Present Tense [Round Two of The Great Game]

by Dave Duncan

  "Nothing to what we were calling you two nights ago,” Stringer said with asperity. “That was hardly pukka, what you did, Captain Smedley."

  "You were long past due for a fire drill. Your presence here demonstrates that my suspicions were well-founded.” Julian toyed with the idea of blacking one of those piscine eyes, and it tasted good. He was shaking, but that was only anger and all right.

  "Well-founded but misdirected. Ah!"

  A woman marched into the room and stopped, raking it with a glower like a burst of fire from a Hun machine-gun nest. She was tall, angular, unattractive. She wore a cheap-looking brown dress and carried a cumbersome handbag. Her hair was bound high in a bun. Smedley had last seen her behind a desk outside Stringer's office at Staffles.

  The men started to rise again. Mrs. Bodgley said, “Ah, there you are. May I intro—"

  "Where is she?” Miss Pimm demanded harshly. “Where is Alice Prescott? Is she with him?” She glared at Smedley.

  He had nodded before he realized.

  "Who?” Ginger said loudly.

  She did not look at him, as if his effort to deceive was beneath contempt. “The Opposition has a mark on Alice Prescott, has had for the last three years. She went to Harrow Hill with him?"

  Mrs. Bodgley made a choking noise and sank back in her chair.

  "Where?” Ginger said.

  "Oh, don't be childish!” Miss Pimm snapped. “I can tell that Exeter is a few miles southwest of us. We have a mark on him! I assume he went to Harrow Hill to consult the presence again. If his cousin is with him, then he is in deadly danger."

  "How do we know,” Smedley's voice said from where he was sitting, “that you are not the Opposition?"

  "You don't. But it makes no difference. You will cooperate anyway."

  "Mana!” Ginger said, and sat down hurriedly. “You have this mana he talks about!"

  She looked at him seriously for the first time. She was the only one standing; the others sat and stared like children in a classroom.

  "Yes, I am with Head Office, although you will have to take my word for that."

  "I don't think I understand,” Mrs. Bodgley muttered faintly. Had her self-possession ever failed her before? “Will you sit down and have a cup of tea, Miss Pimm?"

  "No. There is no time. Mr. Stringer, we must hurry."

  The famous surgeon sighed and drained his cup. He muttered, “You're sacked!” half under his breath.

  Smedley and Ginger exchanged glances of panic.

  "Perhaps you could explain?” Mrs. Bodgley said with an effort.

  Miss Pimm slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “I repeat, there is no time. Nine years ago, I promised Cameron Exeter that I would guard his son. I almost failed. The boy is back again, and I still have some residual obligations to fulfil. I don't believe the rest of you are in any danger now. I shall intercept Exeter before he returns here. Even if the agent the Opposition has sent is a vindictive type, he will have no reason to vent his spite on you. Come, Stringer!"

  "Wait!” Smedley barked. “What exactly are you planning to do?"

  She stopped in the doorway and turned as if to give battle. “I am going to do what I was planning to do at Staffles before you stuck your oar in and disrupted everything, Captain Smedley. It was your blundering intervention that alerted the Opposition."

  "The Blighters, you mean?"

  "We sometimes call them that. Stringer?"

  "Exeter says he will never go back!” Smedley shouted.

  "I fail to see that it is any business of yours."

  "I do. I want to go."

  He had said it. He was shocked to hear it.

  But he had said it, so he must mean it.

  With the reluctance of a frozen pond melting, the formidable Miss Pimm's pale lips thinned into a faint hint of a smile. “After all the trouble you have caused me, you demand favors? Talk about brass! I know you are a man of initiative and fast decisions, Captain Smedley, but do you know what is involved? Do you understand that it means considerable danger and to all intents and purposes is irrevocable? It means loss of family and home and friends. It is a leap beyond the bounds of imagination."

  He nodded. His heart was beating a mad tattoo. Damn Chichester and the old man! Damn the aunts! Sunday was his birthday—twenty-one, key of the door. He smiled, to see if he still could. “Just show me."

  "You are ready to come now? Immediately?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you impress. Very well. Come along and we'll see if it is possible. I make no promises.” Miss Pimm summoned Stringer with a flick of her head and stalked from the room.

