Allie's War Season Three (110 page)

Frankly, Jon
had
been surprised they'd let him come along.

Of course, they couldn't really guarantee his safety outside, either. Wreg probably wanted him where he could keep an eye on him, in case Shadow attacked the others once Revik and Allie were locked inside his castle.

Jon also got the feeling that Revik wanted him inside, too.

Again, he couldn't help thinking that was probably in case Cass was there.

He watched the guard hit through a key sequence of some kind on the wall of the small security booth by the gate. Once the male seer finished, Jon felt those poisonous snakes begin to retract. The hair on his arms remained faintly raised from his close call with the OBE whatever-it-was, but immediately that tension in his chest loosened. The air itself seemed to flow again, enough that he took a few deeper breaths.

Jon remembered again how close they were to the Antarctic when a gust of wind rolled down from the cliffs and the sea beyond.

Shivering, he glanced at Wreg. The seer's eyes remained hard as he stared at the guard, but when the man waved them forward, Wreg stepped up to take the lead.

"You might have lowered the field before we were in danger of stepping into it...
brother,"
Wreg said, giving the seer another stare as he passed. "Or are these theatrics meant to send us quaking in our boots to the doors of your masters?"

The seer's expression didn't move.

"I was told these would be the ranking infiltrators of the Adhipan," the man replied, without a ripple touching the smooth cadence of his formal Prexci. "...With such a group, I had assumed there would be no need of such caution. A thousand apologies if I was mistaken in this, my blood brother. I assure you...your arrival here is most warmly received..."

Wreg snorted, then glanced back at Jon. His eyes shifted to Revik shortly after.

"Well,
laoban?"
he said, his hands on his hips. "Do I give the order?"

Revik glanced up at the cliffs, to the house itself, and then back to the line of ex-work camp seers covering the hill over the village.

He nodded to Wreg, once.

"Yes." He looked next at the guard, and that time, his eyes glowed faintly, green rings emanating from his narrow face. Jon couldn't help but think he looked pretty intimidating like that, even to him. "Yes," Revik repeated. "We will accept your master's invitation. Let us hope for his sake it is meant in as good of faith as you suggest. I would hate to think one of our own would wish to provoke open war, in times as troubled as this...?"

The man bowed to him, his hand respectfully in the sign of the Sword.

Jon noticed, however, that he didn't answer Revik's implied question.

Frowning a little in Wreg's direction, Jon walked through the gate along with the rest of the group, rejoining the Chinese seer on the other side when Wreg motioned subtly in his direction. Yet, as Jon crossed the metal tracks that housed the weight of the organic gates, he couldn't help feeling like he'd just been invited into the gingerbread house.

He knew everyone else in their group felt the same way, but that provided a pretty thin comfort, really, given how blind they were, going in.

He glanced again at Allie, and saw that her jaw had hardened. When Revik nudged her, she took his hand, almost as an afterthought. Her eyes focused up at the house then, her green irises darker than Jon remembered them appearing in the past, even during this trip. They held a narrow focus that felt alien to him. He knew the thing with Revik and this Shadow-dick's construct the day before scared her, but now she looked ready for all-out war. He found himself moving closer to her without noticing he did it, until Wreg caught hold of his arm, forcing his attention off her as he pushed Jon to walk faster up the slick, tile-covered hill.

"Are you ready for this?" Wreg asked him softly.

Jon nodded, but his body tensed anyway. He knew what Wreg meant.

They had no idea what kind of condition Chandre, the seers Stanley and Varlan...even Maygar...might be in, when they finally saw them. It was feeling more and more likely Cass would be here, too. Wreg warned him that everything they'd seen with this Shadow so far implied he knew how to use psychology as a tool in getting what he wanted. If he wanted something from them...some compromise from Revik or Allie or both of them, then he would certainly up the ante with those they'd come to rescue.

"...He'll want us to feel we have no choice but to get them out," Wreg had warned him. "He'll want the pressure on the Bridge and the Sword, especially...which means those nearest and dearest to them. Which means your friend Cass...possibly Nenzi's son." Wreg had been watching Jon's face closely the whole time he explained this, speaking slowly as he did. "...Nenzi knows this, Jon," he said more gently. "He knows it well. It's not so long ago he might have ordered his own people to do the same, if he greatly desired compliance from a powerful rival..."

Hesitating, Wreg added, still watching him, "It's not so long ago I would have done such a thing for him, Jon...if he asked it of me."

That thought hadn't exactly reassured Jon, but he got the basic logic of it.

He knew Wreg was also probably trying, in his own way, to open up to him. Or at the very least, attempting to be transparent. Maybe he wanted to ease him into some of the grimmer facts around who he was...or, at the very least, who he had been. Jon could tell sometimes that the seer worried how Jon might react to him if he knew more, but he appreciated that Wreg wasn't trying to hide those facts about himself, either.

Jon was still turning over Wreg's words when they reached the last stretch of driveway before the front door.

The door itself stood comically large.

Painted dark red and covered in wrought-iron details that again looked more medieval than modern, Jon found his mind comparing it to some of the enormous doors of the Forbidden City in China. In the same moment, he remembered the simple elegance of the Old House on the Hill...the real one, the one that lived in Seertown. That door had been large too, but something about that white, stone building always made Jon feel calm, as if he'd stepped into a cathedral, not some warlord's mansion.

He and Wreg started to slow before the closed door, when someone inside opened it.

