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8


Hame, Hame, Hame


Kory huddled for a long time in the shelter of his folded arms, waiting for the pain to ebb, waiting for his body to recover from the shock of prolonged contact with the Death Metal. Physical shock was not the only thing he had to recover from; his mental processes had undergone similar damage. He did not understand these humans, the ones who had imprisoned him. Oh, abstractly he had known that there were humans who were sick, mentally unbalanced—but he had never encountered any himself. Until now. Until he had touched the thoughts of the man called Warden Blair.

In some ways, he was as shaken by his encounter with Warden Blair’s mind as he was by what had been done to him. Never before had he encountered a person who so desired the pain and degradation of others; who thrived on it as anyone else would thrive on love and praise.

Even Perenor was not so twistedhe was ruthless, and he thought of humans as no better than animals, but he would never have done to them what this man has done. He used people, but he did not go out of his way to hurt any save those he felt had hurt him. Even me, he only set to sleep in the Grove. Even Terenil, he sought only to kill. This man is like the Unseleighe, and I do not understand them either.

Blair devoted himself to inflicting pain, humiliation, specialized in reducing his fellow humans to groveling, weeping nonentities. And then, he would take every opportunity to reinforce what he had done to them, keeping them ground beneath his foot.

He hated everyone; he hated and despised those beneath him, he hated and feared those above him, and he hated and wanted to dispose of his equals. If there was anything that Warden Blair cared for besides himself, Kory had not seen it.

What he was doing to those in his power was only a pale shadow of what he wanted to do to them. What he had already done—sometimes with the aid of his former captives—was horrifying. And not only did he feel no remorse, he regretted that he dared not take his activities as far as he would like.

What he had done to Beth—that was typical of him. It was by no means representative of the depths to which he had already gone. Warden Blair had killed, both directly and indirectly, although he himself had never dirtied his hands with anything so direct as a blade or one of the humans’ guns.

That he left to men he had hired for the purpose. This was something else Kory could not understand: to hire someone for the purpose of assassination. But then, he had never understood humans or Unseleighe who made that their practice.

Once or twice, Warden Blair had found it necessary to deal death personally—but when he did, it was assassination of another sort, through the intermediary of poison. As a scientist, he had access to many poisons, several that mimicked perfectly ordinary illnesses.

And his only regret was that he had not been there to witness and enjoy the death, when it came. He routinely dispatched in this way those he had captured who proved to be too much trouble. He was already considering such an end for Beth, should she continue to resist him.

Beth—Despite his own weakness and pain, he crawled to her on his hands and knees, to gather her up in his arms and hold her. Now that he knew what Blair was like, and what the human had done to Beth, he knew that there was only one way to reach her. She would not trust anything coming from outside her—but she might trust a mind-to-mind link. She had erected shields to hold others out, but she would not have held them against him.

He held her close, shut out the pain of his body, the cold of the cell, and focused himself inward. Inward to seek outward. Inward for control, so that he might have the stability to forget himself and look into Beth’s mind and heart.

He sent out a questing tendril of thought; encountered her shields, and called softly to her. :BethBethy, my lady, my friend, my love—:

The shields softened a little. He touched the surface of her thoughts, and did not recoil from what he found there—a chaos of fear—and old memories, more potent for being early ones. Can’t breathechokingstranglingthe air going, the walls falling in

Her shields softened further and he passed them by. He countered her illusions with nothing more than his presence, knowing now what fear it was that held her prisoner. :Your lungs are filled, the air is fresh and pure. I am with you, and I will not let the walls close in. Bethy, you are not alone.:

She finally sensed his presence in her mind, and grasped for him with the frantic strength of one who was drowning. He stood firm, holding against her tugging, vaguely aware that she confused him with someone else, some other rescuer. That was fine. If she had been rescued before, she would be the readier to believe that she was being rescued again.

