"How?"
"I don't know how!" Kate snapped. "I'll think of that when I catch them."
"They'll realize quickly that we didn't hurt them," Rhiana said. "They'll realize all we did was humiliate them and destroy their carriage. And we don't know how to damage them with magic; how to inflict pain or make their skin ooze with sores or how to cause their lungs to burn or their eyeballs to explode."
Kate looked over at her, an odd expression on her face, and for an instant Rhiana wondered if she'd said something wrong. She decided, however, that Kate was only realizing the precariousness of their attempt to find the three ruffians. She said, "If we could do any of those things, I would say we should keep searching for them. But we cannot. If you find them, you will have to hurt them with your hands or your carria—your car, and I don't know how you're going to do that."
Kate slowed down. She drove through the alley looking into the little side corridors that ran between some of the buildings. Rhiana looked, too, because looking was better than thinking about Kate driving, and better than thinking about figuring out a way to fight off the men who had attacked her. She couldn't see them, nor could she see any sign of how they might have escaped.
When Kate reached the hole their magic had blown in the alley, she backed, turned, and drove out onto the main street.
"You still want to find them?"
"No." Kate's brows furrowed over her eyes and her lips thinned to a hard, angry line.
"Then what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to go home."
"Perhaps we could work on a way to destroy them with magic—"
"No."
Rhiana studied the woman beside her. She heard anger in Kate's voice, and she couldn't understand why Kate would direct anger at her. "You don't want to hurt them?"
"I want to kill them," Kate said. Her voice seethed with bitterness. "But I won't unless I have no choice. And as for using magic to destroy them…or to hurt them…" She exhaled sharply and glanced at Rhiana long enough for Rhiana to see the dark anger in her eyes. "Only a fool would ever consider using magic as a weapon of attack."
"Why?"
"Have you ever heard of the Threefold Law? It says that anything we do, whether good or evil, comes back to us threefold."
"I've heard that said, but never stated as a law—and I've certainly never considered it as fact or as something immutable. Offensive magic comprises a major part of the curriculum for wizards, and while they use destructive spells cautiously, they do use them. Had I done more with my magical studies, I have no doubt that I would have learned destructive spells."
"Perhaps you would have. And perhaps you would have used them, and maybe you wouldn't have seen how your spells came back at you." Kate steered the car roughly, going hard around turns, jamming her foot against the floor pedals that made the vehicle stop and start. Rhiana once again thought that the little cloth belt that held her to her cushioned seat was poor protection against the danger of Kate's driving. "But I think your spells would have come back at you. Not right away, perhaps. Not soon, even. But I truly believe that the shit people throw up in the air falls down on their heads again. I think if you set out to harm someone, you may succeed, but the harm you do will find its way back to you many times over, and your own evil will bite you worse than it ever bit your enemies."
Rhiana recognized Kate's house only as they pulled into the driveway. Relieved that their journey was over and that she would probably live to greet the morrow, she leaned back in the seat and breathed slowly. "What you say cannot be proven either true or false. I have, I admit, seen some things that would seem to show you were right, but I've seen as many that would seem to show you were wrong. And I have to tell you, Kate—if I had a magic that would permit me to destroy those three bastards before they could come at me again, I would take it and damn the consequences."
Kate nodded. She brought the car to a halt, pulled up on the stick that rested between the two front seats, and when it clicked loudly, turned the key again. "I understand how you feel. And perhaps I am wrong, and the Threefold Law is a matter of faith, not fact. It doesn't matter. As long as we're working together and you are depending on me to supply you with raw magical energy, we will not attempt to harm or destroy any living thing with our spellcraft."
Rhiana shrugged. "I don't imagine that I can change your mind. I would if I could; your stubborn insistence on fighting fair could be the ruin of us. But I have to count on you to help me get back to Glenraven, and I won't do anything that will destroy my chances of seeing home."
Kate got out of the car and locked the door behind her. She went to the back and lifted the hatch, then pulled out bags and handed them to Rhiana. "Good is a stronger force than evil, and fighting fair is part of keeping yourself on the side of goodness. Refusing to become destructive is another part. I think only if we keep that in mind will we ever get you home."
Chapter Thirteen
Val studied the little paper squares intently. The pictures on the shiny sides of them were obviously of Kate when she was younger; he saw her as a child, holding a string of fish in one hand and a fishing rod in the other. She was grinning, and he could see that her baby teeth had come out and her adult teeth were just beginning to push through. An invisible wind tousled her hair and her eyes sparkled. In another picture of her done when she was older, she stood on the shore of a great body of water, the bottoms of her breeches rolled up to mid-calf and her striped shirt plastered tight against her torso by the same wind that whipped her hair behind her like a banner. She was a young woman in that picture, a maiden fair of form and full of grace, if he cared to quote the poets and the bards. But a maiden holding another, larger fish, and this one by the tail—and grinning as she pointed to the fish's toothy, gaping mouth and displayed its triangular dorsal fin and lean, predator's body.
She was a maiden with a penchant for picking up monsters, he thought. Another picture, this one of a younger child holding a huge crawfish. And two of her with an enormous snake draped around her shoulders. And one of her bareback astride a brown-and-white spotted horse. A series of her hanging out of various trees.
