Karate Masters vs the Invaders From Outer Space
Date: 2017-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy
Description: A novelette of 13,000 words in the Antryg Windrose series. Exiled wizard Antryg Windrose and his computer tech partner Joanna Sheraton take part - with other students at their dojo - as extras in a low-budget martial arts movie. But while filming in the Jojave Desert, it becomes obvious that something or someone from another dimension is out to kill off everybody in the project. Antryg must use all his powers to figure out what's behind this and who is really the target of the attack - BEFORE his own dojo-mates panic and decide he's to blame.

KARATE MASTERS

VS. THE INVADERS FROM OUTER SPACE

By

Barbara Hambly

Published by Barbara Hambly at Amazon

Copyright 2017 Barbara Hambly

Kindle Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Karate Masters Vs. The Invaders from Outer Space

About the Author

KARATE MASTERS

VS. THE INVADERS FROM OUTER SPACE

“Oh, Dirk,” whispered Joanna Sheraton, “oh, my God, do you know what it’s like for a woman to hunger for real meat, as I’ve hungered for yours?” Soft reflections of flame from the bedroom fireplace slid over the black satin of the waterbed’s sheets, the polished carving of the headboard… the man’s blonde hair, chiseled muscle, and gold neck-chains. The scent of incense made her giddy.

“Give it to me… I’m begging you, Dirk. Give it to me hard…”

“Do people in this universe really say that in bed?” Antryg Windrose, lurking on the sidelines, sunk his voice down under Angel Valentine’s passionate contralto as she repeated – to Dirk (whose real name was Wally Bickle) – Joanna’s sotto voce prompts.

“They do if you pay them,” responded Matt Davidson, part-owner of the North Hollywood residence in which this tender encounter was taking place. The master bedroom of the ranch-style home was roughly the size of a small restaurant, which was fortunate, considering the amount of camera equipment and lights currently crammed into it. Through an archway in a tiled alcove, a Jacuzzi bubbled seductively, and in the yard beyond the artfully-curtained sliding doors, subdued floodlights outlined groves of bamboo and hibiscus.

“They’d have to pay me an awful lot,” grumbled Joanna, and Bill Podmore – director, producer, and writer of Dragon Fist – gestured impatiently for everyone to be quiet.

“Dirk!” gasped Angel realistically, as those sinewy arms clasped the creamy amplitude of her negligeéd charms. “Oh, my God, DIRK—!”

Right on cue, ninja came slashing through the curtains from the yard.

Ed Ashmead, although he had only recently attained second kyu, led the pack owing to the fact that he was the most physically impressive man in the dojo: not quite as tall as Antryg at six feet two, he was heavily muscled and frighteningly tattooed. In a black gi, with his graying hair dyed black at Bill Podmore’s insistence (“You can’t have a forty-year-old old ninja!” “Fuck you, Bill…”), and his blue eyes gleaming through the eye-holes in a mask and swinging a katana in one hand and a wakazashi in the other, he looked every inch a villainous henchman.

Of the two actual black-belts who followed him – Daryl Winchester and Lee Martinez – neither was as scary-looking, and Joanna, backing behind the cameras with her prompt-script and first-aid kit, figured the audience probably wouldn’t notice the difference in technique. The other two brown-belts who constituted the Second Wave, goldenly handsome Shane Grell and prematurely balding Curtis Fennel (known in the dojo as Spacecookie), were overacting terribly and although their swords were, of course, unsharpened, Joanna braced herself to take care of at least a couple of injuries in the ensuing fight.

Antryg, ridiculously tall and gawky with a pair of fearsome-looking outer-space goggles over his mask to conceal his glasses, brought up the rear.

Angel screamed in terror, Daryl and Lee leaped up onto the waterbed in a great flashing of sword-blades (and an amazing demonstration of balance), and Bill Podmore yelled “Great! Fantastic!” and made everybody go back out into the garden and attack again.

And again.

Joanna had learned, when green-belt Matt had propositioned half the senior iaido class at the Genki-do dojo into being in his friend Bill’s “karate movie,” that filming a movie – even a direct-to-video schlockfest – entailed an awful lot of going back out into the garden and coming back again and again.

On the other hand, it was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a May evening in the late spring of 1988.

Bill, Joanna gathered, had been skirmishing around the frontiers of “the industry” (as its practitioners like to refer to their chosen métier) since the 1950s, making epics with titles like Shoot-Out on the Pecos and Hep-Cat Girls. He’d switched to direct-to-video horror and semi-soft porn the moment video technology became affordable, and didn’t seem to mind in the least that his opuses (opi?) never went anywhere. Watching him now, as he broke the master-shot down into close-ups, two-shots, and reverses, she had to smile at his laid-back mellow charm. He was careful to ask who were the best swordsmen of his crew of Evil Henchmen (all of whom were being paid in pizza and Budweiser), was gentle and respectful even the fifteenth time he had to remove Matt’s roommate’s cat Jeeves from the set, and followed the instructions of Teddy Nuvo – the senior student instructor at Genki-do – as to how Wally could most convincingly defend himself against three sword-wielding baddies while fighting on a waterbed.

“Hey, honey, weren’t you in Bride in Chains?” asked Spacecookie, sidling up to Ms. Valentine with manufactured casualness. “Did you really get it on with all those guys? That was a great scene!”

“Thank you,” said Ms. Valentine, and looked around for a bathrobe.

She was more or less rescued by Podmore, who called her back to the camera at that point to be carried off screaming. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it!” volunteered Spacecookie (Angel was scheduled to lose most of her negligee in the abduction), but the chore was delegated to Ed, with Antryg covering his retreat. Shane, Lee, and Spacecookie had already been killed, haemhorraging medically unlikely quantities of fake blood into Matt’s bedroom carpet. “Where’s Antryg?” asked Podmore, looking around.

Joanna found him in the garden, sitting on the edge of the hot tub. He’d pushed up his goggles and taken off his mask – the night, though cloudy as usual in Southern California in May, was warm – and he was frowning worriedly into the darkness. As Joanna approached from the house she saw him hold out his left hand, palm up, the way he did sometimes at night, when he didn’t think she was looking.

The way he did when he was trying to summon magic.

Even a little magic.

Even though he knew it didn’t work in this universe.

He dreamed, she knew, that he was still able to use it. For most of his life, he had been one of the most powerful mages in his own world: magic was not something he did, it was what he was. It was the breath in his lungs, the marrow of his bones. Joanna sometimes tried to imagine what her own mind, her own heart, would be like, if something had sponged away the ability to solve equations, the portion of her mind that instinctively knew, from half a lifetime of experience, how systems and interfaces were set up in hard drives and software: What if I suddenly forgot how to write code?

If I knew it was still there, somewhere, but my mind just sort of blanked it out, the way it blanks out when Todd Eastman tries to explain to me about balancing carbohydrates against chi energy fluctuation?

In being exiled from his own world – his own universe – Antryg had in many ways been exiled from himself. From the part of himself most deeply rooted in his soul.

His natural scatterbrained curiosity about the world in which he found himself stranded – about everything from nuclear physics to Spiderman’s metabolic rate – stood him in good stead, and he was very good at pretending the wound in his heart didn’t still bleed. But sometimes at night she’d see him, trying to summon a ball of light to his palm, or a flame to a candle – the simplest forms of magic, he had told her – concentrating for hours before coming at last, defeated, to bed.

And she’d hear the words he sometimes cried out in his dreams.

“Is everything okay?” she asked softly.

He glanced around at her, touched his lips for silence, nodded across the swimming-pool in the direction towards which he’d been staring. She looked, and by the reflected glow from the house saw Jeeves, and Matt’s roommate’s smaller cat Genji…

“What are they doing?” she whispered.

They were attacking – chasing – something. Leaping, batting, then suddenly cringing away with irises shrunk to thin rims of gold around black mirrors, ears flattened, backs arched.

Sometimes Joanna could almost see what they were after.

And then she couldn’t.

“It’s mummages,” murmured Antryg. “Ragamummages – they come through the Void when it’s opened.”

“What… Here?” Joanna looked again. Antryg had spoken of such creatures before, and on occasion – when she had crossed with him through the Void that separated the many worlds of the universe – she had even seen them: invisible most of the time, or appearing as a faint glitter in the corner of one’s eye. Harmless, flickering, a fleeting impression of a myriad of stiff buzzing wings and dangling feet…

“What are they doing here?”

The wizard rose, removed his glasses to pull down his mask, then replaced the glasses over it. “That,” he said, and fitted the goggles over the glasses, “is what I’m wondering as well.”

