Dominion

by Fred Saberhagen

  Her red lips parted, “Nimue.”

  Thus Talisman addressed them all: “My lords and lady, I do not know that I am here at any summoning of yours; and yet for all I know it may be so. I do know that there is enmity between myself and a certain old man who is a friend of Artos; and that that old man has cursed me, that I must wander far from my proper land.”

  There was a shade of alarm in the lovely dark eyes of the Lady Nimue. “He launches curses still? I thought that I had well disabled him.”

  Talisman looked at her. For the barest instant the look was purely sexual. “And so you have, my lady. The launching of this curse was many years—away in time.” He did not say in which direction.

  Falerin smiled at him; the teeth of Apollo. “You are obviously of high birth, Sir Talisman, wherever you are from. Let us get down to cases. What can you do for us? And what rewards do you expect in return? While some fighting remains to be done, our battle against Artos is virtually won, now that old Ambrosius is, as you say, well disabled.”

  Medraut roused himself from silence with a cough, and leaned forward to point at Talisman with a thick forefinger. “You — — —” he said, concluding with a word that Talisman did not know. But from the way they were all looking at him now he knew it meant that in some way he was not human.

  “As much human as any of you, dishonorable scum,” he replied, smiling, in modern English that no one would understand. “Nay, more.” And then he bent and took up the dead deer from where the reporting huntsmen must have left it on the floor. It was as heavy as a child nearly grown, and Talisman lifted it casually in one hand, as a man might hold a mutton chop. Before the four pairs of watching eyes he bit surely into the great blood vessels of the deer’s neck, neatly piercing hair and hide with his very adaptable teeth. He was hungry, and the deer’s blood would start to spoil if it were left much longer in the body. Even now the blood was not as good as it would have been when the heart still pumped; but it would do. The good taste was reassuring; half a doubt had been raised in his mind, about chilled emerald wine.

  The eyes of Medraut widened to see this feeding; he’d have a tale to tell his fellow swordsmen, over wine. To the watery eyes of Comorr, it appeared that all marvels were about equally uninteresting. The eyes of Falerin—they had seen it all already, seen everything at some time in a long past; he was obviously much older than his face would indicate, his youth and beauty maintained by means of magic.

  The eyes of Nimue ignored Talisman’s peculiarities, and subtly promised much. They said that perhaps nothing would be too good for Talisman if he were her close friend and ally. But he was too old and experienced by far for such a casual seduction to tempt him seriously against his will; even so he knew a pang of regret on deciding that it would not be wise to accept the challenge.

  In a minute Talisman had finished taking nourishment, and tossed the drained meat casually upon the table. “This share in your dinner for tonight is the first part of the reward I claim. As for the rest—” Oh, it was impossible to try to be witty and subtle, when everything had to be repeated, and at best he and his audience could barely understand each other. “—to see my enemies suffer. That will be enough.”

  Falerin leaned forward. “But what can you do for us, to earn your gorge of blood?”

  Talisman had learned here all that he needed or expected to learn. “I go this very night to scout the camp of Artos. Your men tell me that it lies within two hours’ walk.”

  Medraut: “And if we do not release you, to go anywhere?”

  “Consult with your wizard colleague here, Sir Swordsman. He might not be able to prevent my departure from this camp before dawn. Or, if he could, he might see why the effort would be unwise.”

  “You know then,” asked Medraut, “in which camp my father is?”

  “I can discover that.”

  “I know,” said Nimue. “Beside my lake. I am, I was, the Lady of the Lake.”

  SIXTEEN

  Up on the third floor of central headquarters on South State they had a few special cells known informally as VIPs, along with a couple of specially equipped interrogation rooms nearby. The man called Feathers was already lodged in one of the special cells before Joe Keogh got to see him for the first time. Some patrolmen indoctrinated by Charley Snider had been alert to the fact that the old man was wanted for serious questioning in the Carados case, and had picked him up almost as soon as he’d got back to the Street.

