyes a thousand years old.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Joanna asked.

“I know what might be going on,” replied the wizard. He sighed, and picked up some of the trampled weeds – broken stems with dried flowers, handfuls of random leaves – and turned them for a moment in his crooked fingers. Only when he looked around at the smashed foliage and, digging under it, brought out a small pair of rather odd-looking silver scissors did Joanna notice that the stems and roots he held had been cleanly cut, rather than broken.

He sniffed the blades, then the cut plants, and the Butterfly came over, stooped and touched one of the flat, velvety leaves. “It smells like palkset,” she said. “The shape is different, but the smell is like it.”

“And palkset does what?” His deep voice was barely a murmur.

“It rids the body of poisons, and brings gentle dreams.”

“Ah.” His gaze returned to the present, and he looked around him, turning to Nicky Crane with deep and terrible compassion in his eyes. He asked, “Was Sharona a vegetarian?”

“Yeah.” The biker looked surprised at the question. “How’d you know? She—”

Then his eyes went almost black with fury. “What the fuck you mean, was?” He grabbed Antryg’s shirt-front, dragged him to his feet as if he would strike him, shake him, fling him to the ground. “Don’t you fucken say was about her, Merlin! You don’t know fucken shit about what happened—”

He raised his fist, and the Butterfly and Galseel caught his arm. Antryg made no effort to break his grasp, only looked at him, grief in his face. As if he saw the younger man’s tears before they started to run down, tracking through sunburn and wind-lines.

“She’s not dead!” yelled Crane, almost hysterically. “Don’t you fucken go saying she’s dead!”

The Butterfly kept a grip like steel on his arm, but her own eyes went to Antryg’s face. “And is Red Sargin dead as well?” A voice flat and soft, a hunter closing on its prey, a warrior entering battle. Tears are for later.

There was barely sound with the movement of his lips. “Probably.” And, a fraction more loudly, “If you don’t want to come farther I can return for you here. You should be safe enough in the woods. I won’t be long.”

“Fuck that!” Crane shoved him away with the violence with which he’d grabbed him a moment ago. “And fuck you!” Tears still streaked his face, his body shuddering with sobs. “Let’s go get this wrapped up.”

“Then stay together.” Antryg drew his sword again, blade glinting in the rising sun. “And be ready for anything.”

Joanna took a deep breath, and grabbed the back of his belt. She wondered if Dramamine would help.

*

The place was dim-lit, bluish light coming from crystals set on the shelves of a scroll-rack above a broad desk. There was a window at one end of the narrow room – an impression of pale-washed plaster with dim designs stenciled on it behind the book-shelves – but it was shuttered. The air was stale, and stank.

Clinging to a corner of the desk and praying she wouldn’t faint, Joanna recognized at least one of the hideous potpourri of odors – not strong, but deeply pervasive. She managed to whisper, “Blood….”

She heard someone gasping – Crane or Galseel, her mind was too clouded with dizziness for the moment to distinguish – and was dimly aware of the Yellow Butterfly, her spear in one hand, holding onto her shoulder for support.

Antryg murmured “Blood… and myrrh. White hellebore and hyssop. Nightwicker – I don’t know what they call it in your world and I don’t even know if it grows in your world—”

Worse smells beneath those, Joanna knew. The fetors of mortality, vomit and voided waste imperfectly mopped up.

“Things one uses,” the wizard went on, “to raise black magic, death-magic.” He took the disc from his pocket, held it up. “The magic wrought of the energies released, when a human being is killed.”

Joanna understood then where that very fine-grained leather had come from.

Oh, shit…

Her vision cleared and he came into focus, looking around him at the long chamber and, she observed, unobtrusively keeping himself between the little group around the desk, and the room’s only door. His voice was level but deadly quiet, and the pale glimmer of the crystals picked out the insectile rounds of his glasses, the gaudy earrings, the edge of the sword in his hand.

“They would have been wizards in this world, wouldn’t they?” she asked after a moment. “Sharona, and Red Sargin, and whoever it was who was gathering herbs with her scissors and her dog. That’s why they were taken.”

