Future Indefinite

by Dave Duncan

  Alice prompted. “Edward’s obviously collected great power if he can give a blind man back his sight.”

  “True.”

  “And the miracles inspire the crowd to provide more mana? He gets it back?”

  Ursula nodded, beating her hands on her knees and staring angrily at the rocks as if trying to glare through them. “All that singing going on out there doesn’t sound like anyone’s doing much eating yet.”

  “What’s wrong? Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “I never…” The doughty Mrs. Newton scowled at this frontal attack. She glanced at the wall around them as if looking for listeners. “You really want my opinion, no matter what?”

  “Please.”

  “Well, I suppose you are his next of kin. I wouldn’t say this to anyone else. You won’t repeat my words to Jumbo or your cousin?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Rain, Mrs. Pearson! The rain’s bad news. He’s lost a lot of people since yesterday. If the weather continues bad, he’s going to come a cropper. He can’t travel as fast in the rain, he can’t attract enough people. So he won’t collect enough mana—or even enough money. If he can’t feed his flock, it’ll wander away. He’s certainly not strong enough yet to do loaves-and-fishes miracles, not on that scale.”

  Ursula scowled at the fire for a moment. “And that’s not all. I keep telling him he’s not ruthless enough. As you said, when he uses mana to perform miracles, the resulting adoration should give him back more than he spent. That’s the way it should work. But he’s too softhearted. It begins that way, but it’s astonishingly easy for people to become…um, saturated. Blase. The first couple of miracles today, I could feel the whole node tremble with the surge of mana. Did you notice?”

  “I felt something.”

  “That was just a whiff of spray we were getting—the waves were hitting the Liberator and they must have rocked him to his toenails. Did you notice how much less the response was the fourth time?”

  “He overdoes it, you mean?”

  “Absolutely. The Pentatheon’s god of healing is Paa, one of Tion’s. We estimate he grants about one real healing miracle a year, plus a few minor, show-offy things: squints or harelips or measles. Those keep the crowds coming. Tion himself does one miracle cure every year at his festival. By definition, miracles need to be rarities.”

  “I suppose Edward can’t refuse suffering babies.”

  “He could tell them to wait until tomorrow,” Ursula growled. “Listen!” She waved a hand at the dark. “They’re still singing! He went out there to perform a miracle. He can cure an attack of epilepsy with a snap of his fingers, if that’s all it is. But why do it that way? Why hasn’t he ordered the singing stopped and made everybody gather round to watch? He’s not enough of a showman! Oh, he does quite well, but he could do a lot better.”

  Showing off would go against everything he had ever been taught. “So you think he isn’t gathering mana fast enough?” But if there was no way to measure mana…

  “I’m very much afraid he’s losing it. I don’t think he has as much now as he did—”

  She was interrupted by a scream. It began, very briefly, as a yell of outrage or anger. It immediately shot up to the unmistakable shrill note of mortal terror, four and a third octaves above middle C, the universal alarm cry of the human species. It came from somewhere very close, amid the encircling maze of rocks and stalagmites. It reverberated through the cavern, doubled and redoubled by its own echoes. It froze the blood. Alice and Ursula and the four bodyguards leaped to their feet, peering around, trying to locate the source.

  Then the human scream was joined by a sound much greater, an earsplitting animal roar. The two swelled in chorus, alternating, combining, mingling with mighty cracks and thumps.

  Alice clapped her hands over her ears. “What in the world is that?” she howled.

  Ursula yelled back through the din. “A mithiar! What they call a jugular. It’s killing someone.”

  Judging by the noise, it was tearing someone apart.

  As suddenly as they’d begun, the sounds stopped. They were replaced by the blurred roar of a multitude of terrified people on the far side of the rockfall. Their screams, too, echoed everywhere, but at least they were not as close. Roaring Cave suddenly justified its name.

  Alice uncovered her ears. Ursula was ashen. She could not possibly be more shaken than Alice, though, and the men looked no better, apparently torn between a desire to flee and a need to stay close to the light. One of them had hauled a burning branch from the fire, but he wasn’t going anywhere with it.

