The figure pulled her forward into what little light spilled down from the Stuart Arms through the stair gratings. Cordelia brought the gun up and stuck the barrel into her assailant’s belly. It didn’t go far. She pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
She caught a glimpse of dark eyes catching hers. The figure reached forward with its free hand and clicked something on the side of the weapon. A male voice said, “Here, little missy, you left on the safety. Now it will work.”
Cordelia was too astonished to pull the trigger. “Okay, I get the point. Who are you, and can we get out of here?”
“You can call me Warreen.” Sudden light flooded down from above them, bursting through the gratings, painting quagga stripes of illumination.
Cordelia stared at the bars of light falling across the man’s face. She registered the wild, curly black hair, the hooded eyes as dark as hers, the broad flat nose, the high, sharp cheekbones, the strong lips. He was, her mama would have called him, a man of some color. He was, she also realized, the most striking man she had ever seen. Her daddy would have whipped her for that thought alone.
Footsteps clattered down the fire-stairs.
“Now we get out of here,” Warreen said, steering her toward the alley mouth.
Naturally it wasn’t as easy as that. “There are men there,” said Cordelia. She saw an indeterminate number of men holding what seemed to be sticks. They were waiting, silhouetted against the light from the street.
“So there are.” Warreen grinned and Cordelia caught the flash of white teeth. “Shoot at them, little missy.”
Sounds good to me, Cordelia thought, bringing up the weapon in her right hand. When she pulled the trigger, there was a sound like ripping canvas and bullets screamed off brick. The ragged muzzle flash showed her the men in the alley were now flat in the dirt. She didn’t think she had hit any of them.
“Later we worry about marksmanship,” said Warreen. “Now we go.” He enclosed her left hand in his right, not seeming to notice the key still in place in her fist.
She wondered if they were going to jump from back to back of the prostrate men like Tarzan hopscotching crocodiles in lieu of stepping stones.
They didn’t go anywhere.
Something akin to heat washed over her. It felt like energy flooding through Warreen’s fingers and into her body. The heat seared from the inside out—just like, she thought, a microwave oven.
The world seemed to move sharply two feet to the left and then drop a foot more. The air rotated around her. The night funneled into a blazing speck centered in her chest.
Then it was no longer night.
Warreen and she stood on a reddish-brown plain that joined the distant sky in a far, flat horizon. There were occasional hardy-looking plants and a bit of a breeze. The wind was hot and it eddied the dust.
She realized this was the same plain that had overlaid the cabin of the Air New Zealand jumbo in her nightmare between Honolulu and Auckland.
Cordelia staggered slightly and Warreen caught her arm. “I’ve seen this place before,” she said. “Will the wolf-creatures come?”
“Wolf-creatures?” Warreen looked momentarily puzzled. “Ah, little missy, you mean the Eer-moonans, the long-toothed ones from the shadows.”
“I guess so. Lots of teeth? Run in packs? They’ve got rows of quills around their necks.” Holding the gun loosely, Cordelia massaged the inflamed place on the back of her left hand.
Warreen frowned and examined the wound. “Pierced by a quill? You’re very fortunate. Their venom is usually fatal.”
“Maybe us ’gator types have natural immunity,” Cordelia said, smiling wanly. Warreen looked politely puzzled. “Never mind. I guess I’m just lucky.”
He nodded. “Indeed so, little missy.”
“What’s this ‘little missy’ crap?” Cordelia said. “I didn’t want to take time to ask back in the alley.”
Warreen looked startled, then grinned widely. “The European ladies seem to like it. It feeds those delicious colonial impulses, you know? Sometimes I still talk like I’m a guide.”
“I’m not European,” said Cordelia. “I’m a Cajun, an American.”
“Same thing to us.” Warreen continued to grin. “Yank’s same as a European. No difference. You’re all tourists here. So what should I call you?”
“Cordelia.”
His expression became serious as he leaned forward and took the gun from her hand. He examined it closely, gingerly working the action, then clicking the safety back on. “Scaled down H and K full auto. Pretty expensive hardware, Cordelia. Going shooting dingos?” He gave her back the weapon.
