"How is she?" Jill wanted to know.
The older woman shook her head. "I don't know. Still in some shock, of course. She occasionally calls out a man's name-Michael, I believe-and gets upset, then relapses as you see her."
"The child?"
"Still lives, I believe," the woman, obviously a former nurse, told her. "She is far advanced, and with this shock to her system the child could come at any time."
Jill stood there thinking for a minute. "Can she travel, at least in the food wagon?"
The woman shrugged. "I know not, Mistress. I should not like to move her, and such movement over any great distance might kill her or the child or both."
"She will not die," Jill said confidently. "You will stay with her and attend to her. I will have need of her-alive." She turned and walked off, wishing she were as confident as she sounded.
The gnome had not answered her question as to how far the Citadel was, but it had to be fairly close by, as he'd known too much about it.
If so, and if the fates held, that pregnant, delirious girl in the wagon just might be the key to salvaging at least a partial victory for her, although it would not wash the blood off her hands.
They reached the Citadel area before noon on the next day. There was no mistaking it-a broad, deep, rich valley scattered with prosperous-looking farms and with one small town built on a low rise in its center. An ancient, Moorish-looking castle dominated the area from above.
The road continued down into the valley, past huge stone gates that were only remains of a former guard wall. These people no longer needed gates.
A new road branched off along the side of the mountain and continued all the way down the length of the valley, then seemed to cross over the dam that backed up blue river water and to follow the other side back to the original road. Clearly the poor highway department had been thrown for a loss when it discovered that no men could cross or even enter the valley, and had done the best it could. A huge sign at the branch proclaimed, in Spanish and English, that one's highway taxes were at work.
"Remain here," Jill commanded her force. "I will go down and give them one opportunity to avoid carnage."
She approached the gates slowly, apprehensively. Here it would be no ordinary spell like the one at the border, and she had only Constanza's word that it would not affect her.
His word proved correct, and although her horse had some problems, it was successful in the end. A gelding, she noticed for the first time. She made a mental note to see if there were any stallions among the women's horses before any attack. Some of them were sure to be, but then, infantry would be needed, anyway.
Spirits and nonhumans of any kind were obviously barred from the place as well. It seemed to have quite an underground plumbing system, and one building looked like a small gas plant.
Word had gone ahead, though, probably via the gnomes in some way or another. The inhabitants waited for her in a great crowd in the small town square, and they viewed her visage with awe when she moved slowly up to them. For the first time some of them were really afraid.
She surveyed them pityingly. Shopkeepers and farmers, men, women, and children. Not a fighter among them. Here and there she saw people with rifles and swords and even some old fencing rapiers, but nothing that could withstand an onslaught such as she could mount.
They knew it, too; she could see it in their eyes. Her force was visible along the mountain road above them.
She was surprised to see the men, considering the spell, but guessed that it would apply to them only if they left.
An old man, standing tall and straight despite his years, dressed in his best Sunday suit and peering at her through thick bifocals perched atop a bushy white mustache, came forward and faced her, looking grave and scared.
"Why?" he asked, his voice quivering.
It was a question she didn't want to hear, but it demanded an answer. These people deserved an answer.
"I come not from your world but from another far away," she told them. "My world is dying. It will be dead soon and gone to dust, kicked into the sun by a wandering moon. My people have only one hope of salvation, and that hope is to obtain a magic stone that is in the hands of the Wizard O'Malley. His price to save five billion lives is the several hundred of yours."
There was dead silence for a moment in the square; not even the children stirred or made a sound. Finally the old man sighed sadly and said, "Well, that's it, then. You must do what you must do-and so must we."
"You cannot win," Jill pointed out. "You know that. No piece of land is worth such blood. The road goes off in the other direction. If all of you leave, then the spell will be broken the same way as if we had fought."
The old man turned and looked at the silent crowd, then back at her. "Do you know who we are?" he asked her, emotion rising in his voice. "We are the poor and the children of the poor. Of the tens of thousands of us who began, we are the few survivors. Chased, shot, burned, raped, and pillaged in place after place, we finally came here, to a valley that even the Indians and the Little People shunned. It was acid, barren, a badlands hell. We had little food, we had no more money; our few pitiful cows were dying, our horses broken and done in. We had no means of going farther, and no hope of survival. We had only our own souls."
He paused and removed his glasses, wiping them with a big red handkerchief as an excuse to wipe his. misty eyes unobtrusively, then replaced them and continued.
"We built that dam out of the earth and rock without magical aids," he told her. "We went over the mountains and carried out wagons of sod, pulling the wagons in human teams since we hadn't the animals to use. In two generations, without outside aid and with the blood of two-thirds of our number, we built this place. We held it and we loved it and we fed it as it fed us. My family is buried in this soil, and the fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers of all these people as well.
"When Constanza came he tried to get us to move and could not. He built that mighty castle there-we could not stop him, but we hated him. He had no right to this land, and no blood of his was in it that gave him rights over it or us. We sought our liberation, we prayed for it as a body, and our prayers were answered. A creature came from Heaven, shining with a light that paled the stars, while Constanza and his chiefs were away. The spell was laid, and the rest of the staff of that castle he called the Citadel then added their blood to this valley. It is a place of evil and the evil lingers, but it is contained, trapped beneath that hill. We do not enter it, we leave it undisturbed." He paused again, looked back at the people in the square, then back up at her.
