Denner_s Wreck

He shuddered once, briefly. The sensation was so very weird!

That done, he clambered into the shaft, swung himself onto the ladder, and began descending into the gloom.

Two levels down he kicked open another access panel and peered out into the corridor, hoping-although he knew the odds were wildly against it-to see or hear Thaddeus approaching. If the master of the fortress had happened along just then, Geste could easily have caught him in the stasis field before he had any idea he was in danger.

Thaddeus was nowhere in sight, but the Trickster saw something almost as good and almost as surprising. All the corridor doors were open.

Puzzled, Geste climbed out of the shaft into the passageway.

He could see now that not all the doors were open, but several were in either direction. He calculated his location as best he could from his accumulated memories of the fortress, and then headed in the direction that he hoped would lead him to the room where the prisoners had been held.

As Geste emerged from the shaft, Bredon was still in the war room, trying to puzzle out the controls, none of which were anything at all like anything in Arcade, when one of the darkened screens suddenly lit.

“…right now, Monitor,” he heard Thaddeus say.

An image appeared on the screen, a flat, two-dimensional image like a weaving, rather than a proper three-dimensional transmission, and Bredon needed a second or two before he recognized the prison chamber as seen from above the door.

The seven captives were still chained to the wall, and Thaddeus stood over them, looking up as if he were able to see Bredon.

“Listen, savage,” he said, “you caught me by surprise, but I'm ready for you now. You come down here, right now, unarmed, or I'll start cutting throats.” He held up a small black device, clutched tightly in one hand. “This is a knife."

“It is?” Bredon asked. He had never seen anything of the sort. The black thing had no visible blade.

“Yes, it is,” Thaddeus replied. He held out a corner of his robe and waved the “knife” at it.

A chunk of fabric came away in his hand.

Bredon stepped back. The thought of Thaddeus cutting Lady Sunlight's throat was horrible, but he knew that if he obeyed and went down there, alone and unarmed, Thaddeus would kill him.

He needed time to think, time for a miracle to intervene. In the stories he heard as a child, this was the time when Rawl the Adjuster would step in on the side of virtue, but right now Rawl was a helpless captive.

There were other Powers, though. Bredon had no idea what had become of Geste, for one thing, and there were all those other Powers who had refused to help, any one of whom might have reconsidered.

He needed to stall. Even if no one intervened, he had to have a moment to think.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “We can talk about this."

As he spoke, a vague realization began forming. He had control of the fortress machines, if he could figure out how to use it. Surely, he could do something with that!

He looked at the mysterious screens and panels, hoping for inspiration.

“I don't want to talk, savage,” Thaddeus said. “Get down here!"

“All right, all right! Just a minute!” With sudden inspiration, he added, “I don't know the way!"

Thaddeus snorted in disbelief. “You got from here to there,” he said.

“But I wasn't watching the route, I just rode that machine."

Thaddeus paused, considering that, and Bredon felt a sudden chill as he wondered if he had made a mistake in mentioning his control of the fortress machines.

Geste was sure that he was on the right route. He was also sure that somehow the escaping captives had not only gotten the doors to open, but had gotten them to stay open. No other explanation made sense, because the open doors were in a direct path to the prison chamber.

He hurried along, eager to do what he could to help, keeping one hand near his ear.

He rounded the final corner, then stopped, frozen in astonishment.

The prisoners were just as he had left them, still chained to the wall, and Thaddeus, surely the real Thaddeus this time, was standing over them with something clutched tightly in his hand. He was clad in black, rather than the brown the clone had worn. His robe had been cut, and a severed scrap of cloth lay on the floor by his feet.

“All right, savage,” he was saying, “I'll tell you how to get here. It's easy."

This was an irresistible opportunity, better than anything he could have hoped for; if he was somehow making a mistake, he could straighten it out later. He pulled out the stasis generator, adjusted the range, and pushed the control.

Thaddeus froze, his face raised to Monitor's light, one hand raised in a gesture of admonition, the other holding the disintegrator knife. His black garb seemed to expand and fill the surrounding air as the field darkened around him, and then he vanished completely as it crystallized into the familiar mirrored sphere.

In the war room, as Bredon groped for something to say, some new delaying tactic, he saw the stasis field appear. He stared at the screen, baffled.

Then he relaxed and sank into Thaddeus's control chair, overcome with relief, as Geste stepped into view and the prisoners, despite their chains, burst into applause.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“…told among the people who live along the banks of the river where the forests end and the grasslands begin. There, a woman will often wake in the middle of the night to find the furs beside her empty. When that happens, she knows that the Nymph has called her man away for a few hours’ pleasure.

"You might think that the women would be upset by this, that they would be jealous, but in fact few are. They have lived all their lives knowing that this happens, for it's hardly a secret. Scarcely a grown man in the area has not been called at least once. In fact, the wife of a man who has been called back repeatedly will often take pride in the fact-must her man not be a wonderful and inventive lover, to have been so summoned?

"It's not as if another woman had seduced their men. After all, who can compete with a Power? And they can take comfort in knowing that for tensleeps afterward, after a dark or two with the insatiable and perverse Nymph, their men are always too tired and too jaded to bother straying to the beds of other mortal women…"

– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller

The disintegrator knife would have been handy for cutting the chains, but it was trapped in the stasis field with Thaddeus. Monitor refused to provide any assistance, and eventually, at Geste's suggestion and with Aulden providing the necessary technical advice, Bredon sent a machine down that blew Monitor out of the wall in microscopic shards.

While this was being done Bredon and Geste exchanged accounts of what had happened, piecing together the entire story of Thaddeus's downfall. When they had the tale straight, Bredon put a reassuring call through to the Skyland; almost all the jamming and defensive fields had been shut down when he gave his “abort” command to the entire war room, so communication was easy.

The Skyler, though relieved, had no intention of entering Fortress Holding. She would wait where she was, she said.

The same machine that destroyed Monitor, under careful direction, was able to remove the shackles from the seven captives and lead them all, as well as Geste, to the war room.

As they made their way through the passages Bredon, growing more confident in his abilities, summoned other machines, and by the time the Powers reached the room he had a steady stream of service devices bringing food and drink.