  Ursula snatched it from him and headed toward the source of the trouble. The men all yelled and tried to stop her. Shouting and shaking her head, she cleared them out of the way with her flaming brand and kept on going. Shamed, perhaps, they followed. Alice did too, determined not to be left alone in this nightmare.

  They did not have very far to go, and then they all stopped dead, blocking the way and also Alice’s view of what they had found. She scrambled up on a table-high ledge and peered over their heads. Steep walls rose to shoulder height on one side and even higher on the other, forming a narrow canyon that continued on, twisting out of sight. The rocks were pale gray, mottled and cemented together with oozings of white stalagmite like melted candle wax, but now all splattered with sheets of shocking red as if a whole barrel of blood had exploded. In places streaks of blood and blobs of flesh had splashed ten or twelve feet up, glittering wetly in the light of Ursula’s torch. Surely it would have taken a dozen victims to produce so much blood?

  The shouting in the main cave had almost stopped, probably because most of the Free were outside in the rain by now. Flickers of light reflecting from the roof showed that more people were coming to investigate.

  A woman’s body lay facedown in the center of the shambles. It was naked and smeared with gore, but it bore no obvious wounds. How was that possible? Ursula and the men were all talking at once, not a word intelligible to Alice. Some of those lumps were not rock. A leg. An arm. A couple of the men cried out at the same moment, pointing at a small boulder, coated with blood. Its eyes were open.

  Revulsion! Nausea! Suddenly every shadow held a monster, every rock was a tooth. Alice half fell, half jumped from her perch and went stumbling back to the fire, moving as fast as she dared and banging her shins and elbows in the process. She threw a heap of sticks on the blaze to try and make it brighter, then hunkered down beside it, shivering. Two victims, one torn to pieces, one not visibly harmed. That made no sense at all! The sort of claws Jumbo had described could never rip a woman’s clothes off without tearing her skin to ribbons as well. Where had the jugular gone?

  Where had it come from?

  The crowd in the main cave was silent now or else had fled out into the night. She heard voices nearby, and recognized Edward’s, issuing commands. She was shaking from shock and nausea. Even the smoke from the fire seemed tainted with the reek of blood. She could make no sense of the talk, and no one was going to be speaking English for a while. She considered going in search of Jumbo, but she could not be sure he was still in the cave. With Edward’s snub still rankling, he might have taken the dragons and ridden off in a huff. No, Jumbo was too much a gentleman to do that, but she had better wait here until Edward had straightened out the emergency. Her vacation was turning out to be more stressful than she had expected.

  A moment later, light advanced out of the passageway. Ursula appeared with her torch, followed by Edward himself carrying the woman’s body in his arms. Other men came after. As he lowered his burden to one of the heaps of bedding, Alice snatched up a blanket and went to cover her. She was only a girl.

  Edward straightened, wiping bloody hands on his robe, which was already well smeared. “Thanks.”

  “She’s alive?” Of course. He would not have brought a corpse.

  “Eleal Singer. She was starting to come around. I’ve put her to sleep. See if you can clean her up, will you?�
�� He turned to his followers and began giving more orders. He was paler than before, but calm, completely in command. Though they were all older men, they did not argue or hesitate. Most went out by the way Alice had entered, others returned to the scene of the accident—of the murder?

  Ursula came to help, dragging a water skin. Alice chose a tattered cloth that might be somebody’s bedding and ripped a strip from it. Together they began washing away the bloodstains. Eleal muttered and stirred as they wiped her face but did not awaken. There was little they could do about her long hair, which was caked and matted. Her skin bore only a few scrapes from contact with the rock, and there was a reddening welt around her waist that Alice could not explain. When Ursula started work on Eleal’s hands, she moaned and tried to pull them loose. The tips of her fingers were swollen, some of the nails broken. Her toes were the same. Alice exchanged shocked glances with Ursula and thrust away the impossible suspicions that kept boiling up in her mind.

