"It's a complex spell," Wencit said apologetically. "It takes time to prepare for it, and that's especially true in this case. Since you aren't remotely what or who I anticipated, I'll have to be very careful in specifying where you're supposed to go. It's my fault you're here, and if I send you home, that's where I want you to go. I certainly don't want to end up just dropping you into still another world that isn't yours."
"I see." Houghton knew his tone sounded grudging. Which, now that he thought about it, was just too bad. The old guy was right—it was his fault Houghton and Mashita had ended up wherever the hell they were. Still, he reminded himself, the other man—the wizard, he supposed—seemed to be willing to acknowledge his responsibility and do his best to make things right again.
"My name's Houghton," he heard himself saying. "Gunnery Sergeant Kenneth Houghton, US Marines."
"Houghton?" the other man repeated, as if the name felt peculiar in his mouth. Then he shook himself. "Men call me Wencit of Rûm," he said.
"Well then, Wencit," Houghton said, "how soon can we get started on this 'complex spell' of yours?"
"Not for at least several hours," Wencit replied. "As I said, I'd expected to summon my ally from this universe; it never occurred to me that I might end up reaching over into another one. Unfortunately, it did. Since I hadn't expected that, I didn't include a command to identify the one you came from, and the spell's set up a ripple pattern in the magic field. I'm going to have to give it time to settle a bit before I can start looking for the traces that will guide me to your universe."
"My universe?" Houghton shook his head. "You're telling me I'm in an entirely different universe?"
"Obviously," Wencit replied. Another wave of his hand indicated Houghton's uniform and equipment harness and Tough Mama, sitting on the grass behind him and Mashita—who'd climbed up onto the decking through his hatch –ñ looming up on the far side of the turret. Then the same hand indicated Wencit's own clothing, the campfire, and the magnificent horse grazing nearby. "I may not recognize your vehicle, Kenneth Houghton," he said, "but wouldn't you say it seems just a bit out of place here?"
"I guess you could put it that way," Houghton admitted, and glanced over his shoulder at Mashita.
The private had obviously been listening to the early stages of at least Houghton's side of the conversation over his helmet commo link. Now the short, wiry Nisei shrugged and settled himself casually on top of the turret beside the M240 machine gun at the commander's station. It put him close enough to listen to Houghton's conversation with their . . . host, and despite this Wencit's apparent sincerity, it didn't bother Houghton a bit to have the machine gun manned, just in case.
"So, we're in another universe," he said, turning back to Wencit. "What is it? One of those 'parallel universes' the science-fiction writers are so fond of?"
"I'm not familiar with 'science-fiction writers,' Kenneth Houghton," Wencit replied. "But to call our universes 'parallel,' might actually be a good way to describe it. Or, at least, as good a way as I've ever heard anyone else suggest."
"It's Ken, not Kenneth," Houghton said. His voice was harsher than he'd intended as a familiar stab of remembered loss went through him. He'd always disliked his first name. In fact, Gwynn was the only one who had ever been able to call him "Kenneth" without making him feel like some sort of dweeb.
"Ken?" Wencit repeated, then made a sound suspiciously like a chuckle.
"Well, Ken," he said after a moment, "as I was saying, our universes may not precisely be 'parallel,' but time is proceeding at the same rate and in the same direction in both of them. I suppose the best way to describe the differences between them is to say that each of our universes was formed out of the many differing possible outcomes of an inconceivable number of separate events. Judging from your appearance, your equipment, and the fact that sorcery is obviously as strange to you as your equipment appears to me, our universes must have diverged long, long ago.
"Which," he continued in a more serious tone, "leaves me even more puzzled about how my spell could have reached so far afield from its intended destination. And how you could have arrived in the flesh, as it were. Usually, when you try to move people between universes, all you actually manage to summon is a shadowman, a sort of . . . doppelganger, I suppose you'd call it, rather than the actual individual. I'm almost beginning to wonder if someone else didn't have a finger in this particular pie."
"You know . . . Wencit," Houghton said, "the thing that worries me most right this minute is that I'm starting to feel like you're actually making sense."
