Shadowtrap: A Black Foxes Adventure Page 21

  “Hem”—Pon Barius removed the stem of his pipe from his mouth and peered into its dark bowl then glanced guiltily ’round—”sorry about that. But I did save you in the end, now, didn’t I?”

  “I say we forget it,” declared Arik, though Kane growled low in his throat. “Instead, what about the gem? What was the plan if Jaytar succeeded?”

  “Why, boy, it was to seal it in White Mountain, in a chest of silver,” answered Pon Barius. “Both mountain and chest warded ’round and ’round and ’round again such that no one without the knowledge and skills could pass through the power of the seven seals.”

  “White Mountain?” murmured Lyssa. “Why, that’s north in the Rawlons.” She fell silent a moment, then her eyes lit up. “Would Badru happen to live nearby?”

  “Yes,” answered Pon Barius. “You see, Jaytar was to deliver the gem to us up there, but she never came. I suspect that she nearly made it, but the demons caught her at last and she was slain. Likely one of the gnomen found the dagger wherever it was she concealed it.”

  Rith ran her hand over her bandoliered throwing knives. “Perhaps she threw it, instead. Cast it so it stuck high in a tree or some such. I know I would have done so were I trapped and the jewel about to fall into ill hands.”

  “Heh! Good thinking, lady,” exclaimed Pon Barius. “And had we known just where she fell, well, perhaps that’s just where it would have been found. But it wasn’t—until now, that is.”

  “Well,” asked Rith, “now that it is found, what are you going to do with it?” She held the scabbarded weapon out to him.

  Pon Barius blinked at the proffered blade, then reached out and took it. He looked long at Jaytar’s dagger, then up at the Foxes. “Why, deliver it to White Mountain, as planned,” he answered as he held the weapon back out to Rith. “But I am going to need help to do so.”

  A day and a half later in the early dawnlight, Kane lifted Pon Barius up to the makeshift saddle on the back of one of the pack animals. “Krone’s teeth, but this mule is too tall,” complained the syldari, looking down. “Ponies are much more sensible.”

  “And much slower,” rumbled Kane, the big man looking up through morning shadows at the ancient wizard perched high on the mule, the syldari himself but four foot six inches tall.

  “But what will I do if we get in a battle?” asked Pon Barius. “It’s not as if I can guide this beast, tethered behind you as I will be. And even if I were free, still, this is a mule! About as likely to follow a rein as is a wild hare.”

  Arik turned in his saddle and said, “We will get you your own mount in Stahlholt.”

  “But that’s three or four days north,” objected Pon Barius. He leaned over and peered at the ground and shuddered, drawing back. “Until then I’m trapped aboard this towering monster.”

  “Nevertheless, in Stahlholt we will rectify that,” said Arik.

  “With a pony,” declared Pon Barius.

  “With a horse,” growled Kane.

  “Pony,” repeated Pon Barius.

  “A pony will slow us down,” said Arik. “After all, we might have to run from drakka on their demonsteeds . . . or get into battle with them. Even so, I will leave it to you to decide how urgent our mission to White Mountain is.”

  Pon Barius sighed and glanced from Arik to Kane. “All right. A horse.”

  As Kane mounted his own steed he looked over at the little mage. “I’m not overfond of heights myself, you know.”

  Pon Barius did not reply.

  Arik’s gaze swept over them all. “Ready? Then let’s go.”

  And so, in the long shadows of early morn they set out from Pon Barius’s cottage, riding northward through the Wythwood, the low, bright sun glittering among the filigree of latticed branches and leaves, Lyssa in the lead, Arton behind, the others scattered in between. And as they rode from the clearing, Ky glanced back and gasped, for cottage and sward and mighty oak had vanished altogether, along with the ring of oaks surrounding all. Arton, too, was gone, and only silent forest trees met her gaze. She opened her mouth to cry alarm, but then Arton’s horse appeared, trotting out from nowhere, as if emerging from a different realm, Arton on the steed’s back, and afterward came the mule. Ky turned and faced front once more, her syldari eyes filled with wonder. Warded indeed was the wizard’s grove at the heart of the wide Wythwood.

