Poor World (23 page)

Hungry as I was, I was also nervous and afraid, and fear and nerves make me fast. So does heat, if the prospect of getting out of it is before me. I fazoomed across the street and into the building. Cringed as I peeked into Kessler's office. Empty! Was I — finally — in luck?

Of course I wasn't in luck. When had I had any luck in that place?

I dashed down the hall into my room, my eyes still dazzled from the glare outside, slammed the door, reached for the mattress — and froze when I saw that the corner had already been thrown back.

My vision cleared. I looked up, and there was Kessler standing three paces from me, just straightening up, the diamond on one palm. His other hand moved and suddenly held a black-handled knife.

Terror turned my blood and bones to stone. I couldn't move.

“You lied to me, Cherene,” he said. “From the beginning.”

“I know,” I said numbly, my voice squeaking.

‘Good luck' and ‘bad luck' are pretend things. They don't even have the word ‘luck' here. I had to take it directly from English. ‘Luck' is what you make through your actions, intersecting with the actions of others. I'd made all my bad luck through my lies.

Would it have made any difference in his plans if I'd told the truth from the beginning, that being Clair's heir was a choice made out of friendship and trust, not out of the desire for power?

It's too easy to say,
Oh, of course — it would have changed Kessler's life.
Probably it wouldn't have. But who knows? There's even a chance he might have permitted Shnit's young enemy to live — but I don't think he would have extended it to the boys. Or to the other people in his jail.

Or maybe he would have killed me himself.

There is no easy right and wrong. Wasn't then, isn't now.

At the time, I just stared, unable to say anything more.

He raised the knife. “Now I have to keep a promise. I will give myself over to the Land, but you are going with me. You made the choice for me, and I'm going to make it for you.”

He threw the knife at the very moment I whirled and tried to make a break for it. I was facing the door, and the knife sprouted in the wood where I'd been standing.

After all that practice, hours and hours of it, my movements were automatic. With one smooth, unthinking gesture I yanked the knife free and sent it flying right back at him, just the way the tutors had taught me was most effective.

And stared when too late his hand moved — I saw something sparkle — then the knife blade buried itself in his lower ribs. His hand closed over it just after.

“It's true,” he said, blood welling over his fingers. “Dejain was right.”

He staggered.

Numb with shock, my brain seemed frozen, but I guess somewhere in there thoughts were still working because I saw that communicator thing in his back pocket.

He stumbled against the cot, the communicator jarred loose from his pocket and fell.

He vanished.

Did I kill him? I thought. I killed a person.

Keening with misery I bent down, picked up the communicator, scrabbled at the door, yanked it open, and dashed out, down the hall, stumbling out in the fierce sunshine where I almost ran down Puddlenose.

I staggered, and he reached out to right me. He was almost unrecognizable in his filthy, shabby clothes, his pale, bruised skin and long dirty hair. His expression was curiously blank.

“Puddlenose,” I said, holding out the communicator. “C-can y-you — argh! I c-c-can't t-talk ...” My teeth were chattering, my voice sounding like the squeak of a small child. Angrily I sucked in a breath. “Unh! The army. Make your voice. Like Kessler. In Chwahir — h-he t-talked in Chwahir on this th-thing...” I gulped.

“Chwahir?” he repeated, peering at me strangely. “What is it you want me to do? To say?”

My mind cartwheeled wildly. “T-tell 'em — tell 'em to return to the d-dorms. Right away. The Plan's been p-postponed. For, for, for ... for technical difficulties!”

“What — how do I control it?”

I pointed, with fingers that shook.

He gave me a doubtful look then shrugged, cleared his throat, consciously lowered his voice and half-whispered in Chwahir, sounding so much (and so unexpectedly) like Kessler that it made me wince.

When he was done he held the communicator a little away from himself, then made a face.

“What? What?” I demanded, crazy with reaction — and worry. By then I was hopping from one foot to the other on the hot dirt street.

