by Стив Хиллард
“Now, now, there you go again. I truly did enjoy our conversation. I will now pay a visit to your meddlesome gramps at ye olde Algonquin. And then all this will be finished.”
She looked down and saw the sweep hand on the pocket watch quit moving. It chimed softly, with each note she seemed to stiffen, and the world went an uneasy gray.
Chapter 39
OCTOBER 31. 2:40 P.M
So in tune had Jess become with the syren melody of the Elvish writings that, when they so desired, they could speak on their own and his translations somehow ended up scrawled across the pages. Almost without effort, the story of the final chapter of Ara’s Tale was now creating itself. He awoke to find his scribbled pages spilling onto the floor. He leaned back and stretched.
At that very moment, outside the very room in which Jess sat and stretched, a very real, steel blue Beretta Px4 9mm pistol was pointed dead center at the back of Barren’s head. The man pointing the pistol was Bossier Thornton. He cocked the trigger. He had just come out of the elevator to find the man from Riker’s Island. The man was now standing stock still, senses alert, assessing every detail of the situation. Bossier had, as they say, most definitely gotten the drop on him. It was a first in Barren’s life. He assayed the hallway, the lighting, the footing on the carpet, the distance of the man behind him, his age, his breathing, his fear.
Bossier spoke in quiet tones. “Don’t move. Stay still. Hands and palms up and away from your body.”
Barren didn’t move. And then he moved quicker than any cat ever. Bossier sensed a blur sweep past him and then felt his head being pulled back and a knife-edge rest cool and competent against his neck. The touch of steel on his skin, the presence close behind him, all were exquisitely delicate. They were so effortless, so silky. He dropped his gun; it bounced softly on the carpet. The voice next to his ear was soft and familiar. “If you resist in the least, my meddling friend, you won’t even feel the cut. So be as still as a spring dawn. How did you come to be here? Quick and quiet your answer.”
Bossier swallowed and gulped. His throat twitched, every pore and follicle testing the blade. “The call from your cell phone. You were talking to Cadence. You said you were coming here.”
It was meaningless to Barren, but enough to complete his decision. Finish this, he thought. He could complete the task here, but it would be messy. Besides, he had not yet killed in this world. His master was far, far away, and the completion of his single task was within his grasp. His place in all the rest of this world, in all its details and decisions, was his alone to define.
Bossier’s heart thudded so heavily that he could hear nothing but the boom and roar from inside. His only feeling was cool metal on the skin of his neck. The knife lifted away. He felt a hand push hard below his ear. No icy line along his throat. He felt almost a relief at being lucky as the hand pushed harder and the world fell into compressing grayness. I actually may live, was his last thought as he passed out.
Inside his room, Jess hunched over and translated feverishly. Elvish nuances flowed as if they sensed that time was dear. A familiar figure emerged:
The Wraith Pazal, standing poised on a precipice, steadied himself. Before him was an open shaft, falling to a deep river of lava that boiled beneath Fume.
He had spent a long day assisting his master’s armies as they assembled and departed for battle. Even now, the horns were blowing, summoning him and his brethren.
He had failed as a king. Likewise, he had failed to do his master’s bidding, to find the documents in that other world, or to secure the halflings here in this one. The female halfling had escaped once before, only now to be caught, almost by accident, in the very midst of the marshalling armies. Her capture was an exclamation of failure.
The Dark Lord, his ring-liege, the one who had bestowed this existence upon him, was beyond fury. His very essence flamed and then brooded in smoky coils. His bellow had perhaps been tinged with fear, “The same halfling that you let slip away, now in the center of my hold?” Days of confusion and fruitless disarray had followed.
This but engraved the Wraith’s disgrace deeper in the lore of the Land of the Source — perhaps as deep as the well before him. He had long ago failed as a man governed by his own will. He had abandoned even the nobility of his own mortality.
