Merlin Slept Here, Page 4

Chapter 4: Advanced Innkeeping

  This Lord of this castle, his name is Sir Damas, and he is the falsest knight that liveth, and full of treason, and a very coward as any liveth…

  -Sir Thomas Malory

  Late that afternoon the Bernards’ BMW swung into the gravel drive again, and Uncle Dave, Aunt Marci, and Deirdre stepped from the car’s air conditioning into the June heat. When Bob let them in at the front door, Uncle Dave did not wait to be asked to sit down but got straight to the point while they all stood in the entrance hall.

  “Sorry, Bob, but we’ve come to take possession of the house. You don’t have anyone staying here with you, do you? We’ll need all the keys.”

  “Uncle Dave! The redemption time isn’t even over yet.”

  “It’s close enough,” Uncle Dave said. “Face it, Bob, the place is ours. No one’s going to give or loan your grandpa the money to redeem it. Now, we’d like you to get moved out of here right away, so we can be free to sell the furniture. Bob, no offense, but I want you to move out while we’re watching. That’s just standard and keeps everybody friends.”

  Bob understood that his Uncle did not want him to have the chance to steal anything belonging to the property. With his face reddening, he wondered if Dave would want to go through his suitcases before he left.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, battling for self-control. “Maybe it seems to you like it’s no difference whether I leave today or a few days from now, but I have to keep it open for guests as long as I can.”

  “What, you’ve got guests with reservations?”

  Bob had to meekly admit that he did not.

  “Then what’s the problem? Why do you have to keep it open?”

  Deirdre laughed cruelly and pointed into the kitchen. “Because it says so on the fridge. It’s one of his rules.”

  Uncle Dave ignored this. “How soon can you be out?”

  Bob folded his arms and looked down at his uncle. “Not till I’m ready.”

  “Now, come on,” Uncle Dave said angrily. “This nonsense has gone on long enough. Are you one of those kind that squeeze out the last day and minute you can get from the law? Maybe force us to have you evicted? Do you want to create a permanent rift in the family? Look, we’ve got a buyer. We can’t wait on you.”

  “A buyer? But you were going to use the land for your orchard.”

  “That’s right, we are, but we’re selling just this parcel the house is on. There’s a realtor from town, a very nice young lady, coming out tomorrow morning to do the appraisal.”

  Bob felt so angry he hardly trusted himself to speak. He suddenly turned and slammed his palm against the wallpaper. The Bernards all started.

  “You apologize to her, Uncle Dave!” he shouted, turning back to them. “Tell her to wait until the redemption period is over and you can sell it.”

  Uncle Dave looked scared. “So that’s how it’s going to be, huh?”

  “Bobby, you’re not making a difficult situation any easier,” Aunt Marci said quietly.

  “Get out,” Bob said roughly, pointing to the door as if they could not find it without his help. “No, don’t say anything, just leave.”

  “Come on,” his uncle said to Marci and Deirdre. “Bob, you can have a few days. We’ll be back on the fifth, and you’d better be moved out by then, because we will take possession of the property if it takes the sheriff to do it.”

  In the evening, Bob sat on the porch, looking across the yard to the Ghastly Path and feeling hurt and used. He had had no guest the previous two nights, and yet he had thrown his relatives off the property in order to keep the place ready to accommodate more wizards. Wouldn’t that just ice it if no one came tonight either? He wanted to be off dating Julie, not hanging around hoping for something to happen. Maybe he would just call her, and if she still wanted to meet him at the racetrack, leave a note on the door: ‘Inn closed for the night.’ Well, maybe.

  Yet here came someone, earlier than usual, almost running from the Ghastly Path and across the yard to him. The man dashed up onto the porch and faced him, for the moment breathing too hard for speech. This gave Bob opportunity to look him over. What struck him most was the man’s thick, gray hair hanging down to his shoulders. His clean-shaven face was, in contrast, rather youthful. He wore a dark gray and very plain tunic with matching leggings. He carried nothing but a long, heavy coat.

  “I’m the last survivor,” he said at last in an unidentifiable accent. “The Rebels massacred all the other Chosen. They’re following me closely. The other portal, where is it?”

  “Bean field west of the inn,” Bob said, indicating the direction with only a slight motion of his head.

  “It’s close then? I’m almost out of strength. They’ll be here any minute, so I can’t stay here. You’d better come with me or follow me soon. If you try to stay even an hour, you’re life won’t be worth a lidlak.”

  Bob gathered that a lidlak was worth darn little. “You’re right, you can’t stay here,” he said. “I wouldn’t let you stay here even if you wanted to.”

  The man’s face fell. “So you know I’ve lost my powers,” he said.

  “All I know is that you’re not a true guest.”

  “Yes, you innkeepers can always tell about us,” he said tautly. “I was Ben Cooper, the Mage of New Pacifica. Now I’m just Ben Cooper and not welcome here. But no one else is coming, do you know that? They’re all dead.” He looked back toward the Ghastly Path. “Are you coming with me?”

  Bob shook his head with a smile. “You go on.”

  “Right. Keep sealed.”

  He ran around the house and out of sight. Bob got up in a leisurely way, followed him as far as the gap in the fence row, and watched to make sure he went through the western portal. He did not want people like that hanging around his inn. As for Ben’s story, he did not believe a word of it. Maybe he was a Rebel himself, but even if not, he was definitely not one of the Chosen. Worse yet, he was one more person trying to get Bob to abandon the inn.

  He heard the phone ring inside. When he answered it in the hot, close living room, he was pleased to hear Julie’s voice. She hesitatingly asked if he had a guest yet and whether he might just manage to leave the inn late this evening to see her brother race his car. It would be a chance to meet her parents. She mentioned that Logan Alberti had said at the Quali-Mart that afternoon that he would be at the track too. Her brother Rick’s race did not start until nearly ten. Of course, she would understand if he did not come.

  Bob had just been telling himself, after Ben Cooper’s brief appearance, that nothing would pry him away from the inn that night, but for Julie he relented. He agreed to leave if no one had come by nine-thirty; and no one did. He left the house unlocked and a room readied, in case someone would come absurdly late, and drove to the track.

