Summoned to Tourney (25 page)

He’d shown up on the doorstep ready for a fight. “Oh, there are some few things you might have done differently, had you not been so weary and so concerned for the others.”

“Like?” he prompted.

Arvin shrugged. “You should have counted the evil beasties before you sent them out; if you had been a practiced sorcerer you would have known to control them with binding spells to harm no one who was not directly involved with the abductions. And yet—that might not have been enough; they might be clever enough to find loopholes in binding spells. There is some fault resting with us, even.”

Arvin and Kory both glanced over at another High Court warrior—Eric finally recalled his name as “Dharinel,” and that he was one of the Mist-Hold elves that did not approve of Kory’s liaison with humans. He didn’t much approve of humans in general, as far as that went; he avoided coming out from Underhill as much as he could. Eric had only met him once or twice, at the time when Kory had introduced them to the Mist-Hold court, and once at a gathering of Arvin’s. And he had shown up on their doorstep only once: to lecture Kory on his duty, and to find himself escorted politely to the door.

Dharinel nodded sourly in agreement with Arvin’s last statement. “Korendil wished us to teach you, Bard,” he said with obviously unhappiness. “Because he is only a Magus Minor, and knew nothing of the Bardic Powers or how strong you would or could become. I opposed that training. One Taliesen, I felt, was enough, especially in these days when no one believes in magic. If the humans had lost their magic, that was to the good. Or so I thought. Now, it seems, events have proved me wrong.”

Well, don’t apologize or anything.

“If we all survive this, Bard, we will see to your proper training,” Arvin said firmly. “I will make certain that High Lord Dharinel takes care of that
personally
.” The veiled glance he threw at the other elf implied a whole lot more than Eric understood.

What am I, some kind of counter in a game of elven politics?
was his first thought, and
what does he mean
, “
if we survive?
” was his second.

“If?” he said, swallowing. “What’s with this ‘if’ stuff? You know something I don’t?”

“The reason that you could not reach me when Kory was first taken,” Arvin said, his expression grim, “was that we had Seers of our own who had experienced some disturbing visions of late. Visions of the earth shaking hereabouts; of terrible death of humans. And yes, of a horde of some shadowy creatures that we
thought
might be Nightflyers. Only we were not certain; in fact, it seemed far more likely that they were some creation of our Unseleighe kindred. And there were those of us—” he cast a resentful glance at Dharinel “—who were of the opinion that it did not matter if disaster overtook the humans here. But that was before this morning.”

Dharinel did not—quite—snarl. “My own sister—who is a Seer—undertook to Foresee if this great disaster could have any impact upon those of us Underhill. We had no reason to think that it would, of course, none whatsoever. But she is a cautious creature, and felt it might be worth the effort. That was when she Saw that the energies of the quake would close off the accesses here to the Elfhame, stranding any who were here in your world, and isolating them from the rest of us. Bad enough, that—but worse would come. For the creatures we had seen were Nightflyers in their dozens, but worse, they were breeding on the misery and death following the quake, breeding
in
the newly dead bodies. The breeding Nightflyers, growing stronger and more cunning, would find a way to prey upon the elvenkind so stranded, taking Low Court first, then High. And then—driven by hunger for the new prey—then they would break across the barriers themselves, and pour into Underhill.”

Arvin nodded, and Eric whistled in mingled surprise and dismay. He knew that Nightflyers could kill; he hadn’t known they could kill elves.

“That discovery is what had us isolated from you,” Arvin said. “We were in conference, trying to discover what we could do to prevent such a catastrophe. Now, perhaps, we know.”

“It’s a quake that starts it all, right?” Susan Sheffield asked in a quiet voice. Dharinel and Arvin turned as one, as if they had forgotten she was there.

“That is what the visions seem to tell us,” Arvin said carefully. “Of course, as with all visions of the future, the picture is unclear, often distorted. The future is uncertain and many things can work to change it.”

“You think Blair might go ahead and run your machines without you?” Eric asked. “I mean, can he? Don’t you have to be there or something? Isn’t everything, like, secret? You keep what you’re doing in code and in hidden notebooks?”

