Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [27]
Gilles shot his mental presence upward, rolling his awareness like a lining over the walls of tunnels filled with streams of howling, giggling minions. Like the retractable sheath of a launching pad, unfolding. Like an arrow, at one end tethered onto his victim’s heart—he clutched it in his omnipresent Hand of Evil. Oh, sweet innocence! I feel you. You will not escape. He saw his warlocks speeding up on their brooms, and heard the whistling war cry of steam trolls shooting upward through pneumatic “trollways,” felt the specters slipping through his walls, straight through the hard and musty stone. The minions’ swarm was rising in a tidal wave through dungeon levels, while his surface guards descended from above, full speed.
And way below, far beneath them all, the steady, low beat of Dungeon Heart—the source of all his strength, his life itself—boom! boom!
But what he didn’t see was the rogue revenant. Invisibility spell. Very well.
His counterspell flooded the tunnels with a liquid light, drawing out and transforming movement. Sliding through the chutes from up above, his fire salamanders floated like blobs of lava in a surrealist coulage. But no trace of hidden motion.
He shut the gates and pushed his omnipresence into high gear. In the three-dimensional cells of concurrent realtime perception—like windows projecting from the center of a dizzying, kaleidoscopic world—Gilles saw the magic doors dissolving into walls and opening false leads. The superficial layers of his consciousness already smarted from the prickling sting of activated traps—
— barbed wire wrapped around the fairy’s pale, naked skin. He squeezed, and felt her heart bleed pain into his Hand.
Yes!
“Breach at the Crosshairs Juncture.”
He did not require that damn Mentor telling him about scissors cutting through the fabric of his dungeon. He already felt it. His damn dungeon. Anger seethed. He lowered the fairy’s feet up to her ankles into boiling water. Ah….
“The Eagle’s Roost…. The Heron’s Pond…. The Pigeon’s Mailbox.”
Time to shoot.
That’s where it’ ll emerge.
He sped through one of his doors—
— no longer his. The walls around the door blazed with a ring of magic fire; he could not slide past. He pushed his mind against the spell and felt the strength of the enchantment. No simple revenant could do this. Rival keeper? And a strong one, too. A small but noticeable chunk of his world went gray in the three-dimensional projections of the simultaneous vision—claimed. He couldn’t reach it with his consciousness, he couldn’t help his minions trapped inside. Impulsively, he checked his Dungeon Heart. In no danger? Good. But best of all, he had more than enough mana.
Ha, take this!
The fairy’s feet writhed in an agonizing dance.
He uttered the Word. The door exploded before the gust of Dragon Breath. It gave him wings. Embedded in the air, he rushed in. His self-awareness distributed itself across the cloud of blown dust, he saw around and inside himself with millions of tiny eyes. He was the eyes—or eyes within the eyes, looking in myriad directions at the same time, watchful.
Laugh, my wingless fairy! Why don’t you laugh? You’ve lived to see the dark knights fly. In front of him—a maelstrom of limbs and metal armor. An ogre whistled by—and triggered an X-ray Vision trap. It turned him into a bright skeleton, for barely a second. But his black knights’ heavy armor kept obscuring the revenant, its movement only marked by bodies thrown to and fro. As indicated by a pile of knights, his warlocks’ paralyzing spells worked fine, but not against the revenant.
Gilles sped toward the vortex of an empty space that cut a clear path through bodies of his hapless minions.
There!
No…. He barely licked its shape with thin tendrils of dust before it cleared the obstacle course. But Gilles had it marked. There! Sharply edged, a chink of surface—almost two-dimensional, without depth—whirled straight ahead of him. If Gilles had teeth, he would have ground them. His counterinvisibility spell didn’t work? The cloud of dust would have to do.