The Paths Of The Perambulator

by Alan Dean Foster

  Her shoulder-length red hair framed her delicate face, which at the moment was full of frustration and confusion. “I don’t understand any of this. I was taking my ease with a friend in Darriantowne when the world turned inside out.”

  “Male or female? Your friend?” Jon-Tom couldn’t keep himself from inquiring.

  She managed a small smile. “Ever the hopeful lover, Jon-Tom?”

  He smiled back and shrugged. “What else is there but hope when you’re hopelessly in love.”

  “Female. Not that it matters. We were trying to acquire a necklace I’d admired for a long time.”

  “By stealing it,” Clothahump said sourly as he repacked the medical supplies.

  She stuck her tongue out at him, mitigated the charmingly girlish gesture by adding a finger. “Not all of us are as wealthy as you, master hard-shell.”

  “One gains riches by not having a hard head,” he snapped back, but softly. He was in no mood for spurious argument. There were more important matters to be concerned with.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I’d just picked up this beautiful loop of amber and blue pearls when my friend Eila screamed. Everything went cockaloop, and when I could see straight again, I found myself in a strange place. Eila was gone and so was the store.” She turned, tilted back her head, and blinked. “I think I was in—that building.”

  “What did you see?” Jon-Tom made no effort to contain his excitement. Some irrefutable evidence at last! “Who was your captor? What was he like?”

  “I can’t remember. I can’t remember much of anything that happened from the time the store disappeared until you were standing over me holding that damn spear of yours. But I remember—something else. Something like I’d never seen before.”

  Clothahump rejoined them quickly. “What was it like? Think, child!”

  “I’m trying. It kept changing—I don’t know.” She rubbed at her eyes with both hands. “Everything kept changing. It’s all a blur in my mind. I remember shadows. Shadows of myself being peeled away from me, like the layers of an onion. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel a thing. Then I remember running down this mountain, holding a sword, with all those shadows surrounding me. I knew they were shadows because none of them said anything.”

  “They looked real enough to us,” Jon-Tom told her.

  “I remember”—and she looked up into his eyes with such earnestness that it made his heart hurt—”seeing you, Jon-Tom. I knew it was you. And Mudge and Clothahump too. I wanted to cry out to you, to throw away the sword and run to you, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t!” She started to cry again. This time she let him put his arms around her.

  “It was as if someone else, that someone up in that building, was controlling my muscles, my voice. I couldn’t call out. And then I found myself trying to kill your friend.” Colin and Dormas had moved over to join them.

  “Lucky for us you didn’t cut him first,” Jon-Tom told her.

  “No danger of that. Lucky for her I used a kick before the saber.”

  Jon-Tom ran the attack back through his mind, saw the koala striking out with his long sword first instead of his foot, the razor-sharp blade slicing through real flesh and bone. Saw the real Talea bleeding to death in his arms. Too close. It had been too close.

  “Where are we?” She was trying to maintain her usual defiant pose, but to his surprise Jon-Tom could see that she was scared. She had a right to be. “What is this place? Has the whole world gone crazy?”

  “Only at irregular intervals,” Clothahump explained as he proceeded, with Jon-Tom’s help, to tell her the tale of the perambulator and its captor and how the five of them had come to be there.

  “And lastly,” the wizard said, “being unable to defeat us by other means, our opponent sought a way of destroying the spellsinger among us. This he did by seeking out and bringing under his sway the spellsinger’s true love, then copying her and sending all rushing down upon us. It would have worked if not for the soldierly poise of Mudge and Colin.”

  “True love?” Talea frowned as she used the back of one hand to wipe the dried tears from her cheeks. “Whose true love?”

  Jon-Tom turned away from her. “I’ve always thought of you as that, Talea, from the night Mudge brought us together alongside that couple you hadn’t finished mugging, to the day you told me you had to leave because you needed time to think our relationship through. You know that.”

  “I know what? Why should I know that?”

  He turned back to her. “I told you often enough.”