  “How are you doing?” Edward asked.

  He was standing with his back to the proceedings. This absurd display of modesty almost provoked Alice to sniggers, but she fought against them. That way lay full-blown hysterics.

  Ursula pulled the blanket over the patient again. “You can look. She has serious bruising around her middle. There’s something wrong with her fingers and toes.”

  Edward knelt down and considered Eleal’s draped form. “A couple of broken ribs, too.” He touched the blanket over her waist for a moment. Then he lifted one of her hands and gritted his teeth. “Swine!” He covered the girl’s hand with both of his and healed the finger wounds, even the broken nails. He moved on to do the other hand, both feet.

  Ursula was watching intently, but she looked more angry than impressed.

  “What happened?” Alice demanded. “Can either of you explain? Does this sort of thing go on all the time?”

  Ursula shook her head. “It was aimed at him, definitely. Ken’th?”

  “Probably,” Edward said. “Stand back and I’ll—”

  Pebbles rattled. The young fair-haired disciple came hurrying in. His face had a sickly pallor and there was blood on his knees and hands. He held a long strip of blood-soaked leather. From the way he offered it to Edward, it was heavy.

  The two spoke for a moment. The disciple pulled a face, but nodded. He dropped his burden—it fell with a metallic clunk—and headed back out the way he had come. Someone was going to have to organize a burial for that other victim, and probably he had just been given the horrible job.

  A rising murmur of voices indicated that the disciples were coaxing the crowds into the cave again.

  Edward turned back to Eleal. Ursula caught Alice’s arm and led her out of the way, over to the fire. Her fury was obvious now. She nudged the mysterious parcel with her foot.

  “That’s what did the bruising. A money belt.”

  Alice’s brain resisted the implications. “How? And how can you know that?”

  “The buckle’s ripped right through the leather.”

  “Yes, but—” No, don’t think about it. “Where did the jugular come from? Where did it—”

  “It’s sorcery,” Ursula growled, “very horrible sorcery. You think I’d have gone after a real jugular with nothing but a burning stick? If there had been a jugular in the cave, it would have attacked somebody hours ago.”

  “But where did it go?”

  The answer to that was a disbelieving glare. “Dosh has found another body, a priest. Someone bashed him on the head with a rock and took his gown.”

  “I don’t understand!”

  “Oh, work it out, girl!” Ursula shouted. “All cats are gray in the dark. All robes, too. If you wanted to get by the guards…We knew Eleal Singer had some sort of spell on her. We knew it made her come looking for the Liberator. We knew there was a compulsion, we just didn’t know what else it did. Even I could see traces of it on her. I couldn’t see one on you or Jumbo, but that didn’t—”

  “Jumbo! Shouldn’t one of us go and find Jumbo and—”

  Ursula threw up her hands and turned away. “Oh, go right ahead! Go and find him. I can suggest a good place to look. Are you completely stupid? Must I carve words in stone for you? Go to Jumbo by all means. He was a good friend of mine, Mrs. Pearson. A good friend for almost a hundred years. He deserved better than that horrible, shameful death. It’s one more reason to settle accounts with Zath. Go to Jumbo. Tell him we’re sorry. Tell him he’s forgiven. There’s no hurry. He isn’t going anywhere now.”

  47

  Eleal floated back up to consciousness, aware first of a revolting taste in her mouth. She tried to spit out whatever it was. A strong arm reached under her shoulders and raised her; someone held a gourd of water to her lips. Water dribbled down her neck, between her breasts. Coldness, darkness, and her eyelids seemed to be crusted with mud. She forced them open, shivered convulsively. Faint light, coldness again, and awareness that she wasn’t wearing anything. She was on a very lumpy, prickly bed…someone holding her upright.

  “Relax, relax!” said a voice. A man’s voice.

  She clutched at the blanket and pulled it up to cover her nudity. She turned her head and found herself looking into a concerned pair of very blue eyes.