She let it dangle from her hand. “It belonged to the guy I came to Alice Springs with. He’s dead.”
“At the hotel?” said Warreen. “The minions of the Murga-muggai? Word was out, she was going to ice the agent of the evangelist.”
“Who?”
“The trap-door spider woman. Not a nice lady. She’s tried to kill me for years. Since I was a kid.” He said it matter-of-factly. Cordelia thought he still looked like a kid.
“Why?” she said, involuntarily shivering. If she had any phobia, it was spiders. She coughed as the wind kicked red dust up into her face.
“Started as clan vengeance. Now it’s something else.” Warreen seemed to reflect, then added, “She and I both have some powers. I think she feels there is space in the outback for only one such. Very shortsighted.”
“What kind of powers?” said Cordelia.
“You are full of questions. So am I. Perhaps we can trade knowledge on our walk.”
“Walk?” said Cordelia a bit stupidly. Once again events threatened to outstrip her ability to comprehend them. “Where?”
“Uluru.”
“Where’s that?”
“There.” Warreen pointed toward the horizon.
The sun was directly overhead. Cordelia had no idea which compass direction was indicated. “There’s nothing there. Just a lot of countryside that looks like where they shot Road Warrior.”
“There will be.” Warreen had started walking. He was already a dozen paces away. His voice drifted back on the wind. “Shake a pretty leg, little missy.”
Deciding she had little choice, Cordelia followed. “Agent of the evangelist?” she muttered. That wasn’t Marty. Somebody had made a bad mistake.
“Where are we?” said Cordelia. The sky was dotted with small cumulus, but none of the cloud-shadows ever seemed to shade her. She wished mightily that they did.
“The world,” said Warreen.
“It’s not my world.”
“The desert, then.”
“I know it’s the desert,” said Cordelia. “I can see it’s the desert. I can feel it. The heat’s a dead giveaway. But what desert is it?”
“It is the land of Baiame,” said Warreen. “This is the great Nullarbor Plain.”
“Are you sure?” Cordelia scrubbed sweat from her forehead with the strip of fabric she had carefully torn away from the hem of her Banana Republic skirt. “I looked at the map on the plane all the way up from Melbourne. The distances don’t make sense. Shouldn’t this be the Simpson Desert?”
“Distances are different in the Dreamtime,” Warreen said simply.
“The Dreamtime?” What am I in, a Peter Weir movie? she thought. “As in the myth?”
“No myth,” said her companion. “We are now where reality was, is, and will be. We are in the origin of all things.”
“Right.” I am dreaming, Cordelia thought. I’m dreaming—or I’m dead and this is the last thing my brain cells are creating before everything flares and goes black.
“All things in the shadow world were created here first,” said Warreen. “Birds, creatures, grass, the ways of doing things, the taboos that must be observed.”
Cordelia looked around her. There was little to see. “These are the originals?” she said. “I’ve only seen the copies before?”
He nodded vigorou
sly.
“I don’t see any dune buggies,” she said a bit petulantly, feeling the heat. “I don’t see any airliners or vending machines full of ice-cold Diet Pepsi.”
He answered her seriously. “Those are only variations. Here is where everything begins.”
I’m dead, she thought glumly. “I’m hot,” she said. “I’m tired. How far do we have to walk?”
“A distance.” Warreen kept striding along effortlessly.
Cordelia stopped and set hands to hips. “Why should I go along?”
“If you don’t,” Warreen said back over his shoulder, “then you shall die.”
“Oh.” Cordelia started walking again, having to run a few steps in order to catch up with the man. The image she couldn’t get out of her head was that of cold cans of soda, the moisture beading on the aluminum outsides. She ached to hear the click and hiss as the tabs peeled back. And the bubbles, the taste . . .
“Keep walking,” said Warreen.
“How long have we been walking?” said Cordelia. She glanced up and shaded her eyes. The sun was measurably closer to the horizon. Shadows stretched in back of Warreen and her.
“Are you tired?” said her companion.
