Trapped

by James Alan Gardner

  Tzekich slapped him again. “Spark business is what they say it is.”

  Dreamsinger chuckled. “Despotism is nice that way.”

  “Besides,” Tzekich continued to Xavier, “we can’t deal with anything if a Spark kills us for being uncooperative. Stop stonewalling!”

  Xavier paused another long moment, making sure no one missed his disgust. A man of the old school, I thought: responding to every obstacle with brute force, and if something didn’t fall down, he’d just hit it harder. It explained why a man Xavier’s age was still just a minor lieutenant, living in a backwater like Dover-on-Sea; he could be trusted to keep people in line and maintain a basic revenue stream, but he’d botch any job that called for finesse.

  After one last glower, the old man turned and shuffled across the room to a grand piano shoved against the wall. The piano was placed wrong-side-out: if you opened the lid above the strings, the sound would be deflected into the wall rather than to the room at large. Perhaps Xavier had seen pianos in other people’s houses and decided to buy the most expensive one he could find. Clearly he didn’t care about music—the cover was closed over the keys, and stacked with piles of paper, mostly unopened envelopes. Xavier’s filing system: toss incoming mail onto the piano, and deal with it whenever.

  The message Dreamsinger wanted had just arrived that night, so it must be on top of a pile. Xavier realized that we all would know that—otherwise, I could imagine him shuffling through papers with sullen slowness, while Tzekich grew more and more livid. But he found the note soon enough; then the only delay was the time he took unfolding the page and moving the paper back and forth until he established a distance where he could read the words.

  “It’s from Ian Nicoll of the Hoosegow,” Xavier said. “Nice little boat, the Hoosegow. Ian gave it the name because he says it feels like a prison, but if you ask me—”

  Tzekich snapped, “Just read the damned note!”

  Xavier tried to hide a smile, clearly pleased he’d got under her skin. “All right, let me see. Let me see. Let me see.” He squinted and shifted the paper a little closer to his eyes. Then a little farther away. Then back to its original position. “Got some passengers tonight,” he finally read. “Two kids from that school in Simka. Eloping, the idiots. Going to Niagara Falls, to get married then fuck their brains out. Pathetic. But I get paid, so who cares? I’ll be back in time for...” Xavier stopped reading and folded the page. “The rest is just private.”

  Dreamsinger held out her hand for the note. Xavier only stared at her until Tzekich heaved an exasperated sigh. “Either you give it to her or she takes it from your cold dead fingers.”

  “If you want me to kill him, dear sister,” Dreamsinger said, “just say the word.”

  Tzekich gave a humorless laugh. “No thanks, milady. That might sound as if I was giving an order to a Spark Lord...or asking for a favor, which is possibly more dangerous.”

  “Spoilsport,” Dreamsinger pouted. She looked back at Xavier, her hand still held out for the message. With a grumpy look, he plodded across the room and gave her the page. Dreamsinger unfolded it and studied the message briefly. “What time did you receive this?”

  Xavier said, “A few hours ago. From my man Ripsaw.”

  “When did Ripsaw receive it?”

  “He walks around the port every night after supper. Between six and midnight.”

  “I want the exact time.”

  Xavier smiled as if he’d been hoping she’d say that. “Ask Ripsaw yourself.” He pointed at one of the men who’d been standing too close to the windows when Dreamsinger blew them in—a man with more blood on his clothes than in his veins. Dreamsinger peered at the corpse with calculation in her eye; perhaps debating whether it was too late to try a Twinning, whether the brain was still intact or just soggy sweetmeats. After a moment, she sighed with regret.

  “So,” she said, “we don’t know whether this note got written before or after passengers arrived at the Hoosegow. If it was before, the captain simply expected ‘two kids from that school’—which doesn’t tell how many really showed up. If it was after, and the captain was looking right at the two teenagers as he wrote his message...that would make things more interesting.” She looked at Xavier. “Do you know if Hoosegow actually left port?”

  The old man made a sour face. I suspected he did know, but disliked providing information that might actually be useful. Before he could vacillate on an answer, one of the two surviving enforcers spoke up. “I was on harbor watch tonight. Hoosegow left its slip at 11:05.”

