A Host of Furious Fancies

by Mercedes Lackey

  There were others like that one in the grimy yellow building, and Urla comforted itself with fantasies of a gluttonous feeding, one that might slake even the redcap’s eternal hunger, for there were many within the yellow building filled with terror and such a burning despair that it made Urla’s mouth water. When night came again it took up its watching post once more, though by now it had lost all hope that the prey it had tracked here would emerge once more.

  Its tiny mind had been occupied for several hours with the question of whether it would be better to abandon its waiting and go once more in search of the Bard its dark master had commanded it to find, but instinct told it that this place contained many secrets, and secrets were always good to know.

  The moon rose high and began to set. And then, just before the sky began to lighten and Urla must once more choose whether to retreat into the sewers again or to admit its failure, something happened. The prey-creatures’ lives burned in Urla’s consciousness like bright candles, but suddenly several of them simply . . . went out.

  Urla crawled forth from its concealment beneath a parked car, leathery brow wrinkling in puzzlement. They had been there a moment before, and now they were not there. It did not sense the tang of death, and sleep alone could not render prey invisible to a redcap’s hunger. Urla crept closer to the strange building, wondering.

  The riptide of fury that followed the strange quenching was enough to send the redcap sprawling stunned in the middle of the street, visible to any who might look. After the first shock, Urla dragged itself to concealment again, shaking its head as if to ward off the effects of a mighty blow. The rage still keened through its senses—an unhinged fury worthy of a mighty Unseleighe lord, black and all-devouring.

  It had to know more.

  Forcing itself forward against the tempest of madness, Urla began searching for ways to enter the building.

  She’d ordered someone to go out for pizza—one good thing about New York, you could get takeout at any hour—and most of a deluxe pie now sat on the corner of Jeanette’s desk, cold and forgotten. Styrofoam cups, half full of cold coffee, studded every available surface within reach. Across the screen the readouts scrolled, changing only slightly from moment to moment.

  The first effects of the drug should be wearing off now, Jeanette thought. It had been four hours, and her psychoactive cocktail was layered, like a fine perfume, to deliver its effects in calculated stages. So at least some of those loser-freaks should be coming around by now. Jeanette ground her teeth in impatience. They couldn’t all just die on her!

  Suddenly two of the readouts . . . vanished. Jeanette stared at the screen, galvanized to alertness by the impossibility of it. A moment later she heard the faint hooting of the situation alarm sounding through the building. She pushed herself to her feet and ran.

  “What is it?” she shouted, flinging open the Monitor Room door. The technician turned toward her, white-faced and scared. Galliard, her nametag said.

  “I was watching them every moment,” the tech babbled. “Every moment! They didn’t go anywhere, they couldn’t have, I locked them in myself—”

  The denials made no sense until Jeanette looked at the screens. Eight were live. Six showed sleeping subjects, lying on the floors of their padded cells.

  Two cells were empty—as in, nobody home.

  Well, Galliard, you’re going to wish you’d chosen another career when I get done with you.

  “Where the hell are they?” Jeanette asked in dangerously reasonable tones. She took a step toward the cringing girl.

  A scream from the monitors stopped her. The subjects were awake, going from a comatose sleep to full consciousness in instants. She watched, spellbound, as first one, then another, of her test cases began throwing himself about his cell, violently seeking escape, battering and tearing at the padded walls until streaks and flowers of blood appeared.

  After a timeless moment, Jeanette realized that the technician was staring at her, waiting for her to give orders. Jeanette reached out and turned the master audio control on the console to “Off.” It didn’t totally shut out the screams, audible even through the soundproofing, but it did make it easier to think as she mulled over what to do next.