  After the race (in which brother Rick finished third), he and Julie walked to the snack vendor’s shack with grit still in their teeth, thrown by the churning wheels of the quarter-midgets. He was relaxed and happy, anticipating a chili cheese dog or two, and feeling how much he had needed this Friday night off. Behind them, on the other side of the stands, motors were revving for the final race. Julie had slipped her hand into his as naturally as if it had long been their custom. Furthermore, she was not showing off half her skin like so many of the girls here. She did not need to try to snare him like that; she was secure. What a girl.

  “Mom and Dad like you, I can tell,” she was saying. “I hope you like them.”

  He assured her that he did.

  “I told them you’re losing the house, but also that you’ve been trying to get full time at the Mart, and that you want to go back to college and finish your Aviation major. Uh-oh, here comes our favorite Goth boy.”

  Logan had found them in the crowd.

  “Hey, man,” he said, approaching, “did you forget me last night?”

&
nbsp; “What do you mean?” Bob asked.

  “You forgot. It’s all right, man, but don’t you remember you wanted me to come over and help with your guests at the bed-and-breakfast? You weren’t there when I came, and I waited outside your place about all night but you didn’t come home.”

  The stranger had said the Wandering Wood’s spell was triggered by the presence of enemies.

  Bob began to speak hastily, “But that would mean that you’re—”

  “No, dude, I’m not mad. It’s OK, just a misunderstanding. Just tell me when I can come over. How about tomorrow?”

  “I’m sorry, Logan, but I really don’t need any help right now. I haven’t had a guest in days and very few at all.”

  “Really? Because I’m willing to do anything. I just think a business like that is so damn cool. Maybe I could learn some things and open one myself someday.”

  “Sorry, Logan.”

  “That’s cool.” Plainly it wasn’t. Logan’s thin lips were fighting to maintain a smile. “Guess I’ll see you at work then?”

  “See you, Logan.”

  When he was gone Julie made a slight sound expressing relief. “I’m really glad you didn’t go for that. I think he’s up to something.”

  “I’m pretty sure he is.”

  Bob wanted to catch Julie up on events, so as they walked on, he told her in a low voice about much of what had happened to him in the Wandering Wood. He added brief accounts of the Bernards’ visit and of Ben Cooper’s appearance and warning.

  “There are too many people lying to you,” she said. “I hate to say it, but maybe it’s for the best that you’re losing that old place. Maybe then you’ll be left alone.”

  A Saturday evening followed, again with no guest. Bob began to think that the inn would remain untenanted, close peacefully on Thursday, and that be the end of it.

  The man he had dubbed Spangles thought otherwise. That same evening, he was in a motel room on the outskirts of Mercury, just sitting down to talk with Logan Alberti. Without a costume to set it off, the older man’s beard looked quite ordinary. He was wearing slacks and a polo shirt.

  “It’s all right,” he said to the boy. “Bob Himmel’s house is between the portals, and the portals, even over hundreds of years, seldom shift so much that another house gets between them. So even without more evidence, I feel reasonably sure his place is our target.”

  He did not want to tell the boy the main reason he felt confident. The memory of the sound that had come from the stick was too painful to review. He could not prove it but felt in his bones that what he had heard had been voices of the dreaded Golden Legionnaires. But if that were so, he had to admit that even the presence of the stick did not absolutely confirm the inn’s location. The Wise had been known to loan or give such enchanted things to non-Mage neighbors—absurdly generous but all too common.

  He tried another way of checking. “But you didn’t happen to see if there was a wooden sign hanging near the front door?”

  “No, Meph, I told you,” Logan answered sulkily. “No lights were on, so it was black as hell. I could barely see the house.”

  “Well, I didn’t see a sign hung up either when I was there, but it still has to be the place.”

  He now wished that he had brought a pistol to that encounter and not just a heavy staff, but he had not anticipated that Bob Himmel would see through his disguise. He had tried to brain the boy with the staff in order to gain entrance to the house and look for evidence that it was a Magi inn, but Bob had dodged away more quickly than could be expected for such a big fellow, and then he had been so aggressive! The inspection of the inn’s interior had been harrowing and uselessly brief! If more proof of the inn’s location should really be needed, then the use of a gun to gain entrance was still a possibility. But that would be only as a last resort, for having been warned of danger, Himmel might have obtained his own firearm by now. Meph had no intention of tangling with him again, regardless. He would leave that to younger men, many of them, who were on their way.

  “The Wakefields’ house is too small, and they’re too old,” he went on. “As for the Bernards, they just aren’t the type to run a Magi inn. They wouldn’t do anything for free for anybody.”

  “Deirdre would,” Logan said with a wink and a lewd grin.

  “Ha-ha! Would she?” Meph was not really interested in this, but he wanted to keep the boy happy for now. “You know her then?”

  “In a town the size of Mercury everyone knows everyone. She used to be pretty close with a friend of mine. Anyway, let’s just say she’s really laid back and easy going.”

  “Ha-ha. Well, let me tell you on that subject, sir, that you’re soon going to be in a position of such power that you can have any woman you want.” Meph was getting tired of making such promises and tired of watching Logan swallow them, but it was working so well that he would keep it up. “As soon as I came near you in that store where you work, I could feel that aura, the aura of an adept, a master. I’ll tell you the truth, I was almost afraid to speak to you.” Yes, Logan would believe even that. He would believe anything. “But I knew we needed you if we were to get control of the inn. Say,” he added brightly, “are you ready to try something new?”

  “Like what? Sure.”

  “You told me your father is a policeman. On an evening very soon we want to knock out police protection for the inn, and you’re the only one who can do it. It’s not just that the people on the force know you through your father. No, what matters is that I sense you have occult persuasive powers. Do you know the night dispatcher?”

  “Arnie? Sure.”

