A Dragon at Worlds' End (36 page)

First she asked Gert to get her some mice. Old Gert knew what that meant and set into operation a well-oiled system of mice procurement. Soon she had a half dozen stable boys at work with traps and scraps of cheese. Within the hour she would have the two dozen requested.

In Ribela's cell there was a small altar stone made of Defwode marble that stood by the wall. Ribela had lit cubes of lapsulum incense and the heavy musky smell filled the room. As it thickened, so Ribela went over the Birrak and assembled the patterns of declension and volumata that she would require. She practiced a few tricky volumes. It was a spell she had used many times before, but there were more than a thousand lines of declension and some of the shadings were very fine. Ribela had always believed in the memory drills and exercises of her sorcerous craft.

The curious sounds of the volumata and the hushed incantations hung in the still air, vibrating in the incense smoke. Elsewhere in the crowded rooms of the Office of Unusual Insight the workers felt the hair stand up on the backs of necks and hands, or tears suddenly start from their eyes. They, too, knew what this meant and made their own preparations for the coming squall.

In her kitchen, a small, comfortable room at the rear of the offices, Gert set herself down on a stool with a sack of bread and a gallon jug of olive oil. She broke bread into chunks into a tub, soaked it with oil, sprinkled on a little salt, and chopped parsley and stirred it together with a big wooden spoon.

There came a knocking at the back door, leading to the service stairs. There was young Will Wisk with a sack of mice.

"There's thirty in there," said Will.

"If we use more than the two dozen, I'll compensate you." Gert handed over two imperial shillings. Will bobbed his head, thanked her, and darted away to join his comrades in a long afternoon of spending on sweets and small beer.

In Ribela's room, the mice were unceremoniously dropped to the floor, where they streaked for the corners. Gert had to resist an urge to stand on her chair. She had never accustomed herself to the scurrying business at this part of the rites of the Queen of Mice.

The mice ran hither and thither about the chamber, seeking a way out or a place to hide. There was nothing. They milled in the corners and the bigger males started fights with the smaller ones out of fear and tension.

Angry squeaks and yips of pain came from the corners. A few straggled along the walls, one or two were still exploring the base of the bed for a hiding place. But Ribela blew into a set of tiny silver pipes and out came a fragile sound, a high-pitched elfin song, lilting and gliding through a golden meadow far away. The mice froze in place and stared upward with eyes like glossy black pearls.

"Thank you, Gert. Be ready with the food. They will be very hungry after a while."

Since Lessis had hired her as a young girl back in Defwode, Gert had taken care of these rooms and the witches within them. She had done a lot of strange feeding exercises. She had fed bird seed to Lessis, one grain of millet at a time. She had fed any number of dazed seagulls that had been impressed into the witch system of transoceanic message transmission, and she had fed Ribela's mice.

The spellmaking was begun and Ribela caused the lapsulum incense to glow. The room filled with a shimmering power. Now Ribela was indeed the very Queen of Mice. She gathered them to her and they came willingly, running in a circle atop the altar, tail to mouth, tail to mouth until they were a blur of little bodies. As they sped up, so Ribela began a passionate declension from the Birrak and the thing was in motion. The cadences rose and fell as the spell was woven. As it went, Ribela fell into the deep trance state, but even as she did she continued to manage the mice, releasing those that tired and allowing them to feed, but always keeping at least a dozen in motion. This spell would need a great amount of power, as much as she ever used. She intended to project her astral self halfway around the world. Such a journey would require great energy from these mice. Ribela shuffled the mice with practiced skill, but without conscious thought.

The spell progressed and Ribela's declension was faultless. As it took effect, so one part of her mind continued to recite the words in her little cell and manage the mice while another detached from her body and rose above, floating through walls and ceilings. When she was free and clear of anything solid, her astral projection collapsed to a point and sank into the subworld of chaos.

The mice went in and out of the ring and Gert refilled the fuel bowl again and again as they devoured bread and oil.

