The Necromancer's Gambit: The Keep
Nicolas Wilson
Teleporting is biting your thumb at God and Isaac Newton at the same time; theoretically it could release enough energy to start off a fusion chain reaction that would light the air on fire- at least parts of it. But usually all that happens is you burn off the top layer of skin and set some of your hair on fire- which actually hurts way more than it sounds.
I pass out from the pain. Just about every time. This time I wake up in a mound of charred flesh, and I feel like a bastard when I’m glad it isn’t mine.
I’m lying on a path made, brick by brick, out of pieces of Castle, but it’s decaying. There’s still moments from before his death contributing to the geography, but with each passing second, more and more of the place is made up of dead, charred meat.
I push myself off the ground, trying to ignore the way it squishes beneath my hands. The sky is wrong, blue with blood streaking down it. The fortress walls are crumbling, the earth it’s built on falling away. I can’t have much time.
A moat of acid I told him was a damned cliché is low by several feet, more a creek than a moat. I start over the lowered drawbridge, unhappy about the way it creaks under my feet. A board shatters under my weight and my entire leg goes through the hole. I’m lucky; if the waters were as high as they’re supposed to be, the leg would be submerged to the thigh in acid. I pull myself back up, and start to run towards the yard beyond the Fortress walls.
My skin prickles as I pass under the portcullis, even after it doesn’t fall on me. I look up, and catch someone peering down at me through a murder hole in the ceiling. It’s one of the guards- doppelgangers of Castle formed out of pure energy. I’m surprised there are any left, since it’s the power concentrated in them that keeps this place going- and it’s obviously no Energizer bunny at the moment.
And then I wonder, if there are guards left, whether or not they’ll assume I’m an intruder. Supposedly Castle made it so they’d recognize me, but their world is falling apart. I can’t imagine their wiring is faring better than the cracking cobblestones beneath my feet, at least some of which have lost their illusory façade and can be seen for the bone and skull they’re really made out of.
Inside the gate I finally get a chance to see how massive this place is. I remember overhearing an argument between Bishop and Castle while it was under construction. She told him, “All you really need is the Keep.”
“I know,” he said. “But it’s hard to stop once you’ve got into building a serious castle.” But she won the thrust of the argument, which was that all of the important structures, like the cells, be kept in the Keep.
I’m being followed. Those same eyes are stalking me through the arrow slits; I only catch them every few feet, but I know they’re there.
I’m forced to wonder if you can punch an energy construct, because magic isn’t magic here- the rules don’t work- that’s the whole point. I might have brought a gun, but if the physics here are distorting the same way as everything else, odds are decent it would have just exploded like an Elmer Fudd shotgun.
The guard pops out of a doorway. I contemplate doing something stupid and dangerous, when the doppelganger does the last thing I expect: it speaks. “You shouldn’t cast anything here. It used to be nothing would work, but now- it’s more likely that whatever you cast, it’s just going to make your hands explode at the wrists. There are 27 bones in the human hand; the explosion sends them flying everywhere, include up into your forearm. It was kind of funny the first time, but after that it gets sad.”
“Castle?” I ask.
He furrows his brow, as if it’s a deeply philosophical question. “Kind of. I mean, there’s probably enough of him here that you could have a conversation with me and not know the difference.”
“Would you?”
“Probably not, actually. So I guess the difference is pretty tiny and niggling.”
“You always were a niggler.” He raises an eyebrow. “Don’t give me that look- you know what I said.”
“And what about the time you called me niggardly?”
“You were; you’re the most miserly Monopoly player I’ve ever seen. You put the Queen out of the game over a single dollar.”
“That’s how it’s played.”
“Maybe, but it was cold-blooded. And if you’ll recall, it also tipped the game in the King’s favor.”
“Yeah, but not before we put you out of the game.”
“Yeah. You really are just like Castle- and I’m remembering how big an ass he was. So why am I putting myself in so much danger trying to save you?”
“I don’t know, your messiah complex?” He smiles at me, and I’m about to smile back before I remember that he isn’t really Castle.
“Right. So we should probably get to saving you, then. I know there haven’t been any in my time, but if this was an attack on the Gambit we’re in uncharted waters here. Did they leave a binding hex?”
He smiles. “I always suspected you couldn’t be as dumb as you look. At the base of the tower. Attached to a mana bomb, with images of Set carved all over it.”
“A necromancer? That ought to narrow things down.”
“Yep. But that’s just one of the deterrent spells. And the sigil itself is a bitch of a bind. So long as there’s a single strand of my DNA out there, I’d be tied to it. Watching the other doppelgangers burn and decompose, I can tell you I don’t want to have to feel that for the next thousand years. Looks like no fun.”
