Eric was counting on the fact that they still had a little time. There would be at least one whole set by the warm-up band, and a couple of songs by the main attraction before the place went up. Jormin was the lead singer of Pure Blood, and no Bard could resist the chance to perform for this large an audience. Eric had to have at least until Pure Blood took the stage and did a couple of numbers.
But he intended to deny Jormin his audience. Long before then, he and his friends would Bard-Out the people assembled here. They'd undo the frenzy that Gabrevys and his minions had whipped them into, calm them, and convince them to simply leave. The combination of his and Hosea's Bardcraft and Ace's Talent should be able to accomplish that.
But all those people wouldn't be able to hear them over the amps down there, even with magick to help. So they needed to improvise. . . .
They were able to move around fairly easily behind the stage. Nobody was back there; the road crew was standing out in front with Security, watching the show. Until the time came to change the set for the next act, there wouldn't be anything to do.
Eric cast a glamourie over them that didn't exactly change their appearance, but did make them seem to belong there. They didn't have to worry about running into Jormin—he was playing his part of Being a Rock Star, and would be waiting in one of the two trailers that served as green rooms until it was time for Pure Blood to take the stage.
As for Billy Fairchild and any speeches he might be going to make, Eric suspected they'd be timed for just before Pure Blood's appearance as well. He'd want his audience all worked up and ready for him, just as if this were one of his Praise Hours. Besides, Pure Blood was his trophy band; he would want to introduce them.
As big and as ugly as this whole thing was, it still had more than a little in common with all the RenFaires Eric had worked through the years. The stage crew had their mind on the performers, and anybody who looked as if they belonged where they were and were doing what they were supposed to be doing would pretty much be ignored.
For that matter, the number of trained and reliable roadies around was finite. These guys probably didn't care who or what they worked for, as long as they got their paychecks. This year, it was Christian metal; next year, it could be a thrash-rock group, a bunch of Goths, a boy-band or a punk revival. Whoever had a bankroll and a payroll.
The five of them loaded several flatbed carts with what they needed. There wasn't anything big enough to shift the drum-kit and the keyboard, but Lady Day obliged them there, transforming herself into a very shiny four-wheeled "motorized" cart.
"Hey. Wha'chew doin'?" one of the road crew said, wandering over. He was wearing a "Red Nails: Leap of Faith" T-shirt and had to shout to be heard over the band, even back here behind the amplifiers.
"We've got to move this stuff out of the way to make a clear path to the stage," Eric said, extending a thread of Bardic Magick toward the man to make what was actually a pretty lame excuse become completely believable. "They told us to take it over by the trailers."
"Well, hell, we'll just have to move it back over here again when Pure Blood comes on, but if that's what they said, go ahead. Wouldn't want the sky-pilots to trip over somebody's ax. Need any help?"
"No, we've got it. Thanks."
"Look out for souvenir hunters. Judah's been having trouble hanging on to his panties. The ladies think he's really hot." The roadie ended with a snort that said, wordlessly, and so does he.
Eric just grinned and waved, keeping up his impersonation of someone who was with the tour. Lady Day started rolling, and he did his best to give the impression he was controlling a heavy load.
* * *
It seemed as if it took forever before they were safely buried in the middle of the crowd—safe, because the people surrounding them would do a lot to mask them from magickal detection, assuming Gabrevys's people were looking for them here. The spells Eric and Hosea cast kept them from being trampled: the people might not quite register that they were there, but they moved out of the way anyway.
Once they'd worked their way around to the front of the stage, the music was even louder than before. Eric hadn't thought it was possible. He'd never been a real fan of this stuff: his own tastes had always run to classical and traditional music.
Even Magnus and Kayla, who did like what Eric privately referred to as "that head-banging noise" (Kayla liked techno-House; Magnus was a fan of Black Metal) didn't seem to care for the current offering. Well, they could probably make out the lyrics. . . .
