Firemaggot (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  FIREMAGGOT

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Copyright 2009 Barbara Hambly

  Cover art by Eric Baldwin

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  Table of Contents

  Firemaggot

  About The Author

  The Further Adventures

  FIREMAGGOT

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  “Is that it?” The dry autumn moon was halfway to full; Joanna Sheraton could just make out a sprawl of buildings below the hillside where she stood. The plans in the Ventura County Assessor’s office indicated a complex of stables, garages, outdoor and indoor tennis courts, a disused generator-house and what had once been a formal garden.

  Not a light shone. She wondered what it would look like by day.

  Moonlight flashed across her companion’s round spectacle-lense, touched the long beak of his nose as he moved his head. “I can’t imagine there’d be two of them.”

  “Are you kidding? There’s hundreds of these ‘ranches’ between here and Pismo Beach. It’s where rich people come so they can see for miles if someone’s coming after them.”

  He said, “Hmmn,” and took a silver-foil pinwheel from his pocket, and held it out in the direction of the house. No wind stirred the coarse scrub of the hills behind them: this far from Highway 33 the silence was absolute. Yet after a moment, the pinwheel began to turn, first slowly, then quicker, until its gleaming surface flickered in the cobalt darkness.

  Joanna whispered, “What does that mean?”

  Her companion whispered back, “I haven’t the slightest idea.” He replaced the Abomination Detector in his jacket pocket. “Let’s get closer.”

  Great.

  “If anyone lived there, the grounds would be lighted,” she pointed out, as he helped her down-slope with a grip that, though immensely strong, was as light as a cat’s. “Can you see the maze?”

  “I think so.” Even pitched low, his voice had the quality of brown velvet, extravagant as a third-rate actor’s. “It’s tremendously overgrown, but the shape of the power-circles is still there.”

  To Joanna, everything looked like darkness within darkness. But though the man beside her had often said that magic would not work in this world to which he had been exiled, Joanna had noticed that, like the wizards in his own world, he could see in the dark like a cat. Either that - she could not keep herself from speculating - or he had some form of a) internal echolocation b) psychic aura-detection of both organic and non-organic matter or c) hyperacute awareness of absorbed-heat radiation. Her experiments over the past ten months had proved inconclusive. She was just glad he could do it. They’d hiked a good two miles from the car and she hadn’t the faintest idea how to get back, with or without a flesh-sucking monster in pursuit.

  They had almost reached the fence – eight feet of chain-link topped with a savage coil of barbed wire – when he added, almost as an afterthought, “However, if I say ‘Run,’ I want you to run – without question, without hesitation, and without looking back. Promise me.”

  “I promise, Antryg.”

  How far, was another matter. If the thing she’d seen three weeks ago was any indication of what might be waiting for them on the other side of that fence, it wasn’t anything she wanted anyone she cared for to be facing alone.

  Antryg produced another device from his pocket – a hand-drawn thaumatrope – and, hooking the strings around his long, crooked fingers, spun it deftly. In the versions of this toy that Joanna had known in childhood, there had always been a bird printed on one side of the cardboard disk, which, with the speed of the spin imparted by the strings, would appear to be in the cage on the other side.

  The thaumatrope that Antryg had made had a cage on one side, and nothing on the other.

  Joanna wondered what he saw in the cage as it spun.

  A far-off noise – a whiffle of breeze through the electrical wires? – made her jerk around, cold with terror and shock…

  But listening, she heard nothing.

  There couldn’t be more of them. You asked and asked over every bulletin-board on the ARPANet, every server on FidoNet, GEnie, Delphi…

  Only two other people had ever seen them…

  But both of those, were within twenty-five miles of this place.

  She edged closer to her companion, and from where it was slung behind her backpack, grasped the weapon she had made – the weapon she hoped would work.

  “A bit far from town to worry about squatters.” Antryg turned right, made his way cautiously parallel to the chain-link barrier, nimble on the broken ground. By moonlight she could see he’d taken his sword, still scabbarded, from his belt, grasping the scabbard in his left hand while his right he passed along the fence, only a few inches from the wire: sometimes palm towards the wire, sometimes the backs of his knuckles in their fingerless gloves.

  “More likely The Daemon’s first wife keeping wives number two, three, and four from coming onto the place for whatever they can find.” According to the woman at the County Assessor’s office, the contending heirs to the Nedwick estate – which a former owner had named Misselthwaite Manor, a literary reference Joanna had had to explain to her companion — were still paying to keep guards on the property.

  “Did you ever see him perform?”

  “Oh, come on.” Joanna grinned at the recollection of herself in Middle School, fourteen years ago. “I was such a nerd never saw anybody perform.” A momentary vision of moving, in her aunt’s hand-me-down polyester pantsuits, through a giggling swarm of platform-shoed, flared-bell-bottom contemporaries… “And even if my parents had let me go to concerts, or if I’d had anyone to go with, I was just a hair too young for Firemaggot. Their peak year was ’72, and if I’m twenty-seven now, I must have been twelve or thirteen then. Though I remember whats-her-name in Middle School, Shoni Gilmer, dyed her hair with that red-gold-and-purple streak in it like The Daemon had, and got a buddy of hers to tattoo their band logo on the small of her back. I thought the PE teacher was going to have a stroke.”

