Choose Your Enemies Carefully

by Robert N. Charrette

  So what had he been doing fooling around with Hart?

  He didn’t have an answer. His feelings roiled under the heat of suspicion planted by the Man of Light. Was it real magic or just the old biochemical magic of hormones and psychological need?

  He realized that he didn’t know Hart well enough to answer for her. Would she tell him honestly if he talked to her? Could she? That night on the rooftop he had been afraid to tell her everything the Man of Light had said, confining himself to the less personal issues. Still, he remembered how she had shivered when he spoke of the magical compulsion to forget the encounter at Glover’s mansion. What had her reaction meant? He didn't know. In truth, he didn’t know her at all. He remembered the sadness her eyes had held as she pulled the trigger. Why had she done it? There was so much he didn’t know about her. For all he knew, Hart might actually be the Lady Brane Deigh.

  Did that explain everything? Anything? He thought about it for a while, too, and finally dismissed it as paranoid fantasy.

  The time for ponderings ended as he was ushered into the audience chamber. At the far end of a gauntlet of courtiers was a tiered dais upon which sat three thrones. The right one was occupied—the Lady Brane Deigh, he presumed. To the enthroned queen’s side stood a tall, dark-skinned elf. Hart stood among the courtiers nearest the dais.

  Sam was shoved from behind by the elf accompanying him. After an initial misstep, he strode forward, determined not to show the turmoil he still felt. He ignored the scattered titters from the crowd as he stopped before the triple thrones. He stared defiantly at the queen.

  "Why am I here?"

  "You are my guest," she replied sweetly.

  "Guests aren’t kept in cells."

  "Let us say, then, that you may be my guest. As such, you shall be given the freedom of the court, but my guests are well-behaved and display courteous manners. Though lately you have associated with less attractive elements of society, you are a child of corporate culture; thus I know you to have been educated in reasonably civilized behavior. Offend none of my court, and you shall have a long life among us. Prove yourself entertaining or of value, and it shall be a pleasant life."

  Not a guest at all, but a prisoner. Or worse, a pet. "I want no part of your court."

  "It is not your choice. Are you so ungrateful as to throw away what the Lady Hart has won for you?"

  "Oh, I’m grateful," he said icily, staring at his socalled benefactress. Hart would not meet his eyes. "And I’m sure there are many innocent souls in London who would gladly cry her praises as well. If they could."

  "You need not concern yourself over matters in London."

  "Then the Circle is destroyed?"

  "Broken, certainly. And much of that work was yours. You are resourceful, for a mortal. I like that." Sam didn’t believe that the Circle was defeated. They had still been active, and he had heard no evidence to the contrary. So why was the Lady complimenting him? Were elves by nature deceitful? He knew the job wasn’t done—the renegade druids were still at large.

  "You haven’t said that they're destroyed; therefore they will still be at their evil work. They must be stopped."

  "They will be," the Lady assured him.

  "Then you are working to stop the Hidden Circle?"

  "They will be exposed and their evil seen by all the world. Their crimes are repulsive to all sentients. Public revelation of their evil will shatter their warped dreams of power."

  Sam didn’t want to hear vague promises and flowery rhetoric.

  "When?" he demanded.

  "In time."

  Lord Almighty, this woman is playing games with people’s lives. She was far more beautiful in body, but no better in soul than Haesslich.

  "No! They must be stopped at once. If you are opposed to them, you must act now. People are dying." The lady’s warm manner frosted over. "Do not presume to tell me what to do. You cannot know of the large concerns at stake here, with your mortally limited view of time. Perhaps you should talk some more with Padre Rinaldi. In many ways he is as intense as yourself, but his organization has learned to take the long view. You could learn patience from him, he has learned his place."

  "His place? His place is out in the world, not suffocated here as one of your guests. Why is he being held prisoner?"

  "He is so very quick of tongue," she said, folding her hands in front of her left breast. Abruptly, a hint of her former warmth returned. "Could it be that he has not told you his tale?"

  Suspicious, Sam replied, "He has not."

  "Then you see that even he does not consider it any business of yours."

