Corridor (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  He tossed the cable down onto the laptop, turned toward the creature and, for an instant, hesitated. Joanna heard him whisper, “Chingado!” and he wiped his lips. Then he walked forward.

  Joanna knelt, as casually as she could manage, beside the laptop, her eyes on the creature, watching its eyestalks to see where they were turned.

  Antryg whispered, “Get out of here.”

  Her heart seemed to unclench, with a suddenness that made her hands shake. “Can you run?” She didn’t even dare look in his direction, and there wasn’t an instant for wasted words. Lightly, swiftly, she touched in the commands to open the backup .exe files of the virus.

  “I’m fine.”

  She wondered if he were lying, but couldn’t draw attention to herself by turning to look for blood. He’d been bitten and slashed earlier by the attacking grums, there was blood everywhere anyway…

  “Look, I done you a favor,” Villareal was saying. “They was gonna demolish your tunnel here—”

  Joanna sat up innocently as he gestured toward her and that round, cow-like eye swiveled in her direction; the Mexican pulled down a handful of the connecting wires from the ring.

  God damn it…

  He moved forward again and the creature re-focussed all its eyes on him. Joanna swiftly and unobtrusively called up a diagnostic screen, keyed through commands to feed the different variants of the program through the ports that remained open—

  “Get out!”

  “I’m going.” Her hands seemed to move of themselves, lining up batch programs to activate on ten-second intervals. Ten seconds should do for each new upload…

  “My little friend back there tells me this tube of yours goes through to Mexico City,” said Villareal. “People come and go through it, don’t see the border patrol, don’t see the DEA… I was thinking, you probably need a local man to take care of things here, make sure nobody else comes botherin’ you. You think you and me, we could come to an understanding? Me and my boys, we could be a lot of use to you—”

  Later, Joanna tried to recall the exact sequence of events and couldn’t. She was certain Villareal made no gesture that could be construed as threatening – he carried the gun pointed down, held his left hand spread in a sign of peace…

  Maybe he just stepped one pace too close.

  Because the gun exploded with the force of a hand-grenade, blasting Villareal’s body back against the second of the upright rings; and in the next second, Antryg swept his arm in the sidelong motion of a fire-spell…

  Which had the effect – as he had earlier observed – of summoning every grum in the tunnel toward the guard.

  Magus had been right. They were fast.

  The guard – completely disconcerted at the slithering mass of gnawing armored slugs that came crawling out of the glowing fogs – opened fire on them first, only secondarily turning to get off a shot at Antryg. Antryg dived toward Joanna, she ducked from his grip, hit Enter to trigger the virus an instant before a flash of light washed out the whole of her vision-field, as if she’d been dropped into very cold water, paralyzed and unable to breathe.

  “JOANNA!”

  *

  For a time she didn’t recognize the name. It seemed to echo for a long time – or maybe time had slowed down. She held the name in her hand, like a piece of alien fruit, turned it one way and another: Joanna? Who’s Joanna?

  And why can’t I breathe?

  I should be scared…

  Who’s calling me?

  White light. A lot of white light. And the grip of strong hands on hers, holding her up. Drawing her back.

  Antryg’s voice, that she’d know – alive or dead or a thousand years in the future in her dreams…

  She blinked. The ceiling overhead was completely unfamiliar. For a moment she saw the glittering flicker of ragamummages between blackened rafters, just beneath rough plaster, steeply slanting and likewise dark with decades of soot.

  The air stank of sewage, of coal-smoke and mildew. In the street below she heard the swift clip-clip of a pony’s hooves, the creak of wagon-springs.

  Angelshand. I’m in Angelshand.

  There was only one reason she could think of, that Antryg would have brought her here.

  She thought, Oh, shit, but felt too tired to absorb the fact that she’d come that close to dying. And Sergeant Barton had been killed, after surviving the horror of Viet Nam, and making it all those years afterwards… She felt tears collect in her eyes.

  “Dearest,” said a woman’s sweet voice beside her, “you’re all right.” A plump hand patted hers. “You’re quite—”

  Joanna turned her head. A very pretty, very fat little lady sat in the chair beside her, gorgeously attired in a gown that confirmed Joanna’s suspicion of where she was. “Where’s Antryg?”

  “He’s quite safe—”

  She clutched the lady’s hand, surprised at how weak her own grip felt. “Is he gone?”

  No. Please, no…

  She could just hear him saying, I have endangered you enough…

  “My dear—”

  “Tell him,” whispered Joanna, “that if he deserts me ‘for my own good,’ as he puts it, I will follow him, and find him wherever he is, and break his arm.”

  The lady giggled like a schoolgirl, her warm hazel eyes bright. In attic’s single dormer, where the rainy afternoon light was best, three golden-headed finches hopped about in an elaborate cage, and two beautiful cloisonné hummingbirds bobbed on gold wires from the lady’s hair. Joanna realized this must be the dog wizard Hestie Pinktrees, she of the phenomenal scones. “Exactly what I’ve been telling him, dear! But you know what he is about responsibility. No, he’s just upstairs in the secret hiding-place—”

  Hestie Pinktrees stood, and addressed the ceiling. “They’re gone now, dearest. The Witchfinders were here,” she added, for Joanna’s benefit, as a panel opened in the farthest and blackest corner of the attic ceiling and Antryg dropped through with a thump. “For the third time since the corridor vanished with a flash and a bang that shook all Angelshand—”

  “And they’ll be back,” said Magister Magus, appearing in the doorway. His face and coat-sleeves looked a little smudgy with dust and his dark hair was ruffled. Evidently he’d been in concealment somewhere as well. “It’s probably best you get out of here tonight.”

