Adventures Of Myhr Part 25

The Overduke's Palace, a Parlor "Orders is orders ma'am," said Captain Rockbush stoically. "His lords.h.i.+p is the only one who can revoke 'em."

"But if what we heard is true, then it wasnot Lord Anton who gave those orders," Velma patiently argued.

"I was there, ma'am, I oughter know Lord Anton from Lord Botello, who was a sight shorter and dead these two weeks."

"But Lord Anton has been possessed by Botello!"

"Perhaps so, ma'am, but it's not my place to make that judgment. Besides, this here Lord Cadmus might be telling you a tale so as to make an escape. I will afford that it is very original. I've not heard better."

"But he positively reeks of sulfur-doesn't that tell you something?"

"Only that Lord Anton was at work in his Black Room. Maybe he had call for sulfur in his magics. Or rotten eggs. Not my place to make inquiries into his business, ma'am."

Cadmus, sitting on the edge of one of the comfy chairs, buried his head in his hands and groaned. "It's all right, Velma. This is the price of my trusting the wrong man. My gawds, a dead man at that. And they say the dead don't lie."

The other guard, posted at the door by Rockbush, stifled a snort of reaction. Whether it was amus.e.m.e.nt or derision was hard to say. Rockbush was rather more conscious of his training in palace deportment and shot him a glare. The doctor stood by a window, looking squintily thoughtful.

"Perhaps Lord Perdle might be of a.s.sistance," he suggested. "Maybe," said Velma. "But he's not here in the palace. It would be very hard to convince him that anything was off with Anton, either. Perdle's a good minister, but doesn't have a lot of imagination."

"I'm really very, very sorry," Cadmus moaned. "I know it won't help, but there it is."

"I'm sure someone will forgive you," she said, not too consolingly. "But right now we need a way of putting Anton back where he belongs."

"No question about it. With Botello pretending to be overduke there's all manner of mischief he can get up to."

"I'm more concerned about getting Anton out of h.e.l.l," she snapped.

Cadmus winced. "Um, yes, sorry. That must be our first course of action."

"So what do we do?" she demanded.

He opened his mouth, but no brilliant solution came out. He tried thinking a bit, but came up empty there, as well. Had the few hours he'd spent in a mindlock destroyed his ability to reason? Impossible.

Cadmus was fully aware and awake now and trying hard not to s.h.i.+ver as various possibilities about his own immediate future came unbidden to him. Those were gruesomely clear. Nearly all had him wasting away in a dungeon bound up in different kinds of torture devices; the rest had to do with quicker modes of death. It was one thing to hear about the stuff when at a party with a ghost story theme, quite another to face the prospect of learning about them firsthand. Botello would want this inconvenient witness quite thoroughly gone.

"Logically," said the doctor, "we must confront Lord Anton-that is to say Botello. If he is Botello. Are you sure?"

"Abundantly so, my dear fellow," Cadmus answered. "He will deny all, though."

"Certainly he would, whether or not what you told us is true. But the motivation behind the denial will be different for each man. If he is Lord Anton he will have one sort of reaction. If he is Lord Botello, another. But how to determine which is which? Perhaps the lady would be able to shed some light should she be a witness to-"

"Forget it," said Velma. "Let's just a.s.sume he's Botello and take it from there, 'cause if he's really Anton it's gonna be easier to get forgiveness than permission."

"Permission to do what?"

"I don't know! Cadmus has all the magic training, ask him."

Cadmus groaned again. "Magic training, but no magic. He sc.r.a.ped me clean."

"What?"

"It's all gone. I can feel it inside, that is, I can't feel it inside. This happened to me once before when I had a really bad cold, was flat on my back for weeks. Though I got well again physically I was still recovering astrally. Took me months to build up to full magical strength again." "Indeed," said the doctor. "I've heard the same complaint from other Talents; physical ills and even pregnancy affects their working powers. What about now?"

"Now?"

"Recovering what you've lost."

"That's the dodgy bit; there's no magical energy to be had. Botello's drained it all away."

"All of it?"

"Yes! That's why there are no Talents left in Rumpock!"

"That's not just a rumor?"

"No! The Talents who were in town the night the h.e.l.l-river first rolled through were gone by morning.

He never told me what happened to them, but I think they'd been absorbed into it."

"Absorbed. Uh-hum." The doctor sounded dubious, but lacking Talent himself it was understandable.

"No one was reported as missing, though."

"Because of the river! It did something to nearly everyone's memory. Oh, bother. You believe it, don't you, Velma?"