  Sedate them? No, with the dose in their systems, that would be a quick ticket to the boneyard, and even if they were doomed, she didn’t want to kill them so quickly. Restrain them? Gazing down at the gyrating madmen, Jeanette wasn’t sure there was enough money in the world to pay anyone to enter one of those cells. One of the madmen—the display at the bottom said his name was Nelson—cheated of any other outlet for his rage, had turned his fury on himself. He’d gouged out both his eyes and clawed his skin to bleeding ribbons, and was still tearing at himself, howling in a deep voice as he drooled blood from a mouth from which he’d torn his own tongue.

  Galliard was still staring at her, eyes wide and scared.

  “Go find Mr. Lintel. Tell him two of the subjects have escaped. Tell him to find them,” Jeanette ordered. That should keep both Robert and this bimbette busy!

  Galliard scuttled out. Jeanette settled down in the vacated chair to watch the show.

  Urla was inside the building now, crawling through the ventilation system unseen, making slow progress against the invisible headwind of madness that buffeted it. The presence of Cold Iron was a palpable weight against its bones, but unlike others of the Seleighe kin, the redcap was not affected by its poison. It winced as the first mind was joined by one, two, three others, until the four of them raged in a torment that was almost Power—the rage of a demon lord. What was it the mortals did here to cause such anguish? Urla desperately wished to learn their secret, for it would make the redcap’s kind a rich banquet. Some there were among the Unseleighe Court who fed on emotion as Urla fed on lives, and did it own the secret of such cosmic despair, it could trade it to them to its advantage.

  But then something happened that thrust all thought of self-interest from the redcap’s mind. For the last of the mortals prisoned here awoke, and the uprush of true Power nearly blinded his Sidhe senses. Here was the power of Bard or Elven mage trapped in mortal flesh—a wellspring of such Power as the dark lord Aerune had sent him to find. It was here, somehow here where it had not been a moment before, in mortals who had not possessed it before this instant.

  Daniel Carradine awoke with a sudden start, shivering and sweating, his strongest emotion a cheated anger that whatever it was that Keith had supplied, it hadn’t taken the edge off his need. The long-unslaked craving, stronger than he had ever known it, filled him now like a wild thing desperate to be free.

  His Lady . . . his beautiful White Lady . . . . Somehow Daniel could sense her somewhere near, somehow certain that this was Truth, and not some withdrawal-fuelled hallucination. His hunger was strong enough to tear down walls, to see into all the hidden places of the world as if they were made of glass. He knew she was here, knew that all he had to do was reach out for her, and he could have her.

  Daniel reached. The first attempt brought pain, enough almost to blot out the fire in his bones, but it also carried a teasing promise of certainty. If he could only try a little harder . . .

  He reached out again, whimpering as he did it, his whole body shaking and drenched in a greasy sweat. The pain flared again, blinding him, but behind it he felt a strange cool flexing of senses he’d never known before, and abruptly there was a hard roundness in his hand—the object of his desire, summoned to him through all the walls and barriers that separated them. In his surprise, he dropped it, and then crawled frantically across the padded floor after it until he’d grabbed it in both hands.

  He looked down at the stoppered jar half filled with glistening white powder. He didn’t need to open it to know what it was. His Lady. The White Lady. Pure, pharmaceutical-grade heroin.

  He could have taken her that way, opened the bottle and snorted its contents or spilled it across his tongue, but now Daniel knew he didn’t need to. The rest of what he needed to
make everything perfect was out there. All he had to do was imagine it, and its location appeared in his mind. Then all he had to do was . . . reach. This time, when his hand was filled, he clutched the bottle tightly, chuckling with success. Here—and here—and here. And wilderness is paradise enow,3 he quoted out of some half-full store of memory.

  He broke the seal on the pint of distilled water, and slopped a little into the Pyrex beaker. The powder dissolved into the water easily, turning it a milky moonstone color. The rest of what he needed was here, summoned from the same place as the water and the beaker. He syringed the mixture up with the ease of long practice.

  Now everything will be all right, he thought, tapping his arm to find a vein.

  And it was, for those few moments before the massive overdose of uncut heroin—far more, far purer than any fix he’d ever known—carried Daniel down into the darkness and the safest place of all.

