Fellowship Fantastic

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  Thank you, the old knight thought inside his head. This is more than I could ask.

  Torl would have nodded, but couldn’t. And it is the least I could give.

  For the first time in quite a while, Kettigar smiled.

  I noticed you didn’t bury my sword with me.

  Torl felt a flush of guilt. I’m sorry, master. I should have—

  No, Kettigar thought, cutting him off. You misunderstand. I am glad you didn’t. Take the blade, lad—it’s yours. You earned it.

  Thank you, master.

  Torl felt his head nod, once. Then he began to speak—but it was his master’s voice, not his, that issued from his mouth.

  “Bhurget an-shuvak thalkos. Dotho malkeshur gargarinam.”

  It happened at once; there was no time even to take a breath. The ground beneath his feet shook, driving him to his knees. A ripple of power bent the air around the spire, and with a shattering sound the Eye of Heaven spewed fire high into the sky. It billowed thousands of feet tall, a white pillar of light that pierced the clouds and kept on going. Heat washed down from above, driving back the chill that suffused Torl’s body. He fell flat as the ground beneath him bucked and lurched.

  The Eye blazed for the better part of an hour, lighting the land around it as if it were a second sun. When it finally stopped, it seemed like night had suddenly fallen over Car Bandoth. Torl raised his head—and stopped, stomach clenching, when he realized he’d done it himself.

  Master? he thought, and searched his mind for thoughts, memories that weren’t his own.

  Nothing.

  Sorrow took him, but also joy. Kettigar was gone, his duty accomplished. He would not haunt the fort, nor would he be trapped in the world until time’s end. He was free to feast and drink wine in Ardai’s halls. And he would be waiting there when Torl’s time came.

  As Torl lay there, considering this, a new sound arose from below. Thousands of voices were screaming at once. His throat suddenly tight, he crawled to the edge of the precipice, looked down at the sea, and cringed at what he saw.

  The Eye’s signal had been seen. Far away, the queen had given her command to the royal sorcerers, and they had set to work. Now the straits were burning, ghostly blue flames rising up out of the water to engulf the Veyarri fleet. The enchanted ships flared bright, then vanished, casting the soldiers aboard them into the fiery water. Men howled in agony and panic . . . then, one by one, they fell silent.

  Torl watched until it was done, his stomach a hard knot. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be a knight anymore—not if his oaths led to carnage like that. Perhaps it was better than what the Veyarrim would have done to Mallos had their invasion worked. He didn’t know. All he knew was thousands of men were dying all at once and it was partly his doing.

  He wondered about that as he limped back down the stairs to look for his master’s sword.

  OVERCAST

  Alan Dean Foster

  Eric had always enjoyed lying on his back and look ing up at the clouds. Though he had been doing it for thirty years, Sunday was the first time one looked back at him.

  Or maybe he was just anthropomorphizing. That was, after all, one of the joys of cloud watching. For example, the bunch of fluff off in the western sky looked like his twelfth-grade science teacher, Mr. Atkins. The swirl of cirrus directly overhead could easily be transmogrified in his mind into a distant memory of his beloved aunt Grace. Those spotty stratus off to the north were dead ringers for the lines of troops with whom he had marched in Iraq. But until now not a one of them—not Mr. Atkins, not Aunt Grace, not his buddies in the corps, had looked back at him.

  Furthermore, it seemed to him as if it was coming closer.

  Well, why not? he thought. As easy to experience two hallucinations as one. It was a small cumulus, not much bigger than his Saturn four-door and almost as faded. As it descended, he could not escape the feeling that it was looking at him. It had no eyes, of course. Not even Eric, with his expansive imagination, could transform puffs of vapor into eyes.

  It halted a little more than an arm’s length above him. Tugged by the wind, bits and pieces would be pulled away, reminding him of how as a child he used to tear pieces of cotton candy off the main mass and pop them into his mouth. Yet the cloud did not shrink in size. Renewing itself by gathering moisture from the air, he supposed. It was much too small to retain its shape. It was much too close to the ground. It was much too close to him. Alone on the forested hillside above Puget Sound, he sat up. The cloud retreated a few feet and continued to regard him.

