The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  And then she came to one who lived in terror, a broken leg and bruises but nothing that threatened his life. She sank into his thoughts, seeking the fear, bringing oblivion to wipe out the horror once again. She touched memories, and recoiled. They'd promised safety and wealth . . .

  "He was a spy."

  She staggered to her feet, retreating, suddenly frantic for fresh air and sunshine. She heard mutterings spread across the room behind her, stirrings of the whole among the broken, and she didn't want to see what happened next.

  Padric held her elbow, guiding her from the hall. She ached all over, every inch of her body where one or another of the wrecked bodies suffered. Images of fire and blood and destruction fogged the stone around her. Her knees wobbled, and she slumped against the wall.

  {Go to the gate. Hatred approaches.}

  That wasn't the cat. The stone walls spoke to her, voices of delirium, warning of danger. And she could barely walk.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  If the left transept hid a stair down to the crypt, what about the right? Brian remembered that Gothic builders didn't insist on symmetry, but he didn't have time for random searching. The door thumped again, prodding him.

  A shadow opened in the floor at the mirror point, another blind black stair, and he felt his way downward and around and around and downward, favoring the ache in his leg, to another flickering lamp and another corridor and more bones. The Pendragons had buried a lot of dead, down through the centuries. He wondered if the two crypts joined, if there was a direct route between the relic and the labyrinth. Dierdre had wanted to be found at the altar, so there'd be no clue that she'd been the one to show Brian the way out.

  Complicated plot, but those were her specialty.

  The air smelled different, less dust, more dirt, more moisture, more greasy tang from oil smoke. The end of the corridor opened out into a small room with lamps all around, square, with another buried menhir in the center. This one lacked the carved niche for a cross. A familiar pattern traced across the floor.

  He hoped it led back to Maureen.

  Brian took three deep breaths, calming and centering himself. Dierdre had bloody well told him he'd have to kill someone the instant he walked this pattern. Probably someone he knew. She knew he hated jumping into combat blind.

  And then she'd proceeded to half cripple him, just to add to the fun. What the hell was Dierdre up to? Things she'd said and done indicated that she respected him, even if they cordially hated each other. That wasn't enough reason to let him go. She had a sense of duty, a sense of allegiance owed and the need to do ugly things when necessary. God above, she was good at that. And she'd never let small questions of guilt or innocence bother her before.

  He flexed his left leg, wincing at the deep muscle pain from her kick, twisted his torso and asked it if she had truly broken those ribs in their intimate tango of interrogation or had only bruised them. But he couldn't waste time on healing. He had to walk the labyrinth before Merlin's magic counted down its heartbeats and blocked him from the passage. Before someone broke that door open and found Dierdre lying battered and unconscious at the altar.

  Maybe she felt she had a duty to Mulvaney and his betrayed honor? More likely this was Machiavellian office politics, a way to tie Brian and Duncan together and destroy an enemy blocking her path. Duncan she didn't even respect, and the hate she'd shown in flashes down the years had nothing cordial to it.

  Dim shouting echoed down from above. They were in.

  He shook his head and cleared it. He couldn't waste time on thinking, either. He wiped the sweat from his hands and focused on the stone pattern set into the floor, remembering the Way he'd walked that other hidden pattern, dropping his mind into the Zen archer. He placed his right foot squarely on the line, and walked. As he walked, he drew the kukri from his belt and carried the bare steel balanced in his hand. Its calm weight was a comfort. Steel was always calm.

  Again the room fell away from his concentration, from his meditation, as he became the stepping of his feet and then the clockwise inward spiral of the line they were stepping on. He visualized the arrow touching the tip of his nose and turned his head aside and closed his eyes, letting the target grow in his mind, draw nearer, swell until it filled the world.

  He was the archer and the bow and the arrow and the target all in one, and the target loosed him to fly free. Power warmed him and drew him and he sank into the heart of it. He felt it flooding to a peak, this time, and beyond where the other Way was blocked. He couldn't miss.

  "Halt! Who goes there?"

