Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02]

by In the Rift (v1. 5) (html)

  "I'm going to have to get a map of Fort Lauderdale before I can find Callion's home," Kate said. "And I'm too tired to do anything like that right now. There should be a Holiday Inn around here. The sign said left. I think Holiday Inns allow pets."

  Morning waited close by, the knife-sharp edge of dawn crawling just below the horizon. Errga's skin tingled and crawled, warning of its approach.

  Kate pulled off the road into another of those enormous flat paved places and pulled the van under an awning. "Hold tight," she told them, picking up her bag. "I'll get us two rooms and be right back out." She ran into the glass-fronted building. A few doors down from the lobby, a man threw travel bags into the back of his car, while his mate and two young children stood on the walkway and watched him. One of the children looked into the van and began jumping up and down, pointing its finger and pulling on the hem of its mother's tunic.

  Errga ducked beneath the window. Rhiana said, "Everyone smile and wave now."

  "I hate this," Tik said. "It would be easier if we ate the children."

  Val said, "What sort of place is this, where no one thinks anything of us if we wave at them? This is insane!"

  Rhiana sighed. "The worst thing is knowing that if we don't succeed in capturing the Aregen, we'll never see home again."

  "See home again! That will never happen anyway." Bitterness seeped through Val's voice, scathingly sharp. "Kate is a lovely woman, and I'm sure she would be a delight in bed, but you don't actually expect her to succeed against an Aregen and his Rift-slaves, do you?"

  "I expect us to succeed," Rhiana said. "The five of us."

  "Those same Rift-slaves kept Aidris Akalan alive and in power for more than a thousand years, against the combined efforts of the finest wizards of Glenraven—"

  Rhiana said, "No they didn't. They and an enormous army of Aidris's loyalists protected her against a few scattered rebels and the occasional wizard who tired of her restrictions or fell out of her good graces. The majority of the people of Glenraven never fought against her. She preyed on the weakest and bribed the more powerful, so until the wizard Yemus brought Jayjay Bennington and Sophie Cortiss into Glenraven, her power never got a real test."

  Errga wrinkled his nose and showed tooth at that—the Machnan adored their hero Yemus as much as some of the Kin wizards and Kin loyalists loathed him. Rhiana sounded like a mouthpiece for her kind right then; willing to forget that her war against Aidris Akalan was not the first; willing to ignore the masses of the Kin-hera who rose against Aidris and died in the Water-Pot Rebellion, and the brief, bloody Women's War. The Allies' War wasn't unique in Glenraven's history—except that it had succeeded.

  His lips curled back further and the hair on the back of his neck rose. He didn't like being beholden to the humans and the Machnan; his people had fought in the war, but many of them had fought on the wrong side. The Machnan were long to remember mistakes like that.

  The van door opened and Kate jumped in. "Rooms are ready. I wanted to get connecting rooms—I thought that might make things easier. But they didn't have any until just a second ago."

  She pulled the van around to the side of the inn, then ushered everyone out. "Val, this is the key for your room. Errga, Tik, you'll be sharing with Val. Rhiana and I are going to split a room." She handed keys to Tik and Rhiana, then turned to Errga. "You'll have to go out with one of the others every time, so I didn't get a key for you." She slung her bag over her shoulder, opened the back of the van, and said, "Let's hurry."

  People were popping out of rooms on all sides, throwing bags into vehicles—they stopped to stare.

  Kate muttered, "Smile and wave…smile and wave…" and Errga, sick to death of hearing her repeat that, was tempted to comply, himself. He didn't, though. He couldn't imagine how the humans would react if they realized the creatures in their midst weren't humans in funny disguises…but he knew he didn't want to find out. So he trotted at Val's heel, and when Val unlocked the door to their room, slipped inside.

