She paused, grimacing. “I learned young. When he passed our house he carelessly stepped on my favorite flower, crushing it, and though I did not speak I winced mentally. He read that wince, picked me up by the scruff, and whacked me hard on the bottom. I screamed in shock and pain. He smiled, not forgiving me but appreciating my pain. Then he dropped me, literally, and moved on. Only when he was gone did my mother dare come to comfort me. I realized then that not only was the king a monster, but that no one would help me oppose him, not even my family. And I resolved to make an end of him, when I could. But first I taught myself to shield my thoughts.” She glanced at me. “Now you know why. It was a trifling incident, surely long since forgotten by the king, and never even noticed by others, but it was my point of decision. Now I mean to foster a revolt and overthrow the evil king, and replace him with someone with far more decency, compassion, and fairness.”
“Which would be you?” I asked cynically. I might be smitten by her sex appeal, but I had experience with tyrants and knew that their words hardly defined them. Her mind was shielded; she could be lying.
“Yes.” No evasion there.
“How can we know that you would not become a worse tyrant, whatever your stated motive now?” Harriet asked, just as cynically. She too knew about petty tyrants.
“Two things,” the Sorceress replied. “First there is a prophecy that you can verify that suggests that only by replacing the bad king with a good woman will the kingdom be saved. It doesn’t specify the woman, but I fit the gender and I hope the description.”
“And the other thing?” I asked.
“This. I have been reading your minds throughout, up until you learned to shield them, and you are conflicted but honest people, and I trust your discretion in this respect. I understand why you do not trust me. So here I am.” And she laid her mind completely open to us both. It was immediately clear that in such a case, deception was impossible.
There was a lot there, ranging from petty embarrassments to intricate techniques of magic to frustrated emotional longing, things that few folk would care to have exposed to view. But what was uppermost was the sheer authenticity of her desire. She wanted to become queen because she honestly believed that she was best qualified to fulfill the role. She did not desire power for its own sake, but for the good it could accomplish if appropriately wielded.
She might be corruptible in time, but she certainly wasn’t corrupted now. She did seem to be the best bet to reform the governance of the Cloud.
I exchanged guarded glances with Harriet and Henrietta, both of whom nodded. “Close it up,” I said. “We support you.”
Her shields returned. “Thank you. I would rather be bound naked for public ridicule, but this I had to do. Still, you are not ready to commit to my project.”
“We aren’t?” Harriet asked, surprised.
“You have merely verified my commitment. Now you need to understand my plan, so that you can judge its competence, and decide whether it is worthwhile for you. Commitment is a highly personal thing.”
She was right. “What is your plan?” I asked. It had surely been there in her open mind, but that had been like looking at flowers in a garden: way too many to grasp in one glimpse.
“I do not yet know the whole of it. I am locating and gathering the most promising humans I can find in the mortal realm, those with the most potential magic and wit, in the hope of recruiting them and organizing them into a force that can accomplish my purpose. I will heed their judgment. That is why the three of you are here: each of you has at least two magic abilities, and I believe we will need much magic. I hope that you and the others we find are able to devise a plan of attack that can succeed.” She fixed us with a serious glance. “Because you need to understand that if we try, and fail, we will all most likely be tortured and killed in short order. If you are killed here in your waking dream state, you will die in your sleeping state below. This is deadly serious business. I have no perfect way to judge the future, but my estimate is that the chances of success or failure are even, and of course there could be success but also the death of one or more of us.”
“The others?” I asked.
“I have been using my magic to orient on prospects. There are a number. We can orient the beanstalk to descend to their vicinities, so that you can go down to persuade them. That may be a considerable challenge. But letting them find their own way here is risky; the three of you got captured by one of the king’s lowly minions and I had to find a way to get together with you without showing my hand. We need a better way.”
I nodded. The potential recruits would certainly be highly skeptical. “What’s in it for us if we succeed? I mean, apart from doing a good thing and helping many giants.”
“We can allocate a section of the Cloud for you little folk to reside in, which can be shaped to resemble your paradise, a completely pleasant place. Only your imagination will limit it. You could not have governing power, as giants would not heed little folk, but apart from that you could have everything you might want.”
I considered that. Crafting our own little paradise, or as close as we could come to it. It did have its appeal. But something nagged me. “What of our mortal bodies?” I asked. “They can’t sleep forever.”
“You will have to wake periodically to maintain them,” Sydelle said. “Food, exercise, elimination. It will be a chore, but a necessary one. Perhaps you can hire discreet help to maintain the premises and prevent disturbance during your slumbers.”
“And if we elect not to join your revolution?” Harriet asked grimly.
“Then you may return to your full waking state below and resume your normal activities without prejudice. I can and will arrange to provide a source of income for you so that you no longer need to be chained to jobs you detest. You can marry each other and make a supportive home for Henrietta.”
