A great deal more.
And stop saying shit, he admonished himself. Stop speaking foulness when you are with gentle folk. How have you fallen into such a habit?
It serves, he answered himself, to help keep the gentle folk, or some of them anyway, away from me.
And why do you want to do that?
You know why.
But, if he did know, he didn’t want to think about it. Actually he couldn’t think about it, not just yet.
But change had come again, and he was going to have to adapt to change once more.
Here was another item that he hadn’t wanted to think about: he’d really known for a long time that something in the nature of that blowup was coming. It had to be coming sooner or later, no special powers were needed to see that, only a minimal intelligence and a knowledge of the situation. When you dammed up something long enough, when you repressed it, as that new young social worker at the soup kitchen would doubtless say, then sooner or later it would come bursting or leaking through in one form or another.
A good blowup, like this one, reduced tension. But it also created problems. For example, when he opened his eyes, where was he going to be? The answer when he discovered it might not be pleasant. But he was soon going to have to open his eyes, whatever—
His thought was stopped, totally, by the sound of a woman’s voice. It was a soft voice, not ten feet away from him, and it wasn’t laughing this time, as he had heard it in those ghostly warning pre-echoes that his powers had provided for him on the street. No, it was only talking, but its tones of subtle venom were unmistakable. Never in this world or any other was he going to forget the tones of that voice. The shock of them now was such that at first he had no idea what the voice was saying. It took him a little while to get his thought going again.
Then he who had once been known as Feathers opened his eyes. His surroundings hadn’t changed as much as he had feared. His body, strictly speaking, was no longer lying on the rack; rather he now floated horizontally in the air six inches above it. Around him, the tight swirl of his protective powers made what his eyes could perceive as a knotted blanket of blue smoke. Things had very recently been trying to reach him through that blanket, he perceived also, and had been defeated by it. With a little effort he could see some of those things now. They were squatting much like giant toads, in the four upper corners and two of the lower corners of the stone-walled chamber.
But he hardly noticed those things now. All his attention was fixed on the woman who was their mistress. She stood in the approximate middle of the stone-paved floor, almost within arm’s length of the strange torture-bed above which his body was suspended. She was facing him, hands on hips, poised like a sentry who had just heard a suspicious noise—or, he thought, almost like a housewife discovering a mouse. Her attitude was made no less serious by the fact that she was wearing nothing but two tiny strips of yellow cloth. In physical appearance she’d changed very little since he had seen her last.
If she had been anywhere near as surprised as he was by this meeting, she’d had time to get over the first shock of it before he looked at her.
The man who had been Feathers saw no point now in being chary of his use of magic, and therefore no need to struggle with joints stiffened by hours of immobility. Instead of straining to sit up now, he simply willed himself standing. The knots of smoke that held his body tugged and tightened; their network lifted him gently from his suspension above the rack and turned him vertical and set him gently on his feet, a little closer to the woman than he had been before. He noted with secret joy the effort that it cost her not to step back.
He was about half a head taller than the top of her dark curls; familiar measurement.
“Hello, Nimue,” he said softly.
She didn’t have an answer for him right away. There was a lot going on behind her mask of calm control; he could feel it, but he wasn’t able to identify it all, and in fact he did not try. Long seconds passed and still Nimue did not speak. She might have tried words on him while he was still unconscious. If so he felt sure that none of them had been well-meant, and as far as he could tell none had been effective. He and this woman had long ago reached an equilibrium of sorts. The smoky blanket of his powers protected against more than claws.
While waiting for her to speak now, he thought about the creatures, the activity, he could perceive in the room around him. He calmed the local atmosphere somewhat toward normal, while taking good care that the effectiveness of his defensive powers should not be hindered. Their full mobilization was one good effect that the blowup had produced.
Meanwhile his memory was privately examining a recent image: that of a dark man dressed in darkness. A rather tall man, not met before, except in passing on the street, claiming with sly tongue to be well-meaning, prating about honor. And effective. Oh yes. He who had been Feathers could still feel the bruise on his temple, throbbing just a little. The dark-clothed man had been wise enough to know the moment in mid-incantation when it would be possible to strike, and he had had nerve enough to take the risks involved. And speed, and controlled strength. And the old tongue. It all added up to vampire. One of the old, honorable… oh, piss on it, what did it matter now?
And—oh yeah. Some little girl had been here too, dressed up like a stage fairy. In fact this robe bemerded with idiot symbols that he was wearing now had come from her. There was probably some damnfool masquerade planned here, that doubtless had behind it some evil game of Nimue’s, and the girl was just an innocent caught up in the mess. Pretty thing, too. Well, too bad. The world was full of innocents in trouble through no fault of their own.
Only at this point did it occur to him, provoking in him first amusement and then faint concern, exactly what had been the probable fate of the vampire and the girl when the blowup happened. Serve the old blood-drinking bastard right, he told himself, feeling his sore head. And then the innocent girl… he sighed.
