The chief of staff picked up the torch. Looking it over, he walked toward the opening. Just as he reached it he caught sight of what the captain was about to do.
The captain’s pistol smoked and sputtered. A brief flame coughed from the end of the barrel. That was all. Dumbfounded, the captain stood looking at the useless weapon in his hand — briefly, until a dagger suddenly grew in his throat. He dropped the pistol, gurgled, and fell dead. Bright purple blood issued from the wound.
The chief of staff retrieved the knife and picked up the gun. He looked at one, then the other.
“Strange.”
Throwing down the gun, he grabbed the human by the hair and dragged him back through the portal.
Six (Approximately) Months (For Lack of Better Word) Later
Two
Over the Plains of Baranthe
He pushed the stick forward. The nose of the jet fighter dipped, allowing him to view the entirety of Castle Perilous atop its high promontory. It was as it always had been, a vast dark edifice of eye-defying complexity, a jumble of towers, turrets, bulwarks, and other fortifications, all ringed by concentric curtainwalls. The central keep soared into the clouds. The castle sat like a magistrate high on his bench, delivering judgments to the plains below and the snow-capped mountains beyond.
The castle belonged to him, as it had to his father, his father’s father, his father’s father’s, etc., and all his forebears unto many generations. It was his home (one of them, at least), his freehold, and his fortress.
It was the biggest white elephant in the world. In several worlds, in fact.
But he loved the place.
He sent the plane into a wide banking circle around the castle and spent a good quarter hour inspecting it. As old as it was, the castle looked as though it had been built yesterday. No weathering discolored its stone, no mortar crumbled from its joints and cornices. It looked spanking new; in fact, it had been magically reconstructed a little less than a year before.
Without warning, the jet’s single engine died with a whistling whine, and the lights on the instrument panel blinked, then went out.
“Infernal machine,” he said irritably, shaking his head. He worked his fingers in complex patterns and muttered an incantation. The engine coughed once, roared to life, but faded seconds later. He worked his fingers again, chanting monotonously.
No use, the engine was dead. The jet dropped like a stone. He could have effected a levitation spell to keep it up, but that was hardly fun. Sighing, he waved his hand.
The jet disappeared, and was instantly replaced by a helicopter. He took the control bars, checked his counter-rotation, and put the ship into a steep dive.
He leveled off near the ground and hovered. The earth was blackened as if by a great fire. The copter bore down. Charred skeletons lay among the dust of the plain — the remains of the last army that had laid siege to Castle Perilous. The siege had been long and bitter, and the castle had almost fallen. But the besiegers had met a horrible end.
The helicopter’s motor sputtered and choked.
“Damn!” He was dangerously close to the ground. He worked his fingers fast.
The aircraft that appeared around him was an eclectic meld of curving silver metal and clear, tear-shaped bubbles. It hummed and crackled. He looked over the controls — he had flown one of these only twice in his life — then gingerly put the tips of his fingers on the control panel. The craft shot toward the virginal blue sky with astonishing speed.
He leveled off at ten thousand feet, the castle still bulking hugely below him.
“Now to do what I came up here for,” he said.
There was a computer terminal, of sorts, to his right. He studied it briefly, then punched in some data. A small screen next to the terminal lit up.
He was busy for several minutes. Then he looked up and searched the skies.
By the end of an hour, his neck hurt horribly and his eyes burned from reading instruments. It was hard work. The craft’s engines had failed regularly every ten minutes or so, and had to be bolstered by complex levitation spells. The last of these was now fading rapidly.
“There you are!”
A fuzzy gray splotch floated against the bright sky. It looked like a defect in a camera lens, nebulous, out of focus. He headed the craft for it.
Worried that the engine might fail just at the wrong moment, he transformed the craft back to a jet fighter just before entry.
The sky didn’t change color by much — it turned perhaps a shade lighter. Below sprawled an immense city cut by two rivers and outlined by a harbor. A long, thin finger of land, bristling with skyscrapers, ran between the rivers.
“I should have known. All roads lead to New York.”
Smiling, he banked and turned toward Manhattan. It had been a long time.
Presently the radio sputtered and blurped.
“— Kennedy Air traffic control to unidentified military aircraft! Calling unidentified military aircraft! You are intruding in controlled air space! Come in!”
“Yes?”
“Unidentified aircraft — descend to fifteen hundred feet immediately! You are in a controlled air corridor! Acknowledge, please!”
“In a moment.”
“Negative! Negative! You must —”
He snapped the radio off. This would never do. He suddenly realized how unprepared he was. Awkward, really.
The plane around him began to fade.
Of course. He had forgotten how inhospitable this world was to magic. Things were damned difficult here as far as the Arts were concerned. It was ironic. The jet didn’t work very well back home because the universe of the castle was not amenable to mechanical contrivances, even conjured ones. Here, the jet worked fine, but its very existence was tenuous at best precisely because it was entirely a magical construct. He was getting the worst of both worlds.
That left him in somewhat of a pickle, one he should have smelted far off.
A simple shield spell protected him from most of the air blast when the jet finally faded out of existence, but even that began to wear off quickly. He stretched out his arms and legs and went into free-fall posture.
Plummeting toward the cold gray expanse of the East River, he decided that he would have to think of something very fast.
Three
Elsewhere
“I’ve gotten to like the castle,” Linda Barclay said as she munched a kosher dill. “But I still have really serious bouts of homesickness.”
Sitting with his back against the tree under which he and Linda were enjoying a picnic lunch, Gene Ferraro bit into a cheese-laden cracker. “That’s normal. I don’t get so much homesick as bored with life here — I mean, in the castle. I’d like to get out into some of the more exciting worlds. Explore a little, you know.”
“You’re big for adventure. I’m not. I’m basically a homebody.”
“And one of the most powerful sorceresses around.”
“Only in the castle and in some of the magic-is-the-rule worlds. That’s what I like about my life here, as opposed to back in the normal world. Magic is fun.”
“Sure is. Normal world? No such thing. Our world is just one of many — and a pretty dreary one at that.”
“It’s so nice here.” Linda looked out across the meadow. Bright sunlight brought out the delirious green of the grass, and a soft breeze stirred the budding tree above. It was fine, first-warm-day-of-spring weather.
“Yeah, but I’d still like to do some exploring.” Gene looked over his shoulder. “Take that big house over there.”
Linda looked at the top of the huge dome that barely showed above the crest of the hill to the right.
“Did you ever go over and take a good look at it?”