Read The Divine World Page 30


  Chapter Thirty

  Arris inched down the secret corridor, the kitchen knife held firmly in his right hand, his left hand raised before him, searching out unseen outcrops. It was a rough-hewn tunnel through rock, chiseled without care of right angles, thick wooden support beams reinforcing the ceiling every half-dozen feet. There were small glowing stones set into the walls in-between the supports, marble-sized dots pressed into the walls and giving just enough illumination to reveal the general size and shape of the tunnel, but not enough to light it in any useful way. Arris had no idea what they were or how they worked, and hadn’t paused for too long to try to figure it out. They just were, and like everything about the mansion, they didn’t make total sense: most people would have strung lights from the ceiling.

  There was a shriek. It reverberated down the corridor and froze Arris in place, a wail of pain and torture. Arris had heard the sound before, dozens of times. It was a common sound in cinderblock structures built on lonely parcels of land in hot dusty climes, cold arid hideaways and anywhere men had hold of other men with whom they disagreed. There was no mercy in such places, and Arris had long ago learned to turn his emotions off at the sound of a plea for leniency, a call for human decency, a gasp for a moment calm. There was no limit to the amount of pain a man could deal to another man under such a circumstance, and no call for there to be a reason for it. Arris had learned to accept it as just a fact of life, and had mentally readied himself for the inevitable moment he would find himself handcuffed to an office chair under a bare bulb in a shadowy cement room.

  He paused and held his breath, ignored the rush of blood in his ears and cocked his head down the hall. There it was, the murmuring of voices in between takes. The calm, reassured monotone of the man in charge mixed with the gasping, pitchy desperation of the subject. Arris was not there to save whoever it was, although as he crept closer, he knew someone needed to be saved.

  There was a howl of pain similar to the previous one, only louder and brought more into relief now that Arris was closer to it. Just before the yelp, there had been a crackling sound and brief flashes of red light illuminating the far end of the corridor. Arris gripped the knife tightly, once again reassuring himself of its substance.

  The murmuring grew more distinct, and he could make out what sounded to be more of an instruction than an interrogation. A lesson? Whoever the subject was seemed to be pleading randomly, the sounds of his words warbling down the corridor in desperation, as he were hoping somebody, anybody would listen to reason. An appeal to sympathy, Arris thought.

  Arris neared the end of the corridor and found a short, curving length of stairs cut from the rock descending to a wider opening into a chamber he could not see. He paused at the top and listened.

  “You see, Nereika, you must have the faith that you can do it,” Onorien said from somewhere unseen down below, his voice patient and soft. “You must clear your mind of all doubt, of all hesitation, and simply believe. This is the way and the path, child, and to walk it requires only knowing that it is there.

  “Try again.”

  There was a murmured word followed by a hissing crackle mixed with a flash of red light, then a short cry of pain that quickly devolved into the heavy breathing of disbelief. Arris inched forward and slid to the other side of the hallway, stealing himself in the shadow cast along the opposite wall. He pressed against the stone wall with his back and slowly moved his feet down the steps, trying to find a line-of-sight into the chamber.

  After a few steps, he saw a man chained to a wall, the light-skinned black man from earlier that day, his arms slack, the chains taught, his body weight resting on the couplings around his wrists. His body was slick with sweat and blood trickled from his wrists where the irons bit into skin. Arris stopped and tried to merge into the shadow, to become invisible, and watched the man chained against the wall, the man’s eyes staring disbelievingly in a direction where Arris assumed Onorien and Nereika were standing. The man’s breathing was shallow, a mixture of ignoring pain and incomprehension at his current circumstance. Not long ago this man – this boy - had lived a normal life, eaten meals with family, laughed with friends, and splashed in the surf; now, there was only pain and torment, the grim reality of being chained to a wall in a basement.

  “You see, Nereika, you can do it,” Onorien said, “all you need is faith.

  “Again, please.”

