“Did you bring the ring?” Karlini said, heading up a long flight of stairs. The castle was quieter in this section, and the space-warping effects and perceptual illusions that had hit Max lower down were much less flagrant. A wall rippled and changed texture on the left, but the stairs were stable.
“No, damn it; it disappeared in the mess when the Death got out. You were wrong, you know - there was only one Death, not two. Just the Death from this castle, and Oskin Yahlei using his power.”
“But you don’t have the ring.”
“I did the best I could. It’ll make the confinement more difficult but I think we can still pull it off. While I’m doing the incarceration, you’ll set the jump engines to trigger off a time-decay fuse-”
“Where are we going to send the castle?”
“We don’t want to drop it on another populated area, what it’s done to Roosing Oolvaya’s been enough. I’m sure there isn’t enough power around to throw it into orbit ... probably the safest place is the middle of the ocean.”
“It may be simpler to return it to wherever it started from in the first place,” Karlini said, coming out the top of the stairs and charging to the right along a hallway; the ceiling of the hall was shifting between gray stone and a translucent gauze-like substance that glowed bright yellow. “I think that location’s programmed into the mechanism.”
“Fine,” said Max. “You set the jump engine to activate however you want, as long as we have enough time to get out of here first, and while we’re getting out I’ll deal with your hook-field; the power flux should be low enough by then to be able to shake you loose. Well, what do you think, is it all going to work?”
Karlini paused at the foot of a new circular stair leading up into a tower opening off their current hall and glanced back over his shoulder at Max. “You’re the expert in gods, not me. What do you think?”
“… Iffy,” Max said. “I don’t really understand all the guts of this second-level stuff yet, and we’ll be trying some pretty complicated manipulcations. I don’t know if we’ll have enough power to make up for the inexperience.”
“Are there any alternatives?”
“I do have one other idea, but I don’t even want to try it unless we absolutely have to.”
“… One of those.”
“Yeah,” Max said, “it’s one of those, all right.”
Karlini had cocked his head and closed his eyes, apparently listening to something somewhere else. He opened his eyes, straightened again, and squared his shoulders. “Roni and Wroclaw are pulling away,” he said. “This is it, then.”
“Right.” Max had been sketching in the air, and now another headband with vision-disc settled over Karlini’s brow. Through the lenses, they could see giant cables of winding black coming together from all parts of the surrounding structure and funneling upward through the tower walls, coiling around each other and merging together as they rose toward the tower’s peak and the mad Death. Max dragged an armchair away from an end-table in the hall, plopped it down at the base of the stairs, and began making passes over it. One of his coupling-intermediary disk-formations took shape above the seat cushion.
Static charge crackled - another of the heartbeat change-pulses. The stone walls heaved in a long rippling wave like the snap of a whip; behind them, the hall they’d just used as an entrance folded in on itself ceiling-first in a cloud of billowing dust. “That was our exit!” Karlini yelled over the noise.
“We’ll blast through the outside wall and jump if we have to!” Max yelled back.
Karlini’s reply was drowned out by another massive rumble. The floor rocked forward, back, then subsided into a low shudder, several degrees of new tilt added onto its previous downhill slant. The armchair had been enveloped in a swarm of darting blue mites as the disc split and split again, and Max could feel its energy beginning to flow through the transformer coupling into his own body. Max leaned in through the tower entry and glanced up; through his lens he could see red waves of pulsatile light spilling down from above, the staircase seeming to writhe and snap like a plucked string. He reached gingerly upward with a passive probe - yes, the mad god was still there, still gathering strength through the black cables, but also apparently still unaware of their presence below. With a muscle-wrenching pass over the chair, he started to formulize the framework for the first confinement shell.
Karlini had one palm pressed flat against the stone of the wall, his teeth clenched in concentration; his other hand was carefully sketching figures in the air. The figures were oozing from magenta to silver, losing their separate forms and breaking into small round plates like scales. The scales spun away from Karlini in the shape of a miniature tornado and began to fill in the surface of a large glistening teardrop-shaped glob suspended next to him. A ripple ran through the glob and it started to oscillate, its form sliding from long and thin to short and plump and back again like a pool of hanging quicksilver, its colors reversing figure-for-ground at each pulse; then all at once the glob surged forward and flowed into the wall. Just as it entered the wall the pool fractured into a sudden cloud of smaller droplets. Each droplet darted toward one of the coiling black cables and sunk into it, and began to spiral down along the cable toward the heart of the castle. “Are you ready, Max?” Karlini said.
A nestled series of counter-rotating meshwork spheres hung over the remains of the chair, apparently forming one continuous surface communicating along twisted shifting boreholes. “Yeah, almost,” Max said, “but I’m still a little out of range. I want to get closer.”
“Better move it, then; we should see something from the stability points in under a minute … what’s that?”
The sphere-construct had moved ahead of Max and was floating up the stairs to the tower. A rolling blue cloud finished condensing around Max’s hand; he made a final pass above the cloud with his other hand and the cloud heaved and took off, trailing a line of knotted blue behind it like a fishing line. The cloud banked for a quick turn once around Karlini and then dove straight into his chest. Blue smoke puffed out around his torso. The blue line had stretched out across the room, growing wispy and almost invisible against the stone, but it became distinct again where it terminated in a solid blue bracelet locked hard around Max’s wrist. “If we have to bail out before I get back down I might have to crack you loose by remote,” Max yelled to Karlini, now following the sphere up the stairs, “and I think we’ll have enough going on without having to run a fresh spell-guide too!”
“Okay!” Karlini said, his voice ringing in along the blue line. “Be careful!”
“Yeah,” Max muttered. His whole body was tingling from the slug of energy he’d absorbed from the chair; he’d have to use that energy soon or blow it off, or he’d go unstable himself. Another turn up the stairs, and the red glow from the top was becoming harsh in its glare. Black coils of power surged up around him through the walls. Max stretched out, felt around - yeah, there was the Death, all right, still orbiting the tower and sucking in power from the castle. Max tugged at the confinement sphere, adjusting control parameters. The sphere broke apart, segment by segment and layer by layer in a quick radial stream, the fragments shot toward the walls and dove through them to merge with the black current, and the disassembled pieces shot upward toward the mad Death.
“Here it goes!” came Karlini’s voice, and at the same moment the stairs lurched underfoot. A rending groan so low in pitch that Max felt rather than heard it vibrated through the stone. Riding on top of the groan was a throbbing whine, pulsating out-of-time and out-of rhythm against the heartbeat pattern of the castle as a whole. A wave ran up the black energy coils; their progression speeded up, slowed. reversed, surged forward, stopped, and went into a pattern of quick jerks back and forth. Max felt out again and snarled - the Death had sucked up part of his confinement matrix along with his power feed, but not enough of it for full activation.