"Do not be impertinent, Pog." The wizard directed Talea to stop. He dismounted,
looked around. "We walk from now on."
Packages and supplies were doled out, stuffed into backpacks. Then they started
uphill. The rise they were ascending was slight but unvarying. It grew dark, and
for a while they matched strides with the mounting moon. Clouds masked its
mournful silver face.
"We are close, close," Clothahump informed them much later. The moon was around
toward the west now. "I have sensed things."
"Yeah, I just bet ya have, boss," the bat muttered under his breath. He snapped
hungrily at a passing glass moth.
If the wizard had heard, he gave no sign. In fact, he spent the next two hours
in complete silence, staring straight ahead. No conversational gambit could
provoke a response from him.
A subtle tingling like the purr of a kitten began to tickle Jon-Tom's spine.
Tall trees closed tight around them once again, ranks of dark green spears
holding off the threatening heavens. Stars peeked through the clouds, looking
dangerously near.
A glance showed Talea looking around nervously. She reacted to his gaze, nodded.
"I feel it also, Jon-Tom. Clothahump was right. This is an ancient part of the
world we are coming to. It stinks of power."
Clothahump moved nearer to Jon-Tom. Clouds of gneechees now dogged the climbers.
"Can you feel it, my boy? Does it not tease your wizardly senses?"
Jon-Tom looked around uneasily, aware that something was playing his nerves as
he would play the strings of the duar. "I feel something, sir. But whether it's
magical influences or just back trouble I couldn't say."
Clothahump looked disappointed. Somewhere an anxious night hunter was whistling
to its mate. There were rustlings in the brush, and Jon-Tom noted that the
hidden things were moving in the same direction: back the way the climbers had
come.
"You are not fully attuned to the forces, I expect," said the wizard,
unnaturally subdued, "so I suppose I should not expect more of you." He looked
ahead and then gestured pridefully.
"We have arrived. One corner of the subatomic forces that bind the matter of all
creatures of all the world lies here. Look and remember, Jon-Tom. The glade of
Triane."
XIII
They had crested the last rise. Ahead lay an open meadow that at first glance
was not particularly remarkable. But it seemed that the massive oaks and
sycamores that ringed it like the white hair of an old man's balding skull drew
back from that open place, shunning the grass and curves of naked stone that
occasionally thrust toward the sky.
Here the moonlight fell unobstructed upon delicate blue blades. A few darker
boulders poked mushroomlike heads above the uneven lawn.
"Stop here," the wizard ordered them.
They gratefully slid free of packs and weapons, piled them behind a towering
tree that spread protective branches overhead.
"We have one chance to learn the nature of the great new evil the Plated Folk
have acquired. I cannot penetrate all the way to Cugluch with any perceptive
power. No magic I know of can do that.
"But there is another way. Uncertain, dangerous, but worthy of an attempt to
utilize, I think. If naught else it could give us absolute confirmation of the
Plated Folk's intentions, and we may learn something of their time schedule.
That could be equally as valuable.
"You cannot help me. No matter what happens here, no matter what may happen to
me, you must not go beyond this point." No one said anything. He turned, looked
up into the tree. "I need you now, Pog."
"Yes, Master." The bat sounded subdued and quite unlike his usual argumentative
self. He dropped free, hovered expectantly above the wizard's head as the two
conversed.
"What's he going to try?" Talea wondered aloud. Her red hair turned to cinnabar
in the moonlight.
Flor had the collar of her cape pulled tight up around her neck. Mudge's ears
were cocked forward intently, one paw holding him up against the tree trunk.
From beneath the leaf-shadowed safety of the ancient oak they watched as the
wizard carefully marked out a huge ellipse in the open glade. The fluorescent
white powder he was using seemed to glow with a life of its own.
Employing the last of the powder, he drew a stylized sun at either end of the
ellipse. Red powder was then used to make cryptic markings on the grass. These
connected the two suns and formed a crude larger ellipse outside the first.
"If I didn't know better," Flor whispered to Jon-Tom, "I'd think he was laying
out some complex higher equations."
"He is," Jon-Tom told her. "Magic equations." She started to object and he
hushed her. "I'll explain later."
Now Clothahump and Pog were creating strange, disturbing shapes in the center of
the first ellipse. The shapes were not pleasant to look upon, and they appeared
to move across the grass and stone of their own volition. But the double ellipse
held them in. From time to time the wizard would pause and use a small telescope
to study the cloudy night sky.
It had been a windless night. Now a breeze sprang up and pushed at the huddling
little knot of onlookers. It came from in front of them and mussed Jon-Tom's
hair, ruffled the otter's fur. Despite the warmth of the night the breeze was
cold, as though it came from deep space itself. Branches and leaves and needles
blew outward, no matter where their parent trees were situated. The breeze was
not coming from the east, as Jon-Tom had first thought, but from the center of
the glade. It emerged from the twin ellipses and blew outward in all directions
as if the wind itself were trying to escape. Normal meteorological conditions no
longer existed within the glade.
