by Lionel Fenn
Gideon met the man's uneven gaze evenly, trying to ferret a trick, a conspiracy, a plan to separate them and thus render them helpless.
"When?"
"Half an hour ago?"
"And you just now came to tell us?"
"Hey," the man said, "it's dark out there, y'know? All these shacks look alike in the dark."
Gideon nodded, and as he turned to Ivy he threw the man out the door. "We're in trouble."
"No shit. I only have one blouse."
Whale came out of the back room, rubbing his eyes and yawning, saw Ivy partially undressed, saw Gideon wiping his hands on his jeans, and said nothing until Gideon passed on the message he'd just received.
"Oh dear," Whale said. "I suppose that means only one thing."
"No it doesn't," Gideon said glumly, "but I guess we don't have any choice."
"None at all, I'm afraid. We'll have to see Wamchu now. Tonight. Or we'll never see our friends again."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
"Bopped on the head," Gideon muttered as he strode down the road with Whale and Ivy following. "How the hell do you bop a giant goat on the head?"
There were no answers, either from his companions or from the few people they passed. The shacks were all dark, clouds had rolled in to bury the stars, and more than once he stumbled over a rut or into a hole; but Rayn itself was their beacon, aglow with hundreds of small lanterns hanging from lintels, from torches burning brightly atop intricately and hypnotically carved posts at each intersection they crossed. The glow cast shadows on the walls and the now cobbled road, which danced and writhed around them, blotted out the starless sky, and prevented them from seeing into the open windows and doorways of the buildings they hurried past.
But from the sounds they heard within, most of Rayn was having a fairly good time.
"I don't get it," Gideon said in amazement. "Why do they come here? Don't they realize what's going on? Don't they understand whose place this is?"
"Why, they most certainly do," Whale said, as if to think otherwise would be shocking and insulting to the parties concerned. "But you must remember two things. First, Wamchu has only recently decided to return and has therefore not quite put his full evil stamp on life as these dear folks know it. Second, the former mayor, if you will, is not capable of resisting him. And third—and I know what I said, so do not correct me—in spite of his odious and malicious presence, there are still businesses to be run, vices to be pursued, lives to be led, fortunes to be won and lost, tragedies to be enacted, birth, death, life, and things like that." He tugged lightly at his wattles. "It isn't a pleasant place these days, I'll grant you that, my heavens no, but it has its own certain charm if you're inclined to see beauty wherever you look."
Gideon looked up at him.
"Or not," the armorer retreated.
Despite Gideon's concern about a trap being laid for their pursuit of their friends, there had been no trouble getting through the city gates because there were none, merely a gap in a ten-foot wall guardless and unblocked. Once inside, Whale had suggested they take one of the back streets to avoid premature confrontation, but Gideon was too angry to listen to reason. He kept his hand near his enholstered weapon, and his fierce, uncompromising scowl readily cleared the way until, breathless but no less ill-tempered, he stopped at the Wamchu Hold.
Wonderful, he thought; now what do I do?
It was, as he had observed from the knoll that morning, a rugged three-story building, square and flat-roofed like all the others, but as far as he could tell completely without windows. The huge double doors at the top of the three steps were made of a deep red wood, and in the various panels were bas-relief carvings of all manner of exotic creatures in varying postures of menace and intimidation. In one at eye level a pacch was busily thumping a party of innocent travelers into the ground. Gideon examined it for a moment, then sniffed and took out his bat.
There were no guards.
There was no doorbell, doorknob, bellpull, knocker, or peephole.
A glance around at the broad-cobbled square that surrounded the building proved it inarguably deserted of pedestrians, merry-makers, drunkards, and thieves; the people of Rayn, apparently, avoided the Hold once the sun had gone down. He didn't blame them; this was no place to be at night without saying good-bye to your mother.
And there was silence almost total, as if a soundproof invisible wall had been suddenly erected between the Hold and the city. It was more than a little unnerving, and he smacked his lips loudly, clucked, stamped his foot, just to be sure he hadn't been magically rendered deaf.