  This, Eric decided firmly, was ridiculous. He had a vivid imagination, but he was not crazy. He did not drink and did not ingest mind-altering substances. Whatever the source of the phenomenon, he knew he could simply walk away from it. He proceeded to do so.

  The cloud followed.

  It followed him down the slope, which was absurd. It followed him through the trees, which was impossible. It followed him all the way to the parking lot at the end of the trail. He half expected the persistent illusion to follow him into his car. Thankfully, it did not.

  Feeling better, he headed home. Halfway back to Olympia it began to rain, heavily. Not unusual in western Washington. Except while it was raining all around him, puddling up against curbs and filling parking lots with temporary ponds, not a drop of moisture struck his car. He changed lanes, accelerated, slowed almost to a stop. Nothing he did made any difference. Stopped at a red light, he stuck his head out the window with an eye toward scanning the sky. He found he could see it everywhere except overhead.

  A thick mass of heavy and very localized cumulus hovered directly above his vehicle.

  When the light changed to green, he accelerated gradually. Repeated glances outside showed that the cloud continued to keep pace, shielding his car from the storm. Aware that he was now gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles were beginning to cramp, he forced himself to relax as considered the possibilities. Since not a one of them made any sense whatsoever, he decided he might as well go with the atmospheric flow, as it were. He had done so all his life, and while he might never be rich or famous, he could boast of low blood pressure and a general air of peace and contentment that escaped the high-tech hordes who had made an anthill out of the east side of the Sound.

  I have acquired a cloud. So be it. He smiled to himself, wondering if it was the sort of smile that might cause others to edge carefully away from him should they meet him on the street. He checked it in the rearview mirror. It was a perfectly normal smile, not crooked or twisted in any way.

  His house was small but set outside town on a couple of acres of forested land. His nearest neighbor had considerably more land and raised horses. Eric preferred to raise Cain, but only on weekends and with close friends. He wondered how they might react to his new companion, assuming it stayed around. He opened the front door and entered. The cloud followed him right into the house.

  Sitting down on the worn but welcoming old couch in the less-than-immaculate den, he flipped on the TV, watched three minutes of news, then turned the set off. He was not used to having a cloud in the room with him and it was proving hard to ignore.

  “What am I going to do with you?” he wondered aloud. The cloud did not respond verbally. Instead, it drifted from one side of the den to the other, changing from puffy cumulus to leaner cumulo-stratus, and settled itself quietly into a corner. From time to time it would emit a puff of odorless wind in his direction.

  He could do worse, he supposed. Ever since Orton, the street mongrel he had rescued, had died last year, he had gone petless. Could one pet a cloud? Rising from the couch, he walked over to it and extended a hand. It flinched slightly, reverting to full cumulus, but did not try to flee or evaporate.

  “Steady,” he heard himself murmuring, “easy there.” He was very glad there was no one around to see what he was doing. His hand touched the cloud and slipped partway into it. Cool and damp caressed his fingers. He withdrew them. When he did so, the cloud moved
closer. After a couple of minutes of restrained human-atmospheric interaction, it turned cirrus, zipped several times around the room, and finally gathered itself as cumulus again into a tight, dense ball of cloud-stuff in front of the window that looked out onto the back of the property.

  “I guess I’m going to have to let you stay,” Eric murmured thoughtfully. In response, the cloud bobbed up and down in what might have been an indication of assent, or simply a momentary fluctuation in internal air pressure caused by the building’s central heat coming on. “Guess I’ll call you Aerol.” He chuckled to himself. “Aerol Flynn.”

  The name didn’t stick. For whatever reason, he soon came to believe that the cloud was by nature more female than male. This determination constituting only one more foolishness in a rapidly growing list of meteorological absurdities, he saw no problem in changing the cloud’s name from Aerol to Aeriel. Certainly the cloud did not object.