  The words echoed in a hollow space, even though they had been spoken into dead silence rather than shouted, and they carried the feel of boredom. Brian had spent his time on sentry-go and knew the flavor well.

  "Brian Albion."

  "Huh?" And the man shook his head from the shadows. "Anzac."

  Sign and countersign. Reflex answered "Gallipoli."

  "Advance and be recognized."

  Brian stepped across the lines of the labyrinth, shielding his knife in the gloom. Have to talk to the head of security about predictable passwords, traditions be damned. But that would be Dierdre, of course. At least she's told you that today is April 25, somewhere under Glastonbury.

  If she wasn't lying about where the pattern took you.

  The sentry stood in shadow, peering at a list and clutching a submachine gun in his other hand, pointed at the ceiling. Brian gritted his teeth and then forced himself to relax. He concentrated on walking casually, the pace of a man who belonged. Body language could lie as persuasively as words . . .

  Or broadcast the truth. The guard's fingers tightened on his SMG, and the kukri flew before Brian realized his hand had moved. Time did its battlefield trick where he swore he could see bullets in flight, and the muzzle of the 9mm swung down toward him and the kukri spun glinting through the air and orange sparks lit the bore and both he and the guard grunted surprise and impact and pain.

  Spent shell casings tinkled across stone. Brian sank to his knees, swaying gently. The guard collapsed with a faint gurgle, one hand clutching the hilt of the kukri where it protruded above his left clavicle. Strange target, but Brian hadn't chosen it. The knife and his eyes and arm and fifty years of combat had made the decision for him, judging the bulk of the uniform as body armor and changing his aim in mid-swing.

  He waited a moment, wondering why he could hear such things as the shell casings and the rustle of cloth as the man fell. He should be damn near deaf, with a 9mm fired in a tight space walled with stone. Suppressor. What the Yanks would call a silencer. So maybe the other guard wouldn't be here in seconds, or wasn't already taking aim from distant shadows.

  He explored his left arm, finding blood hot and oily on the sleeve. The guard hadn't quite traversed far enough before he'd fired. Maybe had his weapon set for a three-shot burst rather than full auto, so he didn't keep firing as he fell and his fingers jerked in dying reflex. Forearm wound, a glancing furrow, Brian's fingers told him that the bone remained whole and major blood vessels intact. He'd had far worse before.

  But his left side was another matter.

  Brian sighed, gently, gently, his breath limited by stabs of pain. That one felt nasty. Descending colon, his body told him, perforation and leakage. Classic gut wound. Prognosis -- massive infection, ugly lingering death without immediate surgery and antibiotics.

  For a human.

  His abdominal muscles writhed, he curled around the fire blazing through his gut, and a hard lump slithered down inside his shirt. Just one slug. He gritted his teeth as the flames spread out from his side, his body ripping pathogens into shreds and knitting tissue across the ravages of the wound. He reached out for Power, felt it slipping away from him, couldn't grasp it. Merlin again, blocking, controlling, even after centuries. The old bastard wouldn't allow competing magic in this space.

  He blinked swirling dots from his eyes and staggered to his feet, mopping sweat from his forehead with his sleev
e. His ears buzzed. Cumulative effect, the wounds and Dierdre's multiple gifts and the shock of finding something slimy crawling out from behind the Pendragons' crest. Plus, he hadn't had anything to eat or drink since leaving Naskeag Falls. Damn good thing he'd kept in training . . . .

  And now he had to find out who he'd killed.

  He nerved himself and stumbled the distance the knife had flashed in a second and stared down at the corpse. He'd killed before, more times than he could count, mostly strangers in the wrong clothing who'd been trying to kill him. Sometimes men or women he'd known and loathed with a consuming passion, like Liam. Never anyone who had been a friend or ally.

  Healing tissues blazed again as he knelt by the body, avoiding the really excessive splash of blood you get when you cut the carotid artery, and turned the face to the flickering light of oil lamps. Young, but all the Old Blood looked young for a century or more. Straw blond, dark eyes frozen wide with pain and the surprise that death was real.

  Nobody he knew.

