A Host of Furious Fancies

by Mercedes Lackey

  “May I see it?” Ria said, keeping her voice even with an effort.

  She schooled her face to blankness, inspecting the card. It was grey, easy to miss in the dark on a quick inspection, and anyway, the police that’d been here earlier had been looking for perpetrators, not evidence. The card had a gold logo stamped on it . . . a logo Ria had become very familiar with over the past few days.

  Threshold Labs. That’s a LlewellCo subsidiary!

  Someone is going to pay for this. Dearly.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said, smiling sweetly as she handed the key-card back to Toni. “I travel a lot on business, and I thought I might recognize it, but I don’t. Sorry.” And with her shields at full strength, not even a telepathic gargoyle could get through them to see that she was lying through her teeth.

  “Oh.” Toni sounded disappointed. “Can’t you tell anything else? You’re one of them, aren’t you? An elf?”

  Ria winced slightly. “No, sorry.” Just a mongrel that neither side wants to claim. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, but I’m afraid I’m not on the Unseleighe Sidhe’s Christmas card list, and this isn’t really something I’ve got much experience with.” She tried to keep her impatience from showing. Threshold was her problem, her responsibility. She intended to deal with it without any kind of New Age Occult Police help.

  “You’ve been a lot of help already,” Toni said meditatively. “I just wish we knew where Eric was.”

  Ria raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I thought I’d explained that. He took the Gate into Underhill with him. But I’m sure he’ll be back as soon as he can.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Toni looked as if she had more questions to ask, so Ria spoke quickly to forestall them.

  “If there’s anything else you need, Eric has my number.” She turned and walked quickly away, leaving the two Guardians and Greystone staring after her.

  All of a sudden, everything was quiet.

  Eric straightened out of his half-crouch, lowering the flute to his side and blinking in the deafening silence. The elves and the soldiers were gone, it was “day” instead of night, and it was warm enough that he was perspiring in his sweater and leather jacket. Eric was alone, somewhere Underhill. He looked around cautiously.

  He stood in the middle of a primeval forest, one lit by the sourceless silvery light of Underhill. Trees that had grown unmolested since the beginning of Time rose high into the sky, and the ground beneath his feet was carpeted with a thick pale moss filled with tiny glowing blue flowers, making it look as if the earth beneath his feet were carpeted with stars. Despite its beauty, the forest had the faintly unloved air of a theater between performances; a stage without actors. None of the High Elves were in residence here, then—only the Lesser Sidhe, the Low Court, those which could not survive except in Underhill or near a Nexus grove. The low elves were scatterbrained at best; he could expect no help there.

  As if the thought had summoned them back, he began to hear faint far-off birdcalls, and slowly, the forest filled with sound once more. An enormous purple butterfly, silver crescent moons upon its wings, wafted regally past, and at Eric’s feet, something small and grey and furry exploded into action, zipping into hiding before Eric could quite see it. He grinned in spite of himself.

  He was better off than he’d been a moment before, and even if the terrain was unfamiliar, there was plenty of magic here to play with. Unless he ran into a High Magus in a real bad mood, Eric could handle anything this stretch of Underhill had to throw at him.

  But since I’m not going to be staying, the situation isn’t going to come up.

  He could open a Gate right here and step back into the mortal world, but without a Nexus to anchor him—and with no idea of where “here” was—he might find himself appearing on Earth centuries in the past—or the future, or thousands of miles from where he went in. It would be better to have an experienced conductor for this little trip, and Eric knew just where to find one. Elvensteeds were created for situations like this.

  But first, he had to change his clothes before he fried.

  That was a lot easier here than it would have been back in New York. Here there was so much magic in the air that it was like breathing pure oxygen. Eric concentrated for a moment, considering what he should wear, and settled on just getting rid of the heavy sweater and turning his wool slacks into a pair of jeans that wouldn’t get ruined so easily by a walk through the woods. He might need the jacket if he Gated to someplace colder, and besides, he was more attached to it than he was to either sweater or slacks. There was no guarantee that having once banished them, he’d ever get them back; magic was funny that way.