  The man in the chains grew taut and stared straight ahead, his eyes closing to slits and his jaw tightening, anticipating. There was a long pause and Arris thought he heard the slightest shuffle of feet on the floor, a word was spoken – “electric?” – and a red tendril of light suddenly burst into existence in a horizontal line, extending from the mid-section of the man’s body to some uncertain point in the chamber which Arris could not see. The man tensed up and jerked for a moment, every muscle in his body contracted, a shout of pain involuntarily erupting from his lips. Then he collapsed against the chains.

  “Good, Nereika,” Onorien said.

  Arris wasn’t sure what he had just seen, and he had just witnessed it. He took another step down the stairs and turned his head slightly … and was momentarily astonished at what he saw. There, a dozen feet away from him, in an intricately and colorfully painted domed chamber, stood Onorien and Nereika, she in a red robe and Onorien’s garments defying description. He was wearing a robe, but as he shifted the weight on his feet, the colors of the robe shuffled through the colors of the rainbow, as if he were wearing some sort of color-reflecting raiment. Arris shifted his eyes back to Nereika and saw that her robe shimmered slightly, too, as if powered by some electrical current or imbued with reflective threads.

  The chamber itself was perfectly round on the floor where the two stood, the walls were painted in yellow and blue geometric designs that interlocked and gave the perception the room was rotating on an axis. They were carved with perfection from the rock of the mountain, rising up to form a perfect point at the top of the room, the shape of a cylinder or a bullet, which was capped with an inlay of highly polished gold. There were glyphs of all sorts painted onto the walls at eye-level, gold and silver diagrams which shimmered with an ethereal, almost sepulchral glow. Arris turned his attention back to Onorien, who seemed almost bored with what he was doing, an instructor teaching a lazy student a lesson the student should have learned long ago.

  Onorien held a small crystal in his hand, turning it slowly, a translucent piece of rock the size of a tennis ball but cut with facets like a diamond engagement ring. It cast out glints of different colors as Onorien absently turned it in the palm of his hand.

  “Please, help me.”

  The words were spoken softly, almost whispered into Arris’ ear, and he turned his head back to the man on the wall, whose eyes were now fixed directly on Arris. For a moment, Arris stared back into the man’s eyes, not immediately processing the fact that the man on the wall had found Arris in the shadow and was imploring him for aid. But Arris’ senses quickly returned, the weight of the knife in his hand alerting him to action, and Arris turned his attention back quickly on the team of Onorien and Nereika, who had now just found Arris in the darkness of the stairwell.

  “Mr. Arris,” Onorien said calmly, “I was hoping to wait another day or so for your trials. It’s so rare to get a man of the modern world as a subject. But serendipity is what it is.”

  This made no sense to Arris, but his instincts were already kicking in, flooding adrenalin through his body, heightening his senses, preparing him for action. And then he watched as Onorien gently shoved Nereika to the side, stepped to the center of the room, and pointed his right fist at the man on the wall.

  “Exuro!” Onorien said in a commanding tone.

  A violet fireball the size of a beach ball suddenly blinked into existence and raced across the length of the chamber, swallowing the man on the wall in a burst of multi-colored flames, the man’s high pitched shriek quickly extinguished as the flash of fire died out, revealin
g a crumbling pile of ash and bone fragments against the wall. Where there had been a man a moment before, there was nothing but a dark smudge on the wall, the remnants of a campfire at the base, the chains swinging slightly as they ebbed to a stop.

  And Arris was running. His mind raced, trying to process what he had just seen, to make it fit into the natural order of things. Just moments ago, there had been a man in chains against a wall, and in an instant, that man had been turned into a pile of ash by a man pointing a fist at him. Impossible, and, yet, Arris had watched it happen. Arris had seen a lot of men die over the years, in a lot of improbable or unusual ways, but never had he witnessed the instantaneous destruction of a human being with the utterance of a mere word.

  The lights on the side of the corridor whipped by quickly, the light of the open bookshelf growing brighter as Arris sprinted toward it. Already, his mind was working through the maze of rooms and corridors inside the mansion through which he would have to race to make his way to the outside, to the safety of the jungle, where he would have a chance of escape and evasion. He knew the natural world, the world of dirt and plants, cover and concealment. He was dead meat if he remained inside the mansion.

