Date: 2011-11-21 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy
Description: Sequel to Hambly's Windrose series. A transport corporation in another dimension has run a trans-dimensional transport corridor through Los Angeles, and is powering it by draining the psychic energy of the population in its path, driving large numbers of people temporarily insane. Exiled wizard Antryg Windrose and his partner, computer programmer Joanna Sheraton, attempt to put a stop to this by hacking into the corridor itself with a combination of computer technology and magic, assisted by a renegade mage from Antryg’s own world.

CORRIDOR

by

Barbara Hambly

Copyright 2011 Barbara Hambly

Cover art by Eric Baldwin

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Table of Contents

Corridor

About The Author

The Further Adventures

Corridor
by

Barbara Hambly

“What is that?” Angryg Windrose, exiled Archmage of the High Council of Wizards, slid out of the car and walked to the top of the concrete embankment, graying curls ruffled by a stirring of smoggy wind. “Where is this place?”

Joanna Sheraton levered the Mustang into Park and pulled the hand-brake. Was it safer to leave the vehicle unlocked in case they had to make a hasty getaway? In this part of Los Angeles, God knew what would come along while their backs were turned…. “It’s the railroad tracks.” She locked the door, slammed it, and hastened her steps to reach his side. An angular six feet three, Antryg could outdistance her even when he moseyed. “Union Station is about a mile north of here—” Invisible behind the dirty maze of rusted boxcars parked on weed-grown sidings, the hill-high piles of spare railroad ties and old car-tires. She’d explained to him about railroads, which he’d said his own world – parallel to hers, somewhere in the darkness of the Void – was just beginning to develop. “And that’s the river down there. This is not a good part of town.”

“It’s not a good part of the world.” His round spectacle-lenses flashed in the gray November light as he turned his head, brows drawn together as if striving to catch some sound below the thin whine of the wind as it keened along the vast gray ditch of the Los Angeles River – paved forty years previously in the 1940s and crossed, a few hundred feet south of where they stood, by massive freeway overpasses that added to the surreal bleakness of the scene. “What is that?”

“You mean the smell?” The wide corridor of wasteland in riverbed and railroad-yards stretched for miles below the station, weed-grown and haunted by the homeless discards of her own society: addicts, illegal immigrants, burned-out vets unable to fit themselves back into jobs after a war that had ended a dozen years before, and the mentally unstable whom cash-strapped hospitals had declared well enough to be outpatients and released onto the streets (Thank you, President Reagan.) These camped in the storm-drains and under the freeways, and the mingled stench of piss and broken liquor-bottles, though damped by rain earlier in the week, was noticeable even from the top of the embankment. Something moved behind a box-car to her left. She hoped it was only a coyote or a rat.

She had never been more glad of Antryg’s curious ability to be unnoticed.

“No, the… the…” He gestured with his crooked-fingered hands, as if trying to pluck something from the polluted air, then turned to regard her with those wide, slightly demented gray eyes. “Don’t you feel it?”

Joanna shook her head.

“Ah.” His expression changed to genuine worry. “Oh, dear.”

*

Joanna had never liked this part of Los Angeles. She’d driven through it or past it hundreds of times, as her expertise with computer systems – and the growing number of computer-line communications networks – had increased her clientele of businesses that needed software assistance. There were five times as many computers in use now as there’d been when she’d started deisgning systems back in 1980. By 1990, God knew what the market would be. Aside from the issues of traffic, parking, and crowding that plagued the teeming “districts” to the south and west – jewelry, fabrics, cut-rate garments from the sweat-shops stacked in those tall grim buildings – she didn’t mind Downtown, but the tracks along the river were different. The trucks came and went along Alameda Street in the early morning, but after that, the whole long swathe of deserted warehouses and barren lots gave her the creeps. At barely five feet tall, she knew herself incapable of dealing with an attack, and never in her life had she seen a cop or a security guard in this area.

It was not a part of town where a woman – or anyone with any money at all on them – had any business being.

And the look in her companion’s eyes told her that though he was probably well aware of this – Antryg was completely daft but not stupid – this was not the source of his concern.

And that did bother her.

A chain-link fence supposedly guarded the verge of the river’s concrete embankment. It had been cut, and rudely bent back into a semblance of its original shape, but Antryg simply lifted the cut portion aside and ducked through. The stink of excrement and vomit was stronger here. It was late in the day. From the freeways the steady, metallic rushing of cars was growing louder, a reminder – Joanna’s mind snagged on the longtime Angelino’s constant preoccupation – that it was getting on for the hour when anyone who could do so, had better get the hell out of Downtown if they didn’t want to spend the next two hours sitting in locked-down traffic. From his jeans pocket Antryg drew a hand-made cardboard thaumatrope, hooked his fingers through the strings, and set the little disk spinning. There was a bird-cage drawn on one side, but where the bird would be on the other – on all the thaumatropes Joanna had seen as a child – there was nothing.

As Antryg was perfectly willing to tell anyone who asked, though he was a powerful wizard in his own universe (he said), he had no magic here, and had to rely on other sources of information.

It was a credit to his earnest charm and friendly nature that most people – including his therapist – accepted this explanation with little more than “Oh. Okay.”

Tires crunched, somewhere among the boxcars and debris behind them. Joanna heard men’s’ voices, snatches of Spanish. Quiet. Wary of being heard.

Just what we need. A run-in with drug-dealers.

Can I buy our way out of this with a promise to fix their computer?

At the same moment, from down in the dry river-bed, a man’s voice rose in a wordless howl, a harsh ululation of pain and despair and a madness that might or might not have had anything to do with the consumption of raw wood-alcohol.

But like the coyote in the hills that surrounded LA, the howl was answered by others, beneath the bridges or in the outfall-pipes, screams like the wailing of the damned.

Antryg moved a step down the cracked concrete slope, and Joanna closed her hand hard on his wrist. “Can we get out of here?”

“I don’t know,” he replied disconcertingly. “I think we should certainly try. Are you feeling all right?”

“I have a headache,” she said – a not uncommon reaction when one wasn’t able to get on the 101 Freeway outbound before 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon.

*

On the way home – and it did indeed take them two hours and fifteen minutes to make it back to Granada Hills – it crossed Joanna’s mind two or three times to ask her companion, What did YOU feel down there by the tracks? But between the excruciating pounding in her skull, and the antics of the two million other drivers attempting to get from the 110 Freeway onto the 101, she never managed to phrase the question. There wasn’t even a possibility of getting Antryg to drive, always supposing they’d been able to pull over to the shoulder (had there been a shoulder that wasn’t blocked with highway construction). Being a wizard from another universe made Antryg Windrose a hugely entertaining lover and friend, but it meant that he hadn’t the slightest idea what to do behind the wheel of a car.

By the time they reached 75313 Porson Avenue – a down-at-heels Craftsman bungalow, the oldest house on the street by many decades, planted incongruously between two already-shabby ‘sixties developments – Joanna wanted nothing except the bedroom’s quiet darkness.

Sleeping, she dreamed.

Dreamed of a sound, a thin, high keening that seemed to drill through the sutures of her skull, dissolving them like a laser to pierce the brain-tissue within. In the darkness just beneath the bedroom ceiling, tiny creatures whirled and sparkled, like the blown-glass skeletons of fairies: ragamummages, Antryg called them. The things that cats saw in the twilight, harmless and invisible to human perceptions. Only now she saw them, hundreds of them, and sure enough, Spock and Chainsaw, sitting on the bed – as usual separated by as much distance as possible – stared up at them, golden eyes dilated in the dark.

But at Joanna’s movement they turned their eyes towards her. And their eyes had changed, not golden but blood-red, and their long whiskers were tipped with blood. They’re possessed, Joanna realized in terror. At a certain hour of the night, demons come into them, and they kill – Who would suspect innocent cats?

Panic seized her, with the certainty that their poisoned bite spread the evil, opened the corpses of those they had torn to possession by other demons. Her head was splitting with pain, but the simple obviousness of the plague nearly blinded her. Cautiously she rolled from the bed, tiptoed toward the window, beside which Antryg’s sword stood, propped in its scabbard: an antique samurai blade, given him by their old aikido instructor, who also taught the deadlier arts of its use. Antryg knows, she thought. He’ll understand…

She wondered if the cats would die when she struck them, or if merely the demon would leave them. I have to strike fast, before they realize I know.

She slid the blade from its sheathe, an oiled, deadly whisper. Turned back toward the bed…

“Joanna—”

He came from behind her, put one hand on her sword-wrist and the other on her shoulder.

He’s been bitten, she realized in panic, he’s possessed as well!

She swung around, blade ready—

“Joanna.”

His grip tightened and she woke, with a sensation of falling.

She stood in his arms in the dark bedroom, the sword naked in her hand.

Spock and Chainsaw whipped down off the bed and streaked through the door and down the stairs as she dropped the blade in shock: Antryg caught it with effortless lightness.

The crawling purple darkness of the dream was once more ordinary night and streetlamp glow.

The pain in her skull became ordinary, pounding pain.

She stared at him, disoriented, eyes filling with tears – I could have killed them! I WOULD have killed them… and he set the weapon on the end of the bed, out of her reach, and put both hands on the sides of her head.

