Summoned to Tourney

by Mercedes Lackey; Ellen Guon

  Well, none of that got her free of this place. And thinking about him made her angry. Anger disturbed her equilibrium, and if she wasn’t careful, that would give her away to the monitors. She was certain that there were monitors. They hadn’t attached any wires to her, but she had no doubt that every bodily and mental function that could be monitored was being watched. In this ultra-secret complex there must be a great many technological breakthroughs available to the scientists that the general public wouldn’t see for a decade or more.

  Being duped into captivity had been her first and last mistake. After the initial shock and the drug they’d used on her had worn off—which was long before the car she was in reached the lab complex—she was ready and wary, feigning a fear and confusion she did not feel.

  She suspected they had been relying heavily on the drug to keep her disoriented. They must not have ever had a healer with as high a drug tolerance as she had, and she had no intention of letting them know how quickly their narcotics wore off, how little they affected her. If they did, they’d drug her again, and she intended to retain her advantage.

  Warden Blair had revealed more to her about himself than he dreamed, and certainly she had given very little away to him. His open questions about what frightened her, for instance—so clumsy even a CIA operative would have been ashamed. Even if he’d had someone with telepathic skills monitoring her, the chances that a telepath could penetrate her mind to read more than she allowed him to see were slim to none. She let him think that she was afraid of the dark; a simple phobia, and being left in total darkness was no hardship to her. And it was pitifully obvious from Blair’s clumsy threats that he had no notion just how extensive her personal contacts were—nor how high up they reached. She had favors owed to her by some fairly high-powered lawyers and private investigators—not to mention Ria Liewellyn’s still-loyal second-in-command—and when she failed to return from this conference, there were going to be several people asking awkward questions. People it would be difficult to shut up. People with money, political influence, or both.

  Warden Blair was going to discover he’d taken the wrong “holdover hippie”—that was one of the kindest things he’d called her when she failed to give him any real answers to his questions. Interesting that his intelligence was so poor; either he wasn’t relying on government sources, or someone was withholding information from him. Was that happening at the source, or in his own organization? She rather hoped it was the former; attempts to probe her files should set off alarms that would alert some of her friends—and her friends’ friends—to the fact that Warden Blair was showing an unhealthy interest in her. Add that to her turning up missing, and the FBI might come calling, asking Dr. Blair some very awkward questions.

  With luck, they’d demand to inspect the premises. There were others here besides herself; she’d sensed them as she cautiously explored the confines of her prison. She didn’t dare go further than that; her telepathy was not all that strong, and she could not know if who she touched was a friend and fellow prisoner or one of Blair’s tame psychics.

  Of course, waiting for official help was going to take time, and time was critical for some of her patients. If she could manage it, she should try for an escape on her own. She knew that she must be in a sub-basement of some kind; that was frustrating, since it meant that even if she won free of her cell, getting to the outside was going to be very difficult. On the other hand, she was middle-aged, female, and black—and if she could find a cleaning-woman’s smock, she could probably scrub her way to freedom. No one ever looks at janitors. Particularly not black women janitors.

  The more she thought about it, the more appeal that idea had. The only problem with it was that left the others she had sensed still locked away.

  Could she walk away and leave them there? They didn’t have influential friends; it was just a matter of accident that she did. Her own influential friends would be unlikely to move very energetically on behalf of other nebulous captives on her word alone—they would be unlikely to move if their own interests weren’t involved. She didn’t know names, faces—if she couldn’t actually cite the names of people known to be missing, Blair could say she was crazy, deny that there was any such thing going on here. It couldn’t be that hard to hide a few dozen people; not with all the government facilities that must be available to him.

  Miserable little lizard, she thought bitterly. How soon would it be before Blair’s flunkies caught Kayla? That was a thought that truly chilled her. If this were Los Angeles, she wouldn’t have worried; Kayla’s extensive street-side connections made her impossible to catch on her home turf. But this wasn’t Los Angeles, and Kayla hadn’t had the time to make those connections here. She was essentially trapped in her hotel room, unless she had the wits to call Beth Kentraine for help—

  She was also a minor, whose guardian had vanished. She could be charged with anything and “arrested,” taken into “protective custody,” and no one would make any complaints.

  Except Kayla herself. Which wouldn’t change a thing.

  But even as she thought of Kayla—Kayla in Blair’s hands—something changed. As real as a storm-front, as full of potential, and as difficult to pin down without the proper instruments, the passing of this “change-front” raised gooseflesh on her arms and brought all of her senses to alert. Elizabet wasn’t a precognitive, but she was at least a little sensitive in every extrasensory area.

  Something had just happened, out there, outside the walls of this lab. Something that changed everything, that negated every calculation, every plan. And unless she was very much mistaken, all hell was about to break loose. Her Gram used to say, “When devil walk, people should hide.”

  It certainly felt like devils were walking.