:I am here. I will help you to safety, my love. Do not let yourself despair.:

She clung to him, mentally and physically. He felt her thoughts calming; found the place where her fear originated and fed back upon itself. That gave him something to work on; he caught the fear and held it, sensed that she was listening to him now, and knew who he was.

:There is air to breathe,: he told her silently, calmly. :This is only a room. If the blackguard stops the air, I will start it again. If he changes it, I will protect you. I have sent word to the Bard; he is working to free us.: That last, he was unsure of. He knew that he had briefly touched Eric, and that Eric knew what kind of danger they were in, but whether or not Eric knew where they were, and could do anything about it—that was another question altogether. He was only one man. He had the magic of the greatest Bards at his beck and call, but could that magic prevail against one such as Blair? He had imprisoned an elven warrior, even though he did not seem to know what it was he had captured. Could Bardic magic be strong enough to counter what this man could do when elven magic could not?

But the elf pushed his own doubts into the background. He must keep his thoughts positive. Beth needed them, needed him to be strong and with no doubts.

Just as she had been strong and without doubts for him, when he had despaired of saving his people, his Elfhame, himself.

How long he held her, he was not certain. Only that after a timeless moment, she reached up and touched his cheek with a shaking hand.

“K-Kory?” she whispered hoarsely. “Kory—I—”

He raised his head—and something in the quality of the atmosphere told him that there was something very different about the place, something that had changed in the past few moments. Something was very wrong.

“Kory?” Her own arms tightened about him, and he felt her shivering. “Kory, something’s wrong—there’s something out there—”

“I know,” he whispered. He sought to identify what he sensed as he held her. It wasn’t Unseleighe; it wasn’t anything from Underhill at all, either from the ordered Seleighe side, or the chaos of the Unseleighe lands. It wasn’t human spirits . . . or human magic. But it was somehow connected with humanity.

Its evil was human evil, that same evil that lived in Warden Blair. It was that shadowy horror that Beth sensed, that made her shiver and forget her fear of being buried alive. There were things worse than death, and in the darkness of their cell, Kory knew that he and Beth sensed one of those things brushing them with its regard.

It examined them, minutely, as he held his breath.

And passed them by.

Kory let out the breath he had been holding in. Then he realized something else that was not as it had been: the silence. While the room they were in was supposedly sound-proof, elven senses were sharper than human, and the sounds of footsteps, conversation, and other noises leaked across the threshold of the door. There had been sound out there in the corridor; there no longer was.

Cautiously, he created a mage-light; it lit Beth’s face with a faint bluish glow from the palm of his hand. Her eyes were round and wide with fear, her face drawn and bloodless. Whatever he sensed from the being outside their door, she was more sensitive to it. He had hesitated to create the light, for fear it would attract the attention of the thing that had examined them, but nothing happened.

He considered his options, and the continuing silence in the hallway beyond. And he considered his own strength, which was nearly spent.

This would be the last attempt at magic he could make without a great deal of rest and recuperation. Once he had finished a final attempt on the lock, their only recourses at escape would have to be purely physical. On the other hand, what did he have to lose? If what he and Beth sensed was truly out there, prowling the corridors of Warden Blair’s stronghold, the human had a great deal more to worry about than keeping his victims penned. Whatever magery had countered his own, it might be gone now.

He sent the ball of light into the mechanism of the lock, as he had before; exerting his will upon the stubborn mechanism to make it yield. This time, however, he was rewarded by the faint clicking of the tumblers. And no one on the other side of the door relocked it.

He freed himself from Beth’s clutching hands, stood up shakily. She started to protest, stopped herself as he moved carefully across the darkened room to the door. He waited for a moment with his hand on the handle, extending his weary senses out beyond the metal of the heavy portal, feeling nothing in the immediate vicinity. He turned the handle, carefully; the door opened smoothly and quietly.

The hallway beyond was deserted—and curiously ill-lit, as if some of the lights had failed. Beth joined him at the door, hunched over, as if by making herself smaller, she could elude the attention of whatever was out there, human or nonhuman. Kory looked cautiously around the doorframe; there was still nothing to be seen in the hall; there wasn’t even a human behind the desk-console at the end of it. He frowned; surely that was wrong. Shouldn’t there be one of those uniformed humans with badges there at all times?

