Tracked by Terror (12 page)

A monkey leaped into the tree overhead, stared down at them, and started to shriek. “We can't stay here,” Jarvey said. “Let's go.”

They tried to head in the direction of the wall, but the going was treacherous, broken ground cut by the twisting roots of ancient trees. “Maybe you could try some magic of your own,” Betsy said.

“How?” Jarvey was tired, his hands were blistered, and he felt slimy with his own sweat. “I command the trees not to move! I order the vines not to grab us! Stay away, monkeys! I'll blast you with my power! Think that will work?”

“You don't have to be nasty. If you can't help, you can't.”

“It's not my fault!” Jarvey yelled.

And at that instant the world exploded.

 

For a heartbeat, Jarvey thought he had been shot. White light filled the world, a sound like a cannon going off next to his head shook him to his bones, a burst of heat and a stench of burning filled the air ...

Betsy was shaking him, her mouth moving, but no sound came out. No. Jarvey blinked and heard only the ringing of his own ears. The sound had been so loud that it had deafened him. “What?”

Betsy didn't reply in words, but yanked him to his feet—he had gone sprawling to the ground—and dragged him forward. He saw a gap in the thicket, a ragged, smoking hole four or five feet across. The steaming vines twitched aside as Betsy dragged him toward the opening. Thinly, as if she were standing a long way off, her voice broke through: “We can make it! Hurry!”

The trees and brush writhed, trying to send twigs and branches into the smoldering gap. Red sparks of fire crept through the dry edges of the hole, and Jarvey flinched away as they passed close to a burning branch. “Wait, I can't keep up!”

“There's the wall!”

This time he heard her better. “What did I do?”

“Made lightning strike the thicket! Or anyway, lightning did strike it!”

The trees on this side had thinned out, and the blue sky stretched overhead. “But there aren't any clouds.”

“Magic,” Betsy said shortly. “Come on! There's the seashore, and if we can get to that, we can get to the docks!”

Jarvey looked behind them. The blasted thicket was already closing up, though a thin haze of blue-gray smoke still drifted from it. From this side, the barrier looked as if it ran for miles away from the wall, following the rise and roll of the hills. Somewhere back in there the Nawab was hunting. No wonder the poster had warned about his intent.

He hunted people.

They had come to the edge of a steep drop. The cliff led almost vertically down ten or twelve feet to a row of dunes. “We can climb it,” Betsy said, studying the vegetation spilling over the top of the crag. “We can hold on to these vines.”

“No, thanks. They might hold on to us.”

Betsy prodded one with her toe. It swayed back and forth but did not react. “Don't think so. These seem ordinary. I think the stuff in the forest might be enchanted to have some strange kind of movement, but these are just plants.”

“Okay,” Jarvey said. “Let's try.”

It wasn't a pleasant climb, especially with his raw, blistered hands, but Jarvey followed Betsy down to the crest of a dune of coarse gray sand. The ocean rolled in a few yards away, low waves breaking and boiling on the beach. The sun had sunk toward the horizon off to the left, and it looked swollen and red. “We don't have much time until night,” Jarvey said. “We were in there all day.”

“We do better in the dark, anyway,” Betsy pointed out. “Come on. ”

They made their way toward the docks, perhaps half a mile distant. Jarvey could see the masts of three or four ships, and out at sea another vessel stood away from the shore, tilting to the left as the wind filled its sails and took it out to sea. Soon they were walking through a scatter of driftwood, broken masts, snarls of fishing nets, even a snapped-off oar or two. An upended ship's boat, its bottom staved in, stuck up out of the sand like a beached whale, its surface roughened by knots of barnacles.

At last they scaled a low stone wall and stood at the end of the docks. The pier where their ship had tied up was about halfway down. By then the sun had set, and a deep twilight had fallen.

“Let's get to the hideout and retrieve the Grimoire,” Betsy said. “Then we'll hide on a ship until morning.”

