"You and you stay. Watch," the main officer commanded, using the celebrated army volunteer system to select two men. "You, down the tree. You, you guide the prisoners."
Without hesitation Kian moved ahead to the cliff and the ladder and descended after the two soldiers. John followed, feeling the unnecessary prod the man behind gave to his b.u.t.tocks. The descent into the tree was one he had not actually made before, though he had climbed an identical tree and ladder in the frame of the silver serpents.
He wondered, as he carefully made his way down, branch by branch, if this time there would be a rescue. Maybe, just maybe, it was foreordained that he and his son were to die here. That would certainly simplify Kelvin"s life, allowing him to complete the prophecy without interference.
Now I"m thinking like Charlain, he thought. Next I"ll be reading her Book of Prophecy and studying her predicting cards!
But will there ever be a chance? Will I ever see Kelvin"s mother again? Will I ever even see her duplicate?
He sighed soundlessly. Obviously his heart wasn"t in his resolution to stay out of Charlain"s life. But if he should encounter one of her alternates in another frame, and not an evil one, what then? Actually there had been another woman in his life, evil Queen Zoanna. In the serpent frame he had encountered her good version, Queen Zanaan. Now there was a prospect to conjure with! If Kian could marry in that frame, why not John himself?
His feet touched the ground, bringing his mind to reality. What use were dreams, when he wasn"t free to do anything about them? There were more troops and horses waiting here. There was no chance for escape.
At the commander"s orders they mounted horses and rode what seemed a very familiar path. Would they meet flopears, he wondered? Maybe Smoothy Jac"s duplicate? What about Lonny? Would her duplicate appear? And Zanaan-suppose she was here, too? That could really complicate things!
They rode on, through what became a very tiring day.
Kelvin stepped out of the transporter closet into an empty chamber. Kian and his father were nowhere in sight. Yet they must have come here. Should he stay and search? Or go back and ask the squarear"s advice?
He decided to have a look outside. This seemed to be the frame of the silver serpents, but wasn"t quite right. There wasn"t the dust he remembered. Of course that could mean that this was the right frame and that others had since been here.
He crossed the chamber and walked through the shimmering golden curtain under the glowing EXIT sign. Outside, the cliff behind his back, he saw the tree and the ladder he expected. Only the ladder was down into the tree now, and it had been pulled up. He frowned, wondering, and then his gauntlets began to tingle.
If there was one thing he would never do again, he had promised himself, it was to ignore the gauntlets" warning. Obeying them as much as his own thoughts, he drew his sword and whirled.
A uniformed man, half in and half out of what appeared to be solid rock, was about to strike him on the head with a short club. His sword confronted the man, and at the same time he found his voice, letting the gauntlets somehow choose his words and rap it out as a command.
"Freeze! How many of you in there?" he demanded.
The man was evidently startled to have the tables so abruptly turned. "J-just two. Me and Bert."
"Tell him to come out. Slowly, without a weapon."
"You hear that, Bert? He"s got a sword against my gullet. Don"t be a hero, Bert. I"m your friend and the commanding officer isn"t."
Bert came through the rock, unarmed.
Kelvin sighed with relief. He had been afraid the hidden man would fire an arrow from cover. Give the gauntlets a chance and they took control!
"Where are my friends? Do you have them?"
Bert spoke, looking scared. "Those two men? On the way to the king"s dungeon."
"King? What king?"
"King Hoofourth, of course!"
So it was a different frame! He had thought so, when he saw the setting at %, but was taking nothing for granted now. "King of what country?"
"King of the Kingdom of Scud," the crafty-faced roundear said.
So it was a frame not too different from the silver serpent one, but not identical. "Tell me, is there an outlaw somewhere in the desert by the name of Jac?"
"Jac? You mean Scarface Jac?"
Why not? "Enemy to the king?"
"What else? An outlaw has to be, no matter what else."
"Skin thief?"
The soldiers looked puzzled. "Skin? I don"t know what-"
"Silver!" Kelvin said impatiently. Not that it mattered, but the silver skins of serpents had proven to be of great importance.
Both men shrugged. Bert said, "I know he"s robbed, but-"
"Doesn"t matter." Kelvin decided he"d pay the local Jac a visit before planning his rescue of his father and brother. Even with his gauntlets and the Mouvar weapon and the levitation belt he was just one person. This frame, like every frame he had visited, probably contained some surprises.
"Tell me, can anyone in this frame levitate?"