  “Well, I think you can control Arnie.” He waited for this to sink in. “When a Warlock—and you may as well begin calling yourself one—wishes to control someone, he uses some exterior lever to gain access to the other person’s will.”

  “Damn!” Logan said appreciatively.

  “Do you believe me? I sense that you do. So what is Arnie’s weakness? What can you exploit?”

  “I don’t know. He’s fat.”

  “Food then. Remind me, and I’ll give you extra money tonight before you leave, more than usual. Use it to buy snack foods he’ll like and—”

  “But I don’t know what he likes.”

  “Use your powers. If you search the matter with your spirit, you will choose and choose unerringly.”

  “Like maybe donuts?”

  “You see, it’s working already. You just know. Learn to rely on that ability.”

  “OK, I will.”

  “Start dropping in on Arnie every evening and bring him the snacks. Talk with him. Get him talking about himself. It won’t take you long to find what subjects he’s excited about. Before long he will trust you. Ask to be the dispatcher for a few minutes while he stands by. Ask again the next evening and do it for longer, and so on. The police on patrol will quickly get used to this, that Arnie is letting you have some fun. Then, on the evening when we strike, I’ll call you on a cell phone I’m about to give you—”

  “Damn! My Dad took mine away.”

  “—and give you word that it’s time. Then you will introduce this,” he showed the boy a capsule, “into what Arnie is drinking. Harmless of course. He gets sleepy. You point out that it’s a dead quiet night—I believe they almost all are in Mercury—and propose that he take a short nap while you cover any calls. I assume there’s a cot or something available?”

  “Yeah, down the hall.”

  “You see how it falls into place? Adepts simply desire something and the way smooths itself before them, sometimes with remarkable coincidences. This will be a special night, a very good night for such coincidences. While Arnie is sleeping, handle all calls but one exactly as he will have told you. An exceptional call may come from the inn.” He handed Logan a piece of notepaper. “Maybe there will be no call from there, but if there is, this is the number you will
see on the caller identification, the inn’s number. When that call comes, whether from Bob Himmel, his girl, or anyone else, promise a hasty police response, get off the line, and then do nothing. Don’t log the call.”

  “What if they recognize my voice?”

  “Just explain that you’re covering for Arnie. They have no reason to be suspicious of you, do they?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Fine then. Here is money.” He handed him a wad of twenties, and the boy stuffed them away in his black clothes with a smile.

  “Are you going to teach me some more?” Logan asked expectantly.

  “Yes, but I suspect that it won’t be long before our roles are reversed and you are teaching me.” Meph went to the chest of drawers and brought out candles, an incense burner, a crucifix, some pills, and a black book with a pentagram on the cover. “The mirror here will do for our purposes,” he said, nodding to where it hung on the wall.

  Meph did not like to do these things as much as he used to. He knew that the next hour would begin with tedium and end with revulsion and fright. He would be more frightened than the boy, for he knew what he was playing with.

  Five of them, five wizards at once! And they were all true guests. One of them was pale and unwell, so Bob and the others helped him up to a room. Since only three bedrooms remained for the four other guests, he offered his own room for the use of any one of them, but they declined, two of them agreeing to double up. These men seemed seasoned travelers, adapting to all inconveniences.

  Their first need after seeing their weakened companion to bed was to change into lighter clothing, for what they had worn to the inn was both winter-heavy and inexplicably wetted from the knees down. As they reappeared one by one in the living room, Bob began to distinguish one Mage from another: the blond Frenchman Petain, old Nat with his fourteen-forked gray beard, each fork tied with brown string; the little African Thomas; and Long from China. Avoiding the Siege Perilous, they settled themselves around the room with groans of weary satisfaction and for a few minutes conversed in some language unidentifiable to Bob.

  But soon Bob begin to notice that these men were severely stressed. Petain was hunched over, his hands clutched together and yet visibly trembling. Long sat and wept. Whatever it was they were saying to one another, all said it glumly.

  Noticing Bob standing by, Petain said, “Here is our good innkeeper who worries about not enough beds. We are sorry, sir, to be so many.”

  “I’m just sorry it’s so hot in here. I’ll bring the fan from the kitchen.”

  “Hot? It isn’t hot, it’s comfortable. We have been wading in ice water getting here. I thought my heart would stop.”

  The others echoed the Frenchman’s words.

  Thomas, clothed in a silk robe of bright yellow, added his own word of apology. “You see, sir innkeeper, we were detained for days when Rebels with guns entrapped us. We were barricaded against them. Fortunately, they could not shoot their way in because the inn was part of a town beneath the ocean. Damage to a wall would have drowned us all.”

  “An uncanny place,” said old Nat. “Through the windows I saw the monsters of the deep.”

  “This wasn’t New Pacifica?” Bob asked.

  “Yes, that is its name,” said Thomas, looking surprised that Bob could guess it.

  “But is there such a place? I’ve never heard of a whole town under the sea.”

  “Oh, it isn’t yet, but after your time it will be, in a few hundred years.”

  Bob grappled with this. “You were in the future?”

  “Yes. Our roads wind here and there through the portals,” he waved a dark hand to illustrate, “back and forth through time.”

  “Get real! That’s great!”

  Thomas was slow to continue, as if preoccupied, but in a moment he added, “That’s why we Chosen are often believed to be very long-lived. You may have heard that Master Merlin, in order to do his job as he should, has moved about and operated in various centuries. Unlike most of us, he has attracted a lot of attention: it was noticed that the same man kept reappearing. So the theory has developed among the uninformed that he has lived hundreds of years. Actually, he’s only about sixty-five.”

  “Is?” Bob’s eyebrows raised.

  At this Old Nat sighed and shook his head, brushing his whiskers against his rough shirt. “He and the others with him, how will they get out now?” he said. “I think the road is cut behind us. A plague on Nineveh!”

  And now suddenly the old man was crying too. Long had never stopped.

  Thomas gave Nat a pat on the shoulder and said to Bob, “Others have thought there were no Longaevi, no long-lived ones, and that reports of the same Mage appearing centuries apart had to be due to mere legend. The truth is, we live in whatever place and era we need to for as long as we need to be there. Then we move on.”