Clothahump had taken a stance in the center of the near sun drawing. They could
hear his voice for the first time, raised in chant and invocation. His short
arms were above his head, and his fingers made mute magic-talk with the sky.
The wind strengthened with a panicky rush, and the woods were full of
zephyr-gossip. These moans and warnings swirled in confusion around the
watchers, who drew nearer one another without comment.
A black shape rejoined them, fighting the growing gale. Pog's eyes were as wide
as his wing beats were strained.
"You're all ta stay right where ya are," he told them, raising his voice to be
heard over the frightened wind. "Da Master orders it. He works his most
dangerous magic." Selecting a long hanging limb, the famulus attached himself to
it and tucked his wings cloaklike around his body.
"What is he going to do?" Talea asked. "How can he penetrate all the way to
Cugluch through the walls of sorcery this Eejakrat must guard himself with?"
"Da Master makes magic," was all the shivering assistant would say. A wing tip
pointed fretfully toward the open glade.
The wind continued to increase. Flor drew her cape tight around her bare
shoulders while Mudge fought to retain possession of his feathered cap. Large
branches bent outward, and occasional snapping sounds rose above the gale to
hint at limbs bent beyond their strength to resist. Huge oaks groaned in protest
all the way down to their roots.
"But what is he trying to do?" Talea persisted, huddling in the windbreak
provided by the massive oak.
"He summons M'nemaxa," the terrified apprentice told her, "and I don't intend ta
look upon it." He drew his wings still closer about him until his face as well
as his body was concealed by the leathery cocoon.
"M'nemaxa's a legend. It don't exist," Mudge protested.
"He does, he does!" came the whimper from behind the wings. "He exist and da
Master summon him, oh, he call to him even now. I will not look on it."
Jon-Tom put his lips close to Talea in order to be heard over the wind. "Who or
what's this 'Oom-ne-maxa'?"
"Part of a legend, part of the legends of the old world." She leaned hard
against the bark. "According to legend it's the immortal spirit of all combined
in a single creature, a creature that can appear in any guise it chooses. Some
tales say he/she may actually have once existed in real form. Other stories
insist that the spirit is kept alive from moment to moment only by the belief
all wizards and sorceresses and witches have in it.
"To touch it is said to be death, to look upon it without wizardry protection is
said to invite a death slower and more painful. The first death is from burning,
the second from a rotting away of the flesh and organs."
"We'll be safe, we'll be safe," insisted Pog hopefully. "If da Master says so,
we'll be safe." Jon-Tom had never seen the bellicose mammal so cowed.
"But I still won't look on it," Pog continued. "Master says da formulae and
time-space ellipsoids will hold him. If not... if dey fail and it is freed,
Master says we should run or fly and we will be safe. We are not worthy of its
notice, Master say, and it not likely to pursue."
A delicate gray phosphorescence had begun to creep like St. Elmo's fire up the
trunks and branches of the trees ringing the glade. Argent silhouettes now
glowed eerily against the black night. The glade had become a green bowl etched
with silver filigree. Earth shivered beneath it.
"Can this thing tell Clothahump what he wants to know?" Jon-Tom was less
skeptical of the wizard's abilities than was Pog.
"It know all Time and Space," replied the bat. "It can see what da Master wants
to know, but dat don't mean it gonna tell him."
There was a hushed, awed murmur of surprise from the otter. "Cor! Would you 'ave
a look at that."
"I won't, I won't!" mewed Pog, shaking behind his wings.
Clothahump still stood erect within his sun symbol. As he turned a slow circle,
arms still upraised, he was reciting a litany counter-pointed by the chorus of
the ground. Earth answered his words though he talked to the stars.
Dark, boiling storm clouds, thick black mountains, had assembled over the glade
with unnatural haste. They danced above the wind-bent trees and blotted out the
friendly face of the moon. From time to time electric lava jumped from one to
another as they talked the lightning-talk.
Winds born of hurricane and confusion now assaulted the ancient trees. Jon-Tom
lay on the ground and clung to the arched root of the sage-oak. So did Talea and
Mudge, while Pog swayed like a large black leaf above them. Flor nestled close
to Jon-Tom, though neither's attention was on the other. Branches and leaves
shot past them, fleeing from the glade.
None of the swirling debris struck the chanting wizard. The winds roared down
into the double ellipse, then outward, but avoided the sun symbol. Above the
center of the glade the billowing storm clouds jigged round and round each other
in a majestic whirlpool of energy and moisture.
Lightning leapt earthward to blister the ground. No bolt struck near Clothahump,
though two trees were shattered to splinters not far away.
Somehow, above the scream of wind, of too close thunder and the howling vortex
that now dominated the center of the glade, they could still hear the steady
voice of Clothahump. Trying to shield his eyes from flying dirt and debris,
Jon-Tom clung tightly to the tree root and squinted at the turtle.
