Jeez, and I swore I wasn't going to date outside my own species. Even at Fairgrove. She's so sexy!
He reached out with his real hand; Shar put hers into his without any prompting on his part. Physical touch gave him physical linkage; he pitched his chanting a tad higher and plugged her into the Mach I's energy reserves.
"Oh!" she exclaimed. And then thoughtfully, "Oh . . . my."
He sealed the connections to her and dropped back into the real world. She was sitting in absolute, Zen stillness, head cocked to one side, eyes unfocused, her attention concentrated on what he had just given her.
He watched her face; interestingly, it was as easy to read the vulpine expressions as the human ones. Finally, her eyes focused again, and she came back to reality, turning a face still full of surprise to him. "Tannim—" she said very slowly, her expression full of wonder and gratitude. "You didn't need to do that."
He shrugged, covering his mingled feelings. He was filled with pleasure at her thanks, and nervousness at having given her the key to so much of himself. "Gives us both an edge," he replied. "Gives us both a source of power to draw on when we don't want to let the locals know that we're mages. Now, you go out there and study that Gate. Here, take the other Mylar blanket, too. Put it over the wool. Sit on the hood. The engine'll keep your—ah—tail warm, and you'll have a pure and reliable power source to draw on."
Tom took all this in, head tilted to the side, a slight smile on his face. "I'll be havin' another bit of a nap, if ye won't be a-needin' me, eh?" he said, when Tannim had finished.
Tannim chuckled weakly. "Sounds good to me, Tom," he said, and the old man curled up, tucking his head under an improvised blanket-hood so that his face could not be seen.
Shar laid her hand on the back of his. "Thank you," she said quietly. "Thank you very much. It is a noble gift, and a generous one. I'll never forget it."
Then, before he could reply, she popped the door open and slipped out with a crackle of plastic. She stood wrapped in Mylar in a reversal of "woman in a silver dress, wrapped in a fox-fur cape." He turned the car around carefully, so that the nose faced the Gate. Like the one in the Mountain King's Hall, this was a simple arch of three rough stones and appeared to be the only structure here for as far as the eye could see.
She slid up onto the hood of the car and sat just in front of the air-intake, breath steaming up into the air, pointed ears perked forward. Tannim took it upon himself to sit guard for her, watching with every sense, in every direction except the one she faced, for any sign of living things.
He sensed her slipping into deep meditation; she must have felt him putting out warning-feelers, and trusted to him to guard her back.
It was the second such evidence of trust she'd granted him, the first being when she had slept for an hour or so, back in the amber room.
And despite their precarious situation, he felt his mouth stretching in a silly grin.
Or maybe not so silly. Because maybe, just maybe, this is all going to work out. . . .
* * *
"You will come with me, please." Lady Ako rose gracefully to her feet; Joe discovered that he was not as practiced at sitting on the floor as he had thought, when he tried to follow her example.
Chinthliss and FX didn't seem to have much more luck than he had, fortunately, or he'd have felt really stupid.
The kitsune-lady led the way not to the door into the nightclub but to the door through which their kitsune-server had come.
"We will use the private entrance," she said, turning her head to speak over her shoulder.
"I didn't know there was a private entrance," Chinthliss observed with mild surprise.
Lady Ako smiled slightly. On a fox-head, that translated to showing the barest tips of her teeth. Definitely an unsettling sight. "You were also not aware that the majority partners in this establishment are five-tail kitsune, I assume."
FX started with surprise. "I'd wondered about the Tea Ceremony," Chinthliss replied with equanimity. "There aren't too many nightclubs equipped to perform it at a moment's notice."
Lady Ako said nothing; she only opened the door for them all and bowed without a hint of servility. They all filed through, Joe taking the rearmost position.
The door led into a perfectly ordinary, utilitarian hallway, white-painted, terrazzo-floored, with ordinary light fixtures overhead. Odd creatures squeezed by them as they passed, emerging from other doors along the hall. Some were in the uniforms of the cocktail waitresses and waiters, some in full tuxedos, a few in very little other than strategically placed spangles.
Joe blushed; he couldn't help it. Bad enough when these females were at a distance, but they brushed past him without a trace of embarrassment, full breasts practically in his face. His cheeks and neck felt as if he had the worst sunburn in his life, and he was certain he looked like a boiled lobster.
"Two sequins and a cork," Fox muttered in his ear as they threaded their way past another group of girls with butterfly-wings in matching—outfits. "Placement optional."
Joe blushed so hard he could have blacked out from the rush of blood to his skin. And elsewhere.
Finally Lady Ako brought them to a door at the end of the corridor and opened it for them. Joe had only a moment to notice that the doorframe seemed filled with a hazy darkness—
Then, before he could stop, his momentum took him through.
His stomach lurched for a moment. A Gate? he thought in confusion; then his leading foot came down solidly on the "other side."
His eyes cleared; he shook his head to clear it as well, taking a firm grip on his weaponry.
"No need," Lady Ako said mildly from behind him.
