neetha Napew - The Paths Of The Perambulator

XIII

Thanks largely to the fighting skills of Mudge and Colin, the number of redheaded attackers was soon reduced to half a dozen. Acting under orders from an unseen master, these viragos retreated and prepared to roll heavy rocks down on the advancing intruders. They never had the chance to complete the planned ambush. Using his longbow, Mudge picked them off one by one. In so doing, he used the last of his arrows, but he was able to recover the majority of them from the surrounding rubble-strewn slope, where they had come to rest after passing completely through the spurious bodies of the Talea clones.

Jon-Tom and the others waited for the otter to conclude his collecting, a task in which he was greatly aided by Sorbl. Meanwhile the spellsinger held the hand of his heart’s desire and tried to comfort her. Talea, however, was her usual self again, which meant that she was in no mood to be coddled. She did acquiesce to Clothahump’s ministrations, allowing the wizard to bind the shallow cut in her arm. Actually Colin’s kick to the leg was giving her more trouble than Jon-Tom’s revealing spear stroke. With his help she rose and tried walking. She found she could move well enough but with a definite limp.

Her shoulder-length red hair framed her delicate face, which at the moment was full of frustration and confusion. “I don’t understand any of this. I was taking my ease with a friend in Darriantowne when the world turned inside out.”

“Male or female? Your friend?” Jon-Tom couldn’t keep himself from inquiring.

She managed a small smile. “Ever the hopeful lover, Jon-Tom?”

He smiled back and shrugged. “What else is there but hope when you’re hopelessly in love.”

“Female. Not that it matters. We were trying to acquire a necklace I’d admired for a long time.”

“By stealing it,” Clothahump said sourly as he repacked the medical supplies.

She stuck her tongue out at him, mitigated the charmingly girlish gesture by adding a finger. “Not all of us are as wealthy as you, master hard-shell.”

“One gains riches by not having a hard head,” he snapped back, but softly. He was in no mood for spurious argument. There were more important matters to be concerned with.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I’d just picked up this beautiful loop of amber and blue pearls when my friend Eila screamed. Everything went cockaloop, and when I could see straight again, I found myself in a strange place. Eila was gone and so was the store.” She turned, tilted back her head, and blinked. “I think I was in—that building.”

“What did you see?” Jon-Tom made no effort to contain his excitement. Some irrefutable evidence at last! “Who was your captor? What was he like?”

“I can’t remember. I can’t remember much of anything that happened from the time the store disappeared until you were standing over me holding that damn spear of yours. But I remember—something else. Something like I’d never seen before.”

Clothahump rejoined them quickly. “What was it like? Think, child!”

“I’m trying. It kept changing—I don’t know.” She rubbed at her eyes with both hands. “Everything kept changing. It’s all a blur in my mind. I remember shadows. Shadows of myself being peeled away from me, like the layers of an onion. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel a thing. Then I remember running down this mountain, holding a sword, with all those shadows surrounding me. I knew they were shadows because none of them said anything.”

“They looked real enough to us,” Jon-Tom told her.

“I remember”—and she looked up into his eyes with such earnestness that it made his heart hurt—”seeing you, Jon-Tom. I knew it was you. And Mudge and Clothahump too. I wanted to cry out to you, to throw away the sword and run to you, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t!” She started to cry again. This time she let him put his arms around her.

“It was as if someone else, that someone up in that building, was controlling my muscles, my voice. I couldn’t call out. And then I found myself trying to kill your friend.” Colin and Dormas had moved over to join them.

“Lucky for us you didn’t cut him first,” Jon-Tom told her.

“No danger of that. Lucky for her I used a kick before the saber.”

Jon-Tom ran the attack back through his mind, saw the koala striking out with his long sword first instead of his foot, the razor-sharp blade slicing through real flesh and bone. Saw the real Talea bleeding to death in his arms. Too close. It had been too close.

“Where are we?” She was trying to maintain her usual defiant pose, but to his surprise Jon-Tom could see that she was scared. She had a right to be. “What is this place? Has the whole world gone crazy?”

“Only at irregular intervals,” Clothahump explained as he proceeded, with Jon-Tom’s help, to tell her the tale of the perambulator and its captor and how the five of them had come to be there.

“And lastly,” the wizard said, “being unable to defeat us by other means, our opponent sought a way of destroying the spellsinger among us. This he did by seeking out and bringing under his sway the spellsinger’s true love, then copying her and sending all rushing down upon us. It would have worked if not for the soldierly poise of Mudge and Colin.”

“True love?” Talea frowned as she used the back of one hand to wipe the dried tears from her cheeks. “Whose true love?”

Jon-Tom turned away from her. “I’ve always thought of you as that, Talea, from the night Mudge brought us together alongside that couple you hadn’t finished mugging, to the day you told me you had to leave because you needed time to think our relationship through. You know that.”

“I know what? Why should I know that?”

He turned back to her. “I told you often enough.”

“Like hell you did, you great, gangling, impossible man! I thought all you wanted was to bed me. Every male I meet wants to bed me, including that obscene otter you hang around with, and he isn’t even of the same species.”

“Somebody mention me name?” Mudge looked up from his arrow-gathering.

“Never mind, Mudge.” Talea turned angrily back to Jon-Tom. “You never said one word about my being your only true love.”

“Couldn’t you tell how I felt about you?”

She let out a sigh of exasperation. “You men! You expect every woman to be a mind reader. How am I expected to know how you really feel if you don’t tell me?”

“Truthsayer,” said Dormas sagely.

“I just thought—” he tried to say lamely, but she was in no mood for excuses.

“ ‘You just thought.’ You men just think, and we poor women are supposed to divine what you’re thinking about, and if we don’t, then we’re callous and uncaring and insensitive!”

“Now just a minute!” he roared. “If you think all you have to do after disappearing on me is . . .” And they went on in that vein, arguing loudly and incessantly, about just who had let whom down.

Colin was standing nearby, cleaning his saber. Mudge ambled over, nodded toward the pair of combative humans. “Charmin’, wot? ‘Ave you ever seen a prettier couple?” The koala nodded, turned his sword over, and commenced to polish the other side. It was thick with red-orange dust. “Listen to them squall. ‘Tis true love for sure.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“Old acquaintance o’ mine. Carries a sharp knife an’ a sharp tongue an’ is quick to use both. Introduced ‘im to ‘er when the two of us had occasion to ‘elp ‘er out o’ a tight spot. They didn’t ‘it it off right away. She’s a bit o’ an independent, Talea is. Been awhile since they’ve seen each other. I imagine they’ve a bucket o’ mutual insults to catch up on.”