by Dave Duncan
"Yes. We didn't have very many in Nagland, but the Man decreed that they must be stamped out."
D'ward raised his head and frowned at the troops in the water. “I think we'll have company in a moment. The Church of the Undivided? Tell me about that."
"It's a new faith,” Golbfish said hastily, racking his brains for the little he knew about it. “Where it started, or when, I don't know. It's fairly widespread in Randorland. It may be cropping up in other vales too—I have no idea. It preaches a new god, a single god. That sounds like Visek, but it isn't. All gods are the Five and the Five are the Parent, you know? But this god is none of them. His followers claim that he is the only true god, and all the others are..."
"Yes?"
"Demons,” Golbfish said reluctantly. It was a heresy almost too foul to repeat. Why in the world was D'ward interested in that obscure sect of deluded fanatics?
"Has he a name, do you know, this new god?"
"Apparently not.” Vague memories of drunken dinner conversation stirred. “If he has, it is too holy to be spoken. And his followers do not pray to him directly."
D'ward grunted. “This is very interesting! What are his teachings, his commands to the faithful?"
"I really don't know, sir! I wish I could be of more help! They wear a gold earring in the left ear."
D'ward turned his head and stared. “Even the men? And only one ear?"
"Apparently."
"Peculiar! That must make them very conspicuous. It will be dangerous, if they are being persecuted. Or is that the whole idea?” he added thoughtfully.
"Perhaps not all of them do,” Golbfish suggested. He had always taken the gods for granted. Philosophy was interesting, but religion he had left to the priests.
"Perhaps not,” D'ward agreed. He sat up as a mob of wet warriors emerged from the lake, eager to greet their former friend, now elevated to giddily high rank. “One last question. Quickly! If I wanted to find this church, where should I look?"
"Randorvale, I suppose,” Golbfish said. “But we're going the wrong way."
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23
"WHITE TABLECLOTHS!” EDWARD SAID IN A TONE OF WONDER. “SILver cutlery! Civilization!"
Outside the dining car window, the Thames valley rushed by in a blur of hedgerows and hamlets, evening sun on woodlands and church spires. Even in the mere ten years of Alice's experience, rural England had changed, although much less than the cities, where the inrush of motor vehicles and power lines was more visible. Out here the plodding horses still hauled mountainous hay wagons, but lorries and omnibuses were proliferating on the country lanes. Tradition was a personal thing, she supposed. The landscapes Constable had painted had long since been blighted by railway lines and then telegraph wires.
The carriage swayed in hurried rhythm. Clickety-click, said the wheels, clickety-click, clickety-click...
"I think I'll try the Scotch broth,” she said. “How long since you saw tablecloths?"
"Ages. We had them at Olympus, but I didn't stay there very long."
He had been attempting to turn the conversation away from his adventures, inquiring about her life in wartime London. She kept steering him back to Nextdoor. Even then, he would obviously rather talk about Olympus than relate his experiences as a warlord. She was curious to know why. Either he had something to be very proud of and was being typically modest about it, or he had done something shameful. Which?
Was he concerned that she would think he had gone native? Julian and Ginger had both been shocked by the little they had heard, although neither had said so. In their view, the code of the English sahib did not include self-mutilation and spear-throwing. Having spent much of her childhood playing in the dust of an Embu compound, Alice had few such prejudices. As far as she could see, Edward had had no choice. Marooned on another world, he could hardly have appealed to the British Consul.
"The lamb may be safest,” she said. “Railway food is not what it was before the war. Tarion sounds like an interesting character."
Edward snorted. “He has charm, when he bothers to use it. He's a superb athlete and tough as an anvil. That about sums up his good points, I'd say."
"How about his bad points?"
"Please! That would take all night. I swear the man has not one trace of morals or ethics or scruples. Nothing is beneath him, absolutely nothing!"
"He tried to bribe you, I suppose?"
Edward looked up from the menu again and rolled his eyes. “Dozens of times. You can't imagine some of the offers he made me!"
