King of Swords (The Starfolk)

by Dave Duncan

  Nobody can undo store packaging with their bare hands, Rigel thought inanely. He took to his heels and ran straight ahead, ignoring stabs of pain from his scabs. Halfway up that aisle a pregnant woman screamed at him and released the stroller she was pushing so she could grab a toaster off the shelf beside her and throw it at his face.

  He batted it aside with his iron glove and kept right on moving. Still screaming, she hurled a stainless steel coffeepot and he treated that the same way. He did register the fact that he had not been wearing a gauntlet a few seconds ago, but he was in too much of a hurry to consider the ramifications; he just had time for the fleeting thought that it was the same glove that had formed around his fist that time in Vancouver. As he jostled past the woman, she tried to claw his eyes out, so he had to elbow her out of the way more roughly than he would have liked. Another man came rushing around the corner ahead of him. This one was younger and better dressed than the first. He was armed with a wood ax.

  Another missile struck Rigel in the back, but did him no harm. He continued to run, heading straight for Wood Ax, who raised his weapon two-handed to strike. Rigel extended his sword at arm’s length—where had that come from?—and realized too late what was about to happen. His feet and arm had taken on a life of their own, and all of his muscles were out of his control. The sword ran the man through cleanly. The worst part was that it met with almost no resistance anywhere; it was like stabbing soft ice cream. Human beings should not die so easily! Their combined momentum slammed the two of them together. Rigel cried out in horror, but Wood Ax just collapsed, convincingly dead.

  Rigel yanked his sword free, wasting no time on wondering where the damned thing had come from or the mailed gauntlet that held it. He turned—it felt more as if the sword turned him—just in time to parry a downward jab from Carving Knife, who had followed him. The man was obviously no fighter, for he was clutching his weapon like a tennis racket, but he was certainly a dangerous maniac, spitting foam and curses. The sword took no chances with him. Before he could strike again, it slashed him across the throat.

  Appalled, Rigel backed away from the second corpse. He hadn’t meant to kill anyone. The sword made me do it! How could he ever explain that? Had these men been sent by Mira’s jealous Micah? So soon? And the pregnant woman, who had abandoned the stroller and was even now struggling to pick up the knife? This was madness. Nobody hired pregnant women to beat people up!

  Mira! Rigel jumped over Wood Ax’s body and raced off in search of Mira. There was definitely something odd about Mira. Two mysteries—the woman who had appeared so dramatically and inexplicably in his life and this mob insanity. She was the one who had told him to assume that the mystery of his bracelet and the mystery of his parentage must be related. Perhaps she had somehow caused this riot. If so, she was probably the only one who could put a stop to it.

  The madness had spread. Women were screaming, men shouting. Rigel himself was splattered with two men’s blood and brandishing a gory blade that was more than a meter long and apparently razor sharp.

  Luggage… luggage… where would they keep the luggage? He rounded a corner and almost ran into a middle-aged, blue-rinsed female employee engaged in restocking stationery. She looked up with a smile, which turned into a shriek when she saw the blood-spattered monster looming over her.

  “Luggage?” he said. “Where can I find luggage?”

  She leaped at him and tried to claw out his eyes. He pushed her aside so roughly that she sat down hard on the floor, while he fled back the way he had come. He found a broader thoroughfare in the middle of the store. His appearance was greeted with screams of triumph as a crowd of fifty or more people surged at him, many of them pushing shopping carts ahead of them like tanks. Some in the back of the mob began lobbing mortar bombs of merchandise over the heads of those in the front.

  A fire alarm erupted in intolerable clamor. Someone must have dialed 911 by now, and cops would soon be swarming the store like ants. Guessing that Mira would head for the front door, he went in what he thought was that direction.

