According to Belegir and Ivradan, Great Drathil had once been a sizeable stone-and-timber city in the foothills of the High Hilvorns, surrounded by sprawling fields and orchards.
Great Drathil was now a sizable charcoal-and-large-rocks wasteland surrounded by scorched earth and tree stumps, with only a few bits of wall to get in the way.
She and Ivradan sat a-pony on a rise at the edge of the forest, overlooking what used to be the city. They'd left Cambros, Tavara, and Belegir behind them at the Oracle early this morning, and on Felba and Fimlas (it was Marchiel who'd been the blue-plate special after all, so said Ivradan, not that Glory could tell any of the ponies apart), and leading another pack-pony, she and Ivradan had taken the supply road that had once connected Great Drathil with the Oracle of Erchane.
And now they were here, at what had once been the Allimir's largest city.
It was an area at least as big as downtown Melbourne, and it wasn't there any more, just charcoal and grey mud and pieces of buildings, but not quite enough of them to let her guess what the living city had looked like. There wasn't even green on the mountainside beyond the city—just bare rock and more bare rock and a few hundred million kilos of lab-sterile potting soil, all in shades of grey. The surrounding hills were nothing but bare mud, deep-cut with the erosion-furrows of five years of rain.
What the hell had happened? The city looked as if it had been firebombed. Supposedly it had been the first place in the Land of Erchanen to feel the Warmother's wrath, and that was five years ago. Surely there ought to be weeds and vines by now. Something to soften the look of utter destruction.
There was nothing. It looked like somebody had drowned the place in weed-killer and kerosene and then set it alight. Grey, and grey, and more grey, as bleak and sterile as something Glory couldn't think up a good comparison for. Not the mountains of the Moon, not even the death-camps of the last big war: the Moon was empty and neutral as a glass dish, and the death-camps had been the ultimate expression of human monstrousness. This was different than either one, disturbing where it ought to be terrifying, as though it were something so far beyond merely human comprehension that the human mind couldn't get a good hold on it.
But she'd better. Because this was where the danger was, and if she couldn't recognize the danger when it came, she was going to be buying a quick ticket to the boneyard, with the Allimir to follow her in pretty quick order.
And you might even be able to take a step back out of your own skin and look at that from a philosophical point of view, were you so inclined (it was amazing, as a noted Outback philosopher had once said, how much mature wisdom resembled being too tired), except that Glory had the sneaking suspicion that the nastiness wouldn't stop here. She already had ample evidence that the Warmother's magic didn't confine her to this world alone. Why should She stop here, once she'd turned the whole place into a bigger version of Great Drathil?
She wouldn't, would she? Glory bet that all those heroes who'd been "too busy" to come to the Allimir's aid would find time to pitch in against the Warmother once she wandered off her own patch, right enough. And Glory also suspected it would be too late.
So screw the consolations of philosophy.
She adjusted the sweatshirt she'd tied around her shoulders (and around her sword), shivering in spite of it. The day had dawned overcast, and even now was still grey—just as well, all things considered. Glory didn't think she could face the looks of this place in full daylight.
"Well, this is cheery, I must say," Glory muttered under her breath, getting ready for what came next.
It wasn't so much that she had an actual plan, as that she knew what she had to do. Whether that conviction stemmed from heroism or lunacy, she didn't know, and she certainly didn't think that the Oracle had provided the inspiration. All she knew was that she was entirely fed up with this Warmother, and she was going to go and tell her so.
"Which bit's . . . it?" Glory asked Ivradan.
Ivradan pointed at the tallest of the peaks. She had to crane her neck to look at it. The top, fittingly enough, was shrouded in clouds. Great Drathil had been built directly into the base of Elboroth-Haden, the mountain on which the Warmother had once been imprisoned—not where she would have put her largest city, if she'd had a seriously taboo mountain to contend with, but what the hey?
Ivradan pointed again, lower. Blinking and peering through the ruins of the city, Glory could make out a smooth stone path leading toward the mountain. At one time, it looked as if there'd probably been a set of rather nice iron gates barring the way—at least until they'd been mashed, crumpled, and generally wadded up like a couple of balls of waste paper in a rather petty-minded fashion by something large enough to do the job.
"There's something moving down there," Ivradan said in a tight voice. The Allimir horse-master wasn't a happy camper, but Glory gave him points where points were due: he neither grizzled nor whinged, and he'd come along without complaining. He did his job, and if he wasn't happy about it, who was she to blame him? She wasn't happy herself.
Then she saw it. Someone moving around down in the ruins, just stepping out of the shell of one of the buildings. Not a monster. A man.
There was something familiar about him . . .
"Hup-hup-hup!" A better horsewoman than she'd been this time last week, Glory chivvied Fimlas down the road into the city, leaving Ivradan behind.
The little beast was a showoff at heart, happy to leap the fallen timbers that stood in its way. Its unshod hooves clattered over the paving stones of the city proper as it moved into a gallop, and Glory found herself giving tongue to Vixen's trademark battle yell: "Hi-yi-yi-yi! Come, camrado! Evil wakes!"
She didn't even feel silly about it.
By the time she reached the place where she'd seen him, the man had disappeared. The building must have been dead impressive once, whatever it had been: the ground floor was made of large blocks of the local granite, which was why most of it was still here now. The side and back wall were almost intact, though blackened and fire-glazed, and enough of the second floor was still in place to form a roof of sorts, making the structure dark and shadowy inside. A nice place for spiders and snakes, not that she'd seen many of either since she'd got here.
Not that she'd put it past the Warmother to import either by the boxload, just for grins.
She swung down from the horse and pulled her sweatshirt off her shoulders, dropping it to the ground and drawing her sword. The blade flashed, an absurd spot of cheery color in the grey desolation.
"Come on out, you! Better now than later!" she shouted.
There was a scuffling sound from inside the ruins, and a figure emerged.
"Dylan?" Glory stared in slack-jawed disbelief. Dylan MacNee, a cutting-edge vision in black from his Versace loafers to his collarless Prada linen duster, stepped gingerly over the broken rubble and gawped at her in turn. Defrocked priest, hedge-Satanist and black magician (at least he played one on TV), she could have kissed him on the spot.
His resume claimed he was five ten, but Glory towered over him even in flats, and thought five eight was being charitable. Like most actors, he lied about all his vitals. He was slender and pale, with black hair and (thanks to colored contacts) startlingly green eyes, his narrow beard carefully trimmed and waxed into a properly Satanic point for his role as Fra Diavolo, minion of Lilith Kane, the Duchess of Darkness. He had the usual resume: East End, a little Shakespeare, a few episodes of Dr. Who, some commercials. One of that legion of eternal journeymen, their lives unchanged from the Bard's day, whose entire epitaph might well consist of the single line: "He always worked." Like the rest of the TITAoVtS cast, Dylan had been shipped to America on the promo tour, but his part in things had ended earlier than hers had, and Glory hadn't seen much of him after New York.
"Glory?" When he wasn't putting on side as the cultured Castilian, Dylan's vowels were pure working-class Britain. "What the hell are . . . ? That's not your sword!"
She'd used to think the stereotypes about actors never carried over into real life until she met Dylan.
"I reckon it is now," she said with magnificent simplicity. "Dylan, what are you doing here?"
"I was in the men's room at the Waldorf Astoria," he said with an expression of hurt dignity. "Then I came out again and they'd bombed the place or something. I'll sue, I swear I will. But what's going on? I thought you were out in the land of sun and hardbodies, doing vapid telly for luscious bronzed young persons. My God, you are a mess, aren't you? Ooh, Tricia is just going to kill you when she sees what you've done to your leather! And where's your sword? Your proper sword? Our Brucie won't be best pleased if you've gone and lost it somewhere, now, will he?"
