Plus-One (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  Movement beside her and Antryg strode in, like a monster himself in his gas-mask, katana blade hissing in the jerking light. He cut twice, grabbed Joanna’s arm and dragged her back through the door into the Urbino Room. Jerked the door shut – Joanna grabbed one of the metal curtain-rods that had been left stacked in a corner and slid it through the immense, gilded handles. The doors jerked once under slamming weight, and Antryg shouted,

  “We’re here to help you!”

  Movement again in the mists beside her. Joanna whirled, brought the spray-nozzle up, and Antryg slapped it underneath with his open hand, forcing it up.

  In the flashlight glare the man in the gray suit stood before them.

  “We’re here to help you,” said Antryg again, and pushed up his gas-mask, straightened his glasses without letting go of his sword. “And we need your help.”

  He stood for a moment, facing the man in the gray suit. In the room’s silence the hum of the fog-machine sounded as loud as a freight-train. Then, carefully, Antryg sheathed his sword and handed it to Joanna, and took his eyes from the man long enough to shine his flashlight on the shallow, bloody slashes on her arm.

  “Are you all right?” He was already digging in his pocket for a bandana to use as a field-dressing.

  She nodded, and pushed up her gas-mask. At the same moment the man stepped forward: “How bad is it?” he asked anxiously. Joanna found she could see his face quite easily, only since he looked exactly like Dr. McClaren, who’d taught her English 101 class at Long Beach City College, she assumed this was a disguise. “My poor girl, I’m so sorry—”

  Even his voice was Dr. McClaren’s.

  The ebb of adrenalin, and the shock of the pain in her arm, made her dizzy: You are NOT going to faint now! That thing is still out there…

  Antryg pressed the bandanna in place and dug a roll of electrician’s tape from his pocket with his free hand and handed it to Dr. McClaren: “Rip off three pieces of that for me, would you? Long pieces…”

  “I’m all right.” Joanna tried to breathe deeply, leaning against Antryg’s shoulder. The pain was astonishing.

  “Please forgive me—”

  “Who are you hiding from?” asked Antryg. “The Church, the Wizards, or the Law?”

  “The law.” Dr. McClaren’s shoulders slumped, defeated. “Originally. And now… I meant it for the best.”

  Antryg sighed. “We all do.”

  With horrible violence, something crashed against the doors. Joanna shrank back as a storm of noise broke outside, chattering, barking, roaring. Antryg darted lightly forward, caught up another couple of curtain-rods and shot them through the door-handles – Joanna didn’t see how he could get anywhere near the doors in the face of that hammering mad hatred. The Plus-One caught her shoulders and drew her back to the far end of the room, and looking over her shoulder at him, she could see the terror in his face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again. “I’m so sorry…”

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” said Joanna. “I swear it—”

  “I know. It—It doesn’t matter.”

  As abruptly as it had begun, the onslaught stopped.

  Antryg stood before the doors, an odd, angular figure in the flashlight glare. Elsewhere in the hotel, dimmed by the intervening walls, alarms honked and trumpeted, and Joanna noticed that the lights on the fog-machine’s battery backup had come on. Power outage…

  “Will it attack again?” she asked, and the Plus-One looked a little surprised.

  “Of course. It… It doesn’t give up. Ever.”

  “What is it?” Antryg retreated soundlessly to join them, never taking his eyes from the doors.

  “A wyrth, they’re called in the Old Books,” said Dr. McClaren. “Or what’s left of the Old Books. Or a wyrthwight, or a kamynmeld.”

  “Ah.” His voice was barely a whisper. “And you’ve grown it into a kill-wight.”

  The Plus-One nodded wretchedly. “My master taught me a little about summoning them, before the Chancellor’s Guard got him. He had one that he’d grown into a defender, but it wasn’t strong enough to protect him…”

  “And are you hiding here from the Chancellor’s Guard?”

  “No.” Infinite sadness: for that lost master, the vanished, half-trained child he had been. “No, I’m afraid all that happened when I was very small. For the past seventy seasons all I’ve been is a thief.”