Across the black land, the horns blew forth, filling every breast with fire and calling the wraiths to war. Criers exhorted the assembled army:
“Come forth and slay the Unbelievers! Wreck and lay havoc to their homes! Burn down their sacred holds! Punish their arrogance! We are the People of the Source!”
Pazal’s ring, Greypoint, clasped his finger as it had for long centuries. It could not be removed from his left hand, though it was now well worn from long use.
In his right hand he held forth Arac, ancestral sword of his house, notched deeply but still gleaming and fearfully sharp.
He let it drop.
It twirled in its descent, its mirrored edges reflecting blood-red gleams. Moments later, there was a single flash as it thrust into the boil.
The final lines of the poem he had written long ago came to him:
No king will leave the sword of his ancestors,
Nor can he betray his lineage.
Legends of his falling, preserved in all time, matter not.
It’s his own assay, that of a man of himself,
That yields strength in the end.
For the first time since the ring had grasped his finger, he smiled a genuine smile, without the puppet’s smirk of malice imposed by his master.
He stepped forward into the void, slowly rolling as he fell. Red gleams played out from the ring as it slipped from the finger that hosted it for centuries, and together they passed into the maelstrom of fire.
Jess put down the pen and massaged his cramped hand. He had to keep going. The Elvish tale of Ara’s fate boiled and rolled in the cauldron in which he and Cadence had been cast. Peril weighed their lives on the same scale as the Tolkien documents.
This was his state of mind as he sat in the room at the Algonquin and completed the last chapter of the Tale of Ara.
There was a knock on his door.
* * *
Three hours later, Jess Grande cursed Murphy’s Natural Law of Flashlights. His flashlight wavered. Bright. Dim … dim … Shake. Brighter … dimmer … dim.
The soot-covered tracks to the abandoned 130th Street— Blain Place subway stop were strewn with the debris from a flood of time. They led through a smoky junkyard of incongruous objects: grocery store carts, beams of wood, twisted tree branches, lunch boxes, street signs, railroad tools, clothing, loose strata of ancient glass pop bottles and beer cans topped with the froth of plastic beverage containers. And gruesome pod-like trash bags.
Nothing would stop him now.
So he progressed, the light dimming with every fateful step, catching still-life images of cracker boxes and a mangled pair of sunglasses staring back with one dark, all-seeing eye.
He and the dimming flashlight were one, for there would be no return journey.
An hour later, when the flashlight was exhausted, Jess shook it and then let it fall from his hand.
He sat on a wooden box in the storeroom. The thin, purpled light was jeweled with intermittent greasy drops falling from the ceiling grates. He listened to far distant rumbles, car sounds like the cawing of crows.
The pool lay before him, fanning with ripples from each drop. It waited, implacable in its own small completeness.
He waited there, dressed once again and now forever as the homeless man in cast-off clothing, holey socks inside heel-less boots with knotted twine for laces.
Hours passed and the deep breath before the plunge would not come.
The choir of selves that had long peopled his soul came and berated him. The buzz-cut young Osley catching fly balls and overjoyed with the promise of a long summer mocked him. The crew-cut freshman Osley from Los Gatos stood at the Berkeley Gate looking in w
ith disbelief. The white-coated chemistry student Osley glanced up from the lab table, regarded him sadly and shook his head. The drug entrepreneur Osley, riding shotgun in the tractor cab as they barreled through the night, turned to him and said, “How?” The radical assistant professor Osley, sitting impudent and cigared at President Grayson’s desk, as Columbia seethed with tear gas and angry shouts. Even the scissor sharpener Jess, sitting across from Professor Tolkien, who was swearing him to the fealty of preserving these precious writings. They were all there. Along the way, a thousand road signs betokened the long highway of his life as it twisted into a far distant vanishing point. Each sign pointing at him with long fingers of silent accusation.
More images came in stately procession — family, friends, mentors. Their garbled voices began to chime together, “Look at you, living out the end of your wasted life in fear.”
Still, the deep breath of true belief would not come.
