The Universe Twister (21 page)

The sun was high when he crossed the cactus-grown borderland and rode down the last slope into the green countryside of Artesia. News of his approach had spread ahead of him: his fifteen-foot-tall mount must have been visible for the last quarter hour as it tramped across the sandy waste. The road was deserted now; shops stood empty; the windows of the houses along the way were tight-shuttered. O'Leary's cuts and bruises were aching abominably and his reflections were gloomy.

By agreeing with his theory that Lod was the abductor, Nicodaeus had neatly set one nuisance against another, with a chance that O'Leary and the giant might manage to destroy each other. The magician had been a plausible scoundrel; poor King Goruble had given the schemer quarters right in the palace, where he could carry out his plot with the greatest convenience. The plan had been well worked out, O'Leary conceded; and only luck had given him this chance to thwart the would-be usurper—if he wasn't already too late.

He entered the suburbs—the collection of squatters' huts and merchants' stalls clustered outside the city wall proper. All was silent, the narrow alleys empty. A damned shame he couldn't find someone to spread the word that he was on their side, that he needed their help now in his attack on Nicodaeus. No telling what the magician might have rigged in the way of defenses. There might be a battery of artillery waiting just inside the palace walls. Well, if so, that was just a risk he'd have to run.

The city gates just ahead were closed tight. From his perch, O'Leary could see over the wall into empty streets beyond. Well, if they wouldn't let him in, he'd have to make his own way. He urged Dinny ahead; the saurian balked, sidled, then turned, lashed out with its tail. A twenty-foot section of the ancient wall went over with a crash and rumble of falling masonry. The dinosaur picked its way delicately through the rubble into the street of shuttered shops. Far away, O'Leary heard the sound of a church bell tolling out a warning. Except for that, and the scrape and clack of the iguanodon's horny bird-feet on the cobbles, the city was silent as death.

The palace gates were shut, O'Leary saw, as he rode up the avenue leading through the park toward the high iron grilles. Two frightened sentries stood their ground inside the wall, nervously fingering blunderbusses. One raised his weapon as O'Leary halted fifty yards from the gates.

"Don't shoot," he called, "I'm—"

There was a loud boom! and a jet of black smoke spurted from the flared muzzle of the gun. O'Leary heard a shape whack! against the dinosaur's hide. The latter turned his head casually and cropped a bale of leaves from an arching branch.

"Listen to me!" Lafayette tried again. "I've just escaped from Lod's fortress, and—"

The second guard fired; O'Leary heard the ball shriek past his head.

"Hey!" he yelled. "That could be dangerous! Why don't you listen to what I've got to say before you make a serious error?"

Both men threw their guns aside and bolted.

"Oh, well, I guess it's what you'd expect," O'Leary muttered. "All right, boy, here we go again." He urged the dinosaur forward; it stalked up to the gates, leaned on them, trampled them down without slowing, continued along the wide, graveled drive. Ahead the palace loomed, windows aglitter in the afternoon sun, silent. A movement caught O'Leary's eye at the top of one of the towers. He turned toward it across the lawn and waved an arm.

"Hello in there!" he shouted. "It's me, Lafayette O'Leary—"

All along the parapets, from the castellated tops of towers, from the archer's slit set in the stone walls, arrows sprang, arching up in sibilant flight, converging, dropping.

O'Leary ducked, closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. An arrow clacked off Dinny's snout, inches from his boot tip. Something plucked at his torn left sleeve. Other darts clattered down, glancing from the dino's tough hide, bounding off to fall in the grass. Then silence. He opened an eye; ranks of men were in view at the ramparts now, fitting new bolts to strings, bending bows.

"Let's get out of here, Dinny!" O'Leary dug in his heels; the big reptile started forward as a second flight of arrows swept past to thud into the turf and rattle off the iguanodon's tail. The balustraded grand entry was just ahead. The dinosaur took the graceful flight of wide steps at a stride and halted at O'Leary's command.

"No use knocking the wall down," he panted, sliding down to the smooth tiles of the terrace as Dinny lowered his head to investigate the geranium boxes along its edge. "You wait here."

