[Chronicles of the King's Tramp 03] The Last Human by De Haven Tom

Author:De Haven, Tom [De Haven, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1993-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

CORPSE

Jere Lee woke from a dreamless sleep. Pulled up the blanket, and its coarse weave was scratchy against her bare skin. It had been a long time since she’d last slept naked. Years. Fifteen? Even longer? And decided she wouldn’t try to figure it out. Probably could, but deliberately wouldn’t. The time had come, she felt, to quit revisiting what was finished and gone. To hell with her past and the person she’d been. Just—to hell with it! With a smile, she turned on her side, smelling straw and fragrant herbs.

The bedding.

Not exactly comfortable, but comforting.

She’d said to Squintik, “Change the room back—could you?”

He could. And he did, and the pale-blue bedroom of her married life had become a dim, low-ceilinged monkish cell: a wooden table, two chairs, a low burning brazier, and a pallet. Unpainted plaster walls. “Change the room back,” she’d said, and it had taken the Cold Mage all of ten seconds to do. Very impressive. Yeah, sure, but a little scary, too. You had to wonder what the hell was real. Jere Lee thinking now of Joe De Fazio’s big glitzy office, and of that vapor tavern. The maze of corridors. And doors, doors, doors.

There was a big dose of dream, she thought, a big dose of dreaminess, about the Undermoment, and it wasn’t just the place, either.

It was the purpose.

You just throw a bunch of people together, see what happens?

Seems kind of primitive.

And who picks the people? she thought. And what kind of people get picked?

It struck her suddenly: in all her perambulations through the corridors, she hadn’t seen one single child.

She sat up. “Squintik?”

He was no longer beside her.

Rubbing her eyes, then blinking them open and closed, she peered around the dark room.

“Squintik?”

He was seated in a chair at the table with his back turned to her.

Jere Lee rose quietly from the pallet. Stood with her head tipped to one side.

A faint bluish glow rippled on the mage’s arm, flickered across the side of his face.

First thing she thought? He was watching television, one of those tiny Japanese sets you could put in your pocket.

Yeah, right.

She crossed the floor, bare feet sliding on cool, smooth stone.

Squintik was staring transfixed at a flat oval of blue light that held steady in the air.

When she moved around behind the chair and looked over his shoulder, the light suddenly took on depth, became a kind of long tunnel. And peering into it, Jere Lee saw an old, old, mummified-looking man dressed in a black cassock. While mirrors twisted slowly above him, the old man leaned over a stone table. Where the corpse of the Epicene lay stretched out.

Using a curved knife, he began to saw at one of the creature’s mud-scabbed claws.

The blade snapped in half.

Squintik let out a gravelly sleeper’s groan of distress.

Jere Lee touched him on the shoulder, and the blue light narrowed, diminished, blinked out.

His left hand came up and rested heavily upon hers.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” she said. “I can tell.”

As he was turning toward her, there was a knock on the door behind them.

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