Golden Torc - 2 (40 page)

She handed him the amber with the message she had signed, then covered them both with her mental cloak. They scrambled up the steep wall. The surface of the savanna was fully four meters higher than the streambed. No one from the castle could have been able to farsense their hiding place, not unless there was a powerful metapsychic deliberately searching for them and alert for her illusion. They had only a short distance to walk and moments to wait before they fulfilled the duty they had set for themselves. And then, back to the hiding place, where they would hope for the best, should the alarm be raised... Last night-or rather early on this morning-they had tried to find out what had happened to the saboteurs. Madame had sent her mind's ear straining over the long kilometers that separated them from the Balearic Peninsula... But the distant mumble refused to finetune. She could not hear and dared not call. And so the two of them had simply prayed for their friends, made love again, and slept. She muffled her coughing in the blankets. Her mental alarm woke them at the preselected time. As evanescent as morning wind, they approached the crowd of people near the time-portal. In the east, the sky was now greenish yellow and the day would be hot. (But their cave had been cool, and they had had plenty of water and food and the soft decamole couches, and so the brief days had passed without effort. He had told her about Gen and she had told him about Theo, and then they had explored one another as only the wise old ones can, the lucky ones who are still strong and alive to danger-for the adrenals hold the great secret of old lovers, but only for those who are brave.)

They were almost at the gate. It was nearly time.

... And the world around them abruptly turned black. Both of them cried out. The sound did not propagate. They seemed to stand yet on solid ground, but all around was darkness... until there came a pinprick of light that swelled to a sun, to a glowing face, to the face of Apollo.

"I am Nodonn."

Well, it's finished, Claude told himself. And now she'll die with the guilt.

A voice was speaking aloud. They knew that no one heard it but themselves. "I know who you are and what you would do. I have decided there must be an end to you and your meddling."

Angelique's thought was resigned: You Tanu have won this time. You may kill us, but others will come to shut this devil's gate.

"They will not," said Nodonn, "because I have chosen you." The flaming mask was enormous, its mind-light numbing. "My people have never understood the great harm you did to us in opening this way across the aeons. They would brook no interference with it. Not even I dared to close the time-gate by force. But now there is another way. You will do my will and at the same time achieve those goals you have set for yourselves. The goals you have both sought ever since coming to this Exile. I presume you understand."

Claude replied: We understand, all right.

"My people will believe that you two alone are responsible for the closure. The supposed calamity will be more acceptable to them when they learn that the insurgent leader and the man who bombarded Finiah have been removed from the Many-Colored Land... But you know that I cannot coerce you into this final deed. The torced guardians at the gate would detect my intervention. And so you will have to act freely-and visibly."

She said: Yes. It will be the ultimate proof to those at the other end of the gate.

Claude said: And I'm glad I blasted your damned slavecity! Maybe you think closing this time-gate will make you Tanu safe from any more human uprisings. You're in for a disappointment! Things are never going to be the same here again.

The sun-bright face darkened. Nodonn's voice rolled in their minds. "Go back where you came from, accursed!"

Claude said: You fool. We came from here.

And then their human ears heard birdsong again. The true solar disk was breaking over the rim of the highland beyond the Rhone. Not a stone's throw away, a shimmering block hung in the air just above the square of stones where the portal guardians and soldiers waited.

Their illusion of invisibility still intact, the two old people began to run over the dry sod. Four human time-travelers materialized within the tau-field and were assisted to alight.

Angelique stumbled. Claude seized her hand, shoving aside soldiers and bewildered timefarers.

"Jump for it before it recycles!"

One of the armed guards gave a shout and rushed forward, waving his bronze sword. Fully visible, the old man and woman stood side by side in midair, hands linked. The temporal field reversed itself and they disappeared.

In the sky above, a nightjar shrilled its furious kutuk-kutukkutuk and flew away.

Only one of the auberge clients whose trip had been so unexpectedly aborted was not suffering hysterics. Still holding his plankton net and sack of specimen bottles, he answered Counselor Mishima's questions warily.