Ace and Hosea simply looked grim. And Molly, who was riding atop one of the carts, had flattened down as far as she could, her ears pressed close to the sides of her bowling-ball-shaped head. If the music was stunningly loud to human hearing, Eric could barely imagine how it must sound to a dog.
The crowd began to thin as they neared the other building. Everybody wanted to be close to the music.
Right. Bottom of the ninth and bases loaded. You've been here before. Nevertheless, his stomach was knotting up. He felt a terrible need to hurry, although they were moving as fast as they could, and if they flat-out ran, they might attract the attention of any of the things around here that could see through Bardic glamouries. There was a lot they were counting on to make this work: most of all, that Prince Gabrevys shared the fatal obliviousness of all the Unseleighe Sidhe, and would simply never imagine (not that any of the Sidhe were any good at imagining, and as far as Eric knew, Gabrevys had no human advisors) that an enemy he'd last seen running for his life, an enemy that Gabrevys knew he was more powerful than, would simply turn around and sneak right back into his mortal stronghold.
And beyond that, they were counting on the fact that Gabrevys ap Ganeliel was a feudal prince who took his ruling style from the real Middle Ages—which meant that the way he wanted to do something was the way it was going to be done, period. And that meant that even if any of his underlings happened to have any initiative, they certainly wouldn't use it. If Gabrevys had a bunch of people looking for the five of them in South Jersey and said that was where they were, nobody would be looking for them here if they knew what was good for them.
Meanwhile, just as Eric had said to Magnus what seemed like a thousand years ago, repeating what his own mentor had told him: "Life is war, young Banyon. Art is war. You would do well to remember both these things. Concentrate on the destination, not the journey. And do not allow your lust for frivolity and self-indulgence to distract you, for your enemy will use that against you. Self-indulgence is a vice no Bard—and no warrior—can afford."
They weren't here to take out Gabrevys or his Bard—or even Parker Wheatley and his new "Demonic" crusade today. All they wanted to do was shut down this crowd so that Ria's specialists could come in and find the bomb. They wouldn't have any trouble getting into the building—provided they didn't have Talent, anyway.
Hosea tapped Eric on the shoulder and pointed. Between the music and the roaring of the crowd, talking was impossible. He could have cast a bubble of silence around them to shut out the noise, but he really didn't want to use any more magick than he had to. Enough magick of the wrong sort would probably attract Gabrevys's attention.
He looked where Hosea indicated.
There were two guards in casino security uniforms standing in front of the main entrance to the building they wanted to enter, obviously to keep spectators from getting in. Getting around them wouldn't be a problem—a quick look with his mage-sight told Eric they were ordinary mortals, and so the glamourie he had cast to conceal the five of them would hold, and they could probably just walk right past them—but if there were guards here, there'd be more around the side, where the service door was, and those would take more dealing with.
He was right. As they angled around the side, he saw two more of the uniformed guards. But he was not at all prepared for what happened next.
He was ready to put them both to sleep, but he needed to catch their attention in order to do it. But the moment their attention was on them, he didn't get the reacti
on—irritation, anger, even fear—that he expected. Instead they looked resigned and faintly amused.
"Is this the rest of the stuff for the guys upstairs?" one of the men asked. He had to cup his hands over his mouth and shout to be heard.
"Uh . . . yeah," Eric said. Guys? Upstairs? This does not sound good.
But they could deal with them when they got there—they'd have to—and right now he was going to take the guards' mistake as a gift from whatever gods protected improvising musicians. He simply waited as one of the guards opened the unlocked door for them and held it to let them move their equipment through, cracking some joke that Eric and the others couldn't hear.
At least once the door was shut, the music was damped to a dull roar. They moved away from the entrance, down the dark hall, lest the Security people should think twice about letting them in. Next thing they had to do was find the stairs—and then find out whose little helpers those guys had mistaken them for.
But was something else weird going on.