  “You’re all right,” D’ward said. “You’re not hurt. You’ll be quite well in a moment. We’re trying to help you. Wash your mouth out again.”

  She discovered more aches and scrapes. Her elbows and ankles, especially. Her teeth felt as if someone had worked them over with a mallet.

  D’ward holding her up. Her head against his bony shoulder. D’ward wiping her face with a wet, pink cloth. Had she been injured, somehow?

  “What?” she said, and her tongue felt wrong in her mouth. “What happened?” She tried to focus, but his face was too close, a blur.

  “You had a brush with very nasty sorcery, but you’re all right now.”

  He lowered her. She still held the blanket under her chin. He was kneeling beside her.

  “Relax! You’re still not thinking straight. Take a little longer.”

  Why did her teeth hurt so? Vague, confused pictures whirled in her mind: D’ward in his priest’s gown with the hood over his head, walking along a passage below her…a man with a mustache…take money to D’ward…Woeful maiden, handsome lad, Met on lonely way…

  She peered up at him. He smiled at her, and she could make out the smile. How had she come to be lying in bed with no clothes on and D’ward beside her? She smiled back. If that was about to happen, then she would as soon it was D’ward as any…. What was wrong with her teeth?

  “Starting to feel better?”

  “Yes. What—what happened?”

  “You saw a man in a robe and thought it was me.”

  She closed her eyes. That did sound right, but where? And what had she been doing? She opened her eyes again and tried to nod.

  D’ward blinked at her a few times. “You’re all right, Eleal. It’s all gone now. The curse is gone.”

  Then the missing pieces dropped into place. She stiffened in horror. “D’ward! I came to find you! I jumped—”

  “Never mind. It’s over.”

  “Just going to surprise you…I started to sing—”

  He seized her shoulders and squeezed them hard. “It’s all right, I say. It wasn’t me! It’s all right.”

  “I didn’t want to sing…didn’t mean to sing—” Her voice was shrill. She felt tears, panic, and terror. Her limbs thrashed and trembled.

  He steadied her, strong hands on her shoulders. “It is all right, Eleal! It’s all over!” He made soothing noises, whispering. She calmed abruptly. The whirling terrors settled like leaves after a gust of wind has passed.

  He said, “Oh, Eleal, Eleal, darling! You saved my life and—”

  “What?”

  “Yes! There was another curse, see? A man after me. So you saved my life again, and this time it was my turn to wash and nurse you…. Well, it was my helpers—not
me. I mean, I didn’t even peek…”

  That struck her as funny. She laughed. “You think I would mind if you peeked?”

  “Perhaps not as much as some,” he agreed awkwardly.

  “You think I didn’t peek at you when I had the chance?”

  “Er…That was a long time ago. The main thing is that the curse is gone.”

  She closed her eyes and saw the man with the mustache.

  “He kissed me!”

  “I expect that’s his preferred technique.”

  “He sent me to find you, kill you?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  She shivered and lay still, thinking hard. “I was coming to tell you that I believe in you, not in the imposters.”

  “Good. Truly that makes me very happy.”

  “I came to give you my money.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Some of it was his. He gave me money!” Memories were coming back. The room, the crystal figurine.

  “I’ll certainly take his money, if you like. And put it to a good use.”

  “And let me stay with you? Keep me safe, in case he tries to—punish me for failing?” She opened her eyes and watched to see what he would say.

  He looked worried. “You don’t have to stay, Eleal. You have two good legs now. You can go and chase that acting career you wanted.”

  She wanted to stay. Very much she wanted to stay, and things that worked on most men would not work on D’ward. Not quickly, anyway.

  “But most of those plays—they’re lies! They’re about the evil sorcerers who pretend to be gods. Those plays are bad, D’ward, aren’t they?”

  He rubbed a wrist across his brow and looked even more worried. “If you take them seriously they are.”

  “Then what’s to become of me!” A sob escaped her.

  “Join us if you want. Glad to have you. I need someone to help with the preaching.”

  “Preaching? Me? You don’t have to mock me.” She writhed under the blanket.