Plus-One (Windrose Chronicles)

  PLUS-ONE

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Copyright 2012 Barbara Hambly

  Cover art by Eric Baldwin

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  Table of Contents

  Plus One

  About The Author

  The Further Adventures

  PLUS-ONE

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  “Who’s that?” Antryg Windrose nodded toward the Hotel Della Robbia’s all-you-can-stand-to-eat pasta-bar, which was barely visible amid a feeding-frenzy of college students who seemed to think that Velveeta Alfredo actually constituted food.

  “Who’s what?” Joanna Sheraton craned her neck and stood on tip-toe. All very well for Antryg to ask the question: in addition to being the Archmage of the Council of Wizards (in another universe, he would hasten to explain) he was six feet three inches tall and could look over the heads of most crowds. “I assume the question is rhetorical? There’s people here from all over the western half of the United States.” At not-quite five feet and limited to the perceptions available in America in the mid-1980s, she didn’t feel qualified to give an opinion.

  Then she caught a glimpse through the jostling backs of the some five hundred would-be successors to Bruce Lee gathered in the Venezia Room and said, “You’re right—” though Antryg had expressed no opinion to be right about.

  She knew what he meant.

  The man had no business there.

  “He could have just wandered in from the Casino…” But it wasn’t that and she knew it.

  Something about the man at the pasta-bar lifted the hair on the nape of her neck.

  And she had no idea what.

  She made a move in the direction of the buffet, and Antryg laid a hand, very gently, on her shoulder: Don’t. Behind the thick-lensed spectacles, a shadow crossed those daft gray eyes that told her that whatever bothered her about the freeloader, it bothered him a great deal more. So she headed laterally in the direction of Sensei McKie, a Shotokan instructor from San Bernardino, California who for all his tough-guy swagger had an appetite for gossip that Joanna hadn’t encountered since Middle School.

  Antryg moseyed after her, but she noticed he kept his eye on the interloper – whoever the hell he was.

  And there wasn’t, she reflected, anything visibly amiss about the man.

  Obviously he didn’t belong in a roomful of participants in the Western Regional All-Schools Martial Arts Tournament. Even shlubby out-of-shape senseis like Gordy Sumter – bawling unsolicited opinions about Madonna’s breasts to a couple of the local Las Vegas Tae Kwan Do boys – still moved and stood like someone who could take out an enemy if he really had to. Mr. Freeloader, though taller than average, had the pear-shaped softness of a sedentary businessman, and wore a metallic-gray suit and narrow, pale-blue tie, at odds with the student jeans, parachute pants, and sweats that surrounded him.

  “Who’s that guy?” she asked McKie, when she came up to him. “He looks familiar and I can’t place him, but I don’t think he’s in karate…”

  McKie followed her nod, shook his head dismissively, then did a very slight double-take and looked again. A frown pulled the long, tufted red eyebrows together. Something bothered him, too. But he said, “He looks like he’s just out for free food. We got plenty here.”

  “There is nothing in this room,” replied Joanna loftily, “that qualifies as food,” and that got her a white, wicked grin.

  “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  She turned around in time to see Antryg drifting toward the end of the buffet, where Mr. Freeloader stood chowing down his plateful of penne and bow-tie pasta with three assorted glops of varying colors, and – cautiously, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain – she moved to follow.

  But the next time she looked, the man was gone.

  ***

  “Did he leave?” She rejoined Antryg beside the ballroom’s main door.

  He shook his head. Generally her housemate’s amiable other-worldliness was no different than thousands of burned-out over-age hippies in Southern California – even with a relatively respectable cotton button-up shirt instead of his usual flaking rock-band t-shirt, he wore several strings of brightly-colored beads and a pair of rhinestone earrings that would have embarrassed Zsa Zsa Gabor. When he would explain, earnestly, that he was a wizard in another universe, hiding out from the infuriated Council of Wizards with a price on his head, people would nod and agree, “Yeah, man, whatever…” and that was acceptable by all concerned.