“Weird. Voices right into my head. They all said ‘okay' in military talk, and it's just like they were in my skull with me. Ugh. You take it.” He dropped the communicator thing onto my hand.

“I don't want it — ” I held it by a corner, afraid the remaining Kessler cooties would rise up and zap me.

“I'll take it,” came a familiar, and most welcome, voice.

Puddlenose and I whirled around and there were Clair and Christoph, both carrying armloads of books.

“Oh, Clair,” I said nervelessly. “Kessler — ”

Just then Rel appeared, coming from the other direction, the rest of the girls with him.

Clair sighed with relief to see them, and then we all trooped into the jail, even though Kessler's building was empty.

I sidled up to Clair and whimpered, “I think I killed him. Threw a knife — ”

“Don't think about it now, CJ,” Clair said. “Here. The easy part is the ward against your magic. I found it almost right away.”

And she performed the spell, and I felt a corner of my mind clear, just as if a fog lifted.

“Now comes the hard work,” Clair said. “We've got to figure out what ties together the enchantments, and how to break this key. I wish we had
any
hints on how to proceed.” She looked down at the books now spread on the floor of my cell. “Well, we don't. At least I'm pretty certain that these are the books we'll need to begin finding what we need.”

She sat down cross-legged, picked up the first book, and started reading.

The girls were all talking, asking for explanations.

Christoph and Rel answered questions; Puddlenose sat in a corner, his head bent, his hands loose on his knees.

I couldn't help, and I didn't want to talk.

So finally I forced myself to make one last trip back to the building, in the room I'd used. Kessler was gone, and there was no sign of his presence.

I'd remembered that sparkle just before his enchanted knife had hit him, and sure enough, there was the diamond on the floor under the cot, gleaming with cold light reflected from the window.

I bent down and picked it up, and realized that it had gone completely clear.

“By cracky,” I said, and left.

The diamond was the key, of course.

I found it out later, which I stuck in another record. I'll put the short version here, where it belongs. That's the nice thing about rewriting records, you get to tie up all those questions and ends that life at the time always leaves undone.

So. The diamond.

Dejain had tied all her magic-spells to it, and if anything happened to her, the enchantment broke. She'd put it in Norsunder as a power check against Kessler — for that's where I had been, to Norsunder.

Existing outside the temporal world, Norsunder is partly what the creators make it, but it's also partly what you make it. Each place I'd gone there came out of my own fears — a pattern I might have gotten caught in forever (or until I went crazy — or one of the bigwigs came along and collected me) had I not thrown myself out of the pattern, figuring death was preferable than to living nightmare, and then — momentarily propelled beyond fear — sought the key to Kessler's defeat. That is, in wishing for it, I focused on it enough to transfer. It was Dejain's own distrust of Kessler (of anyone, actually) that set up the magic — placed the diamond — so that I went right to it.

So why was Kessler there?

While Dejain planned his betrayal as a kind of backup power play, Kessler was being courted by some of the leaders of Norsunder, about whom we knew nothing at the time. He had been resisting their offers of power, preferring to get it himself and keep his will free — but he knew that Dejain had made a bargain with them, and he'd suspected that she had keyed the magical side of his plans through there. So he'd visited every night he could take away from his own plans — ostensibly to keep them from coming to him, and ostensibly to listen to the leaders' blandishments, but actually seeking Dejain's handiwork.

The diamond and its imaginary guardian had been set up to ward against Kessler ever finding them, but not against anyone else from outside Norsunder — like me. He only found us because whoever was courting him told him that I was there — and he focused on me.

At the time, he didn't know much more than I did how that place worked.

That was to change.

 

o0o

“Whew.” Clair dropped her book and looked up.

I'd just rejoined the others, the clear diamond in my hand.

Clair pushed the book off her lap and scrambled through the pockets of her dress, then pulled out Kessler's communicator, which she'd stuck there and forgot about.

“Yuk.” Then her frown changed from dislike to puzzlement to focus.