Wencit chuckled at Houghton's desert-dry tone. Then he shook his head again.
"You said you were a 'gunnery sergeant,'" he said. "That's a military rank, yes?"
"Yeah. A gunnery sergeant is the senior noncom in a platoon of Marines," Houghton said.
"Ah. I thought it must be something like that. And this." The wild wizard gestured at the peculiar, bulky, massive vehicle again. "This entire wagon, or whatever. It's a weapon, isn't it?"
"It's armed," Houghton conceded warily, one eyebrow quirked. He folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head. "It's not exactly a main battle tank, but I'd guess it could hold its own against anything we're likely to encounter here."
"I see."
Wencit rubbed his neatly trimmed white beard for a moment, then grimaced.
"Gunnery Sergeant," he said earnestly, "as I say, you aren't at all what I expected. But if you and your friend —" a nod of his head indicated Mashita, still sitting atop the eight-wheeled vehicle "— are both soldiers, perhaps the spell that brought you here did better than I first thought."
"Just a minute, now, Wencit!" Houghton said. He recognized that tone. It was the kind of tone officers—or, still worse, civilian intelligence pukes or even Air Force officers—used when they needed someone to volunteer for some perfectly stupid frigging op.
The wizard stopped speaking and regarded him steadily. Or, at least, Houghton thought it was steadily. It was amazing how hard it was to read someone's expression when you couldn't actually see their eyes.
"I'm sure you wouldn't have 'summoned' us—or the gryphon you were trying to get, anyway—unless the shit had really hit the fan. And for all I know, you're a perfectly nice guy, with a perfectly legitimate reason for looking for any help you can get. But like you say, this isn't our universe, and Jack and I have responsibilities of our own back home."
"I realize that," Wencit said earnestly. "But at the same time, don't good men have the same responsibilities, wherever they may find themselves?"
"Don't go there," Houghton cautioned, shaking his head firmly. "Every time I've gotten into trouble in my life, it's been because someone convinced me it was the 'right thing to do.' It's not going to work this time."
"So you're not even curious about why you wound up here?"
"I didn't say that. I just said that what Jack and I need to do is to get back to where our own people are waiting on us for the operation we were about to mount. Trust me, Wencit, we've got more than enough shit of our own to deal with back home."
"Really?" Wencit crossed his own arms and settled back on his heels. "You're at war, then?"
"Yeah, we are," Houghton agreed bleakly. "Took us a while to figure it out. And we screwed up along the way, more than once. But that's what we are."
"What kind of war?"
"Ha! It's gonna take more than a few hours to answer that one! Let's just say we're up against a bunch of certified looney-tunes who're more than willing to murder as many civilians as it takes to make their point. And," he conceded grudgingly, "a lot of them are perfectly willing to die themselves along the way."
The tall red-haired "gunnery sergeant's" voice had gone flat and hard, Wencit noticed. He rather doubted Houghton realized just how true that was, but it confirmed several things Wencit had already suspected about him.
"You sound like a man who's seen too much bloodshed, Ken Houghton," he said quietly. "Too many innocent de
ad."
Houghton's jaw muscles clenched hard for a moment. Then he inhaled deeply.
"Damned straight I have." His voice was as quiet as Wencit's own, but burred with anger and the ashes and clinkers of old hatred. "Not all of them from the other side's efforts, either," he continued. "I don't know about wars here, but the one we're fighting back home is a copperplated bitch. We do our best to minimize civilian casualties, but how the hell do you do that when the other side fades into the rest of the civilian population? When you're doing your goddamned fighting right in the middle of a frigging city?"
He shook his head hard, and Wencit nodded.
"It's the children, isn't it?" he asked gently. "It's the children that make it hurt so badly."
Kenneth Houghton's nostrils flared as he heard the sympathy—the understanding—in Wencit's voice. Somehow, he knew, the old man, the wizard, truly did understand. And because he knew that, the gunnery sergeant found himself admitting the truth.
