Corridor (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  “What is that place? I walked for twenty minutes before I came to what looked like real streets, and even then… where is everybody? Are those actually buildings? I’m glad the beautiful Joanna told me something about this world, or I’d have been completely at a loss, but I was petrified you’d sense the Void opening and would bolt out the back door before I could locate you…”

  Joanna came into the back kitchen – the house had two, and this one was a sort of closed-in porch behind the main one – and saw, sitting at the table, a dapper little gentleman in a neat black suit, looking rather like the devil with his white-streaked black van dyke and his jewel-green eyes.

  She stopped cold. He was the last person she’d expected to encounter. “Magus? Magister Magus?”

  “The very same, my dear.” He rose from the table and executed a courtly bow, then took and kissed her hand. “The greatest dog wizard in the West of the World…”

  “And one whom I hope is going to tell me,” finished Antryg pleasantly, “that he didn’t actually open a Gate in the Void to get here, because God knows what’s followed him through.”

  “He did,” said Joanna. “I saw it, in the river-bed…”

  “We took great care,” said the Greatest Dog Wizard in the West of the World with dignity, “to make sure there were no – er – side-effects.” He held Joanna’s chair for her as she sat down, while Antryg fetched another cup of coffee for her, and cold pizza that he’d evidently ordered in last night while she was having her first round of nightmares.

  It was only at second or third inspection that Joanna could see that the Magus’s clothing – dark trousers, dark coat, discreet flicker of white neck-cloth and ruffles – was cut like nothing of her own world. She wondered if the taxi-driver had noticed. Or was this another case of whatever it was that kept people from stealing Antryg’s bicycle?

  “And ‘we’ would be—?” Antryg raised his brows and settled back into his chair.

  “Hestie Pinktrees – you remember Hestie? She works south of the river…”

  “Oh, dear, yes, Hestie! One of the best dog wizards in the city of Angelshand—” Antryg turned to Joanna. “A most beautiful lady who keeps birds, and makes astonishing scones – I really should try to get her recipe. I know she uses both cheese and garlic in them, and I suspect sesame…”

  “Hestie and Seyt the Pilgrim,” continued Magister Magus firmly, “used magnetism to open a spiracle in what I can only describe as a… a roadway, like the Dead Paths in the countryside between the standing-stones—”

  “Yes, it’s a tube,” said Antryg. “A corridor.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know what it was!” protested Joanna.

  “I didn’t, last night. But I set up a plasmotic detector-field in the back yard after you went back to bed—” He nodded at the windows that formed most of the back-kitchen’s western wall, and through them, amid what Antryg claimed were going to be rose-beds and an herb-garden come spring, she saw a knee-high forest of pin-wheels, coat-hangers bent into obscure shapes, and half-buried bottles.

  Joanna supposed it was no worse than the crammed wilderness of old car-parts and superannuated couches cherished by Mr. Parker next door.

  “—and the resonance-pattern was very clear. It passes through Los Angeles and, so far as I can tell, Mexico City—” He nodded toward the main kitchen, where one of his laptops was open on the table and hooked into the telephone. The dark screen was still dappled with the orange text of one of the dozen weird-news bulletin-boards Antryg routinely trolled in the small hours.

  “Mexico City?”

  “I’ll need you to check and be sure. And it evidently passes through Angelshand as well, because Magus came through from there early this morning. I presume it was in Angelshand,” he added, “if you got Hestie and Seyt to help you – is Seyt still living in the attic of Big Blossom’s place on Hot Pillow Lane, by the way? Frightful woman… And what did it look like inside? And when did it first appear?”

  “It first appeared—” Magus’ voice turned suddenly grim, “—about three weeks ago. All along the waterfront, people would waken in the night at the same hour, screaming from nightmare… Not everyone,” he added, as Antryg opened his mouth to ask the obvious question. “But six or seven in a straight stretch from Offal Lane to St. Bethwyg’s. In broad daylight two days ago a woman killed her child, at the same time that a carpenter’s boy in Pie Street threw himself from the window of his master’s attic: the other people in the house say he screamed for them to look out, to save themselves, though there was nothing, they say, in the attic nor anywhere in the house, when they searched. Others set fire to their houses, saying that it was the only way they could exorcise the demons living in the furniture. It’s a madness. It comes and goes—”

  “And does it come and go—” Antryg picked a very cold anchovy off his pizza and offered it to Chainsaw, “—at intervals in a pattern? Five hours – ten hours – seven hours, five-ten-seven, or whatever the pattern is?”

