too-subtle emphasis on "we."
Then he did a kind of cool little trick: He swirled his hand in a tall oval, and there, shimmering, hanging in the air, was a mirror. In the mirror, a reasonably convincing version of a skinhead. I ran my hand over my scalp. Weird. I could feel hair, but in the mirror I saw shaved scalp.
In my hands I cradled a gun I couldn't actually feel. Air gun.
"A tattoo," I suggested. "Here, on my arm. A dragon swirled around a Confederate battle flag and the words 'Born to Raise Hell.'"
The tattoo appeared, although the flag in question was closer to the British flag.
"Good enough. Now what?"
"We wait," Merlin said. "They are coming."
Sure enough, when I looked down the road I saw a ragged line of torches.
"Shouldn't we hide?"
"No. We should merely be silent."
They came on, and we stood there in plain view, but apparently invisible. They came on, maybe twenty men, all armed to the teeth and favoring the camouflage look. They were singing as they went, and I kid you not, they were singing
"Dixie."
"Dixie." A bunch of guys from Chicago, for God's sake, singing "Dixie" like they were somehow the natural heirs of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the jackasses.
And there was Senna at their head. Senna but not Senna.
This was an enhanced Senna. Senna on steroids. The action figure of Senna. She had turned herself into the Frank Frazetta version of Senna: rippling muscles and costume straight out of some maladjusted comic-book reader's sadomasochistic fantasy. She was swaggering in a very un-Senna sort of way.
Wearing a sword and a winged opera helmet. A Valkyrie, I realized. We'd seen the actual Valkyries, and she had copied their look.
I almost giggled. I mean, come on: Even in Everworld there should be some kind of a limit on fashion choices.
But I guess she was giving the troops what they wanted: some overblown, Edgar Rice Burroughs heroine. Big Babes on Mars.
She came nearer, lit by high-held torches, keeping step with the shouted, defiant song, high on her own power, pumped both physically and psychologically.
The illusory gun I was holding changed subtly as Merlin saw some of the real thing.
Senna came level with us. A frown. A look of uncertainty in her eyes. She felt our presence. She was going to kill me. She was going, I swear to God, going to kill us, going to see us, reach right over and kill me.
I held my breath. Glanced nervously at Merlin. He was watching Senna, eyes glittering, focused. He didn't look too relaxed himself.
Then Senna shook off her doubts and marched on. The column passed by and at the end, we stepped onto the road joining the column. We were visible now. The guy immediately ahead of us turned and gave us a suspicious look from under the brim of his Wehrmacht cap. Merlin smiled at the guy and the guy went kind of blank and then nodded, like we'd known each other all along.
Merlin went to work with shocking efficiency. He stepped up behind Wehrmacht Cap and calmly cut his throat.
I had to cover my mouth to stifle the surprised yelp.
Merlin bent over the body, yanked the guy's Uzi away, and handed it to me. "I take it we need this instrument?" he said.
I nodded and tried not to think about what I'd gotten myself into. "I need the guy's ammo belt, too," I said.
Now I was carrying a real weapon, not an illusion. That was comforting. Not real comforting, but all in all, if you're going to end up in a gun fight you want to avoid carrying an imaginary weapon. Pointing your finger and going, "Bang!
Bang!" is not all that effective.
We marched on our frolicking way: 'Roid-Senna in the lead.
Merlin and me in the rear, and in between twenty or so living proofs that white people aren't really superior.
Through the countryside. Into the town, mostly charred rubble now. Over the bodies. Up the hill to the castle. In the gate. And there it was, the scene Senna must have dreamed about for a long time: The courtyard was filled with her soldiers, all cheering wildly at her entrance. They lined the walls of the courtyard and the tops of the walls, poised atop the crenellations, many if not most holding torches. How many? At least fifty, seventy-five with our contingent added. It seemed like more. All armed to the teeth.
