Chapter 11

It's not every day that you step out of a portal to find yourself something like a thousand miles away from where you were a few moments ago, and then catch some half-naked religious weirdo in the act of trying to stick something six inches long, hard and throbbing into a close female acquaintance of yours!

Yes, the damned blood covered obsidian dagger was throbbing. It stole life-force from sacrificial victims and used the energy to keep open a permanent portal between Rockford, Illinois and somewhere here deep in the heart of batshit crazy land, i.e. Deseret. If anyone was asking me, it sounded darned complicated to have to haul endless boxes of guns and ammo down the steep steps of the modern Aztec style pyramid, but maybe that's the way the priests needed to do things, endless human sacrifices at the top of thousand foot altars just to keep that damned portal open and to fuel their other magic. We don't do human sacrifices back home ... so I guess these assclowns know how to get the most bang from their victims.

Being fashionably late as usual, I still arrived just in the nick of time to defer Janice's own sudden introduction to the afterlife. Being in a hurry and in a bit of a blind panic, I didn't have time to think (no jokes please) and as usual quite did the entirely wrong thing. As the sacrificial knife started its rapid decent towards Janice's naked chest my first thought was to quickly pop a protective shield around her. Not a bad reaction normally, but upon further review I had the unhappy thought that the massively magical knife probably had enough octane to cut its way through. Naturally, I liked Janice's chest exactly the way it was, heart intact, but when I felt the blade begin to break through my barrier, and rather easily, I didn't react nearly quickly enough.

Fortunately, I had close at hand a rather undertrained and highly over stimulated young apprentice that had a frightening talent for mimicking anything that she'd seen another wizard do. In this case, she wisely stuck to simplicity, and grabbing a big handful of the loose magical energy that permeated the entire area around the sacrificial altar that fueled the portal, she just blasted the high priest, dagger and all, off the edge and down the side of the pyramid. Yes, he bounced the whole way down and I don't think he was either conscious or still living even by the half-way point.

Just to show the kid that her alleged master knew a trick or two as well, I did much the same thing to the remaining two junior priests that were holding Janice down ... except with rather a bit more force than was necessary. They quite flew off of the pyramid for a couple of hundred yards off into the night and probably only had to bounce just once when they hit the hard rock pavement about a thousand feet below us.

Janice was more or less alright and unharmed, physically anyway. She was butt naked and had been drugged to keep her quiet and complaisant by some junior priests down at the bottom of the pyramid within a few minutes of her arrival, so mentally she was quite out of it and it took both Miranda and myself to get her almost standing on her own feet. Getting down a thousand vertical feet of steep pyramid steps was going to be mildly entertaining to say the least.

To make things slightly more complicated, there was rather a long line tonight waiting for their turn at the altar. It was apparently about midnight or so, and a couple of dozen more potential victims, along with their guards were now wondering what the delay was. I stuck my head down and stared at them in the gloom, and they stared back at me until one overly ambitious guard decided that I wasn't part of the normal sacrificial party and decided to put his ceremonial spear up my ass. Now thoroughly annoyed, I cleared house, sending the dozen or so guards on a short air flight with more rather sudden and extreme landings down at the bottom that they probably wouldn't walk away from.

Try as I might, I couldn't remember the trick Bel had done to easily undo locks (without massive collateral damage) so to my chagrin, my lowly untrained apprentice puzzled out the trick in less than a minute setting the entire string of slaves free to run like holy hell anywhere but here. Maybe a few of them would make it ... maybe ... but with Janice quite out of her head with happy drugs, even getting her (as us) safely down the pyramid was going to be tricky and none of the former captives had the patience to wait for us even as far as the first ten steps, and there were a lot more to follow.

"Sean... please be here with us!" I half whispered and half prayed. The dragon had seriously spooked my resident Ùruisg, one of the most innately magical creatures in the entire known multi-verse and he'd been of absolutely no help at all during the brief conflict ... probably because he'd been none too certain about who would win. If Sean was afraid of a dragon, then I ought to have been gibbering insane with fear, but my smart-ass mouth (and a little luck) had amazingly gotten me out of trouble. This time!

"Don't shout!" He murmured. "My nerves aren't at all up to it. I need a drink ... any chance these Deseret barbarians enjoy any sort of civilized mature beverage suitable for enjoying irresponsibly, and have some large quantities of it sitting around?"

"Slim and none. I think it's illegal here, but in more of a 'we'll kill you up upon a high altar if we catch you', rather than the silly pseudo- speakeasy stuff back in the US..."

