"I'm sorry I asked. This is starting to make my head hurt."
Doc smiled. "There is also an expenditure of personal energy, a telling one. Alastair will be performing the ceremony tonight—"
Alastair perked up. "Thank you for telling me."
"— so I will not be excessively wearied by the transfer. That way I should retain the wherewithal to send us back when we wish.
"But listen to me, Harris." Doc's expression, momentarily illuminated by moonlight, had become somber. "If we are separated or I do not survive, I need you to bring Gaby to the conjurer's circle precisely a day after our arrival. Exactly eight bells after the devisement is cast, the far conjurer's circle becomes alive again and sends everything within it back to the fair world. It is a process that does not require the deviser be there. Do you understand?"
"Yeah. It's a deadman switch. I can send her back without you." Harris thought it over. "That's what happened in Central Park. I was standing on the conjurer's circle when the time came up."
"Yes."
"Well, don't make me use the deadman switch. Alastair and Noriko will come across and make me explain why. I don't want to have to do that."
"That's true. I wouldn't want to."
* * *
Doc's room in the Monarch Building was barely larger or more personal than the one Harris had been given. Harris spent a couple of minutes picking through the man's wardrobe and looking for appropriate clothing. He gave up quickly: "There's no way we're going to make you blend in, sorry. So take this ruffled white shirt job and the brown pants and vest. We'll pass you off as a sixties burnout case or a disco revivalist."
Doc looked confused by the terminology, but retreated to his water closet to change.
Harris nosed around a bit while he waited. The books on Doc's low bookshelf looked like technical manuals, but their titles suggested they were textbooks written by New Age gurus: Kelloqq's Musings on Excarnation Theory, Groundline Interaction With the Tallysin Aura in Controlled Environments, Traditional Dances and Heightened-State Mental Acuity. Harris grimaced.
"Goodsir." It was a woman's voice, low and urgent, with a bit of mechanical hiss over it.
Startled, Harris spun around. There was no one behind him—but against the wall, Doc's talk-box had come alive.
And there, staring at him from the screen, was Gaby.
Again she was against the stony background and wearing the slinky dress he was really beginning to appreciate. He had a sudden urge to see the whole costume. He had another urge to help her take it off.
"Hi." He moved closer to the set, afraid with each step that she'd disappear. "Are you talking to me now?"
"Do you really know me?" Her expression was somber, tense.
"I thought so, yeah." Bitterness gnawed at him. "I guess maybe I didn't."
"Tell me what you know—"
Harris heard Doc open the bathroom door. Gabrielle heard it too, looked startled . . . and her picture faded to a little white dot. Harris cursed.
Doc emerged. He wore the clothes picked out for him; his hair, drawn back in a braid, concealed his ears. He looked no stranger than some musicians Harris knew. He gave Harris a curious look. "Who were you talking to?"
As Alastair drove them back to the rented house where the conjurer's circle lay, Harris told Doc about the conversation. Doc looked briefly annoyed that he'd missed Gaby—rather, that she seemed to have deliberately avoided him.
At the little estate on Heinzlin Corners, Alastair walked around the conjurer's circle and, consulting one page of Duncan's book, adjusted the placement of some of the rocks; he told Harris that he was performing corrections. "Someone who knew what he was doing has meddled with this," he said. "Made a trap of it. If I'd left it as it was, gods only know what you'd have been when you got there."
Meanwhile, Doc checked over his gear. A small, brassy-looking revolver worn in a shoulder holster under the shirt; a leather pouch full of little devices on his belt; the assassins' "volt-meter" in his hand. "The charge on you should wear off as soon as we reach the grim world," he told Harris. "But with study I may be able to key it to find Gabrielle. It seems evident that the kidnappers used something of the sort to find her originally. And this device was a little antiquated. I've made some improvements to it."
Harris wore Gaby's fanny pack with her possessions in it. Alastair solemnly offered him a pistol like Doc's, but after a moment's thought Harris shook his head. "I'd just shoot myself in the foot," he said.