“No,” murmured Antryg. “Not even that, I’m afraid. Stay here.” With his free hand he fumbled a piece of chalk from his jeans pocket, and, kneeling, sketched a perfect circle around the little group (He must have learned how to do that in Wizard School, reflected Joanna, observing the mathematical perfection of its circumference), herding them a foot or so from the desk in order to finish. He glanced repeatedly at the door as he traced a second circle outside the first, linking sigils that she half-recognized, suns and stars and the emblem of the United Federation of Planets, joined by curling lines.

“But they were all healers,” protested Galseel. “It sounds – is it not true, Crane? – It sounds as if they all practiced healing arts.”

“Did your husband eat differently from the other members of the people?” Antryg sat back for a moment on his heels, chalk in hand, the third, half-formed circle trailing away to his left. His gaze, still sad, had gone to the Yellow Butterfly, crouched on the other side of the treble line of protective spells, studying them as if they’d been the tracks of some unfamiliar beast. “Healers often do. Did he treat his own body differently? Purge himself with aloes or briory?”

“He did.” She rose, still gripping her bone-headed spear. “How did you—?”

“That’s what they were after,” said Antryg grimly. “Not magic. They knew it didn’t work in the worlds they sought. They were just after purified flesh, purified blood – what you’ll sometimes find in those who seek to work magic, whether they are able to do so or not. They—”

His head snapped around and he rose, scooping up his sword from the floor at his side. Joanna grabbed the Butterfly by one wrist and Crane by the other as both would have gone to him: “Don’t! Don’t cross the circle. Not for any reason…”

She’d gone enough places with Antryg to know that this was one of the Prime Directives. Do NOT step out of the ring of protective spells. You WILL NOT like what happens next.

At the same instant, from the far end of the long room, lightless and hidden in shadow, the clear treble voice of a young boy called out “Uncle Sim? Is that you Uncle Sim? Help me! Help us—”

And in that moment, the door opened and the voice of a youth scarcely older, by the sound of him, gasped, “Shit!”

The crystals’ glow showed Joanna the three young people in the aperture. A tall youth, slightly gawky, his saturnine face delicate and pretty under a long mop of black hair. A tall red-haired girl, freckled and strong-jawed. And behind them a smaller youth, dark also, chubby, and halfway to a manhood he sought to proclaim with a weedy mustache.

As the Yellow Butterfly had said, they wore plain, dark robes that billowed around them, and their hair was bound back in fillets of twisted wool. All three bore staffs, split at the heads to contain glowing crystals: gold, green, and red. From the dark at the far end of the room a woman’s voice cried, “Help us!” and the red-haired girl pointed with her staff and yelled, “Kill them!”

The two boys hesitated just fractionally, but lightning sprang from the girl’s staff and Antryg leaped out of the way, flipped his sword to his left hand and from his right flung what looked like a bolt of yellow-white light at the doorway. Joanna wasn’t sure what happened next, because pain slashed through her: a blinding headache, a horrible cramping in the muscles of her legs and belly (Must be because Antryg didn’t finish drawing that third circle…). She was aware of Antryg striding towards the girl and then falling, as if something had knocked his feet from beneath him. In the same moment the two boys dashed into the room, behind him, and threw lightning and fire that illuminated the fact that the sleeves of their robes were glistened with fresh blood.

Sharona, thought Joanna. Red Sargin… THEIR blood.

With a throat-tearing bellow of rage, the Butterfly flung her spear at the red-haired girl – and stepped across the lines of the protective circle in her follow-through.

Joanna yelled, “Scatter! Keep moving!” as she staggered to her feet – legs hurting worse than the worst charley-horse she’d ever had after an aikido class, ever. “Don’t try to attack them!”

Crane yelled an obscenity and went straight for Redhead; the Butterfly grabbed him, dragged him toward the far end of the room – “You fool, they’ll use us for hostages!” she shouted, and Joanna saw, indeed, the boys angling around, trying to aim their staffs.

Redhead yelled, “Get the mage you idiot! Barrin, guard us—”

Barrin must have been Wimpy Mustache, because he snapped to and began directing blasts of lightning, not specifically at Joanna or Crane or the hunters, but at the zone between them and Antryg, while the tall boy and the girl went after the older wizard with everything they had. Keeping close to the wall, Joanna grabbed a crystal off the corner of the desk and dashed to the far end of the room. There were three narrow doorways there, barred doors in a wall barely a dozen feet long. Three cells like little corridors lined with wooden racks of some kind (Wine-store?).

