Witch Doctor - Wiz in Rhyme-3 (58 page)

I come to your reward!"

The chamber was quiet a moment.

Friar Ignatius shook his head, face very sad. "I have lost another

soul, another of God's creations."

"It was not you who lost her, Friar, but herself," Frisson said quietly. "She was so far gone in false pride that she would not admit defeat, so saturated in evil that she would not reach out to God's grace.

She had truly given up belief in goodness or in love, even as simple fellowship-so there was no one through whom she could reach out to God, and no one whom she would not wish to torment for her own twisted pleasure."

"And so dedicated to deceit that she would not see the lie Satan had foisted on her as blandishment." Friar Ignatius nodded heavily. Then, distant, faint, but very clear, a scream rang out, rang through all that reeking chamber, through each of our minds, making our hearts sink, for it was Suettay's voice in agony so intense that it shook me to the core-agony, but with the shock of betrayal. It was a scream that seemed to go on and on, and hadn't slackened a bit as it faded from our hearing-and, I suspected with dread, would go on for eternity.

it seemed still to ring through us for a very long time, but the room had actually been quiet for several minutes before I looked up at my guardian angel and said, in a last feeble attempt at protest,

"Eternity is a very long time."

He nodded sadly. "Yes, Paul. It is."

"Look," I said, "you didn't have to show up as a hippie. Who do you think you're kidding, anyway?"

I caressed Angelique's hand while I said it, though. She sat beside me in the courtyard-anything to get away from the stench of that laboratory-eyes glowing, head resting on my shoulder. She'd been in a great deal of pain when she "woke"-not the sharp pains e'd headed off, thank Heaven, but the of present torture, which w aches of old ones. it was enough to make me mad at Suettay all

over again, and ...

"I shouldn't be glad she's suffering," I told the angel.

"Suettay, I mean. But I am-after what she did to my Angelique." I was able to say 'my" with only a passing qualm, somehow.

,You should be above such sentiments," the angel murmured.

"I know," I said, "but I can't help how I feel-and it's better to be honest about your feelings. Hey, man, I'm human, too!"

"Yeah, you are," the angel acknowledged. "But you're a good human. " I frowned. "I said, you don't have to look and talk like a hippie. I know you for what you really are, man."

"Yeah, sure," the angel said, "but if I didn't look like this, you couldn't sit there and call me 'man.' " I took a deep breath. "Okay, so it sets me more at ease, and I can relate to you better. But there are times when it's more important to be looking up to an angel, than to be comfortable."

"True, true-and when those times come, I'll be glad to show up the way you expect, halo and wings and all. But for the moment, I think we need to be able to get down and clear a little more."

"The way I expect?" I looked at him sharply. "What's your true form? "

"I don't have one," he said right back. "I'm a spirit, remember?"

"Okay," I said impatiently, "how would you look to me if I were a spirit, too?"

"Like whatever you expected, man."

I bit down on my temper. Angelique reached over with her other hand, stroking mine. I know she meant it to be soothing, but it was anything but. it did serve as a nice distraction, though, and I couldn't remember to keep being angry.

The angel smiled, proudly-and that irked me all over again.

"Look, I'm not a good man! So don't go smirking line that. "No, you are," he contradicted. "At least, you're a I decent and humane man. For example, you wouldn't really want Suettay to suffer for eternity, would you?"

That gave me pause. I stopped to consider, consulting my inner feelings. "No," I said at last. "A good long time, yes-long enough for justice. But not forever.I1

Angelique stirred beside me, nestling a little more firmly against my arm.

"You'll have to stop distracting me," I told her, "or I won't be in any shape to talk to an angel."

She looked up to give me a heavy-lidded, pinfeather smile, then closed her eyes, looking very content.

I/ so what happens now?" I asked the angel. "What do I do?" He shrugged. "Whatever you want-and, I hope, whatever you really believe is right. I don't run your life, Paul

I1 Saul," I grated.

I only try to shield you from the Temper and sway you back to God.

"You've been doing pretty well so far," I admitted. "Anybody who can keep me on the straight and narrow . . ."

" '. . doesn't really have all that hard a job," he finished. Ask your friend Matt."

"I'm asking you!"