In the center of the courtyard a dozen people stood staggering under the weight of massive chains. David, Jalil, King Camulos, Fios, Goewynne, a handful of druids I didn't know, and Etain.
The chains were looped around legs and waists, over shoulders, around necks. Here and there massive, primitive locks had been placed. The chain links were each big enough to stick your hand through. The chains weighed a ton. Etain was on her knees, unable to carry the weight, her head bowed low.
Her clothes were ripped, shredded. Goewynne had been hit.
Her face was bruised. The king was badly wounded, clutching his side, blood seeping from a gut wound. A blue druid, a young guy with an incongruously full beard and strange green eyes, was trying to help stem the flow of royal blood.
David was a mess. His own mother wouldn't have recognized him. He'd been professionally beaten. One eye was closed by a knot the size of a lemon. Jalil wasn't much better off.
April was nowhere to be seen. That was the worst of it, because although seeing them like this made me burn, not seeing April, not knowing what had happened to her, or was happening to her, that was worse still.
I felt Merlin's hand on my arm. Restraining me. He looked at me with eyes that were not his own, and shook his head slowly.
I unclenched my fists. Forced myself to breathe. Loosened the finger that had wrapped around the Uzi's trigger.
"Silence!" Senna roared.
The yelping and hollering and yeehahing and sieg-heiling calmed down. An expectant pause.
"Hello, David. Hello, Jalil," she said in a sneering voice intended to reach most of her troops.
No answer. The crowd leaned forward expectantly. They wanted to see what the Great One was going to do. I guessed that most of these guys didn't really know what they'd gotten themselves into, or who, exactly, they were following.
"Nothing to say, David?" Senna demanded.
David just looked at her.
Keith stepped up behind him and nailed him in the kidneys with his rifle butt. He went down, gasping for breath, an involuntary whimper of pain escaping. But then he levered himself back up, fighting the pain and the weight of his chains.
"Where are the other two?" Senna demanded in a hiss of a voice.
The question was directed at a guy I hadn't noticed before: a skinhead wearing a muscle T-shirt over plenty of muscle.
Muscle Shirt looked uncertain. "What other two, Great One?"
"April and Christopher," she said. "Where are they?"
"The uh... the blond guy, that's Christopher, right?" Muscle Shirt stammered. "He got killed. He's... the body is right over, you know, Great One, with the other bodies."
"Bring it here. I want to see it," Senna ordered.
This ought to be good, I thought. A bunch of toadies raced off to rummage through the grisly heap of bodies by the gate. I was pretty sure they weren't going to find my body.
Senna waited impatiently, staring holes through Muscle Shirt. The flunkies returned empty-handed.
Senna drew her lips back in a feral snarl I'd never seen before. "You let Christopher escape. Well, that's okay, I'll let that go. He's irrelevant. But April... that's a different matter entirely.
Where is my favorite half sister?"
Muscle Shirt looked around like someone else might come forward to take the blame. Oddly enough, no one volunteered.
I spotted Keith in the crowd. He was carefully looking down at the ground.
"No April," Senna said regretfully. "And yet, my orders were clear: At all costs get the four real-worlders. Despite this, I see only half of them here. Well, half a failure earns half a punishment."
She waved her Demi Moore arms very theatrically,
and instantly Muscle Shirt's body burst into flames. No, only half. He burned only on his left side. Burned as if someone had poured lighter fluid all over him and struck a match.
He screamed and flapped at himself as every glittering eye gazed on in horror and fascination. Muscle Shirt's flesh crisped and peeled like pork cracklings in the barbecue.
Senna was burning a man alive.
Chapter
XXV
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Muscle Shirt quivered, shook, whimpered as he touched the burned flesh that now, magically, was whole and sound and unharmed again.
The burning had been an illusion, but no less hideous for that feet. A display by the Great One. A little lesson on who held the power. And her boys loved it. They were horrified and sickened and scared peeless, but they loved it just the same.
