Changer's Daughter (31 page)

“Just a moment,” Eddie says. He drops the paper on the floor and crosses to the adjoining room. “Dakar, Anson’s back!”

Then he gets a bunch of bananas from a cupboard and brings them to the monkey. He has to peel the first one and feed it chunk by chunk to the exhausted creature. After the monkey finishes a couple more, there is a blur of color and where the monkey had been is the gangling human form of Anson A. Kridd.

Anson finishes the rest of the bananas just as Dakar Agadez comes in from the adjoining room. Dakar looks at him with surprising compassion and lifts him from the floor to the bed.

“Got to get your skinny, naked butt off the floor,” Dakar says, by way of greeting. “Still hungry?”

“Starved, but here is my good Eddie, ministering to my needs. I am like the King, eh?”

Eddie sets a laden tray down on the bedside table.

“We’ve had it ready for hours. I was about to give up and order another one, no matter what the landlady would think.”

Anson dips his fingers into some yam
amala
and nods his thanks. When he has licked his fingers clean of the soft, doughy stuff he says:

“I have found him again.”

“Katsuhiro?” Eddie sounds excited.

Even Dakar’s disdainful grunt is unconvincing. Anson had located Katsuhiro the very first night he had investigated the Regis compound, but when he had returned the next night to talk with him, Anson had found the cell empty except for the body of his friend Adam. Since then, he has returned to continue the search, pushing his reserves dangerously low.

“Why’d it take you so long?” Dakar says, pouring Anson a glass of sweet soda. “It shouldn’t take long to find one Nip in a batch of darkies.”

Anson nods. “It shouldn’t, but my forms are not infinite. The compound is so well guarded that I could not go there as a human, except possibly disguised as one of their own staff. I was not willing to risk that until I had exhausted all other courses of action.

“Next I tried as a monkey, but a monkey is a daytime creature. In the daytime, the guards took great delight in shooting at me.”

“I remember,” Dakar grumbles, though it had been he who found the injured monkey, when he had grown concerned that Anson had not returned, and he who had bandaged its wounds so well that Anson had been able to return to his search the next night.

“So I must be a spider, with a few switches to monkey or man when no one seems to be about.” Anson shrugs, his energy and his good humor returning now that he has consumed some four thousand calories, including a tub of butter, eaten in spoonfuls. “No one sees a spider, but a spider is not so swift, eh?”

“
Na
,” Dakar agrees. “So where is the Nip? Is he still breathing?”

“Breathing,” Anson agrees, “but looking very serious, far too serious for a man who has just had a lovely woman come and climb into his bed.”

Eddie looks astonished, Dakar indignant. After laughing at their expressions, Anson continues his tale.

“Window by window I checked the big central command building. I started at the top, climbing there quickly as a monkey and praying not to feel the sting of a bullet, then as a spider I lowered myself by a thread, checking each window.

“When I come to one window, I feel great hope, for there is Katsuhiro, naked and erect, climbing into bed with a beautiful woman—a woman, too, who I recognize as Teresa, the wife of my friend Adam.”

Eddie frowns. “Adam, who you swear you saw Katsuhiro murder three nights ago.”

“Yes.” Anson finishes a partially melted chocolate-nut bar. “That’s right. Now, I have seen much lovemaking, done a lot too, in this long misspent life. I think now I am going to watch the old horizontal bop one more time and resign myself to waiting. Then I notice, though they are careful to conceal it, Teresa and Katsuhiro are talking far more than they are fucking.

“I wonder why they are so carefully hiding what they say, and, suspicious old coot that I am, I study the room until I see that, well hidden above a doorframe, is a video camera lens, situated so that it can record most of what goes on in the room. Evidently, our friend Susano has more audience than just me. Someone is making blue movies of his bedroom performance!”

Dakar guffaws rudely, but Eddie looks serious.

“So you couldn’t very well go in and speak with him there, could you? I don’t suppose you overheard what they were talking about?”

Anson looks cheerfully shamefaced. “I tried, very carefully, I tried, but I only caught a word or two.”

“Couldn’t you get close?”

“Eh! You know our impetuous Katsuhiro. Here he is, naked in bed with a woman and trying not to take advantage of her...”

“Tell me another lie!” Dakar laughs.

“No, seriously. They put on a good show, but I don’t think...” Anson shrugs. “That is not important. What I am telling you is that I did not care to put my fragile spider body near where Katsuhiro might blot it out with a single blow of his hairy fist.”

“Good point,” Eddie concedes. “Have his captors hurt him?”

“Katsuhiro does not seem to have been tortured, but I think he has learned things he does not like. You remember the ‘hospital’ I told you about, eh?”

The two athanor nod. Neither is likely to forget Anson’s account of the smallpox barracks.

“I think he must have been shown that—it would explain why he hasn’t escaped. Perhaps his entire island nation is being held hostage against his good behavior.”

Eddie rubs his head, tugging at the woolly hair as if just remembering how he has been transformed.

“What can we do then?”