The pain lessened at once. He looked into her eyes, said something – she never afterwards remembered what – and the agony was gone.

“It’s all right,” he added.

She caught his wrists, her balance momentarily deserting her. Remembered how real it had seemed, the reflecting blood-red zombie-light in the eyes of the cats, in Antryg’s eyes as well. “It’s all right,” he repeated.

“I sleepwalked.” She struggled to free herself from the after-images of the dream. The recollection of what it had felt like, to be ready to kill. She shook the leonine ruffle of her blonde hair from her eyes, looked back at the curved steel lying across the muted darks and lights of the bed-quilt. “I was going to kill them.” She realized she was trembling. “Spock, and Chainsaw –“

“But you didn’t.” He steered her back to the bed. The pain in her skull was gone but her head felt strange, as if her skull were made of something other than bone.

“It was so real.” Joanna sat down among the blankets creased and pressed where she’d lain in her evening nap. Through the open window she could hear their down-the-street neighbors talking, so it couldn’t be terribly late…

“They were possessed by demons or something and I really would have hurt them—”

“Well, they’re pretty fast,” he said. “And I wouldn’t have let you.” He took the sword and sheathed it again, returned it to its place. Her own sword – a regular, unsharpened training katana – and his training sword as well, stood near-by. The fact that she’d gone straight for the lethal blade shook her to the heart, as if everything she had learned since meeting Antryg, nearly eighteen months ago now – first aid, and the handling of weapons, and the exhausting joys of combat sports – had become a deadly mockery, the irresponsible obsession of the delusional which could turn dangerous at the whisper in a dream.

“But what if you hadn’t been here?”

He sat next to her, the round lenses of his glasses catching the light. “But I was,” he pointed out.

“Were you expecting me to do that?”

“I was expecting something. I’ve been sitting here next to you for two hours.” He nodded toward the footboard of the bed, where a couple of comic-books attested to the truth of his statement. Although Antryg claimed that no magic existed in this universe, Joanna had long ago observed that he still had no trouble seeing – and reading – in complete darkness, and, wizard-like, would wander around the house without bothering to turn on any lights. What people – including herself – heard him speak was more and more frequently actual English, as his skills in that language increased, instead of the Ferryth tongue telepathically translated, but he still found reading more than simple English a challenge.

Sometimes he seemed to be under the impression that there really were plant elementals, with the minds and hearts of living men in them, that fought galactic evil….

And he had yet to explain why no one ever stole his bicycle, no matter where he left it unlocked.

“What was that, down in the river-bed?” she asked after a time. “What did you see? What did you hear? There was a sound,” she added. “In my dream… Only it wasn’t really a sound. It was like light. Burning light.”

He said softly, “Ah.”

“And I saw mummages!” she added, and looked up at the ceiling. The ragamummages were gone.

Or were invisible to her again.

“Did you?” He smiled; she’d wanted to be able to see them ever since he’d told her of their existence. “What color were they?”

“All colors,” said Joanna immediately. “Bright reds, bright blues, iridescent green – there were hundreds of them. I thought you said mummages were transparent like glass.”

“They are,” said Antryg gently, “after they’ve lived in this universe for a few years. The ones hatched in this world are transparent. But when they first come through the Void they’re brilliantly colored, and only fade with time.” When they died, he’d once explained, their skeletons became visible as dust-kittens under the beds.

Joanna thought about that. “That means someone opened a Gate in the Void, doesn’t it? That’s why there were so many bright-colored ones—”

“It looks that way, yes.”

“Is that what was down in the river?” Ragamummages, Joanna well knew, were the least dangerous things that came through the Void between universes when a Gate opened. The spells that let a wizard cross from one world to the next frequently triggered worm-holes, sometimes miles away.

“No.” A corner of Antryg’s mouth flexed downward. “Unfortunately. I haven’t the smallest idea what’s going on down in the river-bed… Yet.”

Joanna said, “You’re telling me we have to go back.”

“I have to go back. You—”

“I’m not staying behind.”

*

In her dream she heard the sound again. It couldn’t touch her, because of what Antryg had said to her, but she was aware of it, like the whining of a mosquito heard from the safety of an enclosing net. But it filled the concrete wasteland of the river-bed and train-yards. Somewhere a man was screaming, high-pitched wailing like that she’d heard that afternoon. It was hard to see, but she thought there were four or five sleepers in a shelter made of railroad ties and part of a car, men wrapped in dirty blankets; she could smell the filth of their bodies, the stale reek of the tobacco that was their only defense against hunger. One man gasped and sat up, stared around him at his companions with the unseeing eyes of a sleepwalker… Oh, shit! He sees them the way I saw the cats.

He sees their eyes red and filled with demon-light, and it makes sense to him that he has to kill them…

She tried to scream at the other sleepers, Wake up!

The sleepwalker fumbled around him in the dark, found something metal and sharp, a can-lid, Joanna thought. It cut his own hand as he grabbed it but he didn’t notice and didn’t wake.

Wake up!

He rolled up to all fours, began to crawl toward the nearest sleeper, the noise getting louder and louder, as if focusing itself from a knife-blade to a scalpel’s terrifying sharpness.

WAKE UP!

She couldn’t stay to see what happened next, wrenched herself away from the blackness of that pitiful shelter. She saw the river-bed outside, and Yes, she thought, I don’t care what Antryg says…

Shimmering blackness, vertiginous skeletal light hung in the air beside the polluted river-channel. A worm-hole through the Void. Someone’s opening a Gate.

I have to warn Antryg…

She woke breathless, crushed by panic that dispersed at once like mist. Chainsaw slept curled up against her, Spock on the pillow by her head. Evidently all was forgiven. It was cloudy-gray daylight. Through the open bedroom door she smelled coffee, and heard voices downstairs.

“I took a taxi,” said a man’s voice, rich and beautiful and – Joanna realized – familiar…

Where the hell did you find a TAXI in Los Angeles? She pulled one of Antryg’s shirts off the back of the nearest chair – she’d changed into pajamas before going back to bed last night – and went downstairs.

“What is that place? I walked for twenty minutes before I came to what looked like real streets, and even then… where is everybody? Are those actually buildings? I’m glad the beautiful Joanna told me something about this world, or I’d have been completely at a loss, but I was petrified you’d sense the Void opening and would bolt out the back door before I could locate you…”

Joanna came into the back kitchen – the house had two, and this one was a sort of closed-in porch behind the main one – and saw, sitting at the table, a dapper little gentleman in a neat black suit, looking rather like the devil with his white-streaked black van dyke and his jewel-green eyes.

She stopped cold. He was the last person she’d expected to encounter. “Magus? Magister Magus?”

“The very same, my dear.” He rose from the table and executed a courtly bow, then took and kissed her hand. “The greatest dog wizard in the West of the World…”

“And one whom I hope is going to tell me,” finished Antryg pleasantly, “that he didn’t actually open a Gate in the Void to get here, because God knows what’s followed him through.”

“He did,” said Joanna. “I saw it, in the river-bed…”

“We took great care,” said the Greatest Dog Wizard in the West of the World with dignity, “to make sure there were no – er – side-effects.” He held Joanna’s chair for her as she sat down, while Antryg fetched another cup of coffee for her, and cold pizza that he’d evidently ordered in last night while she was having her first round of nightmares.

It was only at second or third inspection that Joanna could see that the Magus’s clothing – dark trousers, dark coat, discreet flicker of white neck-cloth and ruffles – was cut like nothing of her own world. She wondered if the taxi-driver had noticed. Or was this another case of whatever it was that kept people from stealing Antryg’s bicycle?

“And ‘we’ would be—?” Antryg raised his brows and settled back into his chair.

“Hestie Pinktrees – you remember Hestie? She works south of the river…”

“Oh, dear, yes, Hestie! One of the best dog wizards in the city of Angelshand—” Antryg turned to Joanna. “A most beautiful lady who keeps birds, and makes astonishing scones – I really should try to get her recipe. I know she uses both cheese and garlic in them, and I suspect sesame…”

“Hestie and Seyt the Pilgrim,” continued Magister Magus firmly, “used magnetism to open a spiracle in what I can only describe as a… a roadway, like the Dead Paths in the countryside between the standing-stones—”

“Yes, it’s a tube,” said Antryg. “A corridor.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know what it was!” protested Joanna.

“I didn’t, last night. But I set up a plasmotic detector-field in the back yard after you went back to bed—” He nodded at the windows that formed most of the back-kitchen’s western wall, and through them, amid what Antryg claimed were going to be rose-beds and an herb-garden come spring, she saw a knee-high forest of pin-wheels, coat-hangers bent into obscure shapes, and half-buried bottles.

Joanna supposed it was no worse than the crammed wilderness of old car-parts and superannuated couches cherished by Mr. Parker next door.

“—and the resonance-pattern was very clear. It passes through Los Angeles and, so far as I can tell, Mexico City—” He nodded toward the main kitchen, where one of his laptops was open on the table and hooked into the telephone. The dark screen was still dappled with the orange text of one of the dozen weird-news bulletin-boards Antryg routinely trolled in the small hours.