  He smelled something fascinating in the brief instant that he crossed the parking lot from the van to the room, though. Something wondrous and ancient, primal, alluring, compelling—something he knew viscerally though he had never gotten a whiff of it before. He determined that he would find the source of that scent. He would discover it and claim it, whatever it was. Steal it if he had to, but have it at any cost.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Kate woke up muddled. She felt like she'd been on a ship all night, a ship that constantly rolled forward and back and from side to side—a ship that fought its way through the turbid waters of a restless sea. She rubbed her eyes and tried to clear her head. The room was too dark, and she could see a single slit of brilliant white light coming from entirely the wrong direction through utterly opaque curtains. Ah, she thought, as realization dawned. Hotel

  All her life she had hated waking in unfamiliar places. Always those times brought back the memory of waking in her grandmother's house when she was ten, with her grandmother sitting in the kitchen waiting for the phone to ring. Lying in that darkened Florida hotel room, Kate could still smell her grandmother's coffee percolating on the stove; hear the clock down the hall; see the light through the half-opened door, hear the phone ring, and hear her grandmother pick it up before the first ring had even died away; the soft bubbling of the coffee and the creaks of the old house and her grandmother's voice, roughened with fear, asking "How is he?" and the silence that seemed to stretch forever, forever; then the sound of her grandmother crying. Soft sobs, and between the sobs, "I'll get her up and dressed. No. No. I won't tell her. I'll wait until you're here."

  Her grandmother didn't need to tell her, though. Kate knew Jackie was dead. Jack, her brother, twenty-one months older than she was, funny and handsome and smart and athletic, who had gone swimming with some of his friends and who had told her she couldn't come because she was a girl. He and his friends had raced away on their bicycles, laughing, while she stood in the yard, furious at not being included when she could do anything he could do as well as he could do it…and most things…better.

  And he had never come back.

  All her life, she'd thought, If I had been there, I could have saved him. If I had been with him, he would still be alive. Lying in the Florida hotel room with people who didn't even belong in her world, she still thought, If I had been there I could have saved him. I would have.

  In some ways she would never grow up, never leave behind the ten-year-old sister who thought she should have been the one who died. She still felt the absence of her brother as an aching, hollow pain that nothing and no one could ever take away.

  But at that moment, in that place, she put her pain away, as she eventually had to put it away every time it came to her. She got up, showered and dried her hair, and put on enough makeup to cover the last remnants of the bruises on her face. In spite of a yellow-green bruise across her cheek, she almost looked like herself again.

  She turned on CNN while Rhiana headed into the bathroom for her shower. Kate preferred CNN to introspection when she caught herself heading down her well-worn path to guilt. How much easier to watch the unending squabbles between Syria and Libya and Israel; to listen to the latest president lying about the budget, drug wars, foreign policy, and the state of the union in order to get reelected; to see demonstrations of inhumanity and irresponsibility and utter stupidity that had no impact on her, that would never touch her existence, that meant, in the narrow circle of her single short existence, nothing. How much easier than sitting in the darkness and listening to the ghost of her grandmother sobbing over the ghost of Jack.

  However, Kate realized nothing the smiling anchors said had passed between the impermeable wall of her memories to touch her awareness, and she reached for the remote to turn off the television. As she did, she heard a thud in the bathroom. She clicked off the TV set and waited.

  Silence.

  More silence.

  And then a faint, muffled groan.


  She ran to the door and knocked. "Rhiana?"

  No answer. She hadn't locked the door; Kate shoved it open and found Rhiana sprawled across the floor, halfway dressed, rolled into a little ball on the tile with her hands covering her face. She bled from her forehead. She made no noise.

  Kate crouched beside her and said, "Rhiana? Rhiana? Can you hear me?"

  "Be quiet," Rhiana whispered. "For the sake of the gods, Kate, I'm fine."

  "What happened?" Not sure why she was doing it, Kate kept her voice low.

  Rhiana sat up. "I slipped on some water on the floor." She pressed her fingers to her lips and shook her head a little—her motions obviously meant This isn't what happened, but from whom did she think she was hiding the truth? Sound didn't carry from room to room—

  Someone knocked on the connecting doors.

  Rhiana scowled and got up; Kate thought she looked pale, and while the place on her forehead wasn't bleeding heavily, it sent a steady trickle down the side of her face.