  Nine days later found them riding through upland pines, Pon Barius now on a mount of his own—a small, sturdy bay mare. In the distance to their right towered the crags of the Rawlons; miles away to their left and occasionally glimpsed through the trees lay the River Tuimelen, its cascading ribbon of water glinting in the sunlight.

  When they stopped for a meal at noon, Lyssa glanced at one of her maps and said, “Tomorrow will see us halfway there.”

  “By my eyes,” groaned Pon Barius, “if I only had the power to spare I would have conjured us a magic road ’twixt my cottage and our goal. But I am going to need all my powers just to get us up and into the mountain.” He sighed and took another bite of waybread.

  Lyssa blanched. “Into the mountain? We are going underground? Down into a cave or such?”

  “Certainly, my dear,” replied the ancient syldari. “We can’t just leave the dagger lying about, you know.”

  “But underground.” Lyssa shuddered.

  “Better deep in the bowels of the earth than clinging to a mountainside,” growled Kane.

  Lyssa looked at the big man as a chill wind stirred through the woods. She glanced up at the clouds gathering above. “Cruk! A storm is brewing. Let’s ride on. Perhaps we can find good shelter before it strikes. If not, well, at least we will have covered more ground.”

  As they removed the nose bags from the horses and mules, Pon Barius glanced at Lyssa and said, “I don’t suppose there’d be a town nearby, would there?”

  Lyssa shook her head No.

  “Krone’s teeth,” exclaimed the old syldari. “I thought not.”

  Ky laughed. “Look at it this way, master: Rith will make a wondrous bard’s tale and sing of the terrible storms we battled through to thwart the DemonQueen.”

  “I’m afraid not,” responded Pon Barius. “You see, we must never tell of what we have done, else the DemonQueen, should she hear of it, might find a way to break the wards and gain the gem if she knows where it lies.”

  “But I thought we were taking it to a place she could never enter,” said Rith.

  “Never say never, my dear,” replied Pon Barius. “Even the most impossible things turn out to be feasible after all.”

  “Every lock can be opened,” said Arton, “if you but have the righ key.”

  Pon Barius turned to the thief. “Exactly so, young man. Exactly so.”

  The storm struck just after nightfall, rain pelting down, wind howling through the trees, great jagged bolts smashing from sky to earth as lightning and thunder walked hand-in-hand down from the Rawlon Range. Huddled in their raincloaks under their lean-tos, the Black Foxes and Pon Barius peered by the light of a lantern out at the furious downpour. A few steps away the horses and mules stood sheltered under thick pines, the animals skittish in the raging tempest but securely tethered to the trees.

  “Dretch,” growled Kane, water dripping from his nose. “Why is it that whenever we go on one of these ventures all seven hells break loose?”

  “Exactly right,” muttered Arton, flinching with every flash. “Just once I’d like these old bones to go on a quest where the days are cool and the nights warm and where there’s an inn with good food and drink at each and every stop along the way.”

  “Yes, yes,” agreed Ky. “And whatever it is we have to do gets done with a minimum of fuss and bother.”

  “But then,” wailed Rith, though she grinned through the rain, “what would I have to sing about? I mean, heroes are supposed to struggle.”

  “You could sing, la de da,” said Kane, “about how we, la de da, tripped through a field of daisies, la de da, laughing gaily in ring-around-the-ros
ey, la de da, you could.”

  “Or if you’d rather,” said Ky, “you could reprise every song we sang as we quaffed our ale before a roaring fire.”

  Lightning flared nearby, the immediate clap of thunder drowning out Rith’s reply.

  “That was close,” hissed Arton, huddling even deeper into his cloak. “Too close, if you ask me.”

  Another flare lit the black night, thunder whelming, and Arton scooted back against the slope of the lean-to.

  Kane turned to Pon Barius and gestured at the sky. “Look, you made the storms in the old high pass; can’t you do something about this?”

  “Even if I could, I wouldn’t,” replied the ancient mage. “Didn’t you hear me say I needed all of my power just to get us into White Mountain?”

