No. It would not forsake him after all their ages together.
That just could not happen. Its recent behavior had to be just time catching up.
The animal was getting old despite being immortal.
He stared across the strait. There lay a long trek back to civilization along a harsh route. That boy, the Deliverer, had managed it but the devastation he had left behind guaranteed that no one would again until the complexion of the earth changed and a new climate embraced this part.
Star Rider’s scheme was springing leaks. Only two demons remained. Success could require all four iron statues. Two might not be enough to dilute Varthlokkur’s strange sorcery. And the wizard would not be alone.
Improvisation had become imperative.
He was not good at making it up on the fly, despite so much experience. He was a master of the long, slow, complex machination, shogi with a thousand pieces.
He no longer knew real fear. Nothing had threatened him mortally in so long that he had lost the emotions surrounding the event. Last time of maximum risk had been during the Nawami Crusades. He was uneasy, though. Definitely uneasy.
Little had gone well this past year, up to and including the last five minutes. There was no reason to expect his luck to turn around.
The new year was close, though, and the changing of the years always brought new hope. That was what new years were for. Not so?
He made sure he had the remaining demons under absolute control, then herded his companions down a long stair to a weathered court. A stiff-stepping iron statue missed its footing and tumbled, grinding and clanking, taking the fall alone. A human in the same straits would have grabbed at anyone and anything to save itself. It rose from the flagging wearing only a few new scratches. It waited on Old Meddler and the rest, then followed, creaking worse than before.
Old Meddler surveyed his surroundings. Curious. These fortifications had existed when first he had come to Ehelebe. Time had inflicted few changes. The dust was thicker. The sandy decomposition surfacing the building stone was just a little crustier.
Nowhere had so much as one plant taken root. Other abandoned places suffered the assault of vegetation beginning the moment its caretakers went away. In a few generations a mighty city could subside into jungle entirely, vanishing before its legends could fade.
Plants did not strive to reclaim this place, nor did any animal. Birds refused to nest, yet swarmed the cliffs across the strait. Every species of mammal but Man shunned the place. Bugs and spiders were rare. The few were warped compared to their mainland cousins. Only scorpions and some things with a thousand legs appeared to prosper.
Once inside, Old Meddler caught a scent that did not belong, body odor from someone who ate mostly rice and smoked fish. An ascetic, perhaps, who had visited recently.
His nose had saved him before. He trusted it completely.
The odor was unremarkable. He associated it with older Tervola. It had been there last visit, not as fresh, dissimilar enough to have been left by a different individual.
Tervola must be frequent visitors. But which? And why? Was the place being scouted as a possible secret base? It had served that purpose before. Some middle-level Tervola conspirator? The only access was by transfer portal. Only the Dread Empire owned those.
Yes. The woman ruling there would be a red flag to half the Tervola. Where better to plot an end to that abomination?
Too bad he was locked into this, which demanded swift resolution. Otherwise, he could sit here like a trapdoor spider, snapping up conspirators, adding them to his inventory of fools. Tools.
He heard a humming that could only be a live portal.
He headed for the kitchen area. It was there that he had seen workable portals last time. Could someone be there? Those portals had been too small to pass an adult. The man-size ones, in theory, could only be activated from the other end.
The racket his crowd made would have to have been heard. The hum might be somebody making a getaway.
He sent a demon ahead, backed by an iron statue. The demon, shrunken down to a beetle of human size, entered the kitchen walking upright on unnaturally robust rear legs, feeling the air ahead with antennae half as long as it was tall. Its wings lay on its back like fitted plate, polished purple-black. The statue, the one that had fallen earlier, clanked behind clumsily, right leg squealing as it dragged through the first few inches of each step. It had not been maintained. Old Meddler wished there had been time for an overhaul. There had been no time for years. Not a minute to invest in routine upkeep. Too often, not a minute for desperately needed sleep.
This task had become impossible once he lost his ancient associate.
A bad choice made, that time.
Old Meddler seldom acknowledged mistakes, even to himself. He did not make mistakes. He was who he was. He was what he was. He could not make mistakes.
Even so, that sloppy choice had cost him like none other since the cluster that got him sentenced to this hell. It had, worse, cost him the closest thing he had to a friend.
So now the Old Man was dead. All that he had done to help, when he had been awake, had piled itself onto Old Meddler’s weary shoulders.
So. There was no time for maintenance. No time for anything but handling the crisis of the moment.
Retina-blistering emerald light flared. A green shaft ripped through the demonic beetle, hit the iron statue in the right abdomen. Chunks of demon chitin flew, revealing the inside of the thing’s wing case to be orange and the body beneath as red and orange. Stuff flew off the iron statue, too. It staggered back a long step, leaning slightly, like a man kicked in the gut.
That flying stuff might have been globules of molten metal. They splattered, then hardened quickly.
This was not possible.
Blindness came.
He did not panic. He knew flash blindness was not permanent. He had lost vision this way before. He would recover, not as quickly as he might like. But…
That bolt, however generated, had immense power behind it, of a level not seen since… No, even the Nawami Crusades had produced no blast savage enough to pierce the frontal armor of an iron statue. Had it? This world had seen nothing like this. Someone had tapped directly into…
He could not concentrate. His eyes hurt. The pain threatened to become the focus of his existence. Despite past experience he had trouble managing his fear of blindness-though he must remain calm and controlled. He was deeply vulnerable at this moment, even with demons and iron statues to shield him.
The event had not been an attack. He understood that when no follow-up came. The demon had triggered some trap. Maybe there was competition for this place. Underground movement often wasted energy on internecine murder rather than battle the object of rebellion.
Or maybe he had been expected. That would explain the magnitude of the blast.
Unlikely, though. There was no way anyone could have predicted his visit. Some overly bright Tervola was determined to make a convincing statement to any fellow Tervola who stumbled onto his handiwork.
One of those master sorcerers had found the golden key, a way to suck power off the transfer streams. Must have. The dream had been out there for ages. No lesser source could have delivered that emerald violence.
Had he truly seen molten metal fly? He did now recall a similar instance in one rare moment where the Great One had chosen to inject himself directly into the Nawami conflict.
The Great One had used power stolen from the transfer streams. He had made himself a god by finding the way, and later became a denizen of the transfer streams, existing in all eras simultaneously while also constituting a parallel, prior entity in the world outside. The Great One inside had been the Great One the Dread Empire defeated in the eastern waste. Shinsan had gone on to root his fetch out and engineer its annihilation-though not before it reached back and fathered itself in an age long gone.