exasperated gesture, and turned to look into the corners of the room, where almost perfect darkness reigned. And where there seemed to be no clothes to be discovered.
Margie felt a sudden urge to do something, anything, to solve the problem. “Wait,” she said, and turned and hurried out of the chamber and into the narrow ascending tunnel. As she ran she pulled out her little flashlight from her ruined costume’s pocket. In a moment its beam had found her shoulder bag, waiting on the floor just where she’d left it. Looping the strap over her shoulder she hurried back to the dungeon, meanwhile rummaging in the bag. As she rejoined the men, she was pulling from the bag a garment of thin but closely woven brown cloth. Margie had got this from her costumer, whose idea it was of what a medieval jongleur ought to wear. She had brought it along as an alternate costume for herself, in case the gauzy materialization outfit—what a total loss that was now— should at the last moment prove unworkable or inappropriate.
When she extended the robe to the old man, he at once hopped down from his awkward wooden couch, demonstrating in the process that he was very little taller than she. He grabbed the offered garment from Margie’s hands and pulled it on over his head. Somehow she had assumed that the effect was going to be bizarre, a hairy old man in a dress, and somehow it was not. The bright, meaningless symbols that decorated the cloth suddenly seemed to acquire a potential significance. The ancient knotted the robe’s simple tie at his waist, and stood before them in new dignity.
To Margie he absently muttered something foreign, that she supposed might have been a thank you. When he spoke to Talisman it was no longer as a cowering derelict, though fear was still audible in his voice. “Whadda you think they want with me? The ones who brought me here?”
“To the best of my belief,” Talisman told him calmly, “they intend to use you as the next in a series of human sacrifices.”
Unconsciously Margie had retreated from both men. Her back was now against the stones of the dungeon wall. And a part of her mind, having now recovered somewhat from the terror of the beast, was trying to tell her that she ought to believe none of this. That this talk of powers and enchantment and sacrifice had to be part of the biggest show, the biggest act, the biggest scam… She knew that nothing she had seen or heard here had been part of any act.
Talisman was speaking to the old man, as if in explanation, again speaking what might have been French or Latin. Whatever it was, the old man understood it, and nodded slowly; his suspicions, or some of them, were being confirmed.
“And I have fought the loup garou,” Talisman added. He was still inexorably calm. “Within the hour. And only a few paces from these walls.”
The old man nodded again, in fear.
Talisman went on “Some dark dominion has its center in this house above our heads. Among its evil powers there may be—nay, must be—some greater even than the werewolf. But you know this. You must.”
The ancient one regarded Talisman hopelessly, then closed his eyes, as if he could bear to hear no more. “We must be a hundred friggin’ miles from the city,” he muttered hopelessly.
“At least that far.” Talisman paused. “That you should have been plucked from the streets at random seems impossible. They chose you deliberately. Or they were led to choose you. Who, what, might have led them?”
The old man had no answer.
“There are powers at work here, honored one, that are beyond my experience and comprehension. Tell me, what is it that you so greatly fear?”
The ancient was rubbing at his forehead. “I wonder what the bastard put in that wine… you figure it out, why they picked me. I don’t give a damn, I’m leaving, whatever I have to do. If I can remember how.”
Talisman was quietly upset by this announcement. “The place for one of your stature to be is here, in confrontation with your enemies who kidnapped you and brought you here. Honor and wisdom alike forbid that you should simply leave.”
“Screw honor and wisdom. Whadda you know about wisdom?”
“Do you not see…?”.
But plainly the old man was not listening. Having glared once more at both his listeners, as if they were the ones guilty of kidnapping, he had closed his eyes again and was now muttering systematically. His toneless voice fell into the rhythm of a chant.
“Master,” said Talisman. To judge from his tone he was now closer to offering violence than service. “I do not insist on courtesy from you; it is not my place to do that. But more than courtesy is at stake. I ask you to behave with common sense. For your own good, as well as for the sake of the innocent folk of this time and place.”
“Shuddup, will ya? How in hell’s a man supposed to think? To remember?” The blue-gray eyes closed yet again, the mumbled words came louder, faster than before.
Talisman uttered a sound that was not quite a sigh, and took one step forward. His right arm flicked out like a lash. Margie winced at the sound his hand made, hitting the old one on the temple. The old man’s eyes stayed closed, and his jaw sagged open in mind-chant, displaying snaggled teeth. Talisman caught the body gently, just as it began to fall. He lifted it easily, to put it back unbound upon the handy rack.
And at that point a soundless explosion overcame the world.
For a moment Margie actually thought that a bomb might have been detonated, so powerful was the sense of almost instantaneous change. But what happened was silent, and did not blast or burn, and was just a beat too slow to have been the effect of chemical explosives.
Margie saw herself surrounded by gray, glowing haze. Talisman had disappeared, but she caught just a glimpse of the great pale wolf-beast bounding away in flight. Raging men and women who she had never seen before surrounded her, their hands outstretched to clutch. Angry creatures she had never imagined bared fangs larger than the dark wolf’s had been.
A hideous paw that was not quite a hand slid past her face and down. A woman’s face, all malign beauty under dark curly hair, snarled in surprise and fury, then was shocked into pale marble when the woman’s eyes fell on the supine figure of the old man.
Still dressed in Margie’s surplus robe the old man lay on the rack, unconscious but unbound. She had the impression that reality was swirling like fog round his unmoving head.
Margie could take no more. She went down, huddling with hands over eyes, until the madness should end somehow.
She landed, sitting, on something at once springy and soft, finely divided, and softly irregular. It wasn’t a stone floor.
No touch came from the clutching hands, no pain from snapping jaws. Everything was quiet.
Inside the protective cage of her hands she unclenched her eyelids just a trifle, until she saw bright light nudging through. It turned the flesh of her caging fingers incandescent pink.
Not until a breeze caressed her face did Margie realize that she was sitting on long green grass in bright sunshine.
ELEVEN
When the world blew up around Feathers with a great shock, it left him drifting like a shed plume amid the smoky wreckage of what had been the local atmosphere. The shock didn’t stun him, though. In fact it partially cleared his mind, at least enough for him to understand that it wasn’t really the atmosphere that had been wrecked and stirred and scrambled, but something more fundamental. And also that now he wasn’t Feathers any more.
Shit, he never had been, really, not with any sense of identification with the name. And with one false name out of the way, he was able to understand, willing to remember, more.
A great deal more.
And stop saying shit, he admonished himself. Stop speaking foulness when you are with gentle folk. How have you fallen into such a habit?
It serves, he answered himself, to help keep the gentle folk, or some of them anyway, away from me.
And why do you want to do that?
You know why.
But, if he did know, he didn’t want to think about it. Actually he couldn’t think about it, not just yet.
But change had come again, and he was going to have to adapt to change once more.
