holding still a short ways off. Another… hm, low temperature, diffuse and unstable emission, as if it were more like a… a swarm of cells coordinated somehow… pheromonally?… hovering, also at a distance. But the third’s practically next to us, moving around in the brush; and that pattern looks human.”
She saw him quiver with eagerness, no longer seeming a professor. “I’m going to try to make a capture,” he said. “When we have a subject for interrogation— Stand ready to let me back in again fast. But don’t risk yourself, whatever happens. And keep this cocked.” He handed her a loaded big-game rifle.
His tall frame poised by the door, opened it a crack. Air blew in, cool, damp, full of fragrances and murmurings. The moon Oliver was now also aloft, the radiance of both unreally brilliant, and the aurora seethed in whiteness and ice-blue.
Sherrinford peered afresh at his telltale. It must indicate the directions of the watchers, among those dappled leaves. Abruptly he sprang out. He sprinted past the ashes of the campfire and vanished under trees. Barbro’s hand strained on the butt of her weapon.
Racket exploded. Two in combat burst onto the meadow. Sherrinford had clapped a grip on a smaller human figure. She could make out by streaming silver and rainbow flicker that the other was nude, male, long-haired, lithe and young. He fought demoniacally, seeking to use teeth and feet and raking nails, and meanwhile he ululated like a satan.
The identification shot through her: A changeling, stolen in babyhood and raised by the Old Folk. This creature was what they would make Jimmy into.
“Ha!” Sherrinford forced his opponent around and drove stiffened fingers into the solar plexus. The boy gasped and sagged. Sherrinford manhandled him toward the car.
Out from the woods came a giant. It might itself have been a tree, black and rugose, bearing four great gnarly boughs; but earth quivered and boomed beneath its leg-roots, and its hoarse bellowing filled sky and skulls.
Barbro shrieked. Sherrinford whirled. He yanked out his pistol, fired and fired, flat whipcracks through the half light. His free arm kept a lock on the youth. The troll shape lurched under those blows. It recovered and came on, more slowly, more carefully, circling around to cut him off from the bus. He couldn’t move fast enough to evade it unless he released his prisoner—who was his sole possible guide to Jimmy.
Barbro leaped forth. “Don’t!” Sherrinford shouted. “For God’s sake, stay inside!” The monster rumbled and made snatching motions at her. She pulled the trigger. Recoil slammed her in the shoulder. The colossus rocked and fell. Somehow it got its feet back and lumbered toward her. She retreated. Again she shot, and again. The creature snarled. Blood began to drip from it and gleam oilily amidst dewdrops. It turned and went off, breaking branches, into the darkness that laired beneath the woods.
“Get to shelter!” Sherrinford yelled. “You’re out of the jammer field!”
A mistiness drifted by overhead. She barely glimpsed it before she saw the new shape at the meadow edge. “Jimmy!” tore from her.
“Mother.” He held out his arms. Moonlight coursed in his tears. She dropped her weapon and ran to him.
Sherrinford plunged in pursuit. Jimmy flitted away into the brush. Barbro crashed after, through clawing twigs. Then she was seized and borne away.
Standing over his captive, Sherrinford strengthened the fluoro output until vision of the wilderness was blocked off from within the bus. The boy squirmed beneath that colorless glare.
“You are going to talk,” the man said. Despite the haggardness in his features, he spoke quietly.
The boy glared through tangled locks. A bruise was purpling on his jaw. He’d almost recovered ability to flee while Sherrinford chased and lost the woman. Returning, the detective had barely caught him. Time was lacking to be gentle, when Outling reinforcements might arrive at any moment. Sherrinford had knocked him out and dragged him inside. He sat lashed into a swivel seat.
He spat. “Talk to you, man-clod?” But sweat stood on his skin, and his eyes flickered unceasingly around the metal which caged him.
“Give me a name to call you by.”
“And have you work a spell on me?”