Somehow that was not completely appealing. Not after glimpsing the prospects of the Cloud. Even the best of mundane lives now seemed dull compared to adventure in a magic realm. “Where’s the catch?” I asked.
“It is that your experience here will slowly fade, like the dream it is, until at last you have little or no memory of it. You will never know what it is you gave up.”
That made me wince. But it was Harriet who came up with another aspect: “You said we had at least two magic abilities. Telepathy for each of us, and pyrotechnic for him, electricity for me, and transmuting base materials into gold for Henrietta. There may be others?”
“Yes. But the third is in each case more subtle and powerful than the others, and will take longer to discover and learn to use. Maybe years. There is no shortcut.”
“And if we opt out,” I said, “We’ll never discover what those other talents are.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Paradise lost,” Harriet said.
It was time to decide.
Except that Henrietta had a question. “Your missing tooth,” she said. “What happened? Did someone try to chop your head off?”
Who cared about such a detail? But sometimes seemingly minor things were more relevant than they first appeared. At least this provided us more time to consider our decisions.
Chapter 10:
Beheading
Then it hit me.
Henrietta wasn’t just asking a random question. The hen had somehow known the correct question to ask. I considered again; indeed, the bird had not shown a proficiency for telepathy. That might be just as well. More than likely, I would not want access to a bird brain. Perhaps their functionality was too foreign to follow coherently. Rather, the bird’s second gift—apart from transmuting base materials into gold—was the gift of “second sight.” That is, the power to perceive things that are not present to the five senses. But “second sight,” I was certain, had more to do with future events, not the past. I was stumped.
“Yes,” said Sydelle, looking away and rubbing her neck. “Very good, Henrietta. Obviously we are seeing evidence of your
second gift.”
“What gift is that?” asked Harriet a second before I could.
“My guess would be retrocognition,” said Sydelle. “The ability to see past events. Am I correct, Henrietta?”
“I’m thinking, yes,” said the hen. “The longer I’m standing here, the more the images are coming.”
“Or did she just see into your thoughts like we did?” asked Harriet. “And she simply picked up on the near-beheading among the many thousands of other images that flashes through our minds.”
I knew this answer. “She doesn’t have the gift of telepathy.”
“No,” said Henrietta. “And I wouldn’t want it either. We hens have pure thoughts, simple thoughts. I think if I had access to your own human thoughts, I might just go mad.”
Then again, I thought, and didn’t bother to shield my thoughts, I might already be mad. After all, I’m talking to a hen that lays gold eggs.
Here, here, came Harriet’s answering thought.
Do you feel like you’re going crazy? asked Sydelle, her words appearing just inside my ear. I suspected Harriett heard the same question, too.
No, I thought. For some damn reason this all seems perfectly normal.
Which might be further evidence that I have seriously gone off the deep end, added Harriet.
I can assure you both that your minds are healthy. Here on the Cloud, as you sometimes refer to it, dreamscape and reality sometimes blur.
I thought about that, realizing there was something to her words, something that tugged at me, something that I suspected had to do with our latent third gift. I shelved it for now.
“Well,” said Henrietta, rather rudely. “Are you going to tell them what happened to your tooth, or should I?”
“No,” said Sydelle, “I will. I rather hoped that the two of you would have seen the scene play out when I revealed my deepest secrets to you, but I see it was missed. But first, would you like something to eat?”
We all agreed we did. Soon, we were seated at an oversized table. Harriet and I shared a wooden chair, while Henrietta pecked at some extra large corn kernels, squawking and cursing, as she broke the grains down into more edible sizes. Harriet and I slurped from the smallest bowls Sydelle could find. The “soup” seemed to be a concoction of something sweet and something hearty. As we slurped, the sorceress told us her tale.
“Do you remember that prophecy I told you about?”
“The one that foretells a woman taking the throne,” said Harriet, not missing a beat.
“Aye,” said Sydelle.
She was was sitting with us at the table, taking up her own chair in a normal fashion. She was sipping on her own sweet/hearty bowl of soup. She held the bowl in both of her hands. It took four of our hands, Harriet and I working together, to lift our own. Even then, I twice nearly took a tumble inside the bowl.
“The prophecy states that only a woman can save the kingdom...and only a woman who has been,” she paused and set the bowl down.
“Go on,” said Henrietta from the floor below. “Tell them.”
“Yes, of course,” said Sydelle. She glanced over at us with her big, round, beautiful eyes. My assessment of her eyes was, of course, firmly contained within my wall. “Part of the prophecy states that the woman who would be king must first be resurrected.”
“From the dead?” said Harriet.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” said Sydelle. “You see, the hen was only partly right. Someone didn’t just ‘try’ to cut off my head.” Now she reached up and pulled down the collar of her tunic, revealing what had to be one of the nastiest scars I had ever seen. “They succeeded in cutting off my head.”
