Zenobie (Windrose Chronicles) Page 5

  Hostage…

  She bolted down the stairs like a rabbit, the stranger – whoever the HELL he was – at her heels and gaining.

  If I hide in any bedroom that’ll make THAT person the hostage…

  She plunged down the main stair toward the hall and the hit-man leaped over the bannister and landed on the stair in front of her, knife flashing in the moonlight as he darted up toward her. She rammed the poker straight at him like a sword-thrust (Thank you, Sensei Shimada…) and though he blocked it, it broke his momentum. She darted past him even as Antryg, likewise, jumped the bannister of the upstairs gallery and landed on the stair (If I tried to do that I’d break my leg…) directly behind the stranger. From the hallway above, Lumen’s voice yelled, “Norman!” (Whatever drug it is, thought Joanna, the dose must be small enough to wear off quickly—) and she skidded to a halt at the bottom of the stairs as the assassin threw himself on Antryg, ducking a savage thrust with the pole.

  Conyer’s voice shouted “What the hell—?” followed by an extremely un-self-realized remark, and as the hit-man drove his knife into Antryg’s side Mrs. Durham’s voice called,

  “Watch out, dear!” followed immediately by the roar of a shotgun.

  Plaster exploded from a wall yards from the two combattants, but both men dropped flat to the stairs, arms over their heads. The hit-man recovered first. He bounded to his feet, plunged down the stair. Joanna ducked behind the newel-post into the black shadows of the hall, but guessed – even as groggy as she still was – that she was in no further danger of being used as a human shield. As far as their visitor was concerned the jig was definitely up, and he pelted past her without a glance. Antryg, Dr. Conyer, Lumen, and Mrs. Durham (it was a double-barrelled shotgun, so running made good sense) piled down the stairs behind…

  Something cold passed across Joanna’s back. For a moment the smell of foulness, like rotting meat far-off, gagged her, and what appeared to be fast-blowing shreds of luminous mist flowed by her and into the hall. The hit-man had already torn open the front door, plunged out into the raggedy cloud-streaked moonlight.

  Antryg, ahead of the others despite the blood soaking his t-shirt where his hand pressed to his side, flung out his arm to block the pursuit as the glowing mist swirled in the hall. Conyer gasped, “What the—?” again and Joanna heard the thunder of boots on the front gallery, and saw through the open door their visitor spring down the steps and start to run, sloshing through the steely glimmer of the flood-water, toward the woods.

  The mist drifted after him, seeming to dissipate in the moonlight.

  He’ll get away – He’ll try again…

  Joanna ran to the door, the others – including Antryg – behind her.

  The hit-man was wading fast through the water toward the woods. There was something weirdly dream-like in the monochrome world of moonlight, the spiky black islets of the guest-houses, the floating branches and packing-crates and cut ends of two-by-fours. Or maybe it’s just the drug, thought Joanna detachedly, as Mrs. Durham raised her shotgun for another try and Antryg slapped it up from beneath the barrel: her target was far out of range.

  The whole of the surface of the water shuddered suddenly, and what appeared to be several hundred small, thick black triangles appeared, trailing gleaming arrowheads of wake. Now and then, one would resolve itself into three feet of whipping tail.

  They converged on the fleeing man, swimming far more swiftly than he could run.

  Joanna said, “Shit!” and closed her fingers tight on Antryg’s hand where it rested on her shoulder. Dr. Conyer said something even less refined.

  Lumen said, “Cottonmouths—”

  The hit-man screamed, staggered, swatted futilley at the water as the snakes swarmed around him. Joanna thought there were a dozen of them hanging onto him when he regained his feet and tried to continue wading toward the woods.

  He fell again, and didn’t rise.

  After a few moments the snakes boiled to the surface, and swam away in all directions. The water grew still. Then Joanna thought she saw the mist rise up, and hang above the surface for perhaps five seconds before it dispersed.

  *

  “I should guess,” remarked Antryg to the Lafourche Parish sheriff, when that gentleman put in an appearance the following afternoon, “that the first place to make enquiries as to our visitor’s employer would be with the family of Miss Hallard’s mother or grandfather.”

