There were two good things about descending Elboroth-Haden in the dark during a rainstorm. One of them was that they couldn't see how far they had to fall if they slipped. The other was that at least moving kept them warmer than standing still.
Ivradan led, being in marginally better shape than Glory was. She kept close behind, one hand on his shoulder, the other pressed against the cliff wall, Gordon tucked tightly under her arm. He was a wet and soggy bag of elephant, but he'd made it this far, and she wasn't going to abandon him now.
She told herself that her work was done, that it really didn't matter whether or not they got down alive: the Warmother would stop coming after the Allimir—from outside at least. She told herself that the trail had been wide enough going up for the ponies, so it had to be wide enough going down for two people on foot.
She wished it would stop raining.
She hadn't thought it could be possible to sleep while walking, but she must have, because she didn't remember very much about the descent at all until the part where Ivradan stopped and shook her gently to rouse her.
Glory blinked and looked around.
It had stopped raining at some point. The night was clear, and the moon—moons—were out. The two of them were standing on the flat, and the sky gave just barely enough light for her to make out their surroundings. Ahead lay the ruined gates to the mountain path.
She rubbed her bare upper arms with her wrapped hands—she'd lost the bandage somewhere along the way—trying to clear her head. After a moment, she heard what Ivradan had heard.
She nodded to Ivradan and crept forward as quietly as she could. Her leather creaked, and the empty scabbard on her back jingled faintly. Might as well get rid of it now. Nothing to put in it.
She reached back to unhook it, and a lancing pain in her shoulder stopped her. She winced, shaking her head in disgust. She'd definitely done something to that shoulder up on the mountain. The scabbard would have to stay.
"Can't you be quieter?" Ivradan whispered.
"Only if I go naked, mate," she whispered back. She started forward again, and reached the edge of the gate. From there she could see the city, and beyond.
Serenthodial was pale in the moons-light, stretching off into the distance. Nearer to hand stood the black ruin of Great Drathil.
And here and there, among the ruins, fires. Camp fires. She could smell the smoke, too, now that she was sniffing for it. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her of the long gap between meals. Sometime soon there'd come a day when she got breakfast, lunch, and dinner all within the same 24 hours, and wouldn't that be a minor miracle?
Just now she had other things on her mind.
It would have been too much to ask that all of the Warmother's good works vanish with her, Glory thought irritably. The mercenary band of nightmares that had chased them up the mountain in the first place was still there, and somehow she didn't reckon that striding into the camp and announcing that she'd killed their boss was likely to improve anybody's temper. She thought about the slaughter back in the castle of Arlinn when the Warmother had simply left, and shuddered. No.
"What do we do?" Ivradan whispered.
"Let me think," Glory answered.
She knew they had to get back to the Oracle where Belegir and the other Allimir were waiting. It was barely possible that they could use the ring-road to sneak around the edge of the mercenary camp and reach the trail through the forest. There was no way to get into the forest any sooner. The ring-road was cut down into sheer rock, and neither of them was in any shape to try to scale the ridge any place short of where the forest road cut into it.
She worked her right shoulder, trying to decide how bad the damage was, as she listened. From the singing, it was clear everyone wasn't asleep down there. How many guards did they have out and how alert were they? How far was the camp spread out? Had anyone made it out of Charane's palace alive this afternoon and brought news of what was going on?
And did any of these people care?
One good thing—or bad, depending on how you looked at it—was that the Warmother's magic wouldn't be working any more. But if they noticed that, they might notice that She wasn't around to keep an eye on them anymore . . .
"We don't know where they are, and we can't tell from here. Let's see if we can sneak back to the Oracle trail and get back to your mates without putting the wind up anybody, hey?"
"What if that doesn't work?" Ivradan said dubiously.
"Then we try something else," Glory said, with far more confidence than she felt.
"Before we go . . . " Ivradan said, hesitantly.
"Give me the magic doll. You can't hold onto him and fight at the same time," Ivradan said.
Reluctantly, Glory extricated Gordon from beneath her arm. She wrung him out carefully before handing him over to Ivradan. Ivradan tucked him just as carefully into the front of his tunic (lucky Ivradan, to be wearing proper clothes, and layers at that, even if they were wet) and cinched his belt tight. "There."
Glory smiled. "'Come, camrado,'" she said, consciously quoting. And hoped Evil was taking the rest of the night off.
This time she led, trying to remember what the road had looked like during the day. It would have been too easy if the ponies Charane had magicked down off the top of the mountain were waiting here for them. Maybe they weren't dead, wherever they were. That had been the Warmother's style, hadn't it, really? Not to kill outright when she could make things miserable instead? Maybe she'd sent the ponies back to the Allimir just to make Belegir's lot unhappy, bad cess to her.
As they got closer to the raiders, Glory began to wonder if anyone in the mercenaries' camp was asleep. There seemed to be entirely too much drinking and carousing going on for anybody to get his head down in the middle of it. And what could they possibly be drinking? From what she'd seen of them earlier, they hadn't been carrying much with them.
Unless Great Drathil'd had vast untapped wine-cellars that had escaped the original fire . . . ?
She looked around. The ring-road had dipped. They were out of sight of the fires, and from the sound of things, the mercenaries were still some distance away. "Ivradan?" she whispered, stopping him. "When this place burned, did anybody ever come back here?"
"What?" He stared at her as if she'd lost her wits.
"Did any of the Allimir come back? To salvage anything?"
"Of course not," he whispered back. "It is a cursed place."
And everything above ground had been burned by the Warmother. But from what she'd seen when she'd been mucking about in the ruins today, there'd been a lot built in stone, and the ground itself hadn't been too badly damaged, just . . . sterilized, like. The city had burnt from the top down, not the bottom up.
"Were there cellars? Deep cellars?" she asked.
"Are you feeling all right?" Ivradan demanded incredulously.
She gritted her teeth and held on to her temper with an effort. "Cellars? Wine cellars?"
Finally he saw what she was getting at. "Yes. Of course. Wine—beer—mead—the vineyards of Great Drathil stretched for miles, and its vintages were famous. Why?"
She patted him on the shoulder with relief.
"Because every soldier I ever heard tell of went looking for the pub first. And from the sound of things, I'd say this lot found it."
It took a moment for Ivradan to work that through. "The— They— You mean they're drunk?"
"I hope they're drunk. They sound drunk, anyhow. What time is it—how long until dawn?"
Ivradan looked up at the sky, judging the time from the position of the stars and moons. "Nearly midnight."
It had been around noon when the mercenaries had arrived at Great Drathil. Say four or five hours to find the cellars and get at least some of the stock out, and by now the party should be well underway. If she were lucky, at least half of them were legless with drink by now.
Moving faster now, they continued along the road. The Oracle was north of the city, and the entrance to the forest road was on a ridge overlooking one of the main city gates. Anybody who cared to look would be able to see them at that point, and there was no cover, but with only a little luck they were too drunk to notice.
Glory and Ivradan were walking close beside the ditch-moat—she had a vague back-up plan that involved jumping in and hiding if they spotted anyone—when up ahead, she heard the unmistakable sound of someone retching.
Glory froze. Then, to her own astonishment, she began to move forward quickly, giving Ivradan a hard shove in the chest so he'd stay put.
Something that was puking like that had to be human-shaped, didn't they? And with so many different kinds of imported talent around here, who was to say she looked out of place?
She could see the sufferer silhouetted against the road. It was one man, alone, sicking his guts up, leaning on a spear for support. He didn't even notice her approach. And he reeked of vomit and wine.