This building should have had all the charm of a wet sock, even in the middle of March: stuffy, airless, and damp with the fact that it had been uninhabited and without power for who knew how long. But although it was obviously untenanted, there was air circulating here.
"Power's on," Magnus said, coming to a stop. He flipped a wall switch. The overhead lights came on. "Yup."
"Elevators," Kayla said, turning back. With elevators they wouldn't have to drag this stuff up quite so many stairs, and from the second story, they could find the roof access.
"Why?" Hosea asked simply.
"Somebody else in this building needs power for something," Eric said. "Electrical power, not the other kind. And they must be running enough equipment off it that the guys at the door figured we were with them, bringing in more."
Kayla found the button and pushed it. The rumble of the elevator indicated that all the building's systems were, indeed, live. It descended to ground level and the doors opened.
Kayla started to wheel her cart into it, but Eric stopped her.
"If there are freaky people upstairs, Hosea and I had better deal with them first," he said.
"Here, Little Bit," Hosea said, slipping his banjo off his shoulder and handing it to Kayla. "You hang on to Jeanette for me until I get back."
"Aw, geez," Kayla muttered, taking the instrument gingerly by the neck. "First dogs, now haunted refugees from the Grand Ol' Opry. Hurry back, you guys."
Her tone was light, but her pupils were dilated. Eric just nodded at her.
The elevator doors opened, and Hosea and Eric walked in.
Eric took a deep breath, doing his best to feel as far away as he could, trying to sense danger ahead—or possibly behind. He wasn't sure whether to feel pleased or irritated that he didn't sense anything at all.
The elevator stopped.
The lights were on here on the second floor, at least in the back half of the building, but like the old joke said, nobody seemed to be home.
Neither Eric nor Hosea were inclined to raise their voices though—or even, really, to talk. Both of them could feel that there was something wrong here, as wrong as if all the closed doors they passed in the hallway concealed stacks of murdered bodies. They just weren't sure, either of them, what it was.
And for some reason, they could hear the concert better here than they had downstairs.
Could the bomb be here, instead of over in the cathedral and casino? Eric paused to consider that. It was so . . . unlikely . . . that he simply didn't think that Gabrevys would have thought of it, and he couldn't imagine that the Unseleighe Prince would have warded that building and not this one if the bomb were here.
But because the stakes were so very high, Eric took the time to look, using his mage-sight to look not only through the building, but through the building, as if it weren't there, searching for anything that thought of itself as a bomb. Nothing on this floor, or the floor below, and the building was built on a slab besides—buildings near the coast didn't tend to run to basements—so there wasn't a basement to worry about.
Nothing.
Whatever was the cause of their uneasiness, it was something else.
When they found the fire stairs at the end of the hallway—fortunately the building wasn't very large, not in comparison with the Cathedral and Casino of Prayer—they also found a nest of extension cords running from various outlets and rushing up the steps like a Medusa's hair. The door itself was propped open—the music was very loud now—and ice-cold outdoor air came blowing down the short flight of stairs that led to the roof. The air brought with it a rank organic scent—maybe somebody had been dumping garbage up here?
"Somebody shore needs a lot of power for his radio," Hosea said. Eric couldn't hear him now, but he could read his lips.
Eric nodded. "Let's go see," he mouthed back.
They moved cautiously up the stairs, Eric in the lead. The door at the top hadn't just been propped open, it had been ripped off its hinges. Well, that pretty much explained why the music was so loud.
Ripped off the hinges . . .
This is not good.
Cautiously, Eric looked around the edge of the doorway.
The power cables snaked out to the center of the roof to three state-of-the-art video cameras on tripods and their peripherals, all trained on the stage across the way. The set-up wouldn't be visible from the ground—well, they hadn't seen it, after all.
And baby-sitting the equipment were three werewolves.
