Firemaggot (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  With terrible effort, Joanna slapped the spare container of silver nitrate onto the bottom of the sprayer, rammed the pump for all she was worth… God only knew what a magic-user would have done with an automatic firing mechanism.

  There was a reason, she realized, that wizards trained in swordsmanship.

  The Firemaggot drew back. Joanna blinked, breathless with inspiration. The vision of how all the various servers and nets that she’d been probing could be welded into a unified whole was more real to her than the battle, and she had to struggle to keep her focus on the creature and its next move. It coiled again, burning, leaking dark fluid from its wounds, the feathering of its horrible gills fluttering as if it lay beneath invisible water. A few yards in front of it, Antryg stood with his sword at ready, silent—

  Listening?

  To what?

  He backed a pace, said quietly, “Run.”

  “What—?”

  “Run.” He released his left hand from the sword-hilt, held it palm-up, as he had held it last night. Only now a softly-whirling mote of white light formed itself just above the palm, hovered for a moment, then darted like a glowing insect through the gap in the hedge that surrounded the dark building before which the fight had taken place. “Follow it. Now, do it—”

  Joanna cast a last look at his face, streaked with sweat and gore from the spawn-bites – looked back at the creature that crouched before him, its flames dimly showing the old guest-house at the maze’s heart, the tangles of hedge crowding close. Then she turned and ran after the light.

  In the maze outside, Saldana straightened up from the crumpled bodies of two other men in blue Holdfast uniforms. One of them stirred, groped with one hand—

  “We’ve got to get out,” said Joanna, bending to help the man sit up. “Get your friend, now, come on—”

  “What’s going—?”

  “Come on.”

  Both guards – Nagy and Esparza – seemed unhurt but groggy, causing Joanna to deduce that Saldana had been able to lay them both out with the rake-handle. Having one’s mind temporarily taken over by the Firemaggot didn’t do much for one’s aim, apparantly. As Saldana got his friend to his feet Antryg emerged from the darkness, sword wiped clean but still in hand— “What happened in there?” the guard whispered. “Did he kill it?”

  “Just come on.”

  The shocking vision of a Net among Nets shredded from her mind as they followed the light, Antryg walking – almost unseen in the darkness - behind. Twice she looked back, saw by the reflected phosphorous only the tall, gawky shape of the man she loved, the eerie gleam of his spectacle-lenses…

  He’s become its protector.

  What can I do? He’ll never let me back to this place…

  I’ve lost him…

  “I thought he didn’t have magic?” Saldana persisted. “He said he didn’t…”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if it’s made a deal with him? Like it did with The Daemon? Could that thing give him his magic in this world?”

  Joanna looked ahead at the light. It evidently had. She said again, “I don’t know,” almost sick with shock, helplessness, grief.

  The light led them out of the maze – hung shimmering in the pre-dawn blackness as she and Saldana helped their stunned companions to sit just beyond the maze’s gate. Nagy – a freckled, middle-aged white man with graying hair – seemed simply half-numb, but Joanna deeply misliked Esparza’s blank stare. The Firemaggot’s whispering had faded from her own thoughts – without even a memory of how she’d thought the various bulletin-boards of FidoNet and its kindred could be woven into a single web – but Officer Esparza had been exposed to the influence of the creature for months.

  They absorb them… subtly. A few cells at a time. The host – the protector – generally isn’t even aware that he – or she – is being absorbed… that his – or her – thoughts are no longer quite their own.

  Antryg… She rose to her knees, looked hopelessly at the dark gap in the dark walls of the overgrown hedge. If he doesn’t come out, will I even be able to find my way back to the center?

  The wisp of witch-light, burning between them and the maze gate, faded like a candle going out.

  Then spectacles flashed in the dark of the entrance, and the long glint of the sword-blade. Antryg emerged onto the threshhold and stood there for a long moment, listening, Joanna thought…

  Then he sheathed the sword, crossed to Esparza, and knelt at his side. He made a few passes in the air that Joanna recognized as spell limitations, sketched sigils in the dirt with his crooked forefinger on either side of the stricken man, and pressed his hands to Esparza’s temples.

