My Path to Magic 2: A Combat Alchemist (18 page)

We didn'
t feel stuffiness or lack of oxygen inside; the only indication that we were deep under water was silence, as if the world beyond the bronze shield ceased to exist. We neither laughed, nor joked, nor moved unnecessarily, and nervously waited. Signs of white spells mysteriously flickered on the boat walls (I never thought before that the white could succeed in something alchemical!). My tension grew, as if hordes of ants crawled under my shirt, whereas I could not scratch myself; my colleagues looked no better. Unlike me, they knew what they were up to, because they had been there before.

The
boat's bottom touched the hatch; the crew diligently checked the reliability of the docking and lifted the hatch lid - no more than a few spoonfuls of water leaked through the seals. To us it looked like a new space opened up under the bottom, a hole into another world.

Hello, City of Nabla!  I
decided to ask Mr. Barray who this Nabla was - I would bring this guy to life, thank him, and put him back to rest.

I was the last one to
board and the first to go out. The enchanted blue lantern dimly glowed inside the dome. Mr. Barray handed me a brighter lamp, but it did not help see better - all I saw were the distant corners of a spacious hall drowned in darkness. Apparently, this section of the dome was originally designed for boat docking, and our shipbuilders simply copied the ancient mounting dimensions. The closest wall of the hall had four sliding doors, which formed a large semi-circle; one of the doors was opened, allowing me to see another hatch, similar to the one we had entered through. Metallic carcasses of benches stretched along the walls of the hall; thanks to unexplainably dry air, they stayed tarnish- and rust-free despite the passage of thousands of years. There were neither cobwebs, nor the remnants of vegetation, nor any corpses. Two corridors came out from the hall; one led to a strange double staircase going up; the entire opening of the second was covered by a membrane of oiled silk. To the right of the staircase there was a gap in the wall, which opened up a hollow suspiciously resembling a nest of sand gnats, as they were described in the ancient manuscripts.

Mr.
Barray went down right after me. The crew handed him a small metal suitcase, and he changed a cartridge in the oxygen regenerator huddled under the lantern.

"
The air in the dome doesn't have enough oxygen," he explained.  "The regenerator makes air suitable for breathing just in this room. We don't want to disturb the existing balance - oxygen could be detrimental for ancient artifacts. So, please, do not go beyond the area marked with chalk!" The chalk line was drawn just before the silk membrane.

I understoo
d that I should not expect to get everything at once, but nothing could stop me from looking around. A good alchemist would guess a lot from just seeing a man-made device. Every detail of the dome's interior – the ribbed walls of its corridors, the tightly jammed door to the semi-circle - all of them concentrated years of experience, research, successful solutions, and deafening failures.

My eyes easily distinguished
a borderline between the ancient and the modern: their shapes and designs differed dramatically. In the ancient part all seemed too smooth and standardized: I did not know a technology which was able to manufacture delicate metal saucers attached to the ceiling, unless they were carved from a single piece of metal and polished by hand.  But even in this case some small defects would have been present on their surface. And there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such saucers, and they were all exactly alike. Now I understood the obsessive fantasies of the white about technomagic: they believed that this level of workmanship could not be achieved without magic, purely alchemically. I activated my Source and ran my hand along the accessible part of the wall, trying to sharpen my feelings.

"Don'
t play with your Source here, young man", somebody said behind. "It is dangerous."

I
didn't start quarrelling - we were short of time for that.

Mr.
Barray brought everyone in the room with a wall. Sediment covered the base of the dome, so the ocean was not visible. A dramatic crack ran through the glass in the corner of the wall. Not far from it was something on the floor, looking like a skeleton. Mr. Barray told me it was a man who died while trying to take off his hydro suit. How they managed to figure this out was a great mystery to me. Human bones, in theory, can persist for thousands of years, but in real life, under harsh environmental conditions, they turn into brittle white trash. The skeleton on the floor lacked its cranial vault and rib arches; I could discern only yellow beads of teeth and white ash in the place of his spinal cord. Mr. Barray performed the usual manipulations with the regenerator and lit bright blue lights.

