A Host of Furious Fancies

by Mercedes Lackey

  That any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic was a favorite saying of Beth’s, and right now Kory hoped desperately that she was right, and that what they were facing was an advanced technology. Because if it wasn’t, his plan wouldn’t work. And if it didn’t work, he and Beth would be prisoners within the hour.

  He urged Mach Five to greater speed across the open desert, exulting inwardly when the flying car followed. Let them think he fled in blind panic, so long as they pursued him at the pace he set. And then he withdrew all his attention from his surroundings, to concentrate on the spell he must cast.

  Node Groves held Gates, semipermanent Portals between Underhill and the World Above that anchored the elfhames both in time and in space, and most of the traffic between the worlds used such Gates. Elvensteeds could, by their very nature, open a Portal anywhere at very little cost to themselves, but only for themselves and their riders. The Sidhe could open Portals away from the vicinity of a Gate and pass anything through them, but to open such a Portal away from a Node and its anchoring Grove took both Art and Power—the more Cold Iron or inanimate mass involved, the more power it took.

  Beth said modern computers contained very little metal because they were so advanced. Kory only hoped that an invisible car that flew was even more advanced than the computers he had seen today, or the backlash from his spell would guarantee he would not have to concern himself with Beth’s scolding.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated, making the shape of his intention clear in his mind. He drew on Mach Five’s power as much as he dared, adding it to his own, though he well knew he could not take too much or his elvensteed would not be able to maintain the pace Kory had set. Desperation drove him—he would not think about the fact that his spells had been useless against the Man In Green before, he would not think about the fact that if he failed here he would be helpless, all his power spent. He concentrated, summoned up all his power, his will, his need . . .

  And opened a Portal directly in the path of the onrushing aircar.

  It hurtled through and vanished, the Portal closing behind it. Kory only had the strength to hold a Portal for seconds—he had needed to ensure that both he and his pursuer were going so fast that the aircar could neither stop nor turn aside. Mach Five staggered to a halt and stood, head hanging, sides heaving. Kory, drained and exhausted by that ultimate effort, slid from his ’steed’s back to lie dazed and motionless beneath him in the desert sun.

  Beth reached them a few moments later. She jumped from Bredana’s saddle and staggered over to where Kory was groggily trying to sit up.

  “What happened?” Beth demanded. “Where are those guys that were following you? Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” Kory said, his voice blurry. “But I do not think they will be back for a while.”

  On the long—and considerably slower—return trip to Las Vegas, Kory explained what he had done. They were riding together on Bredana, leading the exhausted—but smug—Mach Five.

  “Perhaps it was not the safest course to take, nor yet the wisest, for now they are somewhere in Underhill with their vehicle and their weapons, but it was the only one I could think of, Beth, and I did not want you near me when I tried. It was possible that the backlash would have . . . So I wanted you out of the way before I tried anything.”

  “If you ever scare me like that again, Kory, you’ll wish they had gotten you,” Beth promised feelingly. “But . . . how can we be sure you got all of them, or that they won’t be back? Leaving aside the question of who they are in the first place.”

  “I can’t,” Kory said somberly. “But if they last saw us fleeing into the desert, that is where they will seek us—and our vanished pursuers—and we may gain the sanctuary of Glitterhame Neversleeps unmolested. I think it is time to lay this whole matter before Prince Gelert and cry his aid. It is a greater peril than I have wit to solve.”

  Upon their return to the Tir-na-Og Casino, Beth and Kory immediately sought out their host, glad to discover that there was stabling for Otherworldly steeds as well as more conventional parking beneath the casino.

  Gerry Meredith was devastated to hear about the trouble they’d had at Comdex. “But lovely people, how hideous that something like this should have happened to you on your very first visit to our wonderful city! Certainly you must not stir a step from your rooms, and I assure you, we will all be supernaturally vigilant! Don’t worry a hair on your pretty little heads about your shopping list—leave it entirely to me; I have oodles of entirely human employees just eating their heads off who would jump at the chance to go pick up some lovely computer equipment! We can have it brought here and transshipped to Misthold before you can say ‘Owain Glyndower,’ never fear. And no one at all will suspect the fair hand of the Fair Folk in the matter.”