Whale came up behind him then, examined the forbidding entrance with hands clasped behind his back, and muttered what was either a complaint about the weather or an incantation; either way, there were no results.
Ivy pushed them both aside and pulled out her dagger, attempting to slip it in between the doors in an effort to spring the bolt. Nothing happened except a bending of the blade, which she straightened with an evil look and a stomp of her boot.
Gideon brushed aside a suggestion that they walk around the rest of the Hold, that perhaps there was another way in. He stood sideways to the door, rested the bat on his shoulder, and waited for the pitch. Then he swung at the barrier and yelped at the stinging that was born in his hands and grew up to fire that coursed along his arm.
Ivy, on the other hand, cried out at the cracks that webbed across the panels, at the screech of tearing wood, and jumped back when the doors crumbled into fragments at their feet.
"There's that way, too," Whale said with a sigh, and stepped over the threshold into a large chamber from whose exposed beams two stories above hung hundreds of heraldic banners, from whose damp stone walls angled monstrous blazing torches, and on whose paving-stone mosaic floor were thousands of tiny rugs, each with a single red eye embroidered in its center.
There were no doors to either side, but directly ahead was a staircase that led to a short gallery.
There were no guards.
Gideon took a determined step toward the stairs, swinging the bat angrily, but Whale took his arm in a restraining grip.
"Now what?"
"There are no guards," the armorer said.
"I know."
"If you were the Wamchu, heaven forbid, would you let just anyone be able to walk across this magnificent hall and up those stairs and into your room without some sort of protection? My heavens, don't you see that there are probably any number of hidden traps around here, most of which, if I am any judge of hidden traps though without firsthand experience of them, are very likely on the fatal side?"
Ivy moved closer to Gideon and looked down. He looked down. Whale looked down. They were standing on an eye. There was a gap a single paving stone in width before the next tiny rug. When Gideon surveyed the floor more carefully, he realized that the carpets were arrayed in checkerboard pattern.
"One just doesn't rush into these things precipitously," Whale continued as one hand fumbled into his belt pouch and pulled out one of the tiny round bombs. "We shall have to discover in some clever way how to reach those stairs without coming to any harm, which will surely be the case if—if you'll pardon me for being so long-winded about it—we are not more cautious. Can you imagine the destructive power of one of those torches should it be loosed from its bracket? Or the speed at which a spear or arrow can reach when launched from a gap in those walls? Or the suffocating trauma of one of those banners if a single misstep should bring the lot down on our heads?"
"The door," Gideon said.
Ivy looked; it was still shattered across the threshold, and she could see straight up the street toward the gates. "What about it?"
"Could anybody else have gotten through that door but us if this Wamchu didn't want it?"
"Not unless it was opened," Whale conceded after a second's deliberation.
"Then what the hell are we worried about?"
"Dying," Ivy said.
"That's a good one," Whale agreed.<
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Gideon looked at them disgustedly, took a firmer grip on the bat, and took a step off his rug onto the bare floor. His legs tightened, his stomach lurched, his eyes watered only slightly, but nothing untoward happened. A second step, a third following a fraction more rapidly, and he was soon walking straight across the hall. At the staircase he looked over his shoulder and saw Ivy and Whale following, hesitantly, fearfully, but eventually reaching him and grabbing onto the newel posts.
Granting Gideon his moment with a nod, Whale scanned the gallery's length and frowned. He pointed, and Gideon looked up to see nothing but a blank wall. There were no doors, no tapestries behind which doors might be hidden, and there were no guards in front of what might have been doors that rotated on a hidden axis. Nor could he discern the presence of ropes for ladders, ladders folded into niches, or gaps through which an ant might crawl.
It didn't make sense, but neither did the feeling that he was being watched.
