Chapter 26

The figure depicted on the surface of the rod bowed to McAllister, hands wide. The sense of familiarity, the sense he knew the figure, grew. As McAllister watched, the figure turned to the shelves on the wall behind him, stepping away from McAllister, toward the hundreds of tomes.

McAllister caught his breath as the size of the figure diminished in proportion as it strode purposefully toward the wall of books in the room behind the table.

A clearing of the throat snapped him out of the moment, and he looked up from the ivory to meet Savonne's eyes. "What did you do?" the other man asked.

"I ... We," McAllister amended, with an odd motion of wrist and chin to indicate the ivory baton, "broke the interdiction of the Rod of Irel."

"McAllister," the voice of the mother sounded, quietly, in the bloody room, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. "I must be vigilant now, and have no time to help you directly. Much is happening, and there is much maneuvering on the plane of the gods. You must proceed to my altar, and call me there, arrayed with my deacons."

In the sudden silence, Savonne looked around for a moment, and then asked, "The Mother?"

McAllister nodded, while looking through the hanging dust at the doorway filled with the massive iron-bound deadfall.

Savonne turned, too, as did the other men. "Can you raise it?"

"I wonder," McAllister mused aloud, "if it would be better to go through the wall."

Several of the men turned to look at the wall's medium-sized stone blocks set with mortar, disbelievingly. "Do you know a use of the inner fire that can do that?" Gérard asked, with only mild surprise mixed with curiosity in his voice. His sudden sneeze ruined the effect.

"No," McAllister said, with a tight smile. "Who has a sturdy knife? Dig a hole in the mortar here, and here," and indicated two joints.

"You heard the Mother," Savonne turned and addressed the guardsmen in the hall. "You will not attack?" Savonne received hurried assurances from the men in the hall, and McAllister dismissed them from his attention.

"Well, my friend, you are a mystery and no doubt," he silently told the figure drawn in the study. The figure was now depicted at the table, with a stack of books open, and an assortment of objects upon it. As he watched, the man lifted his head and met McAllister's gaze levelly. The realization struck McAllister abruptly that the figure in the window was interacting with McAllister as an object in his own world. Dimly, the sounds of steel on cement came to McAllister from the wall before him.

"I need black powder," he told the man. A moment later, the rod erupted in golden fire, and once again the world was hard and cold, dim outside of the light the rod cast.

Quickly, McAllister drew the line of fire from within himself, for the second time in ten minutes. He drew it with only the much-depleted golden fire from within, somehow reluctant to use the trace of the green fire the strange god lent him. With familiarity comes ease, McAllister supposed, as the stuff of space folded. He filled the fiery square with the image of the casks of black powder the ivory baton left outside of the normal flow of time in Sea's Home.

It was an easy matter to pull one of the smaller boxes of the explosive stuff to him through the square of golden fire. Though, it resisted motion in the cold half-light of the world outside of time, having an odd tendency to stop moving when he stopped pulling.

Surprised, McAllister saw the walls of the square of the golden fire he drew from within were perhaps three fingers deep. He attributed the phenomenon that they had any width at all to the distance through which he had made the breach in the fabric of the world.

With a powder-box held in one hand, containing perhaps five pounds from the twenty or so tons in the room outside of time, McAllister released the aether delineating the rent in space.

"The dagger reaches nine inches into the mortar," Gérard reported.

Eying the box McAllister hadn't held before, Savonne described the mortar as being soft, but the wall thick. "It will take us hours to remove a block," he assured McAllister. "What is in the box?"

"A substance that has no place on this world," McAllister responded, placing the box on the ground and moving to inspect the mortar. "Good man," McAllister clapped Gérard on the shoulder.

McAllister retied the ivory to his breast, though with an odd reluctance, as he was now convinced he knew the figure depicted on it. "Savonne," McAllister said aloud, then, drawing the attention of every man in the room save the one chipping at the mortar. "When we breach the wall, until we reach whatever central chamber there may be, any who offer opposition to our ingress are to be killed. I don't know with what weapons they may fight, but best we kill them from a distance."

Savonne nodded. "You have given them enough time to flee?"

McAllister nodded. "I cannot risk any of you in the service of the Mother. It's a hard thing for a commander, as you well know, to choose those who live and die. I know these men. Those others ... I don't."

Old Rizzo knelt, face turned up toward the man on the dais before him, though the blind eyes didn't see. Rizzo saw other things than the light reflected off the world before him, and had ever since the mule kicked him when he was a young man of only thirteen years.

