Summoned to Tourney (24 page)

That
was good news. “Okay, you take care of that. I’m going upstairs. By the time they get here, I may have some idea what’s going on with Bethie.” He vaulted up out of his chair and sprinted for the stairs, noting absently as he passed the kitchen door that the murmur of voices sounded less angry and more—anxious.

And maybe Elizabet’s getting through to the scientist-lady. I sure hope so. I don’t want to have to wipe her mind clean of what happened at the labs and anything to do with us.

This Bardic magic stuff was getting messier all the time. Seemed as if every time he used it to fix something, he had to use it again to fix what the fix had messed up, and then fix the problems that the fix to the fix had brought up.

Why couldn’t things be simple, like in one of those awful Role Adventure Escape books? Just find the Magic Talisman and poof, all the crayon-box dragons would roll over on their backs…

He paused at the door to the bedroom and peeked inside. Beth was asleep, but he doubted it was anything other than magic-induced sleep. Kayla looked up as the door creaked, surveying him warily from her perch in the window.

And just find the Wand of Wizardly Wonder, wave it, and everyone is healed of everything. Including death.
He shook his head a little unhappily.
I could do with one of those right now. And not just for Bethie.

“Kayla?” he whispered, easing himself into the room. “You’re gonna have to spot for me. Kory’s calling in some kind of elven SWAT team to back us, and I’m going to try to find out what happened to Bethie, since she won’t tell us.”

The kid’s expression sharpened with interest, until she looked like an alert little fox. “What are you gonna do, Bard?”

He grimaced ruefully. “Wish I knew. Oh, I have a plan—I’m gonna try and get inside her head. But once I’m in there, well, I dunno what’s gonna happen. So you’ll have to play it by ear. Sorta put a lifeline on me and haul me out if something goes wrong, okay? You’re better at this than Elizabet is.”

“Jeez, you don’t ask for much, do you?” the kid muttered. Then, louder,

“Okay, I’ll do what I can. But—shit, Bard, I don’t know what I’m doing

here. So don’t sue me if I mess it up.”

“If we both mess it up, kid, there isn’t gonna be anything to sue.” This was going to be dangerous for Kayla—not so dangerous as it was for him —but she could get hurt and he hoped the healer kid realized it. From the expression on her face, she did. From the expression on her face, she also had no plans to try and back out.

Kayla gritted her teeth. “I know,” Kayla said grimly.

He settled himself on the bed next to Beth, one hand covering one of hers. What should he use to key on? There weren’t any Celtic songs about mind-reading…

Oh, of course. Gordon Lightfoot. Perfect. He closed his eyes, and hummed the first few bars—and Felt the power take hold of him.

“Okay,” he muttered, “let’s get this over with.”

He came up out of his trance with a scream.

And he found himself the center of an audience. Kayla he had expected, and maybe Kory—but the tiny room was full of bodies, human and elven. His eyes went first to Elizabet—and, to his immense relief, he saw a pale-faced, round-eyed Susan Sheffield crowded in beside her. Kory stood on the other side of the scientist, and the rest were jammed in however.

He checked the elves first, and they were equipped for mayhem. Elegant, but definitely no one was going to mess with them. Knives long enough to qualify as swords hung at many sides; the elf he had last seen dressed in pink-punk style was still in pink, but it was a cat-suit, and she had a bandolier of throwing knives across her chest. One end of a
bo
staff peeked over the heads of those on the right side, and were those arrows on the left?

So they’d taken the threat seriously. Good. They’d better. The threat was a serious one. He hadn’t been throwing bull when he’d told that stuff to Kory. Odds were nine-to-one it was true.

“Well?” Elizabet said, as he struggled into a sitting position—not an easy feat on a waterbed.

“Remember what you said about torture?” he asked the healer, who frowned and nodded. “Well, that’s what he did. Somehow he figured out that Bethie’s a claustrophobe; there’s nothing in Beth’s memory of how he did it, but I’m guessing maybe he used her reactions to questions and had a lie-detector on her. Then he locked her in that damn decompression chamber in the dark, and started increasing the pressure.” He snarled as he spoke, and the scientist whitened a little further. “Real clever, too. Torture without leaving marks. Wonder what he’d have done to you, Elizabet?”