  Having switched to cooler clothes, Eric breathed a deep sigh of relief. He rolled his shoulders, easing out the kinks.

  Now to get out of here. Maestro, a little traveling music. . . .

  He raised his flute to his lips and began to play. First a few trills to reassure the forest that he meant it no harm, then he segued into his Calling. The forest around him shivered, half-wakened by Eric’s magic, and, as if from far in the distance, he heard Lady Day’s faint acknowledgement inside his head. The elvensteed would find him wherever he was, and reach him as soon as she could.

  Now all he had left to do was wait—which was just as well, as he had a lot of thinking to do about recent events. Eric looked around, walking through the forest a bit until he found a comfortable place to sit. One of the great trees had fallen (or more likely, a fallen tree had been created by one of the Sidhe at just this spot the way the Victorians used to build “ancient ruins” in their gardens), and its trunk provided a pleasant seat from which to think matters over—and if he got hungry waiting, he could just conjure up whatever he wanted to eat or drink from the magic in the air. While Eric hadn’t mastered kenning, the ability to create exact duplicates of anything he knew well out of pure magic, he could certainly summon up anything within a reasonable distance to come to him.

  So it’s a great place to visit, but I don’t think I’d actually want to live here. All things considered, Eric preferred the “real world,” even though New York didn’t seem to be a healthy place to be at the moment, at least for elven-trained Bards.

  He’d blundered into something big and nasty back there in the Park—something even worse than Dharinel’s gloomy warnings about conquest-mad Unseleighe—and if he didn’t want to have his head handed to him the next time he ran into the Guys With Guns, he’d better stop and think things through now, while he had a breathing space. Dharinel always said that a moment of thought could save a year on the battlefield.

  The Guardians said there was trouble in Central Park, and I found out that the Dark Sidhe was trying to put up a Nexus about where I dreamed of the goblin tower, but when I followed the trail of the magic he was using, it seemed to be all tangled up with the homeless folks downtown. At the Park, I think there was some kind of a mage with the soldiers that the Wild Hunt was trying to get at, but when the Unseleighe Lord saw me, he killed the mage, and that got rid of the monsters I was trying to take out. And I beat it out of there, but the Sidhe’s already seen me. And EVERYBODY loves a Bard.

  So . . . could things be any more of a mess? Maybe, Eric decided with a sigh. But not easily. Guns and Sidhe don’t mix. He kicked at the moss beneath his sneakers. Tiny beetles glowing in a rainbow of colors scurried out of sight, and Eric watched them for a moment, fascinated. The air was filled with birdsong now, making his fingers itch for a notebook so he could try to get some of it down on paper. Whatever he wrote would be a poor copy of the original, though. Still, it might be fun to try.

  At least his responsibilities in this mess were clear. He had to get back to his own time and place, and once he did, he needed to contact Elfhame Everforest and tell them about the Wild Hunt showing up in Central Park. That should be enough reason for the Seleighe Sidhe to break the truce and settle this particular Unseleighe’s hash, but that wasn’t the only problem. There was still the matter of a
ll those guys playing soldier . . . the ones with the now-dead mage.

  Back in San Francisco, the Feds who were chasing him and Bethie had been tangled up with a project that was trying to tap into natural psi powers. But most people didn’t have much in the way of either easily tapped psi or innate Power: the Gift usually ran deep in humans, most of the time needing magic or training to bring it to the fore.

  He flashed back to the packet of white powder he’d seen in Annie’s hand in the alley outside the soup kitchen downtown. What if somebody had figured out a way around needing magic or years of training to make a wizard? What if they’d come up with some kind of drug that forced Talent to the surface? That would explain the twisted mage he’d been fighting, and if the bad guys had been testing their stuff on the streets, it might also explain all those deaths that the Guardians—and the people at the kitchen—had been talking about. Magery while you wait. No wonder that nut on the horse was so interested. If that stuff can crank up a human into a mage, just imagine what it would do for an elf?