  He skidded and juked the hard ninety-degree turn through the open bookshelf, turning his head only for the slightest second down the corridor to see the onrushing silhouette of the girl, her robe puffing out with her exertion to catch up. He stepped into the room and was for a moment directionless, the position of the doors not immediately remembered by him, and he took several hesitant steps into the middle of the room to get his bearings as his eyes sought out the exits. Nereika’s steps suddenly grew firm against the corridor floor, rising in pitch as she approached. Arris turned, the heft of the knife reappearing in his hand, assuring him of an option.

  Nereika burst into the frame of the open bookshelf and quickly assumed a fighting posture. Arris stared at her for a microsecond before his instincts made his legs continue to move, sidestepping through the room toward the nearest door.

  “Exuro!” Nereika said as she pointed her fist toward Arris, a small, ping-pong ball of flame burst into the air in front of her fingers and jetted from her knuckles across the room, past Arris’ shoulder and crashed into the wall behind him with a puff.

  With a fluid movement Arris raised the knife and spun it through the air toward the girl, the knife turning into a silvery disk around its center of gravity. But the girl was quick and stepped behind the wedge of the bookshelf, moving it just enough for the knife blade to bury itself into the spine of a book.

  Arris dashed out the doorway into the hallway and turned down it, rushing past rooms and the side tables and barely noticing the sculptures and knick knacks that had earlier interested him. His mind raced as he looked for the slips of paper he had left in the frames of the doorways, but they were of little help. He turned around corners and through similar hallways, paper slips or not. This was impossible. There was no way he could be constantly going down the same hallways; the mansion was big, but not that big. And each time he stopped to gain his bearings, he could hear the faint sound of Nereika’s footsteps rising through the silence

  He turned another corner and found himself in the foyer, the large wooden door opposite him, the curling staircase rising to the second floor. That didn’t make sense, either, as he was sure he had just been on the upper floor. He hadn’t gone down any stairs in the mansion, just those in the corridor behind Onorien’s study, and that room, Arris was certain, was upstairs. Not that it mattered, as the door to the outside world was right in front of him.

  He crossed to it and pulled it open.

  “Nuts.”

  Moving quickly across the lawn was a stream of people, the natives from the village, armed with spears and machetes. Arris stared at them in disbelief, his situation now markedly worse as his escape was now cut off. What the hell were they up to? Why, of all the days in all the years they had lived in the village, had they chosen this night to raid the mansion?

  One of the natives near the head of the line suddenly pointed at Arris, the rest of them reacting by quickly readying their weapons and fanning out. The man at the head of the line raised his sword, what looked to Arris to be a cutlass of some maritime vintage, and dropped it to point at the spot in which Arris was standing. Arris took a step back and slammed the door closed. He turned and surveyed the foyer just in time to see Nereika assume stance in a nearby hallway, clench her fist and point it at him.

  “Exuro!”

  Arris had already started moving before the small ball of fire whizzed by him and slammed into the door behind him, charring a small circle in it. He was bounding up the stairs three at a time, a red dash of Nereika in her robe whirring by in his peripheral vision, coming after him. He made the top of the stairs and turned down the nearest hallway, once again his mind searched for a distinct memory pattern of the layout of the building and came up blank. The hallway looked just like any of the others, the end tables and their displays insignificantly different than any he had seen elsewhere.

  Down the hall a few dozen more feet he came to an open door and turned into it, rushing to the middle and pausing when he realized he was in Onorien’s trophy room, the medieval weaponry and other assorted artifacts surrounding him. For a moment, he almost reached for a small dagger on a display stand before him, but then he remembered the pistol on his ankle, a small wave of admonishment washing through him at having forgotten he was armed, and he bent down to it. He pulled his pant leg up, snapped open the Velcro hold and grasped the butt of his Kahr P380 as he stood up in one fluid motion, raising the weapon to readiness.

  He saw Nereika standing twenty feet in front of him, her arms outstretched toward him, palms raised, her red robe shimmering in the dim light of the room, fractions of a second ahead of his movements.

  “Electricus!” she said.