Presently she looked up at all of us.

“Something's happened,” she said. “I think — I think the spell is broken, all on its own.” Then her gaze lit on the stone I held out on my palm. “CJ? Is that your diamond? I thought you said it was black.”

“It was! But it turned clear somehow — ”

Clair's brows lifted, and she motioned for me to be silent. She clutched the communicator with both hands, not even breathing as she listened.

“That's it,” she said finally. “That's it! The enchantment is broken, and the tutors are frightened, and asking for orders. I guess some of the people don't know where they are, and fights are breaking out. Only fear is keeping them all from panic.”

She looked at Puddlenose, who shook his head.

Rel held out his hand. “What do you want me to say?” he asked.

“Keep them in their dorms, or whatever they are called. We'll come around one at a time, and send them home. It's all I can think of — ”

Rel frowned slightly, listening. “Scouts,” he said after a lengthy pause. “Reporting in from attack sites. Waiting on the assault groups.”

Clair sighed. “I can't transfer them back — Dejain had some kind of special transfer spell for those people. In any case, what would we do with them?”

Rel turned away and murmured; I heard the flat tones of Chwahir.

When he looked at us again, he said, “Told 'em Kessler had been defeated. Gone to Norsunder. That ought to scare the best of 'em, and warn the worst. Told them no one was coming through, and they were completely on their own.”

Clair nodded. “Then let's begin sending everyone else home — beginning with those people waiting down in the dungeon.”

o0o

It took a long time, of course.

In recent months, apparently, Alsaes hadn't been all that careful about recruitment. He'd relied on Dejain's spells to make people willing zombies
before
Kessler talked to them, except when Kessler had sent him after specific people. Like us. A lot of them therefore had no real idea where they were or what had happened to them.

Those were the easy ones, once they got over being mad, or scared, or confused. A lot of those were gathered around Razzmatazz in one of the mess halls, as he strutted around claiming to have been the cause of Kessler's defeat.

They were easy to line up and send home. Including Razzmatazz, and good riddance; his home town is probably busy building a statue to him, and if so, all I can say is, may every bird in Imar bomb it.

The ones who'd joined believing in Kessler's cause were a lot harder to deal with. Some of them wanted a fight, but who was there to fight? I stayed away from them all, on Clair's advice. No one knew who she was, and with her white hair, she was assumed to be morvende or related to a magic race. She listened patiently to ranting and raving and demands and passionate stories about bad government and other abuses of power, and then sent people wherever they wanted to go.

It took a lot of magic, and that took energy. She was as tired as the rest of us when, at last, the compound was empty.

None of us wanted to stay a moment longer than we had to. We transferred out, leaving it to the hot sun and scouring winds — and there it still might be, for all we know.

Ah, how good it was to be home, and safe. No assassins lurking about, the air cool and pine-scented, the sound of the wind in the trees, and water rushing in streams. We girls went straight to the Junky.

I wanted to hole up and sleep for a week, but at the same time I felt a restless urge to run about in the woods above, and shake free of the last of the dry, dusty horror of Kessler's place. Except I couldn't just shake free of memories.

The girls decided us: Diana and Seshe were both anxious to make certain that the Chwahir had not done the forestland any harm while we were gone — and that Alsaes hadn't come back with some of his pet killers and done any, either.

So we went out. I'd have been happy with a good soaking rainstorm, but at least the air was cool, and the greenery did my spirits good. We ran about for a while, and when everyone (but Seshe, and Dhana, and Diana) got tired, I zapped us back to the Junky.

Seshe and Diana left to do a wider patrol. As for Dhana, there'd been no sign of her since she dove into a stream, flickered into a flash of rainbow-colored light and vanished into the water. Poor thing, the desert weather had to have been harder on her than on all the rest of us together.

We ate a good meal, food made by us. With ourselves as company. Puddlenose and Christoph and Rel (who'd gone upstairs to the white palace to get cleaned up and new clothes) joined the rest of us at sunset.