Page 5 (1/2)

Chapter 11

I tore the rug froain I&039;d packed alyrabbedrod, and nearly killed o down the ladder too quickly I stopped a couple of steps froain There was a pair of sirasshopper could signal the other that soht be dangerous I locked the door fir on?" blurted Bob from his shelf

"Bob, I need the wards do"

"Why don&039;t you just - "

"Because they&039;ll co spell I need them down Get off your bony ass and do it!"

"But that will knock them out for at least a week - "

"I know Go do it, and hurry! You have my permission to leave the skull for that purpose"

"Aye-aye, O captain, e sparkling light flowed out of the skull&039;s eye sockets and rushed upstairs through the cracks at the edge of the trapdoor

I i ait, too, but there was no help for that

Less than half a ain "There&039;re a bunch of guys in suits and unifor on the door, Harry"

"I know"

"Why?" he asked "What&039;s going on?"

"Trouble," I said "What do I have in here that&039;s illegal?"

"Do I look like an attorney? These ain&039;t law books I&039;m surrounded by"

There was a heavy sla a ram on the door Good luck with that, boys I&039;d had my door knocked down before I had installed a heavyto overcohost dust?" I asked

"One shelf over, two up, cigar tin in a brown cardboard box," Bob said promptly

"Thanks," I said "That section of rhino horn?"

"Under the shelf to your left, plastic storage bin"

So it went, with Bob&039;s flawlessfull Then I tore the Paranet , and tossed the directory of contact nu I needed was the FBI deciding that I was the hub of a network of terrorist cells

Bob&039;s skull went in, too I zipped the bag closed, leaving just enough opening for Bob to see out Last, I took the tords (at least one of which had been used in h so, and then hurriedly duct-taped them into place, just to be sure I wouldn&039;t lose the&039;s strap overwas heavy

Bangs and bu sound I winced The door and its frath, but the house they were attached to was a wooden antique fro had begun to give

"I told you," Bob said "You should have found out as on the other side fro before now"

"And I told you," I replied, "that the last thing I wanted to do was thin the barrier between h it and then attracting the attention of whatever hungry boogity-boo was on the other side"

"And you rong," Bob said sly "And I told you so"

There was a tremendous crash upstairs, and someone shouted, "FBI!" at the sao PD!"

An instant later, soun went off

"What was that?" screaent Tilly&039;s voice, dripping with disdain "You opened fire on a freaking cat And missed"

Mister My heart pounded in otten all about him But, true to his nature, Mister see escape

There were chuckles from several voices

"It isn&039;t funny," snapped the other voice It was Rudolph, all right "This guy is dangerous"

"Clear," called a voice from another room - which meant my bedroom and bathroo in here"

"Dammit," Rudolph said "He&039;s here soh the ?"

"They saw soo Doesn&039;t ent Tilly said, "Or, gee Maybe he&039;s down in the subbasement under that trapdoor over there"

"You still have men in place at the s?" Rudolph asked

"Yes," Tilly said wearily He raised his voice a bit, as if speaking to soe room "This place is buttoned up There&039;s nowhere for hiives hihts and everything, and if he cooperates, this could be over pretty quickly"

I paused I had sogested In the long run, it was obviously the best choice for me I&039;d be questioned and cleared by anyone reasonable (ie, not Rudolph) I could even point them at the duchess&039;s business interests and turn them loose to become a thorn in her side After that, I would be back to the status quo of wary cooperation with the authorities - but that process would take precious time A couple of days at the very least

I didn&039;t have that kind of tient Tilly struck me as someone not entirely unreasonable But if I approached hiarrest at the very least Even if everything else in this et me jail time, which I wished to avoid Besides There wasn&039;t anything Tilly could do for Maggie

And, I had to adry This was my home, dammit You don&039;t just break down the door of a man&039;s hoer already stored up, but hearing those voices in e lump to the

So instead of stopping to talk, I turned to the su circle, stepped into it, summoned up my will, and whispered, "Aparturu the tool with reen light began to eular area seven feet tall and half as wide - a doorway between my apartment and the Nevernever I had no idea as on the other side

