A blast shook the tent, a hollow booming, and Galen knelt there before Agatha. He clutched her fists, and his shoulders heaved up, hunching under some huge, unseen weight. He bowed his head, eyes squeezing shut, his whole face screwing up in agony.
The heat haze’s yellow dimmed, became orange.
On the beach, the soldiers began to move again, slowly at first, then faster and faster, stepping aside from ax-blows, returning pike-stabs.
The beastmen howled in fear and fought in panic.
But the High Cave lay silent, like some fantastic Hall of Horrors in a wax mu-seum. An occasional whine or grunt escaped the Neanderthals frozen body-to-body in combat, straining each against the other—Kobold’s men to Eagle’s parti-sans, Mughorck locked with Yorick.
Rod and Brom stood frozen, the Kobold’s glittering, malevolent eyes fixed on them, holding its frozen prey in a living death.
There was agony in Rod’s eyes. A drop of sweat ran down from his hairline.
Silence stretched out in the glimmering, ghostly elf-light.
On the beach, the soldiers slowly ground to stasis again, their muscles locking to stone.
The Neanderthals roared and swung their axes like scythes, mowing through the Gramarye ranks, their victory song soaring high.
In the cabin, Galen bent low, the black weight pressing down, squeezing, kneading at his brain. The other soul was still there with him, fighting valiantly, heaving with him against the dark cloud.
And the High Cave lay silent.
A crowing laugh split the air, and a wriggling infant appeared on Rod’s shoulders, straddling his neck, chubby hands clenched in his hair, drumming his collarbone with small heels. “Horsey! Gi’y‘up! Da’y, gi’y’up!”
The Kobold’s gaze focused on the baby boy.
Magnus looked up, startled, and stared at the creature for a moment, then darted a glance at his frozen father. Terror started to show around the edges of the boy’s expression; but hot, indignant anger darkened his face faster. He clutched his father’s temples and glared back at the monster.
Rod shuddered, his neck whiplashing as the dark mantle wrenched free of his mind.
He tore his eyes from the Kobold’s, saw Mughorck and Yorick locked strain-ing in the embrace of hatred.
Rod leaped forward, ducking and dodging through the paired immobile Ne-anderthals, and sprang. His stiffened hand lashed out in a chop at the back of Mughorck’s neck. The skinny tyrant stiffened, mouth gaping open, and slumped in Yorick’s arms.
Yorick dropped the contorted body and lunged at the black box, slapping a switch.
Slowly, the Kobold’s eyes dulled.
Galen’s body snapped upward and back.
His hands still held Agatha’s.
For a moment, minds blended completely, point for point, id, ego, and con-science, both souls thrown wide open as the burden they had strained against disappeared—open and vulnerable to the core. For one lasting, soul-searing moment, they knelt, staring deeply into each other’s eyes.
Then the moment passed. Galen scrambled to his feet, still staring at Agatha, but his eyes mirrored panic.
She gazed up at him, lips slowly curving, gently parting, eyelids drooping.
He stared, appalled. Then thunder cracked, and he was gone.
She gazed at the space he’d filled with a lazy, confident smile.
Then a shout of joy and triumph exploded through her mind. Her gaze darted upward to behold the heat haze one last time before it vanished.
On the beach, the Gramarye soldiers jerked convulsively and came com-pletely to life, saw the carnage around them, the mangled remains of friends, brothers, and leaders, and screamed bloody slaughter.
But a howl pierced the air, freezing even the soldiers. They stared as a beast-man in the front line threw down his ax and shield and sank to his knees, wailing and gibbering to his mates. They began to moan, rocking from side to side. Then, with a crash like an armory falling, axes and shields cascaded down, piling up in waist-high windrows.
Then the beastmen sank to their knees, hands upraised, open, and empty.
Some of the soldiers snarled and hefted their pikes; but Tuan barked an or-der, and knights echoed it; then sergeants roared it. Reluctantly, the soldiers low-ered their weapons.
“What hath happed?” Sir Maris demanded.
“I can only think ‘tis some event within their minds,” Tuan answered in a low voice, “mayhap to do with that fell weight being lifted from ours.”