A woman was in one, a boy in another – the boy twelve-ish, black-skinned with pale silvery eyes and long white hair. The woman was gray-haired, straight as an arrow, wrinkled and shorter even than Joanna. There were no locks on the barred cell-doors and Joanna, after yanking each once, deduced they were closed with magic (Damn their goddam spells anyway!)…

She barely glimpsed the little heaps of other things – discarded clothing, a Nike sneaker – in the dark at the back of the cells.

“The books!” gasped the boy, pointing back at the desk. “They read the books on the table before they take someone—”

“Always they look at those things,” added the woman. “Over and over they repeat the same words, like practicing a song.”

“Can you do magic?” asked Joanna. “Any magic at all?”

The woman shook her head. “The gods are not in this place—”

And the boy gave her the look common to Middle Schooler aged boys apparently across the universe and said, “Duh! There’s no such thing as magic. Not real magic.” And ducked aside, as a stray sizzle of lightning blew chips out of the wall beside his cell door.

“Great,” said Joanna, turned, and ran zigzag back towards the table, the broken circles, the sear and flash of light and power. Nausea gripped her and cramps twisted her legs, Barrin’s spells, keeping them back in the rear portion of the room. Redhead and Tall Boy had called something – hideous, half-formless – out of what looked like a gap in the Void, something that drove Antryg into a corner, slashing at him with fangs and tentacles. The sword flashed in the dim crystal-glow and the creature went down in two pieces, pieces that wriggled on the stone floor even as Antryg turned towards his attackers again.

How long does the power last, from a sacrificial death? Joanna wondered. If they both have it, are they running low? Antryg dodged another lighting strike, the glare showing his face running with sweat and blood.

Showed also that both attackers had little leather spell-sigils, strung on cords around their necks.

Redhead and Tall Boy sprang momentarily together, joined their magic in a blast of power, and the air between Antryg and Joanna was suddenly filled with crows – immense, malevolent, moving too fast and too randomly to be struck by a sword. They attacked, not Antryg, but Joanna, screaming and cawing like some insane Hitchcock nightmare. She stumbled, and Crane scrambled to her side, slashing futilely with his knife—

“Get back!”

In another second Antryg would turn back to help them and be killed…

From her purse she pulled the bug-sprayer and pumped a blackish cloud of silver chloride at the whirling shapes. Some of them simply dissolved, black feathers scattering like wind-blown leaves. Others, screaming, turned on their summoners, tearing at Tall Boy’s face and hands.

“Here!” yelled the silver-haired boy’s voice behind them, and something skidded across the floor from his cell. Galseel snatched it up, stared at it with a cry of grief before the Butterfly snatched it from his hand.

It was a throwing-stick, an atlatl – Joanna recognized it from anthropology classes at college – and with it a small bundle of sharpened wooden bolts.

Red Sargin’s. They had to be…

Joanna threw the bug-sprayer to Crane, yelled, “Cover me!” and dug once more in her purse. The Butterfly snapped a wooden bolt at Barrin – who was vainly swatting at the enraged crows – then scooped up her spear and charged the young man, Galseel at her heels with an ax.

In the same moment Joanna raced for the table, almost crashed into it, and with hands shaking uncontrollably from adrenalin and terror, struck fire from the cigarette-lighter she usually carried, just in case she ever needed such a thing.

And touched it to the papers on the desk.

And flung herself aside, rolling (as she’d been taught to do in aikido classes) to get out of the way of the snarl of pure power that blasted a chunk out of the side of the desk where she’d been a second before. Redhead screamed, “NO!!!” and the last of the black birds vanished in smoke. She hurled some kind of fire-killer spell at the desk, and in that instant of her distracted attention, Antryg flung out his hand at Tall Boy, who screamed also and collapsed to the floor.

The next second Antryg turned and threw what looked like a skeletal purple whisper of non-light at Redhead. She convulsed and fell across the burning papers, still clutching at them, still swatting with feeble hands at the flames as she slipped to the floor. She whispered, “No….”

Antryg reached Tall Boy in two strides, grabbed the sigils that hung around his neck and pulled them off with a violence that broke the string with an audible snap. Then he caught the boy’s hair and dragged him up kneeling, put his hands on either side of his face and stared for a long moment into his eyes.

