by Tara Janzen
“I only know that you are the Prince of Time, and that we face nothing that has not been faced before. Mychael ab Arawn fought the everlasting night of Dharkkum, and he prevailed. Llynya of the Yr Is-ddwfn did the same.”
The names gave Morgan a heart-jolting pause.
“I knew them both,” he said, and wondered what had become of the world after he’d fallen into the weir, that Mychael and Llynya would have been pitted against such evil.
“Come with me and you will know them again,” she said as if in answer to his thoughts, implying a promise he would be hard-pressed to refuse. “It is your path we will follow into the past. It is your time where the darkness lies sealed behind the nascent crystal. If we can put ourselves in Kryscaven Crater before the seal is tempered by time, we can save the five that were lost, and the world will not be what it has become, a wasteland of war, but will be what it was, a planet of blue seas and green forests where life prevails and the miracle of each day is blessed by nature.”
Her impassioned plea did not fall on deaf ears. She was offering him his heart’s desire—to go back to his own time.
But the price.
Sweet Jesu. ’Twas more than he could ever have imagined.
Dharkkum, she’d called the darkness, but no single word could sum up the horror he’d seen. Dharkkum was a devourer. It was pestilence and plague and thinning screams of ungodly terror. It was chaos in its most virulent form, distending atoms on a quantum level. If it was sealed in the earth by some miracle of crystal, then that was where it belonged.
He had a life in the here and now. Imperfect? Aye, but not unbearable. He remembered that now, remembered what the wine had made him forget: that life in any form was sweet, a blessing not to be squandered.
Avallyn had saved him from the wine with her potion, but he could not save her from Dharkkum, except by keeping her in the present. Gods, but he should have thought twice before he’d set Aja to breaking the tracking bracelet code.
“Worlds die,” he told her. “Stars go supernova every day. Change is the only constant in the universe.”
“I have a duty,” she insisted, much to his amazement. “I was born to make a difference.”
A hundred and twenty-five years old and she was still clinging to youthful ideals? Perhaps he was older than her after all.
“Aye, well, my sense of duty is threadbare and unlikely to carry the day,” he said, finishing the conversation. He strode by her, heading for the sick bay and the tracking bracelet he’d left on the bed, praying it was still there. He’d lock her to him, if need be, to keep her from the death he’d seen. She’d be safe by his side, aright, because he sure as hell wasn’t going down any wormhole.
Aye, and wasn’t that a shocker.
There it was, his heart’s desire, laid out before him like a banquet for a beggar—and he dare not partake of the feast.
Dharkkum.
Even the name sent a chill through him. Yet she’d stood there in front of him and talked about duty, her duty to face the black horror and save the five that were lost.
What five? he wondered. Five Quicken-tree? Or mayhaps Dain and Ceridwen were part of the company.
God, he hoped not. For certes they’d both been into magic up to their necks, and he soon would be as well if they were trapped in some magical crystal crater. Ten thousand years, and his debts on that front had not yet been paid. Avallyn had already told him that Mychael and Llynya had prevailed in their battle with the darkness. Given a little thought, he could see the two of them together, the too-serious boy and the elfin sprite. No doubt they had saved each other more than once from disaster.
He strode through the open hold door and turned right for the sick bay. She’d called him a barbarian and mayhaps she was more than half right, but if so, it was what he’d become in the future, not what he’d brought with him from out of the past. Her world was barbaric, made so by men like the Warmonger and the crude and vile beastmen called skraelings. What there was of art had been stolen from someplace else or created in some other century. There were no gatherings of people for a common good, no harvests, no Christ’s mass, no religion untainted by greed. ’Twas utter barbarism, to Morgan’s way of thinking, that people would choose to be so alone.
He swung through the sick-bay hatch and was relieved to see the tracking bracelet right where he’d left it, but his relief didn’t last any longer than it took for him to cross the room and pick the thing up.
Damn. He looked down at the band of thullein, caught in a quandary.
If he was going to leave her, now was the time. Rabin-19 was not so far away. He and York and Aja could take the rover’s tender and make the caravanserai in two hours. From there he could negotiate the final price for the Sonnpur-Dzon dragon. The Warmonger’s spies were everywhere and easy to find. Any fly-blown bar in the Waste housed half a dozen.
