lab was three stories down from the top of the tower, and through the window you could see most of the city. I heard the rustle of Jo’s wings as she landed behind me, and that faintly disturbing feeling that was stirring around in the back of my head started moving a bit more energetically as she handed the beacon to Jai.
“One down, two to go,” Jakon said—or rather, half said and half growled.
“There’s got to be more to the test than this,” Josef rumbled. He sounded disappointed.
And I wanted to say, There is, there is . . . Don’t let your guard down . . . but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to say it. And then I saw one of those sleek little airships swoop by the window, and I knew.
But then it was too late.
I spun around and faced the others, managed to say “It’s a trap!” But that was all, because then everything— changed.
It was like watching a ripple that started in the beacon Jo held—a ripple that spread outward in all directions, washing over everything in its path—including us. I felt nothing except a momentary coldness and disorientation. None of my teammates seemed to be affected either.
But everything else was. That ever-expanding ripple turned into a transparent wave that passed over the equipment and scientific paraphernalia, transforming everything as it went. That merciless fluorescent glare gave way to the flickering yellow light of tapers. A long-range surveillance monitor screen wavered and changed into a crystal ball. A rack of chemicals and solutions held in glass retorts and test tubes became an oaken cabinet housing earthen pots and vials full of various powders, salts and elixirs. A radiation and toxic materials containment chamber became a circle of gold bricks inlaid in the floor and stamped with protective cabalistic signs. The wave—actually an expanding bubble, with us at its center—accelerated as it grew larger, and within seconds the futuristic laboratory had been transformed into a sorcerer’s sanctum.
And it didn’t stop there. Looking out the window, I could see the wave spreading across the city in all directions like the radiating blast front of a nuclear bomb. The Art Deco skyscrapers and spires rippled, wavered, became Gothic towers of mortared stone. The aerial ramps and tubes vanished, while the darting airships metamorphosed into winged dragonlike creatures who carried human passengers on their backs.
In a matter of a minute or less, the gleaming science fiction city had been turned into a medieval town complete with a castle at its center, with us in its tallest tower. Even the window I was watching through was now an unglazed opening with crosshatching iron bars. Everything had changed.
No, I thought then—not changed. You couldn’t change what had always been, and this had always been a world ruled by magic, not science. My subconscious had realized that when Jo had flown up to get the beacon. Her wings were far too small to support her purely in terms of lift and air pressure. Jo’s people had evolved on a world where magic was in the very air they flew in, and she could fly only when such transmundane power was present.
Like here.
“Back to the roof!” I shouted, and turned toward the elevator shaft, only to find instead a narrow enclosed stairwell, crowded with guards holding spears, swords and crossbows pointed at us.
I called myself six different kinds of a moron. No wonder there had been no people visible save for the far-off ones flying the airships. No wonder the whole city had looked so spic-and-span. A glamour had been laid over the whole shebang, just for our benefit—a spell of seeing that mesmerized the eyes and brain into visualizing and experiencing a false front. Our taking the first beacon— probably a talisman disguised as the beacon—had triggered the spell’s dissolution and signaled HEX that we were safely in the net.
No wonder everything had been so easy!
Hue hovered anxiously over me and my companions as the armed guards stepped apart to make way for two people I hoped I’d never see again—Scarabus, the original Illustrated Man, and Neville, that walking, talking, glutinous, life-sized version of the Visible Man model kit I’d gotten once for Christmas. They came down the stairs and stopped, each flanking the stairwell entrance. They seemed to be waiting for someone, and I had no trouble guessing who it was.
There was a rustle of silken robes, and a cloaked figure materialized from the darkness within the stairwell tower. She stepped into the wavering light of the sconces, threw back her hood and surveyed us. Her gaze stopped on me and she smiled.
“Well met again, Joey Harker,” said the Lady Indigo. “What a pleasant surprise. And look! This time you’ve brought your friends.”
“GET BEHIND ME!” SHOUTED Jai, proving again that he could say exactly what he meant when he had to.
He was floating about six inches above the floor. He raised both hands, and something like a huge translucent umbrella took shape in front of us. Jai’s psychokinetic abilities depended neither on magic nor on science, he told me once, although they were stronger on magical worlds. They were, he said, spiritual. Whatever. I just hoped that they could keep Lady Indigo at bay.
A shower of crossbow bolts struck the umbrella shield, slowed in the air and fell to the floor, drained of all forward movement.
Lady Indigo gestured, and a bead of vermilion fire hung above her palm. She put it up to her lips and blew. It hurtled toward Jai’s umbrella shield. When it hit the shield, it exploded into a sort of syrupy crimson flame. Jai looked like he was gritting his teeth. He began to sweat and then, slowly, to tremble. The effort of holding the shield in place was taking its toll on him.
Then there was a pop! and the shield vanished in a blaze of crimson fire. Jai collapsed to the floor.
I heard snarling. Josef had picked up Jakon, the wolf girl, and threw her, almost bowled her, up the stairwell. It was like one of the games we’d play back on Prime Base, but this one was for real. She knocked a dozen archers down as she rolled like a gymnast. Then she sprang from the stairs down onto Neville. I think she expected to knock him to the floor, but she hit his jelly flesh, and she froze, like someone paralyzed by a jellyfish’s sting. He picked her up like a child’s toy, shook her once violently and dropped her. She didn’t move again.
Josef grunted and charged Neville. It must have been like being charged by a tank, but it barely seemed to faze the jelly man. Josef plunged his fist deeply into Neville’s vast stomach, which simply distended like something in slow motion without apparently troubling Neville at all.
The jelly man laughed, a vast, muddy, bubbling laugh. “They send children against us!” he said. Then he held his hands out: The jelly flesh shot forward, covering Josef’s face. I could see him struggling to breathe, his eyes distended. Then he collapsed as well.
Jo fluttered upward until she was in the rafters of the room. She was up in the top corner, out of range of the arrows.
Lady Indigo snapped her fingers, and Scarabus knelt at her feet. She touched one of her fingers to a picture that writhed its way up his spine. It was a picture of a dragon.
And then Scarabus was gone, and in his place, huge and hissing, was a dragon, complete with wings and clawed limbs on a nightmarish pythonlike body. It flew up and wound itself around the rafters, moving at blinding speed toward Jo. She fluttered back against the wall, terrified.
Almost