"But there isn't any more need for me to stick around-at least, not so you can see me. So long-but remember, I'm with you for life!" And he disappeared.

"Cop-out," I snarled after him, then thought about the term. He was sort of a Heavenly cop ...

"Your friend gone?" Matt came clanking up. I should ask I looked up at him. "In a manner of speaking. He says YOU. I1

"Anything." Matt clapped me on the shoulder, looking straight into my eyes with a grin. "But there are some boys over there who have a question for you."

"Boys?" I looked around the courtyard, frowning. Queen Alisande's knights were cleaning up the castle, rounding up evil stragglers, with a dozen of Matt's junior sorcerers along to help. We head honchos could take the weight off our feet for a while.

Not a very long while, though. A hundred yards away stood a small army of heavy dragoons-at least five hundred. I winced at the thought, hoping there were more still alive-if "alive" was really the term for a magical construct. I certainly owed them. I went over to see what they wanted. "Good afternoon, Sergeant. What can I do for you? "

"More work for us, Guy?"

I remembered looking up toward the dragoon's back trail during the battle, seeing their dead lying fallen, fading even as I watched, disappearing.

"No," I decided. "Return to quarters." The dragoon saluted and whirled his horse, turning back to his fellows, bawling orders. I chanted after him, "To whatever barracks stores them,

Let these soldiers now retreat to, With soft cots and pensions for them, And full store of beer and eats, too!"

A heat haze seemed to spring up, enveloping the dragoons, thickening to mist, then London fog. When it cleared, they were gone, leaving behind them only a cowering wreckage of moaning men-atarms and fallen knights.

"As if they'd never been," Matt whispered.

"Retired," I corrected. "Maybe not to Heaven, but to one heck of a Limbo!" I turned to him and caught his hand. "You found me in the nick of time."

"I knew when you'd arrived in this world," he said, squeezing back. "I talked Alisande into moving out the next day." I was amazed at how firm his clasp was-amazed at his having enough strength to walk around in all that armor, in fact.

"You've put on a lot of muscle in the last three days."

"Three days to you." He turned, strolling back to Angelique and the seats we'd found, by the wall of the keep. "Four years, for me." I stared. "Four years?"

"Time moves at a different rate here, I guess," he said, "or there's a differential between our two universes." I just stared at him for a moment, as he sat down, right where the angel had been-or still was, for all I knew. The thought gave me a chill, but I shook it off and said, "So what's been happenin', man?" He started telling me. It took a while.

When he was done, I just sat there, dazed.

" 'Tis a Most amazing tale," Angelique murmured by my shoulder.

"We had heard some echo of it, we folk in Allustria, but not all."

"You wouldn't," I said. "Suettay wouldn't have wanted it known that evil sorcerers and usurpers could be beaten." Then, to Matt: "So that tall blonde with the crown is the queen of Merovence-and your wife?

" Finally," Matt affirmed.

"Yeah, after she kept you waiting three years." I felt indignation for my old friend, but I tried to assure myself that long engagements just meant more-solid marriages. "So you're the king?"

"No, just the royal consort-and Her Majesty's Wizard. She was very insistent about that. So was I, in fact."

"Yeah, I wouldn't want that much responsibility, either." Angelique looked up at me, shocked.

"That doesn't mean I won't accept any," I hastened to assure her, and she relaxed with her smug, lazy smile again.

"So how'd you get here, Paul?"

I grinned. "You first."

Matt returned the grin. "TOO much studying. I started concentrating on that piece of parchment so much that it began to make sense-and when I looked up, here I was."

"Same thing," I said. "I got worried about you, and I couldn't find any trace, so ... I1

He flushed. "Sorry, man."

"Hey, it's okay, it's okay-now. I ran out of leads, so I started studying the new parchment that showed up . . ."

"New parchment?" He sat up straight, frowning, "What new parchment? "

"You know, the one that said, 'Hey, Paul, drop me a line

"That one?" The frown deepened to a scowl. "I just wrote that out when I was feeling homesick one night. When I went to throw it in the wastebasket the next morning, it was gone. How'd it get to you?"