  Everyone stood up again.

  "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!” the surgeon growled, following her. “Thanks awfully for the tea, dear lady. I have so much enjoyed our long chat this afternoon. Don't bother to see us out. We really must do this more often. Get the lead out, Captain! She won't wait for you.” He disappeared into the hallway.

  Smedley was shivering like a dog in the starting gate. He looked to the others. “Anyone else feeling suicidal this afternoon?"

  Neither had any close family. They were both aging. Ginger at least believed the tales of Elfenland—Smedley wasn't sure if Mrs. Bodgley did. Get away from the war! Live forever! Be restored to youth and health! How could anyone refuse the chance, no matter how long the odds?

  Ginger removed his pince-nez and rubbed it vigorously on his sleeve. Then he replaced it and sighed. “No. I think not. Not me."

  Outside, the car engine rumbled into life.

  "Mrs. Bodgley?"

  The lady was pale. She bit her lip. Her hesitation was longer, but then she shook her head. “No. At my age ... no. My memories are here."

  "Then I must run. Thank you, Mrs. B. Thank you both for ... everything.” Oh, God! His eyes were flooding. He grabbed her and kissed her cheek. He clutched Ginger's outstretched hand awkwardly and pumped it, thumping the man's shoulder with his stump.

  "Bye!” he shouted, and ran out of the room. He blundered into the umbrella stand, ricocheted off it, raced along the hall and out the front door. The great silver Rolls was just starting to move along the driveway. He sprinted after it, and a door swung open for him.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  48

  THE ROAD WAS NARROW BETWEEN TALL HEDGES. IT WAS CANOPIED by branches of great trees and full of fragrant green coolness. But it was steep. Alice gasped a final, “Whoof!” and gave up. She put her foot down and wiped her forehead.

  "From here I walk!” she said. “How much farther?"

  Edward halted at her side. “Just around this corner, I think."

  She dismounted, pulled her skirts clear, and began to push the bike.

  He took it from her, pushing both. “Look on the bright side. We can freewheel on the way back!” He was grinning, quite unwinded. He was in much better shape than she was.

  "Mmph! Well, you can do the talking on the way up. You have never told me how you found Olympus."

  "There isn't much to tell. You've heard all the exciting bits. How far had I got? Karzon? Well, he dumped us on a band of Tinkerfolk—"

  "Why? I mean, I thought he was the Man, and Zath was one of his."

  "Ah! Zath's supposed to be, but he hasn't been for quite a while. There had never been an actual god of death before him. Who would want to be? There are several fictitious deities like that, just a temple or shrine with no stranger behind them. People worship there just the same. In every case, a member of the Pentatheon will claim suzerainty, so not all the mana is lost. I think Death was merely an abstract notion until some minion of Karzon's asked for the title and Karzon let him take it. What his real name was, I don't know and it doesn't matter.

  "Anyway, Karzon had made a bad mistake. Zath founded his own cult, bestowed the Black Scriptures on it, sent out the reapers. Human sacrifice is an enormously potent source of mana. Even though the murders were not committed on his node, he gained power from every death. By the time the Pentatheon r
ealized what he was up to—and that probably took half a century or so—none of them dared challenge him."

  "They couldn't combine against him?"

  Edward guffawed. “Combine? After thousands of years of playing the Great Game? No, they can't think like that. They let Zath continue on his jolly way, all trying to get on his team. About fifty years ago, he arranged for a new temple in Tharg, with himself as co-deity. The Five, in effect, have become six."

  "I think I get the gist. So Karzon supports the Liberator and the Filoby Testament!"

  "Enthusiastically! He daren't let Zath know that, of course. He was hoping that little old me would achieve what all the gods of the world were scared to try. Well, I won't!"

  Alice groaned. They had rounded the corner. The road ahead was straight—and straight up.

  "Oh, I remember this bit,” Edward said. “The gate's at the top."

  "I hope my heart will stand it. Do you think we ought to be roped?"

  They began to climb. Edward continued to push both bikes, yet he still had enough wind to talk.

