Melizar realized his true worth, he could learn more and complete the last pieces of the puzzle. He glanced at the cold one's cube and then looked up to stare at Drandor's slack-jawed face.
But at what price was he willing to pursue his quest? The robe of the master was supposed to bring the respect of peers and followers-a proof that he, too, was a man. Would it be there, if won by treachery and guile? If the order of all things were destroyed in the process? If he were the lackey of one so cold and strange? Jemidon drew his lips into a firm line. He wanted the robe, but not if he lost everything else in exchange.
'No,' he said quietly, his voice as soft as Melizar's own. 'I have changed my mind. It is too much power. The laws were not meant to be altered.'
'Whence I came, the laws were not meant to stay the same.' Melizar stepped forward. 'But no matter. By one means or another, you will serve. Seize him, Drandor. If he chooses not to offer his mind and muscle to me, then the manipulants will enjoy his marrow.'
Jemidon stepped back, wishing that he had a weapon. As he did, he saw the imp light about Melizar's head brighten to a fiery incandescence. Too late, he tried to dodge a handful of dust that Melizar splashed into his face. He felt the beginning of a numbing torpor. Then nothing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Door into Elsewhere
JEMIDON felt a gentle touch on his forehead and forced open his eyelids. A bouncing glow of reddish light and strands of golden hair filled his view.
'Delia!' he said thickly. 'It was you whom I came to rescue.'
'With about as much forethought as when we raced into the presentation hall.' Delia pulled away to give him room. 'And your discussion with Melizar seemed to focus on other things. Even though bound by the animation, I recall most of what was said.'
Jemidon rose to sitting. He felt stiff and sore. His mouth was dry and the taste rancid, as if he had been awakened from the middle of a drunken sleep. Hovering a few feet from his head was a large, glowing sprite, its bony arms crossed in front of a shallow chest and its legs coiled into a knot. The forehead bulged with bumps and mounds. Tufts of coarse hair protruded from tiny ears. The nose lay smashed across a broad and pockmarked face. Except for the whine of rapidly beating wings, it seemed like the well-preserved remains of a grotesque child.
Jemidon ran his hands over his leather vest, touching the reassuring smoothness of the coin about his neck and the lump of Benedict's changer underneath. He placed his palms down at his sides and felt a tingling from a surface that was glassy-smooth. As his senses returned, he detected the same vibration through his thighs. He looked around in the sprite light and saw rock everywhere. He and Delia were enclosed in a perfect sphere, centered on the small demon and showing no seam or exit. As if from the polished face stone of some great palace, specks of quartz and mica cast back pale reflections of the flickering luminescence.
'A rockbubbler,' Delia said. 'It can maintain a void several arm spans about itself in all directions, even at the greatest depths. One of the score or so that keep open a pit under Drandor's tent. And apparently I have some degree of control over this one. He responds to my bidding, as long as it does not conflict with his other instructions.'
'The Law of Dichotomy,' a small, squeaky voice radiated from the gentiy bobbing devil. 'One of the two upon which wizardry is based. 'Dominance or submission.' There is no other choice.' One small eye cocked to the side and stared at Delia. 'I have a master and I must obey. I fulfill your request because it does not contradict and it is my choice.'
'By whatever justification, the end result is the same,' Delia said. 'I instructed him how to trick two others of his kind with which he had a petty feud. And now he has kept his sphere just tangent to the others so that the manipulants could not find you, Jemidon, before you awoke.' Delia stopped and shuddered. 'Although with the fighting that will eventually happen above, they will have many from whom to pick.'
'What has happened?' Jemidon shook his hands at arm's length to restore the circulation. Any excitement from being with Delia was muted by the remains of a deep lethargy. 'Where are we? The last I clearly remember is Melizar casting some powder in my face.'
'Torpordust,' Delia said. 'Something that can be made with the new magic. He uses it to slow prisoners for the manipulants.'
'I thought it might have been a freezing.'
'The cold does not come from Melizar. It is generated by the imps that circle his head. Without them, he would have to sleep with the rest, I suspect he can barely tolerate moving among us as it is. When he must concentrate deeply, he requires it to be even more frigid.'
'Then where is he from?' Jemidon asked. 'From what he has said, not across the sea or from another star in the sky.'
'No, not another star.' Delia shook her head. 'Somehow, it is farther than that. I asked him once and he laughed. He said that on all our worlds the laws are the same. It was only through the demon's portals that one could journey whence he came.'
'The realm of demons,' Jemidon said. 'It may well be the lands beyond the flame from which the djinn appear when they are beckoned.'
'My master forbade me to speak of it, or I would tell,' the sprite said. 'But even in sleep, I must honor his will.'
'These manipulants?' Jemidon asked. 'Are they demons too?'
'No, I think not,' Delia said. 'Even demons would not behave as they do.'
'But if not djinns, how can they exist behind the flame?'
Delia reached out and grabbed Jemidon's hand. 'There is little else that I know. Little else except for some of the workings of Drandor's animations. Melizar has been teaching me the craft and has made sure that I remained unharmed. The cold one wants the trader to know he can he replaced if he does not continue to comply. There is nothing with which Drandor can bargain, not even the exercise of the new sorcery.'
'And I?' Jemidon looked around the featureless sphere. 'What do I have that is any better?'
'At least you are fully awake,' Delia said. 'For four days you have slumbered, while I kept the rockbubbler apart from the rest. Now you must use your wits to aid me as you have done before. Come,' she said. She turned until she was on hands and knees. 'Follow the sprite. You will see what else lies in the rock under Drandor's tent.'
Jemidon frowned as the small demon turned in Delia's direction and began to drift slowly away. Delia's answer to his question was not what he had hoped to hear. But before he could say more, hefelt the sphere rotate beneath him, pushing with increasing firmness behind and then finally toppling him forward to sprawl by Delia's side. He looked up to see what appeared to be a tiny opening form in the curved wall directly ahead.
As Jemidon scrambled into a crawling position, the circle grew, revealing a larger cavern beyond. Sliding his hands along the smooth surface and pushing with his feet on the slope behind, he managed to keep up with the slow rotation of the sphere.
In a moment, the opening had expanded to the maximum extent. The rear of the bubble became a hemispherical bulge on a larger volume. Like a sealed chamber in a dungeon, the void in the rock was heavy with damp air and the smell of decay. The floor looked like the crate for an array of eggs, a lattice of shallow depressions that matched a similar set of indentations in the ceiling above. In between, in a more or less geometrical precision, hovered other rockbubblers, eyes closed and arms and legs crossed.
Like a rag doll flung aside, Drandor lay in the center-most sphere. The trader's eyes were barely open and his chest heaved with deep breaths. Occasionally he lashed out with his good arm, swatting the empty air. Dots of light showed where imps, much smaller than the hovering rockbubblers, flitted above him, dropping a fine mist of sparkling sand.
'More torpordust,' Delia said. 'It keeps the trader in lethargy until Melizar requires his efforts.' Delia paused and swallowed. 'And except for those, the manipulants, it would not matter.'