Still carrying Lod's ax, O'Leary ran to the wide glass doors—less substantial than the oak panels opening from the courtyard side, he noted gratefully—kicked them in. The great hall echoed his steps. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a hoarse voice yelling commands. Those archers at the battlements would be arriving on the scene at any moment—and at close range, they could hardly miss.

The entrance from the great hall to the secret passage system was on the far side, he remembered; right about there, where the tall mirrors reflected gilt ceilings and a vast crystal chandelier. Feet were clattering above. O'Leary ran, reached the wall, felt quickly over it. To the left? No, more to the right.

There was a loud yell from above: O'Leary looked up, saw a beefy-faced household guardsman with three wide yellow stripes on his sleeve leaning over a gallery rail, pointing. More men crowded up behind him. Bows appeared, and muskets. O'Leary searched frantically. He had seen the chandelier when Yokabump had opened the panel for him to peek out—he remembered that. And the fountain there—

A section of wall slid aside, just as the roar of a shot boomed through the hall. Bowstrings twanged and an arrow struck the wall beside him as he ducked, stepped inside and hauled the ax in behind him. A second arrow shot between his knees and thumped into the wall inside the passage. O'Leary slammed the panel, heard half a dozen hammer blows as more bolts struck, just an instant late. He leaned against the rough brickwork and let out a long sigh.

Now for Nicodaeus.

* * *

The heavy door was closed and the tower room silent, as O'Leary stood before it listening. From below, he could hear shouts ringing back and forth as the agitated guardsmen scurried about, looking for the lost trail. They might start up the stairs at any moment and if they cornered him here, it was all over. An ax wasn't much good against guns and bows. He hammered on the door.

"Let me in, Nicodaeus," he called in a low voice, then put his ear to the panel. There might have been a faint rustle from within.

"Open up or I'll knock the door down!" This time he was sure; there was a soft thump from beyond the door. Perhaps there was another passage, one Yokabump hadn't known about; maybe the magician was making a backdoor escape while he stood here like a Fuller Brush man.

O'Leary raised the ax, swung it high.

The door creaked open six inches. There was a hoarse yell as the ax came down against the panel with a crash that slammed the door wide. O'Leary looked past it at Nicodaeus, backed against a table, making gulping motions.

"Dear boy," the magician managed to gasp out, "you startled me."

O'Leary wrenched the ax from the oak door. "You can skip all that 'dear boy' schmaltz," he said coldly. "I'm a little slow to think unkind thoughts about anybody I've shared a drink with, but in your case I managed. Where is she?"

"Where—where is who?"

"Adoranne. And don't bother with the innocence routine either. I know all about you. Your friend Lod spilled the beans just before I killed him."

"You
killed
Lod?" Nicodaeus' eyebrows shot up toward his receding hairline.

"With this." O'Leary hefted the ax. "And I'm prepared to use it again, if I have to. Now start talking. Where have you got her stashed? Right here in the palace, I suppose. It would be easy enough, with all these passages in the walls."

"You must believe me, Lafayette!" The magician straightened himself. "I know nothing of her Highness' disappearance, no more than any other—"

O'Leary advanced. "Don't stall; I have no time to waste. Talk fast, or I'll hack you into stew-sized chunks and find her myself. I know the back routes pretty well."

"Lafayette, you're making a mistake! I don't know what the rebel, Lod, said of me, but—"

"Never mind what he said. What about the way the cops pounced, five minutes after I came into your inner sanctum here, looking for help, a couple of evenings ago?"

"But—but—I had nothing to do with it! It was a routine search. I didn't have time to summon the guard, even if I'd wanted to. And they couldn't have responded that quickly if I had."

"I guess you have nothing to do with framing me with that silly episode in Adoranne's boudoir, either—to get me out of the way, so you could carry on with your schemes unmolested!"

"Of course not! I was as amazed as you were."

"And I should just disregard what Lod said about your plans."

"Lafayette, I did, I admit, approach Lod on one occasion, but only in an effort to learn certain facts. I offered to, ah, grant him certain compensations if he would tell me all he knew of, well, certain matters . . ." Nicodaeus' face was damp, his eyes bugging slightly as they followed the glint of light on the brown-crusted edge of the ax in O'Leary's hands.

"Uh-huh. Certain compensations—like Adoranne."

