unspoken, almost unconscious wish of his was granted: another look at the coffee-colored man who had picked up Feathers on the street, and drugged him, and then drove him all the way out here from Chicago.
This abductor came through a door into the dungeon now. “What is it?” he demanded of Nimue, in the tone of one who has just heard his name called from an adjoining room. Then he looked in surprise at the old man’s gown, and then he was distracted seriously by trying to aim a hard stare into the old man’s eyes. Whatever the hard stare met there caused the kidnapper to back up a step, right into a corner where one of the demon-toads hung right above his head. Neither of Nimue’s agents appeared, for the moment, to be aware of the other one’s existence.
Now that her human helper had been maneuvered into the room, Nimue would go along with his presence gracefully. “Carados,” she addressed him easily, “tell me why you picked out this particular old specimen? Out of all the wrecked men who must have been available on that street.” Her tone was mild, but the speech was a display of arrogance, giving away as it did the true name of one of her people, throwing caution aside, daring Hawk to make what use of it he liked. They both understood that she could still dare him as she liked. Because…
Carados shrugged. Insolently his eyes ransacked his mistress’s body, as if she had put that brief costume on to please him. She was not only in a swim suit, Hawk noted, she was actually still wet. She must have been called from poolside for the emergency. And again he wondered just what the hell was going on.
Carados said: “Why not? He was just about able to walk, so I didn’t have to carry him, but too far gone to put up any fuss. What’s wrong with him?”
“Take a milder tone with me. Somehow you were led, influenced, to choose this particular man for the next sacrifice. I would like to know who influenced you, and how and why.”
“He been feeding you some kind of line about me?” And Carados tried to look menacingly at Hawk, but somehow the intimidating stare became diverted. Carados stared up uneasily into one corner of the ceiling. Plainly he knew that something was there besides the stones, but he was having a lot of trouble even seeing what it was. Nimue had to recruit whatever assistants she could find, evidently.
And the jockeying in the background, below the level of mundane reality, had grown more feverish. It was more than jockeying. Hawk could feel the energies of magic, blind, immensely powerful, all tensing steadily like the magnetic lines of force wound tight within a generator, like land along an earthquake fault. His first estimate had been wrong. That little blowup of a few minutes ago had really achieved almost nothing in the way of a relief of tension. To hash the metaphor some more, that little blowup had only taken one key blockage out, and the logjam was now free to rearrange itself, which it was doing. When rearrangement was done, it would be free to move. There was likely to be another blowup down the road, and it was likely to be a bloody whopper.
His swearwords were becoming more English, he noted. He supposed that might count in some minds as progress toward elegance.
Nimue, he could see, was pondering, along with other problems, what best to do with her mad helper. The man must be very useful, very good at something, to balance the obvious difficulties of having him around. Hawk had now been near the man for long enough, and was now alert enough himself, to detect the dangerous madness radiating from him. The madman had received a bad scare, too, at some time in the recent past, a scare that would probably have disabled an ordinary citizen for some time. But he had hardly been affected once the danger was gone. Against some things madness could guard almost as well as powers.
Becoming aware of the scrutiny of the two sorcerers, and made uneasy by it, Carados became belligerent. “You’re nothing special, old man. You’re shit I picked up off the street. Hey, some cool threads you picked up there.” And he muttered some garbage that was meant to be a pain-inflicting spell, and reached to grab Hawk by the robe- front.
Such manhandling of the old man had been relatively easy before the recent blowup and mobilization. Nimue understood that stage of things was past, and now Hawk could see her wince perceptibly in anticipation. But Hawk had already eased the trigger on his defenses somewhat, and Carados only pulled back fingers twisted in a sudden cramp.
Unnoticed by Carados, the demon above his head stuck out a foot-long tongue in mockery. Carados rubbed his aching fingers, glared at Hawk, and moved forward to try again. Hawk looked at him in turn, and Carados stopped, his eyes turned downward in disbelief. In his mind he had felt the solid stone floor of the dungeon crack, threatening to open up beneath his feet.
Looking at Nimue, Hawk put his question once more: “What’re you trying to do here?”
Her smile was a touch broader than it had been before. Her teeth were fine, a little too perfect but otherwise very human. As she was, he reminded himself. She said: “Don’t you want the wine before you go?”
He muttered something foul. He wasn’t going to try to insist that she answer him, because… looking down at himself, he became distracted. When he showed up back on the Street, dressed like this… never mind, something could be done about that.
He spoke three more words, and was gone.
The woman in the yellow bikini looked up at the ceiling. All the toad-creatures were gone from its high corners.
Gregory, who must have been waiting, listening, just outside, came in. Fat Arnaud, still weak from the tearing of his werewolf’s throat by vampire’s fangs, followed cautiously behind him. Carados, understanding less and less of what was happening, looked at the three other people in the room with him, sneered at them, his mind retreating from the scene, superimposing its own reality.
The woman they called Vivian asked prosaically: “What time is it, Gregory? I must have a talk with our young visiting magician before dinner.”
TWELVE
Margie was still sitting in the position in which she had collapsed, on the grassy flank of a lightly wooded knoll. She was facing a small lake framed in gentle hills, its nearer shoreline a little more than a hundred yards away. The sun was low in a clear sky, the weather a gentle fairness utterly unlike the scorch of the morning and early afternoon of the day on which Margie had closed her eyes a moment earlier. The air here had a pastel quality, touched with mist. It was all so different that Margie understood from the start, without reasoning about it, that her journey had been a long one.
Here it was either early morning or late afternoon, with no immediately apparent way to decide which. The long grass was damp, either from morning dew or recent rain. The air was moist and fresh. Between the foot of Margie’s hill and the adjoining rise, a tiny stream murmured through tall rushes. The stream widened gradually into a small marsh at the place where it joined the lake. Immediately beyond the marsh, some high ground just along the lake shore held a string of crude, thatch-roofed buildings. Smoke rose tranquilly from a clay chimney. On the far side of the hamlet a single lane of road, unpaved and deeply rutted, followed the curve of shoreline for another quarter of a mile before turning away to vanish among more of the gentle, grassy hills.
In the opposite direction from the hamlet, to Margie’s left, a few sheep were grazing along the flank of an adjoining hill. When she got to her feet the movement was slow and uncertain, but still it caught these animals by surprise. They baaed and turned in awkward flight.
The disturbance among the sheep triggered another. A great shaggy dog that had been dozing near the buildings now awoke, with a savage volley of growls and barks. The animal leaped to its feet and started toward Margie, to halt when it reached the edged of marshy ground between.
The dog’s excitement in turn produced people. An old man and a young one appeared from somewhere to stand between two of the buildings. At first glance Margie thought that they were dressed very much like the servants at the party, but a second look showed that the clothing of these men was somewhat more varied and complex. They advanced slowly, with puzzled faces, to pause like the dog on the edge of the marsh. The young man spoke to quiet the dog, while the gray-beard continued to study Margie from fifty yards away, then hailed her. Their language was not English, nor—and this seemed additionally unfair—did it even sound anything like the tongue that the other two men had spoken before Margie in the dungeon. That scene too had seemed perfectly real. Before the world blew up in a swirl of monsters…
The peaceful landscape before Margie now was reassuring by comparison. Both men were calling to her now, but she could not understand a word.
She shook her head. At last she called back, in a tremulous voice: “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re
