Day of Honor - Michael Jan Friedman [8]
Lumas's wife ran her fingers along a delicate limb of one of the sculptures. She smiled. "I didn't know this place had had such a profound effect on you. But I see now how beautiful it must have seemed."
More so to him than to her, he realized now. Strange that that should be so, after they had been mates for so long. Yet there it was.
"Can I add something?" asked Lumas's younger daughter, Anyelot. "A stream, maybe? Or a walkwa)
He grinned. Anyelot would be an architect some day. There was no doubt of that. He reached out to touch her brow with his fingertips.
Then something happened-something he found alarming. Suddenly, Lumas and his loved ones weren't alone in the swaying sculpture garden.
Suddenly, there were three other figures.
Their skin was pasty-pale, their bodies encased in hard black harnesses. Instead of hands, they displayed mechanical appendages. Tubes sprouting from their chests ended in connections to their hairless skulls.
The strangers' faces were even more disturbingthat is, the part that could be seen. Half of each visage
was concealed behind a mysterious black prosthetic. The other half was cold, expressionless, yet for all that driven by some arcane purpose.
Lumas didn't understand. He hadn't asked this realizer to create these beings. To his knowledge, he had never even seen anything like them.
Yet there they were. And if they were chilling to him, he could only imagine what his wife and daughters were feeling.
"Father ... ?" Anyelot whimpered, her voice climbing in pitch. "What are these things? Make them go away!"
"Don't worry," Lumas told her, his voice sounding strange to him with the band on his head. "They'll be gone in a moment, little one."
All it would take was an effort of will. Lumas stared at the strangers and wished them into oblivion.
But nothing happened. The creatures remained. One of them even went so far as to grab his wife's wrist-and since the realizer's creations had substance, she couldn't pull it back again.
"Help me!" she cried, with genuine panic in her voice.
Lumas didn't know what to do. He had never heard of anything like this happening before. A realizer was supposed to be attuned to its wearer's whims, completely and utterly. It wasn't supposed to defy him.
Chilled to his core, Lumas reached up and tore the band off his head. As he threw it to the floor, the sculpture garden wavered and vanished. But the nightmare beings remained.
Only then did Lumas get a glimpse of the truth. The invaders had nothing to do with the realizer. They
weren't products of his imagination. They existed on their own, just like him and his wife and his daughters.
In short, they were reat
As Lumas watched, one of them pulled Finaea to him and embraced her-but not as the youth who played the chinharp would have embraced her. The invader's grip was powerful, stifling-unyielding.
"No!" Lumas shouted.
But it didn't come out as the bellow of rage he had intended. It emerged as little more than a murmur, a sigh.
Lumas lunged at the invader, intending to rip his arm off if need be-anything to free his baby, his treasure. But he barely shuffled forward. His legs felt leaden, useless, his hands little more than lumps of flesh at the ends of his arms.
Of course, Lumas thought, in a still-rational part of his mind. It was an aftereffect of the realizer. It always took several seconds for the wearer to regain full use of his faculties.
"Agron!" his wife cried. "Please, it's hurting me!"
He tried to move again, but he was still too weighted down. As he looked on, horrified beyond measure, Anyelot flung herself at the intruder who had grabbed her mother-but she couldn't pry open that viselike grip.
Then Anyelot, too, was seized-in her case, by the back of the neck. The deathly pale stranger raised her off her feet, choking her, seemingly oblivious to the croaking sounds coming from her throat or the frantic kicking of her legs.
"Leave me alone!" Anyelot