Summoned to Tourney (17 page)

He stepped out into the corridor and motioned Beth to follow. She was still crouched by the wall, staring up at him. “Beth, we must leave here now. That creature could return.”

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t move, I can’t feel my legs.”

He moved back to her, helping her to stand. She leaned against his shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and tightened his arm around her waist. “Can you walk?” he asked.

“I think I can,” she said faintly, then spoke stronger. “Of course I can walk. No twisted little government shithead is going to get that victory over me. I’m walking out of here
right now
.”

Kory couldn’t keep the smile off his face. This was the Beth that he knew, the human woman that he loved.

They slipped into the hallway, backs flat to the wall. Still, there was nothing to be seen anywhere in the hail, and nothing to be heard. Only an empty, echoing silence.

When they reached the desk-console, Kory stopped and peered over the edge of it. He was half-afraid that he would find a body there; that was the way it always worked in the human television shows. But to his immense relief, there was no body; there was nothing, in fact. Only a half-eaten sandwich and a can of cola, beneath row after row of darkened squares of glass, which he recognized, after a moment, as small television sets.

Beth peeked over the edge and frowned at those. Before he could stop her, she poked at some of the buttons beneath the nearest, but nothing changed.

“Are those supposed to do something?” he ventured.

“The ready-light is on. These should be working.” Beth touched another button, with no visible result. “These video screens should show the insides of the cells, but they’re not working at all.”

“You understand these things?” he asked, amazed. This console was more complicated than the most intricate sorcery he had ever attempted. Something that could allow you to Farsee into the cells…
In the cells
.

Beth, my lady,” he said urgently. “Other cells—think you that we were the only captives here?”

Her head snapped up; her eyes met his. “No,” she replied, slowly. “No, we couldn’t have been. That creep knew how to break people too well—he
had
to have had practice.” She began searching among the buttons and switches for something, cursing softly to herself when she could not find it, then snapped her fingers and pulled out a drawer. There was another, smaller bank of labeled buttons there, as well, besides pencils, sticks of gum, erasers, loose bullets.

“Got it,” she said in satisfaction. She pushed two buttons in succession; one marked “Emergency Override,” the second under a piece of masking tape with the words “cell doors” written on it, labeled “Mass Unlock.”

She hesitated for another moment, then looked up at Kory. “If this system is anything like the one on the psych ward that I worked on, the unlock key won’t work unless there’s a real emergency—like a fire. And we’re just lucky that there
is
a manual override to the computer-driven system. We’re gonna have to manufacture an emergency.”

Her words meant very little to him; he seized on the ones he did understand. “If we wish to release other prisoners, there must be a fire?” he asked. She nodded. “Very well then. There will be a fire.”

Even exhausted, fire-making was a child’s skill for any of the Folk. He stepped back along the corridor to their empty cell and considered the contents. There was bedding on the bunk, padding on the walls, all flammable. It would do.

He closed his eyes, and sent power into the cell. The bedding ignited with a
whoosh
; the padding took a moment longer, but within a heartbeat, it too was in flames.

Alarms sounded immediately; the lights in the corridor flickered and failed, and new, red lights came on. In the cell itself, water began to spray from the ceiling.

Since it did not suit Beth’s plans to have the fire extinguished, he gave the copper pipe leading to the fixture a brief mental twist, blocking it. The spray of water died, and the fire continued to blaze merrily.

Far down the corridor, now, he heard people screaming, pounding on doors, and the sounds of some of those doors slamming open. He trotted back to the console, very pleased with himself.

“Will that suit—” he began, when Beth grabbed his hand and began sprinting down the hall, towards a sign over which blazed the words “Emergency Exit.”

The feeling of something very old and very evil passing outside her door made every hair on Elizabet’s body stand straight on end. She wasn’t sure what to make of it; whatever was out there, it didn’t match any horror she had ever encountered. But then, she hadn’t encountered many really nasty things in her life; she had spent her time on the magics of life, not death.

Whatever it was, it passed her by as she held her breath, waiting for it to sense her and attack.

When she was certain it wasn’t going to come back again, she let her breath out in a long sigh.

But what was that—thing? Another of Blair’s little friends? Or was it something that Blair had attracted without knowing what he was doing? If so, he was in for a shock, especially if it was looking for him. She decided that she was better off not moving for a while. No telling what the thing was hunting—and she was certain that it was a hunter; had an unmistakably predatory feeling about it. No telling how it hunted, either. If by sound, then her best bet was to stay quiet. Let Blair and his flunkies make all the noise and attract it.

But it was very hard to remain motionless, silent, sitting in the gloom of her cell, wondering if the thing was going to come back.

Another thought occurred to her after a moment: was this another of Blair’s little ideas, something designed to make her more cooperative?

That almost seemed more likely than that it was something Blair had attracted.

If it is, I’m not going to let one haunt spook me into playing footsie with that creep
, she told herself, a little angrily.
It’s going to take more than a bogeyman to frighten me!

An earthquake or a fire, now—trapped down here in a locked room in a sub-basement—

As if someone was reading her mind, fire alarms screamed out into the darkness all up and down the corridor—red emergency lights came on in her cell, startling her as much as the alarms.

She got herself to her feet, cursing middle age and the slowing of her reflexes. She ran for her door, praying that there was an emergency override on the locks in case of catastrophe—and that someone had been compassionate enough to use it. Which, given the kind of people who worked for Blair, was not a “given.”

She emerged into the corridor with a half-dozen others, equally frightened, equally bewildered. She sniffed the air; no smoke on this level, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a fire somewhere above or below.

