by Mark Anthony
Deirdre tightened her grip on Glinda’s hands, but somehow she felt the other slipping away. “Who, Glinda? Who was Leo trying to bargain with? Why do they want you? I have … friends who can help us.”
Slowly, as if with terrible sorrow, Glinda shook her head. “No, sweetie. I told you, it’s too late. They don’t need me anymore. They don’t need … us.”
Carefully, she disentangled her fingers from Deirdre’s, then pressed them against her belly. Only then did Deirdre notice the faintest swelling in the center of her willowy body.
Glinda sighed. “Arion told me tonight.”
“Arion?”
“The doorman. Everyone’s whispering about it. No one knows how, but they’ve gotten themselves a pure-blood. They don’t need any of us now.”
Deirdre tried to comprehend the other’s words. “I don’t understand, Glinda. Please, help me.”
But Glinda wasn’t looking at her anymore. Instead she gazed up at something over Deirdre’s head. A dreaminess stole across her face, like the peace just before sleep.
“She’s so beautiful,” Glinda murmured. “So beautiful, and so pure. If only I could have been more like her.”
Deirdre turned, craning her neck, and finally she understood. Of course—Surrender Dorothy. Where else could she have taken her name?
On a nearby television screen, a scene played out in vivid Technicolor: reds, greens, yellows, and blues all as lush and juicy as they had been the better part of a century ago when first revealed to a drab, black-and-white world. Dorothy Gale stood before a fallen farmhouse surrounded by Munchkins as a bright bubble of light danced toward her, shimmering and expanding until it became a woman clad all in gauzy, glittering white.
Deirdre turned back toward Glinda. “It’s not too late. You can come with me … with us. Whoever it is who wanted you, if they don’t need you anymore, they’ll let you go.”
“You’re wrong, sweetie. They don’t let anything go.”
A calmness filled Glinda’s eyes, and it sickened Deirdre. They couldn’t give up without a fight. She opened her mouth, but Glinda shook her head, and suddenly Deirdre found that words had fled her. She worked her tongue, but she could make no sound.
“Hush, sweetie. It’s all right.” Glinda’s voice was like cool water. “You came for me, and that’s all that matters. Sometimes just by wanting to save someone, you do.”
Deirdre shook her head and felt the warm wetness of tears against her cheeks.
“Here, sweetie.” Glinda pulled a silver ring from a slender finger, then pressed it into Deirdre’s hand. “This came from my mother. I won’t … I won’t be able to give it to my daughter. You keep it instead, so that we live on. At least a little bit.”
No, Deirdre tried to say. I don’t want it. But she closed her hand around the ring. Glinda leaned forward and pressed her purple lips to Deirdre’s, kissing her deeply, lingeringly.
Deirdre’s eyes went wide, for in that moment the murky nightclub around her vanished. Instead, she and Glinda sat on a flat, moss-covered stone in the middle of a misty forest glade where moonbeams stole between silver trees like ghosts. The only music there was the chiming of water tumbling over polished stones. All around her, like bits of gossamer, tiny beings with ugly faces floated on the air with butterfly wings.
Deirdre pulled away from Glinda’s kiss.
“Where—?”
But at that moment the forest vanished, replaced again by the nightclub and the throbbing pulse of electronic music.
Glinda curled up on the couch, drawing her long limbs inward until she was small as a girl. Deirdre began to reach for her, but a stubby hand on her arm stopped her.
“They’re coming,” Arion said. “You have to go.”
She shook her head, beyond words now.
The doorman pulled her arm. “Sticks and stones, come on! If they find you here, they’ll spill your blood. They have no love in their hearts for your kind—if they even have hearts at all.”
Deirdre stumbled to her feet. The doorman pulled her toward the back of the nightclub. Deirdre glanced over her shoulder, but the sofa was empty, save for a single twig bearing two silver-green leaves resting on one cushion.
