Corridor (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  “You’re crazy. Crazy like that other asshole—”

  “You mean the one who stepped into that circle and made himself disappear?”

  Ten minutes. And nothing.

  Oh, shit. Oh, damn. Oh please don’t make me have to do this…

  “Three hours and forty-five minutes?” Magister Magus knelt at Joanna’s side. “I thought we had seven hours and thirty-two minutes from the last time the energy-reader activated.”

  “Obviously,” said Joanna, keeping her voice steady against rising panic, “we’re closer to the source here – whatever it is – and the line branches between here and Ferryth. We’re getting more frequent shipments here.”

  “Oh. Oh, dear… How much time—?”

  “It’s worse than that,” said Joanna. “Antryg’s run into trouble of some kind. One of us needs to go in and get him out.”

  *

  After a certain amount of argument, Master-sergeant Barton (retired) borrowed two Uzis and half a dozen clips of ammo from Villareal and his men: “You know how to use one of these things, honey? Easy as pie…”

  Joanna briefed Magister Magus on how to activate the virus program and how to use the chat function, should it appear on-screen. Of course he couldn’t read English any more than Antryg had been able to six months ago, but she wrote out a simple set of codes, one of which meant, ACTIVATE THE VIRUS. WE CAN’T GET OUT. She didn’t tell him what that would do, and just hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  “My dear,” whispered the dog wizard nervously, “it isn’t anything truly serious, do you think? The thing is, I’d really rather not be stranded here in your world, and if we lose both the corridor and Antryg – not to mention yourself…”

  I was hoping you wouldn’t ask about that part…

  Joanna put her house-key into his hand, and closed his fingers around it. “Hide out there til we get back,” she said, and tried to sound like it was a foregone conclusion that they would get back. Antryg could open Gates in the Void, even from this world, if he wanted to deal with the horrors that could come slipping through the wormholes that opened in the vicinity of such portals…

  Magus couldn’t.

  Completely setting aside the issue of Mr. Villareal and his “bravos,” if stranded here, he would be screwed indeed.

  Not as screwed as Antryg and I’ll be if anything comes roaring along the corridor while we’re still inside….

  “We’ll be back.” She patted the Magus’s velvet sleeve.

  Strangely, once the waves of terror had passed through her, she felt very calm, though a little cold inside. As if she’d jumped off the side of the swimming-pool and was in the water with the sharks. All she had to do was swim to the other side.

  “You got about thirty minutes on these batteries,” Torres informed her, checking the gauge he’d wired to the terminals. “Less, depending on how much current your friend’s gadget is going to need once you fire it up.”

  “In thirty minutes—” Joanna checked her watch again, “—that’s going to be the least of our worries. Thank you for keeping an eye on this for me.” Torres worked in a garage – Joanna suspected, stripping stolen cars. “What’s the worst thing you saw in that corridor, Magus?”

  “I don’t know what it was—” His voice dropped to a whisper. “But it looked like a set of flaming wheels, and spit lightning. And there were things like many-legged bugs—” He measured something roughly two and a half feet between his hands.

  “Great—”

  “There were a lot of those. And they’re fast. My dear—”

  “I’ll be fine.” She had the suspicion that with the best intentions in the world, once he got into the corridor, the odds were good that Magus would turn tail and run for his own universe, and by the time they figured out what he’d done, it would be too late. She was deeply fond of the little dog wizard – as he was, she knew, of both her and Antryg. But he was what he was. “I’ll be good. Sergeant Barton—?”

  Villareal, relegated to the periphery of these preparations, only scowled as they walked along the trail of wires to the spiracle, glinting sharply in the pale chilly light. Behind her, she heard him say, “You tellin’ me that thing’s like an invisible passageway? Like nobody can see it?”

  “Roughly, yes. It’s being operated by beings in another dimension…”

  “We better hold hands,” she said to Barton, although in other circumstances the thought of doing so would have been a deal-breaker to the whole project. “I don’t know how this thing works, and I don’t know if we’ll be dropped in the same place.”