But he couldn’t leave her alone in the desert, and he couldn’t leave her in Rabin-19, because every fly-blown bar in the Waste housed half a dozen of the Warmonger’s spies.
Nor could he take her to Claerwen, for fear her mother would drop her down a weirgate with or without her barbarian warrior from the past. He didn’t consider her father, wherever he was, any more reliable.
Fine, he thought, slightly disgusted with himself. Now was the time to leave her, and he couldn’t leave her. She’d saved his life with the Lyran, and he owed her his protection.
No more than this tied him to her, he assured himself, no more than fair play. It had nothing to do with her kiss or his dreams or the book called Fata Ranc Le.
“Well?” she asked from behind him, breaking into his reverie.
Well, hell, he wanted to answer.
Instead he said, “Do you know Rabin-19?”
“Aye. Claerwen considers all of Craig Tagen within its jurisdiction. We patrol there.”
He took one last look at the tracking bracelet, then shoved it into the leather packet with the gold dragon before turning to face her.
“York thinks we can get spare parts for the fusion block from one of the mechanic shops on the south side.” The whole south side of Rabin-19 was a salvage yard full of junked rovers and ditched chassis, broken tenders and crashed air cargoes. Any piece of junk found out on the dunes was dragged into Rabin-19 or Cere.
“You won’t find a Class G,” she told him. “The Night Watchers never abandon their rovers.”
“It doesn’t have to be a perfect match for York and Aja to get it to work,” he said, dragging his hand through his hair and not quite meeting her gaze.
He was taking her with him, and leaving York and Aja to prepare the rover for the new fusion block. It only made good sense, he told himself. She knew the caravanserai, and he always did the reconnaissance.
So if it made so damn much good sense, and he was the one making the decision, why did he feel like the whole damn situation was out of his control? He didn’t want her out of his sight, and it wasn’t because he didn’t trust her. Hell, she was savvy enough not to leave the rover, and she’d more than proved she could take care of herself. They weren’t bound by the tracking bracelets any longer, so why did he feel compelled to keep her by his side? And was this the sort of reasoning that would eventually find him sliding down some cosmic worm gullet?
“It won’t be like it was the last time,” she said, and he knew exactly what she was talking about.
Christ save him, if she was going to read his mind. “I’ll be with you,” she went on, taking a step closer, her voice softly earnest. “And you’ll be prepared.”
Prepared? ’Twas impossible to be prepared for what he’d seen and felt and heard in the weir.
“The priestesses will give us chrystaalt to ease our way, and the Sha-shakrieg will bind us en chrysalli. You’ll not be alone this time.”
Frankly, he didn’t think having someone to share the terror would be much help, but he didn’t tell her that.
“You’ve got an hour,” he said. “Then we leave for Rabin-
19.”
He left the sick bay without waiting for an answer. He knew she’d come with him. She’d been waiting her whole life to follow him into the blackest bowels of hell. She wasn’t likely to balk at a cakewalk into Rabin-19.
Chapter 12
Approached from the southwest, Rabin-19 looked like a war zone. Rusted heaps of metal jutted out of the landscape, some soaring hundreds of feet into the air, others bunched and piled like tide wrack in long, twisting lines. Beyond the salvage yards, the mud brown buildings of the caravanserai shimmered in the heat, seeming to float above the desert floor. Walls had been built on the north and west sides of the town, sunbaked ramparts snaking a path through the dunes, meant to hold the wind-driven sands at bay—and failing. Hillocks of sand building up on the windward side of the wall sporadically crested and poured over into the streets, giving the outpost an air of quiet desperation as it was slowly swallowed by the dunes. The people in Rabin-19 had the same desperate look about them, furtive and edgy, as if they didn’t expect to survive the day.
Morgan understood the feeling. There were an uncommon number of Rift dogs roaming in the surrounding hills, striped wolf-like animals capable of taking a man down and stripping his bones clean. He and Avallyn had seen half a dozen packs of thirty or more animals within two miles of the city’s walls, all of them seemingly heading toward Rabin-19.
