Dominion, Fred Saberhagen [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

   His voice was still patient too. “Hil, in a little while they’ll all be back, Vivian and all her helpers. Then there won’t be even this pretense of hiding, of getting away. So you’d better stop pretending now. You’d better be sensible. If Vivian finds out that you’ve been trying to cut and run…” There was a faint quaver in the unfinished sentence. Hildy knew Saul well enough to realize that he was now really, badly, frightened. It made her own terror all the worse.

   Hildy ran once more. She couldn’t have stopped running if she’d tried. This time her sprint brought her to a door she’d never opened, as far as she could remember; she was in one of the parts of the castle that she had never had the time to explore fully. The door opened for her, and she went through in a burst of desperate hope. To stop almost at once. She was on a balcony, halfway up the wall of a circular room, very high, maybe thirty feet across. Below her on a stone table, dark puddles were half-congealed in the light of a ring of torches. The bodies of the Wallises lay there, naked, broken, stabbed with a hundred wounds and drained of blood. Blade still in hand, wearing the face of Grandfather Littlewood, the executioner looked up at Hildy and smiled. She screamed and screamed and screamed and then someone or something had seized her from behind.

* * *

   The moment Talisman’s body vanished, Simon tried to take advantage of the confusion that suddenly appeared among his enemies. He turned, and leaped past Vivian, over the edge of the bluff, ready to die in a rolling, bouncing fall rather than stay where he was. No one, nothing stopped him, and it seemed for a long moment that he had got away. His leap turned into a fall into mist and darkness, and the fall went on and on, long past the moment when he should have struck some portion of the hillside. He felt no fear, only relief that he was going to be killed, and would not have to exist any longer as a pawn in Vivian’s service. And just then he landed with a thump, arms and legs collapsing under him so that his face was pressed into sodden leaves. Their wetness had a lint, familiar smell, and Simon knew that he was once more somewhere near the castle on the Sauk.

   He got to his hands and knees and looked around. Again it was near sunset on a cloudy, warm day; it seemed to him that it was always near sunset in this place. The sky was ominous, but only a little rain was falling at the moment. Only another leap away was the edge of the bluff, and below that would be the river, the way out to sanity. Simon sprang erect, ready to leap again.

   A shadowy figure, almost invisible, moved at the corner of his eye. As if it had been waiting for him here, it seized his elbows from behind, and marched him back toward the castle. He did not try to turn his head to see what it looked like.

   In the grotto, a ring of torches was flaring in the twilight, supported in ancient-looking wrought-iron stands that Simon had never seen before. The familiar statues looked on uncaring. There were other figures about besides the statues, creatures in and of the twilight, that Simon could not fully see. He made no effort to see them better. A hand unlocked the barred cave-door and Simon was thrust inside, and the door closed and chained tightly again after him.

   Looking out across the grotto, he could now see no one, no presence, nothing moving but the wavering torchflames that ringed the waiting, empty stone. Drops of rain hissed sullenly in the torches. Was this to be yet another test? He could see without turning that the secret tunnel was no way out this time. It was forbidden, pre-empted, occupied by something, some process, so hideous—

   There was the tiniest sound behind Simon, and he spun round. In a small natural alcove, on the opposite side of the cave from the mouth of the descending tunnel, the twins from the antique shop, still dressed as medieval servants, sat huddled together like small children in a corner.

   Simon stared at them. They returned the stare, but he could not tell if it was with hope or fear.

   “What are you doing here?” he asked at last.

   They looked at each other. Neither wanted to answer him.

   “You’ve got to tell me what you know about this. If there’s going to be anything we can do, we have to—”

   “Sacrifices,” said the boy at last. It was a small child’s voice. “She’s going to kill us. You too. You’re in here.”

   “He’s started coming through the tunnel now, to our world,” said the girl. “The Master is. I did what Vivian wanted, I did, but it won’t be needed now.”

   “What? What won’t be needed?”

   “The baby. The Master is coming now. Vivian won’t need any more help.”

   “What baby?”

   “Mine.” The girl looked steadily up at Simon. “Yours.”

   Hints and fragments of explanation, each more dreadfully suggestive than the last, struggled to take form in Simon’s brain. “You mean you’re pregnant—from me. That time I thought that you and I—I wasn’t dreaming—you were in bed with me—”

   The girl was nodding. She sat there clasping her knees, looking ugly. “It’s how we all live here. It’s how we do things. Vivian breeds people. People with powers, the powers she needs to help bring the Master. But now he’s coming at last. Now she needs the sacrifices more, that’s what she said. Needs us to be killed. Needs our blood. Help me!” The girl seized Simon by one leg, clung to his knee with a burst of weeping. Suddenly she looked up at