robert Charrette - Arthur 02 - A King Beneath the Mountain (48 page)

"No!" she screamed.

John saw what she saw.

Beryle lay sprawled on the ground near the corner of the building. A man stood over him, more like a scavenger than like a victorious warrior. Beryle's assailant was dressed like a mid-rank executive out for an evening stroll. The man wore a set of visor glasses that looked like a virtual reality feed, but

he didn't move like a VR addict when he reached down and picked something up. Beryle's gun.

The spell form rippled and started to crumble as Dr. Spae abandoned her control. The sudden shift left John blinded and dazed.

He heard a shot.

And Quetzal's voice saying, "You should have selected a more alert assassin, Spae."

John recovered enough of his wits to realize that his blindness was due to his eyes being closed. He opened them in time to see a bolt of pure power leap from Dr. Spae's staff. Unlike the blasts she had unleashed in her hotel suite, this one wasn't aimed at the darkling mage. Her target was Beryle's attacker.

He was no mage. He had no protection. The energy blast lifted him, flailing, into the air. He crashed into the top of one of the fence's supporting brick pillars and rolled off onto the iron bars. Pointed iron pierced his body and tented the back of his coat. Beryle's gun fell from his limp hand and smacked against the sidewalk.

Quetzal avenged the loss of his henchman by launching his own bolt. The blast tossed John and the doctor in different directions and ripped a crater in the lawn. John landed somewhat downhill of where he'd lain, battered and winded, but conscious. The doctor must still be conscious too; he could feel the interplay of energies as Quetzal straggled to complete another blasting spell. Someone—it had to be Dr. Spae because it wasn't John—fought against him.

Away! Get away!

The struggle between the two sorcerers was beyond John's competence. All he could think about was getting out of range of another arcane blast. He didn't think he could survive another. He started crawling away from the danger.

He had to get away!

The night sky seemed shot with lightning as the magicians fought their battle. Tired and dizzy, John crawled on. His head was spinning and multicolored lights danced before his eyes. Sounds seemed to come from very far away.

There was someone lying in his path. A girl, apparently unconscious. Someone else hurt in tonight's disaster.

He crawled toward her. He hadn't done much good tonight. Maybe he could get her away from the danger. The least he could do.

The girl was Faye.

Away!
his brain shrieked at him.

Yes! He had to get them both away. John forced himself to his knees, then to his feet. He got a grip on her wrists and started to drag her after him. His head spun with the effort, but he persevered. If they were to be safe, they had to be elsewhere.

At least the lightning had stopped. The air was clear. There was no storm here.

Here?

Dropping Faye's arms, he looked up. Despite a distant diffuse flashing on the horizon, the sky was lit by billions of brilliant stars. They twinkled and danced and swirled. They spun John around, and he crashed to the ground.

The dank, cold darkness was everywhere.

CHAPTER

29

Spae felt as if she were coming apart at the seams. When she'd seen Quetzal's slave standing over David, she'd gone a little over the edge. She'd blasted the slave, but at what cost? She'd lost the link with Reddy and Faye. She'd lost control of the entrapment spell. She'd lost David.

Lost it all.

Quetzal's power beat down on her. She fought back. As long as she prevented him from forming a coherent spell structure, she would live. But what was the point?

They had failed.

David had died, shot in the back while he lay helpless.

The Faery kids, the material Reddy and immaterial Faye, were gone, vaporized by Quetzal's blast.

Only she was left. For the moment.

She was abandoned.

Alone.

It was only a matter of time.

Quetzal created structure after structure around her. She lore them down. He made new ones, each harder to destroy than the last. She knew the despair was undermining her ability to resist Quetzal. What did it matter? She couldn't beat him. She'd run out of tricks to try on him. He knew them all.

Still, she fought.

But he was strong, stronger than anyone she had ever tested her power against. She couldn't beat him. His spell forms came closer and closer to completion. She was going to die. The wind started to roar in her ears. Maybe she was already dying. Well, that was better than living as Quetzal's slave. Infinitely better.

He loomed over her, as he had once loomed over her in a dream. He was darkness, all shadow and sinister dread. Her defenses were slowing, she was weak.

Dying.

A light blossomed in the sky behind Quetzal's head, a brilliant, dazzling white light. Some people said that you saw a great, shining light as you passed from life to death.

Did angels have running lights?

John was lying on his back, staring—once he'd opened his eyes—at the sky. Stars! Billions of them! He knew those stars; they lived in the sky of the otherworld.

He was in the otherworld!

And he had come here by himself!

But not alone. Faye? "Faye!"

He found her a few yards away, lying on the ground, her arms stretched over her head where he'd dropped them. Was she all right? He couldn't tell if she was breathing. He knelt beside her. She was, she
was
breathing! He'd been afraid she was—

Her eyes fluttered open when his tears fell upon her cheek.

"John?" Her voice was weak, but there was strength in her arms when she pulled his head down and kissed him.

"I'm so glad you're alive," she exclaimed. "When the darkling mage struck, I thought you'd— I thought we'd— I thought— I don't know what I thought. His spells were so powerful. How's Dr. Spae?"

Her question crushed his happiness. He had abandoned the doctor. He looked back in the direction he thought they had come from. There were no buildings, just a few trees that looked familiar, and a lot more that didn't. Diffuse flashes of light reflected from the dark leaves, but John couldn't make out a source.

"I guess she's still fighting him," he said softly.

"She needs help, John. She can't defeat him alone."

