"I see. So in general, drinking wine or beer with breakfast food is frowned upon?" Rhiana studied the pictures on her menu.
"In general," Kate said. "I imagine Ben Franklin started the prejudice against it. Anyway, supposing one of our companions is a—"
Jeanette returned with coffee and juice and water. "You ladies ready to order yet?"
"Pigs in blankets and some hash browns," Kate said.
Rhiana gave Kate a puzzled look, then nodded, folded up her menu, and handed it to the waitress. "The same for me."
"I'll get that right out to you. Isn't this just a gorgeous day?" Jeanette asked.
Both women agreed that it was.
"She's very friendly," Rhiana said when she was gone.
"We'll leave her a nice tip. Now." Kate leaned forward and lowered her voice. She didn't suppose any of the people in the surrounding booths gave a damn about her and what she was saying, but she didn't want any of them staring at her, either. "Supposing one of our companions is a wizard, what can we do about it? The last week or so has been difficult enough for me. I'd rather not wrap up your visit by having my flesh melted off my bones or something like that."
"That would be unfortunate," Rhiana agreed. Kate saw the corners of her mouth twitch into a brief smile.
"Yes. If this…" she whispered "…wizard…is still putting a spell on you, even after he knows we can work together, then he must have planned a way to eliminate us as a threat."
"Yes. I imagine he intends to kill or disable one or the other of us."
"Why doesn't he just go back to Glenraven?"
"Perhaps he can't. Perhaps he wants to meet Callion first. Perhaps…" Rhiana shrugged. "I don't know. I don't want to think about it any more right now. I just want to eat and pretend that everything is fine and that my life makes sense."
Kate sympathized with that. She pulled the Fodor's out of her bag and opened it up. "I want to see if it can tell us anything about the traitor," she said.
She looked at the title page. The letters seemed a little fuzzy—they looked almost as they might have if they'd been printed on porous paper that had allowed the ink to wick. Kate squinted at the page, wondered if perhaps humidity could affect the print, and flipped to the next page, and then to subsequent pages. The print continued to have that fuzzy-edged look, and worse, for a moment it would begin to run in toward the center of the page, spiraling slightly as it did so, as if the page had become a sink and the print was water flowing down its drain.
"Something is wrong," she said softly.
Rhiana held out her hand, and Kate passed the book to her.
Rhiana glanced at it, closed her eyes, then opened them again.
She handed the book back, frowning. "Worse than wrong. It's trying to tell us something, but it can't."
"Why not?"
"It's been spelled, too. The spell is different than the one on me, both more complicated and subtler. This spell is proof that the person who spelled the book—and me—is a brilliant wizard. Worse, I think, is this. It tells us that whoever the traitor is, he knows we know he exists, and he's determined to do what he can to hide his identity."
"The book knows who the traitor is, doesn't it?"
Rhiana shrugged. "Probably, but we can't be certain, and even if we were certain, knowing wouldn't help us. The book is mute—perhaps for just a while, or perhaps for good. It can't tell us anything."
"It was going to tell us how to get you back to Glenraven." Kate stared down at the guidebook, at the blurring, streaking, spiraling print that struggled to tell Kate something she needed to know, but now could not.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rhiana worried about the book. And she worried that her limited magical abilities would keep her from ever seeing her world again, and that the traitorous Glenravener would conspire to kill her if she discovered who he was. But she also worried about the Kin, because she had been discovering gradually and in little ways that she liked Val much too much.
She kept herself distant from him. She was intentionally rude. She didn't want him to think she was one of the silly Machnan girls he had doubtless deflowered in the moss-green dew-gemmed glades of the forest. She didn't want him to think about her at all, in truth, because the love of a Kin and a Machnan could never amount to anything but pain and despair.