  “And back out?” Lyssa’s eyes were wide.

  Pon Barius smiled at the ranger. “Yes, my dear. And back out.”

  As a look of relief washed over Lyssa’s face, Rith flung up a hand and called out, “What’s that?”

  Their gazes followed the line of her pointing finger up through the boughs of the pines. High in the sky and lighting the black churning clouds from within, a bright glow hurtled westward, the light blooming and fading and blooming, as if some flaring thing like a great ball of fire streaked through the roiling maelstrom above; and in the distance behind came another flaring thing, and another after, and perhaps even more in its wake.

  And Arton gave a cry of fear and scooted back and covered his head.

  Overhead hurled the first, slanting downward and to the west, a great bellowing roar following after. And then a brilliant flare blossomed in the sky, the entire world turning white, the intense glare blinding all whose sight had tracked its thundering course.

  “Arda!” cried Rith, jerking her face aside. “I can’t see!”

  “Kane,” barked Arik, also blinded.

  “Everyone, stay where you are,” called Kane, as he pressed his hands to his own sightless eyes. “I’m certain that this is—”

  BAAAADOOOOMMMMM!

  An enormous shock wave whelmed into them, hammering them back, blasting away their lean-to. The horses and mules were knocked from their feet. Trees whipped over, some trunks splintering, while other trees were uprooted entirely. And though they couldn’t hear it, there came the yawling roar of the second light as it hurtled toward the west.

  Arton scrambled to his hands and knees, and uprighted the oil lantern, the spluttering wick catching flame once more. But he did not need the light of the lantern to see by, for the world was lit with flaming tendrils of violet witchfire. His skin crawled with tingling lavender flames, and purple arcs crackled from his fingertips to the ground, to his face, to the lantern, to wherever he touched. Yowling, he scrambled backward upon the flaring earth, and saw the others groping blindly and burning violet, amethyst witchfire flickering from their fingers, from their hair. “Arda. Oh, Arda,” he cried, but all ears yet rang with the mighty detonation, and none else heard his prayer.

  Again the world turned into intolerable glare as the second thing detonated in the sky, blasting the land with unbearable light. And even though Arton was facing the opposite way, still the flare was agonizing and he violently jerked upright and threw his arm across his face.

  Yet though his eyes were closed, purple fire burned in his vision, and as he shouted in panic—

  KAAAWWHHOOOMMM!

  —the second shock wave hit, knocking him to his face.

  And unheard overhead came the thundering roar of another blare of light hurtling westward, bearing its cargo of witchfire . . .

  . . . And when the next shock wave battered into them, they cried out in mortal anguish for it was as if their spirits, their essences, their very souls were being torn from their bodies and hurled down a long, fiery tunnel toward a bottomless black abyss.

  As Arton shrieked in pain and spun down through violet flames toward a whirling ebony void, he was looking directly at Pon Barius; the last thing the thief saw was the old wizard’s form rapidly changing from an ancient syldari to a five-year-old girl to a boy to an elderly man to a fat bald black woman to a slender young beauty to an old toothless woman to a regal female clad in iron to an endlessly spiraling vortex of blackness to an ancient syldari to a five-year-old girl to black demon to a . . .

  And down through the sporadic rain came the bellowing roar of a fourth flare of light hurtling westward through what remained of the shredded clouds.

  24

  Thor’s Hammer

  (Coburn Facility)

  Above the Coburn Building . . .

  . . . In the churning thunderheads vapor roiled upward to become water droplets, and whipsawing air currents bore the droplets onward, rising up and up, the water becoming colder and colder, becoming supercooled, turning at last into tiny lumps of ice, lumps which then clumped together to become falling hailstones, hailstones which in turn collided with the upwelling supercooled droplets, droplets which shattered as they instantly froze upon striking the surfaces of the stones, splinters from which bore positive charges up and away from the falling hail, the stones themselves plummeting on downward to melt into negatively charged water drops. Thus in that maelstrom, water vapor and convection and freezing and clumping and gravity and upwelling and collisions and splintering and melting had all combined to turn the whole of the clouds into giant generators producing millions of kilowatts of electricity and hundreds of millions of volts between the positive terminal at the top and the negative terminal at the bottom, with uncounted coulombs of trapped electrical charge just waiting to break free . . .