He stepped out into the corridor and motioned Beth to follow. She was still crouched by the wall, staring up at him. “Beth, we must leave here now. That creature could return.”

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t move, I can’t feel my legs.”

He moved back to her, helping her to stand. She leaned against his shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and tightened his arm around her waist. “Can you walk?” he asked.

“I think I can,” she said faintly, then spoke stronger. “Of course I can walk. No twisted little government shithead is going to get that victory over me. I’m walking out of here right now.”

Kory couldn’t keep the smile off his face. This was the Beth that he knew, the human woman that he loved.

They slipped into the hallway, backs flat to the wall. Still, there was nothing to be seen anywhere in the hall, and nothing to be heard. Only an empty, echoing silence.

When they reached the desk-console, Kory stopped and peered over the edge of it. He was half-afraid that he would find a body there; that was the way it always worked in the human television shows. But to his immense relief, there was no body, there was nothing, in fact. Only a half-eaten sandwich and a can of cola, beneath row after row of darkened squares of glass, which he recognized, after a moment, as small television sets.

Beth peeked over the edge and frowned at those. Before he could stop her, she poked at some of the buttons beneath the nearest, but nothing changed.

“Are those supposed to do something?” he ventured.

“The ready-light is on. These should be working.” Beth touched another button, with no visible result. “These video screens should show the insides of the cells, but they’re not working at all.”

“You understand these things?” he asked, amazed. This console was more complicated than the most intricate sorcery he had ever attempted. Something that could allow you to Farsee into the cells . . . In the cells . . . “Beth, my lady,” he said urgently. “Other cells—think you that we were the only captives here?”

Her head snapped up; her eyes met his. “No,” she replied, slowly. “No, we couldn’t have been. That creep knew how to break people too well—he had to have had practice.” She began searching among the buttons and switches for something, cursing softly to herself when she could not find it, then snapped her fingers and pulled out a drawer. There was another, smaller bank of Labeled buttons there, as well, besides pencils, sticks of gum, erasers, loose bullets.

“Got it,” she said in satisfaction. She pushed two buttons in succession, one marked “Emergency Override,” the second under a piece of masking tape with the words “cell doors” written on it Labeled “Mass Unlock.”

She hesitated for another moment, then looked up at Kory. “If this system is anything like the one on the psych ward that I worked on, the unlock key won’t work unless there’s a real emergency—like a fire. And we’re just lucky that there is a manual override to the computer-driven system. We’re gonna have to manufacture an emergency.”

Her words meant very little to him; he seized on the ones he did understand. “If we wish to release other prisoners, there must be a fire?” he asked. She nodded. “Very well then. There will be a fire.”

Even exhausted, fire-making was a child’s skill for any of the Folk. He stepped back along the corridor to their empty cell and considered the contents. There was bedding on the bunk, padding on the walls, all flammable. It would do.

He closed his eyes, and sent power into the cell. The bedding ignited with a whoosh; the padding took a moment longer, but within a heartbeat, it too was in flames.

Alarms sounded immediately; the lights in the corridor flickered and failed, and new, red lights came on. In the cell itself, water began to spray from the ceiling.

Since it did not suit Beth’s plans to have the fire extinguished, he gave the copper pipe leading to the fixture a brief mental twist, blocking it. The spray of water died, and the fire continued to blaze merrily.

Far down the corridor, now, he heard people screaming, pounding on doors, and the sounds of some of those doors slamming open. He trotted back to the console, very pleased with himself.

“Will that suit—” he began, when Beth grabbed his hand and began sprinting down the hall, towards a sign over which blazed the words “Emergency Exit.”



The feeling of something very old and very evil passing outside her door made every hair on Elizabet’s body stand straight on end. She wasn’t sure what to make of it; whatever was out there, it didn’t match any horror she had ever encountered. But then, she hadn’t encountered many really nasty things in her life; she had spent her time on the magics of life, not death.