"Dylan, did three short people in strange costumes show up and ask you to come and save the world?" Glory demanded in exasperation, cutting short what promised to be a lengthy catalogue of her lapses. Dylan's ability to ignore everything that didn't revolve directly around Dylan was legendary on the set, but this was excessive, even for him.
He fluttered his lashes at her sweetly. "Well, I am staying with some dear friends down in the Village, but . . . no. Now what the hell is going on?"
Glory sighed. "It is a very long and very complicated story. I'll tell you everything I know—"
"—but first I want you to wait right here while I go take a look at something."
"Suppose I don't feel like it?" Dylan said sulkily.
"Do you see any taxis around here?" Glory said. "Or Craft Services, for that matter? Stand about. There's things that come out at night here that make the jackbooted Family Values crowd look like something you'd want to meet. Hold this," she added, thrusting Fimlas's lead-rein at him.
For once, Dylan didn't have anything to say. He didn't even criticize her delivery. Glory strode past him, sword out, stepping into the ruin.
She wasn't sure what she was looking for—the men's room door of the Waldorf-Astoria, maybe. But there wasn't anything. She got as far as the back wall of the building, and found nothing more than a curious absence of debris. No mages, good or bad. No glowing crystals in any color, or eldritch runes, or anything in the least peculiar. Assuming she could identify, any longer, what peculiar consisted of.
If Belegir had recruited Glory to aid him because he was looking for a hero and had gotten her confused with the part she played, why was Dylan here? He didn't look all that much like Sister Bernadette, assuming The Powers That Were had decided she needed a sidekick. And if they'd wanted a Bad Guy, why wasn't Romy here, not Dylan?
Though anybody who tangled with Romy Blackburn got what was coming to them, and then some.
She shrugged. She had no clue. But even assuming they were after Fra Diavolo instead, anyone seizing upon Dylan as a henchweasel of evil had some unhappy surprises coming. Dylan wasn't willing to exert himself that much.
"The explanation?" Dylan demanded waspishly, when she re-emerged. He'd dropped the rein, and Fimlas had wandered away, looking for something to eat. She hurried after the pony and collected it, then sheathed her sword before returning to Dylan. She picked up her sweatshirt, trying to figure out what she was going to say. No point in trying to convince Dylan of the reality and the gravity of the situation. If Great Drathil itself couldn't convince him, nothing she could say would help. Best to stick to simple facts.
"When I was in Hollywood, a bunch of wizards from another dimension came and asked me to save their country from this villain called the Warmother. She lives up there," Glory added, pointing toward the mountaintop. "They'd got me all confused with, you know, Vixen, but before I could sort them out, their magic went off and I ended up here. Since she's going to do the lot of us whether I help or not, I thought I'd see what I could do."
"That's the stupidest pitch I've ever heard," Dylan said after a long pause, speaking with the surreal self-possession of the entirely self-involved.
Another pause, then: "Are you out of your flaming little mind, dearie?"
Glory shook her head wearily. "This isn't a pitch, Dylan. This is real life. And do you have a better explanation? Or an idea?"
"Run like hell," Dylan said smugly.
"Well, there's got to be somewhere," Dylan said uneasily. He looked around. "Even assuming I believe your idiotic story."
"Come up with a better one," Glory said reasonably. She turned and began to lead Fimlas back up the path toward Ivradan.
Dylan grumbled something barely audible and followed her.
"But look," he said, though he was forced to address this cogent argument to her back. "Even were I to accept this utterly shopworn tale at face value: why me? Galaxy Quest is hardly a fresh new idea. If someone wants a hero for their gladiatorial games, well and good, but why me? I'm a henchman, Glory, dear. Second villain and all, supporting frightener—though I must say, my Mercutio has been rather well received, and—"
"I don't know," Glory said bluntly, stopping to look back at him. "I want to know. I reckon I'd better know. But right now, I don't." She did manage to feel a bit sorry for Dylan. He'd been dropped right into the midst of things, and that none too gently. She'd be happy to send him off to the sidelines if she could, but where? The only possible place was the Oracle.
Maybe she could send him back with Ivradan. Who'd be worrying just now, and who would at least be easier to explain things to. She led Dylan back out of the ruined city, up the gentle rise to the edge of the forest to where Ivradan waited with the other two ponies. She only hoped he wasn't as familiar with TITAoVtS as Englor had been, or she was going to have a lot of fast talking to do to explain the presence of Fra Diavolo.
Ivradan's eyes widened when he saw Dylan. "Mind your manners," Glory told Dylan in an undertone. "His mum's a wizard who can turn you into a hatstand if you look crosswise at him. S'okay, Ivradan," she said, pitching her voice a little louder. "He's my, um, camrado. Dylan comes from back home. Where I come from."
Ivradan inspected the newcomer warily, taking in Dylan's wildly inappropriate but very fashionable outfit.
"Is he a wizard?" the Allimir horse-master asked at last. Dylan smirked.
"Not exactly," Glory temporized. But if she'd managed to kill an eight-foot-tall monster with a dull sword, who knew what Dylan might not be able to accomplish if he had to? She considered how best to explain to Ivradan that he was to take Dylan back to the Oracle with him, and how to persuade Dylan to go peacefully.
"More of your little friends?" Dylan asked idly, pointing out across the plains.
Glory turned and looked, and her heart sank.
A mass of marching figures. There were a lot of them, as many as TITAoVtS would lay on for a superdeluxe big-budget crowd and battle scene, say eighty to a hundred. They were, by the most generous estimate, five kilometers away, too far to make out the individual details clearly, especially in the diffuse grey light of the overcast day. She could not even tell whether they were entirely human. But the blades of their pikes or spears or whatever they were were clearly silhouetted against the sky, and they were wearing some kind of armor, and here and there in the mass of determinedly marching figures, she thought she could see a toxic gleam of blue, as from the glow of an amulet.
Ivradan watched them come with the worried incomprehension of a man who knows the news can only be bad, but still has no idea of what it is he's looking at.
The marauders were heading straight toward the ruined city, which meant straight toward them. The three of them couldn't hide and couldn't fight. And their directions for running away were decidedly limited. Glory took a deep breath.
"Ivradan," Glory said gently, "that is an army, and I reckon they'll be unkind to us if they reach us. I'm not sure we can outrun them, and if we try, we'll just lead them back to the Oracle. I'm afraid all three of us are going to have to go up the mountain. How fast can you get the pack off that pony?"
"An army?" Ivradan abruptly went greyish under his all-weather tan. "Her army?" He swayed on his saddle-pad, causing Felba to shift uneasily beneath him.
Glory growled a flavorful Elizabethan profanity under her breath—one that had slipped right past the Standards and Practices review board when it had made it into the script for the pilot episode—and went over to the pack-pony. She pulled at the forward cinch's double-ring closure, growling under her breath. Maybe there was some way over the mountain that didn't involve tromping down the Warmother's throat—and even if there wasn't, that was still better odds than standing here while an army of rogue bushrangers and freelance nightmares marched over them. The three of them could take the beer and whatever food they could carry with them, but the rest would have to be left behind.
The cinch loosened, and Ivradan, bless Erchane for what backbone he did have, was there to take the weight of the sliding pack and work the second cinch free faster than Glory could have managed.
"Can the wizard ride?" he asked, letting the packsaddle slip to the ground and worrying its waterproof covering loose.
"Like a sack of turnips," Glory said succinctly.
"Let Fimlas take him, then. You ride Felba, and I shall have Heddvi here." He tore through the contents of the pack with ruthless efficiency, winnowing its contents into three bags small enough for them to carry. She heard things break.