  Ellie Borden woke suddenly out of a long confused dream. Her whole life the last few months had been a dream—a bad one—as she lost first her job, then her health insurance, then her apartment, ending up on the street doing whatever she could just to survive one more day.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The automatic protest no longer held either fury or grief, only a weary resignation. She’d paid her taxes, obeyed the law, been kind. She was supposed to be safe, protected by Society from cradle to grave. But that hadn’t happened. All the social services’ safety net that was supposed to be there to catch people like her had melted away the moment she needed it. The programs that were supposed to help had waiting lists months long, and Ellie didn’t have months. She’d discovered that the halfway houses were not for people like her, that the only place that would take her in on that terrible day she’d gone home to find everything she owned piled on the curb in front of her former apartment was the street.

  She’d quickly learned there were ways to take the edge off the pain, to gain the minimal money that would buy her a room in a flophouse she’d never have dared enter when she’d had a life, to buy her the things that would let her live with the sickness that was eating her life away, but the things she’d had to do to get them were best forgotten.

  When she’d been arrested, it had almost been a relief, because you got medical care in prison, didn’t you? Only that had turned out to be another grim joke like the rest of her so-called life, because all they’d done was dump her in a cell with a bunch of other street people and forget about her. She’d taken the packet from the dealer the way a starving man would take food, not caring what it was, half-hoping it would kill her if it would only end the pain.

  But it hadn’t.

  She awoke in a strange room, not the holding cell, all by herself. The pain was gone. Gone! She felt better than she had in almost two years. The evil shadow that lived in her bones had vanished forever, she knew it. She felt reborn.

  What have they done? she thought in slow-growing wonder. What did they do to me? She stared at her hands, marveled at the soft brown skin. No longer cracked, scarred, covered with sores. New again, reborn.

  Just as she had been reborn.

  Thank You, God, Ellie thought silently. I won’t forget this. I won’t throw it away.

  One was dead, killed by his overreaching appetite, but the other remained, still connected somehow to the magic so very like that of Underhill. In the air ducts, Urla gnashed its teeth, hating the choice it must make, the choice of gluttony deferred.

  This was not the answer that its dark master sought, the news of a human Bard who could form the Nexus Aerune sought to build, but it was news worth the bringing, regardless. The redcap abandoned its own hunt and turned back the way it had come, hurrying back to the door in the air that led into Underhill and the road that led to the Dark Court.

  Jeanette glanced at the clock on the wall of her office. The digital readout said 11:36 in glaring red numbers—a 24-hour readout, so it was a little before noon of some damn day or other. She rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t slept all night—she hadn’t left the lab for two days—and the strain was beginning to tell on her.

  It had been a busy morning, full of new discoveries. And mistakes, but those happened in any research program.

  The first mistake she’d made had been in assuming that all six of the surviving test subjects would react the same way. Obviously they hadn’t. The four that had gone psychotic had fixed everybody’s attention on them until it was too late . . . sort of. And by the time they’d gone catatonic, what was going to happen, had happened.

  For the thousandth time, she replayed the tape of Cell One on her computer screen. That had been a young white male, early 20s. Keith said he’d given his name as Danny-boy. She watched as Danny-boy awoke, agitated but obviously not as crazy as the berserkers. She watched him reach out and pluck things out of the air—a jar of white powder, a bottle of water, a beaker, a syringe. He’d teleported them all from her lab—she’d been able to tell by the inventory number engraved on the beaker, and the bar codes on the stock—but how had he gotten them through a locked door and a solid wall? And how had he known they were in her lab in the first place?

  If we’d been watching, could we have stopped you? she wondered. She watched as he fixed, hands shaking with his addiction, and watched as he slumped a moment later, dead in a heartbeat from an overdose of pure heroin.

  Stupid boy. Don’t you know street drugs are stepped on six or seven times—if you’re lucky—before they get to you? This was the pure stuff. You should have cut back the dose. You should have WAITED, you blockhead.