Whatever it was, it passed her by as she held her breath, waiting for it to sense her and attack.

When she was certain it wasn’t going to come back again, she let her breath out in a long sigh.

But what was that—thing? Another of Blair’s little friends? Or was it something that Blair had attracted without knowing what he was doing? If so, he was in for a shock, especially if it was looking for him.

She decided that she was better off not moving for a while. No telling what the thing was hunting—and she was certain that it was a hunter; had an unmistakably predatory feeling about it. No telling how it hunted, either. If by sound, then her best bet was to stay quiet. Let Blair and his flunkies make all the noise and attract it.

But it was very hard to remain motionless, silent, sitting in the gloom of her cell, wondering if the thing was going to come back.

Another thought occurred to her after a moment: was this another of Blair’s little ideas, something designed to make her more cooperative?

That almost seemed more likely than that it was something Blair had attracted.

If it is, I’m not going to let one haunt spook me into playing footsie with that creep, she told herself, a little angrily. It’s going to take more than a boogeyman to frighten me!

An earthquake or a fire, now—trapped down here in a locked room in a sub-basement—

As if someone was reading her mind, fire alarms screamed out into the darkness all up and down the corridor—red emergency lights came on in her cell, startling her as much as the alarms.

She got herself to her feet, cursing middle age and the slowing of her reflexes. She ran for her door, praying that there was an emergency override on the locks in case of catastrophe—and that someone had been compassionate enough to use it. Which, given the land of people who worked for Blair, was not a “given.”

She emerged into the corridor with a half-dozen others, equally frightened, equally bewildered. She sniffed the air; no smoke on this level, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a fire somewhere above or below.

One thing was obvious: there wasn’t a single uniformed guard or one of Blair’s suited goons among the milling, frightened people in the corridor. Whatever had happened—they’d been presented with an opportunity to escape.

“Get the rest of the doors open!” she shouted, taking charge. “Then let’s get out of here!”

A woman with aggressively butch-cut hair whirled and stared at her, while the others stopped and gaped—perhaps wondering if she was one of them, or one of the enemy. The woman sized her up, then nodded, and began flinging doors open along the left-hand side of the corridor. Elizabet did the same on the right, until they were all open, the occupants either joining the rest in flight, or remaining huddled in the red-lit interior of the cells. Half of Elizabet wanted to run in there and coax them out as a few of the others were trying to do—

But the sensible half said that their window of escape might be closing at any moment. She had patients to care for, and a ward out there, waiting, probably frantic with fear.

She turned and ran for the emergency stairs.



The Nightflyer directed the steps of her host’s body downwards, as the lights went to red and strange howling noises split the air. She—or it; Nightflyers were all hermaphroditic females, neuter until breeding conditions were encountered. Sometimes she thought of herself as both. One level down was something very important; something so important that her host hated the people who worked upon it with a passion undimmed by the fact that he was dead.

The Nightflyer sensed that this thing had something to do with whether or not the Breakthrough would be made. The music-maker was part of it, of course, and she was the ForeRunner, who would breach the barrier between the Waking and Nightmare Realms, but the Breakthrough itself would not occur unless some great outpouring of Waking fear gave her the energy needed to cast the bridge across the barrier and hold it open.

She was not precognitive in the sense that humans understood the word; she sensed the future in a myriad of pathways. That this object had the potential to make something happen, and that human knew the key to an event.

As now. The music-maker had the potential to bring the Breakthrough, even though it meant that the Nightflyers who answered the call would be forced to obey him. Potential future pathway: one Nightflyer would find a host. Potential future pathway: that host might lead her to something instrumental to the Breakthrough. At the moment, it appeared that Nightflyer would be her.

Down. That was the direction of the highest potential futurepath—and she followed the potential as a compass-needle follows a magnet.