Kayla was livid, and holding her anger well; much better than he had expected she would. “That’s probably what I was for, boss,” she said to Elizabet, who nodded. “He was gonna snatch me, and tell you to cooperate or he’d take me apart and not be too careful about putting me back together. I almost wish that son of a bitch would let me get within a few feet of him, guards or no guards…”

“There’s more,” he told them, “but right now, the only thing that’s pertinent is that she’s got the phobia mixed up with
my
precognitive dream about the Big One. The one we were kinda talking about. It’s pretty clear, and there’s Nightflyers mixed up in that one, too. That gonna give you enough to work on?”

“That should give me enough to break her out,” Elizabet told him. “Once I’ve got her out of this hallucination-cycle she’s in, and talking, the rest will come.”

He heaved a sigh of relief, and rolled to the edge of the bed. Several sets of hands helped him up, and he staggered with fatigue as he got to his feet. Kory caught and held him, and he looked up into the friendly, worried, elven face he knew so well. “I have a nice nervous breakdown coming,” he said conversationally. “I’ve earned it, and I’m by-God going to take it as soon as this mess is over. But right now—we’ve got things to take care of. Is Arvin in here, somewhere?”

“Here, Bard,” said a voice at the back, somewhere near the
bo
staff.

“Okay, let’s all of us get out of here and let Kayla and Elizabet do their thing. I’ve got something that involves all of the rest of us.” He looked straight at Susan Sheffield. “You, especially.”

“Me?” She looked confused and apprehensive, and probably would have backed away from him if there hadn’t been so many people.

“Yeah, you, and that Home for Deranged Scientists you work at. Let’s move it on out of here.” He nodded at the door, and let the tide of the others carry him down the stairs and to the living-room.

Once there, the “audience” arranged itself around him in a semicircle; Arvin wordlessly handed him a glass of Gatorade, which he downed with gratitude. His head hurt, he was ready to drop, and he wanted to sleep for a week. He could have used one of Kayla’s jump-starts, but she was busy with something more important.

Christ, I haven’t felt this bad since my last hangover.

And yet, he was calm for the first time in weeks, maybe months, because now
he
had some answers. He wasn’t crazy, his dream was a warning, not a hallucination. And he wasn’t—entirely—to blame for what the Nightflyers had done. He
had
been their tool, and there was some blame there; he had allowed himself to be deceived and that was something he was never going to forget. But others had been their tools as well, and one of them was standing awkwardly beside the sofa.

“You said your project had something to do with earthquakes, right?” he said to Susan Sheffield. She nodded uncomfortably. “So what’s it all about? And what’s going on with it right now?”

“I can’t tell you that—” she began. He interrupted her with a downward slash of his hand.

“Damn your clearance crap anyway!” he spat, and she winced away from him. Arvin looked impressed. “All right.
I’ll
tell
you
.”

His time in trance hadn’t been spent entirely in Beth’s mind. And it hadn’t been at all under his conscious control. Someone, or something, had guided and impelled his vision. Maybe it had only been his subconscious, which had always been better at putting two and two together than he was. Maybe it had been his conscience, which had lately been pretty good at making him face up to the facts, no matter how unpleasant they were.

Whatever it was, once he’d seen in Bethie’s memory what she had been put through, his trance had taken a different turn without him thinking about it. He had leapt into an omniscient point of reference right over Warden Blair’s shoulder, and fast-forwarded to the Nightflyer invasion.

He knew a lot now. He knew that Warden Blair wasn’t Warden Blair anymore—and hence, the change that Dr. Sheffield had noticed. And he knew what Project Poseidon was.

“You built yourself an earthquake machine down there, didn’t you?” he said to Susan, whose eyes widened with shock. “Not one to
read
them; one to
make
them. I don’t suppose you worried much about the implications of that.”

“That’s all I thought about! It’s meant to trigger micro-quakes, to relieve stress along faultlines,” she said defensively. “It’s going to help people, to save lives—”

“Yeah, but your project’s in Warden Blair’s hands, lady,” he countered as she blanched. “And by the way, I wouldn’t go back to my apartment right now if I were you. He told that Colonel Steve of yours to send you a little reception committee after that unscheduled visit you made to the office this afternoon. He got worried, and he wants to make sure he has your services for as long as he needs them.”

Her face went paper-white, then flushed. “You’d better be telling the truth,” she said angrily, “because I have a way of checking that.”