  Torn between relief and suspicion, Saldana protested, “I thought you said you—”

  As if he had not heard him, Antryg got to his feet, and walked a few yards back toward the maze. For a moment he stood motionless in the pale gray of the oncoming dawn, considering the open gate, the tangle of yew-hedge, the darkness still within, Joanna thought, with the expression of a recovered alcoholic confronting a long-forgotten hideout bottle, unexpectedly unearthed. Then with a sigh he raised his arms, palms to heaven, closed his eyes—

  And the whole maze, in a single stroke, burst into flame.

  Antryg folded his arms around himself as if taken suddenly cold, and turned his face away, unable to watch it burn.

  *

  “I’m sorry you had to do that,” said Joanna, about fourteen hours later, as she pulled the car up in front of the Genki-Do Dojo on Ventura Boulevard. Antryg glanced sidelong at her. He had been a little withdrawn all day, when he hadn’t been sleeping; upon their return to Porson Avenue he’d remained awake long enough to clean and oil the sword properly, then had collapsed into bed and slept as if drugged. Cautious about the kind of dreams she was likely to have, Joanna had cleaned the kitchen and unpacked four boxes before joining him. To her relief, she had dreamed about searching through cartons of dishes for information-packets of compressed micro-bits, rather that about thirty-foot blazing sandworms—

  —or rock stars who had traded their souls for the music they could not find in themselves any other way.

  Of the blinding vision of something… something to do with computers… something phenomenal, marvelous, earth-changing… she retained only the ghostly ache of what what it had felt like to know… whatever it had been.

  A tired grin flickered at the corners of those mobile lips. “It’s not something I’d want to do very many times.”

  She knew he wasn’t talking about tackling a mutandion with a sword.

  She began, “That was—” and, suddenly self-conscious, couldn’t go on. That was noble of you? That was an act of greatness? How to say that without sounding totally lame…?

  “It was,” said Antryg, with a twinge of regret in his voice, “what wizards do. We protect… God help us. At whatever the cost.”

  “Was the magic real?” she asked. “I mean, could the Firemaggot actually give you magic that would have survived in this world?”

  “Oh, yes.” He paused in the act of opening the car door, looking a little surprised that she hadn’t known this – a habit that invariably made Joanna want to hit him, act of greatness or not. “Mutandion are enormously powerful creatures, because their magic will work in almost any universe. But I would always have had to go back to it periodically, to have the spell restored. And every time I did, I would lose a little more of myself. As the poor Daemon did.”

  “Do you think he knew what was really going on?”

  Antryg settled back into the car-seat for a moment, his sparse brows drawing down over the extravagant beak of nose, thinking about the man whose body had been found in that maze seven years before. “He did eventually,” he said slowly. “After he had reached the point where he couldn’t get far from the maze. Like Emily Violet before him, his life became the house and the maze. If one is doing enough drugs, I suppose one could go for years thinking that what happened in the maze was ju
st the result of something one had sniffed or smoked or shot. But he wasn’t a stupid man, and he had studied the occult. He guessed the truth eventually – the whole of the truth.”

  He swung his long legs out of the car, and carried the sword into the dojo. Beginner class was in session, Dan Gretsky taking the straggly mix of college students and working stiffs, white collar ladies and grim-faced kids, through the simplest kata with the long bamboo shinai: the thud of feet, the barked count and the hoarse sharp cries. In the back room, intermediate students warming up nodded greetings to Joanna as she passed through. “You guys training tonight?” someone asked, and Joanna shook her head. Quietly, Antryg tapped at the office door.

  “Shimada Sensei?” He held out the sword in its long velvet covering to the little white-haired gentleman behind the desk, and bowed. “Thank you very much. It was most useful.”

  Joanna knew Shimada Sensei spoke almost no English, but then Antryg spoke very little, though he was making rapid strides. Virtually no one noticed this because of one of the few residual spells that did work in this universe – the Spell of Tongues that permitted communication. Most people were convinced that he was speaking English – as Katsushiro Sensei, who taught the advanced kendo students, generally thought Antryg was speaking Japanese, when he thought about it at all. Part of the Spell of Tongues was, that most hearers didn’t think about it.

