Queen of Stars (2 page)

His ears jumped to the top of his head. They stood erect, pointed like cats’ ears, but pink, hairless, and enormous, each as large as a grown man’s hand. They also sported six or seven jeweled studs along each rim. The fuzz on his head—more like short fur than hair—had taken on a faint rainbow sheen, like oil on a puddle or the play surface of a CD. His eyes, too, twinkled with rainbow fire.

Avior clasped her hands over her mouth to block a scream and Rigel caught her arm to steady her.

“All right?” he asked, looking worried.

No, but she shook him off furiously. “This is real?” she whispered. “Not just some cruel, horrible trick you’re playing on me?”

Izar turned his ears outward, then inward, and grinned even wider.

“It’s real,” Rigel said. “I was born on Earth too. I didn’t discover what I was until about three months ago, so I know how much of a shock this must be. The point is, Avior, halflings like you and me don’t belong here on Earth. We don’t fit properly in the Starlands, either, because we’re not pure starborn. But the Starlands are better, believe me! At least people will know what you are and you won’t need to hide it. If you want a taste, we can take you there and show you. I swear I’ll bring you back here any time you want—after an hour, a day, whatever. I have the queen’s word on that. The change is instantaneous. We just…
Izar, where is your reversion staff?”

The boy stopped grinning. “Oops! I left it over here, I think.” He tore off toward
Born of Woman
, looped around that plinth and kept running. “Or maybe over here…”

Suddenly Rigel yelled in alarm, leaping at Avior and hurling her to the ground with himself on top. Automatic gunfire roared through the gallery, shattering glass, ricocheting off concrete, and pounding the inside of her skull. The lights went out in a shower of sparks from the circuit box on the wall while lines of bright holes sprouted across the plywood shutter. Glass shattered everywhere, clattering down on the tiles. Sheer noise seemed to shake the building.

It was ten minutes past six.

Silence.

“Izar!”
Rigel yelled, still pinning Avior to the floor.
“Are you all right?”

“I think so,” wailed a very young-sounding voice.

“Don’t get up yet. Lie still. You too, Avior.” Then Rigel added, “Here they come.” The sound of boots crunching on glass was loud in the wake of the silence following the blitz.

He rolled clear of her. To her astonishment his right hand now wore a steel gauntlet and held a glittering silver sword.
What good could that be against guns?

Three armed men stepped in through the shattered window wearing masks, clearly intent on completing their deadly work. Peering around the now dim gallery, they began to advance, spreading out, looking for bodies, alive or dead.

Rigel muttered, “Damn!” beside her.

Izar shouted something that sounded like, “Edasich, Edasich, Edasich!”

Rigel said, “Double damn!”

Then there was a dragon, a Chinese-style dragon as massive as a pony, but longer and lower, with bright, shiny green scales. Where it had come from, Avior did not know. It had frills and horns but no wings; its eyes bulged grotesquely.
It was growing bigger as she watched.

The nearest man yelled a curse and swung his gun around to fire a burst at the beast. Ricocheting bullets screamed off in all directions. Seemingly undamaged but understandably annoyed, the dragon swarmed forward and loosed a great blast of white fire. The gunman,
Child’s Arm
, and
Famine 9
all exploded into balls of flame. The man screamed once. The dragon swelled as big as a dinosaur.

Rigel’s sword and gauntlet had disappeared. He swore again and sprang to his feet. One of the gunman saw him and aimed his weapon. A gesture with Rigel’s left hand sent a ball of purple fire streaking across the room at him, but it exploded on contact without seeming to harm him. The dragon ignited Rigel’s attacker with another roar of flame. The third man was already running to the window, but the dragon pursued, its writhing tail hurling plinths and sculptures aside like sticks. The man leaped through the gap, his terror clearly visible to the TV cameras outside. The monster was too big to follow, but its head wasn’t, and its jaws closed on him with a crunching sound audible even to Avior on the floor. The game was over, but fire had engulfed the plywood window covering and most of the wax sculptures.

Izar arrived, crashing into Rigel and wrapping his arms around him.

“All right, imp!” the halfling said. “Up, Avior.”

“Rigel, I still can’t find my staff!” Izar sobbed.

Two of the burning men had escaped into the street and were rolling on the ground. The dragon was leisurely eating the third. The fire had spread to the carpet and the office was also in flames. Choking, eye-watering smoke was filling the gallery.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rigel said. “We’ll all go on this one. Hold on!”