Glory yanked the spear away, wincing at the weight in her hands and the pain as her cloth-wrapped palms closed over it. It was a footman's weapon, heavy as a pool cue from Hell.
The drunkard was turning toward her, staggering off-balance, mouth open to yell. Glory hit him in the side of the head with the spearshaft as hard as she could. Her bad shoulder made her pull the strike a little, but it was still hard enough. There was a sound like a cricket-bat hitting a ripe melon. He went down, and he didn't move.
She was looking down at him, trying to decide if he was still breathing, when a sound out of the farther darkness stopped her cold.
"You shouldn't a' hit Bakar like that."
Two more shadowy shapes came forward out of the night, moving with the ponderous unsteadiness of the far-from-sober. Bakar's mates, come to make sure he got back to his drink okay, and just her bad luck. She swung the spear around, grounding the butt with a thump. It had a wide leaf-shaped head, sharp and gleaming.
"I reckon you don't know who I am, mate. I'm Vixen the Slayer. I kill gods as a warm-up routine."
"You shouldn't a' hit him," repeated the one who'd spoken first, too drunk to take much notice of what she'd said. She doubted his friend was in much better shape, but it wouldn't take much competence for the two of them to kill her. All they really had to do was yell.
She heard a rasp as the one who'd spoken pulled his sword and started weaving toward her. It was a short sword; all three of them were wearing studded leather tunics and sandals, making Glory think of the Roman legions. His mate moved sideways, so that they'd be coming at her from two directions. It was a bar-brawl move as old as time, and no less effective for all of that.
She backed up, away from Bakar's body and the drainage ditch, moving to get the rock wall at her back. She had the longer weapon, and there were things you could do with a quarterstaff. It was too bad it was dark and she didn't know most of them.
The second one didn't have a sword. But he had a bottle. She heard it smash against a rock, and knew he'd be coming in close with a fistful of broken glass, and her armor didn't cover all that much. She swept the spear at them both, jabbing, driving both of them back, but it was only a matter of time before they found a way to get to her.
"Hey," said Broken Bottle, in tones of aggrieved and very drunk discovery. "It's a girl. D'you suppose she's one a' those— One a' those— You know. Those."
"She shouldn't a' hit Bakar," said Swordsman, who was apparently a man of few but very fixed ideas. "Let's kill her."
Broken Bottle lurched forward again, and Glory swung her spear toward him. Swordsman rushed in, trying to take advantage of her lapse, and Glory kept on swinging. The butt-end of the spear came up and poked him in the face, not hard enough to do any real damage, but it confused him at least. He reeled back and sat down hard, dropping his sword. It went sliding away up the road.
It would all have been funny, if it hadn't been so real. They were trained professionals out to kill her, and only the fact that they were drunk and it was dark had saved her from dying immediately.
Broken Bottle was still on his feet, the jagged neck of the wine bottle in his hand. Glory thrust at him with the spear, and discovered why spears were often impractical on the field of warfare. It went sliding in through a gap between the studs on his leather armor and sank into the flesh along his ribs—not a lethal wound, but bloody and painful—and then it stuck. The head twisted and the studs held it fast. She couldn't pull it free.
Broken Bottle screamed, a full-throated bellow of disappointment, pain, and surprise, dropping the bottle and clutching the shaft of the spear. Glory shook the spear furiously, but she couldn't pull it free. She gave up and shoved as hard as she could, knocking him sprawling. They'd have the whole camp here in moments.
Ivradan was standing in the road, holding the other mercenary's dropped sword. The man was getting slowly to his feet, looking far more sober than he had a moment before.
"Give me that, little man, and I won't hurt you. Much," Swordsman said.
Glory stared for a frozen moment, unwilling to shout and distract Ivradan. What could she do? What would Vixen do?
She pulled one of her last remaining stakes from her boot, forcing her stiff clumsy fingers to fold themselves around it. Not long, but sharp, and his neck was bare. She could hurt him with it. Badly.
"Why don't you pick on somebody your own size?" she shouted to Swordsman, running toward him.
He was on his feet, advancing on Ivradan, but he stopped when he saw her. "Tadmar! Get up off your dead ass and be some use!" Swordsman bellowed, backing away.
Tadmar must be the one she'd stuck. She wished she could see what he was doing, knowing she didn't dare look. But over Swordsman's shoulder she could see the lights of the camp coming closer. Torches. And that meant people to carry them.
But she meant to take a couple of them with her if she could.
"Get behind me!" she shouted to Ivradan. "And watch out for Tadmar!"
She advanced on (the former) Swordsman, thinking of nothing but the best way to take him apart. She smiled, and something about her expression made him turn and run. She watched him for a second or two, obscurely satisfied, and turned back just in time to see Ivradan cut Tadmar's throat.
"Hey," she said weakly, just as if she hadn't been hoping to do the same thing to Tadmar's mate a moment before. She watched as Ivradan set the swordblade beside the spear, cutting the gash wider until he could work the spearhead free.
I reckon you lot won't need that much help in getting back to your old habits after all, she thought uneasily.
"C'mon," she said urgently. No need to whisper now. She could hear hoofbeats along the road, heading their way. Big horses, too, not the little Allimir ponies.
Ivradan came trotting back, spear in one hand, sword in the other. There was blood on his face.
"What now?" he asked, offering her the sword.
"How far to the trail?" she asked, as she took it. Automatically she slipped the stake back into its sheath. She might need it again later.
Ivradan dropped the spear—too heavy to carry—and they ran full-out. Get far enough away from the bodies, and they still might be able to trick the rest of the army for long enough to get away. At least now she had a sword.
They got back past the first gawkers without difficulty—either they were too drunk to notice the two of them, or were following the old soldier's dictum of not asking questions. But then there were more—a milling, disoriented mob of creatures and the more-or-less human—all drunk, belligerent, and demanding to know what was going on, waving sputtering pitch-soaked torches about with a fine disregard for the faces and hair of their companions. There were even some of the bear-wolf things in with the mob, towering over the rest by a good foot and more. None of them looked particularly worried about being attacked. The Warmother must have told them this place was easy pickings.
Glory grabbed one of the wobbling torches from its owner and held it high with her free hand, trying to work her way through the crowd. For a few moments, she thought the two of them were going to get away with it; slip through the mob and get away.
It was one of the lizardly things she'd seen up in Charane's palace. It stepped right in front of her and grabbed her by the wrist that was holding the torch.
Glory stared back blankly. What could she say? She didn't feel a lot like Glory McArdle at the moment, but if she told them she was Vixen the Slayer, they might recognize the name.
"Koroshiya," she said after a moment.
"I don't know you," the lizard-man said, tightening his grip on her wrist until she was glad of the bracer's protection.
Glory brought the point of her sword up between his legs and pressed. He might not keep the family jewels there, but she reckoned he wouldn't fancy being sawed in half just the same.
"Just how well do you want to know me?" she said, her voice hard and flat.
But she'd attracted too much attention. Everybody was looking at them, and Ivradan didn't look like anything but an Allimir. Things were about to get ugly. Glory could feel it. The mob pressed closer, and she felt something sharp dig into her back, cutting into the leather. The lizard-man smiled, showing pale yellow gums and a pair of long bluish fangs, and reluctantly, Glory lowered her sword.
Then there was a different kind of disruption, and people were looking away from the two of them, behind her. The mob that had been pressing up against her from all sides drew back, and even Lizard-Man let go of her wrist and stepped back, raising his hands in a gesture of submission.
With a sinking heart, Glory turned and looked.
She was riding a white horse, and there were six more Amazons behind her, also riding white horses. All seven of them looked stone cold sober, and none of them looked particularly pleased to be here.