“Mexico City?”

“I’ll need you to check and be sure. And it evidently passes through Angelshand as well, because Magus came through from there early this morning. I presume it was in Angelshand,” he added, “if you got Hestie and Seyt to help you – is Seyt still living in the attic of Big Blossom’s place on Hot Pillow Lane, by the way? Frightful woman… And what did it look like inside? And when did it first appear?”

“It first appeared—” Magus’ voice turned suddenly grim, “—about three weeks ago. All along the waterfront, people would waken in the night at the same hour, screaming from nightmare… Not everyone,” he added, as Antryg opened his mouth to ask the obvious question. “But six or seven in a straight stretch from Offal Lane to St. Bethwyg’s. In broad daylight two days ago a woman killed her child, at the same time that a carpenter’s boy in Pie Street threw himself from the window of his master’s attic: the other people in the house say he screamed for them to look out, to save themselves, though there was nothing, they say, in the attic nor anywhere in the house, when they searched. Others set fire to their houses, saying that it was the only way they could exorcise the demons living in the furniture. It’s a madness. It comes and goes—”

“And does it come and go—” Antryg picked a very cold anchovy off his pizza and offered it to Chainsaw, “—at intervals in a pattern? Five hours – ten hours – seven hours, five-ten-seven, or whatever the pattern is?”

The dog wizard’s green eyes widened. “How did you know?”

Antryg said, “Hmmn,” and consumed the next anchovy himself.

“Because the path was straight I thought it sounded like an energy-line,” went on Magus. “Only there is no such line in that part of the city. The Witchfinders arrested Kyra the Red about a month ago, and there was a tremendous uproar before she was released, but as a result there wasn’t a Council Wizard left in the city, either banished or fled in a panic. And to tell you the truth,” added the little dog wizard, “when Hestie and her friends came to call on me, I was packing my bags.”

Joanna, who had been captured by the Witchfinders on her one visit to the gray, sprawling city of Angelshand, and locked in a bona fide dungeon in fear of her life, didn’t blame him one little bit. Antryg generally wore fingerless gloves against the chill of the autumn mornings because the Witchfinders had dislocated most of the bones in his hands. “Why did they arrest Kyra?” She remembered the skinny red-haired novice she had met briefly at the Citadel of Wizards; the Magus shook his head.

“It’s always something or other, with the Witchfinders. But now I’m beginning to wonder if these… these spells of terror or madness or whatever they are, had something to do with it. They usually go after the Council Wizards first, you see. It’s why we used magnetism.” He sipped his coffee and winced a little, as if he could taste the micro-waves.

“Magnetism?” Antryg’s eyebrows shot up in fascinated delight.

“Yes. Two children were playing in Pie Street with a ship’s compass; they said it had spun ‘round just before their older brother set fire to the kitchen of their house. When I went down to the waterfront with a magnet it behaved… oddly. The Witchfinders would have been down on us like a duck on a bug, if we’d opened a spiracle into the energy-line using magic. We had to boost the power of the magnets, of course, and that meant doing small spells in attics and cellars all over the city and then running like the Devil before we could be caught—”

“Electricity.” Antryg scrambled to his feet. “I think I have an electromagnet in my room…” He strode up the old backstairs from the kitchen, Joanna and their guest at his heels. “We can run a current off a car battery, can’t we, Joanna? Because it sounds to me as if they’re manipulating magic with a computer—”

“They who?”

He turned in the doorway of his workroom, mad eyes bright with delight. “Does it matter? With a computer it would be easy to maintain an infinitely long enclaved universe… Could you get into the corridor with the same sort of procedure that one uses for the energy-tracks in the countryside? I trust you timed your entry to take place just after the madness had passed…”

As he spoke, Antryg rummaged among the debris spread over the old oak table and the ancient workbench that, together, lined the whole eastern side of what Joanna guessed had begun life as a sleeping-porch, in the house’s early days before the invention of air conditioning… not that 75313 Porson Avenue had air conditioning even now. The long room was still two-thirds windows, and like the secondary kitchen on the other side of the house, freezing now that the weather was chilling down to winter. Every remaining inch of wall-space was filled with makeshift shelves built of packing-boxes and stocked with the unimaginable assortment of Antryg’s hobbies: dental tools, photographic reflectors, boxes of lenses, four disassembled computers, wind-up toys, electric doorbells, test-tubes, decanters, the skulls of three foxes and a human being, snake bones, locks of hair, strings of goat-hooves, baby-food jars filled with sulphur, silver, and powdered wolfsbane; compasses, astrolabes, clocks, balls of string, plastic baggies of herbs, candle-ends, a Magic 8-Ball, stacks of comic-books and of rubbings taken from tortoise-shells. Old keys and miniature liquor-bottles filled now with feathers, sticks, withered leaves or honey hung in a string across the tops of the windows; the tables were littered with Antryg’s two computers, model ships and catapults, alembics, retorts, a dozen pinwheels, wires, old radio-tubes, crystals of various sizes and clarity, screwdrivers, drill-bits, packets of sculpy and LED bulbs, a spectrometer, a seismograph, and, yes, a two-foot electromagnet that had originally been part of a wrecking-yard hoist.

“I’m not an idiot,” said Magister Magus, looking around him, “nor suicidal. The spells of madness take place every eleven and a half hours, then seven hours thirty-two minutes, then four hours twenty minutes – we timed them over a period of four days and they time to the minute. I went in just after the four-hour spell, to give myself the most time.”

Antryg fetched a canvas sports-bag from under the workbench – he had half a dozen, in which he carried his gi and hakama to and from the dojo – and carefully loaded the magnet into it. “And what was it like once you were inside?”

“Misty. Light-filled. The mist and the light came together to form a sort of wall, though whether it was permeable or not I didn’t test. Believe me, I had no desire to push through into some other world and then not be able to get back into the corridor. Arches had been built at intervals – rings, actually, out of what looked like stone—”

“Stone would be heavy for an artificial construct,” remarked Antryg, extracting a fifty-foot coaxial cable from the dresser-drawer and fitting a makeshift splitter onto one end. “And it would be difficult to maintain a uniform consistency.”

“Whoever put up the stone along the Dead Paths in the countryside didn’t seem to have that problem.” Joanna, perched on a corner of the workbench, tapped through into Antryg’s favorite computer to Delphi Net, and navigated her way to the Weird Stuff bulletin-board maintained by NYU. There was indeed a thread, Wake Up Screaming, on which fifty entries had been posted in the past three weeks.

“Yes, but they marked those Paths over a period of hundreds of years – could you hand me that box of crystals there by your elbow? Thank you. If this track has only existed for less than a month it would argue for a technological rather than an organic growth, so I’m guessing they’re high-impact plastic of some sort. Were there ragamummages in the corridor?”

“And bigger things.” Magus shuddered. “Some of them a great deal bigger. And my head ached abominably, in spite of the spells the others had put on me. Part of it was the light, which reflected off the mists and the dust—”

Antryg turned from wiring doorbell-magnets and crystals onto the ends of the long tendrils that emerged from the splitter: “Dust?”

“The air was full of it.” Magus held out his arm, and Joanna saw, on the black velvet of his sleeve, where yellowish-white dust had collected in the folds. Antryg wet the tip of one finger to touch it, and with it brushed his lower lip.

“What is it?” asked Joanna, as the wizard’s eyes lost the bright cheerfulness of a new challenge, and narrowed in anger, as if the taste had told him the whole story.

His voice was deadly quiet as he replied, “Corn.”

*

“When we get there,” said Antryg quietly, as they headed for the stair some ninety minutes later, “I want you to stay back out of the river-bed.”

Joanna stopped, letting the Magus go on ahead of them, loaded down with the bag containing two car-batteries and Antryg’s laptop.

“I’ve watched you load virus-disks before,” Antryg continued, “and I can coach the Magus on what to do. He has a phenomenal memory for long complex routines, we all do, it’s part of a wizard’s training. I can—”

“What do you think is going to happen when you hook those things up?” She touched the satchel slung on Antryg’s bony shoulder. It contained not only the electromagnet and a second laptop, but the devices he’d assembled while Joanna searched the bulletin-boards: one a linked apparatus of wires and crystals like an arcane lasso that spread out to a circle of ten feet in diameter, the other the coaxial cable with its twenty long extension-wires, each tipped with the magnetic coil from a doorbells, a nodule of crystal, and a sticky wad of duct-tape.

“To the best of my knowledge, it should be perfectly safe.”

“And how many trans-dimensional tunnels have you collapsed with computer-viruses?” She patted the pocket of her exceedingly sorry old corduroy blazer, where the disk containing the nastiest of her considerable collection resided.

He looked aside. “I don’t want you hurt.” Archmage and exile, even without magic, she understood, he felt the responsibility.

Joanna said quietly, “I don’t want me hurt, either. But if something goes wrong, you don’t know how to look at the program and improvise a fix on the fly. If you’re going to risk your life, let’s at least increase the chances of having it be for something that’ll work.”

He started to say something else, but Joanna turned away and headed for the stairs. Behind her, she heard Antryg go into their bedroom; glancing back, she saw him emerge, and slide the scabbarded katana through his belt.

