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

   “And are you going to join us too?”

   “I’ll try… Simon.” There followed a soft, heartrending cry, from what sounded like an enormous distance. Oh beautiful, Marge! Beautiful!

   Simon faced the table. “Our sprite is going to try to join us. It will help if we all concentrate intensely. All of us, even the old gentleman up there on the wall. I’ve been watching him. Now if I were to tell you that

I’ve seen the eyes of that portrait move, you’d tell me that I’ve been seeing too many horror movies.”

   And in beautiful obedience to suggestion, all eyes, even Vivian’s, swung together to regard the portrait high on the dim wall above Margie’s secret door. And in the second of time he had thus obtained for invisible action, Simon’s wrist flicked gently, tossing the object already in his hand behind him at the fire.

   He and Marge now had about ten seconds to wait, if all went well. If it didn’t, if his toss had missed the actual flames, then he’d have to distract the audience once more, and try again. But so far tonight everything was going so smoothly and so well that Simon was absolutely sure he hadn’t missed.

   And now while the count (five) was going on in his head (four), he kept the patter going (three): “To bring our guest among us, we call upon the powers ruling space and time, the strength of Astarte and Apollo, the oaths of Falerin—”

   Where had that last name come from? There was no time to wonder now, for behind Simon the fire whooshed up most satisfactorily, smothering his words. The faces round the table all swiveled right to left, tennis-watchers startled bright green in the eerie new glow of a conjurer’s chemistry set. Saul, under the surface of his mild surprise, still looked bored and worried; the man who called himself Reagan looked almost childlike in the openness of his wonder. Only Vivian’s gaze did not turn all the way to the fire, but came to rest again on Simon himself.

   This was the second of time in which Marge should be halfway through the panel. Simon of course was not looking toward the panel now, but it should be now, this very second—

   It struck like some monstrous aftershock from the puny stage-explosion in the fireplace. Ten thousand times as loud, it came with a deep crack sounding through the timbers overhead, and a simultaneous flat concussion of the stone floor, as if the castle’s foundation of bedrock had been struck by some earthgod’s hammer from below. All Simon’s sureness of body and mind was in an instant brushed away. From a corner of his eye he saw one, two, three of the fear-struck dinner servants vanish, go out like blasted candle-flames. Simon staggered on the vibrating floor and almost fell. Voices round the table, Vivian’s among them, were raised in fear and incomprehension. And now a brightness, a fishbelly glare the equal of midday, struck in upon them all from the place where the secret panel had been sealed into the wall.

   In the first instant of shock, that secret door had been burst from its hidden hinges. It spun now toward Simon as if hurled from some giant’s hand, and he watched it coming with the sense that everything in the world around him had been shifted to slow motion. There was a blast of wind, bearing a strange smell. Trying to dodge the flying door, his own body seemed capable only of very slow movement, feet stepping awkwardly and off balance.

   The door missed him, somehow. It missed everyone, to crash with splintering force against a distant wall.

   Vivian, breaking the hand-held circle, was on her feet, her arms spread wide, her head thrown back in what appeared to be a paroxysm of triumph. She looked past Simon, into the cold furnace of light beyond the once-secret doorway. Then she screamed a name.

   And now, from that glaring, howling world beyond the blown-in door, someone was trying to enter the great hall, someone very different indeed from Marge Hilbert. It was a man, tall and powerful, handsome and richly robed. The young and evil king of Simon’s afternoon dream. He was about to burst in and claim them all.

   And Hildy was screaming, on and on, in utter terror.

FIFTEEN

   When the soldiers who held Talisman in charge at last received the necessary signal from inside the building, and motioned for him to go in alone, he found only four people waiting for him inside. The building was a great hall, built of timber and thatch, and no bigger than some of the bedroom suites would doubtless be in the reconstructed castle on the Sauk. Behind a long trestle table, three men and a woman sat perched upon tall stools, the nearest thing to thrones, probably, that could be found in the whole island. By now it was deep night. A fire in the clay hearth smoked the air, and there were a pair of torches. Stray gleams of light caught on the slender gold or silver circlets worn on the heads of all the four.

   No one spoke immediately. From the invading army camped about this building on all sides there drifted in some sentry’s call.

   Comorr the King—a king, rather, within a hundred miles of here you might find a dozen men calling themselves king of this or that—Comorr, Breton invader of what would one day be England, Comorr, mass murderer, bluebeard, sat watery-eyed and ineffectual-looking upon the highest stool, his by reason of claimed royal rank. He held a piece of fruit, on which he chewed with difficulty, as if his teeth were bad.

   At the right hand of Comorr there perched in fine robes the foul magician Falerin. In his countenance he was as handsome as a god, and there hung about him the sense of devilish