“What’re you looking for?
“Map.”
“A map? What the hell good is a map?”
He cast me a glance out of the corner of his eye. “You forget, I don’t read maps like the average guy.”
Something hopelike stirred in my chest.
“Intiryesneh,” said Doc.
“Huh?” I swiveled my head to peer back into the dark recess where Doc was on his knees, checking out the wall.
He gestured at it. “Interesting. It seems … blurry to the eye and …” He pressed the palm of his hand against the rock. “… it feels very strange, too. Almost, em … fuzzy.”
He glanced up at Cal, who left off looking for the map and got down next to him on all fours. “I’ll be damned. You’re right. This does seem less than solid, doesn’t it?”
Looked perfectly solid to me.
Doc nodded. “Yes, exactly. It seems like real earth and stone, but…” He pushed at the rock. “Less than solid, as you say. Goldie went through here?”
Cal nodded. “If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Then I suppose we must wait until he comes out again. There is breakfast to be eaten.” His eyes grazed mine as he rose. “Patience, like most virtues, is easier on a full stomach.”
We saddled the horses and packed first, then ate quickly, our eyes on the little cave. I suspect each of us was rehearsing what we were going to say to Herman Goldman when he came back up from the underworld. (Jeez, who names their kid Herman, anyway?) Of course, the longer we waited, the louder and nastier the rehearsals got. Damn Goldman. By the time he got here we’d have all run out of mad.
As it happened, we didn’t so much run out of mad as had it scared out of us.
Cal had gone back to the cave. I could hear him tapping at the wall with something heavy and metallic. (That’s no way to treat a good sword.) Doc and I were sandwiched between a couple of horses, packing up the last of the kitchen items, when Doc yelped and leapt back, bumping me and knocking me face first into a bag of drying mushrooms that was dangling from a pack saddle.
“Bozhyeh moy!” he said, and I sneezed and came back with “Sonofabitch!”
I turned to see what he was bozhyeh moying about. Over the rear end of the packhorse I saw a guy peering at us from the trees at the edge of the camp, about twenty-five feet away. At least, it looked like a guy at first glance. Young.
I stepped out from between the horses, hand on my knife. “Hey! Either get lost or come out here where I can see you.”
He smiled. That’s when I realized this was not a normal guy. If you were to mix everything you’d ever seen that was dangerous, dizzying, vile, putrid, and charming into a smile, this would be it.
Smiling Jack chose option number one, leaving nothing but a bobbing tree branch to mark where he’d been. He didn’t reappear. Imagine my relief.
We moved the horses up to the cave and gave the camp and clearing a thorough last look. Then Doc and I went to hover outside the cave, where we watched Cal in silence for a while.
“Anything?” I asked finally.
He made a negative noise and shook his head.
I gave the area around the mouth of the cave a nervous once-over. Tree limbs shivered in a chill breeze and a mist was caught like cotton wadding in the branches.
Great. Another soggy day.
I beckoned to Doc and we moved to secure the horses on their grazing line, strung out along the perimeter of the mound.
“So what does that mean,” I asked as we worked our way back toward the cave from the end of the line of horses. “Boshuh … bozeh…”
“Bozhyeh moy? It means ‘my God.’ ”
At the end of the line I squatted down, my back against the steep berm of the mound. “You a religious man, Doc?”
He seemed surprised by the question and answered slowly as if he had to look at each word as it came out. “Yes. Yes, I am a religious man. An anomaly, yes?”
“An anomaly,” I repeated. “I’m not quite sure how to answer that.” In fact, I didn’t have a clue what the word meant, but I wasn’t about to admit it.
He shrugged, glancing down at me. “I merely mean that, with all that has happened, it may seem… foolish to believe in a God.”
“Hey, no, really,” I protested. “I wasn’t thinking that at all. Although, I gotta say, the whole idea of evil is sort of weird. I mean, why would God invent a devil? What-He didn’t think life had enough challenges?”
He smiled, his eyes straying out over the clearing to the billows of fog that pressed into it. “Perhaps God did not invent evil. Perhaps all He did was invent man.”
“Yeah, but He gave us the tools for evil. Look at the Source. All that power. Look what they did with it. What it’s become.”
“Tools, Colleen, are neutral. They are neither good nor evil. Good and evil are in the using.”
He reached down, picked up a rock, and held it out to me in the palm of his hand. It was river-worn, a flattened oval of reddish brown. The sort of stone that would skip well.
“Is this a weapon or a tool? Hmm? Does not the answer depend only upon whether I choose to hit you in the head with it, grind corn with it, or skip it across a quiet pond?”
I laughed because he had seemed to read my thoughts. “Okay. Good point. I heard somebody say that about fire once: in the hands of a wise man, it warms the house-”
“In the hands of a fool, it burns it to the ground.” He turned the rock in his fingers. “In the hands of a fool …” he repeated softly.
“Catholic?”
“Russian Orthodox.”
“Ah.” Like I knew the difference.
He was still smiling at me, still balancing the rock in his hand, when my alarms went off. So did the horses’. They whickered nervously and yanked on their tether. The fog was practically lapping at their butts, and something dark swam through it.
I tried to stand, but my feet slipped out from under me, landing me on my ass. Doc immediately knelt to help me up, and it was while we were in that awkward position that
I saw Smiling Jack again over Doc’s shoulder. He was much, much closer, seeming to ride the crest of the fog.
“Shit!” I flung myself up, using Doc’s shoulder for leverage, and just managed to get my knife free of its sheath.
Jack wasn’t alone. There were four more guys just about like him, only less guylike. They were all young and recognizably human, but there was something wrong about them. Their features seemed distorted-like I was looking at them through a warped window and a thick mist.
Doc turned, saw them, and moved to shield me. This was absolutely the wrong time for that chivalry crap. I shoved him roughly toward the mouth of the cave, which was about eight feet farther to our left along the mound. Our mounts were tethered on the far side. My crossbow hung from the pommel of my saddle, for all the good it did me.
I brought my attention firmly back to our friends. “What d’you want?” I demanded.
“Want?” repeated Jack.
Well, at least he could talk. “Yeah, want. If you’ve got your eyes on our food, fine. We’ll share, but that’s about all we’re good for.”
He smiled, his weird, amber eyes sweeping me up and down. “Not all you’re good for. Huh-huh-huh.”
I realized that was supposed to be a laugh. The rest of them picked it up: “Huh-huh-huh.” My skin tried to crawl off and hide.
“You with him, huh?” Smiling Jack was facing me, but his eyes were on the mouth of the cave.
“Him? Cal?” I glanced at Doc, whose face was so rigid it might’ve been cut from stone. “Yeah, we’re with him. Why?” “He did this,” Jack informed me.
I shook my head. “Did? What-did what?”
“This!” He snarled the word, pounding himself on the chest with a clenched fist, his lips drawn back over sharp, uneven teeth. There was pain in his eyes.