Changes

Chapter 2

Yeah.

This was not what I’d had in mind when I got out of bed that morning.

The damned thing should have been slow. By every law of physics, by every right, a centipede that big should have been slow. Dinosauric. Elephantine.

But this was the Nevernever. You didn’t play by the same rules here. Physics were sort of a guideline, and a very loose and elastic guideline at that. Here, the mind and heart had more sway than the material, and the big bug was fast. That enormous, predatory head shot at me like the engine of some psychotic locomotive, its killer jaws spreading wide.

Fortunately for me, I was, just barely, faster.

I brought forth my left hand, holding it out palm forth in a gesture of command and denial, a universal pose meaning one thing: Stop! Intent was important in this place. As the jaws closed, I brought up my spherical shield to meet it, the energy humming through my bracelet’s charms, which burst into shining light as the magic coursing through them shone through the ephemeral substance of mere material metals.

The jaws closed with a crunch and a crash, and my bracelet flared even brighter. The shield exploded in more colors and shapes than a company of kaleidoscopes, and turned aside the beast’s jaws—its strength, after all, was just one more bit of materially oriented power in an immaterial realm.

I brought my right hand out of my coat holding my blasting rod, and with a shouted word loosed a sledgehammer of searing power. It dipped down and then curled up an instant before it hit, landing a sorcerous uppercut on what passed for the centipede’s chin. It flung the creature’s head several yards up, and its entire body rippled in agony.

Which, in retrospect, probably shouldn’t have caught me quite as off guard as it did.

The ground beneath my feet heaved and bucked, and I went flying, my arms whirling in a useless windmill. I landed in a sprawl amid ranks of primroses, which immediately began to move, lashing out with tiny stem-tendrils lined with wickedly sharp little thorns. Even as I struggled back to my feet, tearing them away from my wrists and ankles, I noticed that the flowers around me had begun to blush a deep bloodred.

“You know what, Harry!” Bob called. “I don’t think this is a garden at all!”

“Genius,” I muttered, as the centipede recovered its balance and began reorienting itself to attack. Its body flowed forward, following the motion of its head. I decided that all those legs hitting the earth like posthole diggers in steady sequence made the giant bug sound less like a locomotive than a big piece of farm equipment churning by.

I ran at it, focusing my will beneath me, planted my staff on the earth, and swung my legs up in a pole vaulter’s leap. I unleashed my will beneath and behind me as I did, and flew over the thing’s back as it continued surging forward. It let out a rumbling sound of displeasure as I went, the head twisting to follow me, forced to slow down enough to allow its own rearmost legs to get out of its way. It bought me only a few seconds.

Bigger doesn’t mean better, especially in the Nevernever. One second was time enough to turn, focus another beam of fire into a far smaller area, and bring it down like an enormous cutting torch almost precisely across the middle of the big bug’s body, an act of precision magic that I’d learned from Luccio, and which I was not at all confident I could have duplicated in the real world.

The beam, no bigger around than a couple of my fingers, sliced the creature in half as neatly and simply as if I’d used a paper cutter the size of a semi trailer.

It shrieked in pain, a brazen, bellowing sound that conveyed, even from such an alien thing, the depth of its physical agony. Its hindquarters just kept right on rolling forward, as if they hadn’t noticed that the head was gone. The front half of the thing began to veer and waver wildly, its limited brain perhaps overloaded by the effort of sending nerve impulses to bits of its anatomy that no longer existed. It settled into a pattern of chasing its own retreating midsection, rolling in a great circle that crushed the ranks of primroses on either side of the trail.

“Booya!” I shouted in pure triumph, the adrenaline turning my manly baritone into a rather terrified-sounding shriek. “What have you got for fiery beam of death, huh? You got nothing for fiery beam of death! Might as well go back to Atari, bug-boy, ’cause you don’t got game enough for me!”

It took me five or ten seconds to realize what was happening.

The wound I’d inflicted hadn’t allowed for much bleeding, cauterizing even as it sliced—but even that little bit of bleeding stopped on both severed halves of the monster. The front half’s wounded rear end suddenly rounded out. The second half’s wounded front end shuddered and suddenly warped in place, and then with a wriggling motion, a new head began to writhe free of the severed stump.

Within seconds, both halves had focused on me, and then two of the freaking things rolled at me, jaws clashing and snapping, equally strong, equally as deadly as before. Only they were going to come rushing at me from multiple directions now.

“Wow,” Bob said, in a perfectly calm, matter-of-fact, conversational tone. “That is incredibly unfair.”

“Been that kind of day,” I said. I swapped my blasting rod for my staff. The rod was great for pitching fire around, but I needed to pull off something more complicated than it was really meant to handle, and my wizard’s staff was a great deal more versatile, meant for handling a broad range of possibilities. I called forth my will and laced it with the soulfire within me, then thrust the staff ahead and called, “Fuego murus! Fuego vellum!”

Energy rushed out of me, and silver-white fire rose up in a ring nearly sixty feet across, three feet thick, and three or four yards high. The roar of the flames seemed to be somehow intertwined with an odd tone that sounded like nothing so much as the voice of a great bell.