At last the voices became simply his own as he spoke aloud in the dark room, “How did you think this would end?”
The valise with all the original documents, plus the archives materials and the translation key, sat at his side. He fished in its contents for a while, then plucked out a single leather scrap, which he rolled and put in his pocket. Then he sat. He finally picked up a broken yardstick from the debris underfoot. He could just make out the inscription: Holland Hardware 143rd and Broadway. On the back side was etched a calendar for 1948. The year he was born.
He poked the stick in the pool, felt the scratchy rough concrete an inch underneath. Felt it again, confirming the absurdity of the real.
Go away now. Turn your face from Cadence. Find your way to the surface and let the street take you and finish you off in some pee-saturated doorway squalor, furnished with rags and cardboard, the other street people picking through your things like night vultures.
Die, Gutless Wonder.
He realized he hadn’t believed in himself, or anything else, for decades.
He had this one last chance, and he couldn’t measure up.
The certainty of his failure angered him. He poked the stick hard. It hesitated, and then it went in. He stirred and felt the stony firmness give to mush and then thin liquid. He pushed harder, and the yardstick went in two feet.
He stood up, his heart pumping, valise in hand, his stature erect as a novice cliff diver gazing down from a rocky aerie at the wavering dime of blue below, circled by razor-sharp volcanic outcroppings and the relentless pounding surf. Timing the waves.
He took a deep breath and plunged.
Chapter 40
WAKEUP
Consciousness came to Cadence in a rush of disoriented fear. All she could think was that she was in the center of a giant stadium, the Klieg lights suddenly flaring into blinding light and the marching bands sounding a thunderous crescendo.
She blinked. The rush passed, followed by the Rip Van Winkle effect. She felt a sense of precious time having passed and momentous events having occurred. All while she slept. It was a sense of being left behind and catching up, with a yawning hole in the middle.
The room where she had conversed with Barren was the same. She was alone. Her keys lay on the coffee table, the talisman removed.
The keys held down a note on folded stationary similar to that slipped under her hotel door. She looked at it in the same way that people regarded a telegram in the 1930s. Bad News. Yellow Death. Don’t read it.
She read it. It said:
The deal is afoot. Pray that it goes smoothly.
If so you shall never see me again.
If not, perhaps a glimpse as my swift knife falls.
She knew somehow that the other rooms would be different than when she entered. First was the waiting room, perfectly appointed in Victorian furnishings and décor. The skylight was still there, letting down a cascade of soft afternoon luminescence. An adjustable sky curtain in semblance of the aurora borealis spread overhead at the second floor to filter and direct the light. A single thin rope of the material hung downward. She touched it. It felt light to her touch, almost alive with changing color and organic tension.
The display cases and their odd contents were gone. She toed the corner of a distinctive blue-yellow, antique Persian rug that had not been there before. She saw that the fade marks on the wood perfectly matched the shape of the rug, as if it had lain there unmoved for years.
She went to the front door. It was the same wood but a simpler latch and pull assembly. She pushed down on a bar and the latch released. The door opened. It was afternoon, as if she walked in only minutes ago. But she knew that was not the case. Not at all.
She stepped out and smelled the air. Raw and new. The door snicked shut behind her. She jumped and looked at its unyielding closedness.
She pushed and fiddled, but it was locked tight — no budge or latch movement. She felt for Barren’s note, but realized she’d left it on the table.
Both outside signs were gone.
The time vacuum that she knew was there scared her, as if its unfilled potential could suck in all sorts of horrendous possibilities. She began to run toward Broadway, looking to catch the first downtown subway train back to the Algonquin.
As Cadence left the Talisman Store and began to run in sweating desperation, a few translated pages sat alone on Jess’s desk. Those pages gave witness to Ara’s final destiny unfolding in a far distant realm:
Just as Pazal unsheathed his sword for the last time and stepped into the abyss, so the halfling Bearer stood a mere pebble’s toss from another edge, on the far side of Fume.