"Yeah. It's the kids." His jaw tightened once more. "It's everybody caught in the mess, but especially the kids. They never asked for any of it, never got to choose. If it was just us against the bad guys, out in the open, one-on-one, that'd be one thing. But it isn't. And I don't guess it can be, really. We call it cowardly, and maybe it is. But it's also what they call 'asymmetrical warfare.'" He grunted a harsh, bitter laugh. "They're not about to come out where we can blow their asses off, because they know they can't possibly fight our kind of war and win. So instead, we have to fight their kind. And the more civilian casualties that get inflicted, the better it works out for their plans. After all, we're the ones in their cities. If somebody gets killed, who are the locals going to blame for it?"
"You're tired," Wencit said. Houghton looked at him, and the wizard smiled crookedly. "Not physically, perhaps. But tired—so tired—of seeing the innocent killed."
"What?" Houghton tried to rally. "You're a mind reader, too?"
"No, I'm a wizard, not a mage. But I don't have to be able to read your mind. Not to see that truth, Gunnery Sergeant Houghton. Trust me," the smile went even more crooked for a moment, "even if we've never met before, I recognize the kind of man you are. I've known others like you. Too many of them, I think sometimes."
"And?" Houghton said when the wizard paused again. A little warning bell was trying to sound deep inside Houghton's brain. Somehow the conversation was slipping out of his control, going places he'd never intended it to go. He'd intended to maintain his focus on the demand that he and Mashita be sent back to their own universe, yet something inside him knew it was going in another direction entirely. And something else inside him couldn't resist that changing destination.
"And I'm afraid I'm about to lose another one of them," Wencit said. "A good man, one with a sense of responsibility, who's already seen and faced enough evil for any other man's entire lifetime. I think you'd like him, if you ever met."
"And you're about to invite me to do just that, aren't you?" Houghton said. It was a challenge, but without the edge of confrontation Wencit had half-expected. "You're going to suggest that I ought to go ahead and help him—and you—out, like one good, responsible man to another."
"Something like that," Wencit admitted.
"I don't think so," Houghton responded. But his tone wasn't quite as firm as he'd wanted it to be.
"You've said you're fighting an ugly war back home," Wencit said. "So am I, my friend, and I'll wager I've been fighting it even longer than you have. A lot longer, in fact. I know what it is to have blood on your hands. To lose friends, comrades. To see the innocent caught in the middle of all the carnage—to wonder if your efforts aren't actually making it worse. If at least a part of you isn't becoming the very thing you're fighting. That's what I'm doing out here in the middle of nowhere, the reason I cast the spell that ended up bringing you and your friend here, as well."
"I'll take your word for it," Houghton said. "It's still not my war."
"No?" Wencit cocked his head. "Maybe it is. Surely, evil is much the same in every universe, isn't it? And —" he looked directly into Houghton's green eyes "— quite a lot of children have already died in my war, as well. And more of them will die very soon now, if it isn't stopped."
"Shit happens." It was supposed to come out hard, uncaring.
It failed.
"Yes, it does," Wencit said. "May I at least show you what I'm talking about here?"
Houghton knew better. He knew better, and yet someone else seemed to have control of his voice.
"Sure," he said. "Go ahead. Trot it out, but you're gonna have to go some to beat the kind of shit I've already seen."
"Am I?"
Wencit smiled oddly, and then his hands moved. They sketched an immaterial square in the air, about chest height, four feet or so across, and two or three tall. Houghton frowned and started to open his mouth to ask him what he thought he was doing, but then the air in the square Wencit's hands had defined seemed to ripple abruptly.
The Marine's mouth snapped shut again as the ripple effect cleared as suddenly as it had appeared. In its place were images—sharp, as crystal-clear as any video screen or television Houghton had ever seen. And, as he saw them, Houghton felt a sudden, total confidence that what he was seeing was an actual, faithful record of what had truly happened.
It was one of the most horrific things he had ever seen.
Kenneth Houghton had seen men, women, and children mangled and mutilated by "improvised explosive devices," by mortar and rocket fire, by artillery shells, bombs, machine-gun fire, and small arms. He'd seen the horror napalm left behind, the indescribable burns of white phosphorus. Yet this . . . .
