The current was more definite here, although the swells and smaller waves washing back from the river into the city were becoming more pronounced. Max swam ahead along the channel. A flickering source of purple light approached on his right: then, lifted by a wave, Max saw a crackling shaft of lacy violet about ten feet long hanging just above the water, rolling absently with the swells - a piece of the flood barrier matrix. He passed it with a deliberate distance to spare. The shredded remains of the rest of the flood barrier web slipped by underneath, then a ragged section of wharf. Max pulled up, treading water, raised his head above the surface, and pursed his lips in thought, for ahead of him in the river, the half-moon rising now in silhouette beyond it, was the castle of the Death.
The rock groundwork and most of the outer walls had sunk beneath the water, and of course the main entrance as well. Since the side of the castle facing Roosing Oolvaya was the one canted over at an angle, the crenellated top of the curtain wall was only ten feet above the water level, low enough for the larger waves to ride completely over it. Max lifted his hand into the air and tentatively sketched a string of compact characters. He hadn’t tried this before, but the principle was well-founded; there was no reason it shouldn’t work. The characters flowed together, melting and merging, and wound into an open circlet of soft silver, a smaller solid disc hanging from it; Max lowered the circlet over his head, resting it above his brow, and positioned the solid disc in front of his left eye.
While the disc appeared solid, it was still massless and immaterial, and so passed smoothly through the truly solid form of the face-mask that was also in front of Max’s eye. Through the viewing disc the castle appeared brighter and the water less distinct. The foundation and the submerged walls were clearly discernable ahead and below, and at their heart the dark pool of energy interwoven with the matrix of the rock. Fine black tendrils ran up through the castle, infiltrating the walls and internal airspace like nerves or branching capillaries. The image had the pulse of a heartbeat rhythm, shifting proportion and perspective amorphously with each regular surge: beat - the castle went depth-negative, reversing its dimensions, so that the side arcing toward Max seemed to suddenly embed itself in space and curve away - beat - side and front structures superimposed themselves, crowding each other in an irregular mapping - beat - shift, change - beat - shift, change. Unfortunately this wasn’t the information Max was looking to find out, since at the moment he was interested more in traps, and viewing things from the perspective of the second quantum level was quickly giving him a headache to boot. The near point of the castle was only fifty yards away but that was apparently too far for such details as trap nodes. He could see one area of reasonable detail, though - the red smoke-ring circling the topmost tower. Through the quantum lens, the red fireball was a spray of hot anthropomorphic shapes and mad field lines wound about with arching helices. Max didn’t know whether that meant the Death was calming down or getting ready to run amok, or what, but the image certainly didn’t look serene. Another thing he was looking to find, that he hadn’t been able to see either, was the location of Roni and Karlini and the rest of their gang.
Max flipped the lens up on its circlet and nosed over into the water. A wave came up behind him, lifting him as he paddled. Would it be high enough? … it was. The wave broke against the curtain wall of the castle, but Max was riding it toward its peak; he slipped with the crest between two square crenellation stones, across a small lagoon covering an underwater courtyard, and washed up next to the interior wall facing onto the yard, just below a window. He pulled himself up on the sill, saw nothing inside, and rolled through.
The floor was awash to ankle-depth but the room was empty. Max crossed it quickly, trying not to splash, positioned his lens again in front of his eye, eased open the door, and peeked out onto a flat landing off a circular staircase. The same sheet of shallow water covered the landing. A deeper pool hooded the descending stairs, large bubbles bursting on its surface. A low orange glow suffused up through the water from some unseen source below. In the vague light Max’s right eye made out the features of stair and stone resting quietly and apparently inert. His left eye could see the scene more distinctly through the lens, but the viewer revealed no sign of greater activity. He moved up the stairs.
Through the lens, the stairs rippled and revolved, seeming to suddenly point down when he was still obviously going up, abruptly receding to a distance of miles and then popping back to sit atop his nose. He passed a room on his right; his right eye saw it as a simple sitting chamber but his left added a churning blue disc hanging in the air at neck-level. Additional rooms passed on the left, the staircase coiled tighter and steepened its pitch, and then the wall opened on the right into a level corridor. Max took a step toward the corridor and froze. The corridor was constricting about thirty feet ahead, drawing together from all four sides like a soft tube pinched around by fingers; his left eye saw it and his right eye saw it too. In the center of the constriction zone dangled a small kaleidoscopic vortex. Max spun back to the staircase and froze again. Something from below was following him rapidly up the steps.
Max backed warily upward. Give me a break, already, he thought, I don’t have time to waste like this. He had to find Karlini - an orange glow spread up the stairs, strobing with the heartbeat rhythm of the castle. A distant tremor ran through the floor. Max glanced around, behind him, down - DOWN! He flung himself back, scrabbling convulsively upward, as a twisted mass festooned with pincers and shining with a sick orange glare sprang up through the stone floor itself and spun toward him. Max flung a destabilizer at it, followed by a barrier disk; the disk folded twice along sudden orange creases and toppled melting to the floor while the destabilizer dart degraded into a pile of tiny leaves that hung fluttering in the air; the orange thing pulsed again and changed, gaining several long-stalked eyes with multiple pupils and a set of mobile jaws; and Max turned and ran full-tilt away from it up the stairs. A turn-and-a-half above, the staircase ended at a dead-wall landing. A single doorway opened to one side.
The construct was right behind him, now sporting a dragging tail and ventral fins. The walls around Max as seen through the lens were squirming with life, the veins of black energy in them throbbing with knots of slipping silver. Half-a-dozen veins had leapt out from the walls and were embedded in the orange construct, feeding it silver globs - that gave Max an idea. He backed through the door, trading maneuver room for time while his fingers wove in the air. He had entered a circular chamber twenty feet across with a peaked ceiling and several open windows, an observation turret slapped onto the side of the major tower. The orange creature shot after him, its pincers gnashing, but missed the doorway and plowed into the wall. That didn’t stop it; with a grinding growl a five-foot section of stone next to the door exploded into gravel and smoky dust, and the creature pushed its way into the room. The thing’s half-dozen eyes turned to face him.
It had been a long time since Max had worked this particular kind of transformation and it was a complicated one to boot, but the technique was coming back. He pumped activation potential into the transmutation bridge – there, he had it! The air curdled behind the creature. A foot-long section of each dancing feeding tube turned gold, then yellow, then gray; the construct paused, three of the eyes whirling to peer around behind it; and the tubes of energy began to stretch and fall toward the floor like wisps of smoke suddenly possessed of solid weight. That was in fact close to the truth; Max had gotten them with a solidification bridge that was warping mass into their immaterial matrix structure. Two of the veins cracked in mid-air and splintered. The creature was waving its pincers around, lights and refractive effects sparkling around them as it snapped off wards and counterfields, but the bridges had their contacts firmly bound and with its power rapidly declining the creature couldn’t shake them. Its orange color faded toward a translucent yellow. Then the eyes wobbled up to peer at Max and one of the hanging mouths broke into a nasty grin. The construct grabbed at the solidification bands, reversed its own polarity, and yanked. A wave of accretion poured along the feeding veins and burst through the construct in a surge of pulsing gray.