Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02]

by In the Rift (v1. 5) (html)

  When she read the last one, Rhiana got excited. "That one. It has to be that one."

  "You're sure?"

  "Of course I'm sure. Callion Aregeni means 'Callion the Aregen.' It couldn't be anyone else."

  "Then we have him. He lives at 5236 Camino Lindo in Abilene, Texas. All we have to do is drive there and…well, do whatever we're going to do."

  "How soon can we leave?"

  "I'll call the operator to double-check the number, and then we can figure out how we're going to get the five of us down there and what we're going to do when we arrive."

  "You're wonderful to help us, Kate," Rhiana said.

  Kate shrugged. "My life has felt hollow for a while. Doing this, I feel like I matter again."

  She dialed the area code for Abilene, then 555-1212 for directory assistance. When the operator came on, Kate said, "Callion Aregeni, please."

  "One moment."

  Kate waited for the automated voice telling her the number, but the operator came back. "I'm sorry, but we don't have a listing for that name."

  Kate spelled it for her.

  "I'm sorry. No listing."

  "You don't see him at 5236 Camino Lindo?"

  "I'm really sorry. I don't."

  "Do you have any sort of a new listing? Maybe something that says his number has been changed, that gives a new number?"

  "I have a notice here that his phone has been disconnected. I don't have any notation of a new number."

  Kate sighed. "Oh. Well, that's it, then. Thank you."

  "Thank you for using AT&T," the woman said. And as an afterthought, "Good luck."

  Kate hung up the phone and sat staring at the number. "Shit," she said, with feeling.

  Rhiana sat watching her. "He isn't there."

  "No. He's moved."

  "Then we are where we were before. We know he's someplace on this planet, and we know nothing more than that."

  "No." Kate had no intention of giving up that easily. "No. We know where he was. Exactly where. Somehow, we should be able to connect where he was to where he is. The real estate office that sold his house might be the best place to start."

  "I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about."

  Kate smiled. "It doesn't matter. I have a couple of ideas that might give us Callion's new address. I'll try them. If we get lucky, we don't have to find a magic spell to take us to him." She shrugged. "While I'm trying my ideas, though, why don't you see if you can come up with an angle or two on that spell. Just a couple of things we could try in case the things I'm doing don't pan out."

  Rhiana stood for a moment with a blank expression on her face. Then she said, "Yes. I believe the book had difficulty translating for you that time. It took a while for its words to catch up to your voice. But I understand now." She gave Kate a wan smile. "I will do my best on the spell, but I will also do a little meditation that you will be lucky in your search."

  Kate lifted what was left of her glass of orange juice and said, "To luck, for all of us."

  Rhiana lifted her own glass of beer and echoed, "To luck."

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kate said, "Thank you, Mrs. Pederman. Thank you so much for helping me."

  "When you see Mr. Aregeni, tell him I hope he's feeling better."

  "I will. I promise." When she hung up the phone, Kate sagged against the countertop and rested her head in her hands.

  "This time?" Val asked.

  "Yes. One more real estate agency, though, and I would have just given up, I think." Kate's shoulders ached and her neck throbbed and she had a headache. She didn't even know how many Abilene real estate agencies she'd called between Friday morning and Saturday morning, but it didn't matter anymore. She had the next piece of the puzzle in locating Callion. She forced herself to sit up, and dug her fingertips into the muscles of her shoulders and neck. "I don't have a street address, but I have a city. The lady who sold his house said he mentioned to her that he was moving to Fort Lauderdale for his health."

  "Fort Lauderdale? Is that near or far?" Rhiana asked.

  "It's far, but it could be a whole lot further. If we get on 95 and drive steadily at the speed limit, we can be there in about twelve hours."

  "That isn't long. Once we get there, how will we find him, though?"

  Kate said, "We can probably find him from here. His last number wasn't unlisted. There's a good chance this one won't be, either." She dialed directory assistance again, and this time asked for the phone number and street address for Callion Aregeni. In less than a minute, she had both.