  While it only whispered to him via the occasional breeze and did not purr like a cat or bark like a dog, there were undeniable advantages to having a cloud as a companion. He did not have to walk it. When it had to go, it let him know by bumping repeatedly up against the back door. And when it relieved itself, which was no more than once or twice every several days, the hollyhocks and wildflowers in the yard were immediate beneficiaries.

  At night it snuggled itself into the air above the master bedroom bathtub, though not before brushing past him to gently stroke his face. These repeated caresses imparted to his skin a healthy glow that others could not fail to notice. Female coworkers stopped him in the halls at work to ask what kind of moisturizer he was using. He could only reply that it was a natural substance he concocted himself, and in quantities too minuscule to share.

  On weekends and days off he would sit outside in the backyard, reading and soaking up the sunshine, a tiny bit of Mt. Rainier visible in the distance. If the sun became too harsh, the cloud would interpose itself between him and the sky. On the camping trips and long solo hikes in the Olympics that he so enjoyed, he no longer worried about finding a place to bathe. He would strip, stand wherever the view was satisfying, and Aeriel would run him through a personalized sprinkle, douse, and rinse cycle as required.

  In return, the cloud asked little. A place to condense at night, occasional trips to a lake or the Sound to graze on moisture, sometimes play behind the house during which he would attempt to squirt her with a hose while she dodged or attenuated. She was always waiting for him when he came home at night. Dinner was usually pasta or fish for him, always a bucket of spring water for her. When it came time to do the dishes, he would soap them up and stick them, one at a time, into her. When he withdrew his hand and the glass or pot or dish, it was invariably sparkling clean. All he had to do was dry. Then she would settle down in the air behind him as he read or watched TV. Sometimes he read to her, and she would express her feelings with breaths of fresh air that were either warm or cold, depending on how she felt about the subject matter at hand.

  He became a more than casual viewer of the Weather Channel. She loved it, hovering close at his shoulder as reports were filed and charts displayed, only occasionally whipping away to hide in the bedroom if a report of a hurricane or tornado came on the screen. Eric was content. The cloud was content.

  Then he met a girl.

  He brought her home.

  Jessica was short and vivacious, with bobbed black hair and obsidian eyes and a personality that was wonderfully unimpeded by convention. They met at work, then after work, then after after work and occasionally on into the early mornings. Ideas were exchanged, notions were swapped, and before long it was mutually agreed that they were more than a little agreeable. He visited her apartment. She wanted to see his house. He wanted her to see his house, except . . .

  “I have a pet,” he told her uneasily as they headed out of town on an overcast Saturday evening.

  She laughed and pushed playfully at his shoulder. “Why do you think that would be a problem, Eric?”

  Holding the wheel with both hands, he looked across at her. “You don’t have any pets.”

  “No, but I feed half the stray cats in my neighborhood, and the occasional dog, and you always see seed in the birdfeeder outside my window.”

  He stared at the road ahead. The distance between her place and his kept getting shorter, and there was nothing he could do about it. “Mine’s not a cat or a dog. Or a bird. Or a giant tortoise or a lemur. It’s not like any pet you’ve ever seen or heard of.”

  “Oh, come on, Eric!” She was shaking her head now, but affectionately. “What is it, tell me. A lion? Do you have a lion? A poisonous snake? Is it something that’s likely to bite me, or claw me?”

  “No, no.” He turned off the highway and down the street that meandered in the direction of his property. The forest that dominated the landscape seemed to close in around him. “It doesn’t have any teeth, or any claws.”

  “I know,” she declared excitedly, clapping her hands together, “it’s a parrot! You’ve got a big, foul-tempered, dirty old parrot, or maybe a macaw, and you’re afraid it won’t like me and it’s going to beak me to death.”

  He looked over at her. He had to smile. “Her name is Aeriel. At least, I’ve always thought of her as a ‘her.’ ”

  She frowned at him. “You mean you have a pet and you don’t know what sex it is?”

  “It’s not easy to sex,” he argued. When she started to protest, he raised a hand. “When you meet her, you’ll see what I mean.”