"Anton believed it, and I believed him," she hedged. "But back to the main problem. How do we get Botello out of him and Anton back from h.e.l.l? Without magic?"

"We can't."

"We might come morning."

"What do you mean?"

"The dawn meeting of the remaining Talents? You and Anton talked about it at dinner."

"ButI wasn't there. That was Botello in my body, remember?"

She nodded. "And neither of us noticed any difference in your manner, either. It could be real hard proving Anton's Botello."

Cadmus looked up, nonplused and annoyed. "You mean you didn't see anything odd about my behavior?"

"Sorry. It's not the sort of thing you normally have to look out for."

He bit back a very ungentlemanly word. b.l.o.o.d.y Botello. Not only had he done a mindlock and impersonated him, but had beengood at it. Cadmus hated the idea of being that easy to mimic.

"The meeting," reminded Velma. "Just after dawn the Talents are all going to come here. Anton wanted them to focus together and work out a way of getting rid of the h.e.l.l-river. They would either talk it all outor he told me something about pooling their power to help him get a really clear vision of a solution.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, not so good now, unless they can put Anton back where he belongs."

"You'll have to warn them off or Botello will sc.r.a.pe them out just like me, then gawd knows what he'll do next. He'll be the only one with magical power, mountains of it."

"There's not that much left," she pointed out. "And magic's not all that strong."

He gaped at her. People without Talent just didn'tknow . It was like explaining music to the tone-deaf.

"Not on this side of Reality. It's more subtle here. But on Otherside . . . like in h.e.l.l . . . it's beyond imagining."

And evidently beyond Velma's immediate imagining. "Okay, fine, but Botello's on our side of Reality, so he'll be limited in what he can do."

"No he won't! I think he's going to have the same impact here as he did when he was in h.e.l.l."

"That's bad, right? So then we've really got to get Anton back. How?"

Cadmus was about to lose all sense of good manners and bellow out to her face that he didn't know, when a perfectly wonderful, absolutelybrilliant thought blossomed in his mind.

But before Cadmus could voice it, Captain Rockbush clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder. "That's all for now, sir, your lords.h.i.+p's feeling better, and I've got my orders. Come along quietly, there's a good fellow."

Chapter Thirteen.

In an Undetermined Otherside Location Not Quite in h.e.l.l Overduke Anton was not a man given to hysteria. Life had taught him the wisdom of calm; it had been decades since his last outburst in childhood. He forgot all about self-control for a whole minute, though, as he tumbled helplessly in a terrifying, smoky abyss the color of blood. At any point in his long fall he expected to be dashed into something unforgivably solid that would silence his voice for good. Panic and shock required expression, so he vented them. Fully.

Then he had to draw breath, and a distant part of his mind informed him that he should have struck that unknown solidity by now. He risked opening his eyes a tiny crack-the blood-red clouds stinking of sulfur still unnerved him-to ascertain just what had happened to him . . . was happening.

Nothing pleasant.

He still seemed to be falling. Itfelt like falling, yet the clouds remained close, slow-churning about him, so they were either traveling at the same speed, or he was victim to delusion. Gathering his bewildered wits and forcing them to work, he concluded he wasfloating in some other place than his Black Room. Asthere were no cloudy red abysses anywhere near Rumpock, he eliminated one possibility after another-including visions, hallucinations, drugged kidnapping, and drunkenness. What remained he did not care for at all, as it meant that Cadmus had managed to shove him into an Otherside place, a not very nice one from the look and smell of things.

Look . . . by gawds, he couldsee ! Never had his physical vision been so clear before. His circ.u.mstance was awful, of course, but the novelty of unblurred sight took away a bit of its edge. But where and how was he? He didn't feel right, not bodily.

His hands, he noted, werenot his own. The fingers and nails were all wrong and the garment clothing him-he'd never worn this drab brown color that he could remember. The same went for the trousers, robe, and boots. He felt his face and hair. Oh, yes, those were wrong. What else? No . . . oh,no . . . not that . . . .

Fresh horror blooming, he grabbed his crotch, then sighed out grat.i.tude. Everything was there, hopefully in working order. Hastily, he pulled up the hem of his tunic, opened his trousers, and checked their contents. Good gawds. That wasn'this wedding tackle. What in the name of everything had Cadmusdone to him?

Before he could crumble into another bout of panic, there came a decided change in the sulfurous red air. The unforgiving hard surface he antic.i.p.ated occurred, only he seemed to justbe on it instead of smas.h.i.+ng into it. That was good. So far as it went.

