CHAPTER 24

Trip to Roughmaul Mountain

Kelvin, Heln, his parents, both his human children, and their respective mates were gathered with Helbah and the nominal kings of Klingland and Kance in Helbah's headquarters. They had done the crystal searchings for an extended length of time, or at least Helbah had, and neither Horace nor his mate had made an appearance. They weren't at the cave where Horace had been told to wait, nor at their retreat where they had sunnymooned. They just weren't anywhere that Helbah could find.

"Do you think she's got them?" Kelvin asked. After seeing what had happened to an entire kingdom he could well believe that Zady could magic them from existence. It was painful to think about. Horace had seemed a monster to him and his wife, but then Horace had saved the other siblings and stood by him the day Zady lost her head. He, and he thought Heln too, had come to love Horace as a son—a little like a retarded human son—ever since.

As though thinking the same thing, Heln suddenly buried her face against the brownberry shirt covering his newly muscled chest and began crying. A loss of a kingdom was bad, but the loss of a child and the child's mate was disastrous.

"I don't know if they exist in our frame anymore," Helbah said. "Any luck yet, Charlain?"

Charlain looked up from the table where she had spread the cards. "It's always the same, Helbah. All the cards show is danger and uncertainty for anyone I ask about. The death card never shows, but that doesn't mean they're safe."

John patted Charlain's shoulder. "At least you don't see disaster."

"I'm not certain, John." She looked with violet eyes from her astonishingly still-beautiful face. Now those eyes were wide and frightened in a way that Kelvin could not remember them ever having been before.

He didn't like the tremble on her lips as she whispered, more than spoke, to his father. "The cards are worthless."

"Darling, you've never said that before!"

"I've never felt this way before! Maybe it's something Zady's doing—preventing me from reading the future."

"The future you read always has been ambiguous," John reminded. "That uncertainty card showed up a lot in the past, didn't it?"

"Yes, but before I could always find the right questions to get around it. Long ago Lester was wounded and the cards wouldn't tell me if he would live or die. But then I asked about specific medicines, and finally I found one that the cards told me would save his life. They had been unable to answer until I made the decision on the right or wrong medicine."

"Ask them if there are questions that will remove the uncertainty," John suggested.

Charlain almost absently shuffled and laid out the cards. She closed her eyes in concentration, then Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

raised her hand above their backs. Her fingers made a circle over the cards, her forefinger pointing outward, then down.

Triumphantly Charlain opened her eyes and picked up the card her pack had chosen. She looked at it, and promptly burst into tears.

Kelvin didn't need to see the card to know that it was what she called the chaos or uncertainty card.

What it meant, or had meant in the past, was that any outcome was possible. The cards had as much as proclaimed their own impotence.

"Helbah," Kelvin said in agony, "isn't there some magic you can use?"

Helbah looked around at them, her eyes lingering longest on the two unmatured kings whom she had nourished and trained over a span of time equal to Kelvin's own life.

"You know, hero, that there isn't. I've told you before—the magic Zady is now using is beyond my ability. I don't comprehend it in terms of magic any more than your father comprehends it in terms of science. The power Zady's displaying isn't comprehensible."

"Then it comes from beyond the stars?"

"Kelvin, the questions you can ask! You're as bad as Kildom and Kildee. Do you really know what you just asked?"

"No," Kelvin admitted. He had just asked the first question that occurred to him.

"I will tell you, then. The answer is I don't know. There is power all witches tap or harness, but we don't think of it as other than magic. Whether what we do or command comes from the planet or the stars or somewhere else is of no consequence. Your father's science worries about things like that, not practitioners of magic. Zady may have found a new and more powerful source than that from which is derived either benign or ordinary magic. But if she has, does its origin matter?"

"If we could find the source we might destroy it," Kelvin's father said.

"Oh, John, John!" Helbah chided him. "You're thinking science. If a source exists it probably isn't in our frame and there's no way of locating it. On Earth could you locate and destroy the source of electricity?"

Kelvin's father hung his head. Charlain held him close, trying to comfort him. He had said a foolish thing and Helbah's words made him realize it. To not believe in magic was bad, but to be forced to believe in it and then to have to acknowledge to yourself that you had no idea how it worked was demoralizing. As always, Kelvin sympathized with his father. It was all the consequence of his miseducation—an overemphasis on cause and effect and denial of even the possibility of magic.

"Are we going to go to war again?" one of the royal twins asked in a squeaky little voice. They had been sitting there so quietly, so well behaved, that that alone seemed magic.

Helbah said, "I don't know." She didn't bother to box their royal ears. It was a defeated witch standing in this palace room, not a disciplinarian.