Thunder coughed up deep within the earth. A rush of steam, scalding and scorching, shot forth.
The Dark Lord was calm, even as he watched the halfling dither.
Beside His Darkness, Lord of the Eye, loomed a tall contraption studiously assembled from glass and wood, and served by hunched minions of a race unlike any she had ever seen. Meticulous piping led here and there from an immense clear bowl in which danced a silvery substance. Lesser vials held churning liquids of different colors, jade green, horse hair yellow, autumnal orange. It was the Source. It was the sum of it all, the ultimate mixing of alchemic fluids, decocted from a special chamber deep in the earth’s heart.
The Bearer stared down, wavering and almost toppling over the edge. His heart seemed compressed, squashed and unable to perform beneath the weight of his burden. He could not catch his breath. His mind cycled in a whirlpool of indecision. His fingers mirrored this, fluttering in a repeated, futile dance. The Object, now fully alive, jumped and pirouetted on its chain entangled within his fingers.
This is my final role, he thought, and now I’ve lost all. Because of that, that Wizard. Bind I shall keep. I shall find Ara. I shall …
“Halfling?” the Dark Lord said, barely loud enough to be heard. The Bearer turned slowly, his body now rigid. His eyes were glazed with exhaustion, and then he saw clearly who was there.
Ara stood at the Dark Lord’s side. She was watching him.
She was dressed in tattered rags, yet wearing a dark crown. A necklace of resplendent black stones encircled her neck, each stone shining forth with a brilliant red spark.
Like spider eyes, thought the Bearer, his mind still defying the plain truth revealed by his senses.
Ara’s eyes glittered, drinking in the conflict laid before her. Oh, the possibilities! She could be a princess of supreme power, ruler of all the lands of her kind. How her people in Frighten had been slighted!
Or she could be wife and Amon to this honest and brave halfling before her.
The Dark Lord enjoyed the dumbstruck look on the Bearer’s face. He feared no resolve in this halfling. Not with Ara, his prize, dangled before him. The Bearer’s servant, his fat companion, hovered at his side. He was a less predictable thing. But the answer there was at hand also.
Behind them arose that slinking gargoyle the Dark Lord had trained to follow them like a jackal to offal.
The Bearer faltered
and then fell before the terrible beauty of the Halfling Queen. There he cried out in the pain of his burden and the loss of his beloved. He saw the clinging one who shadowed him always, creep toward him on all fours like a loathsome spider. The power within the Burden had wrung its destruction.
“How does it come to this?” the halfling cried.
The Dark Lord gloated. He felt no humility in his dependence on the Source, of which he was but an imperfect copy of an unnecessary part. His avarice and arrogance in this moment far outstripped his malice, and in this his focus wavered.
There they stood, frozen in tableau, as the fumes rolled up over the precipice and the earth at its core trembled and rendered up its boiling soup.
Then the Lord of the Source, soon to be once again Wielder of Bind, extended one hand in gracious direction before Ara. She stepped forward. She walked across the rubble to where the Bearer lay. She knelt by him and gently uncoiled his fingers. Bind she took into her own palm, rising and displaying it to her Master in triumph. Its spell swirled about her. It tugged and writhed in anticipation of its return to the Hand of the Source.
The Halfling Queen turned to the defeated halfling who was once her Amon. “Rise,” she said, “and let us try to speak the words.”
The Bearer looked up, fighting the pain and struggling to see around him. Ara’s eyes pronounced the secret of their vows. The words that just might break the invisible chains that yanked them here and there like clumsy puppets in some crude minstrel show. Whether the Dark Lord, or Bind itself, pulled the chains in this macabre dance, she could not tell.
The Bearer coiled tighter in a returning spasm of pain. He uttered, “Down … roads …”
The Halfling Queen’s obsidian eyes softened. She also spoke: “Past … borders …”
He raised his head and reached his hand to her: “Through … gates …”
And in unison they groped to speak: “Each … together … to spy that … sea!”