There were a half-dozen white-coated humans coming up, fleeing in panic; she ignored them. They had nothing to do with her, or the potential of the moment. At the bottom of the steps, she paused and tried the door. It opened to her touch, but not on a corridor of rooms, as she had found on the level above. This door opened on a single large room, filled with a maze of complicated devices. Blair’s memory told her that this had been a storage area, until “Project Poseidon” came and did something, and found it perfect for their needs. What those needs were, Blair did not know. He only knew—the memories dimming as the body cooled—that he hated these people for taking even an unused part of “his” building, and for using money that could also have been “his.”

Sounds from the other side of a wall of machines told the Nightflyer that there was still someone here. This might be a complication, or it might be another advantage. While it was in a host body, it could not kill quickly and efficiently, as it could when it was in its natural form—though to take a host, as only it could do, it did not kill quickly or quietly.

But while it was in a host, it also could not be compelled to return by the music-maker. Therefore it was remaining in the host, however uncomfortable and inconvenient that might be.

She moved, slowly, into a hiding place among the machines. She was not used to the way this body worked as yet, but she sensed a possibility with the as-yet-unseen human, and it would require stealth to make use of the new potential that was unfolding. The human must not guess that she was there.

She wedged the body between two machines and beneath a table, in a way that would have been painful for the original occupant. Once there, she concentrated on reaching outward to that other human’s mind. There was something that the human was doing that was important . . . 

The human, a male, had remained behind to perform a task of securing machines, despite a danger that he perceived. The Nightflyer sensed something beneath the surface of his concerns, and probed deeper.

There was relief there, that the machines could not be used as weapons, for only he and one other knew of that capability.

The potentials flowered, powerful and clear. This was the information she sought.

Quickly, she absorbed it all; the machines, how they worked, and how a single one of them could be used to trigger a massive earthquake. It took the Nightflyer a moment to comprehend just how massive an earthquake—and precisely what that meant to her.

At that moment, it took great control to keep from bolting from her hiding place, and taking one of the machines then and there. But she did not have the means to power or control one. She watched the human’s thoughts as he locked down the equipment, then fled like the others; and she contemplated what she had learned.

One of the machines was directed very near one of the points that would trigger a major quake. Near enough, in fact, that the humans here had hesitated to use it for this experiment, and in the end, took a chance that the experiment would fail rather than take the greater risk.

She could go out now, and manually re-aim the machine. The fire and the escape of her host’s captives would cause a great stir—she could use that and her host’s high status to order this building sealed before the humans learned of her meddling. Then she could return to this level, and use the re-aimed machine.

And then, all she need do would be to wait.

Potential crystalized. This was a good plan, with high probability of success.

She squeezed her host’s body out of its hiding place, and set to work.


*   *   *


Kory supported Beth as she stumbled and nearly fell; there was something very odd about the absence of guards and Warden Blair’s men. Was that strangeness connected with the evil creature he had sensed outside their door?

Suddenly, without warning, a shape out of nightmare loomed up in front of them, blocking their path. Kory knew it the moment it appeared, although he could not put a name to the thing. It was the creature—or one like it—that he had sensed outside their door.

And it loomed above the body of one of the guards, mantling shadowy wings over it, as if it were a great bird of prey.

Beth stifled a gasp; Kory backed carefully away from the thing. It did not move, apparently intent over its victim. After a few seconds, it drifted away, sliding through a half-opened doorway.

Well, now they knew where the guards had gone.

He glanced at Beth, and saw that she was standing motionless, her back pressed against the wall, still staring at the spot where the guard had lain. “Beth, we must leave here—” he whispered urgently to her.

“Can’t you feel it?” she whispered back to him. “They’re all around us, hidden in the shadows. They’re so close, I can feel them brushing against my skin, stealing the air we’re breathing. We’ll suffocate here, as the walls fall in around us, and the shadows will eat our souls . . . ”

“No!” He gathered witchlight in his hand, casting light into every corner of the corridor. “There’s nothing around us, Beth. We’re close to the exit, just another doorway and some stairs. I know Eric is out there, I can feel he’s close to us”—And so can anyone else within five hundred leagues, my friend the Bard is shining like a torch tonight—“Lean on me, love, and we’ll walk out of here together.”