“What does it mean,” asked Joanna, as she inched her aged blue Mustang carefully across lanes of clogged traffic toward the Alameda Street off-ramp, “that the dust in the tube is corn? What does corn have to do with magic?”

“Everything, I should imagine,” responded Antryg, “if a substantial percentage of your population doesn’t have anything to eat.”

Even at this hour – quarter past eleven, when everybody should have been at work – there were still a LOT of cars on the freeway. Don’t any of you have jobs? Though according to Magister Magus’s silver watch it had been only four hours since he’d entered the corridor to reach their world, the pinwheels in the back-yard plasmotic field had begun to whirl about twenty minutes after the three adventurers had come downstairs: “That should give us seven hours and twenty minutes,” said Joanna as she’d scooped up her car keys. “Plenty of time to get down to the river and back, now that Rush Hour is over.”

“But there isn’t starvation in Ferryth,” Magister Magus said now, tearing his eyes from the horrifying spectacle of a semi-truck the size of a barn within touching distance of the car window. “Or anywhere on our world this year, that I’m aware of. And in any case, no one but the Council has the strength to open an energy-line like that—”

“Oh, they’re not on our world,” said Antryg. “Not if they’re using plastic amplification-rings to extend the enclave. Nor on this one. They’re only using – at a guess – the populations of the largest cities they could find as power-sources to keep the corridor open, from wherever the corn is being grown to wherever conditions have changed so that the local population is no longer able to feed itself, through epidemic or climate-change or even a Word of Wasting laid on all crops… It only stands to reason. Though in fact,” he added thoughtfully, “I’ve done some of my best reasoning lying down… or running extremely fast.” He propped his glasses more firmly onto his long nose, glanced at the dashboard clock and then at the sky visible above the gray concrete bridges that spanned the traffic lanes. “What were the creatures you saw in the tube itself? Sort of purple ball-shaped things with silver fins?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t make any sense. Any group of wizards capable of opening an energy-track like that one would be more than capable of dealing with an epidemic or a Word of—”

“Catch fire and die, you fucking bastard!” said Joanna. Then quickly added, “The guy in the Chevy, not you, sir. It wouldn’t be the buyers, would it, who have the dimensional transport technology? It would be the sellers.”

“Got it in one.” Antryg wrapped his long arms around the canvas bag as the Mustang swayed with the tight hook of the off-ramp, then slowly bumped and rocked its way along the broken pavement and old street-car tracks of Center Street toward the edge of the yards.

“That’s why Mexico City.” The reports on the several bulletin-boards she’d double-checked that morning sounded exactly like what the Magus had described… and like her own frightful dreams.

“It could be anything from electrical usage to blood-heat to life-energy,” said Antryg, as they edged between parked trucks, turned down a narrow street between dingy warehouses of stucco and brick. “Magic varies from universe to universe, and this corridor obviously runs between several. Once a group of people – some of them wizards, some of them computer technicians, and possibly not even from the same universe – learned how to open a trans-dimensional corridor and power vehicles along it, all they’d need to do is to put themselves in touch with the local wizards or shamans or dream-scryers of an area that’s in trouble, and offer to solve their woes. If there are shamans in an isolated area, like the Red Waste—”

Magus nodded, familiar with wherever that was – Joanna had never heard of it.

“—it may appear easier to import food in bulk from several dimensions away, rather than send out caravans to Tir Quag, which might not make it across the Waste anyway and wouldn’t be able to carry enough back to save more than a few hundred. The buyers probably don’t know about the effects of the transport corridor on the worlds it touches – or possibly don’t care.”

“But what would they pay in?” Joanna parked the Mustang in a weedy yard behind a boarded-up former gas station, whose price-boards listed Regular at 25¢ a gallon and Ethel at 29. The open door at the back of the little adobe building was surrounded by a dirty trail of torn mattresses and and filthy plastic bags. Whatever protects your bicycle, Antryg, you BETTER put it on my car… “I’m betting the Interdimensional Transport Company doesn’t move that much corn for free.”

“If it were me,” said Magus grimly, picking up the battery-bags, “I’d probably charge the enslavement of a couple of their shamans, if they don’t have some resource like gold or silver that can be used for magic.”

“Or, depending on how high their population is,” added Antryg, as he led the way toward the wire fence and the wilderness of tracks beyond, “they may simply set up a power-sink on-site to extend another branch-line to somewhere else from there. The food will keep the population dense enough – depending on how much the Company is willing to transport and distribute – to power the corridor—”

“And if some of them go insane every time a train comes through,” concluded Joanna, “that’s par for the course.”

“Par for the course?” Magus inquired, and the rest of the journey across the branching steel rails, and among the rusted cars on the sidings, that lay between them and the river, was spent in Antryg’s explanation of how golf was scored, a religious practice in which he had been indoctrinated by its devoutest believer Jim Hasselart, the manager of Enyart’s Bar.

Deathly silence lay over the river-bed, as Joanna produced wire-cutters from her backpack and Antryg snipped his way through. The gray overcast had thinned to bleary sunlight; the freeway glittered like a poisoned snake. Antryg walked toward the shallow depression of the weed-filled flood-channel itself, a pinwheel in one hand and the Magic 8-Ball in the other, his profile like a beaky stork’s as he turned his head here and there, listening. Joanna and the Magus followed, with the electromagnet, the batteries, and the lasso of wire and crystal. Somewhere far-off a police helicopter chattered. Distant sirens wailed. Joanna’s head began to ache again, as if somewhere within the wall of an old house, wiring had shorted and the wood begun to smolder.

“The corridor must set up a constant emanation of low-grade damage,” whispered Magus, as if fearful to break that terrible hush. “The waterfront folk spoke of it, even the ones who didn’t have nightmares or go mad and murder one another. Most of them said their children cried constantly—”

“No surprise,” returned Joanna. “I feel like bursting into tears myself. Where did he learn about all this?” she added, and nodded toward the angular form ahead of them, in his tattered green Army jacket and shabby jeans. “I mean, is trans-dimensional energy-corridors something they teach in Council Wizard School?”

“Not having been permitted to enter the Citadel courses,” replied Magus, a trifle bitterly, “I wouldn’t know. I don’t believe so. But one has to take Council vows, you know, in order to receive training – and of course your first vow is not to use whatever you learn, for any purpose whatsoever, no matter how good it seems to you. But then before he took his vows, Antryg was taught by Suraklin, who was probably the most powerful mage in the past thousand years… And if anyone would know how to suck the life-force out of people’s bodies to power up a stove to cook his dinner, Suraklin was the man for it. I’m astonished—”

“That’s far enough!” A man’s voice split the stillness like an ax. “Get your hands up or we shoot.”

Antryg turned in surprise; Joanna and Magus raised their hands at once. Men emerged from behind the concrete pillars of an old bridge, from the black mouths of the nearest storm-drains. Others were scrambling down the opposite concrete slope. Several carried automatic rifles – AK-47s, Joanna saw, as they came closer – the others – there were about ten in all – had Uzis. They were dressed in sharply-fitting polyester trousers and guayabera shirts, black hair sleekly combed. The man who seemed to be the leader held no gun, though when he came close Joanna saw that under his tailored leather blazer he wore a shoulder-holster. Flecks of gray showed in his trim jawline beard. Joanna and Magus retreated to Antryg’s side as they were surrounded, and the leader and the largest of his henchmen came to within a few feet of them before the bearded leader spoke again.

“You the man been sellin’ shit to my bravos down here in the river, asshole?”

The Uzi leveled at Antryg’s chest, but curiously, nobody mentioned Antryg’s sword. Joanna wondered if they saw it.

“Good Heavens, no,” responded Antryg mildly. “I haven’t an ounce of shit on me, neither do my friends, do you, Joanna? Magus? And you would be…?”

“I’m Villareal and I don’t like stupid jokes. I seen you and your bitch down here yesterday—”

“Ah, so that was you behind the pile of cars. I’m not terribly fond of stupid jokes myself. Have you seen us down here before yesterday? Yet your friends hiding down here in the storm-drains – illegals up from Mexico, I assume? – have been waking up in the night and killing one another for three weeks now.”

Villareal caught Antryg by a handful of his shirt, jerked him savagely back and forth. “How you know that, Four-Eyes?”

“It’s my business to know. Please handle that carefully,” he added, as one of the men – a boy barely growing his first fluff of mustache – jerked the canvas tote from Magus’s hands. “If it’s destroyed the problem is only going to get worse.”

“You tryin’ to threaten me?”

“Not at all.” Antryg regarded his captor with surprise in his wide, gray eyes. “But if we can avoid having everyone in the riverbed – and possibly for several miles around, if the emanations spread – go insane and start murdering one another at random with a few simple precautions, I’d rather do it that way. But you see, since the source of the problem is invisible, unless my friends and I take care of it this morning, eventually someone is going to inform the authorities and they’ll come down here and make a search, and you wouldn’t really want that, would you? They won’t find anything, of course, but when people start howling and seeing devils at regular intervals…”

Villareal shook him again. “What the fuck is goin’ on?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. It’s what we’re here to ascertain. With your permission, of course.”

