And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (31 page)

The woman coughed, groaned, then started gasp-ing and wheezing.

Several of the women in Jill's force approached, and she turned to them. "Get her to a wagon!"

she or-dered. "Those among us with any kind of medical skills should attend to her. We will camp on the farm land just beyond the fence tonight."

They hastened to do her bidding, bowing slightly in deference. She got up and walked back to the gnomes.

"How many lived there?" she demanded to know.

"Ten-five males and five females," the gnome re-plied. He looked around, still trying to sound haughty, defiant. "We have decided that nine for one is atone-ment. We will consider this matter closed. The well, however, shall not be used. We shall seal and destroy it."

She had to admire his nerve. He was still talking as if he had a choice in this.

"We agree," she responded, allowing him his pride. "Now you will return to your domain and we shall keep to ours."

The little creature nodded and started to turn to go, then turned back to her. "Answer me one question, if you will," he said in a curious and respectful tone. He gestured to the women now setting up camp in the fields. "Whither is such a strange force as this bound, and to what purpose?"

She smiled at his obvious prodding for information. "I should answer you that you should keep going, that it is none of your affair," she taunted, "but I will ask you this question in turn. How far from this spot are the lands and castle known as the Citadel?"

He looked at her strangely. "You are a free spirit, not bound," he noted. "The others are under spells, yes, but not you, nor is your soul with lein. Why would you go against such peaceful folk as those when your victory is one for such evil?"

It was odd to hear him take so moral a tone after he'd just murdered nine human beings by burning them to death.

"But was the spell not cast by one equally as evil?" she retorted, throwing the ball back to him.

He looked genuinely surprised. "Do you not know, then? Not all the elemental forces between the worlds are evil. You speak as if man vanquished them, but it was not so. We-human, gnome, faerie, all the deni-zens who now live upon this earth-were the by-products of that struggle, not the victors but the inheritors. They were vanquished in civil war, not by the efforts of others. This world is where the bat-tle was won, not anything more. The others still rule the spaces between the worlds of our own universe-they have no need of Earth. They who still rule the light and the darkness aided the spell you would break. I beg you, do not do so, for beneath the Cita-del lies the gate to evil most foul!"

"I will take your words to heart," she told him, "but I beg you to remember that even free souls are not fully free, nor are all chains visible. I bid you goodbye." She turned and started walking toward her women now camping in the fields. After a few seconds she turned and looked back.

There was no one there. The gnomes had com-pletely vanished.

She made her way to the food wagon where the pregnant woman-no more than a girl, really, she saw-lay. They had removed and burned her scorched dress and covered her with a blanket. She was still in shock. An older woman was tending her, wiping her brow and occasionally trying to force some water into her mouth.

The women of the force spoke little except in their duties, yet they responded to the girl as ordered. The older woman looked up and nodded slightly in defer-ence to her Queen.

"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 for-mer 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 cen-ter. 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 dis-covered 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 car-nage."

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 de-manded 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 an-swered. 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 chil-dren. 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 nerv-ousness, 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, ac-tually 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 peo-ple 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 fall-ing. 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'Mal-ley's best spells. It had that used look, that feel of magic and dark forces.