More than one someone, Jon soon realized, seeing the row of white-clad servants wearing gloves who stood inside the shadowy entrance of the room. As Jon passed through the opening and into the house, those servants stopped him long enough to pat him down, and Wreg, too. Taking Jon's Glock and even the knife he had tucked into his boot, they smiled politely, assured him his weapons would be returned upon his leaving the castle, and signaled for him when it was okay to pass.

Disarming Wreg took a lot longer.

Rather than wait, Jon walked past the line of servants and into the dimmer entryway beyond. Stepping deep into the right half of the room, he shoved his hands in his pockets and looked around as casually as he could.

Inside, the ceilings stretched even higher than the door, and Jon found himself looking up at the enormous wrought-iron chandelier that hung from the ceiling. It took him a second of blinking in that dimmer space before he realized they'd lit the chandelier with candles instead of lightbulbs. The effect added to the gloom, needless to say, but also sent warm light on a few floor-length tapestries that hung from the longest wall beside the elegantly carved, waterfall staircase that dominated Jon's view into the square entrance hall. Elk heads hung from the opposite side, along with massive oil paintings, antique chairs and tables that looked more South American than European, an enormous, gilded mirror and a row of antique bird cages. Inside the cages themselves, parrots squawked and fluttered, alongside a number of brightly plumed tropical birds that Jon didn't recognize well enough to be able to name.

As more in their party filtered into the room, Jon let himself be moved deeper into the pocket of shadow outside the arc of the open door's splash of light. Noticing Wreg's eyes darting around the same space, probably scouting entrances, exits, the construct and whatever else, Jon glanced up, following the walls with his eyes instead, and trying to get a feel for their owner.

Clearly, the guy dressed to impress, including his house.

The ceiling stretched up to the top of the next floor, which also seemed to house twenty-foot ceilings at least, if not higher. Everything appeared to have been designed to create a sense of awe, if not downright intimidation. The balcony above the waterfall staircase had been carved from polished, dark wood that made Jon think of rain forests, but the floors were all granite tiles and the staircase itself appeared to be of white marble.

Plant fronds covered in purple and white flowers cascaded down between the wooden pillars, the latter being separated by octagonal holes that allowed them access to the open air. Jon saw stone planters stuck at symmetrical intervals along the second floor, as well as the glimpse of balconies overlooking the view behind the house. Paintings rimmed the walls of that upper floor, too, most of them of people Jon didn't recognize, but a few depicting more mythic scenes, and one that seemed to illustrate some battle scene in one of the World Wars.

The ceiling took the cake, though, in Jon's view.

At the furthest height of the room, someone hand-painted a DaVinci-like mural of the pantheon of intermediary beings. The way they'd been depicted, however, struck Jon as pretty dark...and well, lame. The Bridge wielded bolts of blue-white lightning from on top of a mass of blood-red clouds that stormed down on Earth. The Sword wasn't depicted in the young boy version Jon remembered from most of the old texts. Instead, he looked a lot like Revik did now, only his eyes glowed green and he stood on top of the world, as if he owned it.

Other beings writhed in a pale, silver-blue background, including a turtle under the earth, holding it up as if its shell were about to crack...and an elephant stomping over the oceans, along with a rabbit...what looked like a king on a throne and a queen-like figure by his side...

Jon found himself frowning, looking back up at the depiction of Allie, then of Revik.

Whoever painted this, they didn't seem to like the intermediaries all that much.

Or maybe it was humanity they weren't too fond of.

Someone nudged him from the other side.

Jon glanced up and was surprised to see Neela there, standing next to Jorag and looking wound, as if every muscle in her body readied for a fight. She'd lost the big gun; presumably one of those white-gloved servants took it from her with the same smile they'd directed at Jon when disarming him.

Giving the female seer a nod and a thin smile back, Jon began walking after the others, keeping Wreg in his peripheral vision as he followed Holo and Tenzi through the echoing hallway. He could see another of those white-gloved servants up ahead, and watched as the man disappeared through a doorway just past the staircase, with Revik and Allie not far behind.

He didn't mind staying somewhat behind and within the mass of others. Revik pretty much told Jon to keep a low profile once they entered the house, anyway; Jon knew they were all worried that this Shadow guy was a zealot who wanted all the humans dead. Whether Shadow's people had a copy of the Displacement list or not, Allie warned him they wouldn't be oblivious to the fact that Jon held a high place in the inner circle.

They might take him out just on general principle.

So he kept his head down, and Wreg to his right and slightly ahead. Neela remained on his left and slightly behind, with Jorag at her side like a walking monolith. All in all, Jon felt about as safe as he could have, under the circumstances. Even gun-less, and despite her relatively small size, Neela always struck Jon as a bit frightening. Something about the way she moved reminded him of a cat, nearly soundless and soft on her feet, yet he doubted she had an ounce of real fat on her entire body. He'd seen her move in fight situations, too, so fast he'd barely been able to track her from one place to the next.

Wreg told him of all of his people, he would trust Neela to have his back when it came down to the line, and Jon believed him. Wreg had worked with her for years, in the latest rebellion and even the one before that, which put her at Revik's age at least, if not a bit older. Seeing the way she paced him now, Jon couldn't help wondering if she'd been given additional duties on this trip as well...besides protecting Allie and Revik, that is.

He forgot all that a few seconds later, though.

He followed the other seers through double doors made of ancient-looking oak and into a room that looked like something out of an old gothic romance novel, or maybe one of the Frankenstein movies. A long table of the same old-growth oak took up most of the middle of the cavernous space. The ceiling would have looked astronomically high, if not for the foyer they'd just left behind; as it was, Jon found himself trying to take in the height of the floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows on the far wall, as well as the carved wooden sconces, more ancient paintings and tapestries, and the requisite dead-animal heads.