The gang-leader let him go with a shove, and stood irresolute. Magus, meanwhile, had been thoroughly frisked, and Joanna had her backpack pulled off her and gone through: “Nice laptop in here, Villa. Nuthin’ else but wires an’ tools an’ shit… What the fuck is this?” A stocky young man with a Fu Manchu mustache held up the wire-and-crystal lasso.

“Technically it’s a portable dimensional spiracle,” replied Antryg promptly. “When hooked to a power-source – please don’t pull the crystals out of it, they’re just quartz – it should breach the energy-barrier that separates a multi-sourced trans-dimensional enclave from the world into which it’s been introduced, hopefully without opening subsidiary portals… Generally the things that come through those aren’t anything you want to meet.”

“You fucken crazy, man.”

“You know, that’s exactly what my therapist says! But she does also say I’m perfectly harmless. Watch out with that bag, there’s another laptop in it…”

“Okay, my friend.” Villareal grinned evilly. “You go ahead an’ you just show us how you gonna make everythin’ okay down here an’ make all my coyotes quit screamin’ an’ tearin’ up their own faces with tin-can lids… an’ then maybe I let you go. Maybe I let your little girlfriend here go, too.”

Joanna stepped away from the hand that he reached to touch her hair.

The men made a circle around them, nudged each other, snickering, ready for a show.

“Joanna—”

Antryg held out his hand. Shaking a little, she took the canvas bag from the kid, and her backpack from Mr. Mustache. “Hey, those are good batteries,” protested one of the men when Magus retrieved the tote that held them.

“We get ‘em back, Vato, don’t worry about it,” replied Villareal. “Soon as we see what Four-Eyes here’s gonna do.”

“He gonna make the Statue of Liberty disappear?” asked Mr. Mustache, and got a general laugh, as Joanna set up the electromagnet and spread the lasso in a five-foot circle on the ground.

“He gonna make you disappear, Torres, how about that?”

To Antryg, she whispered, “Can I go with you?” She knew what was going to happen, and the thought of being left with Villareal and his “bravos” if anything went wrong was more than she wanted to deal with.

“No.” He took one of the laptops, screwed in the long wires from port to port connecting them – a precaution in case the corridor itself interfered with computer function in some way – and plugged in the mass of wire, crystals, and smaller electromagnets that he’d rigged along the co-ax cable into the printer-port. “I’m sorry – I’m profoundly sorry – but I do have to insist this time. You’ll be far safer out here than you would be with me—”

“That does not make me feel any better!”

“It would if you knew what’s in there. If my laptop does work in there, it should register when the ports make connection with the activation-field on these rings Magus described. If not, I’ll—”

“What’s in there? Abominations? Things that fell in from the Void…”

“Those will be bad enough,” said Antryg quietly. “I think I’m going to meet the people who think it’s all right to suck the sanity out of human brains to source long-distance commodity shipments, and I suspect I won’t like them. I’m almost certain they won’t like me.”

“Hey, come on, Four-Eyes!” called out the mustachioed Torres, and someone else whistled.

“Yeah, kiss her an’ get to work!”

She whispered, “Just don’t disappear in there, all right?”

She saw his eyes shift, and realized that the possibility existed. That he’d known the possibility existed.

But he only leaned down quickly and brushed her lips with his, tucked the folded laptop under his arm, and shoved the handfuls of crystals and doorbell-magnets into the pockets of his jacket. Joanna stepped back, knelt beside the main electromagnet and opened the laptop, checked the program. Her hands shook. God, get me out of this safely…

“Now, whatever you do,” called Antryg to the watching ring of thugs, “don’t anyone step into the circle here.”

They all laughed, and Torres mimed terror. “Oooh, I’m scared!”

“What, the spell not gonna work if we do?” called out the kid. “Like in the movies?”

“Oh, it will,” said Antryg earnestly. “It’s just that you won’t like what happens next.” In the center of the palely-glittering lasso, he raised one crooked hand.

Joanna took a deep breath and hit Enter.

And Antryg disappeared.

There were, not surprisingly, shouts of shock and anger: “What the fuck!” “Chingado!” “Where’d he go, man?” The kid strode forward and Joanna yelled, “DON’T step in the circle—” and of course he did…

And vanished also.

“What the fuck—?” Villareal grabbed her by the shoulder, dragged her to her feet; Joanna tried to twist free before the electromagnet got kicked over or the computer stepped on.

“I told him not to step in the circle!” she yelled.

Magister Magus shoved him back. A half-dozen Uzis swung to cover him – which would have caught Villareal in the spray of bullets as well – and the gang-leader yelled, “You bring him back, bitch, or I’ll—”

“Or you’ll what?” Joanna wrenched her arm free, dropped to her knees beside the laptop again, forced her attention back to the screen. “Kill me? That’ll bring him back.”

“Kill your friend here—”

She heard Magus squeak and guessed someone had pulled a knife, and forced herself not to look around. A shadow fell over her and a hand grabbed her arm again and she said, “DON’T! He’ll be in touch with me in a minute—” Please, God, let his laptop work in the corridor! “—if the connection isn’t broken…”

A scuffle behind her, and she risked a quick glance as Villareal strode toward the circle. The wires that connected laptop to laptop snaked across the dirty, pale concrete and over the crystals of the portable ring, and ended in its center. There was something – like the flicker of a migraine’s colorless fire – just at the end of them, making it impossible for the attention to focus on exactly what was there for more than an instant.

Villareal walked all around the circle. There was another man with him, whose face was an older version of the kid’s; this man yelled “Chico!” into the blandly empty ring, a note of frantic desperation in his voice. “Chico!” Other men were coming to join the little group in the riverbed, emerging from the storm-drains or from the little cluster of cardboard shacks under the bridge, like bundles of rags whose unwashed stink made Joanna gag. Some trotted; others ambled, like men with all the day before them and empty years behind. A few called out questions in Spanish, but three or four were brown-haired, blonde, or African-dark: bearded, ragged, and – as she saw as they came closer – nearly toothless. One short man in a much-decayed brown suit-coat said, “You step back from that girl, brother,” and, when some of the Uzi-wielding gang turned toward him, demanded, “What, you really gonna shoot them things off down here in the middle of the day in front of all these witnesses? You okay, honey?”

“I’m fine, but just keep them back from me,” said Joanna over her shoulder.

The man came close, crouched beside her; Magus had moved up on her other side.

“Where the hell’d your friend go, honey?” asked Brown Coat. His breath was a sewer. “I saw him disappear, from clear across the river. David Copperfield himself can’t pull a trick like that, not in the center of a circle. Wayne Barton,” he added, holding out his hand, nearly black with filth. “Master-sergeant USMC… retired.”

“Joanna Sheraton.” She took his hand, well aware that he might very well have saved her life and Antryg’s, too. “This is Magister Magus.” If I say he’s a wizard they’ll think it’s all a magic-trick… “We’re paranormal investigators.”

“You here about this nightmare shit that’s been goin’ on?”

Deeply relieved to finally have a corroborative witness, Joanna said, “Yeah.”

“It’s fucken drugs!” insisted Villareal. “These assholes been sellin’ some kind of weird shit—”

“That’s not what’s goin’ on, man.” Sergeant Barton turned his head to squint up at the gang. “I don’t know what the fuck is goin’ on, but it’s no drug I’ve ever seen. These the guys you’re bringing up from the Border?” He nodded in the direction of the gathering group of newcomers, men – and a couple of women – not dressed like the long-time homeless, who stood in a clump a few feet away.

“None of your goddam business,” retorted Villareal uncertainly, and at that moment the darkness of the laptop screen was lit with orange numbers. “What the hell do you know about it anyway?”

SUB-PORT 01 ACTIVATED.

SUB-PORT 02 ACTIVATED.

SUB-PORT 03 ACTIVATED.

Joanna whispered, “He got through. And the laptop works inside the corridor. He’s installing that thing—”

“What will it do?” Magus paused in his explanation to Villareal about what was going on, which Joanna hoped wasn’t making any sense.

“Theoretically,” said Joanna, “it’ll feed a randomizer virus into whatever system is keeping the corridor open—”

“I know about it because every three hours and forty-five minutes we get this… this sound, this feeling… Some of the guys get the shakes, or go into panic… The babies your wetbacks got with ‘em start to cry—”

“What – What?” Joanna jerked around from the screen. “Three hours and forty-five minutes?” And looked at her watch.

Oh, shit.

SUB-PORT 04 ACTIVATED.

SUB-PORT 05 ACTIVATED.

SUB-PORT 06 ACTIVATED.

SUB-PORT 07 ACTIVATED.

There were twenty sub-ports, calved off the coaxial cable wired into the laptop’s printer-port, enough, Joanna had calculated, to feed sufficiently different variants of the virus into whatever was the computer component of the corridor’s power-system. Even if something went wrong now, the fact that the laptop would work inside the corridor meant that she had a better chance of fixing it. With luck, Antryg would be able to use at least some of his abilities at magic inside the corridor as well, against whatever he might meet in there…

SUB-PORT 08 ACTIVATED.

