Robert Charrette - Arthur 01 - A Prince Among Men (37 page)

He had failed. Again. Holger hung his head, eyes blinded with fresh tears. When he looked up, he and O'Connor were entering the chamber again.

"The staff," the beast prompted.

Holger looked at it longingly. Mannheim always said you can't unmake your decisions. What if he was wrong?

But whom was a man to believe in? A thing of magic or the mentor who had taught you how to make life livable? Mannheim had known the answer to that and had taught it to Holger.

There was no choice to be made, because a man could only make one choice.

Holger threw himself on the beast. Through it, actually. He bounced from the hard gritty stone. The beast snarled at him, baring its teeth. But instead of leaping on him, it recoiled. For a moment it seemed more substantial. Holger seized that moment, making it his as Mannheim had always counseled. He drew his boot knife and flung it. His aim was poor—a transparent beast was a difficult target—but the thing howled as steel embedded itself in its shoulder.

It took a step back, then staggered as a bolt of energy hit

it.

Spae lowered her staff, looking to see what her magic had done. She was no longer trapped within the column of light. Holger didn't know how she had done it, but he was glad she had. Face knotted with rage and determination, Spae raised her staff, pointing it at the beast. Another bolt leapt from its tip, crackling into the beast and raising a smell like burning fur.

The beast howled. It stepped sideways and was—gone.

As if it had never been.

Spae took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh that sounded as though it had come from her feet.

"I'm glad it's gone. I don't think I have enough left to hit it again," Spae said. Her knees buckled, but she retained a strong enough grip on her staff that Holger was able to reach her in time to ease her to the floor.

"Thanks," she said.

"Are you all right, Doctor?"

"Me? You're the one that tiling was slavering over."

"I don't seem to have been quite what it wanted." He rubbed at a spot on his cheek that was stinging; his hand came away bloody. He didn't remember receiving the wound. "How did you escape the crystal's trap?"

Spae shook her head. "I haven't got that completely sorted out. You're right, though, the crystal
was
a trap; it sent me somewhere else, a place outside the otherworld, yet not back to our own world. I don't think I can explain it. No, I
know I
can't explain it. At least not to you, because you're not open to magic; you couldn't go there, so you won't be able to understand."

Holger was not sure he wanted to understand, but he was glad she was back. Spae went on, trying to explain the unex-plainable.

"I—I learned something there. A lot of things, actually. It was a bit humbling. I think the beast expected me to be helpless there, but I learned some things and used some of what I learned to find my way back to this locus."

"The magic told you how to escape the trap?"

"Well, that, and the tug on my staff."

Was there an accusation in her tone? "I never touched your staff."

She nodded. "But the beast wanted you to take it, didn't

it?"

And he had almost succumbed to the temptation. He felt a need to confess. "It told me I could use your staff to—to help someone."

"It lied. If you'd touched the staff I would have been lost forever, and you wouldn't have been any better off. You're a mundane; you wouldn't be able to use the staff. You couldn't have helped anyone with it."

So it had been a false temptation, had it? Or had it? "How do you know that?"

"It's something I learned in that other place. I'll tell you more if you want, but I have to warn you that it's magic, and fairly esoteric magic at that. I don't think you'll want to hear it."

"You're right. I don't want to hear it." He'd take her word

for it.

"You don't look like you're in very good shape," she said sympathetically. The concern didn't fit his image of her, but he found he liked it.

"I'll survive." He'd gotten this far, hadn't he?

"I expect you will," she said thoughtfully. "But I must tell you, Mr. Kun, I think we're
both
lucky that my return disrupted the beast's spells."

"I was told never to believe in luck, Doctor."

"Times change, Mr. Kun."

"No, they don't, Doctor." She started to speak, but he cut her off. "Doctor, the walls! They're dissolving!"

It did appear that they were, but Spae made no move; she just squinted and said, "I'd wager they were never really there."

Holger wouldn't have taken that bet on his life.

They were in a field. It was still night, but the fog was gone, and the star-dusted sky of the otherworld sparkled above their heads. Holger immediately snapped alert, slapping a new magazine into the Viper.

"I hear something."

"It sounds like someone chopping wood," Spae said.

The sound seemed to come from beyond a rise to their left. Together they crept up the slope. Holger motioned the doctor to remain below the crest, and to his surprise she did so without complaint. He dropped, to a crouch, then to all fours as he approached the crest. Finally on his belly, he raised his head to where he could see down into the next vale.

There he saw Bear, looking haggard and battered, determinedly hacking down a sapling with a belt knife. Holger called Spae forward and started over the hill himself. Bear looked up and waved as Holger stood. The first thing Bear said was, "Got any ammo? I've about used mine up."

Holger didn't ask how or why, he just tossed a fresh magazine to Bear. It was better not to know. Bear tossed away the sapling. "Don't need this now." Picking up his machine pistol, he slapped home the magazine. "You didn't tell me how fast this stuff is used up."

"Shorter bursts or single shots."

"Yeah. I should've remembered."

Maybe later Holger would ask. Later, under a real sky, in a real world.

CHAPTER

23

"He's over here!"

It was Faye's voice.

John iooked around to see Faye running down the slope toward him. The sight of her, long silver hair streaming behind and white dress flapping in the breeze of her rush, banished his worries.

Behind her, Trashcan Harry came over the crest. The goblin had lost his crutch somewhere and replaced it with a crooked tree limb. Harry was making better speed than he had been making and appeared to be in better health; the otherworld seemed to have a restorative effect on him. Maybe the air was better for goblins here, maybe they needed magic to heal.