"They were just standing there, I tell you. We only saw them for a split second when those mirrors in the machine's walls cut off. And then they were skeletons! And then dust... I really must demand an explanation. Counselor. The brochure states most emphatically that there is no hazard in the journey through time-" One of the other counselors, kneeling in front of the gazebo, broke in. "Alan, come and look at this."

Mishima said, "Please go upstairs and wait with the others, Dr. Billings. I'll be with you in just a moment." When the man had gone the two counselors bent over the pile of ashy powder. There was a peculiar gold ornament halfburied in it, a kind of barbarian necklet. When Mishima lifted it, glittering flakes-all that remained of the internal components -sifted from small openings and mingled with the dust.

"And here... oh, God." The other counselor had discovered the two flat pieces of amber. The writing was clearly visible within. "We-we'd better rush these things up to the director, Alan."

Mishima sighed. "Yes. And tell that Billings chap and the others that they needn't wait after all."

The twin rings carved from jet were not discovered until later, when the gazebo's dust was reverently swept up to be stored-until the investigatory panel's work should be finished in a durofilm sack in the auberge director's safe.

Six million years away, in the room without doors, Elizabeth and Brede wept. Foreknowledge, as Elizabeth had suspected all along, had only made it worse.

THE END OF PART TWO

1

BY THE TIME OF THE GALACTIC MILIEU THE MOUNTAIN WAS worn away to a remnant. It rose from the Mediterranean as the island of Menorca, easternmost of the archipelago that had been called the Hesperides. Monte del Toro, not 400 meters above the sea, marked its greatest eminence on eroded Elder Earth. Most of its ancient labyrinth of caves had by then been opened to the sun by wearing elements or, in the case of deeper caverns, drowned by the encroaching sea.

But six million years in the past, the mountain had another aspect. When exotic newcomers to the Balearic Peninsula first saw its shadowed mass with the twin crags flanking a summit meadow (where Bryan and Mercy would lie), they named it the Mount of Lugonn and Sharn-after the Tanu and Firvulag champions who had fought their ritual battle at the Ship's Grave. Later, the mountain was simply called the Mount of Heroes. By a rare express command of Brede, it was made the property of the Guild of Redactors. Their college of healing and mindexploration was built on the southeastern slope overlooking Muriah and the White Silver Plain. After the Times of Unrest and the banishment of Minanonn, the very caves within the mountain were annexed-at first to serve as secure crypts for the interment of the Great Ones, and latterly for far less sacred purposes.

Felice had vowed to herself that she would never cry aloud. Her mind's voice might rage and the Interrogator laugh; but somehow, through all the days, she remained steadfast and never uttered a sound through the jaws wedged open. She had willed this one thing: paralysis of her vocal cords; and they of all her betraying flesh had obeyed.

Culluket had gone slowly, learning her, utilizing both redaction and coercive power, now strumming like an artist, now thumping with overwhelming crude malice. And if the sensory overload sent her into fugue, he coaxed her back with tweaks at the core of the brainstem to restore full-alert wakefulness when it was time for the next refinement to be demonstrated.

Mental humiliation of her, he had discovered to his surprise, was not nearly so effective as the purely physical assaults upon her feminine dignity. But she was still a child, of course. A perverted child. She had yielded up the required information rather quickly (the Spear of Lugonn in the possession of Aiken Drum, the Ship's Grave and its trove of flying machines, the schemes for producing iron weapons, the fortified villages abuilding in the north); and the data were sent to Nodonn so that action could be taken following the Grand Combat. That had satisfied the others of the Host, leaving Culluket free to satisfy himself.

To peel open her mind slowly, like a fruit, so that he could observe and then savor all of the strange humors of the alien murderess. Her secret horrors, the massive psychic wound from the loss of her golden torc (and yet that not as devastating as one might have expected), the monstrous metapsychic faculties for coercion, psychokinesis, creativity, farsensing, now walled up and latent like ravening beasts in squeeze-traps, never to be freed again.