  Their audience with Prince Gelert later that day was less encouraging.

  “Green men upon whom the magic cannot take hold, say you? This makes for ill hearing. One such came here yester’een—but he was following an Unseleighe lady, and we thought he had some private quarrel with the Dark Court. We are not so great a secret among mortalkind as some among us might hope—many mortals know of our existence, and not all of them have had good of our kind.”

  “I don’t think this is a private quarrel, Prince Gelert,” Beth said carefully. “It seems more organized than that. What happened to the young man who came here?”

  Looking around the Prince’s rooms, Beth was pretty sure whose taste was reflected in the decor of her own suite and the rest of the casino—but here there was no need to even pretend that the suite’s trappings were such items as might be found in the normal everyday human world, and the whole effect was like the inside of a jackdaw’s jewelry box.

  “Ah, my Rhydderich set a glamourie on him, casting from his mind all that had befallen him that day, and sent him back to his own place. At the time we thought no more of it.”

  Prince Gelert frowned, pondering the matter. The Seleighe lord was what Beth would have to call “thoroughly acculturated”; even here in his private penthouse suite, while discharging his princely duties, he wore Earthly garb—though the double-breasted suit in pale mauve silk (with matching tie) was a bit on the flamboyant side. Only his speech patterns betrayed any hint of his true age; fascinated as they were by novelty, the Sidhe were as prone as anyone else to gravitate naturally to the styles and fashions learned when they first became adults. And if your adulthood lasted several centuries, a certain amount of cultural jet lag was bound to set in. . . .

  “Have we enemies, my Rhydderich? And of ourselves, or of the hame, or of the Sidhe in general?” Gelert asked.

  The casino’s security chief—and head of Gelert’s personal guard—bowed his head. “I know not, my Prince—and the fault is mine for letting my prisoner go so lightly!”

  “You acted under my orders,” Gelert said kindly, excusing the fault. “We wish no trouble with mortalkind, no matter how they come to discover our true nature, and you had little reason to think he was not alone. You acted wisely—I do confess, I would like to know more of these enemies before I do face them.”

  “Maybe you could see if any of the other hames have been attacked,” Beth suggested cautiously. “Or see if anyone looking suspicious and wearing green has been hanging around them.”

  Or if a lot of elves are all of a sudden going missing, she thought and did not say. What did they want with Kory and the other elves, anyway? She wished she knew—but not at the price of ever seeing those green-clad whackos again.

  Gelert sighed heavily. “We must warn our Underhill guests of what it is that may stalk them while here in our city, and I fear that too many of them will regard it as a chance for great sport. Meanwhile, I shall send word to my brother princes of all that has befallen us here, and I am sure your lord will have his own questions for you when you return home, Prince Korendil. Be easy in your mind that we shall do all that we may to see that your mission here is accomp
lished as you would have it, and that your visit here is troubled no further.”

  He looked sorrowful and proud, a combination that clashed oddly with his dress and his surroundings, but after so much time among the Sidhe, Beth barely noticed the incongruity. Now that they had warned the Prince about the trouble in his own backyard, she was anxious to finish their business here and return to the safety of Underhill. Not even the prospect of delivering the computer system to Chinthliss and achieving the solution to her quest could comfort her at the thought of what had nearly happened today. Though the chase had come to naught, the terror had awakened old ghosts, and Beth dreaded the thought of sleeping tonight.

  Three days later, Beth and Kory stood once more before the gates to Chinthliss’ palace.