“But why have they not fought to the death?”
“For that, haply we may thank Master Yorick’s rumormongering.” Tuan squared his shoulders. “Yet, when we bade him spread that word, we did effec-tively make compact with him, and with all his nation. Bid the men gather up the weapons, Sir Maris—but be certain they do not touch a hair of any beastman’s head!” He turned his horse away.
“Why, so I shall,” the old knight growled reluctantly. “But whither goest thou, my liege?”
“To the High Cave,” Tuan said grimly, “for I misdoubt me as to what occur-reth there.”
Fess’s hooves lifted, slamming down at the back of a Neanderthal’s head. The beastman slumped.
Rod caught two beastmen by the neck, yanked them apart, and smashed their heads back together. He turned away, letting them drop, and saw a pair of rocks flying through the air to brain two beastmen “Tag!” cried Magnus; and, as the Neanderthals fell, he gurgled, “Fun game!”
Rod repressed a shudder, and turned just in time to see Brom heave at a beastman’s ankles. The Neanderthal fell like a poleaxed steer, and Brom sapped him with the hilt of his knife.
But beastmen came in mismatched pairs here, and Brom had guessed wrongly. The other half roared and lunged at him.
The dwarf grabbed an arm and pulled sharply. The beast-man doubled over, his head slamming against the rock floor.
“Nice work,” Rod called approvingly. “That’s why I’ve been knocking out both halves of each couple. We can winnow out the friends from the foes later.”
Yorick finished trussing up Mughorck like a pot roast, and turned to join the battle; but just as he did, Fess nailed the last beastman. “Aw-w-w! I always miss the fun!”
Rod looked around the huge cave and saw that there was nothing left stand-ing except himself, Brom, Fess, Yorick, and Magnus. Though Magnus wasn’t really standing, actually; he was floating over an unconscious beastman, lisping, “S’eepy?”
“Hey, we did it!” Yorick strode around Mughorck’s inert form with his hand outstretched—but he kept on rounding, circling further and further toward the mouth of the cave as he came toward Rod. Rod suddenly realized Yorick was pulling Rod’s gaze away from the back of the cave. He spun around just in time to see the black doorway behind the monster glow to life, a seven-by-three-foot rectangle. Its light showed him a short twisted man. From the neck down, he looked like a caricature of Richard III—an amazingly scrawny body with a hunched back, shriveled arm, shortened leg—and so slender as to seem almost frail.
But the head!
He was arresting, commanding. Ice-blue eyes glared back at Rod from be-neath bushy white eyebrows. Above them lifted a high, broad forehead, sur-mounted by a mane of white hair. The face was crags and angles, with a blade of a nose. It was a hatchet face, a hawk face…
An eagle’s face.
Rod stared, electrified, as the figure began to dim, to fade. Just as it became transparent, the mouth hooked upward in a sardonic smile, and the figure raised one hand in salute.
Then it was gone, and the “doorway” darkened.
“Impressive, isn’t he?” Yorick murmured behind him.
Rod turned slowly, blinking. “Yes, really. Quite.” He stared at Yorick for a moment longer, then turned back to the “doorway.”
“Time machine?”
“Of course.”
Rod turned back. “Who is he? And don’t just tell me the Eagle. That’s pretty obvious.”
“We call him ‘Doc An
gus,’ back at the time lab,” Yorick offered. “You wouldn’t have heard of him, though. We’re very careful about that. Publicly, he’s got a bunch of minor patents to his credit; but the big things he kept secret. They just had too much potential for harm.”
“Such as—a time machine?”
Yorick nodded. “He’s the inventor.”
“Then”—Rod groped for words—“the anarchists… the totalitarians…”
“They stole the design.” Yorick shook his head ruefully. “And we thought we had such a good security setup, too! Rather ingenious how they did it, really…” Then he saw the look on Rod’s face, and stopped. “Well, another time, maybe. But it is worth saying that Doc Angus got mad at them—real mad.”
“So he decided to fight them anywhere he could?”
Yorick nodded. “A hundred thousand B.C., a million B.C., one million A.D.—you name it.”
“That would take a sizable organization, of course.”