*

Joanna made an excuse to linger at Matt’s after the shoot finished at midnight (and the beer-and-pizza orgy wrapped at three), so that Antryg could have a thorough prowl around the dark yard without constant interruptions by ninja or by Bill’s two lights-and-camera assistants, but it was to little avail. It was also murderously counterproductive, given her Monday deadline on a new software installation for the offices of Starburst Fixtures Systems, which sold toilets and bath-tubs from seven stores and three warehouses in the San Fernando Valley. (She ended up sleeping most of Saturday and then pulling an all-nighter Sunday to make up for it).

She suspected that during the course of the following week, Antryg biked over to North Hollywood one morning, climbed the Davidson fence, and had another look while the genial librarian and his fussbudget roommate were at work: she only hoped her own erratic roommate hadn’t tried to break into the house. He came back late in the afternoon looking worried, and spent a good portion of the evening and the next day re-adjusting the odd maze of pinwheels, half-buried Coke-bottles, stones and wind-chimes in the back yard of their down-at-heels Craftsman bungalow in Granada Hills, like a sailor adrift far out to sea watching the weather.

“The Void opened somewhere,” he said on Thursday evening, after aikido class at the dojo and a late dinner of leftover pad thai on the bungalow’s upstairs sleeping-porch. The bungalow was the last on Porson Avenue, so from the sleeping-porch they could look down in one direction to the modest little ‘sixties ranch-houses – most lights out, or else large rectangles of flickering, spooky gray-blue where fans of David Letterman and Jeopardy re-runs sat half-hypnotized in the dark. Somewhere, someone was playing Def Leopard, the throb of bass attenuated with distance. From the dark hills that rose in the other direction the smells of dust and sage breathed disturbingly, a reminder of a more ancient world.

“I’ve felt movement in it for some weeks,” he went on after a time, and behind the Coke-bottle lenses of his glasses his gray eyes were no longer those of a gravely daft hippie, but the eyes of a wizard, a shift which always scared the hell out of Joanna. “Movement close to here, I mean.”

“Do you think it’s someone coming to find you?” The Council of Wizards in his own universe had, on a couple of terrifying occasions, come after him before.

He had sworn, the last time, that if it happened again he would flee Los Angeles, as much to keep Joanna out of the line of fire than for his own safety. She lived with the fear that she would one day wake up, or come home some afternoon, to find him gone – forever. And would never know if they’d caught him and killed him, if they’d tortured him again (and how badly), if they’d bricked him up in some magic-proof dungeon… or if he’d somehow managed to get away…

The thought of living without him was like the thought of losing a hand, or her sight, or the ability to dream. She congratulated herself, obliquely, that she’d managed to keep her voice steady when she’d asked.

“I don’t know.” He nipped the fragment of shrimp from his chopsticks and put his arm around her shoulders, and tried to sound reassuring. “It could have nothing to do with me, you know. There’s always movement somewhere in the Void. It’s a big place.” He frowned. “Except of course when it isn’t.”

“When a gate is opened,” said Joanna, recollecting what she’d learned from him by rather horrifying association, “you’ve said the universe sort of flaws along a fault-line, and things can fall through. Could the mummages you saw Friday night have been just that?”

“It could,” he agreed. “But that of course leaves the issue of what else might have come through. It may be a good idea to keep a closer eye on the bulletin boards for a week or so – and perhaps to consult Mr. Parker as well.”

Joanna rolled her eyes at this suggestion. Their neighbor, Ike Parker – in addition to keeping in his back-yard eight sheds full of old newspapers and books, rusted ammunition and jerry-cans of water, the rotting corpses of six Volkswagens and two school-busses and God only knew what else (the inside of his house was supposedly worse) – was a gold-mine of conspiracy theories extending back to the Teapot Dome Scandal and could be counted upon to know if anyone in the surrounding three states had seen lights in the sky or nameless things creeping about in the darkness. “You can do that,” she offered, and Antryg grinned toothily.

“The problem about Mr. Parker,” he said, raising one crooked finger—

“There is,” interrupted Joanna, “more than one problem about Mr. Parker.”

“Well, yes, I mean, other than the rats and the raccoons – he puts out food for them, you know – and the drums of gasoline in one of the sheds, and the – ah – persistent quality of his conversation… But one of the problems about Mr. Parker is that he’s perfectly correct about thirty percent of the time. It’s just that one never knows which thirty percent.”

“Oi.” Joanna went back to her pad thai, and resigned herself to about three weeks of their neighbor’s unannounced and interminable visits, with stacks of ancient (and painstakingly annotated and cross-indexed) issues of the National Enquirer and the Fortean Times, which had followed the last time Antryg had gone to Parker for information…

But in fact the question turned out to be moot.

And within forty-eight hours, Joanna would have traded events for a week of their neighbor’s company, and been glad for the opportunity to make the exchange.

*

Dirk Longbow (a.k.a. Wally Bickle) drove grimly, eyes narrowed to slits of concentration and brow decorated with a long artificial gash which changed position several times when Joanna saw later takes, out to the desert hideout of his bride’s evil abductor. Podmore shot those scenes over two nights in the Angeles National Forest (which lay nowhere near any desert in California), and the ninja assembled bright and early at three o’clock Saturday morning at the dojo, to car-caravan out to the Devil’s Fortress, which lay in the deeps of San Bernardino County, miles south of I-40 and – opined Ed Ashmead, when they stopped at a Denny’s in San Bernardino at four for breakfast – about twenty miles east of Hell.

Not being a hundred percent sure that Joanna’s battered blue Mustang would make it out to the middle of the Mojave Desert and back, Joanna and Antryg had hitched a ride with Bill Podmore in the equipment van. Angel Valentine had offered to give up the only other actual seat – beside Bill – to Joanna, but Joanna settled in the back with Antryg and Wally and a neatly-packed plethora of light-meters, screens, water-jugs, Fisher cams, crates of tapes, a portable generator, spare batteries, and three folding director’s chairs. Angel and Joanna slept a good part of the way. Joanna woke periodically to hear bits of Wally’s non-stop monologue about his career in films, which seemed to include gigs as a rock-star with Urgency and as an extra on The Love Boat.

They reached the Devil’s Fortress at five-thirty, a round stone tower and an arcaded colonnade which had once – according to Sherry Rubocalva, Shane Grell’s relentlessly informative girlfriend who had come along as assistant scene-setter and general gopher – been part of a Marine Corps testing-range, though the structures were clearly older than that. Joanna guessed that they’d been originally associated with a small gold-mine, since the small range of chewed-up looking hills against which they backed was riddled with tunnels. Some of these the Marine Corps had evidently enlarged, making for an interesting low-budget set. The second van of the caravan, driven by Bill’s cameraperson Rob Tarvell, was crammed with a table, some chairs, a couple of Chinatown screens, an elaborately-carved oriental chest and sufficient random electronics equipment to give the Golden Scorpion’s den the look of an actual hideout (although Joanna wondered where the Golden Scorpion – a.k.a. Ross Ventura, formerly seen on Passionate Hearts in the late ‘seventies – and his henchmen got their food from. “Does one of his ninja drive into Bakersfield every Saturday morning to grocery shop?”) (“Don’t ask, honey,” twinkled Podmore).

While Rob Tarvell and Bill’s sound tech Dana Kim set up lights and camera, the ninja helped Sherry dress the sets, arranging chairs and screens and the oriental chest in such a way that they would cause the least damage when the fighting started. In addition to Sherry (whom Joanna suspected Shane had brought along mostly as a brag: she was easily the most beautiful woman Joanna had ever seen), Ross Ventura had brought a girlfriend as well, a boneless-looking brunette named Selena Rider. But while Sherry and Joanna set up the villain’s “computer room,” Selena remained in the lower floor of the tower with Angel, drinking vodka in Gatorade (Angel settled for Diet Coke) and chatting animatedly about how much each of them had made on her last job, and mutual acquaintances who’d had their boobs done. Spacecookie made three attempts to insinuate himself into the conversation before Ed Ashmead threatened to break his glasses for him.

“At least it isn’t hot,” remarked Dana, crossing with Joanna to Shane’s emerald-green Cadillac – the Titanic, it was referred to in the dojo – to get bottles of Gatorade from the ice-chest in its capacious trunk. “When I came to California I thought it was always about a hundred and fifty degrees out in the desert, even in the middle of winter.”

Joanna squinted up at the thin gray overcast of the sky. “It’s actually not going to get really hot until July. And the overcast helps.”

“It’ll sure make lighting easier.” The tall Korean girl shaded her eyes as she scanned the landscape, barren in the distance to the south and east but thick on the scrubby hillslopes with cholla and beavertail, and dotted now with bright flashes of yellow, magenta, and white. “The wildflowers make it look almost too cheerful. Bill’ll have to shoot around them.”

