The Warlock's Companion (34 page)

"Nay, let me join this mirth," Gwen said, and, suddenly, a duplicate of the Count appeared, advancing toward Sola, but with his rum-blossom nose a bit more swollen, the malice in his face somehow become foolish. "Behold, milord!" Gwen called, and the Count turned about, on hands and knees, and looked up to see—himself.

Himself, as others saw him, waddling toward a pretty girl with a swollen paw outstretched, burbling, "Nay, my pretty, dost thou wish advancement?"

"Why, aye, my lord," the ghost-girl responded, and stepped aside. The doppelganger blundered on by, groping about, finally managing to stop, while Sola watched it, giggling. There was nothing threatening about it now—it turned back, still groping and loosely grinning, merely an old, ugly, coarse, and foolishly leering dotard.

But Count Foxcourt laughed, too. "Why, what old fool is that?"

"Who?" Cordelia cried indignantly. "Art thou so blind? Nay, then, here's thy mirror!"

And a full-length cheval glass appeared in front of Foxcourt, right next to his doppelganger. He could not help but see, and blanched, turning to stare at the co-walker, then back to stare at the mirror, glancing from one to the other as his visage slackened.

Then rage contorted his features. "Nay, thou shalt not mock me! All men of mine attack! Or wouldst thou yet be banished?"

The laughter died as though it had been cut off, and the ghosts stared, horrified. They all knew what awaited them.

"Now!" the Count howled, and they started forward, faces grim.

"Remember, all they can do is scare you," Rod said quickly to his children. "Everybody take a dozen or so, and keep them from being scary."

"Like this, dost thou mean?" Gregory chirped, and Sir Boreas's ghost slipped, skidded, and flopped floundering down.

"Yeah, that's the idea! Keep it up!"

Sir Dillindag hauled out his sword, and found it was a daisy. A man-at-arms chopped with his halberd, and it kept on going, spinning him around and around in a circle while he howled.

"Good idea," Rod grunted, and another halberdier went spinning, but this time rose up slowly, his halberd acting as a helicopter rotor, until he dropped it, screaming with fright.

Then Fess reared, his whinny a scream of fury as he whirled and struck out with his forehooves at advancing knights.

It was a mistake; this, they could understand. The knights descended on Fess shouting, englobing him in seconds, a melee of flailing swords and ghostly battle axes.

"Get away from that horse!" Rod shouted, humor forgotten in the threat to his old friend, and he waded through the knights, struggling to reach his companion.

He got there just in time to see Fess go rigid, knees locking; then his head dropped to swing between his fetlocks.

"A seizure," Rod groaned. "Too many enemies, too fast."

"Who is elf-shot?" cried a treble voice.

" 'Tis the horse!" answered a crackling baritone. "Yet who did fling the shot?"

" 'Twas none of us," answered a countertenor, and Rod drew back, staring in disbelief—for miniature ghosts were climbing out of chinks in the walls and coalescing out of thin air, translucent and colorful, and none more than a foot high.

"Mama," Cordelia gasped, "they are ghosts of elves!"

"Yet how can that be?" Gwen marveled. "Elves have no souls!"

" 'Tis he hath done it, mistress!" An elfin dame pointed at Magnus. "He doth call up memories of such of us as once did dwell here."

"Yet what can have slain thee?" Gregory wailed. "Elves are immortal!"

"Not when we're pierced by Cold Iron—and so cruel were this Count and his men that they did hunt us out to slay us!"

" 'Twas good sport," said Foxcourt, with a feral grin. "And it shall be again, if thou dost not take thee hence!"

"Indeed it shall," chuckled a pretty elfin damsel, "yet 'tis we who shall make sport of thee! Gossips, what use is a count?"

"Why, for numbering," answered a dozen voices. "Shall we tally all his bones?"

And a skeleton grinned in the dark, a foolish thing that busily ticked off each of its own pieces—and somehow bore Count Foxcourt's face.

"How dost thou dare!" the Count cried, livid with rage.

"Why, for that thou canst not slay us now, foul count," said a larger elf, grinning with malice, "for we are dead. Now ward thee from the wee folk!"

People were laughing again, and in the gloom, a ring of merry elfin faces was appearing—faces crowned with caps and bells, forms bedecked in motley. The fools and jesters had come to take their turns in the audience.

