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"Right, mate, I 'eard you."
Colin spared a glance for the tall man, then commented to the otter fighting
at his shoulder. "Sounds like these two have a wonderful relationship."
"Of course, I'm bleeding, you stupid imbecile! You stabbed me."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." He was so relieved and so happy, he could hardly
speak. "I had to."
"You had to stab me?" She looked down at her arm. Blood continued to filter
through her fingers. "If you wanted to tell me mat you still love me, you
could have given me flowers instead."
"You don't understand. Look. Look around you."
She did so, and blinked, several times. Jon-Tom had to catch her to keep her
from falling. She was warm and familiar against him. Her anger vanished, to be
replaced by fear and confusion.
"Where am I, Jon-Tom? What is this place? And-and why do all those women look
like meT'
"You really have no idea?" She shook her head, wide-eyed, and suddenly looking
very small and vulnerable.
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He eased her gently down to the ground, left her sitting there, holding on to
her still bleeding arm. "I'll explain it to you as best I can," he assured her
softly, "as soon as the rest of you are all dead."
XIII
Thanks largely to the fighting skills of Mudge and Colin, the number of
redheaded attackers was soon reduced to half a dozen. Acting under orders from
an unseen master, these viragos retreated and prepared to roll heavy rocks
down on the advancing intruders. They never had the chance to complete the
planned ambush. Using his longbow, Mudge picked them off one by one. In so
doing, he used the last of his arrows, but he was able to recover the majority
of them from the surrounding rubble-strewn slope, where they had come to rest
after passing completely through the spurious bodies of the Talea clones.
Jon-Tom and the others waited for the otter to conclude his collecting, a task
in which he was greatly aided by Sorbl. Meanwhile the spellsinger held the
hand of his heart's desire and tried to comfort her.
Talea, however, was her usual self again, which meant that she was in no mood
to be coddled. She did acquiesce to Clothahump's ministrations, allowing the
wizard to bind the shallow cut in her arm. Actually
Colin's kick to the leg was giving her more trouble than Jon-Tom's revealing
spear stroke. With his help she rose and tried walking. She found she could
move well enough but with a definite limp.
Her shoulder-length red hair framed her delicate face, which at the moment was
full of frustration and confusion. "I don't understand any of this. I was
taking my ease with a friend in Darriantowne when the world turned inside
out."
"Male or female? Your friend?" Jon-Tom couldn't keep himself from inquiring.
She managed a small smile. "Ever the hopeful lover, Jon-Tom?"
He smiled back and shrugged. "What else is there but hope when you're
hopelessly in love."
"Female. Not that it matters. We were trying to acquire a necklace I'd admired
for a long time."
"By stealing it," Clothahump said sourly as he repacked the medical supplies.
She stuck her tongue out at him, mitigated the charmingly girlish gesture by
adding a finger. "Not all of us are as wealthy as you, master hard-shell."
"One gains riches by not having a hard head," he snapped back, but softly. He
was in no mood for spurious argument. There were more important matters to be
concerned with.
"Anyway," she continued, "I'd just picked up this beautiful loop of amber and
blue pearls when my friend
Eila screamed. Everything went cockaloop, and when I could see straight again,
I found myself in a strange place. Eila was gone and so was the store." She
turned, tilted back her head, and blinked. "I
think I was in-that building."
"What did you see?" Jon-Tom made no effort to contain his excitement. Some
irrefutable evidence at last! "Who was your captor? What was he like?"
"I can't remember. I can't remember much of anything that happened from the
time the store disappeared until you were standing over me holding that damn
spear of yours. But I
remember-something else. Something like I'd never seen before."
Clothahump rejoined them quickly. "What was it like? Think, child!"
"I'm trying. It kept changing-I don't know." She rubbed at her eyes with both
hands. "Everything kept changing. It's all a blur in my mind. I remember
shadows. Shadows of myself being peeled away from me, like the layers of an
onion. It didn't hurt. I didn't feel a thing. Then I remember running down
this mountain, holding a sword, with all those shadows surrounding me. I knew
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they were shadows because none of them said anything."
"They looked real enough to us," Jon-Tom told her.
"I remember"-and she looked up into his eyes with such earnestness that it
made his heart hurt-"seeing
you, Jon-Tom. I knew it was you. And Mudge and Clothahump too. I wanted to cry
out to you, to throw away the sword and run to you, but I couldn't, I
couldn't!" She started to cry again. This time she let him put his arms around
her.
"It was as if someone else, that someone up in that building, was controlling
my muscles, my voice. I
couldn't call out. And then I found myself trying to kill your friend." Colin
and Dormas had moved over to join them.
"Lucky for us you didn't cut him first," Jon-Tom told her.
"No danger of that. Lucky for her I used a kick before the saber."
Jon-Tom ran the attack back through his mind, saw the koala striking out with
his long sword first instead of his foot, the razor-sharp blade slicing
through real flesh and bone. Saw the real Talea bleeding to death in his arms.
Too close. It had been too close.
"Where are we?" She was trying to maintain her usual defiant pose, but to his
surprise Jon-Tom could see that she was scared. She had a right to be. "What
is this place? Has the whole world gone crazy?"
"Only at irregular intervals," Clothahump explained as he proceeded, with
Jon-Tom's help, to tell her the tale of the perambulator and its captor and
how the five of them had come to be there.
"And lastly," the wizard said, "being unable to defeat us by other means, our
opponent sought a way of destroying the spellsinger among us. This he did by
seeking out and bringing under his sway the spellsinger's true love, then
copying her and sending all rushing down upon us. It would have worked if not
for the soldierly poise of Mudge and Colin."
"True love?" Talea frowned as she used the back of one hand to wipe the dried
tears from her cheeks.
"Whose true love?"
Jon-Tom turned away from her. "I've always thought of you as that, Talea, from
the night Mudge brought us together alongside that couple you hadn't finished
mugging, to the day you told me you had to leave because you needed time to
think our relationship through. You know that."
"I know what? Why should I know that?"
He turned back to her. "I told you often enough."
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