  Be damned to Blair’s monitors. If this was as big as it felt, it wouldn’t matter what the monitors recorded. Blair was about to have a surprise. Fire, flood, earthquake, or something she couldn’t even guess at—these labs were going to experience catastrophe. If there was enough confusion, she would be able to walk right out. She gave up her pretense of catatonia in favor of the tightest barriers she could raise, and sheltered behind them. Waiting.

  Something told her that the wait wasn’t going to be long.

  Dr. Susan Sheffield watched the needle of the seismograph with one eye, and the rest of the instruments with the other. One of her techs followed the countdown silently, lips moving. When he reached zero, he clutched involuntarily at the edge of the desk, even though the probability of them actually feelinganything, even if this run was successful, was less than half a percent.

  Unless, of course, by pure coincidence, they had chosen the moment Mother Nature had picked for a shake to run Poseidon.

  Nothing happened of course. It would take several minutes for Poseidon to vibrate this little faultlet loose, even under the best of circumstances. They’d only picked it because it ran directly under the Dublin Labs property, one of hundreds of little cracks coming from the San Andreas.

  “Ja, Shub-Niggurath,” muttered Frank Rogers, her partner.

  “Say what?” she replied, without removing her attention from the instruments. Oh, they’d record whatever happened, but if it happened, she wanted to see it.

  “Lovecraft,” he told her. “Howard Phillips. Horror writer. Shub-Niggurath was one of his Elder Gods—the ‘Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young.’ I was thinking the San Andreas is like that—Big Mama Nasty with a thousand little nasties spawned from her. The little nasties wouldn’t matter squat if Mama wasn’t there to back them up.”

  “Yeah, well if Poseidon works today, we’ll have a way to lasso Mama,” she said. “And we’ll have the data to prove it.”

  Just at that moment, the needle jumped—tracking the course of a quakelet on the scrolling paper. “Shut it off!” she yelled, as she sprinted over to the bank of other geological instruments. The tech threw the switch and shut Poseidon down as she and Frank frantically took sight-readings in case an
y of the recording monitors might possibly have failed. Every reading Sue took made her feel like cheering more. Finally Frank let out a whoop. “Hot damn!” he yelled, waving his clipboard. “Come look at this one!”

  The rack of crude sensors was entirely dead. As it should be; they measured nothing—only registered electrical flow across pairs of contacts set all along the faultline at varying depths. That they were all dead meant that the contacts were no longer touching.

  Which meant the fault had moved, easing stress. Quietly, infinitesimally, without so much as a beaker shaking. And along the entirefaultline.

  Poseidon was an array of devices that were the sonic equivalent of a laser: coherent sound. What Frank and Susan had proposed was that if a Poseidon line could be set up along a fault under stress—like the San Andreas—low-frequency, coherent soundwaves could trigger tiny quakelets along the entire length, for as long and as often as it took to ease stress along the faultiine. So far it had worked well enough to warrant a bigger proposal, taking the project out of the stage of pure research and into the stage of attempted application. The Big One everyone dreaded might never happen now…

  And the pinheaded holdover hippies that picketed every month might be persuaded that there was legitimate research going on here. Susan was getting damned tired of running a gauntlet once a month, and wondering if this time she would be the one who’d have to spend hours getting red paint off her car.

  Not that there wasn’t a military application to Poseidon—but Frank had agreed with her to destroy the figures and any reference to their other finding. That one single Poseidon CSAA (coherent sound amplification array) placed at a point of maximum stress could trigger a “Big One.” She was far more right-wing than Frank, and she didn’t want that information in the hands of the military. All it took was one nut… and unlike radioactives, CSAAs didn’t require any equipment that couldn’t be bought on the open market—nor did they need bombers or ICBMs to deliver them. Just a good power-source.

  And earthquakes didn’t discriminate between civilian and military targets. In fact, civilians were far more likely to be the victims; the technology that made military structures hardened against nuclear attacks also made them earthquake-resistant.

  No—the military didn’t need to know about Poseidon.

  “You know, I just had a horrible thought,” Frank said, turning toward her with a look of stark terror on his face.

  “What?” she asked, alarmed.

  “Remember when they put through that law about fault-line disclosure, and all those scumbag real-estate scammers couldn’t sell their fault-line property?” he moaned. “You realize we’re about to make those parasites rich?”

  She sighed and started to make a snappy comeback—when the hair on the back of her neck started to rise.

  Warden Blair rarely left his lab complex between seven in the morning and midnight; about the only thing that could lure him outside the walls was the prospect of another pickup.

  The walls of his office were studded with television monitors, one for every cell in the complex. Most of them were uninteresting; the occupants were asleep or drugged unconscious. One of the catches from today, a black woman, was one of those—the only thing that made her interesting was that she had passed out in the corner of her cell, wedged into a sitting position. Stubborn bitch.

  She’d been worse than that red-haired piece; she hadn’t been anything less than polite, but she’d been just as adamant in refusing to give him any information at all and in refusing to sign up on the project. She’d stared at him and answered—when she answered at all—in words of one syllable, as if she was speaking to a particularly dense child. When he refused to answer any of her questions, she gave him a look of disgust and disdain— exactly like the one his ninth-grade teacher had given him when she discovered the frog he was dissecting was still alive.