  Brian grunted with the effort of jerking his knife out of bone. He wiped it on the loose uniform, another of those stupid purple Renaissance things the Pendragons seemed to affect for their secret inner circle. He felt the hardness under it, some kind of flak jacket of plates laminated with Kevlar fabric. Hand and eyes had read it right. He carved long strips of velvet from the outer sleeve and wrapped them as a pressure bandage around his forearm. He couldn't waste Power on healing minor problems. The major ones needed far more than he had.

  The SMG did have a suppressor screwed to the muzzle. He studied the weapon for a moment. Standard Pendragon issue, which meant it had been keyed to the sentry's hand. Wouldn't do Brian any good until he found half an hour and some tools to bugger the mechanism, and the blood on it might serve as a beacon to any tracker. He left it where it lay.

  Now to get the hell out of here. He groaned to his feet, fixed the pasture oak in his head, not taking chances, and forced the three steps necessary to move from one world to the next. Then he shook his head. The gloomy labyrinth and grotto still walled him in. Merlin again, with his layers upon layers of defense. The man must have been a certifiable paranoid.

  So Brian would have to do it the hard way. He tested his body again, gently twisting, bending, swinging his right arm and grimacing at the effect that had on his left side. Those muscles tied into everything. Then he took a deep breath, nearly collapsed as that stabbed him in the gut, forced himself upright, and strolled up the corridor beyond the corpse, again doing his best to counterfeit the air of someone who belonged. In spite of all the blood staining his arm and side.

  Flickering oil lamps glowed from niches in the walls, barely lighting the way, looking like they'd been put there by the Romans or by the Picts and Scots before them. Black soot shone with a greasy glaze on the walls, centuries of oil vapor condensed on the cold damp stone. The flagged stone floor had been worn smooth by millennia of feet. Just keep putting one bloody foot in front of the other. Sooner or later, this buggering ramp has to end. His rubbery legs told him otherwise, told him the climb stretched for miles.

  He concentrated on the kukri in his hand, heavy, strong, calm. Deadly, like the men who carried its brothers. The touch raised shouts of "Ayo Gorkhali" in his ears, wars long ago and far away and a mental salute from the Gurkhas he'd led into battle. They marched indomitable across his memories, lending him strength and will from a cooling spring that had seemed endless. Like Maureen's strength and will.

  The corridor spiraled up and outward, a long corkscrew widdershins in the climb, deasil on the descent, like a snail shell or the labyrinth itself.

  And then a shape formed out of the gloom, a man, the back of a man standing at a formal "parade rest" and watching closed-circuit TV monitors mounted on the ceiling. Brian crept along doing his best imitation of a ghost. He could try to disable, or he could kill.

  The second guard kept watching outward like a dutiful soldier because his mate was guarding his back. Brian lifted his knife, fire blazed through his wounded side, and breath hissed between his teeth. The sentry started to turn, weapon rising, and the kukri took his head off with a single stroke.

  The head fell to one side, body still standing and pumping blood like a fountain for seconds afterward. Then it collapsed all in a heap. Brian almost followed it down; the effort of swinging his arm and the knife left him swaying. He stared down at the weapon, another Pendragon-issue submachine gun. Forget it. Then he knelt and checked the head, even though he wondered if he'd be able to get back up again. He had to find out . . . .

  Her head. Dark gleaming hair cut short, startled eyes still moving and focusing. Her lips tried to form a word and failed. Claire. Bugger. His gut spasmed, a red hot iron, and he swallowed sour vomit.

  It had to be Claire. His eyes blurred for a moment, and he felt his heartbeat stagger. Out of all the possible combinations and permutations of Pendragons, it had to be Claire standing between him and Maureen.

  Not exactly a friend, not exactly a lover. You didn't really have friends or lovers inside the Pendragons. But Claire was someone he'd trusted more than once to guard his back. He remembered her long white body in bed, hard and angular and as big as most men's but emphatically female. She'd been bisexual, sometimes had it off with Dierdre. He wondered if she'd known who was on duty when she cut her prisoner loose. Her position, she must have.

  Bitch.