  After a long night of unbroken nightmares, Kory had demanded that Beth return to Elfhame Misthold without him. He had followed the next day, driving a wagon drawn by two affronted elvensteeds that was piled high with the booty from Comdex. Computer, printer, monitor, software, batteries—and the Faraday Cage that would make it all run in Chinthliss’ Underhill domain.

  The Gate opened as they approached, and once more they found themselves within the dragon lord’s great hall. Chinthliss was there to greet them himself, regarding the cart’s contents with ill-concealed eagerness.

  “We have brought all that you asked,” Kory said, bowing.

  “Excellent,” Chinthliss purred, rubbing his hands together in glee.

  “If you’ve got a room with an, um, skylight,” Beth said, “that would be the best place for it. It’s set up to run off batteries and solar cells, and it has a wireless connection for your Internet link.” Though where you’re going to dial in to, and how, I’m not sure I want to know.

  Chinthliss snapped his fingers, and servants appeared to unload the cart and carry away the boxes. Unlike the flowerlike geisha Beth had seen on her last visit, these servants were burly, bald, and half-naked—picture-perfect dacoits from the pages of an old penny dreadful.

  “All is in readiness. Perhaps you would like to see it assembled? I have asked my son to see to that trivial and insignificant detail.”

  Son? Beth wondered, as she and Kory followed the dragon.

  The room Chinthliss had chosen for the computer looked as if it had started life as a Victorian greenhouse. The walls and ceiling were made up of hundreds of panes of leaded glass, and jasmine trees in colorful porcelain pots ringed the walls. A large mahogany table stood in the center of the room, awaiting the computer.

  By the time Beth and Kory reached it, the servants had already gotten most of the equipment unpacked. A young man in jeans and a T-shirt stood surveying the mess; Beth was surprised to recognize the black-haired race-car driver from the photo in Chinthliss’ study.

  “My son, Tannim. Tannim, this is Prince Korendil and the lady Beth Kentraine. They have come to use my library.”

  “And paid handsomely for the privilege,” the young man said, grinning. “Hi. I’m Tannim, from Fairgrove.” He held out his hand. Fox had said Tannim was a friend of Chinthliss’, but the dragon called the young man his son. Which is true? Beth wondered. Both?

  “Hi,” Beth said, taking his hand. His grip was strong and warm, the palm slightly rough in the way of those who work with their hands. “I’m Beth, and this is Kory. I sure hope you know more about this stuff than we do.” And if you’re from Elfhame Fairgrove, I guess we’d better warn you about little green men with nail guns before you go.

  Tannim grinned engagingly. “Not really—but I read directions really well. Hey . . . what’s this?”

  Beth explained about the Faraday Cage, and to her relief, she didn’t have to explain much.

  “We use them sometimes at Fairgrove, too. Pretty cool.”

  With so many helping hands, the work went quickly. The Faraday Cage was unpacked and assembled—despite Tannim’s protests of mechanical helplessness, he certainly seemed to know what to do with a toolbox—and soon the gleaming copper mesh, a cube twelve feet square and eight feet high—filled the room. Tannim and Kory unrolled rubber floor mats and covered them with an Oriental carpet before the servants moved the mahogany table back inside. It had to weigh as much as a small car, but Chinthliss’ impassive servants handled it as if it weighed nothing at all.

  Soon the computer itself was spread out upon the table, an Omnium processor—only one generation up from the Pentium, not two, but Intel had looked at its choices of names—Sexium, Septium, Octium, Nonium—and wisely opted to skip them all—with a 27-inch flat screen, full-color laser printer, and wireless Internet connection. Cables ran to the solar array lying on the floor beside the table, an LED flashing slowly as it began to charge.

  “I guess we better switch the cage on before we turn on the computer,” Tannim said, “or there isn’t going to have been much point to this, right?”

  Just then Chinthliss’ butler arrived, to announce that luncheon was served. He fixed his master with a militant gaze, as if daring him to mistreat his guests. Chinthliss nodded reluctantly, although Beth could see that he was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning, and just as eager to play with his new toys.