  “Or we used to,” Petain said bitterly.

  It seemed to Bob that suffering had made these wizards more willing than his previous guests to talk about the mysteries of their brotherhood. He did not want to take advantage of their distracted state, but on the other hand, who knew when another such opportunity might come? He seated himself on an arm of the couch and gently inquired about the making of the portals.

  “I help make one once,” Long answered. “Slow and difficult. First we fashion gem, then we place gem in foundation of house. Then conjure long time. Finally gem forms two portals, opposite from each other. That is the start. Need more gems then to make road. Place several gems so that portals of each match exactly with portals of gems on each side. You have word for this is ‘conterminous.’”

  This was not Bob’s word for anything, and he must have looked it, for Petain added to help him, “A Magi road, friend, is laid out as alternating gems and portal ‘sets’ where a portal of one touches a portal of the next. You might say the gems form a line holding hands, and the portals are their hands touching.”

  “So every portal is really two stuck together?” Bob asked with a frown of concentration.

  The Frenchman nodded. “No other way to make a road.”

  “Oh, except for the end ones!” Bob said, correcting himself.

  “Yes, the end portals are single, that is, unless the road goes in a circle and there are no ends. The doubled portals make the road more sturdy. If one gem in the line leaves contact with the ground, the road can still be traveled. That gem’s two portals disappear, but the two portals that had held hands with them, the ones formed by the two gems nearest along the line, are still there. But if two gems in a row are missing, then the portal set between those gems disappears completely. We say the road is cut.”

  Nat mumbled something surly about the folly of providing lessons at a time like this. He stood and announced that he was going to check on Cyrus, their bedridden friend. While he ascended the stair in the entrance hall, Bob asked the others if they would like some popcorn. Though none of them had ever eaten popcorn, they readily agreed. But none of the various alcoholic beverages they requested to go with their snack was available. Bob did not even have a beer in the house. They would have to settle for tea.

  When Bob returned with a tray and had served them, he asked eagerly, “So the gems make the portals? How?”

  No one answered at first.

  “I think no one knows how,” Thomas said.

  Petain said, “I compare the portals to refracted light from an ordinary gem. Cast a cloth over a gem, and what? The refracted light disappears. Just so, if you remove an inn’s gem from its place, the portals disappear. Put it back and they reappear.”

  “So if two adjoining gems are removed someplace along a road,” Bob said softly, “and two more further down the same road, then a Mage in between…”

  “Yes, he is trapped,” Petain supplied, “unless a side portal enters the road there, or unless he can travel conventionally to the site of some o
ther portal. We have known terrible instances. A Mage may thus be doomed to make his home in such a hellhole as Calcutta in the eighteenth century or Las Vegas in the twentieth.”

  As Bob stood and turned on a lamp in the darkening room, Sophia’s voice floated out to them from the mirror, saying, “Always have an escape route planned.”

  “Oh, she’s been here, has she?” Nat said, as he returned to the room and picked up his tea glass. “I suppose we’ll be listening to her proverbs all night. Damned nuisance. Cyrus is resting but can’t sleep. He asks for a little music, and I promised him to oblige as soon as we’re done eating. Petain, you will help me?”

  “Of course. But just look at the disappointed face of our young innkeeper. He has more questions, true?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Bob said. “Just for a minute? You see, speaking of inn gems, I have never figured out where the gem is located in this house. I’ve searched the basement, but no go.”

  “Could be in your fireplace,” Nat said, pointing to its worn bricks. “That’s common enough, and this one looks as old as the house. But it’s best to leave them alone. And if you do find it, don’t touch it with your bare hand. I’ve heard strange stories about that.”

  “I won’t, sir,” Bob promised.

  “What else do you want to know?” Petain asked.

  “Well, if all you have to do to get to the next inn is walk through a portal, I mean a set of portals, then doesn’t that mean you could go past a bunch of inns in one day without stopping?”

  “It is possible, but for several reasons it is seldom done. For one, the portals are usually placed far enough from the inns that some real foot travel is involved. So usually a Mage will arrive at least a little tired, ready for hospitality. You do not consider this because the portals for this inn are unusually close, almost too close because it makes it too easy for an enemy to identify the inn. But another reason the Mage will not go on is that hurrying through multiple portal sets will, in most persons, result in a kind of discomfort we call magkalleb sul. The symptoms are nervousness, depression, or even feeling ill in head and stomach.”

  “Is it like jet lag?” Bob asked.

  “Yes, some have called it portal lag. It is said to be somewhat similar to jet lag but more miserable. We are suffering lightly from this sul now, because we hurried past the last inn to arrive here, trying to put more distance between us and our pursuers. But again, as to why we don’t rush through portals, you should know that, regardless of what time of day you enter a portal to progress toward the next inn, when you exit it’s always dusk or thereabouts—give or take a few hours. That time adjustment is built in.”

  “So that’s why Magi never come any other time of day but around dusk!”

  “Yes, because they cannot. This means that the Chosen always arrive at an inn either under cover of darkness or nearly so. Then they can sleep some if they need to, or can stay up and practice their arts if they don’t, and some of our spells rely on darkness. You probably haven’t seen much of what the Wise do at night because often lately we have been arriving at inns exhausted due to the pursuit of the Rebels. But finally, even if we ignore all other reasons for not passing by an inn, it is often simply impractical to continue travel by night. Wild and deadly things lurk outside some inns in the darkness; and there may be danger of becoming lost, too, for though the way to an inn is often marked by secret signs—Mage blazes and the like—it is not always so.”

  Bob said that he was satisfied with this explanation.

  “One important point I should have made about the portals’ time adjustment,” Petain added, “is that our enemies, if they are following too slowly, may come to the portal a little too late in what is night on their side. If so, they miss the ‘dusk gate,’ as we call it, and so are delayed in the portal until the following evening of the other side. They do not feel that this is happening. Their walk through the portal seems instantaneous, and yet from your point of view they are held back for nearly a full day. It is a useful defense. What else do you wish to know?”

