“But won’t that kind of insulation keep the computer from connecting with the Internet?” Kit asked.
“Possibly. I couldn’t say for sure unless I saw it up and running in its host environment. The simplest solution is just to run a copper ground to your landline, but it might need to be tweaked with. You’ll probably need to run a few tests to see how well your system connects—it will, however, run without disrupting the magical environment, so long as it’s in the cage and the cage is powered up.”
“Can it really be so simple?” Beth marveled.
“Only in the sense that it can be conceived and described. After that, you’re talking money—large cartloads of it, and that’s where you run into trouble. Most magicians have more interest in the Great Work than in getting rich. Governments commonly have large cartloads of money, but have trouble attracting competent magicians. Magic is anarchic by its very nature—Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law doesn’t get along very well with beancounters in suits. Any competent tyrant with any awareness of the Unseen World starts out by restricting access to it: Hitler didn’t round up all the Adepts he could get his hands on in the 1930s—from astrologers to Freemasons and everything in between—just to be mean. He saw them as a threat to his power. Fortunately, these days nobody takes magic that seriously. Something to be thankful to the New Age fluffy bunnies for.”
“Some people do,” Beth said, repressing a shiver.
“Well, there’s Sun Streak and Stargate and things like that, but those projects seem to be focusing more on psionicists, fortunately. So long as they’re concentrating on natural Talents, and not on Adepts, they should lose interest eventually. And if they do decide we’re a nuisance, probably all they’ll do is make study of the Art illegal. We’ve been underground before. We’ll survive.”
“Except for the people who get caught,” Beth said tightly.
“That’s right,” Azrael said levelly. “Except for those who get caught. But I’m sure Kit warned you both about my hobbyhorse, and I don’t think I’m going to transgress the bounds of hospitality by riding it tonight. You’ll forgive me, I know.” He smiled at them engagingly, and Beth found herself liking him more and more.
“I think—in the long list of people the government is likely to build internment camps for—that occultists come way, way down the list,” Kit said.
Beth and Azrael exchanged glances of wordless disagreement. Both of them thought that Adepts were much higher on that list than Kit seemed to—and when you came right down to it, it didn’t matter if they were at the top of the list or the bottom, if they were on the list at all.
“Well, that’s enough for tonight, ladies and gentleman. I’ve got places to surf and people to annoy. I should have that stuff you need by tomorrow night, and after that, it’s up to you,” Azrael said.
“That seems fair,” Kory said.
“More than fair. You’ve been a great help. Are you sure there isn’t anything we can do in return?” Beth asked.
Azrael smiled. “Sure there is. When you get it up and running, let me know how it works, okay?”
“We will,” Beth promised.
* * *
After Hosea left to go and clean out the basement room, Eric paced around the apartment, still edgy. There was no real point in trying to go back to sleep—not with the adrenaline surging through his system. He fielded a couple of calls from friends who lived in the building—mostly they wanted to compare notes on what he thought had happened. Finally he decided he might as well get his stuff together and go on over to the school. At least at Juilliard, he’d face a different kind of annoyance. And maybe he could shake his feeling that there was trouble on the horizon—distant still, but surely coming.
Must’ve picked that up from Jimmie. But the Guardians are supposed to have some kind of Distant Early Warning System, and it doesn’t seem to have gone off. Every attack of the blue megrims doesn’t have to herald the end of the world—I guess it’s true what Freud said: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
He was on his way out the door when the phone rang again. At first he just looked at it, unwilling to answer it and field yet another set of vague yet apprehensive questions. All the psychics in the building knew perfectly well that there hadn’t been trouble with the boiler this morning, but even if he wanted to tell them the whole truth, he wasn’t sure what it was. So far, this morning was a story without an ending. None of the Guardians, or Eric for that matter, knew why the building wanted Hosea, or for what—and Eric wasn’t sure if the discovery that Guardian House could act independently of the Guardians wasn’t the creep-worthiest part of the whole thing.