He dropped him, strode to Redhead, rolled her over and did the same thing to her. She moved feebly, sobbing, “Save them…”

Antryg raised one finger without even looking over his shoulder. The fire died at once.

Redhead lay where he left her, weeping as if her heart would break.

Antryg stood, the sigils dangling from his hand. He went to the table, looked down at the papers.

Barrin, huddled between Crane and the Butterfly, was sobbing, too, an atlatl bolt impaling his right shoulder and blood running down the side of his gouged face. Crane grabbed the youth by the neck and said, “You go open those cells,” and he and Galseel half-dragged their captive to the far end of the room. Joanna stood where she was, watching Antryg’s face as he studied what was on the desk, the blood dripping from the end of his long nose.

He wiped it off, turned to look at the girl who lay almost at his feet.

Joanna had several times seen Antryg – usually the most dottily amiable of men – change suddenly, and look like a wizard.

This was the first time she’d seen him look like what he was: the Archmage of the wizards of Ferryth. The holder of the Master Spells that dominated other wizards, the power and the responsibility that went with that power.

He said, very quietly, “You killed people to cheat on your exams?”

Tall Boy managed to sit up, his body half bowed over with pain. “They only take four new students every ten years,” he managed to say. He brushed the lank swatch of hair from his forehead, his hand shaking. “I’ve got to be one of them. There hasn’t been a mage in our country for fifteen years – I’m the only one who’s been mageborn there since before the Queen took the throne. We need a mage, desperately. And anyway they weren’t really People.”

Antryg stared at him. Not as if he didn’t believe that he’d heard what he’d just heard.

As if he did.

And through the Spell of Tongues – by which she’d understood what the Yellow Butterfly said, and Barrin, and Redhead – Joanna heard in her mind the distinction. In the language of the boy and his comrades, there were People – the word shimmering in the glow of magic – and there were Empties. Just like People, but without magic.

“Fuckers!” screamed Nicky’s voice, from the far end of the room. From the cells where the captives had been kept, until their blood had been shed, their lives had been torn from them, to provide these three young people with power.

Power to pass their magic-exams.

To open the doors to learning.

“Damn you! God damn you—!” And the last of these words cracked with tears.

Joanna thought of the atlatl that had been in the white-haired boy’s cell, the little bundle of deadly-sharp throwing-sticks, one of which was still buried in the weeping Barrin’s shoulder-joint. She remembered, like the disembodied image of a dream, a woman’s sneaker, lying on its side.

The next instant the biker pounded out of the darkness, knife in hand, face twisted with rage. Galseel and the Yellow Butterfly grabbed him, and he fought them like a roped bull, shouting obscenities, trying to get at the three young wizardlings who clustered together, almost hanging onto Antryg’s legs for protection.

Joanna saw their expressions. They were frightened, but the way they’d have been frightened if they had been in the presence of a deadly, furious animal. Yow, he’s mad. Not, We killed someone he loved….

Her eyes went to Antryg’s face, and it was like stone.

“We had to do it.” As the Butterfly and her brother gently pulled Nicky away, Tall Boy edged to Barrin’s side, fumbled a handkerchief from some pocket in his robe, and looked at the atlatl bolt sticking from the stocky boy’s shoulder. “Sir – My lord… Some of the others who’re taking the exam are… I know they’re just pawns of the Great Lords. Ethia Bluehand’s father is Lord Staerlock! If Bluehand gets into the training – if he learns the powers, the secrets, of the Inner Circle… We can’t let that happen!”

He stared pleadingly up into Antryg’s expressionless face, begging to be understood. Then, hesitantly, “Is this weapon poisoned, sir? I can’t… I’m not able….” His voice stumbled to a halt. His fingers were sticky with Barrin’s leaking blood, Barrin himself leaning now against his shoulder, half-fainting.

As if he hadn’t heard this last, Antryg said, “So you sought your victims in other worlds. Where a disappearance couldn’t be traced.”

“Well, yeah.” He said it exactly as the white-haired boy – who, with the old woman, had quietly joined the group around the Butterfly – had said, Duh….

He clearly realized in the next second that he shouldn’t have used that tone of voice, because he quickly corrected himself, “They watch us, you know. The King, and the Guard. They keep an eye on us all the time. They’d know if somebody just disappeared—”

“And why do you think they keep an eye on you?” Antryg’s voice was soft. Through the torn neck of his t-shirt, the scar was visible, where the Council of Wizards had bound a sigil on him to strip him of magic, before locking him in the Silent Tower.