Alice thought she could, but she knew he would not mention them in the presence of a lady.
She wondered just what it would take to bribe her idealistic cousin into doing something he felt was wrong. The Imperial Crown Jewels, perhaps, as a start? Edward had no family responsibilities; he was young enough to have few needs beyond his daily bread. He had been taught to believe that honesty and willingness to work would suffice to carry him through life. Vast estates would just seem a burden to him, and his education had armored him against depravity. He probably still took a cold bath every morning. He would be true to King and Country, decency and fair play—and seek nothing else. His education had been designed to turn out incorruptible administrators, the men who ran the Empire. Even Edward Exeter might slip in a year or two, when idealism faded in the light of experience, but at the moment he was as close to incorruptible as any mortal could be. The Tarion man must have been very puzzled by the response to his offers.
Where Tarion had failed, how could Alice Prescott succeed?
Whatever had happened to her patriotism all of a sudden? She recalled the recruiting posters of the early months of the war, before conscription: THE WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY “Go!” She had been horrified when D'Arcy enlisted, and yet proud of him. Like everyone else, she knew the war must be fought and must be won—she just did not think that it was Edward's war. He had been called to other duties. The very laws of nature seemed to bend around him. But if she could not justify this feeling even to herself, how could she ever convince him? What would it take to change his mind?
"You declined, of course?"
"Alice, darling! What do you think I—Don't answer that! Of course I did. Even if he'd come up with anything really tempting, Tarion's promises are mere wind and always will be."
"Did you tell him so?"
"Of course. He would just laugh and agree. In a day or two he would try me again."
Edward smirked. He knew what she was thinking. He knew he was good. Well, she could deflate him. She could still make him blush.
"You're young and winsome,” she mused. “I assume he also made indecent advances?"
He blushed an unbelievable scarlet. “How did you guess?"
"From things you didn't say. Golbfish was no pillar of virtue either, I gather."
"Not by our standards,” Edward said primly. “But he was merely debauched, whereas Tarion was depraved. There was a real man inside Golb-fish's blubber. He'd just never had reason to call that man out before."
"Not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder—"
"Oh, cut it out!” Edward said testily.
"So you turned a frog into a prince? And then—"
The waiter appeared beside them as if condensing out of the air. They ordered dinner. Up ahead, the engine came into view, snaking around a curve, smoke pouring from its funnel. Some poor devil of a fireman was shoveling his heart out there. The dining car rocked unevenly as it reached the bend.
They sat for a while in silence, Alice reviewing a mental list of things she should be asking. Talking was difficult in the crowded train; when they arrived at Greyfriars they would have Julian for company again, possibly Ginger, and also the formidable Mrs. Bodgley. Mrs. Bodgley would probably demand Edward's story from the beginning. She would certainly want an account of what had happened to her son. Alice mu
st put this brief dining-car privacy to good use.
The waiter slid soup plates in front of them and departed.
"This is not bad at all!” Edward announced.
"But look at this awful wartime bread!"
Everything went black.
"Don't eat it!” he said over the racket. “It makes you go blind.” The acrid reek of coal began to foul the air. Then the train burst out of the tunnel, gradually shedding its cocoon of smoke.
"You are still the idiot I used to know,” Alice said affectionately. “Tell me. You want to get in touch with the Service? You said you had three ways in mind."
Edward nodded glumly. “They're all very flimsy leads, though. One of them is that letter I asked Ginger to post for me. Do you remember Mr. Oldcastle?"
"I remember you talking about him."
"He wrote to me just after—after the news.” His bony face seemed to grow even thinner for a moment, remembering the bad times, when Cameron and Rona Exeter had died in the Nyagatha massacre. “Claimed to be with the Colonial Office. He wasn't, of course. He was with Head Office."
Alice had known only that Oldcastle had been an absentee father to Edward. In retrospect, he had been too good to be true. His Majesty's Government would never take so much interest in the orphaned son of a very minor official.
"When you disappeared, I wrote to Mr. Oldcastle."
Edward grinned, popping a crust in his mouth. “What address?"