Yeah.
Clearly, my colleagues had worked hard during their previous visits: the floor was covered with signs and lines of pentagrams (shields, absorbers, reflectors – they all help us stay alive, if the ritual goes awry). It was all good and impressive, but the high quality of the drawings was insufficient to enable the success of necromantic weavings.

"These
bones are the only more or less preserved human remains in the cleared off area," Mr. Barray looked at the bones without trepidation. "It will be our last attempt to raise this man. If you fail, we will have to postpone your work till next year."

I could not afford to fail
- I would die from curiosity by next year.

Mr.
Kraps activated protective signs around the regenerators, while we were warming up. A green lace of necromantic weavings started dancing in the air; each mage contributed his own spell of unique pattern and strength. My assignment was to revive the function of speech - not the vocal cords, but the very ability to communicate.

Almost immediately I realized why
they failed time after time before. One took feelings, the other - memory, the third – consciousness, and so on; each separate weaving was perfect, but no one locked our Magic Circle, reconciling all individual rhythms. Our weavings were at odds with each other, like the engine with the headlight on my motorcycle until I installed a controller. I waited and waited, but no one stepped forward to lead the Circle. I understood why they needed Charak, but the old necromancer gave up on such feats and sent me instead.

I decisively made my weaving more com
plex, forcing others to fix minor flaws in theirs and shape them into the needed form. The mages got agitated. Kraps tried to get out of the Circle, but I caught him via a magic loop and didn't let escape. Now I led the circle, and the rest obeyed me. For a moment everything came into harmony, and the corpse responded to us.

Streams of dark energy pier
ced the space, resonating with the fine underside of reality, thinning the border between the worlds, smearing the difference between the living and the nonliving. And the hitherto mute bones started singing an unheard song.

The art of
necromancy lies not in the creation of zombies (no matter how strongly ordinary people believe it), but in the awakening a deceased personality, in giving him or her a chance to come back to life for a while. It is much harder than raising a zombie, because for a human - a dark mage - it is incredibly difficult to separate reality as such from his perception of it. A necromancer must accept the awakening person for what he or she is, without trying to simplify or improve it, as Charak warned me; at the same time, our dark Source is aggressive and rebellious; to maintain control over it and simultaneously passively contemplate an alien personality is a task of unbelievable complexity. The difference between my revival of Max and what we tried to accomplish now was in the intricacy of the perceived psyche, as well as in the depth of detachment required from a necromancer - the bones of the deceased human from Nabla barely retained an imprint of his essence.

For
the first time I was raising a full-fledged human being; I watched with admiration as different parts of his personality, appearing out of nothing, merged into the whole. Just think of how many contradictory traits coexist in one person! The desire to move and the willingness to stand still; the urge to see, though he had no eyes, to breathe, though he needed no air; the chaotic flashing of bits of random thoughts; the relentless pressure of his awakening willpower. Oh, the corpse was once a woman; she would have been terribly embarrassed if she could see how she looked now. Finally, we reached a limit in our resurrection efforts, either due to the incompetent actions of our Circle or to the antiquity of the remains. Her bones had no desire to finish their assembly, and it was for the better - I didn't want to deal with a hysterical female zombie. The raised psyche was definitely short of vital energy; Kraps reached for her with his willpower, ready to subdue the poor woman, but I did not let him. He was too accustomed to eviscerating criminals!

Now I began to grasp
Charak's words about identifying myself with an alien person - I felt as if I simultaneously became two different people.  For the revived frightened woman, the bygone centuries did not exist; she just fell to the floor and suddenly was surrounded by strange aliens.

"Do not worry," I
sent her a mental message. If she had been a real person, we wouldn't have understood each other, but now we were on the same wavelength, of sorts. "Help me. Tell me what happened to you."