  The dog wizard’s green eyes widened. “How did you know?”

  Antryg said, “Hmmn,” and consumed the next anchovy himself.

  “Because the path was straight I thought it sounded like an energy-line,” went on Magus. “Only there is no such line in that part of the city. The Witchfinders arrested Kyra the Red about a month ago, and there was a tremendous uproar before she was released, but as a result there wasn’t a Council Wizard left in the city, either banished or fled in a panic. And to tell you the truth,” added the little dog wizard, “when Hestie and her friends came to call on me, I was packing my bags.”

  Joanna, who had been captured by the Witchfinders on her one visit to the gray, sprawling city of Angelshand, and locked in a bona fide dungeon in fear of her life, didn’t blame him one little bit. Antryg generally wore fingerless gloves against the chill of the autumn mornings because the Witchfinders had dislocated most of the bones in his hands. “Why did they arrest Kyra?” She remembered the skinny red-haired novice she had met briefly at the Citadel of Wizards; the Magus shook his head.

  “It’s always something or other, with the Witchfinders. But now I’m beginning to wonder if these… these spells of terror or madness or whatever they are, had something to do with it. They usually go after the Council Wizards first, you see. It’s why we used magnetism.” He sipped his coffee and winced a little, as if he could taste the micro-waves.

  “Magnetism?” Antryg’s eyebrows shot up in fascinated delight.

  “Yes. Two children were playing in Pie Street with a ship’s compass; they said it had spun ‘round just before their older brother set fire to the kitchen of their house. When I went down to the waterfront with a magnet it behaved… oddly. The Witchfinders would have been down on us like a duck on a bug, if we’d opened a spiracle into the energy-line using magic. We had to boost the power of the magnets, of course, and that meant doing small spells in attics and cellars all over the city and then running like the Devil before we could be caught—”

  “Electricity.” Antryg scrambled to his feet. “I think I have an electromagnet in my room…” He strode up the old backstairs from the kitchen, Joanna and their guest at his heels. “We can run a current off a car battery, can’t we, Joanna? Because it sounds to me as if they’re manipulating magic with a computer—”

  “They who?”

  He turned in the doorway of his workroom, mad eyes bright with delight. “Does it matter? With a computer it would be easy to maintain an infinitely long enclaved universe… Could you get into the corridor with the same sort of procedure that one uses for the energy-tracks in the countryside? I trust you timed your entry to take place just after the madness had passed…”

  As he spoke, Antryg rummaged among the debris spread over the old oak table and the ancient workbench that, together, lined the whole eastern side of what Joanna guessed had begun life as a sleeping-porch, in the house’s early days before the invention of air conditioning… not that 75313 Porson Avenue h
ad air conditioning even now. The long room was still two-thirds windows, and like the secondary kitchen on the other side of the house, freezing now that the weather was chilling down to winter. Every remaining inch of wall-space was filled with makeshift shelves built of packing-boxes and stocked with the unimaginable assortment of Antryg’s hobbies: dental tools, photographic reflectors, boxes of lenses, four disassembled computers, wind-up toys, electric doorbells, test-tubes, decanters, the skulls of three foxes and a human being, snake bones, locks of hair, strings of goat-hooves, baby-food jars filled with sulphur, silver, and powdered wolfsbane; compasses, astrolabes, clocks, balls of string, plastic baggies of herbs, candle-ends, a Magic 8-Ball, stacks of comic-books and of rubbings taken from tortoise-shells. Old keys and miniature liquor-bottles filled now with feathers, sticks, withered leaves or honey hung in a string across the tops of the windows; the tables were littered with Antryg’s two computers, model ships and catapults, alembics, retorts, a dozen pinwheels, wires, old radio-tubes, crystals of various sizes and clarity, screwdrivers, drill-bits, packets of sculpy and LED bulbs, a spectrometer, a seismograph, and, yes, a two-foot electromagnet that had originally been part of a wrecking-yard hoist.