"You mean fly? Mouvar is said to have flown."
"Good enough," Kelvin said briskly. "Turn your backs."
The two men obeyed him and he wasted no time in activating the levitation belt. Silently he rose above their heads and above the cliffs that towered higher than he remembered, then moved out over the tree and the river. The river was much broader than the rivers in the other frames. He looked back and saw the two soldiers still standing with their backs turned. Good, no arrows would be following him!
He settled down to the business of flying. It wasn"t nearly as hard as he had once imagined. His father said he had a natural ability, as he did himself. He gathered that some people couldn"t get used to the ground sliding away beneath their feet, the clouds rolling in front of their faces. It wasn"t anything to do with bravery, for he certainly wasn"t brave. Nor could he credit the gauntlets for his acceptance of flying. It was just a case of being lucky in one thing and unlucky in others.
As he drifted dreamlike over the rolling hills of the kingdom of Scud, he found himself thinking about luck. He had been lucky. Time after time he had been saved from impossible situations by what seemed chance. The silver serpents that could have swallowed him, for instance. The chimaera that could have cooked him with tail-lightning and eaten him steaming hot. Was that the effect of the prophecy, as his mother would say? Was that what was protecting him? To him it felt like mere fortune, that could reverse at any time. He really didn"t have a lot of confidence in the accuracy of the prophecy, at least not as it might relate to him. It might be talking about some other roundear entirely.
But that line of thinking led only to mischief. It was better to believe that his mother was right. That the prophecy applied to him, and that he would prevail. So he would do his best to believe that, so that he could rescue his father and brother.
Down below was the first of the connected valleys. Serpent"s Valley, home of great silver serpents and their spiritual brothers the dwarf flopears. He looked close but saw no serpents. No holes in cliffs that could be serpent tunnels. Sad to think that they were not here. What would Hud have been without its serpents and flopears? What would Scud be like? Whatever dangers he faced here he hoped-no, knew now that he could handle them. With his levitation belt and his gauntlets and his antimagic weapon there just couldn"t be anything against which he couldn"t triumph. Unless there was another chimaera here, which seemed highly unlikely. Like it or not he was a hero, uncertain nature and weak stomach aside.
He left the valley, pa.s.sing over the cliff where Kian had once fought a flopear and, almost miraculously, survived. The flopear had also survived, he remembered, falling with his club off the cliff and down, down, to land with a probable splatting sound. As Kian had told it the tough little warrior had not only survived the fall, but had a short time later intercepted him and Lonny at the base of the cliff! Obviously Kian too had lived through great dangers, but so too had that murderous flopear. If it was really the same one.
How familiar the country looked! How very familiar. He flew at near minimum speed into the desert. At home they called this land the Sadlands, while in Hud it was the Barrens. In Scud it would be called something equally appropriate. Strange, though near duplication in people and geography prevailed in related frames the names always changed. Fortunately, perhaps, otherwise the confusion for a frame-hopper would be even worse. Suppose he were to meet his mother"s duplicate in this frame, and she not only looked like his mother and acted like her, but had his mother"s name? Or suppose his wife? If he met Heln here and she looked the same as the Heln he had left at home, and had the same name, he"d think of her as the same person. That could be very bad, and he was thankful that duplicate individuals bore separate identification. For one thing, the only way a local Heln could have the same name was if she had married a local Kelvin. Was he ready to meet himself?
He shook his head, trying to free it of burgeoning concepts that threatened to make it explode. Flying along at a little over a good running speed he began some unaccustomed philosophizing. It was what he had warned himself against. The squarear had said it was bad to think about such things, but now he did. The thought was, which was real? Was it home or was it the silver-serpent world, or the chimaera world, or his father"s Earth? Bad question, and quite senseless, maybe. For of course all realities were real in equal proportion. It depended where a person was, and when. Thus the warriors of the past, and ancestors he had never seen or known existed-they seemed unreal, yet were the very substance of reality, for who would exist without that ancestry? Likewise every possibility, every slight change with infinite variations was, by the very nature of things, real and leading to real realities somewhere else. When such realities mixed, as when folk used the Mouvar network to travel between them, or when John Knight and his band accidentally crossed over- And there was an answer to one riddle! There would be no Kelvin here, no Heln, because they were the children of the members of that group. They would exist only in the particular world to which that band had come. There might be a Charlain here, but she could never have married John Knight. Maybe Hal Hackleberry, or his equivalent, but not- Head buzzing, as it always did when he tried to think about such things, Kelvin looked down and spied what had to be Scud"s outlaw camp. He would land boldly, and- But suppose it was the bad Jac who had stolen the dragon scale and kidnapped Jon? That was in his home frame, but couldn"t a Jac of that nature exist here instead of the Jac he had more recently known? He hoped the answer was no, but he couldn"t be certain. An evil Jac and an evil king in the same frame was more than he thought he could manage. Would Lonny be here? And another dwarf either as evil as Queeto or as saintly as Heeto? These thoughts were making his head more than just swim. The height did not make him dizzy, but the thinking it engendered did. He had to get down and put an end to this.