She
trusted me and with the last, mortal effort evoked the images of her past; I watched the world through her eyes and saw everything as it was then. Spacious, bright rooms; multi-colored lights, the illuminating depths of the ocean; machines slowly drifting in the water; and the dirty stains of a blooming
phoma
web on white metal. The otherworldly abomination spread out before her very eyes, enveloping the dome, and all the people stood and pointed fingers at it. They did nothing to stop it; they looked surprised and slightly alarmed, but not scared.

"Do
you know what it was? Did you recognize it?" I questioned the deceased.

Her
bones turned to ashes, this time for good - she was unbelievably old, after all; they barely retained an echo of her life.  Even the most powerful magicians in the world could not hold her psyche for more than a minute.

The other dark mages
saw the same images as I did. We kept silence, shocked.

"Have you managed to learn anything
new?" Oh, yes, our ritual had an audience. Mr. Barray didn't have access to our visions.

"They were killed by
an invasion of otherworldly creatures," I answered for all. "By the
phoma
, one of the most primitive among them. But they did not know what it was and couldn't defend themselves."

"But they were in the sea!" Kraps gasped in shock.
"They just needed to wash the walls with saltwater!"

I shrugged,
"It's easy if you know what it is. They did not have time to look for remedy."

Kraps
pestered me all the way back to the island. "Congratulations! What a success! I did not believe that anything worthwhile would come out of it. But we managed wake up her consciousness in its entirety! It's a miracle! How many corpses have you already raised?" the necromancer's eyes narrowed.

"
It's none of your damn business! Shut up!"

"
After-effects," he concluded calmly. "You need a couple days of rest."

I turned
away. I wanted to be left alone, to experience again, without being disturbed, a strange feeling that had settled inside me. Very faint images, tastes, smells, not quite reaching my consciousness, appeared every now and then; I sensed them as if through a dirty glass or as a muted conversation. They could be caught only in utter stillness, on the sly.

Perhaps
that's what Charak had in mind talking about living someone else's life. With dread and delight, I realized that my personality had become fuller (though the feeling was familiar -
Rustle
was sensed similarly). Snatches of alien judgments pierced my brain as flashes, leaving behind unexpected associations and strange thoughts. I had only a couple of days in order to save, to capture the fragile miracle before it would dissipate and become a mosaic of obscure spots. I was ready to do anything to retain this window into another world, where people sailed under water and flew in the sky, where man-made devices were able to speak, and where colored pictures were moving. The City of Nabla was paradise for alchemists! Probably, the other necromancers also experienced something similar - upon arrival to the camp we all instantly hid in our corners.

A healer from the camp dropped by and tried
to give me a sedative potion. I took it, smiling, and emptied its contents into a garbage bin. I became ashamed of my escapade and began to apologize to her, talking nonsense about the harmful effect of drugs on achieving soul harmony. The dark mage talking about his soul frightened her far more than the poured-out elixir.

The night went by as if I were in
a state of delirium; I woke up in the morning, took a towel, and went to the ocean to swim. Before, I would have considered myself insane for the desire to swim in saltwater; that day I believed it would be stupid not to take advantage of a chance to bathe in the warm, tender ocean while I was on its shore.  Apparently, this strange idea was evoked by memories of the ancient woman. I spread a bath towel on the gravel and began sunbathing.  Alex immediately joined me in this retarded time-wasting.

"H-hi, h-how are you?"

"I am fine," I decided not to burden his brain with the odd after-effect of the necromantic ritual. "Have you actually been down there?"

"N-no, n-not allowed…
"

"I understand."
Yes, all these gloomy corridors and enormous water depths could turn off the brains of impressionable white mages. "Why don't you dig on the surface?"

"W-what for?"

"It is an artificial island; first, they made the walls, stuffed them inside with trash, poured sand on top, and built houses. The remains of the extinct volcano protected this cultural layer from the ocean currents and winds. You can't see the ruins because after so many years they sank and became partially covered by petrified lava, soil, and ocean. The water level rose and hid the island's foundation. Surely there are still plenty of artifacts under our feet!"

Alex threw a look at the angular dunes with interest.
"W-where did you g-get this idea?"

