"Here we will spend the night, drink the oracular waters, and take what counsel Erchane sends us," Belegir announced. He unrolled the pack and separated out the blankets: two for each of them. Well, she'd slept rougher. After today's hike, Glory felt she could sleep on the bare stone as comfortably as if it were an innerspring mattress. She spread the blankets out and sat down on them, pulling off her thigh-high boots and wiggling her toes with relief. A quick rummage through her purse found her enough pins to get her hair up off her shoulders, and then she pulled on the big logo T-shirt and proceeded with the delicate business of getting her costume off beneath it.
The corset came away from her skin with a sucking sound—it was lined in buckram, and they usually replaced the lining every week or so, or the thing went higher than roadkill in August—and she took a deep grateful breath. Then she squirmed out of the chafing leather panties and into her jeans, and dragged off the double bracers (she still couldn't bring herself to vandalize them, not quite), piling the stiff damp costume elements against the wall.
Then she rooted around in her purse for a hairbrush, tucked her legs under her, took down her hair, and began to brush it. She probably ought to braid it, if there were going to be further adventures, and elegance be damned.
But maybe there wouldn't be. Hadn't Belegir said that the Oracle might send her home?
This time tomorrow I could be home in Melbourne. Or at least in a hotel room somewhere in America.
It was an unsettling thought. She ought to have been uncomplicatedly delighted by it, but oddly, she wasn't.
If I leave, I go knowing Belegir and all his mates're going to die.
But it wouldn't be her choice, now, would it? It'd be the Oracle's choice.
Did that make things better—or worse?
Daft cow brought me here in the first place. S'her problem, innit?
No. Now that Glory knew about the situation, it was her problem, too, in some fashion she hadn't quite worked out yet.
She glanced over at the pool, and blinked to see Belegir scooping water out of it into his tea-bottle in a rather cavalier fashion. The spirit-stove was already assembled and lit, the tea-things laid out around it. She'd thought there'd be more ceremony and reverence somehow, if this place was as important to the Allimir as Belegir had let on. Her stomach rumbled loudly, reminding her that it had been a long time since a small lunch, and a bit of something would be nice.
"A little tea and fruitcake to refresh us," Belegir said, smiling, "and then we will drink from the Oracle and dream her counsel."
"Happy days," Glory said. She pulled her henna-enhanced mane into a thick braid and tied off the end with a scrap of ribbon, then picked up Gordon and cuddled the stuffed blue elephant protectively. Vixen had Sister Bernadette, the Fighting Nun. Glory had Gordon.
The tea was thick and sweet, a different thing entirely than what they'd drunk at noon, and the fruitcake was exactly that—cakes of dried fruit, mashed together with honey. Her head rang with sugar overload, but at least she wasn't hungry anymore.
"Belegir," Glory said impulsively, "what do you reckon will happen?"
"Whatever happens, it will be Erchane's will," the Allimir mage said firmly.
Glory bit her lip. She hated to ask the inevitable follow-up question—she liked Belegir—but she needed to know.
"And the rest of it? The reason I'm here? That, too?"
Belegir smiled sadly. "Erchane is not kind, though She is just. Her face is both dark and bright—ask the farmer who has lost his crop to drought or storm, his flock to wolf or lion. Ask the mother who has lost her firstborn to fever. Life feeds life. That is Erchane's way. But it is also the way of Life to struggle to live, and so we must. We are Her children, no less than the wolf and the storm. She favors none above the other. The beasts have fang and claw—the Allimir have magic, and the knowledge of Erchane's will. She will help us, if we will help ourselves."
Which seems to bring it right back around to you, gel.
"But wouldn't the Warmother be sort of against Erchane's will?" Glory asked, floundering through unfamiliar epistemological territory. Either chaining Her up or letting Her loose would have to be. Assuming, of course, She existed. That was the real question, now, wasn't it?
Belegir shook his head, not smiling now. "Perhaps a Great Mage could answer such a question, but there has been no such since Cinnas died. You ask questions no one thought to ask in all our long golden years of peace. And now there is no one left to ask them."
"Well, maybe we can find some answers anyway," Glory said with a defeated sigh. Why do I keep trying to have these conversations?