"Quite understandable ... I'm about ready to kill myself for a stiff drink and I pity the poor bastard that gets into our way until I find one!" He tersely snarled. Yep, he was scared and angry that he'd been caught dead scared, just like the rest of us. Tough shit ... we were now in a serious pickle and probably hundreds of miles away from anything resembling help. We were going to need to kick some serious ass to get our own fannies safely out here, not to mention finding Bel, and I was going to need help!

"Look, this would be a really convenient time to do something useful." I snarled, and rather loudly. "For starters, can you purge the happy juice from out of Janice? We're walking at a crawl down the sides of a nearly pitch black freaking pyramid when we need to be getting our asses running, very fast and very far away! Even the dimmest priest or guard down there has now figured out that tonight's sacrifice has been terminated with extreme prejudice, and they're now gathering up all of their friends and butt boys with sharp objects to get the curtain back up on their show!"

"Can't do that ... that's purely medicinal, and nothing regarding magic. I can stimulate her nerves a bit to wake her up a bit, but it would be dangerous to do more." With a quick mental nudge, Sean woke up our sleeping beauty, mostly anyway, which really just made her an almost wide-awake and alert drunk. If anything, now that she was more under her own power, she was much more likely to stagger and fall down the remaining half the length of the pyramid ... while giggling non-spot.

Actually, now that I think about it ... this was worse. Before it took the two of us to drag her down each and every step, but now our laughing merry lunatic was doing to best to dance down the steps in a gleeful frolic, and it was all Miranda and I could do to no keep her from trying fly off into thin air.

The progress we were making was just too slow. In the dim moonlight, I could see cars full of reinforcements arriving. Soldiers with guns and probably a handful of semi-adequate magicians, too. The heavier stuff would be shortly behind these folks. Already a few of the better shots with hunting rifles were taking potshots at us, but the flying lead was just that – lead, and with minimal shields up we were so far pretty safe, for another minute or two but we had to get off this damned deathtrap of a staircase fast!

"I don't suppose this would be a good time to try a basic lesson in levitation or flying, would it?" I muttered to anyone around me who might care. No one said anything otherwise, so I took a deep breath and reached up for some air currents to use to give us a lift. A month ago, if anyone had told me that I could hold a decent sized half-wrecked airship up in the air for over a half hour, I could have suggested that they were clinically insane. Having done it, once, I decided that giving three people a lift could not be that much more difficult, but even the basic levitation trick that about half of any decent crop of Adepts could manage, was an awful tricky and slippery thing.

I sort of almost figured it out, at least enough to blast us rather out of direct controlled flight onto the roof of a stone one story building a bit away from the immediate excitement, and by landing I mean a rather sudden uncontrolled crash from the height of about fifteen feet. Still, any landing that you can walk away from...

The pain of crashing did make Janice a little more alert for a minute or two, enough so that I could get something of a story out of her.

"Janice, do you have any idea where you are? And where did they take Bel?" As a magician, I figured Bel was a little too valuable to be wasted (yet) on a normal sacrificial altar and I was hoping that Janice knew when they had been separated, and perhaps she was just alert enough now to tell me.

She was ... barely. "The wizards took her! Bel's old boss and a big and mean looking Deseret grand Pooh-Bah. They didn't need me and left me up there! I think they said something about the Fort, something 'green' but they didn't stay and they flew off with Bel! They were going to kill me!" She wailed, loud enough for everyone within a hundred yards to now figure out our hiding location.

That was fine. Bel didn't seem to be anywhere near here and this place had gotten onto my last nerve!

I got the ladies down off of the roof safely and we found a bit of a space of clear open ground and I told them to lie flat down and stay there because things were going to get a bit bouncy. I didn't think my usual wind or fire storm was going to bring down that big-assed pyramid, but I wanted it shut down ... permanently. From the brief looks of the minimal landscape in the gloomy moonlight around us, this was just some minor religious function and cargo warehousing area. Its purpose was strictly to bring in the guns and ammo, and feed the magic necessary to keep the gears going. This was something that I could definitely put a stop to.

With a rather nice fat Earth Ley not too deep below me, I didn't have the slightest doubt that I could summon a suitably sized earthquake quite capable of bringing that high altar of evil crashing right down. In fact I rather enjoyed the experience! It was only when Miranda came up me to gently remind me to stop, that I actually let go of the rather massive forces that I'd unleashed for the last ten minutes. Everything, and I mean everything, was just a heap of rubble ... and very likely to remain that way.