And this morning he'd been first to the door, first to claim her fall had wakened him from his sleep, first to feign concern, when probably he had cast the spell that had sent her sprawling. He no more had wizard's eyes than Tik or Errga, but that meant nothing. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she didn't see a flinty glare or amoral ferocity, yet she was in a minor way a wizard. Harch, the wizard who'd trained her, looked as merry as the first birds of spring and as open as sunshine. The wizard Yemus looked like a traveling poet…or would if he laced his shirt with ribbons and wore his hair longer. His languorous dark eyes and sensuous lips sent the women of the various village courts into paroxysms of lust; had he been anything but a wizard, bastard babes with his dark eyes and knowing smile would have been popping from the meadows like dandelions. Naturally, as he was what he was, he would have found a mate easier had he been a sot.
So that the Kin didn't have wizardly eyes or wizardly ways meant nought. He could be the secret wizard as well as either warrag or dagreth.
She wouldn't believe it of him unless she were forced to.
Kate finished her pigs in blankets and sat waiting for Rhiana.
"I'll hurry."
"Don't." Kate smiled. "We have things to do, but none that won't wait for breakfast."
Rhiana nodded, tried to smile, cut another bite of the griddle-cake-covered sausage, picked it up, put it down, and sighed. She looked at tall, fair-haired Kate, whose loveliness became more apparent with every day, as the bruises vanished and the cuts healed. Kate could have been Kinnish, save for her teeth and ears; if the origins of humans were true, then Kate looked to have Kinnish bloodlines. She wasn't short and dark and Machnan-scrawny. And in Glenraven, with the Watchmistress human and her mate and eyra Kin, no one would think to torment Kate or Val if they became eyran.
"What do you think of Val?" she blurted.
Kate looked startled. "Why? You think he's your traitor?"
"No. Of course not. Well, he could be, I suppose. I wasn't…I didn't…" She felt her cheeks flush hot. "I simply wanted your opinion."
Kate leaned her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her cupped hands. "I haven't thought of him much at all, if you want the truth. He stayed in my house, he ate my food, he drank my beer, he helped me catch those lunatics who were after me. As did the rest of you. I appreciate what he did, and I intend to get him back home." She frowned and looked away; her eyes moved down and rightward. "What do I think of him?" She looked up at Rhiana and smiled. "He annoys the hell out of me on long trips."
"He seems to be…attracted to you."
"No. Sorry. I haven't felt any sparks." Kate leaned closer and lowered her voice. "So if you were wondering if the coast was clear, it is. I wish you luck."
Mortified, Rhiana said, "Oh, no! Not me. Machnan and Kin cannot mate!"
"I thought you and Val said that it's all one big, happy family anyway. That a warrag and a dagreth could breed and have fertile offspring."
"They could" Rhiana said. "Physically. But…gods' blessings!" She stared at Kate, wonderingly. "But how could you understand? I'm being absurd. In your world, only humans exist. So what could you know of mating restrictions or taboos? You could choose any other human being on your planet as your bondmate and no one would utter a word of reproof."
"Ah…" Kate started slowly shaking her head, and Rhiana saw chagrin in the small smile. "Ah. Now I understand."
"You do?"
"The various cultures of my world have their taboos, too. Some cultures demand that blacks don't marry whites, that Orientals don't marry any but other Orientals; some religions don't marry outside their faith; men don't marry men nor women marry
women—"
Rhiana's mind reeled. She interrupted. "Skin color? Religion? What sort of nonsense is that? And as for the rosalle, if they cannot love each other, who are they permitted to love?"
"Rosalle?"
"The men who love men. The women who love women."
"Our term is homosexual. I wonder why it didn't translate."
Rhiana heard the word as tondara, which meant something entirely different than rosalle. She said, "A tondara is someone with a problem. Someone not normal. Someone with a form of sickness. At least that is what I hear when you say the word. But rosalle is just men who love men, and women who love women, without the taint of sickness. What is your word for that?"