The centipedes (plural—Hell’s bells, I needed to stop being so arrogant) rose up onto their rearmost limbs, trying to bridge the wall in a living arch, but they recoiled from the flames even more violently than when I’d slammed the original head with a cannonball of fire.

“Hey, neat working!” Bob said. “The soulfire is a nice touch.”

The effort of managing that much energy caught up to me in a rush, and I found myself gasping and sweating. “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Of course, now we’re trapped,” Bob noted. “And that wall is going to run out of juice soon. You can keep chopping them up for a while. Then they’ll eat you.”

“Nah,” I said, panting. “We’re in this together. We’ll both get eaten.”

“Ah,” Bob said. “You’d better open a Way back to Chicago, then.”

“Back to my apartment?” I demanded. “The FBI is there just waiting to slap cuffs onto me.”

“Then I guess you shouldn’t have become a terrorist, Harry!”

“Hey! I never—”

Bob raised his voice and shouted toward the centipedes, “I’m not with him!”

None of my options were good ones. Getting eaten by a supernaturally resilient centipede-demon would be an impediment to my rescue effort. Getting locked up by the FBI wouldn’t be much better, but at least with the feds putting me in a cell, I’d have a chance to walk out of it—unlike the centipedes’ stomach. Stomachs.

But I couldn’t walk back into my apartment with a bag full of no-nos. I’d have to hide them before I got there—and that meant leaving the bag here. That wasn’t exactly a brilliant idea, but I didn’t have much in the way of a choice. I would have to take whatever precautions I could to hide the bag and hope that they were enough.

Earth magic isn’t my forte. It is an extremely demanding discipline, physically speaking. You are, after all, talking about an awful lot of weight being moved around. Using magic doesn’t mean you get to ignore physics. The energy for creating heat or motion comes from a different source, but it still has to interact with reality along the same lines as any other kind of energy. That means that affecting tons of earth takes an enormous amount of energy, and it’s damned difficult—but not impossible. Ebenezar had insisted that I learn at least one very useful, if enormously taxing, spell with earth magic. It would be the effort of an entire day to use it in the real world. But here, in the Nevernever . . .

I lifted my staff, pointed it at the ground before me, and intoned in a deep, heavy monotone, “Dispertius!” I unleashed my will as I did, though I was already winded, and the earth and stone beneath my feet cracked open, a black gap opening like a stony mouth a few inches in front of my toes.

“Oh, no, no,” Bob said. “You are not going to put me in—”

It was an enormous effort to my swiftly tiring body, but I pitched the bag, with the Swords, Bob, and all, into the hole. It vanished into the dark, along with Bob’s scream of, “You’d better come back!”

The furious hissing of the enraged centipedes sliced through the air.

I pointed my staff at the hole again and intoned, “Resarcius!” More of my strength flooded out of me, and as quickly as that, the hole mended itself again, with the earth and stone that the bag and its contents displaced being dispersed into a wide area, resulting in little more than a very slight and difficult-to-see hump in the ground. The spell would make retrieval of the gear difficult for anyone who didn’t know exactly where it was, and I had put it deep enough to hide it from anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for it. I hoped.

Bob and the Swords were as safe as it was possible for me to make them, under the circumstances, and my wall of silver fire was steadily dwindling. It was time to get going while I still could.

My legs were shaking with fatigue and I leaned hard on my staff to keep from falling over. I needed one more effort of will to escape this prettily landscaped death trap, and after that—

The ring of fire had fallen low enough that one of the centipedes arched up into the air, forming a bridge of its own body, and flowed over it and onto the ground outside. Its multifaceted eyes fixed upon me and its jaws clashed in hungry anticipation.

I turned away, focused my thoughts and will, and with a slashing motion of my hand cut a tiny slice into the air, opening a narrow doorway, a mere crack, between the Nevernever and reality. Then I threw myself at it.

I had never gone through such a narrow opening before. I felt as if it were smashing me flat in some kind of spiritual trash compactor. It hurt, an instant of such savage agony that it seemed to stretch out into an hour, all while my thoughts were compressed into a single, impossibly dense whole, a psychic black hole where every dark and leaden emotion I’d ever felt seemed to suffuse and poison every thought and memory, adding an overwhelming heartache to the physical torment.

The instant passed, and I was through the narrow opening. I sensed a fraction of a second in which the centipede tried to follow, but the slit I’d opened between worlds had healed itself almost instantaneously.

I tumbled through about three feet of empty air, banged my hip on the side of the worktable in my lab, and hit the concrete floor like a sack of exhausted bricks.

People started shouting and someone piled onto me, rolling me onto my chest and planting a knee in my spine as they hauled my arms around behind my back. There was a bunch of chatter to which I paid no heed. I hurt too much, and was too damned tired to care.

Honestly, the only thought in my mind at the time was a sense of great relief at being arrested. Now I could kick back and relax in a nice pair of handcuffs.

Or maybe a straitjacket, depending on how things went.