  They halted where the ground dipped sharply. “Do you have those pieces of wood I asked you to bring?”

  She produced them, having earlier disposed of Antryg’s chivalrous offer to carry the backpack with the question, Will it slow you down if you have to fight one of those things? She sensed rather than saw his movement, and heard the fence-wire softly clang. “Can you crawl under here? It isn’t very high, but there’s something about the fence—”

  “It’s not electrified, is it?”

  “You won’t go flying back in a shower of sparks if you touch it, no.” His big hand took hers, guided her down the declivity to where he’d bent the lower edge of the fence up over a tiny gully, and propped it with the wood. “But they’ll know it, if we climb over.”

  Some kind of motion-sensor on the links. “They’ll know because they’ll hear me scream when I get to the barbed wire part.” The gap wasn’t large, but Joanna was a small woman, and – for all her pocket-Venus figure - slender. Feeling like she’d stumbled into a re-make of The Dirty Dozen, she lay flat and slithered. All I need is a rifle and a belt full of grenades. “I hope you can find your way back here,” she added, when Antryg – tall and thin and dirt-covered – stood up beside her again, brushing himself off.

  “I shouldn’t—” he began, but a sou
nd – or what Joanna thought for an instant was a sound – made her gasp and turn, listening again, cold to her marrow.

  Nothing.

  Nothing but the hammering of her heart.

  When they’d discussed this expedition, Joanna had had no doubts: Of course I’m coming. You can’t drive a car.

  It had been daylight, then.

  Now, in the darkness, the only thing her mind could focus on was the horror that Chainsaw the Cat had so proudly laid on her pillow – embryonic, ghastly, dying but not yet dead – which had triggered the three weeks of search through libraries, computer bulletin-boards, microfiche files and public records. Antryg had said, It’s there. It has to be. And it has to be in the maze…

  And it had seemed completely logical at the time to reply, If those are the things it’s spawning, it’s got to be dealt with.

  Maybe that was the reason the wizards in his own universe considered him so dangerous.

  The house loomed on their left, lightless as Hell. Another wall of blackness, thick with the cloying sweetness of datura blossoms, blotted the stars ahead, uneven texture like cloud seeming to absorb the spidery light. She wondered if the little building in its center – the assessor’s plans had described it as a ‘belvedere’ in the 1920s, but it was called a ‘guest house’ in 1944 – was still standing, and if that was where this thing – if there actually was a thing – had been hiding all these decades. Her hand tightened on Antryg’s; it was one thing to read that the maze covered almost three acres, and another to confront that massed, brooding shadow. “Can you see the gate?”

  He produced the pinwheel again, held it toward the wall of hedge. It spun like a thing possessed. “It was supposed to face the—”

  The flat bark of a gunshot was like a thunderclap. Joanna spun, gasped, momentarily too surprised even to be frightened, and heard the roar of a second shot and felt something hot pass her face with a faint whitt. Antryg, with reflexes attuned to worlds where it wasn’t particularly illegal to shoot at intruders, grabbed her shoulder and shoved her ahead of him back in the direction they’d come, with such violence that she nearly fell. Shouts behind them: Joanna didn’t make out words but guessed they weren’t good ones. The iron grip shifted to her wrist and dragged her at a dead run, his other hand – he must have thrust the scabbarded sword back into his belt – catching her as she stumbled, hauling back her onto her feet.

  Another shot. Feet thudded behind them. Antryg zig-zagged, dragging her after his erratic course by main strength. At the fence he flung his coat up over the barbed wire – at six-foot-three, reflected Joanna resentfully, easy for him – and boosted her up after it with that strength that always surprised her. Somewhere in the run terror had seized her – after about the fourth shot – and she thought as she scrambled awkwardly over, I’m a sitting target up here…

  Even through the heavy cotton, the barbs tore flesh.

  The fence-wire clattered wildly under Antryg’s springing weight. She heard him curse as he dropped beside her, seized her—

  A man’s voice yelled, “Stop, goddamit it!”

  Three more shots followed them into the night.

  *

  “Nothing—” The word was barely a whisper, forced from him by pain. Joanna paused, fingers sticky with the blood that glistened on his arm, glanced at his shut eyes and the still concentration in his face.

  She realized he was trying to use magic.

  She’d seen him slow bleeding, summon energies to keep shock at bay… work healing on himself and others. Elsewhere. Not in this world, this universe. She pressed a field-dressing over the wound on his arm – two dollars and fifty cents at The Survival Shop on Ventura Boulevard – hands fumbling with the violence of her own adrenalin-rush. Twisted a tourniquet tight.

  Thank God for deep backpacks.

  “Can you make it to the car?” Strangely, despite the trembling that had seized her, she felt completely calm.

  He made a gesture – frustration? Anger at her fussing? – with his uninjured right hand. “I can’t—”

  Then his breath hissed and his head came up, not in pain, but at some sound—

  This time it was unmistakable.