"You ask us to leave this place," he concluded, "yet we cannot. We are this place and it is us. We have no place else to go, nor any desire nor purpose elsewhere. We built this place and made it, and it is our only world. You might as well ask us to leave this planet. We will die, if necessary, but all men must. But we will die here!
She felt like crying but didn't dare. Instead she said, "That is true for you. I understand and accept it. But not the younger parents, surely, and their children. They have a chance at life-they deserve a chance at life."
The old man looked again into her eyes, and she saw within them a strength beyond the fear and nervousness, a strength that was inside him, inside all of them, that somehow made them greater than they seemed.
"They are the fruits of this valley; they will not transplant easily," the old man told her.
"Still, consider it," she urged. "All of you. You cannot win. There will be no miracles from Heaven this time. I will stay my advance until dawn tomorrow. That is the most time I can allow. I beg you, at least the parents of the children too young to decide, to leave. We will not stop you, and I promise we will do our utmost to take care of those who go. Consider it until dawn. After that, I can make no more decisions; it will be out of my hands."
The old man smiled warmly and reached out, actually taking her hand. He spoke for them all, she sensed that.
"I'm
so sorry you must do this," he said softly, kindly, gently, with pity. "So very sorry for you."
She looked at him in complete surprise. He was pitying her!
"What do you mean?" she managed.
He smiled kindly and patted her hand. "For us it will be a brief moment. For you it will be a lifetime."
She turned and spurred her horse to increase its speed away from the town, through the gates, up the road, past the sign. She slowed only to regain control of herself. It would not do for the others to see their goddess crying.
She turned and looked back down at the peaceful green valley and the distant town, then rode into the rapidly established hillside camp, up to the food wagon where the pregnant girl lay, still semicomatose. The nurse poked her head out the back.
"Has the child come yet?" Jill asked her.
The woman shook her head. "False labor twice, but no birth yet. It cannot be long."
Jill stared at the nurse. "Now, listen carefully to my commands and obey them to the letter. A great deal depends on this." And in the back of her mind something shouted: Oh, Mac Walters, find the gem tonight and spare me!
6
It was night again, and again he circled near O'Malley's estate, trying to think. Theritus simply had to be close to the house, he just had to be. But where? Not under the ground-Mac had checked that angle. Nor in the house or the beach houses, either. Nowhere. He'd even checked out many of the other estates up and down the north beach area, but they were even less likely havens. They were mostly millionaires' places and far, far too public to hide Theritus.
Using his hypnotic powers to question random people only confirmed this; no one had seen anyone who looked like the demon anywhere around, at any time.
Still, I'm missing something, Mac told himself as he flew aimlessly up and down the beach. There was a clue here, something he'd seen that was important, if he could only figure it out.
He almost stopped dead in the air and started falling. Not something he'd seen, but something he had not seen!
There had been an altar, a full magical room that was used for sacrifices and for casting many of O'Malley's best spells. It had that used look, that feel of magic and dark forces.
But there had been no paraphernalia of the magician there, not even spares, assuming he took some with him. No magic books, either-no potions or signs or formulae of any sort. Mac didn't care how powerful the sorcerer was, he couldn't possibly carry everything in his head-and you didn't dare make even a tiny mistake in his business. And yet that room was where he did his evil work. That meant that the things he required had to be close by, so close as to be on instant call as needed.
Mac was sure he had the answer within his grasp, if only he could take the last little step the evidence demanded. Where was Sherlock Holmes when you really needed him?
Burial? No, that was out. It would take a metal container to safeguard all of it, and the denizens of the Underearth were very jealous of that and clearly had authorized no such burial-nor could O'Malley have trusted them in any case. Not there. Not in the house. Not on the grounds. Not in the immediate neighborhood, either. Yet the stuff had to be very close by ...
Under water? He considered that, turning his gaze to the lethal-looking lake. No, not under water, either, since again O'Malley would have to trust the sea-sprites and freshwater mermaids, not to mention the major water elementals. He didn't dare sink the stuff-it would no longer be his, but the property of the water worlders by law and treaty.
The boats!
Mac cursed himself for a fool. A yacht basin. Three hundred-plus yachts out there, all neatly anchored, with a speedboat tied to O'Malley's pier. The perfect hiding place for the records and books and all the magical stuff O'Malley would use-close by, easily accessible, but should the cover ever be blown, explosive charges would destroy the stuff as well as send it to the bottom.
He studied the boats well, wishing just this once he could get to the Hall of Records when it was open to see which boats in the batch were registered to Constanza, O'Malley, or one of their fronts. But that wasn't any good, anyway-it would take days just to unearth the faces behind those fronts.
The lake glowed its lethal. color against which the ships were silhouetted perfectly. He edged over as close as he dared, at one point actually skimming the water about five meters up. He felt the effect even from where he was-a sapping of strength, a general malaise. He could not cross the water on his own, he knew that.