Foxcourt couldn't stay on his feet; the floor kept sliding out from under him. At one point, he was actually bouncing about on his head, while Sola laughed and laughed, one hand pressed to her mouth, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Behind him, his court were chopping frantically with swords that sprouted wings and chicken's heads and fluttered, squawking indignantly. Knights kept grabbing at armored pants that kept slipping down, and men-at-arms kept skidding on squashed fruit, as overripe pears and plums flew from the jesters and clowns all about them, and the manic laughter made the whole hall shake.

"What ails thee, milord?" a voice called. "Hast thou a bout of gout?"

"Good night, bad knight!" another cried. "When thou canst not prevail, thou must needs take to thy bed!"

"Yet he'll not prevail there, either," a third voice answered.

A fourth called, "In what cause hast thou fallen, Sir Borcas? Art thou down for the Count?"

"Why, he doth flounder!"

" 'Nay, a flounder's a fish!"

"And so is he—he's found his
fin
!"

"Hast thou downed the Count?" a new voice cried; and another answered,

"The Count is down!"

"Nay, Count up!"

"He doth not count at all!"

"Then he is of no importance?"

Pale with humiliation and rage, the Count was inching back within the ranks of his courtiers. But, "Nay," Gwen said, "how unseemly of thee, to depart ere the festival is done!" And the audience of fools seemed to curve around as the howling, cursing mob of courtiers faded, leaving the Count encircled by jeering grotesques, pointing and laughing.

"Be damned to you all!" he shouted, despairing, but the audience only laughed the louder and cried, "Brother, will he seek to step?"

"Nay, he'll step to stoop!"

"An he doth stoop, he'll never stand up straight again!"

"Why, gossip, he hath not been upstanding since he came to manhood!"

"Aye, nor hath been upright since his birth!"

"What, was he born?"

"Aye, borne in triumph! See his noble stance!"

Which, of course, was the cue for the floor to slip out from under him again.

"Away!" the Count screamed. "Avaunt thee, monsters!"

"Doth he speak to himself, then?"

"What, shall we show him the true shape of his soul?"

"Nay, do not!" the Count cried in panic. "Go leave me! Get thee hence!"

"Why, I have hence, and roosters, too."

"And so have I. Wherefore ought we seek more?"

"To give us eggs."

A pale spheroid flew through the air and struck, breaking open on the Count's head and oozing down over his cheeks. He howled in dismay and turned to run—but he could only run in place.

"There is only one direction in which thou mayest go," Gwen said, her voice hard.

"Any! Any way is good, so that it takes me from these loons!"

"What—a loon, doth he say?"

"A loon he needs, for he doth weave."

"Hath he a woof?"

"Nay, for they did spurn him."

"Then must he have a warp!"

"Aye. Now see him take it."

And the ghost began to diminish, shrinking into the distance as he bumbled away in a limping run; though he stayed in the same place on the dais, he grew smaller and smaller, with his crowd of hecklers hard on his heels, till they all shrank away to nothing, and were gone.

The Gallowglasses were silent, listening.

Faint, ghostly laughter echoed through the castle, but it was hilarity now, not the wicked gloating they had heard before.

"We have won," Magnus whispered, unbelieving.

Rod nodded. "I had a notion we could, if we just kept from being scared. Embedded memories aren't going to hurt you, you see—they can only make you hurt yourself."

"Yet if they're naught but memories, how could we best them?"

"By making new memories to counter them," Gwen explained. "Now, if the Count's wickedness should echo within thy brother's mind, these scenes of humiliation will arise, to make him slink away again. For look you, all that he did truly seek in life were pride and power—pride, gained by shaming those about him; and power, by giving hurt wheresoe'er he could. 'Twas that which was his true pleasure—the sense of power; his fornicating and his cruelty did feed that sense most vividly, for him."

Cordelia's eyes lit. "Yet here, he was himself held up to ridicule, which did shame him unmercifully."

"
Aye
, and at the hands of a victim, too."

"And he found he had no power, to strike back! Nay, small wonder that he fled, even if 'twas to his just desserts!"

