The Warlock is Missing

Unless somebody else could see it, too. He stabbed at another touchpoint and barked, "Sergeant! Come in here!"

Two minutes later, a third man stumbled in through a side door, hair tousled, blinking sleep out of his eyes. "What… what's moving, Captain?"

"Ghosts," the captain gritted. He pointed out the window. "Tell me what you see."

The sergeant stepped over to the pane, puzzled. Then he stared. "They're not real!"

"Well!" the captain heaved a sigh. "At least you see them, too!"

"What?" the sergeant turned to him. "Did you think you were dreaming, sir?"

"No, just hallucinating. Now, you've seen them—go look on the monitors, will you?"

Frowning, the sergeant turned and went out into the hall. A few minutes later, his voice sounded right next to the captain's ear. "Right you are, sir. There's nothing on the monitors."

"That's what I thought." The captain stared out at the darkness, numb. There were three of them now, flitting from one tree trunk to another. Or else it was just one, moving very quickly… "Check all the sensors."

A few minutes later the sergeant reported, "Nothing on infrared, sir," and the guard's voice said, "No radiation… no new concentrations of mass… no RF reflection…"

"They're not real." The captain glared out at the glowing, dancing forms in indignation—but under that emotion was a growing dread. The things were there, no doubt about it—it wasn't only him; the sergeant had seen them, too. But how could they be there and not leave any trace on the sensors?

Gregory looked up at Magnus and Geoffrey. "Canst thou sus-tain this illusion, brothers?"

The two bigger boys knelt side by side, sweat starting on their foreheads, deep in concentration. "Long enough," Magnus answered.

"'Tis hard, casting this picture into their minds," Geoffrey muttered. "The groaning was easier."

"Then make them hear it again," Magnus grunted. He waited a moment, then asked, "How doth it work on them?"

"They do begin to fear," Gregory reported. " 'Tis not great, and buried deeply—but it hath begun."

"So much the worse for them," Cordelia declared. She turned to Fall. "Hast thou the spiders?"

"Aye, a thousand for each door. They have begun spi

'"'Tis well." Cordelia turned back to Magnus. "Are the elves in place?"

Her brother looked the question at Kelly. "Aye," the lepre-cohen gri

"Then let them laugh," Cordelia declared.

A hideous cackling rang through the house from every nook and cra

"Trace!" the guard shouted. "That sound shows a waveform, Captain!"

"At last! Something real!" The captain hit a touchpoint on the wall beside the desk and a siren whooped throughout the house. Agents tumbled from their cots, bleary-eyed and fuzzy-brained, hearing the captain's voice booming near their ears, "Search every place large enough to hold a loud-speaker!"

They searched. Behind the terminals, behind the stacks of boxes of organic powder, throughout the storerooms they searched—but they found nothing more than spiderwebs, cur-iously without spiders. As the siren faded, they heard what they were looking for—or its evidence; shrill, manic laughter, at exactly the right pitch to set their teeth on edge and make chills crawl up their backbones. Inside the closets they searched, around the hearth and inside the chimney—but they didn't peer into the cra

It was just as well they didn't. They wouldn't have be-

lieved what they found, anyway. Even if they had, it wouldn't have made them feel any better.

In every nook more than two inches wide with a foot of space behind it, an elf crouched. Inside the walls, in back of the baseboards, and behind the food synthesizer hid pixies, shooing away mice—and from every minute crack and each open grille echoed their laughter, growing more and more hilarious with every passing moment.

"It's mass hallucination!" the captain bellowed. "It couldn't be anything else!"

"How about sabotage?" called a civilian official.

"From where?"

"Bid them coax the mice to where they can see these fellows," Magnus instructed Kelly.

The elf protested. "Why not the Wee Folk?"

"We dare not let the Big People find them! 'Tis too dangerous," Cordelia explained.

Geoffrey nodded. "And, too, if they did find something that could explain the noises, they might become able to bear their fear."

"Assuredly, we do not wish that," Kelly gri

Inside the house, elves coaxed mice into mouseholes that the men didn't know existed. Quivering, the mice stared out at the huge beings who were hurrying from place to place, peering and seeking, growing more and more frantic with each passing minute.

Cordelia closed her eyes, opening her mind to the kitchen mouse. "Aye, I can see them. That cup, there…"

The cup shot off the counter and flew through the air, narrowly missing a plainclothes agent. The agent's head snapped around watching it; he winced as it smashed itself to smithereens against the wall. He looked about with a sudden stab of foreboding…

… and saw the saucer spi

In the watch office, the captain heard a crash. He spun about to find the terminal cover in a dozen pieces and molecular-circuit gems strewn about in a circle.

-

At the guard station, the terminal beeped. The guard turned toward it, wide-eyed, and saw a mass of print scrolling frantically upward on its screen.

The print stopped abruptly.

Slowly, the guard stepped toward it, sca

But a civilian agent down the hall suddenly ducked as a vision pickup wrenched itself out of the ceiling and went whistling past his ear to smash itself to bits on the wall. The agent screamed, "Poltergeist!"

With sweat dripping off his brow, Magnus asked, "Have the gnomes tu

"Aye," Kelly reported. "A score stand under each comer —and the Puck is with them."

Magnus nodded. "Tell them the contest hath begun."

"It's enemy action!" the captain said to an agent, white-faced and trembling. "That High Warlock has to have figured out where we are, and he's sending an army of espers against us!"

"The High Warlock is missing," the agent snapped. "Remember?"

The whole room shivered.

The agent looked up, white around his eyes. "What the hell was that?"

At the guard station, the desk suddenly heaved upward as the floor bucked beneath. The guard toppled over, howling, "Earthquake!"

"If it's an enemy action," the agent said to the captain, "it's a damn good one!"

The floor again heaved upward a foot, then dropped back down. The agent and captain tumbled shouting to the floor.

Out in the hallway, a civilian agent grabbed at a door frame for support, but the jamb jumped under his hand.

"Enemy action, supernatural, or just unexplained phenomena—it's lethal!" The agent jumped to his feet and stabbed a touchpoint on the desk. "Everybody evacuate!"

"They might come out at any number of places," Geoffrey said angrily.

Gregory shook his head. "They wished the house to be proof against burglars— so they filled the windows with slabs of glass so thick they ca