  Over lunch, Kory told the others the tale of their flight and narrow escape from their pursuers in Las Vegas.

  “And you mean that those guys are somewhere Underhill? Wild,” Tannim said. He didn’t sound particularly worried. “Hope they’ve got more with them than those dart guns. Not everything down here is allergic to iron.”

  “What is of greater concern to me—as it will be to Keighvin Silverhair—is the motive for their attack, as well as their methods,” Chinthliss said. “You say they used no magic?”

  “None that I could sense,” Kory admitted. “Yet their artifice was such that they were invisible to me, though Beth could see them. And I do not understand how their vehicle could operate at all.”

  “Beats me,” Tannim said, interested. “Fairgrove is pretty up-to-date when it comes to automotive technology, and offhand I can’t think of anything that could do what you’ve described. Flying fast—and silently—and with some kind of cloaking device—there isn’t anything out there, or in development, that could do that.”

  “Unless it did not come from your world at all,” Chinthliss supplied helpfully. “Underhill is vast, and there are realms within it that rely as much upon technology as the Sidhe do upon magic. Yet why should they choose to trouble the elfhames upon Earth?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Beth agreed. “We’ve run into people before who wanted to treat Talents like lab rats, and there’s all those psychic research programs the government runs, but . . . these people knew about elves. And were hunting them.”

  “It would be sad indeed were the ancient alliance between Sidhe and human to founder upon this rock of enmity,” Chinthliss said. “I shall consider the matter, and see if any of my resources can provide an answer to this riddle. And now, let us return to our work.”

  By the time the four of them returned to the conservatory, the boxes had been tidied away and the solar panels were up and running. “Here goes nothing,” Beth said, flipping the switch to power up the Faraday Cage.

  She heard a faint whine that cycled quickly up past the edge of human hearing, and Kory winced. When the others moved to enter the enclosure, he stepped back.

  “I believe I shall remain here.”

  Beth glanced at him curiously for a moment, then understanding dawned. If the cage worked as advertised, and sealed off everything inside from the currents of magic constantly wafting through Underhill, stepping inside would be like going into a soundproof room—or worse—for Kory. It was tempting to fall into the habit of thinking of the Sidhe as invulnerable, but the truth was, they had as many weaknesses as mortals did. They were just different ones.

  Whatever the reason for Kory’s distaste, it was plain that Chinthliss didn’t share it. He led the other two into the cage and seated himself in the squamous leather chair behind the t
able. Beth felt a faint tingle—as if a storm were brewing—as she stepped inside, and smelled a faint tang of ozone, but nothing more.

  “What do I do?” the dragon asked eagerly.

  “Well, first you load the operating system,” Beth said, leaning over his shoulder.

  An hour later, the software they’d brought was installed and running, and there was a fat pile of manuals at Chinthliss’ elbow. Even the internet was up and running, on a T1 line to a standard server with a cross-worlds energy link via tightbeam broadcast to Underhill through a Nexus. Chinthliss had not only gotten his e-mail up and running, he’d ordered several thousand dollars worth of CDs to be delivered to a P.O. box in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  Well, it’s a good start. . . .

  “It’ll take you a while to get the hang of all these apps,” Beth said, regarding the screensaver full of flying toasters that moved smoothly across. A bouncy march played over the computer’s speaker suite in flawless high-fidelity concert hall sound. “But that’s everything.”

  “Excellent. I am truly impressed,” Chinthliss purred.

  “And now, my lord?” Kory said from outside the cage. “We have fulfilled our side of the bargain.”

  Reluctantly Chinthliss shut down the computer, watching as the screen went inert and dark. Then he got to his feet and walked out of the Faraday Cage.

  “Just as I promised you,” he said, reaching into his suit jacket and placing a large gold key into Kory’s hand. “Full access to my library and all that it contains. The information you seek is there. Tannim and I will be away on business for some days, but my house is yours. Charles will provide you with anything you desire.”