  “I wanted to ask about this guy Nineveh. What’s his story?”

  With a thoughtful, evaluative expression, Petain finished chewing a piece of popcorn. “Nineveh, yes. He cut all the Magi roads leading out from an orb that he wanted to keep and control. A web of interconnected portals, I should have said, is called an orb. He made his orb like a fort, all the portals leading around in circles back to each other. No one gets in or out. And that we call an orb-island.”

  “I see. So who is he exactly?”

  “Oh, he is a lapsed Mage. One of our portal masters, Nehushtan, gave him stewardship over some portals so that he could inspect and repair the roads. However, when Nehushtan fell ill, Nineveh manipulated him to give him authority over many more portals, supposedly temporarily. Then, without any hint or declaration of his treachery, he eliminated more than a hundred portals leading outward and so made himself his little island, claiming it for his own.”

  “He did this all by himself?”

  “No, with help. I should have said that he had recruited a few other lapsed Magi and many non-Magi.”

  “Thieves and murderers, every mother’s son of them,” Nat added.

  “Yes, and they traveled around removing gems from inns and killing or incapacitating Magi. Once he had control of his island, Nineveh used it in a scheme to amass a fortune.”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” Bob said. “He did it with knowledge from the future, like who would be the winners of horse races and what would be the hottest stocks. They always do that.”

  By ‘they,’ he meant the people in time travel stories he had read.

  “True, but it doesn’t work so well as you’d think,” said Thomas. “The wager money has poured in for him, certainly, but money in one era and place isn’t money in another. He has endless headaches dealing with money-changing, security, and so forth. And if one of his thugs wants to go traveling the portals as a rich man, he has to take along twenty fortunes in twenty different currencies.”

  “Couldn’t he just bank some of it in each century?”

  “I suppose, but not every society has sound banks or banks at all. Among those that do, Nineveh himself can only open an account where he has a recognized identity. That limits him to the United States of the mid-twentieth century, where he was born, but in that era he is known as a criminal wanted by the government.”

  Bob laughed in disbelief. “Nineveh is an American? Come on!”

  “You don’t think it possible?” said Thomas. “But he is one of your American success stories. He was a failed businessman from Ohio. But where legitimate business failed him, a combination of his Magi connections and organized crime did not. All his wagering on sure things, despite the money exchange difficulties, brought him much wealth. But in addition to that, he and his Rebels were also raking in money and treasures through robbery and extortion. Through use of the portals they had what every criminal dreams of, a perfectly safe hideaway. When they had murdered or stolen and, as they say, the heat was on, they could escape into another place and time, sometimes dragging a corpse along with them.”

  “Geez! And the tabloid headline says ‘Kidnapped by Aliens’!”

  Thomas laughed. “Yes, the authorities are baffled.”

  “Are the other Rebels mid-twentieth century too?”

  “Most of them are. Nineveh picks up icy-hearted thugs from wherever he can, but most of his men are gangsters from Cincinnati, his home city. Any of his Rebels who don’t speak English just have to learn it.

  “After a good many years of easy success, he has come to feel much like a god. He decided he needed a god’s throne. Before long he was holding court in an antediluvian palace near the site of one of the inns he had destroyed and sending messages to his betters, even to the Legion, demanding that they recognize him as legitimate ruler of the orb he had stolen, or the Realm as
he came to call it.”

  “But he was afraid!” Nat bellowed.

  “Yes,” Petain said. “So at first, out of fear, he opened a portal now and then and let in a Mage or two from outside for inspections and what he called dialogues. Our leaders felt he would not be stupid enough to maintain his wild claims for long, so for a time they talked. They hoped he would see reason. But what our inspectors soon saw was that the areas near the inns he controlled were catastrophically neglected. With some of their Magi murdered and the rest severely limited in their movements and influence, those parts of the worlds’ eras have been falling into ruin, into immorality, decay; sometimes suffering starvation or massacres. His island is rotting.”

  “A stitch in time saves nine,” said Sophia’s voice from the mirror.

  Petain glanced that way in annoyance and continued. “The Legionnaires tried reasoning first, then threats. Nineveh’s response has been to cut off the inspections and visitations, but not the ‘dialogues.’ After much talk he agreed in principle that any Chosen, however few, who might want to leave his Realm have his permission and safe passage to do so. But with the exterior portals closed, there has been no way for them to leave without his help. They must apply to him for permission, for visas! Most of us have been too proud to ask. Those who have asked have been mocked either with interminable delays or with silence.”

  “Couldn’t these Legionnaires send in some really tough, honking Magi and just take the orb back?” Bob asked.

  While Petain hesitated, searching for a reply, Bob noticed that Thomas had pulled from his garment a little stick and was waving it in small patterns as if to amuse himself. He wondered if he was finally seeing a wand in use.

  “How do we answer?” Petain said to Thomas.

  “A direct assault?” the African said. He continued talking as he slowly swiveled in his chair, stick in hand, to face the bookcase. “No, sir innkeeper. Though many of us have asked the same question, our leaders have felt that warfare against Nineveh’s Realm is out of the question while there is still hope of saving the trapped Magi who have become, in effect, his hostages. Just a short time ago we ourselves were among those trapped in his Realm.”

  “Knowing his hostages’ value,” Petain added, “Nineveh is most generously leaving most of them alive as long as they seem to have no chance of escape.”

  Bob said that Omlish had told him about the alternate strategy of the Wise, how they had assigned Stringer and others to open old, abandoned Magi roads unknown to the Rebels.

  “Should have been a secret,” Nat fumed, shaking a skinny finger in the air. “But Magi can’t keep anything secret. When the Rebels found out about it, which was mighty damn fast, our leaders warned them not to interfere with the evacuation. And that Ninny—that’s what I call him—he promised nicely. What he’s really been doing is gathering every thug and cutthroat he can to stop us. He won’t give up his hostages. Any Mage who tries to escape the Realm is risking death.”