  “And we shall do so.” Antryg strode immediately across to the bed, caught Joanna’s hands in his and kissed her, with a gentleness that told its own story. I must really have been far gone…

  She freed her hands, cupped his face with them, drew him into a proper kiss. His face was scratched and bruised; he’d traded his demolished fatigue-jacket for a ruffled shirt and a green velvet court-coat, much patched. She felt the guilt in his hesitation, before he yielded.

  “Joanna—”

  “No.” The attic was cold, the bed piled with eiderdowns; she felt strange and deeply tired, and had the vanishing memory of drowning in white light.

  “I could have got you killed.”

  “I could have got me killed,” Joanna corrected him. She sat back against the pillows, looking into those wise, mad, rain-colored eyes. “You had nothing to do with it.”

  “Except that I led you into the corridor. And not only you.”

  Barton gamely blasting away at grums and djiowbars and various other monstrosities… Had he really expected he might die in there?

  The part of him that hadn’t died in Viet Nam?

  “Why do you think the Council of Wizards refuses to teach a mage who won’t take Council vows?” asked the wizard softly. “We are bringers of destruction, Joanna. The vows are only in part – and that part the least of it – to control the evil wizards, the venal mages who sell their abilities to kings or bandit-chiefs or Interdimensional Transport Corporations for gold. I was trained by one of those, the worst of them…. But those of us who are convinced that we’re doing right are far more dangerous, because we’ll carry through with our projects at the cost o
f our lives. Or the lives of those around us.”

  “How many worlds did you save,” asked Joanna softly, “by what you did? By what we did, you and I and poor Sergeant Barton? How many worlds did that corridor go through, powering itself up by the life-force of people and eating their minds away by the energies it spread? Or was that supposed to be not your business? Did you take those vows?”

  “Oh, yes.” He sighed. “I took them. And called down a death-curse upon myself if I broke them, which the Witchfinders seem enthusiastically ready to facilitate… But I couldn’t keep them, you know. That’s why the Council considers me dangerous. Not because I’m evil. Because I want to do good.”

  “Are you sorry you did what you did?”

  “I’m sorry about Barton,” said Antryg. “Even about Villareal, who was so far out of his depth and didn’t even know it. And if you had been killed—”

  Joanna reached up, and put her fingers to his lips. “You can’t control what people do, Antryg. Not me, not Barton, not Villareal. Not that poor kid Chico, who’s God knows where by now. They – We – make our choices. To do evil for money, to do good when the way to it is shown us… or to stand back with our hands folded and say, I’ll do neither evil nor good, and so will escape all blame. Could you love me, if I did that?”

  He looked surprised at the question. “Of course. I’d love you whatever course you chose.”

  She laughed, and leaned her head on his shoulder. “And I’d love you even if you behaved yourself. Can you get us back?”

  “Oh, yes. Thanks to the Witchfinders there still isn’t a Council Wizard in three hundred miles.”

  They left as soon as it was fully dark, the gibbous moon red with the smoke-fouled air of the dreary city, vast clouds moving in black across the sky amid a smell of rain and the sea. Hestie Pinktrees and Magister Magus walked with them through the cobbled streets towards the waterfront, partly to bid them good-by – Hestie carried a handkerchief full of fresh-baked scones for them, for tomorrow’s breakfast – and partly to make sure, with a light glamour of look-over-there spells, that nobody interfered with their departure.

  “The whole Void’s been cleared of abominations in this area, because of the explosion,” Antryg explained. “It won’t last, but at least it’ll make for a safe crossing, for once.”

  In Pie Street the dim glow of oil-lights flickered in the windows of what had once been the houses of the rich, now long gone to some more fashionable neighborhood; hanging laundry flapped like ghosts in the darkness. Children’s’ voices echoed from the near-by courts; a coster-monger passed with his donkey and his barrow, singing a scratchy tune. “You know, just once,” said Joanna, hugging the Magus’s borrowed black coat around herself, “I’d like to visit this city when I wasn’t running away from something, or wanted as an Accessory to Sorcery, or trying to save the world.”

  “Then I suggest,” retorted Magister Magus, “that you abandon your house-mate and spend a week with me. You won’t stay out of trouble any other way.”

  “But God knows,” put in Hestie, “what kind of mess you’d find him in when you got back.”

  “There is much,” said Joanna, “in what you say.”

  She took the scones, kissed Magus on the cheek, and took Antryg’s hand.

  He stretched out his other hand—

  —and the Void opened in a coruscation of mage-light and mummages.

  About the Author

  Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.

  Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

  Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

  She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

  The Further Adventures

  by Barbara Hambly

  The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.

  Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?

  The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)

  So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?

  This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.

  The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.

  Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.

  The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.

  The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.

  In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.

  Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.

  Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.

  To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.

  I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.

  Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.

  Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - an
d reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.

  The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.

  Life goes on.

  Love goes on.

  Everyone continues to have Further Adventures for the rest of their lives.

  *

  Novels in the Antryg Windrose Series (out of print but commercially available digitally)

  The Silent Tower

  The Silicon Mage

  Dog-Wizard