  "I'll get it," Kate said, and opened her half of the connecting doors.

  Val stood there, his expression concerned. "I heard Rhiana cry out," he said. "I was sleeping, but the noise woke me."

  Kate had barely been able to hear Rhiana while sitting a few feet away. She wondered if his hearing could be that much more acute. She said, "She slipped on a wet patch in the bathroom, but she's fine."

  "You're sure?" He looked concerned, even compassionate. Kate wanted to reassure him, but Rhiana's strange behavior made her suspicious of him. Suspicion was stupid—from the other room he couldn't have done anything to hurt Rhiana, but…

  "I'm fine," Rhiana told him. She came out of the bathroom with her hair wrapped in a towel. The towel, certainly not accidentally, covered the little cut. "I fell because I was careless. No damage done."

  He nodded. "If you're sure—"

  "I'm sure." She smiled that same cold, polite smile she always used with him, the smile that said, I'll be polite because I am that sort of person, but keep your distance. "Thank you for your concern. Are Tik and Errga awake, also?"

  "None of us were awake. The sound of your fall woke me—"

  "Yes," she said. "I can imagine how it could have done that. Well…thank you. I'll see you this evening."

  She made a move toward the door as if to close it, but Val stopped her. "Is anything the matter?"

  "Nothing except that I'm extremely hungry. When I'm hungry, I become unpleasant." The tight-lipped smile again. "As I'm sure you've noticed. But Kate and I are going out to get ourselves something to eat. We'll be back shortly."

  This was the first Kate had heard about going to get something to eat, but she played along. "We won't be long at all," she said. "If you want, I can bring you back something."

  Val thought about it. "Sausages," he said. "And maybe one of those giant egg things you made with all the meat and things in it."

  "An omelet? That might not travel too well."

  "Sausages and something else, then."

  The dagreth wandered to the door, and Rhiana's smile for him was, as always, more genuine. "Hello, Tik."

  "Lady," he said with a nod of his massive head. "The sound of people discussing food woke me. Did I hear rightly, or was I just having a particularly appropriate dream?"

  "We're going to get breakfast," Kate said. "We'll have to get it from one of the all-day-breakfast places, which are more expensive than someplace like McDonalds."

  "I'd like more of those cinnamon biscuits," the dagreth said. "With lots of the gooey white icing."

  "Those were Hardee's biscuits. I don't think we'll be able to find a Hardee's in South Florida," Kate said, feeling that she was going to end up vetoing everyone's breakfast fantasy wish list. "I have an idea. Rhiana and I will go out and get something we think you'll like." She crouched a little and leaned to one side to peek through the open door. She could see Errga sitting behind and to one side of Tik, his body stiff with irritation. "Is that all right with you, Errga?"

  "I would have said so, if Tik the Rump hadn't wedged himself in front of me," he growled.

  Rhiana said, "Tik the Rump was hungrier than you, warrag."

  "Tik the Rump will be my breakfast, and we'll see who's hungrier," the warrag grumbled.

  Kate finally got the door between the rooms closed.

  Again Rhiana put her finger to her lips. "I have to braid my hair. It will only take a moment. Then we can get everyone something to eat."

  Kate got her keys and her purse and the Fodor's guidebook, then waited.

  When they left, she glanced curiously at Rhiana, but the other woman shook her head once and almost jogged to the passenger side of the van.

  Only when they had pulled out of the parking lot and driven down the busy street through three intersections did Rhiana begin to talk.

  "One of them is a traitor," she said.

  Kate took a right turn at random, then a left, then a right. In the distance, she saw an International House of Pancakes and headed for that. "A traitor. What does that have to do with you slipping on a wet spot in the bathroom?"

  "I didn't slip, of course. I'm certainly neither so clumsy nor so careless. One of them can use magic, though, because I felt it this morning, aimed at me. I think I discovered what was going on only because I was awake when usually I am asleep; otherwise, this spell-renewal wouldn't have had any effect on me."