  The Glenraveners cheered. Kate felt like cheering, too. Then, however, Rhiana brought up one other difficulty. "How can all five of us travel in your vehicle. We won't all fit in it."

  For a moment, Kate wanted to beat her head on the countertop. But something from the events of the past week finally connected, and Kate grinned. "No. We won't, but it doesn't matter. I have to have my car repainted, and the insurance will cover some of the cost for a rental car while that's being done. I'll do that today, and rent a van, and we'll use that to drive to Florida while the car is in the shop."

  By the time she'd finished setting that up, she hoped she would never see another telephone. But Jack's Automotive Detailers could take her Escort in that day, someone from Budget Rent-A-Car would pick her up from Jack's, and even though she couldn't get a van with tinted windows, she could get a van…and her insurance would cover all but eight dollars per day of the expense, at least until her car was finished, which the manager at Jack's said would probably be on Tuesday.

  That might be enough time to get down to Fort Lauderdale, find Callion's hiding place, do what they had to do, and get back. Of course, keeping in mind that she didn't even know how they were going to do what they had to do, she didn't think she would bet the ranch on that. She decided when she went in to pay to make sure that she gave the rental place enough money to cover against any eventuality.

  She turned to Rhiana. "You want to come with me? We can pick up the van and buy a few things we'll need for the trip."

  Chapter Eighteen

  The phone rang and Callion picked it up. "I'm a friend from…back home," the voice on the other end of the line said. The voice was male, and deep, and spoke one of the Kinnish dialects with an accent Callion couldn't quite place.

  "As far as I know, I don't have any friends back home."

  "You'd be surprised. There are a lot of us who don't want to see a human Watchmistress. Quite a lot. For some assistance and a few concessions, I could take you into the heart of the new rebellion. More than a few Glenraveners are ready to see you as Master of the Watch."

  Callion leaned back in his desk chair and rested his feet on the desktop. "I'm listening."

  "I don't have time to talk. But a small force of hunters has picked up your trail; they're on their way to force you and the Watchers to return to Glenraven. Maybe that won't be such a bad thing; I'm traveling with them, and will continue to interfere with their actions as I have been all along." Silence for an instant, then, "Damn. I'll have to call you back. This phone isn't secure."

  Callion was intrigued. "By all means, do call back. I'll be eager to hear what else you have to say."

  The line went dead in his hand.

  Interesting, Callion thought. Extremely interesting. His divinations had indicated a coming break in the pattern of his days, something that could either lift him to the power and position he desired or else destroy him utterly. Now the past had caught up with him in the form of a stranger from Glenraven, but that stranger was an ally, not an enemy. Callion had cast a spell while listening to the caller to discern the presence of any duplicity; he had been pleased to discover that the caller was not an enemy trying to win his trust in order to betray him. In the stranger's voice he found no perfidy.

  So events shaped themselves in his favor. He smiled. He had planned for many eventualities, he had expected violence and bloodshed and mayhem in his quest to regain Glenraven and force it to
bow to him, but in all of his planning and preparing, he had not anticipated allies.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rhiana tossed her small bag into the back of the rental van and stood while Kate showed her how to shut the doors and secure them. Val and Tik already had bench seats behind the main one, and Errga slept curled with his nose under his tail on the floor in the cargo area to the very back. Twilight was bringing a storm with it; Rhiana could smell it in the sharpening scents of earth and dust and feel it in the dampness on her cheeks and the backs of her hands. The leaves on the shrubs rattled and the new growth on the trees overhead softened the clacking of the branches to a whisper. The edge of every storm brought Rhiana a sense of heightened anticipation, a. knotting of the gut, a feeling of almost…almost…almost…that twisted tighter and tighter the closer it approached. At that moment, her skin tingled and she felt slightly breathless, but also tense. Edgy. Almost…almost…almost…hummed in the back of her mind and she could not decide if the thing that had almost reached her should give her cause for joy or terror.

  When the doors were closed, Kate took two rolled strips of paper out of a shoulder bag she carried and handed one to Rhiana. "Hold this just a sec, will you?"