  Xavier gave the man a dirty look; the enforcer ignored it, keeping his gaze on Tzekich. Obviously, the bully-boy had decided that pleasing the top boss helped one’s career far more than humoring a surly deputy.

  “So,” Dreamsinger murmured, “the boat is on its way. No reason for that if it didn’t have passengers; so Sebastian must have showed up and said, ‘Let’s go.’ He wouldn’t do that unless Rosalind was with him.”

  “Rosalind?” Knife-Hand Liz repeated. “I thought you said...” Her voice trailed off.

  “Dear sister,” Dreamsinger said, “one version of your daughter is dead. Another may be sailing to Niagara Falls; and now I’ll have to follow.” She shuddered. “Pity me, friends. Such a dreary place. So conventional and crowded. Why do people come from around the world to see water falling over a cliff? And all the hideous ‘attractions’; they should be called distractions, built to prevent newlyweds from realizing the banality of what they’ve just done. I hate it all. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it...” She stopped herself with an effort. “But, I suppose while I’m there, I can check—”

  Her voice choked silent. Her face froze—as if some inner reflex held her expression immobile so we couldn’t guess what was going through her mind. An instant later, she whirled to face the three of us at the window. “This Sebastian was a powerful psychic?”

  We all nodded.

  “What was his power?”

  Impervia and the Caryatid looked at me to answer. I chose my words carefully. “Our psionics teacher says Sebastian can talk to the world: as if land, sea, and air are full of happy puppies, eager to fulfill the boy’s tiniest wish. So his powers cover the whole spectrum.”

  “The boy talks directly to nanites? And he’s headed for Niagara Falls?” Dreamsinger’s voice had gone shrill. “With a creature that can make itself look like Rosalind?”

  Mother Tzekich stirred at her daughter’s name, but didn’t have a chance to speak. Dreamsinger surged toward the window where Impervia, the Caryatid, and I still crouched. The Spark Lord grabbed me by the jacket and heaved me up as if I weighed no more than a rag doll. “Fool!” she whispered, so softly no one else could hear. “Those curds weren’t a bioweapon. They were cast-off cellules from a Lucifer.”

  “But I thought...” Opal had said the flake-away bits of Lucifer were like grains of black gunpowder. Dark and dry. I suddenly remembered that both Dreamsinger and her brother had asked if I was sure the curds I’d seen were white and wet, not dark and dry. They both must have suspected there was a Lucifer in our neighborhood, but my talk of a bioweapon had made it seem like something else. “It looked like cottage cheese,” I said. “Honestly...”

  “The Lucifer mutated,” Dreamsinger told me in another furious whisper. “It’s been trying to do that for decades. It knows Spark Royal can track its life-signs...so the blasted thing finally managed to change its metabolism. And now it’s going to Niagara Falls with a psychic?”

  She tossed me aside in disgust. Pure luck let me grab a corner of the window frame and catch my balance; otherwise, I would have fallen onto the broken glass that littered the floor. Dreamsinger didn’t care—she was already stepping over the sill, out onto the dark lawn. At the same time, she tapped her pearl necklace: the one that was actually a radio transmitter. “Spark Royal, attend,” she snapped. “I need immediate pick-up, this location.”

  “Please activate anchor,” a metallic
voice said from the necklace.

  “Give me ten seconds.”

  Dreamsinger reached toward her waist. To my eyes, she was grabbing at nothingness a short distance in front of her bare navel. A belt pack, I thought; her armor must have pouches and attachments that I couldn’t see because of the Chameleon spell. A moment later, she pulled a small device from thin air—a black plastic box the size of a book, with four metallic gold horseshoes arranged in a diamond on its top face.

  “Dearest sister,” she called to the Caryatid, “could you come here, please?”

  The Caryatid hurried forward.

  “Do you see this switch?” Dreamsinger pointed to a toggle on the box’s side. “When I’m gone, please push that; it turns the anchor off. Be careful not to turn it on again—just keep the anchor safe, and I’ll come for it someday.”

  “Yes, milady.”

  “Good. Keep faith with me.” Dreamsinger kissed the Caryatid lightly on the lips. Then she whirled and told the rest of us, “Only my sister on the Burdensome Path may touch the device. Everyone else stand clear.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she stepped away from the Caryatid, pushed the toggle-switch herself, and laid the box on the ground. “Spark Royal, attend,” she said to empty air. “The anchor is active. Take me home.”

