“You shut up and listen, Captain Asshole. None of the rest of you have a hope in hell of getting out of this. Amerie pumped one of the guards after she said Mass for them this morning. These exotics have metafunctions that can zap out your brain and turn you into a lunatic or a fuckin’ zombie. They can’t even be killed with ordinary weapons! They’ve got some system for controlling their slave-cities that’s almost perfect. Once we arrive at Finiah and they test me out and find I’m latent, they’ll collar me or kill me and the rest of you’ll be lucky to spend your lives shoveling shit in the chaliko barns. This is our chance, Richard! And you’re going to do as I say!”
“Let him go, Felice,” said Claude urgently. “The guards.”
When she dropped him, Richard whispered, “Damn you. Felice! I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. But you can’t treat me like a friggerty baby!”
“What else would you call a grown man who craps up his bed?” she inquired. “Who changed your dydees when you drove starships, Captain?”
Richard went white. Claude was furious. “Stop it! Both of you!… Richard, you were sick. A man can’t help himself when he’s sick. For God’s sake, forget the matter. We were glad to help you. But you’ve got to pull yourself together now and join with the rest of us in this plan to escape. You can’t let your personal feelings toward Felice wreck what may be our only chance to get out of this nightmare.”
Richard glared at the little ring-hockey player, then gave her a twisted grin. “You may be the only one of us who’s a match for ’em at that, sweetie-babe. Sure. I’ll go along with whatever you say.”
“That’s fine,” she told him. She reached behind the black leather of her left greave and extracted what looked like a slender golden cross. “Now the first good news is that we aren’t completely weaponless…”
They rode away in the evening with a crescent moon shining through the cypresses. After fording the shallow tributary, the trail climbed to the Burgundian plateau and once more resumed its northerly course. Fire-beacons lit the way through deepening twilight. After a time they were able to look down on a vast heaving region of mist marking extensive swamplands where the Pliocene Saône was born from the prehistoric Lac de Bresse. The lake waters stretched northward and eastward into the distance like a sheet of black glass, drowning the entire plain below the Cote d’Or. Richard entertained the old paleontologist with descriptions of the legendary wines that would be produced in this district six million years into the future.
Later, when the stars were bright, Richard took one last sighting of Pliocene Polaris. It was the brightest star in a constellation that the two men dubbed the Big Turkey.
“That’s a good job you’ve done,” Claude said.
“The whole business may turn out to be academic if we end up dead or brain-burned… You think this scheme of Felice’s might really work?”
“Think about this, son. Felice would be able to escape by herself fairly easily. But she’s worked out this plan to give the rest of us a chance, too. You may hate the little lady’s entrails, but she just might bring this thing off. I’m going to do my damnedest for her, even though I’m just an old poop one step this side of fossilization. But you’re still a young man, Richard. You look like you could handle yourself in a fight. We’re counting on you.”
“I’m scared outa my motherin’ mind,” the pirate told him. “That little bitty gold knife of hers! It’s nothing but a toy. How the hell am I going to do it?”
The old man said, “Try Amerie’s prescription. Pray a lot.”
In the forward part of the caravan, Basil the Alpinist was saluting the sinking crescent moon by playing “Au clair de la lune” on his recorder. The little butterfly dancer from Paris who rode beside him sang along. And amazingly enough, Epone herself joined in in a soprano voice of melting richness. The exotic woman continued to sing as Basil played several more songs; but when he began “Londonderry Air,” one of the soldiers galloped back on his chaliko and said, “The Exalted Lady forbids the commonalty to sing that song.”
The climber shrugged and put his flute away.
The butterfly dancer said, “The monster sings that song with her own words. I heard her, back at Castle Gateway on the first night that we were imprisoned. Isn’t it odd that a monster should be musical? It’s like a fairytale, and Epone is like a beautiful wicked witch.”
“The witch may sing a different song before dawn,” Felice said; but only the nun heard her.
The trail came closer and closer to the western shore of the great lake. The caravan would have to skirt it before heading east into the Belfort Gap between the Vosges highland and the Jura, which led to the valley of the Proto-Rhine. The lake waters were utterly calm, reflecting the brighter stars like an inky mirror. As the curve of the trail took them around a promontory, they saw a distant beacon reflected as well, a streak of orange stabbing toward them across a broad bay. “Look, not one fire but two.” Felice’s voice held a note of anxiety. “Now what the devil do you suppose that means?”
One of the soldiers from the rear of the caravan galloped past them to confer with Captal Waldemar, then returned to his position. The chalikos slowed to a walk and finally halted altogether. Epone and Waldemar rode off the trail to the top of a small rise where they could survey the lake.
Felice gently pounded one fist into the palm of her other hand and whispered, “Shit shit shit.”
“There’s something out there on the water,” said Amerie.
A light mist filmed the reaches of the bay. One part of it seemed to thicken and grow bright as they watched, then break into four separate, dimly shining masses, fuzzy and amorphous. As the will-o’-the-wisps approached, they grew larger and glowed in color, one faintly blue, another pale gold, and two deep red. They bounced up and down as they followed a devious path over the water to a place not far offshore from the halted caravan.
“Les lutins,” said the butterfly dancer, her voice rough with fear.
The central portion of each mass now revealed a form suspended within the glow, rounded bodies with dangling appendages that flexed. They were at least twice as tall as a humanbeing.
“Why, they look just like giant spiders!” whispered Amerie.
“Les lutins araignees,” the dancer repeated. “My old Grandmere told me the ancient tales. They are shape-shifters.”
“It’s an illusion,” Felice decided. “Watch Epone.”
The Tanu woman had risen in her stirrups so that she stood high above the back of her motionless white chaliko. The hood of her cloak dropped so that her hair was luminous in the multihued light radiating from the things out on the lake. She placed both hands at her neck and cried out a single word in the exotic language.
The flame-spiders elevated their abdomens at her. Filaments of purple light rocketed toward Epone and over the heads of the prisoners. The people exclaimed in wonderment, hardly conscious of fear. The episode was so bizarre that it seemed like a light-show performance.
The bright webbing never reached the ground. As it shimmered above them, it began shattering into a myriad of glittering fragments like dying fireworks. The outer edges of the individual spiders’ haloes started to disintegrate in the same coruscating fashion, enveloping the phantoms in a cloud of swirling sparks. The glowing spiders became krakens with writhing tentacles, then monstrous disembodied human heads with Medusa hair and fiery eyes, and finally featureless balls that dwindled, dimmed, and winked out.
Only stars and the beacon fires gleamed on the lake.
Epone and the captal rode back to the trail and resumed their places at the head of the procession. The chalikos snorted and whiffled and set out again at their usual trot. One of the soldiers said something to a prisoner at the head of the column, and the word passed slowly back.