“Pity he couldn’t have gotten a couple of big, mean-looking dogs.”

“He did think of that.” Dana grinned with affection for her boss. “But even if we could find a couple, he said it would probably be too hard on the dogs.”

Everybody got into their gis – Ross Ventura, into a crimson gi top and a black hakama, as befit his rank as Master of Evil (“Samurai really wore these sissy-lookin’ things?”). Wally Bickle, resplendent in gold neck-chains and a white gi, had his bloody forehead-gash re-installed (over the wrong eye, as it turned out when they finally saw the dailies), and the carnage commenced.

*

“What is it?” Joanna walked up the dark slope of the main tunnel – through shifting slabs of shadow as Rob, Bill, and Dana moved the lights around in the dungeon where Angel was chained (they’d had to bring their own chains, plus a couple of Western Costume iron staples which were inconspicuously duct-taped to the wall) – and found Antryg standing in the doorway of the tower, looking uneasily out at the soft uniform grayness of the afternoon.

He shook his head. He’d participated enthusiastically in the running battle in the tunnels, and along the colonnade (where he’d been killed – once in the master-shot and three times in close-ups); a few smears of fake blood still decorated his cheekbones and nose. Mask and goggles were pushed up on his forehead into the unruly fluff of his graying curls. His eyes had returned to their ‘wizard’ look. He had, Joanna noticed, replaced the unsharpened training katana in his sash with his real one. She had noticed, as they’d shifted gear from her own car to the van in the dojo parking lot early that morning, that he’d brought along hers as well.

“Whatever it is,” he said softly, “it seems to be connected with the filming.” His sparse eyebrows pulled down over the splendid beak of his nose. “I didn’t sense this… this nearness… all week; not even when I broke into Avram’s house.”

Antryg, you’re going to get yourself into real trouble some day…

“But now it’s back.”

Joanna wound her own tousled blond lions-mane into a pony-tail and looked up at him worriedly. “Nearness of what?”

“Nearness of something in the Void. Something seeking a way through.” He produced a yo-yo from somewhere within his sinister-looking black gi, and made a couple of practice passes with it, watching it spin with a kind of bonkers intensity. “I think we need to get out of here fairly soon.”

Joanna glanced back at the entrance to the tunnel. Bill’s voice echoed forth, “Can we get a little more play on that chain, Rob?” and Teddy asked, “Should we all be waiting in the tunnel?”

“It’ll show when we move the camera…”

“How much ceiling clearance do we have?”

The fight in the dungeon – with the increasingly-disrobed Angel clutching Dirk’s gi-top (largely unsuccessfully) against her palpitating assets – was going to be, as folks in The Industry liked to call it, the Money Shot.

“You need a hand, baby?” inquired Spacecookie eagerly.

Joanna looked back up at Antryg. “Good luck with that. Podmore’s not going to head back to LA until he’s finished… What the hell time is it, anyway?” She looked at her watch.

Its neat, square face was blank.

Antryg held out his hand. A moment later, a flickering ball of blue-white flame appeared above his palm.

Joanna said, “Oh, shit.”

*

It was, to the best of anyone’s calculations at the time in the dungeon, another three hours before the battle concluded with Wally and the gi-clutching Angel – now down to an exiguous black lace thong – leaping over six bleeding bodies and fleeing up the tunnel to the previously-shot combat (with the same six henchmen) in the colonnade.

“It’s probably some kind of local magnetic field,” surmised Bill, frowning at his own stopped Timex. “Or maybe some kind of EMP pulse from the generator. We did have a kind of a weird fluctuation when we were setting up down here.”

“Whaddaya know?” exclaimed Rob Tarvell as they emerged into the round ground-floor chamber of the tower. “Must not be as late as we think. It feels like we were down there forever.”

The overcast sky outside had darkened slightly, but Joanna knew in her bones – not that her bones hadn’t been mistaken before – that it must be at least eight at night. Her glance crossed Antryg’s. He was looking very worried.

“You know,” said Dana, “since it looks like it’s only – what, five o’clock, would you say?” Her watch had stopped, too. “—we can probably shoot the whole rape sequence here in the dungeon and save rental on the sound-stage.”

“Sounds good to me!” piped up Spacecookie enthusiastically, despite the fact that only the handsome Mr. Ventura was slated to assault Angel. Nevertheless, hope sparkled eternal in his beady eyes. Ed gave him a look that would have skinned a wild boar.

“I don’t know about anybody else,” announced Daryl, “but I don’t think I could take another set-up. I’m beat.”

“And it’s probably going to be dark by the time we’re headed back,” pointed out Wally, sponging fake blood off his chest and neck. “You okay, Angel?”

She’d paused uncertainly halfway to the oriental screens that hid everybody’s street-clothes, and glanced at Bill, who was, after all, the trail-boss of the expedition.

In a jocular tone, Spacecookie chuckled, “You feel like getting raped this afternoon, baby?”

Daryl put one hand on Ed’s arm and the other on Antryg’s, to prevent a completely unscheduled and un-filmed scene of mayhem, and said, “Don’t be a dick, Curtis.”

“Hey, I was just kidding—”

“You’re still a dick,” said Joanna.

Bill smiled like a good scoutmaster and said, “Sounds like everybody’s pretty tired. The scene with Angel and Ross will look better in the bedroom set anyway, where we can control the lights. Let’s pack up.”

Joanna looked around for Antryg, and finally located him out by Bill’s van, counting how many live katana they had. For the close-ups, to make the Evil Henchmen appear more Evil, those students who had possessed fully sharpened steel swords had brought them along, in violation of a number of San Bernardino County ordnances and the regulations of the Screen Actor’s Guild – to which Ross, Wally, Angel and Selena at least belonged. It was, in fact, one of Joanna’s duties as Script Girl (“Continuity Supervisor,” Dana corrected gently) was to make sure that no matter how many times the Henchmen had checked to make sure that the weapons they carried were the unsharpened training blades, she, personally, had a look at every katana and wakazashi before anybody yelled, “Action!”

So she knew exactly how much live steel was on hand.

Four.

She asked softly, “What’s going on?”

“We’ve been enclaved.” Antryg straightened up, and stepped aside to let Rob Tarvell and Lee Martinez start loading up the lights. He’d resumed the several strings of garish love-beads that he habitually wore, and the rhinestone spaceship earrings that were his current favorites, and looked more like a demented flower-child than either a mage or an Evil Henchman. “And I suspect it’s going to be physically impossible for us to reach San Bernardino – probably we won’t make it as far as the highway. We’re in a sort of a… a goldfish-tank—” He formed his crooked hands demonstratively, as if he were holding a softball, “—that’s been separated out from your universe, where space will turn back on itself after a certain distance. Like a bubble in the Void.”

“Why?”

The wizard shook his head. “They can occur naturally – and they can occur when someone creates an enclave elsewhere and the Void flaws, the way it flaws when a gate is opened. The ones that occur naturally don’t last long – they just fade back into their original universes, usually, though not invariably, at the same point in time they bubbled out—”

“Oh, great,” whispered Joanna. “So we could suddenly find ourselves having to explain two vans and a Cadillac to a bunch of pissed-off Apache or troops from the Mexican War—”

“Oh, not all the way out here, surely. There’s no water in a hundred miles. Apache wouldn’t be that silly. I can’t speak for American troops from the Mexican War. And in any case,” he added, “a natural occurrence – or even a flaw as the result of activity elsewhere – is extremely rare. I’m afraid it’s very much more likely—” He propped his glasses more firmly onto his long nose, and scanned the featureless overcast of the sky, “—that somebody did this on purpose.”

“Why?”

“Well—” He frowned back in the direction of the Fortress, where Teddy and Sherry, Shane and Wally were loading the second van and Shane’s Cadillac. “I’m sure we’re going to find that out.”

When the cars were loaded and everyone got changed back into jeans and t-shirts (including Angel, to Spacecookie’s ‘jokingly’ crude disappointment), and the sky was still the dim gray of half-twilight, people were beginning to become uneasy. But nobody said anything – not wishing to run the risk of a) sounding like they were in an issue of EC Comics, or b) admitting that something weird was going on – and the four vehicles (nobody had volunteered to give Spacecookie a ride or to ride in his grody red Volkswagen with him) got under way.

When they had driven for what felt like an hour and a half, and the sky had not further darkened, nor had they reached Highway 40 (seventy miles north of the Devil’s Fortress) Bill pulled over.

“We can’t be on the wrong road,” said Teddy Nuvo, contemplating the map, his dark hair falling over his eyes. “I mean, there is no other road. There’s not a fork or a crossroad or nothing.”