The queen dismounted. She tossed her reins to Glory as though she'd expected her to be there just to hold them, and as she strode past her on her way to Lizard-Man, she whispered one quick phrase from the corner of her mouth:
Glory turned to Ivradan, trying to pretend she was Romy on a Bad Hair Day: pissed with everyone in sight and looking for someone to run errands. She threw her torch at the feet of the nearest mercenary—the man danced back, out of range of the shower of sparks—and passed Ivradan the reins. "Get up," she whispered. He was the better horseman. He could get them out of here if anyone could.
"What's going on here?" the Amazon queen bawled, in a voice that would wake the dead on battlefields six counties over. "Where's the commander of the Night Watch? Is that liquor I smell on you?"
Bluff. It was all sheer bluff, and they had a bare instant to use it.
Ivradan was up. The stirrups were far too long for him. He reached a hand down to Glory and hauled her up behind him with surprising strength. She got her feet into the empty stirrups and held on one-handed, still clutching the short-sword.
Ivradan drove the mare forward with a sudden lurch. The mercenaries scattered.
"Stop her!" the Amazon queen shouted a moment later. "She's stealing my horse!"
Glory looked back. For some reason, the other six Amazons had all lost control of their mounts at the same time. The animals were plunging back and forth through the mob of drunken sellswords, scattering them and completing their disorganization. Not one of the women reached for her quiver of spears.
Then they were past even the stragglers, out of the glare of the torches, with only the light of the moons to steer by. Ivradan was leaning over the mare's neck, stroking her and talking to her in a low voice. Glory's eyes, still dazzled by the torches, saw only darkness, no matter how hard she strained. The wind whipped tears from her eyes, blinding her, until she gave up and closed them. She leaned over Ivradan's back, holding onto him tightly and concentrating on not falling off.
Then the mare slowed from a gallop to a trot, and lunged up the embankment to the ridge. A few minutes more, and they were under the trees of the forest road. The mare slowed to a walk.
We made it, Glory thought in disbelief. She looked around, but there wasn't much to see. The trees had shut out what little light there was from the stars and moon, and there was nothing to see but darkness. She twisted around in the saddle to get a better look behind her—everything hurt, and her bad shoulder was a sullen constant ache as the adrenaline wore off, but she guessed it didn't matter much now—but she saw nothing behind them but darkness, and heard nothing but the sound of the horse's hooves on the leaf-strewn trail, the jingle of her tack, and the creak of her own leather.
It had all happened so fast. From the moment she'd first hit Bakar till now was . . . what? Ten minutes, if that? She had no way to be really sure. But she knew it hadn't been as long as it seemed.
Ivradan pulled the mare to a halt.
"I'd better lead her the rest of the way," Ivradan said, slipping down from the saddle. "Poor lady, she is lost and far from home, and these paths are strange to her."
"And how do you know all that?" Glory asked, shifting forward in the saddle. She laid the sword across her thighs, so as not to drop it in the dark, and gripped the front of the saddle with both hands. Gingerly. Her palms felt puffy and swollen, like a combination of a bad burn and a fresh bruise. Funny how she hadn't really noticed it back there while she'd been fighting for her life.
"She told me," Ivradan said simply. "Her name is Maidarence."
"Yeah?" Glory said intelligently. Ivradan began to lead the mare forward at a slow walk.
"I'll get down and walk," Glory said reluctantly.
"No," Ivradan said firmly. "She can carry you without trouble, and you are weary from your labors."
Got that right, mate, Glory thought with guilty relief. Killed a dragon, climbed down a mountain, fought a mercenary army . . . it might all be in a day's work for Vixen the Slayer, but it was damned tiring work all the same.
And she'd killed someone, she remembered with a belated pang of realization. At least, Swordsman thought Bakar was dead. And she'd been trying to kill some others when they'd been rescued—by a woman whose name she didn't even know. Not to mention Ivradan's contribution to the evening's festivities. Slitting Tadmar's throat as cool as you please. And Glory hadn't even blinked.
God's teeth, what am I turning into here?
Best to leave off wondering about that until the sun comes up, she decided wisely.
"Think they'll come after us?" she asked, after a few minutes of silence.
"Erchane protects Her own," Ivradan answered.
Not noticeably, Glory thought, but then she wondered. It was true that they'd gotten out of all of these scrapes by the skin of their teeth, but they had gotten out. No thanks to Cinnas and his magic, though. It was Cinnas who'd made this whole mess in the first place, him and his great idea to get rid of War forever.
That's not the way it works, chum.
Maidarence's rocking walk was soothing, lulling her, if not to sleep, then at least into a comfortable absence of thought. They were going home, if nothing killed them first, and soon all the Allimir could go home, and if it wasn't going to be quite the happily ever after anybody'd been looking for, it was better than the alternative.
"Slayer?" Ivradan said, after another long quiet while.
"Why did she give you Maidarence?"
"What? Who?" Glory asked, struggling further awake. She looked around. She didn't know how Ivradan could see to find his way—it was as black as the inside of a coal mine at midnight out here. It even smelled late: three or four o'clock, say, a couple of hours before dawn. If she ever saw a bed again, she promised herself she was going to sleep for a week.
"The woman in white. Why did she help us? She was one of the Warmother's allies."
Glory thought about it. "You know, mate, I don't reckon she was like the others, her and her girls. I don't guess you saw much of what happened up there in the palace?"
"The wizard betrayed you." Ivradan's voice was flat with anger.
"No, Ivro," Glory said sadly. "She tricked him, and he didn't have someone like you to let him know what she was on about. She tricked him and she scared him, and she didn't give him time to think."
And now that it was all over, she found that she could actually be sorry for Dylan as well. He hadn't asked for any of this, God knew. Fra Diavolo had been just another acting job to him, not even a chance to play out a wonderful game of make-believe, the way Vixen was for her.
She sighed, and brought her thoughts back to the present. "Anyway, that thing Charane gave him was a gun—a weapon from my world. And he went a little bit troppo with it—started shooting at everybody, not just me. So the Amazon queen—that's the Woman in White to you—put a spear through him. Killed him dead. And I gave her the gun. Guess she used it to shoot her way out of there."
"And the— the Amazon queen was grateful to you?"
"I reckon," Glory said again. "Or something close enough to it so that we're here now, any how."
"Good," Ivradan said comprehensively. "What will happen to her now? They will not be grateful to her for allowing us to escape."
"I don't know," Glory said honestly. "It depends on if they sober up enough to figure it out. But I know I wouldn't want to get on her bad side."
A while later the first birds began to call out from the tops of the trees, and a little after that, there was enough light that Ivradan mounted up in front of Glory again.
Glory wasn't sure which of them the others were more stunned to see: her and Ivradan, or the enormous white horse they rode in on. Unlike the Allimir livestock, Maidarence had no opinion of the Oracle cave, and both Glory and Ivradan had gone on foot to coax her along through the cave passage.
"They've returned! Tavara—Mage Belegir! The Slayer has returned to us!" Cambros shouted when he saw them.
His voice echoed weirdly through the cavern of the Pilgrim's Fountain. Maidarence, at last seeing something she understood and approved of, was pulling Ivradan across the floor toward the water. Her shod hooves clicked loudly on the smooth stone.
Glory stopped where she was and let them go on ahead.
Belegir was lying on his makeshift bed beside the fountain, with Tavara sitting beside him. The Allimir healer had gotten to her feet at their approach, and was standing uncertainly, looking almost as if she wanted to fend Glory off. Belegir looked pale and worn, ground down by his injuries, but alive and obviously on the mend. It was only when she saw him, when she was standing once more in this place that all her instincts told her was a really safe place, that Glory could honestly feel that her task was over, the battle ended.