Belegir tucked the tea-things away again—she'd been sure, for one apprehensive moment, that he'd been going to wash them out in the spring, but apparently, spiritual informality didn't extend that far—and then circled the cavern again, dousing all the candles except for the small glass lantern. When he came back to the edge of the pool, he was holding a footed cup in his hands.
It was most of a meter high. The bowl was of bone, dark gold with age, the stem and foot of some darker material, with the sheen of oiled and polished wood. Belegir plunged it into the spring, submerging it completely, and then held it out to her.
Glory took it reluctantly. She'd seen a lot of magic since she'd come here, but this was the first time she'd been called upon to drink any.
Assuming, of course, that this Oracle business wasn't all humbug and social engineering.
Whether it was or not, the water itself was pure and numbingly cold, chilling her all the way down to the pit of her stomach. She emptied the cup and returned it to Belegir, who dipped it full again and drank, then returned it to its niche and came back to his bedroll carrying the lantern.
"Are you ready?" he asked, lying down.
"I reckon," Glory muttered, trying not to sound as uncertain as she felt. She pulled out her sweatshirt and struggled into it. Might as well be warm.
Belegir hooded the lantern, and the darkness fell like a hammer. In the dark, Glory squirmed out of her jeans and rolled them up into a pillow, then insinuated herself between the two blankets, clutching Gordon to her chest.
I'm not going to be able to sleep, she thought.
And slept.
CHAPTER FOUR:
Blood and Gold
It was the Duchess's castle in the North—many a work of fell sorcery had been accomplished behind its stark stone walls, with no one living to tell the tale. Vixen the Red, Scourge of the Night, Harrower of Hell, Doomslayer, had been here many a time before, and each time barely escaped, with Hell's own hounds snapping at her booted heels. Even the bravest freebooter would have thought hard before coming back, but Vixen had no choice. The two people she cared most about in the world—her doughty sidekick, Sister Bernadette, and Queen Gloriana's trusted adventurer-spy, the playwright Kit Marlowe—were in danger. She had to save them.
With the supernatural grace of her ninja training, Vixen scaled Castle Boleskine's outer wall. The Duchess trusted too much in the castle's terrible (and well-founded) reputation among the local peasants to bother with a regular guard other than the fierce, half-demon dogs that had the free run of the grounds after sunset.
With lithe pantherine grace Vixen sprang to the greensward below. Her sword left its scabbard in a rasping hiss and her red lips drew back in a feral smile as she heard the howl of the dogs in the distance. A little warm-up before the main event, when she would put an end to the Duchess of Darkness for once and all.
It's amazing what a little black makeup and some post-production CGI can do to tart up a Rottweiler, Vixen the Slayer thought happily.
* * *
The interior of the castle was oddly deserted. Torches burned with a weird green light, and for once the floor was blessedly free of camera tracks and electrical cables. She knew the Duchess was waiting for her somewhere up ahead, and she had to get there. If she didn't hit her marks in time, Megan would be furious with her. . . .
Something's n
ot right.
Vixen stopped, shaking her head in confusion. What could be wrong? She was Vixen the Red, slayer of evil and all around badass. Somewhere up ahead was Lilith Kane, the Duchess of Darkness, her sworn enemy. She hefted her sword and strode on.
* * *
The Duchess was waiting for Vixen in Boleskine's Star Chamber. The floor was composed of a single slab of meteoric iron, inlaid with a Greater Seal of Solomon and edged in Cabalistic sigils shaped and quenched in human blood. The room was hung with draperies in glowing garnet velvet, and in the center of the demonic hexagram stood the Duchess of Darkness herself, a fragile-seeming blonde in a sweeping satin gown the color of freshly spilled blood. At her side, a dark shadow to her Satanic flame, stood the reptilian Fra Diavolo, the evil Jesuit who served her nefarious ends.
"Welcome, Koroshiya. How delightful that you have joined us at last. Shall I introduce you to our other guests? But I forget—you won't need any introduction. You're among friends here—old friends," the Duchess of Darkness purred throatily.
