From alt.pub.dragons-inn Thu Dec 8 08:12:56 1994 Xref: netcom.com alt.pub.dragons-inn:7942 Path: netcom.com!ix.netcom.com!howland.reston.ans.net!news.moneng.mei.com!uwm.edu!caen!crl.dec.com!crl.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!leggy.zk3.dec.com!orb!not-for-mail From: hutch@ibeam.jf.intel.com (Steve Hutchison) Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [KAN] Warwick Shakes His Bells Date: 8 Dec 1994 08:27:23 -0000 Organization: Duchy of Wabesylvan Obspauk Lines: 390 Sender: news@Orb.Nashua.NH.US Message-ID: X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL11] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ar'Elya was created by Penny Hutchison. Little Rat was created by the Dreamer. 'Raelf was created by me. All are used by permission. This post is copyrighted (1994) by Stephen Hutchison. Permission is granted for the distribution of this story on the usual alt-net channels and for archival but all other rights, including repost, are reserved to the author. ===)) Warwick Shakes His Bells from Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Beware of danger, for Warwick is in the field. "Trojans beware, Achilles has donned his armour." A metaphor from falconry, the bells being those of a hawk. "Neither the king, nor he that loves him best The proudest he that holds up Lancaster, Dares stir a wing, if Warwick shakes the bells." Shakespeare - Henry VI, part III, Ii. ((=== 'Raelf stood on the beach that was a copy of the place he had made his home for the first decades of his life. He waited, breathing the smell of the sea for a long moment. He inspected his hand, dark-gold tan and bright gold of fine hairs, square fingernails, no callouses, no scars, not inside or out. In the distance something automatic and unliving made a cry like the sea birds he used to chase and play with. Or, they were the same thing as sea birds would have been, in the Stable Places. The wind didn't smell right. <> he whispered. <> He walked out of the rest-pit, and across the jungle of plants that Raye had planted when they moved here. He smiled at the memory, her formal, deliberate declaration of her intention that they would stop and stay a while. That they had been, too long and without relent, Travelling, and they were together and could rest for a while. She had kissed him, all her many roles focussed in one overwhelming concentration. And he stopped, and shouted with elation, "THAT'S IT!" He inhaled, then exhaled, slowly, eyes sqinched shut, and suddenly three people stood where one had been: a satyrlion, a street-kid, and the big blond surfer. <> the surfer said, and the satyrlion grinned and tousled Kev's hair. The street kid ducked, laughing. <> he said. <> <> the surfer said, and they blurred back into one person -- the dark-skinned, white-blond giant who was his focus in elemental Void. He grinned. "She'll like this." ==-==-== It was easy enough to find her. True, her neutral form hadn't always been physically present; it had disappeared momentarily when H'ro dragged Kadrys off to the fighting pits. But ar'Elya liked to appear in this spot, gazing out over the waves, the blankness flickering in her eyes the only indication that she was more active in another place. She was still sitting on the couch in the same postion she had been in when she and Kadrys had viewed the message crystals, staring blindly out the window at the edge of ocean and sky. Her left hand clutched the bag the crystals had come in, and her right hand was bleeding from numerous cuts. 'Raelf stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the outside and the ocean. She gave no sign of recognition or awareness. He fell to his knees so he could look into her eyes. Shuddering, he saw the blankness of her stare, far too close to the dead cold resignation, the stricken-too-deep-to-feel-pain that he had seen there once before, and prayed never to see again. A glint caught his eye, and he looked at the small table near the couch. It was dusted with bits of crystal. Cautiously, 'Raelf stretched out a hand and touched the tabletop. He hissed as the cold seeped into his skin, then growled at the message it carried. His hand shook as he shed the message -- so that was it, the hidden disaster back Home. The ice-queen in her Dark and Lonely Tower had stirred herself to spite again. "ar'Elya?" he asked, huskily. Nothing. He reached out and took the bleeding hand into his own, absently noting how much more pale she seemed against this new body he wore. Bringing his lips down to her hand, he kissed each wound delicately, leaving a path of quickly-vanished scars. When he was about halfway through, her hand began to tremble. Looking up, he saw that her lips had parted and slowly, she started to breathe again. "Wh...who?" she shuddered. Her head turned, and she looked down upon a dark head with a waterfall of white-blonde hair. Releasing her clutch on the