  “Like hell you did, you great, gangling, impossible man! I thought all you wanted was to bed me. Every male I meet wants to bed me, including that obscene otter you hang around with, and he isn’t even of the same species.”

  “Somebody mention me name?” Mudge looked up from his arrow-gathering.

  “Never mind, Mudge.” Talea turned angrily back to Jon-Tom. “You never said one word about my being your only true love.”

  “Couldn’t you tell how I felt about you?”

  She let out a sigh of exasperation. “You men! You expect every woman to be a mind reader. How am I expected to know how you really feel if you don’t tell me?”

  “Truthsayer,” said Dormas sagely.

  “I just thought—” he tried to say lamely, but she was in no mood for excuses.

  “ ‘You just thought.’ You men just think, and we poor women are supposed to divine what you’re thinking about, and if we don’t, then we’re callous and uncaring and insensitive!”

  “Now just a minute!” he roared. “If you think all you have to do after disappearing on me is . . .” And they went on in that vein, arguing loudly and incessantly, about just who had let whom down.

  Colin was standing nearby, cleaning his saber. Mudge ambled over, nodded toward the pair of combative humans. “Charmin’, wot? ‘Ave you ever seen a prettier couple?” The koala nodded, turned his sword over, and commenced to polish the other side. It was thick with red-orange dust. “Listen to them squall. ‘Tis true love for sure.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “Old acquaintance o’ mine. Carries a sharp knife an’ a sharp tongue an’ is quick to use both. Introduced ‘im to ‘er when the two of us had occasion to ‘elp ‘er out o’ a tight spot. They didn’t ‘it it off right away. She’s a bit o’ an independent, Talea is. Been awhile since they’ve seen each other. I imagine they’ve a bucket o’ mutual insults to catch up on.”

  Mudge’s sarcasm was grounded more in the otter’s personality than in truth, for the argument soon gave way to recriminations and apologies. Before long, Jon-Tom and Talea were talking amiably and quietly. That was rapidly replaced by whispering, he doing a lot of smiling and she doing a lot of giggling.

  “Bloody disgustin’,” Mudge said, observing the congenial couple.

  “I take it you’re not looking for a permanent mate,” Colin commented.

  “Wot, me? Listen, mate, the only thing that would ever slow this otter down would be two broken legs, an’ even then I’d do me damnedest to crawl out of any potential ‘ouse’old.”

  “I feel differently. Not married yet, but I hope to be someday. I just haven’t found a lady with whom I’d feel comfortable for the rest of my life.” He hesitated a moment. “I find talking about personal relationships with females difficult. I’m much more comfortable when the conversation has to do with casting the runes or the arts of war.”

  “Is that so? Well, then, if you’d like, I’d be ‘appy to give you the benefit o’ me extensive experience in that particular area in which you confess to a certain deficiency. If you can talk war, you can talk love, guv’nor.”

  “I know some folks consider the two not dissimilar.” He eyed the otter warily. “It’s just that I’m interested in the diplomatic angles, and I think you’re more involved with subversion.”

  “Nonesense, mate!” Mudge put a comradely arm around the koala’s broad shoulders. “Now the first thing you got to know is ‘ow to . . .”r />
  “I’ve been through several different kinds of hell this past year,” Jon-Tom was telling Talea. “No matter where I was, in what danger, I was always thinking of you.”

  “I never stopped thinking of you, either, Jon-Tom. In fact, there was a time when I thought I’d made up my mind about us. I tried to seek you out, only to find out that you’d gone off on some fool errand clear across the Glittergeist Sea.”

  “Clothahump was deathly ill,” he explained to her. “I went because he needed a certain medicine that was only available in a certain town. As it turned out, the whole expedition was unnecessary, but none of us knew that at the time. We didn’t find that out until it was too late.”

  “There are so many things in life we don’t find out until it is too late,” she murmured, waxing uncharacteristically philosophic. “I’m beginning to learn that myself.”

