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?”
Glen Cook, Collected Short Stories of Glen Cook
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