David had watched the whole thing stonily. Jalil's face was a mask of indifference. Etain had raised her head as much as she could, but let it sink back down under the weight of her chains. King Camulos was too gone even to glare, he was bleeding out. The blue druid eased him to the ground and knelt beside him. Goewynne tried to go to her husband, but Keith yanked her back by her hair.
Senna owned the crowd, that was for sure. Nothing like a display of casual brutality to really wow this particular crowd.
She strode her newly muscular way up to David.
"General Davideus," she said. "You've been outgeneraled."
She laughed at that. Laughed. Senna, a person who pretty much never laughed.
She was way off the deep end of the pier. She was channeling Mussolini at this point: strutting, posturing, flexing her illusory muscles, sticking out her rock-hard chest. She was playing to the crowd, camping it up, making them love her.
"David Levin!" she yelled, pointing an accusing finger at David. She'd placed extra emphasis on the "Levin," and through the crowd went the murmured response, "Jew."
"David was once my tool," she announced, clenching her fist. "But he defied me. And now he will suffer as all who defy me suffer."
Anticipation. Excitement. Oooh, the good stuff was still to come.
She turned to Jalil, and now the faked hatred she'd exposed toward David was replaced by real hatred.
"Still the unbeliever, Jalil?" she mocked. "Still think you're going to dissect me, take me apart, outsmart me?"
Jalil remained silent. I knew him well enough to know he was scared, but damned if he showed it.
"Pray to me, Jalil," Senna whispered. "Down on your knees and pray to me. Beg me for your life, and I'll let you keep it."
"I don't think so, Senna," he said.
"I think you will," she said. "You know, Jalil, I think your hands are very, very dirty."
Jalil looked blank, then slowly at first, then faster, he began rubbing his hands, rubbing at them with imaginary soap. He rubbed and rubbed, twisted them, worried them, scratched and clawed at the backs of his hands.
Blood began to flow.
"Jalil has a little problem. Did you know that, David? Jalil just can't seem to get clean. What's it called, Jalil? Obsessive-compulsive?"
"Stop it," David snapped.
"Jalil's a sick, sick boy. He tries so hard to be all brain, but his brain is sick. Sick and dirty, right, Jalil?"
"I said stop it," David said.
"No, I don't think so," Senna said and giggled as Jalil became more frantic. His hands were bloody, his nails clawing, and now tears rolled down his face as the crowd laughed and hooted, unsure what they were seeing, but glad to see the black man cry and bleed.
"I'll make him claw himself down to the bone," Senna said to David. "He'll clean himself to death."
"Do something," I muttered to Merlin.
"This is not the time," he whispered. "Something will happen soon, and then the time will be ripe. Soon! He approaches. I sense his approach."
"He? Who he?"
No answer.
"Jalil, oh, Jalil," Senna mocked in a singsong voice. "Your face is dirty now. Filthy!"
Jalil shuddered, tried to resist, then began slowly to scrub and finally to claw at his face.
"You sick bitch!" someone yelled.
That someone, to my great horror, was me.
Senna spun on her heels, and for a sweet moment I saw fear in her eyes. The tyrant's natural, instinctive fear of defiance.
"Who said that?" she shrieked.
"You really must learn patience," Merlin snapped in an undertone. Then, without missing a beat, he yelled, "He said it!"
and pointed his illusory finger at an unoffending creep standing beside me.
"No!" the creep yelled, but way too late.
Senna aimed a finger at him and he burst into flame. I backpedaled, everyone did, backed away as the guy screamed and writhed, and I knew deep down that this time it was no illusion.
I could smell it this time.
He fell to his knees, a living torch. His gun fell from his grip and I snatched it up like I was trying to save valuable hardware from being wasted. It was hot to the touch.
Senna's mad, distorted face glowed in the flames.
Bang! Bang!
Not me, not anyone firing a gun, the reports were from cartridges in the dead man's ammo belt fired off by the heat of the flames. Everyone scattered. The guy had loaded magazines all over, maybe a hundred rounds, and Senna, who was not only a complete whack job, but not real bright when it came to weapons, had lit up what amounted to a walking ammunition dump.
