Blue Magic

SEY NO TAS SEY NO MENAS

DAK WOLOMENAS WOLOMENAS SEY NO TAS SEY NO MENAS

SEY NO TAS SEY NO MENAS PAGASE PAGASE AMEGARTA GAR

HREOS MEGARITAN…

Danny Blue grunted as he slammed into one of the legs, then into Brann; he rolled across the table, contorted his body to avoid the sensor panel, finished for the moment stuffed into the corner where the windbreak curved round one of the front legs. The sled shuddered, scraped against the wall, stone shrieking_, as it rubbed against stone. He ignored the battering and focused on water; the shield he’d woven about the sled wasn’t difficult to hold in place, it just required a steady flow of power which Brann and the changers supplied. A tube, that was what he needed, a tube and some molecular pumps. Tithe, hmm, same weave as the shield, don’t want Maksim cutting it…

Brann wrapped one arm about a table leg and reached for Dan’s ankle so she could keep up the feed. It was hot and stuffy and darkly twilight inside the sphere, the sensor panel provided a dim bluish glow and the feed pipe was a soft yellow, neither of them made much impression on the darkness. She and Dan weren’t choking on fouled air because Yaril and Jaril fed them fresh along with the godfire, but that only kept the atmosphere bearable, it didn’t make it pleasant. The godfire feed was spasmodic now (she smoothed it out before sending it on into Dan); the changers were moving too fast and too erratically to maintain a constant flow. They took turns as they’d done that time on the mountain, plowing through the elementals, collecting from them, splashing earthfire at Maksim, snapping the feedpipe down to Brann, pumping her as full as she could hold, doing this over and over. When the earthfire flooded into her, when it sat seething in her, it wasn’t quite as agonizing as godfire, but it was bad enough, it was like gulping down mouthfuls of boiling acid and it never got easier. She endured the pain because she had to, Danny Blue depended on her, young Koti had called in a promise-and most of all she was no longer ready to die, there were too many other promises she had to keep, promises she had made to herself. She endured and grew stronger not weaker as the torment went on.

Her eyes began to burn. She blinked repeatedly, tried to focus, but she could see less and less as the minutes passed. Her skin burned. She touched her face, held her fingertips close to her eyes and saw that they were stained. She touched them to her tongue, tasted warm salty wetness. Blood. Her tongue began to burn. The pain from, the earthfire was hiding… what? She fought to set that internal burning aside and feel about with immaterial fingers for what else was happening.

Smoky rotting vegetation smell, faint but there. A feeling of humidity, swampiness. Hunger. Now that she was listening, it shouted at her, HUNGER. “Dan,” she cried. Her voice was hoarse, her throat felt as if something was scraping it raw. “Dan, there’s something in here with us. What is it? DAN!”

Danny Blue heard Brann saying something, but he had no time nor attention to give her. He Reshaped the Pattern of the spherical shield (maintaining the shield in place and carefully separated from his other activities), and used the new Pattern to construct a closed cylinder; he poured more energy into it, lengthening it. He inserted the lead end into the shield, eased it through, then began the exacting and difficult task of forcing the cylinder through the thick elastic rind of earth elementals.

Brann realized he wasn’t listening and dropped the attempt to reach him. She took her hand from his ankle and clamped it briefly around her own arm, felt something like a greasy film spread around it. Scowling, she wiped her hand on her trousers, then closed it around Dan’s ankle so she could maintain the feed. She’s got a reading from the thing: an intensification of that feral hunger, no sense of intelligence behind it, only will, a predator’s will. Cautiously she reached out, pulled life from the thing, drinking it in as once she’d drunk the life of a black malouch, there was the same sense of wildness, greed, hunger. And fear as the thing felt the danger from her.

It wrenched free of her and Danny, fled toward the top of the sphere. The air curdled up there as it compacted its misty substance, as far from her as it could get.

Brann broke from Danny again. Holding the table leg she struggled to her feet and reached for that mist.

With a kind of silent scream it flowed desperately away from her hand until it managed to ooze down between the windshield and the shieldsphere where she had no way of reaching it. Satisfied for the moment, she dropped back, settled herself as comfortably as she could while the table continued to rock wildly, to judder like a worm with hiccups, to slam between the wall and the dais. Her legs wrapped about the table’s leg, she spared a moment to heal the damage from the mist, Dan first, then herself, then she went back to feeding fire to him. She didn’t know what he was doing, only that it must be important if the intensity of his concentration meant anything.

Danny felt the small pains but ignored them. Sometime later he felt the upheaval when Brann interfered with his body as she healed the skin burns and the eye-damage; he ignored that too. He drove the tube up until it was clear of the elementals, bent it in a quarter circle and expanded it swiftly toward the nearest wall, holding it steady despite the careening of the sled. When it jammed against the stone, he heated the head end hotter than Amortis’ fire and melted the tube through; his Sight was cut off by the elementals, but he could See down the tube and expand that Sight a few degrees as soon as one end was outside the temple. He sent it arching down over the edge of the island, down and down until it reached the gray seawater. When it dippйd below the surface, he felt the cold shock of that water, shouted his triumph, “I’ve got you, Maks, I’ve got you now.” He heard Brann’s exclamation, ignored it and grew side pipes along the tube in an ascending spiral; grinning, he popped in the tiny pumps and started them sucking. “Brann, tell the changers there’s going to be a lot of water in here in just a moment. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but it’ll be wild.”

He reached again, sending an imperious call for water eIementals, felt an immediate, almost frightening surge as they answered him. Answered him in the hundreds. Came compressed, swimming up the tube with the water the pumps were hauling.

Water and water elementals spurted from the side-pipes, sprayed copiously over the earth elementals crawling weak and angry over the shield sphere. Converting them to a slippery mindless sludge that dripped, ropy and viscid, off the sphere.

Light flared through the shield, red light, gold light, light hard and bright as diamond.

Settsimaksimin and Amortis stood together, dais and chair, Maksim half sunk in her shimmering translucent female body. Black sorceror body, Black Heart in that Rose of Light, chant reverberating thunderously through the great chamber…