"Do you mind if I ask what's going on?" Dylan demanded, coming over to look. The first sack was full, and Glory thrust it at him, pointing back over his shoulder.
"That is an invading army. We are running away from it as fast as we can."
"On what?" Dylan asked, in tones that rather suggested he knew.
"No," he said, backing away, still clutching the canvas sack. "No, no, no. I don't do horses. You remember—when that damned Adrian of yours stepped on my foot I was lame for a month!"
Adrian the Wonder Horse had been a joy to all who knew him, but trick-horses weren't so thick upon the ground that Full Earth could afford to pick and choose, and Adrian, ham and prima-donna though he'd been, was a great big gorgeous beast, far less easy to replace or do without than any of the human cast. And he'd known it, too, more the pity.
"Then stay here and die," Glory snapped, losing what passed for her patience. If the errant gods of whimsy wanted to supply her with missing cast members, why couldn't they have sent her Adrian? He'd have been a bit more use at the moment. "I don't have time to argue with you, and I'm not going to carry you. But I reckon you ought to know that that lot coming are probably cannibals."
Dylan looked back toward the army. "I'll fall off," he whined, as if that made any difference to the facts.
"Try not to," Glory advised. "And don't drop the bag. It's got your dinner in it." She hoped.
Taking pity on him, she took one of the spare cinch straps out of the wreckage of their pack and buckled it around Fimlas, apologizing to him as she did. It would give Dylan something to hold on to, at least. The pony regarded her with wise sardonic eyes and shook its head energetically.
She got Dylan aboard Fimlas and mounted Felba, and Ivradan handed her tote-bag up to her and passed her one of the bags of supplies and a blanket, then mounted Heddvi, not bothering to rig what passed for a bridle here. Glory dug her heels in, and the pony headed back down the path toward Great Drathil. As she'd hoped, Fimlas followed of his own accord, and the sense of urgency was enough to keep even Dylan momentarily quiet.
The ridge cut them off from the sight of the enemy army almost immediately, though it was closer now, and Glory could hear scraps of sound carried toward them by the freakish acoustics of the ruins. A cry; something that might be part of a marching song. The most disturbing thing of all was that everything about the advancing horde wasn't alien. Although she didn't know for sure that they weren't human, they certainly weren't Allimir. And if the marauders were human, she had an even better idea of what would happen if the villains caught up with them, though it hardly mattered how dead they got, or what happened to their bodies afterward, if they were killed. Dead was dead.
She headed Felba toward the ruined gates and the path that lay up the mountainside. On their way here this morning, Ivradan had described Great Drathil as a walled town surrounded by a ring-road and a moat used primarily for drainage and sewage purposes. Glory had reason to be grateful for that now: the moat had probably been full the night the city burned, and its presence had kept the destruction from spreading across the road, with the result that their headlong flight was reasonably unimpeded now. Glory led, urging the pony to a ground-eating trot, and Ivradan brought up the rear, making sure that Fimlas and Dylan stayed essentially together.
She'd lost sight of the gate when they reached the ring-road, though she could see the higher bits of the path up the mountain now; a set of switchbacks leading all the way to the top. The army would be able to see it too, and probably the three of them on it, but there was literally nowhere else for them to go. They couldn't hide in what was left of the city—even retreating back into the forest wasn't a real option: if her eyes hadn't been fooling her, and those blue gleams she'd spotted were real, the magic the enemy was carrying would be enough to track the three of them down—or call them and their mounts to it, the way the monster had called Kurfan and the ponies out of the Oracle-cave.
Glory shuddered. Maybe they wouldn't look up and see them on the mountain path. Maybe they had other marching orders. Maybe the magic of the Sword of Cinnas was more powerful than their little talismans and would shield the three of them somehow. Maybe the bad guys were afraid of Elboroth-Haden, too.
Why do I always come up with perfectly good plans and then come up with perfectly good reasons why they won't work? She'd liked it better when she thought the Warmother was a figment of the Allimir's collective imagination.
At last the gates that had once barred the way to the Forbidden Peak came into sight. She could imagine they'd been pretty impressive back in the day. They'd probably looked like the gates on Skull Island, the ones the natives put up to keep King Kong out of the potato salad. Allimir teenagers probably snuck out here on dark nights and dared each other to touch them, then ran off giggling. That sort of thing.
They'd been made of wood and gold and iron. The wood had been reduced to a black spray of charcoal, as if someone had thrown paint on the rocks. The gold and iron had run all together, and the iron had rusted red with the rain of passing seasons, while the gold, annealed to utter purity, gleamed as bright as if it were still molten, running in threads across the dull rusted surface of the iron. The metalwork had been softened until it had sagged like moist potter's clay in a rainstorm, melting and slumping and sliding away, pulled by the patient force of gravity.
Then something, angry and impatient, had taken that soft hot malleable metal and forced it open, tearing it like an unbaked piecrust and crushing it against the bones of the mountain. There it had cooled, its form halfway between shapeless slag and the careful work of art it once had been.
Glory took this in during the seconds it took her to approach the gates and make her way through them at a trot. She'd have preferred a gallop, or a flat-out run, but Dylan couldn't stay on Fimlas at that gait, and they couldn't use the ponies up now when they'd need them later. Besides, they weren't going to win this one by speed. There was no way to outrun this enemy. Only to outwit him, ill-prepared as she was for that kind of fight.
What I need is a miracle, true enough. And this place has been running scant on those for a long time now, hasn't it?
The path began to incline sharply upward, and the pony, no fool, slowed from a trot to a walk. Glory wasn't sure what she'd expected to see on this side of the gate, but what she did see was a wide path, narrowing as it rose up the mountain, that seemed to have been cut directly into the rock as if with God's own butter knife. It ought to have been covered with the natural accumulation of the dirt and debris of a thousand years, but at the moment it was scrubbed as bare and clean as if someone had been through here with a new broom and one of those industrial steam-jets they used to de-grime skyscrapers with. The ponies' hooves clicked on the stone as if they were walking down Bourke Street back home. Even the rock around her held no shadow of moss, no fugitive weed making its home in a handy crevice.
Ivradan pulled level with her, and Felba took the opportunity to slow to a meditative walk. The horsemaster's face was grim, set in an expression that suggested he never expected to hear good news again.
"What now, Slayer?" he asked in a low voice.
"We go on. Maybe this path curves around the mountain. If we get round the side before they think to look up, we're home free."
"We're on Elboroth-Haden," Ivradan pointed out unnecessarily.
"Maybe the trail branches out up ahead and we can go somewhere else," Glory said soothingly. "Come on." She urged Felba into a faster walk, glancing back to make sure Dylan was still back there. He was. He looked rumpled and irritated, clinging to the cinch strap. She wasn't in the least surprised to see that he'd dropped both the bag and the blanket she'd handed him, and she was just as glad not to be able to get into any conversations with him just now. Ivradan dropped back to keep pace with him—and also, Glory rather thought, to allow her to be the first to face anything the mountain had to throw at them.
But that left her with nothing to do but brood, and keep the pony moving. Had she made the right decision? It had all happened so fast. Maybe they could have gotten out of there on foot ahead of the villains and kept all the supplies—it occurred to her she'd just sent the three of them haring up the side of a mountain at the end of summer with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and a couple of blankets.
But for that matter, what was an army—or a raiding party, or whatever it was—doing coming in this direction, anyway? They couldn't be looking for Allimir. All the Allimir were out on the Serenthodial, cowering in their vardos. There were only two things in this direction.
"Oh sod and bleeding buggering bugger all," Glory groaned feelingly under her breath. What if the raiding party was going home?