  Bitch, The word applied both to Mrs. Bucher and this hag. They both made him feel like a naughty little boy without saying a word. Well, it was too late to do anything about Mrs. Bucher, but this old bag was going to find out she was sneering at the wrong man. Maybe he’d turn Bobbie loose on her… when Bobbie got done, she’d be a lot more cooperative.

  The other new catches, now—they were much more interesting. The man was, anyway. They’d finally had to take the cuffs off him a half an hour ago; all the devices they had monitoring vital signs went into red-alert. Heart rate was way above the safe line, brain-scan showed seizure conditions and unbearable pain. Blair had never seen so severe a psychosomatic reaction—especially not to something as nonsensical as physical contact with metal.

  Now the young man huddled in the corner, head sheltered in his arms. The attendants reported that there were burn marks two inches wide circling each wrist.

  So, he not only had a new type of psychic, he had someone who could reproduce stigmata-type marks. He’d been wanting to get his hands on a stigmatic for some time—the problem was every single genuine stigmatic was protected by a horde of Catholic stooges.

  Once he got his hand on the third member of that little gypsy trio, and the kid who’d been with the old bat, he’d have quite a little stable. More than enough to impress—

  The monitors went blank. All of them, at the same time.

  For a moment, he stared at them, unable to believe that his state-of-the-art, triply redundant equipment had just failed on him.

  No—it couldn’t have failed on him. Someone out there had pulled the plug on his office.

  He surged to his feet, suffused with rage. Whoever that someone was, he was going to pay—

  He headed for the door, but before he took more than two steps, something came through it.

  Through the closed door.

  Something dark, shadowy. And very big. But transparent, and his mind dismissed it as a projection or an illusion. One or two of his stable were quite adept at creating projections, and if something had gone wrong with the equipment, the electronic fields that kept them from sending their creations outside their cells might also have malfunctioned.

  He was quite certain it was harmless. Until he touched it.

  Then he screamed with pain and shock—screamed even louder as it enveloped him, sure that one of his men would break down the door and save him. But his men had troubles of their own…

  He continued to scream for a very long time.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8:

  Hame, Hame, Hame

  Kory huddled for a long time in the shelter of his folded arms, waiting for the pain to ebb, waiting for his body to recover from the shock of prolonged contact with the Death Metal. Physical shock was not the only thing he had to recover from; his mental processes had undergone similar damage. He did not understand these humans, the ones who had imprisoned him. Oh, abstractly he had known that there were humans who were sick, mentally unbalanced—but he had never encountered any himself. Until now. Until he had touched the thoughts of the man called Warden Blair.

  In some ways, he was as shaken by his encounter with Warden Blair’s mind as he was by what had been done to him. Never before had he encountered a person who so desired the pain and degradation of others; who thrived on it as anyone else would thrive on love and praise.

  Even Perenor was not so twisted—he was ruthless, and he thought of humans as no better than animals, but he would never have done to them what this man has done. He used people, but he did not go out of his way to hurt any save those he felt had hurt him. Even me, he only set to sleep in the Grove, Even Terenil, he sought only to kill. This man is like the Unseleighe, and I do not understand them either.

  Blair devoted himself to inflicting pain, humiliation, specialized in reducing his fellow humans to groveling, weeping nonentities. And then, he would take every opportunity to reinforce what he had done to them, keeping them ground beneath his foot.

  He hated everyone; he hated and despised those beneath him, he hated and feared those above him, and he hated and wanted to dispose of his equ
als. If there was anything that Warden Blair cared for besides himself, Kory had not seen it.

  What he was doing to those in his power was only a pale shadow of what he wanted to do to them. What he had already done—sometimes with the aid of his former captives—was horrifying. And not only did he feel no remorse, he regretted that he dared not take his activities as far as he would like.

  What he had done to Beth—that was typical of him. It was by no means representative of the depths to which he had already gone. Warden Blair had killed, both directly and indirectly, although he himself had never dirtied his hands with anything so direct as a blade or one of the humans’ guns.

  That he left to men he had hired for the purpose. This was something else Kory could not understand: to hire someone for the purposes of assassination. But then, he had never understood humans or Unseleighe who made that their practice.

  Once or twice, Warden Blair had found it necessary to deal death personally—but when he did, it was assassination of another sort, through the intermediary of poison. As a scientist, he had access to many poisons, several that mimicked perfectly ordinary illnesses.

  And his only regret was that he had not been there to witness and enjoy the death, when it came. He routinely dispatched in this way those he had captured who proved to be too much trouble. He was already considering such an end for Beth, should she continue to resist him.

  Beth—Despite his own weakness and pain, he crawled to her on his hands and knees, to gather her up in his arms and hold her. Now that he knew what Blair was like, and what the human had done to Beth, he knew that there was only one way to reach her. She would not trust anything coming from outside her—but she might trust a mind-to-mind link. She had erected shields to hold others out, but she would not have held them against him.