Kate smiled sadly. "We don't have a word for that. Every word we have carries some stigma. And as for who the…rosalle…are supposed to love, I suppose if the predominant culture had its way, they would love no one, and would be unloved. Or they'd pretend to be straight, marry someone of the opposite sex, and make themselves and their partners miserable."
"That's insane. But your cultures would see nothing wrong with human and Kin, or human and dagreth, or Kin and Machnan."
Kate laughed abruptly. "No. No. That would be an abomination, too."
Rhiana nodded. "I suppose I can be glad to know that pigheaded stupidity and ignorance are not confined to my world alone."
"No. They aren't. One of my favorite cartoonists, Scott Adams, says that everyone is an idiot some of the time. I think he's right."
"I think he is, too. The gods all know I've been an idiot more than once." Rhiana resolved to finish her breakfast. She felt better, though she didn't know why. She'd resolved nothing. She had no answers. She could not deny, though, that her mood was lighter.
But she wondered one thing. "When you say cartoonist, I hear two words, 'oracle' and 'jester.' But these words seem to have nothing in common. So what is a cartoonist?"
Kate began to laugh.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Devourers spun in restless spirals; ebbed and flowed from one side of the room to the other like waves on the sea; flattened themselves into a single brilliant circle of light on the floor then exploded outward in uncountable streaking shards. They flashed red and green and yellow and blue and gold and white, dimmed to a lusterless ashy gray, rebounded to greater brilliance, deeper colors. In their movements lay pattern and art, dexterity, deep and untouchable emotion, and some purpose, but not obvious cause.
Callion watched them anxiously. If he'd had a barometer for their mood he would have said it was falling fast; he felt in them a storm of unspeakable dimensions and unfathomable passion. They refused to speak, refused to answer any questions, refused to carry out any of the little tasks he had for them—they would not slip through the phone wires to steal from a Swiss bank account the frozen assets of a Miami drug dealer, though Callion had gone to enormous difficulty to locate the proper account and divine the way in; they would not slip next door to devour the loud, obnoxious adolescent son who lived there before the rest of the family returned home; they would not cooperate with him in any fashion, even though they had done similar tricks for him on previous occasions. He'd never seen them act as they were acting. He thought, after three years of working with them, that he understood them—and now that he discovered he didn't, he felt twinges of fear.
They formed two amorphous light blobs and shot toward each other from opposite ends of the room; when they met in the middle they collided silently but with a perfect pantomime of violence. Fragments made up of dozens of the tiny lights showered like shrapnel around the room, shattering further when they encountered resistance.
"Stop," Callion said. He put magic behind the command, and the appearance of calm confidence.
They dropped to a foot above the floor and began racing in circles, forming a whirlpool that sucked the center lights down into its depths and spat them out and across the room in all directions. When they rose, the swirling whirlpool seemed to drag them in again.
The whirlpool spun faster. Callion began to feel dizzy watching it. He again commanded them to stop, but again they didn't listen.
He tried to feel what they were feeling; he tried to find by feel some disturbance in the Rift, some tearing in the small, permanent gate he'd dragged through with him from Glenraven—anything that might have agitated them or frightened them or seduced them—but their world kept its secrets from him, as it always had, and they remained a mystery.
He watched them a while longer, wondering what he ought to do. They weren't threatening him. In fact, he didn't think anything they could do would directly threaten him. They weren't causing problems elsewhere. They weren't making demands.
He decided while he could walk away without losing too much face, he would be well to take the opportunity. He turned, stepped out of the room, and quietly closed the door behind himself.
Chapter Twenty-Five
After she took breakfast back to the locally unpresentable part of the Glenraven contingent, Kate took Rhiana to the Barnes and Noble superstore in Plantation to buy a couple of maps. While she found them, Rhiana, wandered around the inside of the store, stunned, picking up books, staring at them wistfully, and putting them back.
She came up to Kate just as Kate decided on the two maps she wanted and said, "The man who owns these books must be richer than the gods and mad as a stag in mash. He has more books than exist in all of Glenraven, and four and five, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty copies of each of them."