After the fourth ring, though, he turned back to answer it. Might as well do his damage control now as later.
“Eric? I was afraid I’d missed you!”
“Bethie?” She wasn’t quite the last person he’d expected to be calling him, but she was certainly in the bottom ten. “Where are you? Is everything all right?”
“We’re at Kit and Bonnie’s up in Inwood. Everything’s fine, actually, for a change. Kory and I are off to Comdex tomorrow to buy a computer system for a dragon—we took Ria’s advice, and it worked out great!”
She sounded happy and excited. Beth was in better spirits than Eric had seen her for quite a while—more like the old, pre-everything self, bubbly and effervescent.
“Wait—wait—wait—slow down. You’re buying a dragon?”
“A computer for a dragon,” Beth corrected, laughing. “His name’s Chinthliss, and he can help us—Kory and me—figure out how to have kids. He’s a friend of someone named Tannim, at Elfhame Fairgrove, he says—you know, with the race cars? All he wants is a computer system that will work Underhill, so he can surf the net, and Kit’s friend Azrael figured out how to make it work—all you need is a Faraday Cage and some really big batteries—this is going to be great!”
Beth was burbling, and well she might, if this Chinthliss had solved the problem of her and Kory’s future offspring. How had that been Ria’s idea? He’d have to ask her.
Are you sure you can trust this Chinthliss? Eric wanted to ask, but kept himself from asking. She’d said Kory was with her, and Kory would cut his own throat before he let Beth wander into any perils Underhill. If the two of them had cut a deal with this dragon, Chinthliss must be all right.
“So where are you going to find this computer?” Eric asked, when Beth ran down a little.
“Comdex. That big trade show they hold in Las Vegas every September. Kory says he thinks there’s a hame there—some of the Seleighe Sidhe took over an Unseleighe casino, if you can believe that, so we’ll have a Gate right there. And then we bring the stuff back through to Chinthliss’ place, and he’ll give us the information we need! He said so! Oh, Goddess, I can’t wait to get home and tell Maeve she’s going to have a little brother or sister!”
Eric smiled, listening to her cheerful prattle. At least things were looking up for someone. He wasn’t quite sure where that thought came from; his life was doing okay. This thing with Hosea would work out, he and Ria were doing fine, and nobody was even trying to kill him lately.
“Well, that’s great,” he said, a little lamely. Beth picked up on his tone at once.
“You sound a little down. Things working out okay at your end?”
“Oh, sure,” Eric said hastily. “I just got up way too early this morning. It looks like Hosea’s going to be living here—there’s a studio apartment available in the basement, and he’s getting it cleaned out now. He’s okay with my teaching him, too. I’m the only one who’s worried about that.”
Beth laughed. “Banyon, sometimes you worry way too much! You’ll be a great teacher. You wouldn’t want to contradict Master Dharniel, now, would you?”
“Perish forfend,” Eric said, smiling in spite of himself. He found that deep inside he was actually looking forward to the day he could introduce his new student to his old master. “Hey, I hate to cut this short, but I’ve got cla
ss and I don’t want to be late. You guys going to be around this evening? We could get together, maybe.”
“I wish we could, but Kory and I are going back to Everforest in an hour or so and then out to Lost Wages, and then from there to Chinthliss’. Come see us when we get back?”
“If I can,” Eric promised.
“Gotta run,” Beth said. “Love you!”
“Love you, too,” Eric answered. He stared at the phone for a long minute after he hung up. Beth’s good news ought to have made him feel better, but the strangely unsettled feeling he’d had all morning didn’t want to go away. He hadn’t wanted to burden Beth with his own problems, but ignoring them didn’t make them go away, either.
Just what did the House want with Hosea . . . and why?
She’d thought she’d been afraid before, but it was nothing to the terror Jeanette felt now, clutching at Aerune as he rode through the shadows of this unearthly place. She could feel the T-Stroke burning through her veins, pulling her down into darkness. She fought its effect frantically. If she lost consciousness here and fell from Aerune’s horse, she did not know what would happen to her.
