The World Shuffler (17 page)

“No, thanks,” Lafayette said hastily, disengaging himself. “We have to get out of here right away. I’m going to go back outside and find a key—”

“Hey, how’d you get in here Lafe? I never heard the door open ...”

“I came through the wall. Nothing to it, just a trick I’ll tell you about later. But I can’t take you out that way. I’ll have to get the door open. So if you’ll just wait here—”

“You’re going to leave me alone again?”

“It can’t be helped, Swinehild. Just sit quietly and wait. I’ll be back as soon as possible. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“I ... I guess you know best, Lafe. But hurry. I never did like being alone in the dark.”

“Never fear, there’s a good girl.” He patted her shoulder. “Try to think about something nice, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

“G-g’bye, Lafe. Take care.”

Lafayette groped his way to the wall, reactivated the flat-walker, waded forward into the glare of the corridor. Again he adjusted his eyes to the light and to the alternately stretched-out and compressed nature of visual phenomena. The narrow passage was still empty. He deactivated the flat-walker, saw the view slide into normality. He made his way stealthily along to the nearest cross-corridor. Two men in scarlet coats lounged in a lighted doorway twenty feet from the intersection. One of them, a paunchy, pasty-faced fellow with untrimmed hair, wore a large ring of keys dangling from his belt. There was no chance to approach them openly. Again O’Leary pressed the control switch of the flat-walker, saw the sides of the passage rush together while the solid glass walls beside him stretched out to a shimmering, opalescent blankness.

“Don’t lose your bearings,” he instructed himself sternly. “Straight ahead, about twenty paces; then rematerialize—and while they’re catching their breath, grab the keys and go flat. Got it?

“Got it,” he replied, and started forward.

At the first step, the lighted corridor shifted, collapsed, became a cloudy veil. Lafayette felt about him; nothing tangible met his hands.

“Must be some kind of orientation effect,” he suggested to himself. “Just keep going.”

It was confusing, pushing forward into the milky glare. By turning his head sideways, O’Leary could see an alternate pattern of glass bricks which revolved away from him as he passed, like walking past an endless curved mirror. After five paces, he was dizzy. After ten, he halted and took deep breaths through his nose to combat the sensation of seasickness.

“Pinchcraft has a few bugs to iron out,” he muttered, swallowing hard, “before the flat-walker is ready for the market.” He forged on another five paces. How far had he come now? Ten paces? Or twenty? Or ...

Something flashed and twinkled in front of him, surrounding him. There was a swirl of scarlet, a glitter of brass. Then he was staring directly into a set of what were unmistakably vertebrae, mere inches from his eyes, topped by a jellylike mass of pinkish material ...

With a lunge, Lafayette leaped clear, gave a whinny of gratitude as darkness closed about him.

“Pinchcraft didn’t warn me,” he panted, “about walking through a man ...”

It was a good five minutes before Lafayette felt equal to resuming his stalk. He picked a direction at random, took five more paces, two more for good measure, then halted and switched off the flat-walker.

“How’d you get out?” a surprised voice said as blazing sunlight flooded his retinas. Lafayette caught a swift impression of an open courtyard etched in light like a scene revealed by a flash of lightning, a grinning face under a feathered hat, a swinging billy-club—then the nearest tower fell on his head, and the world exploded into darkness.

Ten

“All I know is, yer Highness, the mug shows up in the exercise yard, blinking like a owl.” The voice boomed and receded like surf on a tropical beach. “I ask him nice to come along, and he pulls a knife on me. Well, I plead wit’ him to hand it over, no violence, like you said, and he tries a run fer it and slips on a banana peel and cracks hisself on the knob. So I lift him up real easy-like and bring him along, knowing yer Highness’s interest in the bum, and frankly it beats me what all the excitement is about, after twenty-one years on the force—”

“Silence, you blithering idiot! I told you this subject was to receive kid-glove treatment! And you bring him to me with a knot on his skull the size of the royal seal! One more word and I’ll have you thrown to the piranhas!”

Lafayette made an effort, groped for the floor, found it under his feet. He wrestled an eye open, discovered that he was standing, supported by a painful grip on his upper arms, in a large, high-ceilinged room adorned by tapestries, chandeliers, rugs, gilt mirrors, polished furniture of rich, dark wood. In a comfortable-looking armchair before him sat a small, dapper man wearing a ferocious frown on his familiar, well-chiseled features.