"It's a book store," Kate said. "Not a library. They keep multiple copies of the same book on the shelves to sell."
"We could buy them?"
"They rather hope we will."
"I own two books," Rhiana said. "Well, one is a common book—I keep my accounts in that, and things I've done, and sometimes sketches of the things that I see. The other, though, is a real book. "It's the story of Gerowyn of Tenads and how he fought monsters and Kintari and the vast Kinnish hordes to win Tenads for the Machnan. It's a very exciting story." She picked up one of the books on the shelf nearest her, opened it carefully, and said, "The scribe who did it made it much prettier than this book, too. The cover is fine leather and the pages are covered with gold leaf and red and blue and yellow and green and brown inks, and all of the borders are filled. Not like this book. This is so plain."
Kate smiled. "The difference is this book and a hundred thousand like it rolled off of presses in just a couple of days. And in the length of time it took your bookbinders and scribes to turn out the few books they make every year, book publishers in America turn out millions of copies of thousands upon thousands of books." She pointed to the inside cover and said, "They're cheap, too. How many hours would a commoner have to work to earn enough money to buy a book?"
Rhiana looked puzzled. "Commoners don't buy books. How could they afford the jewels on the covers? How could they take care of something so valuable in their little houses? And you asked how many hours they would have to work…" She frowned. "I don't think the field workers could make enough money in their lives to buy one. Some of the merchants do well. I know of one in Ruddy Smeachwykke who employs his own scribe to copy texts he borrows from friends, and once a year hires a binder to bind his newest book. He has six or seven now—but he is terrifically rich, and wasteful."
"The people in this country who are paid the very least make enough money in an hour or two to buy a paperback book. They can buy hardback books with four or five hours of work. And many of them do."
"You're lying."
Kate laughed. "I'm not lying."
They bought the maps. Left. Drove around Fort Lauderdale trying to locate the house, which was on Silver Palm Boulevard. Rhiana sat with her nose pressed to the glass, staring at the foreign vegetation: palm trees and palmettos and enormous ficuses and strangler figs and bougainvillea. Occasionally she'd exclaim over some spectacular specimen, but for the most part she sat quiet and wide-eyed, leaving Kate to her own thoughts.
Ka
te got lost in them. The pulse of Fort Lauderdale captivated her. She hadn't had a chance to notice it before; she'd been in the hotel room and worried about her odd companions, and she hadn't had the chance to think. But watching the road, moving in and out of traffic, she began to drift. She began to feel a hunger that she hadn't felt in years. She tried to examine it, but it was elusive. She breathed the air, admired the clear brilliant blue skies, thought about the huge bookstore, about the libraries she'd passed, about the people she saw. And she thought about Peters, which couldn't even support a single tiny bookstore because hardly anyone in the town read. The Barnes and Noble superstore had been busy; people squeezing past each other in the aisles, crouching to browse, discussing books with each other, looking over the shoulders of strangers to say, "I read that. It was terrific." She compared it to the one real bookstore Peters had boasted, for a while. Amos W. Baldwell, Bookseller, had been an excellent store for the six months it had lasted. Tons of books and a knowledgeable bookseller who'd been enthusiastic about his stock. The only thing the place had lacked had been a base of readers to support it. Kate didn't know if it was fair to use a bookstore as a metaphor for a town, but when she thought of Peters, she thought of the bleach-blonde Dancercized country-club wives standing in the children's section trying to pick out books for their children and smugly confiding to each other that they hadn't had time to read a book in years.
Institutionalized ignorance. Their entire attitude rankled—"We know nothing and we're proud of it." The Peters Chamber of Commerce put out town brochures that said, Peters: The Best Things Are the Things That Stay the Same. The town worshipped its high school football team and its band, admired the fact that the same families had owned the majority of the town since before the Civil War, congratulated itself on its southern hospitality while despising anyone whose grandparents and parents hadn't been born there.
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02] Page 16
