Summoned to Tourney

by Mercedes Lackey; Ellen Guon

  So they’d taken the threat seriously. Good. They’d better. The threat was a serious one. He hadn’t been throwing bull when he’d told that stuff to Kory. Odds were nine-to-one it was true.

  “Well?” Elizabet said, as he struggled into a sitting position—not an easy feat on a waterbed.

  “Remember what you said about torture?” he asked the healer, who frowned and nodded. “Well, that’s what he did. Somehow he figured out that Bethie’s a claustrophobe; there’s nothing in Beth’s memory of how he did it, but I’m guessing maybe he used her reactions to questions and had a lie-detector on her. Then he locked her in that damn decompression chamber in the dark, and started increasing the pressure.” He snarled as he spoke, and the scientist whitened a little further. “Real clever, too. Torture without leaving marks. Wonder what he’d have done to you, Elizabet?”

  Kayla was livid, and holding her anger well; much better than he had expected she would. “That’s probably what I was for, boss,” she said to Elizabet, who nodded. “He was gonna snatch me, and tell you to cooperate or he’d take me apart and not be too careful about putting me back together. I almost wish that son of a bitch would let me get within a few feet of him, guards or no guards…”

  “There’s more,” he told them, “but right now, the only thing that’s pertinent is that she’s got the phobia mixed up with my precognitive dream about the Big One. The one we were kinda talking about. It’s pretty clear, and there’s Nightflyers mixed up in that one, too. That gonna give you enough to work on?”

  “That should give me enough to break her out,” Elizabet told him. “Once I’ve got her out of this hallucination-cycle she’s in, and talking, the rest will come.”

  He heaved a sigh of relief, and rolled to the edge of the bed. Several sets of hands helped him up, and he staggered with fatigue as he got to his feet. Kory caught and held him, and he looked up into the friendly, worried, elven face he knew so well. “I have a nice nervous breakdown coming,” he said conversationally. “I’ve earned it, and I’m by-God going to take it as soon as this mess is over. But right now—we’ve got things to take care of. Is Arvin in here, somewhere?”

  “Here, Bard,” said a voice at the back, somewhere near the bostaff.

  “Okay, let’s all of us get out of here and let Kayla and Elizabet do their thing. I’ve got something that involves all of the rest of us.” He looked straight at Susan Sheffield. “You, especially.”

  “Me?” She looked confused and apprehensive, and probably would have backed away from him if there hadn’t been so many people.

  “Yeah, you, and that Home for Deranged Scientists you work at. Let’s move it on out of here.” He nodded at the door, and let the tide of the others carry him down the stairs and to the living-room.

  Once there, the “audience” arranged itself around him in a semicircle; Arvin wordlessly handed him a glass of Gatorade, which he downed with gratitude. His head hurt, he was ready to drop, and he wanted to sleep for a week. He could have used one of Kayla’s jump-starts, but she was busy with something more important.

  Christ, I haven’t felt this bad since my last hangover.

  And yet, he was calm for the first time in weeks, maybe months, because now he had some answers. He wasn’t crazy, his dream was a warning, not a hallucination. And he wasn’t—entirely—to blame for what the Nightflyers had done. He had been their tool, and there was some blame there; he had allowed himself to be deceived and that was something he was never going to forget. But others had been their tools as well, and one of them was standing awkwardly beside the sofa.

  “You said your project had something to do with earthquakes, right?” he said to Susan Sheffield. She nodded uncomfortably. “So what’s it all about? And what’s going on with it right now?”

  “I can’t tell you that—” she began. He interrupted her with a downward slash of his hand.

  “Damn your clearance crap anyway!” he spat, and she winced away from him. Arvin looked impressed. “All right. I’ll tell you.”

  His time in trance hadn’t been spent entirely in Beth’s mind. And it hadn’t been at all under his conscious control. Someone, or something, had guided and impelled his vision. Maybe it had only been his subconscious, which had always been better at putting two and two together than he was. Maybe it had been his conscience, which had lately been pretty good at making him face up to the facts, no matter how unpleasant they were.