“Frequently the military deliberately mis-represents distances to their secret installations on maps,” pointed out Sherry. “As a security measure, you know.”

“Yeah, but the distance wasn’t mis-represented on the way out,” said Joanna. “It took us almost exactly an hour. How much gas do we have?”

Into the long silence which followed, Dana finally said, “I have no idea. The gas-gauge in the van is out. So’s the odometer. But it’s been more than an hour. Way more.”

Cast and crew all looked at their frozen watches and traded glances (except for Selena Rider, who’d opened her second flask of vodka and was asleep in the back of the Titanic). Several people looked at the sky, but nobody, evidently, wanted to open that issue.

Wally Bickle said, “We should head back to the Fortress.” He hadn’t had much to say on the drive, but he had, Joanna had noticed, leaned forward from his little jump-seat behind the driver to glance repeatedly at the dead gauges of the van’s dashboard, and his handsome face had a haunted look. Joanna wondered if he, too, was a regular reader of the Fortean Times.

“What makes you think we can get back, man?” Shane’s voice had a slight edge of hysteria.

“Oh, we can get back,” said Antryg, and the golden-haired brown-belt swung sharply around on him.

“How the hell do you know?”

“Well, I’m a wizard from another universe,” explained Antryg – not for the first time: he never made any secret of it. “And it looks as if—”

Bill Podmore gasped, “What the hell is that?”

And Spacecookie screamed.

Joanna nearly did, because the thing that appeared – she had the impression of it dropping sideways out of some other reality – did so directly in front of them, at a distance of less than ten feet, squishy and chitenous at once, like a half-disemboweled cockroach except for those toothed, hose-like feeding-tubes that whipped out at them with a wet snap. Antryg grabbed Bill – who was closest to the thing – by the shoulders and whipped him out of its way as one of those limpet mouths ripped his arm. Antryg yelled, “Stay away from the cars!” and dragged Bill back as three other things – they were roughly the size and bulk of upright pigs, but very much lighter on their multiple feet – appeared out of someplace and lunged at them.

Shane, who’d made a dive for the Caddy and brought out a sawed-off shotgun, nearly had his face taken off as a smaller creature – an orange agglomeration of warty bubbles – appeared inside the car and spit yellow goo at him, goo that smoked on the pavement and dissolved the skin on the back of his wrist where a droplet of it hit. Shane howled with pain and dropped the shotgun. Antryg shouted, “Don’t!” as Ross Ventura dived for it: “Don’t fire it! Get away from the cars!”

This last as Rob Tarvell whipped open the back doors of the second van and took refuge inside. Antryg snatched the shotgun from the actor’s hands and threw it into the shallow ditch at the side of the road; Joanna could hear Rob screaming inside the van and saw huge gouts of blood and goo on the inside of the windows in the moments before the gas-tank blew up. Angel, in the process of opening the nearest car-door (Spacecookie’s grody Volkswagen), sprang back, and it was a good thing she did. Tentacles whipped through the half-open window, wrapping around her arms and body. She slithered nimbly away, leaving her shirt in the creature’s grip, and fled with the others across the ditch. Antryg made a long, swooping gesture – a bit like an underhand cricket-pitch – and something like green fire flashed from his crooked fingers.

The cockroach-oids, in the process of scuttling after the shocked and shaken fugitives, backed off, flaring their neck-shields and hissing horribly. Antryg made another pass – with his left hand, this time, and Joanna saw that his right hand had been burned by his own green fire – and one of the creatures exploded messily. The other two turned bright pink and kept on coming.

Antryg said, “Bother,” then gestured again – the things were pretty close by this time – and they turned as one and attacked the warty orange goo-spitter that had by this time oozed out of Shane’s Cadillac and was headed in their direction – fast. Though slightly smaller than either of its attackers the goo-spitter simply vomited slime over them from its several mouths, and as they dissolved – slowly, shrieking – rolled over them and began to suck up the resultant pulp.

“Oh, man—” said Dana, revolted.

“Spread out away from me,” said Antryg, clutching his burned right hand in his left. “Magic doesn’t work here as it does in my world and I have no idea what’s going to happen with the next defense—”

“What the hell is going on?” wailed Spacecookie, and Ed Ashmead replied,

“Just off-hand I’d say we was bein’ attacked by monsters—”

“Why us?” cried Sherry, and then, “Oh, my God…!” as the goo-spitter, now increased in size by about thirty percent, rolled toward them. At the same moment three other abominations appeared in the desert behind them, thick-bodied blue-gray ellipses that hovered in what looked like a cloud of oily heat-distortion and that stank with the most hideous reek Joanna had ever smelled, rotting half-digested flesh…

At Antryg’s next summons the ground shook, and split – a crack about three feet wide by nearly ten deep – between himself and the prudently-retreating cast and crew, and Joanna thought she saw something moving in the curious dimness at the bottom of the chasm. “Watch out!” yelled Wally, as dust billowed from prints that crunched into the ground, huge five-toed tracks that seemed intermittently wreathed in shadow. Another smell – worse – struck them all like a freight-train from that direction and the sagebrush curled and crackled as if withered in dry heat. Antryg swung around to face the invisible thing with his hands outstretched (And God knows what his strongest defense-spell is going to turn into, thought Joanna in terror – Or what we’re going to do when he’s either killed by those things or is hit by his own lightning…)

The blue-gray things disappeared. The horror of the smell – the living malevolence of it – was suddenly gone, leaving only a fetid echo. Whirling, Joanna saw that the goo-spitter had vanished, too.

Antryg stood with his crooked hands outstretched, looking – now that the danger was gone – slightly foolish.

Angel was sobbing, “Oh, my God… oh my God…”

“Stay here,” ordered Antryg, and, leaping over the chasm, headed back to the cars at a long-legged run, everybody else in the caravan at his heels. Stay here notwithstanding, none of them – certainly not Joanna – had any intention of letting the only magic-wielder in sight get away from them, even if the monsters had vanished…

Lee Martinez whispered, “What the fuck just happened?”

And Daryl Winchester said, his voice shaky, “I guess you weren’t kidding about being a wizard from another universe.”

“Well, I told you I was.” Antryg gestured everyone back and pulled open the back door of Bill’s van, which contained no monsters… now, anyway. He tossed the sharpened katanas and wakazashi back to the others—

“Get the trainers, too,” said Ashmead. “I got a whetstone and they’ll take an edge.”

“Ross?” Selena Rider stirred and sat up in the back of the Titanic – the goo-spitter must have materialized two feet from her, in the front. Sleepily she brushed a lock of her dark hair from her face with the back of one wrist. “What the – oh, my God, what happened?”

The other van was still burning.

Spacecookie had leaped into his VW and was trying to start it.

“Get out of there,” advised Antryg softly.

Wally added, “We need to get back to the Fortress.” He looked up at the sky. “It hasn’t gotten any darker or anything.”

“It’s like ninety miles—” protested Lee, and Antryg shook his head.

“No, we’ll be able to make it in a short time, cross-country. If they give us time.”

“If who gives us time?” demanded Ashmead.

Antryg widened his demented gray eyes at him. “Whoever’s going to come after us next.”

*

Despite protest from Sherry, Angel, and Selena on the grounds of their shoes, and from Ross, Shane, and Lee on the grounds of the distance they’d driven from the Devil’s Fortress and the oncoming night (“I sure as hell don’t want to meet more of those things out in the open desert in the dark!”), the entire party set out across the desert following Antryg, and came within sight of the ragged-looking hills, and the stumpy gray stone tower, in what Joanna estimated (given the time it usually took her to mentally recite “The Raven” and “Eärendil was a mariner…”) to be slightly less than thirty minutes. Most walked in silence, though behind her Joanna was aware of Shane and the actor Ross Ventura in quiet conversation, and now and then Angel – to whom Ed had given his Hawaiian shirt – and Dana exchanging whispers. Everyone else seemed to be too horrified by what had happened to Rob Tarvell, and too shaken from the attack, to be able to speak much.

Antryg, in the lead with sword in hand – his palm and fingers wrapped in a field-dressing from Joanna’s first-aid kit – would periodically stretch out his left hand or make cautious little gestures, trying to summon traces of magic. Though none appeared, the oncoming night stubbornly refused to come on, and the medium-gray overcast of the sky had darkened not a whit between the time they left the road, and the time they arrived at the Devil’s Fortress.

“I’ll go in first,” said the wizard, “to make sure there’s no surprises waiting for us.”

“Better not go alone.” Shane hefted his shotgun, which he’d retrieved from the ditch.

