“How come you think I imagined it?” I demanded. Goblin and I were approaching the Dark Horse. Our presence was not necessary at the compound. Elmo could handle all that. And, when the temple girl proved not to be Tides Elba, he could be the man who got in there and did some serious planning on how to track and catch the real thing.
“Because I got a great view of the southern sky.” He pointed.
From out of the distance, unhurried, a flying carpet headed across town, no more than fifty feet above the rooftops. Two people were visible on the side toward us, one wearing a filthy, floppy black hat.
So. The Limper had gone to Utbank parish to find out what One-Eye was up to. And had decided to bring him and the Third back, not entirely convinced that the Old Man had sent them out there because One-Eye’s greed was complicating matters.
“All right. It must have been my guilty conscience. Let’s reward ourselves for work well done with some of Master Zhorab’s fine ale.”
Goblin said, “It’s earlier than is my custom but in honor of our success I will join you, sir.”
We entered. The interior of the Dark Horse exactly reflected its exterior. There were no Company brothers out there, drinking and playing tonk. There were none inside, either.
In fact, there was no one behind the bar.
Goblin rectified that by observing, “Nobody’s home. Let’s get back there and…”
Markeb Zhorab materialized. Goblin said, “Hello, magic man. We’ve done a hard day’s work. Beer is in order.”
Zhorab drew two mugs while eyeing us with unnerving intensity. “Did you catch who you were after?”
The man was incredibly tense. “Yes. Why does that mean so much to you?”
Zhorab raised a finger in a “wait one” gesture. He dug out the hidden cash box he thought was secret but was not to any sharp-eyed regular. He looked around furtively while fumbling it open. He produced a ragged deck.
“My cards.” Last seen in the hands of Corey and his pals. “Where did you get those?”
“Goblin said to hang on to them till you arrested the person the Taken is here to collect.”
The little wizard and I exchanged puzzled looks.
“Oh. It’s not really the cards.” He spread the deck across the bar, hand shaking. He watched the door like he expected doom to thunder through any second.
Goblin asked, “You haven’t sold us out to somebody, have you?”
“Huh? Oh! No! Never!”
“Then how come this place is so empty? How come you’re so nervous?”
I said, “The place is empty because everybody is back at the compound. Hello.” I plucked a piece of parchment from amongst the scattered cards.
I unfolded it.
I stared.
I started shaking. Memories buried monstrously deep gurgled to the surface. “Goblin. Check this out.”
Goblin started shaking, too.
Zhorab asked, “I did it right?”
I pushed a silver piece across. “You did it perfectly.” I had found the copy now, too. “Just one more step. You had the letter writer make an extra copy. We’ll want that one, too.”
Zhorab wanted to lie but desisted after a look into Goblin’s eyes. “It will take a few minutes.”
I put another coin on the bar, with an ugly black knife for a companion. The knife was not special but looked like it ought to be.
Zhorab gulped, nodded, vanished.
Goblin observed, “He gave that up pretty easy.”
“Probably has more than one copy.”
“You want them all?”
“I don’t mind there being a few extras floating around, maybe getting back to the Tower someday.”
“Your honey would run our smelly friend through the reeducation process again.”
I shuddered. I had had my own brush with the Eye. Everything inside me had been exposed had the Lady cared to look. It had been her way of getting to know me. What the Limper would endure would be a hundred times worse, but not fatal. He was much too useful—when he confined himself to being an extension of the Lady’s will.
Zhorab returned. He gave me another folded parchment. I sheathed my knife. “We have to go. Be ready for a big rush later on.”
We encountered Hagop halfway to the compound. “There you are. The Captain sent me to get you guys. He wants Goblin to connect with the Tower so the Lady will know we got the girl, in perfect shape, before the Limper takes her and heads out.”
“Shit.” Goblin looked back, considering making a run for it.
It had been a while since he had made direct contact. He did not want to endure that again. Not voluntarily.
I said, “It must be damned important if he’s willing to put you through that.”
Hagop said, “He really wants to make sure she knows. He doesn’t trust the Limper.”
“Who would?” And, “The temple girl really is Tides Elba?”
“Yes. She doesn’t deny it. She claims she’s no Rebel or Resurrectionist, either. But she’s got some girl magic.”
Goblin asked, “Croaker, it ever feel like everybody knows more than you do?”
“Every damned day since I joined this chicken-shit outfit. Hagop. Take this. First chance you get, plant it right back where you found it.”
He took the folded parchment. “This isn’t the one I gave you.”
The Captain was behind his table. Tides Elba sat on one of his rude chairs, wrists and ankles in light fetters. She looked to have gone numb, emotionally beyond the point where she could not believe this was happening. A torc had been placed around her neck, the sort used to manage captured sorcerers. If she tried to use sorcery, it would deliver terrible pain.