The Hierarchy of the Church of the Mother found him extremely useful over the years, as he freely told what he saw and never offered any opinion on what it meant. A journeyman prelate discovered Rizzo, one new to the pin and on his first tour of the city-states of Denaria. That young prelate hadn't yet become so arrogant that he failed to recognize what treasure the villagers had in the mule-struck man.

The prelate took the young man with him, and over the years used the insight the seer gave him wisely. With the insight that Rizzo had, Mattos Stefane maneuvered himself into the Archprelacy at an early age. Ultimately, that young Archprelate acceded into the First Rank.

Ambition and a hint of the future had gotten Mattos Stefane to where he was now, on the dais before the bent figure of Rizzo, staring at the blind eyes before him, blind though there seemed to be nothing wrong with them. "You cannot see anything of the near future," Mattos Stefane said, flatly.

"No, Your Eminence," Rizzo said, with a tone to his voice which Mattos Stefane found maddeningly serene.

Closing his eyes, Mattos Stefane waited a moment. When he reopened them, he asked, simply, "Why not?"

"The Goddess, she you do not believe in, is real," the irritatingly calm voice responded, the man's face placid. "The Crone always shared her sight with me, having taken pity on me as a cripple. All she ever asked of me was my love and that I never try to look upon her."

"The Goddess, you say, is real." Around Mattos Stefane there were mutters, though none of the other Hierarchy dared speak loudly. "Why have you let us come to this pass, Rizzo? Were we not kind to you and fed and clothed you in her house?"

"You were, Mattos," the calm voice replied. Mattos Stefane quickly found himself becoming more irritated with the reply than the tone it was delivered in.

"Rizzo, it is death and damnation to fail to show proper respect to the Hierarchy. You know this well."

"I have always known the manner and hour of my death, Mattos," the blind man said, and there was no hint of taunt in the voice, though the next words were cutting. "She sent those who make up her new church to kill you. They have defeated the ancient magic protecting this place. She will not help you, nor allow me to, either."

Disgusted, Mattos Stefane made a gesture, and the youngest Archprelate present in the center of the Basilica raised a rod affixed with a cube at the end of it. A dark ruby beam shot from it then, and transfixed the man Rizzo. The beam pierced him from behind, between the shoulder blades. As the man's limbs jerked and flopped, the beam emerged from the chest of the dead seer, now a pure silvery-white.

"Piss and damnation," Mattos Stefane swore, and gestured at the pile of rags at the foot of the dais. "You heard him. She sent them to kill us. Kill them without warning. Do not let them reach this chamber."

Fifty of the youngest Archprelates present acknowledged the command, and ushered the ordinary prelacy out before them, to set up their defense of the inner Basilica. More than one ordinary prelate, having heard Old Rizzo's words, paid with his life for refusing to fight against the new Church of the Mother.

"So, how does it work?" Sable asked, intrigued despite herself. Normally, she regarded magecraft as a toy for many of the same reasons Azer listed before. Chief amongst those reasons was that it took years of mastery with magic to accomplish any effect she could quickly accomplish with sorcery.

As Azer rattled off principles tied to each axis of the spell and the apparatus Azer and Shan Hu made on the table in the midst of all their supplies and experiments, Sable rolled her eyes, and crossed the room for another goblet of wine.

"We can't control the rate just yet, but we think it's along the sixth dimension, and appears to be related to the amplitude of the oscillation," the demon was telling her excitedly as she poured. "It's really tough to say how long the initial charge will sustain the effect," he continued.

Though the stuff tasted like good wine, she felt it was having less and less of an effect upon her, and resolved to check with the sprites who made the stuff. Sable turned again, and took a sip. Her amused eyes met Shan Hu's equally amused glance over the silver goblet's rim, as the demon's tide of words washed over her.

"So you see, all I need to do is lay this piece of silver across this gap, and a volume about the size of this room will speed forward in time," Azer said.

"Azer! No!" Shan Hu shouted, as the demon's slender finger tipped the silver pin over.

Sable stared at the solid-seeming grey wall that formed before her for a minute. Behind that wall she knew the contents of the library hurtled forward through time, carrying Shan Hu and the demon Azer with it. She stood for what seemed like a long time with the goblet at her lips, before she slowly lowered it, unable to find words enough to express what she felt.