  Whatever it was, once he’d seen in Bethie’s memory what she had been put through, his trance had taken a different turn without him thinking about it. He had leapt into an omniscient point of reference right over Warden Blair’s shoulder, and fast-forwarded to the Nightflyer invasion.

  He knew a lot now. He knew that Warden Blair wasn’t Warden Blair anymore—and hence, the change that Dr. Sheffield had noticed. And he knew what Project Poseidon was.

  “You built yourself an earthquake machine down there, didn’t you?” he said to Susan, whose eyes widened with shock. “Not one to read them; one to make them. I don’t suppose you worried much about the implications of that.”

  “That’s all I thought about! It’s meant to trigger micro-quakes, to relieve stress along faultlines,” she said defensively. “It’s going to help people, to save lives—”

  “Yeah, but your project’s in Warden Blair’s hands, lady,” he countered as she blanched. “And by the way, I wouldn’t go back to my apartment right now if I were you. He told that Colonel Steve of yours to send you a little reception committee after that unscheduled visit you made to the office this afternoon. He got worried, and he wants to make sure he has your services for as long as he needs them.”

  Her face went paper-white, then flushed. “You’d better be telling the truth,” she said angrily, “because I have a way of checking that.”

  He spread his hands and arched his eyebrows. “Be my guest. Check on it. I’d rather you did that than walk into an enemy ambush.”

  “I need the phone.” She changed her challenging gaze to Kory, who moved politely out of the way of the phone on the wall—but stayed within grabbing distance of her in case she tried anything.

  She dialed a number, which must have been answered on the first ring. “Hi, Betty, it’s Susan. Listen, I was supposed to have a cleaning crew over this afternoon, are they there yet?” She listened for a moment, and her angry flush paled to white again, though her voice remained steady. “Well, good, Betty, that’s terrific. Yes, they certainly are handsome young men. Yes, they’re bonded, that’s why I let the firm have a key. No, they’ll probably be there a while; they’re cleaning everything. That project’s coming to a head, and the place is a pigpen. Thanks Betty, I just wanted to be sure they’d gotten there. No, thanks, I’ll probably be working late. Bye.”

  She hung up, and when she turned to Eric, her hands were shaking. “A nosy, elderly neighbor can be a wonderful thing, sometimes,” she said, with a false little laugh.

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  She made her way carefully to the sofa, and sat down on it. How much else do I tell her? he wondered, watching her. For all the profound shocks she’d had, she was coping pretty well. Encountering Nightflyers, death, Bardic magic, elves, and betrayal all in forty-eight hours could put quite a strain on the brain… But he needed her input.

  Okay. He might as well go for the whole thing. “You said that you’d noticed something weird about Blair the last time you saw him?” he asked carefully. “I mean, weirder than usual.”

  “The lights were on, but nobody was home,” she said without a second thought. “Or—no, somebody was home, all right, but it wasn’t human—”

  She stopped, suddenly, and he saw her putting all the facts together in the way her brow creased and her eyes widened. “One of those things,” she gasped. “One of those horrible shadow things took him over, like in The Exorcist! Didn’t it?”

  He nodded, while all of the elves except Kory looked puzzled. Great. Kory didn’t tell them how I sprung him.
That’s not going to make them real happy with me, even if it isn’t a direct threat to them. Yet.

  “Right,” he said wearily. “And that is what’s in charge of your project. In charge of something that can trigger the Big One, instead of preventing it. And just what do you think it’s going to do with something like that?”

  He thought for a moment that she might faint, she grew so white, but she recovered.

  “All right,” she said, slowly. “All right. I believe you. For whatever I’m worth, you’ve got me on your side. Now what?”

  “Now you sit there for a minute,” he told her, and turned to the others, taking a deep breath.