  “If you’re mageborn you must have been quite good at it.”

  “Oh, I was. Much too good, in fact.”

  “I thought as much. Someone deduced that you were putting your old master’s teachings to improper use?”

  “They suspected it. They put Bloodsniffers out for me. They’d have known, if they’d caught me. My master warned me about crossing through the Void, but he’d also taught me how to open a portal, when the stars were right. They were closing in, I—I couldn’t see what else to do.”

  Outside the doors, Joanna heard something moving; a soft scraping, and something that sounded like the thick intake of breath.

  “It’s odd.” Dr. McClaren sat on the edge of one of the several tables that had been moved against the wall, covered with tarps, baccarat or roulette tables, or banco: high-roller games. “All those years, when I was stealing things just to stay alive, I got very good at observing people. Figuring out their weaknesses, extrapolating when they’d be at home and when they’d be gone, timing when servants would be in which parts of the house… I could look at a man and know whether he’d put his money in a strongbox or bury it under the floor under his bed. All that attention to them, and I never knew them at all. They were… They were fruit-trees to be harvested.

  “Then when I came here…”

  “Can you go out of the building?” asked Antryg.

  “In the night-time. And even then, the radiation absorbed by the ground itself is very disorienting.” The Plus-One grimaced. “I didn’t dare risk not being able to find my way back to the Place.”

  And Joanna knew – with that curious instinct she’d observed in herself before, when the old Spell of Tongues Antryg had once laid on her was in effect – that the visitor meant, The Place where the Gate through the Void had opened. As if the universe, once flawed on the energy-line between a local mountain and a local underground spring, would always have the potential of being ruptured there again, when the stars were right or the moon was in the seventh house or whatever the necessary conditions were.

  “But I didn’t need to go anywhere, you see. There was always food here – always a place for me to sleep. And always people. When I’m lonely, I’ll go down into the gaming-rooms, or the restaurant, and just listen to their talk. Not for any reason, not wanting anything from them except company. I’ll watch them playing games, or having dinner with those they care for, or falling in love… Or thinking they’re falling in love just because they’re young or happy or with a beautiful Other. And it’s nice.”

  “Except,” said Antryg softly, “when it isn’t.”

  “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” agreed Joanna. “People come here to do things they wouldn’t do at home.”

  Outside the door, that terrible sense of movement again: soundless, soft, and huge.

  Dr. McClaren whispered again, “I meant it for the best.” There was agony in his voice.

  “As I recall,” said Antryg, “it doesn’t take much magic to call a kamynmeld into being. You probably could do it on a short, strong ley like this, particularly in a full moon – if you could find something immediately for it to meld with.”

  For a few moments the Plus-One made no reply. Only sat, head bowed, face taut with grief. “I knew he came back at the same time every year,” he said at last. “The man who… who did things to children. I knew he would be coming back soon, with women who would sell him their children. I hated him for what he did and for what I knew he was going to do again. And then there were the beasts, out in tents in the parking lot. I could feel their fury, their insane lust to kill,
even from in here. I opened the Gate just enough to use the magic of the Void to summon a kamynmeld, then went out immediately and put it on two or three of the beasts in succession, so it could drink their heart-flames, the red cores of their spirits. And when he came – fourteen nights, fifteen nights later – the kill-wight was grown and ready. No one can say he didn’t deserve what he got.”

  “No.” In the harsh reflection of the flashlight glare, Antryg’s eyes had a terrible darkness of their own.

  “But because so much of the kill-wight came from this world – the fury of the beasts, and the physical flesh of the insects in the building – I couldn’t send it away. It dematerialized after it killed, but I could feel its presence. Then later, a man came who did evil things, terrible things – not just to the young man he ordered to be beaten up, by guards who beat and raped the young man’s ladyfriend as well… I knew the wight was still here, you see. I knew if I put a mark on this evil man, it would come for him. And it did.”

  “And you also marked the two warriors who were killed next?”

