Julie’s hand was unmistakable in Farrell’s, the right forefinger and thumb lightly calloused from years of drawing, the palm as broad as his own, strong and cool. Farrell said, “Where’s Micah?” without turning his head.
“Fishing. He’s recognized three more people this week, and today they all came and took him out on the Bay. I think he’s almost all the way back.”
“That’s nice.” She dug her nails hard into the back of his hand, saying, “I thought you were done being snotty. I came looking for you because I thought you could use some help. Whatever Aiffe’s been working up in the lab, the Whalemas Tourney is where she tries it out, always. This one is not over yet.”
At Farrell’s shoulder, Ben said very quietly, “Damn right, it isn’t over. What the hell is happening here?”
Farrell had never seen Garth de Montfaucon defeated in armed combat. For that matter, he had never seen the knuckly-faced man even forced to fight on the defensive; but all Garth’s work was defense from the first moment that he struck out at the bouncing, weaving, shrieking, dragonfaced fury that did everything but somersault back and forth over his head, as Japanese demons do. A feint and a flurry, and he was down a leg, kneeling behind his shield—another lunge, almost bending double, and his sword fell silently at Leonora’s feet. The Ronin Benkei shouted in triumph, hammering Garth’s shield back and back until it thudded against the black helm.
“This is not possible,” Ben said. “Aiffe would never let Garth lose like this.”
“She did it last year,” Julie reminded him, but Ben shook his head, craning forward on tiptoe. “That was different. Why take him all the way back to the kingship and then drop him five minutes later? I don’t see her doing that.”
“Maybe you’re not seeing her at all,” Farrell said. Aiffe was clinging to Nicholas Bonner on the sidelines, shrilling for her father as fiercely as ever as he scrambled on his knees to get to the sword. The point of his shield left a line in the earth all the way to Leonora’s feet. The Ronin Benkei danced and jeered, but let him reach his weapon. Farrell said, “Her ears are wrong.” When Ben and Julie looked at him, he said, “Well, they are. Somewhere in the last hour or so, they’ve gone all pointy and elfin—very pretty, really, and not hers. Something wrong about his ears, too. Quit staring at me like that. I just notice ears.”
Like Bohemond before him, Garth seemed unable to concentrate on his opponent, but was yearning in mute disbelief toward the figures of Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner. The Ronin Benkei parried a blind, desperate cut with one edge of his sword, struck the flailing shield aside with the other, and toppled Garth de Montfaucon with a blow that rang on the black helm as if there were no head inside. Leonora’s cry of avenging delight could be heard even above the mighty yell of the Ronin Benkei.
Ben was moving before Garth had hit the ground, trampling the scarlet flowers of St. Whale as he forced his way across the lists. Farrell and Julie followed him as closely as they could, holding hands to keep together. Ignoring alike the cheering spectators and the muddy, boisterous throng of warriors trooping to do ritual homage to the second new king of the Tourney—Farrell could see Hamid ibn Shanfara standing on the musicians’ dais, coolly improvising an entirely different victory paean from the one he had expected to deliver—Ben marched straight toward the boy and girl who stood watching Garth get to his feet, took them each by the shoulder, turned them to face him and said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, sonofabitch, let’s get out of here.” His own face was the color of an old sidewalk.
Close to, they looked very little like Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner. Close to, everything about them—age, features, dress, gender—pulled apart into fuzziness and shimmering smudge, a newspaper photograph blown up beyond clarity. They smiled and moved their mouths and made human sounds, and no one else seemed to notice that they were no more human than cream cheese. Looking at them for very long made Farrell feel dizzy and seasick. He thought he would die if they should happen to touch him.
“Simulacra,” Ben said tonelessly. “The old Norse wizards made things like that; Egil knew about them. Easy enough to create, but they go bad fast. These will rot away into air by sundown—she only wanted them to hold us here for a while. Worked just fine.” He was gripping Farrell and Julie like a pair of hammers, using them to batter a way through the crowd sweeping across the tourney field. Farrell sheltered his lute and kept looking backward, straining for one more glimpse of the simulacra, although he dreaded the idea of their soft, grinning, bloodless images sticking to his retinas. Then the three of them were out on the street, gasping under the parking lot portcullis, and Julie was saying, “My bike’s parked on Escalona, I’ll meet you at the house.” But Ben held tightly onto her arm as she turned away.
“You meet us right here. You are not to go to the house alone.” His voice was as gray as his face, so low that the late-afternoon traffic all but drowned it, but Julie looked at him and nodded, and Ben let her go.
She was waiting astride the BSA when they returned in Madame Schumann-Heink. Ben leaned out of the window and called to her. “Take the back road, around the hill.” The BSA made a sound like feeding time in hell and leaped forward past the tents and pennons and TV trucks on the lawn of the Waverly. The two falcons were still circling above the hotel, and Farrell could see them in his rear-view mirror long after the blue-and-gold Sagittarius of the League for Archaic Pleasures had sunk from view.
“Why this way? It’s no quicker.” The BSA was flying ahead of them on the laneless foothill road, dipping in and out of traffic like a darning needle, committing Farrell to a steady flow of criminal offenses just to keep Julie in sight.
Ben said only, “Yeah, it is,” the words half muffled by his fist as he crouched forward against the dashboard. His other hand kept coming back to the gearshift, gripping it hard enough to make the rusty metal creak like rope, no matter how many times Farrell slapped it away.
Farrell said, to be saying something, “Those things, those doubles, she did a pretty good job. If she hadn’t tried to improve on herself a bit—”
“I told you, that shit is easy.” Ben’s voice was angry and insulting, unraveling like the simulacra. “Sorcerer’s apprentice stuff, goddamn training exercises. Will you pass that senile moron now, for Christ’s sake?”
“Will you give me my goddamn gearshift back?” Farrell swung out and around a quarter-mile of station wagon, whose driver promptly speeded up, making a three-lane freeway out of the road for a brief but thrilling period.
Beside him, too bitterly frightened to pay any respect to imminent death, Ben muttered, “She is not that good, she is just not that good. Sia could butter the walls with her.” Farrell passed a truck and a schoolbus on a blind curve, because Madame Schumann-Heink was at her very best going downhill.
A long string of tarnished-silver clouds suddenly jolted into motion all together, exactly as if a train were towing them. That was the only warning Farrell had before the wind hit, making the VW shudder and boom, like the time the bear smelled my tuna fish in Yosemite. Madame Schumann-Heink wallowed almost to a stop until he threw her into second gear and struggled on down the slope, concentrating on nothing but keeping her from going over. The rain courteously held off long enough for them to reach the bottom of the decline and start up the other side; then the trees went out and the windshield turned to cement. Madame Schumann-Heink’s headlights only really worked in top gear, and her wipers were overmatched in a heavy dew. Farrell spread himself over the wheel, navigating by the lights coming toward him and silently reminding Kannon that he knew a friend of hers.