Bitch.
Plots within plots within plots. Dierdre was beat to shit, broken bones and all, and Brian had killed one of her known lovers. Clues that Dierdre had been a victim of the plot and not its authoress.
And the bitch had a nasty habit of adding two and two and ending up with five or six. He hadn't told her about Claire, about that stumbling gasping run and the words in twos and threes that told him where to find a further refuge. He'd kept the secret. But the evidence said that she knew. This served as punishment for both of them.
He knelt there and cursed and wept, silently in case of any other guards. He'd trusted the Pendragons. He'd bloody well believed in them. This was where they'd led him. Killing a friend, a former lover. From behind. Assassination. Murder.
He had to keep moving. He could almost hear the hounds baying on his scent. Brian cleaned his blade again and forced himself to his feet again, swaying, leg and arm and side throbbing. Blackness washed across his eyes, and he found himself leaning against the cold stone of the wall. He reached out for Power, hoping, and it came to him grudgingly. Merlin's spells waned with distance. The thin flow let Brian stiffen his knees and clear his sight and dull the flames of half-healed flesh. He could walk again. Slowly.
His head still spun with the convoluted politics this hidden "Circle" had revealed to him. Claire had known about them, been one of them. Each layer he peeled off the onion, the stench got worse.
Dierdre had said there were two sentries. Be just like her, if there were actually three or four and he got his ass shot off this close to safety. That might serve her purpose, whatever her purpose was. Brian resumed his jungle stalk, limping and slow, a wounded tiger slipping through the shadows and the tall grass, trusting nothing. And then the corridor ended in a door in stone masonry, a simple blank metal door with a crash bar like any fire exit in any building world-wide.
He tensed, relaxed, balanced the kukri in his hand, and nudged the crash bar with his hip. The door swung open, no closer or springs, hit a stop, and bounced back half way. The room beyond lay empty, a small cell with two doors. The outer one was wood, old, worn, with iron and brass hardware from several centuries ago. He'd seen it in one of the monitors back where Claire had watched . . .
Again he swallowed bile. Dierdre had known exactly what her plot would mean.
The inner door had a modern keypad lock, a high-grade model that Brian had seen in military security. The outer door was set up for a heavy oaken bar that stood waiting on a pivot. No fiddling around, one swipe of your hand and it would thump into place. Even so, that door opened out as a further bulwark against battering rams. Pounding on it would just make it tighter. Generations of paranoia, carved out of oak planks.
It opened into a narrow alley, little more than shoulder-wide and dark under stars, no place to set your battering ram without first taking down the next building. And the alley opened into a dark one-lane street, high brick walls and shuttered windows and blank doors, no eyes on whoever came and went.
He felt the air loosen around him as he staggered to the end of the alley, as if his skin relaxed over his muscles. That must mark the edge of the warding set by Uther's favorite war-wizard. Was it still Merlin's original spell, or had Pendragon mages renewed it through the generations? Bugger-all difference it made, really.
But Power seethed around him, stronger than he'd ever felt in the "real" world, as if it piled up in waves against the dam that held it out of a place where it wanted to go. He gulped it like air to a drowning man. His eyes cleared and the fire of his wounds died back to a glow. He felt his hands shaking and knew he'd pay the price for this tomorrow, but he didn't have a choice. Not if he wished to reach tomorrow.
He found a street sign, memorized it in case he needed to find this place again, and then glanced up and down the sidewalk, fixing the buildings in his mind as well as making sure no one saw him vanish between one step and the next. Not that they'd believe their eyes . . .
But where was he going? Where would Maureen be? More to the point, when was he going? How had time been flowing behind his back, with the different streams of the Summer Country and the mist lands and the Pendragon's secret lair and the so-called "real" world?
Then he realized that he knew where Maureen was. He'd never heard or read of this before, but he could set her face in his mind and go to her, rather than a place. He could go to her, twisting time to her urgent need, and she needed him now.
And he needed Maureen, needed the Power of her healing, needed the clean smell of her to wash foulness from his nose, needed trees around him and sky above instead of old blood-soaked stones that reeked of treachery.
He saw her face in his mind, felt her hand, smelled her heady fragrance, and stepped through darkness to the image. She crouched on grass in a forest clearing, part of a tableau of statuary that included Dougal's black leopard and a fox. And Fiona, naked from the waist down and with her face buried in the throat of a newborn baby.
With one hand, Maureen tugged at Fiona's grip on the child. Maureen's other hand clamped the baby's cord. None of it made sense, but instinct told him old Alexander had the right idea. Sometimes you just cut the bloody rope instead of
