The Talisman

underside and brushing Richard’s cheek like sand-colored grass . . . and where that hair-covered skin had come from he could see the naked gleam of Richard Sloat’s skull.

“Did it break?” Richard asked. His voice cracked toward a scream. “Jack, did it break when I fell?”

“It’s okay, Richie—it’s—”

Richard’s blood-rimmed eyes bulged widely at something behind him. “Jack! Jack, look o —!”

Something that felt like a leather brick—one of Morgan Sloat’s Gucci loafers—crashed up between Jack’s legs and into his testicles. It was a dead-center hit, and Jack crumpled forward, suddenly living with the greatest pain of his life—a physical agony greater than any he had ever imagined. He couldn’t even scream.

“It’s okay,” Morgan Sloat said, “but you don’t look so good. Jacky-boy. Not

              at

                  all.”

And now the man slowly advancing on Jack—advancing slowly because he was savoring this—was a man to whom Jack had never been properly introduced. He had been a white face in the window of a great black coach for a space of moments, a face with dark eyes that somehow sensed his presence; he had been a rippling, changing shape bludgeoning itself into the reality of the field where he and Wolf had been talking of such wonders as litter- brothers and the big rut-moon; he had been a shadow in Anders’s eyes.

But I’ve never really seen Morgan of Orris until now, Jack thought. And he still was Jack—Jack in a pair of faded, dirty cotton pants of a sort you might expect to see an Asian coolie wearing, and sandals with rawhide thongs, but not Jason—Jack. His crotch was a great frozen scream of pain.

Ten yards away was the Talisman, throwing its effulgent glow along a beach of black sand. Richard was not there, but this fact did not impress itself on Jack’s conscious mind until a bit later.

Morgan was wearing a dark blue cape held at the neck with a catch of beaten silver. His pants were the same light wool as Sloat’s pants, only here they were bloused into black boots.

This Morgan walked with a slight limp, his deformed left foot leaving a line of short hyphens in the sand. The silver catch on his cloak swung loose and low as he moved, and Jack saw that the silver thing had nothing at all to do with the cape, which was held by a simple unadorned dark cord. This was some sort of pendant. He thought for a moment that it was a tiny golf-club, the sort of thing a woman might take off her charm-bracelet and wear around her neck, just for the fun of it. But as Sloat got closer, he saw it was too slim—it did not end in a club-head but came to a point.

It looked like a lightning-rod.

“No, you don’t look well at all, boy,” Morgan of Orris said. He stepped over to where Jack lay, moaning, holding his crotch, legs drawn up. He bent forward, hands planted just above his knees, and studied Jack as a man might study an animal his car has run over. A rather uninteresting animal like a woodchuck or a squirrel. “Not a bit well.”

Morgan leaned even closer.

“You’ve been quite a problem for me,” Morgan of Orris said, bending lower. “You’ve caused a great deal of damage. But in the end—”

“I think I’m dying,” Jack whispered.

“Not yet. Oh, I know it feels like that, but believe me, you’re not dying yet. In five minutes or so, you’ll know what dying really feels like.”

“No . . . really . . . I’m broken . . . inside,” Jack moaned. “Lean down . . . I want to tell . . . to ask . . . beg . . .”

Morgan’s dark eyes gleamed in his pallid face. It was the thought of Jack begging, perhaps. He leaned down until his face was almost touching Jack’s. Jack’s legs had drawn up in response to the pain. Now he pistoned them out and up. For a moment it felt as if a rusty blade were ripping up from his genitals and into his stomach, but the sound of his sandals striking Morgan’s face, splitting his lips and crunching his nose to one side, more than made up for the pain.

Morgan of Orris flailed backward, roaring in pain and surprise, his cape flapping like the wings of a great bat.

Jack got to his feet. For a moment he saw the black castle—it was much larger than the Agincourt had been; seemed, in fact, to cover acres—and then he was lunging spastically past the unconscious (or dead!) Parkus. He lunged for the Talisman, which lay peacefully glowing on the sand, and as he ran he

              flipped back

                  to the American Territories.

“Oh you bastard!” Morgan Sloat bellowed. “You rotten little bastard, my face, my face, you hurt my face!”

There was a crackling sizzle and a smell like ozone. A brilliant blue-white branch of lightning passed just to Jack’s right, fusing sand like glass.

Then he had the Talisman—had it again! The torn, throbbing ache in his crotch began to diminish at once. He turned to Morgan with the glass ball raised in his hands.

Morgan Sloat was bleeding from the lip and holding one hand up to his cheek—Jack hoped that he had cracked a few of Sloat’s teeth while he was at it. In Sloat’s other hand, outstretched in a curious echo of Jack’s own posture, was the keylike thing which had just sent a lightning-bolt snapping into the sand beside Jack.

Jack moved sideways, his arms straight out before him and the Talisman shifting internal colors like a rainbow machine. It seemed to understand that Sloat was near, for the great grooved glass ball had begun a kind of subtonal humming that Jack felt—more than heard—as a tingle in his hands. A band of