  “Grandfather.” Ben Hallard sipped his third cup of black coffee – he looked like ten miles of bad road – and spoke without the smallest sliver of doubt in his voice. “Bree’s – my ex-wife’s – father always hated me. Don’t take my word for it,” he added, with a glance at the white deputy who was taking notes. “You can look up any interview Larry Pell has given in the past fourteen years, on the subject of ‘nigger degenerates’ marrying good white girls like his daughter.”

  The sheriff – a stereotypically Fat White Southern Sheriff from any B-movie, except for his eyes – nodded thoughtfully. “I read ‘em,” he said. “Minute I heard your name was attached to this here Institute, Mr. Hallard, I went to the library an’ looked you up. Read up on Mrs. Durham, too, and Miss Bennett. Just like to know who we was havin’ here in the Parish.”

  He considered Antryg and Joanna for a moment, on the other side of the long dining-room table, as if adding together the wizard’s love-beads and air of daft geniality with the bandage on his arm and the knife-cut on his cheekbone. “You figure he counted on it bein’ put down as another Manson case? Rock star goes nuts in a haunted house, offs his daughter and then kills himself?”

  “With lots of witnesses to the supernatural goings-on,” affirmed the mage. He gestured – with a wince where his wounded side pulled at its dressing – toward the equipment they’d found that morning, in the far end of the attic of the unrepaired north wing. Along with the miniature sound-equipment by which the knockings, rappings, and whispers had been produced, had been found vials of blood (“I think you’ll find the clerks at the pet-store in town can identify him, as having bought feeder-rats a day or two before each incident of blood-writing.”), and an assortment of chocolate-chip cookies which proved, on later analysis, to contain precisely measured doses of a mild hypnotic: enough to knock out those who sampled the cookies, but not enough to cause noticible after-effects.

  “You have to admit it’s an excellent plan.”

  “That it is,” agreed the sheriff. “I’d have bought that story myself, after all the talk there’s been about this house for the past hundred years. I think everybody in town’s heard about Miss Hallard ‘sleepwalking’ that first time… I’d have tested your blood, Mr. Hallard, and your daughter’s, if you’d been found dead in the mornin’, but I don’t think I’d have thought to test everybody’s in the house.”

  “If I hadn’t been in a panic adrenalin-rush from a nightmare I had,” confessed Joanna, “I’d probably have rolled over and fallen back asleep. And if I hadn’t wanted to go up to the tower with Antryg when he summoned the ghost.”

  The sheriff returned his calm blue glance to Antryg again. “You put all them little drawin’s on the tower floor to summon the ghost, Mr. Windrose?”

  “I should have been delighted had she appeared.” Antryg gave the officer a bonkers smile. “But since, that morning, I had observed that the letters supposedly written by the ghost on the wall in blood had actually been made with a paint-brush – you can see one or two of the bristles still sticking in the blood – I thought it best to take a stick with me also, in case the problem had a more human explanation. When I heard our friend coming up the stairs the first time, carrying Miss Hallard, I concealed myself in the shadows in a corner of the tower room. When he left her there and went downstairs again I guessed he was going to fetch her father, and was waiting for him when he came up. I have trained with a fighting-staff,” he added, half apologetically. “I had no idea Mrs. Durham had firearms in the house.”

  “I thought you said the
place was really haunted,” whispered Joanna, when Sheriff LePic was called to the front gallery by a deputy with the word that they’d found the assassin’s body. Nobody had wanted to go wading after it while floods and darkness – not to speak of about a hundred cottonmouth vipers – had covered the land, but when it began to grow light, Antryg had put on some fishing-waders of Chad’s and had sloshed away through waters still thigh-deep, the five miles to town. By the time he’d returned in Sheriff LePic’s high-set off-roader, the floods had begun to sink. In his absence the others at the Institute had found the cache of sound-equipment in the attic – which Ben had easily identified – as well as a rain-wet slicker and boots, and a pee-bottle which had indicated that yes, the assassin had been hiding in the attic probably since afternoon.