Arion tugged again, and she stumbled through an opening. The pulsing music ceased with the sound of a shutting door. One by one, the night sounds of London drifted to her ears: laughter, footsteps, the distant wail of a siren. She stood on the edge of an empty lane, beneath the flickering orange haze of a lone streetlamp. At last she turned around, and she was only slightly surprised to see a blank brick wall behind her.
24.
Dr. Rohan Chandra, third-year resident at Denver Memorial Hospital, specialist in cranial neurology, and at thirty-four years old already the author of five scientific papers discussing the cause, consequence, and reversal of long-term comatose states, had forgotten something.
He stood before his open locker in the residents’ lounge, quite frozen, overcoat pulled halfway onto his slender, well-shaped frame, caught in the act of thought. Several times a day his coworkers at the hospital found him in similar poses: a pen and chart forgotten in his hands, or cafeteria food suspended on a fork between plate and mouth, his brown eyes distant, his lips open and contemplative, his body as still and articulated as a many-limbed statue of Krishna.
At home, his wife Devi had grown accustomed to this habit. Theirs was an arranged marriage, crafted with care and attention by their parents living in India, although both Rohan and Devi had come to the United States for university. Because their union was arranged, they had worked to discover love, and when they did find it, like a yellow flower they had never noticed unfurling between them, it was all the more mysterious, powerful, and sweet.
Devi was an electrical engineer at a computer chip manufacturing firm—although these last months she had remained home to care for their infant son, Mahesh—and so she placed everything in terms of circuits and transistors.
“You’re preemptively multitasking,” she told him one day. This was after she found him in the bathroom, clad only in his boxers, toothbrush jutting from his mouth, staring into space while toothpaste quietly foamed and bubbled down his chin. After he woke from his spell—she knew never to disturb him until he did—he had frantically scribbled down an idea that had led to a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
She had nodded. “It makes sense. You’re giving fewer processor clock cycles to nonessential tasks like tooth brushing in order to divert power to the execution of more critical, computationally intensive calculations.”
“I love you as well, dearest,” he had said. Then he had kissed her foamily, deeply, and he had quickened even as she let her simple house wrap slip to the floor. Exactly forty weeks later—Devi prided herself on her ability for accuracy—Mahesh was born: brown, squirming, and perfect.
Chandra’s eyes fluttered shut, then open again, and he knew what it was he had forgotten. He shrugged off his coat and placed it back in the locker. Devi was expecting him, and he longed to play with Mahesh, to bounce that compact little bundle of life on his stomach, toss him in the air, and bring him down to kiss like a living jewel. But there was a good chance the unidentified patient in Room CA-423 was a candidate for his new study, and Chandra had wanted to observe the comatose man again today, only he had been too busy until now.
He shut the locker. Devi would forgive his lateness. As long as he stopped for mango ice cream on the way home.
With soft, swift steps Chandra made his way through the corridors of Denver Memorial. As a child smaller than most other children, he had gained the habit of moving without attracting notice. As a man smaller than most, it was a habit he unconsciously maintained. Sometimes Devi would look all over the house for him, only to find him sitting, absorbed in a medical book, in the very room she had begun her search.
As he turned the corner into the C wing corridor, his eyes caught motion ahead. A door opened, and a man wearing a black overcoat step
ped out. The man shut the door behind him; even this far away, it seemed a quiet action. In a single glance, Chandra counted the doors between his position and the man, then added the number to that engraved on the door plaque to his left. The final result: CA-423.
The man started to move away down the corridor, quickly, silently.
“Hello?” Chandra called out.
The man hesitated but did not look back. Chandra walked toward him. Since his arrival at the hospital, the identity of the patient in CA-423 remained unknown. Did the other know him? Or was it merely a janitor, on his way home for the evening, remembering he had left something in the room as he had cleaned it?
“Hello there,” Chandra called again. “Do stop for a moment, please.”
The man hesitated, then continued walking away down the corridor. Chandra started after him—
—then halted.
In the space between two moments, the other disappeared from sight. It was as if he had moved around a corner. Except that wasn’t a possibility, for the corridor was long and without bend. Rather, it was as if the white air had quivered and folded, concealing the man from view.