“’Cause they’re jealous.” The redheaded girl sat up, slowly, painfully, her golden-hazel eyes hard with rage and spite. “’Cause we won’t do what they want us to. ‘Cause we have power. ‘Cause they want to be like us.”

“We were careful,” said the tall boy earnestly. “I mean, we looked – Seela looked, to find worlds where magic didn’t exist, had never existed.” He nodded toward the red-haired girl. “Where nobody was really… where it didn’t really….” His voice tailed off.

Seela – the red-haired girl – looked up at Antryg and said, “Come on, you can’t tell me you didn’t use Power to get those Empties—” Her beautiful eyes, swollen from her own tears, flicked toward Joanna, and the Butterfly, and the others, “—to come here with you and back you up.”

Joanna said, quietly, “You find it hard to believe we would have helped him on our own?”

The girl sniffed. “I don’t find it hard to believe that you weren’t aware he was doing it, honey.”

“We didn’t—” began the tall boy. “I mean, of course you’re not supposed to kill Empties, and you’re not supposed to use death-magic. But sometimes you’ve got to… sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, for the good of all.”

“Or the good of most, anyway,” murmured Antryg. “And you three knew you didn’t have enough power to pass these exams, to be admitted to the teachings of the masters.”

“My people need a mage!”

“And you,” returned the wizard quietly, “need to be a mage. At whatever the price. You never—”

Silent as a leopard, Seela flung herself sideways at Antryg’s legs, catching him off-balance and knocking him sprawling. She yelled, “Shang, get him!” but Shang – obviously the tall boy – was as taken by surprise as Antryg was and couldn’t even get out of the way as the wizard stumbled over him in his fall. Seela had a knife in her hand and had one of Joanna’s arms twisted behind her back and the blade at her throat before anyone could move.

“Shang, get Barrin,” Seela ordered. “And you, whoever you are—” She glanced down at Antryg. “Your little friend is coming with me. And if I hear one word of this gets to the Council—”

“So you’re going to become an outlaw now, Seela?” he inquired politely. “Because you know you’re not going to pass those exams without murdering a few more victims, and you seem to be fresh out of the wherewithal to acquire them. You probably can’t even heal the poison in Barrin’s shoulder. Or are you going to carry all the equipment for a Black Rite with you in your pockets, as well as keeping hold of Joanna, and carrying Barrin? Or are you just going to leave Barrin behind?”

“You—” She stammered slightly. “You un-do what it was you did to me. You give me back—”

Antryg said obligingly, “Of course.” And threw the handful of sigils in her direction, about three feet to her right.

She was young, and she turned her head, and didn’t see Antryg’s hand move.

The next second she screamed, her knife-hand flying open as if all the tendons on the back of it had suddenly cramped – which, Joanna was pretty sure, was exactly what had happened. Wrist and elbow spasmed, too, and she screamed again as Joanna slithered sideways and down under her arm, caught her wrist in a breaking-hold (Gosh, this works just like it does in aikido class!)…

In aikido class one didn’t kick one’s opponent as one forced him or her to the mat, but in these circumstances, Joanna couldn’t resist.

She scooped up the knife as she stepped back, and Antryg rolled to his feet, and strode over to roughly frisk the student wizard before she regained either her breath or control of her muscles.

Neither Barrin nor Shang moved, only clung together in terror as Antryg pulled Seela’s sash loose and tied her hands with it. Only when he was done did Shang whisper, “You were lying, right? That stick isn’t really poisoned…”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” responded Antryg. “Butterfly, is the throwing-stick poisoned? Not that that isn’t the very least of your worries.”

The huntress shook her head. “But a wound such as that, unless it is cleansed, will turn nasty without poison. It was such healing substances,” she added, “that my husband was seeking, when you and your friends took him, Rat-Hearts, and brought him here, and murdered him so that you could take magic from his blood and his heart.”