“Okay,” Jarvey said. He wondered if the Nawab was still hunting them. Maybe his spies had told him of their escape. Maybe he was coming this way right now to find them.

In the rising darkness, they darted from doorway to doorway, down alleys and over fences, until they reached the warehouse. “Hope those snakes are gone,” Jarvey said. “I'll check it out.”

He told himself that the cobras had only been guards. They hadn't wanted to bite him, just to drive him and Betsy out into the forest, that was all.

But now—well, if the snakes knew that they had escaped from the Nawab, what then?

To his relief, the alley stretched dark and empty. With Betsy close behind him, he felt his way down the fence until he located the loose board and pulled it to one side. Betsy slipped in before he could tell her to wait, and he followed.

It was gloomy inside the hut, but Jarvey felt absurdly relieved. They were home, as far as they could be said to have a home in this world.

“Get the Grimoire,” Betsy said, dragging the crate over.

Jarvey climbed up on it, teetered, and felt around on top of the beam. “Oh, no.”

“What is it?”

Jarvey didn't answer for a moment. He could feel the layer of dust on the beam, could even feel the rough patch where the Grimoire had rubbed the dust off But as for the book itself...

“It's gone,” he said. “Someone's taken it.”

T
he boat rocked. In the distance the lights of Port Midion gleamed against the face of night. “I don't like this,” Jarvey said.

“I'm not fond of it myself,” Betsy returned. “But I'd rather be here than somewhere those cobra things could reach us.”

Jarvey had to agree with that. They had taken a fishing boat, about a dozen feet long, and had rowed out into the bay, where they dropped the boat's small anchor. Now they bobbed about a mile off shore, trusting to the night to hide them. The waves weren't large, but they occasionally slapped the boat with a slushing sound and a salty spray of water.

“The one hunting us must be the Nawab,” Jarvey said miserably. “He was the one who sent the cobras, the one who hunted us. And if he's a Midion, he'll know all about the Grimoire.”

“We'll have to get it back.”

“How?”

“You're the magician,” Betsy pointed out.

“You keep saying that!” Jarvey fought to keep his anger down. “Look, Betsy, I don't know how to work magic. When I try, weird things happen. I make lightning strike! I can't control it. I could kill us both.”

“Or not. You have the art, Jarvey. You may not be able to control it, but you have it, and I don't. If you could learn—”

“Yeah, right, if I could learn, I'd be great,” Jarvey said bitterly. “I could make my own world, just like old Junius. Have an army of ghosts to serve me. Or I could turn the tables on the Nawab, couldn't I? Make the cobras and the trees and the birds obey me, not him.”

“What's wrong with that?”

Jarvey grunted. “I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe if someone used the Grimoire for good and not for evil, it would change it somehow.”

“Except I don't think anyone who's used it has thought of himself as evil,” Betsy said slowly.

“Oh, come on. Tantalus Midion kidnapped about a thousand people from Earth and made them his servants. Junius has trapped his family for all eternity, and his kids can't even grow up and get away from him. This Nawab guy hunts people!”

“But Tantalus created Lunnon so he'd have a place to feel safe and a place to have power,” Betsy pointed out. “He thought he'd make a city that ran properly, don't you see? And Junius really believed he was a great actor and a great playwright. The way he saw it, he was just making himself a place where his genius would be recognized.”

“You're saying they aren't evil?” Jarvey asked sarcastically. “What about Siyamon? He locked my parents up in his book, and he tried to do the same thing to me! Don't tell me that's not evil!”

“It is to you,” Betsy said. “But what about to him? Maybe your father was due to inherit the Grimoire, and Siyamon thought it should be his and his alone. From his point of view, he'd waited all his life to own and use the Grimoire, and here's this stranger, this foreigner, coming in and—”

“My dad didn't want the stupid old book!” Jarvey snapped. “And if he had inherited it, he sure wouldn't do anything with it that would hurt anybody. Don't tell me that Siyamon's not evil.”

“What would you do with the Grimoire, if you mastered it?” Betsy asked.