"What am I supposed to do? I can't beat him either. It's hopeless to try to link with the doctor while she's in combat with Quetzal. If I knew more about magic, I might be able to
do
something. Elf princes are supposed to be great magicians, aren't they? Why am I such a wuss? You know why? I know why. It's because I'm a frigging changeling. You know what a changeling is? I'll tell you! A changeling is a frigging elven orphan. I might have known enough to do something, if my
father
had ever bothered to teach me anything. What little I've learned, I've learned without any help from
him\"

His tirade ran down into sobs.

"He's strong, John," Faye said gently. "He could help her. I think he would help her, if you asked. I could find him for you."

How could she consider being beholden to
him
after what
he
had done to her? "I can't."

"Dr. Spae needs help, John. She'll die."

"Don't you know any other elves?"

She dropped her eyes, and said in a small voice, "I'm not their kind."

"Forget it, then." It was for the best. It had to be. Besides, if she went to Bennett, he might not listen; and even if he did, there might not be time for him to do anything. "Maybe there's something we can do ourselves. I got us here; maybe I can go back and get her."

"If she's dueling with the darkling mage, you'll never get near enough to open the way."

Then they had to find somebody to help them. "Do you know where we are?"

She looked surprised at his question. "Home."

"You live near here?" If she did, she would know people. Maybe someone who could help.

"Only in the sunlit world," she replied.

Only in the— His hopes sagged. To her, the otherworld was home, all of it. "You don't know this neighborhood at all, do you?"

"Only in the sunlit world. Like you, John."

Wonderful.

He couldn't stand by and let Quetzal kill Dr. Spae.

"We need help, and I don't know my way around, and I certainly don't know anyone to ask." He hated himself for it, but he asked, "You can find Bennett?"

She nodded.

"All right, then. Go get him."

"What about you, John?"

"I'm going to stay here and see if I can come up with something."

"But John—-"

"Go! You're wasting time!"

She pouted at him, but he glared back. She turned and ran away, vanishing into the mist that, in the strange way of the otherworld, always seemed near at hand.

John turned back to the place where the light flashed. When he squinted hard and thought about the real world, he could make out faint, fleeting outlines of the fence and the building where Quetzal had hidden. It was as if the flashes illuminated them somehow. In a way he was not able to put into words, he felt the presence of both Quetzal and Dr. Spae. He seemed to understand where they were located.

He could go back. At least he thought he could.

But what would he do once he was there?

The tension in the Brookfield security center shot up when Joel Lee's point of view swept across a building front and revealed a man standing in a doorway. Charley didn't recognize the guy, but Hagen did.

"Quetzal," he said, as if he were naming a poisonous snake.

To Charley's surprise, Lee didn't go straight to his so-called master. He circled around a block, coming back toward the building from another direction. There was a big iron fence in Lee's way and he went over it, displaying more

agility than any desk jockey Charley had ever seen. Lee's point of view moved slowly after that, as if he were stalking something.

It turned out he was. The point-of-view revealed a man crouched next to the building that Quetzal had been standing in front of. It wasn't Quetzal. Charley spotted the gun in the man's hand; he recognized the tenseness in the man's crouch, too—the guy was waiting in ambush.

For Quetzal?

Whoever he was waiting for, he was about to be bushwhacked himself.

"There's got to be something we can do," Charley said.

Hagen ordered a launch.

The last thing Charley had expected when he had agreed to work with Martinez and her clandestine crew was to be crammed into the number two seat of an Omni Dynamics MRVWC-7 Mamba™. The variable-wing aircraft—known as a verrie to just about anyone who flew one—looked a lot like a dragonfly. The Mambas might look like dragonflies, but bugs didn't have stubby airfoils with weapon hardpoints like the Mambas. When Charley objected to using milspec verries, Hagen said, "These are
civilian
ships."

He pointed out that the only thing affixed to the wing mounts was a pair of directed-beam actinic lights, and that the lower chin turret was not carrying the usual 25mm rotary cannon. "The night sights and targeting systems," he allowed, "are still installed."

Civilian ships or not, a flight of five Mambas was not standard equipment for a corp office block like the Brookfield facility; nor were the other eight crewmen. They all wore Yamabennin flight suits, which Charley had expected; it was the guys themselves that took him by surprise. None of them was taller than Hagen, and that guy was what in a less sensitive age would be called a dwarf. Charley knew that smaller pilots were preferred for a lot of reasons, but Yamabennin was carrying the maxim to an extreme with these shrimps.

The rush to launch didn't leave Charley time to pay attention to anything other than the clipped—and no doubt incomplete—briefing the ground crew gave him while they crammed a helmet on his head and stuffed him into the verrie. He missed most of what they said, their words lost in the un-dampened howl of the warming engines. Charley had been in combat verries before, but never in a gunship. He was already sure that he wouldn't like the experience any better. Hagen put the ship into the air as soon as the cockpit dome was locked down.

The verries lifted with their wings vertical for launch and tilted them down for full forward flight. The craft were fast and they made good time, flying low and illegal. Charley didn't complain.

Charley wasn't as confident as Hagen that they would get to Providence before things started happening.

As they crossed the Seekonk River, the last before their destination, Hagen slowed their Mamba and reconverted to hover configuration. The verrie slowed further when he cut in the stealth baffles on the engines.

They had covered the thirty-odd miles in under eight minutes. Staring at his helmet's projection of what the Mamba's night sight saw, Charley knew that they hadn't gotten there fast enough.