  "I do not believe he has broken any laws. Whatever business it is, you have no right to hold him. Keep me here, if you must," Sam said. If you can, he added to himself. "But set him free."

  "You may make no demands here. Never forget that you are an illegal alien in this land. You live on my sufferance." The lady returned her hands to the arms of her throne. "Still, Padre Rinaldi's wit is quick and keen, and his arguments, though insufficiently informed, did amuse me. However, it is not proper for me to arbitrarily rescind his confinement, and I find that I miss him. It is a dilemma."

  The dark-skinned elf spoke into her ear. His words were pitched to carry to the audience as well. "The Lady Hart is a member of your court. Perhaps she would sponsor the priest as she has the shaman."

  The Lady turned her attention to Hart. "Are you interested, Lady Hart? A toy for your toy?"

  Hart didn't look at her mistress immediately. For a moment she stared straight ahead, then her face turned to Sam. Her left eyebrow rose minutely, a silent question. He thought at first to keep his expression passive, to force her to decide without any input from him. Then, he thought about how much harder it would be to plan an escape without Rinaldi; the priest was his only ally here. Sam had no idea of Hart’s motivation in bringing him here, but she had certainly not asked his permission to kidnap him. Would asking her to take the priest’s part work for or against him? The moment was stretching out uncomfortably. He nodded to Hart.

  "I shall stand for the priest," Hart said.

  Lady Deigh laughed lightly, then smiled expansively. Sam got the sudden feeling that, in some obscure way, he had served Lady Deigh’s ends, whatever they were. If this little tableau had cost Hart something, that was only justice. But he had been set up, too, and he didn’t like it. In the past, whenever he had been manipulated to serve other people’s ends, bad things had happened. The Lady was playing some sort of game here, and she seemed pleased by Hart’s acceptance of responsibility for Rinaldi. Sam didn’t know enough of what was going on and that worried him.

  The Lady rose from her seat, precipitating a rustle in her crowd of attendants as they moved to anticipate her reaction.

  "Let there be music," she said. "I would dance." A soft strain of harp music began, filling the room and seeming to come from everywhere at once. The notes were clear, yet held faint echoes of other songs. The trill of a flute joined in, adding its lively tones to the ethereal sweetness of the melody. A drum slipped in and increased the tempo as the Lady stepped up to Sam and held out her hand.

  "Dance with me, Samuel Verner."

  Not knowing what else to do, Sam took her delicate fingers in his own. He felt coarse and awkward as she turned him toward the open floor, but a sudden flood of insight brought him the steps of the dance. He tasted the magic of the subconscious instruction and knew that the Lady’s strong will powered it. She would not be embarrassed by an untutored partner. They were soon whirling across the floor, feet flashing in the rhythms of the jig. Pairs of elves followed behind them; each courtier strove to outdo his or her partner, and each couple attempted to outshine rival couples with the intricacy of their footwork. None danced with such flair or elegance as the Lady herself.

  Hart did not join the dance. Each time Sam’s gaze swept across her position, he found her cold bronze eyes following him and the Lady across the floor. The music seemed to go on for hours, and Sam
danced, but he didn’t feel his exhaustion until the music finally ended on a wild, shrill clash. Panting, Sam looked around. He didn’t see Hart among the milling courtiers.

  34

  Days passed. Or at least Sam thought they did. Time seemed to be a mutable commodity in the illusion-ridden palace of the Shidhe. After that first interview with Lady Deigh, Sam had seen nothing of the ruler of the palace. Hart he had seen, but not talked to; every time he approached her, she slipped away.

  Father Rinaldi was his near constant companion. The two wandered the halls, groves, and shadowed passages of the Seelie Court, talking. As soon as the priest was released from the cell. Sam had demanded the reason for Rinaldi’s imprisonment. The priest had revealed that he was investigating rumors of renegade druids. When his attempts to gather knowledge from the Irish elves had uncovered the existence of the Hidden Circle, his welcome had come to an end. Lady Deigh had called for an interview and Rinaldi had revealed too great an interest in the subject. Apparently, the Lady had her own plans, though the priest had no idea of their content. She had ordered him imprisoned. The priest had not spoken of his involvement in the affairs of the Hidden Circle earlier for fear that Sam would distrust him as an agent of the cabal.

