The Talisman

He shook his head, and for a moment seemed to forget his haste. “It says in The Book of Good Farming that the meek shall inherit the earth, but those fellows don’t have a teaspoonful of meekness among them. Taking’s all they’re good for. They want wealth, they want—” He glanced upward, unwilling or unable to say what else the men outside wanted. Then he looked back at the boy. “We’ll have to be quick about this, but there are still a few secrets his men haven’t learned about the palace.” He nodded sideways, indicating a faded wooden wall.

Jack followed him, and understood when the Captain pushed two of the flat brown nailheads left exposed at the end of a dusty board. A panel in the faded wall swung inward, exposing a narrow black passageway no taller than an upended coffin. “You’ll only get a glimpse of her, but I suppose that’s all you need. It’s all you can have, anyhow.”

The boy followed the silent instruction to slip into the passageway. “Just go straight ahead until I tell you,” the Captain whispered. When he closed the panel behind them, Jack began to move slowly forward through perfect blackness.

The passage wound this way and that, occasionally illuminated by faint light spilling in through a crack in a concealed door or through a window set above the boy’s head. Jack soon lost all sense of direction, and blindly followed the whispered directions of his companion. At one point he caught the delicious odor of roasting meat, at another the unmistakable stink of sewage.

“Stop,” the Captain finally said. “Now I’ll have to lift you up. Raise your arms.”

“Will I be able to see?”

“You’ll know in a second,” the Captain said, and put a hand just beneath each of Jack’s armpits and lifted him cleanly off the floor. “There is a panel in front of you now,” he whispered. “Slide it to the left.”

Jack blindly reached out before him and touched smooth wood. It slid easily aside, and enough light fell into the passage for him to see a kitten-sized spider scrambling toward the ceiling. He was looking down into a room the size of a hotel lobby, filled with women in white and furniture so ornate that it brought back to the boy all the museums he and his parents had visited. In the center of the room a woman lay sleeping or unconscious on an immense bed, only her head and shoulders visible above the sheet.

And then Jack nearly shouted with shock and terror, because the woman on the bed was his mother. That was his mother, and she was dying.

“You saw her,” the Captain whispered, and braced his arms more firmly.

Open-mouthed, Jack stared in at his mother. She was dying, he could not doubt that any longer: even her skin seemed bleached and unhealthy, and her hair, too, had lost several shades of color. The nurses around her bustled about, straightening the sheets or rearranging books on a table, but they assumed this busy and purposeful manner because they had no real idea of how to help their patient. The nurses knew that for such a patient there was no real help. If they could stave off death for another month, or even a week, they were at the fullest extent of their powers.

He looked back at the face turned upward like a waxen mask and finally saw that the woman on the bed was not his mother. Her chin was rounder, the shape of her nose slightly more classical. The dying woman was his mother’s Twinner; it was Laura DeLoessian. If Speedy had wanted him to see more, he was not capable of it: that white moveless face told him nothing of the woman behind it.

“Okay,” he whispered, pushing the panel back into place, and the Captain lowered him to the floor.

In the darkness he asked, “What’s wrong with her?”

“Nobody can find that out,” came from above him. “The Queen cannot see, she cannot speak, she cannot move. . . .” There was silence for a moment, and then the Captain touched his hand and said, “We must return.”

They quietly emerged from blackness into the dusty empty room. The Captain brushed ropy cobwebs from the front of his uniform. His head cocked to one side, he considered Jack for a long moment, worry very plain upon his face. “Now you must answer a question of mine,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Were you sent here to save her? To save the Queen?”

Jack nodded. “I think so—I think that’s part of it. Tell me just one thing.” He hesitated. “Why don’t those creeps out there just take over? She sure couldn’t stop them.”

The Captain smiled. There was no humor in that smile. “Me,” he said. “My men. We’d stop them. I know not what they may have gotten up to in the Outposts, where order is thin—but here we hold to the Queen.”

A muscle just below the eye on the unscarred cheekbone jumped like a fish. He was pressing his hands together, palm to palm. “And your directions, your orders, whatever, are to . . . ah, to go west, is that correct?”

Jack could practically feel the man vibrating, controlling his growing agitation only from a lifetime’s habit of self-discipline. “That’s right,” he said. “I’m supposed to go west. Isn’t that right? Shouldn’t I go west? To the other Alhambra?”

“I can’t say, I can’t say,” the Captain blurted, taking a step backward. “We have to get you out of here right now. I can’t tell you what to do.” He could not even look at Jack now, the boy saw. “But you can’t stay here a minute longer—let’s, ah, let’s see if we can get you out and away before Morgan gets here.”

“Morgan?” Jack said, almost thinking that he had not heard the name correctly. “Morgan Sloat? Is he coming here?”

7

Farren

1

The Captain appeared not to have heard Jack’s question. He was looking away into the corner of this empty unused room as if there were something there to see. He was thinking long and hard and fast; Jack recognized that. And Uncle Tommy had taught him that interrupting an adult who was thinking hard was just as impolite as interrupting an adult who was speaking. But—

Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail—his own and his Twinner’s . . . he’s gonna be after you