  But sometimes his daft gray eyes would change, and he would, actually, look like a wizard.

  Those times made Joanna shiver.

  ***

  Nothing further was said – or seen – of The Man Who Wasn’t There that evening.

  It was possible, Joanna knew, that whoever he was, he’d been able to slip away in the crowd, and somehow get through the knot of old-line senseis and sifus, college instructors, rowdy sparring-team hot-dogs and totally intimidated yellow-belt newbies in the doorway… but even thrusting and wriggling it would have taken him some time. The mob around the buffet was such that she couldn’t imagine how he’d have gotten to the door without being noticed, once Antryg started after him… and some of the older senseis would absolutely have noticed someone in the room who didn’t belong there.

  But scanning the room from the doorway, she had been certain that the gunmetal-gray suit, the tall, slightly podgy form, were absent.

  And on reflection, she could form no recollection of the man’s face.

  All the following day was spent at the University of Las Vegas gym. Both Joanna and Antryg, as newcomers to the art of aikido, entered the tournament in the most basic randori competitions, as well as for kata, Joanna with a bo and Antryg with a bokken. Antryg, however, had been asked – in preference to students many years senior to himself – to assist Shimada Sensei in a fairly dangerous self-defense demonstration involving swords, ropes, and split-second timing, and Joanna was interested to note that none of the senior students questioned the selection. Though Antryg was very much a novice in the specific techniques of aikido and iaido, he moved differently, and had a different understanding of timing, than those for whom the art was only an art. It was as if they understood instinctively that sometime, somewhere, under circumstances that could only be guessed at, Antryg had used edged steel with his own life and the lives of others at stake: not once, but many times.

  In the same way that the Viet Nam vets in the dojo treated this slightly loopy stranger as one of themselves, the sempai – and the sensei even up to Shimada himself – accepted that of everyone in the dojo, he was the man most to be trusted with a live blade.

  This being the case, Joanna made herself useful when she wasn’t in one of the competition rings – and she was put out fairly early – organizing seeding charts, taking down signs and pulling up floor-tape as the innumerable low-level rings finished up and were consolidated. After the evening Finals – punctuated by demonstrations of everything from Shimada Sensei’s scary ropes-and-knives tricks to Sensei McKie breaking bricks to Sensei Ueda from Phoenix doing his samurai-sword-and-watermelon demonstration (you could smell the split watermelon in the top row of the bleachers) – there was the obligatory mass dinner at Pancho’s on the Strip, followed by a mass retreat to the hotel, and parties in everybody’s rooms.
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  “Just so everybody will feel their very best for the drive home tomorrow,” remarked Joanna, as she and Antryg – sweaty and rumpled and extremely tired – carried their gi bags back through the lobby of the Della Robbia to the elevators (mobbed, of course). There was a bank of slot machines in the lobby and a whole room full of them immediately through a pair of ornate bronze doors, through which Antryg gazed in fascination. On the other side of the lobby, a wedding-party posed on a crimson-carpeted stairway worthy of a Busby Berkeley musical: a dozen bridesmaids in a cutsey rainbow of satin and tulle, groomsmen in black tuxes with matchy-poo satin rainbow cummerbunds, bow-ties, and shoes… “They must have got white ones and dyed them,” marveled Joanna, who couldn’t imagine where anyone would have acquired purple patent-leather men’s pumps with tigerskin uppers.

  “Is that something men aren’t supposed to do?” inquired Antryg, a little wistfully.

  “Yes.” They passed through another doorway and into the vast, tepid darkness of the courtyard. “It’s not.” Gaudy neon illuminated more wedding-guests, and the sparkling, unnaturally aqua water of not one but three swimming-pools. A whole chain of “lanai suites” had been taken by relatives of the happy couple and like blazing stage-settings, buffets could be seen in each one, dominated by sculpted ice swans and dolphins and aswarm with men in tuxes and women in designer gowns not created for human bodies. On the other side of the courtyard, Sensei McKie had also taken a lanai suite and its deck likewise spilled party-guests – far more informally attired – into the greater courtyard.