  They concluded that the elves had thrown them together in the hopes that they would reveal things about the Circle. Sam didn’t know what he knew that the elves didn’t. He suspected that they knew more by far and were just being cautious. Once Sam and Rinaldi discovered they were opposing the same adversaries, they postponed their discussions until Sam, with the help of Rinaldi’s theoretical knowledge, managed to adapt one of Herzog’s spells to cloak them in silence. Protected from prying ears, they pooled their knowledge and reached the conclusion that they needed to escape confinement as soon as possible. The renegade druids had to be stopped.

  They wandered the halls of the palace, alert for anything that might offer an opportunity of escape. They knew they were followed, usually by a single elf; the watchers made little secret of their surveillance. Follow they did, but the watchers did not interfere unless Sam and Rinaldi strayed towards one of the zones forbidden to them. At such times, the lone watcher was rapidly reinforced by other elves with munchkin minions who blocked the prisoners’ path and ordered them to turn back. They were never told why they were not allowed to proceed further. Sam maintained that they had gotten too near the outer precincts, but Rinaldi seemed more inclined to think that they had only approached some reserved sector.

  Three times the great tables in the main hall were replenished with the elaborate meals Sam had dubbed "dinner" before he and Rinaldi stumbled upon a service passageway that led to a space under the open sky. The Shidhe’s cloak of illusion made the open space appear to be a natural clearing in a forest. The confusing fog of active magic was weaker in that place, and Sam’s astral senses let him pierce the masking spell to see open space as it was: a modern helipad designed to facilitate the loading and unloading of cargo craft. Four more "dinners" passed before Sam, using some of Dodger’s tricks and paying a terrible price in headaches, managed to tease a transport schedule from the palace computer system while the watcher thought he was reviewing library files.

  From that list, they learned of a regular cargo shuttle run. Sam was relieved to see that the aircraft assigned to the run was an Ares Wyvern, a small single-rotored cousin of the massive twin-rotored Dragon that seemed to be the mainstay of the Irish helicopter transport fleet. He wasn’t sure he would be able to handle the big ship; he was nervous enough about trying a small helicopter even with the help of the sophisticated autopilot with which Ares equipped their aircraft.

  Sam and Rinaldi started taking irregular walks, making sure that their paths frequently took them near junctions close to the service passage. They honed their plan to hijack the Wyvern and use it to cross the Irish Sea to England. Periodically, they checked the palace computer system’s bulletin board, watching for the dummy message that was the signal from the knowbot Sam had left monitoring the cargo schedule.

  Sooner than they dared hope, the Wyvern arrived. They redirected their path, hoping that they still appeared to be wandering aimlessly while they were in fact taking as direct a route as possible to the landing pad. They wanted to time their arrival to coincide with its final clearances for takeoff, and they didn’t have much time.

  Two archways from the pad, they ducked into the shadows on the side nearer their goal and waited for the elf who had been following them. Their watcher had grown complacent; he stepped through the archway totally unsuspecting. Sam’s punch took him cleanly in the belly. The elf folded, gasping for air. Grabbing handfulls of collar and of pants, Sam directed the elf into the wall. Sam winced at the crunch the elf made but was relieved to see his knees buckle. The elf sprawled on the floor, unmoving.

  "Let’s go," Rinaldi urged.

  Sam tore his eyes from the fallen elf and followed the priest down the corridor. They cut through another arch into a more crowded thoroughfare. It was torture to move at the more sedate pace, but Sam knew they had to do it. He felt that the elves and other beings they passed were aware of what he had done, what he and the priest were trying to do. But despite his fears, no one tried to stop them.

  At last they reached the side passage that would take them to the landing space they had discovered. It was a service corridor lined with crates and parcels and bereft of the cloaking illusions so prevalent in the Shidhe palace. This stretch of passage might have been in any airport in any metroplex. Once through the illusion that hid the corridor’s mundanity and assured that the way was clear, they ran.