He stood upright just as the clouds began to thin and whisk away. Intuition made him do up his trousers again. He be d.a.m.ned if he got caught anywhere with his pants down.

Dignity restored, Anton looked about him with his sharp new eyesight . . . and promptly wished himself blind.

Emerging from the retreating clouds before him was a h.e.l.l-being. There was no mistaking it, as it looked exactly like the nightmare vision he'd had not so very long past. The eyes were the same; so was the voice, a squalling shriek like all the souls that ever died cried out their torment through its gaping mouth, as though trapped within. The demon was far uglier, larger, and smellier than the vision, and the earth-or whatever it was Anton now stood upon-shook as it walked.

It loomed over him like a great red ma.s.s of growling hate, then bared several rows of needle-sharp teeth, snuffling to get his scent, glowering down with fiery eyes.

Despite a profound instinctual urge to pelt away shrieking, Anton held his ground. In the vision he'd dreamed he could not run or fight. If he was where he thought he was, there would be no point attempting escape. No one ever got out ofthis place to tell the tale. "Hallo, there," he ventured.

The demon snuffled again, belched out fetid breath, and roared. A very unsettling sound. "You're not Darmo," it p.r.o.nounced with dark certainty.

Anton didn't quite know how to respond to that. Darmo? As in Botello? What didhe have to do with things?

"Not. Darmo," it thundered again, ominously.

"Er . . . no. Not as such." Anton didn't recognize the voice he used to respond. It wasn't the one he'dbeen born with, but someone else's. Almost familiar, but not. Was this how Botello sounded inside his own head? A tiny little inkling of the terrible truth began to trickle into Anton's consciousness.

Rumble. Growl. The demon stood tall as houses over him, burning slime dripping from its jaws. "Then who the h.e.l.lareyou?" it wanted to know.

Darmo House, the Kitchen It was a good thing Filima had once led an ordinary sort of life, otherwise she wouldn't have been able to unbend enough to sit around a kitchen with Shankey and watch while I puttered and put things together for food. She had the demeanor of royalty required for her gig as the lady of the manor, but could drop it according to the situation. Anyone born to the life wouldn't have adjusted. She did a very nice slump with her elbows firmly on the table, looking all cute and adorable. I wanted to tell her that, but in her mood she might have slugged me.

Shankey turned out to be the sn.o.b of the moment, at first refusing to sit down until she specifically told him it was all right. He didn't mean anything against her; it was just his training. After I located and raided a stout keg we each had a beer and that helped things along. It wasn't as potent as Clem's, but worked well enough.

At this hour the staff was all in bed; we had the place to ourselves, and however huge the room, candles made our patch pretty cozy. Not a lot of light, but cozy. I had good night vision, but used my sense of smell more often than not to locate the needed ingredients for the feast I planned. Though Terrin had top cookery training, even he couldn't match my skill at made-from-scratch pizza.

As this wasn't the Earth I knew, there were differences in the food, but dough was dough and cheese was cheese nearly everywhere in the Multiverse. Tomato sauce was trickier, but I let my nose lead me until I found something like it in a cooler crock. They called it wolf apple smash, and warned that I'd need honey to take out the tartness.

I tasted the red sauce. Tomato/to-mah-to, a rose is a rose, and a cigar is a smelly leaf that costs way too much.This was what I wanted. "Just needs salt."

"Salt?" Filima was scandalized. "You'll ruin it."

"Trust me, this will work."

"What are wedoing here? We should be helping Terrin!"

"Trust me, thatwon't work. When he's on a research binge just keep clear. You clean up the mess he leaves only after he's done."

"But I can help him with Botello's code."

"You've been studying it for two weeks, right? Not made a crack, right? Let the wizard-dude play. He's got the magic for it."

"So do I," she maintained. And any little league player could throw a baseball, but not like Nolan Ryan. I kept the comparison to myself. One, she wouldn't get the reference, and two, if she did, she'd be mad at me for implying she didn't have the same level of expertise as Terrin. I was sure she knew that, but guilt and desperation to fix things had to be clouding her thinking. Now that she'd broken down and confessed all, she wanted action and to be a part of it.

"Just chill and go with the flow," I said, hoping to sound rea.s.suring. "Terrin knows what he's doing."

He needed his s.p.a.ce and isolation to concentrate. Sure, he could block out distractions, even hubba-hubba babes like Filima, unless she made a point to put herself in the middle of his work. As restless as she'd gotten that was a forgone conclusion. He'd turnreal cranky then. Better to keep them apart until it was time.

Time for what, I didn't know, but I felt it. It was big and on its way.

Sooner or later.

Not now, but not never.