“We must get Katsuhiro out,” Anson says, “but we should communicate with him first to make certain that he will leave. Then we get him out, both him, I think, and Teresa.”

“Then kill Regis,” Dakar says, his eyes shining with joy at the thought of his revenge.

“Unless he is an athanor,” Eddie hedges.

Dakar snarls something inarticulate, but does not argue.

Outside the boardinghouse window, the
harmattan
wind intensifies, wailing the grief and frustration none of them dare express. Eddie crosses and slams the window shut.

“Hell,” he mutters, “even if he
is
an athanor.”

Stinky Joe refuses to leave the Other Three Quarters Ranch, when Lovern requests magical assistance, but a significant coterie—led by Tuxedo Ar, Stinky Joe’s perpetual rival—departs in the Wanderer’s van, eager for new horizons and a chance to showoff in the company of the Cats of Egypt.

With their departure, something changes around the ranch, something the unicorns sense so that they pause more often in their grazing to sniff the winds, something the griffin feels and so intensifies her alertness, something that makes the hydra lurk in the back of their caves when they long to be out basking in the winter sun.

Frank MacDonald is not unaware of his companions’ changed moods. Riding Tugger, since the former plow horse doesn’t mind a saddle, he makes the rounds.

“What troubles you?” he asks the unicorns where they tremble in one of their hidden valleys.

Pearl shakes the pale whiteness of her mane as she tries to articulate a feeling. Her answer is not wholly verbal, but is constructed of foot stomps and ear twitches, of tail flips and snorts through her nose. Frank, however, hears it as if it were words—this is an old gift with him, so old that he is uncertain whether it is magic or experience.

“The air seems clearer,” she begins, then shakes her head. “No. Not that. But like that. We feel less well hidden, as if a fog has lifted and we discover that we are in the midst of an open plain.”

Frank nods. The unicorns can tell him nothing more. The griffin is more helpful, perhaps because she is a predator rather than an herbivore and so more accustomed to planning rather than reacting.

“Always,” she says, nervously preening her wing feathers as a person might chew a fingernail, “since I have come to live under your care, there has been an aura about wherever we have made our home. Like a song or...”

“A fog?” Frank suggests. “That is what the unicorns said.”

“A fog,” the griffin considers, “perhaps. More to me like a song saying, ‘Look over there, just to the side, not straight ahead.’”

She preens some more, clearly dissatisfied with her answer.

“Misdirection, then,” Frank says, “rather than concealment.”

“Yes.” The griffin scratches the dirt with a fore claw. “I thought that you had created it, if I thought about it at all. Most of the time I didn’t. You don’t think about the sun in the daytime until an eclipse makes it vanish. I just know that when I first came to you it was the thing that made where you were feel so different from the rest of the world.”

Tugger puts a word in then. “Frank, I think it has to do with the cats.”

“The cats?”

The former plow horse nods. “Yes. I think the cats created it, maybe not deliberately, but maybe by the fact that there were so many of them here.”

Frank considers this. “You may have a point, Tugger. I started collecting cats a long time ago—in the Middle Ages when people started killing them as witches’ familiars. They were good animals to have around, able to feed themselves, able to hide quickly.... I wonder if their hiding was purely physical?”

Tugger snorts. “I don’t think so. Sneaky creatures, cats. Even the cats I like are sneaky.”

The griffin, who after all is part-lion and so part-cat, does not comment on the behavior of her distant kin, but something in how she ruffles the feathers on her neck suggests that she agrees with the plow horse.

Frank nods. “They are sneaky, but that’s how they’re created. They could no more change their nature than you could—nor would they want to do so.”

“They do keep down the rats and mice,” Tugger concedes.

“And maybe do more than that,” Frank says. He turns to the griffin. “Could you pass along a warning to be extra cautious?”

The griffin gapes her beak, distressed. “I should not fly. If the protection is reduced, I might be seen.”

Frank frowns. “You’re right. I’ll get the crows and ravens to pass the word.”

“I’ll tell the hydra,” the griffin says. “They are so stupid they might eat a crow rather than listen. They won’t dare try to eat me!”

“Good.” Frank settles into his saddle. “Tugger, take me to the barn. I need to talk with Stinky Joe.”

While Frank is conferring with the great golden tomcat, working through the cat’s natural secretiveness to confirm Tugger’s guess that the cats’ concentrated presence conferred a protection on their home (and coming to suspect that the cats themselves had been unaware of what they were doing), another resident of the OTQ Ranch is sensing that something has changed.

A haze that has blocked her best efforts to reach out is lifting, a clarity of thought is returning. For the first time, she can touch minds that are not untethered and drifting in dreams. Most of those she touches are either too stupid to be of assistance or are dangerous, for they may recognize her for what she is—an intruder.

Still, there are possibilities here. Her whiskers twitch and her little pink nose quivers with excitement. She leaps onto her exercise wheel and runs.

The Wheel of Fortune turns. When those who are at the top fall, those who are at the bottom must rise.

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