  A pair of thin lines of red lights suddenly blinked into existence, connecting the distance between her palms and Arris’ torso. His body tensed with convulsions and pain. His eyes singed in their sockets, losing focus on the world; his ears rang and his lips quivered. Throughout the length of his body, Arris could feel every muscle engaged, taut and filled with heat. He could not move. It felt like a Tazer, only more forceful and painful, but it was not unendurable, and he managed to keep his mental focus through the pain, his eyes focused on the red blur that was the girl before him.

  And then it stopped. Relief flooded his body but one thought dominated every cell in his brain, one reaction filled every nerve ending in his body, every fiber in every muscle, an instinct honed over two decades. Shoot.

  His arm finished the swing up to his waist, the pistol pointed at the space in the room where Nereika stood, and his finger drew steadily in, a firm controlled motion bringing the trigger back. An instant later, the girl crumpled and twisted backward, a small explosion of blood from her abdomen mixed with a look of shock and pain on her face. Arris had seen the reaction dozens of times before and turned away as he heard the girl’s body make a dull thud on the ground.

  He ran to the door and pulled it, suddenly astonished that it would not open. He tried again, yanking and then pushing on the handle. Nothing. He looked through the room for another exit, quickly ruling out the hallway corridor through which he had come, certain that the natives had now breached the building, looking for who-knew-what.

  He stepped to a window and looked through it down onto the manicured lawn below. Freedom was on the other side of the glass. He pushed up on the window: no budge. He heard Nereika whimpering in the silence of the room, could hear her feet scraping the floor as she tried right herself, to regain her composure and come at him again. But a gut shot was a painful wound and she was a slight girl; he knew she would remain down, obsessed with the pain and the blood seeping through her fingers. He had seen that enough times, too: she wouldn’t live long without first aid.

  He moved to the next window and tried to raise it, again bewildered by the sudden immobi
lity of the doors and windows. Hadn’t they been easily opened just the other night? He turned and scanned the room quickly, his eyes resting on a nearby sword displayed on a wooden table. He tucked the pistol into his waist band, grasped the hilt of the sword and took it to the window, thrusting it into the window jamb and levering it like a crowbar. Still nothing. Arris was amazed.

  Behind him, Arris heard the barest trace of a contemptuous laugh, the sound of someone watching a small rodent struggle in a maze, trying to find the lever for a pellet of food. Arris released the hilt of the sword and turned, drawing the pistol from his belt in a single movement in a manner he had done thousands of times before.

  Only to see Onorien in his shimmering robe on the other side of the room, standing at total ease, his arm cocked ever-so-slightly upward, his index finger pointed at Arris. Shoot, Arris thought. Way too late for that. Onorien tugged his finger inward, once.

  “Exarmo!”

  The pistol ripped from Arris’ hand and spun through the air, dropping to the ground between him and Onorien and skittering across the floor. Onorien barely paid it attention as it came to a rest near his feet; a useless lump of metal forged my man in a computerized factory by machines calibrated to manufacture it with infinitesimal precision.

  Arris snapped his arm back toward the sword stuck in the window jamb, his eyes trained on Onorien just long enough to see the slightest trace of a smile flash across his lips, barely revealing his teeth.

  “Cohibeo!”

  Arris was suddenly pushed against the wall by a hand of air, a force that simply wrapped around him and moved him effortlessly. He felt it but couldn’t believe it. He was enveloped by pressure on every square inch of his body and easily moved, slammed ever-so-slightly against the stone wall, the back of his head dinging it as he resisted. His resistance, though, had been futile. Not that there had been much time to try, but in the few micro-seconds it took to push him against the wall, he had been able to accomplish nothing in the way of slowing or stopping the air’s grip around his body. He had simply been moved by nothing.

  Once against the wall, he was held fast. He strained against the unseen force but achieved nothing. Indeed, his attempts to move away from the wall were impotent from the start, the only evidence of his strains visible on his face. Onorien ignored him and walked across the room to where Nereika lay on the floor, writhing in pain. He bent down to her and touched her cheek, brushing away a few strands of hair with one hand while using the other to move the folds of clothing around the entry wound.