“Yesterday Katerina over there tried to set fire to the shelter they’re all living in, with her little girl inside it,” went on Barton more quietly, with a nod toward a very scared-looking young woman standing at the back of the immigrant group. “I don’t know how well you know your people, Mr. Villa, but down here we’ve seen ‘em come and go and that little lady wouldn’t touch drugs if you held a gun on her. It was like she was sleep-walking, and the others don’t dare let her by herself now, for fear she’ll do herself a harm out of horror at what she almost did. Whatever’s goin’ on, it’s not drugs.”

Where’s sub-port 09?

“So what the fuck is it, smart guy?”

“Damned if I know, but if these folks have some kind of idea how to stop it—”

Joanna looked at her watch again. Five minutes since the last port went up. They’d left the house about twenty minutes after the pinwheels had gone off but Joanna hadn’t noted the exact time: Why would we? We had almost eight hours…

“I ain’t seen ‘em do nuthin’ but dick around with their computer—”

“And make two guys disappear into thin air!”

An hour to get down here and at least a half-hour yattering around with Villareal and his thugs, maybe more…

“One of ‘em was one of my bravos!”

“One of your bravos who was dumb enough to go do what somebody yelled at him not to! I may be a god-damn drunk, but I’m not stupid, and whatever it is, it’s on a line straight down the bed of the river from Seventh Street almost to Union Station, and whatever it is, it gets worse like a… like some crazy heartbeat, regularly, every three hours and forty-five minutes all along the line at once.”

“You’re crazy. Crazy like that other asshole—”

“You mean the one who stepped into that circle and made himself disappear?”

Ten minutes. And nothing.

Oh, shit. Oh, damn. Oh please don’t make me have to do this…

“Three hours and forty-five minutes?” Magister Magus knelt at Joanna’s side. “I thought we had seven hours and thirty-two minutes from the last time the energy-reader activated.”

“Obviously,” said Joanna, keeping her voice steady against rising panic, “we’re closer to the source here – whatever it is – and the line branches between here and Ferryth. We’re getting more frequent shipments here.”

“Oh. Oh, dear… How much time—?”

“It’s worse than that,” said Joanna. “Antryg’s run into trouble of some kind. One of us needs to go in and get him out.”

*

After a certain amount of argument, Master-sergeant Barton (retired) borrowed two Uzis and half a dozen clips of ammo from Villareal and his men: “You know how to use one of these things, honey? Easy as pie…”

Joanna briefed Magister Magus on how to activate the virus program and how to use the chat function, should it appear on-screen. Of course he couldn’t read English any more than Antryg had been able to six months ago, but she wrote out a simple set of codes, one of which meant, ACTIVATE THE VIRUS. WE CAN’T GET OUT. She didn’t tell him what that would do, and just hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“My dear,” whispered the dog wizard nervously, “it isn’t anything truly serious, do you think? The thing is, I’d really rather not be stranded here in your world, and if we lose both the corridor and Antryg – not to mention yourself…”

I was hoping you wouldn’t ask about that part…

Joanna put her house-key into his hand, and closed his fingers around it. “Hide out there til we get back,” she said, and tried to sound like it was a foregone conclusion that they would get back. Antryg could open Gates in the Void, even from this world, if he wanted to deal with the horrors that could come slipping through the wormholes that opened in the vicinity of such portals…

Magus couldn’t.

Completely setting aside the issue of Mr. Villareal and his “bravos,” if stranded here, he would be screwed indeed.

Not as screwed as Antryg and I’ll be if anything comes roaring along the corridor while we’re still inside….

“We’ll be back.” She patted the Magus’s velvet sleeve.

Strangely, once the waves of terror had passed through her, she felt very calm, though a little cold inside. As if she’d jumped off the side of the swimming-pool and was in the water with the sharks. All she had to do was swim to the other side.

“You got about thirty minutes on these batteries,” Torres informed her, checking the gauge he’d wired to the terminals. “Less, depending on how much current your friend’s gadget is going to need once you fire it up.”

“In thirty minutes—” Joanna checked her watch again, “—that’s going to be the least of our worries. Thank you for keeping an eye on this for me.” Torres worked in a garage – Joanna suspected, stripping stolen cars. “What’s the worst thing you saw in that corridor, Magus?”

“I don’t know what it was—” His voice dropped to a whisper. “But it looked like a set of flaming wheels, and spit lightning. And there were things like many-legged bugs—” He measured something roughly two and a half feet between his hands.

“Great—”

“There were a lot of those. And they’re fast. My dear—”

“I’ll be fine.” She had the suspicion that with the best intentions in the world, once he got into the corridor, the odds were good that Magus would turn tail and run for his own universe, and by the time they figured out what he’d done, it would be too late. She was deeply fond of the little dog wizard – as he was, she knew, of both her and Antryg. But he was what he was. “I’ll be good. Sergeant Barton—?”

Villareal, relegated to the periphery of these preparations, only scowled as they walked along the trail of wires to the spiracle, glinting sharply in the pale chilly light. Behind her, she heard him say, “You tellin’ me that thing’s like an invisible passageway? Like nobody can see it?”

“Roughly, yes. It’s being operated by beings in another dimension…”

“We better hold hands,” she said to Barton, although in other circumstances the thought of doing so would have been a deal-breaker to the whole project. “I don’t know how this thing works, and I don’t know if we’ll be dropped in the same place.”

“Honey—” Barton tucked one of the Uzis under his arm to get at his pocket, took out a half-finished pint of Jim Beam, and took a judicious sip, “—this is gettin’ better all the time.” He offered her the pint (Uh – none for me, thanks…), re-pocketed it, took her hand. “One… two… Happy New Year.”

They stepped together into the spiracle.

*

Joanna had forgotten the breathless shock, the horrible disorientation she’d felt the first time she’d left her own world. The terrible sense of falling, of drowning in light that looked like darkness.

And the drilling, grinding panic generated by the corridor itself, even through Antryg’s defensive spell, was a thousand times worse.

Barton screamed, released her hand, fell to his knees with his hands pressed to the sides of his skull; Joanna immediately relieved him of both Uzis but wondered what she’d do if he tried to grab them back. She took one fast look around her – and yes, Antryg had been perfectly right, it was a sort of tube about fourteen feet in diameter whose sides seemed to be light-soaked mist – then caught her companion by the shoulders: “Wayne!”

She remembered her dream, of the cats’ demon-red eyes.

She saw that dream reflected in the way the man stared at her. He made a gasping scream, struck at her and tried to scramble to his feet and flee. “Wayne!” she yelled again, and grabbed his wrists, holding him inside the spiracle. “It’s a hallucination! Wayne, it’s a dream!”

He stared at her, shaking like a sapling in a gale.

“Wayne, it’s a dream! You think I’ve turned into a demon but I haven’t! Think about the dreams you’ve been having…”

He managed to nod. He pulled a hand loose from her grip, fished in his pocket for the Jim Beam – Will that make matters better or worse? She hadn’t the slightest idea – and gulped down several more swallows. “I know it,” he whispered. In fact, the whiskey seemed to steady him. “It’s just in here, it’s about six billion times worse. Don’t give me those guns, honey, unless there’s somethin’ that needs shootin’ right away.”

Oh, great, and how will I know that the next demon I see isn’t Antryg?

Or that the next Antryg I see isn’t a demon?

In one direction – to her left and what would have been in the direction of Union Station – a long strand of twine snaked away, losing itself in the shifting coruscation of migraine-lights, mist, and glittering dust. Presumably the line that Magister Magus had carried with him – he had explained in the car – to lead him back to his own universe: she’d forgotten to ask how he knew when he’d reached Antryg’s current location, and suspected that by the time this was all over she wouldn’t get the chance. The wires from her own computer led away in the other direction, in which – very dimly – she could make out the shape of one of the upright rings the Magus had described. Dust gritted her eyes and scratched her throat. It was impossible to see more than a few yards.

But ragamummages whipped and glittered in the air above her head, bright as colored fire.

And something moved, up beyond the half-glimpsed ring.

Then she heard Antryg’s voice – unmistakable, like brown velvet and bronze – cry out words that she recognized as belonging to a spell. Fire jetted up from the floor beyond the spiracle, oily heat blasting against her face, followed by a tearing whirlwind that spun the flames flat against the ground for an instant before they vanished. The mummages scattered in panic, and Antryg said, quite clearly, “Damn it—”

“Antryg!” Joanna caught Barton’s grimy sleeve, dragged him after her along the course of the wires.

“Joanna, go back!” Antryg yelled. “Don’t—”

She saw him then as the lights seemed to shift, flattened against the second of a pair of rings. His laptop lay beside the first ring of the pair, about half of the bundled wires of the crystal magic-ports affixed to the ring. The rest lay in a tangle on the floor, left there – to judge by the splattered blood, ichor, burned patches and slowly-wriggling severed tentacles and gobbets of goo, when Something had attacked Antryg and forced him to take cover behind the second ring, about twenty feet away.