  He hadn’t been hard to spot.

  The patrolmen had picked up Feathers at about eight-thirty in the evening, and it was only a little after nine when Joe arrived at headquarters with Charley Snider. Fortunately the two of them had been together, working not far away, when the word about Feathers reached them.

  The old man, still wearing the gaily decorated robe in which he’d come back from somewhere to Skid Row, was sitting in one of the interrogation room’s comfortable chairs, staring at nothing, when the two police lieutenants arrived. There were two or three other chairs in the room, and a sort of desk, and some other more special equipment, most of it not visible.

  “Yo, Feathers,” said Charley Snider easily. The instant he entered the room he slowed down enormously from the rush he’d been in to reach it. “Looks like somebody’s been givin’ you a hard time the past few days.”

  Actually, thought Joe Keogh, closing the door behind them, the old man waiting to be questioned by them looked quite hale; apart from his bizarre garment he looked very good indeed for a supposed Skid Row bum.

  The gray blue eyes, wary and weary, looked up at both detectives. “I’m through with that name,” the old man told them in a raspy voice.

  This is no long-term wino, Joe thought to himself again. This old man was too healthy. If the overall physical description were not so completely different, he could more readily have believed—from something about the eyes—that this was Carados himself.

  In one wall was a small mirror, actually a oneway glass through which an observer in the next room could watch this one; and Joe shifted his position by a step, enough to catch the old man’s reflection clearly in the glass. That, as he understood the matter, was a simple and foolproof test for one exotic oddity at least, one which he was not going to try to discuss with Charley Snider. The old man was not a vampire.

  Charley meanwhile had seated himself casually on one corner of the desk. “Okay,” he said cheerfully to their prospective witness. “What name would you like?”

  An expression flickered across the old man’s face, come and gone again in a moment; Joe had seen something like it on the faces of prisoners who were being offered some kind of a deal that they knew was really too good to be true.

  In this case the real wish was not to be attained. “Hawk will do,” the old man said, in a voice of compromise.

  “Hawk. Okay, then, Hawk. Mr. Hawk, is it?”

  A shrug.

  “Any complaints about the way you been treated here?”

  “Just about the fact of being picked up. Since you wanna know. You guys didn’t have any reason at all to pick me up.”

  “For your own good, Mr. Hawk. Your protection.”

  “Huh.”

  “And then, you see, that garment you have on there, it sort of suggested to the patrolmen that maybe something a bit unusual was going on. I’d even be inclined to think that way myself.”

  “Huh. I wasn’t drunk,” the man who used to call himself Feathers insisted. “I’m not drunk now. You charging me with that?”

  Charley appeared to take a careful, judgmental look at the old man’s condition. “You’re talking sensibly so far. Maybe you ain’t drunk. I don’t s’pose you’re gay, either, but that is quite a fancy getup. Want to tell me where you got it?”

  The ancient one flushed faintly. “I didn’t steal it.”

  “Didn’t say you did.”

  “A man wants to be decent, to try to keep from gettin’ busted, well, he’s gotta wear something.”

  Charley
’s large brown hand was now cupping a photograph of Carados. One of Charley’s favorite tools in questioning was the sharp change of subject. “Seen this man recently?”

  Hawk appeared to be grateful for the sharp change. He gave the picture some deliberate thought. When he looked up from it he was obviously making some mental calculation, one in which fear did not appear to have a value; as if, thought Joe, this business of being in jail were only a kind of game, that tomorrow would be over with and forgotten.

  “Yeah,” said Hawk at last, surprising both policemen by cooperating at once like the prince of solid citizens. He nodded deliberately. “That looks a lot like the guy who picked me up on the street a couple days ago. I’m pretty sure it’s him.”

  “Pretty sure? Or sure?”

  “It’s him.”

  Joe and Charley exchanged a glance. “Where is he now?” There was a controlled tightness in Charley’s voice.

  When Hawk shook his head, conveying ignorance, Joe put in: “Where and when did you see him last?”