  "Karzon shipped us out of the city, disguised as Tinkerfolk. They're very much like our Gypsies, only more primitive, because the whole culture is more primitive. They wander all over the Vales, trading, stealing, spying. They're all blond as Scandinavians. It's said they abandon any baby who isn't, in the belief that it must be a half-breed. I wouldn't put it past them. Dosh was borderline, only just blond enough. He probably had a rough childhood because of that.

  "By the time I woke up, he'd already been in a fight. He'd killed one, wounded three others, and was just about a goner from lack of blood himself. I still had some of the mana the army had given me, and I used it to revive him instead of curing my own headache, which at the time felt very altruistic, believe me! They were a rough-and-ready bunch of scoundrels."

  Obviously! Alice had no breath to comment.

  Edward chuckled. “But I had an interesting summer, that year! We crossed a pass into Sitalvale, then another into Thovale, and eventually wandered over into Randorvale. I passed very close to Olympus, although of course I didn't know that, and in any case Karzon's warning to stay away from it made good sense. Dosh disappeared in Thovale. By killing a man of the tribe, he'd acquired a wife, and she was a genuine, steam-powered firecat. Or perhaps it was just the primitive living conditions he didn't like. I don't know where he went, but I'm sure Dosh will survive. He's incredible."

  "How?” She panted. Running with Gypsies! She wondered what Julian Smedley would think of this confession if he knew. Or the masters at Fallow.

  "Just tough! All the Tinkerfolk are, but he could out-tough most of them any day. As for morals...” Edward fell silent for a dozen paces, and apparently decided not to discuss morals. “At first they treated me as a baby, but they had accepted gold and sworn oaths to cherish me, and they kept their word. They didn't know the man who had hired them was Karzon, but they knew he was somebody to fear. I wanted to earn my keep, so I became an expert in livestock trading. Every vale seems to have a different collection of herdbeasts, none of which look anything like our horses and cattle, but they're all traded in much the same way. Charisma came in very useful there, and I cheated outrageously—a stranger can be so plausible! I could extract more money for a worn-out useless runt than even old Birfair himself could, or buy a champion for less. Eventually they came to accept me as useful, a real man."

  Alice decided that her cousin had depths she had not suspected and would prefer not to know about. Julian's hair would turn white if he heard this, an English gentleman going to the dogs, becoming a vagrant huckster.

  "By autumn, though, I'd had enough of rags and dirt and hunger. Ysian was pining. We were in Lappinvale by then, which at the moment is a Thargian colony. And one day I saw a man I knew."

  Alice stopped to catch her breath. He looked at her with concern.

  "I'm all right,” she said. “What man?"

  "You can wait here while I go and see Mr. Goodfellow."

  She shook her head. She wouldn't mind being winded were Edward not so confoundedly cool looking and relaxed. He turned to stare up at the hill ahead, and then peered around at the distance they had come, but his mind was away on another world. He smiled in secret amusement.

  "I had never met him, but I had been told of him. In the higher, cooler vales, they have a riding beast they call ... Well, there are a lot of different names for it. It's the Rolls-Royce of Nextdoor. It's enormous, big as a rhino. It's pretty much a mammal, but it looks like a cross between a stegosaurus—that's one of the dinosaurs in The Lost World with a row of bony plates down the middle of its back.... It's a bit like that and also like a Chinese dragon. It has scales, yet it's warm-blooded. It eats grass, and it's a wonderful steed—gentle, intelligent, willing, the only thing better than a terrestrial horse. I thought of them as dragons, so that name will do.

  "One day I saw a herd of them just outside a village we had been cadging off. There were tents there, and I guessed soon enough that this was the encampment of a man who traded in them. I sauntered over to take a closer look.

  "I got shouted at, of course. I was a tinker. I had bleached hair and blue eyes and my clothes were mostly holes held together by hope. I would have made a scarecrow look like a lord. The wranglers tried to chase me away, because I must be a thief and a ne'er-do-well. Most of them had a little gold circle in their left earlobe, and they all wore black turbans. That told me this was the outfit Eleal had described. Ready?"

  "Think so.” She began plodding again. He sauntered along at her side, still pushing a bike with each hand.

