Robert Charrette - Arthur 03 - A Knight Among Knaves (19 page)

Unbind me. I will reward you.

"What is it you offer me, Harbinger?"

I can eat your enemies.

"My enemies—my surviving enemies—are few."

There are many enemies. They hide. They lie in ambush. Can you know them all? I have great knowledge. I see in ways that you cannot.

"My vision is also wide. I know things you do not. Long have your kind been away from the world, and all is not as it was."

I have seen this.

Was that a tremor of disquiet in the thing's voice? He had been waiting for it to reveal a lever. He believed that he saw it now.

"This world is
my
world, and I know its ways. There are dangers to you that you cannot comprehend. I can guide you, show you the dangers. I do not deny your power, but power is not everything. This is an age of information, and knowledge is the greatest tool."

As it has ever been.

"You know the ways of the shadow."

Yes. I can give teaching.

"And you can learn from me things you need to know."

It stirred, radiating a turmoil that he could not comprehend.
Yes,
it said.

He hadn't expected the negotiation to go so easily. "I'm glad that you understand that there is mutual advantage here."

/ understand loyalty,
it said.

Loyalty, he knew, needed to be earned. Or bought. He touched the intercom. "Ms. Emery, would you come in for a moment?"

He had been putting up with her marginal competence for nearly a week now. Time for his patience to be repaid. He watched her enter, appreciating the youth and energy in her walk. She had gone through an elaborate screening procedure. She believed the extra screening was due to the sensitive nature of the job. As it had, as it had, but not in any way she might have guessed. Her job—her real job—was to serve tonight.

He pointed at the cage. The harbinger would not be visible lo her; not yet, anyway. "Would you please bring that over to

me?"

A brief flicker of annoyance passed over her face. Menial tasks were not supposed to be part of her job. He saw her evaluate the request. He imagined what was passing through her mind. She was too new, and this was the first imposition he had made. She would let it pass this time. She moved toward the pedestal.

He released the binding and the magnetic clamps. The cage shifted and the harbinger sprang. Emery's startlement when the cage shifted bloomed into terror as she perceived the serpentine shape of the entity. There was no time for her to run. The harbinger coiled around her, wreathing her in shadow. She screamed, a full-throated wail of terror and despair.

He smiled. His office was superbly soundproofed, fitted with the most modern materials and technology to absorb unwanted sounds.

Emery twisted within the smoke that was the harbinger. He watched her begin to shrivel as the entity drained her.

I reward loyalty.

A spectral tendril drifted out toward him. He told himself that he could not show fear, could not let the entity know that he wasn't sure that he could trust it. The pseudopod slipped across his desk, rising up like a snake preparing to strike.

He told himself that he must not move, knowing that he lied to himself. He could not move. He was too frightened.

It touched his forehead, and his mind exploded in a rush of power. Echoes of Quetzal's gift flashed across his memories. The heart. The hot, heady taste of the bitch's essence. This woman's taste was different. Better. What the harbinger shared with him was no secondhand leaving, but the full, wondrous taste of flayed soul. It filled him, expanded him. He discovered that he had only imagined that he knew what power felt like.

When I am strong, you are strong.

Oh, yes. Yes!

The harbinger coiled more tightly around its meal, taking the rest for itself. Van Dieman sat in his chair, feeling the wet stickiness in his pants, watching Emery shrink and wither into a husk. There was definitely mutual and commensurate advantage here. He knew a good thing when he felt it.

Of course, once he learned what the harbinger could teach, once he had grasped for himself the power it offered, he would have no further need for it.

He had not cared for the fear it had raised in him. For the moment he had use for it, but that would pass. Until then, he would look forward to the next feeding.

CHAPTER

15

John's fascination with the mother he'd never known puzzled him. He really knew nothing about her. All he had were the tiny clues that Bennett let drop, and they were even vaguer than Bennett's usual comments. It seemed that she was no longer alive, but obviously she had to have been once, and there had been no hint that she had died giving him birth, so it would seem that she was as guilty as Bennett of abandoning him. So why didn't he feel the same way about her? Why didn't he hate her?

Maybe it was because, in some way, he equated her with William Reddy, the earthly father who had died before John had really formed any memories of him. It hadn't been William Reddy's fault that he was gone. Maybe it wasn't her fault either. He wanted to believe that. He didn't want to think that every elven parent was as cold-hearted as Bennett. But he just didn't
know
anything about her, and there were no public databanks here to search. At least John knew the formal official facts about William Reddy.

He had tried asking about his elven mother and gotten little result. His tutors refused to discuss the subject, telling him that there were more important matters to occupy his time. His friends knew nothing about her, and urged him to try unearthing her name from the crystal. The other folk about the keep—those who did not find sudden, important business elsewhere—pleaded utter ignorance of the doings of great ones. Stymied, he had come to see the crystal as his only link to her.

And that had brought him to the highest tower in the keep.

"It's the only way you'll learn anything, Jack," Fraoch said, slipping up behind him and putting her arms around his waist.

"I still don't understand why we have to do it here. There's nothing in the ritual that demands it."

"Nor anything that forbids it. Here we are isolated, away from the prying eyes of Bennett's spies. He will get no warning in time to stop vou."

"You think he would?"

"You're the one who thinks that if he had wanted you to know your mother's name, he would have told you. If he wants the name kept secret, don't you think he'll do what he can to prevent you from learning it?"

"I suppose so."

"You know so." She turned Mm around and kissed him. "Just as you know that this is the best place and the best time to do what you need to do. Why don't you think about it some more while I help Gentiano and Duwynt prepare the circle?"