“Well, for God’s sake don’t fire that thing. The enclave paradigm seems to have shifted away from magic for the moment but there’s no telling what will happen if you try to use it.”

Shane handed the weapon to Ross, and turned to Joanna: “Can you lend me your sword?”

She never liked doing so, but knew the brown-belt was fairly adept in handling such a weapon and guessed that she’d be of more use outside because she’d know – more or less – what she was looking at or looking for. Ed settled himself on a broken bench in the colonnade and began to sharpen the training katanas. Daryl and Lee, armed with the other two live blades, moved a little way off to watch the horizons (Not that THAT’s going to do us any good if abominations appear right under our noses the way they did by the cars…)

Teddy Nuvo whispered to Joanna, “Holy shit, he really is a wizard like he’s been saying…”

“Uh… yeah…”

“Where’d you meet him?”

Feeling a little silly about it, Joanna replied, “At a party. It’s a really long story.”

Bill said, “I gotta get some footage of him throwing fire—”

“He can’t do magic in our world,” said Joanna.

“You mean he’s from like outer space?” Spacecookie’s eyes glittered wildly. “How come he’s here? Can he do really cool stuff like fly? Is he – like – I mean, the two of you—” He made a silly little pointy gesture indicating, Joanna assumed, sexual congress…

“You mean,” she said reasonably, “does he have better manners than to ask people about their sex-lives? The answer to that is Yes.”

Spacecookie held up both hands, palms out, and made a pushing movement accompanied by a big I’m only kidding grin: “Hey, you know, it’s what everybody wants to know…”

Angel said to Joanna, sincerely, “Lucky you.”

From the tower behind them Shane’s voice echoed in a harsh shout, “You take one more step and I’ll blow you to pieces.”

That brought everyone into the big circular ground-floor room. Hands raised, Antryg stood in the center of the floor, while Shane, in the open doorway that led to the tunnel, pointed the shotgun at his back. Ross – with Joanna’s katana in hand – called out “Selena! Get his sword – and you make one false move, Merlin, and you’re toast. We’re not kidding.”

Joanna and Angel grabbed the actress by both wrists – though tall, Selena had the anorexic slenderness of many actresses and the voluptuous Angel outweighed her by a good twenty pounds. Selena wriggled fretfully but was far too drunk to put up much of a struggle.

“What the hell—?” demanded Joanna.

“Let her go if you know what’s good for you,” snapped Shane, and his crystal-blue glance flashed to the others grouped behind the three girls. “Don’t you see? He’s the one who got us into this. He’s the magic guy – and we’re all of a sudden stuck in some magic place getting slaughtered by monsters! He’s the one who got us here – who knew how to get here. We’ve been led into a trap, and if we’re going to defend ourselves—”

“Don’t be an ass, Shane!” said Teddy, switching in instants from a quietly laid-back party boy to the senior blackbelt on the Men’s Sparring Team.

“Of course we’ve been led into a trap.” Hands still in the air, Antryg looked over his shoulder at his captor, with no particular air of awe or fright. “Just because I know something about the nature of traps doesn’t mean I’m the one who designed it, you know.”

“Okay, smart-guy, if you’re all innocent, how come you don’t get us out of it?”

“Because I haven’t the faintest idea how – any more than you have.”

Behind her, Joanna was aware of glances passing back and forth, each of her companions weighing who to believe and what to do about the situation.

“If more of those things show up,” she pointed out to Shane, “we’re probably going to need somebody who can at least drive them back…”

“And we’re probably going to need somebody who isn’t going to stab us in the back while we’re doing it,” he retorted.

In the silence behind her, Joanna heard Spacecookie whisper to somebody, “If he’s the only guy who can do magic, he’s got to be the one who summoned those things—”

Antryg opened his mouth to make a reply, then swept the group in front of him with his bespectacled gray gaze… and closed it again. Hands still in the air, back still to Shane – clearly, thought Joanna, he judged the brown-belt ready to pull the trigger at any equivocal move – he smiled a jack-o-lantern grin and asked reasonably, “What would you like me to do?”

“I’d like you to get us the fuck out of this!”

“I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that.”

“Yeah? How fast would you do it if—”

His eyes went to Joanna. Oh, shit! she thought, and behind her, Joanna felt others move up. She threw a panicked glance over her shoulder – Shane had obviously seen far too many movies in which the superhero buckles to the villain’s will at the thought of a threat to someone he cares about…

Bill Podmore, Ed Ashmead, Teddy Nuvo, Daryl Winchester, and Dana Kim had grouped up behind her. Just standing, arms folded, returning Shane’s cold gaze. Softly, Bill asked, “If what, Mr. Grell?”

Shane’s eyes shifted, counting his support. Joanna glanced, too: Spacecookie and Lee had distanced themselves a little from the group behind her. Sherry and Wally had more or less drifted back and appeared to be trying to hide behind the others.

“You guys are nuts!” Shane yelled, realizing he was out-numbered. “Can’t you see what he’s doing? He’s trapped us here—”

“Listen, listen,” soothed Antryg. “May I put my arms down? This is getting very tiring… Thank you.” He stooped, and laid his katana at his feet, then stood and faced Shane. “If we’re attacked here – and I think we’re going to be, very shortly—”

“He fucking admits it!”

“Shane, any idiot could figure that out,” Joanna reminded him. “Somebody is obviously out to get us—”

“Why?” Shane jabbed a finger at Antryg, then hastily returned his hand to the stock of the shotgun. “You tell me that!”

Again Joanna had the impression that Antryg was about to say something, then changed his mind about what it might be. Instead he looked over his shoulder, and said, “Bill, Ed, why don’t the two of you take swords and go outside and keep watch? I think that should be our first priority—”

Joanna noticed that he had picked not the two senior black-belts, but the two combat veterans: at seventeen, Bill had gone ashore at Omaha Beach and wasn’t likely to lose his nerve at pretty much anything he saw.

“If you see anything out of the ordinary, come back immediately…” He turned back to Shane with his usual dotty smile. “I’m afraid I have no idea how to get us out of this situation,” he continued, without, Joanna noticed, answering Shane’s question. “Here’s what I will do, though. I’ll go back into the tunnel – into that underground room we used for the dungeon – and I’ll stay there. You’ve been down in those tunnels and you know there’s no secret passageways or any other way out, so I can’t escape—”

“Says you!”

“Would you like to take the flashlight and have another look?” He widened his eyes at Shane, who obviously had no comeback to this, then went on, “We can’t get out of the enclave right now. Going back to the cars would be very, very dangerous – please do not try it. I’ll remain in the dungeon until such time as you tell me to come out.” He held up one hand in avowal, and crossed his heart. “All right?”

“So you can stab us in the back?” Shane had lowered the shotgun.

“I don’t know what else I can tell you. I’d suggest you put a guard on me, but I think your available personnel would be better deployed keeping a watch.”

His eyes still on Shane’s, he stooped again, picked up his sword in his bandaged hand, and crossed the room, passing within a foot of Shane and disappearing into the darkness of the tunnel. Shane did not appear to notice that he’d kept his sword with him – Joanna had seen Antryg converse with six members of the LAPD and the entire staff of a hospital emergency room* without any of them noticing he was armed – and neither, it seemed, did anyone else. Shane heaved what looked suspiciously like a sigh of relief, walked into the circular stone chamber that was still marked with fake blood and bits of masking-tape from the fight-scene which had taken place there earlier in the endless afternoon, and said, “Okay. We need to figure out what we’re going to do from here.”

The others grouped around him in a furious altercation, Ross joining in the argument as if he were playing Benito Mussolini (whom he rather resembled) and the two actresses hanging back uncertainly: “Does anybody have anything to drink?” asked Selena. Since they’d brought the three remaining half-gallons of water and all the Gatorade into the tower, this was presumably not the refreshment she sought.

Joanna slipped quietly away into the tunnel, and kept her fingers over the lens of her flashlight until she reached the dungeon door. She, too, had checked out the tunnels earlier in the adventure and knew there was nothing nasty or horrible down there – unless warty orange goo-spitters and tentacled abominations started materializing down there as they’d materialized within the cars. And the stout deadbolt on the door that led from the tunnels into the tower could be thrown by lever from the tunnel side, but had to be keyed from the tower side. Still the blackness gave her the shivers.

Antryg was sitting on the dungeon floor, laying out Tarot cards in the dark.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Well, this rather confirms my suspicions.” His earrings glinted and the round lenses of his spectacles caught the yellow beam like insectile eyes. “And I don’t like the look of this at all.”