They weren't "real" werewolves—as much as the term had any meaning. They were seven-foot-tall fur-covered tailless bipeds with wolfish heads, hands with long talons, and doglike haunches: horror-movie werewolves. They weren't anything Eric had a name for, but Gabrevys had already proved he had allies from something other than the Celtic-based Unseleighe Realms.
Must be Low Court, or something like it, or they would have spotted us on our way here, Eric thought automatically. Low Court Seleighe Sidhe couldn't survive away from their Node Grove; in fact, none of the Low Court creatures on the Light Side of the Force that he had ever run across could get far from their anchoring point in the World Above. He didn't want to think about what their Unseleighe counterparts did to manage.
Or had done for them.
If they were Unseleighe, he could try playing the Bard Card: of course, if they weren't Sidhe after all—and they might not be; there were some very weird things Underhill—it wouldn't matter at all to them whether he was a Bard or not. Only the Celtic-inspired creatures had any respect for Bards, or fear of them.
Hosea came up behind him and peered out over his shoulder. The big man saw what Eric had seen and jerked back with a sound like a stifled and indignant cough of laughter.
Eric could only share his feelings. There was something weirdly silly—and horrible at the same time—about watching a bunch of shaggy nightmares peering through lenses, adjusting recording equipment, and generally acting like techie-geeks, while knowing they must be here so that Gabrevys would have a nice detailed wide-angle souvenir of the explosion and its aftermath. And knowing, too, that the moment they saw the two humans, they'd come for them and rip them to bits. And probably eat them.
He didn't want to fight. He'd been in one full-scale elven battle—the one Perenor had so kindly arranged back in Southern California—and he still had nightmares about that.
Maybe he could just get them all to go to sleep . . .
"Nice puppies," Eric muttered under his breath, conjuring up his Flute of Air.
The notes he blew weren't precisely music: they were music and more—color and light and scent; the idea of rest, comfort, deep, dreamless sleep. They spread out from the shimmering body of the flute in a sparkling swirling fan and arced over the werewolves as if Eric had cast a net.
The spell had no effect.
Except one.
All three of them pricked up their ears as if somebody had just rung the dinner bell.
As one, they swivele
d their long heads and stared.
And with a flash of fangs, all three of them came loping across the roof toward the doorway. The wolf-legs on the almost-human torso gave them an odd tippy-toe gait that looked uncomfortable, like sprinters in high heels.
Except they were coming really fast. And it didn't look as if they were eager to shake hands. Rip the hands off, yes; shake them, no.
Ice and fire mixed ran through his veins, and everything went into Matrix-style bullet-time.
Run? No real place to go. If he and Hosea ran, they'd only lead the werewolves back to the others—who were even less prepared to defend themselves than Eric and Hosea were—and when push came to shove, they needed this rooftop as a staging ground for their spell.
No matter who was on it now.
They had to fight. And as little as Eric liked the idea, they had to kill, because he didn't think there was any way short of that to stop these creatures without magick.
Eric stepped out onto the roof. He summoned up his armor—of all the spells he had at his command, this was one of the easiest—and drew his sword. So much for Bardic inviolability; even if they are Sidhe I've just forfeited my rights to that by drawing first. . . .
Just for good measure he summoned up a levin-bolt (major chord; crash of violins) and with everything he had in him, he threw it at the nearest one, full-strength.
A levin-bolt was pure raw magick, as lethal as lightning: Sidhe, mortal, or King Kong, a levin-bolt would destroy them all.
But he wasn't particularly surprised—just a little disappointed—to see the blast of energy slide sideways in every direction at once—at least that was what it looked like—without any effect.
Not Sidhe, then. He'd been pretty sure when he'd seen how they'd reacted to his first spell, but now he was really sure. Some of the creatures that lived Underhill, oddly enough, all things considered, were utterly magick-null. Magick simply didn't affect them.
They made great shock troops.
Now his senses all began to speed up, until they caught up with real-time.
Right about the moment that the werewolves closed on them.
Music to My Sorrow Page 30