The bolts to the trapdoor began to rattle I heard someone call for a saw The door wasn&039;t closely fitted They&039;d be able to slip a saw blade through the crack and slice those two bolts in seconds

I gathered up h ainst h that doorway betorlds would take e of a rushing waterfall There was no way to know until I actually stepped into it

"I told you so!" Bob chortled

An electric engine buzzed above me and then abruptly died Someone h the crack in the door and soh the bolts by hand

I stepped out of the real world and into the Nevernever

I was braced for whatever would happen Freezing cold Searing heat Crushing depth of water - even utter vacuuht, and would keep me alive even in someplace like outer space, at least for a few ed into the Nevernever,rod ready to unleash hell, as the invisible sphere of force around me slammed into -

- a rather lovely bed of daisies

My shields mashed them flat The entire bed, in its little white planter, immediately resembled a pressed-flower collection

I looked around slowly, ht and ready, arden

It looked like an Italian number Only a minority of the shrubs and floere planted in raised beds The others had been laid out to give the irown naturally into the space they occupied Grassy paths wound through the irregularly shaped garden, twisting and turning this way and that A hubird the size of a silver dollar darted down and tucked its beak into a particularly bright flower, and then vanished again A bee buzzed by - just a regular old bu

Don&039;t laugh I&039;ve seen the spell to allow air to pass through it and took a suspicious, cautious sniff It ht look like a nice place, but for all I knew the atas

It sht be bal the air inpast my shield Birds chirped lazily So water

Bob started tittering "Look out! Look out for the vicious a-squirrel, boss!" he said, hardly able to speak clearly "My gosh! That ficus is about to lowered down at the skull and returned to watching s for a moment more Then I carefully lowered the shields They burned a hell of a lot of energy If I tried to hold them up for more than a few moments, I&039;d findhappened

It was just a sleepy afternoon in a very pleasant, pretty garden

"You should have seen your face," Bob said, still twitching with on or so"

"Shut up," I told him quietly "This is the Nevernever And it&039;s way too easy"

"Not every place in the spirit world is a nightmare factory, Harry," Bob scolded me "It&039;s a universe of balance For every place of darkness, there is also one of light"

I turned another slow circle, checking for threats, before I took ateway back tothe area

"Stars and stones, Harry," Bob saidrubbed off on you Paranoid"Way Too Easy"

Fivehad happened It&039;s difficult to stay properly intimidated and paranoid when there is no evident threat and when the surroundings are so generally peaceful

"Okay," I said, finally "Maybe you&039;re right Either e need to get nizes that can get us back to the Ways"

"You want to leave a trail of bread cru?" Bob asked

"That&039;s what you&039;re for," I said "Reet back here"

"Check," he said "Which way are we going?"

There were three paths One wandered a trees Another was pebbled and ran uphill, with plenty of large rocks figuring in the landscaping The third had greenish cobblestones, and led through a field of nice loers that left lots of visibility around us I ith option three, and started down the cobbled path

After twenty or thirty paces, I started to get uneasy There was no reason for it that I could see It was pure instinct

"Bob?" I asked after a moment "What kinds of flowers are these?"

"Primroses," the skull replied instantly

I stopped in my tracks "Oh Crap"

The earth shook

The ground heaved aroundstones writhed and lifted up out of the soil They proved to be the gently rounded crowns of seged to the unthinkably large green centipede that had just begun shaking its way loose from the soil as we spoke I watched in sickly fascination as the creature lifted its head from the soil, fifty feet away froether several tie enough to cut me in half at the waist

I looked behind us and saw another fifty or sixty feet of the path ripping free, and looked down to see that the walking stone I stood upon was also part of the creature, albeit the last to unplant itself

I fought to keepdumped into a bed of primroses while the enorht and rolled toward littered brightly, and sli jaws Its hundreds of legs each dug into the ground to propel its weight forward, their tips like tent stakes, biting the earth It sounded al locomotive

I looked from the centipede down to the skull "I told you so!" I screamed "Way! Too! Easy!"