The Lady must have probed far into the future. The child was sitting on the only magic she controlled right now.
The Captain scowled. “You’ve been drinking.”
“One mug, in celebration of a job well done,” Goblin replied.
“It’s not done yet. Contact the Lady. Let her know. Before the Limper finds out we have her.”
Goblin told me, “Welcome to the mushroom club.”
The Captain said, “I don’t need you here, Croaker.”
“Of course you do. How else am I going to get it into the Annals right?”
He shrugged. “Move it, Goblin. You’re wasting valuable time.”
Goblin could make contact on the spur of the moment because he had made the connection so often before. But familiarity did not ease the pain. He shrieked. He fell down, gripped by a seizure. Startled, concerned, the Captain came out from behind his table, dropped to a knee beside Goblin, back to the girl. “Will he be all right?”
“Make sure he doesn’t swallow his tongue.” I took the opportunity to cop a feel of a firm, fresh breast and to slip a square of parchment in with the sweet young jubblies. The girl met my eye but said nothing. “My guess is, he’s having trouble getting through.”
The Lady heard Goblin but chose another means of response. Just as the Limper burst in through an exploding door.
A circle of embers two feet across appeared above Goblin, almost tangled in the Captain’s hair. The Lady’s beautiful face came into focus inside. Her gaze met mine. She smiled. My legs turned to gelatin.
Goblin’s seizure ended. As did the Limper’s charge.
A voice like a whisper from everywhere asked, “Is this her?”
The Captain said, “So we believe, ma’am. She fits all the particulars.”
The Lady winked at me. We were old campaign buddies. We had hunted down and killed her sister during the fighting at Charm.
The whisper from everywhere said, “She’s striking, isn’t she?”
I nodded. Goblin and the Captain nodded. The Limper, oozing closer behind his miasmic stench, dipped his masked face in agreement. Tides Elba was indeed striking, and growing more so by the minute—employing an unconscious sorcery to which her torc did not respond.
“Every bit as much as my sister was. This one’s remote grandmother, to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance.”
Different sister, I presumed. Tides Elba bore only a passing resemblance to the one I helped kill. I started to ask a question. Needlessly. Our employer was in an expansive mood.
“Her male ancestor was my husband. He futtered anything that moved, including all my sisters and all the female Taken. Enough. She was about to mate with another of his descendants. Their child would become a vessel into which the old bastard could project his soul.”
The Limper might have considered all that in whatever he had planned. The rest of us gaped. Excepting the girl. She did not understand a word. The language the Lady spoke was unknown to her.
Her whole being was focused on what hung in the air, there, though.
She voided herself. She knew where she was bound.
Something passed between the Lady and the Limper. The stinky little sorcerer bowed deeply. He moved in on the girl, took hold of her arm, forced her to her feet. He pushed her toward the door he had wrecked.
The rest of us watched, every man wishing he had the power to stop them, every man knowing that, if the Lady had spoken truly, Tides Elba was a threat to the entire world. She could become the port through which the hideous shadow known as the Dominator could make his return. No doubt she was sought by and beloved of every Resurrectionist cult hoping to free the old evil from his grave. No doubt she was a prophesied messiah of darkness.
I glanced back. The Lady was gone. The end, here, was almost an anticlimax. But that was because we were out there on the margins, able to see only the local surface of the story. For the Company, the central fact would be we had survived.
We all went out and watched the Limper get ready to go.
He seemed nervous and unhappy. He shoved the girl into a sack. He sewed that shut, then secured it to his carpet with cording. Tides Elba would not evade her fate by rolling off the carpet while it was in flight. His liftoff into the late-afternoon light seemed erratic. He wobbled as he headed west.
I found Hagop in the shadows near where the Limper’s carpet had lain. He gave me a big grin and a thumbs-up. “He spotted it right away. Took it out, looked at it, and jumped like somebody just hit him with a shovel.”
“He got the message, then.”
Goblin stared westward, eyes still haunted, but said only, “What a waste of delicious girl flesh.” And then, “Let’s round up Elmo and One-Eye and go tip a few at the Dark Horse. Elmo has got the cards, don’t he?”
GENE WOLFE worked as an engineer, before becoming editor of trade journal Plant Engineering. He came to prominence as a writer in the late 1960s with a sequence of short stories in Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies. His early major novels were The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Peace, but he established his reputation with a sequence of three long, multivolume novels—The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, and The Book of the Short Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, Endangered Species, Strange Travelers, and, most recently, The Best of Gene Wolfe. He is the recipient of the Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, John W. Campbell Memorial, British Fantasy, British SF, and World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Awards. Wolfe’s most recent book is the novel An Evil Guest. Upcoming is his new novel The Sorcerer’s House.