  She peeled backing off of the other strip, then stuck the strip onto the back window of the van. She smoothed it out carefully, and Rhiana could see that the strip was covered with writing.

  "Hand me the other one now."

  Kate copied the procedure with the second sheet of paper, then stood back to study the effect.

  "What are they?"

  "Camouflage," Kate said.

  "Oh. Are they written spells? Words of power?"

  "Sort of. They're bumper stickers."

  "What do they say?" Rhiana wished the spell that allowed her to understand the local spoken language would allow her to read, too.

  "That one says, 'Even the lousiest lover, properly treated, makes a great drumskin—Old Hoos Proverb.' And the other one says, 'Cats with hands were a bad idea.'"

  Rhiana struggled to understand. Poor lovers probably could be skinned and tanned and turned into drumskins, but she didn't think human skin would be durable enough to make a long-lasting drumskin…nor had she realized that Kate or her people would treat their unwanted lovers in quite that manner. She had gotten the impression that they were slightly more civilized. As for cats with hands, they probably were a bad idea, but since there weren't any cats with hands…

  Kate had been watching her face. "They're supposed to be funny," she said. "Craig got them at a science fiction convention we went to in High Point a few years ago. He never got around to putting them on his car, and I've had them in my closet ever since."

  "You said they were camouflage."

  "Trust me."

  Rhiana nodded. The knot in her belly twisted tighter, the anticipation of coming events grew more fierce, and she shivered slightly.

  Kate went around to the side door and slid it open. "Okay, guys," she said. "Time for some makeup."

  She sat on the seat beside Val, squirted a dab of pale cream onto a sponge, and patted it along Val's forehead, across his nose and cheeks and along his jaw. "Don't have any beard, do you?"

  "True men don't have hair on their faces," he said. He was offended. "Only Kin-hera…and Machnan…and humans." He said the word "humans" like he was spitting something bad-tasting out of his mouth.

  Kate didn't seem upset. "Yeah? Well true men don't wear makeup on their faces, if you want to know the truth, but you're going to have to." She dabbed a slightly darker brown cream onto one finger and dabbed under his eyes and along the sides of his nose with it. She moved back, tipped her head to one side, then muttered, "Not yet." She opened a little case, removed a fuzzy round white pad, rubbed it over what Rhiana recognized as some form of face powder, and began patting it all over Val's face. Finally, when Rhiana could see little sparkles of the powder from where she stood, Kate said, "That'll do."

  She moved back to Tik's seat and repeated the process.

  "What are you doing?" Rhiana finally asked. "Trying to make them look human?"

  "Nope. Trying to make them look fake. Let's go."

  "But aren't you going to give them some way to hide themselves?"

  "Won't need to."

  Rhiana couldn't believe what she was hearing. "But people will see them."

  "You bet they will." Kate climbed into the driver's seat, closed her door, and fastened her seat belt.

  Rhiana got into her own seat, locked the door as Kate had shown her, and struggled with her own belt. The mechanism for this one was different than the one in Kate's car, and she had to work with it for a moment.

  Kate, meanwhile, turned around in her seat and told Val and Tik, "If either of you see anyone staring at the two of you, just smile and wave. Okay?"

  "Smile and wave?"

  "That's right. Let's see it."

  Val smiled without showing his teeth…a tightly stretched, uncomfortable smile that Rhiana thought made him look like a corpse laid out in its coffin.

  "Show some teeth, Val," Kate said. "A big smile. Like you mean it. Like you're having fun, you're happy, you like all the attention."

  Val's smile got a little larger, but no more sincere.

  Kate shrugged. "You'll get the hang of it. And Tik, don't let your tongue hang out like that. Try not to move it much, okay. A little, but not much. Don't lick your nose or anything while people are looking, please?"

  "Why not?"

  Kate sighed. "Because we're going to pretend that you two are wearing costumes. An entire subculture of Americans go to gatherings called science fiction conventions, where they dress up in costumes and discuss books and movies that pertain to their culture. Craig liked to go to them, and I went to some with him. That's where I learned that you can look any way you want if you just smile and wave when people stare."

