Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [85]
Still, he found himself wondering and worrying until their explorations eventually brought them to an expansive, exquisitely decorated bedchamber. Rainbow-hued light poured in through stained-glass windows, burnishing the furnishings with gold and turning the canopied, lace-netted bed at the far end to filigreed sunshine.
The woman who slept thereon might or might not be a princess, but she was certainly of ravishing beauty. She was sleeping peacefully on her back, her hands folded across her chest, a soft smile on her full lips. Slapping away Mudge’s fingers, Jon-Tom considered the somnifacient figure thoughtfully.
“Something familiar about this…”
V
“Not to mention somethin’ irregular.” Mudge contemplated the unconscious female with mixed emotions. “That Wolfsheep didn’t say anythin’ about ’is beloved bein’ in a coma. ’Ow are you supposed to sing ’er a song o’ love if she can’t bleedin’ ’ear you?”
The soft shussh of leather on stone made the trio turn as one. Standing in the doorway was their erstwhile employer, but it was a Wolfram transformed. No longer the supplicating elder, he seemed to have grown taller in stature and broader of frame. His formerly simple cloth cloak glistened in the stained-glass light, and the vitreous globe atop his staff flickered with caged lightning. His entire being and bearing radiated barely restrained power.
“So you have done that which I could not.” Stepping into the room, he ignored them to focus his attention on the figure lying supine in the bed. “Ignorant sots. Did you really think that I, Wolfram the Magnificent, the All-Consuming, Master of the Warmlands, would consign the future of the Mistress of the Namur to your puerile attentions?”
As he replied, Jon-Tom slowly edged his duar around in front of him. “Somehow I knew you’d say something like that.”
A belligerent Mudge stepped forward. “If you’re so bloody all-whatever, guv’nor, then wot did you need us poor souls for?”
The sorcerer gazed down contemptuously. “Isn’t it obvious? The bonds that conceal this place are such as I cannot penetrate. It needs the attention of a kind of magic entirely different from what I propound, powerful as that may be. It required someone such as an innocent spellsinger to blaze a path here and divert any dangers that might lie along the way. This so that I could follow safely in your wake—as I have done.”
“Then,” Jon-Tom said, indicating the exquisite figure reposing serenely in the bed, “this isn’t your beloved?”
“Oh, but she is.” Wolfram smiled thinly from behind his narrow, pointed beard. “It is just that she does not know it yet. You see, whoever touches the princess in such a way as to rouse her from her sleep shall make of her a perfect match to the one who does the touching, and shall have her to wife, thus acquiring dominion over this portion of an important realm and its concurrent significant interdimensionality.”
“Is that all?” Mudge was studying his fingernails. “’Tis okay by me, guv.”
“Oh no it isn’t.” Jon-Tom advanced to stand alongside the otter. “If an interdimensionality is involved here, it means that this piece of whiskery double-crossing scum might be able to make trouble in my world as well.”
The otter shrugged. “Not me problem. Mayhap ’is meddlin’s might improve that revoltin’ London place.”
The sorcerer nodded knowingly. “I thought I would have no trouble with you three.”
His fingers creeping across the strings of the duar, Jon-Tom mentally considered and discarded a dozen different songs. Which would be the most effective against a powerful, malign personality like Wolfram? Knowing little about the man, it was hard to conjure something specific. Then he recalled the sorcerer’s words, and knew what he needed to do.
Whirling, he made a dive for the bed.
“Hassone!” Raising his staff, Wolfram thrust it in the spellsinger’s direction. Gray vapor shot from the globe at its terminus to coalesce directly between the diving Jon-Tom and