Annah laughed. Loudly. White teeth appearing in her dark face, lips opening, a surprisingly throaty chuckle. She covered her mouth quickly, but I could still hear giggles behind her hand. By the light of the Caryatid's flame, I could also see Annah exchanging looks with Myoko. For a moment, I had no idea what was going on; then I realized Myoko must have predicted Gretchen and I would appear in exactly this way, Gretchen pawing me possessively. It was always the same whenever Gretchen met my female friends-she'd immediately make a big show of fawning over me, as if to say, This man is mine.
"You took long enough," Impervia declared. She probably thought Gretchen and I had stopped for a brief romp between the sheets; to Impervia, the world was a hotbed of fornication, always just beyond her sight. "We've already taken the horses to Ms. Kinnderboom's stables," she said. "And rubbed them down. And listened to Pelinor fight with the hostler about what kind of fodder they need."
"Please forgive us," Gretchen oozed. "The delay was my fault." She was using her charm-the-peasants voice-a tone of creamy condescension that was never as false as it seemed. Though she sounded phony, Gretchen liked people: almost everyone she met. Her mistake was thinking she could make them like her in return. "I had to get dressed," Gretchen said. "Your mission sounds so important, I'm coming too. To help any way I can."
Out of Gretchen's sight, Myoko rolled her eyes. Pelinor, however, clapped Gretchen on the shoulder. "Good for you-that's the spirit. I assume your vessel is large enough to hold us all?"
"Of course. Shall we go?"
"Oh yes, do let's," said Myoko, making her voice as low and satiny as Gretchen's. She slipped Gretchen's traveling case out of my hand and tossed it to Oberon (who caught it in one of his pincers). Then Myoko took my right arm in exactly the same grip as Gretchen held my left, and batted her eyelashes outrageously.
Behind my back, Annah broke into another bout of giggles.
I crossed the grounds of Kinnderboom Cottage with women clutched to my arms. Gretchen spent the time quizzing everyone on their impressions of the Sorcery-Lord, but got little information in response. The Caryatid answered every question as if the Sparks might be listening: never speaking a negative word, praising Dreamsinger's power and "force of personality." Impervia, who usually loved detailing the character flaws of people, chose to be contrary this time and told Gretchen nothing.
The only new data I gleaned from conversation was a description of Dreamsinger's armor: a body shell made from glossy plastic, colored sorcerer's crimson, and shaped to mimic the contours of a female body. The helmet had no holes for eyes or mouth… just a plate of smoked glass that offered no glimpse of the woman inside. The several times Dreamsinger had kissed someone-Dee-James, the Caryatid-she hadn't removed the helmet, so no one had seen her face. She could still be anything from a bandy-legged twelve-year-old to a gray-haired grandam.
When we reached the bluffs, Myoko and Gretchen were forced to release their grip on my arms-the stairway down was only one person wide. I made sure Gretchen had a firm hold on the banister, then took the lead downward.
The canopy that usually covered the stairs had been removed for the winter. Therefore, we had a clear view of the lake stretching off to the horizon, glimmering with catches of starlight. On either side of the steps, tangles of thistle and burdock grew despite the looseness of the soil. The weeds had gone brittle in the winter's cold, but plenty of life remained in their roots: they always sprang back when the weather warmed, and I expected Oberon would soon be down here using his pincers to prune any vegetation that encroached on the stairs.
Thinking of Oberon, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw him making his ponderous way down the stairs. The big lobster refused to leave his queen unprotected among strangers… though at the moment, the greatest threat to Gretchen was that Oberon would miss his footing and become a bull-sized avalanche plummeting down upon us.
But Oberon was sure-footed despite his ungainly size: eight legs bestowed remarkable stability. We descended the steps without incident and found ourselves on Gretchen's private pier, facing the good ship Dainty Dinghy.
It was not, of course, a dinghy… nor was it close to dainty. Gretchen's boat was a full-fledged frigate, a former ship-of-war in the Rustland navy and decommissioned in its prime under dubious circumstances.
Specifically: in Gretchen's youth, when she was wild and adventurous and unafraid of open sunlight, Gretchen had wanted a ship. She voiced this desire to a Rustland admiral over whom she exercised undue influence. The admiral somehow arranged for the frigate to be declared "obsolete and supernumerary," whereupon Gretchen purchased it at a rigged auction for vastly less than its true worth. Later, the admiral had been court-martialed, and it was now ill-advised for either Gretchen or the Dinghy to venture into Rustland waters; but lucky for us, the lake's north shore from Dover to the Niagara river was Feliss territory. We were entirely safe from Rustland's old grudge.
Unless we were blown off course. Which I didn't want to think about. Our streak of bad luck had to end sometime, right?
"Ahoy, the ship!" Pelinor shouted. Good thing he'd taken the initiative. If we'd left the job to Gretchen, she'd have stood on the dock who-knows-how-long, genteelly clearing her throat until somebody noticed us.
Two seconds later, a head poked into view above the ship's railing. It was not a human head; since the light from the Caryatid's shoulderflame didn't carry far, I couldn't see the face distinctly, but I knew it lacked eyes, nose, and mouth. This was Captain Zunctweed, an alien I'd met several times. He belonged to a race that demonmongers called Patatas: Spanish for potatoes, so-called because his people had pock-marks all over their bodies like the "eyes" of a potato. Some of Zunctweed's pock-marks were eyes, randomly arranged from head to toe. Other pocks were breathing orifices, others were for eating, a few were for smelling or hearing… and the rest had yet to be understood by what we laughingly called Science on post-Tech Earth.
All we knew about Patatas, one could learn from a brief inspection of any member of the race:
(a) They were human-shaped with two arms, two legs, and a head. However, they had practically no torso-their legs came up almost to their armpits, giving them a gangling gawky appearance but truly astonishing speed when they chose to run. (b) Despite their sprinting prowess, Patatas never ran when they could walk, and never walked when they could lie in a hammock, bawling out orders. (c) It took bitter cold or heat before Patatas would wear clothing. Quite simply, they liked showing off their unclad bodies. And no two members of their race had anything close to the same skin coloration-I'd seen one covered with swirls of lurid red and orange, another who was eye-watering turquoise with zebra stripes of mauve, and a third whom I might describe as "reverse cheetah": dark brown with flaming yellow spots.
Captain Zunctweed was mostly white with smears of soft green on his elbows, knees, and other major joints. Oberon claimed that Zunctweed "enhanced" his true coloration by rubbing himself with grass… but given the time of year, he hadn't had access to green grass for several months, so at the moment he was au naturel.
Zunctweed folded his hands resignedly on the deck-rail in front of him and looked down on us like a dignified grandfather interrupted by noisy brats. This was quite a trick, considering that he had no facial features to give this impression. Still, the collection of flecks and divots on his cranium radiated aggrieved forbearance. "Yes?"