Then sunlight seared his eyes, the sunlight of dawn, and bitter cold stabbed his lungs. Beyond the legs he clung to, the world spread out below him like a map, an immensity of green. Jagged rocks stabbed up, only a few yards below his heels. It had to be a mountain peak, somewhere on the mainland.
Darkness again, blackness—but not quite total, for moonlight filtered through a high, grated window, showing him blocks of granite that dripped with moisture, and niter webbing the high corners of the cramped chamber. Huge rusty staples held iron chains to the walls. A skeleton lounged in the fetters at the end of a pair of those chains. Another held a thick-bodied man with a bushy black beard. His brocade doublet was torn and crusted with dried blood, and a grimy bandage wrapped his head. He stared at them in total amazement. Then relief flooded his face, and his mouth opened…
Limbo. Nothingness. Total void.
There wasn’t any light, but there wasn’t any darkness, either—just a gray, formless nothingness. Rod felt an instant conviction that he wasn’t seeing with his eyes—especially when colors began to twist through the void in writhing streaks, and a hiss of white noise murmured in the distance. They floated, adrift, and the body in Rod’s arms suddenly began to writhe and heave again. A nasal voice cursed, “Thou vile recreants! I will rend thee, I will tear thee! Monstrous, perverse beasts, who…”
Geoffrey cried out, “Abandon!”
Suddenly Rod was hugging nothing; the legs were gone. He stared blankly at the space where they’d been. Then panic surged up within him, and he flailed about, trying to grasp something solid, anything, the old primate fear of falling skewering his innards.
Then a small hand caught his, and Geoffrey’s voice cried, “Gregory! Art there, lad? Hold thou, and pull!”
Gentle breeze kissed Rod’s cheek, and the scents of pine and meadow grass filled his head with a sweetness he didn’t remember them ever having, before. Moonlight showed him the meadow where they’d camped, and Gwen darting forward, to throw her arms about him—and the two boys who clung to him. “Oh, my lord! My bairns! Oh, thou naughty lads, to throw thyselves into such danger! Praise Heaven thou’rt home!”
Cordelia was hugging Rod’s neck hard enough to gag him, head pressed against his and sobbing, “Papa! I feared we had lost thee!”
Rod wrapped his arms around her, grateful to have something solid to hold on to. He looked up to see Geoffrey peeking at him over Gwen’s shoulder. Rod nodded. “I don’t know how you did it, son—but you did.”
6
‘Twas not so hard as that.”
The blankets were around their shoulders now, and a small campfire danced in the center of the family circle. Cordelia turned a spit over the fire from time to time, roasting a slow rabbit for breakfast.
“ ‘Not so hard?’ ” Rod frowned at Geoffrey. “How could it have been anything but hard? That young villain had to be one of the best teleporters in the land! I mean, aside from you boys, the only warlock we’ve got who can teleport anything but himself, is old Galen—and nobody ever sees him!”
“Save old Agatha,” Gwen murmured.
“Nobody ever sees her either,” Rod retorted.
“Save old Galen,” Cordelia reminded him.
“He’s going to need it,” Rod agreed. He turned back to the boys. “Toby’s the best of our young warlocks, and he’s just beginning to learn how to teleport other objects. He’s almost thirty, too. So Alfar’s sidekick has to be better than Toby.”
“Nay, not so excellent as that.” Magnus shook his head. “And he was a very poor marksman.”
“For which, praise Heaven.” Rod shuddered. “But he was too good at teleporting himself—even over his weight allowance! I didn’t begin to recognize most of the places he took us to!”
“Any child could do the same,” Magnus answered, annoyed.
“I keep telling you, son—don’t judge others by yourself. Why didn’t he just disappear, though?”
“He could not,” Geoffrey grinned. “We could tell where he would flee to, and fled there but a fraction of a second behind him.”
“How could you tell where he was going?”
“They held his hands,” Gwen reminded. “Thoughts travel more readily, by touch.”
Magnus nodded. “We could feel, through his skin, where he meant to go next.”
Rod stared at him for a moment, then sat back, shaking his head. “Beyond my comprehension. Thoughts can’t travel any FESSter just by touching—can they?”
“No,” Fess’s voice murmured through the earphone implanted in the bone behind Rod’s right ear. “But there would be less signal-loss than with a radiated waveform.”
Cordelia sighed, striving for patience with her dullard father. “Tis not that one doth hear faster, Papa—only that one doth hear more. With touch, even tinges of thought speak clearly.”
“I bow to the guest expert.” Rod managed to keep the fond amusement out of his tone, giving the words a sour twist.
Fess plowed on. “The neurons in the warlock’s hand did, in all probability, induce the signal directly into the neurons in the boys’ hands.”
“He couldn’t hide his thought-traces from you.” Rod turned back to Geoffrey. “So you always had just enough clues to follow him. But how did you manage to bring me along?”
Gregory shook his head, eyes round. “That, Papa, we cannot say.”
“We thought thou couldst,” Magnus added.
Rod scowled. “No… can’t say that I did. Except that I was bound and determined that I wasn’t going to let go of him…”
The children stared at one another, then at their mother.
“What’s the matter?” Rod demanded. “What am I—a monster?”
“Nay, Papa,” Cordelia said softly, “thou’rt only a warlock—yet a most puissant one.”
“You mean it was just my determination that took me wherever he went?”
Magnus nodded. “Thy magic followed all else that was needful.”
Rod was still, gazing at the fire for a few minutes while he tried to absorb that. It was unnerving to think that he was beginning to be able to work magic the way his wife and children did—just by thinking of it. Now he was going to have to watch his step, to make sure he didn’t do it accidentally. He could just hear a casual passerby asking, “How do you think the weather’s going to be today, Mr. Warlock?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I think it’s going to rain…” and, sploosh! They’d be drenched…
He shook off the mood, and looked up to find the children’s gazes glued to him. They looked worried; he wondered what they’d been up to. “So. Finally, he took us into a dungeon.”
“Twas the sorcerer Alfar’s dungeon,” Geoffrey explained, and Cordelia gasped.
Rod nodded. “Convenient. If he could just have figured out some way to get rid of us, we’d be right there to hand for the jailers. But how did he figure he was going to be able to keep you there? How could he prevent you from teleporting out?”
“I do not think he had thought that far,” Magnus said slowly.
Rod was still nodding. “Makes sense. I wouldn’t be too good at the details, if I was trying to run from the enemy, but he was coming right along.”
“He was not attempting that,” Geoffrey said, with conviction. “He meant only to take us to a place in which we would be unwilling to stay.”
Rod smiled slowly. “Clever kid. Chose a nice one, didn’t he?”
“Aye.” Magnus shivered. “I was well relieved, to be quit of that place.”
“But how’re you so sure?” Rod asked Geoffrey.
“Because we tried to hale him out, and he would not come.”