"If 'twas truly his soul." Magnus frowned. "If he was only memories embedded in the stone, brought to seeming fullness by my mind, then what we have seen may have been but illusion."

"And if it was," said Gregory, "his soul's been frying in Hell these two hundred years."

"Gregory!" Gwen gasped, shocked at those words coming from an eight-year-old.

Gregory looked up at her, wide-eyed. "The good fathers do speak such words from the pulpit, Mama. Wherefore may not I?"

Rod decided to save her from an awkward answer. "I think it's time to revive Fess."

"Oh, aye!" Cordelia leaped to the horse's side. "Do, Papa! How can I have not have thought of him!"

"We were a little busy," Rod explained. He stepped up to Fess and felt under the saddlehorn for the reset switch—an enlarged "vertebra." He pushed it over and, slowly, the robot raised its head, blinking away the dullness from its plastic eyes. "I… haddd uh… seizurrre?"

"Yes," Rod said. "Just wait, and it will pass."

"More quickly for me than for a human," the robot said slowly. It looked about at the empty chamber, and the small boy building up the fire again. "The ghosts… are… ?"

"Gone," Rod confirmed. "We embarrassed them so much that they decided to seek out new haunts."

Cordelia winced. "The elfin ghosts have affected thee, Papa."

"Ghosts of… elves?"

Magnus nodded. "I, unwitting, served for thee to bring them forth."

"
I
? But how could I…"

"The folk hereby do think a seizure's brought by elf-shot," Gregory explained, "so when thou didst seem to be so shot, the elves came forth to seek the slinger."

"But elfin ghosts could be nothing
but
illusion!"

" 'Tis even as thou sayest," Cordelia agreed, "yet were the Count and his men any more?"

"Yet if the ghosts are but illusion," Geoffrey said, frowning, "how can this battle we have held banish them?"

"By counteracting them," Fess answered. "Believe me, Geoffrey—it is a process with which I am intimately familiar."

Rod looked up, surprised. He had missed the analogy between the computer's program, and the interactive loop between psychometricist and stored emotions—but of course, they were much alike.

"Then Sola's ghost was not truly her soul?"

Gwen spread her hands. "I cannot say. Yet soul or dream, I think she's freed for Heaven."

"Still," Rod mused, "it wouldn't do any harm to have Father Boquilva over for dinner. He understands computers, and he carries holy water."

Faint in the distance, a hoarse, raw masculine scream rang out one last time, diminishing into the fading echo of dying laughter. Then, finally, all was quiet.

"Is it cleansed now?" Gwen asked softly.

Magnus frowned, went to Foxcourt's chair, and grasped the wood firmly with both hands. After a moment, he nodded. "Not even a trace doth linger—naught of him, nor of any old angst or melancholia."

And, suddenly, she was there, radiant in the darkness before him, glowing with faint colors, vibrant, alive, and more beautiful than she had ever been. " 'Tis done—thou hast wrought famously!"

Magnus could only stare, spellbound.

So it was Cordelia who asked, "The wicked lord is fled?"

"Aye." Sola turned to her, glowing in more ways than one. "Foxcourt saw that he would be forever mocked, if he dared to linger here—so he hath fled to try his fate in the afterworld, convinced it cannot be worse."

Rod asked, "Didn't he ever have a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher?"

"Aye, and therefore called a priest, and confessed his sins, when he foresaw his death—yet that part of him that lingered here did seek to turn again to some pale shadow of its old delights."

"Foul!" Geoffrey glared, indignant. "Is there no justice in Heaven, either? Will he not be dealt with as he did deal?"

"Not so." Gwen's hand was on his shoulder. "For, though he may yet be redeemed, he must first come to know his guilt, and to believe in it, in his heart of hearts; then may he make reparation. He shall be long in Purgatory, son—if he doth win to it at all. He may not have been truly repentant when he was shriven."

Geoffrey still didn't look content, but he was silent.

"Justice, I desire," Sola admitted, "yet I'll be content with his wickedness ended. Thanks to thine aid, good folk, none shall ever again suffer from the cruelty of Count Foxcourt. Thou hast proven the worth of my father's death, and my brother's; thou hast given their chivalry meaning, and vindicated my mother's suffering. Thou hast made their fates worthwhile by encompassing the downfall of a villain!"