He spread his hands and arched his eyebrows. “Be my guest. Check on it. I’d rather you did that than walk into an enemy ambush.”

“I need the phone.” She changed her challenging gaze to Kory, who moved politely out of the way of the phone on the wall—but stayed within grabbing distance of her in case she tried anything.

She dialed a number, which must have been answered on the first ring. “Hi, Betty, it’s Susan. Listen, I was supposed to have a cleaning crew over this afternoon, are they there yet?” She listened for a moment, and her angry flush paled to white again, though her voice remained steady. “Well, good, Betty, that’s terrific. Yes, they certainly are handsome young men. Yes, they’re bonded, that’s why I let the firm have a key. No, they’ll probably be there a while; they’re cleaning everything. That project’s coming to a head, and the place is a pigpen. Thanks Betty, I just wanted to be sure they’d gotten there. No, thanks, I’ll probably be working late. Bye.”

She hung up, and when she turned to Eric, her hands were shaking. “A nosy, elderly neighbor can be a wonderful thing, sometimes,” she said, with a false little laugh.

“Yeah,” he replied.

She made her way carefully to the sofa, and sat down on it.
How much else do I tell her?
he wondered, watching her. For all the profound shocks she’d had, she was coping pretty well. Encountering Nightflyers, death, Bardic magic, elves, and betrayal all in forty-eight hours could put quite a strain on the brain… But he needed her input.

Okay. He might as well go for the whole thing. “You said that you’d noticed something weird about Blair the last time you saw him?” he asked carefully. “I mean, weirder than usual.”

“The lights were on, but nobody was home,” she said without a second thought. “Or—no, somebody was home, all right, but it wasn’t human—”

She stopped, suddenly, and he saw her putting all the facts together in the way her brow creased and her eyes widened. “One of those
things
,” she gasped. “One of those horrible shadow things took him over, like in
The Exorcist!
Didn’t it?”

He nodded, while all of the elves except Kory looked puzzled.
Great. Kory didn’t tell them how I sprung him. That’s not going to make them real happy with me, even if it isn’t a direct threat to them. Yet
.

“Right,” he said wearily. “And
that
is what’s in charge of your project. In charge of something that can trigger the Big One, instead of preventing it. And just what do you think it’s going to do with something like that?”

He thought for a moment that she might faint, she grew so white, but she recovered.

“All right,” she said, slowly. “All right. I believe you. For whatever I’m worth, you’ve got me on your side. Now what?”

“Now you sit there for a minute,” he told her, and turned to the others, taking a deep breath.

Okay, kids, it’s story-time with Uncle Eric. Got a lot of catching up to do, and a short time to do it in
. “When you last saw our heroes, they were recovering from the big party,” he began. “This is what happened when you all left them—”

CHAPTER 12:
Tom O’Bedlam (Reprised)

Eric waited in sick suspense when he finished his narrative. He more than halfway expected the elves—Arvin in particular—to jump all over him for the way he’d handled the Nightflyers. And he definitely expected them to be on his case for bringing them across in the first place. But they weren’t and they didn’t. And in a way, their actual reaction surprised him more than anything else.

Silence for a moment, then thoughtful nods. Susan looked sick, though— and more than a little afraid of him. Well, he didn’t blame her for either reaction. Kory laid a comforting hand on his shoulder, and he covered it with his. That was one thing he could count on, anyway. Kory would stand by him, no matter how boneheaded he’d been, and help him fix what he’d done wrong.

“Ye didna do too badly, Bard,” one of the more stiff-necked, High Court types said grudgingly. “I canna say that any of us would have acted differently.”

He couldn’t have been more amazed if they’d handed him the Congressional Medal of Honor. “But—” he stammered, “but—I screwed up! I did everything wrong that you could think of! It’s my fault there’s one of them playing around in Blair’s body right now!”

But it was Arvin, not Kory, who leapt to his defense. “No one,” Arvin said fiercely, “no one in all the history that we know, has ever brought more than one of the Nightflyers over from the chaos of the Primal Plane where nightmares are.
No one.
Not even the Unseleighe. How could you know what they would do? We don’t!” He looked down at Eric broodingly, no longer the careless, light-minded, exotic dancer. That persona was gone, shed as easily as shedding a costume. Arvin was a Warrior now —capital “W”—and looked it. Lightweight armor, short sword, hair tied back in a businesslike braid.