rune-bag, she reached out and tentatively touched the shining locks with the back of her hand. He half-sobbed in relief. <> Tears began to run unnoticed down her face. <> He choked on a laugh. <> He paused, decided not to say anything yet about the child stealer. She smiled, and sniffled a little. He pulled a linen kerchief from nowhere and she blew her nose. <> she hiccupped. <> He paused, touching her face with long mahogany fingers, taking away the tears. <> Her eyes sparked silver. <> <> His molten-blue eyes closed for a moment as she cupped his face in her hands, feeling the new planes and angles of the unfamiliar visage. <> ar'Elya searched in his eyes, and frowned. <> He touched her lips. <> His eyes flickered black for an instant, and a hand sized crystalline sphere appeared suspended between them, the traceries of sharp Truth embedded inside. <> The crystal gleamed, unmarred, unbroken, the fragile Truth intact. <> The sun emerged from behind clouds, and a blinding shaft of gold filled the room, making her blink. She looked down and blinked again; the light had caught in 'Raelf's hair and was running like fiery tears across his skin, across her hand where it rested on his shoulder. She closed her eyes against the unwelcome glare, letting the bitterness of the revelation wash through her. <> she said bitterly. <> <> 'Raelf said quietly. A thin, hazy cloud drifted in front of the sun, and the light in the room became bearable. She opened her eyes again. The frail crystalline Truth still hung in the air between them. 'Raelf smiled hesitantly and it vanished. <> She nodded, and pulled him close, convulsively. He whispered, <> In response, she stood, drew him to his feet. He towered above her, and she pulled close into the circle of his arms. A sideways step took them to her Resting Place. Her voice was incense and bells. <> She pulled him down onto the cushions by the empty fireplace. A wandering flame began dancing across the stones as they touched, frantic and hungry. ==+==+== Kev went downstairs to talk to the Little Rat. It took a while to get her to understand. "So ya see, Lex's gonna take me ta visit wit' my granpa. So don't mess wit' my stuff, okay?" Kev grinned, holding his skateboard out to the Little Rat and picking up his stuffed dragon toy. "An' I'm gonna give Foomf to Reelya so's she won't forget me. An' you can use my board while I'm gone if ya want. If ya won't get hurted." "Okay. What's a granpa like? You ever meet him afore you came here?" "I sorta remember him ... he's silly, not dull like my dad was." "Don't you go gettin more silly, Kev. You needs ta be seriouser." "I will, I promise. I'll remember all da stuff ya tol' me." "OK." Little Rat sat down on her bed, an impassive expression on her face. She looked up again. "Well, when ya gonna go?" "Don't I get a kiss bye?" "Dat's mushy stuff, 'sides you gots cooties." "Rather have boy cooties den girl cooties." Kev bent over and kissed her on the cheek suddenly, then ran. She stared after him, astonished, and wiped at her face absently. Up in the lab, the blond surfer returned a flask to the shorter, blond-bearded man who stood across the workbench from him. He smiled wryly as their hands touched and held the contact for a moment, wordless. He blinked, slowly, and when his eyes opened the other was looking at him intently, eyes silver in the light of the overhead lamps. "Ilya, I may never figure out how you do this," Dave said, as he began sketching patterns in the puddle of fluid on the table before him. With his other hand he reached into Void, pulling out a handful of small blank spheres of blackness, and dropped them into the puddle, where they vanished like soap bubbles. "How I do what?" Ilya's voice was level, unemotional, as he carefully measured out a reagent from a bottle into a long narrow tube. "How you manage to be in so many places at once. This new Gift, I'm multilocal without fully timeforking. It feels so weird." He continued dropping more spheres into the puddle. The fluid began shining with a transparent, internal luminance, then images started forming in it, the visual manifestation of the memories that were stored in the spheres. Ilya pondered for a moment, before he answered. "I never had any trouble with it. I'll never know how you can timefork so much, without getting deja-vu all the time. It drives me batty." "Well, being in two places at once does that to me." "Just concentrate on who you're being right now, it's not so bad." The archmage poured the reagent into the crucible and muttered a quick chant of severance and constriction, and the opening in the crucible sealed itself. Dave snorted. "I yam who I yam. Sez you. Love, if you see Erik, please let him know I still care. I'm pretty sure he's going to feel abandoned." "Aren't you going to tell him yourself?" "I better not. He's still a little insecure about us, imagine how he'd be if I told him I was back