  They couldn’t have timed their arrival at the arch to the landing pad any better. Through the cockpit windows of the cargo helicopter, they could see the pilot going through his preflight checks. Fortunately for the escaping prisoners, the pilot had set his craft down so that the boarding ladder was turned toward them. The bulk of the Wyvern screened the ladder from the controllers’ blockhouse.

  Focusing his concentration, Sam cast the spell to project the words he whispered into the pilot’s headset. He held his breath, praying for success. He swallowed hard as the pilot tapped his headset in apparent frustration over mechanical difficulties. Sam saw the pilot’s lips move as the elf asked for a clarification. Refocusing his auditory illusion, Sam whispered again the words he wanted the pilot to hear. To his relief, the elf listened intently, then took off his headset.

  The pilot hauled himself out of his flying couch and disappeared into the body of the helicopter. He appeared again in the hatchway, kit bag in one hand. The elf slung the bag over one shoulder before clambering down the ladder. He walked around the nose of the aircraft and headed for the illusory clump of trees and brush that was really the pad’s control blockhouse.

  Sam allowed himself a sigh of relief before forming the visual illusion that would cloak himself and Rinaldi, making them appear to onlookers as elven pilots. Having seen the flight suit and insignia of the departed pilot made it easier to get the details right. He hoped no ground crew showed up to intercept them. The illusion was purely visual, since overriding one sense was all he could handle. Anyone who touched them would feel the difference immediately. Even sound could give them away; the imaginary clipboards hanging at their sides would not be making the normal clatter and ground crewmen would not fail to notice that discrepancy.

  They stepped onto the tarmac together and tried to look casual. Sam hoped any onlooker would think they were chatting when, in fact, they were watching over each other’s shoulder for any sign that they had been unmasked. Sam was sweating by the time they passed the nose of the aircraft and out of sight of the unseen elves in the control booth.

  Rinaldi was standing at the foot of the ladder and Sam was halfway up when a cold voice ordered them to freeze. Sam looked down to see the elven pilot emerging from beneath the Wyvern. The elf held an automatic pistol trained on them. For all the awkwardness of clambering out from under the aircraft, the muzzle remain
ed steady, leaving no doubt in Sam’s mind that the elf was more than capable of using his weapon. The elf's smile was that of a cat who had just caught a mouse.

  "Now just ease yourself down," he said to Sam. "Your work’s not too bad for a norm. The aural bit had good resolution, even if you had me wondering why O’Neill had gotten so formal all of a sudden. You really need work on your visuals, though. It was a good likeness, but even if it hadn’t been me who saw you, you would have been hosed. Should have varied the spell for the old guy; I’m not twins."

  Rinaldi had to move aside to clear space for Sam. The elf didn’t react to priest’s motion; his attention was mostly focused on Sam. Thus, the pilot was wide open when Rinaldi snapped his foot up into a kick.

  The priest’s foot connected with the pilot’s elbow, wrenching the elf’s arm straight. The gun fell from the pilot’s suddenly numb hand. Before the weapon hit the ground, Rinaldi stepped toward the elf and grabbed his arm. Jerking the pilot forward, Rinaldi drove his knee upward. Air whooshed out of the elf and he started to collapse, and Rinaldi helped him down by slamming his left elbow into the base of the elf's neck. The pilot's head snapped back and he hit the concrete chin first. Sam heard teeth and bone snap.

  Rinaldi snatched up the gun and tossed it to a surprised Sam.

  "Don’t stand there," Rinaldi said. "Get in the helo."

  "But you ..."

  "Did what had to be done."

  Rinaldi bent down and slipped his hand into the elf’s armpits and started to drag him toward the ladder.

  35

  Hart knew she was lucky to be the first one to find Donahue. She bent over to check him out. He had been assigned to follow Sam and the priest and had run afoul of them. The signs were obvious. No one in the court would have run him into the wall, or if they had, they wouldn’t have left him in one piece. Sam was trying to escape.