The Talisman

and saw a second knight, this one wearing the shallow, bowl-shaped head-guard known as the Great Helm. Behind it were a third . . . and a fourth. They came slowly down the corridor, moving suits of ancient armor which now housed vampires of some sort.

Then the hands seized him by the shoulders. The blunt spikes on the gloves slid into his shoulders and arms. Warm blood flowed and the livid, wrinkled face drew into a horrid hungry grin. The cubitieres at the elbows screeched and wailed as the dead knight drew the boy toward itself.

9

Jack howled with the pain—the short blunt-tipped spikes on its hands were in him, in him, and he understood once and for all that this was real, and in another moment this thing was going to kill him.

He was yanked toward the yawning, empty blackness inside that helmet—

But was it really empty?

Jack caught a blurred, faded impression of a double red glow in the darkness . . . something like eyes. And as the armored hands drew him up and up, he felt freezing cold, as if all the winters that ever were had somehow combined, had somehow become one winter . . . and that river of frigid air was now pouring out of that empty helmet.

It’s really going to kill me and my mother will die, Richard will die, Sloat will win, going to kill me, going to

(tear me apart rip me open with its teeth)

freeze me solid—

JACK! Speedy’s voice cried.

(JASON! Parkus’s voice cried.)

The pick, boy! Use the pick! Before it’s too late! FOR JASON’S SAKE USE THE PICK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

Jack’s hand closed around it. It was as hot as the coin had been, and the numbing cold was replaced with a sudden sense of brain-busting triumph. He brought it out of his pocket, crying out in pain as his punctured muscles flexed against the spikes driven into him, but not losing that sense of triumph—that lovely sensation of Territories heat, that clear feeling of rainbow.

The pick, for it was a pick again, was in his fingers, a strong and heavy triangle of ivory, filigreed and inlaid with strange designs—and in that moment Jack

(and Jason)

saw those designs come together in a face—the face of Laura DeLoessian.

(the face of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer.)

10

“In her name, you filthy, aborted thing!” they shouted together—but it was one shout only: the shout of that single nature, Jack/Jason. “Get you off the skin of this world! In the name of the Queen and in the name of her son, get you off the skin of this world!”

Jason brought the guitar-pick down into the white, scrawny face of the old vampire-thing in the suit of armor; at the same instant he sideslipped without blinking into Jack and saw the pick whistle down into a freezing black emptiness. There was another moment as Jason when he saw the vampire-thing’s red eyes bulge outward in disbelief as the tip of the pick plunged into the center of its deeply wrinkled forehead. A moment later the eyes themselves, already filming over, exploded, and a black, steaming inchor ran over his hand and wrist. It was full of tiny biting worms.

11

Jack was flung against the wall. He hit his head. In spite of that and of the deep, throbbing pain in his shoulders and upper arms, he held on to the pick.

The suit of armor was rattling like a scarecrow made out of tin cans. Jack had time to see it was swelling somehow, and he threw a hand up to shield his eyes.

The suit of armor self-destructed. It did not spray shrapnel everywhere, but simply fell apart—Jack thought if he had seen it in a movie instead of as he saw it now, huddled in a lower hallway of this stinking hotel with blood trickling into his armpits, he would have laughed. The polished-steel helmet, so like the face of a bird, fell onto the floor with a muffled thump. The curved gorget, meant to keep the knight’s enemy from running a blade or a spear- point through the knight’s throat, fell directly inside it with a jingle of tightly meshed rings of mail. The cuirasses fell like curved steel bookends. The greaves split apart. Metal rained down on the mouldy carpet for two seconds, and then there was only a pile of something that looked like scrap-heap leftovers.

Jack pushed himself up the wall, staring with wide eyes as if he expected the suit of armor to suddenly fly back together. In fact, he really did expect something like that. But when nothing happened he turned left, toward the lobby . . . and saw three more suits of armor moving slowly toward him. One held a cheesy, mould-caked banner, and on it was a symbol Jack recognized: he had seen it fluttering from guidons held by Morgan of Orris’s soldiers as they escorted Morgan’s black diligence down the Outpost Road and toward Queen Laura’s pavillion. Morgan’s sign —but these were not Morgan’s creatures, he understood dimly; they carried his banner as a kind of morbid joke on this frightened interloper who presumed to steal away their only reason for being.

“No more,” Jack whispered hoarsely. The pick trembled between his fingers. Something had happened to it; it had been damaged somehow when he used it to destroy the suit of armor which had come from the Heron Bar. The ivory, formerly the color of fresh cream, had yellowed noticeably. Fine cracks now crisscrossed it.

The suits of armor clanked steadily toward him. One slowly drew a long sword which ended in a cruel-looking double point.

“No more,” Jack moaned. “Oh God please, no more, I’m tired, I can’t, please, no more, no more—”

Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack—

“Speedy, I can’t!” he screamed. Tears cut through the dirt on his face. The suits of armor approached with all the inevitability of steel auto parts on an assembly line. He heard an Arctic wind whistling inside their cold black spaces.