That Something lay dead and already decomposing between Antryg and the laptop. Heaven only knew what it had looked like alive, but dead it resembled a deflated octopus covered with thorns, eyes, and mouths. It had evidently been joined by an assortment of other attackers: some rubbery, some insectile, two things like fiery agglomerates of wheels rolling and spinning in the air, and two or three the finned purple balls Antryg had asked Magister Magus about. The purplies clung to the dead Something, tearing out hunks of its guts and gulping them happily down. The rest of the creatures surrounded Antryg, who was holding them at bay with his sword.

“Damn,” said Barton. “I ain’t seen that kind of thing since that LSD I took in Da Nang.” He snatched one of the Uzis back from Joanna’s shoulder, yelled, “Take cover, brother!” and opened fire.

Antryg yelled, “Watch it!” and squashed back behind the ring, which bounced the bullets back in all directions. Joanna dropped to the ground and covered her head – not that that would do a damn thing against something flying at 1100 feet per second, though she’d been assured as a child that this position would work against an atomic blast. The bullets ripped the insect-things to pieces – they looked rather like yard-long carnivorous sow-bugs – but the rubbery blobs simply absorbed the ammunition, puffed and glowed for a few seconds with smoke coming out of the entry-holes, and then began shooting the bullets back in all directions.

Antryg ducked, swept his katana in a long side-slash that cut one of them in two – the severed upper half continued to fire off what appeared to be bullets but which, when one of them struck Joanna in the arm, proved to be more like plastic bb’s – sprang over the second creature and dashed to join Barton and Joanna as they reached the laptop. “Can you use magic?” panted Joanna, as the burning wheels whipped toward them again. Barton fired a quick burst – taking more careful aim this time – and the things veered aside, sending lighting-bolts that crackled through the brilliant air but fell short of the barrel of the gun.

“I can, but unfortunately spells are randomized here. When I tried to fire-blast that pelourie—” He nodded toward the original dead Something, upon whom the purple eyeballs had again settled to feed, “—all I managed to do was Summon grums… A lot of them, I’m afraid. Don’t let those things get close,” he added to Barton. “The lightning can knock you unconscious.”

“What the hell are they?”

“Djiowbars,” explained Antryg unhelpfully, scooping up the remainder of the wires from his computer. One sleeve and the back of both shirt and jacket had been torn away, and round, bleeding bites marked the flesh beneath. “That’s a grum,” he added, as one of the insectoids scurried toward them again, moving with horrible swiftness on its hundred little legs. “The shielding on this corridor is almost non-existent. It doesn’t open worm-holes into the world it touches, but where portals do open, there’s nothing to keep strays from wandering in, and the magic that’s used to propel and maintain the corridor both mutates and enrages them. Those poor grums are ordinarily the size of my hand and live on rotting tree-bark.” He slashed it in half with his katana, stepped back shaking goo off the blade. “God only knows how long they’ve been in here.”

Joanna looked at her watch. It had stopped.

No wonder Magus didn’t have the times right.

“Are they usually that color?” asked Barton. Four of them were bright pink, the others, a more ordinary pill-bug hue.

“No. I tried a spell to get them to attack each other and that’s all that happened.”

“Dang.”

“We have to get out of here,” Joanna panted, as she and Antryg edged across to the other side of the upright ring, over a slippery muck of pelourie-goo and pieces of grum. Barton followed, grimly firing off short bursts to discourage the djiowbars whenever they got close. “Those trains run every three hours down here, not eleven, seven, and four… How far apart are you attaching those?”

“Three inches, but I’m not sure that it matters.” He produced a roll of duct-tape from what was left of his jacket pocket. “Who’s back at the main computer?”

“Magus,” said Joanna, tearing and taping the crystals to the side of the ring. “But I’m afraid he’s going to make a break for it, and I can’t really blame him.”

“Can you trigger the virus from here on a timer?”

“Sure. I was picking up your signals on the outside computer just fine. That is, if you trust that something’s not going to go wrong between the time we hit Enter here and the time it’ll take for us to run back to the Spiracle.”

“Joanna—” Antryg glanced down at her over his shoulder with his lunatic grin. “What could possibly go wrong? Did you tell Magus how to open the chat function? I can tell him to come through now, and get back to Ferryth through the corridor – since I’d really rather not have to open a Gate for him and deal with the Council and the Witchfinders and everyone else who’ll be there to meet us if I do that—”

“Can he make it?”

“Oh, yes. As I’m sure you’re aware, Magister Magus can run extremely fast.” He turned back toward the laptop, and as he did so, something like a burst of light exploded in the air in front of him, dropping him to his knees. Joanna started toward him, aware from the corner of her eye that the djiowbars had also been struck, their whirling gold auras crackling with lethal light. Beyond them something was emerging from the fog of brightness, and Antryg shouted, “Get rid of the guns! Now, throw them—”

Joanna, used to obeying his orders without question or hesitation, hurled the Uzi from her as far back down the corridor as she could. It exploded with a deafening report mid-air; she swung around, her scream of “Barton, do it—!” unuttered as Barton’s weapon blew up in his hands.

Antryg rose to his knees and grabbed her as she would have run to where he lay. Even at a distance of fifteen feet, she could see that he was well and truly dead.

He thrust her behind him, scrambled to his feet and held his hands up, empty, as the shape came near enough to see clearly: Travelers, she heard him say to it. Travelers…

“Can it read our minds?”

“I hope it can read mine, but you’d probably better think about something else. Try the opening credits from the Dukes of Hazzard.”

It hung in the air a few yards away, considering them with its long-lashed blinking eyestalks. There were tentacles that came out of the top of its jar-shaped body that presumably acted as hands. It held what were probably weapons in some of them. Whether they, or it, emitted the soft, deadly humming Joanna heard she wasn’t sure, but she was conscious of being listened to. Gauged.

It spoke, she thought, to Antryg: she herself had only the vaguest impression of the images it projected into his mind. But she was fairly sure that what he was being given wasn’t, Greetings, stranger, we come in peace…

Instead, she had the sudden awareness that forty tons of corn could be delivered in exchange for two mageborn children (no adults, please) or five pounds of gold or ten pounds of silver (percentage purity specified); six hundred pounds pure brain-bliss opiate for one mageborn child or untrained adult or one hundred sentient ordinary humans (no semi-sentients or Neanderthals accepted); five hundred laser-fire weapons for two hundred sentient humans or a mageborn child or a pound of gold or…

Joanna resolutely fixed her mind on images of Bo, Luke, and the General Lee to crush down the wave of rage that filled her at the thought of what these creatures were, and what they were doing. Antryg was about ten feet from the laptop, she a yard or so further back. If one or the other of us distracts it…

The sound of a gunshot in the tunnel was like the crack of thunder. Antryg twisted and fell; Joanna spun, found herself looking down the barrel of an ostentatious silver-plated .45 automatic held by Villareal. “Don’t you even think about it, Princesa.” He shifted the gun to point down at Antryg’s sprawled body. “Now, how do you talk to that thing up there? I got some words I need to say to him. I think him and me, we could make a deal.”

Joanna heard footfalls in the brightness behind them, threw a quick look along the tunnel to see the dark figure of Magister Magus vanishing along his guiding-line, back toward his own world…

Antryg had been right. He could run extremely fast.

“It’s telepathy. It isn’t—” Joanna closed her mouth on the warning, It isn’t how you think, there’s magic involved… Antryg could understand it, I couldn’t. Instead she said, “It isn’t a big deal.” She glanced at the creature – Railroad security? Ombuds-thing? – hovering a dozen feet away, wondered if that smooth pus-yellow shell were armor of some kind or its body or both. Wondered if it could understand them now. “You just walk toward it and talk. He’ll know what you’re saying. But you’d better put the gun down.”

“What, so you can grab it?” Villareal laughed rudely. In his other hand, Joanna saw, he had the coil of cable that had connected her computer outside the tunnel with Antryg’s within it, presumably under the impression that the virus had been loaded into the one but not the other. “You just stay back and keep your mouth shut, Princesa, and neither you or your boyfriend gets hurt, comprende?”

He tossed the cable down onto the laptop, turned toward the creature and, for an instant, hesitated. Joanna heard him whisper, “Chingado!” and he wiped his lips. Then he walked forward.

Joanna knelt, as casually as she could manage, beside the laptop, her eyes on the creature, watching its eyestalks to see where they were turned.

Antryg whispered, “Get out of here.”

Her heart seemed to unclench, with a suddenness that made her hands shake. “Can you run?” She didn’t even dare look in his direction, and there wasn’t an instant for wasted words. Lightly, swiftly, she touched in the commands to open the backup .exe files of the virus.

“I’m fine.”

She wondered if he were lying, but couldn’t draw attention to herself by turning to look for blood. He’d been bitten and slashed earlier by the attacking grums, there was blood everywhere anyway…

“Look, I done you a favor,” Villareal was saying. “They was gonna demolish your tunnel here—”

Joanna sat up innocently as he gestured toward her and that round, cow-like eye swiveled in her direction; the Mexican pulled down a handful of the connecting wires from the ring.

God damn it…

He moved forward again and the creature re-focussed all its eyes on him. Joanna swiftly and unobtrusively called up a diagnostic screen, keyed through commands to feed the different variants of the program through the ports that remained open—

“Get out!”