  Something made a popping sound between Thomas and the bookcase, and a musty smell entered the room. He spun around with a smile.

  “But gathering his gang takes time,” the African said. “So it’s a race. So far, our road is still open before us. We are going to a place called Mount Baldy, just a few more inns down the road and quite outside his Realm. Welcoming forces are being gathered to protect us there, forces that are probably too strong for him to challenge. I believe he knows all that. But can he chase us down, head us off? Not so easy. We five, at least, gave the Rebels the slip in New Pacifica.”

  “We were able to sound a false Flooding Alarm,” Petain said, smiling at the memory. “The Rebels rapidly made off through the nearest portal, which fortunately was not the one we wanted to go through.”

  “You didn’t get wet there?” Bob asked.

  “Oh, you mean our legs? No, that was just a short time ago, two inns back, wading the shallows of a very cold lake. Our little boat went down, you see, fortunately very near the shore. But when we were in New Pacifica we stayed quite dry. Still, being trapped there was the closest call we’ve had yet.”

  Bob finally decided to mention the gray haired man who had come by the inn. “I talked to Ben Cooper,” he said.

  “Oh, you did?” They all looked at him.

  “He told me all the other Chosen were dead and that he was the last survivor.”

  The visitors exchanged unhappy glances.

  “Yes, he would say that,” Thomas said sadly.

  Old Nat coughed. “He couldn’t wait. We were all waiting there in his town, in New Pacifica, for Cyrus, who’s upstairs, to recover from his wound enough to travel.” The old man paused. “But enough of that. Petain? Your mandolin?”

  While Petain and Nat went to fetch their instruments from their rooms, Thomas and Long strolled out to the porch. This abrupt change away from the explanations he craved was disappointing to Bob, especially because he had just learned to his surprise that his fifth wizard had been wounded. But since there seemed no chance of asking about it for now, he phoned Julie to tell her about the inn’s unexpected overflow of guests. She was delighted and promised to serve them a first-rate breakfast.

  After the phone call Bob found that the wizards had reassembled in the living room. He brought more popcorn and tea for Thomas and Long and cleared away Nat and Petain’s used bowls and glasses, taking them to the kitchen. He found that dirty dishes had piled up since morning. As he began to run water to wash them, the sound of wizards’ music, Petain on mandolin and Nat on violin, came to him from the living room through the open doorways between. This was no ordinary music. It was evocative beyond anything he had ever heard. It all but spoke of exotic places, and in his mind’s eye he saw the places; of fascinating stories, and suddenly he knew the stories; and of brave and good people, and he knew them too, like brothers and sisters.

  But to his disappointment the instruments stopped after just two pieces. He could hear the wizards conversing again in the strange language in which they all seemed to be fluent. Sometimes they seemed to be arguing good-naturedly, even uproariously, other times laughing about something. Once, in the midst of this, the Chinese man Long came to the kitchen door and asked him in his broken English if he might perform a small and harmless spell on him? Bob’s heartbeat sped up as he obligingly agreed. Long went back to the friendly dispute, nothing happened to Bob (though he once or twice touched his ears to make sure of their thoroughly human length), and he did his best not to think about it.

  When the dishes were washed, Bob went to the living room door with a folded towel over his arm to ask if his guests needed anything, at the same time noting more pieces of popcorn on the floor than could be accounted for by clumsiness. He guessed that they had been throwing them at each other.

  “You please sit down, wait a while,” Long said. “Then I show them,” he gestured toward the other Chosen ones, “how good flame-proof spell work.”

  “And maim him for life!” laughed Petain. “But he won’t sit here for long and listen to our Kreenspam talk.” (Bob gathered this was the name of their language.)

  “Then let’s entertain him. It’s the time of night for a story,” said Nat. “I feel one in my bones. He will like a story about an innkeeper.”

  All agreed to this, and Nat began at once and in English. He told the story in a lengthy, though highly interesting, fashion, elaborating particularly on King Arthur’s imprisonment. Without the elaboration, the tale was as follows.

  Once there was a hardy young innkeeper named Joseph who kept the best inn, with the softest beds, in the long ago land of Logris. One evening there came to his inn a fair lady named Elaine, traveling with her old nurse and several servants. She was engaged to the good knight Sir Ontzlake and was going to his castle to become his bride. Late that same night, after Elaine and her nurse had gone to bed, another guest arrived, the proud Sir Damas, who was br
other to Sir Ontzlake, and he was the same wicked coward who had once imprisoned King Arthur. With Sir Damas was his pitiable servant, a man named Ban, who cringed and sneaked and did whatever the old knight demanded.

  Joseph did not like either the look or the manner of Sir Damas, but he treated him courteously, fed him well, and saw him to bed. Then, because Lady Elaine had said nothing about expecting her future brother-in-law to arrive after her, Joseph decided to stay up and watch the door of Sir Damas’ room. He fetched a stout stick and placed himself in readiness in a darkened corner. At the very stroke of midnight out came Sir Damas, holding a brace of candles in one hand and his naked sword in the other. But what raised the hair on Joseph’s head was not the sword but that Damas was accompanied by a horned and hoofed creature walking like a man, a very devil from hell.

  Joseph steeled himself to be brave, for he must protect his guest Elaine from harm. Elaine’s male servants, he knew, were asleep in the stable where beds had been made for them beside those of his own inn servants. There was no time to rouse them, so he must rely on himself and his God. He grasped his stick and crept after the knight and the fiend. He paused at the end of a long, dark upper passage, for at the other end he could see that the two were standing outside the locked door of Elaine’s room. Then he heard them whispering to each other.

  First he heard the raspy voice of the fiend. “I will open the lock with my arts,” he said, “and you lop her head off.”

  Joseph could hear fear in the knight’s voice as he replied, “My brother will seek to kill me when this becomes known.”

  “I have told you, Sir Damas,” the devil answered, “that once she is dead, I can use her left eye and seven strands of her hair, boiled with certain plants and bones, to do him away with a plague. Then all Sir Ontzlake’s estate will be yours. But if she lives, she will have an heir and you will never have his riches.”