"Don't know," I said slowly, "but I could make a guess. There were an awful lot of spiders in your apartment. One of them bit me while I was translating the parchment. I blacked out, and woke up here. " "The Spider King!" He stared. "I thought he was just a legend!"

"Oh, he's real, all right, and he lives in some sort of dimensional nexus. I think he wanted to clean up the situation here in Allustria, so he . . ." I broke off as Matt's gaze drifted, his eyes brooding.

"What's the matter?"

"The Archbishop," Matt said slowly. "A spider bit him, and he fell ill. I had to go cure him-and while I was working on him, he grabbed my sleeve and demanded to know if I had ever met a single man who had a genuine sense of integrity."

I stared in horror. "You didn't give him my name!"

"Well, yeah," Matt said uncomfortably. "Funny thing is, when he

got well, he didn't remember a bit of it-not surprising, the temper ature he had."

"But I'm not a saint! I'm not a good guy!"

"No," Matt said slowly, "but you have a sense of self that won't quit. You won't let anybody infringe on you, in any way. Makes you pretty abrasive sometimes, in fact."

Angelique moved a little away from me, eyeing me warily again.

"Not true," I assured her. "He always did have too high an opinion of me. " "No," she said, "he did not." I turned and frowned deeply into her eyes. "Then how come I'm in

love with you?"

"I ken not." She gazed back, and her eyes seemed to be all there was in the world. "But I rejoice."

Then she broke the gaze, and her spell, by turning to Matt. "Can you not explain this, Lord Wizard?"

"Only by logic," he said slowly, "which has its limits-but if he is compulsively true to himself, and has nonetheless developed an obsession for you, then there must be something about you that fulfills some element of himself. Probably more than one."

"You traitor," I growled at him-but Angelique had gone heavylidded and self-satisfied again, cuddling up to me, so I didn't really mean it.

Matt knew that; he only smiled. "Don't blame me, Paul. It's not my fault if you have an instinctive sense of psychic balance, some gut drive for keeping the harmony between all the parts of your personality. " "Yeah," I admitted. "You claimed that was why I was attracted to Zen. I kept telling you that it was Zen and Taoism that gave me that sense of balance, not the other way around." Matt shrugged. "Cause, effect, or a positive reinforcing cycle, it doesn't matter. You've got it, and when it's threatened, you lash out at whoever does the threatening." He nodded to Angelique. "Take care, mademoiselle. He gets mean sometimes. He mellows out pretty quickly, though."

"I thank you." But her equanimity didn't seem at all disturbed.

"I shall be mindful of it."

I think I might have felt a little easier if she'd seemed worried.

"So you've got the instinct for walking the ethical tightrope," Matt summarized.

"Yeah," I said with chagrin. "Gave my guardian angel enough grief with that. He kept trying to get me to commit myself to the side of the angels, and whenever he did, I went out and committed a sin."

"At least, a sin by his rules," Matt amended. "I don't think you ever really did anything all that bad."

I glared at him. "I keep telling you, I'm not a saint!"

"Yeah, and some day you'll get yourself to believe it, too. No, no, I take it back." He held up a palm. "Let's just say you're only a fundamentally decent, honest, and caring individual." I was just beginning to get really sore about that, when Gruesome came waddling up, grinning from car to ear-well, from side to side.

"We won, huh?"

Matt scrambled back fast.

"No, no, he won't hurt you," I assured him. "This is Gruesome .

.

"He sure is!"

"No, that's what I nicknamed him. He's my friend." I was startled to hear myself say it, but I guessed I was right. "If he has a name in Trollish, I can't pronounce it."

"He doesn't." Matt still looked very nervous. "They don't have enough intelligence."

"Oh, he has a name all right. Some fairies used it to enchant him so that he wouldn't eat people anymore," I assured him, "and by the time a nymph named Thyme removed the spell, he'd started thinking of us as friends instead of snacks." I turned to Gruesome. "Tell you what, old fellow-I can transport you back to the bridge where I met you, and you'll fit in with your fellow trolls again."

"No! No!" Gruesome shook his head-well, upper half-from side to side rapidly. "Goosum no like trolls no more! Well, maybe females," he added as an afterthought, "but only for little while, now in' then. Goosum like people! " "That's what I'm afraid of," Matt muttered.