  A tube of creamy white lashed down from the sky: the same ectoplasmic smoke we’d seen at Death Hotel. It glinted with color, buffed gold, sea green, peacock blue...and again I tried to imagine what it might be. An energy beam projected from an orbiting satellite? Ionized particles like the Aurora Borealis, curled in a shimmering sleeve? Or perhaps a living creature, some ethereal worm hundreds of kilometers long, ready to lower its tail whenever a Spark commanded?

  The thing stabbed down like a lightning bolt, straight for Dreamsinger’s anchor. The device must have worked like a magnet, for the instant the smoke-tail made contact, its tip adhered to the box; then the tail’s mouth spread wider, until its edges touched all four golden horseshoes on the anchor’s top surface.

  The tip was locked down and secure. But the rest of the smoke-tail flapped wildly, making no sound but whipping through the darkness in ghostly frenzy. A fluttering wraith reaching high out of sight.

  Beyond the house, dogs began to bark—Xavier’s guard pack, finally noticing something was amiss. Why hadn’t they come running when Dreamsinger made the windows explode? Idiotic beasts. Then I realized the explosion had taken place inside the antiscrying shield; since the dogs were outside, the antiscrying sorcery would make them ignore the din of smashing glass. They wouldn’t react till something became visible on their side of the shield.

  Something like a big smoky tube sprouting from the lawn to the stratosphere.

  Three German Shepherds dashed snarling into view; then they stopped in a doggy double-take. They paid no attention to those of us still within the antiscrying shield: all they saw was a pillar of ghost-smoke flicking around the yard, sweeping past the bare-branched trees, occasionally billowing out over the bluffs before whisking back to the house again. The tube’s random swooping soon took it in the dogs’ direction...and they backed off, whining in their throats. The smoke didn’t touch them—it didn’t touch anything, not the house, not the trees, not a single blade of winter-parched grass—but it came within a hair of grazing everything in sight, skimming past my face, darting at the Caryatid’s feet, even looping once around Impervia’s neck before uncoiling again and careening off. As if it were stalking each of us in turn, trying to make us flinch.

  Flinch we did...and the smoke-tail wagged itself happily, heading off to scare the dogs again.

  The metallic voice spoke from Dreamsinger’s necklace. “Anchor established. Ready for transport to Spark Royal.”

  “Dear sister, I must go,” Dreamsinger told the Caryatid. “Turn off the switch when I’m gone.”

  The Caryatid nodded. Dreamsinger smiled back, then squatted beside the anchor box. She slid one finger under the tethered end of the smoke-tail, slipping her fingertip into the mouth of the tube...and suddenly her whole body was sucked inside, her bones, her flesh turning as malleable as clay. It looked like something from a comic drawing, a woman’s body pulled thin as a garter snake, then rammed into an aperture no bigger than a mouse hole; but there was no humor in seeing such grisly distortion for real. The whole thing lasted less than a second, and made no sound except a soft swish of air—otherwise, I might have been sick on the spot.

  The Caryatid, looking equally queasy, forced herself to press the anchor’s toggle-switch. Click. Immediately, the smoke-tail slipped free, jerking loose from its tether and bounding high into the sky like a taut rope suddenly cut. It soared halfway to the clouds, dropped down once more to the treetops, then flew straight up out of sight.

  Mission accomplished. The tube had removed Dreamsinger to Spark Royal—whence, presumably, she’d ride a similar tube to Niagara Falls. There’d have to be an anchor device somewhere in the Niagara area, ready to catch hold of the tube’s tail end...but I suspected there were anchors all over the world, planted in out-of-the-way corners, waiting for the day a Spark Lord needed to get somewhere in a hurry.

  There’d been one in Death Hotel—a place the small device could he undisturbed for centuries. It was probably radio-controlled, ready to activate itself when a signal came...

  My train of thought was interrupted by someone behind me seizing my arm. I looked around. Elizabeth Tzekich was there. “The Spark Lord’s ran off,” she said. “Leaving you to my tender mercies.” Her eyes flashed. “Now you’re going to tell me what’s going on.”