But questions didn't seem important with Faye running toward him, a happy smile on her face. A few feet from him she launched herself into the air, arms outstretched. John caught her, but the impact staggered him back and half spun him around. It was fortunate that she was so light; otherwise they would both have been sprawled on the grass. Her arms encircled his neck and she hugged him fiercely. He hugged her back, immensely pleased to see her safe.

They broke their clinch only when Trashcan Harry arrived. John became acutely aware of many things at once: the warmth of Faye's body, his own rather, uh, strong reaction to it, the goblin's watching eyes. He put Faye down. She still clung to his arm, taking both John and Harry into the radiance of her smile.

"John, you don't know how worried we were."

We were,
not I was'. Maybe she wasn't as personally interested in him as he'd thought—hoped—that she was. He caught Trashcan Harry leering at him and flushed. He rubbed at his cheeks to hide the redness, hoping his gesture would be taken as thoughtful. To complete the illusion, he asked a question.

"Where are the others?"

Faye looked confused. "They're not with you?"

"No."

"Maybe they gave up and went home," Harry suggested.

"Bear wouldn't give up," John said.

"Too stupid," Harry groused.

John put Trashcan Harry's remark down to the old animosity toward Bear, and ignored it. "We'll have to find them. Faye, you can fly. Could you do an aerial search?"

She looked away. "It's different here, John. I can't do everything that I could in the sunlit world."

Just looking at her made it obvious that there were things she could do here that weren't possible back home. Be seen, for one. For another— John cut off that line of thought. They were in the otherworld, not a park in the Benjamin Harrison Town Project; the others could be in danger or hurt or ...

"We should start looking for them." He pointed at the nearest and tallest hill. "We'll head over there. We should be able to see quite a ways from there."

Trashcan Harry turned his head to look at the hill, but stayed leaning on his crutch. He swung his head back and looked at John from under his dark brows. "Do you think that's a good idea, Jack? I mean, if they're looking for us too, we could wander around missing each other. Maybe we should stay here and wait for them to find us."

"That might work if there were just Kun and Dr. Spae to consider, but Bear will push on. You know he will, Harry."

"Yeah," Harry admitted reluctantly.

"Well, come on, then."

The hill gave them the view John wanted; they spotted the others marching in a line directly away from their position. Bear was in the lead, striding determinedly, and Spae was moving briskly as well. Kun was bringing up the rear; he was the only one looking around, but somehow John didn't think it was for him, or Faye, or Trashcan Harry.

John ran on ahead, leaving Faye to help Harry make his best speed. He shouted when he thought he'd gotten within earshot, but Kun didn't look in his direction. It seemed that the air of the otherworld dampened noise, shortening the distance sound carried, much as it scattered light to cut the range of clear vision. John kept going, closing a third of the distance before trying again. This time Kun did hear, spinning and pointing his weapon. He put it up when he recognized John and shouted for Bear to hold up.

The reunion involved a lot of earnest questions about people's conditions, but all involved seemed curiously reluctant to provide details of what had happened to them while they were separated. John knew he didn't want to talk about his visit with the elven knight; the whole episode seemed somehow best kept private.

While they waited for Faye and Trashcan Harry to join them, John saw that he had caught the others just in time. Beyond the hill on which they stood lay a forest of dark, towering trees that went on in an unbroken ocean of leaves as far as he could see in the twilight. It was awe-inspiring in its primeval beauty. This, he thought, was what the land might have looked like before the European colonists came.

Faye and Harry had barely reached the crest of the hill when Bear headed off, saying, "Come on." He walked straight toward the forest.

And into it.

The open country and its occasional woods had been strange to a city boy like John, but this shadowed stand of massive trees was as different from any woods he had been in as a rezcom was from a trash-district shanty. The most noticeable difference was that it was much darker in the shade of the forest giants, darker than anywhere he'd yet seen in the otherworld. There wasn't much in the way of underbrush between the huge boles, which seemed strange until he considered how little light penetrated the canopy of leaves high above their heads. Their feet scuffed through a deep carpet of brown leaves, and though their passage sounded loud to John's ears, the silent trees seemed not to mind. There was a deep peacefulness here within the forest that soothed him, and urged him to forget that he had ever dwelt among the concrete barrens of the earthly realm. Had it not been for the brisk pace that Bear set, John might have lingered to listen to the silent songs of the trees; they were so old, and they must have seen so much.

But even the forest doesn't last forever, and soon John noticed a curious lightening in the direction Bear led them. Not long after, they encountered brush and saplings, and finally emerged from the embrace of the great trees onto a shoreline.

Mist hung over the water, obscuring everything beyond about ten yards. The farther shore was invisible. It might have been a river or a lake, or even an ocean. It didn't smell of salt and there didn't seem to be a current, so John decided it had to be a lake. No lake had been visible from the hill. A small body of water might be hidden under the cover of the leaves, but judging from how the shoreline stretched out of sight in either direction, this was no small body of water.

With sudden certainty, John knew it was no ordinary body of water, either.

Kun looked out across the water, his index finger twitching slightly where it lay along the trigger guard of his machine pistol.

"I don't like the fog," he complained.

"There's magic here," John said.

"He's right," Spae agreed.

"This is not news," Kun pointed out sourly.

Bear ignored the byplay, staring fixedly out over the water. Finally he turned to them with a strange glint in his eye and said quietly, "She is here."