  It required a tremendous effort of will for him not to press his affections on her, sitting there winsome and vulnerable as she was. But during their on-again, off-again relationship he’d learned one thing well about Talea: It was best not to push her, to insist on anything, because her natural reaction was not to acceed but to push back. Having found her again under the most unexpected circumstances, he was going to be as careful as possible not to drive her away again.

  “It’s all right. I understand. All of us need time to learn about ourselves. We have plenty of time.”

  She looked up at him sharply. “That’s not what you said before. You wanted a permanent commitment right then and there.”

  “I’m not the same person I was before. I’m a full-fledged spellsinger”—that was only a small fib, he told himself— “I’ve been around, and I know a lot more about myself as well as about the world around us. Enough to know to let love or just friendship take its course.” He reached out to caress her cheek with one hand. “Right now it’s enough just to see you again, just to be near you. I just wish the immediate situation wasn’t quite so desperate.”

  She nodded solemnly. “It’s all so bizarre and crazy, but I keep telling myself it must be so because you and Clothahump both wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “We wouldn’t lie to you separately.”

  “So I have to accept it. The proof of it is that I’m here.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  She hesitated. “If this is a matter of magic, Clothahump could be the one to handle it. You and I could leave.”

  “I can’t.” He swallowed. The pressure of her hand in his sent fire racing up his arm. “I owe Clothahump too much. I have to help him see this business through to the finish, even if it means the end of me. Of us.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” she said with relief.

  “It is?”

  “I was afraid that part of you, that bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, that committment to justice when confronted by indestructible evil, might have changed also. I wanted to make sure it hadn’t. I couldn’t love you if you’d gone sensible on me.”

  “Thanks—I think.”

  “I know from what you’ve told me that we have to free this perambulator thing from its captor up there.” She indicated the fortress just above the place where they had paused prior to making the final assault. “I wouldn’t leave now even if you agreed to. I’ve been used. I feel used. I want to make that unseen bastard pay. He almost had me killed, which isn’t so bad. But he tried to make you do it. That’s dirty. I don’t like dirt, Jon-Tom. I like clean. There’s something up there that needs cleaning up.” She put both hands on his shoulders. Her lips were every close. He leaned forward.

  “Maybe,” she whispered lovingly to him, “if we’re lucky, we’ll have the chance to chop and slice and dismember him all by ourselves.”

  He licked his lips, sat back, and regarded the light in her eyes and the bloodthirsty grin on her exquisite face. This was his Talea, no mistake about it.

  “Uh-yeah, maybe. Let’s try that leg again, okay?”

  “Okay.” She let him help her up. When he let go, she took a few steps. The leg was stiff and it was hard going at first, but the rest had definitely helped her mobility. “Much better.” She put her hands on her hips and tried jumping a few small rocks. “It’ll get better still.”

  “I’m glad.” He put his arms around her and this time had no second thoughts about kissing her. Finally they separated, and she pointed to her right.

  “The hinny I’ve met, but I don’t recognize your short fat friend.”

  “His name’s Colin, and he’s not fat, he’s as solid as iron. He’s a rune-caster, a reader of the future. Sometimes, anyway. His skill with the runes is about like my skill with the duar.”

  “That bad, hmm?” Seeing the look that came over him, she smiled and patted his cheek affectionately. “Just kidding, spellsinger. Speaking of which, you have your duar. Can I borrow your ramwood staff?”

  “Lend ‘er another staff o’ yours, mate!” Mudge howled gleefully.

  “I should’ve split that otter years ago!” she said through clenched teeth. Picking up one of the vanished clone’s swords, she started chasing Mudge over the rocks. The cackling water rat eluded her with ease, taunting her each time she took a swing at him.

  Colin strode by, intent on making certain their supplies were strapped tight to Dormas’s back. “Glad to see your fiancee’s leg’s better.” He glanced in the direction of the chase. “Sword arm seems okay too.”

  “They’re old friends,” Jon-Tom told him.

  “I know. I can see that.”

  Eventually a winded Talea gave up and re-joined Jon-Tom. “One of these days I’ll feed that foulmouthed otter his works.” She reached up to push red hair out of her eyes. Then she put the sword aside to wrap both arms around him.