He blinked, finding himself in bright sunlight on an immaculately groomed gravel path. Sculptured mounds crowned with carefully placed, twisted trees, stone statues, and iron lanterns rose on either side. Ahead of him was a bridge that arched over a tiny stream, with a curve as gentle as a caress. Beyond the bridge, on a perfectly shaped miniature hill, stood a pavilion with a peaked roof and white paper walls.
"You are at our embassy here; you have not left your original section of Underhill," Lady Ako stated calmly. "We will be able to search for Shar and Tannim from here—and we will be able to alert our allies and agents in unfriendly domains to watch for them."
It was not until she came around in front of them that Joe saw she had changed significantly. She was no longer a fox-woman, but was, to all appearances, perfectly human. She still wore her kimono, but she had discarded the elaborate black hairdo somewhere. Now she wore only what Joe assumed was her real hair: a long, unbound fall of fox-red, with a streak of white, ornamented by a single clasp in the shape of a carved fox of white jade. That hair color looked distinctly odd on someone with otherwise Oriental features.
She moved to the front of the group, but did not lead them to the pavilion as Joe had expected. Instead, she brought them, after a short walk, to another building altogether.
Joe got the oddest feeling that Lady Ako was giving them the runaround. But why would she want to do that? Wasn't it her daughter that was in trouble here?
He put his feelings aside; surely he was mistaken. It was just because this was all so weird that the only way his mind could cope with it was to be suspicious.
This was something like a bigger version of the pavilion; it had a wide, wooden porch around it, with more little flat tables and cushions arranged neatly and precisely. Lady Ako brought them up onto the porch and took her place on one of the cushions; they did the same, arranging themselves around her.
"Now," she said, when they were all settled, "we shall have Tea."
"We will not have Tea!" Chinthliss exploded, shattering the serene silence and frightening some little birds out of a sculptured bush near the porch.
Ako fixed him with a look of stern rebuke. "We will have Tea," she repeated stubbornly.
But Chinthliss had evidently had enough. "We will not have any damned Tea!" he shouted, leaping to his feet. "Tannim is miss
ing, you don't know where Shar is, an Unseleighe enemy of Tannim's and mine wants Tannim in small pieces, and you want to serve us another bowl of your damned green glop?"
"She's stalling!" Joe blurted.
All eyes turned to him—including Lady Ako's, and she was not happy with him or his observation. But Joe couldn't help it; now that his subconscious had come up with what was really going on, he had to report it to Chinthliss, his "superior officer."
"She's stalling, sir," Joe said to Chinthliss, deliberately avoiding Lady Ako's gaze. "I don't know why, but she's been taking as much time as she possibly could to do everything. It isn't just that tea-stuff, it's everything; if she really wanted to get something done, couldn't she have met us at the park? Or if she had someone watching to see if we came to the Drunk Tank, couldn't she have brought us straight here?"
The sheer numbers of people crowding that hallway, too, had been way out of line. "She even had everybody working in the club out there in the hall, just to keep us from moving through it too quickly." Now he cast a quick glance at Lady Ako; she looked distinctly chagrined. "Sir, she's been throwing every single delay at us that she could. She probably even had some kind of `emergency' planned, so that she could shut us up someplace for a while."
Chinthliss stood, towering over her as she remained seated on her little cushion. "Well?" he asked icily.
She averted her eyes. "I haven't the least idea what the boy is talking about," she protested, though it sounded to Joe just a bit feeble. "Why would I do anything like that?"
"The reasons are as many as your tails, Ako, and only you know which of them are true." Chinthliss was clearly out of patience. "The only thing useful to have come out of this is that you have told me that Shar and Tannim are likely together, and that Tannim is pursued but no longer captured. Thanks to all this taradiddle of yours, that may no longer be the case."
He jerked his head a little, and Joe took his place behind him. FX vacillated for a moment, then joined them.
"You may do what you like, Ako," Chinthliss said, his voice coldly emotionless. "I am going to find a taxi. I suggest that you do nothing to stop us."
* * *
Tannim's nose and feet were awfully cold, but the rest of him was warm enough, wrapped up with his armor beneath it all. Tom Cadge slept blissfully on in the backseat, and Shar contemplated the Gate from the hood of the car, a fox of white jade wrapped in shiny silver gift wrap.
She could have been an incense burner, with the fog of her breath for smoke. Or a baked potato in a microwave? No, she's not at all potato-shaped. And potatoes explode. Hope she doesn't do that.
Finally, though, she stirred and climbed carefully down off the hood of the Mach I. Still wrapped in her silver cloak, she padded quickly to the door of the car, opened it, and slipped inside. The Mylar crackled annoyingly as she slid into her seat.
"This was good. With leisure to study the Gate, I was able to trace all of its destinations as to type if not actual location. Six settings, so I can't add one of my own," she said. "One is back to the place we just came from. One goes directly to the domain belonging to the yeti. We could take that one—they have another Gate that goes to the other side of the Hill—but we'd wind up in the Himalayas near Everest, and the Mach I is neither a yak nor equipped with oxygen and climbing gear."
