"Daphne?" he called, but his voice reverberated hollowly up the stairwell, eliciting no reply.
"She's got to be up there," he assured himself. "There's nowhere else she could have gone. So, here goes." The sound of his own voice talking to himself was unnerving. He started slowly up, then paused.
"Wait a minute, O'Leary," he commanded himself sternly. "This would be a good time to do something at least half-smart. You don't know where you are now; why get in deeper?
"Because if poor little Daphne is up there," he replied doggedly, "I want to find her and tell her everything's OK. But is everything OK?" He went on, unwillingly.
"OK or otherwise, she went up, and I've got-to go, too," he settled the dispute. He paused to listen. Other than the faint keening of the wind, there was no sound at all—unless that was cautious whispering down below ... On impulse, he turned and went back down, pausing just inside the half-open door.
"... tell ya it's him," a hoarse voice hissed urgently. "All we gotta do to cop the reward is lay the scoundrel by the heels."
"That's easy to say, Marv," another raspy voice came back. "But if that's really the dread necromancer Allegorus, all the more reason to stand pat and send for the cavalry."
On impulse, Lafayette uttered a low, anguished moan, as of a spook in distress.
"Listen! You hear that, Marv? It sounded like maybe he's dying! Allegorus healthy is bad enough," he went on, "but wounded—and thirsting for revenge—lemme out of here!" The sounds of pounding feet and a brief scuffle followed.
Satisfied with the effect, O'Leary groaned again. More sounds of departing feet; and the chamber seemed deserted again. He stepped boldly forth, and at once found his head enveloped in a coarse and dusty cloth, held in place by more than one pair of hard hands. He managed to bite a thumb, eliciting a yell of pain, but the enveloping folds were only pulled tighter. He kicked, felt a satisfying impact against what felt like a knee, then swung both fists in haymakers which failed to connect. Then a rope clamped around him, both binding his arms and securing the dusty cloth tightly. He sneezed violently.
"Hey!" one of the coarse voices yelped. "No sneeze-spells now, or we'll hafta clobber ya good, which ya might never come to!"
Desperately, Lafayette suppressed a second sneeze, choking it down to a muffled snort. At once, a loose block of masonry fell from the ceiling, knocking him end-over-end. He had time only for a pang of dismay that he had somehow done it again, before all thought faded away.
It was going to be one of those tedious dreams, O'Leary realized, the kind where you know you're dreaming but having to go through with it, just as if you were awake. Only this one was surrealistic: nothing but a face, an angry—or frightened—face, yelling at him at close range, demanding, threatening. The face of a man. The man was dressed in a drab gray smock, Lafayette saw, and behind him in the dim gray-lit room he caught a glimpse of Daphne.
"Very well, then, fool!" the angry man said clearly. "If you refuse to cooperate, I shall consign you to the unresolved continua of your own meddlesome making. Begone!"
O'Leary tried to lunge past him toward Daphne, who was gone now, but he tripped and hit his head hard. He got to his feet shakily.
Chapter Two
He was standing—barely—supported by a man on either side who gripped his arms with hands like C-clamps. The ache in his head was approximately three feet in diameter, he estimated. He was back outside, he realized, smelling the fresh night air. Dimly, through a haze of pain, he saw a squat but mightily muscled man with bushy whiskers sitting on a broken gilt chair before him. The man was wrapped in badly cured furs. For some reason, O'Leary had the feeling the stubby Hercules had seated himself only a moment before. A small pink mouth opened amidst the whiskers, exposing chipped yellow teeth.
"Got any last words, traitor?" the pink mouth said. "Too bad if you do," the seated man continued after a momentary pause. "I'm Lord Trog. I got no time to listen to excuses." The beady red eyes which went with the whiskers seemed to O'Leary to be boring into him like hot pokers. Beyond the hacked-out clearing he stood in were some woods and, in the background, the pale silhouette of a ruined tower. He returned his attention to Lord Trog.
"You shoulda never of came out, hotshot," the gravelly voice went on. "Overconfidence, I guess."
"Where's Daphne?" O'Leary blurted. "I don't know who you are, or what you think you're doing, invading the palace grounds and grabbing me. When the palace guard grabs you, you'll wish you'd been a little more subtle."
"Yeah, well, about the palace guard, they took the year off, see? And I don't know no Daphne." The squat man paused to poke a grimy finger into what O'Leary assumed was an ear, buried somewhere within the nearly spherical mass of untrimmed, greasy-looking hair which enveloped the fellow's head.
"Sounds like a dame," Trog added indifferently. "Boys," he turned his attention to one of the men holding O'Leary's arms, "boys, you seen any strange dames around the place lately?"
"Seen no dames at all, Chief," the fellow replied. "No dames, no booze, no smokes, no card games—we don't get to have no fun at all. Never figgered I was ennerin a monastery when I joined up."
"That will do, Marv," the Chief grunted. His eyes flicked to the other man beside O'Leary.
"You, Omar? Any complaints? By the way, put Marv in irons at once, in the lower dungeon."
"Who, me, Chief?" Omar replied in tones of astonishment. "Why, no, sir, I'm perfectly content, just a loyal retainer glad to do his job. Do I really hafta stick old Marv down the hole? I mean, maybe he was just kidding, like."
The bearded man fumbled inside his furs, brought out a gray plastic object the size of a cigarette pack, and pressed a button on it as he brought it to his mouth.
"Top Dog to Pup One, over," he muttered. "Come in, Pup One. OK, skip the routine, but get the duty hit squad over here pronto. Over."
"Hey, boss, I was onney kidding around." Omar protested. "Me and Marv, we're nothing if not true-blue—" His protests were cut off abruptly as three louts in ragged blue knee-breeches and faded pink-and-yellow jackets with chapped elbows showing through the patches arrived on the scene, ominously clacking the actions of short-muzzled machine pistols.
"These here bums, Chief?" the foremost of the trio inquired, eyeing Marv and Omar dubiously. "Or this one?" He swiveled to cover Lafayette, who at once began mentally reviewing Professor Doktor Hans Josef Schimmerkopf's instructions for Focusing the Psychical Energies:
"... whilst at all times aware of the distinction between the outer, or objective Reality and the inner, concentrate on those as-yet-not-realized aspects of the Scene the outcome of which remains problematical; and by an Effort of Will, bring into Focus that eventuation most conducive to satisfaction ..." In spite of the old boy's pompous style, Lafayette reminded himself, his methods had worked well enough to transport him to Artesia in the first place, and to several less desirable alternate realities thereafter. But at the moment, all that was necessary was to divert the whiskery fellow—