Laughing, always laughing.
And then pictures of her with boys and girls older and younger than her, all with the same facial features, all with the same golden hair and pale, freckled skin. Her brothers and sisters, he thought. He discovered a large picture in the bottom of the box—in this one, the girls all wore emerald green dresses, the boys wore dark gray long pants and coats of an ugly shape, and dangling bits of cloth at their throats. They dressed in the same manner as the two adults; Val guessed these had to be Kate's parents. He studied the faces, seeing that she had her father's smile, her mother's eyes.
He put the paper pictures back into their box and slid it onto the stack of boxes like it. He wished he could read the words Kate had written on the outsides; surely all of these miniature artworks would tell him something that he needed to know, if he could only understand why she'd grouped them the way she had. All they could tell him so far was that even as a child she hadn't been afraid of much, and that someone had spent enormous amounts of money to record her every triumph over the world of things that slithered and swam and bit.
He thought of the painters who had toiled to put their works onto the tiny squares and wondered why they did so many paintings, why they painted so small—and why Kate had so little reverence for the efforts of the artists that she hid their work away in brown boxes. They hadn't spent a great deal of time emphasizing her perfections and hiding her flaws. Perhaps that was why she hid the works. Artists in his own world never did portraits where their subjects looked like they'd been through a windstorm.
He pulled out another box, remembering where in the stack he found it, and carefully lifted the lid off of it. More faces stared back at him. This time Val found Kate much as he knew her…except she was not alone. These pictures were more formal, more concerned with appearances of beauty. And they didn't featur
e any animals, either living or dead. To him they were more comprehensible. He found a picture of Kate seated in a red velvet chair, while a man stood behind her, staring forward. Kate's hair was a pale cascade that flowed to her shoulders and curled under—worn soft and loose, as young maidens wore their hair before they braided it and put it up and became women. But Kate was a woman in the picture, and even though she smiled, he could see a sadness in her eyes that he had never seen in the stacks of pictures made of her when she was younger. He looked more closely at the picture. The man who stood behind her smiled, too, but in his eyes Val could see the ragged edges of despair, carefully disguised but not sufficiently well-hidden. Her lover, Val thought. The one who had killed himself. Yes. He could see the emptiness in the dead stranger's eyes that would some day bring him to annihilate himself.
He wondered at the skill of the artist—in Glenraven an artist was considered skilled who did not make the nose too large or set the eyes too close or give his subject's face the sort of leering expression that would make later generations believe their old ancestor was a sot or a lecher or a debaucher. No artist he knew could capture in such a tiny space such a wealth of detail, render it so finely, and add in a measure of the soul, too.
Each world has its own varieties of magic, he thought.
He put the pictures away and delved further into the closet. Behind clothes and more clothes, he discovered a panel in the wood, and he pressed it; his people loved puzzle boxes and intricate, hidden doorways and tricky locks. He was disappointed when the door popped open immediately, but less so when he realized he had found what he'd been looking for—the cache where she kept her weapon and, if he guessed correctly, a store of the missiles she'd used to blow such impressive holes in the Rift monster's body.
He lifted out the weapon and studied it, trying to discern from touch the function of the cold metal levers and switches. He didn't disturb anything—he had a healthy respect for what the weapon might do to him if he mishandled it. He studied the blue-coated wire that ran into one portion of the center of the weapon and looped out another part, and realized that when he had seen the weapon before, that dangling bit had not been there.
Closer inspection proved it to be a lock, one no doubt intended to prevent use of the weapon by anyone who might accidentally come across it. Someone such as himself, for instance.
He frowned. How inconvenient—she had reason not to trust her houseguests, of course, but to distrust them in such a way that she not only hid her weapon but locked it…
He slipped the weapon back onto its rack and stared at it. He would have to discover where she kept the key, and somehow he would have to find out how to shoot the gun. He needed to do it without arousing her suspicions, because if she doubted the best intentions of any member of their little party, she might not be so inclined to help them track down Callion and find a way home.
Through the closed closet door he heard the slamming of other doors outside. He recognized the sounds as coming from Kate's carriage, and he swore softly and shoved the hidden panel back into place. She was back sooner than he'd anticipated. He didn't dare let her catch him digging through her room; she'd locked her bedroom door before she left and he certainly did not wish to have her find out that he was capable of going through that lock as if it didn't even exist. Nor did he want her to know that he'd been spying on her.
He made sure everything in her closet was as he had found it. Then he hurried out, this time not admiring the elegant simplicity of her furnishings or her choices of colors and fabrics. He found her an interesting woman, but did not think he would be as intrigued by her if she refused to help him get back to his home and the little battle he had been so near winning—at least, he had been before Rhiana and her poorly-cast spell had trapped him in this exile's hell.
He carefully turned the knob, all the while listening to the sounds from downstairs. He had not yet heard Kate or Rhiana come into the house. He still had a moment; he could get downstairs before she found him out.
He pushed Kate's lock back in and stepped onto the landing.