She'd won. Vixen the Slayer had won.
She walked over to the fountain and knelt, stiffly and awkwardly, beside Belegir. Her leather, only faintly damp now, creaked loudly as it flexed.
"It's over," she said simply. "The Warmother will come to trouble you no more."
Belegir closed his eyes in relief, but the tears Glory had somehow expected of him did not come. The Warmother's unbinding had changed everything, everyone she'd known here in Erchanen. Even him.
"There is more to tell?" he asked, after a moment.
"A lot," Glory said. She glanced back over her shoulder. Cambros and Ivradan were fawning on the white mare, like boys with a flashy new car, and Tavara was regarding Glory warily from a safe distance. All of them seemed somehow more normal, more there, as if some missing ingredient, like salt in stew, had suddenly been supplied. "I don't think I did what you wanted. What Cinnas wanted. I'm sorry for that."
"It is the way of heroes," Belegir said gently, reaching out to take her hand. His eyebrows rose at the sight of the makeshift bandage. "I think you must hear now what the Oracle told me, Slayer."
Glory's eyes opened wide in apprehension. "Oh, no, Bel, I don't reckon—"
But Belegir was strong enough now to argue. "Leave us," he told Tavara firmly.
The young healer bobbed an unwilling curtsey and walked away toward the others.
"It cannot harm you now," Belegir said to Glory. "You have done what you came to do, have you not?"
"I . . . yes," Glory admitted. Still holding his hand, she moved from her knees to a cross-legged seat that was a little less uncomfortable. She had the woozy, light-headed feeling of too many hours awake on too little food, and hoped to be able to sleep soon. But she owed it to Belegir to listen to what he had to say.
"That night when the Oracle came to me, it said that you would bring to the Allimir such sorrow and disaster as our people had not known for a thousand years. I did not know what to think. I thought then that Erchane meant you must fail in your task . . . but She did not, did She?"
"No," Glory said reluctantly. But you're all still alive! You've got a chance now! she wanted to protest. "You know what Cinnas did, don't you?"
"He bound the Warmother upon the peak of Elboroth-Haden of the Hilvorn, then called Grey Arlinn," Belegir said. "He bound her by binding her into mortal form."
Glory squeezed his hand gently with her fingertips—it hardly hurt at all—and then released him. She rubbed at her eyes. "She was all of you, first. He took her out of all of you—the spirit of War—and gave her a single form. His daughter, Charane. That was what—that was who—he chained to a rock up there. I had a chance . . ." She stopped, staring off into nothing. "I could have killed Ivradan, and he would have taken Charane's place, and everything would have been just like it was. But I couldn't do that."
Couldn't kill Ivradan to save the rest of the Allimir, but she could drag him into mortal danger without a backward glance, couldn't she? And found it easy enough to try to kill anyone else that looked at her cross-eyed, didn't she? She knew she'd done the right thing—but it didn't seem very logical, somehow.
And what, she suddenly wondered, would have happened to all those mercenaries the Warmother had imported if she had taken the easy way out, and chained War up again? Would they have all gone back to their own places and times just as if She hadn't summoned them up in the first place? Or would they still have been here, with the Allimir as helpless as before against them?
Did I make the right choice after all?
"So I guess I undid Cinnas' original spell," she said, after a long silence. "You're back where you started. Back in the Time of Legend."
And now the tears she'd been expecting did come. Only they were hers.
She scrubbed at her eyes angrily with the tips of her fingers—if anybody here ought to be grizzling, it was Belegir. "Sorry," she whispered. "Sorry."
Belegir patted her knee. "Do not weep for us, Slayer. It is Erchane's will, and a problem to be faced another day. Now you must rest, and have your own wounds seen to. Tavara, attend us!"
The healer came hurrying back as if she'd just been waiting to be called—as she undoubtedly had been.
"See to the Slayer's injuries, taken in honorable battle," Belegir said decisively, "then let her sleep undisturbed."
Too exhausted to resist—or even think straight—Glory allowed herself to be led off.
The Allimir rescue party had packed in quite a lot of gear on their string of ponies, or else had gone out shopping while Glory's back was turned. One corner of the cavern had been set up as a combination surgery and supply dump, concealed behind a standing screen that must have come from somewhere inside the Temple complex, as it was far too large to have been packed in.
Tavara took Glory behind it and seated her on a makeshift stool, then disappeared again. When she returned a few moments later, she was carrying Glory's other clothes—the jeans and T-shirt she'd left behind.
"If you will remove your armor, Slayer . . ."
"Easier said than done," Glory muttered. She managed to unlatch the clasps down the right side of her corset, but could not manage to twist around to get at the ones on the left. Tavara came forward and helped her, peeling away the filthy, clammy leather shell that was glued to her with an accretion of sweat, mud, blood, and other things best left unremembered. Fortunately, a girlhood spent in gymnastics had pretty much erased any trace of body-shyness Glory might have been born with. Tavara draped a blanket around Glory's shoulders, and waited.
Glory looked down at her boots, up at Tavara, and shrugged.
"Sorry," she said simply. Between her hands and her back, there was no way she could get those boots off.
Tavara knelt before her and tugged. First one boot, then the other, came loose with a grinding, sucking sound. Glory wiggled her feet, sighing in relief. Hello, toes. She stood—carefully—and pushed the bedraggled remains of her Elizabethan slops down over her hips.
"Any chance of a bath?" she asked hopefully. Now if she could just get those damned bracers off. She never wanted to see any part of this S&M rig-out again!
"Soon," Tavara answered, sounding like nurses everywhere. "What did you do to your hands?"
Glory looked down at them. They were mittened in the black velvet panniers she'd torn from her costume, and only the fingertips showed. The dye had run, staining her skin a greyish black—at least, she hoped it was the dye. She'd torn a couple of fingernails. The fingers looked swollen, and her hands felt stiff.
"Ripped them up pretty good, didn't I?" she said disinterestedly. "Just help me get these bracers off," she added, "And then you can bandage to your heart's content."
The leather bracers that covered her arms like opera-length gloves laced for fit, and normally Glory just slipped them on and off like bracelets, trusting friction to keep them in place, but they'd been soaked through and dried several times since she'd put them on last, and by now they'd shrunk a bit. After struggling with them for a few moments Tavara got a knife and sliced through the lacings. She pulled them open, freeing Glory from the last vestige of Vixen the Slayer.
Only . . . not. She's me now, and I'm her. It's not the clothes, or the makeup, or the sword. It's all the rest. It's what's inside.
Tavara brought another blanket and let Glory stand to wrap it around her sarong-style—apparently this was going to take a while—then started to unwrap the makeshift bandage that covered her hands. It was soon apparent it was stuck to the flesh (a happy thought, that), so Glory got to balance a bowl of green-tinged water on her knees, soaking the cloth on her hands free (the dye ran, turning the water black; a relief of sorts), while Tavara gave her a makeshift sponge-bath and exclaimed over each of the various cuts and bruises she discovered as though Glory had gotten each one of them just to make extra work for Tavara.
Glory wasn't really looking forward to seeing what was underneath the velvet. She could still feel the way the hilt of the sword had dug into her flesh with a thousand tiny needles. And then the Warmother had bled all over her.
"You tore the bandage on your shoulder loose," Tavara said accusingly.
"Here. On your shoulder. I told you to leave it there until it fell off, and you didn't. Does this hurt? There's a bruise."