Her light played across The Falling Tower (Oh, great!), Death, and the Nine of Wands. “Can you get us out of here?” she asked. “Open a Gate…”

“I’m afraid not. Here… and here…” His long, crooked finger touched the Three of Swords and the World (reversed). “Whoever summoned those abominations summoned rather a lot of them, and they’re swarming all around the Void hereabouts. If I opened a Gate now, there’d be dozens of them on us – maybe hundreds. Most of us wouldn’t make it through the Void – and several hundred would slide through on a fault-line that would run from Bakersfield probably as far as Mexico City. I can’t do that.”

“Swell. Is there a back way of here out through the tunnels?”

“Well, there is, but I wasn’t joking when I said we’re safer here. When the attack starts—” He checked his (stopped) watch, then licked his forefinger and held it up as if checking wind direction in the motionless darkness. “—we’ll need to get everyone down here, because they may very well bomb the tower—”

“Who will?”

“Whoever is behind this.” He widened his eyes at her. “They know we have a magic-worker with us – that’s why they shifted the enclave out of the zone of magic. I’m guessing they’ll use a physical attack this time. Most magic-based cultures become magic-dependant, so it’s unlikely we’ll have to deal with an airstrike, but they could very well have a catapult and some form of primitive explosive. Gunpowder isn’t that difficult to manufacture. Unless they’ve domesticated dragons.” He dug in his pocket for his yo-yo, did a couple of warm-up drops and then a sleeper, worriedly studying the results. “But dragons are extremely difficult to control without magic and it’s actually fairly rare you’ll find them used in combat. Things like griffins or wyverns are even more unreliable, though they’re far stupider – although the same could be said of the average politician. We shouldn’t—”

“So why did you agree to come down here?” asked Joanna. “Just so you could look at the Tarot and figure out what’s happening?”

“Oh, I know what’s happening.” He pocketed the yo-yo, scooped the cards into his hand and tucked them away as well. “I came down here so that the person our enemies actually want to kill could come and confess. And here he is.”

And he turned, with a pleased smile, to the dungeon door.

Wally Bickle blinked and raised his hand against the beam of light as Joanna swung around.

“Aliens from another universe are trying to assassinate a porn star?”

“Well,” said Antryg, “I don’t imagine he envisioned a career in adult entertainment when he left his own universe. Did you, your Grace?”

Wally slipped around the door-frame, padded silently forward and knelt in front of the wizard. “I didn’t think they’d ever find me,” he whispered.

Antryg flipped one of the cards from his pocket onto the floor between them, and Joanna recognized it from the spread: the Ten of Wands.

The man struggling under the weight of a burden which is almost more than he can bear.

“Prince?” Antryg raised his eyebrows, and Wally nodded.

As Archmage of the Council of Wizards, Antryg – Joanna reflected – would understand that there were more reasons than crime, to flee through the Void.

Both the Page and the King of Wands had been in the pattern as well, she recalled.

“Did you know it was me?”

“Oh, yes.” Antryg produced a length of string. “You were the first person who thought coming back here was a good idea: you knew we’d need defenses. And you were looking for ground-tracks of something invisible. Do you play cat’s cradle?”

Wally said, “Hunh???” but when Antryg had formed the initial cradle – to the actor (or prince)’s obvious mystification – Joanna showed Wally which pieces to draw out, to form the central opening. Antryg contemplated this for some time, then glanced back at the young man’s face. “So who is after you?”

“I think it’s gotta be my cousin.” Wally let his breath out in a shaky sigh. “Cherianth. She – and that poisonous aunt of hers – have been playing for the Scepter since my grandfather came to power fifty years ago. Nemlyth – House Kamog’s tame wizard – has some way of summoning other mages, dust-mages, from some other world, some other universe; nobody knows how strong he actually is. And I… I just let her have it. Have the power. Have the rulership of Tser Nyan. I saw what wielding the Scepter – wielding the Power – did to my father, and to my aunt. Having flesh cut out of him, to make a successor—”

Joanna exchanged a startled glance with Antryg, who widened his eyes and shook his head: Never heard of THAT one…

“—having his dreams manipulated, to keep the jemylath at bay…”

Through Antryg’s telepathic spells of comprehension, Joanna had an unclear glimpse of jemylath: dark, gelatinous, incompletely material and obscenely carnivorous, dwelling somewhere – Underground? Undersea? In dark desolation without light…

Distantly within that glimpse she seemed to hear screaming, and to smell the smell of death.

In a beaten voice, Wally concluded. “I couldn’t take it. Osnar – one of our House Mages – knew about… about other worlds. Other universes. Knew how to open the gate, with the right energies… And I swear we only sacrificed animals. A lot of animals, to get the gate to open, but we never used people…”

“WHAT???” Antryg stared at him in dismay.

“Blood,” said Wally, as if surprised he didn’t know about this. “Deaths. To get the gate to open between Universes. That’s not how you have to do it here?”

“No,” whispered Antryg, his face aghast in the reflection of Joanna’s flashlight. It was clearly something he’d never encountered before, in all his years of traversing the Void.

Joanna wondered suddenly if his old master, the evil Suraklin, had known that there were worlds where this was needed…

Wally’s mouth quirked. “Well,” he said bitterly. The dazzling handsomeness – the Johnny Depp cheekbones and Jimmy Dean eyes – were subtly changed by the look behind those eyes: desperation, grief, self-loathing at having run from a burden he couldn’t bear. “Good for you.”

“But if you just walked off and left Cousin Cherry in charge of the Scepter,” said Joanna matter-of-factly – because Antryg, for once in his life, was speechless, “—how come she’s coming after you?”

“It’s got to be the smallholders.” The young man’s voice sank to barely a whisper. “It’s got to be the marchers – the ones who actually rule the villages, who actually protect the lands from jemylath. Cherianth – House Kamog – they’re… They’re strong, but they’re not good people. They think they’re entitled… Well, they ruled the Lowlands for a dozen generations, and their war with the Highland Houses and the Sea-Lords just about tore the realm apart, before my grandfather suppressed them and united all the smallholders and the march-lords to drive back the jemylath, and let the people re-claim a lot of the land.”

His brows pulled down over the bridge of his nose, and he spoke slowly, memories he could barely bring himself to face. “The Kamogs have always taken the best – of the land, of the water, of the trade, of the food. They have enough of the King-blood, the god-blood, in them to be able to withstand the jemylath, and to make successors from their flesh. They said the people owed them obedience, and they’ll go to war for it, rather than use their forces to protect the lands from horror. I think the march-lords and the smallholders – I think Hesayn, my… my friend – rose against Cherianth and the Kamogs and have probably started looking for me, to… to give me back the Scepter. To return it to the rightful blood-line. To bring me home. And that’s why Cherianth wants to make sure she finds me first.”

Antryg said softly, “Ah.”

“I don’t want to go back.” Maybe he said the words in his own tongue – left behind years ago in his own world. Maybe it was just some effect of the spell of understanding that Antryg had long ago laid on her. But Joanna felt for a moment, behind his words, the dread of what waited for him there: the searing fatigue of having strength drained from his flesh, day after day; the endless, wary wranglings of innumerable councils; the burning focus of spells she couldn’t understand and the mental and physical exhaustion from which not even sleep could provide refuge.

Then from up the tunnel Daryl yelled, “What the fuck is that?”

Antryg stretched out his hand and no light appeared in his palm; he scooped up his sword and got to his feet in a single smooth movement. “Do your people have explosives?”

“Fireballs. And meppeth.”

The word translated into Joanna’s mind as animal auxiliaries, and she asked, as they dashed up the tunnel, “How big?”

Her question was answered a second later as they emerged into the circular room on the tower’s ground-floor, and four of the score of blue baboon-like things lunged at them, backed by two of the human warriors in dark leather body-armor re-enforced with plate. Antryg, the only one armed, used a jab and an almost surgical slash to disable two of the meppeth, then ducked back into the tunnel as three crossbow bolts flashed past Joanna’s head. In the room beyond she had a confused glimpse of a scrimmage around the door that led to the metal stairs to the upper floor. Three of the meppeth had Angel, and Ed stepped in and broke one of the newly-sharpened training-swords on the nearest creature’s neck-guard. Then there was a shattering roar from the shotgun, the whapping of crossbows, and Angel, her borrowed shirt in rags, leaped from her fallen captors, tripped as one of the things seized her, and was scooped up by Spacecookie (of all people) who bore her to the stairway door in his arms.

At almost the same moment Joanna heard Wally gasp, “Give me the sword,” and turning her head, saw him pull loose one of his golden medallions and press it into Antryg’s hand. “Osnar,” he gasped. “The mage who helped me… he’ll be with Hesayn…”

He caught up Antryg’s blade and dashed into the open room as warriors and meppeth converged on the door to the upper floor.