Since he did not want to be pierced with crossbow bolts or arrows, he would land a short distance away and walk in to the camp. Probably he should have been thinking about that instead of those other things.
Moving his fingers carefully on the control levers on the belt"s buckle he came to a stop in midair and descended until his feet touched sand. Nothing moving now, as it had been while he was aloft. He was once more on solid earth, and so his thoughts were grounded too.
Ahead was the camp. Horses, men moving. If they had not seen him in the air, they would spy him now.
Even as he thought this, two horses approached. As they came nearer he recognized the riders and men he had known, though of course these were not the same.
"Stranger, who be you? Quick, or die!"
That was poor unfortunate Smith, who had died such a ghastly death! Kelvin strove to get his thoughts in order, knowing that the threat was real and so were their weapons.
"I have business with your leader."
"My leader?" The man was incredulous.
"Scarface Jac. He is your leader, isn"t he?"
This Smith seemed to hesitate as if trying to decide whether to use the crossbow he had leveled at Kelvin, or merely cut him down with a sword. Then, deciding it could do no harm, he circled his horse behind the stranger and said, "Walk into camp. I"ll be watching you."
Kelvin wished he had landed closer. By the time he was among the tents he was sweating from exertion under the desert sun. A scorpiocrab scuttled out of his way, reminding him of the chimaera. Other than that and a couple of th.o.r.n.y plants he saw no sign of desert life.
They emerged from tents almost as though by magic, Jac among them. He really was a scarface, with a scar that was twice the size and ugliness of Cheeky Jac"s, the onetime bandit of the Sadlands. He waited for Kelvin to speak.
"I"m Kelvin Knight Hackleberry," Kelvin said. "I need your help to rescue some friends of mine."
"Why?" Jac asked. It was a challenge as much as a question.
"Their captors are the king"s men. My friends and I can help you defeat the king"s men. You see, we"re from a different frame."
"From a different frame and you want to help us defeat King Hoofourth, Scud"s good and proper king? Just why do you want to do that and why do you think I"d be interested?"
Oh-oh, Kelvin thought. This wasn"t quite as he had antic.i.p.ated.
"In the other frame your king was a tyrant and had to be replaced. Isn"t he a tyrant here as well?"
At that moment the first woman Kelvin had seen came from a tent and walked straight to Jac. She put her face against the bandit"s brawny arm and looked up adoringly. It was Lonny, or at least her duplicate. The girl Kian wanted to marry.
But this wasn"t the same frame! Here Lonny could marry the bandit, who had indeed been attracted to her in the serpent frame. There, she could marry Kian. There was no conflict. Just so long as Kelvin managed to rescue Kian and get him there.
"You call our king a tyrant?" the outlaw demanded. "You want him overthrown?"
Kelvin tried to tell himself that it wasn"t genuine anger in the bandit"s voice. Carefully he said, "It may be that I do not understand. In a world nearly like this one there was a king who was very bad. In that world an outlaw named Jac fought and conquered him."
"You would have me commit treason?" Jac"s face was very red, and the scar tissue in the star-shaped mark on his cheek stood out ghastly white.
"I"m not here to start trouble," Kelvin said. "But if your sovereign resembles this other, you must want to be rid of him."
"I must, must I?" This was spoken very aggressively.
This had to be a mistake, Kelvin thought. Time to rectify it. He fingered the controls on his belt and instantly was high above the bandits" heads.
"You come down here!" Jac the bandit ordered.
Kelvin ignored the order. He climbed to a suitable elevation, then moved the lever forward for full speed. He was just in time. Even at this rate of motion, he saw the arrows and crossbow bolts come perilously close.
He heard shouted orders and looked back to see men mounting horses. Fortunately the belt could outrun any horse, even the oversized battle steeds.