The wizard was turning easily within his proscribed symbol. He appeared
completely unaffected by the violent storm raging all around him. The sun symbol
was beginning to glow a deep orange.
Clothahump halted. His hands slowly lowered until they were pointing toward the
small heap of powders in the center of the inner ellipse. He recited, slowly and
with great care, a dozen words known only to a very few magicians and perhaps
one or two physicists.
The ancient oak shuddered. Two smaller trees nearby were torn free of the earth
and hurled into the sky. There was a mighty, rumbling crescendo of sound that
culminated in a volcanic rumble from the glade, and a brief flash of light that
fortunately no one looked at directly.
The shape that appeared out of that flash within the inner ellipse took away
what little breath remained to Jon-Tom and his companions. He could not have
moved his knuckles to his mouth to chew on them, nor could his vocal cords give
form to the feelings surging through him.
Soft, eerie moans came from Flor and a slight, labored whistling from Mudge. All
were motionless, paralyzed by the sight of M'nemaxa, whose countenance
transfigures continents and whose hoofbeats can alter the orbits of worlds.
Within the inner ellipse was a ferociously burning shape. The form M'nemaxa had
chosen to appear in was akin to all the horses that had ever been, and yet was
not. He showed himself this time as a stallion with great wings that beat at the
air more than sixty feet from tip to body. Even so the spirit shape could not be
more than partially solid. It was formed of small solar prominences bound
together in the form of a horse. Red-orange flames trailed from tail and mane,
galloping hooves and majestic wings, to trail behind the form and flicker out in
the night.
Actually the constantly shed shards of sunmeat vanished when they reached the
limits imposed by the double ellipse, disappeared harmlessly into a
thermonuclear void only Clothahump could understand. Though wings tore at the
fabric of space and flaming hooves galloped over the plane of existence, the
spirit stallion remained fixed within the boundaries of sorceral art.
There was no hint of fading. For every flaming streamer that fell and curled
from the equine inferno, new fire appeared to keep the shape familiar and
intact, as M'nemaxa continuously renewed his substance. A pair of fiery tusks
descended from the upper jaw of the not quite perfect horse shape, and pointed
teeth burned within jaws of flame.
Among all that immense length of horsehell, a living stallion sun whose breath
would have incinerated Apollo, there were only two things not composed of the
ever regenerating eternal fire-eyes as chillingly cold as the rest was
unimaginably hot.
The eyes of the stallion-spirit M'nemaxa were dragonfly eyes, great black
curving orbs that almost met atop the skull. The
y were far too large for a
normal horse shape, but that was only natural. Through the still angry cyclone,
Jon-Tom thought he could see within those all-seeing spheres of black tiny
points of light; purple and red, green, blue, and purest white that stood out
even against the perpetual fusion that constituted the body shape.
Though he could not know it, those eyes were fragments of the Final Universe,
the greater one which holds within it our own universe as well as thousands of
others. Galaxies drifted within the eyes of M'nemaxa.
Now a long snake tongue flicked out, a flare frora the surface of a living horse
star. It tasted of dimensions no puny creature of flesh could ever hope to
sample. It arched back its massive flaming head and whinnied. It stunned the
ears and minds of the tiny organic listeners. The earth itself trembled, and
behind the clouds the moon drew another thousand miles away in its orbit. Rarely
was so immense an eminence brought within touch of a mere single world.
"ONE WHO KNOWS THE WORDS HAS SUMMONED!" came the thunder. Great red-orange skull
and galactic eyes looked down upon the squat shape of an old turtle.
But the wizard did not bend or hide his head. He remained safe within his sun
symbol. His shells did not melt and crack, his flesh did not sear, and he looked
upon the horse-star without fear. It dug at existence and its hooves burned
time, but it moved no nearer.
"I would know the new magic that gives so much confidence to the Plated Folk of
the Greendowns as they ready their next war against my peoples!" Clothahump's
most sonorous sorceral tone sounded tinny beside the world-shaking whisper of
the horse.
"THAT IS OF NO CONSEQUENCE TO ME."
"I know," said Clothahump with unbelievable brashness, "but it is of consequence
to me. You have been summoned to answer, not to question."
"WHO DARES...!" Then the anger of the stallion spirit faded slightly. "YOU HAVE
SPOKEN THE WORDS, MASTER OF A HUMBLE KNOWLEDGE. YOU HAVE DONE THE CALLING, AND I
MUST REPLY." The spirit seemed almost to smile. "BEWARE, LEADER OF AN IGNORANT
SLIME, FOR THOUGH THEY KNOW IT NOT THEMSELVES, I FORESEE THEM DESTROYING YOU
WITH MIRRORS OF WHAT IS IN YOUR OWN TINY MIND."
"I don't understand," said Clothahump with a frown.
Again the whinny that frightened planets. "AND WHY SHOULD YOU, FOR YOU HAVE