Summoned to Tourney (16 page)

And earthquakes didn’t discriminate between civilian and military targets. In fact, civilians were far more likely to be the victims; the technology that made military structures hardened against nuclear attacks also made them earthquake-resistant.

No—the military didn’t need to know about Poseidon.

“You know, I just had a horrible thought,” Frank said, turning toward her with a look of stark terror on his face.

“What?” she asked, alarmed.

“Remember when they put through that law about fault-line disclosure, and all those scumbag real-estate scammers couldn’t sell their fault-line property?” he moaned. “You realize we’re about to make those parasites
rich
?”

She sighed and started to make a snappy comeback—when the hair on the back of her neck started to rise.

Warden Blair rarely left his lab complex between seven in the morning and midnight; about the only thing that could lure him outside the walls was the prospect of another pickup.

The walls of his office were studded with television monitors, one for every cell in the complex. Most of them were uninteresting; the occupants were asleep or drugged unconscious. One of the catches from today, a black woman, was one of those—the only thing that made her interesting was that she had passed out in the corner of her cell, wedged into a sitting position.
Stubborn bitch.

She’d been worse than that red-haired piece; she hadn’t been anything less than polite, but she’d been just as adamant in refusing to give him any information at all and in refusing to sign up on the project. She’d stared at him and answered—when she answered at all—in words of one syllable, as if she was speaking to a particularly dense child. When he refused to answer any of her questions, she gave him a look of disgust and disdain— exactly like the one his ninth-grade teacher had given him when she discovered the frog he was dissecting was still alive.

Bitch
, The word applied both to Mrs. Bucher and this hag. They both made him feel like a naughty little boy without saying a word. Well, it was too late to do anything about Mrs. Bucher, but this old bag was going to find out she was sneering at the wrong man. Maybe he’d turn Bobbie loose on her… when Bobbie got done, she’d be a lot more cooperative.

The other new catches, now—they were much more interesting. The man was, anyway. They’d finally had to take the cuffs off him a half an hour ago; all the devices they had monitoring vital signs went into red-alert. Heart rate was way above the safe line, brain-scan showed seizure conditions and unbearable pain. Blair had never seen so severe a psychosomatic reaction—especially not to something as nonsensical as physical contact with metal.

Now the young man huddled in the corner, head sheltered in his arms. The attendants reported that there were burn marks two inches wide circling each wrist.

So, he not only had a new type of psychic, he had someone who could reproduce stigmata-type marks. He’d been wanting to get his hands on a stigmatic for some time—the problem was every single genuine stigmatic was protected by a horde of Catholic stooges.

Once he got his hand on the third member of that little gypsy trio, and the kid who’d been with the old bat, he’d have quite a little stable. More than enough to impress—

The monitors went blank. All of them, at the same time.

For a moment, he stared at them, unable to believe that his state-of-the-art, triply redundant equipment had just failed on him.

No—it
couldn’t
have failed on him. Someone out there had pulled the plug on his office.

He surged to his feet, suffused with rage. Whoever that someone was, he was going to pay—

He headed for the door, but before he took more than two steps, something came through it.

Through the
closed
door.

Something dark, shadowy. And very big. But transparent, and his mind dismissed it as a projection or an illusion. One or two of his stable were quite adept at creating projections, and if something had gone wrong with the equipment, the electronic fields that kept them from sending their creations outside their cells might also have malfunctioned.

He was quite certain it was harmless. Until he touched it.

Then he screamed with pain and shock—screamed even louder as it enveloped him, sure that one of his men would break down the door and save him. But his men had troubles of their own…

He continued to scream for a very long time.

CHAPTER 8:
Hame, Hame, Hame

Kory huddled for a long time in the shelter of his folded arms, waiting for the pain to ebb, waiting for his body to recover from the shock of prolonged contact with the Death Metal. Physical shock was not the only thing he had to recover from; his mental processes had undergone similar damage. He did not understand these humans, the ones who had imprisoned him. Oh, abstractly he had known that there were humans who were sick, mentally unbalanced—but he had never encountered any himself. Until now. Until he had touched the thoughts of the man called Warden Blair.

