Here was another item that he hadn’t wanted to think about: he’d really known for a long time that something in the nature of that blowup was coming. It had to be coming sooner or later, no special powers were needed to see that, only a minimal intelligence and a knowledge of the situation. When you dammed up something long enough, when you repressed it, as that new young social worker at the soup kitchen would doubtless say, then sooner or later it would come bursting or leaking through in one form or another.
A good blowup, like this one, reduced tension. But it also created problems. For example, when he opened his eyes, where was he going to be? The answer when he discovered it might not be pleasant. But he was soon going to have to open his eyes, whatever—
His thought was stopped, totally, by the sound of a woman’s voice. It was a soft voice, not ten feet away from him, and it wasn’t laughing this time, as he had heard it in those ghostly warning pre-echoes that his powers had provided for him on the street. No, it was only talking, but its tones of subtle venom were unmistakable. Never in this world or any other was he going to forget the tones of that voice. The shock of them now was such that at first he had no idea what the voice was saying. It took him a little while to get his thought going again.
Then he who had once been known as Feathers opened his eyes. His surroundings hadn’t changed as much as he had feared. His body, strictly speaking, was no longer lying on the rack; rather he now floated horizontally in the air six inches above it. Around him, the tight swirl of his protective powers made what his eyes could perceive as a knotted blanket of blue smoke. Things had very recently been trying to reach him through that blanket, he perceived also, and had been defeated by it. With a little effort he could see some of those things now. They were squatting much like giant toads, in the four upper corners and two of the lower corners of the stone-walled chamber.
But he hardly noticed those things now. All his attention was fixed on the woman who was their mistress. She stood in the approximate middle of the stone-paved floor, almost within arm’s length of the strange torture-bed above which his body was suspended. She was facing him, hands on hips, poised like a sentry who had just heard a suspicious noise—or, he thought, almost like a housewife discovering a mouse. Her attitude was made no less serious by the fact that she was wearing nothing but two tiny strips of yellow cloth. In physical appearance she’d changed very little since he had seen her last.
If she had been anywhere near as surprised as he was by this meeting, she’d had time to get over the first shock of it before he looked at her.
The man who had been Feathers saw no point now in being chary of his use of magic, and therefore no need to struggle with joints stiffened by hours of immobility. Instead of straining to sit up now, he simply willed himself standing. The knots of smoke that held his body tugged and tightened; their network lifted him gently from his suspension above the rack and turned him vertical and set him gently on his feet, a little closer to the woman than he had been before. He noted with secret joy the effort that it cost her not to step back.
He was about half a head taller than the top of her dark curls; familiar measurement.
“Hello, Nimue,” he said softly.
She didn’t have an answer for him right away. There was a lot going on behind her mask of calm control; he could feel it, but he wasn’t able to identify it all, and in fact he did not try. Long seconds passed and still Nimue did not speak. She might have tried words on him while he was still unconscious. If so he felt sure that none of them had been well-meant, and as far as he could tell none had been effective. He and this woman had long ago reached an equilibrium of sorts. The smoky blanket of his powers protected against more than claws.
While waiting for her to speak now, he thought about the creatures, the activity, he could perceive in the room around him. He calmed the local atmosphere somewhat toward normal, while taking good care that the effectiveness of his defensive powers should not be hindered. Their full mobilization was one good effect that the blowup had produced.
Meanwhile his memory was privately examining a recent image: that of a dark man dressed in darkness. A rather tall man, not met before, except in passing on the street, claiming with sly tongue to be well-meaning, prating about honor. And effective. Oh yes. He who had been Feathers could still feel the bruise on his temple, throbbing just a little. The dark-clothed man had been wise enough to know the moment in mid-incantation when it would be possible to strike, and he had had nerve enough to take the risks involved. And speed, and controlled strength. And the old tongue. It all added up to vampire. One of the old, honorable… oh, piss on it, what did it matter now?
And—oh yeah. Some little girl had been here too, dressed up like a stage fairy. In fact this robe bemerded with idiot symbols that he was wearing now had come from her. There was probably some damnfool masquerade planned here, that doubtless had behind it some evil game of Nimue’s, and the girl was just an innocent caught up in the mess. Pretty thing, too. Well, too bad. The world was full of innocents in trouble through no fault of their own.
Only at this point did it occur to him, provoking in him first amusement and then faint concern, exactly what had been the probable fate of the vampire and the girl when the blowup happened. Serve the old blood-drinking bastard right, he told himself, feeling his sore head. And then the innocent girl… he sighed.
Nimue had at last tired of her game of silent waiting. “By what name shall I call you now?” she asked. It was certainly a banal way for one adept to begin a conversation with another. And a pointed reminder of his own discourteous bluntness in using her own true name at the start. Well, some people deserved courtesy, and some…
Nimue had addressed him in one of the languages from old Brittany; he couldn’t recall the name of the damned tongue now, if it even had a name, but as soon as he heard it again the sound and meaning of it flowed smoothly once more in his antique brain cells.
He spoke the tongue of Brittany, for the first time in a thousand years “I’m leaving. You need not worry about what you ought to call me.”
“I should prefer to be able to use some name.” Nimue’s voice was smoothly unrevealing. “For reasons of courtesy.”
“All right. Hawk is a good name.” Then, switching to modern English: “Mr. Hawk, to you.” And then, after a pause: “I don’t get it, what you’re trying to do here. I mean, why me? And tied down on a rack. I mean, what the bloody hell, woman? Did you just want to see the expression on my face when I woke up?”
Nimue only smiled faintly, and shook her head. They both knew that she didn’t have to explain anything at all to him. Because… because… the reason escaped Hawk just now, but he knew it was a damned good one.
“Just fate, I suppose,” he meditated aloud. “That’s why I’m here. Or somebody’s plan?”
Still the enigmatic smile. Nimue raised an open hand, and made a small gesture with two fingers, and two of the things—in the old days he would probably have called them familiars—from two of the top corners of the room went flickering away upon some errand. They were pre-instructed, evidently, or maybe pre-programmed was the modern word.
Nimue said: “No plan of mine, Mr. Hawk. You can leave here any time you want to, for all of me. All we wanted was some human who would not be missed, so it will be easy enough to obtain a replacement. The rack was just a handy place to keep you, nothing more. By the way, would you like a good bottle of wine to take along? I understand that wine had been your chief interest ever since we last spoke.”
She couldn’t resist a chance for petty cruelty. Hawk shuddered. The emotion that made him do so was not quite recognizable. “Just ‘some human’, hey? And you got me. How about that man who picked me up on the street? Some private plan of his, maybe?”
Nimue looked as if she would like to remind Mr. Hawk of his expressed wish to leave, but was at the same time afraid that any word from her might have an opposite effect. Was all this some subtle ploy intended to influence him to stay? Hawk didn’t think so.
He could see that some enterprise of consequence was in the process of organization here.
Besides the squat-toads, relatively easy to visualize when you knew how, a veritable crowd of other presences were waiting in the wings. The dim dungeon—as moderns would call this place, he’d rather simply call it a hole—crawled with powers, his own, Nimue’s, who-knew-whose. All these were edging each other ominously, maneuvering for position, elbowing like basketball players under some evil backboard. Were such as these in fact spirits? Were they alive at all, or like the winds only the artifacts of some invisible force? He still didn’t know, despite the long centuries of service he had received from some of them. The older he grew the less he knew with certainty. But when the ball flew at the backboard, things were going to happen. Of that he could be sure.
Anyway something of his own willed purpose must have been worked out amid the jockeying. A recent