The outpost itself was stark, emptied of litter by the ceaseless wind and overlaid with a thick layer of dust blown in from the wasted plains to the south. No trash piled up in its alleys, no clothes were left out to desiccate in the fiery sunlight. No one lingered in doorways or courtyards. Everyone was inside somewhere, emerging into the day only to submerge into another covered market, another tavern, or their transport. The exception was the wild boys. They ruled the desert streets with cocky confidence, their sandskiffs battened down and anchored to great iron rings bolted into the breached walls, their masutes—the shaggy-headed quadruped mounts of the Deseillign Waste—harnessed to the same rings.
Seeing gangs of the boys gathered by their tents on the western outskirts, Morgan had steered the rover’s tender on a more southerly approach. The fewer people he and Avallyn encountered, the better. He wanted to finish his business and be gone. They’d barely passed the outlying boundaries of the town before he’d begun regretting his decision to bring her with him. Virgin princess or nay, she was a desert mother, and she’d told him Rabin-19 was under Claerwen’s jurisdiction. The place could be crawling with the priestesses’ spies, and unlike the Warmonger’s, Morgan didn’t have a clue as to who they were or where they might be found—though he suspected they were hidden among Claerwen’s allies, the wild boys.
He and Aja had been to the caravanserai a few times in years past, when they’d still been scavenging most of their hardware. Besides transport junk, the salvage yards in Rabin-19 stockpiled used and discontinued sensitized equipment, the small stuff that made Morgan’s jobs go so much more smoothly. He and Aja had tipped a cup or two with the wild boys in Rabin and never noticed anything amiss, but now Morgan wondered if they’d been watched and reports had been filed—and he wondered which desert sept had found him so many years ago and set him on the road to Pan-shei.
“There,” Avallyn said, pointing an authoritative finger toward a low-slung building with a large open bay. “Stoell’s is the place to find a fusion block.”
Morgan nodded in agreement and stopped the tender in the small slice of shade afforded by the salvage shop. A few cannibalized scant-ton chassis were piled together in a heap just outside the bay, with most of the good parts missing, from what he could see. Before opening the hatch, he took a quick look at his companion. She was angry—nothing new there—her eyes flashing silver in the bright light, her mouth tight. A tiny muscle was working in her jaw, and she was avoiding him with studious disregard. No mean feat when they were jammed together almost shoulder to shoulder in the tender’s cockpit. Other than her mood, she looked fine. In truth, she looked better than fine, even dressed in Aja’s old clothes—rust-colored pants, faded yellow shirt, an even more faded green quilted jerkin, and a turban they’d fashioned from part of an old white cloak. Without her Night Watcher garb she looked far more nomad than priestess, more wild boy than princess. All she needed was a quirt to look the perfect masute mahout.
“Where’s your tech-jaw?” he asked. Angry or not, he wanted to kiss her, but it was pretty damned unlikely that he was going to get the chance.
She slanted him a long look, then pulled one of York’s tech-jaws out of her pocket and stuck it in her mouth. Still holding his gaze, she bit down hard, real hard, and he winced at the skittering of static through his ear.
Aye, pretty damned unlikely, he thought, and wasn’t he the perfect fool for still wanting her after what he’d seen in his dreams. But his dreams had not all been of horrors. They’d been lovers in the night. The taste and feel of her was still imprinted on his brain, a vision made real by her potion, and a part of him ached for her.
“If you would put your tracking bracelet back on, we wouldn’t have to worry about getting out of shouting distance,” she said loud enough to make him wince again, making sure he heard her inside and out.
He heard her, all right, every peevish word. She’d been peevish since he’d walked out on her in the sick bay, and she hadn’t wasted any time in letting him know. He’d gotten no farther than the hatch when she’d tried her royal tone of voice on him with her imperious command: “Hold.”
He’d done no such thing and had been suffering her mood ever since—which was probably for the best. If she’d been at all amenable, he’d be making love to her right now in some hidden cove of Craig Tagen, and dragons and Dharkkum could go to hell. Which, of course, was exactly where making love with her was going to get him. All in all, ’twas best she was angry.
