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Close to, they looked very little like Aiffe and Nicholas Bo
“Simulacra,” Ben said tonelessly. “The old Norse wizards made things like that; Egil knew about them. Easy enough to create, but they go bad fast. These will rot away into air by sundown—she only wanted them to hold us here for a while. Worked just fine.” He was gripping Farrell and Julie like a pair of hammers, using them to batter a way through the crowd sweeping across the tourney field. Farrell sheltered his lute and kept looking backward, straining for one more glimpse of the simulacra, although he dreaded the idea of their soft, gri
“You meet us right here. You are not to go to the house alone.” His voice was as gray as his face, so low that the late-afternoon traffic all but drowned it, but Julie looked at him and nodded, and Ben let her go.
She was waiting astride the BSA when they returned in Madame Schuma
“Why this way? It’s no quicker.” The BSA was flying ahead of them on the laneless foothill road, dipping in and out of traffic like a darning needle, committing Farrell to a steady flow of criminal offenses just to keep Julie in sight.
Ben said only, “Yeah, it is,” the words half muffled by his fist as he crouched forward against the dashboard. His other hand kept coming back to the gearshift, gripping it hard enough to make the rusty metal creak like rope, no matter how many times Farrell slapped it away.
Farrell said, to be saying something, “Those things, those doubles, she did a pretty good job. If she hadn’t tried to improve on herself a bit—”
“I told you, that shit is easy.” Ben’s voice was angry and insulting, unraveling like the simulacra. “Sorcerer’s apprentice stuff, goddamn training exercises. Will you pass that senile moron now, for Christ’s sake?”
“Will you give me my goddamn gearshift back?” Farrell swung out and around a quarter-mile of station wagon, whose driver promptly speeded up, making a three-lane freeway out of the road for a brief but thrilling period.
Beside him, too bitterly frightened to pay any respect to imminent death, Ben muttered, “She is not that good, she is just not that good. Sia could butter the walls with her.” Farrell passed a truck and a schoolbus on a blind curve, because Madame Schuma
A long string of tarnished-silver clouds suddenly jolted into motion all together, exactly as if a train were towing them. That was the only warning Farrell had before the wind hit, making the VW shudder and boom, like the time the bear smelled my tuna fish in Yosemite. Madame Schuma
Ben was frantic from the moment the rain started, screaming at Aiffe and Farrell alike, while Madame Schuma
Julie was soaked, dazed, and furious, but unharmed, swearing in Japanese, as Farrell had never heard her do, while Ben and he carried her back to the bus and dried everyone off with bedrolls and oil rags. “Black ice,” she kept snarling, “black ice in fucking September, and both forks bent to hell. Okay, now the bitch dies.” There was no talk of salvaging the motorcycle; they left it to bleach in the desert and lunged along, while hailstones the size of gumballs flayed the remaining paint off Madame Schuma
The back road followed the eastern frontier of the university, flirted momentarily with a freeway, considered a serious career as a link between Avice
There was an explosion behind them, and then another, and Farrell said, “She’s good with engines, too. We just blew two pistons.” He cut the motor, sighed very deeply, and let Madame Schuma