They were no longer on Earth. Somehow she knew that, though there was little she could see. Aerune’s cloak whipped back over her, blinding her, as the stallion moved from a trot to a canter, and the chill surrounding her fought with the fire in her blood. She could see a full moon above them, horribly distorted, and around the horse’s legs shadowy pale things yelped and gibbered, leaping into the air to attack the riders and falling back in defeat.
Then the moon was gone in a blinding flash of light, and they rode across a sun-hammered desert of cracked clay beneath a dark brass-colored sky. Furnace heat struck like a blow, and in the sky above, black shapes wheeled and screamed.
Then darkness again, and on the horizon, torn by the black peaks of mountains, a distorted, blood-red sun filling half the sky. The air was thin here, and Jeanette found herself gasping for breath. Her lungs burned with the need for oxygen, and the sky above was black, filled with unwinking stars.
Then air and light—the foggy dimness of a swamp filled with giant trees festooned with corpse-pale moss. Aerune’s stallion splashed and skidded through the slime, and with each step it filled the air with the stench of rot. She looked down, and saw that the black water was filled with writhing white worms, each longer than a man. She shut her eyes tightly then, and did not open them until a shock of cold told here that they were again elsewhere.
—An arctic plain, the snow only marginally whiter than the sky overhead. In the distance, a vast structure of black stone, and the sound of a strange high-pitched refrain: Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
—Darkness more absolute than blindness, the only sound the stallion’s running hooves.
—Cold again, the stallion running faster, along a thin shining bridge only inches wide. Stars above and below, shining dimly through veils of violet haze. Ahead the bridge ended, and the stallion gathered itself to spring, leaping out into nothingness. She screamed then, the sound thin and flat as the world shifted once more.
The stallion slowed to a walk.
They were in a forest. It was dark, but this time the almost-comforting dark of night. Everything was lit by faint greenish moonlight, though she could see no moon. The trees were like nothing she’d ever seen: black and smooth and leafless, looking unpleasantly like polished bone. The ground was covered with a low white mist that reached to the horse’s knees concealing everything beneath it. She felt flushed and nauseated as the drug worked through her, and Jeanette knew she had only a few minutes of consciousness left. The trees wheeled dizzyingly around her, and she could not tell whether that was an effect of the drug, or whether they really were moving.
When they finally left the forest, Jeanette could see the source of the light. Far in the distance, at the top of a peak that rose up out of the center of the bone-wood, stood a tall gothic castle, shining with a baleful moth-green light. Try as she might, she could not see it clearly; walls and towers seemed to meet at impossible angles, and it wavered in her sight like a heat mirage, though the night was damp and cool. The castle grew to fill the entire world, burning brighter and then blindingly bright.
And then there was nothing at all.
Consciousness returned in slow stages. For a long time she drifted back and forth, aware enough to know she was awake, but unable to remember why that might be odd. Finally, a single fact floated to the front of her mind, pulling awareness with it like a train of boxcars.
She’d taken T-Stroke.
Aerune had kidnapped her.
The T-Stroke hadn’t killed her.
She was somewhere in Elfland.
Aerune’s castle?
Jeanette opened her eyes, rolling over in the same movement and crashing to the floor as she fell off the narrow bed she had lain on. The pain completed the process of her awakening, and the last few hours settled back firmly into memory. She looked around.
She’d been lying on a narrow shelf cut into a wall. She was in a small room, much taller than it was wide. Twelve feet up there was a door set into the wall; a latticework of iron bars through which light spilled. The walls and floor were made up of large gray stone blocks, like every dungeon in every movie ever made. Torches burned in iron brackets on the walls, but the light was white and directionless, too steady to be coming from the flickering orange flames or the doorway above.
It’s like a stage set.
She got to her feet and quickly sat down on the bed, her heart racing with excitement and fear. She’d gambled and won: by the very fact that she was alive, she knew she was one of the lucky 10%—she’d survived her dosing, and now, by rights, she should be able to manifest some sort of paranatural power.
