“Well, this is encouraging.” Jon-Tom studied the hallway ahead. It curved slightly to the right. Evidently Mudge didn’t share his opinion. The otter let out a derisive snort.
“Why? Because it proves that the bastard we’re fighti’ is a lousy ’ousekeeper? Some’ow that don’t reassure me.” The otter’s eyes kept darting from filthy corners to shadowed eaves high overhead as they advanced deeper into the fortress.
“No. Because it hints that he might have exhausted his resources trying to stop us outside,” Jon-Tom replied. “Maybe he’s thrown everything at us he could think of and he’s run for cover.”
“I do not think so.” Clothahump indicated the destruction around them. “Look around you. Banners torn down to form makeshift bedding, chairs broken up to build fires in the middle of the floor: such a life-style would make sense only to a madman, and a madman would not have the sense to retreat. Nor do I think that after having defended his sanctuary so violently he would simply give up and run away. I admit that I did not expect us to enter so easily, but that is yet another indication that we are up against an unbalanced mind. What we see here is hardly the result of poor housekeeping.”
“You can bet on that,” Colin agreed. “It looks like there’s been a war here.” He pointed out places where a blade of some kind had cut not only into the furniture but into the stones of the wall itself. “Definite signs of fighting but no blood, no lingering aroma of death. I wonder who was fighting whom in here? You think others have preceded us and failed?” It was a sobering thought, one they hadn’t considered until now.
“I doubt it,” Clothahump murmured. “I know of no one skilled enough to detect this location and get here prior to us. That you arrived in the same territory at approximately the same time was due only to your unique ability to read some of the future.”
The koala turned his gaze back to the devastation they were striding through. “Then who’s been fighting here?”
“Our unknown opponent. I strongly suspect he has been doing battle with himself, as is not uncommon among the insane. I wonder how long he has been assailed by unseen demons and imaginary terrors?”
Sorbl fluttered along overhead, having to work hard to stay airborne in the confined space of the hallway. “Master, what kind of maniac opposes us for leagues and leagues, only to abandon the defense of his own home?”
“That is largely what we have come to find out, apprentice.”
“Look there!” Dormas came to an abrupt halt.
“Where?” Jon-Tom joined the others in looking around anxiously.
“Road apples!” the hinny muttered. “Sometimes I regret not having any hands. It’s hard to point with a hoof. Up there, off to the left ahead of us. I could swear I saw something move.”
“Come on, then!” Mudge sprinted down the hallway, skidded to a sudden halt. “Wot the ell am I doing?” He waited for his companions to catch up to him before resuming, at a more prudent pace, his advance. And he permitted Jon-Tom and Colin to take the lead.
Clothahump noted that solid rock had replaced thatch and wood overhead. “We are inside the mountain proper now. This redoubt is much larger than it appears from outside. I wonder who raised it, and when. The exterior walls are of relatively recent construction, but this is old. Precalibriac, I should say. It wears the poorly constructed walls outside like a mask.”
Sorbl backed air nervously. “Master, I hear something.”
Weapons were readied, muscles tensed. “How many of ’em?” Mudge inquired of their aerial scout.
“It did not sound like people moving about.” The owl sounded agitated. “It sounded like—like someone humming. Very loudly.”
“Which way?” Jon-Tom asked him. The hallway forked ahead of them. The right-hand tunnel bent away, dark and downward. He didn’t like the looks of it. The passageway on the left was weakly lit by a single torch. He was relieved when Sorbl suggested that they should go that way. Better to confront any opponent in the light than his own fears in the dark.
The instant they entered the branch tunnel, the sound that Sorbl had detected became audible to all of them. Even Jon-Tom and Talea, with their inferior human hearing, could sense it clearly. Sense it because it first manifested itself as a vibration rather than as true sound. He touched the near wall with his fingers. Yes, you could feel the thrum through the stone. Whatever was generating the noise was far more powerful than any individual.