“Look,” said Shang, “I’m… I’m sorry about your husband. Really I am.” He fidgeted a little, as the Yellow Butterfly gazed with cold hatred at the blood that still blotted his sleeves and the front of his robe. “But sometimes – I mean, you can’t help the many, ten thousand people, without…”

“And I,” said the Butterfly quietly, “am sorry about you.” She looked sidelong at Antryg, who sighed, and extended his hand out to his side, palm up.

Shang cried desperately, “Don’t! Don’t call them! Do you know what they’ll do to us?”

The Archmage was silent for a time, his hand still extended. Looking, as the Yellow Butterfly looked, at the blood on his clothing and hands. When he spoke, his deep voice was sad. “It isn’t my decision to make.”

“It is yours.” Seela’s voice blistered like burning oil. “It’s exactly your decision. Your choice.”

“We won’t take the exams,” offered Shang, the words shaking, jostling one another as he spoke them. “I swear, none of us will ever use our powers again. Only to help people, and – and to heal… and that’s all I ever wanted to do in the first place! I’m sorry about the Empties, I’ve – uh – learned my lesson – We all have,” he added, with a frantic glance from the now-unconscious Barrin to Seela. “We’ll do penance, any penance you name – If you take us to another universe where there’s no magic, we’ll go, we’ll work to help—Don’t call them!”

His voice, barely a man’s to begin with, broke on the words, a boy’s again. “We didn’t know! Empties…” He stammered on the word, and his eyes went to Joanna, as if aware for the first time that the word might possibly give offense. “I mean – uh – people… We won’t do anything like that again. Not ever—”

“No,” murmured Antryg, in a voice of distant pain. “No, I daresay you won’t.” And he folded his long, crooked fingers together into his palm. “It’s done.”

Seela jeered at him, her voice cracking, “Now who’s a murderer?”

Antryg made no reply.

Joanna didn’t see them appear, but they were there, in the shadows just within the doorway. She had the feeling they had been there a long time. Maybe centuries. The smell of blood, of hellebore and myrrh, clung to their crimson robes. Their faces were invisible in the darkness of their hoods.

Almost, she thought, she would have said they had no faces…

The one in front – the smallest – had hands like a human being’s, man or woman, she couldn’t tell: preternaturally long, fragile skin clinging to fragile bones without any trace of tissue between. Nails that curved like a dragon’s. The hands were white as silk. The hands of the second, taller figure were gray as dust, as if the tissue had mummified long ago, without decay. The hands of the third were naked bone, without flesh.

Windrose…

Joanna knew it was the first creature speaking, though the voice was only a breathing in her mind.

Antryg inclined his head. Gawky, bony, his face and arms bleeding from the beaks of the devil-birds, all the aura of power had vanished from around him. The things before him seemed to drink power, a black hole of silence. He said, “My lords.”

These are the victims you have saved?

“These two, lords.” Antryg stepped back, and put his hands on the shoulders of the boy and the woman. The woman regarded the three robed figures quietly, but the boy’s eyes were almost blank with shock. “People who worked with the forms of power, though there was none in their worlds. People whose flesh – and hearts – were affected by the disciplines they practiced.”

The Three turned faceless darkness towards them. What they saw, Joanna could not imagine.

Nicky said hoarsely, “You go look in those cells – my lords,” he added, clearly in imitation of Antryg, “—you’ll find their stuff: the ones these… these People—” And he spit out the word like the heart of rotted fruit, “—murdered, so they could put together enough magic to pass their fucking exams. There’s a woman’s shoes and a bundle of sage, and a man’s moccasins. That thing—” He jerked his hand toward the atlatl still thrust through the Yellow Butterfly’s belt, “—was his, too. And there’s a woman’s basket with herbs in it, and a little kid’s shoes. We came to find them. To get them back.”

The Three regarded him in silence.

Antryg took from his pocket the sigil Joanna had given him, and held it out. “This was found where one of their victims tried to flee.”

When the dust-colored thing reached to take it, Joanna noticed that the gray hands had no fingernails. Only shallow pits, filled with dust.

The same soft voice in her mind said, No need. And she saw, as if she had dreamed it, a trestle-table in a dark room whose plastered walls bore the same sort of stencils as this chamber did; a trestle-table surrounded by a still-glowing maze of signs drawn on the floor and in the air. Braziers throbbed with dying embers. The trestle, the floor, the knives on the table and even the wall behind where the table stood, glistened with blood that reflected the feeble light.