“So why didn’t you disarm it?”
“I’m made of energy. It might look like I’m a flesh and blood person, but if I touched it- well, it’s the same reason they tell you not to use a cell phone near a bomb- I’d probably set it off.”
“Then you better take me to it.” He steps in front of me then freezes, and puts a hand on my shoulder to keep me from moving.
Then I see it: a creature waddling out from another doorway in the Fortress wall. He looks like a candle of a man that was left out in the noonday sun. “What the hell is that?” It has dumb, animal eyes, but there’s a feral fury in them, too; I can tell it wants badly to destroy me, if only it can remember how.
“I tried to grab elements of myself from all the moments before I died; I thought maybe we could isolate the dead Castles, we could excise them- like they were cancer. Almost worked. But the more time passes, the more the ‘cancer’ spreads; it’s getting harder to remain connected to the living Castle the farther in time we get away from his death- so more of this place dies. Same thing is happening with the guards- none of us are completely from one moment or another- but the closer we are to his time of death the worse off we get. In layman terms, he’s kind of like a Bizarro Castle. Him am number one. He’s functionally pretty retarded, ugly as an ass wart, and way too powerful for how stupid he is. You can’t tell, but right now he’s asking me how to set your testicles on fire.”
“Please don’t tell him.”
“Heh. The guards who haven’t been fortunate enough to die, most of them ended up like this, decaying slowly. If you’ll excuse me.”
It’s too fast to be any spell I know of; there are no words or reagents, no sigils- he just raises his arm, and blue light manifests along the bones in his hand before discharging in a burst from his fingertips. The melted-looking Castle dies fast, almost quickly enough I don’t hear him scream, or smell the burnt flesh. Almost.
“What the fuck spell was that?” I ask as we start moving again.
“Something new I made up. That’s the fun thing about being in a totally new reality. You can make up new rules. I am going to miss that.”
“Miss it?”
“I’m still dying- I mean, temporally I’m already dead. This is a magical stall; it’s the last ride for Butch and Sundance.”
“I guess it is.” And then I see the bomb. The thing’s a porcupine of hexes jutting out of a mound of sludge. There’s a bamboo rod with a Pinocchio hex on it; I’ve seen it once before, if triggered, the bamboo grows, and unless you’re either real fast or real lucky you end up shish kebabed on the end of it. And that’s just the first counter-measure I recognize.
It’s a work of art. It could take me weeks to figure out how to disarm the hundreds of individual pieces- and I’ve got hours- probably less. But before I even get close enough to touch it, the bomb reacts to my aura- fuckers were thorough. I feel the energy inside it building up- then it explodes, the second time in a few hours I’ve been engulfed in flames.
Energy can’t be created or destroyed; but it can be redirected. I have a fraction of a second to get the spell in place and hope it doesn’t backfire on me. I feel the heat most in my bones, and for an instant my body disappears in a cloud of pain.
The first parts of my body I’m aware of are my knees, planted firmly in the dirt; I idly wonder how much more likely I’ll be to get bone marrow cancer after this.
I feel my fingers again, and I’m lucky to still have them- and I try to ignore the overdone hamburger texture of the ground.
I figure I captured 90% of the energy from the blast in a crystal reservoir; the other 10% 10% burnt off a few more layers of skin- like heat loss in electrical wiring; I imagine if I were still in the real world my brain would have cooked. The reservoir’s valuable, because it’s a battery, you could use all that captured energy for a spell.
“Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” Castle’s there, and helps me up. “Maybe I wasn’t clear, that the object was to prevent the bomb from going off. I mean, that’s my bad. I should have recognized you’d need more guidance.”
“The bright side,” I tell him, “is that between the bomb and my half-assed redirection spell, I don’t think there’s anything left from the bind.”
“Give me a sec,” he says, and he stretches, and for an instant I see the electrical arc of his nervous system instead of a man, and it stretches and grows until it’s a lightning strike touching the earth from between the clouds. Then he’s a man again, and he says, “You’re right.”
“You could feel it?”
“It was like… you ever wake up and your junk’s gotten twisted up in your underpants, and it feels… constrained, and in those first few seconds you’re awake you can’t quite put your finger on it. It was like that. And now, I’m free balling.”
“Good, I guess. But the other thing- if they came here, it probably wasn’t just to leave an exploding dick move in your soul. They were after something or someone. So do we know who’s left?”
“They let most of the prisoners loose. I get the feeling that was part of the plan- sowing chaos in the aftermath. Whatever they’ve got planned, they want you chasing your tail in the interim.”