He took up his own staff from the floor and held it upright. Izar and Avior both grabbed it.

Shock…icy cold…an agonizing wrench…

Chapter 3

F
or a moment Avior was racked by coughing and her eyes streamed tears, but gradually she became aware of bright sunlight and a cool breeze.

She was standing on the roof of a stone tower, set among rolling green hills checkered with patches of forest and open meadow. There was no sign of habitation as far as she could see in any direction. A small pond shone like silver about a hundred yards away, under a sky of Wedgwood blue and puffy white clouds.

The tower itself was about seven or eight meters high and five in diameter. A stone bench encircled it, backed by a balustrade so massive that it looked more like battlements. A ladder protruded from a floor hatch.

“Schmoor!
” Izar shouted. “This isn’t Fornacis!”

“No, it isn’t,” Rigel said, scowling. “Sit down and make yourselves comfortable while I think. Sorry, Avior Halfling. I seem to have brought you into danger.”

There was moss growing on the stonework, and mica grains twinkled in the stones themselves. The air had a fresh, after-rain smell. So real! This was either a nightmare or acute schizophrenia. She had to behave as if she believed it was real or she would go catatonic. She rather wished she
could
go catatonic. Obviously she had slipped completely over the edge this time—the hammer through the window, the vicious reviews, the breakup with George, and the escalating legal battles…She needed a drink, several drinks.

She must not stare at the boy’s grotesque ears.

“Dragons and gunmen aren’t danger?”

“Those too.” Rigel hurled his staff down and sat on the bench. He leaned back against the wall and scowled at the landscape.

Avior sat also, though not too close to the wizard. The seat was unexpectedly high and felt damp. It must have rained here recently.

“Why’d you make all those
schmoory
bodies and things?” Izar asked. “Worms coming out of people’s eyes and—”

“Mind your own business, imp,” Rigel said. “Can you hear birds?”

“No.”

“Me neither.” That seemed to be bad news.

“Rigel, did I leave Edasich behind?” Izar asked mournfully. “Don’t want to lose Edasich!”

“I don’t think so, but don’t
call her here! There isn’t room for her. I’m sure she must have come with the amulet.”

“I’m going for a swim,” Izar said as he headed for the hatch.

“No! Sit down.”

“You can watch me.”

“That pool may be full of crocodiles. You know what this building is, imp?”

The boy paused with one foot on the ladder, but he obviously knew when to listen to his older friend, or brother, or whatever Rigel was to him. “No.”

“I think it’s a blind. The pool is a watering hole.” Rigel gave Avior a rueful smile. “Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

She said, “You’re joking!”

Izar asked, “Wha’sa blind?”

“A blind is a place where hunters lie in wait for animals. Blinds are usually made of wood or wicker but this one’s stone and I don’t like that. What’s it supposed to keep out—elephants? Or worse? I don’t think there were birds back in the Jurassic, so that’s a bad sign. Ah! Look there. That’s better.”

A flock of specks had risen from some trees, swirling as birds do.

“And there’s a hawk or a vulture!” Izar pointed at a very high dot.

“Right! Good. We don’t know how accurate this domain is,” Rigel said. “There were no starfolk around in the Jurassic, so if they were going for something prehistoric, cave bears and sabertooth tigers are more likely than T-rexes.”

Avior hugged herself so the shaking of her hands wouldn’t show. She was cold. “Elms, beech, oak. Those aren’t Mesozoic species.”

Rigel bobbed his head in a bow of tribute. “Well done. Thanks. Modern flora indicates that there’s probably modern fauna. But I do think this is a safari park.”

“Who are you?”

He sighed and rubbed his close-cropped flaxen hair. “I’m a professional babysitter. Babysitting can be a lot tougher than is commonly believed.”

“He’s my bodyguard,” Izar said cheerfully, hauling himself up on the bench next to Rigel. “He kills people who try to kidnap me.”

She thought Izar did a pretty good job of killing people for himself, if he had loosed that dragon. “Can you start at the beginning, please?”

Rigel glanced at the sun. “We do have a few hours of daylight left, but the beginning was about sixty thousand years ago, when Naos first imagined the Starlands. Let’s fast-forward to this afternoon…I told you what halflings are. What I didn’t say is that making them is illegal and highly immoral. That doesn’t stop some starborn, though.”