Suddenly the largest, most impressive crystal Helbah owned flared, and then the lesser crystals brightened as their inner markings swirled. When the swirling stopped Zady's ugly face, which seemed to Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

have grown even more warts, looked out at them and around the room.

"All my enemies together!" Zady enthused in her crackly voice. "Kelvin of the round ears, father of the Roundear, Mama, and the two who were born with the help of a chimaera!"

"We're here too!" one of the kinglets said.

"Yeah, we're your enemy too!" his brother echoed him. Katbah, perched familiarly on Helbah's shoulder, as befitted a familiar, spat.

"Yes, all my enemies," Zady reiterated. "And now I have some orders for you. But first, would you like to see your sister, Kelvin?"

Before he could answer the scene changed in the big crystal. It showed Jon, apparently unharmed and by herself. Behind her was a stone wall. Overhead, open sky with dark clouds scuttling through it.

"Come closer, dearie. Come look in my crystal."

Jon stepped closer, moving as one drowned and dead. "Kelvin!" she said, bumping into something invisible. "Kelvin, don't come here! Stay away from her! Stay away!"

Jon vanished from the crystal and Zady's warty face reappeared. She began a cackling laugh and continued it far longer than seemed possible. Finally her eyes fixed on Kelvin, chilling him to his depths.

"Kelvin, I want you in dragon territory with the Alliance's official surrender and I want you here in three days. Failure to arrive will cost the Alliance a kingdom. With you I want"—her eyes roved the room—"your father, your two grown-up brats, and of course your dragon brat. Incidentally, your sister will suffer what will be your future punishment until you arrive."

The searing eyes turned away from them. Zady spoke and apparently gestured at an unseen Jon.

"Dearie, a spear up your derriere, perhaps?"

Jon began screaming. She screamed loudly and piercingly in a way Kelvin had never heard her or any woman scream.

"Stop it, Zady! Stop it!" he pleaded and ordered in the same breath.

"Why, what do you want to do about it, little boy?"

Jon's voice broke in over Zady's, though she hardly stopped screaming. "It's not real! It's not real!

Kelvin, it hurts! It hurts!"

"Yes, dearie, the spear isn't real but it hurts anyway, doesn't it? The pain is excruciating for you, just as it was for that war-horse. After I tire of this one, I'll cut your breasts off again. Then you'll be stepped on by an orc and squashed but still conscious. After that—"

"NO! NO!" Kelvin shouted.

Jon continued screaming.

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"Many, many innovations I've thought up. Come join the fun, Kelvin. You won't enjoy any of it."

"No, Zady, no! Don't torture her! I'll come there. You can torture me if you must!"

"Spoken like a true hero." Again the insane laugh.

"I'm coming to find you! I'm coming!" Kelvin said.

"Of course you are, dearie, and don't forget to bring your rejuvenated old father and your mind-reading grown-up brats."

"Zady, Zady, don't go! I want to keep talking! Zady—"

The crystal blanked. Kelvin felt that a part of his mind blanked with it. It wasn't until Helbah spoke that he even thought again.

"You have to go," Helbah said. "With or without surrender."

"We must never surrender, Helbah!" He was pleading, wanting her to contradict him and yet knowing that she couldn't.

"No, not even if all the kingdoms vanish one by one."

Kelvin swallowed. "I've got my boots on. I'll just step over into dragon territory."

"Not without me," Glint said. "I can read her mind if I get a chance."

"I'm coming too!" Charles said. "I want to do more to her than I did last time. Cutting her head off will just be the start!"

"Me too!" Merlain echoed. "She made me walk off a cliff. I haven't forgotten that! I still have nightmares!"

"And don't forget your father," his father said. "She wants me as badly as she wants you. After all I was married to her niece."

"I have to go alone," Kelvin said, faking bravery. Possibly the rest could escape to another frame. He wished he could believe it and somehow make it happen.

"No, you can't go alone," Helbah said. "You need these others, just as they each said."

"But the danger—"

"We're all in danger."

"She'll do horrible things to—"

"To all of us if she gets the chance. Don't you let her get the chance!"

"But I can't take all the others! I've only one pair of boots and one levitation belt!"

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"Make more than one trip. Carry them into dragon territory with you, Kelvin, one at a time."

"But—! But—!"

"Son," his mother said, coming close to him, "do as she says. Helbah knows best."

"But they're my children, Mother! They're young, and I'm—"

"A hero, Son—a prophesied hero. You've got all your past to prove you are a hero, and you know that Mouvar favors you."

"Who is Mouvar?" Kelvin had to ask. "Is he a god or a wizard or a green dwarf? If he favors me so much, why doesn't he come here and help?"

"Because that's not his way, Son."