“But did they come for anyone in particular?”
“Annoyingly, us guards aren’t connected- not in real time, anyway. We can do a kind of, um, mental email. But I’ve lost contact with all of the guards on a beeline up the tower. Some of them were bound to be from the period after my death, but probably not all of them.”
The Keep is a box, the one part of Castle’s Fortress that was designed entirely as a practical fortification, heavy stone masonry without the little aesthetic touches that might give it more character at the cost of strength. I can’t imagine the power of the spells that Castle and Bishop designed to protect the structure. Out of the center of the Keep is the Tower- the last defensive position if the entire place gets compromised. There’s only ever been one person up there- and he’s about the worst person we could lose.
“I was on my way to check- mostly out of idle curiosity- when I stumbled into you.” The Keep’s large door is intact, which I want to interpret as a good sign, but Castle notices and shakes his head. “They burnt through the lock- but I healed it. I figured if anyone was left inside I wanted them to stay put. Of course, that was long before I realized the whole place was coming down. I was still wrestling with whether to open the prison, let the last of them escape.” He produces a key, and slides it into the lock. He opens the door and holds it for me.
“Really?” I ask, and he locks it behind us. The Keep is dark, save for torches in the wall that give off no smoke and only minimal light.
“The captives here weren’t given a death sentence. Given the choice between setting them free or murdering them- well, it gave me pause, at least. I figured the worse ones you could recapture; the lesser, we’ll call it parole.”
“So what did you decide?”
“I hadn’t, yet. Still mulling. Thoughts?”
“Well, as un-fun as it sounds, having to recapture any of these bastards, letting them die because their prison’s falling apart seems unjust.”
“Well, while we’re on your stupid errand,” he closes his eyes, and for a moment his voice is strained, “I’ll reach out.” He opens his eyes. “I’ve got a couple guards left, turns out. They’ll see to it that anyone who’s still in a cell gets tossed out on their ass.”
The tower’s exactly what it sounds like, one single, spiraling staircase going up. There are various cells built into the walls, but since they’ve never been occupied the doors are wide open. “They’re not all going to pop out in Bishop’s lab, are they?”
“No. We were always cautious. Each one of them has their own lode stone buried in different places in the High Desert- a little Olmec geomancy. If you’re curious, I’ve got a log of them in Bishop’s lab with GPS coordinates.”
“What if we want them to pop out at Bishop’s? Preferably weaker and less conscious than I end up there.”
“Well, the exit will probably put the both of you into a coma for a few hours. I guess if you wanted to be a real prick about it you could try to use him as the battery for your port- that might do what you want. You’re thinking Baldur?”
“Yeah. I got lucky last time. We caught him with his pants around his ankles.”
“And his Mjolnir in some Sif, if I recall.”
“Yeah, and only two of his Kindred standing guard; and they’ve been pretty much schmucks since we carted him off.”
“Well, he was the head of their Jörmungandr you basically cut off.”
“Exactly my point. I don’t want to see what they might be able to do with him back in charge.”
“Well, let’s just hope he’s still in his cage, then, or should I be making some kind of a Loki reference about a cave, and uh, some stuff about Ragnarok or...” He trails off because we both see the door to the cell at the top of the tower- it’s open.
His shackles- Baldur Odinson was the only inmate kept in chains- are empty. Baldur is the founder of the Kindred- crazy with a capital K- a white supremacist militia with a magical arsenal nearly as big as the chip on their entitled shoulders or their hard on for Norse mythology. We put him away on a fucking pretext, because we knew about the shit they got up to in Idaho, before they moved here to have a larger recruiting base. And now he’s out. Fuck.
Castle interrupts me before I get to the part where I start punching the wall. “You need to get the hell out of here, man.”
He sees something in my eyes I hadn’t thought about. “Don’t look at me like that. You saved me. Sort of. I won’t be suffering, anyway. It’s more than I could have ever asked. But now you need to go. This place could come apart any second.”
He’s right. But I don’t want to. Because the moment I’m gone I know he’s going to let the tesseract fall. And then Castle dies all over again.
He closes his eyes, and I see the strain in his face. “It’s not as easy as you think to keep this place from collapsing into a singularity. It hurts.” I think he’s full of shit- telling me what he thinks I need to hear to get rid of me. But I can’t stay here forever, just to forestall the inevitable. He’s already dead. I just… I need to admit it.
“We’ll miss you,” I tell him.
“How could you not?” he asks, and then the world is sucked away, along with all the air, and I’m left in darkness.