Trapped lop-6

by James Alan Gardner

  There in the yard, lobsterlike Oberon was obviously trying to decide how Gretchen's whims would run tonight. If I'd been alone, he would have let me proceed to the house immediately; Gretchen's standing orders were to let me pass, and she'd decide for herself whether to admit me to her glorious presence. But I'd come with five strangers in tow, and Oberon wasn't eager to let them close to his exalted mistress. He belonged to his species' warrior caste, and his first instinct was to keep his queen safe from outsiders.

  He clicked his pincers softly. "We weren't expecting guests tonight, baron."

  "I know. But we need to see Gretchen immediately."

  "The question is, does she need to see you?"

  "Excellent point, good fellow," said Pelinor. Our noble knight liked aliens almost as much as he liked horses; he'd been gazing in admiration at Oberon ever since the big ET had appeared from the darkness. And just as he had a feel for horse psychology, Pelinor could guess what was on Oberon's mind. "How about this," he told the demon. "You keep us here while, uhh, Baron Dhubhai goes for a private chat with Ms. Kinnderboom. No problem with that, is there?"

  Oberon nodded immediately and waved me toward the house. I gave my friends one last glance (attempting a soulful meeting-of-the-eyes with Annah, then a warning glare at Impervia, who was gazing at Oberon with the thoughtful look of someone considering where to punch a lobster for maximum effect); then I hurried up the gravel drive.

  The front of Kinnderboom Cottage was dark: no lights in any of the rooms, just a single oil lamp above the main entrance. Still, I was certain Gretchen would be awake; for the past five years, she'd slept days instead of nights. If anyone asked why, she'd say, "I'm a vampire now, darling, didn't you get my note?"… but in fact, she was just a woman on the high side of forty, trying to deny she might ever show her age. Daylight was too unforgiving, especially since the cottage had mirrors in every room. Gretchen preferred to see herself by candleshine, or when she was greatly daring, by the muted glow of sun through curtains. Her bedroom had curtains in three different colors — red, gold, and dusky brown — plus meters of thick white lace, so she could make love in the afternoon and tint the lighting to whatever shade made her feel sexy.

  She never went outside. Ever. Sometimes after a night together, she would nudge me out of bed at dawn and get me to open the doors to the balcony outside her window. She would ask me to pull the thinnest lace curtains across the opening, like a sheer white veil; then she would make me get back into bed, and she would go alone to the doorway, standing naked in the sunrise, inhaling the morning and the breeze that fluttered the curtains around her.

  But she never threw the curtains wide open. Never took that last step onto the balcony to feel the sun on her skin. She always stayed behind the thin lace barrier. Sometimes I wondered if this was all just a performance, so I could see her body backlit by dawn and imagine the breeze licking her nipples, the sheer curtains swishing against her stomach and thighs… but at other times, I was sure I could sense an ache inside her, a yearning to be truly outdoors instead of a single step shy. She would stand there for minutes, closing her eyes and taking deep silent breaths; then she would come back wordlessly to bed and either cling to me like a little girl or throw herself into ravenous love-making, driving, driving, driving until we were both obliterated.

  Those moments were what made me keep coming back to Kinnderboom Cottage — not for the sex itself, but for the woman who used sex to run from herself. Lonely, silly, exploitive Gretchen. She made me feel needed… which is not the same as being loved or appreciated, but it can still be addictive if you don't ask yourself too many questions.

  The door opened as I walked up the front steps. Oberon's mate Titania stood in the entrance, bowing low in greeting. Like her husband, she was built on lobstery lines, but smaller and colored a deep earthy brown. Instead of pincers, Titania had a second pair of arms: nimble and strong despite their thinness. She served as Gretchen's majordomo, keeping the other slaves organized. If Titania were human, she might easily have become total mistress of the estate, since Gretchen had neither the shrewdness nor the discipline to resist. Gretchen could have become a pampered prisoner with Titania controlling the staff and the purse-strings. But Titania was not human; she was an alien lobster whose instincts to follow a queen were just as strong as Oberon's. Though Titania ran the cottage far better than Gretchen ever could, Titania would never dream of usurping ultimate command.