  Okay, kids, it’s story-time with Uncle Eric. Got a lot of catching up to do, and a short time to do it in. “When you last saw our heroes, they were recovering from the big party,” he began. “This is what happened when you all left them—”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12:

  Tom O’Bedlam (Reprised)

  Eric waited in sick suspense when he finished his narrative. He more than halfway expected the elves—Arvin in particular—to jump all over him for the way he’d handled the Nightflyers. And he definitely expected them to be on his case for bringing them across in the first place. But they weren’t and they didn’t. And in a way, their actual reaction surprised him more than anything else.

  Silence for a moment, then thoughtful nods. Susan looked sick, though— and more than a little afraid of him. Well, he didn’t blame her for either reaction. Kory laid a comforting hand on his shoulder, and he covered it with his. That was one thing he could count on, anyway. Kory would stand by him, no matter how boneheaded he’d been, and help him fix what he’d done wrong.

  “Ye didna do too badly, Bard,” one of the more stiff-necked, High Court types said grudgingly. “I canna say that any of us would have acted differently.”

  He couldn’t have been more amazed if they’d handed him the Congressional Medal of Honor. “But—” he stammered, “but—I screwed up! I did everything wrong that you could think of! It’s my fault there’s one of them playing around in Blair’s body right now!”

  But it was Arvin, not Kory, who leapt to his defense. “No one,” Arvin said fiercely, “no one in all the history that we know, has ever brought more than one of the Nightflyers over from the chaos of the Primal Plane where nightmares are. No one. Not even the Unseleighe. How could you know what they would do? We don’t!” He looked down at Eric broodingly, no longer the careless, light-minded, exotic dancer. That persona was gone, shed as easily as shedding a costume. Arvin was a Warrior now —capital “W”—and looked it. Lightweight armor, short sword, hair tied back in a businesslike braid.

  He’d shown up on the doorstep ready for a fight. “Oh, there are some few things you might have done differently, had you not been so weary and so concerned for the others.”

  “Like?” he prompted.

  Arvin shrugged. “You should have counted the evil beasties before you sent them out; if you had been a practiced sorcerer you would have known to control them with binding spells to harm no one who was not directly involved with the abductions. And yet—that might not have been enough; they might be clever enough to find loopholes in binding spells. There is some fault resting with us, even.”

  Arvin and Kory both glanced over at another High Court warrior—Eric finally recalled his name as “Dharinel,” and that he was one of the Mist-Hold elves that did not approve of Kory’s liaison with humans. He didn’t much approve of humans in general, as far as that went; he avoided coming out from Underhill as much as he could. Eric had only met him once or twice, at the time when Kory had introduced them to the Mist-Hold court, and once at a gathering of Arvin’s. And he had shown up on their doorstep only once: to lecture Kory on his duty, and to find himself escorted politely to the door.

  Dharinel nodded sourly in agreement with Arvin’s last statement. “Korendil wished us to teach you, Bard,” he said with obviously unhappiness. “Because he is only a Magus Minor, and knew nothing of the Bardic Powers or how strong you would or could become. I opposed that training. One Taliesen, I felt, was enough, especially in these days when no one believes in magic. If the humans had lost their magic, that was to the good. Or so I thought. Now, it seems, events have proved me wrong.”

  Well, don’t apologize or anything.

  “If we all survive this, Bard, we will see to your proper training,” Arvin said firmly. “I will make certain that High Lord Dharinel takes care of that personally.” The veiled glance he threw at the other elf implied a whole lot more than Eric understood.

  What am I, some kind of counter in a game of elven politics? was his first thought, and what does he mean, “if we survive?” was his second.

  “If?” he said, swallowing. “What’s with this ‘if’ stuff? You know something I don’t?”

  “The reason that you could not reach me when Kory was first taken,” Arvin said, his expression grim, “was that we had Seers of our own who had experienced some disturbing visions of late. Visions of the earth shaking hereabouts; of terrible death of humans. And yes, of a horde of some shadowy creatures that we thought might be Nightflyers. Only we were not certain; in fact, it seemed far more likely that they were some creation of our Unseleighe kindred. And there were those of us—” he cast a resentful glance at Dharinel “—who were of the opinion that it did not matter if disaster overtook the humans here. But that was before this morning.”