But no. She knew she was grasping at straws, but still. There'd never been raiding parties before, only the invisible something, striking under cover of darkness, that none of the Allimir had ever seen. That certainly wasn't a description of that mob the three of them were fleeing from now. Ergo, the Warmother did not, in the normal course of business, have job lots of villains heading back and forth to this particular mountaintop. So while the odds weren't against them heading in this direction, they weren't especially in favor of it, either.
Back to Square One. And back to this being a waiting game, or as much of one as you could play while ambling up a mountainside on ponyback at a brisk clippity-clop.
Fortunately, it was in the nature of mountain trails to curve, and eventually this one did, but unfortunately she'd been wrong about it going around the mountain. Instead, it turned at a right angle to itself and sent them parallel to the city, several hundred yards above it. Instead of sheer walls of granite on both sides of them, the one on their left was gone, and by now the trail had narrowed appreciably. They proceeded single file along an uncomfortably narrow path with a sheer cliff to their right and a sheer drop on their left, more-or-less in plain sight of anyone who cared to look up.
Beyond the burnt scar that had been Great Drathil, the vast prairie of Serenthodial the Golden stretched outward to meet the sullen sky. Somewhere out there were the last of the Allimir, counting on her to save them. The more fool they.
Closer at hand were the enemy nightmares. They'd reached the city and were swarming over the ruins as if searching for something. She could hear them shouting at each other angrily, and wondered what they were looking for. Unfortunately for her curiosity, she still couldn't see them very well. Great Drathil itself seemed to be their goal, any how, which was some small relief.
"I am going to be sick," she heard Dylan enunciate crisply behind her, and recalled guiltily that Dylan wasn't terribly good with heights.
"Sorry," she said, half turning on Felba's back to talk to him. Dylan's face was a greenish color and he clung to the leather strap about his mount's ribs like grim Death. "Just close your eyes and try not to mind. We'll be at the top soon." I hope.
Dylan followed her advice and addressed several feeling remarks to the ambient air, of which "insensitive Colonial trollop" was perhaps the most complimentary.
Glory spent the rest of the ascent worrying. She started with the probable and likely perils: the enemy forces, the weather, the state of their supplies, and then with enforced leisure, moved onward and outward: the possibility that one of the ponies would slip and hurl itself and its rider over the cliff, the prospect of a sudden ice storm or monsoon, the chance that they would be set upon by giant killer eagles or radioactive mutant bats. Somewhere in the middle of her worries she dug around in her bag and pulled out Gordon. Cuddling the stuffed elephant made her feel better, and it hardly mattered if she looked ridiculous.
When she had exhausted all the possible and improbable disasters that could happen during their ascent, she prepared to start in on what would happen when they got to the top of the mountain, but then she realized she really didn't need to. Her imagination was exhausted. When they got to the top of the mountain, they were all going to die. She believed that absolutely. She was certainly going to give interfering with that outcome her best shot, but she knew that so far she'd only seen the Warmother's warming-up exercises, and even those were good enough to squash her like a bug.
Still, giving up wasn't in her. You went out there and tried—and tried your best, because anything less was cheating yourself and your opponent. Winning wasn't as important as doing your best—the lessons of a thousand gymnastic competitions, drummed into her from the time she could barely walk, came back to her now. Outgunned, but never outclassed, that was what her coach Ross always used to say to her. "C'mon, Glory-gel, y'wanna live forever?" And the answer she'd learned to give—if only inside her head—as she grew was always the same: "I choose glory over length of days . . ."
They'd been climbing steadily for what seemed like ages, but with the switchbacks and the angle of the trail, it was impossible to see any distance ahead, and hard to tell how much farther they had to go. It was only when she reached the last of the switchbacks that she realized it was the last one, or near it, because ahead the trail was blanketed with a dense fog. Clouds. She remembered that the top of the mountain had been shrouded in mist.
She hoped Dylan still had his eyes closed.
She reached out her left hand and let her fingers brush against the rock. It was wet. They ought to dismount and lead the ponies, but the trail now was too narrow and much too slippery even for that. She didn't know if Felba would walk on if he couldn't see the trail in front of him, or how slippery the mist would make the bare stone beneath his hooves, but this was no time for second-guessing. She wound her free hand in the pony's mane, clutched Gordon tightly against her side, and held on, wishing she could pray, but she couldn't bear to close her eyes.
Felba walked on into the mist at the same placid unhurried pace at which he'd covered the rest of the ascent. The mist settled around her, wet and chill, until she could see nothing—not her outstretched arm, not the animal beneath her. The sound of the ponies' hoofbeats, so clear and sharp a moment before, jumbled and faded away into an echoing arrhythmia.
"Glory!" Dylan's voice boomed out of the mist somewhere behind her. She heard something else—maybe Ivradan—but couldn't make out the words.
"It's all right," she shouted back, though to her own ears, her voice sounded flat and muffled. "I reckon we're near the top. Hang on!"
As if he'd do anything else. Fair strangling the poor beast, he probably was.
Water beaded up on her skin and began to run down it in rivulets, trickling beneath her corset and soaking the lining. Glory shivered as the chill of the sodden fog began to make its presence felt, and spared a wistful thought for all those other blankets they'd had to abandon. Her hair was braided back, but even so, she could feel it getting heavier as it wicked up moisture from the air around her just as if it were raining. She hoped that whatever that purple sword was made of, it wasn't something that could rust.
Through it all, the little pony plodded on doggedly.
Glory didn't know how long they spent in the cloudbank—it was strange how the destruction of all visual referents destroyed the time sense as well—but suddenly she was aware of a peculiar brightness ahead. Then the mist thinned further, and she realized it was sunlight. Bright afternoon sunlight.
As simply as that, they were through the fog. Somewhere back in the mist the trail had widened, or ended, or whatever. They were here, at the top, in daylight, looking down at the tops of clouds.
The top of the mountain was absolutely flat, as though someone had decided to construct a king-size scenic car-park in the middle of nowhere. It was large—you could drop Melbourne Cricket Ground in the middle of it and have elbow room to spare—and completely covered with short, velvety, utterly weed-free lawn.
And in the middle of it there was a genuine size-extra large Mad Enchanter Stronghold. It looked like it had been designed by Perky Goths, or maybe by Martians who'd seen one too many episodes of Beverly Hills 90210. It was at least five stories tall—the towers were taller, and there were a lot of them—and apparently chiseled out of one giant piece of mother-of-pearl. It was carved and ornamented over every inch of its surface, and polished to a fare-thee-well. It flashed and glittered iridescently in the sun, and the whole thing gave Glory a headache to look at it. Banners and pennants flew from every place a banner or pennant could fly from, all of them as soap-bubble glistery as the palace itself.
"What the bleeding 'ell is that?" Dylan demanded, reverting to the vowels of earliest youth. He slid stiffly off Fimlas' back and staggered toward Glory, giving his inoffensive mount a backward look of venomous dislike.
Ivradan made a sound very like a groan of despair, slipping easily from Heddvi's back. Both animals stood stolidly, neither dipping its muzzle to browse at the greensward.
"Turn them loose," Glory said in a low whisper. She stroked Felba's neck, stripping cloud-water from the coarse hair. She didn't like this place. She liked it less with every passing moment, and she didn't know why—other than the obvious. It was storybook-pretty; cloyingly, exuberantly sweet, like a Precious Moments version of Middle Earth. It shouldn't leave her feeling the way Ivradan looked.
"Turn them loose," she repeated. She swung her leg over Felba's rump with some difficulty and stood up, letting her tote-bag slip to the ground. "Send them away, if you can."
She was here by choice. Ivradan and Dylan hadn't exactly had a choice, but they were able to consent. The ponies could neither choose nor consent to their involvement, and Glory wanted to save them if she could.
