by Holly Lisle
“You haven’t even heard him sing. Of course, it would be worse if there were hundreds just like him.”
Minerva frowned. “I was meaning to talk to you about that—”
“Later.” Darryl sprinted up the ramp. The last thing he felt like hearing about was the Great Dragon Fiasco, and his failure to be a brilliant magician.
The day brightened, and Darryl’s mood lifted. The bridge shed enough light to banish the gloom around it, but the fogs and clouds were blowing away, too.
The dragon cocked an eye heavenward and said, “So much for our cover.”
“Shut up, Birkwelch.” Minerva reached the top of the ramp and looked down the road in both directions. She smiled suddenly. “Hey, look! A city.” She pointed to her right and consulted her compass. “Yesss! That’s the way!”
It wasn’t far. The place looked to Darryl like an exercise in ugly — a city that had not so much survived floods, famines, and fires as one which had gone down beneath their weight... while still retaining upright walls.
“What a dump,” the dragon muttered.
Darryl found himself agreeing.
At his side, Minerva whispered, “Oh, no!”
“What?” He looked at her with alarm.
“Murp’s gone.”
Darryl tried not to snap at Minerva. “Maybe the cat will show up. But Murp is the least of our worries right now.”
Minerva started toward the city, hurrying, Darryl suspected, so he couldn’t see her cry. “I know that,” she said, “but it seems like a bad omen.”
“It isn’t like you could eat the damned thing,” Birkwelch said “Cats taste worse than Wheaties.”
“Shut up, Birkwelch,” Darryl said, and hurried after his wife.
* * *
Barney saw his mother and father coming for him in his dream. They were with a dragon, and with Murp.
But this time, Barney knew better. His parents weren’t ever coming for him. They didn’t really want him.
So he turned his back on the dream, and drifted into the darker gray places of sleep, where nothing bothered him at all. And finally, in his dream, a voice offered him rest, and peace. The voice offered him an escape from all the hurt. He listened to the voice, and let go of himself completely. He joined with the nothingness, and forgot the pain.
CHAPTER 14
Minerva stepped off the bright, shining road into the battle-broken ruins of the Unweaver’s city. She wished the cat were with her; conversely, she wished the dragon weren’t. She discovered herself incapable of appreciating witty remarks made while walking into the jaws of death. She would have preferred the dragon to act as afraid as she felt, but barring that, she would have found silence acceptable. Instead—
“Ho, puny godling! We three mortals have come to beard you in your lair!” the dragon bellowed. “Come out, puling fiend, and show your scabby visage!”
“Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!” Darryl hissed.
The dragon turned to Darryl in apparent surprise. “He knows we’re here. The least we can do is go into this massacre looking like heroes.” Birkwelch appealed to Minerva. “Look, if we’re going to be stripped atom from atom and fed into the bonfires of eternity, I at least want it said that we went with a bit of style. Don’t you?”
“No!” Minerva and Darryl said together.
The dragon gave each of them a hurt look and retreated into silence.
Darryl turned to Minerva. “Which way?”
She held the compass in her hand. It pointed down a twisting alley filled with rubble and overshadowed by shattered, tilted walls. “That way.” She frowned. Right at the point where the alley twisted, she could have sworn she saw something move. Its shadow smeared across one whole wall, grotesque and undefinable. She glanced at Birkwelch. “If what you said before still stands, how are we supposed to protect ourselves?”
“Think happy thoughts?” The dragon acted like he’d seen that hulking shadow lurking in the alley, too. He puffed a flame experimentally, then sighed. “I don’t know. I’m not a Weaver. I do know that it’s harder to create than destroy, which is why there are so many destroyers and so few creators.” The dragon moved into the street, in the direction Minerva had indicated. “I’ll do what I can to protect you.”
Minerva and Darryl followed. The stink of filth and sulphur was worse in the ruins, the air closer and damper and hotter. The ground rumbled intermittently, and Minerva became aware of a grinding sound, very low — she could not pinpoint its location. Sometimes it seemed nearby, sometimes it came from a point far away. The sound made her uneasy — there was about it something of the giant’s rhyme in the Beanstalk fairy tale: “I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.”