  Dharinel did not—quite—snarl. “My own sister—who is a Seer—undertook to Foresee if this great disaster could have any impact upon those of us Underhill. We had no reason to think that it would, of course, none whatsoever. But she is a cautious creature, and felt it might be worth the effort. That was when she Saw that the energies of the quake would close off the accesses here to the Elfhame, stranding any who were here in your world, and isolating them from the rest of us. Bad enough, that—but worse would come. For the creatures we had seen were Nightflyers in their dozens, but worse, they were breeding on the misery and death following the quake, breeding in the newly dead bodies. The breeding Nightflyers, growing stronger and more cunning, would find a way to prey upon the elvenkind so stranded, taking Low Court first, then High. And then—driven by hunger for the new prey—then they would break across the barriers themselves, and pour into Underhill.”

  Arvin nodded, and Eric whistled in mingled surprise and dismay. He knew that Nightflyers could kill; he hadn’t known they could kill elves.

  “That discovery is what had us isolated from you,” Arvin said. “We were in conference, trying to discover what we could do to prevent such a catastrophe. Now, perhaps, we know.”

  “It’s a quake that starts it all, right?” Susan Sheffield asked in a quiet voice. Dharinel and Arvin turned as one, as if they had forgotten she was there.

  “That is what the visions seem to tell us,” Arvin said carefully. “Of course, as with all visions of the future, the picture is unclear, often distorted. The future is uncertain and many things can work to change it.”

  “You think Blair might go ahead and run your machines without you?” Eric asked. “I mean, can he? Don’t you have to be there or something? Isn’t everything, like, secret? You keep what you’re doing in code and in hidden notebooks?”

  She smiled faintly. “Sorry kid,” she said regretfully. “This isn’t the late- late show. These days, especially if you’re doing research on a government grant, you have to keep clear instructions and up-to-the-minute protocol, in case you get hit by a truck—or—or get ‘compromised’ as Steve likes to say—and somebody else has to pick up where you left off.”

  She shook her head, thinking of all the regs she had to follow—not for the sake of good science necessarily, but to keep her grants. She had never guessed how much of her life would be tied up in bureaucratic crap. “You’ve got to be ready for inspections, and be ready to prove you can do what you say you can. There’s only so much grant money and lots of people want it. E
specially Teller’s boys, and he still has clout, the old bastard.” She shrugged. “It wouldn’t be easy for someone to crack my computer protections, but anybody with a higher access priority than mine—like Colonel Steve—is going to be able to bypass those.” She smiled wanly. “I hope you’ve got a guest room. I think I’m going to need it.”

  “So as soon as they figure out that you aren’t coming home to your apartment, we can bet on Blair having his hands on your stuff.” Eric sighed and buried his face in his hands, “God, I wish we had Bethie in one piece. She’s so much better at this real-world strategy stuff than I am. There’s so many things to try and think of—”

  “I think,” Kory said, slowly, “that there are only two questions that should concern us at the moment. How soon will it take the Blair-creature to learn how to operate your mechanisms—and how long will it take for him to make the earthquake happen when he does?”

  She was awake. And—not in a street full of bodies, nor a chamber with walls closing in on her. That was an improvement—at least for as long as it lasted.

  Beth kept her eyes tightly closed, and took in the evidence of her other senses. Was she hallucinating again, or sane, however temporarily? Or worse—still a captive? Sound—the murmur of voices from downstairs, and the faint sounds of traffic from outside. Scent—the green of the garden on a gentle breeze. Touch—the crisp feel of sheets on her body, the soft cotton of the quilt Karen had given them under her hands, and the faintly undulating warmth of the waterbed.

  I’m home. I’m safe. There’s no earthquake, no monsters, and no mad scientist…

  She waited, holding her breath, for all of that to change. It always had. Only this time she held her breath until she couldn’t stand it anymore— and it didn’t.

  “You might as well open your eyes, Beth Kentraine,” said a voice she knew. “Because I know very well that you’re awake.”