The Summoning

Anisca arrived before dawn, with the entirety of Nexus's gurantor fleet. All the Pashtuk people who were hosted by Dagono had returned, except those working for Red Tower — they had committed for a season and would stay as promised. The beasts would be given a day to rest and let the humans unload cargo, and then trains would turn north. Another thousand Pashtuk were being hosted by Bitter Spring, who would be overjoyed to send them home.

Nexus forces came with them: two cadres of disciples (mostly former Enclave healers), their bulwarks, and a few priests who doubled as song leaders.

Taylor hadn't slept well, but Anisca couldn't wait to tell him about the arrangements she had made, the deals she had struck, and the important things she had learned. She likely wanted praise. Maybe she deserved it. But Taylor couldn't listen properly with the throbbing sense of doom hovering over him. They were sitting in an anteroom of the local temple (seldom used by the looks of it) in a room he liked to use for reading because it got just the right amount of sun, drinking a local root-based infusion that allegedly improved one's vitality, while Anisca's words were being swallowed up by the adobe walls.

Something something can't make Nexus something something won't partake if something something blurr blurr blurr.

"It's starting." Taylor's voice sounded distant, even to him, but the first threads of mana were unmistakable. Tendrils of spatial interference were reaching out to him.

The Tabuas were on duty and Otavio had "the box", a rectangular case longer than Taylor's arm with a strap along one side so he could sling it over his shoulder. Otavio held it out for Taylor to grab in passing. In seconds he was out of the room, over the wall, out of Pashtuk.

Taylor ran, as fast as he could, through Pashtuk's mischus while ignoring scattered greetings and warnings not to step on plants. He had kept a stack of suitable enhancements on himself for days, which hadn't helped his sleep situation but saved him time when it mattered. The summoning spell would take several minutes to assemble fully so he had enough time. He just didn't have any time to waste.

Taylor went past the mischus and into the desert proper before he stopped. He laid the box down and opened it to access the four items inside. The first was a sheet of paper with magic circles drawn on it. The second item was a large bag of tiny oblong beads, made of silver alloyed with traces of manganese and other metals. Using the paper as his reference, Taylor drew lines of mana in the empty air and along the ground, then tossed handfuls of silver beads into the design. The beads stuck together end-to-end, forming lines along his mana, transmuting his invisible latticework of protective inscriptions into a wireframe pyramid, tall enough for him to stand in comfortably. When all the faces looked complete and neat, he fused the beads together. In theory, he could do this without a physical element, but why leave anything to chance?

The third item in his box was his power source: a rod of blood-red emerald, a flawless hexagonal crystal that took up the full length of the box. It was the biggest spirit stone in Taylor's arsenal, capable of holding eight days' worth of his spirit. As a gemstone, it was ludicrously valuable: ultra-rare, flawless, and massive. As a spirit stone, it was too large for normal use. He could make more of them of course, from beryl ore and base metals, but the only applications were industrial. It was too large to carry conveniently, and channeling so much power could injure most practitioners. On the other hand, an inscription made from kilograms of high-capacity alloy could handle that much and more.

Taylor laid the rod down along one edge of the pyramid, inside a rectangle surrounded by glyphs for draining mana. The four stones he normally carried with him, made of sturdy chrysoberyl, were slotted into receptacles at the center of each face of the pyramid. The smaller stones would buffer the mana supply and make the device more responsive to attacks or other kinds of turbulence.

As Taylor's inscription filled with spirit, it drove away the spatial magic that was trying to surround him. The opposition's spellwork crept around his cage, slowly enveloped it, seeking cracks and crevices like a hungry octopus probing coral with its suckered arms, hunting for the hidden fish inside. The divination factors were certain of his location, but the spatial magic couldn't touch him.

The last item in the box was a device that converted carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. In keeping with the day's theme, it was a little pyramid about twenty centimeters tall. The trinket needed more work — it was supposed to collect the carbon in a bin that made up the majority of its bulk, but it tended to spread the fine particles everywhere. If he was stuck inside the pyramid for long enough, Taylor would come out looking like a coal miner.

The last time someone had tried to summon him from Tenobre, all he had was a smaller rod full of spirit and raw determination. The blowback had nearly killed him, and his followers had to rush to find help. This time he was prepared, at least in theory, and prayed to Olyon that his hard work would pay off.

Also unlike last time, he had minutes to spare. Minutes to watch the spellwork surround his space. Minutes to worry if his followers were pulling people into the city, so they wouldn't get caught in whatever insanity was about to happen. Plenty of time for doubts to creep in. Time enough to wonder if the mage (or mages, more likely) on the other side could tell that something was going wrong and adjust. At the very least, they had to know the mana cost of their spell had quadrupled. Most summonings worked by swapping spaces instead of things, and Taylor had isolated himself in a shape more than four times larger than his body volume. To get him, the spell would need to swap the volume of several young men. Maybe the rise in costs would cause the distant foe to abandon their project. He could only hope.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Taylor felt the lattice of inscriptions fully activate, and the walls of his cage turned colorless. He was truly isolated now. The only air he had to breathe was what he had inside the pyramid. The only light was from a tiny node at the cage's apex. The only sound was his breath and the thumping heart inside his chest. There was nothing on the other side of the inscription: no earth or sky, no sun or stars, not even the emptiness of deep space. He was imprisoned in a speck of matter, in the great void of nothingness outside all creation. There was no escape now, nor anywhere to escape to.