For long seconds Chandra stared motionless, body forgotten, his brain devoted to thought, searching for an explanation. Then he saw the dark place in the hallway. One long segment of fluorescent lighting was burnt out, casting a ten-foot length of the hallway into shadow. Beyond there was an opening that led to an intersecting corridor. Clad as he was in black, the man might easily have seemed to vanish into the relative dimness, only to pass through the opening before Chandra’s eyes could adjust to the stark difference in contrast. He started into motion again and stepped through the door of room CA-423.
The gentle whir of machines filled the clean, antiseptic air. It had been several days since Chandra had last come to observe the patient. The changes were subtle but immediate.
The level of spontaneous muscular activity was certainly an order of magnitude higher. There: a slight curling of the fingers in the right hand, followed almost immediately by the small but perceptible twitch of a cheek. With a thumb, Chandra raised one of the eyelids. Immediately the pupil constricted, highly reactive to the overhead light.
Chandra released the eyelid and nodded, satisfied. His earlier beliefs appeared correct. After weeks in a deep coma, the patient was close once more to consciousness. Whether he would cross the veil remained to be seen; sometimes such victims surfaced briefly, only to sink deeper and not return. However, Chandra’s newest study focused on the use of combination drug therapy to enhance the recovery process. Certainly this man seemed a good candidate for the research. Chandra would speak to the hospital administration tomorrow.
Chandra leaned over the rail of the bed. “Soon, my friend, you shall be able to tell us your name.”
The man remained motionless. Once again, Chandra wondered who he was. He was a tall man, certainly a full foot taller than Chandra if he were to stand, and before the atrophying of his muscles he had been powerful as well. Clearly he had led a rough life. When taking his history, a nurse had cataloged over a dozen significant scars on his body. And there was the wound that had nearly cost him his life, a gash in his side that had pierced the body wall. The wound was well healed now, his veins filled with blood again. What remained was to see if his brain would forgive his body for the trauma.
“You are a fighter, aren’t you, my friend?” Chandra murmured.
It wasn’t only the scars. Certainly there was a wildness to him, even in unconsciousness: a fierceness to the sharp features, a freedom to the long hair tumbling back from his brow. He seemed a fallen warrior, lying in his funeral boat as the waves carried him from the shore. Except he was not dead. Not yet.
“Nor will you be. If you are a fighter, then fight, my friend. Tomorrow I will help you in your battle.”
The clock on the wall ticked the seconds away. Chandra sighed. Time to pick up the mango ice cream, to kiss Devi’s sweet, sticky lips after she ate it straight from the carton, and to raise Mahesh cooing in his arms.
It was only as he started to turn from the bed that he noticed it, draped over the IV stand beside the bed. At first he took it for a piece of gauze. It was only as his fingers pierced its fabric that he understood. He pulled his hand back and stared at the gossamer shreds. It was a spiderweb, dense and glittering. He went still, thinking, but before he could arrive at a conclusion there was a faint plop as something small fell from the ceiling above and landed on his arm.
The thing was about as large as a quarter, its surface a dull, burnished gold marked by a crimson diamond in the center. Then, even as he watched, the thing stretched forth eight slender, golden legs and scurried down the length of his arm. It moved with a mindless precision that seemed more mechanical than organic, scuttling over the cloth ridges and valleys of his white lab coat.
Fascinated, he watched. Two tiny eyes glinted like rubies. Then the gold spider crawled over the cuff of his coat sleeve and onto the back of his hand. He could actually see its gold pincers extend forth, could observe them sink easily into his flesh, piercing skin, reaching for moving blood.
The pain was instant and agonizing, like fire. With a cry, Chandra flung his hand aside. There was a gold flash, and a skittering sound against the polished floor. Chandra turned and moved toward the door, but already his muscles were stiffening to cold clay as the poison moved through his body, carried rapidly by the increased blood flow and heart rate that accompanied fear and the rush of adrenaline.
