CHRISTOPHER STASHEFF
HERE BE MONSTERS
WARLOCK'S HEIRS #4
PROLOGUE
Allouette gazed out the window as Gregory lit the incense in their meditation room. “How curious!” she murmured.
“What is curious, my love?” Gregory came up behind her to follow her gaze. His hand seemed to rise of its own accord toward the satin-draped curve of her hip, but he forced it back by sheer willpower; his fiancée did not need any distractions if she intended to meditate.
He exerted more willpower to turn his gaze to the meadow below their tower, rather than toward the beauty of her profile, the more beautiful because it was radiant with happiness—at last, after a decade of exploitation.
“That is the fifth couple come to build in our meadow.” Allouette pointed to the ground around their ivory tower that had so recently sprouted four sturdy thatched cottages. The young folk who lived in them were helping the new arrivals build a cottage of their own. They had already set up the posts and were weaving the wattle branches among them.
“I had cherished our solitude,” Allouette told Gregory. “Why must they come here? Can they not study as well in their own villages?”
“They cannot,” Gregory said regretfully, “for few peasants understand their hunger for learning, and their lords are quite impatient with their ways of passing the winter days.”
“I must strive to understand that,” Allouette said thoughtfully. “I was fortunate in that, at least—that my foster parents did provide me a school, and encourage my desire to learn—nay, nearly force me to it.” Her mood darkened at the memory of a happy childhood turned harsh in her teens. She shrugged it off with an effort and made a face (Gregory thought it was charming). “I may view them with sympathy, but I have no wish to be lady of the manor. I have had my fill of ruling others.”
She had indeed, young though she was. She had been trained to be a secret agent for an interstellar organization of anarchists—trained also to be an assassin and to do whatever was necessary to gain access to her assigned targets, including seduction. When she had realized she was being used—not only as a tool, but also as a toy for her superiors—she determined to become the one who did the using instead, and seduced and murdered her way into becoming the chief of her spy ring.
Her assigned targets had been the Gallowglass heirs—Gregory, his older brothers, and his sister. If she couldn’t kill them—for, powerful though she may have been as a projective telepath, she found that the Gallowglasses were stronger—she was to keep them from reproducing.
She had accomplished this most effectively with the eldest, Magnus, maiming him emotionally and imprinting him with a horror of intimacy. She had tried to steal Cordelia’s beau, Prince Alain, which would have had the advantage of bringing her to the throne, an excellent position from which to sabotage the government—but Cordelia proved too strong for her, as did Alain’s love. She might have managed to ensnare the middle son, Geoffrey, but he had captured a fiery young female bandit, Quicksilver, who had captured his heart in return.
Still, one out of three wasn’t bad—but she had tried to make it two out of four, doing her best to seduce Gregory away from his beloved books and enslave him with chains of love. In this she had succeeded—all too well, for his probing intellect had seen through her disguises to the woman underneath, knowing her for what she was but loving her anyway. Logic dictated that he execute her, in love with her or not, but his sister Cordelia had pled the cause of mercy and reformed her with the aid of their mother. Gwendylon had used telepathy to probe deep into the woman’s mind and found that the causes of her homicidal tendencies had been carefully ingrained by the anarchist agents who had reared her. Gwendylon enabled her to confront her fears and convictions of worthlessness, and helped her cure herself. In the process, she had discovered how completely the anarchists had victimized her, realized how thoroughly the political convictions with which they had reared her had been based on lies, and had rejected their philosophy in disgust.
Remorseful and lost, she had turned to the man who loved her, had traveled with him and fallen in love with him, and helped him build the ivory tower where the two of them studied the operation of the extrasensory powers that made up the “magic” of Gramarye’s “witches.” They threw themselves headlong into research—and one another. She was not quite willing to marry but was even less willing to leave the ivory tower and her scholarly swain, for she had to admit to herself that she was already addicted to Gregory.
Now, though, it was time for study, not lovemaking. She turned away from the window and went with Gregory back to the center of the room, mind already turning to the cluster of neurons she had identified as a possible source of telekinesis, the power to move inanimate objects by thought.
Gregory, not yet so pragmatic, was still enmeshed in trying to discover whether ESP was actually a characteristic of the brain or was simply a mode of thought. In their discussions, he had already conceded that if it could be inherited, that mode of thought certainly had its source in the brain itself—but he was content to leave neurons and synapses to Allouette while he tried to trace the convolutions of thought, the brainwave forms, that actually made the witches and warlocks of Gramarye able to fly (by telekinesis), to disappear in one place and reappear in another (by teleportation), to read one another’s minds and project thoughts and images into others’ minds, and to sculpt and animate the strange Gramarye fungus called “witch-moss.” Each had already read every book written on the subject, which were few, and had interviewed the few people who knew anything. That, however, gave them plenty of information to organize and analyze—food for many hours of thought.
So they settled down, sitting cross-legged at right angles to one another—Gregory had found that, if Allouette were in his line of sight, he could concentrate on nothing else. On the other hand, if she weren’t with him, he couldn’t concentrate for worrying about her welfare—so they meditated together, backs straight and hands on their knees, closing their eyes, envisioning the images that represented the problems they were studying. Their minds drifted into the rapturous haze of association and correlation, searching for patterns and testing them for soundness, sorting and rejecting, hoping for the inspiration that would make sudden simple sense of a complex knot of facts.
Then Allouette drew a long, shuddering gasp, her eyes opening, seeing not the room around her but the horrors that had invaded her mind.
CHAPTER 1
Allouette’s groan penetrated Gregory’s trance in an instant, and the images of his mental constructs fell to shards. He didn’t even give them a thought—he was already at her side, chafing her hands to restore contact with the real world, speaking in a low but intense voice. “My love! My love, come back! From wherever you roam, return to safety!”
Allouette’s gaze shot up to his face, terror twisting her features. Then she recognized her fiancé and the sight of his face waked her from the trance. She leaned against him but was still stiff as timber.
“There now, it was all a dream, only your own imaginings, only nightmares of the past twisted into new and horrible forms,” he soothed. “No matter how horrible, it is not real.”
She stayed stiff a moment longer, then went limp, collapsing into his arms and sobbing bitterly. Gregory held her and stroked her back and shoulders, marveling at his impossibly good fortune in having so wonderful a creature in his arms. He glowed with a feeling of power and purpose because he was able to comfort her.
At last the sobbing slackened and he tilted her chin up enough so that he could wipe at her tears with the hem of his sleeve. “Poor love, you must have seen horrors indeed! Was it a glimpse of genes gone awry, twisted into an angry knot? Or of a tumorous brain yielding distorted—”