  “Okay.” Grinning, she sat back in the passenger seat. “Now you’ve got me really curious!”

  The sun, insofar as its location could be determined on a typical northwest Washington day in late fall, was setting when they reached the house. Instead of pulling into the garage, Eric parked the car in the driveway. Outside, the air was cool and quiet.

  “Now don’t be shocked,” he warned her as they walked up the paving stones he had set by hand. “Whatever you’re anticipating, Aeriel’s not going to be what you expect.”

  “I’m ready for anything.” Taking his arm in hers, she snuggled close and batted goo-goo eyes at him. “My big bwave software progwammer will pwotect me.” Her voice shifting back to normal, she asked, “Is there a chance this mystery companion of yours might, um, leap into my arms?”

  “Unlikely,” he told her as he slipped the key into the front door lock, “but if she does, I guarantee she won’t knock you over.”

  Sometimes the cloud was waiting for him in the hallway. Other times it waited elsewhere, giving him time to unburden himself of laptop, groceries, and any other baggage before greeting him. This evening it was waiting in the kitchen.

  “Aeriel?” Tentatively, Eric entered the den. “Aeriel, we have company.”

  The cloud was hovering in the kitchen, above the stove. He often left it on for her. She loved to hover in the column of warm, rising air. It was one of her favorite places.

  As the cloud drifted out of the kitchen and into the den, Jessica’s beautiful black eyes got bigger than marbles. “Eric, what . . . ?”

  He took a deep breath. “Jessica, meet Aeriel. Aeriel, this is Jessica—my fiancée.”

  Cloud and woman regarded one another. Jessica started to say something, stammered, turned to look sharply at Eric, returned her gaze to the drifting cloud. As she did so, the cloud began to change.

  Normally a pleasant, puffy cumulus shading to a relaxed altostratus, Aeriel was undergoing a metamorphosis that was as ominous as it was swift. She began to swell and expand, puffing herself up mightily, spreading upward and outward until she filled half the den and her roiling crest and splintering edges pushed threateningly against the walls and ceiling. She grew dark, darker than Eric had ever seen her before. She was cumulonimbus gray, then nimbus charcoal, then—she was black, black, a glowing, rumbling anvil-head.

  She moved toward the couple.

  Jessica took a step backward, and fell down. Mesmerized by the turbulent, roaring thund
erstorm that now dominated the room, she started edging backward on her backside, pushing with her hands and feet. An anxious Eric hurried to place himself between his fiancée and the glowering cloud. Within the den, a wind was rising.

  “Aeriel, you don’t understand! There’s no reason to be angry. This is the way people are, this is the way they’re meant to be. It doesn’t mean that you and I . . .”

  A sudden blast of wind, cold and wet, sent him staggering to his left. He stumbled up against the wall, denting the plaster, and fought for balance. The howling wind held him pinned there. From deep inside the cloud, lightning had begun to flash and crackle. A furious rain filled the room, soaking furniture and the carpet. Jessica tried to rise, to run, but the wind knocked her legs out from under her.

  “Aeriel!” Eric was shouting, “listen to me! Everything can be. . . !”

  Lightning lanced. It wasn’t a very large bolt, but it was bright and intense enough to momentarily blind him. The smell of ozone filled the room. When he could see again, Jessica was no longer backing up. She was lying flat on the floor, eyes shut, curled up in a fetal position. An ugly black scar streaked her chest just below the right shoulder blade. Wisps of smoke were rising from the ragged slit that had appeared in her blouse.

  Battling his way forward through the wind, Eric fell to his knees beside her. When he put a hand beneath her back and raised her up, her head hung free and loose. The moisture that welled up in his eyes was entirely self-generated. Today was supposed to have been a happy day, a joyous day. Whirling, he turned his furious gaze on the hovering, rumbling, ferocious thundercloud.

  “Look what you—look what you . . .” He swallowed hard, clenched his teeth. “Get out! Get out of my house, get out of my life! I don’t want you here anymore! I don’t want to see you ever, ever again!”