“Okay. Sound thinking, for a lunatic.” Barney wiped his eyes. “Damn, I must be allergic to something here.”
Janice didn’t weep alone when we bade good-bye. And within me paced the grave thought:
—No more may I aid you, Steven Pavlovitch, Virginia Williamovna, Janos Farkasovitch, and cat who surely has a soul of his own. Now must I become a mere watcher and recorder, for the sake of nothing except my curiosity. I will not burden you with the grief this causes me. You will not be further aware of my presence. May you fare with God’s blessing.
I felt him depart from the conscious part of my mind like a dream that fades as you wake and try to remember. Soon he was only something good that had happened to me for a couple of hours. Or no, not entirely. I suspect what calm I kept in the time that followed was due to his unsensed companionship. He couldn’t help being what he was.
Holding our brooms, Ginny and I walked hand in hand to the Nexus. Svartalf paced ahead. At the midpoint of the figure, we halted for a kiss and a whisper before we slipped the masks on. Our people cast the spell. Again the chamber filled with night. Energies gathered. Thunder and earthquake brawled. I hung onto my fellows lest we get separated. Through the rising racket, I heard my witch read from the parchment whereon stood the name Victrix, urging us toward her through diabolic space-time.
The room, the world, the stars and universes began to rotate about the storm’s eye where we stood. Swifter and swifter they turned until they were sheer spinning, the Grotte quern itself. Then was only a roar as of great waters. We were drawn down the maelstrom. The final glimpse of light dwindled with horrible speed, and when we reached infinity, it was snuffed out. Afterward came such twistings and terrors that nothing would have sent us through them except our Valeria Victrix.
XXXII
I must have blanked out for a minute or a millennium. At least, I became aware with ax-chop abruptness that the passage was over and we had arrived.
Wherever it was.
I clutched Ginny to me. We searched each other with a touch that quivered and found no injuries. Svartalf was hale too. He didn’t insist on attention as he normally would. Bolyai made him pad in widening spirals, feeling out our environment.
With caution I slipped off my mask and tried the air. It was bitterly cold, driving in a wind that sought to the bones, but seemed clean—sterile, in fact.
Sterility. That was the whole of this place. The sky was absolute and endless black, though in some fashion we could see stars and ugly cindered planets, visibly moving in chaotic paths; they were pieces of still deeper darkness, not an absence but a negation of light. We stood on a bare plain, hard and gray and flat as concrete, relieved by nothing except scattered boulders whose shapes were never alike and always hideous. The illumination came from the ground, wan, shadowless, colorless. Vision faded at last into utter distance. For that plain had no horizon, no interruptions; it went on. The sole direction, sound, movement, came from the drearily whistling wind.
I’ve seen some abominations in my time, I thought, but none to beat this . . . No. The worst is forever a changeling in my daughter’s crib.
Ginny removed her mask too, letting it hang over the closed bottle like mine. She shuddered and hugged herself. The dress whipped around her. “I w-w-was ready to guard against flames,” she said. It was as appropriate a remark as most that are made on historic occasions.
“Dame described the seventh circle of the Inferno as frozen,” I answered slowly. “There’s reason to believe he knew something. Where are we?”
“I can’t tell. If the name spell worked, along with the rest, we’re on the same planet—if ‘planet’ means a lot here-as Val will be, and not too far away.” We’d naturally tried for a beforehand arrival.
“This isn’t like what the previous expeditions reported.”
“No. Nor was our transition. We used different rituals, and slanted across time to boot. Return should be easier.”
Svartalf disappeared behind a rock. I didn’t approve of that. “Kammen Sie zuriick!” I shouted into the wind. “Retournez-vous!” I realized that, without making a fuss about it, Lobachevsky had prior to our departure impressed on me fluent French and German. By golly, Russian too!
“Meeowr-r,” blew back. I turned. The cat was headed our way from opposite to where he’d been. “What the dickens?” I exclaimed.
“Warped space,” Ginny said. “Look.” While he trotted steadily, Svartalf’s path wove as if he were drunk. “A line where he is must answer to a curve elsewhere. And he’s within a few yards. What about miles off?”
I squinted around. “Everything appears straight.”
“It would, while you’re stationary. Br-r-r! We’ve got to get warmer.”
She drew the telescoping wand from her purse. The star at its tip didn’t coruscate here; it was an ember. But it made a lighted match held under our signatures and Svartalf s paw-print generate welcome heat in our bodies. A bit too much, to be frank; we started sweating. I decided the hell universe was at such high entropy-so deep into thermodynamic decay-that a little potential went very far.
Svartalf arrived. Staring uneasily over the plain, I muttered, “We haven’t met enough troubles. What’re we being set up for?”
“We’ve two items in our favor,” Ginny said. “First, a really effective transfer spell. Its influence is still pereceptible here, warding us, tending to smooth out fluctuations and similarize nature to home. Second, the demons must have known well in advance where and when the earlier expeditions would come through. They’d ample time to fix up some nasty tricks. We, though, we’ve stolen a march.” She brushed an elflock from her brow and added starkly: “I expect we’ll get our fill of problems as we travel.”
“We have to?”
“Yes. Why should the kidnaper make re-entry at this desert spot? We can’t have landed at the exact point we want. Be quiet while I get a bearing.”
Held over the Victrix parchment, the proper words sung, her dowser pointed out an unequivocal direction. The scryer globe remained cloudy, giving us no hint of distance or look at what lay ahead. Space-time in between was too alien.
We ate, drank, rested what minutes we dared, and took off. Ginny had the lead with Svartalf on her saddlebow, I flew on her right in echelon. The sticks were cranky and sluggish, the screenfields kaput, leaving usd exposed to the wind from starboard. But we did loft and level off before the going got tough.
At first it was visual distortion. What I saw—my grasp on the controls, Svartalf, Ginny’s splendid fig ure, the stones underneath—rippled, wavered, widened, narrowed, flowed from one obscene caricature of itself to a worse. Gobs of flesh seemed to slough off, hang in drops, stretch thin, break free and disappear. Sound altered too; the skirl turned into a cacophony of yells, buzzes, drones, fleetingly like words almost understandable and threatening, pulses too dip to hear except with the body’s automatic terror reaction. “Don’t pay heed!” I called. “Optical effects, Doppler—” but no message could get through that gibbering.
Suddenly my love receded. She whirled from me like a blown leaf. I tried to follow, straight into the blast that lashed tears from my eyes. The more rudder I gave the broom, the faster our courses split apart. “Bolyai, help!” I cried into the aloneness. It swallowed me.
I slid down a long wild curve. The stick would not pull out of it. Well, flashed through my fear, I’m not in a crash dive, it’ll flatten a short ways above—
And the line of rocks athwart my path were not rocks, they were a mountain range toward which I catapulted. The gale laughed in my skull and shivered the broom beneath me. I hauled on controls, I bellowed the spells, but any change I could make would dash me on the ground before I hit those cliffs.