The Golden Queen (16 page)

“At the same time, security around the aberlains will be very tight. Microscopic cameras will be hidden in the main corridors, and motion detectors will be at every window. I doubt that you can make it into the compound undetected. Dronon vanquishers themselves will probably patrol the compound, and they are very dangerous. You will need weapons and an escape plan.

“Gallen, don’t be in a hurry to rescue her. This will require careful planning and research.”

Veriasse looked down at the chronometer on the magcar. “Everynne, my child, we really must go now, before the vanquishers block our exit.”

Everynne gritted her teeth. Veriasse had just outlined an impossible task for Gallen—a task that only Veriasse himself could pull off. She glanced at Gallen, ashamed to be leaving, and said, “Good luck.”

“What world will you be going to next?” Gallen asked. “Maybe we will follow you there?”

Everynne considered lying. She had to protect herself from possible danger, yet she knew that Gallen must be feeling lost and alone. As a Tharrin, her presence gave him a sense of comfort that he could not find elsewhere. And the world she was going to was beyond enemy lines.

“Cyannesse is its name,” she said. “The gate lies nearly three hundred miles north of here, about a quarter of a mile off the right-hand side of the road. When you put your key up to the gate, it will glow golden. That’s how you know you have the right destination.”

Gallen looked at her longingly, and Everynne could not bear to watch him any longer. “Take care of yourselves,” she said. She gunned the thrusters and headed out.

Chapter 9

Gallen watched Everynne and Veriasse glide off through the forest in their magcar. Orick grumbled and pawed the ground, raking leaves as if he were frustrated. “What now?” he asked. “Do you have a plan to save Maggie?”

Gallen considered. He had few resources: a couple of knives, a key to unlock the Maze of Worlds. A few days before, he’d told Everynne that imagination was the measure of a man, but now he wondered if that were true.

“You heard Veriasse,” Gallen said. “If we try to rescue her, the Guide will warn Karthenor. Our only hope is to take her without her or her Guide knowing of it.”

“Can we trick the Guide?”

“I doubt it,” Gallen said. “It’s probably smarter than we are. But I may be able to figure out some way to lure Maggie out of the city at Karthenor’s request, so that the other Guides can’t hear her talk.”

“Och, this sounds like a
grand
plan!” Orick said. “Why, it’s no plan at all, that’s what it is.”

Orick was right, at least for the moment. “We’ll have to find a way to disable the Guide,” Gallen said. “I’ll have to find a Guide-maker.”

“So, what are you going to do,” Orick asked, “walk right into a shop and ask the fellow, ‘By the way, how can I break one of those things?’ and then hope he answers you square?”

“No,” Gallen said. He knew the means had to be close by. He thought,
If you were the most creative bodyguard in the world, Gallen O’Day, what would you do?
He waited for a moment, and a familiar thrill coursed through him. He knew the answer. “I’m going to go speak to a past employee of the company that makes the Guides. A dead employee, to be precise.”

“What?” Orick shouted.

“When we first went into town, and I was wandering around on my own, I met a merchant who sells a machine that lets you talk to the dead, so long as they’re properly embalmed and haven’t rotted too much.”

“And what if you can’t find a dead employee handy?” Orick said. “What then?”

“Well, then I’d stick a knife in an employee and make him dead!” Gallen shouted, furious at Orick’s exasperating mood.

“Fine!” Orick growled. “That’s fine. I was just asking.”

It was early morning. Kiss-me-quick birds sang in the trees, hopping from bush to bush, their green wings flashing.

“I think I’ll go ask about this now, in fact,” Gallen answered.

“What about me?” Orick asked. “You can’t leave me here again.”

“And I can’t take you with me. Orick, there are some things we’ll need—food, shelter, clothing, weapons. You’re in charge of finding them and setting up a proper camp. We might be stuck here awhile.”

“Right,” Orick said.

Gallen hunched his shoulders. His muscles were tight from the tension, and suddenly he longed to be back home in Tihrglas, guarding some merchant’s wagon. Hell, on any day of the week, he’d rather take on ten highwaymen single-handed. Ah, for the good old days.

He ambled back to Toohkansay and made his way to the merchant quarters. There, he sold the shillings from his purse along with a bead necklace to a dealer in exotic alien artifacts.

Then he went to the merchant who sold “Bereavement Hoods,” and began to haggle. Gallen didn’t have enough money to buy the thing. The hoods were designed for those who wanted to “Share those last precious thoughts with the recently departed.” Gallen cried and put on a show, talking about his dear sister who had died, until he finally convinced the merchant to rent him a hood.

“Now you understand,” the merchant warned, “that your sister is dead. She’ll know who you are, and she’ll be able to talk through the speaker in the hood, but she won’t gain any new memories. If you visit her once, she’ll forget all about it, even if you return five minutes later.”