He turned to look out over the pure fairy-tale roofs and spires of the keep. The platform on which he stood was so far above the next highest that he might have been flying above it rather than gazing down from crenellated battlements. The sky above was full of stars, glowing in all their glory and whispering promises of magic, love, and hope from their eternal vantage point. They were a million eyes, watching, burning down through a clear sky that somehow defied the mists that shrouded the countryside around the keep. In the otherworld there was never a clear view for any distance, except in the sky. The land around the keep was shrouded in the mists of Faery, leaving the keep's spires an island of reality in a sea of dreams. There were hills and trees and rivers hidden out there, he knew; he'd walked and ridden over that land, smelled the fragrance of the trees, and felt the cold, bracing rush of the waters. Yet it seemed that the towers were the only substance in the midst of mirage. A matter of perception? Maybe. Maybe all of Faery was a matter of perception, a place of desire and dream fulfilled.

His foremost desire now was to know his mother, and the fulfillment of that desire began with learning her name. He turned toward the ritual circle.

Duwynt was taking his place in the north. Fraoch stood to the east, Gentiano opposite her. Once John took his place, each of them would occupy a cardinal point, places assigned according to personality, physical characteristics, and correspondences. The better to focus the energies.

"Time may pass slowly here," Gentiano said, "but we haven't got forever."

Gentiano was right. His friends were here to help him. There was no point and no courtesy in delaying. All that he hoped to gain would only be gained by completing the ritual.

John entered the outer boundary of the circle and closed it behind him before moving to the center. The crystal was already there, resting in the bowl of a small brazier wrought of silver rods carved in the shapes of vines. Small piles of dirt lay under each of the brazier's tripod legs. He picked up the crystal and lifted it above his head, offering it to the view of the stars. Laying it down again, he drew the cleansed knife from his belt sheath and pricked his finger with the tip. Blood beaded. He let a drop fall on the crystal. Just one was needed to link him to it. He spoke the words to energize the link and retreated to his station in the south.

John stood for a moment, gathering his wit and his will. This was to be a complicated sorcery, and he didn't want to make any mistakes. Mistakes were dangerous, and as ritual master, he would bear the brant of any backlash.

He started slowly, as his tutors had taught him, gathering the energy and channeling it, using it to shift his perspective from the ordinary realm of Faery into the preternatural fields where the magic coursed. Around him the tower seemed to rise, carrying them up into the embrace of the stars, until the bulk of the keep was lost in the mist below, until it seemed that the rest of the universe might not exist at all.

He looked at the object of their efforts. The crystal looked different, pallid and plain. Gone were the facets that had caught and held the subtleties of the light. Gone too were the intricate traceries of the silver mount, replaced by a dull, unattractive banding. He felt a desire to look elsewhere, to find something else of more interest, but the energy of the ritual was strong and he understood that he was experiencing a glamour. He put aside the urgings, but the crystal's uninteresting image remained. Try as he might, he could find no flaw in that perfect image.

"It's well protected," he told his friends.

"If there were no secret here, there would be no need for protection." Fraoch sounded excited. "Try harder, Jack."

He did, but to no avail. Everywhere he pushed or probed, he was rebuffed. "I need more strength."

"We're here to help, Jack," Faroch reminded him, reaching out.

He took her hand, Gentiano's too. They took Duwynt's hands. The four of them linked, channeling their energy together, under John's direction, against the spell surrounding the crystal.

It was still not enough to perturb the crystal's protections.

Hell!
There had to be some way to penetrate the wall of blankness. The featurelessness of the crystal's arcane image was not true. There was no way the thing could be as simple as that. He had seen it, touched it, felt it to be more textured. He knew what Bennett had given him and that gift was not what he saw lying in the brazier. He knew—

He saw an answer. There
was
a way to get around the blankness. He'd found a flaw in the spell, and it lay in the nature of the crystal as it related to John. Bennett had given the crystal to him.
Given
it to
him.
That fact was the key to circumventing the spells that protected the crystal's secrets. Not all actions have a magical significance, Bennett had once told him. However many actions, perhaps most, could be
made
to have such significance. Having been given the object—freely—John had been given whatever secrets the object held. The one was the other. The crystal was his now.

His!

The crystal's pallid arcane image morphed into the brilliant, sharp-edged image he remembered. The web of its silver mounting shone with the fire of the stars.

But no writing appeared. No answers sprang to his mind. No name—no name anywhere.

It couldn't be a cheat! It couldn't!

But wait. There
was
something there—faint, but there. A sense of presence, of person. No one he knew, but someone who was somehow connected to him.

His mother?

"Do you have it, Jack?"

Fraoch's voice shocked John from his feeble grasp on the perception. His gaze slipped from the preternatural to the ordinary. What he saw beyond her was not part of the ritual they intended.

Shahotain perched on one of the battlements. Cold starlight sparkled from the silver studs and buckles on his garments, and from his opalescent eyes. His pale hair writhed in the wind, looking like pallid flames haloing his head. He might have been the leather-clad biker ghost of vengeance from
Interstate 666
^EM
.
But he wasn't—he was Shahotain, looking as grim and frightening as the first time John had seen him.

He leaped down to the wooden floor of the tower and strode into the ritual circle. His presence, unplanned for and unanticipated, ruptured the spell. Energy crackled around the boundaries of the circle and arced, naked and uncontrolled, overhead. John, as master of the ritual, had the responsibility to contain those energies. He tried to hold them to the shape he had built in his mind. Gentiano's hand left his, then he felt Fraoch's slipping away.