  “I’m not clear on what day it was.” Hawk pulled at his own beard, as if the length and feel of it were a matter of surprise and some distaste.

  “This’s what?”

  “Friday night.”

  Hawk shook his head again; the blur of time in the eye of his memory was all too visible. “Anyway, I know where.” He named a street intersection deep in the inner city. “He picked me up there, took me into a tavern a block away. It was late in the afternoon. Then he fed me something in a drink and I passed out.”

  “And where were you when you woke up?”

  Hawk looked at them both, not the way a street bum ought to be looking at detectives. “Next thing I can tell you I was back on the street, and your man was busting me for being in drag, or whatever. Ask him what for. And now I’m here.”

  Charley was tapping the photograph with one big finger. “This man’s name is Carados. That mean anything to you?”

  “Name? I don’t care anything about his name.”

  “You say he picked you up. Why’d he do that? What did he want?”

  “Said he wanted to buy me a drink. I said sure. We had a drink and I passed out, but not just drunk. He drugged me, like I said.”

  Charley was silent for a moment, trying to choose which way to go next. It had to be as obvious to him as it was to Joe that this was not your ordinary wino. But if Hawk wanted to play that part, they would go along with him, for a while at least.

  Joe chimed in: “You’re looking good, Mr. Hawk. Like maybe you’ve been off the booze, resting up for a couple of days?”

  The blue-gray eyes considered him fearlessly. “Like I said, I can’t really remember anything since I passed out in that tavern.”

  “But you could try to remember something. How about this—when you woke up, how were you dressed?”

  Charley flicked the photo. “You don’t want to do this man any favors, do you? After the way he treated you?”

  Hawk was thinking again. They let him take his time. At last Hawk said: “All right, I’ll give it to you for what it’s worth. The way I remember it, I woke up in a castle.”

  “Castle,” repeated Charley. Under the circumstances the flatness in his voice had to be taken as courtesy.

  Joe Keogh’s reaction, was different, fortified as he was with the memory of a certain phone conversation. He took a long shot now. “See any swords in that castle, Mr. Hawk?”

  The old man flared at Joe silently; he’d hit home, though in exactly what way Joe wasn’t sure.

  “Whadda you mean by that?” Hawk demanded at last.

  “Just wondering. Swords, castles, they go together. Describe the place for us.”

  “Don’t think I can,” the witness muttered sullenly. “About all I remember is the inside of some stone walls.”

  “You mean,” said Charley, “you were in a big house with stone walls when you woke up?”

  “All right, yeah, that’s what I said, a big house. Listen, you guys, can you get me some clothes besides this?”

  “We’re gonna take care of that right away. Did you see Carados in this house? The man who picked you up?”

  “It’s kinda embarrassing, sitting here this way.”

  Joe stuck his head out into the corridor and called. Presently he came back in and shut the door again. “Some clothes are on the way,” he said. “Just jail issue for now, okay? We’ll work out something else later.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now tell us,” said Charley, “some more about Carados.”

  Somehow he never did, although the interrogation session went on for about an hour. There were a lot more sessions planned, Hawk was sure, but meanwhile he was at least dressed in some acceptable clothes again. There had been a time, long ago, when he would have thought nothing of wearing a gaily decorated robe as his sole garment; one adapted to the times one lived in. Unfortunately, in periods of rapid change, one sometimes found one’s learned attitudes lagging by a few decades.

  The face of the little girl who’d kindly given him the absurd robe stuck uncomfortably in his memory, even now after the garment itself was gone. She wasn’t his responsibility, of course. He hadn’t meant her any harm. He couldn’t afford to get involved with her situation.

  So he got through the first session of questioning, playing dumb, then acting weaker and more tired than he felt. It wasn’t that he’d made a decision to tell the police nothing more of substance about Nimue and her friends. The decision had somehow been made for him. He couldn’t tell them anything more, certainly not that Nimue was up to something involving murder, because…

  He had got as far as identifying Carados, his kidnapper, for the police. Beyond that point he could not go, because then Nimue would start to become involved, and… and that was not something Hawk could do.