“Mine’s Eric. If you don’t give me another choice, I’ll have to call you… m-m-m… Wuddikins.”
“What?” However eldritch, the bound one remained a human adolescent. “Mistherd, then.” The lilting accent of his English somehow emphasized its sullenness. “That’s not the sound, only what it means. Anyway, it’s my spoken name, naught else.”
“Ah, you keep a secret name you consider to be real?”
“She does. I don’t know myself what it is. She knows the real names of everybody.”
Sherrinford raised his brows. “She?”
“Who reigns. May she forgive me, I can’t make the reverent sign when my arms are tied. Some invaders call her the Queen of Air and Darkness.”
“So.” Sherrinford got pipe and tobacco. He let silence wax while he started the fire. At length he said:
“I’ll confess the Old Folk took me by surprise. I didn’t expect so formidable a member of your gang. Everything I could learn had seemed to show they work on my race—and yours, lad—by stealth, trickery and illusion.”
Mistherd jerked a truculent nod. “She created the first nicors not long ago. Don’t think she has naught but dazzlements at her beck.”
“I don’t. However, a steel jacketed bullet works pretty well too, doesn’t it?” Sherrinford talked on, softly, mostly to himself: “I do still believe the, ah, nicors—all your half-humanlike breeds—are intended in the main to be seen, not used. The power of projecting mirages must surely be quite limited in range and scope as well as in the number of individuals who possess it. Otherwise she wouldn’t have needed to work as slowly and craftily as she has. Even outside our mind-shield, Barbro—my companion—could have resisted, could have remained aware that whatever she saw was unreal… if she’d been less shaken, less frantic, less driven by need.”
Sherrinford wreathed his head in smoke. “Never mind what I experienced,” he said. “It couldn’t have been the same as for her. I think the command was simply given us, ‘You will see what you most desire in the world, running away from you into the forest.’ Of course, she didn’t travel many meters before the nicor waylaid her. I’d no hope of trailing them; I’m no Arctican woodsman, and besides, it’d have been too easy to ambush me. I came back to you.” Grimly: “You’re my link to your overlady.”
“You think I’ll guide you to Starhaven or Carheddin? Try making me, clod-man.”
“I want to bargain.”
“I s’pect you intend more’n that.” Mistherd’s answer held surprising shrewdness. “What’ll you tell after you come home?”
“Yes, that does pose a problem, doesn’t it? Barbro Cullen and I are not terrified outwayers. We’re of the city. We brought recording instruments. We’d be the first of our kind to report an encounter with the Old Folk, and that report would be detailed and plausible. It would produce action.”
“So you see I’m not afraid to die,” Mistherd declared, though his lips trembled a bit. “If I let you come in and do your man-things to my people, I’d have naught left worth living for.”
“Have no immediate fears,” Sherrinford said. “You’re merely bait.” He sat down and regarded the boy through a visor of calm. (Within, it wept in him: Barbro, Barbro!) “Consider. Your Queen can’t very well let me go back, bringing my prisoner and telling about hers. She has to stop that somehow. I could try fighting my way through— this car is better armed than you know—but that wouldn’t free anybody. Instead, I’m staying put. New forces of hers will get here as fast as they can. I assume they won’t blindly throw themselves against a machine gun, a howitzer, a fulgurator. They’ll parley first, whether their intentions are honest or not. Thus I make the contact I’m after.”
“What d’ you plan?” The mumble held anguish.
“First, this, as a sort of invitation.” Sherrinford reached out to flick a switch. “There. I’ve lowered my shield against mind-reading and shape-casting. I daresay the leaders, at least, will be able to sense that it’s gone. That should give them confidence.”
“And next?”
“Next we wait. Would you like something to eat or drink’?”
During the time which followed, Sherrinford tried to jolly Mistherd along, find out something of his life. What answers he got were curt. He dimmed the interior lights and settled down to peer outward. That was a long few