Gallen nodded, but the merchant drove the point home until Gallen finally asked, “What are you really telling me?”

“Well,” the merchant finally admitted, “it’s just that the dead are always surprised and happy to be visited, and they’ll tell you about the same fond memories time and again. They tend to get … repetitive.”

“So they get boring,” Gallen accused.

“Most of them, yes,” the merchant admitted reluctantly.

When Gallen finished, he went to the pidc, accessed the public records to find out who in Toohkansay made Guides, and found that they were made under the auspices of a Lord Pallatine. Gallen accessed Pallatine’s files, got a list of his workers for the past ten years. By checking vital statistics for each worker, he found that sure enough, a fellow named Brevin Mackalrey had been a corpse for less than three months, and poor Brevin was down deep in the crypts under the city, kept in cold storage so that his widow could speak to him on occasion.

Gallen hurried down a long series of subterranean corridors to pay a visit to poor old Brevin. The crypt was a dark, desolate place, with only a few visitors. Corpses were stacked in long rows, sleeping in glass coffins that could be pulled out for display. The temperature in the crypt was near freezing, and perhaps that tended to keep the mourners’ visits short. The bodies were stored for a year before final interment. Still, Gallen was surprised to see hundreds of bodies and only five people visiting them. Gallen searched alphabetically until he found Brevin Mackalrey, pulled the man out.

The glass coffin was fogged; icy crystals shaped like fern leaves had built up under the glass lid. Gallen opened the lid. Mr. Mackalrey did not look so good. His face was purple and swollen. He wore only a pair of white shorts. He had dark hair, a scraggly beard, and legs that were knobby and bowed. Gallen decided that this particular fellow probably hadn’t looked so good even when he was alive.

Gallen pulled up the fellow’s near-frozen head and placed the hood on. The hood was made of some metallic cloth, and electromagnetic waves from the hood stimulated the brain cells of the dead. As the dead man tried to speak, the cloth registered the attempted stimulation of the cerebral cortex and translated the dead man’s thoughts into words. The words were then spoken in a dull monotone from a small speaker.

Gallen activated the hood, waited for a few moments, then said, “Brevin, Brevin, can you hear me, man?”

“I hear you,” the speaker said. “But I can’t see you. Who are you?”

“My name’s Gallen O’Day, and I came to ask your help on a small matter. My sister has a Guide on, and she can’t get it off. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get one of them buggers off.”

“She’s wearing a Guide?” Brevin asked. A mourner passed Gallen, heading down the aisle of coffins.

“Aye, that’s what I said,” Gallen whispered, hunching low. “Is there any way to get it off?”

“Is it a slave Guide?” Brevin asked.

“Of course it’s a slave Guide,” Gallen hissed. “Otherwise, we’d be able to get it off.”

“If she’s a slave, it would be wrong for me to help you. I could get into trouble.”

“Well,” Gallen drawled, “how much trouble can you get into? You’re already dead!”

“Dead? How did I die?”

“You fell off a horse, I think,” Gallen said. “Either that, or you choked on a chicken bone.”

“Oh,” Brevin said. “I can’t help you. I would be penalized.”

“Who would know that you’d told me?” Gallen said.

“Go away, or I’ll call the authorities,” Brevin’s microphone yelped.

“How are you going to call the authorities?” Gallen asked. “You’re dead, I tell you.”

Brevin went silent for several moments, and Gallen said, “Come on, answer me you damned corpse! How do I get the Guide off?”

Brevin didn’t answer, and Gallen began looking about, wondering what kind of barter chip he might use. He whispered, “You’re dead, do you understand me, Brevin? You’re dead. You got no more worries, no more fears. If there was one thing in the world I could give you, what would you want?”

“I’m cold. Go away,” Brevin retorted.

“I’ll give you that,” Gallen said. “I’m going away. But first I want you to tell me how to take a Guide off of someone without setting off any alarms.”

Brevin didn’t answer, and Gallen decided to bully him into it. “Look,” he said. “I hate to have to do this to you, but you’ve got to answer me.”

Gallen took the dead man’s pinky finger and bent it back at an excruciating angle until he feared it might snap. “There now,” Gallen said. “How does that feel?”

“How does what feel?” Brevin asked.

Gallen saw that torture was no use. The dead man couldn’t feel a thing. Gallen scratched his head, decided on another tact. “All right, you’ve pushed me too far. I didn’t want to have to tell you this, but the reason you’re so damned cold is because you’re lying in this coffin naked. Did you know that?”

“Naked?” Brevin asked, dismayed.

“Yes,” Gallen assured him. “You’re bare-assed naked. At this very moment, I’m looking at your penis, and I’ve got to tell you that it’s not a pretty sight. You were never well-endowed in the first place, but now you’re all shriveled down to the size of a pinhead. Did you know that?”