"Massey knew it,"
I said and added in response to his puzzled look, "Messina Fowler, the deceased whom we raised yesterday. And what did you imagine?"

"M-make s-sense to
t-try…"

I shrugged.
Alex could find his way to the past only through the debris of stones and pieces of pottery; he had no chance of seeing the world through the eyes of people who lived in those times. What irony! Every white was an empath from birth, but only the dark mages could try on someone else's personality - and then grieve about a lack of a sun umbrella and comfortable loungers on the beach for half a day.

Resolutely folding the
towel, I went back to look for someone savvier than myself, a bruised-by-the-ritual necromancer. For example, I wanted to find our colonel - it was he who suggested raising a deceased in the City of Nabla. The colonel occupied the dining tent; he was sitting at the table surrounded by a pile of papers.

"Well, have you
solved the mystery of the fallen civilizations?" I asked him.

Colonel
Stephenson shuffled a bundle of sheets on the table and replied, "So far, I only get a stream of consciousness. I am not asking for a report from you - it wasn't in your contract, and the memories will be the same, anyway."

'
But the interpretation of these memories might be different, ' I said to myself but not aloud. I did not want to get stuck there!

"To be honest,
we haven't before considered the idea of the supernatural as the cause of apocalypse," Stephenson filled up his pipe with some smelly grass and lit it, not bothering himself with asking my permission to smoke. "The government and leaders of the white community sponsored a large-scale study and rejected natural disasters as the reason of the past civilization catastrophes. Your results from yesterday will overturn our conceptions. Now we need to begin anew…"

"I got an impression that the
re were no magicians in Messina's time." I was sure that Messina never heard of magic and would never believe in a resurrection of deceased.

"The othe
r necromancers of the Circle came to the same conclusion," the colonel nodded grimly. "We know a funny thing about Capetower: it was not a sanctuary for the elect, but a prison, in which the last dark magician of their era served a life sentence along with other criminals. Don't you see the same trend? Before the end, both the Nabla and Capetower civilizations lost their knowledge of magic, dark magic in particular."

"
Who was that last dark magician?" I asked the colonel.

"
A legendary king who ruled for three hundred years. Naturally, descendants described his life in great detail; thus we learned that there were no other dark magicians at his time. It was he who started practicing the ritual of forced Empowerment - he could ill afford to wait for his successors to wake up spontaneously."

"Perimeter leaks in three places,"
Rustle
uttered distinctly into my ear; the monster, unfelt and unheard lately, suddenly reminded me of himself. I shivered. Thank god, thirty-thousand-year-old problems weren't my concern.

My colleague
-necromancers continued to meditate and recuperate, but I needed to get back to Redstone. I wouldn't mind enjoying a free vacation on the ocean shore, but my degree was more important, and my zombie-dog had stayed without my supervision for a week already.

The same afternoon I received the
required signatures and permissions to leave from my supervisors. All that remained was to choose a road to freedom. Nursen offered to wait for one of the ocean liners that delivered supplies for the expedition once a month. I disagreed. There were two railway stations on the east shore: in Port Illsill on the border with Kashtadar, and in Veront. It would take five days by water to reach any of these two, and not every ship could accommodate my motorcycle. Also, I would imminently need to make transfers, because the trains did not go directly to Redstone. Meanwhile, Colonel Stephenson decided to send an urgent package to his superiors. The mail needed to be delivered by truck to the post office of the train junction on the western border of Arango; the truck was on standby in Gilead. The mission was entrusted to Alex. The road to the railway station, where the transcontinental express train made a stop, was straight and well-trodden (not like the country roads I took from stupid Tyukon Town), hence the truck should arrive there in three days. When Alex suggested giving me a ride, I nodded enthusiastically.

One problem remained:
the thought that my zombie would run through the thorns again made my stomach roil. I wondered if the dog would fit in the back of the truck. I decided Max and Sorcar with his stuff would sit in the truck, while I would drive my motorcycle light.