  Party small-talk and the friendly green scent of burning cannibis illuminated the dark air.

  “I wonder if magic could be used to affect slot-machines?” said Antryg. “It doesn’t work in this universe, of course, but theoretically, magic affects random events at a molecular level. Now that the tournament is over, might we stay an extra day and—”

  “Antryg,” said Joanna patiently, “one of two things would happen. You’d lose a hundred dollars’ worth of nickels learning that finite quantities of magic do not exist in this universe – something we both know already – and I wouldn’t get the programming done for Wondersystems’ billing department by Thursday, or you’d establish that finite quantities of magic do exist in this universe and get both your kneecaps broken by the crime syndicate that runs this hotel.”

  “Could I purchase a slot-machine and take it home to experiment on?”

  Antryg’s workroom back in Los Angeles already housed four dismantled computers, a gutted pinball machine, two pachincos and the dismembered corpse of an arcade Defenders game, all in the name of experimentation with random events.

  “Only if you disable the sound-card.”

  “It shouldn’t…” Antryg froze mid-stride, turned his head sharply toward one of the lighted wedding-buffets.

  And Joanna saw him. The Man Who Wasn’t There, plump and unobtrusive in his gray suit, loading up his crystal plate with poached salmon and mini-quiches.

  “I’ll meet you at the party.” Antryg thrust his gi-bag into her hands and darted, gawky and incongruous, into the well-dressed crowd.

  Well, hell, reflected Joanna. If the Father of the Bride has no problem with a guy in a gray Sears business-suit among all that Armani and Donna Karan, he’s probably not going to notice Antryg’s jeans and earrings either.

  Only a few of the senseis had taken the exclusive (and costly) lanai suites. The students who’d participated in the Western Regional All-Schools etc. were bunked twelve to a room on the higher floors of the hotel, or in the two long wings that flanked the parking-lot, a football-field of sun-attracting asphalt which had, over the hot late-May weekend, acquired the universal appellation The Anvil of God. Even at this hour, Joanna guessed as she crossed it, heading back to their room at the far end of the eastern wing, the ground temperature still had to be over a hundred; she could feel it through the soles of her flip-flops. In combination with the black velvet of the sky, bleached even of stars by ambient light, and with the klieg-light brilliance of the parking-lot lights on their high poles, the heat was eerily incongruous.

  It may only have been that incongruity, combined with a rather surreal day and the empty stillness of the lot itself. The Della Robbia was a new hotel on the farthest outskirts of town. Empty desert stretched beyond the parking lot’s edge.

  Enough to give anyone the willies.

  Later, Joanna tried to tell herself that was all it was.

  She glanced over her shoulder, once, and then again a few steps further.

  Tried to identify what it was that she’d heard.

  The parking-lot was lit like a movie-set, there wasn’t a single possibility of a shadow anywhere, or of anything moving among the scattered cars.

  It’s behind you.

  She moved out into the center of an aisle, stopped – though everything in her screamed Run you idiot! – turned and looked. Scanned the cars, the empty spaces, the flat cindery-gray acres of asphalt, her heart hammering with sudden, terrified conviction.

  It’s there.

  Only it wasn’t.

  Only it was.

  It had taken everything in her to stop, turn around, and look, and now it took everything she had to turn her back on the there’s-nothing-here-dear and head for the distant end of the long hotel wing. It was behind her and it was closing the distance and she thought she heard it growl – If I break into a run will it chase me, like a dog?

  Panic. Terror.

  What happens if it catches me?

  In her bones she knew.

  What the hell do I do?

  She had her room-key in hand when she reached the open concrete stairs and she mounted them fast, and there wasn’t anything there and somehow she knew it didn’t come up after her…

  Is it waiting at the bottom of the stairs?