"Bleeding hell!" Glory yelped, as Tavara dug her thumb in just below Glory's right shoulderblade. "Of course it hurts, you fool girl—I sprained it!" And a little quarterstaff practice on top of things hadn't helped any.
She glared over her shoulder at the little Allimir in a fashion that would have had the healer cowering under the furniture a few days before, but now Tavara stood her ground.
"I'll strap it for you so you can rest it, once you've dressed. There's bruising and some scrapes, but it doesn't look too bad."
"That's because it isn't your shoulder," Glory muttered under her breath. The jolt of pain had roused her to full wakefulness again, and she started picking at the wet cloth, pulling it away from her hands. Whatever was in the water seemed to numb the pain, or else she was used to it by now. Tavara didn't object as she peeled her hands free and dropped the wet cloth to the floor. She held her hands up, inspecting them critically.
Both palms were starred with dozens of bloodless wounds, covering them from the heel of the palm all the way to the middle of the second finger joint, all the places where her hands would have touched the sword. They looked like razor cuts, and where they intersected, there were pits in the skin where chunks of flesh had been torn away. Both hands were swollen, as if from a burn, but her right hand—the one that had held the stake—was puffiest, covered with tiny broken blisters.
All things considered, Glory was just as glad it had been too dark to see clearly up there on the mountaintop.
Even Tavara didn't have any smartmouthed nursery rejoinder to make when she saw Glory's hands.
"What did you touch?" she said in a small voice.
"Something poisonous," Glory said. "But they bled a lot."
"Then that— That's good. It will have washed the poison away."
I hope, hovered unspoken between them.
Tavara bandaged her hands with a thick black foul-smelling salve that felt cold and gluey, followed by yards and yards of bandage going halfway up her arms until her hands resembled thumbless boxing gloves. She daubed Glory's other scratches with something that simply burned, and then finally relented and helped Glory into her jeans and T-shirt. It was something of a shock to confront once more the image of her doppelganger—painted, coiffed, and immaculately armored, glaring menacingly up at her from her own chest.
"Live the Legend." Ah, if you only knew . . .
True to her word, Tavara put Glory's arm into a sling to immobilize the shoulder, then bound the arm against her side with more strips of bandage, covering up the Vixen-image.
"Do not, I ask you, Slayer, destroy more of my handiwork," the little healer said scoldingly.
"Do my best," Glory said, her words slurred with exhaustion. "An' if I starve because I can't hold a spoon, it's on your head."
"You will not starve," Tavara said, smiling now. "Come."
She led Glory back to the fountain. Her bed was laid out beside it, and Ivradan was waiting for her, scrubbed up and dressed in fresh clothes. He looked tired, but pleased with himself, and was holding a steaming mug in each hand.
"Felba and Fimlas and Heddvi are here," he said happily. "All well."
It took Glory a moment to place the names.
"She only sent them away," Ivradan said happily, "and so they sought the nearest place where they knew they would be fed. They came here, arriving before night fell."
No wonder the others had been so stunned at the sight of them, showing up the morning after their horses did. It hadn't been Maidarence at all. It had been them coming back from the dead.
"And it's all right?" Glory said fumblingly, not quite sure of how to ask the right questions.
"No harm can enter here," Ivradan said soothingly. "Come. Sit. I have brought soup for you. You will sleep—we will both sleep, and tomorrow Belegir will tell us what we must do."
She was too tired to pick holes in his logic. She managed to get herself down into a sitting position one-handed—awkward, with the bed so low—and let Ivradan hold the cup for her. It held a thick broth, with a faint undertaste, but tired as she was, Glory hardly cared if Tavara had been spiking it. She was asleep before she finished the mug.
She half-woke a few times, just far enough to remember there was no reason to wake up, and went back to sleep, wallowing in unconsciousness as in the ultimate self-indulgence. Once somebody pulled her hair, but after a while they stopped. She cuddled Gordon tighter and ignored them, her face buried in the toy elephant's mold-scented dusty plush.
Eventually hunger—and more pressing needs—roused her to full consciousness again. She pried open her eyes, and bopped herself in the face with a large bandaged mitt when she tried to rub her face. There was something under her arm.
Sometime while she'd slept, someone had taken Gordon away, and cleaned him, and put him back together again. He'd been restored to his original roundness; the bullet-holes had been carefully patched before they'd brought him back and tucked him in with her again. The color and the fabric didn't match, but it was at least blue, carefully oversewn around the edges to hold it in place against the well-loved plush. She kissed him gently on the forehead, working the tips of her left-hand fingers to the edge of the bandage so she could touch him. Good old Gordon. A real trouper. Not many stuffed elephants could say they'd faced down a demon-queen and survived.
She sat up cautiously, and looked around. Everything was quiet. The others were all asleep. She didn't know how long she'd been out—long enough, obviously, to get herself turned around from all of them. What she needed now was to find the jakes.
Aside from the bum shoulder, and her hands, she wasn't in too bad shape, all things considered, though she wouldn't be in competition condition any time soon. She got to her feet without much difficulty, leaving Gordon on her pillow, and went padding barefoot toward the temple steps. She knew she could find something to make do with up there—better than wandering around down here until she woke somebody, anyway—and besides, she knew she could be alone there. Now that all this was over, she thought she was entitled to a bit of a think.
As she got to her feet, she realized that the Allimir had done more for her while she was sleeping than repair Gordon. Someone had brushed out her hair and rebraided it into two loose braids. Must've been dead to the world and all found, she thought, looking down at them. A nice gesture, even if a little unsettlingly intimate. She wondered which of them had done it.
Sore muscles protested as she went up the broad shallow steps, but it was no more stiffness than a little stretching would cure. She'd give the shoulder a couple of days rest and then see if Tavara had any liniment for it. If these people had horses, they must have horse-liniment, and that would do fine for her, too.
A few minutes later, having debased one more solid gold bucket and another acolyte shift, Glory sat down on one of the benches in the Presence Chamber and took stock of her life.
What happened now? She wasn't any closer to getting home than she had been the day the door fell off her dressing room, as far as she could see. The Allimir were in a little better shape—but now they were sharing the plains of Serenthodial with a job-lot of imported villains and frighteners, none of whom looked like good candidates for honest work—except maybe the Amazons, and Glory still wasn't sure how they'd got mixed up in all of this—and all of whom were likely to be just as much trouble for a bunch of farmers trying to get the crops in as the Warmother had been. The first thing the Allimir were going to need was an army of their own, and where were they going to come up with one? They might not be all that peaceful any more, but they still didn't know anything much about the arts of war. And she couldn't teach them.
Maybe Erchane'll send them a nice drill-sergeant next.
And there was one other thing still bothering her.
If Belegir's dream had been true, what about hers?
The voice behind her caused her to levitate with a shrill unheroic squeal. She spun around, cursing her awkwardness, to find Ivradan standing in the doorway.
He was undressed for sleep, capless, his long chestnut hair hanging down over his shoulders, barefoot as she was, wearing only his loose linen undersmock and calf-length trousers.
"I woke and saw you gone. I thought you might have come this way," he said.
"So I did," Glory said, taking a deep breath and trying to slow her racing heart. It seemed almost odd not to feel the springy resistance of the corset when she did so, but it was going to be a cold day in whatever passed for Hell around these parts before she put that outfit on again.
"My turn to ask you, I reckon: what happens now, Ivradan?" she said, when she was sure her voice was steady.
"Now we can return to our homes, and rebuild the Allimir nation," Ivradan said. "It will not be easy, of course."
"Not with a bunch of pissed-off mercenaries wondering where their meal-ticket's got to," Glory said. She sat down on the bench again.