Ribela now flew through the familiar realm of chaos. Gray backwash swirled in endless vortices through the ether. Patterning erupted from wave collisions, and heavy crackling of lightning sent jagged blue flashes searing away into the pixellated fog. The Queen of Mice had spent much of her life traversing this dread region. Now her astral self arrowed away through the gray murk past black-patterned confusions of waves toward distant coordinates.

Such an energetic presence in their realm inevitably drew the predators, the Thingweights being the most notable. One by one they swung in alongside her, matching her pace, thrusting tentacles into the place they felt she must occupy, but they found nothing there. Baffled, they fell back, and some began fighting one another. Others attacked the smaller predators that had also been drawn to her trail. She left a wake of horrid struggles, twisting tentacles of fire, monstrous feasting on the dead.

As she progressed, so her scale shifted and she seemed to rise above the sea of whirling vortices and to see farther, to a vast horizon. As she sped on, she began to sense a presence there.

It grew as she approached and eventually she saw the first whirling lights over the terminator. Then the whole cluster appeared, thousands of blue lights all racing around an unseen center. They completed an orbit of that center once a second, and as they went, their light flickered, producing a wild, maddening display.

Ribela had seen this object before from a distance and knew well what it was. This was the pocket realm of the Lords Tetraan, fugitives from the world since the days before the Old Red Aeon. This was the product of the Great Game they played in their hidden city, Mirchaz. The lights blazed furiously in blue and purple white, thousands upon thousands of them.

That was where she must go. Ribela sent her astral self directly toward the center of the cluster. The lights rapidly grew in size and became a vast whirling shell that occupied half the universe. Then she dropped through the outermost shell and flashing teardrops, vast as worlds and flashing blue fire, were hurtling past her at the rate of one or two a second. She fell farther and entered a lower shell, where even more of these teardrop bubbles were active.

A vast churning of bubbles is what the whole thing was, but these bubbles were worlds, forced out of the ether of the Hand of the Mother by great sorcery. Each of these self-contained bubbles was a world, complete and unto itself. Each could only be entered through the Game portal, which was controlled by the lords who faced each other across the Great Game board in the Pyramid of the Game in the city of Mirchaz.

The predators could not enter here; these hurtling juggernauts produced waves that would have torn them to pieces, since they were nothing but organized energy themselves. But Ribela dodged the oncoming worldlets and continued to sink toward the center. The closer she came, the faster and more energetic were the worldlets. Here she sensed grandiose dreams had been raised up. Some of these worldlets radiated on an emotional wavelength that could be sensed to a degree by Ribela in her astral state. The information was faint, but her acuity was very highly developed.

One passed and she felt a great pulse of lamentation. A world of woe lay within, ruled in capricious cruelty by a mad czar who enjoyed inflicting pain and suffering on a gargantuan scale.

There came another, and Ribela's heart was chilled. Such foulness she felt here that it made her spirit tremble. Here were great worlds, stuffed with creatures that were tormented, driven to war and social madness, cannibalism and slavery. Their bodies piled up in heaps beneath the feet of the laughing lords. Cruelty had become their single greatest pleasure in some cases.

Directly ahead was the Game center, a swirling sphere of psychic energy that pulsed slowly through the red part of the spectrum, oscillating between a dark dim red and brilliant ruby.

And then she sank into the sphere and entered a place of powerful mental currents. A vast spell was in place and the fused minds of the ten thousand in the mind mass provided all the energy that was required. But Ribela sensed that no ordinary mind could maintain that level of output for long, and thus she knew that this was a systematic abuse of human slaves whose lives were shortened dramatically by it.

And then she felt something else slide over her astral mind. It was not something she could perceive in a physical manner—she saw nothing—but she felt it all the same, as if a mist had arisen suddenly around her in the forest. She realized with a sudden shock that this was a mind of vast proportions, but a mind that was asleep. While its physical components were locked into the aspects of the Tetraan spell that they powered and made real, this gestalt consciousness floated above, empty and without self-awareness. This gestalt was a great engine, and a prominent object even on the scale of the Sphere-board itself, but it knew itself not and therefore was nothing but the plaything of the lords.