  "Spell-renewal?" Kate wondered if Rhiana's fall had perhaps made her paranoid. Maybe she was delusional. Maybe she had a slight concussion. Rhiana had been adamant about the fact that none of the other three—not the Kin nor the dagreth nor the warrag—had any sort of magical ability at all. She had insisted that she could tell this, that she and Kate were going to be the only hope for the four stranded travelers because the other three could contribute nothing.

  Now she insisted that one of them had some facility with magic, and further, that one of them was using it against her.

  Kate studied the Glenravener out of the corner of her eye, then zipped between two New Jersey snowbirds in their Cadillac and a Canadian family in a Mercedes Benz and pulled out of traffic into the IHOP parking lot. She got a space at the far corner of the lot and turned off the ignition. "We can get breakfast here, or we can sit in the van and you can tell me what you're talking about."

  "You think I'm making this up."

  "Not necessarily. I think it's a big turnaround from your absolute certainty that none of your three friends could use magic. And I haven't seen behavior in any one of them that would indicate to me that he's a traitor."

  Rhiana didn't look distressed by Kate's doubt. "Nor have I. But as I was brushing my hair, a hard wave of magic hit me; it surrounded me and for an instant I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move, I couldn't think—I felt like a horse was standing on my chest. I fell then, but I couldn't make a sound. Only when the magic passed was I able to make any noise."

  "Sounds like you had a heart attack to me," Kate said.

  "Heart attack…" Rhiana looked thoughtful. "I understand what you mean, but this is not like that. I could see the magic."

  "But I thought you said Glenraveners wouldn't be able to use the magic of this world unassisted…that my source was too distant or too odd or something."

  Rhiana sighed. "I thought that was true. I really did." She turned sideways in her seat and rested her hands on her knees and leaned forward, intent on what she had to say. "But this is why I haven't been able to use the sources of magic that I could see. Whoever has done this has blocked me from using them."

  Kate opened her door and pointed toward the restaurant. "I don't know about you, but I'm starving."

  Rhiana nodded and got out of the van.

  As they walked across the parking lot, Kate said, "What does it matter, Rhiana? We found a way to work around the block. I feed magic to you, you use it, and we accomplish what we need to accomplish."

  "It matters because for someone to hide magic from me so completely that I can see no trace
of it, he has to be a major wizard. He would have to be almost on a level with the master wizards of Glenraven. They're frightening. I studied with one for a while, before my duties to Ruddy Smeachwykke began to take too much of my time. He could do terrifying things."

  "Terrifying?"

  "He could dissolve stone with the snap of his fingers. He could cause saplings to grow to the size of centuries-old behemoths in the span of a day. He could create illusions so real you not only heard them breathe, but felt their breath against your skin."

  "That's terrifying."

  "Yes. And those were the things he did to amuse me. What he could have done when he was angry I don't care to think about."

  Kate opened the door and let Rhiana go in ahead of her.

  "Two?" the woman by the Please Wait to be Seated sign asked.

  "Two."

  "Smoking or non?"

  Kate said, "Non," and they followed her back to a tiny table next to two others just like it.

  "Enjoy your meal," the hostess said, and gave them menus, then headed back to her post.

  Kate said, "The pigs in blankets are excellent. So are the harvest pancakes." She didn't open her own menu. She sat thinking about wizards out of fairy-tale worlds who could use magic for awesome and evil purposes. It would have made for an amusing dinnertime daydream had it not threatened to affect her personally.

  The waitress came to the table. A slender black woman with one gold tooth and a smile that would have been just as bright without it, she said, "I'm Jeanette. I'll be your server today. Would you like some coffee?"

  "Please," Kate said, "and a glass of orange juice."

  Rhiana shook her head vigorously. "Water, please. With ice in it. Do they have wine or beer?" she asked Kate.

  Jeanette looked startled by the question. "No," Kate said to Rhiana, and to Jeanette, with an apologetic smile, "She's from Europe."

  "Oh." Jeanette nodded as if that explained everything, and nodded off.

  "Europe?"

  "Europeans have a reputation in the United States for drinking wine or beer with all their meals. It's a gross generalization, but telling our waitress that's where you come from will keep her from wondering about you."