"There will be . . . intemperance," Ivradan admitted reluctantly. "Peace-breaking. Even violence."
"Lots of that," Glory agreed. "Harsh language. People may even lose their tempers from time to time."
Ivradan blushed and hung his head, looking embarrassed.
"But you'll need all those things," Glory said urgently, wanting to comfort him. "They're what you'll have to have to survive. Maybe you don't have the Warmother around any more, but she left you a whole world full of enemies."
"That is what I must go and tell them," Ivradan said. "With your permission, I will take your horse, and—"
"My horse?" Glory interrupted, confused.
"Maidarence," Ivradan said. "I know that the Amazon queen gave her to you, but she is wonderfully fast, faster than our ponies, and so I thought . . ."
"Take her, take her," Glory said, waving at him with her free hand and feeling unaccountably irritable. "I reckon she's really yours anyway. Likes you better than she does me, anyhow. When are you going?"
"As soon as it is light. Belegir has given me the authority to call the people together and tell them all that you have done for us, and what we must now do for ourselves. I will send others here to take my place, and in a few hands of days, when Mage Belegir is able to travel . . ."
"You braided up my hair, didn't you?" Glory said, getting to her feet again. So he was leaving. No reason for him to stay, was there?
"Thanks for taking such good care of Gordon, hey? He looks good as new."
"I knew that was what you would want, Slayer."
"I reckon you'd better shake a leg then. You've got a long ride ahead of you. Maybe— Well, have a good ride, then."
Ivradan turned and left. Glory watched until he was out of sight, then waited until she was sure he was out of earshot. Then she kicked out viciously at the nearest bench with the side of her foot.
Hot needles of protest raced up her leg into her back. The bench teetered and fell over with a loud and solid thud. Glory limped over to the one next to it and sat down on it, and stayed there until she was entirely sure Ivradan had ridden away from the Oracle.
The day after Ivradan left, Belegir was allowed to walk as far as the door of the cavern—Tavara and Cambros on either side—and Glory got her left hand rebandaged so that the fingers showed. That day's big adventure was moving the Allimir ponies down the hill to the old stables that once served the Oracle—visitors to the Oracle had always come on foot, so Belegir told Glory, but the Oracle's servants had kept some animals for their own use. Since neither of the invalids was any use in this undertaking, they were left to their own devices while the others were absent.
"You miss Ivradan," Belegir said.
"Doesn't matter," Glory answered shortly. Was it that obvious, or was Belegir just going all wizardly on her? "Every hero has to have a sidekick, and all. But I guess I'm out of the heroing business."
Belegir regarded her shrewdly. Though he still slept a great deal, and tired easily, the bruises were fading quickly and he was well on the mend. A new set of pink robes, a tube of Max Factor, and he'd be back in the Mage business. "Yet it seems to me that you have some unfinished business that disturbs you."
Glory sighed, shaking her head. "Yeah, well, you remember that night at the wellspring when you dreamed I was going to make a dog's breakfast of this whole business? I dreamed something, too."
As best she could remember it after so long, she told Belegir about what she had dreamed: about the Dreamer of Worlds, who was somehow responsible for Glory's presence here in the Land of Erchanen. The more she told him, the more she remembered, but it still didn't really make a lot of sense to her. It all seemed a little too much like bad television.
". . . and she said I was being tested, but she didn't say what the test was, or how I'd know if I'd passed—just that if I didn't pass, everybody back where I come from would be toast, and that if I did pass, they'd all be admitted into the Universal Dream and have magic and wizards and unicorns up the wazoo—only that didn't sound so good either. And I don't even know if it was a real dream, Bel—maybe this Oracle-stuff only works for the Allimir, not for people like me."
Belegir considered the matter with careful deliberation, frowning as he thought.
"Yet you are here, and have held Cinnas' sword in your hands, and unmade the Warmother, so I think we must believe that Erchane smiles upon your people as well as upon my own. Still, this sending you speak of contains much to puzzle me. It is true that Erchane wears many names among her peoples, but never is she needlessly cruel. And never in all the ancient texts that I have studied have I seen any mention of such a being and such a test as you name—yet if such a test were true and real, the Allimir must have faced it and passed it in the long-ago, for all of Erchane's gifts are ours to wield. I cannot help you, Slayer, but there is yet one who may. Erchane herself, if She so wills, do you but seek Her counsel."
And look how well that turned out the last time, Glory thought sourly.
"Whether you would accept Erchane's counsel in that matter is your own decision, yet there is one more matter upon which you would do well to consult Erchane—and soon," Belegir said, breaking into her thoughts.
Glory looked up at him guiltily, hoping her opinion of the uselessness of Erchane's Oracle wasn't as obvious as she was afraid it was.
"Will you go home—back to your own people? Or will you remain here—with us?" Belegir said gently.
Unfortunately, there was no way around that one. Glory wanted to go home, she told herself—of course she wanted to go home; who wouldn't want to go home?—and that meant going off to see the Oracle again.
She put it off as long as she could.
Three more days. Her shoulder had been unbraced, and she had Tavara's permission to exercise it gently. She was down to a light bandage on her left hand and an only slightly heavier bandage on her right, she could wiggle all her fingers, and had even gone back to doing parts of her morning warm-up routine. She'd nagged Cambros about the importance of watching for smoke to give them warning of the mercenaries' possible approach, especially with the horses stabled so far away (though she had to admit that the cavern did smell better now) and had taken to going to the cave-mouth several times a day to look herself, but she'd seen nothing.
Maybe they'd all killed each other. Maybe they'd all marched up to the top of Grey Arlinn and jumped off. Maybe they were all still getting drunk. But wherever they were, they hadn't come this way.
She wondered where Ivradan was, and what he was doing.
Tavara was the one who had mended Gordon, and she'd also resewed a couple of the acolyte's shifts so that Glory would have something to change into besides her jeans. Glory'd managed something close to an actual bath, and washed her hair, but aside from her jeans and T-shirt, everything else she'd brought to the land of Erchanen was gone: it had been with the horses when the Warmother had magicked them off the mountaintop, and hadn't survived the trip. So—no makeup, no mirror, and no aspirin. She wasn't sure which—if any—she missed.
She was standing in the cave-mouth, watching the afternoon—more for something to do than because she believed, by now, that any trouble would come—when she saw a bright flash of red among the trees. At first she thought it was a bird, but when she saw it over and over again, coming closer, she realized it was one of the spellbirds that Helevrin had loosed the first day she'd come here. It flashed by her, arrowing into the cave.
Glory ran after it, arriving panting and out of breath to find Belegir consulting with Tavara. The little healer had grown quite proprietary toward her charge just in the time Glory had been here. She wondered if Mages married—or whatever Allimir did to produce little Allimir. They were going to have to do something to fill up all those deserted cities.
"You got a bird," Glory said, when she could speak.
"Mage Helevrin sent word," Tavara said importantly. "She will come with a party to the Oracle tomorrow—for counsel. Just like— Just like Before!"
Belegir looked past Tavara's shoulder at Glory, regarding her with as much sternness as his round pink face was capable of. They both knew that she'd put off what she needed to do for long enough. There was no more time.
After dinner, Glory trudged up the steps to the temple, lantern in one hand, Gordon in the other. She carried the lantern carefully, because it was already lit. She was going alone, and she wouldn't have Belegir to light it for her once she got to the Wellspring.
But this time she was damned if she was sleeping on bare rock, and too bad if it took away from the purity of the whole experience. She wheeled one of the lustral carts out of its chamber, hooked the lantern on the side and propped Gordon jauntily up among the red velvet ropes, then went back to the sleeping alcoves beside the Presence Chamber and grabbed a mattress and several blankets and loaded them on the cart. The cart wheeled easily down the hallway to the Oracle—it was designed to, after all.
