This Rough Magic

Still, Bianca used the last of her strength to send agony pouring into Sophia's body as best she could. And a great deal of agony it was, too, despite the handicaps. Bianca Casarini was fighting for her life, and the agony she summoned was driven by a will to live that had sent her into every foulness imaginable, for years.

It was perhaps the worst thing she could have done, not that she really had any options. Sophia's body arched like a suddenly drawn bow from the excruciating pain—but her hands, clenched by the same agony, never let go of the scarf. The silk that had been choking Casarini now collapsed her windpipe completely, crushing it into ruin.

Bianca spit out blood, feeling her life going with it.

* * *

I can't believe it! Sophia Tomaselli!

I WANTED TO LIVE FOREVER!

* * *

'She's dead,' Eneko said grimly. 'I felt the monster dying. I knew the moment she was gone.'

He knelt and crossed himself, then kissed the crucifix, reverentially—and yet, Erik thought, with some other emotion as well. Guilt? Regret? Though Erik could not imagine what Eneko Lopez could possibly have to feel guilty about, at least in this instance.

'How did she die?' asked Erik.

After he rose to his feet, Lopez shrugged. 'That, I couldn't tell you. I am not clairvoyant, you know. I could simply sense the monster's frantic attempts to use magic to forestall her death—somebody or something was killing her, that much I know, though I couldn't tell you who or what—and her eventual failure.'

His expression was grimmer than Manfred had ever seen it—and Eneko was a man given to a grim view of the world. ' 'Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,' ' he heard the priest murmur. 'Still . . . the beast died in great despair as well as fury. It was fitting.'

* * *

And you shall live forever, Bianca Casarini. Oh, yes, most certainly.

Confused, Bianca opened her eyes. She was more confused, then, by what she saw.

First, because all the images seemed duplicated—no, multiplied, many times over.

Oh, you'll get accustomed to compound eyes soon enough. Perhaps unfortunately, from your point of view. Not mine, of course.

The strange voice seemed to be coming from all directions at once. Bianca's eyes moved over the . . . landscape?

Hard to tell. It just seemed like a world made of cables. A kind of enormous net of cables. Dirty-white in color, stretching to what seemed like infinity. She sensed that the effect was not simply caused by the weird multiplication of her vision.

A reddish glow somewhere to her left drew her gaze that way. Dully, she stared at it for a while. How long, she couldn't say. She seemed to have difficulty determining the passage of time.

The color of the glow changed, slowly; shading from red to yellow to, eventually, a particularly loathsome shade of yellow-green. The color of slime, if slime were as hot as lava.

Also the color she'd once seen, in a glimpse she'd gotten of the Great One. The eyes that weren't eyes at all, but something that had reminded her at the time of staring into bottomless, volcanic cesspools.

Welcome, Bianca Casarini! Welcome to eternity!

Realization finally came to her. She opened her mouth to scream.

Tried to, rather. She had no mouth. Looking down, all she could see was a proboscis of some kind, where she'd once had a nose.

Looking down still further, at her body, she saw that her lungs were now on the outside, red-veined and pulsing.

Oh, yes, that. I'm afraid that certain physical laws still apply here. On this level, at any rate. There are quite a bit more than nine, incidentally. How many? Hard to say. Depends on which mathematical formula you use.

She tried to scream again. The only effect was to make her proboscis grow more rigid—and cause the lungs to pulsate quicker.

Yes, yes, I'm afraid so. Volume to surface-area ratios, that sort of thing. All very tawdry, I'm afraid. It also means that discreet little spiracles won't do the trick at all. So I've had to modify your lungs a bit.

It does make you hideously ugly, true. But, then, that's now the least of your problems. I'm afraid Crocell lost his sexual appetites long ago—and wouldn't care in the least if you were still as comely as you were.

Paralysis was giving way to terror. Bianca's eyes now ranged down the rest of her body.

There were way too many legs, and she was quite sure that wasn't simply a function of her strange new vision. Skinny, weirdly jointed, hairy legs.

Six legs, to be precise. I'm something of a stickler when it comes to tradition. Very conservative, actually, despite my reputation as a rebel.

Ah. Here comes Crocell, now. Give him a nice run, would you, Bianca? I have to keep him well- exercised, for the rare occasions when I let him out.