quivered and boomed beneath its leg-roots, and its hoarse bellowing
filled sky and skulls.
Barbro shrieked. Sherrinford whirled. He yanked out his pistol,
fired and fired, flat whipcracks through the half light. His free arm
kept a lock on the youth. The troll shape lurched under those
blows. It recovered and came on, more slowly, more carefully,
circling around to cut him off from the bus. He couldn’t move fast
enough to evade it unless he released his prisoner-who was his sole
possible guide to Jimmy
Barbro leaped forth. “Don’t!” Sherrinford shouted. “For God’s sake,
stay inside!” The monster rumbled and made snatching motions at
her. She pulled the trigger. Recoil slammed her in the shoulder. The
colossus rocked and fell. Somehow it got its feet back and lumbered
toward her. She retreated. Again she shot, and again. The creature
snarled. Blood began to drip from it and gleam oilily amidst
dewdrops. It turned and went off, breaking branches, into the
darkness that laired beneath the woods.
“Get to shelter!” Sherrinford yelled. “You’re out of the jammer
field!”
A mistiness drifted by overhead. She barely glimpsed it before she
saw the new shape at the meadow edge. “Jimmy!” tore from her.
“Mother.” He held out his arms. Moonlight coursed in his tears.
She dropped her weapon and ran to him.
Sherrinford plunged in pursuit. Jimmy flitted away into the brush.
Barbro crashed after, through clawing twigs. Then she was seized
and borne away.
Standing over his captive, Sherrinford strengthened the fluoro
output until vision of the wilderness was blocked off from within
the bus. The boy squirmed beneath that colorless glare.
“You are going to talk,” the man said. Despite the haggardness in his
features, he spoke quietly.
The boy glared through tangled locks. A bruise was purpling on his
jaw. He’d almost recovered ability to flee while Sherrinford chased
and lost the woman. Returning, the detective had barely caught him.
Time was lacking to be gentle, when Outling reinforcements might
arrive at any moment. Sherrinford had knocked him out and dragged
him inside. He sat lashed into a swivel seat.
He spat. “Talk to you, man-clod?” But sweat stood on his skin, and
his eyes flickered unceasingly around the metal which caged him.
“Give me a name to call you by.”
“And have you work a spell on me?”
“Mine’s Eric. If you don’t give me another choice, I’ll have to call
you . . . m-m-m . . . Wuddikins.”
“What?” However eldritch, the bound one remained a human
adolescent. “Mistherd, then.” The lilting accent of his English
somehow emphasized its sullenness. “That’s not the sound, only
what it means. Anyway, it’s my spoken name, naught else.”
“Ah, you keep a secret name you consider to be real?”
“She does. I don’t know myself what it is. She knows the real names
of everybody.”
Sherrinford raised his brows. “She?”
“Who reigns. May she forgive me, I can’t make the reverent sign
when my arms are tied. Some invaders call her the Queen of Air and
Darkness.”
“So.” Sherrinford got pipe and tobacco. He let silence wax while he
started the fire. At length he said:
“I’ll confess the Old Folk took me by surprise. I didn’t expect so
formidable a member of your gang. Everything I could learn had
seemed to show they work on my race-and yours, lad-by stealth,
trickery and illusion.”
Mistherd jerked a truculent nod. “She created the first nicors not
long ago. Don’t think she has naught but dazzlements at her beck.”
“I don’t. However, a steel jacketed bullet works pretty well too,
doesn’t it?”
Sherrinford talked on, softly, mostly to himself: “I do still believe the,
ah,
nicors-all your half-humanlike breeds-are intended in the main to be seen,
not used. The power of projecting mirages must surely be quite limited in
range and scope as well as in the number of individuals who possess it.
Otherwise she wouldn’t have needed to work as slowly and craftily as she
has. Even outside our mind-shield, Barbro-my companion-could have
resisted, could have remained aware that whatever she saw was unreal . . .
if
she’d been less shaken, less frantic, less driven by need.”
Sherrinford wreathed his head in smoke. “Never mind what I experienced,”