The Sea Peoples(78)

“You’re very welcome. Just doing my bit,” Pip said, feeling a little guilty as they filed out into the corridor.

“Now for Wilde,” Deor said as the door closed and locked behind them and something heavy was drawn up against it. “Vance isn’t important anymore—and Wilde is another step towards Prince John.”

“Why couldn’t I hit the bastard?” Toa said plaintively.

Deor shrugged with a wry smile. “Because we are in a story, my friend; a story about things that once happened. Happened in another place that no amount of physical travel could find, or inconceivably long ago, or both. And the . . . forgive me, I must use a term from my art . . . the narrative structure of this story had Vance using this—”

He moved the knife slightly.

“—to kill the young lady and her father. When we disrupted that, it pushed back to restore events to the original . . . plot.”

Toa looked slightly alarmed. “This . . . you-know-who bugger . . . he was doing it?”

“Not directly,” Deor said. “Not yet. For that Power to do so would rip the fabric of this story apart, and this story is very important to It; one source of Its strength. No, what has happened here is that we have . . . written ourselves is the only way I can put it . . . into the story and are turning it towards our own purposes, a little at least. And the story itself is fighting us. Events try to reshape themselves towards the original ending.”

All right, this is getting even stranger, Pip thought; Thora’s snort said something along the same lines.

Then something occurred to her. “These people here . . . they don’t know they’re characters in a story, do they?”

“No,” Deor said. “That is where using the terms of my art, the storyteller’s art, breaks down. They are real, and the story is their world which is real to them.”

“But if they can’t tell they’re in a story about something ancient, how could we? If we were, that is.”

She pinched herself where none of the others could see it. It hurt, and she mildly needed to pee . . . but then, she knew right now that her physical body was lying beside John’s and those things had felt just the same back there in the real world, the one where she didn’t think occasionally that she was either accompanied by or somehow was a lioness.

My head hurts, she thought. But does that mean anything if pinching myself doesn’t?

Deor began to reply, checked himself, then said: “Best not to think too much along those lines, Captain Pip.”

Toa shuddered. “Too bloody right! We’ve got enough to worry about right now. I wish you hadn’t said that, Pip; I have a feeling it’s going to come back to me and I wish it wouldn’t already, if you know what I mean.”

Then something struck him, something closer to his brutally pragmatic nature.

“Won’t that happen with this Wilde character, too?” Toa said.

“Probably,” Deor admitted.

“Then let’s get to it,” the Maori grumbled.

They went up the stairs in a quick rush; after the noise of the fight below, stealth was less necessary, or at least less practical.

Deor stopped them outside Wilde’s door. “Remember,” he said. “Our enemy is not this little man’s body. Our enemy is the world around us, trying to make us fail. You are all tested warriors of great skill . . . but you don’t need great skill to defeat his body. And the greater the skill of your attack, the more things that can go wrong with it. This world, this story, will seize upon each such chance.”

Thora nodded. “KISS. Keep it Simple, Stupid. Good advice.”

Toa chuckled like gravel in a bucket. “Right you are. A sheila after my own heart. Let’s do it, then.”

He pulled back the shovel for a blow at the door. Deor coughed, leaned forward and turned the knob. Then he pushed it open sharply, and they lunged through to spread out within.

Wilde was sitting on his high chair, eyes glittering in the dimness of a single tallow candle. He grinned at them, adjusted his pink wax ears, and threw the cat resting on his lap at Deor’s head.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

The cat stopped singing. John wept with relief; he’d started wanting to hear it, and it was starting to make sense. His mind babbled, thanks to saints and the Virgin and the Holy Trinity, and to Pip and Thora and Deor and Toa for coming after him—he couldn’t recall exactly how he knew that they had, but he did know, and hope was as sweet as water would be on his swollen tongue.

Just knowing that there’s something in the universe besides this room and the cat and . . . whoever the man from Boise is, poor bastard.

The cat lashed its tail and hissed, then darted out of the room—the door was open a little, then not. And the absence of the cat pulled at him. Suddenly the two of them were . . .

We’re with Hildred Castaigne again.

Wilde watched Hildred in silence after Vance left; when Hildred had stepped into the hall he looked back. Mr. Wilde’s small eyes were still fixed on him, while the shadows gathered in the fading light. Then he rose, closed the door behind himself as he left and went out into the darkening streets as the fairy-fire of electric lights came on.

They don’t even need the gasman who goes around and lights the streetlamps of the richer cities in Montival about this hour.