“Go-go-go-go,” Lafayette babbled, and paused for breath.

“Sergeant, if you’ve scrambled his wits, it’s your head!” the gray-haired man yelped, rising and coming forward. “Lorenzo!” he addressed Lafayette. “Lorenzo, it’s me, your friend, Prince Krupkin! Can you understand me?” He peered anxiously into O’Leary’s face.

“I ... I understand you,” Lafayette managed. “But—but—you—you’re—”

“Good lad! Here, you cretins, seat my guest here, on this pile of cushions. Bring wine! How’s your head, my boy?”

“Terrible,” Lafayette said, cringing at each pulsebeat. “I was almost over my hangover when I fell down the elevator, and I was almost over that when this lout clubbed me down. I must have three concussions running concurrently. I need a doctor. I need sleep. I need food. I need an aspirin—”

“You shall have it, dear lad. Along with my abject apologies for this dreadful misunderstanding. I hope you’ll excuse my remarks at our last meeting, I was overwrought. I was just on the point of sending for you to make amends when the sergeant reported he’d encountered you wandering in the courtyard. Ah, by the way, how did you happen to be in the courtyard, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I walked through the wall—I think. It’s all a little hazy now.”

“Oh. To be sure. Well, don’t worry about it, just relax, have a drink. A nap will fix you up nicely— just as soon as we’ve had a talk, that is.”

“I don’t want to talk, I want to sleep. I need an anesthetic. I probably need a blood transfusion, and possibly a kidney transplant. Actually I’m dying, so it’s probably wasted effort—”

“Nonsense, Lorenzo! You’ll soon be right as rain. Now, the point I wanted to inquire about—or about which I wanted to inquire, we must be grammatically correct, ha-ha—the point, I say, is—where is she?”

“Who?”

“Don’t play the noddy, my lad,” Prince Krupkin came back in a sharper tone. “You know whom.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Krupkin leaned forward. “The Lady Andragorre!” he snapped. “What have you done with her?”

“What makes you think I did anything with her?”

His Highness glared at O’Leary. He gripped his knuckles and cracked them with a sound that sent new waves of pain lancing through O’Leary’s head.

“Who else would have had the audacity to spirit her away from the luxurious chambers in which I, from the goodness of my heart, installed the thankless creature?”

“Good question,” O’Leary mumbled. “Lorenzo would be the likeliest suspect if he weren’t in a cell ...”

“Exactly! Which brings us back to the original query: where is she!”

“Beats me. But if she got away from you, good for her.”

“I’ll have the truth out of you if I have to extract it with red-hot pincers, you miserable ingrate!”

“I thought kid-glove treatment was the prescription,” Lafayette said. His eyes were closed, watching the pattern of red blobs that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.

“I’ll kid-glove you! I’ll have the hide off your back under a cat-o’-nine-tails—” Krupkin broke off, took a deep breath, let it out between his teeth.

“Such are the burdens of empire,” he muttered. “You try to give a vile wretch of a double-crossing sneak an even break, and what happens? He throws it in your face ...”

Lafayette forced both eyes open, looked long into the irate features of the prince.

“It’s amazing,” he muttered. “You talk just like him. If I hadn’t already met Swinehild and Hulk and Lady Andragorre and Sprawnroyal, and Duke Rodolpho, I’d swear you were—”

“Ah, that slippery eel, Rodolpho! He seduced you from the path of duty, eh? What did he promise you? I’ll double it! I’ll triple it!”

“Well, let’s see: as I recall, he said something about undying gratitude—”

“I’ll give you ten times the gratitude that petty baron can bring to bear!”

“I wish you’d make up your mind,” Lafayette said. “What’s it to be, the red carpet or the rack?”

“Now, now, my boy, I was just having my little jest. We have great things to accomplish together, you and I! A whole world to whip into shape! The riches of all the mines and seas and forests, the fabled loot of the East!” Krupkin leaned forward, his eyes bright with plans. “Consider: no one here knows the location of the great diamond mines— the richest gold deposits—the rarest beds of emeralds! But you and I do—eh?” He winked. “We’ll work together. With my genius for planning, and your special talents”—he winked again—”there’s no limit to what we can accomplish!”