And cross it to where? he wondered. On one of those three hundred ships out there was Theritus and the jewel, of that he was now certain. The problem was that he didn't know which one-and it was sure to be guarded.
He studied the boats again carefully. For the first time he realized that circumstances had placed him at a disadvantage in being a vampire. He considered the woman in the house but rejected that idea. She would do his bidding, of course, but he could not become her; even after finding the demon he would have to figure out how to get the jewel from him.
He racked his memory. It had been a long time since he'd seen Dracula on television. Had that master vampire been stopped by running water? If Mac remembered it right, the Count was from Rumania but the movie was set in England. How had he reached England? How had he returned?
Of course! He'd shipped himself as freight on a ship! He'd even killed the crew and beached the ship! He could travel over running water!
Mac alighted near the speedboat. The keys weren't in it, of course. He stopped short. What was he thinking of? It might look like a speedboat, but it couldn't be, not in this world. They didn't have internal-combustion engines.
Not a rowboat, though. There was a steering wheel, a pilot's seat, and-
"Well I'll be doubly damned!" he swore aloud. "Pedals!"
It was like riding a bicycle-easy once he got the hang of it with his superior strength. He was down a bit from the sapping feeling the water around him gave him, but still stronger than an ordinary man, and in life he'd been an athlete. He was nervous, though: first that some guard might notice the boat was missing, or that somebody might spot him; and also because if he fell or was pushed overboard, that would be the end of him.
He had to put both possibilities out of his mind; he still had to find out which boat was which.
It turned out to be fairly easy. First there were the guards with submachine guns occasionally walking up and down the decks of nearby ships-but the real tip-off was the line in the water. He was almost on it before he realized it-a rope or something kept afloat with marker buoys. All the guards were on boats outside the line, which went from that boat to that boat to that boat to that boat to that boat and back again.
A pentagram. A pentagram in the water, with another ship in the center, a big luxury ship with two masts and a smokestack as well-a two-way sidewheeler-and-sail combo.
But first he had to get past those guards.
They hadn't spotted him, despite the torches around, because he'd been cautious as well as lucky. Guarding is one of the most boring businesses there is. You can't be as dumb as those house servants, since you might be called upon to foil some very clever thief or cop or interloper, yet you had about the same thrills as that girl who waxed floors. Less even.
Those men were there, but they weren't looking for anything.
He pulled up close to one of the boats and hoped he had judged the distance correctly. He made a mighty leap and clung like a spider to the hull of the yacht. The small boat was pushed away by the force of the leap and he made some noise when he grabbed onto the hull, but that couldn't be helped.
He hoped the noise would be put down by the guards as just the sounds of boats at anchor, but no such luck. A man was coming along the deck directly above him at a dead run, a directional lantern in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. He peered anxiously over the side, then spied the small boat drifting away and became suspicious.
A strong arm suddenly grabbed the man's neck and held it in a viseli
ke grip; he was pushed backward before the power of the vampire's grip on his windpipe. He could not cry out. His eyes bulged and his tongue swelled, and suddenly his eyes rolled and he sank limply onto the deck. Mac didn't know whether he'd killed the man or not, but he no longer cared. He crept along the deck, all too conscious of the glaring torchlights that turned the area of the basin almost into daylight.
He wondered idly if he could fly and then decided not to risk it. There were still a lot of problems, he saw. They'd left the place less heavily guarded than they could have-no more guarded than such a collection of fancy shipping should be-to avoid attracting attention to their hideaway. And yet- There were still three guards around, possibly more if there were any on the central ship,, and that central ship was about ten meters from any other craft. Ten meters! He couldn't fly over there, close as it was-he dared not risk doing so over water. He had lost his small boat, too. He couldn't even risk raising anchor on this one, since it was part of the pentagram. He hardly wanted to free the demon, loose him before he got what he'd come for.
The ships were unnaturally steady, anyway, probably held to the shallow lake floor by concrete posts. It wouldn't do for storm or ice to disrupt the protection, either.
The pentagram was even more cleverly designed than he'd thought. It was designed not to keep people out but to keep people in. You had to have some special counter, like the guards, to walk out, although the guards could probably take you out. That, too, was bad. He had perhaps four hours to complete all this or he'd be trapped here at sunup, unable to return to the culvert.
He'd have to abandon subtlety and depend on the fact that the pentagram was supposed to work to keep the nonhumans out and that the guards were there to keep people out. Nobody had considered vampires.
He looked around nervously. None of the other guards had apparently seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, but he would have to cross the distance to the central key boat in full torchlight and with nothing to hide behind. The machine guns the men had couldn't hurt him, but they would have impact, perhaps enough impact to knock him into the water. He examined the yacht itself-deserted, of course, probably used only for the guard's quarters. He checked below and found signs that at least two others lived there-probably not the other guards but the rest of the shift now off in town. Down in the hold, below the water line, he saw that he'd guessed correctly. Two huge steel and concrete pilings, fixed in concrete, came up through the bottom of the hull. There was a trickling of water which convinced him to get out of there. He wanted no part of water regardless of how shallow and still it was.
And the Devil Will Drag You Under Page 24