Harriet and I collectively lost our appetites and set the oversized bowl down. Below, the hen resumed pecking and cursing, seemingly unaffected.
“But...I don’t understand,” said Harriet.
“A dark day in my life, for sure.”
And with that, she gave us a glimpse into her thoughts again, this time focused on the events surrounding her beheading. We watched her get dragged out of her simple home—one that looked far different than the one we were currently in. The men who dragged her off wore official-looking armor. The king’s men, I suspected. She was hauled kicking and screaming through town, while her mother had to be held back by neighbors, kicking and screaming herself, no doubt risking her own death but not giving a damn.
Sydelle was dragged to a chopping block in the center of the village, a block that was already coated with blood and gore. Apparently, the king’s men had been making their rounds that day. There was much wailing in the village.
The young sorceress was dragged up to the block, and now I caught something else in her memory: she could have fought back with her magic. In fact, she was far more powerful than she had let on. But she had always known—or suspected—that she would be queen, that day by day, she was fulfilling the prophecy. A prophecy that stated that the queen would return from the dead.
And so she permitted the king’s men to roughly place her on the block, to force her to look up as the ax was raised high. And as it flashed down, Harriet screamed, and the memory mercifully stopped.
“Not my best day,” said Sydelle.
I looked at Sydelle’s clothing again, and noted something I had previously missed: dried blood just inside the collar. She was wearing the same clothing.
“You’ve only recently come back to life,” I said.
“Very good, Jack. Yesterday, in fact. Just prior to summoning you to Giantland.”
“But how?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “I woke up in my family’s tomb, my head reattached.”
Harriet and I were silent for many minutes. The hen wasn’t so silent as she pecked and pecked.
Finally, Harriet said, “You risked death for your kingdom.”
“Yes,” said Sydelle.
“Then I would be honored to help you.”
Tears sprang to the young sorceress’s eyes. She glanced at me. “And you, Jack of New York?”
I bowed at her bravery, my admiration for her flowing over. “I’m with you to the end...my queen.”
Chapter 11:
Bankrupt
“Let’s get the details straight,” Henrietta said. “Blank spots are awkward.”
“Blank spots?” Harriet asked.
I caught on. “Like who took the body to the tomb, and reattached the head. Someone must have known that it was important to save Sydelle.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Henrietta said. “I came to the Cloud before the two of you.”
“You were my first attempt,” Sydelle agreed. “I messed it up by losing track of you at the outset. So I concentrated on getting it right next time. But my execution intervened.”
“Yes,” the hen agreed. “I heard the giants talking about the slaughter. How several suspects had been executed, including one shapely wench, and the bodies left to their families as a public example. All the victims were quickly removed.”
“And then to bring her back to life,” I said, resuming the main thread. “Do we have another sorcerer on our side?”
“I know of none,” Sydelle said. “I have been quietly reading minds, and while some villagers have magic, they suppress it, and none have magic of that caliber.”
“But could some have telepathy, and see you coming, as it were?” Harriet said. “In fact, who betrayed you to the king’s minions, so you got beheaded?”
Sydelle’s mouth opened in surprise and dismay. “I never thought of that. I thought it was just a routine sweep.”
“Without first raping you?” Harriet asked. “They just threw away your fine body, unmolested? No brutal degradation before the end? That’s not SOP. They wouldn’t waste a creature like you without good reason.”
“And that good reason would be that you were too dangerous to let live one moment longer,” I said. “Once they knew what was in your mind,”
“You’re right,” the sorceress agreed, cha
grined. “The king’s men lusted after me. I could read that in their brutish minds from far away. They were just waiting their opportunity. The moment I got in trouble, however minor, and got chained naked in the public square, they would be there. They dreamed of it. And if I didn’t get in trouble, the king would soon have taken me as his plaything; that was in his mind too. Yet none of that happened. I was simply beheaded.” She smiled grimly. “I think after that my body was less appealing.”
“So you were betrayed,” I concluded. “And not by a lustful minion. So they made short work of you. Still, that doesn’t reveal your betrayer.”
“Or how you were restored to life,” Harriet added. “We do need to explain these mysteries, lest we get betrayed again, and this time with no recovery.”
Sydelle shook her head. “What you say makes sense. Someone might have read my mind without my knowing it, and told the king. But returning me to life—I know of no one with that level of magic, not even the king. That is an art I think I dabbled in, but no one else approaches that level.”
“You think you dabbled?” I asked. “Don’t you know?”
“My memory is foggy. But it’s coming back now. Yes, I was studying reanimation.”
“How could you forget a thing like that?” Harriet asked.
The sorceress concentrated. “I—I think I wanted to.”