The Sea Peoples(30)
Deor remembered more; he had had the Sight to see what lay behind the physical things, and it had been like staring into the Sun, blinding the eyes of the spirit.
Vaster than worlds, he thought, and recalled tension like a steel band around his head until it snapped and left him feeling like a dust-mote tumbling in a hurricane. The wrath of a Goddess.
“I think . . .” he said. “I think we walk among memories as well as dream. Memories of what was, or what might have been . . . perhaps what might be, also.”
Pip’s head came up, and then Thora’s and Toa’s. Deor heard it too.
Clip-clop, clip . . . clip clop, slow and maddeningly irregular. Toa’s thick lips curled back from his teeth, and he glanced towards the brush and then back over his shoulder.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Neighborhood’s getting too soddin’ crowded for comfort, straight up, and it’s not the types who show up for a vicar’s bunfight.”
Pip opened her mouth and then hesitated. A sound came from nearby, a metallic clunking chunk accompanied by a groan.
“What was that?” Thora exclaimed.
Pip spoke, slowly and her voice very flat. “That sounded very much like an automobile door opening and closing again. One of my granddad’s cronies kept an old Jag from before the Change in mint condition on his Station and had it pulled around by horses now and then while he tooled behind the wheel. It sounded just like that when he got out. Except not so rusty.”
“But there’s nothing in those cars except—”
The same sound was repeated, this time with a loud screech as of rust-bound metal breaking free into movement. And again, and again. The stink of ancient decay grew suddenly stronger.
“—nothing in them but the long dead,” Pip finished. “Let’s bloody go, shall we?”
“Too right!” Toa said, and trotted into the fog.
Deor took a long breath and plunged into the mist behind him. It seemed to press into his mouth and nostrils, choking; then there was an instant of unbearable heat and they were through it, skin still tingling from what wasn’t—quite—scorching damage. The heat had been full of screaming, too, as if from multimillionfold deaths that never died.
The others exclaimed—or in Toa’s case, grunted and cursed in his own language—as they felt pavement beneath their feet, and an unfamiliar brilliant cool light leaking into the narrow dark place they stood. They were in a city, a living one from the lights and murmur of voices and wheels amid less familiar noises; in an alleyway smelling of uncollected trash in sheet-metal bins. He looked around; small red eyes looked back and then scrambled away. Scrawled on one surface of sooty brick in tall reddish-brown letters barely legible because of smearing and long dribbling trails was:
NOT UPON US, O KING! NOT UPON US!
Then they all exclaimed again, and louder, as they realized their clothes had changed as well. Deor felt something choking him and his hand flew up to it. Some very conservative parts of Montival still sent emissaries to the High King’s court in what the ancient world had called a suit and tie, and this was like that, only worse—the collar was starched and dug into his neck, and he had on a wool jacket and waistcoat too, and a hat much like the one Pip had called a bowler when she wore one. A quick look showed that Toa was wearing blue denim, a suit of loose pants with a bib-like extension that covered his chest over a collarless gray shirt and rough shoes and a flat floppy cloth cap with a bill over the eyes; he’d seen something very similar worn by farmers in New Deseret. The two women were in dresses that extended a little below the knee, light colorful fabrics and impractical-looking shoes with buckled straps bearing distorted skulls, and hats like bells made out of cloth with wool pom-poms on top.
“Where’s my damned sword?” Thora snarled. “I thought we could call weapons to us!”
Her left hand clapped against her hip on that side, groping for a scabbard where there was nothing but a narrow belt of cloth instead of the frog for her backsword. But there was a large embroidered handbag over her arm, and it clinked metallically. The red-haired Bearkiller froze, and then reached within it. They all recognized what she pulled out; it was a revolver, a massive thing with an eight-inch barrel.
What they’d never seen was one that would work as the old tales described, of course.
“Be careful where you point that, here, oath-sister,” Deor said, and she tilted it up. “Think of it as a loaded crossbow.”
Toa had something in his hand too, a wrench a yard in length ending in a knob crusted with stains they all recognized as well, and from their own experience. Pip was still carrying something very like her double-headed cane, and she looked inside a haversack-like thing slung over one shoulder.
“Mummy’s kukri-knives are in here,” she said.
Deor felt a catch under his left shoulder. He reached beneath the woolen jacket, and felt the butt of a weapon like the one Thora had just tucked away again in a complex holster arrangement designed to make it easy to draw but well-concealed.
“I think we have equivalents,” he said. “Ones that . . . fit . . . with wherever we are.”
Pip looked rebellious. “How did we imagine things we’d never imagined?” she said.
Deor was tempted to brush the question aside, but she might . . . would . . . need to make decisions in split seconds. A mind in turmoil was less likely to make the right ones.