  “I’m not an idiot,” said Magister Magus, looking around him, “nor suicidal. The spells of madness take place every eleven and a half hours, then seven hours thirty-two minutes, then four hours twenty minutes – we timed them over a period of four days and they time to the minute. I went in just after the four-hour spell, to give myself the most time.”

  Antryg fetched a canvas sports-bag from under the workbench – he had half a dozen, in which he carried his gi and hakama to and from the dojo – and carefully loaded the magnet into it. “And what was it like once you were inside?”

  “Misty. Light-filled. The mist and the light came together to form a sort of wall, though whether it was permeable or not I didn’t test. Believe me, I had no desire to push through into some other world and then not be able to get back into the corridor. Arches had been built at intervals – rings, actually, out of what looked like stone—”

  “Stone would be heavy for an artificial construct,” remarked Antryg, extracting a fifty-foot coaxial cable from the dresser-drawer and fitting a makeshift splitter onto one end. “And it would be difficult to maintain a uniform consistency.”

  “Whoever put up the stone along the Dead Paths in the countryside didn’t seem to have that problem.” Joanna, perched on a corner of the workbench, tapped through into Antryg’s favorite computer to Delphi Net, and navigated her way to the Weird Stuff bulletin-board maintained by NYU. There was indeed a thread, Wake Up Screaming, on which fifty entries had been posted in the past three weeks.

  “Yes, but they marked those Paths over a period of hundreds of years – could you hand me that box of crystals there by your elbow? Thank you. If this track has only existed for less than a month it would argue for a technological rather than an organic growth, so I’m guessing they’re high-impact plastic of some sort. Were there ragamummages in the corridor?”

  “And bigger things.” Magus shuddered. “Some of them a great deal bigger. And my head ached abominably, in spite of the spells the others had put on me. Part of it was the light, which reflected off the mists and the dust—”

  Antryg turned from wiring doorbell-magnets and crystals onto the ends of the long tendrils that emerged from the splitter: “Dust?”

  “The air was full of it.” Magus held out his arm, and Joanna saw, on the black velvet of his sleeve, where yellowish-white dust had collected in the folds. Antryg wet the tip of one finger to touch it, and with it brushed his lower lip.

  “What is it?” asked Joanna, as the wizard’s eyes lost the bright cheerfulness of a new challenge, and narrowed in anger, as if the taste had told him the whole story.

  His voice was deadly quiet as he replied, “Corn.”

  *

  “When we get there,” said Antryg quietly, as they headed for the stair some ninety minutes later, “I want you to stay back out of the river-bed.”

  Joanna stopped, letting the Magus go on ahead of them, loaded down with the bag containing two car-batteries and Antryg’s laptop.

  “I’ve watched you load virus-disks before,” Antryg continued, “and I can coach the Magus on what to do. He has a phenomenal memory for long complex routines, we all do, it’s part of a wizard’s training. I can—”

  “What do you think is going to happen when you hook those things up?” She touched the satchel slung on Antryg’s bony shoulder. It contained not only the electromagnet and a second laptop, but the devices he’d assembled while Joanna searched the bulletin-boards: one a linked apparatus of wires and crystals like an arcane lasso that spread out to a circle of ten feet in diameter, the other the coaxial cable with its twenty long extension-wires, each tipped with the magnetic coil from a doorbells, a nodule of crystal, and a sticky wad of duct-tape.

  “To the best of my knowledge, it should be perfectly safe.”

  “And how many trans-dimensional tunnels have you collapsed with computer-viruses?” She patted the pocket of her exceedingly sorry old corduroy blazer, where the disk containing the nastiest of her considerable collection resided.

  He looked aside. “I don’t want you hurt.” Archmage and exile, even without magic, she understood, he felt the responsibility.