  “Shh, you’ll be okay” Onorien said softly. And then he moved Nereika’s hands from her abdomen and splayed his right hand out above her blood-soaked robe. “Retardo!”

  Arris watched this in amazement, not sure what Onorien was doing. Arris was pressed firmly against the wall by a force which had the consistency of a strong gust of wind, and, yet, there he was, immobilized by nothing. Nereika groaned, refocusing Arris’ attention on the robed duo for a moment, and he saw Onorien whispering to her, words Arris could not hear. He struggled, still, not ready to give up on his predicament, unable to place himself in a version of reality that made any sense.

  Onorien stood up from the girl and walked over to Arris. Onorien’s face was calm, composed, and certain of his environment; everything Arris was not: a spider picking its way across its web toward a stuck fly. Arris watched him approach, struggling with every muscle to break free from the invisible grip that held him fast. Onorien smiled.

  “You can strop struggling, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said. “You will remain where you are until I release you.”

  “You know, I’m going to have to admit that I’m a little behind the power curve on what’s going on here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not good” Arris said. “At least, not for me.”

  Onorien flashed some teeth. “You are not a man of faith, are you Mr. Arris?”

  “Faith in what?”

  “In anything I gather.”

  “Well…”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “I don’t exactly see where you’re going with this,” Arris said, latching on to one of Onorien’s words, trying to get the man to identify a common humanity between them.

  Onorien simply stood there, looking at Arris as if there weren’t a care in the world, as if this were nothing more than a passing event his life, not something that re-defined the meaning of everything. Perhaps it was that for Onorien, but for Arris, life was now something more intricate, composed of parts he had been previously unaware existed. The hidden was now revealed, even if Arris was deeply unclear on what it was that he was learning. Arris stared at Onorien and a word materialized in his mind: wizard.

  Not possible. Arris looked again: the man was wearing a robe that shimmered, shifting through the colors of the rainbow but giving off no luminescence. It glowed, but lit nothing. This white-haired man had spoken words – Latin? – and changed reality, forced the air to press him against the wall. Arris relaxed against the wall, wondered if there was a “why” coming. There had never been a why coming before, but, then, there had never been a reason for a why. Drug kingpins and wanna-be terrorist overlords had whys, but they never gave speeches when taken down, never monologued. One moment they were kings of the world, the next Arris and Gregoire were either killing them or fastening their wrists together with plastic zip ties, the fading smell of gun smoke in the air.

  “For starters, Mr. Arris, perhaps you should tell me who you are and how you ended up on my island,” Onorien said.

  It was in no way what Arris had expected to hear. It was a normal sentence, a routine request, something Arris reckoned every bad guy thought when he saw Arris and Team Opera poking into his reality, ending it with gunfire. This is how it ends? Really?

  “I already told you that,” Arris said.

  “You told me a story, yes, to be sure, but I am not quite so sure that an aerial tour operator would be flying around with a pistol hidden on his body,” Onorien said, his eyes flicking to the weapon lying inert on the floor.

  “It’s dangerous here in the Caribbean,” Arris said, “dangerous in some pretty far-fetched ways, judging from the way things are unspooling.”

  There was a loud commotion from down the hall, the sound of shouting and doors opening and closing. Slammed shut. The breaking of furniture and windows. Onorien turned his attention to the hallway and strode over to the entrance way, cocking his head to the side, listening. His eyes flitted back to Arris for a half-moment before returning to the hallway.

  Arris looked beyond Onorien at the various items in the room, trying to ascertain if any of them could be of any use to him against Onorien. Not that it mattered, much, seeing as how Arris was plastered against the wall by air. He stretched and wiggled, and then he realized he wasn’t immobilized, only pressed against the wall. His arms and legs moved up and down, and as he experimented for a half-instant, he realized he could slide against the wall to his left or right. Onorien glanced back at him and Arris froze in place.

  “Although, I’m starting to wonder if all this stuff you’ve got in here is the real deal,” Arris said.

  Onorien lifted a finger, wagged it at Arris, and said “Pulsus!”

  Arris’ body was suddenly pushed quickly into the wall, hard, the back of his skull banging against the stone. Stars erupted inside his eye sockets for a moment, and he blinked the pain away, shaking his head slightly.