McAllister pointed at a spot at the junction of two blocks of the stone over the middle of the block in the course below, two feet above the cracks dug with the dagger.

"Here too, lad," he said, "we'll need to give the rock a place to move to, or it won't fracture like we want. It'll only flake a little out the front near these cracks you've dug, otherwise."

The man nodded, and moved to remove the mortar from the spot McAllister indicated, drilling through the stuff quickly with the point of the dagger.

"The rest of you, gather rags from the dead, enough to seal up the face of these joints," McAllister ordered.

"Seal them?" the man with the dagger asked. The four deacons were the first to move to get McAllister his cloth.

"So the powder doesn't fall out," McAllister said. "It'll burn from the outside in, and its own force will seal the explosion inward."

Nodding, the man gave every indication of not understanding what the madman behind him said, but fully intending to give his Captain what the man wanted.

"Oh. Shit," the demon said, a tone of surprise in his voice. "Um. I really didn't mean to do that," he continued, "or at least with her outside of the effect. I'm sorry," he said to Shan Hu, who simply stared at Azer, aghast.

"Well, I suppose we ought to begin researching how to make a spell to go back in time," Azer remarked to Shan Hu after a few minutes passed.

A short while later, he tried again with, "I really hope the charge runs out before supper time."

Shan Hu finally spoke, after what might have been an hour inside the library caught in the grey walls of shifting time. "What would happen if we just stepped through the walls?"

"Nothing good," the demon said, thoughtfully. "I imagine the first part of you through would age at the outside rate, until you pushed long enough for your heart or brain to get through, whereupon the parts still inside..." he gauged Shan Hu's decidedly unsanguine expression. "Do you need a bucket?" he asked, solicitously.

Shan Hu waved him off weakly, while he sat and thought.

"Fire in the hole," McAllister said, casually, standing behind a wall of sorcery-bound air built over the surface of the wall, where he had poured the gunpowder into the cracks. The ivory rod in his hand sent a fat golden spark leaping through the shield of air and into the powder jammed into the gaps in the wall.

With a muffled roar, the outside face of the stone blocks erupted from the cracks in a sooty red and orange gout, and rock showered outward. A large pall of black smoke rose from the spot, leaving black soot on the wall and ceiling, forever staining the wall hangings. The metallic smell of blood in the room was masked by the almost-sewer smell of black powder smoke.

"What was it supposed to do?" Savonne asked, and McAllister was sure it was the question on every man's lips, though only the Duke had dared speak it.

"This," McAllister said, and bent to pick up a fist-sized chunk of rock. Letting the woven shield of air fall, McAllister swung the rock in his hand like a hammer, and the face of the blocks crumbled and fell out onto the floor in a shower of stone dust and chips. Five sharp bashing blows later, and McAllister could see through the damaged wall, a small circle of light that he quickly stopped again with the rock in his hand.

"Once more into the breach," he said, smiling for the words of the English king of long ago as attributed by the playwright, and pointed out the four corner-joints he wanted the mortar chipped from.

"Why couldn't you do this with sorcery and not this powder?" Savonne asked, curiously.

"I don't know how," McAllister answered, shortly, to Savonne's wide-eyed amusement. Behind him, the four deacons began whispering.

Five minutes later, there was a man-sized breach in the wall, and no more black powder in the cask McAllister fetched from Sea's Home.

"Make a shield," McAllister ordered the deacons, and did also. "Keep it between them and us," he said, and commanded, "Forward."

The first men through loosed bolts, and then McAllister stepped through, Savonne behind him. The shouts and yells of desperate men filled the air, mixed with the screams of the wounded and dying. All around was the sound of fighting, crossbows and running feet. Arrayed around a grand reception room inside the old heart of the Basilica were dozens of robed men, most with an oddly-shaped rod with a cube affixed to it in their hands. Two were lying face down, one in a pool of blood, the other with a bloody bolt penetrating from his shoulder.

From every single man, including the ones hiding behind pillars or furniture, McAllister felt the faint taint of an allegiance to Hell. Around McAllister, men began to fall, pierced by ruby-red beams.

"A shield of air won't do," McAllister yelled in the noise of battle to the deacons. A ruby lance darted through the air before him at an inclined angle, singeing a hole in the now-ruined wall hanging on the side wall of the reception room. "See if you can create a shield of silver," he shouted at them, and turned his attention to drawing silver sorcery from his internal fire, filtered through the brooch.