  Eric shuddered. That was something he’d just as soon not find out about. But if the soldier-boys meant that the Feds were mixed up in things again, he was in even more trouble than he’d thought. Because if they were looking for Bethie, they were looking for him as well . . . and his cover would be blown the moment anyone looked really closely.

  Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Banyon. Master Dharinel was right, not that his being right would have kept me from meddling. But it doesn’t really look like I’ve improved the situation once, and now both sides are after ME. Gee, Brain, what do we do now? Well, Pinky . . .

  He needed help and advice, and from someone who was as comfortable with high-level human politics as Eric was with Bardic magic. The trouble was, he didn’t know anyone who fit that particular bill but Ria. After what he could tell her about today, he was pretty sure she’d help him if she could, but that help might come at a higher price than he was comfortable with paying.

  Well, we can burn that bridge when we come to it, as Mason said to Dixon.

  All of a sudden the forest fell silent. The birds stopped singing, and the creatures scuttling through the fallen leaves froze where they were. Eric looked around quickly.

  Trouble.

  Nothing in sight, but his shoulders crawled. There was someone behind him. He could feel it. Eric got to his feet, turning around slowly, shields at full, to see what had startled the forest.

  He stared. It looked like a giant lawn gnome brought to hideous life. Upright, it would probably stand almost four feet high, but it was bent over so far it was hard for Eric to judge its size, balancing on grimy bare feet and the knuckles of its long, apelike arms. It was wearing human clothes centuries out of date—calf-length leather pants and a long grimy smock that might have been white once but was now soiled to a grimy brown. Its face was a caricature of a human face—almost noseless, with tiny piggy eyes. On its head it wore a crusty brownish-red cap that it had dipped in some thick liquid that was flaking away now as it dried. The creature stank of undefinable things.

  When it saw Eric’s face, it smiled, the grin splitting its nightmare face impossibly wide. Its mouth was filled with long yellow teeth.

  Sharp yellow teeth.

  ELEVEN:

  LORD OF THE

  HOLLOW HILLS

  Robert Lintel regarded his temporary headquarters with disgust. Even in December, the smell was incredible. It was filthy beyond anything he’d imagined possible—interior walls torn down, some covered in graffiti, whole rooms used as toilets, people sleeping anywhere, on torn mattresses or just piles of rags. This abandoned building was a haven for runaways. That was why he’d picked it.

  He stared at the terrified band of feral children huddled together in the middle of the room. He was doing these kids a favor, he realized. They should be grateful to him for putting an end to their whole trivial sordid existence. For once in their useless lives, they’d get the chance to do something that mattered, something that would benefit people more important than they could ever be.

  As far as he had been able to tell from Jeanette’s notes and what he’d gotten from the Survivors back at Threshold before he’d used them up, the younger you were, the higher the initial dose, the better chance you had of surviving exposure to T-Stroke and developing the Talents that Robert Lintel needed. He didn’t have any more time to mess around handing out free samples to dozens of people to get one or two Survivors. He needed broad-based success—and fast.

  “Okay, you! Sabatini! Is this everyone?” he barked.

  “Everyone in the building, sir,” Sabatini said. Robert had brought the cream of his surviving security troops here with him. The eight of them were loyal—and smart enough to know that they were implicated in everything Threshold had done so far. They needed Robert’s protection—and Robert needed what these children could provide.

  “We’ve got all the exits sealed. Nobody goes in or out,” Sabatini said.

  “Good.” Street hookers and runaways were no match for trained professionals. His men had taken the place over before half of them realized they were being invaded, and within minutes his operatives had searched the whole building and rounded all of the squatters up and brought them here.