Nimue had at last tired of her game of silent waiting. “By what name shall I call you now?” she asked. It was certainly a banal way for one adept to begin a conversation with another. And a pointed reminder of his own discourteous bluntness in using her own true name at the start. Well, some people deserved courtesy, and some…
Nimue had addressed him in one of the languages from old Brittany; he couldn’t recall the name of the damned tongue now, if it even had a name, but as soon as he heard it again the sound and meaning of it flowed smoothly once more in his antique brain cells.
He spoke the tongue of Brittany, for the first time in a thousand years “I’m leaving. You need not worry about what you ought to call me.”
“I should prefer to be able to use some name.” Nimue’s voice was smoothly unrevealing. “For reasons of courtesy.”
“All right. Hawk is a good name.” Then, switching to modern English: “Mr. Hawk, to you.” And then, after a pause: “I don’t get it, what you’re trying to do here. I mean, why me? And tied down on a rack. I mean, what the bloody hell, woman? Did you just want to see the expression on my face when I woke up?”
Nimue only smiled faintly, and shook her head. They both knew that she didn’t have to explain anything at all to him. Because… because… the reason escaped Hawk just now, but he knew it was a damned good one.
“Just fate, I suppose,” he meditated aloud. “That’s why I’m here. Or somebody’s plan?”
Still the enigmatic smile. Nimue raised an open hand, and made a small gesture with two fingers, and two of the things—in the old days he would probably have called them familiars—from two of the top corners of the room went flickering away upon some errand. They were pre-instructed, evidently, or maybe pre-programmed was the modern word.
Nimue said: “No plan of mine, Mr. Hawk. You can leave here any time you want to, for all of me. All we wanted was some human who would not be missed, so it will be easy enough to obtain a replacement. The rack was just a handy place to keep you, nothing more. By the way, would you like a good bott
le of wine to take along? I understand that wine had been your chief interest ever since we last spoke.”
She couldn’t resist a chance for petty cruelty. Hawk shuddered. The emotion that made him do so was not quite recognizable. “Just ‘some human’, hey? And you got me. How about that man who picked me up on the street? Some private plan of his, maybe?”
Nimue looked as if she would like to remind Mr. Hawk of his expressed wish to leave, but was at the same time afraid that any word from her might have an opposite effect. Was all this some subtle ploy intended to influence him to stay? Hawk didn’t think so.
He could see that some enterprise of consequence was in the process of organization here.
Besides the squat-toads, relatively easy to visualize when you knew how, a veritable crowd of other presences were waiting in the wings. The dim dungeon—as moderns would call this place, he’d rather simply call it a hole—crawled with powers, his own, Nimue’s, who-knew-whose. All these were edging each other ominously, maneuvering for position, elbowing like basketball players under some evil backboard. Were such as these in fact spirits? Were they alive at all, or like the winds only the artifacts of some invisible force? He still didn’t know, despite the long centuries of service he had received from some of them. The older he grew the less he knew with certainty. But when the ball flew at the backboard, things were going to happen. Of that he could be sure.
Anyway something of his own willed purpose must have been worked out amid the jockeying. A recent unspoken, almost unconscious wish of his was granted: another look at the coffee-colored man who had picked up Feathers on the street, and drugged him, and then drove him all the way out here from Chicago.
This abductor came through a door into the dungeon now. “What is it?” he demanded of Nimue, in the tone of one who has just heard his name called from an adjoining room. Then he looked in surprise at the old man’s gown, and then he was distracted seriously by trying to aim a hard stare into the old man’s eyes. Whatever the hard stare met there caused the kidnapper to back up a step, right into a corner where one of the demon-toads hung right above his head. Neither of Nimue’s agents appeared, for the moment, to be aware of the other one’s existence.
Now that her human helper had been maneuvered into the room, Nimue would go along with his presence gracefully. “Carados,” she addressed him easily, “tell me why you picked out this particular old specimen? Out of all the wrecked men who must have been available on that street.” Her tone was mild, but the speech was a display of arrogance, giving away as it did the true name of one of her people, throwing caution aside, daring Hawk to make what use of it he liked. They both understood that she could still dare him as she liked. Because…
Carados shrugged. Insolently his eyes ransacked his mistress’s body, as if she had put that brief costume on to please him. She was not only in a swim suit, Hawk noted, she was actually still wet. She must have been called from poolside for the emergency. And again he wondered just what the hell was going on.
Carados said: “Why not? He was just about able to walk, so I didn’t have to carry him, but too far gone to put up any fuss. What’s wrong with him?”
“Take a milder tone with me. Somehow you were led, influenced, to choose this particular man for the next sacrifice. I would like to know who influenced you, and how and why.”
“He been feeding you some kind of line about me?” And Carados tried to look menacingly at Hawk, but somehow the intimidating stare became diverted. Carados stared up uneasily into one corner of the ceiling. Plainly he knew that something was there besides the stones, but he was having a lot of trouble even seeing what it was. Nimue had to recruit whatever assistants she could find, evidently.
And the jockeying in the background, below the level of mundane reality, had grown more feverish. It was more than jockeying. Hawk could feel the energies of magic, blind, immensely powerful, all tensing steadily like the magnetic lines of force wound tight within a generator, like land along an earthquake fault. His first estimate had been wrong. That little blowup of a few minutes ago had really achieved almost nothing in the way of a relief of tension. To hash the metaphor some more, that little blowup had only taken one key blockage out, and the logjam was now free to rearrange itself, which it was doing. When rearrangement was done, it would be free to move. There was likely to be another blowup down the road, and it was likely to be a bloody whopper.