“I’m going.” Her hands seemed to move of themselves, lining up batch programs to activate on ten-second intervals. Ten seconds should do for each new upload…

“My little friend back there tells me this tube of yours goes through to Mexico City,” said Villareal. “People come and go through it, don’t see the border patrol, don’t see the DEA… I was thinking, you probably need a local man to take care of things here, make sure nobody else comes botherin’ you. You think you and me, we could come to an understanding? Me and my boys, we could be a lot of use to you—”

Later, Joanna tried to recall the exact sequence of events and couldn’t. She was certain Villareal made no gesture that could be construed as threatening – he carried the gun pointed down, held his left hand spread in a sign of peace…

Maybe he just stepped one pace too close.

Because the gun exploded with the force of a hand-grenade, blasting Villareal’s body back against the second of the upright rings; and in the next second, Antryg swept his arm in the sidelong motion of a fire-spell…

Which had the effect – as he had earlier observed – of summoning every grum in the tunnel toward the guard.

Magus had been right. They were fast.

The guard – completely disconcerted at the slithering mass of gnawing armored slugs that came crawling out of the glowing fogs – opened fire on them first, only secondarily turning to get off a shot at Antryg. Antryg dived toward Joanna, she ducked from his grip, hit Enter to trigger the virus an instant before a flash of light washed out the whole of her vision-field, as if she’d been dropped into very cold water, paralyzed and unable to breathe.

“JOANNA!”

*

For a time she didn’t recognize the name. It seemed to echo for a long time – or maybe time had slowed down. She held the name in her hand, like a piece of alien fruit, turned it one way and another: Joanna? Who’s Joanna?

And why can’t I breathe?

I should be scared…

Who’s calling me?

White light. A lot of white light. And the grip of strong hands on hers, holding her up. Drawing her back.

Antryg’s voice, that she’d know – alive or dead or a thousand years in the future in her dreams…

She blinked. The ceiling overhead was completely unfamiliar. For a moment she saw the glittering flicker of ragamummages between blackened rafters, just beneath rough plaster, steeply slanting and likewise dark with decades of soot.

The air stank of sewage, of coal-smoke and mildew. In the street below she heard the swift clip-clip of a pony’s hooves, the creak of wagon-springs.

Angelshand. I’m in Angelshand.

There was only one reason she could think of, that Antryg would have brought her here.

She thought, Oh, shit, but felt too tired to absorb the fact that she’d come that close to dying. And Sergeant Barton had been killed, after surviving the horror of Viet Nam, and making it all those years afterwards… She felt tears collect in her eyes.

“Dearest,” said a woman’s sweet voice beside her, “you’re all right.” A plump hand patted hers. “You’re quite—”

Joanna turned her head. A very pretty, very fat little lady sat in the chair beside her, gorgeously attired in a gown that confirmed Joanna’s suspicion of where she was. “Where’s Antryg?”

“He’s quite safe—”

She clutched the lady’s hand, surprised at how weak her own grip felt. “Is he gone?”

No. Please, no…

She could just hear him saying, I have endangered you enough…

“My dear—”

“Tell him,” whispered Joanna, “that if he deserts me ‘for my own good,’ as he puts it, I will follow him, and find him wherever he is, and break his arm.”

The lady giggled like a schoolgirl, her warm hazel eyes bright. In attic’s single dormer, where the rainy afternoon light was best, three golden-headed finches hopped about in an elaborate cage, and two beautiful cloisonné hummingbirds bobbed on gold wires from the lady’s hair. Joanna realized this must be the dog wizard Hestie Pinktrees, she of the phenomenal scones. “Exactly what I’ve been telling him, dear! But you know what he is about responsibility. No, he’s just upstairs in the secret hiding-place—”

Hestie Pinktrees stood, and addressed the ceiling. “They’re gone now, dearest. The Witchfinders were here,” she added, for Joanna’s benefit, as a panel opened in the farthest and blackest corner of the attic ceiling and Antryg dropped through with a thump. “For the third time since the corridor vanished with a flash and a bang that shook all Angelshand—”

“And they’ll be back,” said Magister Magus, appearing in the doorway. His face and coat-sleeves looked a little smudgy with dust and his dark hair was ruffled. Evidently he’d been in concealment somewhere as well. “It’s probably best you get out of here tonight.”

“And we shall do so.” Antryg strode immediately across to the bed, caught Joanna’s hands in his and kissed her, with a gentleness that told its own story. I must really have been far gone…

She freed her hands, cupped his face with them, drew him into a proper kiss. His face was scratched and bruised; he’d traded his demolished fatigue-jacket for a ruffled shirt and a green velvet court-coat, much patched. She felt the guilt in his hesitation, before he yielded.

“Joanna—”

“No.” The attic was cold, the bed piled with eiderdowns; she felt strange and deeply tired, and had the vanishing memory of drowning in white light.

“I could have got you killed.”

“I could have got me killed,” Joanna corrected him. She sat back against the pillows, looking into those wise, mad, rain-colored eyes. “You had nothing to do with it.”

“Except that I led you into the corridor. And not only you.”

Barton gamely blasting away at grums and djiowbars and various other monstrosities… Had he really expected he might die in there?

The part of him that hadn’t died in Viet Nam?

“Why do you think the Council of Wizards refuses to teach a mage who won’t take Council vows?” asked the wizard softly. “We are bringers of destruction, Joanna. The vows are only in part – and that part the least of it – to control the evil wizards, the venal mages who sell their abilities to kings or bandit-chiefs or Interdimensional Transport Corporations for gold. I was trained by one of those, the worst of them…. But those of us who are convinced that we’re doing right are far more dangerous, because we’ll carry through with our projects at the cost of our lives. Or the lives of those around us.”

“How many worlds did you save,” asked Joanna softly, “by what you did? By what we did, you and I and poor Sergeant Barton? How many worlds did that corridor go through, powering itself up by the life-force of people and eating their minds away by the energies it spread? Or was that supposed to be not your business? Did you take those vows?”

“Oh, yes.” He sighed. “I took them. And called down a death-curse upon myself if I broke them, which the Witchfinders seem enthusiastically ready to facilitate… But I couldn’t keep them, you know. That’s why the Council considers me dangerous. Not because I’m evil. Because I want to do good.”

“Are you sorry you did what you did?”

“I’m sorry about Barton,” said Antryg. “Even about Villareal, who was so far out of his depth and didn’t even know it. And if you had been killed—”

Joanna reached up, and put her fingers to his lips. “You can’t control what people do, Antryg. Not me, not Barton, not Villareal. Not that poor kid Chico, who’s God knows where by now. They – We – make our choices. To do evil for money, to do good when the way to it is shown us… or to stand back with our hands folded and say, I’ll do neither evil nor good, and so will escape all blame. Could you love me, if I did that?”

He looked surprised at the question. “Of course. I’d love you whatever course you chose.”

She laughed, and leaned her head on his shoulder. “And I’d love you even if you behaved yourself. Can you get us back?”

“Oh, yes. Thanks to the Witchfinders there still isn’t a Council Wizard in three hundred miles.”

They left as soon as it was fully dark, the gibbous moon red with the smoke-fouled air of the dreary city, vast clouds moving in black across the sky amid a smell of rain and the sea. Hestie Pinktrees and Magister Magus walked with them through the cobbled streets towards the waterfront, partly to bid them good-by – Hestie carried a handkerchief full of fresh-baked scones for them, for tomorrow’s breakfast – and partly to make sure, with a light glamour of look-over-there spells, that nobody interfered with their departure.

“The whole Void’s been cleared of abominations in this area, because of the explosion,” Antryg explained. “It won’t last, but at least it’ll make for a safe crossing, for once.”

In Pie Street the dim glow of oil-lights flickered in the windows of what had once been the houses of the rich, now long gone to some more fashionable neighborhood; hanging laundry flapped like ghosts in the darkness. Children’s’ voices echoed from the near-by courts; a coster-monger passed with his donkey and his barrow, singing a scratchy tune. “You know, just once,” said Joanna, hugging the Magus’s borrowed black coat around herself, “I’d like to visit this city when I wasn’t running away from something, or wanted as an Accessory to Sorcery, or trying to save the world.”

“Then I suggest,” retorted Magister Magus, “that you abandon your house-mate and spend a week with me. You won’t stay out of trouble any other way.”

“But God knows,” put in Hestie, “what kind of mess you’d find him in when you got back.”

“There is much,” said Joanna, “in what you say.”

She took the scones, kissed Magus on the cheek, and took Antryg’s hand.

He stretched out his other hand—

—and the Void opened in a coruscation of mage-light and mummages.

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. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, 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.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

The Further Adventures
by Barbara Hambly

The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.

Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?

The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)

So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?

This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.

The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.

Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.

The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.

The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.

In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.

Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.

Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.

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. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.

I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.

Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.

Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.

The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.

Life goes on.

Love goes on.

Everyone continues to have Further Adventures for the rest of their lives.

*

Novels in the Antryg Windrose Series (out of print but commercially available digitally)

The Silent Tower

The Silicon Mage

Dog-Wizard

Table of Contents

- Corridor by Barbara Hambly

- The Further Adventures by Barbara Hambly