She felt a twinge of unease as she neared the armory, but the door was shut tight, just as she'd left it the last time. She thought about opening it to see if she could get her own sword back, and decided against it. If she got it back, something'd probably show up that she had to use it on, and she'd rather stick with her perfect record of victories. War, someone had once said, was hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. Well, she'd had enough terror. She was ready for several hundred hours of boredom.
She turned away from the armory and faced the Oracle
I don't want to go in there again, she thought, looking at the barred door. What if it shuts and won't let me out?
Then Belegir will come looking for you, she told herself pragmatically. Belegir knew she was down here. Cambros and Tavara knew she'd come down here to do some sort of mysterious hero thing. And even if something weird and peculiar happened to all three of them, Helevrin was coming tomorrow with a whole gaggle of people who'd need water fetched from here, and she'd get the door open. There was no possible way for Glory to be trapped here.
But her reluctance to go inside was strong.
God's teeth, gel, y'wanna live forever? Ross always used to ask her that—at least the last part—as if the obvious answer should be "no." And when the stakes were high enough, when people were counting on her, that was the answer, the right answer, the answer she gave.
But somehow, right here, that didn't seem to be the answer she felt like giving.
Growling under her breath, Glory strode over, jerked the bar out of its brackets, and swung the door open. It swept back fluidly, offering no resistance at all, and banged against the wall, the sharp reverberation of its impact against the stone making Glory jump nervously.
A regular bundle of maiden twitches, that's our Glor.
She wheeled the cart up against the door, hoping she could trick herself into believing she was going to leave it there all night to brace the door open, knowing deep down inside that she wouldn't. Sighing at her own perversity, she unhooked the lantern and went inside to place it into its niche. It was the one Belegir had used: slide the outer sleeve up, and everything was dark. Leave it down, and you saw the flame. She thought she might leave it down. The Oracle wouldn't mind her having a night-light, would it?
She was pleased to feel only the very faintest twinges of foreboding as she dragged the mattress down off the cart and laid it beside the Wellspring, making a second trip to arrange the blankets on her bed. It would be too short for her, but for one night, it wouldn't matter if her legs hung off the end. At least she'd had a proper dinner before she'd come, this time. Dinners and breakfasts, baths and clean clothes—she was turning into a regular hobbit.
And here was her hole in the ground.
At last, reluctantly, she realized she couldn't stall any longer. She pushed the cart back from the door, climbed the steps for the last time and leaned out to pull the door shut.
It was dark. Every time, the quality of the darkness took her completely by surprise.
She fought down the moment of automatic panic, and, just as it had done before, it subsided, leaving behind the sense of peace and comfort. Nothing bad could happen to her here in the dark. This place was her friend. She was in the presence of Erchane the Mother—who, like all good mothers, let her children go free to make their own mistakes, no matter how disastrous those mistakes might be.
"Pity you couldn't've dropped a word in Cinnas' ear though, hey?" Glory said aloud. "How could he have done something like that to his own kid?"
But she thought of what she'd seen in Charane's great hall, the blood and the slaughter, and thought of seeing things like that every day, of horrors taking place everywhere in all the world you knew, to the people you knew, and thought that Cinnas had probably gotten, well . . . lost. The way Dylan had lost himself at the end.
That doesn't excuse it! she told herself angrily. But maybe it explained it, just a little.
And maybe, if the Allimir knew the whole story about Cinnas, and how his plan to save them had come out in the end, maybe they wouldn't make that same mistake again.
Always assuming they get the chance.
Her eyes had adjusted to the light from the one small candle now, and she found the cup in its niche on the wall. She took it down carefully and squatted beside the spring to dip it beneath the surface, remembering just too late that her hands were still bandaged.
"Oh, well," Glory said with cheerful resignation. A little wet wouldn't hurt them. Might even help.
She held the cup underwater until the cold made her hands ache, then brought it up again full to the brim, holding it carefully so as not to spill any. Still crouched there, she chugged it down in one go, then got up to put the cup back in its place.
As she turned, her foot slipped.
Off-balance, Glory took a step backward, and fell into the spring.
She plunged straight down, deep beneath the surface, the water filling her nose and mouth, choking her. The water was icily, numbingly cold, and she could feel herself sinking. Desperately, she struggled to keep from inhaling. Her lungs burned with the need for air, but there was nothing to breathe here—only water, freezing and lightless.
The spring seemed to have no bottom. Her eyes were open, but there was nothing to see—she was blind in the darkness, and as she flailed, she could not feel the sides of the spring. All sense of up and down had deserted her; the cold and the blackness was as disorienting as a blow, and she was no longer sure which way she was oriented. Her lungs burned for air, and her vision was fogged with false stars. In the room above, she could almost step across the spring, but down here, not matter how desperately she struggled, she could not reach the sides, as if the small opening above were only the entry to some vast and stygian underground lake . . . or worse.
Don't panic! she told herself. Just relax. You'll float up. But would she? Or was the Oracle spring more like an underground river than a well? Was she being swept along beneath the rock even now, carried away from the only air-hole for miles, to suffocate and die in the dark? Belegir wouldn't even grieve for her—when she didn't return in the morning he'd think she'd been magicked back home—
That thought was too much to bear. She could feel her mind going fuzzy around the edges as she greyed out, and clasped one hand over her nose and mouth to keep herself from breathing in water for as long as she could. Kicking upward furiously—please, let it be up—she reached out with her other hand. If she could even touch rock above her head, she could pull herself back to the opening of the Wellspring and get back to the cave. . . .
At last, when will alone kept her hand clamped over her nose and mouth, she felt her questing hand break the surface of the water, felt it slap down on the edge of the spring in the free air, felt hard stone beneath her palm. Frantically, she thrust her way to the surface and hung halfway over the edge, gagging and sputtering, sucking in air in deep furious gulps between wracking coughs. Her nose ran, and she coughed hard enough and long enough so that most of the water she'd drunk—and her dinner with it—came up to decorate the rock. Glory felt a small vindictive surge of triumph.
"Oh, no, you don't, you old besom. You aren't getting rid of me that easily," Glory gasped at last, her voice hoarse with misuse.
Thoroughly cold and wet—and entirely out of temper with the Oracle—she dragged herself out of the spring again and sat weakly beside it for several minutes, panting hard. She struggled out of her foul wet T-shirt and jeans—losing her bandages entirely in the process—and towelled herself dry with one of the blankets.
She supposed she couldn't just leave the place looking—and smelling—like that. Using her T-shirt as a mop, she swabbed the stone clean, and then gave her shirt a thorough washing in the spring. The Oracle deserved it, after what she'd put Glory through, and the water should be clean again for drinking by the time Helevrin's lot came tomorrow. When she was done, she wrung out the T-shirt and her jeans as best she could, knowing they'd still be damp in the morning despite her best efforts, and spread them flat on the rock at the far side of the cave.
Just to remind me of why—and how much—I hate magic. Now where's that damned cup?
For a moment or two she thought she might have dropped it into the spring—and wouldn't that have made a pretty tale to explain in the morning?—but she finally found it. It had rolled over against the wall of the round chamber. She picked it up and put it back in its place, then picked up the lantern.
Oh, I'll sleep like a baby after this. No worries.
She brought the lantern back over to her sleeping pallet, warily avoiding the puddles on the floor, and set it down at the head of the bed. Her heart was still hammering with the narrowness of her escape when she sat down on the mattress to blot her braid dry with the damp blanket she'd used for a towel. If she'd hit her head going in— If that had been the entrance to an underground river after all—
But you didn't, and it wasn't, and you're here.
