The Sea Peoples(84)

John had noticed steps behind him, but Hildred hadn’t in his agony of soul, an agony that shook John even though he realized how richly it was deserved. Hands seized him from behind, and bound him despite a struggle that left his veins standing out like cords. His voice shrieked wordless hate, and he sank his teeth into a wrist below a blue uniform jacket’s cuff, worrying it until the man screamed, too, and staggered away with blood spurting from a torn artery. It ran down Hildred’s teeth and chin too and across the silk of his robe. It tasted hot and salt and metallic as he fell to the floor and struggled in futile jerks against the handcuffs and the boots.

He saw Hawberk then, and behind him Louis’ ghastly-pale face, and farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

“Ah! I see it now!” he shrieked. “You have seized the throne and the Empire. Woe! Woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!”

His mind spun down to blackness, and John heard a familiar voice shouting:

“John! Johnnie! Wake up!”

Cords of silver and gold pulled at him, pain and relief and hope more bitter than either. He opened his eyes.

? ? ?

“I’ve got it!” Pip said. Then: “John! Johnnie! Wake up!”

There was a prison stench as the stretch of wall swung back. A lamp burned dimly, high on the windowless wall, and a chain from an overhead bracket ran to a thick bar. That ran behind Prince John’s back, between the crooks of his elbows, with his hands bound in front of him and the balls of his feet just touching the dirty boards below. Another man sat manacled to the wall not far away.

“Wait—” Deor began, then swore and followed her.

The others crowded in, and the hidden door swung shut. John looked at her, his honey-brown eyes dull.

“You almost look . . . real . . .” he said.

“I am real, you bloody fool!” she snapped. “Toa, hold him!”

Muffled through the door and the books and papers on the other side came shouting and a high frenzied shrieking. Toa put an arm around John’s waist and lifted, enough to take the strain of the rope, and Pip flicked out her kukri in two precise chops. The weapon had started as a peasant’s tool in Nepal, used for everything from cutting kindling to settling disputes with the neighbors; her mother had gotten these from a Gurkha veteran she’d adventured with after the Blackout, a sort of uncle-mentor. The heavy back-curved blade was fine steel and it snicked through the heavy sisal with a thack-thack-thack as she moved it with snapping precision, then struck the point into the floor and took John in her arms, lowering him gently.

“Water, somebody,” she said.

A hand—she didn’t notice whose—put a bottle in her hand; it was lemonade from the street cart, but that would do. John’s lips were cracked and his face gaunt and heavy with brown beard just getting to the end of the bristly stage, but his eyes cleared as they met hers.

“Ah!” he said, taking his lips from the bottle. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, that was good. Pip . . . Thora . . . Deor . . . Toa . . . thank you! But what are you doing here? Where is here?”

It’s the dream of a mad God, Pip thought, then took pity on his bewilderment—that was apparently literally true, but not what he needed to hear.

She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling herself shuddering in relief. We found him! she thought, and it was as if a weight had been taken off her very bones.

Admittedly they hadn’t rescued him yet, or themselves; they were stuck in a very bad place. But half-done was well-begun.

Deor spoke with a briskness that was more soothing than a gentler tone would have been:

“My Prince, you were abducted in the moment of victory. You remember that?”

“Yes . . .” he said, frowning. “The Pallid Mask . . . and there was some local ghoulie working with him—Rangda, I think I heard her called. She . . . well, she looked to me like a woman with white hair only her face was . . . sort of like a beast, with fangs. . . .”

Pip blanched, and saw that the others did too. “Rangda? The demon queen of the Leyaks?”

I really wish things in folktales would stay there! On the other hand, I just turned into a lion . . . except this is all a collective dream . . . oh, bugger.

“If that’s what she is,” John said, draining the rest of the lemonade. “She had this mob of little . . . things with her. Like pygmy humans, with faces like a withered apple and big eyes. And blowguns.”

“Kuro-i!” Deor said.

They all looked at him, even Thora. He shrugged. “I collect tales. The kuro-i are goblins of a sort. Haunters of the deep jungle, takers of heads; not quite human, and full of malign hatred towards our breed. Some of the scholars I’ve spoken with in Bali thought they were a memory of a tiny folk who first inhabited the island world before true men came south in their canoes very long ago.”

John nodded, and then winced as he tried to shrug his shoulders. Pip and Toa gripped them and began to knead, both familiar with injuries and their care. John went a little white around the lips, but stifled the groan that tried to burst out between clenched teeth. When he could speak he went on:

“And the Pallid Mask was there. Like the one in the mask we fought in Baru Denpasar’s harbor, but not . . . quite the same . . .”

The man chained to the wall stirred, clanking his fetters. John nodded to him. “This man’s one of ours, from Montival. Boise, I think—I’ll tell you about that later. We need to take him out of here.”