There followed a moment’s vertigo, and when I straightened we were back in Jurt’s apartment. I laughed and he slapped my shoulder.
Immediately then, we were changing back into our human forms and garments. As soon as that was done, he caught hold of my arm again and trumped us to Fire Gate. A moment later, and he’d jumped us again, this time to a mountaintop overlooking a blue valley beneath a green sky. Then again, to the middle of a high bridge above a deep gorge, the sky putting away stars or taking them on.
“Okay, now,” he said, and we stood atop a gray stone wall damp with dew, possibly even the remains of a v storm. Clouds were taking fire in the east. There was a light breeze out of the south.
This was the wall that surrounded the innermost zone of Jidrash, Luke’s capital in Kashfa. There were four huge buildings below us-including the palace and the Temple of the Unicorn directly across the Plaza from it-as well as a number of smaller buildings. Diagonally across the way from where we stood was the wing of the palace from which Gryll had fetched me (how long ago?) from my rendezvous with the queen. I could even make out the broken shutter of our window amid an expanse of ivy.
“Over there,” I said, gesturing. “That’s where I last saw her.”
An eyeblink later we stood within the chamber, its only inhabitants.
The place had been straightened, the bed made up. I withdrew my Trumps and shuffled out Coral’s. Staring then till it grew cold, I felt her presence and reached for it.
She was there yet she wasn’t. It was the disjointed sense of presence one encounters in dream or stupor. I passed my hand over the card and ended our tenuous contact.
“What happened?” Jurt asked.
“I think she’s drugged,” I replied.
“Then it would seem they’ve already got her,” he said. “Any way you can trace her in that state?”
“She could also be in the next building, on medication,” I said. “She wasn’t well when I left.”
“What now?”
“Either way, we’ve got to talk to Luke,” I said, searching for his card.
I reached him in an instant on uncovering it. “Merlin! Where the hell are you?” he asked.
“If you’re in the palace, I’m next door,” I said.
He rose to his feet from what I now realized to be the edge of a bedstead, and he picked up a long-sleeved green shirt and drew it on, covering his collection of scars. I thought that I glimpsed someone in the bed behind him. He muttered something in that direction, but I could not overhear it.
“We’ve got to talk,” he said, running his hand through his rusty hair.
“Bring me through.”
“Okay,” I said. “But first, you’d better know that my brother Jurt is here.”
“Has he got my dad’s sword?”
“Uh-No.”
“Guess I won’t kill him right now,” he said, tucking his shirt into his waistband.
Abruptly, he extended his hand. I clasped it. He stepped forward and joined us.