  “Honey—” Barton tucked one of the Uzis under his arm to get at his pocket, took out a half-finished pint of Jim Beam, and took a judicious sip, “—this is gettin’ better all the time.” He offered her the pint (Uh – none for me, thanks…), re-pocketed it, took her hand. “One… two… Happy New Year.”

  They stepped together into the spiracle.

  *

  Joanna had forgotten the breathless shock, the horrible disorientation she’d felt the first time she’d left her own world. The terrible sense of falling, of drowning in light that looked like darkness.

  And the drilling, grinding panic generated by the corridor itself, even through Antryg’s defensive spell, was a thousand times worse.

  Barton screamed, released her hand, fell to his knees with his hands pressed to the sides of his skull; Joanna immediately relieved him of both Uzis but wondered what she’d do if he tried to grab them back. She took one fast look around her – and yes, Antryg had been perfectly right, it was a sort of tube about fourteen feet in diameter whose sides seemed to be light-soaked mist – then caught her companion by the shoulders: “Wayne!”

  She remembered her dream, of the cats’ demon-red eyes.

  She saw that dream reflected in the way the man stared at her. He made a gasping scream, struck at her and tried to scramble to his feet and flee. “Wayne!” she yelled again, and grabbed his wrists, holding him inside the spiracle. “It’s a hallucination! Wayne, it’s a dream!”

  He stared at her, shaking like a sapling in a gale.

  “Wayne, it’s a dream! You think I’ve turned into a demon but I haven’t! Think about the dreams you’ve been having…”

  He managed to nod. He pulled a hand loose from her grip, fished in his pocket for the Jim Beam – Will that make matters better or worse? She hadn’t the slightest idea – and gulped down several more swallows. “I know it,” he whispered. In fact, the whiskey seemed to steady him. “It’s just in here, it’s about six billion times worse. Don’t give me those guns, honey, unless there’s somethin’ that needs shootin’ right away.”

  Oh, great, and how will I know that the next demon I see isn’t Antryg?

  Or that the next Antryg I see isn’t a demon?

  In one direction – to her left and what would have been in the direction of Union Station – a long strand of twine snaked away, losing itself in the shifting coruscation of migraine-lights, mist, and glittering dust. Presumably the line that Magister Magus had carried with him – he had explained in the car – to lead him back to his own universe: she’d forgotten to ask how he knew when he’d reached Antryg’s current location, and suspected that by the time this was all over she wouldn’t get the chance. The wires from her own computer led away in the other direction, in which – very dimly – she could make out the shape of one of the upright rings the Magus had described. Dust gritted her eyes and scratched her throat. It was impossible to see more than a few yards.

  But ragamummages whipped and glittered in the air above her head, bright as colored fire.

  And something moved, up beyond the half-glimpsed ring.

  Then she heard Antryg’s voice – unmistakable, like brown velvet and bronze – cry out words that she recognized as belonging to a spell. Fire jetted up from the floor beyond the spiracle, oily heat blasting against her face, followed by a tearing whirlwind that spun the flames flat against the ground for an instant before they
vanished. The mummages scattered in panic, and Antryg said, quite clearly, “Damn it—”

  “Antryg!” Joanna caught Barton’s grimy sleeve, dragged him after her along the course of the wires.

  “Joanna, go back!” Antryg yelled. “Don’t—”

  She saw him then as the lights seemed to shift, flattened against the second of a pair of rings. His laptop lay beside the first ring of the pair, about half of the bundled wires of the crystal magic-ports affixed to the ring. The rest lay in a tangle on the floor, left there – to judge by the splattered blood, ichor, burned patches and slowly-wriggling severed tentacles and gobbets of goo, when Something had attacked Antryg and forced him to take cover behind the second ring, about twenty feet away.