Vixen looked around. Her friends were chained against the velvet-covered walls. Plump and perky Sister Bernadette, in her short-skirted brown nun's habit and tights—Sister B's eyes went wide when she saw Vixen, as if she wished to shout a warning but didn't dare.
Beside Bernie was the tall and slender Marlowe—Wardrobe had only been able to give him one costume change for his episode, but the teal-blue velvet doublet (re-cut from one of the ladies-in-waiting's dresses from the series premier) showed off his craggy red-headed good looks to perfection. She did wish they hadn't had to kill him off at the end of his episode, but since he'd only been dragged off to Hell by demons, there was always hope.
"Undoubtedly, you will wish to know my plan," Lilith Kane said, stepping forward into her key-light. "Behold!" she said, with a sweeping gesture.
Fra Diavolo scuttled downstage, the skirts of his black soutane swishing, to fling back the curtain at the far side of the room. Lying on a tilted table, wearing a brief white shift and nothing else, was another Vixen, identical in every respect to the original but seemingly asleep. Startled, Vixen looked down to make sure she was still her.
The Duchess laughed, a pealing laugh like silvery bells. "Surprised? I sent to Cathay for the most perfect mandrake, and from it and a drop of your blood I had the foresight to save from our last adventure I had my alchemists grow a homunculus indistinguishable from you in every degree. Soon I shall give it life, and send it forth in the world in your place, where it will undo all the good you have done in your short life and make the name of the Slayer anathema throughout Merrie England! Only two people could possibly see through this masquerade, and so I had them brought here, where their blood will give my poppet life—and seal the covenant of your doom and everlasting disgrace!"
There was a pause.
"Oh, Jesus," Sister Bernadette muttered, sliding her hands out of the manacles.
"Line!" Marlowe shouted, looking behind Vixen.
"Effing—goddamned—amateurs!" the Duchess shouted, dropping the posh pear-shaped tones and turning away. "Christ on toast, girlie, when I was at Southland, your size-eighteen ass would have been out the gate the second time you blew your line that way."
"Hey, Zorro, you just hit 'em with your sword, right? I mean, it's not like they should expect you to talk, too—"
Vixen whirled. Standing behind her was Count Wolfgang von Blitzkrieg, Hentzau's ambassador to the Court of Queen Elizabeth, and former Eurotrash underwear model. He wove drunkenly toward her, leering sloppily.
"Leave her alone," Julie Sluice said. Vixen's former Olympic teammate was wearing her selkie costume from Episode 18, and the silver makeup glistened in the torchlight. "It isn't her fault she isn't any good. When she was on the team with me in Seoul, she always did her best. It wasn't much of a best, but . . ."
"Time is money here," Sister Bernadette said, walking forward. "How hard can it be to say 'Come, camrado, evil wakes' or whatever it is this week? For heaven's sake, Vixen, you've said it a hundred times. Just tell her she'll never get away with it, and—"
"Stop it!" Glory shouted. She threw her sword down on the stones, where it clattered ringingly. "I can't do this without a script! I don't know what to do! I'm not Vixen—I'm not even really an actress!"
"Well, we all knew that, didn't we, sweetie?" Lilith Kane vamped maliciously. She turned and began to walk briskly away, toward the back of the Star Chamber.
Glory followed her. She was angry enough to want to shake some manners into Miss High-and-Mighty Romy I-Was-A-Star-Before-You-Were-Born Blackburn, and somewhere deep inside she figured that Romy might know what was going on. The Duchess always knew what was going on—she was the one plotting all the plots, after all.
But somehow Glory didn't seem to be able to get any closer to her. She went from a walk to a run, from baffled anger to red, murderous fury, until all she could think of was getting that snooty bitch's lily-white throat between her fingers. She ran, and somehow never reached the back wall of the set, and Lilith floated on ahead, tauntingly just out of reach, her long blond hair (a wig, certainly, Romy's hair was nothing like that long) shimmering down her tight-laced red satin back beneath her lace-edged Elizabethan headpiece.
And then Glory lunged forward and grabbed a fistful of hair, and miracle of miracles, the wig held, and she snapped the Duchess back toward her like a bimbo yo-yo, panting with victory and rage.