Taylor leaned away from maddening thoughts and toward his inscription. He couldn't see what was happening in Tenobre, but he could read the battle's progress from his device's functioning. First, the pyramid stole power from the opposition to help maintain the dimensional effect. When spatial isolation circuits neared their maximum, the pyramid of magic circles began stripping electrons from their nuclei and packed the altered matter into a dense mass, right where Taylor was supposed to be. When the attackers exchanged some of their space for Tenobre's, they were going to receive a plasma bomb. It probably wouldn't kill anyone; any decent summoner would have protections in place. But it should wreck their summoning room and serve a warning: try different search parameters next time.

The opposition had extraordinary resources. Whoever they were, they weren't giving up. After the replacement space was filled with plasma, the summoning kept coming, kept trying to touch Taylor and bring him through. With the stones and wireframe full of mana, and the exchange space packed with all the plasma it could hold, the glyphs for dumping excess energy switched on. An outside observer would see a cone of light shoot up from the protective shell. It would start out white, but gradually split into all the colors of the rainbow. That last touch was inefficient and entirely unnecessary, but it made Taylor happy. If one must attract attention, one should do a thorough job of it.

That was when Taylor started to worry. The mana dumping circuits were intended for his re-entry into normal space, to power down the pyramid if all the mana stones were at full capacity and couldn't absorb any from the wireframe. He'd given fifty-fifty odds that his summoners would exhaust themselves before the isolation circuitry was even full. He never thought, at least not seriously, that they'd fill the plasma replacement space full to bursting. Taylor had only connected the plasma block to the mana-dumping block out of an abundance of caution because the universe was big and held amazing things one has never thought of. Also, the two systems were right next to each other. They were trivial to connect and easy to test.

Just how much more did these people (it had to be people plural because no one could whip up this much mana alone) have to spend? If he had known they were going to use mana on this scale, Taylor would have taken a different approach. He might have gone full-creationist on the problem, turning pure energy directly into matter. How amusing would that be, turning enemy mana into pure gold?

Anxiously he re-examined all the circuits, but nothing was changing. The summoners and summonee had reached an equilibrium.

As much as that development troubled him, Taylor couldn't stop thinking about his creationist idea. Direct conversion was a brute solution. The elegant way, the easier and more sensible way, was to use natural processes to do most of the work. If the plasma store was surrounded by a gravity field, and then compressed enough, it would ignite into fusion. The free-floating protons could be processed and exchanged until the desired output elements were made. The reaction chains wouldn't be natural, of course, that's what the magic was for. But he could make any element he wanted.

With a notebook in his hand, Taylor started to think: What did he want? Gold was nice, but mostly he used gold to buy other metals. Silver, copper, tin, and manganese were his mainstays. Then again, with an equal mass of gold, he could buy all those other things.

He tried some reaction sequences that weren't completely crazy, at least not by his lets-twist-nature-just-a-little standards, but he kept coming up with too many radioactive heavy elements. By giving up his quest for gold, Taylor devised a chain that produced a dozen useful elements, mostly metals, and the equations were almost balanced. To make the numbers perfect he had to accept a bit of uranium-238, a miniscule amount really, small enough to be easily handled, and give up nearly all the gold. But it would work. When the sun burnt itself out it would expand, dissipate a huge amount of helium into the local atmosphere, and leave behind a goodly lump of hot metal.

Until it died, the reactor would spray the area around it with super-heated elements on a more or less constant basis. That would be an interesting problem to solve: how to collect the valuable stardust without setting people on fire.

Taylor double-checked all of the chemical, gravimetric, and magical equations, felt satisfaction with their beauty and their balance, and immediately lost interest. He put the notebook away. Tenobre wasn't ready yet for anything like that. They needed to rebuild their scientific basics almost from scratch, and they only had a few generations until the surface became uninhabitable. Giving these people a miniature sun was like throwing your toddler into a spaceship alone: the baby would escape the immediate problems on your planet, but one could hardly hope for good outcomes.

Taylor had an insane urge to touch the charged latticework, tap on it like it might be stuck, and see if anything happened. But the thing hadn't any moving parts, so there wasn't any point. He just had to wait, and not let boredom drive him into recklessness.

Half an hour after the isolation circuits fired, they switched off. All three mana-dumping sequences were active: the rainbow lights, the chord in F major (which Taylor called "Extravagant Bong!") loud enough to echo from Pashtuk's walls, and the hurricane of fire. The hurricane was a last resort, another feature Taylor hadn't expected to use, but with the stones full of mana, all the power in the latticework had to go somewhere, and a light show wasn't enough. Hence the firecane.

The world appeared beyond his prison walls again, with Extravagant Bong rumbling the ground and the last licks of fire dissipating into the rainbow-lit sky. He had passed through the crisis, unsummoned and unharmed. Everything had worked.

"Yes!" He shouted with his arms held high, "Take that, you interfering bastards!" Taylor shook both fists at the sky. "Complete and total success! Woo!"