In some ways, he was as shaken by his encounter with Warden Blair’s mind as he was by what had been done to him. Never before had he encountered a person who so desired the pain and degradation of others; who thrived on it as anyone else would thrive on love and praise.

Even Perenor was not so twisted—he was ruthless, and he thought of humans as no better than animals, but he would never have done to them what this man has done. He used people, but he did not go out of his way to hurt any save those he felt had hurt him. Even me, he only set to sleep in the Grove, Even Terenil, he sought only to kill. This man is like the Unseleighe, and I do not understand them either.

Blair devoted himself to inflicting pain, humiliation, specialized in reducing his fellow humans to groveling, weeping nonentities. And then, he would take every opportunity to reinforce what he had done to them, keeping them ground beneath his foot.

He hated everyone; he hated and despised those beneath him, he hated and feared those above him, and he hated and wanted to dispose of his equals. If there was anything that Warden Blair cared for besides himself, Kory had not seen it.

What he was doing to those in his power was only a pale shadow of what he
wanted
to do to them. What he had already done—sometimes with the aid of his former captives—was horrifying. And not only did he feel no remorse, he regretted that he dared not take his activities as far as he would like.

What he had done to Beth—that was typical of him. It was by no means representative of the depths to which he had already gone. Warden Blair had killed, both directly and indirectly, although he himself had never dirtied his hands with anything so direct as a blade or one of the humans’ guns.

That he left to men he had hired for the purpose. This was something else Kory could not understand: to hire someone for the purposes of assassination. But then, he had never understood humans or Unseleighe who made that their practice.

Once or twice, Warden Blair had found it necessary to deal death personally—but when he did, it was assassination of another sort, through the intermediary of poison. As a scientist, he had access to many poisons, several that mimicked perfectly ordinary illnesses.

And his only regret was that he had not been there to witness and enjoy the death, when it came. He routinely dispatched in this way those he had captured who proved to be too much trouble. He was already considering such an end for Beth, should she continue to resist him.

Beth
—Despite his own weakness and pain, he crawled to her on his hands and knees, to gather her up in his arms and hold her. Now that he knew what Blair was like, and what the human had done to Beth, he knew that there was only one way to reach her. She would not trust anything coming from outside her—but she might trust a mind-to-mind link. She had erected shields to hold others out, but she would not have held them against him.

He held her close, shut out the pain of his body, the cold of the cell, and focused himself inward. Inward to seek outward. Inward for control, so that he might have the stability to forget himself and look into Beth’s mind and heart.

He sent out a questing tendril of thought; encountered her shields, and called softly to her.
:Beth—Bethie, my lady, my friend, my love—:

The shields softened a little. He touched the surface of her thoughts, and did not recoil from what he found there—a chaos of fear—and old memories, more potent for being early ones.
Can’t breathe—choking—strangling—the air going, the walls falling in—

Her shields softened further and he passed them by. He countered her illusions with nothing more than his presence, knowing now what fear it was that held her prisoner.
:Your lungs are filled, the air is fresh and pure. I am with you, and I will not let the walls close in. Bethie, you are not alone.:

She finally sensed his presence in her mind, and grasped for him with the frantic strength of one who was drowning. He stood firm, holding against her tugging, vaguely aware that she confused him with someone else, some other rescuer. That was fine. If she had been rescued before, she would be the readier to believe that she was being rescued again.

:I am here. I will help you to safety, my love. Do not let yourself despair.:

She clung to him, mentally and physically. He felt her thoughts calming; found the place where her fear originated and fed back upon itself. That gave
him
something to work on; he caught the fear and held it, sensed that she was listening to him now, and knew who he was.