  If the death of a financially inconvenient son-in-law and grand-daughter were to be blamed on supernatural murder-suicide, Joanna guessed, one couldn’t have drippy trails of rainwater all over the house.

  “Anyway,” she added uneasily, “it is really haunted. What the hell was that… that mist?”

  “I think the entire incident is what one would call an induced haunting.” Antryg poured himself another cup of tea and offered Joanna the plate of cookies – Lindy had made oatmeal-raisin that morning, just to make sure nobody got mixed up with the evidence.

  Joanna shook her head. She felt she had had enough cookies for the moment.

  “It’s what puzzled me, you know,” the wizard went on. “I was looking for a cold spot – the most common manifestation of a haunt. Yet there was none in the house. I could feel there was definitely an entity present in the house, but there was no… no sense of malice, no change in temperature, no smell of the dead, during the events of Thursday night. And my card-readings all showed up perfectly random. There was nothing, in fact, to indicate that anything genuinely supernatural was going on at all. This was confirmed when I had a closer look at the blood-writing in the tower Friday morning. I’ve seen the writing of actual spirits and it looks nothing like that. It was crudely-formed, but more or less on a line, and at the eye-level of a person close to six feet tall.”

  “So why’d you try to summon the ghost in the tower,” asked Ben Hallard, “if you knew it wasn’t involved?”

  Antryg widened his eyes at him. “To ask her what was going on, of course.”

  “And you’re saying our visitor – the hit-man – woke her up?” said Joanna.

  “Woke her up… and angered her.” He glanced across at Ben. “I suspect it was because he meant to injure your daughter,” he added. “She may even believe that Galadriel was her daughter – and that the man who came up to the tower, filled with the cold indifference that doesn’t care who it harms, was the man she hated, the man who had given her daughter to another woman.”

  He rose, and walked to the window, through which Sheriff LePic and two deputies could be seen making their way through the ankle-deep weedy slush that was all that was left of the flood. The deputies carried a stretcher between them. LePic shook his head; Joanna, standing at Antryg’s side, heard the sheriff say, “Damndest thing I ever seen—”

  “It is a very great mistake,” said Antryg softly, “to anger the dead. I think you’ll find he came in as one of the contractor’s men. As such he’d have a key to the store-rooms under the house – at least, there was no sign of the locks having been picked – and from there he could come and go at will, unseen, through the holes in the floors of the bedrooms in the deserted wing. From under the house he could make the footsteps, the rapping noises – loud or soft – and the whispering Brightsky heard, by putting the speaker against the floor-boards.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” said Hallard softly. “And it doesn’t surprise me that old Pell would do this. He’s hated me and hated Galley, ever since he failed to get custody of Galley when she was three. My brother Ivar – who’s my manager and a hell of a lawyer – got the court to set up a trust-fund for Galley from the divorce settlement, but Grandpa Pell’s never liked it. He’s tried to break it twice, even though Galley’s his only grandchild…”

  His mouth hardened. “He talks about ‘bad blood.’ The damn thing is, we can’t prove it was Grandpa Pell who hired this man. And knowing Pell, I know he’s going to try again.”

  *

  In point of fact, the hit-man – whose name turned out to be Clay Denny, or at least that was the name under which he’d been employed by Charlie Trasher to install air conditioners – had taken care of that problem himself. Evidently – so the Star, the National Enquirer, the Globe and the Sun gleefully informed the American reading public over the course of the next several weeks – Mr. Denny had doubted his employer’s good faith in the matter of paying up the $500,000 (the Enquirer said $250,000) negotiated for the hit, and had informed Mr. Pell that “If anything happens to me, tapes of our conversations are going straight to the FBI and to every major newspaper in the country.” (Presumably, not the major newspapers that Mr. Pell owned).

  And when something indeed happened to Mr. Denny in the course of the hit, the tapes duly went out, and 65-year-old billionaire Larry Pell – whose new wife was expecting their first child – found himself under investigation for trying to eliminate the grand-daughter who had a claim on a substantial portion of the fortune he hoped to leave to his new family.