  That Something lay dead and already decomposing between Antryg and the laptop. Heaven only knew what it had looked like alive, but dead it resembled a deflated octopus covered with thorns, eyes, and mouths. It had evidently been joined by an assortment of other attackers: some rubbery, some insectile, two things like fiery agglomerates of wheels rolling and spinning in the air, and two or three the finned purple balls Antryg had asked Magister Magus about. The purplies clung to the dead Something, tearing out hunks of its guts and gulping them happily down. The rest of the creatures surrounded Antryg, who was holding them at bay with his sword.

  “Damn,” said Barton. “I ain’t seen that kind of thing since that LSD I took in Da Nang.” He snatched one of the Uzis back from Joanna’s shoulder, yelled, “Take cover, brother!” and opened fire.

  Antryg yelled, “Watch it!” and squashed back behind the ring, which bounced the bullets back in all directions. Joanna dropped to the ground and covered her head – not that that would do a damn thing against something flying at 1100 feet per second, though she’d been assured as a child that this position would work against an atomic blast. The bullets ripped the insect-things to pieces – they looked rather like yard-long carnivorous sow-bugs – but the rubbery blobs simply absorbed the ammunition, puffed and glowed for a few seconds with smoke coming out of the entry-holes, and then began shooting the bullets back in all directions.

  Antryg ducked, swept his katana in a long side-slash that cut one of them in two – the severed upper half continued to fire off what appeared to be bullets but which, when one of them struck Joanna in the arm, proved to be more like plastic bb’s – sprang over the second creature and dashed to join Barton and Joanna as they reached the laptop. “Can you use magic?” panted Joanna, as the burning wheels whipped toward them again. Barton fired a quick burst – taking more careful aim this time – and the things veered aside, sending lighting-bolts that crackled through the brilliant air but fell short of the barrel of the gun.

  “I can, but unfortunately spells are randomized here. When I tried to fire-blast that pelourie—” He nodded toward the original dead Something, upon whom the purple eyeballs had again settled to feed, “—all I managed to do was Summon grums… A lot of them, I’m afraid. Don’t let those things get close,” he added to Barton. “The lightning can knock you unconscious.”

  “What the hell are they?”

  “Djiowbars,” explained Antryg unhelpfully, scooping up the remainder of the wires from his computer. One sleeve and the back of both shirt and jacket had been torn away, and round, bleeding bites marked the flesh beneath. “That’s a grum,” he added, as one of the insectoids scurried toward them again, moving with horrible swiftness on its hundred little legs. “The shielding on this corridor is almost non-existent. It doesn’t open worm-holes into the world it touches, but where portals do open, there’s nothing to keep strays from wandering in, and the magic that’s used to propel and maintain the corridor both mutates and enrages them. Those poor grums are ordinarily the size of my hand and live on rotting tree-bark.” He slashed it in half with his katana, stepped back shaking goo off the blade. “God only knows how long they’ve been in here.”

  Joanna looked at her watch. It had stopped.

  No wonder Magus didn’t have the times right.

  “Are they usually that color?” asked Barton. Four of them were bright pink, the others, a more ordinary pill-bug hue.

  “No. I tried a spell to get them to attack each other and that’s all that happened.”

  “Dang.”

  “We have to get out of here,” Joanna panted, as she and Antryg edged across to the other side of the upright ring, over a slippery muck of pelourie-goo and pieces of grum. Barton followed, grimly firing off short bursts to discourage the djiowbars whenever they got close. “Those trains run every three hours down here, not eleven, seven, and four… How far apart are you attaching those?”

  “Three inches, but I’m not sure that it matters.” He produced a roll of duct-tape from what was left of his jacket pocket. “Who’s back at the main computer?”

  “Magus,” said Joanna, tearing and taping the crystals to the side of the ring. “But I’m afraid he’s going to make a break for it, and I can’t really blame him.”

  “Can you trigger the virus from here on a timer?”

  “Sure. I was picking up your signals on the outside computer just fine. That is, if you trust that something’s not going to go wrong between the time we hit Enter here and the time it’ll take for us to run back to the Spiracle.”

