Then Killer drove the wagon to the barn. Jerry started tossing more firewood up from the main pile onto the porch, his Meran clothes shielding him from the downpour. Killer had not stripped to keep his clothes dry— he was enjoying a cold shower, which was fairly typical. A true Greek, he was never really happy with his clothes on. He was also a show-off.
Jerry went back into the cottage and gave it a thorough inspection. The furniture was all old and secondhand, the upholstery shabby, with the flowers long faded on the chintz. The sofa was lumpy. One bed, obviously, would be for the person they had come to meet, the potential eater of that third steak. The second bed… well, probably Killer and he would be taking turns at guard duty anyway, but he could survive on that sofa if he had to. Both bedrooms had bolts on the doors. He tried a few keys on the piano, and it was in tune. He found a bucket, a tin basin, and a stack of three large towels, so the Oracle had even foreseen the rain.
When Killer came limping in, Jerry was busying himself with the stove and pointed to the towels. Killer was shivering, but he shook his head and picked up the bucket.
“I’ll get that,” Jerry protested, angry at his oversight. “Where’s the well?” But Killer had already gone.
He returned with a full bucket of water, bolted the front door behind him, and surveyed the room carefully as he dried himself. Rain was thundering on the roof now, dribbling noisily from the eaves— a hell of a night.
Before he got dressed, Killer made his own inspection of the cottage— and it made Jerry’s effort look like a quick glance. He even crawled under the beds. He peered in, behind, and under the icebox. He poked in all the drawers and cupboards and under the rugs. He glared suspiciously at the piano and asked what the devil that was.
Jerry told him, and he pulled a face— Killer disliked anything more complicated than pan pipes. He sniffed at the oil can and hefted it for quantity; he tried all the switches and grinned childishly as the lights went on and off. Then he frowned at a small box standing on a shelf over the table, beside the lamps, matches, soap dish, and two empty cooking pots.
“That’s a wireless!” said Jerry, who had missed it. He turned a knob, and it came to life at once, surprising him; but he could find nothing but static.
Killer grinned and picked up the wand from the table and walked across the room. The static grew quieter.
“How did you know about that?” Jerry demanded.
Killer chuckled, pleased at catching him out in his own time frame. “I’ve seen them before, but smaller. Besides, a lot of that technical stuff gets fouled up by the wands.” Of course Killer had been Outside hundreds of times, not a half-dozen like Jerry. After some knob-twisting, Jerry found a badly garbled voice gabbling quickly, something about a President addressing a Congress. So it was not a wireless, it was a radio, and he knew which continent he was on. He turned it off.
Killer pulled on his pants.
“It’s all fake,” he remarked casually. “There’s never— ever— been horses in that barn. I tasted the floor to be sure. The biffy has never been used. There’s no junk lying around the yard or under the cottage, and, even in my day, peasants collected junk. In your century, they’re nutty about it. This place has been created for us, specially.” The room was shabby, and the furniture old— but there was no dust on anything. Jerry should have noticed that at least.
Cool shivers danced along his spine. So they were in the borderlands. Technology would work, if it was not downtime, but faerie would work also, at least near the wand. Jerry had discussed this situation many times with Gervasse and the other philosophers, and none of them knew what to expect. Either the wands created bubbles of their own power within the reality of Outside, or this was a transitional condition on the outer limits of Mera’s influence. Only the Oracle knew and it would never say. The worst of both worlds, then, an unholy mixture. The enemy might come as flesh and blood, armed with firearms or with claws and fangs; the guns would hold them off, if they were not too many. The wand was still tingling, so it would have power against the disembodied legions of hell if they came— unless, again, they were too many or too strong or clever— but what of the in-between, Asterios himself, or his equals or senior deputies? Jerry almost wished that he were back in Mera, playing a nice game of mayhem.
“Well?” he asked. “Are we ready for whoever is going to come calling? Anything I’ve forgotten?” Killer tugged the cloak over his head and gave his curls a final rub with the towel. “How do you turn that high light off?” Jerry thought, then looked around for a circuit box, but the master switch did not turn off the yard light. “You don’t,” he said.
Killer shrugged. “You shoot it, then, if you have to, but we’ll probably want it on, not off. Need to get more wood in. Close the drapes. Move the sofa over there and the chair there. All the windows look good and solid. I found no gaps in the hedge, and it has prickles. We can see the gate from that window. Hide the weapons around the place so we can lay our hands on them. There’s enough oil to keep one lamp lit just in case; we’ll keep it down in that corner and sit in the dark so it’s safe to open the drapes— ” Killer scowled. “What are you grinning at, Jeremy, scion of Howard?” He was grinning at the transformation in his companion. Jerry himself was very conscious of the stress, of the cold, naked feeling of Outside, the vulnerability. The skin on his face felt tight, and he kept wanting to twitch. Perhaps he did twitch. But in Killer the stress was coming through as a cool professionalism, a vastly more adult approach to the world than the juvenile posturing and rowdyism he affected in Mera. What mercenary leader would not jump at a chance to hire Killer? He was the enlistment officer’s dream, the ideal recruit: a twenty-year-old with four hundred years’ experience.
But the concept of measuring a man by the length of his service was totally foreign to Killer’s thinking, so there was no way to explain that.
“I was just musing, Achilles, son of Crion,” said Jerry, “that I’m proud to be your friend. Mera would be a duller place without you… but I like you even better when you’re mortal.” Far away in the grasslands, barely audible over the rain, something howled, lonely, haunted, and unworldly.
Three
“Are we nearly there, yet?” asked Lacey.
“For Heaven’s sake!” stormed Ariadne, “that’s the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time you’ve asked me!”
Then she thought, Give me strength, took a deep breath, and said, “Sorry, darling. Mommy’s very tired. Yes, I think we’re nearly there and I’m sorry I shouted at you.” Tired was not adequate. Exhausted, fatigued, frazzled… there were barely words for this sandy-eyeballed, concrete-in-the-bones feeling. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep for a few years, and a cold car would be quite comfortable, thank you; but she had Lacey and Alan with her, and the metronomes in front of her were wipers, and she must not sleep.
She had been driving for fourteen hours.
Lacey was sobbing and trying to make it a silent sobbing, which was worse than the furious bawling that Alan had indulged in until he had faded away.
“Soon, darling,” said Ariadne. “Remember I showed you the sign at the turnoff? Hope, it said. We’re going to a place called Hope. That’s a nice name, isn’t it?”
Lacey sniveled and probably nodded in the dark.
Except that there seemed to be no Hope. She had given up trying to reach the border that night— the coffee had done no good and the hamburgers had merely allowed Alan to have his third attack of car sickness and make the car stink even worse. Okay, maybe the coffee had helped for ten minutes or so, but then her eyelids had started folding up again, the rain had gotten worse, and the cold fact had soaked in— she wasn’t going to make the border that night. Then a sign had said HOPE NEXT TURNOFF, and that had sounded like what the marriage counsellor ordered; and she had taken the exit to Hope.