"I tried Whitehall, and I tried the one Ginger had, at the school."
"Whitehall had never heard of him and the GPO had never heard of Druids Close?"
"Right on."
"There is no Druids Close. There was no Mr. Oldcastle. He was a committee, or so Creighton told me, although he always wrote back in the same hand. Head Office were keeping an eye on me, you see, as a favor for the Service. The Blighters were after me then, too."
Clickety-click, clickety-click, clickety-click...
"So if Oldcastle doesn't exist, how do you get in touch with him now?"
"I do what I always did—I write him a letter! I already have, and Ginger will have posted it by now."
"I thought Julian had already tried this for you?"
Obviously she had been expected to ask that.
"Ah! But this one has my handwriting on the envelope, which may be important, and it's going in the right box.” Edward smirked like a schoolboy demonstrating his first card trick. “I know a little more about magic now, you see. It would take a great deal of mana to bewitch the entire postal service, but not much to do one pillar-box."
"That is certainly logical."
"And as soon as I worked that out, I remembered several times when Mr. Oldcastle warned me that he would be away—at about the same times I was going to be away from Fallow! So any postcards or letters I sent him, from anywhere else, might reasonably not get answered! Simple, isn't it?"
"And you think the magic is still on that box?"
"Well...” He frowned. “I have no idea. It may not be. I warned you all these ideas were dishwaterish."
"Let's hear the next one."
"The next one is even dicier. The, er, man who rescued me from the hospital was a numen. He used to go by the name of Robin Goodfellow, a fairish time ago."
Blue eyes studied Alice solemnly, waiting for her disbelief. The waiter removed the soup plates and served the roast lamb.
"Puck?"
"The same. One of them. A local representative of the old firm, was how Creighton put it. Forgotten now, and ignored, but still residing on his node, amid the bracken and brambles and the standing stones—husbanding scraps of the mana he received back in Saxon times or the Middle Ages, when people still believed in the People of the Hills."
Gods on a storybook world were one thing. In modern England they took more believing. “What was he like?"
"Nice enough old boy. At least, he was nice to me. Mad as a rabid bat, really, I think. He can't have had anyone to speak to in centuries."
"He's with this Head Office bunch?"
"He's a neutral, but he must know how to find them."
"And where do you find him?"
Edward shrugged, struggling to cut an extra tough slab of mutton. “Not sure exactly. I was half out of my skull with pain that morning, but not far from Greyfriars, on a little hill. I'll know it when I see it."
This sounded even weaker than the first idea. It would take time and transportation to inspect all the hilltops around Greyfriars. The police must be after Edward Exeter now. The ominous Blighters might be. Looking at him, it was hard to believe that he was twenty-one and a man of two worlds. She felt a motherly obligation to dispatch her hopelessly idealistic young cousin off to Nextdoor as fast as possible, whether he wanted to go or not. Details to be arranged.
"Will Puck help you again?"
"I can only ask. He's a stranger here, of course. Originally from Nextdoor. From Ruatvil, in Sussland. I could sacrifice a bullock, perhaps."
He was being remarkably generous with her money.
"A bullock? You'll get thrown in jail if you waste food like that, these days. There's a war on, my lad!"
"Oh. Well, I shall think of something."
"Tell me the third lead.” Alice forked up some well-named string beans.
"I think I still remember the key I used with Creighton, the ritual. Anyone who goes to the same portal and does that dance will arrive at the Sacrarium—that's the ruined temple in Sussvale.” He gave up on the mutton and poked angrily at a soggy potato. “But that's a fair way from Olympus, and who could I ask to risk it? Arriving naked, not knowing the language?"
"You'd have to go yourself!” Now they were making progress!
He must have sensed her approval, because he scowled. “No. It would take too long, and I'd have to find my way back here all over again."
"It would only be a flying visit, surely? There and back.” Another three years and the war would be long over.
"I don't trust the Service! They wouldn't let me come Home before, and they might try to hold me again. You think Smedley really wants to cross over?” he added hopefully.