She'd been looking toward the others. The voice came from behind her. Glory swung around.
She was staring at a woman who might even be taller than she was. The woman was wearing a long heavy robe of turquoise blue gold-shot silk that resembled the robes of the Allimir mages the way a showroom-new Maseratti sports car resembles a battered old Ford truck. Her hair was entirely hidden beneath a silk caul in the same color, and she wore a high elaborate jeweled headdress with sheer floating veils that brushed the grass at her feet. Her eyes were brilliantly blue, her beautiful face serene in the way of a statue's or a saint's.
"If you want them gone, then they shall go." Her voice was like low music, kindly and amused.
Before Glory could say anything, the woman raised one arm in a sweeping gesture. The rings on her fingers flashed: the stones were a rich and toxic azure, a brighter blue than the sky. The robe had long batwing sleeves; they fell back as she gestured, revealing a tight undersleeve as brightly gold as if it were made of the liquid metal itself.
Glory stared numbly at the place where Felba had been, unwilling to look back and see that the other two were gone as well, though she knew they were. Even her tote-bag was gone. She clutched Gordon tighter.
She'd be a thousand kinds of fool not to know what was happening here. This was the Warmother, up close and in person. This was the monster the Allimir had sent her to whack. She was pretty—more than that. Beautiful. Glory wasn't deceived. She was entirely certain the Warmother needed whacking, no matter what the bitch looked like.
But what she couldn't do was just haul out her sword and start swinging, because that wasn't what heroes did. There were rules for being a hero, and Glory knew very well what they were (especially after a whole season as Vixen of playing straight man to Lilith Kane), even if she wasn't altogether fond of them. The rule in this situation was very clear: the villain had to attack first. Glory could reproach her with her wickedness, but she couldn't just walk in and clobber her. That just wasn't what the hero did.
And nothing less than textbook heroism would save the Allimir. If she wasn't a hero, she'd at least better try to be what she was—an actress—and act her part. Act like a hero, suck it up and do this according to Hoyle, and maybe when she bought the farm it would make a difference.
"Just what did you—" she began.
"Well, now, I'd say you've got something going for you a good deal better than smoke and mirrors," Dylan said, striding forward. He bowed to the Lady with a Shakespearian flourish. "Dylan MacNee—artist, thespian, student of the Bard. And who might I have the pleasure of addressing, dear lady. . .?"
The woman smiled, a cool smile of utter self-possession, and looked at Glory. "She knows. But for now, it pleases me for you to address me as . . . Charane."
She said the name as though it ought to have meant something to them, and Glory glanced back at Ivradan, but he was plainly and simply terrified, not up to fielding the in-jokes of Hell Incarnate. She stepped back and put a hand on his arm. She could feel faint shudders coursing through him, a trembling he could not control, though he kept his face impassive.
"Gracious lady, dear Charane," Dylan cooed ingratiatingly, and Glory realized what all this tiger butter was in aid of. Dylan might not have grasped much else about the situation he found himself in, but he did realize that magic had gotten him here, and only magic could get him home. And the monster in the fancy blue hat was the likeliest source of it available. "You see before you a lost and weary traveler, a long way from home—"
"And so I have made plans to greet all of you properly," Charane said gaily. "I bid you welcome to the castle of Arlinn, where there is a great feast prepared in your honor. Come. Join us. Let me receive you properly—and I promise you . . . all your desires shall be fulfilled," she finished in a meaningful purr.
"Well, this is something like!" Dylan said happily. Charane tucked her arm through his and led him toward the castle.
As she watched, he sank to his knees with a low moan of absolute terror, covering his face with his hands.
Glory knelt beside him, still clutching Gordon. She put her arms around him awkwardly, patting his back. Everything she could think of to say seemed inadequate—and worse, patronizing. Of course he was terrified. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't even an Allimir mage. If the Warmother scared her, what must Ivradan be feeling right now?
"I know I told you I wouldn't bring you here," she finally said, "but I couldn't leave you down there. The army would have killed you. And they might have made you do something that would hurt Belegir and the others first. I can't leave you alone here, either. I know you won't be safe. You won't be safe with me, either, but I don't think she means to do anything just yet. I think she wants to play." Now that the first shock was over, Glory was starting to get angry again. "Just like she's been playing with you lot all along." She shook her head and went on stroking his back. She could feel his muscles quivering, but Ivradan made no sound.
Glory looked around. There was no one in sight now—just the blue sky, the green grass, the white clouds stretching out level with the top of the mountain, and that ridiculous fairy-tale palace smack in the middle of everything. Like a deserted amusement park, or a stage set.
And it was a stage set, in a way. This was where the last act in the farce was going to be played out, wasn't it?
Glory faced it down, believing in her future enough to see it clearly at last. What if it had been the Warmother who had brought her here, all along? What if she'd done it to raise the Allimir's hopes, to make them think they'd found a hero, so that when Glory failed them, their disappointment would be all the more crushing? Like the cat that lets the mouse think it can escape, over and over again; that was how the Warmother was.
Glory gritted her teeth. I don't care. She regarded the glittering castle with narrowed eyes, a dull purposeful anger filling her heart to the exclusion of everything else. I don't care who brought me here—Erchane Incarnate, or the Warmother, or that Dreamer of Worlds bimb. It doesn't matter. The end result is the same.
She was here for the Allimir. It was just too bad for Earth, and whatever test Humanity was about to flunk for the eleven-hundredth time, but she'd been asked to this party by the Allimir, and now they had her. They had Vixen the Slayer, Vixen the Red, Scourge of the Night, Harrower of Hell, Doomslayer, Koroshiya, Hell's Own Harpy. And she had the Sword of Cinnas. That couldn't have been part of anybody else's plans!
Win, lose, or toes-up: she'd come to these games to compete. Stone the rules and stone the judges. She had the playbook. She was going to play.
Abruptly, Glory wasn't afraid, not the way she had been when she first saw the castle. She was still afraid of pain, and afraid of dying, certainly (though she hoped she was just a little more afraid to fail), but she wasn't afraid of the Warmother, not his/her/itself. You had to respect something on some level to be properly afraid of it, and Glory had never respected a bully. There was no self-discipline in being a bully.
She stroked Ivradan's hair. Poor little bugger. He didn't deserve to be here any more than the ponies had.
"I can't leave Dylan alone in there, thick as he is. And this is what I came for." To be murdered in an alien dimension by a crazed demon just to get out of a publicity tour? "To try to make her stop. So I reckon I've got to go in there after her. I can't say what's going to happen then. I'm sorry. I reckon I'm not too good at making other people's choices for them. I did my best, but maybe it isn't much of a best. I won't ask you to do anything you don't think you can do, Ivradan. I reckon you could try to make it back down the trail alone, if you want . . ." She stopped, unable to finish the sentence. She knew he wouldn't make it to the bottom alive, and if he did, the army would be there.
Either way—stay or go—he'd be dead.
"But you . . . you will go on?" Ivradan whispered, at last. He sat up, and brushed his hair back out of his eyes. His cap had fallen off, and his burnt-chestnut hair was as unkempt as the mane of one of his own horses. He looked hollow-eyed, like a man who had faced down Death and accepted his mortality.
"I'm stupid that way," Glory said with a faint wistful smile. She offered him her elephant.
"This is Gordon. Ever since I was a little girl, I carried him with me everywhere, especially when I thought I was going to places I wasn't going to like."
Ivradan regarded the stuffed blue elephant with an unreadable expression.
"Hey! This is a genuine interdimensional stuffed elephant from the world of Vixen the Slayer, which has accompanied her to the very wellspring of the Oracle," Glory said, desperately hoping to make him smile.