  Errga sat up and looked over the backseat. "What about me?"

  "Unfortunately, dogs can't talk even at science fiction conventions. We can explain away your hands as your doggie costume, but I'm afraid you're still going to limit your conversations to 'woof, woof' when anyone might overhear you. We'll have Val or Rhiana or Tik walk you on a leash. I'll pick up a collar on the way so that we can let you out at rest stops. You can cock your hind leg to pee on bushes and take a dump in the grass."

  "In front of people?!" The warrag sounded horrified.

  Rhiana thought, Poor Errga. A member of the most private species of all the Kin-hera, and Kate wants to make him empty his bladder in public. She said, "Perhaps we can let Errga out by the side of the road near the woods from time to time. That way he can do what he needs to do behind shrubs and he won't have to embarrass himself."

  Kate glanced at her, then looked back at Errga. "Or we can do it Rhiana's way, if you would prefer."

  "I would prefer," Errga said.

  "It won't be that big a deal. We'll be traveling in the darkness, so probably no one is going to notice you guys anyway."

  Kate started the van and pulled out of her drive.

  "You're sure the horses will be all right?" Rhiana asked.

  "Lisa said she would take care of them. She will."

  Almost…almost…almost…

  Something coming, something about to happen, something ready to change to become something else—trouble, danger, disaster, death. A hard, hot flash inside her head, the sharp bitter current of twisted magic, something wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong Rhiana could taste it. The road rolled by at her side and she leaned against the car door and watched it race by underneath her, trying to hide the fact that suddenly fear so completely consumed her she was about to be sick.

  She closed her eyes, pretending to try to sleep while Kate turned on Machine World music that sounded like madmen being tortured with thumbscrews and branding irons to the accompaniment of crashing cars. She didn't sleep; instead, tentatively, she felt around with magical senses for the disturbance she'd felt.

  Whatever it had be
en, it hid itself away when she started looking for it. Trouble, she thought. Evil, trouble, riding in on the storm-front like a banshee. That one sharp stab of magic had been too quick for her to discern distance or direction or even form. She had gotten from it only the quick, certain impression that it meant her harm, and then it vanished into nothingness.

  The first drops of rain splatted against the windshield to the accompaniment of the first low, rolling boom of thunder. Rhiana forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply with the monotonous regularity of a sleeper. The splatterings got louder and came faster, as the rain came down harder.

  "Wow," Kate said, and Rhiana could tell by the flash of light that glowed through her eyelids that lightning had struck close by. Thunder crashed in its wake, no longer the delayed, rolling booming of a distant storm but the immediate shouting fury found only in the heart of one. Rhiana opened her eyes and sat up.

  Metal arms slid in quick, rhythmic arcs across the windscreen, pushing water out of their way. Twin cones of light stabbed into the sheeting rain, illuminating very little, and that poorly. Rhiana realized the van moved forward slowly; Kate squinted through the gloom, frowning.

  "We're going to have to pull over until this lets up a little," she said. "My windshield wipers aren't keeping up with this downpour and I don't want to get rear-ended by someone whose are."

  "No. Of course not," Rhiana said. She didn't understand exactly what Kate was talking about, but it sounded serious.

  Under a bridge, Kate pulled the van to a halt. She left the vehicle running and the headlights on. Rhiana realized they were on a double road, with two lanes of the smooth black surface separated by a wide strip of grass from two more just like them. She recalled Glenraven's tiny riding paths and the dirt roads so narrow that wagons could only pass each other at wide spots, and wondered what sort of people humans were to create such mammoth thoroughfares…or to need them.

  Giant vehicles with huge wheeled boxes attached to the back rolled slowly by them, and small cars, and vehicles of every imaginable shape and size in between. Rhiana felt like a silly child, but she stared out at the slowly passing traffic until the rain lightened somewhat and Kate decided she could drive in it again.