The alley twisted hard to the left and split into a T. Minerva consulted the compass. “Right,” she said. The right road was narrower than the left. The bombed-out buildings overhung it further. It figured.
The three of them moved warily onto the new road. Something keened, off in the distance — a shrill, heartrending, animal cry of anguish.
“Ugh!” Darryl whispered. “I could have done without that.”
Shapes and shadows moved near the corners. Minerva pointed to them, and Darryl nodded.
Birkwelch’s ears swiveled, and he stopped. “Listen,” he said.
The grinding sound grew louder and moved closer. Minerva shivered in spite of the heat and checked the compass again. The three of them reached the next intersection: a Y. Minerva checked the compass. It wavered back and forth between the two possible roads, spun once in a complete circle, then settled into place, pointing to the left branch. Minerva frowned — she hadn’t seen any sort of uncertainty in the compass’s directions before.
Then the grinding grew louder, and this time it seemed to come from the place the trio had just left. Birkwelch bounced from one hind leg to another, and the tip of his tail whipped back and forth like an angry cat’s. “Can’t you do that any faster?” he asked.
Minerva pointed down the dark, narrow, twisting left alley. The rumbling began up ahead — horrible crushing stone-on-stone noise. They seemed to be heading straight into it — but the arrow on Minerva’s kid-compass was unwavering.
Then, from the air around them, Jamie yelled, “Mom! Mommy! Daddy! Go back! Please go back! Don’t let him hurt us!” The child-voice echoed and re-echoed through the twisting ruins, punctuated at the end by a scream that left Minerva’s heart in her throat. She broke out in a cold sweat. Beside her, Darryl went ghost-white.
Carol shrieked, “Mommy, Daddy! No! If you come here, the Unweaver will kill us.”
“Don’t hurt me, monster! Don’t—!” Barney’s cry dissolved into a bubbling, wordless howl.
Birkwelch snarled and all of them began to run. They came to another intersection. “Which way?”
The grinding and the rumbling was all around them, constantly growing louder — Minerva had to yell to be heard over the steady, subterranean roar. “The needle’s still spinning,” she shouted. “Wait a second!”
The needle twirled around, while the roar grew thunderous and the ground beneath her feet began to shudder. From the gutted windows of the broken buildings around them, Minerva saw eyes looking down at her, glowing dully in the shadows. Then the needle settled on a direction — back the way the trio had just come.
Minerva’s head snapped up, and she spun around and stared back the way they’d just come. The alley deformed before her eyes, the buildings shifting and moving closer. The noise—
“Oh, God! Run!!” she yelled, and charged toward the place they’d left. The buildings slid together faster the closer she got to the escape, the alley grew narrower, and suddenly she saw the end pinch off before her eyes.
“Retreat!” Birkwelch shouted, and darted back. Minerva and Darryl followed, racing as fast as they could, while the rest of the alley crushed together behind them.
The four-way intersection became a courtyard before their eyes, the alleys wiped out of existence by the moving bank
of solid, blank walls. And when the last of the alleys closed off, the buildings advanced toward Minerva, Darryl, and the dragon, slowly but steadily. As the ruins advanced, they also grew taller, so that the gutted windows towered high out of reach before any of the trio had a chance to use them as a means of escape.
Minerva looked up. “Another magic carpet?” she yelled to Darryl. The two of them, she thought, were the only ones who really had to worry. Birkwelch could fly.
Darryl nodded.
Minerva opened her paintbox, grabbed a brush and light-paint — and the buildings arced toward each other over her head, grew into a solid ceiling, and swallowed the light.
The grinding stopped. In the unexpected silence, Minerva could hear her own harsh breathing and that of her companions.
“Trapped!” Darryl shouted. “We need a tank!”
“No!” Birkwelch yelled. “I already told you — no destruction! Everything you unweave makes him stronger.”