Ivradan regarded Gordon with more respect, and picked him up as he'd seen Glory do. "I will go with you, Slayer," he said, getting to his feet.
"No worries," Glory said automatically, standing as well. After all, we're dead one way or the other, seems to me. Maybe we can really piss this Charane bint off before we die.
She put her arm around Ivradan's shoulders, and side by side they started across the lawn toward the Warmother's castle.
Was this the worst idea she'd had in a long history of having not terribly good ideas? Glory wondered to herself. She knew a sane person would be peeing themselves in terror at this point, but the strongest feeling she was conscious of was irritation.
She had a lot of time to wonder about her own sanity in the time it took to cross the lawn and lead Ivradan up the steps of the castle.
The inside seemed to be much larger than the outside.
There was a short entry hall and the walls were mirrored. In their flawless reflection, Glory could see herself clearly for the first time in many days.
Though her hair was braided and still wet from the clouds, it still managed to be frizzy and unkempt, and it was several days late for a wash. The bruise on her cheekbone was fading to greens and yellows, showing through the pancake she'd hastily applied this morning. Her eye makeup was smudged and runny, ringing her eyes in a sloppy raccoon mask, and she'd eaten off all her lipstick hours ago. Her leather was scuffed and battered, desperately in need of a good polish and some decent care. She'd torn a couple of the chrome studs off here and there, and the crushed velvet panniers were crumpled and dusty. Her shoulders were peeling, and the bandage Tavara had put on her arm was grimy and tattered.
Dylan had been right. She was a mess. A joke. A—
"Don't look," Ivradan said urgently. She turned toward him. He was staring fixedly at the floor. "You will lose yourself if you look into her mirrors."
They're only mirrors, Glory wanted to say, and didn't. There was nothing "only" about any of this. Back at the Oracle, she'd had one taste of how sneaky magic could be. Who was to say that this wasn't another? She nodded, saying nothing, and kept her eyes fixed on her boots (not all that scuffed, not really) as she walked forward toward a set of silver doors even larger than the golden ones. They stood open, framing the entrance into what was obviously the place Charane had been taking them. The mirrors stopped a few feet short of those doors, and Glory looked up.
As if some invisible bubble had popped, she suddenly became aware of what lay beyond. The sounds of music, of talk and laughter and singing, the scents of roasting meat, of flowers and incense, flowed out of the great hall in a rolling wave of dazzling sensation. Framed by the silver doors as bright as mirrors she could see intense colors in every possible shade and hue; people and creatures talking, laughing, dancing; torches flaming, and bright banners waving languidly in the air of the windowless chamber. It was a three-ring circus and a Roman orgy and downtown Manhattan at high noon on a weekday. It was like walking into the Ginza on a Saturday night after three weeks in a sensory deprivation tank.
She stood where she was, stunned with the shock of it. Living among the Allimir, being with Belegir at the Oracle, had been . . . quiet. Restful, in a weird way. This was noise and bustle and toxic craziness, like being dropped back into Real Life with a jarring, disorienting thump. It was like nothing she'd ever seen—and yet, somehow, it was familiar.
After a long moment, she shook her head and doggedly forced herself forward, dragging Ivradan with her. If all this brought her up short, it must bollix him up twice over.
Glory reached the doorway and stopped again, though she'd sworn she wouldn't. The enormous room was oval-shaped, windowless as she'd guessed, and constructed somewhat after the fashion of an old Roman arena, making her think once more of Roman orgies and decadent mad emperors.
I hope that isn't an omen. . . .
On each of several levels that terraced the room, banqueting tables were laid, with plenty of room for the feasters to move around them. Staircases between the tables led down to the floor, on which dancers were gathered. Though she could see little of the walls themselves, covered as they were with banners and tapestries, if she were to judge by the floor, the castle seemed to be made of mother of pearl inside and out.
The musicians she had heard were gathered in screened platforms hung high on the walls out of harm's way—Glory couldn't quite see how you could get in or out of the boxes—and there were also strolling players working the crowd here and there. Directly opposite the entry doors, set on the highest tier, was a table with only empty terraces gleaming pearlescently below it. The wall behind the table was hung with azure velvet, and there was a gold-fringed canopy above it, and beneath the canopy sat an enormous golden throne upholstered in white velvet, with two smaller thrones beside it, all out of the Little Golden Book for Deranged Medieval Fascists.
Charane sat upon the enormous throne, with Dylan seated at her left hand, looking very much as if Trish was going to rush in any minute and scold him for being out of costume on the set during a dress walk-through. A number of lesser seats were arranged along Charane's table. All those seats were empty, but every other seat here in the Hammer Hall of Horrors was full. As Glory stared at the High Table, a servant came through the draperies to pour wine for Charane and Dylan, so there must be at least one other exit from the chamber. The table was covered with a long white damask cloth (at least if this were a medieval romance it would be damask: it could be polyester for all Glory actually knew), set with plates and goblets of jeweled gold—but only three sets. It looked like Charane had only been expecting two guests for dinner—but which two? Her and Ivradan? Or her and Dylan?
She glanced back. Ivradan was one step behind her, clutching Gordon like grim death and not looking as if he found any of this in the least amusing or even faintly interesting.
Glory looked around the room, eyes narrowed. The Warmother had certainly been busy. Only some of the creatures here were what Glory could properly call human. But she'd gawk at them later. Right now she had an entrance to make.
"C'mon, Ivro. Don't ever let 'em see you sweat," she muttered to her companion in an encouraging undertone. Squaring her shoulders, she strode down the steps on her way to the High Table.
She knew how Vixen would play it, and so Glory played it the same way: head high, face a mask of disdain, looking neither to the left or the right as she made her way down the long flight of steps. Conversation came to a stop as she passed, until by the time she got to the bottom of the stairs the room was completely quiet. Even the musicians had stopped playing. She hoped Ivradan'd had the great good sense to follow her.
Everyone was staring at her, watching her, and at last she realized why this seemed so familiar. Seoul. The Games. Walking into the arena with her mates, and everyone staring. Her heart beat faster. She'd thought then that it was going to be the most important time of her life, the payoff, that what she did there would pay for all the rest. It hadn't been true then, but it was true now.
There was a rustle like pigeons' wings as the dancers moved back to let her pass, and for a moment Glory felt like the heroine in a fairy tale, one of the dark Northern ones that ends badly. She heard the scuffling echo of Ivradan behind her. Then the steps at the far side of the dance floor were before her and she began to climb.
Going up was harder than coming down. She made her mind a blank and concentrated on doing it well. There were no re-takes here. All live, all real.
She reached the top and hesitated. Behind her, the conversation had resumed once more, quietly, and she had the feeling it was all about her. The Hero's Manual did not have a single clear-cut answer to cover this situation. Should she sit down next to the bitch and pretend they were all taking tea at Government House? Sit down at this end where she could reach the stairs easily? Refuse to sit down at all? She supposed it all depended on which kind of hero you were being, and unfortunately Vixen had never been in this sort of situation. She shrugged, and walked behind the table toward the "special guest" chair. Refusing to sit down would be silly, and Charane could probably outrun her or outfly her or something.
Glory pulled the chair out with her foot and eased herself into it as well as she could with the sword in the way. There was no way to really get comfortable without taking the sword off, and she didn't intend to do that. It was her only ace. She plonked her elbows on the long linen-covered table and stared out at the revelry without really seeing it.