in one piece. Besides which... He's gone and done that experiment without waiting for help. He's elementally dispersed right now, if I got too close to any of his prime loci he'd grab onto me for stability and we'd end up with him being lunch. I don't have enough control right now to keep separation." The surfer frowned, and slowly pulled two more spheres of memory from the Void. Ilya walked around the workbench and began gently stroking Dave's forehead. "You aren't saying something again." "You're right. I'm a little afraid about this trip. We'll be apart for too long. Again." "Wait until you're in one piece and we'll talk about it." Dave nodded. "Shiny-rock," he said, stirring in a last memory, "Could you give him this philtre when you see him? I want him to know for sure that I really still love him before I see him. Y'know," he said, half-laughing, "this being an apeling sure has its drawbacks. All the time fighting with the instincts. Did you know I was getting jealous of you and him the other day? After the food fight, at lunch?" "No," Ilya smiled, "but I understand. Remember the rules, from Alien Interpersonal 352, `While adopting alien schema, the Traveller may enjoy emotions which are unnatural to the TrueSelf, and for long-term mental balance these must be kept in proper perspective.' I was just having a nice long talk with him, not even rubbing elemental essences." Dave raised an eyebrow. "Uh, yeah. Just a chat. Relating, one might say. Mage to Shadowmaker." He un-poured the liquid into a crystal flask and stoppered it, then put it on the table. "All right, so I was rubbing essences just a little." Ilya took the flask and placed it into a cabinet, and smiled as, from the far end of the factory floor, Kev skated up to him. "You seem to be doing all right," he said, brushing a hand across the boy's head. There was a ripple like a stone dropped into a clear pond, and Kev vanished. Lex sighed in relief. "That's better. Now I'm just in two places." "That's rather odd," Ilya said. "You aren't really multilocating so much as folding in a bit of parallel time. You look tired, too. You ought to try some Catamount for that," he advised. "No thanks, I'm gonna be travelling. Besides I'm not sure how dangerous that would be for me. I did a diagnostic, and I found out that I can't be more than a half a mile away from myself or I lose the farthest focus and collapse back into one body. You can be almost a world away without any trouble at all." "I'd guess that it has to do more with time in Generica than with an intrinsic weakness. You might want to experiment when you get away from the shifting frames of reference here. Oh, can you at least control which body you wind up in?" "Yeah. But it hurts." Dave pulled a cloth from a drawer and began wiping the surface of the bench clean. "Rafe, are you sure you want to do this? Aunt 'Lyand is doing her best to push things through on her side." Ilya pulled up a lab stool and sat. "You know she can't interfere. Trust me." Lex kissed Ilya gently on the forehead. "I do." "Good. Please give this to Erik when he comes by." Lex handed the sphere that the fluid had formed to Ilya. He blinked, and flickered again, reverting to his new form, the dark-skinned man. "'Raf just finished saying goodbye to the band. They're being a bit enthusiastic. Well, I'm ready to go then." He reached over to Ilya, who changed at his touch to ar'Elya in her neutral form, an elegant woman with shoulder length hair the shade of polished redwood. She took his hands gently. "Aren't you going to take any weapons? Defenses? Tools? Anything?" "No, just my board and voidsuit, and my focus staff. I'll probably even have to leave those behind before I go to your folks' place. Hey, how'd you like to do me a favor?" ar'Elya nodded. "What kind of favor?" "You'll see." They walked over, hand in hand, to the racks where the skyboards were curing. In one cradle, a twelve-foot board rested, two fins on the back base and one in front. 'Raelf grinned and pulled the voidsuit on -- it fit this body somewhat differently, and he had to adjust the length and tightness, stretching the arms and legs and narrowing the waist, adjusting the body-tight fit. He watched her "Pick a name for this shape of me?" She smiled and considered. "Martel." "Thank you, beloved. Hey, I wanted to know. My TrueForm also changed, what do you think about the new me?" "Let me look again... Well, I already teased you about the eyes. They're very pretty though. I like the gold fur. And I want to play some more with this new void-body you've put together, so you _will_ come back to me alive. Or I'll kill you." "I'll be ok, I promise." "Let me know when you find him." "As soon as I can." He kissed her gently, the room whirling around them, and hopped up onto the board. A wave of his hand, and the runes glowed, and it vanished, taking him along curves of Air and Fire, leaving her behind.