One of the first things he did on his way was stab – very neatly (They must have some form of sword training back on Krypton, Joanna thought) – the nearest of the human warriors through the neck-chinks of his armor. The man, though clearly not dead, was no longer in any shape to either fight or keep Joanna from grabbing his sword from him. Her intent had been to guard Wally’s back, but three warriors and two meppeth turned from the general fray and charged at her, and not being the stuff of which heroines were made, Joanna retreated into the tunnel again, slammed the door and threw the dead-bolt. (And I hope to Jesus one of those things didn’t sneak in here behind my back…)

“Antryg?”

No answer.

“Antryg!”

She found her flashlight, switched it on, and saw him sitting in the doorway of the dungeon, crooked hands folded tight around Wally’s gold medallion, head bowed and eyes closed.

Calling for re-enforcements…

His breath was harsh with emotion.

They use the power of deaths to open Gates…

The door jerked under violent impact, but the Marine Corps made its defenses stout. Even when the points of a dozen cross-bow bolts punched a quarter-inch out of the re-enforced composition surface like a pincushion, the door itself didn’t give. A moment later, smoke began to roll from beneath it. Somewhere in the room beyond Joanna heard the roar of the shotgun again, and kiai-yells she recognized as Ed, Daryl, and Lee, plus assorted curses and the yowling screeches of the meppeth.

Then the din increased, a confusion of noises and what sounded like battle-cries, and over it all a woman’s voice shouting “Arion! Arion!”

The door was blazing hot and flames began to lick through it. Joanna hefted her sword – twice the weight of a katana and straight-bladed – and threw a glance back at Antryg, still lost in his summoning…

“Joanna!” yelled Bill Podmore’s voice. “It’s us!”

The noise in the chamber beyond had quieted down, so Joanna wrapped her hand in one of the bandages from her first-aid kit and with gingerly speed threw the deadbolt back. Bill kicked the door in, and Joanna saw past him a scene of serious carnage.

Six meppeth lay dead, riddled with arrows, within a dozen feet of the tunnel door. Three warriors lay among them, including the one from whom she’d snatched her sword. He was dead now, his face still hidden by the molded leather mask that fronted his helmet. Blood made a sticky puddle under his head and throat. She wondered if he’d been bleeding to death even as she’d grabbed his weapon away from him. She couldn’t remember.

Ross Ventura lay dead beside the door that led out to the colonnade. He’d been shot through with four crossbow bolts. Several more leather-armored warriors – and about a dozen other meppeth – had evidently been killed near the door to the upstairs, shot in the back with gray-feathered arrows, not crossbow bolts. Eight more warriors – still masked, but disarmed – sat facing the wall, their hands clasped behind their necks, watched by two guards whom Joanna assumed to be the re-enforcements Antryg had summoned: one man, one woman, both armored in red leather and iron plating, both masked.

Bill’s face, sweat-streaked, was also spattered with blood. There was blood, too, on his Hawaiian shirt and hands, and the bandage someone had put over his gashed arm had come loose. He carried one of the enemy swords, and his face was grimly quiet. He’d seen worse. Beside him, Daryl – likewise blood-splattered – looked ill with shock.

Angel and Selena were hugging each other and sobbing quietly. Spacecookie was throwing up in a corner.

The remaining students, and Dana Kim, clustered together in front of a small phalanx of the red-armored warriors, whose leader had removed her mask to reveal a severe, rather strong-featured face framed in buzz-cut hair so baby-blonde as to be nearly invisible. She was looking in the direction of the tunnel door as Joanna and Antryg emerged. At her sign, two of her guards flanked them, and escorted them back to their comrades.

No meppeth, Joanna noticed, seemed to have survived. Programmed like war-dogs, to fight to the death? A wave of anger went through her, for that innocent unrewarded ferocity, and Antryg put an arm around her shoulders. She glanced up at his face and saw that he, too, had seen worse.

Every one of the dojo party – Shane included – turned to Antryg. You negotiate with these guys... Shane looked almost pleading. He had clearly had enough.

Maybe he’d had enough when Ross was killed.

Antryg gave Joanna’s shoulder a quick pat, then left her, and went to stand before the red-armored commander.

“How many people did you sacrifice in order to open a gate in the Void?” His velvety voice was quiet, but Joanna heard the anger that burned beneath it. At himself, at her, at the fact that their rescue had cost unknown lives.

“Five,” returned the woman calmly. “They were volunteers.”

“That makes no difference.”

“It makes a difference to those who’ve seen their parents, or husbands, or children taken by Nemlyth and the dust-mages who serve the House Kamog.” She regarded him with eyes like black coffee. When she turned her head, Joanna saw the stripe of an old burn-scar down the right side of her jaw. Flecks of white, as if she’d been spattered with acid, marked her temple on that side. “To those who fight in order to bring the true prince – the legitimate blood-line – back to our realm. It was you who summoned us, wizard.”

He looked aside, unable to bear the accusation.

In a quieter voice, she added, “And for that we thank you. We have been searching for two years.”

She held out her hand, and Antryg put into it the gold chain, and the pierced gold medallion that Wally had given to him. Her mouth tightened for a moment in pain as she touched it; then she closed it tight in her palm.

“It is something which we would have done, in any case.”

“Thank you.” His voice was barely audible. More steadily, he added, “I – and my companions – are deep in your debt.”

A small man of about Antryg’s age, robed in black and crimson and his long, curly brown beard faintly streaked with gray, stepped forward from among the warriors and reverently grasped the medallion. “Is Prince Arion here, then, Lady Hesayn? This is indeed the token my master Osnar gave him when he fled…”

Hesayn swept the group before her with her glance. Joanna saw her eyes meet Wally’s, and for a long moment they stood looking at one another. Then she, like Antryg, looked aside and said softly, “I do not see him, Pharnon, no.”

“He disappeared,” provided Joanna helpfully. “He gave that medallion to Antryg before the Kamog troops showed up, and said he’d found a way out of this place – I don’t know what it was.”

The bearded wizard’s face fell, and he pressed the medallion between his soft, white hands. “Shall we continue the search, Lady? Without the medallion he’ll be even harder to trace. Perhaps—” He turned to Antryg, “—my lord wizard will assist? Osnar and the others can shift this enclave back to the zone of power, if we contact them. We might—”

“She’s lying.” Wally stepped from among the little gang of iaido students, Antryg’s sword bloody in his hand, in his torn shirt and gold neck-chains and sweat-streaked fair hair looking every inch a prince (or a porn star). “Joanna, I thank you. Lord Antryg—”

He extended the sword to him, and Antryg took it quietly.

Then Wally – Prince Arion – went to stand before Hesayn, and their eyes met again. “I’m ready to come back,” he said softly. “Enough people have died through my cowardice, and more will die. And there really is no way to flee. I’m sorry.”

Turning, he faced Bill, and Dana, and the hysterically shivering Selena Rider. “There’s no way I can make amends to you, for the loss of your friends. For putting you all in such danger. I didn’t know this would happen. I didn’t know the arm of Nemlyth had grown so long, or the power of the House Kamog so great. Please…”

He looked back at Hesayn, and the scarlet-clothed wizard beside her. “Please, do what you can. Hesayn…” He stretched out his hand to her. “Forgive me, if you can.”

She extended her fingers to touch his. “I’ll be with you,” she promised softly. “You won’t be alone. I’m glad you’re coming home. Pharnon—” She moved her head, to address the mage at her elbow.

The bearded man nodded, and beckoned from the ranks of the warriors two others who were clearly, also, mages. One carried a satchel, from which she began to take glass tubes and what looked like a set of convex mirrors. To Antryg, Pharnon said, “We would appreciate your assistance, my lord. It’s a difficult spell, particularly since we’ll first have to shift the enclave back into the zone of power…”

For a long moment Antryg stood, looking around him at the blood on the floor and walls, the dead meppeth and men – and women, too, the shape of their breasts and hips barely discernible under the leathern armor. Ross Ventura’s body sprawled by the doorway where he’d been shot. His fellow students, clustered and staring at him with shocked, uncertain eyes, seeing this gangly amiable hippie, in his love-beads and rhinestone earrings, as something wholly unsuspected…

Antryg raised a hand, Wait… to them and to Hesayn and her wizards. Then he took Joanna by the shoulders and led her back toward the entrance of the tunnel. When they were out of earshot of the others he asked her, very softly, “My dear, do you want to remember any of this, or not?”