  “Are you sure my brother will die?”

  “Sure as evil. Do you see to the maiden. Stand ready.”

  Now it happened that Joseph had a rather high-pitched voice, and raising it even higher than usual, he called out from the shadows. “Oh, nurse! Bring me a brush. My hair is in tangles. Nurse, dear? Won’t you bring my brush?”

  The two wicked ones turned and peered down the passage.

  “We are at the wrong door,” Sir Damas said.

  “I saw her go in here,” the devil insisted, but Damas was moving away from him along the passage.

  As Sir Damas approached, Joseph silently slipped backward and down a stair to where he could just see the light of the knight’s two candles as they shined upon the upper wall of the passage. He heard him try a locked door, rattling its handle.

  “Stop it,” the devil screeched in a whisper. “You will wake them.”

  “Well, how are we to know where they are?” Damas said petulantly. “There are two doors at this end. If I don’t find out which one they’re behind, we’ll have to give it up.”

  “She is behind the door I showed you at the other end of the passage!”

  The fiend began to draw Sir Damas away, and Joseph readied himself to again imitate a maiden’s voice. But just as he opened his mouth to do so, someone pulled his stick away from him from behind.

  “Master!” this person cried. “I’ve found a man hiding on the stair!”

  It was Damas’ starveling servant Ban. In desperation Joseph lunged for the man in the dark and was able to wrest the stick from him. Then with a few heavy whacks, he sent Ban running and howling down the stairs and out the back door of the inn.

  Almost numb with fear, he then climbed the stairs and faced the knight and the devil. At least, he thought, Elaine and her nurse could not have slept through such noise. Maybe they can call for help out their window. As for himself, he was determined to fight for the lady and for the security of his inn.

  Sir Damas and the fiend, when they saw who he was, laughed.

  “I was afraid it was my brother Sir Ontzlake,” Damas said. “He is such a mighty man that I would not dare to face him even with a devil at my side. But it is only the silly innkeeper. Put down that stick and go back to your bed, knave, and I will let you live.”

  Even as Damas spoke, the devil brought a spell of icy cold on Joseph, so sudden and painful that he dropped the stick. With screaming joints Joseph managed to stoop and pick it up again and, raising it high, stood his ground.

  “Out of my house!” he cried. “Neither devil nor wicked mortal may stay in my inn!”

  Now Sir Damas’ cowardice showed itself. He backed away from Joseph. “Stop him,” he said to the devil.

  “He is a bumpkin. Cut off his head with your sword,” the devil replied.

  Joseph began to see that the fiend was not ready, perhaps not even able, to kill anyone. He was relying on Sir Damas to do the murdering, no doubt to insure the damnation of Damas’ soul. So, still shivering from the fiend’s spell, the innkeeper ran forward and brought his stick down on the devil’s head squarely between his two horns. This made a loud crack, and at once the cold left Joseph’s bones. Yet the devil was still standing there grinning at him.

  Sir Damas’ nerve, however, now gave way. He ran away down the stair at the opposite end of the passage. Joseph found out later that the lily-livered man did not even get his things from his room below but, going straight to the stable, had his charger saddled and rode away into the night. Ban he left behind.

  Joseph and the devil still faced each other. Plainly the stout stick had done no more to hurt the fiend than a gentle wind. He stuck out his very long tongue at Joseph and made a scornful sound.

  “Run!” he cried.

  Joseph threw the stick down and laughed. “What, from you?”

  Shouldering the fiend aside, he passed him and went to Elaine’s door where he rapped on the oaken boards. “Milady, all is well,” he called. “There is no danger now.”

  At this, the devil was enraged. “You filthy swine, how dare you say I am not dangerous? I will boil your blood in your veins! I will turn you into a mouse!”

  But Joseph had taken his keys from his pocket and had unlocked the door. He led the Lady Elaine into the passage. “You see, Milady? There is no one here but this ranting little demon. The inn is all safe now.”

  The devil raised a claw as if to cast a terrible spell. Whether he would have succeeded or not we will never know, for at that moment the hall was flooded with people and light. The folk in the stables, both Joseph’s servants and Elaine’s, having been roused by Ban’s yells of pain, had arrived with torches and lamps. Amid so much love and devotion, and so many prayers of thanks, the fiend shriveled and faded away.

  Elaine went on the next morning and soon wedded her good knight. Damas’ servant Ban, upon being mercifully hired by Joseph, changed his ways and became a good man. As for Joseph, his bravery won him no small renown in his neighborhood, and his inn was even more celebrated and sought out than before.

  The tale was ended. Bob thanked Nat and stood, ready to leave his guests.

  “Stay, stay!” said Long. “We test spell now. Here, wait while I make fire.”

  And now at last Bob got to see one of the things that Mark Stringer had warned him not to become alarmed about. The Chinese Mage made twirling motions with the fingertips of one upturned hand, as if turning an invisible knob, and gradually a burning globe about eight inches across appeared in the air above his fingers and, as he withdrew his hand, hung there without support. It crackled with heat, and Bob caught its searing smell.

  “If please to touch fire,” Long requested of him with a smile.

  “If I were you,” Thomas warned, “I’d just almost touch it first, to see if you can feel its heat. It’s not that we doubt Long’s spell works. The debate is over how long it works. Petain, Nat, and I think it can’t possibly last more than a few minutes, in which case you’re no longer protected.”

 
; “Days,” Long asserted. “Spell last many days.”

  Because of the story he had just heard, Bob was feeling particularly daring. He stepped to the floating ball of fire and gripped it firmly with both hands. Nothing. It didn’t even feel warm. Then he released it and held up his unharmed hands to show the others. The three doubters drummed their feet in applause.

  “Are you sure you made that ball quite hot?” Petain asked Long with a laugh.

  “Very sure. You want touch it and see?”

  From a nearby table Bob had picked up a stick-type ball-point pen and now held its end against the fireball. Immediately, a little of the plastic melted and dripped on the floor. “Yeah, that’s hot,” he said. He was delighted to be enchanted and could hardly wait to get off by himself and test it with matches.

