The demon worlds passed swiftly because they had no affinity with the pattern Maksim presented as key, but there were other realities he’d discovered, other realities he could reach into, one of them that busy place he’d snatched Todichi Yahzi from. Realities without magic in them, or at least without the kind of magic he could tap into, and therefore of no interest to him. Three of that sort of reality resonated with the oddman’s pattern; he tagged these and went on searching the index until he reached the limits of his explorations. He hadn’t sent his shamruz body searching for decades, it took too much energy, too much time, it was a luxury he couldn’t afford when he already had more power sources and demon pits that he needed. When he had to acknowledge that his body and the energy it contained, out of which he worked, was slowly and inexorably failing. So he left off searching and did not bother exploring the non-magical realities since there was nothing for him there. More than that, unlike the demon realities, those were immense beyond even his ability to comprehend. Immense in size and immensely various in their parts. He was uncomfortable there, reduced to a mote of spectacular unimportance; which was hardly an inducement to spend what he could no longer replace unless he had a need no other sort of reality would or could fill, Todichi Yahzi being one example of such a need.
He entered the first of these universes, set his construct of the oddman before him and swooped between the stars following the guide on a twisty path that set his immaterial head spinning. He visited one world after another, watched folk going about their business, they looked very much like the peasants and shopkeepers and traders in Cheonea and sometimes he understood what they were doing, the goods they were selling but not often, mostly their deeds were as incomprehensible as their words; even though he knew what the words were supposed to mean, he didn’t have the referents to make sense of what those folk found perfectly sensible. The guide construct was wobbling uncertainly with no evident goal, he wasn’t learning anything and he felt himself tiring, so he withdrew, rested a moment, then visited the second of the realities. Here the guide construct waffled aimlessly about with even less direction than before. Angry and weary, Maksim broke off the search and tried the third.
This time the pull was galvanic; the construct whipped immediately to a world swimming in the light of a greenish sun; it hovered over a stretch of what looked like seamless dusty granite spread over an area twice the size of Silagamatys. There were the mosquitolike machines on one part of it; on another, one of the metal pods these folk drove somehow between worlds, a huge hole gaping in its side. A tall bony blond woman with a set angry face snapped out orders to a collection of four-armed reptilians using peculiar motorized assists to load crates and bundles on noisy carts that went by themselves up long latticed ramps and vanished inside the, pod; now and then she muttered furious asides to the short man beside her.
“No, no, not that one, the numbers are on them, you can read, can’t you?” Aside to her companion, “If that scroov shows his face round my ship again, I’ll skin him an inch at a time and feed it to him broiled.”
The bony little man scratched his three fingers through a spongy growth that covered most of his upper body; he blinked several times, shrugged and said nothing.
“Sssaah!” She darted to the loaders, cursed in half a dozen languages, waved her arms, made the workers reload the last cart. Still furious, she stalked back to where she’d been standing. “Danny Blue, you miserable druuj, I’ll pull your masters rating this time, I swear I will, this is the last time you walk out on me or anyone else.”
“Blue wants, Blue
“Hah! Mouse, if you’re so happy with him, you go help Sandy stow the cargo.”
“I don’t do boxes.”
She glared at him, but throttled back the words that bulged in her throat, stalked off and spent the rest of the time Maksim watched inspecting the carts as they rolled past her and rushing over to the loaders to stop and reorder what they were doing.
Maksim opened his eyes, ran his tongue along his lips; for several moments he lay relaxed in the chair breathing slowly and steadily; he licked his lips again and managed a smile. “Danny Blue. An analog with you, Baby Dan? Odder and odder.” He stroked long tapering fingers over the staff, knowing every bump and hollow and nailmark, taking comfort in that ancient familiarity. “If she was a shipmaster here, I’d say Danny Two was cargomaster and she’s fussing about him going off and leaving her to do the stowing. Sounds like he makes a habit of it, disappearing on his obligations to go off and do what he wants. A pillar of milk pudding when it comes to providing support. Why him? Who’d be such a fool as to bring THAT MAN here? Forty Mortal Hells, what good is a twitchy cargomaster to the Drinker of Souls? Who’s in this idiotic conspiracy?” A quick unhappy halfsmile, then he pushed himself up and levered the chair to vertical so it supported his back and head and his feet were planted firmly on the footboard. He was wearier than he’d expected to be and that worried him. The Lot’s tomorrow, he thought, just as well. His stomach knotted, but he forced the misery away. Children die; children always die, they starved by the hundreds when the Parastes and their puppet king ran Cheonea, they died of filth and overwork, they died in the pleasurehouses and under the whips of those fine lords. What’s the death of one child compared to the hundreds I’ve made healthier and happier? It was an old argument, he felt deeply that it was a true argument, but when he took the child who drew the gold lot to Deadfire Island, the child who was miserable at leaving his parents and excited about seeing the marvels of the Grand Yron in the holy city Havi Kudush deep in the heart of Phras, when he took that child and fed his life (or hers) to BinYAHtii, he found his rationalizations hard to remember.
He glanced at the wallcabinet, wondered if he should take another dram of the cordial, but he didn’t want to break the pentacle and have to lose more energy reactivating it. Reluctantly he spread his hand over BinYAHtii and drew on it; it was restive and hard to control, but the disciplines of that control were engraved in his brain by now, in his blood and bone, so he dealt with the brief rebellion so quickly and effectively he hardly noticed what he was doing. When he was ready, he smoothed his hair again, straightened out his linen robe and the soft black overrobe, pulled BinYAHtii through the neck opening and set it flat against the snowy linen. He swung the staff around and held it vertical beside him, then he began to chant, letting his deepest notes ring out, the sound filling the chamber with echoes and resonances.
“I0 I0 DOSYNOS EYO I0 10 STYGERAS MOIRO I0 I0 TI TILYMON PHATHO I0 I0 LELATAS EMO.”
And as the echoes died he gestured with hand and staff in ways both erotic and obscene (which is one of the reasons he did most of his primal magic in private; a sorceror in many ways is stuck with what his submind dredges up for him; powerful magics require powerful stimulants no matter how upsetting or ridiculous they might seem to onlookers.)
“PAREITHEE, OY YO ROSAPER ROSPALL. PAREITHEE ENTHA DA ROSPA.”
He beat the end of the staff against the stone three times, the sound faint after the power of his reverberant basso. A misty column appeared in the smaller pentacle.
The mist thickened and solidified into a creature like a series of mistakes glued together. A cock’s comb and mad rooster eyes, spiky gold feathers, a black sheep’s face where the beak should be, narrow snaky shoulders and torso, spindly arms with lizard hands-and lizard skin on them, male organs bulging in a downy pouch, huge heavy hips and knees that bent the wrong way, powerful in the wrongness, narrow two-toed feet with lethal black claws on the toes. Rosaper Rospall whined and panted and swayed in the small space allotted to him and fixed frantic evil eyes on Maksim.