“Sure—so he built one up and found ways to make it finance itself.”
“And if he’s fighting the futurian anarchists and the futurian totalitarians,” Rod said slowly, “that puts him on our side.”
Yorick nodded.
Rod shook his head, amazed. “Now, that’s what I call carrying a grudge!”
“A gripe,” Yorick chuckled. “That’s the name of the organization, actually—G.R.I.P.E., and it stands for ‘Guardians of the Rights of Individuals, Patenthold-ers Especially.’ ”
Rod frowned. Then understanding came, and the frown turned to a sour smile. “I thought you said he didn’t patent the time machine.”
“That just made him madder. It was his design, and they should have re-spected his rights. But the bums don’t even pay him royalties! So he gathered us together to protect patent rights up and down the time line, especially his—and democracy guards individual rights better than any other form of government, including patent rights; so…”
“So he backs us. But how does that tie in with several thousand psionic Ne-anderthals cavorting around our planet?”
Yorick tugged at an earlobe, embarrassed. “Well, it wasn’t supposed to work out quite this way…”
“How about telling me how it was supposed to work?” Rod’s voice was dan-gerously soft.
“Well, it all began with the totalitarians…”
Rod frowned. “How?”
“By tectogenetics.” Yorick hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the Kobold. “You may have noticed they’re pretty good at it. The future has worked up some dandy genetic engineering gadgets.”
Rod nodded, still frowning. “All right, I’ll buy it. So, what did they engi-neer?”
“Evil-Eye Neanderthals.” Yorick grinned. “They cooked up a strain of mutant projective telepaths and planted ‘em all over Terra. Figured they’d breed true and become dominant in whatever society they were in—take over completely, in fact. It would’ve made things a lot easier for the futurians if they’d been able to prevent democracy’s ever getting started at all.”
Rod shuddered. “It sure would have.” He had a quick mental vision of hu-manity evolving and progressing down through the long road of history, always shackled to the will of one group of tyrants after another. “I take it they’re ge-netically a different race from the other Neanderthals.”
Yorick nodded. “Can’t interbreed to produce fertile offspring. So they’d stay a minority and they wouldn’t dare loosen the reins, for fear of being wiped out by the non-psis.”
Rod began to realize that humanity had had a close call. “But you caught them at it.”
Yorick nodded. “Caught ‘em, and managed to persuade all the little groups of projectives to band together. The totalitarians made the mistake of just letting na-ture take its course; they left ‘em unsupervised.”
“Which you didn’t, of course.”
“Well, we thought we were keeping a close watch.” Yorick seemed embar-rassed. “But the totalitarians dropped some storm troopers on us one night, killed most of the GRIPE force and chased away the rest, then set up a time ma-chine and herded all the Neanderthals to Gramarye.”
Rod’s eyes widened. “Now it begins to make sense. What’d they expect the beastmen to do, take over right away?”
“I’m sure they did. Leastways, by the time we managed to find ‘em again they were running around in horned helmets and talking about going a-viking—and I don’t think they dreamed that up on their own.”
“So you hit the totalitarian force with everything you had and stole your Ne-anderthals back. But why couldn’t you have taken them someplace else?”
“Have pity on the poor people, milord! Would you want them to spend their whole existences being balls in a cosmic game of Ping-Pong? No, we figured it was better to let them stay and try to keep them under protection. We mounted a strong guard—but we forgot about infiltration.”
“Mughorck.” Rod’s mouth twisted. “Then he isn’t really a Neanderthal?”
“Oh, he’s the genuine article, all right—just as much as I am!”
Rod stared at Yorick. Then, slowly, he nodded. “I see. They ‘adopted’ him in infancy and raised him to be an agent.”
Yorick nodded. “A farsighted plan, but it paid off. When the fat hit the fire we couldn’t do anything about it. It was either kill the people we’d been trying to civilize, or run—so we ran.” For a moment, he looked miserable. “Sorry we slipped up.”
Rod sighed. “Not much we can do about it now, I suppose.”
“No, not really,” Yorick answered. “ ‘Fraid you’re stuck with ‘em.”
It was the perfect moment for Tuan to come charging into the cave.
