Tod did not hesitate. There was absolutely no moral struggle. He simply jammed his own keys into the ignition of the motley subcar and slid behind the wheel of Mark’s real one. An exchange, if not a fair one. Wards and barriers fell apart around Tod like so many cobwebs. The car smelled clean and new. Bliss. The seat adjusted to Tod’s shorter build with a sigh of power. It took him a second or so to discover how to get reverse, but he was backing smoothly up the drive by the time Mark arrived at the front door. Seeing the sober, pale figure emerge, and stand aghast, Tod gave him a cheerful wave as he swooped backward into the road. Then he put the lovely car into forward gear and surged away.
4
It could not really be sleep, not if she was to hold Joe for the length of time they might need in Laputa-Blish. Maureen continued to drag downward, into a place she had only heard of and never yet experienced, deep in the ether. Down and down.
Some time later they were hanging, still tightly wrapped together, in a place full of whorls of feeling and shadows of color, where everything seemed a sick sepia to the taste, and motes like sticky dust rained into their hearing. Things wrong and bad lurked in the corners of the senses, or made little scuttling rushes, trailing gelatinous disturbance over the floor of the mind. Some of the things — Maureen had an image of just such a disturbance, with too many legs, nestling in the lap of a fat old woman, which was surely wrong, and bad. Nightmares, she thought. Perhaps this was a mistake.
Joe roused when she did — they were that closely involved. Oddly enough, he finished the sentence he had started when she caught him. “If you ask me, that was a con job too. I don’t think they can bring me back. What did you want to bring us down here for? This is a very bad part of the ether.”
“I know,” she said, or rather communicated, being bodiless here. “But tell me a better way to hold you. I had to get some sleep.”
She could feel panic writhe in him and be controlled. “It’ll be more than sleep you’ll get unless you know the way out. Our bodies could starve to death. Do you know how to get out?”
“No,” she confessed. “I was desperate. I—”
“You never think, do you? You’re worse than I am.” She felt him consider. “I had lessons in this. I should remember. Yes. The first thing to do is we make ourselves bodies here, or we lose what little we’ve got left. Come on, woman, concentrate! Imagine you’ve got your usual body.”
Maureen did so. Joe’s carefully controlled panic assured her it was urgent. She pushed her answering panic away and thought of herself, her body, as she knew it. Long legs, slender, shapely back — particularly nice firm buttocks — thin, strong arms, small breasts, her neck, the sweet line of jaw, her hair, which she loved for its color, her own freckled, wide-eyed face. Toes. Long fingers. Elegant flat belly.
And it came into being, nebulously, as she succeeded in visualizing it. Joe also assumed a form, almost at the same time, but she noticed that he had edited himself so that he no longer had that heavy, coarse look to his face. She could see little else but his face, for they were still entwined, because that was how their minds were, arms around each other, leg wrapped into leg, as closely as lovers.
“You’ve made yourself prettier,” he told her. “Your face usually looks much more like a camel’s.”
“So have you. You usually look like a thug,” she retorted. “What now?”
“Unwrap me.”
“No way! You’ll scoot and leave me here.”
“You’re dead right, you bitch! Unwrap, or neither of us moves.”
“Stuff that!”
It was another deadlock. They hung there in the senseless sepia nowhere, gazing each over the other’s shoulder at scuttling whorls of nightmare. When a disturbance came uncomfortably close, one or the other would push or pull or tug sideways, and their combined bodies would drift away in a new direction. It was timeless. They could already have been there twenty years. Our bodies are probably long dead, Maureen thought.
“Of course they aren’t. You never did have a sense of time!” Joe snapped at her.
My thoughts are not private anymore, Maureen realized.
“That’s your own stupid fault — Hurl’s balls! Look out! Upwards!”
Maureen looked and found a huge and regular disturbance approaching. Overhead, the fabric of everything was dented and pounded inward, as if a company of four-legged giants were marching towards them across a hammock made of thin veiling. The sepia was trodden to sick pink in bulges. And whatever the giants really were, they were striding straight for their two enwrapped nebulous bodies.
Both pushed and pulled frantically to get out of the line of advance, but the striders seemed to sense their presence and altered their course to follow. Closer and closer, until Maureen caught a whiff of their nature — something wild, but harnessed by a malevolence that had its origin in this place. Closer still. The malevolence almost unbearable, right on top of them. As the leading monstrous dent came bulging down upon them, Maureen freed her arms, scarcely knowing what she did, and pushed, hard and desperately. Joe’s arms were free too. He stretched up and heaved at the thing’s underside. Between them, they caught the strider at one side. That seemed to unbalance it. It, and the bulges that followed it, appeared to stumble and tip, and then veer ever so slightly. Maureen tilted her head and watched the whole train of striders pace off into sepia distance at an angle to the two of them.
As the striders went, a vision came to Maureen, not of this place, and not of anything she knew. Things were striding in the vision, too, but these things were metal towers, giant sized, that were marching over grass against a stormy sky. As they strode, the metal things trailed a wild, unharnessed malevolence that seemed akin to the striders, but with that they also trailed arcing, crackling blue violence. Killing violence.
She threw her arms around Joe again, not holding him now, but hugging him for what comfort she could get. “What the hell were those?”
He was scarcely articulate and clung to her as hard as she clung to him. “A sending — bad one — really strong — ye gods! Wild magic — the size of it! — right down through half the Wheel — How have we made someone that angry?”
5
“Your lover,” said Mark, “has just stolen our car.” Paulie, now hurriedly dressed in stretch-nylon trousers and an Arran sweater, paused in filling the thermos. “He is not my lover. I never saw him before today.”
Mark discerned that she was telling the truth. “Then why did you have him in the house?”
“He’s Tony’s brother — I told you.” Before Mark could make any comment about Tony, Paulie swung to counterattack, with the thermos clutched to her sweater as if it were her injured name. “You watched him steal the car, and you didn’t try to stop him! I suppose it didn’t occur to you that you’re the most powerful magician in this country. You could have stopped him in his tracks if you’d thought to use your power.”
“I did think,” said Mark, “and I did try. Whoever he is, he turns out to have more power than I have. By some way. He brushed me off like a fly — along with all the wards on the car.”