  “Joanna—” Antryg glanced down at her over his shoulder with his lunatic grin. “What could possibly go wrong? Did you tell Magus how to open the chat function? I can tell him to come through now, and get back to Ferryth through the corridor – since I’d really rather not have to open a Gate for him and deal with the Council and the Witchfinders and everyone else who’ll be there to meet us if I do that—”

  “Can he make it?”

  “Oh, yes. As I’m sure you’re aware, Magister Magus can run extremely fast.” He turned back toward the laptop, and as he did so, something like a burst of light exploded in the air in front of him, dropping him to his knees. Joanna started toward him, aware from the corner of her eye that the djiowbars had also been struck, their whirling gold auras crackling with lethal light. Beyond them something was emerging from the fog of brightness, and Antryg shouted, “Get rid of the guns! Now, throw them—”

  Joanna, used to obeying his orders without question or hesitation, hurled the Uzi from her as far back down the corridor as she could. It exploded with a deafening report mid-air; she swung around, her scream of “Barton, do it—!” unuttered as Barton’s weapon blew up in his hands.

  Antryg rose to his knees and grabbed her as she would have run to where he lay. Even at a distance of fifteen feet, she could see that he was well and truly dead.

  He thrust her behind him, scrambled to his feet and held his hands up, empty, as the shape came near enough to see clearly: Travelers, she heard him say to it. Travelers…

  “Can it read our minds?”

  “I hope it can read mine, but you’d probably better think about something else. Try the opening credits from the Dukes of Hazzard.”

  It hung in the air a few yards away, considering them with its long-lashed blinking eyestalks. There were tentacles that came out of the top of its jar-shaped body that presumably acted as hands. It held what were probably weapons in some of them. Whether they, or it, emitted the soft, deadly humming Joanna heard she wasn’t sure, but she was conscious of being listened to. Gauged.

  It spoke, she thought, to Antryg: she herself had only the vaguest impression of the images it projected into his mind. But she was fairly sure that what he was being given wasn’t, Greetings, stranger, we come in peace…

  Instead, she had the sudden awareness that forty tons of corn could be delivered in exchange for two mageborn children (no adults, please) or five pounds of gold or ten pounds of silver (percentage purity specified); six hundred pounds pure brain-bliss opiate for one mageborn child or untrained adult or one hundred sentient ordinary humans (no semi-sentients or Neanderthals accepted); five hundred laser-fire weapons for two hundred sentient humans or a mageborn child or a pound
of gold or…

  Joanna resolutely fixed her mind on images of Bo, Luke, and the General Lee to crush down the wave of rage that filled her at the thought of what these creatures were, and what they were doing. Antryg was about ten feet from the laptop, she a yard or so further back. If one or the other of us distracts it…

  The sound of a gunshot in the tunnel was like the crack of thunder. Antryg twisted and fell; Joanna spun, found herself looking down the barrel of an ostentatious silver-plated .45 automatic held by Villareal. “Don’t you even think about it, Princesa.” He shifted the gun to point down at Antryg’s sprawled body. “Now, how do you talk to that thing up there? I got some words I need to say to him. I think him and me, we could make a deal.”

  Joanna heard footfalls in the brightness behind them, threw a quick look along the tunnel to see the dark figure of Magister Magus vanishing along his guiding-line, back toward his own world…

  Antryg had been right. He could run extremely fast.

  “It’s telepathy. It isn’t—” Joanna closed her mouth on the warning, It isn’t how you think, there’s magic involved… Antryg could understand it, I couldn’t. Instead she said, “It isn’t a big deal.” She glanced at the creature – Railroad security? Ombuds-thing? – hovering a dozen feet away, wondered if that smooth pus-yellow shell were armor of some kind or its body or both. Wondered if it could understand them now. “You just walk toward it and talk. He’ll know what you’re saying. But you’d better put the gun down.”

  “What, so you can grab it?” Villareal laughed rudely. In his other hand, Joanna saw, he had the coil of cable that had connected her computer outside the tunnel with Antryg’s within it, presumably under the impression that the virus had been loaded into the one but not the other. “You just stay back and keep your mouth shut, Princesa, and neither you or your boyfriend gets hurt, comprende?”