Taste the rage! Watch the agony deepen at the forced sharing. Flay, open to reveal the unsatisfied needs, the infant deprivation short-circuiting the pleasure and the violence pathways deep within the cerebellum. Delicious possibilities there! Realize them. Replay from multiple vantage points the filth, until even she, wretched Lowlife, understands her own vileness. Inhumanity proven by a nonhuman male, exquisitely skilled.

He worked her, shock following shock, pain piled upon pain, her body's degradation translated into maceration of ego; her hatred and fear of other beings clarified as hatred and fear of her self.

Leave her bereft of everything she has ever valued, waiting for dissolution. (Her body had to be unharmed, of course; but he would fulfill his promise to the Battlemaster if he delivered her able to fight in the Combat as a petit-mal automaton.) But she would not go mad.

Piqued, he rummaged in the wreckage, trying to discover the explanation. He almost missed it. But there-a minute spark barricaded within a stubborn shell of screening that resisted all his attempts at puncture. Diminished and encapsulated, the being that was Felice continued to abide.

If only he could make her speak, cry out! That was the way, the key. He knew it! One voluntary sound and the last defense would fall.

But she would not. After days had passed and the Combat was almost upon them, he dared go no further for fear of extinguishing life, along with that stubborn remnant of shielded identity.

"Keep it, then," he said, "for what good it will do you." And after pleasuring himself with her one final time, he clamped the gray torc of slavery around her neck, released her jaws, and had the attendants take her away to a cell in the deepest of the catacombs.

... Steinie?

Lovelove you're awake. "Does it still hurt, Sue?" He knelt on the damp stone floor next to the niche with its straw-stuffed mattress and took her by the hand. There was just enough light to see her, cast by the single Tanu jewel lamp set like a sad star in the high ceiling of the cell, surrounded by stalactites.

"There's only a leftover ache now. I'll be all right. Lord Dionket said there was no permanent damage. We'll be able to have others later on."

But not him Sukey not my first unbornson. "It must have been my fault. We shouldn't have... after we were sure you were pregnant." Stupidstupidselfishprickbabykiller!

"No!" She struggled up, sitting on the edge of the stone bed and taking his face to kiss. "Never think it was your fault. I'm certain it wasn't." (And will the certainty into his mind through the silver torc still worn; but hide the reality. O never let him find that out.) "You must stop thinking about it now, love. Get ready for the escape! The Combat starts tomorrow. I'm sure that Aiken has waited until the last minute so that the Tanu won't bother to come after us."

Stein growled deep in his chest. He shook his head, like a bear warding off attacking bees. Alarmed, Sukey perceived the random neural firing within his brain that signaled the onset of a spasm induced by his maladaptation to the gray torc.

"Damn Aiken Drum," Stein groaned. "He said... he promised...but first you, now me...Christ, Sukey, my skull's exploding-" She held his head to her breast and plunged within his mind, as she had at ever-shorter intervals during their time in Muriah. Once again, she was successful in stopping the threatened conflagration. But if the torc stayed on him much longer, he would not survive.

"There, Steinie. There, love. I've got you. I've fixed it." Water dripped from the ceiling of their prison cell-regular, musical. The wild beating of Stein's heart slowed and his rough exhalations eased. He lifted his head to meet his wife's eyes. "You're sure that it wasn't my fault?"

"Believe me. It wasn't. Sometimes these things just happen." Still kneeling beside her, he sank back to rest on his heels, great helpless hands turned palms up, the image of a shattered giant. But Sukey was not deceived. She could see into his mind.

If he could not blame himself, he would look elsewhere. Aiken Drum hoisted the heavy Spear of Lugonn easily, menacing the ornate chandelier in Mayvar's audience chamber in the Hall of Farsensors. The glassy lance shone golden, now that the last of the disguising blue lacquer had been cleaned from it. The powerpack was fully charged.

"Take that for your yoni, witch!" he chortled, striking a wicked pose.

Mayvar's smile was indulgent. "Tomorrow, my Shining One. Tomorrow it all begins. But there will be five days of it, remember. And you can use the Spear only at the very end, after midnight on the fifth day when the Heroic Encounters take place, and even then only if Nodonn decides to use the Sword. And if you survive to meet the Battlemaster at all-"