  "Good evening, baron," Titania said. "It's provident you came. Mistress Gretchen could use some company just now."

  "I'm afraid that's not why I'm here. I need Gretchen's help."

  Titania stared at me a moment, the tips of her whiskers lifting. I'd come to recognize that as her species' look of disapproval: Queen Gretchen was apparently in some black mood and Titania wanted me to make things brighter, not bring new problems of my own. On the other hand, it was not a courtier's place to shield her queen from making decisions; in Titania's mind I was behaving with commendable sense, approaching Queen Gretchen with a humble petition for aid. That's what loyal subjects did… and loyal retainers didn't stand in the way.

  "All right," Titania said, making an effort to relax her whiskers, "I'll present you. But take off your boots — they're filthy."

  We walked up to Gretchen's room in silence: Titania in front and me behind, because she was too big for us to walk side by side through corridors built to normal human scale. She held a kerosene lamp in one hand, but its shine was blocked by her body; climbing the stairs, I was almost completely in the dark.

  Then again, I didn't need any light — I'd gone up and down this stairway so often in blackness, I knew exactly how many steps there were and which were likely to creak under my weight. Heaven knows why Gretchen and I were so furtive when there was nobody else in the house except slaves, and the slaves were aliens with precious little interest in human sexual affairs… but we always conducted our meetings like an adulterous couple sneaking around while their spouses slept nearby.

  Stupid habit. But that's what Gretchen and I had: just an ongoing habit.

  Titania tapped on the door of Gretchen's suite, then went inside without waiting. I followed into the so-called Sitting Room: a place seldom used but often redecorated, with its appearance changing from season to season (sometimes month to month, or week to week). At the moment, it was designed to fight the dourness of winter with warm/hot colors — wallpaper of ferocious carmine red accented with a black and gold border around the top. The furniture (couch, rocking chair, ottoman) matched the color scheme with appropriate upholstery or afghan throw-covers draped neatly over bare wood. The neatness of the afghans proved Gretchen truly was in a bad way. When she was feeling good, she sprawled wherever she wanted with no regard for how the afghans might slip; when she was in a mood, she needed everything just so, and could spend hours fussing to get proper tucks and folds.

  Titania crossed the room as quickly as her eight legs would go — I think she deliberately avoided seeing how fastidiously everything was arranged — and she knocked at the door to the bedroom. "Mistress Gretchen," she murmured, "Baron Dhubhai has come to visit." Titania looked my direction as if daring me to say otherwise; then she turned back to the closed door and asked, "May I let him in?"

  If any answer came, it was too quiet for me to hear. Nevertheless, Titania turned the knob and pushed the door open. "The mistress will see you now."

  I nodded. Titania bowed once more, then silently brushed past me as she headed downstairs.

  I'd never seen the bedroom so brilliantly lit: every flat surface held two or three shine-stones, beaming dollops of quartz I assumed had been enchanted by sorcerers working for Papa Kinnderboom in Feliss City. Usually Gretchen only kept one or two stones out in the open, and she often draped those with squares of thin cotton to mute the gleam; but tonight there were dozens all over the place, standing uncovered on the vanity, the dressers, the night stands, even scattered on the floor. My eyes ached from the brightness
— I had to shield my gaze with my hand as I searched for Gretchen herself.

  Despite the incessant remodeling in other parts of the house, Gretchen's bedroom hadn't changed in years — except for the darkening curtains, the place was always white, white, white, the walls, the bedding, the carpet. For variation, the furniture was painted in a range of bleached grays. There were also accents of color where Gretchen had thrown a sapphire blue dress over a chair, and left a crimson bra pooled on the floor; but the overall impression was still that eye-glaring white, illuminated now by several dozen shine-stones.

  Quite bright enough to show that Gretchen was missing.