Sorbl bounced from one wall to the other, crisscrossing the air above their heads. “It is near, Master, very near.”
Another bend in the corridor. The vibration and humming were joined by a high-pitched whistling and a sound like amplified panpipes. It was a mournful, powerful lament. Jon-Tom thought of the multitude of tones a good snythesizer could generate as well as the extraordinary range of sound his duar was capable of reproducing, but never in his experience had he heard anything quite like this. It was as much a disturbance in the fabric of existence as it was music.
Without warning the corridor widened and they found themselves staring into a vast hexagonal chamber. The six walls enclosing them were paneled in lapis and jasper, while the domed ceiling was lined with cut crystal. It reflected back the aspect of the chamber’s sole occupant.
So intense was the light that emanated from it, they could hardly look directly at it. It overwhelmed the torches that lined the walls as easily as it would have overwhelmed ten thousand such firebrands. As they shielded their faces their eyes tried to delineate its limits while their minds struggled to define it. The humming and vibrating it produced seemed to go straight through Jon-Tom’s being. He could hear its song in the bones of his legs and the tendons of his wrists. It was not painful or unpleasant, merely deep and penetrating. It rose and fell, questing and inconsistent, like the waves on a beach, and superimposed over the deeper rumble was that eerie combination of whistling and panpipes.
It was, of course, the perambulator.
Jon-Tom had expected something full of power and majesty. That would be in keeping with something capable of altering entire worlds by means of an interdimensional hiccough. He had expected it to be good-sized, and it was, for it almost filled the chamber. It was substantial but also light and airy. What he had not expected it to be was beautiful.
It hung there in the stagnant air of the chamber, and it was never still. Changing, shifting, metamorphosing, altering its structure from moment to moment, it looked like a series of interlocking dodecahendrons one moment, an explosion of colored fireworks the next. Each new shape was perfect and tightly controlled, and each lasted no more than a few seconds. Now it was an electrifying mass of sharp, fluorescent blades, now a series of infinitely concentric alternating gold-and-silver spheres. The spheres gave way to a collage of squares and triangles, which in turn were subsumed by an exploding mass of tiny glowing tornadoes. It was translucent and then it was opaque. It was a growling DNA-like helix spinning at a thousand rpm and throwing off blue and green sparks. The helix collapsed and left in its place a towering cone of light within which multicolored bands traveled from base to peak before bursting into the air at the crown as blobs of pure color.
As it changed and contorted, rippled and glowed, it sang, all whistles and panpipes and synthesizerlike dominant chords, a living fugue of color and sound.
“Crikey,” Mudge whispered as he joined his friends in gazing at the marvel, “you could bloody well charge admission.”
“There are isolated descriptions in the ancient texts.” Clothahump was equally transfixed by the ever-changing magnificence before them. “But they are based more on supposition than on eyewitness knowledge. To actually see a perambulator…” His voice trailed away, lost in awe.
“Exquisite,” said Dormas. “Wouldn’t it look grand over the entrance to the stalls?”
“Pretty but dangerous.” Colin had one arm over his eyes. “It doesn’t belong here. You said as much, Wizard, and I can sense it.”
“Seeing the future again?” Dormas
asked him.
“No. Relying on my own inner convictions. It’s been here much too long. It wants out.”
“Is it intelligent?” Jon-Tom wanted to know.
“There are as many different definitions for intelligence as there are different varieties of intelligence, my boy.” Clothahump was drowning in wonder but not to the point of having forgotten why they were there. “A more knowledgeable sorcerer than I would have to say. But I am of one mind with our fractious, furry friend. It needs to be freed, to be allowed to depart this cold prison so that it may continue its journey through the cosmos.”
“Freed how?” Talea was brushing back her hair even as she was trying to shield her eyes. “I don’t see any ropes or chains binding it.”