  But another mob promptly spilled toward him around a corner—shoppers, clerks, cashiers leaving their tills, many of them wielding wire shopping baskets like weapons. For some reason, he had become a leper and the sight of him was enough to arouse a lynch mob. Trapped between the two ravening hordes, he dived into yet another merchandise canyon. Mira was facing in his direction with her feet apart, both hands gripping her damnable gun. She wasn’t aiming at him, though, but at a man in between them, who was striding toward her with a golf club raised to strike. Rigel was pleased to know that he wasn’t the only pariah, but why had the entire shopping population of Nanaimo gone homicidally berserk? And why were they only attacking him and Mira? Attention shoppers! The drug-peddling pedophile terrorist in aisle nine… Mira’s mouth was moving. No doubt she was shouting at her assailant and possibly he was shouting back at her, but whatever they were saying was inaudible under the cacophony of the fire alarm and the mob.

  Rigel wanted to scream at her to put the damned gun away. The Canadian judicial system went ballistic at the slightest hint of handguns. Handguns implied gang warfare; they were illegal, smuggled in from the United States, and they carried extra penalties. More urgent was the fact that he was directly in her line of fire. The sword lurched forward, taking him with it. He turned his face away, but couldn’t avoid feeling the impact as the blade sliced into the would-be golfer’s back.

  He looked again. Mira was still shouting inaudibly, but now she seemed to be shouting at him. The golfer squirmed on the floor, horribly wounded and probably dying. She lowered her gun, freeing one shaky hand to point. The head-splitting tumult suddenly shrank to a distant whisper, as if a glass bubble had closed around them. No, Mira was not looking at Rigel; she was looking past him, at a tidal wave of men and women—mostly women—that had jammed into the aisle in a frenzied effort to reach their intended victims. Those in the front line were being buried by people scrambling over them and by avalanches of merchandise toppling from the high display racks.

  “You all right?” he asked, and he heard his own voice perfectly well. Another mob was coming from the other direction. The two of them were about to be stomped into mush.

  But no! That mob, also, suddenly stopped advancing. It began piling up higher and higher, beating itself against nothing, as if an invisible sheet of glass had intervened between it and its desired victims. Rigel saw missiles bounce off the intangible barrier, saw people being squelched against it, as the mob kept trying to surge forward. The same thing had happened on both sides, as if he and Mira were enclosed in a science fiction force field.

  He felt sick. Stop! Stop!

  Then they had company.

  He was not accustomed to looking up at people, but the newcomer was certainly taller than he was, likely more than two meters, not counting the huge, pointed ears set on top of his head like a cat’s. Even so, he might weigh no more than Rigel, because he was slender as a wand. That he had neither nipples nor a navel was immediately evident because his only garment was a shimmering kilt set low on hips that didn’t look capable of holding up a rubber band. Nice beachwear, but not really practical for shopping. He sported numerous metallic bracelets on his wrists and ankles, many jeweled studs around the edges of his feline ears, and a thin staff of polished wood taller then himself, bound with bands of many colors. His hair was a velvet cap of spun gold, and his irises shone amber to match. He loomed over Rigel like a string colossus, frowning down at the bloody scene around them. Despite his bare feet and near-nudity, he projected an aura of power and authority that made a man’s knees want to buckle into obeisance.

  But Rigel wanted to scream with joy. Whatever or whoever this newcomer was, he obviously belonged to the same species as Rigel, or close to it. Rigel Estell was no longer alone in the Universe! Unable to offer a hand to shake, because his right hand was still enclosed in a steel glove and clutching a bloody sword, he bowed. “Delighted to meet y
ou, Mr. Fomalhaut.”

  “You know this monster?” Mira wailed.

  “I never set eyes on him before. But that’s his name.”

  “Correct.” The stranger’s voice was pure song, as sweet as the call of a flute. “You having presently no further requirement for that gruesome weaponry, Rigel Halfling, I do demand that you now diligently decommission it.”

  Rigel glanced guiltily at the bloody blade. “I don’t know how to do that, sir.”

  “Lower it, you incompetent freak!”

  Rigel pointed his sword at the ground, and both sword and gauntlet immediately vanished. His arm was spattered with blood down to his bracelet, but his hand and wrist were dry and clean.

  “Where did you come from, halfling? Who is your sponsor, and who granted you the authority to extrovert?”

  “I regret that I have not the slightest idea what your lordship means.” Rigel could hear sirens. They were barely audible over the muted fire alarm, but he strongly suspected that the police were just outside in the parking lot. He hoped there were ambulances there too, because there must be dozens of injured people in those writhing heaps of humanity. At the same time, he felt a certain urgency about taking his leave before people began posing questions and asking for ID.