He took one look at the Kobold and sawed back on the reins, freezing—just for a moment, of course; the monster was shut down. But it was a sight to give anyone pause.
Behind him, sandals and hooves clattered and Brother Chillde jerked to a halt to stare, paralyzed, at the monster. “My liege.. what…”
Tuan turned to him, frowning, then caught a glimpse of what was behind the monk. He looked again, and stared. “Lord Warlock!”
Rod turned, frowning. “Yes?”
“But how didst thou…” Tuan turned back to him, and whites showed all around his eyes. “But thou wert even now…” He jerked around to stare past Brother Chillde again.
Rod followed his gaze, and saw…
Himself.
A giant self, astride a behemoth of a horse; a handsome self, with the form of a Greek statue.
Brother Chillde stared at the double, then whipped around to stare at Rod, then back to the double, back to Rod—and the double began to shrink, the horse began to dwindle; the doppelganger’s face became more homely, its features more irregular, its muscles less fantastic—and Rod found himself staring at an exact duplicate of himself.
Brother Chillde’s gaze still swiveled back and forth from one to the other like a metronome. “But what… how…”
“By thyself,” Brom rumbled behind him. “It is thou who hath made this co-walker, friar, though thou didst not know it.”
Brother Chillde sighed as his eyes rolled up and his knees buckled. He col-lapsed in a dead faint.
“He’ll get over it,” Rod assured the company.
“Thy double will not,” Brom snorted as he watched the co-walker blur, sag, and melt into a huge heap of fungus.
A sponge rubber club hit Rod in the back of the neck, and a little voice de-manded fretfully, “Gi’y‘up!”
Rod grinned, reached up, and plucked his son off his shoulders.
Magnus’s eyes went round and wide; foreboding entered his face. “Naw’y baby?”
“Not this time.” Rod tried hard to look severe, and failed. “No, good baby. By accident, maybe, but good baby, anyway.” He tickled Magnus’s tummy, and the baby chuckled and squirmed. “But Daddy’s busy just now, and I’ve got a job for you.”
Magnus bobbed his head. “Baby help!”
“Right.” Rod pointed to the
heap of witch moss. “Get rid of that for me, will you?”
The baby frowned at the pile, then screwed his face up in intense concentra-tion. The fungus began to twitch, to heave; it separated into fifty or sixty frag-ments, each of which stretched up, developed arms and legs, helmets, shields, and armor—and an army of toy knights stood waiting at attention.
“Pretty!” Magnus chirped, and drifted up out of Rod’s arms. “March!”
He drifted toward the doorway, calling commands that were frequently in-comprehensible as his new model army marched before him out the cave-mouth and down the ramp.
A broomstick swooped in the entrance just before Magnus left it, and an arm reached out and pulled him firmly against a hip. “And where wouldst thou go, my bonny babe?”
“Mommy!” Magnus cried in delight and threw his arms around her neck.
Another broomstick wobbled in beside Gwen’s. Agatha cast a brief smiling glance at the pair, then came in for a landing.
“Hail, reverend dame!” Tuan called. “Are all thy witches well?”
“All,” Agatha agreed, hobbling forward. “But then, I’m certain the High War-lock could ha’ told ye as much.”
Tuan cast a questioning glance at Rod, who nodded. “I didn’t really know, you understand—but when the mental fog lifted for the third time, I was pretty sure.” He turned to Agatha. “And how’s your son?”
“Vanished,” Agatha retorted, “and with joy; for when that unholy weight lifted from our minds, Galen’s thoughts blended fully with mine and, from their combination, Harold was able to lift what he required. He’s homeward sped, to wake his body.”
Rod eyed her narrowly. “You don’t exactly seem heart-broken.”
“I am not.” Her eye glinted. “I’ve knowledge of the old stiff stick now; I’ve seen deeply into him, and know what he holds hid.”
Rod frowned, puzzled. “And that’s enough to make you happy?”
“Aye; for now I’ll invade his Tower truly.”
“But he’ll throw you out again!”
“I think not.” Agatha’s smile widened into a grin. “I think that he will not.”
Rod stared at her for a long moment; then he shrugged. “You must know something I don’t know.”
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