Clothahump smiled as much as his relatively inflexible mouth would permit. “The ties that bind are not always visible, my girl. To tie down a perambulator in the manner you allude to would be as futile as trying to bottle a star. No, you require something else, at once barely perceptible and yet strong, like the forces that bind the building blocks of matter together. Something that even the perambulator cannot twist through.” He was staring straight at the explosively metamorphosing mass now and no longer trying to protect his eyes. He was functioning at the pinnacle of wizardly perception, and he drank in the light as he drank in the beauty.
Jon-Tom tried to stare, too, but his eyes kept filling with water, and to his chagrin he was forced to turn away from the brightness. “I don’t see a thing, sir.”
“Aye, if there’s a cage ’ere, ’tis more than a mite insubstantial,” Mudge added.
“So it is,” Clothahump told them solemnly. “As insubstantial as an evil thought, as fragile as sanity, as tenuous as a nightmare, but as strong as life and death. This perambulator has been imprisoned in a cage of madness powered by hatred. I see it as clearly as if it were made of iron.
“Think! A perambulator is in constant motion, ever-changing, but there is nothing illogical or irrational about it. Each universe it speeds through is founded upon logic and consistency, no matter how alien or different from our own. But every universe is subject to aberrations, to unpredictable flare-ups of insanity and illogic. These the perambulator studiously avoids. Until now. Because someone here has managed to entrap it in a sphere of madness, which is the only thing it cannot penetrate. It has been walled in and pinned down.
“But it continues to change, and each time we see it change, a perturbation travels swiftly through the world and affects the fabric of existence. Most of the time the changes are infinitesimal and we notice them not. A red bug becomes a yellow bug. A leaf separates from a tree only to fall up. A human’s tan deepens or the hairs fall from the tip of an otter’s tail.” Mudge glanced reflexively at his own.
“Normally a perambulator passes close by the world so infrequently that its presence is not remarked upon and its effects never noted. They move too fast to be detected, though sometimes their waste products can be measured by sorcerous means, even as it passes harmlessly through our own bodies.”
Jon-Tom struggled to find an analogy for his own world, but the only thing he could come up with wasn’t very pleasing. Could cosmic rays really be perambulator piss? Try laying that explanation on a particle physicist.
“That is what we have to deal with,” the wizard was saying. “A cage of insanity. Somehow we must destroy it.”
Jon-Tom found his attention wandering from the perambulator to the doorways that ringed the chamber. All stood empty—for the moment.
“Who could generate something like that?”
Clothahump, too, was studying the portals. “One of great power and utter madness. Both are required.”
“A sorcerer off ’is nut. Great.” Mudge moved a little closer to his tall friend. So did Talea.
“So you think I am crazy?”
Everyone turned. Instead of appearing at one of the other entrances, the questioning figure had snuck up behind them.
He was alone. Nor did he leave much room in the narrow corridor for anyone else. He was nearly as tall as Jon-Tom and much more heavily built. Mental condition aside, the owner of the challenging voice was not someone Jon-Tom would have cared to meet in a dark alley.
Colin held his long saber tightly in both hands. “Wolverine. Biggest one I ever saw.”
“And quite mad,” Clothahump murmured.
Even Jon-Tom could see the wildness in the wolverine’s eyes, that faint burning light that was a mockery of the perambulator’s own. It was staring straight at them without really seeing them, as though the animal’s perception had become unfocused. He wore what originally must have been fine robes of silk and leather but which now hung about his massive body in rags.
In one huge paw he clutched a four-bladed battle-ax. Jon-Tom couldn’t have lifted it, much less made use of it. But the wolverine made no move to attack. Instead he seemed to be searching the chamber beyond them. It was almost as though their very presence confused him.
“I am not crazy. I am Braglob, supreme among the wizards of the Northern Marches, and there is nothing wrong with me.” He stretched his other arm out toward them. “Go away, get out, begone all of you! Leave me alone or it will go worse for you. I won’t warn you a second time.” He raised the immense battle-ax, holding it easily over his head.
Mudge slipped around behind Jon-Tom so he could notch an arrow into his longbow without being seen—and coincidentally take cover behind the human’s lanky form.