Joanna stared up at him, aghast. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re going to alter everyone’s memories. Veil them. There’s nothing that can be done – for Ross, for Rob… no more than for any of the dead here who served these Kamog people…”

“Can you do that?” For a horrified moment she recalled the days when first she’d known him, when she hadn’t known what he was capable of, or whether what she saw or felt was illusion…

“Not myself, no. Any more than I can create an enclave like this one, or shift it back and forth from zones of magic to zones of emptiness. Just as well, really,” he added after a moment. “There are things I would probably try to remove from my own memory… and that’s never a good idea for a mage.”

Nights returned to her, when she’d wake to find him sitting in his workroom staring out the window into the dark of the hills. Other nights, when he’d waken her crying out in dreams, when he’d cling to her in frantic desperation.

Her anger faded, but she said, “It isn’t right. Just to… to forget them. I didn’t know either Ross or Rob, but they had families, friends…”

The wizard nodded. “Would it help,” he asked, “if those friends knew that Ross was shot in a stupid fracas with alien warriors? That Rob was torn apart by abominations from the Void? Would knowing that give them comfort?”

“I don’t know.” She knew it would give her no comfort, were she to lose her father, or her friend Ruth, or others she knew…

“And I suspect,” Antryg went on gently, “that the reason Pharnon and his colleagues are taking the trouble to veil the memories of those present is to keep this Nemlyth and his dust-mages – who seem to be as skilled as my old master Suraklin was, or more so, in manipulating the Void – from tracing Prince Arion’s friends in his exile, and capturing them to use against him.”

And when Joanna stared at him in shock – in spite of Shane’s earlier suggestion this possibility hadn’t even crossed her mind – he added, “When veil-mirror spells are used, the mind of the subject will sometimes fill in a story of events – rather like persistence of vision bridging the still frames of a motion-picture film into the illusion of actual motion, if I understand what you’ve told me about it. What Selena will remember about her parting from Ross – what Bill will recall of why Rob Tarvell didn’t come home from the desert with him – may not involve their deaths. They’ll simply be… gone.”

He laid his bandaged hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know if that will be better or worse, my dear. For you, or for them. I’m sorry.” And after a long silence he added bitterly, “As a wizard, I find myself saying that a lot.”

“So I’ll come up with an explanation in my own mind what happened out here?”

“You may. Or it may simply be a blank. It will for most of them.”

“And would you tell me?”

He moved his head slightly: No. “I’d simply pretend it was a blank for me, too. Because I’d know it was what you chose.”

“But you’d remember.”

A haunted look – a glimmer of horrors Joanna could not imagine – passed like a momentary shadow across his gray eyes. “I always remember.”

Do all wizards wake up screaming in the dark?

She put her hand on his wrist, and repeated what Hesayn had said to her fugitive prince: “I’ll be with you. You won’t be alone.”

*

Antryg took her into the dungeon, sat her down in a corner with her flashlight, and drew a complex double-circle around her with the colored chalks that he carried in his pockets. (Most of their mutual laundry bore streaks and smudges of accidental pinks and greens). “This won’t take long,” he promised, and left Joanna to disturbing visions of what might happen if the evil Nemlyth and his dust-mages (What the hell IS a dust-mage?) showed up and carried off the whole company in the Fortress – warriors, wizards, Prince Arion and Commander Hesayn, cast and crew – and nobody ever came back for her…

How long should I wait?

What if Nemlyth and the dust-mages open a gate in the Void to drag everyone away and abominations show up here, as they did in the cars…?

What ARE we going to do about the cars anyway…?

No wonder Antryg has nightmares…

As near as she could estimate (she kept losing the thread of “The Raven” because of noises from the room at the end of the tunnel) it was a half-hour before she heard Antryg call softly to her, “Joanna?” Glancing automatically at her wrist, she saw that her watch had started again.

Started at 11:17, not the blinking 00:00 of a re-set.

The dead meppeth – the dead men and women who had been sent by House Kamog to kill the rightful heir to the Scepter, and those who had been killed fighting at their command – Ross Ventura among them – all those were gone. The only blood on the floor was the fake gore spilled so copiously in the rightful heir’s terrific battle with the minions of the Golden Scorpion.

Outside, it was dark, the overcast broken to show cold silver-blue moonlight, and a star-blanketed desert sky.

The little company of students, actresses, and cinematographers didn’t return to mental focus for nearly three hours. During the long walk to the cars – the charred ruin of the second van was missing, too – they seemed to be moving in a dream, responding if spoken to but volunteering nothing in the way of movement or action. Only when they’d settled into a large corner booth – and ordered – at the Denny’s in San Bernardino did Ed look suddenly across at Angel and say, “When did I lend you my shirt?” He himself had been provided with Bill’s spare sweatshirt out of the back of the van, and the rips and holes in Angel’s attire inadequately covered by a shawl that Sherry had left in the trunk of Shane’s Caddy.

Daryl pointed to Antryg and asked, “What’d you do to your hand?” His gaze went to Bill and his dark eyes widened. “And your arm?”

Bill – in a spare dojo t-shirt – moved his arm, winced, and regarded the fresh field-dressing with shocked confusion.

Selena – suffering the effects of a punishing hangover – whispered “What… What happened?”

And none of them knew.

They realized it was three o’clock on Sunday morning, the fifteenth of May (Joanna had surreptitiously checked the newspaper as they’d come in from the parking lot) – all their stopped watches had started up again reading the same – correct – time. None of them remembered anything after about five the previous afternoon, when they’d been packing up to leave the Devil’s Fortress.

Sherry had the impression that there’d been a quarrel of some kind and that Ross Ventura, Wally Bickle, and Rob Tarvell – who had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was known to be at something of a loose end in his life – had headed off to Vegas in the second van. She had a dim memory of Shane threatening somebody with his shotgun – which, when later checked, proved to have been fired and not cleaned. Beyond that, nobody had any recollection of actually leaving the Devil’s Fortress, or of the drive back to I-40… or of what had transpired in the eight hours between those two points. They were baffled, awed, uneasy…

And, as the enormity of the event sank in, thrilled to death.

Joanna ate her hot fudge sundae in silence.

Thinking about what those hungry for power would probably do with whatever friends of Prince Arion they could get their hands on – drag back through the Void as hostages – Joanna understood that this was for the best.

But she still felt angry, and sad.

*

In the ensuing month, the police interviewed Bill, Ed, Dana Kim, Shane, and Sherry about the events of that weekend – Rob’s ex-wife and Ross Ventura’s agent had both filed Missing Person reports – so the Dragon Fist Thirteen (as Spacecookie persisted in referring to them) agreed to back Sherry’s recollection of the events leading to the disappearance of the three men. But Angel showed Bill scratches on her arms and chest that couldn’t be accounted for – not to speak of Bill’s gashed arm and Ed Ashmead’s shredded Hawaiian shirt – and Shane pointed out to everyone in the dojo the small acid burn on his wrist and the queer, slobbery streaks where acid had eaten through the twenty-four coats of hand-rubbed lacquer on the Titanic’s emerald flanks.

“Something happened out there in the desert,” he said portentously. “Something we can’t remember…”

Spacecookie’s VW also had acid streaks, though they were less easy to distinguish given the general state of the rest of the filthy and rust-pocked paint-job. He, too, pointed them out with pride, and claimed to remember: The green lights in the sky, the way everyone’s watches had stopped, the childlike gray-skinned aliens, the brilliant interior of the spaceship, the intensive questioning and the invasive medical procedures. He was eventually interviewed on the Hour 25 Science Fiction Radio show on the strength of it.

The only thing Spacecookie did not seem to recall was rescuing the half-undressed Angel Valentine from the claws of the meppeth, or carrying her to safety in his arms. (“Which,” Antryg sighed, after the fiftieth time of hearing Spacecookie relate his saga at a dojo party, “is probably just as well.”)

Joanna never heard what actually became of Prince Arion: whether he succeeded in defending his people against the jemylath, whether he and Hesayn managed to defeat his vile cousin and House Kamog. She hoped that wherever he was, he was happy… or as happy as he could be in the circumstances.

Did they Veil HIS mind?

She wondered if he ever dreamed of Los Angeles. Or woke sobbing in his sleep.

Antryg, she knew, had traced most of those who’d known Wally Bickle in LA, and quietly kept an eye on them. Evidently the veil spells of Hesayn’s wizards had their effect, for nothing untoward happened to any of them. Joanna could only hope that meant that Nemlyth and his dust-mages had come to a bad end.

And the following year, Bill Podmore wrote, produced, and directed the low-budget cult classic film, Karate Masters Versus the Invaders From Outer Space, starring Angel Valentine.

Based, said the ads, Upon True Events.

*See: “And Pretty Maids All In A Row”

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, 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.