The dust-colored thing stepped closer to where Antryg stood, with the woman – who wore a plain, short dress that Joanna mentally identified as being machine-made – and the boy, in his shorts and uniform shirt. Antryg’s long arms tightened around their shoulders but the thing reached out its mutilated hand and touched his face, and he flinched a little and stepped back. The glimmering dark halo of the Gate opened around them; Joanna smelled the ozone wind of the Void, felt its marrow-deep cold even where she stood. She wasn’t aware of losing consciousness but woke – still on her feet, and only seconds later – to find the Gate, and the woman, and the boy all gone.

Two ragamummages, the nearly-invisible glittering things that flitted through the Void, flickered in the ceiling-vaults like flies.

When the dust-thing approached Nicky, he stepped back to take the hand of the Yellow Butterfly, his eyes meeting hers. He said, “Can you send me… I mean, there’s nothing for me in my own world. And the police there’ll be after me.”

The thing seemed to regard him for a long time – as if it had stood there for centuries – and Joanna thought it said something to him, in the silence that this time, she could not hear. Darkness shimmered behind them like an opening cloud, and when her mind cleared again, all three – Nicky, Galseel, and the Yellow Butterfly – were gone.

The skeleton thing moved toward Antryg – walked, Joanna saw, walked as if there were a real person under those robes, or what had been a human once – and she ran to his side. The smallest of the Three stopped her, the cold thin white hand on her arm, and it turned its head toward Seela, who had begun to weep again in terror. Shang, who had crept to her side, held her in his arms, weeping also, and the white-handed thing said, Go into the place where you have thrown their remains, Shang Tarrien, Seela ni-Cicarnath, and let your tears fall on their bones. See if this will put the flesh back onto their bodies, the hearts back into their ribs.

Shang sobbed, frantic, “But they weren’t real People! Not real People…”

Seela only wept harder, and clung to her friend.

To Antryg, the thing said, Did your tears return life to those whom you killed by means of your magic, Windrose? Those without magic to raise against your power?

He said, softly, “No.”

The skeleton hand stretched forth and rested against his chest, over his heart. Joanna cried out and tried again to reach him, but the crimson mage held her back again. For a moment its fingers closed around her arm – icy with the flaccid chill of a corpse – and then she woke with a gasp, as if from a dream of suffocation.

*

For a moment she had no idea where she was. She saw the moon – so bright it washed out the near-by stars, though they arched in banners of powdered crystal against the blackness farther away – and the darkness like abysses of inky velvet all around her. And she was cold, under the thin denim jacket that was perfectly okay for July in the San Fernando Valley. Her eyes adjusted a little and she made out the tops of trees above her, and smelled the astringent scent of pine-woods, the fustiness of gravel and dirt.

Lytle Creek.

She sat up. The bare sandy ground under her, the San Bernardino Mountains around her, did one drunken curtsey, then straightened out.

Oh, shit…

She looked down-hill and yes, there was her car. The black bulk of what had to be Nicky’s motorcycle stood a few yards from it and against the pale ground near-by she made out a dark shape like crumpled laundry. She got to her feet, staggered with leg-cramps left over from the battle, limped two steps and then ran the rest of the way.

It was Antryg. He was breathing. Dust and sand stuck to the drying blood on his face and his glasses, on the dirt a few feet from him, were beaded with condensed moisture. She dug in her purse for a flashlight and by its glare saw no wound other than what the demon minions had left. His hand was still closed around the hilt of his sheathed sword.

His eyelids puckered when she shook him and he sat up slowly, looked around for his glasses. She handed them to him.

“You okay?”

He sighed, as if the whole of his soul would tear loose. Then made a slight movement with his head and shoulders, like a man shaking his spirit back into place on his bones, and carefully put that light frame of wire and steel back onto his face. “Let’s go home.”

*

“Is that what you think of us?” asked Joanna, when they stopped for coffee in Cucamonga. It was four in the morning, on the second of July. Nicky Crane had come to their door, and they’d driven out to Lytle Creek, on the first. Joanna hoped he hadn’t told anyone where he was coming that day. “That we’re… a different species? Just like real People, except not really?”