  “Marty LePic in Lafourche Parish told me you had the whole set-up pretty well nailed,” said Jon Sheraton approvingly, four months later, when he appeared in Los Angeles to take his daughter Joanna and her “beau,” as he referred to Antryg, out for Thanksgiving dinner. Joanna suspected that this was at least in part to introduce her to his most recent wife, a dazzling blonde who probably looked a good deal like Starshine Worlds-Daughter herself had looked at the age of twenty-seven. “He says you went straight for exactly what a trained officer would have checked: possible entry to the house, and how the effects could have been produced… You ever do any police work?”

  “Only in an amateur capacity in my home town as a teen-ager, sir. I’ve never had any kind of training. But I like to think I have the habit of observing things, and anything out of the ordinary will draw my attention. I do love things,” added Antryg with a grin, “that are out of the ordinary.”

  “I don’t know any good cop who doesn’t.” Joanna’s father had mentioned in passing, in the course of setting up the meeting at Jerry’s Famous Delicatessen that evening, that he’d made Chief of Police of Trenton, New Jersey, the previous year, something her mother had never thought to mention during the week they were in Louisiana. “And what do you do?”

  Joanna got ready to kick the wizard under the table, but Antryg replied, “Oh, tend bar, tell fortunes….”

  Her father’s cheekbones and ear-tips turned bright red, and she could see him getting ready to yell, Don’t we have enough of that crap in this family already? But the beautiful blonde Annie caught his eye, like a gentle, warning chime, and he visibly got himself in hand, took a deep breath, and merely grimaced. “Oh, I bet Susan loves you…”

  With a little deft guidance from Annie (whom Joanna had liked instantly: she was long ago used to stepmothers her own age) the conversation turned to hunting – like most wizards, Antryg knew a great deal about birds and animals – and to the martial arts. “Glad you got Joanna into learning a little self-defense. She needs to get out more. Stop spending so much time staring into a computer screen.”

  “I never thought you’d get along with my dad,” said Joanna later, as she drove home through the rain-slick glare and darkness of Victory Boulevard. Christmas lights blared from every mall and store-front. A dozen billboards trumpeted the season’s offerings of G-rated films to keep bored kids busy. Joanna could only be profoundly glad that she’d seen the last of both parents, with luck, for another year or more. Antryg’s earrings alone, she suspected, would have set her father off if he hadn’t been on his best behavior.

  “I don’t suppose he’ll ever approve of me.” Antryg craned his neck briefly to o
bserve the long line already forming on the sidewalk outside a Toys R Us that advertised the new Cabbage Patch Kids would go on sale at midnight. “But why wouldn’t I like him? He, and your mother, both contributed to making you what you are – and I very much like you.”

  “What were your parents like?” In over two years it was the first time she’d thought to ask him. Having grown used, all her life, to not speaking of the tensions between a wildly enthusiastic flake and a driven alcoholic, she had fallen out of the habit of thinking that other people might have equally bizarre home-lives.

  In the long interval of silence she glanced sidelong at him, but his eyes were hidden behind the reflection of oncoming headlights in the lenses of his glasses, and his wide mouth was settled in an expression of sadness. “They were poor,” he said at length. “And frightened. I was the oldest of nine; my mother always had something else to do. And like yours, my father was drunk a great deal of the time—”

  He must have seen her startle, because he paused, and the next moment Joanna realized that though her father was clearly back in AA these days, the broken veins in his nose and cheeks were a giveaway. Maybe other signs as well. To a wizard, or perhaps to anyone who’d grown up hearing yelling through the wall every night.

  “They tried to cover up my powers, when I was tiny. It’s never good to be a wizard, in my world. If you’re mageborn, you can work all sorts of little magics when you’re four and five years old, and then it all goes away, and you spend about ten years wondering whether any of it ever really happened, before they start to come back. I’d forgotten I’d had powers, until I was fourteen. When I was fourteen Suraklin took me away—” He shook his head. “I never saw my parents again. I suspect they didn’t even miss me.”