  Long now made the fireball disappear, and the two musicians returned to their music. Bob drifted out to the entrance hall, then went up to check on Cyrus. He found the swarthy skinned man sleeping soundly and so came back down, went to the kitchen, turned on a stove burner, and held his palm to it. Nothing. This was just too good. He would have to do this again when Julie was around and scare the bejeebers out of her.

  Now the guests began a song, and because it was wizard song, he knew exactly what the Kreenspam words meant in English. The four of them were singing parts, and though it was a little creepy, it somehow seemed fitting when occasionally the voice from the mirror joined them for a line or a phrase.

  I know a long delight, a thing

  More pleasing than my life, a good

  More lasting than my coffin’s wood:

  The kisses of my king.

  I never knew a thing go wrong

  Since I stopped listening to my head,

  Let down my guard, and heard instead

  His strange and silent song.

  This paradise is not my nerves

  Or how the day took hold of me,

  The sunlight on the greenery,

  Or soft, forgiving words;

  Not what I hold but who holds me,

  This firm grip on my months, this straight

  Unyielding force that men call fate

  And I call ecstasy.

  Though he did not know who the wizards’ king was, Bob was glad to hear such hopeful words from men who had been so depressed earlier in the evening. The little impromptu party had done them good.

  Soon he saw the wizards pass through the entrance hall and up to bed. This was puzzling because he could still hear violin and mandolin playing the sweet tune of the song. He walked into the living room, in which just one table lamp remained on, and found the instruments lying on the coffee table, playing softly by themselves. Pick and bow lay still beside them, and yet their strings vibrated.

  He turned out the lamp and went to bed. For perhaps half an hour the magical instruments played gently on and then ceased of themselves.

  Breakfast was merry with all five wizards, even Cyrus, eating heartily and Julie delighting in them all. Cyrus’ wound was in his left side, he said, but not deep enough to reach any organ. It was the work of a Rebel. Beyond that, he and his friends refrained from any detailed explanation.

  After they had signed the registry and had gone away through the portal, Bob indeed scared Julie nearly witless with the stove burner trick. But when she too had left, he began to remember that the house was not his grandfather’s anymore, and his worries returned. This was Monday, and the Bernards would be back on Thursday. Then he would have to get out fast.

  He wandered into the living room and looked at the fireplace. Could a huge gem really be hidden in it somewhere as Nat had suggested? Some of the bricks looked as if they could be loose. He would try them, but first he reached out to straighten one of the few books in the wall’s built-in bookcase. This volume, which had fallen over, was a hardback copy of some Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, left behind from another era than his own. Perhaps it belonged to Grandpa Dan. He had never looked into it, for his literary taste was limited to science fiction, fantasy, and war histories. Books like this he used only for decoration.

  But the book, he noticed as he lifted it, was not the same as before. There was some resemblance, but the title on the binding had changed. It now read Dragon’s Children: A Guide to Understanding and Opposing Evil Persons. He remembered suddenly that during the previous evening Thomas had done something with his small wand while seated near this bookcase. Opening the volume, he found an illustrated title page, attributing the authorship to an Aurelian August and providing the publication year 1844. This he would read! What a shame he had not been able to thank Thomas.

  Laying the volume aside for now, he turned to the fireplace and began to test the bricks, one by one, by prying at them with his fingertips. The hiding place revealed itself surprisingly quickly as several bricks slid out together and still mortar-bound to one another. Behind them was an empty space and in the space was an object about a foot long. This he eagerly extracted and found in his hands a metal shaft with a wooden handle at one end and at the other a metal clip gripping a huge amber gem. It struck him at once that the tool he was holding was designed for the purpose of moving the gem without touching it.

  The clip could be pried apart, he saw, and the gem freed. He would do well, however, to heed the warnings he had been given and not touch the gem. On the other hand, could he simply put it back without experimenting? If the gem proved unsafe to touch, then it could not be sold either, so as to bring in money for paying the redemption fee for the house. That would be that, and he would just put it away (supposing he survived the experiment) and forget about it. But what if it could be touched and therefore could be sold? It would save the inn.

  Last night someone had said that an inn’s portals would still function if its gem was removed, that is, supposing the two gems of the inns adjacent to it on the road still functioned. As an optimist, he assumed therefore that, though he had now removed the gem from its place, this inn’s portals were still there. The wizards’ road could do without this immense, rectangular stone with the appearance of a topaz.

  He brought a forefinger close to the gem. He reconsidered. Even supposing it safe to touch, did he really want to know if it could be sold? For if he were to sell it, would he not be like some fool in a fairy tale who gave up something of inestimable value in exchange for mere money? Jack in the Beanstalk had traded the family cow for magic beans. Was this not like trading magic beans for a cow?

  Still, the gem looked so harmless that he felt he just had to touch it and find out where he stood. He tapped it with a fingernail with no result. Then he pressed the flesh of his forefinger against it briefly. He did so again and held his finger in place for half a minute. Nothing happened. So the fabulous gem was harmless! He could sell it.

  But he suddenly decided that he would not, at least not now. For by the way his guests talked, all the other wizards who meant to come to his inn were in terrible danger from the Rebels and might never get this far. The five wizards themselves had barely made it here, with Cyrus apparently having the narrowest of escapes. So why scrabble for money to save the house if it might function as an inn no more anyway? If there were to be no more guests, then why not put the gem back in its hiding place and let it go to his Uncle and Aunt along with everything else? Not that he would ever say anything to them about its existence.

  This consideration brought relief to his troubled conscience. For the gem might be considered to belong not to him, his grandfather, or the Bernards, but to the wizards who had placed it in the house. If he sold it, would it not be like selling the ‘Curves Ahead’ sign that stood down by the road, put up by the county? That sign was on his property but he had no right to do anything with it.

  Yes, the gem should only be used if absolutely necessary for the good of the wizards. So he would wait for now. He put it back, still held by the gripping implement, and replaced the bricks.r />