“I’m exhausted.”
“Do you need to rest?”
She thought about that. Her own conclusion surprised her. “No. No, I don’t think I do. Not yet, anyway.” Where was the energy coming from? She was exhausted—and yet strength seemed to rise up into her, as though she were a plant taking nourishment from the earth. “This place is magical.”
Warreen nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes, it is.”
“However,” she said, “I am hungry.”
“You don’t need food, but I’ll see to it.”
Cordelia heard a sound apart from the wind and the padding of her own feet on the dusty soil. She turned and saw a brownish-gray kangaroo hopping along, easily pacing them. “I’m hungry enough to eat one of those,” she said.
The kangaroo stared at her from huge chocolate eyes. “I should hope not,” it said.
Cordelia closed her mouth with a click. She stared back.
Warreen smiled at the kangaroo and said courteously, “Good afternoon, Mirram. Will we shortly find shade and water?”
“Yes,” said the kangaroo. “Sadly, the hospitality is being hoarded by a cousin of the Gurangatch.”
“At least,” said Warreen, “it is not a bunyip.”
“That is true,” agreed the kangaroo.
“Will I find weapons?”
“Beneath the tree,” said the kangaroo.
“Good,” Warreen said with relief. “I wouldn’t relish wrestling a monster with only my hands and teeth.”
“I wish you well,” said the kangaroo. “And you,” it said to Cordelia, “be at peace.” The creature turned at right angles to their path and bounded into the desert where it soon was lost to sight.
“Talking kangaroos?” said Cordelia. “Bunyips? Gurnagatches?”
“Gurangatch,” Warreen corrected her. “Something of both lizard and fish. It is, of course, a monster.”
She was mentally fitting pieces together. “And it’s hogging an oasis.”
“Spot on.”
“Couldn’t we avoid it?”
“No matter what trail we follow,” Warreen said, “I think it will encounter us.” He shrugged. “It’s just a monster.”
“Right.” Cordelia was glad she still had tight hold of the H and K mini. The steel was hot and slippery in her hand. “Just a monster,” she mumbled through dry lips.
Cordelia had no idea how Warreen found the pond and the tree. So far as she could tell, they followed a perfectly straight path. A dot appeared in the sunset distance. It grew as they approached it. Cordelia saw a tough-looking desert oak streaked with charcoal stripes. It seemed to have been struck by lightning more than once and looked as if it had occupied this patch of hardscrabble soil for centuries. A belt of grass surrounded the tree. A gentle slope led down to reeds and then the edge of a pool about thirty feet across.
“Where’s the monster?” said Cordelia.
“Hush.” Warreen strode up to the tree and began to strip. His muscles were lean and beautifully defined. His skin shimmered with sweat, glowing almost a dark blue in the dusk. When he skinned out of the jeans, Cordelia at first turned away, then decided this was not an occasion for politeness, whether false or otherwise.
God, she thought. He’s gorgeous. Depending on gender, her kin would have been either scandalized or triggered to a lynching impulse. Even though she had been reared to abhor such a thought, she wanted to reach and lightly touch him. This, she abruptly realized, was not like her at all. Although she was surrounded in New York by people of other colors, they still made her nervous. Warreen was engendering that reaction, yet it was vastly different in nature and intensity. She did want to touch him.
Naked, Warreen neatly folded his clothes and set them in a pile beneath the tree. In turn, he picked up a variety of objects from the grass. He inspected a long club, then set it back down. Finally he straightened with a spear in one hand, a boomerang in the other. He looked fiercely at Cordelia. “I can be no more ready.”
She felt a chill like ice water run through her. It was a sensation both of fear and of excitement. “Now what?” She tried to keep her voice low and steady, but it squeaked slightly. God, she hated that.
Warreen didn’t have a chance to answer. He gestured toward the dark pool. Ripples had appeared on the far side. The center of those ripples seemed to be moving toward them. A few bubbles burst on the surface.