She spun Romy around, and realized, to her horror, that the Duchess was tearing, that Lilith Kane was coming apart like a weird rubber disguise from which the contents had suddenly been removed. Suddenly Glory was alone, holding an empty dress, and the lights were going out.
"Hello?" Glory said. Her voice sounded small and frightened.
"I am the Dreamer of Worlds."
The voice seemed to come from all around her, soft yet definite. With each syllable, the world around Glory took on form, until she could see once more. She knew now that what had come before had been a dream, and that while this, too, was a dream, it was a dream of a wholly different sort—a real dream, as opposed to her mind's hermetic churning of memories and fears.
She was surrounded by stars. Beneath her feet, there was a softly glowing crystal plate a good hundred meters in diameter through which she could see more stars, though more dimly. She stood in its center, and so need have no fear of falling off, which was a good thing, because there were stars below as well as stars above, stars a thousand times brighter than anything she'd ever seen, even looking up at the sky last night from the Allimir encampment. So bright they shone in colors, unwinking and unwavering, stars all the way down to the edge of the crystal horizon and stars beyond.
There was no one else in sight.
"Ah . . . hello?" Glory said again.
"I have come to test humanity for its worthiness to be admitted into the Universal Dream," the disembodied voice said. It was cool and sexless—Glory thought of it as being female without being able to quite put her finger on any actual reason for why she thought that. Probably it reminded her a bit of a dental receptionist she'd used to know.
Glory was pleased at how well she was taking all this, all in all. It helped that she was quite certain she was asleep. On the other hand (as she belatedly remembered) she was supposed to be having an oracular dream just now.
"Erm, excuse me, but are you the, um, Oracle of Erchane?" she asked.
"I am the Dreamer of Worlds. I have come to test humanity for its worthiness to be admitted into the Universal Dream. This is your test."
"This here? Doesn't seem like much. Or what you did to the Allimir? Them having to go looking for a hero is a test for ME?" The anger that she'd felt at the dream-Romy, suicidal though it might be in this situation, came seeping back, and Glory wished she still had her sword.
"If not the Allimir, it would have been some other. These misfortunes I do not cause, nor do I need to. Hear me now if you would save the Allimir people and your own," the cool dispassionate
voice commanded.
"I am the Dreamer of Worlds, and I have come to test humanity for its worthiness to be admitted into the Universal Dream. Long have I considered the case of Earth. Until I have judged humanity worthy—or otherwise—the magic of Earth is withheld from your mages; your creatures of magic are absent from your sight. Magic and creatures of magic live now only in the imagination of your peoples, but should you fail my tests, you will be denied the Universal Dream forever, and even that tiny blessing will be lost to you. You, Gloria Emmeline McArdle, are the last I will take from your world to test. Know that all before you have failed."
"Well, that's comforting, innit?" Glory muttered to herself. She looked all around, but couldn't find any particular thing that looked like a Dreamer of Worlds to glare at. "So tell me why I care about this in particular, why don't you?"
"Is it possible you do not fully understand?" the Dreamer of Worlds asked itself. "I will explain. Unless humanity passes this test, Earth will be sealed off forever from contact with all other races of the Dream—as an evolutionary dead end. All magic will be removed from Earth, and through that loss, your world and your people will dwindle away into extinction, like all failed experiments of the Master Dreamer. So choose well what you do here, Gloria McArdle."
"Wait!" Glory yelped. "You can't mean that the whole future of humanity depends on what I do here! That's stupid! What's the test? How do I pass? How do I get HOME? Come back here, you stupid pommy git!"
But there was no answer, only the slow inclination of the crystal disk beneath her feet, until she was first sliding, then falling helplessly into the sharp and merciless stars.
* * *
She floundered awake struggling and swearing, but only when she hit her head—hard—on the wall beside her did the real world of the Oracle's cavern separate itself from the terrifying fall of her dream. She sat up, running her hands over skin still sticky and clogged with the remains of yesterday's makeup. Should have had a wash in the fountain outside when you had a chance, she told herself wisely. Surreptitiously, she pulled up a corner of her T-shirt and scrubbed at her face, feeling tidier once she was done.
The Warslayer Page 10
