This woman was someone he’d never known before. He said: “It isn’t here.”
Nimue glared at Simon as if he’d dared to threaten her with a blow. She declared: “You saw it here. I can tell, now, what you see and what you don’t. You can’t imagine what it’s cost me to come here myself. Find it!” Her voice vibrated, almost growling, and she gestured imperiously toward the nearby ruins.
“I can’t,” said Simon, and expected to be struck down on the spot. “I thought for a moment that it was here, yes. But it’s not.” Under Nimue’s gaze he could not lie, could not even try to hold back knowledge. “It’s not. I was fooled, by the way it’s been concealed.” Simon shook his head a little, awed. “The magic.”
“Where is it, then?”
“In our own time. My own time. That’s where we can reach it. It’s somewhere, as you thought, in—or near—the castle.”
“Then we will go to where it is. At once—”
At that moment Talisman struck. He lunged straight at the woman, from his position eight feet to Simon’s left. But Gregory and Arnaud had alertly positioned themselves close to her as bodyguards. They intercepted Talisman’s rush, caught him between them. Fast and powerful as he was, he could not break through. Wraith-figures closed in from the circle.
The sound of the struggle was unearthly. At the moment of greatest violence and noise, Nimue’s eyes let Simon go, and he was able to turn and run. But he had not gone half a dozen steps before another of the figures from the circle was in his path, confronting him. Then it vanished, but at once he felt its hands clamping his elbows from the rear, pulling his arms behind him, bringing him to a stop. The thing laughed with a high shrieking sound, and Simon saw other figures of the circle close before him, jeering at him. The pressure of the grip on his elbows increased until he screamed with pain. If his arms were pulled a centimeter closer together, the bones around his spine would certainly crack.
“Gently,” said Nimue’s controlled voice, somewhere behind him. “Simon is still my friend. We still must treat him gently.”
The pressure did not vanish, but it eased out of the region of pain, and Simon could see clearly again. When the grip on his arms turned him back toward Nimue, he beheld Talisman now stretched out unconscious on the ground, his two chief opponents standing over him. One of them, Gregory, kicked the fallen man savagely. The jarred body on the ground looked less human than before, more like a puppet or a statue; for a moment Simon thought that Talisman was dead, but inward vision showed otherwise.
Gregory had put on his foolish-looking hat now and was squinting into the east. “Shall we just leave this one here, mistress, for the morning sun to find?”
There was a little silence while Nimue considered; the peasant’s cheerful singing had stopped some time ago. “No,” she decreed at last. “Too uncertain, for one of his power. But daylight has him frozen in man-form. Finish him now, with wood.”
Arnaud growled in his throat. It was a low, regular sound, of which he appeared to be no more conscious than of his breathing. He looked round him, then seized a green tree-limb, thick as a man’s arm. In a moment he had plucked it, like a flower. As Gregory stepped out of the way, Arnaud raised this weapon in both hands and brought it down like a spear at Talisman, splintery end first.
The stroke dug deep into leaves and earth, the end of the branch going two feet deep in solid ground. Talisman’s body had disappeared.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kate had brought along a new shirt and an undamaged jacket to the hospital on Sunday morning, along with a lot of other stuff. The doctors were ready to let Joe go, and early Sunday afternoon Charley Snider was there helping him get the fresh upper-body clothing on. Kate had gone up to her folks’ place on the North Shore to give them the facts, or some version of the facts, about the shooting incident in which the news media reported their son-in-law had been involved.
As he dressed, Joe reflected that Kate was probably mad at him for going right back to work from the hospital, without even coming home to her for a rest. But some of Carados’ friends, as much murderers as he had been, were known to be still on the loose. And Kate was religiously strict about not trying to interfere with any of the vital aspects of Joe’s job.
The bandage on his right arm wasn’t all that hard to work into a sleeve, with Charley’s gentle help. Trouble was, the hand was still just about useless. A nurse brought him a plain sling of dark cloth; Joe wasn’t sure if the sling was going to be a help or a hindrance, but he meekly enough let his arm be guided into the thing after his coat was on. Maybe at least the sling would be a reminder to other people not to bump him.
“You up to this, ain’t you?” Charley asked him when at last Joe was fully dressed.
“Now’s a good time to ask that. Yeah, I’m up to it. I’m lucky, the bullet missed the bones and the big blood vessels. And we’ll just be riding around for a few hours in a car, right? No harder than sitting around in a chair somewhere.” Still he wished he could be home.
Charley grunted, and picked up Joe’s bag. “Well, it’s important, so they say. They wanna do it today, on Sunday, I guess they figure they’ll find more people home. We got an FBI honcho comin’ along, a state police captain, some big shot from the attorney general’s office. Maybe they figure they could never all get together during the week.”
Now it was necessary to concentrate for a few minutes on the details of getting Joe officially checked out of the hospital. As soon as they were effectively alone again, with Charley carrying Joe’s bag for him across the lobby—it had taken Joe some arguing to keep from being forced to ride down in a wheelchair—Charley said: “Another reason, as I get it, is that there’s actually a couple—three big old houses out in that direction that could actually be described as castles. Owned naturally by some pretty big people, so we don’t want to bother ‘em unnecessarily. And our star witness is a little vague on his geography—he’s gonna ride in the car with you and me, by the way, once we get our caravan organized. Seems he requested it that way.”
In front of the hospital Charley’s unmarked police car waited, under the usual cloudy Chicago sky. When they were in the car and moving, and Charley had reported in on the radio, he asked: “What you think it is, anyway, with all these different names our star witness likes to use?”
“Who is he now? And did you find out how he got out of that cell at headquarters?”
“He just keeps sayin’ the door was open. We don’t want to push him on that until we find out if he can help us with Carados’ friends. And he’s still Falcon, as far’s I know. We still don’t have any better make on ‘im than that. No fingerprints, nothing.”
Joe turned the subject over in his mind, not for the first time. Feathers, Hawk, Falcon. There was certainly an association there, even a progression of sorts. “A falcon’s a kind of hawk,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Well, with or without a real name he ain’t much as a star witness. But maybe he can put us onto something if he can recognize this castle where he claims he was. Some of Carados’ people from New Orleans are still runnin’ loose somewhere, that much we do know. Including the one you shot at and hit down the alley. There was a good blood trail there and I thought we had ‘im. But then the trail just cut off. How come your gun was loaded with silver bullets?”
“What?” said Joe, weakly. Then understanding, of a sort, came, a few seconds after shock.
“You heard me, man. Silver. The bullets that you fired. The ones we could find, anyway. You emptied your piece and we found three, two in Carados and one ricochet all flattened out of shape, on the alley pavement.” Charley didn’t sound really perturbed. More as if silver bullets were something you were likely to run into maybe once a year.