The Sennites up on the walls crouched behind stone.
Everyone down below bolted for cover. It was a kitchen full of cockroaches when someone turns on a light.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The bullets went off randomly, in groups of two or three, in singles, unpredictable. Merlin and I had run with everyone else and we were behind a stone well. Only the chained prisoners and Senna remained exposed, and David was yelling, "Get down!"
Etain and Goewynne were already down, but now the druids and the king dropped, too. One of the druids was too slow. A bullet caught him in the leg.
But, of course, bullets fired without benefit of a barrel were less dangerous. The explosion was not confined so they were dangerous only at close range.
I saw David slipping out of his chains. He must have beat the lock already because he sloughed off the weight without too much trouble and was now grabbing Jalil, pulling Jalil's clawing hands away from his face.
Senna looked like the visiting head of the school board addressing the assembly where someone has lit a stink bomb.
She was outraged and confused at losing control. She was furious and unsure of where to direct her rage, what with the fact that she herself was responsible for this particular fiasco.
One thing was sure: Senna had to go. Senna was loony.
The human race was going to have to get along without her.
I did what I never wanted to do: I leveled my rifle, took shaky aim, and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing.
The safety!
I fumbled madly, looking for the safety. Was that it, or wasn't the thing even cocked? What was... there, that had to be the safety.
I clicked it, but a hand was already wrapped around the barrel, forcing it down.
No man would take Senna's life. That's what Brigid had said. I looked up into Senna's manic face. "Who are you?" she demanded. Of course, she couldn't yet see through Merlin's disguise of me.
She put her free hand on my face, almost caressing, and I felt all the anger, all the determination slip away, disappear behind a bank of fog that rolled into my brain.
"It's just me, Christopher," I said.
Chapter
XXVI
“Christopher, of course," she said. Then, raising her voice to a shout, she yelled, "Come and take this garbage away!"
I was confused for a moment because I thought she was talking about me, and she couldn't be talking about me because I loved her, I loved her and served her, and always would.
/>
But no, to my deep relief she was talking about the dead man, the burned corpse who had, at last, slowed his rate of fire.
A couple of her soldiers came running, eager to please, scared to disappoint, but leery about grabbing onto a charcoal briquette studded with un-fired rounds.
There was a bang and a yelp of pain, but they managed after some confusion to throw a rope around the remains and drag him off at a run toward the gate.
The cowering minions resurfaced, laughing with relief.
"All we need is April now," Senna said, caressing my face.
"And, of course, master Merlin. He must be very nearby. Only he could have disguised you so effectively."
I was all set to point Merlin out, but the wizard was no longer where I'd last seen him. Senna noticed my puppy-dog eagerness and frustration and patted my head almost affectionately.
"No, no, never fret, Christopher: He's shifted himself again, no doubt. But we'll find him, won't we? We'll find the wizard yet."
"We'll get him," I said. "We'll get April, too."
Senna looked sharply at me. "Do you know where she is?"
"No," I said. And yet, at that same moment, a flash of memory, an image. Blue. Green eyes. A strange beard.
I tried to put it together in my head, tried to make sense of it. The answer would please Senna, and pleasing Senna was the point. I tried to focus, tried to think, but it was as if someone else was in my head, blocking my every attempt.
Senna turned away. Time to rally the troops.
"Brave soldiers of the New Order," she cried. "A wizard is among us. None other than Merlin the Magnificent. He is passing as one of you. But you know who you are. Each of you is known to at least a few others. Look around at your companions, and point out the soldier who is unknown. Find the outsider."
Muttering, suspicious looks, yelling back and forth. Just the kind of assignment to appeal to this crowd: Find the outsider.
"There!" a voice cried finally. "That one. No one knows him."
It was Keith, pointing triumphantly.
"What the hell are you talking about? It's me, John Loboda.
Terry, you know me! Al, you know me."