Brevin emitted a low moan, and Gallen continued. “Now, not only are you bare-assed naked,” Gallen said, “but I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to drag your naked carcass upstairs and leave you in a hallway tonight, and every person who walks by is going to see what a shamefully inadequate organ you have. It will be an embarrassment to your whole family, I’m telling you. Everyone in Toohkansay will see your shrunken pud, and when they do, they’ll look at your wife and smile in a knowing way, and wonder, ‘How could she have stayed with that fellow all those years, what with him being so sorrowfully lacking?’ So tell me, my friend, what do you think of that?”

“No,” Brevin said. “Please!”

“You know what you have to do,” Gallen said. “Just a few small words is all I’m asking. Give me those words, and I’ll put your pants on and leave you with your dignity intact. What do you say? You do me a favor, and I’ll do you a favor.”

Brevin seemed to think for a moment. “A universal Guide extractor can take off the Guide. Simply point the rod at the slave in question and press the blue button. Lord Pallatine has three of them locked in the security vault.”

“Tell me about this vault,” Gallen said. “How would I get into it?”

“You can’t. Lord Pallatine has an electronic key, but the vault is equipped with a personal intelligence that will only open when it recognizes that Pallatine alone has come to open it.”

“So I don’t have access to all that fancy equipment,” Gallen said. “I just want to free my sister, quick and easy, and I don’t want to get caught. Surely you know how to do it.”

Brevin’s stomach muscles twitched, and for a moment Gallen feared that he would sit up, even though he was stiff as a twig. But the dead man said quickly, “First, you will need to catch her unawares. You should take her when she’s asleep. If you can’t take her in her sleep, you need to immobilize her so the Guide can’t fight you. It will take control of her body at the first sign of danger. If you can, perform the abduction in a room that has metal walls to block any transmissions the Guide might send. Then insert a knife at the back of the Guide near the base of the skull. You will have to cut through two small wires. This will sever the Guide’s neural connection to the victim. When you’re done, destroy the Guide.”

“What do you mean destroy it?”

“Put it in acid, or crush it, or burn it. It must be thoroughly pulverized on the atomic level.”

“What if the Guide isn’t thoroughly destroyed?” Gallen asked, half certain of the answer.

“If the Guide is retrieved, its memory will identify you.”

“Thank you, Brevin. May you rest in eternal peace. I’ve already got your pants back on you, and all your secrets are safe with me,” Gallen said. He sat back and thought. He knew where Karthenor’s aberlains slept, in apartments near the cantina with windows over the river. He would have to work quickly—get in through the window and remove the Guide before the vanquishers responded to the alarm from the motion detectors at the window. Afterward, a simple toss could send the Guide off into the muddy deep. It would take the vanquishers some time to retrieve the Guide from the water. By then, Gallen imagined he could be well away from Toohkansay, on the trail to another gate and a new world.

He removed the bereavement hood, closed Brevin’s coffin, and shoved it back into its chamber. He knew that he couldn’t leave poor little Maggie any longer than necessary. He stared at the black bereavement hood. Its metallic cloth was of a heavy weave. Perhaps not as thick as the walls of a room, but it might block radio transmissions from a Guide.

Gallen could only hope.

The road from Toohkansay to the Cyannesse gate was clear most of the way, yet Everynne drove with a heavy heart, a sinking feeling of guilt. She had left nine ardent supporters dead behind her and had left Gallen, Orick, and Maggie to fend for themselves in matters beyond their understanding. Yet she drove on. Everynne skirted two smaller towns in an hour, barely slowing the magcar. When she was four hundred and eighty-one kilometers north of Toohkansay, the land began turning to desert, a sandy plain where only a few volcanic flows marred the surface.

This gate, unlike most, was in open view of the highway. Perhaps ten thousand years earlier, when the gate was built, the landscape had been different. The gate may have been hidden in a forest or swamp, but now it was in open view of the road. Even though the road was nearly empty of traffic, Everynne did not relish the idea of entering from a place where she would be in view of prospective witnesses.

She began to slow the magcar, but Veriasse waved his hand and whispered, “Keep going! Keep going! Don’t stop. Don’t even slow!”

She engaged the thruster to speed up, and on her rearview display saw six giant humanoid figures rise up from some camouflaged pit out near the gate. Vanquishers had been hiding, and now were watching them pass, perhaps wondering if they should give chase. If six of them were secluded there, many more would also be hiding.

“How did you spot them?” Everynne asked when they were far down the road.

“I didn’t,” Veriasse said. “I just felt uncomfortable. If Maggie was captured three days ago, then the authorities may have been expecting us. They’ve had plenty of time to seal off the gates and prevent our escape. In another hour, they will simply receive confirmation of our escape from Tihrglas, and matters will be worse.”