The room was full, and only some of its inhabitants could rightly be called human. The Warmother had cast her net wide: there were more upright bear-wolves like the one she'd killed, but better groomed; androgynous golden-scaled bipeds with tall red crests; men shorter than Allimir, but blue-skinned and wearing furs; tall, hard-eyed Amazons in white tunics; bronze-skinned men who could have passed for human anywhere on Earth—in short, trouble in every shape and size and color, mercenaries and sellswords and villains all.
And all of them as out of place as she was. What had Charane told them to bring them here? Was it anything close to the truth? Would any of them rather be back where they'd started from?
She wasn't likely to get any of those questions answered.
Ivradan seated himself dolefully beside her. Glory looked sideways at the Warmother. Charane.
What was it about that name? Glory wished Belegir were with her, or even Englor. She bet either of them would know what it meant. She also bet Charane would have killed either of them outright, rather than playing cat and mouse with them here in Sorceress Barbie's Mystical Castle.
But Charane hadn't killed the Mages out on the Serenthodial. She'd only made a real try for Belegir when he'd gone back to the Oracle. Which meant—and wasn't it just the way, that she figured this out when it was too late to help?—she bet that Belegir could have done something at the Oracle that would have put a spoke in the Warmother's wheel. Too bad neither of the two of them had known it at the time.
But knowing that She had a few vulnerable bits left was comforting. If Ivradan got away—and knowing what Glory knew about Charane, she'd probably want someone to take the news back to the Allimir that their hero had failed—he might remember to tell Belegir what she'd called herself, and then—
Glory smiled a glassy and insincere smile at the amphitheater full of nightmares, groaning inside. She couldn't measure the Allimir by the standards of her mates back home. Even if the information Ivradan brought meant something to Belegir, he wouldn't do anything about it. He'd just curl up and wait to die. And she couldn't exactly blame him. There was something wrong with him—something wrong with all the Allimir.
Which didn't make what Charane here was doing right.
"So. When do we eat?" Vixen the Slayer asked the Warmother coolly.
Charane smiled her catlike smile. "Has the Allimir's precious hero found her courage at last?" she asked.
"Is the tucker here that bad?" Glory asked, still in Vixen's flat American accent.
"Do you think you can—" Charane began.
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Glo, you're not in front of the cameras now!" Dylan said hastily, leaning across Charane. "Save the shtick for your little fans and remember who you really are."
"Yes," Charane echoed meaningfully. "Remember who you really are."
Glory smiled. She hadn't missed the expression on Charane's face when Dylan had interrupted her, the moment when the mask of smiling serenity had slipped to reveal a flash of pure fury. Anybody who could get angry that fast wasn't quite as smug about things as they were putting about.
"But tell me what I can do to entertain you. I'd hate to think you'd come all this way just to be bored," Charane cooed with poisonous sweetness.
Glory stared at her blankly. As far as Glory could tell, the Warmother was the original Bad Hat, but there didn't seem to be any dignity about her evilness. Even supposing you said she was so powerful and so inhuman that she didn't care about the human suffering that she caused—why was she so interested in causing it? If she was that inhuman, how could she calculate the grief she caused to a tax accountant's nicety, killing the Allimir off by inches?
And if she did know precisely what she was doing, and how much it hurt—and she must—all this pretending she didn't, and making them pretend along with her, was the mark of a particularly nasty, low-minded, undignified bully.
Glory hated bullies. They all knew Charane could kill her, and it was hard to get excited about anything less. And as a matter of fact, this part of things always did bore her, in books and movies and the like—the part where the villain paraded his or her superior might and boasted about his or her plans, showed off whatever Doomsday Machine might be knocking about the shop, and attempted to impress the onlookers with a sense of their vast futility and unimportance.
"Look," Glory said, a little desperately, "could we just skip all the stuff where you explain about how invincible you are and how nobody can stand against you and just get to the part where you try to kill us? Because if you really—"
" 'Try' to kill you?" Charane said, standing up. "Do you think that I cannot? I am War, and Darkness, and the fear that comes for a man in the lonely places. Do you think that I cannot destroy you if I please? I have destroyed the Allimir—"
"Not yet," Glory heard herself say.
Charane stared at Glory as if she'd slapped her.
"They aren't all dead yet," Glory explained reasonably, still hoping they could skip the villain-talk. "So either you can't destroy them, or you can, and you're just toying with them when you know they don't have any way of fighting back. And that isn't exactly the sort of thing they write songs about, you know. It's petty. Lilith Kane doesn't do things like that."
Dylan winced and said something under his breath.
"I will scour the Allimir from the plains of the Serenthodial," Charane said conversationally. She straightened to her full height and spoke to the room at large. "You see here beside me the last hope of the Allimir—the hero their precious Oracle has delivered to them! You know what I am, as she does not: No warrior born of woman, no weapon forged in the world, can unmake my form, yet their Slayer has come here to slay me!"
The room exploded with laughter—nervous and fearful, it was true, but laced with enough mockery to make Glory think that whatever the truth might be, those here in this room believed Charane's words.
And that meant they might be true.
Had Belegir known this, or suspected it? Was this a part of the dream the Oracle had given him? That no matter how many fancy swords Glory had, she'd fail?
And would she have acted any differently if she'd known that?
"But she shall be slain instead, and you, my chosen people, I shall turn loose upon this pleasant realm to reap my red harvest. I shall populate this world with my legions, until all the world runs crimson with War once more!"
There were wild cheers from the creatures assembled below.
"And then what?" Glory asked, getting to her feet as well.
The cheering for Charane continued, banging off the walls and filling the room. It was so loud Glory couldn't hear herself speak, but somehow Charane heard her. The Warmother's head whipped around; she stared at Glory with her blue, blue eyes.
Glory stared stubbornly back. "So the whole world runs red with War. What then? It's just one world."
"Many things," Charane said, though for the first time she sounded ever so faintly uncertain. Glory could hear her plainly, as though the two of them were the only people in the room. "But you will not live to see them, Vixen the Slayer."
Glory sighed, and wondered why it was that nobody here could keep her straight from her character. She'd given it her best shot, but they'd had the threats and exposition part of things after all. She guessed there was a Villains Handbook to go right along with the Heroes one. Someday she'd like to get her hands on the loon who'd written both of them. At least she knew what came next.
She reached back and drew her sword. The crystals along the hilt flared brightly enough to shine between her fingers.
"All right, then," Glory said. Her mouth was dry, but her voice was steady. The frenzied cheering was still going on—these people seemed to be the local equivalent of football fans, willing to shout for hours—and that was another thing that reminded her of home. It didn't matter that the cheers weren't for her. They never had been, not really, but she'd liked hearing them all the same. Somehow, in a strange way, it had always been the cheering that was the important thing, not who it was for.
"Kill her," Charane said simply. She stepped back behind Dylan's chair and spoke directly to him. "Kill her, and I will give you anything you want."
The Warmother reached into her sleeve and set a gun on Dylan's plate.
It was a Webley Mark 6. Her father'd had one like it, handed down from his father, who'd brought it home from the War. It was black and dangerous and utterly out of place in this frothy whipped-cream idiocy of a magic palace. And facing it, Glory might as well be holding a peacock feather as a magic sword.
Dylan stared at it in fascination and horror.
"Kill her?" he asked, as though he wasn't quite sure he'd heard the words correctly.
"You have seen my power. I can give you anything you desire. I can send you home," Charane said. "Just do this one small thing for me."
Dylan reached for the gun, then drew back. He looked at Glory, and she saw honest, naked emotion on his face.
In that moment, Dylan MacNee looked every day of his age. A man in his late forties, claiming mid-thirties, who thought youth and illusion was the only thing he had to sell. Who knew that the only relationships in his life would be transactions, and measured his viability by what he had to sell.
"Don't do it, Dylan," Glory said quietly.