  "So I withdrew to a safe distance and squatted down by some bushes and waited. After an hour or two, the man I wanted came marching back from the village. He was very big, and he had an enormous copper-colored beard. You know the legend of the sailor who has a girl in every port? Well, this fellow has one in every village.... I assume that's where he'd been, but perhaps I'm doing him an injustice. He may have been there on business. I doubt it. Anyway, I cut him off before he reached his tents.

  "He barked an obscenity and tried to go round me.

  "I said, ‘T'lin Dragontrader? We almost met, once.’ That stopped him!

  "He scowled at me and said something I won't repeat.

  "I said, ‘How are things with the Service these days?'

  "He went back two steps with his eyes almost popping out of his head. I knew that he was an agent of the Service, you see, because Eleal had told me. He's a native, not a stranger, and he spies for the political branch. He threw some sort of password at me then—'The grass grows softer when the rain is cool,’ or some such gibberish.

  "I said, ‘Frightfully sorry, but I don't know the answer.’ I gave him another code that I'd been told once. He recognized it, although he didn't know the answer, because it was for the religious branch and he's political. In the end I just said, ‘I am D'ward Liberator.'

  "I thought he was going to faint. We sat down beside the bushes, and we had a long chat. He admitted that the Service was hunting for me—they'd heard of the fall of Lemod, too, of course, and realized I was still alive. He knew they were not the only ones after me. I asked him to pass the word. Then I remembered Ysian and decided that being a dragon trader would be nicer than being a tinker. So I informed T'lin that he had just acquired two more hands.

  "He didn't argue, actually. He's a very loyal follower of the Undivided—a likable rogue, very shrewd. I went and got Ysian. Old Birfair and the gang were genuinely sorry to lose us, and I had to write a note to Karzon, testifying that they had fulfilled their side of the bargain. I doubt if any of them could read, but they were grateful for the insurance. Then we went to T'lin's camp and put on some respectable clothes and became dragon traders. Look out."

  They moved to the side of the road as a car came growling up the hill to pass them. It was a bright red roadster, puffing stinking clouds of exhaust. The driver wore goggles and a sporty cap.

  "May his radiator boil
and his tires all burst!” Edward said cheerfully as he strode out again. “Only a real bounder would drive a motor that color. We wandered around the Vales a bit, and settled down in little Mapvale for the winter. By then I'd been almost two years on Nextdoor and was getting pretty desperate, but we got no word back from Olympus before the passes closed. I loved the dragons, though."

  They walked for a while in silence. They were past the worst. The gate must be just around the corner, set back in the hedge, probably.

  "Did you meet Eleal again?"

  "No, never. T'lin had changed his schedule, and he had not run into the troupe since the reaper almost got him in Sussvale. He thought they were still in business."

  "And Olympus?"

  "Ah! One morning, early in the spring, I was exercising a couple of bulls—boars—stallions? What the deuce do you call a male dragon in English? Anyway, I ran into a chappie riding a beautiful young female, of the color they call Osby slate. Of course we stopped to admire each other's stock, and of course I asked him if he would like to sell or trade.

  "He was a lanky, rangy youngster with sandy hair and a notably big nose. Well fitted out. He admitted he would consider an offer...."

  Something funny was coming, judging by the grin.

  "We must have stood there and haggled for two solid hours. I tried every trick I knew. I really wanted that filly! I blew my charisma to white heat. I argued and wheedled. I kept going up and up, and he wouldn't come down one copper mark. I was completely flummoxed. And finally he held out a hand and drawled in perfect English, ‘I don't believe I want to part with her after all, old man. I'm Jumbo Watson. I was a chum of your father's.’”

  Alice chuckled at Edward's infectious glee. “Nicely done?"

  "Oh, beautifully! I wanted to melt and soak into the sand.” He laughed aloud. “You should hear Jumbo tell the story! He puts on this incredible Tinkerfolk accent, although we'd been speaking Joalian. I have died a thousand deaths at dinner tables over that episode. But that's Jumbo."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. I took to him right away. We got along like a house on fire. We rode dragons over the ranges to Olympus, which was a corker of a trip at that time of year, and he was absolutely solid. He was gracious to Ysian, which is more than can be said of some.... He has the most marvelous dry humor, a regular brick.