Finally her hair was as dry as it was going to get unless she unbraided it and combed it out with the comb she hadn't thought to bring. Reluctantly—alert for any further tricks on the Wellspring's part—Glory lay down and cocooned herself in blankets, tucking Gordon tightly under her arm and staring up at the candle's flame. She'd never felt less like sleeping in her life.
It was an accident, she told herself. Sure it was. Course it was. That's just a big puddle of water, that. So maybe it's deeper than it looks—and wider underneath than on the top. That doesn't mean somebody pushed you in. You just scared yourself green, is all.
After a while she sighed, giving up, and reached out to slide the sleeve up on the lantern, plunging the small chamber into darkness. Might as well take the whole E-Ticket ride while I'm here.
She was walking along the road, through the Victorian countryside where they shot most of TITAoVtS' exteriors. It was the winter season, and everything was green. She could pick out the familiar landmarks up ahead—Camrado Oak, and Slayer Rock—but none of the usual production company equipment was here—sound trucks, equipment vans, trailers for cast and crew. She didn't even see the standing set, though she should certainly have reached the village and castle set by now. She knew she was late for something—why else would she be in costume if they weren't shooting today?
She looked down at herself, at all her gleaming black leather, buffed and shining and fresh from Wardrobe.
Thought I'd mucked this up, she thought in faint surprise. Then she realized she must be dreaming, that the water had worked after all. Well, she'd swallowed enough of it, even if she'd tried to sick it all up again. But why was she dressed like this for a dream? She looked back over her shoulder. Even her sword was here—her own sword, the one she'd given up for the magic one. And look how well THAT turned out. . . .
She stopped and looked around at the familiar landscape, then shrugged to herself and started walking again. Might as well get on to where she was supposed to be. If this was a dream, it was a lot more solid than dreams usually got. But it didn't really look like the sort of place that the Dreamer of Worlds would choose for a return engagement—or Erchane's Oracle either, for that matter.
But someone was waiting for Glory, all the same.
The woman was leaning against the tree the TITAoVtS crew had named Camrado Oak. She was wearing a chain-mail shirt, split for riding, that fell to her knees. The mesh was so fine it almost looked like heavy cloth, and over it she wore a leather belt and baldric that held a sword hanging from a scabbard on her back. Below the chain mail she wore high boots over tight leather trousers, both black. She was also wearing gloves, their stiff flared gauntlets reaching almost to her elbows, and so heavily studded with metal above the wrist that it was hard to see the leather beneath. The glove part must be flexible, though, because she was holding a large red apple in her hand, and as Glory approached, she bent to pull a knife from her boot and began to peel it.
There was something oddly familiar about the gesture. Startled, Glory looked up into the woman's tiger-yellow eyes.
She was looking at Vixen the Slayer.
Yes. No. Or was it Vixen as she might have been, if she'd been dressed for practicality and not for ratings? The outfit looked practical, anyhow. Easy to move in. The woman's hair was as long as Glory's own, braided snugly back and wrapped with soft leather. Glory saw it swing free as the woman straightened, still peeling the apple.
"Going to gawk all day?" Her voice was Vixen's too, the flat American drawl Glory had worked so hard to master. It was like looking into a distorting mirror of a different sort than the kind she'd faced in the Warmother's castle—one that made things better, not worse. With all her heart, Glory yearned to be the woman she saw.
"I . . . I . . . What are you doing here?" she stammered.
"Could ask you that. Ask yourself: what are you doing here?" Vixen said.
Glory set her jaw. If this was going to be another clever symbolic dream in a fancy hat, she might as well go along with it as far as she could, because bugger her if she was going back to the Oracle to spend the night a third time.
"I came to find out about the Dreamer of Worlds. What does she want? Did I pass her test? What happens now?"
Vixen went on peeling the apple in silence for a moment, removing its skin in the narrowest possible unbroken curl.
"The thing about gods, camrado, is that you can never be sure about them. They're always showing up and making pronouncements and wandering off again. Also, they lie. By the time she shows up again, your folk might not need her any more. Or she'll have forgotten you were supposed to be her last candidate. Or maybe the test's still going on. Some tests take a really long time, you know. God's Teeth! But you'll see."
"That's not very helpful," Glory said crossly.
"Sorry," Vixen said, not sounding very sorry at all. "I'm not good at questions. Solving problems, now . . . But seems to me you don't have many of those just now."
"But what am I supposed to do?" Glory wailed.
Vixen smiled, as though that was actually the question she'd been waiting for.
"Well there, camrado, I'd say you've got two choices. Whether you've passed the Dreamer's test or not, you've done pretty good in the hero line, and the Allimir are going to need one. Seems to me you could stick around and do some heroing. Or head on back to where you came from. Your choice."
But I already made my choice, Glory realized. Back at the spring—I could have come up anywhere. That was my chance. She remembered how hard she'd fought—not just to breathe, not just to get out, but to get back to the same place she'd fallen in—to Belegir, and Ivradan, and even Englor and Helevrin, bless their hearts. Back to the Allimir, and Erchanen, and the plains of Serenthodial. Once again magic had snuck up on her when she wasn't looking—but if she'd been truly homesick, she'd have been thinking of home while she was drowning, not Ivradan.
Glory smiled reluctantly. She'd been given a fair chance, even if a sneaky one.
"But they don't need me. They need you. I'm not you," she protested.
" 'Course you are," Vixen asserted inarguably. "If not you, who? God's teeth, gel, who d'you think you're looking at? Someone has to take the dream and make it real. What were you doing in front of those cameras all those months? Or up on Grey Arlinn? Knitting?"
Glory stared at her, slack-jawed. It can't be that easy. But it could. She knew it could. Just that easy—and that hard. Embrace an ideal, and be willing to die for it. Live the legend, because people needed dreams as much as bread. And don't look back.
"But you'd better get yourself a proper sword. None of that tawdry magic. I hate magic. And nothing that breaks." Vixen's amber gaze roved over Glory's showgirl costume at length, and her lip curled eloquently. "And cover yourself up. You'll die of sunstroke and give your troops heart-failure if you don't."
"I . . . all right. I will." Glory squared her shoulders.
"Good girl. Do us proud." The last of the apple peel dropped to the ground in an unbroken coil. Vixen took a step away from the tree. With one smooth gesture she tossed Glory the peeled fruit.
Glory caught it, neatly, in both hands. She looked down at it, and it seemed as if by looking away from Vixen, she'd unmade whatever dream-world Vixen existed in. Suddenly it was dark, and Glory was awake enough to know she'd been asleep, or . . . something.
Darkness. She smelled wet wool and wet rock and burning candle, and realized she'd been asleep for a long time.
There was something in her hand.
She squeezed it, her head still fuzzy with dreams, and smelled apples. Suddenly she was entirely awake, rolling onto her stomach to slide the shutter on the little lantern down to expose the candle. In the abrupt brightness, she could see what she held.
A freshly peeled apple, its white flesh only now starting to darken with exposure to the air.
And there was only one place it could have come from.
True magic, real magic, miracle enough to hang a lifetime on. She sat up in her bed, grinning to herself. No fear she was going to forget what she'd dreamed this time! She'd remember it for the rest of her life.
But she wouldn't tell. Not even Belegir. No one needed to know, as long as she knew.
"Damn right I will," Glory said aloud. She bit into the apple. She'd better get moving. She had a lot to do today, and all the days to follow.
There's always work in the land of Erchanen for Vixen the Slayer.