  She'd recently been in the bed: the covers were thrown back and the sheets rumpled. The sight made me think of dead Rosalind, her covers wide open too. But Gretchen was not lying sprawled across the mattress… nor was she sitting at the vanity or lounging in the giant bathtub against the far wall. I peeked into the walk-in closet, but saw no sign of her. I didn't get down to look under the bed, but I glanced in that direction while staying on my feet, and decided it was unlikely Gretchen had managed to crawl out of sight. Since there was nowhere else she could hide (short of scrunching into a cedar chest or one of the trunks in the closet), I was on the verge of leaving; then a puff of breeze swirled the curtains in front of the balcony doors.

  The doors were open. Despite the chill of the not-yet-spring night.

  The hairs on the back of my neck bristled as I walked across the room. If she'd finally taken that last step into the open air… I kept picturing her throwing herself off the balcony in some fit of despondence. Or bid for attention. We were only one story up, so she'd almost certainly survive; but I didn't want to look over the railing and see Gretchen lying below. I had to force myself to push through the curtains, into the cold night breeze…

  …where Gretchen stood quite alive, naked and hugging herself, rapidly puckering into one gigantic goose-pimple.

  "Hi," I said.

  "Hi yourself." Her teeth chattered. "Could you, uhh…" She lifted one arm to gesture back into the room, then quickly went back to hugging herself. It took me a moment to realize what she wanted.

  "The lights?" I said.

  "Please."

  I hurried back into the bedroom and collected shine-stones, dropping them into the thick velvet sack where Gretchen usually kept them. As I worked, I couldn't help chuckling — imagining Gretchen as she heard the knock at her door. She must have realized she was surrounded by more light than a summer afternoon… so she scuttled to the balcony to keep me from seeing her in the unforgiving glare. All those times I'd tried to get her outdoors, I'd been using the wrong tactics.

  I laughed again.

  Soon I was carrying a bag full of shine: all the stones except one. I'd left that one on the night stand and covered it with a scarf of turquoise gossamer that had been balled up on the vanity. The resulting light tinted the room either sickly green or sea-mist blue, depending on your tolerance for turquoise… but it seemed to satisfy Gretchen, for she immediately came back inside, and closed the doors behind her. For a count of three she tried to bluff out the moment, letting her arms fall to her sides and striking a pose of regal nudity, pretending to be unfazed by cold. Then the shivers hit her and she stumbled forward, ripping a comforter off the bed and wrapping herself as her body shook.

  I took her into my arms. She was a tall woman, almost exactly my height, long-legged and lean… but at that moment she seemed much smaller, shrinking into me as she opened the comforter and wrapped it around the two of us. Her bare body pressed against my clothes. Milky skin, green eyes, russet hair — all of which seemed entirely natural, but when a woman's daddy has sorcerers on his payroll, one can never tell how much cosmetic help she had in her formative years. Kaylan's Chameleon isn't the only beauty spell cast on developing girls — sorcerers have plenty of "tuck 'n' tweak" enchantments, making eye color more vivid, hair more lush, and adolescent body development more in keeping with local fashion. There was a reason my cousin Hafsah had such memorable loveliness: my grandma the governor paid for it. For the same reason, Gretchen's creamy complexion showed no hint of the usual freckles, moles, and other punctuations that flesh is normally heir to.

  Yet sorcery has its limitations — it can correct imperfections, but it can't stop time. Removing a mole just means banishing pigments from a specific area of tissue; removing a wrinkle from a forty-ish woman's face means fighting the whole course of physical development, all the ongoing changes that lead to dry skin, slowing hormones and declining glands. Aging isn't one thing, it's everything… and neither science nor sorcery has identified all the body's clocks, let alone figured out how to turn them back in unison. There are too many proteins and enzymes and secretions that have to be balanced: if you stop the formation of crow's feet by changing the quantity of a particular body chemical, other body chemicals shift too. Lots of chemicals. Next thing you know, there might be a rash, or sores, or an epileptic fit.

  Aging isn't an aberration that can be set back on track… it's the track itself.