Minerva painted a sphere of light that hung in the air between them, driving out the darkness and casting weird shadows on the walls behind them. “Turn the other cheek, then?” she asked.
“Too passive.” The dragon leaned near enough that she could smell his breath — even in the stink of the city, this was unfortunate. “It is not enough that you refrain from unweaving; you must also weave. ‘He who does no evil, but neither does good, is still evil by default.’ ”
“Who said that — Buddha?” Darryl asked.
Birkwelch wrinkled his muzzle and snorted. “The Worm Kiffaulter. Draconic philosopher. It’s from a long parable about the munching of babes and woofers and the acquisition of treasures great and small — but I figured the parable was probably a species thing.” The dragon’s toothy grin only emphasized the direness of the situation. “I skipped to the moral at the end.”
“Good.” Minerva stared into the glowing light-paints in her box. “So we have to create our way out of here?”
Her question was punctuated by a soft plop.
Minerva pushed the light-sphere upward — it floated toward the ceiling and threw its light into the farthest corners of the unnatural cavern. In the last pool of shadow, something moved.
“Yes,” Birkwelch said, stepping toward the hulking shadow. “And now would be a good time.”
The shadow-shape welled up and oozed moistly toward the dragon, making long, sucking, slurping sounds as it progressed. It was not large, but what it lacked in size, it made up for in gruesomeness. The dragon shot a blast of flame toward it, but did not touch it. It retreated, bubbling and wailing.
There was another plop, from the other side of the cavern. The rainbow paints glowed softly. Minerva clutched the first pot she touched. Darryl leaned over and kissed her.
She kissed him as hard as she could, and when she pulled back, brushed tears from her face with a backhanded swipe. “In case it’s good-bye,” she whispered.
He had a pencil in one hand, the paper pad in the other. “I won’t let it be good-bye,” he promised. “Not again. Never again.”
Minerva heard a third squishing plop. All three of the creatures oozed toward her and Darryl. They had dagger-lined maws and horrible eyes. They advanced, and the dragon laid down lines of flame on the earth in front of them, galloping in circles around the cavern, racing from one monstrosity to the next, renewing each line of fire as it flickered out. “You’re running out of time,” Birkwelch bellowed. “I can’t keep this up forever.”
Minerva dipped the brush into the paint — she’d come up with green. Green, she thought. Green as meadows, green as fields, green as forests. She flung up a horizontal line in the air, undulant, a rolling hill. “Wide-open meadow,” she yelled to Darryl.
He pressed his back to hers and began to write. She read his words in the glowing air around her while she painted:
The field was peaceful. Short grass ruffled in waves at Minerva’s feet. Three gentle horses cropped the grass, while a cool breeze blew past, and—
The writing stopped unfolding in front of her. Minerva, madly brushing in hints of blue sky and wispy white clouds, said, “— and on the front porch of the house on the hill...”
“Yes,” Darryl said.
—on the front porch of the house on the hill, the Unweaver sat, smiling politely, drinking lemonade.
“I HATE LEMONADE!” an unfamiliar voice shrieked.
The closed-in labyrinthine ruins were gone. The oozing monsters were transformed into miniature ponies that nibbled at the lovely green meadow grass and plucked the rainbow-hued flowers, tails flicking lazily. On the front porch of a lovely white antebellum mansion, a plump little man sat, lemonade glass in his hand — at least for an instant. Then the lemonade glass deformed into a thing of leprous ugliness, and the paint on the house began to peel. Layers of the plump little man stripped themselves away into a cloud of dark smoke that formed over his head — skin and flesh, sinew and bone feeding into the wraith; man devolving into fog.
The ponies lifted their heads and laid their ears back. They, too, began to shift and change — not so much to become something else as to melt away into less than they had been before.
“Don’t let him spoil it!” Minerva yelled at Darryl. She kept painting — retouching the house and the little horses to keep them firmly grounded in reality, adding fences and an orange tabby cat on one fencepost — and then painting in the Unweaver — painting a woman, a grandmother — kindly, sweetfaced, the sort of woman who would yearn to dandle her daughter’s babies on her knee, who would bake bread. Darryl’s followed Minerva’s lead. His words glowed in the air.