Her hand tightened on his, and he half-carried her past the place where the guard had died. He saw another Emergency Exit sign with a feeling of relief, and herded Beth toward it. As they reached it, a flood of people appeared coming from the other direction, and crowded into the door with them. There were a great many more people in this building than he would have judged, and it seemed as if all of them had chosen to bolt into the staircase he and Beth had taken.

That was not so bad—many people would provide confusion and cover, in which they could escape.

And more victims for thatcreature?

Was that something Eric had called, in an effort to free them? If so—could the Bard control something like that? Or had he taken on more than he knew?

Kory could only hope that the Bard knew what he was doing, as he and Beth let the press of humans carry them up the stairs and into the free night air.



Eric and Kayla waited as patiently as they could for something to happen. There didn’t seem to be much going on out there, though, and Eric began to wonder if he’d made a really bad choice of weapons. Maybe he should have gone to the police after all—or the media—

The Nightflyers had all headed towards one building; he and Kayla watched them drift inside, not all of them by means of doors or windows. A few of them seemed to be able to pass right through solid walls if they wanted to; something that did not bode well for his sleeping habits for a while. From the look on Kayla’s face, he had the feeling the same was true for her.

But since they had entered the building, it looked like business as usual from the outside. Those shadows drifting across lighted windows—they could just as easily be late workers as his otherworldly creatures. No one came running out of there, screaming or otherwise—

Alarms sounded, shattering the silence, startling both of them into shrieks, which fortunately were drowned in the klaxon-horns. He grabbed Kayla and hauled her back, deeper into the shadows, as she tried to bolt for the building.

She couldn’t have heard him unless he yelled, but his meaning was plain enough: they needed to stay where they were.

As armed security guards appeared from other parts of the Lab complex, racing towards the building in question, Eric noticed that the lights in the windows had all turned red. Is that some kind of emergency lighting? Did the Nightflyers finally do something that triggered an alarm?

The front doors burst open as guards took up defensive positions—and were promptly overwhelmed by the rush of frantic people streaming out of the building. Some wore white Lab coats, but only about half; the rest were in ordinary street clothes. Some looked injured; there were groups of two and three helping each other along. There were a lot more of them than Eric would have expected; evidently there was a lot of work going on at night. He peered through the confusion, hoping, fearing—

And spotted a pair of familiar heads as a knot of people passed under a sodium-vapor light, ignoring the guard who tried to stop them. One blond—one red—

“Elizabet!” Kayla squirmed out of his grip and sprinted away, and he didn’t even try to stop her this time, assuming that the confusion would cover her. He made a dash of his own for his two targets; brushed aside a guard whose bewildered expression told him there was something odd about the situation, and threw his arms around the two who were supporting each other.

There was no time for greetings, though; he swept them from an embrace into a stumbling trot, heading for the gate. No one moved to stop them—no one made a move to stop anyone who was trying to leave.

At some point between the place where he caught Kory and Beth, and the entrance, Kayla and Elizabet joined them, making a group too formidable for anyone to trifle with. At the entrance, Eric guided them all off to the side, shoving Kory and Beth ahead of him. “I’ve got transportation,” he said to Elizabet, “but there’s something I have to take care of back there. You guys go back to the house—I think it’s safe, I don’t think those goons knew where we live. I’ll catch BART back home.”

Elizabet looked as if she wanted to object, but finally nodded, tersely. “Neither Beth nor Kory look as if they’re in a fit state to be left alone,” she said. “And knowing what happened to me—we’ll stay with them. Kayla, I think Beth may need you the more. I’ll stay with Kory.”

Eric nodded his thanks, and left them heading in the direction of the bikes. He turned, and went back to the edge of the fence.

Now to put the genie back into the bottle. If I can . . . 

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