“Like my dad,” Izar said glumly.

That remark Rigel ignored. “You were located as a lost halfling on Earth, Avior. Queen Talitha, like Queen Electra before her, insists that lost halflings be rescued. On Earth we’re freaks; here we’re people—second-class citizens, admittedly, but even that is better than being a freak. I volunteered to come for you, because I was raised in Canada, so we speak alike. Insanity sounds even worse when it comes in an unfamiliar accent. I’m Izar’s official bodyguard, and it seemed like a safe, educational little trip for him. Also, he threatened to eat me raw if I didn’t bring him along, so this afternoon we flew to Fornacis, which is the domain of Starborn Fomalhaut, the queen’s court mage. He let us spy on you with a type of magic called seancing—crystal ball stuff. We watched the two fat women sneer at your work. As soon as you were alone, Fomalhaut gave each of us a reversion staff.”

Rigel nudged the fallen staff with his bare toe. “The staves are a special form of amulet, and they must be longer than the person being reverted. That’s because the Starlands aren’t a world, they’re a different ‘dimensional continuum’—don’t ask, because I don’t know. A red mage like Fomalhaut can flip back and forth between Earth and Starlands as much as he pleases with a staff, but he had to preset them for us. We ‘extroverted’ to Earth and introduced ourselves to you.”

“We were betrayed,” Izar said.

“I was. I don’t think you were.”

“Yes I was!” the boy said indignantly. “We were betrayed twice. Someone else was seancing that gallery place and when we arrived they sent in men with guns to kill us. They wouldn’t have bothered doing that if they’d known our staves were booby-trapped too. The staves were set to introvert us here so that something else could kill us.”

How old was Izar? At times he seemed like a mere child to Avior, yet he could spout logic like an adult. His matter-of-fact way of talking about murder and betrayal was bloodcurdling, as if they happened all the time. And the sight of his ears kept ripping up half-buried nightmares.

Rigel smiled fondly at him. “That’s very ingenious, and you may well be right. I agree that there must be two traitors, but it’s more likely that they were both just after me. We hadn’t told anyone that you were going to extrovert with me, remember—not even your mother, who will have my hide for a doormat if the Family doesn’t get it first. So whoever sent the gunmen didn’t know you were there. Edasich didn’t come until you called her, which means you weren’t the one they intended to hurt. And whether the second traitor was Fomalhaut or Mizar, he probably sabotaged my staff but not yours. If all had gone according to their plan, you would have introverted back to Fornacis and I would have come here.”

Avior closed her eyes and sniffed the woodland-scented breeze. She ran her fingers over the stonework of the bench. It was all real, real, real! It was not a movie or a role-playing game. Not madness. She could remember childhood dreams of other worlds and aliens coming to rescue her from her personal hell. Maybe those dreams had finally come true. She opened her eyes and saw Rigel watching her worriedly.

“Why should anyone want to kill either of you?” she demanded.

“Well, nobody should want to kill Izar,” he said. “Except because of his manners, I mean. Kidnap him, yes, because his mother is Queen Talitha, who rules the Starlands, and his father is Prince Vildiar, who wants to. If Vildiar can get his hands on their son, he can force Talitha to abdicate in his favor.”

“He would threaten his own son?”

“Vildiar personally wouldn’t, but Izar’s brothers would.”

“Don’t call them that!” Izar yelled. “I’d rather be related to rats!”

“Sorry,” Rigel said. “The Family.”

“But where
are
we?” Avior demanded, shocked at how shrill she sounded.

“I don’t know. In some domain in the Starlands. See those?”

He pointed to a herd of about a dozen deer that was cautiously emerging from the trees, sniffing the air, edging steadily closer to the water hole. Even with only trees to judge their size against, Avior could tell that the adults were very large, and the buck flaunted enormous antlers. Bigger than Izar’s ears…

“They look a lot more appetizing than we do,” Rigel said. “I think we should start exploring while we still have some daylight. Go look for snakes at the bottom of the stairs, imp.”

Needing no further encouragement, the boy vanished down the hatch. Rigel frowned at Avior’s city shoes. “Did you get human or starborn feet in the lottery, Avior Halfling?”

