Demonhome (Champions of the Dawning Dragons Book 3)

  So his days had been hot, his nights cold. Gary had explained the can opener to him, and the canned food Karen had packed was decent but

  unsatisfying. He was tired of living outdoors, and he missed the convenience of Roberta’s bathroom.

  “Do you want to stay here?” he asked Gary as he packed to leave.

  “I do, but I shouldn’t,” said the AGI.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got the GPS coordinates for this spot. You’l need me to find your way back.”

  Matthew chuckled, “Hah! I grew up in a world without your fancy technology. My pathfinding and direction sense are better than you know.”

  “Not to be insulting,” said Gary, “but you don’t realy strike me as the outdoorsy type.”

  He wasn’t, but he knew the basics. Not that he would need them; he had a better strategy in mind. “I promise I can find it again. Do you want to stay or go? There’s nothing you can do here.”

  “She’l be safe?”

  “As long as a boulder doesn’t land on her. It would take something significant to be able to disturb the enchantment.”

  “What about an animal?”

  Matt shrugged. “A grown man with a sledge, if he aimed at the quartz cubes, might damage them and break the enchantment. I doubt a bear or wolf would try something like that.”

  Gary stil looked worried. “If someone shows up while we’re gone…”

  “You would be helpless to stop them,” Matt finished for him.

  In the end, Gary decided to come with him.

  Before he left the area, Matthew walked to the edge of the canyon and hunted around until he found a relatively sheltered spot. Then he used the barest minimum of his power to etch a circle on top of a flat stone.

  “What’s that?” asked the machine.

  “A teleportation circle,” he replied. “So I can come back without having to worry about your GPS.”

  “What if they detect it?”

  “They didn’t detect the stasis enchantment. The circle has almost no aythar in it anyway. Just a tiny amount to label this particular space so I can use a similar circle to teleport back. When it isn’t in use, it might as wel be mundane artwork,” he explained.

  “You aren’t going to use it to leave?”

  “No,” he replied. “That might produce enough magic to alert them. I won’t be teleporting to go home, anyway. I’l be translating through dimensions, and I can do that from anywhere. So I figure the best bet is to walk as far away from here as I can before I do, since I already know that they can detect it when I do that.

  “I’l go home, find help, and when I’m ready, I’l bring them back. I don’t know where I wil appear in your world when I return, but it won’t matter. I can make another circle and teleport to this one before they catch me at my return point. Then I can colect Karen and take her to my world before they find this place.”

  “Is there someone who can help her?” asked Gary.

  He had put a lot of thought into that. Gram’s grandmother, Lady Thornbear, was very knowledgeable regarding healing, but she wasn’t a

  wizard. His father, being an archmage, could presumably help, but he was stil missing. The other wizards he knew—Elaine, George, his sister—al of them had some level of skil, but he doubted they could handle this.

  That left two possibilities. Lynarala was She’Har, and with her spelweaving ability she might be able to use the advanced techniques of her people, if she knew them. If not, her mother, Lyraliantha, might be able to teach her.

  But Matthew didn’t like that option. If she did need to receive instruction, it would take weeks or months. Lyraliantha was a mature She’Har, a tree, and her idea of a brief conversation could a considerable amount of time. It would take far too long if Lynarala had to seek advice.

  The other possibility was Gareth Gaelyn. He was an archmage and, according to Matt’s father, even better at dealing with matters of the flesh.

  He had been responsible for Moira Centyr’s new body, after al, as wel as Mordecai’s after his fateful encounter with Mal’goroth.

  Gareth was his preferred option. “There are several people I can ask,” he said, answering vaguely. “But first we have to get some distance from here, so I can go home safely.”

  “You need to travel at least a couple of hundred miles to be safe,” said Gary.

  Matt squinted at the screen. The blazing sun made it difficult to see. “That’s a long way on foot.” He didn’t intend to fly, since that might defeat

  his purpose. “Are you sure we need to go that far?”

  “Again, you underestimate their resources. The moment you shift to your world, the anomaly wil alert ANSIS, and since it is isolated from the rest of the network I can’t block or influence its reporting. They’l begin a search, radiating outward from the detection point.”

  “It would take thousands of men to search this vast wilderness…,” began Matthew.

  “They have thousands of drones,” interrupted the machine. “Drones that can fly, that don’t get tired or miss things. Drones with AI in them that can analyze everything they see and spot something as obviously artificial as that stasis field you left behind. They’l divide the area into a grid and find her in a matter of days—if we don’t leave from somewhere very far away.”

  “Can’t you fool them?” suggested Matt. “Like you did at her aunt’s house? You were bragging about how you had become super-inteligent

  last week.”

  “They’ve taken the drones off the network,” explained the AGI. “They’ve probably connected them directly to the ANSIS network instead,

  though I’m only guessing. Either way, I can no longer reach them.”

  Matt resumed walking, though his feet felt much heavier now that he knew how far they would have to travel. The terrain didn’t help. Their first order of business was getting out of the canyon, which seemed to be larger than anything Matt had seen before. I guess that’s why they call it

  ‘Grand’.