"No!" the magician yelped. "Did he say that? In his own crude way, Lod was a man of directness, not guile. Surely he didn't accuse me of such an act!"

"Well . . ." O'Leary went back over the conversation with Lod. "He called you a traitor—and he accused me of being your agent."

"But the other—did he say that
I
had promised him the person of her Highness?"

"He kept babbling about the plotter in the palace—how you were out to seize the throne, and do away with Adoranne."

"The plotter in the palace?" Nicodaeus frowned. "It wasn't
I
he was talking about, dear lad. I promise you that. What else did he say?"

"He said you didn't need him any more, so you were welching on your promises."

"Lafayette, I made the giant a promise—this I admit. But it was only that if he would tell me all he knows of—of the matters I spoke of—that I would confirm him in his local power, and see to it that he received a reward in cash—an offer which he promised to consider. But as for thrones, and murder—"

"Get specific, Nicodaeus! What were these certain matters?"

"I'm . . . not at liberty to say."

"All right, play it mysterious then. But if you think I'm going to let you talk your way out of this . . ." O'Leary advanced, bringing the ax up.

"Stop!" Nicodaeus raised both hands. "I'll tell you, Lafayette! But I'm warning you, it's a gross violation of security!"

"Make it good!" O'Leary waited, ax ready.

"I'm a . . . a representative of an organization of vast importance; a secret operative, you might say. I was assigned here to investigate certain irregularities."

"Don't give me that 'certain' routine!"

"Very well; I was sent here by Central. There was the matter of a highly localized Probability Stress. I was sent to clear it up."

"Not very good," O'Leary said, shaking his head. "Not very convincing. Try again."

"Look . . ." Nicodaeus groped inside his flowing robe, brought out a shiny shield-shaped object. "My badge. And if you'll let me get my lock box, I'll show you my full credentials . . ."

O'Leary leaned forward to look at the badge. There was a large 7-8-6 engraved in its center on a stylized representation of what appeared to be an onion. Around the edge O'Leary spelled out:

SUBINSPECTOR OF CONTINUA

He frowned at the older man and lowered the ax reluctantly. "What does that mean?"

"One of the jobs of Central is seeking out and neutralizing unauthorized stresses in the Probability Fabric. They can cause untold damage to the orderly progress of entropic evolution."

O'Leary hefted the ax. "That's over my head. Tell me in simple language what this is all about."

"I'll try, Lafayette—not that I'm at all sure I know myself. It seems that this coordinate level, this, ah, um, universe? Dimension? Aspect of multi-ordinate reality?"

"You mean world?" O'Leary waved a hand to encompass all of Artesia.

"Precisely! Very well put. This world was the scene, some decades ago, of a Probability Fault, resulting in a permanent stress in continuum. Naturally, this required clearing up, since all sorts of untoward events can occur along the stress line, particularly where matter displacement has occurred."

"OK, let's skip over that. I'd say you were nutty as a pecan roll except for a few things that have happened to me lately. Too bad we don't have more time to discuss it. But what's that got to do with Adoranne?"

"I was merely attempting to establish my bona fides, dear boy. Some sort of skullduggery took place here twenty or thirty years ago; the situation still remains unresolved. It's my job to find the center of the stress pattern, restore all anachronisms and extra-continual phenomena to their normal space-time-serial niches, and thus eliminate the anomaly. But I confess I've made no progress. The center is here, nearby. At one time, I even suspected you, Lafayette—after all, you appeared under rather mysterious circumstances—but, of course, you checked out as clean as a scrublady's knees." He smiled glassily.

"What do you mean, checked out?"

"I took readings on you when I visited you in your room, before the ball. The lighter, you know. You gave a neutral indication, of course. You see, only an outsider—a person native to another continuum—would elicit a positive indication. Since you're a native, you gave no such reading."

"Mmmmmm. You'd better have your dials checked. But look—this isn't finding Adoranne. I was sure you had her. If not . . ." O'Leary looked at Nicodaeus, feeling suddenly helpless. "Who does?"

Nicodaeus stroked his chin. "The plotter in the palace you say Lod spoke of?"

"I wasn't paying much attention; I thought he meant you. He was pretty drunk, but still cagey enough not to mention the name."