It occurred to him that the stairs themselves might be the traps, and with a deep breath for courage he took tight hold of the lefthand bannister and began to climb up, testing each riser with a kick, each flat with gentle pressure before moving on to the next. It was slow going, but he was no longer rushed. He didn't think that Wamchu would harm Red or Tag, that the taking of them—how the hell do you bop a giant goat over the head?—was merely to draw him and the others into the Hold before the night was done. It remained then to figure out just why this night was so important, why this all couldn't have waited until tomorrow.
Whatever the answer, he knew damned well he wasn't going to like it.
Just as he knew when he reached the gallery and waited for the others to join them that there was something odd about this whole thing. Nobody builds a front hall without any exits save for the way one gets in.
On the other hand, nobody has a place like this in his pantry, either, so why bother to look for reason when he had obviously fallen through the looking-glass?
He sighed loudly to signify his martyrdom for those who cared, then walked to the gallery's far end and began pressing against and tapping the wall, hoping that somewhere along the line he would uncover a clue to the next portion of the puzzle. Whale, seeing what he was doing, began at the opposite end. Ivy stood at the head of the stairs and glared down at the hall, dagger at the ready, every so often plucking distastefully at the baggy black shirt Whale had given her to replace her burnt blouse.
In the center the two men met, without success, and joined Ivy in her scowling.
"I don't get it," Gideon said. "There has to be a way."
"No, there doesn't," she answered tartly. "You just think there does because you're imposing your own cultural attitudes on a culture that has no connection with yours."
"No, I'm not."
"You are too."
"I am not. And there is so a connection."
"Name three."
He almost did, then shook his head angrily.
"Well, I think we ought to go back outside and do what Whale said in the first place."
Whale maintained a diplomatic silence, though his grin gave his deepest feelings away.
"All right, so I was wrong," Gideon admitted. "But you have to understand I'm new at this sort of stuff."
"This sort of stuff," Ivy said heatedly, "is going to save our world as we know it! If you don't want to help, just find yourself a damned Bridge and go back where you came from!"
"All right," he said. "Okay, don't get so huffy."
"I am not huffy," she said, and took a stamping step down.
Gideon moved to stop her, to apologize, and Whale hurried after them.
Not long after that, the steps gave way, dropping out from under them and plunging them into a darkness unrelieved by anything save their startled shouts and screams, suddenly developing a slanted floor that took their breath away on impact and sent them sliding and spinning downward in what Gideon perceived was a spiral chute of some sort, a tube made of highly polished and very slick wood that was, as he raced through total blackness, beginning to burn a hole in the seat of his jeans.
Christ, he thought, what a pain in the ass.
Below he could hear Ivy's high-pitched curses end abruptly, followed by a shout from Whale, and followed by himself when his soles struck a barrier, the barrier gave way, and he plummeted out of the chute onto a high pile of silk-covered multihued pillows.
He rolled down the uneven slope and landed on a floor littered with silk-covered, multihued pillows only marginally less thick than those he had landed upon, and came up against Ivy, who was sitting cross-legged and shaking her head.
"Are you all right?" he asked, taking her shoulders and looking deep into her eyes.
"Dizzy."
He was, too, and they held each other for a long time before the dizziness passed.
Then: "Where's Whale?"
Gideon looked around the room and saw no sign of their friend.
The room, however, soon distracted him.
It was a full twenty feet on a side, its walls of whatever composition hidden behind tapestries depicting beautiful garden scenes fraught and filled with unicorns, maidens, flowers, birds, kings and queens, and their richly attired retinues.
"Jesus," Gideon said with a slow shake of his head. "My god, I've never seen anything like it outside the third grade."
The tapestries were dreadful. There were gaps, mismatched colors, and disproportion; the sides were uneven even when they were bound, the fringes were ragged when there was any fringe at all, and even from where he was sitting he could tell that whoever had done them had used whatever threads had come along, thick and thin and without regard to origin of same.
He rose shakily and pulled Ivy to her feet. A check of the pillow tower behind them failed to locate Whale. A check of the ceiling hidden behind tapestries tacked to it failed to uncover anything but the chandelier that gave the room its soft golden glow.
"Electricity?" he said, his astonishment rendering his voice high.
"What?"