  He glanced at Mira, who was still staring openmouthed at the apparition.

  The giant said, “Who gave you that amulet?”

  “What amulet?”

  “That bracelet!”

  “I do not know, sir. I would love to know!”

  “Then you will come with me.”

  Oh, yes! Anywhere but here! “I am at your lordship’s command,” Rigel said giddily. “And my friend must accompany us.”

  The alien curled his lip at Mira like something that had crawled out of a landfill. “What is she? Your servant? Your concubine?”

  More police sirens were shrieking all around them. Every badge on the Island was going to be pouring in there in a few minutes, waving guns and bullhorns.

  “Ms. Silvas is a friend, who saved my life just yesterday.”

  “She’s an earthling!”

  Earthling or not, Mira must not be left behind for the police to torment—not after all she’d done for him.

  “She knows too much. She comes or I stay.”

  Fomalhaut shrugged his inhumanly narrow shoulders. “You are hardly in a position to dictate terms, Halfling Rigel, but your analysis is plausible. Very well. Grip this!” He held out his curiously banded staff.

  Rigel shrugged. Both he and Mira took hold of it. The world around him vanished in a flash of darkness and bitter cold. For a moment there was an agonizing wrenching and twisting sensation, but it was gone before Rigel could even scream.

  Then the world started up again.

  The three of them were standing in a grassy, sunlit meadow, just a few meters from the edge of a small lake. On the far side of the lake, waterfalls sprayed down mossy cliffs, and a couple of stringy, golden-skinned youths had just leaped off in parallel dives. A dozen or so similar looking youngsters of both sexes were romping around in the water itself amid a welter of foam and high-pitched laughter, and the entire scene was framed in trees, flowers, songbirds, and boughs laden with multicolored fruit. The air was perfumed, and exactly the right temperature. It all looked like a travel poster for some tropical paradise, but the kids in the water all had high, pointed ears like bats’.

  “Where is this?” Mira cried. “Where are we?”

  Rigel sighed with an almost unbearable joy. “I don’t know where you are,” he said, “but I think I just came home.”

  Chapter 6

  Their arrival had been noticed. One of the bathers shot up out of the water like a dolphin. Instead of falling back, he began running over the surface toward the visitors.

  Rigel’s mind instinctively rejected the image. He looked away, but the scenery seemed as far-fetched and unrealistic as a child’s drawing. The grass was too long for a lawn and too short for pasture; the ground was uneven, but the hollows and hummocks were oddly regular; and the deep blue of the sky didn’t fade to a paler shade near the horizon. No obvious path or road led out of the clearing. The only building in sight was a freestanding doorway just a few meters away—two pillars, a threshold, and lintel, all made of marble, framing a grandiose double door of white enamel and gold trim. None of your suburban glue-and-sawdust, hollow-core trash here! He resisted the temptation to go around it to see what was on the other side.

  “My gun!” Mira cried. “What did you do with my Smith and Wesson?”

  “It remained behind,” Fomalhaut said, “like your watch.”

  She howled in outrage, staring at her wrist. “That was a genuine Rolex Perpetual!”

  “Doesn’t matter. Machinery cannot be introverted.”

  “Welcome, welcome!” shouted the boy running over the water. His name, quite obviously, was Muphrid, although Rigel had no idea how he knew that. He was as tall as Fomalhaut, with the same large bat ears and iridescent loincloth. The major difference was that his hair was grass green. His playmates were following in a more orthodox fashion, arms flailing, moving like Olympic champions.

  “My God!” Mira said. “They’re elves!”

  “Watch your mouth, earthling!” Fomalhaut barked. “Use that word here and you will regret it dearly.”

  “If you’re not elves, then what in hell are you?”

  “We are the starborn, the starfolk, and impudent earthlings get soundly flogged here.”

  “And just where is ‘here,’ your lordship?” Rigel asked. I’ve a feeling we’re not in Canada anymore, Toto.

  “We are in the Starlands, the realm of Queen Electra.”

  That told him nothing much.