  Onorien seemed unperturbed by the disturbance down the hallways; he stood there listening in silent contemplation, as if the natives who had breached his house were not worth the trouble of confronting. Onorien turned and stared long and hard at Arris, as if it were Arris who were the real source of the day’s trouble.

  “Now, Mr. Arris, I ask you again, how did you come to be here?” Onorien asked. “Who sent you?”

  That there was this kind of worry in Onorien’s thought process intrigued Arris. On some level, Onorien was connected to the world off the island in a much more c
omplicated way, and it was clear that Arris represented the possibility of an enemy at work. What kind of adversary was unknowable, but if Onorien was actually wasting time trying to talk answers out of Arris, then there was a greater scheme in existence, not just a crazy man with the ability to cast spells. Although, honestly, that was unbelievable enough.

  Arris looked Onorien in the eyes and stuck with his cover story. “Nobody sent me here. I was on the way to pick up some honeymooners for an hour-long flight over the islands when my helicopter’s engine quit and I ended up in the drink.”

  Arris paused for a long second, rolled his eyes around the hidden mystical force pinning him to the wall, and then stared back at Onorien. “Although, I think there’s a better question begging for an answer, and that’s ‘what the hell are you doing to me and how are you doing it?’”

  Onorien’s shoulders sagged a bit, and the older man stared off into the distance through the window behind Arris’ shoulder. Arris took another tiny half-step to his side.

  “It is a rather mundane Restraint Spell, Mr. Arris, and there is nothing you can do to free yourself,” Onorien said.

  “Spell?”

  “Yes. You don’t believe in divine forces, do you Mr. Arris? I infer also that you are probably the type of man who doesn’t believe in things he hasn’t seen with his own eyes, and, yet, here you are, subject to a force you cannot see and do not believe in,” Onorien said.

  “But like most people in the modern world, you probably do believe in a whole host of things you have seen work but have no idea how. Have you ever seen your voice encoded and decoded by a telephone? How do a series of ones and zeroes on a disk of plastic create sound when scanned by a laser? How is it that everything technological in the modern world gets more powerful and yet also smaller with each passing year?

  “Questions, Mr. Arris, with answers that most people have never thought to ask except as a passing joke. And, yet, everyone believes these devices will work when asked. Press the ON button and voila, your cellular phone connects you to the world, your satellite navigation system will guide you to your destination, your digital music player will queue up your entire music collection and play it in whatever order you desire. And the typical man or woman in Guadalajara or Montenegro or – “ Onorien sniffed out a brief laugh “ – London or Los Angeles has no idea why or how any of this technology works, just that it does.

  “And at the same time, billions of people all over the globe believe in omniscient, omnipotent beings that orchestrated all that is on the planet, from the tiniest grain of sand’s exact location to what color eyes each creature on the planet should have, and yet nobody has ever seen or heard anything from any of these beings.”

  Arris pushed his body away from the wall and made not a dent in the air, the force that held him fast had not lost any of its staying power over time. He stared at Onorien’s face and shrugged against the wall.

  “Well, all that stuff’s not exactly forbidden knowledge. If I wanted to, I could probably find a technical manual or a Website explaining how any of it worked, and why,” Arris said. As for the religious bit, Arris wasn’t sure if Onorien was back to bar stool philosophizing or trying to needle him pointlessly.

  “Exactly my point, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said. “You have faith you can prove your beliefs, even though you never bother to prove them to yourself. You have faith that a phone will work because it always does work. But when your Internet connection fails, don’t you sit there at your computer staring at it, saying –“ Onorien adopted a mocking voice of a helpless and bewildered computer illiterate “- ‘But it’s the Internet, it’s computers, how’s it not working?’”

  Arris tilted his head slightly, more certain now that Onorien was not merely some island hermit hiding from the world, but some psychotic madman waiting in exile for his moment of return. “That’s why I switched from dial-up to broadband. It’s more reliable.”

  “No, Mr. Arris, it is your faith in the new technology that made you switch, your faith that the newer is better, your blind faith that the scientists and engineers have figured out how the world works,” Onorien said. “But they have only figured out one way.”