I figured the two nearest warehouses would contain all of the most recently smuggled arms and ammo that Probert and the Harrison brothers, with the help of the Clinton Street Gang, had channeled out on Friday and indeed it looked like I'd finally hit the jackpot. It really didn't take a lot of creatively applied fire to get this arsenal nicely exploding, especially since they'd mixed crates of ammo together with the firearms.

Everything blew up 'real good' and I think I genuinely smiled for the first time since I'd arrived at Probert's farm. Mark this entire smuggling ring, along with a large depot of smuggled goodies, toast! Assuming I made it home alive, a few folks might actually be happy with me!

On the other hand, I was a good thousand miles or so away from Chicago, somewhere in Western Montana if my guess was even half accurate, and there would be a lot of very angry Deseret wizards and soldiers hunting my ass down. Not to mention that I had to find Bel!

With everything within five square miles a heap of rubble, I had slightly more trouble than I anticipated finding live prisoners to question. Even the survivors looked seriously scratched and dented up and not particularly in good enough shape to talk.

The priests were all absolutely useless; their magical compulsions forcing them to suicide the moment my bright and shiny face peered into theirs. The soldiers weren't hardly any better, mostly zealots the lot of them. Mind-treated to resist to the very end, and pretty much to a man they did. I ended up setting a lot of barely walking wounded on fire the next hour or so and Miranda commented later that I was the walking personification of the angel of death.

I was in goddamned Deseret - the bastards just couldn't run away ... no, they all had to go banzai and attack me or the women! No, I wasn't taking prisoners! It just wasn't safe to.

Eventually I found some poor pitiful maintenance worker who wasn't much higher up the social ladder than the slaves, but he knew what I was asking about and seemed reasonable to deal with. The wall that had collapsed nearly completely on top of him was already more fatal than the dangers of speaking with me.

"Where are the great wizards, and where would they take a captive woman wizard?" I asked the poor mangled fellow who was already breathing blood from his nose and mouth much too copiously to be remotely healthy.

"To the Fort at Green River, west down the road from here." He replied with no particular resentment or apparent anger towards me. The wars of his betters didn't seem to concern him much and he was too unimportant to be worth the time to mind-condition. "The Great One, Jamil, Great-Lord Wizard of the Second Circle commands the testing grounds there and his word is death or benevolence to all. More of the former than the later, I'll admit. I saw him leave some time ago, before the great earthquake, with an Otagu, a foreigner who serves but does not accept the Prophet and shall never become one of us. They had a woman with them. Clothed, so not to be a sacrifice but yet well-bound and hooded, for it is anathema that any woman should meet the eyes of a man as an equal, let alone a great lord. I think she is for the breeding pit there, to be given to either the Great One or his guests, dark creatures that are not men. That is where captured female magicians are always taken, to be bred for the future glory of the Prophet and our race, or so I've heard whispered. I saw one just once and prayed that the servants of the Prophet would select me at once for their next sacrifices, but I never was. But now I am not unhappy, for I shall rejoin my wife in the next world and my soul and blood will never darken any altar. I am content."

That was the last word he spoke and his eyes shut and he quietly passed beyond any pains of this world and for once I was glad that I didn't have to speed along someone's passage to death. I already seen as much death and destruction in the last few hours as could manage, but I knew that this was just a start ... and this dark night wasn't over yet!

From the looks of the first road sign we passed, the shattered pyramid and storage area was near the outskirts of a town call Rock Springs and there was a marker for the town of Green River about ten miles away heading west down the road. I assumed the Fort, being a rather secret testing area, would be a few miles somewhere out of that town, and I figured we'd have no trouble finding it.

Since it was still rather early in the morning, just barely after midnight still, I figured that it was a whole lot safer for us to follow the edges of the road in the moonlight and approach the Fort under cover of darkness. Mayhem could wait until I could get a look at the layout of the place and find where they were keeping Bel. The idea of a breeding pit didn't at all sound comforting.

Now that Janice was more or less coherent, it was hard to keep her mouth quiet during our hike. She was still a bit 'bouncy' and also barking mad at me for getting her (indirectly) into this mess in the first place and soon absolutely livid about finding herself in a backwards corner of Deseret with umpteen thousand fanatic soldiers and wizards between us and freedom ... and her lover! Our portal trip was now permanently a one-way one, and that was a price I was quite happy to pay for the destruction I'd wreaked in return. Now that I could mentally run some accounting figures, I cheerfully determined that the good-guys were slightly ahead on points already, and a tough trip home wouldn't balance the scale much back their way.