  The funny thing was, not one of them had fought back. Robert had seen this kind of behavior before. Most people took a certain amount of time to work themselves up to physical resistance in a traumatic situation. Often the difference between the amateur and the professional was their quickness off the starting blocks, not their martial arts skill. The amateur might be just as proficient as the professional, but it took him longer to make up his mind that the situation required violence. And that was the difference between success and failure. So to keep any would-be heroes off balance, Robert’d had his prisoners slapped around a little once he’d gained control of the squat, just to drive home who was boss now. The children huddled together like a pack of orphaned kittens, wearing lace and leather, lipstick and sequins, the tawdry finery of a pack of Lost Boys and Girls who would never live to reach Neverland. They’d seen the uniforms and the guns, collected a few bruises, and now not one of them was willing to do so much as complain, no matter what he did to them.

  They might get their spunk back in a few hours, but by then it would be far too late. In fact, it was too late right about . . .

  “Now. Start dosing them.”

  Angel and Sabatini shouldered through the circle of huddled children. Of the twenty-four men who’d been in Central Park last night, only these eight remained, but that was more than enough for his purposes. In fact, when he got what he wanted here, they’d be disposable, too.

  Robert had brought one of those pressure injectors with him from the lab, and all the T-6/157 he could find. Even after the random doses they’d put out on the streets over the last two days, there were several kilos left—more than enough to build an army with. As Angel held a gun to their heads, Sabatini injected the street kids one by one with a double dose of T-Stroke. Most of them didn’t even make it into a sitting position before passing out.

  Robert smiled his approval as the last of the street kids dropped unconscious to the ground.

  “Sir?” Elkanah asked. “What do we do with the ones that go crazy? If we put them out on the street, they might lead someone back here.”

  “Put them down in the basement.” On his earlier reconnoiter of the building, Robert had seen that the steps to the cellar were gone. Anyone thrown down there—assuming they survived the eighteen-foot drop—would have no way of getting back out again. “Put the dead ones down there, too. They might as well have some company.”

  Sabatini was sorting the limp bodies now. Two thirds of the kids were still alive. So I was right about younger subjects surviving better. All to the good. There’ll be no lack of subjects. Thousands of kids vanish every year, Robert thought.

  Almost as soon as the dead bodies were cleared away, the Screamers started to aw
aken. They were harder to dispose of than he’d expected; supernatural strength seemed to go hand-in-hand with violent psychosis, and his operatives had to play rough. Fortunately only five of the surviving subjects needed that treatment, and with the doors between the kitchen and the front room shut, he couldn’t even hear them screaming once they’d been dumped in the basement.

  And if their presence lured that pointy-eared claim-jumper Aerune back again, that was all to the good. A steel knife through the gut should settle him down and make him see reason.

  Soon, the Survivors started to rouse, staring around themselves with wide, disbelieving eyes. There was a skinny blonde brat who seemed to be their leader. She glared at Lintel in terrified defiance, her mascara running down her painted cheeks in thick black streaks.

  It doesn’t get any better than this, Robert thought gloatingly. This was always the best part, watching someone who was too terrified of him to run away. Campbell had been an exemplary employee in many respects, but she’d never been properly afraid of him. Maybe he’d look her up and change that, once he had this situation squared away to his liking. He looked around for some place to sit, found nothing, and resigned himself to standing. He wouldn’t be here for more than a few hours, anyway.

  After that, he’d be taking the war to the enemy.

  “Now—” he said, smiling predatorially at the Survivors. “This is what I want you to do. . . .”

  Ria hadn’t slept all night, and neither had a lot of people in the West Coast offices. She’d dragged Jonathan out of bed with her midnight phone call, but Ria was too angry about her discovery to care: she wanted action and she wanted it now.

  Jonathan delivered, gods bless him. It hadn’t taken him long to get the first of the answers she wanted, and the more she found out about Threshold Labs, the worse things sounded. The company had been draining even more money from LlewellCo than she’d realized at first glance, its depredations carefully camouflaged by the bright boys and girls in Oversight and Accounting.