"I don't know. I don't know if he knows. He's pretty badly shaken, Edward. Don't think any the worse of him for that! He's got enough medals to start a pawn shop and lots of fellows have been—"
"Shell-shocked. Yes, I know. I saw some of them, remember.” Again he hacked angrily at the meat. “Smedley's a brick, I don't doubt it. But I can't send him over alone, not knowing the language. I damned nearly died myself, and I would have done if I hadn't had Eleal to help me."
"Suppose none of these plans work?"
"Then I can't warn the Service about the traitor, that's all."
"So you just stay here and enlist?"
"Enlist or hang. Or both."
"Where is this portal you mentioned?"
"Stonehenge.” Edward peered out the window. “What town is this we're coming to? Swindon already?"
Alice laid down her knife and fork. “Edward, Stonehenge is on Salisbury Plain."
"Of course I know.... Why? Why does that matter?"
"The Army has taken over all of Salisbury Plain now. There's an aerodrome at Stonehenge itself. There's even talk of knocking down the stones because they're a danger to planes landing and taking off, it's so close."
He stared at her in frank dismay.
Clickety-click, clickety-click, clickety-click...
"You were counting on that one, weren't you?” she said. “Stonehenge was your trump card?"
"Final stand, more like."
"You won't get near it,” she said.
"After the war?"
"Perhaps after the war, whenever that is."
He pushed the remains of the meal to one side of his plate and laid down his knife and fork. “Damn!"
Damn indeed!
Then he grinned. “So I can't go back! Clear conscience. Good!"
"Do you wish to try the sweet, madam?” the waiter inquired. “Dundee pu
dding and custard?"
"Cheese and biscuits, please,” Alice said, suppressing a shudder, “and coffee."
"The same for me,” Edward said, not even looking up.
Waiter and plates disappeared.
Edward poked at some crumbs. “Let's just hope the letter works."
"Yes."
"And let's hope that the Blighters don't get it instead."
"What! Is that possible?"
He smiled bleakly. “Definitely possible. Head Office suffered a major defeat. I don't know what their English equivalent of Olympus is, but it may have fallen to the enemy since I was a kid. If that's the case, then I just wrote to the enemy, saying where I am."
"Oh."
"I should have warned you."
Disbelief swirled around her like a sudden squall. Two days ago Ginger Jones had walked into her life and now she was a character in a John Buchan thriller. The Black Stone is after you! Flee, for all is lost....
"In fact,” Edward said sternly, “I should never have let you come. You had better catch the first train back to town."
"Not Pygmalion likely!” Alice said. “Tell me more about your experiences as Chief of the Headhunters."
He frowned.
"Sorry,” she said. “That was a cheap shot. So what happened when the old queen died? Who got the crown? The reformed Golbfish or the unrepentant Tarion?"
Edward sighed and turned to look out the window.
"The news arrived early one morning, just after we reached Lemodvale, before we got trapped. Old Kammaeman called me in to ask my opinion—which brother should he send back? I couldn't help feeling flattered, although I knew it was nothing to do with me personally, just my charisma at work. I told him any man who trusted Tarion ought to be chained in a padded cell."
She could guess what was coming from his disgusted expression.
"But by then it was too late?"
Edward looked up with rueful surprise, spoon poised. “Right on! Tarion had taken his Nagian cavalry and gone. Deserted in the middle of a war!"
She sipped coffee. “You expected better of him?"
He tried to laugh and swallow at the same time, and shook his head. “No! It was perfectly in character. He got the news even before Kammaeman did, so he must have bribed somebody somewhere. Personally, I was glad to see the back of him, but it left us seriously short of cavalry. Moas are one-man beasts. They fix on one owner when they're only chicks—calves I mean, I suppose. They're closer to mammals than birds. English doesn't have the right words. Anyway, it takes fortn—months, that is, to imprint one to a new rider. The Joalians hadn't been able to bring very many over Thordpass—it's too high—so they'd been depending on Tarion's troop. He upped and left, and that put us in the soup."