But what? She felt no different. All the test subjects had used their powers instinctively, but she felt no instinctive pull to do anything out of the ordinary.
What was true was that she was dying. All the subjects who had received T-Stroke had died in a matter of days or hours. She felt a small thrill of triumph at cheating Aerune of his victory by dying, but quickly stifled it, unwilling to look beyond this moment to her own death. If Elfland existed, then so must Hell, in some form or another, and Jeanette knew that Hell was her destiny for what she’d done in life. To distract herself, she resumed her study of her cell and herself.
The clothes she had come here in—jeans, jacket, boots—were gone: she was barefoot, wearing a sleeveless grayish knee-length tunic of some coarse stiff fabric. There were chains and shackles set into the walls, and she walked over to inspect them, hefting the fetters in her hands. By rights they should have been black iron, and they were black, but the sheen and smoothness told her they were not iron. If anything she’d read about elves was true, cold iron would burn them like a red-hot poker, so the metal must not be either iron or steel. Pewter? Silver? More mysteries. It did explain the absence of her clothes, however. Everything but the T-shirt had iron in it—the studs on her jacket, the toe caps of her boots, the hooks and eyelets on her brassiere, even the snaps and rivets on her jeans. All steel, and thus taboo in this place—or should be. How much of what she’d read in old books could be trusted, and how much was sheer fabulation? Trusting anything she thought she knew could be fatal.
She did know one thing for sure and certain, however. Aerune had not brought her here just to lock her up and leave her to rot. And there was only one thing that made her valuable: her ability to manufacture T-Stroke.
But what did a faerie lord want with a drug that gave humans psionic powers? Jeanette frowned, puzzled. Elves had magic powers—she’d certainly seen enough hard evidence of that from Aerune—so she couldn’t imagine why they’d need what T-Stroke could do for them. T-Stroke didn’t give anyone magic powers, anyway; it gave them psionic powers—a fine distinction, but a real one. While magic could play cut and paste with the laws of physics, psionics were essentially bound by them: with psychic powers you might be able to read minds
or see the future—or heal—but you couldn’t turn lead into gold, raise the dead, or teach a pig to speak English. And while natural psychics might manifest several different psychic gifts in varying strengths, her T-Stroke-created Talents only seemed to be able to do one particular thing, which must make them doubly inferior to an elven magician—though it was also true that Aerune had wanted her test subjects, inferior or not. Back in December he’d been grabbing them before she or Robert could get to them, though presumably he could do everything they could do and more. She’d never found out why; she supposed she’d find out now.
She knew she should be more afraid than she was, but all Jeanette felt was numb. Shock, she thought—that and the certain knowledge that she would die soon whether Aerune tortured her or not. Death was such a final answer—and however much she feared it, she couldn’t escape it—so why not embrace it as much as she could?
Because she was too afraid to, that was why.
Just then there was a rattling sound from the doorway above. She looked up, just in time to see the doorway sink majestically downward through the stone like a descending elevator cage, until the opening was level with the floor.
Two trolls—they couldn’t be anything else—gazed through the bars at her.
Their smooth shiny skin was the greenish color of tarnished copper, and a wave of stench like rotting frogs rolled into the cell from their presence. They were about five and a half feet tall, alike as twins, and cartoonishly muscled, with shoulders nearly as wide as they were tall, and arms that dangled below their knees. Their faces were like a caricature of Early Man: flat noses, massive jaws, and heavy beetling brows from beneath which their eyes glowed with the silvery redness of beasts’. The long tips of pointed ears extended for an inch or two above their flat skulls, and dull lank hair the color of old moss began low on their foreheads and straggled down their backs. They were dressed in a parody of medieval costume: knee-length chain mail shirts beneath black tabards with a crimson blazon, bronze bracers laced onto their huge forearms, and shaggy boots that seemed to have been crudely made from imperfectly-emptied bears. Each of them held a seven-foot billhook in his hand.
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