Ribela's heart wept for the cruelty and horror that it represented. Here was cruelty laid upon cruelty, for on Ryetelth the native peoples in all the lands around Mirchaz were preyed on to provide slaves for the mind mass. Then in the worlds they created for the Lords Tetraan, there was often nothing but hedonism or, worse, a calculated cruelty that satisfied a dark spirit among these faded elves from Gelderen.

She sank down into the space where the Game grew from the board itself, stretched out in the Pyramid of Mirchaz. There was a strong disorganizing field here that would have disrupted any Thingweight that had survived thus far. Ribela felt it as a sharp astringence, but it did not apply to the astral vibration, which slipped through unscathed. In truth, no other sorcerers had ever matched the greatwitches of Cunfshon in the arts of astrality and animancy. In these, they were the absolute mistresses.

Billions of computations pulsed around her. The mind mass was there, stacked above and below the Game board, ten thousand poor souls kept in marble troughs, fed, watered, and sluiced daily where they lay, lost in the trance state that was their lot. The scale of the magic was enormous.

Ribela was confronted with the sheer majesty of what the Lords Tetraan had done. She understood that they were great magicians, sorcerers far above her in their knowledge of the deepest arts, but she also saw that they were weak and capricious. They were the losers in the war for Gelderen, forced out by the golden elves and driven into exile for their crimes against the holy light.

Then they had fled to the southern continent and dwelled among savage monsters and primitive peoples. They had no contact with the rest of the world, disappearing beyond the mountains into the Lands of Terror. There they had grown inward and fell and their spirits had become dark. And they had created a tiny facsimile of the Sphereboard of Destiny for themselves, where they were the absolute rulers. Through this, they had sunk into a dreadful evil. They grew bored with their paradises and turned to cruelty to satisfy their need for fresh sensation. In some cases cruelty was a limited thing, in some it went to grotesquely horrible heights. Imitations of the reign of Waakzaam the Great, the dread sauronlord of twelve worlds, existed in some of the realms of Tetraan.

And so their great and majestic achievement had been turned into a vast degradation with such foulness at its heart that these lords and ladies were damned evermore.

And there, taking shape "beneath" the eye of her astral self, she perceived the Great Game board spread out. A grid of one thousand squares to a side, one million squares within. This plane of activity was studded with clumps of pieces. The clumps represented zones where the players contested with opponents. From piece to piece flew energies, determined by control of surrounding space. Small pieces were in constant motion. Occasionally a piece under assault by overwhelming power would explode into flames, collapse, and be absorbed by other pieces.

Thus did the Tetraan pass the centuries in tedious battle over access to their pleasure worlds. On this diabolical loom they wove the magic that controlled the entire process.

Ribela let her astral mind flow out and grow tenuous as it formed a film over the board. Relkin of Quosh was here, the Sinni had given her specific images to locate him with. If any outsider could penetrate this maze, it was the Queen of Mice.

She let her consciousness float as soft as down, as insubstantial as spider silk, slipping into the pieces, reaching out to the Game players hunched over their positional boards in their Game chambers above. None felt her subtle presence, so absorbed were they in their own activities.

She avoided contacting the great gestalt which underlay all of this activity. That would be to risk madness. She might be destroyed in an instant if it woke up. And she had a mission to carry out.

Through the chambers filled with gaming lords her consciousness seeped, probing so softly that she was undetected. And then quite suddenly she found what she sought. In an instant she concentrated her attention. There in that chamber, the one who called himself Psithemedes was focused on the problem of finding the world that the one-eyed lord had hidden. The one-eyed lord who had taken the boy! The boy with no tail who came from the Ardu land.

And there, another lord was thinking of the same one-eyed Game lord. A name floated up, Mot Pulk it was. And here was another, Zulbanides, who sought the impious Mot Pulk. They were all seeking the same Game lord as she and they all sought him because he had possession of the boy Relkin.