  McClaren nodded. “When it appeared, it was different. I had felt this – sensed it. It needed the mark to materialize, and I’d tried to imprison it in one of the underground rooms of this building, but magic doesn’t work here. And there were little beasts, all through the building but mostly in the underground portions, clever and savage and very, very strong. It was devouring them, all those hundreds of nights…”

  “But you marked the warriors anyway.”

  His gaze met Antryg’s, his eyes for a moment not human at all, though he wept. “I saw what they did to her. To the dancer—”

  Antryg whispered, “I know.”

  “Then the men came back, who made the beasts fight. Who tortured them – hurt them…” His voice stammered over the words, speaking faster and faster as if he had to get them out quickly, before he thought too much about what he’d started. “The wight materialized on its own. Killed on its own, without a mark to command it. I was… I was shocked, I was horrified, but there wasn’t anyone I could ask. I was only a dozen seasons old when my master was taken away; they burned his books, and growing up I didn’t dare even whisper where I’d come from or seek for anyone who had the Old Learning. And I didn’t want to. And since I knew that there was no magic in this world, I knew that anyone who would come looking for me had to be sent by the Chancellery Council…”

  The crash of weight against the doors made them all jerk around. Joanna brought up her spray-gun, her hands shaking now so badly she was almost glad that the thing was big, I can hardly miss it…

  It’ll hardly notice.

  There was no barking, no chattering, no roar. Only steady, crushing weight, thrown against the door again and again, til she heard the wood around the hinges crack. There was no way out of the gambling-room and if there had been, she suspected it would only be onto the overgrown terrace-garden. She didn’t doubt, now, why Mr. Pacinotti had gone over the eighteenth-floor balcony.

  Antryg stepped toward the door, slid his sword from its sheathe.

  The pounding stopped.

  It’s listening…

  “Who sent you?” Dr. McClaren whispered. “I’ll go – I’ll accept whatever punishment they decree, even death… even slow calcification. I deserve it. After the dog-man, it just… just killed. It’s killed six people, innocent people. Women… a child, one of them…”

  Joanna had read about twelve-year-old Selina Castro. The police report had been that her father had bludgeoned her to death and then thrown himself from the balcony. It didn’t take much to guess what had actually happened.

  “I thought I was acting for the best and I can’t stop it. I can’t make it go away. I tried to stop it the last time – the last two times. But I never know where it’s going to strike, or why. It’s just a mass of… of rage, of hunger, of a need to tear something…”

  “That is the problem with kill-wights,” agreed Antryg, never taking his eyes from the door. “They absorb things. And once you create them, you have to lock them up very, very tight, to keep them from eating things they shouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t know! I didn’t know, and the deaths of those poor people are my fault. The way that poor girl screamed for her father to save her – the way the chambermaid’s beloved wept over her body when they found her, only because she’d tried to come into these rooms. The wight believes it’s protecting me – the girl tried to come up here, too…”

  “Was that why it came after me?”

  Dr. McClaren shook his head wearily. “It could have been. But the last two people it killed never came up here, nor looked at me, or anything. It just… needs to kill. I would…” His voice sank; he swallowed hard. “I’ve thought of killing myself,” he whispered. “Only I feared that so doing would simply release it from this place, this building. Would it? If you were to take me… to take me back…”

  “Oh, we’re not here to take you back.” Antryg moved backwards, sword still ready, until he stood close to them at the far end of the room once more. For a time there was only silence, save for the churning hum of the fog-machine. Even the far-off bleat of the hotel’s alarm system had died: Joanna wondered whether the management had simply turned it off, or whether a Fire Department Investigation Crew was going to come walking into the thing in the other room. Even if they succeeded in getting the elevators working again, she thought, there was no way they’d make it up here in time to keep herself and Antryg from being killed, if the thing broke through the doors…

  Or materialized in the room with them.