Clothahump took a step forward. “I am Clothahump of the Tree, supreme among all wizards, and I tell you that we can’t leave just yet. You know that we can’t.”
The wolverine’s heavy brows drew together as he struggled to make sense out of this comment. It occurred to Jon-Tom that this Braglob was completely out of it. Not that it made him any less dangerous. If anything, the contrary was true.
“You have been warned!” Braglob waved the ax over his head. “I am master of the perambulator. I will cause it to turn all of you into pebbles. No, into tiny crawling things, into worms I can use for fishing. You will know your own slime.”
“You will do nothing of the kind,” Clothahump replied with impressive self-assurance, “or you would have done it already. You have repeatedly made attempts to prevent us from reaching this place, yet we stand here before you. There is nothing more you can do. I do not believe you control the perambulator. You can imprison it in a single sphere of space-time, but you cannot control it. Once I thought it might be possible. After seeing both it and you, I am convinced it is not, for it is more astonishing and awesome than I believed possible, and you are less so.”
“Liars, intruders, trespassers, interlopers, all of you!” The wolverine hunkered down, and Jon-Tom tensed, trying to interpose himself between the huge creature and Talea. The redhead would have none of that and kept trying to edge around in front of him. Difficult to be chivalrous, he mused, when the woman you are trying to protect is only worried about whether or not she will have the opportunity to use her sword.
Braglob again studied them without seeing them. Clothahump was right, Jon-Tom thought. He is completely crazy. Despite the near fatal encounters incurred during the long journey up from Lynchbany, despite all the trouble caused by the perambulator, he found that he was still able to muster a soupçon of sympathy for their opponent.
Physically he was more than impressive, but the torn clothes, the dirty fur, mitigated that impression. Braglob clearly hadn’t bathed or groomed himself or had a decent meal in no telling how long. Here was an antagonist more to be pitied than feared. An individual at war with himself, striking out at invisible opponents, fleeing from the tormentors that had invaded not his fortress but rather his own mind.
“Let the perambulator depart,” Clothahump was saying quietly, “and we will leave too. We need not fight. There is no argument, no enmity between us: only an accident of supemature. Let it go.”
“No!” Braglob snarled, showing powerful teeth. “The pretty stays.
It makes me feel good. It warms me with its company.”
“See,” the wizard whispered to his uneasy companions, “he finds the perturbations reassuring. They convince him he is no crazier than the rest of the world.”
“I am not insane!” the wolverine shrieked in a shrill voice. “It is you who are mad, who want me put away so I cannot challenge the simpering, sickening status quo you find so comforting. You and rest of the world.” And he encompassed it with a single sweeping gesture. “But the perambulator will fix that.” He adopted a sly expression, grinning at some private thought. “I will keep it here close to me. The changes will come more and more often. Soon they will be permanent.”
“Being mad,” said Clothahump slowly, “you can do one of two things. You can make the rest of the world as mad as yourself or”—and he held out a hand in friendship—“you can make yourself unmad. If you would but let us, we might be able to help you. If your madness can be cured, you will no longer feel the need to live in an insane world. You won’t be able to in any event, because before too long, the perambulator is going to perturb the sun itself. It will blow up and you will die, mad or sane, as quickly as the rest of us. Give it up, fellow practitioner of the art. Give it up.”
“Prevaricator within a box, come no closer, I warn you!” The wolverine skittered back into the corridor a few steps and gestured threateningly with the battle-ax. Clothahump ignored the warning and continued his measured approach, reaching out now with both hands.
“Come now, since you still retain enough sense to execute spells, you must realize in some part of your brain that you are gravely ill. Why won’t you let us help you?”
“No, please, stay away!” It was not a threat this time but a cry for help wearing the guise of an admonition, a desperate, pleading whine. The wolverine had backed himself up against a wall and held the ax out defensively in front of him. Jon-Tom was startled to see that the giant was trembling.