A chime later Alastair got things under way. First, he asked, "You're sure you don't want me along? Or the others? Or some troops?"
Doc shook his head. "If we haven't returned in eight bells, we have both failed. You are the only one left who understands Duncan's work well enough to try again. You have to stay. And the more of us who go, the more we will be conspicuous. So, no." And that was that.
Doc and Harris waited in the center of the conjurer's circle. Alastair, his face lit from below by the oil lamp that rested beside the book, hovered over the proper page. He began reciting words in a language Harris did not understand—thick, gooey words that put Harris in mind of a preacher trying to cough up a peanut butter sandwich stuck to the roof of his mouth.
The recitation went on and on, long enough for Harris to become bored and restless . . . until he began noticing things.
Such as the way the pines nearest the conjurer's circle were beginning to shed their needles—they'd already looked a little bare, and now even more needles began raining down on the ground.
Such as the way the wind was stirring, tugging at Harris' clothes and hair, feeling almost like tiny, delicate hands playing with him.
Such as the way the moon and stars suddenly felt like eyes staring down on him.
Harris brushed away the gooseflesh rising on his arms. Then, all over Neckerdam, clocks mounted high in impossible skyscrapers began solemnly bonging off six bells, not quite in chorus.
When the nearest tower chimed for the third time, it happened: the world changed shape. He saw the trees growing tall, the kneeling Alastair stretching all out of proportion.
The first sensation of dizziness touched him. Harris didn't wait for it to worsen; he dropped to one knee and put his hands on the ground for balance. Alastair, still chanting, his words deepened and coarsened by what was happening, was suddenly twelve feet high and still growing. Doc awkwardly dropped to sit beside Harris, dizziness and annoyance clear on his face.
Then the pop.
The trees were suddenly gone, and Alastair with them. The stars above were gone, obscured by clouds and haze, but somehow the sky was friendlier—there were no malevolent eyes staring down at them.
Central Park.
It was as if Harris had been wearing a heavy weight of tension around his neck on a cord . . . and the cord were suddenly cut. He felt light, and light-headed. He was home.
The old man felt the faintest chill, like a cold trickle of water down his neck and back. He rubbed his neck to be rid of the sensation.
He didn't like that. His instincts were very good. It didn't pay to ignore them. "Bill, check to make sure she's still there."
Phipps obligingly picked up the tracing device and switched it on. After a minute, the little screen glowed green.
"She hasn't budged. Wish she'd go to sleep. I . . . " His voice trailed off.
The old man waited an impatient moment. "Yes, what?"
"Nothing, I think. Caught a faint blip way off at the edge of the screen. Just a spike, faded in and out. Sort of like the way the neopagan festival we scanned kept futzing with our readings. It's gone now."
The old man sat back, scowling. He had to fight back a sudden urge to take the tracing device and go roaring off in the direction of that phantom blip. But as close as he was to finishing this long, long stage of the plan, it wouldn't do to go running off like a reckless youth.
The chill faded, but his unease did not.
During the cab ride, Doc was fascinated by the sights and sounds of Ma
nhattan. His head whipped around as he stared at the clothes people wore, at the cars, at the skyscrapers—buildings no taller than Neckerdam's tallest, but very different in style and construction. He said nothing, though at several times he seemed to want to.
At Gaby's apartment building, Harris pressed the buzzer for her apartment, but no one answered. However, her keys gave him access to the lobby, and three flights of stairs later he and Doc stood outside her door.
Or, rather, her brand-new door. That's right, Mr. Crenshaw had said that somebody had smashed her door to pieces. The new one didn't open to their knock. Worse, her door key didn't open it.
"She sure got it fixed fast," Harris said, grumbling. "Any reason we need to go in? I can make the calls from my apartment."
"We need to go in. I want to see if her kidnappers left any sign behind."
"Can you pick the lock or something?"
"Something." Doc wrapped his hand in his handkerchief. He looked back and forth along the hall, then gripped the knob and tried to turn it.