  Finding a way up might have taken days, but Gary and his seemingly magical GPS could pinpoint their exact location, and since he had access to aerial surveys and maps, he knew the location of the nearest trail that led to the southern rim.

  The hike/climb took most of the morning and Matthew’s legs were burning by the time they reached the top. He almost didn’t notice his

  discomfort, though; with every step higher the view became more and more spectacular. When they finaly reached the top and he was able to get a ful view of the canyon, he was astounded.

  Thousands of feet below, the brown river meandered humbly along, as though ignorant of its role in carving out the massive structure. The

  canyon itself stretched out into the distance as far as his eyes could see, like a giant wound in the earth, banded with striations of red, gold, beige, and brown. The entire thing was on a scale his mind simply couldn’t comprehend.

  He opened his mouth to articulate his wonder. “Oh.”

  “Struck dumb, eh?” observed Gary. “Most people feel that way the first time they see it.”

  “Wow.” Matthew’s vocabulary was slowly beginning to return.

  “Gary, the real Gary, brought Karen here when she was a teenager,” said the AGI, describing memories that were not his own. “He wanted to

  share the feeling of seeing it for the first time with her.”

  “It’s so big,” said the human. He temporarily forgot to use English, stil being dumbfounded, and was forced to repeat himself for Gary’s

  benefit. “It’s huge.”

  “One of our astronauts described stepping onto the moon by comparing it to standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon,” expounded the AGI.

  “So, it’s understandable that you may find it hard to describe.”

  “Astronaut?” Matthew hadn’t heard that word before.

  “Explorers we once sent to the moon,” explained the machine.

  Matthew stared at the machine and then p
ointed upward. “By moon, you’re referring to the one up there?”

  The moon wasn’t visible just then, but Gary understood. “Yes. We stil have facilities there, though they aren’t manned by organics. There’s an astronomical observatory and a lot of now defunct mining equipment.”

  “People went there?”

  “Yes.”

  Matthew wasn’t sure he could believe what the machine was saying, though he had never had reason to doubt Gary’s words before.

  The AGI watched his reaction and wondered if perhaps he might have said too much. He hadn’t meant to stupefy the young man. The Grand

  Canyon was enough of a shock by itself, so he tried to put it into perspective. “You’re a traveler from a paralel universe. You’ve already done something beyond my imagining. You should expect to find wonders here that are far outside your own experience.”

  Matthew just nodded, letting his eyes drink in the sight of the immense canyon before him while his mind soared upward to the stars. He

  wondered if people could do the same in his own world. At some point he realized he had sat down, and he was unsure how long he had spent

  there, absorbing the view.

  He didn’t even notice the approach of a lone pert landing only twenty feet behind him, not until his ears announced it. Glancing around in alarm he jumped up and then crouched back down.

  “Relax,” said Gary. “I summoned it.”

  “Why didn’t you tel me?” accused the young man.

  Gary’s face assumed an expression of exasperation. “I’ve been teling you for the last half hour. Al you’ve done is nod and grunt. I knew you weren’t listening!”

  As he tried to recal the missing time, Matthew had a vague recolection of Gary talking, but he had been so caught up in his thoughts he hadn’t heard any of it. Rather than apologize, he pressed forward. “How do you know it’s safe? Can’t they track it?”

  “If they knew it was here, they could, but they don’t,” said the AGI smugly. “The owner hasn’t used it in years, not since he was uploaded. I changed its registration to that of an organic living in California who is unlikely to be under any active study.”

  “You stole it,” said Matt bluntly.

  “The previous owner doesn’t need it, and he’l never notice it is missing, since I’m managing the security camera that watches the garage it was housed in. The new owner doesn’t know it exists. If you were a bank robber, this would be the perfect getaway car.”

  Matt stared at the screen as he tried to process that last statement, “Do people rob banks here?”

  “There aren’t any banks anymore,” Gary informed him. “But if you had ever seen any old movies—wel, never mind. The important fact is that

  you can use this to get much farther away before you translate home. After you do, I’l send the car back to its garage and restore its registration to its original owner, and no one wil even know it was used.”

  That sounded good, but one point confused him. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  “This PM is, and I’l keep a compact version of myself loaded on it, but the rest of me wil stil be here,” said Gary.

  “You can be in two places at once?”

  “People can’t,” said the AGI. “But I am not a person. Strictly speaking, the me that I consider central to my existence wil remain here, but a lesser, more limited copy wil be on the PM. Make sure to keep it charged up. I look forward to learning about your world from my smaler self when it returns.”

  If I ever try to write a personal memoir, people will think I’m crazy, thought Matthew. No one will believe all this.

  The pert flew west for the rest of the day, and by evening Matt could see the ocean on the horizon. The scenery had been beautiful, but his eyes could only take so much of it before his mind drifted into daydreams. He had half-dozed for much of the journey, drifting in and out of sleep between long periods of introspection.