She smiled faintly. “Sorry kid,” she said regretfully. “This isn’t the late- late show. These days, especially if you’re doing research on a government grant, you have to keep clear instructions and up-to-the-minute protocol, in case you get hit by a truck—or—or get ‘compromised’ as Steve likes to say—and somebody else has to pick up where you left off.”

She shook her head, thinking of all the regs she had to follow—not for the sake of good science necessarily, but to keep her grants. She had never guessed how much of her life would be tied up in bureaucratic crap. “You’ve got to be ready for inspections, and be ready to prove you can do what you say you can. There’s only so much grant money and lots of people want it. Especially Teller’s boys, and he still has clout, the old bastard.” She shrugged. “It wouldn’t be easy for someone to crack my computer protections, but anybody with a higher access priority than mine—like Colonel Steve—is going to be able to bypass those.” She smiled wanly. “I hope you’ve got a guest room. I think I’m going to need it.”

“So as soon as they figure out that you aren’t coming home to your apartment, we can bet on Blair having his hands on your stuff.” Eric sighed and buried his face in his hands, “God, I wish we had Bethie in one piece. She’s so much better at this real-world strategy stuff than I am. There’s so many things to try and think of—”

“I think,” Kory said, slowly, “that there are only two questions that should concern us at the moment. How soon will it take the Blair-creature to learn how to operate your mechanisms—and how long will it take for him to make the earthquake happen when he does?”

She was awake. And—not in a street full of bodies, nor a chamber with walls closing in on her. That was an improvement—at least for as long as it lasted.

Beth kept her eyes tightly closed, and took in the evidence of her other senses. Was she hallucinating again, or sane, however temporarily? Or worse—still a captive? Sound—the murmur of voices from downstairs, and the faint sounds of traffic from outside. Scent—the green of the garden on a gentle breeze. Touch—the crisp feel of sheets on her body, the soft cotton of the quilt Karen had given them under her hands, and the faintly undulating warmth of the waterbed.

I’m home. I’m safe. There’s no earthquake, no monsters, and no mad scientist…

She waited, holding her breath, for all of that to change. It always had. Only this time she held her breath until she couldn’t stand it anymore— and it didn’t.

“You might as well open your eyes, Beth Kentraine,” said a voice she knew. “Because I know very well that you’re awake.”

“Elizabet!” Her lids flew open without any urging on her part, and she sat straight up, making the waterbed slosh. Elizabet sat on one padded railing, while Kayla perched on the other. Both of them watching her.

Doesn’t that kid ever just sit somewhere? It’s like she’s only there for a second before she decides to take off for somewhere else.

“What happened?” she asked, not sure what she meant.

“Ah.” Elizabet’s dark brow arched upwards. “That is what I wanted to ask you. What happened to you in the lab complex? Every time I attempted to ask you—well, you were most uncooperative.”

“I’d—rather not talk about it,” Beth faltered.

But Elizabet leaned over and seized her wrist, forcing her to look into the healer’s eyes. “I do not really
care
that you would rather not talk about it, girl,” the healer said fiercely, enunciating each word with care. “You have work to do that you can’t do as walking wounded, and if you don’t talk about what happened, I can’t do anything for you!”

Beth wanted to deny that she needed any help—but the trembling, hollow place inside her told her that she did need it, and needed it badly. At any moment, she could find herself on that street, or in that tiny room. There would be no predicting it. She would never be able to sleep, waiting for nightmares; never be able to sit within four walls, waiting for them to crush her. The spells would return, throwing her back into horror with little or no warning. And she knew it.

What had been a simple phobia, easily dealt with, had become a mental cancer eating at her sanity.

She took a deep breath; and clenched her fists in the fabric of the quilt. “Some goons grabbed me on the street and shoved me into a car. I don’t know where they took me, at least, I didn’t until we broke out—Dublin Labs, right? All I knew was they got me into this place that was like some kind of prison.”

Elizabet nodded. “Then what?”