"Do, by all means, listen to the golden girl," Charane advised cordially. "She's taken such tender care of you so far, hasn't she?" She leaned over, and spoke into his ear. It was a whisper, but somehow, Glory could hear it clearly, even over the shouting and cheering from the rest of the room.
"Just kill her. No one will ever know. You can go right back home, just as if today never happened. It will all seem like a dream. I'm not asking you for so very much. Haven't you really always wanted to wipe the smug smile off that arrogant no-talent bitch's face? Walking into a starring role that she wouldn't have except for you . . ."
Dylan picked up the gun, shaking his head. He looked miserable.
"I'm sorry," he said to Glory. "I just want to go home."
Glory was still standing flat-footed, still unable to believe he'd fire. The first shot caught both her and Dylan by surprise.
Dylan had been raising the pistol, squeezing the trigger at the same time. It went off unexpectedly, making a sound like the loudest cherry-bomb in the world. The gun jerked up with the force of the shot, and Dylan dropped it.
The bullet passed Glory several inches to the right. She jumped back, turning to look behind her just in time to see Gordon jump up and fill the air with whitish fluff as the bullet passed through him. Ivradan shrieked and went over backwards with his chair.
"You shot my elephant!" Glory screamed.
The quality of the sound in the room changed, but she didn't dare look around. Dylan was down on his hands and knees, searching for the gun among the billowing blue velvet draperies. Glory raised her sword and started forward, knowing even as she did so that she couldn't hit Dylan with it.
She looked for Charane—if she threatened her, could she make this stop?—but Charane was gone.
And Dylan had found the gun again.
He swung around, holding it with both hands this time. Between the shouting and the gunshot, Glory's ears were ringing. She shook her head to clear it, knowing it wouldn't help. She took another step, passing him.
She didn't know where she was going. She just knew that she didn't want to get shot, and she didn't want Ivradan to get shot, so she ran away from him. Only six bullets in the Webley. Dylan would run out sooner or later. Then she could beat him senseless with her bare fists.
Dylan fired again. A piece of the wall dissolved into a spray of sparkling chips beside her head, and she realized that the roaring in her ears had been replaced by the angry shouts of a mob, not an audience. She darted a quick glance across the room. With Charane gone, her pet mercenaries were off the leash. They were on their feet, reaching for their weapons, moving in all directions. Some—not all—were heading this way.
Glory reached the end of the terrace. Dylan was behind her, ready to fire again. There was no place to go but down, but the first of the villains were already at the foot of the steps. She heard a crash, and saw one of the tables go over, trapping struggling bodies beneath it. She heard screams soaring above the shouts, and the high pure clang of steel.
Dylan fired three shots in quick succession. He was rapidly losing his gun-shyness, though fortunately his aim hadn't yet improved. How many rounds did that make?
The terrace directly below was still clear. It was an eight-foot drop. Glory turned away from the stairs and jumped.
They hated having her do her own stunts on TITAoVtS, because if she got hurt, production stopped dead, but in fact she was damned good at it, and the stuntpeople had taught her a few helpful tricks. She held the sword well out from her body and threw herself into a forward somersault, landing on her feet, crouching to absorb the impact—just like the vaulting horse, that—and backing up quickly against the wall. If Dylan was as rattled as she was, it might take him a second or so to figure out where she'd gone.
The noise was deafening, and the floor beneath her feet shook. She looked out over the room, catching her breath and trying to think of what to do next. What had been orderly moments before was . . .
As if Charane's presence had been the only thing keeping them in order, her creatures had turned on each other. If they'd all been trying to get to the High Table, she, Dylan, and Ivradan would be dead now, but they weren't even that orderly.
Some were trying to get out, fighting their way up the long steep staircase to the only door they could see. The chamber might have been designed to trigger a bloodbath, and with a distant clinical thrill of horror, Glory wondered if it had been. The ones who had already gotten out were trying to push the doors shut to keep the others inside (why?), but the doors were jammed open by the fallen bodies of the dead and dying. Others were simply fighting, as if for the sheer joy of it, slowing those who were bold enough to rush the High Table.
There was blood everywhere. A swampy smell, sulphurous and meaty, rose up from the floor below. The liquid on the floor—wine and blood and ichor commingled—stood in pools. More trickled down the edges of the white stairs in absurdly cheerful candy stripes. Men and creatures slipped in it, and fell, and died, and all for no reason that she knew. It was bedlam, this chamber a proving ground designed by a master sadist, being put to its intended use.
She heard screaming that brought tears to her eyes, and turned her head resolutely away from the direction of the sound. She would not look.
Ivradan. She had to get to Ivradan.
She forced herself to shut out the distractions, to focus, to move, clutching the sword so hard her fingers hurt. She had no doubt now that she could use it on anything that got in her way. She was terrified, and filled with a cold unemotional purpose all at the same time. Here, in this room, was the reason Cinnas had chained the Warmother.
The stone at her feet exploded in a shower of chips. She looked up. Dylan was standing at the edge of the terrace above.
"It never runs out of bullets," he shouted happily. She could barely make out the words. He aimed out at the crowd and pulled the trigger half a dozen times, with the relieved look of one who knows that nothing matters because this is all a dream. Then he pointed the gun at her again.
"Dylan—no! Don't do what she wants!" Glory shouted, though she knew it was useless. He probably couldn't even hear her. And he'd already made up his mind.
The javelin caught him neatly in the chest, just below the breastbone. It appeared as if it had suddenly teleported there. To throw a javelin twenty feet into the air with enough force that it will pierce a human body upon its arrival is no small matter; someone down there was skilled. There was no blood; the javelin plugged Dylan as neatly as a cork in a bottle.
Dylan stared down at it; Glory saw him blink in surprise. He reached up to it with the hand that held the gun, but never completed the gesture. He went limp, collapsing at the knees and falling forward to land at Glory's feet. The impact drove the shaft through his body in a red rush. It wavered, teetering upright, tapping out sketchy wet hieroglyphs against the pristine wall behind him.
Numbly, Glory bent down to pick up the pistol. She was still clutching the sword in her right hand, precious little use though it had been to her so far. At last she turned and looked in the direction from which the javelin had come.
Standing in the middle of the floor, surrounded by her warriors, was one of the tall grey-eyed Amazons, a still point in the chaos that surrounded her. She held another of the slender throwing spears in her hand. The woman was bloody to the knees; even the edge of her short fringed tunic was red. For a moment their eyes met.
Not knowing why she did it—it seemed somehow fitting—Glory tossed the gun down to the woman. The Amazon queen caught it easily and stared at it curiously, then looked back at Glory. Glory pantomimed squeezing a trigger. The woman nodded, smiling grimly, and turned away, raising the gun.
Glory turned back to the wall, the moment already forgotten. If this was shock, it was a damned useful invention, a small part of her mind said perkily. She had to get to Ivradan, and straight up the wall was the fastest way.
Behind her, she heard the sound of gunfire.
She reached up, setting the sword on the level above her, then jumped as high as she could. She managed to get her elbows over the edge. The cloth puffs around her elbows slipped on the slick surface, and she swore, but the studded leather on her forearms gripped the floor, and she squirmed up, fighting hard for every inch. At last she dragged herself over the edge, grabbing the sword and rolling under the table without thinking.
It was dim under the cloth, and gave the illusion of safety. She blinked, willing her eyes to adjust, and began to crawl forward. If he'd panicked and run— If Charane had taken him somewhere—
Then she saw the huddled figure, curled into a tight fetal ball in front of the tumbled chair, still clutching the ragged remains of the blue elephant.
"Ivradan!" she gasped. The word came out in a husky croak. She wriggled forward, dragging the sword, and reached out for his hand.