  12

  DEMON, DEMON, LOVER

  Tzekich pulled me across the parquet littered with glass. I tried not to tread in the blood of the dead...but Knife-Hand Liz walked straight through. When she reached a clean section of floor, she left sticky scarlet slipperprints.

  Back at the windowsill, the Caryatid and Impervia climbed inside. Staying loyally with me, even though they could have run off into the night. My friends.

  Meanwhile, the surviving bully-boys from the Ring unholstered their pistols. Behind the enforcers, Xavier broke into a wolfish leer—he must have regarded us all as human punching bags, here to help him forget the humiliation of submitting to a Spark Lord. Lucky for us, Tzekich outranked the old bastard...and she was so irked by Xavier’s stupid intransigence, she treated Impervia, the Caryatid, and me with utmost gentility. She obviously wanted to annoy her deputy as much as he’d annoyed her.

  “Please sit,” Tzekich said, gesturing toward a black leather couch. “Tell me everything you know.”

  We sat, we talked. The facts, but no interpretation. I didn’t recount Chancellor Opal’s encounter with the Lucifer, nor did I mention what Dreamsinger whispered to me before she left. I’d have to ponder her words some time soon, but not with Elizabeth Tzekich and two armed guards hovering over me. For now, I just stuck to the bioweapon version of the tale; suddenly changing my story might antagonize Knife-Hand Liz to the point of violence.

  She was angry enough as it was—during my recitation, Xavier made a constant nuisance of himself with pointless intrusive questions, aggravating Tzekich to the verge of fury. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t toss him from the room...or borrow a gun from an enforcer and create a new opening in her organization. But she tolerated Xavier’s petty interference with clenched teeth, only once giving him a lethal glare and saying, “I am trying to find out about my daughter.”

  Of course, Tzekich asked questions of her own—and from their tone, I realized she didn’t want to believe her daughter was dead. If there were two copies of the girl, why couldn’t the one still alive be the real Rosalind? Perhaps an enemy had created a sorcerous duplicate of her daughter as a way to infiltrate the Ring of Knives. But Rosalind had defeated the double by using the impersonator’s own cottage cheese bacteria; then the girl had run off with “that Sebastian boy” to escape before more enemies arrived. Elopement was so utterly ridiculous at Rosalind’s
age, it must be a ruse to throw off pursuers.

  That made sense, didn’t it?

  No one wanted to argue—not even spiteful Xavier. There are some things it’s not safe to say when a mother is being willfully blind.

  Tzekich rose from her chair and snapped her fingers toward her men. “We’re leaving now. Let’s go.”

  Xavier grunted. “Just like that, we’re off?”

  “To Niagara Falls. Get your fastest boat.”

  “Ach...it won’t be as fast as that Spark Lord.”

  “No,” Tzekich said, “but it might be fast enough to catch the Hoosegow”

  Xavier shook his head. “They got a good wind, a long headstart, and the Falls are only ten, twelve hours away. Hoosegow will beat us.”

  “We’ll still be close behind.” Tzekich headed for the door. “I refuse to sit here while my daughter’s in danger.”

  Xavier’s expression was easy to read: The girl’s not in danger; she’s dead. But he simply pointed a thumb at Impervia, the Caryatid, and me. “What do we do with them?”

  Tzekich stopped in the doorway. She turned back to consider us. Impervia and I tensed, ready to put up a fight...but the Caryatid simply toyed with the anchor device Dreamsinger had left in her keeping, idly tracing one finger along the inlaid gold horseshoes. Did Tzekich want to mess with a Spark Lord’s “dear sister”?

  A tense silence. Then Tzekich said, “Forget them.” She glared in our direction. “Get the hell out.”

  We didn’t need to be told twice. Before Tzekich vanished from the doorway, before Xavier could have us roughed up behind his boss’s back, we three teachers were out the window and scurrying into the darkness.

  The guard dogs raised a ruckus on our way off the property; but with the Caryatid waving flames in the dogs’ faces and Impervia swinging a fallen tree branch as a club, the animals soon decided their duty lay in snarling from a distance rather than outright attack. They saw us to the gate, yapping all the while and continuing long after we were gone. Dogs on other estates took up the barking, making an awful racket...and I cringed at the noise until I realized it was harmless.