He stared at Wencit's images and saw brutal combat with swords, axes, pikes and halberds—the sheer, personal butchery of edged steel cleaving flesh, close enough for an enemy's blood to spray into a man's face and eyes. He saw arrow storms, and thundering cavalry. He saw fountains of flame he somehow knew were born of the same sort of "sorcery" which had brought him to this world, this place. And he saw other flames—the flames of burning cities and villages, their streets littered with the bodies of those who had once lived in those blazing homes. He saw the bodies of women, mothers, cut down as they fled with children in their arms. He saw the children they'd tried to save. He saw laughing warriors tossing screaming children into the flames. He saw blood soaked altars, surrounded by the butchered bodies of sacrificial victims while still more victims were dragged, fighting frantically, to their fates. And he saw . . . creatures he had no names for—creatures out of the darkest depths of nightmare—killing and maiming, devouring. He saw them being directed, controlled, in their slaughter.
And he saw the men—and women—who stood against the tide of butchery and darkness. He watched them, recognized the iron determination and raw courage which kept them on their feet, facing that avalanche of horror when simple sanity must have cried out for them to flee for their lives. Some of them seemed wrapped in glittering coronas of blue light, like some sort of lightning. Others were simply men and women, with no light, no special aura. Only men and women who could not let the darkness triumph unopposed. Who had to face it.
And who died fighting it.
He saw it all, and only much later did he realize that what seemed to have taken hours at the time could not have lasted more than a very few minutes.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended. The images disappeared, and he found himself staring into Wencit of Rûm's wildfire eyes.
"That's my war, Gunnery Sergeant Houghton," the wizard said very, very softly. "And it's the war my friend is riding straight into all by himself."
II
"I'm thinking as how something new'ís after being added to the pot," Bahzell Bahnakson said to his horse.
Except, of course, that the magnificent roan stallion under his saddle wasn't a horse. In point of fact, Walsharno, son of Mathygan and Yorthandro, was a Sothÿ ii courser, far larger than any mere "horse," and as intelligent as an
y of the Races of Man. And, like the fox-eared hradani in his saddle, a champion of the war god, Tomanâk.
"And to just what sudden stroke of genius do we owe that particular observation?> a mellow voice asked deep inside Bahzell's brain.
"The fact that we're after seeing another entire batch of hoof prints joining up with them," he replied, waving one hand at the trail of trampled grass leading steadily southeast from the slight rise upon which they had halted. A second trail had just joined it, angling in from the west.
"Oh, that."
"Aye, that," Bahzell agreed sardonically.
"Well, maybe there'll be enough of them that they'll get in each other's way," Walsharno suggested.
"And if you're after believing that, I've some bottomland on the Ghoul Moor I could be letting you have cheap."
"I never said I thought it would happen that way. I merely pointed out that it could."
"Aye, so you did. And so far as wishful thinking is going, it's in my mind it's not so very much less likely than the King Emperor deciding as how he should be after adopting me as his heir."
Walsharno blew through his nostrils, shaking his head in equine amusement, and Bahzell chuckled. Not that either of them truly found the situation all that humorous. Champions of Tomanâk were seldom handed easy challenges, but this one was turning steadily more nasty as they went along, and Bahzell eased himself in the saddle as he contemplated how simple it had all seemed in the beginning.
It had started as little more than an unidentified raiding party, attacking herds and small villages along the southern frontier of the Kingdom of the Sothôii. Everyone's first assumption had been that the raiders who ruled the Kingdom of the River Brigands at the head of the Lake of Storms were responsible. But they had protested their innocence, and—in this case—they'd actually been telling the truth. Tomanâk was the god of justice, as well as the god of war, and no one could lie successfully when one of his champions directly invoked his power.
Had it in fact been the River Brigands, the situation would have been straightforward and relatively simple. The Brigands knew hradani only too well, and, like everyone else in northwestern Norfressa, they were sufficiently familiar with Bahzell's reputation to have listened very closely when he suggested that their current activities might be . . . unwise. Unfortunately, it hadn't been them after all, which had raised the interesting question of just who was responsible, and why.