  What Shimada Sensei thought was always difficult to tell.

  The old swordsman accepted the blade, unwrapped its covering, and drew a few inches from the scabbard. Joanna thought this was simply to check that it was being returned in good condition – a natural enough precaution, considering its age and value – but saw the glint in the old man’s eyes as he looked up at his tall student. “It is said,” the old man replied – and though the effect of a long-ago Spell of Tongues was less pronounced on her Joanna still grasped the meaning of his words – “that Tonomori Sensei forged this weapon at the request of a samurai who had been sent to the deep north, to rid one of his master’s villages of a creature of a sort that no one had seen before, a white flying thing that came out of the darkness. Legend is that the shamanesses of three villages assisted in its forging. Whether the samurai succeeded in killing the creature, the tale has forgotten – yet I have thought for a long time that this blade has had a hunger in it, for a food that it could not find.”

  He snicked the blade into the scabbard again, re-wrapped it, and held it out to Antryg again. “I think you need to keep this for awhile yet, my friend. I trust that you will use it well.”

  “I earnestly trust that I won’t have to.” Antryg bowed again. “Yet it will be a comfort to know that I have such a friend.”

  *

  Back in the car again, Joanna said, “It is gone, isn’t it? With the power circles in the maze destroyed the Firemaggot can’t come back, can it?”

  The wizard shook his head. “The fire will have driven it back into its enclave between the Universes; with the power circles gone, it can’t come out. Though mind you, I wouldn’t buy a condominium on the site.”

  “And the spawn?”

  “Die when the mutandion does.”

  “One thing I don’t understand,” said Joanna. “Why did it kill The Daemon? He was its protector. Emily Violet lived to a ripe old age…”

  “Miss Violet probably never quite believed that it was real – or of any consequence,” said Antryg. “Heaven only knows what the mutantion looked like to her, when first it came through a gap in the Void, either from its own world or from one it had tried to strip-mine for power. Mutandion work rather like the Spell of Tongues: they take forms from your own mind, and translate them to their own thoughts. She might very well have thought that her growing unwillingness to leave the grounds stemmed from some problem of her own. She seems to have been a simple soul – you can tell that, by the very rudimentary nature of the power-circles she caused to be made in the maze – and I doubt she ever did learn the truth.”

  “But The Daemon did?”

  “Oh, yes. He was going into the maze, Ricky said… I suspect, to confirm to himself in a state of sobriety what was there – remember at the autopsy they could detect no illegal substances in what was left of his system. And the fact that he brought silver-dust with him tells me he knew what he would be facing. He may have intended to do precisely what I did – drive it back into its enclave, and burn the maze to cut off the power and close the gate. September is the dry season in those hills, before the rains.”

  “Even though it had made him what he was? Even though without it, he would have to go back to being… what he had been.”

  Antryg sighed. “Even so,” he said.

  “And it killed him?”

  “It blew back the silver-dust into his face,” said Antryg softly. “Enough of his flesh, as well as his mind, had been replaced by the Firemaggot – absorbed, as they do — that the silver simply ate him away. I remembered that,” he added, “when it offered me… magic.” He held out his hand, palm-up, as he had in the maze… No light swirled to life in the darkness above his palm. “Remembered what it would cost, in the end.”

  “Then I guess I owe it to him,” said Joanna, as she turned the key and edged the blue Mustang out of the parking-lot and onto Ventura Boulevard, “to get a couple of his albums, and hear what he had to say. That was him, who made the music, wasn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t the mutandion…?”

  “That was The Daemon. Or Harold Nedwick, if you will. It only brought out of him what was deeply buried – what perhaps could not have been freed in any other way. But the cost was simply… too high. As he came to understand too late. It’s never a good idea,” Antryg added, “to have a long-term relationship with creatures from other Universes. They seldom end well.”

  Joanna grinned. “I’ll risk it,” she said, and pulled out into traffic.

  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 the
ir 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.