The Unweaver, who had loved nothing, believed nothing, embraced nothing, in that moment became something — became human, learned to love — and in that becoming, embraced and affirmed life.
Nice, Minerva thought. Nice touch, Darryl. Conquer by creation, leave something good in the place of all the evil and destruction.
Minerva looked up at the woman — for indeed it was a woman who stood on the veranda of that plantation house. The tired Weaver walked up the hill toward her and reached out her hand to touch her — to touch the creature who had once been the Unweaver, and who was redeemed.
The woman watched Minerva’s hand come toward her, and her mouth opened as if she were about to say something—
But the mouth kept opening, and opening, and the flesh of the face peeled back and fell away, and a scream — rage, or terror, or pain — rent the air. Then the Unweaver ripped itself to shreds before Minerva’s eyes, almost beneath her fingers, and the last remnants — two burning glowing sockets that might have been eyes, suspended in a cloud of gray haze — sucked down into a crack between the floorboards of the veranda and were gone.
“Er, nice try,” Birkwelch said. He’d just finished reading Darryl’s words, which were fading quickly into nothingness. “Nice concept, anyway.” He flipped the rilles of his face backward and sighed. “But pointless. You cannot change the essential nature of the Unweaver. He’s a primal force.”
“In other words — ‘a valiant effort, but to no avail’,” Darryl muttered, and kicked the bottom step of the veranda.
“Don’t take it so hard,” the dragon said, and patted Darryl on the back. “You’ve got him on the run. You’ve probably chased him out of this universe entirely.”
“He’s probably hiding under the floorboards of the house, plotting revenge,” Minerva said.
The dragon looked around him. Minerva saw him studying the big white house, the rolling hills, the manicured pastures, the horses, and the lovely picket fences. Birkwelch shook his head vehemently. “Not his kind of place. Hanging around now would drive him nuts. He tried to tear your Weaving down, and failed. I don’t think he’s here anymore.”
“Great. Wonderful.” Minerva studied the house and frowned. “I don’t care whether he’s still here or not. I just want to find the kids.”
* * *
Birkwelch stood on the veranda. “About the kids — they could be in
anything,” the dragon said. “They could be anything. Everything that was here before is still here — but it’s all been transformed. Since none of the little dears have come bounding out the door yet, I’m assuming there might be a problem.”
Darryl gripped the porch rail. He and Minerva had crossed universes to get their kids back. They’d beaten the Unweaver. They couldn’t have come all that way, done all the things they had done — conquered entropy personified, for crissakes — to lose at the last minute.
“In the house somewhere, then?” Minerva looked worn and scared to Darryl. Her eyes were huge and shadowed, her skin pale.
“Let’s go,” Darryl said, and walked up the steps and onto the porch. He didn’t want to wait any longer — didn’t want to talk about finding the kids, or talk about possible problems, or talk about anything. He just wanted to get in, get them, and get the hell out. The idea of home seemed dearer to him than it ever had.
He swung the door open and walked in. And stopped. What had been a Southern plantation on the outside... well, wasn’t on the inside. The walls were stone, pale gray. The front door opened into a hallway, with doors on either side. The hallway inside the house extended much farther than the walls outside the house.
“I’ve been here before,” Minerva whispered.
Birkwelch and Darryl looked at her with, Darryl suspected, nearly identical expressions of disbelief.
“In a nightmare,” she added. “There were bloody footprints on the floor, and a door with a lion’s head — it was all very vivid.” She closed her eyes. “Also, I was flying,” she said.
Darryl was willing to give consideration to the concept that Minerva’s dreams might have some validity. He never had before — But, he thought, just living from day to day can give you reason to reconsider the possibility of most anything.
They walked down the hall, opening each stone door. All the doors opened easily, but all the rooms were empty. “If this place looks the same as it did in my dream, does that mean we didn’t succeed in defeating the Unweaver after all?” Minerva asked.