I couldn't blame Janice for being rather angry and annoyed. It didn't help that she was nearly freezing in the cold night air with just a single blanket we'd found in the wreckage to cover her body and the only pair of shoes we could find that fit her from off a dead body was now pinching and rubbing her feet raw. Neither Miranda nor I had much in the way of extra clothes to offer her, and she refused any of the blood-soaked salvaged items we'd offered her. In the chill of the late winter/early spring air, it was much too cold for her to rest, let alone sit down for any length of time, so we kept pressing on.

Worse, Janice bitched constantly that she felt naked without her gun, so Miranda grudgingly handed over the Thompson machinegun she'd cleverly grabbed before we headed into the cellar with the dragon. It was still loaded up with a full hundred-round magazine of silver ammo hell, and she was now itching to give some Deseret wizards some stitches. If we'd been clever, we'd have grabbed some of the weapons from the fallen guards, but we hadn't. Janice had still been loopy and needed all of Miranda's and mine attention to deal with and we'd tried to leave the pyramid area as fast as possible.

Any thought of actually taking the roadway was crazy. Nearly as soon as we started down the side of the road west to Green River, it seemed like every five minutes or so another vehicle or truck loaded with soldiers passed us heading toward the disaster area at Rock Springs. They'd soon suspect that a grade-A wizard, or someone like me, had gotten through their defenses and had attacked the religious center and the warehouses. The magic signature from my earthquake would make it obvious that this wasn't any natural event. They'd search around there for us first, but eventually somebody clever (and too high ranking to be ignored) would figure out that we were heading towards the Fort. Hopefully long after something structurally debilitating had happened to it.

Our first plan that we discussed while trotting along as fast as Janice's sore feet would let her, was for a quiet surgical extraction, but this optimism wasn't fooling anybody. Maybe we could get in quietly, but finding Bel, let alone getting her out alive was probably going to take some serious magic ... and the usual helping of excessive destruction. Once I had Bel safe in my arms, or rather probably in Janice's arms, it was going to be time for some gratuitous random redecoration of the local landscape. I'd used up a lot of magical energy the last week or so, and the last couple of big firefights hadn't helped. You can party down on Ley power as much as you'd like but some of the energy has to come from within yourself. My internal reserves felt low, and walking all night without much recent sleep certainly didn't help matters. If Miranda and Janice weren't inclined to complain, then I could also keep my own private bitches silent as well.

Walking in the growing dark as the moon started to think about setting, we lucked out a couple of miles out of town when we saw a pair of car headlights way ahead of us, and quite off of this roadway. As usual we hunkered down to let them pass us by but not before we noticed that these military vehicles had definitely not come from the town just ahead of us. Tracing their path on the road ahead of us we soon found the small dirt road leading north that they had come from, and we figured this must lead us toward the Fort, and in about another weary hour of walking it did. The region was pretty rough and it wasn't too hard to keep to the edges of the roadway and hide when other vehicles passed. Apparently they weren't wasting any time on beauty sleep either and they were trucking out squads of soldiers to look for us just as fast as trucks could be found and loaded, and reloaded for second and third trips in the direction of Green River.

In an unwarranted bout of optimism, I hoped this would mean that most of the soldiers would be now gone from the fort, searching for us in the morning darkness at a place where we weren't.

On the other hand, this alert also meant that the existing guards would be very alert, and perhaps even the usual number of usual soldiers patrolling the grounds would be now doubled. There sure seemed like there were an awful lot of them at the main security gate, and more annoyed soldier boys also patrolling inside and outside the wire. As for seeing the layout of the Fort inside, the way the hills were inside of the guardhouse on both sides of the road, I really couldn't make out a thing past them.

"Decision time." I whispered to my shivering ladies fair. "I can do something loud and violent to the guardhouse and probably set all of the local brush on fire too, or we can try another night flight into the unknown. Or does anyone else have a clever idea that won't get us all killed, or at least not right away before we can take an awful lot of them along with us."

No one did. Miranda shrugged and just suggested that I fly much more carefully this time. Yeah, right.

This time however, I wasn't in as much of a hurry and I didn't want to create a sudden curious gust of wind blowing things like guard towers and big trees over so I took it cool, calm and casual. We took a short and very elliptical flight up high out of sight and no one was more surprised than I was when we reached the top of the leftmost and tallest hill, my exact objective, which I hoped would provide a decent nighttime view of our objective, and with some cover and darkness, we could now reconnoiter adequately enough to make some final planning for our rescue plan.