  “How much farther do you want to go?” he asked the AGI.

  “Can you transfer to your world over the ocean, or do you have to be on land?” said Gary, answering the question with one of his own.

  Matt shrugged. “I could do it here, but I would prefer to get out of the pert so I can take everything out of the pack and bundle it up first. The dimensional opening built into it won’t work once I leave.”

  “So the coast then?”

  “No, the ocean is fine. Since I’m going to alert them anyway, I can use some power to make a stable surface.”

  “If you had come to this world a few hundred years ago, you could have made a fine living as a messiah,” said Gary dryly.

  Matthew frowned. “I don’t understand the reference.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Gary. “Just a bad joke.”

  They flew out over the ocean through the deepening twilight, and when the stars came out Matthew found himself staring up at them with

  renewed wonder as he waited for the moon to make its appearance. When it finaly did appear, he could see no real difference between it and the moon he had grown up with; presumably the two dimensions were similar enough to be almost identical, except for differing in their timelines. Five or ten thousand years was probably a miniscule difference as far as the moon was concerned.

  Could we really go there? he wondered as he stared up at the pale sphere. “How far away is the moon?” he asked aloud. He was beginning to get used to Gary’s seemingly limitless supply of information and facts.

  “If it were directly above us, it would be approximately two-hundred-thirty-eight-thousand miles away. If you desire a more precise measure I can calculate one based on our current latitude and the moon’s present position respective to our exact location…”

  Matthew shook his head, boggling at the number. “No, I can’t even wrap my head around the size of the number you just gave me.”

  “For comparison, the diameter of the Earth is seven-thousand-nine-hundred and seventeen point five miles,” added the machine.

  “That’s a help,” said the young wizard sardonicaly, but even as he said it he was doing a calculation in his head, Roughly thirty times the distance around the earth to…

  “You could travel around the world…,” began Gary.

  “Thirty times, I have it, thank you, Gary. I know my world must seem primitive to you, based on what you’ve heard, but we do have

  mathematics.”

  The face on the screen of the PM closed its mouth, and then after a second the AGI responded, “My apologies, I didn’t mean to give offense.

  Honestly, it wasn’t because of prejudice, though. Few people, few organics I should say, can do multiplication or division in their heads without the aid of their implants.”

  The young wizard nodded. “I’m just tired of being cooped up in this metal box. I didn’t mean to snap at you.” He didn’t bother explaining that most of the people in his world weren’t able to do mental math either. Most counted themselves lucky if they could read.

  Several more hours passed, and the view of land had been gone for quite some time when the pert came to a stop and hovered a few feet

  above the tops of the waves. Matthew opened the door and jumped out, smoothing the surface of the water and reinforcing it with his aythar so that it would hold his weight as he dropped.

  Once down, he expanded the smooth level surface another ten feet in each direction and added a shield to the edges to prevent waves from

  outside from washing inward. That done, he opened Karen’s pack and began removing the contents, laying them on a large blanket. It went against

  his natural tendency to order to jumble them together, but he didn’t have much choice.

  As he worked, his mind considered the problem, and he had several ideas for improving his storage problem when moving between

  dimensions. He filed the ideas away for review later, when he had the luxury of working on them. The blanket was filed and the pack was now empty. He tossed it onto the pile and
gathered up the corners.

  He wasn’t realy sure what his limits were when it came to transporting materials across dimensions, but he suspected that they folowed similar rules to those that his other magic did. The blanket that held the gear was there primarily as a boundary. It defined the equipment within it, so that rather than it al being separate things it fel into the category of a bundle in his mind. It was the mental concept that was important. He wouldn’t have to think about bringing the tent, the food, his personal items, and so on. He only had to think about bringing the bundle.

  “Are you ready?” he asked the PM in his hand.

  Gary smiled. “I took care of organizing and loading what information I think I’l need already. You can start as soon as you want.”

  Matthew did, and the world began to melt away.

  Chapter 28

  They arrived deep in a forest where the trees were so thick and tal that the sun was barely visible. Birdsong filed the air and the space between the trees was relatively free of underbrush, smaler plants having been deprived of light by their larger brethren.

  “Do you know where we are?” asked Gary.

  Matthew shrugged, “No idea. We could be anywhere in the world, and there’s a lot of it I haven’t seen.”

  “You don’t control where you arrive?”

  “The first time I went to your world I arrived in a spot that was analogous to the one I left. The second time I homed in on Karen somehow,”

  he answered. “When I returned the location seemed random. I don’t think I can control the arrival point without some sort of beacon. This is stil new to me.”

  “I am glad you’re so confident,” said the AGI. “For myself I’m having some trouble adjusting. Without a GPS signal, many of this device’s

  basic functions are failing, and with each passing second I’m sure my other time-related functions are becoming less and less precise.”

  Matthew gave the screen a curious look. Gary’s voice almost sounded anxious. “You sound less confident of yourself than you did before,” he observed.