  Mira uttered a strangled yell and screamed, “You did this!” She was accusing Rigel, not Fomalhaut, which was ironic because Rigel had suspected her of causing the riot in the Walmart.

  “Steady!” he said, putting an arm around her—his left arm, not his magic-bracelet arm. “Wherever we are, let’s wait and see what happens before we panic, okay?”

  She was trembling violently, wide-eyed and chalky pale, looking ready to faint. He could not doubt her terror, but though he understood it, he did not share it. In a sense he had been waiting and hoping for something like this all his life; it was a childhood dream come true.

  Muphrid trotted ashore and bowed low to Fomalhaut, sweeping his arms out to the sides in an expansive gesture as if he were about to leap off a diving board. When he straightened up, his huge smile displayed white teeth with far too many sharp points. He was puffing, every rib visible and working hard. “Welcome to Alrisha, my lord! You do my home great honor.”

  His eyes shone greener than emeralds, the same lucent color as his hair. That fitted—Fomalhaut had gold hair and gold eyes, Rigel’s were both white, and why shouldn’t a person’s hair and eyes match? It was a tidy idea. Elfin eyes were slightly slanted, their chins were more pointed than normal in human males, and body fat was definitely out. So was body hair, and the growth on their scalps looked like flat-lying fur.

  “Such is not my intention.”

  Muphrid gulped and seemed to shrink. He clasped his hands together under his chin, elbows together, and his ears went flat. His friends, who were just starting to wade ashore, stopped dead at the sight.

  “I have displeased my lord?”

  “Prince Vildiar is enraged by your territorial rapacity in annexing Starborn Dubhe’s Moon Garden.”

  “But she never uses it!” Muphrid wailed. “Not once in the last fifty years. Parts of it were being forgotten!”

  “Nevertheless, such larceny is reprehensible, and Dubhe has influential connections. His Highness is considering denouncing you to the regent, and you know how he will react to such egregious larceny.”

  With a loud wail, Muphrid collapsed on his bony knees and tried to kiss Fomalhaut’s toes.

  His lordship stepped back hastily. “Desist, you groveling maggot. I do not wish to be e
mbroiled in so sordid a contretemps. Possibly you can make redress by dealing with this halfling.” He gestured toward Rigel, who still had his arm wrapped around Mira.

  Muphrid sprang upright like a jack-in-the-box and looked Rigel up and down. He scowled. Rigel scowled right back.

  The elf’s ears went even flatter. “What must I do with it, my lord?”

  “Quarter him for a few days. He is probably older than he looks, but he is fresh out of the mud and as ignorant as a newborn.”

  “That is blood on him, isn’t it?”

  “Only earthling blood, but he is armed and may be dangerous. If he proves obdurate or recalcitrant, apply whatever force is needful to restrain him. Otherwise proceed to instruct him in the rudiments of civilized behavior and deference to his betters, so that he will have some minuscule chance when he appears in court.”

  Rigel lost his temper. “Just a minute! I was attacked by a crazy killer mob! Are you suggesting that I was wrong to defend myself?”

  The two elves looked down at him with open contempt.

  “You did not defend yourself, halfling,” Fomalhaut said. “Your amulet did. Whoever gave it to you is the party at fault, and the court will endeavor to determine the miscreant’s identity so that he or she can be suitably penalized.”

  Aha! “I shall cooperate fully with the court in that, your lordship. My greatest wish is to learn my father’s name.”

  “Then this is the right place for you.” Fomalhaut turned back to Muphrid. “Educate him in our ways as best as you can. Excessive ignorance on his part will waste the court’s time.”

  “My lord wants me to treat a halfling like a guest?” Muphrid’s face retained its golden shade, yet his expression would have better suited a bilious green color, like his hair.

  The audience at the edge of the water was exchanging grins and smirks. Some were holding hands, even cuddling, as they watched, and Rigel decided that these gangling people were not the children he had originally thought them to be. They were all skinny as ropes, their faces were unlined, and they had been romping and screaming, but they were not behaving like children now. They could be any age—twenty or sixty or even a hundred. Maybe it was just Fomalhaut’s arrogant bearing that made him seem older than the rest.