  Joanna said quietly, “I don’t want me hurt, either. But if something goes wrong, you don’t know how to look at the program and improvise a fix on the fly. If you’re going to risk your life, let’s at least increase the chances of having it be for something that’ll work.”

  He started to say something else, but Joanna turned away and headed for the stairs. Behind her, she heard Antryg go into their bedroom; glancing back, she saw him emerge, and slide the scabbarded katana through his belt.

  “What does it mean,” asked Joanna, as she inched her aged blue Mustang carefully across lanes of clogged traffic toward the Alameda Street off-ramp, “that the dust in the tube is corn? What does corn have to do with magic?”

  “Everything, I should imagine,” responded Antryg, “if a substantial percentage of your population doesn’t have anything to eat.”

  Even at this hour – quarter past eleven, when everybody should have been at work – there were still a LOT of cars on the freeway. Don’t any of you have jobs? Though according to Magister Magus’s silver watch it had been only four hours since he’d entered the corridor to reach their world, the pinwheels in the back-yard plasmotic field had begun to whirl about twenty minutes after the three adventurers had come downstairs: “That should give us seven hours and twenty minutes,” said Joanna as she’d scooped up her car keys. “Plenty of time to get down to the river and back, now that Rush Hour is over.”

  “But there isn’t starvation in Ferryth,” Magister Magus said now, tearing his eyes from the horrifying spectacle of a semi-truck the size of a barn within touching distance of the car window. “Or anywhere on our world this year, that I’m aware of. And in any case, no one but the Council has the strength to open an energy-line like that—”

  “Oh, they’re not on our world,” said Antryg. “Not if they’re using plastic amplification-rings to extend the enclave. Nor on this one. They’re only using – at a guess – the populations of the largest cities they could find as power-sources to keep the corridor open, from wherever the corn is being grown to wherever conditions have changed so that the local population is no longer able to feed itself, through epidemic or climate-change or even a Word of Wasting laid on all crops… It only stands to reason. Though in fact,” he added thoughtfully, “I’ve done some of my best reasoning lying down… or running extremely fast.” He propped his glasses more firmly onto his long nose, glanced at the dashboard clock and then at the sky visible above the gray concrete bridges that spanned the traffic lanes. “What were the creatures you saw in the tube itself? Sort of purple ball-shaped things with silver fins?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t ma
ke any sense. Any group of wizards capable of opening an energy-track like that one would be more than capable of dealing with an epidemic or a Word of—”

  “Catch fire and die, you fucking bastard!” said Joanna. Then quickly added, “The guy in the Chevy, not you, sir. It wouldn’t be the buyers, would it, who have the dimensional transport technology? It would be the sellers.”

  “Got it in one.” Antryg wrapped his long arms around the canvas bag as the Mustang swayed with the tight hook of the off-ramp, then slowly bumped and rocked its way along the broken pavement and old street-car tracks of Center Street toward the edge of the yards.

  “That’s why Mexico City.” The reports on the several bulletin-boards she’d double-checked that morning sounded exactly like what the Magus had described… and like her own frightful dreams.

  “It could be anything from electrical usage to blood-heat to life-energy,” said Antryg, as they edged between parked trucks, turned down a narrow street between dingy warehouses of stucco and brick. “Magic varies from universe to universe, and this corridor obviously runs between several. Once a group of people – some of them wizards, some of them computer technicians, and possibly not even from the same universe – learned how to open a trans-dimensional corridor and power vehicles along it, all they’d need to do is to put themselves in touch with the local wizards or shamans or dream-scryers of an area that’s in trouble, and offer to solve their woes. If there are shamans in an isolated area, like the Red Waste—”

  Magus nodded, familiar with wherever that was – Joanna had never heard of it.

  “—it may appear easier to import food in bulk from several dimensions away, rather than send out caravans to Tir Quag, which might not make it across the Waste anyway and wouldn’t be able to carry enough back to save more than a few hundred. The buyers probably don’t know about the effects of the transport corridor on the worlds it touches – or possibly don’t care.”