  Onorien raised his hand and pointed a finger at Arris. “Pulsus!”

  Arris’ head banged off the wall, sending splinters of pain through his head. “Hey, do you have to do that?”

  “Have you figured out any other ways the world might work, Mr. Arris?”

  Just then, there was the sound of glass breaking followed by a shouted cheer of triumph. Arris looked to the doorway, the source of the noise, and wondered what was going on down the hallway.

  “The natives are restless,” Onorien said. He turned away from Arris and walked over to Nereika, who had raised herself up on her elbows. “Nereika, can you stand?”

  Nereika looked up at Onorien uncertainly, her eyes unfocussed and glassy. She closed them for a long moment, the sounds down the hallway rising in volume, and then opened them again accompanied with a series of deep breaths. She nodded, and Onorien extended his hand to Nereika to help her to her feet.

  “Go hold them off until I arrive,” Onorien said to her. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Nereika nodded slightly, clutched her belly and moved off down the hallway. Onorien watched her as she shuffled down the hallway, and Arris moved a little to the side along the wall, unsure what he was angling for, but certain that moving was better than holding fast, even if it only ultimately changed the exact location of his death. Onorien approached him from across the room.

  “Faith, Mr. Arris.”

  “Faith?”

  “Yes, it is the other way the world works.”’

  “Faith in what?”

  “Anything.”

  Arris suppressed a sniff of a laugh. “Anything?”

  “To an extent, certainly,” Onorien said. “Here you are, an atheist to the world of the divine, and yet an adherent to the world of science. So your faith, such as it is, is in the ability of a small group of a certain type of people to tell you what can and cannot be done. Recycle this, save this animal, eat this food, and don’t use this energy source.”

  Onorien stepped back a bit and regarded Arris for a moment. “Is that not a religion?”

  “I call it science,” Arris said, “although I eat what I want to, mostly.”

  Onorien gave Arris a once-over as he was held fast to the wall. “Well, let’s see if science can free you.”

  From down the hall there was an enormous detonation, an explosion that shook the floor of the display room as a bright flash of light strobed through the doorway into the room. Moments later, a cloud of dust wafted in from the hallway, and Onorien was suddenly concerned. He flicked a glance at Arris and then strode across the room to the entryway, staring down it and listening to the ongoing cacophony. Something was not going according to plan, and it had just occurred to Arris that there had been some sort of plan going on, interrupted when he poked his head into the chamber beneath Onorien’s study.

  Not that Arris was slow on the uptake; he was just realizing that there had been something much larger at play when he entered the picture, and Arris’ unexpected arrival on the island was now altering the possibility of whatever outcome Onorien had been working toward. This explained why Onorien was bothering to keep him alive, given that Onorien could’ve turned Arris into a lump of charcoal by now, were Onorien convinced that other forces were not actively at work against him. The storming of the mansion by the natives was either the work of these other forces or God’s unseen hand at work, and Arris, held fast to the wall by nothing, was not sure which belief system to put his transitory faith in.

  If there were a world of magic at work in his reality, he had never seen it. Indeed, outside of stage magicians, he had never even heard of it. And, yet, here he was, held fast by air against a wall by a wizard in a mansion in the Bermuda Triangle with a hidden suspicion of others at work against him. That Onorien feared these others enough to wonder i
f they had sent Arris gave Arris a moment of pause, a glimmer of hope, that maybe there were some avenue of escape. Arris wasn’t dead because Onorien thought he was part of the forces arrayed against him, which meant he might have information of use to the spell caster.

  Whatever was happening down the hallway had now totally consumed Onorien’s attention, and he was conjuring fireballs and bolts of electricity and sending them flashing down the hallway, little flashes or sparks erupting from his fingertips in random colors. The sight of this made Arris want to laugh, just watching Onorien standing there in a shimmering, color-shifting robe: It was the best stage show Arris had ever seen. He had seen special effects crews at work on movies and television shows countless times over the years, and their work was often impressive in the raw, but it was pyrotechnics and men standing around holding fire extinguishers while some actor tried not to wince. This was awesome.