Dominion by Fred Saberhagen (spiritual books to read TXT) 📗

   The old man had no answer.

   “There are powers at work here, honored one, that are beyond my experience and comprehension. Tell me, what is it that you so greatly fear?”

   The ancient was rubbing at his forehead. “I wonder what the bastard put in that wine… you figure it out, why they picked me. I don’t give a damn, I’m leaving, whatever I have to do. If I can remember how.”

   Talisman was quietly upset by this announcement. “The place for one of your stature to be is here, in confrontation with your enemies who kidnapped you and brought you here. Honor and wisdom alike forbid that you should simply leave.”

   “Screw honor and wisdom. Whadda you know about wisdom?”

   “Do you not see…?”

   But plainly the old man was not listening. Having glared once more at both his listeners, as if they were the ones guilty of kidnapping, he had closed his eyes again and was now muttering systematically. His toneless voice fell into the rhythm of a chant.

   “Master,” said Talisman. To judge from his tone he was now closer to offering violence than service. “I do not insist on courtesy from you; it is not my place to do that. But more than courtesy is at stake. I ask you to behave with common sense. For your own good, as well as for the sake of the innocent folk of this time and place.”

   “Shuddup, will ya? How in hell’s a man supposed to think? To remember?” The blue-gray eyes closed yet again, the mumbled words came louder, faster than before.

   Talisman uttered a sound that was not quite a sigh, and took one step forward. His right arm flicked out like a lash. Marge winced at the sound his hand made, hitting the old one on the temple. The old man’s eyes stayed closed, and his jaw sagged open in mid-chant, displaying snaggled teeth. Talisman caught the body gently, just as it began to fall. He lifted it easily, to put it back unbound upon the handy rack.

   And at that point a soundless explosion overcame the world.

   For a moment Marge actually thought that a bomb might have been detonated, so powerful was the sense of almost instantaneous change. But what happened was silent, and did not blast or burn, and was just a beat too slow to have been the effect of chemical explosives.

   Marge saw herself surrounded by gray, glowing haze. Talisman had disappeared, but she caught just a glimpse of the great pale wolf-beast bounding away in flight. Raging men and women who she had never seen before surrounded her, their hands outstretched to clutch. Angry creatures she had never imagined bared fangs larger than the dark wolf’s had been.

   A hideous paw that was not quite a hand slid past her face and down. A woman’s face, all malign beauty under dark curly hair, snarled in surprise and fury, then was shocked into pale marble when the woman’s eyes fell on the supine figure of the old man.

   Still dressed in Marge’s surplus robe the old man lay on the rack, unconscious but unbound. She had the impression that reality was swirling like fog round his unmoving head.

   Marge could take no more. She went down, huddling with hands over eyes, until the madness should end somehow.

   She landed, sitting, on something at once springy and soft, finely divided, and softly irregular. It wasn’t a stone floor.

   No touch came from the clutching hands, no pain from snapping jaws. Everything was quiet.

   Inside the protective cage of her hands she unclenched her eyelids just a trifle, until she saw bright light nudging through. It turned the flesh of her caging fingers incandescent pink.

   Not until a breeze caressed her face did Marge realize that she was sitting on long green grass in bright sunshine.

ELEVEN

   When the world blew up around Feathers with a great shock, it left him drifting like a shed plume amid the smoky wreckage of what had been the local atmosphere. The shock didn’t stun him, though. In fact it partially cleared his mind, at least enough for him to understand that it wasn’t really the atmosphere that had been wrecked and stirred and scrambled, but something more fundamental. And also that now he wasn’t Feathers any more.

   Shit, he never had been, really, not with any sense of identification with the name. And with one false name out of the way, he was able to understand, willing to remember, more.

   A great deal more.

   And stop saying shit, he admonished himself. Stop speaking foulness when you are with gentle folk. How have you fallen into such a habit?

   It serves, he answered himself, to help keep the gentle folk, or some of them anyway, away from me.

   And why do you want to do that?

   You know why.

   But, if he did know, he didn’t want to think about it. Actually he couldn’t think about it, not just yet.

   But change had come again, and he was going to have to adapt to change once more.

   Here was another item that he hadn’t wanted to think about: he’d really known for a long time that something in the nature of that blowup was coming. It had to be coming sooner or later, no special powers were needed to see that, only a minimal intelligence and a knowledge of the situation. When you dammed up something long enough, when you repressed it, as that new young social worker at the soup kitchen would doubtless say, then sooner or later it would come bursting or leaking through in one form or another.

   A good blowup, like this one, reduced tension. But it also created problems. For example, when he opened his eyes, where was he going to be? The answer when he discovered it might not be pleasant. But he