  Plots within plots within plots. Dierdre was beat to shit, broken bones and all, and Brian had killed one of her known lovers. Clues that Dierdre had been a victim of the plot and not its authoress.

  And the bitch had a nasty habit of adding two and two and ending up with five or six. He hadn't told her about Claire, about that stumbling gasping run and the words in twos and threes that told him where to find a further refuge. He'd kept the secret. But the evidence said that she knew. This served as punishment for both of them.

  He knelt there and cursed and wept, silently in case of any other guards. He'd trusted the Pendragons. He'd bloody well believed in them. This was where they'd led him. Killing a friend, a former lover. From behind. Assassination. Murder.

  He had to keep moving. He could almost hear the hounds baying on his scent. Brian cleaned his blade again and forced himself to his feet again, swaying, leg and arm and side throbbing. Blackness washed across his eyes, and he found himself leaning against the cold stone of the wall. He reached out for Power, hoping, and it came to him grudgingly. Merlin's spells waned with distance. The thin flow let Brian stiffen his knees and clear his sight and dull the flames of half-healed flesh. He could walk again. Slowly.

  His head still spun with the convoluted politics this hidden "Circle" had revealed to him. Claire had known about them, been one of them. Each layer he peeled off the onion, the stench got worse.

  Dierdre had said there were two sentries. Be just like her, if there were actually three or four and he got his ass shot off this close to safety. That might serve her purpose, whatever her purpose was. Brian resumed his jungle stalk, limping and slow, a wounded tiger slipping through the shadows and the tall grass, trusting nothing. And then the corridor ended in a door in stone masonry, a simple blank metal door with a crash bar like any fire exit in any building world-wide.

  He tensed, relaxed, balanced the kukri in his hand, and nudged the crash bar with his hip. The door swung open, no closer or springs, hit a stop, and bounced back half way. The room beyond lay empty, a small cell with two doors. The outer one was wood, old, worn, with iron and brass hardware from several centuries ago. He'd seen it in one of the monitors back where Claire had watched . . .

  Again he swallowed bile. Dierdre had known exactly what her plot would mean.

  The inner door had a modern keypad lock, a high-grade model that Brian had seen in military security. The outer door was set up for a heavy oaken bar that stood waiting on a pivot. No fiddling around, one swipe of your hand and it would thump into place. Even so, that door opened out as a further bulwark agains
t battering rams. Pounding on it would just make it tighter. Generations of paranoia, carved out of oak planks.

  It opened into a narrow alley, little more than shoulder-wide and dark under stars, no place to set your battering ram without first taking down the next building. And the alley opened into a dark one-lane street, high brick walls and shuttered windows and blank doors, no eyes on whoever came and went.

  He felt the air loosen around him as he staggered to the end of the alley, as if his skin relaxed over his muscles. That must mark the edge of the warding set by Uther's favorite war-wizard. Was it still Merlin's original spell, or had Pendragon mages renewed it through the generations? Bugger-all difference it made, really.

  But Power seethed around him, stronger than he'd ever felt in the "real" world, as if it piled up in waves against the dam that held it out of a place where it wanted to go. He gulped it like air to a drowning man. His eyes cleared and the fire of his wounds died back to a glow. He felt his hands shaking and knew he'd pay the price for this tomorrow, but he didn't have a choice. Not if he wished to reach tomorrow.

  He found a street sign, memorized it in case he needed to find this place again, and then glanced up and down the sidewalk, fixing the buildings in his mind as well as making sure no one saw him vanish between one step and the next. Not that they'd believe their eyes . . .

  But where was he going? Where would Maureen be? More to the point, when was he going? How had time been flowing behind his back, with the different streams of the Summer Country and the mist lands and the Pendragon's secret lair and the so-called "real" world?

  Then he realized that he knew where Maureen was. He'd never heard or read of this before, but he could set her face in his mind and go to her, rather than a place. He could go to her, twisting time to her urgent need, and she needed him now.

  And he needed Maureen, needed the Power of her healing, needed the clean smell of her to wash foulness from his nose, needed trees around him and sky above instead of old blood-soaked stones that reeked of treachery.