The dagreth sat by the door waiting, a cold smile curling the corners of his muzzle. "Caught you," he said.
Val didn't bother trying to create an expression of innocence or surprise; he looked at the Kin-hera and said, "I'm taking care of the things I have to take care of."
"Right. In her room."
"You don't know what's at stake. You don't know how much lies at risk for you…for me…for all of us."
"You're talking about Glenraven business, and she doesn't have any part of that. You're trying to use her, Val. You're trying to take advantage of whatever magics you can find here to play with politics back home, and you could end up destroying her as easily as falling down stairs." The dagreth's eyes glowed coldly in the dim light, and Val saw his old companion for the first time as someone formidable, even dangerous.
"I won't hurt her. That wouldn't help me, would it?"
The dagreth wasn't mollified. "I've seen your singlemindedness before. I've seen you stop at nothing if you thought it would bring you the reward you were after." Downstairs, the kitchen door opened and Val could hear Kate and Rhiana talking at once, their voices lacking the happiness and lightness he'd heard in them when the women left.
"I'll tell her," the dagreth said.
"Don't. You'll destroy everything."
"Maybe the everything I'd destroy would be for the good. You're moving into places you don't belong, old friend. You're meddling with people you have no business touching. If you do it again, I'll tell her and ruin your game outright."
Downstairs, he heard the warrag delay them. Val said, "This is about lives, Tik. This is about taking advantage of an opportunity to make Glenraven over the way we want it to be."
The dagreth shook his head slowly and said, "This is about the betrayal of a trust. You have my warning. Ignore it at your own peril."
The giant Kin-hera turned and padded down the stairs. At the middle landing, he said, "Val will be down shortly. He's finishing up his bath. I thought to wait for him, but he's taking much too long."
Val moved himself to the bathroom and made the necessary cleaning-up noises, and thought about Tik and his threat. Tik could destroy him, and out of a sense of misplaced loyalty or friendship to the woman Kate, he might choose to do it.
How could Val neutralize the threat without hurting his old friend?
As he went downstairs to join everyone else, he thought perhaps he couldn't.
Chapter Fourteen
Two days after her shopping trip with Rhiana, Kate was feeling better about everything. Val and the warrag had learned to use the stove and proved to be talented cooks, even if they did lean heavily to meat dishes. They'd also repaired the dining room floor, using Kate's power tools and some Old World skills she'd never seen. She no longer had an icy draft blowing up from the crawl space, and once they finished sanding and staining, she'd have a beautiful parquet circle in the center of the old boards that looked not only intentional but even classy. Meanwhile, Tik had taken to patrolling the perimeter of the property at night, which meant Kate slept sounder. However, the three thugs seemed to have given up on their harassment of her; Kate thought the magical explosion was probably responsible for that.
Better yet, spring was finally in the North Carolina air, and the azaleas were beginning to bloom, the birds were coming back, and the temperatures had soared into the sixties during the day and the forties and fifties at night. At that moment, with the sun just below the trees and the cool breezes blowing through the open windows, Kate could have thought she lived in a perfect time and a perfect place.
If it hadn't been for trying to solve her guests' problems, life would have been almost idyllic. Life, however, was far from idyllic.
"It won't work," Rhiana said. She sat cross-legged on the living room floor, shaking her head and looking frustrated.
"If we can't find Callion, we can't get you home."
"I know
that, Kate. But trying to use the book as a divining tool won't work, because the book doesn't know where he is. And not all the spells in the world can make it know what it doesn't know."
"If we had his scent, we could send a bloodhound after him."
"Yes," Rhiana said. "And if we knew his phone number, we could call him and ask him where he lived."
Rhiana's sarcasm had gotten thicker and sharper as the days wore on without any real breakthroughs. "I'm glad you've become so experienced with the phone…" Kate stopped. "Wait a minute. There's a CD-ROM disk that has personal phone numbers on it. Lisa has a copy—she was telling me back before all of this started how she'd found an old friend of hers through it. I can call her and have her do a search for me."
"I was joking."
"That's okay. It doesn't matter. You might have something. Let me just call her—"
Outside, she heard a roar. She froze, and Rhiana said, "That's Tik."
The kitchen door opened and slammed. "Val and Errga went after him. Rhiana, go ahead. I'm going to get my gun; I'll be out in a minute." She raced up the stairs and into her room, threw on her shooting vest with the pockets already full of shells, and pulled the gun out of its hiding place. The key that unlocked the chamber lock was on her housekey ring; she got it, took out the lock, and made sure the shotgun was fully loaded.
Down the stairs and outside, running as hard as she dared, worrying that one of the creeps who was after her had hurt Tik…
She spotted the warrag first, crouched down behind the old cast-iron tub that served as a watering trough. She heard a shot, but no cries or screams. Maybe none of her people were hurt; or maybe one or some of them were dead. She ran crouched over and tried to keep cover between herself and the barn while she crossed the backyard to the trough. When she reached it, she ducked down beside the warrag and asked, "Where are they?"
He pointed with his nose toward the open door. "Tik has them treed. Look along the first crossbeam," he said, "to the point where the support beam angles into the roof. See that shadow?"
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