The water was shrugged aside. What surveyed the couple on the bank was a figure out of a nightmare. Looks meaner than any joker I’ve ever seen, Cordelia thought. As it lifted more of its body from the water, she decided the creature must possess at least the mass of Bruce the Shark. The froglike mouth gaped, revealing a multitude of rust-colored teeth. It regarded the humans with slitted, bulging lizard eyes.
“It is equally sired of fish and lizard,” said Warreen conversationally, as though guiding a European tourist through a wild-game park. He stepped forward and raised his spear. “Cousin Gurangatch!” he called out. “We would drink from the spring and rest beneath the tree. We would do this in peace. If we cannot, then I must treat you in the manner employed by Mirragen the Cat-man against your mighty ancestor.”
Gurangatch hissed like a freight train bleeding its brakes. Without hesitation it lunged forward, slamming down on the wet bank with the slap of a ten-ton eel. Warreen lightly leapt back, and the stained teeth clashed together just in front of his face. He poked Gurangatch’s snout with the spear. The fish-lizard hissed even louder.
“You are not so lithe as Mirragen,” it said with the voice of a steam hose. Gurangatch jerked away as Warreen pulled loose the spear and stabbed again. This time the pointed end jammed under the shining silver scales surrounding the monster’s right eye. The creature twisted, tugging the spear loose from Warreen’s fingers.
The monster reared high, gazing at Warreen from ten feet, fifteen, twenty. The man looked up, expectant, the boomerang cocked in his right hand. The hiss was almost a sigh. “Time to die again, little cousin!” Gurangatch’s bull neck flexed, dipped. Jaws gaped.
This time Cordelia remembered to click off the safety. This time she braced herself by holding the H and K with both hands. This time the bullets went exactly where she wished.
She saw the slugs stitch a line down Gurangatch’s throat. She released the trigger, raised the gun, fired a quick burst at the monster’s face. One of the creature’s eyes burst like a balloon full of dye. It cried out in pain, green jelly sloshing down across its snout. The wounds in the neck were oozing crimson. Christmas colors, Cordelia thought. Get a grip, girl. Don’t go hysterical.
As Gurangatch writhed in the water, Warreen swung his arm in a short, tight arc and set the end of the boomerang into the creature’s remaining eye. At this, the monster bellowed so loudly, Cordelia winc
ed and recoiled back a step. Then Gurangatch doubled over in the water and dove. Cordelia had a quick impression of a thick, gilalike tail disappearing through the spray. Then the pool was quiet, small wavelets still splashing up on the banks. The ripples flattened and were gone.
“He has dived into the earth,” said Warreen, squatting and peering into the water. “He will be gone a long time.”
Cordelia put the H and K back on safety.
Hands free of weapons, Warreen turned away from the pool and stood. Cordelia couldn’t help herself. She stared. Warreen glanced down, then met her eyes again. With little apparent embarrassment he said, “It is the excitement of the contest.” Then he smiled and said, “This wouldn’t happen under ordinary circumstances if I were guiding a European lady in the outback.”
It occurred to Cordelia to pick up his folded clothing and hold it out to him.
With dignity Warreen accepted the garments. Before turning away to dress he said, “If you’re ready, it would be a good time for a refreshing drink and some rest. I’m sorry I’m a bit short of tea.”
Cordelia said, “I’ll manage.”
The desert was slow to cool with the sunset. Cordelia continued to feel the heat rise out of the ground beneath her. Warreen and she lay back against the gnarled, semiexposed roots of the tree. The air felt as though it were a quilted comforter pulled up over her face. When she moved, the motion seemed to be at half speed.
“The water was delicious,” she said, “but I’m still hungry.”
“Your hunger here is an illusion.”
“Then I’ll fantasize a pizza.”
“Mmph,” Warreen said. “Very well.” With a sigh he raised himself to his knees and ran his fingers over the rough bark of the tree. When he found a loose patch, he tugged it away from the trunk. His right hand darted forward, fingers scrambling to catch something Cordelia couldn’t see. “Here.” He displayed his find to her.
Her first impression was of something snakelike and squirming. She saw the pasty color, the segments and the many legs. “What is that?” she said.