  . . . Above the Coburn Building.

  And just below the negative pole a small pocket of positive charge had built up at the base of the cloud . . .

  . . . Above the Coburn Building.

  Tripped at random, or perhaps by a hurtling cosmic ray, a trigger discharge leaped from this small pocket to the main negative pole, leaving a track of ionized air in its wake. Attracted by the positive charge of the earth below, from the main negative terminal a faint pilot discharge flashed down this ionized track. After forty-one meters, the discharge suddenly grew brighter as a great surge of electrons roared after, overtook, and became a massive leader stroke. Down through the air flashed the leader, stepping this way and that, zigging and zagging and sometimes branching as dictated by local variations in the electric field ahead. Within one one-hundredth of a second it was just ninety-two meters from the top of the Coburn Building and traveling at velocity of one hundred fifty thousand meters per second. At this point there was a difference of twenty-three million volts between the negative tip of the leader and the frame of the building. A huge surge of positive charge flashed upward through the steel girders, and streamers leapt from the structure toward the oncoming leader. One hundred eighty-two thousand amperes blasted through one of the many lightning rods, and copper vaporized in its wake. The air at the core of the bolt flashed to sixty-eight thousand degrees Fahrenheit, exploding outward at supersonic speeds, the resulting shock wave racing to hammer upon anything in its path.

  The leader stroke was done, but up the track now coruscated the return stroke, hurtling toward the sky, leaping upward from building to cloud at one-third the speed of light, ninety-one thousand amperes flowing at its peak, and the last of the copper vaporized along the track. Brilliant light flared—eighteen billion watts, all told, before the return stroke died—and thunder would roll for seconds as the superheated air expanded. But even as the concussion began its hurtling race outward—

  —a scant one hundred milliseconds after the return bolt expired, from a higher region of the cloud, a region yet burgeoning with charge, down the ionized channel left behind flashed a massive dart leader, the stroke moving at two point two million meters per second. . . .

  Altogether, there were five vast charge regions in the cloud above. . . .

  Every coulomb of which would slam into the Coburn Building below.

  The second titanic bolt cra
shed downward, vaporizing passive solar panels and exploding the transfer liquid into chemical steam.

  One-tenth of a second later, the third stroke smashed through the wide window of the executive conference room, for no steel beams whatsoever stood along that glass-paneled wall. The horizontal bolt slammed through James Langford, knocking him backward, and it leapt across to the great walnut table, exploding it into kindling as the lightning punched onward through wall paneling and followed electric cables downward. The shock wave blew out all of the windows, the blast of expanding air slamming Toni Adkins forward into the wooden rail and hurling chairs and Henry Stein and Drew Meyer and Mark Perry aside like chaff upon the wind.

  The next stroke flashed down the rear of the building and blasted into the main power bus. Transformers exploded, superheated oil flying wide as the building went dark.

  The final stroke again hammered across the executive conference room, crashing through the door and blowing it to splinters as lightning stuttered down the hall and dove through the floor.

  All in all, three-quarters of a second had elapsed from first stroke to last. Nearly five billion joules of energy had been expended. Far below the building, bubbling sand would fuse to glass. . . .

  . . . And then the thunder rolled.

  BAAAADOOOOOMMMM! Walls jolted, floors jumped, glass shattered, bookshelves toppled, cabinets shuddered and doors swung open, spilling out the contents. And the shock wave slammed into people, rocking them back, knocking the breath from them, deafening them wherever they were, causing noses and ears to bleed.

  The building plunged into darkness. . . .

  In the control center all were hammered by the concussion, techs and medtechs and Timothy Rendell and Alya Ramanni and John Greyson, along with the few folks still sitting in the observation room behind.

  “Son of a bitch!” shouted Timothy in the blackness, barely perceiving his own voice above the ringing in his unhearing ears; that he managed to detect his words at all was due entirely to bone conduction.