Nothing happened for a long moment—except Doc's arm trembled almost invisibly, and a vein stood out on his wrist. Then, with a sharp cracking sound, the lock turned in his hand. Broken. He pushed it open, glanced nonchalantly at Harris, and entered.
Harris found the light switch by feel but didn't turn it on until the door was closed behind them.
Gaby's tidy one-bedroom apartment. Her furnishings were old but clean; her walls were decorated with framed prints and posters, some of which he'd given her. Harris walked Doc around, explaining things to him: TV Guide and bug-bombs and junk food leftovers and why the TV received but didn't call out and dishwashers and blue toilet drop-in tablets and clocks with LCD displays; the list went on and on. Partway into it, Harris realized that this was just the sort of stuff he'd been asking during the month-long day he'd spent in the fair world.
Finally Doc settled in to look over the traces of intrusion—signs of violence in the living room, footprints that were too large to belong to anyone but Adonis. "Make your talk-box calls," he said.
"Sure. It may take a while. It's one a.m.—uh, nearly seven bells—and I'll be waking people up. Conversations won't be too friendly."
Doc tried not to show his irritation. He couldn't make his thoughts run in the same direction, couldn't focus them. Each one wanted to go its own way, to marvel, to deduce, to condemn.
The grim world. He supposed he'd always believed in it. So many of the legends of his youth had their bases in scientific truths. But this world was nothing like he imagined it to be.
Animals didn't befilth the places where they lived, but the men of the grim world did. His nose was sharper than most men's, but surely they couldn't all be immune to the bad mechanical smell the automobiles spat out.
He wished he could read the writing that decorated the ground-floor exteriors of so many of the buildings, but the cursive script was difficult to decipher and so many of the words meant nothing. Did these scrawls act as wards against bad devisements, appeals to the gods, simple territorial markings?
And the buildings themselves—the men of the grim world must not have come from a tradition of defensive buildings. So many of their structures had windows on the ground floor; some of the high-rises seemed to be made entirely of windows. He resolved to look into their techniques of construction; not many of the architectural styles he'd seen here had appealed to him, but that one had.
The grimworlders' technological achievement was amazing. Talk-boxes that people could effortlessly carry, in singles, doubles, and triples. He hadn't yet seen any portable quadruples—no full-picture send and receive in a hand-carry device. But shows from all over the world came in on the triples.
Harris had said they had aircraft that surpassed the speed of sound, and he desperately wanted to see one in flight.
Human skin colors he'd never seen before. Browns so deep as to be almost black. Yellow tones. But as on the fair world, the darks and duskies of the grim world didn't seem to have all the advantages of the lights.
The language. Harris had been right. Doc recited poetry to himself to test its rhyme and scansion. His words were the same they had ever been; no mystic translation had taken place. So Low Cretanis and English were dialects of the same tongue. He'd also heard dusky men of the grim world shouting in something like Castilian.
It made no sense. He could think of no way for languages to stay so similar if they hadn't been in constant contact in the centuries since the worlds drifted apart. Yet somehow they had.
Other similarities. The cars were as related as the languages; he was certain that he could drive one of the automobiles of the grim world, even if they did have only one gear. Dwellings here were broken down by familiar human needs: parlors, bedchambers, kitchens, privies.
So much iron. He'd burned his hands half a dozen times since he'd arrived, as if every other thing he touched had just been resting on a hot stove. No use letting Harris know; there was nothing he could do about it. Doc hadn't thought to carry gloves—a careless error; he was annoyed that he hadn't given it more thought. Now he just let Harris precede him everywhere. He'd pick up gloves as soon as he could.
So much to learn . . . but for now, the only thing he could afford the time to learn was the nature of Gabriela Donohue's attackers.
Harris had to use the phone in the bedroom; the one in the living room had been torn free from its old-fashioned wall connector. The bedroom was stuffy, so he opened the window over the fire escape and looked out on the sparse 11th Street traffic while he called.
