A Gathering Of Stones

4

Midnight.

Danny Blue waggled a finger at the wick. The spark caught and the oil-soaked braid began to burn and smoke. He cranked it down until the flame seemed to spout from the brass tube. As soon as the smoke cleared away, he fitted on the glass chimney and clipped the lamp into its brackets. He frowned at the leather sack, shook his head. No point in it since he was planning to use local materials to build his boat. Airboat. He grinned as he peeled the blankets off the bed, dragged the lumpy mattress onto the floor, doubling it over so it was thicker and half the width. What I did before, I can do again. He pushed at the pallet with the toe of his boot, walked around it, inspecting it. After a moment he dug through the bedclothes, found one of the thin pillows and tossed it down at the end of the pallet. Unless the damn god wakes and sticks her long nose in my business, or one of the S’wai gets a twinge. The way his luck was running, either one could happen or worse. Tungjii my friend, I could use a smile from you right now. He stepped into the middle of the pallet, knelt as comfortably as he could in front of the pillow and pulled a shield tight about him except for a tiny hole he hoped no one would notice.

He thought a moment, then began gathering his forces, putting bridles on his half-sires, whipping them into a momentary subservience and opening himself to both sets of memory; when he was ready, he adapted his half-sire Daniel’s energy cables to his half-sire Ahzurdan’s fire-handling and wove a lead; he drove the lead through the pinhole into the violent reality of the salamandri. He couldn’t project himself into that reality, he couldn’t draw demons from it, but he could tap into it and use its raving energies to power his Shaping and Transforms. When he had a steady flow coming through the lead into the accumulator cells he’d formed inside his body, he brushed his fingers across the pillow, back across the coarse canvas of the pallet cover. Murmuring a minor Transform, he turned a roll of cloth into a marker that drew coarse black lines. He narrowed his eyes, focused will and attention, and began blocking in the areas where he needed to make the major Transforms that could convert the pallet and pillow into a liftsled like the one he’d made once from a kitchen table, like the sled Daniel knew so well from his home reality.

Sketching with the marker he shuffled backward on his knees, sweeping lines across the flat in broad X’s; he hobbled to the front again and began drawing honeycomb braces around the edge of the pallet. He finished, straightened his aching back, and inspected his work. “Good,” he muttered. “Now the hard stuff.”

He knelt before the pillow, touched it. As it happened before, it happened now. Chant poured out of him with a rightness that seemed to come from bone rather than brain, as if the rightness and the elegance of the design once more commanded him, mind and body and spirit, as if the liftsled was using him to be born. He Reshaped the flocking and canvas into glass and ceramic, metal and plastic. Sucking great gulps of fire from the salamandrin reality, he poured it into the Patterns his will created, pressing and shaping that fire into the esoteric crystals that were the heart and brain of the liftfield. He laid down layer on layer of them, embedding them in intricate polymers, wove more polymers into honeycomb braces that stiffened the floppy mattress into something like solidity. He Reshaped the pillow into sensors and readouts, a canted control plate that would let him regulate start-up, velocity, direction and altitude; he drew a pair of powerlines from it to the rear of the palletsled. Dropping the lines for a moment, he sculpted twin energy sinks in the tail; he reclaimed the lines and joined them to the sinks. Then he rested a short while, until the shaking went out of his hands.

Holding the tap quiescent, he inspected his work inch by inch, making small changes here and there to improve the conformation. When he was done with that, he knelt by the sinks, put a hand flat on each and began feeding power into them until they were topped off, humming to the touch like a hive of angry bees.

He let the tap fade, let the shield dissolve about him. He got up and stepped away from the liftsled, triumphant but too drained to crow or preen-for the moment, anyway. He tossed the blankets back on the bed, spread them over the interwoven ropes that had served to support the mattress. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but he was too tired to care. It was a transient thing he’d made, fairygold, apt to vanish if you kept it around too long, but it’d last the night and it was so alien to this reality it wouldn’t trigger alarms for the witches; even the god Coquoquin might not notice what was happening under her nose. Too bad it wouldn’t last. He lay staring at the ceiling, imagining the look on Pawbool’s face if the four of them came swooping in, waving Klukesharna and demanding the antidote. He lifted a heavy hand, checked his ringchron. Nearly two hours gone. No wonder I’m tired.

His muscles were sore, even his bones ached; too tired to sleep, he lay brooding over his limitations. Fused through all Ahzurdan’s memories was the sense of ease, the exhilarating ease with which the sorceror handled the power that leaped to his hands, the getting drunk with that power, riding a high like no other… And Ahzurdan was second rank at his best. Settsimaksimin was something else. His mind drifted to that last battle. Maks alone against all of them, him and the changers and Brann. Funny that… in a way… Maksim depending on a talisman like BinYAHtii to capture and store power for him when he had a thousand thousand realities laid out for plundering. I don’t know, Danny thought, wrong mindset, I suppose. There’s nothing like forcefields and directed energy flows in this universe, they don’t even have something simple.like electricity. That’s it, probably. They don’t have the physical analogs to show them how to handle the hot stuff. If you don’t know something exists, kind of hard to use it. Hmm. Wonder why Old Garbagegut didn’t think of that? Wit’s been sucked in, I suppose. Thinks like everyone else here. Computer, mmf. An’t it the way, they have all the data but can’t jump the ruts. Just as well, I hate to think what life would be like for ordinary folks here if h/it knew how to get h/its tentacles on that much power. Maksim now, he could handle anything the realities put out, if he happened to think of it. Look what he can do without the tap, transfer himself anywhere in the world he wants, wards’re cobwebs he brushes aside, hardly noticing them. At least, that’s how Ahzurdan remembers him, larger than life and more powerful than a god.

Danny drifted awhile through Ahzurdan’s memory, melancholy at the loss between then and now. When Ahzurdan was on his own and at his peak, he could jump the horizon to any place he’d been before, he could snatch unwarded items half a world away. Me, I’m lucky if I can do a simple line-of-sight snap. To save my life, I couldn’t round a corner ten feet off. Too bad. Too t0000 bad. If I could look into the heart, If I could make the exchange without going in… Klukesharna’s copy in the warded sack under the sheet… for Klukesharna in the Heart… no use regretting what I can’t do… so much simpler, though… He drifted into a light sleep.