Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

He was frantically seeking efficacious lyrics as the train bore down on them. The engineer saw the wide-eyed trio running in front of his engine and threw on the brakes. An ear-piercing screeee! echoed from the walls of the tunnel. Too little, too late.

Jon-Tom found himself stumbling, going down. As he fell, he saw something directly beneath him. It was not the empty candy wrappers or stubbed cigarettes or torn, useless lotto tickets that drew his attention. It was a flat circle of softly seething black mist, lying neatly between but not touching the tracks or the center rail. He let himself fall, hoping his companions would see what was happening to him, hoping they would follow.

Of course, it might simply be a lingering patch of black fog, rising from the heat of the tracks.

He felt himself thankfully, blissfully, continuing to fall long after he should have struck the ground.

Seeming to pass directly over his head, barely inches from his ear, the roar of the train faded. He hit the ground, rolled, and opened his eyes. They were still in his head, which was in turn still attached to his shoulders. These were good signs. Sitting up, he rubbed the back of his neck and winced. Reaching around behind him, he found that the precious duar had taken a battering from the fall but was still intact.

Nearby, Mudge cast a pain-racked eye at his friend. “That’s it, mate. I’ve bleedin’ ’ad it, I ’ave. Gimme me share o’ old Wolfham’s gold and I’ll be quietly on me way.” Behind him a groaning Stromagg was just starting to regain consciousness.

Looking away from the angry otter, Jon-Tom found himself staring. “Don’t you think you ought to have a look around, first?”

“Why? Wot the bloody ’ell should I…” The otter broke off, joined his friend in gawking silently.

Namur Castle rose from a narrow ridge of rock surrounded on all sides by sheer precipices. A wooden bridge crossed from the mountainside on which man and otter found themselves to a small intervening pinnacle, from where a second, slightly narrower bridge arched upward to meet a high wooden doorway. Towering granite spires rose on all sides, while a tree-lined flat-topped plateau dominated the distant horizon. Jon-Tom and his companions were enthralled. It was an impressive setting.

The London Underground, bemused pedestrians, and wild-eyed pursuing costumers were nowhere to be seen.

Starting across the first bridge, a cautious Mudge glanced over the single railing. Like a bright blue ribbon dropped from a giant’s hand, a small river wound and twisted its way through the deep canyon beneath. They reached the intervening pinnacle and crossed the second bridge, whereupon they found themselves confronting a massive, iron-bound door.

Tilting back his head, Mudge rested hands on low hips and muttered to his friend and companion. “Wot now, Mr. Spelltwit, sor? You goin’ to sing us up a key, or wot?”

An annoyed Jon-Tom contemplated the barrier. “Give me a minute, Mudge. I got us here, didn’t I?”

The otter snorted softly. “Oi, that you did—though one might complain about the roundaboutness o’ the route you chose. ‘London,’ it were called?” He shook his head dolefully. “Give me Lynchbany any day.”

While man and otter argued, the silent Stromagg approached the impediment, spent a moment contemplating the wood and iron, then balled both paws into fists the size of cannonballs. Raising them high over his head and rising on tiptoes—a sight in itself to behold—he brought both fists down and forward with all his considerable weight behind them. The center of the door promptly imploded in a cloud of shattered slats and splinters. Dust rose from the apex of the destruction.

Approaching cautiously, Mudge peered through the newly made opening. “So much for a bloomin’ key.”

The interior of the foyer was dim, illuminated only by light shining through high windows. Nothing moved within, not even a piebald rat. Mudge’s sensitive nose was working overtime, his long whiskers twitching.

“Sure you got the right towerin’, forebodin’ castle ’ere, mate?”

Jon-Tom continued through the high vestibule, eyed the sweeping double stairway at the far end of the great room. “I sang for one and one only. This has to be the right place.”

Still, he found himself wondering and worrying until their explorations eventually brought them to an expansive, exquisitely decorated bedchamber. Rainbow-hued light poured in through stained-glass windows, burnishing the furnishings with gold and turning the canopied, lace-netted bed at the far end to filigreed sunshine.

The woman who slept thereon might or might not be a princess, but she was certainly of ravishing beauty. She was sleeping peacefully on her back, her hands folded across her chest, a soft smile on her full lips. Slapping away Mudge’s fingers, Jon-Tom considered the somnifacient figure thoughtfully.

“Something familiar about this…”

V

“Not to mention somethin’ irregular.” Mudge contemplated the unconscious female with mixed emotions. “That Wolfsheep didn’t say anythin’ about ’is beloved bein’ in a coma. ’Ow are you supposed to sing ’er a song o’ love if she can’t bleedin’ ’ear you?”

The soft shussh of leather on stone made the trio turn as one. Standing in the doorway was their erstwhile employer, but it was a Wolfram transformed. No longer the supplicating elder, he seemed to have grown taller in stature and broader of frame. His formerly simple cloth cloak glistened in the stained-glass light, and the vitreous globe atop his staff flickered with caged lightning. His entire being and bearing radiated barely restrained power.

“So you have done that which I could not.” Stepping into the room, he ignored them to focus his attention on the figure lying supine in the bed. “Ignorant sots. Did you really think that I, Wolfram the Magnificent, the All-Consuming, Master of the Warmlands, would consign the future of the Mistress of the Namur to your puerile attentions?”

As he replied, Jon-Tom slowly edged his duar around in front of him. “Somehow I knew you’d say something like that.”

A belligerent Mudge stepped forward. “If you’re so bloody all-whatever, guv’nor, then wot did you need us poor souls for?”

The sorcerer gazed down contemptuously. “Isn’t it obvious? The bonds that conceal this place are such as I cannot penetrate. It needs the attention of a kind of magic entirely different from what I propound, powerful as that may be. It required someone such as an innocent spellsinger to blaze a path here and divert any dangers that might lie along the way. This so that I could follow safely in your wake—as I have done.”

“Then,” Jon-Tom said, indicating the exquisite figure reposing serenely in the bed, “this isn’t your beloved?”

“Oh, but she is.” Wolfram smiled thinly from behind his narrow, pointed beard. “It is just that she does not know it yet. You see, whoever touches the princess in such a way as to rouse her from her sleep shall make of her a perfect match to the one who does the touching, and shall have her to wife, thus acquiring dominion over this portion of an important realm and its concurrent significant interdimensionality.”

“Is that all?” Mudge was studying his fingernails. “’Tis okay by me, guv.”

“Oh no it isn’t.” Jon-Tom advanced to stand alongside the otter. “If an interdimensionality is involved here, it means that this piece of whiskery double-crossing scum might be able to make trouble in my world as well.”

The otter shrugged. “Not me problem. Mayhap ’is meddlin’s might improve that revoltin’ London place.”

The sorcerer nodded knowingly. “I thought I would have no trouble with you three.”