Antryg glanced up at her, from holding his crooked fingers over the steam that rose from his tea. No matter how hot the day, the old breaks always hurt, and the ferocious a/c in Denny’s Coffeeshop didn’t help. “Well, in fact, you are,” he said. “Not as Shang and Seela saw it, but… Power – magic Power – is… I can’t explain what it is. It isn’t like the ability to invent stories, or to produce tunes and songs, or the painter’s eye that can interpret images to on a canvas. It is… It’s deeper than breath. Deeper than sex. Shang was quite right, you know. Not that we’re really people and you’re not, but we are different, in ways that I can’t even begin to explain.”

He gingerly touched the band-aids that Joanna had put over the worst of the gouges on his cheekbones and the zygomatic curve around his right eye. Bandages covered his burned fingers as well.

“I’m not saying that to sound superior. At least I hope I’m not, though I suppose if I were I wouldn’t be aware of it… No more aware than those poor children were.” His gray eyes, looking out past the flat black glass of the windows, seemed filled with the darkness that lay beyond.

“Will they kill them?” She remembered Nicky Crane’s grieving fury, and the blood on Shang’s robe. Her own rage at the scorn in the girl Seela’s voice: They’re jealous…

And the next second she saw their faces again, terrified and achingly, blindingly young.

Would I feel different if they were my age? They’d still feel as they feel, and do as they did.

Deep weariness in his voice, Antryg said, “Think about it. Even if the… the mages of their Council, as I suppose we have to call them, could take their power away from them, they would always be scheming to somehow get it back. They would have a wizard’s education, and the malice of one who has had the deepest heart of one’s being – the core of one’s self – shredded, crippled.”

As his had been, she thought, looking at the darkness in his eyes.

Beyond the window, headlights flickering by on Highway 10 put strange reflections in his glasses, alien shadows across his extravagant nose and the graying curls of his hair. “They would always be filled with the most terrible resentment. It would never be safe, to let them live.”

“Were you?”

“I don’t… I don’t think so.” He frowned, at the memory of the years he had spent, locked in the Silent Tower, stripped of his power by the Council of Wizards. Deeper than breath, he had said… The core of one’s self.

“I believed – I still believe – that the evil I averted by joining the Mellidane revolt would have killed many, many more people than those who perished as a result of my… meddling. I still believe that there was a very powerful mage controlling the lords of Mellidane. But I couldn’t prove it. I’ve never been able to prove it. I joined the revolt – lent my aid to a political cause – wanting only to do good, to help the people… And I’m sure poor Shang felt exactly the same way about killing the woman Sharona, and Yellow Butterfly’s husband, and who knows how many others. Something about not having an omlette unless one is willing…”

He broke off, unable to finish the old similie. Silence lay between them, Antryg turning his broken fingers over in the steam from his tea, until Joanna reached over and put a hand on his wrist. “So that’s why you do what you do,” she said. “Because you did what you did.”

He nodded, barely a movement of his head, then glanced across at her, a hesitant question in his eyes. She answered without speaking. Of course, she said. Of course….

He sighed. “I was a little surprised they didn’t kill me,” he went on. “I had done precisely what Shang and his friends did. Killed Empties, although I wasn’t aware at the time that my spells would have the effect they did…”

“You mean, surprised at your own Council? I thought Suraklin the Dark Mage arranged for your sentence to be changed, secretly, because he wanted to take over your body. It’s no wonder you went a little crazy.”

The gray eyes widened. “Oh, I was crazy before that,” he said. “And yes, that did surprise me at the time… But I meant, just now. The Crimson Ones…”

He shook his head. “I was there for over an hour, after they sent you and the others away. Some of it I don’t remember, at least not very clearly. I am sorry,” he added, “that you had to be dragged into it.”

“Me, too,” agreed Joanna cheerfully, and Antryg, remembering how it came about that she’d been with him, ruefully returned her grin. She took a phone-card from her purse, and laid it on the table before him. “You’d probably better call Jim at the bar.” Enyart’s Bar closed at six. They both knew he’d still be there.

The wizard obediently picked it up, and headed for the blue-and-gray rank of pay phones by the door of the Men’s Room.

“What’re you going to tell him?” Joanna called after him.

Antryg turned back with eyes wide, surprised she’d asked.

“The truth,” he said.

Joanna sighed. She knew he would, too.

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 – The Time of the Dark – Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.

For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series – short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way – with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna – in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

Table of Contents

- Just Like Real People

- About the Author