He tried to cry out for help, but his vocal cords were already paralyzed, and the sound was a hoarse croak. A neurotoxin then, like that of the pit vipers that had haunted the edges of his childhood village in India. He had once seen a playmate of his struck by a snake not twenty feet away, and the boy had been dead by the time Chandra had run to him.
The floor rushed up to meet his left cheek, striking it with a curiously dull and muffled sound. A convulsion turned his face upward. The pain was fading. Chandra’s last vision was of the face of the clock on the wall, as distorted as a timepiece in a painting by Dalí. Even then, his mind was able to achieve a clarity apart from his physical being, to crystallize itself in thought.
Time of death: 7:09 P.M. Cause: heart failure from a rapidly acting neurotoxin of unknown origin.
A weak muscle spasm passed through him, then came one final meditation.
Kiss Mahesh for me, dearest.
And for the first time since his birth, Dr. Rohan Chandra’s thoughts were silent.
25.
Somehow, Grace expected Travis to be angry when he stepped into their musty motel room, pale and tired from his night’s work at the hospital, and she told him she had telephoned the Seekers. Instead, a haggard grin crossed his face. “So what took you so long?”
She crossed her arms inside her preposterously baggy thrift-store sweater. “Do you mean to say that all this time I’ve been agonizing over whether or not I should contact the Seekers and how quickly you were going to eviscerate me if I did, you’ve been expecting me to call them?”
He sat on the corner of the opposite bed, mattress springs mewling like a nest of baby mice. “Pretty much.”
Grace let out a groan. Nothing like torturing oneself for days on end for absolutely no reason whatsoever. She glared at the cardboard box and pair of Styrofoam cups strategically positioned on the nightstand. “If I had known you were going to be this easy, I wouldn’t have bothered getting coffee and King Donut to soften you up.”
“On the contrary, Grace, you chose wisely.” He flipped up the lid, grabbed a powdered jelly, and took a big, squishy bite. “If the Seekers are coming to town, we’re going to need all the energy we can get.”
She popped the lid on her coffee and took a deep swig. A reflexive grimace crossed her face.
He cocked his head. “What is it?”
Grace laughed, gazing down at the oily surface of the brown liquid in the cup. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just that on Eldh I always f
ound myself wishing for real coffee. And now that I’m here …”
“You wish it were maddok.”
Her smile faded, but she concealed it by raising the cup and taking another sip of the coffee. It was hot and bitter, and it burned her tongue.
“You miss Eldh, don’t you, Grace?”
His voice was soft, his gray eyes concerned. Sometimes this new seriousness of his startled her. Since she first met him, Travis had been funny and complaining and charming in a fumbling way. And, when both worlds had needed it most, impossibly brave. But since Castle Spardis, where he confronted the Necromancer Dakarreth in the fires of the Great Stone Krondisar, he had changed.
It was subtle. Had they not been through so much together, she might not have noticed it. However, there was something to Travis now that had never been there before. She could call it depth, perhaps. Or strength of character. Or even wisdom. It was hard to diagnose it precisely.
“I do miss it,” Grace said. “It’s hard to explain. For so many years I tried to make a place for myself here in Denver, a place where I could survive. And I did. But on Eldh, I did more than just survive. There, it felt like …”
“You belonged,” he finished quietly.
She nodded.
“We’ll get back, Grace. I don’t know how, but we’ll find a way. We have to.” He warmed his hands around his coffee. “I’m not sure where I belong anymore, if I even belong anywhere. But you need to be there, and so does Beltan.”
Grace sucked in a breath. Yes, that was it—that was the peculiar aura around Travis these days. He had given up everything he was, everything he had ever been, to save Eldh. Maybe now he was a man who had nothing left of himself that he feared losing. There was a peace in such freedom, and a purity, but a terrible sorrow as well.
An urge filled Grace to touch his arm, to say something comforting, but she held herself until it passed. Over the improbable course of this last year, she had learned she could still care for others, that the heart she had thought long ago excised still beat within her. But it was yet a fragile organ, and she did not believe it would ever be completely whole.