  A searing insectile whine, but loud. Like wasp-wings, if the wasp happened to be six inches long. Joanna’s tongue dried to the roof of her mouth and when Antryg shoved her to the ground under him she went like a rag-doll, heedless of the bull-thorns under her bare hands, the dust in her nose. Can it smell his blood?

  The noise darted over them, horribly close, only yards off it sounded like. Gone...? Back, filling the night.

  Can IT see in the dark?

  The dead thing’s head had been too inter-melded with the skull of the squirrel it had absorbed, to tell if it had eyes.

  Another thing Antryg could do, Elsewhere, not here… was make things that were after him look the other way. She could tell by the way he breathed that he was reaching with his mind into an inner darkness where there was nothing for it to grasp.

  Gone again…

  When they reached the car again he whispered, “I should never have brought you.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” She eased the tourniquet as she’d learned in her first-aid course, wadded her gray car-sweatshirt around the wound and knotted it with a couple of lengths of wire from her kit. The bone didn’t feel broken. A graze, bloody but not deep.

  Frustration, despair, anger at himself cracked the blithe calm that was his shield. “Without magic I have no business asking you—”

  “We’re all without magic here,” Joanna pointed out, and put the Mustang in gear. “And we manage just fine.” She heard his breath catch, as the tires bumped roughly off the shoulder, onto pavement. Sinking moonlight showed her the road. She wasn’t going to turn on her lights til they reached the 101.

  He was silent all the way back to Tarzana.

  *

  When first she’d seen him – daft, bemused, and much more Gandalfy in his long mage’s robe and cross-gaitered boots, in flight from the wizards of his own world – she had sensed the power behind that scatterbrained friendliness: the power and the danger, almost beyond his own volition to control. Now in the glare of the lightbulb that hung from the dining-room ceiling of the down-at-heels bungalow they’d bought on Porson Avenue, he had a stripped air that went beyond being shirtless, dirty, and smeared with blood. He had expected to be able to protect her.

  Protecting others was what wizards did.

  Stripped of his power, he had been as terrified as she.

  She threaded up a sterile needle. “Security guards are supposed to arrest people in this world, not shoot them,” she said, keeping her voice matter-of-fact. “Losing their jobs would only be the least of their troubles….”

  “Hence those last seven or eight shots, I suppose.” His tone answered hers, but she could hear him, struggling for his balance. “No witnesses, no—OWWW!!”

  He did not, she noticed, pull his arm away. “You’re the man who went head-to-head with Undead monsters and soul-eating blobs, and you say ‘Ow’?”

  She had waked last night – it was only their first week in the house, and its seventy-five-year-old noises were unfamiliar to her – to find him missing from their bed. Had seen him through the old-fashioned archway in the little chamber next-door, sitting on the window-seat in the moonlight, his hand held before him, palm-up. Instead of the concentration that one might have expected, his face – eyes shut, wide-lipped mouth relaxed – wore an expression of an almost frightening openness, like a man listening for a sound, scenting for a smell, impossibly distant, upon which the whole of his life depended.

  Isn’t there something out there… Isn’t there anything…?

  Magic was not something that Antryg did. It was what he was.

  She had gone silently back to bed. He had not rejoined her until it was nearly light.

  Now he said, “Neither of those monsters had a gun.” With his right hand he poured his third demitasse of Bacardi. There was P
ercodan somewhere in the boxes that still stacked every corner of the dark living-room behind them – courtesy of Joanna’s step-mother – but Antryg shared Joanna’s deep mistrust of drugs. Spells to defuse pain were another part of a healer-mage’s arsenal that were denied him; in his own world, the near-universal analgesic was vodka.

  In a quieter voice, she asked, “Do we call the cops?” though she guessed what his reply would be. With the back of her free hand she discouraged Spock – who at eight years old still had the inquisitiveness of a kitten – from playing with the dangling end of the suture.

  “And tell them what? What do we know that we didn’t know last week? Other than that men who’ll shoot witnesses will probably lie if we file a complaint—for which we’d have to give our address, wouldn’t we? Joanna, I should never have taken you—”

  “We will tell them,” Joanna cut him off firmly, “that we were looking for our lost dog—”

  “On the property of one of the greatest heavy-metal rock-stars of the 1970s?”

  “That’s where she ran away.”

  “Who died on the premesis—” His breath caught and he rather hastily gulped his rum. “Besides, if the matter becomes official, it will be possible for those who are protecting the mutandion to delay investigation. Once a mutandion starts to shed spawn, they can produce thousands in a week.” Without his glasses, his gray eyes had the wide earnestness of a mad scientist’s on a mission – not, reflected Joanna, the mien most likely to impress the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, particularly when coupled with an unexplained gunshot wound.

  “Delay is what we can’t afford,” he went on. “They’re protecting it and they’ll do anything to go on protecting it: that’s what mutandion do. It’s how they survive. They hide in other worlds, and they acquire a protector. They give him or her the thing he or she wants most, needs most – you saw the plans of the maze. There was nothing that poor befuddled rock-star – and the owner of the property before him – wouldn’t do, at the inspiration of the thing in the maze. I’ll have to go back there, and it will have to be—”