:There is air to breathe,:
he told her silently, calmly.
:This is only a room. If the blackguard stops the air, I will start it again. If he changes it, I will protect you. I have sent word to the Bard; he is working to free us.:
That last, he was unsure of. He knew that he had briefly touched Eric, and that Eric knew what kind of danger they were in, but whether or not Eric knew where they were, and could do anything about it—that was another question altogether. He was only one man. He had the magic of the greatest Bards at his beck and call, but could that magic prevail against one such as Blair? He had imprisoned an elven warrior, even though he did not seem to know what it was he had captured. Could Bardic magic be strong enough to counter what this man could do when elven magic could not?

But the elf pushed his own doubts into the background. He must keep his thoughts positive. Beth needed them, needed him to be strong and with no doubts.

Just as she had been strong and without doubts for him, when he had despaired of saving his people, his Elfhame, himself.

How long he held her, he was not certain. Only that after a timeless moment, she reached up and touched his cheek with a shaking hand.

“K-Kory?” she whispered hoarsely. “Kory—I—”

He raised his head—and something in the quality of the atmosphere told him that there was something very different about the place, something that had changed in the past few moments. Something was very wrong.

“Kory?” Her own arms tightened about him, and he felt her shivering. “Kory, something’s wrong—there’s something out there—”

“I know,” he whispered. He sought to identify what he sensed as he held her. It wasn’t Unseleighe; it wasn’t anything from Underhill at all, either from the ordered Seleighe side, or the chaos of the Unseleighe lands. It wasn’t human spirits… or human magic. But it was somehow connected with humanity.

Its evil was human evil, that same evil that lived in Warden Blair. It was that shadowy horror that Beth sensed, that made her shiver and forget her fear of being buried alive. There were things worse than death, and in the darkness of their cell, Kory knew that he and Beth sensed one of those things brushing them with its regard.

It examined them, minutely, as he held his breath.

And passed them by.

Kory let out the breath he had been holding in. Then he realized something else that was not as it had been: the silence. While the room they were in was supposedly soundproof, elven senses were sharper than human, and the sounds of footsteps, conversation, and other noises leaked across the threshold of the door. There had been sound out there in the corridor; there no longer was.

Cautiously, he created a mage-light; it lit Beth’s face with a faint blueish glow from the palm of his hand. Her eyes were round and wide with fear, her face drawn and bloodless. Whatever he sensed from the being outside their door, she was more sensitive to it. He had hesitated to create the light, for fear it would attract the attention of the thing that had examined them, but nothing happened.

He considered his options, and the continuing silence in the hallway beyond. And he considered his own strength, which was nearly spent.

This would be the last attempt at magic he could make without a great deal of rest and recuperation. Once he had finished a final attempt on the lock, their only recourses at escape would have to be purely physical. On the other hand, what did he have to lose? If what he and Beth sensed was truly out there, prowling the corridors of Warden Blair’s stronghold, the human had a great deal more to worry about than keeping his victims penned. Whatever magery had countered his own, it might be gone now.

He sent the ball of light into the mechanism of the lock, as he had before; exerting his will upon the stubborn mechanism to make it yield. This time, however, he was rewarded by the faint clicking of the tumblers. And no one on the other side of the door relocked it.

He freed himself from Beth’s clutching hands, stood up shakily. She started to protest, stopped herself as he moved carefully across the darkened room to the door. He waited for a moment with his hand on the handle, extending his weary senses out beyond the metal of the heavy portal, feeling nothing in the immediate vicinity. He turned the handle, carefully; the door opened smoothly and quietly.

The hallway beyond was deserted—and curiously ill-lit, as if some of the lights had failed. Kory looked cautiously around the doorframe; there was still nothing to be seen in the hall; there wasn’t even a human behind the desk-console at the end of it. He frowned; surely that was wrong. Shouldn’t there be one of those uniformed humans with badges there at all times?