One thing was obvious: there wasn’t a single uniformed guard or one of Blair’s suited goons among the milling, frightened people in the corridor. Whatever had happened—they’d been presented with an opportunity to escape.

“Get the rest of the doors open!” she shouted, taking charge. “Then let’s get out of here!”

A woman with aggressively butch-cut hair whirled and stared at her, while the others stopped and gaped—perhaps wondering if she was one of them, or one of the enemy. The woman sized her up, then nodded, and began flinging doors open along the left-hand side of the corridor. Elizabet did the same on the right, until they were all open, the occupants either joining the rest in flight, or remaining huddled in the red-lit interior of the cells. Half of Elizabet wanted to run in there and coax them out as a few of the others were trying to do—

But the sensible half said that their window of escape might be closing at any moment. She had patients to care for, and a ward out there, waiting, probably frantic with fear.

She turned and ran for the emergency stairs.

The Nightflyer directed the steps of her host’s body downwards, as the lights went to red and strange howling noises split the air. She—or it; Nightflyers were all hermaphroditic females, neuter until breeding conditions were encountered. Sometimes she thought of herself as both. One level down was something very important; something so important that her host hated the people who worked upon it with a passion undimmed by the fact that he was dead.

The Nightflyer sensed that this thing had something to do with whether or not the Breakthrough would be made. The music-maker was part of it, of course, and she was the ForeRunner, who would breach the barrier between the Waking and Nightmare Realms, but the Breakthrough itself would not occur unless some great outpouring of Waking fear gave her the energy needed to cast the bridge across the barrier and hold it open.

She was not precognitive in the sense that humans understood the word; she sensed the future in a myriad of pathways. That
this
object had the potential to make something happen, and
that
human knew the key to an event.

As now. The music-maker had the potential to bring the Breakthrough, even though it meant that the Nightflyers who answered the call would be forced to obey him. Potential future pathway; one Nightflyer would find a host. Potential future pathway; that host might lead her to something instrumental to the Breakthrough. At the moment, it appeared that Nightflyer would be her.

Down
. That was the direction of the highest potential futurepath—and she followed the potential as a compass-needle follows a magnet.

There were a half-dozen white-coated humans coming up, fleeing in panic; she ignored them. They had nothing to do with her, or the potentials of the moment. At the bottom of the steps, she paused and tried the door. It opened to her touch, but not on a corridor of rooms, as she had found on the level above. This door opened on a single large room, filled with a maze of complicated devices. Blair’s memory told her that this had been a storage area, until “Project Poseidon” came and did something, and found it perfect for their needs. What those needs were, Blair did not know. He only knew—the memories dimming as the body cooled—that he hated these people for taking even an unused part of “his” building, and for using money that could also have been “his.”

Sounds from the other side of a wall of machines told the Nightflyer that there was still someone here. This might be a complication, or it might be another advantage. While it was in a host body, it could not kill quickly and efficiently, as it could when it was in its natural form—though to take a host, as only it could do, it did not kill quickly
or
quietly.

But while it was in a host, it also could not be compelled to return by the music-maker. Therefore it was remaining in the host, however uncomfortable and inconvenient that might be.

She moved, slowly, into a hiding place among the machines. She was not used to the way this body worked as yet, but she sensed a possibility with the as-yet unseen human, and it would require stealth to make use of the new potential that was unfolding. The human must not guess that she was there.

She wedged the body between two machines and beneath a table, in a way that would have been painful for the original occupant. Once there, she concentrated on reaching outward to that other human’s mind. There was something that the human was doing that was important…

The human, a male, had remained behind to perform a task of securing machines, despite a danger that he perceived. The Nightflyer sensed something beneath the surface of his concerns, and probed deeper.

There was relief there, that the machines could not be used as weapons, for only he and one other knew of that capability.

The potentials flowered, powerful and clear. This was the information she sought.

Quickly, she absorbed it all; the machines, how they worked, and how a single one of them could be used to trigger a massive earthquake. It took the Nightflyer a moment to comprehend just how massive an earthquake —and precisely what that meant to her.

At that moment, it took great control to keep from bolting from her hiding place, and taking one of the machines then and there. But she did not have the means to power or control one. She watched the human’s thoughts as he locked down the equipment, then fled like the others; and she contemplated what she had learned.

One of the machines was directed very near one of the points that would trigger a major quake. Near enough, in fact, that the humans here had hesitated to use it for this experiment, and in the end, took a chance that the experiment would fail rather than take the greater risk.

She could go out now, and manually re-aim the machine. The fire and the escape of her host’s captives would cause a great stir—she could use that and her host’s high status to order this building sealed before the humans learned of her meddling. Then she could return to this level, and use the re-aimed machine.

And then, all she need do would be to wait.

Potential crystalized. This was a good plan, with high probability of success.

She squeezed her host’s body out of its hiding place, and set to work.

Kory supported Beth as she stumbled and nearly fell; there was something very odd about the absence of guards and Warden Blair’s men. Was that strangeness connected with the evil creature he had sensed outside their door?

Suddenly, without warning, a shape out of nightmare loomed up in front of them, blocking their path. Kory knew it the moment it appeared, although he could not put a name to the thing. It was the creature—or one like it—that he had sensed outside their door.

And it loomed above the body of one of the guards, mantling shadowy wings over it, as if it were a great bird of prey.

Beth stifled a gasp; Kory backed carefully away from the thing. It did not move, apparently intent over its victim. After a few seconds, it drifted away, sliding through a half-opened doorway.

Well, now they knew where the guards had gone.

He glanced at Beth, and saw that she was standing motionless, her back pressed against the wall, still staring at the spot where the guard had lain. “Beth, we must leave here—” he whispered urgently to her.