  Softly, Antryg said, “When we take our vows to the Council of Wizards, we’re required to put a death-curse on ourselves, if we ever use the powers of magic in the affairs of humankind, either for ill or for what we conceive of to be good.” He reversed the katana in his hand, slid it into its scabbard; unzipped the front of his coverall and pulled down the neck of his t-shirt. Joanna saw no mark on his pectoral, but in the cold actinic glare of the flashlight she saw the Plus-One’s eyes widen, and the frightened brown glance dart to Antryg’s face.

  Whatever was there, he saw it. And he saw it for what it was.

  “Will you put the mark on yourself,” said Antryg, “to draw your kill-wight?”

  Dr. McClaren made a small noise in his throat, like the whining of a child too terrified to scream. Joanna recalled what the typed report had said about some of those kills. Personally, I’d scream… and then burst into tears and do anything – ANYTHING – not to die that way…

  Including going off the parapet if I can make it that far…

  The thought horrified her – and the thought that she knew she meant it.

  “We’ll protect you when it comes for you,” Antryg continued. “We have to make it materialize, if we’re to have any chance of destroying it—”

  “It can’t be destroyed! It takes magic to destroy one—”

  “Yes, it can.” The wizard’s velvet voice was briskly soothing. “Yes, it can… I’d have you mark Joanna here as bait but that really doesn’t seem fair—”

  “Don’t make jokes!” Terror made her almost sick.

  “No, you’re right.” The visitor pressed his hands to his face for a moment, trembling. Even in the glare of the flashlight, he’d gone ghastly pale. “It is for me to do…”

  “Quickly, then. Now!” From his pocket Antryg produced a small, irregular flake of obsidian – an ancient Indian arrowhead, in fact, Joanna had been with him when he’d bought it – and pressed it into Dr. McClaren’s hand. At the same instant the clammy ground-fog that filled the big room knee-deep swirled and churned, as if a single twelve-foot paw had struck down in its midst, and the chattering, howling bark of the kill-wight struck like a hammer.

  McClaren stared at the billowing fog as it sucked up into a column, outlining for a moment a hideous shape, burning eyes, the musty stink of insectile flesh. “Do it!” Antryg yelled, sword snaking forth again as he waded through the mists. He slashed, and some
thing brown and totally foul splattered. McClaren’s shaking fingers fumbled, and he dropped the arrowhead as he fell back against the wall, his hands before his face.

  Joanna swore mightily, let off a spray-blast of HCl in the direction of the heaving mists and then dropped to her knees, groped beneath the fog… drywall screws, cigarette butts, crumbles of carpet-padding. Antryg cut at it again and evidently, though still mostly invisible, it was material enough to knock him sprawling against the corner of one of those shrouded tables. The sword spun from his hand; fog billowed above him. Joanna sprang to her feet, let off another blast of acid even as Antryg rolled, grabbed the sword, cut at the thing as it turned toward Joanna—

  “Get the goddam arrowhead!” he roared.

  Joanna dived for the place – or what she thought had been the place, with fog and darkness and the jarring swing of the flashlight beams it was hard to tell. McClaren was curled in a fetal position against the wall, hiding his face from the battle; Antryg dodged, sidestepped, cut and leaped back. Joanna’s small hands swept across the filthy sub-floor beneath the fog – Find it, find it, FIND IT… A splinter ran into her palm, as painful as the agony of her cut arm. A crash behind her, as Antryg fell or was struck down again, DON’T TURN TO LOOK…

  The razor edge of the arrowhead cut her finger; she snatched it up, almost fell as she ran to McClaren…

  He’s got to do it. If I do it it’ll come for me…

  IT’S COMING FOR YOU ANYWAY YOU IDIOT…

  But she put it into the terrified thief’s hands. “Do it!” she yelled.

  With a scream of pain McClaren slashed the palm of his hand, daubed up the blood on his fingers – dropping the arrowhead again, but Joanna figured it didn’t matter at that point – smeared a mark, like the crude shape of a stick-figure man, on his chest.

  And I hope you got it right, pal.

  Fog bellied up around them, the stink of it horrible: glaring eyes in the blackness, a dim sense of spikes and teeth and thorns. She fired a blast of HCl at it and sprang back – So much for it going after him…