The way back to
Gilead flew by quickly, perhaps because this time we sailed aboard an ordinary ship, and a normal sailing schooner did not annoy me as much as the crippled steamboat that brought us to Bird Island. In less than eight hours I disembarked at the port and stood still for some time, blinking and trying to figure out what happened to the city while I was away. Where a week ago I saw just gray dirt and dusty trash, now I enjoyed dozens of shades of color and nuances of smell. The dilapidated boats no longer seemed anti-progress - something irrationally romantic appeared in them; shabby sheds of kelp and croaker pleased my eye by the originality of their contours. Even the malodorous, familiar stench of rotting algae and fish suddenly displayed new flavor nuances of salt, iodine, and exotic herbs.

No, Gilead remained th
e same; it was me who had changed. Memories of the woman who lived all her life in the underwater city of glass and metal and in some places in the sky (what did she mean by that?) revived in me. Messina Fowler would be touched by the simple and unpretentious provincial life of the poor seaside town, devoid of crazy rhythms and mind-blowing intrigues. I personally would prefer the madness of Redstone to the simplicity of Gilead. I smiled at the thought that from all the human remains in Nabla we came across a sentimental "nerd" thirty thousand years old! I was fed up with modern whites, never mind the ancient ones…

Perhaps,
Sorcar heard about our return from the island in advance; he came to the pier with my dog on a leash. I wondered how his Source was doing - an angry crippled dark mage by my side was the last thing I needed.

Max tapped his
tail vigorously on the boards of the dock. By the way, had I absorbed the farm dog's memory, too? I stared suspiciously at my zombie; Max raised his ears like a fan. No, it could not be that the dog's psyche took up residence in me!  A human being is so much more complex than an animal; there must be some gear ratio…I forced myself not to worry about things that couldn't be fixed.

"
Your truck was almost stolen," Sorcar said incidentally to Alex.

"By w-whom?" Alex was surprised.
What a pure soul! Every other resident of Arango wished to flee the province - no wonder the expedition's vehicle had attracted the attention of thieves.

"Who
knows?"

"Why did the thieves
fail?" I took a practical approach to the matter.

"Your zombie scared them off!
Max popped out of the window and started barking. Even I almost kicked the bucket when I heard his voice at night."

Luckily, Sorcar had no access to
his Source at the moment; otherwise, he would not only kick the bucket. I already developed a habit of trusting my zombie's judgment: if Max found someone worth furiously barking at, the situation was really serious.

The owner o
f the
Drunken Flounder
offered beer on the house to us for this occasion: "Don't take offense at us, the bullies weren't local."

Most
likely he lied. Hooligan-strangers in god-forsaken Arango? No way! However, we weren't up to catching the unlucky thieves; the next morning we left Gilead.

* * *

The great and terrible General Zertak brainwashed his subordinates. The mighty sorcerer, who was rumored to have survived the lethal curse, was quick to punish the guilty.

"Irresponsible
imbeciles! You didn't follow my order!" the general ranted. "What were you told? To escort! And what did you do?"

Captain Ridzer looked down
; his subordinates lowered their heads.

"
How dare you leave a valuable employee alone, without a means of communication and an agreed-upon route?!"

"
My fault," the captain gasped; to object to the general would be suicide. Ridzer diligently nurtured remorse in his soul, in order to stifle any opposition to his dark nature.

"What
were you thinking when you let him go alone?!" The general continued to rage. Zertak knew his soldiers better than a staff empath and nipped in the bud any attempt by his subordinates to do a sloppy job. How else could he keep a gang of dark thugs from getting out of his hands?

Leaving the staff tent, Ridzer took a deep breath and stopped squeezi
ng his high-crowned hat with coat of arms - a symbol of his captaincy. He managed to retain it today! He was spared!

"Maybe we should
find him?" suggested the most conscientious of his subordinate mages.

Ridzer
wiped his shaven head with a handkerchief and put the hat on. "What's the point? He went to a secret facility. While we are searching for him, he will finish his work and leave. Besides, he has a zombie, which is worth at least one and a half of you. Nothing will happen to him!"