  I looked at the woman in my arms, and despite the dimness of the light, I could see everything she didn't admit was there: the wrinkles, the crinkles, the lines. A puffiness around the jaw; lapses in the sleekness of her neck. All very subtle, what most of us would consider insignificant — anyone standing back a few steps would see a woman at the peak of her beauty. But that wasn't enough for Gretchen. When she invited a man to her boudoir, she had no intention of keeping him at arm's length.

  "I'm glad you're here," she whispered. Her breath caressed my neck; a moment later, her lips did too.

  "Gretchen," I said, "I can't stay."

  "Don't be a silly billy." She kissed my neck again. "You just got here."

  "I have some friends outside. There's been trouble at the school, and we need to borrow your boat."

  "What?" She blinked as if I'd just pinched her.

  "One of our students has run off. People are after him — dangerous people. We need a fast boat so we can find him before they do."

  "You're just here to take my boat?" Her voice had an edge of outrage.

  "It's important, Gretchen. A girl is dead. Murdered. And other people are dead too, thanks to a Spark Lord who—"

  "A Spark Lord? Which Spark Lord?"

  "The female Sorcery-Lord. Called Dreamsinger. She showed up at a tavern and—"

  "You met a Spark Lord? When?"

  "Tonight," I said. "Just a while ago. Now she's gone to Niagara Falls, and we need your boat to—"

  "So this Sorcery-Lord is in Niagara Falls?"

  "That's where she said she was going."

  "And you want my boat to go there too?"

  "Yes."

  She drew away from me — not abruptly, but in typical Gretchen fashion: a squeeze of mock affection, then an ooze of regretful detachment, and finally a playful flash of her naked body before she closed the comforter around herself. "All right," she said, "we'll head for Niagara Falls."

  "We?"

  "Yes: we." She threw off the comforter and began to get dressed.

  She'd probably claim that she dressed in a hurry… and she did abbreviate her usual routine of trying on half her wardrobe before deciding what suited her mood. But Gretchen was not one of those heroines from fiction who can switch instantly from pampered beauty to rugged adventurer. If her bedroom caught fire, she wouldn't leave until she'd tried on half a dozen outfits to see which matched the flames. As for being seen in public without rouge, mascara, perfume, et cetera — silly billy, what are you thinking?

  So I sat on the bed and waited as patiently as I could. Trying to rush Gretchen was worse than useless — if you annoyed her, she slowed down to punish you. The woman had a knack for petty vindictiveness: entirely unconscious too. She'd be genuinely shocked if you suggested she was deliberately taking longer than necessary to redden her lips, pluck her eyebrows, and choose which garters went with which stockings inside which boots to wear on a muddy ni
ght in late thaw; and then she'd slow down even more.

  Gretchen could drive a man mad in so many ways.

  "Now tell me," she called as she rummaged through boxes in her closet, "what did this Dreamsinger look like?"

  "Don't know," I answered. "She was hidden in Kaylan's Chameleon."

  Gretchen stuck her head out of the closet. "Now I really want to know what she looked like. Me perhaps?"

  "If you were my ideal sexual object, do you think I'd admit it?"

  She laughed and disappeared back into the closet — no doubt convinced I couldn't possibly desire any woman besides herself.

  I said, "You realize this trip might get dangerous? We aren't the only ones going to Niagara. Have you heard of the Ring of Knives?"

  "God, those people? I swear, that dreadful Warwick Xavier spies on me with a telescope."

  "He's a smuggler; he watches the lake for customs agents."

  "He watches my windows for a glimpse of my booboos."

  "Do you ever give him one?"

  Gretchen laughed. "Of course. Every girl needs someone to torture."

  "In addition to herself."

  Gretchen didn't dignify that with an answer. For a while, the only sound from the closet was the squeal of metal hangers scraping sharply along clothes-rods.

  "So," I finally said, "why so many shine-stones tonight?"

  "Nothing, darling, just a whim."

  "What kind of whim?"

  "An idle one."

  Since she couldn't see me, I rolled my eyes. "You weren't, for example, afraid of the dark and wanted as much light as possible? Or feeling so depressed, you thought the light would cheer you up?"

  "Don't be ridiculous. I feel fine."