“For the two seconds it took me to realize how much I’d miss you if I was dead.”
“You say such sweet things, Bee. I’d miss you, too. I wouldn’t stay. I’d follow my skinny guy anywhere he wants to take me.”
“Carrie!”
“You know what I mean. I don’t plan on getting downwind of Death for about nine hundred more years. Longer if I can work it.”
“Then I’ll stick tight and help you get what you want.” Though Carrie could have stated it with more clarity Babeltausque understood that she wanted him to remain evasive in the matter of deliberate self-risk.
She gave him a big grin, a peck on the lips, and popped into her portal, a master traveler after only one previous experience. The portal hummed. She vanished.
Babeltausque stepped into his own destiny.
Darkness. Then terror like none he had known before.
He was not alone in there.
Something had been lurking at the boundary. Something that had a yearning beggaring his own sad need for Carrie.
He stumbled into a place where half a dozen easterners gabbled at Lein She like frightened geese. Something was happening that should not be. Lein She rushed Carrie on toward a portal making feeble teakettle whistling noises. Someone plunged in ahead of her, a boy with a rusty short sword.
Tang Shan bums-rushed Babeltausque toward another portal, this one quiet. Another armed boy preceded him. Lein She pranced like he had a bad need to pee. The instant that portal reset, he followed Carrie. Behind him, babbling technicians settled into combat poses behind long swords, facing another portal producing especially hideous noises. Babeltausque experienced a weird sensation suggesting labor pain.
Tang Shan shoved him so hard he feared his shoulder had been dislocated. He spun, staggered into the portal backwards, glimpsed several unsettling things before the darkness embraced him.
Carrie’s portal tore itself apart-in total silence.
Black smoke emerged from the portal making the ugly birthing noise. The technicians harried it with their blades, which began to droop like overheated candles but caused much worse noises each time they slashed the smoke. Something was in extreme agony. Then a disembodied face pushed out of another portal. Babeltausque knew it without ever having seen it before. Old Meddler. And he was furiously unhappy.
Babeltausque suspected that devil found himself in the slow, painful process of arriving at a destination other than the one that he wanted.
Darkness.
The yearning engulfed him. It felt more familiar, now. It had become a friend after one brief connection. He thought at it, Crush that wicked old devil. Or something of the sort, never really articulated but enough to distract it briefly.
Then he felt Tang Shan coming, frightened by the inexplicable presence.
The passage dragged. Tang Shan remained close. Too close? Almost… They could not merge, could they? The receiving portal would not spit out some eight-limbed vertebrate spider-monster, would it?
He tumbled. Momentum brought him up against someone.
Carrie. She was seated on a dusty stone floor, laughing wildly while making no sound he could hear. Behind her, on hands and knees, the youth who had preceded her was puking his guts up while crawling toward his sword. Lein She lay curled on his left side, clutching his abdomen. The easterner who had preceded Babeltausque also lay in the fetal position, his blade eight feet away. He did not appear to be breathing. The sorcerer headed his way, to help, only belatedly realizing that he was suffering less than anyone else.
Tang Shan began ridding himself of his last several meals.
One thump and Babeltausque had the boy gasping. The pudgy man dizzily struggled to keep his feet under him. It was all on him, now. Whatever it was. He was the only one able to do anything.
The portals. There were three. Two still hummed. He had to make sure nothing followed…
Would Old Meddler bother? Who here was of any value?
How could the devil know that?
Someone stirred in the portal that Babeltausque had used. He hesitated, caught between the urge to snatch up a sword and the desire to fling an attack spell. Then he recognized a portal technician, another boy, maybe fifteen, armed but terrified and desperate to escape.
Something pulled him back.
He disappeared with a pathetic puppy yelp.
The calm nurtured during his association with Dane of Greyfells came over the sorcerer.
He had to silence those portals. They looked delicate. They should break easily. What to use?
Obviously, the sword that had gotten away from the youth who had come through ahead of him.
While stooping to recover the sword he became aware that every muscle and joint he owned now ached. He might not be puking up his soul but he had acquired a world of hurt all his own.
Carrie tried to say something.
He promised, “Nothing will get you. I won’t let it.” And he meant it.
He shuffled toward the portals.
Someone began to emerge from that same portal where the panicked boy had been pulled back. This one wore shreds of clothing similar to that boy’s but was more nearly naked than dressed. Babeltausque did not recognize that pale face. That was not anyone from Karkha Tower.
He raised the sword like a club. He had no idea how to employ the Eastern weapon.
The newcomer desperately dragged two-thirds of her body length out into the cold. Her? Oh, definitely, yes! Though she wore tatters of boy’s clothing, there could be no doubt. She had been well-blessed by Nature.
She could not get any more of herself free of the transfer’s grip.
Her desperation touched Babeltausque. Blade held high in one hand, he extended his other, let her grab hold, pulled. Out she popped. Well, most of her did. Part of a fine right leg, from just above the ankle down, did not emerge. There was no bleeding. Babeltausque noted that she wore scraps of a boy’s clothing.
Carrie gasped, “Bee Boss, you got to wreck them damned gates!”
Well, yes, he did have to get on with that, even if he and Carrie were way down on Old Meddler’s list, if just to deny that villain a possible escape route from the Karkha Tower.
Carrie was up now, hunched, in pain, muttering about hoping being pregnant was all in her head because no fetus ought to go through what they just had. Babeltausque did not quite grasp that right away. He dragged his attention away from eternity’s most marvelous set and attacked the portal whence their owner had come.
The one called Lein She said, “Strike lower, to the right. Your other right. The right side of it. Hit the orange and yellow hashes.” Babeltausque understood every word. At the moment he did not wonder how that could be.
Carrie stumbled to the stranger, helped her remain upright. The girl stared down at herself, plainly thrilled. She cupped her breasts, then commenced a slow blush. Carrie said, “One of these perverts will give you his jacket.”
Babeltausque was not alone in being thoroughly impressed.
His sword stroke fell where Lein She said it should.
A whine went out of the world, a sound the sorcerer had not recognized was there till it went away.
Tang Shan gasped, “Silence the others, too!” He was on his knees, now, eying the footless girl, baffled.
As a boy Babeltausque often fantasized himself an unstoppable swordsman, even then knowing it would only ever be a fantasy. He was not an athlete in any sense. But here he was, swinging a long eastern blade like he knew what he was doing. Clang! Clack! Ring! It was a magic blade, a singing sword!
“Enough!” Tang Shan yelled. “We want them damaged so nothing can come after us, not busted beyond repair.”
“Working off some fear energy,” Babeltausque admitted. “And now I’m exhausted.” He understood most everything Tang Shan said. Lein She, too. Was that a byproduct of their passage through the transfer stream? Instead of them being mashed together into a two-headed human crab?