  In a little while, he thought, alone in his comfortable little cell again, the cops would slacken their vigilance, give him a chance to depart the slammer without being too spectacular about it. Of course as soon as they realized he was gone they’d be out looking for him on the street again. Well, if he had to move on to some other town, okay, he’d move. Sooner or later they’d catch up with their important murderer, or else move on to some other problem, and then no one would want to bother much about Hawk. But catching Carados for them wasn’t Hawk’s job. That coffee-colored one was crazy, badly and sickly crazy, and he was going to have a short life and a miserable one no matter what. No special powers were needed to see that. Hawk wasn’t going to go out of his way for revenge, just to give that crazy one more trouble.

  If he were to go looking for revenge on anyone, it would be that damned insulting vampire. Hawk’s temple was still a little sore. Thinking about the vampire. Hawk started to get angry again. Then he chuckled, imagining the hard time the vampire would have trying to get back to the twentieth century, if he got past Nimue and her bunch back in the sixth.

  Nimue.

  There was a cop posted about two steps from Hawk’s cell door. Hawk was going to wait a while before he decided how to go about trying to get out. To sit in jail for a little while wasn’t really suffering, not in a cell like this one anyway, not in comparison to the kind of life to which he was trying to return.

  He paused in his thoughts to ponder that point. If life on the Street was really so bloody awful, as it undoubtedly was, then why was he… why did he…?

  Just because.

  Hawk’s thoughts wavered, sought a new tack. The coffee-colored madman’s face came again before his imagination. He returned to the idea that if the cops had Carados, they wouldn’t care any longer about

  Hawk. He’d be free to fade away.

  The cop two paces from his cell door was sitting in a schoolroom chair, one of those things with one broad flat arm, for doing paperwork. He was working away at some kind of record or report, and meanwhile keeping an eye on the few occupied VIP cells. Hawk wasn’t left unobserved for more than a minute at a stretch. It would just be too d
amn spectacular, it would draw too much attention to him, if he simply vanished now. Sooner or later, though, this close surveillance was going to flag.

  Then, if he knew where Carados was…

  Hawk cleared his throat, and made himself as comfortable as possible sitting on the edge of the jail cot. These cells were sure a great improvement over the drunk tanks downstairs.

  Now…

  His vision went farseeing, through the concrete wall that was not much more than an arm’s length in front of him as he sat on the cot. He stared for a little while into the mists that he saw beyond the wall, then shook his head in puzzlement. He was having a hard time locating Carados. Was that because Nimue needed Carados in her plans?

  Hawk really didn’t want to think about Nimue. Dark and extremely ugly things were going on round her, as usual. Meanwhile there was a young woman whose welfare somewhat concerned him. He’d find her, and also take another look at the insulting vampire. It was good to be doing something again, at last, after all the centuries.

  The centuries of what? Just what had he been doing for the past thousand years? Nothing, it seemed, but rolling in an alcoholic fog from one gutter to another. He didn’t want to think about it.

  He started over, by rubbing one horny thumbnail reasonably clean on the sleeve of his new blue jail shirt. Then he oiled the nail as shiny as possible by rubbing it on the side of his nose. Whispering a few words, Hawk settled down to stare into the dull mirror thus provided.

  “Oh,” he added a moment later under his breath. “There you are.” He tried to chuckle wickedly at first at the girl’s predicament, when he saw where the backblast of his own broken transportation spell had tossed her up. But instead of chuckling he moaned inwardly, in sympathy. Then he cursed inwardly, at himself, knowing himself, knowing how even an unconscious appeal from an attractive young woman could twist him from his purposes, force him into doing madly dangerous things.

  And then Hawk drew breath with a gasp. Of course he ought to know, even without farseeing, where this particular girl was in the sixth century. Because he’d once met her there… oh God.