“There was a man,” she said, slowly. “Probably the same one who nabbed you. He—he wanted me to sign some papers, sort of check myself into whatever program he was running.”

“He said the same to me. We think he was collecting psychics,” Elizabet said, giving Beth a moment to steel herself against what she must deal with next.

“Well, I told him to go stuff it,” she said. “He—didn’t like that; I guess he likes people being afraid of him and it really pissed him off that I wasn’t. He kept asking me questions, and he—he turned off the ventilation.”

The mere memory was enough to make her sweat. But then Kayla touched her other hand—

And suddenly, it wasn’t quite so bad. The feeling of edge-of-panic was still there, but not so bad. She licked her lips and continued.

“Then—I thought he might rough me up, but he didn’t. He had his goons drag me around and shove me into a decompression chamber. And he—he turned off the lights—and—”

I can’t!
she thought, panic rising to choke her throat shut.
I can’t, I can’t talk about it, I
— The walls were closing in; they were going to collapse on her, she saw them moving, leaning down, about to topple—

Kayla touched her wrist again, and Elizabet did the same on the other side—hardly felt at all amid the wave of fear and panic that had washed over her.

And then—the fear was gone. Mostly, anyway. There was still sweat on her forehead, and running coldly down her spine, and her stomach was full of new-hatched butterflies, but the walls weren’t moving, and she could breathe again.

She blinked in amazement, then stared at the two healers, knowing they had done something, but not sure what it was that they had done to her. “How in
hell
did you do that?” she demanded. “I was about to go into a full-bore claustrophobia attack! How in hell did you stop it?”

Kayla shrugged, and Elizabet simply smiled. “Half of our work was done for us,” the older woman said. “Eric exercised some of his own powers to find out what had happened to you—and when we went to work on you while you were still unconscious, we discovered that he had already half-healed you. Without even realizing it, I suspect. That may be why the poor child looks like a puppy’s favorite rag right now.”

She seemed to remember something—in the depths of the worst of her nightmares—a strain of melody. An old Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts.” And even now, as she thought of the melody, she felt a calm descending over her, and new strength coming to her.

The same one she and Eric had used to heal Kory when they thought that they had almost lost him.

A melody that she had followed out of nightmare and into ordinary fear —out of madness and into sanity.

“Am I cured?” she asked, incredulously. “I mean, am I—”

Elizabet shook her head. “You’re still claustrophobic, and the only way you’re going to get over that is going to be through a few months of desensitization training. I’ll put you in touch with a therapist who’s also a Wiccan. But for now, Kayla and I have put a layer of mental floss between you and the memories, that
should
get you through the next few days or weeks.”

“Now,” Kayla said firmly, “about the
other
problem. The nightmare—”

The images rose up before her, terrifying and nauseating. Wrecked buildings. Bodies in the street. Her hands covered in blood—only they weren’t her hands, because she was dead, on the ground in front of herself, and there were these horrible shadow-creatures everywhere—

“It’s not a nightmare,” Kayla said, again putting that insulating touch between her and the memory. “It’s real, I mean, it
will
be real, unless we can do something.”

Beth shook her head. “Huh?” she replied cleverly.

“What Kayla is trying to say is that it isn’t a dream,” Elizabet told her, with her dark face shadowed by even darker thoughts. “What you experienced just now—and what you were locked into—was Eric’s vision of the future. Remember, that was the nightmare you all came to talk to me about. It wasn’t something that came out of some kind of mental imbalance, it was a true glimpse of a possible future. But it’s not just a vision only he has had; not anymore. There were some other folks at the conference that had dreams that sounded like his.”

“Yeah, and that’s not all,” Kayla put in. “Here’s a hot news flash; your friends with the pointed ears have seen the same thing, too.”

“Which means?” she asked, her mouth drying with a different kind of fear altogether.

Elizabet folded her arms as if she felt a breath of chill not even the warmth of the room could dispel. “That it becomes more and more probable with every hour that the vision is soon to become the reality.
Soon.
Within days, maybe even hours.” She nodded at the door to the bedroom.

“There’s a war council going on downstairs right now to try and figure out what—if anything—we can do.”