"Hi, it's Harris. I'm looking for Gaby. It's kind of an emergency. Are you sure you don't? No, sorry, I wasn't implying anything. I know it's late, I'm sorry, bye."
But the third call was to Elaine's, and a second later Gaby was on the line. "Harris, are you all right?"
"I'm fine." I almost got my leg cut off but a magical doctor put me back together. "How about you?"
"I'm okay. I've been so worried. Did the police find you? Where are you?"
"Your place. No, I haven't talked to the police. They're kind of low on my priority list."
"Did you talk to Leo next door? I asked him to kind of keep an eye on my place. If he hears something suspicious he may call the cops."
"We'll keep quiet."
Doc appeared in the doorway, the volt-meter in his hands. Harris said, "Doc, I have her."
"So do I, I think. I rekeyed this to show myself . . . and I read another signal, probably hers. She'd be nearly due east of here, ten or fifteen destads, I think."
"Who's Doc?"
"A friend, Gaby. Wait a minute—you mean you don't know him? Doc, with the Sidhe Foundation?"
"Huh?"
Harris looked up at Doc. "She says she doesn't know you from Adam. What's a destad?"
"Two thousand paces—ten stads. If her signal strength is similar to yours, she is—"
"Ten or fifteen away. Right." Harris did a rough conversion: one pace would equal about one yard. That made her twenty to thirty thousand yards. Sixty to ninety thousand feet. Divide by five thousand . . . "Yep. That puts her out somewhere near New Rochelle, all right. Gaby, Doc here has a gizmo that you have to see. It shows that you're at Elaine's."
"You've got to be joking."
"No . . . Oh, shit. If Doc has this thing working right, then the old guy . . . Gaby, the old guy has to have one of these, too. He probably knows where you are right now."
He heard her hiss of breath, then: "Stay there. I'll get there as fast as I can." And she hung up.
"Dammit." Harris slapped the handset down in its cradle. "She's coming here, Doc. It'll be a little while."
Doc nodded. "That will give me more time to collect scrapings and measure aura traces. There was something very ugly in these quarters a few hours ago . . . and if I read the signs right, Adonis was not the ugliest."
Chapter Ten
Doc closed his right eye and returned to scanning the living room. It wasn't easy; though his Gif
t was very strong and well trained, ever since he'd come to the grim world it had been very hard to call upon.
It was too bad Alastair wasn't here; the doctor's good eye was so much better than Doc's. Alastair might have been able to make more of the faint haze of aura that still hung in the apartment. All Doc could see was traces of two aura presences. One was obviously "Adonis"—dim, channelled anger and animal spirit.
The other, almost washed away by Adonis' trace, was dark and very complex. Someone with the Gift. Maybe even a deviser. Doc had seen the auras of many of the Gifted and a few devisers . . . and this aura trace was starting to look familiar.
Almost as familiar as his own. Doc found himself swallowing as his stomach rebelled. It was different from the aura he remembered, but not more different than could be accounted for by twenty years of profaning the spirit.
Duncan's aura. Just older. Bleaker. Purer. He'd started to suspect when he studied the tracing device, but it had been easier not to believe.
These thoughts held Doc's attention so completely that he never heard the faint creak of footsteps out in the hall. He didn't recognize danger until it was on him: the door slamming inward, two men in street clothes and coats pointing guns at him, shouting words in angry tones.
Solemnly, he raised his hands, with a little prayer to the gods that this gesture was universal.
"Lights going out, sir."
The old man started out of his doze and looked over at the Carpenter house. The porch light was now off, and as he watched, the last of the bedroom lights went out. "Ah. Very good. We'll wait a few minutes and then go in."
"Sir . . . Things would be easier and safer if we just eliminate her."
"I want to study her."
"Yes, but—forgive me—wanting to study her has caused us a lot of problems so far."
"You're entirely correct." The old man sank comfortably back against the soft seat. "William, does gravity ever bother you?"
"I never gave it much thought. It's not as though I have a choice."
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