  She made it into the room and locked the door, shaking all over, barely able to breathe.

  She was still sitting on the bed, telling herself there was nothing in the parking lot, three hours later when Antryg returned.

  ***

  “Could they be connected?” she asked the next morning in the coffee-shop.

  Most of the tournament contestants had departed. It was a long way back to anywhere from Vegas. Finals, jobs, classes, deadlines had to be dealt with Monday. Only the fact that Joanna could crawl out of bed anytime she pleased tomorrow morning no matter how late they pulled into Granada Hills tonight accounted for the leisurely breakfast.

  Daylight made the invisible monster in the parking lot considerably less terrifying, but in her months of dealing with Antryg, she had at least learned not to say, There must be a reasonable explanation…

  Antryg drizzled cream in his coffee, studied the patterns of the white coiling into the black. “I certainly hope there aren’t two open portals letting trans-dimensional beings through in the vicinity of this hotel. Can I get you some syrup?” he added, rising, and, when she shook her head, headed off in the direction of the breakfast buffet.

  Though by the time he’d come in last night Joanna had almost talked herself out of the Yes, there is something in the parking-lot position, he had gone downstairs and walked the entire monstrous acreage of asphalt, with periodic halts to test wind-direction and draw arcane diagrams in mini-bar sugar and salt on the pavement. He had sensed nothing. Nor, he’d informed her after he was done, had he tracked down The Man Who Wasn’t There, though he’d had some excellent wedding-cake and a long and interesting conversation with the bride’s grandfather about the black market in Seoul during the Korean War.

  And if there IS something in the parking-lot, thought Joanna, who do we tell?

  Do I just waltz up to that woman over there – ADMINISTRATION was written all over her black-red-and-golden blazer suit – and say, Hey, there may be a rift in the Void between universes in your hotel and abominations are coming through… Have you had any unexplained murders around here lately?

  Her gaze followed Antryg, tall and thin in hi
s tattered sweatshirt, as he chatted with the omelet chef: He probably would, she reflected. He probably will.

  Was it like this for him growing up? She raked her curly blonde hair up into a banana-clip, considered the preposterous profile, the beaky nose and the tousle of graying brown hair. The voice like brown velvet, that you’d trust to the end of the universe. A peasant’s child in some village in the back of nowhere, in that world on the other side of the Void… Harvesting wheat and cutting wood, aware of things other people couldn’t see, unable to speak to anyone because no one would believe?

  Of course he’d give his soul to the first person who understood – to the first wizard who told him, What you feel is the truth…

  Leading him into a labyrinth of magic and power, betrayal and lies…

  “Excuse me.”

  It was the woman in the black-gold-and-crimson hotel uniform.

  She held out a well-manicured hand. “My name is Delia Bannister. I’m the catering director for the hotel.”

  Shit, they found out about the men’s sparring team bringing their own beer into the rooms.

  Joanna said, “Uh—”

  “May I have a few minutes of your time? And please,” Ms. Bannister added with a smile, “allow the hotel to comp your breakfast.”

  “Be my guest,” said Joanna. “Except that we’re actually your guests.” She moved over as Antryg returned with his breakfast of choice: oatmeal, two eggs over easy on top, and syrup all over that, a combination Joanna found revolting. “Ms. Bannister, this is my partner Antryg Windrose. I’m Joanna Sheraton. Antryg, Ms. Bannister works for the hotel.”

  “Very pleased to meet you.” Ms. Bannister, Joanna guessed, was in her mid-thirties, five or six years older than herself, and had all the professional ease and polish that Joanna had always wished for. Her dark hair was close-cropped without looking mannish or weird, something no white woman Joanna had ever met could accomplish; nails polished without in any way calling attention to themselves; chaste expensive gold jewelry and never at a loss for words. “I wanted to ask you about the gentleman you tried to speak to, Friday night at the Martial Artists’ reception buffet and then again last night at the Park wedding. The gentleman in the gray suit. Do you know him?”