His mother held his face in her hands and looked as beseechingly at him as she had sometimes done when he was a small boy. Now, as then, her mother-magic was doing its work. He did understand that it didn't matter what Mouvar was—what mattered was that Mouvar had foreseen him and had provided weapons for him. The gauntlets and the boots and the levitation belt, not to mention the antimagic weapon, were all Mouvar's gifts. So, in a way, was the chimaera's sting. And come to think about it, it might have been through Mouvar's maneuvering that he met the chimaera and that eventually his own remarkable children were born. Mouvar might have foreseen or arranged everything that happened in his life, but it was he, not Mouvar, who was the designated hero.

It all rested with him, and all he could do was hope that Mouvar knew everything and would push him to be a hero in spite of himself. But could he win? Could any human or non-human win against a power that could take kingdoms right out of existence? He would do what he could, but he hoped that Mouvar had more knowledge of the future than did his mother or Helbah. If Horace with the opal and he with Mouvar's gifts couldn't defeat Zady, then Zady must be undefeatable.

"Do you want me to come too, Charles?"

Charles kissed Glow. "No, dear, you stay here with Helbah. With Dad's help we'll win. We'll burn Zady to ashes and scatter them. After that we'll come back to you."

Kelvin was touched by his son's confidence in him. He wished that he had that much confidence in himself. It was time, high time, that he started acting like the hero everyone said he was.

"Dad, you take the levitation belt as a precaution. Merlain, I want you to carry the Mouvar antimagic weapon and keep a sharp mind out for hostile magic. Son-in-law, you strap the chimaera's sting on your back and hope to use it. Charles, here's my right-hand gauntlet—I fought a war with the left one and won. Now we're all armed. Everybody ready?"

There were nods of real or feigned eagerness as his small band buckled on and secured their weapons.

Kelvin knew that they had no choice. He stooped down, visualizing the place in dragon country where, as children, he and Jon had encountered their first dragon. The old debris piles would long have washed away, but the river would still have its bend and that ancient rock and big tree would still be there. He'd step well away from the water, at approximately the spot where he and Jon had once tethered their long-gone but never forgotten donkey. He indicated his back with a jerk of his thumb.

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Glint took hold of his shoulders and threw a leg over his side. Kelvin lifted him, glad now that he could do so as he couldn't have before Helbah had made him exercise and lose weight. Glint was heavy. But it was only for one step. One step and his son-in-law would slide off and he would leave him there and step back.

Kelvin took the step he had tried delaying. Glint dismounted and looked about. It was a tamer section of dragon country than where he had dwelt with Ember. Wild enough for Kelvin. He hoped Zady would not pull a surprise raid on his little party before all of them were delivered. Glint would be searching with his mind, and Helbah would be watching by crystal, but the possibility was evident.

He stepped back and got his father, who was even heavier than Glint despite his rapid loss of weight.

Now he had to fetch his children, and the necessity pained. He waved at his father and Glint. He could count on his father to check on anything Glint sensed by rising into the air as high as was necessary with the levitation belt. He hoped that Glint wouldn't sense Jon in horrible agony from Zady's torture.

He stepped to the palace, bent over, and his son Charles got astride his back. Charles, good boy that he was, could use the sword at his belt with the skill of a master swordsman, with the aid of the gauntlet. He stepped over and down on the riverbank beside Glint and his father. Charles slid off. Kelvin hated worst of all that he was now required to fetch Merlain.

She was waiting, and wasted not a moment. She had pulled on a rough brownberry shirt that would be warm high in the mountains and that covered the Mouvar weapon. He straightened up, took one last look—it might really be his last, he knew—at his mother, at Helbah, at his wife, at the beautiful girl his son had married, and at the two apparent boys. All looked back confidently, including Helbah's familiar.

The magic crystals showed his father and Glint and Charles awaiting him and Merlain.

"GO!" Helbah ordered him.

He straightened up and took the step. Countryside blurred as it had before.

"Whee!" Merlain said. "This is more fun than riding Horace!"

Fun! She was still a girl in some respects, and here was her father taking her into more peril than she could imagine. Her mentioning her dragon brother did, however, spark a thought.

He put his foot down, right beside Charles. Merlain slid off and he carefully felt his vertebrae. All he really needed was for his middle-aged complaints to come back!

They were looking at him expectantly, and he had to act as if he were the leader he wasn't. Merlain had given him the clue.

"We have to find Horace," he announced. "We have to find him now, before we go to Roughmaul Mountain. With Horace we'll have opal power."

They looked at him as if they respected what he had said, as he himself did not. Belatedly he realized that if Horace encountered them he would see them as Zady and helpers of Zady and would attack them.

Or, and this was an equally terrible thought, if Horace encountered Zady he would see in her only a friend.

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