  She sighed, and rubbed her tired eyes. Now, dammit, she had no way of knowing if her mix would have killed him without the heroin, and an autopsy probably wouldn’t be able to sort it out either.

  “Campbell?”

  She looked up from the screen with an effort as Robert came into the office. If he’d spent as many sleepless hours as she had, it didn’t show. He had an ulcer, too—she’d hacked into his personal files once out of idle curiosity—and that didn’t show either. Robert Lintel was the original Teflon boy. His three-piece grey suit was immaculate, and he was wearing the particular smug expression that Jeanette liked least. But Robert always had only seen the possibilities in her work, the ultimate goal, and not the long process that led there.

  “What?” she said sullenly, knowing that letting him see her mood was weakness, and weakness had always been the thing she defended herself hardest against showing.

  “Hey, Campbell. Smile. We’re almost there, you know. It worked!”

  “Two missing—have you found them yet?—four crazy, and of the two qualified successes, one dead. Some success,” she grumbled.

  “We’re looking for the two that vanished, but frankly, I think they went to the same place the chimp did. I had Elkanah dump the other four out on the street. They should be dead by now, or at Bellevue. Either way, not our problem.” He walked into the room and stood over her desk, beaming down at her paternally.

  “So that leaves—what’s her name?—Borden? And her readings have gone back to normal. Whatever she had, it’s gone,” Jeanette said.

  “But while she had it, it was enough to get her clean. I had Dr. Ramchandra give her a quick once-over. According to his interview with her, she’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But she doesn’t have it now. In fact, she’s in perfect health. What do you think of that?”

  “I think you aren’t paying me to find a cure for cancer,” Jeanette answered, but Robert’s smug smile only grew wider.

  “That’s right. But actually, I don’t think you need to work on refining your formula any more. We know it works on ten percent of the population. We just have to find the ten percent it works on.” He sat down in the chair opposite her desk, the big comfy leather one that only Robert ever sat in.

  He was talking about mass trials.

  “So where are you going to get enough people to put together a profile for that? Carradine and Borden both manifested Talent, but other than
that, they have nothing in common. He was white. She’s black. He was a teenager. She’s in her thirties. They were both users, but we don’t even know they were using the same things.”

  “Campbell, Campbell, Campbell. When are you ever going to learn to trust me? I have this all figured out.” He leaned forward, and she caught a whiff of soap and expensive cologne.

  “I want you to go into production with this. Whip me up a few kilos of Batch 157 and portion it out into single-dose packets—we’ll call it something like T-Stroke. I’ll put it out on the street—we’ll sell it of course, but we’ll undercut everything else—crank, Mexican brown, snow, the whole menu. They’ll buy it, and you’ll have your test pool—cheap, easy, and nothing for us to clean up after. We’ll rope in the ones that survive, run them through the mill, and find the common thread. Once we have that profile, we can use it to find volunteer subjects.”

  Jeanette had always been serenely convinced that nothing could shock her, that she didn’t care about all those faceless drones she shared the world with. But the butcher’s bill Robert was proposing so guilelessly startled even her.

  One out of the eight in the first group had survived. Statistically, that meant the odds were that if eighty people received T-6/157, seventy would die. And if you took those numbers out to the thousands of doses that Robert was recommending they spread across the streets of New York . . .

  “There’s going to be dead junkies stacked like cordwood on every street corner,” Jeanette said slowly, trying to decide how that made her feel. She knew she ought to like the idea, but instead she felt curiously numb inside. How confident must Robert be, how eager for his results, to suggest a plan that held so much possibility of . . . unforeseen consequences.

  But Robert didn’t even seem to notice her lack of enthusiasm. He bored in, eyes glittering like a high-pressure salesman closing a big deal.

  “And your point is? C’mon, Campbell, we’re looking for results here, not scientific validation. If we generate the Survivor Profile, nobody’s going to care how we got it.”