  “Promise me something, Jon-Tom.”

  “If I can.”

  “When we find this evil one, let me be the one to slay him. I’ll make him bleed slowly.”

  “Talea, sometimes I think you enjoy fighting too much.”

  She stepped back from him, pouting. “If it’s a frothy petite woman you want, then you should never have fallen in love with me, Jon-Tom.”

  “The woman I love is stronger than that, but she doesn’t have to be a barbarian ax murderess, either.”

  Silence between them. Then her pout gave way to a scintillating smile. “They say that opposites attract, don’t they? Didn’t you tell me that once?”

  “Yeah, and on reflection I think it was a pretty stupid thing to say. All I know is that I love you with all my heart, and if you want to carry a sword during the wedding, well, hell, that’s all right with me, so long as it doesn’t intimidate the wedding master.”

  “Wedding master.” She looked uncertain. “You said you wouldn’t push, Jon-Tom.”

  “No one is going to do any pushing except up this hillside.” Clothahump regarded them sternly. “We have rested long enough. It is time now for us to make an end of this matter, lest it make an end of us. There is no telling what we may encounter inside these walls. Talea likely saw nothing because it was intended that she not. All of you must be prepared for an attack of the most outrageous possibilities.

  “We have journey far but have the longest way yet to go. And there is no telling when the next severe perturbation will occur. Let us make haste to find the perambulator and set it free.”

  “I’m ready, by m’luv’s legs,” Mudge announced loudly. “Lead on, short, shelled, and stubborn! I’m with you for ‘avin’ an end to this business. There’re ladies waitin’ to be loved and liquor waitin’ to be drunk, an” I’m sick an’ tired o’ livin’ off the land when the land ain’t very accommodatin’.”

  “You ain’t the only one, water rat,” said Dormas. “I’d hate to miss the opening trot of the social season.”

  With Clothahump and Jon-Torr in the lead they advanced toward the single doorway above.

  Though they were ready for anything, and Colin anc. Mudge were spoiling for another fight, the actual ass
ault on the falling-down fortress was more of an anticlimax than any of them could have foreseen. Mudge reached the doorway first. The double doors were fashioned of hand-hewn wood, and not very well seasoned wood at that. They were high but otherwise unimposing. There were no guards to challenge them, no perturbed monstrosities to confront them. Nothing, in fact, to object to their entrance.

  Mudge put a paw on the latch, pushed down, and shoved hard. The door swung inward a foot, two feet—and there was a loud crack. Everyone tensed, and the otter jumped a yard straight backward, but it wasn’t the sound of something attacking. The door had fallen from its top hinge. It swayed there, hanging precariously from the bottom loop of iron.

  The otter slowly advanced to peer inside. “Well?” Clothahump prompted him.

  “Scrag me for a Lynchbany tax collector, Your Sorcererness, if the bleedin’ place ain’t as deserted as a mausoleum!”

  When they entered, they found the outer hall as silent and empty as a tomb, just as Mudge had indicated. But it hadn’t been that way for very long. Benches lay overturned, chairs were smashed against walls, candle standards had been twisted like candy. A few decorative banners hung listlessly from the curved ceiling while others were scattered in shreds across the stone floor. Several had been piled in a corner to form a crude bed. A couple of matching couches were missing all their cushions. They found those a few yards farther on. All of them had had their stuffing torn out and thrown around the hallway.

  There were gouges in the floor and on the walls. Half-eaten food and other debris was scattered over everything. Dark stains on some of the furniture and floor at first suggested grisly goings-on. They turned out to be from spilled wine, not blood.

  “Well, this is encouraging.” Jon-Tom studied the hallway ahead. It curved slightly to the right. Evidently Mudge didn’t share his opinion. The otter let out a derisive snort.

  “Why? Because it proves that the bastard we’re fightin’ is a lousy ‘ousekeeper? Some’ow that don’t reassure me.” The otter’s eyes kept darting from filthy corners to shadowed eaves high overhead as they advanced deeper into the fortress.