His swearwords were becoming more English, he noted. He supposed that might count in some minds as progress toward elegance.
Nimue, he could see, was pondering, along with other problems, what best to do with her mad helper. The man must be very useful, very good at something, to balance the obvious difficulties of having him around. Hawk had now been near the man for long enough, and was now alert enough himself, to detect the dangerous madness radiating from him. The madman had received a bad scare, too, at some time in the recent past, a scare that would probably have disabled an ordinary citizen for some time. But he had hardly been affected once the danger was gone. Against some things madness could guard almost as well as powers.
Becoming aware of the scrutiny of the two sorcerers, and made uneasy by it, Carados became belligerent. “You’re nothing special, old man. You’re shit I picked up off the street. Hey, some cool threads you picked up there.” And he muttered some garbage that was meant to be a pain-inflicting spell, and reached to grab Hawk by the robe-front.
Such manhandling of the old man had been relatively easy before the recent blowup and mobilization. Nimue understood that stage of things was past, and now Hawk could see her wince perceptibly in anticipation. But Hawk had already eased the trigger on his defenses somewhat, and Carados only pulled back fingers twisted in a sudden cramp.
Unnoticed by Carados, the demon above his head stuck out a foot-long tongue in mockery. Carados rubbed his aching fingers, glared at Hawk, and moved forward to try again. Hawk looked at him in turn, and Carados stopped, his eyes turned downward in disbelief. In his mind he had felt the solid stone floor of the dungeon crack, threatening to open up beneath his feet.
Looking at Nimue, Hawk put his question once more: “What’re you trying to do here?”
Her smile was a touch broader than it had been before. Her teeth were fine, a little too perfect but otherwise very human. As she was, he reminded himself. She said: “Don’t you want the wine before you go?”
He muttered something foul. He wasn’t going to try to insist that she answer him, because… looking down at himself, he became distracted. When he showed up back on the Street, dressed like this… never mind, something could be done about that.
He spoke three more words, and was gone.
The woman in the yellow bikini looked up at the ceiling. All the toad-creatures were gone from its high corners.
Gregory, who must have been waiting, listening, just outside, came in. Fat Arnaud, still weak from the tearing of his werewolf’s throat by vampire’s fangs, followed cautiously behind him. Carados, understanding less and less of what was happening, looked at the three other people in the room with him, sneered at them, his mind retreating from the scene, superimposing its own reality.
The woman they called Vivian asked prosaically: “What time is it, Gregory? I must have a talk with our young visiting magician before dinner.”
TWELVE
Margie was still sitting in the position in which she had collapsed, on the grassy flank of a lightly wooded knoll. She was facing a small lake framed in gentle hills, its nearer shoreline a little more than a hundred yards away. The sun was low in a clear sky, the weather a gentle fairness utterly unlike the scorch of the morning and early afternoon of the day on which Margie had closed her eyes a moment earlier. The air here had a pastel quality, touched with mist. It was all so different that Margie understood from the start, without reasoning about it, that her journey had been a long one.
Here it was either early morning or late afternoon, with no immediately apparent way to decide
which. The long grass was damp, either from morning dew or recent rain. The air was moist and fresh. Between the foot of Margie’s hill and the adjoining rise, a tiny stream murmured through tall rushes. The stream widened gradually into a small marsh at the place where it joined the lake. Immediately beyond the marsh, some high ground just along the lake shore held a string of crude, thatch-roofed buildings. Smoke rose tranquilly from a clay chimney. On the far side of the hamlet a single lane of road, unpaved and deeply rutted, followed the curve of shoreline for another quarter of a mile before turning away to vanish among more of the gentle, grassy hills.
In the opposite direction from the hamlet, to Margie’s left, a few sheep were grazing along the flank of an adjoining hill. When she got to her feet the movement was slow and uncertain, but still it caught these animals by surprise. They baaed and turned in awkward flight.
The disturbance among the sheep triggered another. A great shaggy dog that had been dozing near the buildings now awoke, with a savage volley of growls and barks. The animal leaped to its feet and started toward Margie, to halt when it reached the edged of marshy ground between.
The dog’s excitement in turn produced people. An old man and a young one appeared from somewhere to stand between two of the buildings. At first glance Margie thought that they were dressed very much like the servants at the party, but a second look showed that the clothing of these men was somewhat more varied and complex. They advanced slowly, with puzzled faces, to pause like the dog on the edge of the marsh. The young man spoke to quiet the dog, while the gray-beard continued to study Margie from fifty yards away, then hailed her. Their language was not English, nor—and this seemed additionally unfair—did it even sound anything like the tongue that the other two men had spoken before Margie in the dungeon. That scene too had seemed perfectly real. Before the world blew up in a swirl of monsters…
The peaceful landscape before Margie now was reassuring by comparison. Both men were calling to her now, but she could not understand a word.
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