“I can walk on nails, if that’s what you mean, but I want to go home, please. You said—”

He pouted. “I know I did, but I don’t have the magic needed to reset my reversion staff. It might dump you back in a burning art gallery and a murder case. Or it might do much worse, because it was sabotaged to trap me here, so it won’t likely be set to get me out again. We’re in a totally new situation. Sorry.”

It made sense. She kicked off her shoes and reached down to pull off a sock.

“Shouldn’t we stay here to be rescued?”

“No. My enemies know where I am; my friends don’t.”

He had an answer for everything. Men always did, of course. She could only hope that Rigel’s answers were right more often than George’s had been. She followed him to the hatchway.

The first ladder took them down to a room as appealing as a dungeon. Barren of furniture of any kind, it was dimly lit by narrow slits in the thick stonework. The ground floor was identical, except it had piles of leaves on the floor and a doorway leading out to the grasslands. The pivots for a door were still there, but the door itself was gone, and the implications of that were nasty. Avior took note of Rigel’s worried frown but said nothing, because Izar was waiting just outside, within earshot.

As they set off across the meadow in line abreast, the deer at the watering hole raised their heads to study them, but did not seem alarmed. The breeze was slight, but brisk enough to make Avior shiver as the wet grass chilled her feet. Izar removed his tee shirt and tucked it into his belt, and a moment later Rigel did the same. Not a nipple between them. How old was Rigel? About half her age, she decided—out of his teens, but not long out. She was amazed at the trust she was putting in him, but perhaps that was a natural reaction to all the impossible things that were happening. His calm acceptance of their situation was all that stood between her and screaming hysteria.

Besides, she had no choice.

If she failed to respond to the court order by Monday, George’s lawyer…

“A lesson in how to fight sabertooth tigers, please?” she asked.

Rigel exposed perfect human teeth in a grin. “As long as they don’t sneak up on you, they shouldn’t be a problem.” He stopped and tugged at the rings on his left hand, eventually freeing a gold one with a blue stone. “Put this on. Either hand, doesn’t matter. Now turn the stone inward. Put your thumb on it and pretend to throw something at that bush.”

“I’m not good at throwing.”

“Doesn’t matter. The amulet is. Try.”

Her clumsy gesture sent a ball of purple fire flying straight from her hand to the bush, which exploded in flames, then vanished in a cloud of smoke and drifting ash. She said, “Oh!”

“Now turn it so that the gem’s facing outward,” Rigel said. “That’s the safety catch. It will certainly scare the stripes off a sabertooth, if saberteeth have stripes. And I see that discretion is the better part of venison, too.”

“What?”

“We’ve scared the deer away.” He started walking again.

His childish humor was presumably intended to calm both her and his young ward. Or perhaps just her, because Izar seemed more annoyed than frightened about being marooned in this strange place.

“Seriously,” Rigel said, “there’s no need to worry. The starling and I both have Lesaths. At least I hope his dragon is still with us. Try calling her now, Izar.”

Izar stamped his left foot twice and said, “Edasich, Edasich, Edasich!”

The dragon appeared, strolling alongside him, no larger than a Saint Bernard dog now, rolling its globular eyes independently as it scanned the countryside for trouble. It had dried blood around its mouth.

“Good girl!” Izar said happily. He patted the scaly neck. “Edasich, go home!” The dragon vanished. The boy grinned at Avior and did a little dance so he could point at a jade bangle on his left ankle. “That’s where she lives.”

“Edasich would snack on mastodons,” Rigel said. “As for people, see this bracelet of mine? It’s old and very powerful and legendary, what the starfolk call ‘ancestral.’ ” He held out his right arm. “Saiph!”

Back came the gauntlet and sword that she had glimpsed in the art gallery.

“Rigel fought Hadar and Tarf and Adhil with Saiph!” Izar said excitedly. “Hadar has a Lesath called Sulaphat and Tarf had one called—”

“Let’s leave out the gory details,” Rigel said. He lowered his sword and it disappeared. “Saiph saved your life from the gunmen. Just before they opened fire, it yanked my arm so hard that I fell to the floor. Fortunately I guessed what was happening and grabbed you on the way down. I’ll have a bruise on my wrist tomorrow, see?”

It sounded as if her life had been saved by Rigel rather than his gadget.
He must have incredibly fast reflexes
.

“A Lesath is a magic weapon?” Avior asked. If anyone had told her an hour ago that she would be seriously discussing magic…Well, it did keep her mind off bat ears.