Jarvey didn't answer for a minute. Then he said, “Use it to free everyone it's got locked away. Get rid of the worlds the Midion sorcerers have created.”

“So everyone in my world would die,” Betsy said.

“No—”

“Yes. If you made Lunnon cease to exist, then all my friends, everyone you knew there, they would die. We can't go to your world, Jarvey. There's no room for us there. So to us, you'd be evil, do you see? You might not mean to be, but you would be.”

“There's no use talking about it,” Jarvey said glumly. “We've lost it.”

“No, we're going to get it back somehow,” Betsy corrected him. “And then we'll decide how best you can use it.” She shifted herself on the seat. “You try to get some sleep. I'll take first watch. I'll wake you when I think about four hours have passed.”

Jarvey couldn't lie down in the boat, because it was rolling and pitching too much, and besides, about an inch of water had collected in the lowest part. He halfway lay down on one of the hard, uncomfortable seats, gripped the gunwale, the side of the boat, with his left hand, and tried to relax, thinking about the Grimoire and what it could do.

In the beginning, he had thought that his parents, that he himself, that the whole city of Lunnon were actually in the book, were part of its pages. But Zoroaster had said the book didn't hold worlds, but opened a gateway to them. It somehow warped reality, made a hole in time and in space, and let people from one world slip through it into another. He was beginning to think that this world, that the theater of Junius Midion, that Lunnon, all existed in places that had their own reality. The dimensions, the realities, whatever you called them, existed before the Midions tampered with them. But the Midions wrote chapters in the book that were actually magic spells, and these complex spells changed the dimensions to the liking of the magicians. Maybe the cobras here weren't Earthly cobras at all, but some kind of native animal changed and reshaped by the spell that let the Nawab come through from Earth. Even the sentient trees might be plants native to the world that the magician had changed.

Or had used the Grimoire to change. Just before he drifted to sleep, Jarvey had a final, disturbing thought. Maybe he could use the Grimoire to warp the world, all right.

But when he did, if he did...

Maybe the Grimoire could warp
him
at the same time.

 

The eastern sky was barely pink with dawn when they rowed back to shore and tied the boat up to the same pier from which they had borrowed it. No one was awake yet.

“Okay,” Jarvey said. “I'm going to try a spell. I did it once before in Lunnon, when a policeman was after me. Zoroaster said it wasn't really an invisibility spell. It just made people overlook me, not notice me. I did it once, so I should be able to do it again.”

“All right. Try it.”

Jarvey closed his eyes and began to chant: “No one will see me. Everyone will ignore me. No one will know I am there.” He said it over and over, clenching his hands.

“Nothing's happening.”

“I'm trying!” He balled his fists even tighter and chanted again, faster, more urgently.

“Jarvey, it's almost daytime. We'd better hide—”

Jarvey felt a flash of anger. “I can do it!” He repeated his chant and felt a strange, electric quiver. He opened his eyes. Everything looked dim. Betsy stood looking anxiously around her.

“How's that?” Jarvey asked.

Betsy didn't reply. She looked around, her gaze sweeping right past him.

I did it, Jarvey thought. She can't see me! He nudged her, and she took a few uncertain steps away. She turned and looked around again, her face clenched in a puzzled frown. She looked as if she were on the verge of speaking, but then shook her head and walked away. Jarvey followed her.

He watched her snitch some bread for her breakfast, expertly. Jarvey simply walked into the shop and picked up a piece of the bread, eating it as the cooks chattered around him, talking of the ship that had come in with dyed fabric and cheap jewelry. No one paid him the least bit of attention. They stepped around him, never bumped into him, but they didn't seem to see him at all. Now all he had to do was...

“Let me go! I've done nothing!”

Betsy's voice, coming from outside the booth! Jarvey ducked out, and what he saw made his heart sink. One of those gorillas had grabbed Betsy's wrist and was dragging her along the cobbled street. She was stumbling after her captor, trying not to fall.

Jarvey hurried after her. “I'm here!” he whispered.