"You have electricity here?"
"You mean the stuff in the wires?"
He nodded, unable to speak.
"Sure. If you want to put up with it, all those holes in the walls, all those wires, all that little bitty crap running around in them and making you sterile."
Seven or eight immediate questions came to mind, but they were all shoved to the background when the tower of pillows began to crumble around them. Grabbing Ivy's hand, he backed away and watched, bat at the ready, as the landslide of silk and satin hissed and rustled and tumbled around their feet.
"Do something," Ivy whispered urgently.
"What? Have a pillow fight?"
They backed away again, wary and thin-lipped, until the tower was completely destroyed and there, in its midst, sat Whale.
Gideon's first reaction was to take a step toward him; his second was to try to pry Ivy's fingers off his hand when they began to crush the bones; and his third was to look at her and then behind, where she was looking herself.
At a tapestry that had been drawn up into the wall, and at the doorway behind.
"Good evening," said Lu Wamchu. "Welcome to my house."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The three walked in glum single file behind the imposing Wamchu, along a narrow, ill-lit corridor toward a bright, blinding white light.
Whale came first, nervously tugging at his hair and wattles, murmuring incomprehensibly to himself and holding tightly to the pouch into which he had replaced his tiny bombs. He stumbled several times along the way, perhaps as a result of his near suffocation in the mound of pillows, but refused any assistance from Ivy, who followed, fingering her dagger and braiding and rebraiding her hair to such distraction that Gideon, bringing up the rear, felt a great and uncharitable temptation to tear it out at the roots.
He also wondered why he didn't just grab one of the bombs and blow Wamchu up, or at least clobber the man with the bat and be done with i
t; and the answer, he knew, was painfully and ridiculously obvious—he had no idea what lay ahead or how to escape from the Hold. Nor did he know where Red and Tag were, and until that information was forthcoming, he was forced to play the tyrant's game.
He closed on Ivy after a few paces and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, raising himself slightly so that he could see the man at the lead.
Wamchu, his back rigid and head held high, was nearly seven feet tall, with a sickening abundance of hair almost as blond as Ivy's that fell in well-brushed ripples down his back. He had no mustache but sported a deep red beard neatly trimmed in a crescent moon beneath his chin. His taut skin was dark, much like a Navajo's, and his features the same except for the brilliant dark red, gold-flecked eyes that were somewhat Orientally slanted. A curious amalgam disconcerting at first sight and somewhat fearsome afterward, the intimidating effect heightened by the clothes that he wore—deep ebony silk of so many folds and ties and subtle tucks that it was impossible to tell whether he was wearing an elaborate shirt and trousers or a single flowing garment that hissed like enraged snakes as he walked, exposing with each stride night-green boots on whose toes had been tooled reflections of his eyes.
There was no question that his was the indistinct face Gideon had seen several times since his arrival, that his evil presence was the one felt when the sun went down and nightmares crawled out of his subconscious, that his was the upper hand until fortune returned from her inexplicable vacation.
Whale once or twice haltingly attempted to engage the man in conversation, but Wamchu merely flicked a disdainful hand over his shoulder and the armorer fell silent.
Ivy made once or twice to toss her honed dagger into the broad back, but Gideon hastily restrained her, whispering urgently that they dare not do a thing until the fate of the others had been discovered, not to mention learning the whereabouts of Glorian and her stupid duck.
Reluctantly she agreed and gripped his hand tightly until, at last, they passed from the winding corridor into the light.
It was a chamber twice as large in all dimensions as the pillow room, evidently carved out of solid rock some distance beneath the surface. A dazzling orange light was provided by torches throughout and a massive, twenty-tiered crystal-and-diamond chandelier that hung from a twisted black chain from the unseen vaulted ceiling. There were smooth-stone pews set up as though the place had once been a church that seated several hundred worshipers; yet where the altar should have been was a raised dais upon which sat a throne of solid ivory, simple and unadorned and most impressive in its plainness. Behind it were draperies of the same execrable design as the pillow room tapestries.