He sped away across blank desert, then swung to the east. He would catch up with the king"s party himself. Even if the gauntlets and the Mouvar weapon couldn"t handle the situation, he"d still have to try. If the prophecy his mother believed were true, he"d have to survive this frame and get back home to fulfill it at what he hoped would be some far future time.
But then, as the green hills appeared, a disturbing thought intruded itself. Just maybe the prophecy had no effect in other frames. He always had believed himself capable of getting killed, prophecy or no prophecy, and in a different frame death might be likely. He remembered unpleasantly almost dying when he first arrived in the frame so much like this one. If it hadn"t been for Heeto, the heroic dwarf in that frame, he knew he would have died. No, no, the prophecy might or might not be real, but it was nothing to stake one"s life on.
Down below the road that led, if the geography of this frame did not diverge too far from the frames he remembered, to the royal palace, there was a big cloud of dust. He slowed, hovered, and tried to make out what was happening.
There were horses prancing. Swords were flashing. Men were dying. G.o.ds, he realized belatedly, it was a battle!
He lowered himself silently, trusting that the combatants would be too involved to look up. In the swirling dust he saw his father and brother kept back by guards wearing the Scud uniform. More uniformed soldiers were battling men who wore no uniforms at all but were clad much as were the bandits in the desert. Those who fought the soldiers must be the good guys. But were they? Uncomfortably, he thought of the encounter he had just had. Similar frames were deceptive in their dissimilarities.
I can"t take anything for granted, he thought. Just because they are taking Father and Kian to the palace doesn"t necessarily mean harm to them.
But he was almost sure it did. Something about the way the soldiers had acted at the cliffs convinced him that the royal side just couldn"t be the right side.
Having convinced himself, he acted. Skillfully he moved the lever. When he was at precisely the right spot he cut off the belt power completely.
He dropped, sword in gauntleted hand, like a heavy stone. He was about to join the fray.
CHAPTER 18.
Healings
Charlain saw the dust clouds ahead and heard the drumming of horses" hooves, the clang of swords, and the screams of men. Battle. Men seemed to take such foolish joy in combat! It seemed to her that the very knowledge lent wings to her horse"s feet. Not away from danger, but toward it. Toward Lester and whatever danger threatened his life, that the cards had shown her.
Why, she wondered, bouncing uphill on horseback, am I doing this? I haven"t any magical witch"s fire! I haven"t any laser weapon! I haven"t even a sword! What"s to prevent some mighty thewed swordsman from swinging down on me?
A moment later she was at the crest of the hill, and saw just such a swordsman as she had feared. His sword blade was raised high and caught the bright rays of the sun here above the dust clouds. In a moment he would reach her and that blade would lop off her head.
She sat on her horse. She stopped it with a gentle "Whoa, Nellie," and waited with hands on reins. The Kance soldier could see her plainly, could see that she was a woman and unarmed.
Of course there were other things soldiers did besides killing, as Heln had found out...
The soldier"s horse slowed. The young man, hardly older than Kelvin but more heroically formed, stared at her, mouth agape. The sword hesitated. His blue eyes, cold but still youthful, studied her. Then, as abruptly as he had appeared, he lowered the sword, sheathed it, and rode away. She watched him disappear over the rise and then down into the cloud of battle, and she hoped that he too would be a survivor this day.
What had done it? Certainly not her looks, though she believed she was still attractive. Was it because he saw his own mother in her eyes? She could not be certain, but she knew that an ancient witchery had served her well this day. Soldiers commonly killed soldiers in the heat of battle, but not unarmed, unresisting, and thoroughly helpless innocents. A warrior the young Kance soldier might be, but not a mindless, consciousless slaughterer.
She took a deep breath, and then she simply waited until the battle sound diminished and the dust settled in the valley. Soldiers in Kance uniform sped past her on lathered horses. Below, the color of the uniforms resolved themselves into Hermandy"s muddy clay and Kelvinia"s forest-green. The side that she had expected to win this battle had in fact won.
She was still waiting when the Hermandy soldier approached on horseback. Following after fleeing Kance warriors he had spotted her and turned. Now he rode forward deliberately. He was a big man with hair on his face and a cruel set to his mouth. When he stared into her eyes she knew instinctively that he would not be dissuaded as easily as the first had been.
Should she scream? Who would hear her? Should she wheel her horse and try to run? That charger he rode could readily overtake her mare. Should she look seductive and try to buy a little time? The Herman might not be interested. Judging from appearances, his l.u.s.t might be mainly for causing pain.