I remembered looking up toward the dragoon's back trail during the battle, seeing their dead lying fallen, fading even as I watched, disappearing.
"No," I decided. "Return to quarters." The dragoon saluted and whirled his horse, turning back to his fellows, bawling orders. I chanted after him,
A heat haze seemed to spring up, enveloping the dragoons, thickening to mist, then London fog. When it cleared, they were gone, leaving behind them only a cowering wreckage of moaning men-at-arms and fallen knights.
"As if they'd never been," Matt whispered.
"Retired," I corrected. "Maybe not to Heaven, but to one heck of a Limbo!" I turned to him and caught his hand. "You found me in the nick of time."
"I knew when you'd arrived in this world," he said, squeezing back. "I talked Alisande into moving out the next day." I was amazed at how firm his clasp was - amazed at his having enough strength to walk around in all that armor, in fact.
"You've put on a lot of muscle in the last three days."
"Three days to you." He turned, strolling back to Angelique and the seats we'd found, by the wall of the keep. "Four years, for me." I stared. "Four years?"
"Time moves at a different rate here, I guess," he said, "or there's a differential between our two universes." I just stared at him for a moment, as he sat down, right where the angel had been - or still was, for all I knew. The thought gave me a chill, but I shook it off and said, "So what's been happenin', man?" He started telling me. It took a while.
When he was done, I just sat there, dazed.
" 'Tis a Most amazing tale," Angelique murmured by my shoulder.
"We had heard some echo of it, we folk in Allustria, but not all."
"You wouldn't," I said. "Suettay wouldn't have wanted it known that evil sorcerers and usurpers could be beaten." Then, to Matt: "So that tall blonde with the crown is the queen of Merovence - and your wife?"
"Finally," Matt affirmed.
"Yeah, after she kept you waiting three years." I felt indignation for my old friend, but I tried to assure myself that long engagements just meant more - solid marriages. "So you're the king?"
"No, just the royal consort - and Her Majesty's Wizard. She was very insistent about that. So was I, in fact."
"Yeah, I wouldn't want that much responsibility, either." Angelique looked up at me, shocked.
"That doesn't mean I won't accept any," I hastened to assure her, and she relaxed with her smug, lazy smile again.
"So how'd you get here, Paul?"
I grinned. "You first."
Matt returned the grin. "TOO much studying. I started concentrating on that piece of parchment so much that it began to make sense - and when I looked up, here I was."
"Same thing," I said. "I got worried about you, and I couldn't find any trace, so ... "
He flushed. "Sorry, man."
"Hey, it's okay, it's okay - now. I ran out of leads, so I started studying the new parchment that showed up . . ."
"New parchment?" He sat up straight, frowning, "What new parchment? "
"You know, the one that said, 'Hey, Paul, drop me a line'.
"That one?" The frown deepened to a scowl. "I just wrote that out when I was feeling homesick one night. When I went to throw it in the wastebasket the next morning, it was gone. How'd it get to you?"
"Don't know," I said slowly, "but I could make a guess. There were an awful lot of spiders in your apartment. One of them bit me while I was translating the parchment. I blacked out, and woke up here. "
"The Spider King!" He stared. "I thought he was just a legend!"
"Oh, he's real, all right, and he lives in some sort of dimensional nexus. I think he wanted to clean up the situation here in Allustria, so he . . ." I broke off as Matt's gaze drifted, his eyes brooding.
"What's the matter?"
"The Archbishop," Matt said slowly. "A spider bit him, and he fell ill. I had to go cure him - and while I was working on him, he grabbed my sleeve and demanded to know if I had ever met a single man who had a genuine sense of integrity."
I stared in horror. "You didn't give him my name!"
"Well, yeah," Matt said uncomfortably. "Funny thing is, when he got well, he didn't remember a bit of it - not surprising, the temperature he had."
"But I'm not a saint! I'm not a good guy!"
"No," Matt said slowly, "but you have a sense of self that won't quit. You won't let anybody infringe on you, in any way. Makes you pretty abrasive sometimes, in fact."
Angelique moved a little away from me, eyeing me warily again.
"Not true," I assured her. "He always did have too high an opinion of me."
"No," she said, "he did not." I turned and frowned deeply into her eyes. "Then how come I'm in love with you?"
"I ken not." She gazed back, and her eyes seemed to be all there was in the world. "But I rejoice."
Then she broke the gaze, and her spell, by turning to Matt. "Can you not explain this, Lord Wizard?"
"Only by logic," he said slowly, "which has its limits - but if he is compulsively true to himself, and has nonetheless developed an obsession for you, then there must be something about you that fulfills some element of himself. Probably more than one."
"You traitor," I growled at him - but Angelique had gone heavylidded and self-satisfied again, cuddling up to me, so I didn't really mean it.
Matt knew that; he only smiled. "Don't blame me, Paul. It's not my fault if you have an instinctive sense of psychic balance, some gut drive for keeping the harmony between all the parts of your personality."
"Yeah," I admitted. "You claimed that was why I was attracted to Zen. I kept telling you that it was Zen and Taoism that gave me that sense of balance, not the other way around."
Matt shrugged. "Cause, effect, or a positive reinforcing cycle, it doesn't matter. You've got it, and when it's threatened, you lash out at whoever does the threatening." He nodded to Angelique. "Take care, mademoiselle. He gets mean sometimes. He mellows out pretty quickly, though."
"I thank you." But her equanimity didn't seem at all disturbed.
"I shall be mindful of it."
I think I might have felt a little easier if she'd seemed worried.
"So you've got the instinct for walking the ethical tightrope," Matt summarized.
"Yeah," I said with chagrin. "Gave my guardian angel enough grief with that. He kept trying to get me to commit myself to the side of the angels, and whenever he did, I went out and committed a sin."
"At least, a sin by his rules," Matt amended. "I don't think you ever really did anything all that bad."
I glared at him. "I keep telling you, I'm not a saint!"
"Yeah, and some day you'll get yourself to believe it, too. No, no, I take it back." He held up a palm. "Let's just say you're only a fundamentally decent, honest, and caring individual." I was just beginning to get really sore about that, when Gruesome came waddling up, grinning from ear to ear - well, from side to side.
"We won, huh?"
Matt scrambled back fast.
"No, no, he won't hurt you," I assured him. "This is Gruesome."
"He sure is!"
"No, that's what I nicknamed him. He's my friend." I was startled to hear myself say it, but I guessed I was right. "If he has a name in Trollish, I can't pronounce it."
"He doesn't." Matt still looked very nervous. "They don't have enough intelligence."
"Oh, he has a name all right. Some fairies used it to enchant him so that he wouldn't eat people anymore," I assured him, "and by the time a nymph named Thyme removed the spell, he'd started thinking of us as friends instead of snacks." I turned to Gruesome. "Tell you what, old fellow - I can transport you back to the bridge where I met you, and you'll fit in with your fellow trolls again."