“Do you remember the protocol?”
Her eyebrows rose at that, the nicked one going a wee bit higher. “Protocol? Do you mean the part where you give the orders and I obey?”
“Aye.” His gaze was unflinching. “That’s exactly what I mean.” His reconnaissance protocols were tried and true, proven to glean the greatest amount of information with the least amount of effort and personal danger.
“And, the part where I keep my mouth shut and you do all the talking?”
“Aye,” he said, still unflinching.
“You’ll be lucky to walk out of Stoell’s with your shirt, let alone a fusion block,” she informed him with the slightest of sneers, turning away to look out the tender’s windshield.
“I’ve traded here before,” he assured her, starting to feel a bit peevish himself. Her lack of faith in him was annoying, considering that he was supposed to be her great warrior barbarian, sent to fight off her enemies and unimaginable evils.
She shrugged, an elegant lift of one shoulder that told him he was a fool, a doomed, soon-to-be-fleeced fool whom she couldn’t be bothered to save.
It made his teeth hurt, that little shrug, to have himself so neatly summed up and dismissed. ’Twas no more than he deserved, he was sure, for he’d pretty neatly summed up her whole life as a lost cause and thrown it back in her face.
Still, her shrug hurt. He wanted her, and he couldn’t have her, and it was going to drive him crazy until he could figure out a way to get rid of her—and probably even longer than that.
“Let’s get this over with.” He coded in a lock sequence on the console and flipped open the tender’s hatch. He’d taken another part of the white cloak for his own turban, and when the wind and sand caught at him, he fastened a swath of the worn cloth over the lower half of his face, leaving no more than a slit for his eyes.
The tender was a small subclass hovercraft that had seen too many desert days attached upside down on the rover’s underbelly to be anything but a sandblasted rattletrap. It looked little better than the scant-ton chassis piled up in front of Stoell’s, which Morgan thought gave them an added measure of security. No one wa
s likely to try to steal something that looked like it was on the verge of collapse, and in the case of the tender, appearances weren’t deceiving. Besides a fusion block for the rover, they were going to need a pair of short-shanked meridians to replace the ones on the hovercraft, if they wanted to get back to the rover sometime before next week. They were lucky to have made it to Rabin-19. He figured the lot would set him back about three hundred and fifty Old Dominion marks.
~ ~ ~
Seven hundred marks later, he and Avallyn stalked out of Stoell’s, neither of them speaking. Morgan because he couldn’t—he was gritting his teeth too hard—and Avallyn because she didn’t dare. Or so he thought.
“Your first mistake was talking to Stoell.”
Knowing she was right, Morgan didn’t bother to reply. He just kept walking, wanting to get to the tavern a block up before the sun fried his brain.
“Dray and I always deal with the mechanics in the yard.”
Again he had to admit—silently—that she was right. He and Aja had always dealt with the mechanics in the yard too. But Stoell had waylaid them the minute they’d walked into the bay, and for the life of him Morgan hadn’t been able to shake the old codger or get anywhere near one of the mechanics. They had all been in the back of the bay, huddling around a pile of Class S junk.
“And you hardly made eye contact with the crikey bastard,” Avallyn went on, oblivious to his silence, “let alone give him that damned intimidating look which you are so damned fond of giving me.”
Morgan stopped at the tender and locked the fusion block and the short-shank meridians inside. Seven hundred marks. He’d been taken and he knew it, and so did Avallyn. However much it was bothering her, though, it wasn’t what was bothering him. He turned the latch on the tender’s cargo hold and took off at a fast walk.
“He wouldn’t have dared to overcharge me,” she said, lengthening her strides to keep up.
Once again, Morgan was absolutely sure she was right. The old man wouldn’t have dared to overcharge a White Lady of Death. He’d seen the little bag of bones hanging from Stoell’s belt, the nervous dampness on the old man’s upper lip, the way his glance kept darting to the windows and any door that led to the outside. When the parts had been found and Stoell had named his outrageous price, Morgan had been glad to pay just to get out of the place.