“Special talents? I play the harmonica a little— learned it via correspondence course—”

“Now, now, don’t twit me, lad,” Krupkin waggled a finger good-naturedly.

“Look, Krupkin—you’re wasting your time. If the lady’s not in her chambers, I don’t know where she is.” Lafayette held his head in his hands, supporting it delicately, like a cracked melon. Through his fingers he saw Krupkin open his mouth to speak, and suddenly freeze, lean forward, staring at him with an expression of total amazement.

“Of course!” the prince breathed. “Of course!”

“See something green?” Lafayette snapped.

“No. No, not at all. Not green at all. Amazing. That is to say, I don’t notice a thing. I mean to say I didn’t see anything at all. But it suddenly comes to me that you’re tired, poor lad. Surely you’d like a hot tub and a few handmaidens to scrub your back, and a cozy bed to snuggle down in? And after you’ve rested, we can have a long chat about your further needs, eh? Splendid. Here!” The prince snapped his fingers at an attendant. “Prepare the imperial suite for my honored guest! A scented bath, my most exquisite personal masseuses—and let the royal surgeon attend with balms and unguents for this nobleman’s hurts.”

Lafayette yawned hugely. “Rest,” he mumbled. “Sleep. Oh, yes ...”

He was only half-aware of being led from the room, along a wide corridor, up a grand staircase. In a big, soft-carpeted chamber, gentle hands helped him out of his grimy garments, lowered him to a vast, foamy tub, scrubbed him, dried him, laid him away between crisp sheets. As the rosy light faded to sweet-scented gloom, he snuggled down with a sigh of utter contentment ...

Abruptly, his eyes were wide open, staring into the darkness.

“You
and I know the
location
of the diamond
mines ... the gold deposits,” he seemed to hear Krupkin’s unctuous voice saying. “With your special
talents ...”

“Only someone from outside Melange— someone from a more highly developed parallel world—would know anything about gold mines and emerald beds,” he muttered. “The geology is very much the same from world to world—and an outsider could dig into the Kimberley hills or the Sutter’s Mill area and be dead sure of a strike. Which means Krupkin is an outsider—like me. And not only that—” Lafayette sat bolt upright. “He knows
I’m
an outsider! Which means he knew me before, which means he’s who he looks like: Goruble, ex-king of Artesia! Which means he has a method of shifting from here to there, and maybe he can get me back to Artesia, and—”

Lafayette was out of bed, standing in the middle of the room. He groped, found a lamp, switched it on, went to the closet, extracted his clothes— including the innocent-looking blackout cloak— neatly cleaned and pressed.

“But why is he interested in Lady Andragorre?” he ruminated as he dressed quickly. “And Swinehild? But—of course! Being who he is, he realizes that Swinehild is the double of Princess Adoranne, and that Lady Andragorre is Daphne’s twin ...

“Never mind that right now,” he advised himself crisply. “Your first move is to get Daph—that is, Lady Andragorre—out of his clutches. And Swinehild too, of course. Then, when they’re safely tucked away, you can talk from a position of strength, make some kind of deal to get home in return for not turning him into Central.

“Right,” he agreed with himself. “Now, which way to the tower?” He went to the window, pulled aside the hangings, looked out at deep twilight, against which the minarets of the Glass Tree glittered like spires of varicolored ice. He visually traced the interconnecting walls and walkways and airy bridges linking the keep in which he found himself with the tall tower. “If I can just keep my sense of direction ...”

Silently he let himself from the room. A lone guard under a light at the far end of the passage failed to look around as he eased off along the deep-carpeted hall.

Three times in the next half-hour O’Leary reached a dead end, was forced to turn back and find another route. But at last he gained the circular stair down which the guards had dragged him some hours earlier, on the way to the dungeons.

On the landing above, he could see an armed guard in scarlet and white, yawning at his post. O’Leary went up silently, invisible inside his cloak, carefully cracked the man over the head, and laid him out on the floor. He tried the door. It was locked. He tapped.

“Lady Andragorre! Open up! I’m a friend! I came to help you escape!”

There was no answer, no sound from inside. He checked the guard, found a ring of keys, tried four before finding the correct one. The door swung in on a dark, untenanted room.

“Daphne?” he called softly. He checked the bathroom, the closet, the adjacent sitting room.

“It figures,” he said. “Krupkin/Goruble said she was gone. But where could she have gotten to?”