"And I'm not a mountain climber," Tannim added. "We'd have to be damned lucky to survive the Himalayas long enough for Tibetans, monks, or some expedition or other to find us and rescue us. And if we arrived in the middle of one of their killer snowstorms, we're ice cubes. Next?"
"One leads to a swamp. I don't know who owns the swamp, but I suspect something like the Will-o'-the-Wisps." She waited for his reaction, keeping quite still, so that the Mylar wouldn't crackle.
Tannim shuddered; he'd encountered one, the real thing, not swamp gas. Will-O'-the-Wisps were not little dancing fairy lights; they were horrible creatures who lived only to lure living beings into sucking morasses in the swamps they called home. Like the other Unseleighe, they thrived on fear and pain; when their victim was well and truly trapped, and sinking to his death, they would perch nearby and drink in the panic and despair as he struggled and died. The Will-o'-the-Wisp Tannim had encountered had not been content with trying to lure him away to his death; when he had not cooperated, it had tried to frighten him into a morass. Then it decided to take the matter into its own hands.
The experience had not been a pleasant one, to say the least. "I don't think that's a good idea," he said. "Next?"
"Nazis," Shar supplied succinctly.
"Pardon?" he replied, sure that he could not have heard her correctly.
"Nazis," she repeated. "And I must admit, this does solve a little puzzle for me. The Nazis had a secret program of research into magic and the occult. I always wondered where all the Nazi sorcerers went when the Third Reich collapsed; they were too powerful to have been caught, the way the Nazi leaders were, but there was no sign of them after the end of the war. Apparently, they discovered or built a Gate, found a vacant realm and took it over for their very own. They must be some of the very few mortals to succeed in living Underhill without elven aid."
"Nazis." He shook his head. "I hate those guys."
"I doubt that even the Unseleighe would care for them," Shar replied. "They were approaching magic as a science, and their attitude would have turned even Madoc Skean off. So, that's four of the six destinations. The other two end in the Unformed."
Tannim gave that some thought. The Unformed was the generic term for pockets of odd, thick mist in completely unclaimed and untouched areas. There were a few realms that were so large that they were still surrounded by a dense and impenetrable cloud of the Unformed. Elfhame Outremer had been like that—and it was out of the Unformed that their destruction had come, for the mist was psychotropic, and anyone with strong enough psychic powers could influence it, create things out of it.
In the case of Outremer, disaster had come at the hands of a seriously unbalanced child with powerful psychic and magic powers: a deadly combination, when put together with the Unformed.
Anyone who was both psychic and a mage could find himself facing down his worst nightmares out in the Unformed. In the old days, that had often been a test of a new mage, the test that proved how good his control was not only of his magic but of himself. There were a lot of mages who hadn't survived this particular ordeal.
There were a number of unclaimed pocket domains that were the results of these trials-by-fire, as well. The one that they were in might well be one of those, come to think of it.
"Any idea how big the pockets are?" he asked finally.
Shar shook her head. "Not even a guess. Can't help you. The only thing I can tell is that one of them might have more than one Gate in it. The other might have a physical connection to another realm. You have to remember that it is very likely that every setting on the Gates there is taken up by a destination we wouldn't like. The Unseleighe and their ilk still prove out young mages in trial-by-Unformed."
"Go for the one with the physical connection?" he hazarded. "That would be my choice. The drawback I can see to the Unformed with two Gates in it is that there's twice the probability that there's something really nasty still roaming around in the mist out there, left over from a trial—and twice the chance that some new Unseleighe mage is going to pop in on us while we're there, and maybe even break the Unformed down around us while he goes through his trial."
Shar nodded thoughtfully. "I hadn't thought of that, but you're right. It's going to be hard enough to keep our own thoughts pleasant; I'd hate to meet some Unseleighe nightmares. Actually, a Nightmare may be exactly one of the things we'd meet out there."
"A Nightmare?" Tannim had only heard of those, and he had no real wish to meet one in person. Sometimes a skull-headed white horse with her retinue of nine black, man-eating foals, sometimes a grim woman in a robe of storm clouds, with the head of a fanged horse in place of her own, she was, as Dottie
succinctly put it, "mondo bad news." If you were lucky, she would only force you to mount and ride her through your greatest fears.
If you weren't lucky . . .
"Anytime I can avoid a Nightmare, I'd prefer to," Shar replied, echoing his own thoughts. "They're classic Unseleighe, so they wouldn't like the Mustang's Death Metal, but why take chances?"
"Heh. Mustang versus Nightmare—now that's something I'd like the video rights to!" He cracked a smile, and Shar pretended to swat him. "So, you want to aim for what, then? The destination with the possible physical outlet?"
She shrugged. "They're all bad; that seems the one with the least risk. With luck, that physical connection will be to something neutral."
"Right." He was under no illusions here; they were in enemy territory, working without a map, and their best hope was to end up somewhere Shar recognized. Only then would they be able to make their way to safe ground.
And home. . . .
Lackey, Mercedes - Serrated Edge 05 - Chrome Circle Page 27