Chapter 12

Yeah

This was not what I&039;d had in

The da should have been slow By every law of physics, by every right, a centipede that big should have been slow Dinosauric Elephantine

But this was the Nevernever You didn&039;t play by the sauideline, and a very loose and elastic guideline at that Here, thebug was fast That enorine of so wide

Fortunately for ht forth esture of co: Stop! Intent was iht up h ht as the h the ephemeral substance of mere material metals

The jaws closed with a crunch and a crash, and hter The shield exploded in more colors and shapes than a company of kaleidoscopes, and turned aside the beast&039;s jaws - its strength, after all, was just one more bit of materially oriented power in an iht hand out ofrod, and with a shouted word loosed a sledgeha power It dipped down and then curled up an instant before it hit, landing a sorcerous uppercut on what passed for the centipede&039;s chin It flung the creature&039;s head several yards up, and its entire body rippled in agony

Which, in retrospect, probably shouldn&039;t have caught round beneathin a useless windmill I landed in a sprawl aan toout with tiny stem-tendrils lined ickedly sharp little thorns Even as I struggled back tothem away from my wrists and ankles, I noticed that the flowers around un to blush a deep bloodred

"You knohat, Harry!" Bob called "I don&039;t think this is a garden at all!"

"Genius," I an reorienting itself to attack Its body flowed forward, following thethe earth like posthole diggers in steady sequencepiece of fars up in a pole vaulter&039;s leap I unleashed my will beneath and behind &039;s back as it continued surging forward It let out a ru to follow s to get out of its way It bought er doesn&039;t mean better, especially in the Nevernever One second was tih to turn, focus another bea it down like an enor torch al&039;s body, an act of precision ic that I&039;d learned from Luccio, and which I was not at all confident I could have duplicated in the real world

The beaers, sliced the creature in half as neatly and simply as if I&039;d used a paper cutter the size of a semi trailer

It shrieked in pain, a brazen, bellowing sound that conveyed, even froony Its hindquarters just kept right on rolling forward, as if they hadn&039;t noticed that the head was gone The front half of the thing began to veer and waver wildly, its li nerve ier existed It settled into a pattern of chasing its own retreating reat circle that crushed the ranks of primroses on either side of the trail

"Booya!" I shouted in pure triushriek "What have you got for fiery beaht as well go back to Atari, bug-boy, &039;cause you don&039;t got gah for me!"

It took

The wound I&039;d inflicted hadn&039;t allowed foreven as it sliced - but even that little bit of bleeding stopped on both severed halves of the monster The front half&039;s wounded rear end suddenly rounded out The second half&039;s wounded front end shuddered and suddenly warped in place, and then with a wriggling an to writhe free of the severed stump

Within seconds, both halves had focused on s rolled at , equally as deadly as before Only they were going to co at me from multiple directions now

"Wow," Bob said, in a perfectly calm, matter-of-fact, conversational tone "That is incredibly unfair"

"Been that kind of day," I said I swappedfire around, but I needed to pull off so more complicated than it was really reat deal e of possibilities I called forth my will and laced it with the soulfire within o velluy rushed out ofnearly sixty feet across, three feet thick, and three or four yards high The roar of the flames seemed to be so so reat bell

The centipedes (plural - Hell&039;s bells, I needed to stop being so arrogant) rose up onto their rear arch, but they recoiled from the flainal head with a cannonball of fire

"Hey, neat working!" Bob said "The soulfire is a nice touch"

The effort of ht up to"Yeah," I said "Thanks"

"Of course, noe&039;re trapped," Bob noted "And that wall is going to run out of juice soon You can keep chopping them up for a while Then they&039;ll eat you"

"Nah," I said, panting "We&039;re in this together We&039;ll both get eaten"

"Ah," Bob said "You&039;d better open a Way back to Chicago, then"

"Back toto slap cuffs onto uess you shouldn&039;t have become a terrorist, Harry!"

"Hey! I never - "